The Science of Godzilla, Zombies & Other Monsters, with Charles Liu

0:00We had to do an episode on the physics of monsters. We had to. Oh my gosh. I've learned so much. And I don't look behind you right now, but I think there's something creeping up on you. And it's not just the physics, but the biology of monsters, the chemistry of monsters, all that coming up on StarTalk.

0:28This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Today we're talking about the physics of monsters. I got with me Matt Kirshen. Hey. How you doing? Professional comedian? Yeah, that's the job title. That's the recital tax return. You're on tour now. I am on tour. I'm on a couple of tours at the same time. Well, I'm opening for Sarah Millican, who's a fantastic UK comedian. And we're doing some lovely theaters around the country. And then I'm doing, kind of off the back of that, I'm doing some club headlining sets where I'm telling, you know, her many, many audience members like, hey, if you enjoyed me for 15 minutes.

1:07So you're pilfering her audience. I am shamelessly, I'm shamelessly siphoning off some of her success. Oh my gosh. So yeah, mattkirchen.com for all of the dates. I'm going to be around the country. Plus you have a podcast, a sometime science. Probably science. I know you do this on purpose. I know you do this on purpose, but every time. i've only ever been on once i'm waiting for my next we got it uh i think we're talking about because you've you've always got another book coming out and i think we're gonna try and again shamelessly piggyback off of your success on that one as well call me matt so we'll get you on for for the definitely science episodes so this monster subject you know i have some interest in the physics of monsters but when we hit topics like that we've gotta call the geek and Chief.

1:56I'll let you introduce him, but I've done one other episode with our guest. With the Geek and Chief. It's lovely to see you be topped on this subject. It's lovely to see someone out-nerge you on this stuff. I'm not worthy. Charles Liu, welcome back to StarTalk. Thanks for having me, Neil. What a pleasure. Hi, man. Oh, it's lovely to see you. Man, you're a professor at CUNY, Staten Island. Yes. CUNY City University of New York. Yes. Many campuses in the city. 25. Oh my gosh. A quarter million full-time students. Wow. Yeah, it's a great system. Wow. And you have a podcast that started a few years ago?

2:32Yes. The Looniverse? The Looniverse, yes. I see what you did there. It wasn't me, okay? My family did. I'm proud to have it as the name, but I always thought it was a little bit weird to put your name into the universe and claim that you had a real role in that. Almost everybody's podcast has their own name in it. So just don't be afraid of that. Okay, okay. Okay? But when I heard how clever this was in the universe, I started thinking other, like, lunatic. Oh, I could fit that description. There's a lot of lew, you know. Oh, yes. And then there is lew. The lew. Yep. The lew, yeah. The British lewd behavior.

3:08It's all about. Oh, jeez. Lewd behavior, yeah. So the physics of monsters. Yes. Gosh, that topic has no end. No, it has no end whatsoever. And monsters to maybe actual animals in our environment that we didn't know much about and only showed up at night. Maybe had beady eyes and people, maybe they worked their way into legends as monsters. Yes. And one of my favorite was, is it the Triceratops skeleton that was coming out of some eroded cliff face? Uh-huh. It was like, what animal is this? That's right. Is this a dragon? before anyone had any understanding of dinosaurs or extinction or anything.

3:51Yeah. There's a famous, I don't know, human nature makes us think about monsters because when we have something that's unknown and we fear it, we want to explain it. We want to put it in a context. And so with me, as a professional scientist, I still am driven by the unknown and the creative and the strange things. As you must be if you're going to be a good scientist. Yeah, I love comic books. I love science fiction and fantasy and everything like that. And what we did as a species centuries or millennia ago, anything we didn't know, didn't understand and feared, we tried to personify or put into this concept of a monster, make it more accessible to us.

4:34And then years later, as we have learned more about our natural world, we see that those monsters aren't monstrous at all. In fact, they're very natural and it's scientific. And that kind of connection and learning about these creative things makes us feel cooler and makes us feel better about the whole universe. So do you have a favorite monster? We all do, presumably. At the moment, my favorite monster is Godzilla. That's almost too easy. It is. Godzilla is classic. It is the longest running movie franchise of all time. Is it really? The first Godzilla movie came out in 1954. So it's been 70 years of Godzilla.

5:14So you're not counting train coming towards you as a monster? Oh, in the original silent movie. In the original silent movie. It's more slowly galloping. Well, those are monsters of a different kind, right? Those are the monsters in our imagination. Right. Things that we think are frightened and scary, they must be a monster. But then, turns out it's just a train. It can still smush you, but it's just a train. My niece, who grew up in Pennsylvania, came to New York for the first time. I think she was seven or eight. And we're about to take the subway. And we start walking down the stairs. And this sound of a train comes in.

5:55And she doesn't know what it is, but it's coming from that direction. And she runs back up the steps. That's right. And would not go down the stairs. It is a very, the New York subway particularly is an aggressively loud sound. Yeah, and it rumbles. And so that was her, that was a train, which she'd never seen before, a subway train. But that, why fear it unless you think it will harm you? It is kind of monstrous. And it's coming out of the darkness. You don't see, first there's the noise, then the lights. Right, right. And there's a tunnel and it's a, yeah, all of the above. And so humans will do that, right?

6:25Okay. Now, the thing about Godzilla, which is extra special to me, is that it can be that kind of subway monster. Loud, scary, and it burns you with its atomic breath and everything like that, right? But culturally, when it came to the United States, it took on a different kind of life. You see, in Japan, monsters since time immemorial have not necessarily been these evil, scary creatures. They are just a non-human creatures. And as a result, they can be different from humans in ways that you can find in literature, in stories, in mythology that allows you to tell things much like the gods of Olympus did say in ancient Greek times about things that we don't understand and are trying to understand, not just of nature, but of human nature.

7:12Going back to Greece and Rome, are you suggesting, for example, that in our 88 constellations of the sky, there are non-human creatures up there that you might think of as a monster? We have centaurs. Yes, we have Draco, the dragon. Draco, the dragon. Wrapped around the North Star. Yeah, and we have Minotaur, which is like half bull. That's right. If one of those showed up at my front door, I'd be scared. Those are pretty monstrous too, right? But they're not portrayed as scary. They're just non-human things. Yes, and that is precisely how I see monsters based on that kind of cultural thing, right?

7:48You have Asian heritage from Taiwan. Yes, absolutely. So our exposure to the Asian, if I may group it that way, dragon is very different from the European dragon. 100%. The European dragon is a menace. That's right. Whereas the Asian dragon is just a playful thing. Not only playful, but noble and very helpful and so forth. the constellations of the Chinese zodiac that you know, right? The dragon is kind of in the middle. The story is very long, but to cut it short, the reason it's number six, as opposed to number one, because it's such a powerful creature, is because it saw a rabbit in trouble crossing a river.

8:29And so he went back to help the rabbit cross the river and let the rabbit finish in the contest before he did. So the rabbit comes before the dragon. That is some kind behavior. That is great. In real life, by the way, if any rabbits are listening to this, you shouldn't actually trust dragons because that is just a myth. Public service announcement. I just need to get that in before you get into lawsuits. But if I remember correctly, from my Chinese zodiac, the dragon is the only non-actual animal of the 12. It is the one truly mythological creature. That's right, in the zodiac. And indeed, dragons are considered particularly successful, particularly smart, particularly potentially wealthy.

9:16So people will actually change their birth dates of their children so that they are born in the year of the dragon. They will delay C-sections, they will wait and so forth just to make sure. This is the kind of thing that I want people to think about when it comes to bonds, right? They're not necessarily good or bad unless we project those facts in. In fact, aren't the true monsters we humans ourselves? I think it was a deliberate act of naming that on Sesame Street, the puppets, Muppets, were all called monsters. C is for cookie. That good enough for me. But they're lovable and playful and colorful.

9:56and so I think it was intended to de-scarify a monster in the eyes of small children. These are lovable monsters and so now you're going to talk about a monster, I'm just going to laugh at you because monsters teach you the alphabet. Yeah, absolutely. They save rabbits and they teach you how to count. 100%. No, that was the count who taught you how to count. Oh, that's a good point. Get your character straight, dude. You're from the UK. What do you know? Is a vampire not a monster? I don't know. There you go. Right. Is a vampire a monster? Absolutely it was, right? When the original Vlad, right, the impaler, right, and was later on died and then people in Transylvania area, not Transylvania itself, but that area of Eastern Europe wanted to scare their kids.

10:46They said, be careful because Vlad will come get you even though he's dead, right? The concept of the undead, which had been around for thousands of years in folk mythology got embodied in this one guy, right? Count Dracula, which was then brought into modern times by Bram Stoker and then into the movies with Bela Lugosi, right? And you kind of went from there. And Tom Cruise, yeah. Oh yeah, that guy. Don't forget Tom Cruise. Interview with the vampire. There you go, Leshtat. Yes. So that kind of monstrosity, right is literally a human being that has become something non-natural so the evil comes from not the fact that he's not human but because he used to be a really bad human right right the count just counts ah ah ah right he wasn't scary at all but he was a vampire he was a monster

11:51I'm Joel Cherico, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

12:09I was simultaneously enlightened and disturbed when I came to this realization that God's Godzilla in Japan, within 10 years of the dropping of the atomic bombs, shows up as a radioactively influenced... Created. The radioactivity created him. I was thinking to myself, Japan is the only country against whom atomic weapons have been used. Yes, this is not a coincidence at all. That's why I want to affirm here that it became part of their storytelling culture. What are we going to do with this? How are we going to come to terms with it? Yes. So again, it's a way of sort of embodying your fears and the worst things that have happened to you.

12:58That's right. And personifying them. Think about environmental degradation, right? Yeah. Godzilla was the result of, according to the mythology, atomic testing and the radioactivity that basically awoke a sleeping giant or transformed something that was large and powerful, but benign. You didn't even have to give the specific details of that. Just that it created this life form. And turned it into this terrible thing that destroyed humans. In other words, what did we create? What have we done? They're city killers. Humans are collateral damage. That's a great point. Yeah, we are, but minor. But you see what happened was other monsters like Gamera.

13:42Okay. Big giant flying turtle, by the way. Very cool. Very similar to Godzilla in size and shape, but different kind of thing. This is also from the Japanese. Oh, yes. From that Japanese tradition. What's the name of this one? Gamera. How come I know? I don't remember Gamera. Oh. I remember Mothra. Mothra. Yes. Who attacked Gamera also would sprinkle little things onto Godzilla and confuse him. But my favorite, can I say my favorite? Yes. But I want to keep telling me about Godzilla. I just have to get my favorite out there. Get your favorite out there. My favorite was Rodan. Rodan, big flying guy.

14:10It was basically a pterodactyl. A pterodactyl is just flying around. Because it was supersonic. Okay. It would like fly and trucks would tumble in its wake. In its wake. That's right. And I said, if I were a super monster, I want to be. Well, before Mothra became a butterfly, Mothra was a caterpillar. I thought Mothra was a moth. Mothra became a moth after, but originally Mothra was larval. And like nature, right? Butterflies come from caterpillars or moths come from caterpillars. Moth and a butterfly, not the same thing. My bad. My bad. Mothra is a moth. Thank you. Butterfly-a is a butterfly.

14:54But yes, Mothra before achieving the flying state was a caterpillar. A silkworm, literally. Oh, yeah. That blew out. Silkworm again, you get the regional culture. That's right. And so there was actually one of the great monster movies of all time. It was a collab. They had Godzilla, Mothra, and Rodan together to fight King Ghidorah, which had three heads and was very, very dangerous and was like brought in from alien. King Ghidorah was not a product of Earth. It was an evil monster. Wasn't there an episode, wasn't there one of these movies where Mothra as a caterpillar spins a cocoon to trap the enemy monster?

15:41Oh, many episodes. Oh, many episodes. Many things like that. Yes. And in fact, there's episodes, we keep calling it episodes, but they're just individual movies. But the franchises have become so huge that they're almost like individual episodes. But at least in one movie that I saw a long time ago, I don't remember the exact details of it. When Charles says he doesn't remember the exact details, it means he doesn't remember every single detail. It comes down to the syllable, but it just has the kind of like broad stroke. Okay, yeah. Okay, just want to clarify. Okay. And the eggs hatched and there were two new moth rusts.

16:16The scientist says knowingly, yes, multiple births are common in the natural world or the insect world or whichever world it was, it was talking about. But that kind of connection between these monsters being representations of nature, something like King Ghidorah, which is the representation of evil and conquest, right, wound up coming against each other. And monsters like Godzilla, which wiped out cities in early episodes or early movies, wound up saving humanity more than once, including, ironically, against humans creating a new monster because of environmental degradation, not nuclear, but pollution.

16:53famous movie Godzilla versus the smog monster. The smog monster? The smog monster. Why do you know this? Charles! Godzilla agrees to bike to work a couple of days a week. Godzilla cuts down on meat consumption. Godzilla does vegan-yering. That's right. Well, Godzilla's difference from just a big dinosaur is his atomic breath. and the physics of the atomic breath have been retconned over and over again. How does he breathe fire? How does he breathe this terrible? Weren't dragons breathing fire before Godzilla did? Yes. But this is a different account. And also presumably the myth of dragons of breathing fire long predates any human knowledge of atomic energy.

17:40That's right. And so the idea that this fire comes from that is very important and it's atomic in nature. But Gamera, that turtle guy that I was referring to earlier. A flying turtle. Yes, actually. Turtles must go to the drive-ins all the time to see this. Turtles are great. Yeah, they love that stuff. Because they're the slowest moving thing. That's right. If you have a flying turtle. They got flying, they got ninjas. That doesn't do very well in the... And Master Ugui from Kung Fu Panda. They're doing... They're batting above their average. Is that also a turtle in Kung Fu Panda? Ugui is turtle in Mandarin Chinese.

18:15And Master Ugui is the turtle. Stupid. Did you know that? Yeah. I'm more of a Cantonese speaker. Are they different? They're different languages, right? I haven't screwed that one up. Okay, thank you. It's linguistically different, even though they share the same written forms. Good. Yes, absolutely. It's nice to have my joke fact checked. In real time, I like that. I'm just glad turtles get some love. That's right. Get some love out there. Gamera not only catches a child that's falling, he eats fire. It was figured out in the first Gamera movie that the reason he was destroying cities was because he was seeking fire and he wanted to eat it because he needs that.

18:49That's his nutrition. And so when he knocked over a structure where a little child was watching and it was like the child was going to fall to his death, Gamera caught the child, put it down. It then literally was willing to leave the world to save Earth. What happened was the humans said, you know, we want Gamera to survive. Gamera is obviously not evil, but he can't come around and knock down our cities and eat our oil refineries. And so they created something called Plan Z. You said he eats fires. Yeah, play Plan Z, okay? And they had him stalled at a train depot and just kept sending trucks and train cars full of gasoline onto him so they would catch fire and so he could eat the fire.

19:32And then they cut that off when they got Plan Z ready. They had all these flares that would slowly get him up a mountain and they'd walk up the mountain, okay? But unfortunately, a hurricane came, a typhoon, and blew out all the flares. And so he was like, oh, blasted typhoon. He was going to head back down to the city, but then the volcano erupted. So he kept going up toward the volcano top. Is this Fujiyama erupted? I don't remember which mountain it was. How many volcanoes are there in Japan? Right. But, you know, this is just amazing coincidence. You have a typhoon coming and a volcano erupting at the same time.

20:08And then he slowly went up to the top and then he got into an area which had a lot of fire. and then the area closed up and turned into the top part of a rocket, which then sent him to Mars. Wow, okay. Yeah. Isn't that cool? The whole... So in terms of the science of monsters, many of these are derived from actual life forms that are important to us, what we think about and care about. Dinosaurs, for example, in the case of Godzilla. One thing I've always had an issue with was to be that large, yet that nimble. Can't do it. You can't do that. Can't do it. No, it's physically impossible. Yeah, so talk about that.

20:50Well, the scaling of volume and surface area and height, right, goes at different powers. Mathematical powers, not physical powers. Well, that kind of too, right? So if I double in height, I will actually increase by a factor of eight in volume, right? Two times two times two, left and width and height. So I would be eight times larger in volume. And thus, presumably, all of the stuff inside me is made of the same material. I'm eight times heavier. That means my legs have to support eight times the weight, right? Now, if I get bigger, it gets worse. If I'm 10 times taller and wider and thicker, then I'm a thousand times more massive.

21:37Okay. My legs are increasing in surface area, in cross-sectional area, only by a factor of a hundred in that case. Right. So my bones have to be 10 times stronger to support my weight. Because your strength goes not as the volume, but as the area, the cross-sectional area of the muscle. And your muscles have to be 10 times stronger to propel them. That's absolutely right. So if Godzilla being 400 feet tall or so in the first movie. Godzilla would weigh a billion tons. Yeah, so much that all known bone would shatter, right? All known muscles would tear. He would just be a blob of protoplasmic stuff because he couldn't support himself.

22:18Nevermind walking with that cheerful little gait that he has. Right. Yeah, he's nimble. Yeah. Same way like actually with real things that like a cricket can jump many times its own height whereas humans can. that's right and so if the cricket were outside it would just collapse under its own that's right yeah its legs would not be able to support its spindly little legs because when you read about it as a kid they'll say like oh a flea can jump however many times its own height and if that were a human size then it'd be able to jump over the Empire State Building or whatever it is and I was actually no it wouldn't it would just kind of lie flat on the floor kind of like kill me kill me now these are people who don't know physics who are giving those answers this is where that creation of monsters like Godzilla get exciting to us because we do see animals uh insects uh things like that that are smaller than us do amazing superhuman things if they were scaled up to size right so we imagine that if they're even bigger than we are they'd be even more amazing and powerful but the physics prevents that right that doesn't make them any the less cool and so modern monsters right are looking um more and more friendly and cuddly right less and less evil and scary you're very helpful there and so i just realized we had a monster earlier than our version of a monster earlier than godzilla and that would be king kong yes that's now that's 20 years earlier that's right that's right uh-huh right and and a giant monkey ape chimp type creature who was benign and perfectly friendly and it was living on a skull island and doing great until humans decided to take him to New York and show him off as the eighth wonder of the world.

23:57And only then did he become bad and harm people. Right, the movie, now that I'd forgotten this, was quite sympathetic. It was, very much so. It was, some people think that it was a way that the movie makers were trying to say, hey, don't hurt the environment, guys. You know, take good care of nature lest it comes back and bite you. bite you in half, which was one of the scary scenes of King Kong, where he actually had a human being in his teeth dangling. And while he like bit down on it, he was like, oh yeah, that's, that's scary. Right. But that was sort of nature unfettered if humans messed it up.

24:35Right. And he wound up being in love with Faye Ray, the girl, climbed up the Empire State building and then airplanes came and shot him and killed him and he fell down to earth and the last line of the movie it was beauty killed the beast as he's laid their dead on the street it wasn't it was the airplanes right that's right or it was humans that killed the beast yeah the beast was oh this beast was actually very friendly guy i mean he treated uh the humans with perfect kindness and normal behavior until he was put in this environment and and uh you know that one of the things also was the humans losing control of nature right because when another repeating theme that's right when the when the um reveal of kong happened in new york city and the flash bulbs were popping and he was getting upset and he was pulling against his restraints right well the the impresario said, don't worry, ladies and gentlemen, those shackles are made of chrome steel.

25:40There's no way he can break out of those, right? And then he breaks out of them because humans underestimated the power of nature in our hubris. And we overestimated the power of our chrome steel, which back then in the 1930s was like, oh wow, chrome steel. That's why they made car bumpers out of chrome steel that's right before your day i've seen chrome before my day okay i don't know about your day but uh yes so uh another sympathetic monster yes but you have to remember that you were sympathetic to him is frankenstein's monster yes absolutely that you know i felt sad for the thing yes considered by many to be the first true science fiction novel in the european tradition Percy Bysshe Shelley's wife, Mary Shelley, wrote this book, Frankenstein.

26:30It went through several editions in the early 1800s. But the monster was the creation of Dr. Frankenstein, who was trying to - Frankenstein. Sorry. That's the Gene Wilder version, which I liked very much as well. Yes, and Igor instead of Igor, right? Yeah, yeah. But it was an allegory about what happens when you try to violate nature. because he was a man trying to reproduce, trying to create life. Trying to be God. That's right. Trying to be a woman, trying to give birth to life. And so the combination of just defying nature and defying God caused Mr. Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein to lose control of the monster and the monster winds up becoming this bad thing.

27:19So comment on the details of how he accomplished this. So he went to graveyards and got body parts that are long dead. That's right. Which at that time was also social taboo. Of course. You weren't supposed to mess with people. Since Da Vinci's day. That's right. Where else is he going to know where all the muscles are? That's right. He digs up cadavers in the dark of night. You're not supposed to do that. Yeah, and would presume, and yeah, they were grave diggers, grave robbers who they would employ on the fly. Well, no, they wouldn't care about your body. They wanted the jewelry. Right. But there were people who would then brave Robin and steal for the medical, for the cadavers, right?

27:54Or for the artists or for the... Would they? Eventually. Yeah. Eventually. So they got a third party to steal instead of him. Well, that came later, sort of in the mid-late 1800s. So what I'm getting at is the idea that the body is absent some life force. Yes. Okay? And you can't have electricity in your novel until electricity has been discovered... That's right. as a thing that you can harness. So do you remember the exact year of the - 1817, 1818, I think is the first edition. Okay, so Ben Franklin was active with electricity at the time. By then, Ben Franklin had already figured out plenty of electricity.