Cosmic Queries – Pure Spacetime

About This Episode

Is there no single shared “now” for everyone in the universe? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Paul Mecurio dive into another grab bag of fan questions about superconducting asteroids, what memories are made of, and if you could ever experience pure unwarped spacetime.

First a question from Interstellar: what would the crewmembers on Miller’s Planet see if they looked up at their crewmate through a telescope? Neil explains how light arrives at different paces depending on your position in a gravitational well. If we’re living in a simulation, would you want to know? Is randomness in the universe actually just sloppy programming? Learn about chaos as a precise mathematical phenomenon and how consistent laws guide the universe.

Could an asteroid become a superconductor in the near-absolute-zero cold of space? What would happen to ocean tides if the Moon left orbit? Are human memories really just atoms, and what does that mean for people experiencing memory loss or dementia? Is there a “purpose” to a black hole, or is that the wrong question entirely?

The episode closes on some of the deepest physics of the hour: is there anywhere in the universe free from all gravitational influence, where you could experience pure, unwarped spacetime? Neil explains why gravity technically never reaches zero, no matter how far you travel. We question whether information that falls into a black hole could actually be reconstructed from the particles at its surface and explore the sponge-like structure of galaxies across the universe.

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