Cosmic Queries – Cream of the Universe Soup

Gravity as the curvature of space.

This is so great.

If the photon follows the curvature of space.

Amazing.

It knows no other job in this world but to do that.

That’s awesome.

But in addition, the original 1919 eclipse expedition by Sir Arthur Eddington to test Einstein’s general relativity that light would bend near a gravity source.

So you wait for a total solar eclipse, because now you can see stars right up to the edge of the sun and you can see is their position the same as when the sun isn’t there and then you can see that the light bent.

Here’s something nobody talks about.

The light would have bent even without Einstein’s theories, but it would only have bent half as much.

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

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk Cosmic Queries edition and this one is Grab Bag.

Chuck, I think that’s your favorite one, Grab Bag.

Is that right?

Yeah, I kind of dig the Grab Bag, you know, just because…

You reach in and whatever comes out…

It’s a potluck.

Whatever happens.

A potluck is never a bad thing, right?

It’s just a different thing.

Yeah, that’s right.

Potluck is great because you don’t know what you’re getting.

You get there and there’s a bunch of good stuff.

Normally.

And usually it’s people’s best stuff, right?

They don’t bring their worst stuff.

Exactly.

Nobody brings their crap dish to potluck.

Their B-list dish, right.

And you say like, what are you bringing to the potluck?

And they’re like, my string bean casserole.

It’s like, no, you got to go.

I like string beans.

I like string beans too, but you can’t be bringing the recipe off the Campbell’s soup to the potluck.

Oh, oh, oh, oh.

You got to, now, if you have an original recipe for a string bean casserole, that’s a different story.

That one was from the mushroom, cream of mushroom soup.

The cream of mushroom soup.

Yeah.

You dumped that in.

That made everything.

Yeah, exactly.

You can make anything with cream of mushroom soup.

Campbell’s, it had enough salt to serve an army.

Yeah.

It was thick enough to move.

But anyhow, wait, so you got a whole set of questions.

I haven’t seen them or heard them, so let’s bring them on.

All right, well, we can jump right into this.

I love this first question.

This is from Amanda.

And Amanda clearly believes that everybody knows who she is because that is all there is.

Just Amanda.

It just says Amanda.

And that’s like, if you don’t know, then you blew it, bro.

If you don’t know, you blew it, bro.

Everybody who needs to know knows Amanda.

So Amanda says, you get a lot of questions about a lot of things.

What is the question you wish people would ask you, but they normally do not?

Ooh.

Wow.

Yeah.

I see, I don’t wish people to ask questions.

That’s not how I think about life.

I see myself as a servant of people’s curiosity that gurgles up natively within them.

Not as people who will serve my needs or my wants by asking me questions that I wish they would.

However, I think what she’s saying though is, what is the question that would excite you that people may not know to ask?

You helping out in that question.

So they’re curiosity.

You helping her out in that question.

I am helping her out because I get exactly what you’re saying.

And so I’m just reframing Amanda’s question in such a way.

I got one.

Here’s one.

Here’s one that no one has asked.

And I don’t know why.

I spent a whole chapter on it in my book Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.

The title of the chapter is On Earth as It Is in Heaven.

And the question is, how do we know that the laws of physics we discover here on Earth apply elsewhere in the universe?

Is that an assumption?

Is it a article of faith?

And if they apply across the universe, how do we know they also apply throughout time?

Because as we look out in the universe, we’re looking back in time.

And so no one asks that.

And so I guess I get to put that one in.

That’s awesome.

And if you want to know the answer to that, people, all you got to do is go buy Neil’s book.

That’s all you got to do.

Go buy the book.

You get the answer.

By the way, these are all asked by Patreon members, correct?

I think you have access to this currently with our new tier system at the entry level Patreon.

Yes.

You get $5 a month, I think.

Anybody who joins Patreon, if you join Patreon and support StarTalk Radio at patreon.com/startalkradio, then you automatically get to ask us questions.

And last I checked, isn’t like an entry level cup of coffee at Starbucks $5?

That’s actually cheap.

That’s just a regular cup of coffee.

Once you add the plutonium to it, it costs a lot more.

That’s what they’re doing.

There are so many.

I only get coffee.

The other stuff is just too deep for me at Starbucks.

It’s all sugar.

No, I mean, I’ll let you say no sugar or you say…

No, I’m saying though, it’s like a caramel macchiato, half calf, whatever.

It’s a dessert.

They deliver a dessert to you.

Yeah, half of them are the Frappuccino.

Yes.

Right, right, right.

Yeah, I can’t do it.

I can’t, you know.

I mean…

All right, well, if you get one of those every day, you can surely become a member by paying that once a month.

Per month, right.

That’s only one day.

Skip, skip the banana frappe for one day.

Skip the banana frappe with double the whipped cream for one day, and you support us for the entire month.

There you go.

All right, so my answer for Amanda is very simple, actually.

Initially, we didn’t know.

And here’s an interesting little historical note.

Isaac Newton comes up with his laws of gravity, and he’s rocking the house with these.

He can explain the moon’s orbit around the earth, earth’s motion around the moon.

He explains Jupiter’s satellites in orbit around Jupiter, which was the first time we calculated something, orbiting something else, other than either ourselves or the sun.

So it’s like, oh my gosh, this is badass universal law of gravitation.

And then Herschel, William Herschel, discovers planet Uranus with his telescope.

This is a planet orbiting just beyond Saturn.

Okay, so it’s a modern planet, was not known to the ancients, even though it’s named with a Roman god.

And so, Uranus was Greek, and then it was very close to that in Roman, in Latin.

Anyhow, that planet, it’s orbiting the sun, but they kept tracking it.

And it was not matching Newton’s laws.

It was deviating.

And people said, okay, we found the limit to Newton’s laws.

It only goes out to Saturn.

Beyond Saturn, we got to make other laws to apply to the rest of the universe.

And somebody else said, nah, Newton was too badass for that.

Let’s assume his laws are correct.

And then wonder what could be perturbing Uranus’s orbit in the way that we see.

And so some brilliant mathematicians got together, a French mathematician primarily, Le Verrier.

And he calculated with Newton’s laws.

And you have to invert the equation mathematically, which is not easy to do.

Instead of having an equation saying, here’s an object.

What’s the field of gravity at this distance?

You have to ask a different question.

Where would an object have to be and at what distance to influence this object in this way?

That’s a whole other way to use that law of physics and the arithmetic and the calculus.

So he does that, predicts that if Newton’s laws are accurate, and we didn’t come to the end of Newton’s laws, if they’re accurate, this should be a planet right over here, take a look.

Take a look.

And sure enough, they put the…

That night, that night, there was a telescope in Germany.

I forgot the guy’s name who tasked himself to this.

We’ll call him Wilhelm for the hell of it.

Wilhelm, whatever.

Ludwig Wilhelm.

Gunther, we’ll just call him Gunther.

That’s…

Chuck, that’s racist.

I’m pretty sure.

I’m pretty sure it is, too.

But let me tell you something.

If there’s one people that cannot complain about racism, it is the Germans.

Okay.

I’m like, really, bro?

We want to go down that road?

Do you really?

It’s clear Chuck is still in his race therapy classes.

Exactly.

All right.

So, this German astronomer…

It will come to me in a minute.

So, that night, he said, I’ll look here in this little box that Le Verrier is telling me to look, and sure enough, planet Neptune is discovered.

Look at that.

Where it should have been, and at the distance it needed to be to perturb the orbit of Uranus, and so Newton’s laws were intact.

Then, some time later, we found binary stars orbiting each other far outside of the solar system.

They’re following Newton’s laws of gravity.

Then we find galaxies in orbit.

We take this out to the edge of the universe.

Now, it turns out there’s a limit to Newton’s laws.

We find out they do fail in the regime of extremely high gravity.

And so you need Einstein’s laws to describe where Newton’s laws fail.

So it’s not a matter of place and time.

It’s a matter of severity of how much mass and energy have you compacted into a small volume.

So you can’t use Newton’s laws to describe black holes, for example.

Right.

But you can just describe practically everything else in the universe.

So they’re highly useful.

So we got to the moon on Newton’s laws in 1968 and 69.

So and we can look at spectra.

You can take carbon or nitrogen or oxygen and you burn it and it can send off features in a spectrum, which is the fingerprint of each element.

Each element has a unique fingerprint on the periodic table.

Some are complex, some are simple, some are fascinatingly ordered, but each element is unique.

Now we look out in the universe.

Oh my gosh!

Halfway across the universe, carbon showing up exactly as it would have on Earth.

Oh, but wait a minute.

The universe is expanding, so there’s a shift in the wavelength of light.

Oh, by how much?

Well, by this much.

So let’s shift in the spectrum here on Earth.

There’s the carbon fingerprint.

Wow, look at that.

Right, in exactly the configuration it needs to be, but the whole pattern would shift it according to how fast the thing is expanding away from us.

And we could take that to the edge of the freaking universe, which takes us not only across space, but through the depths of time itself.

And the spacing of those features is very sensitive to quantum physics and the speed of light.

And so that also tells us that not only do the basic laws that we know apply, but also other things like the speed of light, the quantum, other things that are tied up with other measurements that enable those measurements to even exist at all, those work out too.

Hence, they call the universal laws of physics.

Look at that.

And that’s what gives you that obnoxious thing, which is kind of true.

There’s the laws of physics and everything after that is opinion.

Wow, look at that.

That’s completely obnoxious.

I don’t think it’s obnoxious when it works.

But it’s kind of mostly true.

Yeah, you’re not obnoxious.

It’s a little Jordan-esque.

You know, like Michael Jordan was like, you ask him, who’s the greatest player of all time?

And he’ll just be like, man, we don’t need to have that conversation.

Oh, that’s how you answer that.

But you know what he means when he says that.

You know exactly what he’s saying.

What he’s saying is, I am the greatest player of all time.

But he’s like, man, we don’t need to have that conversation.

Because he’s not going to say it himself.

So, yeah, there you go.

Right, okay.

So, just remembering now, with the help of our producers, Johann Gottfried Gale, G-A-L-L-E.

In German, I’m not sure how you would pronounce that.

But he’s the guy who went to the telescope and found Neptune.

At the commands of the French mathematician, Le Verrier.

So, yeah, there it is.

Laws of physics.

That’s why physicists, I think, have good justification to have a certain cocky confidence when we invoke our laws of physics that we know apply throughout the universe and all of time.

Because, listen, when this stuff works halfway across the damn galaxy and then it works when other galaxies, they’re doing the same thing, it’s hard not to feel just a bit confident.

It doesn’t mean, it’s not justification to be an a-hole in your character and personality.

Just when you’re declaring your confidence in a discovery or a state, it’s okay.

Yeah, no, that’s pretty cool, man.

And listen, Amanda, what a great way to get us rocking on the show.

Okay, I took down the whole damn segment there.

Who cares?

Drop another one.

Let’s see what we can fit in here.

Okay, let’s go to Brittany Menacati.

Men-cati, not men-uh, Men-cati, Brittany.

Yeah, Menacati is like one of my favorite pasta dishes.

There you go.

So she says, Hi, Neil.

Hey, Chuck.

I’m an aspiring chef in Louisville, Kentucky.

I was wondering what the future of the culinary arts may look like with if and when we colonize elsewhere in our solar system or even further.

Oh, oh, okay.

I’m going to answer that real quick and then we go to a break.

So you’d have to make adjustments for different atmospheric pressures.

Right.

And let’s assume we could recreate the air mixture of nitrogen and oxygen.

The different atmospheric pressure will affect it.

And if it’s not exactly the same amount of oxygen, then things will burn at different rates.

If you have a coal oven or even your gas burning, because more oxygen, it will burn more violently because oxygen promotes combustion.

All of that, you’ll have the moon cookbook and the Mars cookbook.

And something else we discovered, and we’re not quite sure what causes this, in orbit, people’s taste buds wane.

So the foods that they eat tends to…

People who never had it before, they add hot sauce to their foods just to sort of punch it up.

Punch it up.

Punch it up a notch.

We don’t know if it’s because you’re weightless or because the pressure is a little different in the air.

It’s like being on a mountaintop.

You don’t put spacecraft at the same pressure as atmospheric pressure.

It’s just not necessary because you’re not running marathons.

You can breathe a thinner air like on a mountaintop.

You can breathe a thinner air and you’ll be fine.

But all the forces that operate on your olfactory senses, you might need a special version of your recipe for it to work on the moon.

But here’s something before we take it out to the break that you have to watch out because even if you have a delicious meal on the moon, if you open a restaurant, it’s not going to have any atmosphere.

Oh, I got it.

I see what you did there.

That’s a dad joke, but I’m allowed because I am a dad.

Let’s take a quick break.

I’m going to say that joke cratered.

Good one, Chuck.

Good one.

To get outjoked.

That’s good.

I like that.

Let’s just putt on putt.

Let’s take our first break, and we’ll come right back to StarTalk Cosmic Queries Grab Bag Edition with my co-host Chuck Nice.

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.

Thanks for listening.

We’re back, segment two, Cosmic Queries, Grab Bag Edition.

Chuck, you’re just pulling them out, random out of there.

So what else you have?

Here we go.

Let’s go to Kayla Nickel.

From Boise, Idaho.

No, no, it’s Boise.

Oh, Boise.

Boise.

Boise.

By the way, it just feels so unnatural to say Boise.

Boise, but from there, that’s what they say.

I’m pretty sure that’s how they say it.

What’s the person’s name again?

So this is Kayla Nicol from Boise.

Boise.

Boise says, hey, Dr.

Tyson, Lord Nice, do you think warp drive for interstellar travel is possible?

Yeah, we know how to do it on paper.

So the question is not, do laws of physics prevent it?

The question is do engineering abilities or knowledge or material substances enable it?

That’s really what that comes down to.

So is it possible in principle?

And so in principle, it’s possible.

So the math works?

Math works.

You can take space in front of you and create a density field and collapse it and then move through it.

And then you’re moving faster than the speed of light, but you’re not moving, no, you’re traveling faster than light speed, but you’re not moving faster than the speed of light.

Oh, Chuck says that perfectly.

Oh, Chuck.

Chuckie baby.

So there are two ways you can think of this.

One of them is you bunch up waves of space-time in front of you.

And then you sort of surf them on the crest of those waves.

And then you stretch the waves out behind you.

And then that way you go faster than light.

But it may be that wormholes get invented before that.

Gotcha.

Because a wormhole is a tear through your location in space and time.

It crosses through a higher dimension and re-enters in another location.

In another location.

And that reminds me of my fast story.

I’ve said it a couple of times, but now is a good time to say it.

I was at Charlotte Airport.

I had to go from a big plane to a little plane, and my luggage didn’t have wheels.

It was like a garment bag and my backpack, and I said, oh, I regret this.

I felt like I walked three miles.

It was probably only a mile, but it felt like three miles.

I got to my little plane gate, and I thought I’d be clever, geeky, and I tweeted.

This is back when tweeting was a fun thing to do rather than dipping your toe into the cesspool of human hatred, right?

Okay.

Back when you just tweet thoughts, right?

Fun thoughts.

So I tweeted, and I said, can’t wait till the day we have wormholes because then all gates will be adjacent to one another.

I thought, you know, I’m card-carrying geek.

That’s a good tweet.

And then, however geeky you are is always someone who’s geekier than you.

That’s right.

Because that spectrum goes to infinity, all right?

You only get to be king geek for a day.

Sometimes not even a full day.

Not even a full day.

Somebody’s there to unseat you and go a little geekier.

And the new geek in town, what do you got?

So the person said, Dr.

Tyson, the day we have wormholes, you won’t need airports.

There you go.

How to get out deep in real time.

So wormholes might just make all that obsolete, is my point.

But no, we’re not anywhere close.

And just to be clear, when people said, oh, we’ll never have heavier than air flight, people like to cite that as well, that scientists were wrong when they would say that scientists never said that.

Idiot engineers said that.

All right.

Here’s how you know they’re idiots.

And of course, the owner of Dirigible Companies.

They said that too.

The Graf Zeppelin family said that.

Right, right.

So the reason why you know that is birds are heavier than air.

And they can fly.

There you go.

This was not a hard thing.

So what you should have said is we don’t have to imitate a bird yet.

One day we might, rather than say we never will.

Then came, we’ll never travel faster than the sound barrier.

The word barrier started getting used for it.

Like, oh my gosh, you can’t cross it.

Well, why did you use the word barrier in the first place?

All right, why don’t you just say the speed of sound?

Right, the sound threshold.

Threshold, thank you.

Thank you, but you said sound barrier.

And then you had people who will never cross the sound barrier.

Meanwhile, rifle bullets, at that time, routinely travel faster than sound.

So does the crack of a whip at the very tip of the whip.

That little crack is like a mini sonic boom as it goes faster than sound.

We had things travel faster than sound.

Plus, everybody knew mothra travels faster than sound.

I mean, come on now.

But that wasn’t evidence enough.

That’s true, right.

No, no, was it mothra or was it…

No, it wasn’t mothra.

It was the rodent.

Rodent.

Oh, rodent, yes.

Well, that is…

The mothra was the moth.

Mothra is a big, we have a furry one.

Rodent is like the pterodactyl.

Yes, the pterodactyl.

And so, but my point is we had things in nature that could do it, and so to say we will never be able to do it is very little confidence in our own ingenuity.

Right.

Because all we have to do is mimic nature on that level.

So right now, we don’t know anything that’s making wormholes and things, but the math works.

So maybe one day, but not anytime that I can foresee.

Nice.

Well, that was fun.

Thanks, Kayla.

Thank you, Kayla.

From Boise.

From Boise.

Boise.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, Boise.

This is, of course, the Violetta Hour.

Violetta?

Yeah, Violetta Hour.

Is she married with children by now?

How old is this child?

She’s like our oldest questioner.

Yeah, no, she’s just 14.

And she’s-

Okay, so I knew that.

I knew that.

You know why I knew that?

Why?

You know why I knew that?

Because her mother brought her to New York City.

And I said, well, we gotta come visit.

So they visited my office.

But the child still kept asking questions.

I said, is the child, is she ever gonna shut up?

That’s great.

No, it’s a level of curiosity that people often lose right around her age right now.

Age 13, 14.

And so if she may entertain that, I said, I asked the stupid grown up question, what do you want to be when you grow up?

I felt stupid asking it.

And she said, yeah, I’m gonna be a scientist.

And she’s on the right path.

So listen, when we started, she was like Violetta, the nine-year-old astrophysicist, and now she’s Violetta, the 14-year-old astrophysicist.

Plus she’s into sports and things.

So good, she’ll have a whole, full, complete life.

There you go.

Coming down the pipe.

Okay, so what do you got, Violetta?

Violetta says this.

I was wondering, we have various measurements for traveling at X velocity through space, which is distance divided by time, like meters per second.

But what would or do-

See right there, she’s showing off.

Throwing some algebra in there.

I’m going to let her flex, though.

I got to let her flex.

You know what I mean?

I’m like, go ahead, girl.

Go ahead and flex.

All right, you go, girl.

You know, you do your thing.

Do your thing.

She says, but what would or do, we call the measurement for traveling through time?

And what would it or does that look like?

Oh, traveling through time.

I’ve never thought of that because when you’re traveling over distance, the thing of the metric there that we all care about is your speed.

Your distance divided by time.

Now, if time is what you’re traveling through, are we thinking about the speed with which you travel through time?

That’s a different one.

I haven’t thought of that.

But here’s the other thing.

Does speed make any real difference when time is the medium through which you’re traveling?

Oh, because usually when you talk about speed, you say, do I really have an hour to kill to do this?

Exactly.

Whereas in time, you just wipe out the hour because you’re traveling through time.

Time is the medium.

So, okay, interesting, right?

Time is, yeah, yeah.

Like, if you have access to a time machine, these words will never come out of your mouth.

We don’t have time to finish the report.

Right.

Said no one ever who had access to a time machine.

Right.

So let me think, how about this?

You will need a device that when you travel through time, keeps track of how far you have traveled in distance.

Not how long it took.

Not how long it took to get there.

Right, the time doesn’t matter.

Just how far.

Because, as I’ve said before on this program, if I have a time machine right here, and I go back one day, okay?

If that’s all I do, is go back one day, I will reappear in the vacuum of space because Earth is not in this position one day ago, okay?

In fact, I’ll be in the way and Earth will slam into me.

So, because things are moving, you can’t just go through time and land in a place you expect to land unless you also plot a trajectory through space.

So, if you want to be where that time machine is in that room a day later, six months later, whatever, you got to move to Earth’s spot.

If it’s six months, you’re on the other side of the sun, thank you.

It’s two seasons later, thank you, all right?

You got to track all of this.

So, I bet it’s not a speed calculation, it’s a distance calculation that we’re going to have to carry in our hip pocket.

Right.

Lest we all die suffocating in the vacuum of space.

And let me tell you something, Violetta.

If you are 14 years old asking these type of questions, don’t ever smoke weed.

Just leave it alone.

You don’t need it.

You don’t need it to get to that kind of thing.

When the kids come and they say, yo, you want to hit this?

You just say, yo, I’m hitting that all the time in my mind.

My mind is just constantly hitting that on the universe.

Because you just don’t need it if you’re already thinking of questions like this at 14.

It’s funny you say that because one out of four of my tweets, when I comment or reflect on an observation I’ve made, somebody’s always saying, Neil, put down the weeds.

I’ve seen that in your responses.

The one that got the most was, in a mirror, you can kiss yourself, but only on the lips.

People lost their minds on that.

And it’s very simple optics.

But then people said, Neil, are you high?

So I guess it’s how to get high thoughts for free.

Just think deep thoughts about the physical universe.

And you’re there.

You know, Vailette is old enough to do stuff because her earliest queries were sent via her mother.

Yes.

You remember that.

Now she’s writing herself.

Of age.

Okay.

Bring it on.

Here we go.

This is Evan Fenwick.

Dear Dr.

Tyson and Lord Nice, I’m Evan from Ontario, Canada, and my question is, as a science communicator, how do you maintain your cool when dealing with outspoken science deniers, and what advice could you offer to people who struggle to maintain their composure when confronted by the same?

I mean, how to not punch someone in the nose.

You know?

No, no.

You know what it is?

It’s a state of mind.

As an educator, it’s not my duty to educate the educated.

If you confront someone who does not know something, that’s what your life is about.

That session that is ready to happen is what you live your life for.

Not just giving lectures just to entertain people, but it’s the person who has a twisted mental pathway knotted in some way that needs to be unraveled, unwoven, because whatever it was weaving was losing track of objective reality.

And so what you have to do is, yeah, it needs infinite patience, but I don’t think of it that way.

To say it needs patience implies that without patience, you would be angry and frustrated.

You know what?

I don’t want to say anger is me.

What frustrates me if someone is no longer curious about learning what is true, and then they’re angered, they dig their heels in and say, let me explain to you why the earth is flat.

It’s harder to be an educator in that setting.

Well, a professor in a classroom, that’s not who’s sitting there in class.

You know, 100 people angry with the professor because they want to keep believing what they’re…

They’re there ready to listen to a new thing.

So all I would ask is, if I have the patience, the least you could do is have the…

Openness?

Just to listen to what I’m going to tell you about what it is you think is true.

Wow.

And let’s take it from there.

That is so much more compassionate and understanding than what my answer would have been.

Which is…

I’ll be sure to leave you at home next time.

Yeah, because my answer is, listen here, you obtuse, ignorant, homunculus.

So, a homunculus is a tiny human being imagined to be the embryo before we had any clue how a reproduction worked.

Exactly.

And they were misshapen in every single way.

A tiny little man.

A tiny little man who was misshapen in every way.

And of course, he had no intelligence at all.

So, another point there is, I guarantee you that if I’m going to engage you in that conversation, it’s because as an educator, I know more about what it is you believe to be true than you know about what I know to be true.

Oh, wow.

Now listen, that’s a great place to be if you are trying to help someone.

Because if I don’t know all their reasons for why they think Earth is flat, I can’t have that conversation.

I’m just lecturing and I’m just hoping they’re listening.

But if I know what’s in their brain wiring, I can access it and work with that and work with them to help disentangle.

So you got to meet them where they are.

Correct.

Correct.

And to me, that’s an educator’s challenge, not an educator’s frustration.

There you go.

So you find where they are, find that spot, meet them there, and then try to bring them along to a place of enlightenment.

That is my job.

While resisting the urge to punch them in the face.

Dumbass!

You dumbass!

Like I said, I’ll be leaving you at home on that pilgrimage.

Okay.

Where’s Lord Nice and Uncle Chuck?

No, I didn’t bring them on this educational route here.

We couldn’t afford the bail money this time.

We didn’t take Chuck.

All right, we got to take a quick break.

When we come back, our third and final segment, StarTalk Cosmic Queries, Grab That.

We’re back, Star Talk.

Grab Bag Edition, I’m with Chuck Nice.

Chuck, you’re in some video projects lately.

What do you got going on?

Well, right now, I’m just, I mean, my Disney show is still running.

Nat Geo panel, if you have Disney Plus, you can watch Brain Games on the road.

Love it.

I’m still doing that.

And I am, you know, I will announce it here, because we are settling up on the final details.

But StarTalk fans will be the first to receive an invitation to come to the taping of my comedy special, which will be only about science.

Why?

I’m doing a comedy special, just science.

Nothing but science.

Whoa.

Yeah, and I took some of the material for discussion or jokes from Neil’s latest book, so it’s kind of cool.

Well, the book just touches everything in our civilization.

It certainly does.

And that’s what comedians, that’s the fodder for comedians, right, is civilization.

Absolutely.

So I’m happy to serve that role.

Will you give us details when it’s ready?

Yeah.

We’re settling up the final date for the taping right now.

So it’s going to be great.

And I told them that before we make a public announcement, that I want to invite only StarTalk fans first.

So they can get first access to the tickets?

They can get first access to the tickets because we’re doing four shows.

Wait, Chuck, are you inviting StarTalk only because they’re more likely to laugh at your jokes?

No, no, because they’re more likely to understand them.

Understand the joke, oh, okay.

I don’t want no dumb asses at my show is what I’m saying.

What do you say there?

What do you mean by that?

What do you mean by that?

You should have kept your dumb behind home.

There’s a difference between that wasn’t funny or I didn’t know enough to understand why that was funny.

And guess what?

The result is the same.

The person doesn’t laugh, but one of them, the stuff was funny, you’re just stupid.

So this is the third segment.

Let’s see how many more we can slip in here.

I’ll try to be my sound bite mode.

Let’s do it, let’s do it.

This is Trevor C.

Mills.

And Trevor says, greeting Dr.

Tyson and Lord Nice.

Trevor from Augusta, Georgia here.

And my daughters love listening to your podcast with me.

My daughter Lucy has a question and she would like to know how does space continue to grow?

What causes the expansion of space-time and how can we slow it down?

So, well first of all Lucy, space drinks its milk every single day.

Gross.

You know, they don’t advertise that anymore.

Oh, that’s right.

I’m too old, look at me, giving away my age.

Got milk, it’s just got milk now.

It used to be milk makes you strong.

It used to be.

And you know, one of my favorite jokes from David Brenner, old comedian from the 70s.

Is that right?

Yeah, he’s a filly guy.

Here’s the bravest person, the bravest human there ever was.

Okay, we say, well, who’s that?

He says, okay, that’s the person who saw a female bovine creature walking the countryside and decided to drink the liquid secretions out of its.

Oh, that’s right.

That’s funny.

Bravest human there ever was.

That is a brave human.

So I forgot, what was the question?

So, you know, space, it’s still growing.

Why does it continue to grow?

And what’s going on with the growth of space?

Okay, so I can answer one out of three of those questions.

Okay, the space is expanding because of the energy endowed in it from the Big Bang.

The Big Bang, okay?

Now, that expansion is also accelerating opposite the collective wishes of all the gravity of all the galaxies in the universe.

We do not know what is causing that, but we measure it and we call it dark energy.

How does it expand?

What is it expanding into?

Into what we don’t know, but however much vacuum of space there is today, there’s more of it tomorrow and more the next day.

And that will continue all the way up to the Big Rip, unless something prevents the Big Rip.

And we talk about Big Rip in the StarTalk book, Cosmic Queries.

Cosmic Queries, a fun book.

And if you pick that up, there’s a whole section on ways the universe can end.

And one of them is in the Big Rip, where we, the accelerated expansion happens so rapidly that the fabric of the space-time continuum cannot keep up with it.

And it no longer stretches, it rips.

And I’ve lost sleep thinking about what that even means.

So.

Yeah.

So, no, we don’t have answers to the two of those.

But the first one, yes, the Big Bang had enough energy to expand for the 14 billion years that are going on now and then some.

Yet there’s this other phenomenon that has kicked in.

And we call it dark energy.

Yeah.

Look at that.

Look at that.

Nice job there, Lucy.

Yeah, okay.

Keep it up.

Yeah, sorry, I don’t have all the answers there.

I listen.

When I say I don’t have it, it’s not just me, my people.

All right, it’s not my personal ignorance.

You’re not gonna find it someplace else.

Right, thank you.

Thank you, okay.

So don’t worry, Lucy.

Don’t be like, Neil, let me down.

I know, let me go to that other podcast where they were.

The Brain Cocks, what’s going on with the expansion?

No, you don’t have to worry.

You’re gonna get the same answer anywhere, all right?

Yeah, all right.

This is Zeki Mashead.

And Zeki Mashead said, hello, Neil, Sir Nice.

We can observe the first, second dimensions, but if there was life bound to them, would they be aware of us?

If not, does that mean that there’s possibility of higher dimensional life forms that can observe us?

But we can’t process their existence.

Would we be able to use the laws of physics or gravity to communicate if this was the case?

Yes, yes, yes.

And thank you, Zeki.

Now let’s move on.

Let’s go to Cicero.

So here’s an interesting thing.

Two dimensional life, let’s say they exist in just this, in a flat surface.

How would they see each other?

Well, they would only see each other along their perimeter.

Edge on, right?

So their skin, if you will, is just their perimeter.

That’s all they are, the perimeter and guts on the inside.

Well, we are three dimensional people.

We can see inside their bodies because there’s no skin separating their two dimensional existence from our three dimensional existence.

Their skin is only in their two dimensions, on their perimeter.

So we could go in and do, we can do surgery on them without cutting them open.

Skinless flounder people.

So by the same analogy, we three dimensional people, if there’s a four dimensional creature that sees us, they see our entire innards.

And I would love to write a science fiction story where they have four dimensional medicine.

Where the surgeon jumps into a fourth dimension, sees every one of your organs just on display.

The way we see all the organs of a two dimensional creature and they just reach in, clear out the arteries, replace the organ, fix the organ, and then they never had to cut you open for it.

And cutting you open part is a big part of the recovery from surgery.

It’s healing from having been cut open.

Now, how might we communicate?

I’m guessing we could write some letters in our three dimensions and they’d be able to see it.

They can see our innards, they can see what our writing is.

And what is writing?

If not two dimensional information when you think about it, right?

Yes, correct.

Not right, but correct.

Right, so I don’t see why we could…

And they would have to then write something, they’d have to stoop to create something in three dimensions that we could then read, or ideally in two dimensions, which is our more familiar form of communicating in the written word.

If they speak, their sound waves, I don’t know how they’d get into our…

What’s a four dimensional sound wave look like?

I’d have to think about that.

That’s pretty wild.

What that would mean for us.

I’m still stuck on a Klein bottle.

I can’t even…

When I look at the renderings of that, that’s a four dimensional bottle.

And I’m telling you, it’s just…

That’s a whole other show.

Dude, we should do a show…

I have spent way too much time sitting and trying to figure out…

It’s really rough.

A Klein bottle has no inside.

No inside.

Yeah.

It’s interesting.

It’s really, really cool.

But it’s a four dimensional…

I can’t even wrap my mind around a four dimensional sound wave.

Yeah, I have to think about that.

Because if we use sound, they might have some other sensory way to receive information.

Sound might be too primitive for them.

Exactly.

Dude, that’s amazing.

Next.

Wow, that was so good.

So good.

Okay, how about this?

Cicero Artefan says, Hey, Dr.

Neil, Lord Nice, Cicero from Toronto, Canada.

I want to know when we use a pillow, it is fluffy because it has air between the foam or the feathers.

But what would a pillow look like in space?

So now, I don’t know if he means like in the actual vacuum of space, where you go and lay down.

Or like just out in the space station.

No, no, in the vacuum of space.

You have to mean a vacuum.

It’s not just zero G, it’s the vacuum.

So a pillow is soft not simply because it has air in it.

There are plenty of things that have air in it that are not soft.

Like your tires.

Okay, sure, that’s a good example.

But I was trying to think of something more rigid, like a dry sponge.

Oh, wow, look at that.

You would not use a dry sponge as a pillow, because it’s kind of…

I would, because I cry when I sleep.

No, yes.

Oh, no, it’s not tears.

It’s snot that comes out of your runny-ass nose.

And drool.

Drool.

Drool.

He’s a drooler.

So it’s because the material is flexible.

Okay, so, and it has a restorative texture to it.

So two things would happen.

If you took a pillow that had air in it and took it out into space, the pillow would flatten instantly.

But, because there would be no air holding up the things.

But then the texture, the restorative force of the material will bounce it back.

And I think you would still have spongy things.

Because you’re not being spongy on the air, you’re being spongy on the material.

On the material, correct.

Memory foam.

Material makes all the difference in the world.

It’s not just simply if there’s air in there.

It does the thing restore its shape once it’s compressed.

So it will have to go through a decompression moment, where all the air comes out.

Then it goes back to shape, and then it’s a regular pillow at that point.

But you still need to breathe.

You know, you’ll need a breathing apparatus.

Well, you’ll be dead because you’re in the vacuum of space.

Your pillow will be fine.

Rest in peace with that pillow.

Alright, this is Fredrik Johansson.

And this is Fredrik says, Hello, Fredrik here from Sweden.

And it’s Friedrik, he gave me the pronunciation.

It’s Friedrik.

Alright.

Does the Johansson have like extra A’s and extra S’s in it?

No, it’s just two S’s.

Johansson.

Just two S’s, Johansson.

Johansson.

He says, my question to Lord Nice and the good doctor is, if photons have energy and energy equals mass, does that not mean that photons have mass?

Okay, so two fast points here.

Photons are pure energy.

There is a mass equivalent of that energy, but while the photon is energy, it does not have mass.

Okay, it is pure energy.

And so now you can ask, well, if it doesn’t have mass, why should it bend according to gravity?

But it turns out gravity, as the curvature of space, if the photon follows the curvature of space, it knows no other job in this world but to do that.

But in addition, the original 1919 eclipse expedition by Sir Arthur Eddington to test Einstein’s general relativity that light would bend near a gravity source.

So you wait for a total solar eclipse, because now you can see stars right up to the edge of the sun, and you can see is their position the same as when the sun isn’t there, and then you can see that the light bent.

Here’s something nobody talks about.

The light would have bent even without Einstein’s theories, but it would have only bent half as much.

Because with Newton, you don’t need mass to then respond to the existence of a gravitational field.

The mass actually divides out, and it’s what effect the field has on anything there.

Energy, objects of any size, it is the same for them all.

That’s why all objects fall at the same rate.

Heavy objects, light objects, no matter how light you made that object, neglecting air resistance, it will fall at the same rate as a heavy object, right to the point where it has no mass at all, such as a photon.

Look at that.

So, yeah.

That is so fascinating.

Oh, here’s an experiment you can’t do, but it would work, right?

So, you take a BB and drop it.

Right.

And let’s say it takes a tenth of a second to hit the ground.

Right.

Whatever is the distance you’re dropping.

You take a beam of light and beam it out horizontally.

Right.

Take a BB and send it out horizontally.

At the same moment you dropped this, Right.

it will go down, wind downstream from you, but it will fall at exactly the same rate as the one falling straight down.

And it will hit the ground at the same time.

Right.

No matter how fast you send it out sideways, it will hit the ground at the same time as the BB you dropped straight down.

It will land miles down the road, depending on the speed you sent it, but it will hit at the same time.

Right on up to a beam of light.

Send a beam of light, a tenth of a second later, it hits the ground.

Wow.

That is crazy.

But it would have gone, you know, 18,000 miles off to the left.

Right.

It wouldn’t be on Earth at that point.

But the point is, gravity operates on all objects in the same way.

And even when it’s not an object, if it’s energy such as light.

So it’s a great question.

It really is a tremendous question.

Thank you, Friedrich in Sweden.

It’s very cool, man.

I don’t have it.

We don’t have any more time, Chuck.

Oh, man.

Do you have a fast one?

Is there like really, really, really fast one?

Let me see here.

Here it is.

Hey, this is Cameron Bellamy.

Hey, Chuck.

Hey, Neil.

My wife, Brooke Bellamy from Baltimore, wants to piggyback on my Patreon account to ask.

You cheater.

You tell Brooke she better give us five dollars.

This question cost five dollars.

Chuck don’t play.

I’m a nice guy here, but Chuck is the mean one.

Brooke says this, would it be possible to see evidence of previous life on planets that may have once had life, but evolved out of being able to sustain it?

Yeah, so it wouldn’t continue to influence the atmosphere, as we do, as life on Earth actively adds oxygen.

We don’t add it, but the plant life adds oxygen to our atmosphere.

So that’s evidence of life on Earth, where you can see from a distance using spectra without having to visit the planet’s surface.

But if there was once a civilization, and it’s no longer there, and the atmosphere had a chance to equilibrate and be its own thing, without the presence of life, you’re going to have to go to the planet as far as you can tell.

You’ve got to go to the planet.

Especially you won’t be able to see it.

Correct, or you need some kind of powerful scope that can see the remnants of apocalyptic cities and things, which we don’t have the resolution to do for distant planets.

But otherwise, you’ve got to go there and dig around.

And that’s what we’re doing with Mars.

There’s no evidence of life on the surface.

Maybe there’s life under the soils.

And so with awkward things.

You need a pro, Brooke.

Get me there.

So that’s all the time we have.

And Brooke, yeah, I got to go with Chuck on this one.

She’s Bogarton.

Brooke is Bogarton, the husband’s account.

Yeah, that’s right.

Join Patreon, Brooke.

Next time, it’ll be under a pseudonym, right?

Exactly.

I’m Brooke Ena from Baltimore.

Next time, he’ll be like, hey, it’s Cameron Bellamy.

I got divorced and my new wife, Joyce, went like, okay.

Like, we know it’s you, Brooke.

We know it’s you.

All right, we got to go.

This has been Cosmic Queries.

Grab bag, I think it’s your funnest category, Chuck.

A lot of fun.

Grab bag it is.

All right, till next time on StarTalk, I’m Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.