Transcripts For CSPAN2 In Depth With Neil DeGrasse Tyson 20170507

And not even knowing their five senses had limits. If its everything you know you think its everything the universe but try to give you but in fact, its not. And so around 160 1600 was inven of the microscope, one direction, and the telescope in the other direction. Each event it was a decade of one another. All of a sudden pieces of the universe, available to us that transcend our senses. Effectively, look inside a drop of pond water and see microorganisms just like just like doing the backstroke. Youre on a brain sentry could not detected were it not for the microscope. You say doesnt make sense that you have entire living creatures inside of a drop of water. Today we know that because we learned from childhood but in the day it may docents at all. He had communication with the royal academy, Royal Society in london, which is what you would normally do when you make a discovery. They thought he was drinking too much. Write another letter and then we can continue our scientific conversation. They were in denial of it until they sent someone up to verify which is a very natural thing to happen amongst scientists. One result, one eyewitness testimony about one result is not a scientific discovery. You need verification of it to confirm that it is real. And especially in modern times, 20 century onward, particle accelerator we discovered quantum physics which has rules of how matter behaves that fall completely outside of not only your senses but our expectations for how life, or how anything should work, particles popping in and out of existence, matter to energy and back and forth. Then we discover like black holes and expanding universe. How could everything there is the expanding at all . It you keep invoking that doesnt make sense, you will miss out on a lot of what weve learned, discovered to be true about this universe. Host what is significant about the year 1600 . Guest well, optics had taken, theres a lot of, the dutch were very good at optics in lenses and this sort of thing. We knew about what one lens would do. You can make a little magnifyig glass out of it. But when you start combining them you get other properties of your optical system enabling you to get a microscope. Once you do that that just opened the floodgates to what else you would do when you combincombined lenses. Galileo made a good version of it back in the early 1600s, and then the sky was the limit. Host wisely triggered as kind of a devil in a sound . Guest theres a little bit of cleansing, depending on how long theres a write up on the account of his time, life and times. That will determine how much Background Information you will get. So the simple story is he makes these discoveries. They conflict with the teachings of the catholic church. They put them on trial, they find them guilty of saying that the earth goes around the sun and not vice versa as well as other discoveries he has made with his devils instrument. Then they put him under house arrest. What they dont tell you, or they would tell you if you read a longer biography of him is about he actually made fun of the pope, public fun of the pope. He wrote a book and italian, not in latin which is the academically which of the day come 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. If you track the statement of the simpleton they are all statements that have come from the official decree of the catholic church. So hes really a pompous a whoe basically. Can i say that . Cspan, can i say that . So socially he did not express the respect he really should have for people that much more power over him. He couldve published in latin, had it spread around the world among academic circles. And the bed he probably would not have gone to trial. Thats my read of this. It is the renaissance, after all. New thought and fresh thought was not some weird thing. So yeah, he had it coming because he did know how to do these authority. Host back to your book astrophysicastrophysics for pea hurry, 14 billion years ago the universe started you say. How do we know . Had we know that . So, the way knowledge is acquired, scientifically, is you have an idea and to propose an experiment to test the idea. And then you come if its an expensive experiment you probably dont have the money to do it in your garage. So now you propose to get funding from sources, typically if its your research will be the National Science foundation, nasas research arm. If youre in other fields like biology, human physiology you might be getting a grant from the National Institutes of health. And so you have this idea, he built an experiment and you test it. If the results of that experiment match your expectations, then the foundation of your idea gained some currency in the conversations you might have at the scientific coffee lounges, at workshops or in the journals. Then youre a confederate of mine. I never liked you, i have a different, we are people, too. And i think you are wrong. Use the experiment im going to build to show that you are wrong. So then you build an experiment and then you get a result the kind of matches my results. Thats interesting. Because you had no intent of matching. You dont even like me but now the results match. Someone else does it. You always have some outliers just because of the experimental uncertainties that exist in all experiments. There will always be some outliers. But when theres a general lean towards a truth, and emergent truth, you look back and say okay, all of these experiments points to approximate the same result. You have these two 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 weve ever devised as a species, as a culture in decoding what is and what is not true about the natural world. Nothing rifles it at all. And so, so once weve done this, then i say heres how the world works, and we go on to the next problem. This is a celebrated thing. Its what got us relativity and quantum physics and gravity and it power the entire Industrial Revolution. You could not have these machines what is machine, 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 machines such as this. They have become simple machines, a lever and a pulley though still require high technology. Technically in the world of physics those are called machines, a leader, a pulley and inclined plane. What they do say make your job a little easier. Its simple. So watch this works. So i have this ledge and have a very heavy thing and 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 live it up little bit at a time. The distance ove of which i havo 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 simple machines have always done for us. Modern machines basically empower all civilization. Host first ten seconds of the universe, what happened . Guest well, thats some busy moments sorry com, i dit focusing on your question about how do we know this 14 billion years. Heres what we do. We look up in the universe and we said okay, we see galaxies, hubble discovered that these fuzzy things in the night sky are entire galaxies such as our milky way, major discovery in 1926. Then in 1929 he discovers that these fuzzy things that we now identify as holy galaxies are hurtling away from us. And this is the first evidence that universe is expanding. So people are just think this up, it must be no. It was an observation. Then we look to see if it fit einstein general theory of relativity, and it did. General three of relativity is a modern understanding of gravity. If anything is happening in universe is going to involve gravity. To check to see that works with this equation. It does. And so that means we didnt have to reinvent the theory of the universe, because it worked. And so then we say if the universe is getting bigger, is the universe bigger today that was yesterday . And that must mean it was bigger yesterday that it was the day before, and 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 a houseware expanding, just reverse that, to do it on the back of an envelope calculate what happens if 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 tells us that the temperature will rise. The simplest example of this is if you ride a bicycle and your targets a little flat side you pump, a hand pump, you pump air into the bike tire and then you feel the valve went youre done. It is hot. You are compressing air through it, okay . So thats just an example. So its related for exactly the same thing but related. The science of the moving of energy from one medium to another cult of thermodynamics. As universe gets smaller and smaller it actually went even hotter in the past that it is in the present. And so now you keep, because the universe has a temperature, you can measure it. It had measured in the 1960s, very cool. You look in every direction and you see the heat signature left over after the 14 billion years. So now you go back in time and you say okay, 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 stupendously high temperature. And i you ask what is the behavior of matter and energy under those temperatures . So now if you turn to the particle accelerators that slam particles together, high pressure, high energy, high temperature, i mean, so you start approximating the conditions of is at what in adam does . Is that what a nucleus does . Is that what happens . Now you take knowledge gleaned from modern atomic physics, particle physics and you apply it to whats going on in the first few moments of the universe when it was hot and small and dense. That gives you a pathway in, a path with insights into what was going on there. Do you know what we find . That you have an era where all particles are formed, the basic foundational particles that Everything Else is comprised of. We are polite in the form of photons. We have corks that make up protons and neutrons. We all have heard of protons and neutrons. They are made of what we call corks. As far as we know they are fundamental as far as we know so far. And also electrons. And they all antimatter counterparts. Electron has antimatter called positron. Very cool name. Positron. Something that Science Fiction people rapidly picked up on. Just to be clear, we intended antimatter and discovered it. I was not assigned desha Science Fiction. It works great and switch over it happen real universe first. So now you bring your insights to the first few months of the universe and say what must have happened then given what we know goes on in our particle accelerants . It will tell you at the rate were expanding at those temperatures, you would be making hydrogen as the predominant atom in the universe. The simplest atom has only one proton, the nucleus. You make this much hydrogen, you make this much helium, that has to protons in it of course, you make trace amount of lithium. Thats the third element on the periodic table of elements remember from chemistry class. Add nothing else, we will be a universe born with hydrogen and helium and barely any lithium. Wait a minute. Then you say if that is 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 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 mid20th century calculations enabled by the Nuclear Research from the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb, because were calculating what adams do, we know that after that time, stars are born, Pure Hydrogen and helium, they manufacture heavy elements in their core. Iand some of them explode scattering this enrichment to yet form stars. They form a next generation of stars that have a lot of extra enrichment. They will make even more enrichment, explode and then terry that extra enrichment to the next generation. This continues through. We, our solar system was born 4. 5 billion years ago. Thats more than 9 billion years after the start of universe. Weve had the benefit of multiple generations of enrichment. So now with our protocloud collapse to make the sun, and that all these other ingredients in it. That it used to make planets. Because rocks are not made of hydrogen. They are not made of helium. They are made of silicone and oxygen and aluminum and arsenic. All these other iron, cobalt, nickel all 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 at this big, literally this big, and exploded from there, you say you were not there, how do you know what youre right, i wasnt there. I di if everything we know happs to matter, happened then, that 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. [laughing] guest is there a song in there . Host do we know what that big bang was . Guest do we know what it was . Host yes. 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 moment onwards. Now, theres a point before which its level of mysterious to us, called the planck time named after max planck one of the many fathers of quantum physics. Theres a point earlier in which kind of the limits of our ability to understand what nature is doing, so we pick it up right after that playtime. I forgot the exact, the playtime is like 1 trillion, trillion of a second after the big bang. No, 1 billion, trillion, trillion. Is outright . Thats about right. But 1 million, trillion, trillionth of a second after whatever was at the beginning, they are physics that we now measure 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 write that in 5 billion years the earth will be a charred ember. Guest yeah. Every now and then i tweet deck on every couple of years i tweet that it barely at those peoples minds. I dont know if thats a good thing or a bad thing but, so the tweet goes, go Something Like this, in 5 billion years the sun will expand so large that it will engulf the entire orbit of our planet. It will engulf the earth as earth, and will be a charred ember. Into the star while it vaporizes. Vaporizes. Have a nice day. Something like that. And people, so its just unveiled it. 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. So how do we know . That are other stars, theres no shortage of stars in universe but 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. Takes millions and sometimes billions and in some cases trillions of years. We are around for a few decades. So how is it that we know this . Because theres so many stars that in any snapshot of universe we see stars being born. Stars in middle age, stars dying. And we look to see oh, these are the same art of a store. They are just different stars. What we are catching his different times. It would be any different from if you were an alien and took a snapshot of the civilization. You would see some humans in a box underground and say what are they doing there . You with the other humans like Little Things crawling on the carpet. You will see other humans who are, who dont have any hair that are little and others who dont have any hair who are older, right . Its just a snapshot because you dont live long enough to see the whole thing. If you are an alien and you just live 90 seconds, all right . So you will say how do i make sense out of this . Are people born in a box in the ground, all shriveled and then they come out of the box and then they get littler and le littler and litter and then disappear inside of another person . Or is it the opposite . 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 and universe, this took decades. We didnt just look at one snapshot and say thats born there and die to do. 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 why do work. A lot of his traces back to the Harvard College observatory, cambridge massachusetts where theres a room full of computers, either human characters, computers, and there are all women because that was judged to be menial work and an instate in offices, you know, doing highlevel thinking. And in this room of women was the foundation of our understanding of stellar revolution. And deborah sobel, you should get on this, just wrote a book and this called the glass universe i think, you just covered it as an omaha to the glass ceiling, the glass universe of little did behind Marty Minogue that when you calculate data that was collected from all the worlds telescopes of stars, there it was the source of the seeds of how and why stars are born with without the lives and die. Host visit booktv on cspan2 practice or a monthly in depth program, and this month we have author and nasa physicist Neil Degrasse tyson is our guest. As you know if you watched this program we spend three hours with one author talking about his or her body of work and this month it is doctor tyson. Beginning in 1989, doctor tyson is written several books, marlins two of the universe was his first big 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 you like to purchase the inner program this afternoon heres how you can do so. We will put the phone numbers up, 202 7488200 in the east and central time zones. 7488201 if you live in the mountain and specific time zones. Go head and start typing. If you can get to on the phone lines still want to ask a question of despair in a program, try on social media. booktv is our twitter handle. You could also make a comment on our facebook page, youll see doctor tysons picture. Just make it, right underneath. Facebook. Com tv and finally email, booktv at cspan. Org and will 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 is based are we talking about . 40 billion earthlike planets. Guest so it was hard earned to learn what the milky way was, ive considered that term we use dates back to ancient rome. Rome when they built streets, they called them ways. You look up at the night sky and see this milky band of light come and they just called it the milky way, the milky street, literally. 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 thi this is a wellknown feature in the night sky. Imagine just to be some cloud of light crossing from one horizon to the next. 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 a milky band of light, it reveals itself into stars, countless stars, that without a telescope are just so far away the light sort of puddles together. So we say wow, all right, but is this all there is, stars in front of her face and the stars that a far away that make this band . It would take until 1920 before we resolved the the debate about whether the spiral fuzzy thing in the night sky were actual other galaxies separate from our milky way. That got resolved very quickly after 1920, and especially with hobbles observation that there are companies or other entire galaxies beyond the milky way. And so we now 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, little galaxy, they galaxy. But you count them up, 100 billion stars per galaxy, 100 billion galaxies. 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 hes making a couple of times, edwin hubble. Who was the . Guest so theres a telescope of course after home the telescope was named after edwin hubble. He was a bit of a pompous kind of snooty astrophysicist back in 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 in 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 he worked her to they weve given him a Nobel Peace Prize for the discovery but aastronomers account get the Nobel Peace Prize we get them once a decade or so. Host you use the example in astro physics for people in a hurry, you talk about the skin of the apple where is we have traveled in a since, probably getting a a little wrong. Guest i took can tight i can tighten that. People think were in an ocean of atmosphere about the thinkings in of the atmosphere is to size of the earth what the skin of the apple is to an apple. What the shelac is to the schoolroom globe so this atmosphere is 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 hays part has particles that go up thousands of miles but the part that i said its functional thickness. Theres not an edge. Atmosphere on this side and not on that side. No. No. What this is in the daytime how come you cant see stars . You can ask that question. Its because the sun is out. No its not why you cant see stars. Not because the sun is out. You cant see stars because we have an atmosphere, and atmosphere scatters sunlight, rendering itself a glow so in the daytime our atmosphere glows sky blue and that prevents you from seeping the stars in daytime. If you go to the moon, you can be in broad daylight but there is no atmosphere. You can look away from the sun, theres the full nighttime sky. So you can ask the question, what altitude before the argentina do you have to travel before the atmosphere is so thin that you can see stares indaytime . Thats 100 kill almost temperatures kilometers up, 62 miles. Thats the functional kev mission we invoke about inning space. And that 62 miles is the skin of an apple to an apple as is our atmosphere to the size of our planet. Host how far out have we gotten from the earth. Guest the moon. With satellites or guest much further. As humanned we have gone to the far side of the map when the the moons orr orbit is not a perfect circle. Its an ellipse. So apoll apollo 8 or apollo 13 i think apollo 13 went to the moon when the moon was the nearest farthest point from the earth, and they went around the moon they never landed. Wanted to but they had the oxygen tank got destroyed. So, on the backside of the moon, in that trajectory, they were the farthest humidities humans have if been from earth so thats 240,000 miles away. So, in terms of spacecraft, we the voyager spacecraft a few years ago launched in 1977, given some gravity boosts by slingshotting around jupiter and saturn multiple planet, multicushion pool shot to exploit to the Orbital Energy of the various planets bass we couldnt launch it with enough energy to escape the solar system. Had to be had to steal energy from planets in order to make this happen and we did this on purpose. Victorier 1 has left voyager 1 has left all traces of she solar system. So doesnt mean just going past neptune, the last planet in the solar system. Its theres like comet beyond that. You go beyond and beyond and beyond 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. Thats a functional place to say you have left the solar system, and voyager has done just that. And how far away . I forth got the number. Forgot in the number. Several hundred time this earthsun distance. Its the farthest during its out there. Host still producing. Guest yes but you have to ask, are we still learning anything . Its costs money to keep something online and keep talking to it, and we go through these funding episodes often. You have something that is kind of working but exhausted the useful life but still taking money. So you shut this off and get a fresh project with new questions youre answering. Would you keep this going because you know it still works and might discover something . We have what are called senior reviews each year, where some of the most respected among us get together and decide which gets turned off and what switch gets turn on, and thats why its important that its our most respected scientist among us because then we judge that theyre being fair in these assessments. So, the voyager spacecraft, fartherrest thing we have sent. If you aim it to the nearest star, it would take 70,000 years to get there. So, give up all expectations that well be visiting other planets outside of our solar system anytime soon. Host 1973, how did you end up in Mojave Desert. Guest oh, yeah, 73. So i attended a camp, a special astronomy camp, for, like, geeky school kids. I was in 73, in ninth grade. That was my first year in high school because back then what the called sorry i was transitioning from ninth grade to tenth grade. Ninth grade was the oldest grade in my junior high school. Today they call it middle school and they end at eighth grade. I was transition examination was a geck request kid at this camp. Lived in the Mojave Desert april from light, very low atmosphere humidity, which is the definition of a desert so theres no cloud formation, very few clouds and we all lived nocturnally. You wake up at night and theres a who islam of telescopes. We had research project, and computers were very early. We hovered around this computer and tried to program it. We had it spew out numbers. This is like computation bc. This transition out of middle school to high school. Attended the bronx school of science and had the telescope and camera. I was just that was a happy summer. As city kid, the first time in the desert and all these creatures at night. Beloved black widows and scorpions. Say dont put your foot inure boot until you shake out he boot. Edyoull get venom into your its like, get me back to the city. That just might be mud. Thats all. And we at least i could talk to the mugger. But it was fun. It was fun and oh, so, my mother saw an ad for this camp, and she knew i had been interested in the universe for the previous five years of my life, and then she was what would i know where to even look for an ad or have that as an ambition. So my parents were particularly sensitive to what the interests of 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 serve our curiosity. I just lost my father in december. Yeah. He was 89, so fall life. Still miss him. He was wise, wise man, and i think in modern times, we forget what wisdom is. People who know a lot and talk a lot and theyre pundits and 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 come out with simple, easy to understand perspectives that things that will live you. Of course they live with you because theyre the digestion of so many different pieces that you didnt necessarily have access to but they did because the live longer than you and theyre observant their whole life jazz. Host 2012, you book space chronicles came out and you rite write that our nation is turning into an idiotcraciy. Guest what i that. Harsh . Host i noted the panel number. Guest yeah, okay, sure. Im normally softer with my critiques than that. Normally the way i would present such a statement would be we are behaving this way in these situations. If that continued we would then become an idiotcracy. Thats generally how i word that. I would double check after. 3 01 when the cameras shut off. Host do it right now while youre talking. Guest so, i think if people dont or they stop valuing discovery just as backdrop for space chronicles if i can just tell a brief back story to that. We have three hours so i assume see how i word that. The nation is turning okay. Okay. So, you got it. Host did misquote you . Guest its verbatim. So an idotcracy in the context in which ive discussed it, its not a system where people simply dont know things. 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 advanced 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 you have the absence ofknowledge, and then you have power over legislation that should be informed by that knowledge and is not, and then you have you come to 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. You either do the homework yourself just because youre not in school doesnt mean you cant or shouldnt do homework, doesnt mean you shouldnt keep learning. So, thats an obvious point that the viewers of booktv, of course, but the 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 its the last day of school because theyre graduating. Even just any other year up until graduation, summer i dont have to learn anymore. Where does that come from . How is it that your time in school can lead you to celebrate being out of school . What is that about . What is missing in the educational pipeline 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. Dont want to be lectured. Its a bad word. What is going on . So, maybe what were missing in the educational system is a remind thats right 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 teachers the right way or the curriculum . I dont have an answer for that. Im simply sharing the observation, and i know thats not helpful to just point it out, but i would claim a lot of the worlds problem wood be whoosh woo be solved is education was a joyous experience rather than something you want to escape from as quickly as possible. So, an idiotcracy i draw that word from the film, indy film called idiotcracy. Might be able to netflix it or something. But it was a world where the people in charge did not fully understand the consequences of the decisions they were making, and the absence of understanding came from an absence of awareness of how nature works. And theres a scene where theyre feeding gatorade to plants because the added for gatorade said it replenishes your nutrients. 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 in space chronicles, it contains an exploration 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. Host that was in 2012. Recently in the wall street journal, an oped, this is a quote in the trump era, says celebrity sisyphuss Neil Degrass Tyson who adds this the most important thing he has ever said, people, quote, have lost the ability to jump what is true and what is to judge what is true and what is not. Guest okay. So that sentence 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. You want to call the preelection era part of the trump era, okay. Of youre looking at something on the internet and you think its true and do not have the got a judge whether its not true, that another element, another ingredient in the recipe for disaster. So, this is this trump is a manifestation the trump era, where what is true and what is not has and almost that distinction notice made, where that has risen to high heights, i would claim those seeds 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 susceptiblity to this. I hate to stand round a are balloon record dish if anybody whos was record is 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 forth to turn something you might be skeptical about to something that is a newly established objective truth. That is not taught in schools. This should be a class, just on what science is and how and why it works. And that would transcend the physicsclass, the general science class, geology, its own course. So that when you are college educated, 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 consensus, no. You dont have that option. Its not how objectively established scientific truths are determined. It is true whether or not you believe in and it 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 that you dont allow to be true because youll prevent it or your political fill osi prevents it. You dont have that option if its objectively established truth and thats the entire point of this scientific enterprise, knowing what is true and what is not, and in particular, because like i said, scientist are humans, too, we have bias and we have all the stuff that guess on with every human in the 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 could have done it this way and not, 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 issue get a demerit. Thats not a real thing but its 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 meddling with their data because they have an idea what they want their data to show. Comes at a huge cost to their career. But even if they think they can get away with it, somebody else will ultimately find it, and if they schopf its wrong show its wrong we dont have any result at all and everybody is back to drawing board. So, objective truths im think that is what any law or legislation should be based on. If you based on anything else than you are imposing what might be your personal truth, your political your personal truth is everyone should fend for themselves and not get a government handout. Lets say thats you feel strongly about that. Well, that is how you feel. And in a free country, go right ahead. If you want everyone else to feel that, that policy, fine negotiating have that political discussion on the floor of congress because that will affect where moneys go. You fund this support program, do you not do you put in a tariff . Tooout subsidize . Do you not . Thats a political conversation. Go right ahead. And then the law that comes out will have political flavor it to. 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 cometly 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 will not say what we need to do. Im not a pundit trying to get everyone to agree with an opinion i might have. What i do instead space chronicles is collection of everything i have ever thought and written on Space Exploration and so it contains opeds and articles, speeches. Its an amalgam and its easy to dip in and out of but im not going to say, we should go to the moon. Whyll say is what ill say is that highly ambitious exercises , conducted by government, have huge exhibit huge force an the ambitions of nation. I dont think its an accident that steve jobs and billgates were 12 and 14 when weland on the moon. How impressional 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 goals and your trajectory of life. So each offering Space Exploration, doesnt matter. If you go into space, its adventurous and you have to invent stuff to make if youre advancing a frontier, you have to invent something. Because you cant just use off the shelf things. You have too use and invent things never been used or invented before. That takes awning newt, in ingenuity, innovation, clever engineers, scientist working together and you might even need clever lawyers. Why . Because, oh, i want to live on the moon. Who owns that plot of moon surface . Am i homestedding . Awant to mine an as steroid for natural resources. Who owns the as steroid and should anyone own the asteroid. Thats a legal frontier so everyone can become a participant the government does it first because the government doesnt have to satisfy a quarterly report. The government can open new industries, as it did with aviation, the government moneys from the government prompted innovations in aviation, in its earliest days, because im saying, um, 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 and make the hull a little bigger, carry more fuel. Can carry six bags of mail. And so there was a race to see who would then get the government contracts to carry air mail. So what happened . The fifth person says, i can carry 30 bags im make thing number but thank you sense is correct. Said wait a minute i dont need to carry mail. Just put chairs now i can sell seats and thus is born an entire industry of aviation. Because of certain investments a government makes that then enable subsequent entrepreneurs to exploit the new place the 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 good today . Mine an asteroid . Thats fine. But these two rockets together and bring your own equipment because i dont know how to dig on an asteroid. Youre a biologist and want to look for life on the surface of mars . Strap these together, a big rocket and this and there you go. We want a tourist jaunt around the moon. Thats these rockets and then the solar system becomes our backyard to do this requires huge levels of innovation but i claim once theres a first round of innovation that can establish the costs and risks and returns on investment, then private enterprise comes in and 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, how long it took, and quantifies things that 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, that will 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 urge to innovate. If you have something else, 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 it by the budget i forget 3 trillion, 4 trillion the numbers comes to a half 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 from the side of the dollar. And when people say, why is nasa spending all this money when we have problems here on earth . And thats assuming that if you took all the money we spent on nasa and then apply them to the problem offed the earth, all the problems would get solved. That very statement presewses that. Yet most of those people who utter that sentence do not actually know how much nasa is getting. Ive done this, like, people on the street, right . You ask in the people who klain about nasa. I says heres a tax dollar. How much are they getting in 0, 10 , 15 . No one half of one percent. When i tell them that, didnt know that . They made a space station and the Space 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 asked i pose the question to you, how much is the universe worth to you . Host one more observation and then well take your calls. You have been very patient. We have spoken sponsor an hour spoken for an hour now and have two hours to take calls. First i want to show this and im not getting it right. Four books you have here, the pluto files, death by black hole, space chronicles and origin. Whats special about these four books. Guest they did this some i was very impressed, your publish are the publisher, norton. These four different books and they all have different covers very spacey covers and i they decided to make the bindings match up into a coherent image. So this is the famous ring nebula, if you can see i got it. Expand its usually, much bigger than what is the extent of our orbiting planets. And so in terms of these, in terms of house allstars die, this is a nonexplosive death. With examples of explosive deaths and they are much readier, really looks like stella got spewed forth. This is rather stately, view it like a smoke ring. And i had to get all four of them. Host which i couldnt do. Lets begin with a question via email. Business from young man named bradley come his parents both work at cspan, longtime dave and paperwork at cspan for a long time aspect did you give them preference to get the question first . Host i mightve got this email directly, just. This is from april she says my son bradley who is 11 has a question for dr. Tyson. Heres a question. When going to a different planet, what aspect of traveling will be most important . Guest great question. Theres a lot of thinking about this especially at the Johnson Space center in houston, nasas headquarters for sort of a manned spaceflight. Its not called crewed spaceflight. They worry about food. Not only is there enough food but will you like the food. Diif you get bored with the food without affect your morale . And then your you less effectie doing other tasks. Do you need comfort food . Do you want exotic food, International Food . The water supply, is her enough water . Do you recycle water . If you recycle the water that means it collects all of your urine, filters it and you drink it back. Is that too freaky for you to do . Water is not uncommon in universe, but in space its hard to get to. You go got to lasso a comment if you want a whole split freshwater and we dont know how to do that. Other things. That time in close quarters with only one or two or three other people, months and months and in some cases years if theres a whole psychological dimension to that. Can we remain emotionally stable over those times . On earth people kill one another. They get into fights. Even in the film interstellar theres an astronaut fight scene which was like more of that . But nonetheless they showed it. Of course its two guys in astronaut suits fighting on an alien planet. So theres that. Will they miss their family, their loved ones at home . Theres the fact that if you fly without creating artificial gravity, that you are weightless beltline. Are you perpetually motion sick, or do you get used to it . And if you get used to it, other any other factors on the body . Your body expects one gravity, 1g we call it which is the equivalent of earths surface gravity. If you go to centrifuge, you can decrease the ground with the centrifuge, but through space you can create artificial gravity, good. If you cant, what is it like to be weightless for a year en route to your destination, or longer . We already know some of the answers, you begin to lose bone density to give the bones of a frail old woman if you keep this up. So that they get what exercise will give you the kind of resistance that we live in moving against gravity. I reach for this cup. I had to lift it against gravity. And Little Things that we take for granted are not something that is normal when youre in space. So all of these factors have to come together. Which is why you cant just send any old person into space. They have to be healthy, also want them to be competent in performing tasks, and you might want to throw in a medical doctor if the crew is large enough to get something might happen to physiologically. They need some engineers. You need the combination of expertise so that the collective safety of the crew is preserved. So all of this matters, and theres another book i can recommend called packing for mars, where all the Little Things you got to keep track of people he interviewed her for star thought and is a whole section of the star talk book which you didnt bring today. Host i went through it but it was too heavy to bring. Too much gravity trejo im sorry. The universe has some weight, all right . We will do this in zero jew semi then you have no excuse. They can toss the book and it will float into your lap. So great question. Host mary roach has been on this program. You can go to booktv. Org, you can watch the three hours with author mary roach as well. Ernie in new york youve been very patient figure on with Neil Degrasse tyson. Caller thank you. Its a pleasure to listen to mr. Tyson. I have a couple of questions. First, when does the big bang violate the conservation of energy . Could it be that we are going to have a bigger crunch followed by another big bang, followed by another big crunch ad infinitum . And i would love to see you run for congress. Senator tyson sounds really good to me. Thank you. Host why have you thought about this big bang . Do you work in some kind of scientific field or caller tactics in physics while i was in school, and the big bang special is interesting because 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. Originally there was Something Like a steadystate theory, which was abolished by the big bang. But it doesnt seem to preclude the idea that universe was always here. If the universe was always here, well then can we dont need a creator, do we . I. T. Host early in new york. Tragic i think of mental records of each one of those in sequence. A couple things first. All evidence we have ever obtained in the history of this exercise since the beginnings of cosmology which basically came to us with einstein and edwin hubble and others who have supportive data four. This includes a belgian priest even by the name of george lamacchia who was generally considered the father of the big bang itself. He wrote down the equations using einstein snood three of gravity to show that we would have a beginning and the past. So all data weve ever obtained is unequivocal in its conclusion that we are on a oneway expansion trip, one way. Host no crunch . Guest no slow down, stop, and we collapse. Collapsed. Not that it is prohibited by einsteinian gravity like any other sense of what the universe could do. We happen to be any universe with that is not the case. Its just simple. Now, given that its only a oneway trip, that means we had a beginning and the entire big bang description takes us from the beginning into the unlimited future. You might then ask, im putting to source and the questioners mouth but against two is a question can what was around before the beginning . We dont have data for that. So we dont know but we have top people working on it. One of the ideas which comes naturally out of the extensions of einstein said gravity and extensions of quantum physics is that there may been a multiverse. A multiverse within preexist our university we are just a bubble that came out of it, among a possibly infinite of the bubbles with other universes with slightly different laws of physics manifest within them. So to imagine universe was always a pair, not our universe because we had a beginning, but maybe the multiverse was always there. Thats possible. Maybe the multiverse had a beginning. Maybe the multiverse is one expression of what a metaverse creates. I mean, its a metaverse that each has bubbles of multiverses. These great universes. Is anything to prevent that in principle . No. That philosophical trajectory is not fundamentally different from thinking earth is it. We are one of the planets, get over it, and so its a demotion. What about the sun . Of course you know, the signage is a 100 billion other sons in the milky way the sun is one of a hundred billion. So we have good precedents for recognizing that the universe is really bad at making things in oneness. And that may be true even for the universe itself. That there could simply be multiple universes. I think that may been two out of three of his questions. You are keeping notes. Host he asked, you talk about this in several of your books come in your talks, religious aspect to the big bang theory, and then have you ever consider running for office . Guest the thing, when you use the word religion it comes with certain expectation of what it means. Here in the west, most places in the world when you say religion, it involves a document of some kind, a holy document, a holy book that prescribes what you should believe even in 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. And if we cannot generate evidence for it, then it ultimately would just simply be discarded or put on a shelf. So evidence matters in this. So if you want to call it a religion with evidence, okay, thats just a very fresh usage of the word religion in your vocabulary. I dont debate words with people. I dont value time invested in debating definition. Just tell me how your you are g the word and i will tell you whether what it agrees with it if youre using the word religion in a way that allows evidence to define what it is people think, say and do, then fine. Its all religion because thats what science does. It finds evidence that defines and discovers the truth of the world. Thats just a simple or anybody else in the world is using the word religion. They are using it to refer to some kind of spiritual elements that require faith in something being true, rather than evidence for something being true. Host political office. Guest i was once asked by the new yorthe new times, theree impasse, several impasses ago in congress and they just thought they would have fun and ask people who are definitely not politicians what solution do they have for getting to getting things to congress and how to fix it. If you were president what would you do . What solutions to have . So i wrote back, if i were president i wouldnt be president. You can find, its on my website. If i were president , just google it and my name, it will take you, it might take you to the New York Times part, but i duplicated it in my website because they cut out a paragraph that there was not enough space. So the full response to the question is there. It comes down to the expectation that if you run for office, you somehow can change everything. And im not into that. Im a little contrarian. My views are the little opposite of what a lobbyist does. Lobbyist goes straight to the politicians to influence the politician in ways that serve the interest of the lobbyist and who they represent. For me, any elected official represents people who put them into office. So as an educator what matters is not so much who the official is what matters is what is the state of enlightenment of who is doing the voting. Because if people, for example, all new recognized and valued what site is and how and why it works, they would never even dream of voting for someone who doesnt know that. Because that person within not represent the full interest. 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. Host. 88 of Congress Stand fr reelection every two years. So you can convince one congressman or another by vineyard to start start all over again. You educate the electorate, we are good. I go to the bahamas, elect people who will take this country into the future rather than back into the cave. Host next call for Neil Degrasse tyson comes from david in east hampton massachusetts. Good afternoon, david. Caller hello. Another Family Member of mine, i was telling him that you are on tv suggesting my want to watch, and he told me something that he heard. I dont know how accurate this is what the story is, but basically he said something about something called and him drive that is supposedly can try the spaceship quickly. Im just wondering, is that a real thing . If so, what is it and how does it work . And also i be interested to hear about other possible drives are spacious for longdistance travel like margaret even further. Guest thats a great story. Let me get some backstroke at right now our rocket ships, were still using what we call Chemical Energy. So you have some molecule which when you break it apart it releases energy. So when can we say its exothermic as opposed to endothermic where the reaction absorbs energy. And by the way we explain to this, if you ever see cold packs that you can buy in a drugstore where you sort of squeeze it and then the thing just gets cold. Thats an endothermic reaction. It is sucking energy out from it in private and venu vineyard het packs with opposite happens. You can give very clever with your chemistry make this happen. Well, rocket engines are endothermic. He squeeze the rocket and then [laughing] highly exothermic, what a rocket engine does. But with that chemical fuels since Robert Goddard back and experience back in early 1920s or so. 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 sale relative to the size of your craft so that you get maximal pressure from sunlight and i can accelerate you and et cetera q for free. And with the way you move front is he would tack just the way you would a sailboat. You attack into the wind or away from the wind, but here the wind is sunlight that you doing this with. Then you can navigate the solar system. Its a little slower but maybe you would ship cargo that way. And then send people faster. So the future of space expiration need not be limited to Chemical Energy. Our other drives. There is a plasma where you very high gas and you let very highly highspeed particles come out. The hotter the gases, the fact of the particles moving can come out. Thats a very little impulse propulsion but it is very high, so no, you not servants a very much when one particle comes up. But this accumulates and you can ultimately accelerate to very high speeds doing so. So heres the problem. This and him drive at all of these frontier means of propulsion. You can go real fast. Instead of taking nine months to get to mars you will take a month. Perhaps pick if you want to go to visit saturn instead of taking 20 years, you will take two years. But even if you got to the speed of light, near the speed of light, you will not reach the speed of light, near the speed of light, if you want across the galaxy, we will watch you do this by our time it will take you 100,000 years to cross at the speed of light. So the answer here, by the way, you will age much more slowly so you get there without much time having elapsed, but we sent you will see you take 100,000 of our years to do that. This is not, you come back, we would all have long to cut about you, that is if civilization is still here. So none of these solve the interstellar travel problem. Relative to a human lifespan. It would build one the years as individuals, sure, who cares if it takes a thousand years to get somewhere . Thats 11000 of your life. Sure, if its an interesting place worth going to. What we really need is wormholes. Wormholes. Just come you open a door here and on the other side of the door on the backside you in another part of the galaxy. By the way, viewers of this program probably read more books than see movies, but theres a movie called monsters inc. , animated kids film, theres a lot of good adult humor in it, too. These are monsters that work in a factory. These are monsters whose sole job in life is to scare little children because of course why else be a monster . They work in this factory in this factory takes doors, doors. And they have the door and theres nothing, its just a door. They opened the door and go through it and it is the door of a childs closet in the kids bedroom. And so they emerge on the kids closet to then scare the child. And they go back to the door and there back in the factory. Thats a normal. They didnt say that in the movie but thats a mother thats how i wormholes would work. And i tried to be clever one time. I was in Charlotte Airport drive to go from a big plane to a little plane. And i swear i walked five miles at this probably like just a mild but it felt impossibly long. So i tweeted, try to be clever and the second i can wait until we have wormholes, and that with all gates can just be adjacent to one another. Gate 400 is just the other side of the door of the gate number one. Someone tweeted back, dr. Tyson, if we have wormholes then you wont need reports. So busted, you got it. So yeah, thats host not proven, wormholes . Guest it works on paper but we dont know how to make one or keep what open because of the tendency to want to collapse. It works in Science Fiction. Thats the best place we can invoke a wormhole. But until then we are going to be pretty much earthbound. Host if we leftright now it would take us nine months to get to mars . Guest no, no. You can leave right now. You have to leave when mars and earth are properly aligned. So just to remind people, you see mars in the sky, start traveling to, no, no. You have to travel to where mars will be when you get there. So its a matching of the trajectories that matters here. And so what we call the minimum energy trajectory. Its one where you burn your engine and you shut them off, then you coast to mars until mars pulls you into its gravitational, you fall towards mars. That takes nine months. But if you run your engine stalled on which we cant do yet because we dont have enough fuel cut if we are filling stations along the way, you could do this, you fill up, burn your engines and then you are accelerated to mars. By the way, that would give you artificial gravity inside the ship because the ship is excelling. But to slow down yet to turn the ship around and then accelerate to slow down. But anyhow, if you do that you get to mars in weeks, a few weeks. But it will take a boat load of fuel to do that. If youll is cheap, why not . Just a filling station. Host lewis, san Mateo California you on booktv with Neil Degrasse tyson. Caller yes. Im in the bay area. Theres a show but im choosing mr. Tyson stated at a question about einstein, but i think what aspects Human Potential instead. Actually the thwarting of the knowledge from a Political Forces like for instance, right now. I think a woman astrophysicists in hawaii who wants, they knew exactly what they want to look for an they want a telescope, it would be perfect except for some american confronts her, some native hawaiians who consider it sacred. So cant do it. And so i guess they will build in the Canary Islands or something. I was just thinking another example would be in terms of political physics, there was supposed to be a super collider built in texas in the late 80s and early 90s which would dwarf the one that is in europe right now that no one wants, the largest one in the world. Because of the Texas Republicans saying that we cant build it, pay for it. They can pay for wars but they cant pay for, you know, science. So im just wondering, it seems to me like at this point we probably wouldve figured out dark matter by now. Be on a way to understanding dark energy. Even host youve covered a lot of topics here and well get a response in a second. Do you work in science in any way . [inaudible] no. I wish. Im unemployed but im actually my last universal basic income. I just tried to get some books from the library but its hard to concentrate. Host thank you very much. Dr. Tyson, anything you would like to say to . Guest thanks for those questions. I think books have always been a great portal to other places and other ways of thinking. And so happy to hear that youre in whatever is your lights trajectory in this moment. Books are giving you other things to think about. Theres two sean towels by the way. Theres a biologist and then a physicist. I assume you meant the physicist when you mentioned ko. But he might admit the other one. Might have meant the other one. In hawaii, the most perfect spot on earths surface to have a telescope. It is at 14,000 feet above the all moisture that could interfere with the view between you and the universe. Airflow from the ocean across the mountain is what we call laminar instead of turbulent pics of the images that you get to the telescopes are sharp rather than blurry. In recent years theres been resistance to adding more telescopes to the mountaintop and resistances come about from native hawaiians who value the mountain as the sacred place. And so if we are in a culture that respects cultures, has much or if not more than sites, then youll get occasions where you want to build something technological that conflicts with a religious or cultural or spiritual or sociological value, you dont and then you go somewhere else. This happens. So these are choices a country makes. What was manifest or is if theres a telescope that was going to be in hawaii and is now in the Canary Islands, which are spanked him and we were going to the particle accelerator but then the next particle accelerator to do what ours is going to do 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. One of the many interesting things about science is that science is not a national thing. In fact, its not anybodys national thing. These are objective truths he explored in the objective universe. So if enough states doesnt do, that doesnt mean no one else will. Other nations will rise up and for example, the Largest Telescope in the world today which focuses on radio waves, it used to be the telescope in puerto rico, largest dish in the world. In fact, many movie scenes are filmed there, including several important ones from carl sagan film contact. Now the largest way to telescope in the world is in china. So if aliens were sending signals to us and we have to find out of the den of cosmic radio noise, the chinese will be the first to committee gate with aliens, not the americans. So this will just continue. Its one of the signs that the United States is sort of fading on the world technological there are many but these are part of the pic if you do not think science matters, then in the future you will be buying products innovated elsewhere, and your Economic Health and stability, you could still be functioning country but will not be leading the world in anything that will be shaping tomorrows civilization. Host steve, Anaheim California please go ahead. Steve, anaheim. One more time. All right. I apologize, dr. Tyson. Steve is not there, but he brought up carl sagan. What was your relationship . Guest it wasnt, 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, that he was already famously he had not yet done cosmos but he was already famous turkey been on johnny carson, the tonight show multiple times. Cover stories in parade magazine. Magazine. He was already wellknown and id apply to cornell where he was on the faculty, and unknown to me the Admissions Office at my application to get his comment and reaction. My application was dripping with the universe at the time because i dont since age nine that this is what i wanted to do. Even sent me a personal letter inviting me to tour the campus and visit the lab so that i can make an informed decision of where i would attend. So yeah, i said yes. Got on the bus, went to new york city up to ithaca new york. This was in december in the winter. It was called and he indeed met me outside the building, took me to the lab, showed me the lab, reached behind her. I never forget, didnt have to grabbed the book on the shelf, one of his books and assigned to me. I just thought that is bad aspect. Wherever you hand lanes, thats a book that you written, i still have that book. It was this book the cosmic connection. Anna says to neil, future astronomer, carl. And so di that at the end of the day he drives me back to the bus station. He begins to still, not an uncommon thing in ithaca, new york, i would later learn, and then he says heres my home phone. If the bus cant get through, just call and you can spend the night with my family. Im thinking, im just like nobody from nowhere, and i remembered distinctly thinking, if im ever remotely as famous as carl sagan, that i will have a duty and obligation to treat students with this level of kindness and generosity that he has 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 that you are on. So thereafter i attended one of his talks he gave a couple of public talks. He blurred my second book. I dont know if you have a here. No, you dont. Host universe down to earth came out in 1994. Guess what i wrote a letter and said i dont know if you remember me, i was a kid who did this, but he was not, this was my second book, and so he read it, wrote a blurb. He said on page 17 i think you have a typo is this and not that. Thats a new he actually did go through the whole book. But that was it, until his widow who was one of the coauthors of the original cosmos, a woman with huge talent in her own right, you know, deeply insightful pic of fact for me i was a shes one of the most enlightened people ive ever met come just in terms of the ask a question was a something, i never thought hey, hey, thats, keep talking to him to sit and listen. You just talk for the next hour. And when you meet someone like that its the special thing. And so i was invited by the estate basically to host the follow on cosmos to the original. And she continued to coauthor that with a colleague of mine, steve souder who also coauthored the original cosmos with carl. So the two of them teamed up for the project and, but other than that, i mean, right if you encounters with carl, maybe five. But we were not great beer drinking buddies and hung at eight each others houses. It wasnt that relationship, nor was any mentorship which you would presume, get that with persistent oneonone exchanges. It was more, let me post a different question. You actually have to be close to someone for them to serve as a mentor. I dont think you do. You just have to be aware of the examples that they set. And what place they occupy in society. If youre observant, if they are successful with that, then just simply being aware, and if youre receptive to it, 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, theres a different impression of what people would be expecting of the word. Host how many day jobs to have right now . Guest i have one day job. Everything else is i am the director of the Hayden Planetarium. Theres another one which is buried within the Boston Museum of science. Doesnt have its own sort of storefront. Is the same hayden money, the hayden foundation. Well, we were the fifth planetarium in the United States. Not come as famous as hayden became in new york and it was the fifth after los angeles, its berg, chicago was the first come at another what i keep forgetting in there, and then came us. So all that happened very quickly, within ten years or so back in the 19 twins and 30. Between 19301935, five planetariums went up. So hayden was like when we gave us the money but in the foundation, he was a financier, the foundation existed and then theyre still active today they give money to programs that help kids after school to lose for the interest in wanting to learn. So yes, im director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of natural history. But also i enjoy writing. A perfect day for me is when the phone doesnt ring, theres nothing in my inbox and i can just think. I also want to get back to the lab. Not something i been in much lately, the proverbial lap. For me it would be at the computer producing data from telescopes, the rising things that can be tested, being a scientist can. I quickly missed that. Its 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, and then all the media starts focusing on it and then i can sort of back away i noticed. Then i go to the bahamas and recovering in a sneak into the lab and no one even knows im missing. All these other people on the landscape of scientific thats the ideal future, that you will never see me again. However delusional that plant is, i think about that all time. So theres that. When im invited i give public talks, although i cant honor all invitation. I get about 200 a month. Its obvious and impossible number. Host how many do you do . Guest we will sit down between zero and four, and ideally we stepped in together so theres a rapid succession that i can go back home. So theres that. Theres the universe i get a call from the press. Im a servant of the publics appetite for knowledge of the universe and science. A live in new york city as where we are right now. So which is a major newsgathering center. We have seen income although real headquarters are in atlanta, a huge building here in new york, abc, cbs, nbc. Host all very close to the Hayden Planetarium. Guest just a car ride and some of the comedic talkshows, they daily show and they are all here as well. So do people fly in and stay overnight to appear on those shows and im home for dinner. I say honey, ill be only 20 minutes. We finished taping and so thats a lot of time and effort. More than you might think because you might see on for the five minutes, in an evening news, for example, but theres that precall and yet to get there an hour early and vignettes could make up and ive got to change and look presentable, and then, so it shakes out, its like what i dont have that many other people might have are long stretches of hours where nothing comes in. Their certificate of thinking, a different kind of creativity that will manifest when you have long stretches where you are not found in 20 different direction. Theres an old saying which i agree entirely, it goes if you want to be more creative, become less productive. How do we define productivity . I did 50 interested and i went shopping and to do this. Look at productive i am. Yet, but did you create anything . Did you have a new idea . You invent something . Have you reflected on reality . Theres a whole other thing that the human brain does when given the opportunity. So i tried to carve swaths of time in a week for just that purpose. Host who is honey . Guest if you are saying hey, i we home for dinner. Guest i dont actually say honey but thats the trope. So my wife, alice, yesterday we both like, we are both foodies i would say. Not crazy foodies foodies but were in the door come in the front door but not in the middle may be. We our ingredients and how the food tastes. One of my great regrets is when we finally perfected by daish, it means we can no longer order it at a restaurant because we make it better than they do. And then go into a restaurant is a longer special. I make it really, if i say so myself, i make it really excellent rack of lamb that i can no longer order in a restaurant because its not as good as mine. So that takes that off the list. And my Roast Chicken is pretty good, too. So i dont order chicken in restaurants anymore. Unless its some very fancy dish where the chick is just incidental to help as it is, nbc the arson reof the chef. So well go into restaurants, slightly more expensive than it should be just to see if something rises up in the menu that you observe. So yes, we care about food and wine, but also go to the theater often. I love a good corny musical, a good dramatic play. We have the luxury to be able to do that as residents of new york city as well, she is a phd in math . Guest in mathematical physics actually. Host richard Springdale Arkansas youve been very patient. You are on with astrophysicist and author Neil Degrasse tyson. Caller hello. Gosh, its a pleasure to speak with you. My question is, around the fourth century bc, there is a great named hipparchus hickey discovered something called procession. Now, all those climate alarmists out there, and i dont want to be political, i want to be scientific, would you please explain procession and the effect it has on this planet . Guest share. Hipparchus, thank you for the question, hipparchus was a brilliant, i mean, i just imagine what he would be discovering today if he sort of woke up in the 21st century world come and to show them all these tools we have of science. Of course he had hardly any tools. He had just a brilliant brain of his. And so, so procession is we have our earth, well, multiple procession to anything that rotates will revolve, will generally process. A procession is if you have like sort of an elliptical orbit, and oval orbit around the sun and theres these planets sort of repeating that. Over time the shape of that oval will turn, even though the plan is continually orbiting. The shape will move around the Center Island that that would be the precession of the orbit. Earth spent on our access to a point off in one direction, the direction where north pole is, where paul s is the north star. However, polaris were not fixed in space doing that. We actually wobble and we execute one full wobble in 26,000 years. Okay . So for example, 13,000 years from now on axis will not be pointing towards the north star. It will be pointing towards a different object over here, if they did in happens to be one. So this is the procession of earths rotation. The way this manifests is on the night sky we call it was called the procession of equinoxes. So earths be quite a projected onto the sky equator onto this guy actually trips across the constellation over 26,000 years. Years. So what this means is, the first point of ares as an assange will tell you which says the sun is entering the constellation aries march 21. That is the declaration of the first point of aries. And beginning march 21 if youre bored in the next 30 days, astrology will say you are aries. The sun is in front of the start of that constellation. In the day people to do about this and so they said the sun is moving through the constellation. But, of course, the set is right in front of us, plus the sun is not really moving at all. But they did know this back when they made all this out, okay . Asserting that the universe was controlling her life. So his first point of aries actually drifts, and its been about 2000 years since this was laid out in the first point of aries was identified. And so if you now look at maps and ask them what is the sun doing when it is, when it is march 21, it is not entering aries. It is an entirely constellation shipped from that. Because 2000 years is about 112 of 26,000 years, a little less. Its a whole constellation off. So when you go to your horoscope, if you do this, and you say i am a scorpio or i am in this, and it tells you what you should be thinking or doing, the name of your astrological sign actually has no correspondence to whats going on in todays sky. It is a holdover from what people used to think 2000 years ago. This is a free country. Read your horoscope if you want. Im not even going to stop you. Go right ahead. I would expect that people voting for people in charge with window that you dont put someone who thinks the universe is influencing their life in charge of other people i know that it isnt. Host from the most recent book astrophysics, our people in a hurry, quote some of the water you just drank passed to the kidneys of socrates, genghis khan and joan of arc. Guest is that a question . Host if you could expound maybe a little bit. Guest you want an expedition. Im trying to, i try to make sure in pacifist for people in her, its not a very big book but theres a lot in there and i want to make sure that everything pages or so it was something there that which is blow your mind that was cosmically true but you got to go, what . In fact, i have to reread that just to fully absorb the significance of it. So heres the point in this cup of water, there is water in your, or is water in here, there are more water molecules in this cup of water down to our cups of water in all the worlds ocean. Thats how small molecules are good with that means is i take this and tossed it out, theres enough molecules in what i tossed to enter from the world water supply. Theres enough to scatter to every possible cup of water in the world. So if i drink this it comes back out of my body in some way or another any one of the halfdozen ways. So that reenters the environment, goes through clouds, goes to the stream, goes to the oceans. And given enough time it mixes completely. So socrates drank a glass of water. It is a certainty, it is essentially a certainty that some molecules that passed through his kidney were i in the class that you just drank. And this is a statement of the connectivity of life. And the Community Reality of our existence with one another. The interdependence of what it is we do and how it is we behave. Its not only that by the same reasoning, there are more molecules of air in every breath you draw than that our breaths of air and all the earths atmosphere. So by the same calculation, every breath you take contains molecules that pass to the lungs, bulges of nitrogen, not the occupant because that mixes back with the tree but certainly the nitrogen. Well, most of the nitrogen because theres a nitrogen cycle as well. But molecules which scatter quickly and easily throughout the atmosphere, some of those molecules pass to the one for whatever is your favorite historical character, jesus. It wouldve passed through their lungs. And so you want to think of us as separate and distinct from one another, not connected to the world but we are. For me what i think of in fast anyways. Host is there something that you studied or learned that you just cant get your arms around yet . Guest tons. Host that you just cant quite guest theres something so never expect to get my arms are either because theyre too big or they are too weird. Often mentioned i got arms around this, it implies that now that makes sense. But as i lead off the book, commenting that the universe is under no obligation to make sense to any of us. I dont have as requirement that i can one day put my arms around. Around. I can just recognize that it is there and accept it even if it just sounds completely weird. And so you accepted because of the evidence shows that it is true. Not because you have faith or because you want it to be true or because you needed to be true. Its because observation and experiment, verified observation and experiment, stimson the truth and that. Host you tweet at neil tyson is your twitter handle. Several million followers. Heres a tweet you se sent out a march 11, 2016. I occasionally wonder whether the entire universe is nothing more than a snow globe on the living room mantel of an alien. Is that a latenight tweet or something . [laughing] guest yeah. I occasionally wonder 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 you have any idea . Dbas know that you are about to steal all of their honey . They have a world where they are pollinating plants and coming back and making honey. Do they have any idea idea thate created that will for them, when it is 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 in which we think theyre happy. And, therefore, they do what it is they want. So we outsmart our pets, okay, we feed them and continue defeat them. That that keeps them there, and we can provide for them, but theres like, we do think that because wer were smarter than y are, they dont know the difference, right . 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. We want to think we have free will. We want to thank that we are in charge. But are we . So yes. Remember what time of day it i think tweets are date stamped and timestamp but i dont remember when i mightve posted at . Host this is an email from michael in florida. A question for neil tyson. Are we alone . Why are there any evidence about ufos . Y, is how he phrased it. Guest so it sounds like a reload on earth rather than are we alone in the universe . We are not likely alone in the universe, if you look at how common the ingredients of life are, is, how common it is, hydrogen and oxygen, nitrogen and carbon. We are made of this stuff. Thats the foundations of organic chemist, carbonbased life. 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, which life is based is the most fertile connectivity that is. And carbon is abundant across the universe. So if the flight somewhere else it is probably based on carbon thats not come its fascinating bias but is not an unjustified bias. And so the universe has been around 14 billion years. Plenty of time to evolve all minutes of creatures out there, particularly microorganisms. We have no reason to not think of microorganisms as aliens. They dont have built a ship. There is just alien life on another planet. Now, have we been visited . Thats a different question than whether we assert that theres life elsewhere in the universe. By the way, we have people looking for life in the universe as well as not own any kind of life, but intelligent life. We tried to be clever about how we can do those experiments. On earth what the ufo community puts forth as evidence is weak on a level that in any scientific circle would be kicked out of the lab room. Your things like eyewitness testimony. Im sorry, this is not working, okay . No. I dont come if you walk into a conference and say this is true because i saw it, you get laughed off we are not send you didnt see. Were simply saying that you cannot present that as evidence for something that you all of us to embrace. Okay . So i went as tesla is of something that is valued in scientific circles. I dont care what it is youre looking at. Especially if it is something that would be truly extraordinary, like visitation by aliens. I need more than your eyewitness testimony. I dont trust your eyewitness tesla and if you tell me the moon rose yesterday, okay . I need better date of the net. I probably would trust that because thats not extraordinary, but on that level, but as your claim gets more and more extraordinary, the less confidence im going to place in your day to take a system that eyes and your brain. It is what insights we invent methods and tools of measurement, to replace, because we know how people that are, how nonrepresentational but art of reality. 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. At the end of that sentence. Put the happens is people keep talking and they say, i dont know what it is therefore it must have been intelligent alien visiting from outer space coming to earth to observe us. Wait a minute. You just said you didnt know what it is. It was unidentified. Now youre telling me what it must be . The fact that you admitted you didnt know what you are looking at includes all the rest of the sentence that just came out of your mouth. Okay. Im not going to stop you from trying to find the alien. Id love to meet some aliens. I have such low confidence in your claims that there aliens that i will not be investing any of my time but im glad you are. Go right ahead. The day you find an alien, i need Something Better than your video camera showing that its unidentified and i need to be better than your eyewitness. Ideally, in fact, bringing the alien. All right youre good to go. Im not going to stop you from doing that. Everybody has a video camera today. Everybody. Where are the flooded youtube postings of peoples experiences inside a flying saucer, shaking hands with the aliens. Where is that . We had video of extremely rare phenomenon now because everybody has a video camera. We have video of buses tumbling in tornadoes. There was a day where you would say oh my god that bus will tumble let me go home and get my shoulder mounted a video camera so i can fill the straight no, you got your ass out of there to see that happen. Everybody has a video camera. We had a rare surveillance of things. Okay . If you had been adducted and got and had an encounter with an ailing, get people to get video of it. Then were good. As long as its unidentified to you, has i made myself clear enough . By the way, i have very high experience looking at the night sky in the day sky. Okay knowing what can happen in the night sky and in the day sky i have seen things without this extra background that i have that i would have easily reported as an uso to police department. I know this. Because ive studied phenomenons of the sky i can identify it. Here are clouds that build above mountaintops that took circular form that are very High Altitude , if the mountain is high, the cloud is even higher. Some are called lenticular clouds but these clouds are very high up. They can have perfectly cylindrical states. Watch what happens, the sunset. The sun sets for you at the bottom of the but it hasnt yet set for those High Altitude. They can see beyond your horizon the sun is still there for them. Its dark for you and the cloud is lit by sunset colors, orange, red, its vibrant and its circular and it looks for all the world like the mothership just came and docked over the mountaintop. If you are susceptible to wanting this to be true, then that is for all the world, the mothership. Where to me, thats a cloud that forms naturally over mountaintops when hot air goes up and cools abruptly and water condenses out of it. Then people say this is a good eyewitness, or a brigadier general. Is the person who is the eyewitness, human . Thats all that matters. You are no more susceptible or less susceptible than anybody else. I dont care what your title is. I dont care if youre a military pilot. It doesnt matter. I dont care. You are human. You have to do better than that. And if you get adducted, i tell these people, if you get abducted and their poking you, poking your gonads as all aliens do, weve been told. Tell the alien to look over there and snatch something off the shelf. Just do that, okay . Then go back to it. Then when they let you out, you pull it out and say look what ive stolen from the alien spacecraft. An alien poster or an ashtray. You can then take this to the lab and see if it if it is alien manufactured. If an alien came here on a spaceship from across the gaps of space anything you pull off the shelf is going to be interesting. Were still waiting for that to happen. Host every guest we have on indepth we ask for their reading, what are their career influences and things like this. These are the answers that we got from Neil Degrasse tyson this is Henrietta Levitt was looking at will get to this magnificent images was looking at images taking from south america because of the whole sky had to be covered. There was a second observatory built in peru to photograph the stars of the Southern Hemisphere she was looking at images of the clouds and she discovered a couple thousand variable stars and made a fundamental discovery about the pattern of variation that the stars that took the longest time to go through their cycle tended to be the brightest stars. She figured that all of the stars she was looking at were roughly the same distance away so the one that looks brighter really were brighter. That observation led to the first usable yardstick for measuring what we would call the galactic distances and intergalactic distances in space. Her work enabled the size of the milky way to be determined. I might be getting ahead of the slides but they figured out the milky way was not the only galaxy in the universe. The universe, in fact, consisted of multiple galaxies. It would be fair to say that at the time they werent sure if the universe was maybe just a few hundred thousand lightyears across and maybe that was it. That was it. Even the shape of the universe. This led to us looking at what geometry of geography clusters and to place ourselves within that geometry. You watch this and other programs online at tv. Org. Heres a look at books being published this week. Former secondary estate Condoleezza Rice examines global struggles for independence and democracy. The surprising david garo explains the pre president ial life of barack obama in rising star. Pat buchanan, former speechwriter and Senior Advisor to richard nixon, offers an inside look at the Nixon Administration in nixons white house wars. They recall john f. Kennedys president ial campaign in road lot. Also being published this Week University of pittsburgh british history professor holger hook looks of the war crimes committed by the british and continental armies during the revolutionary war in scars of independence. Eva dylan reports on her fathers career as an american Intelligence Officer and his relationship with the cia top soviet double agent in spies in the family. Sally Martin Freeman shares the story of two us naval mens effort to find their youngest brother was listed as missing in action in the philippines during world war ii. The jersey brothers. Rachel pearson resident physician offers her thoughts on the American Healthcare system through her own experiences in no apparent distress. Look for these titles in bookstores this coming week and watch for many of the authors in the near future on the tv on cspan two. Neil degrasse tyson. We asked you your favorite books , your influences and what youre currently reading. We show that your audience but you sent us extra notes instead of just titles. You gave some explanations including, on the day you were born you say is one of your favorite books by deborah frazier. Guest Childrens Book. If i had to write a Childrens Book and the book i would have written but i dont have that talent that she did. 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, to orbit around the sun, that the whale is doing in the ocean the arctic turns are doing, its a walk through nature. It has nothing to do with the baker or the politician, those are other things that were happening on the day you were born but nature is the what the person to the child youre reading the story is being exposed. I think its beautiful. Even, i get misty eyed when i read it. Its so beautiful. Its nature brought to life for someone who cant read yet on the day you were born. Host a book that your reading science and humanism by erwin schrodinger, you call it an elementary assessment of the role of value in science inviting progress and. [inaudible] guest i like reading through the history of how people thought. Especially as it may have influenced by the politics or culture of the time. 1950 is the dawn of the cold war and honestly, its before the wall went up but it still feeling the aftermath of the Second World War, the divide of the world, the world powers and this is a scientist who was around and lived through it, he made contributions to quantum physics and decided to write a little bit for the public. Thats not his first book. We have several books that hes written for the public. One of them is, what is life where hes talking about where physics manifests itself in biology and these are short books but a friend of mine gave it to me. I saw it on the shelf and i didnt know shorting dirt wrote this. Yes i wanted tomorrow. It happens to be on my books up at this moment. Host you want to participate in our conversation with Neil Degrasse tyson this afternoon, 7488200 if you leave in the Eastern Central time 7488201 in the pacific time zones will also cycle through our social media addresses so that you can contact us that way. If you cant get through on the phone lines we have about 50 minutes left with our guest this afternoon and heather in Jacksonville Florida you have been very patient. Please go ahead. Caller hi there. Its an honor to speak with you. I have a question about your education. I just finished my bachelors degree and earned it two weeks ago in occasions. Im trying to figure out. [inaudible] thank you. Im trying to figure out what to pursue or should i go back and get a fouryear degree because i like engineering and physics how did you figure out if you wanted to pursue an advanced degree and how did you end up paying for it yes, i am taking notes. Guest this is a great question. Advanced degrees especially in academic subjects subjects as opposed to medical, law school, thats thing, when i think of an academic subject i thank you have to really really love the subject. Right . In middle school you dont have to love medical school to know that at the end you want to be a medical doctor because your friends were medical doctors. Or an attorney. To enter academics, graduate school, you have to really, really love it. Youre not going to get much money. While youre in school and when you get out of school you wont get much money. The rewards are the act of pursuing previously undiscovered truths. In any field, it could be literature, history, art or if its academic, the sciences. Because also, things will not always go as you want them. In the sciences for example you could be in a lab and design an experiment and nothing works. You dont get the result you expected and you dont get a result worth publishing. Start again and its two years of your life. If all of what i just said is a chore, if youre saying, i dont want to be in that situation then no, stay away. But if in your life you have learned to love the questions themselves without regard to whether you asking a question and designing an expense to answer it leads to an answer, then this is that life. So, its a 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 you have a car, house, and a family and there are no unhappy academics for the absence of money. Okay . Theres that part. How do i pay for well, in my field we also worked as a teaching assistant with participates in the enterprise at the school undergoes so that was worth a salary. Not very much money and many people had 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 what if youre in debt thats a contrary and view that most people have, to most people but my point is if you get to do what you love and some debt becomes associated with it that you paid on the debt, the debt takes you ten years, so what 15 years, so what we willingly walk into 30 year willie mortgages when we buy a house. Youre going into debt. So how do we justify it because the real estate value will be higher at the end so this is an investment. Thats what we tell ourselves. For a lot of the time that is true but obviously, there are important exceptions to that especially in 2008 but lets look at your education its an edge investment. Were investing in your enlightenment and future happiness. Shouldnt that be worth at least carrying some debt such as the debt you be carrying in a Home Mortgage . I was never afraid of debt. I was in debt college. And some in graduate school. I didnt pay off my college debt for, when would it have been 15 years later. As my salary kept going up, and im not talking a lot of money here, im talking about going from Student Money to regular person money, all of a sudden the debt that i had accumulated it so earlier it looked smaller and smaller. Its because i was yielding more and more money and so, they need a thousand dollars. I remember paying 10 a month to start off paying the debt. I got my first job and i could pay 50 a month. Then i could pay a hundred dollars a month. So, yeah, i was investing in myself. Thats my answer. As they say, 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 tysons 2001 book, the sky is not the limit essentially autobiography, in many ways. Guest a memoir. Host harvard of University Texas and columbia and the favorite sentence in that book, lets read it for our beers. That ones genitals on fire seems more like the absence of a creative solution to money problems rather than a need. [inaudible] [laughter] guest was that a question. Host if you can expound on that that would be fine. [laughter] guest yes, so. In high school and college i was very athletic and in high school i was the captain of my schools wrestling team but in college i continue to wrestle. I also wrote my first love was worsening. I also was a performing member of two different Dance Companies i like to be in strong and limber but also graceful, flexible and graceful. Dance is that. If its nothing else. I just enjoyed what it could do and before my body. In graduate school, i continued to wrestle and grow and dance. When i should have been. I should never have left the lab but i continued this and i started graduate school in texas where i met my wife, the woman would be my wife. But before all of that, i had my fellow dancers and they hear my money problems and they say, 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 describe. I said, well. I was really struggling. I probably would not have struggled as much, i know i would not have circled as much if i had a roommate but i wanted to live alone. I spent four years in college a roommate so that increased my expenses. Anyhow, they invited me down to check it out. I saw them come out with this jockstrap that have been set on fire. It had been ignited and they were shaking their hips to that jerry lee lewis, great balls of fire. In that instant i said, maybe i should be a math tutor. Im embarrassed that that solution did not occur to me earlier. Of course, i can tutor map. I majored in physics. We know math and physics. A math tutor, you need that anywhere. Anyone who needs a math tutor. From then on i tutored math for some few dollars an hour and that was fine. It enabled me to make my ends meet. Host mr. Tyson is our guest and chris is calling in from goldsboro, north carolina. Chris youre on book tv. Caller thank you. It was great seeing you here on a. M. Joy as well with doctor tyson. Guest thank you. Caller i always try to catch moments when youre on tv. Guest both of these are life i went from that studio, got in the car and now im in the studio. Caller i knew you were in new york because you had to go from one player to the other. Dang, he got there awfully quick [laughter] guest i had a wormhole. But dont tell anyone. Caller my first question involves what ive seen on the series on the 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 involved the speed of matter excelling faster than light within the region of the black hole because of the force of gravity. My question relates to if these conditions were met outside of a black hole, for instance, it happened near a planet or a solar system. What would be the aftermath or the effects of such an event occur . Host thank you, chris. Guest if i understand your question, youre talking about accelerating mass to the speed of light or beyond the speed of light and what effect would that have on its environment, i think that was oppression. Host whether thats feasible guest there is 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. We joke that the speed of light, its not just a good idea but its the law. Its not a matter of we havent invented a way to do it with which was the case with the sound barrier. Consider that anyone who said will never go faster than sound, ever, well, except that the tip of a bolt with that crack that you hear is moving faster than sound. Not only that but we have guns at the time with a bullet emerged from the barrel faster than sound. For anyone to say man will never go faster than sound, no. No. Just because you dont know how doesnt mean we never will. Okay it is different with regard to light. This is not an engineering limit it is a physical limit of nature. Like i said, weve never seen it weve tried and its never worked. Theoretically, its not possible now, that doesnt prevent something ill take the question beyond that. It doesnt take mean that something doesnt exist faster than light. 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. We hypothesized a particle that does this we call the tachy on from the greek rune tachy asked meaning fast. So, that would be really cool if tachy on existed in this world and people have proposed experience for how to detect them and weve never found them. Just because its okay in the equation doesnt mean that nature has to abide by that possibility. The fun part about tachy on is that lets say youre walking down a fourdoor and you slip on a banana peel and fall. And i say let me prevent that. I can send him, a text, to warn him about the banana poop. Because the tachy on will go back in time and i send a message and i say watch out for the banana peel. I send off the text. Ten seconds before you get to the banana peel you get a text and what do you do when you get a text, you reach into your pocket, pull out your phone and start reading it. While you are reading for text it says watch out for the banana peel and you slip on the banana peel. But you would have, you would not have slipped on it if i had not distracted you with the text that said to look out for the banana peel. You wouldve just been walking down the corridor. Thats an interesting case where the act of trying to interfere with the past created the very thing that you tried to interfere with. So, 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 theres nothing you can do to change it because the act of trying to change it created the event that you try to change. Host klein observatory in just saw on book tv neil tyson list agnes clerk as an influence she chronicled the rise of astrophysicist and a remarkable setting. Guest yes, agnes clerk, i have most of her books. I meant to say, many of her books. She wrote in the 19th century which was a golden age of astronomical discovery. We dont think of it that way because you have much bigger telescope today and relativity and quantum physics, all of those are 20th century discoveries but the 19th century, if you are around at the time, you wouldve been celebrating how far science has come. Keep in mind, there is more science going on than ever before and thats a golden age for you. Nevermind what later. In that moment you feel like youre at the top. I have a book from 1890 that i wrote a book on the sun in 1895 where we just learned so much about the sun that i have to have a new addition. Its celebrating this little bit of five years of discovery. What she did was chronicle cosmic discovery not only historically from the agent to the present but she has a book, shes the popularizer of then modern astronomy. Its for astronomy became what we think of astrophysicist. Some of my books are doing just that. I have a book called the pluto files chronicling the demotion of pluto. If she were alive today she would have written that book. I was delighted to learn that there were people who cared enough about science to learn about it. So there i dont know about, the more the merrier. Host 12,007 you wrote the book at spike, black you put a gentleman who in may 1001 said theres nothing new to be discovered in physics now. Guest yeah, that was a boneheaded thing to say. He had a certain arrogance to him. Sort of a physicist eric evans were in physics there is no good justifiably considered the anchoring subject of all the sciences. The weather gets to your ego is a physicist. It would be discovered by albertine dang. Eight years after that, 10 years after that it would be discovered for your soft or that, all of quantum physics would come down the pipe. So thats got to be the most embarrassing statement ever uttered by any scientist ever. Whose otherwise whose acted and the kelvin temperature scale. Host the 20th century ended without us noticing and triggering a composition 90 of that matter. Refiner to numbers. Theres about 85 . So let me say it not that we dont know what 85 of the matter is. We dont know what 85 of the gravity is. Look around the universe and team stars. That includes everything you can think of. Stars moons, planets. All this added up to 15 of what is driving the gravity of the universe. Well dark energy which is responsible for the acceleration of the universe and the number is even higher. I can say with some per physician precision, 95 of everything driving the universe today, which includes what we called dark matter, which i reference in what we called dark energy. Those combined we can measure their existence but we know nothing about them. They are driving 95 of what is going on. Each of those gets a full chapter in astrophysics or people in a hurry. I will not let you get by the missing here, no mnf loving, respect and if not letting how we came to discover the greatest mysteries in my field. Dark matter and dark energy. Host astrophysics for people in a hurry as his latest book it just is calling in from anaheim, california. Go ahead. Caller hello . Yes go hello. Caller i want to say its a great pleasure to talk to you. Im a huge fan of yours. My question come is talked about the issue of longdistance space travel. The importance of psychology and the importance of gravity. I have a background in psychology and its curious thinking about things like the connective gap and things like that, everything weve ever done in many idea weve ever had has had the effect of gravity on a spirit if you announce your gravity environment for a long enough time for thinly populated the planet there is a different gravity. Would that affect the transmission of electrical and chemical signals in the brain . That is an excellent question. I can say it is not likely. Experiments show that the answer is in fact no. Her most things that matter. Consider the following. When you are ending up and you have thought in your hungry, love, hate, whatever, normal cycle emotional thoughts. And gravity is pointing downwards. Now you just lay down to no gravity is pointing out the side of your head and you have followed the same thought. Somehow your brain capacity is not deeply altered by this. You are still in a one g environment, and the fuji is not pointing any completely different direction. So you look at physiologically your veins. Why does lets circulate at all . Does it require gravity . Not really. Your blood circulates standing. His circulates horizontally. Any angle in between because your vessels bump on their own. So why should we think all of a sudden will just stop. Not only that, the lecture of magnetic forces rightparen to the power of four to eight times more powerful than gravitational forces. So all you let go of synoptic phenomenon going on in your brain doesnt give a rats asked about gravity. It is functioning completely independent of it. No chemically common you have chemistry going on in if it is floating around, they are mutually buoyant. They dont care about gravity either. They are floating in the water. Suspended in the water. So that is it they are living in the chemistry of molecules doesnt care either. So to slight any of this works at all under these very different conditions. If you are in low gravity and you grow up in low gravity, that can affect your musculature of course. Everything weighs less than it would on earth. What you do on mars coming counterweight everything to weigh as much for you on mars as it went on earth. When you come to earth, everything weighs the same as you remember. That is the kind of thing you 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 come back to earth and they explore the medical problems he has. Minus capacity for thought. Host this is a first. Dark tea photo is a longtime cspan employee for two signs. They dont send them in for the politician. They send them in for you. Jack is 14 years old. Through his fathers old and according to mark, theyve been having a weeklong debate about mass that took place for half an hour in the groceries door. Jack, 14, one to know that since there is matter and antimatter, is their antimass since there is the existence of mass. Drew wants to know what mass there was at the big bang and what triggered it. Be my great question. So its not obvious on first pass that antimatter shouldnt have antimass. Inc. About it. Anything off in quantum physics with other certain quantity of features that are not familiar in our everyday lives or particles of the days like angular momentum, this sort of thing. If an antiparticle has antimass, cannot mean would that mean that its antigravity . This is an implicit consequence of the question. It turns out no it doesnt have antimass. Nor does it have antigravity. It will attract you no matter what. Your mass actually drops out of the equations. It only matters how far away you are to determine how much im going to attract you to me. So now, there is no negative mass. In the original equations where they were first name, it showed up as a negative mass in the big question is how do we interpret this . It got interpreted as having negative properties and all these other regimes, opposite properties, justifying the turn antimatter. Matter and energy are interchangeable. Where did the universe come from . The frontier of cosmic research. Weve got top people working on it. Otherwise we dont know for sure. We said earlier it may be embedded in the u. S. Where the multiverse came from. One of these at a time. So we dont know. We know that it exists and we are describing and ever since they came to existence. Host is a concern . S. So its on my bucket list. The largest machine in the world is the European Center for Nuclear Research and i think that is how you parse out the acronym. Theyve got the largest particle accelerator in the world, the large hydride accelerator. Now one or two years ago, so its on my list. Postal george from eagle, colorado. Go ahead with your question. High, that her taste in dr. Tyson, it is a pleasure to talk to you. Can we ever harness the gravity and use it for propulsion . Guest that is a great question. You are right. Thats been on peoples minds forever. If theres a way to do it, we have yet to figure it out. 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 is that we can increase that or reduce it. There still people this day they think nasa has a room where you go when in your floating in the zero gravity room. That is not the case yet the closest we have is the neutral buoyancy, which is nasa for a big swimming pool. Astronauts working on the Hubble Telescope and practicing spacewalks to a submerged in that swimming pool. It is in houston, texas. Russia has a counterpart to it in their space center as well. If you can turn off gravity right below the launchpad of a rocket, and that sealed the rocket is using, the acceleration that we gave you if you went away for him zero g. We just have not figured out how to control gravity that way. Its always the spurs do not been associated with the concentration of energy. Host january 29th, to eat from Neil Degrasse tyson piercing rutgers got crazy everyday to not get the last time the worldwide. Guest yeah, people reacted heavily to that one. Why do i mean by that . The First World War is this what we call civilization . We are digging trenches in the wholesale slaughter of other human beings. A few decades later, the Second World War, 50 Million People died. You can run the numbers on this. A thousand People Per Hour were killed in the Second World War. A thousand per hour. You look today and theres like maybe a terrorist attack in a dozen people are dead in Headline News of the last several days. Im glad it is Headline News. That tells me how far we have come when a thousand people are dying per day during the Second World War was not itself news. It was land is taken more battle. Weve won the battle are reconquered this one. The terms are not how many people died. What political gain of leave put into play . His vietnam can go further back in their civil war and slavery. I dont know. I felt compelled to reflect on this, wondering whether the natural urges to sink into some crazy behavior and react how crazy it is then built ourselves out of it. Take him long enough to slip back into it once again. So for me it was very sad. But i want people to reflect on what is happening before. They were crazy thinking this. How could they think this way . What were they thinking . Ask yourself in 20 years what they will be saying about us. I do a lot of the reading of the history of science and the history of culture and books printed in the day so that you feel what they are feeling, not just recounting, but look at the word they are using. We look back at the Temperance Movement in the banishing of alcohol. How could they have done that . If you read offense 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 work spaces. They see the build up. It is fair. If you were alive back then, theres no reason to think he wouldve said no, you shouldnt do this. You just take everybody with the. Culminating. We dont have an equal right amendment banishing the production and sale and consumption of alcohol outside of church religious ceremonies. So what will people in 20 years be reading about today to say what were you guys thinking . Its obvious, cant you see the trees . Host any significance to the fact to the factor when at january 29, a week after the inaugural . Guest im sure there was something that we thought was just people reacting. It wasnt so much the election, that there is the election, the reaction to the election plus what he says about the election i mean, the inauguration and they think it was just a total conduct of everybody, just at odds with one another, at war with one another and killing one another, saying things that you cant imagine in a civilized world you would say to one another. I was really just reacting to that. Host ewart on commissions for the past two president s, correct . Guest i was onto white house commissions under president bush president george w. Bush and under obama we had met several times but i was not in a formal Advisory Committee to him. Right now towards the end of obama and now into the trump administration, i serve on a board at the pentagon. So i have these occasional tours of duty when im called in to washington. Im delighted to serve just as a citizen. If i have expertise and insight that can help governments, i would be irresponsible to decline such an invitation. And of course its unpaid. They reimburse food and whatever, but it is otherwise im paid. So it is my civic duty. Theyll never pick me for jury duty. An zero for three on not one. The least i can do is help the federal government make decisions where they need to. Host a couple minutes left with Neil Degrasse tyson. Thomas in ohio, you might be the last caller. Go ahead. Caller hi, neil. I appreciate your passion for science. I have perhaps a simple question. In your forensic tests, you can often point to the center of an explosion. The big bang is sort of like an explosion. 10 astronomers point to the center of the big ring and what did they get from looking in that direction looking from other directions . Thank you. Thats a great question. The big bang explosion. Its one thing to speak of an explosion of a fireworks display or bomb forensically and analogize it to the big bang. There is a limit to where those analogies can take you there is a point where they fail. Because the big day is an explosion not only of days, there is a center to the explosion but you dont have access to it. The center to the explosion was 14 billion years ago when everything they did this today within the same plays at the same time. So if you think of to go back to you might have heard this analogy to the surface of the balloon, where we lose one dimension just so they can describe it. But in this one rough dimensions we can describe it among ourselves in the way the human brain is wired to see it. Imaginary universe has the universe has the surface of the living and dry spiral on it. As you inflate the balloon the difference between all galaxies rose that is precisely what is going on in our universe. Not because the galaxies are separated from one another within the space, it is because the space itself is stretching. This is prescribed by einsteins general theory of relativity. Our experiments bear this out. So here is the universe now, but yesterday was a little smaller. So if you want to ask where is the center of this surface, thats like asking where is the center of the surface of the earth . The question actually has no meaning. You know to not ask that because it is the wrong question given the geometry of what is going on. But i can ask a different question, not where is the center of this universe the surface of the sphere. I can ask when is the center of the universe and it is 14 billion years ago. So the timeline in a sense is that doctors pointing straight out from the center through the surface of the universe we live in. As the balloon gets smaller and smaller, you are going back and back in time. That is the center of that explosion or 10 million years ago. Post. Adrian in memphis in. Hi, adrian. Caller hello. Im in seventh grade i saw you in this. My question is about a cool. I want to know what it is and blackhole, and how do you know it you sound like youre in college today. There is hope for the world. So i guess if youre a defendant grade, you would have them maybe four years old when i published the book death by black hole. There is a whole discussion about black holes and also how they can kill you. If youre standing on the surface of the earth and you want to escape earth, unlike what your grandmother told you, what goes up, must come down. It is a speed with which you can pass something so that it never comes back ever to earth. We get the word for that in physics. Its called the escape velocity. For her it is that speed seven miles per second. Seven miles per second. When the astronauts went to the moon, they traveled to speed when they turn them off. They had enough speed to get to the point where the moon can then pull them and away from the earth. So they sounded like 6. 8 miles per second. About seven miles per second. You can match the earths gravity were stronger, you would need a higher escape lacivita to leave and never come back. The sun has a higher escape velocity then earth does, is stronger reality at its surface. It is something John Mitchell does, an astronomer from way back centuries ago. Suppose i had a star that had such high gravity that light traveling at the speed of light is insufficient to escape. If that were the case, the star which is dark and and contain all the light that it wanted to generate. And he called this a dark star days. This it turns out to do the calculation correctly requires signs and secretions, not classical equations of. To get the correct right answer. When you do this, you have what we call a black hole. We have examples of blackhole in the galaxy. No, you cant see them directly because theres no light coming as he was back. Sometimes you can see distortion of the fabric of space and time in their vicinity. The star field behind them get distorted. Make the left instead of going straight and good you dont want to get into the blackhole, drawn drawn into its gravity. Expires down, gets hotter and hotter. Before it enters, it radiates brightly and ultraviolet and xray is. We have xray telescopes. As powerful as the Hubble Space Telescope it doesnt take the pretty pictures. We have xray telescopes that signs and maps these articles across the galaxy so when we finally goes days traveling, you know what to avoid. Host dr. Tyson coming of one minute to answer this question from a 2012 boat space chronicles. Friday, april 13, 2029. So actually there is a close approach of an asteroid rediscovered. Its orbit crosses earths orbit and sometimes across this very closely. April 13, 2029, this asteroid the size of a rose bowl will come so close to earth that it will get between our Communication Satellite and us. These ones that go twice the moon distance, four times the earth, we call them close calls. But they are not. This one youre invading our space. It turns out the asteroid will not have a church or read that will then head to in 2036. There is a periodicity where we are in the same place in our orbit. The big worry at that time, will it actually hit us . They are good enough not to say no it will not hit us, but there will be a close approach that will be headlines when it does. Host Jeffrey Donovan wonders whether a person habit tends to be worried or not worried. Guest yes. One of several ways will sure the code is aimed as an asteroid that we discovered too late too late to do anything about. It reminds me of this comic. It may have been in the new yorker. When dennis or lazily leaning on iraq on iraq and saying now is the time to vote in asteroid Defense System and the dinosaurs are laying their, just kicking back in their jurassic laziness. 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