Transcripts For CSPAN2 In Depth With Neil DeGrasse Tyson 201

>> host: dr. neil degrasse tyson did your new book astrophysics for people in a hurry you open by saying the universe is under no obligation to make sense what does that mean?. >> i think up until the year 1600 when we had no particular tools to investigate the natural world the five senses were the primary means we gave all information about the universe and not even knowing that our five senses had live and said everything you know, the thinking of letting tries to give you but it is not better run at 1500 it would go one direction than the telescope it was a decade within one another now it becomes available to us to transcend our senses to look inside a drop of pond water to see microorganisms' doing the backstroke that the sensory system could not have detected with not for the microscope so the "welcome to the universe" tire living creatures living in a drop of water but today we know that from childhood but that made no sense at all without royal society in london when they make a discovery they that he was drinking too much gin. [laughter] write another letter when you have recovered from the drunken stupor if we can continue so then they sent someone to verify one eyewitness testimony is not a scientific discovery issue need to confirm that it is real especially 20th-century and onward to discover quantum physics with the rules of how matter we caves that falls completely not only outside of their senses but the expectation how anything should work that matter turns into energy and back-and-forth so with that expanding universe how could that be expanding at all? if you keep the invoking that does not make sense you will miss out on a lot of what we have learned where have discovered to be true. >> what is significant?. >> the dutch were very good optics and lenses you could make a magnifying glass but if you start combining you get parts of the optical system to get a microscope than once you did that it opens the floodgates of and then galileo made of very good version and then this guy is the limit. >> host: was galileo treated famous the in a sense?. >> there was a cleansing it depends on the account of his life and times determines how much background information you get. the simple story is he makes stories that conflict with the catholic church they put him on trial and find him guilty to save the earth goes around the sun. then they put him under house arrest. if you read along biography they would tell you he actually made fun of the pope. he wrote a book it italian, not latin which was the academic language of the day but italian which means the local people could read it and has a conversation between a simpleton and someone who was wise of the ways of the universe they're all statements that have come from official decree from the catholic church so really he is a pompous a-hole. [laughter] so socially he does not get the respect that he should have for those who had more power than him he could have published in latin and i'm betting he would not have gone to trial. it is the renaissance after all. new thought and fresh thought he had it coming because he did not know how to appease other. >> back to your book "astrophysics for people in a hurry" 15 billion years ago you said how do we know? >> the way knowledge is acquired is you have an idea and propose an experiment that is affected you probably don't have the money to do that so now you try to get funding from sources if it is pure research and will be a government source in the war in other fields like biology your physiology maybe the national institutes of health. you have an idea to build an experiment and of the results match your expectations and the foundation of your idea of the currency at workshops or in the journal's now you are a competitor to say i never liked you. we are people to. i think you're wrong and years of experiment to show they were wrong. then you get the results that matches because you had no intent to match me. but if somebody else does that you have the al meyer -- the out wire with the uncertainties that exist but when there is a general been to the emerging truth to say all these experiments approximately get the same result with a few outlier so we come to recognize this is the new objectively established truth that is what science does the most effective way we have survived as a species to decode what is and what is not true with the natural world. so once we have done this, this is how the world works this is celebrated in regattas relativity and quantum physics and empower the entire industrial revolution what is a machine? that converts energy from one form that is useful to us in another. a car takes chemical energy and gas and then it takes the kinetic energy of your car. all of this comes out of the industrial revolution there were no machines such as this. those don't require technology with the inclined plane it is simple so watch how this works i have alleged but i am not strong enough to do that. if i have always am i can lift up little bits at a time but it takes in this heighth spread out over time so makes it easier for me to complete the task the same total amount of energy is exerted at that rate that is what simple machines have always done for us in modern machines our civilization. >> i'm sorry i did not focus on your question about how do we know. so we look up to the universe to say we see galaxies that hubble discovered these fuzzy things in the sky such as the milky way a major discovery in the 1929 the things that we discovered as a whole galaxy are hurtling away from one another this is the first evidence the universe is expanding. people don't make this up. it was an observation with the general theory of relativity that is the modern understanding of gravity anything in the universe will involve gravity. so that means we did not have to reinvent the theory of the universe so then we say if universes' getting bigger that means it was bigger yesterday them the day before. so what happens if we turn the clock back? when you do this because you see how fast we are expanding just on the back of an envelope calculate the rate of expansion and will hold the universe is in the same place at the same time 15 billion years ago. that is the origin of the idea of the big bang. everything we know about matter that is under pressure tells us the temperature will rise. the simplest example is if you ride a bicycle like a hand pump palms the air and then you fill the golf york impressing air through that. that is just an example it is not exactly the same thing but it is related to have energy from one medium to another. / a would have been hotter in the past than it is in the present now the universe has a temperature you can measure that if you look at every direction you can see the heat signature that is left over after the 14 billion years so then you go back in time that universe was hotter and hotter how much water would it have been 15 billion years ago? you get a stupendously high temperature. so now you ask what is the behavior of matter and energy in those temperatures? so now you turn into the particle a accelerator high-pressure high-temperature so you start approximating the conditions is that what a nucleus does? is that what happens? scenario take knowledge from modern atomic physics and applied that to the universe when it was hot and small. that gives a pathway of insight into what was going on. sebacic foundational particles of life in the photons that make up the protons and neutrons in disbars we know electrons are fundamental they all have anti-matter counterparts even positron that science fiction people have not picked up on. we are the entire matter and have discovered that the that works great with science fiction story telling but it happened in the real world first. so now to say what must have happened given what we know? it will tell you that the rate we were expanding it would be the predominant saddam in the universe with a one proton of the nucleus you can make this much helium you'll have a trace amount of lithium never these elements from chemistry class we will be a universe boren and that you say is that so? that means the very oldest cars we confined for the closest to the big bang would still be alive today would be comprised of only hydrogen and helium and that is exactly what they measure the very oldest doors have the least amount of heavier elements which we have known for the mid 20th century and those calculations to enable research and with the atomic bomb because we are calculating we know after the time stars are born they manufacture heavy elements some of them explode for those that have yet to form stars they form the next generation of stars and they will make even more enrichment and explode in kerry that to the next generation in this continues through. we have a 4.5 sollars system -- the solar system was born 4.5 billion years ago as we have the benefit of multiple generations so now with the. cloud we have all these other said used rocks are not made of hydrogen or helium silicon and oxygen and aluminum and arsenic kobold or nickel all that manufactured later is an abundance late generation stars that were formed so however weird it is to assert 14 billion years ago it was literally this big you say you were not there how do you know, ? you a right guy was not but everything that happens to matter and accurately predicts that gives us the confidence to describe like we were there. >>. >> to we know what the big bang was?. >> what we can tell you the big bank account is a description of what matter and energy was doing. harrison -- there is a point of time one of the fathers of quantum physics that limits the ability to understand when nature is doing we pick that up after playtime one chileans of 1 billion of a second 1 sextillion of the second the end of the six that we now measure in the lab applies to talk about what is going on. >> host: in your book "welcome to the universe" from 2016 your right and 5 million years the earth will be charged?. >> cry to meet that every couple years and the blows people's mind. item no fat is good or bad. echoes something like this and 5 billion years the sun will expand so large that it will involve the entire orbit of our planet google in gulf earth, and earth will be a charge ember as it descends into the star and vaporizes. have a nice day. [laughter] it is a reality it is remarkable feat can no our fate that way but how? will we be there? probably not. there is no shortage of stars in the universe you can see them being born we see them in the act of dying sea put this confirmation together to put a coherent story we don't live long enough and that takes millions or billions are trillions of years we are only around for a few decades but how'd we know this? because there are so many stars that with any snapshot of the universe we can see stars that are born born, middle-aged, dying it is the same arc of a star it is just different stars it would impi any different if he took a snapshot of civilization you would see some humans in a box on the ground to say what are they doing there? little thing scrawling you will see other humans who don't have any hair better older it is just a snapshot you are an alien and only live 90 seconds how do i make sense out of that? are people born in a box in the ground and they come out then they get littler and disappear inside of another person? or is it the opposite? so you keep studying all the photos to piece together a coherent story of what is going on for the stars in the universe we didn't just look at one snapshot. no. this took effort major telescopes brought to bear or human capital or intellectual capital invested trying to understand how the stars work. even the college observatory in cambridge massachusetts and harvard there was room full of human calculators, computers, that was judged to be menial work because the men stayed in their office doing high-level thinking and in this room was the foundation of our a understanding of evolution. the glass universe was just written on this yes you covered it as an old wash to the glass ceiling that little do the high and mighty men know when you calculate from all the world's telescopes' there is a source of how the stars are born. >> host: booktv on c-span to the monthly index program this month we have author and astrophysicist neil degrasse tyson as our guest if you watch this program we spend three hours with one author talking about his or her body of work this month is dr. tyson beginning 1989 he has written several books . universe down to earth 1994. just visiting 1998. this guy is not the limit. 2000. then cosmic horizon death by a black hole, a space chronicle's three years later including "welcome to the universe" most recently "astrophysics for people in a hurry" if you'd like to participate here is how you can do so. barnum's --. >> host: dr. tyson your most recent book, "astrophysics for people in a hurry" 30 billion earthlight planet so what is the milky way and how big of a real talking about? 40 billion?. >> it was hard earned to learn what the milky way was rolm when they built streets they did not call the mistreat they called them a way. so now they call that the milky way meaning a street. in china were milk is less popular they don't call it the milky way but the silver river. so this is a well-known feature in the night sky as the cloud of light and it wouldn't be until galileo and other large telescopes brought to bear you learn if you put the telescope on the milky band of light reveal sources. >> but then the light poles together so to say is this all there is? it would take until 1920 before be resolved that debate were other galaxies suffered from the milky way. . . >> how far out have we gotten to the earth with satellites or anything. >> much further. but humans we have gone to the far side of the moon when the moon was orbiting around the earth. so sometimes it's further. so apollo eight, or apollo 13 it went to the moon when the moon was near his for this point from the earth. they went around the moon before -- they never landed but they didn't have the oxygen tank it got destroyed. so on the backside of the moon, and that trajectory there were the furthest the humans have ever been to earth. so how far is that? about 240,000 miles away. so in terms of space craft the voyager space craft a few years ago launched in 1977, given some gravity boost, slingshot in around jupiter, saturn, and i forgot the exact, it. multi- cushion shot to exploit the orbital energy of these various planets. we could not launch it with enough energy to escape the solar system. it had to steal energy from planets to make this happen. we did this on purpose. we do this, voyager one has now basically left all traces of the solar system. instead of going just passed neptune, the less planet in the solar system, their comments be a matter of which pluto is a happy member. when you go beyond the reach a point where the sun's influence on the electronics of your spacecraft are now confused with the influence of everything else in the galaxy. that is a functional place to say that you have left the solar system and voyager has done that. >> host: and how far away? >> guest: i forget the number. several times the earth sun distance. i have to look it up. it is out there. >> host: is still producing? >> guest: yes but i was still learning anything, it is cost money to keep something online and keep talking to it. by the way, we go through these funding episodes often. give something kind of working but it has exhausted its useful life but is still taking money so do you shut it off and get a fresh project and have new questions you're answering. you might discover something. you had one are called senior reviews each year were some of the most respected among us get together and decide which switch gets turned off and which gets turned on. that is why it's important it's our most respected scientist among us because we judge that it is being fair. by the way, at the rate at which it's traveling, if you aim it to the nearest star it would take 70000 years to get to. so, give up all expectations that we would be visiting other planets outside of the solar system anytime soon. >> host: 1973. how did you end up in the mojave desert? >> guest: seventy-three. i attended a camp, a special astronomy camp for geeky schoolkids. i was in ninth grade. that was my first year in high school because back then i was transitioning from ninth-grade to tenth grade. ninth-grade was the oldest grade in the junior high school, today the call middle school. that was transitioning between the two. i was a geeky kid, we lived in the mojave desert far away from any human life. that means there's no confirmation, very few clouds and we all live nocturnal he. you wake up at night and there is a slew of telescopes we had research projects and computers are very early at the time. your hovered around this computer. one programmed to. >> host: prime numbers which is a calculation on this is like computation bc. so those are some formative years of my life. ninth grade, tenth grade transitioning out of middle school to high school i attended the high school science the borough that i grew up in an a telescope and a camera that was a happy summer as a summer kid that was the first time in the desert with all the creatures that night. with tarantulas and black widows and scorpions. don't put your foot in the boot unless you can until you shake out your boot because otherwise you could have been him or something in it. at least i could talk to the mugger. it was fun. and so my mother saw an ad for this camp. she knew that i have been interested in the universe for the previous five years of my life and then by what i know that it had as an ambition. so my parents were particularly sensitive to what the interests to up my brother and sister, they did not impart interest upon us. they carefully observed the where our interests word and then carefully fetter interest whatever best served our curiosity. >> i just lost my father this past december. he was 89. i still miss him. he was a wise man. in modern times we forget what was to miss. there are people who know a lot and talk a lot and wise people don't talk a lot. they do more observing than talking. somewhere in their head mixed with their life experience they digested and come out with simple, easy to understand perspectives that live with you. of course they will live with you. the digestion of so many different pieces that you did not necessarily have access to but they did because they lived longer than you and were observant your whole lives. >> in 2012 your space critical schema. you write that our nation is turning into an idiotic receipt. >> was i that harsh? >> that's why i wrote the page number in case he questioned it. >> guest: okay. sure. i'm normally soft with my critiques than that. normally the way i represent such a statement would be, we are behaving this way in these situations, if that continues will then become an idiotic receipt. that is generally how i would wear that. i would double check after it was three oh 1:00 p.m. when the camera shut off. so, i think the people stop valuing discovery or just as backdrop for space chronicles facing the ultimate frontier if i could tell it brief back story to the we have three hours. so i'm assuming they can. did i misquote? it is verbatim. in any accuracy in the context of which i discussed in, it's not a system where people simply don't know things. if you don't know things there's no crime in that. maybe you did not study that are spent 16 years in school or some people spent 20 years in school to get advanced degrees. as an educator i will never hold someone's absence of knowledge against them. the problem arises if you have an absence of knowledge and you either know or don't know and then you have power over legislation that should be informed by that knowledge it is not. then you come to it aggressively in your ignorance that is a recipe for societally disaster. part of what it is to be educated is to have a sense of when you don't know something. you either do the homework yourself. just because you're not in school doesn't mean you can't do homework or keep learning. so that is an obvious point to the years the book to be, of course. to the general population how many people you know run down the steps on the last day of school and throw their notes in the air. schools out. they're so excited summer, i don't have to learn anymore. where does that come from? how is it that your time in school can lead you to celebrate being out of school, without about? what is missing in the educational pipeline that people resent being in school were in college attend a lecture in the word lecture outside of college is a bad word. stop lecturing me. i don't want to be lecture. it's a bad word. what's going on. so, maybe what we are missing in the educational system is a reminder that can be front to learn on the last day of school people should walk down the steps sad little world that would be so, do we teach it differently are we selecting the teachers the right way. simply sharing the observation but i would claim a lot of the worlds problems would be solved if education became a joyous experience rather than something you want to escape from as quickly as possible. an idiotic receipt we draw the word from the film there's a film called any accuracy, you might be able to look at it on netflix or something. it was a world where the people in charge did not fully understand the consequences of the decisions are making in the absence of understanding came from an absence of awareness of how nature works. there is a scene where they're feeding gatorade to plans because they had for gatorade said it replenishes your nutrients. so they said if it works for us it should work for the plants. you just have to see official government decisions that had little or no anchor in reality yet everyone thought it was the right thing to do. so in space chronicles with the ultimate frontier it contains an exploration of all of the elements of society that might not be in a position to judge or make an informed decision about the value of space exploration going forward. >> that was in 2012 just recently in the wall street journal and op-ed by kristin, this is quote in the trump area says celebrity physicist who had said this is the most important thing he has ever said, people have lost the ability to judge what is true and what is not. >> guest: that sentence is from a video that was posted just before the signs march. that sentence did not include reference to trump at all. that was added in that editorial. i just said we live in a time where people have lost the ability to judge what is true and what is not. if you want to call the pre-election era part of the trump era okay. but if you're looking at something on the internet and you think it's true and do not have the capacity to judge whether it is not true, that is another element and ingredient in the recipe for disaster. so trump is a manifestation, the trump era where what is true and what is known and almost that distinction is not made but has risen to high heights. i would claim those seeds were germinating long before. it has to do with what people think is true after they read it on the internet. our susceptibility to this. here's something else. i hate to sound like a broken record. that in k - 12 somewhere in there rather than pouring knowledge and people's head and declaring them to be educated for doing so, somewhere in there we have to train people how to think. how to analyze and interpret. how to be skeptical of information and how to recognize when sufficient data put forth to turn something you might be susceptible to into a new truth. that is not taught in the schools. there should be a class just on what scientists and how and why it works. though it transcends the class, the geology class, the general science class, this would be its own course so that when you are college educated and some institution has declared you graduated in a learned member of society if you turn around and say i choose not to believe this, no, you don't have that option. that's not how scientific truths are determined. it is true whether not you believe it and in retrospect you think maybe that's what you should base legislation on something you want to be true or feel should be true, or something you don't allow to be true because your religion prevents it you don't have that option if it's an objectively established truth. that is the entire point of the scientific enterprise. knowing what is true and what is not an in particular scientists are humans too, we have bias in all the stuff that goes on also touches scientists. so we have built the system to double check against that. if i am biased and it shows up because i took some data and not others somebody else is going to get famous for checking my result in showing i am wrong. tyson is wrong. he messed up and if it showed that my biased it influences i get it to merit. it will interfere with the next time i have an interesting result and i want people to pay attention to it. there is a huge cost if a scientist is somehow meddling with the data because they have an idea of what they want their data to show. it's a huge cost of their career. even if they think they can get away with it somebody will find it. if they show that it's wrong we don't have result title everybody's back to the drawing board. so objective truths. that is what any lard legislation should be based on. if you base it on anything else you are imposing what might be a personal truth your personal truth is that everyone should fend for themselves and not get a government handout let's say you feel really strongly about that. we'll that's how you feel. it's a free country go right ahead. if you want everyone else to feel that that is politics, fine go have that political discussion on the floor of congress. that will affect where monies go to fund the support program or not to subsidize or not. that's a political conversation so go ahead and then the law that comes out will have political flavor to that. if you lost somehow pivots on something that is not scientifically true, you are building a house of cards where the first two floors look stable and are completely hollow and empty. by the time he put out a whole floor the whole thing collapses. nature is the ultimate judge and jury and executioner what is true. >> space chronicles of 2012, we need to go back to the. >> i will not say what we need to do. all i will do i'm not a pundit trying to get everyone to agree with an opinion i might have what i do instead will space chronicles is a collection of everything i have ever thought and written in space exploration. it contains ipads and articles and speeches. it's an amalgam so it's very easy to dip in and out of but i am not going to tell you that we should go to the moon. what i'm going to say is that highly ambitious exercises conducted by governments exhibit huge force on the ambitions of a nation on the creativity of the nation. i don't think it's an accident that steve jobs and bill gates were 12 and 14 when we landed on the moon. how impressionable can you be? there is. there's a future and you see this, you don't even have to be interested in space. you just have to be interested in the fact that new frontiers are being breached. and it is possible to do so. it gets infused into your goal and trajectory of life. i'm offering space exploration but if you go into space, it is adventurous. you have to invent stuff to make that. if you're advancing a frontier. juergen have to invent something you just gaze off the shelf things. you'll have to use an event thanks never been invented before. that takes innovation scientists working together you might even the clever lawyers because i want to live on the moon. who owns that pot of moon surface in my homesteading? i want to mine in astroid for natural resources. who owns the asteroid shoe anyone on the asteroid? that's illegal frontier. everyone can become a participant. when that happens, the government doesn't first because they don't have to satisfy quarterly report. they can open new industries as they have done before as they did with aviation. the government, monies from the government prompted innovations in aviation in its earliest days because i'm saying an airplane now we can carry mail through the air. who was the contract they say i want the contract i can carry four bags of mail in somebody else's and i'm using the same but i can make a modification i can carry six bags of mail. and so there is a race to see who would get the government contracts to carry airmail. so what happens? the next person says i can carry 30 bags, they said i don't need to carry it, now i can sell seats and thus is born an entire industry of aviation. because of certain investments a government makes that that enable subsequent entrepreneurs to exploit the new place that the technology has been taken. so we go into space and i'd say we've had a suite of launch vehicles. your biologists strapped these together we want a tourist jaunt around the moon. and all of a sudden the solar system becomes our backyard. to do this requires huge levels of innovation. i would claim that once there's a first round of innovation that can establish the costs and risks of investment than private enterprise comes in and do their thing as they always do. no different from a trading company coming in after christopher columbus who himself was sent by spain. and he comes back and says where and how long it took and then you can make a business case to exploit. if you found another way to infuse an entire nation, even the world with ambitions of tomorrow that will trigger innovations of today thereby assuring the future of health, wealth and security because is coming from technology is not coming from any branch but tomorrow's technology will give us that, i'm simply offering i'm simply as a force of nature operating on her innovations and are urge to innovate. if you have something else, bring it in. if it works and works better go ahead. i've yet have a better example. . . and that's assuming that if you took all the money we spend on nasa and applied it to the problem-solving problems would get solved. that is a statement that presupposes that gets most of the people that utter the sentence do not actually know. i've done this to people on the street. so, you have the people who've complained. i said how much do you think they are getting. 10%, 15%, 5%. no, one half of 1%. i didn't know that. the space station and shuttle's and hubble telescope and all of the centers. all of this is in the one half of 1%. how much is the universe worth to you? >> one more observation and then we will take your calls. we have spoke for an hour now. first, i want to show this and i'm not getting it right, the pluto file space chronicles and origins what's special about these? >> i was very impressed with the publisher. so these different books have different covers as you might expect because of all the books on the universe and so i -- they decided to make the bindings match up into a coherent, so this is the famous ring nebula is if you can see it. it is the death throes of a star. ours looks something like that. in the center of this is the remains of one what once was. so now these have expanded hugely for what is the extent of the orbiting planet. that is how we know stars by. this is a nonexclusive debt. this is rather stately. let's begin with a question from a young man whose parents both worked at c-span for a long ti time. i might have gotten this e-mail directly. she said my son who is evil and has a question. what aspect of traveling will be most important. the great question there's a lot about this about the manned spaceflight. so, they worry about food. not only is there enough food but will you like the food if you get bored with it will affect your morale and then you are less effective doing other tasks. that means that collects and filters it and then you drink it back. water is not uncommon in the universe but it's hard to get to if you want to hold the supply in freshwater and we don't know how to do that. other things, but time in the close quarters with only one or two or three other people in some cases years there's a psychological dimension to that. can we remain emotionally stable in those times on earth people kill one another and getting to fight. there are many even in the film interstellar. of course there are two guys and astronaut suits fighting on an alien planet. so there's that. will they miss their family or loved ones at home? there's the fact if you fly without creating artificial gravity that you are weightless the whole time. if you get used to it are there any other factors on the body? your body expects one gravity which is the equivalent of earth's surface gravity. earths surface gravity. and if you go to centrifuge through space if you can create artificial gravity but if you can't what is it like to be weightless for a year en route to your destination or longer. we already know the answers to that you have the bones of a frail old woman if you keep this up. so we still have to figure out what exercise will give you the kind of resistance that we live in. to lift this country have to lifup to liftit against gravitye things we take for granted are not something that is normal when you are in space. so all these factors have to come together which is why you can't just send any person into space. you might want to throw in a medical doctor if they are large enough because something might have been taking physiologically and then you need some engineers in a combination of expertise so that the collective safety of the crew is preserved. so all of this matters and there is another book i could recommend contacting for mars where all of a sudden little things you've got to keep track of. we interviewed her for star ta talk. it was too heavy to break. i'm sorry, the universe has some weight. they can just toss the book and will float into your lap. >> you can go to booktv.org and watch it for three hours with the author as well. you have been very patient and you are on with neil degrasse >> caller: i have a couple of questions. first, does the big bang violates the conservation energy, and could it be that we are going to have a big crunch followed by another big bang, followed by an other crunch. i would love to see you run for congress. senator sounds really good to me. >> host: why have you thought about this? do you work in a scientific field of? of?guest >> caller: i took some physics while i was in school. the big bang especially is interesting because it is almost a religious question. i think that it's still possible that you can make a case for the universe to have been here all the time forever. originally, there was something like a steady state theory that was abolished by the big bang. but it doesn't seem to preclude the idea that the universe was always here. and if the universe was always here, then we don't need a creator. >> host: that is burning in howard beach. >> caller: i'm trying to make a mental record of each one of those i and sequence. couple things, first of all evidence that we have ever obtained in the history of this exercise since the beginning of cosmology which basically came to us with others that gave support of data includes a belgian priest even by the name of george who was generally considered the father of the big bang itself. he wrote down the equations using the new theory of gravity to show that we would have a beginning in the past. so, all of the data that we have ever obtained he is unequivocal in its conclusion that we are on a one-way expansion draft, one-way. there's no crunch, no slow down, stop and then collapse. not that it is prohibited by the gravity or any other sense of what the universe could do. we happened to be in a universe where that is not the case which is simple. now, given that it is only a one-way trip, that means that we have a beginning and the entire description takes us from the beginning to the unlimited future. i'm putting these words in the customer's mouth but it gets to the other question what was around before the beginning? we don't have data for that, so we don't know that we have the top people working on it and one of the ideas, which actually comes naturally out of the extension of einstein's gravity and the extension of quantum physics is that there may have been a multi-verse and it would then preexist our universe which is a bubble that came out of it among the possibly infinite other bubbles to the other universe is slightly with different laws of physics manifest within them. so, to imagine that the universe was always there, not our universe, because we had a beginning. but maybe it was always there. that's possible. maybe it is one expression of what the meta- verse creates. if each has bubbles they each create a universe, is there anything to prevent that in principle? no. that philosophical trajectory isn't different from thinking earth is it. so then it is a demotion. it's one of just 100 billion others in the milky way. it's one of 100 billion other galaxies. so, we have had good precedent for recognizing the universe is really bad at making things in one's and that may be true even for the universe itself. there could simply be multiple universes. and i think that is maybe two out of three of the questions 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 has he ever considered running for office? >> when you use the word religion, it comes with certain expectations of what it means. when you say religion, it involves a document of some kind that prescribes what you should be needed even in the absence of evidence. and it then tells you about what conduct you should have in the fact that that belief system. in science you can put forth an idea that doesn't yet have evidence but everybody looking for evidence, if we cannot generate evidence, then it ultimately would be discarded and put on a shelf. so evidence matters. if you want to call it a religion with evidence, okay that it's just a very fresh usage of the word religion in your vocabulary. so i don't have words for people tell me how you are using the word and i will tell you if it agrees. if you are using religion that allows evidence to define what it is people think, say and do, then it's all religion because that is what science does. it finds evidence that discovers the truth of the world. that isn't how anybody else in the world is using religion for some kind of spiritual elements that require faith in something being true rather than evidence of something being true. there was an impasse and they just thought they would have f fun. what solutions did they have for getting things through congress and fixing things and i think the way they asked it is if you were president, what solutions do you have so i wrote that if i were president, i wouldn't be president. you can find it i this on my wee if i were president it will take you to "the new york times" part but i duplicated it in my website and they cut out a paragraph where there was not enough space and the full response to that question comes down to the expectation if you run for office you somehow can change everything. and i am not convinced of god. my views are the opposite of a lobbyist. they go straight to the politician to influence the politician in ways that serve the interest of the lobby and who they represent. for me, any elected official represents the people that put them into office. if people for example all recognize the value of how and why it works they would've never evewould nevereven dream of vote who doesn't know that because that person wouldn't represent their full interest. so i would never educate and the liked her so they can people in office who can make scientifically informed decisions about everything they do. rather than just install myself into office and lead people who do not yet have this knowledge. you can convince one congressman or another but then you have to start all over again. you educate the electorate and we are good. good afternoon, david. >> caller: an >> caller: another family member of mine, i was telling him if he were on tv and he told me something that you heard and i don't know how accurate this is or what the story was basically, he said something that can drive a spaceship quickly and i'm just wondering if it's a real thing and if so how does it work and also i would be interested to hear about other possible drives for the long-distance travel. >> guest: right now we are using chemical energy. it releases energy as opposed to where the reaction absorbs energy. by the way, if you ever see called pax you can buy in a drugstore where you squeeze it and everything gets cold, it is sucking energy out of its environment. she passed where the opposite happens. you get clever with your energy to make this happen. well, it is endothermic, so you squeeze the rocket and -- it is highly exothermic. we have had a chemical fuel since the 1920s or so. very little has improved in our capacity to propel ourselves through space since 100 years now. so there's been some talk about other kind of drives. one of them is a solar sail where you can use propulsion from sunlight. you open up a scale relative to the size of your craft so that you get maximum sort of pressure from sunlight and that can accelerate you and it's just the way you want a sailboat but here it is so light you can navigate the system and it is a little slower but maybe you would ship cargo that way. so the future of space exploration need not be limited to the chemical energy. there are other drives. there is a plasma drive where you left high-speed particles come out and that is a low impulse propulsion but it's very high so you are not going to accelerate very much when one particle comes out, but this accumulates and you can ultimately accelerate to very high speed doing so. here's the problem with all of these frontier of propulsion. instead of taking 20 years, you will take to years. but even if you got to the speed of light it's not going to reach the speed of light. we want to cross the galaxy we will watch you do this and it will take you 100,000 years at the speed of light. so the answer here, you will age much more slowly so you will get there without much time having elapsed. but we will see you take 100,000 of our years to do that. so you come back and we will all have forgotten about you. none of these drives saw the interstellar travel problem relative to a human lifespan. if we lived a million years as individuals, who cares if it takes a thousand years. if it is a really interesting place worth going to some of the neatest wormholes. viewers of the program probably read more books than they see movies that there is a movie called monsters inc., the animated kids film has a lot of good adult humor in it, so these are monsters that work in a factory. monsters whose sole job in life is to scare little children because of course why else the monsters have a look at this factory and it makes doors. they have the door. they opened the door and go through and at the door of a child's closet so they emerge to then scare the child. they go back through the door and they are at the factory. they didn't sa see that in the movie but that is how a wormhole would work. i was in charlotte airport from a big plane to a little plane and i swear i walked 5 miles, it was probably just a mile or, but it felt impossibly long so i tried to be clever and i said i can't wait until we have wormholes so they can be adjacent to one another. someone said if we have wormholes you won't need airports. i said you've got it. it works on paper but we don't know how to make one or keep one open because they will have a tendency to want to collapse. it works in science fiction. that is the best place we can invoke one. until then we will be pretty much earthbound. >> host: if we left right now it would take nine months to get to mars? >> guest: you have to leave when they are properly aligned. so it is to remind people when you see mars in the sky and start traveling to the, but no. you have to travel to where mars will be when you get there so it is a matching up the trajectory. until it pulls you into its gravitational influence and that takes about nine months. if you run your engines the whole time which we can't do that because we don't have enough fuel if we have something stations along the way you can do this and then you are accelerating but that will give you gravity and the ship if it is accelerating. but it will take a lot of fuel to do that. you are on booktv. >> caller: i had a question about einstein. the knowledge from the political force like for instance right now there was an astrophysicist they know exactly what they want to look for. it would be perfect except for some native hawaiians who consider it sacred, so can't do it. i was just thinking another example would be in texas in the late '80s and early '90s that's the largest one in the world because of the texas republicans saying we can't build it and pay for it. so wondering it seems to me at this point we would have figured out. >> host: you've covered a lot of topics and we will get a response in a second. do you work in science in any way? >> guest: >> caller: though, i wish. i am on my last leg. i'm just trying to get some books from the library. >> caller: >> guest: thanks for those questions. i think books have always been a great portal between the different ways of thinking so we are happy to hear whatever it is and the trajectory at this moment. there is a science writer and a physicist. either one is good. in hawaii is the most perfect spot at 14,000 feet above all that could interfere with your view between you and the universe, air flow across the ocean so the images you get through the telescopes are sharp rather than blurry. in recent years there has been resistance to add more telescopes to the mountaintop and those that value amount as a sacred place so if we are at a culture that respects the culture as much if not more than science then you will get the occasions where you want to build something technological that completes with a religious or cultural or spiritual or sociological value, so these are choices the country makes. what was manifest here is the telescope was going to be is now in the canary islands which is spain and we were going to have a particle accelerator that the next one to do with ours was going to be because you have to budget this year is now into switzerland. it simply means we will lose the leadership in those areas and others to come as long as that continues. that is just the reality of this and one of the interesting things about science is that science is not a natural thing. it's not anybody's national thing. these are objective truth is being explored in the objective universe. other nations will rise up. for example, the largest telescope in the world today that focuses on radio waves used to be in puerto rico, the largest condition the world in fact many movie scenes including several of them the film contact, now the largest is in china so if they were sending signals to us and we have defined it out of the cosmic radio noise, the chinese will be the first to communicate, not the americans. this is one of the signs that the united states is fading on the technological space. if you do not think science matters, then in the future, you will be guiding products innovated elsewhere and your economic health and stability you can still be a functioning country that you will not be leading the world by anything that will be shaping tomorrow's civilization. >> host: steve, anaheim california, go ahead. i apologize to doctor tyson. steve is not there. >> guest: the press overstates what the relationship was. i met him when i was 17, just a high school kid, but what was remarkable about that he had not yet done cosmos that he was famous on johnny carson, the tonight show, multiple times, covered stories in parade magazine, was already well known in the faculty and unknown to me that they had my application to him to get his comment. the application was dripping with numbers because i had known since age nine but this is what i wanted to do. he then sent me a personal letter if i wanted to visit the lab to make an informed decision of where i would attend. so i got on the bus and went from new york city to ithaca new york and he met me outside the building and showed me the lab, grabbed the book off the shelf. you don't even have to look and one where your hand lands is a book you've written. i still have that book the cosmic connection. so then at the end of the day he drives me back to the station and then he says here is my phone if the bus can't get through just call and you can spend the night with my family. i'm thinking i'm just nobody from nowhere. i remember thinking if i am as famous i will have a duty and obligation to treat students with this level of kindness and generosity that he had exhibited. i didn't ultimately attend cornell. but that was an indelible moment in terms of how to behave in the presence of others that have other ambitions on tracks that you have laid or that you are on. after i attended one of the talks, he blurbs my second book. i don't know if you have it he here. it came out in 1994. i wrote a letter saying i don't know if you remember me. i was the kid that did this. it was my second book. so he read it and set the page 17 i think you have a typo. that's how you know he did go through the whole book. so, that was it until his widow and one of the co-authors of the original cosmos with huge talent in her own right, deeply insightful in fact for me one of the most enlightened people i've ever met just in terms of if you ask her a question i never thought of that, that's good. keep talking. i will just sit here and listen. and when you meet someone like that, it has a special thing. so the estate to host this follow-on to the original and she continued to co-author that with a colleague of mine. other than that i had a few encounters that we were not like beer drinking buddies and hang out at each other's houses. it was -- relationship as you would presume when you get that persistent one-on-one exchange. you have to be close to someone for them to serve as a mentor and i don't think you do you have to be aware of the examples that you said. and if you are observant and they are successful, then just simply being aware and if you are receptive to it, it can in its own way have him serve as a mentor. if you use the word it gives a different impression than what people would be expected. >> host: how many jobs do you have right now? >> guest: everything else is a nice job. director of new york city's planetarium which is sort of buried within the boston museum of science of it doesn't have its own storefront. this planetarium in the united states as it became a new york iin new yorkis that this planetr los angeles pittsburgh, chicago was the first and there's another one i keep forgetting. so all that happened very quickly within ten years or so back in the 1920s and 30s. so hayden was alive when we gave him money. so the director of the planetarium at the museum of natural history. but also, i enjoyed writing. a perfect day for me is when the phone doesn't ring and i can just write. i also want to get back to the lab. i will have a possibly delusional ambition. i'm visible enough and other people want to do what i want to do and rise up. there's always other people on e on the landscape. that is my ideal future. while i'm invited to give public talks although i cannot always take about 200 amount. obviously it is a possible number with severe triage between zero to four. ideally we put them together so it is a rapid succession so there's that and i'm a servant of the public's appetite. some of the comedic talk shows, the daily show are all here as well so the people that fly in and appear on those shows come i'm home for dinner, i will be home in 20 minutes, and we finished taping. so that is a lot of time and effort. more than you might think because they like to see me on for the five minutes in the evening news interview for example. but, there is a pre- call. you have to get there in our early an and got into makeup and change and look presentable. so they take bites out of the day. but i don't have our long stretches where nothing comes in. there's a different kind of creativity that will manifest when you have long stretches. there's an old saying that i agree entirely that goes if you want to be more creative, become less productive. 50 e-mails today i went shopping and look how productive i am. but did you create anything, did you invent something? have you reflected on reality? there's a whole another thing the human brain does when given the opportunity. so, i tried to purchase the purpose. >> host: who is honey if you are saying honey i will be home for dinner? >> guest: i don't actually say honey. so, we both like to. we are in the front door we care about our ingredients and how the food tastes. one of my regrets is when we finally perfected the dish it means we can no longer order at a restaurant because we make it better than they do and it is no longer than special. so, i make it really if i say so myself i make it really excellent rack of lamb i can no longer order at a restaurant because it is not as good as mine. so they take that off of the list and my roast chicken is pretty good. so i do not order checking out restaurants anymore unless it is some very fancy dish where it is just incidental to how fancy it is and then you see the artist henry of the chef. so if we have a restaurant thatt is slightly more expensive than it should be just to see if something rises up in the menu that we observe so yes we care about food and wine and also go to the theater often, we love a good musical and a good dramatic play. we have the luxury to be able to do that as president of new york city. she has a phd in mathematical physics. >> host: springdale arkansas, you are on with the astrophysicist on booktv. >> caller: it is a pleasure to speak with you. around the fourth century, there was a great named artist of the discovered something called procession. for all of the climate alarmists out there and i don't want to be political, i want to be scientific. would you please explain procession and the effects that it has on this planet sucks >> guest: sure. it was a really an -- it was a brilliant discovery today if he sort of woke up in the 21st century world and you show them all the schools that we have in science and of course he had hardly any tools, just a brilliant brain of his. and so, the procession is anything that rotates or evolv evolves. if you have an elliptical orbit around the sun and here are the planets sort of repeating that, over the time, the shape of the oval will turn even though the planets continue our orbiting the shape will move around the center object so that would be the procession. earth spins on the axis and we point to one direction. we actually wobbled. our axis will not be pointing towards the north star but a different object over here. so this is the procession of the rotation and it is on the night sky with a perception so it's projected onto the sky drips across the constellation so what this means is the first point which says that sun is entering the constellation on march 21 but as the declaration of the first point of the area and if you are born in the next 30 days and a strong verbal say it is in the constellation. people didn't know about distance but said the sun is moving through the constellation. of course the fund is right in front of us but it isn't really moving at all. but they didn't notic know thisn they laid all of this out of serving the universe is controlling your life. so, the first point actually directs and it's been about 2,000 years since this was laid out in the first point it was identified and so if you now look at the maps and ask what is the son doing when it is march 21 it is not entering, it is an entire constellation shifted from that since 2,000 years is about 11,226,000 years0 years as a whole constellation off so when you go to your horoscope and say i am this or this, and it tells you what you should be thinking or doing, the name of your astrological sign is no correspondence to what's going on in today's sky. it is a holdover from what people used to think 2,000 years ago. it's a free country. i would hope that peopl the peon charge with no you don't put someone at thinks the universe is influencing their life. >> host: astrophysics in a hurry, some of the water you just drink passed through the kidneys of socrates, genghis khan and joan of arc. >> guest: is that a question? [laughter] i am trying into in that part of the book make sure astrophysics for people in a hurr hurry it ia big book that there is a lot in there and i want to make sure every ten pages or so there is something that will blow your mind that is cosmically true what you have to say what. i have to reread that. so here's the point there some more water molecules in this cup of water then there are cups of water in all the world's ocean. that is how small molecules are. so if i take this and i toss it out there is enough in what i tossed to enter every other possible cup of water in the water supply. there's enough to scatter every cup of water in the world. so come if i drink this it comes back out of my body in some way or another in any one of a half a dozen ways. so that reenters the environment and it goes to streams into the ocean and given enough time enters the stream. stream. so socrates has drink a glass of water. it is essentially a certainty that some molecules that passed through or in the glass you just drink. it is a statement from the collectivity of life and the communality of our existence with one another, the interdependence of what it is we do and how it is we gave. it's not only that, but by the same reasoning, there are more molecules of air in every breath you draw then there are breaths of air in all of the earth's. so, by the same calculation, every breath you take contains molecules that passed through the lungs. but certainly the nitrogen or most of the nitrogen because there is a nitrogen cycle as well. the molecules would scatter quickly and easily throughout the atmosphere. some of those molecules pass the lungs. it was passed through their lungs. so you want to think of as a separate and distinct from one another, not connected to the world, but we are. and for me it is fascinating. >> host: is there something you studied or learned that you cannot get your arms around clark's >> guest: tons. there are some things i never expect to get my arms around either because they are too big or they are too weird. you imply now that makes sense. but as i bea lead off the book i don't have a requirement i can when they put my arms around. i can just recognize that it's there and accepted even if it just sounds completely weird. you accept it because the evidence shows it is true, because you have faith or because you want it to be true what you need it to be true. it's because observation and experiment verified observation and experiment have demonstrated the truth of that statement. >> host: you have several million followers. here is one sent out on marc march 27. i occasionally wonder whether the entire universe is nothing more than a snow globe on the living room mantle. i occasionally wonder that, that's all. the universe is all we know in our entire existence. and look at what we do when you have ant farms they are just doing their thing. i don't know if they are happy or sad or just thinking about it. but do they have self-awareness or any idea? do they know you are about to steal all of their honey? you have a world affair pollinating plants and coming back and making honey. do they have any idea that he created the world for them? any idea at all? so, we get to do this because we are smarter than they are and we can outsmart them and create an environment in which we think they are happy and therefore they do what it is they want. so, we outsmart our pets. we feed them and continue to feed them and provide for them, but we do things because they are -- because we are smarter than they are. could it be everything that we know and love in this world is just for the entertainment of -- is that such a hard-fought to imagine plaques i know you don't want to think that. you want to think we have free will and that we are in charge. but are we? so yes i don't remember what time of day. i think they are time stamped. >> host: this is an e-mail from gainesville florida. got a question for neil degrasse. are we alone and why is there not any evidence of ufos? is there any and why is their? >> guest: it sounds like are we alone on earth rather than the universe. we are not likely alone in the universe when you look at how common the ingredients of life are, how common it is. hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen, carbon. we are made of this stuff. that's the foundation of organic chemistry, carbon-based life. this stuff is everywhere we look in the universe. and so, whatever happened on earth, it's not likely to be rare or unique because carbon chemistry on which life is based is the most fertile kind of chemistry there is. carvin is abundant across the universe. so come if there is life somewhere else it's probably based on carbon. it is in a fascinating bias but not unjustified. so the universe has been around 14 billion years, plenty of time to default old earth creatures out there, particularly micro organisms. we have no reasons do no to notk of microorganisms as aliens. they are not in a ship, they are just alien life on another planet. so, have we been visited is a different question than whether we assert that there is life elsewhere in the universe. but we have people looking for life in the universe as well as the only any kind of life, but diligent wife and we try to be clever about how we conduct these experiments. on earth, the ufo community puts forth as evidence is weekend on a level that in any scientific circle would be kicked out of the room. you have things like eyewitness testimony. i'm sorry this is not working. no, i don't -- if you walk into a conference and say this is true because i saw it, we are not saying you didn't see if we are stressed simply saying you cannot present that as evidence for something you want all of us to embrace. .. psychologists have known this ever since. in science we know that ever since we have seen the effects of this influence data okay so now, now you take a picture of something that you don't understand. that's better than eyes, you have pictures or videos. that's better so it's unidentified. that's what the u stands for, unidentified. we don't know what it is. it's a mystery. okay, good. what do you want me to do about it? okay, so my point here is if you have seen a ufo to you remind yourself what they u stands for? unidentified. once you say i decide ufo there should be a period at the end of the sentence but what happens is people keep talking and they say i don't know what it is therefore it must have been an intelligent alien visiting from outer space coming to observe us but you just said he didn't know what it is. because it was unidentified. now you are telling me where it must be. the fact that you admitted that you did not know what you were looking at concludes all the rest of the sentence that just came out of your mouth. i'm not going to stop you from trying to find aliens. i would love to meet some aliens but i have so -- such low confidence in you that i will not invest any of my time but i'm glad you are. go right ahead and the day you find an alien i need something better than your video camera showing that it's unidentified and i need something than your eyewitness testimony. ideally in fact bring the alien, all right? you are good to go. i'm not going to stop you from doing that and b everybody has a video camera today. everybody. where are they flooded youtube postings of people's experiences inside a flying software -- saucers shaking hands with the aliens? where is back? we have video of extremely rare phenomenon because everybody has a video camera. we have video of buses tumbling and tornadoes. there was a day when you wouldn't say that, let me go get my shoulder mounted video camera so i can film it. now you get you out of there when you see it happening. everybody has a video camera so we have rare surveillance footage of things. if you have been abducted and you had an encounter with an alien give me some good video of it and get somebody else with a view of it too. then we are good. i've got it but as long as it's unidentified to you, have i made myself clear enough and by the way i have very high experience looking at the night sky and the day sky, okay? and knowing what can happen in the night skies in the day sky. i have seen things with this extra background that i have i wouldn't report it as a ufo. but because i have studied phenomenon of the sky i could identify it. there are clouds the old above mountaintops to take circular form letter high altitude and summer clock meticulous clouds. they could have perfectly cylindrical shapes to watch what happens. the sunset, the sunset for you but it hasn't yet set for those high-altitude so they can see beyond your horizon but the sun is still there for them. it's fun for you but the cloud is lit by sunset colors orange, red and its vibrant and its circular and it looks to all the world like the mother ship just came over the mountain top. if you are susceptible to wanting this to be true than that is all the world the mother ship which to me it's a cloud that forms naturally over mountaintops when hot air goes up and cools the water and the water condenses. and then people say this is a good eyewitness. this person is a brigadier general. it's the curtain who is eyewitness human? that's all that matters. you are no less susceptible than anybody else. i don't care what your title is. i don't care if you are military pilot. it doesn't matter. i don't care. you are human. you have to do better than that. and if you get abducted i tell these people if you get abducted in their poking you as aliens do we have been told tell me look over there and snatch something off the shelf. just do that, okay? then when they let you out you say look what i have stolen from the alien space craft an alien coaster or an ashtray. we can take this to the lab and see if it's of alien manufacture and if the alien came here in a spaceship from across space anything you pull off the shelf is going to be interesting. we are waiting for that to happen. >> host: ever guess we have on "in depth" we ask who are they reading, what are some of their career influences and things like this. these are the answers we got from neil degrasse tyson. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> host: dr. neil degrasse tyson we get to see your favor books are influences what you are currently reading. regis show that to our audience that you have extra notes and he gave some explanations including on the day you were born you say is one of your favorite looks. >> guest: children's book. it's a book and if i knew how to write a children's book it's a book i would have written that i don't have that talent. it's a very simple and beautiful account of all the things that are going on in nature any given day of the year but you get to read it to a child. it's a way for a child to be exposed to all the things that nature does in this world, what earth does as a planet orbiting around the sun, with the whale is doing in the ocean. so it's a walk through nature. it has nothing to do with the baker or the politician or the other things happening on the day you were born but nature, nature is what the person to whom the child to whom you are reading the story is being exposed so i just think it's beautiful. i get misty-eyed when i read it. so beautiful. >> host: the book you are currently reading science and humanism. you call it in mid-century assessment of the role and value of science guiding the progress of civil liberties. >> i like reading a history of how people thought especially at maybin influence by the politics or culture of the time. 1950 is the dawn of the cold war and are ghostly it's before the wall went up but it's still healing the aftermath of the second world war and the world's powers and this is a scientist that made contributions to quantum physics and decided to write. that's not his first book. he had several looks that he has written for the public and one of them is what is live where he's talking about how business is accessed in biology. a friend gave it to me off the shelf. he said v-12 barwick so it happens to be a mud bookshelf at the mom. 202 if you want to join in our conversation with neil degrasse tyson 748-8000. we will also cycle through our social media addresses even contacted that way. if you can't get where phone lines we have about 50 minutes left with our guest this afternoon. heather in jacksonville, florida you have been very patient. please go ahead. >> caller: good afternoon sir it's an honor to speak with you. i have an question about your education. i just finished my bachelor's degree in communications and i'm trying to figure out -- >> guest: congratulations. >> caller: thank you. should i go back and get a four-year degree because i really actually like physics. how did you figure out if he wanted to get the degree of how the world did you end up paying for its? >> guest: those are great questions. advanced degrees especially in academic subjects as opposed to medical doctor law school and that sort of thing in academic subjects you have to really really love the subject whereas in medical school you don't have to love medical school to know in the end you want to be a medical doctor because you have friends that are medical doctor so you know and an attorney you enter academics, graduate school , you have to really really love it because you were not going to get much money and while you were in school. when you get out of school you are not going to get much money and the rewards are the act of pursuing previously and discovered truths in any field whether it's literature, history or art or academics and scientists. also things will not always go as you want them and in the sciences for example you could be in a lab, you could be doing an experiment and nothing works. you don't get the results you expected and you don't get results worth publishing and you have to start again. that's two years of your life. if all of what i just said is a chore if you are saying i do 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 are asking a question or designing an experiment to get to it leads to an answer than this is that life. and by the way as an academic of faculty position or in some cases you can be hired by a corporation, it's a decent living. you're not going to be the wealthiest person on the block but you will have a car and a house in the family. there are no unhappy academics for the absence of money so there is that part. you say how do i pay for it? in my field we work as a teaching assistant which participates in the teaching enterprise that the school undergoes so that's worth not very much money. many people have roommates but after that it's still not that much money but it's more and if you went into debt in college but you are doing what you love then we are talking about the happiness of your life here so, so what if you are in debt? that's a contrary india that most people have two most people but my point is if you get to do what you love and some debt he comes associated with it than you pay down the debt. it takes you 10 years, so what? 15 years, so what? we all willingly walk into 30-year mortgages when we buy a house. you are supposed to know if you are buying a house you will go into debt so how do we justify its? the real estate value will be higher in and so this is an investment. that's what we tell ourselves and for a lot of the time that's true. they're obviously important exceptions to that especially in 2008 but all right let's look at your education as an investment. we are now investing in your enlightenment and your happiness shouldn't that be worth at least carrying some debt such as the debt you are carrying in a home mortgage? i was never freighted debt and i have debt from college and some in graduate school. i had to pay off my college debt 15 years later. as my salary kept going up and i'm not talking about a lot of money here. i'm talking about going from student money to regular person money all of a sudden the debt i accumulated so many years earlier looked smaller and smaller because i was making more and more money. i remember paying $10 a month to start off paying that debt. i got my first job and then i could pay $50 a month and then i could pay $100 a month. i was investing in myself and my future. so that's my answer and as they say if you pick a subject to study that you are in love with then you will never be working for the rest of your life. >> host: neil degrasse tyson's 2000 book the sky is not the limit essentially is an autobiography. >> guest: a memoir. >> host: and mail wire. my favorite sentence in the booklets ready for viewers to set one's on fire seems more like the absence of a creative solution to a money problem rather than a -- >> guest: do you want me to expound on that? in college i was very athletic and in high school i was the captain of my schools wrestling team and in college i continue to wrestle and i also wrote that my book was for wrestling and i also was a conforming member of two different dance companies and i likes not only being strong in number but also graceful flexible and graceful and dance is that if it's nothing else so i just enjoyed what it did for my body and in graduate school i continue to wrestle and dance when i really shouldn't have been. i should have should have never left the lab but i continue this i met my wife, the woman who would become my wife but before all that i had my fellow dancers and they hear my money problems and they said oh why do you dance with us? after hours we dance at the strip club for women and i was really buff at the time. i could do things that a might do under all the situations that they described so i said wow. i probably would not have struggled as much. i know i would not have struggled as much if i had a roommate but i wanted to live alone. i had spent four years in college with a roommate so that increased my expenses and so anyhow so they invited me down just to check it out. i saw them come out with an asbestos lined that had been set on fire that have been ignited and they were shaking their hips to jerry lee lewis great balls of fire. i said maybe i should be a math tutor. that solution did not occur to me earlier because of course i could tutor math. i majored in physics and a math tutor you need that anywhere. everybody needs a math tutor so from then on i tutored math for some $2 an hour and that was fine. it enabled me to make my --. >> host: neil degrasse tyson is our guest and chris is calling from goldsboro. chris you are on the air. >> caller: thank you. it was great seeing you earlier on a.m. joy as well dr. dyson. >> guest: thank you. >> caller: it was great. i always try to catch the moments where you are on tv. >> guest: both of these are live so i went from that studio to the car and now i'm in the studio. >> caller: i think it was in new york. you are awfully quick. >> guest: actually have a wormhole but don't tell anybody. >> caller: my first question involves on a series on the science channel called how the universe works. it was one of their segments about black holes. my question involves the teacher that was a possibility. it involved the speed up matter excelling faster than light because of the force of gravity. my question relates to if get these conditions were met outside of the black hole and if it happened near planet or a solar system what would be the effects that would occur? >> host: thank you, chris. >> guest: if i understand your question you are talking about somehow accelerating mass to the speed up laid beyond the speed up flight fit i think that was the question. there is no known way experimentally in the radically to accelerate a material body to the speed up flight and beyond. you can get close to it that you are not reaching the speed up flight. it's a joke. it's not just a good idea, it's the law and we haven't invented a way to do it yet which was the case where the sound barrier, consider anyone who said we will never go faster than sound, ever well accept that the tip of a bull whip, the that you hear is moving faster than sound. not only that we had guns at the time where the bullet emerged from the barrel faster than sound so for anyone who says matter will never go faster than sound, no, no. just because we don't know how doesn't mean we ever will. it's different with regard to light. this is not an engineering limit periods of physical limit of nature and like i said we have never seen it. we have tried and it's never worked and theoretically it's not possible. okay, now that doesn't prevent, and going to take the question beyond the step he doesn't prevent from existing faster than light. i hypothesized about it. you can't pass through the speed up light a deacon exist on the other side and if you do then you move backwards and return and we hypothesized the particle that does this. we call it the taliban from the greek root meaning fast. it's also a word that draws from that. so that would be really cool if tachyons existed in this world. people of exposed experiments were having detecting them and we have never found them so just because it's an okay equation doesn't mean nature has to abide by that possibility. the fun part about tachyons is let's say i see you are walking down the corridor and you slip on a banana peel and fall and i say oh let me prevent that because i can send in the text to warn you about the banana peel before he gets there. if tachyons will go back in time and reach you so i sent that message and i say watch out for the banana peel. 10 seconds before you get to the banana peel you get a text and what you do you do when you get a text? you reach in your pocket and you start reading. while you were reading my text that says watch out for the banana peel you slip on a banana peel but you would not have slept on it if i didn't distract you with a text that told you to look out for the banana peel. you would have just been walking down the corridor so that's an interesting case where the act of trying to interfere with the past created the very thing you tried to interfere with and so there is still a lot more thinking we need to do on the frontier of time travel but that's an example of something were in events may be happening exactly that way and nothing is going to change it because the act of trying to change it created the event that tried to change it. >> host: kline observatory tweets in just saw on booktv neil tyson lewis agnes kirk. >> guest: 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 don't think of it that way because we have much bigger telescopes today and relativity and quantum physics. all those are 20th century discoveries but that the 19th century if you were around at the time you would have been celebrating how far science has come. keep in mind there are more signs going on than ever before that's the golden age creeping in. nevermind what happens later. in that moment you feel like you are at the top -- i have a book, someone else's from 1890 that says i wrote a book on the sun in 1895. we have just learned so much about the sun. i have to have the new edition. it's celebrating a little bit of five years of discovery so what she did was chronicled the cosmic discovery not just historical but to the present. she is a popularizer of modern astronomy before astronomy became today what we think of as astrophysics. some of my books are doing just that. i have a book called -- pluto files. if she were alive today i think she would have written up look. i was delighted to learn that there are people who cared enough about science to learn about it and share it with people who have an interest in science who would not otherwise be doing that work themselves. and math we say it's an interesting and useful thing to do. it's probably pronounced clark but it's spelled clerk. posts are you familiar with kline observatory? >> guest: no, i'm not actually. if there is an observatory i don't know about it the more, the merrier. plus two and 2007 you wrote the book "death by black hole" end quote the gentleman name lord kelvin who in 1901 said there is nothing new to be discovered. >> guest: that was a boneheaded thing to say. he had a certain arrogance to him sort of a physicist arrogance where in physics there is no real understanding of chemistry without physics and there's no way to understand biology without chemistry so this is justifiably considered that anchoring subject of all the sciences and it's a justifiable claim. the question is your ego as a physicist. in his case that's one of many examples where he just kind of said things that he had no business saying. 1901 within four years special relativity would be discovered by albert einstein but eight years after that and 10 years after that the general theory of productivity would be discovered and all of quantum physics would come down the pike. that has to be the most embarrassing statement uttered by any scientist ever who is otherwise a respected scientist in the kelvin scale is named after him. >> host: and "astrophysics for people in a hurry" -- >> guest: we have fine-tuned numbers on that. it's about 85%, so let me say it's not that we don't know what 85% of the matter is that we don't know what 85% of the gravity is. that's a strictly accurate statement. we look around the universe and we see stars and planets moving. we have appalling gravity this should be making that happy -- happen. that includes everything we can think up and dream up and no of. black holes, gas clouds, planets add it up, 15% of what is driving the gravity of the universe. after that there's something that we called dark energy which is just possible for the acceleration of the universe and the numbers even higher. i can say with some precision 95% of everything that is driving the universe today which includes what we called dark matter as i referenced in the quote and what we called dark energy. those combined you can measure their existence but we know nothing about it. they are driving 95% of what's going on and each of those gets a full chapter and astrid -- in "astrophysics for people in a hurry." i'm not going to let you get by unless you hear it and end up loving and respecting if not loving how we came to discover the greatest mysteries in my field, dark matter. >> host: "astrophysics for people in a hurry" is his latest book. jeff is calling from anaheim, california. go ahead, jeff. >> caller: hello. i just want to say it's a great pleasure to talk to you. my question, you have talked about space travel the importance of psychology and the importance of gravity. i was just curious things like synaptic gas and things like that come everything we have done every experiment in every idea has had the effect of gravity on us so if you are in the zero gravity environment for a long time or in a planet and fall from their where there's a different gravity would that affect electrical and chemical signals from the brain? >> that's an excellent question and i can say it's not likely and experiments show the answer is in fact no for most things that matter so consider the following. when you are standing up and you have thoughts and you are hungry , you love, you hate, normal emotional thoughts and gravity is pointing downwards so now you just lay down. now gravity is pointing out of the side of your head. you have all those same thoughts somehow your brain capacity is not altered by this so you were still in a one g environment but the g is now pointing in a completely different direction. so you look at these physiological, your veins. why does blood circulate at all? doesn't require gravity? well not really. does blood circulate standing? it circulates horizontally and it circulates at any angle in between because your vessels pump on their own so why should we think as 0g everything would just stop. not only that electromagnetic forces are at 10 to the power of 40 times more powerful than gravitational forces. so all a lot to call synoptic activity going on in your brain doesn't care about gravity. it's functioning completely independent of it. now chemically you have chemistry going on in a liquid let's say. the microbes are floating around in there buoyant. they don't care about gravity either. they are suspended in the water. that is that they are living and the chemistry of molecules doesn't care either. so it's why this works at all under these very different conditions. if you are in low gravity and you grow up in low gravity that's going to affect your muscular because everything weighs less than it would on earth. now we bring it to earth. you would be a weakling person here on earth unless you are lifting weights. here's what you do on mars. you've counter weigh everything and it weighs as much for you on mars as it would on earth and when he came to earth everything weighs the same as you would remember. that's a kind of in your would have to do. the movie that came out months ago is about the first child ever born on mars and the child wants to come back to earth and they explore the medical problems he has but among them none of this. this is a first. mark flippo is another long-time c-span employee and they don't sentiment for the politicians. they send them in for you. jack is 14 years old, and drew is 12 years old and according to mark babin having a weeklong debate about mass that took place at the grocery store. jack f-14 want to know since there is matter and antimatter is their anti-mass since there is the existence of mass. drew wants to know what mass there was in the big bang that triggered that? >> guest: great questions. it's not obvious on first pass that antimatter shouldn't have anti-mass pre-think about it. it has anti-everything else. in quantum physics it has the opposite of other certain quantum teachers that are not familiar in our everyday lives but particles live by it with and momentum in this sort of thing that the simplest thing to ask is if an anti-particle has anti-mass, what that means, should that mean that it has anti-gravity? this is an implicit consequence of the question, does it have anti-mass. it turns out no, it doesn't have anti-mass nor does it have anti-gravity. and the equations of gravity are such that it doesn't matter what your mouse is made of. it will attract you no matter what because your mouse drops out of the equation. so no, there is no negative mass. in the original equations when it first came it showed up as a negative mass and that the question is how do we interpret this and it got interpreted as having negative properties, opposite properties just to find the term to antimatter. where did all this come from? matter and energy are interchangeable. literally where did it come from the frontier of cosmic research. we have top people working on it but otherwise we don't know for sure and like we said earlier maybe it's part of a multi-verse but then you ask where did the multi-verse come from? one of these at a time. so we don't know that we know it exists and we are describing it ever since it came into existence. it's on my bucket list. the largest machine in the world is the european center for the research and i think we parsed out that acronym. they have a large hadron collider and that's the famous god particle discovered one or two years ago. it's on my list. >> host: -- from eagle, colorado please go ahead with your question or comment. >> caller: dr. dyson. it's a pleasure to talk to you. i have a question that has always been interesting to me. can we ever harness gravity and use it for propulsion? >> guest: that's a great question. and you are right that has been on peoples minds forever. if there is no way to do it we have yet to figure it out and let me flesh out that question and imagine that we have some suitcases where we can harness the force of gravity or control the force of gravity so we can increase it or reduce it so there are people to this day that the think that nasa has a room where you go in and you are floating and that's the zero gravity room but that's not the case. the closest we have to that is what we call the neutral buoyancy tank which nasa uses for a big swimming pool and astronauts working on a hubble telescope and practice spacewalks are submerged in the swimming pool. 10 houston texas. russia has a counterpart to it in their space center as well. if you can turn off gravity below the launchpad in a rocket fuel that the rocket is using oh my gosh the acceleration would give you if you went from 0g to 1g for example. we just have not figured out how to control gravity in that way. it's always associated with the concentration of mass or energy. posted january 29 east a tweet from neil degrasse tyson and the world goes crazy every few decades just long enough to forget the last time the world went crazy. >> guest: yeah people reacted heavily to that one. what i mean by that, the first world war, oh my gosh is this what we call civilization? we are digging trenches and wholesale slaughter of human beings and a few decades later the second world war, 50 million people die. you can run the numbers on this. 1000 people per hour were killed in the second world war. 1000 per hour and you look today and maybe there is a terrorist attack and people in the headline news over the last several days. i'm glad it is headline news but that tells me how far we have come. 11,000 people dying per day during the second world war was not a self news. it was we won the battle or we conquered this. the terms are not how many people died. the terms are what political gain have we put into play. what happens after that and after that and then there's vietnam and you go further back and there's the civil war and slavery. i just felt compelled to reflect on this. wondering whether the natural urge to syncbak into some crazy behavior and then we have to react to how crazy that is then slowly build ourselves out of it just taking long enough to slip back once again. to me it was a fad but i want people to reflect on what happened before because we can say they didn't know. they were crazy thinking this. how could they think this way? what were they thinking? ask yourself and 20 years what they will be saying about us. i do a lot of reading of the history of science and the history of culture. a book printed in the day so you feel what they are feeling, not just a recounting that the words they are using. we look back at the temperance movement and the vanishing of alcohol. they are crazy. how could they have done that? did you read op-ed that the day in articles in the atlantic monthly? it is filled with accounts of families that were torn apart by the drunken husband who comes home and what costs this is to society. it's the buildup. it's their and if you are alive back then there is no reason to say you shouldn't have known that. it just watch the wave take everybody with a culminating in a constitutional amendment. we don't have an equal rights amendment. we have an amendment banishing the production and sale consumption of alcohol outside of the religious ceremony. so what will people in 20 years be reading about today to say what were you guys thinking? it's obvious. can't you see the forest for the trees? i think about this all the time. >> host: any significant that when our january 29 week after the not oral? >> guest: i'm sure there was something, people just reacting. it wasn't so much the election but there is the election plus the reaction to the election plus what he says about the election, i mean the inauguration and i think you was just a total conduct of everybody just at odds with one another and a war with one another and saying things that you can imagine in the civilized world he would say to one another. i was really just reacting to that. but so you have worked on commission through the past and the present. guess why was onto white house commissions for president george w. bush and under obama we met several times but i was not a formal advisory committee and right now toward the end of obama and now the two the trump administration, i served on a board of the pentagon >> guest: thank you, that's a great question. so the big bang explosion, it's one thing to speak of an explosion of a fireworks display or a bomb frantically and analogize it to the big bank but there's a limit to where those analogies can take you and there's a point where they fail. so because the big bang is an explosion not only in space but in time there is a center of the explosion but you don't have access to it. the center to that explosion was 14 billion years ago when everything that exists today was in the same place at the same time. so, if you think, you might have heard this analogy to the surface of a balloon where we lose one dimension. we lose one dimension so we can describe it among ourselves in the ways our human brain is wired to see. imagine you have the surface of a balloon and as you deflate the balloon the distance between is gross precisely what's going on in our universe but separating from one another within the space is because the space itself stretches and this is prescribed by einstein general road -- the area of relativity. here is the universe now at this size but yesterday was a little smaller. yesterday was a little smaller so if you want to ask where's the center of the surface that's like asking where's the center of the surface of the earth? the question actually has no meaning. you know to not ask that because it's the wrong question given the geometry of what's going on so i can ask a different question. not where's the center of this universe, the surface of the sphere. i can ask when is the center of that universe and the plan is 14 billion years ago. the timeline and a sense is the fact jars pointing straight up for the center to the center of the universe that we live in. as the balloon gets smaller and smaller it goes back in time. that is the center of that explosion 20 billion years ago. >> host: adrian and memphis, hi adrian. >> caller: hello. i'm in seventh grade. i sigh you and memphis. my question is about black holes. i want to know what is in black cold and how do you know it? >> a great question and you should be in college by the way that you were in seventh grade. there is hope for the world. a black hole, so if you were in seventh grade you would have been maybe four years old when i published the book death by a black hole so inner there's a discussion about black holes and also how they can kill you but what we know is if you are standing on the surface of the earth i'm mike what your grandma told you what goes up must come down, it's true for most things but there's a way which you can talk something in which it never comes back to earth, ever. there's a word for that in physics. for earth that speed is seven miles per second, seven miles per second. when the astronauts went to the moon they had to travel nearly that speed so they would just fall back to earth when they took their engines and turn them off. if to be the point where the moon can pull them away from the earth so they fell to 6.8 miles per second. but anyways about seven miles per second. you can imagine if gravity were stronger you would need a higher velocity to leave and never come back. that would make sense. the sun has a higher escape velocity than the earth does. that's a stronger gravity of the surface. let's continue this exercise. something john mitchell did an astronomer way back centuries ago. he said suppose i had a star that had such high gravity that light traveling at the speed of flight isn't sufficient to escape. if that were the case the star would just darken and contain all the light that it wanted to generate. you call this a dark star hypothesis. this it turns out to do the calculation correctly requires einstein's equation not lexical equations of newton. einstein's equation to get the correct answer but when he did this we have what you call the black hole and we have examples of black holes in the galaxy though you can't see them directly because there's no light coming from them as you reach the center. sometimes you see a distortion of the pafford -- fabric of space and time in their vicinity so the star field behind them gets distorted. take the left instead of going straight because you don't want to get pulled into the black hole. the most common way we find black holes is when they falaise stars and gas clouds that come near them and spiral down and gets hotter and hotter and before it enters it radiates brightly and ultraviolet and x-ray. we have x-ray telescopes as powerful as the hubble space telescope. you just never heard of it because it doesn't take the pictures that hubble does. there's an x-ray telescope in space that finds and maps these black holes across the galaxy so that finally -- the day we finally go space traveling we know what to avoid. >> host: neil degrasse tyson you have one minute to answer this question from your book space chronicles. >> is a close approach of an asteroid. this is an asteroid we have discovered that crosses earth orbit and sometimes across as very closely and in fact april 13 of 2029 this asteroid which was the size of a rose bowl will come so close to earth that it will dip between our communication satellites and us. those are fighting words. we call it -- but we will just way vesta goes by. this one, turns out that this asteroid will not have it trajectory that will hit us in 2036. there is a period where we are in the same place in our orbits of the big worry was at that time will it actually hit us will the orbital calculations are good enough to say it will not hit us either of those two days but there will be a close approach and we will make banner headlines when it does. preska jeffrey downham wonders whether earth is worried or worried -- not worried about an asteroid. just go yes, one of the most assured ways will go extinct as we discover an asteroid too late and too late to do anything about peter reminds me of this comic it may have been in "the new yorker". there's one dinosaur leaning on a rock and the other one comes up to him and says i say now is the time to build an asteroid defense system and the dinosaurs are just laying there just kicking back in their jurassic laziness. so yes we should have a defense system in place at all times and we don't. >> host: neil degrasse tyson has been our guest for the past three hours. his most recent book is called "astrophysics for people in a hurry". this is booktv on c-span2. this era is the moment for the peak victories of the civil rights movement and the sort of sense that we think of it starts at a moment when tissue are jim crow discrimination and are being dismantled. .. >> >> what facilitates all this is we have people living near each other we picked up on the project of desegregation so now we corral and that is a big thing that i have come to believe in writing this book that it should be a priority to revive and resuscitate desegregation explicitly in those terms as a social project. [inaudible conversations] >> welcome to the san antonio pope festival the signature from the public library foundation things to the library for the artsy-craftsy or overly their space to help us present this amazing day of

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