Live at the Bell House (Part 2)

In the second half of our live show at the Bell House in Brooklyn, Kristen Schaal, Scott Adsit, Eugene Mirman and our very special guest Alan Alda travel through time and higher dimensions.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium. Last week, we aired part one of our live recording from the 4th Annual Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival in Brooklyn. This week, we bring you the second half of that show. The next day, I was to leave for Australia, and that fact showed up in our discussions about the paradoxes and limitations of time travel.

• 0:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We are live at the Bell House in Brooklyn at the Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival. Eugene, please reintroduce your guest here.

• 0:59Eugene Mirman?

  Sure, let's do this. Ladies and gentlemen, the incredible Kristen Schaal.

• 1:10Eugene Mirman?

  She is a favorite from "Flight of the Conchords" and "The Daily Show." And now, ladies and gentlemen, I don't know why I'm... You're really good at this. It's very dramatic.

• 1:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in this corner.

• 1:20Eugene Mirman?

  And in this corner, from 30 Rock, Scott Adsit.

• 1:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I brought Alan Alda with me, so there.

• 1:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so Alan, I was reading your bio. You have six Emmys, but you've been nominated 33 times. Like, what's up with that?

• 1:47Speaker 02

  I just keep losing.

• 1:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just checking, you know, I don't wanna like, get in your business there, but...

• 1:56Eugene Mirman?

  I think it sounds impressive.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  I keep my chin up, I keep trying.

• 2:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright.

• 2:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, what about relativity? So as you may know, in relativity, it is prescribed, and we know this is true, we've done it on particles. It's harder to do it on people, because they might die in your experiment. If you accelerate them to high speeds, their time ticks more slowly than it does for everyone who observes them. Time slows down for you, you can effectively go into your own future, that way. And, so in principle, however fast you go, 90% the speed of light, 99% the speed of light, you have unlimited power over how slowly you will age compared with everybody else when you return to Earth. Now, I did the calculation. The shuttle astronauts from STS-135, in fact, I tweeted this. I tweeted that the astronauts, and I forgot, what was it?

• 2:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was...

• 2:50Eugene Mirman?

  Half a second into the future?

• 2:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it was like, 100,000th of a second into the future, they traveled. On their voyage around the Earth. And, so, but, people were like...

• 3:00Speaker 02

  So did they come back and buy stock, or something?

• 3:07Speaker 03

  Did they recognize the world they returned to? Whoa, what's this? Who are you, honey?

• 3:14Speaker 04

  The SEC just leave him alone?

• 3:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I know, yeah, the 100,000th of a second, uh, rule.

• 3:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you can do this. So if you actually wanna cross the galaxy, you can do it at a sufficiently high speed, even though it's 100,000 light-years across. Get a high enough speed, you can cross there in whatever time you need, without dying before it happens. However, if you wanna observe someone to do it, you have to be a little more clever, and they did this on Star Trek. Hence, the warp drive. The warp drive on Star Trek were engines that took the fabric of space, said, "I'm here, and I wanna go there." Let's warp the space between the two, because they cannot violate the law of traveling faster than light. Warp the space between the two, cut a hole between there and there, unfold space, there you are, across the galaxy during the TV coming through.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  You know, Neil, that didn't really happen.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  That was, that was a TV show. And those people were actors. Especially the guy with the pointy ears.

• 4:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think for some people in the world, that show was real. Yeah.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  That's what I'm afraid.

• 4:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And wasn't there a movie where the aliens came and that was real to them?

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, that was a great movie.

• 4:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What movie?

• 4:31Speaker 02

  That's one of my favorite movies. Galaxy Quest.

• 4:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Galaxy Quest.

• 4:34Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, the parody, yeah.

• 4:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my God.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Let's talk about that for the rest of the time.

• 4:41Eugene Mirman?

  I brought scripts if we want to do a reading of it.

• 4:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So here's the thing, we live in three spatial dimensions in which we have unlimited capacity to move. We are locked forever in the present of the fourth dimension we call time.

• 4:59Speaker 03

  Just like Alan Rickman in Galaxy Quest.

• 5:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I forgot he was in, Alan Rickman was in Galaxy Quest.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  He was so good in that.

• 5:08Eugene Mirman?

  Wasn't he great?

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:09Eugene Mirman?

  So was Tony Shalhoub.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  Oh, was he good. Oh, my God, that was gorgeous. And wait a minute, let's not forget the Gurney Weaver. Yeah, how about her?

• 5:23Eugene Mirman?

  We've definitely seen the movie.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:25Speaker 04

  I have.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  We've all seen the movie.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  So does that take care of that topic?

• 5:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I guess so, yeah, let's move on from. So all I'm saying, our dimensionality, we are prisoners in the present.

• 5:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you stepped out of these four dimensions and looked back, in principle, we can re-enter our timeline at any place at all because we would no longer be locked in our own present. It'd just be a simple coordinate like any other spatial coordinate where we can go forward and backwards within it. That means you are always dying, you're always being born, you're always doing whatever it is you were doing at any point along your world line.

• 6:06Eugene Mirman?

  Say that again, but like really fast.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  Didn't Stephen Hawking say on page 312 that you can't go back-

• 6:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The brief history of time wasn't that long.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  You can't go backward in time, I believe-

• 6:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a problem if you want to go backwards in time. Because if you do and manage to prevent your parents from meeting, you would have never been conceived to then have lived, to then go backwards in time to prevent your parents from being-

• 6:34Eugene Mirman?

  It's called the grandfather paradox.

• 6:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or grandmother paradox. It takes two-

• 6:38Eugene Mirman?

  But it's called-

• 6:39Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 6:40Eugene Mirman?

  But it's referred to as the grandfather paradox.

• 6:42Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 6:44Eugene Mirman?

  It's a sexist thing. I'm not happy about it.

• 6:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a sex paradox.

• 6:50Eugene Mirman?

  Oh my god.

• 6:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, he doesn't have to be your grandfather. It could be your great, great, great, great, great grandfather.

• 6:56Eugene Mirman?

  But they have to call it something.

• 7:03Eugene Mirman?

  No, but go through all the options, Neil.

• 7:05Speaker 04

  Wait, but Neil, so you're saying right now, right now, you are in Australia also.

• 7:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no. I am in Australia tomorrow.

• 7:16Speaker 04

  Right, but that exists in another dimension.

• 7:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, but you can't call tomorrow now, because now is now and tomorrow's tomorrow.

• 7:23Speaker 04

  And I'm a prisoner of now.

• 7:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You are the prisoner of the now.

• 7:25Eugene Mirman?

  But you are always in Australia, no?

• 7:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm always in Australia tomorrow.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  I came all the way to Brooklyn for this?

• 7:36Eugene Mirman?

  You could have gotten just high in 1972 and had the same conversation.

• 7:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, it turns out, there's no reason in principle why space, or the universe, or the cosmos at large, would be limited to four dimensions. There could be other dimensions we are not exposed to, have no access to.

• 8:01Eugene Mirman?

  Like, can I guess, like a fifth dimension?

• 8:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A fifth dimension. A fifth dimension.

• 8:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, here's what's interesting.

• 8:18Eugene Mirman?

  Ah, that's good, that's good.

• 8:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If I take an ant and embed him in a sheet of paper, and I draw a box around the ant, the ant cannot get out of the box, because the ant is stuck in the sheet of paper. The ant is in jail. I have surrounded the ant on all four sides by what the ant considers to be a wall. But we higher dimensional creatures called humans say, "Ant, just step out! And back down, and you've escaped."

• 8:46Speaker 04

  And he doesn't speak English.

• 8:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 8:49Eugene Mirman?

  Without making a big deal, weird example, but go on.

• 8:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You would have to speak ant.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  I don't like how you have to prove this theory with a stupid ant.

• 8:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you would have to speak-

• 8:58Speaker 02

  Why don't you get a smart ant and see what happens?

• 9:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No matter the brilliance of the ant, if it's embedded in the page, it cannot get out of a-

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Oh, embedded in the page?

• 9:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, it cannot get out of a square.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We know how to get out of the square, because we are higher dimensional creatures than the embedded ant. We just say, "Step out, come back in, you're fine." Imagine a higher dimensional creature than we seeing us in a jail cell, surrounded on all of our six sides by a wall. They'll say, "Just step out in the fifth dimension, and then go back in, and you've escaped. Can't you see it?"

• 9:33Speaker 04

  Oh, I'm so humiliated by that being!

• 9:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They will view us-

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Is there any room at that table?

• 9:49Speaker 02

  He's pounding the table here. This is solid stuff. You can't get out just going through the table.

• 9:54Speaker 04

  Ah, higher beings.

• 9:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, think about it. Since the jail cell is actually only a jail cell in three dimensions, not four, if you had access even to our time dimension, you could just rejoin your timeline before you enter the jail cell, and you've escaped the jail cell.

• 10:13Speaker 03

  But you can use the four- We could all use the fourth dimension to get out of that jail cell if we just serve our time.

• 10:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes! Yes!

• 10:21Eugene Mirman?

  What if we go to stand next to some sort of giant mask? Can we go into the future then?

• 10:28Eugene Mirman?

  No? Like a huge, like a... huge mask?

• 10:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you say mask?

• 10:36Eugene Mirman?

  Mask, no, like M.A.S.S. probably.

• 10:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ma-

• 10:41Eugene Mirman?

  Like, uh-

• 10:42Speaker 02

  What, you mean like we all become Catholic? What do you mean?

• 10:45Eugene Mirman?

  I mean, is there a church you could go to to go into the future? No, I mean, isn't there? No. I mean, if you... I don't know, I mean, this is obviously a thing I'm explaining poorly to a scientist. But it's really fun to get a chance to do this.

• 11:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ladies and gentlemen, Eugene Mirman's Time Machine Theory. Go.

• 11:06Eugene Mirman?

  Well, one, if you can go around the Earth like, say, uh, seven times a second, would you then go into the future?

• 11:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was Superman.

• 11:17Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 11:20Eugene Mirman?

  I got it off Discovery Channel, but I know.

• 11:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was a movie-

• 11:23Eugene Mirman?

  He rewound the Earth, I'm not a fool. I'm saying if you got onto a train that went around the Earth seven times a second, would that be any help to anybody? And then the other thing is if you were next to some sort of giant mass of some sort, like the sun, or maybe something colder. Is there any way... How do you go into the future is my question, and I'm coming up with bad examples.

• 11:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 11:44Eugene Mirman?

  And I apologize.

• 11:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so now we know what you meant by the word mass. Okay, you mean a physical Newtonian mass, yes. So, it is-

• 11:52Eugene Mirman?

  Sorry, I didn't know Newtonian.

• 11:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 11:56Eugene Mirman?

  My bad.

• 11:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There are some trajectories-

• 12:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There are some trajectories through the fabric of spacetime around extremely massive objects, where you can actually go into your own past, but it is a past that does not interact with your timeline, spaceline, through life. So you cannot actually interfere with anything you've done in the past.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you-

• 12:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're in another past, not your own past.

• 12:27Eugene Mirman?

  Sounds fun.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  It sounds like you're saying that theoretically, based on the math, time is kind of flexible, you can go back and forth in it, but-

• 12:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, if you have, if you have the power, yes.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  But in, in real life, you can't do what you can do on paper with the math, am I right?

• 12:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because we don't have the power, yes.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  What power? The power of voodoo?

• 12:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The power of moving through time.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  What power are we talking about?

• 12:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All I'm saying is that we can show on paper that there's no reason for the universe-

• 12:58Speaker 02

  That's what I'm trying to say. You can show it on paper, but just try to walk through that wall.

• 13:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's the concern. No, not here. You're a fraud. No.

• 13:13Speaker 04

  You're the ant. I got a question, Neil, if the ant's in its physical body, and we're like, "Come on out, ant, come up here." Would he jump up and then deteriorate because, or fall back and crush his little body on the paper?

• 13:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, don't try away from this. It's not a real ant. It's a two-dimensional. It's a drawing of an ant. It's not a real ant he's talking about. Well, it can understand English, so it's some kind of ant. He said it's a two-dimensional ant.

• 13:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a pretend ant.

• 13:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back to StarTalk Radio, we will continue with our live broadcast from the Bell House in Brooklyn.

• 14:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. We're continuing with the broadcast of our first show in front of a live audience at the Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival at the Bell House in Brooklyn. In addition to Eugene, our panel included the comedian Scott Adsit and Kristen Schaal, and our very special guest, Alan Alda.

• 14:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A physicist, a theorist, named Dirac.

• 14:31Speaker 04

  Oh, yes.

• 14:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is he your boy?

• 14:35Speaker 04

  I'm my first child.

• 14:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dirac noticed the equations of quantum mechanics and noted that there were two solutions to one of the equations. Some equations have more than one solution. For example, what is the square root of 9? Class 3. However, it is also minus 3. Minus 3 times minus 3 is 9, so 2 is plus 3 times plus 3. Two equally legitimate solutions to the question.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  So if I lose $3 three times, I really have $9?

• 15:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you have-

• 15:12Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  That's fantastic.

• 15:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's if you-

• 15:22Speaker 02

  If I don't lose $3.

• 15:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you don't not lose $3, three times.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  I realize that, as I said, but I didn't want to embarrass you. You're right, you're right, totally right.

• 15:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course, it's obvious.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  And you're even right about time.

• 15:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So, here's the point. Dirac noticed that this equation, which applied to matter itself, he said to himself, "If there's an electron," and that's a solution to this equation, "there ought to be another thing that is the opposite of the electron."

• 15:53Speaker 02

  The positron.

• 15:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The positron.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  Which, as Richard Feynman said, "The positron is, of course, an electron going backward in time."

• 16:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  I love, don't you love the phrase, "In the middle of that, he says, 'Of course.'"

• 16:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The prediction was made on paper of the existence of antimatter that became an instruction booklet for the experimentalists to go look for it, and they found it. Antimatter was discovered in the lab before science fiction ever got a hold of it. So, what we find on paper, even if we cannot even imagine it at the time the equation is written, becomes a recipe for future discoveries. And therein is the machinery, the operations, and the very nature of science itself.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  So, do you think that because theoretically you can go back in time, in other words, the equations show that you can go back, like a positron goes backward in time, that this is something that is, that can happen to us, or that only happens to particles? And it doesn't happen in a way we can experience?

• 17:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We just happen to be a lot of particles together, and it's easier to accelerate particles because you stick them in a magnetic field, and, you know, we can play with particles, and PETA won't complain, right? Because particles have no lobby, right? You can destroy them, smash them, no one will complain what you did to the particles. So, they are our proxy for what might happen to us if one day we build a machine that could accelerate us. That's all. So, I'm not going to stop the equations.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  I didn't say you should stop the equations, I just-

• 17:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're acting like it.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  No, I wasn't, I wasn't. I just, I'm trying to, I'm trying to find out the relationship between the equations and things that we can experience. And it sounds like you're actually saying that someday we'll be able to experience the going back in time.

• 17:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Someday we may. Not at the rate we are currently funding science, however.

• 18:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We are sliding backwards.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  I didn't think we were breaking for a commercial yet.

• 18:08Eugene Mirman?

  Do you think it'd take, what, like another like five grand? Like, what do you...

• 18:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pass the hat.

• 18:13Eugene Mirman?

  Are we five grand away from time travel?

• 18:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, what are the materials?

• 18:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just thinking it would be so cool if we had access to much higher dimensions. Imagine how different the world would look to us. Imagine how imprisoned we look to higher dimensional beings.

• 18:28Speaker 04

  But, but the, the next step for the access, you, you can see them, you can equate them. So what is it that you need to get there?

• 18:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We don't know.

• 18:38Speaker 04

  Like titanium? Like, are we gonna build a titanium ladder to dimension seven? I mean, like, what is it that we're missing?

• 18:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We don't know.

• 18:49Eugene Mirman?

  Unobtainy.

• 18:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unobtainy, yes.

• 18:53Eugene Mirman?

  Well, I know some aliens we could kill and take it from them.

• 18:58Speaker 04

  They are peaceful creatures, Eugene.

• 19:00Eugene Mirman?

  They're too tall to live.

• 19:03Speaker 04

  They make love with their hair.

• 19:06Eugene Mirman?

  That's their first mistake.

• 19:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why they have that USB hair ponytail that plugs into things, you know?

• 19:15Speaker 04

  What is it, the problem about us not knowing is that we simply can't imagine it? Just like the ant can't imagine getting out?

• 19:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why we have equations, to go places our brain cannot imagine.

• 19:27Speaker 04

  Well, maybe you need bigger imaginations to come up with new equations.

• 19:38Eugene Mirman?

  I can't tell, I think you were just dared to something?

• 19:43Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, isn't that...

• 19:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was just totally dissed.

• 19:45Speaker 04

  Isn't there always a point where math can't go on without an extra bit of imagination?

• 19:51Speaker 02

  That's where the money comes in.

• 19:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, imagination and math go hand in hand. The difference is, the imagination and the math don't have to actually represent reality, yet. That's the only difference. But you need the imagination to carry the math forward. But sometimes, when you manipulate the equations following normal math rules, the equations guide you to places your imagination had not yet conceived.

• 20:17Eugene Mirman?

  Holy bifurcate.

• 20:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and, and example of that is, Lobachevsky, the mathematician.

• 20:26Speaker 04

  Second kid's name.

• 20:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Among others, asked the question, "We learned geometry from Euclid. Parallel lines never intersect. The angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees." He said, "Suppose space were not that. Suppose parallel lines had to intersect. Suppose the angles of a triangle had to be greater than or less than 180 degrees. What would the world look like then?" Thus was born, an entire new branch of geometry, called non-Euclidean geometry, where space is curved. And it languished there for centuries. The mathematicians had no clue what to do with it, because they could only do it on the page, until...

• 21:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Until...

• 21:15Eugene Mirman?

  AutoCAD!

• 21:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Until Albert Einstein showed that the very fabric of the universe in which we live is curved, and all the math was ready-made and available on the shelf to apply to his new theory of general relativity.

• 21:40Speaker 04

  So we just need some new maths?

• 21:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some, yes. So that was, everything you never wanted to know about higher dimensions, and you heard it here on StarTalk.

• 21:51Eugene Mirman?

  Wait, can I just ask, though I know it's kind of productive, what is an example of like a fifth dimension? I know that the word "fifth dimension" is one example, but what's the... But what would be an example?

• 22:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of a fifth dimension?

• 22:03Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 22:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I...

• 22:07Eugene Mirman?

  Sounds good, get it, okay.

• 22:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  No, that's probably an example of what you're talking about, that it exists and is useful, in fact, up to ten dimensions, or maybe more, useful in the math than trying to figure out the universe, but nobody can picture it or even describe it, right?

• 22:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me blow your mind before we go to break. You ready? You ready for this? Watch, okay? Are you seated? Okay, except for those who are still standing and drinking at the bar. Okay, you ready? A point has zero dimensions. That's why it's called a point. A line has one dimension. It is bounded by two points, each with zero dimension. A square is bounded... A square is two dimensions, but it's bounded by one-dimensional sides, each of which is bounded by one-dimensional points. Zero-dimensional points.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  Are you making this up as you go along?

• 23:17Speaker 03

  You forgot the words to your own song.

• 23:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, so the lesson in progress here is that the shape you... The dimensionality of the shape you described is bounded by forms of one dimension less than the one you just described. So the square is two-dimensional, it's bounded by one-dimensional sides. A cube is three-dimensional, bounded by two-dimensional sides. A cube is a three-dimensional object.

• 23:53Eugene Mirman?

  Now tell us about a time cube.

• 23:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so now watch. So, a line segment has two boundaries. A square has four. A cube has six sides, each of which is a square. A square has four sides, each of which is a line. A line has one side, bounded by two points. A four-dimensional cube is bounded by three-dimensional cubes on eight sides.

• 24:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I'm saying! That's what I'm saying!

• 24:37Eugene Mirman?

  Alright.

• 24:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I'm saying! Right, so, so, its edges are three-dimensional cubes. Those are its sides. In the same way that the sides of a three-dimensional cube are squares.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, that may be, but it's no reason to almost have bitten me.

• 25:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, let's go to break. When we come back to StarTalk Radio, we'll do a brief ditty on the rampant spread of pseudoscience in the world today, and to figure out we have any solutions from this panel, so we can solve the problems of the world. And then we'll go to the audience for Q and A. We'll be right back, here on StarTalk Radio.

• 25:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. We are live at the Bell House in Brooklyn, New York. Brooklyn in the house, as they say.

• 25:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Briefly, in this segment, I just want to talk about how much we are amok in pseudoscience, especially in America today. I get at least five emails a day, somebody saying, "Will the world still be here in 2012? Because the Mayans said it would end." And so my only response there is, "The Mayans could not predict their own demise. Why should we have confidence that they know about the end of the universe?" There's basic thinking that's not going on, and I'm worried about this. Alan, you spent the second half of your career trying to bring science to the public. Are you as pissed off as I am?

• 26:24Eugene Mirman?

  The answer to that is no.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  I don't think anybody's as pissed off as you are.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  But it is rough. There's a lot of belief that goes before evidence. There's a website you can go to, where you can communicate with dead people. They charge $5, and what they do is, you write a message out, and they give it to somebody who's about to die, and he memorizes it. And for that five dollars, that person finds your dead relative and tells them your message.

• 26:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So who gets the five dollars, the dead person?

• 27:00Speaker 02

  No, the dead, the exchange rate is terrible.

• 27:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can't see it.

• 27:05Eugene Mirman?

  Wait, you send a message, they show it to someone who's about to die, assuming that like as if they're going to France.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:11Eugene Mirman?

  And then they pass it on when they get to France.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  And somehow they're able to find your, now this exists in people.

• 27:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, now, now, in all fairness, that's at least an experiment, that's verifiable or falsifiable.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  It ain't. How do you know that they delivered the message? You don't get any message back.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  I would love to be the guy on his deathbed. I want, where do I sign up to be that guy?

• 27:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, of course.

• 27:31Speaker 04

  How do you know a black hole that's spinning doesn't suck in dead souls and spit them out to another place? Maybe the particles of a dead, uh, soul are just right.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  This is a really interesting question that you've raised.

• 27:45Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 27:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whether dead people are flung or slingshot through a black hole?

• 27:49Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no, the idea, you know, when you were talking about many dimensions, and when scientists talk about string theory, it sounds to some people that anything is possible.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  Are you gonna hit the table again? He's clearing the table, he's gonna have a real eruption here.

• 28:09Speaker 02

  Listen to what I'm, I'm asking you.

• 28:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm listening. I just rolled up my sleeves, because I'm gonna be ready for what follows. Go.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  When many laypeople hear about quantum mechanics, and it's counterintuitive when they hear about Schrodinger's cat and that kind of thing, a thing can both be and not be at the same time. They think to themselves, well, anything is possible, so why couldn't you go into a black hole and come out the other end? If you can imagine it, why can't it be true? So that's a problem, it seems to me, you have in explaining science to people, especially the more esoteric parts of it.

• 28:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you are absolutely right. Up until the 20th century, what we discovered about the universe had some consistency with our five senses.

• 28:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You let something go, it drops. You push something, it moves. The laws of nature seem to make sense to us. Only when we began to probe nature in places where the sun don't shine, okay? When we started to notice that we had access to the atom, access to the large-scale universe. We had access to physical phenomenon that transcended our life experience. We saw the universe behaving in ways that does not issue forth from our life experience. Yet it nonetheless represented itself that way in our experiments. And we had the cold, hard reality that you can no longer invoke your senses

• 29:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  as the measure of what is true in the universe. That at the end of the day, what mattered is whether or not the experiment demonstrated it was true.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  Ah, that's the critical moment.

• 29:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  The experiment seems like the critical moment because if you can imagine things freely and think that they're probably as true as quantum mechanics, then anything is possible and we can all go around wearing pyramid hats and little crystals that ward off evil.

• 30:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait, wait. Your crystals?

• 30:10Eugene Mirman?

  First of all, you can wear hats. That's not being disputed.

• 30:16Eugene Mirman?

  It won't have much of an effect mystically.

• 30:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, Alan, yes, you can wear pyramid hat if you'd like.

• 30:24Speaker 02

  I'm not arguing for pyramid hats. It's the opposite. What I'm saying is people get the idea.

• 30:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Didn't it sound like he was arguing for pyramid hats?

• 30:32Speaker 04

  It sounded like you had a line of pyramid hats for sale. I would wear one.

• 30:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, the point is, if a claim is made, you want there to be evidence in support of it. So we're living in a world where evidence is not the foundation of what people think or say. And that is the problem with American society today.

• 30:51Speaker 03

  When I was in junior high, my friends and I had a theory which we loved, which was that if the universe is truly infinite, in the real meaning of that word, there is no such thing as fiction.

• 31:04Speaker 04

  And also, isn't the fact that you don't have evidence for things that you can imagine? And isn't that what's propelling science?

• 31:16Eugene Mirman?

  Are there infinite Earths?

• 31:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Probably.

• 31:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Science is a, they're two parallel streets. One of them, the brilliant ideas, the imaginative people, who put up an idea. And then there are the experimentalists who test it. And if it's wrong, you throw the idea out. So the theory goes ahead of the experiment. The experiment gets conducted, the theory fails, you throw it out. On the other side, you can have an experiment that has no understanding at all. Yet it is a result and it is a phenomenon, and it's waiting for the theorists to catch up. Such is the state of dark matter and dark energy in the universe. We know it's out there, we have measured it.

• 32:02Speaker 04

  What is it?

• 32:06Eugene Mirman?

  Very quickly.

• 32:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just said, we have no idea what it is. But say how big it is.

• 32:13Speaker 04

  But you know it's a thing that's out there, but you don't know what you're saying?

• 32:16Eugene Mirman?

  What does it taste like? Give us that.

• 32:19Speaker 04

  Isn't it the opposite of something? Is that why?

• 32:22Eugene Mirman?

  Where can I buy some?

• 32:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell how much of it there is. There is five-sixths. That's a fraction you know here often. Five-sixths of all the gravity we have measured in the universe has a source of origin about which we know nothing. It is not electrons, protons, neutrons, black holes, clouds, stars, planets, nebulae, comets. It is nothing we know about.

• 32:47Eugene Mirman?

  Proof of God!

• 32:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We, we call that dark matter. But really, we don't know what it is, we could call it Fred. It doesn't matter, okay? Why don't we then?

• 33:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, why is it dark matter? That's so uninviting.

• 33:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I get it, okay. Then... We look out in the universe, and the expansion of the universe from the Big Bang should be slowing down because of the collective gravity of all the galaxies, but it's not. It is accelerating in its expansion. There is a pressure in the vacuum of space causing this. We don't know what that is either. We call that dark energy. If you add up dark matter and dark energy, it is 96% of everything that's driving this universe. And we don't know jack about it. And all we do know is the 4% about which our laws of physics apply. The hand and will of God.

• 33:43Eugene Mirman?

  Yay.

• 33:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can we bring up the house lights? We'll go straight to Q and A.

• 33:52Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah. There's mics if people wanna...

• 33:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Come up to the mic?

• 33:56Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah. If you say it into the mic, then it'll become part of the radio.

• 34:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, sir, go ahead.

• 34:01Speaker 05

  My question is, you spoke earlier about life existing in incredibly inhospitable parts of our world. Why is it that astronomers sometimes completely eliminate certain planets as possible places for life? Like, why are they not even checking Venus? If life can adapt to extremely hot temperatures like that...

• 34:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're right. We have a slight bias, but it's an understandable bias. It's called, "We are in search of life as we know it." And life as we know it, it's carbon-based, and phosphorus is in there, and...

• 34:29Eugene Mirman?

  A face?

• 34:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And a face. No, no. Life as we know it is Earth biology, most of which does not have face. But it's an understandable bias, because if you say, "Is there any example of life anywhere on Earth?", yes, it's here. It's life as we know it. So you start with what you know. If you say, "Well, why don't you look for what you don't know?", well, what is that? We don't know. See, that's the problem. That's the experimental problem. You can't design an experiment to look for something about which you know nothing. So you might as well look for something about which you know something, in fact, about which you know quite a bit.

• 35:03Speaker 05

  Right.

• 35:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Second, Venus is 900 degrees Fahrenheit. A runaway greenhouse effect. By the way, a place to keep close tabs on, because the knobs that got turned there went bad.

• 35:17Speaker 06

  What knob?

• 35:19Eugene Mirman?

  Was it at one point...

• 35:19Speaker 06

  And who turned it?

• 35:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We are flanked by planets that have gone bad. Venus, I did the calculation. You could take a 16-inch pepperoni pizza, put it on the windowsill, and it will cook in nine seconds. That is Venus. You go to Mars. Once had liquid running water on its surface. Today, it is bone dry. Something bad happened on Mars. Nobbs. So, with Venus, what you find is that the molecules that carbon makes are not energetically bound tightly enough to survive those temperatures. So we're absolutely certain that life is only carbon-based? No, what I'm saying is...

• 36:03Speaker 04

  That's what you know, but you don't know what you don't know.

• 36:07Eugene Mirman?

  It's not worth sending a spaceship to a thing that is probably not the thing.

• 36:11Speaker 02

  No, but answer his question. It's a really good question.

• 36:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, so the bonds that are strong enough to sustain 900 degrees are not carbon bonds. They're silicon bonds. And what is silicon? It's rock in its many forms.

• 36:23Speaker 02

  So it's like the rock people in Galaxy Quest?

• 36:33Eugene Mirman?

  Exactly.

• 36:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly, yes. Um, so, you're right. Is there some kind of special life thriving on Venus that is not harmed by the 900 degrees and thinks that that's just comfortable weather? We don't know what that would be, because as the lady said, we don't know what we don't know. When we come back to StarTalk Radio, we will return to the Bell House in Brooklyn.

• 37:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. We're continuing with the broadcast of our first show in front of a live audience at the Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival at the Bell House in Brooklyn. In addition to Eugene, our panel included the comedian Scott Adsit and Kristen Schaal, and our very special guest, Alan Alda. Yes, ma'am.

• 37:32Speaker 07

  Hi, thank you. So, a lot of the hypotheses and phenomena that you talked about tonight are based on kind of mathematical models. And I think that this was Alan's point, was that it's just because of the nature of these questions, they're not easy to test these hypotheses with experiments, like things like time travel, right? So, all we're left with is the math. And so, the validity of the predictions from the math are based on how well-constrained the parameters of these models are to data. So, my question is, you know, if you want to do something like predict how Kristin is going to be torn apart to like 2 to the 10th times by a black hole, you have to have information about the statistics of a black hole. And this is a naive question, but like, is there data to support that? How well-constrained are the parameters of these models? Or is it all kind of bullshit, where you're choosing from a range? I mean, I really, I don't know.

• 38:17Speaker 07

  I'm not a physicist.

• 38:18Eugene Mirman?

  This is how we party in Brooklyn.

• 38:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I paraphrase your question, in case you missed it. How are you constraining the parameters of your model? Or is it bullshit? Right, this is the question.

• 38:32Speaker 07

  I'm sorry for the length.

• 38:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, no, that's fine. I have a very simple answer.

• 38:36Eugene Mirman?

  I doubt it.

• 38:42Eugene Mirman?

  But let's see.

• 38:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's just, just...

• 38:45Eugene Mirman?

  I simply doubt the hypothesis.

• 38:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Spitballing here to find out. Okay. We don't have to test every case. If previous occasions where we've tested it, it has followed exactly what the laws of physics told us it would do. You gain such a level of confidence that you can just declare that what you expect to happen will happen in the future. And so, the stuff we do know, we know really well. And that is what gravity is doing in the vicinity of a black hole. And so, we don't have to do the black hole experiment to predict with high precision what it's going to do. It's the same equations that allow us to land a rover on Mars within a 10-foot radius after it's moved 100 million miles through space.

• 39:31Speaker 07

  But I mean, with all due respect, that stuff was practiced in like zero-gravity experiments and stuff. Like, I mean, my point is...

• 39:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you didn't practice landing on Mars.

• 39:38Speaker 07

  No, but you practiced kind of the interaction. I mean, I see your point. And so, the answer seems to be that the parameters of the model are well-constrained.

• 39:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, we didn't practice going to Mars to land with that accuracy.

• 39:48Speaker 07

  No.

• 39:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no. So, that's what I'm commenting on now. The laws of gravity are so well-known that we don't have to say, "You know..." This might not make it to Mars, let's just check it out, okay? We knew, we knew the Apollo astronauts were gonna make it to the moon. Now, if this craft's gonna hold up, that's an engineering test that you have to do. But not the laws of physics, okay? Neil Armstrong, or was it Buzz Aldrin? On the moon, dropped a hammer and a feather in the airless environment of the moon. They fell at exactly the same rate as predicted by Galileo, who could not have done the experiment, because a feather responds to air. So this is the power of science.

• 40:28Eugene Mirman?

  He's going to eat you if you don't move. We have time for one more question, last question. One more question.

• 40:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, sir.

• 40:35Eugene Mirman?

  You, sir.

• 40:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, Dr. Tyson? That means it's gotta be an awesome question. Otherwise, people are gonna be pissed off.

• 40:41Eugene Mirman?

  It's fine, it can be shitty, just have fun.

• 40:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The universe is expanding. What is it expanding into? Like, it's gotta be, like, if it's expanding, it's gotta be something like it's growing, right?

• 40:54Eugene Mirman?

  Into a sandwich, okay, we're done.

• 40:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if it's not expanding, like, how could it, like, how is there nothing that it's, like, expanding into? What is the universe expanding into? I can answer that. I have an answer for you.

• 41:06Speaker 04

  Great question!

• 41:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can, I'm happy that I can answer that. We have no idea.

• 41:15Eugene Mirman?

  Really? Not even a hint?

• 41:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, okay, there's a hint, but there's no data.

• 41:20Speaker 04

  It's expanding into what you don't know.

• 41:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I wanna separate what we have, like, meaningful. Alright, so...

• 41:26Speaker 02

  This question supposes that something is outside the space that we think we know.

• 41:34Eugene Mirman?

  Well, it's growing.

• 41:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the ant imagining, "I wonder what the square is expanding into." That's right. So the answer to that is, whatever it is, it's a higher dimension than what we currently occupy. And, latest theories of quantum physics, mixed with gravitational physics, tell us that our bubble that is expanding, that we call our universe, might not be the only bubble out there. There might be other universes in a continuously frothing foam...

• 42:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of a metaverse. In fact, we have a word for it. It's called the multiverse. The multiverse is multiple universes being spawned, going in and out of existence. We are just one of them. The concept of the multiverse had strong experimental and philosophical precedent. There was a day we thought Earth was particularly special, but no, it's just one of eight planets. Well, the sun is really important, right? No, it's one of 100 billion suns, we would later learn. Well, that's the 100 billion suns of our galaxy. Surely, our galaxy is what it is. Nope.

• 42:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hubble showed, Hubble the man, showed it's one of 100 billion galaxies in the universe. And now you have us saying, well, that's the one universe. Well, why would there only be one of anything, even including the universe itself?

• 43:02Eugene Mirman?

  Thank you, guys, so very, very much for coming out. Thank you to Neil Tyson, Alan Alda, Kristen Schaal, Scott Adsit.

• 43:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, I gotta officially sign out the thing?

• 43:16Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've been listening to StarTalk Radio live at the Bell House in Brooklyn, New York.

• 43:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Follow us on the web, we're on Facebook. Just look for StarTalk Radio. Our website is starTalkRadio.net. I tweet the universe, mostly cosmic brain droppings, at Neil Tyson. Eugene, you're a Twitter person as well, aren't you?

• 43:40Eugene Mirman?

  Sure, we all are.

• 43:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let's get your Twitter handle, Gene?

• 43:44Eugene Mirman?

  Eugene Mirman. At Eugene Mirman.

• 43:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At Eugene Mirman.

• 43:48Speaker 04

  I'm Kristen Schaldd, E.D., K.R.I.S.T.E., and forget it.

• 43:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Schaldd, okay.

• 43:56Speaker 04

  I'm bad at Twitter.

• 43:58Speaker 03

  I am Scott Adsit, and I do not tweet.

• 44:05Eugene Mirman?

  Stay in the past.

• 44:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk Radio is brought to you in part by a generous grant from the National Science Foundation.

• 44:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As always, at the end of each StarTalk episode, we compel you to keep looking up. You got it!