"RE-RELEASE: Neil deGrasse Tyson"

0:01Hey, everybody. You're listening to Smartless, hosted by Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and myself, Sean Hayes. I know, I wish my voice was more masculine, too. This show is about learning through laughter in the brains of people around the world who are far smarter than us three idiots. And each week, one of us brings on a guest who the other two don't know about. So with that, let's jump into the Smartless rocket ship and let's blast off into the universe together. Ooh, I think I just turned myself on. Smart. Less.

0:32Smart. Less.

0:41i went to uh seventh grade with uh janet jackson are you serious did you at a school called valley professional um it was a perfect hold on it was a school that was only from 9 a.m to 12 p.m so that you had your afternoons free for auditioning for auditions yeah um it was sort of like a the back of a gas station on uh sherman way and vineland and uh i'm not sure they were accredited i think chances are high that they were not accredited i went to high school with with one of the kids um this is not a bit from from the original degrassi junior high um so i went to college with um i was piano majors with craig robinson from the office really oh i knew that wait i knew that piano majors together yeah what's a piano major you major in piano and you don't minor in it get it major there are different ranks there's different because i was a piano colonel but um and then that is so dumb i can't thank you it's a stupid course you're gonna laugh i just watched you hayes because i knew i knew that would get so dumb anyway at ease um who's our guest whose guest is it today whose guest is it today guys today my guest today grew up in the Bronx.

2:00He became interested in astronomy at the age of nine after visiting the Hayden Planetarium. And today... Is this Derek Jeter? No, it's not Derek Jeter. Close. He's now the director of that same planetarium. And after studying at Harvard, he earned his doctorate from Columbia University. He was awarded the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal. Sean, you've really done it this time. He's known for his ability to make difficult concepts accessible to every audience, Will. Sure, yep. So, guys, we have with us today my favorite astrophysicist of all infinity, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Unbelievable, Sean.

2:36What a guess. Hey, guys. What an honor. Thank you so much for being on here. I know this is very nice of you to come and chat with us today. I want to, you know, do people kind of like jump right in and ask you things about the universe in the same way one might, you know, after discovering someone's a doctor and go, you know, I have a pain in my lower back. Without hesitation. Yeah, instead of asking you about you first? Yeah, no, I don't care about me. And as an educator, I don't think who I teach should care about me. That's like cult building. Really? Yeah, so compare these two scenarios. Someone comes up to me and says, hey, aren't you Neil deGrasse?

3:12I said, yes. Tell me more about a black hole in this. So that's the perfect educational encounter. The one that's not is, are you Neil Tyson? I said, yes. Oh, what's your favorite color? What's your favorite? And all of a sudden, I become the object of their curiosity rather than the universe itself. And in that way, I have failed. And you don't like that? No, it's a failure. No, no. It's a failure of my educational efforts if I become the object of their interest. That's all. I'll do it and I'll accommodate it. But on a certain level, you feel like you've failed in your objective. Must not have made the science interesting enough for them to come at that.

3:48But not knowing you, I would think, you know, all I ever see of you, and again, I'm such a huge fan of yours, and I could hear you talk about all of this crap, which I love, for hours. Oh, but the stuff that he spent his life studying, you summed up as crap. Thank you, Sean. I have a PhD in crap. That's crap. This is why I don't have a PhD. Crap is piled high and deep. That's what the PhD stands for. No, but you know what I'm saying? Like, I want to get into that, and believe me, you will answer all of my questions. I'm here for you, yes. But like when I read that thing that you first became enamored with the universe at nine years old, going to the Hayden Planetarium, and now you're the director of the Hayden Planetarium.

4:28Like most teenagers don't have that drive. Because I read that you obsessively studied astronomy when you were a teenager. And so most teenagers don't have that drive. What was the thing that kept you going? I was like, oh my God, the thirst for knowledge. It wasn't so much the thirst for knowledge, but the fact that I knew that when I looked up, I was completely steeped in ignorance. And boundless ignorance. And so there's this quest. Jason usually just looks in the mirror and that happens. He's so connected with that thought. I actually sleep with my eyes open. No. Because, you know, the fact that there's something around us that we know, about which we know so little, became this infinite source of curiosity for me.

5:15And I've never been the same since, since age nine. And I didn't know that most people are still sort of ambling in college. What am I going to major in? Oh, you majored in astronomy. Was that because it's early in the alphabet? You know, no, my stuff goes deep with regard to that. And to that point, explain to people like us idiots who don't know what the difference between astrophysics and astronomy is. Well, so we all in modern times do astrophysics. Astronomy is the traditional older name for it. But in the late 1800s, we figured out how to apply the laws of physics to what was going on in the universe, and thus was birth astrophysics.

5:51Before then, it's like, well, the star is over here, and it's this bright, and it's that color. Oh, it might be moving. Okay, so let's call it a planet. Or it's got a tail, so we call it a comet. So it's descriptive. In the 19th century, we learned how to take spectra of stars. And a spectra breaks the light into its colors like a rainbow. And when you do that, you learn things like how fast is it moving, how fast is it rotating, what it's made of, how long ago it was born. You can create models of that. And so all of a sudden, the universe becomes our backyard. Yeah, because when I still do this, I mean on the dumbest level, on the most simplest level, there's places on Earth and it's wearing thin where the air is cleaner and you can see more stars somewhere like Hawaii or whatever.

6:37and you lie there and you, like a kid, I'm still act like a kid. And I look up and the longer you look up at a clear sky to all the stars, you can't help but think about everything you're talking about, which is where do we come from? That light that we're seeing is like way older than the earth and whatever. That's the one that got me. When I was about 12 years old, a teacher said to me, he said, look up, he said, you see that star? I don't know what I was doing with the teacher in the middle of the night, but he said, the light that you're seeing. that's the next that's another episode it's a different episode it's a whole different podcast that one's called you don't want to know then on a very special you don't want to know um so he said the light you're seeing right now left that star back in the roman empire and i said well what is what does that mean he says well the speed of light is and correct me if i'm wrong you're 186 000 miles a second you got it okay so 186 000 miles a second you just pull that out you know that i mean he left a mark um hold your jokes hold your jokes will um so so if you travel at 186 000 miles a second for a year that's a light year yeah so that's so it's a measurement of distance so he said so the light traveling at 186 000 miles per second since the roman empire that's how far away that that that light is only just now reached only just correct yeah and he And he said, for instance, the sun, the heat that you're feeling on your face, this is after we woke up.

8:09He said, he said, he said, he said that's. And you put down the cigarette. Yeah. You put it out on my forearm and he said that is seven minutes old, the heat from the sun. So that's how far the sun is away. Okay, so I don't know how you got the speed of light correct and that number wrong. Oh. So. Uh-oh. No, but you're close enough. No, you're close enough. It's a long night. So it's not seven minutes away. I'm going to give you the correct number. I mean, to know the speed of light to that precision and then get that other number wrong, that's a little weird. But it's eight minutes and 20 seconds, 500 seconds.

8:46Wow, I was so close. And by the way, it's not only the light that takes eight minutes and 20 seconds to reach us. So, too, does it take the sun's gravity. So if you were some giant and plucked the sun out of the middle of the solar system, we would still orbit. We would still feel its gravity. We would not know any different for eight minutes and 20 seconds. And at that instant, we would plunge into darkness and fling out into interstellar space. So that is – those moments, those things, you know, a teacher telling Jason that thing, those are mind-blowing moments. And I've had those mind-blowing moments where I hear these things, which obviously throughout – because of what you do throughout your life, you must have had a million mind-blowing revelations and stats and things thrown at you and discoveries that you've made.

9:33Have you reached a point where it doesn't blow your mind anymore? Or what are the things that blow your mind about the universe around us? So everyone, I think, should have their mind blown at least once a week. Okay? That's the mind-blowing quota, I think, should be about that. And if your mind is blown, it means you're not reading enough or you're not exploring enough. because there's stuff out there. I'll give you, here's a simple one, ready? If you go to the flower of an apple orchard and count how many petals are on that flower, okay? There are five petals. Then that flower shrivels up and then it becomes the fruit of the tree, the apple.

10:13If you cut the apple horizontally through it and you see the chambers, there are five chambers. So there's a correspondence between the number of seed chambers in the apple and the petals on the flower that became the apple. I mean, this is just kind of, if you don't notice that, start noticing it. And then there are places where, and that's not even anything. That's got nothing to do with the origin of the universe, but it's something simple that's around you. I've had a question that I've been waiting to talk with somebody like you to help me try to answer. And it takes a cream, right? You're looking for a cream or an ointment?

10:50Or an ointment or a gel. Well, okay, so if you look with a strong enough telescope, you can see further and further back in time, right? Because you're seeing light that is older or new. Well, you'll contextualize that for me. But basically, you could effectively look at the Big Bang. Yeah, the origin of the universe. Exactly. So you are looking at the past. And then— But by the way, just to be clear. Yeah. We're in a coronavirus right now, but if I were sitting across the table from you, you don't see me in your present. You see me in your past. Light at 186 ,000 miles per second goes one foot per nanosecond, one foot per billionth of a second.

11:38So if we're like three feet across from each other, you see me not as I am, but as I once was, three billionths of a second ago. We don't make a big deal of that because human lifespan is much longer than billionths of a second. But if I start getting farther in front, the moon is one and a half light seconds, the sun 500 light seconds, the nearest star four light years. You keep going farther and farther away. You get to significant time frames back into the past of the object you're observing. And that's why, that's where cosmology comes in. It's how we decode the record of the universe because it takes light so much damn time to reach us.

12:17And Sean, you were going to take cosmology, right, at one point just— Yeah, for my skin. Beauty school.

12:27That's why I glow. That's why I glow like a star. Beautifully, yes. So if you're looking back at something that happened a long time ago, i.e. the Big Bang, somewhere in that Big Bang is our planet, is the Earth. and therefore you see the earth before anything has ever happened on it. No. So if you can see back— I'll let you continue, but I should really stop you there, but I'll let you continue. Well, so let's make an assumption that the Big Bang was the start of everything. So at some point, whatever we're rolling around on here on this rock was in there. So my point is if you can see all the way back that far, is there a theory?

13:08because it would be impossible to actually construct, where you could set up a series of mirrors where you could look back and forth and back and forth and back and forth enough times, theoretically, where you could see yesterday. Yes. If we can already see the Big Bang, that's got to be harder than seeing yesterday. But if you constricted that into, or contracted that rather, into a series of mirrors, then maybe you could eventually see last week, last month. Yeah, so if you put a mirror one light day away from you and you look at it, you will see yourself yesterday. Right. Okay, but that requires a mirror.

13:46The Big Bang is not a mirror. So when you see evidence of the Big Bang that far out, you're not seeing us go through the Big Bang. You're seeing another part of the universe go through the Big Bang. If they looked to where we are, they don't see our light from you right now in this podcast. No. They see Earth and our galaxy 14 billion years ago when we were going through the Big Bang. So you have to be that distance away to see that far in the past. So there is no way to construct a window into the past by setting up a series of well-tuned mirrors. Well, if someone else set that up for you, yeah.

14:27So you can set up a mirror seven light days away. and then you look at it, you'll see yourself two weeks ago because it's seven days out, seven days back. So in theory, like Jason could apologize to me for certain things that he did. In theory. Do you think we could set enough mirrors in a row so that we could look far back enough to see the start of Jason's question? No, that's what, top scientists still train us. I want to go back again. A lot of people don't ask you about you and I'm interested in you as well as all the other stuff. And I still want to get to that. But you have two kids, right?

15:07Did they ever follow in your passion? Or do they have, are they on TikTok and that's it? There was never that expectation or obligation. And they had freedom to think what they want, to study what they want. And they're each doing different things right now. But I can tell you that by the time they were 12 or 13, certified scientifically literate. Oh, wow. Oh, yeah. You don't have to tell us, but are they in that world of science? No. No, but they're scientifically literate. So the difference is, if you're scientifically literate, it means your brain is wired for inquiry. It's wired for thought.

15:43So that at a young age, I'm happy that they were also polite when they did this because otherwise it would be embarrassing. If you were a grown-up, walked into the room, and you said something, oh, I checked my horoscope sign today, and my 12-year-old, 13-year-old kids heard that, They would say, well, what did you find? They would start asking questions. And what are you basing that on? And have you tested it? And they would just calmly sort of ask the questions to drive you into the corner that you really are in. Because you have no foundation for those thoughts. That's the science literacy that I'm talking about that anybody can and should cultivate for themselves, whether or not you become a scientist.

16:20Uh-huh. Neil, if you could pick one subject that you would have an equal level depth of knowledge about, what would it be? Is there another area? Thanks for that question. If I had a – if there's a parallel universe. Uh-oh, here we go. An alternative – not in this universe, but another universe. In another universe, I would be writing songs for Broadway musicals. are you serious do you write do you play anything oh here no this is why it's another universe that's why i said this is this is so i don't have musical ability but i do i i like to write i like knowing the effect that words have on your emotions on your thoughts on your enlightenment i'd like simplifying phrases and good songs are are not complex stories go read a book if you wanted a complex story, it's got to hit you emotionally.

17:19So I am, my family, we go to musical theater often. I will tear up at a simple Broadway boy meets girl musical, or nowadays it's boy meets boy, girl meets girl. Any of those where there's the expression of human emotion. Well, thank you for checking out the 2010 smash hit on Broadway Promises Promises starring Sean Hayes and Kristen Chenoweth. That's so nice of you. That's incredible. Way to go backstage, Yeah. So, so if I had an alternative universe, so I'd like to write. And so when I write my books, each sentence, each phrasing, each turn of the syllables of a word, I'm thinking about how that lands in the reader.

17:58And I, I think if it's done well, that's what it should be like, because then you'll just want more of it. So if there's another universe, that's what I'd be doing in that universe. I have an idea and this is, I'm not being snarky here at all. What, what if you wrote a space musical like if you i i could see that would be really interesting if you somehow i mean what would would anybody think to make a musical about hamilton you know like that's just bizarre yeah the fascinating fact about broadway musicals is that they have been on every possible subject you couldn't ever have imagined but not hamilton cats uh yeah the the prime minister of of argentina you know just just make the list how does that even so why don't you so why don't you do that because that's another you didn't i just how do i start this i said in another universe you but you could be the creative consultant you're saying he could write the book and somebody else could write the music yeah i think so i would need so i would need a i do have some ideas and i have notes in my book but that's not i got other i got the universe but we're making deals here but you know it's funny that you say neil that you say you know that they've they've there are broadway musicals based on every conceivable subject the president of argentina with evita they're um you know whatever it is and that kind of reminded me of and this whole conversation reminded me of somebody one time explaining to me the idea of infinity and they said imagine infinity is imagine a room imagine a library that is filled with books on every possible subject, including me describing that library to you.

19:34There's a book about me describing that book to you. There's on every possible... Let me go with the mirrors again. The effect of me describing that to you. What effect that has on butterflies. Like, whatever. Understood. Moving forward. And so then imagine that they're stacked in every direction. Yeah. As far as you can see, they said that's what infinity is. We got it. No, no, no. The libraries themselves End it with a question. Will, can I talk to you for a sec? My question is this. No, I got one for you. I'll give you a starter infinity, right? Because it's not really infinity, but it is something to think about.

20:16So consider that if you open a dictionary, every word used in the definition of every word is in that same dictionary. Yeah. That's kind of mind-blowing. Yeah, that is interesting. I never thought about that. Okay. Now, other things that sort of transcend comprehension. Pinocchio. Okay, here's a sentence that Pinocchio utters. Ready? My nose is about to grow. What will happen? It's going to grow. It's going to grow, probably. It's not going to grow. It's not going to grow. Oh, no, because he's a liar. Let me finish. It's not going to grow. that means he was lying. That's right. So it's not going to grow.

21:05No, that means he was telling the truth. Okay, so let me get to some other questions I have. My point is, that sentence has no meaning in Pinocchio's universe, even though the nouns and verbs are all in the right place. It transcends the world that you have set up to understand Pinocchio's statements and his actions. It's a very simple sentence. Given that we agree upon the rules of Pinocchio. Yes. Yes. Of course we agree. Of course we agree. Given those rules, this is a sentence that cannot even be uttered in his world. Okay. So, infinity is something that is not fundamentally accessible to the wiring of our brain because our brain evolved on the plains of the Serengeti to not get chased by a lion.

21:56Okay? Not get eaten by a lion. This is – so the tools we need to not die in our evolutionary past do not include infinity. Now, so based on that, so Neil, so our brains are not wired to understand the concept of – fundamentally to understand the concept of infinity. Yeah, there's an absence of logic. We are logical creatures relative to other life forms. But our capacity to not be logical knows no bounds. But the fact is you know that, and so you have to make certain leaps in order to try to – how do you hack that in order to make discoveries and things that you have to do? What is – do you know – and are you just aware of your own inability to do it simultaneously?

22:43It comes from the math. So you do the math long enough, then you absorb the math as part of your intuition. so you can think intuitively about what the math equations would have done rather than relying solely on how you would have not gotten eaten by a lion and the wiring that that provides. So you start building up other wiring in your brain that empowers you to think in these other ways. And this is how you think in the quantum. The quantum world is really weird. Particles popping in and out of existence. Particles simultaneously existing as a wave. And a wave-particle duality, you might have heard of this.

23:17All of this is fundamental, and the mathematics describes it. The experiments measure it. The brain cannot comprehend it. I know we don't have a lot of time. I have tons of questions. So let's do, like, not a rapid fire. A lightning round. I'm good. I got you. Okay. Let's do it. So how— Boxers or briefs? And by the way, my lightning answers need to be matched with your lightning questions, just to be clear, in order for that to work. No, we're here to listen to you. If you guys have, like, something to follow— But these are really, I wrote these down because I really want to know. Are we ever going to get to Mars, and why do we want to?

23:52We will if it has geopolitical priorities. But otherwise, I think it's a very distant dream. So if China says they want to put military bases on Mars, we're there in nine months. If not— Come on. Really? Really. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to the moon again. Is that right? Did I just read that? Yeah, because other countries are gaining power over what's called cislunar space, the space between Earth and the moon. and that's the new high ground. So there are geopolitical forces that make all of that happen. The business cases come later, the tourism, then all the rest of this, and the SpaceX, that all comes after.

24:26The first forays out there are countries who have geopolitical interests in mind. Columbus came to the new world. Was that, did Queen Isabella say, oh, Columbus, take pictures and bring them back? No. No, it was like, here's a satchel of Spanish flags. Plant them wherever you go and find a shorter trade route to India. It's always been the driver of humanity. Always, always. So, because I'm obsessed with the speed of light, how soon will we be able to travel the speed of light? Because so many scientists... Never. You know, through the... Wait. Next. But wait. They've informed us of certain laws of physics.

25:00I'm just wondering, when do we start applying those? So, breaking the light barrier is not the same thing as breaking the sound barrier. When you heard people say, oh, we'll never fly, and they were just idiots. You know why? Because birds fly. And they're heavier than air. You just haven't figured it out yet. And can you never go faster than sound? Rifle bullets went faster than sound before we had planes. So we can make things faster than sound. Just figure it out. The speed of light is not just a good idea. It's the law of the universe. And if you want to go faster, you have to tunnel through space-time or have warp drives, which is what all the science fiction ones do.

25:35They don't just actually travel faster than light. They try to find some plausible scientific accounting for how they can travel faster than light. And I applaud them all for that. Right, so why then, after what seems like a hundred years, is the only means of fast travel an airplane? Because doesn't it seem like by now there should be some kind of improvement on the plane? The only improvement is, you know, the seat... Sean, don't get pissed off. I know, he sounds angry. Pissed out, you're not aggro today. I am because I'm frustrated that... This is the lightning round, right? I'm going to tell you.

26:08Oh, sorry, go ahead. Here it is. Now somebody else is angry. Some of you are old enough to remember the Concorde SST. Supersonic, right? Yeah, sure. Okay, so that's like the next leap from an ordinary airplane. Do you know something? We didn't have a supersonic commercial plane, but France and England did. Right. That was the Concorde. And I always wondered why they stopped making them. Oh, you know why? Oh, well, wait a minute. Why can't they fly to Los Angeles? Oh, we're not going to let them because they'll have a sonic boom over the continental United States. So we cut them off at their kneecaps and said, yeah, you can fly, but you can only cross the ocean.

26:49That greatly limited the growth of that supersonic industry. And why don't we want a sonic boom over the country? Because it's too scary? What? It can shatter dishes and things and knock them off. The space shuttle did it, though. Well, that's because it's coming in over Florida and it's over low density area and mostly ocean. You have to understand, Neil, Sean's theory is that if you're high enough, anything's okay. It's so stupid. So what we really want is hypersonic transportation where you get to Tokyo in an hour and a half. This would be suborbital. I want that. Right. Okay, that's even faster than just the Concorde.

27:26You know, if you go suborbital, you are not farther than 45 minutes from any two places anywhere on Earth. Here's the problem. What does it mean that it took you an hour and a half to drive to the airport and another 45 minutes in TSA? So it took you three hours, and then you've got to park the car, three hours to take a 45-minute trip to Tokyo. There's a point where just put me on an airplane where I have internet and movies, and I'm fine, and I don't need to get there faster. So correct me if I'm wrong. This is what suborbital is. The Earth is rotating at 1 ,000 miles an hour, right? At the equator.