March 30, 2017 9:13 pm

Friday, Neil Tyson and Chuck Nice Serve up a Heaping Helping of Galactic Gumbo

This week’s episode of StarTalk Radio is just the meal for you. Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice are serving up a big pot of spicy Galactic Gumbo full of cosmic ingredients that are sure to clear out your mental sinuses and light your brain on fire.

You’ll hear about string theory: how the vibrating frequencies of our universal strings could differ from those in another universe, and how this could eventually lead to traveling within the multiverse. And you’ll also get to explore the characteristics of the quantum universe, how its behavior is not deterministic but probabilistic, and the idea of a quantum-free universe.

Find out why there isn’t an exact origin point for the Big Bang, and why it’s possible for the fabric of the universe to expand faster than the speed of light while the things embedded within it do not. And yes, the explanation involves both Einstein’s general theory of relativity and his special theory of relativity.

You’ll also hear about the complexities of viewing galaxies billions of light years away and why we are still seeing them from where they once were, not where they currently are.

For myself, I was blown away by the discussion about Meteor Crater in Arizona, also known as the Barringer Crater, and how small its meteor was compared to the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs. I wasn’t alone: Chuck felt the same way, and expressed those feelings in his own, inimitable style.

I also enjoyed hearing Neil recount one of his proudest moments as a writer, when he was trying to come up with a cavewomen name, and how he got help from a simple word breakdown in the dictionary.

On an entirely different subject, Neil and Chuck discuss connections between science and religion, using scientific practices to search for a higher power, and how Ptolemy and Isaac Newton used the “god of the gaps” within their work.

StarTalk listeners sure do know how to ask questions and this episode is no exception. From the first question Chuck picked from our Patreon Patrons, to the last Cosmic Query in the Lightning Round which he grabbed from StarTalk’s social media channels, it’s a mouth-watering mélange of inquiry and information that makes up this week’s heaping helping of Galactic Gumbo!

Have we whet your appetites yet? If you’re hungry for knowledge, StarTalk style, please join us tomorrow night for Cosmic Queries: Galactic Gumbo at 7pm EDT right here on our website, as well as on iTunes Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and TuneIn. And if you’re an All-Access subscriber, you can watch or listen to this episode ad-free at 7pm, too.

That’s it for now. Keep Looking Up!
–Ian Mullen