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 wit