Transcripts For CSPAN2 In Depth With Neil DeGrasse Tyson 20170508

Primary meanis theprimary meansl information about the universe not even knowing 160 around 1600 was the invention of the microscope in one direction and a telescope in the other direction. Its like doing the backstroke that your sensory systemed wouldnt detect it were it not for the microscope and you could think if that made sense to have entire living creatures inside a drop of water. Its what you normally do when you make a discovery and they thought he was drinking too much gin. They were in denial which is a natural thing to happen. One eyewitness testimony to confirm if its real and then we discover quantum physics how it falls completely outside of not only the sentences but our expectations for how anything should work. How can everything be expandinga at all. St host what is significant about the year 1600 . s a guest . You open up the floodgates when you combine lenses and they made a discovery back and the sky is the limit. N a host theres guest theres a little bit of cleansing depending how long Background Information you get and then when he makes thestoryh discoveries on the Catholic Church they put him on trial and find him guilty as well as with other discoveries hes made with the instruments that they put him under house arrest. What they dont tell you if there was a biography on him is that he actually made fun of the pope. He wrote a book in italian, not latin which is the academic language of the day which means the local people can read it and in it he invents a conversationf and of all statements that have come from the Catholic Church, so he is really a pompous ahole. Can i say that . And socially he cannot express the respect. Nd he could have had it spread around the world and i bet he wouldnt have gone to trial. It is the renaissance after all. And do fresh thought was intome some new thing. So he had it coming because he didnt know how to appease up already. Host back to your book. 14 million years ago to ge ago f her sister did you say and how do we know that . Guest so, the way that knowledge is acquired is you have an idea and if it is an expensive experiment you probably dont have the money to do it in your garage so you propose to get money from sources typically if it is Pure Research in the Science Foundation there is a Research Firm and i in fewer in the other fields like biology or human physiology you might get a grant from the institute of health sou you have this idea and build an experiment and the result matches your expectation to gain some currency. E a co then i never liked you. We are people too. And heres the experiment toso show that youre wrong so then you build an experiment and it kind of matches. Now the results match. You have some outliers because of the experimental uncertainties that exist. There is a genital lean towards the emerging truth. All of these experiments point to the same result so now we come to recognize that this is the new truth and that is what science does. Its the most effective way that we have ever devised as ad species as a culture and decoding what is and is not tr true. Then we say here is how thego world works and we go onto the e next problem and this is aits celebrated thing. The machine is something that converts energy into energy that is useful in another form. So it takes Chemical Energy and gas and turns it into energy inr motion. All of this came out and beforee the industrial revolution, there were no machines since this. Ll technically in the world of physics it is the inclined plane and they make the job a little easier. Simple, watch how this works. I am not Strong Enough to don that but i could lift it up a little bit at a time. The distance is longer but they take this fight and to spread that out over time so it makes it easier for me to complete the task. The same amount of energy is excerpted and that is what the simple machines have always done for us. There are some busy moments. The question on how do we know, heres what we did. We look up in the universe and say okay now we know the galaxy is in trouble and discovered these things in the night sky. Major discovery. 19 then 1929 he discovers these things that weve now identified as the whole galaxy hurtling away from one another. People who just think this up, it was an observation and then we have to see if it fit the general theory of relativity, and did it. Its the modern understanding of gravity. If anything is happening its going to involve gravity so you check to see if it works and it does, so that means we didnt have to reinvent the fury of the universe because it worked. So then we feel like if the universe is getting bigger today than it was yesterday that must mean it was bigger yesterdayig then it was the day before. So what happens if we just c turned the clock back because we see how fast we are expanding so just a verse that on this rate of expansion and the whole known universe is in the same place at the same time. So, everything we know about matter is compressed and under pressure tells us the temperature will rise. So you pump air into the bicycle tire and you are compressing ai through it. So that is just an example and its related thermodynamically moving from one medium to another. For the universe gets smaller and smaller and it would have been harder in the past than it is in the present. They got measured in the 1960s. Ea you walk in every direction and see the heat signature left over after the 14 billion years so now you go back in time how much harder would it have been when the universe was this big and you get this high temperature. Now you ask what is the behavioe of matter and energy under those temperatures so now you turn to the particle accelerator and start approximating the conditions. As thats what the nucleus does, is that what happens so now you take the knowledge from the modern physics and apply it to what is going on in the first moments of the universe and that gives you a pathway in. They make up protons and neutrons and they are made of what we call quarks. And electrons and the antimatter counterparts. Just to be clear it wasnt a Science Fiction invention. It has only one proton. You make this much hydrogen andh helium, you make trace amounts of lithium is the third element on the periodic table and nothing else we will be the universe born with hydrogen and helium. Then you say if thats so, it would mean the boldest that we can find closest to the big bang that would still be alive today would be comprised of only hydrogen and helium the oldest stars have the least amount of heavy elements which we know from the mid20th century of thn calculations enabled by the Nuclear Research in the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb because we are calculating. Pure hydrogen and helium manufacture the heavy elements and some of them explode scattering this enrichment. Now they form annexed generatio and make even more explode tote the next generation and this continues through. So that is more than 9 billion after the start of the universe so we had the benefit of multiple generations so now with the collapse theres all these other ingredients that it uses. All of the manufactured leader is an abundance in the late generation as they were reformed so the lesson here is however weird it is to assert it exploded from there. It happens than that it predicts things that we do measure. What we can tell you is the account is the description of the matter and energy was doing. It was one of the many fathers of quantum physics at the point earlier to understand what nature is doing. It is like 1 trillion,ur 1 sextillion. You write that in 5 billion years [inaudible] i tweet guest apparently it blowss peoples mind and i dont know ibelieve that is a good thing or a bad thing but in 5 billion years it will expand so large that there will in golf the entire orbit of the planet. W earth will be the charred amber as it descends. How do we know, will we be are there . Probably not that there is no shortage of stars. You can staple these bits of information together for a story in other words we dont live long enough it takes millions and sometimes billions or trillions of years and we are around for a few decades so howw is it that we noticed because there are so many stars that in any snapshot of the universe we look tlooked to see these are te steps with the same. It would be any different if yoa took a snapshot of the civilization you would see some humans in a box underground and others with other things crawling on the carpet and other humans who dont have any hair that are little and those that are older. Pe there is a box in the ground and when they come out of the box they get littler and butler and disappear so you keep studying all these photos that you have in piece together a story of what is going on. This took effort. His intellectual capital invested to understand what they are and why they work and a lot of that traces back to the College Observatory in cambridg, massachusetts where theres a room full of computers, these are human calculators and it was judged in offices doing highlevel thing in. In this room was the foundation of our understanding of stellar evolution. There was the collapse of the universe and little did they know when you calculate the data that was collect the there was a source of how and why they live out their lives and die. First this is our monthly indepth program and we have the author and the astrophysicist as our guest and as you know we spend three hours with one author talking about his or her body of work. Beginning in 1989 doctor tyson has written several books. The two were of the universe was the first that came out in 1994. The sky is not the limit thatt was the fourth in 2000. One universe also came out and then cosmic team out in 2001 and in 2004. Death by a black hole. Space chronicles, three years later. Then last year welcomed the universe and o the most recentok astrophysics for people in a hurry. If you would like to participate, here is how you can do so for those in the east and central time zone and 8201 ine the center. Cassandra laid down ten time zone. If you cant get through but still want to ask a question or participate, try us on social media. You can also make a comment on facebook page. Facebook. Com booktv. We will begin taking those in just a few minutes. Back to the recent book. 40 billion earthlike planets. What is the milky way and how bibig they space are we talking . Guest its a term used from ancient rome. When you look at the night sky. In china where it is a less popular beverage they call it the silver river. It is crossing from one horizon to the next and it wouldnt be n until galileo and others brought to bear on the question. There were countless stars where the white petals together. There were stars in front of our face and from far away. It would take until the 1920s before we would resolve the debate about whether the fuzzy things in the night sky or undet the gallery separate from theat milky way. That got resolved after 1920. There are other entire galaxies beyond the milky way. So theres nearly 100 billion in the universe and they havehu hundreds of billions. Thervery few have the observable universe scattered throughout the landscape. Its the local areas. It was named after him he was a bit of a pompous astrophysicist in the early part of the centu century. He had access to the biggest telescope and anybody with access would make the greatest discoveries or does it require some insight to know what question to ask. Its a partly british accent from backwoods america. The good thing about assigning, but personality is euros until the work in the lab so you can praise someones work without being praiseworthy of the person themselves. He worked for the observatories and i think back then they would have given him a nobel prize for his discoveries. Be the prius and physics. Host did you use this example for people in a hurry. The skin of the apple is wherere weve traveled. We think to ourselves we are Walking Around the surface of the planet and there is this ocean of atmosphere where as the functional thickness of thetmosr atmosphere is to the size of the earth with the skin of an apple is and what the shellac is to a school world globe so this atmosphere isnt 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 it has particles associated that go up thousands of miles but theres not an edge. You can say at what distance. Th you can ask that question. The atmosphere scatter sunlight rendering itself so in the daytime it blows into that prevents you from seeing the stars. You look away and theres a ful lifetime sky so when do you travel before the atmosphere is so thin you can see stars in the daytime thats 100 kilometers so that is the functional definition. We go to the far side of the moon. Went to the moon and they never landed. In terms of space craft launched getting some gravity boosts. It was a shot to exploit the Orbital Energy of the planets. It doesnt mean just going past neptune. You go beyond and beyond where the influence on the electronics of the space craft. I would have to look the numbert up. It costs money to keep somethino online with the funding episodes you have something that has exhausted its wife still takingg money so you shut this off and get a fresh project and you might discover something so we have see senior reviews where is the most respected among us to get together to decide what gets turned off and on so thats why it is important to be fair on these assessments. At the rate it is traveling if you aim towards the nearest star it would take 70,000 years to get there. Give up all expectations that we would be visiting other planets. Host 1973 how did you end up in the Mojave Desert fox guest so, i attended a special osteotomy camp so that was my first year in high scho school. I was transitioning from ninth grade to tenth grade so i was transitioning between the two. We lived in the Mojave Desert which was one of the definitions of the desert. There were very few clouds and we all live nocturnal and if you wake up at night and there is aa whole slew of telescopes. Computers were early at the ti time. They would spew out the prime numbers. This was like computation dc. I attended the proms highgh school of science and had a telescope so that was a happy ci summer. Despite first time in the dese desert. You will get van him injected. I could talk to them and it was fun. My mother saw the ad for the cant and knew that id been interested for the previous five years of my life and then how would i even have that as an ambition so my parents were sensitive to what the interests were me, my brother and sister so they carefully observed where we expressed interest in our curiosity. I just lost my father in december. He was 89, so a full life but i still miss him. He was a wise man and i think in modern times we forget what wisdom is. Theres people that know a lot and talk a lot but wise peoplele dont talk a lot. They do more observing and talking and then somewhere in their head they digest it and come out with simple and easy to understand perspectives. Of course they will live previeh you because the digestion of so many pieces they didnt have access to that day were observant. Host to host your book space chronicles came out and on pae 234 you write that the nation is turning into a theocracy. Id theocracy. Guest okay, sure. I am normally more soft with myw critique. Normally the way that i would present such a statement is weat are behaving these ways and ift. That continues. I think if people stop valuingut host did i misquote you . Guest no, it is verbatim. [laughter] its not a system where people simply do not know things. If you dont know something there is no crime. Maybe you didnt spend 16 years at school you spent 12 people get advanced degrees so as an educator i will never hold someones absence of knowledge against them. The problem arises if you haveou an absence of knowledge and you either know or worse you dont dont you have this absence of knowledge and then you have the power over the legislation that should be informed but is not in thing you come to it aggressively in your ignorance. T so part of what it is to beuc educated is to have a sense of when you dont know something. Just because you are not in school doesnt mean that you cant worship off to work. Whether or not the last day of school or any other year untile graduation. Where does that learn from, how is it that your time in school can lead you to celebrate being out of school. What is mi 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, i dont want to be lectured. Its a bad word. So maybe what youre missing in the educational system is a reminder that it can be fun toho learn. Wn the last day of School People should walk down the steps sad now theres an entire summer they will not be learning. Ld what a world that would be. So should we teach differently, are we selecting the right teachers, the curriculum, i dont have an answer but im simply sharing the observation. I kno know it isnt helpful truo point it out but a lot of the worlds problems with the salt if if education were a joyful r experience rather than something you want to escape from as quickly as possible. So i drove that film videot be chrissie. Its a world where the people in charge didnt understand fully the consequences of the decisions they were making in the absence came from an awareness of how it works and there is a scene they are feeding gatorade to the plans because it says that replenishes your nutrients so they said it works for us i bet it works for the plans. Plant. You have to see the decisions that have little or no anchor to the reality. In the space chronicles pacing the frontier of all of the elements of society that might not be in the position to judgek would make an informed decision about the value of exploration host that was in the wall street journal this is in the trump era celebrity physicist who adds this is the most important thing hes ever said. People have lost the ability to judge what is true and what is not. That last sentence is from a video that was posted before the science march but didnt reference trump et al. The vote was added to thatlost e editorial. We live in a time people have lost the ability to judge what is true and what is not. If you are looking at something on the internet and think it is true but do not have the capacity to judge, but thereshe another element to the recipe for disaster so trump is a truma manifestation where what is true and what is not the distinction is not made and i would claim they are germinating long before and it has to do with people reading it on the internet and our susceptibility to this. We need to train people how to think and analyze and interpret and be skeptical of information and recognize their sufficient data has been put forth into thl newly objective truth this should be a class just on what science is and how and why it works and that would transcend the general science class and would be its own course so that when you are College Educated Indian Institute has declared you and learned member of. Society, no you dont have that option for the object to leave scientific truth is not determined it is true whether or not you believe in it and inu t which respect its not something you want to be true or dont allow it to be true because youb religion prevented or political philosophy prevents it you donl have that option and like i said earlier that is the point knowing what is true and what is not and in particular we have all this stuff going on to doublecheck against that. If it shows up in some result because i took the data and i could have been it this way somebody else is going to getch famous for checking the result. I would get a demerit. That isnt a real thing. It would interfere with the next time i have an interestingte result and want people to Pay Attention to it. So if the scientist is somehow meddling with their data because they have an idea of what they would want it to show it comes at a huge cost to their careerr even if they think they can get away with it someone else will ultimately find it and we will not have any result at all. If you base it on anything else, then you are in posing what might be your personal truth that everyone should fend for themselves and not get a government handout. If you want everyone else to feel that, fine, have that political discussion because that will affect where money goes, do you put in a terrorist, do you subsidize, do you not, that is a political conversati conversation. Then what comes out will have aa political flavor to it and i dont have a problem with the y fact that if its somehow thi ps to something that is not scientifically true you were building a house of cards into the whole thing collapses. Host space chronicles 2012. Ll guest i will not say what we need to do. I am not a pundit trying to get everyone to agree with an opinion i might have. What i do instead, i have it on a coal of collections of everything ive ever written on Space Exploration so it contains articles and speeches and it is an amalgam very easy to get in and out of that im not going to tell you we should go to the moon. Im going to say is a highly ambitious exercises could get by government have huge force on the creativity of the nation. I dont think that its an accident that bill gates and steve jobs were 12, 13 somewhere around up there when we landed on the moon. How impressionable can you be. There it is, there is a future when you see that you dont even have to be interested in space, just the fact new frontiers are being breached and then it gets into your trajectory of life so i am offering Space Exploration. But it is adventurous if you are advancing a frontier. That takes ingenuity. You might need clever lawyers. The government does it for this because they dont have to satisfy Quarterly Report they can open new industries. Money from the government prompted innovation and aviation in its earliest days. Now we can carry mail through the air who wants the contract. I can kerry for bags. They can carry a little bit more fuel so there was a race to see who would get the government contracts to carry the mail. So what happens, the fifth person says i can carry 30 bags, making up the numbers but they would say wait a minute i dont need to carry it, i will do chairs and sells seats. Because of a certain investment if they make it enables them to exploit the new place so we go into space and you have a whole fleet of launch vehicles. 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 i. He comes back and says how long it took and quantifies things and 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 there by assuring a future of health, wealth and security because that is coming from technology. It is not coming from any other branch of human existence. But science and technology are going to give us tomorrows health, wealth and security. I am offering the exploration of the universe as a force of nation operating on our urge to innovate. If you have something else, bring it in. If it works and works better bring it. Host nasa operates on our hearts, on our minds, on the educational pipeline all for one half sent on the tax dollar out of 20 billion a year budget. If you take 20 billion and divide it by the budget, i forgot what it is 34 trillion, whatever the number is. If you run the number it comes to half a penny on the tax dollar. If you hold up a literal dollar, and then take scissors and cut one half of one percent of its width you dont even get into the ink from the side of the dollar. People say why is nasa spending that money when we have problems on earth and that is assuming that if we took all money we spent on that and applied them to the problems all the problems would get solved. That statement presupposes that. I have done this to people on the street. I tell them that and i didnt know that. And the nasa centers and the 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 posed the question to you, how much is the universe worth to you . One more observation and then we will take your calls. You have been very patient. We have spoken for an hour now. We have two hours to take calls and hear from dr. Tyson. First i want to show this and i am getting it right. There are four books you have here. What is special about these four books . Guest they did this and i was very impressed. The publisher norton, these four different books, they decided to make the bindings match up into a cohereant image. So, this is the famous ring nebulus. So it is the ring the death row of the star. Our sun will look Something Like that. In the center of this is the remains of a star that once was and outer layers expanded to oblivion. These have expanded hugely. Much bigger than what is the extent of the orbiting planets. So there are tons of these into the night sky. This is one way stars die. This a nonexplosive death. We have examples of explosive deaths that are gorier. This is rather stately and like a smoke ring. Yes, now you have to get all four books. Host lets begin with a question via email. This is from a young man named bradley. His parents work at cspan for a long time. Dave and april. Guest did you give them p f preferen preference . Host here is the question. When going to a different planet what as expect of traveling will be most important . Guest great question. There is a lot of thinking about this especially at the Johnson Space center in houston. Nasas headquarters. It is called crude space flight. They worry about food. Not only is there enough food but will you like the food . If you get board with the food will that affect your morale . Do you need comfortable food . Xotic food . International food . The water supply. Is there enough water . Do you recycle the water . If you recycle the water that means it collects your urine, filters it and you drink it back. Is that too freaky . Water is not uncommon in the universe but in space it is hard to get to. You have to lasso a comet if you want a supply of fresh water and we dont know how to do that. Other things the time in a close quarters with two or three people, months and months, sometimes years, there is a whole psychological dimension to that. Can we remain emotionally stable over time . In the film interstellar there is an astronaut fight scene. They showed it and it is two guys in astronaut suits fighting on an alien planet. There is that. Will they miss their family . Or their loved ones at home . There is the fact that if you fly without creating artificial gravity that you are weightless the whole time. Are you perpetually motion sick . Or to you get used to it . Your body expects one gravity, one g we call it which is the equivalent of earths surface gravity. If you go to centrifuge you can increase that. In space, if you can create artificial gravity, great. If you cant what is it like to be weightless for a year . We know you begin to lose bone density and have the bones of a frail old woman if you keep it up. We have to figure out what exercise will give you the resistance we live in living against gravity. Little things we take for granted are not something that is normal when you are in space. All these factors have to come together which is why you cannot just send any old person into space. They have to be healthy, competent in performing tasks and you might want to throw in a medical doctor if the crew is large enough because something might happen to you physiology and then you need engineers and the combination of expertise so the collective safety of the crew is preserved. There is a book by mary roach called packing for mars where all the Little Things you have to keep track of. We interviewed her for star talk and there is a section in the star talk book which you didnt bring. Host too heavy to bring. Guest the universe has weight. We will do this in zero g next time and you will have no excuse. Great question. Thanks. Host mary roach has been on this ttv. Berny in howard beach, new york you have beenpation and are on with Neil Degrasse tyson. Thank you, it is a pleasure to listen to mr. Tyson. I have a couple questions. First, does the big bang violate the conservation of energy . Could it be that we are going to have a big crunch followed by another big bang followed by another big crunch . I would love to see you run for congress. Senator tyson sounds really good to me. Host bernie, why have you thought about the big bang . Do you work in some kind of scientific field . I took physics while in school. The big bang especially is in the interesting because it is almost like a religious question. I think it is possible you can make a sense for the universe to have been here all the time forever. But originally there was Something Like a steady state theory which was abolished by the big bang. It doesnt seem to preclude the idea that the universe was always here. If the universe is always here we dont need a creator do we . Guest i think i have mental record of each one in sequence. A couple things. First, all evidence we have ever obtained in the history of this exercise, since the beginnings of cosmology that came with einstein and others including a belgium priest by the name of George Lamonte who was generally considered the father of the big bang itself. He wrote down the equation using einsteins theory of gravity to show we would have a beginning in the past. So, all data we have ever obtained is unevequivalent in its conclusion that we are ron on a oneway expansion trip. No crunch. No slow down, stop and relapse. Not that a recollapse is prohibited by any sense of what the universe could do. We happen to be in a universe where that is not the case. It is just simple. Given it is only a one way trip that means we had a beginning and the entire big bang description takes us from the beginning into the unlimited future. You might ask and i am putting these words in the questioners mouth but what was around before the beginning. We dont have data for that. We dont know. But we have top people working on it. One of the ideas which actually comes naturally out of the extensions of einsteins gravity and the extensions of quantum physic and that there may have been a multi verse and a multi versus would preexist our universe. We are just a bubble among possible other bubbles and slightly different laws of physics manifest within them. To imagine the universe was always there, not our universe because we had a beginning, but maybe the multiverse was there or maybe the multi verse had a beginning or maybe the multi versus is one expression of what a meta verse creates. If there is a meta verse with bubbles of multi versus and each multi versus creates universes is there anything to prevent that in principle . Snow. That trajectory is not fundamentally different from thinking earth is this. We are one of eight planets. Get over it. It is a demotion. We say how about the sun . Of course, no, the sun is just one of another billion suns in the milky way. The milky way, just one of a hundred billion other galaxiega. We have good precedent for recognizing the universe is really bad at making things in one and that may be true even for the universe itself. I think that might have been two out of three of his questions. You were keeping notes. Host he asked, and you talk about this in several of your books and talks, is there a religious aspect to the Big Bang Theory and have you ever considered running for office. Guest so, when you use the word religion it comes with certain expectations of what it means. Here in the west, most places in the world, when you say religion, it involves a document of some kind. The holy book that prescribes what you should believe even in the absence of evidence. And it then tells you about what conduct you should have in the fact of that belief system. Okay . In science, you could put forth an idea that doesnt have evidence. But everybody is looking for evidence. If we cant generate evidence, it would be put on a shelve. If you want to call it a religion with evidence that is just a fresh usage of the world religion in your vocabulary. I dont debate words with people. I dont value time invested in debating definitions. Just tell how you are using the word. If you are using religion if a way that allows evidence to define what it is people say do and think then fine it is all religion because that is what science does. It discovers the truth of the world. That is not simply how anybody else in the world is using religion. They using it to refer to some kind of spiritual elements that require faith in something being true rather than evidence for something being true. Hos i was once asked by the New York Times several impasses ago in congress and they thought they would have fun and ask people who are definitely not politicians what solutions they have fto get things through congress. The way they asked it was if you were president what solutions do you have. I wrote back if i were president , i wouldnt be president. You can find it. If i were president just google that and my name with that. I duplicated it in my website because they cut out a paragraph. It comes to the expectation if you run for office you can somehow change everything and i am thought convinced of that. I am a little contrarian. A lobbyist goes straight to the politician to influence the politician in the ways that serve 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 enlithment in who is doing the voting. If people recognized and valueed what science is and how and why it works they would never even dream of voting for someone who doesnt know that because that person would then not represent their full interest. So, i would 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. 88 of Congress Stands for reelection every two year. So, you can convince one congressman or another and then you have to start all over. You educate the electorate, we are good. I go to the bahamas and leelect people who will take the country forward. Host next call is from david in eastern hampton, massachusetts. Caller hi. Another Family Member i told you were on tv and suggested you might want to watch. He told me something he heard and i dont know how accurate it is. But he had he heard something about an mdrive that can drive a spaceship quickly. I am just wondering if an mdrive is a real thing and if so what is it and how does it work and i would be interested in other possible drivers for Long Distance space travel. Guest that is a great question. Let me give backstory. Our rocketships we are using chemical energies. You have some molecule which when you break it apart it releases energy so in chemistry is exothermic as opposed to endothermic. If you have ever seen cold packs where you squeeze it and the thing gets cold . That is endothermic. Then heat packs where the opposite happened. You can get clever with chemistry to make it happen. Rockets are endothermic. It is highly exothermic what a rocket engine does. We have had chemical fuel since robered goddard in the 1920s. Very little has improved in our capacity to propel ourselves through space. There has been some talk about other kinds of drives. One of them is a solar sail you can use propolsion and get maximum pressure from sunlight and that can accelerate you and accelerate you for free. You would tack the way you would a sail boat into the wind or away from the wind. Then you can navigate the solar system. It is little slower but then you can send cargo that way. The future need not be limited to Chemical Energy. There are other drives. There is a plasma drive where you have hot gas and have highspeed particles coming out. That is a very low impulse. You will not accelerate much when one particle comes out but it accumulates and you can get to very high speeds doing so. This and the m drive and frontier means of propulsion can go real fast. Instead of taking nine month do is get to mars you will take a month. 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 want to cross the galaxy, we will watch you do this. By your time it will take you a hundred thousand years to cross the galaxy at the speed of light. So, you would age much more slowly. You will get there without much time having alapseed elapsed. You would come back and we would have forgotten about you if civilization is still here. None of these drives solve the problem relative to a human lifespan. If we lived a hundred years as individuals who cares if the takes a thousand years to get there. What we really need is worm holes. You open a door here and on the other side of the door, on the become side, you are in another part of the galaxy. By the way, there is a movie called monsters inc animated kids film. They are monsters who work at factory and their whole job in is life is to scare children. This factories make doors. They have the door. It is just a door. They open the door and go through it and it is the door of a childs closet in the kids bed room. They emergency emerge from the kids closet to the scare the kid and go back through the door to the factory. That is a worm hole. I was in charlotte and i had to from a big plane to a little plane. I swear i walked five miles. I tweeted and said i cant wait until we have worm holes and that way all gates can be adjacent to one another. Gate 400 is just on the other side of gate number one. Someone tweeted back dr. Tyson, if we have worm holes you wont need airports. So i said, busted, you got it. Host not proven . Worm holes. Guest we dont know how to make it or keep it open. It works in Science Fiction. That is the place best we can invoke a worm hole. But until then we will be pretty much earth bound. If we left right now it would take nine months to get to mars . You have to leave when mars and earth are properly aligned. If you see mars in the sky and start traveling to it . No. You have to travel to where mars will be when you get there. It is a matching of trajectory that matters here. What we call had minimum energy trajectory. You bunch your ensign, shut it off and coast to mars until mars pulls you into its gravitational interest and fall to mars. That takes about nine months. If we had fueling stations you could fill up and burn your engine and accelerate to mars and get artificial gravity if the ship was accelerating. If you do that, you will get to mars in a few weeks but it will take a boat load of fuel. But if the fuel is cheap why not . There is no filling station. Host lewis you are on booktv with Neil Degrasse tyson. Caller i am in the bay area. I have a question about einstein. I think i will ask about Human Potential instead. I think there is a woman astrophysicist in hawaii and they know what they want to look for and build a telescope there. The largest one in the world on the biggest mountain. It would bow perfect except for some native hawaiians who consider the sacred so cant do it. I guess they will go to the canary islands. Another example in terms of political physics is there was supposed to be a super collide built in texas that would dwarf the one in europe but the republicans said we cant build it and pay for it. They can pay for wars but they want pay for science. It seems at this point we would have probably figured out it doesnt matter, i know maybe we are on the way to Understanding Dark Energy host you have covered a lot of topics and we will get a response in a second. Do you work in science in any way . Guest no, i wish. I am unemployed but on my universal basic income. I just try to book from the libraries like sean carol or Something Like that. Host lewis, thank you very much. Dr. Tyson, anything you would like to say to him . Guest thank you so much. I think books have always been the great portal to other ways of thinking. Happy to hear you are sort of whatever your live trajectory in this moment books are giving you other things to think about and sean carol is great physics books. There are two. I think there is a science rider and a. Monaki hawaii is the perfect spot to have a telescope. Air flow from the ocean across mountain is what we call laminar instead of turbulent so the images you get through the telescopes are sharp rather than blurry. In recent years there has been resistant to adding more telescopes to the mountain tops and resistant came from native hawaiians who value the mountains as a sacred place. If we are in a culture that respects cultures as much, if not more than science, you will get occasions where you want to build something, technological, that conflicts with a religious or cultural or spiritual or sociological value and if you dont you build it somewhere else. We were going to have a particle accelerator but then the next particle accelerator is now in switzerland it simply means we will lose the leadership in those areas and others to come as long as that continues. That is jus the reality of this. One of the many interesting things about science is science not national thing. It is not anybodys national thing. These are objective truths being explored in the objective universe. If the United States doesnt do it it doesnt mean no one else will. Other nations will rise up. The largest telecope in the world which focuses on radio waves used to be in puerto rico. Largest dish in the world and many movie scenes are filmed there. Now the largest Radio Telescope in the world is in china. If aliens were sending signals to us and we had to find it from the cosmic radio noise the chinese will be the first to communicate with aliens. Not the americans. It is one of the signs the United States is fading on the technology stage. If you do not think science matter in the future you will be buying products innovated elsewhere. You can still be a funk functioning country but not leading the world. Host steve in anaheim, california, please go ahead. Steve, anaheim, one more time. All right. I apologize dr. Tyson steve is not there. What is your ship with carl sagin . I met him when i was 17. What was remarkable about that is he was famous. He had not done cosmo but was famous. He had been on night shows. I applied to cornell where he was on the pharmaceuticfaculty Admission Office had my application to him. It was dripping with the universe at the time because i had known since age nine this what i wanted to do. He sent me a personal letter inviting me to tour the campus and visited the lab so i could make an informed decision on where i could attend. I said, yes, and got on the bus from new york city to ithica, new york. He showed me the lab and reached behind me and grabbed a book off the shelf it was one of his book and signed it to me. I thought that is bad ass. You dont have to look and wherever your hand lands it is a book you have written. I still have that book. It was his book the cosmic connection. It says to neal, future astronomer, carl. At the end of the day, he drives me back to the bus station. It begins to snow. Not uncommon up there. And then he said here is my home phone. If the bus cant get through just call and you can spend the might with my family. I am thinking like i am just nobody from nowhere and i remembered distinctly thinking if i am ever as remotely famous as carl sagen i will have a duty to teach students with this kind of generosity he distributed to me. I didnt ultimately attend cornell but that was a valuable moment in terms of how to behave in the presence of individuals woo have ambations on the tracks you raid or on. I attended one of his talks that. He blurred my second book. I dont know if you have it here. No, you dont. Nope, nope. Universe down to earth. I wrote a letter and i said i dont know if you remember me, i was the kid who did this. It was my second book. He read it, wrote a blurb, and said on page 17, i think you have a typo it is this and not that. That is how you knew he did go through the whole book. That was it until his widow who was one of the coauthors of one of the original cosmos. A women with huge talent in her own right. I would say she is one of the most enlightened people i met. You will ask her a question and she will say keep talking, i am going to listen. You just talk for the next hour. When you meet someone like that it a special thing. So, i was invited by the estate to host the follow on cosmo do is the original and she continued to coauthor that with a colleague of mine steve suder who coauthored the original cosmos with carl. The two reteamed up for this project. I had a few encounters with carl other than that. Maybe five. We were not beer drinking buddies and hung out at each others house. It wasnt that relationship nor was it a mentorship which you would presume you get that with persistent oneonone exchanges. Let me pose a different question. Do you actually have to be close to someone for them to serve as a mentor and i dont think you do. You just have to be aware of the examples they set. And what place they occupy in society. If you are receptive to it, being aware and receptive has him serve as a mentor. You have use the word it gives a different impressions of what people would be expecting of the word. How many day jobs do you have . I claim one and Everything Else is a night job. I am director of new york citys Hayden Planetarium. There is another Hayden Planetarium in boston which is buried within the Boston Museum of science and doesnt have its same store front. Same hayden . Same hayden mon money. As famous as hayden became in new york it was the fifth one after los angeles, pittsburgh, chicago was the first and another one and then came us. All happened quickly. Within ten years or so between 19301935 five planetariums went up. So, hayden was alibe when he gave us the money but the foundation existed and it is still active today and they give monies to programs that help kids after school boost their sort of interest in what it means to learn. So, yes. I am director of the Hayden Planetarium at the museum of natural history. I enjoy writing. A perfect day for me is when the phone doesnt ring. There is nothing in my inbox and i can write. I want to get back to the lab. Not something i have been in much lately. For me the lab is the computer, doing data from telescopes and theorizing things that can be tested. Being a scientist again. It is now a small fraction of the time i place on the week. I have a delusion that i am visible enough others want to do and they rise up and the media starts focusing on them and i can sort of back away unnoticed and then i go to the bahamas and recover and sneak into the lab. Nobody knows i am missing. All other other people on the landscape of communication. That is my ideal future and you will never see me again. I think about that plan all the time. There is that. When i am invited i give public talks although i cannot honor all. It is about 200 a month. It is an impossible number. Triage widdles it down between 04. We put them together so it is rapid secession. I get a call from the press. I am a servant of the publics appetite for knowledge of the universe and science and i live in new york city as where were right now. So, the major news gathering center. We have cnn although i think the headquarters are in new york. Abc, nbc. Host all close to the Hayden Planetarium. Guest just a car ride. And the daily show is here as well. The people who fly in and stay overnight to appear on the shows and i am home for dinner. You finish taping and you are on your way. That is a lot of time and effort. More than you might think because you might see me on for five minutes but there is the precall and you have to get there an hour early, go into makeup, i have to change and look presentable. It is like bites out of the day. What i dont have that many others is long stretches of hours that come in. There is a different creativity that manifests where you have or situati situations and are not tugged in different directions. There is a saying if you want to become more creative become less productive. I went shopping and did this and look how productive i am. Did you create anything . Did you have a new idea . Did you invent something . Have you reflected on reality . Have you you know, there is a whole other thing that human brain does given the opportunity. I try to carve swaths of time in the week for just that purpose. Host who is honey . Had you if you are saying honey, i will be home for dinner. Guest i dont actually say honey but my wife, alice. We are both foodies. Not crazy foodies but we are in the door. In the front door but not in the middle. We care about ingredients and how the food taste. One of my great regrets is when we perfect a dish it means we can no longer order it at a restaurant because they make it better than do and going to a restaurant is no longer special. If i say so myself i make a really excellent rack of lamb i can no longer order at a restaurant because it is not as good as mine. My Roast Chicken is pretty good too so i dont order chicken in restaurants anymore unless it is some very fancy dish where the chicken is incidental to have fancy it is. We will go to a restaurant that is slightly more expensive thantish be just to see if something rises up in the menu. We care about food and wine and go to the theater often. We have the luxury of doing that as residents of new york city. Host he has a phd in math . Yeah, in mathematical physics. Host richard, springdale, arkansas, you have been patient. You are online live with Neil Degrasse tyson. Caller it is a pleasure to speak with you. There was a greek who discovered something called procession. And for all the climate alertests out there and i dont want to be political but scientific. Can you explain procession and the effect it has on this planet . Guest thank you for the question. Parkas was brilliant. I imagine what he would be discovering today if he sort of woke up in the 21st century world and you show him the tools we had and of course he had hardly any tool just a brilliant brain of his. The procession is we have our earth. Well, multiple processions. Anything that rotates will revolve and generally phave a procession. If you have an orbital orbit over the sun, over time the shape of the oval turns even though the planet is continually orbiting. We did the procession of your orbit. Earth, spins on our axis and we point off in one direction. The direction where the north poll is. The north star. However we are not fixed in space doing that. We actually wobble and execute one full wobble in 26,000 years. Okay . So, for example, 1300 years from now our axis will be pointing toward a different object over here if there happens to be one ebon. This is the procession of worths rotation. The way this manifest is in the night sky we call it procession of equanox. It drifts over the 26,000 years. What this means is the first point of aries as an astrologer will tell you says the sun is entering aries on march 21st. Beginning march 21st if you are born in the next 30 days the asstrologer says you are aries. People didnt go about distance so they said the sun is moving through the con constailation. This first point of aries drifts and it has been about 2,000 years since this was laid out and the first point of aries was identified. If you look at maps now and ask what is the sun doing when it is march 21st. It is not entering aries. 2,000 years is is 1 12th of 26,000 years. If you go to your horiscope and say i am a libra or what not and it tells you what you should be thinking or doing the name of your astrological sign has no correspondence to what is going on in todays sky. It is a holdover from what people used to think 2,000 years ago. It is a free country. I would expect people voting for people in charge would know you dont put someone who thinks the universe is influencing their life in charge of other people would know it isnt. Host from your most recent book, astrophysicis in a hurry quote some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of joan of ark and christopher columbus. Can you explain that . I wanted to make sure every ten pages or so there was something that would blow your mind and be cosmically true but you have to go what. I have to reread tat fully absorb the significance of it. In this cup of water, there is water in here. There are more wat er molecules in this cup of water than in all the worlds ocean. Tat means if i take this and toss it out, there is enough molecules in what i tossed to enter every other possible cup of water everyone draws from the worlds water supply. There is enough to scatter to every possible cup of water in the world. If i drink this it comes back out of my body in some way or another any half dozen ways. That reenters the environment goes to the clouds, screams and oceans and give it enough time it mixes. Socretes did his thing and some molecules that passed through this kidneys were in the glass you just drank. This is a statement to the connectivety of live and our interdependence of what it is we do and how we behave. It is not only that by the aim reasoning there are more molecules in air in every breath you draw than there are breaths of air in all the atmospheres. By the same calculation, every breath you take contains molecu molecules that passed through the lungs, certainly most of the nitrogen, but molecules will scatter quickly and easily throughout the atmosphere, some of those molecules pass through the lungs. Whatever is your favorite historical character. It would have passed through their lungs. You want to think of us as separated and not connected but we are. Host is there something you studied or learned that you cannot get your arms around . Guest tons there is some things i never expect to get my arms around because they are too big or too weird. Oft when you say i have my arms around this it implies that makes sense. 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 a requirement that i can one day put my arms around it. I can just recognize it is there. And accept it even if just sounds completely weird. So, you accept it because the evidence shows it is true not because you have faith or want it to be true or need it to be true. It is because observation and experiment verifyified observation and experiment has demonstrated the truth in that station. Host dr. Tyson you tweet. At neal tyson is your twitter handler. Several million followers. Here is a tweet from march 11, 2016. I occasionally wonder whether the universe is nothing more than a snow globe on the mantle. Was that a late night tweet . Guest i occasionally wonder that. That is all. The universe is all we know. It is our entire existence. Look at what we do to, i dont know, if this is still a thing to do with you ant arms and sand and tubes. The ants are just doing their thing. Do they know they are in an ant farm . Do they have self awareness . Do bees know you are about to steal all of their honey . They have a world where they are pollinating plants and coming become and making honey. Do they have any idea we created that world for them when it is a bee farm . Any idea at all . We get to do this because why smarter than they are so we can outsmart them and create an environment in which we think they are happy and therefore they do what it is we want. So, we out smart our pets. We feed them and continue to feed them that keeps them there and provide for them but there is like we do things because we are smarter they are they dont know the difference. 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 want it thing we have free will and we have in charge but are we . Yes, i dont remember what time of day. I think tweets are date and stamped but i dont know when posted that. Host this is an email. Are we alone . Why is there evidence about ufos . Is there any evidence about ufo . Why is there . Guest this sounds like are we alone on earth not the universe. We are not likely alone in the universe if you look at how common the ingredients of life are is. Hydrogen and oxygen and carbon. We are made of this stuff. That is the foundation of organic chemistry. This stuff is everywhere we look northeast universe. So, whatever happened on earth it is not likely to be rare or unique because carbon chemistry on which life is based is the most fertile kind of chemistry there is and carbon is abundant in the universe. If there is life somewhere else it is probably based on carbon. That is pas mating but not unjustified. The universe has been around 14 billion years plenty of time to evolve all manners of creatures particularly microorganisms. Sited . 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 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 called astrophysics for people in a hurry. This is