The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #919 - Neil deGrasse Tyson

00:00:01.000 Four, three, two, and boom. 0.84

00:00:07.000 That's a nice hat.

00:00:08.000 I've told you already, but live, I gotta tell you, that is a nice...

00:00:11.000 It's very, uh, kind of Indiana Jones, but...

00:00:14.000 It's not quite that, and not quite cowboy, yeah.

00:00:17.000 But it's kind of, yeah, you're like in the middle of that.

00:00:19.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:00:20.000 You're riding the wave.

00:00:20.000 You're dancing on the edge.

00:00:22.000 Well, I have a really fat head, and so there's this website called, like, bigheads.com.

00:00:27.000 There's a website for it? 0.89

00:00:28.000 Yes, a total website for fat-headed people. 0.85

00:00:30.000 I gotta get my friend Burt Kreischer a hat then. 0.98

00:00:32.000 I put his hat on.

00:00:33.000 I couldn't believe how big his head was.

00:00:35.000 There was like an inch gap all around my head.

00:00:37.000 I thought I had a big head.

00:00:39.000 Yeah, so if you know your head size, do you know your head size?

00:00:42.000 No, I do not.

00:00:43.000 So it turns out if you know your head size, that number comes from somewhere.

00:00:48.000 Can I tell you what it is?

00:00:49.000 Sure.

00:00:49.000 So if you measure the circumference of your head, just get a tape measure, like you're measuring your waistline, but do it around your head.

00:00:55.000 And take that number, divide it by pi, then that's your hat size.

00:01:00.000 Whoa.

00:01:00.000 Yeah.

00:01:01.000 Seems complicated.

00:01:03.000 Divide by two?

00:01:05.000 Why can't it be just like your waist, 32?

00:01:07.000 You know, your waist is what your waist is. 0.56

00:01:09.000 Yeah, I know.

00:01:09.000 It just is what it is, right?

00:01:10.000 Why can't it just be the circumference, right?

00:01:13.000 So what it turns out to be...

00:01:14.000 So what that means is, if you're dividing by pi, you're getting the diameter of the circle That has the same dimension as the circumference of your head.

00:01:25.000 So if you have an oblong head, then what it's doing is finding out what the circle is, the diameter of the circle that has that same circumference as your head.

00:01:37.000 That's what that's doing, for whether that helps the hat maker.

00:01:41.000 So, immediately I started thinking about Dan Aykroyd on Saturday Night Live as a conehead.

00:01:45.000 Right?

00:01:45.000 Remember?

00:01:46.000 Well, then you need a tall hat for that, too.

00:01:48.000 Yeah, there's an issue there.

00:01:50.000 So, dude, you're still doing stand-up?

00:01:53.000 That's great.

00:01:53.000 Constantly.

00:01:54.000 I'm loving it.

00:01:54.000 And I caught you a few months ago.

00:01:56.000 You were emceeing some MMA, was it?

00:01:59.000 Well, I'm always doing that, yeah.

00:02:00.000 Oh, you're always doing that.

00:02:01.000 I only catch some of it then. 0.94

00:02:02.000 I think it's great you stayed in shape, because I'm a fat slob right now.

00:02:06.000 Well, you were ripped back in the day, man.

00:02:08.000 I saw a picture of you when you were wrestling. 0.98

00:02:10.000 And I was like, damn, Neil, you look good. 0.91

00:02:12.000 I had some street cred back then. 0.95

00:02:15.000 Do you exercise at all now?

00:02:18.000 It's not that I don't have the energy to.

00:02:20.000 It's trying to find the time.

00:02:21.000 There's you back in the day.

00:02:22.000 Look at you.

00:02:23.000 Shred it.

00:02:24.000 How much did you weigh back then?

00:02:25.000 Let me guess.

00:02:26.000 Oh, go on.

00:02:27.000 176. No, no, no.

00:02:28.000 I'm 6'2", so I'm 190 pounds in that.

00:02:31.000 Oh, you look great.

00:02:32.000 I have big thighs and stuff.

00:02:34.000 Other wrestlers would have skinnier thighs and things. 0.97

00:02:36.000 So I was also taller than anyone I wrestled.

00:02:39.000 So since we're the same height, it meant they had bigger muscles, actually.

00:02:43.000 Because we're the same weight, right?

00:02:45.000 Did I say that right?

00:02:46.000 I'm taller, but we're the same weight.

00:02:48.000 So that means they have bigger muscles.

00:02:49.000 Because none of us have fat, right?

00:02:51.000 So I had to do things that my lankiness would enable me to do and to accomplish that they couldn't.

00:02:58.000 So I have long reach, you know, this sort of thing.

00:03:00.000 I scoop an ankle, that kind of thing.

00:03:02.000 There's great advantages to having long limbs in martial arts, particularly in wrestling, grappling, because of leverage.

00:03:07.000 Yeah, also if you're quick and with long limbs, and I was both, but if they got me in their grip, it was hard for me to get out.

00:03:13.000 So what kind of exercise do you do these days?

00:03:16.000 No, that's not, no.

00:03:19.000 No, I'm trying.

00:03:20.000 Yeah, I'm trying.

00:03:23.000 When I'm in, I'm good.

00:03:24.000 But I've just got so much going on.

00:03:27.000 I have to make the time.

00:03:29.000 That's a problem, right?

00:03:31.000 When you become a little bit too successful for your own good?

00:03:34.000 I saw some food.

00:03:35.000 There's a lot of food documentaries trying to get you to eat differently.

00:03:38.000 So I thought I'd watch them all.

00:03:39.000 I binged on them one weekend while I was doing other stuff.

00:03:44.000 Got hungry?

00:03:45.000 No, one of the guys, he was trying to lose 100 pounds or something.

00:03:49.000 So every 15 pounds he lost, he put a bowling ball up on the counter and said, that is what I'm not carrying around with me.

00:03:56.000 Whoa.

00:03:56.000 Because a bowling ball is about 15 pounds.

00:03:58.000 And I said, wow, he's measuring a weight in bowling balls.

00:04:01.000 That's something.

00:04:02.000 Because we say, I'm three pounds less and two pounds less.

00:04:05.000 That doesn't hit you emotionally the way a bowling ball does after you've lost 15 pounds.

00:04:10.000 Because no one wants to be carrying that around.

00:04:12.000 So psychologically, I thought that was quite potent.

00:04:14.000 That is potent.

00:04:15.000 I think we do need some.

00:04:16.000 I usually use like plates.

00:04:18.000 I think of weight plates or dumbbells.

00:04:20.000 Okay.

00:04:20.000 Yeah, that works too.

00:04:22.000 I started doing intermittent fasting pretty recently where I only allow myself to eat 10 hours in a day.

00:04:28.000 Oh, wow.

00:04:29.000 That's it.

00:04:29.000 10 hours out of the 24-hour day.

00:04:31.000 Yes.

00:04:31.000 So 14. I had Terry Crews on my radio show on StarTalk.

00:04:35.000 My boy is ripped.

00:04:37.000 He looks great.

00:04:39.000 And he's like 47 or something.

00:04:42.000 So he doesn't eat until 12 noon.

00:04:45.000 Oh, same sort of deal.

00:04:47.000 And then he doesn't eat until after 10 o'clock.

00:04:48.000 That's right.

00:04:48.000 Yeah, 10 hours.

00:04:49.000 And then he doesn't eat after 10. It's a 10-hour thing.

00:04:51.000 And so he's watching everyone else have brunch and breakfast.

00:04:55.000 And so he's got to overcome that.

00:04:57.000 So it's a little bit of fasting.

00:04:59.000 Yeah.

00:05:00.000 Each day.

00:05:01.000 Intermittent fasting.

00:05:02.000 Just to keep the discipline.

00:05:03.000 At the end of the day, it's really just discipline.

00:05:06.000 Well, it's not just that.

00:05:06.000 It also forces your body to burn fat instead of carbohydrates.

00:05:10.000 And when it forces your body to burn fat, that state of ketosis is actually easier to maintain because you don't get hungry.

00:05:16.000 Yeah, then there's no roller coaster.

00:05:17.000 Yeah, the crash, the carbohydrate crash that you get.

00:05:20.000 Right, right.

00:05:21.000 Is that outside of the realm of possibility for you?

00:05:23.000 No, I can totally...

00:05:26.000 I'm a ketosis guy.

00:05:28.000 Anything involved in science?

00:05:30.000 Come on.

00:05:30.000 It's in there, baby.

00:05:31.000 It's in there.

00:05:32.000 I once got raked over the coals, not by everyone, but I tweeted once.

00:05:36.000 I said, if there was a diet book written by a physicist, it would contain one sentence.

00:05:44.000 Consume calories at a lesser rate than Consume calories at a lesser rate than you burn them.

00:05:53.000 That is sort of true.

00:05:55.000 That's the one sentence diet book.

00:05:56.000 No, it's more complicated than that.

00:05:58.000 And everybody just try to get all, no, it's this, it's that, it's that.

00:06:01.000 And one of the great things of physics, when you do physics, is all the details are just cut off.

00:06:07.000 It's window dressing, and you get down to the window itself.

00:06:10.000 And that's what the analysis works on.

00:06:12.000 I have rarely seen you attacked, but I did see you attacked when you were celebrating Sir Isaac Newton's birthday.

00:06:19.000 Oh, ha!

00:06:21.000 I was like, people were so mad.

00:06:24.000 People lost their minds.

00:06:26.000 They lost their mind when you were, by the way, incorrect in the date of Jesus' birthday.

00:06:31.000 That is not the date of Jesus' birthday.

00:06:33.000 Yeah, Jesus was not born on the 25th.

00:06:35.000 No, I mean, it's just...

00:06:36.000 Right, plus I didn't even mention it.

00:06:37.000 So what I said was, by the way, that to this day is my highest retweeted tweet.

00:06:43.000 I tweeted it.

00:06:44.000 I retweeted it.

00:06:45.000 So you remember, it's actually a couple years ago now.

00:06:48.000 Yeah.

00:06:48.000 So it was, so on December 25th comes...

00:06:51.000 There it is.

00:06:52.000 A child was born who by age 30 would transform the world.

00:06:54.000 Happy birthday, Sir Isaac Newton.

00:06:55.000 So on this day long ago, a child was born who by age 30 would transform the world.

00:07:02.000 Happy birthday, Isaac Newton.

00:07:04.000 Born December 25th, 1642. 79,000 retweets.

00:07:08.000 86,000 likes.

00:07:10.000 People just lost their mind.

00:07:12.000 They were so mad.

00:07:13.000 They were angry, and I thought, well, interesting, because I'm just speaking the truth here.

00:07:17.000 Yes.

00:07:17.000 He transformed civilization.

00:07:20.000 Actually, he did it by the time he was 26. So, yes, it's provocative, because you're expecting that Jesus is going to end that.

00:07:28.000 But I thought I'd share some actual truth with people.

00:07:31.000 And so, some people celebrated it, deeply religious people.

00:07:35.000 One had a headline saying, Neil deGrasse Tyson's trolling Christians on Christmas Day.

00:07:40.000 And I said, Newton at least has the benefit of actually having been born that day.

00:07:45.000 Then later on, it's actually more subtle than that with Newton, because he was on the Julian calendar, which is 10 days shifted from the Gregorian calendar.

00:07:55.000 So if you ask what would his birthday be today, it would be January 4th, not December 25th.

00:08:02.000 But when he was born, his mother was celebrating Christmas, so that's really what matters for that tweet.

00:08:07.000 Well, it's such a bizarre thing anyway, because if you're a real Christian, you would understand that the birthday was shifted in order to comply with pagan religions.

00:08:17.000 Exactly.

00:08:18.000 It landed.

00:08:19.000 I don't know how many people know that, actually.

00:08:21.000 I mean, you're a well-read guy.

00:08:22.000 But so if you give me a minute to just explain that.

00:08:25.000 So December 21st, we know, is the first day of winter, shortest day of the year.

00:08:30.000 And what makes it short?

00:08:31.000 Short is daylight of the year.

00:08:33.000 And what makes it short?

00:08:34.000 The arc of the sun across the sky is very low.

00:08:37.000 The sun doesn't get very high.

00:08:39.000 And it doesn't stay up for very long.

00:08:41.000 And it's been coming a lower and lower arc every day en route to December 21st.

00:08:46.000 The ancient peoples were worried about this because everyone worshiped the sun because it made your crops come and it gave you warmth.

00:08:53.000 And you say, well, if this keeps going lower and lower in the sky, we're going to lose the sun entirely.

00:09:00.000 December 21st, the sun slows down and it stops this drop in its movement across the sky from day to day.

00:09:08.000 So that stopping of the sun is solstice.

00:09:12.000 That's Latin, the stationary sun, like armistice, stationary arms, right, from the end of the First World War, November 11th that was.

00:09:21.000 Armistice, solstice.

00:09:22.000 So the movement of the sun lower in the sky stops.

00:09:26.000 But that doesn't mean it's going to come back.

00:09:28.000 It takes a few days for us to slow down, stop, and then reverse.

00:09:32.000 He says, oh, it is coming back.

00:09:34.000 Let's celebrate that.

00:09:36.000 And that's a few days after December 21st.

00:09:38.000 It's about December 25th, a pagan holiday celebrating the return of the sun.

00:09:44.000 Christianity is trying to take foothold.

00:09:46.000 Where pagans once roamed.

00:09:48.000 And you put celebrations that match theirs just so that the shift is not as hard for you.

00:09:54.000 And the unknown birthday of Jesus was then assigned this pagan day of celebration to make that transition easier for the pagans to become Christians.

00:10:03.000 And sure enough, it remained Christmas Day ever since then.

00:10:07.000 The birth of Jesus.

00:10:08.000 The speculated birthday of Jesus is like the spring, right?

00:10:11.000 The spring.

00:10:11.000 There's some passages, of course, in the New Testament that reference what the sheep were doing.

00:10:18.000 Plus, there's a census being taken by the Romans, and Mary goes to the manger. 0.90

00:10:24.000 The animals are not in the manger.

00:10:26.000 So there's secondary evidence for that it's probably happened in the spring.

00:10:30.000 Now, with the advent of commercial space travel, which seems inevitable...

00:10:37.000 Seems inevitable, right?

00:10:39.000 Love your segues.

00:10:40.000 Do you think that it's possible that maybe you could even offer up a Flat Earth Believer tour where you take them, like at the very least, take them up to Alaska where it's light for 23 hours a day?

00:10:54.000 Do you have Flat Earthers calling into you? 0.99

00:10:56.000 Tweeting me constantly.

00:10:58.000 Tweeting me constantly.

00:10:59.000 Yeah, calling me a sellout.

00:11:00.000 I'm a sellout.

00:11:01.000 I'm a round-earth sellout.

00:11:03.000 Like as if there's some round-earth money.

00:11:05.000 Wow.

00:11:06.000 You're on the payroll.

00:11:07.000 I'm getting some checks.

00:11:08.000 I'm getting some round-earth checks to keep the nonsense going.

00:11:12.000 You're getting some round-earth payola for your show.

00:11:13.000 I'm sure you've seen the basketball player who graduated from Duke.

00:11:17.000 From Duke.

00:11:18.000 That was hitting the news the last couple of days.

00:11:20.000 I saw that.

00:11:20.000 And he believes that dinosaurs are fake and that the world is flat.

00:11:24.000 Okay, so here's the thing Joe, okay?

00:11:26.000 I've thought about this.

00:11:27.000 I bet you have!

00:11:28.000 As an educator, I've thought about this, okay?

00:11:32.000 So here's what matters.

00:11:35.000 We live in a free country.

00:11:37.000 People should be able to think whatever they want, whenever they want, provided it doesn't subtract away from someone else's rights.

00:11:45.000 Okay, so thinking the earth is flat doesn't harm anyone unless You want to run for office.

00:11:54.000 Or you want some position of power over other people.

00:11:58.000 That's when it's dangerous.

00:12:00.000 I'm thinking of elevator banks where they have numbers.

00:12:03.000 I have a photo essay of what elevators look like inside.

00:12:09.000 I know it's just...

00:12:10.000 You mean the gears?

00:12:11.000 No, no, [...

00:12:12.000 Not even that geeky.

00:12:14.000 Just what are the numbers on the panel?

00:12:16.000 Oh, without the 13, you mean? 0.64

00:12:18.000 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:12:19.000 So about 80% of buildings taller than 12 stories don't have a 13th floor.

00:12:23.000 Okay?

00:12:24.000 And so this Trixideka-phobia is...

00:12:30.000 Again, in a free country, if you want to be afraid of the number 13, go right ahead.

00:12:36.000 It just seems to me you should not be tasked with designing elevators if that's your fear.

00:12:42.000 Find something else to do.

00:12:45.000 Holding aside the fact that I'm a little scared that in this 21st century United States of America, we have people walking among us afraid of the number 13. What does that mean?

00:12:57.000 I don't know in the long run.

00:12:59.000 But if you keep to yourself, don't harm others, think whatever you want.

00:13:04.000 So the rubber hits the road is you now have power over others.

00:13:07.000 And that's where the failure of the educational system actually manifests.

00:13:13.000 That's how societies and cultures collapse.

00:13:15.000 Right, but it's not that they don't know that there's a 13th floor and that you're just calling it the 14th floor.

00:13:19.000 I want to take my Sharpie, cross out the 14th floor and say, that's the 13th floor.

00:13:22.000 You're not fooling anybody.

00:13:24.000 Now, when you see it on an elevator and you see no 13th.

00:13:28.000 Plus, they try to fake you out.

00:13:30.000 How do they do that?

00:13:31.000 So they go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. And then you have to go to the next row to begin for the 14. So you don't see 12 right next to 14. And some modern buildings will put their...

00:13:45.000 The heavy machinery, like the HVAC, on the 13th floor, so that there's no residency there, right? 1.00

00:13:54.000 But they could still say it's the 13th floor, and then there's the 14th floor.

00:13:56.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:13:57.000 Does anybody ever have a dummy 13th button where you press it and it never lights up?

00:14:00.000 Like, I don't get it.

00:14:01.000 I can't get in there.

00:14:01.000 Oh, that's interesting.

00:14:02.000 That's what I would do.

00:14:03.000 Oh, you just put it there to satisfy me, but still nobody lives there.

00:14:07.000 Exactly.

00:14:08.000 That's too clever.

00:14:08.000 Oh, this is one of the 20% of people that makes sense.

00:14:11.000 What a great building.

00:14:12.000 Meanwhile, there is no 13th floor.

00:14:14.000 It's just a dummy button that never lights up.

00:14:16.000 Remember that Twilight Zone episode with the mannequins?

00:14:18.000 They went up to the 11th floor, but there is no 11th floor, and the mannequins come to life at night.

00:14:23.000 Ooh, I forgot about that one.

00:14:25.000 Yeah, they leave the store floors, and they all go up to 11, and they have a cocktail party, and they vote which one of them is going to go out and become human for a day.

00:14:32.000 The Twilight Zone was so good.

00:14:34.000 I think it was the best television there ever was.

00:14:35.000 Like, still, to this day, ever.

00:14:37.000 You've used up so many great premises.

00:14:39.000 Great premises, great actors, great cinematography, and it was in black and white, so shadows were completely dark.

00:14:45.000 Yeah.

00:14:46.000 Because shadows don't have much meaning when you film in color, because everything is just there.

00:14:50.000 But in black and white, the shadows create moods.

00:14:53.000 Yeah.

00:14:54.000 And, yeah, so...

00:14:55.000 I watched To Serve Man the other night.

00:14:58.000 I hadn't seen it in a while.

00:15:00.000 To Serve Man.

00:15:01.000 I had it on the DVR. I'm like, let's just sit down and watch this one.

00:15:04.000 And then they had Big Guy who played Lurch on The Addams Family.

00:15:08.000 Yeah, that was a great one.

00:15:10.000 Because it was just like it had all the elements of people going, well, you know, they seem nice.

00:15:15.000 They seem nice.

00:15:16.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:15:17.000 And they solved all of our war and our famine.

00:15:19.000 It's a cookbook!

00:15:20.000 Yeah.

00:15:21.000 Yeah.

00:15:22.000 God, it was great.

00:15:23.000 Another good one was The Invaders.

00:15:25.000 Do you remember this one?

00:15:26.000 No.

00:15:27.000 This was a one-woman performance.

00:15:30.000 And I forgot who it was.

00:15:32.000 Was it not Agnes Moorhead?

00:15:34.000 One of these women of that era.

00:15:36.000 It'll come to me in a minute.

00:15:37.000 And she's living alone in a farmhouse.

00:15:39.000 No electricity.

00:15:40.000 She's got a farm. 1.00

00:15:41.000 And she's alone.

00:15:42.000 And some alien spacecraft lands on her roof.

00:15:48.000 And it's got these devices.

00:15:50.000 It's got these saws and lasers cutting through things.

00:15:53.000 And she's freaking out.

00:15:54.000 She's got the pan and the pots and the rolling pin. 0.59

00:15:57.000 And then she gets the shotgun.

00:16:00.000 And she's attacking this thing. 0.94

00:16:02.000 And you don't know what it is.

00:16:03.000 And it's got lights and a thing.

00:16:05.000 And it's this tiny little thing.

00:16:06.000 It's like three inches across.

00:16:08.000 And it turns out that's the thing that's attacking her.

00:16:11.000 And then she finally comes.

00:16:13.000 That's it.

00:16:14.000 See the little robot?

00:16:15.000 Okay?

00:16:16.000 And...

00:16:18.000 And then...

00:16:19.000 I gotta give it away.

00:16:22.000 The show is 40 years old.

00:16:23.000 I can give the punchline.

00:16:24.000 So she actually successfully damages the thing. 0.90

00:16:28.000 And then you zoom in on it.

00:16:29.000 And then you hear a radio transmission from the aliens that are inside.

00:16:34.000 And it says, yeah, hello, hello, Houston, there's a giant who's trying to attack us.

00:16:43.000 We need help!

00:16:44.000 Send backups!

00:16:46.000 Oh, it was great.

00:16:48.000 We were the invaders.

00:16:50.000 That was us.

00:16:52.000 Landing on her home on some other planet or some parallel earth from some other dimension.

00:16:57.000 It's just this small are we know no no no Okay, I get it.

00:17:02.000 So she's what's another planet?

00:17:03.000 She's the she's the giant where they're saying there's a giant attacking us, but the whole show you have her point of view these aliens are trying to hurt her when they're just it was our space probe just trying to explore its environment But isn't it possible that it's like another dimension?

00:17:21.000 It's us in another dimension and they are landing on Earth?

00:17:26.000 Except they were speaking English.

00:17:30.000 But couldn't they have just parallel evolution?

00:17:33.000 Well, isn't that the definition of infinity?

00:17:36.000 That somewhere, if there is really an infinity, there is not only a you and an I, but there's a you and an I and everybody else we've ever met and all the exact events and the exact same order have gone down an infinite number of times, including this conversation.

00:17:49.000 Okay, except.

00:17:50.000 Except.

00:17:51.000 There is...

00:17:53.000 I don't know how many people know this, but often it's mind-blowing when you learn that some infinities are bigger than others.

00:18:03.000 Joe Rogan just leaned two feet away from the microphone.

00:18:08.000 Not all infinities are the same size.

00:18:11.000 But if it's infinity, then it's infinity.

00:18:13.000 It's infinity.

00:18:14.000 Well, okay.

00:18:15.000 Don't you remember when you were a kid?

00:18:17.000 What's the biggest number you know?

00:18:17.000 A million.

00:18:18.000 Well, there's a million and one.

00:18:19.000 Okay, how about a billion?

00:18:21.000 Well, there's a billion and one.

00:18:21.000 The annoying kid always added one to it.

00:18:23.000 Okay, how about infinity?

00:18:24.000 Well, infinity and one.

00:18:26.000 Okay, well, it turns out infinity and one and infinity are the same number.

00:18:29.000 Okay?

00:18:30.000 So, for example...

00:18:33.000 The number of counting numbers, so 1, 2, 3, up to infinity, okay?

00:18:40.000 Right.

00:18:40.000 The numbers you would use to count things, that's infinite.

00:18:44.000 The number of irrational numbers, so the numbers that you cannot represent as a fraction, okay?

00:18:54.000 There are more of those than there are counting numbers.

00:19:01.000 By far.

00:19:02.000 So these are orders of infinity.

00:19:03.000 Then there are more transcendental numbers than there are irrational numbers.

00:19:13.000 What's a transcendental number?

00:19:14.000 So that's a number that you'll never find as a solution to an algebraic equation.

00:19:19.000 So pi is a transcendental number, e is a transcendental number.

00:19:22.000 These are magic numbers that show up in mathematics.

00:19:25.000 And there's turns out there's like an even bigger infinity of those Than there is of these other two classes of numbers.

00:19:33.000 And they use the Hebrew letter Aleph in ranking.

00:19:41.000 So Aleph 1, Aleph 2, Aleph 3, Aleph 4. I think there are five levels of infinity.

00:19:45.000 So my point is, just because there's infinite universes to me doesn't mean there's infinite conversations that have happened.

00:19:52.000 And I'd want to really explore the depths of infinities before I say and agree with you that this conversation has happened a million, you know, an infinite number of times in just this way, except you have a different engineer sitting next to us.

00:20:06.000 And an infinite number of times where it's been Jamie, too, right?

00:20:09.000 Yeah.

00:20:09.000 In principle, I mean, that's the argument that's given.

00:20:12.000 But I think that there's some nested infinities in there that deserve some explanation.

00:20:16.000 My feeble brain is not handling this well.

00:20:19.000 Well, that's fine.

00:20:20.000 You know...

00:20:21.000 As I've said, as I say in the epigraph of the book.

00:20:28.000 Book that's not available yet, but I have a copy.

00:20:30.000 Ha ha! 0.86

00:20:31.000 Astrophysicist for people in a hurry.

00:20:33.000 Astrophysics.

00:20:34.000 Physics for people in a hurry.

00:20:35.000 But you've got to say it right.

00:20:36.000 Not astrophysicist for people in a hurry.

00:20:37.000 You come over to their house.

00:20:38.000 Hey, what's up?

00:20:40.000 Astrophysics.

00:20:41.000 For people in a hurry.

00:20:42.000 Oh, you got to say it quick.

00:20:43.000 You got to say it because you're in a hurry.

00:20:44.000 So the epigram on that is the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

00:20:52.000 That's rational.

00:20:53.000 That makes sense to me.

00:20:54.000 And so it makes sense to you that the universe is under no obligation to make sense.

00:20:58.000 So it's okay if your brain hurts when I say there's a ranking of infinities, but you shouldn't say that doesn't make sense, therefore it is not true.

00:21:06.000 I definitely wouldn't say that.

00:21:07.000 But what confuses me is the word infinity, because I had always taken the word infinity to mean something that has no end.

00:21:13.000 So how can something that has no end be larger than something else that has no end?

00:21:16.000 So the way they do that mathematically, the way to demonstrate that mathematically is you map one item in the set of this infinity to corresponding items in the set of the other infinity.

00:21:28.000 And so you do this.

00:21:30.000 So you take the one and you map it to the first transcendental number.

00:21:33.000 You take the two to the second.

00:21:34.000 You just keep doing this.

00:21:36.000 And when you do that mathematically, you find that one infinity outstrips the other infinity.

00:21:42.000 Wow.

00:21:43.000 And then you're left with more numbers.

00:21:45.000 So that shows you that you have a bigger infinity.

00:21:48.000 Now, when you find...

00:21:50.000 I mean, there's a new NASA announcement that's supposed to...

00:21:53.000 Is it Monday that's supposed to be announced?

00:21:56.000 Or tomorrow?

00:21:56.000 Is it tomorrow?

00:21:57.000 The exoplanet announcement.

00:21:58.000 Yeah, it's a Wednesday.

00:21:58.000 Yeah, so it's Wednesday.

00:22:00.000 I don't have a secret...

00:22:04.000 I'm not authorized to.

00:22:05.000 If you did have juicy details, is there a time?

00:22:07.000 Let me invent some juicy details that it could be.

00:22:09.000 So NASA... He's been good at segueing lately.

00:22:13.000 I'm just jumping into questions.

00:22:14.000 He's just jumping.

00:22:15.000 I know I only have you for a short amount of time before you've got to get that red eye.

00:22:18.000 Yeah, I'm flying back to...

00:22:20.000 Thanks for fitting this in, Joe.

00:22:21.000 My pleasure.

00:22:22.000 Anytime.

00:22:22.000 I would open this place up at 3 in the morning for you.

00:22:24.000 Oh, man.

00:22:25.000 I feel the love, so thank you.

00:22:29.000 So...

00:22:30.000 Here's some things it could be, because NASA is saying that it's a stunning new announcement.

00:22:36.000 Well, what could be more than the fact that we already know that there are Earth-like planets orbiting in the Goldilocks zone of the nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri?

00:22:48.000 Can you do better than that for me, NASA? I don't think so, unless you've got some extra stuff you're going to tell us, like What's been a cottage industry in the last couple of years is the observation of planet atmospheres as the planet passes in front of the host star.

00:23:06.000 Light from the host star passes through the atmosphere and the light signature is altered by the chemistry of the atmosphere.

00:23:15.000 So depending on what the chemicals are, it'll influence the spectrum that you get.

00:23:20.000 And when you do that, you can say what the chemical composition of the atmosphere of that star is.

00:23:25.000 There's certain There's certain combinations of elements that we would call biomarkers.

00:23:32.000 No, we can't look down to the surface of the planet and look at cities, if there are any.

00:23:36.000 But there are consequences in the atmosphere to there being life on the surface.

00:23:41.000 Such as, is there oxygen there?

00:23:43.000 I used to think when I was watching Star Trek when I was a kid, because I saw it in real time, that's how old I am, when it first came out, original series.

00:23:52.000 Star Trek characters never wore spacesuits.

00:23:55.000 Yeah.

00:23:56.000 You ever wonder?

00:23:57.000 I mean, you ever thought about that?

00:23:58.000 Okay.

00:23:58.000 What happens is they visit planets that have nitrogen, oxygen, atmosphere, Jim.

00:24:03.000 All right.

00:24:03.000 Well, that's what our atmosphere is.

00:24:04.000 So they find planets with nitrogen, oxygen.

00:24:06.000 They go down.

00:24:07.000 They don't need a space suit.

00:24:08.000 So they've actually thought about that, and that's their solution.

00:24:11.000 So that must mean there'd be planets that you could find.

00:24:14.000 Well, here's the thing.

00:24:16.000 We have oxygen on Earth only because of There is life on Earth.

00:24:21.000 Not any kind of life.

00:24:24.000 Photosynthesizing life.

00:24:24.000 We have life that takes sunlight Turns it into chemical energy into itself, into wood, into plants.

00:24:33.000 And one of its byproducts is oxygen.

00:24:36.000 Oxygen is chemically active.

00:24:38.000 If you took away all plants tomorrow, that oxygen would slowly get absorbed chemically into the environment.

00:24:45.000 And then you would not have oxygen there to be viewed by aliens trying to see if we have life here.

00:24:51.000 And it's pretty surprising to people to note that we're mostly nitrogen in our air.

00:24:55.000 Oh, yeah, we're 78% nitrogen in our atmosphere.

00:24:57.000 You know what happens if you have too much oxygen?

00:25:01.000 If you have, like, let's say 50% oxygen or more.

00:25:03.000 You get really high, right?

00:25:05.000 Isn't that part of it?

00:25:06.000 No, what happens is, like, a forest fire would never go out.

00:25:09.000 Oh, yeah.

00:25:10.000 Yeah, because oxygen feeds combustion, and so you could basically burn all vegetation in the world if the oxygen went above certain thresholds.

00:25:18.000 So you need it high enough so that you can still have oxygen metabolism, but not so high that it's bad for lightning-triggered forest fires.

00:25:27.000 So if they see that...

00:25:28.000 I don't know the announcement, but I'm just guessing here, because it's been a cottage industry the last couple of years.

00:25:35.000 Let's find these biomarkers.

00:25:37.000 Do you have unstable chemistry going on in that atmosphere?

00:25:41.000 Because if you do, it means something's generating it.

00:25:44.000 And certain combinations of chemistry tells you there's likely to be life of some kind.

00:25:50.000 Now, just a couple decades ago, we had speculation of other planets, but we really didn't have any tangible proof.

00:25:57.000 In fact, anytime I give a public talk, you can do this in your gigs.

00:26:01.000 Ask who here is born since 1995, okay?

00:26:05.000 And your audience leans young, so there'll be some fraction of the audience that'll raise their hand.

00:26:11.000 And so what I do is I knight them as Generation Exoplanet.

00:26:18.000 Because 1995 was the first year that a planet outside of our own solar system was discovered.

00:26:24.000 So they have been alive only during a time where we've known of other star systems.

00:26:28.000 That's so crazy.

00:26:29.000 Generation exoplanet.

00:26:30.000 I want to start that movement.

00:26:32.000 It's so crazy.

00:26:33.000 That's so recent.

00:26:35.000 It is.

00:26:35.000 Oh, yeah.

00:26:36.000 I was living out here.

00:26:37.000 Yeah, it's 24 years ago.

00:26:38.000 22 years ago.

00:26:39.000 Yeah.

00:26:40.000 That's insane.

00:26:41.000 If you stop and think about it, what a short period of time that is.

00:26:44.000 And in that period of time, we've discovered...

00:26:46.000 There's like rising through 3,000 exoplanets.

00:26:48.000 This is the advance of tech.

00:26:49.000 That's not just science advance.

00:26:51.000 That's engineering and technology and telescope quality and imaging quality.

00:26:57.000 And there's a lot that goes on to the advance of science.

00:26:59.000 It's not just how clever you are in an Einsteinian way.

00:27:02.000 It's, do you know good engineers to build a device to make the measurement?

00:27:07.000 This is how we discovered gravity waves.

00:27:09.000 What's your take on that planet that's supposed to be outside the Kuiper Belt?

00:27:13.000 Planet Nine.

00:27:16.000 All the data look convincing.

00:27:18.000 So what they've done is they've looked at other objects in the Kuiper Belt.

00:27:21.000 These are colleagues of mine at Caltech.

00:27:25.000 So it's Mike Brown.

00:27:28.000 I get blamed for killing Pluto, but I was an accessory for sure, but I definitely didn't kill Pluto.

00:27:34.000 That dude killed Pluto.

00:27:35.000 He found another object that was basically the size of Pluto out there.

00:27:39.000 So either you make that a planet...

00:27:41.000 Well, you demote Pluto.

00:27:43.000 And how much smaller is Pluto than, let's say, our moon?

00:27:45.000 Oh, so don't get me started.

00:27:47.000 Our moon has five times the mass of Pluto.

00:27:49.000 Wow.

00:27:50.000 So Pluto was lame from the beginning.

00:27:54.000 We thought it was big.

00:27:55.000 We wanted it to be big.

00:27:57.000 We made it one of us, one of the nine, and its size didn't settle out until the late 1970s, where we had better and better, more accurate ways to measure its size, and that's when we learned.

00:28:08.000 It's small even compared to our own But, granted, we have a big moon, but if you're not going to think our moon is a planet, you're certainly not going to think that Pluto is a planet.

00:28:17.000 So this object, let me just tell you how they did it.

00:28:19.000 So they found these other objects out there, the same team, Constantine Batingen and Mike Brown, both at Caltech.

00:28:31.000 And they found these objects in the outer, the Kuiper belt, of icy bodies, of which Pluto is a member.

00:28:37.000 You track their motion.

00:28:38.000 And you say, okay, if I add up all the gravity that's affecting them, they should move this way.

00:28:42.000 But they don't.

00:28:43.000 They move another way, a different way.

00:28:46.000 So either Newton's laws of gravity are failing in the outer solar system, or there's some object out there whose gravity you have yet to reconcile with the motions of these objects.

00:28:55.000 So they said, let's assume Newton is right.

00:28:58.000 What object do we have to put out there, at what distance and at what size, to influence the movement of these Kuiper Belt objects in the way we see it?

00:29:06.000 And did they do this through Bode's law?

00:29:08.000 No, no, we're way past.

00:29:11.000 Thanks for remembering Bode's Law, but Bode's Law was an early measure of where you might find a new planet.

00:29:17.000 And it was based on mass and gravity?

00:29:19.000 No, no, Bode's Law was a simple arithmetic tool.

00:29:22.000 All it did was basically double the distance with a certain additive parameter.

00:29:26.000 Double the distance of known planets?

00:29:29.000 So for example, and there's a factor in there that helped the inner planets come out right.

00:29:37.000 But let's look at Mars.

00:29:39.000 Mars is like two and a half times Earth's distance from the Sun.

00:29:43.000 What comes after Mars?

00:29:44.000 Jupiter.

00:29:45.000 Jupiter is five times Earth's distance.

00:29:47.000 Oh, I see.

00:29:48.000 Saturn is ten times.

00:29:49.000 So it went from two and a half to five to ten.

00:29:51.000 So Bode's Law is just a simple arithmetic scheme.

00:29:54.000 It's not based in any known physics.

00:29:56.000 And it was only based on the solar system itself.

00:29:58.000 On the solar system itself.

00:29:59.000 That's right.

00:29:59.000 And it worked, and you have to fudge your way to get Mercury to work in that.

00:30:04.000 Oh, really?

00:30:04.000 And it didn't have Pluto.

00:30:06.000 Of course, Pluto wasn't a planet anyway.

00:30:08.000 But anyhow, it was a...

00:30:09.000 It was a fudgy way that was mostly right by accident.

00:30:14.000 And this was in, like, what year was this?

00:30:16.000 Oh, that was 1800s, basically.

00:30:19.000 Oh, wow.

00:30:20.000 Yeah, so now we have advanced computer programming, very high precision modeling, and they're saying there's got to be a planet somewhere here in this arc.

00:30:29.000 Of the sky, let's look for it.

00:30:30.000 Because we think that's what's affecting the orbits of these other objects.

00:30:32.000 And that is a completely noble way to discover a planet.

00:30:35.000 That's how Neptune was discovered.

00:30:39.000 Everyone looked at the orbit of Uranus and said, you know, Uranus is not following Newton's laws.

00:30:45.000 Maybe Newton's laws don't work that far out.

00:30:48.000 It's never been tested that far.

00:30:49.000 And they say, well, let's assume it works and ask what would have to influence it.

00:30:53.000 And by the way, it's a difficult mathematical calculation because you're not saying, here's the object, what's the gravity field?

00:30:59.000 You're saying, here's the gravity field I need.

00:31:03.000 Where must the object be and how massive must it be?

00:31:07.000 That's a much harder mathematical problem to solve.

00:31:09.000 And so once the errant orbit of Uranus was known and calculated, they started looking for another planet, and that's how they discovered planet Neptune.

00:31:23.000 Wow.

00:31:24.000 So now, when they're looking at this Planet Nine...

00:31:26.000 I hope I said that right.

00:31:27.000 It was the movement of Uranus's orbit was not following proper laws.

00:31:31.000 And they inferred the presence of Neptune.

00:31:33.000 They said, look here, tomorrow night.

00:31:35.000 And they looked there, and they found it.

00:31:37.000 Wow.

00:31:38.000 Yes, it was a brilliant display.

00:31:40.000 And no, we're going back to the 19th century.

00:31:44.000 So, I mean, people were badass.

00:31:47.000 Every generation's got their badass scientists.

00:31:50.000 Now, how much further out from the known solar system is this unknown planet supposed to be?

00:31:55.000 So, I'm not quick to call it Planet Nine, because...

00:31:57.000 So far out there?

00:31:58.000 It's 20,000 times farther away from the sun than the Earth is.

00:32:03.000 So, I'm not...

00:32:04.000 Sorry, you're not in the family.

00:32:05.000 You're not in the neighborhood.

00:32:06.000 No, you're not in the hood.

00:32:06.000 No.

00:32:08.000 Sorry, I'm not feeling it.

00:32:09.000 It's like calling Connecticut New York City.

00:32:11.000 I'm not feeling it.

00:32:12.000 I'm not feeling it.

00:32:13.000 But it's something massive, right?

00:32:15.000 It's like six times the mass of the Earth?

00:32:16.000 Yeah, I forgot what mass they were assigning it, but if that were in our solar system, there'd be no question you would label it as a planet.

00:32:24.000 And it wasn't their one-time speculation that it was some sort of a burnt-out star that existed?

00:32:28.000 No, not at that mass.

00:32:29.000 No, no, no.

00:32:30.000 Too small?

00:32:30.000 No, you might be thinking, if that's what I think you're thinking, you've got good memory.

00:32:34.000 Long ago, in a galaxy far away, so I'm talking about the 1970s, people looked at the extinction record on Earth.

00:32:41.000 And every 20,000 years, they found a little blip, a little dip in the fossil record where we lost some species.

00:32:48.000 And people were wondering why.

00:32:50.000 Could there have been some flux of comets raining down periodically on the Earth, wreaking havoc on the ecosystem, rendering species extinct in these periodic intervals?

00:33:01.000 If there is, maybe there's some double star to the Sun.

00:33:06.000 Right, binary star system.

00:33:08.000 Some binary star system.

00:33:09.000 So they invoked it, and they called it, they gave it a name.

00:33:13.000 They gave it a name.

00:33:14.000 And so you know what period, orbital period, that object must have.

00:33:18.000 It's got to match the extinction period.

00:33:21.000 Periodicity.

00:33:22.000 And so it's got to be a 20,000-year period.

00:33:25.000 But people looked for it.

00:33:26.000 They couldn't find it.

00:33:28.000 And then you reanalyze the extinction records, and you had to fudge it to make it look like it was periodic.

00:33:35.000 So basically, we've abandoned the idea of Nemesis.

00:33:38.000 And aren't binary star systems really common?

00:33:41.000 Yeah, more than half the stars you see in the night sky are binary or multiple systems.

00:33:45.000 In fact, the iconic image from Star Wars, the original Star Wars movie, before they numbered them, I think, Star Wars 4. Tatooine, right?

00:33:53.000 Is that where they were?

00:33:54.000 Well, yeah, whatever that desert planet that Luke was on.

00:33:59.000 And he comes out after visiting his, what is his step-parent?

00:34:03.000 No, his...

00:34:04.000 Adoptive parents.

00:34:05.000 I don't remember.

00:34:05.000 Whoever he was visiting, he comes out and you see a double sunset.

00:34:09.000 So that's basically the only accurate science in the entire series.

00:34:14.000 That's it?

00:34:14.000 Star Wars series.

00:34:17.000 That was another thing I really enjoyed, is you're taking a part of Gravity, the movie Gravity, and how many people got mad at you for that?

00:34:23.000 The movie.

00:34:23.000 Yeah, you know, so I stopped commenting on movies.

00:34:25.000 I don't need to...

00:34:26.000 Piss people off?

00:34:27.000 When I watch a movie, I'm having those thoughts anyway.

00:34:31.000 So I might as well share them with people if you're interested.

00:34:34.000 So I did just that.

00:34:35.000 And then people, the last time I did it was for Star Wars, The Force Awakens, Star Wars 7. I had a series of tweets.

00:34:42.000 You know, one of them was, BB-8, a smooth, rolling, metal, spherical ball, would have skidded uncontrollably on sand.

00:34:53.000 People got angry. 1.00

00:34:55.000 Someone tweeted back, shut the fuck up, okay? 1.00

00:34:59.000 So I said, okay, I'm not here to get people angry. 0.98

00:35:03.000 I'm just here to enlighten, to help people enhance their moviegoing experience.

00:35:07.000 But to the extent that it is not accomplishing this, I don't need to do it.

00:35:10.000 I'm just saying.

00:35:11.000 I'm an educator.

00:35:13.000 I thought I was being nice.

00:35:15.000 I don't need to do this.

00:35:16.000 I haven't tweeted about a movie since then.

00:35:18.000 Don't let them stop you.

00:35:20.000 I have tweets I could post about Arrival.

00:35:22.000 Please do.

00:35:23.000 I didn't watch that.

00:35:24.000 I watched a little bit of it, but I shut it off.

00:35:26.000 Okay.

00:35:26.000 No, you've got to give it a chance.

00:35:27.000 As soon as I see a movie that starts out, spoiler alert, starts out with a sick kid, I'm like, fuck you. 1.00

00:35:33.000 I know what you're doing. 1.00

00:35:34.000 No, in fact, it's very not about the kid.

00:35:36.000 I'm sure.

00:35:36.000 That's what I keep hearing.

00:35:37.000 It's totally not about the kid.

00:35:38.000 Jamie hated it.

00:35:39.000 Oh, yeah?

00:35:40.000 No.

00:35:40.000 Yeah.

00:35:41.000 Okay.

00:35:42.000 So, you just give it a chance.

00:35:44.000 But anyhow, so I just stopped.

00:35:45.000 Maybe I'll come back, but I'm...

00:35:48.000 Do it!

00:35:49.000 People need to know.

00:35:51.000 Gravity.

00:35:51.000 That was good that you explained that not only is this not plausible, those two satellites aren't anywhere near each other.

00:35:57.000 Oh my gosh, there they were said, oh, there's the International Space Station and I'm on the Chinese Space Station.

00:36:02.000 Let me just jetpack my way there.

00:36:05.000 Do you realize?

00:36:06.000 Excuse me.

00:36:07.000 Lady, do you... 1.00

00:36:09.000 Hey, lady! 1.00

00:36:10.000 Do you know how far away these are from one another?

00:36:12.000 You can just jet around from one space station to another.

00:36:15.000 No!

00:36:15.000 Can't do it.

00:36:16.000 They're tens of thousands of miles from one another.

00:36:19.000 For goodness sake.

00:36:20.000 So, but anyhow.

00:36:21.000 So, yeah, you remember these tweets.

00:36:22.000 Please keep doing it.

00:36:22.000 It was like 15 tweets.

00:36:24.000 And I didn't know.

00:36:25.000 That was when I realized.

00:36:26.000 Like, the press was reading my movie tweets.

00:36:28.000 And those tweets...

00:36:31.000 Now, a couple years ago, when Gravity came out, Sandra Bullock and...

00:36:38.000 What's the dude's name?

00:36:39.000 George Clooney.

00:36:40.000 So I tweeted it and they got talked about on the Today Show, the weekend Today Show on NBC. Then it was talked about on NBC Nightly News.

00:36:51.000 Then my tweets were talked about on Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update.

00:36:55.000 It was the NBC trifecta.

00:36:58.000 And I said, my gosh, that was not the point.

00:37:03.000 I didn't seek this.

00:37:04.000 It's fine.

00:37:05.000 I'm glad they are reacting this way, because that means they care about the science, maybe.

00:37:10.000 But what Seth Meyers did, because he was doing Weekend Update at the time, he said, That's hilarious.

00:37:32.000 I think Sandra Bullock's still younger than George Clooney, though.

00:37:34.000 So they should have got their facts right.

00:37:36.000 Yeah, but not by much.

00:37:37.000 I mean, yeah, they were in the same neighborhood.

00:37:39.000 Yes, they were in the neighborhood.

00:37:40.000 Yeah, I think it's important.

00:37:42.000 I think you enjoy the movie.

00:37:44.000 It's great.

00:37:45.000 It's fun and everything like that.

00:37:46.000 But it's important to point out what the science errors are.

00:37:49.000 I think...

00:37:50.000 I think the movie could have done better, honestly.

00:37:54.000 I think they could have made the same movie with correct science.

00:37:55.000 By the way, I did like the movie.

00:37:56.000 People thought I didn't like the movie when all I was doing was pointing out things they got wrong.

00:38:00.000 By the way, they did some stunning things correctly.

00:38:02.000 For example, this is brilliant.

00:38:05.000 If you're in zero G, a fire basically puts itself out.

00:38:10.000 So think about it.

00:38:11.000 When you burn a candle on Earth, so you light the wick.

00:38:15.000 Does people have candles anymore?

00:38:16.000 They forgot what a candle is.

00:38:18.000 You light it with a match that you used to get from smoking lounges at bars.

00:38:24.000 Alright, so you light the candle and it stays lit.

00:38:28.000 The fuel is the wax.

00:38:30.000 The oxygen continually comes in because it heats the air around it and the air rises.

00:38:36.000 Hot air rises.

00:38:37.000 And fresh air comes in from below and has fresh oxygen.

00:38:40.000 So the candle will stay lit until it burns all the way down.

00:38:43.000 In space, if you light a candle, you can light the candle.

00:38:47.000 It'll heat the air, but the air will not know where to go.

00:38:50.000 Because it's not lighter than everything because it's in zero G. It'll stay clustered around the candle.

00:38:55.000 The candle will use up all the oxygen in that bubble, and then it'll put itself out.

00:39:00.000 They did this in the movie.

00:39:02.000 So why do they have some good science?

00:39:04.000 Because you can't think of everything.

00:39:06.000 Why don't they just have you on staff?

00:39:08.000 Bring you in. 0.99

00:39:09.000 What's wrong with that shitty movie? 0.99

00:39:11.000 So you can't think of everything. 0.99

00:39:12.000 So I wasn't judgmental so much as this movie.

00:39:16.000 The fact that it got so much right is what put it on my map to criticize what it got wrong.

00:39:23.000 That makes sense.

00:39:24.000 Does that make sense?

00:39:25.000 Yes!

00:39:25.000 Like the hair.

00:39:26.000 It earned the right.

00:39:28.000 Oh, the hair.

00:39:28.000 Her bangs should have been floating.

00:39:30.000 Floating all over the place.

00:39:31.000 Now, if you might think, am I nitpicky?

00:39:34.000 No.

00:39:34.000 Because if you look at any picture of somebody with hair, okay?

00:39:38.000 In space, in zero-G, their hair is flying everywhere.

00:39:41.000 It's the first thing you notice about them.

00:39:43.000 It is so obvious, like, wow, that's the cool...

00:39:45.000 You're not thinking about the spaceship or the TIE technology.

00:39:48.000 You're looking at the hair doing stuff you will never see happen on Earth, unless someone is, like, underwater and they're jiggling their head.

00:39:55.000 So they would have to film it all in Zero Gravity.

00:39:57.000 They would have to film it all in one of those drop things.

00:39:59.000 Yeah, or the drop thing.

00:40:00.000 They'd have to be clever about it.

00:40:02.000 And she only had bangs. 0.99

00:40:03.000 That's all you had to figure out.

00:40:04.000 They did other clever things.

00:40:06.000 So anyway, that's all I did.

00:40:07.000 By the way, in all fairness to movies, I'll call out something that's good.

00:40:11.000 A science that a movie got right that otherwise got no science right.

00:40:15.000 I'm the first in line to do that.

00:40:18.000 Like what?

00:40:19.000 Oh, in the movie Monsters, Inc.?

00:40:22.000 Oh my gosh.

00:40:23.000 You didn't think I was going there, did you?

00:40:25.000 No.

00:40:26.000 Those doors were four-dimensional portals to another...

00:40:29.000 That's possible?

00:40:31.000 Well, if you had four dimensions, that's what it would look like.

00:40:34.000 Do you remember the movie?

00:40:35.000 Yes.

00:40:35.000 They take the doors home.

00:40:37.000 Yes.

00:40:37.000 They open the door, and they're in the closet of the kid that they're going to terrorize.

00:40:42.000 Yes.

00:40:43.000 That's a wormhole.

00:40:45.000 That is what access to the fourth dimension looks like.

00:40:48.000 Do you think, scientifically, that's possible one day?

00:40:50.000 I hope so.

00:40:52.000 I hope so.

00:40:53.000 Really?

00:40:53.000 Because here's the example.

00:40:54.000 We've got a nice broad desk here at this interview, right?

00:40:58.000 So, desk is two dimensions.

00:41:00.000 It's got length and width.

00:41:01.000 And I can start putting papers on this desk, and I can lay them out mosaic style.

00:41:07.000 And then, all of a sudden, I have no more room to put a sheet of paper.

00:41:10.000 If I'm an ant living in this surface of the desk, I say, no more room.

00:41:16.000 But wait a minute, we are three-dimensional people, and I can put an organizer and stack things vertically.

00:41:23.000 So I can take a sheet of paper, and now I can put it higher up than the surface of the desk.

00:41:28.000 The ant will say, where did it go?

00:41:30.000 Oh my gosh, it disappeared in some portal!

00:41:33.000 No, no, what is that?

00:41:35.000 It went into the third dimension, and the ant, bound to, it obviously is a three-dimensional thing, Imagine it only lives in two dimensions.

00:41:43.000 You would have made that paper disappear into a third dimension.

00:41:47.000 And it will have no clue where it went.

00:41:49.000 Because you had a portal.

00:41:50.000 You had access to that extra dimension.

00:41:53.000 So, look at how much you can store on a desk when you have access to a third dimension above it.

00:42:01.000 Vastly more than just papers mosaicked out on the surface.

00:42:06.000 So now let's up this example by a dimension.

00:42:09.000 You're storing boxes in a room.

00:42:11.000 Oh, I ran out of room.

00:42:12.000 No, you didn't.

00:42:13.000 Let's open this four-dimensional door.

00:42:15.000 You open it, put the boxes through the door, close the door.

00:42:20.000 Box is gone.

00:42:21.000 That'd be awesome for hoarders.

00:42:23.000 You look around the other side of the door, there's nothing there.

00:42:27.000 Your side of the door, nothing there.

00:42:28.000 It's just a door.

00:42:29.000 That is a portal to a fourth dimension that can hold vastly more content than what you're stuck storing in the three-dimensional space of your room.

00:42:40.000 So that's a brilliant concept.

00:42:41.000 And even though it has monsters that don't exist, that all speak English, and one of them is a cyclops, and one of them is a, you know, I'm not judging the biophysiology of these creatures, but they got the physics of four-dimensional portals completely accurate.

00:42:55.000 Now the concept of dimensions is where it gets really abstract with people.

00:42:59.000 I love me some dimensions.

00:43:00.000 And it is abstract.

00:43:01.000 It is.

00:43:02.000 And that's why you let the math take you into those higher dimensions.

00:43:07.000 Because our intuition will fail for us.

00:43:10.000 Right, but that's where it gets weird when you say take the math, or let the math take you.

00:43:14.000 So like when quantum physicists use these legal notepads, those yellow pads, and write all that crazy stuff down that nobody but you and maybe them understand, and when you look at all those equations...

00:43:24.000 No, it's them, maybe me, not me, maybe then.

00:43:28.000 You probably understand it, right?

00:43:30.000 But I definitely don't.

00:43:31.000 My point is, what are they exactly figuring out that allows them to say there are...

00:43:37.000 I think they say...

00:43:38.000 At one point in time it was 11, but I think they've expanded that, right?

00:43:41.000 What are they saying now?

00:43:42.000 I don't have the latest dimension count on the universe, but what...

00:43:47.000 The way it works is you're trying to make sense of the world.

00:43:50.000 Right.

00:43:51.000 And so you take some leaps, some philosophical leaps, some mathematical leaps.

00:43:57.000 You say, all right, maybe all particles that manifest as an electron, a proton, a neutron, maybe quarks, maybe they're just strings of energy vibrating at different frequencies.

00:44:13.000 And we sense these different frequencies as different particles.

00:44:17.000 Let's just go there for a minute.

00:44:19.000 Well, if you're going to do that, what are the consequences to it?

00:44:22.000 And how many dimensions do these vibrating strings require to have the properties that we see in our dimensionality?

00:44:31.000 So the exercise of explaining what you see takes you to places that you've never been before.

00:44:37.000 And that's fine.

00:44:39.000 Intellectual places that have been previously unplumbed.

00:44:42.000 There's nothing wrong with that.

00:44:44.000 We've done that before.

00:44:47.000 That's why we know what is happening in the center of the sun.

00:44:49.000 Have we ever been there?

00:44:50.000 No.

00:44:51.000 No.

00:44:52.000 But we know how matter behaves under pressure and temperature.

00:44:56.000 We can do that in a laboratory.

00:44:57.000 We've got a sun sitting out there with a surface temperature, a mass, a certain luminosity.

00:45:03.000 And we say, what must be going on down in the core?

00:45:06.000 Let's bring our best physics, our quantum physics, our chemistry, our nuclear physics, bring it all together, and we have a complete understanding of what's going on in the center of the sun, and we're on to other problems now, even though we've never visited there.

00:45:20.000 So when they're going over the mathematics, observable things that we have right now are at the atomic and subatomic level.

00:45:28.000 Correct.

00:45:28.000 You can't see.

00:45:29.000 Do you realize the electron?

00:45:32.000 I did a whole series of this.

00:45:35.000 There's something called the Great Courses Lecture Series.

00:45:39.000 Oh yeah, it was a sponsor of this podcast for a while.

00:45:42.000 Really?

00:45:42.000 Okay, great courses.

00:45:44.000 So, cool.

00:45:45.000 So, I was once invited to be one of their professors for the great courses.

00:45:50.000 And I taught a very short, most of them are like 30 lectures.

00:45:54.000 It's like a whole college semester.

00:45:56.000 So, and I don't have the time, the energy, so they let me do like short bits.

00:46:01.000 So one of them was only six parts, and it's called The Inexplicable Universe.

00:46:06.000 And it's six parts of everything about which we know nothing in this universe.

00:46:12.000 And you might say, well, that's a pretty easy course to give.

00:46:16.000 Dark matter?

00:46:17.000 Having a clue, okay?

00:46:18.000 On to the next lecture.

00:46:19.000 It might be something.

00:46:20.000 Dark matter?

00:46:20.000 Yeah, could be something.

00:46:21.000 We don't know.

00:46:22.000 Stay tuned.

00:46:23.000 But it's interesting to learn how we come to know what we don't know.

00:46:27.000 And so it's an exploration of our ignorance.

00:46:31.000 And I'm very proud of it, because it's not what you'd normally find in a lecture series.

00:46:35.000 And it's still out there.

00:46:36.000 But one of the things I will tell you, and I'll tell you now, the electron has no known dimension.

00:46:45.000 It is smaller than the smallest we have ever had the capacity to measure.

00:46:50.000 So as far as we are concerned, it is infinitely small.

00:46:53.000 We have no way to even know how to measure.

00:46:57.000 By the way, how do you measure something small?

00:46:59.000 You get something smaller and find out how many of those it is.

00:47:06.000 Oh, my head. 1.00

00:47:08.000 My stupid head. 1.00

00:47:09.000 No, think about the challenges at each extreme. 1.00

00:47:12.000 Ask me, how big is the universe?

00:47:14.000 And I'll say, it's as big as, well, I got nothing.

00:47:18.000 What am I going to say?

00:47:19.000 Right?

00:47:20.000 There's nothing as big as the universe.

00:47:23.000 So, at the biggest end and at the littlest end, there's not something else.

00:47:29.000 It doesn't work as well, okay?

00:47:31.000 To try to say what it is relative to something else.

00:47:34.000 Do you entertain the possibility that the biggest end and the littlest end are the same thing?

00:47:38.000 Meaning that at the smallest measurable point, that literally might be a whole other universe?

00:47:43.000 That might be fractal?

00:47:45.000 It's fun to think about.

00:47:47.000 You mean, all the way down?

00:47:49.000 Yeah.

00:47:49.000 It's fun to think about.

00:47:50.000 Like infinitely down.

00:47:51.000 However, and people, by the way, in the 1920s, when we discovered the atom and its structure and that there's an electron in, quote, orbit around a nucleus, everyone said, wait, we've been there before.

00:48:02.000 We've got planets orbiting the sun.

00:48:04.000 And so this, so maybe it's a mini solar system.

00:48:09.000 Maybe it's solar systems all the way down.

00:48:11.000 I'm glad you brought this up.

00:48:13.000 I'm glad we brought this up because I wanted to bring this question that I almost forgot.

00:48:16.000 There's a photograph of a brain cell and side-by-side with a photograph of the known universe, and they look eerily similar.

00:48:24.000 So you're talking about the large-scale structure of the universe where there's clumping of galaxies.

00:48:28.000 So I'll get to that in a minute.

00:48:29.000 Pull that up, Jamie.

00:48:30.000 Okay.

00:48:30.000 So I'll get to that.

00:48:33.000 Do you ever tell him just pull up his own damn images? 0.90

00:48:37.000 Yeah, but I can't put it on the TV, so he has to do it. 0.94

00:48:41.000 So here's why that's not likely.

00:48:48.000 It was an entertained idea, but here's why it's not likely.

00:48:52.000 The manifestation of the laws of physics are different at the atomic scale than they are at the macroscopic scale.

00:49:00.000 They're just simply different.

00:49:02.000 A planet can take any orbit sensible for its velocity around a host star.

00:49:09.000 An electron cannot.

00:49:12.000 Its energy levels are predetermined and quantized.

00:49:15.000 Hence the word quantum, the prefix quanta in quantum physics.

00:49:20.000 So if it was a continuum of matter and energy following the same laws of physics, Then I would say then it's solar systems all the way down.

00:49:33.000 But the rules completely change.

00:49:36.000 And so things can, on the surface, seem similar, but when it comes time to understand them and to analyze them and to manipulate them and to exploit their conduct and their behavior for other means, as we have done with atoms and molecules for the entire IT revolution,

00:49:55.000 No longer are they the same, and you abandon this romanticized concept.

00:49:59.000 So now, with the neurons, the network of neurons, and the clusters of galaxies and galaxy superclusters, that would be on the right, neurons on the left.

00:50:10.000 That's so eerie.

00:50:12.000 Yes.

00:50:12.000 So, yeah, they can look the same, but they're operating under completely different levels.

00:50:25.000 Mm-hmm.

00:50:39.000 Alright?

00:50:41.000 There's chemistry going on in the brain in its natural state.

00:50:43.000 You disrupt that, enhance it.

00:50:45.000 You just put down some chemistry in your stomach that's now affecting your brain.

00:50:51.000 What'd you just drink there?

00:50:52.000 What was it?

00:50:52.000 Alpha Brain.

00:50:55.000 So you're entering the chemistry.

00:50:57.000 So it's chemistry.

00:50:58.000 What's going on on the large-scale structure of the universe is not chemistry.

00:51:02.000 There's some chemistry deep within, but the chemistry is not what's making that pattern.

00:51:07.000 And because of that, it becomes an artistic curiosity, not something that has any kind of deep scientific insight.

00:51:16.000 So it's just a fascinating similarity.

00:51:18.000 Yes, it's a fascinating similarity.

00:51:20.000 Put them up together and it's fun to think about it.

00:51:23.000 It's fun to think about it artistically, but not scientifically, no.

00:51:27.000 It's great if you're hanging out with your friends going, wow, man.

00:51:31.000 It depends on how high you are.

00:51:32.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:51:33.000 But now, when you're looking at subatomic particles, and you're looking at these, like, when they observe particles in superposition, where they're moving and stationary at the same time, where they blink in and out of existence, like, when you get down to that...

00:51:48.000 And I repeat the opening page of the book.

00:51:53.000 The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

00:51:55.000 Oh yeah, for sure.

00:51:56.000 It definitely doesn't.

00:51:59.000 So at that scale, things that go on with atoms and molecules fall outside of your life experience.

00:52:05.000 You don't hang out at the bar with protons, nucleons or other nucleons or molecules.

00:52:13.000 You just don't.

00:52:13.000 So what they do in their day It's completely foreign to you.

00:52:17.000 So now you shrink down to that size, and particles are popping in and out of existence.

00:52:22.000 They become conjoined, quantum mechanically conjoined, and it's completely weird, and you would say, none of this makes sense.

00:52:31.000 And this is observable in a visual sense?

00:52:35.000 Well, it depends, depending on how big the phenomena is.

00:52:37.000 Otherwise, you can see other things that would happen That you know that are the manifestations of that happening.

00:52:42.000 Right.

00:52:43.000 So an electron is smaller even than that?

00:52:46.000 Oh, yes.

00:52:48.000 By how many factors?

00:52:49.000 No, no.

00:52:49.000 We don't even know.

00:52:50.000 We don't know how small an electron is.

00:52:52.000 We've never measured the size of an electron.

00:52:53.000 The concept of superstring theory.

00:52:55.000 So these vibrating strings are smaller than that.

00:52:59.000 Yes.

00:53:00.000 The strings would have to be smaller, thinner, smaller than the electron itself.

00:53:05.000 By many, many...

00:53:06.000 That I couldn't quantify for you.

00:53:08.000 I've got to bring in a string theory person.

00:53:10.000 So it's like...

00:53:11.000 At the bottom of what we can observe.

00:53:14.000 Well, that's a great question.

00:53:15.000 What is the bottom?

00:53:16.000 And you know the word Adam, which was introduced by the Greeks, you know what Adam means in Greek?

00:53:21.000 It has a translation, you know what it means?

00:53:24.000 Indivisible.

00:53:25.000 So they imagined that all matter was you'd come down to some thing We're good to go.

00:53:46.000 It's traceable to a lot of what they were doing back then.

00:53:49.000 And the origins of what science is are traceable to back then.

00:53:54.000 You have an idea that applies to what the universe does that enables you to predict future behavior.

00:54:00.000 That is science.

00:54:00.000 And so the atom, it turned out, is divisible.

00:54:05.000 We're good to go.

00:54:24.000 There are only four fundamental particles in the universe.

00:54:28.000 The photon, which is light.

00:54:30.000 The electron, of which there are several species.

00:54:33.000 There's the anti-electron and this and this.

00:54:34.000 But just stay simple here.

00:54:37.000 The photon, the electron, the quark, and the neutrino.

00:54:42.000 That's it.

00:54:43.000 Everything in the universe that we've ever observed is made out of that stuff.

00:54:49.000 So, those are, quote, the atoms of the universe.

00:54:52.000 The indivisible parts, if you will.

00:54:54.000 Now, this is a good opportunity.

00:54:55.000 By the way, dark matter could be made of yet another kind of thing that we don't know yet.

00:55:00.000 But we got top people trying to figure out what dark matter is.

00:55:03.000 We've measured it out there.

00:55:04.000 We just don't know what it is.

00:55:05.000 Well, it's something like 90-something percent of the universe itself.

00:55:07.000 If you add dark matter and dark energy, it's 95% of all that drives the universe.

00:55:12.000 And we can measure the existence of both, yet we have no idea what's driving them.

00:55:17.000 This is an awesome opportunity for you to illuminate this often.

00:55:20.000 But it's all in Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.

00:55:23.000 It's out in May.

00:55:25.000 It comes out in May.

00:55:26.000 You can pre-order it, which, by the way, publishers love it if you pre-order.

00:55:30.000 Isn't it adorable?

00:55:31.000 It's beautiful.

00:55:32.000 It's a good size.

00:55:33.000 It's adorable.

00:55:34.000 You can pre-order it on Amazon?

00:55:35.000 The reason why publishers like you to pre-order it is so that they can accurately.

00:55:40.000 They don't want to overprint.

00:55:41.000 They don't want to underprint.

00:55:43.000 So they get a sense of the pre-ordering.

00:55:45.000 Because you're not charged until they ship it.

00:55:47.000 So it's a pretty harmless exercise.

00:55:49.000 While we're on this subject of subatomic particles and weirdness, I wanted to, if you could, illuminate this often misused explanation for the observer effect.

00:56:00.000 Because you know the particles, waves, and you watch them, observe them, and it changes the reaction?

00:56:05.000 It is heavily misunderstood.

00:56:07.000 It's misunderstood because people want to attribute it to magic, the magic of the mind and the consciousness looking at it.

00:56:13.000 But isn't it, in fact, just measuring it?

00:56:15.000 Yes.

00:56:16.000 Thank you.

00:56:17.000 Please explain.

00:56:18.000 Next question.

00:56:19.000 Explain to people because I'm so tired of talking to hippies.

00:56:21.000 Joe, you're good.

00:56:22.000 It just drives me nuts.

00:56:23.000 You gotta carry your people with you.

00:56:24.000 I try.

00:56:25.000 Where are they coming from?

00:56:27.000 Where are you pulling?

00:56:28.000 What?

00:56:29.000 What?

00:56:31.000 Where are you getting your people?

00:56:33.000 I don't know.

00:56:34.000 Well, I don't own them for sure.

00:56:35.000 You don't own them, okay.

00:56:36.000 So they're definitely not my people. 0.98

00:56:37.000 They vary greatly.

00:56:38.000 You can't even loop them together.

00:56:40.000 I know.

00:56:40.000 You have an admirably diverse following and that not many people can claim that.

00:56:44.000 And it's probably because of your diverse profile, right?

00:56:47.000 I mean...

00:56:48.000 Well, I'm as open-minded as I can be.

00:56:49.000 But on top of that, you're smart, and you read, and you're thoughtful, and you're also, on some level, respectful.

00:56:55.000 You'll hear somebody out, and you got your MMA thing.

00:56:59.000 So, no, you're in a lot of places, in a lot of spaces, and that's a good thing.

00:57:03.000 I mean, we need more unity in this world.

00:57:06.000 Well, thank you.

00:57:07.000 Thank you.

00:57:08.000 So, please explain what people are getting wrong.

00:57:11.000 They're very simplistic.

00:57:12.000 It's much simpler than you think.

00:57:13.000 Okay.

00:57:14.000 All right, you ready?

00:57:14.000 Yes.

00:57:15.000 So, I'm looking at you.

00:57:17.000 The only reason why I can see you is because there's light reflecting off of your face, your body, into my eyes.

00:57:27.000 So there's light.

00:57:28.000 Oh, by the way, these are stars.

00:57:29.000 That's beautiful.

00:57:29.000 Yeah, those are Hubble photographs.

00:57:30.000 Oh my gosh.

00:57:31.000 Yeah, those are images from the Hubble.

00:57:33.000 I didn't notice that when I walked in.

00:57:34.000 They're sheets that you put over the fluorescent light cover.

00:57:37.000 Very nice.

00:57:37.000 And so when we look up, we actually see the real images from the Hubble.

00:57:41.000 So you're pretending it's the night sky.

00:57:42.000 Yeah!

00:57:43.000 Well, it doesn't look as cool as it could be.

00:57:45.000 And you're not in a completely cavernous recording studio.

00:57:47.000 Well, what I want to do in the future studio, I want to actually build a glass ceiling and have a full-scale image, high-resolution image of the stars.

00:57:56.000 So, a planetarium.

00:57:57.000 Yes.

00:57:58.000 You're describing a planetarium.

00:57:59.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:58:00.000 Call it that.

00:58:00.000 It's a planetarium.

00:58:01.000 Well, something like that.

00:58:02.000 But I just wanted an image.

00:58:05.000 Is there a way to do it?

00:58:06.000 Tell me how to do it.

00:58:07.000 I'll do it.

00:58:07.000 No, do better than that.

00:58:08.000 You get a curved version of those very high-resolution LED screens.

00:58:13.000 Curved?

00:58:14.000 Yeah.

00:58:14.000 And then you put any image up there you want.

00:58:16.000 And then it's the night sky tonight.

00:58:18.000 It's what the sky looks like from Alpha Centauri.

00:58:22.000 Oh, so like when you go to see one of those star shows at a planetarium and they show it on the ceiling above you.

00:58:27.000 Well, yes, but nowadays, the ceiling itself is the source of light.

00:58:32.000 Right.

00:58:32.000 It's not projected from something else.

00:58:34.000 Right.

00:58:34.000 So then you just feed that with image data, and then it becomes whatever you want.

00:58:38.000 Can you hook me up with someone who knows how to do that?

00:58:40.000 Yeah, I can totally.

00:58:41.000 Oh, I'm excited!

00:58:42.000 Yeah, you don't know people?

00:58:43.000 I got people.

00:58:44.000 Well, I mean, people that do planetariums.

00:58:46.000 You need my people?

00:58:46.000 You need my people for something?

00:58:47.000 Well, you know the real people.

00:58:48.000 I thought you had people.

00:58:49.000 But you know the people at the top that would teach the people.

00:58:53.000 So we'll go with them.

00:58:53.000 Okay, so here it is.

00:58:54.000 I'm looking at you, all right?

00:58:55.000 Yes.

00:58:56.000 And...

00:58:57.000 I see you.

00:58:58.000 I want to know where you are.

00:59:00.000 So I turn on the lights and I say, there you are.

00:59:03.000 All right.

00:59:04.000 Now, let's make you tinier. 1.00

00:59:06.000 Let's make you mini-me.

00:59:08.000 Okay?

00:59:09.000 Like in the movie.

00:59:10.000 Right.

00:59:10.000 So now there's a tiny version of you, a mini-me version of Joe Rogan.

00:59:14.000 Now you're little.

00:59:15.000 I turn on the lights.

00:59:16.000 You're still there.

00:59:17.000 Okay?

00:59:18.000 Okay.

00:59:19.000 Because if the lights are not on, I can't see you.

00:59:21.000 I don't know where you are.

00:59:22.000 Right.

00:59:23.000 It's that simple.

00:59:24.000 Okay.

00:59:24.000 Okay?

00:59:26.000 When you start becoming the size of molecules, right on down to the size of an atom, and I ask the question, where is Joe Rogan the atom?

00:59:40.000 And I turn on the light.

00:59:43.000 To see you there, because I think you're there, the photon comes in, hits your atom, and pops you into another location.

00:59:55.000 The very act of trying to measure your position prevents me from measuring your position.

01:00:02.000 And it doesn't have jack shit to do with your consciousness or your mind or your eyes or anything.

01:00:08.000 It has to do with the fact that to know you're there, some information has to come from you to me. 0.64

01:00:15.000 Like shining a light on you.

01:00:17.000 And the smaller you are, the more susceptible you are to the energy of the light changing your position in space.

01:00:27.000 So my question is, how do they know?

01:00:29.000 You know what it's like?

01:00:30.000 You ever, I don't know if this still happened, a quarter spills out of your pants pocket in the backseat of a car, and it's there in the wedge between the bottom and the backseat.

01:00:40.000 And so you try to reach in to get it.

01:00:42.000 And the act of reaching for the coin makes the coin move farther away from you.

01:00:48.000 The act of reaching for it.

01:00:50.000 Right, because you separate the cushions. 0.95

01:00:51.000 You separate it and it just slides down even further.

01:00:54.000 That's not your mind making that happen.

01:00:56.000 It's the act of the measurement that is affecting what it is you're trying to measure.

01:01:01.000 And this was discovered in quantum physics to the point where that's actually, it's a Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

01:01:06.000 It's one of the basic foundations of all of quantum physics.

01:01:10.000 And it's profound.

01:01:11.000 But when it's described in the woo-woo way, they show these particles going through these slots, and then observing them changes the pattern that they go through with.

01:01:22.000 And there's a horrible cartoon that you see in that movie, What in the Bleep?

01:01:30.000 I couldn't get through that movie.

01:01:31.000 I tried.

01:01:32.000 Did you go crazy with the bad science?

01:01:34.000 No, can I tell you where I turned to?

01:01:35.000 Please.

01:01:37.000 Well, here's what people don't know.

01:01:38.000 A lot of that is from a cult.

01:01:40.000 That I didn't know.

01:01:41.000 The woman who is the main woman. 0.98

01:01:44.000 I don't mind a cult movie.

01:01:45.000 She's a channeler. 0.99

01:01:46.000 She's speaking as a character.

01:01:49.000 Do you know that one blonde woman, older blonde woman that's in that movie? 1.00

01:01:53.000 Yeah, okay.

01:01:53.000 When she speaks, she's speaking as a character.

01:01:56.000 Okay, I didn't know that.

01:01:58.000 She's a part of this very bizarre sort of cult.

01:02:02.000 Okay.

01:02:02.000 Should I tell you where I tuned it out or do you want to finish?

01:02:04.000 Please do.

01:02:04.000 No, go ahead.

01:02:05.000 Okay, so I just couldn't watch it.

01:02:09.000 There's a point where they were talking about natives in the Caribbean seeing European ships.

01:02:15.000 Yes.

01:02:16.000 And then they said, well, because they'd never seen a ship before, The brain didn't register it as anything, and then it just disappeared. 1.00

01:02:25.000 Bullshit. 1.00

01:02:25.000 And I'm thinking, no, that's not how the brain works. 1.00

01:02:27.000 Excuse me, that's not how this works, okay?

01:02:31.000 What would happen?

01:02:31.000 They might not know what they're looking at, but they'll know they're looking at something.

01:02:35.000 And they've had ships.

01:02:36.000 They went from island to island.

01:02:38.000 That's how you get from island to island.

01:02:40.000 They say, well, that's a really big version of what we're doing.

01:02:43.000 We've never seen anything that big before.

01:02:44.000 I don't know what it is.

01:02:45.000 I don't know where it came from.

01:02:46.000 But I want to find out.

01:02:48.000 I want to study it.

01:02:49.000 I want to protect myself.

01:02:50.000 Whatever.

01:02:50.000 So just because you've never seen it doesn't mean you're not going to register it.

01:02:53.000 Excuse me?

01:02:54.000 No!

01:02:55.000 Exactly.

01:02:55.000 No!

01:02:56.000 I said, no, I can't waste my...

01:02:58.000 I got other things I got to devote my brain energy to instead of this.

01:03:02.000 But someone else said, oh, it gets better later on.

01:03:04.000 So I said, maybe I'll one day...

01:03:05.000 Oh, no, it doesn't.

01:03:06.000 It does not.

01:03:07.000 It gets more confusing later on, and it does a better job of confusing you as to what science has shown and what they haven't shown.

01:03:16.000 Now, by the way, just in all fairness to what they...

01:03:19.000 I think the point they were trying to make, there are things that if you don't know to recognize them...

01:03:26.000 They would go undiscovered.

01:03:28.000 Yes.

01:03:28.000 Okay?

01:03:29.000 But that doesn't mean you wouldn't see them.

01:03:31.000 Okay?

01:03:32.000 So, for example, let's say you're walking and you didn't know that you were walking over this huge burial mound because the slope was really shallow.

01:03:42.000 And you're just walking.

01:03:43.000 Okay?

01:03:44.000 Well, you didn't notice that.

01:03:47.000 Okay?

01:03:48.000 So you need a different way to see it in order to know.

01:03:51.000 So from space, from an angle, measure the height, whatever.

01:03:54.000 So there are ways to miss things.

01:03:57.000 And that happens all the time.

01:03:59.000 But if it's something there on the horizon, my gosh!

01:04:04.000 This is why we have eyes.

01:04:07.000 Okay?

01:04:08.000 Now, they're not the best data-taking devices, but if there's come time to tell you whether there's a ship or not a ship that you've never seen before, it's a ship.

01:04:15.000 Of course.

01:04:15.000 Okay?

01:04:15.000 Of course.

01:04:16.000 I mean, there's so much evidence of that when people discover new animals.

01:04:19.000 Yes!

01:04:20.000 New anything!

01:04:20.000 They've never seen things before.

01:04:21.000 Anything.

01:04:21.000 New anything!

01:04:22.000 There's no record of it whatsoever.

01:04:24.000 People find it and they can still see it.

01:04:25.000 Most scientific discoveries, you discover something we've never seen before.

01:04:29.000 Ramtha.

01:04:29.000 That was the woman's name.

01:04:31.000 That was the person that she was channeling.

01:04:33.000 That's a cool channeling name.

01:04:35.000 If you had to have a channeling name.

01:04:36.000 If I were a channeler, I'd be Ramtho.

01:04:38.000 I found that after the movie was done, after I watched it.

01:04:44.000 They got me with a lot of things.

01:04:45.000 I was like, wow, is that true?

01:04:46.000 Is that real?

01:04:47.000 And then I started reading.

01:04:48.000 Fortunately, that movie came out in the 2000s instead of in the 90s.

01:04:52.000 Because if it came out in the 90s, we would have all got duped.

01:04:55.000 Oh, yeah.

01:04:55.000 Because we wouldn't have had the internet.

01:04:56.000 We wouldn't be able to research all the shit that's wrong with it. 0.94

01:04:58.000 But in the 2000s, I started researching it. 0.97

01:05:00.000 And then I would send it to my friends. 0.98

01:05:02.000 Like, look where the fuck this came from. 0.99

01:05:04.000 And then you go, oh, that's a cult? 1.00

01:05:06.000 Yeah, it's a cult.

01:05:07.000 The lady's a cult. 1.00

01:05:08.000 She's talking like she's an alien.

01:05:10.000 She's supposed to be an alien, right? 0.99

01:05:11.000 Isn't that...

01:05:12.000 Do you see it in there anywhere?

01:05:14.000 Again, I don't mind if people think they're channelers.

01:05:16.000 I just don't put them in charge of anything.

01:05:18.000 That's all.

01:05:18.000 Well, it's not that I mind.

01:05:21.000 It's just that you should probably say that when you get going with that thing in the beginning.

01:05:25.000 Oh, in advance.

01:05:26.000 Yeah, up front.

01:05:26.000 Yeah, so I know exactly what I'm getting involved with.

01:05:28.000 She's not going to say this is a cult.

01:05:29.000 Nobody's ever said that.

01:05:30.000 She just calls herself Rampa.

01:05:30.000 They think it's real and genuine, and they're very sincere, because they've duped themselves.

01:05:35.000 So what you need is some foundation of science literacy so that you can inoculate yourself against those who would exploit Your absence of knowledge of how the science works for their own gain.

01:05:52.000 Well, not even for their own gain, just YouTube videos.

01:05:54.000 I mean, someone could make a very compelling YouTube video where they get you convinced that, oh my god, dinosaurs aren't real.

01:06:00.000 They start playing these things for you, they tell you about the- Or cell phones can pop popcorn.

01:06:06.000 You ever see that one?

01:06:07.000 Oh, I have seen that one, yeah.

01:06:08.000 Yeah, you line them sometimes and then they start popping.

01:06:10.000 Yeah, you gotta like direct them at the kernels.

01:06:13.000 That was a fun one, yeah.

01:06:13.000 That can't really happen.

01:06:14.000 No, no, of course not.

01:06:14.000 No, of course not.

01:06:15.000 Can you imagine if it could?

01:06:16.000 Jesus Christ.

01:06:17.000 We'd be like, what are we doing with these phones?

01:06:19.000 But there's a ton of those out there where people...

01:06:22.000 See, it's one of the problems with a lack of dialogue.

01:06:25.000 With someone who just has one narrative.

01:06:28.000 Like, you sit down, you edit something, and you just talk.

01:06:32.000 You know, it's very similar to, like, even if you write a blog.

01:06:35.000 I mean, it's one thing if you're writing a blog, like, say, if you're an expert in electronics, you write a blog about how a television works.

01:06:40.000 But if you're just a person, and you don't really understand what you're talking about, but you write something, and you use the right words, and you say it in a very compelling way, like an attack piece on someone that really has no basis in reality, you can have someone convinced this person's a terrible person just by writing something.

01:06:57.000 Without them having to respond, like, hold up, stop, never did that.

01:06:59.000 I tweeted a few weeks ago.

01:07:02.000 I'm not going to botch it because it's way better as the tweet than I will ever remember it as the tweet.

01:07:07.000 So it was one of the great challenges in life is knowing enough to think you're right, but not enough to know you're wrong.

01:07:19.000 Ah, yeah.

01:07:20.000 Well, that is a big problem with a lot of people that watch these YouTube videos, right?

01:07:23.000 That's what it is.

01:07:24.000 They say, oh, this is right, oh my gosh, but they don't know enough to know why it's wrong.

01:07:27.000 Well, this is what I want to talk to you about.

01:07:28.000 What is it about people that there's this very compelling need to find something out that other people don't know, like the world is flat, like dinosaurs aren't real?

01:07:41.000 Like, that kind of stuff is very compelling to people.

01:07:43.000 So what I do in those cases in the...

01:07:46.000 Bigfoot.

01:07:47.000 Yeah.

01:07:47.000 So what I do is I would say, instead of debating them, and some of your listeners are listening to this right now, all I would do is say, what is your best single bit of evidence for what you're claiming?

01:08:05.000 And what would it take to show that you're wrong?

01:08:09.000 Mm-hmm.

01:08:11.000 Alright, well let's go with a simple one.

01:08:13.000 So that's what I would ask.

01:08:14.000 Okay.

01:08:14.000 And I've done this exercise and it doesn't work.

01:08:18.000 You know why?

01:08:19.000 Why?

01:08:19.000 Because there was a guy who didn't believe we went to the moon.

01:08:21.000 We spent a third of our time in our last session there.

01:08:25.000 Someone I know who doesn't believe we went to the moon.

01:08:28.000 Let me just say he's skeptical.

01:08:29.000 So I said, what kind of evidence would convince you?

01:08:33.000 He said, images of the landing site of the Apollo missions.

01:08:39.000 So I said, okay.

01:08:41.000 Here's a website where we sent, in fact, it wasn't West, it was the Chinese, I think it was the Chinese or Europeans, sent a probe, an orbiter, to the moon so that it was close enough, because ground-based telescopes are not, they don't have the resolution to see the landing sites.

01:08:56.000 But if you get close enough to the moon, you can.

01:08:58.000 It photographed the entire surface of the moon, and there were the landing sites, and you saw the rover tracks and the base for the lunar module.

01:09:08.000 And so that night, he went home and found it.

01:09:11.000 Then he came back and says, well, NASA could have faked that.

01:09:15.000 Well, I'm done with you.

01:09:17.000 We have no more to talk about.

01:09:20.000 Because he's not ready to be convinced.

01:09:22.000 Well, that's a weird one.

01:09:23.000 Because I gave him the evidence he asked for.

01:09:26.000 Exact evidence.

01:09:27.000 That would convince him, and it did not convince him.

01:09:29.000 That's a singular event.

01:09:31.000 So I said, I have no other...

01:09:33.000 Conversation with that's a singular event which you could say in one way or like it is Possible that someone could fake a singular event.

01:09:41.000 They can't fake whether or not the world's flat Right like that to me is the scariest one that there's so many people out there that believe the world is flat because You could you could literally see the curvature of the earth from a plane I mean you can get to parts of the you look at the images from the space station where they circle the moon and Or they circle the Earth,

01:10:00.000 rather.

01:10:01.000 I mean, there's many, many satellite images of the Earth in its entirety.

01:10:05.000 And one of the things that the argument was, is how come every photograph of the Earth is a compilation of photographs?

01:10:12.000 Well, because they're all taken from 300 miles up, the Earth is huge!

01:10:16.000 Yeah, the Earth is way bigger than 300 miles.

01:10:18.000 You have to take compilations.

01:10:20.000 You have to.

01:10:20.000 That's the only way to get images of the earth.

01:10:22.000 Except for the Apollo photo.

01:10:23.000 The Apollo 17 coming back has the earth.

01:10:25.000 That's the famous one that has Africa and Antarctica in view.

01:10:28.000 It's the full earth.

01:10:30.000 Very few full earths.

01:10:31.000 It's very hard to get a full earth single photo.

01:10:34.000 Of course.

01:10:35.000 And when we went to the moon, the moon missions, when they're coming back, think about it.

01:10:39.000 To get full earth, means the Sun is behind the astronauts on the way back to Earth, which means the side of the moon facing Earth is not lit.

01:10:49.000 But that's the side of the moon they came from.

01:10:52.000 So they want to visit the moon while it's sunlight there.

01:10:55.000 They don't want to need flashlights when they get to the moon.

01:10:57.000 So they visit the moon while there's sunlight.

01:11:00.000 Earth, the view of Earth, at that time will not be full.

01:11:04.000 So Apollo 17 was there long enough so that by the time they left, The moon was basically a new moon, Earth was full moon, Earth was full Earth, and then they got a full Earth photo.

01:11:16.000 Those packs that they have on their back that regulate their temperature, that allows them to walk on the surface of the moon when it's 250 degrees above zero?

01:11:23.000 Well, the side that's facing the sun is more than 200 degrees, and in the shadow it drops.

01:11:26.000 250 degrees below, right?

01:11:27.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:11:28.000 So can it switch back and forth between those two environments?

01:11:31.000 No, you just insulate.

01:11:33.000 The astronauts insulate it.

01:11:35.000 And so when you're insulated, those temperature extremes are not felt.

01:11:38.000 They're minimized.

01:11:39.000 And it's regulated by the pack in some sort of way.

01:11:42.000 Oh, yeah.

01:11:42.000 It's a life support.

01:11:43.000 The pack goes warm or cool.

01:11:44.000 It's not only oxygen and...

01:11:46.000 No, it maintains the temperature.

01:11:47.000 But it's capable, obviously, of warming and cooling.

01:11:50.000 In the face of what's going on, it maintains the temperature.

01:11:53.000 That's how you need to think about it.

01:11:54.000 Okay, so regardless of what...

01:11:56.000 It's not that it's cooling one side of you and heating the other side.

01:11:59.000 Right.

01:12:00.000 It's maintaining a temperature for you.

01:12:01.000 And when you are in space, like say where they're doing a space walk, like on the space station, same thing.

01:12:06.000 Same thing as being on the surface of the moon.

01:12:08.000 Because there's no atmosphere.

01:12:09.000 On Earth, you are in this cocoon, dare I say, of atmosphere.

01:12:15.000 So all the air in this room is the same temperature.

01:12:20.000 Because the air can communicate...

01:12:24.000 A difference in temperature to itself, equilibrating it across the whole room.

01:12:28.000 If you don't have air, then your temperature is measured by where's the energy coming from that's hitting you.

01:12:35.000 And if the sun is hitting you, all that energy will be raising your temperature, and the side of you that's not facing photons, that temperature will drop.

01:12:42.000 So you could survive it if you put yourself on a rotisserie, figure out the right rotation rate.

01:12:49.000 And even then, you'd have to spend pretty quick in order to balance it all out.

01:12:52.000 I'd have to calculate that, yeah.

01:12:53.000 You'd have to figure out what the right rate is.

01:12:55.000 Now, when you get in a debate with a guy like that, B.O.B. guy...

01:12:59.000 I don't debate people.

01:13:00.000 Okay.

01:13:01.000 Well, when you discuss, educate...

01:13:01.000 Because as the saying goes, when an argument lasts more than five minutes, both sides are wrong.

01:13:07.000 Well, that's a terrible saying.

01:13:08.000 It's definitely someone wrong and the other person's stubborn.

01:13:11.000 It could definitely last for hours.

01:13:13.000 That's not true at all!

01:13:15.000 It's true 80% of the time.

01:13:17.000 Oh, okay.

01:13:18.000 But you got into it with that rapper that thinks that...

01:13:21.000 I'll tell you why, B.O.B., because in his Twitter stream, he was saying he was invoking physics.

01:13:29.000 And I said, I gotta deal with this.

01:13:31.000 And so he showed a picture from Bear Mountain, which is a mountain in slightly upstate New York, where Manhattan is in the sightline of the summit of this mountain.

01:13:42.000 And he says, given the curvature of the earth and this formula, you should not be able to see Manhattan at all.

01:13:48.000 Okay?

01:13:49.000 Okay.

01:13:51.000 It depends on the height that you're viewing it from.

01:13:53.000 Well, thank you.

01:13:54.000 Well, so you do the math and it turns out Manhattan the island would not be visible at all.

01:14:01.000 That's true.

01:14:02.000 But any building taller than 15 stories Would rise up above the curvature of the earth and you will see it.

01:14:08.000 And if you look at the photo, you see the tall buildings rising above 15 stories.

01:14:13.000 It's exactly what the correct formula shows.

01:14:16.000 And not his formula, which was wrong and misinterpreted, claims to show.

01:14:22.000 Well, it's just bizarre because snipers have been using the literal curve of the earth to plan where bullets go.

01:14:30.000 That's how you plot out.

01:14:32.000 You have to when you shoot at a mile.

01:14:34.000 You know, when you're shooting like well out over a thousand yards, those factors...

01:14:38.000 So let me think.

01:14:39.000 A mile, I have to ask, how much curvature of the earth do you get after a mile?

01:14:44.000 It's an interesting question.

01:14:44.000 Well, you also get drop.

01:14:45.000 You get drop and curvature.

01:14:46.000 That'd be gravity drop.

01:14:47.000 Yes.

01:14:48.000 And then curve.

01:14:49.000 Yeah, so both of those.

01:14:51.000 Well, here's a thing to say to someone.

01:14:53.000 If you have a bullet in your hand and you shoot a gun, which bullet drops faster?

01:15:00.000 Generally, they get the wrong answer to that.

01:15:02.000 They drop at the exact same rate.

01:15:04.000 They'll hit the ground at the same time.

01:15:05.000 Exact same time.

01:15:06.000 And that blows people's minds.

01:15:08.000 They can't believe that's a fact.

01:15:08.000 But you do that in Physics 101. It's a physics demo.

01:15:14.000 So that's why physics is so important.

01:15:16.000 You know, people say, oh, let's take biology and this.

01:15:18.000 Great.

01:15:18.000 But don't leave out the physics, because that's where the fundamental operations of nature are to be found, of the physical universe are to be found.

01:15:26.000 So what you have is, you have a gun at one side, It's like a thing that shoots out a projectile, and we'll call it a gun, at one side of the stage.

01:15:34.000 And then you have like a little stuffed animal at the other side of the stage, held up with an electromagnet at the top of its head.

01:15:40.000 And these two are exactly the same level.

01:15:42.000 As the projectile comes out from this mini cannon, it trips an electric circuit that releases the electromagnet at the top of the stuffed animal.

01:15:52.000 The stuffed animal begins to fall.

01:15:54.000 The bullet moves horizontally, but also falls.

01:15:58.000 Because gravity is pulling them both.

01:16:00.000 And you watch the projectile curve down, you watch the stuffed animal curve down, and it hits the stuffed animal every single time.

01:16:07.000 The only factor that would change that would be if you put wings on the bullet and it was dealing with the wind.

01:16:13.000 Wings, yeah.

01:16:14.000 Right?

01:16:15.000 Yeah, wind would affect it.

01:16:16.000 Yeah.

01:16:17.000 Do they have bullets with wings?

01:16:18.000 I haven't seen that.

01:16:19.000 No, they don't.

01:16:19.000 Okay.

01:16:20.000 No, but if they did, you know, if like you shot the bullet and then they figured out a clink and the wings came out.

01:16:26.000 I saw that on some James Bond movie, I thought.

01:16:28.000 Probably.

01:16:29.000 Yeah, I'm sure.

01:16:30.000 Yeah.

01:16:31.000 It's just got to be frustrating for you when these things come back around.

01:16:36.000 Like, there was no flat earth theory when I was in high school.

01:16:39.000 Well, there are other things, though.

01:16:40.000 Think about it.

01:16:43.000 Oh, yeah.

01:16:44.000 The President Reagan.

01:16:45.000 Oh, let's talk about that.

01:16:46.000 Nancy Reagan had an astrologer.

01:16:49.000 Is that all nonsense?

01:16:49.000 So today, you don't see much of it.

01:16:52.000 Unless you talk to Steve Maxwell.

01:16:54.000 But it's still there.

01:16:55.000 It's just not manifesting in public policy.

01:16:59.000 Some people believe in it deeply.

01:17:00.000 I agree, but it's not up there in public policy.

01:17:03.000 That's what I'm saying.

01:17:03.000 Okay.

01:17:04.000 Well, Nancy Reagan was really the only one that made it public policy.

01:17:07.000 Sure.

01:17:07.000 Wasn't she?

01:17:08.000 But at the bar, do you hear people saying, what's your sign?

01:17:11.000 Oh, hell yeah.

01:17:12.000 Is that still a pickup of tonight?

01:17:13.000 Oh, hell yeah.

01:17:14.000 100%.

01:17:14.000 Don't know.

01:17:15.000 Let it not be true.

01:17:16.000 Especially.

01:17:16.000 Listen, dude, you're married.

01:17:17.000 On Tinder?

01:17:17.000 I know I've been married.

01:17:18.000 You're an older man.

01:17:19.000 I'm out of it.

01:17:19.000 Excuse me.

01:17:19.000 You don't understand.

01:17:20.000 If you want to get laid, you've got to talk nonsense to people. 0.98

01:17:22.000 I've got to talk nonsense to people.

01:17:23.000 Well, I'm a Scorpio, and if you're a Taurus, we should just stop talking now.

01:17:28.000 I misled myself.

01:17:30.000 I thought it was fading, but Nancy Reagan was the big proponent at the time.

01:17:35.000 It's nonsense astrology now. 0.78

01:17:36.000 It's not like someone who really understands astrological charts and can plot it, and the moon's in retrograde, and you were born, and Celsius is rising, and all that crazy crap that they tried. 0.94

01:17:47.000 I don't know what they're doing.

01:17:48.000 I was on a talk show with an astrologer.

01:17:49.000 A real one?

01:17:51.000 Apparently, yeah.

01:17:52.000 She's... 1.00

01:17:53.000 A real one or a fake one, right?

01:17:54.000 How do you know?

01:17:55.000 She says she's real.

01:17:56.000 Okay.

01:17:57.000 And I trust her because she talks about how fake other astrologers are.

01:18:02.000 Oh, she's a hater. 0.70

01:18:04.000 She's a hater. 0.93

01:18:05.000 Don't trust her.

01:18:06.000 And she was saying that the Kennedys all...

01:18:10.000 Died during a lunar eclipse.

01:18:13.000 Oh, scary.

01:18:14.000 And, you know, this is a very checkable statement.

01:18:17.000 She just says this and everyone's listening and believing and says, wow, that can't be by accident.

01:18:21.000 Well, I don't know when other Kennedys died, but I know when... 0.64

01:18:25.000 Jack Kennedy died, and it was November 22nd, 1963. So I don't need to know if there's an eclipse then, I just need to know what phase the moon is in.

01:18:34.000 Right.

01:18:35.000 Because you can only have a lunar eclipse when the moon is full.

01:18:37.000 So the moon was nowhere near full.

01:18:39.000 It was like two weeks away from full.

01:18:41.000 Even if there was an eclipse, It didn't happen during an eclipse, is my point.

01:18:47.000 Of course, because it was daylight.

01:18:50.000 Well, you can have a lunar eclipse at any time.

01:18:53.000 You can have a solar eclipse at any time, too.

01:18:56.000 It's just not for you.

01:18:57.000 It's just not for you.

01:18:58.000 It'd be for the other side of the Earth.

01:19:00.000 Somewhere else in the world.

01:19:00.000 Right, right.

01:19:01.000 Don't be so centric.

01:19:04.000 In fact, when there's a lunar eclipse, anyone on the side of the Earth that sees the moon will see the lunar eclipse.

01:19:10.000 So, by the way, lunar eclipses, you get several per year, by the way, partial eclipses as a minimum.

01:19:18.000 And every couple of years, there's full lunar eclipses.

01:19:21.000 So, these are not rare things to start.

01:19:23.000 They're not rare, okay?

01:19:24.000 So I said, you know, he was shot when the...

01:19:27.000 I forgot what moon it was.

01:19:28.000 First quarter moon.

01:19:30.000 And she said, oh, well, this counts if they're anywhere within two weeks on either side of the eclipse.

01:19:37.000 What?

01:19:38.000 That's a month.

01:19:39.000 That's a month out of 12. What?

01:19:41.000 No. 0.97

01:19:41.000 Let me just shut up here and let her keep... 0.97

01:19:43.000 What did she say? 0.95

01:19:45.000 We were sharing the time...

01:19:46.000 Pharrell had a talk show.

01:19:47.000 We were both on Pharrell's talk show.

01:19:49.000 And he likes science, by the way.

01:19:50.000 He wore a NASA shirt at the Academy Award group photo.

01:19:57.000 So I've got to give him some props for that.

01:20:00.000 So I just say I have nothing more to say here.

01:20:04.000 Hence, my argument with her lasted less than five minutes.

01:20:07.000 Now, when they're trying to decide what your personality would be and what you can dictate from your birth date and what time you were born, what are they exactly trying to connect?

01:20:21.000 So, I had a deeper awareness of this recently when I learned that people take the names of things very seriously.

01:20:34.000 Okay?

01:20:35.000 Names mean things to people, regardless of what the thing actually is.

01:20:42.000 Okay.

01:20:43.000 Okay?

01:20:44.000 Okay.

01:20:44.000 So what might we mean by this?

01:20:47.000 So, let's, like, astrophysically, I say we have this thing called dark matter.

01:20:51.000 We don't know what it is.

01:20:53.000 Well, it's got to be some kind of matter.

01:20:54.000 No!

01:20:56.000 No!

01:20:56.000 It shouldn't be called dark matter.

01:20:58.000 It should be called FRED. It shouldn't lead you to think anything about it, because we do not know what it is.

01:21:08.000 We shouldn't really call it dark gravity.

01:21:10.000 It is gravity that we have measured.

01:21:12.000 We don't know what's causing the gravity.

01:21:14.000 To call it dark matter implies you think it's matter.

01:21:17.000 Some people do, but we don't know.

01:21:19.000 So explain to me, what is this based on?

01:21:24.000 Like when you say dark matter, what is it based on?

01:21:27.000 I'd like to just call it Fred for now.

01:21:29.000 Okay, let's call it Fred.

01:21:30.000 And I'm saying we don't know what it is.

01:21:31.000 Right.

01:21:31.000 How is Fred measured?

01:21:33.000 We measure the gravity of this stuff.

01:21:34.000 Okay.

01:21:34.000 It's out there.

01:21:35.000 It's six times the gravity of stuff that's ordinary matter.

01:21:40.000 We don't know where it's coming from.

01:21:41.000 We don't know the source.

01:21:42.000 We don't know the origin.

01:21:42.000 Is it a parallel universe?

01:21:44.000 We don't know.

01:21:44.000 And how are we measuring it?

01:21:46.000 By its effect on the motions of objects.

01:21:50.000 So a certain strength of gravity will force you to move at a given speed as you near it and as you pull away.

01:21:56.000 And we see this in galaxies, galaxy clusters, binary galaxies.

01:22:02.000 And they've measured entire galaxies that are made completely out of this FRED. At least 80% of the force of gravity manifested in these galaxies is FRED, yes.

01:22:17.000 Why are they calling it dark matter?

01:22:19.000 They shouldn't, in my opinion.

01:22:20.000 They should call it dark gravity.

01:22:21.000 Because that's literally what it is.

01:22:23.000 So it's gravity that cannot be measured or gravity that's not completely understood.

01:22:27.000 It's not understood, correct.

01:22:28.000 So it's mysterious gravity.

01:22:29.000 Or it can't be completely measured.

01:22:31.000 No, we measure it.

01:22:32.000 But you can't narrow down what the root of it is.

01:22:34.000 We measure its gravity precisely.

01:22:35.000 Right.

01:22:35.000 Okay, so you measure it, but you can't determine the origin?

01:22:38.000 Because we don't know what it is.

01:22:40.000 Right.

01:22:41.000 My point is, because someone called it dark matter.

01:22:45.000 It has swayed everybody into thinking that it is matter of some kind.

01:22:51.000 It has constrained people's thoughts about how to think about this problem.

01:22:57.000 Okay, so now, the ancients looked up and they saw these stars.

01:23:03.000 And they put their culture on the sky.

01:23:07.000 So there's centaurs.

01:23:09.000 There's, you know, there's a centaur archer, so it's Sagittarius.

01:23:17.000 We have Orion the hunter.

01:23:19.000 We have Taurus.

01:23:20.000 We have sea serpents.

01:23:21.000 We have rivers.

01:23:23.000 We have stuff that mattered to people back then.

01:23:25.000 Okay?

01:23:26.000 We have Aquarius.

01:23:28.000 Okay?

01:23:30.000 What is it?

01:23:30.000 What's the water bearer?

01:23:31.000 Oh, the water bearer.

01:23:32.000 That must mean that when the sun is in Aquarius, it's going to rain more on Earth.

01:23:38.000 Why?

01:23:40.000 Because the ancients called it the water bearer.

01:23:45.000 And all of a sudden, the name reigns supreme.

01:23:50.000 Over the fact that it is a random set of stars, widely separated in space, that don't even look like people holding a pitcher of water.

01:24:02.000 Of the 88 constellations, about six of them look like what you're told they're supposed to look like.

01:24:07.000 The rest require opium-induced imagination to establish what they are.

01:24:15.000 So, they all have names.

01:24:18.000 Then you go to the astrologers' tables, and they say, oh, this is the rain sign, or this is a drought sign, and they take the names of things, and those names are what they interpret, based on where the moon is, the sun is, where the planets are, and whatever the angle configurations there are,

01:24:36.000 and each angle has a certain latitude over which they'll count it as a hit.

01:24:41.000 Rather than as a miss.

01:24:43.000 And so this gives extraordinary capacity of the astrologer to tell you what's going on in your life. 0.99

01:24:51.000 Oh, so it's bullshit. 0.84

01:24:59.000 But they did have this real fascinating connection with these certain constellations and all of the different things that they thought were attached to these certain constellations. 0.98

01:25:10.000 You know what it'd be like?

01:25:11.000 It'd be like a geologist going up to the border of Colorado trying to understand the shape as a geologist.

01:25:18.000 Hmm.

01:25:19.000 It's an arbitrary shape.

01:25:22.000 Colorado is a square on a curved surface.

01:25:25.000 It's amazing how much confirmation bias is attached to astrology, though.

01:25:27.000 It's not bounded by a river.

01:25:28.000 Yeah, that's right.

01:25:30.000 Wiki has a great website on cognitive bias.

01:25:37.000 And there's like 20 or so well-known by every person.

01:25:43.000 This should be a course called Cognitive Bias 101. Forget college.

01:25:48.000 Every high school should have a course, Cognitive Bias.

01:25:51.000 And the entire course should be about all the ways we fool ourselves.

01:25:56.000 Don't you think that would be very important?

01:25:57.000 And you know what science is?

01:25:58.000 I've tweeted this too.

01:26:00.000 Science.

01:26:01.000 The only point of the scientific method...

01:26:06.000 Is to make sure you are not fooled into thinking that something is true that is not, or thinking that something is not true that is.

01:26:18.000 That is the only point.

01:26:20.000 And therefore, the scientific method could be anything you invent.

01:26:23.000 Just take better notes.

01:26:25.000 Take a chart recorder.

01:26:26.000 Be more awake next time you take the data.

01:26:29.000 Bring a friend to observe it with you.

01:26:30.000 Whatever it takes to minimize the chances that you will misinterpret what you're looking at so that you don't think something is true that is not or think something is not true that is.

01:26:43.000 Do whatever it takes To support that mission statement.

01:26:48.000 That's what the scientific method is, and that's what we do as scientists, and that's why when you bring all of these things that people do, so it's the astrology and the crystal healers and the therapeutic touch people.

01:27:04.000 Oh, don't mess with them, dude.

01:27:05.000 That's real.

01:27:06.000 No, that's real.

01:27:07.000 You don't even understand.

01:27:10.000 I'm a healer.

01:27:10.000 I'm an intuitive healer.

01:27:11.000 It goes on and on and on and on.

01:27:14.000 Yeah.

01:27:14.000 And these are the things that fail in the double-blind science.

01:27:17.000 And why do you do double-blind?

01:27:18.000 So you don't fool yourself into thinking something is true.

01:27:21.000 That's why you do double-blind.

01:27:23.000 And if you don't, and you want something to be true, even if you're surprised by something that might have been true, that you were against, Still, you need someone else to check it.

01:27:32.000 And you only get an emergent scientific truth when you have agreement among different people's experiments.

01:27:39.000 So even if you get a result that you're happy with, it is not yet a scientific truth until you can confirm it by other people who have no investment in you, who don't care about you.

01:27:50.000 In fact, we're trying to show that you're wrong.

01:27:53.000 This is what made Einstein so great, because no one believed his relativity, and they kept devising ever more accurate experiments to show he was wrong, and it ended up showing that he was right by ever higher precision.

01:28:05.000 Do you think that we're doing ourselves a disservice by not teaching people how the mind works, how confirmation bias works?

01:28:12.000 And shouldn't that be a big part?

01:28:13.000 We're teaching the wrong things in school.

01:28:14.000 I'm working on this.

01:28:15.000 What are you doing?

01:28:16.000 No, no.

01:28:16.000 In a few years, I'm going to have something.

01:28:18.000 Why not?

01:28:18.000 No, because I'm busy.

01:28:20.000 My kids are in school right now.

01:28:21.000 I'm busy.

01:28:21.000 Excuse me.

01:28:22.000 I can't be.

01:28:23.000 I can't.

01:28:24.000 I understand.

01:28:25.000 But let's discuss it because I think it took me a long time.

01:28:29.000 The curriculum has to include an entire course on cognitive bias.

01:28:32.000 Yes.

01:28:32.000 If we are going to emerge as adults no longer susceptible to charlatans.

01:28:39.000 Yes.

01:28:39.000 Okay?

01:28:40.000 Who are either well-meaning and just misguided or who are explicitly exploiting your ignorance.

01:28:46.000 And it's a major factor in our culture.

01:28:49.000 A major factor.

01:28:50.000 Yes.

01:28:50.000 When it comes to politicians.

01:28:51.000 It drives.

01:28:51.000 It's a major factor when it comes to bosses.

01:28:54.000 It's a major factor when it comes to how you choose what you do for a living, how you choose to live your life.

01:28:59.000 All of human interaction and human interaction with nature itself.

01:29:00.000 Yeah.

01:29:00.000 I mean, we are constantly trying to manipulate and control other people's biases, behaviors, the way they think, the way they act.

01:29:07.000 And we're very vulnerable in some senses because this is not something that's taught to us at an early age.

01:29:12.000 You know, and I think that it takes a long time to figure it out on your own.

01:29:17.000 And I've often thought, like, man, why wasn't I explained this when I was young?

01:29:22.000 Yeah, because the curriculum wasn't thinking about that.

01:29:25.000 Yeah.

01:29:25.000 Well, we're thinking about just giving people facts instead of teaching them how to manage your mind.

01:29:29.000 We're thinking that your head is this vessel into which you pour information.

01:29:33.000 And nowhere and at no time are we trained how to turn a fact into knowledge, knowledge into wisdom, and wisdom into insight.

01:29:48.000 I think that full sequence needs to be in there in the academic system.

01:29:54.000 K through 12, 13 through 16. 13, 14, yeah.

01:29:58.000 College.

01:29:58.000 It's got to be in there somewhere.

01:30:00.000 Without it, you're just this vessel of facts.

01:30:03.000 And even the people we call smart...

01:30:06.000 In class, these are people who get A's on everything and they know everything, but do they have the deepest insight?

01:30:13.000 Do they really understand what it is that they're putting back on the test?

01:30:18.000 I don't think all of them do.

01:30:20.000 I think they have good short-term memory, some of them, and they do well on the exams because of that fact.

01:30:25.000 So they're good at acquiring data and maintaining it?

01:30:29.000 Acquiring information and then bringing it back on command.

01:30:33.000 Not all.

01:30:33.000 Some are deep thinkers, and I don't want to take that away from them.

01:30:36.000 All I'm saying is that the curriculum, I think, needs these other dimensions of survival, really.

01:30:44.000 That's what it is.

01:30:45.000 It's survival in a world.

01:30:48.000 And when a scientist says this is true, you can ask, well, why do you think that's true?

01:30:53.000 Exercise some healthy skepticism.

01:30:55.000 I don't have a problem with that.

01:30:56.000 Say, because of, look at this evidence.

01:30:57.000 Do you know how to read evidence, by the way?

01:30:59.000 And look at this evidence.

01:31:00.000 Look at this chart.

01:31:01.000 Look at this experiment.

01:31:02.000 And this is why we conclude, overwhelmingly, that this is going to happen in our future.

01:31:07.000 Ah, you pointy-headed scientist, what do you know?

01:31:11.000 By the way, give me my cell phone so I can call my grandmother, okay?

01:31:14.000 While I use GPS satellites to know when to make a left turn.

01:31:18.000 Right.

01:31:18.000 I'm going to call my astrologist.

01:31:21.000 To tell them these scientists got their head up their ass, right? 1.00

01:31:25.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:31:27.000 Well, I think also it would be really beneficial to teach people how to manage perspective and how to look at life in a way that's going to be beneficial to you.

01:31:37.000 We're not really given very many tools to manage the mind.

01:31:40.000 Like philosophy.

01:31:42.000 There's some philosophy classes that can help that.

01:31:44.000 Sure, but even philosophy...

01:31:46.000 Not all philosophy, but...

01:31:47.000 Yeah, it's very rare that they...

01:31:48.000 Philosophy of life, you know, just...

01:31:49.000 How to think about decision making and the causes and effects and consequences.

01:31:55.000 There's not enough of that either.

01:31:56.000 Maybe they're relying on that to happen at home.

01:31:58.000 But not all homes are intact.

01:32:01.000 In fact, perhaps most are broken homes or separated homes.

01:32:04.000 So I think the school system...

01:32:08.000 School needs to be rethought, and I'm trying to think that through.

01:32:11.000 It'll be a few more years.

01:32:13.000 Well, anytime you talk about alternative schooling, people look at you like you're some sort of a hippie freak who wants your kids to eat granola and live in the mountains and get their own spring water.

01:32:21.000 You know what I mean?

01:32:22.000 That's what they think of when you say alternative schooling.

01:32:24.000 Right, right.

01:32:25.000 I'll train them at home.

01:32:26.000 Oh, man.

01:32:27.000 Good luck. 0.99

01:32:28.000 As soon as you say homeschooling, oh, you're a religious nut. 0.87

01:32:30.000 I mean, that's immediately the perception.

01:32:32.000 That's the fastest growing sector of the homeschooling sector.

01:32:35.000 They don't want you clouding your head with all that evolution talk.

01:32:38.000 Right, right, right.

01:32:39.000 Do you ever talk to that Ken Ham guy?

01:32:41.000 Have you ever sat down with that guy?

01:32:42.000 No, but Bill Nye has.

01:32:44.000 I mean, Bill Nye debated him.

01:32:45.000 I mean, I can't debate people.

01:32:47.000 It's not what I do.

01:32:47.000 You just can't do it.

01:32:48.000 I just can't do it.

01:32:49.000 It's not what I do.

01:32:51.000 I'm an educator, and I want to educate you so you can think for yourself.

01:32:54.000 Then I go away.

01:32:56.000 That's it.

01:32:57.000 To debate someone implies that whoever is most convincing is correct.

01:33:02.000 Right.

01:33:02.000 That's not how knowledge works.

01:33:05.000 Right.

01:33:05.000 It's just too much charisma involved.

01:33:06.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:33:07.000 Whatever charisma level I have or not have, I don't want to hinge what is true on that fact.

01:33:14.000 Right.

01:33:14.000 Alright, so I'm an educator.

01:33:15.000 I will teach you the causes and effects of knowing what science is and how and why it works.

01:33:23.000 Which is why it's critical that you continue to criticize science fiction movies.

01:33:26.000 It's very important.

01:33:27.000 Don't you back off now.

01:33:29.000 We need you.

01:33:29.000 There's a lot of people that wouldn't know that that Chinese space station is nowhere near the American space station.

01:33:34.000 And that her hair would be moving all over the place. 0.94

01:33:37.000 Her hair would be everywhere.

01:33:37.000 Yeah.

01:33:38.000 Oh, but my favorite one is, remember when he's at the end of a tether?

01:33:41.000 And she wants to save him, but she doesn't have enough oxygen to do it.

01:33:45.000 So he lets go of the tether.

01:33:47.000 Oh, yeah.

01:33:47.000 And that way she can't save him before she can save herself.

01:33:51.000 Right.

01:33:51.000 And then he flies away.

01:33:54.000 It's like, no.

01:33:55.000 They're like floating in space.

01:33:59.000 Yeah.

01:33:59.000 He lets go of the tether.

01:34:00.000 It just stays there in his hand.

01:34:01.000 Yeah.

01:34:02.000 He would be right there.

01:34:03.000 He would be right there.

01:34:03.000 Nothing.

01:34:04.000 He lets go.

01:34:05.000 Nothing happened.

01:34:05.000 Wouldn't be like a bungee cord.

01:34:06.000 Now, if she were swinging him in circles, and he'd fly off at a tangent, but that's not what was happening.

01:34:13.000 Nor were they rotating.

01:34:14.000 I would check what they were relative to Earth below.

01:34:17.000 That was not what was going on.

01:34:20.000 She could have just given a slight tug, and then he would have drifted towards her.

01:34:23.000 That could have even been a little romantic.

01:34:24.000 Just a little baby tug.

01:34:25.000 Yeah, baby tug would do it. 0.96

01:34:27.000 They would slowly drift towards one another.

01:34:29.000 No, I hate that movie.

01:34:29.000 And then the helmets would hit, you know, and then they would...

01:34:32.000 That movie makes me mad.

01:34:32.000 Oh, and then the helmets would break, and then they would be freezing to death.

01:34:36.000 Instantly, right?

01:34:36.000 You'd suffocate.

01:34:38.000 Oh, that too. 0.71

01:34:39.000 And then freeze to death, right?

01:34:40.000 What movie nailed that?

01:34:42.000 There was one movie where they were off in space, or they overdid it?

01:34:45.000 Well, there was...

01:34:46.000 People want you to, like, explode in space.

01:34:49.000 Yeah.

01:34:49.000 No, no.

01:34:50.000 I mean...

01:34:51.000 Well, they want you to freeze solid, too, instantly.

01:34:53.000 Yeah, right.

01:34:54.000 No.

01:34:54.000 And even in, was it Armageddon, where the sun rose over the comet, and he didn't have his visor down, and he was blinded by the sun!

01:35:05.000 It's like the same sun in our daytime sky.

01:35:09.000 The atmosphere doesn't protect you in any way?

01:35:11.000 The Earth's atmosphere takes out, you know, a few percent.

01:35:14.000 That's it?

01:35:15.000 Oh, yeah.

01:35:15.000 Oh, God.

01:35:16.000 A few percent.

01:35:16.000 Well, in the middle of daylight at the top of the sky, it's a few percent.

01:35:21.000 Now, he'll get more UV. He'll get more UV. That's important.

01:35:25.000 Get a little more brown.

01:35:26.000 Yeah, but...

01:35:29.000 Yeah, death in space is nowhere near as spectacular as movies would have you think.

01:35:35.000 Yeah, they make it seem like if you take that helmet off, you just immediately freeze up.

01:35:38.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:35:39.000 No, no.

01:35:39.000 I mean, you can go into very...

01:35:41.000 What happens is there's nothing making you cold other than you radiating heat from your skin.

01:35:48.000 Oh.

01:35:48.000 So you'll only get as cold as quickly as you can radiate away heat.

01:35:52.000 That's all.

01:35:53.000 So it would take quite a while.

01:35:54.000 Oh, yeah!

01:35:55.000 You just have no air, so you'd suffocate quicker.

01:35:58.000 Yeah, you'd suffocate.

01:35:58.000 Oh yeah, you'd suffocate long before you saw anything like that happen.

01:36:02.000 So just think about it.

01:36:04.000 There's nothing touching you that's making you cold.

01:36:07.000 It has to wait for you to radiate away.

01:36:10.000 That's what's happening, okay?

01:36:12.000 And so, yeah, you'll feel very cold very quickly, but you're not going to die from that fast.

01:36:19.000 Now, when Stephen Hawking...

01:36:21.000 Oh, by the way, you also have dissolved gases in your body, which will try to come...

01:36:25.000 Because in the vacuum of space, you don't have the air pressure tamping down the dissolved gases.

01:36:31.000 So you take away the air pressure, then the dissolved gases will begin to bubble out of your blood.

01:36:37.000 And it's the same problem when you have the bends.

01:36:39.000 When you come up from low altitude and you go to lesser pressure.

01:36:44.000 So you want to do that slowly, so that it's a very slow thing, but the hazards of...

01:36:49.000 Why would you be butt naked in space?

01:36:53.000 I mean, you're going to have a space suit on.

01:36:55.000 Well, you just want to prove to everybody that you can do it.

01:36:57.000 Well, they did it in 2001 in Space Odyssey.

01:36:59.000 They basically did it right.

01:37:01.000 The guy, without his helmet, went through the airlock and just held his breath.

01:37:05.000 Oh, okay.

01:37:06.000 Yeah, that's all he did.

01:37:07.000 Oh, well, that's way more reasonable.

01:37:09.000 Well, because it was a reasonable movie.

01:37:11.000 It was a reasonable movie.

01:37:12.000 It was a good movie.

01:37:12.000 It had real advisors.

01:37:14.000 Stanley Kubrick.

01:37:14.000 Well, he was a really interesting guy, too, because he was a mathematician.

01:37:17.000 I didn't know that about him, but I knew he cared about that level of detail.

01:37:21.000 He used to do complex math for fun.

01:37:23.000 So there's a failed bit of physics in 2001. You want to hear it?

01:37:26.000 Oh, yeah.

01:37:27.000 One day I'll talk about 2001. The monkey suits?

01:37:30.000 The monolith?

01:37:32.000 Which was it?

01:37:32.000 No, no.

01:37:33.000 So, remember when he's on one of the moon crafts, and he's orbiting the moon, and they give him food, all right?

01:37:40.000 And there's a tray of nasty food, obviously.

01:37:42.000 It's like astronaut food.

01:37:44.000 Remember, this is 1968, so everything here is a visual taste of the future.

01:37:52.000 So, he has another packet where he extends a straw from that plastic packet.

01:37:58.000 Okay?

01:37:58.000 Oh, there he is.

01:37:59.000 Excellent.

01:38:00.000 You're getting a good photo.

01:38:01.000 You're good.

01:38:01.000 Your boy is good right here.

01:38:03.000 Okay?

01:38:03.000 Yeah, there he is.

01:38:04.000 So, he sucks up the straw. 0.99

01:38:06.000 Right.

01:38:06.000 And this is in zero G, so stuff is floating around.

01:38:08.000 He sucks up the straw.

01:38:09.000 Then he goes to another straw, and the liquid in the straw goes back down.

01:38:14.000 That's gravity. 1.00

01:38:15.000 Oh, they fucked up. 1.00

01:38:16.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:38:17.000 Oh. 1.00

01:38:19.000 He totally fucked up. 0.99

01:38:21.000 No, so that one, obviously, he can't get everything right. 1.00

01:38:24.000 But it's fun to notice the things he couldn't get right, or didn't think to get right.

01:38:28.000 So, to me, it's a celebration.

01:38:30.000 Here's another one.

01:38:30.000 Okay.

01:38:31.000 The rotation rate of the space station.

01:38:35.000 I calculated that, and I calculated what g-force would you have on the outer perimeter of the space station in 2001. And I did the math, and I forgot the exact number, something like between two and three g's.

01:38:51.000 And I said, why would you do that? 1.00

01:38:52.000 That's stupid. 1.00

01:38:53.000 You wouldn't do that. 1.00

01:38:54.000 And I realized, if they rotated it at the rate that would give you one g, it would be way too slow to make an interesting scene.

01:39:03.000 So I gave it to him.

01:39:04.000 I said, I'll give you three Gs.

01:39:05.000 Because the Strauss Waltz, as the thing turns, and the space shuttle that's approaching it matches its rotation rate with the opening in the center of the space station.

01:39:16.000 This whole ballet, this entire ballet...

01:39:20.000 Wow, that's cool again.

01:39:22.000 ...happens at a stately but real pace.

01:39:25.000 Okay?

01:39:26.000 But that pace gives him three G's of gravity.

01:39:29.000 So it's 3x the correct pace.

01:39:31.000 The correct pace would be much slower.

01:39:32.000 It might have been two and a half, but I forgot the number.

01:39:34.000 But it's multiples too high.

01:39:37.000 So that is possible?

01:39:37.000 But it looks good.

01:39:38.000 So I let him do it.

01:39:39.000 It looks good.

01:39:41.000 Fine.

01:39:41.000 That's artistic license.

01:39:43.000 That's Mark Twainian license, where he says, first get your facts straight, then distort them at your leisure.

01:39:49.000 That is what I'm holding artists to.

01:39:52.000 So now, when you're looking at a space station, they're in zero gravity when they're in the space station.

01:39:58.000 No, they are in 1G on the edge of the space station.

01:40:01.000 On the edge?

01:40:02.000 Yeah, on the turning edge.

01:40:04.000 Yeah, that's the whole point.

01:40:04.000 You mean that thing?

01:40:05.000 I mean a real space station.

01:40:07.000 Oh, our space station?

01:40:08.000 Yes.

01:40:09.000 Oh, so it's zero G, yes.

01:40:11.000 Right.

01:40:11.000 But it is possible...

01:40:13.000 It's zero G because it is in free fall towards Earth.

01:40:17.000 So it's constantly in free fall, but it's just going around the...

01:40:20.000 Yeah, it's in free fall towards Earth, but it's going sideways so fast that the amount that it has fallen equals precisely the curvature of the Earth.

01:40:30.000 Uh-huh.

01:40:31.000 Is that more proof that the Earth is round?

01:40:34.000 Is it?

01:40:35.000 If you've had physics 101, yes.

01:40:37.000 But is it possible to generate gravity in a space station?

01:40:41.000 Only if you rotate it.

01:40:42.000 Only if you rotate it.

01:40:42.000 It's not gravity, it's simulating gravity.

01:40:45.000 But according to Einstein, they're indistinguishable from one another, so you can do it.

01:40:48.000 So it is possible to do something where you can send people into deep space and generate gravity through some sort of rotation?

01:40:55.000 At least two ways.

01:40:56.000 One of them you just rotate it, and all the good sci-fi movies have rotating sections of a space station.

01:41:02.000 Right.

01:41:03.000 And there's some that have rotating opposite ways so that they can spin up against one another, right?

01:41:09.000 And so there's some clever ideas out there with space stations of the future for long voyages.

01:41:15.000 Because I had Commander Hatfield on the podcast.

01:41:17.000 Cool.

01:41:18.000 Who came back from space and was talking about the excruciating difficulty he had readjusting to gravity after being in a zero-gravity environment for so long.

01:41:28.000 He's just showing off because he's, like, setting records for being...

01:41:31.000 Wasn't it like six months, I believe?

01:41:33.000 Yeah, it was a long time.

01:41:34.000 He showed, yeah, I couldn't handle life with you lowly Earth people. 1.00

01:41:38.000 He was talking about his body.

01:41:40.000 It took over a year before his bone density came back.

01:41:43.000 Well, this is partly addressed in the film The Martian Kid.

01:41:50.000 He's born on Mars, comes to Earth.

01:41:53.000 Which one's that?

01:41:54.000 Born on Mars?

01:41:55.000 Yeah, the kid born on Mars.

01:41:56.000 Get your guy to research this now.

01:41:59.000 What's the name of the movie?

01:42:01.000 It's...

01:42:01.000 Recent?

01:42:01.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:42:02.000 Oh, The Space Between Us.

01:42:03.000 Oh, what the hell's that?

01:42:05.000 You gotta get out more, dude.

01:42:06.000 I do.

01:42:07.000 Yeah.

01:42:07.000 But that's beside the point.

01:42:08.000 So this is a Martian colony where the first community...

01:42:11.000 What movie is this?

01:42:12.000 This came out a couple months ago.

01:42:14.000 Really?

01:42:14.000 Oh my gosh.

01:42:15.000 Oh yeah.

01:42:16.000 Oh man, I'm so behind.

01:42:17.000 Is this out on iTunes yet?

01:42:18.000 So that's the Martian colony.

01:42:19.000 And one of the female astronauts they send... 1.00

01:42:23.000 That one there happens to be, they learn, is pregnant, and they can't bring her back, and so she gives birth on Mars, and the first person who is ever born on Mars.

01:42:36.000 And then they keep it a secret, and then he comes back as a teenager that falls in love.

01:42:41.000 See, there's the fetus.

01:42:43.000 So, anyhow, he has a hard time on Earth, because his heart...

01:42:49.000 Developed in Martian gravity, which is only 38% Earth gravity.

01:42:52.000 Oh, wow.

01:42:53.000 And then on Earth, he just couldn't, they had to, you know, figure out what to do with him.

01:42:57.000 Wow.

01:42:58.000 Yeah, that's on Mars.

01:42:59.000 The kid was born on Mars.

01:43:00.000 Okay.

01:43:01.000 Yeah.

01:43:02.000 Don't spoil alert me, Jamie. 0.96

01:43:03.000 Shut that up. 1.00

01:43:04.000 That's why, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:43:05.000 So, what were we talking about?

01:43:08.000 Generating gravity in stellar travel.

01:43:09.000 Yeah, so one way is to rotate it up.

01:43:10.000 Another way is if you're headed somewhere, you just have a huge fuel tank and just always run your rockets.

01:43:18.000 Oh, so you always have G-force.

01:43:20.000 There's always a G-force.

01:43:21.000 Oh, interesting.

01:43:22.000 So if you accelerate at 1G towards a destination, then you'll always feel Earth's gravity, and you'll get there awesomely fast.

01:43:31.000 But you would have to have so much fuel or rely on something new.

01:43:34.000 Well, you need filling stations en route, this sort of thing.

01:43:36.000 And if you do this, you accelerate 1G halfway there, then you turn the spaceship around, then you decelerate at 1G, For the other half of the trip, so that when you get there, you're not whizzing past it in a flyby.

01:43:49.000 Okay?

01:43:50.000 That way you have 1G the whole trip.

01:43:52.000 That's how you would do that.

01:43:53.000 Wow.

01:43:54.000 So the momentum when you would precisely hit halfway there.

01:43:58.000 If you accelerate it at 1G, oh my gosh, you hit near the speed of light very quickly.

01:44:02.000 Whoa.

01:44:02.000 I mean, I forgot.

01:44:03.000 What is it?

01:44:04.000 I have to calculate it.

01:44:05.000 But it's...

01:44:08.000 The acceleration of Earth's gravity, if you actually move that fast, that's head snapping.

01:44:14.000 Now, would they have to have some sort of a crazy propulsion system in order to do something along those lines? 1.00

01:44:19.000 How fast will 1G get you there?

01:44:22.000 One year.

01:44:23.000 Yes, so...

01:44:24.000 Wow.

01:44:27.000 1G would take...

01:44:28.000 One year plus the distance in light years.

01:44:31.000 Approximate Centauri 4.2 light years, for example, would take 5.2 years.

01:44:35.000 So the distance in light years plus a year.

01:44:37.000 Wow!

01:44:38.000 That's crazy.

01:44:39.000 So that gets you basically 20-25% the speed of light.

01:44:44.000 But what happens if you just run into stuff on the way?

01:44:46.000 There's a lot of stuff out there, right?

01:44:48.000 Isn't that a giant issue in getting to Mars?

01:44:50.000 Well, space is actually quite empty, but if you do hit something, that's the end of everything.

01:44:54.000 So it's a low-risk, high-consequence...

01:44:58.000 Thing that you gotta put in play.

01:45:01.000 How much of a risk is the space junk that we've left in the environment?

01:45:04.000 We were freaking out the other day about how many pieces are up there.

01:45:07.000 There's countless thousands of bits of space junk.

01:45:11.000 From chips of paint that fell off of the space.

01:45:14.000 To bolts.

01:45:15.000 To bolts and nails and retro rocket boosters.

01:45:18.000 Yeah, it's all up there.

01:45:20.000 And I'm wondering whether we haven't been visited by aliens yet because they saw the space junk orbiting Earth and said, forget that.

01:45:26.000 I'm going to visit some other planet.

01:45:28.000 I'm going to risk my life.

01:45:29.000 Crazy, short-sighted approach to space travel.

01:45:32.000 Yeah, so if you bring up the NASA Orbital Debris Office website, you can actually see the debris that NASA's tracking.

01:45:39.000 Basic, almost in real time.

01:45:41.000 It's crazy how much there is.

01:45:42.000 And it's like a beehive around the Earth.

01:45:45.000 So, you got it?

01:45:48.000 Yeah, there it is.

01:45:48.000 Okay?

01:45:49.000 That's the debris around the Earth that NASA tracks.

01:45:54.000 There's a failed Japanese experiment to try to... 0.99

01:45:57.000 And that outer ring that you see, that's the altitude of geosynchronous satellites.

01:46:02.000 And that inner...

01:46:03.000 There should be a video of that.

01:46:08.000 Go to the bottom right.

01:46:09.000 Go to the bottom right.

01:46:10.000 Right there.

01:46:10.000 Click on that.

01:46:11.000 Play that video.

01:46:13.000 It's not a video.

01:46:14.000 Why isn't that a video?

01:46:15.000 I'm sure there is a video somewhere.

01:46:17.000 Yeah, there's a video on that site.

01:46:18.000 So you can just see...

01:46:22.000 The movement of these pieces and it's so launch windows have to know when to not hit stuff.

01:46:27.000 So when you have launch, it's not just is everything aligned, right?

01:46:31.000 Will you successfully get past the debris?

01:46:35.000 And there was a Japanese, they had an experiment to try to capture it with nets. 1.00

01:46:41.000 It was a recent mission.

01:46:43.000 Didn't work.

01:46:47.000 The problem is the low orbit stuff will eventually fall in and burn up.

01:46:51.000 The high earth orbit stuff will never go away.

01:46:53.000 There's nothing to destroy it.

01:46:56.000 And so they can't capture that stuff?

01:46:57.000 Well, you need a very clever...

01:46:59.000 The stuff is moving 18,000 miles an hour.

01:47:02.000 So, what's your net?

01:47:04.000 What are you doing?

01:47:06.000 That's so crazy.

01:47:07.000 Oh, yeah.

01:47:07.000 There you go.

01:47:08.000 There's the video.

01:47:09.000 Oh, my God.

01:47:10.000 Go higher res on that.

01:47:12.000 I know there's a higher res.

01:47:14.000 Oh, God.

01:47:16.000 That's 1080?

01:47:18.000 No, it's not.

01:47:19.000 It's not from NASA's YouTube panel.

01:47:20.000 It's from some others.

01:47:21.000 Oh, okay.

01:47:21.000 Somebody else.

01:47:21.000 But that's the kind...

01:47:22.000 So all of that's debris that you're looking at there.

01:47:25.000 So anyway, yeah.

01:47:26.000 So your concern for debris is well-placed.

01:47:28.000 And we may be putting so much debris in space that we will close ourselves off from space travel because of the dangers it would take to get through our own garbage heap.

01:47:43.000 That's so crazy!

01:47:44.000 And this was all started in the 1940s, 1950s, like when did they start shooting stuff up there?

01:47:50.000 Oh, no, 1950s, Sputnik.

01:47:52.000 Yeah, 1957. That was the first satellite, right?

01:47:55.000 First anything, yeah, first anything in orbit.

01:47:57.000 Oh, God.

01:47:58.000 And that short amount of time.

01:48:00.000 Yeah.

01:48:01.000 That's crazy. 0.83

01:48:02.000 Yeah, it's like a dumpster.

01:48:05.000 60 years.

01:48:06.000 Planetary dumpster.

01:48:07.000 They ruined the whole thing.

01:48:08.000 Ruined the whole thing.

01:48:08.000 They've had it for billions of years.

01:48:10.000 In 60 years, they filled it up with junk.

01:48:12.000 Yep.

01:48:12.000 Okay, there it is.

01:48:13.000 Oh my god, that's terrifying.

01:48:16.000 See that?

01:48:16.000 Yeah, that's going around the earth.

01:48:18.000 Oh my god.

01:48:19.000 All of that.

01:48:20.000 Oh my god.

01:48:21.000 And has anybody ever hit anything while trying to do something?

01:48:24.000 Well, so what exacerbates it is, remember when China, when was this, 2004, 2003?

01:48:34.000 China destroyed one of its own satellites?

01:48:38.000 Yeah, what was that about?

01:48:40.000 I remember some of that.

01:48:41.000 Yeah, yeah, and they basically did a kinetic kill on a satellite.

01:48:46.000 So a kinetic kill, for those who don't know, is you don't need explosives if the speed of the projectile and its kinetic energy is higher than the energy that would be in the explosive shell itself.

01:48:58.000 Oh.

01:49:00.000 So it's a fascinating calculation to make.

01:49:04.000 So here it is.

01:49:05.000 So I have this delivery system with a warhead and I put some bomb device in the warhead and you can calculate how much energy that is.

01:49:14.000 Then I send it and it hits and it blows something up.

01:49:16.000 But suppose I send this thing really, really fast.

01:49:20.000 Really, really, really fast.

01:49:22.000 I can calculate how much kinetic energy this thing has.

01:49:26.000 There will be a point where I give it so much kinetic energy, the kinetic energy is greater than the chemical energy of the conventional explosive that I put in the warhead.

01:49:36.000 Oh, like Shoemaker-Levy.

01:49:39.000 Well, for example.

01:49:40.000 I'll give you a terrestrial example.

01:49:44.000 It's what we call a high-speed collision.

01:49:47.000 This is more than you bargained for in our time together, but I'm going to tell you.

01:49:50.000 No, I didn't.

01:49:51.000 Okay, you ready?

01:49:51.000 Perfect.

01:49:52.000 The argument for the longest time that the craters on the moon were calderas from volcanoes and not asteroid impacts, the geologists argue strenuously these can't be asteroid impacts.

01:50:08.000 They've got to be calderas, these thousand craters on the moon.

01:50:12.000 Why?

01:50:14.000 Because everyone is a perfect circle.

01:50:18.000 And if asteroids are coming from space, they would come from all angles.

01:50:23.000 And if you come in at a shallow angle, you get an oval.

01:50:27.000 And even shallower would be more oval.

01:50:29.000 So you'd have a whole range of circles and ovals and ellipses.

01:50:32.000 You don't see that.

01:50:34.000 They must be calderas.

01:50:37.000 Explain a caldera.

01:50:38.000 It's a volcano that explodes and it leads a crater.

01:50:40.000 Volcanic crater.

01:50:41.000 Like Yellowstone.

01:50:42.000 Yeah, it's a volcanic crater, that's all.

01:50:46.000 And it's a little more poetic, a caldera.

01:50:49.000 But it's a crater left by a volcano that has exploded.

01:50:53.000 Like the boom was so big, the mountain's gone, and now it's just a big hole.

01:50:56.000 Or at the top of the mountain, there's a crater at the top of the mountain, like Crater Lake.

01:51:00.000 That's a round hole in the top of a mountain.

01:51:04.000 Was that once a volcano?

01:51:06.000 I don't know, but it's a hole.

01:51:07.000 Okay?

01:51:07.000 So, in the 1970s, we were able to do calculations with high-speed computers, with good computers.

01:51:15.000 And what we found was, if the object is moving faster, if the kinetic energy of the object...

01:51:26.000 Is higher than the energy that's holding the thing together.

01:51:32.000 Ooh.

01:51:34.000 Okay?

01:51:34.000 So what's holding together a rock?

01:51:37.000 The chemical connections of the silicon and the oxygen and the iron.

01:51:42.000 Everything that's making the rock that's holding it together.

01:51:45.000 You can calculate how much energy is holding it together.

01:51:47.000 And if it's going 45,000 miles an hour.

01:51:49.000 So write down that number.

01:51:51.000 Now I send in the asteroid with a kinetic energy higher I think?

01:52:18.000 And that explodes it.

01:52:20.000 So on impact, even at an angle, it is a singular point explosion.

01:52:24.000 And that's why every single crater is a perfect circle.

01:52:27.000 We call that a high-speed impact, where the speed is greater, the energy of the speed is greater than the energy that's holding it together.

01:52:36.000 Now, you have experience in this, okay?

01:52:41.000 Have you ever thrown a...

01:52:42.000 Do this next...

01:52:43.000 Oh, we're in California.

01:52:44.000 Sorry.

01:52:45.000 Snowballs?

01:52:45.000 Snowballs.

01:52:46.000 Take a snowball.

01:52:46.000 Go to Big Bear.

01:52:47.000 They have snowballs up there.

01:52:49.000 Take a snowball.

01:52:49.000 And face a barn wall and throw the snowball at it.

01:52:53.000 And it'll make a little circular mark on it.

01:52:56.000 Now change your angle to the wall.

01:52:59.000 And throw the snowball again.

01:53:00.000 It'll still make a small round mark.

01:53:03.000 And it'll keep doing it.

01:53:04.000 You know why?

01:53:05.000 Because the speed with which you threw the snowball, that energy is greater than the energy that's holding the snowball together.

01:53:12.000 Because hardly any energy is holding the snowball together.

01:53:17.000 It's just loosely packed snow.

01:53:20.000 So when you do it against the wall, you see the snowball completely disappear in a mini snowball explosion, if you will.

01:53:28.000 So this works for any comparison of projectile speed and what we call the binding energy of the object itself.

01:53:37.000 This is why the intercontinental ballistic missiles never carried conventional warheads.

01:53:43.000 Because there's speed coming out of space, because they leave the atmosphere, go from one continent to the other, and then they fall out of the sky.

01:53:51.000 That speed gives them more kinetic energy than any conventional warhead would have had.

01:53:56.000 But then we figured out how to make small nuclear warheads.

01:54:00.000 The nukes!

01:54:01.000 Now you're talking energy.

01:54:04.000 The kinetic energy of the ICBM is not higher than the nuclear warhead that we now put in.

01:54:10.000 That's why all ICBMs are nukes.

01:54:15.000 The V2 rocket basically didn't need an explosive warhead in its tip.

01:54:20.000 It came out of the sky going five miles per second.

01:54:23.000 There was none of this...

01:54:24.000 That implies you're hearing the thing.

01:54:28.000 It's coming in supersonically.

01:54:30.000 You're sitting there at a cocktail table on a block, and then the block is obliterated in the next instant.

01:54:36.000 You didn't even know to look up.

01:54:40.000 They added an explosive anyway, but they probably didn't need to.

01:54:44.000 Now, to go back to Shoemaker-Levy, there was a comet that slammed into Jupiter.

01:54:48.000 Now, Jupiter's a gas giant.

01:54:50.000 I've always been confused as to what that means.

01:54:52.000 Oh, most of its mass is in the form of gas.

01:54:55.000 Most of its mass.

01:54:56.000 Oh, yeah, 90-something percent.

01:54:57.000 So when Shoemaker-Levy slammed into Jupiter and made an explosion...

01:55:01.000 It was going so fast, the gaseous atmosphere was like hitting a brick wall.

01:55:05.000 Whoa.

01:55:06.000 That's how fast it was moving.

01:55:09.000 So that's why the explosion was bigger than Earth.

01:55:11.000 Exactly.

01:55:12.000 So all of its kinetic energy that it had got put back into the object itself because it slowed down very quickly relative to its speed.

01:55:25.000 So here's this comet.

01:55:27.000 I forgot how big Shoemaker-Levy was.

01:55:29.000 So now it goes into the atmosphere and you say, oh, isn't it just clouds?

01:55:34.000 Watch how fast it's going.

01:55:36.000 You can ask the question, over how much distance will it plow through its own mass worth of gas?

01:55:46.000 That's the question, right?

01:55:48.000 It has to plow that much mass out of the way.

01:55:51.000 That's an important resistive force, right?

01:55:53.000 So, how much atmosphere?

01:55:56.000 Well, that's a lot of atmosphere, because it's gas, and this thing is solid.

01:56:00.000 However, the thing is going, what, 15, 20 miles per second?

01:56:05.000 It's falling into Jupiter at 20 miles, whatever the speed was.

01:56:08.000 If you go at 20 miles per second, you will cover that much atmosphere in a fraction of a second.

01:56:15.000 So in a fraction of a second, you go from 20 miles per second to zero, or to a tiny fraction of that speed, all that energy has to go somewhere.

01:56:22.000 It goes back into the system.

01:56:24.000 It's a comet made of ice.

01:56:25.000 Ice is not held together very easily.

01:56:28.000 The whole thing explodes on impact.

01:56:30.000 That was another terrifying statistic that I read about the impact that hit the Yucatan and killed the dinosaurs, that how deep it had gone into the Earth's surface within the first second.

01:56:41.000 Oh, yeah.

01:56:42.000 These are numbers that are staggering once you calculate what they are.

01:56:46.000 And like I said, if you come in fast enough, Earth's atmosphere might as well be a brick wall to you.

01:56:52.000 And by the way, you go 60 miles an hour down the road, roll down the window, just stick your hand out the window.

01:56:58.000 You have to use muscle energy to not have your hand blown backwards against 60 miles an hour of air against your open palm.

01:57:09.000 Just try that next time.

01:57:10.000 See what kind of energy that requires.

01:57:13.000 And that's 60 miles an hour.

01:57:15.000 Now imagine 5 miles per second, 10 miles per second, 20 miles per second.

01:57:25.000 You toast.

01:57:26.000 How deep did the asteroid that hit and killed the dinosaurs?

01:57:30.000 How deep did that thing go in the first second?

01:57:31.000 Oh, so what was that?

01:57:32.000 That was a 150-mile diameter crater, something like that.

01:57:35.000 I forgot the exact numbers.

01:57:37.000 So there's a relationship between the depth of a crater and the diameter and the mass of the thing.

01:57:42.000 So, no, it goes miles down.

01:57:44.000 I mean, it's...

01:57:45.000 Miles?

01:57:46.000 Oh, yeah.

01:57:47.000 Oh, yeah.

01:57:47.000 Well, let me think.

01:57:49.000 And Earth rang for like a million years?

01:57:50.000 What happens is...

01:57:51.000 Let me take that back.

01:57:53.000 I don't know if it's miles.

01:57:57.000 It's...

01:57:57.000 I think it was what I had read.

01:57:59.000 I don't remember the exact statistic.

01:58:01.000 Excuse me.

01:58:01.000 No, no.

01:58:01.000 It's got to go miles down.

01:58:02.000 Because the thing is, the asteroid itself was the size of Mount Everest.

01:58:08.000 So the asteroid itself is like five miles across.

01:58:11.000 So it's deep.

01:58:13.000 No, you just don't mess with this.

01:58:14.000 By the way, the crater in Arizona, called Meteor Crater for obvious reasons, that can sink a 60-story building.

01:58:22.000 And that's not even a mile across.

01:58:23.000 And now we're talking about a crater more than 100 miles across that took out the dinosaurs.

01:58:27.000 That famous one in Arizona can sink a 60-story building?

01:58:31.000 If you put dirt up to the rim of that crater, you can bury a 60-story building.

01:58:35.000 Wasn't that an instance where this is your whole calculation about explosions and about the amount of energy?

01:58:41.000 They were looking for the raw materials that caused that crater.

01:58:47.000 Correct.

01:58:47.000 Because they thought that they could mine it.

01:58:48.000 Correct.

01:58:49.000 They first thought it was volcanic, and the geologists thought it was volcanic again.

01:58:54.000 But one geologist, in particular, Eugene Shoemaker, who was in line to be on one of the lunar missions, and then he had like a heart murmur, and then they sent Jack Schmidt in his stead, who was also a geologist-turned-U.S. senator from...

01:59:12.000 Arizona?

01:59:13.000 Where is he senator from?

01:59:14.000 I forgot.

01:59:15.000 But can you look at Jack Schmidt, where he was senator from?

01:59:19.000 Forgive me for forgetting, because I'm friends with him, so I should have known him.

01:59:22.000 NASA. Jack Schmidt.

01:59:24.000 S-C-H-M-I-T-T. There's no D in it.

01:59:29.000 So...

01:59:30.000 Yes, I was right.

01:59:32.000 Oh, I said Arizona, so New Mexico.

01:59:36.000 But anyhow, he's saying, no, this is an impact crater.

01:59:40.000 And well, if it's an impact crater, where is the meteorite?

01:59:44.000 It must be buried down here.

01:59:45.000 And so there were miners.

01:59:47.000 There were iron miners who bought the land so they can get this huge meteor that they were sure was just sitting down there that they could mine for its natural resource.

01:59:59.000 They could not find the meteor.

02:00:02.000 That's because it hit at high speed velocity.

02:00:05.000 It was a high velocity impact, which means its collision energy was greater than the binding energy even of the iron atoms itself.

02:00:13.000 And 90% of that thing vaporized on impact.

02:00:19.000 My brain just went like this.

02:00:21.000 There it is.

02:00:23.000 Wow.

02:00:25.000 That looks more impressive even than I remember it.

02:00:28.000 Okay, there are pieces.

02:00:29.000 That's nice low angle shots so you get the shadows of the rim.

02:00:32.000 That's in Arizona.

02:00:33.000 Where in Arizona?

02:00:34.000 It's near Winslow, Arizona.

02:00:35.000 Where would that be near?

02:00:37.000 Is that like if someone wanted to fly in to see that?

02:00:39.000 Oh, here it is.

02:00:41.000 If you go to the Grand Canyon, then you drive to this and it's a couple hours, a few hours.

02:00:46.000 Okay, there's Meteor Crater.

02:00:47.000 I might have to go.

02:00:47.000 The map is coming up.

02:00:49.000 And where's the Grand Canyon?

02:00:51.000 There's Meteor Crater.

02:00:53.000 And Grand Canyon, which is also in Arizona.

02:00:58.000 Flagstaff.

02:00:59.000 You can drive that.

02:01:00.000 See that?

02:01:01.000 Grand Canyon to Meteor Crater.

02:01:02.000 Through Flagstaff?

02:01:03.000 Yeah.

02:01:04.000 So you're not going to fly that.

02:01:05.000 You just drive it.

02:01:06.000 It has Yelp reviews?

02:01:07.000 Look at that.

02:01:08.000 Look at that when you get highlighted.

02:01:10.000 It's got five stars.

02:01:11.000 You can't Yelp review a crater.

02:01:12.000 Look at it.

02:01:12.000 Come on now.

02:01:13.000 Why doesn't it have all the stars?

02:01:15.000 Look. 0.99

02:01:15.000 I know it should have every goddamn star ever. 0.99

02:01:18.000 No! 0.99

02:01:18.000 Only 3.9! 0.99

02:01:19.000 People are so picky. 1.00

02:01:20.000 It's a fucking meteor crater! 1.00

02:01:20.000 It's not that big a deal, man. 1.00

02:01:22.000 I could dig a hole better myself.

02:01:25.000 Oh, by the way, so this hole was, this meteor crater was dug in like, you know, a few seconds this crater was made.

02:01:33.000 Yeah.

02:01:33.000 Just...

02:01:34.000 And how many years ago was that?

02:01:36.000 50,000 years ago.

02:01:37.000 That's nothing.

02:01:37.000 Approximately.

02:01:38.000 Nothing.

02:01:39.000 Wow, there's probably some form of human living here then.

02:01:42.000 Oh yeah, yeah, early humans.

02:01:44.000 Maybe.

02:01:45.000 I don't know if they were in North America yet.

02:01:46.000 They say 40,000 is the most recent, right?

02:01:49.000 Yeah, it's when they crossed the Bering Strait.

02:01:51.000 Yeah.

02:01:51.000 That's when they would have just arrived.

02:01:53.000 Man.

02:01:55.000 Oh, that's cool.

02:01:55.000 I'm going back.

02:01:56.000 Have you gone to that?

02:01:58.000 Oh, yeah.

02:01:58.000 Multiple times.

02:01:59.000 Oh, yeah.

02:02:00.000 Is it freaky?

02:02:01.000 What's freaky about it is you walk up to it, you can't see it because the rim of the crater, it just looks like a ridge, a ridge line.

02:02:08.000 Ah.

02:02:09.000 The rim is raised above the plane of the area, right?

02:02:13.000 Because when you press down, it raises it up a bit.

02:02:15.000 So you just walk up to it and then you come up to the ledge and then it's like...

02:02:21.000 And you realize what it is.

02:02:23.000 This is nearly a mile diameter hole in the ground.

02:02:26.000 Oh, my God.

02:02:27.000 Oh, yeah.

02:02:27.000 It's a stunning encounter with the forces of nature.

02:02:33.000 And the fact that there's so many of those particles just floating around out there that could easily just slam right in.

02:02:39.000 How big was that one, you think?

02:02:41.000 Oh, yeah.

02:02:41.000 That was about, I don't know, 20 yards across, something like that.

02:02:51.000 Oh my god, that's nothing.

02:02:53.000 That's nothing.

02:02:53.000 That's it?

02:02:54.000 20 yards?

02:02:55.000 Yeah, maybe.

02:02:55.000 Between 20 and 40 yards.

02:02:57.000 20 yards is the size of this building.

02:02:58.000 Yeah, that's right.

02:02:59.000 From that garage to that front door is exactly 19 yards.

02:03:04.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:03:06.000 Wow.

02:03:07.000 That's crazy.

02:03:08.000 Right.

02:03:09.000 And that's the kind of thing that can get close enough that you don't even see, and then it's too late.

02:03:13.000 And those things do sneak in.

02:03:14.000 Of course, that's not going to render you extinct.

02:03:15.000 That's not going to make us extinct, but it'll make a very bad day for a city.

02:03:19.000 Yeah.

02:03:19.000 Okay?

02:03:20.000 Well, yeah, the city's done, and most likely the power grid's jacked for a long time, too.

02:03:24.000 Right.

02:03:26.000 What time is it?

02:03:27.000 Is my plane left yet?

02:03:28.000 Ten till.

02:03:28.000 No, you have ten more minutes.

02:03:29.000 Okay.

02:03:29.000 I had to get the Stephen Hawking's quote out for you.

02:03:33.000 Stephen Hawking was talking about the possibility of alien life discovering us.

02:03:39.000 And that it would be a terrible, terrible thing if it did happen.

02:03:43.000 If you look at what has happened to other primitive life forms when we discovered them, primitive cultures when we discovered them, do you share that same opinion?

02:03:52.000 That if something did find us, I don't have a strong opinion on that question, but I have an analysis of his comment.

02:03:59.000 He is worried about the possibility of aliens enslaving us based on the reality that we've done that to ourselves.

02:04:16.000 Just think about that.

02:04:19.000 His fear of aliens derives not from actual knowledge of aliens, but from actual knowledge of ourselves.

02:04:26.000 Any time a more advanced civilization has come upon a less technologically advanced civilization, it did not bode well for the less advanced civilization.

02:04:35.000 And that happened in North America, South America, North America with Europeans, South America, the Spanish, Australia with the Brits.

02:04:46.000 It never boded well for the less technologically advanced civilization.

02:04:50.000 His factual knowledge of that Leads him to suspect that aliens would be exactly the same.

02:04:58.000 And I'm not that skeptical.

02:05:02.000 I don't think all lifeforms in the universe have the basal...

02:05:12.000 Primal, violent attitudes that we do as a species.

02:05:15.000 I've not been given reason to think so.

02:05:17.000 But don't you believe that things advance because of competition and competition forces things to be fairly ruthless?

02:05:24.000 It has been argued that if you colonize, if you're a civilization that colonizes the galaxy, that it's a self-limiting exercise.

02:05:34.000 Why?

02:05:35.000 Because here you go.

02:05:36.000 You ready?

02:05:37.000 We start here on Earth.

02:05:38.000 It's you and me, boy.

02:05:39.000 Alright?

02:05:40.000 And you take that planet, I take this planet.

02:05:43.000 And now we both have offspring that are just like us.

02:05:45.000 And we want more planets.

02:05:47.000 Alright?

02:05:48.000 We reach a point where expansion is not possible because we are warring with ourselves to gain the territory that each other has obtained.

02:06:01.000 So it has been argued sociologically that That the very act of wanting to colonize is self-limiting against successful colonization of the galaxy.

02:06:14.000 Because to colonize the galaxy has to be done in an organized way.

02:06:17.000 You take this sector, I take this sector, but if I want territory and I want it now, and my kids want it now, I want that territory, not this other one.

02:06:26.000 In fact, I want it all.

02:06:28.000 That kind of attitude breeds violence.

02:06:31.000 It breeds war.

02:06:34.000 Intragalactic war.

02:06:36.000 So it may be that the very kind of civilization that could peacefully colonize a galaxy It's not the kind of civilization that would colonize the galaxy at all.

02:06:48.000 Oof, that's heavy.

02:06:50.000 Very heavy.

02:06:50.000 What about the idea that any advanced...

02:06:53.000 That's my first comment about Stephen Hawking.

02:06:56.000 He made another comment about we should be a multi-planet species.

02:06:59.000 What the hell does that mean?

02:07:00.000 To protect ourselves against an asteroid rendering one extinct.

02:07:04.000 It makes a good headline and it sounds like it makes sense, but I'm not there with it.

02:07:11.000 Yeah, of course I want to...

02:07:12.000 Back up.

02:07:12.000 Of course.

02:07:13.000 Let's be a multi-planet species. 0.97

02:07:15.000 Fine.

02:07:15.000 But I would do it for different reasons.

02:07:17.000 I would do it because it's cool.

02:07:18.000 Not because I want to protect Human species from extinction.

02:07:24.000 No, that wouldn't be the reason to do it.

02:07:26.000 Can I tell you why?

02:07:27.000 Please.

02:07:27.000 List every reason why you think we go extinct.

02:07:30.000 One, we trash Earth.

02:07:31.000 And we can't live off of it anymore.

02:07:33.000 An asteroid is coming.

02:07:35.000 There's some nanobot gone astray.

02:07:37.000 Okay?

02:07:38.000 Pandemic.

02:07:39.000 Virus pandemic.

02:07:40.000 Okay.

02:07:42.000 So...

02:07:44.000 It seems to me that if we want to be a multi-planet species, Mars would be the one, because it's a 24-hour day.

02:07:50.000 It's got seasons.

02:07:52.000 We would have to terraform it first, but then we'd all move there.

02:07:55.000 We'd just ship a billion people there.

02:07:57.000 Here's my point.

02:07:59.000 Whatever it takes to terraform Mars and ship a billion people there, it's got to be easier to deflect the asteroid.

02:08:10.000 Whatever it takes to terraform Mars to turn it into Earth...

02:08:15.000 If you had the power of geoengineering to do that, then you have the power of geoengineering to turn Earth back into Earth.

02:08:23.000 But there are occasionally things that we miss, right?

02:08:26.000 Because of the way that...

02:08:28.000 So?

02:08:28.000 So you say, okay, whatever it takes to geoengineer Mars and ship a billion people there, it's got to be easier to create a perfect viral serum that makes us immune to all possible disease.

02:08:45.000 It's got to be easier.

02:08:46.000 Whatever that takes.

02:08:48.000 But isn't it possible that there's some asteroids that we just will not see until it's too late?

02:08:52.000 Then you put up...

02:08:54.000 Whatever that takes!

02:08:55.000 That's what I'm saying!

02:08:57.000 I mean, whatever!

02:09:00.000 Terraform Mars and ship a billion people there!

02:09:04.000 A billion.

02:09:04.000 Why?

02:09:05.000 Of course.

02:09:05.000 Why wouldn't it be?

02:09:06.000 What, are you going to put ten people there?

02:09:08.000 That's not good.

02:09:08.000 You want to split your species, okay?

02:09:11.000 And if an asteroid is coming that you can't deflect, which would surprise me if you could ship a billion people to Mars, you just let them all die?

02:09:21.000 You're going to let all the Earth people die and the Mars people survive just so you can save the species?

02:09:25.000 Don't save everybody!

02:09:27.000 I'm not buying into the premise, this cable car-ology premise, that you have to save one to not save the other.

02:09:35.000 You know, cable car-ology.

02:09:37.000 I see what you're saying.

02:09:38.000 The cable car, you know, someone's in the tracks.

02:09:41.000 You let them go.

02:09:42.000 You let them go. 0.92

02:09:42.000 You steer it out of the way, but then you actively kill two people instead of passively killing one person. 0.92

02:09:46.000 What do you do?

02:09:47.000 I'm not buying into that premise for this question.

02:09:50.000 I'm simply saying...

02:09:52.000 That whatever it takes, it's got to be easier to put up some kind of net that finds any asteroid that could possibly harm us and zaps them out of the sky.

02:10:02.000 It's got to be easier.

02:10:03.000 This is the last question.

02:10:04.000 Is it possible that the reason why we are never visited by extraterrestrials is because the way civilizations advance?

02:10:11.000 It's because of the space debris.

02:10:12.000 One.

02:10:13.000 Two.

02:10:13.000 Is it because the way civilizations...

02:10:16.000 They have visited.

02:10:17.000 They visited during Comic-Con.

02:10:19.000 Nobody noticed.

02:10:20.000 They don't like cosplay.

02:10:22.000 Three.

02:10:25.000 Their costumes weren't as good as ours.

02:10:27.000 Okay.

02:10:27.000 Three.

02:10:28.000 Three?

02:10:28.000 Three.

02:10:29.000 They've observed us and judged.

02:10:32.000 There's no sign of intelligent life on Earth.

02:10:34.000 Okay, but is there another possibility that civilizations don't ever get to travel like that?

02:10:40.000 Because what happens is, as they advance, and as their technology advances, they become, instead of a biological entity seeking to spread its genetics throughout the universe, they become some sort of symbiotic artificial life.

02:10:54.000 That as they create, as they advance their technology and as they continue to innovate, they reach a limitation in biology and then eventually create artificial life that sees no desire whatsoever to travel.

02:11:08.000 Oh, interesting.

02:11:09.000 So I would say, that's a great philosophical question.

02:11:13.000 I would say that the day we create AI, if the AI is everything we are except more, And not emotional.

02:11:24.000 And not foolish.

02:11:25.000 Then it would have been urged to explore. 0.93

02:11:27.000 Maybe.

02:11:28.000 Otherwise, then it's not us. 0.98

02:11:29.000 But wouldn't it create those doors, like in Monsters, Inc., and start going dimension to dimension instead of fucking around with jets? 0.98

02:11:35.000 With chemical jets? 0.98

02:11:37.000 Yeah.

02:11:37.000 Right, right, right, right, right.

02:11:38.000 Yeah, they figure out the fourth dimension.

02:11:40.000 Yeah, wouldn't that be the best way to do things?

02:11:42.000 And then they figure it out.

02:11:42.000 And then they would figure out a way to travel better than any way we could.

02:11:45.000 But the fact that we want to travel, and we're creating versions of ourselves called AI... I don't see why AI wouldn't want to travel.

02:11:54.000 But why would it be curious?

02:11:55.000 If AI... If it is us, this is my point.

02:11:58.000 If it's not biological.

02:11:58.000 Then it's not...

02:11:59.000 Well, if we create every neurosynaptic map of our brain into silicon, into a computer...

02:12:12.000 And recreate our consciousness as humans.

02:12:15.000 The human brain.

02:12:16.000 But wouldn't that be just one version of AI? Sure.

02:12:19.000 Wouldn't there be like an infinite version of AI that AI could create itself?

02:12:22.000 It could.

02:12:23.000 And why would it limit itself to all of our emotions and sexual desires and jealousy and all the ridiculous things that are holding us back?

02:12:29.000 It could.

02:12:30.000 Sure.

02:12:31.000 Sure.

02:12:32.000 No, I'm not as fearsome of AI as others are.

02:12:38.000 We're not going to make an AI-looking human being, because a human form is not the best or ideal form for anything.

02:12:44.000 Did you see Ex Machina?

02:12:45.000 Yes, I did.

02:12:46.000 Did you love it?

02:12:47.000 Did you love it?

02:12:48.000 It was good.

02:12:48.000 You didn't love it?

02:12:49.000 Good moments.

02:12:49.000 You didn't love it?

02:12:50.000 No, it was good.

02:12:51.000 I loved it.

02:12:53.000 I want to marry it.

02:12:54.000 You want to marry it.

02:12:55.000 Oh, okay.

02:12:56.000 Well, that's the first thing you use.

02:12:59.000 It's the sex bot.

02:13:00.000 No, it's not even that.

02:13:01.000 It's one of my favorite movies.

02:13:01.000 That's where the money will be, for sure.

02:13:03.000 For sure.

02:13:03.000 Yeah, for sure.

02:13:04.000 But I'm just saying it's one of my favorite movies.

02:13:06.000 I want to marry the movie.

02:13:07.000 It's just an awesome movie. 0.95

02:13:08.000 So then marriage would no longer be about sex or just be about reproduction because you just go to your room with your sex bot.

02:13:12.000 Well, I'm hoping that that's one of the first things that people figure out they shouldn't do anymore.

02:13:15.000 Once they get smart enough to symbiotically attach themselves to artificial intelligence.

02:13:20.000 I was watching, what was it, Family Feud?

02:13:22.000 One of the questions was, if you're...

02:13:25.000 We asked 100 married women, if you could have a second husband for only one purpose, what would it be?

02:13:32.000 Something like 70% of them said, just for sex.

02:13:36.000 Whoa. 1.00

02:13:37.000 Damn. 1.00

02:13:38.000 A second husband for only one purpose. 1.00

02:13:41.000 Just for getting stuffed.

02:13:42.000 That's rough. 0.99

02:13:44.000 That's a fucking wake-up call for a lot of dudes out there. 0.99

02:13:47.000 A lot of guys! 0.99

02:13:48.000 Let's end on that.

02:13:50.000 Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysics for people in a hurry throughout May.

02:13:55.000 Thank you so much, sir.

02:13:56.000 You're a gentleman and a scholar.

02:13:59.000 Love you, man.

02:13:59.000 I love you too, brother.

02:14:00.000 Thank you so much for coming here.

02:14:01.000 And thank you anytime.

02:14:03.000 Open invitation.

02:14:03.000 Call me up.

02:14:04.000 Middle of the night.

02:14:05.000 Come down here.

02:14:05.000 We'll open it up.

02:14:06.000 And you gotta wake him up.

02:14:07.000 He'll do it.

02:14:07.000 He's down.

02:14:08.000 He loves you, too.

02:14:09.000 All right.

02:14:10.000 Thank you, sir.

02:14:10.000 Appreciate it.

The Joe Rogan Experience - February 21, 2017

Joe Rogan Experience #919 - Neil deGrasse Tyson

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