Things You Thought You Knew – Is Everything Light?

21:46so chuck how often do you think about pollution quite a bit honestly i mean yeah okay you're a green guy you're a green guy guy i think about it quite a bit and and and the uh deleterious effect that is having on our uh our existence our ecosystem so so not all

22:07Neil deGrasse Tyson:pollution is made of plastic. So very early on, the astronomers of the world have complained about light pollution. When you have the electrification of the cities, all of a sudden, the night sky was competing with lights that were shedding photons up into the atmosphere. And I grew up in a city, so I had no understanding of the night sky until my first visit to the Hayden Planetarium at age nine. Nice. And I know it was nice. And I looked up and the lights dimmed and the stars came out. I said this before, I'll say it again. I thought it was a hoax. Way too many stars. Wait a minute. All that is up there?

22:49Neil deGrasse Tyson:I don't know what this is. I'll go along with it for now, but stop trying to pull my leg. Next time I come back, show it how it really is. Fake news. Fake news. It was totally fake news. And to this day, from mountaintops, when I've gone to high-level mountaintops with high-level telescopes, I look up at the night sky and I say, it reminds me of the Hayden Planetarium. Wow. That's an urban frame of reference. Urban frame of reference that was. So, plus, I'm old enough to remember what not only was there light pollution, as there still is, but back then there was also air pollution. and today we think of the polluting the atmosphere with carbon dioxide carbon dioxide is transparent so that's not what i was thinking at the time i was thinking auto exhaust and and this sort of thing so not only did lights but auto exhaust disrupt your ability to see all objects in the night sky especially the dimmest objects and we should do a whole explainer on noise of all kinds So remind me to do this.

23:56Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yes. But let me just say, if you're in a perfect dark night and you can just barely see a very dim star and then other light gets added to this, the first things to go are the dimmest stars. So you start hacking away at the dimmest things available to you simply because other light is competing with it. And it no longer shows up on your retina or even in a camera. So these are problems. And so we've been living with this like our whole lives. In fact, there's something called the IDA, International Dark Sky Association. Okay. They sound like a group of supervillains. The IDA. That's all I'm saying.

24:44Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's all I can tell you about them. Yes, exactly. We've called this meaning of the International Dark Sky Association. to finalize our plans to permanently block out the sun. That is true. Dark skies for everyone 24 hours a day. Like, that's so funny. I've never heard of that. And how much will it cost? It will cost a million dollars. Sir, I just want to let you know that's not a lot of money these days. Okay. Five million dollars? What's the inflation rate? How much should we ask for? Should we ask for something more? Did he ask? Was that whole conversation in the movie? I think so. I don't know how it went, to be honest, but it was something like that.

25:29Just like, and how much now is it?

25:34Neil deGrasse Tyson:So that organization has gotten more and more powerful. And power not in a let's override you, but there's a lot of interesting, sensible things to do. For example, let's say you're in an airplane and you're flying over a city and you look down and you see the suburbs and you see the streetlights illuminating the streets. Right. At night from your airplane. Right. Do you know why you can see the streetlight? Because it's bright? I don't know. what because somebody in that town is paying for electricity to go into this lamp to generate photons that are going up into the through the window of my airplane i got you so i got you like a lantern the light's going everywhere everywhere it's not directed you don't need the light everywhere do you only need it on the street if i see your light it means you are paying to illuminate my airplane flying overhead.

26:34Neil deGrasse Tyson:If you can see any light at all directly from its source, somebody's paying to illuminate the sky. So the IDA simply makes the economic argument. Do you want to save money? Okay. So you put a little hat on each lamp. Oh, that's adorable. Now, wait a minute and make it reflective. So, hey, that light that used to be going upwards is now coming downwards and I don't need that much light. I was wasting half of it. So now I can cut the wattage in half or by whatever fraction, use less light, and now I'm not illuminating the airplanes flying overhead. It's that simple. And that's why we don't do it because it's that simple.

27:19And anything that simple, we just can't

27:22Neil deGrasse Tyson:Which can't wrap our head up. So the town of Tucson, Arizona, which is proximal to Kitt Peak Mountain, which has Kitt Peak Observatory, which is one of the major observatories of the nation's astronomers, long ago came into an agreement with the municipal leaders to say, look, if your place keeps getting brighter, we can't do our science. We got to move our base because the home base is in town where all the scientists hang out before they go to the mountain. And so, but they like this distinction. Plus, Arizona is beautiful and it's got deserts. And, you know, so why not preserve it all? And so they got together and there are ordinances, city ordinances that control how bright the lights can be, what kind of hat should be on them, when you should turn them off, all of this.

28:09Neil deGrasse Tyson:And so that was successful. That became a model for other towns to emulate. And so that's the light pollution. And like they said, the air pollution is essentially gone relative to when I was growing up. When I was growing up, I'd come home from school, from elementary school. You could brush the ash off your shoulders from incinerated garbage that had gone into the sky and descended back to earth. That is just crazy. It was snowing garbage. Snowing ash. Correct. Every day. That's amazing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's that. But we have more pollution than that. Right. Wait, let me just say this about the light pollution that I just thought about right now because of what you just said.

28:51Neil deGrasse Tyson:Mm-hmm. When they were building the big hotels in Atlantic City, of course, I'm from Philly, so Atlantic City, they were building these giant hotels. and the conservationists in the area, the scientists that care for animals and sea life and birds, they basically realized that you're killing all the birds because they never know that it's nighttime. Oh. Yeah. Okay, so at least I didn't lose my life over this challenge. Yeah. Wow. Wow. So it's just completely disrupting all of their - Just everything. Their bio rhythms. No more circadian rhythm and they were flying until the - And they were dying of exhaustion and all kinds of crazy stuff.

29:40It was a weird little study that they did, but - Wow. And I don't know what they did about it because they haven't changed anything, but I think the consensus from the public was they're seagulls. Who gives a crap? Seagulls and pigeons, right?

29:56Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, seagulls and pigeons. Plenty more of them where they came from. You want us to care about that? I mean, first of all, we could see if they were chickens. They're delicious. But it was terrible. It was terrible. So Chuck, it's not only light pollution that worries astronomers. When we think of light, you think of like visible light, right? But we don't only use visible light to communicate with the universe or to receive the universe. We also have radio waves, huge radio telescopes. Okay. Well, wait a minute. We have TV, AM, FM, satellite, microwave. All those are in the radio parts of the spectrum.

30:34Neil deGrasse Tyson:So not only is there light pollution with visible light that interferes your eyes from seeing dim objects, there's radio wave pollution that prevents our radio telescopes from seeing dim objects. Right. So other bands of the electromagnetic spectrum are also polluted. And so our best radio telescopes have to be put in places where there's like a radio free zone around it. All right. Just so that we don't get noise, radio noise coming in, disrupting our observations of radio galaxies, the microwave background of the formation of the universe and all of this. Well, there you go, people. Cool it on the hot pockets.

31:19Microwave. Take it easy on the hot pockets, people.

31:22Neil deGrasse Tyson:And you know what else? The remote fobs for cars also creates a background noise of radio waves to a radio telescope that is extremely sensitive. So leaving the realm of light in that sense, there's also a new kind of pollution called satellite pollution. Oh, my gosh. And so what happens here is the effect of this is the satellite is moving across your field of view and it's reflecting sunlight. So you get a streak. So other parts of your photo might be okay, but suppose that streak goes to the one object you're trying to look at. So you need a way to sort of subtract it out from the process. We have people working on software to accomplish that right now.

32:04Neil deGrasse Tyson:We don't know how this is all going to shake out in the coming years. So we're preloading our data reduction utilities just to try to subtract them out. I'm told I just attended a workshop on satellite pollution where there was an agreement with Elon Musk for some of his satellites to use a sunshade. Okay. So even though they're up there, the sun will not reflect off of it down to us. And it did improve the seeing conditions. Gotcha. It did improve it. But I think whatever might be a long-term solution to this has not yet arrived. So that's what we're in the middle of now. That is kind of crazy.

32:47Neil deGrasse Tyson:And the current most powerful telescope on Earth is called the Vera Rubin Telescope. And it is designed to take movies of the night sky every single night. That is pretty dope. Okay, because think about it. Up until now, we've been taking just snapshot, okay? Exactly. So if the thing did something different an hour later after you're on the way back to the computer. Tough talks. You missed it. Tough talk. You missed it. Missed out. Okay. So it's taking a movie so that it's called, there's an entire branch of my field that concerns itself with things that change over time. Right. Because most images you're seeing is just a static picture of something.

33:30Neil deGrasse Tyson:Right. So the people who care about stuff that changes in the universe, this will be a delight for them. But now that we're taking movies, we basically have movies of all these satellites crossing our field of view. And we have to distinguish between that and what might be a killer asteroid moving across the field of view because this has an asteroid alert system built in. Wow. So without, I mean, this sounds more important than it might appear. Because this ain't just looking at a telescope and going, what is that? That's some old Elon Musk junk. Don't worry about it. And then it ends up being a killer asteroid.

34:08Neil deGrasse Tyson:What is that? Oh, that's a killer asteroid that we almost mistook for an Elon Musk satellite. Right. Right. Yeah. Right. So, yeah, that's what we're confronting with right now. The buckets of pollution that influence the modern astrophysicist knows no bounds. Wow. And none of it has anything to do with plastic or carbon dioxide. What do you think of that? Well, what we should have is an astrophysicist standing next to a rocket with a single tear rolling down their face. Oh, stop.

34:46Neil deGrasse Tyson:that'll be a public service announcement all right right well i'll volunteer i'll be the tiering astrophysicist for that that'd be great space pollution you only you can stop space

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38:57tell you a story from a childhood okay so yeah yeah so i as a kid or even as an adult who doesn't

39:07Neil deGrasse Tyson:Love potato chips, right? Okay. So I have potato chips. And then, you know, you go to a fast food restaurant, and then I ordered French fries. Okay, that's kind of cool. And then, you know, for turkey dinner, there's mashed potatoes, right? And then in the breakfast brunch, you know, diner, you can get hash browns. Yes. Okay. I think I was 11, maybe 10, before I figured out that all of those were the same food. Right. A potato. It's nothing to think about when you're 11 or 12. It's just food. It's just food, and it's delicious. And only one of them, two of them, have the word potato in it. That's right.

39:50Neil deGrasse Tyson:Mashed potatoes and potato chips, but they are completely different from each other. Oh, without a doubt. And French fries, no one says potato. And hash browns, they don't say potato. Right. And my kids grew up on freedom fries, so they don't even know what French fries is. Freedom fries, okay. So it was a revelatory moment for me to realize that one food could be made so different and so interestingly different to have its own place within our culinary offerings. Each one of those could do that, right? Oh, another one I like were the potato sticks. Do you remember those? Oh, God, yes. Man. And do you remember the potato sticks that – oh, well, yeah, they're the same thing.

40:34Never mind. So they were like french fries. They had the big potato sticks, and then they had the tiny little matchsticks potato sticks.

40:40Neil deGrasse Tyson:The matchsticks, those were the best because there was like a lot of salt. A lot of salt. Okay. So the point is. Okay, I am starving. I'll be back. I'll be right back. So they were all different, yet they were the same. Right. Right. And so too was my revelation of middle school, early middle school. It was probably sixth grade now because I was an early geek. But realizing that, okay, you've heard of these things called microwaves. You've heard of radio waves. You've heard of infrared, ultraviolet. You've seen rainbows, visible light. You've heard of x-rays. You've heard of gamma rays. It's all the same thing.

41:22Neil deGrasse Tyson:Right. It is just different ways of preparing your light, okay, to use my potato analogy. And so you're basically 11 years old and you're making this discovery for yourself. After I realized about the potatoes, yes. Okay. Because I was 37. So I said, my gosh, it's all light. It all travels at the speed of light. And this word light, where you're talking about what the human retina can see, that's very limiting for if you want to talk about the universe. because so what's the our favorite light colors red orange yellow green blue violet okay continue there you go the other side of violet you get ultraviolet you go beyond violet that's how it got its name it's beyond violet and we abbreviate it uv but i like fleshy ultraviolet give me give me all the syllables that it's got okay and this is the sounds far more harmful.

42:27Neil deGrasse Tyson:In fact, it is because in this direction, we are reducing the wavelength of light that's coming to us. And when you reduce the wavelength of light, more energy is packed into one pulse of that light. And so the energy goes up. Okay. Okay. So the higher the frequency, it's how many crests go by per second, the higher is the energy of that light. So the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet is all sort of pretty harmless. You get into ultraviolet light, it has enough energy to break apart biological molecules. Uh-oh. And this will give you sunburn and skin cancer. Right. Okay? So I heard a DJ talk about when he just learned that the temperature on Venus was 900 degrees.

43:14Neil deGrasse Tyson:He said, well, you better bring sunblock a million for that. So he's wrong. He's thinking that you're protecting from the heat. That you can block that. Right, no, you're not blocking heat. Right. The point of the sunblock is to block just the UV. Just the UV. Okay, right. So you're still getting dark and crispy no matter what you want to do. Yeah, you'll get toasted. You're toasted. Toasted no matter what. No matter what. So then you go beyond the ultraviolet, and that's when you get the x-rays. Right. X-rays, it is continuous with the ultraviolet, right? We put a line there just because of our convenience of words and machines built on it.

43:58Neil deGrasse Tyson:But ultraviolet smoothly transitions to x-rays. Interesting. Okay. And you know x-rays are bad for you because when you go in the x-ray room, what does the x-ray tech do? They go to a bomb shelter. They leave the room. They say, are you okay? Are you comfortable? Yeah. Okay. Boom. Door closes. Exactly. And they look through a lead glass and then they, okay. So x-rays can actually penetrate your skin, unlike ultraviolet. And in doing so, it can actually harm your organs. All right. And so you get organ failure from it. And organ cancers are triggered by this. Now, once again, it's a continuum of a change of wavelength of light.

44:47Neil deGrasse Tyson:And then you get to beyond x-rays, you get to gamma rays. Right. And by the way, gamma rays just keep getting higher and higher energetic, but we don't have more words for it. It's just the last word we've got. But you could have divided that up even more. We just don't. Okay. And so gamma rays get omega rays or something like that. Ooh. Yeah. I wonder what superhero would be made from omega rays. Well, gamma rays are in the early days before we fully understood what the sources of energy were there were alpha particles beta particles and gamma particles alpha beta gamma and the alpha particle is a helium nucleus the beta particle is an electron and the gamma ray is a photon but they all had energies that we could measure so we're measuring the energies not knowing what the thing was that caused it at the time but that all splits out so we have um like i said ultraviolet x-rays gamma rays there you have it all right go the other direction wavelengths are getting longer, the energy is dropping.

45:52So you go below the red, you get infra red,

45:57Neil deGrasse Tyson:below the red. All right, by the way, you can't see infrared, you can't see ultraviolet. If you buy, I want an ultraviolet bulb, we used to call them black light bulb. I want an ultraviolet bulb and you turn it on and you see it. You say, I can see the ultraviolet. No, you're not. You're seeing the violet. Right. Okay, there's a little bit of violet spilling out. The actual ultraviolet, you don't see at all. Same with the infrared lamps. You buy an infrared lamp. If that was pure infrared, you turn it on, you wouldn't see a damn thing. Okay? Right. You're not a predator. Exactly. So a little bit spills into the red part, so you see the red emitted by the infrared lamp.

46:33Neil deGrasse Tyson:All right? We can detect infrared not by our eyes, but by our skin. You detect infrared as warmth. Right. All right? It's a detector. Think of it that way. All right? A warmth detector. So there's the infrared, and then you go beyond infrared, below infrared, what used to just all be called radio waves. And then they said, well, there's a section of the radio waves that have special utility for us for communicating. And so it's the shortest of the radio waves, and they call them microwaves. Sweet. Short radio waves, microwaves. So that got labeled right there between infrared and radio waves. And beyond microwaves, we have radio waves.

47:17Neil deGrasse Tyson:And now we're getting physically realizably sized wavelengths of light. So microwaves are about a centimeter long. We can actually show that between a millimeter up through a few centimeters. And then when you get into the meter zone, yards and things, those are radio waves. And once again, like gamma rays, these just continue forever. And we don't have more words for them. Right. Which is why we have so many different broadcasts. Or is those just frequencies? Yeah, they're frequencies. is the wave. You can call them, they call them wavelengths. Right. But it's our habit to call them frequencies.

47:52Neil deGrasse Tyson:Right. Right. So each frequency, when you're tuning, Right. in the old days, you'd have an AM or an FM radio. When you're turning the dial, you are changing the frequency of your detector to receive a signal sent through that zone. Wow. There you have it. That is, that's great. And in the old days, when you turn, old timers, you turn the knob to change the channel on the TV. you're actually changing the frequency detector inside the television and there's that secondary knob that you could tune in a little sharper i don't know if you knew that okay that that got you honed in on that one frequency was it channel seven channel eight we just numbered them we didn't give you the frequency because that's why when you can just number them which is what we did in the day so anyway all of these move at the speed of light it is all light most of it is invisible to you.

48:46In fact, if you put this on a scale, if you drew all of these things and you

48:53Neil deGrasse Tyson:ask, well, how much of this whole electromagnetic spectrum can we see? And we see this tiny slice, this tiny slice among all these broad zones in the electromagnetic spectrum. We are practically deeply blind. And we didn't even know that until William Herschel discovered infrared light. Right. Look at that. That is. And I think I said in another explainer how he discovered it, I'll do it real quick now. You ready? I love this. I love this. Yeah, I do remember. Okay. Herschel's a big fan of Newton. Newton has a spectrum. He shows sunlight is composed of colors and you put a sort of slit in the curtains.

49:36Neil deGrasse Tyson:So the beam of light comes through your prism. so that it's dark elsewhere except where the prism light goes. And Herschel said, I wonder what the temperatures are of each of these different colors. To even think to ask that. Yeah. All right. So he's got a thermometer and he puts it in the blue. And then he puts, and by the way, it's an experiment. So you need a control thermometer. So you put the control thermometer somewhere where the colors are not. All right. On the same table, but just put it outside the colors, which is what he did. And he checked the temperature of the blue and the violet and the green and the orange and the red.

50:12Neil deGrasse Tyson:And he wrote down all these temperatures. And what he noticed is that the temperature sitting outside of the visible spectrum read the highest temperature of them all. Right. And now, why didn't he just say, oh, it must be hot in this room? I didn't realize how hot it was in here. Maybe there's something wrong with me. I can't feel heat anymore. So there it was. And because he didn't put the thermometer somewhere else, he put it next to the other. Right, he put it right next to it. Right next to it because the same environment is there. And he said, oh my gosh, there must be a form of light, quote, unfit for vision.

50:53Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's a, I love the terminology. Unfit for vision. Light that is unfit for vision. And had that thermometer been on the other side of the violet, it's not clear that ultraviolet would have warmed the thermometer in this way. But he happened to have it on the side where the red was, and he discovered infrared light with that experiment. And so when I look at my microwave oven and I look at a radio transmitter, I look at my cell phone and I look at my lamp on my table, it is one happy family of electromagnetic spectrum coming to us. That's so cool. It's dope. And it's called electromagnetic because it's a wave that simultaneously moves between being an electrical wave and a magnetic wave.

51:40Neil deGrasse Tyson:And it's self-propagating through space. So it's a wave that can move through the vacuum of space without having needed a medium to vibrate to send it through, like sound does. Right. So all those movies, Star Wars, they'd all be silent movie because no explosions are in space. But light has no problem moving through space, even though it's a wave, because it's a very different kind of wave. It's a self-propagating electrical and magnetic wave. That's why we call it the electromagnetic spectrum. There you have it, Chuck. That's great. And it all started with my potatoes. Just saying. And what wavelength are they on?

52:19The delicious wave. The delicious.

52:23Neil deGrasse Tyson:We keep them warm with infrared. It all comes full circle. That's so true.

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