Why Do We Exist with Hakeem Oluseyi

26:39There's a film series made in China. called Wandering Earth, which is exactly that. I'm looking that up. That sounds good. Wandering Earth. You got to look at the second episode, which is where they actually. The first one is, I don't know what it is, but second one, they put rockets strategically placed on Earth, and Earth goes. It doesn't go to a bigger orbit. It goes to another star system. Earth becomes the spaceship. Interesting. Yeah. Very interesting. I'd like to see how they did that. Okay. All right. Well, we got to get to some questions. Let's get to some questions. We can do this for the rest of the day.

27:19Our Patreon members. So cool. Yeah. All right. And of course, as always, thank you to the Patreon members for your financial support that allows you to submit these questions, which also allows us to do many other things with StarTalk. Let's go to Patrick. Hi, Hakeem, Dr. Tyson. Patrick, just another science nerd from Southeast Texas here again. And why do we exist? You trace the chain of events that made our existence possible. Do you think that chain points towards increasingly deeper layers of emergent organization? Or do you believe physics will eventually reach a truly fundamental level beyond which there is no deeper explanation?

27:59Ooh, I like that. So when you go turtles all the way down, is there a point where it's just, hey, man, we don't even know? You know, it seems like that question went in both directions at the same time. It kind of did. It sounds like it was like where it's going and what it is at this deepest, most fundamental level. Because in the book, I describe the deepest, most fundamental level. Now, it seems to me the evidence points to the same thing that allegedly Albert Einstein said or believed at one point, which is that the only thing that exists are these fundamental quantum fields and energy, right?

28:32And so, again, I also say, and this is one of the things I say in the book where I differ and diverge from the community. Like a lot of people think that space and time are emergent. And if energy and fields are required to be fundamental, which in this inflaton model of the universe they are, a field requires a geometry. And energy requires time because it makes change, which requires a before and an after. Right? So if you have those two fundamental quantities, you also have space and time existing as fundamental within our universe. Okay. Does that answer the question? If you go all the way to the bottom, that's what you got.

29:12Space, time, energy, and feelings. So you don't think there's anything remaining to be discovered or gleaned beneath that level? Yes. What? Context. Okay. Above that level. Here's what I mean by that. Suppose you, here's one of the mind experiments. Before you go into the experiment, Hakeem. Yeah. I have to ask you this because sometimes I get this impression. Yes, yes, I am. Do you smoke weed? No. On every... Like...

29:48Now, you read my memoir, Chuck. I did. You read my memoir. I did, I did. You mean today? No, I'm joking, man. Are you asking me that I just vape at LaGuardia? Is that what you're asking me? That's hilarious. No, go ahead. Back to what you were saying. Coincidentally. Go ahead. Let's get back to the fundamentals. Seriously. Let's get back to context. So station time would be fundamental. Station time is fundamental. And not emergent. Not emerging. If quantum fields, which require a geometry, choose your dimensionality, you must have a geometry to have a field. The quantum field thing, that totally makes sense for fundamentals.

30:21Yeah, and if you have energy, you have to have time. Even quantum mechanics shows you the fundamental nature, marriage of energy and time. So you separate... So therefore... Go ahead. Therefore, what was the question? Back to that weed. Fundamental. So energy makes time fundamental. So here's the thing. I get it. So you're separating them off. If you accept that energy is fundamental, you must therefore accept that time is fundamental. Time is fundamental. Because of change. All right, because energy is a changed state. Now, let's move that to what's beneath that and above it, which is context, how?

31:05And what's that mean? Well, here's, suppose you were to study, when we talk, we teach observational astronomy to students, you know, people don't walk in having a cosmological perspective. So we try to give them my way of analogy of perspective. So one of the things I used to say is, is that just like the cell is the fundamental building block of the body, the galaxy is the fundamental building block of the universe. Then one day I said, well, what if I take that seriously? What if I shrink myself down so small that the size of a cell to me is the same ratio, 20 orders of magnitude, as a ratio of me to the size of my galaxy?

31:41And then I studied my universe from that perspective. What would I do? I would do what Hubble did. He looked around and said, oh, there are these things called galaxies. They come in different types, spiral, elliptical, dwarf, right? I look around. There's different cells, blood, muscle, bone, right? Then I'd say, hey, they have internal structure, a bulge, arms. I'd be like, oh, they got, what the hell is in a cell? A Golgi body, a nucleus, a riboflavin. No, that's not it. Ribosome. Ribosome. Riboflavin. Mitochondria. There you go. Riboflavin is a mineral vitamin on a cereal box. Hilarious. But then you can zoom out, and you see we discovered the large-scale structure.

32:23There's the cosmic web. and you would do the same thing. But after doing all that, would you have any idea if you're in a whale, if you're in a horse, if you're in a tree? Right? I mean, if you're seeing muscle bones, you're definitely not in a tree. But the point is, you can't get the context of our existence from the inside of the damn animal. Oh, wow. Okay. Damn. Can the unborn child know what its mother looks like? Ooh. Well, if you ask any Christian, yes.

32:54I'd have been in a lot of churches I don't know where that comes from I don't know where that is No, no, I'm joking But, okay, that is really So that's what you mean by context That's the context We don't understand And it's definitely not a bauble on a cat's necklace Hakim, I gotta give it to you, man That's profound You mean the galaxy on the belt of Orion Right Oh, is that the cat's name, Orion? Right, yes Oh Oh, that's a really good example. That's a great example. And the belt was the necklace. The little pendant on the collar. Correct. That was the belt of Orion. Wow, so cool, man. All right, here we go.

33:34Let's go to some guy, 2334. What's his name? Well, that's what he put. Hey, Neil, Lord Nice, and Dr. Oleshe. Lord? He's Lord. Oh, you didn't know? You didn't know that? No. Yeah. He says, I'm Graham from Marina del Rey, California, a longtime listener and a first time caller. I recently learned about a millisecond pulsar whose equator moves at nearly a quarter of the speed of light. Imagine two indestructible astronauts, one standing at or near the pole and one on the equator. What would each see when they look towards each other? Rotational speeds would be much faster at the equator. So how would relativity show up for these probably quite dizzy observers?

34:19A fun analogy, if Earth were somehow rotated that fast, could familiar landmarks appear in places that seem impossible because of relativistic effects? That's the second question. Thanks so much. And you make astrophysics fun and accessible. The first question is blowing my mind right now. It reminds me. If they pull an equator, but a pulsar, relativistically, what would they see? This reminds me of that old joke. What's the last thing to go through an insect's mind when it hits your windshield? What? It's ass. That's not bad.

35:00Place you on a neutron star, bro, and you're going to be a puddle. She gave us a very good qualifier. Which was? Two indestructible astronauts. Yes. Okay. So they are able to maintain their perspective and their physical integrity while one is at the pole. Okay. And one is at the equator of the pulsar. All right. So one is definitely spinning faster because it's at the equator. If you're rapidly spinning, does rapidly spinning create? Well, here's the question. So this is a calculation one, right? Because relativistic effects show up at extremes of speed and gravitational energy. So on a neutron star, you have both, a rapidly rotating neutron star.

35:49So then the question becomes, what are they looking at? Are they looking at the distant universe? Are they looking at each other? They're looking at each other. They're looking at each other. So that means that this body is typically like, we're talking like 10 miles or something across. So you're not gonna look at each other unless you're super tall Okay, they're beyond each other's horizon. Okay, they're beyond each other's horizon if you're super tall you're not in Well, you're indestructible, but doesn't pay to be super because that's the thing right if you're on a super earth the body The the it doesn't matter gravity or lower you're gonna be to survive Okay, so um, but I guess the question they're getting that is you know, it is one of those like how much is space-time curved and and what would be the effect of, your light is traveling to me, you're no longer there, and then the next bit of light is coming, and the next bit of light is coming, and the next bit of light is coming, right?

36:45And their paths are kind of something weird, right? So you're going to be distorted and smeared, is my guess. There you go. Because the light rays are not coming as one color image. Right. They're being smeared out. Yeah, and then you get a whole blur. There you go, that's it. But they're coming from a weird angle, too, right? Yeah. So basically, it's going to be a mess. is what you're going to see. You're going to see a little mess. And by the way, you have to do that on the pulsar because anything else, its gravity isn't strong enough to hold it together as one object while spinning that fast.

37:15Exactly. Which spin itself apart. Right. So pulsars can do that. Yo, that was a great question there, man. That was really cool. From who again? Some guy. Two, three, three, four. That's it. Didn't even give a name. Hey, some guy. This is Charles Coel. who says, aloha from Honolulu. Hi, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice, and Dr. Olesje. Could Schroeder's cat and the Cheshire cat have a kitten? Although the lightest primordial black holes have been ruled out as dark matter or dark gravity, as Dr. Tyson prefers, because they evaporate too quickly, could they still leave something behind like a Cheshire cat's smile?

37:58When Hawking radiation separates the very last virtual particle pair at the event horizon, and the black hole winks out of existence, could the breaking of the final entanglement leave a topological scar? Not mass, not energy, just a knot in space-time that was never there before. I think these people are smoking more weed than either one of us. This is insane. Is that last sentence about, give me that last sentence again. He said, not mass, not energy, just a knot in space-time that was never there before. This sounds a lot like the so-called topological defects from the early universe, but the scenario in which they're generated is...

38:44So basically what they're saying is, is do a GR calculation, right? Model the evaporation of the black hole, and then from that, can you derive the metric that's left over, right? the space-time configuration that's left over. Okay. And if it has fully evaporated, by definition, a space-time metric only exists in the presence of a mass energy density or pressure, right? So it sounds like the answer would be a no, but at the same time, you know, this is going to be a little bit controversial maybe, but there's a lot of stuff we predict, and then we see it. We're so good at that, right? But not everything that pops out of the equations comes to fruition, right?

39:34Sometimes people play with equations in such a way and they find something interesting and it turns out— We did a little explainer on that, I thought. Yes, we did. Oh, excellent. Yeah, equations that have solutions that don't have any correspondence to observational reality. It means nothing to the person who might need it. Right. So with that being said, we've not actually observed black hole evaporation. Right. Right? And, you know, makes sense. Everything, you know, all the GR stuff is being found exactly as predicted to high precision. So I have no reason to say GR is crap. But for a physical phenomenon that has never been observed and to then to speculate what would happen.

40:17Right. That's a lot of the conversation in physics these days. And I think that, you know, black holes get more attention than they deserve in that type of discussion. right I think there's a practical universe discussion on black holes casting shade on black holes he really is no no no I'm like I didn't think they could get any blacker but damn you did it well they no longer swim that helps that right so okay so we want to speculate on the speculation and the speculation you know there's too many layered speculations for me I got you yeah yeah alright well yeah okay well thanks a lot for that one, Charles.

40:57This is Marion who said, hello, Dr. Oleshay, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice. Marion from Pennsylvania. My question is, since Dr. Oleshay was first on StarTalk, I believe five years ago. Wow, she's keeping track. What's the most interesting discovery about the universe you have learned since then? Also, what do you think of the recent proposal that the ancient little red dots are now globules where massive stars are born fangs. It's all good. Yeah, it's all good. So the first part of that intrigues me. So how do you take that? So since then, I've studied a lot of biology and a lot of geology. Here is, you know, I wish I could channel you, man.

41:44And what we started out talking about that, like about the stars making stardust, I want to describe in such the same way the origin of the vertebrate because I went around telling everybody, because one day I had a realization. I was like, wait a minute, because I have a medical condition that brought me to this realization. There's a tube that goes from my mouth to my exit. Okay. I'm a worm with just some appendages, right? Some locomotion, some defense, right? I'm like, we're all worms, right? I was going around telling all my friends and family, hey, we're all worms, ha, ha, ha, right? And then one day I thought, you know what?

42:23What is the real origin of vertebrates? Do you know the origin of vertebrates? No. It's fish. No. No, no, pre-fish. The origin. So it's chordates, right? It's the notochord. Before there's a bone wrapped around it, it's just a chord. So where did it come from? We're a freaking filter feeder, bro. So these little filter feeders like corals and these little lemones, when they're in their larval stage, they go around, they taste little spots to figure out where they want to sit down. And so they look like a little sperm cell. They're a little globular tadpole with a little tail, right? So to power that tail, they had a little nerve going down it to power those muscles.

43:02And then eventually they decided, you know what? I'm going to skip my adult phase. And eventually it becomes the first notochord. And then the coronates. And then you get a... From that backbone. And then there is the new DNA data on race, which is now all over YouTube, right? So we all had the story, oh, ultraviolet light, that's what makes skin color this or that. And the old story was, right, that the evolution of light skin depigmentation happened from 40 ,000 years to 20 ,000 years ago. No, it started 8 ,000 years ago due to agriculture, right? Agriculture created depigmentation. And 5 ,000 years ago, Europe was only 50 % depigmented.

43:45That's 3 ,000 years ago. So we're talking like 1 ,000 BCE, man. At this point, the freaking pyramids are already 1 ,500 years old. So when you look at these ancient Europeans 40 ,000 years ago, you find the oldest math in Germany, in Europe 40 ,000 years ago, and you think, oh, it's the ancient Germans. Bro, they're not, they're brown. Yeah. You know, there's going to be a lot of Germans who are upset with you right now. I was just hanging out with Germans. They've changed. So I've been told. Okay. Yeah.

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45:58I'm Lani Lum, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

46:10All right, so that's the, so biology is your big fascination now. So the second question. And geology. And geology. Okay. Because another thing about geology that is little appreciated is the fact that our freaking outer core is liquid, bro. Liquid metal. Right? So from like 19 % radius out to like 55%, the earth's interior is liquid metal. Yes. Liquid metal. That's the core. We're on a freaking, what is that cake? You cut it in the lava cake. Oh, it's a lava cake. Yeah, Earth is a lava cake. Yeah, that's cool. We're like a nut in the middle. Right. Bro. Yeah, well, that's cool. People think the ground beneath our feet is solid.

46:45No. Well, and guess what? The great thing about that is if it wasn't, we wouldn't be here. Exactly. Because that is what gives us the magnetic field that protects us all. Which IMAP is, so do you. Very cool. All right, so here's the second thing she said. Also, what do you think about the recent proposal that the ancient little red dots are now globules where massive stars were born. Okay. My understanding is based on the latest paper, they see that the sources of the light from those globules is reprocessed light from an accretion disk. So it looks like it's a baby supermassive black hole with an accretion disk in there.

47:22And so there's, what is it called? You see scattered light and you see, what is the word? Phosphorescent? What the hell is it called? It's polarized. It's polarized. So it's absorbed and re-emitted by the gas. So you essentially have... Oh. Okay. Yeah, I didn't understand. Fluorescence. Okay, I didn't understand you at first, but damn. So supermassive black hole accretion disc. Accretion disc is emitting high-energy radiation. That'd be emission nebulae. Where the atoms are charged up, and then they... Exactly. Decharge, and they re-emit. Re-emit. Exactly. Because of emission nebula. Okay, that's cool.

47:55Plus scatter light. Light coming directly from the disc. They just get... Gotcha. All right. Just to remind people, what are these red things? So it looks like it is a baby supermassive black hole being born in the very, very, very early universe. Super early universe. Right, yeah. In the dark ages. In the dark ages. So the question that we've been having is which came first, the supermassive black hole or the galaxy? That's been an eternal question. Internal question. It's looking like it's the hole. Wow. Dude. So that's super cool, man. The hole precedes the dirt. Right. That's so cool. The reason why it's not entirely obvious is a supermassive black hole might have a billion times the mass of the sun.

48:36But the galaxy would have 100 billion times the mass of the sun. So the black hole is less than 1%. 1%, yes. So how are you going to get everybody to join this? So it was not a completely obvious pathway to know who came first in this. That's fascinating. That is really cool, man. I did not know that. Chuck, we have time for one last question. One last question. Here we go. Tristan Phillips says, hello, Neil, Chuck Hakeem. I hope you're all doing swell. Coming from Jensen Beach, Florida here, I have what may be the most important unanswered question in astrophysics. Let's say I somehow acquire a completely indestructible 16-pound Brunswick bowling ball.

49:17It's immune to heat, pressure, radiation, basically everything. I gently place it on the equator of the fastest spinning pulsar we know of. let it rotate with the star, and then through the power of plot armor, I magically turn off the pulsar's gravity just long enough for the bowling ball to escape, okay? Did I just throw the fastest strike in the history of the universe, and how fast is that bowling ball actually leaving? If that's not ridiculous enough, let's say I somehow recover the bowling ball, take it over to a supermassive black hole, and launch it into one of its relativistic plasma jets.

49:53once it's far enough away that it escapes the black hole's gravity and won't end up orbiting anything how fast is it moving now two different scenarios but i like the first one better you basically use a pulsar as a catapult with an indestructible bowling ball sitting at the equator it's spinning spinning spinning when it gets to a terminal velocity you stop it boom it it goes off, how fast is it going? Well, at first, it's going the speed of the spin, right? Okay. But it has to climb out of that gravitational well of that neutron star. Oh, there you go. But she said she turns off the gravity.

50:32Oh, okay, so she turns off the gravity. Oh, turns off the gravity. Yeah, yeah. This is a powerful being we're dealing with. Oh! Oh, I love it. I think she, didn't she say turn off the gravity? Yeah, she said turn off the pulsar, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you know what's really interesting is that I saw someone who actually modeled this because the idea that we always have, you have something spinning and you let it go, it takes off on this tangent line. Right. And they found that actually it doesn't. At the very beginning, there's some little glitch thing that happens. I don't remember the details.

51:03And then it goes on a straight line. But conservation of momentum, that sucker's going to... It's just going to go. Yeah, so typically a fast spinning pulsar, the equator's moving at some appreciable fraction of the speed of light. Like half the speed of light maybe, or quarter the speed of light. I have no idea. So the ball goes off at that speed. At that speed. And that's all you got. That's all you got. Yeah, yeah. Right, yeah. I mean, there's a pretty ornate way to just say what happens if the ball goes at half the speed of light. Right, right. But you know what it reminds me of? That new launch company that spins the...

51:36Oh, yeah, it's a... The centrifuge rocket thing? Yeah, it's a... What do they call it? Yeah, I mean, in fact, I saw some old sci-fi movies where they had a mechanism like this. Before they figured out multi-stage rockets. Deep in the 50s, before we had that going. Yeah, it was a spinner. That makes sense, yeah. And then they deconnect, they detached it. And then shoot it through a tube, and it goes, pshh. Yeah, and then it goes out. That would be kind of cool, though. They're doing it. Yeah, it's fun to think about. You know, I mean, I like it. All right. Hakeem, man, you are like, I'm tired. No!

52:13I mean, damn. It's so cool having you here, man. But. No, it is. No, man, that was full stop. It's so cool having you here. That's it. Thank you, man. It's good to be to a person, man. You're brilliant. People know it, too. It sounds like half of him is in this book. Why do we exist? Like, you open it up, he pops out. The nine realms of the universe that make you possible. And one of them has to be Asgard, because that is a realm of the universe. I think you missed an opportunity. I got one thing I got to say. I'm not a Marvel fan. But I am. But I am. But I am. Okay, good. But I have one thing I have to say about the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

52:55Please. And that is we have just launched a YouTube channel called Astrobeat, where I do explainer videos. It's about time. It is. Because the mission is to spread the love of the universe. Absolutely. Far and wide. That's right. And even though it's called Of the Pacific, it's just incidental that it's on the west coast outside of San Francisco. Well, now our new DBA doing business as is the Astro Society. So that's been our website forever, astrosociety.org. So the YouTube channel is the Astro Society. So in the future, all ASP things that don't have to do with the publications and the awards are going to be labeled as the Astro Society.

53:34And I'm a huge supporter of their work because it makes my job easier. And he is appreciated. That's awesome. All right, dude. Thanks for coming through town. Thank you for having me. I'm honored. Once again. And how do we find you? Are you anywhere on the internet? I am not. But you can find me at theastrosociety.org. You can find us. We have all our socials. I'm on the socials of the Astros Society these days. Okay. And occasionally you come through town and help out the History Channel. Absolutely. I help out the History Channel. I help out Nova. Part of the thought. We work together. Yeah, yeah.

54:09All right. That was great. That's all the time we have. This has been StarTalk, another Cosmic Queries. The Hakeem Olishayi edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson for StarTalk. As always, I bid you to keep looking up. All right. We got it there.

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