StarTalk Radio - Bose-Einstein Condensate, Collisions, The Physics of Fire –TYTYK

Episode Date: October 27, 2026

What happens to matter when the temperature gets near zero kelvin? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice explore things you thought you knew about Bose-Einstein condensate, high impact collisions, and how stuff burns. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://startalkmedia.com/show/bose-einstein-condensate-collisions-the-physics-of-fire-tytyk/Thanks to our Patrons James Sym, Lyndon Crews, László Plájer, Ricardo Jaquez, David Fosse, Liam McNally, Rebecca Harris, Josh Wise, Henrik jonasson, Vamsi Krishna, Maria Falotico, Drew_Kamera, Kristopher Davis, Chris, Rafael Barão, Garrett, Deucer Doc, Danny Sharp, Hans Schenker bei Google, and Christopher Fazzino for supporting us this week. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of StarTalk Radio ad-free and a whole week early.Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hello, Stark Talkians. Neal deGrasse Tyson here. Coming up is another installment of things you thought you knew. In conversation with Chuck Nice. First, we talk about the Bose-Einstein condensate. What is that? You'll find out. After that, we talk about the kinetic energy of car collisions. And then we rounded out with a discussion on burning things. Check it out.

Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Chuck, I've been itching to do this there's so long. Uh-oh. Okay. This is going to be on the Bose-Einstein condensate. Okay.

Okay. And I bet you've been just itching to know about that. Oh, my God. I can't tell you how many sleepless nights I have had. Thinking about the Bose-Einstein condensate. I'm actually building a particle collider in my basement because it just means that much to me. Now, anyway, I don't even know what is the Bose.

Well, you've heard of Einstein. Bose was an Indian physicist. Oh! And the boson is a type of particle that is named in his honor. And you might have heard of the Higgs boson. It's a different kind of boson. So here's what's interesting.

with a Bose-Einstein condensate. It's a subdivision of condensed matter physics where matter gets very dense and very close to itself. And you can do that by reducing the temperature so that the particles don't vibrate as much. Gotcha. Okay. And make it colder and colder and colder and colder.

All right. Now, here's what's going on. Yeah. Okay. It needs a sweater. And I have to whisper because it might disturb the particles. Okay. It's a beautiful day here at Augusta.

Winds are slightly out of the west as the particles line up on the 18th. We've got a... By the way, something about sweaters. If you're the same temperature as the outside air, a sweater will do nothing. It can't warm you. Wait, if you... Oh, my God, yes, you're right. Yes.

But a sweater is not inherently warm. The sweater is just fabric that's an insulator, really. Correct. So if you are warmer than the outside and then you put on a sweater, it keeps your warmth in you. Right. But if you are the same temperature. Right. As you say, you got nothing, your clothing won't do anything.

By the way, I do know, and I hate to say it and don't write. I know a couple of women who will put on a sweater when it's 98.6 degrees. Really? Why is it so chilly in here? Don't stop. Okay. Oh my God, it's so cold. Okay.

Yes, the thermodynamics of men and women have never been the same. You know they did a study and they found that women are actually colder. No, they did a study and found out that the temperatures in office buildings were specked for men because it was at a time when only men were occupying the office buildings. And so, yeah, the women ended up colder. Had they specced it for women, men would be complaining how high. it was. Okay, you're right. You know, that's why I'm glad I'm a man. No, I'm joking.

Do not right. That is not. That's called a joke. That's it. Okay. Do not write because I don't. Okay, that would have rocked the house in 1987. It would have, right.

You know, let's get that. So these particles, you're lowering the temperature. Okay. So in quantum physics, every particle is also a wave. Okay. Holy season. Give me a second, man. Give me a second.

Quantum fixes, every particle is also a wave. Now, is that because they're vibrating? It's, it's, you want to ask rational questions about a reality that still transcends our common sense. Okay, got you. All right. So what you're saying here is like, these are things you have to accept by suspending your natural understanding or your understanding of the world. Your limited understanding brought to you by your own five senses. is honed on the plains of the Serengeti to not be eaten by a lion.

Right. All right. The universe is vastly more complex than that. Gotcha. And involves statements that on the face of it seem like they can't be true. But they are true. Because your intuition is not quantum intuition. Right.

It's classical intuition. Right. Yeah. That's what I mean by your natural understanding. It's the world around you. Okay. Correct. All right.

So now let's get back to this. All right. Every particle is a wave on the quantum level. Correct. All right. And so, on the quantum is also a wave. And so you have a jumble of particles, and they're all doing their thing. You can look at what wave is associated with them, what wavelength.

Okay? And they're each doing their thing. They're all independent particles. Okay. So let's cool them down. As they vibrate less, they have less energy associated with them. and their wave length grows. Uh-huh.

Okay. Okay. All right. So just hang with me now. I got you. I don't want to lose you. Okay. I'm with you right now.

Right now. Okay. Okay. The characteristic wave of the particle as it slows down begins to grow. Right. Now there's a what's called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Oh, right. Which is the more you know,

about a particle's position in space, the less you know about its energy. And the more you know about its energy, the less you know about its position in space. Okay. Okay. Now, there's a geeky way to get out of a speeding ticket where the cop stops you

and it says, do you know how fast you were going? And you just say, no, that means I'm everywhere or something. Some stupid quantum, okay, that's surely to get the black man shot and then... There you go. That's how that works. That's how that works. All right. So, anyhow, so you have these particles, and as you cool this material, when I say cold,

I don't mean put it down in the freezer. I'm talking on a Kelvin absolute temperature scale where zero is the cold. We have a whole explainer on that one. Yes, we do. I remember. You can get down to 10 degrees. And 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, a half a degree, a 10th of degree, a thousandth of a degree. You just keep getting this colder and colder and colder.

And the wavelengths of each of these particles gets longer and longer. Right. And you reach a point where all the wavelengths overlap each other for every. every single particle. And they become one. They've condensed. They've condensed and become one functioning particle. Oh.

Nice. Okay. They didn't just condense and become a solid thing. Right. No. All their waves, which used to be separate and distinct, are now overlapping and resonating with each other.

They're the Voltron. of particles. Okay, I forgot who Voltron is. Who's that? That's the one where all the little robots come together to make one big giant robot. Yes, there it is. There it is.

What movie was that? What comic book was that? Voltron. Oh, Voltron is the story. Yeah, that's the story. Okay, that is it, yeah. So all the particles come together and they become one metaparticle.

A functioning metaparticle. Correct, because they all resonate together at the same time. And this is why you can't think of matter as only particles or waves, all right? Because depending on this situation, they will function as one or the other and in some cases both. Wow. And so, oh, yeah. And by the way, there's a lot of phenomenon.

So that's a Bose-Einstein condensate. When it, when it, it happens like quick. As you drop the temperature, it transitions, boom. It's basically a phase change in what it is. It's weird for us to think that, but is it really any weirder than having a transparent liquid all of a sudden become solid? Right. Think about it. If you've never been in a freezing temperature and someone has a cube of ice.

A cube of ice. And you say, what's that? It's water. No, it's not because I can't drink it and it's not a liquid. Witch! Witch! Witch! Why they only burn the witches and not the warlocks?

You know, why did they never find the warlock is the question. So the men had all the power, I guess. Which I don't understand why every woman, the person who ever, because it's always a guy, right? You know, witch. And immediately if I was a woman, I'd have been like, yes, I'm a witch. He's my warlock. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, totally take that one out.

Yeah, we're going down together, baby. Fight the fire with fire. Fight fire with fire. Yeah. So other phenomena like this, one of them is called. superfluidity. You know what that is? The fluid becomes a super fluid, which means if you pass something through it like your fist, there is no resistance to your hand moving through that volume. It just envelops your hand as though nothing is there. It's super fluidity. Then you can have

superconductivity where the material offers no resistance to the movement of electricity. So you don't lose any electric power to heat. Okay. And it, and you, and you have perfect transmission of electricity. And so you can have superconductivity. And from that, you can get superconducting magnets, which are extremely powerful. That's the meditating. Yeah, yeah, you get some of that. You get some of that. Okay. Well, you get a maglev train that would help out. It could be totally happening if you can get superconducting magnets to do that. The problem is you can't cool everything to fractions of degrees above Kelvin.

You need sort of high-temperature superconductors, high-temperature, which would still be very cold. And so it's a whole thing, it's a whole frontier in material science and in physics. Wow. So the point is none of these phenomena make any sense in a classical world. Right. But when you bring in quantum forces and put it under those conditions, you need quantum. you need quantum physics to understand it. And so I just think it's cool that all these particles can condense

and act as one meta system. And you said it's not Ultron. Who was it? Did you say? Voltron. Voltron is a sum of smaller robots that's acting as a single robot. As a single robot. Yeah.

Voltron is a Bose-Einstein condensate. Look at that. That's pretty awesome. Yeah. That's right. So there it is. That was quick. No, it was great.

Yeah, I did not. We need a healthy respect for quantum physics as we enter the realm of quantum computing, where once again we exploit the weird, wacky stuff that is normal in quantum physics and is out of our life experience from our senses. And so, there it is, Chuck. Okay. That is super duper fly. No, it's super duper conducting.

Ah. Oh, by the way, speaking. of super duper, we're going to build the world's largest particle accelerator. And you know how you accelerate particles? You get a particle with a charge in it, and then you shoot it into a magnetic field, okay? And if you vary that magnetic field, you can accelerate the particle, but the particle wants to have its direction of motion changed.

It starts arcing. So you know exactly how much it's going to arc. You make a tube that's round, and then you, you, alter the magnetic field in that tube to accelerate the particle. This is how every single circular particle accelerator works. And you can only accelerate particles that have charges

can't accelerate neutrons because they don't have charge. That's that joke in the bar. Neutron goes, walks into a bar. Said, Neutron walks into a bar and says, I'd like a beer. So here it is. And the neutron says,

how much? And the bartender says, for you, no charge. That's stupid. So just as we go forward, just embrace all that quantum physics brings you, and don't try to question it. Yeah, you can't. You can't because you're questioning it from a foundation that is not the world of laws that govern quantum phenomena. So you just have to grow accustomed to quantum physics. If anyone says, I understand it now.

No, you don't. No, no. It just is. Right. It just is. That's great. All right, dude. That was amazing.

Yeah, weird, wacky things. the frontier of quantum physics. Weird, wacky things. Yes, that was Johnny Carson. That's weird and wacky things. You are correct, sir. Yeah, you got it. Here's yet another fact from Lost in Space,

the latest collaboration between StarTalk and National Geographic. 1995, we discovered the first authentic exoplanet, a planet orbiting another living star. So anyone born from 1995 onward, I now declare each one of you to be Generation X, O planet. If you like that fact, you can find 4,99 more in Lost in Space. 5,000 facts to help navigate the universe. Lost in Space is now available wherever you get your books. This one is on safe car actions. Okay, I'm in the oxymorons.

I'll play along. Okay. A safe car accident. A safe car accident. Correct. Okay. So let's look at the physics of a moving vehicle. All right.

So let's assume you're wearing your seatbelt. So you're attached to the car. All right. You have all this stuff up front, you know, under the hood, the engine, if it's a front, you know, front wheel, whatever, front engine car. Right. You have stuff in behind you. You got the doors to your left and right. And nowadays, we have airbags.

Correct. In all those places. Yeah. The doors have it. Side curtain airbags. Right. Yeah. Okay.

So the only objective. in a car accident is to take the kinetic energy of the car and do something else with it, okay, in a way that does not harm the passenger. The passenger, okay. All right? So this is why you might have heard these things about crumple zones. Right. You said, why would I want to crumple my own damn car?

Because the energy of the speed of the car now goes into crumpling your car. Right. Because your car after the accident is going zero miles per hour. Right. Where did that kinetic energy go? It has to go somewhere. Something's got to break. Right.

You don't want it going in your head. In your head, okay? Something's got a break. Okay. So if you're not wearing a seatbelt and you're going 60 miles an hour and then zero. And if that happens relatively quickly as what happens in car accidents, you become a bug. You keep moving.

So what happens is the car accident. car hits the wall and the car stops moving. Right. But you're not attached to the car. You keep moving at what speed? 60 miles an hour. 60 miles per hour. Into the windshield.

Correct. Now, there's some people who don't wear seatbelts below like 30 miles an hour. Okay. So I'm not going fast enough. I'll wait until, okay. Here's a thought experiment. Yeah. Do you know how fast Usain Bolt was running when he set the world record?

No. In the 100 meters. About 25 miles an hour. hour. Wow. Maybe 24, something like that. All right. So, ask him, Hussein, please do this experiment.

See that brick wall, run as fast as you can face first into that wall. And then come back and tell me about how to, tell me how that went. Okay. So he would break his face, probably die. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's 25 miles an hour. Yeah, but at least he went out on top.

You know. My favorite Usain Bolt plaque, did I tell you this? No. I was somewhere in Europe. I don't remember. It might have been Heathrow, one of the airports. And there's a plaque there. This is after he set his world record in the Olympics.

There's a plaque on the ground and says, right here in, you know, in 2000 and whatever, whatever was his Olympics, 2012. Usain Bolt arrived at Heathrow Airport. His plane arrived 10 minutes later. It's funny. That is an official plaque. That is a really cute plaque. Oh, man. Oh, yeah.

That was good. Okay. I mean, clearly you are the fastest human, period. You're the fast. If they give you a plaque that says that? A plaque. A plaque that's fun, a fun plaque. And plaques are always dry and interesting.

This was a fun plaque. But that's like Muhammad Ali. He was like, I'm so fast. I'm so fast. I turn out the light and I'm in the bed before the room gets dark. So you're going 60 miles an hour, of course. The car is stopped and now, boom. And now you go 60 miles an hour.

And energy goes as the square of the velocity. So you have four times the energy as someone going 30 miles an hour. And you don't want to go 30 miles an hour because just imagine Usain Bolt running into a brick wall that way. All right. Right. So the whole thing here is you want to reduce the time it takes you to go from 60 miles an hour. zero. Right.

Okay. That's deceleration, a negative acceleration. You, you, did I say reduce it? Excuse me, you want to increase the time. Right. Because the faster that happens, the more damage that will be to your body. Okay. So, when Dale Earnhardt was in an accident in the, in a track, and hit some embankment

on the side, I think it was a one car, I think there was not, there was no flames and it just stopped. Right. I say he's dead. Yes. Because his body is going 200 miles an hour and a fraction of a second later, he's going zero. Yeah. Okay.

That's the kind of thing. Well, is his body strapped in? Sure. But is his head attached? Okay. Your head is going 200 miles an hour. All right. And it's just attached with some ligaments and tissues and some bones.

And that'll rip off. Your heart is dangling there in the middle of your chest in one of its arteries. It's going 200 miles an hour. and if a fraction of a second it's going zero, your heart punch basically can get ripped out of your chest and not come out of your body necessarily, but rip off of the part that's holding it, holding it up. So things can happen internal damage that'll just kill you, kill you.

Okay, so what you want to do is you want to stretch out as long as possible the time it takes the car to slow down. Okay, that's what you want to do. And while that's happening, have the car bear the brunt of the reduced kinetic energy. Yeah. Let the car get banged up, beat up. Let that happen to the car. Let's just make the cars out of marshmallows.

Oh, thank you. Okay? And that's kind of what airbags are, are marshmallows, okay? Right. So. Not as delicious, though. Okay. So when you do that, you reduce the stress on the body, giving your body a chance to slow down with the car in a way that does not bring bodily harm to you.

Okay. So there's a video on YouTube. Some years ago since I have no reason to think it's not still there. Called And They Walked. Oh, I get it. This is a video. of the most twisted, fiery car wrecks in NASCAR and Formula One history. Okay?

And in every one of these wrecks, the person just steps out and walks away while the fire folks come with the hoses. Okay. And they say, and they walk. And they say, it's a miracle. No, it's not. It's physics. because every one of those wrecks, the car went a quarter mile down the track,

spinning, twisting, bending. And there you are inside of it. That's quite the hayride you're on, okay? Mm-hmm. But what kills you is that happening quickly, not happening slowly. So the longer it takes, the more twisted the wreck is

for how long it took to come to a stop. And by the way, they're all in roll cages anyway, okay? All right. So let's get that straight. So they're all in a protective cage. Let the tires fly, flames come out, plus they're in flameproof suits. Suits, yeah. Okay?

So what we're really talking about here are you going to break your bones? So the longer it takes the accident to slow down to a stop, the safer you are. Period. And if you roll your car and if your if your if your hood doesn't completely crush in on you, if, you know, some cars have ribs that go around where the door frames are. And if you're wearing your seatbelt, if you run it right off in a bankment and your car rolls down, all right, that's what you want coming from 60 miles an hour. Right.

That'll do it. Just stretch it out. Stretch it out. Stretch it out. Stretch it out. Okay. I've heard of police who've come up to and they see how banged up the car is and use that as evidence that the person should have been hurt badly. When the more banged up the car is, provided the cavity where the driver is is still intact, right?

The rest of the car let it get banged up. That's what you want in order absorb all that kinetic energy. that's what I'm trying to say here. So, and by the way, that's why high jumpers and pole vaulters land in pillows and not on cement. Well, yeah. Okay. If you come over a high jump or a pole vault and you fall down gracefully backwards and you hit cement, you just broke all your ribs and your back.

Okay? Because you went. They actually instituted that about five jumps in, but yeah. The five guys that didn't make it. So, you know, we should put some... Some should go under here, guys. Guys, I'm not going next. Why did you think it took five times to figure out?

There's some physics idiots there figuring that one out. So you want to stretch out the time. So the deeper that cushion is, the less injury there is. And there's so little injury that they get back up and continue. All right. They don't have to, like, go to the hospital every time that happens. Yeah. That's like when they shoot the guy out of the cannon and they shoot them into cardboard boxes,

empty cardboard boxes that have all been stacked on one another. Oh, okay. Yeah. And so each box just... My guy got shot into a net. Did you go to the budget circus? The trash box? Listen, I went to a ghetto circus, okay?

That's what I'm saying. It was very exciting. My people had nets. I don't know where you, what circuses you're going to. Go get some boxes. Because a net, of course, when you hit it, it's not rigid. It'll absorb your energy into the framework of the stitching. Yeah.

But it also may throw you back out. Boxes will never do that. So what happens is, all that meant is it didn't completely absorb the energy. Okay. It takes the energy and it sends you back out the other way,

correct? So the energy bounces. That can happen. Okay? So anyhow, with a car, you want, it's why head-on collisions are so deadly

because the car doesn't have a chance to slow down. Right. And the whole point of the airbag is to give you a chance to slow down in a very abrupt front-end collision.

All right. So the airbag will get there before you will because it expands explosively it moves at the speed of sound, basically, when it inflates. And that's faster than it would take you to actually hit the dashboard

because your car is not going at the speed of sound in the other direction, right? So the bag beats you to the collision you would have with the windshield or with the dashboard. And then it's basically a marshmallow. So that helps because it's soft and it's cushioning,

and it increases the time that it takes you to. come to a stop. Your body to come to a stop. So a safe collision is the one that takes the longest, provided your driver space is not compromised. So when they say it's a slow motion car crash, that's actually a good thing.

It's a good thing. That's a good thing. So that's all I try to say here. Well, I think the lesson here that we've all... Oh, wait. One other thing? Take the train. Take the train.

That's a real lesson here. The train is the way to go. Because even if you survive it, you really don't want to be on that highlight reel is what you're saying. That's right. That's not the thing. All right. So here's something to look for. Maybe we could put this in a sports edition.

If you ever want to know how badly hurt the batter is in baseball, if they get hit by a pitch. Right. Look to see how much the direction of the ball changed after it hit them. Oh. Okay. That's yeah. Right. So if it hits their thigh but keeps going and gets caught in the catcher's mitt,

oh. Not a problem. Right. Okay. It'll sting, but it's not, okay. If it hits a thigh bounces forward, oh, my gosh. Because that meant all the kinetic energy of the ball got absorbed by the muscle and the bone and got sent back. So watch, now that we have it all in slow-mo, high-speed cameras,

you can see what the exact trajectory of the ball is. And the more the ball continues to roll back to the backstop or go to the side or go forward is the full information you need about how much damage it would have caused the batter. And if you don't see that, you know that how much it hurt when the batter rushes the mound

to beat the hell out of the pitcher. That's what you know. It really hurt. Plus, there's another thing with baseball, you know, It's not a violent sport. Yet if they get hit by a pitch, they're not going to rub it. Right.

Right. No, they're tough. It's on. It's on. They don't want to show the pitcher that the pitcher hurt him. Yeah. They walk it off. They walk it off, exactly.

And then I don't even go rub the spot. They got too much pride. So imagine if they were World Cup soccer players. Oh, my God. If you hit a soccer player with a baseball. He would just fall down. I'm shot. Oh, Jesus, they shot me.

Who allowed guns in this stadium? Oh, God. And I'm broken nail. Oh. Stop. No, they always hold their knee or their ankle, right? Yeah, exactly. No matter what.

The Academy Awards for that. Anyhow, that's all the time we got checked. All righty. So like I said, anytime you see one of these accidents, if someone says it was a miracle. No, it's not, it's just physics. It would have been a miracle had Dale Earnhardt survived his crash.

Oh, and one other thing, there's a record for the person who survived the highest fall from a building. All right, now there's a height above which basically 100% of people are dead. This person fell from a higher fight and survived. And they said they credit the person was religious and Jesus saved them or whatever.

But if you, okay, I heard this and I said, I need more data here. And then I looked at the building. The person hit a tree on the way down. Gotcha. Okay? And broke branches of the tree. Oh, that's a good thing because the kinetic energy of the body is now going somewhere else.

Right. Rather than breaking his own bones. And it probably broke his food bones nonetheless. But in a fall that would normally kill you, if a tree is there, it's going to help you not die. Anything that's in the way is going to help you not die. So, all right, Chuck. That's all we got. That's a good one.

What kind of car accident to have to maximize your chance of surviving it. And don't ever run full speed ahead into a wall, please. Too late for that. Hey, this is Kevin the Somalié, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. You're listening to StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Chuck. Yes, me. You heard the expression, burn, baby burn.

I'm a Republican, of course. All right, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have made that joke, but it was. For a minute, that was a slogan that meant that they wanted to drill for oil and stuff like that. All right. Just drill baby drill, but sorry. I apologize. And anybody out there, I don't mean anything buy it, okay?

Yes, you do. All right. So burn baby burn just as a concept. I don't know if you ever thought much about what it is for something to burn. Have you? It's a disco party I want to be at every time. That's what it is. Burn, baby, burn.

Disco and burn, no. Burn, baby. Burn that mother. Yeah. All right. So here's the thing. I have never thought really about what it takes for something to burn, except that I know that anything that outside the presence of oxygen won't burn. Okay.

So burning just in common usage of the term means combustion in the presence of oxygen. Okay. That's what we generally mean when we say something is burning. Okay. All right. So that's why, for example, you might have done this experiment in maybe middle school or possibly as early as elementary school. You could take a piece of paper, light it, but then put some kind of dome over it. Yeah.

And then it eats up all the oxygen inside and it just extinguishes itself. Right. So it needs the oxygen to burn. All right. Now, I got a question for you. Have you ever burned water? Okay. The answer is no.

Wait, wait. Let me just. No, I want to hear a no for you. Just wait a second. Just wait a second. Because I know you're an astrophysicist, but maybe I should explain a couple things to you now. Of course I've never burned water.

Because water doesn't burn. If you can imagine, taking a cube of pure aluminum, okay? I cannot, but go ahead. Okay, just imagine just a chunk of aluminum and putting it on the stove. Okay. Put it in the oven. Okay.

Will it burn? Aluminum in a char. I don't know if it had a burn, but all my aluminum. No, we don't think, no, it just gets hotter, right? Yeah, it gets hot. You're not saying, that's why we can make pans out of aluminum, okay? Because they don't burn.

Okay. So the point is, notice you'll only use the word burn for some things and not others. Correct. In fact, the thing... Normally stuff that's on fire. The things you are most likely to use the word burn for are the things that turn black after they have burned. True. That is true.

Basically. Most things that burn, you know, they're black afterwards. Except water. except aluminum. I can go down a list, okay? Except lead. Except I can go down on the list. There are plenty of things that can burn that,

sorry, that can get hot, not turn black, and we would never say they were burning. True. Okay. So, the question then is... That is true. My cast iron pan,

it gets hot as hell. It's sitting on fire, actual flame. Flames can be on it, and it's not burned. And it never burns. Okay. Okay. So, what do all the things that burn have in common?

All the things that burn, what they, I don't know, they catch fire? I don't know. What they have in common is, you park the curtains, molecularly park the curtains, and you find the carbon atom. I was going to say carbon, but isn't carbon in pretty much everything? It's in everything you will ever eat, except one thing, except two things, salt and water. I knew the salt and I knew the water.

Yeah, have you ever burned salt? No, you can't. You're right, okay, this is my point, okay? By the way, salt is crystals, sugar is crystals, you can burn sugar. Yeah, and sugar does. It catches fire and it melts. And it melts, catches fire, burns, turn black, the whole thing. Right, the whole deal.

So, so other than salt and water, Everything else you eat contains the carbon atom deep down within the molecules. Right. A. B, the molecules that contain carbon atom have in themselves chemical energy. Correct. Yes. Yes. That's why you eat food at all. In the first place.

Because you get the energy from the food so your body can use the energy. Be it a dead plant or a dead animal, I don't care. You're eating it to get, in large measure, there's some nutrients you're after two. But in large measure, you get in your calories to get the energy that they have it. Okay, so now watch. So you have these molecules that have chemical energy. When you burn it, you're breaking these chemical bonds with the help of oxygen. Right.

And the act of breaking these bonds releases energy. Your body does that, but if you do it with a flame, all you have to do is start it. as like the corner of a piece of paper and the rest of the paper burns because the little bit that you started it breaks the chemical bonds that are sitting above it which causes a chain reaction a chain reaction all the way up all the way on up and so when you and by the way wood campfire right the wood park the curtains there's the carbon atom in there right And wood contains all the energy that it had pulled out of the environment to become a tree in the first place. That's right.

Then you cut it down. Oh, by the way, what kind of wood burns best? Well, it's got to be dry. Dry wood. Why? Because you can't burn water. Right. And the worst thing in the world is to have dry wood with a wet spot inside of it.

And then while it's burning, it says, hey. I didn't know what's talking to me. It's actually, it's a word. It's speaking English. It starts speaking, man. That's the wrong that you're doing. Exactly. Man, what's wrong with you?

What's wrong? Right, because a little pocket of water, it's not going to burn. All it will do is get hotter, become steam, expand, and then pop. Right. Pop. So that's why you want to dry out the wood. Get all the water out of there so that it's just the, these fat carbon molecules waiting for you to extract the energy from them and make the beautiful

fire in the fireplace. Right. And so, depending on the chemical reactions, depending on how efficient or inefficient they are, you can leave behind layers of carbon. And that's what we basically call soot. Right. Soot. By the way, it's possible to burn something so there's no soot left over because then

the carbon gets uptook into other molecules that are stable and float away. like CO2. Okay? So carbon dioxide is a product of burning wood and other things and that's not carbon

left that turns black that's just a whole other molecule that's transparent and you can't smell it, you can't taste it and it's in the atmosphere. But if you have certain kinds of combustion,

certain kinds of burning that don't successfully turn it all into gas, you will get a residue at the bottom and there is carbon ash. And it's carbon. You're revealing

the carbon out of which all of life is based. Look at that. That's pretty doggone cool. So whenever you have a fire, it's basically a circle of life. Exactly. So you should hold that wood up to, like,

before you burn it. Whatever the hell he said. And then you burn it. Then you burn it and you paid due respect for the tree that gave its life for the molecular energy contained in it and the fact that life is carbon-based. Yes.

Actually, you know what? That is very poetic, actually. It's a beautiful thing. It's a beautiful thought. I love it. And the CO2 you just put into the air that's not contributing to global warming because the tree took it out in the first place.

Right. So you are carbon neutral in the process. You are carbon neutral provided you're not only just cutting down trees to feed your fireplace. Right. You got to make sure the trees planted somewhere, and you're basically carbon neutral,

carbon dioxide neutral in that exercise. So there you have it. Kumbaya, around the fireplace. I love it. I love it. I'm going to go burn something down right now. Shepnice up on arson charges.

I was just trying to show people the beauty of carbon, man. Just think about it because we always, historically made houses out of wood. Right. And wood is basically fuel. That's where you make, you're building your house out of fuel and you're surprised it burns down. Right. Right.

Cave men never had house fires. No, never. And the brick house, the pig that lives in the brick house, nobody's burning down his house. Right, exactly. Okay. That's super cool, man. All right. We've got to call a quiz there.

All right. Chuck, always good to have you. Always a pleasure. Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always, keep opening up.