Personal History with Telescopes

Gaigo presents a 30-second podcast between your podcast. Today's story is shared by one of our listeners. It's called Betrayed by Bill. It was in that moment I caught who was staring back at me in betrayal, or more like what? My insurance podcast. With trembling hands, I grabbed my phone and switched to Geico, saving about $900 in the process and never to be betrayed again. Now that was bloody riveting. It feels good when the story ends with savings. It feels good to Geico . Hertz presents, it had to be new . It had to be new . It had to be ne w screens that are smart quickers to start new cars for you Come and see what's new for the Chevries, Linkets and Cheeps. Hertz cars are new. Rent our newest fleet yet at Hertz.com . So Chuck, we just rolled out another grab bag, Cosmoquaries. That's right. And people grabbed all parts of the bag on that one. Black holes. Personal question about me? Yeah. And my telescopes? Yes. What's up with that? We got it all. We'll coming up on Star Talk. Welcome to Star Talk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide . Star Talk begins right now . This is Star Talk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Chuck Nice over here. What's up? All right, Neil. We're gonna do another Cosmic Quarry. A grab a bag. That's all we're doing lately, our grab bags. It's the fam favorite, man. It's like you close your eye, reach in the in the bin, right? Pull it out. Pull out a snake. You know I actually have a black hole bag over there? Did I ever show you that? Wait, did I thought it was the black hole lunchbox? Can I only have one black hole? I can show you way hang on. You might have shown me this a long time ago. This is a black hole bag. Oh Lord Jesus Lord Jesus. What the hell? It's a what the Okay . I love it. And then there's the eyes. Oh, no, I forgot what I put in here. Okay. I put a hole in here. You put a hole in the hole. Yes. What a place to put a hole. Doesn't Don't you remember the hole? My hole? I remember the hole. You remember the hole? This is a hole. We did that whole thing where we cut the square hole. And then you could wal thkrough. Well I said was like, here's a sheet of paper. I'm gonna cut a hole in this sheet of paper that you can walk through. That's right. And you said no. And I said, no, you can't. No, you can't. But you did. And I stole in there. That's a very cool thing. Yeah. Yeah. Chuck, what you got for me? All right. A grab bag. This is the grab bag. And I will pull it out of this black hole made by Apple Computers. Uh the Gumbo. The galac the galac gumbo. This is Dalton. Hey, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice greetings from Huntsville, Alabama. I was watching an Rocket City. Rocket City. Which Trump officially named. Well, by the way, it was always named Rocket City. Right. And then Trump decided to And then officially name it Rocket C ity, uh not to be confused with Little Rocket Man. That's why coming to New York and saying, I'm gonna rename New York the big apple . Which he would do that, by the way. Anyway, yeah, it's so funny. Uh greetings from Huntsville, Alabama. I was watching an old explainer on Absolute Zero and why it's impossible to reach it. If it is impossible by quantum physics to have a particle become completely stationary, then would it not be possible to extract infinite energy from it in the form of heat? In doing so, violating the first and second laws of thermodynamics, it seems a bit paradoxical to never be able to reach absolute absolute zero , since you seemingly can always have something colder . But that I don't know why you would say you seemingly could have something colder. No, no, it's it's it he's he's what this is Dalton Dalton. Dalton he he's merging a classical brain with a a quantum brain. Classical brain. Okay. Right. In terms of his capa his his interest in answering the question. Right. So just let me talk you through this. All right. Talk you off the ledge, Dalton. It's gonna be okay. Talk you off the absolute zero ledge. All right. So let me just remind people that there's no such thing as cold. Right. You can't like put cold in something. That's where I was going when I said it's infinite. If you could do that, then you can make something like infinitely cold. Yes. Add more cold. So what we sense as cold is just the absence of heat. Right. So you start pulling heat out. Right. This is what your refrigerator does. Right. It pulls heat out of your food. Right. Well, think of it that way. Right. You put in something that's room temperature, it takes the heat out. Right. If you take heat out of something, what happens to its temperature? It goes down. And you take it out, where does that heat go? It's gotta go somewhere. It's gonna go somewhere. You go out of the refrigerator. You ever go around back? You ever go around back? Those coils are dissipating coils to to send out the heat. It not only radiates the heat, but it's in touch with air, so the air will conduct heat away as well. Right. Okay. But this is a major issue with spacecraft. Okay. Because if you're in space and you have machines that generate heat, how do you get rid of the heat? You gotta dump the heat somehow. Okay. So you can't just have uh well you can have radiators, yes, but each radiator radiator has to be pointing away into space. They can't point to each other. You can't have a battery of radiators, right. Right? Not not a literal battery, but like a an array. An array of radiators that are like if they point to each other, nothing it just feeds each other the same heat. Exactly. So they all have to face space, but it doesn't have the benefit of air whisking away the heat. It can only radiate it away. Whereas on Earth, you can release heat both ways. Okay. It can radiate away and you can you can convect air around it and it just takes it takes it away. Very efficient. Right. When you have a medium such as an atmosphere to do that. Right. So Cool Breeze. Yeah, cool breeze will cool you down faster than just you radiating energy. Okay. Right. That's it's slightly different. The cool breeze is forcing your sweat to evaporate, and the evaporation takes energy out of you. But so let's get back to the absolute zero. So I keep taking heat out and the temperature gets lower and lower and lower. You reach a point where quantum phenomena dominates and you can no longer use classical reasoning. This by the way, Dalton's not alone in this in this uh intersection, this troubled paradoxical intersection between classical physics and what we call modern physics. Okay. So you get down there and you try to take more heat out and you can't because the and by the way, taking heat out means that particles are moving slower and slower. Right. Okay. The heat is vibrational energy typically. Okay? So you take that out , and there's a regime where the quantum fluctuations prevent it from ever stopping its motion. Right? Okay. So you're saying let me that means there's energy there. Right. Let me pull that energy. Let me utilize that energy. I think I'd have to confirm this with our cosmology trio. Brian and Brian and uh Janna. Janna. Uh the Brian Cox, Brian Green and Bri Brian Cox, of course is in the UK. Right. But he comes through and he's he's a good friend. And then sometimes Sean. Uh Sean Carroll. Right. Oh yeah, yeah. He's a good guy too. When we speak of zero point energy of the vacuum of space, I think that's what they're referring to. The energy below which you cannot go. Okay. Because it's zero point, but it's not really zero. Right. But if you try to get to zero, that's what you're stuck with. And that's quantum fluctuations. And you you I don't think you can extract energy out of that lowest energy fluctuation because it needs a l to take energy out, you need a lower energy state to land. Right. And you can't. Right. Because that's it. You had to do it. Who's that guest we had in another show? A biologist who said the universe is just electrons looking for a place to rest. That's it. Yeah, that was Bitoul. Bitoul. Bitoul. Bitoul from University of Messias in Wisconsin. Yes. Bitoul. The universe. Everything that happens in the universe is an electron looking for a place. Looking to hang its hat. Honey, I'm home. Hard day in the circuit. Uh so yeah, but people are imagine that you could tap the zero point energy and make like rockets out of it and travel through space. And I don't have problems people imagining that. It doesn't seem likely to me though, based on what we know of the behavior of quantum physics. Gotcha. So there you have it. All right, Dalton, way to go, brother. Uh uh hope that keeps you from uh you know from jumping off the ledge. All right, this is uh Rachel Ambrose . And Rachel says, Rachel here from Austin, Texas. Phot ons have to be literally everywhere all the time, even in a dark room. If I can see, then there's photons hitting my eyeballs. I feel like people don't talk about this enough. They are filling every inch of space all the time. They're everywhere. Furthermore, somehow photons from the big bang are still here right now in the form of cosmic microwave background radiation. Neil, can you please speak to this? Yes. I I think Muhammad Ali said it best. Mm-hmm. Okay. Hmm. I'm pretty. That's right, Howard. Look at me. I'm pretty, Howard. Or Howard Cosell. Howard Cosell. I'm so fast. Mmm. I'm so fast. I turn off the lights. That's the one I'm talking about. That's the one I'm talking about. Yeah. So he's he knows that photons have to go, you know. Right. Uh well he's thinking that dark is penetrating the room, right? But light is exiting the room. Right. When you turn off the light. There's no the the light gets absorbed and it's gone. That your eyes are not the ultimate arbiter of whether there are photons in the room. Right. Because your eyes only see red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. Right biv. Yeah. Oh, sorry, indigo violet. Indigo violet. If you gotta get the biv go in there. Yeah. You know, Isaac Newton put in the the eye? Did he? Yeah. Cause he was he's fascinated, mystically fascinated by the number seven. Uh spectrum can't have six colors. Can't have six colors. You gotta like Yeah. Kind of animals do have six colors. What a stupid universe would that be a universe would that be? Throw some indigo in there. No, but if he if he got deeply religious, he could say, Well, the universe was created in six days. Right. There you go. Not seven days, six days. Yeah, that's a good thing. Six days. Seven days he rested. He rested. Which I'm just saying, what kind of God is this? He needs to take a break. God is so God me so damn hard. Oh me is hard. Oh me. Oh my me. Oh my me. It's so hard to make a universe. I need a rest. Oh Lord, I can't do no more. Did I say Lord? I'm so tired . Anyway. Okay . But now I forgot what we were talking about. Right. So anything that is at any temperature at all is radiating photons. There you go. That's what I was gonna say. Because if you're a predator, you see photons all the time. You mean the the the movie character. Yeah, that the monster with the dreadlocks. Yeah, because he had dreads. Yeah. He had dreadlocks. So Creditor uh could see in infrared. Right. Okay. Exactly. You know what's interesting? Go ahead. Just a little fact.. Right I think about movies all the time. Okay. So that was only cool because the infrared was the shadowy shape. Right. That means he has low-resolution infrared cameras. Right. Yeah. We got better cameras than that today. We do. High resolution, you see the full person there. Depending on your temperature, it will determine what kind of light you're predominantly going to emit. Right. So at our temperature we emit primarily infrared. So we'll show up in infrared. We reflect visible light. Right. But we emit infrared. Your walls are room temperature emit a little less infrared because they're not as warm as we are. Right. You keep dropping the temperature. Uh what's on the other side of infrared? Microwaves. Okay. And then radio waves. So the colder it is, the further down the spectrum it shifts. So that when you're only three degrees Kelvin, three degrees above absolute, you're giving off microwaves. That's it. And that's the cosmic microwave backwards. Right. That's it. Cosmic microwave. Cosmic background. So so yeah, and it could be dark for you, no problem . Not many people have been in complete total darkness in their life. True. Do you know how to get it? I d uh I'm going to say um blindfold and uh that can help uh and then bury yourself alive. Okay. Now I was thinking about other ways for that. Okay. If you if you go uh spelunking Oh you mean to a cave then to a cave. You go deep into a cave, make a few turns. So there's no light getting in at all. Turn off your flashlight. Right. You cannot see the end . Anything.. Yeah See now, and no disrespect to anybody, but that's some white people stuff. No black man will die. And dead in a cave with no light at all? First of all, I'm not going in there because even with a flashlight, be like, where'd Chuck go? I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it. Okay. These are jokes. Don't write. Don't write. All right, we better move i'm gonna stop let's move on all right so there you go uh there you go rachel yeah so but i like the mohamed so give me the muhamada lee commenting that's right i'm so i'm so fast. I turn off the light, I'm in the bed before the room get dark. That's good. That's really good . 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You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EBGLIS. Before starting EBGLIS, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Ask your doctor about EBGLIS and visit EBGLIS.lily.com or call 1-800-LillyRX or 1-800-545-5979. Look, if you've got prescriptions, the Walmart app is your place to manage them. Transfer your scripts, refill them, and have them delivered straight to you . Migraines Managed. Allergies Alleviated , dermatology, derma delivered. Ding dong! Is that your pizza? Nope. Walmart pharmacy delivery with a refill. Switch to Walmart and manage your prescriptions in the app. The Walmart you thought you knew is now new. Delivery not available for all prescriptions exclusions apply. Hertz presents it had to be new . It had to be Be new It had to be new Screens that are smart quick push to start new cars for you Come see what's new Hurt cars are new. Rent our newest tweet yet at hurts.com . Hallo, I'm thinking Brook Allen, I and support Star Talk on Patreon. This is Star Talk with Nailed Grass Tyson . Uh this is Max Wilburn who says, Hey Chuck, hey Neil, this is Maxwell from Lexington, Kentucky. And I know Neil thinks very highly of Newton as he has accomplished so much, but recently I learned about Newton's law of cool ing . Although it's not as fundamental and such a stepping stone for the world of physics, I just find it insane that as an aside as a side quest, he did that. What a badass. What are your thoughts? I did not know about his cool. I don't know about the law. I think his law of cooling was, don't you love my hair? Look how cool it is. But I think I think that was a wig he was wearing. Oh no. I was so distraught upon learning this. Really? Yes. So his hair notwithstanding, do you have anything to say about the law of cooling. So I didn't know he came up with that, but it is a well-known means of calculating the rate of temperature change in physics class. Okay. Yeah. So the way you do it is you have two two materials at different temperatures. All right. Okay. And you bring them in contact in some way, either physically, so that atoms are touching each other, or have air molecules bouncing back and forth, or they're radiatively connected. Connect them in some way. Okay. Okay? And then you measure the rate at which the temperature changes so that they reach equilibrium to each other. Cool. Okay? Right. So it's not just that the hot. Sorry. Sorry. One of them might have a continual source of energy going in. Mm-hmm. So then the cool thing comes up to its temperature. Do you see what I'm saying? But if they're two isolated objects at different temperatures, they will meet in the middle somewhere. Right. At a temperature lower than the high one and higher than the low one. Gotcha. All right. So you can calculate the rate at which the temperature changes. Oh, okay. Okay. And deduce as Isaac Newton apparently did. I own everything that man's ever written and I've got to go dig that up. That's a must be a chapter I missed. Yeah. Okay. So what it states is the bigger the temperature difference, the faster the rate of change of temperature will be. Okay. Which kinda makes sense. It just kinda makes sense. Absolutely. Yes. Right. And if you do some measurements of that, you can actually represent it with an equation. Okay. And then you make a prediction. Right. This is the price the the the temperature difference. They'll be the same temperature in ten minutes. Right. Or by the way, you this is happening every day. You get a glass of water, you put ice in it. Right. Eventually It's gonna be water. It's go good the the ice will melt. And then you have water that's cold, but it's still air temperature out here. That's right. Eventually that comes up. And that comes up. That was an assignment in physics class when I was in eighth grade. And uh what we had to do was plot the melting of the ice in a graph to see whether or not it was linear. And it was. Yeah. That would be a cooling cooling curve. Yeah, that's a cool curve. Because it's it's it's it's gaining heat from the outside. Exactly. Yeah. So there you go. Look at that. See people, these are the things you can think of when you are not busy thinking about sex. Like Isaac Newton. This is what happens. You become a genius. Because you're just like, well, I ain't having sex, so I might as well think about how do things melt. Yeah, he never married, had no children, had no known intimate relationships. Intimate relationships. And which so we're pretty sure when he came up with his law of gravitation and motion and calculus. Right. That he was a virgin. Yeah. That there you go, babe. That's it. Like a prize fighter. You know what I mean? You know what they say? You you know, you get stay hungry. All right, here we go. Ben Grun says, Hey, Star Talk. Mm-hmm. This is God here to bestow upon you the keys of limitless energy. Ooh . What do you do? Oh. Wow. Well first, I don't think it requires God. We just have to tap the energy from the sun. There you go. Bro, we got this Energy and the Chinese are now want to put up a solar array in orbit, which where there's no clouds, and if it's far enough away from Earth, it always sees the sun. 24-7, beam it down to Earth by microwaves. So then you have this column of microwaves. Microwaves. What could go wrong? For sure. So so but uh unlimited energy. Here's what I would do. You ready? Go ahead. I would do what they did in Iceland. What's that? Iceland is sitting on top of volcanoes, you know this. Yeah. Okay. It's not Iceland, yeah. Greenland is Iceland, not Greenland.. Right, exactly All right. There's it's the opposite here. So I want to do what they do in Iceland. Go ahead. They heat their water at these lava pits, okay , up in the mountains, and then send the water into town , but they do it under the streets so that snow ne ver accumulates You never you don't need snow plows. You don't need salt. Right. You don't need accident reports. Nope. It snows and then the streets are just they're just clear. I would run hot water under everything. Everything and then you you just snow snow be damned. It's uh radiant heating for us for your whole city. Yes. Wow, that's cool. Yes, and other things I might use unlimited energy for ? I would I'll tell you what I'd use it for. Uh pretty much shutting down every war that's ever been fought. Because most of these wars that we fight are over some form of energy. You know? Like and so it's just like, well, guess what? It's unlimited, guys. What are you fighting over? Well it could all it could also be over food, uh or uh water supplies. There are other other costs. There are other scarce scarcity reasons. Right, right. But I think we'd be smart enough for water. Today nobody is going hungry because there's not enough food in the world. Exactly. If you're going hungry, it's because somebody has some greedy Exactly. So I don't think that was predicted back in nineteen hundred. No, right. We saw the population growing exponentially and we saw the food supplies growing linearly. Yes. And there was a point where people thought that we would run out of food. And just completely starve. Right. And so run out of food to feed everyone. Right. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so that's cool, man. I loved I love the idea of heating for your city though. Yeah, just for the c j just so you don't have to you don't have to do it. Yeah, especially since we got two feet of snow. All right, I love that answer. All right. By the way, I think this is why uh Trump wants Greenland. Because he really thinks he wants Iceland. I think if you gave him Greenland, he'd be like, what is all this snow everywhere? I don't under I don't get it. There's so much ice here. Plus the references to penguins there. There are no penguins in the north. Yeah. They're they're all any any there are no free penguins north of the equator. Right, exactly. They're in captivity. They're in captivity. Wow. All right, this is Scott Openlander, or Oppenlander, not Open, Oppenlander. And he says, Hey Neil, hey Lord Nice, Scott Oppenlander here, tuning in from Phoenix, Arizona. Which I'm told is a quarter mile from the surface of the sun. Yeah, Arizona. Yeah, I I I was in Phoenix one time. Yeah. My f for my first time. Right. And the sun came out. Right. And I said, Oh, this is a beautiful day. The sun is out. No one is in the streets. No one is in the parks. And when they walk in the streets, they walk on the side of the street that's shadowed . And they only follow shadows around. It gets hot Where were you people all day? Like anyway, since our universe appears to be a pancake shape, like planetary systems and galaxies, do galaxies orbit around some larger central structure, like an even more super mega blast massive black hole? Or are galaxy motions just more random or ununiformed? Um there you go. Universe is not pancake shaped. So next question. Well, there you have it's waff.le shit No, but but to to the point, galaxy motions are mostly random. And what I s what I mean by random is they're not coordinated in some big way unless you're part of a galaxy cluster. Okay, then there's some some ballet of most movement. However, some structures in the universe are so large that the average speed of the galaxy moving among other galaxies in that cluster is insufficient for the galaxy to have made one complete path loop through that cluster. Okay . So that has significant consequences to what's going on there. It's called it's not virialized. A virialized cluster is a cluster that has a very mature shape where like a beehive, all the galaxies are moving around. You step back, it has a spherical kind of envelope that contains them. Gotcha. But if it's kinda ratty, like that, it's not yet virialized. It's comes from what's called the virial theorem, which talks about how energy can be transmitted, shared, from objects with high energy to objects with lower energy, so that everybody has approximately the same energy at the end of the of the process. Very cool. So virialization is the sharing of that energy. So it drops the energy of the high energy objects. Mm-hmm. Um it could be thermal energy, it could just be m uh orbital energy. And the lower energies come up . So by the whole branch of physics. We talk about viralization of galaxies. So uh the ratty looking galaxy clusters tend to not have been viralized. Gotcha. And so yeah. All right. So by the way, we moving around the center of our galaxy takes about two hundred and two hundred million years? Two hundred million years. That's much smaller than the age of the galaxy, which is 13 billion. Yeah. So galaxies are mature shape. And we're in a spiral galaxy. Correct. That is very cool, man . Good question. This is MX Self-Destruct. Okay. MX Self destruct is that a is that a thing here? MX Self-Destruct. I have no idea. But his name is Seamus. And he says Seamus? Yeah, he says, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice, Seamus here from Los Angeles . We know that gravity is the result of the way space-time curves. So wouldn't it be more likely that gravity is simply a side effect of this curvature rather than a force with a carrier particle like a strong, weak, or an electromagnetic force. If there is a carrier particle, why is it not just the Higgs boson? Since that imparts mass, thus progressing the curvature uh for the universe that we call gravity. Wow. Man, people are doing some work, man. People mean. Or doing some thinking. Man, so I I can answer 80% of that question. Oh, right. It's an assumption that gravitation as a force in the universe has a force carrying particle. Right. And the assumption is that if you represented classical gravity, even Einsteinian gravity, with quantum physics, it would have to have a particle. So we even named this hypothetical particle. Okay. The Graviton. The Graviton. Right. Exactly. So the hunt for the Graviton is on. Right. All right. And so the effect of the graviton and and mass and energy is to curve the fabric of space and time , forcing you to move in certain ways that would not otherwise be the case if that were not occupying that space. Right. John Archer Bowl Wheeler, uh, a great physicist of the twentieth century, I think I had a him as professor in graduate school. Wow. Okay. Uh in fact, uh I met my wife in relativity class that he was teaching. Cool. I I was sitting in the back row, she was in the front row. And then you guys made relatives. What's I can't quite wrap my head around is if gravity is just the curvature of space and time, maybe it's not a force. Right. Right. So maybe it sits outside of the the quantum paradigms that would require that there be a graviton. Boy, that's something that's kind of cool, man, in a way, because that means that there would be something in between the quantum an understanding that we don't yet have. An understanding we don't have. Right, right, right. It's a frontier. Yeah, that's cool. All right. Well, there you go, buddy. I mean, listen. You did some good. That's a great question. Eczema is unpredictable, but you can flare less with Epglis. A once-monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema . After an initial four-month or longer dosing phase, about four in ten people taking Epglis achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks, and most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. Hempglis, Libri Kizumap LBKZ, a 250m per 2 milliliter injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis, that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals, or who cannot use topical therapies. Epglyst can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to EBGLIS.g Alicler reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EBGLIS. Before starting EBGLIS, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Ask your doctor about EBGLIS and visit Ebglis.lily.com or call 1-800-LillyRX or 1-800-545-5979 . Look, if you've got prescriptions, the Walmart app is your place to manage them. Transfer your scripts, refill them, and have them delivered straight to you . Migraines managed. Allergies alleviated. Dermatology derma delivered . Ding dong! Because I hear pizza. Nope. Walmart pharmacy Delivery with a refill. Switch to Walmart and manage your prescriptions in the app. The Walmart you thought you knew is now new. Delivery not available for all prescriptions. Exclusions apply. Hertz presents it had to be ne w It had to be new It had to be new Screens that are smart to start new cars for you . Come and see what's new. For the Chevy's Lincolns and cheats. Hurts cars are new. Rent our newest Tweet yet at Hertst Com er. I think it's Meyer or Meyer. He's uh M-E-I-E-R . Meyer. John Meyer, yes. John Meyer. Salutations from John in Carlsbad, California. Carlsbad, California. Carlsbad, California. He says, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice, the great defenders of art, curiosity. I have a question that has plagued me. Yeah, the greatest the defenders of curiosity. He says, as budgets seem to be one of the significant components of innovation in science. Yes. It's not a component of Of whether or not something is found to be true. It's a component of whether or not the research is conducted at all. Exactly. The national or hypothetically the global science budget for building telescopes, what would you propose to maximize mankind's current technological possibilities? Uh, and what could they deliver in order to create the most powerful telescope possible? What would it look like? What would you point it at, and what might we see? Oh, I would put an entire array of telescopes on the far side of the moon. Right. There's no atmosphere, so there's no clouds or an ything. So the there's no value to be on a mountaintop. You don't even have val there's no value to being in an orbit. Right. The whole point of the orbit is you're outside the atmosphere. On the moon is no atmosphere, you're good. You're good to go. So I put them all on the far side of the moon. And it doesn't even have to look towards Earth where we have all of this contaminating radio wave noise. And everything I mean, Earth is just this messy thing in space. That's a great idea. They'll put it on the far side of the moon, though to watch all put all the telescopes there. Yeah, and then I would you put of all bandwidths. Right. You put all the telescopes of all the windows of the electromagnetic spectrum. Radio waves, everything. Everything. Everything. And now what would you like to see? I want I'm ready for the next generation of telescope that can see gravitational waves and neutrinos that is not electromagnetic. Not electromagnetic. That would be fantastic. I know. Look at that. Hey, great question, John Meyer. Way to go. All right, this is Tuomas Lima . Okay. Tuomas L imata. How do you how do you spell it? Okay. T U O M A S L Dou I M A T T A. La La Y Mata. Tuomas La Y Mata. There you go. I'm gonna say that. All right. Um and he says, Hey is Tuomas from Olu , Finland, longtime lurker and first time Patreoner. Long time . Yeah. So he's been watching forever , but he decided to work. You just look over the shoulder. Welcome aboard, my friend. He says, I have a small question uh that I've been pondering for a very long time. Is time permanent ? Thank you . Wow I don't know. Mm-hmm. I mentioned John Archibald Wheeler a moment ago. He's famous for uttering the following sentence: Matter tells space how to curve, space tells matter how to move. Yeah . And that motion is defined to make time I love that. That's so great. Motion is defined to make time . That's right. That's right. Yeah. So I so is time. So without that, who knows? Yeah. I mean I want to believe that your whole timeline is just there and you're occupying this point in the present. That's correct. That's correct. I want to think that. And I can sort of do it because I can lay out what's gonna happen that's what a schedule is. What's your schedule? Your your you know are gonna be here on Thursday and there on Friday and there on Saturday. And that's your future history . I don't know how you would live outside of a timeline. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Because where there is no time reckoning, then nothing moves. Exact ly. Because then you can measure time by that. Otherwise. Right. Otherwise, yeah. So that'd be kinda cool though. I mean, no, it wouldn't. To be outside of time. To be outside of time. I hate the idea. However, that's what many people think eternity in the afterlife is, is that it's in a dimension that exists outside of time. Uh-huh. And that's why it's eternity, because time does not exist. Right, right, right. I see. Yeah. Okay. That's the that's the reasoning given. That's the reason given. You know, so you you you know. Anyway, um that's very cool, man. What a what a great thing to think about. Um by the way, if that's the case, if you're outside of time , then that's a the realm of divinity, the realm of spiritual, these sorts of things. I I just don't know how a material object could be. Could could it actually be there. Right. No, yeah. That's the whole idea. History allows us to remember our future. Nice. Yeah. Anyway, um Gavin Bamber says this. Hello from North Vancouver. Uh please visit and please tell me, how much does the universe weigh? In fact, I'm gonna be in Vancouver giving a public talk May 4th. May the 4th be with you. Yes. May the Neil be with you, Vancouver. How much does the universe weigh? So you can just do you can do do that on the back of an envelope. On the back of an envelope. Back of an envelope. Sound like a big envelope. Must be a manila envelope at least. So yeah. You've got we know the mass of the sun. We know the mass of all the planets, a fraction that of the sun. Right. We can practically ignore them because it's just in the round off error. Exactly. Then we know how many stars there are in the galaxy. Okay. Then we know how many galaxies there are in the universe. Okay. Then we know because we have we know where the edge of the observable universe is. Right. Exactly. We know these numbers. Okay. All you have to do is multiply it up. Right. Okay . So uh the sun is is two times 10 to the thirty-three grams uh times the let's say 100 billion stars in the galaxy. So two times 10 to 33 times 10 to the 11th . Mm-hmm. That's 100 billion. So that's two times ten to the forty-third grams. Mm-hmm. Times a possibly a trillion galaxies. That's to the twelfth power. So that uh what it doesn't ten to the fifty something grams. Now grams are small units, you want to put in a tons or something. Well who cares? I mean, at that point, at that point, who cares? Who cares? The number is too big. The number is too big to even conceive of anyway. Yeah, yeah. So the real answer is how much does the universe weigh? Fuck ton . That is the biggest unit of measure there is. That's right. You can't get bigger than that. I told you I I created That's where I got it from. That's what you got it from. It's the vulgar the vulgar metric system. Yeah. That's where I got it from. That's why I said it. So 'cause it's like it's it's uh you know, isn't there like an ass load of something? There's a shitload. Sh a shitload. Take this ass load of things and take it to the market. We got more than that? That's a shitload. And then yeah. Yeah. So it's it's online somewhere. I think I w I had it at a Facebook post, but then it kind of hit it. Yeah. But it's out there. I know, I know, and I just remember from that we we And when I did that someone wrote in and said this is bel beneath you. Yeah. Listened. Then I said why I've hanging around Chuck. You bring down Dr. Tyson . Okay. Why does he why does he sell himself being around you, Chuck? Like so many. So are you pretty surprised? You know what's interesting. Wait, this guy wrote me, he went, I'm sorry, I'm gut we gotta I gotta say this because it's so funny. He goes, Hey man, no disrespect, but I hate you. Please shut up. Please just sit there and don't say anything. Right? And then he's just like, he's like, uh, let Dr. Tyson um give his talk, right? And I'm just like, bro, that's not the show. What you're talking about is his lectures. If you want that, go go watch a lecture. But anyway, I it just tickles me, you know, when people like, you know, there's a there's a contingency out there that feels like I sell you . I mean no disrespect. I mean no disrespect. We try to get out of your way I hate you. Oh it's so great. So that's how you measure the mass how you measure the mass. You just multiply a little bit. We got the numbers and you just there's six times as much gravity in the universe as is what is created by that mass that I just calculated. Right. So if that extra gravity comes from matter, then we legitimately are calling it dark matter. So you take whatever number you multiply up, multiply by six. That's phenomenal. Right. And we can do that without going out there with a scale. Right. Yeah. There are ways to do this. Yeah. Didn't we have an explainer with an explainer or or question? But we weighed a truck. Yes. Yeah, we did that. And basically it was about using the air tires in the truck, in the truck and all that kind of stuff. Anyway, yeah. Let's move on because we're we're time for just a couple more. All right. This is uh Mele um from Macedonia. She says, Hey Chuck, hey Neil, Mele Macedonia Balkan Europe world . Japanese astrophysicists have defin ed um have identified a strong gamma ray glow near the Milky Way Weekly interacting massive particles. Wimps. Wimps. Mm-hmm. Um Could you explain how these particles are different from regul ar matter? No. There you go. I'm sorry. That's so great. The hunt for dark matter. Right. It's a you know, you know who who was was doing that was uh Katie Freeze. Right. We have we've had her extra time. Yes. You go dig up Katie Freeze. Yeah. Watch watch that's actually a really fascinating episode that we have. Yeah, Freeze. R F-R-E-E-S-E. Yes. She's an expert on dark matter detection. She's a theorist. So she would think about what particle would interact with a dark matter particle for that to happen. Now, I'd be surprised if dark matter interacted with such ferocity that it would be giving us gamma rays. Right. That's a little bit mysterious to me. Right. Because it's so it's it's we would see that everywhere. Right, exactly. You'd think. Yeah, exactly. You can't take this one example in our own Milky Way and say, see? When you have a trillion other galaxies. Right, right, right. That should be a common phenomenon. Our sample size is so large, right? You can see even rare phenomena every night. Boom. That's awesome. Yes. I love that.. Mm-hmm All right. A quick reference to medicine. If I have if I have a new uh a pill, a new cure for something. Okay. And it's it's medicine that you take, it's not safe for th this is a old saying in the in the in the field, it's not safe for anyone until everyone has tested it. Exactly. Think about that. No, you can test on a thousand people, but if you have a condition that's one in a million. Right. It's not likely that you were in that data. You were not in that sample. Right. Yeah. So so ideally you would test on everyone. Right. They know exactly who for whom it works and who it doesn't. That's not realistic. It isn't realistic. And yeah. Whereas the universe is big enough so that extremely rare things happen all the time. All the time. Yeah. Right. Last question, Chuck. That's all we have time for. All right. Let's go with Larry Maguire who says hey doctor Tyson. Jerry Maguire? Show me the question. This is show me the question. This is Larry Maguire. He says, hey, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice, Larry from uh Caledon, British Columbia, just down the road from the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory. I use software that they wrote. Oh, really? Okay. Who wrote data reduction software. All right. And it was the primary software I used to m for my thesis, which is sitting right there, that big old fat book. So he says, I'm curious about your tools to keep looking up. What was your first telescope? Uh and do you still have a telescope and what type is it? Okay. Very good. Thank you. That's a great question to end on. So my first encounter with the night sky was this dome of the Hayden Planetarium. Oh, that's so cool. Because I grew up in the Bronx. Right. There's no night sky to New Yorkers. We'd have no relationship. Right. And so that was my first night sky. Okay. Then a friend of mine, yeah, my best friend growing up. Right. He was smarter than me in like many countable ways. Okay. But he taught me chess, he taught me poker, he taught me gambling, he taught me Wow, that doesn't sound like a good friend. I'm just saying that's that's how people feel about me hanging around you. He was your Chuck Knight. He was just like, all right, let me show you how to gamble. Yeah, all his grades were higher than mine and everything. So oh, in fact, I could I'll give his name. His name is Philip Brantford. Philip Brandford. When I was on Celebrity Jeopardy, I pointed him out in the audience. Oh. Yeah. He came to the show. He came to the show. I pointed him out and I say, he first got me to watch Jeopardy. He first got me to watch Jeopardy and uh first dude to uh give me drugs. What was your first telescope? Okay. So he had a pair of binoculars. Oh cool. And so I'd look through the binoculars and I never knew we we weren't wealthy enough to have like binoculars just laying around. That's a different you know that's a that's a whole new other when you got that that's an income level exactly that's the income just a level just a level with laying around the house exactly go get the binoculars when we go to the Okay. So he invited me to look up with them and I saw the moon. And the moon wasn't just bigger. Yeah. It was better.. Yeah It was oh my gosh. Right. And you don't want to look at a full moon because that sucks. Yeah. You want to look like a headphone. Yeah, yeah. Any photographer knows. Yeah. You don't directly illuminate something. Right. There are no shadows. There's no depth. You wait for the there to be shadows. Any other phase, ideally half moon, which is officially called the first quarter or last quarter, first or third quarter moons. So yep, longest shadows visible. I'm looking at it with a binoculars, it was like, whoa, this is like a whole other thing. Nice. Oh my God. I felt like I was there. Nice. Yeah. So that was like tipped me off that stuff was going on up there that the human eye does not notice. Right. So then That was your gateway. This this Yes. The binoculars were the gateway drug. That was your gateway drug. Curiosity. Cosmic curiosity. Cosmic curiosity. Then when I'm eleven , uh we moved to Lexington, Massachusetts. Okay. We spent just a year there. My father had an academic appointment. Okay. And for just one year, uh in the Kennedy School of Government.. All right Yeah, now it's just called the uh Now it's called the Trump Kennedy School of Government. But no one wants to perform there. You talk about the Kennedy Center? Okay. I'm a city kid and we're living in a private house. Like, what's up with that? Right. You want me to do what with this shovel? You want me to do what with this rake? Right, right, right. Oh, isn't this snow pretty? Right. And then they hand me a shovel. Of course. Right. It's like what? Yeah. Okay. And then it's autumn and the leaves are on the go. What? Yeah. The grass gets long. Okay. What? Mo what? Yeah. I'm a city kid. Yeah, you're like r you're pining for the city again. They were on sabbatical or something. Anyway, my interest in the universe was stoked. Because I was I already said I learned that Harvard had a center for astrophysics. Interesting. Whole department of it was like, whoa. Okay , really cool. And so my parents saw this and they took me there for one of their open house nights. They had telescopes. Wow. Rubber and they and was like I I I died and went to heaven. And I'm I'm eleven years old. Okay. For my birthday in October that year when I turned 12, they bought me my first telescope . It was a 2.4-inch refracting telescope. That telescope, I rapidly outgrew. But I mean, I saw the rings of Saturn, the the the the weather bands on on Jupiter, Jupiter's moons, nebulae, the Andromeda Galaxy, the uh sunspots had special filters for that. And then like twelve of my parents just let me out there observed the sun. They never even asked. I think they just trusted that I like. and knew what the hell I was doing Well, no kid walks out with a telescope to go get in trouble. Hey guys, I'll be right back. Yeah, gonna go rob a bank with this telescope. No . No. I'm just in retrospect they would never concern that I w did not know what I was doing. Right. Listen. Yeah. I mean look, you can't you you're not gonna question your Yeah, w with a telescope. With a telescope. Okay, yeah. So and then when it did snow, uh w you know, it's it's this is New England, right? So there's a lot of snow there. I'd want to take the telescope out back. And and and winter nights are long. Right. Anywhere, they're long. And the air is crisp. There's much less humidity. Right. And so the really good observ, some of the best observing is in very cold nights. So I dug a path into the middle of our backyard. We had a backyard and a little circle and that was my little observatory circle. And I put would take the telescope out there and I had several eyepieces and that's what I did. That's very cool. Okay. So within a year I outgrew the telescope. Okay. Okay. Tired of looking at this thing. No, so they uh we sold it to a a friend, uh acquaintance. And then I would then buy my own telescope the next year. Gotcha. Uh when I was thirteen. No, maybe a year and a half later. I would buy my own telescope with money I earned by walking dogs . And that was a six-inch Newtonian optics reflecting telescope. Well okay. It's six inch telescope. Nice. That telescope I took to Africa to view a total solar eclipse when I was 14. And I lied and told everyone I was fifteen. Oh yeah, because that made a difference. I went alone on this