Cosmic Queries - Smarty-Pants Trash Bin with Jordan Klepper

What is string theory? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Jordan Klepper answer fan questions about solar system formation, dark matter, and the expansion of spacetime. What would travelling at the speed of light look like?

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. This is StarTalk. Cosmic Queries Edition. For my co-host today, I've got the one, the only, the inimitable, the... She's so unique in this world, I don't think anyone is related to him. Jordan Klepper.

• 0:29Jordan Klepper?

  I...

• 0:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jordan.

• 0:30Jordan Klepper?

  No, I have no close relatives, very few close friends.

• 0:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There was an egg somewhere, and you hatched out of it.

• 0:39Jordan Klepper?

  I was born onto this earth, who knows from where, and who knows what will come from me? But here I am.

• 0:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I mean, I just, you know, I first, as for so many people, I was introduced to your work on Comedy Central as a sort of correspondent and running around the country, exploring the depths of irrationality that has befallen us all. And I think, I keep thinking to myself, if he weren't doing this, who would? And like, no one, right? So, so I just want to thank you, for all of you have done to expose the underbelly of the country.

• 1:12Jordan Klepper?

  I feel like I'm like James Cameron diving into the abyss. But it's not underwater, it's just into the heartland of America, so...

• 1:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The heartland of America. So we've got you for Cosmic Queries, and this is a grab bag edition. So, you know, we don't like to admit it, but every now and then, there's just like the leftovers from all, from all the... The leftovers, because they didn't fit a category, they didn't fit a theme, and so here they are. It's like the trash bin of questions. Doesn't mean we don't love the questions, it just meant they didn't find a place before today.

• 1:44Jordan Klepper?

  Yeah, to be clear, for all of those folks who are out there, you're not second tier, you're just such unique thinkers, you can't be categorized other, other than the category of trash bin, which, but still...

• 1:58Jordan Klepper?

  We're not like a badge of honor, a trashy badge of honor.

• 2:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. Alright, so you have all the questions and I haven't seen them yet? Not that we're trying to stump me, but if I don't know the answer, I'll just say, "I don't know," and we move on. And I love knowing where the people came from, if they, if it happens to be in their, in their signature. And these are all from our Patreon supporters. So Patreons, we changed the rules, so they're the only ones who actually get to ask questions for Cosmic Queries. So those are the rules.

• 2:28Jordan Klepper?

  And to be, to be clear, I know it's not the goal, but I do hope they stump you, just because...

• 2:35Jordan Klepper?

  You're cocky, Neil, you're cocky, and it's important to knock you down a peg. For me, it, it, it makes me feel better about myself, so I'm really rooting against you on this one, Neil.

• 2:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just before you begin, there was a, um, because people like trying to, you know, stump you, it's... They won't even try to not stump you if they could. They'll put in extra energy to stump. So I, I, I once tweeted that a plane whose engine fails is a glider. A helicopter whose engine fails is a brick.

• 3:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I thought it's pretty clear what I'm talking about there. But no, okay? It's, it's, so, so apparently helicopter experts jumped in and said, "No, the engine can fail, but the propellers will still turn." Okay? And then you have something called autorotation, where you can kind of guide your fall from the sky. You know, like the little, uh, the seeds that can, um, that fall off the tree, that have little propeller blades.

• 3:35Jordan Klepper?

  Yeah.

• 3:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, they don't just fall straight to the ground, they, they have a controlled descent. And so no one, no one volunteered to say, "Maybe Neil meant there's no upward lift at all." Okay? An engine failure, along with the propeller failure, right? No one volunteered that possibility as to what I might have been intending. And so they all just said, "We're gonna prove Neil wrong. He's wrong. He's so ru-" Okay, okay, this is how it is. What's the first one you have?

• 4:07Jordan Klepper?

  Sandra Pagliani has a question. She says, first of all, she says, "Woo-hoo, what a thrill to be on Patreon." Thank you, Sandra. She says, "I've been diving into multiple books on the multiverse, and I'm still struggling with the string theory concept. Can you please explain it in a simple way, or write a string theory book for dummies so I finally get it? Thank you."

• 4:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so a great book on this, which was a big bestseller, was from my friend and colleague Brian Greene. He wrote a book called The Elegant Universe. And there's a lot of other stuff in there, but he's a string theorist, and so string theory deeply infuses his writings, because that's the side of the fence he's on as he comes to the topic. So what I can do is tell you that we have quantum physics, right? That's the theory of the small. So that gives us an understanding of molecules and atoms and particles. And then we have Einstein's general theory of relativity, which is, explains the entire universe, what gravity is doing to shape the universe. And out of that, we get the Big Bang and black holes

• 5:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  and all manner of other things. But it turns out, if you take Einstein's general theory of relativity and apply it all the way down to the center of a black hole, where we would call a singularity, it blows up. I mean, not literally, it mathematically blows up. Do you remember when you took math in like, high school? You weren't allowed to divide by zero? Right? Okay, it's kind of like that.

• 5:35Jordan Klepper?

  The man was holding me down, that's how I always saw it.

• 5:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how you felt about it?

• 5:40Jordan Klepper?

  That's how I felt.

• 5:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You wanted to do it, that just somebody was in your way.

• 5:44Jordan Klepper?

  You don't tell me what to do, Mr. Forrester.

• 5:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so we know general theory of relativity has limits, all right? It applies in all these large-scale places, but when you get down to these tiny areas, it doesn't. Now, so here's the problem. At the Big Bang, because general relativity takes us like, from the Big Bang onward, but right at the point of the Big Bang, when the universe was really small? Wait a minute. If the universe was one small, then maybe quantum physics applies to the entire universe in those few moments. So you have a shotgun marriage of these two highly successful theories of the universe. But we don't know how to do that. String theorists have come in and said, we have an umbrella

• 6:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  that will enclose them both. And put them under one coherent understanding of how the universe works. And we get the singularities out of it. We get quantum physics and we get general relativity. So that's my sort of overview of what string theorists are trying to accomplish here. But they haven't really yet. And there's been a lot of them working for decades. And I've gone up to them and I say, how come you're not there yet? I've been waiting around. They've been at this basically since the early 80s. And there's like dozens of them, right? Maybe even scores of them. I say, how come you haven't done it? They said, well, it's hard. So then I said to Brian Greene, to his face, I said, could it be that you are all just too stupid? Why is it that it's hard and you're not smart enough? Right? It's not that you're not smart enough. Why?

• 7:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's going on there? Of course, no cosmologist theorist physicist is going to say, I'm stupid. They'll say the problem is hard. I take a different sort of view. I think maybe there's yet another place to explore for this umbrella. And maybe it's not string theory. I don't know. But that's where we are now. The two are still not married.

• 7:41Jordan Klepper?

  Well, I mean, marriage, marriage equality, even in the galaxy in and of itself is a process. I think we've, American political system says, it's not that it can't happen. It happens slower than we want it to.

• 7:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, that's what it is. It's happening slower than we, than we really want.

• 7:56Jordan Klepper?

  Exactly.

• 7:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 7:57Jordan Klepper?

  Exactly. This is from Scott W. Peterson. In this month's National Geographic, there's an article about our investigation of small solar system objects. In it, there's a little discussion about the formation of the solar system. The theory is that Jupiter formed closer to the sun. And when it moved outward, it affected the orbits of outer, icier objects, thus hurling them toward Earth. This bombardment was where we got water from. Why couldn't it have been the opposite? The Earth formed out there where there is more ice, then was catapulted inward to a point where the ice becomes liquid.

• 8:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, very nice question. Man, I love it when people read and think and, and this is good.

• 8:39Jordan Klepper?

  This is, this is, this is a thoughtful audience. And they're magazine subscribers.

• 8:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that means they read.

• 8:46Jordan Klepper?

  They read. Print is not dead, it's alive, it's coming to this man's house. I bet this guy, I gotta believe, Scott, I believe, has that beautiful wall of yellow National Geographics behind him.

• 8:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, everybody does.

• 8:57Jordan Klepper?

  I love that wall.

• 8:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The yellow rectangle.

• 8:59Jordan Klepper?

  I love the wall.

• 9:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yep, yep. So, okay. So, here's what happened. We had our own solar system. Before 1995, we were the only known solar system. And so, we presumed that we be representative of other solar systems. Cause what, we gotta start somewhere, let's assume that. We start discovering other planets, beginning in 1995. And the method favored the discovery of big planets, even if there were little ones there awaiting to be seen. And what we found were that there were Jupiter-sized planets orbiting really close to their host star. And we said, who ordered that? Jupiter's belong out, you know, way out where our Jupiter is. How did that happen?

• 9:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we kept looking, and there they were, and they kept showing up, and they kept showing up. And so, we had to ask, what, what's going on? What is normal? I guess is how you hit this. What is normal? And we went back to the, the, the formation drawing board, and we noticed that in a solar system, you could start out with many times more planets than you actually end up with. Because some planets' orbits are unstable. And what we mean by that is, if you come too close to a planet, it can slingshot you out, you can exit the star system. But by doing so, it has consequences in the solar system itself.

• 10:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So for every planet that gets flung out, the remaining planets readjust in their position. And it's a whole migrational thing going on in the solar system. It's called planet migration. And planets can move in, planets can move out. It depends on the circumstances of what's going on here. So if you have a Jupiter that's far out, we can imagine that the exchanges of energies and the capturing of other objects can force that kind of readjustment to give you the spread of what we actually see in our catalogs of star systems. So that's what's going on there. And in fact, I get to do this because this is StarTalk.

• 11:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The StarTalk book, and a boy reads, right?

• 11:15Jordan Klepper?

  He reads.

• 11:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A reader in the house.

• 11:16Jordan Klepper?

  Yeah.

• 11:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Our recent book, StarTalk Cosmic Queries, there's a whole section on the formation of star systems and this migratory process. So I invite you to check out that book. It's a fun book and it's published by National Geographic. Mic drop.

• 11:36Jordan Klepper?

  Look at this. This is why. Scott, you come well-read. You're gonna get a well-read response. That's what you're gonna get. All woven together.

• 11:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's all tight.

• 11:47Jordan Klepper?

  Yep.

• 11:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tight answers.

• 11:48Jordan Klepper?

  Tight, and it's got a sponsorship attached to it. I mean, this is, this is how you make podcasts right here.

• 11:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's a beautiful book. And it was, one of our engineers and editors and producers, Lindsay Walker, was a major contributor to that, just making it shape, start talkifying the content to make sure that any StarTalk fan feels like they are at home in that book. And so, so we got this.

• 12:18Jordan Klepper?

  I love it. I admit, I'm embarrassed. I've never heard of planetary migration before.

• 12:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, well, so you need a life.

• 12:28Jordan Klepper?

  I'm

• 12:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gotta get out more, Jordan.

• 12:30Jordan Klepper?

  That's what I told you, without any family or friends, just as this egg who was birthed unto the world, I'm still grasping at straws.

• 12:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, there you go.

• 12:38Jordan Klepper?

  Uh, Paul Love, he's got a question for us. He says, "When we say that the universe is expanding, are we really talking about just the matter in the universe? Or are we talking about spacetime itself? For example, during the rapid expansion of the Big Bang, was it just all the matter in the universe expanding into pre-existing space?"

• 12:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh. Okay, I can answer that, but only after we take a commercial break.

• 13:03Jordan Klepper?

  Well done. Flip-hanger.

• 13:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You see what I did there?

• 13:06Jordan Klepper?

  It's classic. It's classic.

• 13:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm getting better and better at that.

• 13:09Jordan Klepper?

  This was really good. Make 'em wait.

• 13:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back, we're gonna find out what the hell is the universe expanding into and what does it mean even for it to be expanding on StarTalk Cosmic Queries.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  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.

• 13:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, Cosmic Queries, StarTalk. With me is my co-host, Jordan Klepper. Jordan, love you, man.

• 13:58Jordan Klepper?

  Right back at you, Neil.

• 13:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love you, all your work. And you still got the gig with Comedy Central, right?

• 14:04Jordan Klepper?

  I still got it. I'm still contributing to the good old Daily Show right now, so I launch out into the world every few weeks and see what the world's talking about.

• 14:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And do you pitch stories to them, or do they request of you?

• 14:16Jordan Klepper?

  I do. It's a little bit of both. We basically, you know, I have a small little team that I tend to go out to some of these rallies and events with, and we kind of watch the news. And when a rally shows up, or there's a protest, we went to a mask mandate protest a few weeks ago, there's a couple of events coming up, we sort of look at where the conversation's going, and if there's an event, we try to get there and talk to people, so it's...

• 14:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the more irrational the conversation, the more likely you will be there to report on it.

• 14:41Jordan Klepper?

  Exactly. If you're like, "Man, I bet some people have some irrational points of view and are pretty angry about it," there's a good chance I'm staying at a hotel nearby.

• 14:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So keep them coming. We got questions from our Patreon members.

• 14:54Jordan Klepper?

  Yeah, so this is Paul Love's question. He wants to know, when we say that the universe is expanding, are we talking about just the matter in the universe, or are we talking about spacetime?

• 15:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so, so this is what we learned from general theory of relativity, Einstein, that space, which we think of as this empty thing, and of course, things can move through space. Earth is moving in orbit around the sun through space. The sun is orbiting the center of the galaxy. It's moving through space. And there are some, there's some galactic motion where they're moving through space. However, underneath all of that is the fabric of the spacetime continuum. That is what's expanding when we speak of the expanding universe. And so, no, the expanding universe, and we see galaxies hurtling away from each other,

• 15:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  they are being carried along in the fabric of the spacetime continuum. And by the way, that means in the early universe, there's no rule against that fabric stretching, really, faster than the speed of light itself. The speed of light speed limit is a restriction on how fast you can move through space, not how fast space itself can expand. So the entire early universe, it is booking. It is, it is going way faster than the speed of light. Not a problem. Not a problem there.

• 16:21Jordan Klepper?

  And is, is, when, when, when I'm visualizing this and using even the term fabric, should I be thinking of it in that sense of something that is literally being pulled?

• 16:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I think another way to, fabric is a little more poetic, rather than just rubber sheet.

• 16:37Jordan Klepper?

  Yeah, rubber sheet makes me think of, uh, sixth grade and the difficulties I had at night after I had a big cola before going to bed.

• 16:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, is that right? Oh, gotcha, gotcha. Is this the first you admit this of your childhood?

• 16:50Jordan Klepper?

  I think you, I think it's coming out. I, I wanna be open with everyone. We clearly, we have readers here. We have readers. I wanna be honest with readers. Normally, I'm talking to people who haven't read a book. I'm talking to people who've read books. Here's the deal. Sometimes pee, people pee in the middle of the night, and it's okay. As long as you have the fabric of the universe underneath. You're gonna be fine. I gotta say, that's some good branding right there. StarTalk branded fabric of the universe rubber sheets.

• 17:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For bed wetters. Yeah, there you go. So you have a rubber sheet and it distorts when you sort of press it as a mass would do to it, pressing down. And if you moved along that rubber sheet, you might sort of fall in towards that depression where the mass is. And that's kind of what things do when they're moving through the pre-existing universe. The point is, if you take that rubber sheet and draw galaxies on it, and then just take it and stretch it, then all the galaxies are moving away from one another as part of the embedded rubber sheet that we're talking about.

• 17:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, here's the part that's harder for our limited ape brains to process. This stretching rubber sheet with these dimples in it is happening in three dimensions. So it's a three-dimensional stretching rubber sheet with galaxies embedded in it. And since time is a factor here, it's actually there's a fourth dimension in it as well. So that's why, by the way, so let's take a balloon. They didn't ask this, but it rounds it out. Take a balloon and draw galaxies on it, and then you inflate the balloon. Okay, so the balloon gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and all the galaxies are getting farther and farther apart from each other.

• 18:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then you say, point to where the universe began. No place you point on the surface of the balloon gets you to the beginning. Because the beginning is back through time. You gotta go through the fabric, go back through time to when all the balloon was in the same place at the same time. So basically, everywhere is the beginning of the universe.

• 19:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fourteen billion years ago.

• 19:09Jordan Klepper?

  What?

• 19:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Clear as mud.

• 19:10Jordan Klepper?

  I was gonna say, I was gonna, you know, it was the rubber bed sheet, I was getting somewhere. My brain was really starting to make sense of it. The balloon, I like that metaphor, but now moving through space and time, I'm seeing an exploded balloon and uh.

• 19:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When I came up in the ranks, educators were attempting to go one dimension higher than the rubber sheet. And they talk about raisins in a raisin cake.

• 19:32Jordan Klepper?

  Raisins in a raisin cake, oh, a- a- as that it can, okay.

• 19:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So as the cake expands, when you bake it, the raisin, the distance between the raisins are, are, are, are increasing. The problem there is, the raisin cake has an edge to it. Okay? And whereas the surface of the balloon has no edge.

• 19:54Jordan Klepper?

  I mean, also, one of the other problems is raisin cakes have fallen out of favor. You're not gonna, you're not gonna find yourself with a raisin cake. Like, until you can connect it to a cronut, we're gonna have a hard time for the.

• 20:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, that, you know, nobody makes raisin cakes anymore. I forgot, it's just not a thing.

• 20:11Jordan Klepper?

  It's because you have to understand the fourth dimension and what time means to a raisin cake. And people are like, I'm, kids these days are too dumb to eat raisin cakes.

• 20:20Jordan Klepper?

  Uh, this is from Tyler.

• 20:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why it fell out of favor.

• 20:23Jordan Klepper?

  That's what it is. Kids aren't smart enough to eat them.

• 20:27Jordan Klepper?

  Uh, this is from Tyler Pitts. Hey, new patron, patron here, excited to join the family. My question is about dark matter. We have no clue what it is, but what are your speculations on what it could be? And what is the possibility of us interacting with it anytime soon? Could it be that dark matter is the material slash matter of the void? That our universe is expanding into, outside the observable universe? Just a thing that's been on my mind, thank you guys, and all the love from Michigan. That's my, that's my home state, so a lot of love.

• 20:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that right?

• 20:59Jordan Klepper?

  That's right.

• 20:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Michigan in the house.

• 21:00Jordan Klepper?

  Michigan in the house, Kalamazoo.

• 21:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's your hometown?

• 21:02Jordan Klepper?

  Kalamazoo, Michigan, right there. Home of, home of Derek Jeter and Jordan Klepper. And if you go there. People, people really know one of those names if you go there.

• 21:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, uh, so we're talking about.

• 21:18Jordan Klepper?

  About dark matter.

• 21:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dark matter, okay.

• 21:21Jordan Klepper?

  What it, what it could, what it really could be.

• 21:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's what I want it to be, but there's what I really think it probably is. All right, so I'll tell you what it probably is. It's probably a class of particles yet to be discovered that has a very low probability of interacting with our class of particles. Electrons, protons, neutrons, and even our light. Okay, light is one of, photons are part of our particle family. And so we have our particle family, and there may be a whole other particle family that just simply doesn't interact. But if it has mass, it will have gravity, and we see the gravity of the dark matter. That's why, that's why we're calling it dark matter.

• 22:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, it's matter and it, it's gravity. Eighty-five percent of the universe's gravity comes from it. But it's coexisting with us by not interacting. And that sounds kind of weird, doesn't it?

• 22:19Jordan Klepper?

  No, it sounds like Thanksgiving. You're describing Thanksgiving. It's families coexisting but not interacting with one another.

• 22:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's no real connection.

• 22:27Jordan Klepper?

  There's no connection, and the chances of them connecting are pretty low. Yeah, American Thanksgiving, got it, okay.

• 22:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We, we need, uh, who's the guy who painted Thanksgiving and all those other American images?

• 22:39Jordan Klepper?

  Norman Rockwell?

• 22:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Norman Rockwell.

• 22:41Jordan Klepper?

  Yes.

• 22:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he needs, we need an updated Thanksgiving painting.

• 22:47Jordan Klepper?

  I think it's.

• 22:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People are screaming at each other.

• 22:49Jordan Klepper?

  Yeah, I think it's a triptych of three, of people as far away as they could be and carnage in the middle.

• 22:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's not a stretch to imagine two things not interacting. All right, for example, uh, why do you have windows in your home?

• 23:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The windows are transparent to visible light. Okay, now it turns out the light does interact with the window. It interacts with particles and keeps moving through coherently. But what I'm saying is, you have windows that are transparent to visible light. They're not transparent to infrared. And how do I know that? Because you could take a candle or a match and light it on one side of the window and bring your hand right up to the other side of the window, and you will not feel the heat.

• 23:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whereas you can see the match. So the visible light comes through the window, the infrared doesn't. We live in a world of non-interacting phenomenon. All right, and we exploit that fact. All right, you have a probably a smartphone on your hip or on your desk right now. And if someone's calling you, it will ring. Where did that signal come from? It came through your walls. Okay, you could be in a windowless bathroom and your phone will ring because microwaves pass through all of that. Not interacting until it hits your phone, then it interacts.

• 24:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we have built our lives to interact with and not interact with certain forms of energy. And that's all the same family of energy. So let me keep going. There's a particle called the neutrino. Once again, it's part of our family. Neutrino hardly interact with anything. Oh, my gosh. You need, in order to detect a neutrino, you need like a column of lead light years long. And then send the neutrino through that and maybe it'll stop somewhere in the lead cylinder. That's our own family of particles. So we are imagining other families of particles out there

• 25:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  that interact with us less than even the stuff that we don't interact with as part of our own family. That's the that's the over under on what dark matter is. And we've got top people searching for those particles right now. Because we're hoping that it's not just that they never interact. They just rarely interact. So that maybe if you have an experiment big enough and the experiment lasts long enough, they'll have one, one encounter where the dark matter interacts with our matter. And then we would have experimental evidence of its existence.

• 25:41Jordan Klepper?

  We're working on that?

• 25:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got top people working on that. Now, my favorite explanation is that there's a parallel universe that has more gravity than we do, and it's spilling into our universe affecting the movement of our objects. And we're trying to, it's like, you know, the elephant, what am I touching here? What is it? We're touching the dark matter, ooh, it must be something, I don't know. But it's regular matter and regular gravity spilling out of an adjacent universe. That's what I want it to be, because that's the simplest explanation.

• 26:11Jordan Klepper?

  Yeah, and I mean, it's the most fun. Definitely, that if, if that's a world that is beamed into my Netflix, I'm watching season two, season three.

• 26:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're sticking with that one?

• 26:22Jordan Klepper?

  I'm definitely sticking with that one.

• 26:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and by the way, I'm not just making this up. In a parallel universe, if you look at the properties of these phenomena, light cannot escape the confines of a universe, but the force of gravity can, it turns out. And I didn't take enough quant- quantum field theory, or field theory in general, to fully understand why that's so, but I've been told this by people who do know this and who are experts in field theory. They tell me that the properties of gravity allow it to leak out of your universe. And even though the light can't, so you're not going to be able to see the other universe, but you might be able to feel it.

• 27:02Jordan Klepper?

  I'm imagining like a muffin top, like it's spilling it out over.

• 27:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, oh, I like that.

• 27:07Jordan Klepper?

  Is that right?

• 27:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, give me another one, what do you have?

• 27:10Jordan Klepper?

  This is from Scott W. Peterson.

• 27:13Jordan Klepper?

  Why have car antennas gotten so much smaller over the years? The wavelengths of the radio frequency hasn't changed.

• 27:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, very, I love, man, man, we got good people out there.

• 27:24Jordan Klepper?

  This is not a trash group.

• 27:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, man.

• 27:27Jordan Klepper?

  No, far from it. This is a well-read, outside-the-box thing.

• 27:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay, okay, so here we go. The, uh, first of all, you don't see car antennas anymore. And even when they first started going away, it's because they put the wires in the window or in the, in the body of the car. So I remember my first car that had no antenna, there was a pair of wires that were embedded in the windshield glass that came up the middle and then parted out left and right. And those were the, the, the radio antennas back when we were receiving radio signals. Okay. And so the AM radio, uh, it's a long wavelength and it would, you, generally you want an antenna approximately the length of the wavelength.

• 28:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Today, most of our communication is microwaves. Okay. When you get satellite radio, that's all microwaves, all of that. Microwave waves are much smaller than radio waves. That's why they were called microwaves to begin with. All right. A microwave is about a centimeter long. And so that's how you're doing your communicating, that's the, all you need. That's why walkie talkies never had big antennas like the old cars or even the, um, who else had big antennas?

• 28:47Jordan Klepper?

  And I guess I never knew the antennas were reflective of the actual size of the wave?

• 28:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct. You want the antenna to kind of match, all right? And if it doesn't match it perfectly, that's okay. You'll get a, some percent of the radio signal getting absorbed, so we're cool with that. And so, so nowadays, of course, everything's come, coming over the internet or, and other ways, but microwave is the primary way that these things are, are obtained. Now, there was a trick that they performed, and you might see this in some old timey cars, but not so as old as to have the antenna. If you take an antenna that's long and just coil it.

• 29:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coil it, then you, it's, the, the wave still feels the length of the, of the wire of your antenna, even though the antenna is coiled. And so a coiled antenna gets some of the signal that, that if it were uncoiled, that it would get. And that was a way to not have stuff just sticking out as you drove down the street. And so, yeah. That, that we transitioned through that to then just change the damn wavelengths.

• 29:55Jordan Klepper?

  It's like, it'd just be easier. People are tripping over these cords. I remember having one that my little, uh, my little radio player by my bed when I was a kid, that just, it just had a cord that went all the way down. And it was a, it was a, it was a big mess, to be quite honest.

• 30:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, so that was a great question.

• 30:12Jordan Klepper?

  Yeah. Uh, this is from Fernando Gomes. Uh, greetings from Brazil. And yes, Neil, I read your letter to my country.

• 30:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, he did? Yes, I wrote a letter to, to Brazil a few months ago. Just not to people, to the country.

• 30:27Jordan Klepper?

  The country of Brazil. And they, and it sounds like they got it.

• 30:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To the country. That's what.

• 30:32Jordan Klepper?

  What, what was the letter to the country of Brazil?

• 30:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, okay, so it was, I, I, oh, I, I remember. I, one of my books, Letters from an Astrophysicist, was being translated into Portuguese in Brazil. And they said, do you mind writing a letter to the Portuguese people as a, just to welcome them to this book, to this translated book? And I thought about it, I said, no, I don't want to write it to people. People are so divisive and things. Let me write it to something that's not going to complain, something that can't say anything. So I said, I wrote a letter to Brazil. And that letter, that it leads off the Brazilian translation of it. And it was, it's a celebration of all that we in America know, in the United States, know

• 31:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  of Brazil and things that maybe they could, can and be more proud of. Brazil had early pioneers in aviation, for example. Uh, the very first, uh, Latin, uh, uh, South American astronaut was Brazilian. Okay? For example, so they have, they have a, and, and, uh, most airplanes that you ride between medium, medium sized cities in the United States. Are designed and built in Brazil.

• 31:47Jordan Klepper?

  Really?

• 31:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Embraer is a Brazilian aerospace company. And so, we, you know, we, we tend to think of Brazil as people with not much clothes on, on the beach, and we think of coffee and maybe soccer, right? And so, I, as a scientist, wanted to make sure that all the rest of what Brazil has been, and represents, and can still represent, doesn't get forgotten. And so, it's a celebration of, of a country, all it has been and all it can be.

• 32:16Jordan Klepper?

  Look at that. This is, so if I want you to write me a lovely letter like that, do I have to convince you to write it to, like, the borough of Brooklyn instead?

• 32:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that where you live?

• 32:27Jordan Klepper?

  I was gonna say, yeah, you, come on, I, I, I'm dying for a lovely, thoughtful letter from Neil, but I guess he has to envision me as a, a city-state, or at least a borough. So, um, uh, well, I want to get to Fernando's question, Neil, but, uh, let's take a break first, what do you, what do you think?

• 32:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay, sure, all right. So, we'll be right back. Star Trek: The Cosmoquarian.

• 33:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Jordan, we're back. We left off, we were, we were on the beaches of Brazil last night, yeah?

• 33:09Jordan Klepper?

  It was nice, the weather was nice, it was a good vibe, uh...

• 33:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did Mr. Gomes, what was his question? Did I answer his question?

• 33:15Jordan Klepper?

  No, go, he, uh, he was thanking you for the letter to his country. Fernando wanted to thank you, but he also did have one question, so...

• 33:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, he did, okay, Fernando.

• 33:23Jordan Klepper?

  I'm gonna throw it out here. He wondered, is it possible for the dark energy phenomenon, uh, phenomenon, AKA spacetime expansion, to be an emergent property of matter itself, only manifesting in bigger scales? Like, little ants don't look very complex themselves, though they can show interesting behaviors when you observe the colony as a whole.

• 33:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Once again, a highly literate question come, it's a scientifically literate question, I love it. So, let me just, uh, unpack something there. He mentioned emergence. Emergence is a, a relatively recent exploration going on in the field of biology. All right? I think we've always known about it, but we hadn't really thought as deeply about it as we have in recent decades. So, emergence is, you can look at a bird... Snatch a pigeon off the fountain, right?

• 34:12Jordan Klepper?

  Which we don't recommend. This is not recommend. This is a theoretical conversation.

• 34:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, thank you, thank you.

• 34:18Jordan Klepper?

  I got lawyers in my ear, Neil, just make.

• 34:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you got, you have a pigeon and then study it all you can and all you want. Right on down to its molecular makeup, okay? So it's got a brain, a beak, eyes, it can lay eggs if it's a girl pigeon instead of a boy pigeon. It's got feathers, it can fly. You figure all this out. We don't yet know what's going on in the pigeon for it to know that there are occasions where a bunch of them take flights simultaneously and then flock together as they fly. So the flocking of birds is emergent.

• 35:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's something you can't deduce from studying a single bird. And knowing practically everything. Maybe there's something in the brain that we haven't gotten to yet. The neuroscience of pigeons. That's probably lower on the list than the neuroscience of humans. Maybe we'll get there eventually. But emergent behavior are things that the, the, some of the, the, the parts themselves are not concerned with. Don't concern themselves with it, but the collection of parts together have a property that has emerged. And consciousness, human consciousness, is considered one of those things.

• 35:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Could it be that, once you have a sufficiently complex brain, does consciousness just emerge? And so, yeah, these are very deep. So, is dark energy an emergent feature of the universe and gravity and space? I don't know. It's kind of cool to think that, right? And, but it would be weird to say, matter which attracts itself has an emergent feature that repels itself. That's just kind of, I don't know how to walk into a room and say that.

• 36:21Jordan Klepper?

  Confidently.

• 36:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, no, but it's an interesting thought, and I love the concept of emergence. And it shows up in all kinds of ways and places among us.

• 36:32Jordan Klepper?

  A tangential question. You talk about pigeons. What is it about pigeons? I know there's stories of Tesla befriending a pigeon, and that being one of the most-

• 36:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tesla the car, or Tesla the human being?

• 36:43Jordan Klepper?

  The human being, Nikolai. The cars, I don't know. I'm not, I'm not rich enough to know what the cars make friends with.

• 36:52Jordan Klepper?

  But I know the human being was buddy-buddy with a pigeon from my-

• 36:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He spent his later years in New York City.

• 36:59Jordan Klepper?

  He did.

• 36:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In a hotel in Midtown.

• 37:00Jordan Klepper?

  Mm-hmm.

• 37:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I heard rumors that, you know, through the open window, you, because pigeons are, pigeons in the cities go together, right?

• 37:07Jordan Klepper?

  Yeah.

• 37:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And actually, they're, I think they're technically called rock doves. And they thrive in canyons with steep sides that have rocks. And that's precisely what modern cities are, that have tall buildings. So pigeons are right at home with our civilization. And so if you feed them in a window sill, they'll come back. I don't have all the story there about Tesla's later years. But I just know the physics that he contributed to in his earlier years.

• 37:32Jordan Klepper?

  I love thinking of them as rock doves. That's-

• 37:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:35Jordan Klepper?

  I mean, flying rats I've heard before. It feels like a pejorative. They've never done anything to me, so I'm gonna stick with rock doves.

• 37:45Jordan Klepper?

  I got a question from David Peterson here. He wants to know, Neil, I was hoping you might be able to offer your opinion on what you think we would see if we traveled at the speed of light. I've thought about this quite a bit. I was wondering mostly if there would be a redshift in what would be seen.

• 38:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so, since you can't actually travel the speed of light, let's do the next best thing and travel 99.99999% the speed of light. Okay? And, oh, by the way, there's an author, a brilliant physicist and popularizer, named George Gamow. G-A-M-O-W. The W pronounced as a V. George Gamow. And he, he wrote mid-century last year. One of my favorite books ever was written by him. It's called One, Two, Three Infinity. It's still on my shelf. Read it in middle school, and it's a brilliant exposition of science and math and really cool topics. So, in there-

• 38:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He, uh, not in that book, but he wrote a series of books called Mr. Tompkins. The Mr. Tompkins series. And this is, he, Mr. Tompkins, uh, I think that the root name of the series is Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland. But, is it Wonderland? No, that's Alice in Wonderland. I'm getting my, my fictional worlds mixed up. But it's definitely Mr. Tompkins. And he goes into worlds where the constants of the laws of physics are different. And one of the stories is the speed of light is 60 miles an hour, or like 100 miles, something where you're in a car

• 39:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  and you can approach the speed of light, just as a, as a, as a regular Joe doing so. And when you do that, he then describes what you see and how things get distorted. And, and so I, I, I highly recommend the whole Mr. Tompkins series. Because it's, um, it's, it brings exotic phenomenon of physics into your everyday life experience. So, i- if you go very fast, near the speed of light, the light sources in front of you become basically blue shifted. They have higher energy than you would otherwise measure them to have. And if you look behind you, everything has lower energy. So there's this focusing in front of you,

• 40:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  where everything in front of you becomes brighter and brighter and brighter. And the, if you tra- if you follow the light trajectories, the, the ray tra- it's called ray tracing, you follow what the light does, it actually narrows your field of view ahead of you. So i- in Star Wars, they make the jump to hyperspace. All right, and that's their word for hitting light speed. And they did the visual on that first. And it's not perfectly accurate, but you get a sense of this, uh, focusing of light energy that's sitting in front of you. That is what happens as you speed up and go close to the speed of light. And in, in Star Trek, of course, they call it warp speed. That would be, uh, the speed of light for them.

• 40:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then when they hit the Star Trek movie, which came after Star Wars, they did that light effect as well. So now that's just the, the standard, uh, standard operating procedure. For the visual effects people.

• 41:10Jordan Klepper?

  Yeah, it's a number four, I think is what it is. Just give me that.

• 41:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so it's fun, and I recommend that series. Check it out, and you'll learn more about other things that can be different when you change the constants of nature.

• 41:21Jordan Klepper?

  I got a question here from Tamara Michael. Do you think we will ever be able to develop dark matter vision goggles that will work in outer space similar to night vision goggles on Earth?

• 41:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love it.

• 41:33Jordan Klepper?

  Yeah.

• 41:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love it. So if we figure out that dark matter is a certain kind of particle, and we figure out how to detect it, that's the thing. Something can be there, but what good is it if you can't then capture it and then do something with it? All right? I mean, think about it. Before we discovered radio waves, we were bombarded by radio waves by the sun. We had no way to even know that was happening because they passed right through us. Until we figured out how to make a radio wave detector, now we can aim it where we want, detect it, and then process it. And then we fully exploited that and turned it into music and TV and everything else. So if, once we figure out what dark matter is and how to detect it, I don't see why

• 42:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  we can't flip up some dark matter goggles and then look, and look at the grandeur of dark matter in the universe. That would be beautiful.

• 42:26Jordan Klepper?

  Tamara has actually one more additional question here that, uh, that is fascinating. She wants to know, why do we think we know anything about the outer galaxy if we could only see back in time as we look further away? Couldn't everything we see and or think we know be drastically different by now? If there is life on...

• 42:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man, he's a good question.

• 42:48Jordan Klepper?

  These are good. If there's life on other distant planets, would we ever really know unless we actually go there?

• 42:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so this is great. This, I'm loving it. I'm tickled by it. We got, these are my people.

• 43:02Jordan Klepper?

  These trash people are good people, you know?

• 43:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, the trash bin, the question trash.

• 43:07Jordan Klepper?

  Trash bin, folks. What a, what a, what a great crow.

• 43:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They got, they got the smartest questions of them all. Okay. So it's a smart trash bin, that's all.

• 43:16Jordan Klepper?

  It's a smart trash bin, yep.

• 43:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so first, it's a brilliant question, and we ask that of ourselves in the professional scientific community every now and then. And here's what gives us the confidence. Because it is true. The only thing of the universe that we know is happening now is what's going on right under our noses here on Earth. When we look to the moon, whatever's going on in the moon happened one and a half seconds ago. Okay, we look at the sun, that happened eight minutes and 20 seconds ago. If some giant plucked the sun out of the solar system in this instant, we would still feel the sun, we could still see the sun, we'd still be orbiting the sun,

• 44:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  and we would do so for another eight minutes and 20 seconds. And as you go farther out, these objects are coming to us from farther and farther in our past. So watch what we do. We look in our laboratories, that's happening now. And we measure the speed of light, the values of the quantum constants, like Planck's constant thing. We measure what elements do when they're heated, when they make spectra. We get all of these physical properties, and we have books with these properties in them. Then we look out a little ways, okay? Uh, how about to the outer solar system? How about the planet Uranus?

• 44:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How is its orbit? Oh, its orbit is not following Newton's laws. Oh my gosh, okay, we found the limit. There's a limit in space, forget time, there's a limit in space where the law doesn't apply. Oh, wait a minute, Uranus is being tugged on by Neptune. Neptune hadn't been discovered yet, so we discovered Neptune, oh my gosh. So now that we factor that in, it is following Newton's laws. Oh, wait a minute, so there are two stars out there farther away than the planets, and they're orbiting each other. Bam, they're following Newton's laws. Okay, this is cool, let's look farther out in the galaxy. Let's look to other galaxies. Oh my gosh, the spectrum made by carbon and oxygen and nitrogen matches exactly the spectrum we have for it here on Earth.

• 45:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my gosh, so as we inched our way out...

• 45:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We tested whether the phenomenon we're observing matches the phenomenon that we've established with properties that we've established here on Earth in the here and the now. And in fact, they do. And it applies not only across space, but through the depths of time to the beginning of the cosmos. And that's why science works at all. If it just changed everywhere willy-nilly, then the science would only be good like here on Earth and nowhere else. But we got this one. And it was not a given. People say, oh, science has faith that it would know. We have measurements that tell us this. And that's why we proceed with confidence going forward.

• 46:15Jordan Klepper?

  Boom.

• 46:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Boom.

• 46:18Jordan Klepper?

  What I'm impressed, the people who live on the sun, which we'll get into a next episode, are gonna hear.

• 46:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They live on the dark side of the sun.

• 46:25Jordan Klepper?

  They live on the dark side of the sun.

• 46:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's cooler there, yeah.

• 46:27Jordan Klepper?

  It's gonna be in eight minutes and 40 seconds, they're gonna have some knowledge drop on them. That's gonna blow their mind.

• 46:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I hadn't thought about that.

• 46:37Jordan Klepper?

  They're, they don't even know what's coming. They don't know what's coming.

• 46:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Jordan, thank, I think we ran out of time on this one. But thanks for coming in for this. And we're gonna continue to watch you on Comedy Central. And I get to say every time you have a segment, I say, I know that guy. And he knows my name. That's how I feel.

• 46:56Jordan Klepper?

  I still have, the DeGrasse part, I have a hard time pronouncing. But it's a Degrassi, but I, you know, but other than that, you're totally correct. Yes. Well, I love being out here, Neil.

• 47:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we got this. Always good to have you, Jordan.

• 47:11Jordan Klepper?

  Thanks for having me.

• 47:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, beating you to keep rocking up.