Our Burning Questions – Free Will Emergence

What’s the deal with the strong nuclear force? Neil deGrasse Tyson answers the burning questions Chuck Nice, Gary O’Reilly, and the StarTalk Team have been saving all year about gravity as a force, cosmic rays, free will, emergence, and how physicists decide which equations to apply.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, I love this when you compile the questions of our people.

• 0:03Gary O'Reilly?

  It's easy to do because we have so much depth of curiosity within our StarTalk group.

• 0:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a beautiful fact.

• 0:09Gary O'Reilly?

  It is, and it's time at the end of the year to air them out.

• 0:13Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and we get to ask the questions and you don't, so there we go.

• 0:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Burning questions, all from in-house, coming right up.

• 0:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Special Edition, and I have no idea what we're doing today, but Gary knows. Gary!

• 0:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, you've put the burden on me, responsibility upon me.

• 0:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They just told me to show up for a special edition.

• 0:50Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, so every year, we sit patiently through hundreds of fans' questions, and thank you so much. But now, after a year of good behavior, we get to ask ours. So I suppose it's that time of the year when there's naughty and there's nice, so I guess.

• 1:05Chuck Nice?

  I'll be nice.

• 1:06Gary O'Reilly?

  And I'll be naughty. How about that?

• 1:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is the third time, apparently.

• 1:10Gary O'Reilly?

  I know.

• 1:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 1:11Gary O'Reilly?

  It's become a tradition, yes, in the making.

• 1:14Chuck Nice?

  This one is the charm.

• 1:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Founded in 2023.

• 1:19Gary O'Reilly?

  What a great year.

• 1:20Chuck Nice?

  It just does not sound very impressive.

• 1:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so what do you have? So what happens now?

• 1:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, before we get to our questions and we-

• 1:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These are questions you have.

• 1:28Gary O'Reilly?

  The StarTalk family have, and Chuck and I are part of the StarTalk family, so we have our burning questions.

• 1:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Burning questions. All the people, okay, you have your burning questions, and you're also delivering questions from people who are in the StarTalk.

• 1:39Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, I mean, we are built on curiosity.

• 1:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, if that's as it should be.

• 1:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Thank you.

• 1:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if I can't answer it, I will tell you.

• 1:47Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, before we get to our questions, we recently had a Patreon whose question made the rounds. First, it stumped you, so then you passed it on to Brian Greene.

• 1:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 1:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Who then recently passed it on to Brian Cox and stumped two different theoretical physicists. So congratulations to Mitchell Atkins for winning Cosmic Queries. Well done, you.

• 2:07Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 2:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 2:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there some prize for that?

• 2:10Chuck Nice?

  You get to ask more questions.

• 2:12Gary O'Reilly?

  He gets the pat on the back for being-

• 2:14Chuck Nice?

  I remember that, that's the quark question that you were so enamored of.

• 2:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:20Chuck Nice?

  The quark question, like during spaghettification, when we get down to particles ripping apart. When you rip apart a quark- It makes two more quarks.

• 2:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 2:29Chuck Nice?

  So.

• 2:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there a quark catastrophe?

• 2:33Chuck Nice?

  Oh, great. A quark catastrophe.

• 2:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Here we go. A asymptotic freedom?

• 2:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Asymptotic freedom.

• 2:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Like I said.

• 2:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now you guys got questions. So bring them on.

• 2:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Chuck, you have a question here, um, I think.

• 2:46Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, this was like a general kind of.

• 2:48Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 2:49Chuck Nice?

  Well, we'll keep it to this year. My, my, my actual question was, what was your top non-astrophysics topic we covered this year? Or the favorite thing that you learned in this year?

• 3:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It would have to be David Chalmers interview on consciousness.

• 3:07Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay.

• 3:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. He's Aussie, is that right?

• 3:10Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 3:11Gary O'Reilly?

  But he's NY, I think he's NYU.

• 3:12Chuck Nice?

  He is NYU.

• 3:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So I just like hearing an expert. So many people are opining on what consciousness is and the mind and that. And he just thought a lot about it. And I enjoyed learning about, and that was on, on special edition.

• 3:27Chuck Nice?

  Yes, it was.

• 3:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not just any of the, the flagship StarTalk content. So, so I like learning stuff as much as I can.

• 3:35Chuck Nice?

  I find that shocking.

• 3:36Gary O'Reilly?

  You're not the only one.

• 3:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, if I'm at a party, for example, and I learn that someone's like an expert on like bird wings or grasshopper legs, it wouldn't matter. I got a hundred questions for him.

• 3:50Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 3:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A hundred questions.

• 3:52Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 3:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And.

• 3:53Chuck Nice?

  Why not take advantage of the expertise?

• 3:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Completely.

• 3:55Chuck Nice?

  Take advantage of the moment. Yeah.

• 3:57Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, Chuck, you want to follow up with your?

• 3:58Chuck Nice?

  Okay, oh, here's my first question. Uh, is gravity truly a force?

• 4:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Ooh.

• 4:05Chuck Nice?

  Is it truly a force or is it just the bending of time itself? Okay, now, so clocks tick more slowly as they are closer to objects with more mass, right? Okay, so if we look at a flat spacetime graph, okay, so it's just two axes, all right? And on the space axis, we take Earth and we shrink it down so it's just a one-dimensional flat Earth, which some people actually think is the case, you idiot. Anyway, I take that back. You're not an idiot, you're just stupid. I'm sorry. That didn't come out right either. Anyway.

• 4:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No way for that to come out right.

• 4:44Chuck Nice?

  I know, God. Okay, so the Earth is now flat on this, on the flat space axis, okay? If you traveled up, which is the time axis, right? Which means Earth is stationary.

• 4:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you're just moving in time.

• 4:57Chuck Nice?

  You're just moving in time now.

• 4:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That means you're not moving, you're just sitting there.

• 5:01Chuck Nice?

  You're just sitting there.

• 5:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 5:03Chuck Nice?

  The time axis then bends, okay? Which means that you're bending spacetime, which we know actually happens. But how do we get to that place? You know, in that example? You know what I mean? Like, how do we get to that place in that example? So is it just the large mass object bending time? Or, and dragging space along with it? Is that the case? And I left out acceleration purposely just for this. Like, this could never happen, we know. But if it could, how do we get to that?

• 5:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so, let me try.

• 5:43Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 5:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To answer that.

• 5:44Chuck Nice?

  Alright.

• 5:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know if I'll succeed. So, when you said the time axis has bent, what you mean by that is, the amount of mass represented by Earth and its surface gravity.

• 5:54Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 5:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Has a certain slope of that line.

• 5:57Chuck Nice?

  Correct.

• 5:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That you would move at an angle, so to speak.

• 6:00Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 6:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, on that timeline. And that would be either faster or slower than the time that passes for someone on a more massive object or a less massive object.

• 6:12Chuck Nice?

  Correct.

• 6:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. I think you shouldn't overthink it.

• 6:18Chuck Nice?

  That could be an issue.

• 6:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I'm reminded of, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck.

• 6:27Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 6:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a duck. Okay?

• 6:30Chuck Nice?

  I got you.

• 6:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright. So, have we ever talked about the equivalence principle?

• 6:36Chuck Nice?

  Briefly, in an explainer. Not in a special edition.

• 6:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not in a special edition. So, let's do a special edition.

• 6:40Chuck Nice?

  Alright.

• 6:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? Special edition version, uh, the equivalence principle.

• 6:45Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 6:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So, we're here, and I'm on Earth. There's one G.

• 6:52Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay?

• 6:53Chuck Nice?

  It'd be me.

• 6:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One Gary? Set the unit? A unit of measured. So, it's one degree, so all the mass of the earth is pulling on you to, for you to then weigh what you do. Right. Okay? People say, "Oh, gravity is strong." No, it's not, because I can pick something up away from the earth. You just violate a gravity. No, that's right. You just, like, take that gravity. No, I just jumped, I could jump. I'm just like, yeah. Alright, so, and objects accelerate. So, if I toss something to you, it won't go straight to you, gravity will bend it. Absolutely. Okay.

• 7:30Gary O'Reilly?

  So, it's the parabola?

• 7:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 7:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 7:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Well, on an exam, the answer would be parabola. Right.

• 7:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Alright.

• 7:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Once you understood that, then they say the real answer is, it's the, a segment of an ellipse. Right.

• 7:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay. So, it's constantly falling?

• 7:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, so, if you answer ellipse, it means you know more than the questioner who wrote the question.

• 7:53Gary O'Reilly?

  That's not gonna happen, is it?

• 7:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It can happen, like when they write the New York State Regents in physics.

• 8:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 8:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I had to watch out for knowing too much. You have to answer what they think you should answer. They want the answer then. Yeah, yeah, so, when you do calculations with trajectories, it's approximated with a parabola. Okay? They don't say approximate, they just say it is a parabola. For it to be a parabola, it means the force is directly down at every single point on the trajectory. Right.

• 8:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Alright.

• 8:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  However, earth is round. So, this vertical line is not parallel to this vertical line, because it's moved along earth's arc. They each point inward to earth's center. Right. Okay? You can approximate it over small, this is why people think earth is flat. Because sections of earth, you can approximate with a flat surface. But, if you did it precisely, you would find that those directions that gravity is pulling you angle towards the center of the earth, and that shape is not a parabola. It is an ellipse. Right. And, how do we know it's an ellipse? Because if all the earth were shrunk to its center, it would orbit the earth. This ball you threw to your friend would orbit the earth in a really elongated Right.

• 9:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  ellipse.

• 9:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 9:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it's a cool fact.

• 9:12Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 9:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it's like the

• 9:14Chuck Nice?

  All you have to do is visualize it as, don't look at it as you're throwing something and it's going along the ground. Look at it as you're throwing something and it's going along the curvature of the earth.

• 9:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or, or, or the curve that earth's gravity would give you.

• 9:27Chuck Nice?

  That earth's gravity gives you, that's what I mean.

• 9:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, okay. And the force of gravity from earth, when you calculate with it, you put all of the mass at the center of the earth. And it's, so, when you say, when in Newton's equation of gravity, uh, force equals big G, which is a constant.

• 9:44Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 9:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mass of me, mass of the earth, divided by our distance squared.

• 9:48Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 9:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's our distance if I'm standing on the earth? The distance between the center of my mass and the center of earth's mass, which is down in the center of the earth.

• 9:56Gary O'Reilly?

  So you have two constants. Your, your center of mass and the earth's center of mass.

• 10:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct, and that distance is that distance, it's not, the fact that there's earth between it and me doesn't make any difference to the math, it turns out. So, point is, that's why this arc is not thinking that earth is there. It doesn't care, it just cares that earth is operating as though it's at its center.

• 10:17Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 10:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if earth's surface were not in the way, it would continue in this arc. So here's my point. So Einstein said, if I'm in a rocket, and the rocket is accelerating at 1G, okay? That's a pretty fast acceleration.

• 10:32Chuck Nice?

  Right, that is.

• 10:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, uh, 1G in, in American units is 32 feet per second for every second you're subjected to the force.

• 10:43Chuck Nice?

  Per second, per second?

• 10:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Per second, per second, right. So after one second, you're going how fast?

• 10:49Chuck Nice?

  32 feet.

• 10:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Per second?

• 10:50Chuck Nice?

  Per second.

• 10:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  After two seconds, you're going how fast?

• 10:53Chuck Nice?

  32 feet times 32 feet, no, 64 feet.

• 10:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  64 feet?

• 10:57Chuck Nice?

  64 feet.

• 10:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Per second?

• 10:59Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  After three seconds?

• 11:00Chuck Nice?

  Uh, 128 feet. No, 64 times 30, no, you're right.

• 11:07Gary O'Reilly?

  96.

• 11:07Chuck Nice?

  See, I'm already confused. 96. Add another 32.

• 11:10Gary O'Reilly?

  You're in trouble if I'm getting it right. Just so as you know.

• 11:14Chuck Nice?

  No, this is where my overthinking starts.

• 11:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 11:16Chuck Nice?

  I start overthinking. But yeah, so it's 96.

• 11:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So yeah, that's the recipe to get you your speed after 3 seconds.

• 11:22Chuck Nice?

  Right, because and it will just continue like that. The farther, the longer you fall, it just keeps continuing.

• 11:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It just gets faster and faster.

• 11:27Chuck Nice?

  Faster and faster.

• 11:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, okay, so now, so that's Earth's acceleration of gravity.

• 11:33Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 11:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, all right. So in fact, what you're standing here and you, that's your weight. If I dropped you from an elevator shaft, or put you in an elevator and cut the cable, you will fall to Earth at 32 feet per second for every second. So it takes 4 seconds to hit the ground? How fast did you hit the ground?

• 11:54Chuck Nice?

  Uh, wait a minute. This is time.

• 11:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Do, do, do, do, do. We need Jeopardy Think music.

• 12:02Gary O'Reilly?

  128?

• 12:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  128 feet.

• 12:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, you're 0 for 2 here.

• 12:07Gary O'Reilly?

  I just, I wasn't sure. That's why I sat on that answer thinking, is he playing a game with me?

• 12:13Chuck Nice?

  32, 64, 96, and then the 32 on top of that.

• 12:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  120, okay. So, and then you, then you die when you hit the ground?

• 12:20Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:21Gary O'Reilly?

  Or not.

• 12:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But while you're falling, you're weightless, just so you know.

• 12:26Gary O'Reilly?

  So it's no good if I, just before I hit the ground, I jump in the elevator? When I land softer than if I was just?

• 12:34Chuck Nice?

  Only if you're Bugs Bunny or the Road Runner.

• 12:39Chuck Nice?

  That's when that works.

• 12:40Gary O'Reilly?

  I just wanted to just test that theory.

• 12:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, thank you. Uh, if you could jump, or you were as resistant to death as Wile E. Coyote.

• 12:48Chuck Nice?

  Right, yeah.

• 12:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 12:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you jumped upwards at 128 feet per second, that would counterbalance the fact that you were falling 128 feet per second.

• 12:59Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm gonna hit my head on the roof.

• 13:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you would, I guess, you would just land softly.

• 13:05Gary O'Reilly?

  It's not a theory I want to test.

• 13:06Chuck Nice?

  You would be your own retro rocket at that point. Yeah, your own, you're your own retro rocket.

• 13:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a retro rocket, all right. So now, Einstein said, now here's a rocket that's accelerating at 32 feet per second.

• 13:16Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 13:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? We're in space.

• 13:19Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? You're on the other side of the rocket, and we're accelerating sort of this way, upwards, let's say, up, I mean, towards our ceiling. You're across from me in the rocket, and I take a ball and throw it to you. At the instant I let go of the ball, it is going at whatever speed the rocket was going at that moment. Cause I'm in the rocket and my hand is touching the ball. Right. But if it takes one second to get to you, what happened to the speed of the rocket in that one second?

• 13:46Gary O'Reilly?

  It was about thirty two feet faster.

• 13:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It went faster, thirty two minutes. So this ball is not gonna make it to you. It's not gonna go straight across to you. No, it's gonna go down. It's gonna curve down. Right. I got you. It's gonna curve down exactly the way it curves down if you threw the ball on earth. And Einstein said, could you tell the difference between these two situations? In a rocket or on earth? If the rocket were sealed and just standing here on earth. Right. And you perform this experiment, the ball's gonna dip before it reaches you. If I'm out in space at one G, the ball will dip before it reaches you. He hypothesized, turns out correctly,

• 14:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  that those two situations are indistinguishable.

• 14:35Gary O'Reilly?

  So you're telling me someone took a ball on a rocket, real?

• 14:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, no, there's another way to test this. Alright.

• 14:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, these are two different masses we're talking about. One is your gravitational mass. Yeah. And that shows up in the F G M M over R squared. The other is your inertial mass, which shows up in your F equals M A, which is another one of Newton's equations. And the question is, are those two masses the same? There've been experiments that have shown they're the same to like nine or 10 decimal places. Basically, it's a correct understanding of the universe. So you asked if gravity is a force. Mm hmm. You can think of it as a force when you're sitting here on earth. Right. But when you're just rocketing through space, is it a force? No, it's just the leftover speed the ball had over here that gives the illusion that something pulled it down.

• 15:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But in a sealed rocket, you cannot tell the difference. And so to say is gravity a force or is it just the curvature of space and time? I'm saying that distinction.

• 15:41Chuck Nice?

  Is immaterial.

• 15:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is immaterial.

• 15:42Chuck Nice?

  It doesn't really make a.

• 15:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You want to make, you want.

• 15:45Chuck Nice?

  You want it to be.

• 15:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You want it to be.

• 15:47Chuck Nice?

  Because that is our natural intuitive thought process.

• 15:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Experimentally identical.

• 15:52Chuck Nice?

  Exactly, so.

• 15:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And since one of them involves no planet at all.

• 15:57Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 15:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All we can say is it's convenient to think of that as this thing called gravity here on Earth.

• 16:04Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 16:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a convenience. In space, it's not gravity, but it's doing exactly the same thing.

• 16:09Chuck Nice?

  But it's not gravity in space.

• 16:11Gary O'Reilly?

  When did Newton get to his laws of motion?

• 16:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sixteen, sixteen eighty-seven.

• 16:18Gary O'Reilly?

  So since sixteen eighty-seven, we've been trying to break his laws.

• 16:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're not going to break in the realm that they were testing.

• 16:26Gary O'Reilly?

  People have tried and they still are holding true.

• 16:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah. No, no, it's been verified. So it's only breakdown at the limits.

• 16:34Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 16:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where, oh, my gosh, you're really close to the sun. The gravity of the sun is so strong, Einstein's Einstein matters. Okay, in the general theory of relativity.

• 16:44Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 16:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And where time begins to get altered and then Newton's equations fail. They just fail.

• 16:50Chuck Nice?

  Got you.

• 16:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they still work. We went to the moon on Newton's equations.

• 16:54Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, right.

• 16:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you know.

• 16:55Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, all right.

• 16:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so it's like saying is a, you know, is a hot dog a sandwich? You know, at one point it's just semantic, but people want to argue as though it's a deep philosophical fact.

• 17:05Chuck Nice?

  Right. It only matters for the sake of the argument.

• 17:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Good way to put that.

• 17:12Chuck Nice?

  It only matters for the sake of the argument.

• 17:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It does not matter in the universe.

• 17:16Chuck Nice?

  Right. And the universe doesn't care one way or the other because it works both ways. It's indistinguishable. It works. So basically, this is the spaceship. That's the problem.

• 17:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and, yes.

• 17:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this thing about time.

• 17:33Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 17:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, because I was only just talking about the trajectory.

• 17:37Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 17:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if there's a, if there's a spaceship going past you. So now let's go back to what's called uniform motion. So it's not accelerating.

• 17:45Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 17:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, just easier to think about this. Okay. So a spaceship going past you, you don't know if you are stationary and it's moving or it's stationary. You don't know. There's no way to even. Determine that.

• 17:58Chuck Nice?

  It's like when you're on a train and it pulls off.

• 18:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Real slow.

• 18:01Chuck Nice?

  Real slow. The other train you're looking at, you're like, oh, they're, wait, who's moving?

• 18:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, who's moving?

• 18:06Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 18:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, because it's real smooth. Yeah, if it's smooth. In the old days, they didn't have smoothly paved roads.

• 18:11Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 18:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they just had horse-drawn carriages and chariots. And so if you were moving, you knew you were in motion.

• 18:17Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 18:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how could Earth be in motion? We would feel it. No, because it's moving through space.

• 18:22Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 18:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not on your damn road.

• 18:24Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 18:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know.

• 18:25Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, they don't have a Department of Transportation in the universe. That doesn't do its job.

• 18:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, they may, they may do, we've just not come across it yet. That's true. So here's the problem. If you want to know how their time ticks, all right, let's say they send out time signals. Just one every second. Okay? Well, you'll get one of those signals, okay? And the next signal that comes to you, the interval between those two signals will not match the interval between those two signals sent to you by the person on the ship. Because they're coming towards you and they'll be shrunken or, or expanded.

• 19:01Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 19:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so we also know that the speed of light is the same, no matter the reference frame. And so everything else adjusts to make that happen.

• 19:10Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 19:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so when Einstein publishes his General Theory of Relativity, it took the uniform motion and generalized it to any motion at all. Which, that's why it's called general. The General Theory of Relativity, which includes accelerations, which then talks about gravity and the curvature of space and time. So that's the best I can do with that answer.

• 19:28Chuck Nice?

  No, that's pretty good. Um, and you're right. The real answer is.

• 19:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're gonna be asleep?

• 19:32Chuck Nice?

  You're overthinking it. That's.

• 19:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, yeah, yeah. And, and like you said, on the ship, the, the, the trajectory, it looked like a duck, it talked like a duck, it acted like a duck.

• 19:40Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 19:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As far as you're concerned, it's gravity.

• 19:42Chuck Nice?

  Gravity. Right.

• 19:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go on about your business.

• 19:44Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Okay. No, I'm satisfied.

• 19:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:47Chuck Nice?

  We'll see, we'll see, we'll see with the next one.

• 19:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 19:50Chuck Nice?

  I'm satisfied with this.

• 19:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 19:52Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I'm, uh, yeah.

• 19:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I appreciate your curiosity here.

• 20:05Speaker 03

  This is Ken the Nerd Neck Zabera from Michigan and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk Radio with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 20:20Gary O'Reilly?

  So, right, next question from me. Recently Airbus grounded some 6,000 of its aircraft for emergency computer updates. As a result of cosmic radiation. Why was it just Airbus and not others? Is this a one-off for commercial flight? Or will this become something that will be a new normal for air travel?

• 20:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Great question.

• 20:44Gary O'Reilly?

  You're welcome.

• 20:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, let's back up. There's high-energy phenomena in the universe, especially in the centers of galaxies. And that high-energy phenomenon accelerates charged particles. And to stupendously high energies, like 99.999% the speed of light. They travel across the universe, especially across the galaxy. And when they arrive on Earth, we call them cosmic rays.

• 21:14Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 21:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? They come from every direction. I would see them in my data when I expose a digital detector to the universe through my telescope.

• 21:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 21:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, there are utilities we have that correct for cosmic rays. Because a cosmic ray hits one of the pixels and it blows it out. Okay? So what you do is you take multiple images and then you...

• 21:40Gary O'Reilly?

  You overlay them?

• 21:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you overlay them and then you take out the high and the low. And you get the median of your images. And that basically takes out all cosmic rays. So when you see images reported, it's not the raw image. Raw image is always contaminated with cosmic rays. And so they're everywhere. Oh, by the way, the cosmic ray doesn't make it to Earth's surface. It hits our atmosphere and creates showers of other particles.

• 22:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh.

• 22:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who in total equal the energy of that one particle. It's called a cosmic ray shower. You can look it up.

• 22:10Gary O'Reilly?

  It's like a diffuser.

• 22:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It just comes down and it...

• 22:14Gary O'Reilly?

  See, this is our problem with space travel, the radiation. And now you're telling me this radiation is penetrating.

• 22:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, the the total energy does actually reach the earth.

• 22:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 22:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, it gets.

• 22:24Chuck Nice?

  Right, just not as cosmic rays.

• 22:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Not as concentrated.

• 22:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not as concentrated, correct, correct. Not as the original.

• 22:29Chuck Nice?

  As the original cosmic.

• 22:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We still call them cosmic rays.

• 22:31Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 22:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because of their effect on this. All right. This tells you cosmic rays are everywhere.

• 22:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 22:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Oh, and high charged particles, high energy charged particles from the sun. We're we're just right now with the end, recording this at the end of 2025.

• 22:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 22:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're on the downstroke, the very upper downstroke of the solar maximum. Solar max in the last year and a half or so. And we we heard about Aurora. Also, the the north magnetic pole, which when we grew up.

• 23:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 23:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was wandering around Canada. In the last 20 years, has made a beeline towards the North Pole. And it just and it just recently passed the North Pole. It's on its way to Siberia. So Putin is going to own the North Pole very shortly.

• 23:13Chuck Nice?

  Hmm.

• 23:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here, okay. Why are you laughing?

• 23:18Gary O'Reilly?

  I just don't like the idea. I don't like the idea of that sentence at all.

• 23:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'd rather the Canadians own the North Pole, doesn't it?

• 23:24Chuck Nice?

  Santa, those elves are in for some slave labor.

• 23:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 23:28Chuck Nice?

  That's all I can tell you.

• 23:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, so. Uh, as it goes closer to the North Pole, it actually comes closer to the northeast. Here we are.

• 23:36Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 23:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Recording this in New England, the Middle States. Because it just brought it a little closer. All those three factors combined, plus we're monitoring the sun as as never before. So we know exactly when it would happen. There was a day you didn't know, oh, we caught it here, you check it out, call me if you see. We now know, it's called space weather. There's a whole branch of NASA, if it's still funded as of today. Uh.

• 24:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That studies explosions on the sun.

• 24:03Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 24:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. And one of our favorite guests, Leica.

• 24:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 24:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go hotakuta. That one.

• 24:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She's a NASA solar astrophysicist.

• 24:14Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 24:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so she thinks about all of this. But anyhow, so we have better predictions, better monitoring. And so there's a greater awareness of Aurora today than ever before. But there are people thinking, oh, my gosh, things are getting worse. But it's not. And this maximum we're coming off of, that max, what they do is counting sunspots. When they get a lot, and then when they come down, alright. This max was higher than the last max 11 years ago.

• 24:38Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 24:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But both of these were lower than the previous three. Okay? So there's nothing, you know, if the sun is gonna kill us, it would have happened already.

• 24:46Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, we'd already be dead.

• 24:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're already in cycles.

• 24:49Chuck Nice?

  So like every villain in a movie, if I wanted you dead, you'd already be dead.

• 24:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or let me put you in a contraption that will kill you in an hour after I'm gone. To give you a chance to escape without me knowing.

• 25:01Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna go have lunch now. When I come back, I expect you fully unalive.

• 25:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The laser will.

• 25:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, that's a long preamble to the fact that. It seems to me.

• 25:21Chuck Nice?

  Does it?

• 25:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That given how many planes are flying every day? It's like tens of thousands of flights every day. There's a million people at any given moment who are airborne.

• 25:31Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 25:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In an airplane, okay? That many flights.

• 25:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 25:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That have been flying for that long. Okay? And one plane uncontrollably loses altitude, then regains control. You wanna blame that on the universe?

• 25:47Chuck Nice?

  Oh, no, I'm just saying that happened.

• 25:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, they said it happened. They blamed a cosmic ray. They didn't know it was a cosmic ray.

• 25:54Chuck Nice?

  I don't know about that because that's not the only incident of charged particles. Because when you look at these circuitries, they're.

• 26:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, of course.

• 26:05Chuck Nice?

  They're so small, it also happened to a car company.

• 26:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I'm saying is, go ahead, what I'm saying is.

• 26:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My chip.

• 26:16Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 26:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When I, in my day, the chips were little.

• 26:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 26:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  About this big.

• 26:20Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 26:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I take a picture, depending on the length of the exposure, I have a half a dozen cosmic rays that hit that chip.

• 26:26Chuck Nice?

  Ah, I see what you're saying.

• 26:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, I'm higher up than you. I'm at 7,000 feet. The plane is at 30,000 feet.

• 26:32Chuck Nice?

  Couldn't that make a difference? Because we said that the cosmic rays come in and hit these other particles.

• 26:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're missing my point.

• 26:36Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead. I am. Because it sounds to me like you're making this point.

• 26:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no. What I'm saying is.

• 26:42Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead.

• 26:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're gonna blame it on the universe. It would be happening to way more than one plane.

• 26:51Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I see. The volume of cosmic rays bombarding the earth all the time.

• 26:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All the time.

• 26:57Chuck Nice?

  I get what you're saying. I got you.

• 26:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On top of how many flights there are.

• 27:01Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you have to be so confident.

• 27:04Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the wiring of your plane, that the tens of thousands of planes that all have maintenance schedules and all of this, you have to be so sure that there is no human error in any maintenance schedule for any of those planes that are flying every single day. And it happens to one of them, and you say this plane is perfect, therefore the universe does it.

• 27:28Chuck Nice?

  So here, this is a convenient, this is a convenient, I won't say excuse, but I'll say. Yeah, convenient way for the.

• 27:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell them what CYA is.

• 27:38Chuck Nice?

  Cover your ass.

• 27:41Chuck Nice?

  It's a, it's a convenient CYA for them to say. Because this happened to a car company and they made the same excuse that highly charged particles that bombard the earth somehow hit the circuitry where it's supposed to go to a zero or a one. It changes it to a one or a zero. It changes the bit.

• 28:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 28:00Chuck Nice?

  Okay, and the changing of the bit, of course, changes everything that the computer does.

• 28:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that is for that calculation.

• 28:06Chuck Nice?

  For that calculation.

• 28:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 28:07Chuck Nice?

  And so that, you know, so, but now that I'm hearing you say this.

• 28:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They updated the software. I don't know what they did, but I can imagine what I would have done.

• 28:14Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 28:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I've written in my life about 50,000 lines of code, so I, I think about this, but others, they're. Programmers who do a hundred times that. So I'm not bragging here. I'm just giving some street cred that this is what I would do.

• 28:29Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 28:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If I was worried about this in the future. If it were really a cosmic ray, any truly critical calculation, because planes are flown by computers.

• 28:37Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 28:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's be honest.

• 28:39Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that guy who comes on like, ah, ladies and gentlemen, ah, so great to have you on board with us today. By the way, ah, I'm up here not doing a damn thing.

• 28:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll be taking a nap.

• 28:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Same voice.

• 28:49Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 28:50Gary O'Reilly?

  They go to pilot school.

• 28:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The pilot's school voice.

• 28:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, cuz, yeah.

• 28:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's what I would do.

• 28:55Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 28:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If I were the program, because they said they uploaded program. If there's any truly critical calculation that affects the safety of the plane. And the computers are fast, so you can do this in practically real time. I would put a loop in there to do it three times.

• 29:09Chuck Nice?

  Right. Redundancy.

• 29:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Three times.

• 29:12Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 29:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? And whichever two of those are the same.

• 29:16Chuck Nice?

  That's the right answer.

• 29:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the right answer.

• 29:18Chuck Nice?

  Right. If all three are the same, it's the right answer. If two are the same, it's the right answer.

• 29:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct.

• 29:21Chuck Nice?

  Right. And if a particle actually kicks something out, changes a bit.

• 29:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not gonna do two at once.

• 29:25Chuck Nice?

  It's not gonna do two.

• 29:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 29:26Chuck Nice?

  So, yeah, the redundancy will cover that.

• 29:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct.

• 29:29Chuck Nice?

  And why couldn't you just harden the damn?

• 29:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what it's all about. Well, you're hardening not only the software, but also the hardware.

• 29:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 29:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And like satellites know all about this, because they're up there above the atmosphere.

• 29:39Chuck Nice?

  They don't, they don't have any protection at all.

• 29:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Cosmic ray hit.

• 29:42Chuck Nice?

  They raw dog in the universe.

• 29:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Raw dog.

• 29:45Chuck Nice?

  Like, come on, baby. Bring it on, radiation.

• 29:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Raw dog.

• 29:54Chuck Nice?

  I'm learning some new phrases.

• 29:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can't get that picture out of my head.

• 29:58Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 29:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Satellites, raw dog. Well, that's what it is.

• 30:01Chuck Nice?

  That's what they do.

• 30:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not just, it's not just to protect against the radiation, but they're not protected against asteroids. Meteors.

• 30:08Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 30:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You see, oh, what a beautiful meteor shower. These are. These particles hit our satellites.

• 30:14Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 30:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Especially the space station.

• 30:16Gary O'Reilly?

  They have that last message, oaf.

• 30:21Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow. Okay, cool.

• 30:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, so I, if it's a cosmic ray, that's how I would solve it. I'm glad no one was harmed.

• 30:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 30:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In this, I understand it dropped altitude.

• 30:30Gary O'Reilly?

  See, I was looking at saying, is this a distraction for something else? Or is this someone being smart and getting ahead of a story? And future-proofing to as much as they can.

• 30:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I think they originally wanted to blame it on the sun. Because we're near solar maximum and people are heightened, have heightened concern. But it'd be the same cause and effect. I mean, the high-energy particles hitting, hitting your software.

• 30:51Chuck Nice?

  Cool, okay. All right, all right, here we go.

• 30:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got another one?

• 30:54Chuck Nice?

  Here's another one. What's the most straightforward explanation of the strong nuclear force? And the behavior of quarks and gluons? Because they say gluons. And I think like, oh, that's a thing, like a quark. Like a, but it's not, it's not a particle. But we call it a name like it is a particle. And then when you think of the strong nuclear force, this should not happen. I mean, I know it's happening on the quantum, but these protons, they're like, yo, yo, what's up, buddy? Come on over here, let's hang out, man, I love you, man. Like, yo, give me a hug. But the truth is, they shouldn't be doing that. They shouldn't be doing that, you know what I mean?

• 31:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because they're like-charged.

• 31:41Chuck Nice?

  They're like-charged particles and they should be like.

• 31:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They should repel.

• 31:44Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, like, who the, who you looking at? What you doing over here, man?

• 31:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You get out, I was here first.

• 31:49Chuck Nice?

  I was here, what you talking about? What you mean, this is my space, you on my turf, get out. Like, it should be straight-up turf war.

• 31:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 31:55Chuck Nice?

  But instead, they're all loving and hugging.

• 31:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 31:58Chuck Nice?

  Right? And then the electrons are hanging out just like, what's up, guys?

• 32:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 32:02Chuck Nice?

  You know, which makes sense, that makes sense, the electron field makes sense.

• 32:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 32:05Chuck Nice?

  Okay? But what is the strong nuclear force that this is able to happen?

• 32:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so. Uh, the strong nuclear force is one of the fundamental forces of nature.

• 32:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 32:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There are four, basically.

• 32:20Chuck Nice?

  Electromagnetism.

• 32:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's really three. There's three, but.

• 32:23Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 32:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Um. Just for my benefit, thermodynamics?

• 32:27Chuck Nice?

  No. Electromagnetism.

• 32:29Gary O'Reilly?

  Electromagnetism.

• 32:30Chuck Nice?

  Weak nuclear force.

• 32:31Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 32:31Chuck Nice?

  Strong nuclear force, and then what we just talked about, gravity.

• 32:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gravity.

• 32:35Chuck Nice?

  Which we know is a force just because, accept it, bitch, anyway.

• 32:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it walks like a duck.

• 32:41Chuck Nice?

  Because it walks like a duck.

• 32:42Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 32:43Chuck Nice?

  That's why it's a force, that's why it's a force.

• 32:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, these are the fundamental forces of nature.

• 32:50Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 32:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we didn't invent them, we observed them, okay? And as I.

• 32:59Chuck Nice?

  Once again, overthinking, see that?

• 33:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The opening page of one of my books, it says, "The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you."

• 33:07Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 33:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, here's something to think about.

• 33:09Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead.

• 33:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The electromagnetic force weakens as the distance separates.

• 33:13Chuck Nice?

  Correct.

• 33:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct.

• 33:15Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 33:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gravity weakens as distance separates.

• 33:18Chuck Nice?

  Correct.

• 33:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The strong force gets stronger. As the distance separates.

• 33:25Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 33:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Because?

• 33:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why did you ask because on the other one?

• 33:31Gary O'Reilly?

  Because it didn't come into my head.

• 33:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Because those other forces are, we operate, they're, they're in your everyday life.

• 33:39Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In ways that the strong nuclear force isn't. So you can ask, is there anything in your life where if you increase the distance, they are attracted together more strongly? The answer is yes.

• 33:50Chuck Nice?

  A rubber band.

• 33:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A rubber band.

• 33:52Chuck Nice?

  Oh, yeah.

• 33:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A spring.

• 33:53Chuck Nice?

  A spring, yes.

• 33:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, in physics.

• 33:57Chuck Nice?

  But not a slinky. Because when you stretch it, it just gives up.

• 34:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, slinky is, is a weak-ass spring.

• 34:04Chuck Nice?

  So weak, you stretch it out and it's like.

• 34:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Slinkies are not.

• 34:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Can't face another. Can't face another spare face.

• 34:18Chuck Nice?

  Help me, help me!

• 34:21Chuck Nice?

  I'm sleepy and they stretched me. I'm no good.

• 34:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, if you look at the force equation for a spring, it has a negative sign on it.

• 34:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  F equals minus k x is what it is. K is the spring constant. X is how much you have displaced the spring. Okay? The minus means as x gets bigger, there's more of an attractive force back in. Okay, whereas these other forces, it's a positive. Alright, so it's a contest of forces. A proton at a distance sees another proton and say, "I'm not coming near you. You can't make me." I say, "Yes, I can. I'm gonna heat up the gas." Now your movements are so fast, you will get closer before you successfully

• 35:07Chuck Nice?

  Repel.

• 35:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Repel. Okay, it's a, you're, the temperature is forcing this, it's like a shotgun way. It's forcing it. Then is it at a threshold temperature? It gets so close, strong force says, "I got you." And the strong force, the strength of the strong force overcomes the strength of the repulsive force. In that instant. And then it attracts. And then it ain't even about the electromagnetic force at that point.

• 35:35Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 35:36Gary O'Reilly?

  We discussed earlier on about Newton's laws, how that for centuries, they've stood the test.

• 35:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 35:42Gary O'Reilly?

  Are we likely to find new or slightly varied laws of nature?

• 35:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well,

• 35:47Gary O'Reilly?

  As we explore the universe?

• 35:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Every time that's ever happened, it's like, oh my gosh, look how much more we now understand. When we were previously just touching the elephant, not knowing the animal. So, there's a lot we don't understand today. The, the nature of dark matter, the nature of dark energy, what was around before the universe? Was there a multiverse? How will the universe end? Well, is there a big rip? These are questions that are just dangling there.

• 36:15Gary O'Reilly?

  About time.

• 36:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Possibly, the time, I would have caught Einstein, time is defined to make motion look simple.

• 36:22Chuck Nice?

  Whoa. Dude. That is... F'ing crazy.

• 36:30Gary O'Reilly?

  I saw that.

• 36:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:31Chuck Nice?

  Yo.

• 36:31Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, he did come up with E equals M C squared.

• 36:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That impresses you, but not E.

• 36:35Chuck Nice?

  You're like, that impresses you?

• 36:40Gary O'Reilly?

  E equals M C squared.

• 36:41Chuck Nice?

  That's so funny.

• 36:44Chuck Nice?

  Just saying. That's hilarious. He's saying that impresses you, but not E equals M C squared. I know, I should probably.

• 36:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Recalibrate.

• 36:53Chuck Nice?

  I should recalibrate my.

• 36:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, recalibrate.

• 36:55Chuck Nice?

  I should measure my, uh, my responses there. Yeah, that's a great say. Time is defined to make motion look simple.

• 37:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 37:03Chuck Nice?

  That's, that's, that's very elegant.

• 37:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and deep.

• 37:06Chuck Nice?

  That is really cool.

• 37:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so the quark, so quarks are what protons are composed of.

• 37:13Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 37:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As are neutrons.

• 37:15Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 37:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, and quarks have charge.

• 37:19Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 37:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you knew this.

• 37:20Chuck Nice?

  Yes, I do, but I'm, I'm not sure if I understand them because when I was reading about it, first of all, there's like, ah, Jesus Christ, like 13 or 16 different kinds and then.

• 37:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, there's six kinds of quarks.

• 37:31Chuck Nice?

  Six quarks and then, but then there's another levels and then there's spins. Well, maybe I don't think about it. It's like two up, one down and then.

• 37:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. So in a proton, it has a charge of plus one. And it has three quarks.

• 37:44Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 37:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it has two up quarks. I think it's up with a charge of plus two thirds. What's two thirds plus two thirds?

• 37:55Chuck Nice?

  Um.

• 37:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Each of them has a charge of plus two thirds.

• 37:59Chuck Nice?

  Two thirds plus two thirds.

• 38:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 38:01Chuck Nice?

  Is.

• 38:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Come on, help him out here.

• 38:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Four, four sixths, which is 75.

• 38:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, not four sixths.

• 38:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Then it's not.

• 38:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't add up the denominator.

• 38:09Chuck Nice?

  Denominator.

• 38:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The denominator carries, you add up the top. So just do that. Two thirds plus two thirds equals.

• 38:15Gary O'Reilly?

  One and a third.

• 38:16Chuck Nice?

  Four thirds.

• 38:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One and a third.

• 38:17Chuck Nice?

  One and a third, right.

• 38:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so the other quark has to have what charge for it to be plus one?

• 38:21Chuck Nice?

  Two thirds.

• 38:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 38:22Chuck Nice?

  I mean, has to be a minus.

• 38:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Minus, minus what?

• 38:24Chuck Nice?

  Minus third.

• 38:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Minus a third.

• 38:26Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 38:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is.

• 38:26Chuck Nice?

  Minus third and then it cancels out and now you're good.

• 38:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, then it can't, it adds up to.

• 38:30Chuck Nice?

  It adds up to one.

• 38:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct.

• 38:32Chuck Nice?

  Right. It cancels out, adds up to one.

• 38:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct. And a neutron has. I forgot exactly what, but they can't, they cancel out to zero charge. There's like plus two thirds, minus one third, minus one third. Okay. Okay. And then- So there's still charges within a, there's still charges there. Gotcha. All right. Now, so the quarks are fundamental. Protons and neutrons are not fundamental. One, and then the electron is a negative charge. Forget the electron. We're not talking about that. I know what I'm talking about. Electron only knows electromagnetic force. Right, that's all it knows. Okay, and a, and a weak force, but- See, this is my problem. Now you see how my brain works. That's good, I'm glad, I'm glad Chuck. Yeah, no, I'm not, I'm not. This is very, I'm, I'm a nut job. This is my problem. I'm a frickin' nut job, but go ahead. The strong nuclear force holds the quarks together. Gotcha.

• 39:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the strong nuclear force that when you pull two quarks apart, you have to get more and more energy to do that, like the rubber band, and then it snaps, creating two extra quarks. All right? So that's the strong nuclear force at work. And the, the spillage out of those particles to attract the other, the other nucleons. So, the spillage of the gluon, did I say gluon yet? Yes, well, we, we didn't get to them. Oh, sorry, sorry. So, the quarks are held together by the strong nuclear force. What propagates the strong nuclear force? It is the gluon. What propagates the electromagnetic force? It is the photon. Right. So, there's something called a virtual photon that gets passed between two objects,

• 39:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  if they have a charge, and they will feel that and respond and either get repelled or attract. And they're called virtual photons. The photon is the force carrier of electromagnetic energy. And the gluon- Is the force carrier of the strong nuclear force. Of the strong nuclear force. And it's, it's strongest within those particles, but enough spillage so that two protons can stick together in a nucleus. But the real action is inside the particle itself. Wow. Yeah. Damn. I don't know. Talking now? Yeah, it's weird. It's, it's freaky.

• 40:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Alright, should we have number one? Another question?

• 40:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Please.

• 40:51Gary O'Reilly?

  This is from Tamsin, one of our producers.

• 40:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tamsin!

• 40:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. "When approaching a physics/astrophysics problem, how do you determine which mathematical equation/equations to use? Depending on your approach or on which aspect of the overall problem you're looking at, do you shift the equations you use? Just explain how you apply all the equation." Tamsin says, "Thanks in advance."

• 41:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Great question.

• 41:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Of course.

• 41:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I remembered learning physics for the first time. And a lot of it is kinda like, it's a sliding brick on an inclined plane. There's a pulley, there's... These questions don't look relevant to anything. I wanted to understand the universe, and physics is fundamental to that. That's what kept my interest in these boring-ass problem sets. Okay? So, then you realise, it's not about the problem set. It's about manipulating equations that exist only in the service of the problem you are reading. And so you build this inventory of things that can happen in the universe, and the equations that matter to it.

• 42:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if it's motion, right off the bat, I'm probably gonna need Newton's Laws of Motion somehow. If it's moving really fast, I better know Einstein's equations. Okay? Is it dropping through a viscous medium? Okay?

• 42:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 42:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, by the way, can I tell you? In high school, I didn't know what the word viscous meant.

• 42:23Gary O'Reilly?

  What did you think it meant?

• 42:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got a 98 on my physics Regents exam.

• 42:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I knew what question I got wrong. Cause I didn't know what viscous meant.

• 42:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They said, "A plot, the, the distance time curve for a rock falling through a viscous liquid." You were like, "A vicious liquid?" What kind of liquid is that?

• 42:51Chuck Nice?

  Shark infested.

• 42:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that was a vocabulary problem for me, not a physics problem. So I just got that one wrong. Had I known what viscous was, then it's trivial. Because what happens is you drop it into the liquid. Normally, if you drop something, it moves faster and faster. Right? Cause gravity is accelerating it. But in a viscous liquid, it just descends. That's right. Old timers will remember the Pearl shampoo commercial, where they dropped a pearl into the shampoo, and it just gently descended. So what happens is- What did that prove? I, I felt the same way. It met your hairs, man? How's that clean my hair? It was a physics- Big deal. So, if, if, if something is moving through a fluid where there's viscosity- Right.

• 43:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then there are viscosity equations. And if I never did a problem set that involved viscosity, I would not know to reach for that, that formula, or that bit of mathematics. And that's a real world problem, too. That would, well, all of these become real world problems. That's the point. Yeah. So, so every week, there were typically six physics problems, each testing different, for homework. Each testing a different physical principle. Right. You'd have to apply a new formula you learned that week in order to solve it. And when I say formula, that cheapens it. You'd have to apply a new understanding of the behavior of nature that you learned that week. And here's the equation of that new understanding. So there you, that's your toolbox. Toolbox? Yeah. Toolbox? Yeah.

• 44:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Toolbox. So, you look around, you say, "Wait a minute. There's matter becoming energy here." What's going on? Marie Curie, one of the first to show radioactivity is a source of energy. Coming out of nowhere.

• 44:33Gary O'Reilly?

  Alright.

• 44:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, there's no machine or engine going in. What's going on? There was no way to understand that without an equation that has energy on one side and mass on the other. There was no way, you can just describe it.

• 44:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Hmm.

• 44:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But there's no way to calculate with it. Until Einstein in 1905. E equals mc squared. Oh my gosh, a little bit of mass times speed of light, which is a big number, squared.

• 44:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Hmm.

• 44:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'd get a lot of energy out of that by doing so. So, if you have gaps in your physics knowledge, there'll be some problems that are intractable to you.

• 45:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Yep.

• 45:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm. Now here's what I wonder. We're scratching our head today. What new physics lay undiscovered until it rises up? And we say, "That's the equation I need to figure this out." That I've been scratching my head on for the past 10 years. Maybe the equation does not exist yet.

• 45:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Ooh. So it's, it's- We don't know the solution until we're faced with the problem.

• 45:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or if you're really clever.

• 45:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 45:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People were just, were simply not clever enough with the known physics to solve the problem. For example.

• 45:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 45:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, superconductivity. If you cool down a metal of your choice, low enough, then electricity goes through it without any resistance at all.

• 45:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 45:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whereas any, any wire the electricity goes through, there's resistance which leads to what?

• 45:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Heat.

• 45:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Heat.

• 45:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Exactly.

• 45:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this, it goes through and there's no heat. Oh my gosh, what is that? It's a purely quantum physics phenomenon. Was there enough quantum physics to figure it out? Yes, but no one was clever enough to figure it out. Okay? What they found was that as the electrons get colder- Their wavelengths get longer. Because of the wave-particle duality.

• 46:21Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 46:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As they get longer and longer, all the electrons end up behaving like they're one particle. Because all of their waves line up, they come together. And as one particle, there's no resistance.

• 46:35Gary O'Reilly?

  They behave themselves.

• 46:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They behave themselves. And it comes through.

• 46:39Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 46:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the quantum physics was available, but no one was clever enough to know how to apply it.

• 46:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Didn't know where to point it.

• 46:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where to point it.

• 46:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 46:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where to point the weapons of.

• 46:49Chuck Nice?

  That's a great example.

• 46:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, great question.

• 46:51Gary O'Reilly?

  I have another question. This one is from Lane, one of our other producers. She's over in our LA office. "With David Krakauer and Brian Cox, we learned about the two main pillars of emergence. It is something greater than the sum of its parts, and secondly, possesses a distinct language to describe the emergent behavior. The example David gives is how fluid dynamics through its own formulas can predict movements of groups of particles without needing to know about each individual particle. Given that we have a language for describing and predicting a person's volition that screens off the microscopic factors in someone's life, would that make free will just as real as fluid dynamics?

• 47:33Gary O'Reilly?

  Is free will just an emergent property of conscious thought?" And the finishing is, please discuss.

• 47:41Chuck Nice?

  That was nice.

• 47:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man, we've got good people working for StarTalk.

• 47:47Chuck Nice?

  Why are you surprised? I always knew I was dumber than the people on the show. I didn't know I was dumber than all the people who work here too, damn.

• 47:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The producers, the writers.

• 48:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I love that interpretation of what's going on.

• 48:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, that's a, that's.

• 48:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to remind people in case they, but you can dig up the show. The, there are gas laws we might have learned about in chemistry, which are macroscopic laws that describe the behavior of the entire gas. Okay, pressure, temperature, this sort of thing. And they work, that's why we use them. And they're called laws. Those were discovered before we even knew about atoms.

• 48:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 48:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Successful laws of nature describing the behavior of atoms in this emergent way. What they all do when they're sorted together as a blob of gas. That's remarkable. So, I like the direction certain branches of research are going. Trying to wrap their head around the meaning of emergence in understanding complex phenomena. And so, yeah, free will is emergent. It's an emergent feature of consciousness. I'm always been on the camp, even if it's not free will. If it feels like free will, it's free will.

• 49:17Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I think it's a fascinating thought experiment because you can say if it's not free will, it's still a choice that you're making. So, maybe it's the freedom of the choice. But then, if the choice is predetermined by other circumstances, is it really a choice at all? But if you alter the predetermined factors that caused the choice, who's to say that you did that? Or did the circumstance do it? It's so intertwined.

• 49:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or did the gas law?

• 49:52Chuck Nice?

  Or did the gas law of your brain do it? You know what I mean? Like, did the neurosynaptic, you know, gas law property actually cause this to happen? And I think that in some respects, there's evidence for it all.

• 50:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe.

• 50:06Chuck Nice?

  When you look at it.

• 50:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe. The future of neuroscience, I'm just pulling this out of my ass now. Maybe the future is looking at the electrochemical state of your mind. Okay? Just the way we look at the pressure, temperature, volume, and we put those together with equations that give the future state of that system. Will it expand? Will it contract?

• 50:30Chuck Nice?

  So it becomes predictive.

• 50:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Predictive. Maybe if we do a download of your electrochemical state, maybe there are macroscopic laws that tell you what decision is coming out of that state.

• 50:44Chuck Nice?

  That'd be great.

• 50:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if that's the case, I can say, well, you have this much poverty. You grew up in this situation, a single-parent household. You didn't have food, but... Crime candidate to be committed. What is it? More than half of people in prison?

• 51:00Chuck Nice?

  Are illiterate.

• 51:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or come from poverty.

• 51:03Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's more than.

• 51:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And those are correlated.

• 51:06Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, they are. The illiteracy and poverty go together.

• 51:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you have the configuration that then makes the gas law prediction.

• 51:12Gary O'Reilly?

  You're talking about mind reading, just from being able to take that snapshot.

• 51:15Chuck Nice?

  It's brain reading more than mind reading.

• 51:19Gary O'Reilly?

  In the sense of being brain reading, mind reading, yes.

• 51:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's better than mind reading. It's brain reading.

• 51:22Chuck Nice?

  It's brain reading.

• 51:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the brain creates the mind.

• 51:24Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 51:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So then we're the Minority Report all over again, aren't we? The great sci-fi short story writer Philip K. Dick.

• 51:35Chuck Nice?

  What an unfortunate name.

• 51:38Gary O'Reilly?

  What have you got against Philip?

• 51:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very nice. Very good.

• 51:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in the Minority Report, there were these precogs.

• 51:48Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 51:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So rather than doing a download off your brain.

• 51:50Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 51:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There were these precogs who were telepathic, basically.

• 51:53Chuck Nice?

  Right, yes.

• 51:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so that's how they got into your brain to know what was going on. But same idea.

• 51:57Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it is. Except that you're mapping the actual person's brain.

• 52:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The actual.

• 52:01Chuck Nice?

  Actually, this is better than precogs.

• 52:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, of course.

• 52:03Chuck Nice?

  Because precogs only happen because an event precipitates their telepathic.

• 52:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're not going to know whether you're going to choose strawberry or chocolate for dessert.

• 52:11Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. They can't do that. But with brain mapping.

• 52:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 52:15Chuck Nice?

  And also, yeah, you would be able to determine a person's possible path, but also give them, equip them not to take that path.

• 52:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you might have to change the state of the system, like changing the gas. You'd have to change the temperature, the pressure.

• 52:31Chuck Nice?

  The pressure, right.

• 52:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The volume, so that a different outcome would come.

• 52:34Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 52:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think once that state is established.

• 52:38Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 52:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's going where it's going to go.

• 52:40Chuck Nice?

  Right, yeah. You can't steam clean with cold water.

• 52:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, good. Your momma tell you that?

• 52:45Chuck Nice?

  No, I just made it up.

• 52:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very good.

• 52:47Chuck Nice?

  You can't steam clean with cold water.

• 52:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So for example, the person who's just about to jump off the bridge, did they have the option to not jump off the bridge? I don't think so.

• 52:56Chuck Nice?

  In that instant. In that instant, I don't think they do either.

• 52:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so.

• 52:59Gary O'Reilly?

  And there's no ability to reset.

• 53:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct.

• 53:01Chuck Nice?

  At that moment.

• 53:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not in that moment.

• 53:02Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 53:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that puts a greater burden on society.

• 53:05Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 53:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As treatment of people who have behaviors that are transgressive, or psychopathic, or sociopathic.

• 53:12Chuck Nice?

  We should have that burden anyway, unfortunately.

• 53:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We should.

• 53:15Chuck Nice?

  We don't.

• 53:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're right, right.

• 53:16Chuck Nice?

  You know.

• 53:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  More blame should be

• 53:17Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 53:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On the shoulders of.

• 53:18Chuck Nice?

  And if you know somebody who's in that position, believe me, uh, intervene, okay?

• 53:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 53:23Chuck Nice?

  You can do something.

• 53:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 53:25Chuck Nice?

  Um, even though it may still happen. I mean, I've, I've lost family members to death by suicide and, you know, even despite the intervention.

• 53:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 53:34Chuck Nice?

  But in one case, there was a ton of intervention and the other case, it was like, damn, I wish, I, I pretty much saw that coming.

• 53:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You saw it coming, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 53:42Chuck Nice?

  Saw it coming, you know, so, yeah.

• 53:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Come on, bum us all out, Chuck.

• 53:44Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry. I know I did bring us down, didn't I?

• 53:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're on a happy note, okay?

• 53:49Chuck Nice?

  I'm just saying, if, if you see somebody, don't be afraid to reach out.

• 53:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gotcha. Got one more, but we only have two minutes, so try.

• 53:56Chuck Nice?

  This is from Matt the editor. He says, this is quite literally, and Matt, our editor.

• 53:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Our editor, yes.

• 54:00Chuck Nice?

  This is quite literally a burning question as it has to do with firewood. I once heard Neil mention in an explainer, some time ago, that energy of the sun is contained within the trees that we cut down and chop into lovely little pieces, uh, for the burning in our fireplaces. Can you expound on this idea? I found the fact fascinating and perplexing. But during a recent camping outing, I chose not to share it as I didn't want to sound like an idiot trying to explain this to my fellow guests as we enjoyed the sun's transferred energy via campfire.

• 54:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love it, love it.

• 54:30Chuck Nice?

  Ah, what a great question, Matt.

• 54:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you eat food that was once alive?

• 54:38Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 54:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everyone does.

• 54:41Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 54:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Plant or animal. A plant, yeah, it was once alive, okay? If you eat plants, where'd the plant get this energy from?

• 54:47Chuck Nice?

  The sun.

• 54:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The sun.

• 54:49Chuck Nice?

  Thank you.

• 54:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, if you eat cow, where'd the cow's energy, gets energy from?

• 54:52Chuck Nice?

  The plant.

• 54:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plants.

• 54:54Chuck Nice?

  And the sun.

• 54:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The, the plants you fed it.

• 54:55Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 54:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, we are solar powered through that tracking. Of course. Now, plants use the sun to build larger molecules that have energy contained within them.

• 55:09Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 55:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so the cellulose that has energy, cellulose burns. Paper burns.

• 55:14Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 55:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's energy inside the paper.

• 55:16Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 55:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What color is the paper turn after it burns?

• 55:19Chuck Nice?

  Black.

• 55:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Black.

• 55:21Chuck Nice?

  Because it wants to be cool.

• 55:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The energy is not just sitting there in an energy vessel. The photosynthesis takes sunlight and creates energy dense molecules out of it. Now here's the problem. Here's why we are not cows. Because cellulose has energy. We cannot digest it. No. So you have to be careful in your calorimeter experiment. You don't want to burn things that we don't have digestive enzymes to metabolize. Right. Yeah, if I took straw and burned it, it has a calorie content of no use to us. Right. Okay? Yeah. So it has to be stuff you can digest. Otherwise, the calorimeter experiment is not meaningful to us. It was still, it's meaningful for physics and chemistry, but not for us. All right. And so you burn it.

• 56:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's solar power. It is.

• 56:15Chuck Nice?

  Look at that.

• 56:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is.

• 56:17Chuck Nice?

  Well, Matt, there you go, man. I, I hope that explanation you're able to use as your next camping expedition.

• 56:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just take this recording and play it.

• 56:24Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's there you go.

• 56:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, that's all the time we have. Yeah. Oh, I like hearing from our people. No, no, they're great. Can we do like another one of these?

• 56:33Chuck Nice?

  We need to.

• 56:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've got more than enough questions. From our own people. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But you, you did your first, your own questions first. Yeah, we're selfish.

• 56:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, always good to have you.

• 56:46Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure.

• 56:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary. Thank you, Neil. All right, Neil deGrasse Tyson here. You're a personal astrophysicist. Keep looking up.