SPEAKER_1: Looking for a unique summer getaway?
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SPEAKER_1: So strap in, catch all new episodes of Futurama every Monday streaming only on Hulu.
SPEAKER_3: Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company and Affiliates Columbus, Ohio.
SPEAKER_4: Nobody said there's no gravity in space.
SPEAKER_4: This is one of the biggest delusions that pervades our culture and our storytelling.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, Joe, why are you so delusional?
SPEAKER_4: Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.
SPEAKER_4: StarTalk begins right now.
SPEAKER_4: Hey, everybody, Neil deGrasse Tyson here.
SPEAKER_2: And I'm Lindsay Nix Walker.
SPEAKER_2: And Neil and I, we just co-authored a brand new StarTalk book, and it's coming out very soon.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah, this is the third in a series of collaborations with National Geographic Books.
SPEAKER_4: And this one is titled, To Infinity and Beyond.
SPEAKER_4: And it's available for pre-order from the StarTalk website, startalkmedia.com/books.
SPEAKER_4: If you pre-order it, you gain access to a live stream that Lindsay Walker and I will do from this office.
SPEAKER_4: And you have the occasion to submit questions that we will answer.
SPEAKER_2: Yep, that's right.
SPEAKER_2: So if they go to startalkmedia.com/books, they can pre-order and ask us their query, whatever they want.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, I know that StarTalk fans can ask some really fun off-the-wall questions.
SPEAKER_2: So I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with here.
SPEAKER_1: All right.
SPEAKER_4: Right now, get ready for the next episode of StarTalk.
SPEAKER_4: Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist.
SPEAKER_4: I got with me Chuck Nice.
SPEAKER_4: Chuck.
SPEAKER_1: Yo, what's up, Neil?
SPEAKER_4: Chuck, is this themed or is it unthemed cosmic queries?
SPEAKER_4: What do you got for me today?
SPEAKER_1: This is completely unthemed.
SPEAKER_1: This is just...
SPEAKER_4: So grab bag.
SPEAKER_1: This is grab bag.
SPEAKER_4: I think people like grab bag.
SPEAKER_4: It seems that.
SPEAKER_4: It feels like they get totally into it.
SPEAKER_1: You know why?
SPEAKER_1: Because it's kind of like the prize in a Happy Meal or a box of cracker chips.
SPEAKER_1: You don't know what you're gonna get.
SPEAKER_1: It's the Boris Gump of Star Talk shows.
SPEAKER_4: Box of chocolates.
SPEAKER_1: It's the box of chocolates.
SPEAKER_1: I don't know what you're gonna get.
SPEAKER_1: So let's get into it, I guess, right?
SPEAKER_1: We'll start with GR.
SPEAKER_4: Box of chocolates.
SPEAKER_4: Who had the idea that you could improve chocolate by putting a gooey liquid that's not chocolate inside of it?
SPEAKER_4: This is one of the biggest mysteries of my life.
SPEAKER_1: I'm sure it was someone from the sugar industry.
SPEAKER_1: So.
SPEAKER_4: You don't want all that nasty chocolate.
SPEAKER_1: No, that chocolate.
SPEAKER_4: Let's put it in gooey cherry.
SPEAKER_1: Corn syrup, baby.
SPEAKER_1: That's where the action is.
SPEAKER_1: Who wants that crap?
SPEAKER_1: What's that crap?
SPEAKER_1: Corn syrup.
SPEAKER_4: And it's probably at all cheaper than the chocolate that would have been in that volume in all of those candies.
SPEAKER_1: A hundred percent.
SPEAKER_1: You know it.
SPEAKER_1: You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, good chocolate is expensive, man.
SPEAKER_1: There's a great place not too far from where you live that they have just tremendously high-grade chocolate.
SPEAKER_4: No, I know that place where they have a big window you can see, it's like Willy Wonka or something.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, yeah, and a good chocolate is expensive.
SPEAKER_4: Making Easter bunnies coming off the assembly line, you know, off the factory line.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, man, yeah.
SPEAKER_1: This is GR.
SPEAKER_1: He says, when on Star Trek, they talk about subspace, what the hell are they talking about?
SPEAKER_4: Okay, so-
SPEAKER_1: Is it just a plot device?
SPEAKER_1: Is subspace a real thing?
SPEAKER_1: What the hell is going on?
SPEAKER_1: Thank you, George Rader, Radir.
SPEAKER_4: Okay, so my answer is, I don't know.
SPEAKER_4: We would need Charles Liu for that.
SPEAKER_1: Chuck Liu.
SPEAKER_4: But what I can tell you is, yes, I think it was a plot device, because otherwise, they can't communicate with anybody.
SPEAKER_4: If you're across the galaxy and I send you a signal, you're gonna wait 100,000 years for the signal to get you at the speed of light.
SPEAKER_4: So subspace is some way that I don't know and I don't understand.
SPEAKER_4: I don't care that it's not actually physical.
SPEAKER_4: I don't even know how it works within the world of Star Trek.
SPEAKER_4: But you know Charles Liu knows it.
SPEAKER_4: So we'd have to like do an emergency call to him.
SPEAKER_1: That gets Chuck on the line.
SPEAKER_4: But as a plot point, you need that because without it, how are they going to talk back to headquarters?
SPEAKER_4: Because if you send a signal and they're halfway across the galaxy, that signal will take 50,000 years to reach them.
SPEAKER_4: And a round trip will take 100,000 years if one of them is in the middle of the galaxy and one is at the edge.
SPEAKER_4: So you need some way for signals to reach their destination as though you're just having a phone call with them.
SPEAKER_1: And they're talking in real time.
SPEAKER_4: Basically real time, correct.
SPEAKER_4: So as I understand it, subspace enables this.
SPEAKER_4: Otherwise, communication would just be pointless and impossible.
SPEAKER_4: Whitty repartee would not be a thing.
SPEAKER_1: We can't even talk to Voyager 37 hours at a time.
SPEAKER_1: It takes us to talk to Voyager.
SPEAKER_4: Exactly, exactly, exactly.
SPEAKER_4: So they had to figure out how to get around that.
SPEAKER_1: That's it.
SPEAKER_1: All right, George, Radier or Radier, Radier, whatever.
SPEAKER_1: George.
SPEAKER_4: It's not a whatever, it's a man's name.
SPEAKER_4: Well, whatever his name.
SPEAKER_1: Oh, you know, you should have an easier name, George.
SPEAKER_4: I don't say Choo-kay Nee-chay, Choo-kay, oh, whatever.
SPEAKER_4: No, I'm Chuck Nice, you see, that's it.
SPEAKER_1: I gotta tell you, I don't really mind the Choo-kay Nee-chay.
SPEAKER_1: Choo-kay Nee-chay?
SPEAKER_1: I'm kind of digging the Choo-kay Nee-chay.
SPEAKER_1: You know, you said it, it had a little ring to it.
SPEAKER_1: I gotta be honest.
SPEAKER_4: Because in Italian, a C is a C-H, and a C-H is a C sound.
SPEAKER_1: Right, so C-H-E is K in Italian, and C-E is Chuh.
SPEAKER_4: Chuh, we'll call you Nee-chay.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, Nee-chay.
SPEAKER_1: Here we go.
SPEAKER_1: This is the artist formerly known as James Smith.
SPEAKER_1: And James says, hey, Neal, hey, Chuck, James from Indianapolis here.
SPEAKER_1: So in the very far future, when a black hole is done with Hawking radiation, what is left over once the black hole is gone?
SPEAKER_1: Does the space in which the black hole occupied have a large rip in it, or is the space around the black hole reverted into the form which was there before the black hole was formed?
SPEAKER_1: Thanks, guys.
SPEAKER_1: So does the black hole do something to the fabric of space where it makes a divot?
SPEAKER_4: Does the black hole leave a paw print?
SPEAKER_1: A paw print.
SPEAKER_4: Like the black hole was here, right?
SPEAKER_4: Or did it pee in that section of the universe?
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, another black hole comes along, sniffs it and goes, okay, I either got to mark this or move on.
SPEAKER_4: So it is an actual literal evaporation.
SPEAKER_4: I mean, by a different mechanism, of course, by Hawking radiation.
SPEAKER_4: But so the size of the event horizon, as the black hole shrinks from Hawking radiation, the size of the event horizon shrinks with it.
SPEAKER_4: It gets smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller.
SPEAKER_4: And the nature of the radiation that comes out is you can approximate it by the wavelength of the light that it emits is approximately the same size as the size of the event horizon itself.
SPEAKER_4: So big black holes give off radio waves as Hawking radiation.
SPEAKER_4: As they get smaller and smaller, they give off higher and higher energy light.
SPEAKER_4: So radio waves and microwaves, then infrared, then red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, also like x-rays, gamma rays.
SPEAKER_4: So the gamma rays have the tiniest wavelengths.
SPEAKER_4: So as the black hole gets littler and littler and littler, the evaporation rate increases, and the nature of the Hawking radiation changes to become higher and higher energy radiation.
SPEAKER_1: Did not know that!
SPEAKER_4: Yes, so that in the last instant, it's just a puff of gamma rays.
SPEAKER_4: And then it disappears completely.
SPEAKER_1: That's amazing.
SPEAKER_4: And in fact, I think the original paper, one of the original papers of Hawking, describes this as a source of gamma rays in the universe that you might observe.
SPEAKER_1: Right, right, right, right.
SPEAKER_1: That's really cool.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: So it is a literal evaporation, like a pool of water drying up.
SPEAKER_4: Except it might leave some residue, like mineral residue or something.
SPEAKER_4: Black hole leave, no residue at all.
SPEAKER_1: Nothing leaves nothing.
SPEAKER_1: Right.
SPEAKER_4: Correct.
SPEAKER_4: Cool.
SPEAKER_1: Wow.
SPEAKER_4: Now, the weird thing is, black holes, there's some mathematics derived from Einstein that tells us that inside a black hole, it opens up to another universe, another space-time system.
SPEAKER_4: And so, if that's the case, what happens to that universe when the black hole evaporates?
SPEAKER_1: Nice.
SPEAKER_1: Whoever was smoking weed in that universe sobered up and it's over.
SPEAKER_1: That little universe is gone.
SPEAKER_1: I saw that universe before.
SPEAKER_1: I can't believe I saw this universe, man.
SPEAKER_1: It was just right there in my thumb.
SPEAKER_4: So you're going to write a book, The Universe According to Weed.
SPEAKER_4: Is that what you're...
SPEAKER_1: It's a good book.
SPEAKER_1: I'll call it Astrophysics for Stoners in a Hurry.
SPEAKER_1: That's so funny.
SPEAKER_4: No, no.
SPEAKER_4: For Stoners who ain't in a hurry.
SPEAKER_1: That's right.
SPEAKER_1: That's true.
SPEAKER_1: You never see anybody rushing when they're high.
SPEAKER_1: Urgency is not a matter when you are stoned.
SPEAKER_4: Plus, I've been in a car where the person driving was stoned, and it's like they're driving real slow.
SPEAKER_4: Let me stay on the right hand side, I'll drive real slow, so that no one will know I'm high.
SPEAKER_1: Of course.
SPEAKER_1: And everybody knows.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, clearly as tricycle pass you, they know that you are a tricycle.
SPEAKER_1: Get on a tricycle pass, you know, okay, this dude is stoned.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, that's cool.
SPEAKER_4: What's next?
SPEAKER_1: Here we go.
SPEAKER_1: All right, this is David Sargent.
SPEAKER_1: And he says, and speaking of driving, look at what he says, things StarTalk make me contemplate while I'm driving.
SPEAKER_1: With the size of planets affecting space time, i.e.
SPEAKER_1: gravity, with cultures of huge planets, say the size of Jupiter, only solid, have everything in life moving slower.
SPEAKER_1: Slow music, for example, or in the opposite extreme, a tiny planet, everything moving fast.
SPEAKER_1: So there you go.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah, so he's talking about general relativity.
SPEAKER_4: What's the person's name again?
SPEAKER_1: This is David Sargent.
SPEAKER_4: David Sargent.
SPEAKER_4: So he's talking about, he knows, maybe he might remember from the Interstellar film, where they went down to a black hole planet, and they were deep in a gravitational well.
SPEAKER_4: And if you were in an environment of high gravity, time will tick more slowly for you than if you were in a place of low or no gravity.
SPEAKER_4: So it's relative, okay?
SPEAKER_4: So planets, their gravity is not high enough for any of the big planets, little planets, is not high enough for any of this to make any important difference in anybody's life.
SPEAKER_4: So don't confuse the fact that the black hole planet in the film Interstellar was in the gravitational well of the black hole itself.
SPEAKER_1: The black hole.
SPEAKER_4: Exactly.
SPEAKER_1: The black hole was doing the work, not the planet.
SPEAKER_4: The black hole was doing the time dilation rather than the planet itself.
SPEAKER_4: So if you're just talking about planets orbiting the same star or regular star, this is not something to think about or worry about.
SPEAKER_1: Gotcha.
SPEAKER_1: Now, what about in Star Trek, where the people from heavy gravity planets are super strong?
SPEAKER_1: Would that be feasible?
SPEAKER_4: That could happen.
SPEAKER_4: Because you, whatever you weigh here on Jupiter, so if you weigh, let's say, 150 pounds here, you weigh 500 pounds on a planet.
SPEAKER_4: And so if you were thriving there, you'll have muscles that will accommodate this extra weight of your body.
SPEAKER_4: You'll have really thick, stubby legs.
SPEAKER_4: Like, I mean, think about it.
SPEAKER_4: If you want to be heavy, you need stuff like a hippopotamus.
SPEAKER_4: Like an elephant.
SPEAKER_4: Now, a giraffe is big, but they're not nearly all that heavy.
SPEAKER_4: So they can get away with these spindly legs.
SPEAKER_4: I'm talking about big chunky, you know.
SPEAKER_4: So if you put a giraffe on a heavy planet, break its legs.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, it'll crush itself.
SPEAKER_4: Crush itself.
SPEAKER_4: Right.
SPEAKER_4: Correctly.
SPEAKER_4: Whereas a hippo probably do just fine.
SPEAKER_1: Exactly.
SPEAKER_4: You don't know.
SPEAKER_4: So yeah, your physiology would have to be strong enough to accommodate that.
SPEAKER_4: And then you come to a light planet like Earth, and you would be stronger than other people probably.
SPEAKER_4: Is my guess.
SPEAKER_1: The item from Jupiter.
SPEAKER_4: In a movie.
SPEAKER_4: Oh, what was the movie?
SPEAKER_4: This kid was born on Mars.
SPEAKER_4: The space between us.
SPEAKER_4: There was an astronaut.
SPEAKER_4: It takes about nine months to get to Mars.
SPEAKER_4: There was an astronaut who got on board.
SPEAKER_4: And I don't remember the plot line, whether she knew or did not know if she was pregnant.
SPEAKER_4: Or she like made love the night before she went off.
SPEAKER_4: But anyhow, she gives birth on Mars.
SPEAKER_4: And NASA has to keep that covered up because you know you can't.
SPEAKER_4: So this kid was a secret kid raised on Mars.
SPEAKER_4: And then they brought him back like in his teens.
SPEAKER_4: And the Earth's gravity was like so heavy because Mars you weigh less.
SPEAKER_4: So he was feeling the stress of Earth's gravity.
SPEAKER_4: And yeah.
SPEAKER_1: That absolutely sounds like my life.
SPEAKER_1: I too had a secret kid.
SPEAKER_4: I forgot all about that.
SPEAKER_4: That's with the maids.
SPEAKER_1: That's right.
SPEAKER_1: Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_1: Well, this is why.
SPEAKER_4: You don't let nothing go by here.
SPEAKER_1: No, no.
SPEAKER_1: God bless him.
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SPEAKER_1: You know, chances are you're listening to Star Talk Radio on your phone.
SPEAKER_1: You're probably on the go too.
SPEAKER_1: Think of all you do on your phone the moment you leave your front door.
SPEAKER_1: From checking the weather, to transportation, to online banking, to ordering food.
SPEAKER_1: You know, that requires an amazing network.
SPEAKER_1: And that's why you should switch to T-Mobile.
SPEAKER_1: T-Mobile covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else and helps keep you connected with 5G from the driveway to the highway and all the miles in between.
SPEAKER_1: Because your phone should just work where you are.
SPEAKER_1: It's your lifeline to pretty much everything you didn't bring with you.
SPEAKER_1: Side note, I've been a T-Mobile customer for many, many years and I gotta tell ya, I'm loving that network.
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SPEAKER_1: Cover's not available in some areas.
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SPEAKER_4: I'm Joel Cherico and I make pottery.
SPEAKER_3: You can see my pottery on my website, cosmicmugs.com.
SPEAKER_4: Cosmic Mugs, art that lets you taste the universe every day.
SPEAKER_3: And I support Star Talk on Patreon.
SPEAKER_3: This is Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
SPEAKER_1: YCoss says this.
SPEAKER_1: Hello, Neil, what's up, Chuck?
SPEAKER_1: Could the universe have started off with a much higher initial entropy?
SPEAKER_1: If so, how would the universe have been different?
SPEAKER_1: Also, what's entropy?
SPEAKER_4: Thanks a million.
SPEAKER_1: I love that.
SPEAKER_1: That's pretty funny.
SPEAKER_4: Entropy is...
SPEAKER_4: We quantify it in physics, but in a spoken way, entropy is a way to measure how disordered a system is.
SPEAKER_4: Let's say you have a rectangular box, and there's air inside the box.
SPEAKER_4: And I take all the air and shove it to one half the box.
SPEAKER_4: And the other part of the box, there's nothing.
SPEAKER_4: That is more ordered than it would become if I removed the separator from the middle of that box.
SPEAKER_4: Because you know if I remove the separation, what would happen?
SPEAKER_1: All the air would just rush all over the place, and all the molecules in the air would be like spread.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah, it would just become evenly spread throughout.
SPEAKER_4: And so because the air would just do that naturally.
SPEAKER_4: That is going from a high-ordered state to a lower-ordered state.
SPEAKER_4: And another one.
SPEAKER_4: I have a glass of water, and I take a drop of ink, I drop it into one corner of the one little bit.
SPEAKER_4: And in that moment, there's ink here and there's water everywhere else.
SPEAKER_4: There's an ordering to that.
SPEAKER_4: Okay, because you can point to something here and it's not there, and that's over there, and it's not over here.
SPEAKER_4: You give it time, the ink dissipates.
SPEAKER_1: It gets all caught up in everything.
SPEAKER_4: All the molecules take it in, and the ink gets completely spread.
SPEAKER_1: That's why we don't want no ink moving in our neighborhood, because that's how it happens.
SPEAKER_1: That's how it happens.
SPEAKER_1: It starts off with one little house, one little ink house, one little ink house, then before you know it, you got four or five ink houses in your neighborhood.
SPEAKER_1: Hey, what's going on here?
SPEAKER_1: Now what's happening to the schools?
SPEAKER_1: Oh, wait a minute.
SPEAKER_4: So in my high school, I had this huge cylinder, they call it graduated cylinder.
SPEAKER_1: Right.
SPEAKER_4: Those are the educated ones, the graduated ones.
SPEAKER_4: It was like three feet tall, it was huge.
SPEAKER_4: And it was in one of the display cases.
SPEAKER_4: In most high schools, in their display case, what do you find?
SPEAKER_4: Trophies.
SPEAKER_4: Trophies of the sports.
SPEAKER_4: But my high school was the Bronx High School of Science.
SPEAKER_4: So there were no sports trophies.
SPEAKER_1: That's funny.
SPEAKER_4: So there's a huge graduated cylinder and there was a layer of ink at the bottom and they slowly put water on top of it.
SPEAKER_4: And throughout the year, you would watch the ink work its way up into this cylinder.
SPEAKER_4: So it was like a living exhibit of the diffusion of one liquid into another.
SPEAKER_1: Nice.
SPEAKER_4: Rather than just stir it, of course.
SPEAKER_4: Stir it would happen.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_4: So it'll do that naturally.
SPEAKER_4: It'll become higher disorder than it previously had.
SPEAKER_4: So that's entropy.
SPEAKER_4: So we were very highly ordered at the beginning of the universe.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_4: Because all the matter, energy was all in one place, in one very localized place.
SPEAKER_4: As stuff expands, it's like the gas going into the other half of the thing, like the ink going into the thing.
SPEAKER_4: The entropy, so it was highly ordered.
SPEAKER_4: And so then we go to high disorder as the universe expands.
SPEAKER_4: And so there you have it.
SPEAKER_4: And the end of the universe is total, total disorder.
SPEAKER_4: No order at all.
SPEAKER_4: There'll be no machines, no phenomenon.
SPEAKER_4: Because if there's a phenomenon, it means there's order to make the phenomenon happen.
SPEAKER_1: Make it happen, right.
SPEAKER_4: If everything is completely spread out, nothing can happen.
SPEAKER_4: So we will die.
SPEAKER_4: The universe will end not with a bang, but with a whimper.
SPEAKER_4: And not in fire, but in ice.
SPEAKER_1: Look at that.
SPEAKER_4: As the temperature cools.
SPEAKER_4: So anyhow, I mean, you can't get more ordered than the universe occupying less than the size of an atom.
SPEAKER_4: So you can't really adjust that, okay?
SPEAKER_4: Because everything is very localized.
SPEAKER_1: That's it.
SPEAKER_4: Oh, by the way, the disorder is natural in a closed system.
SPEAKER_4: So that box is a closed system.
SPEAKER_4: You can reverse entropy if you add energy to it.
SPEAKER_4: Oh.
SPEAKER_4: We are alive and our molecules and are scattered all over the world.
SPEAKER_4: We are a higher order of things than what preceded us here on earth.
SPEAKER_4: So religious communities for the longest while, who knew a little bit about this entropy rule of thermodynamics said, C, we have order and that's against the second law of thermodynamics and so therefore God made us.
SPEAKER_4: So you don't hear them give that argument anymore because some of them, one of them must have taught the others after they took some physics that earth is not a closed system.
SPEAKER_1: You can't get a closed system and have sunlight.
SPEAKER_5: Yes, exactly.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, we could only be a closed system with a giant umbrella.
SPEAKER_1: Correct.
SPEAKER_4: Completely enclose earth and watch what happens, all right?
SPEAKER_4: So you take out the base of the food chain, which are all the plants that are undergoing photosynthesis.
SPEAKER_4: Then you kill all of the animals that depend on the plants.
SPEAKER_4: So all the herbivores, the plants die first, then the herbivores, then the animals that live off the herbivores, the predators, they die.
SPEAKER_4: And we all die and decompose in the earth.
SPEAKER_4: And there you have entropy at work.
SPEAKER_1: Look at that.
SPEAKER_1: That's the coolest explanation of entropy I've ever heard.
SPEAKER_4: And there's a way to quantify it with the equations, but...
SPEAKER_1: Very cool, man.
SPEAKER_1: All right, here we go.
SPEAKER_1: This is Christian Holmes.
SPEAKER_1: And Christian Holmes says, Hello, Dr.
SPEAKER_1: Tyson.
SPEAKER_1: Lord Nice, I have a question about time.
SPEAKER_1: I recently learned from watching Dr.
SPEAKER_1: Brian Greene that the fabric of space-time emerges from quantum entanglement.
SPEAKER_1: This explains that space is woven of quantum wormholes.
SPEAKER_1: But does that mean time emerges also?
SPEAKER_1: If so, what collection of quantum phenomena does time emerge from?
SPEAKER_1: Or is time merely the passing of one quantum phenomena to the next?
SPEAKER_1: I really appreciate both of your thoughts.
SPEAKER_1: Hey, thank you, Christian from Pennsylvania.
SPEAKER_1: So there you have it.
SPEAKER_4: I too only recently learned from Brian Greene the recent thinking, this emergent thinking, that the virtual particles in the vacuum of space that pop in and out of existence, that their quantum entangle while they are separated, and that quantum entanglement may itself be the thread that stitches the fabric of the space-time continuum.
SPEAKER_4: But notice I said space-time.
SPEAKER_4: So is it also stitching time?
SPEAKER_4: And I don't know the latest thinking on that.
SPEAKER_4: But if time, according to Einstein, was invented to make motion look simple, then time is just something we create to measure the flow, to measure sequences of events, to know what happened before what, and the intervals that separated these events from those.
SPEAKER_4: So in that sense, I don't know if time is a fundamental property of spacetime, or whether we've attached it afterwards.
SPEAKER_4: I don't know.
SPEAKER_1: Interesting.
SPEAKER_1: Oh, man.
SPEAKER_1: Well, look at that, Christian.
SPEAKER_1: There you have it.
SPEAKER_1: Now you got some deeper looking to do.
SPEAKER_1: That's all.
SPEAKER_1: You gave Neil some homework, Christian.
SPEAKER_4: Could one of these threads be the time thread?
SPEAKER_4: I don't know.
SPEAKER_4: What I do know is threads you can always unweave, whereas for time, as I've said before, we are prisoners of the present, forever transitioning between our inaccessible past and our unknowable future.
SPEAKER_1: Interesting.
SPEAKER_1: Let me ask you this.
SPEAKER_1: If we're prisoners of time, which we are, of course, meaning that we can't go back, undo things and go forward again.
SPEAKER_1: You know, our prison is one direction.
SPEAKER_1: What about dimensionally?
SPEAKER_1: Let's say I'm a higher being in a higher dimension.
SPEAKER_1: Could I screw with our time in this lower dimension?
SPEAKER_4: There's no reason why you wouldn't.
SPEAKER_4: So, for example, you're inside a room there where you're doing this recording.
SPEAKER_4: So, if you had access to a higher dimension so you could see the timeline, then you're no longer a prisoner.
SPEAKER_4: You can just rejoin the timeline.
SPEAKER_1: I can pick a point in the timeline and do whatever.
SPEAKER_4: That's right.
SPEAKER_4: So, I'll give an example.
SPEAKER_4: So, let's say you're an ant and you're living in just two dimensions.
SPEAKER_4: I draw a box around you.
SPEAKER_4: Sorry, a square around you.
SPEAKER_4: You're in prison.
SPEAKER_4: You can't get out until the ant learns, wait a minute, there's a third dimension.
SPEAKER_4: Let me just go up into that third dimension, step out of the square and I'm free from this prison.
SPEAKER_1: I can't believe you're saying this.
SPEAKER_1: I just saw this online two days ago where somebody put an ant on a white piece of paper.
SPEAKER_1: As the ant crawled, they took a ballpoint fountain pen and they drew and wherever they drew, the ant would not go.
SPEAKER_1: It thought that it was blocked from going there.
SPEAKER_4: Really?
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, so cool.
SPEAKER_4: Like an edge.
SPEAKER_4: Okay, so there it is.
SPEAKER_4: So it's not thinking of a third dimension to go up and around and over it.
SPEAKER_4: So you can imprison two-dimensional creatures with a square, okay?
SPEAKER_4: Because they don't know about the third dimension.
SPEAKER_4: Now, we can imprison three-dimensional creatures with a cube, okay?
SPEAKER_4: I'll put you in the cube.
SPEAKER_4: Unless you have access to your timeline.
SPEAKER_4: If you had access to your timeline, you could step into the timeline, occupy a timeline when you're not in the cube, go back into your timeline and you just escaped.
SPEAKER_4: And you never had to open a door or a window of your room to do so.
SPEAKER_1: Amazing!
SPEAKER_1: I love it!
SPEAKER_4: There it is.
SPEAKER_4: Super cool.
SPEAKER_1: There you go.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, cool.
SPEAKER_1: All right, let's move on.
SPEAKER_1: This is C.
SPEAKER_1: Spinoz and C.
SPEAKER_1: Spinoz says, could black holes just be wormholes?
SPEAKER_1: I mean, do we just don't know?
SPEAKER_1: I'm just thinking out loud, guys.
SPEAKER_4: So I think he wants black holes to be wormholes.
SPEAKER_1: I think that's what he really wants is for black holes to be wormholes.
SPEAKER_4: There was more work done on wormholes, especially inspired by Carl Sagan's novel Contact, when he was buds with Kip Thorne, a relativist physicist, astrophysicist at Caltech, where you run through more of the equations and you can in principle just punch a wormhole through the fabric of space without reference to a black hole or a white hole.
SPEAKER_4: But you need some way to pry open space and keep it there.
SPEAKER_4: So you need like negative matter that can pull open space rather than collapse space.
SPEAKER_4: And so our equations give it to you, but we don't know any substance such as negative matter.
SPEAKER_4: So wormholes are really just for now the realm of science fiction.
SPEAKER_1: There you go.
SPEAKER_1: Look at that.
SPEAKER_1: But they do work out mathematically.
SPEAKER_1: That's fascinating.
SPEAKER_4: Yes, they do.
SPEAKER_1: That's super cool, man.
SPEAKER_1: That is just super cool.
SPEAKER_1: This is Anthroposcopic Dylan.
SPEAKER_1: Love it.
SPEAKER_1: Anthroposcopic.
SPEAKER_1: I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_1: Anthropocosmic.
SPEAKER_1: Anthropocosmic Dylan.
SPEAKER_1: Greetings, Dr.
SPEAKER_1: Tyson and Dr.
SPEAKER_1: Comedy.
SPEAKER_1: Neil, build off of your past StarTalk episodes.
SPEAKER_1: Can you talk about the lineage of the stars?
SPEAKER_1: How are the elements that we are made of connected to our sun's generation, or put another way, the cosmic and stellar evolution of the universe?
SPEAKER_1: Thank you, Dylan from San Diego.
SPEAKER_4: I love it.
SPEAKER_4: So in my field, we've binned the star populations into three, no, three, four, yeah, four groups.
SPEAKER_4: So with Roman numerals, except we have a zero, and the Romans didn't have a zero.
SPEAKER_4: There's no zero in Roman numerals.
SPEAKER_4: That's why there's no zero in the Julian calendar, where they try to put the birth of Jesus at the beginning of the calendar.
SPEAKER_4: There's no zero.
SPEAKER_4: It went from 1 BC to AD 1.
SPEAKER_4: But anyhow, you don't invent the zero, or the Hindus invented the zero, then it migrated to Baghdad, and then the Arabs did great things with it, and fully developing algebra and other things.
SPEAKER_4: That's a whole other side.
SPEAKER_4: Nice.
SPEAKER_4: So the first stars in the universe, we call those population 3.
SPEAKER_4: Population 3.
SPEAKER_4: Yes.
SPEAKER_4: Well, sorry, the stars right here, we call those population 1.
SPEAKER_4: Population 1.
SPEAKER_4: What does that mean?
SPEAKER_4: Stars like the Sun have a certain amount of heavy elements in it.
SPEAKER_4: You can measure them.
SPEAKER_4: How much iron, silicon, nitrogen, oxygen, heavier than hydrogen and helium.
SPEAKER_4: Okay.
SPEAKER_4: As we looked in certain parts of the galaxy, we found stars that had way less heavy elements.
SPEAKER_4: We call those population 2.
SPEAKER_1: Population 2.
SPEAKER_4: These did not have the benefit of multiple generations of stars before them, only maybe a couple of generations of stars, enriching their heavy element abundance.
SPEAKER_4: One, those are pop 2, and someone said, well, let's imagine a pop 3, which would be the very first stars, and they have no heavy elements at all.
SPEAKER_1: Right.
SPEAKER_4: So, we are, by this measure, a third generation star system.
SPEAKER_4: And if a star born today, we might call that...
SPEAKER_1: Pop 4.
SPEAKER_4: No, am I doing it the right way?
SPEAKER_1: No, pop 0.
SPEAKER_4: We might call it pop 0.
SPEAKER_4: We should have probably numbered it the other way.
SPEAKER_1: The other way so we could keep going, yeah.
SPEAKER_4: Keep going.
SPEAKER_1: And the stars that look like cute little boys that make girls scream would be K-pop.
SPEAKER_1: I shouldn't have done that.
SPEAKER_1: I don't know what the hell I was thinking.
SPEAKER_4: What?
SPEAKER_1: I just took my daughter to a K-pop.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, I took my daughter to a K-pop.
SPEAKER_1: It was crazy.
SPEAKER_1: I went to a K-pop concert not too long ago.
SPEAKER_4: There it is.
SPEAKER_4: You're absolved.
SPEAKER_1: And I'm scarred.
SPEAKER_1: That's what it is.
SPEAKER_4: You're a drop.
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SPEAKER_1: Let's go back to our questions, and this is Ryan A.
SPEAKER_1: He says, greetings, Neil.
SPEAKER_1: Greetings, your lordship.
SPEAKER_1: This is Ryan from Ontario, Canada here.
SPEAKER_1: Neil, you once said you had an answer to the simulation theory, where either we are first or the last in the series.
SPEAKER_1: And since we haven't invented the ability yet, it can't be real.
SPEAKER_1: However, what if the simulation is not produced by our species, but another in the universe?
SPEAKER_1: Thanks for making my brain bigger every week, Neil.
SPEAKER_1: So there you go.
SPEAKER_1: That's Ryan A who wants to know, are you saying-
SPEAKER_4: Yeah, so if someone else is creating us, that's fine.
SPEAKER_4: However, it only works as something that's scary if it's self-propagating, all right?
SPEAKER_4: That's the whole idea here.
SPEAKER_4: If the original authentic universe creates a model, a computer universe, and they believe they have free will, so then they create one, and they create one, and it's that all the way down until the last one, which hasn't evolved yet to create one.
SPEAKER_4: So this is a real universe creating fake universes.
SPEAKER_1: Right.
SPEAKER_4: What you're saying is you want-
SPEAKER_1: Just a super intelligent species that has supercomputers, they're all quantum.
SPEAKER_4: That's fine, but then they just make us, we have to make a different one, and they make another one, and that's more effort.
SPEAKER_4: So yeah, it could be.
SPEAKER_4: I'm not denying that, but you don't get this sort of runaway effect where everybody's making versions of itself within their own computing system.
SPEAKER_1: Right.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_1: Your way is more fun is what you're saying.
SPEAKER_1: All right, this is Joe Ingracia, and Joe Ingracia says this.
SPEAKER_1: Hey Neil, hey Chuck, this is Joe from Missouri.
SPEAKER_1: If you're in space where you are not affected by any gravity, how do you know if you're going up, down, left, right, or any direction if you don't have any instruments to tell you?
SPEAKER_4: Okay, first of all, nobody said there's no gravity in space.
SPEAKER_4: This is one of the biggest delusions that pervades our culture and our storytelling.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, Joe, why are you so delusional?
SPEAKER_4: You go into space en route to the moon, you can't say there's no gravity there because what do you think the moon is orbiting?
SPEAKER_1: Right.
SPEAKER_4: Okay, the moon feels our gravity and is in orbit around us.
SPEAKER_4: This whole notion that space has no gravity comes about because of the way we travel between destinations in space.
SPEAKER_4: You know how we do it?
SPEAKER_4: I'm gonna head for Mars, I'm gonna fire my engines right now, cut them off and coast to Mars.
SPEAKER_4: If you're coasting anywhere in the universe, you are weightless, period.
SPEAKER_4: But if you turn on the engines, you're gonna feel some G-forces and that G basically counts as weight, according to your body.
SPEAKER_4: So you have weight that way.
SPEAKER_4: That's if you wanna get anywhere fast.
SPEAKER_4: And what was the film where they had the moon pirates?
SPEAKER_4: That crazy film.
SPEAKER_4: Ad Astra.
SPEAKER_4: In the film Ad Astra, I think Brad Pitt was that.
SPEAKER_4: That was Brad Pitt?
SPEAKER_4: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_4: So they had these scenes where everyone's just weightless in their space.
SPEAKER_4: Even though the engines are firing.
SPEAKER_4: Self-sorrow is their belief that being in space makes you weightless.
SPEAKER_4: So, that's the first point.
SPEAKER_4: Second, down, it's whichever direction you're falling.
SPEAKER_1: That's funny.
SPEAKER_4: So if you're coasting towards the moon, down is towards the moon.
SPEAKER_1: Right.
SPEAKER_4: All right.
SPEAKER_4: I think it's that simple.
SPEAKER_1: There you go.
SPEAKER_1: That's really, that makes a lot of sense.
SPEAKER_1: It's very simple.
SPEAKER_1: Super cool.
SPEAKER_1: All right.
SPEAKER_1: Here we go.
SPEAKER_1: This is Walker Foland.
SPEAKER_1: And Walker Foland says, hello, Dr.
SPEAKER_1: Tyson, Lord Nice.
SPEAKER_1: This is Walker Foland from West Branch, Michigan.
SPEAKER_1: Recently, I read that the fabric of space time may be wormholes that are entangled between particles.
SPEAKER_1: Is it possible that the correlation of the-
SPEAKER_4: Like the previous question.
SPEAKER_1: Like the previous question.
SPEAKER_4: This is getting around.
SPEAKER_1: People are on to this, man.
SPEAKER_1: Is it possible the correlation of mass and gravitational pull have to do with the number of entangled particles that are in that mass?
SPEAKER_1: In other words, the more dense a body is, the more entangled particles it has.
SPEAKER_1: Therefore, the more micro wormholes would go to that mass.
SPEAKER_1: Could this explain the very nature of gravity and why it's relation and its relation to time?
SPEAKER_1: I imagine that wormholes would act as a conduit for mass to accumulate.
SPEAKER_1: I would love to hear your thoughts.
SPEAKER_4: I got to think about that.
SPEAKER_4: You know, we do hold that question next time we bring a drag Brian Greene into a cosmic craze.
SPEAKER_4: So what he's saying is, if the wormholes are part of the fabric of space and time, and wormholes can attract objects to them, not only other wormholes, but just more stuff, could that in fact be what causes gravity?
SPEAKER_4: And I don't have a good answer for that.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, that's a pretty wild question, bro.
SPEAKER_1: I got to give it to you.
SPEAKER_1: Well, how about Margaret Berry here?
SPEAKER_1: So now we got to have Brian Greene on.
SPEAKER_1: Thanks for giving us a reason to have the whole Brian bag.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, here's Margaret Berry.
SPEAKER_1: She says, Hi Chuck, Hi Neil.
SPEAKER_1: This is Margaret from North Carolina.
SPEAKER_1: My question is this, if all forms of energy have both particle and wave attributes, doesn't this itself define string theory?
SPEAKER_4: Uh, no.
SPEAKER_1: And that's our show, people.
SPEAKER_4: Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_4: Strings are one-dimensional concentrations of energy living in a higher dimension.
SPEAKER_4: And yes, they vibrate, and depending on how they vibrate, they will manifest as one kind of particle or another.
SPEAKER_4: A wave, however, is not a string.
SPEAKER_1: Right.
SPEAKER_4: It's just not.
SPEAKER_4: So I don't know that you can connect the wave-
SPEAKER_1: The string.
SPEAKER_4: With the string that you'd find in a string theater.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah, I don't think you can do that.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: Okay.
SPEAKER_1: Well, there you go, Margaret.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, it was a nice try.
SPEAKER_1: I get it.
SPEAKER_1: Nice try.
SPEAKER_1: That was a nice try, Margaret.
SPEAKER_1: She was like, I'm on to something.
SPEAKER_1: Like, listen, I'm figuring out the strength theory.
SPEAKER_1: No, that was very cool.
SPEAKER_1: Very cool, Margaret.
SPEAKER_5: Thank you.
SPEAKER_5: All right.
SPEAKER_4: That's all we have.
SPEAKER_4: So, those are Patreon members at $5 a month.
SPEAKER_4: Get your access to this.
SPEAKER_4: I think those numbers are growing.
SPEAKER_4: Maybe this was the carrot that everybody needed.
SPEAKER_4: I don't know, but yeah, the numbers are growing.
SPEAKER_1: For those of you who want to submit your questions, go to patreon.com/startalk and sign up for the $5 level, the tier.
SPEAKER_1: And for that, for the price of a cup of coffee, you can go ahead and be a part of our Patreon family.
SPEAKER_4: All right, that's all the time we got for it, Chuck.
SPEAKER_1: All righty.
SPEAKER_4: All right, this has been StarTalk Cosmic Queries Grab Bag Edition.
SPEAKER_4: Always fun.
SPEAKER_4: Neil deGrasse Tyson here, as always, keep looking out.
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