Joe Rogan Experience #919 - Neil deGrasse Tyson

Key Takeaway

Build a small “anti-fooling-yourself” habit today: when you encounter a confident claim online, write down the claim, the strongest evidence offered, what evidence would change your mind, and one independent source to check. Tyson’s central point is that scientific thinking is less about collecting impressive facts than reducing the chance that you mistake belief for truth. This practice makes skepticism constructive rather than reflexively cynical.

Episode Overview

Neil deGrasse Tyson and Joe Rogan range across astronomy, quantum physics, science-fiction accuracy, space travel, education, and public misunderstanding of science. The episode repeatedly returns to a practical theme: use evidence, precise language, and an awareness of cognitive bias to avoid being persuaded by compelling but unsupported narratives.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Joe Rogan Experience #919 - Neil deGrasse Tyson from Joe Rogan Experience. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

four three two and boom that's a nice hat I've told you ready but alive I gotta tell you that's a nice it's it's very kind of Indiana Jones but it's not quite that it's like yeah that's Chi you're like in the middle of it yeah yeah dancing on the edge well I have a really fat head and so there's his website called like big heads calm there's a website a total website for my friend Bert Kreischer I had then put his hat on I couldn't believe how big his head was there was like an inch gap yeah so if you know your head your head size do you know your head size no I do not so so it turns out if you know your head size that that number comes from somewhere I tell you what it is sure 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 and take that number divide it by pi then that's your hat size whoa yeah just seems complicated is what it is right just why I can't just be the circumference right so what it turns out to be so what that means is if you're dividing by PI you're getting the the diameter of the circle that has the same dimension as the circumference of your head so if you have an oblong head then what's doing is finding out what the circle is the diameter of the circle that has that same circumference as your head oh okay that's what that's doing for whatever without whether that helps the Hat the Hat maker so immediately I start thinking about dan Aykroyd and SIA it live as a conehead Oh with an idiot a tall hat yeah so dude average eye you still doing stand-up that's great constantly loving it yeah and I caught you a few months ago you were M seeing some MMA was it what was well I'm always doing that yeah stated shape because I'm a fat slob right you are ripped back in the day man I tried it's not that I don't have the energy to it's it's trying to find the chance you back in the day look at you shredding how much the way back then go on 176 no no no I'm six-two so I'm 190 pounds in that Oh exactly I have big thighs and stuff other wrestlers would have skinnier thighs and things so I was also taller than anyone I wrestled so since we're the same height it meant they had bigger muscles actually so cuz were the same way right but I'm did I say that right I'm taller right but were the same weight so that means they have bigger muscles right because none of us have fat right so I had to do things that my lank eNOS would enable me to do and to accomplish that they couldn't so I have long reach you know this sort of a scoop an ankle that kind of thing there's great advantages to having long limbs in martial arts particularly in wrestling grappling because of leverage yeah also if you're quick and with long Linda and I was both but if they got me in their grip it was hard for me to get out so what kind of exercise do you do these days no I'm trying I you know I guess yeah I'm trying I'm trying up when I'm in I'm good but I've just got so much going on yeah you like make the time that's a problem right when you become a little bit successful for your some food there's a lot of food documentaries you know trying to get you to eat differently so I thought I'd watch the wall i binge don them one weekend while I was doing other stuff and I got hungry know one of it one of the guys he was trying to lose 100 pounds or something 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 whoa because the bowling balls about 15 pounds I said wow he's measuring weight in bowling balls that's something because we said I'm three pounds less than two pounds that that doesn't hit you emotionally the way a bowling ball does yeah after you've lost 15 pounds because no one wants to be carrying that around so psychologically I thought that was quite potent that is potent anyway I think we do need so I usually use like plates I think of weight plates or dumbbell okay yeah yeah yeah yeah I I started doing intermittent fasting pretty recently where I only allow myself to eat ten hours in a day oh wow that's and I was out of the 24 hours yes so I mean I had a Terry Crews on my radio show another talk that boys my boys ripped yeah looks great he's still and he's like 47 or something I mean he's so he doesn't eat until 12 noon ah until after 10 o'clock that's right yeah he doesn't eat after 10 there's a 10 hour thing and so he has to he's watching everyone else have brunch and breakfast and so he's got to overcome that but so it's a little bit of fasting yeah and today intermittent fasting just to keep the discipline I think it's at the end of day it's really just discipline what is that it also forces your body to burn fat instead of carbohydrates and what forces your body to burn fat that state of ketosis is actually easier to maintain because you don't you don't get hungry yeah then you look there's no roller coaster yeah crash the carbohydrate crash that you get is that outside of the realm of possibility for you know I can totally I'm a ketosis guy it's in there I once got raked over the coals not by everyone but I tweeted once I said if there was a diet book written by a physicist it would contain one sentence consume calories at a lesser rate then at a greater rate no consume calories at a lesser rate than you burn them that is sort of true that's the one sentence yeah no it's more complicated than that and if we just try to get all no words this is that in that and one of the great things of physics when you do physics is all the details are just cut off the it's window dressing and you get down to the window itself and that's what the analysis works on I have rarely seen you attacked but I did see you attacked when you were celebrating Sir Isaac Newton's birthday oh I was like that people were so mad they might lost their mind when you were by the way incorrect in the date of Jesus's birthday that is not the date of Jesus did not was not born on the 25th route it's just I didn't even mention it so what I said was but was that to this day is my highest retweeted tweet I tweeted it so you remember this actually a couple years ago yeah so it was a so on December 25th comes there it is oh you get you get you got on this day long ago a child was born who by age 30 would transform the world happy birthday Isaac Newton born December 25th 1642 seventy-nine thousand retweets oh yeah thousand like people just lost they were so mad they were angry and I thought well interesting because I'm just speaking the truth here yes he transformed civilization by actually he did it by the time he was 26 so yes it's provocative because you're expecting that Jesus is gonna end that but I'm thought I'd share some some actual truth with people and so some people celebrated it deeply religious people one had a headline saying neil degrasse tyson is trolling Christians on Christmas Day well I said I said Newton at least has the benefit of actually having being born that day then later on it's actually more subtle than that with Newton because he was on the Julian calendar which was which is ten day shifted from the goog Orion calendar so if you ask what would his birthday be today it would be January 4th not December 25th so yeah but when he was born his mother was celebrating Christmas so that's really what matters for that tweet well it's such a bizarre thing anyway because if you're a real Christian you would understand that the the birthday was shifted in order to comply with pagan religions that's exactly it was it landed I don't know how many people know that actually I mean you're a well-read guy but so if you give me a minute to just explain that so December 21st we know is the first day of winter shortest day of the year and what makes it short shortest day light of the year and what makes it short the arc of the Sun across the sky is very low the Sun doesn't get very high and it doesn't stay up for very long and it's been coming a lower in lower arc every day on route to December 21st the ancient peoples were worried about this because everyone worshipped the Sun because it made your crops come and gave you warmth and you say wow if this keeps going lower and lower in the sky we're gonna lose the Sun entirely December 21st the Sun slows down and it stops this load this drop in it's moving across the sky from day to day so that stopping of the Sun is solstice that's Latin the stationary sun-like armistice stationary arms right from the end of the First World War weather November 11th that was Armistice solstice so so the movement of the Sun lower in the sky stops but that doesn't mean it's gonna come back it takes a few days for is to to slow down stop and then reverse these oh it is coming back let's celebrate that and that's a few days after December 21st there's about December 25th a pagan holiday celebrating the return of the Sun Christianity is trying to take foothold where there were pagans once roamed and you put celebrations that match theirs just so that the the shift is not as hard for you 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 and sure enough it remained Christmas Day the birth of Jesus the speculated birthday of Jesus is like the spring the spring there's some there's some passages of course in the New Testament that reference with the Sheep we're doing plus there's a census being taken by the Romans you know which is what and and Mary goes to the manger the animals are not in the manger not at so there's secondary evidence for that's probably happened in the spring now with the advent of commercial space travel it seems seems inevitable right love you love your segways don't do you think that it's possible that maybe you can 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 show 23 hours calling in to you this is tweeting me constantly to me constantly yeah call me a sellout I'm a sell I'm a round earth sellout like as if there's some round earth money you're on the payroll check I'm getting some round earth round earth paola for your show I'm sure you seen the basketball player who graduated from Duke from Duke that was hit in the news last couple of days believes that dinosaurs are fake mm-hmm and that the world is flat okay so here's the thing Joe yeah I've thought about this I bet you have as an educator I've thought about this okay so here's here's what matters we live in a free country people should be able to think whatever they want whenever they want provided it doesn't subtract away from someone else's rights okay so if thinking the earth is flat doesn't harm anyone unless you want to run for office or you want some position of power over other people that's when it's dangerous I thinking of elevator banks where they have numbers you know I have a photo essay of with what elevators look like inside I know it's just I mean the gears no no no no not even that geeky just what are the numbers on the panel without the 13 you mean yeah yeah exactly so about 80% of buildings taller than 12 stories don't have a 13th floor okay and so this tricks a deca phobia yeah is again in a free country if you if you want to be afraid of the number 13 go right ahead it just seems to me you should not be tasked with designing elevators if that's your fear find something else to do 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 I don't know in the long run but if you keep to yourself and don't harm others think whatever you want so that the rubber hits the road is if you now have power over others and that's where the failure of the educational system actually manifests well then societies and cultures laughs but it's not that they don't know that there's a 13th floor and that you're just calling it the fourth a Sharpie cross off the four deuce that's the 13th floor you're not fooling anybody now when you see it on an elevator and you're like you see no 13 and plus they try to fake you out how you do that 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 to for the whole team so you don't see 12 right next to 14 and that some other some modern buildings will put their their their the heavy machinery like the HVAC on the 13th floor so that there's no residency right but they could still say it's the 13th floor and then there's a 14th floor yeah yeah does anybody ever have a dummy 13th button where you press it it never lights up like I don't get it I can't get in that's interesting that's what I would do oh you just put it there to satisfy me but you still nobody lives there exactly what that's too clever oh this is one of the 20% of people that make sense this is what a great building I mean while there is no 13th floor it's just a dummy button that Twilight Zone episode with the mannequins they went up to the 11th floor but there is no 11th floor and the mannequins come to life at night ooh I forgot about yeah they leave the store floors and they all go up to 11 then have a cocktail party and they vote which one of them is gonna go out and become human for a day the twilight zone was so good who's the best television there ever was like still to this day ever used up so many great premises great premises great actors great cinematography and was in black and white so shadows were completely dark yeah because you shadows don't have much meaning when you're filming color because everything is just there but in black and white and the shadows create mood and yeah so I watched to serve man the other I had it on the DVR on my collection plate lurch yes yes on The Addams Family yeah that was a great one because it was just like it had all the elements of people going well you know they seem nice yeah yeah and they solve all of our war and our yeah that was great that's another good one was the the invaders do to remember this one knew this was a one-woman performance and I forgot who it was it was it not Agnes Moorehead one of these women of that era it'll come to me in a minute and she's living alone in a farmhouse no electricity she's got a farm and she's alone and some alien spacecraft lands on a roof and it's got these devices it's got these saws and blazars cutting through things and she's freaking out she's got the pan in the pots and the rolling pin and and she then she gets the goods the shotgun and she's attacking this thing it's and and you don't know what it is and it's got lights and a thing and it's this tiny little thing it's like three inches across right and it turns out that's the thing that's attacking her and then she finally like comes that's it see the little little robot okay and and inside she said and then I got to give it what this shows 40 years old I can give the punchline okay so she actually successfully damages the thing and then that you zoom in on it right and then you hear a radio transmission from the aliens that are inside and it says yeah hello hello Houston there's a giant who's trying to attack us we need help send backups oh it was great like whoa we were the invaders that was us landing on her home on some other planet or some parallel earth from some other dimension service we are we no no no no oh she okay yeah I get it no she's oh it's another planet she's that Chinese the giant but they're saying there's a giant attacking us right but the whole show you have her pointed means the 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 it's us in another dimension and they are landing on earth accepted it hmm no no I mean they were they were speaking English I couldn't isn't that the definition of infinity that somewhere some if there is really an infinity there is not only a you and and I but there's a you and 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 okay except except there is I don't how many people know this but often it's mind-blowing when you learn that some infinities are bigger than others Joe Rogan just leaned two feet away from the microphone not all infinities are the same size it's infinity then it's infinities well what is no okay don't you remember when you were kid I said what's the biggest number you know a million was a million and one right how about a billion was a billion and one who the annoying kid always added one two okay how about infinity well infinity and one Friday well turns out infinity 1 and if any are the same number okay so here's the so for example the number of of counting numbers so 1 2 3 up to infinity ok right the numbers you would use to count things that's infinite the number of irrational numbers so the numbers that you cannot represent as a fraction okay that there's more there more of those than there are counting numbers whoa by 4 so these are orders of infinity then there are more transcendental numbers then there are irrational numbers what's a transcendental mom so that's a number that you'll never find as a solution to to an algebraic equation so pi is a transcendental number e is a transcendent these are these are magic numbers that show up in mathematics and there's turns out there's like an even bigger infinity of those than there is of these other two classes of numbers and they use the the the the Hebrew letter Aleph in in in ranking so LF one l f2 l f3 elephant I think there are five levels of infinity so my point is just because there's infinite universes to me doesn't mean there's infinite conversations that have happened 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 or and an infinite number of times where it's been Jamie - right yeah that's the argument that's that's given but I think that we there's some nested infinities in there that deserve some explanation my Phoenix region is not handling this well well that's that's fine as I've said as I say in the in the in the epigraph of of the book book is not available yet but I have a copy haha astrophysicist for people in a hurry astrophysics for people in a hurry oh you can say quick you gotta say there cuz you're in a hurry so the epic the epic the epigram on that is the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you that that's ration I have time for and so it makes sense to you that the universe is under no obligation to make sense so it's okay if your brain hurts when I say there's a ranking of infinities but but you shouldn't say that doesn't make sense therefore it is not true I definitely wouldn't say that but what what confuses me is the word infinity because I had always taken the word infinity to mean something that has no end so how can something that has no end be larger than something else so the way they do that mathematically the way to demonstrate that mathematically is used you map one item in the set of this infinity to corresponding items in the set of the oven other infinity so you do this so you take the one and your map it to like the first transcendental number take the two to the second you just keep doing this and when you do that mathematically what you find that one infinity outstrips the other infinity Wow and then you left with more with more numbers so that shows you that you have a bigger infinity now when you find I mean there's there's a new NASA announcement that's supposed to is it Monday that's supposed to be announced or attention tomorrow the exoplanets a Wednesday yep so it's Wednesday I don't I don't have you have you see details I'm not authorized do see details okay let me invent some juicy details that it could be so NASA so so he's been good at segwaying lately he doesn't jump in he's just jumping I know you get that just yeah I'm flying back to thanks for fitting this in Joe I open this place up at 3 in the morning oh man I'm very I'm feel the love so thank you so here's some things that could because NASA is saying that it's it's a it's a stunning new announcement well what could be more than the fact that we already know that there are there are earth-like planets orbiting in the Goldilocks zone of the nearest star to the Sun Proxima Centuri can you do better that than that for me NASA I don't think so unless you 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 light from the host star passes through the atmosphere and it is all and the light signatures altered by the chemistry of the atmosphere so depending what the chemicals are it'll influence the spectrum that you get and when you do that you can say what the chemical composition of the atmosphere is that's of that star is there's certain there's a certain combinations of elements that we would call biomarkers no we can't look down to the surface of the planet and look at cities if there are any but there are consequences in the atmosphere to there being life on the surface such as is there oxygen there 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 yep Star Trek characters never wore spacesuits yeah you ever wonder I mean you ever thought about that okay what happens is they visit planets they have nitrogen oxygen atmosphere Jim alright well that's what our atmosphere is nitrogen right so they find planets with nitrogen oxygen they go down they don't need a spacesuit so I've actually thought about that and that's their solution so that must mean there be planets that you could find that that well here's the thing we have oxygen on earth only because there is life on Earth not any kind of life photosynthesizing life we have life that takes sunlight turns it into chemical energy into itself into wood into plants and one of its byproducts is oxygen oxygen is chemically active if you took away all plants tomorrow that oxygen would slowly get absorbed chemically into the environment and then you would not have oxygen there to be viewed by aliens trying to see if we have life here and it's pretty surprising to people note that we're mostly nitrogen in our oh yeah we're 78% nitrogen in our atmosphere so I you know what happens if you have too much oxygen if you have like let's say 50% oxygen you're really high right what happens is like a forest fire would never go out oh yeah yeah because oxygen feeds combustion and so you could basically burn all vegetation in the world if the oxygen went above certain thresholds 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 fire so if there if in this if I don't know the announcement but I'm just guessing here because it's been a cottage industry the last couple of years let's find these biomarkers do you have unstable chemistry going on in that atmosphere because if you do it means something's generating it and and certain combinations of chemistry tells you there's likely to be life of some kind now just a couple decades ago we had speculation of other planets but we really didn't have any tangible proof in fact any one any time I give a public talk you do this at your in your gigs that's who here's born since 1995 okay and you your audience leans young so there'll be some fraction of the audience it'll raise their hand and so what I do is I Knight them as generation exoplanet because 1995 was the first year that an that a planet outside of our own solar system was discovered so they have been alive only during a time we've known of other star systems that's so crazy Generation X oh wow that's what I want to start that movement so it's so crazy that's so recent I mean it is oh yeah I was living out here yes 20 is 24 years ago 22 years ago yeah that's it that's insane if you stop and think about how what a short period of time it is and in that period of time there's like rising through 3,000 exoplanets this is the advance of tape that that's not just science advanced that's that's Engineering and Technology and intelliscan and imaging quality and it is a lot that goes on to the advance of science it's not just how clever you are in an Einsteinian way it's do you know good engineers to build a device to make the measurement this is how we discovered gravity waves now what's your take on that planet that's supposed to be outside the Kuiper belt that's planet 9 so far yeah yeah all the data look convincing so what they've done is they've looked at other objects in the Kuiper belt and looked at these are colleagues of mine at Caltech so it's it's a Mike Brown who you know I get blamed for killing Pluto but I was an accessory for sure but I didn't definitely didn't kill that dude kill Pluto all right he found another object that was basically the size of Pluto out there so either you make that a planet or you demote Pluto and how much smaller is Pluto and say our moon oh so so don't get me started our moon has five times the mass of Pluto so the moon the Pluto's was lame from the beginning all right we thought it was big we wanted it to be big we we we made it one of us one of the nine and it's size didn't settle out until the late 1970s when we had better and better more accurate ways to measure its size and that's when we learned it's small even compared to our own but granted we have a big moon if you're not gonna think our moon is a planet you're certainly not gonna think the Pluto is a planet so this hop you let me just tell you how they did so they found these other objects out there the same team a Constantine but gives pronounce his last name but ding Jian and Mike Brown but both at Caltech and they found these objects in the outer so the Kuiper belt of icy bodies we're of which pluto is a member you track their motion and you say okay if I add up all the gravity that's affecting them and they should move this way but they don't they move another way a different way so either Newton's laws of gravity are failing in the outer solar system or this some object out there whose gravity you have yet to reconcile with the motions of these objects so they said let's assume Newton is right 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 and do they do this through bodes law no no we're way past winner no we wait wait thanks for remembering both law but both law was an early measure of where you might find a new planet it was based on mass and gravity no no both law was a simple arithmetic tool all the did was basically double the distance with a certain additive parameter double the distance of some planets so for example you know and there was a little there's a factor in there that helped the inner planets come out right but let's look at Mars Mars is like 2 and 1/2 times Earth's distance from the Sun what comes after Mars Jupiter Jupiter is five times her assistants ah Saturn is 10 times 1 to the 5 to 5 to 10 so Bob's law is just a simple arithmetic scheme it's not based in any known physics it was only based on the solar system in the solar system itself that's right so and it worked and yet you have to fudge your way to get mercury to work in that oh really and it wouldn't didn't have Pluto of course pool it wasn't a plan in any way but anyhow it was a is a fudgy way that was mostly right by accident and this was in like what year was this oh that was 1,800 spaces oh yeah yeah so now we have advanced computer programming very high precision modeling and there's there's got to be a planet somewhere here in this arc of the sky let's look for it because we think that's what's affecting the orbits of these other objects and that is a completely noble way to discover a planet that's how Neptune was discovered and because now everyone looked at the orbit of Uranus and said you know Uranus is not following Newton's laws maybe maybe Newton's laws don't work that far out has never been tested that far and they say well let's let's assume it works and ask what would have to influence it and whether it's a difficult mathematical calculation because you're not saying here's the object what's the gravity field you're saying here's the gravity field I need where must the object be and how massive must it be that's a much harder mathematical problem to solve and so once the the the the errant orbit of Uranus was known and calculated they started looking for another planet and that's how they discovered planet Neptune Wow so now when they're looking at this planet 9 I hope I said that right it was the movement of Uranus's orbit was not following proper laws and they inferred the presence of Neptune they said look here tomorrow night and they looked there and they found it Wow yes it was a brilliant display of and no we're going back to the 19th century so I mean people people were badass that every generations got their badass scientists now how much further out from the known solar system is this planet so I'm not quick to call it planet 9 because so far it's twenty thousand times farther away from the Sun than the earth is so I'm not sorry you're not sorry I'm not feeling like calling Connecticut New York City so but it's something massive right it's like six times the mass of yeah I forgot what mass they were assigning it but yeah it would if that were in our solar system to be no question you would label it as a planet and it wasn't there one time speculation that it was some sort of a burnt-out star no not that mass no no no no you might be thinking you're if that's what I think you're thinking you got good memory the long ago in a galaxy far away so I'm talking about 1970s people looked at the extinction record on earth and every 20,000 years they found a little blip a little dip in the fossil record where we lost some species and people were wondering why 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 if there is maybe there's some double star to the Sun Ryanair a star system so they invoked it and then they called it they gave became a name what they called it nemesis they gave it a name and so you know what period orbital period that object must have has got to match the extinction periodicity and so it's got to be a 20,000 year period and so but people look for it they couldn't find it and then you reanalyze the the extinction records and it was you you had to fudge it to make it look like it was periodic so basically we've abandoned the idea of net of nemesis and aren't binary star systems really common yeah more than half the star as you see in the night sky or binary or multiple systems in fact the iconic image from Star Wars the original Star Wars movie before they numbered them I think what star wars for Rooney right well yeah whatever whatever that that that that desert planet that Luke was on and he comes out after visiting is was was a stepparent know his adoptive parents were yeah where we was visiting he comes out and you see a double sunset so that's basically the only accurate science in the entire series I really enjoyed you're taking a part of gravity gravity and how many people got mad at me yeah you know so I stopped comic-con movies I don't need to piss people off when I watch a movie I'm having those thoughts anyway so I might as well share them with people if you're interested so I did just that 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 you know one of them was bb-8 a smooth rolling metal spherical ball would have skidded uncontrollably on sand people got angry so much someone tweeted back shut the [ __ ] up okay that's so so I said okay I'm not here to get people angry I'm just here to enlighten to help people enhance their movie-going experience but to the extent it is not accomplishing this I don't need to do it I'm just saying I don't I'm an educator I thought I was being nice I don't need to do so I haven't tweeted about a movie since then I got tweets I could watch them stop you I have tweets I could post about arrival please dear why I didn't watch watched a little bit of a shutter off okay no you got to give it a chance as soon as I see a movie that starts out I don't spoil or it starts out with a sick kid I'm like [ __ ] you no no in fact it's very not about the kid I'm sure that's what I keep it's totally not about the kid Jamie hated it oh yeah yeah okay so you just give it a chance but anyhow so I just stopped maybe I'll come back but I'm know it yeah people need to know raveh t that was good that you explained that the not only is it's not plausible those two satellites aren't anywhere near each other oh my god worse said oh there's the there's the International Space Station and I'm on the Chinese Space Station let me just jetpack my way there yes do you really excuse me lady do you hey lady do you know how far away these are from one another you're gonna jet around from one space station - but no can't do it tens of thousands of miles from one another for goodness sakes Oh Betty I'm so yeah you remember please it was like 15 tweets and I didn't know that was what I realized like the press was reading my movie tweets and those tweets is it now a couple years ago when gravity came out with Sandra Bullock and and and what's the news name George Clooney so i eated it and they got talked about on the on The Today Show sent the set the weekend Today Show on NBC then it was talked about on NBC Nightly News then my tweets were talked about a Saturday Night Live's The Weekend Update it was like the NBC trifecta and I said oh my gosh this was I had not that was not the point I didn't seek this did fine I'm glad they are reacting this way because that means they care about the science maybe but what Seth Meyers did cuz he was doing Weekend Update at the time he said astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson harshly criticized the movie gravity saying has contains a number of scientific inaccuracies for example there is no way George Clooney would have spent that much time talking to a woman his own age that's hilarious I think Stan turbo is still younger than George Clooney though so they should have got their facts but yeah but not by much I mean yeah they're in the same neighborhood yes yeah III think it's important I think you enjoy the movie it's great it's fun and everything like that but it's important to point out what the science errors are I think I think I think the movie could have done better honestly the things that could have made this a movie why did people thought I didn't like the movie when all I was doing is pointing out things they got wrong by the way they did some stunning things correctly for example this is this is brilliant if you're in zero-g a fire basically puts itself out so think about when you burn a candle it on earth so you like the wick if there's people have candles anymore they forgot what a candle is you light it with a match that you used to get from smoking lunches at bars all right so you light the candle and it stays lit the fuel is the wax the oxygen continually comes in because it heats the air around it and the air rises hot air rises and fresh air comes in from below and has fresh oxygen so the can will stay lit until it burns all the way down in space if you light a candle you can light the candle it'll heat the air but the air will not know where to go because it's not lighter than everything because it's in zero-g it'll stay clustered around the candle the cannibal use up all the oxygen in that bubble and then it'll put itself out they did this in the movie so why do they have some good sense because they may you can't think of everything so they just have you on staff well no they can you in so you can't think of everything so that wasn't judgmental so much as this movie the fact that it got so much right is what put it on my map to criticize what it got wrong that make sense does that make them a yes okay yeah oh the hair her bangs should have been floating now if you might think I'm in my nitpicky no because if you look at any picture somebody with hair okay in space in zero-g their hair is flying everywhere it's the first thing you notice about them it is so obvious like wow that's the cool you're not thinking about the spaceship or the tie technology 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 so they would have to film it all in zero gravity they would have to film it on one those drop things yeah or the drop thing you they'd have to be clever about it and she only had bangs that's all you have to figure out it they did other clever things so anyway that's all I did please by the way in all fairness to movies I'll call out something that's good the science that movie got right that otherwise got no science right I'll be I'm the first in line to do that like what Oh in the movie monsters ink oh my gosh those doors were four dimensional portals to another that that's possible well if you had four dimensions that's what it would look like do you remember the movie yes they take the doors home yes they opened the door and they're in the closet of the kid that they're gonna terrorize yes you that's a wormhole that's what that is what access to the fourth dimension looks like do you think scientifically that's possible one day yes I hope so really because here's the example we've got a nice broad desk we hear it that this interview right so desk is two dimensions it's got length and width and I can start putting papers on this desk and I can lay them out mosaic style and then all of a sudden I have no more room to put a sheet of paper if I'm an aunt living in this surface of the desk I say no more room but wait a minute we are three-dimensional people and I can put an organizer and and and stack things vertically so I can take a sheet of paper and I can put it higher up than the surface of the desk the aunt will say where did it go oh my gosh it disappeared in some portal we know know what what is that it went into the third dimension in the ant bound and obviously is a three dimensional thing right imagine it's it only lives in two dimensions you would have made that paper disappear into a third dimension and it will have no clue where it went because you had a portal you had access to that extra dimension so look at how much you can store on a desk when you have access to a third dimension above it vastly more than just papers mosaicked out on the surface so now let's up this example by a dimension you're storing boxes in a room or I ran out of room no you didn't let's open this four dimensional door you open it put the boxes through the door close the door box is gone they'll be awesome for hoarders you uh you look around the other side of the bottle that the door there's nothing there right though your side of the door nothing there just a door that is a portal to a fourth dimension that can hold vastly more content then what is what you're stuck storing in the three dimensional space of your room now that's a concept so that's a brilliant concept and even though it has monsters that don't exist that all speak English and to one of them is a cyclops and one of them is a you know I'm not judging the bio physiology of these creatures but they got the physics of four dimensional portals completely accurate now the concept of dimensions is work it's really abstract with people I love me some dimensions and it is abstract it is yeah that's why you've let the math take you into those higher dimensions because our intuition will not will fail for us right well that's where it gets weird oh and when you say take the math let the math take you so like when quantum physicists use these legal and notepads those yellow pads and right all that crazy stuff down that nobody but you and maybe them understand and when you look at all those equations notes them maybe me maybe new then you probably understand it right but I definitely don't my point is what are they exactly figuring out that allows them to say there are I think they say at one point time was 11 but I think they've expanded that right I don't have the latest dimension on the universe but what the way it works is you try to make sense of the world right and so you take some leaps so some some philosophical Leafs leap some mathematical leaps you say all right maybe all particles that manifest as an electron a proton a neutron may barks maybe they're just strings of energy vibrating at different frequencies and we sense these different frequencies as different particles let's just go there for okay well if you're going to do that what are the consequences to it then how many dimensions do these vibrating strings require to have the properties that we see in our dimensionality so so the exercise of explaining what you see takes you to places that you've never been before and that's fine places at intellectual places that you've never been previously unplumbed there's nothing wrong with that we've done that before we that's why we know what is happening in the center of the Sun have we ever been there no no but we know how matter behaves under pressure and temperature we can do that in a laboratory we've got a Sun sitting out there with a surface temperature a mass a certain luminosity and we say what must be going on down in the core let's bring our best physics a quantum physics our 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 so when they're going over this math of the mathematics and like observable things that we have right now or at like the atomic and subatomic level we don't you can't see do you realize the electron just okay so I buy I mean I did a whole series of this there's something called the the great courses lecture series it's a yeah it was a sponsor this podcast for a while would really okay great courses so cool so I was once invited to be one of their professors for the great courses and I taught a very short most of them are like 30 lectures it's like a whole college semester so and I don't have the time the energy so they let me do like short bits so one of them is only six parts and it's called the inexplicable universe and it's six parts of everything about which we know nothing in this universe you might say well that's a pretty easy course to give okay on to the next one you might be something Dark Matter we don't know stay tuned so but it's interesting to learn how we come to know what we don't know and so it's it's an exploration of our ignorance and I'm very proud of it because it's it's not what you'd normally find in electro series and it's still it's still out there but one of the things I will tell you then I'll tell you now the electron has no known dimension it is smaller than the smallest we have ever had the capacity to measure so as far as we in concern it is infinitely small well we have no way to even know how to measure by the way how do you measure something small you get something smaller and find out how many of those it is think about the challenges at each extreme ask me how big is the universe and I'll say it's as big as well I got nothing what am I gonna say right there's nothing as big as the universe so at the biggest engine at the littlest end there's not something else it's it doesn't work as well okay to try to say what it is relative to something else do you entertain the possibility that the biggest send the littlest end of the same thing meaning that at our the smallest measurable point that literally might be a whole nother universe that like might be fractal it's fun to think about it I mean all the way down yeah it's fun to think about again Finelli down like that however and people by the way in in the 1920s when we discovered the atom and its structure and that there's an electron him quote orbit around a nucleus it was that way we've been there before we got planets orbiting the Sun and so this this so maybe it's a mini solar system may it's its solar systems all the way down well I'm glad you brought this up I'm glad we brought this up because I wanted to bring this question I almost forgot there's a photograph of a brain cell and side by side with a photograph of the known universe and they look eerily similar so you're talking about the large scale structure yeah the universe with large-scale structuring of galaxies so I'll get to that in a minute okay so I'll get to that so do you ever tell him just pull up his own damn images so you so why that's not likely okay it was an entertained idea but here's why it's not likely the manifestation of the laws of physics are different at the atomic scale than they are at the macroscopic scale they're just simply different a planet can take any orbit sensible for its velocity around a host star an electron cannot its energy levels are predetermined and quantized hence the word quantum the prefix quanta in quantum physics so if it was a continuum of matter and energy following the same laws of physics then I would say then it's Sol systems all the way down but the rules completely change 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 you no longer are they the same and you abandon this romanticized concept so now with the neurons the network of neurons and they cluster the clusters of galaxies and galaxies super clusters that would be on the right neurons on the left that's so eerie yes so so yeah they can look the same but they operating under completely different laws of physics so in other words the laws of physics that that dictate what's going on in brain cells have no relationship to what's going on in the universe brain cells you're undergoing we can tell you what forces are operating it's it's it's electromagnetic forces brain cells use electrical impulses chemical impulses this is why drugs can affect the brain all right they're chemically there's chemistry going on in the brain in its natural state you disrupt that enhance it you just put down some some some chemistry in your stomach that's now affecting your brain what you just drink there what was it alpha brain okay yeah so you're entering the chemistry so it's chemistry what's going on on the large scale structure the universe is not chemistry right there's some chemistry deep within but it's not the chemist is not what's making that pattern and because of that it becomes an artistic curiosity not something that has any kind of deep scientific insight so it's just a fascinating similarity yes it's a fascinating similarly put them up together and it's fun to think about it but it's not it's fun to think about it artistically but not scientifically no it's great if you're hanging out with your friends going wow man now when you're looking at subatomic particles excuse me and you looking at these like when they observe particles in superposition where they're moving and stationary at the same time or they blink in and out of existence like when you get down to that and I repeat the the opening page of the book the universe is under no obligation to make sense so at that scale things that go on with atoms and molecules fall outside of your life experience you don't hang out at the bar with protons new client and nucleons or you know other nucleons or or molecules you just don't so what they do in their day is completely foreign to you so now you shrink down to that size and particles are popping in and out of existence they're they become conjoined quantum mechanically conjoined and it's completely weird and you would say this is none of this makes sense and this is observable Oh in a visual sense well it depends depending how big the phenomena is otherwise you can see other things that would happen that you know that are the manifestations of that happening right but yeah so an electron is smaller even than that oh yes by how many factors no no we don't even know we don't know the size of an electron the concept of super string theory so a super vibrating string you're smaller than that yes they the strings would have to be smaller thinner smaller than the electron itself by many many that I don't I couldn't quantify for bringing a string theory person so it's like at the bottom of what we can observe well that's a great question what is the bottom and you know the word atom which was introduced by the Greeks you know what Adam means in Greek it has a translation you know it means no indivisible so they imagine that all matter was you'd come down to something that was indivisible how about that oh they do figured out they supposed it and it was the first day we you know they were wealthy and had free time and you know when they weren't waging war you could think and you know what we think of as philosophy it was traceable to a lot of what they were doing back then and the origins of what science is are traceable to back to back then that you'd have an idea that applies to what the universe does that enables you to predict future behavior that is science and so so the atom it turned out is divisible it's divisible into sub atomic sub atom particles so you get electrons protons and neutrons and a whole host of other particles less familiar they're neutrinos and other things then it turns out protons and neutrons are further divisible there you get quarks out of those and as far as we know there are only four fundamental particles in the universe the photon which is light the electron of which there are several species there's the anti electron in this and but just these are just a simple here the photon the electron then the quark and the neutrino that's it everything in the universe that we've ever observed is May out of that stuff so those are quote the atoms of the universe the indivisible parts if you will now this is no dark matter could be made of yet another kind of thing that we don't know yet but we got top people trying to figure out what dark matter is we've measured it out there we just don't know what it is well it's something like 90 something percent of the universe dark matter and dark energy it's 95% of all that drives the universe and we can measure the existence of both yet we have no idea what's driving them this is an awesome opportunity for you to illuminate this often it's all in astrophysics for people in a hurry it's all it may come down may you can pre-order it which by the way publishers love it if you preorder it an adorable beautiful it's a good size it's adorable you're gonna pre-order it on Amazon you know the reason why they publishers like you to preorder it so that they can thank you how many yeah they just want to didn't want to over print they don't want to under print if they if so they get a sense of the pre-ordering because you're not charged until they ship it so it's a pretty harmless exercise while we're on this subject of subatomic particles and and weirdness I wanted to i wanna if you could illuminate this often misused explanation for the observer effect because you know the the particles waves and you watch them and observe them and it changes the reaction it is heavily misunderstood it's misunderstood because people want to attribute it to magic the magic design and the consciousness looking at it but isn't it in fact just measuring it yes thank you please explain because I'm so tired Joe you're good it just tries you carry your people with you I try when I'm were you pulling what what where you getting your people I don't know I don't own them for sure definitely not my people very great you have an admirably diverse following and then not many people can claim that and it's probably cuz of your diverse profile right I mean why miss open-minded as I can but top about you smart and you'd read and you're thoughtful and you're also on some level respect you'll hear it somebody out and you're you know you did you got ummm anything so no you're in a lot of places in a lot of spaces and that's a good thing I mean we need more unity in this world so so well thank you yeah thank you so please explain what what people are getting wrong okay so very simple it's much simpler than you think okay all right you ready yes so I'm looking at you the only reason why I can see you is because there's light reflecting off of your face your body into my eyes so there's light oh yeah those are Hubble photographs oh my gosh yeah those are images from their sheets that you put over the fluorescent light cover and so when we look up we actually see the result real images people pretending it's the nice recording studio 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 a planetarium yes you're describing a pointer exactly call it that it's a planetarium well something like but I just wanted an image sure what you can you know what you know do it don't do better than that you get a you just you get a curved version of those very high resolution LEDs first yeah okay then you put any image up there you want the night sky tonight it's what the sky looks like from from Alpha Centauri Oh like when you go to see one of those star shows at a planetarium and they show it on the ceiling above you well yes so but nowadays that the ceiling itself is the is the source of light rise not projected from something so then you just feed that with image data and then it becomes whatever you want yeah I could totally yeah you don't know Peter I got people I mean people that lend you my people it's Harry I mean my people for me while you're you know you happy but you know the people of the past would teach the people so ok so here what sound looking at you okay all right yes and I see you I want to know where you are so I turn on the lights and I say there you are all right now let's make you tinier let's make you mini-me okay like in the movie right so now is a tiny version of you a mini-me version of Joe Rogan now your little I turn on what you're still there okay okay because if the lights are not on I can't see you I don't know where you are right it's that simple okay okay 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 and I turn on the light to see you there because I think you're there the light the photon comes in hits your atom and pops you into another location mmm the very act of trying to measure your position prevents me from measuring your position and as have Jack [ __ ] to do with your consciousness or your mind or your eyes or anything it has to do with the fact that to know you're there some information has to come from you to me like shining a light on you and the small you are the more susceptible you are to the the energy of the light changing your position in space so my question is I was like you know it's like you ever I don't know if this is still happened you a quarter spills out of your pants pocket on the backseat of a car and is there in the wedge between the bottom and the backseat and so you try to reach in to get it and the act of reaching for the coin makes the coin move farther away from you the act of reaching for it right be separate you're separated and it just slides down even further that's not your mind making that happen it's the it's the act of the measurement that is affecting what it is you're trying to measure and this was discovered in quantum physics and to the point where that's actually it's a Heisenberg uncertainty principle it's one of the basic foundations of all of quantum physics now when it's just ground it but when it's described in the woowoo way you they show these particles going through these slots and then observing them changes the pattern that they go through with and there's a there's a a horrible cartoon that you see in that movie what in the bleep I couldn't get through that movie I tried did you go crazy with the bad science no can I tell you where I turn maybe I mean well here's what people don't know a lot of that is from a cult the woman that I didn't know the woman who is the I don't mind a cult movie you know she's a channeler she's speaking as a character like do you know that that one blonde woman older blonde woman that's in that movie okay and she speaks when she speaks she's speaking as a care okay I didn't know it you have to like she's she's a part of like this very bizarre sort of cult okay and should I tell you where I tuned it out or you want to finish okay so I tried to I just couldn't watch it right there's a point where they were talking about natives in the Caribbean seeing European ships yes and then they said well because they'd never seen a ship before they brain didn't register it as anything and then it just disappeared [ __ ] and I'm thinking no that's not half the brain warehouse excuse me that's not how this works okay what would happen they might not know what they're looking at but they'll know they're looking at something and they've had ships they they went from island to island that's how you get from island to island is it well that's a really big version yeah we've never seen anything that big before I don't know what it is I don't know where it came from but I want to find out why I want to study it I wanna protect myself whatever so just because you've never seen it doesn't mean you're not gonna register it excuse me no it's no I said no but I can't waste my got other things I got to devote my brain energy to instead of instead of this but someone else it oh it gets better later on so I said maybe I'll ba 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 now by the way just in all fairness to what they think that the point they were trying to make there are things that if you don't know to recognize them you would they would go undiscovered yes okay but that doesn't mean you wouldn't see them okay so for example let's say you're walking and you didn't know that you were walk over this huge burial mound because the slope was really shallow and you're just walking okay well you just did you did you didn't notice that okay so you need a different way to see it in order to know so a thumb from space from an angle it measure the height whatever so there are ways to miss things that's and that and that happens all the time right but if it's something there on the horizon my gosh this is why we have eyes okay now they're not the best data taking devices but it's come time to tell you where there's a ship or not a ship that you've never seen before it's a ship of cork a just so much evidence of that when people discover new animals yes before anything anything there's no record of it whatsoever people find it and they could still see most scientific discoveries you discovered some we've never seen before Ramtha that was the woman's name that was the the person that she was double check that's a cool channeling name yeah channeling name Ram power Chandler I'd be ramped though I found that after the after the the movie was done after I watched it I wasn't I they got me with a lot of things so I was like wow is that true is that real then I started reading fortunately that movie came out in the 2000s instead of in the 90s because if it came out in the 90s we were all got duped oh yeah those we wouldn't have the internet all the research all the [ __ ] that's wrong with it in the 2000s I started researching it and then I would send it to my friends like look look look what [ __ ] this came from and then and then you go that's a cold yeah it's a cult that lady's a cult she said she's talking like she's an alien she's supposed to be an alien right isn't that do you see it in there anyway again I don't know I don't mind people think they're channelers I just don't put them in charge of anything that's all well it's it's nothing to find it's just that you should probably say that when you get going with that nobody's ever said she's calls herself a ramp they think it's real and genuine and since and they're very sincere because they're yeah they've do put themselves well that whole thing what you need is is you know what you need is some foundation of science literacies so that you can inoculate yourself against those who would exploit your absence of knowledge of how the science for their own game well not even for their own gain just YouTube videos I mean someone could make a very compelling YouTube video where they get you convinced that oh my god dinosaurs aren't real right they start playing these things for you they tell they tell you some pounds can pop popcorn in the sea ever see that one I have seen now well yeah you line up sometimes more than they start popping yeah you got it like Colonel someone yeah that can't really have no no imagine it could Jesus Christ look what are we doing with these folks but there's there's a ton of those out there where people see that's it's one of the problems with with a lack of dialogue with someone who just has one narrative like you sit down you edit something and you just talk you know it's it's it's very similar to like even if you write a blog I mean that's one thing if you're writing a blog like say if you're an expert in electronics you read a blog about how a television works but if you're just a person and you don't really understand what you're talking about but you write something and use the right words and you say 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 is a terrible person just by writing something without them having to respond I call up stop never do that I tweet have a tweet if you increase you and I don't gonna botch it because it's it's way better as the tweet and I will ever remember it as the tweet 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 yeah well that is a big problem with a lot of people that watch these YouTube videos that's what it is they say oh this is right oh my gosh but they don't know enough to know why it's wrong well this is what I want to talk to you about Oh what is it about people that there's this this this is this very compelling need to find something out that other people don't know like the world is flat like dinosaurs aren't real like that kind of stuff is very compelling to people so what I do in those cases in the in the a flea yeah so what I do is I would say instead of debating them and some of some of your listeners are listening to this right now and what all I would do is say what is your best single bit of evidence for what you're claiming and what would it take to show that you're wrong mmm all right well let's go to a simple one so that's what I would ask okay and I've done this exercise and it doesn't work you know why why because there was a guy who didn't believe we went to the moon we spent a third of our time in our last session goes there says if someone I know who doesn't believe he went to the moon where let me just say he's skeptical so I said what kind of evidence would convince you he said images of the landing site of the Apollo missions so I said okay here's a website where we sent fed wasn't Westar was the Chinese I think the Chinese or Europeans sent aced a probe to an orbiter to the moon so that was close enough because ground-based telescopes are not precise don't they don't have the resolution to see the landing sites but via close enough to the moon you can it it photographed the entire surface of the moon and there were the landing sites and you saw the rover tracks and the the the base for the lunar module and so he that night he went home and found it and then he came back and says well NASA could have faked that well I'm done with you we have no more to talk about because he's not ready to be convinced well that's a weird because we gave him the evidence he asked for exact of that would convince him and it did not convince him that's a so we have no other conversation with you that's a singular event which you could say in one way or like it is possible that someone could fake a singular event 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 a parts of the you look at the images from the space station where they circled the moon or they circled the earth rather I mean there are there's many many satellite images of the earth in its entirety you know and one of the things that the argument was is how come every photograph of the earth is a compilation of photographs well because they're all taken from 300 miles up the earth is yeah there's a way bigger than 300 miles you have to take complements you have to do that's the only way to get will accept your powerful the polished 17 coming back has the earth that's the famous one there's Africa and Antarctica in view it's the full earth very few full Earth's it's very hard to get a full Earth single photo of course the Astra and when we went to the moon the moon missions when they're coming back think about it 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 but that's the side of the moon they came from so they want to visit the moon while it's sunlight there they don't want to need flashlights when they get to the moon so they visit the moon while there's sunlight earth the view of Earth at that time will not be full 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 of Earth was full earth and then they got a full earth rota those packs that they have on their back that regulate the temperature that allows them to walk on the surface of the moon when it's 250 degrees well the site is facing the Sun is about more than 200 degrees and in shadow 250 degrees below yeah so can it switch back and forth between those two environments yeah what you need no what you just insulate the astronauts insulated and so when you're insulated those temperature extremes are not felt well so they're minimized and it's regulated by the pack it's like a clothes warm don't like oxygen and no it maintains the temperature but in the patient voice leh of warming and cooling in the face of what's going on it maintains the temperature that's how you need to think about it okay so regardless of its cooling one side of you and chilling the other and heating the other side right it's maintaining a temperature for you and when you are in space like say what they're doing a spacewalk like on the space station same things being on the surface of the Moon this is your atmosphere on earth you are in this in this cocoon dare I say of atmosphere so all the air in this room is the same temperature because the air can communicate a difference in temperature to itself equilibrating it across the whole room right if you don't have air then your temperature is measured by where's the energy coming from that's heating you 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 so you need to you could survive it if you put yourself on a rotisserie Oh figure out the right rotation rate and even then you'd have to spend pretty quick that's a hog you like that yeah you have to figure out what the right rate is now when you get in a debate with a guy like I don't really guy I don't debate people okay well when you discuss the same okay when an argument last more than five minutes both sides are wrong that's a terrible saying it's wrong and the other person stubborn you know could definitely last for hours yeah it's not it's true 80% of the time okay okay yeah um but you got into it with that rapper that thing said here's I'll tell you why be a baby good cause in his Twitter stream he was saying he was invoking physics and I said I got a deal with this right yeah and so he showed a picture from Bear Mountain which is a mountain in in slightly upstate New York mm-hmm where Manhattan is in the sight line of the summit of this mountain and he says given the curvature of the earth and this formula you should not be able to see Manhattan at all okay and it depends on the height that you're viewing well thank you well so so you do the math and it turns out Manhattan the island would not be visible at all that's true but any building taller than 15 stories would rise up above the curvature of the earth and you will see it and if you look at the photo you see the tall buildings rising above 15 stories it's exactly what the correct formula shows and not his formula which was wrong and misinterpreted claims to show well it's just bizarre because snipers have been using the the literal curve of the earth to plan where bullets go you have to when you shoot it a mile you know when you're shooting like well out over a thousand yards those those factors so let me think a mile I have to ask how much curvature of the earth you get after miles we also didn't drop question you get dropped in Kirby gravity drop yes and then curve yeah so both of those yeah well this is it good its here's a thing to say someone if you have a bullet in your hand and you shoot a gun which bullocks faster right they yeah they generally they get the wrong answer to that yeah drop at the exact same rate they'll hit the ground at the same exact same time and that that blows people's minds they can't believe that but you do that in physics 101 you know it's it's an expected physics demo so that's why it's physics is so important you know people always take biology and this grade but don't leave out the physics because that's where the fundamental operations of nature are to be found okay physical universe are to be found so what you have is you have a gun at one side it's like a thing that shoots out a projectile I don't call it a gun at one side of the stage and then you have like a little stuffed animal at the other side stays held up with an electromagnet at the top of its head and these two are exactly the same level as the projectile comes out from the those mini cannon it trips an electric circuit that releases the electromagnet at the top of the stuffed animal begins to fall the bullet moves horizontally but also falls because gravity is pulling them both and you watch the projectile curve down you watch the stuffed animal curve down and it hits the stuffed animal every single time the only factor that would change that would be if you put wings on the bullet and was dealing with the wind yeah when wind would affect it yeah do they have bullets with wings I haven't seen them no they don't okay no but if they did yeah you know if like you shot the bullet I saw that on some James Bond movie I probably yeah I'm sure it's it's just gotta be frustrating for you when these things come back around like there was no flatter Theory when I was in high school so there are other things though think about it when you're in high school there was much more astrology going on oh yeah the President Reagan let's talk about that Nancy Reagan has an astrologer so today you don't see much of it unless you talk to Steve Maxwell well but it's still there it's just not it's not manifesting in public policy some people believe in a deeply I agree but it's not up there in public policy that's when I said okay well we're the Nancy Reagan was really the only one that made it one publisher then but at the bar - do you hear people saying if you're a Taurus we should just stop I miss that I misled myself I thought it was fading oh but just but Nancy Reagan was the big proponent it's nonsense astrology now it's not like someone who really understands astrological charts and can plot it in the moons and retrograde and you were born and you know Celsius was rising and all that crazy crap that they tried I don't know what their I was on a talk show with in astrology a real one apparently yes she's real she says she's real okay and I trust her because she talks about how fake other astrologers are don't trust her and she was saying that the Kennedys all died during a lunar eclipse Oh scary and you know that this is a very checkable statement she just says this and everyone's listening and believing and Wow that's that can't be by accident and well I don't know when other Kennedys died but I know when Jack Kennedy died and there was November 22nd 1963 so I so I don't need to know if there's an eclipse then I just need to know what phase the moon is in right because you can only have a lunar eclipse when the moon is full so the moon was nowhere near fall it was like two weeks away from full even if it wasn't eclipse it didn't happen during eclipse is my point right okay so of course because it was daylight well no no you can have a lunar eclipse at any time okay Riu dark it's just not for you it would be for your world right right don't be so it's some century in fact when there's a lunar eclipse anyone on the side of the earth that sees the moon will see the lunar so the so by the way lunar eclipses you get several per year by the way partial eclipses as a minimum and every couple years there's a full lunar eclipses so these are not rare things to start they're not rare okay so I said you know he was shot when the I forgot what muna was a first quarter moon and she said oh well this counts if they're anywhere within two weeks on either side of the eclipse what that's a month it's I said let me just shut up here and let her keep it was a what is sharing the time it was a Pharrell had a talk show we were booked so and he'd like science by the way and he he want a cert at the at they at the the Academy Award group photo so I got to give him some props for that but so but so I just said I have nothing more to say here hence my arguing with her lasted less than five minutes now what are they when when they're trying to decide like what your personality would be and what you you know hike what you can dictate from your birth date and what time you were born what what are they exactly trying to connect so I I had a deeper awareness of this recently when I learned that people take the names of things very seriously okay the names mean things to people regardless of what the thing actually is okay okay yeah so what might we mean by this so let's like astrophysically i say we have this thing called dark matter we don't know what it is well it's got to be some kind of matter no no it shouldn't be called dark matter it should be call Fred alright with no it shouldn't lead you to think anything about it because we do not know what it is we should really call it dark gravity it is it is gravity that we have measured we don't know what's causing the gravity just call it dark matter implies you think it's matter some people do but we don't know so explain to me what what is this based on like when you say dark matter what is it based on it's I'd like to just call it Fred okay let's call it Fred and I'm saying we don't know what it is right how is gravity of this stuff okay it's out there it's six times the gravity of stuff that's ordinary matter we don't know where it's coming from we don't know the source we don't know the art is it a parallel universe is it we don't know and how are we measuring it by its effect on the motions of objects so a certain strength of gravity will force you to move at a given speed as you near it and as you pull away and we see this in galaxies galaxy clusters binary galaxies more measured entire galaxies that are made completely out of this Fred a month at least 80% of the force of gravity manifested in these galaxies is Fred yes and that's why are they calling it dark matter they shouldn't in my opinion you call dark gravity because that's literally what it is so it's gravity that cannot be measured or gravity that's not gravity a pletely understood it's not understood correct so it's it's mysterious gravity we're completely measured to do we measure it you can't narrow down what measure gravity precisely right okay so you measure it but you can't so my talking origin because some we don't know what it is right my point is because someone called it dark matter it has swayed everybody into thinking that it is a matter of some kind it has constrained people's thoughts about how to think about this problem okay so now the ancients looked up and they saw these stars and they put their culture on the sky so they're centaurs there's there's you know where the center so Center Archer so it's Sagittarius we have a Ryan the hunter we have Taurus so we have sea serpents we have rivers we have stuff that mattered to people back then okay we have an Aquarius what is it was the water-bearer oh the water-bearer that must mean that when the Sun is in Aquarius it's gonna rain more on earth why because the ancients called it the water-bearer ah okay and all of a sudden the name reigns supreme 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 of the 88 constellations about six of them look like what you're told they're supposed to look like the rest require opium induced imagination to establish what they are so they all have names then you go to the astrologers tables and they say oh this is the raine sign or this is a dry drought sign and there you take the names of things and those names or what they interpret based on where the moon is the Sun is where the planets are and all whatever the angle configurations there are and each angle has a certain latitude over which they'll count it as a hit rather than as a miss and so this gives extraordinary capacity of the astrologer to tell you what's going on in your life so it's [ __ ] but they did have this real fascinating connection with these certain constellations and all of the different things that they thought were attached these certain constellation notes you know would be like it'll be like a geologist going up to the border of Colorado trying to understand the shape as a geologist hmm it's it's it's an arbitrary shape hmm Colorado is a square on a curved surface it's amazing how much confirmation bias is attached to Australia by a river byah yeah that's right so you know wiki has a great website on cognitive bias hmm and there's like 20 or so well known by every person it should be this should be a course called cognitive bias 101 not forget college every high school of course cognitive bias and the entire course should be about all the ways we fool ourselves don't you think that little Sciences so I've tweeted this to science the only point of the scientific method 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 that is the only point of it and therefore the scientific method be anything you invent just take better notes take a chart recorder be more awake next time you take the data bring a friend to observe it with you 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 do whatever it takes to support that that mission statement 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 me and who the the the the quote therapeutic touch people that's real that's real you don't even understand I'm an intuitive e goes on and on and on and on yeah and these are the things that fail in the double-blind science NE why do you do double-blind so you don't fool yourself into thinking something is true that's why you do double-blind and if you don't and you want something to be true even if you even if you're surprised by something that might have been true that you were against still you need someone else to check it okay and and you only get an emergent scientific truth when you have agreement among different peoples experiments and 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 in fact we're trying to show that you're wrong this is what made in Stine so great cuz no one believed his relativity and they kept devising ever more accurate experiments to show he was wrong and it end up showing that he was right by ever higher do you think that we're doing ourselves a disservice by not teaching people how the mind works how confirmation bias works and and things in school I'm working on this what are you in a few years I'm gonna have something let's discuss it because I think either took me a long week it has to include an entire course on cognitive bias yes if we are gonna emerge as adults no longer susceptible to charlatans yes okay who are either well-meaning and just misguided or who are explicitly exploiting your ignorance and that's a major factor in our culture a major factor when it comes to politicians the driver factor when it comes to bosses it's a major factor when it comes to how you choose what you do for a living and human interaction with nature itself yeah I mean we are constantly trying to manipulate and control other people's biases behaviors the way they think the way they act and we're very vulnerable in some senses because this is not something that's taught to us at an early age you know and I think that we it takes a long time to figure it out on your own and I've often thought like men why wasn't I explained this when I was young yeah because the curriculum was it wasn't thinking about that yeah but we're just giving people facts instead of teaching them how thinking that your mind is this vessel into which you pour information and know where and at no time are we trained how to turn a fact into knowledge knowledge into wisdom and wisdom into insight I think that full sequence needs to be in there in the academic system K through 12 13 through 16 13 14 yeah College it's got to be in there somewhere without it you're just this vessel of facts even if you and even the people we call smart in class these are people get a's on everything and they know everything but do they have the deepest insight are they do they really understand what it is that they're putting back on the test I don't think all of them do I think they have good short-term memory some of them and they do well on the exams because of that fact so they're good at acquiring data and and maintaining and acquiring information and then bringing it back on command not all summer aren't deep thinkers and I want to take that away from them all I'm saying is that the curriculum I think needs these other dimensions of of survival really so that's what it is it's survival in a world and when a scientist says this is true you can ask well why do you think that's true exercise some healthy skepticism I don't have a problem with that say because of look at this evidence do you know how to read evidence by the way and look at this evidence pyramid and this is why we conclude overwhelmingly that this is going to happen in our future ah iq out of you pointy-headed scientists what do you know by the way give me my cell phone so I can call my grandmother okay well I use GPS satellites to know when to make a left turn right right I'm gonna call my astrologist to tell these scientists don't dig out their head up their ass right yeah well I think also would be really beneficial to teach people how to manage perspective and how to look at you know look at life in a way that's gonna be beneficial to you but we're not really giving more to manage the mind like philosophy and philosophy classes a sure but but even philosophy not all philosophy has very the philosophy of life you know just how to think about decision making yeah and the causes and effects and consequences there's not enough of that either no I mean they're relying on that to happen at home but not all homes are intact right in fact perhaps most are broken homes or separated homes and so I I think the school systems school needs to be rethought and I'm trying to think that through a few more years 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 right their own spring water that's what they think of when you say alternative schooling right right I'll train them at home and good luck it's as soon as you say Holmes going oh you're a religious nut I mean that's that's immediately the ocean fastest-growing sector of the homeschooling center they don't want you cloud your head with all that evolution talk right right right do you ever talk to that Ken Ham guy have you ever sat down with that guy know what Bill Nye has I mean Bill Nye debated him I mean I can't debate people it's not what I do you just can't do it I just can't do it it's not what I do I'm an educator and I want to educate you so you might think for yourself but tonight go away that's it to debate someone implies that whoever whoever is most convincing is correct right that's not how knowledge works right it's just so much charisma involved yeah it's not how know whatever charisma level I have or not have I don't want to hinge what is true on that fact right all right so I'm an educator I will I will teach you the causes and effects of what science is knowing what science is and how and why it works which is why it's critical that you continue to criticize science fiction movies it's very important don't you back off now we need use a lot of people that wouldn't know that that Chinese space station is known and that her hair would be moving all over the place there would be everywhere yeah well my favorite one is remember when he's at the end of a tether and she's drawn to save him but she doesn't have an oxygen to do it so he lets go of the tether and that way she can't save him before she can save herself right and he and then he flies away it's like no they're like floating in space yeah let's go to the tether it just stays there in his hand yeah doesn't he would be right there nothing let's go nothing happens wooden be like a bungee cord now if he if she was swinging him in circles and he like oh yeah he'd fly off at a tangent but that's not what was happening right and nor were they rotating I would check the what they were relative to earth below there was not what was going on so then you know she could have just give it a slight tug and then he would have drifted towards her that could have even been a little romance it's a little baby tug we talked would do it they would slowly drop the helmets would hit you know and then the helmets break and then there'd be freezing it up instantly right you'd suffocate that too and then freeze to death right what movie nailed that there was one movie with the space you know they overdid it well there was people want you to like explode in space yeah no no I mean well you want you to free solid to instantly yeah right no just know there's and even in was an Armageddon where the Sun rose over this over the over the comet and he didn't have his visor down and he was blinded by the Sun it's like the same Sun in our daytime sky the atmosphere doesn't protect you in any of the Earth's atmosphere it takes out you know the few percent that's right oh yeah a few percent boy in the middle say just one day light at the top of the sky a few percent now he'll get more UV that's important get a little brown yep but yep death in space is nowhere near as spectacular as movies would have you think yeah they make it seem like if you take that a helmet off you just have immediately freeze up yeah yeah no no I mean you can go into very what happens is there's nothing making you cold other than you radiating heat from your skin so you only get as cold as quickly as you can radiate away heat that's all so take quite a while oh yeah no no air so you'd suffocate quicker yeah you'd suffocate oh yeah you some Kate long before you saw anything anything like that happen so so just think about there's nothing touching you that's making you cold it has to wait for you to radiate away mmm that's what's happening okay and so that so yeah you'll feel very cold very quickly but you're not gonna die from that fast now when Stephen Hawking oh by the way you also have dissolved gases in your body which will try to come because in in in the vacuum of space you don't have the air pressure tamping down the dissolve gas so you take away the air pressure then the dissolved gases will begin to bubble out of your blood no there's the same problem with when you have the bends ah when you come up from low altitude right and you go to lesser pressure around you employees again nice so you want to do that slowly so that it's a very slow thing but the hazards of but why would you be butt naked in space I'm you're gonna have a space suit on well I just want to prove to everybody that you do it so like well they did in 2001 a Space Odyssey they basically did it right the guy without his helmet went through the airlock I just held his breath oh okay yeah yeah that's what we do oh well that that's way more reasonable well because it was a reasonable movie there was a real adviser Stanley Kubrick well he was a really interesting guy - cuz he was a mathematician Stanley I didn't know that about but I knew he cared about yeah that level of detail he's to do complex math and for fun so there's a there's a there's a failed bit of physics and 2001 you want oh yeah yeah one day I'll talk about my pencil it's nutso huh then the monolith which was it no no so remember when he's he's on one of the the moon crafts and he's orbiting the moon and they give him food alright and there's a tray of nasty food obviously it's like astronaut food remember this is 1968 so everything here is a is a visual taste of the future so he has another packet where he extends a straw from that plastic packet okay oh there he is excellent and you're getting the good photo you're good your boy is good right here okay yeah there is so he sucks up the straw right and this isn't zero-g so stuff is floating but he sucked up the straw then he goes to another straw and the liquid and the straw goes back down that's gravity yeah he totally [ __ ] them no so that one obviously he can't get everything right but it's fun to notice the things he couldn't get right we didn't think to get right so to me it's a celebration here's another one okay the rotation rate of the space station I calculated that and I did 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 numbers something like between 2 and 3 G's oh and I said it's why would you do that that's stupid you wouldn't do that and I realized if they rotated it at the rate that would give you 1 G you'd be way too slow to make an interesting scene as I gave it to him as I'll give you 3 G's 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 this whole ballet this entire ballet wow that's cool again happens at a stately but real pace ok but that pace gives them a 3G 3GS of gravity so it's 3x the correct pace maybe been two and a half but I forgot the number but it's it's multiples too high so days much soon as I let him do it it's it's so I'm not gonna so I'm fine that's that's artistic license that's Mark Twain II and license where he says first get your facts straight then distort them at your leisure that is what I'm holding artists to so now when you're looking at a space station like they're in zero-gravity when they're in space station know they are in 1g on the edge of the space station on the edge yeah on the turning edge yeah that's a lot I mean that thing so our space yes oh so it's zero-g yes right now it's but it is possibie cuz it is in freefall towards Earth so it's constantly in freefall but it's just going around the yeah it's in freefall towards Earth but it's going sideways so fast that the amount that it has fallen equals precisely the spin of the curvature of the earth uh-huh is that more proof that the earth is round if you've had physics 101 yes but is it possible sorry gravity yeah in a space station only if you rotate it along zero 10 it's not gravity it's a similar system but according to Einstein they're indistinguishable from one another so you can do it so there it is possible to do something where you can send people into deep space and generate gravity through some station or two at least two ways one of them you just rotate it and all the good sci-fi movies have rotating sections of a Space Station right right and there's some that have rotating opposite ways so that they can submit up against one another right and so there's some clever ideas out there with space stations of the future for long voyages we use I had commander Hadfield on the podcast cool 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 he's just showing off because he's like setting records for be sure yeah I couldn't I couldn't handle life with you lowly earth people he was talking about his body like it took like over a year before his bone density came back and well this is it partly addressed in the film the the the Martian kid he's born on Mars comes to earth which ones going on Mars yeah the kid born on Mars I'm get you gotta research this like now yeah what's the name of the movie its recent yeah yeah oh this the space between us oh what the hell is that you got to get out more dude I do yeah that's so this is a Martian colony where the first community who's what movies this this came out of come on months ago really oh my gosh oh yeah ma'am so there's this 19 so that's the Martian colony and one of the female astronauts they send that one there happens to be they learn is pregnant and they can't bring her back and so they she gives birth on Mars the first person who was ever born on Mars and then they then they keep it a secret and then he comes back as a teenager that falls in love see there's the fetus so so anyhow he has a hard time on earth because his heart developed in Martian gravity which is only 38% earth gravity oh wow then on earth he just couldn't they had to you know figure out what to do with him Wow yeah that's on Mars the kid was born on Mars okay yeah don't spoil alert me Jamie yeah that's why yeah yeah yeah yeah so well we're generating gravity yes so one way to rotate it up another way is if you're headed somewhere right I just have a huge fuel tank and just always run your rockets ah solar force is always a g-force if you should sell accelerated 1g right towards a destination then you'll always have feeling gravity and you'll get there awesomely fast but you would have to have so much fuel or on something well you knew you filling stations on route this sort of the end 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 okay then we have 1g the whole trip that's how you would do that Wow so the momentum when you'd precisely do somebody there at 1g oh my gosh you hit near the speed of light very quickly whoa oh my I mean I forgot what is it in a I have to calculate it but it's it's the acceleration of gravity if you actually move that fast that's that's head snapping now would they have to have some sort of a crazy propulsion system in order to do something along those lines how fast were 1g get you there yes yes so Wow 1g would take 1 plus the distance in lightyears Proxima Centauri 4.2 light-years for example would take 5 point 2 years so the distance in lightyears plus a year so that's that's that's so that gets you basically 20-25 percent the speed of light what happens if you just run into stuff on the way like there's a lot of stuff out there right yes it's not a giant issue and getting to Mars well the space is actually quite empty but if you do hit something that's the end of everything so it's it's a low risk high consequence thing then you gotta you got to put in play know how much of a risk is the space junk that we've left in the environment we were started well freaking out about how many S's are up there I guess so there's countless thousands of bits of space junk from chips of paint that fell off of the base so bolts and nails and retro right and boosters yeah that's all it's all up there and I'm and I'm wondering whether we haven't been visited by aliens yet because I saw the space junk orbiting Earth and said forget that I'm gonna submit it to some other planet I'm gonna risk my life since the short-sighted approach to space travel so the NASA orbital debris office website you can actually see the debris that NASA's tracking basic almost in real time it's it'll show serious and it's it's like a beehive around the earth so you got yeah there it is okay that's the debris around the earth that asteroid that NASA tracks and there's a failed Japanese experiment to try to in that outer ring that you see that's the the altitude of geosynchronous satellites and that inner enough that should be there should be a video of that just fine go to the bottom right go to bottom right right there click on that play that video it's not a video why isn't that a video I'm sure there is a video somewhere yeah there's a video on that site so you can just see the movement of these pieces and it's so launch windows have to know when to not hit stuff so so when you've launched whoo it's not just is everything aligned right is what K will you successfully get past the debris and there was a Japanese they had an experiment to try to capture it with nets there was a recent mole yeah so didn't work yeah so the problem is the low orbit stuff will eventually fall in and burn up the higher court except will never go away there's nothing to destroy it and so they can't capture that stuff well you need a very clever this this stuff is moving 18,000 miles an hour so what's your net what just what are you doing go higher res on that sure if there's a high no there's a high rest oh god that's 1080 no it's not from NASA's YouTube there okay somebody else but that's that's the kind so all that's that's debris that you're looking at there so anyway yeah so your concern for debris is well placed and we may 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 that's so crazy and this was all started in the 1940s 1950s like when did they start shooting stuff up there oh no 1950s Sputnik oh yeah 1957 that was the first satellite first anything yeah first anything in orbit Oh God and in that short amount of time no that's crazy yeah it's like it's like a dumpster 60 years planetary don't ruin the whole thing they've had it for billions of years 60 years they filled it up with junk that's oh my god that's terrifying it yeah that's going around the earth oh my god all of that oh my god has anybody ever hit anything while trying to do something alright well so what exacerbates it is remember in China when was this 19 2004 2003 China destroyed one of its own satellites yeah what was that about orbit I remember someone yeah yeah and they basically did a kinetic kill on a satellite so kinetic kill for those who don't know is you don't need explosives if the speed of the projectile and it's kinetic energy is higher than the energy that would be in the explosive shell itself so it knows a fascinating calculation to make so so here it is 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 then I send it and it hits and it blow something up but suppose I send this thing really really fast really really really fast I can calculate how much kinetic energy this thing has 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 ah like shoemaker-levy well that's for example yeah no no I give you a terrestrial example okay it's so it's what we call a high-speed collision this is more than you bargained for in this in our time together but I will tell you nowaday ready perfect 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 they've got to be calderas these thousand craters on the moon oh why because every one is a perfect circle and if asteroids are coming from space they would come from all angles and if you come in at a shallow angle you get an oval and even shallower be more oval so you'd have a whole range of circles and ovals and ellipses and you don't see that they must be calderas it was not sitting out there it's a volcano just create a volcanic crater that's a Yellowstone yeah yeah yeah it's a vault it's a volcanic crater that's all and it's a little more poetic a caldera yeah but it's a it's a crater left by a volcano that has exploded like the boom was so big the mountains gone and now it's just a big hole or at the top of the mountain there's a crater at the top of the mountain like crater lake that's that's a round hole in the top of a mountain was that once a volcano I don't know but it's a hole okay so in the 1970s we were able to do calculations with high speed computers with good computers and what we found was if the object is moving faster if the kinetic energy of the object is higher then the energy that's holding the thing together ooh okay so what's holding together a rock the chemical connections of the silicon and the oxygen and everything that they are an all everything is making the rock that's holding it together you can calculate how much energy is holding it together and if it's going 45,000 write that write down that number now I send in the asteroid with a kinetic energy higher than the energy that's holding it together on impact it explodes oh because all that energy goes back into the rock because thing isn't moving anymore we did the kinetic energy go it digs a crater number one by virtue of putting all that energy back into the stone and that explodes it so on impact even at an angle it is a singular point explosion and that's why every single crater is a perfect circle 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 now you have experience in this okay have you ever thrown us do this next oh you think we're in California sorry snowballs snowballs take us snow cut a big bear they have to take a smoke there and face oh it's a barn wall and throw the snowball at it and it'll make a little circular mark on it now change your angle to the wall and throw the snowball again it'll still make a a small round mark and it'll keep doing it you know why because the speed with which you threw the snowball that energy is greater than the energy that's holding the snowball together because hardly energy hardly any energy is holding a snowball together it's just loosely packed snow so when you do it against the wall you see the snowball completely disappear in a in a mini snowball explosion if you will so this works for any comparison of projectile speed and what we call the binding energy of the object itself this is why the intercontinental ballistic missiles never carried conventional warheads because their speed coming out of this of space because they leave the atmosphere go from one continent to the other and then they fall out of the sky that speed gives them more kinetic energy than any conventional warhead would have had whoa but then we figured out how to make small nuclear warheads the nukes now you talk and energy the kinetic energy of the ICBM is not higher than the nuclear warhead that we now put in that's why all ICBMs are nukes Wow the v2 rocket basically didn't need an explosive warhead in its tip they came out of the sky going five miles per second there was none of this that implies you're hearing the thing the it is coming in supersonically Wow you're sitting there at a cocktail table on a block and then the block is gone is obliterated in the next instant you didn't even know to look up Wow so that's the end and they add an explosive anyway but they'd they probably didn't need to now to go back to shoemaker-levy that was a comment that slammed into jupiter no good Jupiter is a gas giant you've always been confused as to what that means Oh most of its mass is in the form of gas most of its oh yes 97% of its so when shoemaker-levy slammed into Jupiter and missed the gaseous atmosphere was like hitting a brick wall whoa that's how fast it was moving that's why the explosion was exactly so it's slow 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 I'm Ella t'v to thee so so here's this comet I forgot how big shoemaker-levy was so now it goes into the atmosphere and you say oh isn't it just clouds and it can a watch how fast it's going you can ask the question over how much distance will it plow through its own mass worth of gas well that's it that's a question right right that's that it has to plow that much mass out of the way that's an important resistive force right so how much atmosphere that's a lot of atmosphere because it's gas and this thing is solid however the thing is going what 15 20 miles per second it's falling into Jupiter at 20 Mont whatever the speed was if you don't at 20 miles per second you will cover that much atmosphere in a fraction of a second so in a fraction of a second you go from 20 miles per second to zero when we're a tiny fraction of that speed all that energy has to go somewhere it goes back into the system it's a comet made of ice ice is not held together very easily the whole thing explodes on impact 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 oh oh yeah these are these are numbers that are staggering once you calculate what they are and like I said if you come in fast enough Earth's atmosphere is a brick might as well be a brick wall to you and by the way you go 60 miles an hour down the road roll down the window just stick your hand out the window you have to use muscle energy to not have your and your hand blown backwards against 60 miles an hour yeah of air against your open palm just try that next time see what kind of energy that requires hmm and that's 60 miles an hour now imagine five miles per second ten miles per second 20 miles per second you toast how deep did the asteroid that hit and killed the dinosaurs how deep that thing going or so what was that that was a 150 mile diameter crater or something like that I forgot the exact numbers so these are there's a relationship between the depth of a crater and the diameter and the mass of the thing so no-goes miles down I mean it's it's miles oh yeah oh yeah well let me think an earth rang for like a million years what happens is let me pull take that back I don't know if it's miles it's I think it was when I had read I don't remember the exact statistic what excuse me no no it's gotta go miles now because the thing is miles is mile is the the the asteroid itself was the size of Mount Everest so the asteroid sauce is like five miles across so it's deep no you just don't mess with this by the way the crater in Arizona called meteor crater for obvious reasons that can sink a 60-story building and it's not even a mile across and now we're talking about a crater more than a hundred miles across that took out the dinosaurs that famous one in Arizona I think a 60-story building if you if you put dirt up to the rim of that crater you can bury a 60 dad an instance where you this is your whole calculation about explosions and about the amount of energy that they were looking for the raw materials that caused that crater thought that they could mine it correct they first thought is volcanic and the geologists thought it was volcanic again and the 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 Schmitt to in his stead who was also geologist turned US senator from Arizona where was he senator from I forgot but can you looked at Jack Schmitt where his senator from forgive me forget because I knew I'm friends with him so I should have known that NASA Jack Schmitt schm ITT it's not there's no D in it so Bubba desk oh yes I was right yes in New Mexico I said Arizona so New Mexico so he but anyhow he's saying no this is this is an impact crater and well if it's an impact crater where is the meteorite it must be buried down here and so there were miners they were there were there iron miners who bought the 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 they could not find the meteor that's because it hit at high speed velocity it was a high velocity impact which means as collision energy was greater than the binding energy even of the iron atoms itself and 90% of that thing vaporized on impact Wow iron more impressive even than I remember okay the pieces that's that's nice low angle shot so you get the shadows of the rim that's an Arizona where where narrow it's near Winslow Arizona where would that be near someone wanted to fly in to see that oh here it is if you go to the Grand Canyon then you drive to this and it's a couple hours two hours ok there's me you're the man who's coming up and where's the Grand Canyon there's meteor crater and Grand Canyon because it which is also in Arizona Flashdance reports you can drive that see that Grand Canyon to your crater through Flagstaff yeah so you're not gonna fly that you just drive it and it has Yelp reviews it's a good look why does it have all the stars look I know it should have every goddamn star only three point nine so this hole was this this meteor crater was dug in like you know a few seconds this crater was made yeah just and how many years ago is that fifty thousand years ago that's not oximetry nothing Wow there's probably some form of human living here then oh yeah yeah early humans but I mean I don't know if they were in North America I say 40,000 is the most recent right yeah it was when they crossed the Bering Strait yeah that's one that they would have just arrived man no that's cool I'm going back oh yeah multiple times oh yeah is it freaky 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 Ridgeline the rim is raised above the plane of the area right because when you press down it raises it up a bit so you just walk up to it and then you come up to the ledge and in fact and you realize what it is this is a nearly a mile diameter hole in the ground oh yeah it's a stunning encounter with the forces of nature and the fact that there's so many of those particles just floating around out there lamb right no that's that how big was that when you think oh yeah that was about about 20 yards across something that's nothing it's nothing that's nothing that's it 20 yards yeah maybe between 20 and 40 yards 20 yards is the sizes yeah that's right from that garage to that front door kind of stards yeah yeah wow that's crazy right that's nothing and that's the kind of thing that can get close enough that you don't even see and then it's too late and that's not gonna make us extinct but it'll make a very bad day for a city yeah okay oh yeah city's done and most likely the power grids jacked for a long time too right now no you have ten more minutes okay so I had to get the Stephen Hawking's quote out for you Stephen Hawking's was talking about the the possibility of alien life discovering us and that it would be a terrible terrible thing if it did happen if you look at what has happened to other primitive life-forms and we discovered them primitive cultures and we've discovered them do you share that same opinion that if something did find us I don't have a strong opinion on that question but I have an analysis of his comment okay he is worried about the possibility of aliens enslaving us Oh based on the reality that we've done that to ourselves yes just think about that his fear of aliens derives not from actual knowledge of aliens but from an actual knowledge of ourselves anytime a more advanced civilization has come upon all let's if a technologically advanced civil for the less advanced civilization and that happened in North America South America North America with with Europeans South America the Spanish Australia with with the Brits never voted well for the less technologically advanced civilization his factual knowledge of that leads him to suspect that aliens would be exactly the same and I I'm not that skeptical I don't think all life forms in the universe have the basal primal violent attitudes that we do as a species I've not been given reason to think so but don't you believe that things advance because of competition and competition forces things to be fairly ruthless it has been argued that if you colonize if you're a civilization that colonizes the galaxy that it's a self-limiting exercise why because here you go you ready we start here on earth is you and me boy all right and you take that planet I take this planet and now we have both have offspring that are just like us and we want more planets all right we reach a point where expansion is not possible because we are whirring with ourselves to gain the territory that each other has obtained so it has been argued sociologically that the very act of wanting to colonize is self limiting against successful colonization of the galaxy because the colonize the galaxy has to be done in an organized way all right 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 in fact I want at all that kind of attitude breeds violence it breeds war in intra galactic war so it may be that the very kind of civilization that could peacefully colonize a galaxy is not the kind of civilization that would colonize the galaxy at all that's heavy very heavy what about the idea that he advanced that's my first comment ok another one he's got he made another comment about we should be a multi-planet species attacked ourselves against an asteroid rendering one distinct it makes a good headline and it sounds like it makes sense but I'm not I'm not there with it yeah of course back up of course let's be a multi-planet species fine but but I would do it for different reasons I'd do because it's cool not because I want to protect human human species from extinction no that wouldn't be the reason to do it can I tell you why please list every reason why you think we go extinct when we trash earth another when we can't live off of it anymore an asteroid is coming there's some nanobot gone astray okay pandemic and virus a pandemic okay so 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 it's got seasons we would have the terraform at first but then we all move their duty ship a billion people there here's Mike where's my point whatever it takes to terraform Mars and ship a billion people there it's got to be easier to deflect the asteroid whatever it takes to terraform Mars to turn it into earth if you had the power of geoengineering to do that then you have the power geoengineering to turn earth back into earth but there are nation aliyah things that we miss right because of the way that so so you 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 it's got to be easier whatever that takes but isn't it possible that there's some asteroids that we just will not see until it's too late then you put up whatever that takes whatever but they're just kind of out the ship a billion people they're a bit of course why wouldn't it be we have said what do you put ten people there what you wanted not split your species right okay 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 what what is that what's your you plan to you don't let all the earth people die in the Mars people survive just you can save this we don't save everybody I'm not buying into the premise this cable-car ology premise that you have to save one to not save the other and yeah you know you'll cable-car ology I see the cable car you you know someone's in the tracks you let him go if you steer it out of the way but then you actively kill two people instead of passively killing one person from what do you do I'm not buying into that premise for this question I'm simply saying 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 there's got to be easy is the last question is it is it possible that the reason why we are never visited by extraterrestrials is because the way civilization is it because the way stations they have visited they visited during comic-con the costumes weren't as good as ours okay three three three they've observed us and judged there's no sign of intelligent life on earth okay but is there another possibility that civilizations don't ever get to travel like that because what happens is as they advanced 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 that as they create as they advance their technology and as they continue to innovate they reach a limitation in biology and that eventually create artificial life that sees no desire whatsoever to travel oh interesting so I would say that's a great philosophical question I would say that the day we create AI if the AI is everything we are except more and not emotional then I fully have an urge to explore maybe otherwise is that it's not us well wouldn't it create those wars like in Monsters Inc and start going dimension to dimension instead of [ __ ] around with Jets why hammer Kil'jaeden right right right right yeah they figure out the fourth dimension yeah wouldn't that be the best way to do things and then they'd figure it out and then they would figure out a way to travel better than any way we could but if the fact that we want to travel and we're creating versions of ourselves called AI I wouldn't want to travel but why would it be curious if biological it then it's not well if we create every neurosynaptic map right of our brain into silicon into a computer and recreate our consciousness as humans the human brain but wouldn't human version of AI would be like an infinite version of AI hey I could create itself the current 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 it could sure sure no I'm not as fearsome of AI as others are I you know we're not gonna make an AI looking human being because the human form is not the best or ideal form for anything did you see ex machina yes you didn't love it no it was good I loved it okay well that's the first thing you for sure for sure right yeah for sure but I'm just saying it's one of my favorite movies I want to marry the movie it's just awesome movie so then marriage would no longer be about sex or just be about reproduction because just go to your room with your sexy bar I'm hoping that that's one of the first things that people figure out they shouldn't do anymore once they get smart enough to symbiotically attach themselves to artificial intelligence I was watching what was it family feud one of the questions was if you're we asked 100 married women if you could have a second husband for only one purpose what would it be something like 70% of it said just for sex whoa damn it for only one purpose just just for getting stuffed just so that's a [ __ ] wake-up call for a lot of send on that Neil deGrasse Tyson astrophysics for people in a hurry in a horror out in May thank you so much sir your your love you man I love you too brother thanks so much throw them in here and thank you anytime open invitation Carla middle of the night come down here we'll open it and you gotta wake him up he'll do it he's down he loves you too alright thank you sir appreciate