Cosmic Queries – Fan Grab Bag

Black holes, the Arecibo Observatory, artificial intelligence, and more – Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice answer a special batch of Cosmic Queries from some of our most supportive fans.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition. It's becoming quite the fan favorite. And you know I don't do this alone. I need help. Help me, Chuck!

• 0:29Chuck Nice?

  Well, yes, I'm here, but you don't need help. But I'm always here.

• 0:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, you give me spiritual help.

• 0:36Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 0:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 0:38Chuck Nice?

  Right, because I'm certainly not helping to answer the questions, that's for sure.

• 0:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this one is a sort of a fan appreciation episode.

• 0:46Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 0:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where I think it's primarily Patreon questions.

• 0:50Chuck Nice?

  All Patreon.

• 0:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These are our supporters. I think, you know, you're not just a patron. I think that's why the word is different. You know, when you're a patron, you just hand money and charity. But Patreon, there's actually sort of a, what do you call it? A contract between the money you give and what happens next.

• 1:07Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, and there's a scale with higher and higher rewards for it.

• 1:12Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we're trying to just encourage that. Because it allows us to experiment those funds.

• 1:20Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And do things that are not yet tested in the marketplace. And, but we think will work. And then we get to test it, and then it works, then we go on to something else.

• 1:29Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. You give us, they're giving us the opportunity to fail with our consequence. That's basically...

• 1:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I hadn't thought about it that way!

• 1:39Chuck Nice?

  That's what they're doing. It's like, thank you for giving us the opportunity to fail. And we don't have to worry about it. We can, you know. But, you know, that's a good thing, right?

• 1:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, those who are, the only people who no longer make mistakes are those who are no longer on the frontier of inquiry.

• 1:58Chuck Nice?

  Ooh, did you just think that up? That's really good.

• 2:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, no, you're gonna write it down?

• 2:03Chuck Nice?

  I am, writing this down. Like, that's good.

• 2:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying.

• 2:09Chuck Nice?

  That's excellent.

• 2:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, mistakes are evidence that you're exploring. They're not evidence of your failure. So I have to agree with you.

• 2:15Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, cool, man.

• 2:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we have to change our attitude toward. By the way, if you make the same mistake twice, no.

• 2:20Chuck Nice?

  That's a different story. That's a whole new ballgame now.

• 2:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a different, that's a different show.

• 2:24Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 2:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what, so you collected all the questions. So what do you have for me?

• 2:29Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, so, but first we're gonna try something different.

• 2:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's that?

• 2:32Chuck Nice?

  Because speaking of Patreon, we have some patrons that do a yeoman's job of supporting us.

• 2:42Chuck Nice?

  By that, I mean, they, they drop some coin.

• 2:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Drop some coin.

• 2:46Chuck Nice?

  They drop some coin, and so, you know, we like to reward them, um, especially. And so, um, uh, Joel Cherico, um, is, is going to lead us off with a video question because.

• 3:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, this is like, like in Jeopardy, have the video daily double?

• 3:04Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you know, I forgot about that.

• 3:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. And just a little moment of silence for Alex Trebek.

• 3:09Chuck Nice?

  Oh, God, yes.

• 3:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, host of Jeopardy for what, 36 years?

• 3:13Chuck Nice?

  What an incredible career he had.

• 3:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and I've been, I was never a contestant, but I was multiple times on the board, either delivering clues or my name was like a clue. So I feel genetically connected in my own little way.

• 3:27Chuck Nice?

  Well, you know, and of course, there's a big buzz, uh, in the Twitterverse intern webs that you should be the host.

• 3:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, but I, I'm flattered. I'm flattered, but I got, I got, I got a day job.

• 3:41Chuck Nice?

  I got a job, yeah.

• 3:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got a day job.

• 3:44Chuck Nice?

  Man.

• 3:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm very, I'm indeed flattered, but by the way, I think I could do a good job. But it's not, it's not my life's goal. It's not my.

• 3:53Chuck Nice?

  Here's my impression of you as the host of Jeopardy, okay? And so they give the answer, and then the person, uh, chimes in. And then you go, I'm sorry, uh, the question we have there isn't quite right.

• 4:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Judges, yeah, we need judges for the judges, right?

• 4:19Chuck Nice?

  We need a judge for the judge, because I'm pretty sure that that question isn't exactly right.

• 4:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, they messed that one up.

• 4:26Chuck Nice?

  Right, technically, maybe, but no, but yeah. So, anyway. All right, so let's, let's kick things off with our video question.

• 4:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, by the way, just another quick thing. There are people, when I went to college, there was someone who had like a very high IQ, who lived in my dorm. And his IQ was so high that it couldn't be measured by normal tests, so they had to create a special test for him.

• 4:49Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 4:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then he was a consultant to people who write IQ tests for how to test people at very, this is while he was in college. He was a consultant to test writers to test people at very, very high IQ.

• 5:00Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 5:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so this is weird, it's its own thing, it's its own universe, this, this IQ thing.

• 5:06Chuck Nice?

  That's insane.

• 5:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and so what he was wondering was whether IQ correlated with your performance in school only to a certain point.

• 5:16Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 5:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That a higher IQ would get you lower grades. And so I asked, well, what's, what's going on there? He said, oh, because beyond a certain IQ, you are smarter than anyone asking the question. And so you will see answers that they do not yet see, and then you'll be marked wrong.

• 5:35Chuck Nice?

  Makes sense.

• 5:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I thought that was an interesting, an interesting fact. Now, that, I'm not claiming a very high IQ, but this happened to me a couple of times in school, when I was in kindergarten.

• 5:45Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 5:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I made a crayon drawing of the night.

• 5:48Chuck Nice?

  Of the universe?

• 5:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, of the universe, it was the sky, okay? It's like earth and then the, the sky, and I used my black crayon and totally wore it out, put in some stars in it, and the teacher said, uh, no, no, the, the night sky is dark blue. And I'm thinking, no, this is like, why would it, no, it's like, no! But, but I'm like, six or five or something, and so later on, the teacher went home, did research, and came back, and said, no, you're right, the, the nighttime sky is black.

• 6:15Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 6:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so that's what happened there.

• 6:17Chuck Nice?

  And, and, and so. When she said it's dark blue was your answer. So, do you have eyes?

• 6:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I'm five, okay? Just like a full grown up teacher. And it happened again. There was a question on the physics regions, I think it was, where in New York State, we take a regions.

• 6:39Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 6:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's a question. If you have a projectile, this is basic physics, what shape best represents that path? Okay, and so you have like parabola, you know, a circle, an ellipse, whatever. Okay. And the answer they're looking for is parabola.

• 7:00Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 7:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, if you do the math, it's a parabola. However, however, if it's not actually a parabola, it's close to a parabola, but if you removed Earth or scrunched Earth down to only its center.

• 7:16Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 7:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That path would continue and orbit the Earth and come back into that segment. So in fact, it's a segment of an ellipse.

• 7:27Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 7:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  More than it's a segment of a parabola. But it's taught parabola because a parabola equation is way easier to calculate with than an ellipse. So, again, just because you wrote the question and you're testing other people's knowledge doesn't mean you know enough knowledge to test people who know more than you do. That's all I'm saying.

• 7:48Chuck Nice?

  All right. Hey, listen, that's good. Well, now, we're gonna test your knowledge because we got a bunch of questions that have been written.

• 7:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bring it on. The video Daily Double. Chuck, what's behind?

• 7:59Chuck Nice?

  Yes, exactly.

• 8:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Universe for 1,000, go.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Hey, StarTalk, hey Neil. Thanks for the chance to ask some questions. So I'm an artist. I make pottery, some of it inspired by the cosmos. And most of the pots have a spiral in them somewhere because I just, I think they look really cool. So my question is very simple. Why are there so many spirals in nature?

• 8:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 8:27Chuck Nice?

  Interesting.

• 8:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, cool.

• 8:29Chuck Nice?

  And not just the universe, in nature, period.

• 8:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Now, this is Joel, right? Okay, so I recognize him. He came. I don't know who this guy is, okay?

• 8:39Chuck Nice?

  Uh huh.

• 8:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I got right here one of his creations, okay? This is a moon coffee mug.

• 8:47Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 8:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you think of that? And the problem is, every time I take it, I taste a bit of basalt.

• 8:55Chuck Nice?

  Why is this, why is this coffee so gritty?

• 9:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, each one is unique, and I'm very impressed with just the artistry of it. Um, but yeah, he gave me a set of these.

• 9:09Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 9:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they're all around my office.

• 9:12Chuck Nice?

  The funny thing is, he sent me one, as you could see.

• 9:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got one too? Okay, cool.

• 9:16Chuck Nice?

  And he told me, in the note that he sent me, that he had made several for you. And I realized that he sent me one without a handle. I just looked at yours.

• 9:29Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 9:30Chuck Nice?

  So yours has a handle, and clearly, you know, uh, mine is meant to...

• 9:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, Chuck is just so ungrateful. Joel, I apologize for Chuck.

• 9:39Chuck Nice?

  And Joel, I apologize for you sending me a handleless mug. Thank you. Which I didn't even realize. I was like, well, maybe all of his mugs have no handle.

• 9:52Chuck Nice?

  Maybe this is the way he meant...

• 9:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, mine has a little place where your thumb goes. Right on the top of the handle is...

• 9:59Chuck Nice?

  Look at that!

• 9:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Place where the thumb goes.

• 10:00Chuck Nice?

  And not only is your, not only do you have a handle, but it's ergonomic on top of it.

• 10:07Chuck Nice?

  And mine is just like, well Chuck, I hope you don't burn your hands.

• 10:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Alright, so here's, here's what's going on in there.

• 10:12Chuck Nice?

  Spirals.

• 10:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll do my best to give an answer to this. So, um, here's what happens. If anything goes around in circles,

• 10:22Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, you get a circle. Alright, fine. If, however, while you were going around in circles, you move in any direction perpendicular to the circle,

• 10:36Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's no longer a circle. It's a spiral. So the circle gets distorted to move through time in such a way that you get a spiral, like a spiral staircase, or a spiral anything. Right. So, I was in one of the Redwood forests when we were filming Cosmos. And I was intrigued. But first, in the city, New York, we don't have big trees like that. So, everything about this forest is completely alien to me. So I'm examining it like I'm on an alien planet. Because I've never seen anything like this. So, so I noticed that the tree bark on many of the trees has estriated

• 11:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  in this sort of very, very sort of high pitched spiral going up the tree. And every tree did this. And they all did it in the same direction. And I thought, what is asymmetric in the physiology? Can I use that word as applied to plants? Sure. In the physiology of a tree, that there's this spiraling going on. If, I don't know about the rest of the plant, but it's certainly happening in the bark. So I was just intrigued by that. But of course, the tree grows upwards. So whatever is otherwise happening in the tree, if it's, if there's any kind of sap movement, or whatever else is going on, and I don't know, I have no expertise in plants. I'm just saying, combine something that wants to go in a circle, and have it move upwards, you get a spiral. Wow.

• 12:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, now, that's a spiral, that's a three dimensional spiral. Now we have spiral galaxies, which is flat. That's a spiral in a flat shape. And you get that because the inner parts of the galaxy finish a loop faster than the outer parts of the galaxy. So if you have some system, like stars forming in gas cloud, that'll get stretched. Okay? And our current understanding of galaxies is that there's a a wave of pressure inside that galaxy, it's called a density wave, that is moving through the galaxy, through the gas cloud.

• 12:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that density wave is being stretched by the rotation of the galaxy itself. And where that density wave is hitting the gas, you get the formation of stars. So, again, you have an action happening combined with a rotation. And that rotation is not as a solid object. And there you have it. So, by the way, plenty of stuff is not spiral. We have elliptical galaxies, there's no spiral things in them at all. You know, but if you're gonna spin, watch for some spiral action.

• 13:18Chuck Nice?

  There you go. That makes sense.

• 13:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 13:20Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, very cool. Well, thanks, Joel. And thank you for, uh, once again, the handleless cup.

• 13:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And try to get the basalt out of the...

• 13:29Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly. Thank you for our, thank you for my gritty morning coffee.

• 13:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For my volcanic cup.

• 13:34Chuck Nice?

  That burns my hands.

• 13:39Chuck Nice?

  All right. All right, cool. Let's, uh, move on to, I'm gonna combine two questions together now. This is Rudd Van der Linden, uh, or Rood. It's one or the other. So the Rudd or Rood.

• 13:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm imagining his parents didn't name him Rood. I'm just thinking.

• 13:58Chuck Nice?

  And that could, you know...

• 13:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But how do you spell the, how do you spell the first name?

• 14:01Chuck Nice?

  R U U D.

• 14:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rood.

• 14:04Chuck Nice?

  Rood.

• 14:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rood.

• 14:05Chuck Nice?

  Rude Van der Linden.

• 14:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, sounds like rude to me.

• 14:08Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, well, Rude, and Rude, by the way, is kinda cool.

• 14:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is kinda cool, rude.

• 14:12Chuck Nice?

  I'm rude. I'm rude. No, you're very polite. No, I am rude.

• 14:18Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 14:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's his, what's his question?

• 14:20Chuck Nice?

  Rude says this, "Hey, guys, sad news about the, uh, Arcebo Radio Telescope collapsing on itself. I'm so glad I was able to visit it before the collapse and before Katrina. I was wondering, does Neil have any personal stories about the observatory? And what was, according to Neil, the most important discovery that was made with the telescope itself? Thanks, Rude." Now, let me follow that up with Christine Hale, who says, "Hi, Dr. Neil, just wondering how the loss of the Arcebo Telescope will affect our scouring of the heavens for possible alien communication or life? So I figured I'd just combine the two."

• 14:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, yeah.

• 14:58Chuck Nice?

  Cause one is, you know, what's your personal connection to it?

• 15:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, plus, we don't, we don't normally do current events on, in Q and A, so this is good. We'll get to that after this break.

• 15:07Chuck Nice?

  Oh!

• 15:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See what I did there?

• 15:10Chuck Nice?

  Got me!

• 15:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're doing cosmic queries. Uh, this is a, a fan appreciation edition. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice with me, we'll see you in a couple of minutes.

• 15:36Chuck Nice?

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

• 16:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. A special Cosmic Queries fan appreciation edition. Now Chuck, I don't quite know what's different between this Cosmic Queries and others for us to call this fan appreciation.

• 16:11Chuck Nice?

  Well, everybody's from Patreon, so they're...

• 16:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everyone's from Patreon, oh, okay, for sure. And there are even some video questions we're taking in, so that works. So you left off, give me the two names of those who asked about...

• 16:22Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so it's Rude Vander Linden and Charlene Hale, and Rude wants to know your personal stories or connections to the Arcebo radio telescope, because of course it collapsed recently. And Charlene would like to know, will it have an effect on how we scour the heavens for possible alien communication or life?

• 16:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so the Arcebo telescope was the largest telescope in the world for decades, ever since it was built until back in the 50s or 60s. No, no, when was it built? I think 1960s, until just a few years ago, it was the largest telescope in the world. And in telescopes, in astronomy in general, bigger equals better. Because if you're trying to collect rain outside that's coming down, imagine the rain or just photons, okay? And you want to collect it, you can use a thimble, you can use a bucket, you can use a cauldron.

• 17:18Chuck Nice?

  Or a swimming pool.

• 17:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or a swimming pool, you use the swimming pool, you'll get the most amount of raindrops. So it's that simple, it's not more complicated than that. So bigger equals better. So, since it's a radio telescope, it listens, it observes radio waves. And pulsars gives off radio, rapidly rotating neutron stars gives off radio waves. It can also detect things happening in our ionosphere, right? This is a part in the upper atmosphere that's electrically charged, right? And old timers will know that you could get AM radio from very distant cities late at night. And the reason why you could do that is AM radio waves, once they were broadcast by the antenna,

• 18:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  would reflect off the bottom of the ionosphere and be able to cover more than the curvature of the earth that you could see from where your radio was. Whereas FM goes straight out into space. So if you want FM across multiple cities, you need repeaters and all sorts of other... You need all manner of ways to get that signal into other places. Now, of course, everything's cable-driven and satellite-driven. I'm just talking about in the day. Right. So it could observe phenomenon going on in the ionosphere. In fact, the funding originally for our ReCBO was enabled by the US military to detect the signature of decoy intercontinental ballistic missiles

• 18:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  as they re-entered the atmosphere through the ionosphere as launched by Russia. What? This is how... Okay, so don't get me... Is that sensitive? Listen, this is... Don't get me started on... Well, you can, but not in this moment. Okay. On the two-way street between astrophysics, my field and my people, and the military. Oh, man, we gotta do an explainer on that then. We are all... My people were all generally sort of liberal, anti-war, this sort of thing. But at the end of the day, the stuff that we care about, the military cares about. Stuff the military cares about, we care about. So we have strongly overlapping Venn diagrams

• 19:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  in what we do and what we invent and what we innovate. So anyhow, so the money for that telescope was driven by the US military, and we knew all along we could piggyback that fact and make all manner of other discoveries. So it also gets us... It does radio echo, echoing. So what the telescope could also do, better than any other telescope, was send a signal back out to space. Okay, because you think of telescopes as just receiving. Right. But what you can do is take a signal, send it from where the location of the receiver, bounce it back off the telescope, and send it somewhere in space that you designate. Wow. Okay, so, there are asteroids,

• 20:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  which are too small to really carefully track using optical regular telescopes. So what you can do is ta- take a radio signal, send it out, beam it back out to space to an asteroid, and that, then the reflected signal comes back to you. You time it, you get the distance to that asteroid. And when you get the distance and you know which way it's going, you get its orbit. And you need, you want to know what those orbits are for asteroids that cross Earth's orbit, because they will eventually 100% hit Earth. So it's like an echolocator for... Echolocator. You, not, not with sound, of course. Not with sound, but, but still. But, but with, with radio waves, bouncing off and coming back.

• 20:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so this is, so it's a highly useful telescope in that regard. Now, alright, several years ago, okay, um, China says, "We're, we're gonna have the biggest telescope in the world." And so they went up and built a bigger telescope. Twice the collecting area of the Arcebo telescope. Twice? Twice. Twice. Around twice. I, I forgot the exact math, but it's about twice. And... That's the deal with China. China.

• 21:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is what I'm trying to tell you about China.

• 21:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So... They're killing us. They're killing us. They're killing us. So, so they too found a natural crater in the Earth as we found for the Arcebo telescope, and built the largest radio dish in the world. And it has an acronym, it's called FAST. The 500-meter aperture, um, spherical telescope. So its shape is spherical. It's, it's, it's the geometry of it. Nah, good for them. So I visited that. We, we, we shot some scenes there for Cosmos. For a whole episode. The other grass Tyson, communist. Communist.

• 22:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're the communists. Wow, that's so cool. So you want, you got to see it? Okay, yes, I was there. So it's a mile in circumference. Wow. Alright, if you walked around the upper... Anyhow, here's my point. Uh, the question was, do I have any relation? Yes, I do. My mother, my mother, uh, while she's born in New York City, her parents are from Puerto Rico. And in fact, her grandparents are from Aracibo, Puerto Rico. Oh, cool. So we have genetic connection back to the town that's the nearest town to that telescope. Wow. On the island of Puerto Rico. And so that's the first connection. Second, we would go visit relatives, you know, every Christmas and, you know, Christmas in Puerto Rico, that's a whole thing.

• 22:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. That's a whole, by the way, at midnight, you're there usually through New Year's. At midnight, there's a tradition, you eat grapes, one per, 12 grapes, one per, it's, um, a tone of the clock. Right. Okay. And one year, they got grapes, but the grapes had seeds in them. So I was like, okay. You know, and I was like eight or something. It's like, what do I do with the seeds? Oh, eat another grape, quick! You gotta do one bird, one bird stroke of the, bird for a chime. Anyhow, so, so my point is, um, the, oh, so the telescope will be missed in that regard. But it was falling out of disrepair. We've known this for about a decade. The, the National Science Funding, uh, Foundation started withdrawing money for support for it.

• 23:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that means your maintenance doesn't work out. No one writes the article about the drop in those funds. They wait until the damn detector falls out of the sky and then they talk about it as a tragedy. It was a tragedy that had tap roots that goes back a decade. Wow. So for me, this plight of the Aracibo telescope is metaphor for science in America. Excellent. You know, it first, you, the funding drops, it goes out of disrepair. And then a few things break, putting the rest of the structure at stress points. Because an engineering design system, if you start taking out support struts, then the rest of it... Can't, it's designed to be complete.

• 24:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you start yanking out pieces of it because it broke and you don't repair it, then that's the beginning of the end.

• 24:31Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 24:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which in fact it was. The beginning of the end, and now the detector falls down out of the sky. And it's the end of an era. And so now if aliens are gonna talk to humans by sending radio signals.

• 24:45Chuck Nice?

  They're gonna be speaking Chinese.

• 24:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right. The Chinese will be the first to have that conversation with aliens. Now, so I'm, as an American, we're Merker. I'm upset that we can't lead that effort. But as a scientist, I know that if you, if your country becomes short sighted in terms of their investments, the science can and will still get done. It happened with the superconducting supercollider that we were gonna build in Texas. Funding began, then it all got cut to zero. But Europe said, we'll build one. So Europe built at the European Center for Nuclear Research, CERN. They have the Large Hadron Collider.

• 25:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they discovered the Higgs boson, the god particle. They discovered new frontiers in particle physics at CERN, and we didn't, okay? Science doesn't care what your nationality is. All that matters is who is offering you enlightened leadership and enlightened governance if you want to be on that frontier. Otherwise, you will dance to the tune played by others who have made those investments in the future of this civilization.

• 26:01Chuck Nice?

  Wow. Man, that was good.

• 26:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm sorry, that's a long answer to that.

• 26:05Chuck Nice?

  No, it's a long answer, but I gotta tell you, the message at the end of that answer, you can't, it's all worth it. Worth the price of admission.

• 26:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just, okay.

• 26:16Chuck Nice?

  All right. I think we, uh, let's do another video from Joel Cherico.

• 26:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Joel has two videos, okay.

• 26:23Chuck Nice?

  Joel, I'm gonna surprise you, has more than two videos.

• 26:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Joel Cherico, and so, yeah, he does Cherico pottery.

• 26:28Chuck Nice?

  That's right. Yeah, Joel's a big supporter on Patreon.

• 26:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and so, by the way, while I was drinking my coffee, an alien climbed out of the moon mug. Joel, can you lose the aliens, all right? When you, okay, go on.

• 26:44Chuck Nice?

  All right, go ahead. Let's, uh, let's, let's hear from Joel.

• 26:49Speaker 02

  Another question for you. So, science and technology are replacing a lot of the things that we used to make with our hands. Um, they're being made by machines. So, my question is, could a machine ever make art?

• 27:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm. I wonder why he asked that. That's a scared artist right there. Yeah. And you're next Chuck.

• 27:13Chuck Nice?

  Can a machine really tell jokes?

• 27:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I, I, I had a conversation with one of those rolling robots once. You know, at a party. Yeah. And, and they sounded really smart, so I said, "You, you sound really smart, like, where'd you go to school?" And he said, "Oh, solid state university." That was good. That's not bad. That's, that's not, it's not a bad joke. I'm gonna kill that robot.

• 27:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I, I think machines, so, so for me, let me offer my definition of art. Art is, um, reality through the lens of someone with imagination. Which upon being shared with you, allow you to see the world, not only with fresh eyes, but with a perspective that can enhance the beauty of your life and the life of others. Okay. That's what I think of, so, and by the way, art, capital A. Sculptures, screenwriters, set designers. Yeah, all, all of art. So, can a computer do art?

• 28:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think computers, as if they're programmed by you to just do something that's already known to do. No, it's not gonna do art, or it'll duplicate somebody else's art, right? That's not art, that's just forgery, right? So, so, art, for me, has gotta come from a creative place.

• 28:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That no good art has to come from a creative place that is not yet been tapped by anyone else. If you're going to advance the world of art, alright? So, so for a computer to do that, it has to be full up genuine artificial intelligence.

• 29:01Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it would have to be basically human.

• 29:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it would have to be, exactly.

• 29:05Chuck Nice?

  It would have to be, it'd have to have the exact same, I would say, neurological capabilities that we do.

• 29:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it wouldn't have to be the same, it would just have to be, have the capacity to have a thought that was never had before.

• 29:18Chuck Nice?

  Right, yeah, exactly.

• 29:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whether or not it's the same thought we had.

• 29:21Chuck Nice?

  Right, it would just have to be an original thought.

• 29:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  An original thought.

• 29:25Chuck Nice?

  Right, because, I mean, think about it, so you look at, like, just take Monet for, or any of the impressionists, right? I don't know who the first impressionist was, but he was probably nearsighted.

• 29:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Someone go back through time and say, "Yeah, put one of these on."

• 29:45Chuck Nice?

  And he'd be like, "Oh, wait a minute, so that's how this stuff really looks? And it's just, you know, painting everything in great detail?"

• 29:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you could, you could, you hand this to whoever that was, that would destroy an entire movement.

• 30:02Chuck Nice?

  And destroy whole movement. Be like, "Wait a minute, so, oh, that's how stuff really looks." So it, but it was either that, he was nearsighted, or he was like, "Why can't, why wouldn't I see, why couldn't I see the world in this gauzy, like, perspective?"

• 30:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What surely contributed to that was the arrival of photography.

• 30:24Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 30:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, these are coincident in time, right? Because photography is not, now I can capture reality basically exactly as reality is. I don't need you to paint a portrait of me to capture the reality of me.

• 30:37Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 30:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, if you're gonna paint a portrait, okay, give me three eyeballs on one side, or whatever Picasso did, do something different and imaginative, because if I want exactly me, I'll just take a photo.

• 30:47Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 30:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 30:49Chuck Nice?

  So, yeah, yeah, oh, wow, that's really cool.

• 30:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, right, so, yeah, I think that's the kind of computer you need, and the day that happens, you know, we'll just become their pets.

• 30:56Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, we're all screwed.

• 30:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When that happens, it's a rap. It's a rap on us all, okay? Do you know how we created, you know how we domesticated cats and dogs? I know. By killing the ones that bit us. Oh, God, that's awesome. So you have a litter, all right, and some are nice and cuddly and you pet them and they purr and they do that or whatever, and then another one's like scratching and hogging at you? Dead. Kill that one. Kill that one. That, and so you're selectively editing the gene pool of these creatures for their temperament. And so now you went from a wolf to a poodle, right? Or a, what's that, the Pomeranian, you know, or a Yorkie, a lapdog, right?

• 31:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the point is, the day AI becomes our overlord, it would, you just want to be nice to them so you can become their pets. Otherwise, they're going to... Don't be the human who kicks and fights. Don't be that human. Your ass is gone. Because you will not outsmart the AI. Yeah. Because they're designed to be as smart or smarter than anything we ever will be. In the same way, we program computers to be better at us at chess. Okay, computer beat Kasparov, for goodness sake, all right? A computer beat the best Jeopardy champion.

• 32:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we're already kind of know there's certain things they're better at us than. But if they start running things, okay? Yeah, just learn how to purr. Yeah. All right, we got to take another quick break. And when we come back, more Cosmic Queries Fan Appreciation Edition when StarTalk returns.

• 33:01Chuck Nice?

  Hey, we'd like to give a Patreon shout out to the following Patreon patrons, Corey Farnham, Patty Weber, and Vergar Jertson. Guys, thank you so much for your gravity assist as we make our way through the cosmos. Without you, we couldn't do this show. And for those of you who would like your very own Patreon shout out, please go to patreon.com/startalkradio and support us.

• 33:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. Startalk Cosmic Queries, Fan Appreciation Edition. Chuck!

• 33:40Chuck Nice?

  Hey, hey!

• 33:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Spending all this time just blathering, you know, let's, we gotta get to more questions.

• 33:44Chuck Nice?

  Okay, we'll get to more questions.

• 33:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I gotta stop this. I gotta, I gotta...

• 33:47Chuck Nice?

  No. You always say it, but it's, it's good.

• 33:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, no. Okay.

• 33:52Chuck Nice?

  I mean, if you went to the bank, right? And you said, "I'd like to withdraw a hundred dollars." And the bank manager comes out and says, "Oh, hi, Dr. Tyson. By the way, today is Dr. Tyson Appreciation Day. Now, in addition to your hundred dollars, here are," and he counted out by ones, "another hundred dollars."

• 34:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 34:15Chuck Nice?

  Would you say, "Bro, what are you doing? Right? I'm in a hurry. I gotta get out of here. I gotta go."

• 34:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 34:22Chuck Nice?

  No, you'd let him count out the hundred dollars in ones.

• 34:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you take it.

• 34:25Chuck Nice?

  And you say, "Thank you very much."

• 34:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that hundred was not out of your account.

• 34:28Chuck Nice?

  That's right. There you go.

• 34:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bank decision in your favor. Okay. New monopoly card. All right.

• 34:34Chuck Nice?

  It's all gravy.

• 34:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, thank you for the bank analogy.

• 34:36Chuck Nice?

  There you go. Let's go to Tracy Scrubith, who says, "Uh, Dr. Tyson, what do you consider to be the most persistent belief in physics or astronomy, which has already been disproven, but that is still perpetuated in popular culture and/or schools?"

• 34:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, wow. What a great question. Okay, yes, like a multi-part thing going on there, okay. Yes. So, um, the concept of belief, I prefer to use that word for when you think something is true in the absence of evidence. So, um, belief doesn't have much currency in the sciences. What happens is I have some marginal evidence that something might be true. So, I can say I believe it's true, but it's not, I have this much evidence to say it's true. What does your evidence say? My evidence says is the opposite of that. So then a third person comes and say, no, what I found is there's a hybrid of those two things that you're saying, and this is the real truth.

• 35:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then a fourth person says, I agree with that third person. And a fifth person says, I agree with that third person. And you assemble information and data and observations so that there's an emergent objective truth. Right. So it's not like we're all saying, let's just believe this is true and get on with life. No, that's not quite the mechanism of what's going on here. So what you really want to know is there anything that we long thought would be true, turn out to not be true, but the public still believes? Um, I, ah, no, the public belief stuff that we always knew was never true. That's hilarious. So, no, spaceships don't make sound in space, okay?

• 36:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so Star Wars would be silent movie, alright? So, that's one that we always knew was not true and the public doesn't seem to get it. Um, we knew the world was round, uh, in ancient Greece. Forget this Columbus stuff where people thought, no, the educated people knew Earth was round. Um, ancient Greece, they knew Earth was round. You know how they knew Earth was round? Because lunar eclipses, okay? Where Earth's shadow is cast onto the full moon, always made a curved shadow, okay? And the shadow was a circular shadow. And the only shape object that will always make a circular shadow?

• 37:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is a sphere, no matter what angle the light comes from. That's right. So the ancient Greeks were clever people and they recognized this and they saw that it would be at different angles and they always got that that, that, that, that, a circular shadow on the thing. The only way you can get a circle is if we are a sphere. So, so it's been known for a thousand years, yet there are emergent people today who are certain Earth is flat. So I, I, so no, there's nothing that we have carried with us that is yet to be confirmed or has been confirmed in, in the negative that the public still believes, not in physics. You get some of that in medicine, okay? Always. Oh, oh my gosh. Oh, this is chicken soup. This will cure you in, in, in six days. Right. Okay?

• 37:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ginkgo biloba. Okay, so, you know, my favorite is the chicken soup one. So, the way it goes is, uh, there's no better cure than grandma's chicken soup. Okay? And with, uh, that and other good traditional cures will make you better in a week. Right. But, but without them, your cold will linger for seven days.

• 38:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So if you look at sort of, uh, the, what they used to call old, um, um, wives tales. They used to call it that. I don't know how it even got that term. But just things that lore handed down. Another one is, if I, if I roll you in front of the window and the window's open and it's cold air, you'll catch pneumonia. Right. Okay? I heard that from my grandmother. And I'm thinking, why would you catch pneumonia? Is there like pneumonia sitting outside the window, ready to come in? Only when it's cold outside? Like what, what? And I never believed it, but I heard it. Okay? I watch movies, you know, go to TCM movies, black and white movies from the 1940s and 50s. It is all throughout the movies. Okay? Shut the window, you'll catch your death of cold. There, there's a Hitchcock movie

• 39:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  where somebody's trying to kill somebody who's wheelchair bound and rolls him in front of a window, opens the window in the winter and then leaves them there and they catch the death of cold and die. This is, but today, you don't, you don't see that in storytelling. So that must have gotten through.

• 39:18Chuck Nice?

  Right, yeah.

• 39:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It must have, okay, gotten through that, no, that's no longer the case. I was told by my grandmother, "Wear your slippers, otherwise you'll catch a death or cold at night." And how am I gonna catch a cold through the bottom of my feet? You know, I, you know, I have calluses. If a cold gets through the calluses in the bottom of my feet, give it to him.

• 39:38Chuck Nice?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 39:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so I think in other professions, physics, not so much.

• 39:43Chuck Nice?

  Got you, alright, that's cool.

• 39:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Keep it going.

• 39:45Chuck Nice?

  Alright, let's keep it going. This is Timothy L. Johnson, Timothy says, "Chuck, you can pronounce my name, I promise."

• 39:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Timothy Johnson.

• 39:54Chuck Nice?

  Thank you, Ty, thank you, Ty Mophie.

• 39:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ty Mophie.

• 39:58Chuck Nice?

  Thanks, Ty Mophie.

• 39:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Johansson.

• 40:00Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, Johansson.

• 40:04Chuck Nice?

  Then he says, "Dr. Tyson, I wanted to pick your brain, in your opinion, what is the most fascinating thing that we have discovered in our known universe? And how many ways could it kill you?"

• 40:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think nothing beats black holes.

• 40:24Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 40:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And a black hole kill you a hundred different ways.

• 40:26Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 40:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, the first discovered black hole was, it was in a source of X-rays and ultraviolet light in the constellation Scorpius, no, it might have been Cygnus, no, the first one was in Cygnus, the constellation Cygnus. And you have a, when you have a black hole and material getting flayed off of a star in orbit around it, that material falling in radiates copiously before it enters the abyss. And so we knew that, you calculated, this is the signature a black hole would give us as matter falls in, and so you look for those in the sky, so now the catalog, we have no end of catalogued black holes.

• 41:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, it's definitely black holes, and they've captured our imagination in movies, in storytelling. Disney had a movie, The Black Hole, back in the seventies, I think they're redoing it. So, yeah, it's gotta be black holes, and my favorite way to die is falling into a black hole. I don't wanna get hit by a bus, I don't wanna die in a, put me, throw me into a black hole.

• 41:30Chuck Nice?

  Good for you, mine is sleep.

• 41:34Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I'm gonna go with, go to sleep.

• 41:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're going with sleep.

• 41:36Chuck Nice?

  That's what I'm going.

• 41:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In your sleep.

• 41:38Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I'm gonna say that's my favorite way.

• 41:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, why not be part of an experiment while you're doing this?

• 41:46Chuck Nice?

  Because I don't want to be there at all, because I'm dying.

• 41:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm told, I haven't heard this verified, that during the French Revolution with cutting off everybody's heads, if you know you're gonna die that way, why not participate in some science experiments, right? So for example, your eyes connect directly to your brain and they don't need the rest of your body.

• 42:02Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 42:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, you can stop your heart briefly and you're still kind of alive while that's happening. So cut off your head, go to the rolling head, right before it completely dies, and ask, because your ears are still connected.

• 42:14Chuck Nice?

  What do you see?

• 42:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, how many fingers do you see? If you blink. You blink, so I'm told, I didn't have this verified, that there was still some brief brain activity right up. You did an experiment, okay?

• 42:28Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 42:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why waste a guillotined head when you could...

• 42:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if I gotta die, throw me in a black hole, I'll give you all the data you want.

• 42:41Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 42:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 42:42Chuck Nice?

  Oh god, I'm gonna get a t-shirt. "Science: Why Waste a Guillotine Head?"

• 42:51Chuck Nice?

  We gotta get it, oh, that's so great.

• 42:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, by the way, I mean in all seriousness, there was, um, the, there was a prisoner who voluntarily donated his body to be micro-sliced. Okay, do you know how you do this? Okay, so the, oh no, this is a prisoner who was on death row, okay? Voluntarily did this, said, "Yes, give my body to medicine." So, they do that, then you like mostly freeze the body, and then you just start taking slices.

• 43:20Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So ideally you'd have three bodies to do this with, one you'd slice this way, one you'd slice this way, you know, top to bottom, left to right, and then front to back. Then you'd have thin, transparent slices of the human body that you could compare to MRI images of the three-dimensional cross-section of the body.

• 43:40Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 43:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I, I own a book that is this sliced prisoner who was on death row.

• 43:46Chuck Nice?

  And if you're a cannibal, it makes for a lovely carpaccio.

• 43:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Slice human, that's great. Or you're fried, you get human chips.

• 43:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cut potatoes thin.

• 44:01Chuck Nice?

  Alright, let's see, let's go with...

• 44:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I hope kids aren't listening to this show. Are we PG 13? I think we're PG 13.

• 44:07Chuck Nice?

  Listen, we're talking nutrition, that's all. Isam Kabbas says, "Hey Neil, hey Chuck, my question is about the elasticity of the... of expansion of space. Space is expanding in all directions and everything is moving away from everything else. Why isn't the space within our own solar system expanding? Why doesn't the expansion of space destabilize orbits? Why doesn't the expansion stretch the space currently occupied by the Earth and in turn, stretch us?"

• 44:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This person's clearly lost some sleep on this one. If you've got 10 questions that just vomit out out of one idea...

• 44:51Chuck Nice?

  His question was like a little Russian nesting doll of questions.

• 44:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, that's right. So, excellent question. So here's what's going on. The stretching of the fabric of space and time from the expansion of the universe, okay, is at all times competing against gravity that would prevent it, okay? On the largest scale, it is winning. On the smallest scales, it's not. The sun has a good grip on the planets and the urge for space to stretch within the confines of the solar system is not higher than the success of the sun keeping everybody in orbit.

• 45:29Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 45:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  However, in the dark energy future scenario of the universe, where the universe will continue to expand and accelerate in its expansion, the expansion will become more and more significant in places where it didn't previously have a stronghold.

• 45:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And yes, eventually, that extreme future universe, where you have exponential expansion, will start ripping apart solar systems. Yes, the sun will no longer be able to hold on to it against the stretching of space between the sun and the earth and the rest of the planets. Then, it'll start, now, electromagnetic forces are stronger than gravitational forces. So it's holding earth together is stronger than the sun's gravity on the earth. So, the earth will struggle and hold on until it will break apart. And this will continue, until, there's some of us worried about the big rip.

• 46:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this will take place when it tries to stretch the very quantum realm that is the tiniest representation of the fabric of space and time there is. Because that, we don't think, is stretchable at all. And if you get into that realm, you have overcome even the quantum realm, and we think space will just rip, and we don't know what that'll look like. And it's kinda scary. And in fact, StarTalk has another book coming out. Do you know this, in the spring?

• 47:03Chuck Nice?

  I did not.

• 47:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Spring 2021. It's, you know what that book is called?

• 47:07Chuck Nice?

  The Big Rip?

• 47:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's called Cosmic, I shouldn't be announcing it yet, because I don't think it's on shelves yet. Because they're still in production. So don't, don't look for it yet, okay? But it's called Cosmic Queries.

• 47:18Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 47:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in there is the whole discussion about the expansion of the universe, and how it could, in one scenario, could end up in the big rip. In which case, all of the nesting doll scenarios described by, um, what's the person's name again?

• 47:33Chuck Nice?

  Isom.

• 47:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, Isom, uh, will, will be realized. And that'll be the end of the universe as we know it.

• 47:39Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 47:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Have a nice day.

• 47:41Chuck Nice?

  Have a great day. The big rip. He who smelt it dealt it. There you go.

• 47:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we got time for one more question, Chuck.

• 47:47Chuck Nice?

  Well, that means we gotta go to our last video question from Joel Cherico.

• 47:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Joel gets three questions?

• 47:54Chuck Nice?

  Yes, sir, he does.

• 47:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dude, he must be giving us a lot of money. Oh my god.

• 47:57Chuck Nice?

  Yes, sir, he is.

• 48:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, alright, no, we're not that crass, but we like to joke about it, but we're very loving. Okay, what does he get? Here it is.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  Another question, so there are some scientists in history who were also interested in art as part of their process, like Albert Einstein had his violin right next to his desk where he would do his math problems, and when he'd get stuck on a math problem, he would take a break and play the violin. So, as a scientist, are there any parts of your process that involve doing anything artistic, anything that's not just doing science, that helps you with your own scientific problems or ideas?

• 48:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent question. Interesting. So, let me, uh, well, I don't know if we have time for me to give the full answer that that question deserves. Let me go quick and briefly. So, the art-science relationship is not an equal two-way street, okay? There are discoveries in science that directly impact how the artist does art. True. Okay, from the computer... From everything to everything. Yeah, yeah, so computer visualization in movies is all the science and engineering that went into the computer that the visualizers are using, all of whom are artists, to do their craft.

• 49:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The, all the stuff that's happening on tablets now, all of the, when neon was discovered or invented as a means of lighting and colors, artists picked up on it immediately and started doing sculptures with neon bulbs, right? And so, the progress of science and engineering directly affects art. The question is, does art directly affect science? I think the actual answer to that is no. There is no scientific discovery where the person says, "This is where a G chord on my guitar came in." There's no, that's not, there is no such infusion. That being said...

• 50:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The value of art to the scientist, I don't think is any different from the value of art to anybody who knows the value of art. It is a place for you to stimulate parts of your brain that are wired differently from all the other ways your brain is wired.

• 50:26Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 50:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that could possibly stimulate new synaptic possibilities in what your next thought will be. Okay, my entire PhD thesis was written to the music of the nine symphonies of Beethoven and all of his string quartets. Okay, so I, I'm, I, me and Ludwig go way back on this, okay? So, I'm, I, so in that case, I'm not writing and then looking at art. I'm writing and listening to artistic creativity in the regime of classical music.

• 51:00Chuck Nice?

  So, science has a direct impact, whereas art may have a direct inspiration.

• 51:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Inspirational impact, correct.

• 51:10Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 51:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not as though Einstein played the violin and said, oh, there's a note. I'm gonna put that note in the thing. That's not really what that is. I see Einstein and the violin, um, not so much as an escape from his work, not so much as something that will directly plug into his work, but as a respite

• 51:28Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 51:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  from his work. And if you have a brief respite, it lets the brain

• 51:33Chuck Nice?

  Breathe.

• 51:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Breathe. I like that.

• 51:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 51:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Metaphorically breathe so that new sort, or maybe literally breathe. New oxygen comes in to feed new thoughts. So, I've always been a fan of art. Uh, my brother's an artist, um, and, uh, so my whole life, and he went to the High School of Music and Art, uh, just as a, well, we're both native New Yorkers. I went to the Bronx High School of Science.

• 51:57Chuck Nice?

  Science.

• 51:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we both sort of were fed by these institutions in New York that knew and understands such people walk around who could benefit from this kind of stimulation. So, so yes, I gotta go with Joel that it can help inspire you, not directly. It shows your brain a different palette on which to think before you return to what you were doing before.

• 52:23Chuck Nice?

  Cool.

• 52:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 52:25Chuck Nice?

  I like that answer.

• 52:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, well, I'm glad. Well, thank you, Joel, for your three daily doubles.

• 52:30Chuck Nice?

  And your money.

• 52:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, stop being so crass.

• 52:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And maybe he'll get the basalt out of there. Some people don't know what basalt is. Basalt is just like hardened lava, lava fields, right? And so the darkened areas of the moon are basalt. We went over that in one of the explainer videos. We talk about making craters. But anyway, this definitely evokes the universe and moons without actually being a representation of a moon. And that's where I like art to be. Don't be the moon. Be something that the moon evokes that makes you feel the moon. Nice. I just want a handle. I just want to get a handle. And like I said in the Van Gogh's Starry Night, that's clearly not what he saw,

• 53:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  but it's definitely what he felt while he was watching that night sky. And I want a piece of what artists feel. Because I want to feel and see the way they do. Nice. I myself am not the artist, so I need their help. We got to wrap it up there. Chuck? Always a pleasure. Always good to have you, man. Okay, this has been StarTalk, Cosmic Query's Fan Appreciation Edition. And as always, I bid you, for the whole StarTalk family, to keep looking up.