Forces throughout the six year civil war hospitals in gaza have been forced to cancel operations in hospitals after cleaners went on strike over delayed salary payments the Health Ministry says planned surgeries cannot go ahead as operating theatres arent ready the cleaning staff are demanding overdue pay from the palestinian Health Ministry which is run by the National Consensus government those are the headlines coming up next its the stream of half an hour of. Protons neutrons and electrons quarks ever heard of a quark i have but i need a little help explaining it luckily we have someone today to help us do just that astrophysicist neil de grasse tyson is here to explain astrophysics to people in a hurry his new book stay with us. And there is. A look that in my d. N. A. Remember the. Industry. From the Big Bang Theory to Quantum Mechanics astrophysics comes up the great images of space and Time Concepts out of reach for some people the Popular American astrophysicist and podcast house neil de grasse tyson hopes to change that hes a new book in physics for people in hungary comes at a challenging time for science in the United States from Climate Change skeptics to the trump administrations proposed budget cuts to Scientific Research many scientists are having to not only explain the work but defend it this is inspired a new wave of activism to combat intelligent facts weve just science with us from new york to explain his work were pleased to welcome back to the scene neil de grasse tyson welcome back you know great to have you also joining you we have from the u. S. Very different is a very welcome we also have zachary coach is a High School Physics teacher an Award WinningHigh School Physics teacher at an asset here in washington d. C. Taking a break from Class Community rivas and her classmate to leah at wharton they are both science lovers at High School Students in washington d. C. Welcome everybody let me just show you a little passage here. From new book my i am a leak as i as well. Know each of physical laws kind in some cases give you confidence to come front lead people neal for example tell us the story. Is that the hot chocolate incident i think it might make and what created oh ok yeah yeah so what happens is when you know how the universe works how nature is put together its empowering and when other people try to exploit what might be your ignorance of that for their own gain for their own attitude or for their own ego you you you become equipped to to confront that its almost like an inoculation against charlatans who are out there this one particular case this person wasnt a charlatan they were just confident in spite of their ignorance and i was in a coffee shop happen to be in pasadena california and im not a big fan of coffee so much but i like a good hot chocolate and so i wanted a hot chocolate in it and of course i ordered it with whipped cream then thats how you know thats how you got to do that and so it came and i didnt see any whipped cream and i said you neglected to put whipped cream on this is it oh yes we did and i said well where is it he said oh it sank to the bottom at which point i said. Either the laws of physics that apply everywhere in the universe are somehow suspended in your coffee shop or you didnt put whipped cream on my hot chocolate. And he got indignant. And so to his credit he wanted to prove me wrong guy when i mention the bring out the whip cream right there it is going to do the explaining whips out it takes out a dollop of the cream pops it down on my hot chocolate bobs once or twice and then floats to the top and then so indeed that coffee house is within the laws of physics of the universe but that is i think is and theres an important lesson there and that is you if you doubt something then you do the experiment and and in science emergent truths arise not from any one persons experiment that they publish you can point to it and think its the truth but its not how we establish objective truths we stablish it by say ok you do the experiment you get this result i need somebody to double check that i need someone whos a competitor to see if theyre wrong and so everyone then devises a new kind of experiment in the end it may be getting the same result and if everybody starts getting the same result and its consistent youll always have some outliers of course but if the overwhelming majority are consistent with the same result you have a new emergent truth so in that coffee house the the emergent truth is that with cream is lighter than hot chocolate well to put that in the book fact that he wanted to prove you wrong in the first place means he clearly didnt know who you were thats not a problem for our audience though there is a video coming here from so hell who say he doesnt know who you are hes a big fan he is a student at George Washington university and heres his thoughts on your book have a listen. As a non science major i fell in love with the concept of your book i think its fantastic that youve compiled all of these terms and ideas that we here and i have read in life that we really dont know too much about but my question is who is the audience most distant from that you are trying to reach out to them is the audience its a question thats a great question a great question and i would say you know i kind of divide audiences into three groups and and so one group is they already know they like science and they have an appetite and they know they have an appetite for some of them its insatiable so we got them all right and theres a lot of a lot of ways that appetite can be satisfied then theres another group that doesnt know that they like science they havent been exposed in the right way and for me thats the most fun audience because i can i think theres an ember in there kind of glowing but not yet ignited and if i have the right sentence or the right turn of phrase in the right ideas with the right mind blowing concept it could just ignore it it can just turn that that that dull glowing embers into a raging fire and its all my gosh i never knew i want more now theres a third category which is much more difficult and these are the people who are sure they dont like science for whatever reason bad experience in school the teacher or whatever and they are. Yeah and so what i try to do in those cases. Yes thats what i try to do in those cases is offer ways that science has touched their lives in ways they would not have imagined and one way i did this a few you know i guess how long ago a year ago maybe there was a i was channel surfing and i came upon a Football Game that had just entered overtime and thats a good as a good time to enter a Football Game just that overtime and i had about fifteen minutes before my movie was going to begin so i just started watching it and after the requisite exchange of possession the next score would be for the win sudden death and i think of the Cincinnati Bengals they were in possession they came within fifty yards of the field goal and they kicked the field go and there it was and the ball tumbled up and it hit the left upright and careened in for the win and i looked at wait a minute so i quickly checked the orientation of the stadium the latitude where they were playing this game and i just ran a calculation then i tweeted and i said the Cincinnati Bengals won the game on a sudden death field goal likely was that wind was likely aided by a third of an inch deflection to the right because of earths rotation. And people so mindblowing oh my god i was wondering about the local the local sports talked about it and i realized in that moment of course you are bringing to the table a scaffold of pop culture i dont have to explain what football is or what or what what a field goal was a fifty yard line is you come prepared with that and now i collapse that scaffold with science now if you didnt like science but i know you like football now science is enhanced thing youre happy she ation of that sport real science and so in this way i kiss almost like a putting little candies in front. And guiding the way. Well you never knew absolutely so you know let me just bringing that. About it yeah let me let me just bring in a High School Physics teacher that you dropped out of physics when you were studying physics and now youre no Award Winning physics teacher what what is it about what neil does and what you do to bring people in to science and into physics get them hooked. Its its the exact same thing its no one your audience theres the handful of students that love science attack embrace just lay love every bit about it want to learn more those are very few students and and theyre great to have but the majority of my students is what i think neal would consider that middle audience where they dont yet know that they love science or even like science or understand what it is and the way to get to them is to make it relevant and going back to the hot chocolate couple hot chocolate with whipped cream can make science relevant putting it right in front of them and saying here it is science is just a way of looking at things and figuring stuff out and explaining this world and universe around us and here this hot cocoa right in front of us now in phoenix we probably would have hot cocoa maybe a nice glass of iced tea or something but its just making it relevant once you make it relevant to that middle audience it just explodes and then they gain that appetite add something that i had learned zack mentioned but i want to emphasize that i think the difference between communicating and lecturing is that when you give a lecture you know you face the board and you write your questions or whatever and people have to sort of come to you to understand what youre doing but if you go to communicate there is huge value to knowing as best you can what ever are the tangled mental roadways that might be coursing in the mind of the student and once you know that you can find receptors to information to insight to knowledge that the student might not even know the student might not even know they have and in the case of the whipped cream i happen to know in advance i left out a little piece of that story i know that people can be confused by the fact that you make whipped cream from something called heavy cream and its called heavy then it must be. He said here then milk right right and so. Heavy and so i know this in advance and so thats why i said let me just follow through with this exercise to get the person out of this missing named product heavy cream of course the heavy means its its thick but that doesnt mean its dense and in fact old timers remember when milk was delivered to your door it was not homogenized and the queen would rise to the top fact its an expression cream always rises to the top but when you skim off the cream whats left is skim milk so obviously then however heavy your cream is its lighter than skim milk less dense than skim milk so i came to this exchange with the with the server knowing all of this when i never had a chart near the ground and his experiment but that you never he never had a chops to actually challenge you because you think science hes used you think physics all of the time we have so many questions for you how to type from my let me get what you want to go so i want to push this to some of the students who are watching you and bring in your own students here on sat this is a video comment we got from a medical Laboratory Science and she runs a you tube channel called fly science this is brand and this is what she told us hi dr tyson im a medical Laboratory Scientist and ive noticed that my friends tend to believe the fostoria about health and science on line rather than believe me and i was wondering if you have any advice that can help the average height to gain the trust from people outside of science thank you so camilla totally a have you experience are sick of the matter of trust so i so i want to get your answer but i want to hear if the two students here in d. C. Because i know you guys are science whizzes have you experienced this and talk to the dr tyson about what thats like. I mean yeah ive definitely sometimes struggled with concepts just process things and just i think youre definitely right that you dont really know until you know until you test it out and i think ive definitely experienced that you know within the classroom or just like outside you know just going about my day i think its definitely a matter of experience to a degree. When it comes to understanding concepts i had a very similar experience early in my life when i first learned that light traveled and i didnt really didnt really know what that meant believe it so i kind of just learned about the experiments and learned about how it works such as topics in special relativity and astronomy class and things like that and sort of now i get it now i get that light travels but. It does exist that people dont understand topics so they dont want to believe it you know you mention astronomy class but you are a junior in high school and the most High Schoolers in the u. S. Do not take a strong to me all the classes the classes offered by g. W. So our school has a partnership and we can take classes there no i want to change it just a little bit just fishing froogle twitter. And you said it was a twenty first chimney nation with a science hall style government and ill show you some live Failing Health wealth and security expand on that. Most people know this and if you dont it can be explained and then you get it so i just thought it would baird repeating that innovations in science and technology will serve as the engines of tomorrows growth economies but not only that it will serve to keep us healthy and also aid in our security it could be Cyber Security or Tech Security in these days its no longer so much how many soldiers do you have its its how wise is your Technological Infrastructure to handle what might be an opposing force and so if you are in denial of what science is and how and why it works that those are the seeds of the un raveling of your informed democracy and as it begins to unravel all the things that science and technology have been providing for you begin to go away and so without hesitation i composed and posted that tweet just to remind people of the importance of what it is to support stem fields in your culture without it you might as well just move back to the cave because thats where youre headed if i wouldnt i would actually like to jump in here. As an educator again knowing the audience of students there are those few students that i know will do great things in science studies science as a major in career but its that majority of students who i just want to get scientifically literate and i want to emphasise that Scientific Literacy isnt just about knowing facts and figures and equations and solving problems its understanding how science plays a part as a process in our community in our livelihood in the world so actually a question for neil on that topic would be then how in specific to the scientific field how can we as educators and and students become more scientifically literate where are we where is the disconnect if any. Yeah i and first i agree with everything you said what is missing from the curriculum i think is because we think of it becoming educated as as you and zip your head and pour because youre a vessel and you pour knowledge in and then you zip it back in hand the diploma to you and they go off and say you are now educated but the educational process needs to contain things like courses an analysis how do you process information how do you to do what is true versus what is not true from data from knowledge from from and what does it mean to interpret ideas but this is an entire other exercise in what it is to become educated and at the centerpiece of that is a missing course that i would call what science is and how and why it works and thats not a particular science subject that is just an introduction to the to the enterprise that is science and without that you can become an educated adult it up standing in denial of an emergent scientific truth cherry picking lone measurements lone observations that you then make as your centerpiece of your legislation this is not how this should go. This is a no and so do i blame em or do i blame an educational system that doesnt even know what it is that should be included to have prevented that in the first place so we live on base but that meal and this is a comment we just got from ben connors is actually a former streamer he wants to know whats one thing that citizens who believe in science and logic should do to support the force of logic in our culture and government is it by and mr spock t. Shirt. By the way. Youll never hear me use the word logic as it relates to science or cosmic discovery logic has various peer and specific meanings in mathematics in some branches of philosophy and theres a whole field called logic yes we invoke logic all the time but often people will say they might stand in denial of something and because theyll say well thats not logical theres plenty in the universe that is not logical in fact the opening page of the book that i just wrote is the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you and so once you recognize that you beat you begin to embrace the fact that the universe is what our experiments show it to be and our experiments are conducted basically outside of your five biological senses because these they are wrought with the capacity to misinterpret something thats going on in front of you psychologists have known this for a century and we figured this out a scientist as you work through the data and you find that the one persons bias. Manifested itself in the results of what they thought was objective lee true now you have people double checking who have different biases or no biases so so. This whole thing about science literacy again and i agree. Its not so much about what you know but how is your brain wired for interpret and processing information and what you have that oh my gosh. There is no limit to where you can take a nation now i want to remind our International Audience to watch a nasty kind of climate where and right now in the United States im trying a little clip from barney sound as eugene palace when he was looking at politicians talking about Climate Change have a listen to this the last seventeen years there has been no significant recorded warming none and the problem is the satellites when theyre measuring the temperature its not happening im keeping an open mind about the science in all of this. You know you could but its a Climate Change is manmade well look i dont know that that is a resolved issue in science today i would hope my colleagues would devote more of their time trying to find Real Solutions for the American People instead of trying to please their liberal base with alarmist rhetoric about Climate Change the truth is climate always changing its always been changing and it will continue to change what percentage of it is due to human activity i dont know the answer to and find i dont know the answer to the exact amount of it thats due to human. And sound keeping talking about being science literate but what do you do when politicians when funders win the pulis who make this im not science literate doesnt science and development depend on them understanding only supreme what scientists are doing. I think so its the beginning of the end. If actually if we actually maybe direct that you are stupid thank you do you actually maybe direct that to our students on the panel what are their thoughts. Or concerns i guess about science and science its future in our country id love to hear. You have. To if you get had those politicians they say oh not so and theres such a thing as Climate Change in your reaction was what my reaction was that i dont want to know in a world where we dont accept what we dont take care of it respect it we need to understand it and whats happening with it so i dont want to grow up in a world thats being destroyed. Yeah i definitely agree with what he has said and i feel like. The more we talk about it the better everything will be like the more we talk about it. The more attention and maybe you know in the future well be able to do something you know because it feels like right now were not doing anything later to have to tell you this neil de grasse tyson has a spooky ability that he trained in self to have which is wrap up a thought in a soundbite because he hates people to have we have one minute left in this part of the show before we all go online so this idea about what do you do when the policymakers and the politicians they dont understand science what it is you educate their electorate so that they know what science is and how and why it works so that in the future they would it would be a possible for them to elect someone representing them who does not know. Interesting you can spend more time with neil de grasse tyson online this is what you have to do you can go online to stream to aljazeera dot com right now and then youll see exactly what seemed to come and also neil de grasse tyson and that me also remind you that astrophysics for people in a hurry is available now in the United States. Free plug it took to have an ally thanks very much for being part of this edition of the stream because this conversation going down online pretty well i will give you a tease for the post so this is caleb who says designs is truly understand how condescending they are to taxpayers and some of these conversations so well see what our guests think about that to be continued that stream that out is here dot com and to watch. We understand the differences and the similarities of cultures across the world. So no matter where you call home aljazeera will bring you the news and Current Affairs that matter to. Aljazeera. A serious debate up front at this time on aljazeera. Aljazeera is a very important fourth of information for many people around the world when all the cameras are gone im still here go into areas that nobody else is going talk to people that nobody else is talking to and bringing that story to the forefront. Twenty seventeen has been full of stories that have changed the Global Political landscape and aljazeera has been there to cover them or. Join us as we look back at some of our most memorable interviews of the year the special edition of talk to aljazeera at this time. Hello im Barbara Starr in london these are the top stories on aljazeera polls