StarTalk Podcast: Cosmic Queries – Fan Grab Bag

[Music] this is star talk cosmic queries edition which is becoming quite the fan favorite and you know i don't do this alone i need help help me check well yes i'm here but you don't need help but i'm i'm always here okay you give me uh spiritual help exactly there you go right because i'm certainly not helping to answer the questions that's for sure so this one is is a sort of a fan appreciation episode yeah where um i think it's primarily patreon questions all patreons these are our supporters i think you know you're not just a patron i think that's why the the word is different you know when you're a patron you just hand money and out of charity but patreon there's actually sort of a uh what do you call it a contract between the money you give and what happens next yeah and so and there's a scale uh with higher and higher rewards for it so yeah uh so that's so we're trying to just encourage that because it allows us to experiment those those funds right do things that are not yet tested in the marketplace and that but but we think it will work and then we get to test it and then it works then we go on to something else so yeah they're giving us the opportunity to fail with without consequence that's basically i haven't thought about it that way that's what they're doing it's like thank you for giving us the opportunity to fail and we don't have to worry about it we can you know but you know that's a good thing right yeah those who are the only people who no longer make mistakes are those who are no longer on the frontier of inquiry oh did you just think that up that's really good oh no you're going to write it down what is right in this yeah mistakes are evidence that you're exploring they're not evidence of your failure so i have to agree with you yeah cool man yeah we have to change our attitude by the way if you make the same mistake twice no excuse that's a different story that's a difference it's a whole new ball game that's a different that's a different show right so what so you collected all the questions so what do you have for me yeah so but first we're going to try something different what's up speaking of patreon we have some patrons that do a yeoman's job of supporting us okay i buy that i mean they they drop some coin drop some coin okay drop some coin and so you know we like to reward them um especially okay um uh joel jericho um is is going to lead us off with a video question this is like like in jeopardy you have the video daily double yeah i forgot about that just a little moment of silence for alex trebek oh god yeah yeah host of jeopardy for what 36 years what an incredible career he had yeah and i've been i was never a contestant but i was multiple times on the board either delivering clues or my name was like the clue so i feel genetically connected in my own little way well you know and of course there's a big buzz uh in the twitterverse intern webs that you should be the host oh yeah but i i'm flattered i'm flattered but i got i got i got a day job i got a job yeah i got a day by the way i think i could do a good job but it's not it's not my life's goal it's not my here's my impression of you as the host of jeopardy and so they give the answer and then the person uh chimes in and then you go i'm sorry uh the question we have there isn't quite right because i'm pretty sure that that question isn't exactly right yeah they messed that one up right technically maybe but no yeah so anyway all right so let's let's uh kick things off by the way just just another quick thing there people uh when i went to college there was someone who had like a very high iq who lived in my dorm and his iq was so high that it couldn't be measured by normal tests so they had to create a special test for him and then he was a consultant to people who write iq tests for how to test people at very this is while he was in college he was a consultant to test writers to test people at very very high iq and so it's weird it's its own thing it's its own universe this this iq thing that's insane yeah so what he was wondering was whether iq correlated with your performance in school only to a certain point right then a higher iq would get you lower grades and so i ask well what's what's going on there he said oh because beyond a certain iq you are smarter than anyone asking the question and so you will see answers that they do not yet see and then you'll be marked wrong makes sense so i thought that was an interesting uh an interesting fact no that i'm not claiming a very high iq but this happened to me a couple of times in school when i was in kindergarten and i made a crayon drawing of the night of the universe it was the sky okay exactly it's right earth and then the sky and i used my black crayon and totally wore it out put in some stars in it and the teacher said uh no no the the night sky is dark blue and i'm thinking no this is like why would it not it's like no but but i'm like six or five or something and so later on the teacher went home did research it came back he said no you're right the the nighttime sky is black right and so that's what happened there and and and so when she said it's dark blue was your answer so do you have eyes no i'm five okay it's like a full grown up teacher and it happened again there was a there was a question on the uh physics regents i think it was where new york state would take a regents so there's a question uh if you have a projectile this is basic physics um what shape best represents that path okay and so you have like parabola you know a circle ellipse whatever okay and the answer they're looking for is parabola right right if you do the math it's a prayer however however if it's not actually a parabola it's close to a parabola but if you removed earth or scrunched earth down to only its center right that path would continue and orbit the earth and come back into that segment so in fact it's a segment of an ellipse right more than it's a segment of a parabola but it's taught parabola because a parabola equation is way easier to calculate with than an ellipse so it's so again just because you wrote the question and you're testing other people's knowledge doesn't mean you know enough knowledge to test people who know more than you do that's all i'm saying all right hey listen that's good well now we're going to test your knowledge because we got a bunch of questions that have been written bring it on okay the video daily double chuck what what's behind yes exactly the universe for 1000 go hey star talk hey neil uh thanks for thanks for the chance to ask some questions uh so i'm an artist i make pottery some of it inspired by the cosmos um and most of the pots have a spiral in them somewhere because i just i think they look really cool so my question is very simple why are there so many spirals in nature um interesting oh cool and not just the universe in nature period oh yeah yeah that's this this is joel right okay so i recognize him he can't i don't know who this guy is okay because i i got right here one of his creations okay this is a moon coffee mug right what do you think of that and the problem every time i tend it i taste a bit of basalt why is this why is this coffee so gritty [Laughter] no no each one is unique and i'm very impressed with just the artisanry of it um but yeah he he gave me a set of these yeah and uh they're all around my office the funny thing is that he sent me one as you can see we got one too okay cool yes and he told me in the note that he sent me that he had made several for you and i uh realized that he sent me one without a handle i just look at yours right okay yours has a handle and clearly you know uh a minus man you know chuck is just so ungrateful joel i apologize for chuck the man and joel i apologize for you sending me a handleless mug thank you i didn't even realize i was like well maybe all of his mugs have no handles maybe this is the way he met he in fact mine has a little place where your thumb goes right on the top of the handle there's a little place where the thumb goes and not only is your not only do you have a handle but it's ergonomic and mine is just like well chuck i hope you don't burn your hands okay all right so here's here's what's going on in there i'll do my best to give an answer to this so um here's what happens if anything goes around in circles okay you get a circle all right fine if however while you were going around in circles you move in any direction perpendicular to the circle it's no longer a circle it's a spiral so the circle gets distorted to move through time in such a way that you get a spiral like a spiral staircase or a spiral anything right so i was in one of the redwood forests where we were filming cosmos and i was nice intrigued but first in the city new york we don't have big trees like that so everything about this forest is completely alien to me so i'm i'm examining it like i'm on an alien planet because i've never seen anything like this so so i noticed that the tree bark on many of the trees has is striated in this sort of very very sort of high-pitched spiral going up the tree and every tree did this and they all did it in the same direction and i thought what is asymmetric in the physiology can i use that word as applied to plants yeah in the physiology of a tree that there's this spiraling going on if i don't know about the rest of the plant but it's certainly happening in the bark so i'm just intrigued by that but of course the tree grows upwards so whatever is otherwise happening in the tree if it's if there's any kind of sap movement or whatever else is going on and i don't know i have no expertise in plants i'm just saying combine something that wants to go in a circle and have it move upwards you get a spiral wow now now that's a spot that's a three-dimensional spiral now we have spiral galaxies which is flat that's a spiral in a flat shape and i you get that because the inner parts of the galaxy finish a loop faster than the outer parts of the galaxy so if you have some system like stars forming in gas clouds that'll get stretched okay and a current understanding of galaxies is that there's a way a wave of pressure inside that galaxy called a density wave that is moving through the galaxy through the gas cloud and that density wave is being stretched by the rotation of the galaxy itself and where that density wave is hitting the gas you get the formation of stars so again you have an action happening combined with a rotation and then that rotation is not as a solid object and there you have it so um by the way plenty of stuff is not spiral we have elliptical galaxies there's no spiral thing for them at all you know but if you're going to spin watch for some spiral action there you go that makes sense yeah yeah very cool well thanks joel and thank you for uh once again the handless cup and trying to get the basalt out of there yeah exactly thank you for thank you for my gritty morning coffee for my volcanic that burns my hand all right all right cool let's uh move on to i'm gonna combine two questions together now this is rud van der linden uh or rude there's one or the other say the red or rude i'm imagining his parents didn't name him rude i'm just thinking that could you know do you spell that how do you spell the first name are you d good good okay all right sounds like rude to me yeah and rude by the way it's kind of cool yeah this is kind of cool rude i'm rude i'm rude no you're very polite no i am rude okay so okay rude what's this question says this hey guys sad news about the uh arecibo radio telescope collapsing on itself i'm so glad i was able to visit it before the collapse and before katrina i was wondering does neil have any personal stories about the observatory and what was according to neil the most important discovery that was made with the telescope itself thanks root now let me follow that up with christine hale who says hi dr neal just wondering how the loss of the arecibo telescope will affect our scouring of the heavens for possible alien communication or life so i figured i'd just combine the two one because one is you know what's your personal connection to it right plus we don't we don't normally do current events on in q and a so this is good we'll get to that after this break oh see what i did there we're doing cosmic queries uh this is a fan appreciation edition i'm the grass tyson chuck nice with me we'll see in a couple of minutes we're back the special cosmic queries fan appreciation edition now chuck i don't quite know what's different between this custom aquarius and others for us to call this fan appreciation well everybody's from patreon so everyone's a patreon oh okay for sure and we there even some video questions were taken in so that's how that works so you left off to give me the two names of those about vander linden and charlene hale and rude wants to know your personal stories or connections to the arecibo uh radio telescope uh because of course it collapsed recently and uh and and charlene uh would like to know will it have an effect on how we scour the heavens uh for possible alien communication or life yeah so the arecibo telescope was the largest telescope in the world for decades right ever since it was built until back in the 50s or 60s uh no no when was it built i think 1960s until uh just a few years ago it was the largest telescope in the world and in telescopes in astronomy in general bigger equals better because if you're trying to collect rain outside that's coming down imagine the rain or just photons photons okay and you want to collect it you can use a thimble you can use a bucket you can use a cauldron or a swimming pool or a swimming pool you use the swimming pool you get the most amount of uh raindrops so it's that simple it's not more complicated than that so bigger equals better so as a since it's a radio telescope it listens it it observes radio waves and pulsars gives off radio rapidly rotating neutron stars gives off radio waves it can also detect things happening in our ionosphere right this is a part in the upper atmosphere that's electrically charged right and old-timers will know that you could get am radio from very distant cities late at night and the reason why you could do that is am radio waves once they were broadcast by the antenna would reflect off the bottom of their ionosphere and be able to cover more than the curvature of the earth that you could see from your where your your radio was whereas fm goes straight out into space so if you want fm across multiple cities you need repeaters and all sorts of other that you need all manner of of ways to get that signal into other places now of course it's everything's cable driven and satellite driven i'm just talking about in the day right so it could observe phenomenon going on in the ionosphere in fact the funding originally for arecibo was enabled by the us military to detect the signature of decoy intercontinental ballistic missiles as they re-entered the atmosphere through the on the ionosphere as launched by russia what this is how okay so don't let me that's sensitive listen this is don't get me started on well you can but not in this moment on the two-way street between astrophysics my field and my people and the military oh man we got to do an explainer on that we are all my people we're all generally sort of liberal anti-war this sort of thing but at the end of the day the stuff that we care about the military cares about stuff the military cares about we care about so we have strongly overlapping venn diagrams in what we do and what we invent and what we innovate so anyhow so the money for that telescope was driven by the us military and we knew all along we could piggyback that fact and make all manner of other discoveries so it also gets us it does radio echo echoing so what the telescope could also do better than any other telescope was send a signal back out to space okay because you think of telescopes as just receiving right but what you can do is take a signal send it from where the location of the receiver bounce it back off the telescope and send it somewhere in space that you designate okay so there are asteroids which are too small to really carefully track using optical regular telescopes so what you can do is to take a radio signal send it out beam it back out to space to an asteroid and that then the reflected signal comes back to you you time it you get the distance to that asteroid and when you get the distance and you know which way it's going you get its orbit and you need you you want to know what those orbits are for asteroids that cross earth's orbit because they will eventually basically 100 hit earth so it's like an echo locator you not not with sound of course but still but but with with radio waves uh bouncing off and coming back and so this is uh so it's a highly useful telescope in that regard now all right several years ago okay um china says we're going to have the biggest telescope in the world and so they went up and built a bigger telescope twice the collecting area of the our sibo telescope twice twice twice around twice i forgot the exact math but it's about twice and so so they too found a natural crater in the earth as we found for the arecibo telescope and built the largest radio dish in the world and has an acronym it's called fast the 500 meter aperture um spherical telescope so its shape is a spherical it's right it's it's the geometry of it good for them oh so i visited that we we shot some scenes there for cosmos for a whole episode the other grass tyson communists are the communists wow that's so cool so you got to see it okay yes i was there so it's a mile in circumference wow all right if you walked around the upright anyhow here's my point the question was do i have any relation yes i do my mother my mother uh while she's born in new york city her parents are from puerto rico and in fact her grandparents are from aracebo puerto rico oh cool so we have genetic connection back to the town that's the nearest town to that telescope on the island of puerto rico and so that's first connection second we would go visit relatives you know every christmas and you know christmas in puerto rico that's a whole thing yeah that's a whole by the way at midnight you're there usually through new year's at midnight there's a tradition you eat grapes one per 12 grapes one per um a tone of the clock right okay and one year they got grapes but the grapes had seeds in them you know and i was like eight or something is like what do i do with the c don't eat another great quick you gotta do one third one bird stroke for a chime anyhow so my point is um the oh so the telescope will be missed in that regard but it was falling out of disrepair we've known this for about a decade the the national science funding foundation started withdrawing money for support for it so that means your maintenance doesn't work out no one writes the article about the drop in those funds they wait until the damn detector falls out of the sky and then they talk about it as a tragedy it was a tragedy that had tap roots that goes back a decade wow so for me this plight of the irisebo telescope is metaphor for science in america excellent first the funding drops it goes out of this repair and then a few things break putting the rest of the structure at stress points because an engineering design system if you start taking out support struts then the rest of it can't it's designed to be complete if you start yanking out pieces of it because it broke and you don't repair it then that's the beginning of the end yeah which in fact it was the beginning of the end and now the the the detector falls down out of the sky and it's the end of an era and so now if aliens going to talk to humans by sending radio signals um they're going to be speaking chinese the chinese will be the first to have that conversation with aliens now so i'm as an american i i'm i'm upset that we can't lead that effort but as a scientist i know that if you if your country becomes short-sighted in terms of their investments the science can and will still get done it happened with the super conducting super collider that we were going to build in texas funding began then it all got cut to zero but europe said we'll build one so europe build at the the european center for nuclear research cern um they have this the the large hadron collider and they just they discovered the higgs boson the god particle they discovered new frontiers in particle physics at cern and we didn't okay science doesn't care what your nationality is all that matters is who it who who is offering you enlightened leadership and enlightened governance if you want to be on that frontier otherwise you will dance to the tune played by others who have made those investments in the future of this civilization wow man that was good well sorry that's a long answer to that no it's a long answer but i got to tell you the um the message at the end of that answer you can't it's all worth it where's the price of admission i'm just saying okay all right all right i think i'll give you some more let's do another video from joel jericho joel has two videos okay this is this is surprise he has more than two videos joel jericho and so yeah he's a jericho pottery yeah joel's a big supporter on patreon yeah yeah and and so by the way while i was drinking my coffee an alien climbed out of the moon mug joel can you lose the aliens all right when you get okay go on all right go ahead let's uh let's let's hear from joel another question for you so science and technology are replacing a lot of the things that we used to make with our hands um they're being made by machines so my question is could a machine ever make art wonder why he asked that that's a scared artist right there yeah and your next chuck kennedy machine tells you really tell jokes no i i had a conversation with one of those rolling robots once you know at a party yeah and and they sounded really smart so i said you you sound really smart like where'd you go to school he said oh solid state university that was good that's not bad that's that's not it's not a bad joke kill that robot [Laughter] so i think machines so for me let me offer my definition of art art is reality through the lens of someone with imagination which upon being shared with you allow you to see the world not only with fresh eyes but with a perspective that can enhance the beauty of your life and the life of others okay that's what i think of by the way art capital a sculptures screenwriters set designers yeah all of art so can a computer do art i think computers as if they're programmed by you to just do something that's already known to do no it's not going to do art or it'll duplicate somebody else's art right that's not art that's just forgery right so so art for me has got to come from a creative place that no good art has to come from a creative place that is not yet been tapped by anyone else if you're going to advance the world of art right so so for a computer to do that it has to be full up genuine artificial intelligence yeah it would have to be basically human yeah they have to be exactly the exact way it have to be uh it'd have to have the exact same i would say neurological capabilities that we do but it wouldn't have to be the same it would just have to be have the capacity to have a thought that was never had before right yeah exactly whether or not it's the same thought we had right it would just have to be an original thought an original thought right that's right because i mean think about it so you look at like just take monet for or any of the impressionists right i don't know who the first impressionist was but he was probably nearsighted someone go back through time and say can't put one of these on he's like oh wait a minute so that's how this stuff really wait a minute so oh that's how stuff really looks so it but it was either that he was nearsighted or he was like why can't why wouldn't i see why couldn't i see the world in this gauzy like perspective what surely contributed to that was the arrival of photography absolutely these are coincident in time right because photography is not now i can capture reality basically exactly as reality it is i don't need you to paint a portrait of me to capture the reality of me absolutely now if you're going to paint a portrait okay give me three eyeballs on one side or whatever do something different and imaginative because if i want exactly me i'll just take a photo yeah there we go so yeah yeah oh wow that's really cool right so yeah i think that's the kind of computer you need and the day that happens you know we'll just become their pets because we're all screwed when that happens it's a wrap it's a wrap on us all okay okay do you know how we created you know how we domesticated uh the cats and dogs i know by killing the ones that bit us oh god okay so you have a litter all right and some are really nice and cuddly and you pet them and they purr and they do that or whatever and then another one's like scratching and hugging at you dead no that one kill that one that and so you're selectively editing the gene pool of these creatures for their temperament and so now you went from a wolf to uh a a a poodle right or a or what's that the pomeranian you know or a yorkie with a lap dog right so um the point is if the the day ai becomes our overlord um it would you just want to be nice to them so you can become their pets otherwise don't be the human who kicks and fights [Laughter] don't be that human your ass is gone because you will not outsmart the ai yeah because they're designed to be somewhat as smart or smarter than anything we ever will be in the same way we design we program computers to be better at us at chess right okay computer beat kasparov for goodness sake right a computer beat the best jeopardy champion so we're already kind of no there's certain things they're better at us that but if they start running things okay yeah just learn how to purr all right we got to take another quick break and when we come back more uh cosmic query's uh fan appreciation edition when star talk returns we're back star talk cosmo aquarius fan appreciation edition shuck spending all this time just blathering you know let's go get some more questions okay i gotta stop this i gotta i gotta no i know you always say it but it's it's good no no no no okay it's i mean if you went to the bank right and you said i'd like to withdraw a hundred dollars and the bank manager comes out and says oh hi dr tyson by the way today is dr tyson appreciation day now in addition to your hundred dollars here are and he counted out by ones another hundred dollars okay would you say bro what are you doing i'm in a hurry okay i gotta get out of here i gotta go all right no you let them count out the hundred dollars at once and then you take it and you say thank you very much and that hundred was not out of your account it was so the bank bank decision in your favor okay monopoly card all right it's all gravy well thank you for the bank analogy yeah there you go let's go to uh tracy scrubber who says uh dr tyson what do you consider to be the most persistent belief in physics or astronomy which has already been disproven but that is still perpetuated in popular culture and or schools oh wow what a great question okay that's like a multi-part thing going on there okay yeah so um the concept of belief i i prefer to use that word for when you think something is true in the absence of evidence so um belief doesn't have much currency in the sciences what happens is i have some marginal evidence that something might be true so i can say i believe it's true but that's not i have this much evidence to say it's true what does your evidence say my evidence says is the opposite of that so the third person comes and say no what i found is there's a hybrid of those two things that you're saying and this is the real truth then a fourth person says i agree with that third person and the fifth person says i agree with that third person and you assemble information and data and observations so that there's an emergent objective truth right so it's not like we're also let's just believe this is true and get on with life no that's not quite the the mechanism of what's going on here so what you really want to know is there anything that we long thought would be true turn out to not be true but the public still believes um i no the public belief stuff that we always knew was never true so no spaceships don't make sound in space okay so so star wars would be silent movie all right so uh that's one that we always knew was not true and the public doesn't seem to get it um we knew the world was round uh in ancient greece forget this columbus stuff where people thought no the educated people knew earth was round um ancient greece they knew earth was around you know they knew earth was around because lunar eclipses okay where earth's shadow is cast onto the full moon always made a curved shadow okay and the shadow was a circular shadow and the only shape object that will always make a circular shadow there's a sphere no matter what angle the light comes from that's right so the ancient greeks were clever people and they recognized this and they saw that it would be at different angles and they always got that that that that that a circular shadow on the thing the only way you can get a circle is if we are a sphere so so it's been known for a thousand years yet there are emerging people today who are certain earth is flat so i i so no there's nothing that we have carried with us that is yet to be confirmed or has been confirmed in in the negative that the public still believes not in physics you get some of that in medicine okay always oh oh my gosh oh this is chicken soup this is period right in six days right okay ginkgo biloba okay so something you know my favorite is the chicken soup one so the way it goes is uh there's no better cure than grandma's chicken soup okay and with uh that and other good traditional cures will make you better in a week right but but without them your cold will linger for seven days yeah so if you look at sort of uh the what they used to call old um um wives tales they used to call it that i don't know how it even got that term but just things that lore handed down another one is if i if i roll you in front of the window and the window's open and it's cold air you'll catch pneumonia right okay i heard that from my grandmother and i'm thinking why would you catch them is there like pneumonia sitting outside the window ready to come in only when it's cold outside like what it what and i never believed it but i heard it okay i watch movies you know go to tcm movies black and white movies from the 1940s and 50s it is all throughout the movies okay there's a hitchcock movie where somebody's trying to kill somebody who's wheelchair-bound and rolls him in front of a window opens the window in the winter and then leaves them there and they catch the death of cold and die this is but today you don't have you don't see that in storytelling so that must have gotten through right yeah it must have okay gotten through that no that's no longer the case i was told by my grandmother wear your slippers otherwise you'll catch a death of cold at night and how am i gonna catch a cold through the bottom of my feet you know i you know i have calluses if a coal gets through the calluses in the bottom of my feet give it to him exactly yeah all right so i think in other profession physics not so much got you okay that's cool keep it going all right let's keep it going this is timothy l johnson timothy says chuck you can pronounce my name i promise timothy johnson thank you thank you ty mafi joe hanson uh then he says dr tyson i wanted to pick your brain in your opinion what is the most fascinating thing that we have discovered in our known universe and how many ways could it kill you [Laughter] i think nothing beats black holes there you go and a black hole kill you a hundred different ways there you go okay so uh the first discovered black hole was um it was an a source of x-rays and ultraviolet light in the constellation scorpius no it might have been cygnus no the first one was in cygnus the constellation cygnus and you have a uh when you have a black hole and material getting filleted off of a star in orbit around it that mature falling in radiates copiously before it enters the abyss and so we knew that you calculated this is the signature a black hole would give us as matter falls in and so you look for those in the sky so now the catalog we have no end of catalogued black holes so it's definitely black holes and they've captured our imagination in movies in storytelling disney had a movie the black hole back in the 70s i think they're re redoing it um so yeah it's got to be black holes and my favorite way to die is falling into a black hole i don't get hit by a bus i don't want to die and i think put me throw me into a black hole good for you mine is sleep why not be part of an experiment while you're doing this because i don't want to be there at all because i'm dying i'm told i haven't heard this verified that during the french revolution we're cutting off everybody's heads right if you know you're going to die that way why not participate in some science experiments right so for example your eyes connect directly to your brain and they don't need the rest of your body right okay you can stop your heart briefly and you're still kind of alive while that's happening so cut off your head go to the rolling head right before it completely dies and ask because your ears are still connected yeah how many fingers do you see why don't you blink so i'm told i didn't verified that there was still some brief brain activity right now there's an experiment okay okay why waste a guillotined head when you could so if i if i gotta die throw me a black hole i'll give you all the data you want there you go all right oh god i'm gonna get a t-shirt science why waste a guillotine head [Laughter] we gotta get it oh that's so great oh by the way i mean in all seriousness there was um the there was a prisoner who voluntarily donated his body to be micro-sliced okay do you know how you do this okay so the oh no this is a prisoner who was on death row okay voluntarily did they said yes give my body to medicine so they do that then you like mostly freeze the body and then you just start taking slices all right so ideally you'd have three bodies to do this with one you'd slice this way right when you slice this way top to bottom left to right and then front to back then you'd have thin transparent slices of the human body that you could compare to mri images of the three-dimensional cross-section of the body nice so i i own a book that is this sliced uh prisoner who was on death row and if you're a cannibal it makes for a lovely carpage slice human that's great or you're fried you get human chips cutting potatoes thin all right but i hope kids aren't listening to this show are we pg-13 i think we're pj listen we're talking nutrition that's all uh says hey neil hey chuck my question is about the elasticity of these of of expansion of space base is expanding in all directions and everything is moving away from everything else why isn't the space within our own solar system expanding why doesn't the expansion of space destabilize orbits why doesn't the expansion stretch the space currently occupied by the earth and in turn stretch us this person's clearly lost some sleep if you've got ten questions that just just vomit out out of one idea his question was like a little russian nesting doll yes that's right so excellent question so here's what's going on the stretching of the fabric of space and time from the expansion of the universe okay um is at all times competing against gravity that would prevent it okay on the largest scale it is winning on the smallest scales it's not the sun has a good grip on the planets and the urge for space to stretch within the confines of the solar system is not higher than the success of the sun keeping everybody in orbit however in the dark energy future scenario of the universe where the universe will continue to expand and accelerate in its expansion the expansion will become more and more significant in places where it didn't previously have a stronghold and yes eventually that extreme future universe where you have exponential expansion will start ripping apart solar systems yes the sun will no longer be able to hold on to it against the stretching of space between the sun and the earth and the rest of the planets then it'll start now the electromagnetic forces are stronger than gravitational forces so what's holding earth together is stronger than the sun's gravity on the earth so the earth will struggle and hold on until it will break apart and this will continue until there's some of us worried about the big rip and this will take place when it tries to stretch the very quantum realm that is the tiniest representation of the fabric of space and time there is because that we don't think is stretchable at all and if you get into that realm you have overcome even the quantum realm and we think space will just rip and we don't know what that'll look like and it's kind of scary and in fact star talk has another book coming out do you know this in the spring yeah okay spring 2021 it's you know what that book is called it's called i shouldn't be announcing yet because i don't think it's on shelves yet because they're still in production so don't don't look for it yet okay but it's called cosmic queries nice and in there is the whole discussion about the expansion of the universe and how it could in one scenario could end up in the big rip in which case all of the nesting doll scenarios described by um what's the person's name again uh nissan uh will will be realized and that'll be the end of the universe as we know it there you go have a nice day yes have a great day a big rip he who smelt it dealt it there you go so we got time for one more question chuck well that means we got to go to our last video question from joel jericho joe gets three questions yes sir he does dude he must be giving us a lot of money oh my god yes sir he is okay okay all right no we're not that crass but we just we like to joke about it but no we're very loving okay what so what does it get here it is so there are some scientists in history who were also interested in art as part of their process like albert einstein had his violin right next to his desk where he would do his math problems and when he'd get stuck on a math problem he would take a break and play the violin um so as a scientist are there any parts of your process that involve doing anything artistic anything non that's that's not just doing science um that helps you with your own scientific problems or ideas excellent questions so let me uh well this i don't know if we have time for me to give the full answer that that question deserves let me let me go quick and briefly so the art science relationship is not an equal two-way street okay there are discoveries in science that directly impact how the artist does art true okay from some from the uh everything to everything well yeah yeah so computer visualization in movies is all the science and engineering that went into the computer that the visual the visualizers are using all of whom are artists to to do their craft the the all the stuff that's happening on tablets now all of the when when neon was discovered or invented as a means of lighting in colors artists picked up on it immediately and started doing sculptures with neon bulbs right and so so the progress of science and engineering directly affects art the question is does art directly affect science i think the actual answer to that is no there is no scientific discovery where the person says this is where a g chord on my guitar came in there's no that's not there is no such infusion that being said the value of art to the scientist i don't think is any different from the value of art to anybody who knows the value of art it is a place for you to stimulate parts of your brain that are wired differently from all the other ways your brain is wired right and that could possibly stimulate new synaptic possibilities in what your next thought will be my entire phd thesis was written to the music of the nine symphonies of beethoven and all of the string quartets okay so i i me and ludwig go way back on this okay so so in that case i'm not writing and then looking at art i'm writing and listening to uh artistic creativity in the regime of classical music so science has a direct impact whereas art may have a direct inspiration uh inspirational impact correct it's not as though einstein played the violin and said oh there's a note i'm going to put that note in there that's not really what that is i see einstein and the violin not so much as an escape from his work not so much as something that will directly plug into his work but as a respite right from his work and if you have a brief respite it lets the brain breathe breathe i like that yeah metaphorically breathe so that new source or maybe literally breathe new oxygen comes in to feed new thoughts so i've always been a fan of art my brother is an artist um and uh so my whole life and he went to the high school of music and art uh just as a we both native new yorkers i went to the bronx high school of science so we both sort of were fed by these institutions in new york that knew and understand such people walk around who could benefit from this kind of stimulation so so yes i i gotta go with joel that it can help inspire you not directly it takes it shows your brain a different palette on which to think before you return to what you were doing before cool yeah i like that answer i don't know okay well i'm glad yeah thank you joel for your three daily doubles and your money your chuck stop being so crass and maybe he'll get the basalt out of this now some people don't know what basalt is basalt is just like hardened lava lava fields right and so the darkened areas of the moon are basalt we went over that in one of the um explainer videos explainers we talked about making craters but anyway this definitely evokes um the the the universe and moons without actually being a representation of a moon and that's why i like art to be don't be the moon be something that the moon evokes that makes you feel the moon nice i just want to handle no you're just trying to get it okay and like i've said in the van gogh's starry night that's clearly not what he saw but it's definitely what he felt while he was watching that night sky and i want to i want a piece of what artists feel because i want to feel and see the way they do nice i myself am not the artist so i need their help we got to wrap it up there chuck always a pleasure always good to have you man okay this has been star talk cosmic queries fan appreciation edition and as always i bid you for the whole star talk family to keep looking up you

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 473,702

Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, chuck nice, patreon, arecibo observatory, 500 meter aperture spherical telescope, spiral galaxies, density waves, artificial intelligence, black holes, expansion of the universe explained

Id: PXpwly3evDM

Length: 52min 22sec (3142 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020