The Surfing Life, with Kelly Slater

Neil deGrasse Tyson catches the perfect wave with world champion surfer Kelly Slater, comic co-host Chuck Nice, Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Finnegan, oceanographer Travis Schramek, lead engineer at the Kelly Slater Surf Ranch Adam Fincham, and Bill Nye the Science Guy. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/the-surfing-life-with-kelly-slater/ Photo Credit: Rtwkeaton [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], from Wikimedia Commons

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to the hall of the universe. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And tonight, we're exploring the science of surfing. Featuring my interview with all-time world champion surfer Kelly Slater. Dude, let's do this.

• 0:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My comedic co-host tonight is Chuck Nice.

• 0:48Chuck Nice?

  Alright. It's up, it's up, dude.

• 0:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tweeting at ChuckNiceComic.

• 0:52Chuck Nice?

  Yes, sir.

• 0:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're also co-host of the spin-off of StarTalk called Playing with Science.

• 0:57Chuck Nice?

  Yes, sir. Yes, it is.

• 0:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All about sports.

• 0:59Chuck Nice?

  It's where jocks and geeks collide and the geeks don't walk away with concussion.

• 1:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's good. Well, so I don't have much particular expertise in surfing, so we brought someone who does. And we've got prize-winning author William Finnegan, staff writer at The New Yorker, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Barbarian Days.

• 1:23Chuck Nice?

  What a great name for a book.

• 1:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A Surfing Life. So we'll be tapping your perspective tonight as we explore my interview with surfing legend Kelly Slater. And Kelly's dominated the sport of surfing like his whole life, his entire life. He has the most championships in the history of the sport, 11. He was the youngest to win that title at age 20.

• 1:43Chuck Nice?

  Yep.

• 1:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The oldest to win that title at age 39. And he's had a little space connection going on also.

• 1:52Chuck Nice?

  Really?

• 1:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you know, that's the first thing I have to ask him about.

• 1:55Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 1:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let's check it out.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  So you grew up in Space Coast? I did. Space Coast, Florida? Yeah. So do you feel space in you? Definitely. My mom worked at NASA. NASA Kennedy Space? Kennedy Space Center, sorry, yeah. And she was there when Kennedy came the first time to visit. Yeah, so it was a huge part of our daily lives. I watched the first... You would've seen all the shuttles. I watched the first 24 launches and the 25th was the one that exploded. You mean Challenger? Challenger. Yeah, yeah. So I had watched everyone up until that point. And I had flown back from California the night before at a surf contest. And I missed school that day. It was the coldest day of the year in Florida. Part of the problem. Part of the problem with the O-rings, yeah. With the O-rings.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  But I was laying in bed and I heard the shuttle go off. And I'd seen so many of them, it wasn't even a thing for me anymore. I mean, people fly from around the world to see these things. And I'm like, well, I've seen them all. So I looked out the window, kind of saw it going up, and I laid back down, didn't watch. And then I remember the whole house just rattling, like the whole house shook like it never felt. And I remember thinking, that was weird, and I went back to sleep. And I woke up about three hours later, my mom was crying, and she said the shuttle exploded. And, you know, this is something that's so dear to people's hearts in Florida. It's in the culture. Yeah, it's in the culture. But yeah, it was a super fun time as a kid to see all this space program. So any memorable science teachers or math teachers, either good or bad?

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Um, I try to forget all of them. But I always kind of thought math mattered somehow. I always thought of the wave as an equation, but I got my worst grade ever in geometry. Ever, in anything? I had never had a C, and then I got a D in her class. It was like, it was pretty heart-wrenching for me as a freshman. That could completely mess with you. It messed with me, yes. Man, I gotta stop staying up late and not studying. But no, I did well in school and I, for the most part, enjoyed it. But I remember being in probably kindergarten or first grade and thinking, gosh, I think I'm a surfer. You know, that's what I liked to do the most.

• 4:11Chuck Nice?

  Very nice.

• 4:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Bill, how big of a star is Kelly Slater in the surfer world?

• 4:16Speaker 03

  Oh, well, his nickname is the King.

• 4:18Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 4:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  I mean, he's been...

• 4:21Chuck Nice?

  Wow, we share the same nickname, wow.

• 4:25Speaker 03

  He has been the consensus best surfer in the world for 25 years.

• 4:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so the world, the surfer world, you, you describe in the subtitle, "A Surfing Life." So what is a surfing life in the surfing world?

• 4:38Speaker 03

  Well, for me, it's, I mean, a surfing life, and I, I'm pretty typical, really, is just an obsessive pursuit of good waves, usually in the company of friends.

• 4:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's pretty clean, clean, it's clean.

• 4:50Chuck Nice?

  That's a very clean.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  And then, but then there's the struggle to fit that obsession into a life life. Not so easy.

• 4:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Bill, Kelly said he always thought of a wave as an equation. When you're surfing, do you feel some kind of math vibe the way he does?

• 5:08Speaker 03

  That's a good metaphor, actually.

• 5:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, a wave kind of presents you with a question.

• 5:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a whole philosophy here, I didn't know that.

• 5:18Chuck Nice?

  That's what I love about surfers, man. Everything has a philosophy with you guys.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  The wave, it never ends.

• 5:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a question.

• 5:24Speaker 03

  And you have to come up with an answer that follows, not really math rules, but at least sort of the rules of physics. And you can come up with an elegant solution, you know, a dazzling solution, or, you know, a mess that kind of gets you from A to B, or, or just get the wrong answer entirely.

• 5:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And get thrown on your ass.

• 5:45Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 5:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the get thrown on your ass solution to the equation. Chuck, how would you calculate the math of surfing?

• 5:52Chuck Nice?

  I'm very glad you asked me that, Neil, because, seeing as I'm the scientist here. Actually, I, I have it right there. It's the square root of nar nar over epic shredding is equal to the absolute magnitude of totally tubular righteousnessness.

• 6:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, very nice. So the two vertical lines on each side, that's the absolute magnitude of?

• 6:14Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 6:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very good.

• 6:15Chuck Nice?

  Thank you, sir.

• 6:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 6:16Chuck Nice?

  I had to make it a real equation, otherwise I would have to suffer your wrath.

• 6:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, I'm a non-surfer. There's not a word for that, I guess, other than non hyphen surfer.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  Oh, there are, but, yeah.

• 6:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, there are words.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Go on.

• 6:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, it was hard for me to sort of fully grok how riding a wave actually works. And so I asked him to help explain the dynamics of surfing to me. Let's check it out. So tell me more about the mechanics of you in the wave. It seems to me there's, dare I call it a sweet spot, where all the forces work to sustain you in that spot. Could you just talk me through what's going on in the wave? Either mechanically or even emotionally?

• 7:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, spiritually, I mean, a lot of things are going on. It's a moving zen, you know? There have been surfers over the years, and I don't know if they're friends with Timothy Leary or not, but they've talked about it being like revisiting the womb. I mean, there's some spiritual stuff going on there, yeah. But you're right, that you're looking for a sweet spot on the wave. Because a wave forms, it builds, it has a certain speed, it has a certain shape. There's just a balance with gravity is really what it comes down to.

• 7:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how hard is it to find that sweet spot in a wave where you're balanced against gravity?

• 7:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, Kelly makes it look easy, but for the rest of us, it takes a ton of practice.

• 7:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a sign of a true champion. What you do, you say, "Oh, I can do that," and then, "No, you can't."

• 7:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So Chuck, have you ever tried surfing at all?

• 7:53Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 7:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have?

• 7:54Chuck Nice?

  I really have.

• 7:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How'd you do?

• 7:56Chuck Nice?

  Actually, we can just do that right now. As I bought something for us to surf on.

• 8:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You brought this in?

• 8:02Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely, check it out.

• 8:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Balance trainer, use at your own risk.

• 8:15Chuck Nice?

  It's physics, man.

• 8:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got this. If it's just physics.

• 8:18Chuck Nice?

  It's just physics.

• 8:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll try it, let me see here. Okay. Yo. Oh, you need the surfer music?

• 8:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, up next, we'll take a deep dive into the science of surfing with world champion surfer Kelly Slater. When StarTalk returns.

• 8:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk from the Hall of the Universe of the American Museum of Natural History. We're exploring the science of surfing, featuring my interview with surfing champ Kelly Slater. Let's check it out.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  My board is a planing surface, right? So I think of anywhere on the wave that my board is at, of course, it's a curve. A wave's a curve.

• 9:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have a flat board on a curved surface?

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think of the whole wave as just millions of flat surfaces. That's kind of how I picture it in my head. And I'm always pushing down against that energy. So I have gravity and I have momentum and my inertia, you know, going in a certain way.

• 9:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're saying that the curved inner surface of the wave is a series of flat surfaces? And you're finding a flat surface to put your flat board on?

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Correct. I'm picturing that flat surface and I'm pushing against that in a certain way. And so there's, I almost feel like it's a track. So the ultimate thing in surfing is to get a super deep tube, barrel, we call it. Like a tube would be like you're kind of in the curl of the wave, right? A barrel is like when you disappear, back deeper in the wave.

• 9:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, joining us to help break down some of the science of surfing is oceanographer Travis Schrammick. Travis, welcome to StarTalk.

• 10:05Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me.

• 10:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're a doctoral candidate?

• 10:09Speaker 04

  Yes, sir.

• 10:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To get a PhD at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego. So your colleagues recently came up with an equation for a wave's sweet spot? Is that right?

• 10:20Speaker 04

  That's correct. One of my colleagues named Nick Pizzo at Scripps Oceanography actually figured out how the math behind the sweet spot works. So if we, if we think about the shape of the wave, just like Kelly was just writing in those big barrels, the peak in velocity in the wave itself is actually the lip as it projects. But the peak in acceleration is the curl of the wave, just under that lip that's projecting out from the edge of it. And in that, that little area, that sweet spot, you can have velocities up to 4G.

• 10:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So... When he executed the tube ride, what kind of physics is going on there?

• 10:55Speaker 04

  So when a surfer's sort of finding that sweet spot, just like you said, you're applying forces back and forth. The fleet of the surfer are applying a little bit forward, a little bit back to try to inch its way, inch your way up into the wave. And then that, that wave is actually pushing forces back into the board. So if you look at most surfboards, there are two pieces of foam with a wooden stringer down the middle. And they're communicating the forces balanced between the wave and the surfer themselves. And so that, that wave is actually driving that board and torquing it as the surfer's moving down the line. And the surfer's then communicating back and forth with its forces.

• 11:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, it never occurred to me, because if, since I don't know what I'm looking at, it just looks like they're standing there, getting pushed by the wave. And what you're saying is, the difference in pressure between a back foot and a front foot can actually help maneuver where they are in the curl of the wave?

• 11:44Speaker 04

  Most definitely. As you're trying to accelerate, you'll kind of put more pressure on your front foot. And as you want to sort of slow down, then you'll see them kind of stall in a wave, and try to wait for the barrel to come over, they'll put a lot more pressure on their back foot.

• 11:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what happens when you see a surfer's board break? Is it just, it was made in China? Or what happened?

• 12:03Speaker 04

  No, waves are really powerful.

• 12:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because that was a shark.

• 12:08Speaker 04

  Well, first you look for the guy, to be, or girl, and make sure they're okay in the water, hopefully. But then you kind of look, as those, as the wave comes down, they kind of can act as a cleaver and just slice a board basically right in half. That's why that, that wooden stringer is typically in the middle of a board, to give it that rigidity, an extra set of forces to communicate the surfer's actions into the wave. But they can just snap because of how strong waves can be.

• 12:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this kind of barrel-shaped wave, what conditions create that?

• 12:36Speaker 04

  So typically, when we see barrels, we're looking at swells that have come from deep energetic water. And then those swells are moving throughout the whole world's oceans. And then you look for areas where it goes from deep water to shallow water really quickly. And as that energy comes into the shallow water, it'll break very, very rapidly and create barrels. And so we typically see these around island systems and coral reefs because of that difference.

• 13:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These would be, these would be archipelago islands.

• 13:02Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 13:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're just volcanoes that have come up from underneath the ocean. And so they're going to have a volcanic slope. Down, right down to the bottom of the ocean.

• 13:11Speaker 04

  Yep, and you'll even see areas like in California, there's a wave called Mavericks, that the point kind of sticks out really far and the deeper bathymetry, the actual contours of the ocean, allow that energy to get directed to a single focal point and make very big waves.

• 13:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so Bill, that's kind of the science of what's going on, but what's it like, what does it feel like to be inside the barrel of a wave?

• 13:31Speaker 03

  Oh, like the womb.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  No, I won't, I won't go that far.

• 13:39Speaker 03

  It is, uh, that, it's this thing you've worked toward a long time, trained a long time to be able to get in a barrel cleanly and, and, and come out in one piece. So, there's generally that sense of intense joy in there and, and people often say, time slows down when you're in the tube. But I, my experience is-

• 14:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Invoking Einsteinian relativity? See, this guy has no limits to where he's-

• 14:08Speaker 03

  But I'm disagreeing. Because, because my experience isn't that it's, it's slow so much as that it's indelible, you know, that, that, that moment really imprints on your memory, you just, all the fine details of what you saw inside and also what you felt.

• 14:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So is that part of the moving zen that he's describing?

• 14:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I think what he means there is that, that's a moment when you have to have absolute concentration, you know, and, and, and kind of, um, everything else out of your mind and focus so much on what you're doing. That's the, that's the sort of zen of, of barrel riding, but of course, Kelly Slater's doing that at a level that the rest of us are not.

• 14:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, you keeping up with these terms?

• 14:53Chuck Nice?

  Of course I am.

• 14:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Zen, barrel riding, you got this?

• 14:55Chuck Nice?

  I actually have a little game that I'd like to play right now.

• 14:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's that?

• 14:57Chuck Nice?

  It's called Surf Talk. Yeah!

• 14:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Surf Talk, oh!

• 15:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Our budget wasn't big enough to send you to an island.

• 15:08Chuck Nice?

  And that's exactly why it's photoshopped.

• 15:14Chuck Nice?

  Alright, so here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna do, I'm just gonna give you a term, Neil. And then you can describe it. And then you can tell us if it's right or wrong. And then you can use it in a sentence.

• 15:30Chuck Nice?

  Alright.

• 15:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's an interesting, interesting game.

• 15:33Chuck Nice?

  Alright, here's a game.

• 15:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Use all the talents at the table.

• 15:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, we use everybody at the table, okay? Here we go, the first one is hang loose.

• 15:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hang loose.

• 15:41Chuck Nice?

  Hang loose.

• 15:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Surfing, I, I, I think if you fall off the board, you don't wanna get too tight, otherwise you might break something. So you just go with the, with the wave, with the crashing wave. That's what I think that means.

• 15:55Speaker 04

  Uh, it means relax, yeah.

• 15:56Chuck Nice?

  Relax, that's correct.

• 15:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But can we get into a sentence, please?

• 15:59Chuck Nice?

  Okay, please in a sentence.

• 16:00Speaker 04

  Oh, um, are you gonna wear these Speedos or are you gonna hang loose?

• 16:11Chuck Nice?

  Alright. Tomb stoming. Tomb stoming.

• 16:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tomb stoning.

• 16:18Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 16:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, maybe after you fell off, and you're buried under the wave, and the, and the only way we know where you are is where your surfboard is. Cause it's the only thing floating.

• 16:32Chuck Nice?

  But it's floating how?

• 16:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, vertically, I guess.

• 16:36Speaker 04

  That's tomb stoning.

• 16:36Chuck Nice?

  That is tomb stoning!

• 16:40Chuck Nice?

  The point of your board comes out of the water, and it looks like a tombstone, right?

• 16:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, you never wanna be underwater.

• 16:45Chuck Nice?

  You never wanna be like that.

• 16:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's bad.

• 16:46Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's very bad.

• 16:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 16:48Chuck Nice?

  Alright, here's the last one. Hang eleven.

• 16:53Chuck Nice?

  No hints for this one, Neil.

• 16:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hang eleven.

• 16:56Chuck Nice?

  Hang eleven.

• 16:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think that's what you look like in that last photo of yourself, underwater, when two feet sticking up, that's just the number eleven.

• 17:04Chuck Nice?

  Hang eleven, so that's your guess?

• 17:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're head first, feet out of the water.

• 17:08Speaker 04

  I only know hang ten. And that's with your toes all over the edge of a longboard.

• 17:13Chuck Nice?

  Okay, that's, that's hang eleven.

• 17:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I don't know hang eleven then.

• 17:17Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 17:17Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 17:19Chuck Nice?

  Hang eleven, a dude surfing nude. Chuck?

• 17:26Chuck Nice?

  Guess what the extra one is?

• 17:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, surfing champ Kelly Slater told me about another physics phenomenon that goes on when he surfs big waves. Check it out.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  Another thing that happens, that maybe you've seen footage of this, you know, when a wave breaks, sometimes it will spit all this water out the end, like air pressure. It's kind of like a fire extinguisher, whatever. So, in a tube, you have all this air expanse, but then when that collapses, that air's got to go somewhere, and so it will create this pressure, high pressure, and just shoot you out the end of the wave.

• 18:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  So, you're dealing with high and low pressures. So, if you have a wave that...

• 18:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All this is going on?

• 18:10Speaker 02

  All this is going on. So, sometimes you have a tube, sometimes guys will be in a tube, and they'll say, "It spit back in my face, or it breathed on me." And so what happens, if you have a wave that kind of starts, not real hollow, it just kind of feathering tube, and then it barrels and the tube gets bigger like this, it pulls air back into it.

• 18:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's open, it's producing suction.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, it creates a low pressure back there, it needs to fill that, and so it creates like a backdraft. And that sometimes will just knock you off your board. Or it'll, so we say it spits back at you, because it'll bring water with it, and it hits you in the face, and it can kind of sting your face or whatever. And then all that water, when the tube sort of all breaks at once, it just collapses on itself, it shoots all that air out, and that'll shoot you out of the end of the barrel. So, there's a lot of things that are kind of happening at once.

• 19:01Speaker 04

  Man. That is awesome.

• 19:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Bill, are you thinking about all these things when you're surfing?

• 19:10Speaker 03

  Not really, you're just reacting. You sort of think about it later, discuss it over beer.

• 19:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Travis, and how about you? Because you're also a surfer, you have some awareness of this, but it doesn't happen on every wave, right? So... So, uh, when you model this stuff, you have all that factored in?

• 19:31Speaker 04

  I agree with Bill. When you're actually on a wave, your mind's kind of going with that moment, and you're focused on that. But when I'm in the water the rest of the time, I'm thinking about commuter, computer models, one after the other. I'm thinking about big swell forecasting and how waves are coming from either the Southern Ocean or the North Pacific and how observations are taken in and how they're reacting to the computer models.

• 19:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's the most important sort of physics factor in surfing?

• 19:56Speaker 04

  In surfing, and if you're actually talking about catching the waves, I think it's actually the speed of a wave and the speed of a surfer. If you can't catch a wave...

• 20:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait. So a wave comes in, but you're not surfing it in, you're surfing it sideways.

• 20:10Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 20:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So isn't it like the speed at which it's sort of crashing sideways? Down the line.

• 20:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, uh, but first, we have to think about like how waves are breaking and the speed at which they're breaking. So they break at the square root of gravity times the depth of the water. When you're going to catch a wave, you have to be moving almost that fast, uh, when you go to catch waves. So if you see the bigger waves that guys and girls will get towed into, you have to be moving just as bit, or as fast as those bigger waves are moving.

• 20:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Otherwise it leaves you behind.

• 20:39Speaker 04

  Exactly. It'll leave you right behind. And bigger waves break in deeper water, so they move even faster. So you can paddle for smaller waves at a relatively slow speed, and you need to move very fast to catch big waves like that. So I think that's probably the most important factor in surfing itself.

• 20:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we come to a segment called Cosmic Queries. Yeah.

• 21:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is where we take questions from our fanbase, and these are questions all about the physics of surfing.

• 21:06Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 21:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I got people here who think about this, who write about it, who research it. So I'll just be mute the whole time, as these questions go to our guests.

• 21:13Chuck Nice?

  Nah, you gotta chime in too, man. Okay, here we go. This is question number one from Mikey Cups from Instagram. Would like to know, if the moon suddenly disappeared, how would it affect the waves of Earth?

• 21:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Travis?

• 21:26Speaker 04

  So the waves of Earth are generated by the wind on the ocean. So the tides regulate how water moves around and drive a lot of currents, but most of what we see in terms of waves is actually driven by, uh, the wind. The question then is how does the lunar cycle then drive the wind? And that's a whole nother factor, so that...

• 21:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, not much. It's mostly the sun.

• 21:45Chuck Nice?

  Uh-huh. See, I told you you would chime in.

• 21:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the sun, unequal heating on Earth's surface generates pressure differences. So air feels high pressure here and low pressure here, so it all goes there. And then you have wind. That's basically what happens. And if you have, you can have cyclonic activity, where air's not just moving from here to here. It's trying to get to that one spot, but it like overshoots it. So it's got, and wraps around, so you get like hurricanes and stuff.

• 22:11Chuck Nice?

  I'm just glad you were gonna leave this to the guest.

• 22:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no.

• 22:16Chuck Nice?

  Alright, this is Kevin Van Skyle from Facebook, who says, "If our energy continues when we die, what's our chances of surfing gravitational waves on another plane of dimension? Where do they barrel? Tips for light speed paddle in, maybe?"

• 22:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man.

• 22:34Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna let you handle this one.

• 22:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's he been smoking? I don't know.

• 22:37Chuck Nice?

  Uh, Travis?

• 22:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That one's outside of my ballpark. Well, I mean, what's interesting about waves is that they have certain properties in common with one another. Be they a sound wave, or a liquid, you know, a medium wave in a medium, of any other kind of liquid medium. So, uh, there's certain commonalities of the physics treatment, as, as you would do that. I happen to know that, in Star Trek, their warp drives, what they do is they sort of compress spacetime in front of them, and then surf the wave as they re-expand it going forward. So they can easily go faster than the speed of light. So, I, I can imagine doing this, but not in the state of being dead, which was how that question began.

• 23:18Chuck Nice?

  Yes. Yes, exactly.

• 23:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. No, I don't see your spirit energy surfing gravity waves across the universe, at all. You're just dead.

• 23:26Chuck Nice?

  Alright, so Kevin, your answer is, you're dead.

• 23:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, okay.

• 23:30Chuck Nice?

  Alright. And finally, this is Carl Rubin from Instagram, who wants to know this. Assuming the presence of liquid water on all the planets of the solar system, which planet's gravity would allow for the biggest waves?

• 23:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 23:48Chuck Nice?

  So, just if there was liquid water everywhere, including gas giants like Jupiter, look at that gravity, what planet would have the biggest waves to surf, no matter where we are?

• 24:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, uh, I would say Earth, four billion years ago.

• 24:06Chuck Nice?

  Wow, really?

• 24:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 24:09Chuck Nice?

  Travis, why is that?

• 24:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was about to ask the same question. Is that the, the formation of the moon? And all evidence and ideas about the formation of the moon tell us that the moon was formed by a collision between a Mars-sized protoplanet, side-swiping Earth, casting our crust into a ring around us, much as Saturn has a ring, and that ring then coalesces to form our moon. What matters here is that our moon would have formed at a distance 20 times closer than where it is now. And the height of the tides goes as the cube of the distance.

• 24:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So 20 times 20 times 20 is 8,000. So the tidal, the size of the tidal waves at the beginning of the formation of the moon would have been 8,000 times higher than they are today. So I'd want to be around then to check that out. I wouldn't.

• 25:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, up next, Kelly Slater tells us about his top-secret professional facility to create the perfect wave when StarTalk returns.

• 25:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk, featuring my interview with world champion surfer Kelly Slater. And Kelly has a little side project going on recently, a secret facility intended to create the perfect wave. Check it out.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  We call it the Surf Ranch.

• 25:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Surf Ranch?

• 25:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, our actual place, we call the Surf Ranch, but we created a man-made wave using a foil, a type of foil technology, to create a swell and then create a bottom with certain symmetry to break the wave.

• 26:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's the difference between what you're describing and what I see in my water parks?

• 26:12Speaker 02

  Water parks, well-

• 26:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I hope I didn't insult you.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 26:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, we did that, I did-

• 26:18Speaker 02

  I actually think time's up. What time is it?

• 26:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This interview's over.

• 26:23Speaker 02

  When I was a kid, I went to Wet and Wild in Orlando, and they have a little wave pool, and they got kind of this hydraulic

• 26:30Speaker 02

  push and pull system, and these pistons or whatever, and they create these little sort of weak waves, you know. But we used to go in there and grab a little boogie board and try to ride them, or body surf. But, uh-

• 26:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mamzy pamzy waves.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  Mamzy pamzy, yeah, they're just weak waves. We call those windswells, basically. A windswell is a swell that's never quite formed its energy over a long period of time, and it's just kind of jumbled everywhere.

• 26:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  What we did with our wave technology was create a soliton, a solitary wave. Is my grade going up?

• 27:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're up to B+ right now.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  Am I getting there?

• 27:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  B+!

• 27:06Speaker 02

  Nice, nice.

• 27:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So solid B+.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Nice. So we wanted to create a soliton, which is, you know, a wave you can send an infinite amount of distance, and it wouldn't lose its energy. And I basically went out and got a consortium of people and said, "Look, I want to create this wave. I think it would be interesting for surfing."

• 27:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A designer wave.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  Designer wave, yeah. But also perfection. We wanted to make something that looked different than any other wave anyone had ever made before.

• 27:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Bill, is there a most perfect wave you've ever surfed in your life? A single most perfect wave?

• 27:44Speaker 02

  There was a place in Fiji where I camped in my youth that had the best wave I've ever surfed. Perfect's not a great word for for what Kelly's got going on at that surf ranch. It's more, I mean, that thing is flawless.

• 28:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Travis, so a perfect wave does exist?

• 28:05Speaker 04

  In the eyes of the surfer, yeah, I think. Depends on what surfer you're talking, though, to. If you want a big barreling wave, that's for one surfer-

• 28:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it sounds like you just dial up what kind of wave he wants, ultimately.

• 28:17Speaker 04

  The cool part about the engineering that they're developing out there is you can manipulate the wave and how it breaks.

• 28:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, can you tell everybody what a soliton is?

• 28:24Speaker 04

  So a soliton is an isolated disturbance that propagates freely where the waveform itself, the shape of the wave, doesn't change. And that has unique nonlinear processes that allow it to transfer through other waves without changing as well.

• 28:38Chuck Nice?

  Now, can you say that again in English?

• 28:41Speaker 04

  So this single wave that has a very unique shape is driven by their pool and has the ability to just break exactly how they want to due to the fact of how it's generated.

• 28:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Soliton.

• 28:56Chuck Nice?

  Soliton.

• 28:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You idiot.

• 28:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Doug, you didn't get that?

• 29:00Chuck Nice?

  Oh no, I just was doing it for the people at home.

• 29:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, is it hard to do what he's doing there?

• 29:07Speaker 04

  So, the first man-made soliton was made in 1834 by this scientist who was pulling a cart down a canal with his horses and he abruptly stopped them and the soliton shot off the front of the bow of the boat that he was towing down the canal. And it ran on and on and on and he chased it with his horse and saw it continuously move on. It sparked a bunch of curiosity. He went home and built a wave channel and started to study these things.

• 29:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So those goods never got delivered on the canal?

• 29:34Speaker 04

  I think he got them.

• 29:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because physics mattered first, right?

• 29:38Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 29:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Bill, would you go surf at Kelly's Ranch?

• 29:43Speaker 03

  Oh yeah. Nobody has made an artificial wave that even comes close to this thing he's come up with. I remember when he sort of pulled the curtain back a couple of years ago and they've been working on this for many years and he pulled it back and we all saw what it was and it was a major shock in surfing world, like an earthquake. I have a friend who's a surf historian who says that...

• 30:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a thing?

• 30:10Speaker 03

  That's a thing. He's the one, named Matt Warshaw. Anyway, he says that, you know, everything in surfing now will have happened BP or AP, before pool or after pool.

• 30:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh. So is this because you can now train and hone your skills on a repeatable wave?

• 30:32Speaker 03

  There is that. I mean, this park, this incredible technology he's come up with, hasn't been replicated. I mean, it's just that place in Central Valley of California, so it's not, you know, implemented yet. But no, it's because, I mean, it's the philosophical challenge, you know, that philosophy interests surfers, as you guys know, and... It's not the ocean and yet it's this dream wave. Uh, it's, it's flawless, which nothing in the ocean is.

• 31:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now clearly some effort went into building this. So, so Travis, is this a PhD thesis right there?

• 31:09Speaker 04

  I, I think it's a great PhD thesis.

• 31:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's your PhD thesis on now?

• 31:13Speaker 04

  I'm studying how the ocean interacts with islands. So out in the tropical Pacific, we look at how...

• 31:19Chuck Nice?

  Well, good luck and I hope you get it in in the next few years 'cause there ain't gonna be no islands soon.

• 31:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So had this come up, would you have switched your topic early enough to, to...

• 31:30Speaker 04

  I'm an engineer by training and this is actually what I wanted to go to college for when I first started out. When I was 17, I wanted to go to college to develop artificial surfing waves. So it's cool to like be a part of this and talk about this kind of wave now.

• 31:41Chuck Nice?

  You have just told us why this is the greatest country on the face of the earth. I wanted to go to college so that I could actually make artificial waves. No place else in the world will you hear somebody say that.

• 31:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you can ask, how might that engineering work in this secret facility? But this is StarTalk. We don't have to guess because we bring in the expertise when we need it. So right now we have on video call wave designer Adam Fitchin, standing by live right now. Adam!

• 32:19Speaker 05

  Hey! How you doing?

• 32:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Adam, you're chief scientist.

• 32:25Speaker 05

  Good to see you guys.

• 32:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, thanks for being on StarTalk. You're chief scientist for the Kelly Slater Wave Company? That's a thing?

• 32:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's a, that's a job that is available sometimes. I mean, there's one thing about being a wave designer and the other thing is about being a wave generator or wave creator. So you can't design something, it's like your Levi's. You need the base model before you get to design a model. So first was to generate a wave and then start tweaking it, i.e. designing it.

• 32:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so this is, so it's not only the, the math and the physics, you gotta actually make, make the machine to do it. But why, why is it so hard?

• 33:09Speaker 05

  Well, you know, there's a lot of things, a lot of things. First off, these type of processes are not easy to scale. So you might produce a very beautiful little wave in your laboratory, and it looks pretty, and you wish you were small. But to bring it up to full size takes several things. You need to be able to scale it. And then, the engineering feat, you're moving thousands of tons of water in a very short period of time. And water is heavy. So the engineering is heavy, large-scale engineering. And then, the costs. This costs a lot of money to do this, so it's not something that many people will be given the opportunity

• 33:52Speaker 05

  to take a risk without being sure of the science.

• 33:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So just to emphasize this challenge, which is not unique to wave design, there are a lot of things where you can make it look good in a laboratory, a smaller scale model. And when you scale it up, the forces interact slightly differently, so you don't get to reproduce what looks so good in the lab. Yeah, so exactly how does it work? Or will you have to kill us all if you told us that?

• 34:20Speaker 05

  Well, you know, we've been working on this for more than 10 years, probably 12 years now. And we have a dozen or so patents to back it up. But if after the show, I see you clearing land in your backyard, we might have to have a stern talk.

• 34:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Adam, thank you for sharing your expertise with us tonight on Startalk.

• 34:45Speaker 05

  Okay, thank you.

• 34:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 34:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, coming up, pro surfer Kelly Slater explains how to survive even the worst wave wipeout. When Startalk returns.

• 35:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk from the American Museum of Natural History, right here in New York City. We're featuring my interview with pro surfer Kelly Slater. And I asked him about surviving a wipeout on a humongoid wave. Let's check it out.

• 35:25Speaker 02

  One of my friends, who's one of the craziest big wave guys in the world, an Australian guy named Ross Clark Jones.

• 35:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was gonna say, of course he's Australian.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  Anyway, well, he had this interview where they asked him about falling and what happened on this one wave. And the waves are about 50, 60 foot faces this day. And somebody said something to him like, you know, what happens when you fall on that kind of wave or whatever? And he goes, oh, well, you know, he goes, it's kind of like you're just enjoying the ride. And then you have a whole different kind of ride and you got to enjoy that one too. So, you know, the idea being that-

• 35:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's all in the attitude.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  Well, it is because you got to keep your heart rate down. And so the more calm you are, the more confident you are in not only your own abilities physically. You're trained up and ready for that, even for a bad situation where you maybe get the air knocked out of you. And you understand you still have oxygen in your red blood cells and you're not going to die. You know, you just got to relax and keep your heartbeat down as much as you can. You kind of got to go to a happy place.

• 36:25Speaker 02

  But there's a dissipation of energy, you know? The wave breaks and as soon as it does, it's spreading that energy out. And it kind of keeps, it almost sort of keeps breaking in a circular fashion until it gets smaller, smaller and smaller. And then, so you're just kind of waiting. That energy is very rarely going to keep you with it going at the speed of the wave. Because you have, you know, the water slowing you down or whatever. So that energy is moving away from you. And you're hoping you're not trapped in sort of a vortex of energy. And if you are, you still got to just kind of wait it out.

• 36:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's never good to be trapped in a vortex of energy.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  No.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  Depends. Could be good energy, could be positive energy.

• 37:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whether or not it's an ocean wave-

• 37:06Speaker 02

  Could be spiritual.

• 37:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or in the cosmos.

• 37:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you agree it's not good to be trapped in a vortex?

• 37:14Speaker 03

  My real fear is, uh, my worst fear is of, uh, what we call a two-wave hold down. You know, where you're being held down by usually a bigger wave, extra long, until the next wave comes, you still haven't made it back to the surface, and the next wave breaks over you.

• 37:31Chuck Nice?

  Down, down again.

• 37:33Speaker 03

  And you just stay under it for that amount of time. I mean, I mean, people survive two-wave hold downs, but, um, but I mean, I think even the people who survive them who don't drown think while they're happening that they're going to drown.

• 37:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So can you guys control your heart rate the way Kelly asserted?

• 37:50Speaker 04

  I think if you're underwater for long enough, you don't really have a choice. Or you might panic, but the, the choice is calm down and wait, or freak out.

• 37:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How do you calm down? What does that even mean?

• 37:59Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. First of all, it's not my heart rate I'm worried about. It's about, it's my loss of sphincter control, quite frankly.

• 38:06Chuck Nice?

  Messing up my wet suit.

• 38:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, I'm just curious to say, well, you're now in a sort of mixed master, uh, crashing wave, but keep your heart rate down. How's that even possible?

• 38:19Speaker 03

  Don't you think you can slow your heart down when you're scared in big waves? I mean, there are times when you can't, you're panicking, and then it gets more serious, I find, and I just get really, really methodical.

• 38:36Speaker 04

  I think it's when you accept that you're in an area where you have to do that, it's when you're, you can actually calm yourself down.

• 38:42Chuck Nice?

  Which is what he's talking about. So what you're saying is you make peace with death.

• 38:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What he's saying, that is what he's saying.

• 38:49Chuck Nice?

  On the spot.

• 38:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right. And then if you come out, that's fine.

• 38:53Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 38:53Speaker 04

  As Kelly said, you go for the next ride, and you know that it's gonna eventually end, but you just hang out for a minute.

• 38:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I'm just curious, when you have wiped out? Is it just total turbulence down there?

• 39:05Speaker 04

  It's incredibly turbulent. So there's a couple of things that are happening when you wipe out. First, you saw when somebody falls on a wave that big. Again, this is way outside of my zone of surfing. But when somebody falls on a wave that big, they skip off the surface first, so that knocks the wind out of your lungs. That's really fast. And then you get driven down deep in the ocean in the super turbulent area. Whitewater, that whole white mess where the wave breaks, is much less dense than the regular ocean water.

• 39:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you can't propel yourself through it?

• 39:34Speaker 04

  Exactly. So you can't really swim very well. And so that's why you really have to relax. Because until the aeration in the water dissipates, you can't really swim to the surface anyway. So you'll grab your leash and ride your tombstoning surfboard back up sometimes because you're just...

• 39:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So is there a competition that involves just big wave surfing, rather than just maneuvering on smaller waves?

• 39:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's a whole series now, a whole circuit that the World Surf League does that's just focused on big waves. They did a contest very recently at Piari in Hawaii, which is also called Jaws a couple of weeks ago.

• 40:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jaws? What's the biggest wave ever surfed?

• 40:11Speaker 04

  Biggest wave ever surfed? You might know this better than I?

• 40:13Speaker 03

  Oh, there's so much hype around that, as you can imagine.

• 40:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's like, how big was the fish you caught?

• 40:20Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 40:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 40:21Speaker 03

  And it's, I mean, the perspective of the observer makes a huge difference. And how you manage, I mean, I'm sure you've got a scientific way to measure wave size, but surfers do not.

• 40:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you guys say surfing is hard, but like, I had some evidence that maybe it's not as hard as they say.

• 40:39Speaker 03

  Ooh.

• 40:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I asked world champion Kelly Slater about this. About this very clear evidence that maybe it's easier than they think. Check it out.

• 40:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's this with the surfing chihuahuas? You know, there's always a YouTube...

• 40:55Speaker 02

  I have a chihuahua?

• 40:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With a lap dog surfing.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  I have a chihuahua, and she hates the water. I mean, it's like kryptonite. She just hates the water.

• 41:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying, if a dog can surf, how hard could it be what you're doing?

• 41:07Speaker 02

  That's not hard at all.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  I mean, look, there's flat-earthers doing, doing science. How hard can that be? Come on.

• 41:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's so cool. We've been talking about the science of surfing. And right now, we have a dispatch on this topic from my good friend, Bill Nye. Check it out.

• 41:33Bill Nye?

  Yo Neil, catch a wave on one of these things and you're sitting on top of the world. And we surfers say that because of the feeling we get when we borrow a bit of energy from the ocean and make it our own. When a wave passes through water, a boat or a buoy will bob. They'll move up and down a bit. But when a wave reaches the beach, the slope of the beach makes that wave curl over, hurling tons of sea at the sand. The joy! So, if a surfer boy or surfer girl can get on top of that wave, gravity will carry them to the shore. This works because a surfboard floats. But once in motion across the face of a wave,

• 42:18Bill Nye?

  the surfboard gets up on a plane. The combined motion, forward and forward, pushes a considerable amount of seawater down. And that exchange of energy with the ocean makes for transcendent transportation. Surf's up! Back to you Neil!

• 42:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I recently learned that Bill is a bona fide surfer. I didn't know that. And in his garage at home, well, he has two homes, because he works both in New York and LA, he's got a whole lineup of surfboards. Apparently, one is not enough. You need a few, right?

• 42:55Speaker 02

  You need a whole quiver.

• 42:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A quiver?

• 42:57Speaker 02

  Nice. Look at that.

• 42:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or just pull one out.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  Like they're arrows.

• 43:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'm just curious, there's a lot of science in this. Is, is studying the science just an excuse to get closer to the wave?

• 43:11Speaker 04

  I think studying waves is really important for ocean sciences. The ocean and the atmosphere talk to each other via waves.

• 43:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  More than.

• 43:21Speaker 03

  Talking.

• 43:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They talk to one another.

• 43:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, they talk. And the reason, or the big idea behind the way that they talk now is the waves are the means by which we transfer momentum into the ocean and how we transfer gases. And so to understand how we're going to live through future climates, we have to understand how waves talk to the ocean via the wind.

• 43:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Phil, your book Barbarian Days, The Surfing Life, Pulitzer Prize winning. I'm not even mentioning that it was like a New York Times bestseller, because who cares if it won a Pulitzer Prize? What makes surfing transcendent?

• 43:57Speaker 03

  Ooh, that's a good question. Well, there are those peak moments we've been talking about, you know, great barrel rides and it's transcendent is a good word for the fact that you can have an experience so thrilling, you know, so moving, so kind of rapturous, just on any given day off an ordinary patch of coast. But I really think that most people who surf don't do it for those peak moments. It's much more, you know, the practice in the Buddhist sense. I know you know what I mean.

• 44:37Speaker 03

  I mean, just the doing it every day, you know, kind of in all conditions and the way that makes you feel both on the day and sort of over the long haul.

• 44:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, in this final clip, I asked pro surfer Kelly Slater about the deeper meaning he gets from riding an ocean wave. Check it out.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  Surfing to people who dedicate their lives to it, it's a profound experience, you know, it is a spiritual experience for us. And I don't know that you necessarily need to be spectacularly good at it for, to have those experiences yourself.

• 45:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Have those feelings.

• 45:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, have those feelings, yeah. So, I mean, I only know what it feels like for myself, but it just feels so natural. It just, it feels like when I surf and it's all linking up, it just feels like I was meant to do that, you know, more than anything else.

• 45:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Born to do that.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  Born to do that, yeah.

• 45:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've actually had people say to me, they didn't want to learn too much about how stars work, because that might distract them from their appreciation of the beauty of a sunset. And my reply, in every case, is, "It does not distract from the sunset, it enhances it."

• 46:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, the beauty of a sunset, there's art and majesty to that. But there's also

• 46:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  strength of knowledge to understand what's actually going on inside of the sun. And this juxtaposition

• 46:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  of the machinery that's behind what is making what is beautiful

• 46:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  is something that plays out all around us, not only on Earth but across the universe. So when I see people wax poetic about surfing, and especially when they know what kind of physics and engineering and mathematics underpins it,

• 46:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  they are taking that sport, they are taking that activity to another level. And I'm reminded of a poem.

• 47:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll read to you now. It's called "The Learned Astronomer."

• 47:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  "When I heard the learned astronomer, when the proofs, the figures, were arranged in columns before me, when I was shown the charts and diagrams to add, divide, and measure them, when I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured to much applause in the lecture room, how soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick, till, rising and gliding out, I wandered off by myself into the mystical moist night air, and from time to time looked up in perfect silence at the stars."

• 47:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass. This is a poet who came to recognize, yeah, you can have columns of numbers describing the universe, you can even embrace that. You can go outside and embrace the universe that way, but it is the juxtaposition of the two that is truly transcendent.

• 48:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that is a cosmic perspective. You've been watching StarTalk. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.