StarTalk Podcast: Cosmic Queries – Kitchen Sink Edition

this is star talk cosmic queries edition the ever popular cosmic queries and that means i got chuck nice right next to me virtually that is virtually yes you don't even know it uh the calls are coming from inside the house neil i'm here i'm here he's outside the back door he's there he's getting closer i'm here i saw that movie that i don't want that that to happen so so chuck you got some questions for us here again if you're unfamiliar we solicit questions from uh in this case our patreon members they get their questions asked uh one on one and you got him and i haven't seen him and if i don't know the answer i will tell you to go on to the next question that is not true so if you don't know that's not true if you don't know the answer you're going to tell me something i'ma tell you something whether or not it's the answer that's true you're going to tell me something but i'll value add to the question in whatever small way i promise you i like it all right okay let's um okay so uh all of our questions come from patreon now people so if you if someone says like what does space smell like and i say i don't know what do you smell like your ways of still addressing the question i like that neil degrasse tyson plays the dozens oh by the way all of our patreon questions are now just patreon questions so if you want to have all of our cosmic queries questions thank you did i say all of our patreon questions okay questions or patreon questions yes so by the way people all of our cosmic queries questions are drawn from patreon now we used to scour the internet and all of our incarnations to find out your burning questions but now we basically just go to one place and that's patreon so go to patreon sign up uh get the get the minimum thing for you know uh being a cosmic queries uh submission and we'll read your question also just remember that when you do that you're helping us put this show on okay so there you have it all right here's our first question this is uh wait chuck this is a grab bag right oh that's right it is a grab bag which means uh there is no themed to to there is no theme topic anything these people want to ask you they can ask you and we've been trying to find a name for this uh uh what i want galactic gumbo is one i like that that's my favorite too because now you know why i don't know of course you know why because now you know when you put it all together you had a little cayenne pepper there you go so i don't know maybe we'll call it kitchen sink who knows the kitchen sink all right give me some kitchens cosmic kitchen sink so here we go uh jensen smart wants to know this what is your favorite star and why apart from the sun yeah he knew i was that's what i was going to give him yeah so it would have to be beetlejuice betelgeuse if you want to pronounce it you know i've heard people say betel juice and i'm just like it's betelgeuse yeah it's it's actually arabic and maybe i'm not even pronouncing it right but it's definitely not beetlejuice okay that's okay i thought it okay i'ma shut up there but just make sure you don't say it three times no twice is okay so um betelgeuse is one of the two brightest stars of the constellation orion betelgeuse is orion's upper left armpit basically and i'm told that if you translate from the arabic is like armpit of the great one and so he variously draws you can call it a shoulder if armpit grosses you out but so orion is a hunter and he's standing there and he's defending himself against taurus the bull another constellation up there in the sky and that star is a red super giant and we tell it like we see it in astrophysics why do we call it a red supergiant i'm going to guess it's red because it's red b because it's big c because it's super big all right if you put betelgeuse where the sun is right now in our own solar system the earth would be orbiting inside its surface okay so we wouldn't big enough for you all right so and betelgeuse is a candidate for supernova uh as it ends its life it will end stupendously in a titanic explosion and this sucker will be visible in broad daylight yeah so it's just it's a star that's got a lot going on and i like stars that have a lot going on and this past couple of years mysteriously betelgeuse dimmed by two-thirds okay what's that about within months this is stars that live hundreds of thousands and in millions of years and it the high mass stars that blow up they don't live billions of years all right they only live hundreds of thousands and millions of years all right so if something happens within a short amount of time it's like whoa what's happening what's going on and i took photos of betelgeuse as part of the whole constellation and then i i looked at it and i almost lost my breath because i had never seen the constellation with the stars in that relative brightness my whole life betelgeuse is one of the brightest stars in the constellation then it had dimmed and became uninteresting and it's like oh my gosh the sky is changing and so it's i got a little spooked i i got to give it to you if you want if you're wondering just google betelgeuse and the all manner of articles about it dimming it's been slowly coming back point is we did not understand why it dimmed we don't have a model for why it should dim and people were worried that maybe it's ready to ready to blow right or or that there's somebody has a dimmer switch yes of course usually when there's something in the sky we don't understand they're the alien explainers that run to the front of the line i could explain it there are aliens that were building a dyson sphere to block the sunlight so that they can power their civilization this would be a sphere that prevents the light from emptying into space and collects all of the energy for their own exploitations so there's always a person who wants to tell you aliens did it when at that moment we don't yet understand it um but it's it's come back for most of its brightness and so i'm i'm sleeping well at nights now but over that time i was i was a little uncomfortable so now that's dimming which i'm uncomfortable with now is that was there anything transiting to cause the dimming or no nobody had any no no that's creepy no yeah it was completely creepy some mechanism was going on inside of it that we haven't modeled and we don't understand ah that's that's cool actually yeah it's actually pretty cool it's actually pretty cool by the way there are plenty of star by the way let me make this clear plenty of stars in the night sky are called variable stars all right and they're called variable stars because chuck uh their intensity raises and lowers yes it varies right okay right it varies thank you yeah that's like like i said that's how we roll so the uh the plenty of stars that do that and we call them variable stars betelgeuse was not among them okay so that's why oh man this is so interesting from one stupid question about what's your favorite star it's like what's your favorite color and you turned it into something interesting i'm just saying and you can look at old maps of the night sky from 500 years ago and earlier and look at the maps that they drew of the constellations and there's orion and betelgeuse is this juicy bright thing i mean how do you make something bright when you're drawing with a pencil so they put stuff around it just so that it shows up more visibly in the line drawing of the constellation so you look at those maps and it's like whoa so now this supernova uh visible by in broad daylight so i read somewhere that many people many people take it back the person that i was re was writing this thought it's possible that the star of the three wise men was indeed a supernova that because the star was visible all the time that's why they were able to follow it because it was always visible including daytime so is that possible that that's what it was so you talk about the star of bethlehem thank you the star of bethlehem because you know okay i'm so good at religion that the three wise men today we call them wise guys maybe hey how you doing don't be a wise guy hey jesus what's up what's the problem huh no room at the end okay yeah we'll tell you i louie will take care of it who told you you couldn't sleep there huh we got we know people we who i know people we know people jesus it's okay we got a manger for you down the street we'll make this happen we'll make good on this uh so the three wise guys uh so yeah so it's a lot written on the star of bethlehem could it have been a comet and so when you look back to when jesus was likely born based on all information available um and that was uh around 4 bc anywhere between sort of two and six bc so people split the difference around four bc jesus was not born in zero in year zero all right plus there was no year zero but that's a whole other we'll do an explainer on that um we went directly from 1bc to ad1 all right and there was no year zero but because when the calendar that was set up to do that the xero had not yet been invented oh matt thank you as i'm saying it's a whole we we'll make an explainer out of that one okay but here's the thing here's the thing so you can there are a lot of things that happened in the sky that were never associated with good events like comets all right so could it have been a comment no because everyone says comets are bad at the time uh and other sorts of phenomena so could it have been a supernova well supernovas leave behind sort of remnants of their existence um we have what are called supernova remnants and we comb the sky for this and there's no remnants plus there's nobody else talking about it in the sky at the time the chinese were keeping really good records of their night sky astrologers were convinced that whatever happened in the night sky was directly affecting events on earth and so you wanted to track such things no one has any other records of it so yeah we can't really reconcile it with astronomical uh phenomena interesting okay yeah but but but but why stop there most of what's in the bible is not reconcile reconcilable just call them all miracles and you're done right okay i mean yeah yeah that's so funny just call them all yeah maybe the star was only in the eyes of the three wise men you know i mean or whoever saw it but if you're a non-believer you didn't see it right there ways are out of that right all right so psychotropic drugs okay if you are going to believe that the creator of the universe impregnated a virgin giving birth to his son then you don't need to appeal to actual astronomical phenomenon as the star of bethlehem you know okay that kind of makes sense it's like it's not a stretch to just say this was in there they saw this and it's in their minds like a black storm trooper like how how can you have a problem seriously how are you gonna have a problem with a black storm trooper okay really so you can suspend disbelief in a galaxy far far away long long ago but when it comes to a black storm trooper that's too much too much i got you i got what you're saying i got what you say only the star wars fans are gonna get that one okay this is true all right let's move on uh wait we only did one question so far yeah we did five questions wrapped in one okay all right all right all right we got like only a couple minutes left in this segment all right a couple minutes this is perfect this is kyle marston and he writes it just like this how you know we only have eight planets and that's like you need like someone pressing against your chest right how do you know now you know okay all right here you go you ready go ahead i all right um we've sent spacecraft from earth to the moon mars and beyond spacecraft that spacecraft that have traveled through the asteroid belt and beyond let's get the order here again mercury venus earth mars the asteroid belt jupiter saturn uranus neptune okay that's eight get over it so how do we know there's only eight planets well within the world of these eight planets all gravity is accounted for so we know where all these objects are and you can run your equations that calculate the force of gravity tugging on your spacecraft okay so as they move among the planets and enter orbit around saturn and go out to pluto and wherever they're going you factor in it because you want to know where your spacecraft is and where it's headed and where it's been and and there's the initial thrust you gave it but then there's everybody tugging on it you want to track that so once you track it of the eight planets and whatever other objects you think could be affecting it some comets maybe if there's one nearby definitely the sun once you do that there's not some unexplainable force operating on your spacecraft so we don't need to appeal to some new ninth planet that we haven't discovered yet it could be now if you want to go really far out in the solar system and find an object that's so far away it's not affecting anything nearby okay okay and in fact such work was done there is an object suspected of being way the hell out there far beyond any zone we would call our solar system historically like gold like three four five times that size and there might be a planet out there that's affecting some comets all right again we're looking at its effect on other objects so uh so maybe but is it let me let me give you the the street answer that if it's that far away is it in the family it's not in the family right there you go right right exactly are you the nice kid if you're not if you're no right no you're sleeping in the field right not in the house so it we might need another vocabulary word to account for objects that are so far away yet still part of the sun's family that maybe there's just another word for them i i don't know you want to call it a planet fine fine there you go but i i i call it since you since you brought up the planet i mean the family i mean if i told you once i'm telling remember going to tell you again fredo don't ever go against the family was that the guy's name fredo yeah that was his brother that was fredo oh it's confusing with frodo yeah i'm mixing my stories here yeah no i'm talking sorry that kind of family yeah gotham not lord of the rings okay all right then we would have to call the planet samwise ganji it was we gotta take a quick break when we come back more cosmic queries grab bag we're back cosmic aquarius galactic gombol that's what we're doing grab back no grab bag so we got to check how many ingredients are in gumbo just to make sure because maybe we have more ingredients in this than are actually found in gumbo itself i told you that brings up the i i i i ivan garnier is gumbo i'm gonna have to i'm gonna keep forgetting all right next time we'll we'll straighten this out because maybe we're insulting the gumbo by putting too much in or it's insulting us so give me another another question uh this is a velvet dunlop velvet dunlap from that's it that's somebody's name that's what they put man so that's a movie star name is it really from velvet from uh spokane washington i was wondering about the primary difference of a gas giant and a typical star during the formation from cosmic soup is it just that there were more metals or heavier gases in the formation of the gas giant that turned it into what it is and i love that question it's it's an origins question yes right and so you go back to the gas cloud right and by the way all stars are made of gas and gas clouds are prevalent in the kinds of galaxies we live in a flat spiral galaxy so it's it's not a stretch to say maybe stars are born in these gas clouds you look in the gas clouds using special telescopes because they're otherwise opaque you need telescopes where the wavelengths of light can go deep inside and when you do that you can find stellar nurseries even today new stars are being born and so so you look in there and you find out that most stars being born are not very massive in fact most stars are less massive than the sun all right those stars will turn out to live for trillions of years but as you sort of go up the mass scale there are fewer and fewer and fewer such stars and the most massive of them there might only be one or two of those made in any cluster of stars in any sort of star family and but otherwise there's no difference it's made out of the same ingredients and the difference is it happened to start out with slightly more mass than everybody else and if you have slightly more mass you have more what energy check uh gravity gravity thank you you have mass and graph you have more gravity more gravity you get in even more mass and now you have even more mass you have even more gravity gravity and so there you go so it's kind of a runaway for you and so you win and everyone else gets the drags all right so this is how that works it's it's how almost like capitalism really yeah look at that the ritz get richer yeah poor bastards you know i might you know rewrite adam smith's the wealth of nations in terms of the formation of stars the formation life death star by the way that's a brilliant concept and all joking aside however um yeah that makes perfect sense so it really is just that like many things in life you start out with a little bit more a little bit a little bit more makes you that much more successful in life look at that and those stars that actually become big like that they're called beyonce stars oh because of their luminosity that's right not because of their mass okay just trying to make sure that's all i'm saying yeah that's all right right not correct for that all right that was a great question i liked it all right i learned something there so that was cool by the way i heard uh david koch one of the now deceased koch brothers yes tell a story about how he brother billionaire billionaire about how he started in life and he tells the story so when i started out i had a newspaper run um on my bicycle and i deliver newspapers every morning and i got you know ten dollars a week and i carefully put it in my bank account and i kept doing this through middle school and right up through high school and then um when my father died i inherited 10 million dollars that was a story that's hilarious because that is amazing because that is that's the origin story he was just he's just up with it he just said yep there it is you have it yeah other than i started off with a small loan of a million dollars and then i got another bridge loan of 100 million dollars and then before you know it i'm a self-made man as a billionaire so all right here we go let's go to howard chang howard chang says hey i have a question about hawking radiation and how black holes can theoretically lose mass by ejecting particles how's this even possible if nothing can exceed the speed of light in order to escape the event horizon of the black hole how fast you're throwing down the supposed particle trap throwing down oh my boy here is paying attention and he's he's he's not letting anything go by all right now what i'm about to tell you when i first learned it completely blew my mind all right cool okay all right you ready ready the black hole is not ejecting these particles which have been called hawking radiation that's not what's actually happening okay okay what's actually happening is just outside of the event horizon okay within which nothing escapes right all right the the black hole gravity is all throughout the space there it's it's not only inside the event horizon it's outside the event and it continues onward all right but just outside the event horizon the gravitational energy is still sufficiently high that spontaneously matter is created from it okay because okay e equals m m c squared so that's so if you mass and energy back and forth back and forth it's a two-way street so if you have a high enough concentration of energy you can start popping particles into existence and it looks like they're coming out of a thin air out of thin air but or thin space so the cost of this is that the total amount of gravitational energy has diminished by that ever small amount and if you're going to make particles out of thin air you will always make a pair of particles somebody got a pattern like somebody gotta pay somewhere somebody's gotta pay so you're gonna make two one is gonna be matter the other is gonna be anti-matter and they're gonna be flying apart in the exact opposite directions so that's the just the physics of it and it happens all the time so don't sweat that so watch what happens this particle gets created right outside the event horizon one direction goes back into the event horizon and the and the other direction goes out and it escapes the system that particle that escapes is taking mass away from the black hole itself and you might say but i thought the black hole is inside the event horizon no the black hole is the entire system including the gravitational energy that manifests it what and the inventory of these particles that come out of the gravitational energy get take your inventory how many quarks how many protons neutrons electrons take your inventory it will exactly equal what the black hole had eaten and pulled into its event horizon originally damn so the the the gravitational field has a memory of what the black hole ate this is profound this is more than profound that's some creepy trippy stuff right there it's creepy it's creepy yeah yes so the black hole is losing mass that it had long ago consumed out of the energy the gravitational energy field that it has created in its environment and for some reason what's outside of that hole outside of the the horizon event horizon has an inventory checklist of what had crossed the event horizon event horizon and it's taken them out one by one oh my gosh that is that's beyond amazing yeah and so it's what it means is you don't lose information that had fallen into the black hole the information content of what stuff is made of and by the way so you might say well how do i know this did i go to the black hole and check it no this is no i met a friend article and the particle told me he said what kind of particle are you he's like yo i escaped the system all right i escaped the system i busted out oh snap so that's kind of i mean it's sort of what happened there that's sort of so it's free and it goes off to you know having encounters with other objects in the universe wow so this process is slow so hawking radiation this evaporation of black holes takes very a very long time and you know longer than the current age of the universe so you're not going to wait around for this to for it to completely evaporate but so hawking showed this and later research showed that these particles do remember what was inside and that's applying the very well tested concepts of of quantum physics wow that's yeah dope that's all i could say that's dope damn yeah so cool all right let's move on hey hey speaking of dope there's a movie called dope did you know this i did not yeah yeah there's a movie called dope about a kid who's really nerdy okay uh uh in high school but the gangs want him to join the gangs but he's you know but he's getting like a straight a's and he wants to go to like harvard and but there's all these forces operating on him and he's just trying to deal with it and and i get name check i get name checked in the movie get out of here yeah are you like his buddy or something no no he's i have another nerd friend he's going to be an astrophysicist he's he writes some essay i think it's for his english class and the guy criticizes it and he said what did you write here and he says oh yeah this is the story if it were written by neil degrasse tyson it was some funny because the english teacher wasn't fully embracing his sci-fi creativity in the in the class or something so but anyhow there's a movie called it's called dope all right all right a part comedy but part serious social commentary exactly okay all right go on here we go this is eric gross eric says this hey stark talk team have a question i've always come back to that's worthy of deep thought given that energy and matter are equivalent and all existence as we know it is a subjective interpretation of infinite interactions of matter and energy do modern theorists believe that anything like free will or self-determination is likely to exist oh i have an answer for that oh get out of it how the hell do you have an answer for that after the break when we come back when we come back to stark talk god's aquarius all right we're back cosmic queries the the the kitchen sink edition uh questions now called from our patreon supporters thank you i publicly thank you for that your interest and your participation in making this highly successful variant of our star talk broadcast fun to do and happy to serve so check okay here we go we we left off with a deep question uh and what is it if matter equals energy and all the world is a subjective infinite interactions between matter and energy do modern theorists believe anything like free will or self-determination is likely to exist now who asked this question yeah tell me about it uh his name is aristotle his name is i smoke weed every day no it's this is frost smoke weed this is from his name every day i smoke weed jokes smoke weed johnson no this is eric gross what a great great eric gross that's a clean simple name but name like that shouldn't be having thoughts this deep you need a different name for that uh i agree chuck we'll come back with a different name so anyhow so first of all uh number one it is true so the your first given is accurate that a matter of energy or equivalent as provided by equals mc squared your second given i'm not giving you you're trying to say the whole world is an unfolding of subjectively interpreted events you you could get away with that before science was invented but we invented science to separate our sensory system from the thing that's doing the actual measurements of what's going on in the world so instead of using your eyes we use a telescope instead of using a mic your your eyes the other way we use a microscope and we take measurements of this we we no longer rely on your brain eye ear connection to either take data or report the data okay when you do this you can now establish objective realities that are not filtered through your subjective system of your subjective sensory system and so so that's why science works that's why the question if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it did it make sound yeah if you don't know anything about science right yeah that's a really great question philosophical questions okay but i can put chart recorders there i can measure vibrations i can do things that establish the existence of sound independent of your sensory system yeah and by the way just falling in a forest that no one is there to hear makes this sound okay just go ahead and it's only when no one's there to hear it but one of my favorite gary larson comics was in the barn and there's a chicken a horse a pig and you know the farmer is somewhere else and they're all talking and and i forgot who said what but was it the pig one of them said but if you divide by the square root of mass you get the same result and then the chicken said but you're missing the basic premise of my theory and then someone looks out the window and says farmer and then the farmer shows up that's funny it's like as a scientist i'm kind of hoping that's really going on in the barn you know even though i i don't really believe it i want it to be true right so so point is i'm not giving you that can't have that that there's that the whole world is somehow subjectively unfolding so now how about free will a lot of recent work on this especially in the neuroscience community all right and they're finding things like you're sitting in a room and they got the electrodes on your head and they and and they find electrical activity and that precedes your conscious awareness of a thought that you then have and then act on that thought okay so you'll say things like i'm going to stand up right now and then you stand up you think you came up with that thought at the moment you think you came up with that thought but brain scans and sensors tell you that that was already a thought in progress so our conscious awareness of free will is not actually free will something else is going on subconsciously wow yeah okay so now you can ask what is making the subconscious do its thing if you're not aware of it but you after the fact declare that you made this decision on your own then then what does free will even mean right so so that's the that's a line of questioning that's coming back into that world and the neuroscientists are right on top of it maybe we'll do a whole a whole episode just on free will to get to the bottom of that be very clear because i'm only sharing with you what i've heard and read and spoken with some experts on it um so but that being said i even if it's not real i fully enjoy my illusion of free will right right i you know and and take it all the way maybe we're in a simulation and all of this is already sort of programmed in and i'm going to thank the programmer for not telling me that i don't have free will because i like enjoying the the idea that i do and if everyone is operating on that assumption uh what i i'd wonder of what value is it to even contemplate whether you don't hmm well you could do it philosophically legally right you can say oh my gosh this person robbed the bank but they were not of their own free will well in some respects what you just said there is there are some examples of that and i will say that drug addiction is one so there are people who feel like oh well you know all you have to do is stop doing drugs but what they don't realize is that when you do drugs you break your brain so that the stopping part does not it no longer works yes same with alcohol exactly right and and you dupe yourself you start making excuses right and you your brain starts taking control over your own power of decision and action so that's a whole that's a whole future of the world that we need to analyze to try to resolve and understand and possibly cure if in fact that's how we're going to get into our own brains so yeah very cool very cool so did i i don't know if i did i fully yeah you did i mean the fact that the real answer to the question is uh stop making assumptions about the infinite interactions between matter and energy that equate to a subjective interpret interpretation of the entire universe because that that is not the case that's that's the real answer that is not that's not the case okay there's also quantum physics where things are not deterministic they're probabilistic right and so you cannot know exactly what will happen you'll only know probabilistically what will happen and and what's interesting in quantum physics is even though there are these uncertainties that guide what's happening we precisely quantify what those uncertainties are wow so so we can we can quantify our uncertainty that's a head trip which sounds that's a head trip right there right there it's primarily because these are systems of many many particles and statistics come out basically perfectly the bigger the system is we are 100 sure that we are unsure exactly that's not what i said okay all right all right let's next one [Laughter] all right here we go uh let's go to nathan kane what's up nathan he says this what's the possibility that we could one day use stars as an alchemy table of sorts to forge elements for ourselves and then extract them ooh interesting i like where he's going with that exactly ooh so so we just so what we're saying is i need more gold all right so let's just churn the the nuclear furnace right and and you could tap the star like you tap a keg right and you put it in the right spot where the gold was being made take it out and you have your gold atoms uh that's that's fast that would be a really cool sci-fi novel yeah i think yeah yeah uh it's just that so much of the rest of the star is doing things that you don't care about so the fusion is going on only deep down in the core and it needs to be in the core because that's where the high pressures are from all the stuff that's not otherwise doing anything else what i might imagine is if you have the power enough to tap a star you could just build some kind of particle machine you know in your backyard if this is the future and just have it churn out the gold by fusing enough atoms together and that's its only job is to do that rather than be a star in addition to making heavy elements so in that future that's what i would try to invent or what you've talked about in the past is you can just mine asteroids that often thank you will already have those elements inside of the pieces thank you chuck i didn't even think to me to say that you're coming along you you're going to get an honorary degree when this is all done i just want you to say all right so it's exactly right because landing on an asteroid you don't risk vaporizing yourself as you would trying to get into a star so yes all of those heavy ingredients were scattered back into the universe and have collected and been pre-sifted to make these metallic asteroids where you have the platinum the iridium the gold the silver the the the iron the nickel all of it's there so yeah chuck cool all right yeah okay so just because you can do it that way doesn't mean you should there might be other simpler ways but it's it's i like the way his brain is thinking yes all right let's go to steven's spotted horse and steven spotted horse says hello dr tyson and mr nice steven spotted horse here from oklahoma why is gravity so weird of a force we are also familiar with it it keeps being it keeps our feet on the ground and yes so much weaker than other forces is it possible that there are other dimensions we cannot observe and gravity our gravity could just be escaping into these other dimensions therefore diluting the force of the gravity that we experience making it so weak but yet it's really not we would be able to receive gravitational forces from other dimensions in space wow these people today are really man they're smoking something together they all got together just like yo man you ever realize that maybe that we're dealing with an infinite number of possibilities that really i make so excited we don't have any kind of true will or free whip nah man here's what i want to know why is gravity so weak i mean seriously it's like the strongest force in the universe but yet at the same time i can break it just by jumping off the ground that's some deep deep man all right let me see if i can answer that in the remaining 90 seconds all right so spotted horse here we go uh gravity is the weirdest of the four basic forces it's the weirdest because it is by far the weakest all right the weakest force so and just bend down and pick up a paper clip off the ground you just you just resisted the gravity of the earth by pulling it away from the earth the earth could not hold it against just the strength of your muscles so so that it's weak and there's because of how gravity behaves and how einstein describes it maybe we shouldn't think of it as a force at all interesting because if gravity is only how you are responding to the curvature of space and time as einstein said it was an einstein or one of his students john archibald wheeler one of the two of them said gravity matter tells space how to curve and space tells matter how to move so they've got this sort of two-way street there and if you're just moving along a curved surface is that really a force do you get is that should you call it a force of rank and privilege of the other forces that we know so that's a legitimate question to ask and if it's not a force that would explain why it doesn't really play well in the sandbox with the rest of the other forces now are there higher dimensions in which gravity manifests differently yeah there could be and you know my favorite explanation for dark matter which is really dark gravity which is not what the professional physicist experts are betting on but i just kind of like it because it's fun that maybe this mysterious source of gravity in our universe that has no known source is actually ordinary matter in a parallel universe with its gravity spilling into ours right and we see oh there's a mysterious force of gravity where is it from i don't know and it's a big mystery and whereas in another universe they just have ordinary objects with spillage so yeah this is unknown it's unknown but i think the more we can learn about parallel universes um the more we might be able to think about how the universes may go bump in the night and possibly alert each other to their presence uh in one way or another wow so yeah i like the way he's thinking yeah it's kind of cool it's a cool thought cool thought and and mr spotted horse invite chuck and me to your next uh session next week next time you guys all get together oh yeah okay yeah so i think that's all we have time for all right well let me just say hello these were some deep questions this weekend and we still didn't get to quite a few so but don't worry guys we're going to get to your questions so always good to have you chuck tweeting at chuck nice comment thank you sir yes always good and if anybody's looking i i hardly ever announce this but i tweet at neil tyson really because you only have 15 million people on i think they already knew that bro all right all right this has been star talk cosmic queries kitchen sink edition and i'm your host neil degrasse tyson your personal astrophysicist keep looking up you

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 274,337

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, Einstein, anitmatter, black holes, simulation, quantum, free will, dark matter, multiverse, gravity

Id: hANc06cpwAg

Length: 45min 22sec (2722 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 15 2021