Neil deGrasse Tyson

Oh, here comes Sean.

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.

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.

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

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?

Because that's another... How did I start this? I said, in another universe. But you could be the creative consultant.

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...

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And I applaud them all for that.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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?

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?

No.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nobody doesn't love the aliens.

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?

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

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?

What do you think? I don't know what it is. That's why it's you, unidentified flying object.

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.

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.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

This is why I don't have a PhD. Crap is piled high and deep. That's what the PhD stands for.

I'm here for you, yes.

Thank you.

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.

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?

You know, no, my stuff goes deep with regard to that.

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.

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.

And so all of a sudden, the universe becomes our backyard.

You got it.

And that light is only just now reached. Only just. That's correct.

And he put down the cigarette. Right.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

No.

So if you can see back – I'll let you continue, but I should really stop you there. But I'll let you continue.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

That's clickbait.

They don't agree. But the Planck is the cosmic background. Right, right. The Planck satellite from Europe, the European satellite.

That's why I'm here. That's why you're here.

To keep you continuous.

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.

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.

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?

than not knowing the expansion rate of the universe by a factor of two.

Somebody found stars that were older than the universe.

The Cosmic Background Explorer, one of the first high-precision measurements of the cosmic background. Mather and Smoot. Nobel laureates.

Right, that's where you get the confidence from. It's not just one data point from one telescope.

Don't ask yourself these questions.

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.

So the center of mass of particle physics moved to Europe, to CERN, to the Large Hadron Collider. They discovered the Higgs boson.

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.

That's right.

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.

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.

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.

She discovered dark matter in the Milky Way. Wow.

The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. Dark matter or dark energy or both? Both. Both of them.

Okay, well listen. Astronomers have millions of dollars?

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.

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.

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.

You could have called me next time.

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?

And you've also involved with NASA's IMAP satellite. Yes. So NASA has no shortage of acronyms.

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?

Right? I know, right?

I went to work.

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?

And the town in Connecticut has an M, I think.

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.

No, no, because when we'd have to admit that we're stupid or that we're not.

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.

Is that what they call them? I call them that.

If dark matter is some kind of matter.

Because there are these two models.

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.

Which actually makes it exciting.

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.

Yeah.

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?

What is the Andromeda paradox?

You're succeeding, right?

How can that be?

That's so backwards.

That's right. So what is the upshot of this?

It works for that to happen.

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.

And that event would surely kill you before you had any experience of the wave.

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.

It's called National Society of Black Physicists. Nerds are a special subspecies of the whole world.

He actually remembers the 60s. Exactly. If you lived in the 60s, you shouldn't remember. All right. Yeah.

I say here, here.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

This is not even an interesting exercise.

You're scooping up the planets of a thousand solos to get the energy from one star.

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.

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.

In the infrared. Yeah, yeah. They're suggesting that they're aliens.

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.

No.

It's about money.

Okay, so here you go. Under your... Leadership. Will it become the astronomical society of the planet? I think so. Okay.

That's how they started.

Exactly. Trigonometry.

HP 45 in there.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

And Lick Observatory is the observatory of Santa Cruz. So, yeah.

Don't make me slappy.

Foothills, yeah.

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.

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.

Good to see you.

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.

And equations. So, I mean, there are now hundreds of these. I mean, it's been around a long time. Oh, absolutely.

Yeah, you're a comedian and you got a show on Broadway or off-Broadway or traveling.

They were named to even talk to the public. Exactly. And so the ASP has been everything I care about as a professional scientist.

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.

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.

How many other sciences make a headline with that frequency? Think about it. Yeah, that's true.

Telescopes, yeah.

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.

One man show and you interact with the audience and stuff?

Yeah, that's bad.

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.

Yes, you did. Okay. This is awesome. So why is the word acceleration in the probe?

Wait, wait, wait. What do you mean supersonic if it's moving through the vacuum of space? Space. Is it exactly a vacuum?

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.

Let him catch up with you.

He's never wrong. Well, we're going to do Cosmic Queries today.

Didn't it? Went to the sun.

There's nothing more boring than a neutral atom. Nothing more boring. It's not ionized. It's not, yeah.

It's a grab bag. With an old colleague and friend of mine, Hakeem. Thank you.

Raining back down.

I better get your last name. Olashay.

Study the song.

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.

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.

That's great. It's so simple and perfect.

What's that?

And we can't just, like, shoot this shit forever.

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.

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.

Just like if you look at a bar and made it.

Gentlemen, it looks like we may need nukes to realize the future we all imagine for ourselves.

Yeah. He did.

In the United States?

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.

What does sodium do for you?

So it absorbs neutrons.

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.

And you also work the Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

That's half of its old school. Is that correct? Half is old school. Yeah. Is that correct?

In a different way. Using the steam. Different source of heat.

So the higher temperature of the water, I mean, it's under pressure, I guess, right?

Stephen, he's the first name. Stephen Colbert. Oh, yeah, sorry. Stephen Colbert of the rest of us.

Rather than making electricity out of it through a turbine.

Very important point.

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.

Yeah. So Paul, you're so highfalutin. Do you still even do stand up like regular comedians?

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?

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.

I heard rumor you have a Broadway show, a state show.

I was recently in Iceland. They're nearly 100% geothermal. I mean, they're sitting on top of multiple volcanic...

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.

Net zero what? Net zero carbon. Carbon. Thank you. Okay.

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?

We'd love me some Frank Oz. Yeah, I know.

Tell me about it.

Yes. So are we still mining uranium? There's still plenty of uranium left in Earth's crust for this?

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.

Okay, cool. So Gary, you and your producer put together this topic.

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?

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.

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?

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?

Okay, so you can track their whereabouts.

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.

Right, right. Cool. So it's picking through your dumpsters. Exactly.

Yeah, but how do you—you can't boost the uranium back into the isotope it needs to be and then just run it?

And that's no different from recycling plastics, or they've got to carry their weight with their waste products. That's right.

But, Catherine, they're not equally as safe.

And you don't have radioactive byproducts.

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.

Gotcha. And you have to dispose of it in some careful way.

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,

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?

They were filming. They should throw it in there.

I never knew.

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.

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.

And I can watch movies. We can all watch different movies.

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.

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.

Mr. Fusion, yes.

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.

So we've got to land this plane. So, Catherine, what are you working on right now?

What does multi-physics mean? What does that mean?

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.

And that's not only in size, but in timescale as well for phenomena.

Okay, but do you earn your keep at the university? Do you also teach?

How about that? Very cool. Just make sure she's an honest broker here. Sounds a lot like she is.

There you go. It all comes full circle. Well, let me offer a cosmic perspective here.

If I may.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

You have that? That's a statistic you guys have?

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?

Hey, former soccer pro.

Wait, higher as a return? There's more power generated. Per whatever, per anything.

Yes.

Soccer announcer. And we're borrowing you from your soccer people.

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.

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.

The flying cars, you still want those.

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.

How many people ever have died mining coal?

Okay. It's pretty high. By the way, when a business says not zero, it doesn't mean it's one or two.

More than zero... Not in my backyard. Don't put it there.

Well, they're not accepting that it's there, they're accepting the disposal plans that Catherine just told us about.

Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right.

You're mixing two things, and I think they're separable variables. You're saying nukes are dirty because fission is dirty.

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?

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.

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.

Well, thank you, man. And I as well. I've never met you before.

By the way, I loved you in the movie Megan.

By the way, that terrified me.

Brought into the 21st century.

That was done 35 years ago, but I brought it into the 21st century. My brother illustrated it. Yes, your brother illustrated it.

He actually went to the High School of Music and Art here in New York City.

Yes, thanks for noticing that. Every attempt to reply to people has its own personality and its own flavor.

I see both happening simultaneously.

Yeah, the smart question is getting smarter, and the dumb question is getting dumber. But I don't care. As an educator, you bring the question on.

Yeah, so the politics... People can say what they want when they're running for office. What matters is how do you allocate money when the budget gets put out? And I can say, you know, no, we don't have another equation like E equals MC squared, you know? That was good. Right. Back in...

That was the hit single that killed, yeah.

Einstein killed it with the equals and the square. In 1905.

Yeah. He knocked the, all right, out of the park. No, you can't. But there's not just science. There's the engineering that flows out of that science. This is the cousin of science that is empowered by science. So you've seen pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope bringing the edge of the universe to the front of your face, putting it in your backyard. That's been happening.

You've seen Elon Musk chopstick a booster out of the sky to reuse later. We've never seen that before. We have a rover on Mars the size of an SUV that brought a helicopter with it. So what are you complaining about? Wait, no, no, no. I'm sorry, doctor. I'm not. Oh, wait. Hey, wait, wait. One more. I got one more. One more. Was it two weeks ago? Three weeks ago?

NASA launched the Europa Clipper mission to go orbit Jupiter and dip close to the frozen surface of Jupiter's moon Europa in search for life in that...

But we have to be very careful.

I don't see important evidence of it. None of this bothers you? None of anything? That's a different question.

So I worry, for example, that people get their science off of random places on the internet, off of clickbait, rather than looking at what this scientific establishment has discovered. for us. Sure. So you get someone on there and say, the whole establishment is wrong and I'm right. Click here. That's irresistible. Yeah, that's what we do on this show all the time. It's irresistible.

It's very effective. And I'm thinking, no, science doesn't work that way. It works by you get enough observations and data. And if it comes to agreement, that's the new objective truth. Right. It's not one lone person that says whatever the hell they want. Doctor, I mean.

Because... Because... all of the House of Representatives gets voted on every two years, and a third of the Senate, and the president gets voted on every four years, at any time that I feel depressed, I say, and this too shall pass. Okay, that's not helpful.

Here's what'll happen. okay if if our science goes goes bad yeah okay and other countries rise up yeah then we all come together and say we don't want to be bested by these other countries and that would be a good reason to come together rather than targeting enemies within us okay that is good but do you have faith that that will happen

Einstein was an immigrant. Everyone's an immigrant. Elon Musk is an immigrant.

One third of all Nobel Prizes in the sciences that have gone to Americans have gone to immigrants. One third. I track that every year. So I know that number. So I've never been spooked by immigrants the way so many other people have.

Are you worried that... If you start closing things off, we will descend and become a shadow of what we once were as a technological power in this country. So it may be... Not to make you depressed, it may be we need to sink deeper before people wake up to the consequences of these actions. Or the consequences of the inactions when they should have taken action.

We may have to sink deeper before we just get slapped in the face and say, oh my gosh, bring the science back. Okay, that's bad. This is bad.

Right, so- By the way, I think that's Persian, and this too shall pass.

Yeah, it's hard, because another thing is clickbait. He said, she said, he said, you said that. Comment on what they said. No, I'd rather comment on ideas and mission statements of what we can be as a species, as a nation, as a world. And so I try to avoid it. But sometimes they just drag you down, drag you into the trenches. And I can fight in the trenches, you know.

I can fight, but I don't want to. I don't want to. I can kick some ass if I have to. I was undefeated. Mass times acceleration.

You got the other equation. That preceded equals MC squared. But no, I was a captain and undefeated on my high school wrestling team. I can kick some ass.

by offering them perspectives they had never previously recognized was in front of them. And you say, have you thought about it this way or that way? No, I hadn't thought about it that way. And let's go have a beer.

The internet is a cesspool, has become a cesspool. And I'm very disappointed by that. So science bad on that one, internet. Well, there's some good science that happens there. But yeah, as an invention, we all thought we would just be the community town hall. And it's just a cesspool. It's a cesspool. Get off it. Yes.

what you said you need another yeah we need like an e equals mc square like we give us a give us something to be like it's gonna come around all the time well you know that's what we we need something give us something give us something einstein was like 200 years 300 years after isaac newton and they're big you know big men on campus so what we got 250 years for the next

Computers. All right, all right. I'll boil it down to one word. Okay. Maybe. It's f***.

Thank you. Einstein hated maybe. Einstein hated maybe.

You need a maybe every now and then, because you don't know the answer, but you're hopeful for one that will satisfy not only you, but the survival of the species. So... Yeah, maybe is kind of depressing. That's not the hit single I was hoping for. No, there are people who are paying attention, I think. Who? People. I got people... No, there's a few.

I feel like we're just in a... In the scientific institutions that we have, National Institutes of Health, National Academy of Sciences, academia. I get that. But leaders come and go. The scientists are there for their careers. Okay? In the end, they is who will triumph. Okay.

I actually do.

Okay, science man, science. That would be no. Okay. Are you sure about that? Is that a maybe? Is that like a maybe no?

No, that's a, not just a no, that's a no. You got to get down and deep on that one. That's a solid E equals MCO. Of all the things you want to worry about cancer, this should be last on that list, not even on the list at all.

Okay, has he ever seen microbes that could be thriving in raw milk under a microscope?

Yeah, if you... Somebody should invite him to see what's going on there under a microscope. Okay. He might feel different.

Can we just unambiguously... Oh, you can drink anything that's liquid.

It's just whether you care whether you die or get sick at the end. Sorry. Yes, you can drink anything. No, don't say that to the... This is on the idiots. The idiots are watching. Stop. Don't say that. Don't. Do not. You can drink bleach. You can drink any of this.

You will die. Okay? I'm just saying, if you want an esophagus when you're done, don't drink bleach. Okay.

No, no, people do something completely stupid that kills themselves before they have children. Yes, yes. So that they're removed from the gene pool. Yeah, yeah. It's a culling of the herd.

Wow, a pill that will remove the... Effects, reverse the effects of the COVID-19 vaccine. Reverse the vaccine. Like, why would you want to do that? Hey, man, I'm just asking the question here. You do that so that you can die from the virus. Look, this is... It's a free country. If that's what they want to do, I don't know that we can stop them. No, but is that a pill?

Answer the science. Oh, I don't... Okay, okay.

If such a pill exists, I know nothing of it. So it might exist.

A laser will function as lasers do, no matter the religion of who invokes it. You know, the more you speak, the more it's like you're more like a Buddhist, like Zen master colon than scientist here. I'm just saying, when you turn on a laser, the religion of the person, it doesn't matter.

That's A. B, to worry that a space laser could affect the weather while we are simultaneously pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, possibly irreversibly changing the weather, seems to me to be a completely misguided, misprioritized sense of the world.

No.

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