Transcripts For CSPAN2 In Depth With Neil DeGrasse Tyson 20170513

Degrasse tyson, director of Hayden Planetarium in new york city and the author of many books including welcome to the universe, death by black hole, and his latest, astrophysics for people in a hurry. Host dr. Neil Degrasse Tyson, in your new book, astrophysics for people in a hurry, you open it by saying that the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. What does that mean . Guest get over it. [laughter] i think up until, well, really up til the year 1600 when we didnt have any particular tools to investigate be the natural world, our five senses were the primary means by which we obtained all information about the universe. And not even knowing that our five senses had limits. If its everything you know, you think its everything the universe is trying to give you but, in fact, its not. And so around 1600 with the invention of the microscope in one direction and then the telescope in the other direction, each invented within a decade of one another, then all of a sudden pieces of the universe come available to us that transcend our senses. The fact that lieu went hoping would look inside a drop of pond water and see microorganisms just doing the backstroke, right . Your eye brain sensory system could not have detected it were it not for the microscope. And you can see does that make sense that you have entire living creatures inside of a drop of water . Well, today we know that because we learn it from childhood. But in the day, it made no sense at all. In fact, he had communication with the royal academy, Royal Society in london which is what you would normally do when they make a discovery, and they thought he was drinking too much gin. [laughter] its like, write another letter when you recovered from this stupor, from this drunken stupor, and then we can continue our scientific communication. So they were in denial of it until they sent someone up, which is a natural thing among scientists. One eyewitness testimony about one result is not a scientific discovery. You need verification of it to confirm that its real. And especially in modern times, the 20th century and onward. We have particle shedderrers accelerators. We have rules that fall completely not only outside your senses, but our expectations for how life or the how anything should work. Particles popping in and out of existence, matter turning into energy and back and forth so then we discover, like, black holes and the expanded universe. How could everything there is be expanding at all, right . So if you keep invoking that doesnt make sense, youre going to miss out on a lot of what we have learned, discovered to be true about this universe. Host whats significant about the year 1600 . Anything . Guest well, optics had taken, there was a lot of the dutch were very good at optics and lendses and this sort of thing lenses and this sort of thing. We knew about what lens would do, you could make a magnifying glass out of it. But when you start combining them, you get other properties of your optical system enabling you to get a microscope. And once you did that, that just opened the floodgate toss what else you would do when you combined lendses. And galileo made a good version of it back in the 1600s. Host was galileo treated as kind of a devil, in a sense . Guest theres a little bit of cleansing. Depending on how long is the writeup on the account of his time, life and times, thatll determine how much back, you know, Background Information youll get. So the simple story is he makes these discoveries, they conflict with the teachings of the catholic church. They put him on trial, they find him guilty of saying the earth goes around the sun and not vice versa as well as other discoveries hes made with his devils instrument are. And then they put him under house arrest. What they dont tell you or they would tell you if you read a longer biography be about him is that he actually made fun of the pope. Public fun of the pope. He wrote a book in italian. Not in latin, which is the academic language of the day, in italian. Which means the local people can read it. And in it he invents a conversation between a simpleton and someone who was wise of the ways of the universe. And all [laughter] if you track the statements of the simpleton, theyre all statements that have come by official decree from the catholic church. So hes, hes really a pompous ahole, basically. [laughter] can i say that . Host yeah, were on cable. [laughter] guest this is cspan. So socially he did not express the respect he really should have for people who had much more power over him. He could have published in latin, had it spread around the world among academic circles, and im betting he probably would not have gone to trial. Thats my read of this. And in the period it is the renaissance, after all. And, you know, new thought and fresh thought was not some weird thing. So, yeah, he was just he had it coming because he, he didnt know how to appease authority. [laughter] host back to your book, astrophysics for people in a hurry 14 billion years ago the universe started, you say. How do we know . Be how do we know that . Guest so the way knowledge is acquired scientifically is you have an idea and you propose an experiment to test the idea. And then you, if its an expensive experiment be, you probably dont have the money to do it in your garage. So now you propose to get funding from sources, typically if its pure be research itll be a government source, the National Science foundation, nasa has a research arm. If youre in the other fields like biology, human physiology, you might be getting a grant from the National Institutes of health. And so you have this idea, you build an experiment and you test it. And if the results of that experiment match your expectations, then the foundation of your idea gains some currency in the conversations you might have be at the scientific coffee lounges, at workshops or in the journals. Then youre a competitor of mine and you say, you know, i never liked you. [laughter] i, i have a different finish you know, scientists are human. Were people too, right . And i think youre wrong. And heres the experiment im going to build to show that youre wrong. So then you build an experiment, and then you get a result that kind of matches my result. Thats kind of, thats interesting. Because you had no intent of matching me. You dont even like me. But now the results match. And someone else does it. Youll always have some outliers just because of the experimental uncertainties that exist in all experiments. Therell always be some outliers. But when theres a general lean towards a truth, an emergent truth, you look back and say, oh, okay. All of these experiments point to approximately the same result. And you have these few outliers here. So now we come to recognize that this is the new truth. The new objectively established truth. And thats what science does. It is the most effective way we have ever devised as a species, as a culture in decoding what is and what is not true about the natural world. Nothing rivals it at all. And so once weve done this, then i say here is how the world works. Then we go on to the next problem. And this is a celebrated thing. I mean, its what got us relativity in quantum physics and gravity, and it powered the entire industrial revolution. You couldnt have these machines what is a machine . Its something that converts energy that lives as one form into energy thats useful to us in another form. So what is a car . It takes Chemical Energy and gas and turns it into energy of motion, kinetic energy, of your car. And that requires machines to do that. All this came out of the industrial revolution. Before the industrial revolution, there were no, there were no machines such as this. Theres something they had what we call simple machines. A lever and a pulley. Those dont require high technology. Technically in the world of physics those are called machines, okay . A lever, a pulley, an inclined plane. What they do is they make your job a little easier. So its simple. So watch how this works. So i have this ledge and i have a very heavy thing, and i want to lift it up to that ledge. Im not Strong Enough to do that. But if i make a ramp, then i can just lift it up little bits at a time. Now, the distance can over which i have to lift it is longer, but it takes this height and spreads that out over time so that it makes it easier for me to complete the task. The same amount of total energy is exerted, but the rate at which i expend that energy is different, and thats what, thats what simple machines have always done for us. And modern machines basically empower all civilization. Host first ten seconds of the universe, what happened . Guest well, thats some busy moments oh, sorry. I didnt want really focus in on your i didnt really focus in on your question how do we know 14 billion years. So heres what we do. We look up in the universe, and we say, okay. We see galaxies. Hub el discovered these fuzzy things in the night sky are entire galaxies. Then in 1929 he discovers these fuzzy things that we now identify as whole Goldman Sachs sachs gal ax is and this is the first evidence that the universe is expanding. People didnt just think this up. No. It was an observation. And then we looked to see if it fit einsteins general theory of of relativity, and it did. Its the modern understanding of gravity. And if anythings happening in the universe, its going to involve gravity. So you check to see if it works with his equations. It does. And so that means we didnt have to reinvent the theory of the universe. Because it worked. And so then we say, all right, if the universe is getting bigger, is if the universe biggr than it was yesterday, that must mean its bigger than it was the day before and then the day before and then the day before. So what happens if we just turn the clock back . When you do this, because you see how fast were expanding, just reverse that, you can do it on a pen and paper on the back of an envelope. Just calculate what happens if you reverse this rate of expansion. And the whole known universe is in the same place at the same time 14 billion years ago. That is the origin of the idea of the big bang. Host first ten seconds. Guest first ten seconds. So everything we know about matter that is compressed and under pressure be tells us that the temperature will rise. The simplest example be of this is if you ride a bicycle and your tire gets a little flat, so you pump a hand pump. You pump air into the bicycle tire. And then you feel the valve when youre done. Its hot. You are come pressing air compressing air through it, okay . So thats just as an example. Its related. Its not exactly the same thing, but its related. Thermodynamic, the science of the movement of energy from one medium to another is called thermodynamics. So as the universe gets smaller and smaller, it actually would have been hotter in the past than it is in the presence. And so now you keep, because the universe now actually has a temperature, you can measure it. It got measured in the 1960s. Very cool. You look at every direction, and you see the heat signature left over after the 14 billion years. And so now you go back in time and you say, okay, the universe was hotter and hotter and hotter. How much hotter would it have been 14 billion years ago when the universe was this big . And you get a stew pep dousely stupendously High Temperature. And now you ask what is the behavior of matter and energy under those temperatures. Is so now you turn to the particle accelerators that slam particles together under high pressure, high energy, High Temperature i mean, high so you start approximating the early is that what an atom does . Be is that what a nuke louse does . Nucleus does . Now you apply it to whats going on in the first few moments of the universe when it was hot, small and dense. And that gives you a pathway in, a pathway of insights into what was going on there. You know what we find . That you have an area when all particles are formed, the basic foundational particles that Everything Else is comprised of. We have light in the form of pro tons. We have quarks. Weve all heard of protons and neutrons. Theyre made of what we call quarks. And they all have antimatter counterparts. Proton has a positive terror positron, something that science 2006 people rapidly Science Fiction people rapidly picked up on. Just to be clear, we invented antimatter and discovered it. That was not a Science Fiction invention. It happened in the real universe first. So now you put, you bring your insights to those first few moments of the universe and say what must have happened then given what we know goes on in our particle accelerators. And it will tell you at the rate we were expanding, at those temperatures you would be making hydrogen as the predominant atom in the universe. The simplest atom has only one proton in the nucleus. You make this much hydrogen, you make this much hemoyum. D helium. Youll make trace amount of lithium, the third element on the periodic table of elements, remember, from chemistry class. And nothing else. We will be a universe born with hydrogen and helium and barely any lithium. Wait a minute. And you say, if thats so, it would mean that the very oldest stars we can find, ones born closest to the big bang that would still be alive today would be comprised of only hydrogen and helium. That is exactly what we measure. The very oldest stars have the least amount of heavier elements which we know, we know this from the mid 20th century from calculations enabled by the Nuclear Research from the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb, because were calculating what atoms do. We know that after that time stars are born, Pure Hydrogen and helium, they manufacture heavy elements in their core, then some of them explode scattering this enrichment to gas clouds that have yet to form clouds. Now, they form a next generation of stars that have a little bit of extra enrichment. Theyll make even more enrichment, explode and then carry that extra enrichment to the next generation. And this continues through. We, our solar system, was born four and a half billion years ago. So thats more than nine billion years after the start of the universe. So weve had the benefit of multiple generations of enrichment. So now when our protocloud collapsed to make the sun, it had all these other ingredients in it that it used to make planets. Because rocks are not made of hydrogen, theyre not made of helium. Theyre made of silicon and oxygen and aluminum and arsenic. All these other iron. Cobalt, nickel. All of that manufactured later is in abundance in very late generation stars that were formed. So the lesson here is however weird it is to assert that 14 billion years ago the universe was this big, literally this big, it exploded from there. You say, well, you werent there, how do you know . Okay, youre right, i wasnt there. But if everything we know happens to matter happened then, then it accurately predicts things we do measure. Thats what gives us the confidence to sit here and describe the first ten seconds of the universe like we were there. Host and it all started with a big bang. [laughter] guest is there a song in there . [laughter] host do we know what that big bang was . Guest do we know what it was . Host yeah. Guest what we can tell you is that the big bang account of the beginning of the universe is a description of what matter and energy was doing from the earliest moments onwards. Now, theres a point before which its a little mysterious to us. Its called the plank time named after max plank. One of the many fathers of quantum physics. Theres a point earlier than which is kind of the limits of our ability to understand what nature is doing. So we pick it up right after that plank time. I forgot the exact the plank time is like one trillionth of a second after the big bang. No, one billion, trillion, trillionth, is that right . 15, 24 yeah, thats about right. [laughter] one million trillion trillionth of a second after whatever was the beginning, then our physics that we now measure in our lob lob in our labs apply. And then we can talk about whats going on. Host in your book, welcome to the universe, from 2016 you write that in five billion years the earth will be a charred ember. Guest oh, yeah. You know, its weird, every now and then i tweak that. Every couple of years i tweak that. And apparently, it blows peoples minds. And i dont know if thats a good thing or a bad thing, but so the between varies anytime tweet varies anytime be i do, but in five billion years the sun will expand so large that it will ening gulf the entire engulf the entire orbit of our planet. As we itll engulf the entire, itll engulf earth as earth, and earth will be a charred ember as it descends into this star while it vaporizes. Have a nice day. Something like that. [laughter] and people, so its just a reality. Its remarkable that we can know our fate in that way over that much time. But how do we know it . Will we be there . Probably not. Is so how do we know . Well, there are other stars. Of theres no shortage of stars in the universe. We can see stars being born, we see stars living out their lives, we see stars in the act of dying. And you can staple these bits of information together and create a coherent story. In other words, we dont live long enough to see a star born, live out its life and die. It takes millions and sometimes billions x in some cases, trillions of years. And were around for a few decades. So how is it that we know this . Because there are so many stars that in any snap shot of the universe we see stars being born, stars in middle age, stars dying. And we look to see, oh, these are the thats the same arc of a star, theyre just different stars. Were catching them at different times. It wouldnt be any different from if you were an alien and took a snapshot of civilization, you would see some humans in a box underground. Youd say, well, what are they doing there . And youd see other humans who are Little Things crawling on the carpet. Youll see other humans who are, who dont have any hair that are lit and others that dont have any hair who are older, right . Be its just a snapshot because you dont live long enough to see the whole thing. If youre an alien and you live just 90 seconds, hurt . So youll say how do i make sense out of this . Are people born in a box be in the ground box in the ground and theyre all shrivelly and they come out of the box and then they get littler and littler and littler and then disappear inside of another perp, or is it the opposite another person, or is it the op to sit . So you keep studying all these photos that you have, and then you can piece together a coherent story of whats going on. And for the stars in the universe, this took decades. We didnt just look at one snapshot9 and say, oh, thats its born there and dies there. No, this took effort. This was major telescopes being brought to bear. A lot of human capital, intellectual capital invested in trying to understand what stars are and how and why they work. A lot of this traces back to the Harvard College observatory, cambridge, massachusetts, where theres a room full of then computers. These are human calculators, computers, and theyre all women. Be because that was judged to be menial work. And the men stayed in their offices, you know, doing highlevel thinking. And in this room of women, was the foundation of our understanding of stellar evolution. And dava social, you should get her, just wrote a book on this called the glass universe. Host weve covered it. Guest yeah. Just an homage to the glass ceiling, the glass universe. Little did the high and mighty men know that when you calculate data that was collected from all the worlds telescopes on stars, therein was the source of the, the seeds of how and why stars are born, live out their lives and die. Host and this is booktv on cspan2. This is our monthly in depth program, and this month we have author and astrophysicist Neil Degrasse tyson as our guest. As you know if you watch this program, we spend three hours with one author talking about his or her body of work, and this month its dr. Tyson. Beginning in 1989, dr. Tyson has written several books. Merlins tour of the universe was his first. Universe down to earth came out in 1994. Just visiting this planet, 1998. The sky is not the limit. That was his fourth book, 2000. One universe also came out in 2000, and then cosmic horizons came out in 2001. Origins came out in 2004. Death by black hole, 2007. The pluto files, 2009. Space chronicles, three years later. And then last year star talk came out as well as welcome to the universe. And his most recent book, astrophysics for people in a hurry. If youd like to participate in our program this afternoon, heres how you can do so. Well put the phone numbers up. 202 is the area code. 7488200 for those of you in the east and central time zones. 7488201 if you live in the mountain and pacific time zones. Go ahead and start dialing in. Now, if you cant get through on the phone lines, still want to ask a question or participate in our program, try us on social media. booktv is our twitter handle. You can also make a comment on our facebook page. Youll see dr. Tysons picture there, just make a comment right underneath. Facebook. Com booktv. And finally, email, booktv cspan. Org. And well begin taking those in just a few minutes. Dr. Tyson, back to your most recent book, astrophysics for people in a hurry. 40 billion earthlike planets in the milky way alone. Ive got two questions. What is the milky way and how big a space are we talking about . 40 billion earthlike planets. Guest yeah. So it was hard earned to learn what the milky way was. Consider that term that we use dates from ancient rome. Rome, when they built streets, they didnt call them streets, they called them ways. And you look up in the night sky and see this milky band of light, and theyd just call it the milky way, the milky street literally. And in china where milk is a less popular beverage into adulthood, they dont call it the milky way, they call it the silver river. And so this is a well known feature in the night sky. Imagine to just be some cloud of light crossing from one horizon to the next. And it would not be until galileo and other large telescopes brought to bear on this question did we learn that when you put a telescope on the milky band of light, it reveals itself into stars. Countless stars. Without a telescope, theyre so far away the light sort of puddles together. So we say, wow, all right. But is this all there is, just stars in front of our face and then the stars that are far away that make this band . It would be, it would take until 1920 before we resolved the debate about whether the spiral, does city things in the night fuzzy things in the night sky were actual other galaxies separate to from our milky way. That got resolved especially with hubbels observation that these are other entire galaxies beyond the milky way. So we know theres nearly 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, and each galaxy has hundreds of billions of stars on average. And so theres a range, big galaxies, little galaxies. But we count them up, 100 billion stars per galaxy, 100 billion galaxies x. There you have the observable universe. And these are scattered throughout the landscape like cities dotting a countryside when viewed from space. The local areas of light. Host youve mentioned him a couple times, edwin hubpersian l. Hubbel. Who was he . Guest well, its the telescope, of course, whom it was named after. He was a bit of a pompous, kind of snooty astrophysicist back in the be early part of the 20th century. He did his best work in the 1920s. He had access to the biggest telescope. So that always leaves open the question would anybody with access to the worlds biggest telescope be making the worlds greatest discoveries, or does it also require some kind of insight to empower you to even know what question to ask. So for him, it was probably a combination of both. But stories about him, he would wear these tweed suits and smoked a pipe and donned a partly british accent when hes from, like, from backwoods america. So, but anyhow, good thing about science, your personality is completely irrelevant to the quality of the work that comes out of your lab. And so you can praise someones work without that having to be being praiseworthy of the person themselves. You can just separate the two. So he worked for carnegie observatories in california and, yeah, i think back then if they, be they figured out that if they figured out that they should have, they would have given him a nobel prize. But astronomer types didnt start getting a nobel prize until the 1960s. So we get them maybe once a said or so for something we do. Host you used this example in astrophysics for people in a hurry. You talk about the earth as an apple and then the skin of the apple is basically where we have traveled, in a sense. Im probably getting it a little wrong with. Guest oh, so i can tighten that up. So people, we think to ourselves the theory of Walking Around on the surface of the planet and were at the bottom of this education of atmosphere, okay . Whereas the thickness, the functional thickness of our atmosphere is to the size of the earth what the skin of an a apple is to an apple. What the shellac is to a schoolroom globe thats on that schoolroom globe. So this atmospheres not some infinite extent of air molecules. It is a fragile, thin skin on this thing we call earth. And i can quantify this for you. The atmosphere has particles associated with it that go up thousands of miles. But the part that i said its functional thickness because theres not an edge. Not atmosphere on this side, not on no, no, no. It fades. But you can say at what distance so in the daytime, how come you cant see stars . You can ask that question. Well, because the sun is out to. No, thats not why you cant see stars. You cant see stars because we have an atmosphere, and the atmosphere scatters sunlight rendering itself aglow. So in the daytime our atmosphere glows sky but. And that prevents you from seeing the stars in the daytime sky. If you go to the moon be, you can be in broad daylight, but there is no atmosphere. You look away from the sun, have your eyes adapt, theres the full nighttime sky. So you can ask the question what altitude above the earth do you have to travel before the atmosphere is so thin that you can see stars in the daytime . Thats 100 kilometers up, about 62 miles. And so thats the functional definition that we invoke about being in space. And that 63 miles is 62 miles is what is the skin of an apple as is our atmosphere to the size of our planet. Host how far out have we gotten guest to the moon. Host with satellites. Guest oh, oh. The moons orbit around the earth is not a perfect circle, sometimes its farther. So apollo 8 . Was it apollo 13 . I think it was apollo 13 went to the moon when the moon was near its farthest point from the earth, ask they went around the and they went around the moon before they they never landed. They wanted to but, remember, they had the oxygen tank got destroyed. So on the back side of the moon in that trajectory, they were the farthest humans had ever been from earth. And so how far is that . About 240,000 miles away. So in terms of spacecraft, the voyager spacecraft just a few years ago launched this 1977, given some gravity boost but slingshotting around jupiter and saturn. I forgot the exact it was a multipleplanet, multiple cushion pull shot to exploit the energy of these various planets because we couldnt launch it with enough energy to escape the solar system. It had to be, it had to steal energy from planets in order to make this happen. We did this quite on purpose. So you do this, the voyager sr. Has now, basically voyager i has basically left all traces of the solar system. So it doesnt mean going past neptune, the last planet in the solar system, theres like comets beyond that, the kuiper belt of comets of which pluto is a happy member. And you reach a point where the suns influence on the electronics of your spacecraft are now confused with the influence of Everything Else in the galaxy. And thats a functional place to say you have left the solar system, and voyager has done just that. How far away . Oh, i forgot the number. Several hundred times the earths sun distance. But id have to look that number up. But its far. Its the farthest any its out there. Host still producing. Guest well, yeah. But you have to ask are we still learning anything, and what is you know, it costs money to always keep something online and keep talking to it. By the way, we go through these funding episodes often. You have something thats kind of working, but its exhausted its useful life but its still taking money. Do you shut this off and then get a fresh project that will have new questions that youre answering, or do you keep this going because you know it still works and you might discover something . So we have what are called senior reviews each year where some of the most respected among us get together and decide what switch gets turned off and what switch gets turned on. And and thats why its important that its our most respected sign terrorists among us scientists among us, because we judge they are being fair in these assessments. So the voyager spacecraft, farthest thing weve ever sent. By the way, at the rate which its traveling if you aimed it to the nearest star, it would take 70,000 years to get this. So give up all expectations that were going to be visiting other planets outside of our solar system anytime soon. Host 1973, howd you end up in the Mojave Desert . Guest oh, yeah, 73. So i attended a camp, a special astronomy camp for, like, geeky school kids. I was in, 73, yeah, i was in ninth grade . Yeah, so that was my first year in high school. Because back then what they called sorry. I was transitioning from ninth grade to tenth grade, and ninth grade was the oldest grade in my junior high school. Today they call them middle schools, and they end in eighth grade. Anyway, i was transitioning between the two. I was a geeky kid, as was every other kid in this camp. We lived in the Mojave Desert, far away from lights, very low atmospheric humidity, and so that means theres no cloud formation, very few clouds, and we all lived nocturnally. And youd wake up at night, and theres a whole slew of telescopes. We all had Research Projects and computers were very early at the time, we were programming we hovered around this computer, and we all tried to program it. One of us programmed it to spew out prime numbers which isen iterative calculation we made it do. Yeah, this was early. This was, like, computation b. C. , you know . [laughter] so those were some formative years of my life. Ninth grade, tenth grade, eleventh grade, transitioning out of middle school into high school. I attended the brocks high school of science the Bronx High School of science, the borough that i grew up in. And i had a telescope and the camera. So, yeah, i was just finish that was a happy summer. [laughter] as a city kid . That was my first time in the desert. And there were all these, like, creatures at night. There was like tranche las and black widows and scorpions. They said dont put your foot in the boot until you shake out the boot, otherwise youll get venom be injected its like, okay, take me back to the city where i just might be mugged. Thats all. At least [laughter] at least i could talk to the mugger, you know . So, but it was, it was fun. It was fun and oh, so my mother saw an ad for this camp. And she knew that i was, had been interested in the universe for the previous five years of my life. And then she why would i know where to even look for an ad or even have that as an ambition. So my parents, who were particularly sensitive to what the interests were of me, my brother and my sister, so they didnt impart interest upon us. They carefully observed where we expressed interest and then fed those interests in whatever way best served our curiosity. Host that was cyril and guest yeah. I just lost my father this past or. Host in december. Guest yeah. He was 89, so it was a full life. I still miss him. He was a wise, wise man. And i think in modern times we forget what wisdom is. You know, there are people who know a lot and they talk a lot and theyre pundits. Wise people dont talk a lot. They do more observing than talking. And then somewhere in their head mixed with their Life Experience they digest it and then come out with simple, easytounderstand perspectives that then sort of live with you with. Of course theyll live with you because theyre the digestion of so many different pieces that you didnt necessarily have access to. But they did because theyve lived longer than you, and theyre observant their whole lives. Host 2012, your book space chronicles came out. And in that book on page 234 you write that our nation is turning into an id i dont care rah city. Grid i dont care rah city. Guest was i that harsh . Host thats why i wrote the page number be, just in case you questioned [laughter] guest im normally softer with my critiques than that. Normally the way i would present such a statement would be we are behaving this way many these situations. If that continues, we would then become an idiocracy. Thats generally how i would word that. So i would double check after. At 3 01 host well do it right now, while youre talking. [laughter] guest so i think if people dont or they stop valuing discovery oh, just as backdrop for space chronicles facing the ultimate frontier, if i could just tell a brief back story to that. We have got three hours, so im assuming [laughter] lets see how i worded that. Host i circled it. Guest okay. [inaudible] okay. Host did i misquote you . Guest no, its verbatim. [laughter] so thank you. So an idiocracy in the context which ive discussed it, its not a system where people simply dont know things, okay . The if you dont know if you dont know something, theres no crime in that. Maybe you didnt study it, maybe you didnt spend 16 years in school and you spent only 12 or 20 years in school as some people do to get advance degrees. So as an educator, i will never hold someones absence of knowledge against them. The problem arises if you have an absence of knowledge and you either know, or worse, dont know that you have this absence of knowledge x then you have power over legislation that should be informed by that knowledge and is not. And then you have, you come to ate depressively coto it aggressively in your ignorance. That is a recipe for societal disaster. So part of what it is to be educated is to have a keen sense of when you dont know something. And you either do the homework yourself you know, just because you not in school doesnt mean you cant or shouldnt do homework, right . Just because youre not in school doesnt mean you shouldnt keep learning. So thats an obvious point to the viewers of booktv, of course. But for the general population, consider how many people you know who might have run down the steps on the last day of school and thrown their notes in the air, schools out whether or not theyve left the school because theyre graduating, even just any other year up until graduation, summer i dont have to learn anymore and where does that come from . How is it that your time in school can lead you to celebrate being out of school . Whats that about . What is missing in the educational pipeline that that people resent being in school . What is missing where in college you attend a lecture but the word lecture outside of college is otherwise a bad word . Stop lecturing me. I dont want to be lectured. Its a bad word. Whats going on . So maybe what were missing in the educational system is a, is a reminder that it can be fun to learn. And the last day of School People should walk down the steps sad that now theres an entire summer where they wont be learning. What a world that would be. Oh, my gosh. So do we teach it differently . Are we selecting our teachers the right way or the curriculum . I dont have an answer for that. And simply sharing the observation. I know thats not helpful to just point it out, but i would claim a lot of the worlds problems would be solved if education became a joyous experience rather than something you want to escape there as quickly as possible. From as quickly as possible. So an idiocracy, of course, i grab that word from the film, it was an indie film. It was a world where the people in charge did not fully understand the decision, the consequences of the decisions they were making. And the absence of understanding came from an ab is sense of awareness absence of awareness of how nature works. And theres a scene where theyre feeding gatorade to plants because the ads for gatorade said it replenishes your nutrients. They said, well, if it works for us, i bet it works for our plants. I mean, you just got to see official government decisions that had little or no anchor in reality. Yet everyone kind of thought it was the right thing to do. So i, so in space chronicles facing the ultimate frontier, it contains an extra ration of all the elements explanation of all the elements of society that might not be in a position to judge or make an informed decision about the value of Space Exploration going forward. And that was in 2012. Just recently in the wall street journal an oped by chris [inaudible] this is, quote in the trump area says celebrity physicist Neil Degrasse tyson who adds that this is the most important thing hes ever said, people, quote, have lost the ability to judge what is true and what is not. Guest okay. So that sentence, that was from a video that was posted just before the science march. That sentence did not include reference to trump at all. That was added in that editorial. I just said we live in a time where people have lost the ability to judge what is true and what is not. And if you want to call the preelection era part of a trump era, okay. But if youre looking at manager on the internet something on the internet and you think its true and do not have the capacity to judge whether its not true, that is another element, that is another ingredient in the recipe for disaster. So this is trump is a manifestation, the trump era, where what is true and what is not has and wherethat distinction is not made where that has risen to highlights. I would claim high heights. Those seeds were germinating long before, and it has to do with what people think is true after they read it on the internet. Our susceptibility to this. And heres something else. Again, i hate to sound like a broken record, if anyone be remembers what a broken record is, that in k12 somewhere in there rather than pouring knowledge into peoples heads and declaring them to be educated for having done so, someone in there we need to train people how to think. How to analyze. How to interpret. How to be skeptical of information, and then how to recognize when sufficient data has been put president has been put forth to turn something that you might be skeptical about into newly objective truth. That is not taught in the schools. There should be a class just on what science is and how and why it works. And that would transcend the physics class, the chemistry class, the biology class, the geology class, the general science class. This would be its own course. So that when you are collegeeducated and some institution has declared you graduated and a learned member of society, if you turn around and say i choose not to believe this emergent scientific con seven discuss consensus, no you dont have that option. Its not how objectivelyestablished scientific truths are are determined. It is true whether or not you believe in it. And in retrospect, you think maybe thats what you should base legislation on. Not something you want to be true or feel should be true or something that you dont allow to be true because your religion prevents it or because your political philosophy prevents it. You dont have that option if its an objectivelyestablished truth. And like i said earlier, that is the entire point of the scientific enterprise. Knowing what is true, what is not and, in particular because, like i said, scientists are humans too and we have bias and all the stuff that goes on with every other human in this world also touches scientists. So we built the system to double check against that. If i am biased and my bias shows up in some result because i took some data and not others and i could have done it this way, somebody else is going to get famous for checking my result and showing that im wrong. Tyson is wrong. He messed up here. And if its shown that my bias did influence it, i get a demerit. Thats not a real thing, but [laughter] it will interfere with the next time i have an interesting result and i want people to Pay Attention to it. So theres a huge cost if a scientist is somehow melding with their data meddling with their data because they have an idea what they want their data to show. It comes at a huge cost to their career. But even if they think they can get away with it, somebody else will are ultimately find it. And if they show that its wrong, then we dont have any result at all, and everybodys back to the drawing board. So objective truths, im thinking thats what any law or legislation should be based on. If you base it on anything else, then you are imposing what might be your personal truth. You know, your personal truth is everyone should fend for themselves and not get a government handout. Lets say thats your you feel really strongly about that. Well, thats how you feel. And in a free country, go right ahead. If you want everyone else to feel that, thats politics. Fine. Go have that political discussion on the floor of congress, because thatll affect where monieses go. Do you fund this support program, do you not . Do you put in a tariff . Do you subsidize, do you not . Thats a political conversation. Go right ahead. And then the law that comes out will have political flavor to it. I dont have a problem with that. But if your law somehow pivots on something that is not scientifically true, youre building a house of cards where the first two floors look stable but theyre completely hollow and empty. And by the time you put on a third floor, the whole thing collapses. Nature is the ultimate judge, jury and executioner of what is true. Host space chronicles, 2012. We need to go back to the moon. Guest i, i will not say what we need to do. All i will do because im not a pundit trying to get everyone to agree with an opinion i might have. What i do instead oh, by the way, space chronicles is a collection of everything ive ever thought and written on Space Exploration. And so it contains opeds, articles, speeches. Its an amalgam. And so you can dip, its very easy to dip in and out of. But im not going to tell you we should go to the moon, no. What im going to say is that high, highly ambitious exercises conducted by governments have huge, exhibit huge force on the am bugses of a nation ambitions of a nation, on the creativity of a nation, on the innovations of a nation. I dont think its an accident that steve jobs and bill gates were 12 and 14, somewhere around there, when we landed on the moon. How impressionable can you be . Can you get . There it is. Theres the future. And you see this. And you dont even have to be interested in space. You just have to be interested in the fact that new frontiers are being breached, and its possible to do so. And then it gets infused into your, into your goals, into your trajectory of life. So im offering Space Exploration be it the moon, mars, beyond, doesnt matter. But if you go into space, it is adventurous, it is you have to invent stuff to make that if youre advancing a frontier, youre going to have to invent, because you cant just use off the shelf things. That takes ingenuity, innovation, clever engineers, scientists working together. And you might even need clever lawyers. Why . Because, oh, i want to live on the moon. Well, who owns that plot of moon surface . Is it, am i homesteading . Am i i want to mine an asteroid for natural resources. Who owns the asteroid . Should anyone own the asteroid . These are legal questions. Thats a whole legal frontier. So everyone can become a participant in this. And when that happens, the government does it first because the government doesnt have to satisfy a quarterly report. The government can open new industries as its done before, as it did with aviation. The government, monies from the government prompted innovations in aviation in its earliest days because im saying, oh, an airplane, now we can carry mail through the air. Who wants the contract . And you say, i want the contract. I can carry four bags of mail. And somebody else says im using the same plane as you, but i can make a modification. I can make the hull bigger, use more fuel, i can carry six bags of mail. And so there was a race to see who would then get these government contracts to carry airmail. So what happened . The fifth person says i can carry 30 bags. Whatever, im making up these numbers, but the sense of it is correct. 30 bags, wait a minute. I dont want need to carry mail, i can just put chairs. [laughter] now i can tell seats sell seats. And thus is born an entire industry of aviation because of certain investment that is the government makes that then enable subsequent entrepreneurs to exploit the new place that technology has been taken. So we go into space, id say you have a whole suite of launch vehicles and where do you want to go today . You want to mine an asteroid . Thats fine. Put these two rockets together, and you bring your own equipment because i dont know how to dig on an asteroid, but youll know. Oh, youre a biologist, you want to look for life on the surface of mars . Strap these together, there you go. We want a tourist jaunt around the moon. Thats these rockets. And all of a sudden the solar system becomes our backyard. Again to do all this requires huge levels of innovation. But i would claim once theres a first round of innovation that can establish the costs and the risks and the return on investment, then private enterprise comes in, and they do their thing as they always do. No different from the Dutch East India Trading Company coming in after Christopher Columbus who himself was sent by spain. And he comes back and says where, how long it took. You can quantify things and then you can make a Business Case to exploit. If you can find another way to infuse an entire nation, even the world, with ambitions of tomorrow thatll trigger innovations of today thereby assuring a future of health, wealth and security because thats coming from technology, its not coming from any other branch of human existence, but science and technology are going to give us tomorrows health, wealth and security. Im simply offering the exploration of the universe as a force of nature operating on our innovations, on our urge to innovate. If you have something , bring it in. I have yet to hear of a better example. Another quote from space chronicles nasa operates on our hearts and our minds, on the educational pipeline, all for one half cent on the tax dollar. On 20 billion a year guest yes. Just take 20 billion and divide by the budget. Iing for got 3 trillion. Its a half a penny on the tax dollar and if you hold up a literal dollar and then take scissors and cut a half of one percent of its width, you dont even get into the ink on the side of the dollar, and when people say why is nasa spending all that money when we have problems here on earth. And thats assuming that if you took all the money we slept on nasa and then apply them to problems on the earth, then all the problem wood get solved. That very statement presupposes that. Yet most of those people who utter that sentence do not actually know how much nasa is getting. Ge ive done this, like, people on the street. You ask the people who complain about nasa. Say, heres a tax dollar. How much do you think theyre getting . Host 10 , 15 5 . No, one half of one percent. I didnt know that, when i tell them that. With that they made a space station and the shuttle and the Hubble Telescope and all the nasa centers and the Cassini Mission which is now at saturn. All of this is in the one half of one percent on a tax dollar. So i poles the question to you. How much is the universe worth to you . One more observations and then well take your calls. You have been very patient. We have two hours to take calls and hear from dr. Tyson. I want to show this and im not getting it right. Four books here, plus to files, death by black hole, space chronicles and origin. Whats special. Guest they did this and iso was very impressed. Re the publisher, norton. These four different books all have different covers, very kind of spacey covers as you might expect, and so i they decided to make the mindings match up in into a co current this is the famous ring nebula. I got it. And that how. So, its the ring nebula, and its. Which is what. Guest the death throes of a star. Our sun will look Something Like that. So, in the center of this is the remains of a star that once was, and its outer layers expanded into oblivion, and so now these have expanded hugely, much bigger than what is the extent of the orbiting planet. And thats how we know stars die. This is a explosive axamplese nonexplosive death. Explosive deaths look ike guts and this is like a smoke ring. So now you have to get all four books. And host put them in the right order which i couldnt do. Lets begin with a question via email. This is from a young man namedbs bradley parents both work at cspan2 for a along time. Disyou give him preference. Might have gotten this email directly. This is from a april and she says my son bradley, who is 11, has a question for dr. Tyson. Heres the question when going to a different planet, what aspect of traveling will be most important . Guest so, great question. A lot of thinking about this. Especially the Johnson Space center in houston. Nasas headquarters for the manned space flight. Its now called crew space flight. So, they worry about food, not only is there enough food but will you like the food . If you get bored with the food, will that affect your morale . And then you are less effective doing other tasks do you need comfort food . Exotic food . International food . Water supply, there is enough water, if you recycle water that means it checks your urine, filters and it you drink back. Is that too freaky to do . Should water is not uncommon in the universe but in space its hard to get to. You have to lasso a comet and w dont know how to do that other. Things. Nd the time in a close quarters with only one or two or three other people, months and months and some cases years. Theres a whole psychological dimension to that. Can we remain emotionally stable over those times . On earth people kill one another, get into fights. There are many even in the film interstellar tears an astronaut fight scene. And of course its two guys and astronaut suits fighting on an alien planet. So, theres that. Theres will they miss fir family or loved ones at home . Theres the fact that if you fly without creating artificial gravity, that you are weightless the whole time. Are you perpetually motion sick or do you get used to it . If you get used to it, there are any other factors on the body . Your body expects one gravity, one g, we call it, which is the equivalent of earths surface gravity. And if you good to a centrifuge you can increase the greater. In space, if you can create artificial gravity, great. If you cant, what is it like ih be weightless for a year or longer. We already know some answers. You lose bone density. You have the bones of a frail old woman if you keep this up. So have to figure out what exercise will give you the kind of resistance that we live in, moving against gravity. I reach for this cup. Havent to lift it against gravity, and Little Things we take for granted are not something that is normal when you are in space. So, all of these facts have to come together, and which is why you cant just send any old person into space. Have to be healthy and have to be competent in performing tasks, and you might want to throw in a medical doctor if the crew is large enough, because something might happen to you physically. You need combination of expertise so the collective safety of the crew is preserved. Another book called packing for mars where all the Little Things you have to keep track of. We interviewed her for star talk and theres a whole section in the star talk book which you didnt bring today. Dn host it was too heavy to bring. Guest too heavy. Host too much gravity. Guest im sorry. The universe as some weight, all right . Well do this in zero g next time so you wont have anyso g excuse. Nate agree. Host mary roach has been on the program go to book tv going going and watch the three hours with mary roach as well. Bernie in new york, you have been very patient, youre on with Neil Degrass Tyson. Caller thank you. Its a pleasure to listen to mr. Tyson. I have a couple of questions. Qui first, desthe big bang violatevi the conservation of energy . Could it be that were going to have a big crunch followed by another big bang followed by another big crunch, infinitum. U id love to see you run for congress. S. Senator tyson sounds really good to me. Host bernie, why have you thought about the big bang . Do you work in a scientific field . Caller no. I took some physics when i was in school, and the big bang especially is interesting because it its almost a religious question. I think that its still possible that you can make a case for the universe to have been here all the time, forever, but originally there was Something Like a steady state theory which was abolished by the big bang,i but doesnt seem to preclude the idea that the universe was always here, and if the universe was always here, then we dont need a creator, do we . N thank you. Host thats Bernie Howard beach, new york. Guest i think i have mental record of each one of those. So, a couple of things. First, all evidence we have ever al obtained in the history of this exercise, since the binge of cosmology, which basically came to us if ion sign and jedwin hubble and others who supported it includes a belgian priest named george lamaxa, who was generally considered the father, figuratively, of the big bang itself. Wrote down equations uses einstein thursday new theory of gravity to show that we would have a beginning in the past. So, all data we have ever obtained is unequivocal in its conclusion that we are on aa oneway expansion trip. One way. Expa so, no d. Host no explain no crunch no slowdown, stop, and then recollapse. Not that a recollapse is prohibited by einsteinan gravity or any other sense of that the universe could do, we happen to be in a universe where that is not the case. So its just simple. Now, given that its only a oneway trip, that mean wes had a beginning and the entire big bang description takes us from the beginning into the unlimited future. So you might then ask im putting these words in the questioners mouth but gets to his other question what was around before the beginning . We dont have data for that. So we dont know. We have top people working on it. And one of the ideas which actually comes naturally out of the extensions of einsteins gravity and the extension of quantum physics, have been a multiverse and that would preexisting our universe. Were just a bubble came out of it among possibly infinite othey bubbles, slightly different laws of physics in them. So, to imagine that the universe was always there, not our universe, because we had a beginning, but maybe the b multiverse was always there thats possible. Or maybe the multiverse had a beginning. Maybe the multiverse is one expression of what a metta verse creates. I mean, if theres a metaverse, that each has bubbles of multiverses the multiverse creates universes, is there anything to prevent that in principle . No. No and that were one of eight planets. Get over it. T then theres a demotion and we say how about the sun . Of course. No, the sun is gist one of 100 billion other suns in the milky way. The milky way . Of course, no, its one of 100 billion other galaxies. So we have had good precedence for recognizing that the universe is really bad at making things in ones. And that may be true even forr the universe itself. If they could simply be multiple universes, and i think thats may have been two out of three of his questions. You were keeping notes here. Host there was he asked, and the you talk about is in in several of your books and your talks, is there a religiou aspect 0 the big bang theory, and then he have you ever considered running for office. O guest so, when you use the word religion comes withth certain expectations it means and when you say religion it involves a document some kind, a holy document, holy book. That prescribes what you should believe even in the absence of evidence. And it then tells you about what conduct you should have in the fact of that belief system. Okay . In science, you can put forth an idea that doesnt yet have evidence but everybody is looking for evidence. If we cannot generate evidence for it, then it ultimately would just simply be discard and put on a shelf. So evidence matters in this. If you want to call its religion with evidence, okay, thats just a very fresh usage of the word religion in your vocabulary. Of i dont debate words with people. I dont value time invested in debating definitions. Tell me how you use the boardd and ill testify if using the word religion in away that allows evidence to define what it is people think, say and do, then, fine, its all religion. Thats what science does. It finds evidence that defines and discovers the truth of the world. Nate not how anybody else inle world is using the word by religion. Theyre using it to refer to spiritual elements that require faith in something being true rather than evidence for something being true. Host political office. Guest oh. I was once asked by the New York Times some impasse several impasses ago in congress and they just thought they would have fun and ask people who were def fifthly not politicians definitely not politicians, what solutioned they have for getting to things through congress and fixing thing. The way the asked, if you were president what solutions do you have . So, i wrote back, if i were b president , i wouldnt be president. You can find its on my web site. If i were president , you just google that and my name tiessone my take on in the new yorkt times part but i dupe mix indicate held in in my webs because they cut out a paragraph because there was not enough space. So the full response to that question this. Comes down to expectation if you run for office, you somehow can change everything. Change eve and im not convinced of that. So im a little contrarian here. My views are the literal opposite of what a lobbyist does. A lobbyist goes straight to the politician to influence the politician in ways that serve the interests of the lobbyist, and who they represent. For me, any elected official represents people who put them into office. So as an educateor, what matter is not who the official is. What matter is the state of enlightenment of who is doing the voting because if people, for example, all knew, recognized and valued what science and is how and why it works they would never even dream of voting for one who doesnt know that. Because that person would then not represent their full interests. So i would rather educate an electorate so they can put people in office who can make scientifically informed decisions about everything they do rather than just install myself into office and lead people who dont yet have this knowledge or insight. Thats not 88 cant do the math right 88 of congress standded for reelection every two years, so you can convince one congressman or another but then you have to start all over again. You educate the electorate, well, good. Good to the bahamas, elect people, take this country into the future rather than back into the cave. Host next call for Neil Degrass Tyson from david in east hampton, massachusetts good afternoon, david. Caller hi. Another Family Member of mine, i was telling hum you were on tv and suggesting he might want to watch. He told me something he heard. Dont know how accurate this is or the story. But basically he said something about something called an mdrive that supposedly can drive a space ship quickly, and im just wondering, is an mdrive a real thing and if so, what is and it how does it work and also id be interested to hear about other possible drives for space ships for Long Distance travel like to mars or further. Guest yes. Thats a great question. Let me give some back story. Right now, our rocket ships are still using just what call Chemical Energy. You have some fuel which when you break it apart it releases energy, its exothem yack as opposed to endothermic. If you see cold packs you can buy in a drug store where you sort of squeeze it and then the thing just gets cold. Thats an endothermic reaction and then you have heat packsg where the opposite happens. You can get very clever with your chemistry and make it appear. Rocket engines are endothermic,r and you squeeze the rocket and so its highly exothermic, what a rocket engine does. But we have had chemical fuel since Robert Goddard back in early 1920s or so. So, very little has improved in our capacity to propel ourselves through space since for 100 years almost now. So, theres been some talk about other kinds of drives. One of them is a solar sail, where you can use propulsion from sunlight that you open up a huge sail relative to the size of your craft so that you get maximummal pressure from sunlight and you move around by just tacking just like you would a sailboat, tack into the wind or away from the wind. But here the wind is sunlight you doing this with and then you can navigate the solar system. Its slower but maybe you would ship cargo that way, and then send people faster, and so the future of Space Exploration need not be limited to Chemical Energy. Ex there are other drives. Theres a plasma drive where you have very hot gas and you let very highly highspeed particles come out. The hotter the gas is the faster the particles move and thats a very low impulse propulsion but very high youre not going to sort of accelerate very much when one particle comes out but this accumulates, and you can ultimately accelerate to very high speeds doing so. Now, so heres the problem. This and the mdrive and all these frontier means ofopulsion propulsion, you can go real fast with it. Instead of taking nine months to get to mars youll take a month. Perhaps. If you want to visit saturn, instead of taking 20 years, you take two years. But even if you got to the speed of light, near the speed of light, not going to reach the speed of light. Near the speed of light. You want to cross the galaxy, well watch you do this. By our time reckoning it will take 100,000 years, the speed of light. So, the answer here by the way, you will image much more slowly so youll get there without much time havingyou ge elapsed, but we who sent you will see you take 100,000 of our years to do that, and so this is not a realist you come back, we would have all long forgotteu about you, thats if civilization is still here. So none of this drives solveshe the interstellar travel problem. If we lived a million years as individuals, sure. Who cares itself it takes a thousand years get there its one unthousand of your life. So what we really need is worm holes. Worm holes. Just you open a door here and on the other side of the door,d youre in another part of the galaxy. By the way, viewersers of the program probably read more books than see movies but theres a film called monsters inc. The show job is to scare little children. Why be a monster. So they work in the factory and the factory makes doors, and they have the door, and theres nothing just a door. They open the door and go through it and it is the door of a childs closet in the kids bedroom. And so they emerge from the kids closet to then scare the child. Then they good back through the door and theyre book the factory. Thats a worm hole. They didnt say that in the movie but thats a worm hole. N how a worm hole would work. Host would work. Guest would work, yes. I tried to be clever one time. I was in charlotte airport. Ahead to go from a big plane toi a little plane, and i swear i walked five miles in the airport, probably like just a mile, but it felt impossibly long and i tweet, trying to dechristopher issue can wait until we have worm holes and that way all gates can just be adjacent to one another. Gate 400 is just the other side of the door of gate number one. Someone tweeted back, if we had worm hole outside wont need airports. I said, you got it. So thats so,. Host not proven. Guest what . Worm holes. Guest it works on paper, yeah, but we dont know how to work one or keep one open because they have a ten den city collapse. Its works in Science Fiction but until then, well be pretty much earth bound. Host if we left right now it would take us nine months to get to mars. No. Constant leave right now. You have to leave when mars and earth are properly aligned. So, just its to remind people, you say mars in the sky and start traveling to it, no, no. You have to travel to where mars will be when you get there. So its a matching of trajectories that matters here. So what we call the minimum energy trajectory. So its one where you bring your engines engines and then shut them off ask then coast to mosser until mars pulls you into its gravitational influence and then you fall toward mars. That takes nine months. If you run your engines the whole time you cant do that because we dont have enough full. If you have filling stations along the way, you fill up, and it would give you artificial gravity in the ship if its accelerating but to slow down you have to turn the ship around and accelerate to slow down. But if you do do that, do you get to mars in few a few weeks but it would take a boatload of fuel to do that but it would be cheap. Host lewis, san ma day, youre mateo, california, your on book tv. Caller in the bay area thats a shore with deepakn chopra. I had a question another einstein, i it bilell ask about Human Potential instead. And the thwarting of the knowledge from a political forces, like, for instance, right now, theres i think a woman, astrophysicist in hawais who wants to they in the exactly what they want to look for and want to build ay telescope there, the largest one in the world on the biggest mountain. It would be perfect except for some american im sorry some native hawaiians who consider it sacred, so cant do it. Ai and so i guess go to Canary Islands or something, and i was just thinking another example would be in terms of part cal part cal physics, supposed to be super collider built in texas in the late 8s and early 90s which would dwarf the one inow europe, and because of the Texas Republicans saying we cant build and is pay for it. B pay for wart but cant pay for science. So, i just wondered, it seems like we probably would have figured out dark matter, maybe be on our way toesunderstanding torque industry host lewis you have coveredu a lot of topics here and well get a response in a second do you work in science in any way . Caller no. I wish. Im unemployed but on my last leg we need universal basic income. I just try to get some books in the library like john carroll or some books but its hard to concentrate. Louis, thank you very much. Dr. Tyson . Er guest thank you for the questions. And i think books have always been the great portal to other places and other ways of thinking, and so happy to hear you are in the whatever is your lifes trajectory in this moment, books are giving you other things to think about and physic books. Theres a science writer, biologist and then a physicist. Assume you meant the physicist when he mentioned sean carroll but might have meant the other one but either one is good. So, in hawaii is the most perfect spot on earth surface to have a telescope. It is at 14,000 feet, above alle moisture that could interfere with you view between you and the universe. Air flow from the ocean across the mountain is what we call laminar instead of turbulent so the images are sharp rather than blurry. So, in recent areas theres been resistance to adding more telescopes to the mountaintop, resistance from native hawaii hawaiians who value the mountain as a sacred place. And so if were in a culture that respects cultures, as much if not more than science, youll get occasions where you want to build something technological that conflicts with a religious or cultural or spiritual or sociological value so you dont. You build it somewhere else. This happens. So, these are choices a country makes. What was manifest here is that if theres a telescope that was going to be in hawaii and now in the can anywhere aislands which is spain and we were going to have a particle accelerator but the next particle accelerate to do what us war questions going to is now in switzerland, it simply means we will lose the leadership in those areas and others to come as long as that continues. Thats just the reality of this. And the interesting one of the many interesting thing about science is that it is science is not a national thing. In fact its not anybodys national thing. These are objective truths being explored in the objective universe. So, if the United States doesnt do it, that doesnt mean no one else will. Ooh nations will rise up. For example, the Largest Telescope in the world today, which focuses on radio waves,sed it used to be in puerto rico. Largest dish in the world. Many movie scenes are filmed there, including several important ones from carl sagans film, contact. He world now the Largest Telescope inn the world is in china so if an alien is second messages to us the chinese will be the first to communicate with aliens. Not the americans. And so this will just continue. Its one of the signs the United States is fading on the worlds technological stage there many but these are part of them. If you do not think that science matters, then in the future you will be buying products innovated elsewhere. And your Economic Health and stability you can still be ar functioning country but not going to be leading the world in anything that will be shaping tomorrows civilization. Steve, anaheim, california, please go ahead. Steve, anaheim, one more time. All right. Apologize, dr. Tyson. Steve is not there. But you brought brought up carl sagan. What was your relationship . Guest i think the press occasionally overstates what the relationship was. I met him when i was 17. Just an Anonymous High School kid. But what was remarkable about that is that he was already famous so not yet done cosmos but was already famous, been on john carson multiple times. Cover stories in parade magazine. Already win e well known and i applied in cornell where he was on the faculty, and unknown to me, the Admissions Office sent my application to him to get his comment and reaction. My application was dripping with the universe at the time becausa i had known since age nine this what wanted to do. He sent me a personal letter inviting me to tour the campus, and visit the lab so i can make an informed decision of where i would attend, and so, yeah, i said, yes. So, i got on the bus, went from new york city up to ithaca, new york. In december in the winter. It was cold and he indeed met me outside the building, showed me the lab, reached behind him, i never forget this. Grabbed a book off the shelf, one ohio bikes and signed it to me. Thought, wow, thats bad ass you dont have to look and its a book you have written itch still have the book, a book, the cosmic connection, and it says to neil, future astronomer,l, carl. Futur and so then the end of the day he drives he back to the bus station and begins to snow. Y not an uncommon thing in ithaca, new york, would later learn, and then he said, heres my home phone. The bus cant get through, just call and you can spend the night with my family. And im thinking, im just like nobody from nowhere, and i remembered distinctive thinking if im ever remotely as famous as carl sagan, i will have duty and obligation to treat students with this level of kindness and generosity that he had exhibited with me. And i didnt ultimately attend cornell, but that was an indelible moment in terms of how to behave in the presence of others who have ambitions on tracks that you have laid or tracks you are on. Hat you so, thereafter i attended one oo his talks. He gave a couple of public talk. He blurbed my second book. Host came out in 1994. I wrote a letter to him i dont notify if you remember them, did this. And it was my second book. And so he read it, wrote a blurb and said on page 17 i think you have a typo, this and that. So thats how you knew he actually did go through the whole book. So, that was it, until his widow, one of the coauthors of the original cost pose a woman with huge talent in her own right. Know, deeply inciteful. One of the most enlightenedwa people i ever met in terms ofer you ask her a question and shell say, never thought of that. Thats keep talking. Ill just sit here and listen. You just talk for the next hour, and when you meet someone like that its special thing. So i was invited by the estate, basically to host the followon cosmos to the original and the continued to coauthor that with a colleague of mine, stephed soar, who also co are authorized the original cost pose we with carl so they teamed up for the project, but other than that, i had a few encounters with carl, maybe five, but we werent like biersch beer drinking buddies and hung out. It within that relationship. Nor a mentorship which you presume you get that with the persistent oneonone exchanges. It was more let me pose a different question. Do you actually have to be close to someone for them to serve as a mentor . I dont think you do. Just have to be aware of the examples they set. And what place they occupy in society. If youre observant and they are successful at that, then just simply being aware, and if youre receptive it to, simply being aware and receptive can in its own way have him serve as a mentor. So i can think of him as a mentor but if you use the word, its different impression that whan people expect of the word. Host how many day jobs do you have right now . Guest so, claim only one day job. Everything else is a night job. So, i am director of new york citys Hayden Planetarium. Thats Hayden Planetarium in boston which is bury yesterdaybm buried within he bob its same hayden money,eu hayden foundation. We were the fifth planetarium in the United States. As famous has hayden became in new york it was the fifth planetarium after los angeles, pittsburgh, chicago was the first, and another one i keep forgetting and then came us. N so, all that happened very quickly, like, within ten years in the 1920 asks and 30s. Between 1930 and 1935 five planetariums went up. And so hayden was live when he gave us the money, and he was a financier and they still give money to programs that help kids after school boost their interest in what is it to learn. So, im director of the Hayden Planetarium the American Museum of national history, and also i enjoy writing, and a perfect day for me is when the phone doesnt ring, nothing my inbox and i can just write. Also want to get back to the lab. Nose something if hey been in with lately. The proverbial lab. So the computer reducing data from telescopes, being a fullup scientist again. Greatly mills that. Its now a very small fraction of the time i invest in a week but i have a possibly delusional ambition that im visible enough so other people want to do exactly what i do and then they rise up as in all the mediaat starts focusing on them and thin can back away unnoticed and then guy to the bahamass and recover and sneak into the lab and no one knows im missing. And all these other people on the landscape of science, and thats my ideal future and then you wasnt have to see me generally. However delusional that plan is, think of that. When im invited i give public talks but i cant honor all invitations. Get 200 a month obviously an impossible number. Mb severe triage whittles that down between zero and four, and ideally we knit them together so its a rapid succession, then guy back home. So theres that. Theres the universe flinches. I get a call from the press. Im a servant of the publics appetite for knowledge of the universe and science. So, i live in new york city as we where we are right now, and so its a major news gathering center. We have cnn. The real headquarters are in atlanta. Hey have huge build hearing in new york. Abc, cbs, nbc. Host all very close to Hayden Planetarium. A guest just a car ride and some of the comedic talk shows, the daily show, and are all here as well. So people fly in and stayover night to appear on those shows and im home for dinner. I say, honey, ill be home in 20 minutes women finish taping s so, thats a lot of time and effort, more than you might think, because you might see me on for five minutes in an evening news interview, for example, but theres the precall and the you have the get there an hour early and get in makeup and change and look presentable and then so it takes its like bites out of the day. So what i dont have that many other people might have are long stretches of hours with nothing coming in, and theres a different kind of thinking, different kind of creativity that will manifest when you havi long stretches where youre not tugged in 20 different direction us. An old saying which i agree entirely, it goes, if you want to be more creative, become less productive. And how to be i did 50 emails today and cooked dinner and went shopping. Look our productive i am. But did you create anything . If you have a new idea . Did you invent something . Have you reflected on reality . Have you theres a whole other thing that the human brain does when given the opportunity. So i try to carve swaths of time in the week for just thata purpose. Host who is honey . If youre saying, holiday,ll be home for dinner. Oh. Re i dont actually say honey but thats the trope. So, my wife. We host alice. Guest yes. We both like were bothike, w foodie. E not crazy foodie foodies but we are in the door in the frontnt door but not me middle maybe. We care another ingredients and how the food tastes and one of my great regrets is when we w finely perfect a dish, it anyones we can no longer afford it at a restaurant because we make it better than they do and going to a restaurant is then no longer special. And so i make a really if i say so myself, i make a really excellent rack of lamb that i can no longer order at a restaurant because its not as good as mine, and so that takes that off thely. Ff the and my Roast Chicken is pretty good, too. So i dont order chicken in restaurants anymore. Unless its some very fancy dish where the chicken is just incidental. And then you see the artistry of the chef. So well good to a restaurant thats like slightly more expensive than it should be just to see if something rises up in the menu that we observe. So, yes, we care about food and wine and also good to the theater often. I love a good corny musical, a good dramatic play, and we have the luxury to be able to do that as residents of new york city as well, of course. Host a ph. D inder that. Thats all. The universe is all we know. Its our entire existence. And look at what we do, i dont know if this is still a thing to do, when you have and farms. Did you ever have an ant farm and a little bit of center, a little vessel. There are the answer just doing their thing. I dont know if theyre happy or sad or thinking about it, but do they know they are in an ant farm . Juliet selfawareness . Do y do they now theyre in an ant farm . Do bees know youre about to steal all of their honey . They have a world where theyre pollinating plants and coming back and making honey. So they have any idea that we created that world for them . When its a bee farm . Any idea at all . So, we get to do this because we are smarter than they are, so we can outsmart them, and create an environment which we think theyre happy. And therefore they do what is they want. So, we outsmart our pets. We feed them and continue to feed them. That keeps them there, and we provide for them, but theres like we do things that because were smarter than they are,th they dont know the difference. Right . And so could it be that everything we know and love in this world is just for the entertainment of an alien . Is that so hard a thought to imagine . I know you dont want to think that. You want to think we have free will. T you want to think that were in charge. But are we . So, yes, i dent dont remember what time of die. I think tweets are day stampedpe or time stamed but i dont know when i posted that. Host this is an email from michael in gainesville, florida. Are we alone . Why there is any evidence about ufos in how he phrased it. Uest host is through any evidence of a ufo . Guest sound like are we alone on earth rather than in the universe. Ne were not likely alone in the universe. You look at how common thehe ingredients of life are is, how common it is, hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and carbon. Wore made of stuff thats the foundations of organic chemistry, this stuff is everywhere we look in the universe, and so whatever happened on earth, its not likely to be rare or unique because carbon chemistry on which life is based is the most fertile kind of chemistry there is so if thats life somewhere else its probably based on carbon. Its an a fascinating bias but notten unjustified bias, and so the universe has been around 14 billion years. Plenty of time for evolve all manner of creatures out there particularly microorganisms. We have no reason to not think of microorganisms has aliens. Nk they dont have to have bail ship. Just alien life on another planet. Now, have we been visit, thats different question than whethert we assert thats life yes me university. We have people looking for life in the universe as well as not only any kind of life but intelligent life. So we try be clever how we conduct those experiments. On earth, what the ufo community puts forth as evidence is weak on a level of any scientific circumstance wool be kick out of the lab room. You having thises like eye witness testimony. Im sorry. Y. This is not working. No. I dont if you walk into a conference and say, this is true because i saw it, you get laughed off the just were not saying you didnt see it. Were simply saying that yousi cannot present that as evidence for something that you want all of to us embrace. Okay . So, i eye witness testimony is not valued in scientific circle. And especially if its something that would be truly extraordinary, like visitation by aliens. I need more than your eye witness testimony. Dont e trust your eye witness testimony if you told me the moon rose yesterday. I need better data than that. Probably would trust that because its not extraordinary, but on that level, but as your claim gets more and more extraordinary, the less confidence im going to place in your data taking system that involves your eyes and brain. It is why in science we invent methods and tools of measurement to replace our senses because wl know how feeble they are, now nonrepresentational they are of reality. Y. Psychologists have nope this ever since theres been schooling inch science we have known it ever since we have seen the effect of this influence data. So now, you take a picture of something that you dont understand. Thats better than eyes. Thats the you stand for. Unidentified. We dont know what it is. Its a mystery. Okay . Good. What do you want me to do about it okay. My point here is if youve seen a ufo, remind yourself what the youth stands for, unidentified. Once you say i saw a ufo there should be. But wait a minute, you just said you didnt know what it is. Ta because it was unidentified. Now youre telling me what it must be . The fact that you admitted that you did not know what you were looking at precludes all the rest of this sentence that just came out of your mouth. Okay. Im not going to stop you from trying to find the aliens. Id love to meet some aliens. But i have such low confidence in your claims that theyre aliens that i will not be investing any of my time. But im glad you are. Go right ahead. And the day you find an alien, i these Something Better than your video camera showing that its unidentified, and i need Something Better than your eyewitness testimony. Ideally, in fact, bring the alien, all right or . Youre good to go. Im not going to stop you fromfi doing that, a. Mera sho b, everybody has a video camera today. From everybody. Where are the flooded i youtube post toings of people postings of people inside flying saucers shaking hands with the alien . We have video of extremely rare phenomenon be now because everybody has a video camera. We have video of buses tumbling in tornadoes. F en there was a day when you wont say, oh, my gosh, that bus is about to tumble, let me go home and get my shouldermounted video camera to film this. Everybody has a video camera. We have rare surveillanceou footage of things, okay . If youve been abducted and you had an encounter with an alien, give me some good video of it. And get other people to get video of it too. Then weve got were good. I got it. But as long as its unidentified to you, are i made have i made myself clear enough . [laughter] and by the way, i have very high experience looking at the night sky and the day sky, okay . And knowing what can happen in the night sky. And in the day sky. Ive seen things, which without this extra background that i have, i would have easily reported as a ufo to the police department. I know this. But because ive studied phenomenon of the sky, i could identify it. There are clouds that build above mountaintops that take circular form that are very high altitude. If a mountain is high, the cloud is even higher. Some are called lenticular clouds, and they can have perfectly cylindrical shape. The sunsets for you, it hasnt yet set for those high altitudes because they can see beyond your horizon. To the stun so the sun is still there for them. The cloud is lit by sunset colors, orange, red x itsti vibrant, and its circular, and it looks for all the world like the mother ship just came and docked over the mountaintop. If you are susceptible to wanting this to be true, then that for all the world is the mother ship, whereas to he its a cloud that forms naturally over mountaintops when hot air goes up and cools abruptly and water cob denses condenses out of it. So, and then people say this is a good eyewitness. This person is a brigadier general. Is the person whos the eyewitness human . Thats all that matters. Youre no less no more susceptible, no less susceptible than anybody be else. I dont care what your title is. I dont care if youre a military pilot. It doesnt matter. I dont care. Youre human. Youve got to do better than that. t oh, and if you get abducted, i tell this to people. You get abducted and theyre poking you, poking your gonads be as, of course, all aliens do, weve been told, tell them, look over there, and then snatch something i off the shelf. Just do that, okay . Ch and then go back. Then when they let you out, you pull it, you say look what ive stolen from the alien spacecraft, an ail yep coaster or an alien coaster or an ashtray. We can then take this to the lab and see the if it is of alien manufacture, okay . And if an alien came here, anything you pull off the shelf is going to be interesting. Till waiting for that to still waiting for that to happen. Host every guest we have on in depth we ask who are they reading, what are some of their career influences, things like this. These were the answers that we got from Neil Degrasse tyson. Host dr. Neil Degrasse Tyson, we asked you your favorite books, your influences and what youre currently reading. We just showed that to our audience, but you sent us extra notes. Ea instead of just the titles, you gave some explanations including on the day you were born, you say, is one of your favorite books by deborah frazier. Es guest childrens book, yeah. Its a book, that if i knew howi to write a childrens book, its a book i would have written, but i dont have that talent that she did. Its a, its a very simple and beautiful account of all the things that are going on in nature in any given day of the year. But you get to read it to a child. Its a way for a child to be exposed to all the things that nature does in this world, what earth does as a planet this orbit around the sun, what the whale is doing in the ocean, what the arctic terns are doing. So its a walk through nature. This has nothing to do with thes baker or the politician or those are other things that are happening on the day you were born, but nature is, excuse me, nature is the, the, is what the person to whom, the child toe whom youre reading this storyo is being exposed. So i just think its beautiful. And i even, like, i get mistyeyed when i read it, its just so beautiful. Its nature brought to life for someone who cant read yet, on the day you were born. Host the book youre currently reading, science andnd humanism, you call it a midcentury assessment of the role and value of science in guiding the progress of civilization. Guest yeah. Gr i like reading through the history of how people thought especially as it may have been influenced by the politics or culture of the time. 1950 is sort of the dawn of thes cold war, and its, obviously, its before the wall went up, but its still were feeling the aftermath of the Second World War, the divide of the world, the worlds powers. And this is a scientist who was around and lived through it, made seminal contributions to quantum physics and decided to write a little bit for the public. And thats not, thats not his first book. He had several books that hese written for the public. Er one of them is what is life, and hes talking about how physics manifests in biology. A friend of mine gave it to me, i saw it on a shelf. Oh, you want to borrow it . So that happens to be right on my book shelf at the moment. Host 202 is the area code if you want to participate in our conversation this amp, 7488200 in the east and central time zones, 7488201 for those of yot in the mountain and pacific time zones. Well also cycle through our social media addresses so that you can contact us that way. If you cant get through on the phone lines, weve got about 50 minutes left with our guest this afternoon, and heather in jacksonville, florida, you have been very patient. Please go ahead. O that caller hi there. Good afternoon, sir. Its an honor to speak with you. I have a question about your education. I just finished my bachelors degree, earned it two weeks ago in kind case, and im try communication, and im trying to figure out guest congratulations. [laughter] caller thank you. Im trying to figure out to pursue an advance degree or go back and get a fouryear degree because i like engineering and physics. So how did you figure out if you wanted to pursue that degree, and how in the world did you end up paying for it . And, yes, i am taking notes. Guest okay, wow. Up so is to those are great questions. So advanced degrees especially in academic subjects as opposed to medical doctor, law school, that sort of thing, when i think of academic subjects, i think you have to really, really love the subject. Right . Whereas in medical school you dont have to love medical school to know that at the end you want to be a medical doctor, because you have friends who are medical doctors, and you know or an attorney. To enter academic graduate school, you have to really, really love it. Because youre not to going to get much money. And at while youre in school. And when you get out of school, youre not going to get much money. Ho and the rewards are the act of pursuing previously undiscovered truths. In any field. Could be english literature, history or art, or if its academic. And in my, in the sciences. So because also things will not always go as you want them. In the sciences, for example, you could be in the lab and you design the experiment, and nothing works. Well, you dont get the result you expected, and you dont get a result worth publishing. Then you have to start again, and its two years of your life. If all of a what i just said iss a chore, if youre saying, no, i dont want to be in that situation, then, no, stay away. But if in your life you have learned to love the question itself without regard to whether you asking a question and designing an experiment to answer it leads to an answer, then this is that life. So its a and, by the way, as an academic if you get a faculty position or in some cases you can be hired by corporations, its a decent living. Youre not going to be the wealthiest person on the block, but youll have a car and a house and a family and all there are no unhappy academics for the ab sevens of money. Absence of money, okay . So is theres that part. You say how do i pay for it . Well, in my field we also worked as a teaching assistant which participates in the teaching enterprise that the school undergoes, so that was worth a salary. Not very much money. Many people have roommates. But thats a flow of money. After that its still not all that much money, but its more. And if you went into debt in college but youre doing what you love, then were talking about the happiness of your life here. So so what if youre in debt . Thats a kind of contrarian view that most people have, to most people. But my point is if you get to do what you love and some debt y becomes associated with it, then you are pay down the debt. The debt takes you ten years, like so what . Fifteen years, so what . We all willingly walk into 30year mortgages when we buy a house. Youre going into debt. Dont buy a house, youre going into debt. How do we justify it . We say, well, the real estate value will be higher at the end, so this is an investment. Thats what we tell ourselves. And for a lot of the time, thats true. There are, obviously, important exceptions to that especially in 2008. But, all right, lets look at your education as an investment. We are now investing in your enlightenment and your future happiness. Shouldnt that be worth at least carrying some debt such as the kind of debt youd be carrying in a Home Mortgage . So i was never afraid of debt. And i was in debt from college and some in graduate school. Like i said, i got some payment in graduate school. So i didnt pay off my college debt for, when would it have been, 15 years later. And as my salary kept going up and im not talking about a lot of money, im just talking about going up from a Student Money to, like, regular person money all of a sudden the debt that id accumulated so many years earlier looked smaller and smaller because i was wielding more and more money. And so, oh, they need 1,000 i remember paying 10 a hospital to start off paying a month to start off paying that debt. I got my first job, then i could pay 50 a month. Then i could pay 100 a month. So, yeah, i was mississippiing in myself and investing in myself and my future. So thats my answer. And as they say, the you pick a subject if you pick a subject to study that youre in love with, then youll never be working for the rest of your life. Youll just be having fun. Host Neil Degrasse ty softens 2000 book, the sky is not the limit, essentially his autobiography in many ways. Se guest memoir. Host memoir. Harvard, university of texas and columbia. And i think the favorite sentence in that book, lets read it for our viewers. To set ones genitals on firefo seemed more like the absence of a creative solution to money problems rather than a need to dance. Pr [laughter] guest was that a question . Host if you want to expound on that, that would be fine, or we could just move on. [laughter] not explain. Guest yeah. So in high school and college i was, i was very athletic. In high school i was captain ofn my schools wrestling team, and in college i continued toi was h wrestle. I also rode, but my first love was wrestling, and i also was a performing member of two different dance companies. Because i also liked not only being strong and limber, but also graceful, flexible and graceful, and dance is that. If its nothing else. And so i just enjoyed what it could do and be for my body. And in graduate school i continued to wrestle and row and dance when i really shouldnt have been. I should have never left the lab, but i continued this. I started graduate school thisi texas where i met my wife, the woman who would be my wife. But before all of that, i had my fellow dancers, and theyd hear my money problems, and theyd say, oh, why dont you dance with us . After hours we dance at this strip club for women, and i was, like, really buff at the time, and i could do a full split. I could do things that a stripper might do under all of those situations that they described. So i said, wow, you know . Because i was really struggling. I probably would not have struggled as much, i know i would not have struggled as much if id had a roommate, but ie wanted to live alone. Id spent four years in college with a roommate, so thatat increased my expenses. Anyhow, so they invited me down just to check it out, and i saw them come out with an asbestoslined jock strap that had been set on fire, had been ignited. And they were shaking their hips to Jerry Lee Lewis great balls of fire. So in that instant, i said maybe i should be a matthew to have. [laughter] and im embarrassed a math tutor. And im embarrassed that that solution did not occur to me earlier. Because, of course, i could tutor in math. Jo i majored in physics, we know math. Si and a matthew to have, you need that anywhere. So from then on i tutored math for a few dollars an hour, and that was fine. It enabled me to make my ends meet. Host Neil Degrasse tyson is our guest, and chris is calling in from goldsboro, north carolina. Chris, youre on booktv. Caller thank you. Gu it was great seeing you earlier today on a. M. Joy as well with dr. Tyson. Guest oh, thank you, thank you. On msnbc. Caller it was great. I always try to catch moments where youre on tv. Guest by the way, both of these are live, so i went from that studio, got in a car, came here and now im in this studio. So [laughter] caller okay. I knew you was in new york because you had to go to from one place to another, and i waso like, dang, he went there awfully quick. Guest i actually have a worm hole, but dont tell anybody. [laughter] anyon caller all right, fine. I have things too, so is hey. My first question involves what ive seen on the series on thees science channel called how the universe works. It was one of their segments dealing with black holes. My question involves a feature that they discussed that was a possibility, and it involves the speed of matter accelerating faster than light within this region of the black hole because of the force of gravity. My question relates to if these conditions were met outside of the black hole and say, for instance, it happened near a planet or a solar system, what would be the aftermath or the effects of such an event occurring . Host thank you, chris. Guest yeah. So if i understand your question, youre talking aboutut somehow accelerating mass to the speed of light or then beyond the speed of light and what effect would that have on its environment . I think that was the question. So, first of all host yeah, and whetheren thats feasible. Guest yeah, no, you cant theres no known way experimentally and theoretically to accelerate a material body to the speed of light and beyond it. You can get close to it, but youre not reaching the speed of light. And thats just a so we joke that the speed of light, its not just a good idea, its the law. And its not a matter of we havent invented a way to do it yet, which was the case with the sound barrier, okay . Now consider that anyone who said well never go faster than sound, ever, well, except that the tip of a bull whip, that crack that you hear, its moving faster than sound. Not only that, we had guns atu the time where the bullet emerged from the barrel faster than sound. So for anyone to say man will never go faster than sound, theyre just no, no. Just because you dont know how doesnt mean we never will, okay . S it it is different with red to light. This is not an engineering. Limit, it is a physical limit of nature. And like i said, weve never seen it. Weve tried and its never worked, and theoretically its not possible. Okay. Now, that doesnt prevent something from existing faster than light. Weve hypothesized about such objects. You cant pass through the speed of light, but you can exist on the other side of this. And if you do, then you move backwards through time. And we hypothesize attar cl that does this, and a particle that does this. So that would be really cool if tacheons existed in this world. Weve never found them, so just because its okay in the equation doesnt mean nature has to abide by that possibility. So the fun part about tacheons is lets say that i see that you, youre walking down the corridor and you slip on a banana be peel and fall, and i say, oh, let me prevent that because i can send him a text to warn him about the banana peel, okay . Before he gets there. Because the tacheon will go back in time and reach you. So i send a message, and i say watch out for the banana peel be, and i send off the text. Ten seconds before you get to the banana peel, you get a text. And what do you do . You reach in your pocket, you pull out your smartphone, you start reading it. While youre reading hi text that says watch out for the banana peel, you slip on the banana peel. But you would not have slipped on it if i didnt distract you with the text that told you to look out for the banana peel. You would have just been walking down the corridor. So thats an interesting case where the act of trying tot interfere with the past created the very thing you tried to interfere with. And so this is still a lot more thinking theres still a lot more thinking we need to do on the frontier of time travel, but thats an example of where an event may always be happening exactly that way, and therese nothing you can do to change it, because the act of trying to change it created the event that you tried to change. Th host klein observatory tweets in just saw on booktv neil tyson list agnes be clerk as an influence. She chronicled the rise of astrophysics in a remarkable set of books. Guest yes. So agnes clerk, i have, i think, most of her books. Many of her bookings. She wrote in the 19th century which was a golden age of astronomical discovery. We dont think of it that wayom because we have much biggerbecas telescopes and all those 20th century discoveries. But the 19th century, if you were around at the time, you would have been celebrating how far science has come. Theres more science going on than ever before, thats a golden age for you. Never mind what happens later. In that moment, you feel like youre at the top of i have a book, not of hers, but someone elses from 1890 that said i wrote a book on the sun in 1895, and weve just learned so much about the sun, i had to, i had to have a new edition, just celebrating this little bit of five years of discovery. So what she did was chronicle cosmic discovery not only historically from the ancients to the present, but she has books shes a popularizer of thenmodern astrongingmy. Po its before astronomy became today what we think of to as astrophysics. And some of my books are doing just that. I have a book called the pluto files. If she were alive today, i think she would have written that book. Iv so its a, i was delighted to learn that there were people who cared enough about science to then learn about it and share it with people who have an interest in science who would not otherwise be doing that work themselves. So shes, in math we say shes an existence proof that this is an interesting and useful thing to do, agnes be clercke. Host are you familiar with kleining observatory . Guest no, im not, actually. By the way, if you have a dome and a telescope, you can call it an observatory. [laughter] so delighted to know theres aning observatory i dont know about. The more the merrier, yeah. Host in 2007 you wrote the book death by black hole, and you quote a gentleman named lord kelvin who in 1901 said there is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. E guest yeah, that was a boneheaded thing to say. [laughter] and he had a certain arrogance to him, a sort of physicists arrogance where sort of inic physics you, theres no real understanding of chemistry without physics. And theres no real understanding of biology without chemistry. So physics, i think, is justifiably considered the anchoring subject of all theidee sciences. So, and its a justifiable claim. The question is whether it gets to your ego as a physicist. And in his case, thats one of many examples where hes just kind of saying things that he really had no business saying. And 1901, within four years special relativity would be discovered by albert einstein. Eight years after that, ten years after that general theory of relativity would be discovered. Four years after that, all of quantum physics would come down the pipe. So, yeah, thats got to be the most embarrassing statement ever uttered by any scientist ever whos otherwise a respected and famous scientist x. The kelvin temperature scales is named after him. Host dr. Neil Degrasse Tyson wrote that the 20th century ended without us knowing the comp sticks of 90 composition of 90 of the matte in the universe. Guest yeah. So we have finertuned numbers on that. So its about 85 of so let me say its not that we dont know what 85 of the matter is, we dont know what 85 of the gravity is. Thats a strictly accurate statement. At we look around the universe and we see stars and planets moving, we add up all the gravity that should be making that happen, we get 15 . That includes everything we can think of and dream up and know of, black holes, gas clouds, stars, moons, planets, all of this added up is 15 of what is driving this, the gravity of the universe. P add to that the something that we call dark energy which is responsible for the version of the universe acceleration of the universe, and numbers even higher. So i can say with some precision 95 of everything that is driving the universe today which includes what we call dark matter which i referenced in that quote and what we call dark energy, those combined we can measure their existence, but we know nothing about them. Theyre driving 95 of what is going on in this universe. And each of those gets a full chapter in astrophysics for people in a hurry. Im not going to let you get by unless you hear, know and end up loving respecting if not loving how we came to discover the greatest mysteries this my field, dark matter and dark energy. Host and astrophysics for people in a hurry is his latest book. Ne jess is calling in from anaheim, california. Go ahead, jess. Were listening. Caller hello . Guest hello. Caller hey. Its i just want to say its a great pleasure to talk to you. Im a huge fan of your work. Guest thank you. Caller but my question, youve talked about the issue of Long Distance space travel. The importance of psychology and the importance of gravity. And so i have a question, would gravity because everything that weve ever done, every experiment, every idea weve ever had has had the effect of gravity on us. If you were this a zero gravity environment for [inaudible] would that effect the transmission of electrical and chemical signals in the brain . Guest thats an excellent question, and i can say its not likely, and experiments showow that the answer is, in fact, no. For most things that matter. I so consider the following whent youre standing up, when youre standing up and you have thoughts, right . And youre hungry, youre you love, you hate, whatever. Normal sort of psychoemotional thoughts and gravity is pointing downwards. Ht so now you just lay down. Now gravity is pointing out of the side of your head. You have all those sameside thoughts. Somehow your brain capacity is not deeply altered by this, okay . So youre still in a 1g environment, but the g is now pointing in a completely different direction. So you look at the physiologically your veins, why does blood circulate at all . Does it require gravity . Well, not really. Your blood circulate ares standing, it circulates horizontally, it circulates at any angle in between because your vessels pump on their own. So why should we think 0g, all of a sudden everything will just stop to. Not only that, electromagnetic forces are ten to the power of 40 times more powerful than gravitational forces. So all electrical city in a minutic phenomenon be going on this your brain doesnt give a rats ass about gravity. It is functioning completely independent of it. Now chemically you have chemistry going on in a liquid, lets say. Well, if the microbes are just floating around, theyre kind of neutrally buoyant, they dont care about gravity either. Theyre floating in water, suspended in the water. So thats if theyre living. And the chemistry of molecules doesnt care either. So its why any of this works at all under these very different conditions. Now, if youre in low gravity and you grow up in low gravity, that can effect yourse. Musculature, of course, because everything weighs less. Now we bring you to earth, that could be bad with. Youd be a weakling person here on earth unless you lifted weights to heres what you do on mars. You counterweight everything to weigh as much for you on mars as it would on earth. Then when you come to earth, everything weighs the same as you remember. Thats the kind of thing youd have to do. The movie that came out a few months ago, the space between us, is about the first child ever born on mars, and the child is raised there and he wants to the come back to earth x they explore the medical problems he has. But among them, none of them is capacity for thought. Host this is a first. Ost ti mark deiffy lip poe is anotherrk long time cspan employee with two sons. They dont send them in for the politicians, but they send them for you. According to mark, he and his 12 and 14yearold sons have been having a debate. Jack, 14, wants to know thatat since there is matter in antimatter, is there antimasser since there is the existence of mass . Drew wants to know what mass there was at the big bang and what triggered it, which weve b covered a little bit guest right. Great questions. So its not of course on first pass that antimatter shouldnt have antimass. I mean, think about it. It has anti Everything Else. Its the opposite charge, and in quantum fizz bics it has fizz bics, it has the opposite of other certain quantum features that are not familiar in our everyday lives, but particles live with us like spin and angular momentum, this sort of thing. But the simplest thing to ask is the an antiparticle has antimass, could that, would that, should it mean that it has antigravity . And this is an implicit consequence of the question, does it have antimass. It turns out, no, it doesnt have iowans mass. Have antimass. Nor does it have antigravity. And the equations of gravity are such that it doesnt matter what your mass is made of, it are attract you it will attract you no matter what because your mass actually drops out of the equations. And all that matters is how far away you are from me to determine how much im going to attract you to me. So, no, there is no negative mass. , in the original equations when they were first seen, it showed up as a negative mass, and the big question is how to we interpret this. And it got interpreted as having negative properties in all these other regimes, oppositero properties justifying the term antimatter. Now, where did all this come from . Matter and energy are interchangeable. Where did all the energy in the universe come from . Its a frontier of cosmic research. Weve got top people working on it. Other side we dont know for v otherwise, we dont know for sure. It may be embedded as a part of a multiverse, but then you ask, where did it come from . So one of these at a time. [laughter] so we dont know. We dont know. But we though that it exists, and were describing it ever since it came into existence. Host have you visited serne . Guest no, i have not. Its on my bucket list. Theyve got the largest particle accelerator in the world. Thats what discovered the famous god particle now one or two years ago. So, yeah, i havent its ongo my list. Host george, eagle, colorado. Please go ahead with your question or comment. Caller hi, dr. Tyson. Dr. Tyson . Guest yeah, hello. Caller its a pleasure to talk to you. I have a question thats always been interesting to me. Can we ever harness gravity and use it for propulsion . Pulsio guest if theres thats a great question. The theres and youre right, thats been on peoples minds forever. If theres a way to do it, we have yet to figure it out. And let me flesh out that question and imagine that we have some suitcase where we can harness the force of gravity or control the force of gravity so that we can either increase it or reduce it. So theres still people to this day who think that nasa has a room where you go in and youre floating, and thats the zero gravity room. Thats not the case. The closest we have to that is what we call the neutral buoyancy tank which is nasaese for a big swimming pool. G and restaurant astronauts practicing space walks do it submerged in that swimming pool. Its in houston, texas. Russia has a counterpart to it in their space center as well. So to think, if you can turn off gravity right below the launch pad of a rocket, then that fuel that the rocket is using, oh, my gosh, the acceleration it would give you if you went away fromom 0g then from 1g, for example. So, no, we just have not figured out how to control gravity in that way. Its always, as far as we know, been associated with the concentration of mass or energy. Host january 29th, a tweet from Neil Degrasse tyson. Seems the world goat batshit crazy every few decades, just long enough to forget the last time the world went batshit crazy. Guest yeah, people reacted heavily to that one. What do i mean by that . The first world war, its like, oh, my gosh. What is is this what we call civilization . Were gassing, were digging trenches and wholesale slaughter of other human beings . And then, you know, a few decades later the Second World War. 50 Million People die . In fact, you can run the numbers on this. A thousand People Per Hour were killed in the Second World War. A thousand per hour. And you look today, and theres like maybe theres a terrorist attack and a dozen people are dead, and its Headline News of the last several days. Im glad its Headline News, but that tells me how far weve come. When a thousand people dying pel day during the Second World War was not itself news. It was, oh, land has taken more battle, weve won the battle or or weve reconquered it is, the terms are not how many people died, the terms are what political gain have we put into play. Be so what happens after that,t you know, a few years after that, then theres like vietnam, and you go further back and then theres like civil war and the slavery. And i dont know, i just felt compelled to reflect on this. Wondering when the natural urge is to sink back into some crazy behavior, and then we have tour react to how crazy that is and slowly build ourself out of itbe just taking long enough to slip back into it once again. So, yeah, for me it was a very, it was a sad tweet. But i want people to reflect on what has happened before so that because we can look, oh, they didnt know. They were crazy thinking this. How could they think this way . What were they thinking . Well, can yourself in ask yourself in 20 years what theyll be saying about us. Ha i do a lot of the reading about the history of science and the history of culture in booksf printed in the day so that you feel what theyre feeling, not just a recounting, but look at the words theyre using and how they we look back at the ban bishing of alcohol banishing of alcohol and say how could they, theyre crazy. How could they have done that . T . If you read opeds of the day in newspapers and magazines and articles in the atlantic monthly, it is filled with accounts of families that were torn apart by the drunken husband who comes home and what cost this is to society. You just see buildup. Its there. P. And if you were alive back then, theres no reason to think you would have said, no, you shouldnt do this, this is stupid. You just watch the wave take everybody with it. Culminating in an amendment, a constitutional amendment. We dont have an equal rights amendment, but we had an amendment banishing the production, sale and consumption of alcohol. Outside of church, religious ceremonies. And so what will people in 20 years be reading about today to say what were you guys thinking . Its obvious. Cant you see through the trees, the forest for the trees . I wonder, i think about this all the time, hence tweet. Host any significance that it went out january 29th, a week after the inaugural . Guest im sure there was something that week that was just people just reacting. I mean, it wasnt so much the election, but theres the election plus the reaction to the election miss the, what he says about the election, i mean, the inauguration, and i think it was just the total conduct ofdut everybody just at odds with one another, at war with one another, killing one another, saying things that you cant imagine in a civilized world you would say to one another. G i was really just reacting toer. That. Host youve worked onal commissions for the past two president s, correct . Guest i was on two white house commissions underue president bush, president georgs w. Bush, and under obama we had met several times, but i was not on a formal Advisory Committee to him x. Right now under well, towards the end of obama and now into the trump administration, i serve on a board of the pentagon. Ni so i, i have these occasional tours of duty when im called boo washington. Im delighted to serve just as a citizen. If i have expertise and insight that can help governance, i would be irresponsible to decline such an invitation. And, of course, its unpaid. Its not they reimburse food and whatever, but its otherwise unpaid. And so its my civic duty. Because theyll never pick me for jury duty. Im 03 on that one. [laughter] so the least i can do is help the federal government make decisions when and where they need to. Host just a couple minutes left with Neil Degrasse tyson. Thomas in tiffin, ohio, you might be the last caller. Go ahead. Caller hi, neil. I really appreciate your passion for science and your sharing it with us. I have, perhaps, a simple question. In failure analysis and forensic analysis, you can often point to the center of an explosion. Now, the big bang is sort of like an explosion. Can astronomers point to the center of that big bang . And what would they get fromnt looking in that direction and looking from other directions . Thank you. Guest yeah, its a great thank you. Thats a great question. So the big bang explosion so its one thing to speak of an explosion of, like, a fireworks display or a bomb forensically and then analogize it to the big bang. But theres a limit to where those analogies can take you. Finish and theres a point where they fail. So because the big bang is an explosion not only in space, but in time its a fourdimensional explosion there is a center to that explosion, but you dont have access to it. The center to that explosion was 14 billion years ago when everything that exists today was in the same place at the same time. So youd have to so if you think of we go back, you might have heard of this analogy to the surface of a balloon where wed lose one dimension just so we can describe it, we lose one Real Dimension so we can describe it among ourselves in ways our human brain is wired to see it. So imagine our universe as the surface of a balloon, and you draw a little spiral galaxy on it. Can and as you inflate theun balloon, the distance between all galaxies grows. Thats precisely whats going on in our universe. But it grows not because the galaxies are separating from one another within the space, its because the space itself is stretching. And this is as prescribed by einsteins general theory of relativity, and our experiments bear this out. Is so here is the universe nowit at this size, but yesterday it was a little smaller. And yesterday it was a little smaller. So if you want to ask wheres the center of this surface, this like asking wheres the thats like asking wheres the center of the surface of the earth. The question has no meaning. You know to not ask that because it doesnt, its the wrong question given the geometry of whats going on. So, but i can ask a different question. Not where is the center of this universe, the surface of the sphere be, i can ask when is the center of that universe. And the when is 14 billion years ago. So the timeline, in a sense, is this vector pointing straight out from the center new the surface through the surface of the universe that we live in. And as the balloon gets smaller and smaller, youre going back and back this time. Bam that is the center of that explosion 14 billion years ago. Host lets fit aide remember in adrienne in memphis in. Caller hello. Im in eighth grade. I saw you in st. Louis. L. My question is about black holes. I want to know what is in black holes . Hat it why is it there and how do you know it . Guest great question. And you should you sound like youre in college, by the way, but youre in seventh grade. Okay, so theres hope for the world. [laughter] so a black hole, so i guess if youre in seventh grade, you would have been maybe 4 years old when i published the book death by black hole. So in there theres a whole discussion about black holes and also how they can kill you. But what we know is if youre standing on the surface of the earth and you want to escape earth, unlike what your grandma told you what goes up must come down, thats just false. Its true for most things, but theres a speed with which you can toss something so that it never comes back, ever, to earth. And we have a word for that in physics, we call it the escape velocity for earth. And for earth that speed is seven miles per second. Seven miles per second. And when the astronauts went to the moon, they had to travel nearly that speed so that they wouldnt just fall back to earth when they lit their engines and then turned them off. They needed to have enough speed to get to the point where the moon can then pull them in away from the earth. So is they traveled, like, 6. 8 miles per second. Anyway, its about 7 miles per second. You can imagine you would need a higher escape velocity to leave and never come back. Ca that would make sense. The sun has a higher escape velocity than earth does. It has a stronger gravity at its surface. Well, lets continue this exercise, its something that John Mitchell did, an astronomer from way back centuries ago. He said suppose i had a star that is such high gravity that light traveling at the speed of light is insufficient to escape. If that were the case, the star would just darken and contain all the light that it wanted to generate. And he called this a dark star hypothesis, all right . And so this, it turns out, to do the calculation correctly requires einsteins equations. Not classical equations of newton, which he used. It requires einsteins equations to get the correct, right answer. When you do this, you have what we call a black hole. We and we have examples of black holes in the galaxy. No, you cant see them directly because theres no light coming from them as you would suspect. A sometimes you can see distortion of fabric of space and time in their vicinity. So the star field behind them gets distorted. It you say, uhoh, make a left instead of going straight in, because you dont want to get sucked into the black hole, drawn into its gravity. The most common way we find black holes is when they flay stars and gas clouds that come near them and it spirals down, gets hotter and hotter and hotter, and before it enters, it radiates brightly in ultraviolet and xrays. We have xray telescopes as powerful as the hubbel space telescope. Youve just never heard of it because it doesnt take the pretty pictures that hubbel does. It finds and happens these black holes across the dwhax city galaxy so the day we finally go space traveling, you know what to avoid are. Host dr. Tyson, friday, april 13th, 2029. Whats going to happen . Guest actually, theres a close approach of an asteroid. S this is an asteroid weve discovered, its orbit crosses earths orbit, and sometimes it crosses very closely. And, in fact, april 13th, 2029, this asteroid which is the size of the rose bowl, will come so close to earth that itll dip between our orbiting Communications Satellites andetn us. Now, those are fighting words. Thats, you know, these ones that go twice the earthmoon distance can, four times the we call them close calls . But theyre not. Well just wave as it goes. This one, youre invading our space. And it turns out that this asteroid will not have a trajectory that will then hit us in 2036. Theres a period where we are in the same place as it in our orbit, and so the big worry was at that time will it actually hit us. And our orbital calculations are good enough now to say, no, it will not hit us on either ofof those two days, but this will be a close approach, and it will be banner headlines when it does. Host well, Jeffrey Dunham wonders whether earths inhabitants should be worried or not worried about errant asteroids. Guest yes. One of several ways we will most assuredly go extinct is an asteroid that we discover too late to do anything about. It reminds me of this comic, it may have been the new yorker. There was one dinosaur lazily leaning on a rock, and the other one comes up to him and says, now is the time to build an asteroid Defense System. And the dinosaurs are just laying there all lazy, just kicking back in their jurassic laziness. Its yes, we should have a Defense System in place at all times, and we dont. Host Neil Degrasse tyson has been our guest for the past three hours. His most recent book is called astrophysics for people in a hurry. This is booktv on cspan2. Youre watching booktv on cspan2 with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. Booktv, television for serious readers. And this weekend on booktv, physician and journalist Elizabeth Rosenthal looks at the business side of health care on after words. Military historians discuss their books on world war i at the colby military writers symposium. And youll see the annual jay Anthony Lucas book prize ceremony. Plus, noam chomsky takes a look at income inequality in the United States. William f. Buckleys relationships with president ial administrations and policymakers, and pulitzer prizewinning journalist Amy Goldstein reports on the fallout after a gm plant closed in janesville, wisconsin. Thats just a few of the programs airing on booktv this weekend. For a a complete television schedule, go to booktv. Org. Kgb doesnt just let people walk away, especially in the United States. How did you and i love this story [laughter] i mean, its somewhat disturbing at the same time, but its fantastic. How did you convince the kgb to leave you alone . Okay. So [laughter] i had to figure out, i wanted to make sure that they wouldnt come after me or possibly even do harm to my be german family. So i was wracking my brain, what do i do, what do i do . So i needed to them them tell them that im not following orders. So i wrote a dear john letter, and it went Something Like, dear comrades, i have to tell you that i decided not to come back because i have contracted aids, and the only place where i could get treatment is this country. And then i added some supporting information, and i actually traced it back to somebody i got the aids from. And it worked. I know that they believed it. How do i know it . Because i also told them to give my german wife the money that was saved on my account, and they did. And they told your german wife that you had died of aids. Yes, they did. And i know that because mien son who is my son who is now 33 years old, we have been in contact for the last five years, so he told me all the story what it was like to be at the other end. You can watch this and other programs online at booktv. Org. And now on booktv we bring you the 2017 colby military writers symposium where three Different Military historians will discuss their books followed by a presentation by this years colby award winner, david barron, author of waging war. First up, youll hear from Jennifer Keene on life for soldiers during world war i and then michael all right, folks, lets get going this morning. The description of a