When the Cosmos Turns Bad: Neil deGrasse Tyson - Education, Astrophysics, Death by Black Hole (2007)

20 years ago this week astronomers witnessed one of the brightest stellar explosions in more than 400 years a supernova that blazed with a power of 100 million Suns next on book TV astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson his new collection is death by black hole and other cosmic quandary this talk from the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City is about an hour 45 minutes good evening it's quite a wonderful showing for this night so you might be wondering who is this strange man standing in front of you and I mean you know I look exactly like Neil and so I might just introduce myself as Neil deGrasse Tyson no actually I am here to introduce him he's an old friend of mine and I'm very happy to have this pleasure and honor to introduce this great man who is about to show up here and my name is Ben Oppenheimer and one of the astrophysicists here at the Museum but I thought about well how do you introduce a man like this everybody has some notion of who he is otherwise we wouldn't have this show a showing like this in the audience so I thought I could go through all the ridiculous things he's done in his life like going to a substandard school up in Boston up in Cambridge something called Harvard I think it was I don't know these things but he did decide ultimately to go to Columbia for his PhD which was a magnificent decision and in fact that's where I met him 17 years ago when I was an undergraduate and he was a graduate student and I thought wow this guy is really dynamic but he's kind of a slacker and you know I wonder what he's going to end up doing and please to joke around a lot in variably led to my being punched in the stomach at some point and if I run out of here later it's because I'm avoiding another one of those punches so please excuse me but then over the years I so I went off to graduate school in California we lost touch for a while got back in touch 1999 and I heard that he was putting together this magnificent new planetarium rebuilding the Hayden which I had grown up going to of course and he showed me around before it opened and there was the certain Glee in his I just utter pleasure and excitement of walking around seeing these new exhibits explaining some very complicated ideas in modern astrophysics in a way that hadn't been done before and I could tell his passion was there this this was no slacker at all and you can go and look up all of his various accomplishments there are many but I'll tell you this I know of nobody any colleague or any even acquaintances who has a dedication and interest and passion for educating the public about what we do in astrophysics other than Neil Tyson and he's got a way of saying things that I hope you enjoy this evening so without further ado I will introduce my great friend and colleague Neil deGrasse Tyson thank you all for coming out this evening I'm just told that there's a foot of snow that just fell so we're stuck here all night I'm most of the time that I'm called upon to speak to the press it's because there's some cosmic thing that happened the universe flinched and here at the American Museum of Natural History we're not far from the major news centers of the nation ABC CBS NBC CNN is now just down the block and so I'm actually a little uncomfortable being in the media for something that is fully just sort of marketed thing all right I'm in the media now because there are marketing people that put my face in front of the camera to sell this book this book for those on the TV screen oh you might not have known we are being taped to for later err on c-span this evening so whatever you say can and will be held against you so I guess my point is I would say 85% of the time I get approached by the press it is because that I didn't twist their arm they wanted a comment on something that happened in the universe and that level of public curiosity and appetite for the cosmos I don't take lightly neither do any of my colleagues we see it as a genuine measure of the public's fascination and appreciation for all we do in the professional astrophysics community and in case you want to know how many of us there are there's about six thousand five hundred six and a half thousand astrophysicists in the world and if you remember your population numbers for the world that number is about six and a half billion so you divide those two numbers you get one in a million so here's here's the catch if you're ever in the company of an astrophysicist that's the time to ask your questions because you never know when the next time will be where you'll be around another astrophysicist okay but it's not that many people who are responsible for bringing all these riches of the universe to you and we are tickled to death every time the public shows interest if not for the Hubble telescope for you know discovery of a black hole in the center of the galaxy right on down to the discoveries of the space program so I want to publicly thank all of you and the rest of what makes up the general public for your support for what we do over all these years and what I expect to continue into the future I want to make sure there's plenty of time for Q&A at the end it's my favorite part of a program and so and I'm not going to read from the book because you just buy the book and read the book you don't need me to do that so what I want to do is I first tell you about it and then sort of pluck subjects from it and then reflect on those subjects and I'll do that for most of the hour and then we'll break and take Q&A that's the that's the layout for the evening the book is called death by black hole of course I was told that c-span has that that one camera and so you put this here then it's just always in view you know of the camera I learned that from Andy Rooney some years back he just took his book and just put it there and just and went had a cup of coffee you know though they had to keep showing it you know I started writing for Natural History Magazine as a columnist in 1995 the then editor had heard me on the radio and felt that they needed some contributions from the universe to bookend the magazine with the contribution that they were getting monthly from Stephen Jay Gould and so I said sure sounds like fun and so I began in January 1995 not knowing that every month writing an essay at least for me would be like giving birth now the women are saying you have no clue what giving birth is okay I confess I have no clue about giving birth however each of these essays is sort of the sum each essay that forms a chapter in this book twelve years hand-picked essays that have appeared in Natural History Magazine selected and called and organized for this volume each month that I wrote an essay it was it was the sum of what I knew in astrophysics all that I knew as an educator and all that I could bring together to make it real and to pump that out each month it was like my flesh was getting hewn from my body and put down onto the page and I felt like after each month I had to regrow part of my body cells okay that's why I can all I can think of is like it was giving birth and so no it's not easy to do that it's hard to do that but it is one of the greatest pleasures of my life because I get to think about what words to use what phrases what what words work together either poetically scientifically rhythmically and so it's my hope that you could pick up this book open to any page and land on a paragraph in that page and you feel good reading read in that paragraph okay that's my goal now whether I achieve that goal I don't know but that's the goal and so these chapters are some of what I feel were my best as well as chapters that I didn't necessarily feel my best but were highly requested on my website and by other means of communication highly requested by the public so we're organized in sections and I'm just going to pluck something from each section first section the nature of knowledge Oh later on with is a part my favorite section is when the universe turns bad all the ways the cosmos wants to kill us and in there's the title chapter death by black hole but there's also a chapter on on killer Astrid it's been a full discussion of one that's actually headed our way if we have time I'll get to that just remind me if you we can fit that in but just if there's time I don't want you know just if it fits in in the session that we have together remind me to tell you about the asteroid that will render the entire west coast of the United States unlivable so let me lead off there's a section here called the nature of knowledge and there's an essay there that was smooth that works that one work hardly ever works but it worked now four seas will do anything for a c-span here there's a there's a chapter called coming to your senses and I want to just sort of share with you where I'm trying to go there we all know the human body has senses how many five some people claim they have a sixth sense get to that in a moment but the five we know and love a sight hearing touch taste and smell thank you a couple of these are not very useful when you're studying the universe like taste you know your tongue doesn't reach the cosmos so the tongue is not very useful neither is your sense of touch abut sight is certainly very useful no doubt about it and nursing a chest cold from a few weeks ago so forgive me we got our five senses and then you some people say they have a sixth sense they can know things that your five senses can't and you say well what might that be that can maybe feel like they know the future or they know when someone's looking at them or they know they feel it somehow turns out turns out anytime you bring that person into a controlled laboratory those talents just go away they just don't exist they're missing in the laboratory so either it is an actual talent that just somehow hates laboratories or there's sort of a delusional thing where you think you have the power but in fact you don't and you're remembering the hits and not the misses you pick up the phone he said Graham I knew that I knew that was going to be you okay well if it wasn't her you wouldn't say oh I thought this was going to be my grave you just don't even say that because they can kind of look bad and so you forget the missus you remember the hits and you this is self-selection go psychologists have known about this forever if it's we do power selves into thinking we are more powerful and more brilliant and deeper and more insightful than we actually are maybe it's an ego preserving feature of what it is to be human but by the time this our session together is over I hope to disavow you of those great feelings you might have of ourselves as a species so it turns out in science we have dozens of senses there's plenty of things you might want to know about but you can't because you're limited to your five senses for example right now you have no clue and no way to measure without a device what is the level of the magnetic field in this room no clue if you could measure magnetic field you could think of that as another sense measure the magnetic fields around you we have no idea we are not equipped for that neither can we measure for example the presence of ionizing radiation well you would eventually know this because like your limbs would fall off and you say hey something happen okay you'd be sterile all that be take a little longer to figure out you know you we have no capacity to measure this other things you don't open other things you don't know there's some obscure things like polarization you can't detect the polarization of light and that light has vibrates in two different directions and you can polarize it so it only vibrates in one direction you can devise glasses that can polarize light but you still Gordon know the difference you don't know we have it's a big deal in in astrophysics whether light is polarized or not that tells us where light is coming from and what its points of origins are but another sort of everyday thing you just can't figure out one of the is you can't detect low-level earth tremors why because you have like the shock absorbers in your knees and so your knees sort of get rid of it you have filters against it but you put up a seismograph there it is there it is so so we I go on and on and on and on and on perhaps the most important sense we don't have is the ability to see outside of the spectrum of visible light you know visible light ROYGBIV red orange yellow green blue indigo indigo violet you a bit there beat ivy now where the indigo come from Isaac Newton who first labeled the colors of the spectrum had this mystical fascination with the numeral seven the number set and so when he went to label the colors of the spectrum and got six he said we need seven somewhere in there so there is indigo you got it was stuck with indigo now if you have enough precision to put an indigo to ten other colors we could have given you in this full continuum of spectra light any color sensitive people couldn't rattle off thirty colors in there but no we got seven and Roy G bill was born okay even go beyond the VIII beyond VIII you get what all true violet we can't we have no way to detect ultraviolet I said it's not completely true you can detect it in a time-delay sense okay so depending on what shade of skin color you have you go out to the beach and lay under the Sun if you are not protected you're laying there damn fine and then how many hours later you look like a lobster okay so there's a delay there it's the ultraviolet that made you look like a lobster but you didn't know it at the time at the time so by the time you figured it out it was too late let's go to the other side of red you get infrared can't see that either you can we do have infrared sensors we sense infrared in the form of heat that's what we all heat when we feel infrared but beyond infrared there's microwaves we have no microwave detector well now we do cuz we all carry around cellphones these are microwave detectors but if we were if eyes of our eyes were sensitive to microwaves tune it in tune in the microwave all your cell phones would be ablaze with light ok we'd all be walking down the street you know and you'd know who was on how to phonecall and who didn't ok if we have microwave detectors then microwave towers would be ablaze in broad daylight and in the middle of the night we have no such detectors radio waves we can't detect radio waves x-rays gamma rays this is the full sweep of the electromagnetic spectrum and in astrophysics we have telescopes and detectors in each one of these bands far beyond what your naked eye can detect and so every day every night of every day the astrophysicist is invoking a full suite of senses that brings us that much closer to the universe because if you only observe the night sky with a visible light telescope expressions of our own eyeballs you'd be missing what black holes are doing in their environment they're dining there flying stars the outer gas layers of stars as it descends spirals and descends down to this abyss it radiates ultraviolet and x-rays so the first x-ray telescope the first x-ray telescope the first thing it discovered in the universe was a black hole candidate SCOE x1 Scorpius x1 then there's another one in the constellation Cygnus called Cygnus x1 these were sources of x-rays we were previously blind - turns out black hole right there black hole so you can't claim to know the universe unless you look in as many different ways as invoke as many different senses as you possibly can now there's a point to all of this the point is until about the turn of the century not our century but the 1800s to the 1900s until then it was possible to say to do an experiment and say to yourself that makes sense or that doesn't make sense and you had a good chance of being accurate in your Assessor come to 20th century with telescopes started getting seriously big where atom smashers started breaking apart atoms probing nature on levels and on scales never previously accessible to our senses now what does it mean for something to make sense for something to make sense what that means is I take if I take this bottle of water and I let go of it what will happen to it it will fall in fact so linked is my act of letting go to the fact of this falling in our minds that all you have to do is say to me drop it and that means let go but suppose you lived in a world where 30% of the time when you let go this went and floated to the ceiling 30% of the time it's only 70% of the time I felt well then common sense would mean something different under those conditions what was common is 30% of the time the thing floats up so the word drop wouldn't even exist someone gasped over in the corner here it would be let go and let's see what happens you know people be taking bets you know people bet on all kinds of things so what happens is we break the atom get inside get into the nucleus and a whole new world of physics opens up to us world of quantum mechanics where the laws are different we discovered we Edwin Hubble discovers that our our galaxy is not alone among galaxies in the universe a great discovery of the 1920s going on simultaneously while quantum mechanics was being discovered the science of the small and not only that he discovers that the galaxies are hurtling away from each other he discovers the universe a few years later the big bang theory of the universe advances with not much data but that we're expanding at the time you turn the clock back you find out the whole universe sometime in the past all occupied the same volume at the same time you say that doesn't make sense how could the whole universe fit on the head of a pin that doesn't make sense and then you realize the universe doesn't care about your senses because we are probing it beyond the range that your senses were formulated your our senses emerge from being born ordinary human being in this world breathing air walking in one jeez worth of gravity that is our life and so in modern science we no longer require that a successful idea makes sense and I think that's created quite a bit of confusion when a scientist says oh well the whole universe was this and a particle pops out of existence here and shows up there and there's 11 dimensions and this and you're here to say is he what's he smoking you know you wonder what's going on with the scientists today and the fact is our regime is no longer grounded in the limitations of the five senses we carry with us and so the lesson there and which comes across in that chapter is my goal is that it before you celebrate the brilliance of our five senses think about what it is you're not seeing about the universe and then ask yourself what do you need to know about that in order to claim that you know the universe to begin with that's coming to your sense another on the knowledge of nature I'll talk about the vagabonds of the solar system in there there's like Pluto shows up but I don't unload oh okay so let's leave Pluto alone for a night I think it's you know it's got to get over having been blue toad you know that was the word of the year did you see that to be Pluto Pluto so was Pluto Pluto or it was Pluto something else which had to happen and then everything else is Pluto after they're after I'm just we got to get top linguist on this all right get a full report on that in the morning so I believe will slip by that one I'm okay you're okay with that I'm okay with that I gotta hit Goldilocks here we are in section for the meaning of life the challenges and triumphs of knowing how we got here we got to check little Goldilocks and the three planets you remember Goldilocks we all know Goldy yeah we all know gold you know gold Goldilocks now here's my problem with the Goldilocks story okay and say hey I got a problem because if I were the parent and I found Goldilocks in the house I just eat Goldilocks okay that's what would happen right that'd be the end of the story and the lesson is don't go bustin in other people's houses okay what you want a lesson there's a lesson all right but they want their lesson to be a little more nuanced so one part is too hot too cold one is just right well in the solar system you can be a distance from the host star that might be too close for water to be sustained as a liquid if so all the water on your planet will evaporate not available to you to make life because life as we know it requires liquid water so now if you can go a little farther away whatever water you might have you're too far from the Sun the intensity of the sun's energy is too low the water freezes once again not available for your circulatory system and so you imagine that beyond a certain distance you would not find planets with water northern planets with life so there'd be this comfortable Goldilocks zone the habitable zone where you'd find liquid water prevalent on the surface of a planet fine fine turns out you can go outside the zone and find water but I'll get to that later but right now let's just consider that scenario now turns out other things affect this like greenhouse gases that trap heat and other and what it would air pressure where if the pressures too low you can't have liquid water the water just go straight from ice to gas you've seen this before it happens it happens with dry ice did they still have the ice cream man in the park and he opens up the thing is dry ice and then it frozen carbon dioxide you've never seen liquid carbon dioxide because the air pressure on Earth is too low for it to ever reach in liquid it goes straight from solid to gas we have a word for that's called sublime kind of like that word sublime for such a an odd chemical phenomenon and so so fine so we're here on earth and say we're fine we've got room temperature I'm good with that and then you look a little to the left you get Venus our sister planet it's about the same size as we are about the same mass as we are a lot of the same structural features that we have it's just a little closer to the Sun than we are if we are one unit of distance from the Sun Venus is 0.7 so Venus is 70 and of the way to us from the Sun so you say okay Venus where are you just like earth no Venus its atmospheres nearly 100 times as thick as our atmosphere that's bad enough because you'll get just get crushed but you'll be lucky if that's all that happened to you because the temperature on Venus in having a carbon dioxide atmosphere it has a runaway greenhouse effect it is 900 degrees fahrenheit on the surface of Venus 900 degrees and I did the math you could take a 16-inch pizza put it out on the windowsill and it will cook in 9 seconds u2 you would have been vaporized in the process but you'll have a cook pizza that's just right in 9 seconds ok of course venus is the goddess of love and beauty and as 900 degrees they didn't know that when they named the planet now let's go a little to the right a little bit farther from the Sun than we are we get planet Mars Mars has riverbeds that meander flood plains river deltas lake beds but not a single drop of water at all but these features were made by water we are 99% confident of that assertion that's what water does when it flows in abundance it makes rivers and lakes and valleys and river deltas you can do a comparative geography of earth features and Mars features and one-for-one you now all of them we had the water go nobody knows we think it's sunk down below the surface froze there in a kind of permafrost situation but there's none on the surface some knobs got turned on Venus and on Mars to turn them into what we would consider completely inhospitable environments Venus is 900 degrees Fahrenheit Mars is 250 degrees below zero bone-dry mark it's right there it's right there Juneau Mars among all the planets is the most hospitable place there is after Earth yet it'll kill you posthaste so the lesson there for me is we know Mars once had water and it does not why not let's find out why because if we find out which knob had turned in the ecosystem of Mars I want to know if we're turning that same knob here on earth we don't know that you got people saying why are we studying the universe we don't need worry about earth problems here and I'm thinking about how about that asteroid coming in you're not looking up for that one you worried about the budget in Congress and this we got an asteroid coming we got a planet has a runaway greenhouse a planet that used to have water and does not excuse me where do you think answers are going to come from we're not an I'll it comes from the sky thank you answer is going to come from the sky but not some Island we are participant in the cosmos vulnerable to cosmic phenomena not only that there's cosmic phenomena that would give us insight into who and what we are and if we don't have that urge you just move back into the cave because that's where we'd all be if we didn't have some fraction of us out there trying to push that frontier it wouldn't have to be a cosmic for just any frontier well wonder what's on the other side of the cliff that person doesn't come back so that's fine what's on the other side of the valley it's a cliff it's I meant to say Mountain there I'm sorry I didn't mean me other side of the cliff let's start that again so they say what's on the other side of the mountain and so they go and find out they bring back fruits or riches or whatever whatever that's what exploration is that's what it is to be human so why we have a space program so we have the luxury of having a space program so so I don't know the universe I see that's that's that's that's the ticket right there that's where insights will come about where we fit in this universe I'm gonna go on to a radio bubble part of the section on the meaning of life a radio bell you might have not heard that phrase before I don't know a radio bubble a radio bubble you might say how do you if they're aliens out there that are intelligent how would you tell them that you're here do send a spaceship our fastest spaceships ever launched would take seventy five thousand fifty thousand years to reach the nearest star that's slow and there's a rule in science if you do an experiment you want to be alive when the experiment is done it's they don't tell you that in graduate school but you figure that out empirically okay so sending a probe to another planet I don't think so not unless we might develop warp drives or something okay and that could happen but I don't think anytime soon or any time that we should be banking on so what do you do well you can send light how about radio waves that's why it a form of light radio waves we have big radio telescopes just reverse them send us a signal out the other way it will travel at the speed of light printed 86,000 my as per second still takes a while there's nothing closed out there nothing the nearest star to the Sun is four years away traveling at the speed of light so it still takes a while but you can outlive that one all right so you do this and you say well wait a minute maybe we have a head start on this plan let's look back in time how long have we been radio-loud how long have we been producing radio signals on earth some of which will have leaked away from Earth you just go back in time turns out TV waves the frequency that we use to communicate with television those go straight if they don't hit you they go didn't they're gone they leave the atmosphere that's why you don't like in the old days remember when TVs had antennas remember that yeah you're all 20 and under I know right there was a day long ago we had to get out of your sofa to change the channel of the television set and while you did that you had to adjust the antenna until it was just right but then you'd be in the way of the screen then you'd let go and then the image would go bad again so everyone would then tell you to stand there holding the antenna this was many moons ago people used to live this way it's true I'm just thinking people sit they can sit in a couch honey where's the remote you know and I like spend 10 minutes looking for the remote rather than just going up to the TV to change the channel anyhow back when TV was broadcast which it still is but most of people get it via cable today a TV way to go straight out and so too would a shortwave radio would go well it depends on which wavelength we use some would reflect off the ionosphere of the earth and stay sort of trap others would escape but if you if you take the inventory of what these programmes were you can say hey we have this growing sphere of influence in the galaxy beginning with our earliest broadcast they've been going now for 70 years so in fact we are in the middle of our own radio bubble that has a radius of 70 light-years it's a radius that is washed over all the stars that fill that volume hundreds of stars and so we've already announced ourselves to aliens if they're there and want to listen so the earliest of these programs it would be it so the aliens are listening right they get the feeble signal but then but they're alien to smart aliens so they can figure it out recode the carrier signal to the main thing we can get the image and there's howdy-doody okay and then they see listen interesting species let me figure out how the male and the female interact with one another and they learn that from early episodes of I Love Lucy yes these are benchmark ways that men and women interact and then as the radio wave continues to wash over then they have episodes of Gomer pile you know and you think about this this is our first introduction to the aliens this is kind of scary now there's some programs that they would never get programs that have only ever been broadcast over cable like MTV's beavis and butt-head okay so there's certain things that are good that you that that's not the first thing the aliens get so some programming is forever hidden in the electrons of your care of your coaxial cable so so you look at this and you say what will they think of us you know then they get broadcast that there was like atomic bomb and a hundred thousand war and I am certain that these aliens who are in desperate search themselves for intelligent life in the universe they will conclude that earth does not contain intelligent life and pass us by um how am i doing on time here we okay I got a few more things are we okay you like you you call everybody got like be somewhere after this I just want to make sure that we okay I don't want to mess up your your plans for later where we going so when the universe turns bad well that's that contains the title chapter death by black hole now to get in trouble with a black hole you got to go out and find him there aren't that many of them in the galaxy so you're looking for trouble if you die for having fallen into a black hole I'm just letting you know that now but if I had my choice that's how I would die because it is so cool all right no you can say well dr. cycle you'd like to sort of die in this hospital bed in this Hospice that's they call in hospices right I say no launch me to the black hole right over there in the gamma sector all right that's how I'm going to do it so here's what happens you stand up here on earth and again six something and my feet are closer to the center of the earth then the top of my head is you can do the math and you can calculate that the force of gravity between earth and you is stronger at your feet than it is at your head because your feet are closer to the center of the earth it's simple Newtonian gravity but you don't feel that difference I don't blame being lightheaded on this fact all right if that's not what May whatever you is not this so here you are and you don't notice it because your body overcomes it it's not it's barely measurable and why is it barely measurable because you are tiny I am tiny compared with the size of the earth this is eight thousand miles in diameter well going to the Senate four thousand miles to the Senate and I'm the six feet standing on top of it that's nothing a black hole however because it's so small you can get much closer to it compared with your height and so what happens is you descend to this and your feet lead it so imagine a feet first dive to the black hole and so you start getting pulled and and you begin to stretch and it kind of feels good you know we all like what you do when you wake up in the morning you stretch people pay top dollar to get to stretch but I think all the yoga people do this direction okay and it feels good until you realize it's not stopping and it's okay I'm not having fun anymore and by the way this difference in gravity is called the tidal force it's the same kind of forcing that creates the tides on earth why the water stretches across Earth's surface so as you get pulled you begin to feel it and there is a point where the difference in gravity between your head and your toe becomes greater than the molecular bonds of your flesh and at that moment your body snaps into two pieces and then those two pieces continue to descend and they feel this difference in gravity and then they snap into two pieces each now we went from one to two we're now up to four cadet we got someone to the front row was plugging his ears you don't want to hear about getting snapped into two pieces and this continued one to two to four to eight to 16 to 32 you keep this up you're not much of anything after a short while you're just the stream of particles descending down now it turns out that's not even the worst thing to happen to you it gets worse because in a black hole the vicinity around of this fabric of space and time in the vicinity of a black hole funnels you it narrows as it comes near the black hole this is what we learned from Einstein's general relativity it describes the shape of space in the presence of gravity and you do up the math you find out that at a black hole space funnels down to the point so as you descend the black hole you are not only stretched you're not only stretched you are extruded through the fabric of and you you move through the fabric of space and time like toothpaste through a tube and we have a word for this go spaghettification that's cool that there's a word for dying while falling into a black hole spaghettification I don't know if it's fusilli again I don't know whatever but it's you know number two spaghetti number eight whatever that is any pasta fiction Otto's here angel hair angel hair pasta that's the thinnest of them if I remember correctly because they measured the thickness of angels hair to determine this so you want to avoid black holes if either they tear up the environment we got a big one in the center of the Milky Way galaxy although it's not the biggest in the neighborhood this the Andromeda galaxy our nearest big neighbor it's gotten one the dwarfs our black hole okay and some astrophysicists have like black hole Envy you know it's like welcome ours isn't as big as that because there's like cool stuff happening in the middle of the andromeda galaxy because it's got a bigger black hole that we got some cool stuff but there's a cooler all right and we what we learned is that most galaxies indeed have black holes in their centers in their centers and send the properties of so many galaxies previously imagined to be distinct and separate and classified as distinct objects turns out it's just a matter of what angle we were viewing the turbulence created by the black hole in the center so there's been a tremendous coming together of galactic information just over the past ten or fifteen years simply because you're looking at a galaxy from a different way and so black holes you really simply just want to avoid them I got a chapter in here which I think is my section here which i think is my favorite it's when science meets culture in fact if you're a little science phobic which is probably not true if you even knew how to get into this museum and come to this room but maybe you were dragged here by a friend raise your hand if you were dragged here by a friend tonight we've got somebody in the back row another one here brave of you sir to be direct to agree on your you know on your Tuesday night to come here thank you for coming that that section is an exploration of what happens when science meets culture and I want to highlight a couple of items in it I've got fear of numbers this one is kind of fun it's you look around you going to elevator this is the first indication that we are number phobic okay so you got the numbers and then you get to the lobby so if you count them down 806 or 32 and it's not a 1 but it's an L that's the lobby but then they're always floors below the lobby and then there's like ll and B and then B B and then s B and I'm thinking what are you doing here just call it zero negative one negative two negative oh no siree no negatives in this culture any accountants out there no negatives on your balance sheet you put your negative numbers in parenthesis are you afraid of your negatives raise me if you're not counting here weight weighs your hand accounting right there why do you what what what's good with you in the negative numbers sir please I got a no he doesn't know either he's a hundred ah look you'll get back to me on this one okay it's in parenthesis I was in a hotel in Geneva Switzerland they had negative numbers and their hotel you went to zero negative one negative two negative three and then I realized of course Switzerland that's where the world's largest particle accelerator is located people they're not afraid of numbers so they can put negative numbers in their hotels another thing take a walk up and down Broadway right here in Manhattan in New York City and go poke your head into each elevator Bank and you will find out that 75% of them I did this experiment do not have a number 13 check it have you seen this look next time and I'm thinking this is not 21st century America I'm gonna go next time I'm gonna go on uh I'm gonna get a sharpie and cross out to number 14 and put 13 next to it I cuz they holy you're foolin that's the thirteenth floor she had people are afraid of the number 13 if people afraid of numbers what hope do we have in this world this is scary just afraid of a number you know about the lottery the state lottery okay it's widely said that that's a tax on the poor because people with lower income spend a disproportionately higher fraction of that income on the lottery and if you look at the data on the line your chance for any one in five million or something and I'm thinking to myself no it's not a tax on the poor the lotteries attacks on everyone who never did well in mathematics in school that's what it's a tax up and you don't have to do that well in math to figure out that's not what to do with your money man guess me angry I got to calm down wait let me get a drink all right where was I let me Adam okay I got another one one of my most highly requested essays it's called Hollywood nights this one I'm going to apologize in advance yes on occasion I'm one of those if you bring me to the movie theater I'm going to say that's the wrong sky that they just put the moon that's the wrong moon and I'll be annoying as I sit next to you but only on selected films if the film has no pretense of getting any facts straight at all then I don't even give it the - I don't even I might even still enjoy the movie but I'm not going to worry about it but there's some films that had no excuse at the top of that list its Titanic we know what day it sank what month it sank what year it's saying what longitude what latitude we know everything about that night so why is it that that Kate Winslet after the ship sank there she is on that on that wooden plank okay fine late why didn't lean on the Caprio try to climb on there with her why what what why not least experiment it just clings on it's okay I'll just die here I'm fine I'm okay with that it's like what we'll find another plank there's got to be some other floating stuff out there where was I I was Kate Winslet so there she is and she's whistling or whisk in delirium and she's looking straight up there is only one sky she should have seen and the sky that the camera showed you was the wrong sky not only that the left side of the sky was a mirror reflection of the right side of the sky it was not only wrong it was lazy and here's a film that was widely advertised as having the cook that they sent a submersible Jim Cameron sent a submersible down to the Titanic and looked at the wall sconces and the china patterns and all the designs of the staterooms and got every rivet every design perfect on his ship for his movie now you can't double check any of that because you don't have a submersible but for 50 bucks you can buy a planetarium program to tell you what the sky looked like the night that Titanic sank so I was pissed so I made a letter I came I rushed back to my office got my finest of letterhead I got a letterhead and got every all 5-color live astrophysicist but I got everything on that let the director Frederick P Rose director that I got all that and I wrote the letter no reply I said I try I did do I did due diligence there a couple of years later I bump into Jim Cameron in Washington that's he not this time I bumped him in in Pasadena California there's a NASA meeting out there but he was very active with NASA and he's and he's an explorer he's a genuine Explorer on top of his other formidable talent as a movie producer and director so he's there and I said you know gee I sent you a letter a couple years those mr. Cameron since your letter a couple of years ago about this and the sky and it wasn't Ryan and I was kind of alright and he said well actually that happened in post-production so and he missed that one so I was still angry I don't know I was not a good another hits it for me but al is the answer I he missed that one fine so two years let after that no what are we up to this happened 80 no no sorry now we're up to 2003 just a couple of years ago he was honored by Wired magazine with a big party here at the Rose Center for Earth and space and just cuz like if my place I got invited to sort of hang out and they invited me to dinner there's like eight of us he and some of his closest friends and we're there he's with his friends the wine is pouring I said here's my big chance to do it again okay now I'm just being like immature at this point so I said Jim because now I can call him Jim we're drinking wine you call him Jim so I said Jim a couple of years ago I told you about the sky and I'm still kind of wondering why didn't you think why why why what and so he said Ruth let me think this one hmm last I checked Titanic has grossed about a billion dollars worldwide imagine how much more it would have grossed if I had the sky correct can I make a bigger fool of myself in front of so then I just let that one go I didn't I was done until two months later I get a phone call from some guy and he says hi I'm Johnny Jones I forgot the guy's name but he I did yeah Johnny everybody who I forget it's just Johnny Jones so he co says I'm I'm working in post-production for a reissue with the director's cut of the Titanic and Jim Cameron tells me you have a sky for me to use for the new footage now he couldn't change all the skies the ones that were already sort of built in but the new footage had the new sky so it is possible it is that it is hope in the world and while I make I make fun of Jim and he the fact is he's he's a he's a man of high integrity with regard to what he produces and what he cares about and so I just wanted to tip my hat to him in that episode and for politely putting me in my place without actually just telling me that I was a you know what he really wanted to surely have told me um I got one more and then we'll just go to Q&A how's that we okay we're okay is it temperature all right out there yeah I'm okay up here too so I'm glad I'm glad um the final section is it's called science and God when ways of knowing collide and that section contains my most highly downloaded essay ever written relatively recently it's called the perimeter of ignorance and I want to share with you some of the themes of that essay before we go to QA um I wrote that essay at a time when the intelligent design movement was garnering headlines weekly and intelligent design movement in case you had forgotten or never knew or weren't paying attention but you're you're a newspaper reading crowd so I'm sure you were all there insulting design is the assertion that there are things about nature that are so intricate so sort of brilliant and concept that it just couldn't happen and so defying of the methods and tools of science to decode that it must have had the hand of an intelligent designer an intelligent in that reference refers to something vastly more intelligent than our feeble human minds and so that's the premise and so you go around look through nature up that's one of those that's intelligently designed that's an intelligent now it's hard to separate the invocation of the word intelligent in that sentence with a reference to some somebody's God so you have to ask is this a religious movement or is it a movement of some pure philosophy untouched by religion you have to ask that and the courts ask that of the movement and their famous court case in Dover Pennsylvania November just just last November where the school district tried to bring intelligent design into the science classroom as a science plan as part of the science curriculum and the judge read the evidence for and against intelligent design and basically through the court case out they threw it out wrote one hundred and one hundred thirty five hundred fifty page statement about why science to do science you need data and evidence and discovery and this sort of thing and a telogen design didn't fulfill that so here is this debate going on and I'm normally I will jump into debates unless I think I have something unique to contribute if you had a lot of voices I'm okay go do it let me find something that needs voices okay that one didn't really need my voice there plenty of people arguing but then I thought wait a minute it's missing something I've got to address and you know what it's missing intelligent design that's the food that's what you call it today but as an idea it's been around for thousands of years in AD 150 Claudius Ptolemy one of the architects of the geocentric universe earth in the middle it was having to be a wrong model but it was brilliantly wrong and of course people to think about what's going on in the mo missions of the objects of the night sky when he looked up he'd see the planets move this is pre Newton of course you see the planets move and then they slow down and stop and then go backwards and then slow down stop and then continue forward again nobody understood this there's like a mystery so Ptolemy would look up and he penned these words in the manuscript of his greatest work he said when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies the planets in that case I no longer touch earth with my feet I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia now that's beautiful theories basking in the majesty of his god Zeus almost in celebration of his ignorance I don't know what this is but surely somebody does that's Zeus and I'm here with it so that's a form of intelligent design he looks at something he can't figure out his tools available to him do nothing for him so he says Zeus did it let's move for going to leave some people out but they're more of the same examples the essay has them all let me fast forward to Isaac Newton we're not going forward 1700 years 1600 years go fast what to Isaac Newton Isaac Newton's my man I think is the smartest person to ever walk this earth and I'm not alone in that assessment now if you want to fight me on that we can do that I'll give you just one example and then they'll just just to sort of temper you if you're ready to go to fisticuffs because like Einsteins your man or Leonardo or whomever I'm going to set you straight okay Isaac Newton discovers well first he's got to put the Indigo in there I get that gets that out of the way then alright actually did that second but he discovered the laws of motion and the laws of gravity and someone comes up to it says uh Ike I don't know if he went by Ike but sounds better Ike why do planets orbit in the shape of ellipses and not some other shape any lips as a kind of squash circle so he looks they say you know because by the way his his equations of gravity give you ellipses and so but he thing he said well you know I don't know I'll get back to you so he goes back home to his home in Lincolnshire which is out away tripple suburbs of London I Newton was avoiding the plank that was running through London killing many many people he left London Newton was smart okay he left London people are dying you leave okay first indication of how smart the man is he left London went to a hillside at home in Lincolnshire goes back I forgot how long this took but it wasn't very long it was you count it in months not in years she goes back figures out why his planets go any lips is and he comes back I figured out here's why and his friend who he correspondent with by mail said that's great what did you what did you have to do to figure this out he said oh I had to invent integral and differential calculus and that helped me solve this answer we struggle with our calculus class and Newton invented on a dare just to get something else done and he did this before he turned 26 I could go on there's a story shared to me brother c-span how you doing you end up taping the thing there I got to get this other quick story on Newton this was conveyed to me by a rich guy a friend and colleague at Princeton where he'd spent some time in Cambridge and learned these sort of Newton stories apparently over the river cam there's a cam revver as we get cam bridge Isaac Newton designed a bridge it's not a big river it's like a stream called a river but it's a stream he designed a bridge made of wood that'll eight neighbors you to walk across the bridge to walk across the river this bridge had no screws or nails in it it was just wood pieces assembled together into a stable bridge then at some point hundred years later people figure well maybe we should clean the bridge for gorf Nord polish it up so they take apart the bridge and they can't figure out how to put it back together so they got nails in it now Isaac Newton also he's responsible for the ridges on coins what but where'd that come from well he was so famous in his day the government had to like reward him somehow so they made him Chancellor of the Exchequer so he was he he tracked British currency make sure there was no no counterfeiters and it was his idea to put ridges on coins that's why today we have ridges on our coins we wonder why you do it's not really relevant to anything but I did kind of lead you there didn't I okay so the ridge is it turns out and the old days coins used to be raided made of like precious metal right not today we know but back then the coin was silver or gold so a coin comes into your possession you'd say nobody will notice let me just file off with just a little bit of the edge and collect it in a little vessel nobody notice then if I do this enough times I'll have a pot of gold now you think you're the only one thinking this but everybody is thinking this and so the coins just got smaller and smaller and smaller and so he said we got to do something about you put ridges on it if the ridges are wiped away you decline the coin takes a brilliant man to come up with something that simple and so all of our coins dime and up have ridges and no one wants to file copper off your penny all right there's a point we just don't put in the ridges all right it's like keep the penny all right I put the whole penny in the thing no one's going to hurt no one's going to miss it so where was that back to intelligent design so here's Newton so I think I made it clear to you what I think of the man so he solves his equations for gravity and says okay there's it's it's a two-body problem so he's got you figured out Earth Moon and the orbit figured out the Sun and the earth he's got it he figured it out figured out the Sun in each of the planets but then he realized that as Earth comes around the bend and Jupiter happens to be out there that not only is the Sun and Earth pulling on each other Jupiter is tugging on earth every time we come around to back stretch Jupiter is tugging and I come around I go guy go a little further cuz Jupiter went further then I come around I get the tug again and so he looked at this we got the major gravity and then we have these minor tugs and he tried his best to figure this out he said this system is unstable you keep this up the orbits will get distorted out of recognition and earth would fly off into space yet somehow we're all still here and somehow the orbits are pretty circular in there so they're ellipses but not bad ellipses so something is keeping things stable and for the first time in his entire record of the discovery of the laws of mechanics and the laws of gravity in this tome that one of the greatest science books ever written and it's called Principia in that for the first time Isaac Newton says God must step in fix he didn't mention God talking about his formula F equals MA his formula for emotion he didn't talk about God when he knew and figured out the motions of the planets and it's universal law God is nowhere to be found he gets to a point where he can't answer the question God is there that's intelligent design something he couldn't figure out there it is he didn't say maybe someone else smarter than I who will figure this out one day it's not what he said and so this concept of reaching the limits of your knowledge and then saying God is there is all old it's not new didn't first show up in Dover Pennsylvania and we're not talking about uneducated people here we're talking about some of the most brilliant minds the world has ever produced so so now what happened let's fast forward it took 130 years but somebody was finally born who could solve that problem Simone Pierre de Laplace a brilliant French mathematician of the late 18th century in the last three years of the 18th century he produced a five volume tone called citizen mechanic or mechanics or celestial mechanics in English but he's French so it would that's what it was so in there he studies the stability of the solar system invents a new or develops perfects a new branch of calculus called perturbation theory and what he says is okay I can figure it out set up the equation this way you've got the main force and now you have these little tugs represent all these little tugs by this term in this equation now crank the equation and when you do that it turns out the little tugs don't amount to much they all cancel out and so that in fact the solar system is stable beyond Newton's projections for it napoleon who's a contemporary of Laplace summoned up this Napoleon he wasn't just a little tyrant he studied engineering and physics said he would know where his cannonballs would drop okay that's at least half the reason why he was successful he go to his library which which I visited it's a whole wall just physics and engineering and and and what's the study of materials metallurgy and metallurgy all on the wall so he summons up Laplace said this is a brilliant piece of work the probably was smart enough to read this book knew enough math to have read this book and gotten the main gist of it said Laplace this is a brilliant piece of work but you make no mention of the architect of the system and Laplace replied sir I had no need for that hypothesis and so here you have a delay of one hundred and thirty years of a problem that previously was ascribed to the handiwork of God now was no longer an assumption and it gets solved by somebody who's brilliant and so what we've learned over all of these examples and they're tons of them one consult is that intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance it is you get to something that you don't understand and then you stop you say god did it and you no longer progress beyond that point and you're going to wait around now here's what here's that here's what's here's what's inexcusably hubristic about that comment you're going to come to this point and you're going to say I can't solve this problem neither can anyone who will ever be born after me solve this problem therefore it is intelligently designed deal you make that comment oh maybe it's true but I don't want to put you in charge of the like Alzheimer's research or if the cancer prevention research no that would put you somewhere else put you on the factory line or something I'm going to get you out of that frontier lab because the discoveries are not coming from you and so the issue in Dover should not have been kick ID out of the school system know it sweet people people have invoked it you don't sweep that under the rug it's a fascinating part of the chapter of this is in history so put it in the philosophy class put it in the religion class put it in the history of science class but because science is a philosophy of discovery it has no place in the science classroom and that was my only argument it simply doesn't belong in the science classroom because it's not science and that essay has been heavily downloaded I don't know what people are doing with it but I'm happy to have served in that capacity to at least put it in context so the people if you engage in the conversation you can do it in an informed way and not in some kind of a you know emotionally driven irrational way in a similar case which came after this book just a month ago to a December mid December do you remember this case is a Jersey kid who taped his history teacher telling the students that they'll burn in hell if they don't accept Jesus as their Savior and he said that the Big Bang and evolution is not scientific and that Noah's Ark carried dinosaurs and so I so and once again plenty people arguing that out and I said let me just let me stay away from that but then I said know something I gotta come back alright um so not tell you why I came back it was being argued on on on the you know First Amendment separation of church and state people say this is a violation of separation of church and state and it can't happen and it's public tax money and and there was a whole Amendment conversation going on about why this should not have and I'm thinking no wait wait stop stop and I say it's not nothing to do with the First Amendment it's got nothing to do with legalities the ALCL ACLU it's got nothing to do with any of these people what it has to do with so it's not the separation of church and state it's that if he says the Big Bang and evolution are not scientific and that Noah's Ark carried dinosaurs what's really going on here is that it's not that you want to separate church and state that you want to separate ignorant scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers that's what you need to do in that case now if he had only said Jesus is your Savior and you got to take him in he's it okay then it's a religion get with the religion somewhere else problem but if he's also going to say that Noah carried dinosaurs on the ark and claim that that's true I don't care what religion that comes from that is demonstrably false we know our width is the museum we got dinosaur bones in this museum we know where they came from okay they long predate human beings long predate human beings by 65 million years elapsed so I actually wrote that letter to the New York Times and they published it in the letter letters to the editor second oh if you caught it but that was like six well I was just - power - it was just a little so I had to get that off my chest as well that happened now I'm gonna leave you with a thought that I hope keeps you awake at nights and it has to do with our assessments of ourselves there's been a long trend in the history of science to basically tell us that we are not unique in any way that one might measure any sensible way one might measure that we thought maybe birth was something Niq in the known universe is not which is another planet in orbit around a unique star no no the Sun is just one of hundred billion stars in a unique galaxy no now we've got 100 billion galaxies in our unique universe okay that's kind of where we are now right are we sticking with one universe or we got following that trend say maybe there's the multiverse we're just one of multiple universes we've got top people working on that now among the things we'd like to tell us is that we are smart as a species smartest species there ever was and we celebrate that fact we say we're human and they're not we can compose poetry we we create symphonies we sonnets and calculus and not all of us invent the calculus but we the least can study it okay now you know our closest genetic relative is what yeah chimpanzee chimpanzee and depending how you measure it's high 90s in percent of DNA that we share now if you ask a chimpanzee oh excuse me what's the Pythagorean theorem a chimpanzee is not going to give you the right answer there now I will give you you know how much time you need to teach it to him he's not going to learn the Pythagorean theorem okay let's get simple why let's just give it the times table it's not going to learn the times table either maybe up to three or maybe just up to one long division no but we can do all those things so we're smart now maybe we're not so smart now here's what that's what keeps me awake at night this is just kind of spooky are you ready okay if the miniscule DNA difference between humans and apes and other Apes or in particular the chimpanzee if the miniscule difference in DNA between us accounts for this vast gulf in intelligence then maybe that does not represent a vast gulf in intelligence consider consider a creature a species with the same increment small increment in DNA beyond us that we are beyond the chimpanzee just a little bit give it to them what will they be capable of look at what we're capable of compared with the chip now ask what would they be capable compared to us and now think of just one flu okay we put our toddlers in front of Sesame Street and they learn their ABCs they put their toddlers in front of calculus streets and by age 4 calculus is self evidence what do we put on our refrigerator doors we put the pasta collages on the refrigerator doors what would they put on the refrigerator doors their kids come home with symphonies composed it's all Junior just did a you know four-part harmony 9 cards at symphony today oh isn't that cute the Junior did that oh so cute our greatest intellectual achievements would be trivial expressions of the intellect of a creature that had that small increment above us that we have above chimpanzees they would show us to their fellow species as we show chimpanzees they might be they might they might take special interest in Stephen Hawking they say here's a special one among them okay Junior see you know the astrophysics you're doing into kindergarten well in these stupid humans it he's better than cuz he can do it in his head okay and he can do it in his head and so they'll study him because he can do in his head what the rest of us have to write down or can't do it all so he be a subject of study and so here we are thinking we're great thinking we're at the top of everything it's because it feels good to to cushion ourselves that way intellectually physically emotionally but the fact is we may not be much at all and that worries me because it might mean that there's some boundary in the universe that in fact we're just too stupid to figure out now our advantage is everyone single one of us doesn't have to be completely smart because we we are we accumulate discoveries I don't have to invent calculus somebody else did I can step on top of that and then try to increment it from there so we're scaling this ladder rung by rung so I'd maybe some hope for us but I don't want to approach this with some kind of large ego thinking we're the top of anything that's the source of most of the evils in the world thinking you're at the top of something when in fact you're not or at least at best you're just the same and the most profound concept that I can share with you in this book is the recognition that while it's humbling to recognize it but it's humbling to see that we're not you know we're small we're kind of feeble with the mercy of asteroid where we're but you know we've got two or three pounds of grain out of here that at least figured out the stuff that we did that's kind of cool but not only that we know enough about the universe to know that it's not that simply we are here in the universe is out there you look at the chemical ingredients of life itself put them in order in in rank order you get hydrogen which comes from the water molecule you get oxygen which comes from the water molecule you get carbon it's the foundation of our chemistry you get nitrogen in order and the next one is that most famous element of them all it's on every single list it's called other okay so hydrogen oxygen carbon nitrogen other now you got left that's enough that's in life now let's turn to the universe and say hey universe what do you have ranked among your elements what's number one for you hydrogen what's number two helium well if you remember from chemistry class helium is inert you couldn't do anything with it chemically even if you tried so let's skip that next in the universe oxygen carbon nitrogen other thank you so we are one for one the same ingredients in the universe which itself is a bit humbling if we were made of an isotope of bismuth then you'd have an argument say hey we're rare stuff come here check us out look at where we are all right and but like no no we're made of the most common ingredients of the universe but those ingredients are traceable to the actions of high mass stars that forge these elements in their core destabilize exploded spread their enriched ingredients their guts across the galaxy creating environments where the next generation of stars will have the ingredients that can then make planets and people and so not only are we in this universe the universe is in us and I know of no more enlightening in nobly enriching thought than that and that is a thought I'll leave you with this evening thank you for your attention uh we can we can hang out for questions and and but some people have to go so I don't want to stop that like if you park too far away or you like live in Jersey or something but but but you can hang out I mean how often can you hang out Plusle and astrophysics being that one-in-a-million thing here's the big chance okay so you should wait until the microphone comes to you otherwise no one in c-span land will know what you ask okay so when we come right here to the gentleman on the aisle test test right there test test you guys here yeah you're on you're on okay sir yes Neil I wanted to ask when the c-span program would be but before that I have to ask does the Hayden Planetarium pay you enough to buy a pair of pants that isn't it oh oh the question was is my salary sufficient to buy pants that do not rip this rip happened two hours ago and I don't normally bring spare pants to my office that would not look good to carry extra pants into your office and so I had so I had to ask myself what do I do about this fact then I realized it's like fashion you know people pay top dollar for cut up pants so what I did was I swear to you it looked too clean I said if it's that clean people think I'm just stupid and didn't like know that I had a rip in my pants so I pulled the threads off so that it looks like they were bought this way and now I look here okay but that was not my point okay I meant no disrespect by wearing holey pants here tonight um it happened just a few hours ago to my dismay okay and I have no idea when they will air the c-span program but I'll give you the mantra check your local listings as they say okay sir on the corner here yes and we'll give her a good workout in fact while I'm answering I'll try to pick the next one so that you can stay in shape there yes hello what did James Cameron give you a special effects credit for for the news oh no no no he did but he did give me a free copy of the of the new release by actually I'm a servant of public appetite I don't need I don't look for credit um could could actually could anything survive a black hole what a bacteria be spaghettified and also theoretically possible to build a ship that was a ship that can go through a black hole and how would that be done of have you ever thought about that the answer to your first three questions is no have I thought about it yes a bacterium will last much longer than you will because it's smaller and the difference in force of gravity across a bacterium is is much smaller than it would be for a human so we'd have to get much closer before it would then become spaghettified but it is it is a spaghettify oisin it's you won't survive it no matter what on the way to the center of the black hole you want to take in a ship that would be the last thing you'd ever did and don't expect to phone home when you get to where you're going no the ship is gone the ship shares the same space as your spaghettified atoms at the center of the black hole so have a nice day another two-seater alright right here on the second row in orange orange dude thank you you intimated the end that when you don't know something maybe you could speculate a little bit I wonder if you mind speculating about black holes a hole can be like a well with a bottom to it for a hole make it be something that goes through something if you speculated that maybe the universe and you intimated that that that might be a small distance so wouldn't be at the end of our universe it would probably be somewhere in it how would you speculate might be within a black hole what do you think about that possibility other possibilities did anyone hear that question yeah just question is how can I speculate about what's going on inside a black hole does it I'm going to paraphrase you a little bit is it a tunnel to somewhere else can we just dream up stuff that might happen inside of a black hole our laws of physics are pretty clear on this one there's the spaghetti equation that your spaghetti there's no way around that now it was once imagined that a black hole would be a portal to another part of the universe and maybe you'd enter and sort of come out the other side before you hit the center because the real spaghettification happens if you're aiming for the center of the black hole but Stephen Hawking just recently came out with a result that tells us that the black hole is not a portal to somewhere else because it remembers everything at eight you know as you may remember a black holes evaporate it's called Hawking radiations what made him famous beyond his normal circles back in the 1970s he recognized that the energy field the gravity field of a black hole could could spontaneously create particles just outside the event horizon this is the boundary between the point of no return and the point of return it could spontaneously create particles there that would escape and so these are particles healing forth from the energy field of its gravity what Hawking showed is that if I drop you in and we take an inventory of all the atoms that went in from your body all the quarks protons electrons let's inventory it and then I wait a hundred billion years and I look at the slow evaporation that comes out I will reconstruct the entire inventory of particles that went in body and soul when they first hundred billion years earlier so the gravity field remembers the property of the matter that went in and the for that to Beach it means the information was not lost it means the information didn't go somewhere else and leave town and show up on the other side of the universe and while this was disturbing to science fiction writers because they needed this as a vehicle to get around the galaxy especially before the TV commercial ends to get across the galaxy would otherwise take to a hundred thousand years Star check would be boring track you know without the warp drive so but I celebrated it as this amazing spooky thing that black holes remember what they eat even through the slow process of Hawking evaporation if a black hole eats it's going to get bigger but if there's nothing around for you to eat it'll just kind of hang there and that it will just slowly evaporate they evaporate very slowly by this Hawking mechanism most of them are eating faster than they're evaporating let's go right here front row this is question about intelligent design I don't believe in it but don't you think there's some force like a dire force in the universe that makes the different shapes of the galaxies elliptical etc instead of just chaotic forms something something going on she suspects that there might be something going on in the universe because the level of I'm paraphrasing the level of order that you see with the beautiful spiral galaxies an elliptical their shapes that that that look like something that's going on there some larger sort of cosmic force and what you must not have seen the galaxies that have collided and look like two train wrecks let's not have seen those or the class of galaxies we call irregular galaxies that have no shape that you would point to so you are pre-editing what you are so you're pre-selecting things and say oh look there's some interesting force going on there when the rest of the universe is sitting there raggedy and you're not commenting on that so what I'm saying is the moment you think something's beautiful in renard just take another look taken I remember I remember I was there we were coming over a bridge with a friend and he saw the sunset and the braid Ian raise and he saw those beautiful God's talking to me that's God and I said because it's beautiful is that why you say that anything yeah it's just and I said well do you think about God when you get a close-up view of the underbelly of a tarantula are you thinking Oh beautiful no you're not right this is the same universe these and so so so if you're selective about the list you draw then the universe could look like any philosophy you want it to look like but once you take it all in you realize that the universe wants to kill us 99% of all the species that have ever lived are now extinct earth is not some cradle for life it is a place that wants to kill us viruses asteroid earthquakes tsunamis volcanoes and so we're running away from these things and we find a little place that we think is safe then the flood comes and then you know and then okay now we finally got a place now the temperature drops we got to like put on clothing and they'd get heat and oh now always an earth so beautiful for us it's like no no so so I would just be cautious about that I know that I understand the urge but I understand and on top of that there are forces that make things round in the universe in fact I invite you I didn't make it to this book as much as I'd like the essay it actually didn't make the cut to this I wrote an essay called on being round and I talked about spiral galaxies and elliptical galaxies in it so just Google Tyson on being round they'll take you right there there's a whole conversation of why things around it neither and yes it is a force but it's not some mysterious Gaia thing we don't understand we understand it is real and we can calculate it but there's certain laws of physics that the universe follows um I would I would I would rather reword that statement to say there are laws of physics that describe the universe because the universe could care less about what we think of it the universe is not obeying our laws of physics so but yes that's correct there are laws of physics out there people who say that the laws of physics is the expression of God and if you want to say that I don't nothing I can't nothing I can find in fact that's very close to Spinoza's gods but noses God was the whatever you find to be the order of the universe that is the expression of God and that's a very different God from the God who's listening to prayers and and then that sort of thing or you know or puts dinosaurs on arks that's it these are different kinds of gods okay and so so the so that would be closer to Spinoza's God but be cautious there because in the days when no one understood what was going on in the heavens that was used as evidence that it was the handiwork of God because why would you ever understand God what God did the fact that you didn't understand it was this was the citation of God at work so now to say we do understand it there are laws and also claim that that is the handiwork of God that is writing both sides of that horse and so I don't have a problem with it but one needs to be aware of this philosophical trend where God is what you don't know and God is what you do know so God is everything and and if that then I'd ask is fine but is that going to help me make my next scientific discovery if not I'm going to put it over here and bring in the books that will ah why don't you pick now cuz that way you can run around alright we're going to take just about two more because we're really at a time I mean I did like I tell kids in this room I wanted like to get a kid question but yes so let's see kid here okay how long ago was the big bang by the way how old are you by the way you're eight years old thank you how long ago was the Big Bang we looked at how fast the universe is expanding and then we said okay let's turn the clock backwards and we watched the universe claps back and when you do that you find out that the whole universe was in the same place at the same time fourteen billion years ago so that's how long ago it was long before the beginning of Earth and our solar system and our galaxy so what kind of johnny-come-lately on this another kid question right here yes exactly our I exactly will power black lows forms our black holes for excellent question we have no idea how you make the big ones in the Centers of galaxies so we got top people working on that one but the ones that are just kind of laying around the neighborhood those are the those are there remnants of the death of high mass stars some of the stars that explode to spread their guts they will need supernovas they will leave behind their they will sir they will live they will leave behind they'll leave to the side in some cases a neutron star a star pack of neutral Neutron but it has more mass than a particular threshold that will further collapse to a black hole yes Clint collapse time and space yes and if that star that now black hole is not near another star you could accidentally step in it and not know that it was there unless you look carefully at what it did to the light from stars behind it because it distorts the fabric of space and time and you start seeing weird patterns of the light behind it as though you drag the lens across you're a funhouse lens across the field of view so you need special funhouse lens watchers on spaceships okay because if you don't catch this early enough it would be worse than not catching the iceberg on the Titanic okay but sometimes they're near other stars and then you can see the the the secondary star getting dined upon and then you know to sort of step around that situation oh I heard someone say asteroid is there an asteroid in the house are you just worried you just don't want to go extinct is that is that's your problem here okay there is an asteroid discovered third week of December 2004 okay so is discovered and they got they look for data from before and after they got enough data to then calculate this just took about a week to calculate that this asteroid will come extremely close to Earth extremely close so the same when we got some really impatient people here who wanna like hit the go for the hills when this they have it so here goes right so they named it once they saw where was headed they named it they called it Apophis after the Egyptian god of death and darkness we did not name that one Bambi so it is the size of the Rose Bowl so take a rock fill the entire volume of the Rose Bowl with it that's how big this thing is it is hurtling through space depending on the angle you look at it 1015 miles per second is it speed relative to us then they figure out well how close is it going to get they run it through the computer they find out that on Friday the 13th in April in the year 2029 Apophis will come close enough to earth to dip below our orbiting communication satellites it will be the biggest closest thing ever observed in cultural history now if you want to observe that you go to northern Europe get your hotel rooms now and that puppy will go straight on by now that's just the entertaining part it turns out the orbit is uncertain enough such that we can't tell you exactly how close we know it's closer than the orbiting satellites but within that uncertainty we can't tell you we don't know it yet because this thing is tumbling through space it's hard to get the exact orbital parameters but there is a window of orbits within the total range it can have which if it goes through that keyhole the gravity of Earth is just right or rather just wrong so that seven years later once again on April 15th April not tax day April 13th it will hit earth if it goes through that keyhole it will hit Earth and if it goes through the senator keyhole we know where it's going to hit on earth five hundred kilometers west of Santa Monica it will plunge into the Pacific Ocean go down a depth of about three miles and then explode cavitating the Pacific gotta watch my pant ripping there cavitate the Pacific to make a hole three miles wide and three miles deep oceans don't like having holes in them okay so the act of making this hole sends a first pulse all across the Pacific and there it is in motion then the walls collapse down in it sloshes back into itself rises high into the atmosphere and comes back down cavitating the ocean again and this rhythm will repeat dozens of times and each time this repeats a pulse a tsunami wave heads towards the shores now unlike the Indonesian tsunami by the way you didn't hear about Apophis when it was discovered because it was its orbit was calculated the same week as the Indonesian tsunami that's why you didn't hear about this we knew all of this for two years now we knew it but justifiably it was it was put in the back behind the Indonesian tsunami but this tsunami make the Indonesian salami look like somebody just stepped into a puddle the in unlikely the Indonesian tsunami which just went smoothly into the Shores unrelentingly this tsunami will come to the shores but then cycle back to get ready for the next pulse and again and again so what will happen is the tsunami comes to the shoreline it grabs the homes that were there and then pulls it out okay then up time to go back to shore it's an outcomes back now the house has a different shape okay the house is no longer a box it is a tangled mess of construction materials and so now it comes back and it churns away all evidence of civilization on the entire west coast of the United States basically sandblasting it clean of all traces of civilization I'll have about fifty feet high so five stories high now there will be stupid people like surfers who want to say let me get that wave coming in they will be stupid meteorologists here comes the wave right here that can't get the camera right here can you see you know these people exist right the the Hurricanes coming down on the Florida coast and they got somebody there you know and meme up the camera is trying to back up you know away from the thing while the reporter is reporting on the waves of the crashing on their you know there'll be people who want to do this but in principle nobody has to die because we can predict when this will happen now better than predicting when it will happen and telling everyone run for the hills I'd rather actually do something about it in the first place like deflect it hey what an idea that we got top people working on this one you take a spaceship bring it if this is the asteroid and bring it up next to the asteroid here's a spaceship and then it'll want to fall towards it they have mutual gravity but you put in a little retro rockets to prevent it from falling in if you do this early enough you can actually gravitation gravitationally tugged the asteroid out of harm's way because the act of preventing the spaceship from falling is tantamount to pulling the asteroid in your direction and all you have to do is pull it out of the keyhole it'll still come by and you'll have to keep an eye on it later on but if it's out of the keyhole we're safe which brings up a whole other set of problems suppose you try to get it out of the keyhole and you miss and then it goes to a different part of the keyhole and then lands and hits another country had you never touched it insurance forms would have called that an act of God but now that you touched it what do you call it what is that it's an active war right so this is Connie you know this is an unresolved political cultural problem and suppose it's headed for for the Indian Ocean obviously we're going to want to care about it if it's headed for the Pacific because we're directly affected by it with the most expensive real estate facing the tsunamis but suppose it's somewhere else who pays for it there's no mechanism that exists right now to resolve how to handle that problem there's no international mechanism we've got people working on it one of them is a friend and colleague rusty Schweickart who's got a website the b612 foundation is check it out org beasts the numeral six numeral one numeral two that happens to be the name of what that is the asteroid that the little prince landed on alright make you the asteroid will make us extinct so it's not that cute um so anyhow we would survive that's not that's not a species extinct thing asteroid Apophis is not it would just do a lot of property damage and so even if it did hit but it would be a bad day on earth and be the worst natural disaster ever but again nobody has to die and so now I now I just totally bummed you out you know but anyhow the universe is a fun place and and thank you for all just coming to hear me talk about by the way I just learned I just learned so I was very I just learned a couple of days ago that this coming weekend this is just eat onto the New York Times bestseller list I didn't know I didn't I now I don't know how long it'll stay there you know who knows if a next Harry Potter book will come in and bump it out who knows what's that one way and I've never been there before it's a very good feeling and it's only there because of support from you guys and others of your passion for hearing about what we do as astrophysicist thank you for coming I'll be outside to sign books thank you Neil deGrasse Tyson is author of origins fourteen billion years of cosmic evolution the sky is not the limit Adventures of an urban astrophysicist and his latest death by black hole and other cosmic quandary director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History you can learn more about Neil deGrasse Tyson at a m and H org

Channel: The Film Archives

Views: 550,977

Rating: 4.6812935 out of 5

Keywords: Neil DeGrasse Tyson (Organization Leader), Death By Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries (Book), Astrophysics (Field Of Study), Into, Ufo, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (TV Program), UFO (Musical Group), Death (metal Band), Alien, Aliens, Lily, Alien Quadrilogy (Film Series), World, Turns, Film (Film), Follow, Cab, Luke, Taxi, Film (Media Genre), Cutie, Noah, Dark

Id: ABCVwS8XqkU

Length: 108min 51sec (6531 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 21 2015