Cosmic Queries – Light Sails & Quantum Scales

If the multiverse exists, where does our universe end and another begin? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice tackle a wide-ranging grab bag of fan questions covering bubble universes, the nature of now, fractals, Hoag's Object, and more.

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

• 0:00Chuck Nice?

  Meu Deus, és linda. Obrigado por mi vida. Translation: My God, you're beautiful. Thank you for listening. Yes, I'm talking to you, but I'm talking to you in Português. That is correct. You never know when you're gonna find yourself in Portugal, or when you're gonna talk to somebody from Brazil who also speaks Portuguese. You know, if you're gonna travel anywhere, you'd be surprised how much it helps to know the language, even if you don't know it fluently. But let's say you do wanna know it fluently. Well, I have an answer for both. Rosetta Stone. That's right. Rosetta Stone has just launched Rosetta Stone Sapphire, featuring Sapphire Studio,

• 0:43Chuck Nice?

  which lets you personalize your learning around what you actually care about right now. Now, we all know that I use Rosetta Stone so that I can understand what my mother-in-law is saying about me behind my back. But maybe you're traveling and you just wanna know, hey, what do I say when I check in? How do I talk to the taxi driver? Rosetta Stone Sapphire is gonna allow you to talk to people in real-world situations in their own language. And the great thing is you can do it on your phone, on your tablet, at your own pace, on your own time schedule. So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and take your language skills to the next level. Don't wait to try Rosetta Stone Sapphire. StarTalk listeners can get 20% off their Rosetta Stone Sapphire subscription

• 1:27Chuck Nice?

  when they sign up today. This gets you access to Rosetta Stone Sapphire in 25 languages. So go to rosettastone.com and sign up today.

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• 2:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, that was a fun Cosmic Queries Grab Bag. My favorite was the person who asked, what would the cosmic microwave background be like when it happened? It's like, whoa, oh, yeah. Take cover. Is that, is this lesson there?

• 2:37Chuck Nice?

  You know what Neil told him? Hey, man, I was there when it happened, and I'll give you a firsthand account.

• 2:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up on StarTalk.

• 2:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 3:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Cosmic Queries Potpourri Grab Bag Edition. Chuck, how you doing, man?

• 3:10Chuck Nice?

  Doing great, Neil. That's right.

• 3:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. I like the way you say potpourri. Let me hear it.

• 3:14Chuck Nice?

  The potpourri, which is, which is my version of Galactic Gumbo.

• 3:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we don't, we don't, we don't know what to call this other than Grab Bag. Grab Bag seems to work.

• 3:25Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, Grab Bag works.

• 3:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's, and it's a fan favorite because people ask whatever the hell they want.

• 3:30Chuck Nice?

  Whatever you want.

• 3:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Chuck, so what's your first question?

• 3:33Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. Tricia Lynch says, hello, Dr. Tyson and Lord Nice. This is Tricia from Beaverton, Oregon. If the multiverse exists, how would we be able to tell where our universe ends and another universe begins? Well, thank you.

• 3:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like that.

• 3:58Chuck Nice?

  Interesting.

• 4:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, there, there's several variations on the, on the multiverse. And I only know a couple of them, but they're more than the number that I know. And they come out of sort of the mathematics of the early universe as you shotgun marry quantum physics and general relativity with string theory and other sort of creative ideas in the early universe. So one version of the multiverse is there's one enormous grid of spacetime, and we're one bubble within that grid. Okay?

• 4:36Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 4:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The difference is these bubbles are separated from each other in a way that you cannot access the other bubble.

• 4:46Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 4:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. At the end of our universe is wherever that is, but it would not overlap with another universe, even though all of these universes are expanding.

• 4:57Chuck Nice?

  If it's a bubble in the spherical sense of a bubble.

• 5:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, sure.

• 5:02Chuck Nice?

  Then the universe ends where the universe begins.

• 5:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh.

• 5:10Chuck Nice?

  Like, where, like, where is the end of a bubble? Where is the end of a bubble?

• 5:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, so, so you might say that the edge of the bubble is where you begin your journey into the bubble universe.

• 5:23Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 5:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that an end or a be- yeah, that's a good point.

• 5:26Chuck Nice?

  Is that an end or a beginning, right? You know?

• 5:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I like that. I like that.

• 5:29Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 5:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A legit reinterpretation of the information. So, so all of these universes are out there, uh, expanding and not overlapping. So that's a, by the way, on the possibility that they might have overlapped, we, there are experiments you can do with the cosmic microwave background. What you can do is, uh, you can look to see if one part of the cosmic microwave background looks statistically different from another part of the cosmic microwave background in a different direction. And that could be somebody else's universe impinging on ours. And that would show up in the statistical analysis of the microwave background.

• 6:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And people have done that experiment and looked for these signatures and haven't found them.

• 6:17Chuck Nice?

  Found nothing, no.

• 6:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They found, yeah, there's no, there's nobody impinging on our statistical,

• 6:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  on the statistics of our universe. And I say statistics of because the microwave background is, is a, is a tapestry of fluctuations of temperature that existed in the early universe that is imprinted in microwaves that we can observe today. And if there's a different universe, it might have a different imprinting, and you'll be able to see that. You should be able to see that if there was some overlap. And we don't. So, so that's one kind of multiverse. Another one is just a whole bubble separate from this grid of spacetime that presumably embedded in a higher dimension. And it's expanding, and we're expanding, and never the twain will meet.

• 7:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, plus, it's possible, in fact, it's likely, given quantum physics, that the laws of physics are slightly different in one universe relative to another. And that would be extremely dangerous if you wanted to visit the other universe. Because you don't know, is the charge on the electron different? Will all your atoms fly apart or will they collapse?

• 7:32Chuck Nice?

  Hey, look who showed up. It's the goo people.

• 7:37Chuck Nice?

  Where did these goo people come from?

• 7:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, did you collapse into a pile of goo because of all the forces that otherwise kept you alive or doing something different? So, yeah, so that's, that's the best I can address this. What I might do is next time we get Brian Greene on, we can bring up that topic with him. Let's see if he has any more to add to it. Because he knows, he's more nuanced about, uh, elements of the multiverse that could influence or impact the, the full answer to that question.

• 8:08Chuck Nice?

  Cool.

• 8:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. I want you to put a star next to that. Put a star next to that. And we'll hold it aside for when Brian Greene shows up again.

• 8:15Chuck Nice?

  Flag it for Brian Greene.

• 8:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 8:18Chuck Nice?

  Super cool. All right, then let's move on to, this is Mary Mitchell. And Mary says, hi, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice, Mary from Oregon.

• 8:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Two Organs in a row.

• 8:30Chuck Nice?

  Two Organs in a row.

• 8:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was just in Oregon, just, oh, just a few weeks ago.

• 8:35Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 8:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In Asheville, Oregon.

• 8:38Chuck Nice?

  Asheville? Oh, my God, that is a party town.

• 8:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where was it? Asheville or Ashland?

• 8:43Chuck Nice?

  I don't know. I don't, I don't know.

• 8:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ashland, Art. Uh, that's the, the site of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. And took in some Shakespeare plays. Yeah.

• 8:52Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Oh, I said it was a party town.

• 8:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's quite the culture town.

• 8:56Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 8:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 8:57Chuck Nice?

  And the, the Shakespeare.

• 9:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Asheville was in North Carolina. Ashland is in Oregon.

• 9:03Chuck Nice?

  Ashland is in Oregon. Okay. All right. Uh, Mary says this. The cosmic query is, for both of you, okay? What is one of your favorite words in astrophysics? Is there a particular word that reflect, reflects the structure function of its referent or that it's just fun to say? Alternatively, is there a word in astrophysics that chafes your cheeky underbelly? So, what's your issue with it? Thanks.

• 9:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. And love the show. I, I love that question, and let me tell you why. My second book ever was titled Universe Down to Earth. Second book ever. Came out like in the early 90s. And in fact, I've been asked to update it and have it get re-released, uh, which might happen in the next 18 months or so. And I'd mention that because one of the chapters is titled, The Confused Person's Guide to Astronomical Jargon.

• 10:14Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 10:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so the entire chapter is just words that, that might confuse you, and then I rectify that. And the words are grouped by, in categories, like words that mean exactly what they say. Words that are completely confusing. Words that sound like romantic destinations. Words, so they're, they're grouped, that's socially and culturally grouped.

• 10:38Chuck Nice?

  Wait, you put this out as a book?

• 10:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that was one chapter of a book. Yeah.

• 10:42Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay. Dude, you should make a pocketbook, like a little pocketbook.

• 10:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay.

• 10:49Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. By the way, I wanna cut. I'm just saying. Y'all heard it here.

• 10:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in terms of like romantic words, so, uh.

• 11:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I I put it in the romantic word section, your La Grange in point.

• 11:09Chuck Nice?

  Oh, yes.

• 11:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have a whole explainer on your La Grange.

• 11:13Chuck Nice?

  La Grange points, yes.

• 11:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if you didn't otherwise know, it's like that's that's going to show up in some romance book.

• 11:20Chuck Nice?

  Hello, mi amor, mon ami, I would like very much to make love to your La Grange point.

• 11:32Chuck Nice?

  If only I could hold you La Grange point at the precipice, not only would you freeze.

• 11:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what what's also there is the four telescopes that observe the sun. There's a a special configuration of the optics where the focus of the telescope, because the sun has unlimited brightness, right, compared to what you're normally looking at as an astronomer.

• 12:02Chuck Nice?

  Not unless you look at it directly from the White House. A lot of people don't know, but nobody knows more about looking at the sun than I do. I can look at it. I stared it down and I won.

• 12:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stared so hard at it, the sun set.

• 12:24Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's a good one. I stared. I stared at it so hard it set. Yeah.

• 12:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what happens is you have the main mirror that reflects the light back to a secondary mirror. And then you take that light and beam it into a separate room. And all the optics are configured so that no matter where the sun is in the sky, the focus will land in this singular room. And that room has all the special optics to do this. And it's called a coude focus. The coude was the is the uh, that's the description of that kind of optics, but the room where it comes in is called the coude room. So I just thought that that had a little romantic.

• 13:06Chuck Nice?

  It does have a romantic, yes. Shall we retire to the coude room? Oh, dear.

• 13:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I also list words that I hate that were not invented by astronomers because we're we're much more creative and descriptive than our physics counterparts. And so there's a branch of study led by physicists in astrophysics. And it's called magneto hydrodynamics.

• 13:33Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 13:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a word with too many syllables. I'm sorry. Magneto hydrodynamics. And so this is the study of magnetic fields and their influence on gases in the universe, whether those gases be gas clouds or the gas constituents of a star itself. Magneto hydrodynamics. So then we have words that mean exactly what they say. Exactly what they say. The sun has spots. Guess what we call them?

• 14:06Chuck Nice?

  Sunspots.

• 14:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you. Jupiter has a big red spot. Guess what we call it?

• 14:12Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, Jupiter bedwetting. Yeah, the Jupiter big red spot. Yeah.

• 14:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jupiter's red spot. And so we we tend to be very practical minded about that. And there are a lot of nebulae out there, just gas clouds formed by all multiple different ways. Some are gases that have been released by a star in its death. Could be supernova, could be uh, other mechanisms that will release gas. Uh, others are just gas clouds themselves that have been influenced by stars being born within them that evacuates pockets of uh, because the pressure from newly formed sunlight will do that. Anyhow, when we look at these things, we say, what does that look like? Hey, that looks like a tarantula. We have a tarantula nebula. Hey, that looks like a ring. That's a ring nebula. These are official names of things. You could look these up.

• 15:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The ring nebula, the tarantula nebula, the lagoon nebula, the owl nebula, something that looks like two eyes and the owl nebula, the eagle nebula, that looks like a spread eagle like on a on money, you know, on a on the seal of the president, with the head of the eagle is pointing sideways. So you can see a beak, the eagle nebula. So the whole set of nebulae, we just call them like we see them. Uh, and uh, that's very different from other fields where they will try to be very precise in their nomenclature, but then it it creates a smokescreen for anyone trying to get close to it, like geologists, like, you know, I was with a geology friend in the woods.

• 15:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I said, that's a pretty rock there. That's orthoclase feldspar. Okay, I don't like your rock anymore.

• 15:50Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. That's, yeah. Yeah, take it to Star Trek, buddy.

• 15:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. So is anything that chafes my my speedos? Uh, I would say magneto hydrodynamics, because as an educator, I I don't want to smokescreen with words. I don't want the word to be the barrier. I want the idea to be what might be the challenging point about what I'm describing, not the word itself.

• 16:16Chuck Nice?

  Right, right.

• 16:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so I don't know if I hit all the elements of that. What they want to know what's my favorite word?

• 16:22Chuck Nice?

  No, you got it all. What what what chafed you? What what did you like? Uh, yeah, you hit them both. Yeah.

• 16:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Uh, here's a here's a word that means exactly what it says. Thermoneuclear fusion.

• 16:36Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 16:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's another thermo is heat, nuclear is the nucleus of the atom, fusion, you're bringing atoms together.

• 16:43Chuck Nice?

  Together.

• 16:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bada bing.

• 16:45Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

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• 18:09Chuck Nice?

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• 18:49Chuck Nice?

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• 19:33Chuck Nice?

  Try Wix Harmony for free at wix.com. That's W I X dot com. Hmm, let's see. Cashmere hoodie, cashmere crew neck, long sleeve tee, performance pants. Hmm, what else? Oh, what am I doing right now? I am uh, kind of counting some of the pieces in my closet that make up the staples in my wardrobe. I'm talking about easy pieces that make fashion effortless and make me look like a fashion guru. Not that I'm not, let's be honest. Quince is what I'm really talking about.

• 20:13Chuck Nice?

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• 20:54Chuck Nice?

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• 21:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Space fact. Dark matter is 85% of all the gravity we measure in the universe. And we don't know what's causing it. It doesn't interact with our light. It doesn't even interact with itself, which means it cannot coalesce to form solid objects like stars or planets or people.

• 22:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you like that fact, you can find 4,999 more in Lost in Space. 5,000 facts to help navigate the universe. Lost in Space is now available wherever you get your books.

• 22:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, we have words that are left over from previous times, but we never tidied up the nomenclature. Among the nebula, there's a kind of nebula called planetary nebula.

• 22:53Chuck Nice?

  Planetary nebula.

• 22:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, oh, it's sad. That's sad that it got called that.

• 22:58Chuck Nice?

  That's why it's not a thing?

• 22:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, are you ready?

• 23:01Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead.

• 23:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You ready for this? Okay, okay. If you have a telescope and you look up at the night sky and you look at a star, the star is so far away, it's just a point of light even in a telescope.

• 23:12Chuck Nice?

  Even in a telescope.

• 23:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even, they're all just points of light, even in a telescope.

• 23:16Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 23:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you look at a planet, it's a disk. You can see a circular disk. Obviously, it's a sphere, spherical, but to a telescope, you see a round thing. Okay? William Herschel, I think it was, found a nebula that was round. And he called it a planetary nebula because it looked planet-like through a telescope. Even though he knew it was a gaseous thing, and he knew it wasn't a planet, he just was naming things just by what they look like, not for what they are. And so I'm pissed off that we still have that term for it.

• 23:51Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, Herschel, you dumbass. God.

• 23:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, the dude discovered other things, so you gotta, you know, give him, he discovered infrared light.

• 24:03Chuck Nice?

  Right, that's true. I mean, listen, but that was, you know, that was him looking at a table, all right, where he belonged looking, okay?

• 24:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He also discovered Uranus, so.

• 24:15Chuck Nice?

  Ah, no, not my anus, okay?

• 24:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't say your anus, I said Uranus.

• 24:21Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay.

• 24:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He didn't discover my anus, maybe your anus.

• 24:30Chuck Nice?

  I don't know who you've been hanging around anyway. Uh, that's cool, that's cool. All right, well, that was very cool. All right, here we go. This is LightBlindedFool. And LightBlindedFool says, hello, Dr. Tyson, Lord nice, my name is Robin and I'm from Vermont. Yay, love Vermont. Thanks for StarTalk, my brain is eating very well. My question is, what do you think will get to Alpha Centauri first? Missions such as Starshot, or what NASA, or what the NASA Advanced Concepts Program is putting together, or will nanotechnology and new propulsion systems outpace these

• 25:14Chuck Nice?

  programs if they are launched years later? And could these missions continue beyond Alpha Centauri to more distant stars since they won't be slowing down?

• 25:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so this is why we have telescopes, so we can get a close-up look without actually going there. I mean, just think about that, okay? You have some object in the distance, you can travel to it, or you can whip out a telescope and view it as though you were standing close to it. So the.

• 25:48Chuck Nice?

  And even take measurements.

• 25:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And even take measurements. So the urge to be in a place that you could otherwise get measurements via a telescope is reduced simply because we have access to telescopes in multiple wavelengths, with multiple detectors, and the like. Okay, so that's my first comment. Second, Starshot, Project Starshot, is ambitious, okay? They're gonna have, send postage stamp-sized spacecraft, where, because so much can be miniaturized today, that can monitor, uh, uh, temperature, magnetic fields, uh, thermal

• 26:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  fluxes, all in a tiny little postage stamp-sized spacecraft that is attached to a huge solar sail, light sail, I should call them, okay? Now, the idea is, you launch boatloads of these, and then you have gigawatt lasers on Earth that beam into these light sails to accelerate this very low-mass spacecraft.

• 26:57Chuck Nice?

  Awesome.

• 26:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the calculations show, and by the way, if you beam light into a reflective surface, the momentum of the light will be imparted on that surface, and you can accelerate it. The calculations show that beaming at these, these spacecraft from Earth, even as they increase their distance, you can get the speeds up to 20% the speed of light.

• 27:21Chuck Nice?

  Damn.

• 27:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, I know. Now, now, let's do the math. The Alpha Centauri system is four light-years away. So, how long will it take these objects to get there?

• 27:34Chuck Nice?

  At 20% the speed of light?

• 27:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Speed of light, uh-huh. And they're four light-years away. 20 years, exactly. Thanks for that good math on the spot. So it'll take 20 years to get there. And so to say, is there some other propulsion, some other technology that'll, we can do within the 20 years that those are in motion, that'll just somehow pass them by? I don't think so. I, I don't think so.

• 28:01Chuck Nice?

  How are you getting faster than 20% the speed of light?

• 28:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and you're not, I don't see that happen.

• 28:07Chuck Nice?

  Right, that's crazy.

• 28:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, and just for context, the fastest spacecraft we've ever launched anywhere was the mission to Pluto called New Horizons. And the reason why that was fast is we have a rule, unwritten, but it's definitely a rule. If you're head of a space mission, you want to make sure that it's completed before you die. That's, that's an unwritten rule. And so Pluto's very far away. With normal rockets, it might have taken dozens of years, but you make the payload as light as possible, give it low mass, and boost it on the most powerful rockets in the space launch arsenal.

• 28:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This gives you very high acceleration from Earth out to Pluto. If instead you redirected that rocket to Alpha Centauri, last I calculated this, it would take you 40,000 to 50,000 years to get to Alpha Centauri.

• 29:08Chuck Nice?

  That's wild.

• 29:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's very different from 20 years, yeah.

• 29:11Chuck Nice?

  Big time, yeah.

• 29:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's the fastest thing we've ever launched. So I don't, you know, we're, we're good, this Project Starshot, there's good Google pages on it, you can check it out. And I think it was one, it might have been one of the X prizes. I have to, I have to check my memory on that. But anyhow, go check out Project Starshot. Very ambitious, and I think realizable, by the way. It might need a few more billionaire investors, but yeah.

• 29:40Chuck Nice?

  Very cool. This is Lyra, who says, Dr. Tyson, Lord nice, Vega from Colorado here.

• 29:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, hold on, how do you spell Lyra?

• 29:50Chuck Nice?

  L-Y-R-A.

• 29:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's a name of a constellation. Okay, now let's keep going.

• 29:55Chuck Nice?

  Vega says.

• 29:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Vega is the name of the brightest star in the constellation Lyra.

• 30:00Chuck Nice?

  There you go, so.

• 30:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying, are we dealing with an alien here?

• 30:04Chuck Nice?

  That maybe, maybe, maybe this is a code. Uh, let's see, let's see what Lyra says, or what Vega says. You talked in previous episodes about there being no functional now. Regarding a moving person and a still person looking up in the sky at Andromeda at the same place and time and seeing it years in the past while moving, and the present and present while standing. My question is, is there any way we can make a simulation to replicate what true now would be if it were able to exist?

• 30:44Chuck Nice?

  Or is our knowledge or understanding unable to comprehend how we could even begin to do that?

• 30:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, no, there's a now for now is a very personal individual thing. And by the way, by the way, let me be precise, the now as in your clock time. Okay, so you we can all have a now, but in what was once synchronized clocks will show up in this case, three different nows for you, me and Vega or Lyra, whoever the person's name is.

• 31:24Chuck Nice?

  Whatever this alien's name is.

• 31:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. So, no, you cannot construct an absolute now. That's kind of the whole, that's what we had to give up when we transitioned from classical physics to to relativity physics to modern physics. What's related to that is we had to give up simultaneity. And that's the same question, in a way, as asking about now, because if things are simultaneous, they're happening in a in the same now. But if there is no absolute simultaneity, that is further evidence that there is no common now in the universe. So you can share a now with someone else if you are together with the same speed and

• 32:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  the same gravitational field, but otherwise, no, just give up on it. And it's hard to give up classical ways because our senses are forged in, like I said, in the Serengeti to not get eaten by a lion. That's how and why our senses do what they do. Beyond that, you know, the universe is under no

• 32:29Chuck Nice?

  Obligation to make sense to you.

• 32:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you. There it is.

• 32:34Chuck Nice?

  There you go. All right, still good question. I mean, nice to think about. This is Christian Jeremison, and he says, hello from, oh, Ilulissat, Greenland, never heard of it. So one of the ways to visualize gravity is through rubber fabric, AKA bowling ball on a trampoline, and I believe that's known as the rubber sheet, right?

• 33:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sure, sure.

• 33:05Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so does

• 33:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whatever your bowling ball be, anything would put a depression in that sheet. Yeah.

• 33:10Chuck Nice?

  Right. Does mass stretch our third spatial dimension into fourth or higher dimensions the same way as rubber fabric? If it does, is there still downward gravity in higher dimensions? Oh, yeah, have some fun with that, Neil, cuz.

• 33:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa, whoa, I'm trying to understand it because the it's not simply that you have a rubber sheet.

• 33:37Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 33:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then, because in a rubber sheet, the way we normally think about that, there's like some big source of gravity in the middle of that.

• 33:44Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 33:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you put a test roller thingy and it rolls around, then it goes into orbit.

• 33:49Chuck Nice?

  Right, right. It's to illustrate that the smaller body is falling towards the larger body. That's that's what it's supposed to illustrate.

• 33:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct, except what that misses is the fact that everything has distortions in its rubber sheet. So the ball that's that's rolling around the curved rubber sheet has its own distorted rubber sheet related to it. And so the universe is this juxtaposition of deformed rubber sheets for everything that's in it.

• 34:22Chuck Nice?

  Everything.

• 34:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From particles out to full galaxies. So we can't think of the mass itself as having some special kind of action on the fabric of spacetime.

• 34:35Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not, it just has the same action that anything else does.

• 34:39Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's and it corresponds with its total mass.

• 34:42Chuck Nice?

  Excellent.

• 34:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 34:44Chuck Nice?

  Very cool, though, but it's good that you asked that because I'm sure when people see that demonstration online, because if you can go on YouTube, many places show that, I'm sure that's the intuitive deduction that everybody makes is what he what he just asked.

• 35:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in fact, in the original Hayden Planetarium, in the exhibits, we had one of these deformed surfaces, but it wasn't rubber, it was just a rigid deformed surface. And you would take a, it's funny, my memory serves, you can take a coin and launch it, and it would roll on its edge around this surface. So you send the coin into orbit around this sort of black hole thingy in the middle. And then we then we keep your money.

• 35:36Chuck Nice?

  That's that's funny.

• 35:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was the black hole fundraising mechanism. The only point I'm making there is in that exhibit, that deformed sheet was was rigid, was a rigid sheet, a rigid surface, and you weren't thinking that even the coin would have deformations in it as well. So I can see, it's easy to see why you would think that the mass would be something separate and apart from whatever made the deformation in the first place.

• 36:06Chuck Nice?

  Right on. Okay, let's move on to Rachel Ambrose. That says, hello, Rachel here from Austin, Texas. Neil, are you familiar with Hoag's object? How statistically improbable is that from our line of sight here on Earth, we'd see a ring galaxy and then billions of light years behind it, another ring galaxy that appears inside the first one? Do you think it's more than a coincidence? Maybe some kind of gravitational lensing effect?

• 36:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I didn't know it had a name. Tell me the name of it again. I know this object, but I didn't know it had it was named. What's what are we giving it?

• 36:50Chuck Nice?

  She called it Hoag's object.

• 36:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Spell that.

• 36:54Chuck Nice?

  H O A G.

• 36:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hoag's object, yeah, okay, I didn't know it had a name. So so let's go back in time. Okay, you look up in the night sky and you see stars.

• 37:06Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm.

• 37:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you ask yourself, I wonder if two stars that are kind of near each other in the sky

• 37:14Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 37:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  are related to each other, or are they just a chance juxtaposition in space?

• 37:19Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 37:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To our line of sight. That's a perfectly natural question. One of the earliest applications of statistics in science, which, by the way, happened way later than whole other branches of math were invented. I've written about that in in the in the risk and reward chapter of of the book, Starry Messenger, Cosmic Perspectives. I lament the fact that statistics is one of the last branches of math to be invented, which should tell us something about how ill-equipped our brain wiring is to think statistically about the world.

• 38:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And entire industries exist to exploit that ignorance, and they're called casinos, all right? Where people, oh, my roll is due, oh, yeah, I think I have feel lucky today. It's like the what the brain does to think it is influencing events that are purely probabilistic is sad and tragic. Okay?

• 38:23Chuck Nice?

  It is. We have a president who who actually bombed a nation based on that same principle.

• 38:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 38:31Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, he said he had a gut. He had he had a gut feeling.

• 38:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just a feeling.

• 38:34Chuck Nice?

  He had a feeling.

• 38:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, I don't like people's guts. I don't like people's guts. I like people's brains better than I like their guts.

• 38:44Chuck Nice?

  Nice, I like that.

• 38:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So can we pose this question mathematically and then arrive at an answer? And yes, so what you can do is you can say, let's take a thousand stars and scatter them randomly on the sky.

• 38:59Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm.

• 39:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you do it randomly, what fraction of them will be within a certain angular distance from each other? There's a certain number you would expect if they went up randomly. And random doesn't mean that they're exactly evenly spaced.

• 39:16Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 39:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is not random.

• 39:17Chuck Nice?

  Even if they were random, you could still get a clumping.

• 39:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, in fact, clumpings are expected.

• 39:23Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 39:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. This was the problem when people said, oh, he's got a hot hand in a basketball court, give him the ball, when whatever is your shooting average in a game, you would expect there to be multiple shots in a row that are made. That's normal. It's not that he has a hot hand. That's normal. It's statistically normal, but again, we can't, our brains don't allow us to think statistically. We think something magic is going on, so we think special kind of luck is happening. So you do this and you know what to expect. Then we looked at how many stars are actually on the sky at to a certain telescopic depth. And then we looked at how many were close by, and there was a statistically significant

• 40:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  increase in stars that were close to each other on the sky relative to random. And that was one of the first applications of statistics to assert that we actually have double star systems in the universe. Stars can be born in pairs. And then we said, let's keep going. The stars are born in triplets and quadruplets. And that that opened the floodgates to think not only statistically about where stars are in the night sky, but also gravitationally and how you form such objects. Okay, you can do the same thing for galaxies, the same thing. And there are billions of galaxies on the sky.

• 40:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So when you have that many galaxies,

• 40:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Things such as alignments of two galaxies, you come to expect them. You don't go straight to them and say, oh, this is interesting and weird.

• 41:03Chuck Nice?

  What an anomaly.

• 41:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What an anomaly. No, no, no, no, no. Look at the statistical likelihood of it and we're good. We're good. We're good here. And, and by the way, we have to be careful because when you do observe such objects, you don't know initially if they're separate or related. And because they're two coherent things, two rings, you, you say, well, if they were on top of each other, could they still maintain their coherence? The gravity might disrupt their shape. You can ask other sets of questions. Point is, uh, it's not always obvious whether they're connected or not, and you need to do other measurements.

• 41:42Chuck Nice?

  Cool. Wow. All right. Still, yeah, good question. Very. Thank you for the curiosity there, Rachel. Uh, we're, we're all the better for it. All right. Let's go to Rourke. You know what? I'm gonna call him Rory. His name is Rory now. Your name Rory now. Rory Kim.

• 42:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your name is Rory because Chuck cannot pronounce your name.

• 42:05Chuck Nice?

  So, no, it's either Rourke or Roark. Uh, and that's R-O-A-R-K.

• 42:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, it's work.

• 42:13Chuck Nice?

  Rourke. Okay. Not, not work. Work. Okay. He says, hello, Dr. Tyson. I wonder if the answers to all of our universal questions lay within our ability to see further into geometry and fractal geometry patterns beyond botanical spirals and other phenomena. What if seeing clearly into space isn't what we actually need? Maybe something that helps us see kaleidoscopically, if you will, to uncover those patterns we cannot otherwise see. What is your take on this? You are a gentleman and a scholar. Also, Chuck, if you're reading this, I love you. Oh, oh, that was nice. Okay. So what do you think?

• 42:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Shout out to Chuck. Yeah. So, uh, here's my take on that. I don't want to speak for the whole field, but here's my take. All right. Was it back in the seventies where, but going definitely into the eighties, uh, people started thinking a lot about fractals. Fractals are patterns that you can generate or occasionally find them in nature where when you zoom, if there's some pattern that you see, so in a larger view, and then you zoom in, that exact pattern.

• 43:23Chuck Nice?

  Same pattern. Yeah.

• 43:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exact same. And you zoom in some more, it repeats.

• 43:26Chuck Nice?

  Again. Oh, they're beautiful. They're beautiful.

• 43:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and you can make beautiful fractal patterns, especially on a computer because computers are good at that. Uh, here's an example. It's a mild example, but, uh, many plants, I don't know if this is true for all plants. You have to check with a botanist on this. If you look at a, a tree, and if you look at the angle that a branch comes off from the tree and measure that angle, it's usually upwards a bit, maybe thirty to sixty degree angle, uh, from the vertical. Okay. Now that branch will have branches, right? Of course they will. This is what I mean by trees branching out. So let's look at the angle that that makes. It's the same angle. Okay. It's the same angle. And look at, if they make a branch, what's that? That's the same angle. So if you just zoom in to

• 44:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  this tree, you're getting a, a smaller tree, even smaller, smaller, you're getting versions of the larger tree as you zoom in. That's just kind of fun to notice if you've never noticed that about plants. I think it's a broader truth for plants that just in general. There may be important exceptions to it, but if you just look at several plants, you'll see this repeating. And it's fun to notice, by the way. Oh, I gotta throw this out there because I only learned it very late in life. If you cut an apple horizontally, and you cut into the core, and you will see seeds, uh, that are radially around the axis of

• 44:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  the apple. Okay. Okay. Do you know how many seed sections there are?

• 45:00Chuck Nice?

  No, I don't. No.

• 45:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Neither do I. I don't remember. But it's the same number as the petals on the flower that preceded that fruit.

• 45:13Chuck Nice?

  What?

• 45:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I know. I thought that was pretty cool.

• 45:15Chuck Nice?

  That is cool, man.

• 45:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's pretty cool.

• 45:18Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. All right.

• 45:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was, that was cool. Uh, okay. But I'm not a botanist, so I'm not here to analyze that. I'm just here to just share with you that, that observation. Okay. Anyhow, so fractals, there was the suspicion that fractals might be something in nature that we would be able to uncover. What makes fractals work is that the same rules that applied on one scale are applying on another scale.

• 45:46Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 45:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It gives you the same thing.

• 45:48Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 45:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the universe, that's not how we're, that's not how it works. Okay. There are large scale forces that do not readily translate to small scale forces. Because as you go to smaller in scales, quantum physics kicks in, and that's not the same as Newtonian physics.

• 46:08Chuck Nice?

  And none of the rules apply.

• 46:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But none of them, all the rules are different.

• 46:12Chuck Nice?

  All the rules are different.

• 46:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're not getting the pattern you're looking for.

• 46:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 46:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We want to think of patterns because it's easier for us to understand.

• 46:22Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 46:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Philosophically easier for us to accept.

• 46:26Chuck Nice?

  And our brains are pattern machines.

• 46:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yes. Pattern recognizing machines like there's never been any. So, so we're good at finding patterns, even when there's no pattern to be discerned. That's how good we are at finding patterns.

• 46:43Chuck Nice?

  So true. So true. Which is why I have a pancake in my refrigerator right now because I don't want to eat Jesus.

• 46:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, he's on the pancake. No, I don't think Jesus shows up on pancakes. He shows up on tortillas.

• 46:56Chuck Nice?

  Oh, really? Okay.

• 46:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So my point is, um, fractals ended up being more entertaining than useful in the sciences. That, that's my only point. They're entertaining and they're beautiful and you can make fun art. But if you try to use it as a tool to probe nature, it's just simply not as useful. And in fact, they tried to model forests using fractal patterns for trees.

• 47:27Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 47:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Model it in for weather and for, and it just didn't work because the trees are different from each other. Even if one tree, even if one species of tree could be fractaled into place, you, that same fractal, uh, model does not apply to all species of tree. It has to be a different fractal model. And how many kinds of, there's thousands or however many, uh, species of tree. So it just became messy and awkward. And so I have not seen much reference to fractals helping scientists decode nature in the last 20 years. Yeah. That's my take on it. If there's a take I've missed, I'd be curious

• 48:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  to know how fractals are coming along. But otherwise, I don't see them mattering as much as they, we thought they might have.

• 48:16Chuck Nice?

  All right. Well, listen, Rourke, um, just, uh, go ahead and continue to admire Romanesco broccoli and know that it has, it has no bearing on the universe at all.

• 48:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Romanesco broccoli is fractal food. Uh, take, look up a picture, Romanesco. Find a picture of it online or buy it. And I'll have you know that in Star Wars Force Awakens, in the bar scene, one of the servers is walking by with a tray of crudites, and one of the objects on that tray is Romanesco broccoli.

• 48:51Chuck Nice?

  Oh, cool. All right.

• 48:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which evidence, evidence that, that exists in a galaxy far away.

• 48:59Chuck Nice?

  Far, far away. There you go.

• 49:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Aliens know about Romanesco broccoli.

• 49:05Chuck Nice?

  It's either that or there's one hell of an importer on that planet. So.

• 49:25Chuck Nice?

  Earth can be a lot. There's gravity, there's mosquitoes, and a sun that will expand and engulf us eh, in about four or five billion years, give and take. Cosmically speaking, you've earned a break, so escape to Pluto. See what I did there? Turn off your earthly problems and turn on the movies and shows you already love. From Anchorman, The Legend of Ron Burgundy, to Dirty Dancing, from Alias to The X-Files. No subscription, no fees, zero dollars. The best things on TV are free. Escape to Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never.

• 50:03Speaker 01

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• 50:38Chuck Nice?

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• 51:09Speaker 03

  I'm Ali Khan Hemraj, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 51:28Chuck Nice?

  All right, this is Travis Knopp. He says, hello, Dr. Tyson and esteemed funny guest. Travis from Richmond, Virginia with a question inspired by my two-year-old.

• 51:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love it.

• 51:42Chuck Nice?

  She experiences a year as half her lifetime, while for me, it's only about 1/40. Could there be a cosmic analog? When we see red-shifted light from a distant galaxy, we assumed the universe was smaller when that light was emitted. Could the same observation, right? But could the same observation be explained by a universe in which time, and thus the speed of light, passed differently in the past? And is there an observable test that distinguishes expanding space from changing time?

• 52:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 52:21Chuck Nice?

  Interesting.

• 52:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love it. Okay, so they are related to each other. Let me get back to time relative to your two-year-old. Of course, your brain is, your life experience is filled by however long you have been having life experience, right? So you would expect one year to, let's not take a two-year-old because they don't know anything about anything yet, a five-year-old, to one year to a five-year-old is surely bigger in their life experience than one year to a 40-year-old, obviously.

• 52:55Chuck Nice?

  I lived a hard life, man. A lot of people think a five-year-old wouldn't know the ways of the world, but first of all, I quit smoking two years ago.

• 53:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I just paid down my mortgage? No, here's something.

• 53:13Chuck Nice?

  I quit my job this week.

• 53:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really mature five-year-old.

• 53:22Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 53:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me back into the answer to that question. When I was 14, I was driven with some other people approximately my age from New York City to the Mojave Desert.

• 53:36Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 53:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To attend an astronomy camp where I lived nocturnally for a month.

• 53:42Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 53:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. The trip, we drove nonstop and the trip took two days and five hours. I didn't correct for time zone change, so it's two days and one hour. Okay. Okay. Is that right? Or is it the other way? However, you correct that for time zone. Point is, it took two days. When we arrived, it seemed like we had left New York a week earlier because those two days were so filled with, oh, wow, that's the St. Louis Arch. Oh, my gosh, we're crossing the Mississippi River. Oh, is this Tennessee? Oh, is this Texas? What?

• 54:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My life was just, my visual, mental awareness of the world was so full that my brain wouldn't allow me to say, oh, that all happened in the last 48 hours. My brain forced me to think that that was spread over many more days than it actually was because the density of life experience was so high, was higher than anything I'd experienced in my life. So that was my mind's attempt to make sense of how much, how action-filled those two days were. Anyhow, that's purely psychological and you can know this because you can bring measuring

• 55:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  devices, clocks and things, and no, it didn't take me a week to get to California. It did only take two days. All right. In the expanding universe, it does affect time. It does. And I am proud to say I am a co-author on the first paper, research paper, to establish that fact. Okay? There were, I forgot, it might have been as many as eight or nine authors on this paper. And the lead author, the lead author would later win the Nobel Prize for the discovery of dark energy, for co-discovering dark energy in the universe.

• 55:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the lead author on that paper, his name is Brian Schmidt, who studied the, as we say, high redshift supernovae. These are stars that explode in galaxies out to the edge of the universe. And if you do that, you can probe metrics of the universe because all the supernova have a certain common properties. So it's like a yardstick, a free yardstick moving throughout the universe. And so he would ultimately share the Nobel Prize with Adam Rees for this discovery. And both those groups, the high redshift supernova groups, one was on the East Coast, one was on the West Coast. Brian Schmidt is now, last I checked, he was like provost at, in Australia, Australia

• 56:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  National University, I think it is. But anyhow, so I'm on a research paper that showed that if you know when a star blows up a supernova, it gets brighter and then it gets dimmer at a very predictable rate. We know this. Okay? That's why they make good yardsticks, standard candles, as we've called them. There was a high redshift supernova that didn't fit this light curve. We call it a light curve. And we said, hmm, is this a different kind of supernova? Or what? Because this supernova hails from when the universe was half its current size and the

• 57:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  universe was expanding, as it still is. So what's up with that? Turns out, if you put in the time dilation expected for the expansion of the universe at the time of that galaxy's light, it stretches the light curve to be exactly on the curve we measure. Holy shit. It was, it was a direct evidence of not only a shift in the expanding universe, but what effect that has on time because the light curve was stretched out.

• 58:00Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 58:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We observing that light curve, it took longer for that light curve to execute its rise and fall than a nearby supernova at exactly the rate that you'd expect from the expanding universe. And so, so I'm proud to be on there. I supplied some data, some supernova data that he compiled to make the full paper. So it's his effort to come up with that result. I was, I was a cog in a much larger wheel to make that happen. So the point is, yes, time is affected and we see that in phenomena, in galaxies and other phenomena, in those places and at those times in the early universe.

• 58:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But the, the speed of light, as you measure it, is the same no matter what.

• 58:51Chuck Nice?

  No matter what.

• 58:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not what changes here. Okay? But the time, the timekeeping, timekeeping is what changes. And so there you have it.

• 59:00Chuck Nice?

  That's wild. All right, this is Kyle Holman. Kyle says, hello, Dr. Tyson, Lord, nice Kyle from Fort Myers, Florida here. Hey, Fort Myers, first-time Patreon member. Welcome aboard.

• 59:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to the Star Talkiverse.

• 59:19Chuck Nice?

  Nice. There we go. What might the night sky have looked like when the cosmic microwave background radiation was cosmic visible light background?

• 59:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, oh, okay. So the cosmic microwave background today is microwaves.

• 59:37Chuck Nice?

  It's microwaves, right.

• 59:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Microwaves, okay. The microwave photon is like one centimeter long or less, a few millimeters up to a couple of centimeters. It's the length, the physical length of the wavelength of the photon. Okay. That has stretched in the expanding universe since the cosmic microwave was first formed. Okay. So we ask, what was the temperature of the universe when it first formed? Because today, the temperature that corresponds with microwaves is three degrees Kelvin, absolute Kelvin, okay?

• 1:00:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The temperature of the cosmic microwave background when it formed was about 3,000 degrees.

• 1:00:26Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 1:00:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It turns out that it's an exact one-to-one relationship between how much the wave has stretched and how much bigger the universe is. So in the early universe, when its temperature was 3,000 degrees, relative to three degrees today, it means the universe was one one-thousandth its current size.

• 1:00:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because over those years, it's expanded a thousandfold, going from the wavelength of light at 3,000 degrees to the wavelength of light at three degrees.

• 1:01:02Chuck Nice?

  Three degrees.

• 1:01:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what is the wavelength of light at 3,000 degrees? It's visible light.

• 1:01:07Chuck Nice?

  So at one point, the whole universe was just a beautiful, like heavenly light.

• 1:01:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, a heavenly glow, but it would be like the surface of the sun, but everywhere. And if you had good measuring devices, you can detect that some parts were slightly cooler and slightly warmer than others, and that you'd be immersed in that, filled with it, and you wouldn't need special telescopes to see it. So when you say night sky, people often think of stars, suns, moons, and planets. Of course, none of that had formed yet because the universe is still trying to get its act together.

• 1:01:42Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:01:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From those early moments, yeah.

• 1:01:45Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's cool. That is really cool. Damn.

• 1:01:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, all right.

• 1:01:49Chuck Nice?

  So you would have seen that, you'd have seen that and just been like, somebody turn that down.

• 1:01:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, exactly. There'd be no, there'd be no, you couldn't, you couldn't get away from it.

• 1:02:00Chuck Nice?

  Right. It'd be everywhere. It's omnipresent, just light.

• 1:02:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And let me tell you how bad it actually would be. If you said, oh, there's some shade over there, and you go under the shade, all of that energy will heat the thing that's shading you, and then it will glow the same temperature as

• 1:02:19Chuck Nice?

  As

• 1:02:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  the background.

• 1:02:20Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 1:02:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you wouldn't, you

• 1:02:25Chuck Nice?

  It'd be inescapable.

• 1:02:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Inescapable.

• 1:02:28Chuck Nice?

  Wow, very cool. Oh, man, that was good, man.

• 1:02:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's, here's, here's a quick thing. I don't know if you've done this. Have you ever done pottery where you have a kiln? Have you ever done this?

• 1:02:38Chuck Nice?

  Um, I wouldn't quite call it pottery. I mean, I took some, I took some clay and some water and supposedly shaped it into something, and then we put it in a little oven, and then when it came out, I was like, throw that shit away.

• 1:02:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:02:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So a kiln,

• 1:03:01Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:03:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, where you fire up the kiln and you, it sets your clay

• 1:03:07Chuck Nice?

  Sets your clay.

• 1:03:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. The, that is glowing hot.

• 1:03:12Chuck Nice?

  Yes, it is.

• 1:03:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, it is glowing hot. It's, it's hotter than red hot, a little hotter than red hot. All right. So there it is. That's about 3,000, call it 3,000, it might be as low as 2,000 degrees, but let's call it 3,000 degrees for the moment, in the kiln. There it is. If you look inside, it's just glowing.

• 1:03:30Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:03:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can't see

• 1:03:32Chuck Nice?

  You can't see it.

• 1:03:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The edges of the walls of the kiln because it's all glowing at you.

• 1:03:36Chuck Nice?

  That's right. That's true.

• 1:03:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now watch. Now, you take your pottery, put it in there. What is the temperature when you put it in there?

• 1:03:44Chuck Nice?

  What does it do or what is it? It says

• 1:03:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is the, what is the temperature of your pottery when you put it in?

• 1:03:50Chuck Nice?

  Oh, it's whatever the atmospheric temperature is.

• 1:03:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Room temperature. Okay.

• 1:03:53Chuck Nice?

  Room temperature.

• 1:03:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now you put it in, close the thing, and the pot, that pottery gets hotter and hotter and hotter.

• 1:04:00Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:04:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can watch this happen. It gets hotter and hotter and hotter until it reaches the same temperature as the glowing walls.

• 1:04:11Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 1:04:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then it disappears.

• 1:04:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it is the same glowing temperature surface as everything else. Maybe if you move your head a little bit, you can catch some edges of it, but compared to what it was when you first put it in, when it's a discreet object, glowing at a room temperature rather than the temperature of the kiln itself. So it's how to make something disappear in the, in the background.

• 1:04:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And one last example, completely obscure, but I got to put it out there, in the film, which I highly recommend because it's very, it's masterfully crafted and very sexy, and it's a caper. It was the remake of, of The Thomas Crown Affair. Okay?

• 1:05:03Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 1:05:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's, it's a heist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, except they didn't agree to get their name mentioned in the credits. I think they don't want people heisting their paintings.

• 1:05:15Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:05:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Anyhow, anyhow, the thieves waited for the hottest day of the year.

• 1:05:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? Then cut the air conditioning to the rooms

• 1:05:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  so that the air got up to the temperature of the walls.

• 1:05:40Chuck Nice?

  Ah.

• 1:05:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so the cameras, they have infrared cameras. The, when that happened, the infrared camera could not detect the paintings from the walls from the air in front of it. And the whole, the whole scene went, I don't, not blank, the whole scene went uniform.

• 1:06:02Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:06:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, yeah, because all glowing at the same temperature.

• 1:06:07Chuck Nice?

  That's pretty cool. Um, if you put the pottery in the kiln and look in the window when it disappears, if you listen very, very closely, you can hear the pottery saying,

• 1:06:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's happening?

• 1:06:25Chuck Nice?

  God damn, it's hot. Oh, stop. Oh, get me out of here. That's so hot. Please.

• 1:06:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm referring only to the light waves, not the sound waves. That's a different conversation. That's right.

• 1:06:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, another thing, by the way, if the temperature in the rooms go up to like 100 degrees, because it's like the hottest day of the year, and the walls go to 100 degrees, what's your body temperature?

• 1:06:52Chuck Nice?

  98 point whatever.

• 1:06:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's, so that's near 100 degrees. So all this just blends. It turns out we have a higher density of infrared light coming off of us than the air does, but it still makes it much harder to figure out what's going on when everything is glowing to you at the same temperature. That's all. So that's a lot of obscure, everyday references to something that started as a cosmological, a brilliant cosmological question about the cosmic microwave background.

• 1:07:22Chuck Nice?

  Nice. Well, thanks, Kyle.

• 1:07:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got it. Yeah, I think that's all the time we have.

• 1:07:27Chuck Nice?

  Oh, well, this was fun.

• 1:07:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Another installment of Cosmic Queries, Grab Bag.

• 1:07:32Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gumbo.

• 1:07:34Chuck Nice?

  Gumbo. That I don't wanna see no, see glad, no, no, and we glad it when we come back, no, missing a guarantee.

• 1:07:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whatever the hell you just said.

• 1:07:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, for those, I've seen this on video, I see on your back screen, it comes and goes, but you're, you're Just Smart Enough video, it's still up on YouTube, on our YouTube channel.

• 1:07:59Chuck Nice?

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:08:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On Startalk's YouTube, on Startalk's YouTube channel.

• 1:08:02Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 1:08:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you, you recorded that and posted it New Year's Eve or New Year's Day?

• 1:08:07Chuck Nice?

  New Year's Day.

• 1:08:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, New Year's Day. So

• 1:08:09Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 1:08:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's you just, just, just telling it like you see it.

• 1:08:14Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, Chuck and I's Just Smart Enough on the Startalk YouTube channel. Go and download it and share it with your friends. It's free.

• 1:08:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got it. That's all the time we have, Chuck.

• 1:08:22Chuck Nice?

  Oh, man, this was good.

• 1:08:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I am Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Keep looking up.

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