Cosmic Queries – Infinite Quarks

Coming up on StarTalk, yet another edition of the ever popular Cosmic Queries.

Of course, I’ve got Chuck Nice.

And in there, we’re gonna learn, is the speed of light constant?

How do we even know what the speed of light is?

By the way, there’s a bunch of questions.

I’m just pulling out some of my favorite.

Another one was, if quarks fall into a black hole, what happens to them?

Is it different from anything else?

And if you’re a beam of light, can you escape the universe?

And could you see that?

There’s really good stuff coming up on StarTalk.

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

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.

I’m so excited to be here with you.

And I’m so excited to be here with you.

And I’m so excited to be here with you.

And I’m so excited to be here with you.

And one of our most popular formats.

That’s great, great, great.

I think people feel that they have a bit of control over the show.

Is that what it is?

Is that what it is?

Otherwise, we just run amok.

So we’re here back in my office at the American Museum of Natural History, the Hayden Planetarium, where I serve as a director.

That’s right.

Right here in New York City.

All right.

And I serve in the cafeteria.

Want fries with that?

Yeah, exactly.

All right.

So just go right on in.

Okay, let’s jump into it.

And it’s Grab Bag.

It is Grab Bag, which we used to call Galactic Gumbo.

But why don’t we call it that anymore?

I don’t know what happened to Galactic Gumbo.

People probably got tired of me going, guarantee me home.

Isn’t he dead?

I don’t know.

I’m not sure, but he…

Paul Poudon, right?

I don’t know if that’s his…

I don’t know his name.

All I know is he used to be on PBS.

He wore suspenders.

He weighed about 600 pounds.

Now I got myself some crawdads, yeah?

Drone, butter…

Every eighth word.

He was like the James Brown cooking show.

He was like…

There’s no understanding.

You wouldn’t understand no word he said.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

You wouldn’t know one, not one song.

All right, here we go.

Hello, Dr.

Tyson, Lord Nice.

This is Sarah, coming from Austin, Texas.

When we’re talking about the age of the universe, 13.8 billion years, is the age of years in Earth years?

Or is it the average time used?

If it’s Earth years, then wouldn’t it be a different age of the universe, depending on your location?

Yeah, it’s Earth years.

It’s Earth years.

If that’s not the unit of time we just all agree to.

And that exists as a unit of time right now, with or without the Earth.

Right.

We’ve defined it as a length of time, measured by an atomic clock.

So if Earth got destroyed out of the solar system by some cosmic monster.

Ooh, that sounds like a good movie.

A day and an Earth would still be defined.

Because we no longer rely on the rotation of the Earth.

It’s not the rotation.

And the orbit of the Earth around the sun.

To reckon our accounting of seconds.

It’s a standard unit of measurement.

Correct.

So yeah, it’s just Earth years.

And you will get a bigger number in centimeters than you will in inches.

Right.

That doesn’t mean the distance is farther.

But the distance is the same.

You’re just measuring it in different terms.

Correct.

So it doesn’t make a difference.

Correct, yeah.

So nothing to lose sleep over there.

I like to use hands myself.

Oh, you ride horses.

That’s exactly, that’s the distance that I use.

So you know how big a hand is?

No.

Four inches.

That’s a tiny little hand.

Who would measure hands like that?

Four inches, four inches.

That’s about, I think it’s four inches.

That’s like this much of my hand.

No, no, it’s the width of your hand.

Oh, I didn’t know that.

Now that I did not know.

You thought it was like a whole hand?

I thought it was a hand.

You put a hand in the hand and a hand.

No, no, it’s sideways.

Yes, sideways hands.

Okay, well that makes a little.

Yeah, yeah, I think it’s around four inches.

Four inches, okay, there you go.

That’s how high you measure.

Horses used to be measured from head to hoof.

How many hands high they would stand.

I’m glad you didn’t know that, because that would give me even more evidence that you did not grow up in the city.

I was born in the city.

Well, I’ve learned about you.

Well, when I was in prep school and I played polo, I said, the stables had many hooks in them.

I said, who is my co-host?

My prep school chums.

I did go to prep school, but that has nothing to do with my horse affiliates.

Your horse ignorance.

Yes.

My horse ignorance comes from, I used to attend riding camp when I was much younger.

Anyway, but it’s been years since I’ve been on a horse.

And you know, the truth is, I think they’re disgusting creatures at this point.

But they are delicious.

Please do not write, these are jokes.

Something interesting about a horse.

What’s that?

Okay, so a human brain is about this big.

Okay.

Do you know how big a horse brain is?

I know.

About the size of your fist.

About the size of a fist, yeah.

Cause there’s-

They’re a way bigger animal with a much smaller brain.

Yeah, well, you know, I don’t need them to solve calculus problems.

I can’t, you know.

My thing is like, pull this plow, that’s fine.

That’s what I need you for, okay?

And the horse is just fine with it.

All right.

Okay, this is Nobody.

Hey, Nobody from Nowhere, Vermont.

Hello, Dr.

Tyson, Lord Nice.

No, wait, there’s a character in West Side Story called Anybody.

Anybody.

I did not know that.

Yes, it’s a tomboy called Anybody.

Oh, really?

Yes, she wants to be with the gang.

She got dirty face, short hair, wears pants, can fight.

But they don’t let her.

Sounds rather sexy to me.

They don’t, they didn’t let her in because.

Because she’s a girl.

She’s a girl.

Back when things were quite binary.

I wonder, has gang protocol changed?

Like if you’re.

You go to the high council.

Like, yes.

I wonder if they’re sitting around all the OGs and the young Gs, and just like, have we advanced to the point where we can let girls in here and shoot them as well?

I’m just wondering if anybody’s came from nowhere.

If anybody came from nowhere.

This person’s from nowhere.

He’s from nowhere in Vermont?

Nowhere in Vermont, okay.

So it says hello, Dr.

Tyson and Lord Nice.

Is there any way for a non-physicist to correspond with a physicist about their papers without being a bother?

Okay, I think this guy is angling to send you some discovery that he or she or they have made.

Okay, so my email is no longer public.

Of course.

It’s no longer public.

No longer.

Because for a while.

For people like nobody.

No.

Because of nobody.

Because I don’t want nobody talking to me.

If you somebody, we might be able to talk.

Had he been somebody.

Had he been somebody.

From somewhere.

From somewhere, he would have got your email right here.

But now he’s nobody from nowhere.

Nowhere so you get nothing.

Sounds like an Abbot of Castile routine.

All right.

So almost every academic on their university page has their email posted.

That’s right.

Practically everyone.

What you want to do if you want to correspond, if probably you have an idea, would you do some homework first?

Make sure.

Do some homework.

Right.

Don’t go to them and say, I have an idea that Einstein is wrong and that all of you don’t know what you’re doing.

Listen to me.

Yes.

And there are those out there.

Because you spent two hours watching a YouTube video.

Exactly.

And this person spent their life and career studying that one subject.

Exactly.

Yes.

So just do a little homework.

Do a little homework.

And what you don’t want to do more than anything.

What?

Is email Chuck Nice and say, Dr.

Tyson is not answering my emails.

That you do not want to do.

Okay.

So that’s how you do it.

Almost all of them, it’s online.

Almost all.

Right, right.

Yeah.

Now, here’s the thing.

Correspond without being a bother.

Oh, without being a bother.

Do your homework and ask an intelligent question.

Okay.

And don’t tell them that you have a new secret to the universe and they have to listen to you.

Otherwise, no, that is not humble.

That is rather arrogant.

That you, a non-professional, would know something more than the professional.

So come to them a little more humbly.

I have an idea.

It might be correct.

I’ve thought about it in this way.

Right.

What do you think of it?

And don’t send them 20 pages.

They won’t have time for that.

Okay?

And do your homework.

Buy some physics books.

Yes.

Learn some physics.

It’s like going to a restaurant and just saying, oh, please, may I have a word with the chef?

You know.

I’m sorry, but what exactly did you season this with?

May I suggest in the future?

I know!

Perhaps some truffle butter would help, sir.

Like, yeah, no.

No, my favorite reply to that is, you know, people say you eat a great dish and they ask the person who cooked it, what’s the secret?

Right.

So, you know what the answer is?

No.

The secret is six years of chef school.

That’s great.

That’s a great answer, too.

Six years of chef school.

You’re thinking something tastes good because there’s one secret that they put in, that you just learned that secret, you could duplicate what they did?

Right, you don’t know it.

Give them some credit for expertise.

It’s a catalog of knowledge.

Give them some credit for expertise.

Coupled with skill.

Yes, knowledge, yes, you need the skill.

Skill, right.

Yes.

All right, that’s great.

All right, this is Mitchell Adkin.

Can you flip a fried egg with one hand while you’re stirring something?

I can’t even flip a fried egg, which is why I eat scrambled eggs.

It gets scrambled.

It gets scrambled on route to being flipped.

And I’m like, well, we haven’t scrambled eggs now.

I’m not even joking.

This is-

All right, what else you got?

This is Mitchell Adkins.

And Mitchell says, hello, doctor and lord.

We’re getting shorter and shorter, aren’t we?

This is Mitchell from Cincinnati, Ohio.

I heard an old episode of yours where you talked about the spaghettification of particles at a black hole.

You said that this continues all the way down until everything is ripped apart, which would make sense.

However, quarks are held together with asymptotic freedom, meaning that the strong force holding them together increases the further you pull them apart.

Would there theoretically be a point where the gravity ripping quarks apart would balance the strong force of asymptotic freedom and actually end up balancing and creating some kind of equilibrium?

Ooh, so let me tell you something about quarks.

You might not know.

I’ll tell you something about quarks, okay?

We’ve never seen an isolated quark.

They come in pairs, pairs or more, okay?

So let’s try to create an isolated quark, okay?

Quark.

So you go down there and you get a quark pair and they’re stuck together.

You begin to pull them apart.

No!

You begin to pull.

The soundtrack.

So you pull it apart.

And the force holding them together gets stronger.

The more you pull.

Yeah.

The greater is their distance, the stronger is the force.

No, it’s not that mysterious.

Right.

Name something every day for which that happens.

Magnets?

No.

No, they get weaker.

They get weaker.

Something that you pull apart and it gets stronger.

Right.

And the spring is what’s called a spring constant.

It tells you how tight it is.

Okay.

And how much energy that takes.

So, we think of this as a spring.

But here’s the catch.

As you pull them so much apart, at the moment it snaps, you have pumped so much energy into it.

Pulling it apart.

Pulling it apart that that energy in that instant becomes two more quarks, and now you have two pairs of two quarks.

That is crazy.

It’s diabolical.

It’s diabolical.

That is crazy.

It’s diabolical.

So, the energy that you put into this separate of the quark.

Yes, equals MC squared.

Right.

Right at the moment, there’s enough energy for each one to create another quark.

It snaps.

And now, once again, you got two quarks.

You got two quarks.

You got Hydra quark.

Nice.

You got two quarks on each one.

Right.

Right, so quarks are diabolical in this way.

That’s…

So, as you’re falling down, the tidal force is gonna stretch you.

Let’s give an energy to the quark.

Right.

So, he’s wondering if there’s some balance point down in there.

But now, here’s the thing, though.

As the quark gets pulled apart, okay, what happens is there is a point of breaking.

So, wouldn’t you just start making infinite quarks?

It kinda seems that way, Chuck.

Because that’s really, to get the equilibrium.

We’re not looking at equilibrium.

We’re talking about the creation of the quark.

So, what you would have is two quarks, four quarks.

Four quarks.

Eight quarks.

Eight quarks.

And that would just keep going because it would continually.

And the quarks would take over the universe.

That’s it.

Ooh.

Chuck.

It’s your world.

I’m just a quark living in it.

So, what we do know is there is no known force that can resist the gravitational collapse to a singularity.

Right.

Right.

I don’t know what to say.

So at some point, yeah.

At some point, the immovable force meets, I mean, the whatever it’s called.

You know what I’m saying.

What is it?

The movable object.

The irresistible force.

It meets the irresistible force.

So, I don’t have a good answer.

It seems to me you would have a quark runaway.

Right.

That’s really.

I gotta talk to some people about this.

That’s just freaky.

I gotta talk to some people about this.

Freaky, man.

I don’t have a good answer for you.

Chuck just said the quarks will take over the universe, and I don’t have a good rebuttal for that.

Yeah, that’s so cool, though.

I mean, what a great thing to think about.

All right, here we go.

Let’s see.

This is Bobdan.

Bob, Bobdan or Bobdan, okay?

B-O-B-D-A-N all together.

Bobdan.

Bobdan.

Okay, there you go.

It’s not Bobdan, unless the parents were lazy, and.

In it, it describes the physics and the mathematics inside the black hole.

And as you go through, it basically opens up an entire space time.

So inside a black hole is effectively a whole other universe, which leads us to wonder whether our universe is just inside somebody else’s black hole.

Somebody else’s black hole, correct.

And we have a horizon that you can’t get out of, and there’s stuff beyond it, but you can’t see it.

So there are some strong similarities between thinking of the universe as a black hole and a black hole as a universe.

Right?

Hello, I’m Alexander Harvey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon.

This is StarTalk with Dr.

Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Thanks for listening.

Will a photon, from its frame of reference, be able to reach galaxies beyond our event horizon should a photon see time stop for the rest of the universe at the speed of light and therefore not experience, listen, the expansion of the universe along which it is traveling?

People are getting in it.

They’re going in.

They’re getting in.

They’re going in.

Going all in.

I’m telling you because bringing up a lot of stuff here, that’s a layered question.

All right, so we have to be careful here.

Right.

We will never see the photon exit the universe.

That’s the whole point of what’s going on here.

The photon will move away and it gets swept up by the expansion of the universe and the energy coming back towards us against the expansion of the universe gets diluted until it disappears entirely.

Okay.

So we can’t, at that point it’s beyond our horizon, we can’t see it.

All right.

As far as the photon is concerned, it’s just happily doing its thing.

It’s just there.

It’s just, it doesn’t even know.

It has no idea.

No idea.

It’s just happily being.

It’s like the famous question with Albert Einstein said, if you’re in a car driving the speed of light and you turn on the headlights, what would you see?

Okay, well you can’t go the speed of light, but let’s go 99.9999% speed of light, you do that, you put on the headlights, you see your headlights.

You see headlights, because that’s it.

Everything is relative.

It’s at the speed of light.

It’s relative.

You don’t even know you’re going at the speed of light.

Exactly.

As far as you’re concerned, everybody else is passing you by.

Exactly, yeah.

Which made the awkward joke, I told you, when Relativity was published, that was at the New York Times, somebody made a joke that, hey Albert, what time does Grand Central Station arrive at the next train?

Right, right.

So that’s the same thing.

So if you’re the photon and you’re at the edge, when you’re at the edge, that’s not your edge.

Right.

When you’re at our edge, it’s not your edge.

Right.

Any more than a ship going to your horizon, that’s not that ship’s horizon, it sees beyond that.

Exactly.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Right, and it’ll, like I said, and a photon will be absorbed in the same instant it was emitted in its own reference frame.

I love thinking about it like a ship, because that’s so easy to envision, that you know the horizon.

And you know the ocean goes beyond your horizon.

Exactly.

Right.

Unless you’re a stupid flat earther.

In which case, you fall off the edge, big dummy, which you see beyond the horizon is your own ignorance, you stupid ass.

Anyway.

Anyway.

Chuck, this is a free country, people think whatever the hell they want.

This is true.

Okay, I don’t have an issue with flat earthers, I just don’t want them to become head of NASA, or something like that.

No, plenty of jobs for them, okay, if you want to think earth is flat.

Right, cleaning toilets is not a bad job.

There’s a lot of dignity in there, as far as I’m concerned.

Anyway, this is Tasos Souris, who says, greetings, Dr.

Tyson, Tasos from Greece here.

How would a civilization living in a planet that is surrounded by black holes from all sides perceive the universe?

Will we, from the outside, be able to see them?

Will they live their own slowed acceleration time frame?

So a couple different questions in there.

So the closer you are to a source of gravity, the more time dilated your life becomes.

So you think you’re living a normal life, people from outside see you living more slowly.

So we will see you living more slowly if those black holes are relatively near.

That’s first point.

Second, if you look out, you will see light bent around black holes.

So you’ll see all these rings, these light rings, because that’s what the geometry of space-time does when you have a source of gravity and light passes around it.

So that’s the main difference, the night sky will be these rings.

And Einstein said, he first predicted the existence of rings, the Einstein’s rings.

And then he thought things will never be so perfectly aligned to get a perfect ring, that you’ll never get a ring.

And we get some rings, but generally what happens is, if it’s exactly aligned, you get a ring.

If it’s slightly off-center, it splits into two parts.

And then if it’s off a little more, you can get four parts and then six.

And so, but in the limit of a perfect alignment, you get a ring.

And so, yeah, now that would be dangerous if you’re surrounded by black holes.

I don’t know how stable that orbit would be.

Right, yeah, exactly.

Because you’re in a pinball machine at that point.

At that point, as they say, there’s no such thing as gravity.

Your planet sucks.

Okay?

The black holes suck.

They’ll suck you in.

Right, all right.

Very cool, thanks a lot there, Tasos.

This is John Bickford.

Says, g’day, Dr.

Tyson.

Good day.

That’s what he says.

John Bickford here from Bolton, Massachusetts.

The Big Bang.

Did it disperse matter in all directions somewhat equally?

If so, and the universe is expanding in all directions, what happens in the space where the Big Bang happened?

Look at that.

Isaac Newton, my man.

And I think I have a finger puppet of him back here.

Never understood finger puppets, because it’s like…

Yeah, now you’ve got to finger up Isaac Newton’s iris.

That’s basically what happens.

That’s not what I was thinking.

Oh, okay.

I was thinking you can’t control the hands or the face or the expression, so it’s kind of…

It’s the lamest puppet.

The lamest puppet.

Even a sock puppet has more emoting than, emotes more than a finger puppet.

And so, I think this is, and not William Herschel, I should check.

But anyhow, they all look alike back there.

Right.

It’s a colonial era and all the Brits look, they all look colonial.

Put a powder wig on them, and who knows the difference, right?

Just put your powder wig on, and your buckle shoes, and get to work.

So, Isaac Newton argued that the universe must be infinite after he discovered his laws of gravity.

It must be infinite, because if it’s not, all the matter will find a center to fall to, and it would all fall to form one great heap of mass.

But if it’s an infinite, then one place is not more special than another.

Now, he didn’t imagine that you can live in an expanding universe.

That was outside of his worldview.

Expanding universe, you’re not all gonna fall to one spot, because there’s a force preventing that.

In our case, we call it dark energy.

So, with that, that place where the center occurred no longer exists in space, it only exists in time.

So, the timeline, if you go back to the beginning of time, on that axis, when you get there, all the matter will be in the same place.

You go forward, the expansion of the universe, you don’t have access to that point in that space.

So, I’ll give you an example, I’ll give you an example.

So, you have a balloon, and you’re inflating the balloon.

You start out, the balloon is like tiny.

That’s the big bang, okay?

Or the whole balloon is in one spot, right there.

Now you start blowing on it, it expands away from that spot.

Is that spot on the surface of the balloon?

No, it’s in the center of the balloon.

How do I get to the center of the balloon?

Turn back time.

The balloon gets smaller and smaller and smaller.

Now you’re back at the center.

Right, so you’d have to shrink the universe.

By going backwards in time.

By going backwards in time.

Exactly.

So the center exists, but not in the space coordinate.

It exists in the time coordinate.

There you go.

That’s really.

Deal with it.

Wow, these people are asking really good questions, man.

I gotta tell you.

This is not up his ass.

He’s got a jacket.

He’s got a red coat on.

I don’t know what jackets you wear, but at the hem of my jacket is my rectum.

Now you’ve ruined finger puppets for me.

I don’t wanna play with finger puppets anymore.

We’ve got a lot of questions today.

We are.

More than usual.

This is Ilias Siametis, Ilias Siametis.

That does not sound right, but we’ll go with it.

You can put a little flavor in it.

Siametis.

Okay, go.

Dr.

Tyson, Lord Nice, Ilias here from London.

What are we, London, Ontario, London, Connecticut, London.

Hey man, it just says London.

Okay, is there a London, Ontario?

I don’t know.

It kinda feels like.

It feels like there’s a London everywhere.

You know what that is?

That’s lazy ass Brits coming to the new world.

Where’d we come from?

We came from London.

Where are we now?

London?

Why not?

No, let’s call it New London.

New London, there you have it.

All right, so he says, would it be theoretically possible to break the bonds between atoms of something and reconfigure them into something else?

Let’s say manipulate the billions and billions of carbon atoms in a wooden chair and make a table instead.

Strong emphasis on the word theoretically.

Yeah, that’s not interesting though.

To turn a wooden chair into a wooden table?

You’re not really manipulating atoms.

You’re just reassembling the macroscopic wood.

Right, that’s all you’re doing is taking the wood and moving it around.

You’re moving the wood around.

If you wanna change molecule, do something fun.

Take your molecules and rearrange them and make an alien.

That’s still alive, but it’s not you.

It’s some other thing.

Do something interesting.

If you’re gonna have power over molecules and atoms, now what chemists do is, because we don’t have tools to pluck atoms and reattach them, we put them in vats of other chemicals that make that happen.

Make a reaction.

And these are called catalysts.

Okay, I want this molecule and I got that molecule, put in a catalyst that makes that.

Boom.

Okay, and does that natively and naturally.

So that’s how we’re doing that today.

So yeah, do something better than a chair to a table.

Right.

And yeah, but in principle, you can turn into anything organic.

Because if you can use the molecules of life, that’s organic chemistry.

Why not make something else organic?

Cool.

Yeah.

I love the idea.

Okay, well there you go, my friend.

All right, this is Aaron Turecky says, hey, Dr.

Tyson, Lord Nice, Aaron here from Staten Island NYC.

There you go.

He goes, my question pertains to the way that we visually display Earth in globes, maps, and elsewhere.

Since magnetic poles flip and the Earth’s landmass are constantly shifting, is there any scientific reason that we decided Antarctica would be at the bottom of the South Pole?

I understand that human civilization happens to exist while a majority of the land is in Northern Hemisphere, so our maps are Northern biased, but what does science have to say?

For example, if an alien civilization was to look at the Earth through their telescopes, is there any reason they would know that Battery Park is at the bottom of Manhattan and not the top?

Oh, wow.

My man got a problem with globes.

Plus, he mentioned Battery Park because one way to get to Staten Island is through the Staten Island ferry out of Battery Park.

That was not a random reference.

Yeah, but who wants to go to Staten Island?

What are you talking about?

Come on, man.

Let me save you from yourself here.

So, what does science have to say about it?

First of all, at the beginning of the film, Happy Feet, where does that take place?

It’s Penguins, so there’s only one place it can take place.

South Pole.

Antarctica.

The camera moves in on the earth.

Right.

And of course, North Pole is up and North Pole is down.

But this entire movie takes place at the South Pole.

Right.

So as far as they’re concerned, that’s where the action is.

So you know what this movie does?

Instead of going down to the South Pole, the entire frame rotates 180 degrees.

And you go straight on in to Antarctica.

That was a point of view shift.

You know who did that movie?

This guy who rode us?

No, the same guy who did Mad Max.

George Miller.

The same guy who did Mad Max.

A little departure from the Mad Max.

He’s got range.

So, anyhow, scientifically, we use the right hand rule.

So, stick out your right hand.

Right.

Palm open.

Now, curl your fingers.

Keep your thumb up.

Any object that’s rotating in the universe, if you curl your fingers in the direction it’s rotating, your thumb is the North Pole.

That’s the North Pole.

Yes.

For any object, anywhere.

Correct.

If you want your thumb to stick in the direction of the North Pole, you have to use your left hand.

Oh, that’s okay.

So the right hand rule is right hand, thumbs up.

That’s how you know what North Pole is.

And if you know what North Pole is, you know what South Pole is.

You know what South Pole is.

Okay.

So yes, of course we are North biased, but there is at least consistency with all maps show North.

North up.

All right.

All right.

So, it’s pretty cool.

I’m going to tell you the truth.

I don’t care.

And by the way, he mentioned the Magnetic Pole.

When I grew up, how old I am, Magnetic Pole was in the Northern territories of Canada.

But it’s been shifting.

It’s been shifting, right?

Yeah, because North Pole is a wandering thing.

And right now it’s passing the North Geographic Pole.

It’s just closer to that than it’s ever been before.

And it’s headed towards Siberia.

There you go.

So it’s actually where it belongs, where we say it is.

Right now, it’s near the North Pole.

It’s near the North Pole.

It’s near the North Pole.

And Putin is going to have control over the North Pole.

Well, then, say goodbye to the magnetic field, people.

All right, here we go, this is Miele Mielkowski.

Speaking of boom, okay, Miele says this.

Hey, Neil, hey, Chuck, my name is Miele.

I’m from Macedonia, Balkan, Europe, world.

I like that, okay.

Yeah, it’s very cool.

He says, we see a lot of matter goes into energy in the universe, but do we see the other way around, energy becoming matter?

Yes, oh yeah, well, yeah, okay, yeah, okay.

So in the sun, in the center of the sun, there’s thermonuclear fusion, hydrogen nuclei merge, okay?

So here’s what happens, ready?

A hydrogen only has one particle in its nucleus, a proton.

So there’s just protons there.

So one proton meets another proton.

Hey, how you doing?

What’s up?

Hey, there you go.

How you doing?

Now, protons have like charge.

So like charge is duet.

They don’t like each other.

They repel.

So in order for them to get close together, they have to be moving so fast that their speed overcomes their repulsion.

And they’re so close to each other that a whole new force that’s strong has to kick in.

You know what we call that?

An arranged wedding.

It’s…

We call it the strong force.

The strong force.

Right, sensibly titled, the strong force.

Okay, in that moment, one of those protons becomes a neutron.

Oh!

It transmutes.

Look at that.

So you have a proton and a neutron.

I don’t need that woke atom in my life.

So what?

Transitions.

Transitioning atoms means that.

So, wait a minute, we started with a positive charge.

Now there’s a neutral charge.

What happened to the positive charge?

You can’t just pocket that.

Okay, a particle comes out carrying away that charge.

It’s the anti-matter version of an electron.

Whoa.

Called a positron.

A positron.

Now, this is a soup of ionized atoms.

When you ionize, electrons are flying everywhere.

If you’re a positron.

And you’re anti-matter positron.

Right.

If you see an electron, that’s all she wrote.

You annihilate.

Look at that.

Instantly.

Instantly.

Creating energy.

The center of the sun.

Look at that.

That’s one of many ways the sun is generating energy in the core.

That happens every moment of every day.

Two particles of matter coming together and creating pure energy.

Positron and the electron in the core of the sun.

That is amazing.

So yeah, but it doesn’t happen around the house.

No, no.

But it would.

If you had a sun.

A sun, S-U-N.

Right.

So now watch.

Not that lazy guy that’s on the couch playing video games all day long.

That’s what your son does.

That sounded too close to the old Chuck.

With your 17-year-old son.

So here’s the thing.

Light that we use, visible light.

Visible light.

If you look up how much energy a red light photon has or a blue light photon.

Just look up how much energy that is.

There is no particle that can be made with that much energy, because it’s not enough.

So light, visible light stays visible light its whole life.

Increase the energy up to beyond ultraviolet into X-rays.

X-rays.

Now ask yourself, what is the energy of an X-ray photon?

It’s about the energy of an electron.

Ooh.

So you can have a field of X-ray photons with electrons spontaneously being created within it.

Oh.

Now, but you can’t just create a particle out of nothing.

You also have to have the antiparticle.

Right.

So if you create electrons, you’re also creating what?

The positron.

The positron.

Right.

There you go.

So that’s energy becoming matter.

Matter.

Right.

Look at that.

That’s the inverse of that that he was asking me about.

Yeah, exactly.

And then they find each other again and they become matter.

This soup was going on in the early universe in every cubic centimeter of the universe.

Matter going back and forth until the universe cooled where none of the photons left had enough energy to make particles.

Oh Lord, I’m so tired.

And we froze out the total number of particles in the universe in that moment.

Look at that.

No longer could you make more particles.

That’s it.

That’s it.

That’s great.

This is like the first three minutes of the Big Bang.

That.

Oh man, three minutes.

That’s the first three minutes.

Look at that, that’s amazing.

So in my book, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, the first chapter, it was something like in the beginning or something, or it begins with that.

And I take you through those details.

The conversion of matter, energy, and what cools down, all that’s happened.

That’s very cool.

Very, very aggressive, the title, In the Beginning.

I’m just saying that association is a…

Well, where else am I gonna begin the story?

But in the beginning.

This is true, you know?

I’m just saying that those words kind of bring to mind something else.

That’s an old joke from elementary school.

What’s that?

How do you know God was a baseball player?

Because he began it in the big inning.

That’s a rough one, man.

Even God is just like, let me handle the humor.

He’s like, stick a prayer, humor’s my thing.

Sit this one out.

Yeah.

Chuck, we got time for one more, I think.

All right, here we go.

Let’s go with Andrew Coffey.

And Andrew Coffey says, Good day, Dr.

Tyson and Lord Nice.

Wishing you a wonderful wisdom from a few fine fellows.

Andy C here from British Columbia.

That would be Canada.

That’s right.

I’ve always wondered, how did we first calculate the speed of light in a vacuum?

And how do we know it’s a constant?

Is it possible?

Is it possible we could be wrong?

Ooh.

Speed of light in a vacuum.

Yes.

So, Galileo is the first one known to try to measure the speed of light.

Look at that.

So he put somebody on-

What an ambitious dude he was.

That dude was ambitious.

My man.

Yeah.

He’s my man Galileo.

At night, he put somebody on a mountaintop with a lantern and a little shutter, okay?

And he was on another mountaintop with a lantern and a shutter.

And they said, when you see one-

Give it back to me.

Give me the signal back with the shutter.

And he concluded, I’m paraphrased, he concluded, light, if it’s not infinitely fast, it’s faster than we can measure, okay?

Nice job, Galileo.

Just tell it like it is.

That’s all you know.

Yeah, that’s it, that’s what we know right now.

Can’t tell more than what you can know.

There you go.

Okay, so the coolest measurement of the speed of light.

Do you know the distance from Earth to the sun?

93 million.

Okay, so twice that is-

186 million miles.

Keep that number in your head.

That’s the baseline of Earth’s orbit.

Okay.

Around the sun.

All right.

A guy named Ol Roemer.

Ol Roemer, he’s got one of those oom-lox with the O-E-E-D, okay?

They just called him Ol Roemer back in the day.

Ol Roemer.

Hey, what’s up, Ol Roemer?

We can’t pronounce your name.

We just call you Ol Roemer.

No, Ol Roemer.

Ol Roemer, at the time he did this, we knew that the Newtonian gravity not only described the moon around earth, earth around the sun, it described Jupiter’s moons around Jupiter.

So you didn’t have to be the sun to be the center of gravity.

For a system, it worked for Jupiter, too.

So this was a testament to the universality of Newton’s laws.

Because if it just works for the Earth and moon, then maybe it’s just the Earth and moon.

You don’t know that it works everywhere else.

It works everywhere else.

All right.

So you calculate when the moons pass in front of and behind Jupiter.

What he found was that when Earth was closest to Jupiter, the eclipses occurred a thousand seconds sooner than when Earth was on the opposite side of the sun from Jupiter.

He said, either Newton’s laws are wrong, or we had to wait for the light to cross the entire orbit of the Earth to get to you.

Because on the backside of Earth, it was a thousand second delay compared to the front of your orbit.

So, what’s the formula for speed?

Distance divided by?

Time.

Time.

What’s the distance?

186 million miles.

What’s the time?

A thousand seconds.

What is the speed of light?

Uh, very fast, very, very fast.

Take those two numbers, you divide them, 186,000 miles per second.

That was the first, now, we didn’t have the diameter of the Earth, the guy had the wrong number for that, but it was the first, it was the most accurate estimate of the speed of light yet to be made.

And I think because we didn’t have, there was some uncertainties in Earth’s distance to the sun, but it was the right ballpark for this.

That’s the first measurement of the speed of light.

That’s cool.

Just the delay in the eclipses of Jupiter’s orbits, depending on where you are in our orbit when you’re taking a look at them.

And the numbers turned out all nice and even, 186 million miles, 1,000 seconds, everything was clean and.

Now, sophisticated, we can measure it in a laboratory.

We can do what Galileo attempted to do.

Sure enough, we get the same number.

Look at that.

Every time we’ve ever measured the speed of light, we get exactly the same number.

At all times.

At all times.

Correct.

And we look at other parts of the universe where we see phenomenon happening, speed of light’s the same.

Right on up to the edge of the universe.

So our evidence, and since as you look out in the universe, you look back in time, we can say with confidence that the speed of light is the same and unchanging across space and through the depths of time.

Look at that.

It is the most fundamental constant of nature we know.

Yes.

It is so fundamental that we define the length of the meter in terms of the speed of light.

So if we make an extra measurement of a decimal place in the speed of light, that affects the length of the meter.

That’s how bad-ass the speed of light is.

Right.

It’s running the show.

Look at that.

So a meter is how far a beam of light goes in one-thirty millionth of a second.

Yep, it’s the right, to 12 decimal places.

12 decimal places.

Yeah.

That is super cool.

Yeah, so that’s, now the speed of light is different in the air and in water and in a diamond, but in the vacuum, that’s the speed.

That’s the speed.

Yeah.

And 186,282 miles per second.

Or three times 10 to the eighth meters per second, but it’s really two, it’s like 29,990,000, we round that up, it’s a nice rounding to three times 10 to the eighth, so that would be 38, no, 300,000 kilometers per second.

And now you make meters and centimeters out of that.

Out of that.

Right, right.

And so, but it’s really like 299,000 something.

It’s close, but we round it up to 300,000 kilometers a second.

186,282 miles per second.

Yeah.

But the best measurement of it is Muhammad Ali.

Oh, yes!

Take us out with Muhammad Ali.

I’m fast, I tell you.

Hmm, I’m so fast, I turn the light switch off, I’m in the bed before the room get dark.

Okay, Muhammad Ali is faster than the speed of light.

There you go.

As evidenced by that very important data point right there.

All right, Chuck, that’s all the time we have.

Oh, that was fun.

Oh, oh, grab bag.

Grab bag.

Grab bag.

Or Galactic Gumbo.

In the Cosmic Crib.

Because we’re back live in my office.

That’s right.

At the Hayden Planetarium.

All good here.

We’re done with this latest episode of Cosmic Queries.

Thanks for joining us.

Neil deGrasse Tyson.