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Jos Lauderos They areoseta stonew miso Chuck, I love having Madto Dowd back on. Definitely. Catch us up on quQasars, on the Verirubin telescope on Big data and AI. Yeah. and I found out that Verirubin is actually not a sandwich Cing up on Star Tal Welcome Star talk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide Our talk begins right now This is Stark Talk. Neil DeGrph Tyson, you're a personal astrophysicist. Got with me, Chucky Nice. Hey, Chucky baby. What's happening? How you doing? doing well? You know what edition of Stark Talk this is? Which one would that be? The Matt O'Dowd edition. Oh That's always good. Matt O'Dow, welcome back to Star Talk. Such a pleasure to be here. It's my favorite subject. Oh, no. It would be I got you an associate professor up at CUy, Lehman College. Exactly. Yeah. And that's right across the street from my high school. The Bronx High School of Science, don't I know that? It was. Yeah. Oh yeah. Is that a feeder school too. I think the Bronx High School of Science go to straight to the Ivy League. They go straight to Ivy League Oh well. but some of them do That's Cononey's L. Some of them come and hang out. Yeah. it's a good We can hang out there. We've been know thereah. Okay. And you're a research associate here at the museum. Exactly. Yes. and you're a host and writer of one of just the coolest YouTube channels just TBS Saceime And I just I just so appreciate the work you put into what you what's on it. How you deliver it, and you're just so casually smart. casually But I would very high what I'm saying. The effort I see and I feel the effort all behind you just being casually smart in those videos. It's like those it's an eight hundred dollars hundred rock star haircuts. make look like you've just got out out. Yeah But you spent twelve hours at the salon. Exactly. That is the perfect metaphor for PBS spaceetime. So you have a research specialty in quasars, if memory serves. Is that correct? Quasars are a star no pun of my research one or two things involved, but yes, the quasar is the coolest thing in space. It I cannot argueable with that Yeah. And also lately been into AI and machine learning? AI and machine learning exxactly. yeah I found that Regular eye was insufficient for my needs so regularing to the artificial regular eye, That's where I am. You have subreular eye, sir. And about the Ver Rubin telescope, which had first light last year, I think, didn't it First light, you know, they kept pushing it. It was actually Just a few months ago, the official first light, so it was o. It was a little more recent. So' like it's in the calibration mode at the moment. Okay. engineering mode. The survey has not yet started. Okay. So the official data taking survey. Ecellent. Okay. Bob so welcome back. Now tell me U Qasars Remind us what that is an acronym of Wow, Okaykay, so and there's a whole history now I'm just going to say it's Qasi's stellar radio source Okay The etymology is disputed, but quasi stella means So like a star as in a little pinprick of light on the sky, faint far away, only see it with a tone Observationally, it's like a star. Exactly. Stars are not pinpricks of anything. Ieed If you'd traveled to one as you have, Neil, then you would know that it's a giant ball of fusion. the quasar is something very different to that, but to us, us mirror earthlings looking out We see these pinpricks of light with telescopes, you can't see them with the naked eye. Some of them also blare radio emissions. so they have these jets, all this cool stuff. And so when these things were first discovered, there were these pinpricks of light on the sky that were associated with these confusingly loud radio blobs And so Qas he stillell a radio source was a bit of a mouth What's the latest on quQasars? Because when I was coming up through graduate school, they were frontier. We were still figuring out. We didn't have the black hole model in place yet. It was contested, not badly contested, but it was do we really need a black hole? There's got to be some other way. And they're all far away. How come there's none nearby? catch up on quar. All right, let me catch up on Qasar. You know, there were the pin brricks, there was the radio, like the big, you know, the watershed moment was realizing that they were far away. When we first took their spectra, we could see that they were moving away from us very quickly. explained by the expanding universe, but they have to be very far away for that. And at those distances, even though they look fveaint to us, they're insanely bright. So once you calculate how much light there really is mayaybe a thousand times the light of an entire galaxy from a point right in the middle of a galaxy. And so You know, people came up with all sorts of swarms of neutron stars, you know, supernova, you know, storms But anyime we're on the frontier, we don't know what's going on. Right. That opens the floodgates for theorists of Yeah ye. so many papers. But to get a lot of energy out of a very condensed region of space, the black hole is a good way to do it because there's no way to Iid so much any. But if black holes suck, how are you getting in? That's true. That's true. Stuff gets in, but it doesn't all get in I mean, so let me give you a painted picture of the quQasar. So you've got a galaxy with what we call a supermassive black hole, a million to a billion times the mass of the sun huge gigantic ball of nothing and gravity It's a thing of gravity. And so when something happens to drive material too close to it, when the Milky Way has one, it's quiet, it's almost invisible. Sometimes they're not invisible. When something happens to drive a bunch of gas, stars, etcet, then you end up with this screaming vortex of material O we say driving. You mean a mechanism to move stars, gas and other material from wherever its orbit is down the galaxy. It has to drop in somehow. Yeah, like galaxy collisions or like you know close you know, there are ways to do it. it wouldn't otherwise have an excuse to be there You have to find a way of moving. somebody's got to st something the atom's orbit. Yeah, just like Earth doesn't fall into the sun. You know, like that. Gas doesn't fall into the center of the galaxy like that. It has to be perturbed. Okay, so you have a mechanism. It seems to me that would have been the challenge How do you get a black hole? to release these obious amounts of energy Yeah, I mean, it's it's the energy of falling And this gas falls a long, long, long way. Can you elaborate on that? The energy of fall We did we did a whole thing on this. It's not. You get in an elevatoright.. it takes you to a top floor. Right. And the energy door up, all the energy is potential. and then when you drop, that's energy release. that's the energy exactly what he's say Is that we st? Yes. I so where Hydroelectric dams work by the energy of falling. Okay. The water falls on I get it because the black hole has gravity. so there I got it now. N mind. So the falling, the gas ends up moving it Really? Insane speeds form as a whirpool because things form whirlpools and tries to get in, but the black hole itself is this incredible choke point. It's like trying to cram a galaxy worth of gas into this little point. And so it screams into this black hole heats up by friction at these speeds and that friction liberates So mass is energy, et cetera And Mass holds a ton of energy hences nuclear power being so powerful We liberate something like ten percent of the rest mass of this infalling gas is just pure energy in the form of light photons Well, and So they shine out Some of the guests gets you. It's just it just a brring closure to this elevator with you on the rooftop. R. That energy is recovered if you jump. And it becomes kinetic energy. Right. However, right. now it's just kinetic energy. How do you turn it into light That now take me from there. Wow. So you have fast moving gas Yeah, something has to now eat that kinetic energy and turn it into light. So the simplest answer is it's hot. it's searing. So it's thermal energy in the end. You've got this whirlool, the gas rubbing against itself and it reaches these insane temperatures so that right in the middle, you know Your heater is infrared hot. The sun is visible light hot at the center. this stuff is X ray hot. It's just the temperatures are insane. But it's also Violent. I mean it's vortex of crazy gasballing into black holes. so you've got these fits and bursts and you know, energy blasting outwards and And if we're old enough to remember the first X ray telescopes. Okay. We were excited because if they found x rays being emitted, from a place where, well, we don't know what else is happening there. It must be a black hole and the gas got so hot, it's now glowing X rays. Yeah. And we see those inside our galaxy also on a much smaller scale. The X ray binaries, which are black holes that are eating their companion st Sound very cannibalistic, veryy cannalistic So So that's so we have agreement on this model. correct We have I mean, the evidence is eaten, I think. You know, we've we've now built telescopes that are good enough that we can You know, for more nearby ones, we can see the gas that in that whirlpool and we can measure its velocities and we can say well in order for those velocities, there needs to be this gravitational field and literally nothing but a black hole can produce an gvation.. So is it safe to say A quQasar, I think this is correct, but I've been out of it for so long and I just want to get updated. A quQasar is like any other galaxy Except It's black hole in its center He's having dinner. Its black hole is in It's feeding phase. So the Milky Way black hole has been in that phase before. It's already been down that road. Maybe more than once Could it be that a galaxy at the edge of our observable universe sees us at the beginning of the universe because that's the light only just not reaching them. And they're seeing our supermassive black hole dining upon gases, and could we be a quasar to them With one exception, I can almost guarantee that The exception is nomenclacho. Qasar is for the brightest ones. The Milky Way would have been a different class of active galactic nucleus. A quasar like object for sure. Okay for sure. And why would it be so different because of the size? It the size man.'s the size. The Milky Way's black hole at only four million suns en masse He's piddling for a supermassive black hole, but quQasars have more like a billion So they're Okaykay, so they're the big bus.. Okay, so how about M eighty seven, the big elliptical galaxy in the Virgo cluster. That's a hunk of black hole right there in its center. Exactly. And how massive is that? Is it a billiona is around at that? Okay, so that's a galaxy that might have been a quasar. And it was. and it's still an active nucleus, but it doesn't have the size of what we call the acccretion disc, the whirlpool that it probably once had. But we can still see the jet. so there's like some magetic fields shooting. Wait a minute, isn't that a black hole that Telescope imaged? Exactly. What did we call it the Vent horizon Vent Horizon telescope. Yeah ye That's the black hole. So I'm talking about, oh, we can see the velocities of the gas. No, we have a picture of a black hole now. Yeah. That' like nice. Yes. those was banner headlines when it came out. Yeah. And a tremendous Caboration around the world. Collaboration of people, but also of telescopes. Yes, because there were radio telescopes literally across the planet that stitched together their data to be able to get the resolution needed to see that. Very cool. Wild stuff And this is do you know about the The data transfer process for the event Horizon Telescope? No es Okay it was too much data for the the over the net. So they had to put them in boxes on planes and send them and stitch it together. Okay, so this is the bandwidth the interternet supposed to fax machines over available. Yeah. Well exactly Yeah. I mean we're talk about big data. This is an example of Yeah, I mean in my day I'd be at the telescope and the the worldwide Web was in its infancy and It wasn't even in public yet. I mean, just had we had our own channels to get to move data. And there's a point where we had to compare the Dat and rate transfer from our telescope to our office versus FedEx Yeah, no. You load up the tape and fedix it and you looad the tape on the other side. I traveled back from Chileia a couple of times with a bag full of tapes of data. You got toa think about, oh, make sure they don't go through the x ray machine and stuff like that. othertherwise is gone. Nowadays it just goes to the archive. Wh where you send somebody you know the data over the wires and then It gets there and they're like, it's okay. Timothy showed up. He walked here and b us bought us the same information. Bandwth of Timothy.. Imagine this, an alien spacecraft lands, an alien comes out And you are the first human ever meets. What do you do Do you say? In my latest book, Take Me too Your Leader, I offer a guide to how to survive that first alien contact Not only scientifically teechnologically, culturally, and even socially Not only for yourself, but in that moment, you are a representative of the entire human species You want to leave a good impression? I am so happy to welcome Noo as a sponsor to Star Talks Established in nineteen fourteen, NoO provides industry leading battery power solutions including jump starters, tire inflators, battery chargers, lithium batteries, and a wide range of accessories. 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Because I've been shopping with Quince for years and I was delighted to see that they are now supporting Star Talk So if you want to look good like me, if you want to elevate your summer wardrobe, even though let's be quQuincez. com slash start Talk for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty five day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's QuNcE. com slash start talkalk for free shipping and three hundred and sixty five day returns. Qince. com slash start talkalk. and guess what? You're gonna look even better So tell me what role gravitational lenses have played in this. So again, I'm old enough to remember the first lenses shown where One had to demonstrate that this curvy little image of a galaxy was the exact spectrum of a curvy image of a galaxy on the other side. Yeah that the image had been split. ing around a source of gravity. And we were we were partying to this because just what Einstein had predicted. And so now you guys have taken this to the next level. But I think before you do that, you might want to say exactly what gravity even though you just gave if somebody knows what it is, but it's kind of confusing when I first read about gravitational lensing because I'm thinking of actual lenses and looking through like I this how you do it? I say, Okay, okay, Mr. PBS space timee Explain that. Okay. Yeah. me to explain stuff No. All right, so in Einstein's universe, gravity mass bends the paths it bends the fabric of space and that changes the path of light It takes the shortest possible path, which is now curved. And so when a beam lightight passes by a strong gravitational field, it ars around that field. This is how Einstein's theory was first Validated, Arthur Eddington goes to see an eclipse, finds that the positions of the stars behind the. Solarclipse. Solar eclipse Exactly. to see the night sky behind the sun and the stars have moved because of the suun's gravitational field. and We see this everywhere now when we look into the distant universe, we see You know, giant clusters of galaxies and the galaxies behind them have been stretched out like this fununhouse mirror of gravity bending their light alsoso multiply imag. So you can see the same galaxy at the bottom of the cluster as at the top of the cluster, which you can verify through the spectrum In the case of quQasars, it's particularly cool because The most often scenario is you have a very distant quasar, a more nearby galaxy, and the light from that quasar will take two or maybe four different paths around that galaxy To us, you know we only know where the light comes from. so it looks like there are two or four images of the same quasar. Was that called the Einstein Cross The most famous one is called the Einstein Cross. Yeah because it was a quadruplely land. Exactly. obbject. One of the early ones that was found. What you're saying is There's four pictures and they're the same becausecause it's the same the same source is making the four pictures One key difference is that They're often at different times because the path lengths are different. So you're seeing the same quasar with offsets of somewhere between hours and weeks And that's really know awful boyait wait hold on. You only know that if something happened on the quQasar Yeah that you can start the cl. Right, which if it's just a static image, you wouldn't exxactly. R Exactly. That's fantastic. Isn't it? I mean, that's just fricaking fantastic. Thatt mean you can predict. Yeah if you know, you can say, oh, this this burped over here. Right. Why wait for it Wait for it? N Wait for it. That's amazing. Wait for it It's almost like you have like a tiny little reset time machine that you're able to observe what's happening. You know, I see that again. They're call gravitational lenses because it's gravity kind of acting as this galaxy sizeed lens in addition to your telescope It's a crappy lens because it's made up of stars and you know it's not very well ground And so what you see is a little messy, right? You see magnification, yes, very helpful, but you also see new fluctuations in the quasar due to the fact that the galaxy itself is made of stars And the stars are moving compared to the galaxy. And so you see all these new effects of a kind of crappy lens. but If you can Model all of it then you can use the gravitational lens to actually map the inner regions of the quasar, which is still very hard because they're still very tiny and very far away. Wait a minute You're saying The lens gives you access Deper access to the quasar than you would otherwise have with just an image of a quasar. Very much. So it's a telescope booster. It's a telescope booster. ye. very good, Ch? Yeah. Yeah. C cool man. It's's not an enhancer, I would say,. I mean, you got to do a little bit of work, know It's like when they first put the Hubble mirror up and it was ground wrong and they had to do a lot of work to recover the images Likewise these crappy lenses When you see the word ground, you mean when you take the shape of the exact the mirror. The geometry need Wait, does that happened You don't remember that? had the wrong shape. Wh were you? Where was I' tell you where I was. had I was watching Japanese anime. That's where I was had the wrong shape. By the way, it had the wrong shape, but it was perfectly ground to the wrong shape. So rather than replace the mirror, we took the other optics and compensated for that other shape and then put it right back in surgery. Okay. Yeah, okay. The reason why that happened, not to get so off topic, is the mirror was tested in situ and it had a perfect shape. Okay. And the other lensers were tested in situ, but they were not tested together. Okay o until it was too late. Yeah,s still a dumbass mistake. right So. what's great. Does that mean now, the farther away the quas are, the more likely you'll have lensing opportunities for things to be in your line of sight? Why yes, that would make sense. But now it's farther away, but now it's dimmer. Yeah I mean there's also one there's a perfect configuration of distance to the lens, distance to the quasar. And so there's some factors. But it's true that very nearby ones are very unlikely to be lensed. And so because there's less stuff Yeah there's aense of stuff being to the exactly. And nearby would be how far away Nowntown New York, No Nearest placeazars, how far out are those? I mean, the nearest ones Uh You know So M fifty one is. Let let me take it off of that. When I see maps of the large scale structure of the universe, quQasars are the most distant objects in these maps Is that because they are the most distant Or is it because Th they arere the only things you can see that far away And But other galaxies, ordinary galaxies are populated among them and you just can't see them. Yes. Okay. No me, yes, yes. and one more thing. So first of all, there was a quasar epoch when quasars were the Bise quasars were the most common. and this is like the middle third of the age of the universe, basically we post that. There are still some big ones locally. The other thing is that the brightest quasars are quite rare And so you just by statistics, you have to look a long way to see the first one, right? Okay. So if you're in a sparce forest, the nearest tree is likely far away Uh, and Lastly are the things that we see to the greatest distances. So when you see these surveys and we can't see the galaxies, we see these pinpoints of light Oh, there's a galaxy there, but we see it because of the quasar And you can't see the galaxy because it's not as bright as the quasar. Exactly. Okay. But there are galaxies we wouldn't otherw have seen were it not for the fact that they were far away and lensed. That's also true Yes. we see galaxies far away. It a real assist from the universe itself. Yeah. Yeah, Lzing's very powerful. That's crazy. It's the best. They predicted by Einstein, another crumb that just fell off Einst. He wasn't even thinking about. He wasn't even thking about it. He wass like, you know what there might be something called graitation or Linzing. No That's exactly that Wh cares? That is exactly how that went down. Wow No, Matt, you know that's how how that went down We actually didn't think we would ever observe Gravitational lensing out in space. he thought it would be too weak and too far away. I think too rare because he was only thinking of it. in an exact alignment of two objects. Okay. And then you get an Einstein ring. Right. Be if you're slightly off, then everybody splits the image it displlits the image. But if it's exactly on it, wow, then the the light Is equally likely in any direction coming around and you get a ring. I think he figured an exact lineup was rare. But also in nineteen fifteen, when general relativity was published, we didn't even know that the universe existed outside the Milk Way Galaxy. Vularly maybe forg. Maybe Einstein did, butubbleble fifteen years later, nine years Hubble along and it was just like Yeah, there's a lot mores Yeah All right, so thanks for catching me up on quQasars. So these sound like complicated problems that need more than just I solve Well, I spent my research life staring at these things with My human eyes, but Until recently it's been possible. you know, when I started out, we had maybe a hundred of these lensed quasars You know, then then three hundred, but we're about to find Many thousands. This comes to you from surveys It's all going to change with Ruben, which will discover many thousands of these lensed quasars o countless other things. and so . So is normal eye, normal intelligence not good enough to handle this problem? It's barely good enough to do it even when you have one because the systems are so complicated. Yeah. You't' You can't model it easily. You've got these stars in the galaxy moving around. You don't know where the stars are You have to do that kind of Stistically And in the quasar starts moving around within the quasar. It is moving around within the lensing galaxy.. That changes the way the lensing works. Oh It's very messy. Oh. But it's powerful because those stars, they like sweep across the innerastructure of the quasar like this kind of radar room oom and they can they can map it. They can map it at the same resolution as the Event Horizon Telescope that the thousands. Wait, wait o I misunderstood. You're saying the galaxies that are lensing the quasar The movement of stars within those galaxies give you varying patterns Exactly in the quasar itself. Exactly yeah. So That is what you were saying. That's what I'm saying. Oh my gosh. Yeah, you have a quasar, you don't really know what' happen freak out. Oh my gosh, Right. But I imagine this distant quasar, it's very small, but you've got this lens and you're kind of sweeping these complicated magnification bands across it So you see different parts of the quasar change over different times. You can even see when it sweeps across the black hole in principle and see it darken for a little bit. All of this is going to be seen by Ruben Wow, but but. Okay. Like Pe Herman said, M Everyone has a big butt. Okay go. So so our big butt is big data. it's the fact that We need to now model thousands of these things and we could barely do one. And so we are indeed turning into AI machines not just I intelligence,. Artificial intelligence, Atificial intellig, whichich presumes that the artificiality of it is better at it than you are. Yeah, I mean, it's such a catch all term and it's not, you know, we're not putting them into ChatBT where Exactly, right sophisticated neural networks of different types to do various of these. I mean I don't want to sound glib, but it's kind of a matter of just pattern recognition at that point, right? You know what Gliff, that's exactly what it is. Okay. These things can be very good at patent recognition better than we are. They they can find they see Jesus in to If you train butrt, you can get them all the time.tve se a tort tra Yeah. The answer is absolutely. they're particularly good at that. But you know, when we come to some data and we look for the patterns, we look for the patterns that we think are going be there, right? Or the relationships between the parameters that we think are important with you know, different types of AI model you can You know, you can throw in the data and it will find the patterns even if they're patterns that weren't expected. But my question too is, we are excellent pattern recognizing creatures So good at it that we will see patterns even that aren't there. Right. So is AI equally as susceptible? Is it that good That Yes bad as we aread as we are. That's the sentence I wanted to sayay. I so good So there is that and there's also the fact that it will find what it's expecting to find just like we will we see what we expect to see. Do you remember, I mean, it's only a few years ago, but' now like the ancient era of AI when you train these neural networks to recognize whether something's a cat or a dog.es. And you show it a cat, one hundred percent of time it knows it's a cat, a dog, it knows it's a dog. Right. If you show it a chipmunk It will definitely say it's either a cat a dog. Right? Yeah. So it'll see what it all depends on message on how you trainin in chipmunk. Yeah. Okay, we trained it on chipmunks. Okay, we trained on so these are some of the challenges that it's as good as what you put in. Yeah, but if you are training it for what you expect, it's not going to find something that nobody expects. that serendipity on the frontier of science that we all cherish so highly. But what you could do if I mean, I'm just spitballing here, but could just Allow it to find whatever pattern at onces. Like whatever pattern is there, just find me a pattern. You have to know what pattern means But it already does, it can extrapolate from the patterns that you already training on. So then what you can do is, but then it's still extrapolating from a given pattern. So you find a pattern for which there is no template. Oh, wow. That's the question. There Okay. So can AI find a pattern on which it has not been trained? Yes. And that can be an authentic pattern, not something in its imagination likeike when we find patterns that aren't there.. there is a power to You know, in our case, it's putting the physics in and training it on what you think the physics is That's actually quite a powerful approach L this sort of simulation It's foundational. Yeah. Yeah. and it tells you what is happening in the context of what you put in. But what if you didn't know what was in there? So But there are so know we talk about supervised learning and unsupervised learning. and there are techniques for unsupervised learning where you can't tell it anything. you just said What do you see? What do you see? And then you know it'll tell you something and then it's your job to interpret what that means and why those patterns emerge. And has the answer ever come back a bunny rabbit It's usually chipmunks actually. Well done. So is that precisely how you werere using your AI? We do a bunch of things and you know Ruben and the other surveys do a bunch of things. In our case, it's We use variational auto encoders to take these, in our case, it's the fluctuation over time of these light curves comppact them down into a much more compact space in what we call the latent space. and then use that latent space to try to reproduce the data In that latent space, we know the patterns are hidden and so we have further neural networks to extract things like what is the mass of the black hole? How fast is it spinning? all of this good stuff? Because in principle the Network has learned what the fundamental parameters that went into generating those fluctuations were. R you need to know the physics of everything going on If you miss some physics ye, you don't know what you're doing. Yeah, but you can you can expand the input physics well beyond what you think is in reality. And we try to do that. We try to say, all right, well, what is the span of all possible physics of you know, of these quasars and lenses, etcetera. Let's go much bigger than that to make sure we encompass the true space. And then you can also test how brittle it is like you can break it and see if it still gives you reasonable answers. So you know, theres there's ways around the chipmunk problem. You're checking the sensitivity of the system. sensitity when you break it and bristittleleness and see how you Exactly right. Yeah Okay That's pretty wild, man I mean, by the way, I want to say These are all done by my graduate students in postdocs. I good for you. I hearing Bahamas while they're doing exactly. Well, Bahamas did come into it actually. No let's know the story. I don't need to hear your Bahamas for. That's f. If anything, I found just the smartest people to do this and and I mean, these days, I you know I learned programming on Fort Tan, right? As did I I confess Itortun for for me.ortun It's quite difficult for me to really grock the ins and outs of all of this. So I just try you an Olfart doesn't Yeah. Ites doesn't make a difference. You you already did your time. my time.. did your time. That You did your time. I get to and take credit for their work. That's how it goes. And one day they'll get to do that to the next're going to race it. That's how it goes. You know what I mean? It's beautiful really. So we've seen photos of veryer Rubin telescope in the Andes mountains of Chile, where we have a lot of telescopes. There's the dome And then there's this whole other section sticking out the side. The shoe. yeah. about it always look like a shoe. It looks like a shoe sticking out because it has a rounded front. right. I presume that's where all the data The big data is happening. Yeah, I think they stack the data in there. I I mean, there's a lot of and then they fly it up to R whatever. There's a lot of on site processing because you can't just ship it all as. So is it because this telescope is uniquely in need data processing support. that it was conceived and designed this way. Well, there's also, you know there are people there doing important engineering things that they haven't been you know replaced by AI like we have So engineering support, but also the computing facilities that are there. And yeah, I I've never been, I want to go and take a tour of the shoe. You have the shoe. Yeah. ye. So what it seems to me, I don't want to speak for you, but tell me if I'm correct that Most people's fear of AI is that it'll take their jobs. Whereas when you're a scientist on the frontier such as yourself AI allows you to step where you could not have stepped at all It so so it's it's not the same thing as replacing job. It is empowering you to think more creatively about your thoughts on the scientific frontier. Is that a fair characterization? It's it's such early days in this revolution that it's hard to say where it's going to land Right now it's Insanely powerful Okay in many, many respects, it takes away work that You know, we didn't want to be doing anywways. Yes. There's a lot work. It's incredibly powerful It's also, you know, the new reasoning models are able to do things that previously graduate students were doing. And the hope I don this get there. The hope. The hope is Oh, well now graduate students going to be freed up to do better things. Yeah. more That is the hope. Yeah. That's the hope. But the reality might be that the AI is like Look at you dumb ass. Chuck. I can't believe you thought that this was something viable. God. Who hired this dude? That's un scary. Yeah I mean on the other hand, the stuff that graduate students used to have to do, which is stare at this boring data forever. R You know, an AGI artificial graduate student intelligence.. Very good. now That wass nice. was do that. they can be do afternoon, essentially. And so the hope is that the professors won't say, Oh, I don't need graduate students anymore. They'll say, Oh, graduate students. Now. I don't get this stuff, please do this now now do this Now let me ask you this Is there any benefit to the graduate student Do the grunt work Do that Is there something that can come out of that for our brain? I'm gonna say no, H's why Really? Okay in my day, in your day. Okay, pre AI. Okay. But computer power was growing exponentially. There used to be a course in graduate school On spherical trigonometry, which nobody needs now. Because the computer does. Exactly. Okay. Sherical trigonometry. You know, trigonometry, normally on a flat piece of paper On the dome, you have angles between stars and moving the telescopes and what's the shortest slew path between two That was that's all spherical trigonometry Gone. We just push a button and it's doneone. Telescope calculates it. And let me ask you this. You took I do not But you took it, right? No, no, no. It was it was like two years before I got there, we stopped stopped doing it And do you understand spherical triony? No's a real That's a real question. I mean, the question is are there int We shouldn't say that No I can we miss now. I think I think there could be intuition Yeahah. That's really what I'm talking about. through going through the wax on wax off of graduate school. Yeah right. Oh, what were you learning? I don't know, but now I know kung fu We don't know what we lose, I guess. Interesting. so I Okay, let me give a counterstory to that. Okay. When I was in graduate school, a member of our department faculty member was World's expert on galaxy classification. Okay. Okay. World's expert. Okay. There's never been an expert such as him either before or since. Okay, Okay. And so in one of his classes, we are classifying galaxies. Okay. It's like, this is stupid. Why am I doing this? All right. Okay. And nowadays, Computers classify galaxies. You don't need to do this. I look at a galaxy that you just took a picture of I have a whole other relationship with it that you don't I'm feeling it. I'm because I've looked at hundredundreds and hundreds of these, maybe thousands of these. And so it's in me in a different way. It's almost a muscle memory of what it is and why it looks that way and what I can much to what I was saying earlier, who knows What inspiration that is inspired by just that reservoir of seemingly useless knowledge. like you were you said, the wax on wax off.. I mean's precisely the And you know, knowing what's under the hood, knowing how the sausage is made You know, these days, future generations of graduate students won't know how to code becausecause they talk to the computer, they vbe code, will code. And they they code. They never make a if statement. What do we lose? Maybe nothing But I feel like there's something about knowing what's under the hood. Yeah, when kind of helps. Well that help, you know, helps you know what the true capabilities You know how you're smart vulnerabities are. No, you don't. Yeah. Like you don't know what the vulnerabilities are if if it's just a black box, I guess. if it's a perfect black box, there are no vulnerabilities. Okay, so we just need to build that. Yeah You may have heard the best voice in show business, Morgan Freeman, talking about a serious and underndiagnosed heart condition that's often missed a TTR Cardiac amyloidosis or ATTRCM It's a condition that can greatly disrupt your life with symptoms like severe fatigue, shortness of breath, and carpal tunnel If left untreated, a TTRCM may become serious leading to a shorter lifespan. Truby helps adults with a TTRCM live longer and have fewer hospitalizations due to heart issues, so you can focus more on living for what you love ell your doctor if you're pregnant plan to become pregnant or are breastfeeding and about the medications you take The most common side effects were mild and included diarrhea and abdominal pain. 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The good news is PD is treatable. If you notice a curve with a bump, a trusted urology specialist can help diagnose it and walk you through your options, including non surgical treatment To learn more about Piron's disease, visit talkboutpd. com This was a magic. Sorry, At Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, we don't do fairy tales. We do real like real adventures to Mars, or real journeys into the future to see how imagination can really take us to strange new worlds and real trips into the past, where we meet heroes and legends way ahead of their time Real rockets, real astronauts, real adventure, All at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. Discover something real Hey, this is Kevin the Samaler. And I support StarTalk on Patreon You're listening to StTalk with Neil Degrras Tyson Let me just bring closure to this data challenge that we now have. We are awash in data. The data rate for the Ruben telescope will exceed that of any previous telescope in our portfolio. Orders of magnitude. B Oders of magnitude. Wow. I'm reminded of what was the first time they turned on the telescope and they discovered like a thousand new asteroids crossing the sky. Right. to do that because it's taking It's repeated imagery, which is the only way you'll know if something moves. because otherwise it's a stillr. st shot. It's a stock shot. And is that a star or is it? Is it something that goes bump in the night? So that forced us, our field, our community to innovate in ways we didn't have to before Right? So It was all good. head in the right direction there Yeah. you mean Do you mean as astronomers or as a conversation all of the about. That's. You were some crazulous you like I offendnder No, No, I'm wasting my life. It's funny because it's true now. I only say that because We had needs for imaging the universe that exceeded what Kodak, now many decades ago routinely produced. And so we they put a special team on our needs and created special emulsions that were more sensitive, that were larger, that and so When CCDs came out, we were the first to fully exploit them. And before anyone even knew what they were, and poor Kodak did not take advantage of.. It's just a flesash in a pan. like I D this for these N Lords films. Yeahs these love him was on. So only when it became a commodity did were we no longer the leading edge of that, but it seems now with this level of data Is this more data than anyone has had to think about before? Or are advertisers mining data off of social media accounts? And is that a greater repository of data for them to sell as a product I mean, it's greater for them. In terms of bits, I don't know if it's greater. So it's enormous.' You know, for the first time taking a full image of the entire southern sky every three nights for ten years. Wow. It's I can give you some numbers about how much data that is. like the CCD is enormous to take takes like four hundred HDTVs to show one image four hundred four hundred. And that's one image and you know, the southern sky is like three, four thousand of those images. Just to be clear, the Hubble Telescope field of view is a fraction the size of the full moon Wow. And this is like forty times the size for one of those images Of the full moon. Yeah. Yeah. it's amazing. So that's how you can because so if you said Hubble, Give me an image of the whole sky. Okay, callall me in thirty years when I finally because I'm going have to stitch this all together. I'm going mosaic this. R. And so call me in three days It' d the whole sky. Wow, that's thevere that. Okay. But like you said, it's a movie of the sky. so we see things changing, things going bump in the night. We see the quasars flickering at the edge of the universe All of it. And it's all just going to be like mainlined for ten years. What do we do with it? Well We're very hot you guys are making like a A flip book of the universe. It's a flip book of the universe or really. Holy c. It's a big flip book. It heart of the page several across theook across the page edges.. Yeah, that's funny. gu I got a papercut. Yeahah, I lost my hand. So just to anchor this in proper context the risk of repeating myself, in my day, you know you go to the telescope, you take a picture and you take the picture home and analyze it. Right. If something moved, you would have no idea. No idea. And it was not that big a problem because stars live ten billion years, five billion years. and you're there getting a thirty minute exposure of it. You're not expecting fireworks R moment you're looking at it, but maybe there are someomewhere in the universe. Well, there definitely are. we know there are. We know a lot of what the fireworks are, but there's a lot that we don't know also The universe is pretty violent. It's quite dynamic. Yeah. Yeah.s tough. let's it'd be a shame for us to sit this close to each other and not compare notes So you've got a YouTube channel. you bring delivered content that's fun and interesting and exciting to hear. as a mix of notot only What is frontier science But but also's fun science. So it's clear that you're doing some cherry picking of what you could be talking about. Plus, you look like the sexy professor that one might daydream about. think' the other things. So share with me some of your tools and tactics that you found most potent in your efforts to bring the universe down to Earth. You know, so PBS space det. feels a particular niche, I think, which is that we we do go hard, like we you know, we've covered the holographic universe quantum mechanics. You' been down. All the way to the edge of the holographic universe and you know, as well as you know, more traditional space stuff. So we found very early that there's a huge appetite for kind of seeing under the hood, like how science happenens how scientists actually talk And I think I think for the longest time, people have felt a little bit babied by A lot of popular science media. And they know when they're when they're being talked down to. They know when they're being talked down to. Yeah. And so I think one thing that I do well is I I have a good jargon detector. I know when something's jargon. And you know jaggon doesn't have to be like a specialized word. It can even be a specialized use of a word. And so the point is that so much of science, even the stuff that's Hard, right is accessible to human language and it can be talked about in human language. And I think that scientists are not the best people that doing that because they talk professionally. they talk in professally. We're not training that. It's our shop talk for science.. So shop talk.. but all professions have shop talk. Exactlyight, right. So what's different about science Science is hyper, hyper specialized just because it's old. We know so much about the world that to make any progress. We have to dig deep and narrow to make any progress. so The language around each subfield tends to be very specialized. And every time you get a subfield of a subfield of a subfield abolutely. It's excluding of others because of the language and because it's You know, it attracts a certain type of people Ns who are really in they enjoy going granular onformation. Yeah. So I think over time science has become I kind of think of it as genreified. so you know something is sciencey if it's hyper focused and detail oriented when really it's about curiosity about the world. So think the beginning of science and what it really is is just a