November 8, 2014 10:25 am
You Can’t Resist the Pull of “Cosmic Queries: Gravity”
Artist’s concept of NASA’s Gravity Probe B orbiting the Earth to measure space-time. Image Credit: NASA.
Comic co-host Leighann Lord kicked off this week’s episode of StarTalk Radio with a Cosmic Query of her own: “What is gravity?”
Neil deGrasse Tyson’s surprising answer: “We don’t know.”
But before fundamental force deniers race off to say, “See, scientists don’t even know what gravity is”, you’ve got to hear what comes next.
Among other things, Neil quoting Einstein: “Matter tells space how to curve; space tells matter how to move.”
And we’re off and running. Quantum mechanics. Gravitons. Gravity waves. Binary Pulsars. The multidimensional geometry of space.
Questions like, “Would a human floating in space have enough gravity to attract things?”
Or, “Is the Higgs Boson related to gravity?” The answer to that one takes us from quantum physics to nonexistent giant spiders as Neil lays out how the laws of physics manifest at difference scales.
He even ends up trash talking gravity as the “stupidly weakest” of the fundamental forces – and then proceeds to back up his accusations with… science.
Oh yeah, and there’s a gravity gun and some Newtonian equations tossed around for fun, too.
Join us for Cosmic Queries: Gravity this Sunday, Nov. 9th at 7:00 PM ET on our website, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn and SoundCloud.
You know you want to.
The pull is irresistible.
That’s it for now. Keep Looking Up!
–Jeffrey Simons
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