The Power of Science Fiction, with William Shatner

Energize! Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with William Shatner to reflect on Star Trek and the enduring power of science fiction. Featuring comic co-host Chuck Nice, astrophysicist Charles Liu, NASA engineer David Batchelor, and Bill Nye the Science Guy. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free. Find out more at https://www.startalkradio.net/startalk-all-access/

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.

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to the hall of the universe! I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And tonight, we celebrate the enduring power of science fiction. Because we're featuring my interview with Captain Kirk himself. The actor, the American icon, William Shatner. So let's do this!

• 0:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My co-host Chuck Nice! Hey Neil! And Charles Lu, my friend and colleague, professor of astrophysics at CUNY, the City University of New York on Staten Island. So we've got my interview. William Shatner came through town, so I nabbed him and stuck him in my office, and grabbed that interview with the original captain of the SS Enterprise. And so I asked him, "How did he find his path to that iconic role?" Let's check it out.

• 1:05William Shatner?

  I was born in Montreal.

• 1:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Montreal, okay.

• 1:08William Shatner?

  I was in the theater and I was in radio and I was in movies and film in Canada before I came to the United States.

• 1:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you have any early sort of geeky experiences? Or were you sort of pure artist, actor?

• 1:18William Shatner?

  I was not a geek. I was a kid actor, child actor, and I loved sports.

• 1:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:26William Shatner?

  And I was a very experienced actor at a very early age, because I started sort of... When I came down to the United States in a play by Marlowe, we played 12 weeks on Broadway, and then I was essentially cast loose into the casting world...

• 1:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, of America.

• 1:45William Shatner?

  The thespian world of America, exactly. So I was a stage actor. So when I was asked to do Star Trek, "Ooh." They had made a pilot prior to with another actor, and they asked me to see the pilot, and I looked at it and I thought, "That was magical." NBC wanted to recast it, so I was cast as the captain in the second pilot of Star Trek, and it sold. But it was, nobody knew what it would become by any...

• 2:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course, no.

• 2:14William Shatner?

  You talk about madness.

• 2:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No one knew what it would become even after it was canceled, so...

• 2:19William Shatner?

  For years.

• 2:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Charles, this show got cancelled after, it's hard to imagine.

• 2:25Charles Liu?

  Now it's hard to imagine.

• 2:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so, any insight as to why it got cancelled? And why it would then get picked up heavily in syndication? And then spawn multiple series after it?

• 2:37Charles Liu?

  I think it's because it talked about the future.

• 2:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, you're saying it got cancelled because it talked about the future? Or they got resurrected?

• 2:43Charles Liu?

  Both. I think the answer is that Star Trek was talking about a future at a time when people were still paying attention to the present just a little too much. And then, as the future came, they saw how, wow, this Star Trek thing is reflecting what the present is and what the future could be. And that's how the popularity built. I never saw a first run episode of Star Trek. It was purely from the reruns that it got me, as a child, to love the future.

• 3:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't remember being particularly excited about it. I didn't see every episode, to step back. Plus, I was a kid, so a lot of the more mature concepts, social, cultural, ethnic concepts, uh, kind of fell beyond me.

• 3:23Charles Liu?

  I think that's right.

• 3:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, but the popularity faded and then was resurrected.

• 3:28Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 3:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, but you're saying people saw the future predicted and then coming to fruition? And then the show had more meaning than it did when it first came out, is that right?

• 3:38Charles Liu?

  I think that's 100% right. And as people were looking for more optimistic views of the world, as opposed to, say, nuclear apocalypse and things like that, people were really starting to see, hey, this is kinda cool.

• 3:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, William Shatner, his sci-fi roots go actually a little bit deeper than Star Trek itself. And I asked him about another role that's always stuck with me, so let's check it out. My first exposure to you was The Twilight Zone. And you're looking out the window. And I go, there's this, uh... This creature. Creature. Ripping apart the metal structure of the wing. Right. And you are freaking out. Yes.

• 4:18Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, okay.

• 4:22Chuck Nice?

  There's a man out there.

• 4:24William Shatner?

  The actor has to treat that with reality.

• 4:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, and without your convincing performance, I would have just laughed at this furry creature.

• 4:32William Shatner?

  Alright, so now why would that thing, made so many years ago in black and white?

• 4:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Black and white.

• 4:37William Shatner?

  Why does it still exist and you're still talking about? What do you think is the underlying principle there?

• 4:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, why is that scene so memorable?

• 4:48Chuck Nice?

  I don't know, but I'll tell you this much. What is the underlying principle behind the fact that that guy still looks younger than he should?

• 4:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, he's 85 years old.

• 5:00Chuck Nice?

  He's 85 years old. I mean, he looks amazing. How does that even happen?

• 5:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I researched this.

• 5:05Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead.

• 5:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, if you add up all the time he's traveling faster than the speed of light from the warp. Einstein's relativity, it bought him 40 years of lifetime. Chuck, you did the same calculation.

• 5:16Charles Liu?

  I did the same calculation, but I came up with a different number than you do. That's okay. No, I think the reason why this still matters is not because it was black and white and we look in color now, but because it shows a very interested desire by audiences of all ages, all periods of time, to look at mysterious things that you know you are right and somebody else can't believe you.

• 5:40Chuck Nice?

  But here's what I'm interested in, because I remember that, that Twilight Zone episode.

• 5:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I think he's, like he said, he sold it.

• 5:47Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 5:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's, you believed that he saw that. He wasn't just some fuzzy dude in a suit.

• 5:51Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, well.

• 5:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He was terrified, he was sweating.

• 5:54Chuck Nice?

  But what I'm interested in is because this guy's a regular guy in this, you know, scenario. And he's like, "Hey, there's a gremlin on the wing." And a regular person would see them and be like, "Hey, you gotta do something about this." But you two are scientists.

• 6:11Chuck Nice?

  So what would you do if you saw a gremlin on the wing of a plane? How would you handle that?

• 6:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd pull out my iPhone and take a picture.

• 6:19Chuck Nice?

  Yep.

• 6:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is how we know flying saucers aren't real, because we don't have extra images of people being abducted in flying saucers, because everybody's got a video camera.

• 6:28Chuck Nice?

  You are no fun at all.

• 6:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right. So here's more of my interview with American icon William Shatner about the science fiction that was portrayed in the original Star Trek. So let's check it out.

• 6:42William Shatner?

  The greatest Star Trek episodes were stories suggested by the great science fiction writers, Asimov being one, the most obvious. But there were others who had great story ideas, but they didn't know how to write a well-made television play. So we had television writers take their great ideas and make the great Star Trek episodes. That magic of science fiction and its projection into the future, its ability to try to imagine an explanation of some of the things we can't explain, moving lights, back in time, that whole thing that astrophysicists wrestle with,

• 7:24William Shatner?

  science fiction wrestles with, but with an imaginative explanation.

• 7:30Chuck Nice?

  Even Shatner is doing Shatner. He doesn't even look, he looks like he's doing an impression of himself. Explanations.

• 7:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Charles, you're a colleague, we both work in the same field.

• 7:44Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 7:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's always some imagination at the frontier.

• 7:47Charles Liu?

  Oh, 100%. You and I both know that if all we did, in the stereotypical sense, was as scientists, be in our white lab coats and do the same things over and over again that you expect that somebody who doesn't have any creativity to do, we would never get anywhere. We imagine answers to questions, whether we have the technical expertise yet or not to answer them. And it just turns out that in real science, we try to use our technical abilities to produce legitimate experiments, whereas in science fiction, they are freed from that constraint.

• 8:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what they also do is not just imagine what science is in the future. In almost all cases, certainly the best cases, they're finding all the ways that new science. affects culture, civilization, humanity.

• 8:32Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 8:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And of course, Ray Bradbury is famous for-

• 8:36Charles Liu?

  The Martian Chronicles?

• 8:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, he, Ray Bradbury was accused of saying, "Why are you always all dystopic about the future?" And you know what he said? He said, "Is this the future you, you're wishing we go to?" He says, "No. I write these futures so that we don't go there."

• 8:49Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's, that's pretty, that's pretty cool.

• 8:51Charles Liu?

  We have to imagine both the good and the bad in order to prepare for either one.

• 8:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, when you have science fiction and an imaginative palette, they're all, it's like a multiverse of options of where you can take the future of our, of our civilization. And I'm trying to think, you go back a few decades, let's say to the 80s, people were already making movies, dystopic movies about pandemics, of course, nuclear destruction, we were still in the Cold War, cloning, a little bit of cyberspace was in there. So, it's just fun to think about what the creativity of a science fiction writer will do and how much we have to pay attention to.

• 9:32Chuck Nice?

  That is so depressing.

• 9:34Charles Liu?

  Not at all.

• 9:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it is. The 80s were a few decades ago? Oh, my God.

• 9:42Charles Liu?

  It's, it's nice that you mentioned Ray Bradbury. Just as much as scientists of our generation were inspired by his, say, Martian Chronicles, he too was inspired by scientists who were just studying Mars at that time. So, it all interplays together. It's a very, very nice combination, creativity and technology.

• 10:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, up next, in my interview with William Shatner, we'll be discussing race relations in America through the lens of Star Trek, when StarTalk continues.

• 10:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk from the American Museum of Natural History. We're featuring my interview with William Shatner, one of the great icons of the sci-fi series Star Trek. And it was created, as you know, by producer Gene Roddenberry back in the 1960s. Let's check it out.

• 10:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Were you self-aware of Roddenberry's larger mission statement? That he was trying to make a difference in the world?

• 10:44William Shatner?

  Well, both of those statements are suspect.

• 10:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, okay.

• 10:50William Shatner?

  I'm not sure how much of a difference Roddenberry was trying to make in the world. He had a wonderful idea, no interference, live long and prosper, whatever the edicts were, except the crew did go down and interfere. That was the... that resulted in a plot. That was the story.

• 11:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you didn't interfere, you'd just say, "Hi, guys, we'll just fly by."

• 11:19William Shatner?

  Yeah, right. "Good going, guys." So you had to interfere to have a plot. So we throw that out the window. But those ideas that were in the individual plots, that each movie, each segment of the series was based on, those were great ideas. Half-white, half-black, half-black, half-white, fighting over the stupidity of racial fighting.

• 11:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In a time when the civil rights movement is in full swing.

• 11:51William Shatner?

  Right.

• 11:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so this is a story in space, forcing us to...

• 11:57William Shatner?

  Forcing us to look at the inanity of race relationships. That's science fiction at its best. So that idea, I don't know where it came from, I don't know who suggested that idea. And I would imagine Roddenberry had the last statement, saying, "This goes, we'll do this story." So from that point of view, he was doing something. From my point of view, of whether I was aware, I read that story, I thought, "My gosh, what a wonderful story idea this is. How dramatic. They fight. I hate you, because you're black on that side."

• 12:42William Shatner?

  That's a great-

• 12:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's obvious I'm fighting you because I'm black on the other side.

• 12:45William Shatner?

  Yeah.

• 12:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that was clear to them for whatever reason.

• 12:48William Shatner?

  Right, right. So, it was clear to everybody what a glorious story that was. And we had so many others down the line with other subjects in mind. Uh, so yes, I was very much aware.

• 13:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, do you remember that episode and what your reactions were to it?

• 13:05Chuck Nice?

  Oh my god, yes. And by the way, I'll just remember myself being a kid and watching that and going, "When will this half-on-half crime end?"

• 13:15Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 13:17Charles Liu?

  That, that, that episode, that episode was entitled "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield." And indeed, it was a very moving story. But the story was so compelling that it was almost impossible to act it in any subtle fashion. Everything was highly choreographed, was highly dramatized, because you couldn't actually do it in a normal, regular thought process.

• 13:42Chuck Nice?

  But you gotta remember, wasn't this the 60s? I mean, I don't know if you remember, I mean, I couldn't physically remember, but I've, I've seen like PBS during Black History Month, it wasn't cool back then.

• 13:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right, that's right. Yeah, the footage is not good.

• 13:56Chuck Nice?

  The footage is not good!

• 13:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like dogs and water hoses and-

• 13:59Chuck Nice?

  To have, just to be able to broach the subject, I think was extremely grave.

• 14:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It wasn't just black and white. There's more conflict between they and aliens. There's the Gorn fight-

• 14:11Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 14:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the arena.

• 14:12Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 14:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe it was inevitable that you'd have to pull one off that dug to the heart of sort of American society.

• 14:19Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 14:19Charles Liu?

  All good television eventually does that.

• 14:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Star Trek broke more ground on race relations. They featured the very first interracial kiss on American television.

• 14:29Chuck Nice?

  Oh my god, you're right.

• 14:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I had to ask Shatner about this, let's check it out. Did you know at the time?

• 14:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That your first kiss with Lieutenant Uhura was the first interracial kiss ever on television?

• 14:44William Shatner?

  I don't remember knowing whether it was the first. I mean, who keeps, uh, most folks don't keep tabs on that.

• 14:52William Shatner?

  But I remember that there was discussion of, uh, it might cause, uh, some controversy. And in fact, I recall some stage-

• 15:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Kissing the blue alien and the green alien, no problem.

• 15:04William Shatner?

  No, no problem. The black alien, problem. On the other hand, she's such a beautiful woman. And, uh, you know, she's, she's a glorious lady, so that how anybody could even, uh-

• 15:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How's that even-

• 15:18William Shatner?

  It was a subject matter. But I remember the potential for controversy.

• 15:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, how is it, how is it that Star Trek can become the landscape on which you'd have the first interracial kiss? There might have been a half a dozen other shows that could have done it, and they didn't. This did it.

• 15:38Charles Liu?

  It's because it's not on Earth. We can avoid all the trappings that keep us stuck in our mindsets if we're out in space.

• 15:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Our social boxes.

• 15:49Charles Liu?

  That's right. And in fact, there's a great-

• 15:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Prison, social prisons.

• 15:51Charles Liu?

  Social prisons. And there's a great story behind all of this that's often untold. Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura, uh, they were forced to kiss by aliens who were pushing them together.

• 16:02Chuck Nice?

  Cause you know, that's the only way a black person and a white person could kiss in the 60s. But like, aliens made us do it.

• 16:10Charles Liu?

  But when they kissed, actually, the censors and the director wanted not to have that scene because it was too controversial. And so I said, okay, let's film two versions, one that actually has a kiss and one that doesn't. And William Shatner purposefully took so much time doing the kissing scene that there was only time left for one more take for the non-kiss. And he purposefully botched it so that the next day, everybody who would have censored it, they said, "We have no choice. We must go with the actual kiss."

• 16:43Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 16:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's good.

• 16:44Chuck Nice?

  That's pretty cool. I can't imagine, though, an interracial kiss being a big deal in this day and age. Me neither.

• 16:54William Shatner?

  I couldn't either.

• 16:54Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 17:01Chuck Nice?

  No, no.

• 17:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have families, we have families!

• 17:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's 20 bucks, get a room.

• 17:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, up next, science fiction becomes science reality. When Captain Kirk, William Shatner, tells me about the first time he ever used a flip phone. When StarTalk returns.

• 17:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to the StarTalk from the Hayden Sphere of the American Museum of Natural History. We're featuring my interview with Star Trek star William Shatner. Let's check it out.

• 17:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did your performances on Star Trek sensitize you to the future of technology?

• 17:49William Shatner?

  I've always been fascinated by the beauty of man-made tools, whether it's a chisel, or a gun, or an engine, or a watch. I love that refinement. I love the idea that man-made tools from the beginning, and then when I was asked to go into the lunar excursion module, at the time the most complex tool that man had ever made, I was totally aware of the millions of systems that had to work for these two guys to be safe.

• 18:28William Shatner?

  And I was and am fascinated by those tools and the tools by which we observe nature. The telescopes, the microscopes, the various instruments that delve into the mystery of how our world, how our universe works. That fascinates me.

• 18:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So were you enchanted when you saw that...

• 18:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One of the earliest cell phones was a flip phone. Inspired by that.

• 19:02William Shatner?

  I had one. They gave me one. Uh Motorola.

• 19:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Motorola.

• 19:05William Shatner?

  Motorola gave me one and I-

• 19:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You gotta be like customer one.

• 19:08William Shatner?

  I was customer one. And the magic of having this phone in your hand. And not having to find a pay phone and put quarters in. And I was in a crowded airport. With one of the new. Tac phones, I think they called them.

• 19:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Star Tac, Star Tac.

• 19:25William Shatner?

  Star Tac. And I was making a call and people passing by laughing. And I couldn't figure out why they were laughing. But I had a communicator.

• 19:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He hasn't shaken that character. They just let him out.

• 19:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we look at the list of technologies Star Trek inspired. Clearly, in that particular case, the flip phone. Which was the communicator, I guess.

• 19:51Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 19:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you know, it was cool.

• 19:53Chuck Nice?

  And the funny thing is, it was seen as so futuristic back then. And now, nobody has a flip phone.

• 19:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, if you had a flip phone, it's like, what's wrong with you?

• 20:00Charles Liu?

  Well, you mean like this flip phone?

• 20:03William Shatner?

  Oh, no you don't. What?

• 20:06Charles Liu?

  Chuck to Enterprise.

• 20:09Chuck Nice?

  Wait, are-

• 20:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Charlie Enterprise. Do you own that?

• 20:11Chuck Nice?

  You, is that work?

• 20:14Charles Liu?

  Chuck to Enterprise. Enterprise, do you read? Chuck.

• 20:17William Shatner?

  I do. Come in Chuck.

• 20:25Charles Liu?

  Actually, I do use this phone still. I have a smartphone. But you notice, I could open this with one hand. I can't dial with one hand on my smartphone. Furthermore-

• 20:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you're incompetent with your smartphone. It's that simple.

• 20:37Charles Liu?

  True. Furthermore. It is possible for me to use this to control the amount of input I get from this crazy world.

• 20:44William Shatner?

  Right.

• 20:45Charles Liu?

  So, I only get texts or voicemails when I want to. But of course, when I need the actual power of a smartphone, I bring that reluctantly.

• 20:52Chuck Nice?

  Well, let me tell you Neil. I use this to control my teenage daughter. Because I say, if you don't do what I say, this is your phone.

• 21:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That must, she must, she must tell those nightmare stories at school. It works. I will take your iPhone and you get this.

• 21:15Charles Liu?

  Well, it's also very economical. Costs way, way less to run something like this.

• 21:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stop trying to defend 20-year-old technology, okay? Just, just stop now.

• 21:23Charles Liu?

  If it ain't broke.

• 21:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 21:25Charles Liu?

  If it ain't broke.

• 21:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stop now.

• 21:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, did you know? I didn't know this till recently. NASA, NASA's official website has a whole page on the science of Star Trek. Really? And it's written by a NASA engineer. His name is David Batchelor. And I think we have him standing by right now, live on video. David, are you there? Welcome to StarTalk.

• 21:51Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 21:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How do we know this is not some corner of your parents' basement you haven't moved out yet?

• 21:58Speaker 04

  This is my library.

• 22:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, uh huh. In my parents' basement. So you wrote an article, "The Science of Star Trek", and it's by far the most read article on that subject on the internet. Just type it in, it goes straight there. And, because Star Trek had this whole list of things. Could you rank them by maybe most extraordinary but possible? Like the warp drives or the impulse engines? Just, what's the start, the top three things we don't have, but you think one day we will? Ooh.

• 22:31Speaker 04

  Well, I think we'll have impulse engines of some type. Uh, and, and antimatter is the thing you would need to power them. Because if, you know, if you think about a starship like the Enterprise, it was supposed to have the mass, something like the USS Enterprise. And if you were gonna try to propel that up to, you know, 90% of the speed of light or something, you would take titanic amounts of energy to do that. Uh, so antimatter is about the only thing that could possibly do it.

• 22:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which gives you pure annihilation of the mass, converting it entirely into energy with E equals mc squared. So where are they getting their antimatter?

• 23:06Speaker 04

  Well presumably they have a big production place somewhere. Hopefully it's very far away from Earth because if you had a containment accident, you could blow away all of Earth's atmosphere in short order with the kind of energy they're talking about, those starships.

• 23:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm glad somebody's calculating these risks. So, how do you transport, in what vessel do you transport antimatter if on contact with matter it annihilates?

• 23:32Speaker 04

  Well, there's a book by Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda called "The Star Trek: Next Generation Technical Manual." And it gives diagrams of all of the containments and things like that. So what you want to have is like hydrogen gas, and it's frozen into a solid form, and you just manipulate it with magnetic fields so it never touches anything.

• 23:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay.

• 23:54Chuck Nice?

  But there's also, if I'm not mistaken, there are also antimatter containment fields that they use as well, which is, surrounds the warp engine, right?

• 24:03Speaker 04

  True.

• 24:04Chuck Nice?

  Okay, I'm going, I'm done, I'm sorry.

• 24:06Speaker 04

  And somehow they pass it through dilithium crystals.

• 24:10Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 24:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so what the hell are dilithium crystals?

• 24:14Speaker 04

  It was a crystal that was made up as a plot element, kind of a MacGuffin in one of the stories.

• 24:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Have you seen the periodic table of fictional elements?

• 24:25Speaker 04

  Oh, very interesting.

• 24:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's very, it's got all the fictional, like unobtanium, go to every possible story ever told where they made stuff up, that element is in this periodic table, it's great.

• 24:35Chuck Nice?

  That's cool.

• 24:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So tell me about cloaking devices.

• 24:37Speaker 04

  Well, there's actually a little progress on that. They can, they can surround an object with a specially engineered exotic material and make light go around it in a way. It doesn't work for every single wavelength of light, so you know, there's still some visible wavelengths.

• 24:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think I've seen pictures where the light gets wrapped around the object, and then comes back out the other side.

• 25:00Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 25:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you, and you're working on this in your basement?

• 25:03Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 25:05Chuck Nice?

  Where your parents' library is.

• 25:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me about, there was some kind of acceleration damper so that when it accelerates from zero to warp speed, people aren't a pile of goo stuck to the back wall.

• 25:19Speaker 04

  Right, right, they had to, they had to have something called inertial dampers.

• 25:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Inertial dampers, how did that work?

• 25:25Speaker 04

  Have you ever looked at the levitating frog? If you, if you Google levitating frog, you can see that there's actually a way to, to have a frog hover in space without going up or down in a magnetic field.

• 25:39Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay.

• 25:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 25:43Chuck Nice?

  I'm just glad that, I feel, I feel sorry for the frog, but I'm happy it's happening.

• 25:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, David, thank you for teleporting your, your wisdom and knowledge to us.

• 25:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Up next, I break down the physics of spacetime to Star Trek star William Shatner when Star Talk returns.

• 26:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to Star Talk from the American Museum of Natural History, featuring my interview with American icon William Shatner, Captain Kirk himself. You know, he had a question for me about the universe. Let's check it out.

• 26:23William Shatner?

  What is spacetime?

• 26:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You already know. You have never met someone at a place unless it was also at a time. You have never met someone at a time unless it was.

• 26:34William Shatner?

  Okay, I get, I get.

• 26:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so we.

• 26:36William Shatner?

  Well, well, wait a minute. What happens to a photon from 13 billion point 800 million years that comes this way and enters my eye so I can see it? Why, where's, where's space involved in that?

• 26:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, it entered your eye at a time and at a place, right here.

• 27:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all that matters here.

• 27:01William Shatner?

  Is that all we're saying?

• 27:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, once you have formalized space and time, and know that they're conjoined, then you can make all kinds of fascinating calculations.

• 27:11William Shatner?

  Well, what is all that, the trains going and I'm walking down there? I'm walking down the train, I'm walking on the air.

• 27:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the time, change.

• 27:17William Shatner?

  What is all that?

• 27:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all the consequences of thinking about space and time as conjoined.

• 27:24William Shatner?

  But it's confusing.

• 27:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The universe is under no obligation to make sense to William Shatner.

• 27:32William Shatner?

  No, but William Shatner is under the obligation to make sense of the universe, as is you are doing. And, and, and, and, and why do, why do I slow down as I approach the speed of light? Does it apply to a photon 13 billion?

• 27:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you want to freak out? I don't, you know, I don't want your head to explode. You ready?

• 27:47William Shatner?

  Yeah.

• 27:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, no, you're not ready.

• 27:49William Shatner?

  No, I'm ready, I'm ready.

• 27:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, the faster you go, the slower time ticks.

• 27:52William Shatner?

  Say that again?

• 27:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The faster you move, slower time ticks for you

• 27:56William Shatner?

  Yeah.

• 27:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  as seen by others.

• 27:58William Shatner?

  Right.

• 28:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As you approach the speed of light, time continues to slow down.

• 28:04William Shatner?

  Yes.

• 28:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the speed of light, time stops. Which means for a photon moving at the speed of light, when it is absorbed in your retina, it is the same instant it was emitted at the Big Bang 14 billion years ago.

• 28:24William Shatner?

  That's what I thought.

• 28:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The photon gets emitted, bam, it's in your, as far as it's concerned, it is in your eye in that same instant.

• 28:32William Shatner?

  Can we measure that photon and observe the Big Bang?

• 28:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know that that came from the Big Bang, and I'm watching it, and it's taken 13.8 billion years to reach you, but if you are that photon, it does not experience that time delay.

• 28:45William Shatner?

  What a great science fiction story that is.

• 28:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Instantaneous.

• 28:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is awesome. So, William Shatner's question takes us right up to Cosmic Queries on Starkoff.

• 29:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this all tonight about the physics of spacetime. So Chuck, you've got some questions.

• 29:05Chuck Nice?

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what do you have?

• 29:06Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. This is Gabriel Felon from Australia, who says, "A warp field is formed by contracting spacetime in front of a spacecraft and expanding it behind it. Could we say that in a loose theoretical sense, that is like riding a gravitational wave?" Serves up.

• 29:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck?

• 29:25Charles Liu?

  No.

• 29:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Next question.

• 29:28Chuck Nice?

  Next question.

• 29:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, just to be clear, gravity waves move at the speed of light. If you want to ride the gravity wave, you're not doing any better than the speed of light. Okay.

• 29:39Charles Liu?

  That's right. And what he was describing there was a theoretical construct of creating a warp bubble.

• 29:45Chuck Nice?

  Warp bubble.

• 29:45Charles Liu?

  And it doesn't work. But nevertheless, it's a cool thing to think about.

• 29:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Such a buzzkill, man.

• 29:51Chuck Nice?

  I know, man.

• 29:51Charles Liu?

  Well, I'm not saying it won't work eventually. Who knows what great discoveries will come just around the corner?

• 29:56Chuck Nice?

  All right. Next. If suddenly the sun disappeared, how long would it take for the warped space around it to go back to normal? How would that adjustment be felt on Earth?

• 30:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh. I'm giving this eight minutes and 20 seconds. How about you, Charles?

• 30:12Charles Liu?

  Well, eight minutes and 20 seconds and our Earth would notice.

• 30:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 30:15Charles Liu?

  But the change in spacetime there would be at the speed of light, right? The sun is about 853,000 miles across, so we'd take maybe four or five seconds for spacetime where the sun was to come back to as if there were nothing there. Eight minutes and 20 seconds later, that effect reaches Earth.

• 30:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So another way to say it is, you can pluck the sun from the middle of the solar system.

• 30:36Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 30:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we wouldn't know about it. You would still bask in sunlight. You would still orbit with nothing happening. 500 seconds later, bada bing, we steep into darkness as we get cast at a tangent off into interstellar space.

• 30:51Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm. So Stanley, your answer is, "You're going to die in eight minutes and 23 seconds."

• 30:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Last question.

• 30:58Chuck Nice?

  This is from Merrill Gwen Speeder from Toronto, Canada. "Would like to know this. What a civilization in the galaxy 1 billion light-years away from us see the universe as 1 billion light-years younger than we are."

• 31:15Charles Liu?

  No.

• 31:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, there you have it.

• 31:20Charles Liu?

  The reason is, the universe is expanding away from that galaxy exactly the same way that the universe is expanding away from our galaxy. So, over there, 1 billion years, they would see us as being 1 billion years younger than we are today. But, they would be the same age. Similarly, we see them as being 1 billion years younger, but we are the same age as we are now.

• 31:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And my favorite such galaxy would be one that's 65 million light-years away, such that they looking upon us with their super duper alien telescopes would witness events in real-time unfolding on Earth 65 million years ago. Because that light is only just now reaching them. And 65 million years ago, what was going down on Earth? An asteroid the size of Mount Everest slammed in the Yucatan Peninsula, although that's not what they called it back then, and taking out the dinosaurs. So, they would bear witness to this. And they would be seeing us in the past. Just as we see them in their past.

• 32:22Charles Liu?

  There you go.

• 32:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, next up, William Shatner explains why being a starship captain is a lot like being a football quarterback on StarTalk.

• 32:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk, featuring my interview with William Shatner, Star Trek star. And I asked him about the unique look and design of the bridge of the starship Enterprise. So, let's check it out.

• 32:52William Shatner?

  A captain of the name of Herman Zimmerman designed that whole cabin.

• 32:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's a set designer for Star Trek. Thought about the ergonomics and the dynamics of a crew's movement.

• 33:03William Shatner?

  Exactly. So, the chair is in the center, the people are all around him to give him information, the people in front, the screen in there.

• 33:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting. So, anytime you look this way, it's always the same person giving you a certain kind of information. And I turn that way, so it's part of a rhythm of your...

• 33:20William Shatner?

  So, that I was watching Peyton Manning work as a quarterback.

• 33:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's just not who I thought you would say in that sentence.

• 33:29William Shatner?

  Peyton Manning guiding the other players.

• 33:33William Shatner?

  Rehearsing them again and again. When I do this, you do that. I'm gonna take three steps here and I could do it. You can imagine that in battle, that this captain would say, alright, I'm gonna turn here. I need that information. I'm gonna turn here, you gotta need that. And, and everything was set up so that he could make an informed decision. I, I lived that.

• 33:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're a quarterback of the universe?

• 33:54William Shatner?

  You like that?

• 33:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 34:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  William Shatner, quarterback of the universe. So, you know, I, I couldn't, Captain Kirk, I wasn't gonna let him go until I had, I had to ask him the perfunctory question. What was his favorite Star Trek episode?

• 34:13William Shatner?

  Ooh.

• 34:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I did, let's check it out.

• 34:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I, sorry, I have to ask you this. So, what was your favorite episode?

• 34:22William Shatner?

  Ah, Neil, that is so bad.

• 34:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, it's the lamest question ever.

• 34:27William Shatner?

  The worst.

• 34:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is so lame.

• 34:28William Shatner?

  God, I'm.

• 34:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not worthy.

• 34:31William Shatner?

  I'm not worthy? Alright, my favorite episode. Well, I don't remember them too well. Okay, I didn't see many, although I don't like to watch me on camera. But there was one that, going back in time, where you try and change.

• 34:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have a tear here on this.

• 34:51William Shatner?

  I'm crying over the question.

• 34:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right there, good.

• 34:54William Shatner?

  Um, there was one episode where we went back in time, I think it was called City Across the River.

• 35:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or City on the Edge of Forever.

• 35:03William Shatner?

  City on the Edge of Forever. Listen to you. I remember.

• 35:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It involves time travel.

• 35:07William Shatner?

  But what is time travel? But a yearning to go back to a past that was brighter and better, or something that you could alter. There's something so, so basic about all human beings, saying, if I could just go back to that moment and change it, I, I wouldn't have done what I did. So I remember thinking that, uh, that back, uh, going back in time and having an affection for that moment. It was a lovely story and a nostalgic story. It touched you. So I, I might point to that as one of them.

• 35:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good. And of your six or seven, eight movies, which one of the Star Trek?

• 35:49William Shatner?

  I thought Star Trek V was brilliant.

• 35:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Five?

• 35:51William Shatner?

  Yeah. Five was going back to God, trying to find God.

• 35:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Uh, which one did the best out of that?

• 35:59William Shatner?

  Probably, uh...

• 36:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was it four, you think?

• 36:02William Shatner?

  They were all in four, but they were all in that hundred thousand, a hundred million dollar thing.

• 36:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, four was, that was dubbed as Save the Whale. So it was the Save the Whale episode. Again, it was going back in time.

• 36:11William Shatner?

  Yeah.

• 36:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And interacting out of place.

• 36:14William Shatner?

  Exactly. Reintroducing a whale.

• 36:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. To the future from the past. That was, I, that was my favorite of the set. I, I have very simple, you know, storytelling needs.

• 36:24William Shatner?

  You, you del, you deal in such mysticism anyway.

• 36:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, up next on StarTalk, featuring my interview with American icon William Shatner, captain of the USS Enterprise. And Star Trek today is more popular than ever, in part, I think, because of the reboot by J.J. Abrams. And I, I had to ask William Shatner, what was his take on this new movie and the whole reboot of the series? Let's check it out.

• 36:54William Shatner?

  I think J.J. Abrams is a wonderful director and wonderful imaginative writer. What we found in the movies we made, that they would make a hundred million dollars, and none of the movies made more than a hundred million dollars. So the budget was limited.

• 37:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh yeah, once you know those numbers reliably, everything gets pre, predefined. The budget is already in place.

• 37:16William Shatner?

  It's already defined. So, so there's not much room for, for special effects to make this movie. When J.J. got a hold of it, he must have decided that the way to increase the revenue was to go and make a ride and give the special effects a full emphasis. Spend the money on the ride.

• 37:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To science fiction, ride.

• 37:38William Shatner?

  It's the ride. And the characters, as a result, I think, suffered somewhat.

• 37:45William Shatner?

  But those movies are uh Blockbuster. Box off, uh, box office, uh, sensation. It's refreshed the franchise. Now, the characters act in a somewhat different, uh, fashion than they would have, uh, uh, had Roddenberry been issuing his edicts. But the proof is in the popularity of the movies.

• 38:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Woo! Uh, Charles?

• 38:10Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 38:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If Roddenberry rebooted the movie today, what would it, how, why would it be any different? He'd have a big budget, high special effects?

• 38:19Charles Liu?

  I think William Shatner here is not taking into account, perhaps the way he should, the fact that it's much harder to develop characters in an hour and a half or two hours than it is over two or three seasons. Uh, in reality, J.J. Abrams has done a lot within what time was available, but it is true, there's a substantial ride going on.

• 38:40Chuck Nice?

  So what you're really saying, if I may, is William Shatner is being a little bit of a hater.

• 38:47Charles Liu?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 38:48Chuck Nice?

  Just a little bit.

• 38:51Charles Liu?

  No, no, no.

• 38:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but in the end, he said, "Look, it's making money."

• 38:53Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna shake a little hate on this.

• 38:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's in the, he's in the business. If it's making money, it's making money.

• 38:58Charles Liu?

  That's right. Now, when Gene Roddenberry actually did get a chance to reboot the Star Trek franchise with Star Trek: The Next Generation.

• 39:05Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 39:05Charles Liu?

  For the first several seasons, he was still involved in it pretty substantially. Gene Roddenberry didn't give edicts so much as he gave a vision.

• 39:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, uh, so Star Trek has gone beyond just the multiple reincarnations of the TV series, the original set of movies.

• 39:19Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 39:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then the next set of movies.

• 39:22Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 39:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It also spilled into fanfiction.

• 39:24Charles Liu?

  Hmm.

• 39:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A whole other dimension, internet-based dimension of storytelling.

• 39:28Charles Liu?

  Absolutely.

• 39:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where people feel, maybe it's kind of the internet's version of a multiverse.

• 39:32Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 39:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? So it's a multiverse where fans get to explore plotlines, never intended, but they have to have some plausibility, otherwise they don't work as fanfiction.

• 39:42Chuck Nice?

  And guess what? Some of that fanfiction actually gets adopted into Star Trek stories.

• 39:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I think one of them is like, uh, Captain Kirk and Spock have, they have like a relationship.

• 39:51William Shatner?

  Once you go Vulcan, you never go back.

• 39:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Neil, are you a big enough fan that you would have a plotline? I guess if I had to have fiction, I would want to see Captain Kirk fight Jean-Luc Picard. Ooh! I just want to see that, because Kirk did his own fighting. That would be awesome. And Picard didn't. That's true. So I just want to see how that would play. And then they have to play that music.

• 40:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, before we wrap up this segment,

• 40:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  we're gonna catch up with my good friend, Bill Nye the Science Guy, to get his take on the enduring power of Star Trek. Let's check it out.

• 40:36Bill Nye?

  The Unisphere. In 1964, it represented our shrinking globe and our expanding universe. Now, let me tell you something. I was here at the World's Fair, and it was the coolest place. This optimistic view of the future through science and technology. And when Star Trek came along, it took that view to a whole nother level, or another quadrant of the galaxy, with each character becoming a metaphor for the tribal conflicts that we still have here on Earth. Now, in Star Trek, they didn't stay on Earth with conflicts between countries. No, they had conflicts between entire planets, each one a unique place in space. And it was Captain Kirk especially, who worked hard to resolve those conflicts.

• 41:21Bill Nye?

  So, thank you. That optimistic view is still with us. Thank you, Star Trek. Okay, Neil, you have the con. Nye out.

• 41:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice. Bill Nye.

• 41:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I look at Star Trek as a vision of the future. And there's one thing that was persistent in every episode. It was, at the end of the day... No matter what you saw, there was some dose of morality. Storytelling is about other worlds. Ideally, better worlds. Worlds where people treat each other more kindly. Where we are better shepherds of our own planet. And that is a cosmic perspective. You've been watching StarTalk. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal ass-pro physicist. And as always, I bid you to keep looking up!