Neil deGrasse Tyson: "The Pluto Files" | Talks at Google

good afternoon everyone thank you for coming welcome here to present Neil deGrasse Tyson give you a little background on him he was born and raised here in New York City where he was educated in the public schools clear through his graduation from the Bronx High School of Science Tyson went on to earn his BA in physics from Harvard and his PhD in astrophysics from Columbia in addition to dozens of professional publications dr. Tyson has written and continues to write for the public he is a monthly SEO score a natural history magazine under the title universe and among Tyson's nine books is his memoir the sky is not the limit Adventures of an urban astrophysicist and origins 14 billion years of cosmic evolution co-written with Donald Goldsmith origins is the companion book to the PBS Nova four-part miniseries origins in which Tyson serves as on-camera host the program premiered on September 28th and 29th in 2004 and beginning in the fall of 2006 Tyson appears as the on-camera host of PBS Nova's spin-off program Nova ScienceNOW which is an accessible look at the frontier of all the science that shapes the understanding of our place in the universe Tyson is a recipient of nine honorary doctorates and the NASA distinguished Public Service Medal his contributions to the public appreciation of the cosmos has been recognized by the International Astronomical Union in their official naming of asteroid one three one two three Tyson on the lighter side Tyson was voted sexiest astrophysicist alive by People magazine in 2000 Tyson is the first occupant of the Frederick P Rose dictatorship of the Hayden Planetarium here in New York he also lives here in New York with his wife and two children so please help me welcome him I think the word is directorship my dictatorship of the Hayden Planetarium just in case you yes I'm proud of you for getting getting through all of that first I want to hear I've never been to Google before this is pretty cool Google is now a verb as you know to be googled you tell that to someone old enough they wonder if it's some illegal thing you do I googled her the other night it's like old call the cops you know let me complement you you you occupy a building that actually has a 13th floor identified in it 80% of buildings in New York City that are taller than 12 leave out the 13th floor so I feel like going with a sharpie and crossing out the 14 and putting in 13 because that is the 13th floor so I just want to be proud of you guys for finding such a such a building so I here just talked about Pluto I like this little chair here it's good this is good Pluto I'm told this audience has a high geek index so I can go places I might not otherwise go with other audiences so may I with your permission excellent okay let's go way back farther back then you might have bargained for there was a day when there were seven known planets and the word planet had an unambiguous definition clear and simple defined by the ancient Greeks Greeks plenty test meaning Wanderers there were seven objects in the night in the sky that would move against the background sky so Mercury Venus Mars Jupiter Saturn the Sun in the moon seven unambiguous everybody could agree that those were the planets and it's those seven names drawn from Roman and Norse mythology's that landed as the seven names for the days of the week their Saturdays after Saturn come if you knew that named after Saturn Sunday's named after the Sun yes Monday the moon this sort of thing and you combine north Greek Roman and Norse legends you get the seven days of the week alright fine well there you go for a couple of thousand years you get to Copernicus in 1543 he says well maybe the Sun is in the middle of all this and if we are that earth goes around the Sun like these other things we had been calling a planet so maybe earth is a planet and so overnight with the publication of the revolutionibus 1543 Nicholas Copernicus Polish astronomer and mathematician overnight practically we went from seven planets down to five because we lost the Sun and we lost the moon because we go around the Sun moon goes around Earth and we gained the earth 27 down to five up to six and there it was but that definition of planet wasn't formal it was just do you go around the Sun okay you're okay good enough for us all right now quite by accident quite by accident in the late 1600s William Herschel who is a famous British astronomer had the biggest telescope in the land he's combing the sky just looking for stuff finds a planet actually no one had ever discovered a planet before so he he was in denial that he had discovered a planet so you read his notes and he says and other people's notes about it it says this is an aw he phony discovered a comic fine because he saw it move against the background of common people knew about comets you could find those but you're not gonna discover it on the planet planet this this has been you know if there was a planet all right you're not gonna discover a planet with your telescope so you read his writings and it says because your comic this is it refuses to show a tail or a fuzzy sort of coma around the so it's it's it's a it's a misbehaving comet when in fact he had discovered a planet all right it was time to name the thing well being like a good scientific researcher you want to name it after like the people who are funding your research right so he named it after King George and so for about fifty years or so if you look at the textbooks of the day textbooks of the day there was the list of planets Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn and George right there it was there it was George so no one had ever named the planet before so you knew that was wrong but you didn't know why it was wrong and they finally figured out okay planets are named after Roman gods gods or goddesses so we got to back out of that one but the British were the most powerful force in the world economically politically culturally militaristically so you don't you don't want to really piss them off so if you're going to concede a Roman name for the planet you've got to give something up so up until then the tradition for naming planet moons has been to name the moon after an assorted Greek character in the life of the Greek counterpart to the Roman god after whom the planets named in other words take Jupiter for remote one of Jupiter's moons is Ganymede Ganymede was the manservant for Zeus and Zeus is the Greek counterpart to the Roman Jupiter Jay got there that's how that works that's have given homage to the Greek and Roman history that that that fills the skies Uranus the planet discovered by Herschel is the only exception to this rule the moons of Uranus are named for assorted characters fictional characters in Shakespearean literature the only exception just kind of cool so you look at the name moon names of Uranus it's like puck Oberon Portia a lot of the characters from the Midsummer's Night Dream give me a few more his name when it probably I got a moon for you uh titania that's right and there's another one with inania titania helen is a helena yeah so we got moons all from them all right now so I always want taking you down this circuitous path is because now you have this new planet Uranus farther away then the then for this most planet Saturn and they said let's track its orbit slow moving though it is you can still check its orbit they found out you know it's not following Newton's laws of gravity we know how this planet ought to be moving around the Sun and it's not do this laws of gravity the one over R squared law to body force the Sun and Uranus it was not happening there were slight deviations in it and that worried people because no one had ever tested Newton's laws that far away from the Sun maybe Newton's laws have a functional limit beyond which they no longer apply now how quick are you to discard Newton's laws I mean it they're working and Newton was a smart guy you don't that's a last resort you don't want to you don't want that to be your first step let you feet that's a fallback position so they said maybe there's an object out there remains to be discovered whose gravity is influencing the trajectory of Uranus maybe so sure enough they check the equations inverted the equations and said we're must a source of gravity B in order to alter the orbit of Uranus this way okay took high-powered mathematicians of the day they said it's got to be fair and so they looked sure enough discovered a new planet that became Neptune the planet Neptune okay is good to us now we resolved Newton's laws you factor that Newton's laws are good good out to Neptune good beyond Uranus you work for Uranus all right now they keep looking at the trajectory of Neptune now now the farthest most clinic and they say hmm it's not following Newton's laws hmm do we throw a Newton app now come on Newton is kicking Newton is good he's good to us right so they said there must be another planet out there influencing it and thus was born the search for Planet X Planet X was the planet that was influencing the trajectory the orbital trajectory of Neptune and Planet X remain this mysterious object for decades upon decades upon decades ok let's back up put a pin in that let's back up for a minute 18:01 people know there's this gap in the solar system between Mars and Jupiter Mercury Venus Earth Mars then there's like this huge gap and then you get to Jupiter people said I wonder if there's a planet there it started looking as telescopes got better and better with every better telescope you acquire there's more stuff you get to see in the universe either farther away that's bright or nearby that's really dim each of those are thresholds that you move beyond sure enough 1801 January 1st a new planet is discovered orbiting between Mars and Jupiter they named it they got the tradition now named Roman gods and goddesses so this one they named series I've heard planet Ceres planets are known you probably never heard I remember is in all the textbooks I have a fun page story planet Ceres discovered Ceres cer es that's the Roman goddess of harvest and that's now the root word to the word cereal by the way cereal it's weight how that works see we get that so so everyone was excited now they kept looking then they found another planet and another and another another this went on for like sixty years they found the first four in the first sort of fifty years and then another sort of dozen in the few years at remember telescopes are getting better by the decade and they kept naming them and they said wait pause how bigger these planets were the kind of small where these planets found weather all in the same zone actually what kind of Warburton am they all have kind of the same orbits in this zone how big is the biggest of these it's smaller than the smallest of any other planet we've seen how much smaller way smaller few hundred miles across eight hundred miles across maybe they're not planets maybe there's something else maybe we've discovered a new swath of real estate in the solar system befitting its own category it took 60 years but people finally realized what had been discovered in 1801 was the first and brightest object in a new place called the asteroid belt now there are hundreds of thousands of asteroids we rising through that number one of them has my name on a double check before I agreed to accept it that it's not headed towards Earth you're not gonna blame that one on me remember that Simpsons episode where where he oh yeah I need my bill yeah we need the moon moon thingies do you remember that there's a Bart Simpson once discovered a comet it was headed towards Earth and then the townspeople went to burn down the observatory that had discovered the comment just to sort of when there's low science literacy that's the kind of thing that happens so where was that before I interrupted myself asteroid belt thank you that was 1801 meanwhile people are still looking for Planet X as the 19th century draws to a close there's a wealthy astronomer named Percival Lowell Lowell of the New England Lowell's you know the Cabot's and the lolz the moneyed family multi-generational families of New England he he was a fanatic smart a little off was a fanatic about the universe got a mountain in Arizona built an observatory there called it the Lowell Observatory yes and had the best observing conditions around Moisture is bad for observing the night sky so you move into the desert and Arizona is not famous for its rainstorms so there you have it he launches the search for plot the modern quote modern search for Planet X they said guys give me your best location for where you think Planet X is all right so they did the same kind of inverted arithmetic that had enabled the discovery of Neptune they've been doing that for a long time no one could find it he's got the best telescope now the best observing conditions he says give me the spot on the sky he looked can't find looks again can't find still fanatical back he ultimately dies someone else is hired to carry on the search clyde tombaugh 24 year old amateur astronomer farm boy from the midwest hired into the Lowell Observatory to pursue this survey so instead of now doing targeted looks I think it's there no nothing there I think it's there no he said let me do a systematic scan of the sky and the way to do this he can't just take a picture and say that's Pluto you have to take two pictures because between one picture in the next all the stars still be in the same spot but put over whatever your solar system moving object would it move from one picture to the next so it takes two epochs of imaging to make this work so does a systematic survey of the night sky bada bing discovers Planet X discovers at 1930 it's there everybody's excited they know how much mass it must have it must be as sort of his massive his Neptune to have influenced Neptune to the amount that they saw that it was everybody's excited if you look in textbooks of the day Lisp luto the ninth planet discovered by an American American never discovered a planet before there it is ok how big is this big as Neptune it's got to be of course it's the planet X then they looked a little closer and they say well it's not actually quite that big maybe it's smaller hmm no so smile may be half the size of Neptune Oh little is though maybe the size of Earth no it's littler than that decade by decade our best estimates for the size of Pluto got littler and littler and littler and come the 1970s it finally settled out and we learned that Pluto is smaller than seven moons in the solar system Pluto is a fit maybe from New York to Colorado that kind of size ok it was not the planet X that everybody's been looking for it just was it was an impostor it wasn't its own fault it was our own sort of layered expectations upon it that made it the imposter who blamed Pluto blue losses being Pluto right so devastating was this drop in size then in the late 1970s there were two geologists I think their mixture was a childish an astronomer or chemist some combination of people who care who noticed this trend line in the size of Pluto over time and decided to make a plot and the title of this paper is the pen the impending disappearance of Pluto and it extract fits there's a fitting function to this curve and it says if it contains it this way Pluto will disappear by 1984 completely crosser the x-axis there it is gone so they actually it's a tutting cheek article of course but it was duly published in a peer-reviewed journal but it got people worried like what's going on with Pluto what's what are we trying to do it what is our understand it really meanwhile schoolchildren throughout the land are learning that there are nine planets and they're learning that the most important science to know about the solar system is to memorize the names of these nine planets back then there wasn't much else to talk about Saturn head rings Jupiter had a spot they have some specs we call moons it's kind of about it so no one's complaining that all you're doing is memorizing these objects in sequence from the Sun always complain well what of that planet X this is still out there it turns out it's not Planet X turned out to be a phantom which I'll get back to in a minute I'll get back to that cuz it's not really the subject Pluto emerge from the search for Planet X and it's Pluto that's the subject I'll get back to it later back to Planet X later so turns out in America since Clyde Tombaugh was American ask around the world how much do care about Pluto most places don't care Americans care most places in the world don't really care any more than they care about any other planet in America they care about Pluto more than any other planet more than any other cosmic object why I have my theories is it because it's the littlest and the cutest no you don't know how cute it is you don't know you don't know anything about it it's a speck on the sky they're littler objects in the solar system than Pluto we got asteroids we've got two moons of Mercury of Mars that are so little their gravity doesn't create a round shape for them they actually have like a potato like Idaho Potato I think that's kind of cute I tell home potato and hold it up to the photo it looks just like an Idaho Potato no one falling in love with Phobos and Deimos of Mars so my theory is my hypothesis is that save the word theory for things that actually are tested and demonstrated my hypothesis is the fact is rooted in the fact that Walt Disney first sketched the dog that shares the name the same year that Pluto the cosmic object was discovered 1930 1930 in the American hearts and minds the cosmic object and the animal have the same tenure the same tenure also when do you first learn about planets in school it's early elementary school right if you're a normal kid and your elementary school you're also watching cartoons and you haven't learned about Roman mythology yet chances are so when the teacher says class here are the planets in order from the Sun you hear mercury it's just a word it doesn't mean anything to you doesn't mean winged messenger God from Rome no it's just syllables strung together to make the sound Mercury Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto you pop up because you know about Pluto of the dog and they're in a genetic link between the earth is created in the classroom that you carry with you to the end of your days I'm certain that this is why because in 2000 when we opened the 230 million dollar Rose Center for Earth and space here in New York City part of the American Museum of Natural History and we looked at the trend lines of what was going on in the solar system we noticed hey let's ignore the fact that Pluto is puny let me let's not even hold that against Pluto because watch cos you got to watch out if you invoke that kind of rule because if you do the math jupiter is more bigger compared with earth then earth is compared with Pluto so if we were like Jupiter Ian's for Jovians they're called and we were asked how many planets are there in the solar system we'd say for Jupiter Saturn Uranus and Neptune and everything else would just be debris earth is just debris if you are Jupiter so I'm not going to hold size against Pluto I got nothing that's not my issue my issue is in the 1990s when we were researching this new exhibit 200 million dollars worth of new planetarium hardware and astronomy museum exhibit rhe we said hey wait a minute the biggest telescopes in the world remember the big any time you have the next biggest telescope you're discovering dim stuff nearby or other dim stuff far away that's bright new telescopes in Hawaii we're discovering icy bodies in the outer solar system okay how big are they with a little like Pluto what are they made of they're mostly kind of ice by volume like Pluto what kind of war batu they have well they got weird orbits like Pluto Pluto's orbit crosses the orbit of Neptune it's that elliptical that that's what it does no other planet does that not only that it's tipped out of the plane of the solar system by 17 degrees the next closest tip is mercury that's eight everybody else is plus or minus a couple of degrees within the plane of the solar system so Pluto's tipped more than anybody else it's elongated more than anybody else it's icy more than anybody else we said to ourselves maybe Pluto is not the ninth planet maybe Pluto is the first object discovered of a new swath of real estate in the solar system I kind of heard this story Kaunas before we've been down this road before what was Ceres it was like the next planet discovered until we realize that we actually discovered a new place by the way of the day as they were raking in the planets in the in the asteroid belt I've got a book that says there now 13 planets in the solar system 13 finds 1830 is the year that book 813 planets it's a 13 or 12 something higher than any number we've seen today because they were counting asteroids in this tally so here we are with a similar kind of story trajectory you discover Pluto everybody's excited you call it a planet now you find family you find family so we were cutting metal we're spending 200 million dollars we don't want to have an exhibit that's going to be found wrong or obsolete months later so we said what's the trend line trend line is let us group Pluto with it's icy brethren in the outer solar system that's what we did if you're going to start grouping objects by properties let's group the gas giants Jupiter Saturn Uranus and Neptune that's a group of four we have on display let's group the rocky objects Rickey Venus Earth and Mars that's a group of four on display that's what we did we didn't count planets we didn't we'd define planet we didn't kick Pluto out of the solar system even though a year later that's what the New York Times headline showed January 22nd 2001 page-one headline below the fold nonetheless page one Pluto not a planet only in New York that's what sent my inbox was out of control started getting hate mail from third graders pissed off colleagues angry school teachers who built whole lesson plans around this and I got branded Public Enemy for having rethought how we would present the existence of Pluto in the solar system I didn't even do it unilaterally I have colleagues we got together and said what's the best data what was what's the trend line here and I have a mock-up of that page one it's right here by the way January 22nd 2001 what happened two days before that Bush got inaugurated George W just got inaugurated they're still counting dimpled Chad's in Florida you think page one would be filled with stories about the transition of power and okay there's some so here this is the mock-up of that newspaper on the first day Bush settles into a refitted Oval Office 537 new Cardinals selected by the Pope okay get the Cardinal action up there it's good my problem with that Iraq rebuilt weapons factories it's fun to see stories before you actually go in there find out with weapons factories when US officials say it's fine fine you keep going I'm gonna come on down here and way that bit here it is Pluto's not a planet only in New York there it is it begins here but it continues and goes half of a whole other page as you get in so that's what my life went to help that's all I'm telling you okay the Pluto files while I have strong opinions about how we should think about the solar system I reserve those for the last chapter called my advice to you as a student parent teacher or just curious adult the rest of the book is a celebration of everybody's reaction to this to this phenomenon we were the first public institution to re-think Oh Pluto six years later the International Astronomical Union it's not a labor union it's like a it's a it's a society and profession as a membership professional Society of astrophysicists they got together form the planet definition committee introduced criteria for what would be a planet what what by the way Anna hadn't been unambiguously defined since ancient Greece that's why there was all this controversy had it been defined unambiguously there would have been no controversy were normally much better about it than this it was never an occasion to have to define it they said let's define it if you put a check in each of these three boxes you're a planet you ready first box are you round around Pluto lovers wanted the definition to stop there then you get Pluto whether you also get Pluto's moon Charon and you also get series the only round asteroid then you get all the other moons in the solar system Pluto you know Earth's moon then the count would go from nine planets up to like 18 or whatever whatever the number is 2020 mid 20s I have a comic in here got permissions to reproduce all these great comics there's a at them at the time there's like a few weeks when it might have been that anything round was a planet because that was proposed by the Pluto lovers out there and so there's a comic it shows a teacher in front of a class and it's got the Sun and all the nine planets and all these other planets there to say and captures no planet left behind in the classroom so when the vote finally tally at two more criteria were added second one are you the principal object in orbit around the Sun Pluto is but its moon Charon is not okay so Pluto now has two checks in the boxes oh by the way you know Sharon is the ferryman to ferry your unfortunate soul across the across the river in to Hades because you got to be the Greek so you're Greek because you've got to be Greek if you're the moon and Pluto and Hades was Greek and Roman and Greek okay so somebody's got his mythology I'm very good so so where was I something was here what was there Oh this is my check boxes thank you so the first check are you round are you the principal I yes third one have you cleared your orbit of orbital debris orbiting Philip cleared your orbit of orbital orbital debris Pluto hasn't no because it's orbiting this new zone where thousands of other icy bodies have been discovered as in cleared its orbit by the way this zone was predicted to be there at mid century by a solar system theorist named Gerard Kuiper he reasoned that if you go beyond the orbit of the outermost large planet Neptune then if there's no other large planet out there to have gravitationally vacuumed up the leftovers of the solar system it should still be there and at that distance would all be made of ice so sure enough you check out there it's all ice it's all there and it's all debris Pluto does not dominate that zone too bad Pluto no check in that box you are not a planet you are the new designation you're a dwarf planet dwarf planet this upsets so many people so now I'm thinking well maybe it's not a demotion maybe it's just a subclass a planet you might drive a compact car you're not saying to yourself gee I wish I was driving an actual car you know you're not saying that to yourself it's just a kind of car a compact car so there were those who said it's not a demotion for Pluto and others who took it personally and are still on a rampage about it I just do the Internet of course you can do that your google here so you you own the internet right so check it out there's this there's this sort of Pluto underground alright that continue to fight this vote and so I'll you have oh there's an extra oak so series becomes a dwarf planet it's round orbits the Sun has not cleared its orbit so series gets elevated from an asteroid to a dwarf planet Pluto gets sort of demoted from Planet to dwarf planet there are other around objects out there they're dwarf planets as well but there's another category I think just to make Pluto feel good and it's if you are you round beyond Neptune which means you're mostly ice then you're poo tide a blue tide some people didn't like that one because sound like some kind of skin disease or some few have blue tides we get medicine for that you know kind of so so there you have it the current sort of formal anatomy of the solar system and I don't have a strong opinion about the definition of a planet we never counted planets what I care about is that if however you define planet I want you to admit to yourself that it's not the most interesting information you can convey about the solar system if I say I just discovered a planet around another star you're going to ask me as a big as a small as it rocky as a gaseous is it have rings is it in the habitable zone there's a tab mood we got to play 20 questions just for you to get satisfied by the answer that fact tells you that the word planet is just not that useful to understand the identity of these objects anymore we by the way it's not I'm not asking for much here if there's a bookshelf of any bookshelves here at Google okay just checking because all your content is online you know bookshelf over yeah okay so you get a books if I say okay you go bring me the book from the shelf go bring me the encyclopedia that's on the shelf go bring me the dictionary that's on the shelf go bring me the pamphlet that's on the shop go bring me the paperback that's on the shelf all those words mean something different to you I don't just say to you go bring me the wood pulp that's on the shelf you won't know what to bring it's all wood pulp all of it it's not useful to you to have this conversation so in my pontificating say for the last chapter I just encourage people to explore the full breadth and depth of what we actually have learned about the solar system and create conversations based on that and you'll come away not with the urge to have to memorize content as schoolchildren are now doing but the understanding of what the form and shape and contents of the solar system is what will emerge and that's really what this is all about any in like cosmic enlightenment of an audience and so that's that's all I gotta say if you have let me add one thing just about Pluto the dog if I'm a got nothing to do with and I gotta tell you what happened to Planet X these are my two ending points and we go to Q&A is that the there you go did the camera get that you got the Pluto I was you know I worked in a natural I'm an astrophysicist who works at a Natural History Museum so I hang out with people who study animals other than humans as well as those who study humans they're anthropologists there in addition and so I have a certain osmotic sensitivity to the animal kingdom that I wouldn't otherwise have so when I learned that Pluto is Mickey's dog but Mickey is not Pluto's Mouse that disturbed me deeply something is wrong in the mammalian order of things because dogs can eat mice all right so I had to get to the bottom of it so I asked I've got some Disney people I called I said what gives here so I learned not that you asked but I got a I spent a lot of time digging this up I gotta get sharing all right again whether you wanted it or not it turns out in the Disney pantheon among characters they created not characters that they bought later like like Winnie the Pooh talked about pure Disney character if no matter what creature you are if you wear clothes you can own other creatures who do not it's that simple Mickey's got the best or whatever he's getting the shoes in the glove Pluto's butt-naked there it is CUDA walks on all fours and does not speak maybe ARF right meanwhile goofy wears clothes goofy is bipedal ok goofy lives in a house pays rent doesn't not in a dog house ok there you have it I know you were burning to know this right alright let's knock out planet X and we'll go to Q a Planet X it took until the 1990s believe it or not for someone to realize let's take another look at this baseline of observations that established that Neptune was misbehaving in its orbit behaving badly not according to Newton's laws and now we've tested Newton way out to the outer limits of the universe so we're not givin up Newton on this one but no one was finding Planet X in all the places it should have been so he goes back to this is a so in this effort had the guy who discovered this is miles Standish by the way and he's got some Roman numeral after his name so he's surely traceable to the Mayflower where the first mile Standish is to walk these shores arrived but he's an astronomer and so he looked at the data and says wait a minute one of these tell us the data from one of these telescopes is sort of a little more different from the rest of these telescopes because you combine telescopes from multiple observatories over you know hundreds of hundred years and he goes to the logbook of this other telescope and finds out I forgot exactly what it's like oh I will decide to clean the gear box tonight okay the guy with the with the telescope clock drive before he took a measurement you don't do that you don't do that in the middle of your measurements you keep everything the same as it ever was if you want a common baseline of what was going on he said let's just test this hypothesis he removes the data from the fit that came from that one telescope and used the data from all the other telescopes in the bank all your all Neptune's orbital parameters fit right into Newton's law and Planet X evaporated overnight so planet X was you know it was like a it was a Planet X was inside the gearbox that's what that was I how else to say it it was just a Hardware artifact of an observatory in the data so all gravity is accounted for in the solar system everywhere now that's different from this Planet X that people been talking about lately who are worried that the world will come to an end in the year 2012 these are the and the world people if you didn't know about this then try googling I say that here googling 2012 website upon website upon website the people who are sure the world will come to an end because a Planet X called Nibiru or NIM Bru is coming and will knock her thought with its axis but there's not it's all a fiction it's a complete fiction gravity accounted for beginning to end there you have it I want to since I said it the year 2012 there's the worry that on December 21st the center of the galaxy the Sun and the moon and the Sun and the earth will come into perfect alignment on December 21st 2012 and if you check your orbital parameters you find that that's true we will come in to exact alignment with the center of the galaxy and the Sun there's the claim that that extra gravity will will knock us off our axis and end to the world will come you can calculate how much gravity that is and holding aside from the fact that it's not more grass it's like it's hold that aside if you're worried about that those same website what they don't tell you is that alignment that exact alignment of the center of the galaxy where there's a black hole the Sun and Earth that exact alignment December 21st 2012 happens every December 21st of every year they left that out anyhow thank you for your time and attention I think I spoke a little too long questions about Bhutto yes I'll ask a question thanks for coming pleasure to have such a luminary in the office they'll take this up because it's short so my question isn't technical but it's about sort of what you do as what seems like a science evangelist and you're here and I've seen you on The Colbert Report a lot I know you're writing and you're on TV so what do you think the state of affairs is in science and kids and science and people reading books and America not falling behind all kinds of other countries and what's your what's on your mind when you're going about your work like what do you think your responsibility is and what do you think people like us our responsibility is in a company like Google you just sort of pontificate about that a little bit uh we have three more hours of tape is that right thanks I'll try to be efficient in my reply first I have very high hopes for the country there are many signs of this one of them is of all the times you may have seen me on television 85% of them came about not through any action of my own or some marketing group or some product that's being peddled 85 percent they are come about because the universe flinched and the producers want a sound bite and my office is 10 blocks north their office of their Studios so I'm an easy date so it doesn't doesn't get to my head that they keep coming an easy date I try to give them a good sound bite that works that's truthful fun to listen to and makes you want to think and do and do more 85% 15% come about because I've written a book or a dude or a I hosted TV show on PBS fifteen percent so what is the other 85% comes from somebody's deciding that the audience wants to learn about the universe I'm a twist in arms I'm not feeding them news stories I'm at home we're in my office minding my own business and the phone rings I think that's a good sign because a producers feel this way that means if their understanding of their marketplace they believe that the public feels that so that's one another one is way back when I was a kid you'd have to go months before you came across a science show on television that was not what about animals in the in the jungle or or the undersea world those two were regulars but for the rest of the science you go months before you saw a show on the site now anytime you sit down every other time you sit down you can land on a TV program that's on the universe on black holes on the Big Bang on DNA on climate something so it's there it's available there are producers funders making these products Third Point the you say you're worried about kids I'm not worried about kids I'm worried about grownups okay these the ones who vote these are the ones who tell you the world is coming to an end in 2012 kids don't say that grown-ups do I'm worried about grownups who say read my horoscope tell me where they'll find money tomorrow grown-ups say this not children okay children do not read horoscopes okay children are perfectly happy counting through the number thirteen children are not afraid to walk under ladders they see a black cat cross their path they Selma kitty kitty they want to pet it not running the other direction children are not the problem here get me started plus kids are born curious they're always exploring we spend the first year of their lives teaching them how to walk and talk and the rest of their lives tell them to shut up and sit down so so there you have Plus Obama put science right in his inauguration speech so we want to like hold them to that and early signs in the in his administration and in Congress show that that might actually come to pass plus in America a capitalist nation where many people if not most don't want to die poor once you understand the role of innovations in science and technology as an engine of economic growth then you are left with no other choice but to value and respect not only those who go into Sciences but you value and respect the science literacy of the nation when it comes time to voting money's in support of such projects so that's my answer to your question yeah another question sir um okay I was one of the people who was kind of sad about Pluto not being a planet are you still sad well unless said now that you explained the thing about sweeping up the other bodies in the same orbit that makes sense what I want to know is is Pluto going to sweep them up good question and maybe then it'll be a planet again good question okay eighty-seven trillion years you come no no Pluto the one way to ask the question is how let me back up Earth plows through two three hundred tons of meteors a day this is debris that is in the way as we move in our orbit I do the calculation in the book I forgot the exact numbers but that sounds like a lie either this includes all the shooting stars you see at night you add all those up a couple hundred tons a day as we orbit the Sun because we're moving 18 miles per second around us that's fast so we're doing a little sweeping up our own ask how much total mass is there that we could sweep up and compare that to the mass of earth itself if you do that it is a mere pittance of our current total mass so you can declare that we dominate the mass of our zone Pluto does not if you look at all the mass that it could interact with collide with scatter there's a process called scattering where you come really close and you redirect the path like in a slingshot fashion you can you can calculate how much mass is there for Pluto interact with its its factors greater than the mass of Pluto itself so for all we know if that all becomes one mass Pluto won't be the mass it becomes it could be joined some other mass even if it did happen but then you would sweep up Pluto so then it would sweep up looting and I'm gonna be the planet and not boot up Pluto would be a lost memory Pluto would be some puddle of molten lava you know we're Pluto we can call it Pluto right you could call it section of your new planet the Pluto zone you know it was like put a little monument to it so that's that's a very that's a very sensitive thought that you had that you shows deep love for Pluto if one day it could dynamically become a planet again so I deeply respect your love I think for Pluto yes but there um somewhat selfish question for Google um I heard kind of a I want Google Pluto yes okay you got Google Earth okay so you go there first to get the surface map all right right now the best images we have from Hubble it's a smudge that's all you got so along someone along those lines when we did Google space it was kind of a collaboration as I heard it in the Pittsburgh office we have some 20% time you know one day a week we get to work on what we want and there was some astronomers there who had all this data and they just got to talking no okay let's put this together you know you say you're at this nice New York location we have a new location all this stuff that you guys use for the planetarium shows those are great I just totally love them those models are so awesome the 3d models the zoom outs up through Orion Nebula all that stuff can we get a hold of those and put them in Google Earth and space yeah yes actually um we would have been up in your face with Google space uh Google you know Google the universe before you even had that venture the difference is in our new facility let's back up you go into a planetarium you're sitting down and there's the sky above you in the old days that was all it could do show you the stars of the night sky we wanted to take you to the next step the next step was not just a closer of view of what's above you we wanted to actually take you there and to take you there required not an image of the object but a three-dimensional understanding of its full structure so we started building a library of the three dimensionality of the universe so it's not as you zoom up to the galaxy that you're getting closer to it because you can get closer to a picture but you're not getting you not get you just it's a magnifying glass you're not going there with our models you can actually go up to the galaxy and enter the galaxy and take a look at it from the other side that is the next step it's the 3d step of the cosmos we got the data you want to share it yeah we have that on tape that do you want to share it so it'd be happy to have conversations about that we use these 3d models oh by the way we have scientists as well as scientifically literate artists computer literate artists who can take the data and turn it into the beauty of these journeys that we share with our audiences so it's exactly right in the old days you'd hire an artist to sort of paint them we've got a we didn't hit a image of the surface of Mars paint went up for me now we have all the data all the trajectories we produce the collision the asteroid collision that took out the dinosaurs old days you might have just drawn and what looks like an explosion we calculate the trajectories the debris it's all ballistic trajectories you can calculate all of that and that's what we do we've got it all oh but not all of it we got all that all the the visualizations that we created for our shows of course we've got that in our library happy to pursue that yeah other questions what is my favorite space oriented movie I have two and then I have my favorite sci-fi movie which you didn't ask me about okay should I start with favorite sci-fi definitely without question the matrix without question it only has one scientific gaff in it given the storyline that they're giving there's one rather embarrassing gaffe actually but I'm gonna let him slide because the rest of the movie was so good was so good you know plus I wanted to like do that I want to dodge bullets myself I just want to you know and you need this has got a sort of dangle in the breeze thank you that's I want to be that I want to make not the matrix two or three matrix one yes okay so I would say holding aside the classics like 2001 that sort of thing I would say my favorite movies in the in the past thirty thirty years - I would say a deep impact they got so much science right that's the asteroid comes takes out civilization and not that's not the Bruce Willis one all right Bruce Willis was in Armageddon where he and oil driller buddies of his save the world and the asteroid in that movie was a comet that he went to explode because we're going to nuke it out of the sky and it broke it into multiple pieces those pieces like must have had like homing beacons because one hit the Eiffel Tower one hit the Chrysler Building one hit a dam one they had aimed meanwhile 70% of the earth's surface is water all right so deep impact understood this fact and so it's asteroid hit the ocean but their producers understood if you hit the ocean you could still destroy the cities and I just do it with a tsunami and that's kind of that's cooler that's kind of more fun okay so a deep impact and I'd say the Carl Sagan movie contact I thought that was brilliantly conceived and executed and was quite a study on on the what maybe we hope not the human reaction cultural reaction to a scientific discovery I thought it was a fascinating probe of that so those are my favorite space movies the others I find to be more pure entertainment and I don't distract myself by them there's the the Star Wars and the Star Trek's and they what's the other one the issue do Star Wars Star Trek little-known um Battlestar actually had a cameo appearance in Stargate Atlantis a cameo like six minutes that was it and then I was gone quite on purpose and and here's what really upset me I thought I did a really good job and then I went home and saw it sucked so I'm not even going to tell you what episode it was all right because I don't want you to know um in the opening of the book there's a really heartfelt letter of apology from a third grader and as since Pluto's demotion I guess have you gotten more of outpouring of yeah we're sorry you're right yeah so in the Pluto files some letters are transcribed others are scanned in so you can see the crayon and the misspellings of the seven-year-old children who have sent me some of these emails by their the only difference between the letters from adults the letters from the children is that the adults spell their words better but they're otherwise have the same depth of emotion and both are pissed off to no end but you cited an interesting letter that I put in the front of the book from a this might have been a second grader third grader who wrote me a letter after the vote was taken to demote Pluto back in 2006 the difference is a third grader today was born into the awareness that Pluto is reclassified so they don't have this baggage this like that the third graders back in 2000 did so that's why the opening letter is a consoling letter and I'll read it for you it's just the openings in the frontier and it's a-you know before you even get to the table of contents there's the letter you can barely read it dear Neil Tyson deGrasse are at first remember all those kids that sent you bad letters well I want to apologize that we said that we'd love Pluto but that we didn't love you sorry about your mean letters so these miss apologize apologizing for the letters and then in the end another letter from a third grader saying people just have to get over this fact that Fudo is a planet that's how science is and so I figured yet see these the kids kids get it kids are cool just the kids the kids so any of the nor the questions we'd be happy to open the other questions anything cosmic I know supposed to be about Pluto but yes you got to go to a microphone otherwise no one in in the youtube world will hear you she's approaching the microphone now here she comes yes okay so I don't think the world is going to be destroyed in twelve twenty twelve of whatever but I thought they had said that that was going to be an alignment that hadn't been happening in a lot of time is that not true it's a lie that's called a lie it's an alignment that happens every year every year and now be careful about people who make big deals about alignments because at any given instant in time the configuration of planets is in and it is such that it won't repeat for you know 80,000 years or 100,000 years or million years and they'll say rare planetary alignment coming up next Tuesday don't miss it no one alive today or ever has ever seen it and you think you're living in special times until you realize that a week later there's another configuration of planets that no one has ever seen in recorded history and so the week later and a week later in a week later that if you have a million alignments that only happened once in a million years then that's in alignment every year so something can be rare but not interesting something can be rare and not even special and that's what happens when you see people touting rare alignments in the sky another one was five years ago there was Mars will come closer to earth that had ever had in 60,000 years don't miss it you say Wow Wow and and the New York Post had a huge like full Mars photo and then this and the story got out of hand it said you'll need sunglasses that night to be able to read by the light of Mars and so here's one of us you ready we're we're in New York here now okay you ready here I'm standing right here right which way is east this way okay I'm impressed that all's you pointed the same direction it's good I was asked that in a place everybody confidently pointed every which way get ready that's East okay ready I go like this now I want to go West is let's do this okay great I've never in my life been this close to Japan it's like yes Mars was closer than it had ever been in sixty thousand years but it was not anything anytime something says a rare thing happens in the cosmos and no one else has ever seen it it's because they forgot all the other rare things that they could have told you about every previous day of the life you've led yes I have I have two questions the first is about the planetary definitions were um has it been determined how round is round and how swept up is swept up oh he's good he's good how round is round it turns out that if you're small as we are the force molecular forces overcome the tendency of gravity to turn you into a round shape that's how we can keep our shape that's why we're not most of us are not spheres okay so so that's why that's why rock can be a rock but the bigger your mass the stronger is what we call yourself gravity and what happens is the force operating on your physical structure ends up overcoming the molecular strength of your material body and since gravity pulls equally in all directions towards a central point the only shape that comes out of that force is a sphere earth itself is all tents and purposes a sphere you so I said well we got Mount Everest and we got valleys and we'll excuse me do you know the deepest point of Earth crust Bannister Marianas Trench thank you it's a good crowd here Marianas Trench do you know how far down that is six miles down six months do you know the highest point above sea level Evert Mount Everest how high up is that why'd you give one in miles in the other in feet give me can we keep the same units here about how high up is matter if live and have fun five miles so the lowest point on our crust to the highest point is like 11 miles it's less than the length of Manhattan to go from the deepest point in the deepest part of the deepest ocean to the highest point of the highest mountain range is 11 miles marathon runners runs they get to that after an hour and a half of it after an hour on the road and how wide is Earth 8,000 miles across do you realize that 11 miles on 8,000 if you were a cosmic finger and came up to the earth and rubbed your finger across it you would not be able to distinguish mountain from valley from dry from wet because the depth of the grooves in your fingerprint would be greater than the texture on the surface of this planet if you shrunk earth down to the size of a cue ball it would be the smoothest cue ball ever manufactured ever so we're all diluted because the school globe in your classroom you'd run your fingers over there's the Himalayan mountains and there's a their line they are lying let me tell you how bad they're lying you think of our atmosphere as this of great extent did you know that the extent of our atmosphere is thinner than the layer of shellac on that school globe so the geology's been lying to you your whole life that's what no why did I go there what it would it don't say wow I was happily answering your question often now wrap around and how swept up and I had well to the roundness so if you're big enough you're round if you're not big enough you're not round like Phobos and Deimos on Mars and Mars so the hope is that this transition is sharp enough so that doesn't confound our efforts to classify okay but there's a worry that in fact that maybe it might be a fuzzier transition that where we're anticipating and that could be another fight down the line the rap how good are we at determining who's around and who is it by the way we're not including the fact that if you rotate fast you get a little fat at the poles and shorter I mean a fat at the equator and short at the poles Saturn is a fast rotator rotates once every nine hours it's ten percent shorter pole to pole than it is across we'd still count that as round it's round but affected by rotation that's how we excited about clearing the zone it's pretty it turns out that's easy to define dynamically there's a calculation you could do whether or not it absorbed it you can declare whether it's gravity is really batting other pieces around and you can that actually has a nice divider between who's clear there orbited who hasn't okay so but it's excellent excellent point and then the other question wanted to ask is just in a two part version of your first question yes fine the second question is with all the space exploration going on or planned or so forth whatwhat do you find most interesting and most worthwhile in terms of where we could put our resources and efforts and what's planned and all that um you know I like life I want to look find life out there it's a huge universe we've made a very common ingredients you know life on Earth is hydrogen oxygen carbon this stuff is everywhere in the cosmos it's chemically fertile make molecules with carbon just you know so I if you want to believe that life on Earth is the only life in the universe in a way that's kind of inexcusably egocentric there's no accounting for that attitude unless you have some sort of philosophy that requires it of you but it's not based in data or evidence okay unfortunately so many philosophies people carry with them today have no foundation in the observation world anyway it's unfortunate because people go to war is over philosophies so so I want to look for life and life on Earth if we use that as a starter kit thrives in liquid water so if you want to find life let's look for liquid water out there and so we know Mars has all this evidence of once having had liquid water we think it's submerged and now in a permafrost and maybe if there's pressures are high enough some of it might have been liquefied creating aquifers recently we found methane emerging from one of the cliff faces of Mars methane you can make it without biology but biology kind of does it for free with sort of anaerobic microbes the kind you find deep in the digestive tract of farm animals methane is an active ingredient in farm animal flatulence so so not that they're cows on Mars that'd be an interesting fine wouldn't it but that the microbes active in the anaerobic microbes it's a it's a it's a whole variety of microbes to thrive where there's no oxygen so I'm wearing treat I want to go digging in those soils one of the moons of Europe of Jupiter Europa is kept warm it's way outside of the Green Zone that zone where the temp does golde zone where the temperatures just right because if you're too close to the Sun and you have liquid water you evaporate too far away you freeze so these kind of there's a zone where it's just right where it's liquid this your rope is well outside of the this green zone this all goalie lie zone yet is an ocean of liquid Ward have been liquid for billion years turns out the gravitational stress of Jupiter on that moon combined with stresses triggered by other moons is pumping energy into that or and when you do so where does the energy go it melts the ice I want to go to Europa go ice fishing on you cut a hole and seal anything swims up to the camera lens and it's called the Jupiter icy moons orbiter Jimo which is currently unfunded or it's on hold for other projects that are coming that would sort of map the surface to choose orbiters will always map the surface for you for the lander that will come later and then you got to be clever about how do you sort of go through the ice you do cut well like what do you do it's probably a kilometer thick you melt it then you have to sterilize the spacecraft you send there you don't want somebody sneezing on it while it's in the lab here then you go there hey we just found you know the Rhino virus you know they have influenza on you know note it came out of your nose sir you know wipe your nose before you packed the spacecraft so you want to make sure that you're not discovering your own self plus one way to melt the ice is to have sort of a radioactive heat source but then you don't want to like get radioactive I you're you know so it's a hard problem how do you explore a planet a surface that might have life that you don't want contaminated so those are my top ones right I like the supercollider going on in in Switzerland right now like probing the limits of the energy of the universe give us insight into what was going on in the Big Bang search for a dark matter dark energy to profound areas of profound ignorance and modern astrophysics 85% of all the gravity in the universe comes from something we had no idea what it is 94% of everything that is the universe so we call dark energy we measure it it's there we don't know what's causing that either so people say are you worried are you upset no I'm actually quite titillated if your research scientists you're drawn to areas of the unknown you don't fear them to embrace them you're seduced by them so thank you all for your time and energy

Channel: Talks at Google

Views: 371,605

Rating: 4.9270496 out of 5

Keywords: TalksAtGoogle, Nova, Astronomy (Field Of Study), The Pluto Files (Book), Pluto (Astronomical Discovery), Neil DeGrasse Tyson (Organization Leader)

Id: ztLZcvtVIo4

Length: 72min 42sec (4362 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 07 2009

Reddit Comments

[u/Scratchums]

I clicked the embedded video instead of the link and I didn't go to the point you specified, and ended up watching the whole damn thing. I'm in a special place right now. A special, drunk place.