In this episode, we talk about the first painting by Van Gogh, Starry Night, and how it changed the way we look at the world. We also talk about what it means to be an artist, and why it s so important to have a name like "The Artist". And of course, we have a quiz from Curtdizzle! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. This episode was produced and edited by Riley Bray. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. The album art for this episode was done by Mark Phillips and our ad music was made by Micah Vellian. We are working on transcribing this episode of the podcast and putting it on SoundCloud. If you like what you hear, please leave us a review and tell us what you thought of it in the comments section below! Thank you so much for any amount you can manage - we really appreciate it. Peace, Blessings, Cheers. Cheers, EJ & Rory. Timestamps: 3:00 - The Artist's Note: 1:30 - What do you think of the painting? 2: What does it take to be a good artist? 3:40 - What is a good painter? 4:15 - How do you feel about it? 5:00 6: What is the most important to you? 7: What would you like to paint? 8:20 - what do you need? 9:30 What is your favorite painting you would like to see? 11: What are you working on? 12:00 | What do they feel? 13:40 14: What's your favourite painting of the night sky? 15:30 | What does your favorite piece of art? 16:50 - What are your favorite thing about the moon? 17:40 | What is it a good place in the universe? 18:00 // 15: What kind of painting do you want me to paint in your head? 19: Is it your favorite place? 21:30 Can you see the moon in your mind? 22: What s your favourite thing? 27:00 +16:10 - Why do you like the moonlight in a tree?
00:00:51.000So even photographs that take you to a slightly other kind of dimension as you gaze upon them, it's more than what was actually going on at the time.
00:01:00.000And that's art taken to the craft of photography.
00:04:20.000Yet is there any other war ever fought in the history of the world where a household name is the name of the person who told other people the enemy was coming?
00:04:30.000We can mention his name, but we can't list the generals that all fought in that war.
00:04:36.000It's because a poem was written about him.
00:04:40.000And he had this mundane job, let me tell people the enemy is coming.
00:04:44.000And so the artist, in this case the poet, Elevated the mundane to something that forces you to reckon it with your understanding of this world.
00:04:57.000What's Joyce Kilmer's most famous poem?
00:06:44.000So I think if you take something ordinary and you subject it to the interpretation of an artist, it can be beatified and elevated on a level where it becomes a household recognition of its importance in this world.
00:07:20.000And, of course, the whole STEAM movement, science, technology, engineering, and math, the artists got in there and said, wait, the STEM movement, science, engineering, and math, they want to throw in the A to get art as part of that movement, science, technology, engineering, art, and math.
00:07:36.000Change it from STEM to STEAM. It's just STEAM, so you get full STEAM ahead.
00:08:32.000So if you're around running, you don't have them on your show, but if you run around saying, I don't like science, science is bad, science is evil, okay, well then you will die in poverty if you elect officials who believe that as well.
00:08:45.000Who the fuck thinks that science is bad in 2019?
00:10:01.000But if thinking what they want influences policy, which then affects everybody, then your science denial has consequences to the economic health of the nation.
00:10:13.000And by the way, it's not only economics, it's your, the economic health, it's your physical health, because medicine flows through advances in science, as well as our security.
00:10:22.000Well, there's people that deny some aspects of science while conveniently using other.
00:12:21.000Complaining that conservatives who have embraced no global warming platform are denying science and they need science on their side.
00:12:29.000And many of those same people are rubbing crystals together to be healed by the crystal energy or they're denying vaccines, thinking that they're somehow bad for you.
00:13:46.000Whatever they believe, if they think Earth is 6,000 years old and they got elected, it's because the people elected them believe Earth is 6,000 years old.
00:13:54.000Or because they're willing to let that one go because they believe in their policies?
00:14:36.000But given that, he is saying, oh my gosh.
00:14:39.000Here's something we, the religious community, and scientists can partner behind, and that is we want to save life on Earth.
00:14:45.000And so we have to be better shepherds of what is going on on this Earth.
00:14:49.000And one of them is we don't want to flood low-lying countries in the South Pacific, where the average sea level is 10 feet above sea level, or whatever it is.
00:14:58.000You're going to lose these countries if you keep melting our...
00:15:52.000If you look at the earliest Titanic movie that was in black and white, they see this huge iceberg on the horizon and they can't swear away from it because it, oh my gosh, it doesn't have, no, no.
00:16:04.000The iceberg that cuts the bottom of your boat is a little bit of ice sticking out above the water because 90% of it is underwater and that's where the damage occurs.
00:16:12.000And in the James Cameron Titanic, The iceberg that they hit above water looks like a little chunk of ice.
00:18:24.000And you, as the temperature drops, depending on how strong the pipe is, and the temperature gradient across it, as the outside temperature continues, it gets to now 25 degrees.
00:18:34.000The pipe is still holding on to the liquid water.
00:18:37.000And it's still 32 degrees inside there.
00:18:39.000And it holds on to, and it keeps happening, and it keeps happening.
00:18:42.000You get a point where the pipe can no longer contain the water.
00:21:04.000And fish would be systematically forced to swim in shallower and shallower waters until they were all freeze-dried on the top surface of the lake.
00:21:15.000And all fishes would be dead every winter in every lake.
00:22:05.000Some weird anomaly that happened where there was too little oxygen in the water and somehow the frozen fish got pushed out in a wall of ice.
00:22:14.000This is South Dakota a couple years ago.
00:22:17.000So there's too little oxygen because of...
00:24:49.000Pull out an ice cube, and just because they'll be near zero Fahrenheit if you have a good freezer, just pull out and leave it on the counter.
00:24:56.000Put it on a wooden cutting board, okay?
00:24:59.000And just let it sit there for like 10 minutes, and its temperature will come up.
00:25:03.000There'll be a point where it hasn't melted yet, But you can take it and squeeze the ice cube, and you can force it to melt by squeezing it.
00:25:12.000Because you're forcing it into a smaller volume that it currently contains.
00:25:16.000And the only way you can accomplish that is if the ice turns to water.
00:25:23.000So the act of squeezing ice can actually melt it.
00:25:26.000So if you had some sort of a pipe that could physically constrict, like something that had threads in it that could wind down to a smaller size, you could stick a cylinder of ice in it and you could slowly crank it down.
00:26:13.000What'll happen is the ice, the weight of the ice Will melt the ice in the contact points of the chain itself because it's feeling that pressure to squeeze it into a smaller volume.
00:26:27.000But by the time it melts, the ice has now passed through the grate and it will refreeze on the other side.
00:26:34.000So you can actually pass a block of ice through a chain link fence vertically just by pushing it.
00:35:31.000So, first of all, it happens with or without us, because we are in the shooting path of countless thousands of asteroids and comets.
00:35:39.000So what you would do is, you'd find one that's headed close to us anyway.
00:35:44.000In the seventh orbit down the line, or the hundredth orbit down the line, and then you'd slightly deflect it in such a way that it would then collide with Mars or even Earth if you wanted, if Earth needed some more fresh water.
00:35:58.000Yeah, I heard that there's a possibility.
00:35:59.000But the problem is, if something really big that would fill lakes, if that collided with Earth, that would just be bad for life on Earth.
00:36:07.000Because it's a spontaneous deposit of energy that can change the climate.
00:36:11.000So you want to do that on a planet that you're trying to terraform.
00:36:15.000Isn't that the speculation of how water got here in the first place?
00:37:34.000The principle behind them is bigger because what they're doing is simple.
00:37:38.000All you're trying to do is get as much light as possible.
00:37:40.000And the more light you get, the dimmer is the object you can detect and the farther away is the object you can see.
00:37:48.000And so for every generation of new large telescopes that have been built, It has increased and deepened our understanding of our place in the universe.
00:38:34.000To put a telescope, yet another telescope there becomes sort of invasion of sacred land.
00:38:41.000And so, yeah, there's a standoff last I looked.
00:38:46.000I mean, people protesting in the streets.
00:38:48.000And there's some native Hawaiians who embrace this because it means jobs, high-quality jobs, engineering jobs, because you've got to build it, you've got to maintain it.
00:39:38.000I mean, it's complicated, and there are a lot of nuanced issues going on there.
00:39:43.000There's a branch of thinking that the United States government and normal municipal leaders have no authority over it.
00:39:54.000There are some who claim that this is native Hawaiian property that does not belong to any municipal entity of the U.S. government, so therefore...
00:40:03.000Even state representatives have no say.
00:40:08.000But if I were to weigh in, this is how I would do so.
00:40:14.000I would say first, I think what should happen is, I don't know if they even have the infrastructure, I don't know how the system is set up, but if they could set it up this way, if the mountain is viewed as sacred by the natives,
00:40:33.000The natives should have entire say of what happens to the mountain.
00:40:39.000So now, what you want to make sure is that whatever decision gets made and voted upon by the natives, that it's fully informed.
00:40:49.000You don't want to vote being misinformed or under-informed in any election, let alone whether you're voting for a telescope on your sacred mountain.
00:42:04.000So there's all these telescopes that all have specific Access points to the universe.
00:42:11.000They're not all asking the same questions.
00:42:14.000And so it's the collection of all the data that gives us the complete understanding of what we think is a complete understanding of the universe.
00:42:20.000So what we do is try to understand our place in the universe.
00:42:26.000And all I'm going to say is that if you have power over what happens on that mountain and it's sacred to you because Whatever that is, it is something important to you and your sense of your understanding of your place in this world that would be spiritual significance.
00:42:51.000I can tell you that what we learn as astrophysicists from those mountaintops gives us a deeper understanding Of who and what we are in this universe.
00:43:12.000So I would say that whatever is your concept of God, be it the creator of the universe, the spirit energy that pervades all of space and time, whatever is your concept, the discoveries of astrophysicists bring you closer to it.
00:44:57.000Now it's not sacred in a religious sense, but it's sacred in a, in terms of a pathway to knowing and understanding who and what we are in this universe.
00:46:30.000It looked like we were on a spaceship, like we were flying through the universe.
00:46:34.000Because of the diffused lighting on the Big Island, because it's all set up so that it doesn't ruin what they're trying to accomplish at the Keck.
00:47:11.000And so my brethren, my fellow astrophysicists who have also observed from mountaintops, by the way, it's becoming a lost art.
00:47:20.000Well, it's not lost, but it's becoming something we don't do anymore.
00:47:23.000It's something called service observing, where you put in your observing program and it's handed to a technician at the telescope who points the telescope, gets the data, and sends it back to you.
00:47:34.000So the next generation doesn't have the experience that my generation did because it was a pilgrimage to the top of the mountain and you converted your life's path, you converted your life's schedule to become nocturnal.
00:49:08.000Yeah, and so when you get celebrity types to put the weight of their name behind it, it magnifies the cause of others, even if they're in the minority.
00:49:16.000And so, like I said, I think natives should...
00:49:22.000Does everyone know who all the natives are?
00:49:24.000Is there some listing so that they can all vote for this one thing?
00:49:27.000You wouldn't want people voting who are not native if you're voting on whether it's so sacred you don't want to put a telescope there.
00:49:32.000You'd want people who have an indigenous concern for what goes on there.
00:49:45.000Even indigenous in reference to Hawaii is relative.
00:49:48.000Every usage of the word indigenous is relative.
00:51:32.000Guaranteed they're made by volcanoes over enough time for continental to have shifted the plates over the hotspot of Earth's mantle.
00:51:42.000So do you think what they're concerned with is the eventual spoiling of this beautiful natural resource that slowly but surely people are putting up houses there and...
00:51:53.000Developments and all these different things.
00:51:55.000And then the scientists are saying, we need this sacred land because we're going to put a volcano.
00:52:00.000And they're like, look, there's already a telescope.
00:52:20.000He said, we've got to preserve these lands because they're beautiful.
00:52:23.000And by the way, he said that after he shot all those elephants and tigers and lions and tigers and bears, yeah, I mean, I hail from a museum, the American Museum of Natural History, where he's the patron saint of that museum.
00:52:36.000What happened was he realizes how important this land is and how beautiful it is, and he is the patron saint of the national park system.
00:52:45.000So, that's the secular version of sacred, right?
00:52:49.000We don't say it's sacred, but we've all decided as a community that we care about these lands, and you don't want to drill on it, you don't want to put housing...
00:52:57.000Was it Lyndon Johnson's wife, Lady Berg Johnson, who said, our freeways that we're so carefully building after the Second World War, the Eisenhower Freeway Project, okay, you know, the interstate system, is...
00:54:44.000And I try to think to myself, is there a counterpart to this?
00:54:49.000That would sort of wake up a Westerner to say, I get it.
00:54:55.000Now suppose some people from, some natives from Alaska or some tribes from Africa or some Aborigines came up from these remote places of the world, walked up to the Vatican and said,
00:55:11.000we want to climb the walls of this Vatican just for sport.
00:55:47.000It depends on how important that detail is to you.
00:55:50.000All I'm saying is, on the level of, we say this is sacred, you say that is sacred, and now you're going to have different rules for who's climbing what.
00:56:01.000I think it'll force you to take pause.
00:56:04.000Well, here's an argument in Supporting what you're saying, look at what's going on with the Himalayas.
00:56:12.000I mean, it's the human shit that they leave behind there.
00:59:03.000Yes, there are more molecules of water in this bottle than there are bottles of water, this volume of water, in all the world's oceans.
00:59:13.000So in other words, if you drank this and peed it out, Okay?
00:59:19.000You have enough molecules in your pee and in your sweat and in the moisture that you exhale.
00:59:25.000All that goes back into the environment, scattering into all sources of water of the world, and there's enough of those molecules to occupy every...
00:59:34.000Half liter of water that covers the surface of this earth.
00:59:38.000So that given enough time, you scoop a cup of water out of there.
01:00:12.000So that is the, by the way, the same is true with breaths of air.
01:00:16.000There are more molecules of air in every breath you take than there are breaths of air in all the atmosphere of the earth.
01:00:26.000So when you exhale, there's enough of those molecules to scatter, and the air currents will do this, to scatter into every breath of air that is inhaled.
01:00:38.000So when you take a breath of air, you have molecules of air that went through the lungs of Jesus.
01:00:46.000We're all connected, and there's no way around it.
01:00:49.000And the water that we have is the water that we have, right?
01:01:23.000But this is now non-salty water going into the ocean.
01:01:28.000So you're mixing fresh water with brackish water.
01:01:31.000And they occupy different places in the vertical profile of the ocean.
01:01:37.000Because salt water is heavier than fresh water.
01:01:39.000So fresh water occupies the top, but it's not as salty as the water below.
01:01:44.000And there are circulations in the ocean, not only up and down northern latitude, southern latitude like the Gulf Stream, there's also circulation top to bottom.
01:01:56.000And the combinations of all these circulations create the stability of the ocean.
01:03:31.000And you say, this is a lot of fresh water?
01:03:34.000Yeah, I guess you can bring it back down to Earth, but that's expensive.
01:03:37.000You're better off selling it to NASA for $9,000 a pound.
01:03:41.000Because it costs them $10,000 a pound to put water into orbit.
01:03:45.000So you're better off keeping it up there and somehow or another transferring it.
01:03:48.000Yeah, so if you harness water in space, you're better off trading in space with it than bringing it back down to a planetary surface at the moment.
01:04:32.000That's the source of our modern day salt.
01:04:34.000This is what I tweeted the other day, that all table salt is sea salt.
01:04:41.000It just came from long buried, prehistoric, evaporated seas.
01:04:48.000So salt mines, and I was told by some geologists, I had had a narrow usage of the word mine.
01:04:56.000When I think of a mine, I think of a hole in the ground.
01:04:58.000But mining operations include surface operations as well.
01:05:01.000So there's surface lakes that have evaporated, and you get salt from that, as well as the mines that you would dig down.
01:05:08.000So that whole, all of that is a mining operation.
01:05:11.000My tweet only referenced the buried ones, but it's all from evaporated water.
01:05:16.000It's all from evaporated, it's all sea salt, is the point.
01:05:19.000Now, nuclear power plants rely on steam, right?
01:05:23.000Isn't that part of what nuclear power plants do?
01:05:25.000Just to finish the point, so you evaporate the water, and the salt left, maybe you might want to use that and make some sea salt out of it, table salt, and that evaporated water condenses out over here, and that is distilled water.
01:05:38.000Now, you might want to mineralize it so it tastes good because distilled water doesn't taste good.
01:05:42.000Plus, it's not really healthy to drink it, as you probably know.
01:05:45.000You drink distilled water, it goes into equilibrium with your minerals, sucking minerals out of you so it has the same minerality that your body does.
01:05:54.000And then you pee it out and you'll systematically drain yourself of important minerals.
01:06:18.000Basically, all of our electricity today comes from essentially – mostly electricity is coming from turbines that convert steam to electricity.
01:06:51.000Oh, by the way, in a hydro plant, they don't have to make steam because they have the water pressure at the base of the dam moves through the turbines and turns the turbines and they make electricity.
01:07:02.000They don't have to heat anything because they have the water pressure to do that anyway.
01:07:19.000The cloud rains into the lake that is above the dam.
01:07:23.000So the energy that got the water up there in the first place is all solar.
01:07:29.000So you should think of hydroelectric as solar as well as wind energy because wind is the unequal heating of air on Earth's surface and that creates air currents.
01:07:41.000Isn't it conceivable that you could come up with a combination of desalination and power plant where you're using the heat to combine, you know, to make the turbines move and then you steam it off and that's where you get the water from?
01:08:23.000I have high hopes for tidal energy, because there are certain places on Earth where tides are very powerful, and you just put some paddles in there, and it works both ways when the water comes in and out.
01:08:35.000Is it battery technology that's the reason why L.A. isn't completely dependent upon solar?
01:08:39.000Because it seems like this is the spot to do it.
01:17:21.000It has a lot of – but basically it was sold as a security need because if you're at war, you need to move material and personnel and you might have to land an airplane.
01:17:56.000You know, have you seen this new, Porsche has a new electric vehicle that they're about to release, and it's got revolutionary groundbreaking technology that allows it to charge much faster.
01:18:07.000You could charge up to 80% in 20 minutes, because it's double the, well, pull up the information, was it wattage or amperage?
01:18:20.000So, yes, some batteries charge faster than others, but what really drives the charging speed of battery is the voltage over which you charge the battery.
01:18:32.000And it goes as the square of the voltage.
01:22:13.000The big price point of that was, when did the average cost to garage a car for a month in Manhattan equal the average cost of a two-bedroom home in the United States?
01:23:46.000Speaking of Tesla and electricity, what did you think about Tesla's initial idea that Westinghouse shot down to sort of broadcast electricity so that people could just pull it out of the air?
01:23:59.000Yeah, so the people in the Nikola Tesla fan club I don't know.
01:24:24.000But his contributions to electromagnetism are real and recognized in the world of physics.
01:24:30.000Like I said, there's a unit of electromagnetism named after him.
01:24:33.000So don't come crying to me and say he was not recognized by my people.
01:25:39.000And information became what characterized the modern era.
01:25:43.000And that's why in the 1950s and 60s, when everyone is imagining flying cars and motorized sidewalks, everything is running on energy because they're thinking energy is going to be free in the future.
01:25:56.000But what they didn't figure was that information would be free or easy to transmit and to generate and to store and to delete.
01:26:08.000And whereas the energy that it would take to move things and to drive things, that would be a problem.
01:27:14.000If you had enough power in radio waves to generate a light bulb, to power a light bulb, through the air, are you standing in the way of this?
01:27:44.000If you're moving enough energy through the air to power something that itself could kill you, the energy moving through the air could kill you.
01:27:54.000Unless you bring a little bit amount and then you store it and then use it later.
01:29:03.000These are microwaves of a frequency that can penetrate walls, send information to my cell phone, and I can communicate using information and not have that energy kill me.
01:29:16.000But it's not enough to power the actual device itself.
01:32:13.000There's another stealth, which was featured in one of the recent, not recent, four years ago, James Bond movies, where light that comes at it, the light that's behind it, Goes around it coherently and continues to come towards you so that you think you're seeing what's behind it and it's not there.
01:32:36.000You are seeing what's behind it, but the path of that light went around the vessel and continued on its way to you.
01:32:42.000So you think you're just seeing the grass and the tree, but there's a car sitting right there.
01:33:09.000Whereas if you needed functional stealth, everybody looking at it should be – every path – Every sight line to it should be able to see what's behind it on the other side of that sight line.
01:35:28.000And my old man sensibility is, if you track what I shop at a store, what I buy at a store...
01:35:37.000And then send me coupons based on what you think I'm going to buy next, based on what I've bought before, which is kind of the same thing you're describing.
01:35:48.000You have denied me the chance of stumbling upon something that I never thought of buying.
01:35:57.000And that takes away my freedoms and I don't want that.
01:35:59.000How have they denied you the chance of stumbling upon something different?
01:36:50.000The randomness of it enriches my life.
01:36:54.000And if you're going to advertise to me because you think you know who I am, maybe you do, but I'll ultimately end up spending less money because it's the diversity of how I think and what I buy and what I think of buying and how I buy it and how much money I spend that is the richness of the life I lead.
01:37:15.000You're trying to channel me into some product, something that fulfills a, what do you call it when they have the study, whether you're going to buy something or not?
01:38:08.000Don't you think they're just doing that because they think it would be effective to advertise in that way?
01:38:12.000So if you go Googling new Nikes, and then as you're looking at something and a Google ad pops up and it's for new Nikes, they say, hey, Neil.
01:38:22.000I know you were looking at these bad boys.
01:39:46.000I guess I'm arguing in principle rather than in detail.
01:39:49.000Okay, well let me take the counterpoint.
01:39:53.000On the positive side, what they're doing in terms of, particularly Google, in terms of your driving, right?
01:40:02.000And in terms of using of Google Maps and documenting the history of all these people driving, and especially with things like Waze, which they acquired, is they've developed a much more efficient product than Apple.
01:40:15.000Which, what Apple does with Apple Maps...
01:40:44.000I can ask it how long it'll take me to go somewhere, rather than it knowing what my daytime schedule looks like, and then coming in, like you said, how do you know, bitch?
01:41:12.000But do you think that this sort of intrusiveness, or at the very least, this connection that you have to these devices and that they have to your patterns and your information, it seems inevitable.
01:41:25.000That doesn't mean I have to welcome it with open arms, but I agree it's inevitable.
01:41:33.000If the KGB had access to people the way we, during the Cold War, the way modern United States has access to us, We would say, oh my gosh, you have taken away your country's freedoms.
01:41:47.000We're the leaders of the free world and you guys have imprisoned your entire population.
01:43:13.000That it appears this random, I mean, not random, but this very distinct pattern.
01:43:15.000Well, if the next thing you do depends on the previous two things you did, you get the Fibonacci series.
01:43:21.000I mean, that's often the case with, you know...
01:43:28.000Think of things in your life you do where the third thing you do depends on you having done the previous two things in exactly the same way.
01:43:34.000That's not everything in your life, but you can surely find some things that do that.
01:43:39.000I think it was Camden, New Jersey, where they had such a crisis.
01:43:45.000No, it's not, because you're talking about surveillance.
01:43:47.000Camden, New Jersey had such a crisis of funding that I think there was a brief period of time, at least I don't know if it's changed, where they literally didn't have a police force.
01:43:56.000And one of their solutions was to put surveillance cameras everywhere.
01:44:01.000And the idea was to sort of try to capture all the shit that was going down.
01:45:32.000What would that look like during the Cold War?
01:45:34.000In the United States, you have to show your papers just to walk into a building?
01:45:38.000Well, they're also changing the ID system, where if you don't want to travel with a passport, you're going to have to have a new federal ID. I've already been through that.
01:47:44.000The book is better than the movie and I hate to be one of the people who say that.
01:47:47.000But I was reminded how you can create an entire state Where everyone is kept in line because somebody is telling you, we are fighting this battle out on the front lines.
01:48:49.000It was inconceivable to someone outside of this generation that there would be a company that would provide a service, and through that service you would give up all notions of privacy.
01:49:37.000We're here alive today because of regulation.
01:49:39.000Because there are nefarious people who, in control of powerful forces operating on society, would gain at the expense of everyone else and would not be good for the progress of civilization.
01:50:22.000It's near zero now and way more planes are taking off and landing than at any time when we were kids.
01:50:30.000So it's a double progress point for not only the Transportation Safety Administration but engineering, technology, and everything we care about.
01:51:39.000But in Harry Potter, the cloak that they wear, the invisibility cloak, that would be this principle if it existed previously.
01:51:50.000There's a bunch of videos of that, but it seems like they're just using After Effects, like Adobe or something like that, to fuck with the video rather than create an actual product.
01:52:00.000Because there was a woman in an office that had a blanket, and she held up the blanket, and you could only see the whole office.
01:53:19.000It's not the GDT. It's the TMT. 30 meter telescope.
01:53:25.000Part of what it is to explore is not knowing what it is that You will find.
01:53:32.000And all these telescopes, the launched ones as well as the ground-based ones, we have enough foresight.
01:53:38.000We're mature enough as a field to know that even though it's designed to look for certain things that were part of the program that you set up for it, You want to have a serendipity mode for it.
01:53:49.000You want to be able to say, let's point it in some random direction and see what shows up.
01:53:55.000Without that, you could miss something in plain sight.
01:53:58.000If you're only looking for one thing that you think is there, extrapolate it from what you knew before.
01:54:03.000And the way I think of it is, you know, there's the old saying, as the area of our knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of our ignorance.
01:55:57.000In letters from an astrophysicist, which isn't out yet, but again, I don't know how the hell you got the book, but there's an entire chapter where I am conversing with people who are strongly religious.
01:56:11.000There's a conversation I have in there with an Orthodox Jewish person, a Muslim, multiple...
01:56:18.000We're fundamentalist Christians, and we're talking about the age of the earth and why, and why do we think one way or another?
01:56:23.000And so there's a lot of intimate stuff in there that I generally don't go public with, but I did it one-on-one with those who had written to me about these challenges they were facing in life, and they wanted to know what an astrophysicist had to say about it.
01:56:36.000What's the youngest version of how old a religious person thinks the earth is?
01:57:35.000You know, I was once, I don't know if you know this, I was once quoted after I think the Scientology documentary came out on HBO and everybody was talking about it.
01:58:30.000So my answer was, we live in a country that protects the free expression of faith-based systems, provided they don't subtract from the rights of others.
01:58:44.000So I will not sit here and judge whether thetans from space exhume souls from volcanoes At least a third of what I just said is accurate from Scientology.
01:59:03.000Or whether a man born of a woman is the son of God who died and rose from the dead.
01:59:12.000I'm not going to compare those and judge whether one of them is more authentic than another when they're both founded on belief systems.
01:59:21.000And so, in this country, belief systems are protected.
01:59:47.000But isn't it more interesting when they do do that and then inside the actual article itself they give your full quote so people can see the deception.
01:59:53.000The real confusing thing is when they take a chunk of your quote and they kick it out of context, which they love to do.
02:00:00.000You should go to jail for that, by the way.
02:01:47.000And go ahead, but I'm good with what I've done and I can land a spacecraft on Mars inside of a crater in a hole-in-one using my understanding of gravity, so I'm pretty good with it, okay?
02:02:01.000So, I'm not distracted by the more philosophical side of that.
02:02:35.000He said, one day I think we're going to find some way that they're connecting to each other, but I don't know what that is right now, but I know my equations work.
02:05:57.000You start losing it right going up until you're 30. So, you can say, well, the hair follicle begins to not producing the keratin or whatever.
02:08:49.000But I just think it's amazing that something that's such a massive part of life on this planet, that we stay glued to the ground because of gravity.
02:12:19.000I think we do, which is why your cell phone gets time from GPS satellites that is pre-corrected for Einstein's general theory of relativity because they're in a different gravitational field in orbit than you are on Earth's surface.
02:13:15.000And we think we understand the formation of stars well enough to say, well, a star is born with this much mass, and it'll lose a certain amount of mass over its life.
02:13:23.000All stars lose mass because there's so much pressure and so much energy coming out, it carries particles with it.
02:13:42.000So, very high mass stars are not especially stable objects.
02:13:48.000They remain stars for 100,000 at most a million years and they'll explode and become a supernova.
02:13:55.000If you're more massive than that, they will not explode because the gravity is so strong that it cannot explode against the strength of the gravity and it collapses into a black hole.
02:14:05.000So, we expect black holes to have It's slightly less mass, somewhat less mass than the most massive stars that we know how to make.
02:14:17.000So if you have a hundred times the mass of the Sun star, it'll lose half its mass over its life and you have a black hole that's 30 times the mass of the Sun or 50 times the mass of the Sun.
02:15:15.000And we think, my colleagues who've done this, think they've discovered a black hole that is sitting in this sort of netherworld where there's no evidence that it ate to become that massive.
02:15:30.000And we don't know how to explain it by the formation and death of stars and is nowhere near the supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy.
02:15:37.000So it's the frontier of research at this moment.
02:15:41.000So it's just a newly discovered type of black hole.
02:16:19.000And I don't mind a little bit of sensationalism there.
02:16:23.000You can say it is a black hole that comes from an...
02:16:26.000If it comes from an object, it is an object we know nothing about and have yet to discover.
02:16:31.000We're not going to say it's an impossible object.
02:16:33.000Every time we point the telescope to the universe, we find something that we never predicted or understood.
02:16:39.000And it adds to the knowledge base that we already have whenever they do discover things, and then it becomes what we know and understand, like the supermassive black holes at the center of every galaxy.
02:16:50.000That was a fairly recent discovery in terms of human history.
02:16:53.000It was hypothesized, because we saw the centers of the galaxy were behaving really weirdly.
02:16:58.000Things, stars were moving faster than they should have, given how much gravity was tugging on them.
02:17:03.000And we said, dude, something's got to be there.
02:17:06.000And it's got to be really small because we're tracking stars really close to the middle.
02:17:11.000Well, if it was made of ordinary matter, how big would it have to be?
02:17:24.000It was confirmed that as a common thing by the Hubble telescope and first photographed, By this recent result in the galaxy M87. Messier 87 is the name of the galaxy.
02:17:37.000And you can determine how big the black hole is based on the size of the galaxy.
02:17:42.000We can determine the mass of the black hole by how fast stars are moving at the distance they are from it.
02:17:47.000So in other words, so we're Earth orbiting the Sun and we have a certain speed.
02:18:39.000At any distance, there's only one speed you can maintain and have a stable orbit around it.
02:18:44.000So when we see stars orbiting something in the center of the galaxy, it is a straightforward Astro 102 equation to calculate how much mass the thing is orbiting.
02:18:55.000And you get the mass and you can't see it.