Cosmic Queries: Time Travel

About This Episode

In this Cosmic Queries episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson gets all wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey as he answers your questions about time travel with the help of comic co-host Colin Jost, Saturday Night Live’s new Weekend Update anchor. You’ll discover why a properly designed time machine would need to use both time and space coordinates for targeting, and how warping space time is a legitimate way to “cheat” the laws of relativity. Find out why using the Sun’s gravity to travel back in time like in StarTrek IV wouldn’t work, but using the gravity of two black holes orbiting each other might. You’ll also learn how much time would pass here on Earth if you took a round trip to the nearest black hole, Cygnus X-1, and how astronomers used X-ray telescopes to discover black holes in the first place. All this, plus Doctor Who, Ray Bradbury, Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and more.

NOTE: All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: Cosmic Queries: Time Travel.