Answering Questions About Why the Big Bang Happened, The Shape of the Universe & More

0:00 that speed at which that light and that dark travels to my eye is so fast except for Muhammad Ali he's said I'm so fast I could turn out the lights and be in bed before it's dark I came of age I'm a little older than you I came of age than when people I have to adjust what what he just told you here like a chiropractor was that is that Lion King we get him it is almost never possible no can I ask a question no uh [Music] so this is Star Talk Neil degrass Tyson

0:45 you're a personal astrophysicist I got with me as co-host today Paul mcyo Paul welcome back oh thanks thanks for having me great to be back with you bud yeah this is the attorney stock broker turned comedian yes jorney Investment Bank return commun there's nothing funny about yeah exactly lawyers and stock Brokers no exactly I found a way to like run from it as fast as I all right so Paul we're going to do grab bag Cosmic queries we are we got some great queries here and I don't trust myself in grab bag mode oh yeah I need backup yes you did I got to get go for the Big D you need your stari you're Scot yeah 70 to to to get that reference he did pull up and aord

1:31 ARA Charles Lou welcome back to Star Talk hi Neil it's great to be back Charles long time friend our familyes a friends and colleagues you were here when we built the new rose Center for Earth in space 25 years ago has it been that long it's been a quarter Century geez it feels like yesterday that I came over here and this place was a hole in the ground yeah it does feel that way and it was you have intellectual and Sweat Equity and what we built here so we're thankful for that ah it was fun and that's weird cuz when we were talking he wasn't here you said he didn't do much you took a lot of the credit I don't know well you know he's not wrong I was just hanging out here all night having a great time yeah yeah that's all it was just jump right in okay all right let's do it this is

2:17 Galaxy uh Hey Dr Tyson Dr Lou I galaxy is the person uh yeah galaxy galaxy okay that's there uh I am Brian from Roseville California I just recently joined the patreon and I'm excited have my question answered welcome yes thank say it right welcome to the universe okay we dim the lights when you hear that I have always wondered how Giant Gas clouds and nebula exist in space shouldn't the vacuum cause all gas to disperse evenly to the point of not being even even being able to see it I love that because on Earth any cloud of gas disperses that's right as as dogs know that's right dogs will smell you

3:02 from far away because whatever is your stank one minute in and he say the guest has stank uh this is a lesson anybody watching on how not to host the show at least it's not smell a vision gracious yeah so it does it dissipate and you look at blood in the water and that that does it dissipate evenly that well there it's a diffusion equation where you have molecules it wouldn't happen in solid cuz all the molecules are just rigid but in a in a fluid they can vibrate no but you're not going to move it through the the system no there's a phase there's a phase issue I'm saying it's not going to move through the system just trying to get technical okay and wow this is getting tense already well he called me skank I

3:49 mean what am I supposed to do I didn't say skank I stank stank let's do our own show okay out here so so the diffusion equate so you have a molecule that can move like all the others and it just works its way through yeah in my high school we had there was a diffusion experiment where they there a long tube it's one of these display because we didn't have any athletic trophies to put geeky so you got put other stuff in your hallway display cases it's a hall of beakers is that yeah one of them is a very tall Beaker yes about this tall if I remember correctly that was little not much little I think it was this big and there was ink at the bottom and they carefully

4:37 put water on top of it y mhm and throughout the year you got to watch cuz the ink is slightly denser but still they're both fluids and so you get to watch the ink work its way up real slowly yeah in at my high school they had diffusion experiments every afternoon after the school lunches were served bean soup oh and in every classroom experiment of different particles suspended in the atmosphere moving from one side of the classroom to the other after you first heard that something people didn't figure out to not eat the bean soup exactly and that's where you got your name skank stank stank stank stank so did you um but would could you do that same with the ink could you do it with oil like cooking oil or well

5:22 it's harder no cuz oil would float and the misil between oil and water is very different between because ink is has is most inks that we used are water-based anyway so the water is finding the water molecules yeah so so Brian your the answer is basically the conditions out in space make it so that these gas particles tend to disperse unless they have a reason to collect okay here on Earth you have different kinds of things like buoyancy involved and things like that that also happens in space but in space when the temperatures are very low say 400° below z f gravity can actually overcome a lot of the emotional sort of

6:07 dispersive diffusive emotional emotional emotional yes it could be emotional you know I ain't doing it it's very moving that's right you tear up you start crying a lot emotional I never heard that word to become a star oh my gosh yeah yeah some become Stars yeah when it's called the random of the gases are actually overcome by the mutual gravity that they exert on each other does it happen is it dispersing in an in an even nature everything is turbulent if you go see for example beautiful pictures of say the Orion Nebula or other interstellar clouds you see that they're streaky and strange and unusual shape they they look like HSE heads they look like helixes and Cat's eyes and things like that um and that's

6:54 completely because the turbulence is still going ontic both we got to ask these stars that are emitting their planetary nebula what are they smoking you know I think that would be a very very good idea but the bottom line is that in space you have gravity holding these clouds together long enough for them to do things like form stars and planets but there's always these forces and these different energies and so forth for trying to disperse them and so you get beautiful combinations and that's why you get beautiful nebula and you get things like stars and planets I will add that you have a gas cloud that makes a family of stars so that eats up most of the mass of the gas cloud but there's part of the

7:40 gas that didn't participate in the formation of the planet snoody like you were in high school little standoffish it just wasn't was and that gas doesn't always land on a star do we know why in all serious well now now the gas doesn't have enough gravity to make it a Next Star we're done no but at the time and I'm not trying to be too far away that gas like all the other gases had an equal opportunity part of that it's not an equal opportunity system if you're a little too far away you not you might not feel the strong enough gravity to participate and the stars form without you and then this and I like that hand gesture because I'll follow up on it the whole galaxy is is rotating okay so your whole system with your stars and your gas is moving and there's

8:29 B other stuff so your gas can get stripped and Scatter into the Galaxy never to make another star so that gas just continues gas throughout the Universe and this is these are the particles that comprise the interstellar medium even between the gas cloud it's not completely empty okay yeah and can that gas marry with other gases eventually and sort of possibly be part of another it depends completely on like what what Neil was saying what is the rotational Shear what is the temperature the environment how much of it just happens to gather at this moment whether it can actually collect or not collect um it's really beautiful and fasinating dynamic but the funny thing is it is very very sparse right here on Earth we have trillions upon trillions of

9:15 particles of gas even in the tiniest you know Beaker or vial but out in space just even a couple hundred miles above Earth's surface we're lucky if we even get one gas particle it be the best vacuum ever created on Earth is what just space so people who study interstellar clouds are literally studying nothing yeah and yet that's the nothing from which we come from right so it's endlessly fascinating such is the layout of this Cosmic ballet well said choreographed by the forces of gravity it's more like a Martha Graham kind of ballet makes it too orderly I I'm feeling Alvin ay okay Alin oh yeah we go we go Alvin I've beened wins every time all right we're moving on uh great question great

10:01 answers Christopher win hello Dr Tyson Dr Lou I am Chris win from Ottawa Ontario Canada I'm new to preaching love your show my question is during the Big Bang what went bang if we don't know what are your best guesses there's only one answer here it's the universe went bang right okay next question I can take well we know the idea we know we know the idea of personal space was blown this right look the term Big Bang was actually coined uh by orri so misleading because it's about expansion not about bang it's a tributed why don't you guys fix that I've tried I've Tri we we there's a lot of Legacy language that that permeates our field

10:47 and it's makes it historically interesting can I ask a question this so in all seriousness how would that process work within the scientific Community if you wanted to sort of take on the task of changing you mean like if you change uh don't even stop stop it I'll kick you out of this office and throw you off the roof say I'm already stank so I mean why not right think about stank wait no no go Ahad two very important points here so finish your big bang story okay the Big Bang term is attributed to a guy named Fred hoil uh it was an interview done early on in the middle of the 20th century uh and back when ideas for the beginning of the universe were still uncertain and they were still contesting

11:33 right and so he himself did not like the idea that the Universe started from nothing or something very small and became something big and so uh the journalist that he was speaking with or interviewer whatever saids something like so you're think in the universe is kind of like a like a big bang of some kind and that just stuck did he do it to make science in all Ser sexy like sort of to get people today no one really knows um I've seen it historically expressed as it was derisive or that it was spectacular one or the other but yes the right answer is it's an expansion of space and time from something small to something big it was not an explosion and now we have this problem where we think oh if the Big Bang is an explosion what did it explode into you know things like that well key part of that where it explode from yeah there's a lot of other and then there's this thing called This

12:18 is Cosmic inflation right which which happened in the first tiny fraction of a second which is an expansion within an expansion you know imagine if you're blowing up a balloon slowly and then suddenly someone slaps you on the back and your air all goes out at once you know and it blows up and we call that inflation which gets mixed in with all kinds of the Jimmy Carter error hyperinflation that existed at the just before nixonian times are you sure but there is a sure but in it was like when this happened okay this this Cosmic inflation there is a theory that a gas cloud formed the initials win which is whip inflation now Jimmy Carter come on that was good that was see how I brought that back it's

13:04 historical though yeah right everything is hisor quick just while we're on the how does it relate back to yeah Society uh I came of age I'm a little older than you I came of age you're lot older than when people uh I think I heard him whisper you're old as dirt and I didn't think it was a very scientific term but that's what he used I think I'm 20% older than Charles here plus or minus so he uh I came of age when we applied computing power yes to what galaxies would do to each other when they encountered classic paper by two brothers arar and Yuri tumr in 1972 tumay And tumr yes terrific paper what kind of data are you inputting into the so so you we saw these weird looking

13:51 galaxies out there this is just an an analog so I don't to spend too much time on it really weird looking galaxies and there was someone in our field who compiled them into one catalog chip ARP called the atlas of peculiar Galaxy yeah these are galy are just weird they don't match any form so I don't know why but here they are and everyone saying what what could make these galaxies are they are they born that way and then Gerard deur who's a Galaxy Jerry I call him Jerry yeah we're like this he he was very French he very he was pretty sure that a crashed Lexus is not a different kind of car it's still a Lexus okay so he that was Toyota

14:37 actually so he becomes a Toyota good one good one so the idea that no they're not peculiar they changed because they had these encounters these collisions these galaxies colliding and they're colliding all the time right okay now I forgot why I I was even going to mention not inflation oh yeah yeah so at the time at the time time this is now in the 80s okay these are your people now in the 80s we we call this no no you'll understand why in 10 seconds come on so we called it in our field mergers and Acquisitions oh my God we did are you serious I have no idea Galaxy mergers and Acquisitions oh my God so hot then it was so hot right out of Wall Street so we have inflation and mergers and

15:24 Acquisitions and and now look where we are that's right we're with doctor thank and um hey Star Talk fans I don't know if you know this but the audio version of the podcast actually posts a week in advance of the video version and you can get that in Spotify an apple podcast and most other podcast Outlets that are out there multiple ways to ingest all that is Cosmic on Star Talk The Big Bang within the bang big bang at the tiny fraction of that moment when it happened Y is there still yet an explanation as to why that had happened there are numerous competing hypotheses but we don't have the experimental evidence to show the initial burst or the thing that

16:12 caused it to happen we're pretty sure it did happen we got Clos to that energy the bigger part is our particle accelerator the earlier in time it can it can see Bas not see but uh represent right in the temperature density and the particle accelerator you can say in the first microc or the first nanc of the universe what was the temperature oh my gosh it was this High have we ever reached that temperature in the lab no not yet the day we do we get to say we think we have sampled what the early Universe would have looked like do new particles pop in is there a dark matter particle that shows up we don't know but do you both understand there brilliant scientists that lay people like myself are looking for in all series of solid answers right like I'm

16:59 still trying to figure myself out hang on a second fig myself out through counseling therapy whatever the universe hasn't been able to figure yourself out in 13.8 billion years can you guys get on the stick and give us an answer I would like to I would like to but this is the you you hit the key point in the difference between yes you hit the key point between what I think is the difference between scientific truth and non-scientific truth with scientific truth we always put in the but we wrong part that we don't know for absolute sure part and that's really really important right science could not have progressed if somebody said this is the right answer and then everyone just oh okay okay people would have stopped it's incredibly important to

17:46 recognize that we have ignorance uh Neil has a terrific term for this uh the perimeter of ignorance we have to understand that there's a space beyond which we don't know the answer yet or even what we think we know could be wrong because of this this this this and this which is why Paul you need to love the questions themselves oh in your search for to profound Dude too profound no that's that's Rainer Maria Ry in a poem ah yes plus I have to I have to adjust what what he just told you here okay like a chiropractor he's gonna he's gonna just wrong word I need a different going to straighten your he's going to straighten your mental back out CRA your mental yeah so um I put a lot of thought and

18:33 energy into defining what true means and I've settled in a way that I think is highly defensible and should be adopted okay okay so scientific truth is that which has been established by repeated observations and measurements when that happens it is not later shown to be false so we can talk about it as an objective truth equals mc^ s is not one day going to be found to be false that earth goes around the Sun that the sun is hot that the sun undergos thermonuclear Fusion is not going to one day be found to be false where Charles is referring to we have to have some acceptance that we could be wrong yes about things that we are not

19:20 definitively correct on the frontier we're wrong most of the time but there are some 90% are some things at least the community is comfortable saying you're saying that there are some things equals MC squ Etc where we're not questioning that anymore there huge things huge swaps otherwise you can't do otherwise we're not flying airplanes otherwise you can't do the exploration into the things airplanes wouldn't fly Rockets don't go to Mars and exactly where could continue to research that there's another rationale but I think what you're saying is no no no hold on let me finish I'm almost done okay it doesn't mean that we will not one day find a deeper truth in which the experimentally verified truths are embedded such was the case with Newton's

20:05 laws of gravity and motion those laws in the Realms in which they were tested are still valid we went to the moon using Newton's laws and not Einstein okay there was no relativity in the Apollo voyages it was all Newton's laws of gravity and motion we then learned that at high speed's high gravity Newton's Laws break down holy do we discard Newton what's going on well there's gravitational weight so Einstein finds a deeper understanding of gravity and motion and he gets his theory of theories of Relativity special Theory and general relativity guess what when you plug low speeds and low gravity into Einstein's equations they become

20:51 Newton's equations people say oh we Newton out Einstein in that misrepresents what's actually happening here they Co you can't have it's chicken egg you can't have one without the other well well no I mean in terms of the pathways of Discovery you get the restricted case before you discover the general case my only point is the uncertainty that a scientist brings to the frontier is in the realm of things that we have not yet experimentally verified and it's it's completely uncertain at that level and we're just duking it out at conferences and the like and the Press Eaves drops on the conferences they the scientists don't know what they're talking about and then people say I don't trust science yeah as they're on their smartphone talking to someone a thousand miles away ience you know so I just want to clarify that and

21:37 two other truths there's your personal truth like is Jesus your savior is Muhammad your last prophet is is Beyonce your queen rather than Taylor Swift right so that's a personal then you have political truths which are things that become true in your head simply because they were repeated so often yes which are the foundations of or because you read it on Twitter yeah no how many times you read it it's not it's how many times and so is that any the foundations of is that any different than commercial advertising no exactly the same I'm going you're going to show you this toy Toyota 50 times and by the end of the week you're going to be like I got to get a Toyota that's a great and no matter what they're telling you that becomes true right so those are the three truths right uh and I will never speak of of an absolute truth because that's not what science does Newton's gravity was proven to be wrong is true

22:27 it's was wrong because in certain conditions in the universe it was not correct but that that's but those are extreme conditions well beyond the experimental realm that expands our it's a good thing when a bad thing happened like that it's a good thing because it expands our base of don't call it bad we don't invest emotions in it some people do but it's not good if you do right well I talk like a six-year-old no so do I well this is is perfect because this next question is about gravitational waves I'm telling this is eie okay this is Mitchell Ransom uh Mitch from the UK I would love to know more about what we can learn from gravitational waves it's cool we can detect them but what can that do for our understanding of the

23:13 universe marvelous question perfect perfect marvelous question you take this off back clean up on it okay go I will be the and then I'll be the guy who shouldn't steal second doesn't gets thrown out and ruins the inning well if Otani were stealing he'd actually make it oh my God yeah or if you're going to steal second do it deep into the count of a battery you want to see come up again the next inning also the that's true right because they get fresh right and also fundamental baseball which doesn't get talked about nearly as much as it we should do a whole thing on baseball oh my God oh my gosh the Bigg I mean I think I think the pitch clock while it's helped Speed the game up I mean stealing is so much more

23:59 interesting and fun to watch because you go over there twice you know you're going to get you you you can't go back at the time that's right they're very interesting rules are always fun too talking about rules the most interesting sport to watch I think baseball because of all of the machinations but anyway yeah okay well here's the deal gravitational waves are essentially uh to the universe and space and time as say ripples are in a pond right so if you see ripples going on in a pond or any body of water you can deduce things about that pond what is the water made out of is there duckweed on the top how deep is it uh is there ice you know things like that all the different things about that puddle by the way the depth is affects the the amplitude of

24:47 the Ripple completely so it's why when you're at the beach how come you know you see a swell sort of out there but then it gets closer to the shore it becomes a big wave yeah so the energy that is out there in the ocean which is shared vertically to the bottom of the thing as you get shallower and shallower that energy has to manifest somehow and the height of the wave grows and so the energy is the same but the height and how you experience it as a beachgoer but where does wind come into this if I'm so because wind can create a have to just that's right the top has an effect the bottom has an effect and the side has an effect right where where is it coming from bouncing off the edges make a

25:32 difference if you're in a bay or if you're just hitting a wide Shoreline also what is the material of the beach is it Rocky is it Sandy so gravitational waves literally have the opportunity if we're sensitive enough to detect them to tell us about SpaceTime the structure of the universe the things that these ripples go through got to add real quick Charles is talking about things you would know Beyond just the simple detection of the wave that's right it's one thing to know that there's a wave there now what's the amplitude what's the wavelength how many of these are there are they coming from this direction there there's different layers but the Nobel Prize went to basically the first time it was ever discovered and then you then you can keep asking more detailed questions when your

26:19 telescopes become better to do so that's right but this gets to Newton's law of universal gravitation right which does not provide for the existence of gravitation waves it asserts that gravity has instantaneous effect which is wrong because I dropped a 1982 bottle of sh chat the feat Rothchild and I in it fell seriously in slow motion did you seriously do that it landed on a pillow I'm sure and it fell in slow motion everything slowed down so he's Newton's wrong I'm right no but so now so that's where Newton and Einstein right are S no wait wait just to be clear Newton did not have a strong investment in any expectation that things happen instantaneously his big concern was that it was action at a distance and there

27:05 was nothing in between that was just a little weird he knew it worked but he couldn't explain it in any way but it's he was not deeply invested an example that for that for me so there's something in the distance but nothing in between let's say I turn off that light okay over there it actually takes a fraction of a second for that light Mater for that information to get to me that the light is no longer shining right except for Muhammad Ali who you know what he said he said I'm so fast I could turn out the lights and be in bed before it's dark he he also floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee that guy was pretty amazing yeah so um that speed at which that light and that dark travels to my eye is so fast that I as a human being

27:54 could never detect it but if I had a very sensitive camera that could really stop down time to billionths of a second or trillions of a second at a time you can actually see it getting darker as it moves forward oh to your right light use moves one foot per nanc per billionth of second so you just need billions and you can catch yeah catch yeah so from the side if you look at it from the side you would you would literally see it there's a right now there's a straight white line of light and then you'd see it getting darker darker well there there's also background light right remember our light is is primarily Illuminating from you have a laser and put chalk dust in there and you see through and then you do this that would work that would be a great way to do that absolutely people

28:39 don't know what chalk dust is go to a baseball game there you go oh yeah yeah for the thing so so Newton really didn't get the sense or understand that there was a time lag right Einstein which is what gravit gravitational waves is all about right right um they move at Einstein showed that information in the universe especially carried by light right and waves has a speed limit and then folks Wonder it's not just a good idea it's the law had to say it's a great commercial D dad joke is going on in your brain it's a dad joke dad I love the dad jeness of that it's really very good so so what happened is that

29:25 Einstein showed that there was this uh reasonable um sort of speed limit to the universe the speed at which light travels in the vacuum and then folks said well you know what if that's the speed limit of light maybe that's also the speed limit of these things these other things any information at all you know and so like gravity yeah so maybe gravity only travels at the speed of light and that's important to know when we see gravitational waves we infer the existence of little tiny particles called gravitons that travel through space in order to have this wave happen we still have never detected the existence of gravitons in the laboratory we may never be able to unless we can get a particle accelerator the size of the solar system but what we can do is

30:10 to say well this proves that speed of light and speed of gravitational waves and so forth are so close to one another that there's a there must be something there so that in itself I guess is another Discovery right by gravitational waves existing you start putting strict upper limits on the mass of a graviton just to be clear before we knew anything about photons of light light was described as waves and then we learn that the wave particle you know do it can be it can manifest as a particle the photon or as that you can detect or as waves which you can also detect as Waves by analogy to that gravitational

30:56 waves are granted a particle counterpart gra the graviton which is it's which is a counterpart in a way phot correct and you need different mechanisms to detect it in that mode when we say particles Collide to create virtual particles do they really fist bump each other down at the plank scale occupying the same voxel at the same time or do they just get close enough and then you know magic happens great question they get close enough as an undergraduate it I learned some about a very technical silly term called the impact parameter and that means that if you have two things coming toward each other how close do they have to be before they

31:42 impact each other affect each other they don't have to touch each other they don't actually have to touch wait so like if I did this to you right I'm not touching you I'm not touching you he's not touching me stop not touching me wait I we let's go a layer deeper we did a whole episode of Cosmos on this because of electromagnetic forces which hold your body together when I go up to Charles and I touch him if you actually analyze what's going on at the molecular and atomic level I'm not actually touching him there forces in a field surrounding the particles and it's the forces that are bumping off each other and this impact parameter exists when there are fields that surround the objects that are coming near each other I can see my finger my skin touching

32:30 that surface so so you're telling me that I'm what I'm seeing at a very microscopic scale there's something between that plastic and my SK there is space between that plastic and your skin but what happens is that the uh Fields transfer energy so your skin still feels as if it is physically touching something but that's something coming from the bottle and the bottles coming from the skin right so so there is a a tiny bit of space in between and there is stuff passing between it otherwise your finger would just pass through the plastic so there's a space like my my emotional relationship with my wife there's a sliver we don't want to get into so so I Love This Love This what Charles says because we don't hear that

33:15 term much but it's kind of it's almost self-explanatory it's the distance within which you can declare there was an interaction between the two object there's there way to there's a way to measure that you can put it in the mathematical equations and say okay well I have some force field in my finger you have some force field in that plastic container when they come together how close do they have to be before I feel the force of those container particles pushing on my finger particles it's it's more precise than that so you have two I'm pulling this out of my 30-year memory you you can ask okay so so if two objects two gravitational objects are come by and one just gets

34:02 pulled a little bit that's right you can say all right what does that mean but you can Define just for conversational and mathematical purposes the impact parameter is the distance within which its trajectory will be altered by more than 90 degrees it's pretty cool so that's why when we talk about say colliding galaxies the stars in the galaxies actually never hit each other almost never have direct Collision but they go by each other and as they go by it's like a swarm of angry bees and they affect each other to the point where there can be an explosion to the effect where at times you will have an explosion that's right so if I'm touching this is there's a force that's strong enough or can be measured at

34:49 which I can push those magnetic field or those fields apart and I'm actually touching it is it ever possible to eliminate that feel that's between the thing I'm my finger and the pen let's say it is almost never possible because at there is a limit no Beyond which the math breaks down you see in the quantum uh structure of the universe by way I feel like I'm asking to use the car and he's saying maybe and my dad's saying go ahead no back up for a minute keep it under 30 m an hour you'll be all right back Story Time real quick okay I'll be reading from Merlin you have some milk milk hot

35:34 coco get some hot coco Alex Merlin's tour of the universe dear Merlin is there a chance that another star will One Day Collide with the sun yes but you should know that if there were just four snails randomly carousing across the continental United States snails don't carouse do they not st's crew what are they alcoholic drug Dr hey stale how's it going drug ad likely for two of them to accidentally bump into each other than it is for another star and the sun seriously to collide yeah yes and then my then my artist brother drew two snails colliding here one of which has a

36:20 bandana and a gun really weird a carousing that's a carousing it's mostly empty space so two galaxies colliding the Stars just pass but they definitely affect each other gravitation so this this star this star is going by it's it there's enough there is enough energy there that it can cause each to explode not necessarily they'll cause each other to change their trajectories but once every 4 seconds or so in the whole observable universe this is an estimate made a few years ago there is actually a direct Collision okay this is most likely to happen in dense clusters of stars very dense okay like globular clusters the center of the cluster right in the center of the star where say for example in the space which is normally say a few light years between me and us

37:06 and Alpha centor for example there could be million stars in that space when the over densities are million to one compared to say our solar neighborhood uh you can actually have stars hitting one another and they could actually explode but the chances of even a collision causing an explosion are tiny because stars are mostly made out of gas so imagine like a star going through another star you're basically just having gas clouds smashing into gas clouds and go through you need the core there are molecules within each gas cloud that could sort of collide but then they don't cause a collision because they're so small right there's so low energy but if you get the core of a star hit the core of a star then can actually create a star happening and you create collisions make that happen come

37:53 on at once every four seconds you guys are doing crazy stuff than gued I know you guys are doing crazy stuff in the basement of this place let's make that happen okay I have more questions I want I don't want to dulge any more to you uh I don't have the clearance have you ever wanted one of your questions on the universe answered we all have questions about the universe black holes to quazars quantum entanglement wormholes there is no end to the depths of cosmic curiosity well the entry level of of patreon membership with Star Talk gets you just that I think it starts at $5 a month you have access to the question line that reaches

38:40 our Cosmic query programming and not only that we produce a special Cosmic queries installment just for patreon members so if you weren't the director of the Hayden planetarium what do you think you would be doing what okay but this have to be another Universe it wouldn't happen in this universe okay I'd be I'd be a a songwriter for Broadway musicals oo so that's the entry level and the perks ascend from there uh there's a level in fact where we send you a an autographed copy of one of my latest books uh right now it's Star Messenger Cosmic perspectives on civilization and it's signed with my fancy fountain pen with purple ink so I

39:27 I invite you to just check the link below and all of that money goes to our ability to experiment with new ways of bringing the universe down to earth so thank you for those who have already joined and we welcome others to participate in this Grand Adventure of what it is to bring the universe down to earth as always keep looking up Paul time for a couple more oh absolutely uh very good question here this is from Morton L lur jar uh uh this is I hope uh Don't make me say it a second time uh it's greetings from Norway ion okay Morton oh sorry Morton lur jar lurar I hope you can help clarify

40:12 something for me if our son is a third generation star how is it that we can observe earlier generation Stars when looking back in time since we are made up of the Stardust from those earlier Stars wouldn't their light have already passed answer is the following I uh am a third generation from my grandfather but I can still see my great grandfather if he's still alive right uh the idea is that the generation in which you are created may have happened while those earlier Generations ours are still alive right so our son is about 4 and a half billion years old but if a first generation star that created it was for billion years old and then the the the

40:59 star that was before it was a few billion years old but then there's a generation of stars that's 13 billion years old we can still see them because they've still lived they're livive still but that first generation star is always going to be mom's favorite the third generation son you know you know you leave the kid home alone let them smoke cigarettes when 12 that third generation you WIP the binky on the pants instead of sterilizing by the third kid take the kid to the track instead of taking him to the zoo I'm sorry I'm really put com out my personal stuff coming out here man wait wait Charles I think you missed the point there I did I think oh no I think sorry sorry I knew that but I didn't want to say it I think okay the

41:47 generation of stars that gave their lives to create the elements out of which we are made are not there anymore you're not going to see your grandfather if you were made out of the the Flesh of your grandfather or or your great-grandfather they're not going to be there they're dead because they gave their lives for you what's going on here is there we as we look out in space we look back in time and see the universe not as it is but as it once was so we can look far enough out into space to see the first generation stars do their thing and and beautiful we we can see look 8 billion years ago 8 billion years ago those are stars manufacturing the elements and they're about to die to

42:33 make room for the second generation and that light is only now just reaching us but those elements continue to exist like my great great grandfather's DNA exists in me yes but he ain't around he lives in you thank you is that Lon King yes oh yeah good very good I recognize the first part of that not the second part sorry can we get a we need a here we go right here okay okay no we're mixing we're mixing two points I know there's two different points two different one point is Look Back Time and the other is the age of things okay okay when the first generation of stars formed no he said when when likeon yes yes yes a whole

43:23 episode of Family Guy on pronouncing yeah that was a good one yeah yeah it that was a good one um when when you have a generation of stars form you have some stars that die quickly but then you have a bunch of stars that live longer so those that died quickly contributed their information or their materials to the Next Generation their elements the element that they make meanwhile the first generation still exists and then that generation goes and then they form another generation but those old star from the first generation still exist the stars that did not give their lives for us happen to live for a trillion years so yes at least so they're all still around right in every Galaxy and

44:08 that's not even about Look Back Time so but some of them gave their lives for us that's right so the notion that we are second or third generation generally that only matters because we have elements that earlier Generations don't those elements isn't it the third generation star the sun is composed of heavier elements like iron o so that because they're heavier they can exist longer or pass low mass stars live forever and high mass stars die and first generation high mass stars died for us so yeah so the caveat is they died for our sins yes the caveat is that if there are well okay um do you realize there's a logical fact in Christianity that if you don't sin then

44:57 Jesus died for no reason well then i' better get to going I better get to get what you been doing that's right that's right what are we doing time are wasted what are we wasted time here come on show's over everybody we're going to go sin our asses off just don't tell my wife um the the first generation of stars like the very very first generation of stars may have only formed shortlived Stars this is something that has been speculated we're not 100% zero generation star the I'm sorry only formed short generation shorted Stars shorted right so it's possible that the original the OG generation of stars is all gone okay okay but certainly we can look back several generations and see that there

45:43 are stars from previous generations that still existed going back to your sort of analogy of the great grandfather it's like it's as if if you can see those stars from previous generations that were it's like your great-grandfather's still alive and you could go see him somewhere even though it's yeah but he's not the one who gave you your elements if you can still see them they're not giving you the elements if they aren't in your own Galaxy we we have all all generations of stars within our own Galaxy and has nothing to do with Look Back Time yeah but the element in that star that I can see that's a previous generation to the sun they'll have fewer heavy elements than we do okay but it's doesn't it share some of the same elements that the sun shares generationally it might yeah yes the sun has all of it plus the next generation's worth mixed into it okay yeah great question great yeah good one okay manade

46:29 Shandy in North Wales who what yeah who what's his name manade Shandy from North Wales wow wow you learn your Welsh that's amazing or Michael is his name okay uh given the relationship between speed and time and the relationship between speed and mass is there also there for a direct relationship between time and mass in other words if time Were Somehow to stop would everything become infin infinitely massive and would we be dragged by intense grav gravitational forces back into Singularity man W man well I love that that's a drop the mic moment everybody I'm the mic's on a mic some amazing

47:17 amazingly thoughtful people in Wales that are asking questions Inc that's incredible man so do you interpret that the way I do he's saying we know from relativity that as you go fast time slows down and your your mass increases so instead of having it happen that way let's figure out a way to slow down time Y and would that then have associated with it it increase in everybody's Mass that's right that's an interesting a great question um I don't think that can happen that's not how time works uh because what we're doing when we're measuring speed is how fast you are going through space right uh it's the distance you travel through space divided by the amount of time it took you to get there is this question

48:02 suggesting you could be dragged backwards in time somehow the suggestion is that you slow time down right I think that instead of going at 1 second per second it becomes 0.9.8 point where something becomes everything becomes singular right and I don't think that can work because the the physics of time which is still mysterious at certain fundamental levels suggest that you can't really manipulate time that way the way you manipulate space or the way you manipulate your speed travel through a good point and my favorite thought about time is that we are prisoners of the present forever transitioning between our inaccessible past and our unknowable future you just gave me a headache I don't even know what you're talking about you know I know you like that but I prefer M you want you want to

48:49 mess with that no but I'm going to provide an alternative from that incredible deep doc lofty Kung Fu Panda Kung Fu Panda from Master ugu okay right the past is history the future is a mystery all we have today is a gift and that is why it's called the present that was from kungu Panda yes it was okay it ain't over till it's over Yogi that that has a Time aspect if you think about it most profound don't look down your nose at that that only works in baseball no if you think about it Super Bowl if you're in the Super Bowl and one team is down by1 points how about it's get LLY 3

49:35 minutes late don't you love it's getting the game is over okay so it's not over you still have to put the two-minute warnings commercials in right you got to sell some soap but the full significance of that comment can only exist in baseball where there is no clock except now there is with the pitcher I I think that's all the time we had so Charles finished a book recently I loved it the quantum something the handy quantum physics answer book they have the word handy and Quantum in the same title that's badass the goal is to help everyone understand which we need like this basic level basic explanations of complex things you know Quantum feels scary it feels unknown but actually we interact with it every day and so think of it as a handbook don't think of it as a textbook okay yeah good yeah nice

50:21 reference gu and and and Paul where where where can we find you next this week my Broadway show directed by Frank Oz the original Yoda and all of that and the great director we are taking out a national tour we're going to be in Florida in Orlando Florida and in um Fort Lauderdale at the brow Center for the Performing Arts Dr Philips Center in Orlando going to be in Rhode Island these good places a real theater we got a set designed by the set designer for The Late Show and we have animation because you you also Moonlight I work at theay Show stepen Co show up the warm up and do on I going to be making another appearance I'm going to be making another standup appearance on the show after the first of Year too and so we got a really so you don't only war with the audience occasionally he'll bring you on for the broadcast yeah yeah done

51:08 a bunch of appearances on the show or do sketches and like few times not you came and say hi to me I love yeah every time yeah absolutely and he's like don't make eye contact with me I'm like okay all right and and we got really cool animation in the set It's JJ settl who did B buad and all the SNL TV pels we created this it's a multimedia show with said with this really cool um it's really cool so yeah people go to palmrio.com get tickets come out support the show would be great we got it permission to speak is the name of it permission to speak it's been really great to be on with you I've read some of your work and it's really great but never shook my hand he never shook my hand come on I love you buddy I love you all right that's all the time we have this has been a Star Talk Cosmic query's grab bag

51:57 that was definitely some bad grabbing right there all right until next time Neil degrass Tyson bidding you all to keep looking up [Music] [Music] [Music]