Tuesday, Oct 26, 2021 • 47min
Cosmic Queries - Smarty-Pants Trash Bin with Jordan Klepper
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What is string theory? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Jordan Klepper answer fan questions about solar system formation, dark matter, and the expansion of spacetime. What would travelling at the speed of light look like?
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(3)
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Jordan Klepper
Chuck Nice
Transcript
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Break
Neil deGrasse Tyson
00:54
Welcome to
StarTalk
. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.Share
01:01
StarTalk
begins right now.Share
01:07
This is
StarTalk: Cosmic Queries Edition.
For my co-host today, I've got the one, the only, the inimitable, he's so unique in this world, I don't think anyone is related to him. Jordan
Klepper, Jordan
.Share
Jordan Klepper
01:23
No, I have no close relatives, very few close friends.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
01:28
There was an egg somewhere and you hatched out of it.
Share
Jordan Klepper
01:31
I was born into this earth, who knows from where and who knows what will come from me. But here I am.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
01:37
Yeah, I mean I just, you know, I first as for so many people, I was introduced to your work on
Comedy Central
as a sort of correspondent and running around the country exploring the depths of irrationality that has befallen us all and I think I keep thinking myself if he weren't doing this, who would? And like no one, right? So, I just want to thank you for all of you have done to expose the underbelly of the country.Share
Jordan Klepper
02:05
I feel like I'm like
James Cameron
diving into The Abyss
. It's not underwater, it's just into The Heartland Of America
.Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
02:13
The Heartland Of America
. So we've got you for Cosmic Queries
and this is a Grab Bag edition. So, you know, we don't like to admit it, but every now and then there's just like the leftovers from all the leftovers because they didn't fit a category, they didn't fit a theme. And so here they are, it's like the trash bin of questions.Share
02:33
Doesn't mean we don't love the questions, it just meant they didn't find a place before today.
Share
Jordan Klepper
02:37
To be clear for all of those folks who are out there, you're not second tier, you're just such unique thinkers, you can't be categorized other other than the category of trash bin, which but still were that like a badge of honor, A trashy badge of honor.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
02:53
Exactly! All right, so you have all the questions and I haven't seen them yet. Not that we're trying to stump me, but if I don't know the answer, I'll just say, I don't know and we move on. And I love knowing where the people came from.
Share
03:05
If they, if it happens to be in their signature and these are all from our
Patreon
supporters. So Patreons
, we changed the rules. So they're the only ones who actually get to ask questions for Cosmic Queries
. So those are the rules.Share
Jordan Klepper
03:20
And to be clear. I know it's not the goal, but I do hope they stump you just because you're cocky.
Neil
, you're cocky and it's important to knock you down a peg for me, it makes me feel better about myself. So I'm really rooting against you on this one.Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
03:35
Just before you begin, there was a because people like trying to, you know, stump you, it's, they won't even try to not stump you if they could. They put in extra energy to stump. So I want to tweet that, "A plane whose engine fails is a glider, a helicopter whose engine failed is a brick".
Share
03:58
Okay, so I thought it's pretty clear what I'm talking about there, but no, okay. It's so, apparently helicopter experts jumped in and said, "No, the engine can fail, but the propellers will still turn", okay.
Share
04:16
And then you have something called autorotation where you can kind of guide your fall from the sky, you know, like the little, the seeds that can, that fall off the tree that have little propeller blades, you know. They don't just fall straight to the ground. They have a controlled descent.
Share
04:32
And so no one, no one volunteered to say, "Maybe
Neil
meant there's no upward lift at all". Okay, an engine failure along with the propeller failure, right? No one volunteered that possibility as to what I might have been intending and so they all just said, "We're gonna prove Neil
wrong, he's wrong. He's so-", okay, okay, this is how it is.Share
04:58
What's the first one you have?
Share
Jordan Klepper
04:60
Sandra Paglia has a question. She says, first of all, she says, "Woo hoo! What a thrill to be on.
Patreon"
. Thank you, Sandra.Share
05:07
She says, "I've been diving into multiple books on the
Multiverse
and I'm still struggling with the String Theory
concept. Can you please explain it in a simple way or write a String Theory
book for dummies. So I finally get it. Thank you."Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
05:21
Well, so a great book on this, which was a big bestseller was from my friend and colleague
Brian Greene
, he wrote a book called The Elegant Universe
and there's a lot of other stuff in there, but he's a string theorist. And so String Theory
deeply infuses his writings because that's the side of the fence he's on as he comes to the topic. So what I can do is tell you that we have Quantum Physics
, right?Share
05:46
That's the theory of the small, so that gives us an understanding of molecules and atoms and particles, and then we have
Einstein's
General Theory Of Relativity
which explains the entire universe, what gravity is doing to shape the universe.Share
06:02
And out of that, we get the
Big Bang
and Black Holes
and all and all manner of other things. But it turns out if you take Einstein's
General Theory Of Relativity
and apply it all the way down to the center of a black hole where is a word we call it Singularity
, it blows up. I mean not literally, it mathematically blows up. Remember when you took math in like high school you weren't allowed to divide by zero, right? You know? Okay, it's kind of like that.Share
Jordan Klepper
06:28
The man was holding me down, that's how I always saw.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
06:32
That's how you felt about it.
Share
Jordan Klepper
06:33
That's how I felt.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
06:34
You wanted to do it, that just somebody was in your way.
Share
Jordan Klepper
06:36
You don't tell me what to do Mr. Forrester.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
06:39
So we know
General Theory Of Relativity
has limits. Alright, it applies in all these large-scale places but when you get down to these tiny areas, it doesn't. Now, so here's the problem at the Big Bang
because general relativity takes us like from the Big Bang
onward, but right at the point of the Big Bang
, when the universe was really small, wait a minute if the universe was one small, then maybe Quantum Physics applies to the entire universe in those few moments.Share
07:13
So you have a shotgun marriage of these two highly successful theories of the universe, but we don't know how to do that. String theorists have come in and said we have an umbrella that will enclose them both and put them under one coherent understanding of how the universe works and we get the singularities out of it. We got
Quantum Physics
and we get general relativity. So that's my sort of overview of what strength theorists are trying to accomplish here. But they haven't really yet.Share
07:44
And there's been a lot of them working for decades and I've gone up to them and say, "How come you're not there yet? I've been waiting around". They've been at this basically since the early'80s and there's like dozens of them. All right. Maybe even scores of them. I said, how can you have another? He said, well it's hard.
Share
07:57
So then I said to
Brian Greene
to his face. I said, "Could it be that you are all just too stupid. Why is it that it's hard and you're not smart enough, right? It's not that you're not smart enough. Why? What's going on there?" Because no cosmologist theorist physicist is going to say, I'm stupid. They'll say the problem is hard.Share
08:18
I take a different sort of you. I think maybe there's yet another place to explore for us toward this umbrella and maybe it's not
String Theory
. I don't know, but that's where we are now. These twos are still not married.Share
Jordan Klepper
08:34
Well I mean marriage equality even in the galaxy in and of itself is a process. I think the American political system says, "It's not that it can't happen. It happens slower than we wanted to."
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
08:45
That's what it is. It's happening slower than we really.
Share
Jordan Klepper
08:48
Exactly
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
08:49
Yes
Share
Jordan Klepper
08:49
Exactly. This is from Scott W. Peterson, "In this month's
National Geographic
There's an article about our investigation of small solar system objects. In it there's a little discussion about the formation of the solar system."Share
09:02
"The theory is that
Jupiter
formed closer to the sun and when it moved outward it affected the orbits of outer icier objects, thus hurling them toward earth. This bombardment was where we got water from. Why couldn't have been the opposite, the earth formed out there where there is more ice than was catapulted inward to a point where the ice becomes liquid?"Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
09:24
Oh, very nice question. I love it when people read and think and this is good.
Share
Jordan Klepper
09:33
These are thoughtful audiences and they're magazine subscribers.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
09:37
That means they read.
Share
Jordan Klepper
09:40
Print is not dead, it's alive. It's coming to this man's house. I bet this guy, I gotta believe Scott, I believe has that beautiful wall of yellow
National Geographics
behind?Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
09:49
Yeah, everybody does that yellow rectangle.
Share
Jordan Klepper
09:51
I love the Wall.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
09:53
Yeah. So okay, so here's what happened. We had our own solar system. Before 1995, we were the only known solar system. And so we presume that we be representative of other solar systems. Because what we got to start somewhere, let's assume that we start discovering other planets beginning in 1995.
Share
10:14
And the method favored the discovery of big planets. Even if there were little ones there waiting to be seen. And what we found were that there were
Jupiter
sized planets orbiting really close to their host star. And we said, "who ordered that Jupiter's
belong out? You know, way out where our Jupiter
is. How did that happen?"Share
10:35
And we kept looking and there they were and they kept showing up and they kept showing up. And so we had to ask what, what's going on. What is normal? I guess is how you hit this. What is normal?
Share
10:49
And we went back to the formation drawing board and we noticed that in a solar system you could start out with many times more planets than you actually end up with. Because some planets or orbits are unstable. And what we mean by that is if you come too close to a planet, it can slingshot you out, you can exit the star system, but by doing so, it has consequences in the solar system itself.
Share
11:22
So for every planet gets flung out, the remaining planets readjust in their position and it's a whole migration all thing going on in the solar system, it's called planet migration and planets can move in planets can move out. It depends on the circumstances of what's going on here. So if you have a
Jupiter
that's far out.Share
11:44
We can imagine that the exchanges of energies and the capturing of other objects can force that kind of readjustment to give you the spread of what we actually see in our catalogs of star systems. So that's what's going on there. And in fact, I get to do this because this is
StarTalk
,
the StarTalk
book and our boy reads right, reader in the house. Our recent book, StarTalk
Cosmic Queries
.Share
12:14
There's a whole section on the formation of star systems and this migratory process. So, I invite you to check out that book. It's a fun book and it's published by
National Geographic
. Mic drop.Share
Jordan Klepper
12:29
Look at this. This is why Scott you come, you come. Well read. You're gonna get a well read response. That's what you're gonna get all woven together. It's also it's all tight, tight answers. Right? And it's got a sponsorship attached to it. I mean, this is this is how you make podcast right here.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
12:47
And it's a beautiful book and it was one of our engineers and and editors and and producers Lindsay walker was a major a contributor to that. Just making it shake, give start talk if eyeing the content to make sure that any
StarTalk
fan feels like they are at home in that book. And so so we got this.Share
Jordan Klepper
13:10
I love it. I admit, I'm embarrassed. I've never heard of planetary migration before.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
13:16
Yeah, well, so you need a life.
Share
Jordan Klepper
13:21
I'm gonna get out more jordans and that's what I told you without any family or friends. Just as this egg whose birth under the world, I'm still grasping at straws. Yes, there you go. Uh paul love. He's got a question for us.
Share
13:34
He says when we say that the universe is expanding, are we really talking about just the matter in the universe? Are we talking about spacetime itself? For example, during the rapid expansion of the
Big Bang
, was it just all the matter in the universe expanding into pre existing space?Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
13:50
Oh okay. I can answer that, but only after we take a commercial break. You see what I did there? It's classic. I'm getting better and better at that way. When we come back, we're gonna find out what the hell is the universe expanding into and what does it mean to be expanding,
StarTalk: Cosmic Queries
.Share
Break
16:37
Hi, I'm
Chris Cohen
from haul worth New Jersey
and I support StarTalk
on Patreon. Please enjoy this episode of Star Talk radio with your and my favorite personal astrophysicist, Neil Degrasse Tyson
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
16:60
We're back
Cosmic Queries
. StarTalk
got with me is my co-host, Jordan
. Klepper Jordan
. Love you man, I love you all your work and you still got the gig with Comedy central, right?Share
Jordan Klepper
17:12
And I'm still contributing to the Good old
Daily Show
right now. So I launch out into the world every few weeks and see what the world is talking about.Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
17:21
And do you pitch stories to them or do they request of you?
Share
Jordan Klepper
17:24
I do. It's a little bit of both. We basically, you know, I have a small little team that I tend to go out to some of these rallies and events with and we kind of watched the news and when a, when a rally shows up or there's a protest.
Share
17:35
We went to a mask, mandate protest a few weeks ago, there's a couple events coming up, we sort of look at where the conversation is going and if there's an event, we try to get there and talk to people.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
17:45
The more irrational the conversation, the more likely you will be there.
Share
Jordan Klepper
17:48
It is not exactly if you're like man, I bet some people have some irrational points of view and are pretty angry about it. There's a good chance I'm staying at a hotel nearby.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
17:57
All right, all right, so keep them coming. We got questions from our
Patreon
members.Share
Jordan Klepper
18:02
So this is paul loves question. He wants to know when we say that the universe is expanding. Are we talking about just the matter in the universe? Are we talking about space time?
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
18:10
So so this is what we learned from
General Theory Of Relativity
Einstein
, that space which we think of as this empty thing and of course, things can move through space. Earth
is moving in orbit around the sun through space.Share
18:26
The sun is orbiting the center of the galaxy, it's moving through space and there are some there's some galactic motion where they're moving through space. However, underneath all of that is the fabric of the space-time continuum.
Share
18:44
That is what's expanding when we speak of the expanding universe. And so no, the expanding universe and we see
Galaxies
hurtling away from each other. They are being carried along in the fabric of the space-time continuum. And by the way that means in the early universe, there's no rule against that fabric stretching really, faster than the speed of light itself, the speed of light speed limit is a restriction on how fast you can move through space, not how fast space itself can expand.Share
19:20
So the entire early universe, it is booking. That is it is going way faster than the speed of light. Not a problem. Not a problem there.
Share
Jordan Klepper
19:30
It is when I'm visualizing this and using even the term fabric, Should I be thinking of it in that sense of something that is literally being pulled?
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
19:39
Yeah, I think another way the fabric is a little more poetic rather than just rubber sheet.
Share
Jordan Klepper
19:44
But rubber sheet makes me think of 6th grade and the difficulties I had at night after I had a big cola before going to bed.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
19:53
Oh, is that right? Okay. Gotcha. Gotcha. Is just the first you admit this of your childhood.
Share
Jordan Klepper
19:58
I think you I think it's coming out. I want to be open with them. Clearly we have readers here. We have readers. I want to be honest with readers. Normally I'm talking to people who haven't read a book. I'm talking to people read books.
Share
20:08
Here's the deal. Sometimes people pee in the middle of the night and it's okay, as long as you have the fabric of the universe underneath. I gotta say that's a good Brandon right there.
StarTalk
branded fabric of the universe.Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
20:24
Rubber sheets for bed wetter. Yeah, there you go. So you have a rubber sheet and it distorts when you sort of press it as a mass would do to it, pressing down and, and if you moved along that rubber sheet, you might sort of fall in towards that depression where the masses and that's kind of what things do when they're moving through the pre-existing universe.
Share
20:49
The point is if you take that rubber sheet and draw
Galaxies
on it and then just take it and stretch it, then all the Galaxies
are moving away from one another as part of the embedded rubber sheet that we're talking about. Now, here's the part that's harder for our limited brains to process this stretching rubber sheet with these dimples in it Is happening in three dimensions.Share
21:22
So it's a three-dimensional stretching rubber sheet with
Galaxies
embedded in it. And since time is a factor here, it's actually there's 1/4 dimension in it as well. So that's why, by the way, so let's take a balloon. They didn't ask this, but it rounds it out, take a balloon and drug Galaxies
on it and then you inflate the balloon.Share
21:43
Okay, so the glue gets bigger and bigger and bigger and all the
Galaxies
are getting farther and farther apart from each other. Then you say point to where the universe began. No place you point on the surface of the will get you to the beginning because the beginning is back through time. You gotta go through the fabric, go back through time to when all the, all the balloon was in the same place at the same time. So basically everywhere is the beginning of the universe, 14 billion years ago. Well, clear as mud will say,Share
Jordan Klepper
22:19
I was gonna, you know, it was the rubber bedsheets. I was getting somewhere. My brain was really starting to make sense of it. The balloon, I like that metaphor, but now moving through space and time, I'm seeing it exploded balloon.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
22:30
And uh when I came up in the ranks, educators were attempting to go one dimension higher than the rubber sheet and they talk about raisins in a raisin cake
Share
Jordan Klepper
22:40
Raisin in the raisin cake, as that It can, okay.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
22:44
So as the cake expands when you bake it, the raising the distance between the raisins are increasing the problem. There is the raisin cake has an edge to it. Okay, And whereas the surface of the balloon has no edge.
Share
Jordan Klepper
23:02
I mean, also one of the other problems is raisin cakes have fallen out of favor. You're not gonna, you're not gonna find yourself with a raisin cake, like until you can connect it to a cronut, we're gonna have a hard time for the
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
23:14
You know, nobody makes raisin cakes anymore forgot. It's just not a thing.
Share
Jordan Klepper
23:18
It's because you have to understand the fourth dimension and what time means to a raisin cake and people like kids these days are too dumb to eat raisin cakes.
Share
23:29
This is from
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
23:29
That's why it fell out of favor.
Share
Jordan Klepper
23:31
That's what it is. Kids aren't smart enough to eat them. This is from Tyler Pits. Hey, new patron here excited to join the family. My question is about
Dark Matter
. We have no clue what it is. But what are your speculations on what it could be and what is the possibility of us interacting with it any time soon? Could it be that Dark Matter
is the material slash matter of the void that our universe is expanding into outside the observable universe? Just the thing that's been on my mind. Thank you guys And all the love for Michigan. That's my home state. So a lot of life, is that right?Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
24:07
Right.
Michigan
in the house you get in the house count. What's your, what's your hometown?Share
Jordan Klepper
24:11
Kalamazoo
Michigan
right there. Home home of Derek Jeter
and Jordan Klepper
. And if you go down, people really know one of those names. If you're going all right. Uh, so we're talking about a Dark Matter Dark Matter
. What it could, what it really could be.Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
24:31
There is what I wanted to be. But there's what I really think it probably is. All right. So I'll tell you what it probably is. It's probably a class of particles yet to be discovered. That has a very low probability of interacting with our class of particles, electrons, protons, neutrons and even our light. Okay, light is one of photons are part of our particle family and so we have our particle family and there may be a whole other particle family that just simply doesn't interact.
Share
25:06
But if it has mass it will have gravity and we see the gravity of the
Dark Matter
. That's why we're calling it Dark Matter
. Okay it's matter and its gravity 85% of the universe's gravity comes from it but it's coexisting with us by not interacting and that sounds kind of weird doesn't it?Share
Jordan Klepper
25:27
Thanksgiving
you're describing. Thanksgiving
. It's families coexisting but not interacting with one. There's no real connection to connect and the chances of them connected are pretty low. American Thanksgiving
. Got it. OkayShare
Neil deGrasse Tyson
25:41
We need who's the guy who painted
Thanksgiving
and all those other American images and Norman Rockwell
, Normal Rockwell. So he needs we need an updated Thanksgiving
painting.Share
Jordan Klepper
25:54
I think it's screaming at each other. Yeah. I think it's a trip tick of three of people as far away as they could be and carnage in the middle.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
26:05
So it's not a stretch to imagine two things not interacting. Alright for example, why do you have windows in your home? The windows are transparent to visible light. Okay now it turns out the light does interact with the window, it interacts with parties and keeps moving through coherently. But what I'm saying is you have windows that are transparent to visible light. They're not transparent to infrared. And how do I know that? Because you could take a candle or match and light it on one side of the window and bring your hand right up to the other side of the window and you will not feel the heat whereas you can see the match.
Share
26:51
So the visible light comes through the window. The infrared doesn't. We live in a world of non-interacting phenomenon. All right. And we exploit that fact. All right, well you have a probably a smartphone on your hip or on your desk right now and if someone's calling you it will ring. Where did that signal come from? It came through your walls. Okay, can you could be in a windowless bathroom and your phone will ring because microwaves pass through all that not interacting until it hits your phone then it interacts.
Share
27:28
So we have built our lives to interact with and not interact with certain forms of energy and that's all the same family of energy. So let me keep going. There's a particle called the neutrino once again as part of our family, neutrino hardly interacts with anything. Oh my gosh you need in order to detect a neutrino you need like a column of led light-years long and then send the neutrino through that and maybe it'll stop somewhere in the lead cylinder that's our own family of particles.
Share
28:08
So we are imagining other families or particles out there that interact with us less than even the stuff that we don't interact with as part of our own family, that's the over-under on what
Dark Matter
is. And we've got top people searching for those particles right now because if we were hoping that it's not just that they never interact, they just rarely interact. So that maybe if you have an experiment big enough and an experiment lasts long enough. Well, we have 1,1 encounter where the Dark Matter
interacts with our matter and then we would have experimental evidence of its existence.Share
Jordan Klepper
28:49
We're working on that?
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
28:51
We got top people working on that now. My favorite explanation is that there's a parallel universe that has more gravity than we do and it's spilling into our universe, affecting the movement of our objects. And we're trying to like, you know, the elephant, what am I touching here? What is it? We're touching the
Dark Matter
, who? It must be, something I don't know. But it's regular matter and regular gravity spilling out of an adjacent universe.Share
29:17
That's what I wanted to be because that's simple. That's the simplest explanation.
Share
Jordan Klepper
29:20
Yeah, it's the most part definitely that that if that's a world that is beamed into my netflix, I'm watching season two season three jumping back and forth. You're sticking with that one, definitely sticking with that one.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
29:32
And by the way, I'm not just making this up uh in a parallel universe. If you look at the properties of these phenomena, light cannot escape the confines of a universe. But the force of gravity can, it turns out, and I didn't take enough quant quantum field theory or field theory, in general, to fully understand why that.
Share
29:55
So, I've been told this by people who do know this and who are experts in field theory. They tell me that the properties of gravity allow it to leak out of your universe. And even though the light can, so you're not gonna be able to see the other universe, but you might be able to feel, I'm imagining like a muffin top, like it's spilling out over. Oh yeah, I like that. Right. All right, give me another one.
Share
Jordan Klepper
30:18
This is from Scott W. Peterson. Why have car antenna has gotten so much smaller over the years. Uh, the wavelengths of the radiofrequency hasn't changed.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
30:29
Oh, very. I love Man Mac. We got good people out.
Share
Jordan Klepper
30:32
There is not a trash group. Oh no. From it. This is a well read outside the box.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
30:38
Okay, Okay, so here we go. First of all, you don't see car antennas anymore. And even when they first started going away, it's because they put the wires in the window or in, in the body of the car. So, I remember my first car that had no antenna. There was a pair of wires that were embedded in the windshield glass that came up the middle and then parted out left and right. And those were the radio antennas back when we were receiving radio signals.
Share
31:14
Okay. And so the
AM
radio, uh, it's a long wavelength and it would generally you want an antenna approximately the length of the wavelength. Okay. Today, most of our communication is microwaves. Okay. When you get satellite radio, that's all microwaves. All of that microwave waves are much smaller than radio waves. That's why they were called microwaves. To begin with.Share
31:41
All right, A microwave is about a centimeter long. And so that's how you're doing. You're communicating. That's all you need. That's why walkie-talkies never had big antennas like the old cars or even the who else had big anti.
Share
Jordan Klepper
31:56
And I guess I never knew the antennas were reflective of the actual size of the wave
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
31:60
Correct. You want the antenna to kind of match. All right. And if it doesn't match it perfectly, that's okay. You'll get some percent of the radio signal getting absorbed. So you were cool with that. And so, so nowadays, of course, everything's come coming over the internet or in other ways. But microwave is the primary way that these things are obtained. Now, there was a trick that they performed. And you might see this in some old-timey cars, but not so as old as have the antenna.
Share
32:29
If you take an antenna that's long and just coil it, then it's the wave still feels the length of the wire of your antenna, even though the antennas coiled. And so a coiled antenna gets some of the signal that if it were uncoiled that it would get. And that was a way to not have stuff just sticking out as you drove down the street. And so yeah, that we transitioned through that too, then just change the damn wavelengths.
Share
Jordan Klepper
33:03
It just be easier. People are tripping over these chords. I remember having one that my little little radio player by my bed when I was a kid that just, it just had a cord that went all the way down and it was a big mess to be quite out of.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
33:17
Yeah, yeah, yes, that's a great question. Yeah.
Share
Jordan Klepper
33:22
This is from Fernando gums, greetings from
Brazil
and yes Neil
I read your letter to my country.Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
33:29
Oh, he did, yes. I wrote a letter to
Brazil
a few months ago, just not to people to the country.Share
Jordan Klepper
33:35
The country
Brazil
.Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
33:36
It was me to the country.
Share
Jordan Klepper
33:40
What was the letter to the country of
Brazil
?Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
33:43
You know? Okay. So it was, oh, I remember, one of my books, Letters from an Astrophysicist was being translated into
Portuguese
in Brazil
. And they said, "Do you mind writing a letter to the Portuguese
people as a just to welcome them to this book to this translated book?" And I thought about it, I said, "I don't want to write it to people. People are so divisive and things, let me write it to something that's not going to complain something. They can't say anything."Share
34:11
So I said, I wrote a letter to
Brazil,
and that letter that it leads off the Brazilian translation of it. And it was, it's a celebration of all that we in America know in the United States
no, of Brazil
and things that maybe they can be more proud of. Brazil
had early pioneers in aviation, for example, the very first Latin South American astronaut was Brazilian.Share
34:39
Okay for example. So they have and most airplanes that you ride between medium-sized cities in
the United States
are designed and built in Brazil
. Embraer
is a Brazilian aerospace company.Share
35:00
And so we tend to think of
Brazil
as people with not much clothes on the beach and we think of coffee and maybe soccer. Right. And so as a scientist wanted to make sure that all the rest of what Brazil
has been and represents and can still represent doesn't get forgotten. And so to celebration of a country, all it has been and all it can beShare
Jordan Klepper
35:24
Look at that this is so if I want you to write me a lovely letter like that, Do I have to convince you to write it to like the borough of Brooklyn instead. Huh? Is that what I was gonna say. Yeah. Come on. I'm dying for a lovely thoughtful letter from
Neil
but I guess he has to envision me as a city-state or at least a burrow. So, I want to get to Fernando's question neal but let's take a break first.Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
35:52
Okay, sure. So we'll be right back.
StarTalk: Cosmic Queries
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Break
Neil deGrasse Tyson
37:00
So
Jordan
we're back where we left off. We were we were on the beaches of Brazil
last I checked.Share
Jordan Klepper
37:13
It was nice. The weather was nice. It was a good vibe.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
37:17
Mr Gomes was his question. Did I answer his question?
Share
Jordan Klepper
37:20
So he was thanking you for the letter to his country, Fernando wanted to thank you, but he also did have one question. So he did throw it out here. He wondered is it possible for the dark energy phenomenon?
Share
37:32
A phenomenon aka spacetime expansion to be an emergent property of matter itself? Only manifesting in bigger scales like little ants don't look very complex themselves so they can show interesting behaviors when you observe the colony as a whole.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson
37:47
Once again, a highly literate question comes it's a scientifically literate question. I love it. So, let me just unpack something there. He mentioned emergence, emergence is a relatively recent exploration going on in the field of biology.
Share
38:04
All right. I think we've always known about it, but we hadn't really thought as deeply about it as we have in recent decades. So, emergence is you can look at a bird, grab snatch a pigeon off the fountain
Share
Jordan Klepper
38:16
Which we don't recommend. Not recommend. This is a theoretical conversation. Just thank you. Thank you. I got lawyers in my ear
Neil
justShare
Neil deGrasse Tyson
38:24
So you have a pigeon and then study it all you can and all you want. Right on down to its molecular makeup. Okay, so it's got a brain a beak eyes can lay eggs if it's a girl pigeon instead of a boy pigeon, it's got feathers, it can fly. You figure all this out.
Share
38:46
We don't yet know what's going on in the pigeon for it to know that there are occasions where a bunch of them take flight simultaneously and then flock together as they fly. So the flocking of birds is emergent because it's something you can't deduce from studying a single bird and knowing practically everything. Maybe there's something in the brain that we haven't gotten to yet. The neuroscience of pigeons that's probably lower on the list than the neuroscience of humans. Maybe we'll get there eventually.
Share
39:26
But emergent behavior are things that the sum of the parts themselves are not concerned with don't concern themselves with it. But the collection of parts together have a property that has emerged and consciousness human consciousness is considered one of those things. Could it be that once you have a sufficiently complex brain does consciousness just emerge?
Share
39:56
And so yeah, these are very so is dark energy, an emergent feature of the universe and gravity in space? I don't know, it's kind of cool to think that right. And but it would be weird to say matter which attracts itself has an emergent feature that repels itself. That's just kind of I don't know how to walk into a room and say that um confidently. So, no, it's an interesting thought and I loved the concept of emergence and it shows up in all kinds of ways and places among us.
Share
Jordan Klepper
40:36
Tangential question. You talk about pigeons. What is it about pigeons? I know there's stories of
Tesla
befriending a pigeon and that being one of the mostShare
Neil deGrasse Tyson
40:46
Tesla
the car or Tesla
, the human being,Share
Jordan Klepper
40:48
The human being,
Nikola
, the car is, I don't know, I'm not, I'm not rich enough to know what the cars make friends with. But I know the human being, was buddy buddy with the pigeon from my,Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
41:00
He spent his later years in
New York City
in a hotel in midtown. And I heard rumors that you know through the open window because pigeons, pigeons in the city's go together. Right. And actually they're, I think they're technically called rock doves and they thrive in canyons with steep sides that have rocks. And that's precisely what modern cities are that have tall buildings. So pigeons are right at home with our civilization. And so if you feed him in a window sill, they'll come back. I don't have all the story there about Tesla's
later years, but I just know the physics that he contributed to in his earlier years.Share
Jordan Klepper
41:36
I love thinking of them as rock doves. That's yeah, I mean, flying rats I've heard before. It feels like a pejorative, they've never done anything to me. So I'm gonna stick with rock clubs. I got a question from David Peterson here. He wants to know
Neil
. I was hoping you might be able to offer your opinion and what you think we would see if we traveled at the speed of light. I've thought about this quite a bit. It was wondering mostly if there would be a redshift in what would be seen.Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
42:05
Yes. So since you can't actually travel the speed of light, let's let's do the next best thing and travel 99.99999%. The speed of light. Okay. And oh by the way, there's an author, a brilliant physicist and popularizer named
George Gamow
. Aww Gamow
the W pronounced as a V George Gamow
.Share
42:32
And he wrote mid-century last year, one of my favorite books ever was written by him. It's called
One, Two, Three... Infinity
still on my shelf. Read it in middle school and it's a brilliant exposition of science and math and really cool topics. So in there, he not in that book, but he wrote a series of books called Mr. Tompkins Mr. Tompkins
series. And this is Mr. Tompkins
.Share
43:03
I think that the root name of the series is
Mr. Tompkins
in Wonderland. But it's a Wonderland. No, that's Alice In Wonderland
. I'm getting my fictional worlds mixed up. But it's definitely Mr. Tompkins
and he goes into worlds where the constants of the laws of physics are different.Share
43:26
And one of the stories is the speed of light is 60 mph or like 100 months something where you're in a car and you can approach the speed of light just as a regular joe doing so and when you do that, he then describes what you see and how things get distorted. And so I I highly recommend the whole
Mr. Tompkins
series because it's um it's it brings exotic phenomenon of physics into your everyday life experience.Share
44:01
So if you go very fast near the speed of light, the light sources in front of you become basically blue shifted, They have higher energy than you would otherwise measure them to have. And if you look behind you, everything has lower energy. So there's this focusing in front of you, where everything in front of you becomes brighter and brighter and brighter.
Share
44:23
And the if you try, if you follow the light trajectories, the rate, it's called ray tracing, you follow what the light does. It actually narrows your field of view ahead of you. So, in
Star Wars
, they make the jump to hyperspace alright, and that's their word for hitting Light Speed and they did the visual on that first and it's not perfectly accurate. But you get a sense of this uh focusing of light energy that's sitting in front of you. That is what happens as you speed up and go close to the speed of lightShare
44:57
And in Star Trek of course they call it Warp Speed, that would be the speed of light for them. And then when they hit the Star Trek movie which came after Star Wars, they did that like effect as well. So now that's just a standard operating procedure. Visual effects people.
Share
Jordan Klepper
45:14
It's number four I think is what it is. Just give me that.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
45:18
So it's fun. And I recommend that series. Check it out and you'll learn more about other things that can be different when you change the constants of nature.
Share
Jordan Klepper
45:26
I got a question here from Tamaaro Michael, do you think we will ever be able to develop
Dark Matter
vision goggles that will work in outer space Similar to night vision goggles on earth. AndShare
Neil deGrasse Tyson
45:37
I love it. Yeah, I love it. So if we figure out the
Dark Matter
is a certain kind of particle and we figure out how to detect it. That's the thing. Something can be there. But what good is it if you can't then capture it and then do something with it. All right. I mean, think about it before we discovered radio waves, we were bombarded by radio waves by the sun. We had no way to even know that was happening because they pass right through us until we figured out how to make a radio wave detector.Share
46:08
Now we can aim it where we want detective and then process it and then we fully exploited that and turned it into music and tv and everything else. So, if once we figure out what
Dark Matter
is and how to detect it, I don't see why we can't flip up some Dark Matter
goggles and then look and look at the grandeur of Dark Matter
in the universe. That would be beautiful.Share
Jordan Klepper
46:30
Tamaaro has actually one more additional question here, that is fascinating. She wants to know why do we think we know anything about the outer galaxy? If we could only see back in time as we look further away, couldn't everything we see and or think we know be drastically different by now. If there is life man, he's a good questions are good. If there's life on other distant planets, would we ever really know unless we actually go there.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
46:58
Okay, so this is great. This I'm loving it. I'm tickled by it. We got these are my people were talking
Share
Jordan Klepper
47:05
These trash people are good people. Oh the trash bin the question trash bin folks. What a great crew they got.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
47:15
They got the smartest questions of them all. Okay, so it's a smart trash bin. That's all, it's a smart trash. But yeah, so so first it's a brilliant question and we ask that of ourselves in the professional scientific community every now and then, and here's what gives us the confidence because it is true.
Share
47:37
The only thing of the universe that we know is happening now is what's going on right under our noses here on earth when we look to the moon. Whatever's going on in the moon happened 1.5 seconds ago. Okay. We look at the sun that happened 8 minutes and 20 seconds ago.
Share
47:56
If some giant plucked the sun out of the solar system in this instant, we would still feel the sun, we could still see the sun, we'd still be orbiting the sun. And we would do so for another eight minutes and 20 seconds. And as you go farther out, these objects are coming to us from farther and farther in our past.
Share
48:16
So watch what we do. We look in our laboratories that's happening now and we measure the speed of light. The values of the quantum constants like
Planck's Constant
. We measure what elements do when they're heated when they make spectra. We get all of these physical properties and we have books with these properties in them.Share
48:38
Then we look out a little ways. Okay, how about to the outer solar system. How about the planet
Uranus
? How does this orbit its orbit is not following Newton's Laws
. Oh my gosh! Okay. We found the limit. There's a limit in space. Forget time. There's a limited space where the law doesn't apply. Oh wait a minute. Uranus
is being tugged on by Neptune Neptune
. Hadn't been discovered yet. So we discovered Neptune
. Oh my gosh! So now that we factor that in it is following Newton's Laws
.Share
49:11
Oh wait a minute. So there are two stars out there farther away than the planets and they're orbiting each other, bam! They're following
Newton's Laws
. Okay, this is cool. Let's look farther out in the galaxy. Let's look to other Galaxies
. Oh my gosh. The spectrum made by carbon and oxygen and Nitrogen
matches exactly the spectrum we have for it here on Earth
.Share
49:33
Oh my gosh! So as we inched our way out, we tested whether the phenomenon we're observing matches the phenomenon that we've established with properties that we've established here on earth in the here and the now, and in fact, they do. And it applies not only across space but through the depths of time, to the beginning of the cosmos. And that's why science works at all. If it just changed everywhere. Willy nilly then the science would only be good like here on
Earth
and nowhere else. But we got this one and it was not a given people. So science have faith that we're not. We have measurements that tell us this and that's why we proceed with confidence going forward.Share
Jordan Klepper
50:21
What I'm impressed the people who live on the sun, which we'll get into a next episode, we're going to hear that they live on the dark side of the sun, cooler there. It's going to be in eight minutes and 40 seconds. They're going to have some knowledge drop on them that's gonna blow, Huh? I hadn't thought about that. They don't even know what's coming, they don't know what's coming.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson
50:47
So
Jordan's
thank I think we ran out of time on this one, but thanks for coming in for this and we're going to continue to watch you on, Comedy Central,
and I get to say, every time you have a segment that I know that guy and he knows my name, that that's how I feel.Share
Jordan Klepper
51:00
I still have the
deGrasse
part. I have a hard time pronouncing uh, grassy, but you know. But other than that, you're totally correct. Yes. Well, I love being on here, Neil
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
51:13
All right, we got this always good to have you
Jordan
. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson
, your personal astrophysicist as always bidding you keep looking up.Share
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