How to See Through Misinformation & Find the Truth | Neil deGrasse Tyson

today one from the vault we're talking with neil degrasse tyson i'm just not sure how to introduce someone of this magnitude someone with so much gravity he's one of america's most beloved science personalities kind of a cross between mr rogers and carl sagan he's an amazing guy brilliant and one of the major influences in science education today certainly in the zeitgeist and vernacular of science pop culture enjoy this episode here we go with neil degrasse tyson [Music] how do you keep childlike curiosity when you're a scientist and you know a bunch of things and you've studied a bunch of things and you're at a planetarium teaching a bunch of things how do you not let things get in the way oh so no you don't have to maintain it you just have to make sure nothing interferes with it which is different from having to actively maintain something so if you have a something that's always at risk of evaporating away or fading then you've got to pump it but i don't i don't have to pump my curiosity really it's yeah it's i've had it since childhood it's the same curiosity you have as a kid but i just have it as an adult and i think all scientists have it as adults that's this may be the only way you can be a scientist where everything is curious to you oh what's that i wonder how that works you know almost distractingly curious and so yeah that's it's there i just make sure that things don't get in the way of it sure i'm curious all the time but i i put in things i learned about something yesterday and just go and steamroll the learning process with bias hmm yeah well so uh bias is an interesting force so you can't expect to live life without bias but you can live life self-aware of it or self-aware the risk of but often bias you don't even know you're biased in a moment that you're being biased so you would at least have the self-awareness that you can be biased and then at another time in another mindset or you know to bring someone else into the equation and just assess how how effective you were in being unbiased if that's necessary for the thought that you're having sure like a scientific experiment the double blind thing keeps out ideally keeps out as much bias as possible exactly and so not only that there's the the fact that someone else does the experiment who might have a different bias from you but if they get the same result then it means you've transcended the bias right especially if they're trying to prove you wrong and they still get exactly exactly yeah that's uh that's got to be a little disheartening if you're a scientist and you're thinking i'm going to prove this guy is full and you keep doing it and you're bad you're bashing your head against them and you're just making the results even better right you're making it more accurate one of the problems in science today is there's not much reward for verifying someone else's results sure so the person who gets the result first will get the nobel prize the person who verifies it enabling the rest of us to believe the first result essentially gets nothing gets fired for not discovering something so so we we would benefit from a shift in the culture uh in the peer-reviewed scientific publishing universe but it's still the best thing we've got going in terms of how you would decode what is what is and is not true in the world thankfully people are still stumbling into correct results whether or not they want to find them or not i suppose people who fund those things might be less crazy about that but the people who are are running it at least are doing good still doing science right it's still science even if you get the result that you don't want it's still science well provided the experiment is properly designed yeah sure yeah you found your calling really young when you were really really young a lot of people when i went to school i was one of those kids who went is there a book full of majors because i was told i have to pick one of these and i'm flipping through the book and eventually luckily enough i made my own concentration out of different subject areas very few people do that because it's a huge pain but that was dodging a bullet of just deciding on business or something else because it sounds good do you find that finding your calling really young is an advantage that has shaped your career path i took it for granted that i had that interest very young and did not realize how odd that was until college and just like you said i'm there in college and half the people are still thumbing the course catalog and i could have told them you know astrophysics is early in the alphabet you could get to that you could hit that pretty early so so then i only then did i look back and and deeply value the fact that i could align my life's pistons early on so that they're all firing together and i guess with emergent electric cars the piston analogy will rapidly right go extinct so align my electrical currents so that so that every decision i make can be in the service of that mission statement because you were giving lectures on this stuff when you were what 15 years old first public lecture yeah i mean that's bananas most most people in their subject area they give a talk when they're 35 and they go okay i've got to learn how to do this oh yeah well it was it wasn't that i had to learn how to do anything i was simply talking about what i loved so if you love something so deeply and you know a lot about it and someone says tell me about it are you nervous no you'll just start talking so now it's like tell me about it except there's 50 people in the room or 100 people in the room so that didn't make any functional difference to me sharing it with one individual or a room full of people uh the difference was when i gave it to the room full of people they actually paid me right you got a check at the end and they clapped and said yeah i was like i didn't and i did it without expecting that they were candid and said look this is what we would pay other speakers and i mean the subtext was you're only 15. we probably could have gotten away with not paying you at all but we're going to pay you because that's what we pay all our people yeah it was basically an infinite i think it might not have been more than 50 or something but it felt like an infinite amount of money right at the time if somebody just gave you enough money to buy pretty much everything you can wrap your hand all i did was talk about what i loved yeah not bad i felt really cheap like no the world should not be configured this way i did i sweat did i bleed did i uh no no it was just a outing and then i realized that society values knowledge yeah of some parts of it anyway looking through the course book thumbing through trying to find a major if you're trying to help people save time by letting them in work by suggesting that they select astrophysics i think my recommendation can be a little bit off but what do you recommend for people who who email tweet at ui i assume you get this all the time what should i do with my life that's got to be a tough one what typically happens is it's not so blunt as that it's a more common example not necessarily in detail but broadly is that someone made a career in its subject that their parents wanted them to go into sure they took over the family business the parents are doctors they became a doctor the parents didn't become doctors but wanted to become doctors so they wanted their kids to become doctors so they're establishing a career based on forces that they did not control and they're for that category of person they reach a point where they realize they're not fulfilled because they're not doing what they love and then i get the phone call right because they're they like the science they've read about and typically people have very different range of mathematical background so nonetheless there are many places and ways you can plug in to this moving frontier of course if you have high mass ability you know sky's the limit but if you don't um they're artists who reach for the universe as their muse as their creative muse their attorneys who are trying to create a new frontier of space law and you know that would be cool who who owns this patch of land on the moon if you get there first you get to homestead it who owns the mineral rights to the asteroid that you paid a mission to to go visit and so no matter your your mathematical ability there are places you can plug in that still have tremendous value provided you love what you do i used to be an attorney as well and in part it's funny should mention math ability one of the things i triple checked on before going to law school was how much math is involved in this particular course of study and they said no virtually none and i said great i'm in but not not really the only decision factor you'll want to look at when choosing a career of course math ability but maybe when when looking at science and things like that yeah it matters but but uh there's something that's not widely embraced but should be i think is he gets a kid in a math class and they already have some established interest somewhere else and they'll recite the following phrase i will never need to know this for the rest of my life right why am i slogging over it now and i think that's the wrong outlook because that that ignores what hoops the brain goes through just to solve a problem it's the statement would be true if learning was i will learn all the things i need to know to do things i will one day need to do but that's really not what learning should be because that ossifies you into whatever was the were the hot topics uh at the time you were in school a more powerful posture would be having had your brain trained for thought and analysis and processing information and then if there's a new thing you've never seen before you will just attack it with vigor attack it in a good way you know the way uh because it's an unsolved problem and you can't get enough unsolved problems i feel like that's what happened to you in college as well it looks like by your own account you didn't maybe spend as much time in the research lab as you would have needed to because you had some dance and some rowing and some wrestling well well no that would have been in graduate school graduate school yeah undergraduate uh my load outside of class work was was not atypical [Music] who lived down the hall for me in the dorm but graduate school yeah i spent a lot of time i mean how much of my time maybe a fourth doing things and i in retrospect i clearly shouldn't have i should have spent all that time in the lab but i can say at the end of it all that i have a certain enrichment of thought and uh uh creativity that i don't know that i would have obtained any other way really i started writing with fountain pens back then and i just like fountain pens i like the way they feel i like good ones well sorry ones that have an interesting nib where they can leave an interesting line on the page if you just have a fountain pen that leaves the same line in every direction just might as well just use a ball point but look at the flourish and the expressive elements of communication that went on in the era of the handwritten letter in the error the handwritten letter and handwritten correspondence in general the words would be written with the flavor of the meaning you're trying to convey and it would influence the flourish or how big the first letter is or the curly cues underneath it and so it was a dimension of communicating that went beyond the simple definition of the word you were writing and all that went away with the typewriter because every word now comes out identical on the page same font same size yeah exactly and then more of that went away in the era of texting where big words are just abbreviated into letters um you know see you tomorrow is the letter c the numeral two evidence that pure texting is completely inadequate to communicate is the flux of emojis that have come down so instead of writing how you feel you just put a picture of how you feel well that's that is like the supreme height of illiteracy where you just put pictures of is hieroglyphics again is it is it pictionary i mean like what is this right it's higher back to hieroglyphics again so so i use fountain pens as a as a way to commune with the past that interest started while i was in graduate school so i had some pens and i bought ink and i and i would practice penmanship on these huge back in the day you had these big computer pages that came out of the big printers and so it was huge real estate dots you got a right yeah yeah yeah the perforated yeah yeah the dots how old are you the dots 37. yeah you got to fold it and then you really yeah yeah so so so my point of saying this is in my adult life i have found that now that i've written books people are vastly more appreciative when i sign it with one of my fountain pens because it has it has interesting form to it that the pen brings to the signature in ways that no sharpie ever could is that what you got in your pocket right there because all i got is a sharpie all right well then i'm going to need this thing you dare put a sharpie in front of me fling it over my shoulders and speaking of emoji i'm feeling pretty smiley face with glasses and buck teeth right now oh so that's that's a good sign it's a good interview that's where i like to go with this idea there and smiley face with hearts on it in the eyes instead of eyes your career started off with uh well i should tell you before that with your doctoral dissertation committee getting dissolved from the university of texas yeah that's got to be kind of scary right because you're in the process of completing this childhood dream that you've had even before when you're 15 you're given lectures on this stuff and now they're kind of like hey you know um sports medicine is a burgeoning area you might want to look at i mean how did that affect you at that time well so i don't think they had any clue of the depth of my interest in the subject the depth and breadth so to say oh we're going to zombie come here now what are you going to do thinking that i'll just you know whatever just find yourself do something else as though going to graduate school was some lark a decision made on a lark so uh no i persisted and so i knocked on doors and called people i knew asked if they would admit me to i'd take whatever tests were necessary so i transferred my graduate program to columbia university from the university of texas after the committee was dissolved and so there was a year delay in there because uh they wanted me to take the general exam which is what you take after you finish coursework oh wow just it's just to but once you know material i mean you're becoming an expert in a field and a world's expert in a sub-part of that same field so the idea that somehow taking an exam would be arduous um is that's a foreign concept we're academics this is what we do and not only that the the idea that i would lose years having put into graduate school and sort of re-jump start that exercise also sounds a bit harrowing but no because what you do in graduate school is exactly what you do when you get your phd and beyond you just get paid less so it's not oh now i have to slog through another thesis and another thing and it's like that's what science is posing a problem researching it writing it up publishing it so it was lost professional uh standing it wasn't lost and it was lost income but it wasn't lost ambition in the close-up version of that story it probably looks a lot like you fell off the tracks obviously now you come back to become a legend in the game which is pretty cool not everybody does that but the fact is they can't really remove your interest from that they can tell you well you know we're not gonna we're not gonna do this anymore because you're doing too much latin ballroom or whatever wrestling or whatever whatever the deal was both yeah both but they can't they can't stop you from going through it and macro picture big picture do you feel like that even was anything more than a hurdle or a speed bump or maybe not even that it was a huge hurdle because i had to leave texas and i was living in my parents basement by the way uh my wife who i met in texas uh got her phd in mathematical physics oh wow from the university of texas at austin and she moved with me to new york which by the way she's from alaska so this is a huge shift for her she moved with me to new york this is when we were just still dating and then while i was living in my parents basement i proposed to her oh wow and she said yes and so i don't think you can get more pure than that no no especially if she wasn't sure what's gonna happen i mean was there ever a time when you were thinking this might not work out especially if they're you get that that letter hey we're dissolving your your dissertation committee it's possible but again i had a huge fuel tank of energy to pursue these interests and it was not anywhere near empty it was lower maybe one-fourth full but a car that has one-fourth a tank of gas can actually go faster than a car that has a half a tank of gas oh that's a good point i hadn't thought about that yeah because it happened you know right was the weight factor the weight factor so you just have to need enough to run the to feed the cylinders and you're good to go well speaking of fuel i i think i've read and heard you say this a lot you we can't make america great again until we make america smart again right uh i think that's the case what does that mean well you you need to make wise decisions and i recently wrote an op-ed uh it's posted on my facebook page if anybody cares uh you can link to it it has the same title as that video that that that got so much distribution just before the science march it's titled it's the same title for both and it's called science in america but the op-ed gets to flesh out in sort of written detail what that means and there's a section of the op-ed it's about a thousand words actually 900 words where i just go president by president from abe lincoln and fast forwarding to the 20th century and just moving forward and identifying which president was responsible for creating which well-known agency that is responsible for thinking about science so that would include the national institutes of health the national academy of sciences they're not in order that just as they come to my head the center for disease control the national science foundation nasa the environmental protection agency the national oceanic and atmospheric administration noaa you just track this over the past 140 years and it just bounces back and forth across the aisle truman puts in the national science foundation and that becomes law in 1950 although it was proposed a few years earlier and he's democrat he was of course the vice president to franklin roosevelt then eisenhower a republican puts in nasa in 1958 and of course kennedy a democrat sends us to the moon 1970 we have the environmental protection agency put into place by nixon a republican that same year noah signed by nixon a republican in the 1990s the there are major investments in bringing the internet from an obscure thing that scientists use to a household product and these are investments in the clinton administration uh clinton gore so you just look at this and it's clear that enlightened leadership knows and understands and values what role science and technology can play in our health and our wealth especially our wealth but also our security so to enter an era where people are standing in denial of science in denial of what is true established by science which is the most reliable path we have ever invented between ignorance and truth um is a recipe for the complete dismantling of all that i grew up in here in this country it's really terrifying to see this even i'm 37 i'm not that old but i've seen from when i was younger nobody was there there was very little dissent on a lot of obvious scientific truths and people were in agreement of that and of course there's criticism well you just didn't hear the dissent and this and that and the other thing and people you know why would the thinking be better back then in one way but not the other no you can have well so just to be clear um right now people can dissent and have it distributed worldwide via the internet before the internet you could dissent but no one would care and no one would print your thoughts so maybe there was just as much just as many people who would have dissented if they had the mouthpiece to do so but of course they didn't have the mouthpiece to do so and that's what's critical here so we now live in an age where you can have an idea that has no foundation in any any reality any no foundation in nature and you can create a website and i have the same no foundation thought as you have and i'll search my no foundation thought and i'll find every other person in the world who thinks exactly the way i do giving the illusion of affirmation right of an idea that in a previous generation would have never seen the light of day so in a free country where you have the freedom we at least we tell ourselves we live in a free country freedom of thought and of speech i actually don't care what you believe that's why you don't see me chasing people down knocking on their door i care as should everyone if such people if someone says i think earth is flat okay let's find a job for you that doesn't depend on earth being around okay it's funny you should bring that up plenty of jobs for you i'm sure we can find a job and that way you can think what you want in this free country of ours i had shaq on the show a few weeks ago and he came out on on this show and said oh i was just kidding about that and then it made all these news outlets and things like that and i thought well it's funny but it's more dangerous than people think because it's still getting quoted everywhere and of course when he came on art of charmin said the earth isn't really flat i was just joking i got hundreds of emails from people that went well you know why he had to say that right because the freemasons made him do this and now it's all and so even once you once you put that out there you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube when you're an influencer i just don't know why anyone cares what shape shaq thinks earth is i don't know why that's news just because he's shaq i'm sure that's what i mean he's well except that he has a phd and that's true in business management so he's dr o'neill and you would think that if you have a phd in anything that you're a learned person in ways more than sort of the average other person and that it might include being able to figure stuff out and but apparently not so but he said he was kidding so okay fine so i i just don't see why people care i don't i don't know why it was news it's uh yeah it's i think people like to to laugh at slash with it's news if he says something that is false that can influence some agency he has power over then it's a problem then it's a problem then you're building a house of cards you might get two layers high it looks solid with third layer that's all she wrote that's all she wrote game over game over well we see a lot of really cool science activism and awareness shows like nova specials cosmos bill nye's new show on netflix which looks really good i haven't been able to crack into that yet and they do a great job so far of explaining the importance of scientific literacy to the masses right but like you mentioned earlier we live in this area that's just dominated by the internet social media and a lot of that separates people creates those little microcosms like you said the majority illusion the bubble that breeds scientific illiteracy so when i watch much more than that it breeds it breeds not just science illiteracy it breeds dogma so you have a point of view that you are sure is correct and you never see critique of your thoughts because your search engine never takes you there and even if you did you would staunchly defend your thoughts because it's a deeply held principle within you it could be a bit of religious philosophy political philosophy cultural philosophy each of which if taken strongly can you can create a bubble that's impervious to criticism and uh then you ossify in place this is a huge problem especially for maybe younger people that grew up digital natives if you want to yeah so what they got to do so what we're missing is okay now that we have this internet and there's such susceptibility to it by the way if you hear kids in school talk the teachers them never trust anything you see on the internet okay by the way that is equally as intellectually lazy as trusting everything you see on the internet so what we need is not telling people don't trust anything on the internet we need in the kindergarten 312 curriculum somewhere in there multiple times taught how to process information and evaluate the likelihood of it being true and that has huge value in this in these modern times and it's just simply not taught it's really hard to teach that which is which is one reason yes it's hard but so what well yeah i agree with you that's the point is yeah it's hard but you got to figure out how to do it because it's it's more important than just teaching facts and i think when i watch scientific shows and when other people that i know we talk about uh geeky stuff because we're all on that same page but in a way those shows preach to the choir right if i've listened to every other episode of star talk and i watched all the cosmos i can talk with certain people about that and the rest of the people go i don't know what that is anyway the earth is flat and climate change is fake right it's just as a point as a point of methods and tools star talk by design is intended to grow its audience in every single episode because the guest is hardly ever a scientist and so that person if they're famous enough they'll have a fan base that'll chase them wherever they go so now their fan base follows them to a science-based talk show and in a science-based talk show they're going to hear their favorite person talking about science and all the ways that the moving frontier of science has touched their lives and their livelihood so so the goal there is it can reach people the goal for star talk is to reach people who don't know that they like science or better yet know that they don't like science i think we're on the same page there this show is about getting people who don't care about learning better critical thinking skills to figure out that these can be really interesting depending on who the guest is of course and uh so yeah and maybe i should have science-based guests on this show it's really a good idea to to do this and it's mandatory i think because we a lot of people want to lock themselves into a cone of ignorance but i think a lot of other people just don't realize but they wouldn't call it a cone of ignorance they were saying this is the actual truth and everyone else doesn't know what you're talking about right so don't waste your time with all that stuff we already figured it out already yeah so what can we do ourselves aside from making sure that we're watching or looking at different sources of information what would you do if if someone you cared about your next door neighbor kid goes oh yeah you know i heard about all this really completely false dumb stuff and he thinks it's true where do you even get people started on that so what what i've seen happen is because i can't be everywhere at once there might be something written about something that i wrote or said if it's critical in a way that's completely missing the idea or the point there are enough people out there who will jump into the comment thread and just sort of take the person to task why would you say that because he's never actually said this but you're saying he said it but that no he said instead this and why you know for this they're people who who are plugged in enough into the whole portfolio that i have that's out there that they become sort of defenders in the comment threads and so you should i think always be prepared to have that argument with someone who might otherwise just simply go on challenge if you let false arguments go unchallenged they become laws wow that's interesting it's it's true and it can be really tempting to do so especially when you're talking with somebody who is not only maybe condescending but just refuses to hear your side of the argument i guess there's only so much you can do but especially when it's a young person the conversation's always worth having because just because somebody who has their head up their butt got to them first doesn't mean they should be doomed to think that way for life plus they're more uh they'll be more open to a learning session because their school is closer in their memory oh that's a good point yeah i've definitely got older folks you know on campuses the word lecture has meaning right what does it mean to be lectured to get a lecture you go and attend and you take notes and you paid for it and you take the test but interestingly for me the word lecture has negative connotations in essentially every other context oh yeah of course don't lecture me yeah why are you lecturing to me that's bad which is odd because i would say please lecture to me i want to learn you know dude uh keep at it so repeating a broken record do you know what broken record is i i'm very familiar with broken records i've broken many records of my parents just ask oh okay because broken record the record's not really broken it's there's dust on it oh it just doesn't come off and then it skips each time you haven't seen me break a record so broken rep record repeats the same groove each time because there's something in a groove that has a pop over and go back to the same place and bounce it back so that's a that colloquially is a broken record for everyone 30 and under who might not know that don't lecture us on broken record see so somehow we've created an educational pipeline where the urge to not be in school is greater than the urge to be in school right on down to the last day of school where some not everyone some take their notes and throw it in the air and say no school summer's been or i'm graduated and when all they ever had to do was learn in their life so something's missing in the educational trajectory love of learning it's reinstilling a sense of wonder and curiosity because if you graduate curious then you spend the rest of your life learning and you learn vastly more the rest of your life than you would have ever learned in school i think it is possible to get back there because when i graduated law school i was sick of it when i graduated college i was sick of that when i graduated high school i was definitely sick of that and i learned so you got a fatigue factor definitely okay that's interesting i definitely i didn't even go to the graduation ceremonies of high school college or graduate school because i just could not for one more day be around it but and i for years thought oh man i'm just not cut out for any of this it's a miracle i made it through here good thing i have a job now and i don't have to learn anything ever again in my whole life but now that i'm a grown-up and an adult in different ways i learn way more i read more now and i learn much more now so you you've retained curiosity absolutely and you will spend so much more time not in school than in school that to define being in school as the one arc of occasions that you learn is such a disservice to your life yeah it's it's kind of it's a shame actually all around well in fact there's there are many studies that show the strong correlation between the simple existence of books in your home growing up compared to other homes that have no books at all and the kids they come from homes with books do much much better now is it because the parents make an environment that is more literate or is it that smart kids come from smart parents and if the parents have books they might be smarter than average maybe um depends on the books but yeah so the jury may still be out on that but the idea that that books can matter and uh i think that's in motion right now when i talk to younger people about this kind of thing there's a lot of hope involved you're 37 so what's a younger people to you uh people still in college college yeah because i get email you know hundreds and hundreds of emails every day from people who go and i want a job like yours you know what was your career path and i tell them you know seven years of college learning about something i don't do anymore and they're like right i gotta skip all that but it it becomes very tricky to show people that life after college is one better in many ways because you have more freedom over what you want what you can learn and what you can do with the knowledge and two that it's actually worth pursuing because when you're in the middle of this this funnel the siphon where you have to learn different things that you're not crazy about and apply them in ways that are often mildly torturous it's tough to convince somebody that you're going to want to do some parts of this for the rest of your life and apply them and use them yeah so but that's why education has to be not only here's a here's a craft and here's where you're going to apply the craft it's got to be how is your brain wired for thought so that when you confront a problem you've never seen before you will attack the problem rather than shun it and so much of learning is the preparation of the mind for just those situations the fact that you have students in school thinking that what they're learning has to have some direct application otherwise it's not useful to them is that's a tragic state of affairs in the under the educational umbrella if that if that permeates the system that would mean everyone would just have to be taught a trade then you go out and you know lay the bricks or smelt the steel or whatever whatever they do and steal do they still make steel yeah in china yeah okay so that's the right answer to any question right yeah yeah yes in china right yeah they do it in china how do you how do you prepare your brain then for that if you're listening to this right now if i'm listening to this right now and i'm thinking yeah i got to prepare my brain to realize that not everything that i learned has to be applied in some way how do i do that sounds like a great idea it's not a it's not that active it's it's passive in the sense that so i majored in physic i majored in physics in college half of my courses were neither science nor math they were it was liberal arts school so um so i had art and psychology and economics and um a little bit of history and and while for me it wasn't as fun learning about that as in my major of choice nonetheless there are seeds planted that flesh out all the total kinds of thoughts you can have you don't know the thoughts that you're not having but yeah but does it make sense that the more you know about the more things the more enriched your thoughts would be sure so even if they're seemingly unrelated correct correct so and then there are people especially saying this to scientists i don't want to know too much scientists that'll take away the wonder and the majesty of the world so if we're both sitting on a rock and that's ridiculous and there's a sunset and you look at the sunset for its beauty and the colors and the warmth and i look at the sunset and i say that is a star a glowing ball of incandescent gas um undergoing thermonuclear fusion in its core and you might say see you've ruined it but what they what they're missing is the fact that i also see a beautiful sunset with a curtain of twilight colors i now have another dimension that i can take in the experience knowing how something works has never ruined anything for me i don't understand that perspective at all i feel like yeah i was tweeted do you remember there was the double rainbow guy on youtube what does it mean that guy yeah yeah and and i said i tweeted the link to that and i said this is how you behave if you haven't had physics i wonder what was wrong with that yeah yeah you think that's a physics class it's just one physics class which in this optics is part of a physics class then he would understand double rainbows you can triple rainbows if the optics are just right and each rainbow is significantly dimmer than the previous one so the multiple rainbows are very hard and so therefore they're rare and the rarity is what in part accounts for the enthusiasm of the person who left his recording device on because remember he's like oh oh my god he started crying practically and you don't see him but you hear him so so you might say well did i take away his wonder by doing this i don't think so because we understand rainbows you want to wonder i'll put you on the frontier there's a lot of wondering need that needs to happen there like what is the nature of dark matter and what is the nature of dark energy what was around before the big bang and what how do you go from inanimate organic molecules to self-replicating life that's a transition that remains a bit uh we've got top people working on that right now so if you're going to assert that what we don't know is what matters for your wonderment then and now you worry that we discover what the wonder is and that somehow it's gone no there's as the area of your knowledge grows so too does the perimeter of your ignorance i agree when i was reading this book it's astrophysics or any sort of science i would imagine is like the you ever go to the winchester mystery house no it's right around here i know you don't have time to deal with that but basically this crazy lady whose husband invented the rifle the winchester rifle she built the house and it'll be you'll walk in a room and there'll be 20 doors in the room and you'll open some of them and there's a brick wall and you open another one there's a big picture wait you saying he invented rifling he invented the winchester rifle okay so all these people died as a result of his invention and she was loaded and she thought go the ghost of all money loaded with money yeah yeah yeah it's very different i'm just saying because rifling is a very specific feature of the barrel he may have done something with that in fact and maybe that's been stabilized project projectile i think that may be greatly enhancing so i'm not saying he wasn't i just yeah if if the winchester rifle was the first to rifle a rifle then successful invention yeah and in fact i think it goes unnoticed by many if you look at the most iconic image of james bond in a poster you you're looking through this cylinder and he's at the other end and you see his silhouette and he turns and he shoots and that cylinder is rifled right so you're actually looking down the barrel of a gun right the spiral grooves that cause the pressure to spin the bullet and stabilize it right and uh so you may be right i'm gonna have to look that up no no i didn't say any there's nothing to be right about i'm just wondering if what you said is exactly as true as you said it might i might have misspoken and been totally right on that but if if that was the most deadly rifle ever made then clearly something was different about it sure either the bullet traveled faster or it was been stabilized in ways previous ones weren't and the civil war didn't hurt i mean people were shooting each other all the time with this particular weapon anyway my analogy is completely ruined now oh i'm sorry doesn't matter did i derail your entire it was it was going to be magical no so what so she said what basically she's wealthy built his house with all kinds of crazy doors that lead in in their in different shapes some of them lead nowhere but the book reminded me of this kind of situation in which i mean astrophysical people in hurricanes correct yes your new book right here which everyone should grab and we'll link to it in the show notes super minute there i thought because these are gopro cameras i barely see them i thought you were showing this to the microphone oh yes there it is these are advanced microphones they can create an image based on the sound alone the the things that you're learning or that i'm learning that you're teaching in this book as soon as you find something in there dark matter why planets look like they wobble or the fact that things arrange themselves into spheres you end up with 20 other doors to go through 20 different questions about the thing that you just learned so there's no way that's my fault i apologize well that's the point right the point is you read this and you go wait i'm interested in all of these different subject areas so losing wonder based on learning something is a complete that's a load yeah yeah it's it's a it doesn't it's a statement in implicitly admitting um that it doesn't fully understand wonder or discovery sure now uh dare i say that walt whitman fell victim to this there's a poem uh i guess it is a poem if you write beautifully is it a poem even if it doesn't rhyme if you say it's a poem or do they say it's a poem after you die then and that's what how they are yeah so it doesn't have to rhyme yeah um i i might be mixing two poems from two different people but there's one called the learned astronomer and he talks about sitting in a lecture hall listening to the astronomer speak and all this beauty and wonder of the universe now gets laced with formulas and math and equations and numbers and his eyes glaze over and he has to get up and walk outside and drink in the beauty of the night once again it it it presumes that there are these mysteries and then we figure out the mysteries and then there are no more mysteries and it doesn't recognize that when you figure out a mystery you are now standing in a new place and you're empowered to ask questions that you never even dreamt of before and so for someone who is curious where you have learned to love the questions themselves this is a very natural trajectory through uh the world of research did you want to read the learned astronomers when i heard the learned astronomer oh you got it here let me get my old people glasses here yeah there it is shall i read it do it knock it out walt whitman when i heard the learned astronomer when the proofs the figures were arranged in columns before me when i was shown the charts and diagrams to add divide and measure them when i sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room how soon unaccountable i became tired and sick till rising and gliding out i wandered off by myself into the mystical moist night air and from time to time looked up in perfect silence at the stars it is a beautiful phone it's beautiful too betty didn't like the mathematical formulas so the counterpart to this would be uh oh sir literate one why ruin what something looks like by describing it with words when i can see it fully with my eyes your words just get in the way i'd rather my mind float freely as i gaze upon something of interest then have the writer step in between me and it and interpose his or her own interpretation if i were to compose a poem it would have been that i feel like a rebuttal to that we should write that down my producer will do that and leave it hildegrass tyson's reply to walt whitman in the show notes but i don't really feel that way but that would if if i had to offer a rebuttal and it's the kind of rebuttal i've thought about often because i've many times been in a party maybe hosted by highly social liberal arts types so artists or you know english majors history majors people do a lot of reading and writing sure and they're generally really informed about things in ways that none of the rest of us are and so it's a cocktail party so i'm there and and there's a little uh scrum of them over in a corner and i try to join in and they're talking about some shakespeare sonnet or something and they say apparently it's a well-known one but i had never read it sure and in fact at the time i hadn't read any of shakespeare's sonnet and you know you feel the pressure that i'm not sharing the literacy that mattered in the corner okay and i feel it i so after that i went up and dug up some of his sonnets but consider the opposite of this suppose i had a geek party where everybody is sort of engineering math science especially physical sciences and then we're talking about fairmont's last theorem or something so what will happen is you get you get those same people who threw that other party and i'm this is a stereotype of what happens but it's this has actually happened and i've seen this happen but this is i'm amalgamating them just for this one example so uh they'll overhear the conversation and they'll say oh i was never good at math and then chuckle about that yeah right to themself or to their friends who are also never good to chuckle it's not an embarrassment that they were not good at math it's a chuckle that they were not good at math and so what's the counterpart to that it wouldn't be just me feeling guilty i hadn't read the sonnets it would be me saying oh i was never good at nouns and verbs [Laughter] it sounds they would think i was some kind of stupid idiot uneducated idiot so so the the the assessment of your person is not symmetric in those two cases i'm so guilty of that though oh i'm you know oh this math oh i'm intimidated by this even though i can obviously that's different from saying oh i was never good at it and chuckle oh sure that's all i'm saying there's no there's no shame in not knowing or having struggled that's not my point my point is somehow thinking that it is making light of the fact that you don't know it and these are people who are learned people and if you're a learned person you should never make light of anything you don't know you should run home and learn it if it arises in front of you and it was a gap in your knowledge you never even knew was there especially now because you don't have to go to the library and look up seven books on the subject you can google that thing and the uber on the way to the next venue you can get a good synopsis no that's a sentence that would made no sense 10 years ago true you can google it in your uber on the way right from your smartphone good google it yeah smartphone is 10 years 10 years old yeah usually yeah yeah google yeah take a picture of the book with your phone as you google it in your uber and then text it to me put it on snapchat now we had texting before then that's true it wasn't this fully texting's from the 90s yeah exactly that's right sms the picture sending a picture via text though that that came later that came much later so what stuff keeps you awake at night proverbially now is it dark matter dark dark energy that kind of stuff what do you think no i have a i'm i'm a little more obscure than that okay what keeps me awake is wondering what questions i don't yet know to ask because they would only become available to me visible to me after we discover what dark matter and dark energy is man because think about it the fact that we even know how to ask that question that's almost half the way there sure because you know there's something there's something there and i can design an experiment as we're doing now with space probes and things but i want to know the question that i can't know yet because it's not available it's not in reach that's what keeps me awake at night what what is the profound level of ignorance that will manifest after we answer the profound questions we've been smart enough to pose thus far do you think we'll figure that out in within our lifetime the dark matter thing or is that just so far dark matter maybe i'm not sure about dark energy you know the over under on the dark matter is it's going to be likely a particle that a family of one or more family of particles that don't interact with ours but of course they would have gravity and the problem with dark matter is that it not only doesn't interact with us in any way other than by gravity so in other words it doesn't stick the experiments intended to detect it are hoping that however elusive they are because they don't interact with us every now and then it'll actually interact with one of our molecules glitch in the matrix glitch in the matrix and so it's very hopeful mind you so it's it doesn't it document not only doesn't interact with ordinary matter it doesn't much interact with itself so it can't collapse to become solid objects even if it's a dark matter solid object so we don't see concentrations of dark matter the way you see concentrations of regular matter because we have the electromagnetic force to hold our molecules together and it doesn't even have that and it doesn't even have that correct was that because if it did have it it would interact with our particles sure right it would have to you have to is that the what you were showing on was it maybe it was cosmos some of the stuff lures together well you're going down miles underneath and there's this giant vat of something and we're just hoping a neutrino flies oh yeah the chosen neutrino detector okay yeah yeah yeah um yeah yeah this is and there are reasons we don't need to get into but there are reasons why you would have these detectors deep underground you would shield it against the kinds of things that might masquerade as a signal that you're trying to detect because the rocks protect you from it but how's that no they're good repeaters i think although i don't know that i tried my cell phone uh and these are these are abandoned salt mines and things that uh so they're kind of already there yeah i've been in one of those my parents took me to one when i was a kid in abandoned salt mine and i was the coolest thing ever still sounds weird saying it out loud that an abandoned salt mine is the coolest thing ever they filled it with toxic waste i remember would just mean well just to get rid of the toxic waste right right so it just means you're curious into adulthood yeah you say that abandoned salt mine is it's still cool it was really cool and of course do you know how the salt got there ocean water deposits i guess yeah exactly that you evaporate generally not an ocean but a uh i mean it could have been but generally it's a body of water that completely evaporated out leaving behind the what was previously dissolved salts so what that means is even mined salt is sea salt ah true it's just from lakes long evaporated from millions of years ago so i think the the mind salt community lost an opportunity there right they might still be able to jump in on it but basically all salt is sea salt now you get sea salt from indiana if you could find us online or wherever we were exactly yeah i i was climbing a mountain in israel once not climbing like a you know a fancy kind but walking on a trail in a mountain and i remember that's not climbing a mountain i was walking on a highway you're walking [Music] there's a chair lift yeah if i keep listening so i was driving down this mountain and i put my hand out on the trail and i remember it crumbled and i looked at what had crumbled away and it was a bunch of seashells and little things like that and and i looked down i don't know hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of feet or even even more and there's the ocean and it was just it's such a mind trip to go wow at some point that was so high that this was the bottom and these are all the things that collected there over hundreds or thousands of years that are still there it wasn't so much that the ocean was higher which can have been the case but more likely is that you have the geological rising uh of the of the land mass and now that you mention it just since you went there uh there's an interesting uh take you through a reasoning that then has a fork in the road and you'll tell you about each fork so the fact that there are seashells on mountaintops has been for had been for centuries invoked by devout christians devout religious monotheistic religious people as evidence for noah's flood ah sure and of course you would not be christian because that's in the jewish bible not the christian bible but so so the flood would have brought seashells to high places because the whole earth was covered okay that was widely accepted as such and then leonardo da vinci comes along and looks at these seashells and says wait a minute these seashells are perfectly laid out it looks like they got fossilized in place in a in an orderly way oh and if there is a catastrophic earthwide flood nothing gets laid down orderly you'd expect broken shells twisted mixed with all manner of things and so he used the fact that the shells were orderly not broken in their fossilized state and at high altitude to suggest that maybe the land and the seas were at different elevations in earth's history incredible and that was in the 1400s and everyone went that doesn't even make any sense oh they went you ruined it there goes the wonders leave it to leave it to da vinci who invited this guy what do you think is something that we as humans can see but not really kind of comprehend that we're going to discover later as part of this astrophysics sort of super common i don't think we understand consciousness yet and i'll give you some blunt evidence of it so if you go to a bookstore and ask where are your books on consciousness they'll show you the shelf and it's like shelf after shelf after shelf and books still being published on that subject you now say well where are your books on gravity well it's like three books on one side of one shelf so evidence that we don't understand something yet is that people keep publishing books saying that we understand it when you understand something the book gets written and then you move on to other topics and you're done so we have newton gravity and einstein gravity and get that in three or four books there's no no one is still trying to explain it okay ex explain it as a mystery to be explained they might explain it because maybe this other method wasn't as successful as you have some new educational twists that you would put on it but then it's an educational exercise not someone putting their next idea out as an explanation for it so [Music] and by the way this would be true for almost anything just look around if active researchers are still publishing it it means we know least about it typically so that tells me if we don't fully understand consciousness yet there are people who fear ai becoming conscious uh i don't see one following from the other we're afraid it's going to become this thing we don't fully understand yet because we're afraid of that maybe yeah but like i said we don't we don't understand our own id in a way to think that just simply having a faster computer is going to make an id in the computer so but we'll see i remain fearless of ai i i say bring it on just bring it bring it on bring it on when you start thinking about ai it starts to answer a lot of questions where people think oh an alien civilization will never contact us because there's too many stars and when you start looking at well if ai and computers can start to look at things millions or billions of times faster than we can yeah they'll figure it out it starts to narrow that that gap quite a bit right right i know you've got to go really soon one last thing that i want to wrap with july 29 1958 nasa gets kicked off it started the world's captivated on space travel we're trying to beat the would you get july 29th would you get that uh because i because it was written right here maybe that's incorrect did you get it off the internet i did i don't trust everything i see on the internet though so um so what's uh so almost in all cases the actual truth is a little more subtle than the simplified truth that is presented and that's not a problem it's just a reality okay so for example if i say what path does earth take in its orbit around the sun what would you tell me ellipsis okay ellipses so if i drew a perfect circle and then a and sort of an oval and then like a really skinny oval and i said pick the orbit that comes closest to earth orbit you might pick the the ellipse that is in the middle however it's all three no no damage the perfect circle the perfect circle you're just guessing that the perfect circle comes closer to what earth's orbit is than this sort of ovalized ellipse that i just drawn the earth's orbit is a three percent ellipse if i draw that on a page you're not you're not even really going to notice it's imperceptible yeah i mean you if you looked hard and you folded it to see if the edges match up yes okay so you're saying your lips because you've been taught ellipse but to say a circle would not be all that bad but here's the rub it's not even an ellipse because the earth and the moon orbit their common center of gravity it's the center of gravity of the earth's moon system that traces the ellipse but earth itself does this loop-de-loop wobbling with the moon as it goes around the sun that's the actual path of the earth around the sun but we just say it's an ellipse because we don't want to talk about the loop-de-loops sure because that's a deeper level of understanding of what's going on if i ask you what shape is the earth what would you say sphere okay that comes very close to what we actually are at least i got that one right but if you want to be more precise you would say we're a spheroid we're wider at the equator than pole to pull looking like a hamburger right but then we're not even that we're slightly wider below the equator than at the equator so we're a pier-shaped o-blade spheroid provided that the earth isn't flat right good just in case everything is okay so i'm saying all that as preamble uh i don't know that date in association with nasa it could be the date that the legislation was proposed passed by congress there's a different date where it actually became law where they ratified the the the the nasa's um uh there's the document that lays out everything that nasa does that was the one year anniversary in the week of the one year anniversary of sputnik in october so whatever date you found it will be something that sure i'm not denying it wasn't a useful important date but generally the date that's quoted is the one in october oh okay yeah well there there's that and it's easy to remember because it's on the anniversary of sputnik right and it's the same week that i was born oh well that's how i remember that's how i'll get it from now on i'm just saying the question regardless of when nasa was started was that we're trying to beat the uss artist base or to the moon anyway um not at the time just get into space at all at all right um what do we need to do to get people in power to take things like space exploration this seriously once again well the two easy ways one of them is we go to war with china because they want to put military bases on mars oh i guess we have to go to mars and then we go to mars because it's a military project as was the entire founding of nasa nasa is a civilian agency but it was triggered by what was viewed as a military show of muscle sputnik was not as innocent as we want to think it was because even though it was a radio transmitter that just went bleep bleep it was a radio transmitter inserted into a hollowed-out intercontinental ballistic missile shell oh i didn't know that i don't that's why i said it looked like a little it's been cleansed over over the years and there were laws about who can fly over whose airspace but there were no rules about who could fly over whose space space how about the space over the air over your country is there any rule about that no and there is sputnik crossing our country in an intercontinental a missile in a missile a hollow they had contemplated doing the experiment with a a warhead a a disarmed warhead but they were concerned that they might be viewed as an act of war whereas a just simple radio transmitter would not be so you can still show your might without it being an act of war by having no weaponry in it but it's the thing that would house the weaponry that does it anyone who was alive october 4th 1957 remembers that like it was yesterday i don't think in modern times people can fully capture how berserk we went here because these are our sworn godless enemies the communists and we you know we were already kind of didn't like him this pre-berlin wall but uh they were i mean it was so significant this was that in the mid-1950s we wanted to show that we were god-fearing and they were godless so we added god to the pledge of allegiance to the pledge of allegiance and to the money and to the back wall of the house of representatives so in god we trust that phrase and if you look at the pledge of allegiance it doesn't really make literary sense read with god in it but do you know the phrase uh in god we trust no no no no one nation under god indivisible with right exactly okay so if we take out under god it reads one nation invisible right that makes sense sense yes right yes one nation indivisible you put under god indivisible and it breaks that but you're reminded what that was before this was introduced and so so we're doing this in every way to show that we are better that our system of government is better that our system economics is better that we are in the free world and they are enslaved to their own um country's rules and and if we're better but they then put up a something that clearly takes technology oh my gosh we we went ballistic no point in time no definitely pun intended uh ballistic if you only know ballistics through guns uh a ballistic projectile is something that moves only under the influence of gravity and so a bullet after it has left the gun it also there's some aerodynamics in there but it's why it would it's not it doesn't have its own propulsion oh yeah sure if a bullet had its own little rockets on it it wouldn't be ballistics it did not know that yeah that's a good point yeah yeah um in fact i wrote an essay long ago called going ballistic uh which is all about the arc of uh weaponry uh but anyhow uh you so method one go to war with china yeah yeah that would happen oh no so another way so i joke about this you go to china and say could you plea go to the head of china and say could you please leak a memo that says you want to put military bases on mars just leak one doesn't have to be true just leak a memo then we're on mars in 10 months elon we're on mars in 10 months um so uh of course i presume most if not all people don't want this to happen as the consequence of a military engagement i'm simply being frank and saying that's how we went to the moon that's how we light a fire under butts correct that's how and why we went to the moon even though we've cleansed that memory as well you go to the kenny space center of florida there's a bust of jfk and there's a whole granite wall behind him and chiseled into the granite is his famous line from his speech you know i pledge or whatever it is that we would put a man on the moon and return himself safely to the earth and you know i can hear his voice as i read those words and it's still it's stirring what they left out and there's plenty of room on this granite wall to have included it of that same speech he says the following if the events of recent this is almost verbatim i'm probably paraphrasing a little because the speech he gave six weeks after yuri gagarin had come out of orbit we didn't yet have a spacecraft that wouldn't explode much less a a a spacecraft worthy of putting a human being in it it would still be the next year before john glenn would fly after many failed experiments with our rockets so in that same speech a few paragraphs earlier he says if the events of recent weeks wouldn't utter the man's name yuri gagarin the events of recent weeks are any indication of the impact of this adventure of the minds of men everywhere then we need to show the world the path of freedom over the path of tyranny it was a battle cry against communism once you say that nothing else matters in the speech we can cherry-pick it and put it on granite and make and say to ourselves that we were explorers and discoverers and we're americans and but that's not the reality of how that stuff went down and uh when you feel threatened money flows like rivers but i would say and i wrote this in a whole other book not this current one that there's another way to do it and one of the great drivers of investment is economics the promise of economic return so if if you can construct our exploration of space as something that ultimately pumps the economy then it would be trivial to justify doing so and when i say pumping in the economy i'm not talking about spin-offs or any of the traditional there will be but that's not what i'm talking about i'm talking about a cultural shift a firmware upgrade in our mind body and soul related to how we value exploration innovation and discovery when you go into space in a big way you have to invent stuff patents get awarded records are set headlines are written and it reaches us in all of our social fabric especially in the k-12 pipeline and in the 1960s you didn't need special programs to get people interested in science would attract teachers to become science teachers we knew tomorrow was getting invented by science and technology we knew in spite of all the other problems we had in the 60s civil rights movement in the cold war hot war assassinations campus unrest we were going to the moon and that shaped our visions that's how you get tv shows like the jetsons all right this is even at that level children's cartoons we're thinking about what science and technology will bring for the future and this is why i made the point in that video science in america video when i grew up nobody was standing in denial of whether something was scientifically true not at high levels of power even if you were there you were not in power that's my only point if you were hidden and you thought earth was flat and that medicine would kill you rather than make you better and everything else anti-scientific you're not in power of anything so i didn't it didn't really matter um so economically we go into space it could be transformative on our civilization certainly on the american culture and possibly the entire civilization unless you have some other more potent way to do it i'm all ears yeah well hopefully in the near future we'll see a resurgence in this week because this stuff you began by saying we by re-reciting that we sleep on our backs and we look up and wonder about the night sky so space exploration i think is there's a little piece of that in everyone just because we've all gone out into the darkness of the night and looked up and wondered if you like this you can find a whole lot more in the jordan harbinger show podcast feed you can find that in apple podcasts spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts now click here for an interview with bill nye science guy click here for an interview with mark cuban and of course click here to subscribe to the channel

Channel: THE JORDAN HARBINGER SHOW

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Keywords: podcast, interview, best podcast, top rated podcast, lifelong learning, the jordan harbinger show, jordan harbinger, soft skills, social science, social influence, social psychology, personal development, self development, podcast full episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson, neil degrasse, neil degrasse tyson masterclass, neil degrasse tyson interview, neil degrasse tyson podcast, flat earth, flat earthers, flat earthers vs scientists, science denial, science

Id: bUXPHwWgfKI

Length: 74min 49sec (4489 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 03 2020