BILL MOYERS:
This week on Moyers & Company astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on science, God and the
universe. NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
If God is the mystery of the universe, these mysteries, which we're tackling these mysteries
one by one. If you're going to stay religious at the end
of the conversation, God has to mean more to you than just where science has yet to
tread. ANNOUNCER:
Funding is provided by: Anne Gumowitz, encouraging the renewal of
democracy. Carnegie Corporation of New York, celebrating
100 years of philanthropy, and committed to doing real and permanent good in the world. The Ford Foundation, working with visionaries
on the front lines of social change worldwide. The Herb Alpert Foundation, supporting organizations
whose mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society. The John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation,
committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. More information at Macfound.Org. Park Foundation, dedicated to heightening
public awareness of critical issues. The Kohlberg Foundation. Barbara G. Fleischman. And by our sole corporate sponsor, Mutual
of America, designing customized individual and group retirement products. That's why we're your retirement company. BILL MOYERS:
Welcome. Look at this glorious photograph. It was taken by a NASA space telescope and
shows the remains of a supernova, an exploded star, 17,000 light years away from us, back
when here on planet Earth we were still in the Stone Age. Now hold your hand up to the screen and see
how the photo resembles the X-ray of some large celestial hand. That's why astronomers have called this image
the "Hand of God." Not literally, of course. But the picture does provide us with an elegant
entry into the next part of my conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson. He's the director of the Hayden Planetarium
at New York's American Museum of Natural History. He's also the narrator of a mesmerizing new
show at the planetarium called Dark Universe, and this spring he'll appear as the host of
a remake of the classic PBS series Cosmos. You can see it on the National Geographic
Channel and FOX TV... In our first episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson
talked about the phenomenon of dark energy, the accelerating expansion of our universe. NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON from Moyers & Company
Show 301: We expected gravity to be slowing down the
expanding universe. The opposite is happening. We don't know what's causing it. BILL MOYERS:
Nor do Tyson and his colleagues yet fully comprehend another cosmic enigma known as
dark matter. NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON from Moyers & Company
Show 301: There is no known objects accounting for most
of the effective gravity in the universe. Something is making stuff move that is not
anything we have ever touched. BILL MOYERS:
On that mysterious note, we begin the next part of my talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Welcome. NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
Thank you. BILL MOYERS:
There were two strange sequences in your planetarium show. And I managed to go online and look at. NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
You've become a dark matter junky here. You're going online, you need more. BILL MOYERS:
I think-- NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
You need more. BILL MOYERS:
So let's talk about the scene of dark matter from your show at the planetarium. NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
So what's going on here is you're viewing the structure of the large-scale universe. And what we've represented here are dark areas
that themselves have more gravitational attraction than the light areas. So the light areas are drawing themselves
to the dark areas. And so you, what happens is, as this happens
over the eons, structure begins to manifest in the universe. And you see this web work, and it looks almost
organic, or it looks like some kind of neurosynaptic map. The formation and collection of matter in
the universe follows the laws of physics. And when you add in the dark matter, this
extra gravity, it turns the universe into the universe that we see. That's why we know that dark matter is real. We don't know what it is. But we know it's there because we can't make
the universe as we see it unless we put this extra gravity into our simulations to match
the gravity that we see. BILL MOYERS:
So you know it's something. NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
It's something. And there's some exotic ideas for it, by the
way. Particle physicists are convinced that it
might be an exotic particle that doesn't interact with us. Doesn't interact with our light, with our
telescopes, but that it has gravity. So these particles are doing their own thing,
invisible to us, but otherwise attracting our matter into their, nucleating us among
them. So, but of course, a particle physicist would
think that the solution is a particle. If you're a hammer, all your problems look
like nails. One of the more intriguing accounts I've heard
is if you have multiple universes, it turns out gravity can spill out of one universe
and be felt by another. And if we have another universe adjacent to
ours, it could be that these sites where we see extra gravity is ordinary gravity in a
parallel universe. And here we are, looking at it mysteriously
like, "What is this?" It's like the blind man touching the elephant. "I don't know what this whole thing is, but
here I can describe this part of it. And it's kind of textured, and it's, no, no,
no, no, no, this got, it's smooth and hard." And, you know, you can't see the whole elephant. Maybe the elephant is ordinary gravity in
another universe and we're feeling it and we're making stuff up just to account for
it. BILL MOYERS:
You think there could be another universe? NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
I don't see why not. Because back when we thought Earth was alone
in the universe, we knew that there were other planets, that the Earth is just a planet,
one of many. "Well, the sun is surely special." No, the sun is one of a hundred billion other
suns. So, the galaxy, the Milky Way. No, the galaxy is one of hundred billion galaxies. How about the universe? We have philosophical precedent to suggest
that why should nature make anything in ones? Okay? Everything else we ever thought was unique
or special, well, we found more of them. So philosophically, it's not unsettling to
imagine more than one universe. We also have good theoretical grounds for
suggesting the existence of a multiverse. Where our universe is just one of some countless
number of other universes coming in and out of existence, with slightly different laws
of physics within them. That makes it a little dangerous. Because we are held together, involved in
a universe where we work. Where we work physically. If you want to visit another universe, I would,
like, you know, send something else ahead of you. BILL MOYERS:
So explain this to me, why is it I felt more satisfied watching the planetarium show, and
as I'm sure we will watching the new "Cosmos," than I do personally from science fiction? I mean, I came away with a sense of really
having experienced something authentic at the planetarium. NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
That's a great question. By the way, there are many science-fiction
fans who also embrace the science reality. And people who are fans of fantasy and super
heroes and science fiction and all the storytelling that goes on on the frontier, essentially,
everyone there knows the difference between that frontier and the real science that comes
out. And they will judge the storytelling based
on how much science it got right before starts inventing what the frontier of imagination
would bring. If you violate a known law of physics, that's
lesser science fiction than the one where you get all your physics right, now take me,
now give me the warp drive. Now give me the transporter. Take me beyond what we know. So, but to your point I think maybe it's the
same effect as if you tour the Air and Space Museum in Washington, which has the history
of flight, including space flight, that we could've made an exact, we museum people,
could've made an exact replica of the Apollo 11 command module that went to the moon. And then we'd say, "Here's an exact replica." So that's okay. But if I now say, "This actual thing went
to the moon," intellectually, that means something different to you. Your eyes see exactly the same, you could
make a replica, a perfect, that looks exact, with all the blemishes and all the heat shield
damage. You could do that. But if you know it's the real thing, the meaning
is magnified. And so yes, you go to our space show, it is
the real science. And it is captivating you the way we'd only
perhaps had thought science fiction could. BILL MOYERS:
Science fiction came first in a way, in terms of popular entertainment. NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
In some cases. But I'm a fan of JBS Haldane once said, I'm
paraphrasing, he said, the universe is not only stranger than we have imagined, it's
perhaps stranger than we can imagine. And when you realize that I, you understand
why some people don't need to read the science fiction. Because black holes flaying stars in orbit
around them and planets that have life forms undreamt of on Earth, this is, we're speaking
real stuff here. Maybe that's as seductive as the imagination
of someone standing on the frontier. BILL MOYERS:
One thing I took away from your planetarium show is that dark energy, is the increasing
rate at which the universe is pulling itself apart, so how does it happen that we don't
experience this expanding of universe as we walk down the street, or sit here in this
building? NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
Yeah, because you live 80 years instead of billions. If you lived billions of years, oh yeah. This would be, "Hey, check that out. Look what I noticed." Yeah, I think about things you miss because
of how short our time on Earth is. I'll, the best example I can give is when
you walk around, say, "Oh, there's a nice, puffy cloud." You don't stare at it for an hour, you just
notice it. BILL MOYERS:
Right. NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
If you do a time-lapse of the cloud, especially cumulus clouds, they are roiling, gurgling,
boiling, places of condensed water vapor. They're alive. Yet, when you walk down the street, you think
it's just sitting there peaceful and calm if it's just a simple cloud. So even something that does change in your
lifetime, you don't think of as an actively roiling place, a cloud. So imagine longer, imagine mountain building
on Earth. Imagine watching the Hawaiian islands pop
up, or come, imagine watching ice ages come and go. Imagine watching species of life rise up,
the dinosaurs, and then an asteroid comes, they go extinct essentially overnight on the,
in the fossil record. That's a whole other way to see the world. And it's the task of the geologist, the astrophysicist
to think about how that works. Fortunately, we have computers that can speed
up time. I'll give you a great example. We used to have catalogues of galaxies. We say, "That's a really messed-up looking
galaxy there. Let's make a catalogue of irregular galaxies." So we have a catalogue of beautiful galaxies
and irregular galaxies. And then people came up with theories, "How
does a galaxy become irregular?" No one knew until we realized, galaxies collide. Galaxies feel each other's local gravity,
collide, and it's a train wreck. And half the irregular galaxies are train-wrecked
galaxies. There's a famous astronomer, Gérard de Vaucouleurs
who said, a wrecked Lexus is still a Lexus. It just happened to be in a car accident. So we would learn. Now, how do you get to know that galaxies
collide? You put in the forces of gravity on a computer,
run the simulation, and watch it unfold. And there you can recreate the havoc that
you see in the universe on a 100-million-year time scale. BILL MOYERS:
So when a child sings, or used to sing, I don't think they do anymore, "Twinkle, twinkle
little star, how I wonder what you are," it's not twinkling. Something powerful, dramatic, and dynamic
is happening to it. Right? NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
Well, yes, and we call that twinkling. So yeah, there's starlight coming billions
of, or millions of light years, well it depends on if it's a galaxy, well, hundreds of thousands
of light years across space, and it's a perfect point of light as it hits our atmosphere,
turbulence in the atmosphere jiggled the image, and it renders the star twinkling. And by the way, planets are brighter than
stars typically, like Jupiter and Venus. Venus has been in the evening skies lately. And if you go, "Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
how I wonder what you are," and you, I want, you want to wish upon the star, most people
are wishing on planets. That's why their wishes don't come true. Because the planets are the first stars to
come out at night. BILL MOYERS:
Don't you sometimes feel sad about breaking all these myths apart? NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
No, no, because I think it's, some myths are, deserve to be broken apart. The, out of respect for the human intellect. That, no, when you're writhing on the ground
and froth is coming out of your mouth, you're having an epileptic seizure. You have not been invaded by the devil. We got this one figured out, okay? I mean, discovery moves on. So, I don't mind the power of myth and magic. But take it to the next frontier and apply
it there. Don't apply it in places where we've long
passed what we already know is going on. BILL MOYERS:
I came out of the planetarium, and that evening, I sat thinking about what you said in the
show about, you acknowledged the Big Bang and you, and I remember that Hubble rewound
the process mathematically. Correct me if I'm wrong, and calculated that
everything, matter, space, energy, even time itself, actually had a beginning. NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
So it turns out that was not Hubble, although Hubble had the data that enabled the calculation. The person who did that was a Belgian priest
Georges Lemaître, he was a priest, physicist. Physicist-priest, okay? What a cool thing to have on your business
card. You got people coming and going with that. But he calculated what the implications of
Einstein's general relativity, which was the new theory of gravity, would be with Hubble's
expanding universe. And he says, the whole universe may have begun
in a singular point in the past. And thus Big Bang as a phrase was used pejoratively
of this idea, but it stuck. BILL MOYERS:
Well, the astronomer Robert Jastrow described it like the explosion of a cosmic hydrogen
bomb. Not the explosion of a cosmic hydrogen bomb,
but like the explosion of a cosmic hydrogen bomb. NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
Yeah, so there you're stuck with the analogy of the biggest explosion you know, using that
to describe something that's even bigger. Which is hard to do, right? I mean, not to get morbid on you, but I was
four blocks from the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. I live downtown. And I was trying to describe to others the
sound of the collapse of 107-story building. And it is not like anything else. So I can say, "Well, imagine two trains colliding." But how many of us even have heard or seen
that? Whatever that is, it's more than that. So you're stuck. If the biggest explosion we've made on Earth
is the hydrogen bomb, and then you say it's a cosmic hydrogen bomb, it is, I think saying
it's a cosmic hydrogen bomb cheapens the event. Yeah, it's way bigger than-- BILL MOYERS:
I understand. An incredible flash of energy and light, though? NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
And matter and, yeah, all of this. All of the above. BILL MOYERS:
Do you give people who make this case, that that was the beginning and that there had
to be something that provoked the beginning, do you give them an A at least for trying
to reconcile faith and reason? NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
I don't think they're reconcilable. BILL MOYERS:
What do you mean? NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
Well, so let me say that differently. All efforts that have been invested by brilliant
people of the past have failed at that exercise. They just fail. And so I don't, the track record is so poor
that going forward, I have essentially zero confidence, near zero confidence, that there
will be fruitful things to emerge from the effort to reconcile them. So, for example, if you knew nothing about
science, and you read, say, the Bible, the Old Testament, which in Genesis, is an account
of nature, that's what that is, and I said to you, give me your description of the natural
world based only on this, you would say the world was created in six days, and that stars
are just little points of light much lesser than the sun. And that in fact, they can fall out of the
sky, right, because that's what happens during the Revelation. You know, one of the signs that the second
coming, is that the stars will fall out of the sky and land on Earth. To even write that means you don't know what
those things are. You have no concept of what the actual universe
is. So everybody who tried to make proclamations
about the physical universe based on Bible passages got the wrong answer. So what happened was, when science discovers
things, and you want to stay religious, or you want to continue to believe that the Bible
is unerring, what you would do is you would say, "Well, let me go back to the Bible and
reinterpret it." Then you'd say things like, "Oh, well they
didn't really mean that literally. They meant that figuratively." So, this whole sort of reinterpretation of
the, how figurative the poetic passages of the Bible are came after science showed that
this is not how things unfolded. And so the educated religious people are perfectly
fine with that. It's the fundamentalists who want to say that
the Bible is the literally, literal truth of God, that and want to see the Bible as
a science textbook, who are knocking on the science doors of the schools, trying to put
that content in the science room. Enlightened religious people are not behaving
that way. So saying that science is cool, we're good
with that, and use the Bible for, to get your spiritual enlightenment and your emotional
fulfillment. BILL MOYERS:
I have known serious religious people, not fundamentalists, who were scared when Carl
Sagan opened his series with the words-- CARL SAGAN from Cosmos:
The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. BILL MOYERS:
I mean, that scared them, because they interpret that to mean, then if this is it, there's
nothing else. No God and no life after. NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
For religious people, many people say, "Well, God is within you," or God, the, there are
ways that people have shaped this, rather than, God is an old, grey-bearded man in the
clouds. So if God is within you, what, I'm sure Carl
would say, in you in your mind. In your mind, and we can measure the neurosynaptic
firings when you have a religious experience. We can tell you where that's happening, when
it's happening, what you're feeling like at the time. So your mind of course is still within the
cosmos. BILL MOYERS:
But do you have any sympathy for people who seem to feel, only feel safe in the vastness
of the universe you describe in your show if they can infer a personal God who makes
it more hospitable to them, cares for them? NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
In this, what we tell ourselves is a free country, which means you should have freedom
of thought, I don't care what you think. I just don't. Go think whatever you want. Go ahead. Think that there's one God, two Gods, ten
Gods, or no Gods. That is what it means to live in a free country. The problem arises is if you have a religious
philosophy that is not based on objective realities that you then want to put in a science
classroom. Then I'm going to stand there and say, "No,
I'm not going to allow you in the science classroom." I'm not telling you what to think, I'm just
telling you in the science class, "You're not doing science. This is not science. Keep it out." That's where I, that's when I stand up. Otherwise, go ahead. I'm not telling you how to think. BILL MOYERS:
I think you must realize that some people are going to go to your show at the planetarium
and they're going to say, "Ah-hah! Those scientists have discovered God. Because God," dark matter, "is what holds
this universe together." NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
So is that a question? BILL MOYERS:
It's a statement. You know, you know they're going to say that-- NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
So the history of discovery, particularly cosmic discovery, but discovery in general,
scientific discovery, is one where at any given moment, there's a frontier. And there tends to be an urge for people,
especially religious people, to assert that across that boundary, into the unknown lies
the handiwork of God. This shows up a lot. Newton even said it. He had his laws of gravity and motion and
he was explaining the moon and the planets, he was there. He doesn't mention God for any of that. And then he gets to the limits of what his
equations can calculate. So, I don't, can't quite figure this out. Maybe God steps in and makes it right every
now and then. That's where he invoked God. And Ptolemy, he bet on the wrong horse, but
he was a brilliant guy. He formulated the geocentric universe, with
Earth in the middle. This is where we got epicycles and all this
machinations of the heavens. But it was still a mystery to him. He looked up and uttered the following words,
"when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies," these
are the planets going through retrograde and back, the mysteries of the Earth, "when I
trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch
Earth with my feet. I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and
take my fill of ambrosia." What he did was invoke, he didn't invoke Zeus
to account for the rock that he's standing on or the air he's breathing. It was this point of mystery. And in gets invoked God. This, over time, has been described by philosophers
as the God of the gaps. If that's how you, if that's where you're
going to put your God in this world, then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific
ignorance. If that's how you're going to invoke God. If God is the mystery of the universe, these
mysteries, we're tackling these mysteries one by one. If you're going to stay religious at the end
of the conversation, God has to mean more to you than just where science has yet to
tread. So to the person who says, "Maybe dark matter
is God," if the only reason why you're saying it is because it's a mystery, then get ready
to have that undone. BILL MOYERS:
In the next and concluding part of my conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson, we'll talk about
science and democracy. NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
You have not fully expressed your power as a voter until you have a scientific literacy
in topics that matter for future political issues. This requires a level, a base level of science
literacy that I don't think we have achieved yet. BILL MOYERS:
At our website, BillMoyers.com, there's more about and from Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'll see you there and I'll see you here,
next time.
