Why Do We Exist with Hakeem Oluseyi

What is fundamental in the universe? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice welcome back Hakeem Oluseyi to dive deep into cosmology, plasma physics, the origins of life, and some of the most provocative ideas in modern astrophysics.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck.

• 0:00Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't think we can find a container to hold a full Hakeem Olusey.

• 0:05Chuck Nice?

  No, I don't even think a magnetic field would do it. Yeah.

• 0:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's coming up.

• 0:10Chuck Nice?

  Boundless energy coming your way.

• 0:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Delivered from the universe.

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, Chuck Nice, right next to me.

• 0:34Chuck Nice?

  What's up, Neil?

• 0:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, man.

• 0:36Chuck Nice?

  How are you, buddy?

• 0:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Doing good?

• 0:37Chuck Nice?

  Doing good.

• 0:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Doing great. We've got a cosmic queries today.

• 0:39Chuck Nice?

  Yes, we do. Inquiring minds want to know.

• 0:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Indeed. And in fact, it's on cosmology.

• 0:46Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 0:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Topic.

• 0:47Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 0:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is the expertise of our guest. Third time on StarTalk?

• 0:52Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think so.

• 0:53Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 0:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hakeem Oluseyi.

• 0:57Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Thank you so much. And it is the fourth time.

• 1:00Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's right. Cause this, yeah, no, wait, fourth time?

• 1:04Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Memoir, cosmic queries, both remote, and then finally.

• 1:11Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it kind of messed me up.

• 1:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we got an astrophysicist cosmologist, which is a subdivision of all astrophysicists, who thinks about the origin, evolution, and fate of the universe.

• 1:25Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 1:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Plus, he's been practicing my open for this show.

• 1:31Chuck Nice?

  Hmm.

• 1:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I don't know if I should be happy about it or kick his ass later. Let me hear, go.

• 1:37Chuck Nice?

  Let's see.

• 1:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. You know, that's pretty good.

• 1:41Chuck Nice?

  Not bad.

• 1:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, you know.

• 1:43Chuck Nice?

  Tell you.

• 1:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know.

• 1:44Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Right now with the three black guys up here, I don't know who's who.

• 1:47Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Wait a minute, wait a minute. I want to get back to this kick your ass comment.

• 1:53Chuck Nice?

  That's hilarious.

• 1:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So you're a host of the podcast Particles of Thought.

• 1:57Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 1:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love that title. And it's a Nova podcast.

• 2:01Hakeem Oluseyi?

  It's a Nova podcast.

• 2:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  PBS Nova, GBH, out of Boston. Very good.

• 2:05Chuck Nice?

  Very nice.

• 2:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And CEO. How many people get to say they CEO? Cause if you CEO, you the man.

• 2:12Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 2:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  CEO of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

• 2:16Chuck Nice?

  Very nice.

• 2:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'll ask you about that in a minute. And you've also associated with NASA's IMAP satellite.

• 2:23Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yes.

• 2:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Remind me what IMAP stands for?

• 2:25Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe.

• 2:29Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 2:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who's accelerating?

• 2:32Hakeem Oluseyi?

  The sun's magnetic fields, both at the surface of the sun and interactions with the sun, solar wind, and particles trapped in the heliosphere.

• 2:42Chuck Nice?

  Uh huh.

• 2:42Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Right? And those generate neutral atoms that come back into the solar system and get measured by IMAP.

• 2:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 2:48Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 2:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Okay.

• 2:49Chuck Nice?

  All right. And may I ask, why?

• 2:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and if you worry about the sun, that doesn't sound very cosmological. So how do you stitch that together?

• 2:59Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Because I started out doing instrumentation.

• 3:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 3:04Hakeem Oluseyi?

  And calculations, computational, and understanding plasmas really well.

• 3:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very nice.

• 3:09Hakeem Oluseyi?

  So it's kind of like I have this toolbox that I can travel from field to field with, right? So I've done.

• 3:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause plasma is everywhere in the frickin' universe.

• 3:15Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Absolutely.

• 3:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 3:16Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 3:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And tell people we're not talking about blood plasma.

• 3:19Hakeem Oluseyi?

  No.

• 3:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What kind of blood?

• 3:20Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I forgot about that.

• 3:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a whole other kind of, there's a different plasma.

• 3:23Hakeem Oluseyi?

  So this is when you take a gas, heat it even more, you break more bonds, right? And you break the solid to liquid bond, liquid to gas. Now, once you're a gas, you're just molecules or atoms. You start breaking those apart. So once you break apart electrons from atoms, you now have a plasma.

• 3:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's an electron soup, basically.

• 3:41Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 3:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. And so, so this gas will respond to magnetic fields.

• 3:46Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 3:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can do really cool things with it.

• 3:47Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 3:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Including feed a fusion reactor.

• 3:50Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Exactly.

• 3:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For the future of energy.

• 3:52Chuck Nice?

  Very nice.

• 3:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Anybody's gonna go.

• 3:54Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 3:54Chuck Nice?

  And that'd be the only way you would be able to hold the energy is in a magnetic field bottle, right?

• 3:59Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Not necessarily.

• 4:00Chuck Nice?

  No, really?

• 4:00Hakeem Oluseyi?

  You can also put it in a little pellet and close it in a metal and blast it, generating X-rays that create fusion. Oh, but that's not a, I'm sorry. I was thinking fusion. That's not a plasma. You're starting with a little seed, right? But yeah, so if you're gonna confine a plasma, you're gonna do that with magnetic fields.

• 4:15Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 4:16Hakeem Oluseyi?

  A magnetic bottle.

• 4:16Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you totally shook my confidence there.

• 4:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Last, last you were here, you've been busy and you wrote a book.

• 4:27Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I did.

• 4:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A book with the audacious title, the bodacious title, the out of this world title, Why Do We Exist?

• 4:37Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 4:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The nine realms of universe that make you possible.

• 4:45Chuck Nice?

  Hmm. This sounds very Asgardian.

• 4:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So wait, the realm, that's right, they're realms.

• 4:50Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 4:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. So you say they make you exist. Does that mean, cause you're speaking to the reader.

• 4:55Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That's right.

• 4:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does that mean you have a different point of origin? Cause otherwise that word really should be a we.

• 4:59Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Just saying. I think it is a we.

• 5:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why do we exist?

• 5:05Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Absolutely.

• 5:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The nine realms of the universe that make you possible.

• 5:09Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That's right. That's right. That's kind of like, you know, when you're talking to your spouse and you say, let me tell you something, your son.

• 5:15Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 5:16Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Okay.

• 5:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Tear a new one right there.

• 5:23Chuck Nice?

  That sums it up. Cause I've said those words many times.

• 5:27Hakeem Oluseyi?

  And sometimes you might hear, you mean our son?

• 5:29Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 5:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what is a realm?

• 5:31Hakeem Oluseyi?

  So in this case, what I do is I listen to what the universe told me and I report on it. Essentially, what I realize as a physicist is that when you study the universe, we typically do it in this disjointed way, right? But there is a cohesive story, but what the average person doesn't understand is how the rules that, that our intuition gives us just doesn't scale. And the universe, as it scales, the rules change fundamentally. So you have to really start looking at the universe completely differently. So here, we're in the middle realm. I call a middle realm, bigger than an atom or molecule, smaller than a galactic arm, right?

• 6:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's Middle Earth, like.

• 6:12Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly. What about second breakfast? Are you going to the Shire?

• 6:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What happened?

• 6:22Hakeem Oluseyi?

  So anyway, the cosmological realm, right? So now the dynamics of spacetime dominate. In the middle realm, the dom, you know, and what dominates is based on the flow of energy through that realm. So what you see, the trend is, is energy is constantly leaving matter, going from, and it's really a story of quantum fields, going from the matter to fermionic quantum fields into the electromagnetic quantum fields.

• 6:44Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 6:44Hakeem Oluseyi?

  So every day, there is more photons than there were the day before. There's less energy in matter, right? Ultimately leading to this heat death, right? The long time in the future. Now, we go, if you study the cosmological realm, you realize something ain't right. That leads you to the dark realm.

• 6:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These are energy realms, in a sense.

• 7:00Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Well, no, they're, they're realms of emergence as well, right? So when you go to, for example, the temporal realm, the story of how time unfolds. But listen, in other realms, there are still unfoldings. In the middle realm, I discuss how stars and planets come into existence. In the realm of life, we talk about abiogenesis and how that leads ultimately, you know, through this energy ladder from chemosynthesis to, you know, anoxic photosynthesis, to oxygenic photosynthesis, to oxygenic respiration, right? This energy ladder that leads to a brain like yours.

• 7:34Chuck Nice?

  Right. Okay.

• 7:35Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 7:35Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 7:36Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, exactly. And then you have the realms beyond horizons, beyond our cosmic event horizons, within the black hole event horizons.

• 7:44Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 7:44Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 7:45Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. That's unknowable.

• 7:46Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah. And then you have the multiverse. So now, when you look at the cosmic microwave background radiations, uh, super horizon signature, that seems to indicate that inflation occurred.

• 7:57Chuck Nice?

  So is that just the edge of the observable universe? What's the super horizon? I don't know that.

• 8:01Hakeem Oluseyi?

  So if you look at the TT spectrum of the cosmic microwave background radiation, which you get from looking at the sizes of these blobs.

• 8:09Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 8:09Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah. You'll see to the, beyond the biggest lump, there's a dip, right? And that's known as the super horizon fluctuation.

• 8:17Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 8:17Hakeem Oluseyi?

  So when you look at the inflationary epic of the universe.

• 8:20Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 8:20Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Right? You have a situation now where our boundary, the cosmic event horizon, is moving outward, right? But at early times during inflation, right? It could have been moving inwards. And so areas that were separated, that were within your, you know, outside your horizon now would have been inside your horizon. So you can get these bigger fluctuations. I don't, you know, I screwed up when I, when I described the Andromeda paradox here slightly, even though the world now knows it. And I'm screwing this up too.

• 8:48Hakeem Oluseyi?

  But the super horizon fluctuation signal is in the data at a high precision. And that suggests, you know, that signal is predicted by the inflationary model. So then, when you look at the inflationary model, what you find is that if you say, how did this happen? You come upon this idea of the inflaton field, right? And so if there is this field that's popped out our universes, our universe wasn't the first time, and it would not be the last time. And in fact, it should be happening all the time, right?

• 9:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If, and just to be clear, inflaton is a hypothetical.

• 9:23Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Particle.

• 9:24Chuck Nice?

  It's like a graviton.

• 9:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That has a field that is responsible for the inflationary epics.

• 9:29Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Exactly. So all these universes are popping out all the time. So that means that we do live in a multiverse. Not the, you know, my cosmic event horizon doesn't overlap with your event, right?

• 9:40Chuck Nice?

  So it's, it's different from the bubble version of the multiverse?

• 9:45Hakeem Oluseyi?

  It is the bubble.

• 9:46Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 9:46Hakeem Oluseyi?

  It is the bubble. But there's two ways people think of the bubble version.

• 9:48Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 9:49Hakeem Oluseyi?

  One way is you're so far away that you're not within my cosmic event horizon, you're not within my observable universe, right? That's one type of bubble universe. But you're still in the same universe.

• 9:58Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:58Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Right? The, the other bubble you're talking about is that inflaton field inflates so rapidly, even if you pop off one universe side by side next to another, with a nanosecond later, the distance between them is so great, they'll never overlap, right? Just because of the rapid expansion of the inflaton field. So you're isolated forever.

• 10:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the distinction is, there's a spacetime that has expanding bubbles within it.

• 10:22Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 10:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Versus multiple spacetimes with each its own independently expanding bubble.

• 10:28Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:28Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Exactly.

• 10:29Chuck Nice?

  That's wild.

• 10:30Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That's wild.

• 10:30Chuck Nice?

  That's wild.

• 10:31Hakeem Oluseyi?

  It's a loaf of bread with the pockets of air and the bubble, air bubbles in it. You know, the loaf of bread has its own life.

• 10:38Chuck Nice?

  You don't mean what we buy in the store. You mean like a baguette with all the little bubbles inside?

• 10:44Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That's right.

• 10:44Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Okay, I got it.

• 10:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, what do you want people to take away from your book?

• 10:48Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Well, first thing is, the title is a provocation. It is not a book that provides the answer. And so what I'm doing is.

• 10:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's an authentic question.

• 10:55Hakeem Oluseyi?

  It's an authentic question. It's a question, and I want you to put your mind to it. And what that book does.

• 11:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not buying a book where I gotta put my mind. I'm buying your expertise.

• 11:05Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Well, listen, you're right.

• 11:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's like I go to Broadway play and they want me to sing with them.

• 11:09Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Here's the.

• 11:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Participate. I pay good money.

• 11:12Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 11:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For you to act your ass off. And I don't want to do a damn thing while I'm sitting here, except listen to you.

• 11:17Chuck Nice?

  Why do we exist? You open it up, it's just blank pages. Have at it.

• 11:22Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Comes with a little pen.

• 11:25Chuck Nice?

  Tell me your thoughts.

• 11:27Hakeem Oluseyi?

  So you're telling me you want me to work and bring my own interpretive powers while I'm reading your book? After you finish my book, while you're reading it, this is gonna be so mind blown at every moment that you're just gonna be like, wow, damn, oh, I never knew that, oh my god. But then, at the end, you now have a full picture, you now have a full cognitive map of reality across scale, across emergence, across time, and across realms. And so now, you are in a place where you can now, because I feel like Einstein felt, right? Imagination, we've not, since dark energy, what have we discovered new about the universe that's fundamental, right? Everything we've found is, oh yeah, we're right about our, about our predictions, for the most part.

• 12:10Hakeem Oluseyi?

  So, you know, I think we need to

• 12:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to put the high mind. So, dark energy got the Nobel Prize in 1998, was it?

• 12:21Hakeem Oluseyi?

  It was discovered in 1998. I think you got the prize in like 2010.

• 12:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly, okay. So, what you're referring to is a 28-year

• 12:27Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 12:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  gap in a discovery of something truly fundamental.

• 12:31Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Exactly.

• 12:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we can make a discovery, new kind of galaxy, a new formation, a new this

• 12:36Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Planet, yeah, okay.

• 12:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, okay.

• 12:39Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Right, right. The next one is probably life, right? But outside of our universe, yeah. Oh, and in there, I do give the Oluseyi equation, I never called it that before today, but

• 12:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Oluseyi equation.

• 12:49Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Well, my equation predicts the number of stellar systems that should host a planet with multi-cellular life, which I think is where it's at, right? Looking for civilizations, I think that's

• 12:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was it different from the Drake equation, but truncated?

• 13:02Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Essentially, it is, but the difference is, is that the way it's constructed is

• 13:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that already has a name, the Drake equation.

• 13:06Hakeem Oluseyi?

  No, it doesn't, because Drake wrote his, how many years ago? So there were things we know that he did not know, right? Yeah, exactly. So he's like, what fraction of stars have planets? Now we know, yeah, all of them.

• 13:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:17Hakeem Oluseyi?

  And so mine is very simple, right? It's just like, the just right stars, just right planets, and then whether or not life actually

• 13:24Chuck Nice?

  Alright.

• 13:25Hakeem Oluseyi?

  You're wise, right?

• 13:25Chuck Nice?

  Fair enough, fair enough.

• 13:26Hakeem Oluseyi?

  But I get a number, I get a number.

• 13:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just wanna make it clear, using a truncated version

• 13:31Hakeem Oluseyi?

  It ain't a truncated version, it's a very differently motivated equation.

• 13:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 13:37Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Very differently motivated, and when you read it, you'll be like, damn.

• 13:40Chuck Nice?

  So you're saying, the information that was unavailable to him, you took and used that as the basis for your equation?

• 13:46Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Not exactly.

• 13:47Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 13:48Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Here's what I did, I started my equation, he started his, his equation is, is written in many ways in terms of outcomes. Life is formed, a civilization forms, technologies forms. Mine is around the drivers for life, right? So if you look at the just right stars, what defines a just right star? It has to have

• 14:08Chuck Nice?

  Got you.

• 14:08Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Right, exactly. What defines a just right planet?

• 14:11Chuck Nice?

  That's, that's valid, what you're saying is very valid.

• 14:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it's the Oluseyi equation, inspired by the Drake equation?

• 14:17Hakeem Oluseyi?

  And the Seeger equation, I'll have to add, right? Because Sarah Seeger, from MIT, also came out with an equation, it has to do with this

• 14:23Chuck Nice?

  I know, but what's a Seeger?

• 14:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A big planet person.

• 14:28Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 14:29Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, and now astrobiology.

• 14:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yes, yes.

• 14:33Chuck Nice?

  Very cool. Well, that's, that's excellent.

• 14:35Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, man, so they're gonna come away with a cognitive map of reality that will allow them to

• 14:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, so, so I, I think I, I spoke wrong about it. What you're saying is, we'll read the book, and then come away reflecting on it.

• 14:49Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, read the reviews, that's what, you know, it's like, wow, this is something different to think about. And then when the physicist, here's the thing, you're gonna like, so you're different from the average person, because you've heard it all, and you're probably at a point now where you've probably heard it all. So you have a new perspective, see, that's what I love about you. Man, when I first met you, you didn't meet me, but when I first met you, I was like, man, like the thing you did that went super viral, where you're talking about the stars, where somebody asks you

• 15:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, they asked me, what's the most mind blowing fact about the universe?

• 15:20Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, as an astronomy dude

• 15:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's still going viral.

• 15:22Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I had heard that, I had heard this, you know, we all hear that young, right?

• 15:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 15:26Hakeem Oluseyi?

  But I'd never heard it like that, I never heard, nobody made me feel it, right? You know what I'm saying? And so I think this particular provocation is gonna hit, hits in a different way for physicists like that.

• 15:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got it.

• 15:37Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Because you've seen it all, and now somebody comes at it from this other angle, and you're just like, oh.

• 15:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I see what you're saying. So, you're taking information that we already thought about in bits, you put it together in a new way.

• 15:49Hakeem Oluseyi?

  And there's new material.

• 15:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 15:51Hakeem Oluseyi?

  And there's a lot of new, original thinking.

• 15:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That bit you think, it was called the most astonishing fact, I was asked by Time Magazine, sitting in this chair.

• 15:58Chuck Nice?

  Really?

• 15:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they had a long interview, he said, what's the most astonishing fact? And then I had to think about it for a moment.

• 16:03Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 16:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then I delivered an answer, which then other people plucked, and then put B-roll visuals behind it, and that's what really took off, not just me sitting here, delivering the answer.

• 16:15Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 16:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, that's what, okay, so, that's a, that's a noble goal.

• 16:21Hakeem Oluseyi?

  It is, it is.

• 16:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is.

• 16:22Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, okay.

• 16:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Space fact, if you took all the mass of all the asteroids in the solar system, and balled it up into one object, it would have barely 3% the mass of our moon.

• 16:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you like that fact, you can find 4,999 more in Lost in Space, 5,000 facts to help navigate the universe. Latest collaboration between StarTalk and National Geographic Books. Lost in Space is now available for preorder, wherever books are sold.

• 17:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, there's, there's an acronym associated with you, called SWAG.

• 17:34Hakeem Oluseyi?

  SWAG, SWAG.

• 17:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course, there is. SWAG, as an acronym, what is, how do you get that? How do you get those letters?

• 17:40Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That's a scientific wild ass guess.

• 17:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wild ass guess, I like it, what a scientist.

• 17:45Chuck Nice?

  That's black for hypothesis.

• 17:49Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Informed. Informed hypothesis.

• 17:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so tell me, give me an example.

• 17:58Chuck Nice?

  What's that?

• 17:59Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Well, everything I've been telling you, I tell you right in the book, the whole book is my swag, right? This is a, this is a scientific wild ass guess, but it's highly informed, right? I've been thinking about this.

• 18:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. But normally, like you write a paper, get it published, peer reviewed, and then, then a book comes after that.

• 18:14Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That's right, yeah, yeah. Well, this is, this is not that kind of work, this is not for them. So, you know, I've been in a world of the pros forever, right? And, you know, this is for everybody else.

• 18:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 18:26Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, but for the pros too. So, you know, this is not a, this is not a quantitative study, only one tiny part of the book has a couple of equations in it, right? So there's no data

• 18:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's an exploration of ideas.

• 18:39Hakeem Oluseyi?

  It's deeper than that, man, you know

• 18:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's an exploration of deep ideas.

• 18:43Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Deep ideas, right? But it's also a, man, it is just so dope.

• 18:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, but if we unpack this idea, it's, anyone can come up with a wild ass guess.

• 18:53Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That's right.

• 18:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But not all of them would be scientifically tracked.

• 18:57Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Exactly.

• 18:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, help me understand that distinction.

• 19:01Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Well, the distinction is, if I were going to submit a paper, I would have a hypothesis, okay? And typically, you're gonna study some very narrow question, right? This is very broad, and what I'm doing is something that a professional in my position doesn't really normally do. So when a physicist interviewed me, he said, Hakeem, what I don't understand about you, bro, is how are you so courageous? How are you so brave? You just throw out your ideas, and you don't care what people think, and that's what I've done in this case. I've, you know, we talk about crazy ideas privately, right? But, hey, I'm putting it out there for the world. Once I, once I snitched on myself in my memoir, I might as well tell you my crazy thoughts about the universe too, but they're well grounded.

• 19:46Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so these are well-formed, scientifically-based imaginings.

• 19:56Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Isn't everything an imagining?

• 19:58Chuck Nice?

  In, in many respects, yes.

• 19:59Hakeem Oluseyi?

  But no, it's not that, it is, I'm, I'm a serious empiricist, so I have to stay within the boundary of what we have observed to be true.

• 20:07Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's what I said, scientifically informed. That's scientifically informed. Exactly. If you're imagining what can be

• 20:14Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 20:14Chuck Nice?

  within the boundaries of scientific soundness, that's what I'm talking about.

• 20:20Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Exactly. For example, one of the things that you often hear people say is, we have to become an interstellar species, because we must leave Earth, right? One day the sun's gonna go red giant.

• 20:29Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's true.

• 20:30Hakeem Oluseyi?

  You know, or, or, you know, but look at it like this, here's another one of my scientific wild ass guesses. If you have the ability to be an interstellar species, you don't need to leave your solar system.

• 20:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 20:43Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Right? You can just go right out there to Titan, build your own suns, i.e. fusion reactors, and keep on harvesting energy. You don't need the sun anymore.

• 20:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Better yet, move Earth.

• 20:55Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That sounds more monumental.

• 20:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Than packing up a billion people and shipping them to a moon of Jupiter and pitch intent in rebuilding civilization? I think it'd be way easier to move Earth. In fact, they do that-

• 21:06Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Wait, who said a billion people?

• 21:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a film series-

• 21:09Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Wait, any-

• 21:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a film series made in China-

• 21:12Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Ah.

• 21:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Called Wandering Earth, which is exactly that.

• 21:16Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I'm looking that up. That sounds good.

• 21:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wandering Earth. You gotta look at the second episode, which is where they actually-

• 21:21Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Oh, I love that.

• 21:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The first one is, I don't know what it is, but second one, they, they put rockets strategically placed on Earth, and Earth goes, what it does, it doesn't go to a bigger orbit, it goes to another star system.

• 21:36Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Ah.

• 21:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Earth becomes the spaceship.

• 21:39Chuck Nice?

  Interesting.

• 21:40Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, very interesting. I'd like to see how they did that.

• 21:44Chuck Nice?

  Okay. All right, well, we gotta get to some questions.

• 21:46Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Let's get to some questions.

• 21:47Chuck Nice?

  This for the rest of the day.

• 21:48Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Patreon members.

• 21:49Chuck Nice?

  So cool.

• 21:49Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 21:50Chuck Nice?

  All right. And of course, as always, thank you to the Patreon members for your financial support that allows you to submit these questions, which also allows us to do many other things with StarTalk. Um, let's go to Patrick. Hi, Hakim, Dr. Tyson. Patrick, just another science nerd from southeast Texas here again. Um, and why do we exist? You trace the chain of events that made our existence possible. Do you think that chain points towards increasingly deeper layers of emergent organization, or do you believe physics will eventually reach a truly fundamental level beyond which there is no deeper explanation?

• 22:28Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Ooh.

• 22:28Chuck Nice?

  Mmm, I like that. So, when you go turtles all the way down, is there a point where it's just, hey, man, we don't even know?

• 22:37Hakeem Oluseyi?

  You know, it seems like that question went in both directions at the same time.

• 22:40Chuck Nice?

  It kinda did.

• 22:41Hakeem Oluseyi?

  It sounds like it was like where it's going and what it is at this deepest, most fundamental level. Because in a book, I described the deepest, most fundamental level. Now, it seems to me the evidence points to the same thing that allegedly Albert Einstein said or believed at one point, which is that the only thing that exists are these fundamental quantum fields and energy, right? And so, again, I also say, and this is one of the things I say in the book, where I differ and diverge from the community. Like, a lot of people think that space and time are emergent, and if energy and fields are required to be fundamental, which in this inflaton model of the universe, they are, a field requires a geometry, and energy requires time, because it makes change, which requires a before

• 23:26Hakeem Oluseyi?

  and an after, right? So, if you have those two fundamental quantities, you also have space and time existing as fundamental within our universe.

• 23:36Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 23:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did that answer the question?

• 23:38Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 23:39Hakeem Oluseyi?

  If you go all the way to the bottom, that's what you got. Space, time, energy, and field.

• 23:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you don't think there's anything remaining to be discovered or gleaned-

• 23:47Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yes.

• 23:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Beneath that level?

• 23:48Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yes.

• 23:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 23:49Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Context.

• 23:51Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 23:52Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Above that level, in the other direction. Here's what I mean by that. Suppose, you, here's one of the, the mind experiments-

• 23:59Chuck Nice?

  Before you go any further, Hakim-

• 24:00Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 24:00Chuck Nice?

  I have to ask you this, because sometimes I get this impression.

• 24:03Hakeem Oluseyi?

  You're, you're, yes, yes, I am.

• 24:05Chuck Nice?

  Do, do you smoke weed?

• 24:08Hakeem Oluseyi?

  On, like, every, like-

• 24:17Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Now, you read my memoir, Chuck.

• 24:19Chuck Nice?

  I did.

• 24:19Hakeem Oluseyi?

  You read my memoir.

• 24:20Chuck Nice?

  I did, I did.

• 24:21Hakeem Oluseyi?

  You mean today?

• 24:22Chuck Nice?

  No, I, no, I'm joking, man. Come on.

• 24:24Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Are you asking me that I just vape at LaGuardia? Is that what you're asking me?

• 24:28Chuck Nice?

  That's hilarious. No, go ahead, back to what you were saying.

• 24:30Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Coincidentally?

• 24:31Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead. Let's get back to the fundamentals. Seriously, let's get back to context.

• 24:35Hakeem Oluseyi?

  So, space and time would be fundamental.

• 24:36Chuck Nice?

  Space and time is fundamental.

• 24:37Hakeem Oluseyi?

  And not emergent.

• 24:38Chuck Nice?

  Uh, not emergent.

• 24:39Hakeem Oluseyi?

  If, if quantum fields, which require a geometry, choose your dimensionality, you must have a, a geometry.

• 24:46Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, but that makes sense. The, the quantum field thing, that totally makes sense for fundamentals.

• 24:50Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah. And if you have energy, you have to have time. Even quantum mechanics shows you the, the, the fundamental nature, marriage of energy and time.

• 24:59Chuck Nice?

  So, you separate-

• 25:00Hakeem Oluseyi?

  So, therefore-

• 25:00Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead.

• 25:01Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Therefore, what was the question? Back to that weed.

• 25:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fundamental.

• 25:10Chuck Nice?

  So, the, the energy makes time fundamental.

• 25:13Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Context.

• 25:14Chuck Nice?

  So, when, so here's the thing, I get it. So, you're separating them off.

• 25:17Hakeem Oluseyi?

  If you accept that energy is fundamental-

• 25:20Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 25:20Hakeem Oluseyi?

  You must therefore accept that time is fundamental.

• 25:23Chuck Nice?

  Time is fundamental, because of change. All right, because energy is a change state. Now, let's move that to what's beneath that and above it, which is context, how, and what's that mean?

• 25:34Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Well, here's, suppose you were to study, when we talk, we teach observational astronomy to students, you know, people don't walk in having a cosmological perspective. So, we try to give them, by way of analogy, a perspective. So, one of the things I used to say is, is that, just like the cell is the fundamental building block of the body, the galaxy is the fundamental building block of the universe. Then, one day, I said, well, what if I take that seriously? What if I shrink myself down so small that the size of a cell, to me, is the same ratio, 20 orders of magnitude, as a ratio of me to the size of my galaxy? And then, I studied my universe from that perspective. What would I do? I would do what Hubble did. He looked around and said, oh, there are these things called galaxies.

• 26:17Hakeem Oluseyi?

  They come in different types, spiral, elliptical, dwarf, right? I look around, there's different cells, blood, muscle, bone, right? Then, I'd say, hey, you know, they have internal structure, a bulge, arms, right? I'm like, oh, they got, you know, what the hell is in a cell? Golgi body, a nucleus, a riboflavin. No, that's not it. Ribosome.

• 26:36Chuck Nice?

  Ribosome.

• 26:38Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Mitochondria.

• 26:40Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 26:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Riboflavin is a, is a mineral, vitamin on a, on a cereal box.

• 26:47Chuck Nice?

  Hilarious.

• 26:48Hakeem Oluseyi?

  But then, you can zoom out, and you see, we discovered a large-scale structure, right? There's the cosmic web, and you would do the same thing. But after doing all that, would you have any idea if you're in a whale, if you're in a horse, if you're in a tree? Right? I mean, if you see muscle bones, you're definitely not in a tree. But, the point is, you can't get the context of your, of, of our existence from the inside of the damn animal.

• 27:08Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow.

• 27:09Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Okay.

• 27:10Chuck Nice?

  Damn. You know-

• 27:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can the unborn child know what its mother looks like?

• 27:15Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Ooh.

• 27:17Chuck Nice?

  Well, if you ask any Christian, yes.

• 27:22Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I, I'd have been in a lot of churches. I don't know where that comes.

• 27:28Chuck Nice?

  No, no, I'm joking. But, um, okay, that is really-

• 27:33Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That's what you mean by context. That's the context. We don't, we don't understand the con, it is definitely not a bauble on a cat's necklace.

• 27:38Chuck Nice?

  Hakim, I gotta give it to you, man. That's, that's profound.

• 27:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You mean, you mean the galaxy on the belt of Orion?

• 27:45Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:46Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Was that the cat's name, Orion?

• 27:47Chuck Nice?

  Right, yes.

• 27:48Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yes.

• 27:49Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's a, that's a really good example. That's a great example.

• 27:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the belt was the necklace.

• 27:54Chuck Nice?

  Right. The little dang, the pendant on the, on the collar.

• 27:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct.

• 27:58Chuck Nice?

  That was the belt of Orion. Wow, so cool, man. All right, here we go. Let's go to some guy, 2334.

• 28:05Hakeem Oluseyi?

  What's his name?

• 28:06Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's what he put, uh, yeah. Hey, Neil, Lord Nice and Dr. Oleshey.

• 28:12Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Lord? Yeah, he's Lord.

• 28:14Chuck Nice?

  Oh, you don't know?

• 28:14Hakeem Oluseyi?

  You didn't know that?

• 28:15Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 28:16Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 28:17Chuck Nice?

  He says, I'm Graham from Marina Del Rey, California, longtime listener and a first-time caller. I recently learned about a millisecond pulsar, whose equator moves at nearly a quarter the speed of light. Imagine two indestructible astronauts, one standing at or near the pole, and one on the equator. What would each see when they look towards each other? Rotational speeds would be much faster at the equator, so how would relatively show up for these probably quite dizzy observers? A fun analogy, if Earth were somehow rotated that fast, uh, could familiar landmarks appear in places that seem impossible because of relativistic effects? Uh, that's the second question. Uh, thanks so much, and you make astrophysics

• 29:00Chuck Nice?

  fun and accessible. The first question is blowing my mind right now.

• 29:07Hakeem Oluseyi?

  It reminds me-

• 29:08Chuck Nice?

  Pole and equator, but a pulsar, relativistically, what, what, what would they see?

• 29:14Hakeem Oluseyi?

  This reminds me of that old joke, what's the last thing to go through an insect's mind when it hits your windshield?

• 29:21Chuck Nice?

  What?

• 29:22Hakeem Oluseyi?

  It's ass.

• 29:24Chuck Nice?

  That's not bad.

• 29:28Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah. Place you on a neutron star, bro, and you're gonna be a puddle.

• 29:32Chuck Nice?

  She gave us a very good qualifier-

• 29:35Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Which was?

• 29:36Chuck Nice?

  Two indestructible astronauts.

• 29:38Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yes.

• 29:39Chuck Nice?

  So, they are able to maintain their perspective and their physical integrity while one is at the pole-

• 29:47Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Okay.

• 29:47Chuck Nice?

  And one is at the equator of the pulsar.

• 29:50Hakeem Oluseyi?

  All right.

• 29:51Chuck Nice?

  So, one is definitely spinning faster because it's at the equator.

• 29:54Hakeem Oluseyi?

  If you're rapidly spinning, does rapidly spinning create-

• 30:00Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Well, here's, here's the question. So this is a calculation one, right? Cause relativistic effects show up at extremes of speed and gravitational energy. So on a neutron star, you have both, a rapidly rotating neutron star. So then the question becomes, what are they looking at? Are they looking at the distant universe? Are they looking at each other?

• 30:24Chuck Nice?

  They're looking at each other.

• 30:25Hakeem Oluseyi?

  They're looking at each other. So that means that this body is typically like, we're talking like 10 miles or something across. So you're not gonna look at each other unless you're super tall.

• 30:37Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 30:38Hakeem Oluseyi?

  They're beyond each other's horizon.

• 30:39Chuck Nice?

  Okay, they're beyond each other's horizon.

• 30:41Hakeem Oluseyi?

  And if you're super tall, you're not, well, you're indestructible, but doesn't pay to be super. Cause that's the thing, right? If you're on a super earth, the body, the, the, the, the greater the gravity, the lower you need to be to survive.

• 30:51Chuck Nice?

  Right, right, yeah, so, okay.

• 30:53Hakeem Oluseyi?

  So, um, but I guess the question they're getting at is, you know, is, is one of those, like, how much is spacetime curved? And what would be the effect of your light is traveling to me, you're no longer there, and then the next bit of light is coming, and the next bit of light is coming, and the next bit of light is coming, right? And their paths are kind of something weird, right? So you're gonna be distorted and smeared, is my guess.

• 31:19Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 31:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the light rays are not coming as one coherent image. They're being smeared out. Yeah, and then you get a whole blur.

• 31:26Hakeem Oluseyi?

  But they're coming from a weird angle too, right?

• 31:29Chuck Nice?

  So then you, basically you just, it's gonna be a mess, is what you're gonna see. You're gonna see a little mess.

• 31:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and by the way, you have to do that on the pulsar because anything else, its gravity isn't strong enough to hold it together as one object while spinning that fast.

• 31:43Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 31:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which would spin itself apart.

• 31:45Chuck Nice?

  Right, right.

• 31:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So pulsars can do that.

• 31:47Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that was a great question there, man. That was really cool.

• 31:51Hakeem Oluseyi?

  From who again?

• 31:51Chuck Nice?

  Uh, someguy2334, that's it. Didn't even give it to me. Hey, someguy.

• 31:59Chuck Nice?

  This is Charles Coell, who says, aloha from Honolulu. Hi, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice, and Dr. Oleshey. Could Schrönders cat and the Cheshire cat have a kitten? Although the lightest primordial black holes have been ruled out as dark matter or dark gravity, as Dr. Tyson prefers, because they evaporate too quickly, could they still ha, leave something behind like a Cheshire cat's smile? When Hawking Radiation separates the very last virtual particle pair at the event horizon, and the black hole winks out of existence, could the breaking of the final entanglement leave a topological scar?

• 32:39Chuck Nice?

  Not mass, not energy, just a knot in spacetime that was never there before? I think these people smoking more weed than either one of us! This is insane!

• 32:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That last sentence about, give me that last sentence again.

• 32:56Chuck Nice?

  He said, not mass, not energy, just a knot in spacetime that was never there before.

• 33:05Hakeem Oluseyi?

  This sounds a lot like the so-called topological defects from the early universe, but the scenario in which they're generated is, so, so basically what they're saying is, is do a GR calculation, right? Model the evaporation of the black hole, and then from that, can you derive the metric that's left over, right? The, the, the spacetime configuration that's left over.

• 33:30Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 33:31Hakeem Oluseyi?

  And if it has fully evaporated, by definition, a spacetime metric only, um, exists in the presence of a mass-energy density or pressure, right? So it sounds like the answer would be a no, but at the same time, you know, this is gonna be a little bit, uh, controversial maybe, but there's a lot of stuff we predict, and then we see it. We're so good at that, right? But not everything that pops out of the equations comes to fruition, right? It, it, you know, sometimes people play with equations in such a way and they find something interesting and it turns out...

• 34:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We did a little explainer on that, I thought.

• 34:08Chuck Nice?

  Yes, we did.

• 34:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, excellent. Yeah, we had, there's equations that have solutions, yeah, that don't have any correspondence to, exactly, to observational reality.

• 34:16Chuck Nice?

  The, the person who, who might need it at, for, for, right.

• 34:20Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Right, so with that being said, you know, we've not actually observed black hole evaporation.

• 34:25Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:26Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Right, and, you know, makes sense, everything, you know, all the GR stuff is being found exactly as predicted to high precision. So I have no reason to say GR is crap, but for a physical phenomenon that has never been observed, and to then to speculate what would happen, right? That's a lot of the conversation in physics these days. And I think that, you know, black holes get more attention than they deserve in that type of discussion, right? I think there's a practical universe discussion on black holes.

• 34:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Casting shade on black...

• 35:00Chuck Nice?

  He really is.

• 35:01Hakeem Oluseyi?

  No, no, no, no.

• 35:02Chuck Nice?

  I'm like, I didn't think they could get any blacker. But damn, you did it.

• 35:08Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Well, they no longer swim, that helps, that...

• 35:11Chuck Nice?

  Right, so, okay.

• 35:13Hakeem Oluseyi?

  So we wanna speculate on the speculation and the specula, you know, it's too many layered speculations for me.

• 35:18Chuck Nice?

  I got you.

• 35:19Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 35:19Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, alright, well, yeah, okay, well, thanks a lot, uh, for that one, Charles. Uh, this is Marion, who said, hello, Dr. Oleshey, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice. Uh, Marion from Pennsylvania. My question is, since Dr. Oleshey was first on StarTalk, I believe five years ago, wow, she's keeping track, um, what's the most interesting discovery about the universe you have learned since then? Also, what do you think of the recent proposal that the ancient little red dots are now globules where massive stars are born? Thanks.

• 35:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's all good, yeah, it's all good. So, the first part of that intrigues me, so what do you, how do you take that?

• 36:03Hakeem Oluseyi?

  So, um, since then, I've studied a lot of biology and a lot of geology. Here is, I, I, you know, I wish I could channel you, man. And what we started out talking about, that like, about the, uh, stars making stardust, I wanna describe in such the same way the origin of the vertebrate. Because I went around telling everybody, cause one day I had a realization, I was like, wait a minute. Because I have, I, I, I have a medical condition that brought me to this realization. There's a tube that goes from my mouth to my exit.

• 36:36Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 36:38Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I'm a worm, with just some appendages, right? Some locomotion, some defense, right? Like, we're all worms, right? That was going around telling all my friends and families, like, hey, we're all worms, ha, ha, ha, right? And then one day I thought, you know what? What is the real origin of vertebrates? Do you know the origin of vertebrates?

• 36:58Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 36:58Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Those fish? No, no, no, pre-fish, the origin, the pre, so it's, it's cordates, right? It's, it's the notochord. Before there's a bone wrapped around it, it's just a cord. So where did it come from? We're a freaking filter feeder, bro. So these little filter feeders, like corals, these little limneys, when they're in their larval stage, they go around, they taste little spots to figure out where they wanna set down. And so they look like a little sperm cell, they're a little globular tadpole with a little tail, right? So to power that tail, they had a little nerve going down it to power those muscles. And then eventually it decided, you know what? I'm gonna skip my adult phase. And eventually it becomes the, the first notochord, and then the cordates, and then you get a, um...

• 37:42Chuck Nice?

  From that, a backbone.

• 37:43Hakeem Oluseyi?

  And then there is the new DNA data on race, which is now all over YouTube, right? So we all had the story, oh, ultraviolet light, that's what makes skin color this or that. And the old story was, right, that the evolution of light skin, depigmentation, happened from 40,000 years to 20,000 years ago. No, it started 8,000 years ago, due to agriculture, right? Agriculture created depigmentation, and 5,000 years ago, Europe was only 50% depigmented. That's 3,000 years ago is what it's, so we're talking like 1,000 BCE, man. At this point, the freaking pyramid is already 1,500 years old. So when you look at these ancient, you know, Europeans 40,000 years ago,

• 38:26Hakeem Oluseyi?

  you find the oldest mass in Germany, in, in Europe, 40,000 years ago. And you think, oh, it's the ancient Germans. Bro, they're not, they're brown. Yeah.

• 38:37Chuck Nice?

  You know, there's gonna be a lot of Germans who are upset with you right now.

• 38:40Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I was just hanging out with Germans and...

• 38:44Hakeem Oluseyi?

  They've changed.

• 38:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sardentol.

• 39:01Speaker 03

  I'm Lanny Lum and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 39:13Chuck Nice?

  Alright, so that's the, so biology is your big fascination now, so the second question-

• 39:18Hakeem Oluseyi?

  And geology.

• 39:18Chuck Nice?

  And geology, okay.

• 39:20Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Because another thing about geology that is little appreciated is the fact that our frickin' outer core is liquid, bro, liquid metal, right? So from like nineteen percent radius out to like fifty-five percent, the Earth's interior is liquid metal.

• 39:33Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 39:34Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Liquid metal.

• 39:35Chuck Nice?

  That's the core.

• 39:36Hakeem Oluseyi?

  We're on a frickin', what is that cake? You cut it into lava cake.

• 39:40Chuck Nice?

  Oh, it's a lava cake, yeah.

• 39:41Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, Earth is a lava cake.

• 39:42Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 39:43Hakeem Oluseyi?

  With like a nut in the middle.

• 39:44Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 39:44Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Bro.

• 39:45Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, well, that's cool.

• 39:46Hakeem Oluseyi?

  People think the ground beneath our feet is solid.

• 39:48Chuck Nice?

  No, well, and guess what? The great thing about that is if it wasn't, we wouldn't be here.

• 39:53Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Exactly.

• 39:53Chuck Nice?

  Cause that is what gives us the magnetic field that protects us all.

• 39:56Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, which I map as, so yeah.

• 39:58Chuck Nice?

  Very cool. Alright, so here's the second thing she said. Also, what do you think about the recent proposal that the ancient little red dots are now globules where massive stars were born?

• 40:08Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Uh, my understanding is based on the latest paper, they see that the sources of the light from those globules is reprocessed light from an accretion disk. So it looks like it's a baby supermassive black hole with an accretion disk in there. And so there's, what is it called? Where, you know, you see scattered light and you see, what is the word? Phosphorescent? What the hell is it called?

• 40:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's polarized.

• 40:35Hakeem Oluseyi?

  It's polarized, so it's absorbed and re-emitted by the gas. So you essentially have-

• 40:39Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay. Yeah, I didn't understand-

• 40:41Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Fluorescence.

• 40:42Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, now, okay, I didn't understand you at first, but damn.

• 40:45Hakeem Oluseyi?

  So, so a supermassive black hole accretion disk, accretion disk is emitting higher radiation.

• 40:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That'd be emission nebulae, where the atoms are charged up and then they-

• 40:55Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Exactly.

• 40:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Decharge and they re-emite.

• 40:56Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Exactly.

• 40:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We close the emission nebulae.

• 40:58Chuck Nice?

  Okay, that's cool.

• 40:58Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Plus scattered light, like coming directly from the disk, they just get, yeah.

• 41:01Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 41:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So just to remind people, what are these red things?

• 41:05Hakeem Oluseyi?

  So it looks like it is a baby supermassive black hole being born in the very, very, very early universe.

• 41:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Super early universe.

• 41:13Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Right, yeah.

• 41:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the dark ages.

• 41:15Hakeem Oluseyi?

  In the dark ages. So the question that we've been having is which came first, the supermassive black hole or the galaxy?

• 41:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's been an eternal question.

• 41:21Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Eternal question. It's looking like it's the hole.

• 41:24Chuck Nice?

  Wow, dude, so that's super cool, man.

• 41:27Hakeem Oluseyi?

  The hole precedes the dirt.

• 41:29Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 41:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and the reason-

• 41:31Chuck Nice?

  That's so cool.

• 41:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The reason why it's not entirely obvious is a, a supermassive black hole might have a billion times the mass of the sun.

• 41:39Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 41:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But the galaxy would have a hundred billion times the mass of the sun. So the black hole is less than one percent. So how are you gonna get everybody to join this? So it's, it was not a completely obvious pathway.

• 41:53Chuck Nice?

  Okay, okay.

• 41:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To know who came first in this, yeah.

• 41:56Chuck Nice?

  That's fascinating.

• 41:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 41:58Chuck Nice?

  That is really cool, man. I did not, I did not know that.

• 42:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, we have time for one last question.

• 42:02Chuck Nice?

  One last question, here we go. Tristan Phillips says, hello Neil, Chuck, Hakim, I hope you're all doing swell. Coming from Jensen Beach, Florida here, I have what may be the most important unanswered question in astrophysics. Let's say I somehow acquire a completely indestructible sixteen pound brungzwick bowling ball. It's immune to heat, pressure, radiation, basically everything. I gently place it on the equator of the fastest spinning pulsar we know of, let it rotate with the star, and then through the power of plot armor, I magically turn off the pulsar's gravity just long enough for the bowling ball to escape, okay? Did I just throw the fastest strike in the history of the universe? And how fast is that bowling ball actually leaving?

• 42:47Chuck Nice?

  If that's not ridiculous enough, let's say I somehow recover the bowling ball, take it over to a supermassive black hole and launch it into one of its relativistic plasma jets. Once it's far enough away that it escapes the black hole's gravity and won't end up orbiting anything, how fast is it moving now? Two different scenarios, but I like the first one better. You basically use a pulsar as a catapult with an indestructible bowling ball sitting at the equator. It's spinning, spinning, spinning. When it gets to a terminal velocity, you stop it, boom, it goes off. How fast is it going?

• 43:23Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Well, at first, it's going the speed of the spin, right?

• 43:29Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 43:29Hakeem Oluseyi?

  But it has to climb out of that gravitational well of that neutron star.

• 43:32Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 43:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But she said, she says she turns off the gravity.

• 43:35Chuck Nice?

  Oh, cause, cause it's, okay, so she turns off the gravity.

• 43:38Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Turns off the gra-

• 43:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:40Hakeem Oluseyi?

  This is a powerful being we're dealing with.

• 43:45Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I love it.

• 43:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think she, did she say turn off the gravity?

• 43:48Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, right, right, right, right.

• 43:49Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 43:50Hakeem Oluseyi?

  So you know what's really interesting is that I saw someone who actually modeled this, cause you know the idea that we always have, you have something spinning and you let it go, it takes off on this tangent line.

• 43:59Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:59Hakeem Oluseyi?

  And they found that actually it doesn't. At the very beginning, there's some little glitch thing that happens, I don't remember the details, and then it goes on a straight line. But I, conservation of momentum, that sucker's gonna-

• 44:12Chuck Nice?

  It's just gonna go?

• 44:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so, so typically a fast spinning pulsar, the equator's moving at some appreciable fraction of the speed of light.

• 44:19Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 44:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like half the speed of light, maybe, or quarter the speed of light.

• 44:22Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I have no idea.

• 44:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so the ball goes off at that speed.

• 44:24Chuck Nice?

  That's me, right.

• 44:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all you got.

• 44:26Chuck Nice?

  That's pretty, that's all you got.

• 44:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:27Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, it's a pretty ornate way to just say, what happens if the ball goes at half the speed of light?

• 44:34Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Right, right. Which only reminds me of that new, uh, launch company that spins the-

• 44:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, oh, yeah, it's, it's a-

• 44:41Chuck Nice?

  The centrifuge rocket thing?

• 44:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's, it's a, what do they call it? Yeah, I mean, in fact, I've saw some old sci-fi movies where they had a mechanism like this, before they figured out multi-stage rockets, deep in the fifties, before we-

• 44:54Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that makes sense.

• 44:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We had that going.

• 44:56Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 44:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it was, it was a spinner, and then they disconnect, they detached it-

• 45:00Chuck Nice?

  And then shoot it through a tube and it goes phew.

• 45:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and then it goes, it goes out.

• 45:04Chuck Nice?

  That'd be kinda cool, though.

• 45:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, they, they're doing it.

• 45:07Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it's fun to think about, you know? I mean, I like it, yeah. Alright, Hakim, man, you are like, I'm tired.

• 45:17Chuck Nice?

  I mean, damn, it's so cool having you here, man.

• 45:20Hakeem Oluseyi?

  What? No, it is, no, man, that was full, full stop, it's so cool having you here.

• 45:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, thank you, man. It's good to be to a person, man. You're brilliant. People, people know it too. If it sounds like half, half of him is in this book, why do we exist? Like, you open it up, he pops out.

• 45:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The nine realms of the universe that make you possible.

• 45:43Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 45:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And one of them has to be Asgard, cause that is a realm of the universe. I think you, you missed an opportunity.

• 45:49Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 45:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got one thing I gotta say.

• 45:51Chuck Nice?

  I'm not a Marvel fan.

• 45:52Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Oh, but I am, but I am, but I am.

• 45:55Chuck Nice?

  Okay, good.

• 45:55Hakeem Oluseyi?

  But I have one thing I have to say about the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and that is we have just launched a YouTube channel called Astro Beat, where I do explainer videos.

• 46:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's about time.

• 46:07Hakeem Oluseyi?

  It is.

• 46:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the mission is to spread the love of the universe-

• 46:11Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Absolutely.

• 46:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Far and wide.

• 46:12Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That's right.

• 46:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And even though it's called of the Pacific, that's just, it's incidental that it's on the west coast, outside of San Francisco.

• 46:20Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Our new DBA, doing business ass, is the Astro Society. So that's been our website forever, astrosociety.org. So the YouTube channel is the Astro Society. So in the future, all ASP things that don't have to do with the publications and the awards are gonna be labeled as the Astro Society.

• 46:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'm a huge supporter of their work because it makes my job easier.

• 46:42Hakeem Oluseyi?

  And he is appreciated.

• 46:45Chuck Nice?

  That's awesome. Alright, dude, thanks for coming through town.

• 46:48Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Thank you for having me, I'm honored.

• 46:49Chuck Nice?

  Once again. And how do we find you? Are you anywhere on the internet?

• 46:53Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I am not, uh, but you can find me at the astrosociety.org. You can find us, we have all our socials, I'm, I'm on the socials of the Astro Society these days.

• 47:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and occasionally you come through town and help out the History Channel.

• 47:06Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Absolutely, I help out the History Channel, I help out Nova, parts of the thought, we work together, yeah, yeah.

• 47:12Chuck Nice?

  Alright, that was great.

• 47:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all the time we have. This has been StarTalk, another cosmic queries. The Hakim Ulyshay edition, Neil deGrasse Tyson for StarTalk. As always, I bid you to keep looking up. Alright, we got it, man.