Tar talk on television. Neil we think it is the First Time Ever of there being a science talk show on television. We didnt do it for that purpose, but it turned out that way. Charlie what i like in reading about it is that they came to you wanting to do a television show. And you said why dont you just bring in your cameras into my radio show . Neil i said, keep it simple, i dont want to do anymore. But there was budgeting to address. Part of it is that we filmed in the hall of the universe. Charlie cant get as better face cant get a better space than that. Charlie i got to announce that. [deep bravado voice] from the hall of the universe. Charlie you have come to the deep halls. [laughter] neil but it is still structured the same. We have a comedian. I have a guest. Charlie that would be you. [laughter] neil i have been to think the universe is completely hilarious, but we have someone who thinks that way professionally. There is a main guest who is quickly coming from pop culture. That is the real difference. Many of the guests are the same ones you would see on the late talk show circuits. Im asking them different questions. Im asking them about their nerd hood and their science teachers that they liked or hated. I found out how science and technology has impacted their livelihood. Charlie you are not looking for from pop culture who like science, but just people who simply neil it matters that you have heard of them. Then you take an interest in them from the beginning. Then you learn these extra things about them. Like i said, do they have a nerd underbelly . That might not reveal itself on anybody elses forum charlie how do you find a nerd underbelly . Neil if they want to break into a fight about which captain they prefer in star trek. [laughter] or did han solo shoot first . There are these nerd questions from from the nerdiverse. I think there are many people with hidden interests or maybe there is an ember that needs to be fanned and ignite. And then you will see and feel and hear all of the interest they express in the sciences. Charlie is it the fact that people are simply curious about things they do not know about and curious about the future . Neil every one of us is a person was deeply curious about our environment as children. Scientists tend to not ever lose that. They stay curious their whole lives. I think other people get it beaten out of them, one out of them, so i am in search of that soul of curiosity that continues to lurk in all adults. Charlie what happened . Do we tamp it down . Neil what happens if you are in a class and you say, what is that . Let me go to the window [stern teacher voice] sit down. Do your lesson. Charlie to me talk rather than engage. Neil exactly. Our School System tends to be reward people who obey and do what they are told. People who hand things in on time. Those are the the honors students. The best students, as we have come to define them. The student that is distracted by the butterfly that could be the next great naturalist but doesnt get rewarded in school because you should be studying for this curriculum that we have established for you. I think we should do it all, but dont suppress. Yes, you need a curriculum yes, you need exams. But if you see energy in a student being expressed by questioning their environment, that should be nurtured and not somehow declared as out of line. Charlie was that you as a kid . Neil yes. [laughter] no, i think teachers had energy in the classroom. It was a 6th grade teacher noticed that i had all this social energy bordering on disruptive. I have an interest the universe. All of my reports were on what the moon was like and the Space Program. Charlie even then. Neil starting at age nine, but it did not really gel until age around the sixth grade. The teacher noted for me that the local planetarium, hayden planetarium, had lessons on the universe. I started taking these classes after hours. That can get you tired. Going to school after another thing, it has to down. But now i had a whole new uris to devote my energies to. Charlie when did you know that what you wanted to be an astrophysicist . Neil when i was nine years old, the vista to the hayden planetarium. That put something in my veins. I still think it was the universe who called me and not i who called it. And of course, growing up in the bronx, there arent many stars visible anywhere in new york, especially in the bronx at the time. The sky in the planetarium was magical to me. I did not even think it was real. I thought it was a hoax. I have seen the sky from the bronx. And this is not it, therefore it must a hoax, not of course knowing that he was portraying the real sky. By age 11, i had the real answer. I had the answer to that annoying question adults asked children what do you want to be when you grow up . Charlie injuries or was . And your answer was . Neil astrophysicist. That ended conversations pretty quickly. But i was on a mission ever sent. Charlie you have said before when we go outside, we dont look up too many of us dont do that. Neil i did that even back when it was dangerous to do that. Prepooper scooper laws, you had to look down every few seconds. [laughter] i would risk the incident just for looking up. Any time especially at night , but also in the daytime. I will look up and want to know what the moon is doing. Charlie can we see it . Neil oh yeah. It is harder to see it. The sun is just so dominant that the moon does not call as much attention to itself as it does during the night. I check for when the plaintiffs are coming up. The planets are coming up. The most beautiful time of the night photographically speaking is the curtain of twilight colors. The moon becomes more apparent. The first stars you see are generally not stars, they are planets because they are brighter. When you make a wish on a star, star light, star bright, first star i see tonight, your wishes do not come true because you are wishing on a planet. [laughter] charlie you were off course from the beginning. Neil right now from the season diniz is quite striking venus is quite striking over the skies. When viewed from new york city it is kind of over new jersey. You would confuse it with planes coming in and out of newark airport. If your western horizon is near an airport, you have surely seen venus and thought it was an airplane. Charlie have you ever wanted to write a Science Fiction novel . Neil yes, however but i dont have the talent at writing. I wish that i did. Charlie would you have a story . Neil i got a story. [laughter] its ready to go. I could advise on such a good story. In terms of Character Development and emotions, i dont have the experience. Certainly not writing it. Charlie but you know a story that would be compelling. Neil i have one in mind right now. Im happy to tell it. Charlie ok, tell me. Neil world is at war, ok . Charlie the world that we know. Neil yes, and in some very disruptive way. Not with art weapons, but with regional battles everywhere, and people are choosing sides. And then an asteroid is discovered. Charlie tell us what an asteroid is. Neil a chunk of rock that varies in sizes. There are tens of thousands of them, probably hundreds of thousands of them. Most of them are located mars and jupiter. Some of them cross the orbit of the earth. Thousands of them. You do the math. You learn that earth and these asteroids will collide with one another guaranteed eventually. So what we want to do is keep track of all of the earth crossing objects and monitor them. Ideally, you want to put a low jack on something, it is 10 00 p. M. , do you know where your killer asteroid is . We learn there is an asteroid that could render us extinct. At that moment, everyone comes together and sees that asteroid as the common enemy. The technology that has been developed all around the world it is the future developing countries are now technology enabled. They have been developing their technology to fight wars. They had to assemble pieces of all of these technologies. Charlie they develop a common front. Neil not only a common front, but we need different pieces of technology for the deflection device to be put together. Then we all sing kumbaya. [laughter] charlie you could make this so real. Neil oh yeah, the heads of state come into play. The conflicts not only within countries, but looking what between countries. Run with that. Charlie go back to the sides. This is real. You could make this as a real possibility. Charlie theneil science would be in identifying it, the tools you would use to engage the flexion if something doesnt exist, you , could invent something that would work. You find out that i have a piece of this, but i have to go to my enemy who invented some other piece to make the whole thing work. It could be quite dramatic. Maybe we have a piece of asteroid that hits the earth. You have to flood a city or something otherwise hollywood doesnt like it. You have to destroy something. [laughter] i remember armageddon. They managed to hit the earth, and some its your. Some bids hit the. But it had good aim. They were aiming. It will most likely hit the ocean. Like i said, you can still get to destroy a city with a tsunami. Charlie a big one came to earth . Neil two years ago in russia. There was one the size of this studio traveling 40,000 Miles Per Hour that collided with earths atmosphere. They landed in the ural mountains. Charlie what wouldve happened if it hit the center of Manhattan Island . Neil that happened to explode about 20 miles up. 2025 miles up. That is high enough so that energy gets deposited into the atmosphere and dilutes before it reaches earths surface. But even so that was enough of a , shockwave to shatter every single window in the city. While people were looking out of the window you wonder what the light was that they had seen. Light travels faster than sound. They see this bright light from the explosion, looking out the window, then the stock comes stock wave comes. Lacerated hands and skin. 1600 people were injured. That was a shot against our about. A shot against our bow. The universe telling us, asking us [laughter] if that happened over manhattan, manhattan would have a different problem. Shattered Windows Windows would fall. They become these sharp sabres descending to the student, possibly hurting or killing pedestrian. Descending to the street. Charlie do you think the United States has done a lot with the lessons that happened there . Neil that asteroid we did not realize he was coming until it was too late. You may have certain evacuation times, but that one is not large enough to catch it. Charlie and if it is far enough away, we shoot it down . Neil no, that is the macho man. Shoot blow the sucker out of the sky i think there was a movie about that. The kinder, gentler ways to reflect it nothing has been built or funded to make this happen. One way to do it is to take your spaceship. If i can borrow your outliner. Bring your spaceship nearby. Just park it there. They will see one another, and wants to drift towards one another because of their mutual gravity. But you dont let that happen. You fire retro rockets and the act of doing so slowly tugs the asteroid out of harms way. You dont have to destroy it. Just make sure that on its route, it will not hit anyone. If you get good at this it is like shooting pool cues. Just knock them out of the way. Charlie that is one of the theories. Neil that is one way to do it. You could monitor your progress. If you just go and blow the thing out of the sky. In america, we are good at blowing stuff up and less good of knowing of where the pieces will go when we are done. It is very messy to try to explode the asteroid. What you dont know will it break into two pieces . Now you have to evacuate both coasts . It is a challenge. By the way, works on paper. Engineers have worked this out. But there is no plan in place, there is no International Collaboration in place to fund this. Suppose it is heading for the indian ocean. Do you tell all of the indian ocean countries, you have to defend themselves . We have the most advanced Space Program at the time, so should we pay for it . Tax everyone . The way the membership at the u. N. Is taxed . Do you handle that money to the most evil country that can deflected . The most able country that can deflect it . Lets say it is heading for the u. S. And we deflect it and the deflection fails and now it will hit europe. Now what do you do . All of these problems. Charlie we could put this in the movie, too. Neil yeah, exactly. [laughter] youre still thinking hollywood. Charlie what are the most important Unanswered Questions for you . Neil that is a great question and i have an unorthodox answer. It will sound like a copout, but it is not. I really feel this and think this. For me, the greatest Unanswered Questions are those questions we dont even yet know to ask. Because they only manifest upon reaching some next frontier of ignorance. I want to know what dark matter is. It is 85 of the gravity of the universe. We have no idea what is causing. We do not even have the right to call it dark matter. We are on it. We have top people working on it with top equipment. But at this moment, we do not know what it is. Charlie what is the most likely answer . Neil i dont i have a preferred answer. Particle physicists want to say it is a particle because they are particle physicists. [laughter] higgs boson is a very powerful particle. If you want to be a particle that is the one he wants to be. [laughter] there is dark energy. The universe is accelerating and expanding against the wish of gravity. We dont know what is causing that. We dont know how you went from organic molecules to animated life. That is a transition that is on the frontier. Charlie say that again . Neil how do you go from organic molecules to selfreplicating life based on those organic molecules . We are not there yet. Charlie we dont know that either. Neil no and we dont know what happened before the big bang. These are great questions. We have top people working on it. [laughter] i will put you on the speed dial if you want to know the latest. Charlie dark matter. Neil we dont know. We should call it dark gravity. Dark energy we dont know what it is. What was before the big bang . How did life get here . Charlie and the big bang . What was it . Neil the universe. Duh. [laughter] if you turn the clock back, it was smaller and hotter. For each day that you turn the clock back. Run the clock all the way back, you learned that universe was in the same place at the same time. And that extremely high temperatures. Trillion is the highest number anyone has any comfort with, but the temperature was much hotter than that. When you have these temperatures the thing is unstable and explodes. You have the birth of the universe. We dont know what was around before the. Before that. Neil i would order it that way. I am an astrophysicist i care , about the dna. I know we have life, and we havent. We have that. All of those are very real questions that exist with us today. The answers to those, you start dishing out nobel prizes. Charlie you can answer those. You are on this page you can enter those. Neil i want to know what questions we are not intellectually mature enough to ask yet. They will reveal themselves after we answer these questions. Charlie has a new question has revealed itself in the last 15 years . Neil yeah. Dark energy was discovered in 1998, 17 years ago, but still a big mystery. Charlie who discovered it . Neil two teams. They were studying a supernova. A particular species of supernova is like a standard candle. They are like a yardstick in measuring time and distance in the universe. They are very potent in your ability to measure the expansion rate of the universe and the size of the universe. Two teams, one in california, one on the east coast, where working on the same problem and arrived at the same answer and shared the nobel prize for that. Charlie this is a simple question. I assume it is the most frequently asked question are we alone . Neil the people i sit next to on an airplane, once they learned what i do, astrophysicist that is what they want to know. Charlie how do they get to the question . Neil i think some people still look up. You cannot help but wonder. All these stars. We know enough to know that there are stars just like the sun and planets orbiting the stars. If they are planets, how could you now wonder if there is life . And it there is like, is it intelligent life, are they smarter than us . If they are smarter than us should we be scared of them . Charlie what is your best guess . My best guess is the universe is teeming with life. Charlie why is that . Neil here is the argument you have the timeline of the earth. 4. 5 billion years. What this planet out there. Some planets were born yesterday. You dont know when in the timeline. Here is earth. Throw a dart at the timeline. Most of the time the dart hits earth, there is only single celled life. Charlie wow. Single celled life is like an amoeba . Charlie yeahneil yeah single self like earth for 300 billion years. That we have an explosion of life. The chemistry of the atmosphere changed. Oxygen is like rocket fuel for complex life. Now life has Carte Blanche to become complex. The system could support it. Now you have limbs and detectors like eyes and sensors. It is a stunning development. Then you have complex life. That is a smaller piece of the total timeline. Where will you find intelligent life . We only know this little bit that we define as intelligent. If earth is any measure of anything, there are planets we could land on. Who is to say we will find what we call intelligent . Maybe the planet has conditions that are specially right for complex life. If they did, they would have billions of years to develop intelligent life. If that is the case, it is quite clear to me that if they are observed us and landed here and looked, it would be clear to them that there is no sign of intelligent life on earth. [laughter] charlie they would land and look around. Neil nope. Not what were looking for. We wont mate with these people. [laughter] charlie they may be people, but they are not intelligent. [laughter] charlie what is on mars . Neil the curiosity rover is the size of an suv. Charlie is it still projecting . Neil yeah. Charlie what is up there . Water . Neil the martian surface has rampant evidence of Running Water at one time. When i mean by evidence, i mean really awesome evidence. There are riverbeds, dry, meandering river that. Riverbeds. When you look at things that floodwaters have done and longtime rivers have done and the grand canyon kinds of things, you see these features on mars. Charlie when do we see them . Neil anytime you take a photograph of a surface. Charlie we could have known that without going there . Neil no, the resolution is very hard to pick up. You want to get close. Then you could see ridges and valleys. Charlie that tells you water is there . Neil certainly liquid. Were pretty sure it was water. For a river to meander that means it was there for some time. You do not meander overnight. It is very slow think that rivers do. Not only that, there are dried lake heads salt deposits at the bottom. How do you get salt deposits . You get that from standing water that had minerals deposited in it. The water evaporates concentrating the mineral deposits. When there is no water left, you get a salt lake. You fly over utah, that is what Salt Lake City is sitting next to. Charlie should we go to mars . Is it feasible and doable . Neil people say, the radiation we have clever engineers. I have no doubt they will figure out the technology. It is just money. It is only ever money at all times. Charlie are you disappointed we dont do more in space . Neil the curiosity part of me disappointed. The politically astute side of me fully understands why that is the case. Charlie we had other priorities. A pr move . Neil we have always had priorities. So that is a false excuse. When he went to the moon, we had plenty of other priorities. The civil rights movement. The hot war in Southeast Asia the cold war with the soviet union. We did it because we were at war with the soviets. That was an act of war essentially without the weapons. And we were not at war, the motivation to go to the moon, we would tell ourselves, we went to the moon because we are americans. We are explorers. It is in our dna. Ok, that might be true, but the people who wrote the checks dont give a rats about it. When security is at risk, that is when money flows. We went there in that climate. Charlie but should we create that kind of urgency again for Something Like going to the moon . Neil you know when i joke about . Let me go visit china and whispered to the head of china psst, can you leak a memo that says you want to put military bases on mars . [laughter] dont tell anyone. The memo shows up in the pentagon. We would be on mars in 10 months. One month to design, build, and fund a space craft. Nine months to get there. That is how motivated i think we would be. Because that is how motivated we were in the 1960s. I dont want to go to mars for military reasons. I think there a strong, economic reason one to make. I think it is more subtle, and i think it takes longer than the proverbial elevator ride. It takes maybe twice as long as an elevator ride. I am thinking i voted for my , representation in congress. I want them to listen to me for longer than an elevator ride. It is simple. If youre going to space in a big way, visiting asteroids, mining asteroids, tourist jaunts on the moon, military activities, science on mars, all of this to accomplish this would require advancing space frontier. Patents would be granted. You have these discoveries writ large weekly if not daily in your newspapers. That infuses a culture of inquiry. A culture of exploration. A culture of innovation. When you have a culture of innovation, stuff gets solved. Your whole mindset is different. Charlie how we lost the culture of innovation . Neil yes. It has been gone since we stopped going to the moon. Charlie what about Silicon Valley . Neil a great culture of innovation. I was misrepresented in some headlines when i said i gave a talk and there was a question. Someone asked what i think about it. I said the world has problems , that are bigger than can be solved just waiting for your next app. We have problems in transportation housing, poverty, disease, energy climate. These are huge problems. And if we all sit down and play with our apps, it wont get solved. The headline was, tyson attacks entrepreneurs. Saying that they are linked statement. Like cavemen. Charlie what did you mean . Neil what i mean is to bask in the pleasures of your next app will hide from you the fact that there are larger problems that need to be solved. Charlie are you saying the next app should be something that could influence Climate Change and not something that could yet neil i dont know how an app could help fix the climate just yet. If there is one, i want to know about it. I dont know how an app to get rid of poverty. Charlie maybe develop an economic model . Neil sure. But an app doesnt build bridges or tunnels and transportation. Charlie which raises the question, of all these people like jess bezos and elon musk who want to build vehicles in space dont laugh at me. Neil no, i am with you. Somebody has got to do that. Whether or not they will succeed you want someone there. , they affect how other people think. In classes i have spoken to, one day i want to work for spacex. They are the smartest kids. I want to explore what he is doing. I want to invent a new car. I want to invent the next rocket. Thats the influence that i am telling you infuses into a culture when you go into space in a big way. Everything else comes in after that. Charlie is that part of your mission . Neil i dont have a mission. I would rather just stay home. Charlie when you get up in morning neil when i get up in the morning, i hope the phone doesnt ring. I want to play with my kids. Date with my wife. Then go to my lab. Charlie are you serious . Comeon. Neil what happens when i get a phone call because something twitched in the universe and they want a soundbite for the evening news . Or a documentarian has an idea that they want to explore storytelling, and i get a phone call. I serve those interests. Im a servant for the public appetite for the universe. That is what i do. I dont go doortodoor. I will never tell someone who to vote for. Thats not what i do. Im an educator. Charlie when they continue to do cosmos first, was carl sagan a mentor of yours . Neil that is an easy way out for people to mention the relationship. We met a few times. But my first time meeting was influential for me. Note that i was in high school he was a professor at cornell. Charlie a Television Star . Neil he had not done cosmos yet, but was a guest on Johnny Carsons tonight show and published his own books. He was famous. And here he is making time for me a 17yearold kid. He showing me his lab at cornell, trying to attract me to court and. Trying to attract bme to attend. Back, didnt even look signed , it. It was cool. It was a book that he wrote. [laughter] he didnt even look. Whatever he took, that was a brook that he wrote. Charlie that was the extent of . Neil i met him a few times after that. Evil sometimes thinks big things are big. More often than not, Little Things are big. I was a little part of his day but he was a big part of my life. It is the Little Things. Charlie roll tape. Here it is. Carl sagan there are two types of dangers. We have arranged society on science and technology where no one understands anything about it and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later it will blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy where people dont know anything about it . The second reason im worried about this is that science is more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. A way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions to , interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we are up for grabs for the next charlatan political religious figure and going along. It was a thing that jefferson made Great Strides on. He said it wasnt enough to enshrine some rights in the constitution in the bill of rights. The people have to be educated. They had to practice their skepticism in the education, otherwise we do not run the government. The government runs us. Neil was at the same table . Same classes same glasses . That is kind of spooky. He is alive now as he was then. Charlie that was when he was sick. That was a famous interview i did when he talked about dying. Neil yes. Charlie 1996. Neil he died that year. He said it better than any of us connecting science literacy with what it is to have an informed democracy. If you want to take control of your fate, you cannot do it if you are misinformed or underinformed about what matters. In this, the 24th century 21st century, it is going to matter. Charlie im really concerned about this and the things you talked about. You got another award for your service to science in terms of raising the necessity of paying attention to science and popularizing science. Charlie neil the Public Welfare metal. Welfare medal. Thanks for mentioning that. Charlie i worry that are we losing not our competitive edge, but the race to develop the brightest minds in sufficient quantities, that we serve science as well as other people may come to serve science . Neil a lot of focus tends to be on who the brightest students and can we get them interested in science and invent something to save the world . I think there are world always be the smartest kids in the class. There will always be that. Im not word about them. Im worried about the rest of about the rest of everyone else who is given the freedom to say to themselves and others i was never good at math hahaha or i was never into math, or science. I never read because im not good at nouns and verbs, you would laugh me out of the room. These are fundamental parts of civilization. The arts and sciences have defined a civilization ever since there has been civilization. Two separate yourself from one of the other and claim to be informed, as the good dr. Sagan said, that is a combustible mixture, especially if that kind of ignorance is wielded by by people in power. For me, it is sufficient to say spread and appreciation of science to everyone. You dont have to be scientists, but understand what it is. Charlie if they understand it, they are more likely to support it. Neil not support it like it is a thing. Charlie you are supporting the idea that science is important and you are creating a culture that respects it and therefore wants to enhance it. Neil couldnt have said it better myself. If people understand what science is and how it works and why it works, you could vote intelligently on issues that involve scientific principles and issues. Charlie things like Climate Change. Neil you could know who is not telling the truth and who is in analyze it. Charlie do we had too many scientific deniers . To be given to much prominence to those who wants to look the other way . Neil yes, there are some of those. There i implicate some elements of journalism . There is a journalistic ethos. Not to tell you what your but as i understand it the journalist obligation is to give equal column space to all sides. Or have to one of each side. Or half to one of each site. If someone says the earth is round and some and says the earth is flat, at some point youll make a judgment. The earth is flat people are flatout wrong. I will not be giving them the attention, we are wasting time and were not doing service in my role of informing the public. And so, i think journalists are smart people and highly educated and curious. They have curiosity that kids have that they still have installed. Have as adults. That is a great thing to have. At some point, invest your brain energy to recognize when something is fringed. Report it that way. When you do that, people are properly informed about what is and is not true. What is in emerging truth . What is a truth that is in doubt . What is something has been refuted . Responsible on that frontier. It will help my job. Charlie im sorry to tell you this but you are a journalist. Neil you dont have to apologize. Neil i host a talk show. I cannot say im not a journalist. Charlie not only that, but you are in pursuit of questions. Neil yes. Charlie which is what journalism is about. I thought you might have a disparity in the sense of journalism. I thought you might be offended with your disparaging view of journalists. Charlie neil no, i think we need all the journalists i think we can get. I attended the white house Correspondents Dinner and it was teeming with journalists. That is fun. It is a zoo for sure. I agree i am a journalist to ask questions. The only question we do not ask is the who . We are good at the what when where, why, and how . But who moved to blackhole m oved the black hole . There is not an answer to that who. Charlie there is no idea what a black hole is for some people. Neil it is a region of space where matter has collapsed to such density that the gravity if matter collapses and gets denser, the surface gravity gets higher. If you are standing there, you will pay more and more. You will weight more and more. It would be harder to escape. At some point, this will condense so significantly, that for you to escape you would have , to travel faster than the speed of light. That means light cannot escape. If light cannot escape, you are not getting out of this place. It is not only dark, but it is a hole. It is a hole in every direction that you . Threedimensional. In my field, it is a one syllable description. Charlie how long have we known about it . Neil einstein could have predicted with his own equations, but he didnt interestingly enough. Charlie he was interested in them . Neil no. I asked Stephen Hawking over dinner, why didnt isaac you make certain discoveries with his own mathematics that he invented . His response was, einstein did not come up with black holes. You cant think of everything. [laughter] charlie what else did you talk about at dinner . Neil the conversation was slow, of course. Charlie i have talked to him as well. And you have to submit questions. Neil that is if you are scheduling an interview. This was just banter. Im going to tell you how it was. The conversation is going. You might even send something his way, but then you keep your own conversation with others. Later on, that answer comes out. You rejoin the conversation. Thats how that unfolds. Charlie what dazzles you about him . The triumph of his life . Or the quality of his mind . Neil i would say all of the above. I am delighted that the public on a glimpse in the theory of everything. I got to see a prescreening on that. It was clear to me if there was going to be an Academy Award for best actor, it would go to his name Charlie Eddie redmayne. Neil it was clear to me. He became Stephen Hawking. He became Stephen Hawking. After that the actor had point, transcended acting. Theres Something Else going on. I delighted that the public got am a glimpse of this. I think what it says is, and i cannot speak for disabled people because i have never been disabled in any way that matters in this world, but when you see someone with that level of disability meaningfully contributing to the world and be held up as one of the greatest minds there ever was, if i hope, i would mine that for hope of what i could do and be if i were disabled at least physically disabled the mind is , still there. As an academic, i value what you can do with your mind. If anything, it gives you hope for what our species is capable of. Charlie explain to me time travel. Neil it has been suggested that there might be some law of physics we have yet to discover that would prevent you from going backwards in time. Because think about it. Maybe there is a law of physics we have yet to discover. It will declare, without hesitation, thou shalt not go back in time. Because, if you do and you prevent your parents from meeting one another unlike the terminator series where they kill people so that they do not mate, all you have to do is prevent them from meeting or having sex thats really all you have to do. Whoever started the revolution is not there. Have the people have sex 10 minutes later than they otherwise would have, you give birth to a different person. If you go back and prevent your parents from meeting one another, you would have never been born to have lived to go back in time to prevent your parents from meeting one another. You have this paradox. It is a causality paradox. That being said, we have no shortage of interesting ways to go forward in time. We can speed you up. In a spaceship, time goes fast. The electronics in your digital watch. But also your physiology everything about you would tick more slowly. You would age more slowly than your twin on earth. You come back, you will be younger than 20. Andthan your twin. You have effectively on into the future in gravitational fields i think portrayed this in the film interstellar. Every strong gravitational fields also have an effect on what rate your time ticks. You could measure this. The gps satellites that are farther away from earth than we are, the time ticks differently. Their time ticks gps satellites tick faster than owner. But it sends you the correct time. So how do we do that . We knew in advance about general relativity. Gps satellites are precorrected for this time change by the formulation of einstein general theory of relativity now it could send the correct time down to a dispute other times, the times would separate from one another and you could not use gps satellite to tell you anything while we are on the earth surface. This is real it is not something that we cherry picked. Charlie tell me finally about this thing about dust. You told me on the 60 minutes profile about dust. Neil by way, not everyone goes into 60 minutes profiles better than when they went in. [laughter] charlie the pen on whose hand depends on whose hand youre in. Neil but thanks for your interest. Charlie it was dust to dust. The composition of the earth in dust within the human body. Neil ok, you want to get a piece of that. Charlie if i want to leave america, those are the basic fundamental things the essence of science and your work and others. Neil i think the single greatest gift that astrophysicists has brought civilization is the discovery back in 1957 by four authors. No movies are made of them. It is four and not just one. We romanticize the lone researcher burning the midnight oil. This is four scientists working for a decade to get this result. They realized that the elements on the periodic table that we remember from chemistry class owe their origin to thermonuclear fusion in the cores of stars. They come together to make heavy elements. If they only stayed in stars, it would not be interesting, but these particular stars havent you stars happened to explode and scatter across the galaxy. All of these elements scatter into gas clouds. They then collapsed and form next generation star systems one of which was ours. The very ingredient that provides life are traceable to stars. They gave their lives billions of years before we were. Were not only figuratively but quite literally stardust. Charlie i like. Finally, the notion of you, you dont have a mission. Neil not really. Im a servant. That is what i think of myself. Charlie but do you have things you want to accomplish . Neil neil i would say one of my favorite quotes i dont remember if i told you one of my favorite quotes that was uttered by an educator who said, be ashamed to die until you have scored some of victory for humanity. I want that on epitaph. I want to be buried, and i want that on my tombstone. Charlie be a shame to die until you have scored some victory with humanity. Neil it can be anything. Raising kids that are responsible. That is a very broadly defined victory. Im not the first to say this. At least leave the world a little better off for you having lived in it. Why not . It is like clean up your mess. , [laughter] after you have cleaned up the room you lived in, leave a flower behind. Something where people could come in and say, this is a slightly better place. Then we could all celebrate each of our existence in this world and not lament it or regret it. Theres so much in the world that regresses civilization. Sat it is sad. I wonder how far we would be if not for such forces that operate in this world . Charlie thank you for coming. Neil thanks for having me. Charlie Neil Degrasse tyson for the hour. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. This is trending business. This is what we are looking at flying high in shanghai. Soaring by the daily limit on its trading debut, the company has been profitable in each of its last four years. Heading for its first decline in nine days, ending its longest winning run since june. Reserving opinion. Chinese bid for the yuan is backed by the u. S. Timing the currency is the longer overvalued. Washington may not agree. If you want more on trending news i am on twitter. We will get over there a little bit later but yvonne is here with what else is going on. Yvonne look at the map, it doesnt look very good for asia. The volume has been down about 34 i should say 21 below the 30 day average. Trading down about three quarters of a percent. This is following the losses we saw in the u. S. Overnight after we saw better than expected u. S