Neil deGrasse Tyson
Appearances
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
That's why I said. So I don't have musical ability, but I do. I like to write. I like knowing the effect that words have on your emotions, on your thoughts, on your enlightenment. I like simplifying things.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
phrases and good songs are are not complex stories go read a book if you wanted a complex story it's going to hit you emotionally so um i am my family we go to musical theater often i will tear up at a simple broadway boy meets girl musical or Or nowadays it's boy meets boy, girl meets girl. Any of those where there's the expression of human emotion.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
Yeah. so so if i had an alternative universe so i'd like to write and so when i write my books each sentence each phrasing each turn of the syllables of a word i'm thinking about how that lands in the reader and i i think if it's done well that's what it should be like because then you'll just want more of it so if there's another universe that's what i'd be doing in that universe
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
Yeah, the fascinating fact about Broadway musicals is that they have been on every possible subject you couldn't ever have imagined. But not space. Hamilton, Cats, the prime minister of Argentina. You know, just make the list. How does that even happen?
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
Because that's another... How did I start this? I said, in another universe. But you could be the creative consultant.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
Yeah, I think so. I would need a... I do have some ideas and I have notes in my book, but that's not... I got the universe...
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
Will, can I talk to you for a sec? My question is this. No, I got one for you. I'll give you a starter infinity, right? Because it's not really infinity, but it is something to think about. So consider that if you open a dictionary, every word used... in the definition of every word is in that same dictionary.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
That's kind of mind blowing. Yeah. That is interesting. I never thought about that. Okay. Now, now, now the other things that are sort of transcend comprehension, Pinocchio. Okay. Here's a sentence that Pinocchio utters. Ready? My nose is about to grow. What will happen?
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
My point is that sentence has no meaning in Pinocchio's universe, even though the nouns and verbs are all in the right place. It transcends the world that you have set up to understand Pinocchio's statements and his actions. It's a very simple sentence. Given that we agree upon the rules of Pinocchio. Yes. Yes. We all, of course we agree. Of course we agree.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
Given those rules, this is a sentence that cannot even be uttered in his world. Okay. So infinity is something that is not fundamentally accessible to the wiring of our brain because our brain evolved on the planes of the Serengeti to not get chased by a lion. Okay. Not get eaten by a lion. Okay. This is – so the tools we need to not die in our evolutionary past do not include infinity.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
Yeah, there's an absence of logic. We are logical creatures relative to other life forms, but our capacity to not be logical knows no bounds.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
It comes from the math. So you do the math long enough, then you absorb the math as part of your intuition. So you can think intuitively about what the math equations would have done rather than relying solely on how you would have not gotten eaten by a lion and the wiring that that provides. So you start building up other wiring in your brain that empowers you to think in these other ways.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
And this is how you think in the quantum. The quantum world is really weird. Particles popping in and out of existence. Particles simultaneously existing as a wave. And a wave-particle duality, you might have heard of this. All of this is fundamental, and the mathematics describes it. The experiments measure it. The brain cannot comprehend it.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
Okay. Let's do it. Boxers or briefs? And by the way, my lightning answers need to be matched with your lightning questions, just to be clear, in order for that to work. No, we're here to listen to you.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
We will if it has geopolitical priorities. But otherwise, I think it's a very distant dream. So if China says they want to put military bases on Mars, we're there in nine months. If not – Come on. Really? Really. Yeah. Yeah.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
Yeah, because other countries are gaining power over what's called cislunar space, the space between Earth and the moon, and that's the new high ground. So there are geopolitical forces that make all of that happen. The business cases come later, the tourism, then all the rest of this, and the SpaceX. That all comes after.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
The first forays out there are countries who have geopolitical interests in mind. Columbus came to the New World. Did Queen Isabella say, oh, Columbus, take pictures and bring them back? No. No, it was like, here's a satchel of Spanish flags. Plant them wherever you go and find a shorter trade route to India.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
So breaking the light barrier is not the same thing as breaking the sound barrier. When you heard people say, oh, we'll never fly, and they were just idiots. You know why? Because birds fly, and they're heavier than air. You just haven't figured it out yet. And can you never go faster than sound? Rifle bullets went faster than sound before we had planes. So we can make things faster than sound.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
Just figure it out. The speed of light is not just a good idea as the law of the universe. And if you want to go faster, you have to like tunnel through space time or have warp drives, which is what all the science fiction ones do. They don't just actually travel faster than light. They try to find some plausible scientific accounting for how they can travel faster than light.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
Now somebody else is angry. Some of you are old enough to remember... The Concorde SST, supersonic, right? Yeah, for sure. Okay, so that's like the next leap from an ordinary airplane. Do you know something? We didn't have a supersonic commercial plane, but France and England did. Right. That was the Concorde.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
Oh, you know why? Oh, well, wait a minute. Why can't they fly to Los Angeles? Oh, we're not going to let them because they'll have a sonic boom over the continental United States. So we cut them off at their kneecaps and said, yeah, you can fly, but you can only cross the ocean. That greatly limited the growth of that supersonic industry.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
It can shatter dishes and things and knock them off you. The space shuttle did it, though. Well, that's because it's coming in over Florida, and it's over a low-density area and mostly ocean. So you can do it.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
It's so stupid. So what we really want is hypersonic... where you get to Tokyo in an hour and a half. This would be suborbital. I want that. Right. Okay, that's even faster than just the Concorde. You know, if you go suborbital, you are not farther than 45 minutes from any two places anywhere on Earth. Here's the problem.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
What does it mean that it took you an hour and a half to drive to the airport and another 45 minutes in TSA? So it took you three hours, and then you got to park the car, three hours to take a 45-minute trip to Tokyo. There's a point where... Just put me on an airplane where I have internet and movies, and I'm fine. And I don't need to get there faster.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
No, no. So if you launch your plane at the equator and you stay in Earth's atmosphere because it's flying through the Earth's atmosphere, Earth is turning at 1,000 miles an hour. The air is moving at 1,000 miles an hour. The plane is moving at 1,000 miles an hour. Now it goes 500 miles an hour. So it's going 1,500 miles an hour through space.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
So they want that 1,000 miles to get a little extra boost to go into orbit around the Earth, and orbital speed is 18,000 miles an hour. So you get a little boost by doing that. If you go back the opposite way... You've got to make up 2,000 miles per hour's worth of speed.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
In fact, they don't do that. I'm saying if— Just to be clear, it's something people don't know. Most of the energy of a rocket launch is not to go up. It is to go downstream and give it enough sideways speed so that it doesn't fall out of the sky. Wow. So the space shuttle, the space station, they're all going 18,000 miles an hour sideways.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
Without hesitation. Instead of asking you about you first? Yeah, no, I don't care about me. And as an educator, I don't think who I teach should care about me. That's like cult building. Really? Yeah. Yeah, so compare these two scenarios. Someone comes up to me and says, hey, aren't you Neil deGrasse? I said, yes. Tell me more about a black hole in this.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
That's why mission control, you now go through the execute the roll program. And this is the space shuttle now going sideways downstream. We're down... So they're not going up, they're going sideways. That's most of their energy. We think space is up. You know how high up they go? Where do you guys live? Where do you live? In LA? Okay. Yeah. They are...
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
less above Earth's surface than the distance of San Francisco from Los Angeles. Okay? In fact, they're half that distance. What's it, how many miles is San Francisco, it's like four?
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
Yeah, about 350 miles. So two thirds of that, that's the height that the space shuttle flies. So you can drive that in a few hours. That's not even what the rocket is doing. Okay? It's just getting up above the atmosphere because it doesn't have to plow through air. By the way, if we didn't have an atmosphere, it would just go sideways. Just launch it sideways. Okay?
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
No. Last we checked, Earth is orbited by the moon. The moon feels Earth's gravity. So all astronauts are deep within Earth's gravity. The difference is they're weightless, not because they've left Earth's gravity, but because they're falling towards Earth. So here's the brilliance of Isaac Newton. You want something mind-blowing? Here it is. Isaac Newton. He said, hmm...
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
There's the moon in orbit around the Earth and I drop an apple and it falls straight to Earth. Is this the same thing or is it two different things going on? And then he had a thought experiment. This is why he's Isaac Newton and we're the rest of us. He said, suppose I have a mountain and I have a cannon and I fire a cannonball from that mountain horizontally.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
It'll go out a few hundred yards and hit the ground, right? Suppose I fire it faster. It'll go farther along Earth's surface before it hits the ground. Let me keep increasing the speed. and it falls farther and farther away from you. There must be a speed where it falls so far away from you, it completely goes around the earth and hits you in the back of the head. Well, at that point, just duck.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
And the ball continues in what we call orbit. And that entire time, it was falling towards Earth. The difference is it fell by the exact amount that Earth curved away from it.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
Never, ever hits him in the head. No, just think about it. This is profound. Think about this. Yeah, it's incredible. You're going sideways so fast that when you've dropped a foot, When you've dropped a foot, Earth's curvature curves away from you by a foot.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
You never catch up to the Earth. Thus is the definition of an orbit, and you're in free fall the entire time, like cutting the cables of an elevator, falling straight down, except you happen to have sideways motion. And so falling straight down means you never hit the Earth.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
So that's the perfect educational encounter. The one that's not is, are you Neil Tyson? I said, yes. Oh, what's your favorite color? And all of a sudden, I become the object of their curiosity. rather than the universe itself. And in that way, I have failed. And you don't like that? No, it's a failure. No, no. It's a failure of my educational efforts. Got it.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
Yeah, I've heard of these claims. But they don't offer it to laboratories to – I mean, here's the thing. If we're visited by aliens, why – Maybe we've been visited. Okay? Maybe. I think we have. Okay. Let me offer you countervailing thought regarding that. Do you realize we collectively upload a billion photographs and videos to the internet per day?
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
per day every day we upload more photos and videos to the internet that existed in the world in the first hundred years of photography we we have photos of extremely rare phenomena like buses tumbling and in hurricanes i mean or in tornadoes in the day you wouldn't say oh that's interesting let me go home and get my camera and film this no everybody's got a camera right
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
Until we had, until everybody had a camera, you had all these reports of people getting abducted. Where's the photo of the craft? Where's the... Why is it that your best evidence for aliens visiting is fuzzy Navy video? Yeah, I know. I get that. Why is that your best evidence?
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
What do you think? I don't know what it is. That's why it's you, unidentified flying object.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
So the common denominator of all conspiracy theorists is when they don't have the data, they have to invent something to bridge the gap in their data. So I'm not bridging any gap. I'm saying everybody is a recorder. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
If I become the object of their interest, that's all. I'll do it and I'll accommodate it. But on a certain level, you feel like you've failed in your objective. It must not have made the science interesting enough for them to come at that.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
This is why I don't have a PhD. Crap is piled high and deep. That's what the PhD stands for.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
It wasn't so much the thirst for knowledge, but the fact that I knew that when I looked up, I was completely steeped in ignorance and boundless ignorance. And so there's this quest.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
No. Because, you know, the fact that there's something around us that we know, about which we know so little, became this infinite source of curiosity for me. And I've never been the same since, since age nine. And I didn't know that most people are still sort of ambling in college. What am I going to major in? Oh, you major in astronomy. Was that because it's early in the alphabet?
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
Well, so we all, in modern times, do astrophysics. Astronomy is the traditional older name for it. But in the late 1800s, we figured out how to apply the laws of physics to what was going on in the universe, and thus was birthed astrophysics. Before then, it's like, well, the star is over here, and it's this bright, and it's that color. Oh, it might be moving. So let's call it a planet.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
Or it's got a tail, so we call it a comet. So it's descriptive. In the 19th century, we learned how to take spectra of stars. And a spectra breaks the light into its colors like a rainbow. And when you do that, you learn things like how fast is it moving, how fast is it rotating, what it's made of, how long ago it was born. You can create models of that.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
And so all of a sudden, the universe becomes our backyard.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
And that light is only just now reached. Only just. That's correct.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
Okay, so I don't know how you got the speed of light correct and that number wrong. Oh, uh-oh. But you're close enough. No, you're close enough. It was a long night.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
I want to give you the correct number. I mean, to know the speed of light to that precision and then get that other number wrong, that's a little weird. But it's eight minutes and 20 seconds, 500 seconds. Wow, I was so close. And by the way, it's not only the light that takes eight minutes and 20 seconds to reach us, so too does it take the sun's gravity.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
So if you were some giant and plucked the sun out of the middle of the solar system, we would still orbit. We would still feel its gravity. We would not know any different for 8 minutes and 20 seconds. And at that instant, we would plunge into darkness and fling out into interstellar space.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
So everyone, I think, should have their mind blown at least once a week, okay? That's the mind-blowing quota, I think, should be about that. And minus one means you're not reading enough or you're not exploring enough because there's stuff out there. I'll give you, here's a simple one. Ready? If you go to the flower of an apple orchard and count how many petals are on that flower. Okay.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
There are five petals. Then that flower shrivels up and then it becomes the fruit of the tree, the apple. If you cut the apple horizontally through it and you see the chambers, there are five chambers. Okay. So there's a correspondence between the number of seed chambers in the apple and the petals on the flower that became the apple.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
I mean, this is just kind of, if you don't notice that, start noticing it. And then there are places where, and that's not even anything. That's got nothing to do with the origin of the universe, but it's something simple that's around you.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
So you are looking at the past. But by the way, just to be clear, Yeah. We're in a coronavirus right now, but if I were sitting across the table from you, you don't see me in your present. You see me in your past. Light at 186,000 miles per second goes one foot per nanosecond. one foot per billionth of a second.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
So if we're like three feet across from each other, you see me not as I am, but as I once was, three billionths of a second ago. We don't make a big deal of that because human lifespan is much longer than billionths of a second. But if I start getting farther and farther, the moon is one and a half light seconds, the sun 500 light seconds, the nearest star four light years.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
You keep going farther and farther away, you get to significant time frames back into the past of the object you're observing. And that's where cosmology comes in. It's how we decode the record of the universe because it takes light so much damn time to reach us.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
So if you can see back – I'll let you continue, but I should really stop you there. But I'll let you continue.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
So if you put a mirror one light day away from you and you look at it, you will see yourself yesterday. Okay, but that requires a mirror. The Big Bang is not a mirror. So when you see evidence of the Big Bang that far out, you're not seeing us go through the Big Bang. You're seeing another part of the universe go through the Big Bang.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
If they looked to where we are, they don't see our light from you right now in this podcast. No, they see Earth and our galaxy 14 billion years ago when we were going through the Big Bang. So you have to be that distance away to see that far in the past.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
Well, if someone else set that up for you, yeah, so you can set up a mirror seven light days away, and then you look at it, you'll see yourself two weeks ago because it's seven days out, seven days back.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
There was never that expectation or obligation. And they had freedom to think what they want, to study what they want. And they're each doing different things right now. But I can tell you that by the time they were 12 or 13, certified scientifically literate. Oh, wow. Oh, yeah.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
No. No, but they're scientifically literate. So the difference is if you're scientifically literate, it means your brain is wired for inquiry. It's wired for thought. So that at a young age, I'm happy that they were also polite when they did this because otherwise it would be embarrassing.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
If you were a grown-up, walked into the room, and you said something, oh, I checked my horoscope sign today, and my 12-year-old, 13-year-old kids heard that, They would say, well, what did you find? They would start asking questions. And what are you basing that on? And have you tested it?
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
And they would just calmly sort of ask the questions to drive you into the corner that you really are in because you have no foundation for those thoughts. That's the science literacy that I'm talking about that anybody can and should cultivate for themselves, whether or not you become a scientist.
SmartLess
"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"
Thanks for that question. If there's a parallel universe. Oh, here we go. An alternative, not in this universe, but another universe. In another universe, I would be writing songs for Broadway musicals. Are you serious?
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
We had a great conversation. Awesome book. I got your bio here. It's great. Astrophysicist, cosmologist, your previous guest on StarTalk from a few years back. And recently, like practically minutes ago, CEO of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Wow.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
They don't agree. But the Planck is the cosmic background. Right, right. The Planck satellite from Europe, the European satellite.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Wait, wait, just set the stage. So you have data from the early universe. Yes. You get a Hubble rate. You get a Hubble rate. You get the traditional galaxies, usually with supernova or some other standard candle. And those two numbers do not match. They do not match. In my day, measurements of the expansion rate of the universe differed by a factor of two.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Factor of two yeah, and so now they differ by just a few percent right but the error bars the error bars the uncertainty is Way smaller than the difference in those two measurements, right? So that is a more severe fact.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Right, and his expertise in the universe, cosmology, dark matter, dark energy. Dark energy. It's the future of the field on StarTalk, coming right up. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. I got with me Paul Mercurio. What's up, my man?
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
than not knowing the expansion rate of the universe by a factor of two.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Somebody found stars that were older than the universe.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
The Cosmic Background Explorer, one of the first high-precision measurements of the cosmic background. Mather and Smoot. Nobel laureates.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Right, that's where you get the confidence from. It's not just one data point from one telescope.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Let's just back up. In the United States, we surely would have discovered the Higgs boson with our superconducting supercollider, whose budget was canceled right around when peace broke out in Europe. Right between 89 and 93.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
So the center of mass of particle physics moved to Europe, to CERN, to the Large Hadron Collider. They discovered the Higgs boson.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Thank you. So you got a podcast, Does It Fly? Yeah. By Roddenberry Entertainment. Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek fame. And you've got a memoir out there. That's right. It's been out for a few years now. Yeah. A Quantum Life. It keeps getting released. My Unlikely Journey from the Street to the Stars. And that's the book that we talked about on my show.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
And then another question is— It could be yet another phenomenon acting on the expansion rate beyond the three that we have characterized. Do we have an idea what it might be? Some weird quantum field. You come up with something.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Sure. Let me clarify here. So this notion that the expansion rate is misbehaving, let me characterize it that way, that just means it doesn't match what our three most potent models would give us for it. Okay, so do we introduce a fourth accounting or do we say that one of these are wrong? Right. Or they're all working in harmony.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
LSST. LSST. was the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. But we're astronomers and we don't like going that way. We don't play that. So we just named it after one of our- You guys just like acronyms.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. Dark matter or dark energy or both? Both. Both of them.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Okay, well listen. Astronomers have millions of dollars?
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
That reminds me of the quote from Oscar Wilde. We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking to the stars. Ooh, that's good. You didn't know about that quote? You could have put that in the book.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Through the edges of the planet. Yeah. All right, so we're with you. You have this transit, and the planet is moving across the surface. Now, you don't see that. You don't see it. You just see light.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
It hasn't just succeeded, it's badass. It's badass, yeah. It's opened up the whole industry, the whole cottage industry to make that happen. Yeah, yeah. All right.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Let me shape that another way and throw it right in your lap. So we probe the universe using our methods and tools of science that we have developed to this day. Could dark matter simply be awaiting some brilliant theoretical understanding coupled with some brilliant new kind of telescope that would see it in ways that no one had previously dreamt. So is it awaiting technology?
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
And you've also involved with NASA's IMAP satellite. Yes. So NASA has no shortage of acronyms.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
I think it's more basic than that. Or is it going to plug in with just a new kind of particle that just doesn't interact?
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
You're a smart guy. His memoir is called From the Street. All right, that's the start. I got that out of the mud. What part of that title do you not understand?
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Oops. Machos would be massive compact halo objects. So we come up with our better instruments and look for them. So machos and wimps are two kinds of... Yes.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
No, no, because when we'd have to admit that we're stupid or that we're not.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
But we are driven by the uncertainty. There are ambulance-chasing theorists out there. Yes, there are. The slightest observation that's a little quirky, they're going to come up with a whole theory to understand it.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
So the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, I'm a big supporter of theirs, like from way back. And they say, it sounds like it's only the Pacific, but they have a mission statement that's, functionally international. Getting people to look up. Yeah. That's why I try to do that every day. You're succeeding.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
But because we know that whatever the dark matter is, it's cold and not warm. Yeah. It can't be going faster than light. Exactly. Because it would have evidence. It would give evidence of that.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
So will it do damage, first of all? Yeah. And we know it's a disturbance in the gravitational field, and everybody knows after the movie Interstellar that if you're in a different gravitational field, you're going to age differently. Yeah. So what kind of consequences?
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Or to be, you know. Yeah, because the first one that was measured, it jiggled the experiment by 1 20th the diameter of a proton. There you go. You ain't feeling that.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
And that event would surely kill you before you had any experience of the wave.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
The gravitational wave moves at the speed of light, so it can't kill you before the wave hits you. That would all happen at the same time. Oh, that's a good thing if you add those things. Oh, well, that's the upside. No, you don't even know. You don't even know.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
It's called National Society of Black Physicists. Nerds are a special subspecies of the whole world.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
He actually remembers the 60s. Exactly. If you lived in the 60s, you shouldn't remember. All right. Yeah.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Just to clarify, he said black holes have no hair. What he meant was that when matter becomes a black hole, it should have only like three physical parameters, like angle of momentum, mass, and charge. So the idea was whatever it looked like before, it has none of that later, once it becomes a black hole. So it says it has no hair.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
But that's back when enough people had hair that that was a part of how you identify them. But now that bald look, Lex Luthor, the billionaire with the bald look.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Yeah. It's like in China. You don't imagine people are IDing each other. No, because when I talk about... You're invoking hair color. Right, exactly.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
So you're in the we lost information camp. In the black hole. Clearly. Or information, there's too much made of this information idea. Exactly. Okay. This is where he's coming from.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
No, the point is the dark energy is making us expand and never return. So maybe he meant dark matter. So is there sufficient dark matter to close us back and then have the big squeeze?
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Oh, by the way, just to make it clear, there are people who, when they want to know stuff, they look it up on the internet. But when you're a scientist, you calculate the answer. Okay? Right. I gave someone an answer one time. What source did you use? In my education. The brain app.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
You got so a geek can be a geek in any Specific category you can be a music geek, right? Okay. Well, you're just into me music No, so but you're not necessarily associated with science if you're a geek right you geek you're just into your thing right but a nerd is it says something about your personality and your behavior and your things you care about. The quality of your personality.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
You can totally get it. So, they're hot. Let me add to what you just said, because it's a brilliant revelation regarding the material necessary. Right. If you had that much material, it means you're visiting other star systems.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
You're scooping up the planets of a thousand solos to get the energy from one star.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Let me add to that. Last year, there was a research paper on an observing project to look for Dyson spheres. Wow. Now, you know how they're going to do this? They're looking for very, very red star systems.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
They're just stepping it down. They're just saying that if you absorb all the energy from a star at this greater radius, then it would then radiate.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
In the infrared. Yeah, yeah. They're suggesting that they're aliens.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
That's exactly the rebuttal to that. Yeah. That there's stars, when you're in dust, it absorbs the energy and it re-radiates it and it radiates it. It makes a star look very red. So that was the ordinary explanation for those very red stars in that experiment. We got to wrap.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Okay, so here you go. Under your... Leadership. Will it become the astronomical society of the planet? I think so. Okay.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
A stone hinge. You got a stone hinge in your backyard. I got a nap to playa. We out. We out here. Peace. Hakeem, really good to see you again. Thanks. Man. Your first time in my office here at the Hayden Planetarium.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
You're welcome. You're welcome. So this has been StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition Potpourri with my old-timey friend and colleague, Hakeem. Welcome back. And, of course, Paul. Great to be here. All right. Until next time, I bid you to keep looking up.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Yeah, what you care, you care about different things. You care about different things. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. So do you have a vision for the Society of the Pacific?
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
So the Pacific has, well, one time. Let me just remind people, it's an organization that promotes public awareness and understanding of astronomy at all levels.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
But at the amateur level, you get a telescope. That's right. Why the term Pacific? That's where it began, in San Francisco Bay Area.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
And Lick Observatory is the observatory of Santa Cruz. So, yeah.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
The ASP produces the magazine for the public, Mercury Magazine, and they produce proceedings of scientific conferences. Of scientific conferences. They got it in everything. In fact, there is probably one of these books is from that conference.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
This is for every meeting of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, every professional meeting, there are proceedings. Yeah. And they're beautifully published. Everybody has them.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
We all have these. And these are just two that are here relative to others that I have on a different part of the shelf. Galaxy Evolution, The Milky Way Perspective.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
And equations. So, I mean, there are now hundreds of these. I mean, it's been around a long time. Oh, absolutely.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Yeah, you're a comedian and you got a show on Broadway or off-Broadway or traveling.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
They were named to even talk to the public. Exactly. And so the ASP has been everything I care about as a professional scientist.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
He probably has an answer, but I have an answer. In our field, there aren't many fields where it can reach the enthusiastic amateur and they can still participate.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
What I'm saying, that's astronomy and astrophysics. You can't really do, can you do that with physics, really? Well, you can if you're not pompous, like you are. No, but it's harder because everybody's looking up. You know, when we discover a supernova, a black hole, anything, it's headlines. Splitting an atom is less relatable than looking up at the stars.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
How many other sciences make a headline with that frequency? Think about it. Yeah, that's true.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Yeah. Yeah, so good luck with that. Sometimes you need a little bit of that. Oh, absolutely. But you're at the helm of a very important organization. Thank you, sir. And there it is. So now tell me about the latest... NASA acronym. Yes, Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration. And Acceleration Pro.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
One man show and you interact with the audience and stuff?
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
The word in the acronym can't be in one of the words in the acronym. It's like GNU's not Unix. Look at this, Mr. Smart Alec over here.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Yes, you did. Okay. This is awesome. So why is the word acceleration in the probe?
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Wait, wait, wait. What do you mean supersonic if it's moving through the vacuum of space? Space. Is it exactly a vacuum?
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
It's approximately a vacuum. Yes, it is. Okay, so cool. So it's moving faster than the speed of sound would be in that very reduced vacuum.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
He's never wrong. Well, we're going to do Cosmic Queries today.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
There's nothing more boring than a neutral atom. Nothing more boring. It's not ionized. It's not, yeah.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
It's a grab bag. With an old colleague and friend of mine, Hakeem. Thank you.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
You make a tiny discovery. Yeah. And it can open up a hole. Yeah, it opens up. Now you can build an entire experiment just for that discovery.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
So Donald Goldsmith, who's an astronomy writer and co-wrote the original Cosmos, and I actually co-authored a book with him on origins. He has his own LLC company, and because he writes books and writes for TV, it's called Interstellar Medium. No, Interstellar Media.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Do we trust the data or do we need new physics? If the data's off, the model's off by definition, no? Maybe, no? I spent time at Princeton where they have a lot of theories. They say never trust an observation unless it's backed up by a theory.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Just to be clear, so the magnetic field is confining the plasma. That's right. So the shape of the plasma is the shape of the magnetic field. And so he's saying that the magnetic field is just a constant cross-sectional tube, but it should be something more dynamic than that.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Gentlemen, it looks like we may need nukes to realize the future we all imagine for ourselves.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
So Emmy and Peabody Award winning. I mean, at Peabody. That's coveted. That's highfalutin. Highfalutin. It's that little chairman. I didn't know you were that highfalutin here.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Just so it gets wet. Just spend a quick second reminding us. I don't want to simplify it too much, but correct me if I've done so. In the end, all you're trying to create is a source of heat to raise the temperature of water that will spin a turbine that has magnetic fields and coils in it to generate electricity. That's the same way we've been making electricity since Faraday.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
And you also work the Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
That's half of its old school. Is that correct? Half is old school. Yeah. Is that correct?
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
In a different way. Using the steam. Different source of heat.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
So the higher temperature of the water, I mean, it's under pressure, I guess, right?
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Stephen, he's the first name. Stephen Colbert. Oh, yeah, sorry. Stephen Colbert of the rest of us.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Rather than making electricity out of it through a turbine.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
The shoulder-mounted one that they used in... The one that Magnum PI would have. Or Gecko in... Right, right. Right, so now- Shoulder mounted. I remember, 1987, I saw the movie in real time. And I'm looking and I said, gee, I wish I was rich. So I had a phone like that. I could have a phone in a suitcase.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Yeah. So Paul, you're so highfalutin. Do you still even do stand up like regular comedians?
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
What's also happening is chips are getting more efficient. Right. So your laptop used to burn the top of your thighs. It doesn't do that anymore. What were you putting in?
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
And why was it on your thighs? So, Catherine, if we have quantum computing, which does much more computing in less time, ultimately that's less consumption of energy, isn't it? Or not? Hmm.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
I heard rumor you have a Broadway show, a state show.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
I was recently in Iceland. They're nearly 100% geothermal. I mean, they're sitting on top of multiple volcanic...
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Like, I would say the total wattage of all light bulbs in my house is probably 100 watts. I got 50 light bulbs, and they're all LEDs. Okay. All right? So, Catherine, I don't even have shut-off lights before you leave the room because I don't need it.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Net zero what? Net zero carbon. Carbon. Thank you. Okay.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Flat earthers among us, don't say across the world, say around the world, okay? Just give me that sentence again. You had to get that in, didn't you?
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
We'd love me some Frank Oz. Yeah, I know.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Yes. So are we still mining uranium? There's still plenty of uranium left in Earth's crust for this?
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Yeah, I think that's what it comes down to. That's right. If there's trouble in one sector, you just shift the economics. But if you have single-point failure... Everything is running on oil. If you're trapped into fossil fuel, then there's a problem.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Okay, cool. So Gary, you and your producer put together this topic.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Katherine, if you have what's called spent uranium, and that is basically waste product from fission, uranium fission, what does it mean to recycle it? You have to boost the isotope back or stick it in a particle accelerator again? Because you have the uranium, how would you accomplish this?
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
So I think the public is generally not familiar with the chart of the nucleotides. We all know the periodic table of elements, because that's that mysterious chart of boxes that sat in the front of your chemistry class. And the table of nucleotides, those were always in the more advanced chemistry classes. The one I didn't go to. Or the physics classes.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
And I love me, it's nukes. I love me some nukes. Not the missile kind. Nukes predate missiles. Okay, good. As long as you're not. When I say nuke, I mean the nucleus of the atom. Yes. And the energy contained therein. It's the OG. What you do with it after, that's your problem. That is, okay, so. Set up this show. What do you have?
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
And so that lists not just the elements, but all the... isotopes possible for each of the elements? That's a more complicated diagram, correct?
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Okay, so you can track their whereabouts.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
You listed technetium as one of the byproducts, and I've seen that used in medical imaging. So that's what you mean by possibly recycling some of this material.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Right, right. Cool. So it's picking through your dumpsters. Exactly.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Yeah, but how do you—you can't boost the uranium back into the isotope it needs to be and then just run it?
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
And that's no different from recycling plastics, or they've got to carry their weight with their waste products. That's right.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
But, Catherine, they're not equally as safe.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
And you don't have radioactive byproducts.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
I got a guy that does that. We've got one of the world's experts on those very subjects coming right up. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Special Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And of a special edition, you know what that means. We've got Gary O'Reilly.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Gotcha. And you have to dispose of it in some careful way.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
And one other quick point, I think the fear factor here is if there is an accident, it will kill many, many more people than if there is a coal mining accident. You can tout the deaths per terawatt hours, and nukes look very good until they don't look good. And if there's some disaster, if a terrorist takes over the plant, or it becomes the target of a weapon,
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
and there's some kind of radioactive leakage if it's in the fission. If in the fusion, maybe, as you said, it's not self-driven, so maybe you'll just snuff it out. But what do you tell someone who's concerned about how widespread the damage would be in an accident relative to any other sources of death from any other source of energy?
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
They were filming. They should throw it in there.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
I would be delighted. Good. I love my physics peeps when they're out there. And we have one. We have one. Join me in welcoming Catherine Hough. Catherine, welcome to StarTalk. It's great to meet you. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. I got to do it in the voice. Welcome to StarTalk. Excellent. That's for the first time you got to get one of those.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
in 2001, which is 33 years after that. And what they could not figure was that the future of computing would be distributed rather than centralized. So to them, the modern computer was this one giant computer, Hal, controlling the whole ship. The super brain. The super one brain, and they weren't thinking that it could be miniaturized, you don't need a whole room, it could fit on your hip.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
And I can watch movies. We can all watch different movies.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
So that's a question back to our expert here. Is that a future possibility? And let me add that I'm impressed at the level that private enterprise is participating in trying to solve our energy future. Because I don't think it was always like that. There was like each city had its power plant or each county and that was it.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
And it was a utility and it did the thing and the government and that was it. But in an entrepreneurial atmosphere, it seems to me, yeah, I want to invent that, so you buy the product from me.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
You are associate professor in the department. Now, this is a mouth. This is like a business card's worth it. In the Department of Nuclear Plasma and Radiological Engineering. That's right. Which means she glows at night at University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Hang on. Flip the card. Now it goes to the back of the card. Oh, it keeps going. Yes. So your PhD is in nuclear engineering.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
So we've got to land this plane. So, Catherine, what are you working on right now?
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
What does multi-physics mean? What does that mean?
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
The actual reaction is this tiny little nuclear thing that has to plug into this macroscopic facility out of which you draw energy. So I hadn't thought about it that way. Multiphysics, is that the word? That's right.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
And that's not only in size, but in timescale as well for phenomena.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Okay, but do you earn your keep at the university? Do you also teach?
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
How about that? Very cool. Just make sure she's an honest broker here. Sounds a lot like she is.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
There you go. It all comes full circle. Well, let me offer a cosmic perspective here.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Yeah. Those of us old enough remember back in the 50s and 60s where people were imagining futures, and we didn't have to wait longer than a month, maybe not even a week, before one of the major magazines, Life magazine, Look magazine, had a cover story. The city of tomorrow, the home of tomorrow, transportation of tomorrow, food of tomorrow. And you'd see these artists' illustrations
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
of what tomorrow would look like. And that tomorrow was not infinitely far away. It was like in your lifetime. What every single one of those projections got wrong was the assumption that we'd have unlimited access to energy. Because every one of those illustrations, they had flying cars, motorized sidewalks, everything was in motion from a power source, an energy source.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
And what it got wrong was, no, we didn't walk into a future of unlimited energy. we walked into a future of cheap computing. So we became an information technology future, not an energy technology future. And what I wonder now, hearing these developments on the horizon and our needs that will require it, perhaps though it's long overdue, we're on the doorstep of a future
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
where we derive our energy from any one of a dozen ways, and we have as much of it as we need to do anything we want. And that is a cosmic perspective. Join me in thanking Catherine Hough for your brilliant expositions on the state of the industry. And, dude. Always fun. Good to have you, man. Absolutely. And tell Frank Oz I said hi, because we became good friends when he was on the show.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
But not only that, you've actually had a tour of duty serving the federal government. You were assistant secretary for nuclear energy in the Department of Energy, 2022 to 2024. So you did a little tour of duty there. So you've seen it all. So Catherine, could you just remind everybody the difference between fusion and fission?
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Yeah, he's not a fan. Okay. Why are you laughing? Because it's funny. All right, Gary, we'll catch up with you next time. For StarTalk Special Edition, Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
For the nucleus. So, and we know in astrophysics, the peak of that curve, or depending if you plot the other way, the base of that curve is iron. And stars give up the ghost when they hit iron. Because you can't fizz it or fuse it and get energy out of it. It sucks energy. And stars in the business of making energy, it hits iron. That's all she wrote.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
It collapses and then explodes in a rebound as a supernova. So we know all about this in astrophysics. There's quite the relationship between what nuclear physicists do and what we do thinking about stars in the universe. So let me just open this up, because after Chernobyl and after Three Mile Island and after Fukushima, you know, nukes just left a bad taste in people's mouths.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
It was always that way, and these then just became evidence for it. And so there's a lot of rebranding that's gonna have to happen going forward if nuclear energy is gonna rejoin the conversation. So what are your challenges
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
squaring that circle from the sources of energy people typically talk about, especially in the green movement, and nuclear energy as a kind of wannabe as part of that conversation.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
You have that? That's a statistic you guys have?
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Yes. That's just weird to count deaths by how much electricity has been produced. Nuclear energy. You'll only die once in a while. No, but does that exist for coal?
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Wait, higher as a return? There's more power generated. Per whatever, per anything.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Soccer announcer. And we're borrowing you from your soccer people.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Yes. Oh, so that's how it wins. I get it. She pulled some fast denominator-numerator math there. Did you stay with that? Pulled the right turn on you. No! No, no, because if you have gerbils on a treadmill producing your energy and it kills a thousand gerbils, they didn't make much energy to begin with, right? So the death rate relative to the energy return, that ratio is bad for you.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Again, correct me if I'm wrong, Catherine. Nukes are so potent in the capacity to produce energy that whoever died doing whatever, there's so much energy produced at the other end, it compensates for that.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
At Special Edition, we think all about the human condition and all that matters to make that work. And since you have been an injured soccer player in your life, you know about the human condition.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
How many people ever have died mining coal?
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Okay. It's pretty high. By the way, when a business says not zero, it doesn't mean it's one or two.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
More than zero... Not in my backyard. Don't put it there.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Well, they're not accepting that it's there, they're accepting the disposal plans that Catherine just told us about.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
You're mixing two things, and I think they're separable variables. You're saying nukes are dirty because fission is dirty.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
That's true. It just doesn't happen yet. So, Catherine, are you, in your world of thinking about this, combining them together as a solution going forward? Or are you totally leaning fusion, excited by the recent sort of ignition test that went on at the Livermore Labs?
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
So we are correct to fold that into the conversation. And I'm still waiting for Mr. Fusion, the home fusion from Back to the Future.
StarTalk Radio
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Yes, yes, and I love it. And I've got with us Paul Mercurio. Nice to see you guys. He's back. Yeah. Yes, Paul. Always fun. All right, you were a former stockbroker or attorney? Attorney, mergers and acquisitions, which is hilarious.