StarTalk Podcast: Cosmic Queries – Get Some Space, with Neil deGrasse Tyson

this is Startalk I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson your personal astrophysicist and for this edition of Startalk it will be cosmic queries I think it's a grab-bag edition but I got a check with my co-host Chuck nice Chuck yes what's up Neil and you are stressed so there are the first query has been answered first query is what are the queries about that so what happens is we solicit normally we solicit topics but other is sort of dribble in and they they sort of collect we're housekeeping really but getting tending to the questions that are completely random coming from every direction of every compass direction of the universe what just good to because people get very upset when their questions go and when their questions go unanswered but they don't realize that when we're soliciting new questions it's because it's a different topic like you said it's a different thing yeah it's not like we can just continue so yeah you're right this is a great way to do some housekeeping them make some people happy in so let's do this let's do this all right before we begin so what does a comedian do in the shutdown Korona verse do the the clubs are closed right so they just tell jokes to your wife and your kids they don't want to hear any of my deadly what my kids don't even want I'll never the worst day was when I walked in and my wife was like oh good you're home let's watch and there was something I had done some TV shows that she had taped and she didn't watch it just so that she could watch it with me it was like the first episode of something I was on and both my children I have three but two of them were sitting and they both like without Q way when do we have two Danny's on TV he's right here yeah yeah no I mean I'm actually just doing the only thing that's available which is remote voice work so okay yes you got a good voice for it yeah so I um I can't say which but I've booked several commercials I can't say which ones yet because you're not allowed to say what commercial you're on until it actually airs and they won't be this is just a start or audience we won't tell him yeah that's okay just which way between you and me no worried about nation da you scientist so yeah so just look for my voice on a couple things you know that if you I have commercials written to the point where they have NDA's know what the hell you're just advertised yes yeah it's it's really strange how secretive and like how just overbearing you might say but then that when I think about it you're talking about if you look at the industry as a whole billions bill dollars so basically it's because they don't want whatever the client is doesn't want their competitor to know what it is that they're doing you know that's understand yes alright let's just write into this of course gave to me patreon is first always with patreon so oh boy we calling this potpourri or galactic gumbo I like gumbo you know with the Dumbo let him know you know see know down in do know the left don't mean we missile Dumbo all right yeah local at the gumbo I love it so let's start with a patreon patron this is Abdul Aziz bin or a job and he says hey quick question what form or thing can sustain itself and not be destroyed by a black hole or what thing can sustain itself the most and to which degree would it be able to hold itself together when they're entering a black hole so is there anything that can withstand the oh your term I'm about to use is there anything that isn't spaghettified when it goes into a black hole No ooh next question oh so what happens it's a very simple calculation normally when we think of materials so you know we have eggs that will break or steel that strong or rubber that's flexible so we have these sort of macroscopic descriptors for these things in our lives when you analyze it at a molecular level because that's all the black hole is going to care about and then the atomic level as you fall towards the black hole what gets you is that what I call the tidal forces these are the forces that will stretch you head to toe as you fall it are you sure you want to go the old rhyme I pen 30 years ago but anything so so what's happening is the party that's closer to the black hole singularity feels a stronger gravity than the part of you that's farther so in a feet-first dye if your feet will start falling towards the black hole that towards the singularity faster than your head will that's not a good situation to be in you initially feels like a stretch you know who doesn't like a good stretch but then you realize that it is unrelenting and growing and it reaches a point where the tidal forces exceed the molecular bonds that hold your flesh together then you snap in two pieces your upper half and your lower half of your body and then but you might say well how about a brick of steel yeah steel is held together more strongly than your body is but there's still a breaking point for the atoms of steel and for the molecules that make up the steel sector the carbon the iron and all that comprise the alloy that is the steel they're connected by some force and you can calculate what that force is and there's a distance from the center of the black hole where the tidal forces will be so great it'll rip apart the molecules and the atoms of your solid block of steel yes that will happen closer in then what would rip you apart yes but it'll still just still going to happen it's still gonna have not only that it'll rip the atoms themselves apart and then nuclei I'm saying that's insane oh man that's serious that's that's that's evil yeah evil the evil forces so therefore this is where gravity wins over atoms nice so now let me just take up duels question and for my own edification go a little further so when you're looking at the creation of a supermassive black hole when you get down to the place where it's the star that's dying is producing iron and now there's nothing that can happen after that so it's like okay I'm gonna collapse in on myself right so now okay so now you're the iron is already there up what happens as these things or whatever it is whatever matter it maybe falls towards this singularity when it gets there is it is it is it infinitely compressed does it have like a core does it what is happening at that point since you have these streams of particles that are now just they're not even particle they are just four six you say where do they land that's what I'm trying to figure out so so the only way to find out truck is if we send to you if you report back okay it's the fourth back so here's here's the problem Einstein's general theory of relativity which gives us the large-scale structure of the universe and a Big Bang and and black holes and the like shows us that at the center of the black hole the gravitational force exceeds everything molecular and atomic and in fact the compresses matter to a point of infinitely small size which means it has infinite density right now that's just crazy that is so it may be I mean actually crazy evil when I'm trying to think of this but it can't yet maybe that doesn't happen Oh what I'm telling you is Einstein's general theory of relativity predicts that so that could be the edge of where Einstein relativity applies accurately to the universe maybe before it hits the singularity some other law of physics needs to be invoked to extend our understanding of the universe beyond where Einstein then leaves us off okay I'm a Newton left us off Newton's forces operated under relatively low gravity and low speeds and it failed at high gravity in high speeds we needed Einstein to go into the into the dark closet of the unknown but now we know in advance that general relativity has these limits and so enter string theorists they come in and talk about the singularity they've got a whole mathematical formalism to think about the singularity and so it so either it really is infinitely small and if it we dance or there's another branch of physics that still needs work string theory still needs work to give us an understanding of that particular regime in the cosmos so yeah I can't so the answer the the answer that question is I don't have an answer right well clearly no one does what we do know what we do know you didn't ask this but I will tell you what we do know is that the we used to think or hope that if you went into a black hole it's a portal to another place perhaps perhaps another dimension another universe itself the problem is it turns out the information that entered the black hole will ultimately come back out of that same black hole through Hawking radiation the black hole basically evaporate given enough time it'll lose its mass through particles and the inventory of those particles that came out equals the inventory of particles that went in which tells us that you can't take stuff put it through a black hole and have it show up somewhere else wow that may still remain sense it still remains in this universe it's a remarkable discovery modern quantum physics and black holes that's incredible yes that isn't correct yeah so the evaporation of black hole through Hawking radiation kinda lets you know that it's not going anywhere exact chuckling it's actually coming back out coming back coming back out what kind of bucket I said just so people in case you didn't know what Hawking radiation is you remember the equals mc-squared you'd learn this in elementary school there's the equivalence of energy and mass e equals M energy and mass and C squared is a as a constant there's a speed of light but there's actually not important about what I'm about to describe so you can convert energy into mass and mass into energy they're interchangeable so it turns out in the vicinity of a black hole the energy density of the gravitational field is so high that the energy will spontaneously create particle pairs and it creates a matter and antimatter particle 1 particle falls back into the black hole the other escapes and that's the narration and you take the inventory of those particles and it is exactly what fell in and guess we get a find in the first place that's amazing yeah oh my god don't wait a minute so it just dawned on me then so what you just described though the information you called it information that means that there's a change of information then so wait just to be clear what's for me mind-blowing is matter enters the black hole right that's what I'm saying yeah and then the black hole has gravity because of that matter and the gravitational field when it generates new particles makes remembers remembers the matter inventory of what fell into the black hole in the first place oh my god yes that's amazing there is some communication in the system where the entire system remembers what matter it had eaten it has to because otherwise it wouldn't be able to create the same portfolio right to to to put it off to send it out and desperate so this for me that was the most amazing fact about that discovery oh my god and and it's it's upsetting to science fiction folks because you want to go into black hole and come out somewhere else so now we need some other way to go to leave the universe okay mm-hmm amen great question uh other tool all right much all right let's see guys okay here we go let's let's do is that only one question we're almost out of time for this first row all right it's just good start go all right here we go this is a giannis theosis okay that said your name wrong man sorry gianna still you know what I'm talking about from Facebook he says what will be more groundbreaking as a discovery and why understanding dark matter or discovering life outside of our solar system or even for it you know okay so the Dark Matter question would be amazing it's the longest unsolved problem longest standing unsolved problem in astrophysics it's good we're going on 90 years not knowing what dark matter is today okay so yeah yeah so if we learn what it is that would be a great day in astrophysics however if it's simply another kind of particle that doesn't interact with our own and it's out there with that we're hypothesizing anyway that's not as interesting as if dark matter were the gravitational effect of a parallel universe influence it whatever it is I'd want it to have far reaching implications for me to get excited about it okay is it if we know dark matter to then we know dark energy and is there another thing do we now can we unpack black holes because we know is there some other thing that it comes with is it some package deal with other unsolved problems that get solved with it if not I'm going with the discovery of life elsewhere on and another on an exoplanet because that for two reasons if it's made of DNA either we're shared DNA and life got around in the early formations of solar systems or DNA is an inevitable consequence of complex organic chemistry right so that wherever you find life it would then be DNA based now think about it is that so much of a stretch if you go to Mars you find rocks that are familiar right if you go if you go to Europa you find ice that you have seen before so geology and chemistry seem to repeat you see volcanoes geela on Io one of Jupiter's moons so why would biology have to be sort of unique to one place and not be a highly repeatable phenomenon that's a fair question to ask but what I can tell you that so it would be interesting if it was based on DNA for both of those reasons it would be even more interesting if it had nothing to do with DNA yet it still was life self-replicating thriving that that would be like oh we got to open up our definition and understand and our understanding of what life is and then then the biologists who you know they celebrate the diversity of life but behind closed doors but they got to be honest with themselves you know what they say you know what that honesty is oh look at the diversity of my plants and animals and fungi in behind closed doors it's all it's it's pretty much the same as its routine it's it's it's it's wayna it's not in special baby all life has one common all right so what you want is another genesis and then you can compare and contrast well life requires this but doesn't require that well you know we used to think life required a 72 degree tide pool you know just no no you have extremophiles doing the backstroke in acid under radiation conditions so every every new thing we learn about life on Earth tells us how Hardy life is and how resilient it is to stress to a system even if an organism dies life in general seems to thrive and so if we find life thriving under conditions on dreamt of with a chemistry unimaginative signing up another particle to add to the particles ooh that we then credit for being dark matter the particles though I think I'm gonna take my kids there Chuck got to take a quick break when we come back more cosmic queries galactic no you say no home glad Nick gumbo okay you know me mouse and I'll guarantee when we return your back Startalk cosmic queries grab-bag edition but Chuck calls it something else yeah gumballs got a lot of different ingredients in that's why we're saying yeah Gumbo's got what you got man you got everything that crap you got so hold on you got cross and do we salty do it and you're also right that's right yeah I think I told you this I don't know if we talked about it on the air or privately but Yvonne Gagne gosh-darn man gotta get you some of Yvonne Gagne gumbo that she's a friend of the family from New Orleans who used to make gumbo that would so so where is it so I'm waiting for talk about it you do something you have never mentioned it on or off the air because I haven't had it yet here we go let's go to rearm somebody who says are we done with the patreon questions no this is also sorry from patriarchy still Pedro they have people that pay their way to the top of the list they do the American Way as we call it your Senate like okay here we go Rhian wants to know this he's very poetic so I'm just gonna read all this everything here because he's very poor they killed he says the sky calls to us if we do not destroy ourselves will we one day venture to the stars it was Carl Sagan's lifetime mission to encourage humanity to explore the universe and you Neil are calling for the same goal and carrying the message to a new generation given the recent promising spaceflight developments of SpaceX do you think that during our lifetime we will finally see humans colonizing other planets or at least finding a glimpse of intelligent life on other world that's beautiful yeah yeah this is a guy this is a guy who spends a lot of time reading your stuff clearly okay so the answer's no I'm just being mean oh that was a hot knife and twisted Wow he's okay so eloquently asked this very like just super optimistic question and are you serious do you really think no yeah yeah you said our lifetime no but can I tell you why I need to pull that out of my ass I have reasons for this thinking this okay it's think about it what other planet in our own solar system comes closest to anyone possibly living on it which which plan it's none what Mars used to be March March March okay now because Mars like has polar icecaps it's has seasons it's it's near us in the habitable zone it once had liquid running water doesn't today may be underwater underground in a permafrost frozen so okay Mars you ain't going to Venus is 900 degrees Fahrenheit 500 degrees Celsius yeah it's hotter than a pizza oven you ain't go into Venus you're not going to mercury it's almost as hot okay some Mars do you realize that Antarctica is wetter and ball near than every location on Mars yeah I don't see people lining up to buy condos in Antarctica that's colonized that's cuz Superman's a lousy neighbor he's an excuse me he's in the North Pole now oh is he okay yeah yeah I think I'm pretty sure it's the North Pole but they're they showed land but there's no land in the North Pole so they got that wrong that's okay but Santa is on an ice floe that's right but whatever whatever's left of it okay Santa's in a bathing suit right now sipping sipping pina coladas with a polar bear wearing sunglasses you know what if we're laughing but it's so sad but go ahead be excused for Santa to get get buffs right if he's other than a bathing suit on an ice floe sipping a drink would give Santa with ABS that'd be interesting but so we don't see that happening so the urge to live on Mars would be novel initially I think but to say I want to live here forever I don't see that happening as an urge you'll want to get back to your vacation there briefly but you want to get back to earth and so I'm suspecting so for me what you'd have to do is terraform the planets first then their earth-like and they can go there and pitch tent and you're you get off the the spaceship and you don't suffocate step when Columbus arrived in the New World as the as one of the first Europeans I guess after the Vikings when he stepped off his ship he could breathe the air he met other people here who greeted him he could eat the fruit on the vines he could repair his ship why because the trees in the new world were made of wood just like the trees in Europe so when people speak of the next generation of space exploration analogizing to that era of explorers you're missing the point about dying when you step off the ship so it is supremely hostile to human physiology that's all I'm saying and and plus if we do go to another planet and find civilizations I'd like to think we've learned something about how to interact with people who are there to greet you so lessons from the Columbus chapter of colonization is if you do find all the life-forms how what's the playbook for how we're going to interact with those life-forms be they what we designate as intelligent or not by the way NASA hasn't higher branch of itself called planetary protection which is if you're going to visit a place that might have life then set a probe there you have to sterilize the probe completely so that if you sneezed on it before it was launched you don't get Rhino virus on on the on the planet that you're gonna be expects or in for life itself and for any samples that get returned to Earth they have to be quarantined to make sure that nothing then contaminates earth cool so it's my longer answer but the answer is still no Wow I'm and yeah look it's the visit yeah but not to call I don't see colonization yeah it makes any time soon it makes sense sorry I'm sorry buddy yeah okay sorry buddy there we go this is Brett Marshall from Facebook and I just have to read this because I you know it's I don't know why it goes hey I'm still here and I'm still too stupid to come up with a good question but okay but I listen to every show hey still here still too stupid to come up with a good question listen to every show please remember to might be but he's on Facebook he's so appreciate the sentiment but by the way it's I don't judge whether questions good or not in the end is my answer good that you should be judging my answer not whether you think your question is good right don't ask anything that any ask anything you feel that's what matters here okay all right here we go this is dawuan only the one only from instagram hello dr. Tyson how far do you think our advancements in science would be if the United States budget used for the military was actually used towards science and technology okay so the budget I haven't looked at the very latest budget but last time I looked the budget for the National Science Foundation was about 30 billion dollars gnats NASA's budgets about 20 billion so you put them together you get about fifty billion there are other ways we spend money on science for example the National Institutes of Health does medical research this sort of thing so if you add up all the portfolio's in all disciplines of science research in America you get up maybe 70 billion maybe a hundred billion dollars okay yeah that's a lot of money the military spends 600 billion every year Oh on the military no a lot of that is standing armies literally a matter to me that yeah it's like you know pay-or-play it's like what if oh you want to fight a war that's on top right it's that right you know I don't know you want to find a war we need more money for that okay so so it's not always true that throwing money at something at that high rate leads to a discovery sometimes you have to move through a place where new ideas percolate germinate and maybe those new ideas come from the from the wrong result it could be a long result says wait a minute no we would do minute wrong the whole time it's really this and you couldn't have had that thought unless you landed in a place where you had done it wrong in the first place some of this takes time so I I would say the way to think about this is that peer review of research grants and so I write a grant I said I want to do this research and I can take me this long it'll take me this much money I want to hire this many people I want to do it in this location and they approve okay so here's what happens depending on how much money there isn't how many people are playing you get to grant 10% of applications uh-huh sometimes 50 well how about the other 85% well you can say well these are just not worth funding but these others were on the border and they should be funded but we can't fund everything you want money for those okay that would I think double the what we're currently spending so I would say if you want as healthy a science budget as you have given the number of scientist in the country if you doubled all the science budgets that would get is pretty far pretty quickly now how advanced would we be again it's a matter of time okay if civilization didn't spend so much time in the Dark Ages or rejecting what science could have been if scientists weren't sorcerers or people who had some knowledge of the natural world if we'd work crediting the oceans to Zeus sort of the wrath of God or to other supernatural forces and we sit in a way to it maybe they're natural forces had that begun earlier it's possible we might have been on the moon in the nineteenth century rather than in the 20th century but again it takes developments right you have to figure out oh we need this new material waiting that we have to dig for it well where we gonna dig is the geology up to match through with that and we have to understand the human physiology it's medicine at that place so it's very complicated in a in a good way it's complicated I mean you want you want a lot of different things happening but you also need bridges and tunnels connecting these discoveries so that the next innovation can exploit what had come before in any discipline that it needs to make that happen so I would say to punch science along at the rate it should you'd have to double all budgets and otherwise yeah we've probably lost a few centuries in the history of civilization because of people standing in denial the role of natural forces relative to supernatural yeah and we're headed back there so yeah the way to go way to go world way to go [Laughter] what's that I tweeted recently I said every disaster movie begins but people ignoring the warnings were science that's right okay this is em Jonesy 19 from Instagram he says can you please explain the horizon problem it would seem that no matter where you are you are in the center of the universe which means all locations are the center of the universe that really bets another question is there a center the universe and how many licks does it take to get to the center of that universe if you're over 60 you'll remember that TV commercial for the Tootsie Pop now they brought that back how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop or something like that yeah yeah it depends on how slobbery you are yeah I knew that was a kid when I first I was nine I said it depends on how wet your tongue is you can what are you even doing here you know so I Mudd was it's because you'll bite it before you look all the way that was the UH that's didn't get us the catch yeah yeah because you get the guy so good I can't wait to lick all the way down right what is the horizon problem yeah well there are other brothers the buddies sighting is not entirely the horizon problem so but let me just explain horizons right when you're a ship at sea and if you just look around the distance from you to the last bit of water that you can detect is the same in every direction and that distance is farther the higher up you are in the ship so the quote crow's nest the highest point auto ship is where the lookout person stood to see to look for icebergs to look for land they would be the first to see this because they have the farthest view over the curvature of the earth land ho right yeah exactly it's that person who's cited it not someone looking over the railing so so so it's clear and understandable that if you're at sea the horizon is the same distance to you in each direction okay now another ship also in the middle of the ocean has the same they see their owner everybody is the middle of their own horizon ocean and what we don't know in our own universe is whether is there points you can stand where your horizon doesn't go the same distance out does it end and in principle yes in principle but what I can tell you is that every direction look when we look 14 billion light-years distant we see the origin of the universe just now reaching us so that means everybody at that distance okay at that time distance away from us is experiencing the beginning of the universe if in this direction they were not and I saw a regular galaxy there and in this direction I see them being born whoa that would mean I'm a land ho okay would mean this direction is different from this direction mmm and if you're out at sea if there's land that way but see in every other direction water in every other direction something different just happened and so that becomes a more intriguing part of the universe we all be focused that way if that were in fact the case now the horizon problem as stated just the horizon from means something different from what he asked and it has to do with if this horizon is very different from that horizon or there's several manifestations of this but one of them is how can that part of the universe be at exactly the same temperature as this part of the universe how would it know to be the same temperature unless the whole universe was somehow connected to itself in a very small place all right and it had to be really connected because the difference in temperature in every direction is like a hundredth of a degree Kelvin Wow you you don't have that consistency of temperature from one side of your room to the other much less one side of the universe to the other and so this is part of what we think of as the horizon problem and that's where we got to inflationary cosmology so these are the details that's in that what I call it in the in the weeds of the Big Bang when they saw the Big Bang is having problems know there's just challenges within the weeds but the broader picture that we began as an explosion 14 billion years ago that's intact it's like what's going on in the weeds that we have to try to understand enter say wow all right well cool cool we've got it in there we've got one more segment left all right cosmic queries and Pokiri cosmic queries grab-bag cosmic queries they'll add big Dumbo no when we return we're back Startalk cosmic queries grab back position for us Chuck says lat be Dumbo not Hall that [ __ ] I think we have more questions ask them there are ingredients in gumbo no we do that and all not a lot of question they get go get doing work boom boom get to the question guarantee mr. um this is P an wonders who wants to know this with earth gathering mass from space material all the time when will the mass increase to have an effect on Earth's orbit and what would that effect be yeah that's a great question so earth plows through in our orbit earth plows through several hundred tons of meteor dust a day hundreds of tons okay so write down that number several hundred tons in a day times 365 days times four billion years and figure out how much mass that is and then compare that to the actual mass of the earth that's like a net flying full speed ahead into an elephant and the elephant said I quit the shovel yeah that's not gonna happen it is it is it is uninterestingly small relative to the total mass of the earth so no not not to worry so nothing to worry about there negligible last days just sleep sleep sleep sleep well tonight yes Ian wanders oh by the way there's something else happening the Sun is slowly losing mass through solar wind you've heard of our solar wind these are particles have you wish your concern about the sun's mass well the Sun is actually get a lighter and as it gets lighter the speed with which we are in our orbit is too fast to maintain that orbit and it goes to a higher orbit okay so in fact the fact that the Sun is losing mass is making Earth's spot slowly spiral away from them and the Sun will lose mass at an ever-faster rate as the billions of years unfold and we'll end up there all the planets will end up warbling farther and farther away last one of the fates fates of the solar system the solar system is a cruel cruel mistress it's it's yes yeah it's crazy crazy all right here we go bugger dude from Instagram bugger dude says this how the astronomers find out that the edge of the observable universe is 43 billion light-years away okay so let's let's resolve this so most of us we astrophysicists when we think of the edge of the universe we say it's 14 billion light years away that's not really true okay the part of the universe we can see the light that was sent by that has been traveling for 14 billion years but that thing that emitted the light that's not 14 billion light years away right now it has been part of the expanding universe and is now 40 low 40 43 45 billion light years away in that direction and 45 billion light years away in that direction so want to speak of the diameter of the universe you're talking 90 billion light years you just don't observe that and so so much of my field tries to anchor itself in what you can see rather than what you calculate to be true so yes we can calculate how far away that galaxy is that we're watching right now being born 14 billion years ago in the Big Bang where is it today it's a full-grown galaxy it's a it's fully grateful red-blooded gal and there it is or green-blooded if it's got copper for its DEMA globin and there it is 45 billion light-years away and you don't see it there so that's how that was so if you have to calculate based on the known expansion rate of the universe where that is today right so basically the cosmos is an annoying grandmother that pulled out an album of baby pictures [Laughter] yeah I guess a little bit and who pulls out albums of anything yeah Chuck how old are you oh I still know I still keep I print out my photos a night and I put the pants to my question how old were you well it's the same as scrapbooking as far as I'm concerned it's like you know because you know why ladies and gentlemen Chuck is 75 years old just a black black don't crack so he looks good you know what and your rheumatism is acting it's gonna rain well it's gonna rain tomorrow no okay so here we go this is a Scott and his last name yeah that's the car okay Patrick are all right like I picture that what you have to think about that Chuck you're not just you have to read it and think about it and then say it yeah because I mean you know okay okay I mean ah Scott I didn't have to think about you know okay that looks pretty cool but other than that oh it's a crock I bet you okay anyway hello dr. Tyson and hey please pronounce my name I shot okay yeah I shot his you know where I shot thank you my friend he gave me there you go he says my question is that about 400 years ago Sir Isaac Newton hey Neal I know that's your man discovered the laws of motion and gravity he also discovered calculus and had already discovered the laws of optics how was he so focused and deeply indulged in his work during the plague which was a pandemic during that time how was he able to manage his mental health and how can we manage our own mental health and have a spark of our own creativity and imagination during time of peak anxiety and a shot is coming to us from India love who thank you our shot so first I don't claim any mental health expertise but I do know a little bit about Isaac Newton and I know a little bit about others who have made singular contributions to our understandings of the natural world and one of the things they all had in common was that they had episodes in their life either forced upon thrust upon them by Isaac Newton escaping the Black Plague in London and in Cambridge he was a professor at Cambridge or at least in school at Cambridge or whether or or if you have an injury that sort of lays you up for a period of time all these people have long periods of time where they were in solitude solitude and so the brain just explored on its own today other than families that have many young kids running up and down so there is no solitude and everyone is is quarantined together there are others who just can't go to work and you live alone you can't go to the bar or the club so what are you doing are you sitting alone on the couch thinking or are you binging on the latest Netflix series so we live in a time where many people's creative juices that might have otherwise flowed are arrested because they have distractions in their life evening television on-demand television streaming services so I lament I wonder what discoveries remain unrevealed sit by brilliant people today simply because of the distractions we have built into our own lives and the distractions are fun they're not chores there we enjoy them all right but and sitting alone by yourself staring to the ceiling no one would call that enjoyment but that's exactly the conditions under which Isaac Newton plated the cosmos and dark contemplated the cosmos his long walks alone in the woods no there wasn't a TV screen there wasn't advertising there wasn't I got to get back and watch you know Westworld no none of that was going on in their lives so if you ever had a chance of making such a discovery about the natural world it's not good I don't think it's gonna happen while you are distracting yourself with modern media or they hang out on Facebook or anything else on the Internet it's just not unless something there gives you an idea you could be a fertile person you know it's an idea that's an idea but then you step away and develop the idea how about that okay so for me that's what's behind that and one of my great disappointments in the corona verse the corona verse quarantine is I'm not giving myself enough solo time because I'm catching up on email and I'm doing and I you know I'm cooking and I'm perfecting some recipes both my wife and I we both like food so that we're doing that there's some other things was not call light let me just be alone and think and write so I'm failing on that myself but and plus not everyone is Isaac Newton you know so yeah that's an understatement [Laughter] yeah oh by the way Isaac Newton all evidence suggests that he was I don't call it quite a misanthrope but he did not really enjoy the company of other people he never married he never had kids so if you don't enjoy the company of other people then being sent to the country home in Lincolnshire away from other people that's a godsend to you right yeah and so yeah there you have it yeah I forget I don't know I forget who said this but gosh she's there's a writer and she said the greatest impediment to creativity is distraction oh yeah sure definitely yeah bye and basically write a lot of what you just said and another there's another saying which is if you want to be more creative then become less productive right yeah that see now that's where I'm a Viking well yeah because what when you say oh I went shopping I did this I'm ever and look how much that God did get done today well did you create anything chances are the answer is no yeah well you don't you don't give your mind a chance to do that say yeah yeah cool alright so here we go this is Alfredo Baldo cassiano who says short off now in the mood yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah he says dear friends I have a black hole question if a black hole is a point of infinite infinite density that means it can bend the space-time so much that a particle falling inside can accelerate so much that it can reach the speed of light now he put a question mark at the end he wrote it as a statement but he's asking it as a question so if a particle falls into a black hole it is the gravity so strong since light can't escape will it cause the particles coming in to reach the speed of light going in they'll come close depending on how far away they they emanate but but no no no the answer is no so so you can calculate it so the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light it means if they just put it right at the speed of light just for this example if you went the speed of light you can escape the black hole it'll keep tugging on you slowing you down but you'll reach infinity and have zero speed there it's weird to speak on these terms if you had more than the escape velocity you'll reach infinity and still be going okay if you have less than the escape velocity it just pulls you back so it depends on what distance you fall into the black hole from and and you'll and you can calculate what your speed is and it's not in most cases it's not anywhere near the speed of light for that it's not two so the answer is basically nope no yeah all right come on a lot of material spirals into the black hole really this it doesn't just yeah because as you see these disks of matter are that the 'true cooler we should disk very good very good I got a chrétien disc of my own right here that's what the you and your wife for cooking see that's the results good accretion discs cooking there's another cookbook right maximizing the accretion disk so yes so in fact most Mammoth Falls is black hole is spiraling and it's not just falling straight in very cool this is [Music] FLV lq i don't know what that I don't know what that is from Instagram he says it looks like a random pips on a keyboard it really does and lvo cute he says while I was listening to the podcast I heard about nuclei getting spaghettified if the nuclei get spaghettified aha here we go what about the Clarks I have an answer for that I don't know yeah I have two if I read guess I would say it also spaghettify as the quarks Wow because it's pretty bad down there it really is and tastes nasty it is I mean you are literally tearing an atom apart whoa wait so so you tear the atom apart by ripping off the electrons that's nothing that's right right well then yeah go ahead electrons are easy yes but then the nucleus which is very tightly packed that gets spaghettified and they're asking now that you spaghettified the nucleus now you have the nuclear particles right protons neutrons and they that are polarizing quarks right hence I think the answer is yes but we got it well pulling Janna on our next episode to see what she says but my mic I think my answer is yes nothing nothing survives a black hole Wow damn that's really just disturbing you know you know be fun that's a good poem that needs to be written ready everything flowing in to a black hole gets spaghettified except spaghetti I already know one thing should have oh that's how that's all I'm saying that's a lot of power okay this is what else you get Teague Griffin Teague weeping people are making up stuff now man Chuck this have to be the last question could spend too much time with jury a ting on these answers yeah it's okay and we've got Equis pen from Instagram says this what are your thoughts on the simulation theory how likely is it that it exists now yeah so okay I'm happy to end on that because my thinking on that changed in recent weeks and Chuck did we do it yes we think that's wise that go ahead and do it so yeah yeah yeah so all right so I now think where there's a better chance that were not in a simulation than I had previously imagined okay good now let's stop there and now go find that explainer so we can get more views on YouTube and I'm gonna say and Michael Bruce wants to know this how can we yeah that's right now go find it go find that it's later on YouTube and we're gonna get our eyes we're gonna get more views now so Michael Bruce wants to know this how can a while you're there subscribe yeah make sure you subscribe so Michael Bruce wants to know this how could we prevent a mass extinction event when the world governments believe more in listening to who pays them / scientific fact so a better question I mean not a better question a different question is how we elevate science to a place of respect when it comes to our leaders in government you know I wish I didn't have to say this but maybe science needs better advertising you know you know politicians can get you to like them just by a series of ads maybe we need that for science this there's science in your life that you don't even know is in your life that's keeping you alive and breathing most people who are alive today are alive because of some scientific advance in food production and prenatal care and of the health and sanitation just I don't think people it's easy to take something that's so embedded within your life for granted so once you do that then people will then see and understand what science is how it works and then they'll respect it and and then we won't go extinct from short-sighted politicians I hate to say that because science shouldn't need advertising right but maybe we teach people you know maybe if you teach them to constantly see and embrace it then you don't need the ads teach them that in school and so every day hey that's science hey that's science hey what if you do that then you it's built in to the system so by the way when we were going to the moon every day you were reminded what science was because we were going to the moon you didn't need room you didn't need someone say oh we need more science teachers how do we attract them they people would climb it over themselves to study science it's a technology and engineering and math because they saw the fruits of that in that era so yeah I don't have a good answer the extinction may be in our future for that very reason I'm science and I approve this message on that happy note we gotta call it quits there are electic galactic bold as that gumbo our potpourri this has been star talk cosmic queries Chuck but as always thanks for being my co top scorers Neil deGrasse Tyson here bidding you to keep looking up [Music]

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 935,297

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, black hole, tidal forces, general theory of relativity, string theory, hawking radiation, speed of light, DNA-based life, Antarctica, military budgets, Horizon problem, observable universe, Sir Isaac Newton

Id: 2J5Dkj-L8K8

Length: 55min 33sec (3333 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 02 2020