Things You Thought You Knew – Sonic BOOM!

23:55Neil deGrasse Tyson:It'd be 40 below zero. Yeah, exactly. Just a few miles up. Why is it so cold up there? Is it because you're closer to space? No. No. No, it's because you're farther away from where the sunlight is actually doing the heating, and that's right above the Earth's surface. In fact, in meteorology, there's a rule about how high above Earth's surface you have to put the thermometer so that everybody can get a consistent reading. Interesting. That makes sense. It's not directly above the ground. You've got to pull it up a little so there's some mixing of the air so that everybody can get a nice, consistent, sensible reading of the temperature.

24:29Neil deGrasse Tyson:I love that. I'm not done yet. Oh, get out! Okay, so now watch. Infrared. Do you know what traps infrared? Greenhouse gases. Do you know what the predominant number one greenhouse molecule in the atmosphere is? Water vapor. Water vapor. Yeah. The water molecule. Okay. So let's do an experiment. Let's take away the water molecules from where you are. There's a word for such places. What are they called? Deserts. Deserts. Thank you. So the temperature rises in mid-afternoon in the desert, then the sun sets. What happens to that heat that the ground had accumulated from the sun? It gets re-radiated as infrared.

25:17Neil deGrasse Tyson:Does it get trapped? No. It escapes. And the nighttime temperature in the desert plummets. Yes. And that is the weirdest thing about the desert is you will die of a sunstroke during the day and you will die of overexposure at night. Hypothermia at night. You got to be ready for a 40 degree range of temperature from maximum heating in the afternoon, maximum warming of the air, to when everything just radiates away. And by the way, when there's no sun, you're just losing heat. So therefore the coldest time of the day is when? um i'm going to say in the well the coldest time of the day of the 24 hour day when is it um 12 midnight or no o 'clock in the morning three o 'clock in the morning no no just before sunrise oh yeah because there's been no sun all that's been no sun it's been cooling off the whole time take a look at temperature plots all right exactly okay it'll peak in the mid-afternoon and it'll no matter where you are it'll do that and then it'll go to its lowest point just before sunrise.

26:27Neil deGrasse Tyson:And then the sun starts giving you the energy again. See, I got to stop overthinking things because I'm talking to you and I'll start overthinking. I get basic questions. I'm not trying to. These aren't trick questions. I know. Okay. But it's still, yeah, but you're right. Yeah. The sun has not been present all that time. It makes sense that just before the reappearance of the sun, that would be the coldest time. Correct. And I got to correct something that people have gotten wrong. Okay. They'll say, when is the darkest time of night? Just before the dawn. No, see, that's bullshit. Okay. That's bullshit.

27:04Neil deGrasse Tyson:Okay, sorry. All right. Anytime it is not twilight, you are basically equally as dark the entire night. No matter what. So you want to pick midnight if you want. Fine. All right. But that whole time, you are good to go. None of this, the darkest is just before dawn. Just before the dawn. Yeah, it's just bullshit. Right. Yeah, right. Exactly. That's why I say it's the darkest in the room just before I turn on the light. Well, it was dark that whole time before you turn on the light. Right. Exactly. Yeah. All right. So, but wait, I'm not done. There are certain places like Hawaii and Iceland where the range from the high to the low temperature in any 24 hour period is very narrow.

27:49Neil deGrasse Tyson:Check out the climate data for those two places. I know this for a fact, but go ahead. And so why? Oh, I don't know. I just used to stay in Hawaii for a bit. I spent a few months living there. Yeah, be like 76 in the daytime and maybe 68 at night. Yeah. You know, and so that's because they're in the middle of the oceans. And the ocean has very high humidity that stabilizes the flow of the heating between day and night. Oh, I got you. It slows it down. So I've done this even as a New York City resident. Okay. The way you want to minimize the temperature drop is you have a perfectly sunny day. Then at sunset, moist clouds come in.

28:38Neil deGrasse Tyson:Then they'll trap the heat. Hold the heat. They'll hold the heat overnight. That's hot. I mean, that's cool. I mean, that's great.

28:52Neil deGrasse Tyson:So this is why you get huge temperature swings in the deserts, why you don't in humid climates, the tropics, and of course in island nations. It's also why it's hotter a couple hours after the middle of the day than right at the middle of the day. And one other thing, the day of the year where the arc of the sun is longest and highest in the sky is the first day of summer, June 21st. That's right. Chuck, what is the hottest month of the year, at least in the Northern Hemisphere? August. Yeah, it's not June. It's not even really July. It's August. It's August. For the same reason, climactically, what goes on in a daytime cycle actually goes on in a seasonal cycle.

29:37Neil deGrasse Tyson:So, wow. You have maximum ground heating in June, but there's a lag between the ground heating and the ground responding to this. And seasonally, that takes a couple of months to build. Not to mention the ocean temperatures in those areas, too. It's also delayed. Right. Also delayed. Super cool, man. There you have it. I thought this was going to be a boring one. I did. This is great. I don't want to let you down here. I didn't title this one. This is like the temperature during the day. Okay, we need a better title than the temperature during the day. Right, right. And why it's cold when you're up in it.

30:20Neil deGrasse Tyson:How about fun with Fahrenheit? Oh, I like that. Fun with Fahrenheit. Fun with Fahrenheit. And like I said, when you're in an airplane, you're so far away from the ground, the ground had no chance of heating the air you're flying in. Right. And so it could be 40 below up at five miles up where you're flying at 30 ,000 feet. And one final thought. Go ahead. Okay. Do you know the temperature, the Fahrenheit and Celsius temperature scales? Correct. They're different, right? But do you know they actually cross on a graph? I did not know that. Okay. Because I thought they were running parallel. Yeah, they're not parallel.

30:59Neil deGrasse Tyson:No, Celsius is parallel to Kelvin, but Celsius is not parallel to Fahrenheit. So for example, what is it? Boiling water is what Fahrenheit? 212. And it's 100 Celsius. What's the degree difference between those? 112 degrees. 112 degrees. On Celsius, what temperature does water freeze? Zero. On Fahrenheit, what temperature does it freeze? Oh, 32. So what's the temperature difference there? That's only 32 degrees. So the difference between Celsius and Fahrenheit is shrinking as you get colder. Colder. Ah. Okay. There is a temperature where if you plotted this, those two graphs cross. Cross? That makes sense.

31:42Neil deGrasse Tyson:Which means at that temperature, they're equal each other numerically. And that temperature is exactly 40 below. Nice! So when I say, oh, it's 40 below, and you say, oh, was it Fahrenheit or temperature? I might just mess with your head and say, doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. So cold doesn't matter. does gotta matter and then i say do the math and there's a little formula to convert fahrenheit to celsius and if you put in one temperature you get the other if you put in 40 for one of them but minus 40 minus 40 comes out the other side so it's an equation at that point that gives you the same answer going in as coming out it's very cool yo man i'm getting a t-shirt that says i'm 40 below because I'm cool anywhere, baby.

32:23I'm cool Celsius or Fahrenheit. I'm ice cold anywhere. All right.

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35:34So please support our show and tell them that Chuck sent you. And by that, I mean STARTALK.

35:50Ask me where Wynn comes from. Oh, I know. It's my uncle. And, uh,

35:59dude thinks it's funny. He's kind of rude. Doesn't make a difference if we're at the table or not. It's terrible. Doesn't apologize or nothing. Doesn't apologize or nothing. Sometimes he's proud of it. Not cool. Not cool.

36:15Neil deGrasse Tyson:Not cool. Okay. Ask me about meteorological wind. Oh, okay. Where does meteorological wind come from? I will quote Ogden Nash. Ogden Nash. Yes, yes. The playful poet. Ogden Nash. Wind is caused by trees waving their branches. That guy was stupid.

36:50Let me tell you right now, I do not know where wind comes from. I'm going to be honest. I don't know where wind comes from, but I know this much. It don't come from trees waving. Hey, how y 'all doing?

37:04Neil deGrasse Tyson:How would you know? Because, and I'll tell you why. This is important. This is a bit of science here. Okay. You, how do you, when it's windy out, trees are swaying. Right. So how do you, how would you test what the cause and effect is of that? Because two things. One. Wind could be caused by fast spinning anemometers. Okay. The weather veins. It could be, you know. It could also be caused by a butterfly flapping its wings in Japan. A big butterfly. Mothra. Mothra. The monster approaches Tokyo. No, the reason is because I hear the wind and then I see the tree move. So that means the wind was there before the tree.

37:56Neil deGrasse Tyson:The wind ain't about what sequence you obtained data. The wind didn't hit your ear first and the tree's waiting for it to get through your head and then hit it. Sometimes it does. Sometimes I hear the wind and then I see the tree move. I'm like, that something came by me. Something came by me and moved that tree. Those are the trees a quarter mile away. Could be. All right. So no, this is very, it's actually very simple. Okay. You have wind, which is a readjustment of air pressure. It's really what's going on. Okay. So I don't see you say it like that. You say it like that just explained it to me.

38:43Sorry. No, no, what you have is basically a readjustment of air pressure. That's all. That's what it is.

38:51Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's all it is. We're done here. Done. No. Thanks. So it's the unequal heating of Earth's surface. Oh, now that makes sense. That's what it is. Okay. That's cool. And so if it's warmer in one place than another, and plus Earth is rotating, so these factors conspire so that if air ever rises, well, that wouldn't cause wind as we know it because wind goes horizontally to the surface. But if you have rising air because it just got heated, what has to happen next? You don't create a vacuum blow. Well, you do. But then what happens? You have falling air. Sorry. Yes. That's very good. If air rises, you'll also have falling air.

39:44Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's true in total. But the pocket of atmosphere directly below where the air had gone up, okay, what happens there? Oh, it has to be filled. It's got to be filled. So you get an updraft. And it gets filled from the sides. Right. Oh! It gets filled from the sides. Sweet! Yes. Oh, my God. That's how it works? Yes! That's so cool. Yes. Okay. I'll tell you, Earth is tricky. Earth got some tricks. So you have rising air. It creates a partial vacuum, which is a pressure difference. And then other air says, we have to fill that gap. Let's go there. And so there it goes. Okay. Nice. So if you look at hurricanes, for example, very, very low pressure in the middle.

40:41You have heated, warm, moist, what we call unstable air.

40:49Neil deGrasse Tyson:If air is unstable, it rises. Okay. In that low pressure system, all the clouds in the neighborhood want to go there. Sweet. Everything wants to go to the center of a hurricane. It's the Cloud Nightclub. Yo, man, you going to the eye tonight? You going to the eye? No. Yo, man, I heard the eye is going to be hot tonight.

41:17Neil deGrasse Tyson:So all the clouds try to come in, but then Earth's rotation sort of veers them to the right. No matter which way they're trying to head into the front entrance of the eye club, they veer to the right. And so you have this circulation while the clouds are trying to get to the middle. And this gives you that spiraling storm. That spiral effect and everybody trying to get into the middle. And so hurricanes have famously fast winds because of this. Like hundreds of miles an hour in the fastest of them. Now, if you have air that is descending, air that descends, first it won't make a cloud. So, descending air is like generally clear skies.

42:14Neil deGrasse Tyson:Deserts have descending air. Oh, okay. Now, there's certain parts of the world where the descending air is so sort of total, it is sort of gently descending. And it can go out the sides, but if the area of the descending air is large enough, then there's no sideways wind. Wow. These areas of Earth's surface, especially over the ocean, are called the doldrums. That's the club that nobody wants to go to. Sorry. You got the Hurricane Eye and you got the Doldrums. Exactly. It's like, man, I couldn't get into the eye last night. Now I got to go to the Doldrums. The Doldrums. So the Doldrums are regions of Earth's surface where all the wind has ceased.

43:02And if you happen to be a sailing ship that wanders into the Doldrums.

43:07Neil deGrasse Tyson:Wow. Oh, my gosh. That's bad stuff. That's it. That's it. Many a ship have just given up the ghost in the doldrums because you can't move if they don't have oars. There's no wind, nothing, nothing. And they eat up their food supply. They eat each other, whatever, and that's it. Wow. It's like the great wind garbage patch of the ocean. Like the plastic patch. The plastic patch. It just accumulates. It goes nowhere.

43:46Neil deGrasse Tyson:It's the wind version. I thought of it that way. Yeah, that's terrible. It's a fascinating disturbed analogy. It is. Oh, that's terrible, though. Now, a couple of things, a couple other things. So Mars has famously large wind storms. And we call them dust storms because the wind picks up the dust. You know, the Martian surface dust. Yeah, yeah. And so you can see this. In fact, when it happens, it cloaks the Martian surface. And so our telescopes and space probes, we can't see what's at the bottom. It's basically one of these like sandstorms you've read about in the desert, but it's like a dust storm on Mars.

44:28Or it's a very clever cloaking device that the Martians use to stop us from looking at them when they're doing stuff on the surface of Mars. Yeah, exactly, Chuck.

44:42Neil deGrasse Tyson:Wait, do you remember the face on Mars? Listen, do you remember the face on Mars? So it was back in the 70s. There was like the famous face on Mars. It was like some kind of a structure that had eye sockets, a nose, and a mouth. And it looked like a huge, it was huge, huge. And we got a couple photos of it during the Viking missions. And everyone said, we got to go back. Clearly, there's life there. Okay. By the way, if there's life and that represented it, it would have to be life that had sort of a simian face. Most life on Earth doesn't have a face. So that would be weird if life on a whole other planet had a humanoid face.

45:23Neil deGrasse Tyson:That would just be weird. Okay? Just saying. But lobsters don't have—did we notice the lobster monument that was there? No, because we're only looking for stuff that looks like us. All right. So we went back. And you saw—and we had better, higher resolution. And you saw a hint of like where the eyebrows were in the mouth, but it was mostly sort of good. And people said, the Martians knew we were looking at them. Yeah, right. They covered it up. They covered it up. With their Mars dust. Here's my point. The Martian atmosphere is one one-hundredth the thickness of Earth's atmosphere. Oh, that's terrible.

46:00Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's barely any atmosphere. It's barely any atmosphere. So if you move that air 100 miles an hour, you ain't got... It's like an infant trying to blow out a birthday candle, you know? It's like...

46:23Neil deGrasse Tyson:I'm giving up. And that's why the whole scene in the movie The Martian where they can't leave... They're trying to leave the planet because of windstorm. a dust storm is coming and the rocket is rocking it's rocking back and forth and they take off and they leave Mark Watney on the surface because they're afraid they'll topple over from the wind oh man another movie ruined, thank you Neil no yeah that can't happen then right, that just can't even happen yeah yeah it's not it's not happening, you might be dusty and you can't see but you're not blowing over any spaceships So it's also not going to pick up a rod, a metal rod, and spear you with it because it's not going to do that either.

47:12Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, it's not tornado speed. Right, right. So the point is, Mars is also an unevenly heated planet. And that's why you get this. Correct, correct. All right, wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait, wait. What? I got to ask you this now, all right? And this is off the explainer chart, but I got to do it, okay? I know that you know him. So did you ask him about that when he wrote this? Are you talking about Andy Weir? Andy, yeah. Did you actually ask him? I got all up in his situation. But then what I said was, what I said was, okay, Andy, so much else in that novel, later the movie, was so well calculated and thought through, I'm going to give you a hall pass on this one.

48:04Oh, okay. Because without it, he's got no story. Yeah, he had to do it. It was poetic license for a Mars hurricane so he could get to the rest of the story.

48:14Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, so I gave it to him because he did the rest of his homework. See, I'm not totally evil commentator. I will cut you some slack if you're an artist. But as Mark Twain said, first get your facts straight, then distort them at your leisure. Okay. That's Mark Twain's edict. I love it. So I'm all in on that. By the way, Venus is very evenly heated over its surface, and we think it has hardly any winds there at all. Nice. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. It's a refreshing 900 degrees. You would vaporize, but ignoring that complication. No wind needed. No wind needed. It's so even. It's so even. It's not a dry heat.

49:02It's an even heat. You're good.

49:06Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's the joke I heard about hell, they say. You know, you ask some evil person, how's hell? Yeah, yeah, it's hot, but it's low humidity, so we're fine. That's funny, actually.

49:21Neil deGrasse Tyson:Chuck we got to end it there this is a windy starting off with your uncle yes we had a windy a windy explainer for StarTalk Dad, it's always a pleasure Neil deGrasse Tyson keep looking up

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50:50Neil deGrasse Tyson:Prime Day is June 23rd through the 26th. These deals are so appealing, like portable steamers for steaming. Whoa, did I just sing soprano? I think I'm breaking into song. Epic deals on air fryers, vacuums, and skincare. I can't stop singing. Shop Epic Deals this Prime Day, June 23rd through the 26th. I think that's it. Nope, there's more. Luggage, smart glasses.