Neil deGrasse Tyson on "Interstellar"

dr. Tyson I am not ashamed to admit I am completely starstruck to be here standing next to you thank you I am I'm such a big fan of yours and I have been following your thoughts on interstellar on Twitter but since this forum allows us more than 140 characters we play around with that on a scale from one to ten one being absolutely completely not plausible ten being very realistic where would you place interstellar on that scale I would say that the science was ambitious and the science that they tackled black holes wormholes relativistic time dilation I mean they went all out for that and so I'd give it a eight or nine out of ten on this Wow oh yeah that's very impressive well they had a real adviser a real science adviser who was also executive producer and his name is Professor Kip Thorne and he's a friend of mine and and and he's an expert on Einstein's general theory of relativity these tidal waves that we've been seeing in the trailers and the promotional materials could that actually happen on a planet when I first saw it I said wait a minute if you have a wave that wave needs water that would otherwise surround it such as in a tsunami and yes they're in low-level water they're like waiting there but the wave comes and that water level doesn't change until the wave comes I said that's not real and then then I read Kip Thorne's companion book the science of interstellar and he made it clear that these waves aren't literal tidal waves they're not tsunamis and what's a tidal wave it's a bulge in the water that surrounds the planet and that bulge is created by strong tidal forces from the outside in this case a black hole this planet is orbiting a black hole and so what actually happens in a tidal wave is that the solid planet rotates in and out of the wave so it looks like the wave is coming to you but in fact you're being rotated towards it that's true even if you're on the shores on earth you say oh the tide is coming in the tide is coming up no no you're rotating under a tidal bulge of order that is fixed in space around Earth angle towards near where the moon and the Sun are at any given time so I said fine now that the tidal wave was a little spiky and and real tidal bulges are kind of more round than that but I'll give it to them I'll give it I'm a fan of Mark Twain once said first get your facts straight then distort them at your leisure so I'm saying okay you want a wave and you want to make it exciting go for it because otherwise they would have just all sort of bobbed up and then Bob down like a duck on a wave that went by and that wouldn't make an interesting scene so I actually will grant personally grant a movie creative latitude provided they started with the right idea and then take that have fun with it go go go for it this idea of wormholes can they exist naturally or does it have to be placed there by some species yeah or it's some alien with far more intelligence and power over space-time than we have so we think we understand the mathematics and physics of wormholes we can write down the equations to create one but we don't know how to make one otherwise we don't have the control over matter and energy because what is a wormhole it is a particular distortion of space and time that allows you to sort of pass through a tear a portal from where you are in this part of the universe to another part without actually having to take the whole journey imagine taking a sheet of paper and folding it mm-hmm and what you want to get from here to there and you fold it and then you just take a little little little portal right there that's the wormhole and then you unfold it hey I crossed the entire diameter of the galaxy during the TV commercial or whatever whenever you'd be doing this so that's what a wormhole would do for you and it'd be really useful for any science fiction storytelling and because they had they were properly advised in interstellar they got the physics of that right as you come upon a wormhole but would that look like and you'd see this sort of distortion and space and it's a hole in any direction you approach it that's the freaky part when we think of holes you think of like a hole you would step into and fall through and come out the other side well in this case you are coming out the other side but it's in another dimension so you could fall into it you would enter one hole from any direction at all and disappear and show up somewhere else that's what's cool about it in the film we see Matthew McConaughey's character come out of a black hole alive in one piece I from what I understand about black holes and my knowledge is is very minimal I didn't think that that was possible is that possible black holes are bad no matter what all right you should if there's a black hole there and not over here go there instead go where there isn't a black hole yes so what I found was odd was the the fact that they found planets that might serve as replacements for earth orbiting black holes I'm thinking no we we already have a thousand planet candidates in our catalogue none of which are orbiting black holes and many of which look better than the ones portrayed in the film so so I don't think there's any universe in which we're going to have to go to a black hole planet in order to save Earth but of course that added more drama to the storytelling if you're in a planet orbiting a black hole you're deep in what we say is their gravitational well of the black hole and the deeper down you are in it the slower your time ticks relative to everybody else so then you get this time dilation effect it's called yeah and we saw an extreme amount of time passed while he was in that black hole and around that black hole correct that actually oh yeah that we yes it happens all the time we can measure this in fact it happens daily no GPS satellites orbiting high above Earth or farther away from Earth's gravity than we are on the surface okay it is in a different time reference frame than we are and you calculate what that difference is using Einstein's equations of general relativity and GPS satellites are pre corrected when they beam the time down to us to compensate for relativity so it's happening all around us all around us all around us the time keeping is so precise that even for something as measly as Earth and it's weak gravitational field relative to a black hole this effect is still there and we can measure it and we compensate for it in our daily communication with the GPS satellites for our cell phones for our navigation devices and everything else we use them for so it is real now in the movie they just brought it to a an extreme example with a black hole rather than Earth's surface and yes the you can calculate where you'd have to be how close you'd have to be to the black hole to get that difference in the rate at which time ticks and so they did that so you'd have to be uncomfortably close to the black hole but again that's the sort of the cinematic license that they're taking to add to the drama of the storytelling finally let's talk about this mind-bending conclusion to interstellar is there a chance that in some other alternate universe there's a parallel depiction of dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson and semone voice who could be actually puppeteering this interview that we're doing right now so there may be a multiverse out there where we in our universe were just one of many that's not even philosophically much of a stretch there was a day we imagined that earth was alone and it's sort of meaning in the universe and we find out we're just one of you know eight planets yes I said eight planets Oh get over it no sorry so then we saw the Sun or so as soon as a special thing in the sky nothing else looks like if we find it it's just one of all a billion hundred billion other stars in the galaxy or galaxies special no we're just one of the hundred billion galaxies well the universe is special maybe not maybe our universe is one many and so there's there's good historical precedent for the universe having more than one of anything and everything in other words the universe as far as we know has never made one of anything so why would there even be one of itself perhaps and so if that's the case then molecules are assembling and the forces of nature conspire to make stars and planets and possibly life it's not crazy to imagine there are other places we could be having this the evil counterpart of ourselves so having this I was going to say in the evil universe I'll have a mustache no but I actually have a mustache in this universe oh so yeah it's possible but I there's so many variations I think it's narcissistic to say where's the variation that has me in it and suppose it did have you in it it's just they're different molecules it's not you it really isn't you even if it has all the same molecules assembled in the same way your twin has all the same molecules assembled in the same way with identical DNA but it's not you you're still you so I don't to say I want to live forever in another universe where you going with that I'm cool right here I one other thing I didn't answer was how can you survive going in and out of a black hole you will surely die if you fall straight down to the center of a black hole the tidal forces the kind that still made the Bulge of the tidal wave those same forces will stretch your body as your feet fall to the center of the black hole faster then your head does and your body begins to stretch like Stretch Armstrong and it'll stretch so significantly that ultimately you will snap into two pieces as the tidal forces exceed the intermolecular forces of your flesh you will likely snap at the base of the spine first and then as those two pieces kept falling to the abyss those two pieces would snap into another pair and then another pair and you'd be bifurcating one two four eight sixteen until your this stream of atoms descending into the abyss and that's not even the worst thing that will happen to you okay because it does not no no no no so in the black hole the fabric of space and time funnel down to a point a singularity so as you fall to the center you occupy a narrower and narrower range of space-time and so as you get ripped apart head to toe you get extruded through the fabric of space like toothpaste through tube that's if you have a nice day but no so so both of those will happen to you going to the center but if you have a trajectory that does not go through the center and you have and where people try to work out what this would be in principle this will not have to happen to you and you could conceivably survive a trajectory into a black hole getting out is the hard part but we may be aliens made this wormhole for us we don't know how to make a wormhole this it's a wormhole and there's a pendant and that and there's a they're black holes there so there there might be trajectories out of black holes where you're still intact and we have people working on that and that was some of the the fictionalized storytelling of the film that's why it's called science fiction right you get some science right and then the rest is fiction and now the fact that he would be jettison from it and land in exactly the right spot to then sort of in this tesseract they call it oh the tesseract no that's different okay so now you're in the black hole okay so he's in the black hole now to ask that all right this idea of this tesseract where you can alter things that have already happened in your lifetime can we do that yeah so no so you didn't ask that correctly okay you a very human about it and you said alter things that happened the interesting thing about the tesseract a word that has gained some currency with the with the film's the the Avenger series because there's a tesseract that with Thor and people moving in and out of it all right so the tesseract mathematically is a higher dimensional object well if you have access to a higher dimension it means you would no longer bound to where you are in time we though we can move left and right and up and down and forward and back we have access to x y&z at will but you are a prisoner of the present forever transitioning between the past in the future you know higher that's the fourth dimension XYZ and time in a higher dimension you can step back and look at your entire timeline and access it no differently from how you just walk around in a room so the question can you go back in time to change them that's not even the right question once you see your entire timeline you are always being born you're always dying you're always in school you're always asleep you always brushing your teeth these things are always happening and you just access them at will so in the tesseract he's not changing the past that always happened we saw it happen Jessica Chastain as a child saw the books come out it's a mystery why we find out why because her father does go into space does go into the black hole does access the tesseract to try to tell her to have him not go but here's the weird part he did go he had to go otherwise he couldn't be telling her that he shouldn't go oh okay yes I don't think about this think about this if she did interpret his signals correctly and managed to prevent him from going then he would have never given her the signals in the first place to tell him to not go so that entire series of events had to unfold exactly as portrayed and so you're wrong to think that you're going to go back and change something in a timeline that is already there so yeah I can it can make your brain hurt because we are we are prisoners in our own four dimensions and in higher dimensions really cool stuff can happen as portrayed in the film when I watch a film like interstellar it makes me want to go into space I really hope that I'll see that opportunity before I die do science fiction films make you want to go into space um not if bad things happen gravity yeah has there been a science-fiction film that didn't proceed like this people go into space and something bad happens I think that there's the whole plot of every single science fiction film you've ever seen I think I interviewed Christopher Nolan for my radio show Startalk star talk radio and we have an arrow yet have come out in a few weeks and I learned that he was deeply influenced by the film 2001 a Space Odyssey um yeah I I I'm old enough to have seen it like in real time when it came out I think I'm a little older than he is so you have to catch it on the upswing later back then they would re release the film to theaters because you know one had video access a home video access so that was deeply influential to him and I understand why big sweeping scenes of spaceships docking and traveling among the planets how could you not want to be on those voyages so I agree a well-done science fiction movie makes you want to participate in that future my favorite films include yes 2001 but becoming into modern times definitely the film contact the Carl Sagan story that one they put a lot of effort into how people on earth would react to the discovery of intelligent life in the universe life more intelligent than we that I thought a lot of good effort was put into trying to make that accessible and and possible other films I thought planet of the apes that's in the original from back in the 60s I looked at that again recently and that has held up holy cow of that that was another one of these Einsteinian things they didn't age but all the rest of the earth did but that was just a moment to set up the story they didn't keep visiting that fact but just the idea that Apes would rise up and the Apes themselves were segregated the intelligent class was the were the chimpanzees and the the diplomats were the orangutan so it was an insurance I didn't when I first saw it when I was a kid I didn't put all that together but even in that world people sort of segregated by what species of a pea were and and the the police were the with the gorillas right they so must be what we think of the various apes I want to those Apes think of us so that I thought was if a science fiction story can't hold up a mirror to what's going on in the world in which you live I think the story fails for me in some fundamental way and and at some point you want to reflect on what's going on in your own world by virtue of this story told in space and so for me the best science fiction stories do that and and take the whole Star Trek series for example it's all about that thank you so much for debating the mysteries of the universe when I can do it all day can I have a hug cuz my brain oh I love boy okay yeah all right good

Channel: FOX 5 New York

Views: 4,227,174

Rating: 4.9168739 out of 5

Keywords: Neil DeGrasse Tyson (Organization Leader), Astrophysics (Field Of Study)

Id: l7tV7v71k-I

Length: 18min 33sec (1113 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 18 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/sheikyerboutiii]

He really nails the dismount. "...can I have a hug cause my brain hurts?" "Oh, Idlubbuhdoyaboighey!"

[u/RatchetPo]

when she asked can you survive going into a black hole he was so enthusiastic in his explanation of what a black hole is that he totally forgot to answer the original question haha

edit: nvm he remembered to answer it later!

[u/marshmallowwisdom]

Wow, that 18-minute Q&A passed by so fast. Watching this makes me want to go see Interstellar again.

[u/DarkSideofOZ]

Love this interview, love this film, love NDT, love this thread, love all of you. I'm drunk.

[u/rsoxguy12]

You can feel the passion he has when speaking about the subject matter, what a great guy. Also...how funny is it that Planet of the Apes is one of Neil deGrasse Tyson's favorite movies?

[u/VanillaWax]

I could listen to him talk for ages. It's really nice to watch someone talk passionately about something they know and love.

[u/Al_The_Killer]

I bet he showed her his tidal bulge afterwards....

[u/iSuchtel]

She is so obsessed with his hands... no matter what he does with them, he will always look at them and do it herself after he did it.

[u/[deleted]]

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