WIL WHEATON & Science of Star Trek - StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson

rare native stars I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson and we are log at the Neptune theater Seattle this is Startalk live Eugene Mirman tell us who you brought with you I brought the wonderful Paul F Tompkins hello comedian extraordinaire Thank You the universe and the lovely and equally wonderful Kristen Schaal and we had an extra seat we sweet caught him just walking around outside the one in the only Wil Wheaton we all know and love thank you of all the timelines I currently exist in this is my favorite ha excellent now know how many remember this guy in when he was a little kid in that movie uh remember that movie I wasn't in The Goonies and I'm not doing the truffle shuffle free okay if that's what you came for leave so we're less concerned about your childhood acting as we are later in your later years you took some seriously geek roles in a lot of TV programs and what's interesting to me is you can have actors who just like are paid to do that but you knew that was you I was an enormous Star Trek fan before I was cast in next generation as wellesley crusher yeah you know I'm actually I'm so much of a stash where I know you from oh this was killing me now aren't you glad that I didn't just tell you cuz I can't Rob Jon didn't show you of that discovery I appreciate that welcome thank you I remembered Toy Soldiers and then it's sort of blank after yeah you in the entertainment industry until about 2006 um so close the creature in Star Trek The Next Generation TNG if you're in the circle right if you don't have if you're very busy you don't have time to say things like the next generation um I'm such a big Star Trek fan that I noticed that your sideburns are actually pointing at Star Trek II know I used to I used to have like 1970s mutton-chop sideburns they were in style at the time okay and then I had transitioned and I said my homage to Star Trek was to do the do the point D so he know when I was a person to ever notice that is right here to my right achievement unlocked thank you for that so thank you for that so when I was a kid and I was working on Star Trek a levar burton and I were the only two original next-gen cast members who were sort of like a like very proud out of the closet Star Trek fans um nobody else really knew the show like we did and I would go there so you're like legitimate characters on the show in that sense yeah there was like I did things like uh when I was flying the spaceship you know like you do um uh it was these the buttons that we had didn't didn't really do anything it's it's nice yeah I know well it's really this is what I want you to imagine that you're at like an important conference and you're trying to use your iPhone it's very much like that it happens a lot yeah um but I like I invented a series of buttons and beat this particular series made the ship go to warp speed this particular series of buttons up put us into standard orbit nobody knew it nobody cared about it but it was very important to me well it probably showed in your face maybe your acting yeah the Robert DeNiro Space Shuttle button-pushing yeah hey I wrote a book about it that nobody wanted to buy look at compensation Detroit so let's hey you asked let's get back to the deck of the enterprise okay okay so there's all this technology there I know it's fake technology but it's still technology we can think about yeah and if I may share this brief story I I wish you would okay in the original I'm old enough so I remember like the original thinking what could that happen or who did not happen and I'm thinking all right they got this thing that makes food hot real quick okay maybe that'll happen one day all right and they had this little car they stuck in a machine gun I'm sorry I don't remember he seats the original Star Trek where they just heated up food no there is what these are Thursday but they were like it would leave it move to an materialize that is different other like being a computer a set pot pie to warmer than now so here's the thing they clearly never watched the third season of the original Star Trek of all the technologies with the tricorder and the communicator the one that I I said this will never happen in 500 years was where the doors opened up just by walking in front of it it's like no that'll never happen that's how old I am hey what doors did not open for you when you approached it I think less realistic is a world that only has jazz and classical music that isn't copyrighted um Patrick Stewart and I did did a scene once in next generation where we were a great sentence Patrick Stewart and I did a sea that's that's test that's well Wheaton here okay go so uh Picard and Wesley are going I get asked why did he have a French name and he spoke with a British accent shut up Picard and he speaks Brit right well probably because sometime between now and then uh Britain probably just storms across the channel and and and occupies occupies France what you think they built the channel for convenience I mean listen there are plenty of websites on geo cities devoted to exposing this conspiracy you can reach them all in the same web ring it's not hard so Patrick and I did this did the scene once where we were we're walking into like we're on a star base and I think Wesley's going to do a you know one of those Academy tests and I think he's going to have his artificial heart replaced and they has built of your character in the third person yeah that is so classy so they had they had built this set that had this this glass door just a regular door with a handle on it and we walked up to it and I said to Patrick Wesley has never experienced the door that doesn't just open for him so let's do this thing when the when that when they're rolling where I will walk up and I'll just stop there and look at it like what the hell is what do you do with this yeah and then and then he was like oh and then I'll look at you like Oh kids and then I'll push the door open and go through and we did it and it made it into the episode so we're doing like this kind of schlocky sort of like physical comedy bit on Star Trek and I guess we just snuck it through no it's it me every now and then I think it may be needed it we needed that well because our science was airtight yeah so I got my list here so some Star Trek we had the warp drive you need to add of course yeah cuz here's here's the galaxy and you're on one side of the galaxy you want to get to the other in case you didn't know the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 lightyears so traveling at the speed of light if you watch the ship do that it would take 100,000 years so they invoked the warp drive hundred thousand years is equal to one light year no a hundred thousand how what the light-years is a hundred thousand light-years well how long is a Lightyear uh so a light year is it is distance and how far it is five point eight trillion miles yeah thank you okay good so five point eight trillion times 100,000 that's how many miles that is okay so now so so they put a little twenty years it's it's okay we can give it more power it's exactly right so you warp space so where you are gets closer to where you're trying to go and then you took you go through a little wormhole you unwarped space and there you are and you got there during the TV commercial that's how that works right so so what drives I'm cool with that I'm duh yeah I'm down with that uh tell me about Captain Kirk yeah he had a way with the alien ladies yes most certainly did and why would first the aliens be female right I mean right this there's life on Earth that is non gender and you go to another planet and there's gender right and so then yeah why doesn't he have sex with Gendron ooze troll like piles of alien goo it's a very easy gig exploration well actually in the classic Star Trek episode devil in the dark no one ever really explains how that Horta became pregnant oh the water that was very good with Korda was that life formed a silicon-based life silicon-based life right silicon directly below carbon on the periodic table so they were boning right uh ah no no no they don't bond with each other they each bone with the same other elements oh so they have an understanding they have a total understanding element bone so so carbon and silicon creatures I understand so right so it was a pregnant silicon base life yeah so notice that it's fed it's this little baby's didn't have any hair just like William Shatner Oh yeah have you said this to his face no okay you think shots we can try to get him to listen to this and then yes so so into the point is we are carbon-based chemistry and in principle you can create life such as we on any based on any element in that column on the periodic table even adamantium you know one of my favorite sci-fi novels ever is Larry Nivens Ringworld and it is it is one of the books that really helped me understand that I was a that I was really was totally different from everybody else that I knew that I was really nerdy that I really loved science that that this this imagined world was more interesting than my own and what really blew me away about that was just the scope of the Ringworld itself and how it stays in place and all of those things and in in I know it's unstable I'm getting there and and and in the audience that it's unstable yeah so that's so I'm sure you have a science back please don't keep it down oh so there's nothing more entertaining to the non geek then watching geeks argue over not exist future worlds I like tell how this guy was trying to head it off because as if will was gonna say so we should do that right we should make it a reality the fact that we glossed over so you'll take space and you'll flip it over like a tortilla and you'll get there I'm cool with that I'm not what kind of energy are they Cousy to take all of space and put it into a bowl and just flip over okay can you explain it with a different ethnic food it's a she doesn't like Mexican ending a grain of rice that is yes what's here what it's what happens when you mix matter and antimatter through a dilithium matrix to control the man just explode so anyway it takes an enormous amount of energy to do that maybe the energy of all of the stars in the known universe approximately that actually let her get good yeah yeah so anyway she got a show right so Nivens going to conventions and he's speaking about Ringworld and people in the audience are shouting out the Ringworld is unstable so he writes a second book called Ringworld engineers where he goes to repair the Ringworld because that's a good way to spend your time and in and in that book there's all this interspecies sex and it's and it's sort of this like it's it's the way that they sort of like they consummate a deal by by engaging in this interspecies and what does that lead to off swearing I don't think on the odds no I don't I don't I don't I don't think it does mules you STDs well 60 DS some some people think some people think that that's actually how Rick Santorum was formed unfortunately due to his antipathy to science we haven't been able to actually test right so now you have interspecies sex do we answer did they have STDs uh well you know I don't know it wasn't in the book but actually the two in the in the in in real world date in ring roll they don't but but I mean that's sort of I mean R a little sounds like an STD right there yeah well it is unstable as we heard I guess but you know what's weird is like I think think you raise an interesting point like Howard its Captain Kirk's dick not just fall off I guess that conversation took place between the scenes like that was before we do this yeah I do have to know will you disintegrate my dick probably some acting work he was doing in his face right yeah who's my dude it's worth it yeah yeah those hot blue babes yeah you can't tell me about the holodeck that was your that was your your holodeck was us yeah see I didn't see every episode did you ever get to go on the holiday I did I spent a great deal of time I was actually the holodeck on the pilot and what were you and what were you imagining for your own world uh well um in the pilot I was a holodeck is a room you go into and live out all of your fantasies right right yeah yeah it's you know it's sort of like the Internet um and but real right yeah either they Stingley the detail there the idea was that the the galaxy-class starships in next generation would go farther and they would be out in space longer than the constitution class ships in the original Star Trek series so to in order to sort of like keep people from like uh you know going clothing at me yeah that I was researching for a reference and I was like what are those Argentinian soccer players called and then I lost it so they they were they they did a couple of things they put families on the ship so that people could be with their families which is a super great idea when you're sending a thing out at the unknown space where you're definitely going to be involved in Wars and things and then they built these holodecks that would let people go and sort of escape the drudgery of being on a starship the problem with that is that the holodecks constantly malfunctioned like every time you would I don't know if this imaginary thing called the holodeck yeah malfunction yeah it turned into it but since I imagine they could have just not made it malfunction it would be funny right the first episode Rick they all went into space with their failures that all the families died right away I mean I guess it's good that that didn't happen right oh I would think the holiday Christmas be really addictive to like how do you keep you bare without a holodeck there was he in there the whole time yeah and the worst job on the spaceship is the guy that has to go in and mop up the holodeck that's the worst so they think I think they got you the UV light I guess yeah boy you do not want to go in there with that but it's a great idea and it's actually right now I'm voicing an audio book called masters of doom and it's about john romero and john carmack the guys that invented Wolfenstein 3d and then doom and then quake and and it was the holodeck on next generation that was really driving Carmack to program 386 computers to do really incredible technological astounding the last track is influencing the creativity of video engineers yes and if you assume that that next generation exists at you know at a point in the future of our timeline it creates this interesting paradox that people are watching Star Trek and then developing technology that they that was inspired by Star Trek that then Star Trek uses yeah it's like Battlestar Galactica I get it yeah first so one of my favorite devices on the deck was the visor that that Jordi wore yeah sure that is the that official name it was just the visor and visors an acronym but I don't remember what it stands for does anybody in the audience know what it stands for yeah I didn't think so he's got to be from he's got my vision independence real or brain or reality yeah that's actually that's right it includes or yeah we haven't nailed this down but we need to call it something suck so here's the thing if in astrophysics we basically have that but you don't wear it right so so there's visible light and we used to only build telescopes they viewed visible light in the universe fools and then we said and we said yeah we're like we're empowered by these telescopes and then we discovered wait a minute there's this thing called infrared which sits right on the other side of red and something called ultraviolet which sits beyond violet and so then we built telescopes sensitive in those reeds and the universe is doing something else we look in the same spot and it's something else happening there in fact with ultraviolet telescopes we discovered black holes and so then then we fill what's beyond ultraviolet then you find x-rays we build a telescope out of those there's x-ray things going on in the universe and then on the other side of the infrared there's microwaves and then radio waves and the gamma rays and the whole electromagnetic spectrum is talking to us from the universe and we've got a telescope lined up in every band you're walking a fine line towards conspiracy theory but I believe you one of the things that I loved about Gene Roddenberry creator of greater Star Trek he was he was a good friend of mine we were working on the show I'm sort of a mentor to me and Star Trek the original series the secular humanism of Star Trek informed a hundred percent of my morality in my worldview and one of the great features of the help was it's the storytelling captured social cultural is yes well a way where oh it's just science fiction but in fact it was pointing directly back to us and what you were saying about like all those telescopes that we've that we've made and the things that we can observe in the universe I've done a number of educational short videos for the Spitzer Space Telescope program at Caltech and it's awesome the the the things that that telescope can see your mind blowing and when Mitchell telescope is tuned for the infrared so a whole telescope orbiting like Hubble is orbiting except it's checking the universe out in infrared which enables you to see deep into otherwise opaque gas clouds revealing the birth of stars and planets within so we're a rope around the house so you're talking about all of those things a knife and the thing when I led row but well when we talk about those things that we have done the things that science has done those things that human beings have done just by through the application of knowledge um I think yeah we did that like we did that we we as we sat down as a species and we decided we want to know these things want to understand these things and we will develop and build instruments that let us do that and one of the things Gene Roddenberry used to say was um there's there is no limit to what mankind can do when we just sort of work together and the only time I ever said she get angry we were at a convention and someone was going on and on about the face on Mars and pyramids on Mars and and just a bunch of stuff that was like pseudoscience and aliens came to earth and aliens built the pyramids and gene was like no they didn't human built the pyramids we did that he was and he was incensed well so he missed an opportunity what he should have said was the fact that some members of the human species look upon their pyramids and are so awestruck by them that they cannot even believe that it is a product of our own species is that much more of a testament to how brilliant the human mind can be I I still find it difficult to believe that that pot that you can drain pasta through that that was a human being it came up with that I wasn't even on Star Trek they just gotta know where ha so the cloaking device so a couple of comments about that if I may um no let's move on fine I take it back um I'll allow it you are invisible if the band of light you use to observe it passes through it so windows are cloaking devices for visible light if you shine visible light it when it goes through so you don't see the window you see what's on the other side of the window so if you can also you can see windows I know that no one ever contests you but I can totally see windows I saw one today yeah my hotel room window city I was on a plane it was full windows that kept going gene yeah you gene clean your windows and then maybe what I said will apply Oh snack I will clean my hotel windows and then go downstairs to the front desk you do it you can't see my windows cuz I clean them too much someone's stolen my window so how do you propose we settle this I want a new room with windows no cross-country car race that's the only way to settle the issue of stolen windows here's the thing so this space is that the walls are transparent to radio waves and that's why you can have radio reception even microwave reception and so so one way to be to cloak is to use a beam that goes right through you okay so that's one way another way to cloak is they found a way to have the light transmitted a path around the object and then continue out the other side and so that way if you can do that for all beams of light then you could be invisible to any way they try to detect you sounds like it could get kind of hot no big actually it would be actually it'd be kind of cool because you feel warm by absorbing energy from light that hits your body that's why it always feels warmer in the sunlight even though the air temperature is the same as it was in the shade the shade is not cooler in air temperature than standing in sunlight so stop saying that it has been settled oh it's the same air you shade muggers make me so so what happens is you step out of the shade into sunlight and your skin absorbs radiant energy from that source of light we call the Sun and that way you have two sources of energy into you the vibration of the molecules of the air as well as the sunlight and air is transparent to sunlight that's why you can see the Sun in the daytime oh so the Sun is cloaking the air yes very good air has Sun cloaking device that in fact christen but if no one told you why would you even and this Eugene might have to pipe into this if no one told you why would you even think there was anything between you and the audience right now they're right there I what are you talk are you high you went from so much science to like who knows where we all are now what if I'm you yet is green air is transparent to visible light it is not transparent to ultraviolet light which is why when we first detect an ultraviolet light we needed to put a telescope above Earth's atmosphere and we would not have known about black holes until we put the ultraviolet and x-ray telescopes above the atmosphere that's all I'm saying is black holes the best name they could have come up with I made it yeah it's a really awesome name first of all for because because for you know a hole if it's a hole in the ground you fall in sure a black hole it's a three dimensional hole you fall in from any direction you approach in fact one so that's an awesome hole fact look I am NOT I am NOT trying to denigrate the holes themselves okay okay okay well okay I mean I let ultraviolet slide that was definitely a lazy like infrared sounds really cool and then it's like it's so violent it's like ultra fine let's watch The Big Lebowski again the term was in its defense coined at the Spicoli Institute well just so you know so you know we had we had the way we looked at the visible spectrum we ordered the light Isaac Newton my man first did this red orange yellow green blue indigo violet okay what do you imagine Indigo's left out all the time I don't cuz cuz out indigo doesn't belong there all right Isaac Newton had a mystical fascination with the numeral seven and he counted six colors he said I need a seventh one somewhere let's put an indigo that is its if you're gonna put an indigo they twelve other colors you can put in there cuz if the colors change continuously he's your man what indigo be his muse oh I like that okay he's my man I'll end it so he's got the seven coat so we order them like red at the bottom violent at the topic quite an arbitrary notion to order them that way it's an increasing energy it is but so when you go beyond the violet its ultra violet when you go below the red it's infra red you guys feel so dumb right now let's don't like it I still don't like it suppose you leave the edges of Seattle you go to ultra Seattle look closer to Pike Place Market is infra all right one last thing here we got a in this segment uh you know I like that medical scanner that was good you just wave the wand uh and yes I know know everything yeah without cutting you open right we need that yeah you know the guy that invented the MRI invented the MRI because of the device that he watched the original Star Trek and he watched dr. McCoy sort of scan around on a thing and he thought we should do that we should we should there should be a way that we can see inside people's bodies without having to cut them open so then he sort of like set his life to doing that do a set it stand up in Mariah next week haha stand up Emperor some people afraid to be rolled in on their back it's the stand up MRI magnetic resonance imaging discovered that it's actually nuclear magnetic resonance that's the physical principle but but that had one of the table have some very good news for you Neil a man in the audience says you're correct achievement unlocked dr. Tyson so here's the thing the physical principle is nuclear magnetic resonance but that term has one of the two famous n words in it and so you to bring that technology into the hospital people fear that N word and so they excised it from the name came up with a new one so it's magnetic resonance engineering but it is so nuclear magnetic resonance I'm just letting you know that right and so you sent a mega strong magnetic field across the nucleus of an atom and the nucleus aligns then you can image what the different alignments are depending on the mass of the nucleus and so you can see where different elements are inside your body without cutting you opens a brilliant device invented by physicists who by the way had no specific interest in medicine happened to been a physics professor of mine in college just by coincidence my point is there people who say I want a dear science class it was my sign fire right so he won the Nobel Prize for that my point there is that people say I want to live healthy let's fund medical research wait a minute every device in a hospital with an on/off switch that diagnoses the condition of your body without cutting you open you're making me nervous about my health I'm sorry like is there something that I should know about do i up stop what's wrong is there like what do I have like what's wrong yeah every one of those machines is based on a principle of physics discovered by a physicist who had no interest in medicine and it took the medical technologist to say to say hey wait a minute y'all sick like people should give me the money and I promise to invent a thing for them of no specific description yet you know one of the really cool things about that one of the really great things about the design of the computers on next-generation and specifically the tricorder is Michael cooter and Rick Sternbach are were the guys that designed all of these things and Mike had this idea in 1987 that eventually computers were going to be sort of operating system independent and and that you you would come up to a computer and the computer would would one way or another know what you wanted it to do and the computer would reconfigure itself to serve that particular purpose and that's kind of the the underlit Superman that's that's sort of the core philosophy of the l card system and and it's and it's why every computer in the enterprise goes to read to when Wesley walks by but they the medical tricorders on next generation were they were specifically designed so that the doctor could just sort of like it's the coolest thing in the world that the doctor just goes what's wrong with this guy point point point and the things that says everything but you got to take that information to the ship's computer and then use the ship's computer to sort of interpret all of that all that information and some of my favorite some of my favorite like fake computers on the enterprise were those things in in sickbay because of all the computers that we had they were the ones that looked the most like real to me and what is clear is that the most primitive thing today that the future will assess to be primitive is our hospitals and evidence of that is you wouldn't be caught in twenty-year-old Hospital technology you the fact that the medical community community says medical advances is so high and so great and we have come so far the fact that they say that means they were not far yesterday if you keep saying how far you just come it meant you're still improving right you're still not really there yeah that's why I don't go to a doctor I go to a physicist we got to bring the segment to a close you're listening and observing and watching Startalk live in the Neptune theatre from Seattle

Channel: Nerdist

Views: 890,332

Rating: 4.8871202 out of 5

Keywords: Nerdist, Nerdist Channel, Chris Hardwick, Hardwick, Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk, Wil Wheaton, Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry, Next Generation, Jean Luc Picard, Picard, Kirk, Spock, Kristen Schaal, Paul F. Tompkins, science, space, astrophysics

Id: 0wO8yvV2UX0

Length: 33min 33sec (2013 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 06 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/mrpotatomoto]

The anecdote about Wesley, Picard, and the door is from the Samaritan Snare, about 28:05 minutes into the episode (based on Netflix time).

[u/stamido]

At 8:43 Niel deGrasse Tyson explains warp drive incorrectly. It doesn't bend space and create a wormhole, it compresses space, so that more of it can be travelled through in a shorter time! Grrr.

[u/izimulation]

Wheaton notices Tyson's Star Trek sideburns and Tyson flips his joyous shit. He says that Wheaton is the first person to ever notice. FALSE. In an earlier episode of StarTalk, Brent Spinner and LeVar Burton were his guests and they noticed Tyson's pointy sideburns, and Neil also tells them that they are the first to ever notice.

WHY ARE YOU LYING TO US NEIL

[u/kaysea112]

I had no idea Niel deGrasse Tyson had a talk show. Can anyone recommend a good show?

[u/ElimGarak]

Interesting, although I was a bit disappointed in NdGT. I know far more about Star Trek than he does. So his attempts to explain and point out physics things about ST to the audience were really simplistic and boring to me. Did he really just ask if Wesley has ever been on the holodeck in the show???

And no Neil, that's not how cloaking devices work. Or how the warp drive works.

Wil's anecdotes were neat though. I never caught that Picard-Wesley-door interaction - now I will have an excuse to watch that episode again. :-)

[u/nukefudge]

lovely.

all over the place and with laughs. just the thing i needed!

[u/lazersaurous]

They should have gotten rid of those comedians. It would have been way more interesting to just listen to Wil Wheaton and NdGT nerd out for half an hour.

[u/AbsurdWebLingo]

http://i.imgur.com/9RWkf.gif

[u/senatortruth]

Cross-Country Car Race? What?