Things You Thought You Knew - Big Bang Dilemma

Are we rethinking the Big Bang? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice explore features of the James Webb Space Telescope, magnetism and how the aurora borealis works, and if the Big Bang is being debunked.

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?

  Chuck.

• 0:15Chuck Nice?

  Yes, what's up?

• 0:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's time for a Things You Thought You Knew.

• 0:20Chuck Nice?

  Well, right on.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Episode of StarTalk.

• 0:24Chuck Nice?

  Or if we actually said it from my perspective, Stuff You About to Learn.

• 0:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stuff you never knew.

• 0:32Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, because you know damn well you didn't know it before. There was nowhere you thought you knew.

• 0:39Chuck Nice?

  So now it's just Stuff You About to Learn.

• 0:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have three whole segments, and each one is fresh and different of Things You Thought You Knew. So let's start.

• 0:49Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 0:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a feature of the James Webb Space Telescope that I haven't seen talked about much. People only just think of it as some next big telescope that's out there in space, bringing us badass images. But there's certain engineering, scientific features that are unique with it, that I think are worth calling out.

• 1:09Chuck Nice?

  Okay, that sounds good.

• 1:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, if you can hang with me on this, all right? Allow me to remind us that unlike Hubble, which orbited Earth 360 miles up, this thing is parked a million miles away in the opposite direction of the sun from the Earth.

• 1:32Chuck Nice?

  It's pretty wild.

• 1:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, yeah, and so I say parked. We're all, it and the Earth are orbiting the sun together. And so, so basically, if you look back in the Earth's direction, the sun will always be there.

• 1:47Chuck Nice?

  So it's, it's using the Earth as sunblock?

• 1:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it has some motion where it is, okay? But it's not going to drift away from that location, even though there is some movement within the location.

• 2:02Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 2:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The point is, occasionally, Earth will block the sun.

• 2:05Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 2:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But the value of this is, you always know which way the sun is.

• 2:11Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 2:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At all times.

• 2:13Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 2:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's behind you, okay? Right. All right? I'm looking out. The only way to take good pictures. And what they say like, hey. Good one, yeah, that's true. Get the sun behind you. That's right, that's right. So that everyone is squinting as they look in the camera. Exactly, right.

• 2:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's funny. So, so by the way, when I was a kid, you know, home movies had these really bright lights. Yep. Right? And you could barely open your eyes when they were doing this. You know why the lights were so bright? No, no. Because the film wasn't that sensitive. You know, if you took a, if you took a photo of, just with a regular handheld camera. Right. You can adjust the exposure to let more light come in. Right. And then properly expose the film. Right. But in video, going however many frames a second. Every frame is its own photo. Right. Okay? And you need enough light in that fraction of a second to create the image. So when you come indoors, you had to bring out the floodlights.

• 3:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And for the old timers will remember this. Young folks would say, Daddy, what the hell is that? What? Exactly, right. Did we not pay the electric bill again? What is happening? So, uh, but in there is some wisdom because what it says is, if you're gonna take a picture of something that's dim, you either have to illuminate it yourself, which we really can't do for the early universe. That doesn't work. Or you can take a long exposure to allow the light to accumulate. But while you're taking that long exposure, you can't jiggle the camera. It has to be perfectly stationary. We can't take a flash picture of the outer universe. So we have to open the exposure for a long time. Okay, so now watch.

• 4:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, different. Bands of the electromagnetic spectrum tell us different things about the universe. Alright, so if you're gonna do that, you need telescopes that specialize in the chosen band. And by the way, we didn't even know light came in bands other than visible light. Somebody had to discover that.

• 4:25Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 4:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, just think about it. Why would you have any inkling? Why would you believe at all?

• 4:33Chuck Nice?

  That there's an X-ray.

• 4:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That there was a kind of light out there that your eyes could not detect.

• 4:37Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 4:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Especially if you're religious, right? If you're religious, what God made humans, that we have eyeballs to see light. And how could there possibly be something we can't see? Alright, so there's certain expectations of who and what we are as a life form that were completely overrun the day infrared light was discovered.

• 4:58Chuck Nice?

  Hmm.

• 4:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and did I tell you how they discovered infrared? Did I tell you?

• 5:03Chuck Nice?

  Uh huh, but...

• 5:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was, did, did William Herschel discovered it.

• 5:08Chuck Nice?

  Never mind, tell the story.

• 5:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, no, real quick, okay?

• 5:11Chuck Nice?

  I was thinking of something else. I'm like, okay, wait a minute.

• 5:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, William Herschel discovered it, and how'd he do it? He, he knew that Isaac Newton figured out that white light is composed of colors.

• 5:23Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 5:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He just passed it through a prism and it breaks it apart. So, he repeated this experiment. You put a little slit of light in your room, but the whole room has to be dark so that only the spectrum shows up. Alright, and you pass it through a triangle prism. You get a rainbow on your table. And there it is, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. And he had the foresight to ask the question, "I wonder if the different colors of light have different temperatures."

• 5:52Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, we're all...

• 5:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to even ask that question.

• 5:55Chuck Nice?

  It's a pretty, uh, pretty impressive question.

• 5:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Think about that. It's a simple question, maybe retrospectively obvious, but at the time... Okay, so what does he do? He has a thermometer and puts it in each of the different colors of light. But wait a minute, you need a control thermometer. So he took his control thermometer, put it off to the side, just to the, just to the side of the red. Okay, so that was not in the spectrum. All right, and that would presumably just measure room temperature. All right, but it was still on the table where he was measuring the rest of the temperatures. Your control has to have a minimum of variation other than the one thing you want to change. Okay, so the thermometer is on the table, but just off to the side.

• 6:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so there he is, he's measuring the temperature of blue and red and yellow. And what he's finding is that the thermometer off to the side is consistently measuring higher temperature than all the rest of the thermometers. All the rest of the readings that he was taking. And he said WTF, I'm sure that's what he said, okay?

• 7:01Chuck Nice?

  Yes, exactly.

• 7:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I am sure.

• 7:03Chuck Nice?

  And right after that, he went OMG.

• 7:09Chuck Nice?

  OMG WTF.

• 7:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so he publishes this paper. And it's just, it's beautiful in how he's tiptoeing around a discovery. Because he doesn't really know, he said, could there be light? That is unfit for vision.

• 7:35Chuck Nice?

  Unfit for vision.

• 7:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is how he described it.

• 7:38Chuck Nice?

  That's a great description too.

• 7:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he does this enough and he's, I think I've discovered light unfit for vision. You're damn right you did, and it was, it's light below the red and what do we call it?

• 7:48Chuck Nice?

  Infrared. Wow.

• 7:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 7:50Chuck Nice?

  And it's so funny, you still see the hubris of human existence there. It's unfit for vision, not we can't see it.

• 8:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We blind.

• 8:04Chuck Nice?

  Right, exactly.

• 8:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's got the problem.

• 8:07Chuck Nice?

  It's got the problem. Not us.

• 8:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's unfit for us.

• 8:10Chuck Nice?

  It's unfit for vision.

• 8:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I hadn't thought about it that way. Very good. So, so it turns out, so that's just an interesting sort of discovery experiment. And then we would learn, well, if that exists, maybe other bands of light exist. And so thus thereafter, we would discover ultraviolet, um, um, uh, microwaves, radio waves, X-rays, and each have their moment in the sun, so to speak. And that fills out the entire, what we call electromagnetic spectrum. Only a small fraction is visible light. And so, so now you're gonna say, what in the universe gives off infrared light? And you find out that things that have kinda any temperature at all will radiate in the infrared. Okay?

• 8:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, so for example, if you have an electric stove and you put it on low and turn out all the lights, can you see it? No.

• 9:01Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not if it's on low.

• 9:02Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 9:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you put your hand on it, you'll burn your hand. Okay?

• 9:06Chuck Nice?

  Tell me about it.

• 9:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Something is coming out of the stove.

• 9:10Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's not, it's unfit for vision, right? It's infrared light. Okay? And when the thing gets hot enough, it's not only giving off infrared, it'll begin to also give off visible light.

• 9:22Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? But if the thing is cool enough, it's primarily only gonna be giving you infrared. Suppose you wanna see infrared, alright? And by the way, infrared doesn't make it very nicely through Earth's atmosphere.

• 9:33Chuck Nice?

  Hmm.

• 9:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know how you know this? Because we have greenhouse gases that trap the infrared that is down here. Okay?

• 9:41Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, the greenhouse effect are molecules that have a special relationship with infrared. And there's the ground trying to radiate infrared back into space. It said, no, you don't. And it sends it back down and accumulates. Okay? So, here's the cool thing about the James Webb Telescope. It has a special reflective surface on its mirrors

• 10:05Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  that are tuned to reflect infrared with very high efficiency. That's number one. Reflect and focus. Number two, if you're trying to detect something that is a very low temperature... What happens if you have a temperature and you're the detector? You end up detecting yourself.

• 10:25Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 10:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can't have that.

• 10:28Chuck Nice?

  I went searching for the universe and all I found was me.

• 10:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so you need a way to cool the telescope. So we could send up cryogenic liquids and things, but they would eventually evaporate or gain temperature. So what we figured out to do, we, not I, the engineers who were tasked with this, that telescope has a series of thermal baffles between it and the sun. All right? And so those, just take a look at any photo of the full telescope deployed. These, they're basically screened, they're like sheets that are, that are put up, a series of them in the row. So sunlight comes and hits one of them.

• 11:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It reflects some back. Others get absorbed and gets retransmitted to the next sheet, but that gets resent back. There's this multiple, triple reflections. And at each layer, the amount of heat from the sun is dramatically dropped. Okay? Dramatically. By the time it comes out the other side, it's barely there at all. And so the temperature of the telescope can now drop to what is basically the temperature of deep space without any influence of sunlight increasing its, its body temperature, if you will.

• 11:57Chuck Nice?

  That's wild.

• 11:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Totally wild. So now the James Webb Space Telescope can observe deep in the infrared part of the spectrum.

• 12:05Chuck Nice?

  That's amazing.

• 12:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it can.

• 12:07Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so there you have it.

• 12:09Chuck Nice?

  That.

• 12:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A little primer on infrared and infrared telescopes and how that works.

• 12:14Chuck Nice?

  Well, there you go, people. I hope you're paying attention because you're going to be at a cocktail party where this is going to come in very, very handy. I plan on using it this weekend, I'm telling you right now.

• 12:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's that skirt for on the outer edge of the telescope? There it is.

• 12:32Chuck Nice?

  I suppose you didn't realize that there were baffles that actually filtered the sunlight in such a way that cools the telescope, so that we're able to register the infrared without registering the heat from the telescope itself. Yes, this is the kind of stuff you learn when you're an extremely smart individual. By the way, off with you. Okay.

• 12:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why you don't have any friends left at your party, right?

• 12:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Chuck, we gotta take a break, but when we come back, more things you thought you knew on StarTalk.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Chris Cohen from Hallworth, New Jersey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. Please enjoy this episode of StarTalk Radio with your and my favorite personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 13:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to Things You Thought You Knew. I got a doozy for you here, Chuck.

• 13:38Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 13:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you seated? Are you ready?

• 13:40Chuck Nice?

  You know, I am seated. I know I'm short, Neil, but I am seated.

• 13:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. All right, here it goes. So you might have heard intermittently, every now and then, that Earth's poles will flip. Have you ever heard? You've heard that, right?

• 13:59Chuck Nice?

  I've heard people say it.

• 14:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Say it. Well, thank you for clarifying that, right? Right? And clarifying that it's not what is true, it's what people say or think is true. These are not always the same thing. So...

• 14:13Chuck Nice?

  Right, right.

• 14:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it was especially bandied about when we were approaching not only the year 2000, but also the year 2012. But every 10 years, people band together and wanted to clear that the world is about to end based on some cosmic force. I'm intrigued. I think that people need followers. If you're the one saying the world's gonna end and no one else is, people will think you have special knowledge, and then you become sort of this guru of prognostication. So let me just make it clear that Earth's rotation axis with Santa Claus at the top is not flipping. That is a completely stable configuration. We bob up and down a little bit, okay?

• 14:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On our spinning axis, we not only precess, which is a fancy word for wobble. Okay, we wobble, if you ever played with a top. As the top slows down, you see it wobble. Uh, but also we bob up and down. Okay? And they all happen on very different time scales. But none of them involve a flipping of Earth's axis. And north and south. However, what does flip are the magnetic poles. Ah. The magnetic poles. Now, let me just nip something in the bud here. Okay, just so you know. Uh, you're old enough to have probably used a compass in your life when you were a kid. Oh, yeah. Okay.

• 15:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, which way does the compass always point? North is what they say. Okay, so that's, that's, that's correct. And it, it points to the north magnetic pole. All right? Right. Which, by the way, does not exactly align with Santa Claus. All right? Okay. It's, there's, by the way, there are things in the universe where the, it's almost at 90 degrees to each other. So there's, there's nothing specially, it's, it's no cosmic prerequisite that they perfectly align in the spinning object. All right? So in our case, they don't align. The north pole is sitting somewhere in northern Canada. All right? So if you're trying to find Santa Claus with a compass and you're in northern Canada, you're gonna land in the wrong spot. Oh, wow, okay. Just to be clear about that.

• 16:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No wonder we can't find him. It's funny. You didn't get your presents. You didn't get your presents this year. That's why he's so good. Yeah. You didn't get your pony. Yeah, exactly. I can't find this. You gonna pay what you owe, Santa.

• 16:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so it'll find the north magnetic pole. All right? So, that thing that's pointing there is the north pole of the compass needle. The compass needle is itself a magnet with a north and a south pole. Now, here's, here's a little-known fact. Okay? Uh, what can you tell me about north and south poles of a magnet? Take two magnets together, what do they do?

• 17:08Chuck Nice?

  Well, you know, they repel each other if it's the same pole.

• 17:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which repels? What repels?

• 17:13Chuck Nice?

  So north to north and south to south.

• 17:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They each repel each other, correct?

• 17:17Chuck Nice?

  They repel each other, right, yeah.

• 17:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Light charges repel.

• 17:19Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 17:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So wait a minute, if the needle of a compass that says north on it points to the north pole, shouldn't it be

• 17:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  pointing in the opposite direction?

• 17:35Chuck Nice?

  Right, it should be repelled and pointing down.

• 17:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, except it's not, it's attracted, which tells you that Earth's south magnetic pole is in the north. Because the north part of all magnets point in that direction.

• 17:49Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 17:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't even know that.

• 17:53Chuck Nice?

  No, and you know, like, here's the thing, you already, you, what you did was you took the empirical and put it first. And then you said the ridiculous thing afterwards. So now, what am I left to do? I'm like, well, he already proved it. So what am I gonna do, like?

• 18:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's pre-approved.

• 18:14Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I can't be, I can't say like, yeah, right, whatever, you know.

• 18:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, because you're already with me on it.

• 18:21Chuck Nice?

  Exactly, I was like, yes, absolutely, right.

• 18:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Demonstrate this. They don't tell you that in the Boy Scouts.

• 18:27Chuck Nice?

  No, they don't.

• 18:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That the Earth's south magnetic pole is in the north, which is why all north poles of magnets point there.

• 18:34Chuck Nice?

  Sorry, little Tommy, but you're screwed.

• 18:37Chuck Nice?

  Your compass is lying to you.

• 18:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your compass concept of reality is off.

• 18:42Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 18:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By 180 degrees. Alright, so here's what happens. We have a magnetic field because our core is fluid, alright? All the heavy stuff when Earth was molten, heavy stuff fell to the middle, and the heavy stuff is the iron. And the light stuff, which is the rocks, floated to the top. Okay? And we don't think of rocks as light. But it's much lighter than metal. All right, and so all the metals, nearly all the metals went to the core. Some got frozen in place as we have these ores, these veins of ores. As Earth is solidifying, it didn't fall down fast enough and it got frozen in place.

• 19:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There are other occasions where volcanoes can redistribute material from below and put it up in the crust. But basically, most of Earth's iron is in our core. And it's hot. And so the iron is molten and we have molten and you're spinning. You have moving magnetically, uh, chargeable metals. Okay, iron is magnetizable. When you have moving metal, you create what's called a dynamo. And in a dynamo, you basically create a magnetic field from scratch. Wow. That's why old, dead planets that have cooled do not have magnetic fields. Right. Okay, they don't, they don't have magnetic field.

• 20:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like Mars, no magnetic field to speak of. Okay, because it's, it's cooled faster than Earth did. It's smaller, so cool, if you're smaller, you will cool faster. And so, no, there's not, you don't have these, this churning. Uh, by the way, Mars once did, for sure. Mars has the largest known volcano in the solar system. Okay, so Mars used to be hot on the inside, but that's called Olympus Mons. All right, makes our volcanoes look like molehills, by the way. It's huge. Anyhow, the, the point I'm getting at here is the dynamo goes through cycles. Okay. And it goes, it goes, it goes stronger, then it goes weaker, and it flips. Got you.

• 20:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so every half million years or so, the magnetic field of Earth has flipped. Period. Okay, that's pretty wild. Okay, yeah, it's, it's, it's fascinating. And while it's flipping, it actually goes to zero and then recovers coming out the other side.

• 21:09Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so then that makes me ask, what does the magnetic field of Earth do for Earth and do for us?

• 21:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Other than give compasses a meaning in life?

• 21:21Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, other than confuse, um, Boy Scouts who don't understand that, that the compass should be pointing in the opposite direction.

• 21:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Einstein was quite intrigued by a compass, that some mysterious force, that you can't see, touch, smell, or taste, is forcing the needle to move. And he was very intrigued by that as a child. So I think we'd be thankful that we had compasses back. If it was just GPS with a handheld device finding north, I think maybe Einstein would, you know, he might have gone on to play basketball or something. Who knows?

• 21:55Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 21:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who knows what career he might have had? So actually, that's the opposite of a Gary Larson comic. That's where I got that idea from. There's a picture of Einstein on a basketball court.

• 22:07Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 22:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like dribbling, right? And it said, uh, "Albert Einstein, uh, in school was destined to be, to be, uh, you know, all-star basketball player until an ankle injury." Sent him into his physics books.

• 22:21Chuck Nice?

  That's funny.

• 22:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so the point is that, so the magnetic field has flipped. And what the magnetic field does when it's operating is it creates a magnetic shield around Earth, if you will. And when charged particles come from the sun, the solar wind, we call it.

• 22:39Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 22:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, they see this magnetic field and they spiral down towards the poles.

• 22:44Chuck Nice?

  Uh-huh.

• 22:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or go towards the magnetic poles. And as they spiral down, they careen into air molecules. And if you have two molecules that collide with each other, energy gets exchanged. Okay, so your, your energy of motion gets boosted into the energy inside the molecule itself. So you've excited the molecule. Then on its own timetable, like fractions of a second, it de-excites and then radiates visible light.

• 23:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So wait a minute, what is that? Oh, I know what that is. That's the aurora.

• 23:14Chuck Nice?

  That's pretty wild.

• 23:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The aurora borealis that's in the north. And take a, take a gander what it's called in the south?

• 23:22Chuck Nice?

  Um, the, oh, let me see. Um, the southern aurora borealis.

• 23:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, thank you, Chuck.

• 23:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I'm okay with that. No, it's the aurora australis.

• 23:37Chuck Nice?

  The aurora australis.

• 23:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Australis, right. Because it's symmetric, right? You have a north pole and a south pole. So we make a big deal of our own aurora because ninety percent of the human population of the world lives north of the equator. So, so we get aurora. So there it is. And, and we know the field is flipped. You know why? Because you can see volcanic plains where iron came out and the iron aligned with the magnetic field when it froze in place. And you compare this from different generations of volcanic eruptions and you can see the flipping of the orientation of the, of the iron particles.

• 24:20Chuck Nice?

  That is.

• 24:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's, it's remarkable.

• 24:22Chuck Nice?

  That is really outstanding. That's pretty wild because, yeah, the, the, the, the mag- It's a magnet. So it's metal and a magnet and it's actually, um, um, uh-

• 24:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's doing its thing.

• 24:36Chuck Nice?

  Succumbing to the properties of mag- of magnetism.

• 24:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct, correct. And if Earth is helping that out, it's gonna align them when it freezes out of the volcanic flow. So, yeah, no, it's, it's pretty cool stuff and it all comes together. And by the way, this involved like astrophysicists and geologists and there's, plus there was a worry, if we don't have a magnetic field, right? That means the charged particles come straight into us and don't get directed to the poles. Would that be bad for life on Earth? So it might be, you might think it would be, but there are no particularly striking extinction episodes.

• 25:12Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 25:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At, at the times when the-

• 25:14Chuck Nice?

  When, when it flips and it goes to zero.

• 25:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, there's no, there's no, we've, we've, by the way, animals are going extinct all the time, especially now because humans have a, have their hand in this process.

• 25:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're told it's the sixth extinction, really.

• 25:27Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 25:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Uh, so, um- So yeah, that's in case you didn't know that your compass points south.

• 25:35Chuck Nice?

  That's great.

• 25:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, we've got to take a quick break, but when we come back, more Things You Thought You Knew on StarTalk.

• 25:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, we're back.

• 25:56Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 25:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Things You Thought You Knew. All right, so I got something for you. So it's not so much a thing you thought you knew, but it's... I have to address something that I think we've seen in the news. You know, every six months goes by and then you see a headline, "Oh, does astrophysicists have to rethink the Big Bang?"

• 26:17Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 26:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  "Big Bang is debunked," or...

• 26:20Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 26:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or... Did you see any of these at any time?

• 26:23Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my God. Well, recently, the James Webb Space Telescope, supposedly, the headline is, "Did the James Webb Telescope make scientists think the Big Bang?" Or, "Has the James Webb Telescope debunked the Big Bang?"

• 26:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it makes excellent clickbait.

• 26:43Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 26:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is. It's clickbait headline. So let me just explain a few things that's going on here, okay? On the frontier of scientific research, it is a bloody place. Right? Ideas are slain.

• 27:01Chuck Nice?

  Two scientists enter. One scientist leaves.

• 27:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the octagon.

• 27:09Chuck Nice?

  Welcome to Science Dome!

• 27:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On the frontier, ideas are contested daily.

• 27:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And most ideas turn out to be wrong. All right, so what you are as a scientist working on the frontier, you're in this idea factory.

• 27:29Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what you are. And you want to...

• 27:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The successful idea is not the one that's argued most strenuously, or argued by the most articulate.

• 27:41Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's called politeness.

• 27:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's called politeness. Exactly, exactly. It has nothing to do with either of those. It has to do with evidence. All right, which idea is supported by evidence? So typically what happens is you can test your ideas. And here's where you have to be convincing. You have to say, I, I think my idea is better than your idea. And here's a way to test it.

• 28:05Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 28:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Boom. So I have, I have an idea. So if you don't like me, the way you show it is you design an experiment to show I'm wrong.

• 28:14Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's some cutthroat nasty stuff right there.

• 28:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's, it's nasty. All right.

• 28:19Chuck Nice?

  That's some real housewives stuff.

• 28:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Real housewives.

• 28:28Chuck Nice?

  Let me tell you something, Phaedra. Your hypothesis is trash. Trash.

• 28:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Uh, you don't like me and you're gonna show me that I'm wrong. And so you go home and you invent an experiment. You invent an experiment to test my idea.

• 28:47Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 28:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With the objective of showing that I'm wrong. And it turns out, hey, wait a minute. I'm getting what the dude says.

• 28:53Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 28:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You gotta publish that.

• 28:55Chuck Nice?

  I'm picking up what you're putting down.

• 28:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but, but performs another kind of experiment aimed at testing the same hypothesis. And they get kind of the same result. And then someone from a different country with a different wall current. 240 volts, maybe. And they plug their stuff in and they're getting the same result. When you have repeated experiments verifying an idea. We have a new objective truth that has emerged in those sciences.

• 29:22Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 29:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what I'm telling you is that the Big Bang Theory.

• 29:29Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm.

• 29:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, if you type that into Google, you get the TV show. Just, I'm, my personal jury is still out on whether that's a good or bad thing. Um, you know, it doesn't mean like science is so popular. It's a TV show and it's the first thing you hit. Because you gotta get through that. Then there's the Big Bang is a K-pop group. You gotta get through that. Then you get to the origin of the universe. Okay.

• 29:53Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 29:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Google search. Just thought I'd point that out.

• 29:55Chuck Nice?

  Well, it's good to know that we Google in order of importance.

• 30:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is. Just saying. Wow. So, so here's the point. The tenets of the Big Bang, that the universe started out small, hot, dense, where matter and energy were a primordial soup, where the forces of nature had merged. All of that is thoroughly supported by observations of this universe. Thoroughly supported. Okay? Now, there are some things that, well, did this really cause that? Or might it be something that we don't know about yet? And who ordered up the dark matter? We don't know where that came from. And where's this expansion?

• 30:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we don't know where that came from. But we can describe it. And we can measure it. Here's the point. If tomorrow you have a new idea about how the universe works,

• 31:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  it's gonna enclose everything we've been talking about up to that moment. That has been experimentally and observationally verified. You can enclose it in something deeper. Okay? You can say, "Wait, I have an idea. Our universe is just one in a multiverse." Right. Fine. Okay? But our universe would have started with a Big Bang. Okay? Right. And our universe would have expanded from a dense, hot, cool state. And it's been cooling ever since. That's observed, and that's real. And that's not going away. That's my point. So, so what you have are journalists trying to make clickbait. And if there's some little thing in the early universe that is still on the frontier, still being contested in the octagon,

• 31:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  in the, in the, in the fight dome, and, and, and some new idea is emerging over another idea, people say, "Oh, Big Bang is in trouble. So I just go back to the drawing." But Big Bang is not in trouble. Right. I'm just saying, it's not in trouble. It is a whole thing. That could conceivably fit in a deeper, bigger idea.

• 32:09Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 32:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it's not gonna be swapped out tomorrow. We're not gonna find out tomorrow, gee, uh, the, the, oh, the early universe was cold instead of hot.

• 32:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 32:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not gonna happen. That's not how science works.

• 32:22Chuck Nice?

  Right, right.

• 32:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So...

• 32:24Chuck Nice?

  So if you're gonna come up with something new, you're not coming up with something that will change the old. All you have to...

• 32:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The, the old that has been experimentally verified.

• 32:34Chuck Nice?

  That's dumb.

• 32:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. If you're gonna come up with so- something new about the earth and the sun, it's not gonna be, well, it's really, earth is stationary and the sun moves around the earth and the sun is cold and earth is hot and earth is what's illuminating the, the moon. That is not gonna happen.

• 32:47Chuck Nice?

  Right, right, right.

• 32:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? You can't just pull an idea out of your orifice and ignore experimental verification of what's going on.

• 32:55Chuck Nice?

  Right. So you might, you might come up with the big thing, but you're not changing the big bang.

• 33:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, what's the big thing? I get a C plus on that one.

• 33:05Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it's like, it's what, it's what came before the big bang. We call it the big thing.

• 33:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The big thing?

• 33:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's a B plus, if that's...

• 33:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's your thing?

• 33:16Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's before the big bang. Yeah, it was before the big bang.

• 33:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, and, and by the way, the, when we think of Einsteinian physics.

• 33:27Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 33:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's relativity.

• 33:28Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 33:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which completely, uh, usurped Newtonian gravity and Newtonian motion, all right? What we call cla- the era of classical physics, which led right up to the late 1800s. Newton's ideas reign supreme, all right? And, uh, he told you what gravity did, what motion did, and acceleration in a pre-existing space, and it was working, okay? It was working. And then people said, well, wait a minute. Uh, the orbit of Mercury is not really following Newton's laws. And we said, oh, we got this. We, we know, we got this. There's a, there's another planet you can't see that's tugging on it.

• 34:09Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We even had a name for that planet. It was called Vulcan, okay?

• 34:13Chuck Nice?

  Oh!

• 34:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We, a hypothetical planet, tugging on Mercury so that we didn't have to throw out Newton's laws.

• 34:20Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right? So that was invoked just out of, we just pulled that out of our ass, right? Said, there it is, we'll find it one day.

• 34:26Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Einstein comes along with a special theory of relativity, and that is general theory of relativity. And what we find is that at high gravity, like near the sun, and at high speeds, at high gravity and high speeds, Newton's laws completely fail. You cannot use them at all. So do we say, "Did we throw away Newton?" No, we didn't. You know why? Because if you take Einstein's equations and plug in low speeds and low gravity, they become Newton's equations. Ah. Yes, so Einstein basically enclosed

• 35:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Newton's ideas as a special low-speed, low-gravity case of a much larger, deeper understanding of the universe. That is fantastic. It is beautiful. And so, and by the way, Newton's gravity and Newton's motion were just fine for the Apollo project. Right. We got to the moon and back without any Einstein relativity at all. Okay, so it's only if you're really up the stakes in your gravity. There's no way to understand black holes, really, or even the Big Bang itself, with just Newtonian physics. Point is, new physics does not undo experimentally verified physics.

• 35:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the whole point of experimental verification. That's all. Look at that. And so the Big Bang is just fine. You want to do something else with it? Take it, body and soul, and stick it in some other theory you have. But you can't undo what the experiments and observations have shown. All right, Chuck, that's three things you thought you knew. Yeah. One right after another. And now I know. What? Now I know. I thought I knew, and now I know. Okay. You were blind, now you see. There you go. That's right. Yeah, again, I don't know how many years I got left. We might have to like change the format or something. Because if I run out, you know, then you're done with me. No, then it's, well, things you thought you knew,

• 36:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  but now you gotta know again.

• 36:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, things you thought you knew, but then you did know, but now you forgot. Right, things you forgot. Things you forgot. Things I told you and you forgot, alright? Okay, we'll change it to this. How many times I gotta tell you?

• 37:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, thank you for rebirthing this format.

• 37:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How many times I gotta tell you? Twice, okay?

• 37:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not, your mama told you that, right? You know, that's exactly where it came from.

• 37:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, this has been StarTalk, Things You Thought You Knew. Neil deGrasse Tyson, keep looking up.