Cosmic Queries – Wormhole Universe

Does an evaporated black hole leave a trace? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian co-host Chuck Nice answer questions about the fabric of spacetime, black holes, cosmic evolution and more.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nobody said there's no gravity in space. This is one of the biggest delusions that pervades our culture and our storytelling. Yeah, Joe, why are you so delusional?

• 0:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hey, everybody. Neil deGrasse Tyson here.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  And I'm Lindsay Nix Walker, and Neil and I, we just co-authored a brand new StarTalk book, and it's coming out very soon.

• 0:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, this is the third in a series of collaborations with National Geographic Books, and this one is titled "To Infinity and Beyond." And it's available for preorder from the StarTalk website, starTalkMedia.com/books. If you preorder it, you gain access to a live stream that Lindsay Walker and I will do from this office, and you have the occasion to submit questions that we will answer.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  Yep, that's right. So if they go to starTalkMedia.com/books, they can preorder and ask us their query, whatever they want. I mean, I know that StarTalk fans can ask some really fun, off-the-wall questions, so I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with here.

• 1:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Right now, get ready for the next episode of StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. And I got with me Chuck Nice. Chuck?

• 1:41Chuck Nice?

  Yo, what's up, Neil?

• 1:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, is this themed or is it unthemed cosmic queries? What do you got for me today?

• 1:46Chuck Nice?

  This is completely unthemed. This is just-

• 1:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so Grab Bag.

• 1:51Chuck Nice?

  This is Grab Bag.

• 1:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think people like Grab Bag. It seems that. It feels like they get totally into it.

• 1:58Chuck Nice?

  You know why? Because it's kind of like, you know, the prize in a Happy Meal or a box of crackers. You don't know what you're gonna get. It's the Boris Gump of StarTalk shows.

• 2:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Box of chocolates, okay.

• 2:12Chuck Nice?

  It's the box of chocolates.

• 2:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. All right.

• 2:15Chuck Nice?

  I don't know what you're gonna get. So let's get into it, I guess, right? Okay, we'll start with GR.

• 2:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Box of chocolates. Who had the idea that you could improve chocolate by putting a gooey liquid that's not chocolate inside of it? This is a, this is one of the biggest mysteries of my life.

• 2:33Chuck Nice?

  Uh, I'm sure it was someone from the sugar industry. So.

• 2:40Chuck Nice?

  I'm just.

• 2:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't want all that nasty chocolate?

• 2:43Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, no, that chocolate, oh.

• 2:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's put in a gooey cherry.

• 2:46Chuck Nice?

  Right. Corn syrup, baby. That's what, that's where the action is. Chocolate? Who wants that crap? Corn syrup?

• 2:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's probably all cheaper than the chocolate that would have been in that volume in all of those candies.

• 3:02Chuck Nice?

  A hundred percent. You'd know it.

• 3:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd say.

• 3:05Chuck Nice?

  I mean, yeah, good chocolate is expensive, man.

• 3:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know.

• 3:08Chuck Nice?

  There's a, there's a great place not too far from where you live that they have like just tremendously like high-grade chocolate.

• 3:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I know that place where they, where like they have a big window you can see like, it's like Willy Wonka or something.

• 3:22Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah. And, and good chocolate.

• 3:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He makes the Easter bunnies coming off the assembly line, you know, off the factory line. Yeah.

• 3:31Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, man, yeah. All right, here we go. This is G, GR. He says, when on Star Trek, they talk about subspace.

• 3:41Chuck Nice?

  What the hell are they talking about?

• 3:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so.

• 3:44Chuck Nice?

  Is it just a plot device? Is subspace a real thing? What the hell is going on? Thank you, George Raider. Radier, radier.

• 3:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, so my answer is, I don't know. We would need Charles Lou for that.

• 3:59Chuck Nice?

  Chuck Lou.

• 4:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But what I can tell you is, yes, I think it was a plot device because otherwise they can't communicate.

• 4:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With anybody.

• 4:11Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 4:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're across the galaxy and I send you a signal, you're gonna wait 100,000 years for the signal to get you at the speed of light. So subspace is some way that I don't know and I don't understand. I don't care that it's not actually physical. I don't even know how it works within the world of Star Trek. But you know, Charles Lu knows it. So we'd have to like do an emergency call to him.

• 4:38Chuck Nice?

  That gets stuck on the line.

• 4:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But as a plot point, you need that because without it, how are they gonna talk back to, you know, headquarters? Because if you send a signal and they're halfway across the galaxy, that signal will take 50,000 years to reach them.

• 4:56Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 4:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And a round trip will take 100,000 years if one of them is in the middle of the galaxy and one is at the edge. So you need some way for signals to reach their destination, as though you're just having a phone call with them.

• 5:08Chuck Nice?

  And they're talking in real time.

• 5:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Basically, real time, correct.

• 5:12Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah, it's like.

• 5:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So as I understand it, subspace enables this. Otherwise, communication would just be pointless and impossible.

• 5:21Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 5:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Witty Rep R K would not be a thing.

• 5:24Chuck Nice?

  We can't even talk to Voyager 37 hours, 37 hours at a time it takes us to talk to Voyager.

• 5:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 5:33Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 5:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. So, so they, so they had to figure out how to get around that.

• 5:37Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, okay.

• 5:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they.

• 5:39Chuck Nice?

  That's it. All right, George Radier or Radier, Radiar, whatever, George.

• 5:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not a whatever, it's a man's name. Whatever his name.

• 5:49Chuck Nice?

  Oh, you know, you should have an easier name, George.

• 5:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't say Chuket Niche, Chuket, oh, whatever. No, I'm Chuck Nice, see?

• 5:58Chuck Nice?

  I gotta tell you, I don't really mind the Chuket Niche.

• 6:05Chuck Nice?

  I'm kind of, I'm kind of digging the 2K Nietzsche.

• 6:10Chuck Nice?

  You know, you said it had a little ring to it. I gotta, I gotta be honest.

• 6:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because in Italian, a C is a C H. And a C H is a C sound.

• 6:19Chuck Nice?

  Right. So C H E is K in Italian. And C E is cha.

• 6:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cha.

• 6:25Chuck Nice?

  Cha.

• 6:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll call you Nietzsche.

• 6:27Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, Nietzsche. There we go. This is the artist formerly known as James Smith. And James says, hey Neil, hey Chuck, James from Indianapolis here. So in the very far future, when a black hole is done with Hawking radiation, what is left over once the black hole is gone? Does the space in which the black hole occupied have a large rip in it? Or is the space around the black hole reverted into the form which was there before the black hole was formed? Thanks, guys. So does black hole do something to the fabric of space where it makes a divot?

• 7:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does the black hole leave a paw print?

• 7:11Chuck Nice?

  Paw prints.

• 7:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like, the black hole was here, right?

• 7:14Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 7:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or did it pee in that section of the universe?

• 7:19Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, another black hole comes along, sniffs it and goes, eh, okay. I either gotta mark this or move on.

• 7:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, it is an actual, literal evaporation. I mean, by a different mechanism, of course, by Hawking radiation. But, so the, the size of the event horizon, as the black hole shrinks from Hawking radiation, the size of the event horizon shrinks with it. It gets smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. And the nature of the radiation that comes out is, you can approximate it by, the wavelength of the light that it emits is approximately the same size as the size of the event horizon itself.

• 8:05Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow.

• 8:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, big black holes give off radio waves as Hawking radiation. As they get smaller and smaller, they give off higher and higher energy. Light, so radio waves and microwaves, then infrared, then red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, also like X-rays, gamma rays. So the gamma rays have the tiniest wavelengths. So as the black hole gets littler and littler and littler, the evaporation rate increases and the nature of the Hawking radiation changes to become higher and higher energy radiation.

• 8:38Chuck Nice?

  Did not know that!

• 8:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, so that in the last instant, it's just a puff of gamma rays. And then it disappears completely.

• 8:48Chuck Nice?

  That's amazing.

• 8:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in fact, I think the original paper, one of the original papers of Hawking, describes this as a source of gamma rays in the universe that you might observe.

• 9:00Chuck Nice?

  Right, right, right, right. That's really cool.

• 9:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 9:04Chuck Nice?

  So it is a literal evaporation, like a pool of water drying up.

• 9:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go, except it might leave some residue, like mineral residue or something. Black hole leave no residue at all.

• 9:14Chuck Nice?

  Leaves nothing, right, correct, cool. Wow.

• 9:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, the weird thing is, black holes, there's some mathematics derived from Einstein that tells us that on, inside a black hole, it opens up to another universe, another spacetime system. And so if that's the case, what happens to that universe when the black hole evaporates?

• 9:35Chuck Nice?

  Nice. Whoever was smoking weed in that universe, it's over, and it's over. That little universe is gone. I saw that universe. I can't believe I saw this universe, man. It was just right there in my thumb.

• 9:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're gonna write a book, The Universe According to Weed, is that what you're gonna do?

• 9:55Chuck Nice?

  Yes. It's a good book. I'll call it Astrophysics for Stoners in a Hurry.

• 10:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 10:08Chuck Nice?

  That's so funny.

• 10:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, for those who ain't in a hurry.

• 10:12Chuck Nice?

  That's right, that's right, that's right, that's true. You'd never see anybody rushing when they're high. That is so very urgency is not a matter when you are stoned.

• 10:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, I've been in a car where the person driving was stoned. And it's like they're driving real slow.

• 10:30Chuck Nice?

  It's a funny thing to feel safe.

• 10:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stay on the right hand side, I'll drive real slow so that no one will know I'm high.

• 10:36Chuck Nice?

  Of course, and everybody knows, like, yeah, clearly, as they're as as tricycle pass you, they know that you are.

• 10:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ah, tricycles.

• 10:44Chuck Nice?

  Get on a tricycle passes you, you know, okay, this dude is stoned.

• 10:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 10:49Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 10:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, what's next?

• 10:52Chuck Nice?

  Here we go, here we go, here we go. All right. This is David Sargent. Uh, and he says, speaking of driving, look at what he says. Things StarTalk make me contemplate while I'm driving. With the size of planets affecting spacetime, i.e. gravity, would cultures of huge planets, say the size of Jupiter, only solid, have everything in life moving slower? Slow music, for example, or in the opposite extreme, a tiny planet, everything moving fast? Uh, so there you go.

• 11:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so he's talking about general relativit-- what's the person's name again?

• 11:34Chuck Nice?

  This is David Sargent.

• 11:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  David Sargent. So, so he's talking about, he knows, maybe he might remember from the Interstellar film, where they went down to a black hole planet and they were deep in a gravitational well. And if you were in an environment of high gravity, time will tick more slowly for you than if you're in a place of low or no gravity. So it's it's relative, okay?

• 11:59Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So planets, their gravity is not high enough for any of the big planets, little planets is not high enough for any of this to make any important difference in anybody's life. So don't confuse the fact that the black hole planet in the film Interstellar was in the gravitational well of the black hole itself.

• 12:25Chuck Nice?

  The black hole.

• 12:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 12:27Chuck Nice?

  The black hole was doing the work, not the planet.

• 12:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The black hole was doing the time dilation rather than the planet itself. So I, if you're just talking about planets orbiting the same star or a regular star, this is not something to think about or worry about.

• 12:43Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha. Now, what about in Star Trek where the people from heavy gravity planets are super strong? Would that be feasible?

• 12:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That could happen.

• 12:58Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 12:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That could happen. Because you, whatever you weigh here on Jupiter, so if you weigh, let's say 150 pounds here, you weigh 500 pounds on a planet. And so if you were thriving there, you'll have muscles that will accommodate this extra weight of your body. You have really thick stubby legs. Like, I mean, think about, if you want to be, if you want to be heavy, you need stub, like a hippopotamus, you know, like an elephant.

• 13:27Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, a giraffe is big, but they're not really all that heavy. So they can get away with these spindly legs. I'm talking about big chunky, you know. So if you put a giraffe on a heavy planet, break its legs.

• 13:41Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, crush its stuff.

• 13:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Crush its stuff, right, correctly. Whereas a hippo probably do just fine.

• 13:47Chuck Nice?

  Right, exactly.

• 13:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you don't know.

• 13:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So yeah, so you'd have to, your physiology would have to be strong enough to accommodate that. And then you come to a light planet like Earth, and you would be stronger than other people probably, is my guess.

• 14:06Chuck Nice?

  I am from Jupiter, okay.

• 14:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In a movie, uh, what was the movie? This kid was born on Mars. The Space Between Us. Um, there was an astronaut. It takes about nine months to get to Mars. There was an astronaut who got on board and I don't remember the plotline, whether she knew or did not know if she was pregnant. Okay. Or she like made love the night before she went off. But anyhow, she gives birth on Mars. And NASA has to keep that covered up because you, you know, you can't. So this kid was a secret kid raised on Mars. And then they brought him back like in his teens. And the earth's gravity was like so heavy because Mars, you weigh less. So he was feeling the stress of earth's gravity.

• 14:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And yeah.

• 14:57Chuck Nice?

  That actually sounds like my life.

• 15:02Chuck Nice?

  I too had a secret kid.

• 15:09Chuck Nice?

  I forgot all about that.

• 15:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, with this, with this, with the maid.

• 15:13Chuck Nice?

  With the maid. That's right.

• 15:19Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay. Well, this is why.

• 15:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't let nothing go by here.

• 15:27Chuck Nice?

  No, no, well, listen, I, I, look, God, God bless him. That's all I can say.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  I'm Joel Cherico and I make pottery. You can see my pottery on my website, cosmicmugs.com. Cosmic Mugs, art that lets you taste the universe every day. And I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 16:04Chuck Nice?

  Why cost says this, hello Neo, what's up Chuck? Could the universe have started off with a much higher initial entropy? If so, how would the universe have been different? Also, what's entropy?

• 16:27Chuck Nice?

  Thanks a million. I love that. That's pretty funny.

• 16:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so entropy is, we quantify it in physics, but in a spoken way, entropy is a way to measure how disordered a system is. So if you, let's take, you have a rectangular box and there's air inside the box. And I take all the air and shove it to one half the box. Okay? And the other set part of the box, there's like, there's nothing. Okay? That is more ordered than it would become if I removed the separator from the middle of that box. Cause you know, if I remove the separation, what would happen?

• 17:15Chuck Nice?

  All the air would just rush all over the place and all the molecules in the air would be like.

• 17:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, yeah, yeah. It would just become evenly spread throughout. And so, cause the air would just do that naturally. That is going from a high ordered state to a lower ordered state. And another one, I have a glass of water.

• 17:39Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 17:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I take a drop of ink. I drop it into one corner of the one little bit. And in that moment, there's ink here and there's water everywhere else. There's an ordering to that. Okay, cause you can point to something here and it's not there and that's over there and it's not over here. You give it time, the ink dissipates.

• 17:59Chuck Nice?

  Gets all caught up in everything.

• 18:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Every, all the molecules have taken it in and the ink gets completely spread. In my high school.

• 18:08Chuck Nice?

  That's why we don't, that's why we don't want no ink moving in our neighborhood. Cause that's how it happens. That's how it happens. Starts off with one little house, one little ink house, one little ink house. Then before you know it, you've got four or five ink houses in your neighborhood. Hey, what's going on here? Now what's happening to the schools? Oh, wait a minute.

• 18:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in my high school, I had this huge cylinder. They call it graduated cylinder.

• 18:35Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 18:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Those, those are the educated ones, the graduated.

• 18:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The whole science joke. Anyhow, so we had a huge, it was like three feet tall. It was huge and it was in one of the display cases. In most high schools, in their display case, what do you find?

• 18:52Chuck Nice?

  Trophies.

• 18:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Trophies of the sports. But my high school was the Bronx High School of Science. There were no sports trophies.

• 18:59Chuck Nice?

  That's funny.

• 18:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so there's a huge graduated cylinder and there was a layer of ink at the bottom and they slowly put water on top of it. And throughout the year, you would watch the ink work its way up into this cylinder. So it was like a living exhibit of the diffusion of, of one liquid into another.

• 19:23Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 19:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rather than just stir it, of course. Stir it, it would happen. But yeah, so it'll do that naturally. It'll become higher disorder than it previously had. So that's entropy.

• 19:34Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 19:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So we were very highly ordered at the beginning of the universe. Cause all the matter, energy was all in one place, in one very localized place. As stuff expands, it's like the gas going into the other half of the thing, like the ink going into the thing. The entropy, um, so it was highly ordered. And so then we go to high disorder as the universe expands. And so there you have it. And the end of the universe is total, total disorder. No order at all. There'll be no machines, no phenomenon. Because if there's a phenomenon, it means there's order to make the phenomenon.

• 20:17Chuck Nice?

  Make it happen.

• 20:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Okay. If everything is completely. Spread out, nothing can happen. So we will die. A, a, the, the universe will end not with a bang, but with a whimper.

• 20:32Chuck Nice?

  Hmm.

• 20:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And not in fire, but in ice.

• 20:36Chuck Nice?

  Look at that.

• 20:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As the temperature cools. So anyhow, I mean, you can't get more ordered than the universe occupying less than the size of an atom. So I, you can't really adjust that.

• 20:46Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 20:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, because everything is very localized.

• 20:49Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 20:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 20:50Chuck Nice?

  So there you go. Uh, that's it. All right.

• 20:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, by the way, this, the, the disorder is natural in a closed system. So that box is a closed system. You can reverse entropy if you add energy to it. Okay?

• 21:07Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 21:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We are alive and our molecules and us scattered all over the world. We are a higher, a higher, uh, order of things than what preceded us here on Earth. Okay? So religious communities, for the longest while, who knew a little bit about this entropy rule of thermodynamics said, see, we have order and it's against the second law of thermodynamics. And so therefore God made us. So you don't hear them give that argument anymore because some of, one of them must have taught the others after they took some physics that Earth is not a closed system.

• 21:46Chuck Nice?

  You can't get a closed system and have sunlight.

• 21:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, exactly.

• 21:51Chuck Nice?

  I mean, we, we could only be a, a closed system with a giant umbrella.

• 21:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct. Correct. Completely enclosed Earth and watch what happens. All right? So you take out the base of the food chain, which are all the plants that are undergoing photosynthesis. Then you kill all of the animals that depend on the plants. So all the herbivores, the, the plants die first, then the herbivores, then the animals that live off the herbivores, the predators, they die and we all die and decompose in the earth. And there you have entropy at work.

• 22:26Chuck Nice?

  Look at that. That's, that's the coolest explanation of entropy I've ever heard.

• 22:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's a way to quantify it with the equations, but, uh.

• 22:38Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 22:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 22:40Chuck Nice?

  Very cool, man. All right, here we go. This is Christian Holmes. And Christian Holmes says, hello, Dr. Tyson, Lord nice, I have a question about time.

• 22:51Chuck Nice?

  I recently learned from watching Dr. Brian Greene that the fabric of spacetime emerges from quantum entanglement. This explains that space is woven of quantum wormholes. But does that mean time emerges also? If so, what collection of quantum phenomena does time emerge from? Or is time merely the passing of one quantum phenomena to the next? I really appreciate both of your thoughts. Hey, thank you, Christian from Pennsylvania. So there you have it.

• 23:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I too only recently learned from Brian Greene, the recent thinking, this emergent thinking, that the virtual particles in the vacuum of space that pop in and out of existence, that they're quantum entangled while they are separated. And that quantum entanglement may itself be the thread that stitches the fabric of the spacetime continuum. But notice I said spacetime. So is it also stitching time? And I don't know the latest thinking on that. But if time, according to Einstein, was invented to make motion look simple, then time is just something we create to measure the flow,

• 24:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  to measure sequences of events, to know what happened before what, and the intervals that separated these events from those. So in that sense, I don't know if time is a fundamental property of spacetime,

• 24:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  or whether we've attached it afterward. I don't know.

• 24:26Chuck Nice?

  Interesting. Oh, man. Well, look at that, Christian. There you have it. Now you got some deeper looking to do. That's all.

• 24:37Chuck Nice?

  You gave Neil some homework, Christian.

• 24:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, could one of these threads be the time thread? You know, I don't know.

• 24:43Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 24:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I do know is threads you can always unweave. Whereas for time, as I've said before, we are prisoners of the present.

• 24:55Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 24:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Forever transitioning between our inaccessible past and our unknowable future.

• 25:02Chuck Nice?

  Interesting. Let me ask you this. If we're prisoners of time, which we are, of course, meaning that, you know, we can't go back, undo things and go forward again. You know, our prisoner, our prison is one direction. What about dimensionally? Let's say I'm a higher being in a higher dimension. Could I screw with our time in this lower dimension?

• 25:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's no reason why you wouldn't. So, for example, you're you're inside a room there where you're doing this recording.

• 25:34Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 25:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you had access to a higher dimension, so you could see the timeline.

• 25:40Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 25:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then you're no longer a prisoner. You can just you can just.

• 25:43Chuck Nice?

  I can pick a point in the timeline and do whatever.

• 25:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right. So I'll give an example. So if let's say you're an ant and you're living in just two dimensions. And I draw a box around you. Sorry, a square around you. You're in prison. You can't get out. Until the ant learns, wait a minute, there's a third dimension. Let me just go up into that third dimension, step out of the square, and I'm free from this prison.

• 26:08Chuck Nice?

  I can't believe you're saying this. I just saw this online two days ago. Where somebody put an ant on a white piece of paper. As the ant crawled, they took a ballpoint fountain pen and they drew. And wherever they drew, the ant would not go. It thought that it was blocked from going there.

• 26:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really? Okay.

• 26:27Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. So cool.

• 26:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Edge. Okay. So there it is. So it does. So it has. It's not thinking of a third dimension to go up and around and over it. So you can imprison two dimensional creatures with a square. Okay, because they don't know about the third dimension. Now, I am. We can imprison three dimensional creatures with a cube. Okay, I put you in the cube unless you have access to your timeline. If you had access to your timeline, if you step into the timeline, occupy a timeline when you're not in the cube. Go back into your timeline and you just escaped. You never had to open a door or a window of your room to do so.

• 27:06Chuck Nice?

  Amazing. I love it.

• 27:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is.

• 27:09Chuck Nice?

  Super cool. There you go. All right. Okay, cool. All right, let's move on. This is C. Spinos. And C. Spinos says, "Could black holes just be wormholes? I mean, do we just don't know? I'm just thinking out loud, guys."

• 27:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sounds like he wants black holes to be wormholes.

• 27:32Chuck Nice?

  I think that's what he really wants, is for them to be wormholes.

• 27:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There was more work done on wormholes, especially inspired by Carl Sagan's novel Contact, when he was buds with Kip Thorne, a relativist physicist, astrophysicist at Caltech, where you run through more of the equations and you can, in principle, just punch a wormhole through the fabric of space without reference to a black hole or a white hole. But you need some way to pry open space and keep it there. So you need like negative, negative matter that can pull open space rather than collapse space. And so that works, our equations give it to you,

• 28:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  but we don't know any substance such as negative matter. So wormholes are really just, for now, the realm of science fiction.

• 28:26Chuck Nice?

  There you go. Look at that.

• 28:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 28:28Chuck Nice?

  But they do work out mathematically. That's fascinating.

• 28:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, they do. Yes, they do.

• 28:33Chuck Nice?

  That's super cool, man. That is just super cool. All right, this is anthroposcopic Dylan.

• 28:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love it.

• 28:40Chuck Nice?

  And anthroposcopic, I'm sorry, anthropoc cosmic, anthropoc cosmic Dylan. Greetings, Dr. Tyson and Dr. Comedy. Neil, build off of your past StarTalk episodes. Can you talk about the lineage of the stars? How are the elements that we are made of connected to our sun's generation? Or put another way, the cosmic and stellar evolution of the universe? Thank you, Dylan from San Diego.

• 29:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love it. So in my, in my field, we've binned the star populations into...

• 29:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Three, oh, three, four, yeah, four groups. And just, so with Roman numerals, except we have a zero and the Romans didn't have zero. Right, there's no zero in Roman numerals. No zero in Roman. That's why there's no zero in the Julian calendar where they try to put the birth of Jesus at the beginning of the calendar. There's no zero. It went from one B.C. to A.D. one. So anyhow, you don't invented the zero or the Hindus invented the zero, then it wa- it migrated to Baghdad and then the Arabs did great things with it and, you know, fully developing algebra and another thing. Bam, that's a whole other aside. So. Nice.

• 30:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, the first stars in the universe, we call those population three.

• 30:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? Population three. Yes. Well, sorry, the stars right here, we call those population one. Okay. Population one. All right. What does that mean? It's stars like the sun have a certain amount of heavy elements in it. You can measure them. How much iron, silicon, nitrogen, oxygen, heavier than hydrogen and helium? Okay. As we looked in certain parts of the galaxy, we found stars that had way less heavy elements.

• 30:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We call those population two. Population two. Right, these did not have the benefit of multiple generations of stars before them, only maybe a couple of generations of stars enriching their heavy element abundance.

• 30:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got you. We're pop one, those are pop two, and someone said, well, let's imagine a pop three, which would be the very first stars and they have no heavy elements at all. Right. So, we are, by this measure, a third generation.

• 31:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stars, and if a star born today, we might call that.

• 31:24Chuck Nice?

  Pop four.

• 31:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know, am I doing it the right way? No, pop zero.

• 31:27Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry, pop zero, right?

• 31:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we might call it pop zero. We should have probably numbered it the other way, but it's too late.

• 31:33Chuck Nice?

  The other way so we could keep going, yeah.

• 31:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can keep going.

• 31:36Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 31:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:38Chuck Nice?

  And, and the stars that look like cute little boys that make girls screams would be K-pop. I'm sorry, I didn't, I shouldn't have done that. I don't know what the hell I was thinking.

• 31:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 31:49Chuck Nice?

  I just, I just took my daughter to a K-

• 31:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One, two, three, and K-pop.

• 31:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I took my daughter to a K- it was crazy. It was, I, I went to a K-pop concert not too long ago and I-

• 31:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, there it is. You're absolved.

• 32:00Chuck Nice?

  And I'm, and I'm scarred, that's what it is.

• 32:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're absolved.

• 32:16Chuck Nice?

  All right, let's go back to our questions and this is Ryan A. He says, greetings Neil, greeting your lordship, my- This is Ryan from Ontario, Canada here. Neil, you once said you had an answer to the simulation theory where either we are first or the last in the series, and since we haven't invented the ability yet, it can't be real. However, what if the simulation is not produced by our species? But another in the universe? Thanks for making my brain bigger every week, Neil. So there you go, that's Ryan A. who wants to know, are you saying-

• 32:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Someone else is creating us, that's fine, however, it only, it only works as something that's, that's scary if it's self-propagating, all right? That's, that's the whole idea here. If the original authentic universe creates a model-

• 33:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, a computer universe and that they think, believe they have free will to then they create one and they create one. And is that all the way down until the last one, which hasn't evolved yet to create one? So this is a real universe creating fake universes.

• 33:36Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 33:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What you're saying is you want

• 33:38Chuck Nice?

  Just a super intelligent species that has supercomputers. They're all quantum.

• 33:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's fine, but then they just make us, they have to make a different one and they make another one. And that's, that's more effort. So, yeah, it could be. I'm not denying that. But that was that you don't get this sort of runaway effect where everybody's making versions of itself within their own computing system.

• 34:00Chuck Nice?

  Right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Your way is more fun is what you're saying.

• 34:07Chuck Nice?

  All right. This is Joe Ingracia and Joe Ingracia says this. Hey Neil, hey Chuck, this is Joe from Missouri. If you're in space where you are not affected by any gravity, how do you know if you're going up, down, left, right, or any direction if you don't have any instruments to tell you?

• 34:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, first of all, nobody said there's no gravity in space. This is one of the biggest delusions that pervades our culture and our storytelling.

• 34:40Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, Joe, why are you so delusional?

• 34:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You go into space en route to the moon. You can't say there's no gravity there because what do you think the moon is orbiting?

• 34:55Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. The moon feels our gravity and is in orbit around us. This whole notion that space has no gravity comes about because the, because of the way we travel between destinations in space. You know how we do it? I'm gonna head for Mars. I'm gonna fire my engines right now, cut them off and coast to Mars. If you're coasting anywhere in the universe, you are weightless. Period. But if you turn on the engines, you're gonna feel some G-forces and that G basically counts as weight according to your body. So you have weight that way, you, you, um, that's if you want to get anywhere fast. And what was the film that where they had the moon pirates?

• 35:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A crazy film. Ad Astra. In the film Ad Astra.

• 35:44Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 35:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Brad Pitt was that.

• 35:46Chuck Nice?

  That was Brad Pitt?

• 35:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:48Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 35:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they had these scenes where everyone's just weightless in their spaceship even though the engines are firing.

• 35:55Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 35:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So thorough is their belief that being in space makes you weight. So that's the first point. Second, down, it's whichever direction you're falling.

• 36:08Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. That's funny. That's funny.

• 36:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you're coasting towards the moon, down is towards the moon.

• 36:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 36:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. I think it's that simple.

• 36:22Chuck Nice?

  There you go. That's really, that makes a lot of sense.

• 36:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 36:26Chuck Nice?

  It's very simple.

• 36:29Chuck Nice?

  All right. Super cool. Super cool. All right. Here we go. This is Walker Folland and Walker Folland says, hello, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice. This is Walker Folland from West Branch, Michigan. Recently, I read that the fabric, the fabric of spacetime may be wormholes that be, that are entangled between particles. Is it possible?

• 36:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like the previous question.

• 36:50Chuck Nice?

  Like the previous question.

• 36:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Getting around.

• 36:52Chuck Nice?

  People are on to this, man. Uh, is it possible the correlation of mass and gravitational pull have to do with the number of entangled particles that are particles that are in that mass? In other words, the more dense a body is, the more entangled particles it has. Therefore, the more micro wormholes would go to that mass. Could this explain the very nature of gravity and why its relation and its relation to time? I imagine that wormholes would act as a conduit for mass to accumulate. I would love to hear your thoughts.

• 37:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. I gotta think about that. I gotta, you know, we do, we'll hold that question. Next time we bring, uh, drag Brian Greene.

• 37:38Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 37:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To a cosmic grave. Uh, so what he's saying is if the wormholes are part of the fabric of space and time and wormholes can attract objects to them, uh, not only other wormholes, but just more stuff. Could that in fact be what causes gravity? And I don't have a good answer for that.

• 37:58Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's a pretty, that's a pretty wild question, bro. I gotta give it to you. Uh, well, how about Margaret Berry here? Uh, so now we gotta have Brian Green on. Thanks for giving us a reason to have Brian back. Brian back. Okay, uh, here's Margaret Berry. She says, hi Chuck, hi Neil. Uh, this is Margaret from North Carolina. My question is this, if all forms of energy have both particle and wave attributes, doesn't this itself define string theory?

• 38:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh. Oh.

• 38:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, no.

• 38:40Chuck Nice?

  And that's our show, people. Thank you so much.

• 38:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, strings are one dimensional, um, concentrations of energy, living in a higher dimension. And yes, they vibrate and depending on how they vibrate, they will manifest as one kind of particle or another. A wave, however, is not a string.

• 39:07Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 39:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? It's just not. So I don't know that you can connect the wave particle duality with the string that you'd find in string theory. Yeah, I don't think you can do that.

• 39:20Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, okay. Well, there you go, Margaret. I mean, it was a nice try. I get it. That was a nice try, Margaret. She was like, I'm on to something. Let me tell you.

• 39:30Chuck Nice?

  Like, listen, I figured out the string theory.

• 39:35Chuck Nice?

  No, that was, that was a very cool, very cool, Margaret. Thank you.

• 39:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, that's all we have. So those are Patreon members at $5 a month. Get your access to this, so.

• 39:43Chuck Nice?

  That's all you, listen, people.

• 39:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I think those numbers are growing. So people, I, maybe this was the carrot that everybody needed. I don't know, but yeah, the, the numbers are growing.

• 39:52Chuck Nice?

  For those of you who want to, uh, uh, submit your questions, go to patreon.com slash StarTalk and, uh, sign up for the $5, uh, level, the tier. And, uh, for that, for the cup, for the price of a cup of coffee. You can go ahead and be a part of our Patreon family.

• 40:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, that's all the time we got for it, Chuck.

• 40:14Chuck Nice?

  All righty.

• 40:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, this has been a StarTalk Cosmic Queries Grab Bag Edition. Always fun. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, as always. Keep looking out.