Things You Thought You Knew – Venus Pizza

How long would it take to cook a pizza outside on Venus? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice discuss the physics of surface temperature, the size of ~wAvEs~, and the meaning of horsepower. Could horses get you to space?

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.

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. Got with me Chuck Nice, co-host.

• 0:21Chuck Nice?

  Hey, what's happening?

• 0:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, today we're gonna do some explaining. Just an explaining, front to back.

• 0:27Chuck Nice?

  Oh, yeah.

• 0:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Three segments. That's become its own genre.

• 0:30Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it is.

• 0:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 0:32Chuck Nice?

  Every time you said we're gonna do some explaining, I almost wanna look over my shoulder for my wife.

• 0:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because, because of "I Love Lucy"?

• 0:41Chuck Nice?

  Uh, well, yeah, exactly. That's what I'm normally, that's where it normally, you know.

• 0:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so this, I guess, I don't know if we settled on a title. It's, it's "Stuff You Thought You Knew."

• 0:51Chuck Nice?

  Okay, I like it.

• 0:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even stuff you never knew that you didn't know.

• 0:55Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 0:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, you're right. So, that's what we're...

• 0:58Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I like that as a title, too.

• 1:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, "Stuff You Never Knew That You Never Knew."

• 1:03Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, "You Never Knew, You Never Knew."

• 1:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Three segments, we're gonna talk about what we really mean by "temperature."

• 1:10Chuck Nice?

  Ah-ha.

• 1:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and that's one of them. Another one is gonna be "Size and Wavelength."

• 1:17Chuck Nice?

  Right on.

• 1:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's stuff happening there you, I don't think you knew that you knew, or didn't know that you didn't know.

• 1:23Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 1:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:24Chuck Nice?

  Cool.

• 1:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Size and wavelength.

• 1:26Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And...

• 1:27Chuck Nice?

  Well, if we're talking about that, I know I didn't know.

• 1:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, all right. And it'll make you look twice at your microwave oven, make sure it's designed properly.

• 1:36Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 1:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And third, we're gonna talk about horsepower. And how completely irrelevant it is when applied to rocket engines.

• 1:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As NASA has done for decades. So, that's on this edition on StarTalk, "Stuff You Thought You Knew." We've talked a little bit about temperature before.

• 1:57Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 1:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I just wanna just sort of do it again.

• 2:00Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 2:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, let me first tell you, in the world of physics, what temperature is.

• 2:05Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Temperature only has meaning when you have an ensemble of particles that are vibrating.

• 2:14Chuck Nice?

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 2:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you can ask, uh, how fast is everything vibrating? Okay? And you get, oh, how fast is this one and this one and all sort of moving in different directions like the molecules in a gas cloud? Or even, even in a solid object, the particles are vibrating.

• 2:34Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 2:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you can ask, what is the average kinetic energy? Energy of this motion of all those particles?

• 2:41Chuck Nice?

  So, okay, let me just ask then. Do those vibrations from these particles produce some type of measurable energy like heat?

• 2:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so they bang up against your thermometer and then the thermometer gives you a reading.

• 3:00Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that is.

• 3:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 3:02Chuck Nice?

  That's kind of dope. I'm liking it so far.

• 3:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's okay. So we're clean on that, right?

• 3:07Chuck Nice?

  Yes, yeah.

• 3:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No problem. Okay. So what happens if you don't have any particles?

• 3:12Chuck Nice?

  Um, you should be really chilly. Like, you need a glass of, you need a cup of tea.

• 3:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It means you're chilling. You're so chilling. No, no.

• 3:23Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 3:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How do you measure the temperature of something?

• 3:27Chuck Nice?

  If you don't have a vibration.

• 3:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Particles vibrating against it. So what happens in that case is, because the vibrating molecules or particles are not the only thing that can put energy to your thermometer.

• 3:42Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 3:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, all right. Light can do the same thing too, or electromagnetic energy, which includes light. Okay, visible light.

• 3:51Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 3:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, light goes to your thermometer as well. All right. But your thermometer has to be able to absorb it in order to then get a temperature for you.

• 4:03Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 4:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. If you're trying to find the temperature of the visible light in this room. And your thermometer is made of transparent glass. The visible light goes right through the glass and you won't get the temperature of that light.

• 4:20Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 4:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so it's, temperature is not a completely obvious thing. Under certain circumstances that are, that are not even much of a stretch. Okay, so I'll give you another example. I once calculated, dare I say famously, calculated, how long it would take to cook a 16 inch pepperoni pizza on the windowsill of your home on the planet Venus.

• 4:48Chuck Nice?

  Okay, is this gluten free we're talking?

• 4:52Chuck Nice?

  And did you make that calculation?

• 4:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I didn't do the gluten factor.

• 4:57Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay.

• 4:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The gluten correction I didn't make, alright. So, it's similar.

• 5:02Chuck Nice?

  And is there an annoying Venusian who goes, "I'm sorry, do you have gluten free?"

• 5:10Chuck Nice?

  "By the way, I'm also vegan."

• 5:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Somebody don't like vegans.

• 5:17Chuck Nice?

  No, no disrespect to vegans, it's just an old joke. How do you know somebody's a vegan? They'll tell you. Okay, that's.

• 5:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright.

• 5:26Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead.

• 5:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So.

• 5:27Chuck Nice?

  16 inch pepperoni pizza on the window ledge of the planet Venus.

• 5:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, on your house on Venus. So, here's what happens. The atmosphere in Venus has like a hundred times as many particles in it per volume. So it's a hundred times as dense.

• 5:44Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 5:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so there you have your pizza in the oven and there's hot air hitting it. But I have a hundred times as much hot air hitting it. Okay?

• 5:53Chuck Nice?

  All of Venus is one big convection oven.

• 5:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pizza, pizza oven, right. So there it is, alright, but, and the air is hotter.

• 6:02Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay.

• 6:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The air is like 900 degrees Fahrenheit. So, so, and a pizza oven's only around 500 degrees Fahrenheit. So, so, what, you have a hundred times the atmospheric, uh, contact and 500 more Fahrenheit degrees, uh, to boot. So, I calculate if it takes 15 minutes to cook a pizza and you do the fractions and you do this, right? I did it. I got about seven seconds, between seven and nine seconds. To cook a pepperoni pizza.

• 6:33Chuck Nice?

  Well, no, and, and we'll be there in thirty minutes or less guaranteed, baby. Guaranteed. Fifteen seconds.

• 6:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, yeah, there's a two, it's seven and nine seconds, around there. So then, as I've told you before, the geek spectrum knows no limits.

• 6:55Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And who's, and who occupies it. All right, as I say that all the time when our good friend Charles Lou comes in. All right. So I put this out there and I, and somebody called me out and said, Dr. Tyson, you neglected the radiant energy just from the gas being hot. That's in addition to the molecular contact energy that's going on at the pizza surface.

• 7:25Chuck Nice?

  Hmm.

• 7:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if you included that, the pizza gets cooked in like two or three seconds.

• 7:33Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 7:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not the seven seconds. So it's not only the transfer of heat from the vibrating molecules, there's the infrared light that's coming out of the warm oven. Not only the air itself, but the walls of the cavity. That's why pizza ovens are brick ovens because, the, the ideal ones, because the oven is radiating to the pizza on top of the air.

• 7:59Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, everything around it is hot, not just the air.

• 8:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everything around it is hot. So it's, it's, it, so the pizza is lose, is, is, is gaining energy from the air molecules directly and from the walls of the oven indirectly because of the radiant, um, uh, influx of, of infrared in that case. Okay, so there's these two ways. So if you have a thermometer in the vacuum of space, what matters is how much of the photons of light is the thermometer absorbing?

• 8:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you wrapped a thermometer in reflective Mylar, then the temperature will just keep dropping, until it reaches the temperature of the whole universe, which is damn near zero degrees.

• 8:45Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 8:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Kelvins, you know, absolute zero. So, the temperature has to do with what are you wearing?

• 8:53Chuck Nice?

  Are you?

• 8:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, wait a minute, we've heard this before.

• 8:56Chuck Nice?

  I thought we were doing that thing. Well, you know, Chuck, what are you wearing?

• 9:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What are you wearing? No, it's who are you wearing, Chuck?

• 9:03Chuck Nice?

  Right, oh yeah, I forgot. That's the red carpet.

• 9:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, did you, did you wear, well, so, when they say, "Wear lighter clothes in the summer",

• 9:12Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What they're saying is, the air will have whatever temperature it does, but you don't wanna, and it's gonna be hot, probably, but you don't wanna add to that by absorbing light from the sun. Cause that will just add more temperature.

• 9:27Chuck Nice?

  That's why in the summertime, I just wear bike reflectors.

• 9:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you do that.

• 9:32Chuck Nice?

  Just walk around with bike reflectors on.

• 9:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all you'll get, if, if, so if you just clad your body with bike, bicycle reflectors, or something that is good at reflecting sunlight, which you could just be, by the way, it's been rumored, that, you know, all futuristic sci-fi, um, space, things that people wear, they're always reflective, you have a silverie. It could be because they're living too close to their host star, and they have to keep reflecting it off to stay cool. Point is, you cannot speak singularly about the temperature of the air in any way that matters to you, if you're also exposed to light, that could be absorbed by what you're wearing.

• 10:17Chuck Nice?

  Uh-huh.

• 10:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, in the winter, it's cold out, you want as much extra energy as you can get. So wear dark clothes, the dark clothes absorb sunlight, and then the temperature inside your clothes goes higher, than would otherwise be if it was just, if you were just measuring the air.

• 10:36Chuck Nice?

  Right, and that, that is why, in the wintertime, I hang out with my black friends, and in the summertime, I hang out with my white friends.

• 10:48Chuck Nice?

  And I'm always in the Goldilocks, I'm in the Goldilocks spot, always.

• 10:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in the fall and winter, you say, oh, can you back up a little, come a little, no, you move away. And you got this zone.

• 11:05Chuck Nice?

  In the fall and spring, I just hang out with Puerto Ricans.

• 11:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Damn, Chuck is gonna get this show canceled as fast as.

• 11:17Chuck Nice?

  Come on, people, y'all can't get mad at that. Come on.

• 11:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was pretty funny. That was good. That was good. So, I'm just saying, temperature is just a little more complicated than you might otherwise think.

• 11:29Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 11:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all. It's not just what is the air, it's how fast are your molecules vibrating? And what is causing that to vibrate? And the air is how we usually think about it, but other things can make that happen as well. So that, that's what I'm saying. And, and there are rules about the thermometer that gives you the official weather, weather service temperature. That thermometer is in a shadow. It's not open to the sunlight.

• 11:55Chuck Nice?

  Ah.

• 11:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, in fact, I, I used to do this when I was growing up. I think they've corrected this. So, the bank temperature time signs, you know, they used to be on our banks.

• 12:07Chuck Nice?

  Time and temperature.

• 12:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Time and temperature, right? I would look at bank time and temperatures that were in sunlight and bank time and temperatures that were in shade. And the official air temperature might be 90 degrees, the bank thermometer would say 105 degrees. It's like, no, it's not, okay? Cause you're sitting out in sunlight. And you're absorbing the sun on top of the air temperature. So that's, misrepresents what you would feel standing in the air but in shadow. In, in the shadow of a tree, for example.

• 12:35Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 12:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And when you walk under a tree saying, oh, it's cooler under the tree, the air is the same temperature. So Chuck, why is it cooler under the tree?

• 12:43Chuck Nice?

  Well, the absence, same as the shadow temperature. It's the absence of the light being directly on you.

• 12:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the absence of the light that you would be absorbing that would make you feel hotter. It's not just a feeling, you're actually hotter than the air temperature when you're absorbing the sunlight.

• 12:58Chuck Nice?

  Wow. There, there you go. That's pretty cool, man.

• 13:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so that's just, so temperature, I could go on and on.

• 13:05Chuck Nice?

  There's a lot more to temperature than just a reading. That's.

• 13:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct, correct. And one thing I've said in multiple shows, and I'll say it again, the fact that you can see the sun in the daytime. All right, that's an obvious fact.

• 13:20Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Means the sunlight is moving through the atmosphere and the atmosphere is transparent to sunlight. Okay?

• 13:29Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's visible light at least. So, and the visible light is where the sun's energy peaks. So, if the atmosphere is transparent to the sun, the sun is not heating the air. Because the energy is going straight through it.

• 13:44Chuck Nice?

  Right, oh man, I mean, well, there you go.

• 13:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, wait, wait, and so, and so, oh wait, so then, then what does it finally hit?

• 13:51Chuck Nice?

  The ground.

• 13:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The ground, and then the ground warms up, and then the ground is in physical contact with the air, and the ground heats the air. So Chuck, holding aside an exotic upper layer of the atmosphere, what I'm generally telling you is, what is the hottest part of the Earth's atmosphere?

• 14:08Chuck Nice?

  Uh, right next to the ground.

• 14:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right next to the ground, and as you ascend, the temperature drops. As we all know, if you paid any attention at all to the data on the screen in an airplane, and what's the temperature outside the airplane? Forty below zero.

• 14:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Icarus had it all wrong.

• 14:26Chuck Nice?

  He didn't fly too close to the, right, his wings would have froze.

• 14:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Frozen, correct. They, they knew nothing about thermodynamics when they invented the story of Icarus.

• 14:37Chuck Nice?

  That's pretty cool, man.

• 14:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As he ascends to get close to the sun, he would have been farther away from the sun's source of heat on Earth. And the temperature would have dropped and dropped, and his wings would have frozen and cracked. He still would have fallen, um, but for different reasons, okay? All right Chuck, we gotta call it quits there.

• 14:55Chuck Nice?

  That's very cool, I'm so, uh, who knew? That was so, you always surprise me, man, you always surprise me.

• 15:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the whole point of this.

• 15:03Chuck Nice?

  I guess, I didn't think we could get this much out of temperature as.

• 15:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, but temperatures, a lot going on.

• 15:09Chuck Nice?

  Who knew there was this much going on with temperature?

• 15:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And let me just say, if you go high enough in the atmosphere, you reach the ozone layer.

• 15:16Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 15:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what, what does the ozone do?

• 15:18Chuck Nice?

  Um, with, to what, the sun?

• 15:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why, why do we have the ozone, why do we like the ozone layer?

• 15:24Chuck Nice?

  Oh, it protects us from radiation and, and.

• 15:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, from, from ultraviolet.

• 15:27Chuck Nice?

  Harmful rays of the sun.

• 15:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so to protect us, it means it absorbs it.

• 15:34Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 15:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, tell me about the temperature of the ozone layer.

• 15:39Chuck Nice?

  Yes, it must be really hot.

• 15:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It gets hot, and so, in fact, if you look at the temperature profile of our atmosphere, the temperature drops until you get to what we call the thermosphere, and the temperature goes back up. Because in that layer, the chemistry of the atmosphere is absorbing ultraviolet rays from the sun, and that heats that layer.

• 16:03Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 16:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And protects us down here on the surface.

• 16:06Chuck Nice?

  That's very cool.

• 16:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go. All right.

• 16:09Chuck Nice?

  Well, the only thing I really took away from this whole thing is that on Venus, no one ever says, "Who touched the thermostat?"

• 16:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, delivered in 30 minutes or less is way too long if they don't cook your pizza in four seconds.

• 16:29Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 16:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. All right, Chuck, we gotta take a quick break, but when we come back, we're gonna talk about size and wavelength.

• 16:37Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 16:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These are two things you don't normally hear in the same sentence.

• 16:40Chuck Nice?

  This is true.

• 16:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we're gonna put them together in ways I maybe you'd never thought of before.

• 16:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we return.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  Hey, I'm Roy Hill Percival, and I support StarTalk on Patreon, bringing the universe down to earth. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 17:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk, Things You Thought You Knew. Chuck, you may have heard of... The wave particle duality of nature.

• 17:29Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 17:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Heard that?

• 17:30Chuck Nice?

  Light.

• 17:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, i- is it a wave or is it a particle? And somebody tried to-

• 17:36Chuck Nice?

  Hey, you got, you got wave in my particle. Hey, you got particle in my wave.

• 17:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're over sixty, you'll get that reference to a TV commercial for Reese's, Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.

• 17:49Chuck Nice?

  Reese's Peanut Butter?

• 17:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. Okay, so the problem is we have a brain that wants to compartmentalize and, and doesn't really blend to what feels like disparate bits of information. So people try, they invented the word wavicle. I thought that was pretty cool, never caught on.

• 18:07Chuck Nice?

  Wavicle.

• 18:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Have you ever heard wavicle? Yeah, cuz it's just, it never caught on.

• 18:10Chuck Nice?

  It doesn't work, that's why.

• 18:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It doesn't work, but let me just give some, uh, interesting examples.

• 18:16Chuck Nice?

  Wavicle.

• 18:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 18:18Chuck Nice?

  It actually sounds like, uh, something the professor from The Simpsons, "Wavicle!", you know, Ivan, like, I'm sorry.

• 18:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so, uh, before we pick up wavicle, let me just remind you that light, which in my field we call the electromagnetic spectrum.

• 18:41Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 18:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is all forms of light. Most familiar to us is visible light. Okay, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet.

• 18:49Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 18:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if you go on the other side of red, you get to what?

• 18:54Chuck Nice?

  Um, infrared.

• 18:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Infrared, very nice. The, your retina can't detect it, but it exists. We do have infrared sensors. It's, we detect it on our skin as heat. Alright, so we can detect infrared, but not, we don't see it. We feel it, though.

• 19:10Chuck Nice?

  That, by the way, makes us sound so much cooler than we really are.

• 19:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, with our, with our skin sensors, yeah.

• 19:17Chuck Nice?

  We've got infrared sensors.

• 19:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay, now, uh, you go beyond the violet, you get what?

• 19:25Chuck Nice?

  Ultraviolet.

• 19:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ultraviolet, so that's beyond the violet. We can't see ultraviolet either. We also have sensors for ultraviolet, but they're significantly time delayed.

• 19:36Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I thought you meant like black lights that just show us all the nastiness that happened in a hotel.

• 19:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, no, no, that, no. What happens in, in the, in, under quote, black light is you're, you're illuminating the crime scene with ultraviolet light, which you cannot see. And certain substances fluoresce under it and send you the light back in violet light that you can see. So you're never seeing the ultraviolet.

• 20:02Chuck Nice?

  You're never seeing the ultraviolet.

• 20:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Okay, so, so here we are on ultraviolet. We have ultraviolet sensors. They're just time delayed. Okay? So the time delay is, okay, you're out in the sun. Oh, and an hour later, you feel like you have, your sun, if you have lighter colored skin, you're, you feel like you're, you get sunburned. And you do that enough, then you get skin cancer. These are, in a way, detectors of ultraviolet. It's just too late for you.

• 20:28Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 20:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. All right, let's go back the other end. Uh, so we had red, infrared, and you keep going in that direction on the spectrum. By the way, what's changing on the spectrum is the wavelength of the light. Right?

• 20:40Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 20:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So as we go to the red, wavelengths are getting bigger and bigger. We get to ultra, we get to infrared, beyond infrared, we get to microwaves.

• 20:48Chuck Nice?

  Microwave, yeah.

• 20:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so now I can describe the, the length of the wave, like with physical fingers and things. So a microwave is like a few millimeters to like, maybe a couple of centimeters, around there.

• 21:02Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow.

• 21:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just, just call it a centimeter. Yeah, a physical centimeter is.

• 21:05Chuck Nice?

  That's, that's a pretty big wave.

• 21:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a big wave. That's a half an inch. Uh, and so a full wave, a crest and a trough, gets manifested in that space when you have microwaves. Okay?

• 21:16Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 21:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's go beyond that. You get to what we call radio waves.

• 21:20Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 21:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So.

• 21:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Before microwaves had their own name, they were just short wavelength radio waves. Okay?

• 21:30Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 21:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've heard of short wave?

• 21:31Chuck Nice?

  Short wave radio.

• 21:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So then we'd say, well, there's small versions of radio waves, let's call them microwaves. And that's why they're called micro, even though they're bigger than infrared.

• 21:42Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 21:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, that's all I'm saying here, okay. So, so radio waves are like meters and longer. We don't have word, a radio wave can be miles in wavelength, we don't, a different word for that. So, radio waves are for everything bigger than microwaves. All right, so now watch. If I want to detect a radio wave,

• 22:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I need a thing that's at least as big as one of the waves.

• 22:14Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 22:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, TV, old world TV,

• 22:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  before it came in via cable, used antennae. How long was a TV antenna?

• 22:30Chuck Nice?

  Um, two stories.

• 22:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 22:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The one on your TV was about a meter long.

• 22:39Chuck Nice?

  Right, yeah.

• 22:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, in fact, you'd have two of them.

• 22:42Chuck Nice?

  Sticking out all over.

• 22:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you'd extend it to about the length of the waves of the, of the radio waves you're trying to receive. Okay. All I'm saying is, you can't detect waves bigger than the size of your detector. It doesn't work.

• 23:02Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 23:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? It'll just wash over your detector and your detector won't even know what happened. Right?

• 23:07Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 23:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how about microwaves? Have you ever seen a microwave, um, walkie talkies? How long is the antenna on a microwave walkie talkie? It's about like that.

• 23:18Chuck Nice?

  That's nothing to it.

• 23:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's about, it's about a couple inches.

• 23:21Chuck Nice?

  It's like an inch and a half.

• 23:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Inch and a half. There's your microwaves.

• 23:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the size of the microwaves.

• 23:27Chuck Nice?

  That's pretty wild.

• 23:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, that's, so it is the size to fit the situation.

• 23:35Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 23:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That also means if you have a substance that prevents the transmission of any of this energy.

• 23:43Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 23:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You could put holes in it, and as long as the holes are smaller than the wave, the wave is not gonna get through.

• 23:51Chuck Nice?

  Whoa, that, well, is that the, like?

• 23:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, take a look at your microwave oven.

• 23:57Chuck Nice?

  That's what I was about to say.

• 23:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so glass, so why, microwaves go through glass, no problem.

• 24:02Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 24:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, but, so you have a glass thing, so microwaves and visible light go through, so you can see your food cooking. But there's something else on the other side, there's a screen.

• 24:11Chuck Nice?

  Screen, yeah.

• 24:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that screen is opaque to microwaves, okay? Except they put holes in it.

• 24:21Chuck Nice?

  Now, that's why I got this tumor on my head.

• 24:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, just stop.

• 24:25Chuck Nice?

  Is that why?

• 24:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just don't stick your hand inside the microwave oven. So, so neither you nor the microwaves can see through that material, except for the fact that they put holes in the material. How big are the holes? They're smaller than the size of the microwaves they're using in that oven.

• 24:48Chuck Nice?

  That's pretty wild.

• 24:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Microwaves cannot squeeze out.

• 24:50Chuck Nice?

  It's the antenna in reverse.

• 24:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In reverse, ooh, I like that, very clever. Very clever. So, so, so you can put holes in things, so radio telescopes. Have you ever seen a radio telescope? Go to a radio telescope one day. They're huge. They're huge, they're huge, and they're made of like mesh. They're like chicken wire mesh with these huge holes in it, because it's the, depending on which kind of radio telescope you're visiting, that the, the metal is reflective of radio waves. But you don't have to build the whole surface of, of metal, you can put, put big holes in it, makes it lighter. All right, and rain can get through, we're not a problem, and with, because of these huge dishes.

• 25:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they can take radio waves, reflect them to a focus, and there you have it.

• 25:43Chuck Nice?

  That is a really, really cool.

• 25:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let's keep going in the other direction. You ready?

• 25:47Chuck Nice?

  Okay, there's more?

• 25:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But wait, there's more, okay.

• 25:50Chuck Nice?

  I was satisfied, but yes, please.

• 25:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let's go the, let's go the other direction. So we go red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, ultraviolet. You go beyond ultraviolet, you have X-rays.

• 25:58Chuck Nice?

  X-rays.

• 25:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wavelengths are getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. Okay? Really tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny. Much smaller than the wavelengths for visible light. Okay? Alright, so now watch. If I have a regular microscope, and I want to see something small, I cannot see anything smaller than the wavelength of the violet light I'm using in the visible spectrum.

• 26:33Chuck Nice?

  Oh, man.

• 26:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because otherwise, it washes right over it. It would not even know it's there.

• 26:38Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 26:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? So, if you want to see things smaller than the wavelength of visible light, that would be the violet side of it, you need even smaller wavelengths of light.

• 26:52Chuck Nice?

  Interesting.

• 26:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so here's, talk about getting clever. You ready?

• 26:56Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 26:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, people said, "How about electrons?"

• 27:02Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You say, "Well, electrons are particles. They're not waves." They're also waves! Oh, my gosh! What wavelength corresponds to electrons that we could generate in a machine? X-rays! Oh, my gosh! So electrons and X-rays have the same wavelength.

• 27:21Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 27:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if I invent a microscope that uses electrons, then I'm using a wavelength of light as small as X-rays, so I can see the tiniest detail. So the photographs that have this, the most exquisite detail of the smallest things are not regular microscope photographs. They're electron microscopes.

• 27:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because we commandeered electrons, piggybacked an electron using the X-ray wavelength that it represents. To take, that's why you see those bug pictures with the hairs and the thing.

• 28:02Chuck Nice?

  That's how electron microscopes work.

• 28:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how they work. Isn't it clever of the human mind to do that? After quantum physics, we said, we got the wave-particle duality, and I can't see anything smaller than the wavelength of violet light, but I know there's gotta be detail there, because there's detail up until the point where it gets fuzzy. Well, let me keep going. And then you invent the electron microscope, and bada bing, the world of the small continues to open to you.

• 28:28Chuck Nice?

  So that means if, so is our gam- what's the smallest wave? Is it gamma?

• 28:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the smallest waves that we have a word for are gamma rays. So gamma rays are the opposite, like radio waves. So it's smaller wavelengths than X-rays are gamma rays, and then we don't have it, we don't keep dividing it. So, so gamma rays that are like really, really, really small, they're still called gamma rays, yes.

• 28:52Chuck Nice?

  Okay, gotcha.

• 28:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, the problem is, if you, a gamma ray telescope, you have to be able to focus it.

• 28:58Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 28:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not good enough just to use the light. You have, you need to be clever about with the machine you're making, and we know how to focus electrons because they have a charge, and so we can focus them down and get images and things, so, yeah.

• 29:11Chuck Nice?

  So the only thing gamma rays are good for is making you a superhero.

• 29:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A Hulk, yeah, yeah. That's tested, we know.

• 29:20Chuck Nice?

  Right, we know that.

• 29:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I think it's gamma rays on Spider-Man 2.

• 29:27Chuck Nice?

  I don't know, I'm not sure what it is.

• 29:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, there was a radioactive spider.

• 29:32Chuck Nice?

  There was a radioactive spider that bit him.

• 29:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That bit him, and I-

• 29:35Chuck Nice?

  I don't, I'm not sure what ra- what, what-

• 29:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What kind of rays it was.

• 29:38Chuck Nice?

  What the machine was using to make him, you know. First of all, I just love that we went from pure science, here's how an electron microscope works, to now exactly how the Spider-Man-

• 29:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this is how you become the Hulk, if you want to do this in your basement.

• 30:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, all I'm saying is, double check your microwave oven. If your holes are the size of like a centimeter, they're too big and microwaves are leaking out.

• 30:08Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 30:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If they're down around a millimeter or two, then that's a good size. You're not getting the microwave, the microwaves are not getting out.

• 30:14Chuck Nice?

  There you go. There you go.

• 30:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, all right, so that's a little bit on size and wavelengths that you might not have known, a connection that you might not have known was ever there.

• 30:23Chuck Nice?

  That was great.

• 30:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right Chuck, we gotta take a quick break, but when we come back, when we come back, all kinds of stuff you never knew about horsepower.

• 30:32Chuck Nice?

  Oh, nice.

• 30:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In our third segment, when we return.

• 30:44Chuck Nice?

  Hey, time to honor some of our Patreon patrons with a Patreon shout out for Josh Whitleaf, Kumar Vaibhav, and Daniel Davis. Hey guys, thanks so much for your support. Without you, this show couldn't happen, so we really appreciate it. And anyone else listening who would like their very own Patreon shout out, please go to patreon.com/startalkradio and support us.

• 31:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. Startalk, Things You Thought You Knew, our third and final segment, all about horsepower. Horsepower, of course is only in the... Chuck, I do a lot of, a fair amount of reading of history. I love looking at how we used to think about things and how the advance of science and technology modifies, improves, supplants whole words, whole concepts that just become obsolete. Like, I think our parents might have been the generation that might have still called a refrigerator an icebox.

• 31:52Chuck Nice?

  Which because it was an actual ice box.

• 31:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was a literal ice box. You know, the Iceman would come. In fact, my mother.

• 31:59Chuck Nice?

  Get your ice here.

• 32:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm hmm.

• 32:01Chuck Nice?

  Ice cold ice.

• 32:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that how cold it is? It's ice cold.

• 32:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so Chuck, uh, where was the, the space within the box where they put the ice? What part of it?

• 32:15Chuck Nice?

  Uh, hopefully up top.

• 32:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Up top.

• 32:17Chuck Nice?

  Cold air fall.

• 32:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. Cold air fall. Chuck, you're thermodynamically fluent. I love you, man. Okay. And it would have a mechanism where it melted and you'd replace the pan at the bottom.

• 32:27Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 32:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where the water melted. Okay. So, uh, then we have, then we don't need ice for it anymore because we perfect refrigerators. And it orphans some people's vocabulary. And, but that's fine. I don't think anyone under 60 calls it an ice box anymore. So I, I'm, I, I, I find that fun to track vocabulary, the, the evolution of vocabulary in the face of the progress of science and technology.

• 32:52Chuck Nice?

  You just reminded me of my great grandmother. And I'm just having a fond memory right now because she lived until I was 30. And she was born in 1901. And used to routinely tell me about the Iceman and the fishmonger. And the milkman. That all these people came around and by the way, on horse drawn carriage. So that's the stuff you didn't get from the market. Somebody came by and you got it outside your door.

• 33:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Especially since it was perishable or would, it would melt. Right.

• 33:32Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 33:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They couldn't just leave it at the market hoping you'd come by and get it. Right.

• 33:36Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 33:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. So, so we go from horses. Which, you know, we built civilization on the back of horses. We also fought wars on the back of horses.

• 33:47Chuck Nice?

  And they never got to thank you.

• 33:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They never got to. No, there's some horse memorials in the world.

• 33:53Chuck Nice?

  Get out.

• 33:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To the war horses, yes. Uh, I spoke, I was speaking to my sister about that. Also many a war statue are the soldiers on a horse. So, um, this is, the horses are a fundamental part of that. But you're right. I don't think anyone told the horses before they went to the battle that they'd be shot at. I'm pretty sure that was not a, they, they, we did not get.

• 34:13Chuck Nice?

  They would have bucked every soldier.

• 34:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we use horses up until like the car is invented, right? So Carl Benz sort of makes a really good version of an internal combustion engine. And then we're off to the races. So then what happens to the horse? Well, the horse rapidly disappears, especially from urban centers and then basically from all of civilization. Much later on farms, I think, but eventually they would be replaced with tractors. Okay.

• 34:43Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what is the power of a horse? Well, I don't know, but let's just call it one horsepower. Okay, so now you have a car. And what does someone who rode horses all their life call a car? A horse drawn carriage without a horse.

• 35:03Chuck Nice?

  A horseless carriage.

• 35:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A horseless carriage, okay? Because that's the reference frame you're using to identify it. So now you say, how powerful is the engine? We don't have any way to think about the power of the engine other than in reference to horses. So car engines started getting measured in horsepower.

• 35:22Chuck Nice?

  Makes sense.

• 35:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Horsepower. Okay, so one horsepower, so then I know that's like what like my horse. Two horsepower, hey.

• 35:30Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I got a pretty nice carriage going on.

• 35:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got a carriage going on, four horsepower.

• 35:35Chuck Nice?

  Oh, four horses, this is like Cinderella.

• 35:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, and six horsepower is Ben-Hur.

• 35:39Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 35:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, so, so there you have it. Now, so power, once we all became metrified, you can think of it in terms of watts. So one horsepower equals about 750 watts.

• 36:00Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 36:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. And because power doesn't have to be how fast you're moving, it's what is the rate that you are consuming energy. So in the old days, hair dryers would be up around that many watts. All right, nowadays.

• 36:13Chuck Nice?

  And they put it, they put it on the hairdryer still.

• 36:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, well, no watts, they don't put horsepower on a hairdryer.

• 36:18Chuck Nice?

  No, the watts.

• 36:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yes, definitely put watts on it. But I'm saying, but generally you see horsepower on things like that are going to motion. Or in some cases, I've seen.

• 36:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Horsepower on lawn mowers, on motorcycles, things that have sort of engines, because that's where the deepest roots are, traceable to when horses did that work. That's all I'm saying. Okay, so now, we are left with the completely absurd, completely absurd statement in NASA press releases of how many horsepower the shuttle rocket engines are.

• 37:04Chuck Nice?

  Oh, man, I love that.

• 37:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 37:06Chuck Nice?

  Oh, man, it's like souped up Santa Claus.

• 37:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And let me just.

• 37:11Chuck Nice?

  Two thousand horses flying into the sky.

• 37:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you have NASA's press releases saying, "The shuttle main engine produces 37 million horsepower."

• 37:23Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my God.

• 37:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and so you say that's powerful, but it is completely meaningless.

• 37:32Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 37:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because.

• 37:33Chuck Nice?

  Because there are not 37 million horses anywhere. You will not find 37 million horses probably on Earth, let alone all together, just hanging out.

• 37:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At Kennedy Space Center, right? So now, let's just say you could strap them together.

• 37:50Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 37:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No matter how clever is your strapping, your 37 million horsepower is not gonna, if it's actually made of horses, is not gonna put you into orbit. The horses are not gonna ascend from Earth and go into orbit around Earth.

• 38:11Chuck Nice?

  However, it is kind of cool to start every space mission with five, four, three, two, "Hia!"

• 38:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gentlemen, start your horses.

• 38:26Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 38:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we didn't have a term that comes to us from cars that we then apply to rockets. It would have been nice if we had car power.

• 38:39Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 38:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, leave horses behind, now we have car. So what's car power? Let's say 100 horsepower is now one car power.

• 38:44Chuck Nice?

  Oh, man, did I just...

• 38:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, then we could talk about rockets and car power. If we're gonna be one generation behind, I would have been okay with that. But no, they kept referencing horses, which I personally, I think is completely absurd. And like I say now, since horsepower is just a matter of power, and so are watts, and we all, in the USA, we're all watt fluent. Alright, we could just use watts, kilowatts, that sort of thing. So Chuck, there was a similar challenge when we detonated the first atomic bomb.

• 39:21Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 39:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so is there a unit of energy to talk about atomic bombs? No, because no one ever made one before.

• 39:32Chuck Nice?

  So let me guess, we now use exploding horse?

• 39:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, Chuck. So, so we look back and say, what is the biggest explosion that we had before? It's...

• 39:46Chuck Nice?

  Oh, dynamite!

• 39:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A stick of dynamite, okay? And dynamite is TNT. And TNT, by the way, discovered by Alfred Nobel, got quite wealthy on it, from it, and then created a fund to reward, uh, science and peaceful applications of it, especially with regard to medicine. So, so TNT, a stick of TNT, dynamite, was the biggest explosion we had. So now we have an even bigger explosion, and so nu... atomic... And so atomic bombs were measured with respect to how many tons of TNT it would be. Okay?

• 40:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, the two bombs dropped in Japan in warfare by the United States. Each of those was between 10 and 20 kilotons of TNT.

• 40:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Twenty thousand tons, kilotons, okay?

• 40:48Chuck Nice?

  That's crazy.

• 40:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now, watch. As we, oh, by the way, so that's a fission bomb that takes uranium and plutonium, big atoms, splits them into two lighter atoms, but they're, they're, those two lighter atoms, when you add them back, you don't get to the original atom. There's extra energy that got converted into the bomb, okay?

• 41:09Chuck Nice?

  That's just.

• 41:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so, we would develop an even more potent nuclear weapon called the hydrogen bomb, which comes from fusing hydrogen atoms together to make helium. So you take four hydrogen atoms, you get a helium atom, and you had, you started out with more mass than you ended up. Where did the mass go? Became energy.

• 41:30Chuck Nice?

  Energy.

• 41:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  E equals mc squared, alright.

• 41:31Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 41:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, mild hydrogen bombs are a thousand times more powerful than your atom bombs. So, we don't speak of them in terms of kilotons, we speak of them in terms of megatons.

• 41:46Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 41:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ten megatons, fifty megatons, mega as in, as in million, okay? So, once again, we have these devastatingly powerful weapons, and we're referencing their power by something Alfred Nobel invented a century earlier.

• 42:06Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 42:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, to me, that's the same as, well, I mean, not identically the same, but it's, it's, it's linguistically the same as calling your refrigerator an icebox, and talking about the power of your car in horsepower.

• 42:18Chuck Nice?

  In horsepower.

• 42:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. And we're still there, it was still measured in megatons.

• 42:23Chuck Nice?

  It's still measured in megatons.

• 42:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 42:24Chuck Nice?

  Is there anything bigger than a hydrogen bomb?

• 42:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, not that, well, a supernova is, is pretty big, but we, we just measure those in, in ergs with a power, very high power. Yeah, we stopped finding words for it. We just, let's just go back to any, any unit of energy and stick in the high.

• 42:42Chuck Nice?

  And stick it there.

• 42:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stick it there.

• 42:44Chuck Nice?

  That's it.

• 42:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, we're not, we're not, we're not measuring supernova in terms of horsepower, or TNT.

• 42:51Chuck Nice?

  Or TNT.

• 42:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, right, this is not, this is not happening. Uh, you know what would be good? If we measured it, this would blend pop culture with science. If we measured it in Death Star power.

• 43:03Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 43:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The power it takes to completely obliterate a planet. We can calc- we can calculate what that is. Oh, my gosh.

• 43:09Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 43:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then our hydrogen bombs would be, it's only one millionth a death star. And then it becomes small rather than large.

• 43:17Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 43:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, yeah, you can calculate exactly how much energy it takes to completely obliterate a planet.

• 43:23Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, by the way, in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, where they have the new and improved Death Star, they can kill all the planets of an entire solar system. And you know where it got its energy from?

• 43:33Chuck Nice?

  Where?

• 43:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, it sucks the energy out of a nearby star.

• 43:36Chuck Nice?

  Oh, the star.

• 43:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it goes through a star, sucks out all the energy, contains it, and then dishes it out and take out a whole solar system all at once. So that's badass, right?

• 43:45Chuck Nice?

  That is pretty badass.

• 43:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Except if you actually add up all the energy of a star, it could kill a thousand planets, not just ten. So they didn't do their math. Because had they, then the dark, the dark force, the dark side would have been way more powerful than anything portrayed in that movie.

• 44:03Chuck Nice?

  You know what? We should do a show, and I don't want to offend anybody because I'm a huge Star Wars fan, but over the years, I've heard you say many, many things-

• 44:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't get me started.

• 44:15Chuck Nice?

  That Star Wars gets-

• 44:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hold me back!

• 44:17Chuck Nice?

  That they get it and that they get totally wrong. We should do a show called Star Wars is Stupid.

• 44:26Chuck Nice?

  Now we should! It'd be awesome! I mean, it doesn't mean that we don't like it. It just means like, look, here's all the bad science that you find in Star Wars.

• 44:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, like, like BB-8 is a smooth, rolling, metal, spherical ball. And somehow it's not sliding uncontrollably on sand.

• 44:47Chuck Nice?

  On, not only sand, but on waxed floors like a bowling ball.

• 44:53Chuck Nice?

  Dude, that'd be a great show!

• 44:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we'll work on it.

• 44:55Chuck Nice?

  Star Wars is stupid.

• 45:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How to cut your viewership in half, right?

• 45:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, we gotta land this plane? Oh, man. Or land those horses? Yes, I was gonna say, are we on, do we have saddles? Do we have saddles to land this plane? Are we gonna, we gonna cut the red wire on the fuse to that bomb? Right. And bring this episode to a close, but I enjoyed it. I enjoyed talking about stuff that Yeah. people don't always know that they know. These are fun. Yeah, yeah, and I'd like, I'd like to believe it connects you just a little more closely to the coming and going of society and all the ways that technology touches it or doesn't. I love that, you know? All right, this has been StarTalk. Always good to have you, Chuck. Always a pleasure. Neil deGrasse Tyson here. Keep looking up.