Cosmic Queries: A Taste of Space, with Matt O’Dowd and Neil deGrasse Tyson | StarTalk Full Episode

this is Startalk I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson your personal astrophysicist and for today's edition it's cosmic queries Pokkiri and I've got Eugene Mirman visiting in from Boston used to be local and now you're not anymore Dino why uh you know you got married got kids out there any children - that's up jeez man that happens yeah that happened welcome back thank you we're here in the YouTube studios I don't know why but that's where we are with you why are we in the YouTube studio yeah we're collaborating yeah Wow how do we know that because Matt O'Dowd is here and in from Australia that's your home motherland well that's training once upon a time once opponent multiple times on and we've got you now he's a professor of physics and astronomy happy to be gone at at the City University of New York and throughout Lehman College up on the Bronx where I'm from hey and you're here because you have a YouTube channel I do yeah and I part of the PBS universe are very delighted to learn that PBS has was a digital I wrote it down digital the digital studio exactly and you your program within that is called Jamaica life and yes I space time it's a PBS Digital Studios show these are shorts with like four or five minutes each or when we go a little over we tend to go 8 to 10 bull kill some people I'm kind of Asami I don't I feel like that people take naps partly partway through they wake up for the end where the jokes are no it's great so that's why we've got you that's why we're in the YouTube studios and you're here to help me handle these cosmic queries you listen it from the internet at the back from our from our basically our social media base that gets solicited and sometimes we solicit by topic and then some don't fit in exactly right and so we put them all on the grab bag and so we Jane let's do it we haven't seen these and so no no idea buffs will will work will work at this okay this is really prove where we have anything a little bit so let's do this Jordan Thompson from Indianapolis asks Neal there once were reptilian the size of buildings-- planets made of diamonds stars five billion times that of our Sun and holes that lead to nowhere do you know do you think the universe has any limitations within the creation so many things to pick on what we can start off by saying I'm from New York City yeah there are no reptiles with size of buildings look out ways from like Iron Maiden lyric book I want to live in this universe actually are there were several planets native diamond planet a local oh yeah yeah so tell us about that what do you know of it so Diamond D is a very very its form of carbon put cover under a lot of pressure and those atoms all aligned is that beautiful diamond lattice that we like to wear on our fingers sometimes but planet critical data so yes crystal is exactly planets sometimes massive enough that the interiors can presumably crystallized carbon Robins not rare in the universe no so there are planets and the whole planet in fact there are sections of the universe where it's mostly carbon they're places where stars in their effluences will actually release copious amounts of carbon this is typical in material yeah yeah yeah so I mean the planets would be the dog it would be inside you need to get that pressure and so you need a bunch of stuff on top so there'd be carbon I knew I got a did work plan on not all carbon little woman and the other thing is diamonds aren't that rare anyway even under this I think we you know it'll eyes them too much yeah I mean that they're they're not no quick so we get the diamond and like I said in New York City there are no reptiles the size of buildings but if you live in a small town you know t-rex would be bigger than your house along goodbye I know you know this because I I think you assembled the t-rex skeleton yourself at the Museum I don't know this was a kid yeah put it together actually well so so reptile was descended from the same ancestor as dinosaurs but I saw some souls whatever else yeah yeah were not reptiles as far as I understand they are basically closely related to birds in fact birds are dinosaurs really aren't Birds more closely related with dinosaurs than modern reptiles are my understanding really from the phylogenetic tree at the American Museum of Natural History is that birds and dinosaurs are just really the same thing the only active idea was that reptiles that's what I'm saying so let's talk about birds being the descendants of dinosaurs without mentioning the crocodile and is that true is that it's a product I don't know crocodile is the worst bird yeah my name is repairable there neither of us is an F is a is it's a paleo biologist but but so all I can say it is I don't they would never dinosaurs the size of New York City buildings that's all right and all I want to say is is there a limit to this universe I would say absolutely yes in that not everything that can exist does but so me how do you know that is it it's an educated guess I think was I don't think so that can exist that you think doesn't not only that can exist well for example the mathematics of say of relativity described things like wormholes and and you know quantum mechanics says it's tachyons these leaving start records and real look look at volume it I can emit a tachyon pulse I would say an infinite universe contains an infinite number of things but it doesn't contain everything that you can imagine I said the laws of physics still have to be obeyed well I'm so I'm with you on that so you're not going to have an Empire State Building sized reptile because it can't hold itself up exactly with a very interest so you know about this they teach this I don't think teachers outside of like physics 101 by so so as you get bigger yeah your volume grows I your weight goes up according to your volume yeah what the strength of your limbs goes up only according to this cross-sectional area so it's a matter of area versus volume some Villa is Godzilla collapse under the weight into a puddle of guts yes correct even if they'd really radiated just because oh the Irate he was a radiant that changes the volume area seemed completely right I don't have been affected at all so it's why they it's why big animals are heavy animals have thicker legs you can't just scale up an insect right make them this big because their body that is great news that's good very gay I had a minute and it completely negates pastured horror movies or the 1957 and I would have identikit was I would have to be look W series cankles to be able to also as the ant gets bigger the body weight goes so much gross faster than the strength of its spindly legs can support it and would just collapse under its own weight so you can't just scale up insects and get big insects it's just not going to happen I remove that as a fear ahead good so the laws of physics prevent that which is why you can't Godzilla right as big as Godzilla can a person be like any other giant person that's besides in the building this movement no no jumps about any kind of life I mean any kind of life right right right of course we don't need to fear like giant elephants or King Kong gosh there's another thing that involves blood pressure okay so if you're really really big we have to get blood to your brain and brain is at the top you need a seriously pumping valves to do this well you had a heart though that was the size of a house inside your body that's the size of a skyscraper would that be fine you mean that could pump with that kind of a temp yeah I guess so I mean when is you need maybe two or three hearts is what we're saying if you want you to decide you're measuring the creature here but I'm just adding a heart the division giant thing that does it a good thick that's bear I think pilot problem is these things evolved from smaller versions and so they have to kind of co-opted those miniature organs to something that works on the large scale come out of the box big yeah right exactly right that was the biggest creature that ever existed is how like this no it is the blue whale then exists today okay so what's fascinating to me that mammals have some of the widest size range of any branch in the tree of life what is the smallest mammal it's like it's split it's like a it's like this big there's a little to the adenine or the current sure I don't know yeah but you go from this to the blue whale now here here's where the blue whale cheats you look at blue whale in the book yeah well wait for is gazillion tons yeah not really because gazillion isn't a number well nobody not only to that reason but it's actually floating the water right she is not holding up that way so once you are in water then there is no limit to your mass weight so could Godzilla exist but only in water gods who loves being in the water he couldn't that exists so that he could come out of the water and start terrorizing the town in the same way a crocodile is basically useless on the ground cargo has to do a push up just to walk and then go back down because his legs are not directly under it which is a big evolutionary advance you I don't need muscles to hold up my body weight because vertically I'm just I'm just supported so so to redo this Godzilla kenick this but not out of the water Gio hit says go into the water that's right and that's why huge clumsy things are can be highly nimble swimming into one giant yes cuido jellyfish would just be a second yeah it should be done exactly yeah yeah okay great all right we learned a lot and that was from whom that was from a Georgian Thompson Jordan angle Jordan yeah Susan was that a patreon question no an Instagram okay these are all sort of largely facebooking Instagram those ones we're supposed to read patreon questions first can they like give us money and they bribe us no I hate their questioners well I'm totally with you excluding the part where I have no questions from patreon okay so I can make them up okay all right go on if that's how that's how you can bribe us yeah no I agree Susan minnow from facebook asks how sure are we about our map of our galaxy in the universe in general could our tools techniques be mapping an illusion that the universe is much smaller or larger than we've calculated your show is called space-time yeah why do you take everything we don't based on lies I mean it's it could just be that there's a giant dome that's painted kind of like The Wizard of Oz set right and are we in a super complicated Truman Show I think that the closest thing to that is the idea of the holographic universe where you have this vastly distant shell that's a hologram and that our three demented to protect you from two highly highly hypothetical and moving us a theoretical but so the answer all right how do we how do we measure this stuff with with many scientists working independently making measurements independently and getting agreed-upon results um in the case of the map of our universe is pointing multiple different telescopes at justed galaxies and and you know basically calculating redshifts and so we're also getting distances by different independent methods so I would add that we use a regular telescope that is sensitive to visible light and that's the extension of our retina and we see a galaxy there now somebody else invents an infrared telescope or microwave telescope or a radio telescope and we scan the sky we find the same object but now emitting in these other bands so this gives us confidence that the object is real that it's actually there and some interesting things are happening in it and that it's not and then like as you were saying before it erupted you and you that you can get the distance to this object by multiple ways they're not standard ways you would measure distances on earth on earth you can pace out the distance you could get a little tape measure you can use now one of these like a wheel light using the laser laser thingy so they're multiple ways if you get the same answer from all those ways and all those ways are completely different from one another and you have confidence you have the right distance to the object yeah and so yeah so this you combine all of these factors we think the universe is real and it is what we measure it to be but you can get take a deeper philosophical point that there is no reality beyond the measurement the measurement becomes the reality of the universe that we describe so to say it really is this other thing you're just not measuring it to be so I'll say how will you ever know that it's this other thing well I don't know the question wouldn't be that it's another thing it's just that we are wrong well how would you know that we are there's so so we learn in quantum physics you learn in clubbin ha ha the reality of the world only makes sense through the measurement right in a sense yeah the sense so you cannot it doesn't that mean anything to talk about a world that is outside of a measurement so definitely you know what that's what Niels let not say access to it I think what I think I think others I think you know for example David Bowman and and and realists would would argue I like I think the important thing is not to confuse though the idea that the you know we haven't a subjective experience of the universe and that that subjective experience isn't the universe it's a different thing to the actual universe and but nonetheless the universe remains consistent our subjective experience of the universe matches other people's subjective experience we can all make measurements that agree with each other and that gives us confidence that there is something objectively real out there even if we can't say exactly what it means and I would add to that I'll tie a bow on it that I look at something and I say ok that looks red to me well my on drugs or not ok so that'd be a subjective reality so then you devise an experiment to an apparatus that measures wavelengths of light and you've already calibrated it so that this wavelength is a red over here so now you come to this and the machine measures red as well if the machine on drugs your thing should see glittering what red means is we're got to teach them over here what red is and then we look at this thing that I'm looking at and so now we both query the Machine what color is this and the Machine gives us the same answer so I've removed my own brain from this experiment and I'm getting the same answer so to limit our subjective experience you reality but we know the limits of our subjective experience and the whole point of science is to is to probe reality reducing our subjective interpretation by as much as is humanly possible ideally to zero yeah well refining the subjective model so that it better and better predicts the objective reality even though it will never be the objective reality it's a highly effective predictive you know apparatus okay all right next question it's time for like one more question okay segment all right what are you from leo zua Zuza on instagram how about the recent articles about the possibility of us being part of a simulation and the big bang being just the seeding event of such simulation Thanks I'm totally there yeah I'm taking it every minute I'm you don't like a lot of it I want to hear this I'm loving it well if you made the simulation some some some snot-nosed kid in the parents basement of an alien civilization one is bored and and they're more advanced than we are and they've read way more computing power than we are I totally do this like little handheld Nintendo you can do exactly and so they program in enough detail to completely simulate every molecule in this universe and we are here for their entertainment what else can you explain where things are going wrong just fine in the world then all of a sudden there's a complete disruption the snot-nosed kid culturally politically economically a complete disruption I think that's it's they throw it in for entertainment that's what I said okay I'm going to say I have two things that I firstly I predict that you don't believe that that's my first pro K I'm not going to I don't know it was in your head argument for why that that's more likely than any other scenario I'll tell you the habit but the numbers game ok so the idea that if you if you you need to produce one universe capable of producing universe simulation that's all you need and if that universe produces billions of universe simulations then any universe that you happen to find yourself in is more like molecular we want to Denver one University order at all now the way that like virtual reality now exists and you know video games have advanced it is likely that in say a thousand years whatever our virtual reality for 30 years 30 years thousand or 30 30 years but whatever it was would potentially be physical like you would be able to feel it I guess it wouldn't it doesn't even require that no it requires that what you program in there has an in your Nintendo yeah whatever it is has enough complexity that in the mind of the characters in that game they think they're real right so it's not free well it can't simulate the whole universe because to simulate the universe perfectly you need a computer the size of a universe do you do you yes I don't know because I mean do I hear you aiming it's except I do want to hear but we got to take break I want to hear all right okay so I should say when we come back more this cosmic queries Edition on Startalk we're back on dark ah I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson Eugene Mirman hello back in the house Eugene you tweet by what handle at Eugene Mirman at Eugene Mirman you got it and I've got a friend and colleague matt'll down who is he's an associate up at the American Museum of Natural History my day job if I serve as director of the planetarium but he's at he's an affiliate of ours and but a professor and of his own up at Lima college you're not so welcome and you've got your own YouTube channel I'm jealous you got a good YouTube channel well my team's YouTube channel I would say okay that's PBS Digital Studios EVs tutorial studios very good a titled space-time exam have we left off before the break you asserting to my disagreement that you need a computer the size of the universe to program the universe and I'm saying that the universe that's created doesn't have to be the whole universe it can be just some other universe it can be whatever less than the original universe needs to be to be whatever it is and I agree they think it's their whole unit that I agree with okay good then I agree we have no discussion no go for beer right all right I I do have one thing to say so yeah this this whole idea recently came up I think it got a bit of umph because Elon Musk asserted that this was quite likely that we were part of a simulation by the way just to be clear this part did not originate with him of course not it goes back to the 90s and there are a few philosophers who started who set this ball rolling and then old many others many others and one of them one of those writers whose name I'm blanking RL Jam if that might might have been Pearl Jam so the idea was that we are most likely in in what he called I don't know your groups and when they paint this is the hands of George so the idea is an ancestor simulation the idea that some future version of ourselves when we're more advantage to Oscar is what are the original okay but God the idea was that that in the future scientists or kids with Nintendo would choose to simulate the entire mental life of ancestors a bit of you know from hundreds of years ago just as a study there's a study in past psychology but that's all I have to do that they have to seem like only the the activity of the mind and input all of the senses as long as they're consistent now that that probably will be able to do I mean the brain doesn't have that many connections that we can't you know in a couple of Moore's Law doublings will sort that out the problem with though I recently heard that Moore's Law is now no longer 18 months just how our ears that until we hit the next I guess iteration of once we move beyond silicon maybe well I just never heard you ever run right top people sure I can this might this might take very good be on the top people rate it okay so we go with this so the idea is it's not simulating the universe as you as you suggested but I think it I think it requires a lot of assumptions that the future us will want to simulate the entire mental life of our ancestors and and that we're more likely to be that but my main objection is that part of the idea is that if something goes wrong for example we figure out where part of the simulation then whoever's running the simulation can edit it and remove that thought and business-as-usual term and so it's the most useless hypothesis people who disappear and lower lows where they are but that would happen that without but that would be but that would be lame the Russian that was like okay that was silly at some UN you've had thoughts that popped into your head today that you never had previously in your life so there's no way no way that the conspiracy can be proved or denied because everything is programmed including you know evidence that we see that it is true people disappearing you know Roswell or this stuff is presumably programmed in so I reject it because I think we need to continue on as though it's not you can do both you could be like we're maybe we're a simulation but we should clearly live life as if we're people rescue halves don't have free will we would also still like even in a simulation of you murdered someone you'd go to simulation jail which I'm sure is terrible that's true yeah I dunno all right next question all right big dog d1 two to three asks if Venus doesn't have a magnetic field then how does it keep its thick atmosphere shouldn't it end up like Mars that's a good one I'm not a planet guy but let me sort of address it cherishable so one of the things that keeps our magnetic field stoked yeah is that down in our sort of semi molten iron core you get cup you get iron sort of move moving if you have an earth is spinning and so since we spin it that relative once a day that's relatively fast much faster than Venus I'm a businessman like a little less often than once a year and in the wrong direction right it's been what I am planning and I know yeah but a doubler so you are fewer you are fewer days old on Venus than you are years so that's so it's not churning you know you don't get this sort of what they call differential rotation so so Venus right does not have a significant magnetic field and magnetic field protects you from the ablative effects of solar wind and so there's meaning it's closer to the Sun getting twice the flux of solar wind then we get and it maintains its atmosphere so generally when we what goes on here on earth is it's not that it will blow away our atmosphere it's that if there's a water molecule high up h2o the energy from the Sun can break apart that water molecules separate the hydrogen from it then you lose the hydrogen because hydrogen is very light and in a given temperature gas it's the fastest moving atom okay if it doesn't bind onto something it's just going to escape you're going to lose your Ida j'en in a earth-sized gravity so so you can systematically lose your water from such a place and Venus as far as we know has no water it's all carbon dioxide well it doesn't have a carbon dioxide atmosphere has hydrochloric acid up there which I guess has some hydrogen but I think I think part of it is also that Mars is much much lighter than Venus and so Venus is almost as mess that massive as the earth and yes it holds on to it and no the it has so much of it it's got to be losing stuff but the timescales just much much longer it's got nearly a hundred times the atmospheric pressure as Earth so from how does that well you so if you go there you would you'd be crushed split seconds before you vaporized if you order a black tape like this 11:00 a.m. arizona's sensor i don't know the full the royal origin of that right it's got a lot more albans i had a model and what was a regular battles I've said on the record for a lander on on Venus is something like two three hours before crumpled in like yeah and and the big Venus people were the Russians they have the Venera spacecraft they thought didn't they got the nickel and that's right yeah you get crushed in it melts it's they knew this but it was it's a little challenge while we were going to Mars they were going to Venus right and we go to Mars because it's super easy I have to get coffee harvest amazi hard not as quickly so it's while we're on the subject I allow me to tell you the story of Venus sure okay I was going to say you know starting on Otis or Venus right so you know if you're from Mars your Martian Earth's forever furious Earthling Venus you're a Venusian you know these we have these words if you are of those places yeah it turns out Martian is act is correct earthling is good but Venusian that's a improperly formed word we've stuck with that word because the properly formed word was already taken by a whole other branch of science the medical doctor if you are of Venus you are venereal from the latin from the legs exactly that is the genitive form of venus and so when doctors found diseases peculiar to lovemaking and venus being the goddess of love and beauty is that let's name it all after venus right so that became the category of venereal Bailey like we would rather you didn't cause the knee right back there pissed off so ever since so so it's we should not be surprised at the spacecraft the Russian Center Venus walk all the Venera series it's because of their genitive form so so war wounds should be Martian like that's a Martian core to Xion you see yeah that's a Brad if you want to be yeah you want to be symmetric about that consistent yeah you have a Martian wound oh yeah yeah very good let's try to make that happen yeah nailed nailed son from Syracuse in upstate New York almost as bad as Chuck nice with this he he mangled the names on a single time I'm not mangling anything is he parries weird night yeah being like peoples like monikers which even the word I just spaced on commented cold well he got pronounced incorrectly yeah still s space SS and yes we have an obligation the area red big dog D 1 2 2 3 2 just early dog D 1 2 2 2 sorry so Nelson also accurate from Syracuse at do scientists and theorists have any idea how much time passed before the Big Bang was there time before the Big Bang I can answer that yeah we have no freaking idea ok god I know what you have what do you get for that I mean the the standard wisdom was always that time started at the Big Bang and before that there was no time that was your the first second happened then but you know I think there's new thinking now I think ideas like eternal inflation so the idea that possibly this universe just you created out of some inflating rapidly expanding multiverse type thing in which time might have some sort of existence yeah we get it would be time to be a matter time for the meta universe basically whereas our bubble surely has a beginning point may show that none of that one dimension so I want to get semantic on it we say time as we measure it began at our beginning right but if we are part of this multiverse you should think of a multi time right that actually is the master clock of all yeah or talk instead of chain of cause and effect there was a cause before the Big Bang at some sort so like roughly an hour yeah what 4045 min I don't want to be inaccurate all right mister findell asked we created tools to detect and see different wavelengths of light that our eyes can't see that's where they are there any ideas of tools that would allow us to detect and see dark matter so many ideas depend on what on their first study is we do see the effects Dark Matter has on matter right Dark Matter has what rabbit can see it has gravity that's how we know it's there that's why we thought I was getting too quickly and I keep saying this it shouldn't ever have been named dark matter they just been called Fred because we don't know anything about it maybe it's not matter per se it may be matter maybe not so to call it any kind of matter is misleading yeah right so you can hopefully good presumptive that's a better word thank you and but what it actually is is dark gravity mmm-hmm that is literally true yeah so so we see its effects on things and that's pretty good that's so that's why we all know something's happening out there all right so now is there some other way we can detect it you're getting a depends on what it is I mean if it is really massive and some kind of particle then people roll over it so people are there is best over/under on that is that it's going to be a particle like this like some ideas is that it might it might self annihilate when dark matter particles find each other and that would produce very high-energy light or other particles that we could detect here on earth as as you know your flashes of gamma rays or cosmic rays dark matter something that's far out in space or is there visit near the earth or is it everywhere and meaning it might be in this room differently certainly in this room what dark matter is so diffuse it's manifest only on very large scales exactly so it is so dominated by ordinary matter in normal situations dissipates that you can live life as though it's not there right same with our solar system there's no you don't need to invoke dark matter to calculate anything that's going on where around us but in deeper states where there's less in a bigger space more space until just adds up over yeah yeah over the like yeah here's the same might we ever find it if it is a particle might we ever find a dark matter planet or dark matter something else but probably not because not only does this dark matter stuff Fred not interact with us or dairy matter it doesn't even interact with itself if you don't interact with yourself you cannot coalesce and become something I L it doesn't interact with itself because it would otherwise stick to itself there isn't there are ideas that would allow it to near each other - I mean to annihilate itself when it when they interact that it's so small and spread out that it just doesn't happen very often you think it's only a frequency issue by some models okay but or war might not interact with itself okay so also possible right because we we our particles in which we make molecular bonds atomic bomb so it's knocking so we make molecules and then we can be this fleshy thing called humans with yeah it's not capable of that cigarettes not listening but be really cool it they were like humanoid Dark Matter entities yeah I like the whole eyes you haven't they be completely transparent they don't interact with light that could be right here right next to be all connected be all around us yes oh maybe that's what angels are okay all that yep one more real quick what are you great before we break someone let Mike Huckabee know just in data on Instagram at is it possible for the fabric of space to be ripped or pulled apart could an over expanded black hole then be the cause of a sort of big bang as the matter rips a hole through the fabric of space I saw that episode in Doctor Who right now another so I love the idea that we might rip it's terrifying and beautiful at the same mm we're not going to rip in what we're doing now but in the distant future where this this dark energy pressure of the vacuum is forcing it most elderly and fun an acceleration of the expansion it that will grow exponentially so I'm curious Mike there be a day where space is expanding so rapidly that it's it's its pliability cannot keep up with what's happening to it and it just rips instead of continuous or the very least atomic nuclei ripped apart and and yeah so my if that's your favorite classic structure it would be terrifying but oh my gosh there'll be a new thing I think even cooler is vacuum decay Oh so the idea back in decay do you want oh what's back in vacuum decay no great look over the edge of it and it could happen any time for the commercial hotel okay when we come back more star talks cosmic queries Kokiri edition neil degrasse tyson back at you star talk cosmic queries edition potpourri grab-bag I got Eugene Mirman Eugene and I love heaven will stay waiter so long next I'll be back soon yeah call me or something I'm okay Mack wait to have a guy said where's the youtube so videos why because you have a youtube show sure I did call FaceTime great name thank you very much I didn't come up with a but you keep up PBS Digital Studios that's right very good and so we're doing QA here and something that keeps me awake at night is wondering whether the vacuum energy of the universe is stable I lost audio i + lead me to lost not a lot of sleep have you I'm about to we're going to make sure you join the club what is this so ah so vacuum decay yes it's scarier than the big rip that might happen due to dark energy because it could happen at any time it could happen spontaneously so the idea is that you know the vacuum you know it basically vacuum means there's nothing in it but actually the vacuum has some tiny bit of energy the fields that permeate the universe would give rise to particles are through the vacuum now one of those fields is the Higgs field okay it's what gives subatomic particles mass the famous Higgs boson it's a variance of bad ass as you get to be a portal that's what god particle contradict name is Nick number so this is the idea is that that anybody like a quick explanation for how it gives mass I sure to sport I think this explanation works ok ok think of a party in Los Angeles okay in Hollywood I've made likes into one but ok alright and so what the Higgs field does is it will create a resistance to your ability to move through that field depending on what kind of particle you are and the greater is that resistance the more you measure its mass to be ok these massive things don't move ok so you go to a party in Los Angeles and somebody nobody has heard of walks in okay Arnold Schmid Nick okay fine walks in no one crowds around he can go straight to the bar his very low party mass mm-hmm Beyonce walks in then a scrum builds around her she cannot move because people taking selfies getting autographs asking a question paparazzi she moves five inches a minute takes her a half hour to get across event she has very high party mass the party field granted her more mass than Arnold's reg'ment child is a neutrino and Beyonce is it's a massive portal electron exactly yeah okay good so the universe is do I get your approval on that analogy I think it I think it's nice I think for as Greta and I direct everyone to an episode on space time we've done this object that uh takes only a tiny little bit further okay sorry goodness but the cool thing about the it is dislike that no I love like well here's what I only give them is I've never been invited to that party and I know absolutely I know tell me about the racket is that I need to be afraid of okay please so the Higgs field works because it has a nonzero energy everywhere there's a little bit of he genus everywhere in the universe yeah who don't feel the goji you know before that's how I described right yeah and just to be just to be clear because in case anyone who's watching us is really young and the only concept of a vacuum is a machine that's sitting in the closet right so that machine creates a vacuum hence we call them vacuums right so in space unlike who was it that said it nature abhors a vacuum only on the surface of the earth most of the universe is vacuum so the universe loves itself some bakit okay so it's a region where there's nothing except there isn't nothing there's some little Higgs energy desert all right and so when when the universe was settling down soon after the Big Bang that Higgs energy found a nice comfortable place tacked to to be a rest value to take and you can sort of think of it as it it was it was falling downhill in energy and it found a nice dip in the energy that it could be and came to rest at that that particular energy but over that little hump there may be a deeper drop and a much more preferential comfortable lower energy for the exec you'll to take the vacuum if it could get to that lower energy point it would go there because the universe one thing universe does love to do is be in a low energy State that's something it will do whenever it can but it needs to realize that over that little hump that low energy state is there it only takes one little part of the universe to get the message that it can have a lower he makes a whole wrestle universe we're happy yeah and so the idea is you have this vacuum decay that will power the vacuum decay to that lower energy state and all the physics goes out the window everything loses mass or particles can suddenly move at the speed of light time winks out as we understand it we will become essentially photons okay and they say it dogs and cats start dating one of those that turns up that so that is highly hypothetical no one know anyway personate again what happens when we try down so Coco trainer yeah I was really expanding the whole burger okay no do dreamer cook so the one thing of us realizes that it is this new energy state and and not what we thought that bubble expands and at the speed of light envelops the universe okay but you know the universe is big so my so depends where it starts so maybe it all start it's all so it only moves at the speed of light when this happened yes almost tunnels there then whole thing happens instantaneously mmm and it's already happening tunneling where instantaneous not about the distance is limited telling distances Oh at election of probability so okay but if this is happening somewhere in the universe and we'll just get swallowed up in it yeah basically yeah what are the kids is already happening the chance is we have no idea by the way I think it is lost with the racking state every time I fly over crater like you know the it's the volcanic caldera and there's a crater there sure and if there's a lake in it there's water just sitting there yeah ready to kill you now if that water knew that it always had access to the ocean below it would go like that mm-hmm but it doesn't know mmm these got rats getting this that's going in this in this it thinks it has reached the low ground because water always finds a lower spot it thinks it has reached the low ground but it doesn't know that it can get lower hmm and so I like I said I lose sleep wondering and part of the problem is that because the the new vacuum expands at the speed of light we can't see it coming because light outpace it the first to get education we get would be like wait so it sounds like there in a sense there's nothing appear cuz it'll just happen that's not going to help me meaning I think just you can't even watch it happen yeah it'll just be will have been a thing and then not a thing that's not so bad yeah yeah I mean I don't care for it but we're a simulation anyway so there's next time we really love being it I will see ya sorry let's choose from the internet yes cool let's read this question ready hmm d 6 1 6 3 6 on Instagram asks how was the Phoenix cluster discovered and why hasn't it devoured our solar system ooh okay I I hope you know the answer to this no I don't know the Phoenix cluster is well I guess that's another thing to fear well I don't I don't know next cluster risk you don't know official I know what the Phoenix nebula you know what is that it's a rather beautiful stuff warming Nebula that it's going this is some hundreds of light years away it's yeah it is it's quite pretty look like a phase if it hears you say that I think it will like it yeah all right here's another question evil Lucas at square wait let me back up for a minute so I don't know if this answers that specific question but it relates to it sure if a black hole shows up somewhere mm-hmm it doesn't automatically become some kind of huge vacuum sucking up everything that it didn't previously suck in before given the mass that it once was so black holes are not giant sucking machines earth it's earth if the Sun became a black hole mm-hmm all the planets won't all of a sudden just get sucked into the but we would be harmed well it would be cold and be very go that's the only change look super cool it was super cold as cold as a get as cold as as possible so it is how we reassure people after the vacuum decay thing that people are afraid of science the more you know the more there is severe so if in this cluster there's some black hole they might have read about I haven't gotten the latest on that but if that's the case you needn't fear freshly foreign black holes all right because regret the gravity the reason why black holes are scary because you can get very close to them because they're very small and we need that close to them you feel extraordinary gravitational effects on you but if you maintain the distance you've always had from that object it makes no difference to you like my call was in Chicago would we be fine here in New York because the black hole size of a nice shoes it in yeah yeah it would be would systematically beat the earth you know that would be you know would be like the mass of Jupiter oh yeah yeah yeah so just what is that what if it was the size of a dime with that destroy the earth that would be the mass of molten yeah on order if this earth is a black hole the size of like Ruggeri that's not that's nine millimeters in denominator so a pomegranate seed black hole food that sounds that sounds rough to the types of black hole that the Large Hadron Collider would produce in its when it collides beams those would be so infinitesimally small that it shouldn't be a problem they should decay into very one finger so the things so recently okay basically is the probably be okay if it's edible of a black hole was the size of something edible we would all be dead yeah sits in your mouth I do you think of a way to be scared systemically I've been trying to keep all the earth in its vicinity well you would suspect it'd be good but how long oh and so like but we would in the minutes our second uh fractions of a second I would guess so again that's the value light there will have to do the calculation I feel yeah but it's quick quick quickly okay yeah um time for a moment yeah yeah yeah let's do right vodka oh no wait we never read it evil locust when it comes to the multiverse theory is there any way to know the ages of the very is universes or would they all be the same eh mm Wow so I think the answer is absolutely no way given them there's no way to test whether they exist so here's an interesting fact of science generally if you don't know anything your first question is the simplest does it exist right then when you confirm that it exists then you ask the next round of questions how long is it existed will it die and then you go how big is it what are the properties so right now we don't we don't even know if multiverses exists right much let's start handing out ages to them as the the idea is these things pop in and out of existence forever in some meta clock right all right hence this via so what do we how would you know if there was another universe those are depends on the type of multiverse I mean there are many different types to choose from words what's what example is oh so five example easy right so there's the quantum multiverse the idea of many worlds that that the universe splits into two multiple realizations of itself every little subatomic decision that one is the same map they're all the same age because they all started from the same branching chain then you have the use of the famous many-worlds interpretation yeah they came out of the physicists in Denmark they called the Copenhagen interpretation it's post Copenhagen box all right yeah it makes the same predictions of this Copenhagen was that this was mate this came out in the 60s and I'm blanking on the physicists and all that okay anyway so then you have the the idea of the multiverse that expands from the what I mentioned earlier in the show the the eternally inflating multiverse so one part of it just stops inflating so crazily fast and just a regular Big Bang inflation and those should those who just be appearing all the time in that greater multiverse one cool thing about those is that it may possible to detect them if you happen to have two universes that kind of kid like champagne bubbles and overlapped in the in the very beginning rejected and and merged you would see like rings on the cosmic Michael background radiation because of coffee stains of where they interacted back conditioning and we haven't seen them yet but we must me think I was another one where the actual space-time that you're in has pockets of non causally connected expanding sections so in other words we look out to our horizon but beyond that horizon there's a whole other universe but part of our space-time but we can't have access to it and so that there's this huge fabric of space-time and just universes dotting the space within it and so and that type should be as all it all should be the same exactly the same be exactly that would be the same Big Bang at birth right sorry but my favorite one is the one where it's just this frothy foam that is birthing universes back and forth and just the completeness number five to me the universe of Lee Smolin where black holes when they form they create new universes interest inside of a black hole the mathematics tells you a whole other space time emerges on the other line after it because you fall in you'll have get to that after you see the future history of the universe from which you came unfold no yeah so yeah that I thought should is just in yeah so is we don't know but though over ideas are really great we got to stop it here you've been watching if you've seen this on youtube or otherwise listening to Startalk a cosmic queries edition I've been your host Neil deGrasse Tyson your personal astrophysicist I think Eugene Mirman Eugene thanks for coming back thank you very much a ton I know alright your Boston I just start texting you science classic okay I know you're alive you up well rounded the universe worth if I was some friends we want to know exactly exactly and I think my friend and colleague mantel down who's got his own YouTube channels on PBS Digital Studios and it's called space-time based time if I type of space-time it goes to you tada strains he doesn't go to Einstein's theory it goes to you when I'm three or something like that you get straight to YouTube and work hard or you might become number one on yeah I'm great having to say don't think they'll always alright good so as always I bid you to keep looking up this is Startalk [Music]

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 312,384

Rating: 4.8822956 out of 5

Keywords: StarTalk, Star Talk, Neil Tyson, Eugene Mirman, Matt O’Dowd, PBS Space Time, Higgs field, diamond planets, dinosaurs, galaxy, universe, ancestor simulation, is our universe a simulation, dark matter, Big Bang, multiverse, astrophysics

Id: cBbcVJrw6_Y

Length: 50min 26sec (3026 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 14 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Juvenile_Rockmover]

Thank you. Just what I felt like.