Cosmic Queries – Total Darkness

22:18Neil deGrasse Tyson:Sorry. One of them might have a continual source of energy going in. Mm-hmm. So then the cool thing comes up to its temperature. You see what I'm saying? Right. But if they're two isolated objects at different temperatures, they will meet in the middle somewhere. Right. At a temperature lower than the high one and higher than the low one. Gotcha. All right. So you can calculate the rate at which the temperature changes. Oh, okay. Okay? And deduce, as Isaac Newton apparently did. I own everything that man's ever written, and I've got to go dig that up. You've got to go dig up the law of cooling.

22:54Neil deGrasse Tyson:That must be a chapter I missed. Yeah. Okay? So what it states is the bigger the temperature difference, the faster the rate of change of temperature will be. Okay. Which kind of makes sense. It just kind of makes sense. Absolutely. Yes. Right. And if you do some measurements of that, you can actually represent it with an equation. Okay. And you make a prediction. Right. The temperature difference, they'll be the same temperature in 10 minutes. Right. By the way, this is happening every day. You get a glass of water, you put ice in it. Right. eventually it's going to be water the ice will melt and then you have water that's cold but it's still air temperature out here eventually that comes up and that comes up that was an assignment in physics class when I was in 8th grade and what we had to do was plot the melting of the ice in a graph to see whether or not it was linear and it was yeah that would be a cooling cooling curve yeah that's a cooling curve it's gaining heat from the outside exactly yeah so there you go look at that See, people, these are the things you can think of when you are not busy thinking about sex.

24:01Like Isaac Newton. This is what happens. You become a genius. Because he's just like, well, I ain't having sex, so I might as well think about how do things melt.

24:08Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, he never married, had no children, had no known intimate relationships. Intimate relationships. So we're pretty sure when he came up with his law of gravitation and motion and calculus that he was a virgin. There you go, babe. That's it. Like a prize fighter. You know what I mean? You know what they say? You know, you stay hungry. All right, here we go. Ben Grun says, hey, StarTalk. This is God here to bestow upon you the keys of limitless energy. What do you do? Oh, well, first, I don't think it requires God.

24:53Neil deGrasse Tyson:We just have to tap the energy from the sun. There you go. Bro, we got this. Thanks. I say, God, we got, yeah. We're worried about somebody else. Take care of that homeless man in the street. We got the energy thing. We're kind of slow on the go here, but the sun has basically unlimited energy, and the Chinese are now wanting to put up a solar array in orbit, which there's no clouds, and if it's far enough away from Earth, it always sees the sun. 24-7 beam it down to earth by microwaves. So then you have this column of microwaves. What could go wrong? I want to cross that path for sure. But unlimited energy.

25:36Neil deGrasse Tyson:Here's what I would do. You ready? Go ahead. I would do what they did in Iceland. What's that? Iceland is sitting on top of volcanoes. You know this. Yeah. Okay. It's volcano land. It's not Iceland. It's not Iceland, yeah. Greenland is Iceland. Iceland. and not Greenland. Right, exactly. All right, it's the opposite here. So I want to do what they do in Iceland. Go ahead. They heat their water at these lava pits, okay, up in the mountains, and then send the water into town, but they do it under the streets so that snow never accumulates. Genius. Genius. You never, you don't need snow plows. You don't need salt.

26:21Neil deGrasse Tyson:Right. You don't need accident reports. Nope. It snows and then the streets are just, they're just clear. I would run hot water under everything. And then you just snow, snow be damned. It's radiant heating for your whole city. Yes. Wow, that's cool. Yes, and other things I might use unlimited energy for. I'll tell you what I'd use it for. pretty much shutting down every war that's ever been fought. Because most of these wars that we fight are over some form of energy. And so it's just like, well, guess what? It's unlimited, guys. What are you fighting over? Well, it could also be over food or water supplies.

27:07Neil deGrasse Tyson:There are other causes. There are other scarcity resources. But with unlimited energy, you would make water. Today, nobody is going hungry because there's not enough food in the world. If you're going hungry, it's because somebody— Yeah, it's because some greedy bastard is keeping you from getting food. Disrupting the food chain. So I don't think that was predicted back in 1900. No, right. We saw the population growing exponentially, and we saw the food supplies growing linearly. Yes. There was a point where people thought that we would run out of food. And just completely starve. Right. And so run out of food to feed everyone.

27:42Neil deGrasse Tyson:Right. rich people are always going to heat now exactly wow so that's cool man I love the idea of radiant heating for your city just so you don't have to do it especially since we got two feet of snow alright I love that answer by the way I think this is why Trump wants Greenland because he really thinks he wants Iceland I think if you gave him Greenland he'd be like what is all this snow everywhere I don't understand I don't get it. There's so much ice here. Plus there are references to penguins there. There are no penguins in the north. Yeah. They're all just. Any. There are no free penguins north of the equator.

28:25Neil deGrasse Tyson:Right. Exactly. They're all in captivity. They're in captivity. Wow. All right. This is Scott Oppenlander or Oppenlander, not open. Oppenlander. And he says, hey, Neil. Hey, Lord Nice. Scott Oppenlander here. Tuning in from Phoenix, Arizona. which I'm told is a quarter mile from the surface of the sun. Yeah. I was in Phoenix one time. Yeah. For my first time. Right. And the sun came out. Right. And I said, oh, this is a beautiful day. The sun is out. No one is in the streets. Nobody's in the streets. No one is in the parks. Yeah. And when they walk in the streets, they walk on the side of the street that's shadowed.

29:01Neil deGrasse Tyson:And they only follow shadows around. It is hot. It gets hot. You know. Yeah. Whoa. Yeah. Yeah. Scottsdale. It's like night, night, the sun goes down and all the vampires come out. Where were you people all day? Like, anyway, since our universe appears to be a pancake shape, like planetary systems and galaxies, do galaxies orbit around some larger central structure, like an even more super mega massive black hole? Or are galaxy motions just more random or ununiformed? There you go. The universe is not pancake shaped. So next question. Well, there you have it. It's waffle sick. No, but to the point, galaxy motions are mostly random.

29:49Neil deGrasse Tyson:And what I mean by random is they're not coordinated in some big way unless you're part of a galaxy cluster. Okay. And then there's some ballet of movement. However, some structures in the universe are so large that the average speed of the galaxy moving among other galaxies in that cluster is insufficient for the galaxy to have made one complete loop through that cluster. Okay. So that has significant consequences to what's going on there. It's called, it's not virilized. A virialized cluster is a cluster that has a very mature shape where, like a beehive, all the galaxies are moving around. You step back, it has a spherical kind of envelope that contains them.

30:39Neil deGrasse Tyson:But if it's kind of ratty like that, it's not yet virialized. It comes from what's called the virial theorem, which talks about how energy can be transmitted, shared, from objects with high energy to objects with lower energy so that everybody has approximately the same energy at the end of the process. Oh, very cool. So virilization is the sharing of that energy. It's the sharing of the energy. So it drops the energy of the high energy objects. It could be thermal energy. It could just be orbital energy. And the lower energies come up. So, by the way, it's a whole branch of physics. We talk about virilization of...

31:19Neil deGrasse Tyson:Of galaxies. Of matter. in whatever situation. So the ratty-looking galaxy clusters tend to not have been virilized. Gotcha. And so, yeah. All right. And by the way, we, moving around the center of our galaxy, takes about 200 million years. 200 million years. That's much smaller than the age of the galaxy, which is 13 billion. 13 billion years, right. Yeah, so galaxies are mature shape. And we're in a spiral galaxy. Correct, correct. That's very cool, man. Good question. This is MX Self-Destruct. Okay. Is that a thing here? MX Self-Destruct, I have no idea. But his name is Seamus, and he says, Dr.

32:03Tyson, Lord Nice, Seamus here from Los Angeles. We know that gravity is the result of the way space-time curves. So wouldn't it be more likely that gravity is simply a side effect of this curvature rather than a force with a carrier particle like a strong, weak, or an electromagnetic force? If there is a carrier particle, why is it not just the Higgs boson since that imparts mass, thus providing the curvature for the universe that we call gravity?

32:36Neil deGrasse Tyson:Wow. Man, people. Man. People are doing some work, man. People, man. People are doing some thinking. Man, so I can answer 80 % of that question. All right. It's an assumption that gravitation, as a force in the universe, has a force-carrying particle. Right. And the assumption is that if you represented classical gravity, even Einsteinian gravity, with quantum physics, it would have to have a particle. So we even named this hypothetical particle. Okay. The graviton. The graviton. Right. Exactly. So the hunt for the graviton is on. Right. All right. And so the effect of the graviton and mass and energy is to curve the fabric of space and time, forcing you to move in certain ways that would not otherwise be the case if we're not occupying that space.

33:29Neil deGrasse Tyson:Right. John Osher-Bowell Wheeler, a great physicist of the 20th century. I had him as a professor in graduate school. Wow. Okay. In fact, I met my wife in relativity class that he was teaching. Cool. I was sitting in the back row. She was in the front row. And then you guys made relatives.

33:52Neil deGrasse Tyson:What I can't quite wrap my head around is if gravity is just the curvature of space and time, maybe it's not a force. Okay. Because forces have these carrier particles. Right. And if you're just falling along a curvature of space and time, what does it even mean to think of that as a force? As a force. Right. Right. So maybe it sits outside of the quantum paradigms that would require that there be a graviton. Boy, that's something. That's kind of cool, man, in a way, because that means that there would be something in between the quantum. An understanding that we don't yet have. An understanding we don't have.

34:27Right, right, right.

34:28Neil deGrasse Tyson:It's a frontier. Yeah, that's cool. For sure. All right. Well, there you go, buddy. I mean, listen. You did some good. That's a great question. Mm-hmm.

34:48Support for StarTalk Radio comes from TalkAboutPD.com. Let's talk about a condition many people haven't heard of, and it turns out it's more common than you'd think, Peyronie's disease, or PD for short. PD can happen when scar tissue builds up under the skin of the penis. This can cause a curve with a bump during an erection, and for some men, lead to pain during intimacy, and may impact mental health. It may also lead to anger and frustration, depression, lower self-esteem, and even withdrawal from sexual activity and physical intimacy. Because of this, some men could feel embarrassed or reluctant to talk about PD.

35:27The actual cause of PD isn't always known. In some cases, it may be linked to a minor injury or repeated injuries during sex or other physical activity. The good news is PD is treatable. If you notice a curve with a bump, a trusted urology specialist can help diagnose it and walk you through your options, including non-surgical treatment. To learn more about Peyronie's disease, visit talkaboutpd.com. This episode of StarTalk is brought to you by six all-new McCafe drinks at McDonald's. We're talking crafted sodas made with your favorite sodas and topped with velvety cold foam, like a Spriteberry Blast made from Sprite and blueberry raspberry syrup.

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37:59This is John Mayer. I think it's Mayer or Mayer. He says M-E-I-E-R. Mayer. Mayer. John Mayer. Salutations from John in Carlsbad, California. Carlsbad, California. Yeah, Carlsbad, California. He says, Dr. Tyson, Lord and I, the great defenders of art curiosity. I have a question that has plagued me. Oh, that's a t-shirt if there ever was one. Yeah, the great defenders of art curiosity. He says, as budgets seem to be one of the significant components of innovation in science.

38:35Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yes. It's not a component of whether or not something is found to be true. It's a component of whether or not the research is conducted at all. Exactly. He says, if we were to greatly increase the national or hypothetically the global science budget for building telescopes, what would you propose to maximize mankind's current technological possibilities? And what could they deliver in order to create the most powerful telescope possible? What would it look like? What would you point it at and what might we see? Ooh, I would put an entire array of telescopes on the far side of the moon. Right. There's no atmosphere, so there's no clouds or anything.

39:18Neil deGrasse Tyson:So there's no value to be on a mountaintop. You don't even have value. There's no value to being in an orbit. Right. The whole point of the orbit is you're outside the atmosphere. On the moon, there's no atmosphere. You're good. You're good to go. So I put them all on the far side of the moon. And it doesn't even have to look towards Earth, where we have all of this contaminating radio wave noise. And everything. I mean, Earth is just this messy thing in space. It is. It's terrible. That's a great idea, though, putting on the far side of the moon, though, to watch. Put all the telescopes there.

39:45Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, and then I would, you put, of all bandwidths, you put all the telescopes of all the windows of the electromagnetic spectrum. Right. The radio waves. Everything. Everything. Everything. And now, what would you like to see? I want, I'm ready for the next generation of telescope that can see gravitational waves and neutrinos. Wow. That is not electromagnetic. Not electromagnetic. Yeah. That would be fantastic. I know. Look at that. Hey, great question, John Meyer. Way to go. All right, this is Tuomas Limata. Okay. Tuomas Limata. How do you spell it? Okay, T-U-O-M-A-S-L-I-M-A-T-T-A. Laimata.

40:31Tuomas Laimata. There you go. I'm going to say that. All right. And he says, hey, it's Tuomas from Olu, Finland. Long time lurker and first time Patreoner. Long time lurker? Lurker, yeah. So he's been watching forever, but he decided to lurk.

40:50Neil deGrasse Tyson:You just look over the shoulder. So now he pulled the trigger and now he's welcome aboard, my friend. He says, I have a small question that I've been pondering for a very long time. Is time permanent? Thank you. Wow. I don't know. Mm-hmm. I mentioned John Archibald Wheeler a moment ago. He's famous for uttering the following sentence. Matter tells space how to curve. Space tells matter how to move. Yeah. And that motion is defined to make time look simple. I love that. That's so great. Motion is defined to make time look simple. That's right. That's right. Yeah. So without that, who knows? Yeah, I mean, I want to believe that your whole timeline is just there and you're occupying this point in the present.

41:46Neil deGrasse Tyson:Points on the arrow. That's correct. Right. That's correct. I want to think that, and I can sort of do it because I can lay out what's going to happen. That's what a schedule is. What's your schedule? You're, you know. Right. I'm going to be here on Thursday and there on Friday and there on Saturday. and that's your future history. I don't know how you would live outside of a timeline. Right. Yeah, yeah. Because where there is no time reckoning, then nothing moves. Exactly. Because then you can measure time by that. Otherwise. Right, otherwise, yeah. So that'd be kind of cool though. I mean, no, it wouldn't be.

42:26I'd hate that idea. To be outside of time. That'd be outside of time. I hate the idea. However, that's what many people think. eternity in the afterlife is, is that it's in a dimension that exists outside of time. And that's why it's eternity, because time does not exist. Right, right, right. I see. That's the reasoning given. That's the reasoning given. Anyway, that's very cool, man. What a great thing to think about.

42:53Neil deGrasse Tyson:And by the way, if that's the case, if you're outside of time, then that's the realm of divinity, the realm of spiritual, these sorts of things. I just don't know how a material object could be. Could actually be there. Correct. Right. No, yeah, that's the whole idea. History allows us to remember our future. Nice. Yeah. Anyway, Gavin Bamber says this. Hello from North Vancouver. Please visit and please tell me, how much does the universe weigh? In fact, I'm going to be in Vancouver giving a public talk. Uh-huh. May 4th. May the fourth be with you. Yes. May the Neil be with you, Vancouver. How much does the universe weigh?

43:39So you can just do that on the back of an envelope. On the back of an envelope. Back of an envelope. Sound like a big envelope. Must be a manila envelope at least. So, yeah. You've got, we know the mass of the sun.

43:58Neil deGrasse Tyson:we know the mass of all the planets a fraction that of the sun we can practically ignore them because it's just in the round off error then we know how many stars there are in the galaxy then we know how many galaxies there are in the universe because we know where the edge of the observable universe is we know these numbers all you have to do is multiply it up right so the sun is is two times 10 to the 33 grams, times, let's say, 100 billion stars in the galaxy. So two times 10 to 33 times 10 to the 11th. That's 100 billion. So that's two times 10 to the 43rd grams times possibly a trillion galaxies.

44:48Neil deGrasse Tyson:Right. To the 12th power. Mm-hmm. So that's, what is it? 10 to the 50-something grams. Now, grams is a small unit, so you want to measure the tons or something. Oh, who cares? At that point, who cares? Who cares? The number is too big. The number is too big to even conceive of anyway. Yeah, yeah. The real answer is, how much does the universe weigh? Fuck ton. That is the biggest unit of measure there is. That's right. You can't get bigger than that. I told you, I created this. That's where I got it from. That's what you got it from. Yeah. It's the vulgar metric system. Yeah. That's where I got it from.

45:28That's why I said it.

45:29Neil deGrasse Tyson:So - Because it's like, it's a, you know, isn't there like an ass load of something? There's a shit load. A shit load. No, ass load is less than that. Right? Take this ass load of them. Take it to the market. We've got more than that? That's a shit load. And then, yeah. Yeah. So it's online somewhere. I think I had it at a Facebook post, but then I kind of hit it. Yeah. But it's out there. I know, I know. And I just remember that we— And when I did that, someone wrote it and said, this is beneath you. Yeah, of course. This is— Then I said, well, I've been hanging around Chuck. I was going to say, just blame me because I get that letter every day.

46:07You bring down Dr. Tyson. Okay. Why does he—why does he sully himself being around you, Chuck? Like so many—so—are you being surprised? You know what's interesting? Wait, this guy wrote me. He went, I'm sorry. I got to say this because it's so funny. He goes, hey, man, no disrespect, but I hate you.

46:32He's just like, please shut up. Please just sit there and don't say anything. And then he's just like, let Dr. Tyson give his talk. And I'm just like, bro, that's not the show. What you're talking about is his lectures. If you want that, go watch a lecture. But anyway, it just tickles me when people, there's a contingency out there that feels like, I sully you.

47:02Neil deGrasse Tyson:I mean no disrespect. I mean no disrespect. Get your head out of your ass. But I hate you. Oh, it's so great. So that's how you measure the mass of things. That's how you measure the mass. You just multiply it all out. We got the numbers. Oh, sorry. Sorry, I left out. Go ahead. Okay. there's six times as much gravity in the universe as is what is created by that mass that I just calculated. Right. So if that extra gravity comes from matter, then we legitimately are calling it dark matter. So you take whatever number you multiply it up, multiply it by six. That's phenomenal. Right. And we can do that without going out there with a scale.

47:41Neil deGrasse Tyson:Right, yeah. There are ways to do this. Yeah. Didn't we have an explainer, was it an explainer or question? But we weighed a truck. Yes. Yeah, we did that. And basically it was about using the air tires in the truck and all that kind of stuff. Anyway, let's move on because we're getting derailed. Time for just a couple more. All right. This is Mille from Macedonia. She says, hey, Chuck. Hey, Neil. Mille from Macedonia, Balkan, Europe, world. Japanese astrophysicists have defined, have identified a strong gamma ray glow near the Milky Way Center, matching predictions for annihilating dark matter particles, WIMPs.

48:26Okay? Weakly interacting massive particles. They're called WIMPs. WIMPs. Could you explain how these particles are different from regular matter? No. There you go.

48:39Neil deGrasse Tyson:I'm sorry. That's so great. The hunt for dark matter. Right. You know who was doing that was Katie Freeze. Right. We've had her as guests. You go dig up Katie Freeze. Yeah. That's actually a really fascinating episode that we had. Yeah, Freeze. F-R-E-E-S-E. Yes. She's an expert on dark matter detection. She's a theorist. She's a theorist. So she would think about what particle would interact with a dark matter particle for that to happen. Now, I'd be surprised if dark matter interacted with such ferocity that it would be giving us gamma rays. That's a little bit mysterious to me. Right. Because we would see that everywhere.

49:18Neil deGrasse Tyson:Right, exactly. You'd think. Yeah, exactly. You can't take this one example in our own Milky Way and say, see? When you have a trillion other galaxies. Right, right, right. That should be a common phenomenon. It should show up someplace. Our sample size is so large, you can see even rare phenomenon every night. Boom, that's awesome. Yes. I love that. All right. A quick reference to medicine. If I have a new pill, a new cure for something, and it's medicine that you take, it's not safe for—this is an old saying in the field. It's not safe for anyone until everyone has tested it. Exactly. Think about that.

49:56Neil deGrasse Tyson:No. You can test it on 1 ,000 people, but if you have a condition that's one in a million, it's not likely that you were in that data set. It's not likely that you weren't in that sample. You were not in that sample. Exactly. So ideally, you would test on everyone. They know exactly for whom it works and who it doesn't. That's not realistic. It isn't realistic. Whereas the universe is big enough so that extremely rare things happen all the time. Happen all the time. Right. Last question, Chuck. That's all we have time for. All right. Let's go with Larry McGuire, who says, hey, Dr. Tyson. Jerry McGuire?

50:31Show me the question. Show me the question. This is Larry McGuire. He says, hey, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice. Larry from Caledon, British Columbia, just down the road from the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory.

50:50Neil deGrasse Tyson:I use software that they wrote. Oh, really? There was an important colleague of mine from that observatory who wrote data reduction software. All right. And it was the primary software I used for my thesis, which is sitting right there, that big old fat book. That one right there. Yeah. So he says, I'm curious about your tools to keep looking up. What was your first telescope? And do you still have a telescope? And what type is it? Okay. Very good. Thank you. That's a great question to end on. All right. So my first encounter with the night sky was this dome of the Hayden Planetarium. Oh. That's so cool.

51:31Neil deGrasse Tyson:Because I grew up in the Bronx. Right. There's no night sky to New Yorkers. We had no relationship. Right. And so that was my first night sky. Okay. Then a friend of mine. Yeah. My best friend growing up. Right. He was smarter than me in like many countable ways. Okay. He taught me chess. He taught me poker. He taught me gambling. He taught me. Wow, that doesn't sound like a good friend. I'm just saying that's how people feel about me hanging around you. He was your Chuck Nice. He was just like, all right, let me show you how to gamble. Yeah, all his grades were higher than mine. So, oh, in fact, I'll give his name.

52:05Neil deGrasse Tyson:His name is Philip Branford. Philip Branford. And when I was on Celebrity Jeopardy, I pointed him out in the audience. Oh, really? Yeah. He came to the show. He came to the show. Came to the show. I pointed him out, and I say, he first got me to watch Jeopardy. He first got me to watch Jeopardy and first dude to give me drugs. What was your first telescope? Okay, so he had a pair of binoculars. Oh, cool. And so I'd look through the binoculars, and I never knew. We weren't wealthy enough to have binoculars just laying around. That's a different, you know. Yeah, that's a whole other income. It's a whole other income.

52:38That's an income level thing. Exactly. That's an income, just a level. Just a level. Just laying around the house.

52:42Neil deGrasse Tyson:Right, exactly. Go get the binoculars when we go to the. Abner. Look at what they're doing over there, Abner. Where did you get Abner? I don't know. Anyway. Okay. So he invited me to look up with them, and I saw the moon. And the moon wasn't just bigger. Yeah. It was better. Yeah. It was, oh, my gosh. Right. And you don't want to look at a full moon because that sucks. Yeah. You want to look like a half moon. It gets blown out. Yeah. Any photographer knows. Yeah. You don't directly illuminate something. Right. There are no shadows. There's no depth. You wait for there to be shadows. Any other phase, ideally half moon, which is officially called the first quarter or last quarter, first or third quarter moons.

53:23Neil deGrasse Tyson:So, yep, longest shadows visible. I'm looking at it with the binoculars. It's like, whoa. This is like a whole other thing. Nice. Oh, my God. I felt like I was there. Nice. Yeah. So that was like tipped me off that stuff was going on up there that the human eye does not notice. Right. So then. That was your gateway. This.

53:46Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yes. The binoculars were the gateway drug of my. That was your gateway drug. Curiosity. Cosmic curiosity. Cosmic curiosity. Then when I'm 11, we moved to Lexington, Massachusetts. We spent just a year there. My father had an academic appointment for just one year in the Kennedy School of Government. All right. Yeah, now it's just called... Now it's called the Trump Kennedy School of Government. But no one wants to perform there.

54:21Neil deGrasse Tyson:You're talking about the Kennedy Center? Yeah. Okay. I'm a city kid and we're living in a private house. What's up with that? Right. You want me to do what with this shovel? You want me to do what with this rake? Right, right, right. Oh, isn't this snow pretty? Right. And then they hand me a shovel. Of course. It's like, what? Yeah. Okay. And then it's autumn and the leaves are on the ground. What? Yeah. The grass gets long. Okay. What? What? Yeah. I'm a city kid. Yeah. You're like, you're pining for the city again. We just stayed, it was someone else's private home for a year. Right. That's what it was.

54:54Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah. They were on sabbatical or something. Anyway, my interest in the universe was stoked. Because I learned that Harvard had a Center for Astrophysics. Interesting. Old Department of Astrophysics. It was like, whoa. Okay. That's like really cool. And so my parents saw this, and they took me there for one of their open house nights. They had telescopes. Wow. And it was like, I died and went to heaven. And I'm 11 years old, okay? For my birthday in October, that year when I turned 12, they bought me my first telescope. It was a 2.4-inch refracting telescope. That telescope, I rapidly outgrew. But, I mean, I saw the rings of Saturn, the weather bands on Jupiter, Jupiter's moons, nebulae, the Andromeda galaxy, the sunspots, they had special filters for that.

55:54Neil deGrasse Tyson:And then I'm like 12 and my parents just let me out there to observe the sun. They'd never even asked. I think they just trusted that I knew what the hell I was doing. Well, no kid walks out with a telescope to go get in trouble. Hey guys, I'll be right back. Yeah, gonna go rob a bank with this telescope. No, no. I'm just, in retrospect, they were never concerned that I did not know what I was doing. Right. That's, I'm not kind of angry. Well, listen. Yeah. I mean, Lee, you can't, you're not going to question your kid when they're just like, yeah, I want to go look at the sky. Yeah, with a telescope.

56:32Neil deGrasse Tyson:With a telescope. Okay. Yeah. So, and then when it did snow, you know, this is New England, right? So there's a lot of snow there. Yeah. I want to take the telescope out back. And winter nights are long. right anywhere they're long and the air is crisp yeah much less humidity right and so the really good observe some of the best observing is in very cold nights so i dug a path into the middle of our back we had a backyard and a little circle and that was my little observatory circle observatory circle would take the telescope out there and i had several eyepieces and that's what That's very cool.

57:07Okay, so within a year, I outgrew the telescope.

57:12Neil deGrasse Tyson:Okay. Okay. Tied of looking at this thing. Stuck. No, so we sold it to a friend or acquaintance. And then I would then buy my own telescope the next year. Gotcha. When I was 13, maybe a year and a half later, I'd buy my own telescope with money I earned by walking dogs. and that was a six-inch Newtonian optics reflecting telescope. Wow, okay. It's a six-inch telescope. Nice. That telescope I took to Africa to view a total solar eclipse when I was 14, and I lied and told everyone I was 15. Oh, yeah, because that made a difference. Because I wanted the respect of a 16-year-old. I went alone on this cruise.

57:58Neil deGrasse Tyson:It was like a science expedition to the— Very nice. So I took my telescope with a big old, the telescope is huge, and a big old crate. That telescope has since been gifted to a museum of science in Kentucky who decided to make an exhibit of famous people's first telescope. Interesting. They have my telescope. They have your telescope. It's like on permanent loan there. That's great. I haven't visited there. I don't know if it's on display or anything. but they got my telescope. That's cool, man. I also took it to the Mojave Desert where I was in astronomy, lived nocturnally in an astronomy camp.

58:41Neil deGrasse Tyson:Very nice. Talk about geeking out. Yeah, man. Who else is going to be there but like crazy other - Other, yeah, geeks. That's it. That's from - Yeah, girl geeks and boy geeks and we were all there and since then, I went a long period without a telescope when I went to college and I said, it's time I gotta get back in the game here. Much later, when I had some cash, then I bought a very high quality optical telescope, and since then I have two digital telescopes. Which takes some of the fun out. You know, you just set up the tripod, go back into your warm. It's the rompopeel of telescopes. Set it and forget it.

59:20Neil deGrasse Tyson:You just, you go back in to your warm living room, and you just guide it with your iPad. Love it. I'm old school. Give me, make it hard for me. Love that. Love it. So, yeah. So, at the time, I was a member of the Amateur Astronomers Club, which had monthly meetings here at the American Museum of Natural History under the shadow of the Hayden Planetarium. So, I go way back in this. Nice. There you go. That's what it is. Those are my telescopes. Very nice. Oh, and in this office, I have a 2.4-inch refracting telescope, which is not my original, but it's exactly the same size. It's exactly like, right.

1:00:03Neil deGrasse Tyson:Okay? And in the hallway of the astrophysics department, there's a 6-inch Newtonian reflecting telescope, which is exactly the size of my telescope. But they were selling them in the shop 50 years ago. Wow. And this one was the display model, and we just kept it now that the shop is all blended with the other shops. Very nice. And so those are my two memories. You were the first. No one in the department knows this. Right. That I had that telescope there and this telescope there, that same optics. And so when I see them, I feel a little nostalgic. A little nostalgic. Yeah, except for when I was on the roof with my telescope.

1:00:41Neil deGrasse Tyson:Right. And then neighbors call the cops. Oh, well, yeah. Because, you know, you can't have a black man on the roof. With something that looks like a bazooka. With something that looks like a bazooka.

1:00:53I think he's going to murder the president. I'm not sure. He's up there with a big scope.

1:00:58Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, yeah. Cop approaches me, hand over his gun. It's like, what the hell? I'm a 15-year-old kid. That's funny. You know, just absorbing the universe. Nice. One last thing, and then we got to call it quits here. Okay. So there's some children's books that tell my story growing up. Okay. And one of them retells that story of me on the roof. On the roof? With the cops? And they show the cops showing up. Uh-huh. But then the cops show up, and I say, have you ever seen Saturn through a telescope before? and then they're enchanted, they're on. But up until that moment, it's actually quite tense. Of course.

1:01:28Neil deGrasse Tyson:Because they don't know what I'm telling them to look at. Right. You know. You got them with Saturn. You ought to have the moon or Saturn ready to - That's a good one to get anybody. Get anybody. And that children's book, which showed the cop, was banned in Pennsylvania. Oh, no. Yeah. For what? Because it was showing - A police officer in a bad light? Yes. Do you remember there was a period of book banning? Right. That wanted to protect the image. The image of prey. Yeah. And so, and I tracked it, and it was only on the ban list for about six months, six to eight months. Those people who ban those books, they would like the version where the cops show up, and they go, oh, well, hello, young Negro.

1:02:13And then they go, we'd like to introduce you to somebody. And then all of a sudden, they bring out Carl Sagan. and you're like, oh my God. And then everybody loves happily ever. It's not how that one went down. Exactly, right.

1:02:24Neil deGrasse Tyson:All right, so that's my story of my telescope. Oh, well, that was cool. Yeah, thank you for that question. Yeah. Very good. All right. All right, we got to call a quiz there. Well, there you have it. That was as potpourri a selection of questions as there ever was. That's why they're fun. That's, there you go. Chuck, always good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. Neil deGrasse Tyson for StarTalk Cosmic Queries. Until next time, keep looking up with or without a telescope.

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