Neil deGrasse Tyson Q & A @ Overheard

dr. deGrasse Tyson i asked dr. steven weinberg once what did he think about the expanding universe was it it can expand forever or would it collapse into the Big Crunch what do you think it's it's not a matter of who thinks what you look at the data the data is unambiguous and he would give you exactly the same answer I'm giving you now an answer that you didn't reveal to me in advance it doesn't matter because he'll give you the same answer all data show that we will expand forever on a one-way trip and the data has never shown that we would ever Rikka lapse so the Rica lapse model was a mathematically allowed possibility in Einstein's general theory of relativity so you go through all the possible ways the universe can behave while still following the precepts of general relativity one of them is a collapse one of them so so we are in a one-way trip which is I have found to be philosophically unsettling to many people because they how could you be in a universe that only has one one one go at it but that's it yeah that's it so so what you learn when you study science in general but astrophysics especially that you no longer invoke your senses to judge what makes sense or you no longer invoke your personal philosophies to judge what should be true the universe is what it is it really doesn't care about your senses yeah you know what he answered he said it's gonna expand forever unless it doesn't sir thanks for thanks for your interview here dr. Tyson I heard a great science joke the other day and I wanted to see if you had heard it how many how many astrophysicists does it take to change a lightbulb no I don't know yeah the answer is to one to hold the bulb and the other to rotate the universe I've heard that applied to other professions as well so I don't know if it uniquely applies to astrophysicist yeah all right sir hi I was a physics major at SUNY Albany and it was state university and it was really really hard I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't for you but I was hoping maybe you could share as your time as a student and then professor and then lecture a an aha or like Eureka moment like where something finally clicked for you just in my life in general or specific physics yeah uh well a couple of things first there's very little in life that's worth achieving that isn't hard those things that are hard are hard because most people can't do it that's why we say they're hard if you work at it and achieve it this and you continue that throughout your life you are you are distinguishing yourself among others around you by what you have achieved and those who rise the highest or those who keep solving hard things and you'd be surprised how lazy intellectually lazy we can become you go to college and you say I'm going to take this easy class so that I can get an A then everyone will be impressed with my a well a is supposed to be a proxy for how brilliant you are well your brilliance is not measured then by your grade it's measured by what you actually accomplished out there so that's why in the most brilliant people out there you don't ask them what grades they got the grades are irrelevant it's the hard things that they encountered and tackled leads me to the famous quote from John Kennedy we choose to go to the moon not because it's easy but because it's hard now my best example for you is not from physics but from mathematics I was in high school and I took calculus for the first time calculus is really different from stuff that comes before it all right it's calculus is more different from algebra than algebra is from arithmetic all right and there's and I got the calculus but can you open it up and there are these formulae lining the inside jacket in the front and in the back and it's got squiggly symbols and half the Greek alphabet is visiting my textbook I don't know what the letter is I don't know how to pronounce it I don't know what it means I don't know what it's used for and there it was and I said I will never understand this that's how far in it look to me but day after day you go through the textbook and learn a little more and a little more and then I open the pen hey I know what that is now that's a derivative on the second very all hey and it was this it was this fog that dissipated and that was a lesson for me that hard work dissipates ignorance and I've you I've invoked that in my life ever since the measure of whether you learn something is not whether it was obviously true to you upon first glance that's a good answer thank you that's very interesting I like your NASA shirt thematically appropriate I was just wondering if there are any schools of thought or generally accepted ideas that might have flipped in the field over the past century or so what was the most interesting or dynamic one for you yeah so I flipped you mean we thought this and now we think that yeah new data yeah yeah yeah so science doesn't really work that way so there's a lot of misunderstanding about science as an enterprise and then we just if I can take this moment please to highlight if you perform experiment that demonstrates the conduct of reality maybe I don't agree with that experiment because maybe I think you're biased then you're trying to get that result and you're either intentionally biased or you're passively biased but I I'm gonna doubt you I'm going to perform that same experiment and see if I get the same result if I get the same result and I'm a completely different person then maybe that result is reality it's the ballgame there okay yeah now but still two is not enough because I use an experiment of the same design somewhat a third person comes in and say I'm not going to use that design because I think that design of your experiment is flawed because this is an important result I'm not gonna base the whole thing on just what you got all right so now you create a whole new kind of apparatus and you get the same result then you have experimental consensus and a new truth emerges about the operations of nature that truth does not later on get overturned that's not how it works what gets overturned are ideas that are not yet experiment experimentally verified and any research journal is full of ideas that in six months or a year will get tossed modified reworked ignored so people say oh science is just one day you'd want to believe this and then you believe that and I say what's your best example they talk about the flat earth versus the round earth that was back 500 years ago science as I now describe it to you has taken on this identity basically since Galileo 1600 onwards in that era experimentally determined truths do not get undone what happens is take newton's laws for example he has a law of motion and law of gravity then we find out wait a minute and if there's a high gravity source Newton's laws fail if you're moving really fast faster than a running horse whatever Newton might have experienced in his life his equations begin to break down do you throw away all of Newton no it works in all the other cases so what's going on Einstein comes up with laws of motion his special theory of relativity Einstein comes up with a new law of gravity his general theory of relativity do they replace Newton no they draw a bigger circle around the applicability of Newton's laws Newton's laws apply here Einstein's laws take over for the rest of the universe and if you put in low speeds and low gravity and Einstein's equations they become Newton's equations sorry they become Newton's equations so given that fact all I will tell you is a strongly held idea that was not experimentally verified but everyone was really sure it had to have been true then I got overthrown and that was the luminiferous ether the idea that sound requires air or a table or some medium through which to propagate light which is also a wave surely must require a medium as well but there's the vacuum of space and clearly we get light from the Sun and the rest of the stars so what medium is carrying the light so everybody invented a medium the ether calculated what light must be doing through it and in the late 1800s Early 1900s experiments were done to show not only do we not need the ether light travels just fine through a vacuum and it propagates in a different way from sound so our understanding grew ether got thrown out the window overnight and we moved on yeah facts don't change just that's it yeah that's a long aunt I'm sorry took some really good answer that and also the answer was basically no and it was that one question thank you yes thank you sir oh wait what war and there's more war but wait war we don't know anything about anything and then a new idea comes up yeah so we didn't know how elements were formed it all the elements on the periodic table we had no idea there wasn't even a there wasn't even an offering for how they formed we just knew we were plumb ignorant about it until 1957 when a paper was published called the was it called they see the formation of the elements and we discovered that elements were formed in the Centers of stars and that transformed modern astrophysics and and chemistry we learned a lot about chemistry from that as well so that was a new thing that didn't flip-flop anything it's just added knowledge to our base so sorry okay good answer yeah we have we have a limited amount of time we're gonna try to make the question sound bites ready okay two quick things in one question the Austin Astronomical Society since its greetings and they're very happy for you to renew your membership yes get that doctor off of my space telescope doctor story Musgrave story Musgrave was a medical doctor and so what you're trying to do is call me out on the fact that I wouldn't let a medical doctor operate on the Hubble telescope and story Musgrave who serviced the Hubble telescope is a medical doctor so what what's up with that story Musgrave also has three or four I've lost counts master's degrees in engineering and it's his engineering background that was tapped to even help design Space Shuttle in the first place so Shazam so and there's no indication that Sandra Bullock knew any engineering at all so there you have it next that's a former academia or as an academia it's particularly appropriate now any thoughts on the Seguin effect where academic research becomes less credible as the researcher becomes more popular what do you say about that yeah so I don't think that's true any longer because of course he pioneered this and what I've found is over the years the academic community in my field others are laggards here I've seen it geology physics chemistry in my field we understand that we are healthier when the public embraces what we do and when the members of Congress can converse about frontier astrophysics research with the rest of them then budgets go up everybody's happy and so this activity has been embraced by my community and I have independent evidence for that so so know that concern while what surely was true one day ago is no long night now yes I love you quick question I have a question about the fossil record when people non-believers try to attack the dating system they use for the for fossils and whatnot carbon dating or whatnot is there any validity to that so these are none when you say non-believers people who like to reject science yes in favor of their religious philosophies yes so these are people who are apparently require data to support their faith I find that odd right because then it's not faith right I mean if if you have religious faith then whatever anyone says about the world wouldn't matter to you if it does matter to you then you're that's a different kind of contract that you're taking out on information and that contract is there could be data out there that would conflict with your religious philosophy and then you'd have to go along with it that's not what actually happens they there's a pretense that data matters and then they filter it reinterpret it ignore parts of it slice and dice it so that it all fits in to the religious philosophy so it requires blinders in order to make that happen so with the the radio radioactive dating which we use there many different elements carbon is good carbon-14 we've all heard about that is good for periods of time that go back thousands tens of thousands of years basically into the ice age we can carbon date you know frozen cavemen for and mastodons coming out of glaciers then we have we have other other elements used that are radioactive and they decay lead is used to date the age of the earth that has a half-life of billions you I forgot the exact billion plus years whereas car carbon-14 is in the thousands of years so you so you pick the one that suits the time interval you're interested in and then you can date those that's how we date meteorites for example the people who are in denial of this simply it exhibits a failure in their educational system that's what elyda t2 it of course not yeah okay good ma'am I was actually gonna ask how you balance being a public intellectual with your work as a scientist and how your celebrity affects your reputation as a scientist but that guy two guys behind me kind of stole that question I can and I can put some nuances on it Thursday so first it's not balanced right I've been heavily doing cosmos these past several years and so I have in mind that when cosmos airs and we're done that I become a scientist again rather than just play one on TV and so I actually plan to pull back a bit from my public exposure no more Jon Stewart no more Stephen Colbert none of the sad to hear well if if if if it's just the Neal show then I would have failed as an educator what I should be doing is making sure others are out there as well and they have more people in their rolodex right if it's just me well that's cultism I mean what am i that's not what I'm cater that's not what I'm aiming for a year so so that's really my goal here it's not a balance balancing act in terms of reputation it's based on what your publication record is it's only that if I don't publish then people don't think one way or another if I do they'll judge it for whether it's good or bad whether or not I was in public eye so that's kind of a good thing about how this system works so no I'm not worried about that fact that several invitations to do a sabbatical a research sabbatical immediately after all this and I'm forward to some of that yes okay thanks last one quick quick one no verbs so I only have like a layman's knowledge of the question about to ask you but I'll do it real quick so I had to do a project on galactic filament and I kind of had a poof moment looking at like a diagram of it and how like those big like columnar structures of galaxies kind of go off in ordered space and it kind of made me want to ask you since you're here and I'm here it seemed like a good opportunity so do you see any and it sounds and they might sound silly but do you see any like intention or anything and like the ordering of this of the cosmos especially at that macro scale or like what do you see into that because that was kind of like a poof moment I mean yeah so if intent is an interesting question when imposed on the universe for the longest while philosophically people imagined that the universe was some perfect place earth was a haven for life especially human life and everything is just right for us and that would leave you thinking that there's some intent to the universe that the universe is serving our needs and of course this is as you would suspect very strong in religious philosophies where the adherents of that particular religion are sure that they are more special than any other religion we're more correct in so doing when you look at the large-scale universe and you see these structures what you have to ask yourself is so all the galaxies were exactly equally spaced rather than in these filaments and structures perhaps you'd be asking the same thing go look at is there some intent here look how beautifully ordered it is ask yourself is there some configuration of the universe where you wouldn't ask that because if there isn't then the question doesn't actually aim towards a unique answer if anything you see out there looks like it's ordered to you then the question you can't ask the question you have to be able to ask the question such that if it were this other way you would reject it now the people who said earth is a haven and all this the fossil record argues differently ninety seven eight percent of all life that ever existed is now extinct that's the sign not of a planet that loves its wife that's a sign of a planet that wants it to get there like the hell off the ante Haven right right we are alive not because but in spite of it from tsunamis earthquakes tornados hurricanes droughts floods every year they killed thousands of people thousands you're kind of bumming me out not to mention asteroid impacts took out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago earth is in a shooting gallery you want to say there is intent yeah the intent is to kill us okay there's your intent now so so the more you look at the universe the less clear any purposeful intent there is and I recommend if you look online Google my name and the universe and the word purpose and I have an essay that was actually done up on it as a YouTube video as well where i comment on does the universe have purpose on that upbeat note you want whether you know when that when the asteroid comes yes okay if we have people who who reject the science world and the asteroid is headed towards us they will be doing a number of things trying shirts certainly I'll be running away from the impact point they'll be buying toilet paper and bottled water and whereas if you had scientists in your midst and engineers when the asteroid comes at you saying how can I deflect that two completely different outlooks on your fate so if I'm bumming you out by saying there's a disaster that will kill us yeah I'd like to lift you up again by saying it may be that innovations in science and technology may be the only thing that can save us from ourselves ud bummed me [Applause]

Channel: шackunin

Views: 713,316

Rating: 4.8911066 out of 5

Keywords: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Overheard, Evan Smith, science, Q&A, interview, astrophysics

Id: bd993w3syBM

Length: 21min 40sec (1300 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 23 2019