Cosmic Queries – Light Sails & Quantum Scales

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1:07on plus and pro plans. Chuck that was a fun Cosmic Queries grab back. My favorite was the person who asked what was the cosmic microwave background beat like when it happened. Take cover. Is that because this lesson there? You know what Neil told him hey man I was there when it happened and I'll give you a firsthand account. Coming up on StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Cosmic Queries. Poporee grab bag edition Chuck how you doing man? Don't agree Neil that's right. All right I like the way you say poporee let me hear it. The poporee which is what's my version of galactic gumbo. Yeah we don't we don't know what to

2:12call is other than grab bag grab back. Yeah it works. Yeah it works and it's a fan favorite because we last would have the hell they want. What everyone. All right Chuck what's your first question? All right here we go. Trisha Lynch says hello Dr. Tyson and Lord nice this is Trisha from Beaverton Oregon. If the multiverse exists how will we be able to tell where our universe ends and another universe begins. Well thank you. I like that interesting. Well there's several variations on the multiverse and I only know a couple of them but they're more than the number that I know and they come out of sort of the mathematics of the early universe as you shotgun marry quantum physics and general relativity with string theory and other sort of creative ideas in the early universe. So one version of the multiverse is there's one enormous grid of space time and we're one bubble

3:22within that grid. Okay. Okay. The difference is these bubbles are separated from each other in a way that you cannot access the other bubble. Right. Right. Right. The end of our universe is wherever that is but it would not overlap with another universe even though all of these universes are expanding. If it's a bubble and the spherical sense of a bubble. Yeah sure. Yeah. Then the universe ends where the universe begins. Like where's the end of a bubble? Where is the end of a bubble? So you might say that the edge of the bubble is where you begin your journey into the bubble universe. Exactly. Is that an end or a big answer? Good point. It's at an end or beginning. Right. You know, I like that. I like that. Yeah. Yeah. A legit reinterpretation of the information.

4:23So all of these universe are out there expanding and not overlapping. So that's a by the way, on the possibility that they might have overlapped, their experiments you can do with the cosmic microwave background. What you can do is you can look to see if one part of the cosmic microwave background looks statistically different from another part of the cosmic microwave background in a different direction. That could be somebody else's universe in pinging on hours. That would show up in the statistical analysis of the microwave background and people have done that experiment and look for these signatures and haven't found them. Found nothing. They found yeah, there's nobody in tinging on our statistical on the statistics of our universe. And I say statistics of because the microwave background is a tapestry of fluctuations of temperature that existed in the early

5:25universe that is imprinted in microwaves that we can observe today. And if there's a different universe, it might have a different imprinting and you'll be able to see that. You should be able to see that if there was some overlap and we don't. So that's one kind of multiverse. Another one is just a whole bubble separate from this grid of space time that I presumably embedded in a higher dimension and it's expanding and we're expanding and never the twain will meet. So plus it's possible, in fact, it's likely given quantum physics that the laws of physics are slightly different in one universe relative to another. And that would be extremely dangerous if you wanted to visit the other universe because you don't know is the charge on the electron different all your atoms fly apart or like laps. Hey look who showed up. It's the good people. What if these good people come from? Yeah, did you collapse into a pile of goo?

6:30Oh my god. All the forces that otherwise kept you alive are doing something different. Right. So yeah, so that's that's the best I can address this. What I might do is next time we get Brian Greenon, we can bring up that topic with him. I'll see if he has any more to add to it because he knows he's more nuanced about elements of the multiverse that could influence or impact the full answer to that question. Cool. All right. I want you to put a star next to that. Put a star next to that and we'll hold it aside for Brian Green shows up again. Flag it for Brian Green. Yes, super cool. All right then let's move on to this is Mary Mitchell and Mary says hi Dr. Tyson Lord nice Mary from Oregon. Two organs in a row. Two are good. I was just in Oregon just a few weeks ago. Okay. In Asheville, Oregon. Asheville. Oh my god. That is a full hearty town. Where was Asheville or Ashland? I don't know.

7:34Ashland art. That's the side of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's a great place. Yeah. Oh, I said it was a party town. It's quite the culture. Exactly. And the Shakespeare was in North Carolina. Ashland is in Oregon. Ashland is in Oregon. Okay. All right. Mary says this. The cosmic query is for both of you. Okay. What is one of your favorite words in astrophysics? Is there a particular word that reflects the structure function of its referent or that it's just fun to say? Alternatively, is there a word in astrophysics that shapes your geeky underpelling? Is it so? What's your is you with it? Thanks. Okay. I love the show. I love that question. And let me tell you why. My second book ever was titled Universe Down to Earth.

8:40Second book ever came out like in the early 90s. And in fact, I've been asked to update it and have it get re-released, which might happen in the next 18 months or so. And I'd mention that because one of the chapters is titled The Confused Persons Guide to Astronomical Jargon. Wow. And so the entire chapter is just words that might confuse you and then I rectify that. And the words are grouped in categories like words that mean exactly what they say. Words that are completely confusing. Words that sound like romantic destinations. Words, so the group that's socially and culturally grouped. Wait, is that a book? Well, that was one chapter of a book. Dude, you should make a pocket book, like a little pocket book. Oh, okay. Okay. By the way, I want to cut.

9:40I'm just saying. Y'all stay here. So in terms of like romantic words, so I put it in the romantic word section, your Lagrangian point. We have a whole explainer on your Lagrangian point. I'll go on to explain. Yes. But if you didn't otherwise know, it's like that's that's going to show up in some romance book. Hello, my mom. I like very much to make love to your Lagrangian point. If only I could hold your Lagrangian point at the precipice. Not only would you freeze. So what's also there is the four telescopes that observe the sun. Okay. There's a special configuration of the optics where the focus of the telescope

10:46because the sun has unlimited brightness, right, compared to what you're normally looking at as an astronomer. You look at it directly from the White House. A lot of people don't know, but nobody knows more about looking at the sun than I do. I can look at it. I stared it down and I won. I stared it so hard at it. The sun's set. Oh, that's a good one. I stared at it so hard. So what happens is you have the main mirror that reflects the light back to a secondary mirror, and then you take that light and beam it into a separate room. And all the optics are configured so that no matter where the sun is in the sky, the focus will land in this singular room. And that room has all the special optics to do this. And it's called the Kude focus. That's the description of that kind of optics.

11:48But the room where it comes in is called the Kude room. So I thought that had a little romantic memory. It does have a memory. Shall we retire to the Kude room? Oh, yeah! So I also list words that I hate that we're not invented by astronomers because we're we're much more creative and descriptive than our physics counterparts. And so there's a branch of study led by physicist in astrophysics. And it's called magnetohydrodynamics. Oh. And so we're with too many syllables. I'm sorry. Magneto hydrodynamics. And so this is the study of magnetic fields and their influence on gases in the universe, whether those gases be gas clouds or the gas constituents of a star itself. Magneto hydrodynamics. So then we have words that mean exactly what they say.

12:50Exactly what they say. The sun has spots. Guess what we call them. Sunspots. Thank you. The Jupiter has a big red spot. Guess what we call it. Yeah. The Jupiter bedwitting. Yeah, the Jupiter bedwitting. The big red spot. The Jupiter's red spot. And so we tend to be very practical minded about that. And there's a lot of nebulae out there. Those gas clouds formed by all multiple different ways. Some are gases that have been released by a star in its death. Could be supernova. Could be other mechanisms that will release gas. Others are just gas clouds themselves that have been influenced by stars being born within them that evacuates pockets of because the pressure from newly formed sunlight will do that. Anyhow, when we look at these things we say, what does that look like? Hey, that looks like a tarantula. We have a tarantula nebula. Hey, that looks like a ring. That's a ring nebula. These are official names of things.

13:50You could look these up. The ring nebula. The tarantula nebula. The lagoon nebula. The owl nebula. Something that looks like two eyes and the owl nebula. The eagle nebula. That looks like a spread eagle on money, you know, on the seal of the president. Right. With the head of the eagle is pointing sideways so you can see it speak. The eagle nebula. So the whole set of nebulae, we just call them like we see them. And that's very different from other fields where they will try to be very precise in the nomenclature, but then it creates a smoke screen for anyone trying to get close to it. Like geologists like, you know, I was with the geology friend in the woods. And I said, that's a pretty rock there. That's orthoclase felt spar. Okay, I don't like you rock. Yeah, exactly. That's, yeah. Yeah, take it the star trap buddy. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So is anything that chafes my my speedos? I would say Magneto hydrodynamics.

14:52Because as an educator, I don't want a smoke screen with words. I don't want the word to be the barrier. I want the idea to be what might be the challenging point about what I'm describing. Not the word itself. Right. Right. And so I don't know if I hit all the elements of that. What did you want to know? What's my favorite word? No, you got it all. What chafes you? What did you like? Yeah. Yeah, you had them both. Yeah. Yeah. Here's a word that means exactly what it says. Thermo nuclear fusion. Absolutely. That's another thermo is heat. Nuclear is the nucleus of the atom fusion you're bringing atoms together. Together. Bottom right. Yes. You may have heard the best voice in show business, Morgan Freeman, talking about a serious

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16:54Brought to you by Bridge Bio. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with progressive save hundreds because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on things you love like those iced lattes that help you get ready to face the day. So switch your home and auto to progressive and see if you could save and keep sipping away. Get your quote today at progressive.com progressive casualty insurance company affiliates and other insurers not available in all states. Let's see. Casimir Hoodie. Casimir Crudenac. Long sleeve tea. Performance pants. Hmm. What else? Well, what am I doing right now? I am kind of counting some of the pieces in my closet that make up the staples in my wardrobe. I'm talking about easy pieces that make fashion effortless and make me look like a fashion guru. Not that I'm not.

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18:57Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada and the UK too. And when quince asks where you heard about them, let them know that it was start talk radio and the fashion guru Chuck Nice that tells you all about it. It's the best way to support the show quince.com. Go there right now. Space Fact Dark Matter is 85% of all the gravity we measure in the universe. And we don't know what's causing it. It doesn't interact with our light. It doesn't even interact with itself. Which means it cannot coalesce to form solid objects like stars or planets or people. If you like that fact, you can find 4999 more in lost in space.

20:015,000 facts to help navigate the universe. Lost in space is now available wherever you get your books. By the way, we have words that are left over from previous times, but we never tidied up the the nomenclature. Among the nebula, there's a kind of nebula called planetary nebula. Planetary nebula. Oh, oh, that's sad. That's why it's not a thing. Okay, are you ready? Are you ready for this? Okay, okay. If you have a telescope and you look up at the night sky and you look at a star, the star is so far away, it's just a point of light even in a telescope. Even in a telescope. Even at the all just points of light. Yes. Even in a telescope.

21:01Okay? If you look at a planet, it's a disk. You can see a circular disk. Obviously it's a sphere. It's spherical. But to a telescope, you see a round thing. William Herschel, I think it was, found a nebula that was round. And he called it a planetary nebula because it looked like a planet through its telescope. Even though he knew it was a gaseous thing and he knew it wasn't a planet. He just was naming things just by what they look like, not for what they are. And so I'm pissed off that we still have that term for it. Yeah, Herschel, you dumbass. Okay. God. Well, the dude discovered other things. So you got this, you know, he discovered infrared light. Right, that's true. I mean, listen, but that was, you know, that was him looking at a table. All right, where he belonged looking. Okay. You also discovered Uranus. So, I know, not minus.

22:04I didn't say you're anus. I said Uranus. He didn't discover my anus. It's a big boy. I don't know who you been hanging around anyway. That's cool. That's cool. All right, well, that was very cool. All right, here we go. This is light-blinded fool. Light-blinded fool says hello, Dr. Tyson Lorde Nice. My name is Robin and I'm from Vermont. Yay. Love Vermont. Thanks for start talking. My brain is eating very well. My question is, what do you think will get to Alpha Centauri first? Missions such as Starshot or what NASA, or what the NASA Advanced Concepts program is putting together, or will nanotechnology and new propulsion systems outpace these programs if they are launched years later and could these missions continue beyond Alpha Centauri

23:07to more distant stars since they won't be slowing down. Well, so this is why we have telescopes. So we can get a close-up look without actually going there. I mean, just think about that. Okay? You have some object in the distance. You can travel to it or you can whip out a telescope and view it as though you were standing close to it. So the Earth measurements. Even take measurements. So the Earth to be in a place that you could otherwise get measurements via a telescope is reduced simply because we have access to telescopes in multiple wavelengths, with multiple detectors, and the like. Okay, so that's my first comment. Second, Starshot project, Starshot is ambitious. They're going to have sent posted, stamped, sized spacecraft. Where because so much as can be miniaturized today, that can monitor temperature, magnetic fields, thermal fluxes,

24:14all in a tiny little posted, stamped, sized spacecraft that is attached to a huge solar cell. Light-sale, I should call them. Okay? Now, the idea is you launch boatloads of these, and then you have gigawatt lasers on Earth that beam into these light-sales to accelerate this very low mass spacecraft. Awesome. And the calculations show, and by the way, if you beam light into a reflective surface, the momentum of the light will be imparted on that surface and you can accelerate it. The calculations show that beaming at these spacecraft from Earth, even as they increase their distance, you can get the speeds up to 20% the speed of light. I know, I know. Now, now let's do the math. The office-sensory system is four light years away.

25:17So, how long will it take these objects to get there? At 20% of light? It's three to five. And they're 20 years away. 20 years exactly. Thanks for that good math on the spot. So, it'll take 20 years to get there. And so to say, is there some other propulsion, some other technology that we can do within the 20 years that those are in motion that'll just somehow pass them by? I don't think so. I don't think so. How are you getting faster than 20% to speed a light? You're not, I don't see that happening. And just for context, the fastest spacecraft we've ever launched anywhere is the mission to Pluto called New Horizons. And the reason why that was fast is we have a rule, unwritten, but it's definitely a rule. If you're ahead of a space mission, you want to make sure that it's completed before you die. That's an unwritten rule.

26:19And so Pluto is very far away with normal rockets it might have taken dozens of years. But you make the payload as light as possible, give it low mass, and boost it on the most powerful rockets in the space launch arsenal. This gives you very high acceleration from Earth out to Pluto. If instead you redirected that rocket to Alpha Centurion last I calculated this, it would take you 40 to 50,000 years. Alpha Centurion. That's wild. That's very different from 20 years. Yeah. Bit time. And that's the fastest thing we've ever launched. So I don't, you know, we're good, this project star shot, there's good Google pages on it. You can check it out. I think it was one of, it might have been one of the ex-prices. I have to check my memory on that. But anyhow, go check out project star shot. Very ambitious and I think realizable, by the way.

27:20If you need a few more billionaire investors, but yeah. Very cool. This is Lira, who says Dr. Tyson, Lorde Nice, Vega from Colorado here. Wait, wait, hold on, how do you spell Lira? L-Y-R-A. So that's a name of a constellation. Okay, now let's keep going. Vega says Vega is the name of the brightest star in the constellation, Lira. There you go. So, we do have an alien here. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe this is a code. Let's see, let's see what Lira says or what Vega says. So you've talked in previous episodes about there being no functional now. Regarding a moving person and a still person looking up in the sky at Andromeda, at the same place and time and seeing it, years in the past while moving and the present and present while standing. My question is, is there any way we can make a simulation to replicate what true now would be

28:27that we're able to exist or is our knowledge or understanding unable to comprehend how we could even begin to do that? Yeah, no. There's a now for now is a very personal individual thing. And by the way, by the way, let me be precise, the now as in your clock time. Okay, so we can all have a now, but in what was once synchronized clocks, we'll show up in this case, three different nows for you, me, and Vega, or Lira, whatever the person's name is. So whatever this name is. Right, right. So no, you cannot construct an absolute now. That's kind of the whole, that's what we have to give up when we transition from classical physics to relativity physics to modern physics. What's related to that is we have to give up simultaneous and that's the same question in a way

29:31as asking about now because if things are simultaneous, they're happening in a, in the same now. But if there is no absolute simultaneous, that is further evidence that there is no common now in the universe. So you can share it now with someone else if you were together with the same speed and the same gravitational field. But otherwise, no, just give up on it. And it's hard to give up classical ways. Because our senses are forged, like I said, in the Serengeti to not get eaten by a lion. That's how and why our senses do what they do. Beyond that, you know, the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. Thank you. There it is. There you go. All right, still good question. I mean, nice to think about. This is Christian Jeremiah. And he says hello from

30:35Ilulisat Greenland, never heard of it. So one of the ways to visualize gravity is through rubber fabric, aka bowling ball on a trampoline. And I believe that's known as the rubber sheet, right? Sure. Sure. Okay. So does anything would put a depression in that sheet? Yeah. Does mass stretch our third spatial dimension into fourth or higher dimensions the same way as rubber fabric? If it does, is there still downward gravity in higher dimensions? Yeah, have some fun with that, Neil. Whoa, whoa. I'm trying to understand it because the it's not simply that you have a rubber sheet. Exactly. And because in a rubber sheet, the way we normally think about that, there's like some big source of gravity in the middle of that. Right. And you put a test roller thingy and a roller down, then it goes into orbit, right? Right. Okay.

31:36It's to illustrate that the smaller body is falling towards the larger body. That's what it's supposed to illustrate. Correct. Except what that misses is the fact that everything has distortions in its rubber sheet. So the ball that's rolling around the curved rubber sheet has its own distorted rubber sheet related to it. And so the universe is this juxtaposition of deformed rubber sheets for everything that's in it. Everything. From particles out to full galaxies. Right. So we can't think of the mass itself as having some special kind of action on the fabric of space time. Right. It's not. It just has the same action that anything else does. Right. And it's a car sponge with its total mass. Excellent. Yeah. Very cool though. But it's good that you ask that because I'm sure when people see that demonstration online,

32:38because if you can go into YouTube, many places show that. I'm sure that's the intuitive deduction that everybody makes. It's what he just asked. And in fact, in the original Hayden Planetarium, in the exhibits, we had one of these deformed surfaces. But it wasn't rubber. It was just a rigid deformed surface. And you would take a, my memory serves. You can take a coin and launch it. And it would roll on its edge around the surface. So you send the coin into orbit around this sort of black hole thingy in the middle. Right. And then we, then we keep your money. That's, that's funny. It was the black hole fundraising mechanism. The only point that I'm making there is in that exhibit that deformed sheet was, was rigid. Was a rigid sheet, a rigid surface.

33:38And you weren't thinking that even the coin would have deformations in it as well. So I can say it's easy to see why you would think that the mass would be something separate and apart from whatever made the deformation in the first place. Right on. Okay. Let's move on to Rachel Ambrose. That says, hello, Rachel here from Austin, Texas. Neil, right. Are you familiar with Hoag's object? How statistically improbable is that from our line of sight here on Earth? We'd see a ring galaxy and then billions of light years behind it. Another ring galaxy that appears inside the first one. Do you think it's more than a coincidence? Maybe some kind of gravitational lensing effect? Okay. I didn't know it had a name. Tell me the name of it again. I know this object, but I didn't know it was named. What, what are we giving it? She called it Hoag's object. Spell that.

34:39HOAG? Hoag's object. Yeah. Okay. I didn't know it had a name. So, so let's go back in time. Okay. You look up in the night sky and you see stars. And you ask yourself, I wonder if two stars that are kind of near each other in the sky are related to each other or they just a chance juxtaposition in space. Okay. To our light of sight. That's a perfectly natural question. One of the earliest applications of statistics in science, which by the way happened way later than whole other branches of math were invented. I've written about that in the in the risk and reward chapter of of the book, Starry Messenger, Cosmic Perspectives. I lament the fact that statistics is one of the last branches of math to be invented, which should tell us something about how ill-equipped our brainwiring is to think

35:44statistically about the world and entire industries exist to exploit that ignorance. And they're called casinos, right? Where people, my role is due. Oh yeah, I think I have feel lucky today. It's like what the brain does to think it is influencing events that are purely probabilistic is sad and tragic. Okay. It is. We have a president who actually bombed a nation based on that same principle. What? Yeah, he said he had a gut. He had a gut feeling. It's just a feeling. He had a feeling. Yeah, yeah, I don't like people's guts. I don't like people's guts. I like people's brains better than I like their guts. So I like that. So can we pose this question mathematically and then arrive at an answer? And yes, so what you can do is you can say, let's take a thousand stars and scatter them randomly on the sky.

36:46If you do it randomly, what fraction of them will be within a certain angular distance from each other? There's a certain number you would expect if they went up randomly. Random doesn't mean that they're exactly even based. That is not random. Even if they were random, you could still get a clumping. Yes, in fact, clumpings are expected. This was the problem when people said, oh, he's got a hot hand in a basketball court, given the ball, when whatever is your shooting average in a game, you would expect there to be multiple shots in a row that are made. That's normal. It's not that he has a hot hand. That's normal. It's statistically normal. But again, we can't brains don't allow us to think statistically. We think something magic is going on. So we think special luck is happening. So you do this and you know what to expect. Then we looked at how many stars are actually on the sky at two a certain telescopic depth. And then we looked at how many were close by.

37:48There was a statistically significant increase in stars that were close to each other on the sky, relative to random. That was one of the first applications of statistics to assert that we actually have double star systems in the universe. Stars can be born in pairs. And then we said, let's keep going. The stars are born in triplets and quadruplets. And that opened the floodgates to think not only statistically about where stars are in the night sky, but also gravitationally and how you form such objects. Okay. You can do the same thing for galaxies. The same thing. And there are billions of galaxies on the sky. So when you have that many galaxies, things such as alignments of two galaxies, you come to expect them. You don't go straight to them and say, oh, this is interesting and weird. What an anomaly.

38:49What an anomaly. No, no, no, no. Look at the statistical likelihood of it. And we good. We good. We're good here. We're good here. And by the way, we have to be careful because when you do observe some subjects, you don't know initially if they're separate or related. And because they're two coherent things, two rings, you say, well, if they were on top of each other, could they still maintain their coherence? Their gravity might disrupt their shape. You can ask other sets of questions. Point is, it's not always obvious whether they're connected or not and you need to do other measurements. Cool. Yeah. All right. All right. Still a good question. We have good question. Very. Thank you for the curiosity there, Rachel. We're all the better for it. All right. Let's go to Rorke. You know what? I'm going to call him Rorke. His name is Rorke now. Your name is Rorke now. Rorke can't. Your name is Rorke because Chuck cannot pronounce your name.

39:51No, it's either Rorke or Rorke. And that's R-O-A-R-K. Okay. It's Rorke. Rorke. Okay. I would say Rorke. Not Rorke. Okay. He says, hello, Dr. Tyson. I wonder if the answers to all of our universal questions lay within our ability to see further into geometry and fractal geometry patterns. Beyond botanical spirals and other phenomena, what if seeing clearly into space isn't what we actually need. Maybe something that helps us see kaleidoscopically, if you will, to uncover those patterns we cannot otherwise see. What is your take on this? You are a gentleman and a scholar. Also Chuck, if you're reading this, I love you. Oh, that was nice. Okay. So what do you think? Shout out to Chuck. So here's my take on that. I don't want to speak for the whole field, but here's my take. Was it back in the 70s where, but going definitely into the 80s,

40:52people started thinking a lot about fractals. All right. All right. All right. The fractals are patterns that you can generate or in occasionally find them in nature, where when you zoom in, if there's some pattern that you see, so in a larger view, and then you zoom in, that exact pattern. The same pattern. Yeah. Exactly. And you zoom in some more and it repeats. You suck again. Oh, they're beautiful. They're beautiful. And you can make beautiful fractal patterns, especially on a computer because computers are good at that. Here's an example. It's a mild example. But many plants, I don't know if there's two for all plants. You have to check with a botanist on this. If you look at a tree, and if you look at the angle that a branch comes off from the tree, and measure that angle, it's usually upwards a bit, maybe 30 to 60 degree angle from the vertical. Okay. Now that branch will have branches. Right. Of course they will. This is what it means by a tree's branching out. So let's look at the angle that that makes. It's the same angle. Okay.

41:52It's the same angle. And look at if they make a branch, what's that? That's the same angle. So if you just zoom in to this tree, you're getting a smaller tree, even smaller, smaller, you're getting versions of the larger tree as you zoom in. That's just kind of fun to notice if you've never noticed that about plants. I think it's a broader truth for plants that just in general, there may be important exceptions to it. But if you just look at several plants, you'll see this repeating. And it's fun to notice, by the way. Oh, I got to throw this out there because I only learned it very late in life. If you cut an apple horizontally, and you cut into the core, and you will see seeds that are radially around the axis of the apple. Okay. Okay. Do you know how many seed sections there are? No, I don't. No. Okay, I need to do why I don't remember. But it's the same number as the petals

42:54on the flower that preceded that fruit. What? I know. I thought that was pretty cool. That is cool, man. That's pretty cool. Yeah. All right. That was cool. Okay. I'm not a botanist, so I might here to analyze that. I'm just here to just share with you that observation. Okay. Anyhow. So fractals, there was the suspicion that fractals might be something in nature that we would be able to uncover. What makes fractals work is that the same rules that applied on one scale are applying on another scale. Right. It gives you the same thing. Right. In the universe, that's not how it works. Okay. There are large scale forces that do not readily translate to small scale forces. Oh, well, as you go to smaller and scale, quantum physics kicks in, and that's not the same as Newtonian physics.

43:54And none of the rules apply. All the rules are different. All the rules are different. So you're not getting the pattern you're looking for. Right. We want to think of patterns because it's easier for us to understand. Yes. It's philosophically easier for us to accept. And our brains are pattern machines. Yes. Pattern recognizing machines like there's never been any. Right. So we're good at finding patterns, even when there's no pattern to be discerned. That's how good we are at finding patterns. So true. Which is why I have a pancake in my refrigerator right now because I don't want to eat Jesus. I don't think Jesus shows up on pancakes. He shows up on tortillas. I don't see that pancakes. So no, no, I don't. So my point is fractals ended up being more entertaining than useful in the sciences. That's my only point.

44:55They're entertaining and they're beautiful and you can make fun art. But if you try to use it as a tool to probe nature, it's just simply not as useful. And in fact, they tried to model forests using fractal patterns for trees. Okay. Okay. Model it in for weather. And it just didn't work because the trees are different from each other. Even if one tree, even if one species of tree could be fractal into place, that same fractal model does not apply to all species of tree. It has to be a different fractal model and how many kinds of there's thousands or however many species of tree. So it just became messy and awkward. And so I have not seen much reference to fractals helping scientists decode nature in the last 20 years. Yeah. That's my take on it. If it's a take I've missed, I'd be curious to know how fractals are coming along.

45:55But otherwise, I don't see them mattering as much as they we thought they might have. All right. Well, listen, work. Just go ahead and continue to admire Romanesque go broccoli and know that it has no bearing on the universe at all. Romanesque go broccoli is fractal food. Look up a picture of Romanesque scoop. Then you find a picture of it online or buy it. And I'll have you know that in Star Wars Force Awakens in the bar scene, one of the servers is walking by with a tray of kudite's and one of the objects on that tray is Romanesque go broccoli. Cool. All right. Which evidence evidence that that exists in a galaxy far away far far away. There you go. And there's no about Romanesque go broccoli. It's either that or there's one hell of an importer on that planet. So.

47:10Life on Earth can be hard. I mean, it's not even really our planet. It belongs to microbial organisms that are living in our gut and living on everything else too. We're really just an Uber ride for all these organisms. And sometimes when we're giving those organisms a ride, they pay us with sickness and death. All right. Maybe I'm getting a little dark here. You know, what I'm saying is Earth can be a lot. You know, everything from what I just said to the fact that there's a sun that's going to engulf us very soon. And about, I don't know, five billion years give or take. Cosmically speaking, you've earned a break. So escaped a Pluto TV. Yeah, I did it. Yeah, you heard it. I did it. Turn off all your earthly problems and turn on the movies and shows you already love from Ankerman to legend of Ron Bergen D to dirty dancing. Pluto TV is out there. Sure, it's not a planet anymore,

48:12but it is the best destination in the solar system. Sorry, Jupiter. And the number one reason why Pluto TV is completely free. No subscription, no fees, zero dollars, and as any mathematician will tell you, zero is one of the most profound numbers ever conceived. Is it really a number? Is the absence of value a value? Who cares about that? The best things on TV are free. Let's get to Pluto TV. Stream now. Pay never. Since when has building a website been hard? Since forever until now, that's right. With Wix, the first of its kind, AI website builder where you get the best of AI and drag and drop editing in one place. Wix Harmony allows you to build a real working website for yourself in minutes with the business stuff already built in. I'm talking e-commerce, scheduling, payments, all of it.

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50:18Every discovery starts with a question. What if? Why? How? When it comes to education, Southern New Hampshire University has answers. Whether you want to build new skills or pursue a lifelong passion, SNHU has over 200 online programs to expand your horizons. And the flexible format lets you learn on your schedule without putting life on hold. So if you're asking, what's next for me? It's time to find out. Explore what's possible at snhu.edu slash start talk. I'm Olican Hemraj and I support start talk on Patreon. This is start talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. All right, this is Travis Nop.

51:18He says, hello, Dr. Tyson and esteemed funny guest. Travis from Richmond, Virginia with a question inspired by my two-year-old. Love it. She experiences a year as half her lifetime, while for me it's only about 140th. Could there be a cosmic analog? When we see red shifted light from a distant galaxy, we assume the universe was smaller when that light was admitted. Could the same observation be explained by a universe in which time, and thus the speed of light, passed differently in the past, and is there an observable test that distinguishes expanding space from changing time? Interesting. Love it. Okay. So they are related to each other. Let me get back to time relative to your two-year-old.

52:20Of course, your brain is your life experience is filled by however long you have been having life experience, right? Right. So you would expect one year to not take a two-year-old because they don't know anything about anything yet, a five-year-old. So one year to a five-year-old is surely bigger in their life experience than one year to a 40-year-old. Obviously. That's the best thing. I live a hard life, man. A lot of people think a five-year-old wouldn't know the ways of the world. But first of all, I quit smoking two years ago. And I just paid down my mortgage and I... Now here's something. I quit my job this week. Really mature, five-year-old. Yeah, exactly. Let me back into the answer to that question. When I was 14, I was driven with some other people approximately my age from New York City to

53:23the Mojave Desert. Wow. To attend an astronomy camp where I lived nocturnally for a month. Wow. The trip we drove nonstop and the trip took two days and five hours. I did it correct for time zone change. So it's two days and one hour. Okay. Does that right or is it the other way? How have you correct that for time zone? Point is it took two days. When we arrived, it seemed like we had left New York a week earlier. Because those two days were so filled with... Oh, wow, that's the St. Louis Arch. Oh my gosh. We're crossing the Mississippi River. Oh, is this Tennessee? Oh, is this Texas? What? My life was just my visual, mental awareness of the world was so full that my brain wouldn't allow me to say...

54:26Oh, that all happened in the last 48 hours. My brain forced me to think that that was spread over many more days than it actually was. Because the density of life experience was so high, it was higher than anything I'd experienced in my life. So that was my mind's attempt to make sense of how much how action filled those two days were. Anyhow, that's purely psychological. And you can know this because you can bring measuring devices, clocks and things. And no, it didn't take me a week to get to California. It did only take two days. All right. In the expanding universe, it does affect time. It does. And I am proud to say I am a co-author on the first paper, research paper, to establish that fact. Okay. There were... I forgot it might have been as many as eight or nine authors on this paper. And the lead author, the lead author, would later win the Nobel Prize for the discovery of dark energy

55:36for code discovering dark energy in the universe. So the lead author on that paper, his name is Brian Schmidt, who studied the, as we say, high-red shift supernovae. These are stars that explode and galaxies out to the edge of the universe. And if you do that, you can probe metrics of the universe. Because all the supernova have a certain common properties. So it's like a yardstick, a free yardstick, throughout the universe. And so he would ultimately share the Nobel Prize with Adam Rees for this discovery. And both those groups, the high-red shift supernova groups, one was on the East Coast, one was on the West Coast. Brian Schmidt is now less-dichacked. He was like provost at in Australia, Australia, National University, I think it is. But anyhow, so I'm on a research paper that showed that if you know when a star blows up or supernova, it gets brighter and then it gets dimmer

56:38at a very predictable rate. We know this, okay? That's why they make good yardsticks, standard candles, as we've called them. There was a high-red shift supernova that didn't fit this light curve. We call it a light curve. And we said, hmm, is this a different kind of supernova? Or what? Because this supernova hails from when the universe was half its current size. And the universe was expanding as it still is. So what's up with that? Turns out, if you put in the time dilation, expected for the expansion of the universe at the time of that galaxy's light, it stretches the light curve to be exactly on the curve we measure. Holy shit. It was a direct evidence of not only a shift in the expanding universe,

57:42but what effect that has on time because the light curve was stretched out. Right. We observing that light curve, it took longer for that light curve to execute its rise and fall than a nearby supernova. Exactly the rate that you'd expect from the expanding universe. So I'm proud to be on there. I'd supplied some data, some supernova data that he compiled to make the full paper. So it's his effort to come up with that result. I was a cog in a much larger wheel to make that happen. So the point is, yes, time is affected and we see that in phenomena, in galaxies and other phenomena, in those places and at those times in the early universe. But the speed of light as you measure it is the same no matter what. No matter what. That's not what changes here. Okay. But the time keeping is what changes.

58:47So there you have it. That's wild. This is Kyle Holman. Kyle says, hello Dr. Tyson. Lord, nice Kyle from Fort Myers, Florida here. Hey, Fort Myers. First time Patreon member. Welcome to the start talk of verse. Nice. There we go. What might the night sky have looked like when the cosmic microwave background radiation was cosmic visible light background? Oh, okay. So the cosmic microwave background today is microwave. It's microwaves, right? Right. Microwaves, okay. The microwave photon is like one centimeter long or less. Two millimeters up to a couple of centimeters. It's the length, the physical length of the wave length of the photon. Okay. That has stretched in the expanding universe since the cosmic microwave was first formed.

59:51Okay. So we ask what was the temperature of the universe when it first formed? Because today the temperature that corresponds with microwaves is three degrees Kelvin. Absolutely Kelvin, okay. The temperature of the cosmic microwave background when it formed was about three thousand degrees. It turns out that it's an exact one to one relationship between how much the wave has stretched and how much bigger the universe is. So in the early universe when its temperature was three thousand degrees, hmm relative to three degrees today, it means the universe was one one thousandth its current size. Because over those years it's expanded a thousand fold going from the wavelength of light at three thousand degrees. So the wavelengths have light at three degrees. At three degrees.

1:00:51And what is the wavelength of light at three thousand degrees? It's visible light. So at one point the whole universe was just a beautiful like heavenly light. Yes, a heavenly glow. But it would be like the surface of the sun but everywhere. And if you had good measuring devices you can detect that some parts were slightly cooler and slightly warmer than others. And that you'd be immersed in that. Feel with it. And you wouldn't need special telescopes to see it. So when you say night sky people often think of stars, suns, moons and planets. Of course none of that had formed yet because the universe is still trying to get its act together. From those early moments. Yeah. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. That is really cool. Damn. Yeah, all right. So you would have seen that. You'd have seen that in just been like somebody turn that down. Yes, exactly. There'd be no, there'd be no. Yes, look right. You couldn't you couldn't get away from it. Right. It'd be everywhere. It's omnipresent, just light.

1:01:53And let me tell you how bad it actually would be. If you said, oh, there's some shade over there and you go under the shade. All of that energy will keep the thing that's shading you. And then it will glow the same temperature as the background. Wow. Okay. So you wouldn't you. It's inescapable. Inescapable. Wow. Very cool. Oh, man, that was good. Here's here's a quick thing. I don't know if you've done this. Have you ever done pottery? Will you have a kiln? Have you ever done this? I wouldn't quite call it pottery. I mean, I took some clay and some water and I supposedly shaped it into something. And then we put it in a little oven. And then when it came out, I was like, I thought that shit away. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. So a kiln. Right. You know, where you fire up the kiln and you, it sets your clay.

1:02:55It sets your clay. Okay. The that is glowing hot. Yes it is. Okay. Okay. It is glowing hot. It's hotter than red hot. A little hotter than red hot. All right. So there it is. That's about three, that call it three thousand. It might be as low as two thousand degrees. But let's call it three thousand degrees for the moment. In the kiln. There it is. If you look inside, it's just glowing. Right. You can't see the edges of the walls of the kiln because it's all glowing at you. That's right. That's true. No. Now you take your pottery, put it in there. What is the temperature when you put it in there? What is it do or what is it? It says to what is the what is the temperature of your pottery when you put it in? Oh, it's whatever the atmosphere temperature is. Room temperature. Okay. So now you put it in, close the thing. And the pot that pottery gets hotter and hotter and hotter. Great. You can watch this happen. It gets hotter and hotter and hotter until it reaches the same temperature as the glowing walls.

1:03:59Okay. And then it disappears. Because it is the same glowing temperature surface as everything else. Maybe if you move your head a little bit, you can get some edges of it. But compared to what it was when you first put it in, when it's a discrete object, glowing at a room temperature rather than the temperature of the kiln itself, so it's how to make something disappear in the background. And one last example, completely obscure, but I got to put it out there. In the film, which I highly recommend, because it's very, masterfully crafted and very sexy. And it's a caper. It was the remake of the Thomas Crown affair. Okay. Okay. It's a heist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, except they didn't agree to get their name mentioned in the credits.

1:04:59I think they don't want people heisting their paintings. Exactly. Anyhow. Anyhow. The thieves waited for the hottest day of the year. Okay. Then cut the air conditioning to the rooms, so that the air got up to the temperature of the walls. And so the camera, they have infrared cameras. The when that happened, the infrared camera could not detect the paintings from the walls from the air in front of it. And the whole scene went blank. The whole scene went uniform. Right. And yeah, because all glowing at the same temperature. That's pretty cool. If you put the pottery in the kiln and look in the window,

1:06:01when it disappears, if you listen very, very closely, you can hear the pottery saying, referring only to the light waves, not the sound waves. That's a different conversation. That's a different thing. Oh, another thing, by the way, if the temperature in the rooms go up to like 100 degrees, because it's like the hottest day of the year, and the walls go to 100 degrees, what's your body temperature? 98 point, whatever. Yeah, that's so that's near 100 degrees. So all of this just blends. It turns out we have a higher density of infrared light coming off of us than the air does, but it still makes it much harder to figure out what's going on. When everything is glowing to you at the same temperature, that's all. So that's a lot of obscure everyday references to something that started as a cosmological,

1:07:05a brilliant cosmological question about the cosmic microwave background. Nice. Well, thanks Kyle. You got it. Yeah, I think that's all the time we have. Another installment of cosmic queries, grab bag. Yeah. Go go. Go live. Go live. Go live. Go live. That guy don't know. I see no see. Glad they're no. No. And we glad that when we come back, no reason. Garot. What ever the hell you just say. Chuck, for those I've seen this on video, I see on your back screen, it comes and goes, but you're you're just smart enough video. We still up on YouTube on our YouTube channel. Oh, thank you. Yeah. I talk to you on start talks to YouTube channel. That's right. And you you recorded that and posted it. New Year's Eve or New Year's Day. New year's Day. New Year's Day. So it's you just just just telling it like you see it. Yeah, Chuck and I just smart enough on the start talk YouTube channel. Go and download it and share it with your friends.

1:08:07It's free. Oh, got it. That's the old time we have, check. Well, man, this was good. I am Neil deGrasse Tyson. You're a personal astrophysic. Keep looking up. Yeah. In the fight against all simmers, now matters more than ever. Because now we have treatments, treatments that could change everything. But now is no time to stop. Now we've got momentum. So now we use it. Now we seize the moment. Now we turn the tide. Now we make a difference and make some noise. Now is the time to get up, get out and join the movement. At the Alzheimer's Association walk to end Alzheimer's, held over 600 communities nationwide. And we need you with us. Because now is the time for hope. Join the fight at ails.org slash walk. Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co-founder of Angie. And one thing I've learned is that you buy a house. So you make it a home. Because with every fix, update, and renovation,

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