In short
StarTalk Radio: Cosmic Queries – Death of a Black Hole
Episode Overview In this episode of StarTalk Radio, Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-host Chuck Nice dive into various cosmic queries, focusing primarily on the nature of black holes, lunar eclipses, and the philosophical implications of "nothing." The episode blends scientific insights with humor and pop culture references, engaging listeners with profound and speculative scientific ideas.
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Key Topics Discussed
- Lunar Eclipses
- Question: Why don’t we have a lunar eclipse every month?
- The tilted orbit of the Moon relative to the Earth's orbit around the Sun (the ecliptic) means that lunar eclipses occur only when they align perfectly.
- Key Concept: A full moon does not guarantee an eclipse; alignment with the ecliptic is necessary.
- The Nature of Black Holes
- Question: Could the death of a black hole cause the Big Bang?
- As a black hole evaporates (through Hawking radiation), it loses mass and energy, culminating in a high-energy explosion of gamma rays.
- Key Insight: The explosion signifies the end of the black hole; it doesn't create a void for the universe to expand into.
- Revisiting the Terminology of "Black Hole"
- Question: Should we rename black holes since they aren't truly "holes"?
- The term "black hole" refers to the phenomenon of falling into a massive gravitational well. Alternatives suggested include "Black Omega Star."
- Philosophical Note: The naming of scientific phenomena can influence public perception and understanding.
- Time Travel and Causality
- Speculative Idea: If time travel were possible, what would happen to causality?
- The discussion touches on theoretical scenarios where the universe may "split" to maintain consistency if time travel were to alter events.
- The Value of Scientific Literacy
- Question: What are the benefits of scientific understanding beyond knowledge?
- Key benefits include:
- The empowerment to discern misinformation.
- The ability to quantify one’s ignorance, leading to increased self-awareness.
- Nature of Vacuum and Nothingness
- Question: What constitutes a vacuum in space?
- The best vacuum achieved experimentally still contains particles, and the idea of "nothing" becomes complex.
- Key Concept: Even in a vacuum, quantum fluctuations and the laws of physics remain; thus, nothing does not equate to the absence of laws or existence.
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Highlights and Memorable Quotes
- "You can only get an eclipse if both the sun and the moon are in the same place in their tilted orbits."
- "The last gasp of the black hole will be of such high energy, it'll be a burst of gamma rays."
- "If you have net energy flow into a system, then it's not a closed system."
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Conclusion This episode of StarTalk Radio encapsulates the blend of scientific inquiry and humor that the show is known for. Tyson and Nice tackle complex subjects in an accessible way, encouraging listeners to think critically about the universe and our place within it. The show reinforces the importance of scientific literacy while engaging with both the wonders and absurdities of the cosmos.
For more in-depth discussions and fun insights, listen to the full episode [here](https://startalkmedia.com/show/cosmic-queries-death-of-a-black-hole/).
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Chuck, that was a brilliant set of questions. Yes, it was. Some bordered on the philosophical. Yep. Even the spiritual, maybe? Yep. No, I was feeling it. And I wrote them all. I'm taking credit for every question. You were lying. You did pretty good with pronouncing people's names this round. I would give myself a C+. He's still working it. Coming up, Cosmic Queries, Grab Bag Edition on StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. We got Cosmic Queries grab bag today.
0:51Chuck. Hey, what's happening? Yeah, we got a grab bag. You grabbed inside the bag? I did. Sometimes they let you do that. All right, so let's go right in. Yeah, we might as well jump right into it. This is Roger McVeigh, who says, hello, Dr. Tyson. Lord, nice Roger from Wisconsin here, currently in Surin, Thailand. Wow. Way to go, Roger. Ooh, good food in Thailand. Yeah, that's what I hear. He says, why is there not a lunar eclipse every month? is it just the distance or the wobble or something else great question that's an observant question yeah very good very good so if you look at the path the sun takes in the sky uh throughout the year right okay so the sun actually moves against the background stars you can't see the stars but you can kind of you can kind of see them at twilight like before sunrise but it's not so bright that You can't see the stars.
1:54Look at the stars that are there. They come back in a month. It's a different set of stars. I say the sun is moving. We are orbiting the sun, so our sight line on the sun is changing. Every month, the sun is in front of a different set of stars. All right. That is called the ecliptic. The moon orbits in a plane that is tilted to the ecliptic. Got you. You can only get an eclipse if both the sun and the moon are in the same place in their tilted orbits. Okay. Okay? I'm saying the sun has an orbit. I'm very pre-Copernican in this description. Okay. When they're in the same place, then Earth, the sun, and the moon line up.
2:47Right. But at any other time, the moon is above the sun, below the sun, to the side, and it's not, it's got to be right. And it's called the ecliptic because when the sun, moon, and earth line up, you get a eclipse. Oh, gosh darn.
3:07That makes sense. Doesn't it? Yeah. We good here? Yeah. So you can have a full moon, but it's not crossing the ecliptic. Okay. So it's not going to enter our shadow. You can have a new moon and it's not crossing the ecliptic. And so it's not going to pass in front of the sun. You need a new moon or a full moon coinciding with when they cross the ecliptic. Right. And so that doesn't happen every month. Right. Not every month. And in Dune, was it Dune? Okay. Where there were eclipses every day. There's something getting eclipsed all the time. I don't know what's doing. So it was not even interesting anymore because it was kind of a daily phenomenon.
3:56It's like a sunrise at that point. The sunrise, yeah. It's still fun, but you're not going to plan your life around observing it. Right. That's the simple reason. So if the two were aligned, we would have a - If they were always in the same plane, it would happen that way. Every month we'd have a total solar eclipse. Total solar eclipse. And the difference is, not that this was in the question, a solar eclipse, you have to be on the spot on Earth where moon's shadow drags across Earth's surface. And if you're not in that spot, you're not going to see the eclipse. Right. Whereas in a lunar eclipse, the moon is entering Earth's shadow in space.
4:32Right. Anybody who can see the full moon will watch it enter Earth's shadow. The entire half of the Earth that faces the moon will see a lunar eclipse. Lunar eclipses are slightly, last I remembered, slightly less common than solar eclipses, but everybody gets to see it. Oh, that's cool. You don't have to travel. You don't have to go anywhere. Very kind of the universe. Yeah, it is. Very cool, Roger. Yeah, that's the only reason. L-E-C-L. What? Spell it. E-L-Y-S-S-I-E-L. Okay, I don't know what you do with that. I'm going with L-E-C-L. Is this a one-name person? Like Cher? Like Madonna? Yes, exactly.
5:15It's like the more difficult version. See, Cher, Madonna, Eliseo.
5:23Salutations from Newcastle, Australia. Ooh, love them. Which, if it is the case that a black hole explodes at the end of its life, would that explosion contain all the energy the black hole ever sucked in or has all that energy already escaped via hawking radiation? And I wonder if the Big Bang could have possibly been an exploding black hole of such mass that the event horizon was larger than our observable universe. And the universe as we know it is now stretching out to fill the void left by the universally large black hole. Perhaps beyond is a far larger, far older galaxy that is pulling on the mass of our observable universe at great enough distance.
6:13It would seem that the pull attributed to dark energy. Thank you. So did we get a black hole to fart us out? Was that the translation? basically and then there's another galaxy that's older that is actually pulling on us but what we're feeling is the gravity of that other galaxy and that's why we think we have dark matter got it okay okay a couple things all right so he's right uh as the black hole evaporates it is losing mass yes and the more the smaller the black hole becomes the faster it evaporates okay until the rate at which it evaporates goes exponential. In Stephen Hawking's original paper where he describes this, he says the very last gasp of the black hole will be of such high energy, it'll be a burst of gamma rays.
7:10Gamma. Gamma rays. Because the wavelength of light is the size of the black hole emitting it. So the black hole gets smaller and smaller, the wavelength of light gets smaller and smaller. And that means it has higher and higher energy. Small wavelengths are higher energy. And so the very last gaps would be gamma rays. But that explosion means there's nothing left. So it's not like that's exploding and then you're filling the void with something that'll expand to fill that. No, it's gone. That's it. That was the end of everything. Right. It for the black hole. Right. It's spent. Now, you want something outside our horizon possibly pulling away giving us the delusion that there's some mysterious force pressing outward on the universe.
8:04The reason why that's not likely, nothing wrong with the idea coming in, somebody's tugging on it from the other side. Because you're still, if that were the right explanation, it means you're still dealing with ordinary gravity. Because that's ordinary gravity, it's pulling the other way. And it wouldn't be a galaxy, it would be a whole other universe. Right. The reason why it's probably not true is the dark energy is greatest the larger the region of space that you're describing. So it's not obvious to me why an external force of gravity would manifest that way here. Right. So what you're saying is there are regions where it's greater than in other regions?
8:55Well, it depends on how big is the region that you carve. That's all. So it's a property of the vacuum. So the more vacuum we have, the more of this you have. That's how you think about it. That's how I should have said it. Okay, so the more, right. So as the universe gets bigger, this phenomenon is more significant. Right. Whereas if there's just something else pulling on the other side and we got bigger, the gravity would be less and less because we're getting farther and farther. Yeah. So any and all ideas accepted, I mean, or considered, because we don't know what the hell dark energy is. And, you know, that's what makes it so much fun that LECL can say this, because what I love is when our listeners, like, think.
9:38Yeah, yeah. And they come up with these, like, ideas. And it's real thinking. It's real thinking. You know, it's scientifically based. It's really cool. Yeah. Yeah. All right. But the answer is no. All right, here we go. This is Paradox. Another one-named person. This is Paradox. Paradox. Yeah. There's a wine called Paradox, but it has ducks on it. Paradox? Paradox. Paradox. Yeah, I think it's a play on that. That's very funny. At first, I was just like, man, I'm like, wait a minute. That's kind of cool. I see what they did there, yeah. Paradox. Okay, here. Greetings, Dr. Tyson. This is Dennis from Salisbury, Indiana.
10:22The case for taking the word hole out of black hole. They are not holes in space. It's very off-putting to think of them that way. Renaming them could possibly give new perspective on them. B.O.S. Black Omega Star. How about that? He is upset that we call them black holes. They are not holes. And so the Black Omega Star, which sounds like a new Marvel character. No, it sounds like the Blaxploitation movie that was never made in 1970s. Oh, that is right. He came from another planet with superpowers in his afro. Powered by radiation and disco music. He's Black Omega Star.
11:19Black Omega Star! Something's going down at the disco! Don't worry about it, baby. Black Omega Star will be there. Hold on for a second while I pick out my radioactive afro. Oh, shit. So, now I forgot the question. Can we rename it? I'm not one to debate word definitions. Okay. I'm not that guy. I'm not that guy. I see. Good words are good words. If you have a good reason to think it should be different, I'll hear you out. But see, don't they call it a black hole? Because when you look at it through a telescope, first of all, you see all the light of the universe. Forget the light. They call it a black hole because you fall in.
12:04You fall in. Oh, that's true. You are falling in. In. You're falling in. The difference is when we think of holes, we think of a two-dimensional surface and you fall through the hole. Right. This is a three-dimensional hole. any direction you approach it you fall in it's a hole right so that's a little freaky yeah but and by the way when you fall in you fall in every direction then every direction because you're falling into a three-dimensional hole yes so you got to be falling in every direction at the same time if you are falling in from any direction right when you get inside of it i don't know what you just said neither do i okay it just makes sense that you're falling in every direction at So it's a little odd that it's a hole in every direction, but so it's a three-dimensional hole.
12:48I mean, that's what it is. And light doesn't come out, so it's black. I think it's the best named thing there ever was. Okay, well, that ends this conversation. Like, well, there you go. Sorry about that, Dennis. No, no, but just think about it, because the word galaxy, you know what that comes from? No. It's Greek. Greek for galactos. Galactos. You know what galactos means? Let me see. He's the arch nemesis of Black Omega Star. Galactose is milk. Milky Way. This is how you get that. Oh, that makes sense. It's poetic and romantic, but it's still, you have to go there. You got to construct what's going on.
13:29Right. And in China, where milk is a less popular beverage than in Europe, they don't call it the Milky Way. They call it the Silver River. Oh, that's lovely. That's way beautiful. For me, that's better. That's better. That's better. Sorry, Greeks. And by the way, we found a sugar in milk, a couple of sugars in milk. One of them, we called it galactose. Okay. That's one of the sugars. And the other one is lactose. Right. Lactose galactose. All because of the galaxy. Right. That's cool. Crossing our sky. Anyway, so I think Black Hole is good, but Black Hole Megastar, you know, that's... Yes. Again, it's the movie that was never written.
14:12That's kind of wild, man. I kind of dig it. Okay. All right. Well, there you go, Dennis. We can get a phone call from some Hollywood director. Exactly. We got to make this movie. We got to make this movie. Yes. Black Omega Star. Radioactive Afro.
14:26All right. All right. Here we go. Sam. I'm sorry. Oh, man. Now I'm thinking about Black Omega Star coming home from work and just this woman is just like, where you been? Oh, you got time to be out there saving the universe, but you can't be in here taking care of these kids. Black Omega star. This is the home life of a superhero. You need to get your ass over there to them Black Omega dishes. That's what you need to do.
14:56All right, here we go. Get your Black Omega ass on that lawnmower and mow the lawn. Take the garbage out. Yep. All right, here we go. This is Sam Green. Have you seen the Key and Peele skit? On what? Where they imitate me and my wife. Yes. You have seen that? I finally did see it. Somebody showed it to me here, and it was very funny where - Yeah, Jordan Peele plays me. Yes. And I'm looking through a telescope, and Keegan comes in dressed like my wife. and said, Neil deGrasse Tyson, why don't you stop looking through that telescope and do the dishes and take the garbage out and walk the dog? And then he says, well, in another universe, in a quantum ray, that's already happened.
15:50So are we in this universe? He says something really cosmic, and then she says, oh, okay. So when I first met them, it was at the Emmys, Because during one of our nominations, when StarTalk was on Natchio, and we were nominated for an Emmy three times, they were there. And so I went up to him and said, dude, my wife has a PhD in mathematical physics. So the conversation would not have gone down that way. And then that's when Jordan Peele went, well, actually.
16:39Hi, I'm Ernie Carducci from Columbus, Ohio. I'm here with my son Ernie because we listen to StarTalk every night and support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
17:04All right, this is Sam Green. He says, hi, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice. Sam here, living on Tulsa time. Tulsa. That's right. Tulsa, Oklahoma. I rode in the, there's a river there in Tulsa. Did not. I rode there. Never been at Tulsa. An annual festival. Never been. Yeah, when I was, I rode for the University of Texas. Oh, very nice. Yeah, beautiful town. That town has these big praying hands, I think. They need it.
17:35he says my question is about space time and causality we usually limit our models of space time to ones where causality is preserved but i wonder could space time behave in a sort of meiotic or metotic way to preserve itself when causality is violated. I realize I'm borrowing from biology here, but imagine space-time splitting when encountering. Is that mitosis? Yeah. M-E-I-T-O-S-I. That's mitosis, yes. Mitosis. Mitosis. What word is that? He said meiotic, M-E-I-O-T-I-C. Maybe he's borrowing from biology words? Yes. Because I don't know that in physics. Yeah. And then mitotic, which maybe that is the mitosis.
18:30Okay. Okay. Go on. I don't know either one of those words either. So maybe we can look them up, guys. Maybe I'm not even saying them right, to be honest. Who knows? I don't know. People cut you slack every time now. Well, you know, listen, it's an honor to have me mispronounce your name or a word. All right. You keep telling yourself that. He's like, come on, man. Don't mess. Let that happen. All right. Let's get back to him. He says, I'm realizing I'm borrowing from biology here, but imagine space time splitting when encountering a causal mass or replicating to contain a causal characteristics.
19:13could such a mechanism A causal as in not causal not causal A as in not could such a mechanism be a way the universe maintains consistency I like that idea so the only way you're going to mess up causality is if you go back in time and Rich Gott wrote a whole you know he's a friend of StarTalk in fact he's a co-author of mine we co-authored a book together called Welcome to the Universe Very nice. It was based on a course that we co-taught together at Princeton, along with Michael Strauss, the three of us. Okay. So it's Tyson Strauss Gott, G-O-T-T. Nice. I want to find that. And there's like four versions of the book.
19:59There's Welcome to the Universe, that's like textbook style. Then there's a brief Welcome to the Universe, that's like a pocket, sorry. And then there's Welcome to the Universe in 3D. You guys really milked that thing, man. I'm telling you. Way to ride a horse. All with Princeton University Press. So Rich Gott wrote a book called Time Travel in Einstein's Universe. Right. And it turns out there are solutions if you take a certain path around a black hole or a pair of black holes and then come back. You can come back before you left. Oh. There's a solution that I don't know how to calculate, but people who are fluent in this do.
20:45But we don't have to worry about the details of that. What we care about is the idea of it. Is the universe going to get angry if you manage to go back in time? Then tell yourself to not go back in time. Right. How do you square that? That would be the most awesome thing. I could see why the universe could get mad at that. Right, right. So does the universe split? I mean, that's kind of what he's hinting here. Yeah, that's what he's saying. Because at that point, what you have done, because you already can't let that go. You already win. Right. So when you come back and don't go again, what happened to the win?
21:20See? Because you already win. That's how you got back. Right. But in the movies, what happens is you always end up doing something else that puts you right back where you got to go. Or you disappear from the photo. Right. Right. Stephen Hawking has something called the time travel conjecture. Okay. He thinks, thought, that one day we would find a law of nature that explicitly says you cannot go backwards in time. Okay. And so as a conjecture, he's imagining that one day we will make such a discovery. You know what he did? He had a time travel party. Did you know about this? I did not. He or his people hosted a party at Caltech, and the announcement was made to all time travelers, come back in time and meet us here, and we will greet you.
22:23And nobody showed up.
22:27That's funny. So another one, you know the one about the Titanic? in the TV series Time Tunnel. I don't know that. It had the same producer. There was a couple of shows that had the same kind of Land of the Giants, Time Tunnel. It was like one-hour TV shows, primetime, that were science-y, science fiction-y. Okay. Okay? And Time Tunnel, the very first episode, they go back in time, and they're kind of lost in time. That's the show. They try to come back and they can't. they land up at another place. Oh, okay. So where's the first place they went? The Titanic. It was the Titanic. Well, that was the end of the series.
23:11Oh, well, that was nice while it lasted. And so then the reveal is there as he's walking on the deck. Then he sees the Lifesaver. And it says USS Titanic. Well, no, it's not US. Oh, that's right, because it's not the US. It's British. British, right. Yeah, but I don't know. SS Titanic. SS Titanic. It's been hypothesized because everyone is so intrigued by the Titanic and that story. Right. That the day time travel actually gets invented, everyone wants to go back to the Titanic. And that's why it sank. Yeah, well. There wasn't enough boats for everybody because they're all time travelers. I don't want to go back to the Titanic.
23:53I want to go back to a rowboat. A rowboat? That's... sitting off to the side of the Titanic and eating some popcorn like, wow, that is messed up. Look at that. Who knows how that would get resolved? Either you can't go back in time or if you do, the universe splits and prevents you from altering. One of the timelines. One of the timelines, correct. And we're not there yet. But it's a great question. Okay, that's super cool. Parker Mann says, Hello, Dr. Tyson and Sir Charles. This is Parker Mann, retired geophysicist in Ventura, California. Now looking up instead of down. Oh, nice. Tell me the name again.
24:44This is Parker Mann. Parker Mann. Shout out to you. All right. And by the way, we need more geologists to look up than down so that they will understand that it's one of our asteroids that took out the dinosaurs. Mm-hmm. Okay. We got a whole lot of down-looking paleontologists out there. All right. I don't want to loop you in with the paleontologist, but Earth is your place. But yeah. All right. He says, I recently saw a video in which Dr. Tyson said that Jupiter's orbit allows it to partially protect the Earth from asteroid impacts. If it were further out, would it protect Mars and closer in protect Venus?
25:23Can you elaborate on why Jupiter differentially protects planets based on its orbit? Thank you. Good question. Yeah, well. Nice question. So we say protects Earth because we don't care if it protects Venus. Perhaps anybody else. But the truth is, it's protecting everybody. It's protecting everybody within its orbit. Within its orbit. Because it's... What would happen is... It's like alignment. A comet would come by and you cannot escape the gravity of Jupiter. The gravity of Jupiter. I should say that more precisely. Go ahead. You cannot come in and out of the solar system without having felt the influence of Jupiter.
25:58Nice. Okay? Because the word escape has very precise meaning. That's true. I don't want to say it that way. I got you. So Jupiter is protecting Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. Yeah. Period. So a comet comes in and it feels Jupiter and then it swings out the other side. Right. And never even comes in. Never even comes in to come towards us. Correct, correct. Right. So plus the distances between and among the planets is exponential. in units of the Earth-Sun distance. Okay. Mercury is 0.4. Venus is 0.7. Earth is one. Right. One distance. Okay. Of course it would be. Mars is two and a half. Oh. Jupiter is five.
26:41Oh. Saturn is 10. Oh. Uranus is 20. Neptune is 30. but no but the distance was getting really big really very fast that's what the point of this this lame exercise i'm trying to lay down and so the so all of the inner planets basically are huddled compared to where jupiter is right and and its ability to protect its inner children yeah cool is that because the uh the mass of these other planets is so much bigger that they need more distance so they're not disturbing they would clear out more distance they would clear out more distance. But the formation of solar systems is still an active field because we used to think any other star system would look like our solar system.
27:31Right. That's the first assumption. And none of them do. Wow, that's so cool. Some of them have Jupiters as close as Mercury is. Oh. They call hot Jupiters. That's cool. Yeah. How you doing? I'm hot Jupiter. What's up, Saturn? That girl is ratchet. I'm telling you right now. All right, that's super cool. If you want it, put a ring on it. All right, Parker, man, what a great question. Here we go. Freddie Abden. Hey, Neil. Hey, Chuck. My name is Freddie Abden, an American living in Peria, Colombia. What's the name of the town? Peraria. I don't know that town. I don't either. Spell it. Maybe I do know it if you pronounced it right.
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28:17P-E-R-E-I-R-A. Peraria. Peria. Peria. Peria. Okay. Is it E-I-R-A? It sounds Portuguese. E-I-R-A. Yeah. Peria Colombia. Portuguese, they put the E in front of the I. Yeah, okay. Where the best coffee is grown. Ooh. That's right. Colombian coffee. That's right. Colombian coffee. We used to get those TV commercials. That are known as cocaine. Stop. The second law of thermodynamics says entropy must increase. Yet, for a surprisingly long stretch, Earth maintained extraordinary order and complexity enabling life to thrive in stark contrast to the decay and disorder we observed elsewhere in the cosmos.
29:01That should not have happened, statistically speaking. What could explain that rare pause in entropy, that bubble of low chaos? Could it point to— Could you put it, Captain Kirk? What could it explain? Could it point to unique initial conditions or maybe even some odd influence beyond our natural forces? Religious people who know only some physics, but not enough physics, know about the second law of thermodynamics that everything proceeds to chaos. Correct. That is a simplification, but basically it goes from order to disorder. Okay. Okay. And earth goes from disorder to now we have like life.
29:52We can't get more complicated than life. Right. So they wanted to invoke that as a reason for not that physics didn't work, but that the hand of God operated. Intervened. Intervened here. Reversing what would otherwise be the trend that we see everywhere else in the universe. So it was not a statement of physics not working. It's a statement of the handiwork of God and what is a miracle if not the suspension of the laws of physics. The proper way to say the second law of thermodynamics is for any closed system, the system will move to disorder. Right. Inexorably. We're not a closed system. We're open to the universe.
30:40We're open to sunlight. Right. We're bathed in sunlight. That is energy entering our system. Okay? Right. So if you have net energy flow into a system, then it's not a closed system. All right. So now, but you got to rob Peter to pay Paul. If our entropy is going down, life is lower entropy than what was there before, somebody's entropy had to go up. Really? The sun. Oh, the sun is dying. The sun is dying. Yes, it is. So that we might have life. A different kind of sun giving up life that we might live. Oh, I see what you did there. You see what I did there? I see what you did there. So the sun will die.
31:28Right. And then when the sun dies, nothing is bolstered after that. Right. And then the whole system goes to entropy. That's, look at that. Now, a quick little aside, in our whole of the universe, we have a completely completely enclosed sphere, glass sphere, that has water and three life forms in it. Why would you do that? That's terrible! That is just awful! Okay, yes, they're sealed in this cavity. Oh my god. All right, and so, so we have three life forms. There's krill, like really tiny krill. Yeah, little shrimpy things. Little shrimpy things. We have snails. Okay. And we have something like kelp.
32:20Okay, like a plant. Plant, planty thing. Plant, plant. That creates a complete ecosystem. Mm. Okay. So the krill poops, the snails eat the poop. Right. Okay. And then that fertilizes the kelp. Get the kelp. And the sunlight comes in and helps the kelp. Exactly. And then it's a whole circle. Oh, so you noticed it's not a completely closed system. Right. Because it's made of transparent glass. Right. So sunlight gets in. Okay, so now, here's the story. When we were building the Rose Center for Earth and Space in the year 1999, because we opened January 1st, 2000, there was a lot of construction dust.
33:02They finally moved that into place. There's construction dust. So the construction people said, Oh, no. We clearly have to protect this sphere of glass. Up came the tarp. Oh, poor snaily. Well, the plant. Yeah, I mean, it's... So, fortunately, clear heads caught it. I mean, you can't blame the construction workers. I mean, they're not astrobiologists, okay? They weren't looking at that like, guys, I know it looks like a closed system, but it isn't, okay? We got a lot of sunlight in. We need photosynthesis for the kelp. And the two life forms actually, they're all three life forms and they're dependent upon each other.
33:45So, yeah. So, I forgot how long. It was a few days. But you picked it up and there were a few belly up krill in there. Oh. But they reestablished their equilibrium and they're still going. They're still going. After 25 years. In that seemingly closed system. Seemingly closed system. In that seemingly closed system. It is living off of the sun. Nice. So, yeah, that's how that works. Okay. Very cool. All right. I love that. That was a great little lesson in entropy. Nicholas Hayes. Hello, Neil. Oh, one other thing about entropy. Go ahead. Okay. You're alive. Well, we hope. Sometimes. Right now, you are consuming energy for being alive.
34:29For being alive. Where'd the energy come from? I'm going to say Jesus. No.
34:38That's the way you said that. The very Southern Baptist. Well, that's the only way you said. Well, no. I mean, I ate food. You ate food. Period. I ate food. People say, they look at food and it's the calorie count as something bad. Yeah. The calories is the energy that you're using. Do you know what the word for energy is in French? No. Calorie. But the dose. Okay. So, when you die, you stop eating. Right. well there's there's a reason why sorry you don't choose to stop eating when you die I don't see too many corpses like god I am so hungry man hey why don't you eat what are you doing you're not taking care of yourself it just says you're dead sorry I said it back I'm sorry I said it the wrong way so but when you're dead there's no more metabolism in you right okay and you begin to decay.
35:37Right. You become disorder. You're moving to entropy. Yes. Right. There it is. Yeah. Because you are now a closed system. Right. See, as long as you got a pie hole to shove food into, you're not a closed system. Very cool. Yeah. All right. This is Nicholas Hayes. He says, hello, Neil and Chuck. My name is Nick, and I'm an industrial designer in North Bend, Washington. Love him. My question is, if I, in my super advanced starship, were traveling close to the speed of light and blew past a planet moving in the opposite direction, would I appear to be traveling faster than the speed of light to anyone watching me from the planet?
36:14Or would my reference frame constantly change based on what is being passed by? Yeah, no. Okay. Next question. All right. No, so here's how it works. so at low speeds you can just sort of add velocities and you so if you're in a car going 60 miles an hour one way a car going 60 miles an hour another way you will pass each other at 120 miles an hour thank you yes 120 miles an hour okay what's really fun is in an airplane where you see the ground you know going by slowly because you high up right when another plane is coming towards you, the opposite direction, the relative, because you're going maybe 500 miles an hour, and they're going 500 miles an hour, it's passing you at 1 ,000 miles an hour.
37:05If you want to see what a supersonic jet would look like to you if you're just standing there, and it's really, just check it out next time. Look out the window. You will find planes coming the other way, and they go by fast. Very fast. and they're pretty far away and they're still zipping by you man zipping by yeah so the formula to add velocities is very simple it's this one plus that one and that's your relative velocity as you go faster that formula breaks down and you need to use a relativity formula oh to add velocity oh please tell because i'm not i'm not familiar with you didn't know about that I do not know.
37:46This is so cool. And the relativity formula, it is not how fast you're going. It's how fast you're going relative to the speed of light. Aha. And that ratio is in the formula. Oh. Okay. Very cool. Yeah, and so when that ratio is near zero, the formula just becomes two numbers added. But as the ratio gets higher, it's a more complicated formula. It becomes a more complicated formula. and so at half the speed of light and half the speed of light you would see the other thing going maybe at two-thirds the speed of light not because half and half would be a full speed of light right right going the opposite directions so if you're going 99 that way 99 this way you invoke the formula you're never going to get higher than the speed of light gotcha yeah so the answer is no Because if, let's say, you were going, I don't know, nine-tenths the speed of light, without the formula, you'd be going much faster than the speed of light when you pass each other.
38:49Correct. And you can't do that. You can't do that. So you can't violate that law. Correct. And so because you can't violate that principle of physics or the universe, you've got to have this formula. It's not just a can't. That's what we observe. And so this is the formula that describes what we observe. What we're observing. Right. Gotcha. The universe is not obeying our formulas. Right, right. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, we've actually made a formula to tell us what the universe is doing. Correct. I got you. It's an important distinction. It is. I will occasionally loosely say the planet is following Newton's laws.
39:23Right. No, Newton's laws are following the planet. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. That's funny. All right, that was, oh man, what a great question, Nicholas Hayes. I can't recite it off the top of my head, but I'm sure there's a wiki page on adding relativistic velocities. Relativistic velocities. Adding relative, you just go there. And the formula has, you know, some squares and square roots in it. It's not complicated. It ain't crazy. It's not crazy. Right. Because we can go crazy if you want to go crazy. But so you can do it if you've had elementary arithmetic. Elementary algebra. Sorry.
39:56Sorry.
40:19this is john's damn he says hi neil and chuck this is john from tampa florida uh we describe space as being three-dimensional like a cube is the fabric of space better described as a four-dimensional or a tesseract because it is also expanding what could happen But if the universe stopped expanding, would time or the speed of light be affected? We do not know what of what we measure is fundamentally linked to the expanding universe. It has been suggested that the second law of thermodynamics, since we just went in and out of that, might be a property of an expanding universe. And that if the universe slowed down and re-collapsed, maybe isolated systems achieve order rather than disorder.
41:13Or does the second law of thermodynamics pass through an expanding and a collapsing universe? Did the law of physics not change? So these are unknown questions. We make some assumptions, but they're not tested, and so we do not know. Our time dimension is not a space dimension. So it's not a tesseract. Tesseract is 4D, four spatial dimensions. And time is different. We need it as a coordinate, but it's not the same as the other coordinates. Because as I've said, we are a prisoner of the present. Forever transitioning between our inaccessible past and our unknowable future. So that is not a coordinate we can move back and forth on.
42:02Right. But X, Y, and Z, we can go forward and back up and down, left, right. We have full access. So it's correct to say we live in four dimensions, but one of those is space. It's a very different world from one where four space dimensions exist, and then you have time on top of that. That would be the fifth dimension. Oh, what's up? Did I tell you the arranger of the fifth dimension was a family cousin? Who? The arranger. His name was Rene DeKnight. was Renee DeKnight. Oh, really? Yeah. And every time the Fifth Dimension came through New York, we got tickets. Oh, that's very cool. I was a little kid, but we, the Ed Sullivan Theater, where they perform.
42:41No, the Fifth Dimension is huge. They're huge. They were huge. They were worldwide. When the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars and peace I don't know the rest. Will guide the planets and love I don't know how to sing. Love will steer the stars This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius. Fifth dimension. Yep. All right. Fifth dimension. Yep. All right. That was for all you Aquarians out there. We know how needy you are. All right. This is Marcus Gustafson. Gustafson. Gustafson. Is it two Fs? Yep. No, one F. One F. Gustafson. Gustafson. Okay. Is it two Ss? Yes. Yeah. There you go.
43:25Gustafson. I got the wrong double there. Good. He says, hello, everyone. Mark is here from Sweden. You think? He says, I have a question about the value of scientific understanding. Love it. Love it. I've always valued gaining knowledge about the universe after following, after and following StarTalk for years and reading books on the subject that I find my life has gained something for doing so. But I have a difficult... Notice he didn't say he read my books. No. He just said he read books. Let the record show. Okay. Okay. I'm sure you're in there somewhere. Okay. In his choices. He says, but I have had a difficult time exactly pinpointing what.
44:14I believe I have gained scientific literacy, which comes with a different perspective on how to know what is true and the value of quantifying my ignorance as well as getting humbled. What would you say are some more important things a person gains from scientific understanding aside from knowledge alone? Well, brother, you just named two huge, huge things to learn. Okay. So here it is. The number one thing is the number one feature of science literacy. Yeah. It empowers you to know when someone else is full of shit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's empowerment. If someone says, well, I have these crystals, rub them and you...
44:59If you understand crystals and you understand medicine, you understand... You're not going to buy the crystal from the person. Right. All right? You are a victim of charlatans, which implies the person selling to you knows better, or you're the victim of other people who themselves are victims. So he wants more out of this. Ain't that enough? I mean, and by the way, quantifying your ignorance is a huge self-awareness that most people never, ever get. Where I thought he was going with the question was, there are things that we can measure but don't understand. Okay. We measure dark matter. Right.
45:39We don't know what's causing it. We measure dark energy. We don't know what's causing it. We know we're alive. we don't know how we got from organic molecules to self-replicating life right we don't know just because you can measure it doesn't mean you understand it in fact my favorite example here is once telescopes and cameras became once cameras once film became sensitive enough to if you look at any old photo like from the 1920s 1930s somebody's blurred in it because you The camera wasn't sensitive enough to light. The film wasn't sensitive. And you needed long exposures for everything. And they say, hold it.
46:19Hold the position. Right. Okay? And there's always some, especially if it's a kid in a family photo, the kid is blurred. Right. It was very hard to get astroworthy photographs because the image is very dim. When we did, we knew that when you take the starlight and pass it through a prism, you get important information about the light. chemical composition. Well, there's features in the light. We didn't know. There's features in the light. There are bright lines and dark lines. It's a spectrum. In the 1910s and 20s, we started taking spectra of stars, knowing that one day that's going to be important, even though we don't understand it.
47:02Right. Okay? Even though we don't really know what's going on. Super cool. And so huge data sets came down the pipe. And we have laboratory counterparts to the spectrum. So we think that's hydrogen. Oh, we think that's carbon. We think because it's over here and we see it there. Right. And... That's, I mean, unbelievable. No, no, it's amazing. It's amazing. It's so great. And finally, the 1920s come along. Quantum physics gets developed. We understand the freaking atom, what electrons are doing, what they do to light. If white light passes through it or any kind of light passes through it and all the data we have been collecting and not understanding what the hell it was telling us became the foundations for our understanding of stellar evolution.
47:54And it's one of the great triumphs of 20th century astrophysics. Wow. Yeah, man. That is very, very cool. All right. This is Alejandro Guardado. That's a different Alejandro. It is. We had Alejandro... Renoso. Renoso. That's right. Alejandro Renoso. Renoso. And this one is... Alejandro Guardardo. Guardardo. Okay. He coming in from where? Alejandro from Washington State.
48:33At least the other Alejandro was from Monterrey, Mexico. Yes, Monterrey. Monterrey, Mexico. Wasn't he from Mexico? Yeah, he was from Mexico. Okay, so maybe it's just Alex. They call him. You can call me Alex, though. Hey, guys. What you doing? Can I join? Got a question for you, dudes. The uncoolest person in the room. You go from the most interesting man in the world to... Hey, call me Alex. okay Alejandro from Washington State from Washington State he says I'm a new Patreon member oh nice welcome thanks buddy I gotta do my voice welcome to the universe there you go oh yeah you've been officially birthed into our family bro and by the way I think you do get a lower voice than me but you don't sustain it I can't you have that whiskey voice that's why I can't sustain it oh cause it's I'm drunk right now he says my question is what are good ways to wrap your head around partial or even complete vacuums.
49:42For example, space. I am still trying to wrap my head around fans not working in space. And I'm wondering. That's a weird thought. It is. Why don't fans work in space? And I'm wondering why these. The rotor's spinning. I can't. It's still hot. I don't understand how I'm hot. And it's only like three degrees Kelvin in here. Anyway, he says, I'm wondering why these things work the way they do. What is the vacuum of space? I mean, that's a very weird. There's a deeper question there. Go ahead. And it's, what is nothing? What is nothing? Yeah. The best vacuum we've ever created was in the detector, was it, of the Large Hadron Collider.
50:31Oh, cool. Because you don't want those particles hitting stuff they don't want them to hit. That's right. No, you got to suck everything out of there, man. And one of the problems is material. I did this when I was in college. I worked at Bell Labs for one summer. And we explored different vacuums because we were testing for superconducting materials. And you want a very sort of pristine environment for that. But anyhow, so you can, we have a cavity, and you suck out all the gas until the pump can't pump out any more out. You say, that's pretty good. Here's what you do next. You heat the walls.
51:12They're gas particles that got stuck in the texture of the surface of the cavity. You heat the walls. They all jump out. You see the pressure go back up just by heating it. Then you suck that out. Now you cool it down, and then you have a way better vacuum than you otherwise would have. But still, the particle's left over there. So, we do okay with our vacuums. You leave our atmosphere very far between the planets, that's an even better vacuum. You go outside the solar system between the stars, that's an even better vacuum. You go outside the galaxy, between the galaxies, that's an even better vacuum.
51:56And last I ran the numbers on that, that vacuum has one particle every cubic meter. That's correct. And one particle? Yeah, yeah, one particle per cubic meter. So leave your fan at home. That's the lesson here. But if you take away that particle, then what is that? Is there nothing there? No, there is still something there. the laws of physics are still there.
52:26If you want a place where there's nothing, shouldn't you be removing the laws of physics as well? Now we're talking like we're outside of matrix stuff now. Let me not even get there yet. That's not even a loading program anymore. Let's not even get there yet. Now there's no particles there. Okay. There is light passing through it. the cosmic microwave background visiting the region. Right. Okay. And there's something called virtual particles that pop in and out of existence. Quantum physics dictates this. And so there's a vacuum of no regular particles, but other stuff is happening. And through that volume is the fabric of space and time.
53:16so a real place a real vacuum should have not only no particles it should have no virtual particles it should not even have a space time continuum and if it doesn't even have that maybe that's how you get rid of the laws of physics you took away the space time maybe laws of physics are part of space time so yeah this is kind of stuff like over a beer you know you. Yeah, but make sure it's a zero calorie beer. No, I know I said beer because you would have said weed, right? That's a weed conversation. I never smoked, so I can't relate to what that might be. That is definitely a weed conversation, man.
54:02And by the way, and I forgot which one of my two Merlin books, they just got republished, one last year, and one is coming out in a few days, actually. the someone asked merlin that very merlin was my pen name for a column that i wrote for like 10 years right and people asked the public asks so i'm very comfortable in this q a environment just in case i don't know you didn't know that well you know i we've been working together for a little while now so i figured that out so so one of the questions was what what's the best vacuum And so Merlin is my pen name goes through all the various vacuums.
54:41Oh, really? And how many particles per cubic meter. There's a lot and then less and less and less. And so it's in there. It's very cleanly described. Very nice. Yeah. All right. That's all the time we have. All right. Oh, my gosh. And all these were asked by Patreon members. That's right. Thank you all the Patreon people. Yes. We love our Patreon supporters. And you can go to Patreon.com and join the StarTalk family for as little as$5 a month. You too can save a comedian. In the arms of an angel. You need puppy eyes? You gotta be looking through a gate or something. Yeah, we need a chain link fence right here.
55:25And I'm just like. All right. that's not where the money goes to it goes to experiments that we conduct to try to it allows us to expand the show in ways that are not quite commercially viable yet and work on it and get people's input and so yeah we appreciate you is the point that's right and we got StarTalk Plus channel now in YouTube because of Patreon because StarTalk Plus makes no money at all not yet we're working on it we're working on what works in there Yeah, we're working on it. Okay, that's it, Chuck. Another episode of StarTalk Grab Bag. That's right. All right. So this has been yet another episode of Cosmic Queries Grab Bag Edition.
56:11Chuck, always good to have you. Always a pleasure. All right. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.
56:27Okay,
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From the publisher
What is nothing? Could a dying back hole cause the Big Bang? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice answer fan questions about a black hole’s dying gasp, lunar eclipses, and the meaning of nothing.
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