StarTalk Radio - Cosmic Queries - Black Hole Universe

Episode Date: September 9, 2025

Are we closer in size to an atom or the universe? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Paul Mecurio answer grab-bag questions about Hawking Radiation, power on the moon, and whether our universe is inside a black hole.NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://startalkmedia.com/show/cosmic-queries-black-hole-universe/Thanks to our Patrons Raj Gaddam, Jason Thurman, Foosoul, Jeff, Micheal Flint, Charles Watson, Sn3aky Viking, Chotch Kam, Nick the Winemaker, David Perez, Greg Haile, Daniel Smith Jr, Ryan Herchenbach, Demetrius Green, Wong Tang clan, Yash Vardhan, Enrico Klau, Micheal, Prakhar jai kumar, Dom, Stepphanie Young Raszagal1045, Leigh Hunt, Adam Hinckley, Adventure Music, MadHarold, Josh Edenfield, Noah Benoit, CN Scott, Andriy Knysh, Erkka Lehtonen, Eduardo Mancilla, Emil Roman, Brandon van Hinte, Eli The Great, Jonne Ticklén, T W, Murderbot, otto mann, Bob Binion, Stephen Pelo, Héywud Xiablomé, Morgan Greenhalgh, Mary Beebee, Kacey Biggs, Barry INgram, Host - History of Money, Banking, and Trade, Stefan, George Evans, Tyler Zarzeka, Jim Kirkpatrick, Jason acosta, Vincent L., C Edward George, Daniel Hester, Fahad Sheikh, Thor Maier, Msemaji Nlan, De'Saun Thomas, steve chilcote, Kevin, and hedrick sanabria 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.

Polar, there were a lot of cosmology questions in there. Oh, it's a big bang, multiverse, black holes? Negative gravity. Yeah, no, people into that. Yeah, I see you as a negative gravity person. Tend to be negative. Coming up, Cosmic Queries on StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk.

Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, you're a personal astrophysicist. This is going to be a Cosmic Queries grab bag edition. And to help me get through these questions, I got Paul McCurio. Paul, how are you doing, man? I'm doing well.

It's Baron, Paul McCurio. Barron? Oh, yeah. Sorry. Not barren as in you cannot reproduce. Your womb is baron. I actually am. I'm trying to keep that on their racks.

You have evidence. You have one son, so that's evidence that. By the way, look at you all dressed up like a little schoolboy, going to look at you. I dressed up for you. Clearly, you have no such reciprocal feeling for me. Because you asked me to help you move furniture, and so that's what I did.

Plus, like, you're out of a job now. I'm out of a job. What the hell happened down there? What did you do? What did you do to piss off Paramount? Apparently, I broke CBS and Paramount, apparently. on the late show. You're on the staff of the late show.

I work on the late show, perform on the show, and we're not going to be in existence come May. Wow. And I am going to be sleeping outside living your bushes looking for any nickels I can find.

I live in Lower Manhattan. I don't have bushes in my backyard. We're going to get you something. Yeah, so, you know, I'm looking, you know, whatever. All right. You know, if you know anybody. Well, if I know someone needs a long mode.

He needs an ex-lawyer. Ex-lawyer. I forgot. You went to law school. Investment banker. I could do M&A deals and make you laugh and make you ravioli all at the same time.

Come on, but I'm barren. Case people are wondering during one of our Patreon exclusive segments, one of our Patreon members where they get to view a Q&A session live, felt sorry for Paul McCurio for not having a title. And he came up with a great...

Commensurate with Lord Nice of Chuck Nice. So he got knighted, some number of episodes, ago. So they felt pity upon you. That's a lot of people there. And so they decided to call you Barron. Yes. I thought Barron feel, that feels right. Barron Paul McCurio. I command

I have a presence. I command attention. I felt that worked. And so I happened to have Excalibur in the office. Why wouldn't I? I got everything else. I had Excalibur. And so we, I knighted you. Barron, Paul McCurio. Cut me on the neck, eight stitches, but

otherwise it was great. So I'm on And I want to thank the Patreon exclusive. How did you know it was an accidental cut? What makes you think that was an accident? I need security when I come on this show. Tampson's got my bag. So we're going to do some... Yeah, let's do some Q&A here.

All right. All right. Just some general grab bag. But you're least employed through June. Is that correct? May. May. May, unless something happens and I screw something else up and get us fired earlier.

Okay. But May. And I'm also doing my... off-Broadway show permission to speak, touring with it, and we have it on Patreon now, so people can go and enjoy it there and support it because I don't have any money. I'm poor. I'm out of a job.

You know, I'm eating hay, if you care. I'm a baron. I shouldn't be eating hay. I'm a baron, okay? All right, here we go. Opal Lehman. Hello, everyone. Opal from Atlanta. I'm 15 years old and was wondering, You said recently that we only know 4% of the universe, well, Neil does, we know more.

4% of the universe, which includes everything we know. So do you think there are more types of science out there left, sorry, to create or discover, or would the rest of what we would know about the universe just be branches of what we already know? Love that question. Yeah, it's a great question. Ooh, good one.

Good one. So let me never say that something's just a branch of something else. else that makes it sort of subservient to it. Let me give a slightly longer answer than he might have bargained for. Beginning in the 1990s. You know it's glad when Neil says it's going to be a long answer. In the 1990s, NASA realized that there was some scientific questions that needed answering that did not sit comfortably within the...

Known body of knowledge. Yes, but certainly not even. even within the siloed sciences as they have been laid out, as we've come to think of them in college. You're majoring chemistry. I'm majoring physics. I'm majoring that. Nature doesn't draw those boundaries.

We did. So, one of the questions was origins. Origins of life. Is that just biology? No, life began on a planet in a solar system. It could be stellar or, you know. No, no, just the forces operating on this. And how's a biologist going to answer that question

without knowing what the sun was doing at the time life began? What Earth was doing. So what NASA created were these origin centers, rather they created funding umbrellas, origins funding umbrellas where you could enter into the room with the figurative room

from all these different branches of science. And they would come together and ask questions of each other. Because they're interdependent to answer. to answer this other question. Some of these questions. I don't want to call that a spin-off.

I want to say that's a whole brand-new way to explore the world. An extrapolation or an extension of. So, yes, there is new sciences to be plumbed. I don't want to think of them as an entire branch of science. I'd like to think of them as new things out there where people with different expertise may have to come together to address those questions.

And I would say, that being said, probably the newest science out there is neuroscience. We're in our infancy. And I look forward to when it's in its maturity. Then we nip-tuck and fix all your, especially your mental problems. Well, you need a nip in a tuck. You really do. That's not even a real mustache, anybody. What about AI?

Does AI potentially bring us to not either through the use of AI or AI itself, other types of science or the uses of various sciences. I haven't seen AI, that doesn't mean it won't still happen. Right. But AI at its best today, I've yet to see discover something that was not otherwise on the internet or put together, it's putting together things on the internet. But suppose you had a thought that no one ever thought of before, and it's not on the internet.

Does AI have access to that thought? The answer is no. Could AI come up with that thought? that's my question. If it can't come up with a thought that none of us have ever had nor have ever put it on the internet, there's a limit to where AI can take us.

But my thought is a manifestation of several things that I know and the chances are statistically that AI knows some of those things as well. Of course. It's not just chances or it does. Provided those things are online. Right.

Which they probably, statistically probably are. So it could probably formulate the same question. Not as good as my own really smart. point is to make a completely new discovery. Could AI come up with the general theory of relativity? Could AI have invented cubism? Cubism doesn't look like it came from much before it, okay? You know, there's no early cubistic paintings of Neander Da Vinci or Michelangelo.

Can you tell me what branch? It's true. If you tell me a branch of science we can use that compels people to take their bike on the subway, it's a bike. ride the bike it's not a moving bike rack okay i don't take my car to the airport and check it on the plane it is a little weird no it's a lot weird and it needs to stop it's a little weird and i don't care if they live in new york i don't try to get it out of your way people they'll lift up the front wheel they'll tuck it to the side where the door is and their handlebars end up my

butt and that's not what i paid $2.90 for whatever i'm paying okay so the neuroscience surgery will adjust that first in your brain don't defend it Please, Dalmere de Silva. De Silva, Dalmere de Silva. Hey, Dr. Tyson, oh, this is from Brazil. Barado-Zalanzo Brazil. Assuming I got this right, we can intuitively think of hawking radiation as matter escaping a black hole

when a pair of virtual particles is created outside of it. That's precisely correct. Okay, so you got that part right, and you get a dishwasher. the anti-particle falls into the black hole and annihilate itself with its counterpart already in the black hole this sounds like a movie leaving the other one loose to fly away

and since particles don't have identity it wouldn't have to be the antiparticle but one of those two particles would fall in one of the two okay and since particles don't have identity it's like that particle just escaped from the BH My question is He's on a friendly basis

With the black hole No black hole ever told me I could call it BH Well you know Someday you'll be cool enough You gotta hang out with the cool kids To hang out with the BH The question is why do black holes

favor antiparticles The creation of virtual particles Should be random all the time Every direction So it should be 50-50 Yeah and my understanding is that's the case, as is his understanding. If I'm

wrong, I don't know why I'm wrong. Because when the antiparticle pair is created, the momentum that they have is in random directions. So it's by quantum design random.

So they have to go exactly opposite directions so that their momentum cancel into that spot. At the same Well, sorry. It depends on what the momentum was of the photons that begat the particles.

The point is, everything has to check out in the end. And when it checks out, check out meaning arithmetically balance out. So, my understanding is you could just as equally have an antiparticle in the black hole as a particle. If it's not that, I don't know why it's not that. And if that's the case, we've got to check

with Jan 11 on that. So, yeah, his whole question is predicated on something. something that I also don't think is true. Which is? That only the antiparticles fall back in and the regular particles escape. But we don't have proof of that.

Isn't that the case? No, I'm saying, if it's true that only the antiparticles go in, I don't know why that's true. Any understanding I have of particle pair creation, they fly off in opposite directions and that set of directions are random to each other. So you can just as easily have a regular particle going in,

As an antiparticle. So he's right to be suspicious of this. Right. It should be 50-50. I'm thinking, yes. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

Got it. All right. Great question. with Neil deGrasse Tyson. This is Pateek-Nagar. Hello, Dr. Tyson. My name is Araya, 12 years old. I'm from Salt Lake City, Utah.

I love watching your explainers and the fun and knowledge that comes with it. While in class, the question came up in size, which are we humans closer to? The universe or an atom? I was very intrigued by this question, especially because atoms are incomprehensibly small and the universe is incredibly big.

If we are closer to the size of the universe, could there be a time knowing that the universe is expanding that we are closer to the size of an atom? Cool question. I've actually answered that question in my next book. Whoa. Called Just Visiting This Planet. And I will read you that question and answer from my book.

Okay. If I may. Yes. Can someone pass my computer? Go ahead. Read me a bedtime story. May I? It's a bedtime story.

Yes. So, as you may know, for 12 or so years, I wrote a question and answer column for the public. Under a pen name, Merlin. That's why I have Excalibur in this office. I didn't know you did that. Because me and Merlin go way back. You're tight. You're like this, literally.

We're tight. We're totally tight. And so people ask Merlin these questions. Merlin was the pen name. So here it is. If I may. Dear Merlin, I am six feet tall. Comparatively speaking, which is the farthest away from my eye?

The atomic particles in my little toe were the most distant galaxies. That's the same question. Right. Since you're only six feet tall, there is no doubt that the distant galaxies are farther from your eyeballs than your pinky toe. Another way to address your inquiry, however, is to imagine you suddenly became ten times taller. 10 times taller again, and so forth. After about 25 of these stretching exercises, your head will brush up against the most distant galaxies

in the visible universe. Returning to your eyeball, imagine you now shrink in successive steps so that each shift takes you within one-tenth of the distance to the atoms in your toe. So we increase by factors of 10, decreased by factors of 10. it would take only 15 shrinks to enter the nuclei of your toe atoms

adding the two sets of jumps reveals that the entire known universe spans about 40 powers of 10 in one direction no you add them together it's 40 powers of 10 but this seems from small to large and I don't mean this so what this means is you are closer to the atoms in your toe

it's only 15 powers of 10 down and it's 25 powers of 10 down of 10 to the edge of the universe. Right, and I'm not trying to... This seems like, I'm not saying this to be... Oh, by the way, that book is just visiting this planet. Available October 2025. Okay.

Not available in paperback. This seems like an obvious question that doesn't even need to be asked. And I don't mean that to be mean-spirited, but like, to me, I'm a complete lay person. The answer was your toe. Of course it's 15 versus 25. No, you didn't know that in advance.

These are powers of 10. I understand, but there's no question that the atoms in your toe are going to... If I take a tape measure, the toe is six feet away, and the universe is a 14 billion light years. Right. If you want to say it's obvious, the answer is obvious, that's what you should be citing. But in Powers of Ten, it's not obvious.

At all. But this question wasn't in the context of powers of ten. But that's the only sensible way to answer it in the way they were debating it in their class. Elevate yourself to the level of the 12-year-old. man you were asking a lot of me today that's impossible okay so online there's a

on YouTube somewhere it's there there's a 10 minute movie called Powers of 10 it's made in the 1970s 78 and it starts with a man laying down a picnic on a in a park outside of Chicago

and as we start with a scene one meter wide and one meter tall of a man. And every 10 seconds, we're gonna go 10 times farther away. And we do that. And you see how many jumps. It's an early CGI, but it wasn't even used computers. It was very well done in its day. 10 times farther away.

Every 10 seconds. And you go to the edge of the universe. They said, now, then we zoom back. And it says, now we're gonna go 10 times closer every 10 seconds. And so you go 10 times closer. 10 times closer. And it takes fewer 10 times. It's 10s, right?

It takes, right. And that's all I'm saying is it's obvious that that would take 15 10s to my toe. You were not thinking in powers of 10 to justify saying that. You don't know what I was thinking. That's true. I don't know what you were thinking. And that's why this relationship has never worked and we need marriage counseling because you don't bother to think what I think.

So I think we hooked up our guy with his answer. Very good question. Yes. And this is 12 years old. Amazing. All right. This is Master Builder E.J. No, but he's one of our fans.

So it's not amazing that he says that. It's expected. Can't even give a compliment. All right. Average question, 12-year-old. Try better the next time. That's Neil talking, not me. I thought it was amazing.

Hello, everyone. This is Ethan Henning from Houston, Texas. I have a question about power sources. What would be the best power source for a moon base that would have the purpose of mining and sustaining the lives of astronauts for six months? could it be fission maybe it's solar I would love to know what you think I love this podcast it's my favorite

ask me why I'm dressed up I lied to you and said I dressed up for you at the beginning of this why are you dressed up because hours ago I was on CBS mornings their morning show oh right I fell asleep during that sentence he asked me

so I get dressed up for TV but with a little bit of you know yeah when you come on the late show Which I work on you. You'll wear a tie or you've got your best. I show some tie. Or the vest. One or the other.

Both would be... A little much. It would break the lens. Yeah. So people would bleed from their eye sockets. So they asked me about nukes on the moon. And first, we're making portable... Not quite the right.

We're transportable nuclear power plants that could, like, fit in a truck, for example. If you can fit in a big rocket, okay? And these are nuclear... fission power plants. We've talked about this on the show, needing portable nuclear plants to drive AI and all of this other. What you would do is,

if you have a computation farm somewhere, where AI's intensely using energy, or Bitcoin. You take it off, yeah, you're calculating for Bitcoin. You just take it off the grid, give it its own power supply. You can't put it near a waterfall or this, and then you don't know if the sun

is shining all the time. A nuclear power transportable power plant the word plant overstates it at that level power station power station

then yeah yeah that was the expert that we had on the show we talked about exactly we did we did so right now NASA is considering

fast tracking a nuclear power generator and about the size that I described and one of those would give you 100 kilowatts are you kilowatt fluent

uh yeah you live brother, my, okay, no, I can, no. KW. See, I know. Okay. I'm not dumb, I'm smart. I'm not dumb.

Let's become fluid together. You ready? Yeah. So 100 kilowatts, kilo is what? Mm-hmm. Thousand. Thousand. So 100,000 watts.

Mm-hmm. Okay, that's the power that it can generate. Mm-hmm. 100,000 watts. Do you know the power drain of a hair dryer? I'd say a kilowatt. Yeah, 1,000 watts. Mm-hmm.

Okay? So, how many hair? hair dryers could 100 kilowatt power generator 100,000 I'm sorry let's try this again I wasn't listening apparently

100,000 watts generator your hair dryer draws a thousand watts oh 10,000 yeah wasn't that the question start from scratch all right okay go ahead

100,000 watts a kilowatt okay 100 thousand watts a hair dryer uses a thousand watts so how many hair dryers can this sustain it's a thousand you just pulling it out of you 100,000 watts yeah so the hairdrivers a thousand watts it can sustain 100 hair dryer right okay so that's the energy level that NASA is looking at to create and send to the moon right now so it's not some Mondo power plant can keep 50

hair dryers going on the moon. Right. Okay. And by the way, you wouldn't need a hair dryer because it's 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Right, that's true. Just stick your head out of the window for a second, right? It'll completely dry.

So, these power plants, at that size and with that wattage, can run for 8 to 10 years. How do they deal with maintenance and that kind of? No, no. These are, these are, this new generation, there's no maintenance. No maintenance at all. And it's a very efficient. and how it distributes heat

and it's not going to over it's fission it's nuclear fission of fissionable uranium which is not the same uranium as you might learn from a explainer we did on isolating

uranium for energy or for bombs so there's how pure the uranium is for what your use might be it's got to be really pure if you're going to make a bomb out of it if you're going to make a power station

it doesn't have to be that pure and so it's much more readily obtainable. So anyway, so nooks would do it for eight years. You never have to maintain it. If you had solar panels, by the way, no matter where the sun is in the sky on the moon, it's just as bright as it is anywhere else because there's no atmosphere.

So the sun is just as bright on the horizon as it is directly overhead. So you can have solar panels that just track the sun. It'll get 100% sunlight as long as the sun is above the horizon. do you know how long a day lasts on the moon 24 hours the moonth

it lasts a moonth what is the moon what do you think the word month came from have you thought about it no way how long it takes the moon oh okay that's only the moon goes around the earth right but as it does that

it has and it goes through phases as it's doing that it's experiencing a lunar day so a lunar day is a month a moon's long okay so two weeks you had a speech impediment that's why you stared at me

like what does he say like a dog yeah exactly so so two weeks of sunlight two weeks of darkness so you got two weeks of solar power generation

problem is if you exceed your power needs the energy's got to go to somewhere so put it to storage batteries when it's dark for two weeks okay

you might want to use the energy however batteries don't work well in the cold. As soon as the sun sets, the temperature drops from 200 degrees Fahrenheit to 200 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

We haven't been able to come up with a battery. You'd have to, like, insulate the batteries and have some other heating source. Just put a Tesla up there. Just take care of it. Have you driven a Tesla in the winter? The battery?

It took me an hour to get crossed down when it should have taken me five minutes. So, yes, nuclear fission makes complete sense, given what we've done with it, lately you can create a reactor and just send it to the moon

one last question on this then we'll move on so how do you protect the reactor from whatever something could hit it happen what could happen on the moon that is yeah a meteor could hit it right because there's no atmosphere and there's nothing protecting you right media could also hit you

you can say we finally have it protected bam no you're dead no I'm coming to your house and I'm going to just hide under the couch yeah so a big enough meteor you're not going to protect maybe you could bury it for example protect it that way how far away are we from this realistically uh the military already has prototypes that they're using of just the size i'm describing and so i think we're very close within years not decades yeah all right let's move on next question derrick evans dr tyson this is derrick from south windsor

Connecticut. I know where that is. Long time listener and attendee of live events. Nice. Thank you for coming to them. First time Patreon support. We give three or four live events a year. Typically in the region. One in Connecticut, the beacon theater here in Manhattan. And we sometimes go to Jersey and to

Philly. But yeah. Those are great. I think you need a juggler at the beginning of it just to kind of loosen things up. There be you. You also juggle. I'm going to do anything come May. Whatever. In a recent conversation you had about micro black holes, it had me wondering about interstellar traveled.

How could you travel vast instances while being sure to avoid these tiny black holes and what time dilation or other unintended consequences would exist? Or do they radiate away fast enough not to pose any problems? So, the larger the black hole,

the slower it evaporates. It's obviously the inverse is than true. As the black hole gets smaller, the rate at which it radiates increases and grows exponentially. As it gets smaller. As it gets smaller.

So it gets smaller, it gets smaller faster still. Because it's compressing on itself? No, it's not compressing. It's because its rate of evaporation has to do with its surface area. And the smaller it gets, the more surface area it has relative to the volume.

It's an interesting fact about the geometry of surface area going as R squared, radius squared, and the volume going as RQ. surface area of this of the sphere doesn't it decrease as it it does but the volume decreases faster than the surface area and why is that it's just the arithmetic of it because the volume is not a good enough answer specifically why don't duck the question don't be a politician answer so this manifests i think we

have a whole episode on this it's on size and life so if you can ask here's a certain surface area you have and how much flesh is associated with that surface area? You can do that. As you get smaller, the amount of flesh associated with the surface area drops faster than the size of your flesh that protects it. Within the body. Within the volume.

That's correct. Okay. And since the evaporation rate is related to the surface area, the rate, it is sucking, it is. Extracting? There's no such a thing as gravity. Black holes suck. Sorry.

You should put that on a business card. So what's a business card? I'm going to explain that. So as it gets smaller, the amount of volume that's going to evaporate out gets smaller, faster relative to the surface area, and so it evaporates in a flash of light. So a tiny enough black hole

that will not last long enough for you to come upon it and then put your life at risk. Plus, we don't expect there to be many of them. even if they were there and space is really vast and really empty you ever see the video the video the

the sci-fi movies where person's trying to navigate the asteroid belt a duck left they're great that dot did that even in the expanse they did this they got asteroids no you know the average distance between any two random asteroids

in the asteroid belt it's like 50 miles some some number way bigger that they have ever shown so if you're driving driving through that, you could literally, like, use your knee to drive and eat a Big Mac, and then eventually... Put on makeup. Put on makeup. Answer some text.

Yeah. Yell at your kids in the backseat. In fact, Pioneer 10 was the, I think it was, the first spacecraft to traverse the asteroid belt. Americans, Americans remain the only country to have probes outside of the asteroid belt. okay there was some concern will it survive the answer yes it has survived of course it survived

so we packed a lot in there in terms of der expression or do they radiate fast enough yes to not to pose any problems that's the answer yes the answer because of the dilation okay got it all right Lily Rose

hello Dr. Tyson and Lord Nice or but he's not here all right so put in your name with your new title put it in right now graphed it in go hello Hello, Dr. Tyson and Baron Mercurio.

Okay. Lily Rose here from, that really does roll off my tongue. Lily Rose here from Virginia. My question is, was the wow audio signal ever solved? Have scientists determined what was heard or do you have any theories on what it was? Thank you and love the show. Yeah, so back in the day when we had chart recorders, there was a radio signal. By the radio is not the same thing as sound.

we equate the two because we used radio waves to transmit audio into a box called a radio and we associate the word radio with sound but radio is a band of light that travels at the speed of light sound is the result of... You can transmit sound with optical light

as you can do with fiber optics for example. They have fiber optics speaker connections to your so you have to be clever about the modulation of the electromagnetic signal and know how to that and turn that into sound on the other end. So the wow signal was a radio signal

that rose up out of the din of cosmic noise. And then it never rose up again. How long did it, how long did we? I don't remember how long it lasted, but the astronomers on duty, they say, wow, that's why it's called the wow signal. Like a wow and an exclamation point. Can I just say something?

What? You guys couldn't come up with a better name. What? Holy shit. No. What did you want? I, well, don't have a six-year-old name it. G. Whisker. Like, what's the...

G. Williger. And it was before, O.M.G. You know, no one knew how to do that yet. What's the speculation on what the source of this was? If that has been solved with some explanation, I don't know. But how close was there any... You speculate all the time. If we wanted to be aliens, and aliens should know better than this.

You don't just send out one. pulse of signal. You want a rhythm in there so that anyone eavesdropping on you will know it's not from the universe itself. You can't do just one blip and if you send any blips at all

send them at regular intervals. But it was a consistent signal. No, it was one blip. Maybe it was from another star system an alien left the TV on and fell asleep. It could have, yeah, sure. Well, you're going to mock me. Mr. Wow, that's

plausible as naming this thing wow audio no i'm saying i don't know what it is and just because you don't know what it is doesn't mean you know what it is wow wow you said wow oh god busted oh my god

it's not fair that you take acid for these and i don't go ahead no just to be clear there are people who see something in the sky that they don't understand right they don't know what it is and they say because i don't know what it is. I know what it is. It's intelligent aliens visiting from another planet. No, but that's just people wanting to believe that. That's my point. Just because you don't know

what you're looking at, it doesn't mean you know what you're looking at. That needs to be a bumper sticker. Exactly. Okay. Has the wow signal, has that been left alone? Has anybody still pursuing that? They went back to the region they couldn't find anything. Yeah, it's been, it's been revisited, as they say. We're going to move on. Conrad Dunfee, Dr. Tyson, Conrad Dunphy here from Portland, Oregon. Portland, 11th. On the multiverse-ish, J-WST, coming out with a lot of data supporting the Black, Cold Universe.

Hypothesis. What is the likelihood that physics within a different black hole would be similar to ours, and if those physics are similar, what would be the first guess at how we escape our black hole universe to visit another? Wormhole? Wow, it's a lot there. So, there's only some tentative evidence. Maybe for those watching that don't know, JWST. My people? Oh, you never know. It might be somebody new. It might be somebody new. It might be somebody new. Just because you don't know what they're doing. Okay. Oh, okay.

So I'll explain it for others and not you, because you already know it. Okay. Compelled by Paul to bring everyone onto the same page, JWST, James Webb Space Telescope, has, in one recent measurement, found evidence of possible rotation among an ensemble of galaxies, which we don't expect if the universe is, was born in the ways we, expected via the Big Bang, okay? It would mean there was some net rotation of the universe. We know from equations that are in one of these books

that inside a black hole opens a whole new space-time continuum. So, a black hole, however, accrete matter that circulate toilet bowl style. We expect black holes to have rotation rates. Wait a minute. If our universe has a rotation rate, and we are a space-time existing with that and we have a horizon are we in a black hole

there's a chance of that can't rule that out okay now that means we're in a contained universe with our own laws of physics in the multiverse every multiverse would have a different slightly different laws of physics

quantum physics tells us that you don't want to visit those other universes why because the charge on the the electron might be slightly different from what's going on in your body and you would collapse into a pile of goo totally mess you up so like star track the whole like transport me be me up it could be a mess you'd be a pile of goo yes so if you do find one with i would dare i say identical laws of physics then i don't mind being the first to step in there you would need a

wormhole to connect us do you think it's plausible that there's one with an identical yeah if there's an infinite number there'd be one with identical yes Do you think we're ever going to be capable of discovering that? Wormholeing to another universe? I don't know. I want wormholes as badly as the next person. And I like to work hard. I like the way Rick makes wormholes.

You know, he has a gun or some device that'll do. He uses real science. Whereas this guy from, who's this guy? You know what I'm talking about? Dr. Strange from Marvel. He uses magic. That's, you know, what's that? That's the worst.

No, I'm telling you. It should be outlaw. All right, that was a great question. You could probably do it with a wormhole, but otherwise the universes are not connecting. That's kind of what defines them as independent universes. And even if you could go visit, you're not sure you want to because you don't know

what you're going to step into. Plus, you don't know if they're made of antimatter. Right. The antimatter is not in our universe. Where did it go if it exists anywhere? Maybe it made another universe. So here's what you do. Bring a little coin with you.

You see a person in the other universe, you know, flip them a coin. if he spontaneously explodes quickly go back to it's not the same no but the minute i entered the black hole through the wormhole that that universe you have to come in contact with other matter right and you know space is pretty empty deep space is very empty so yeah time for one more all right john swiley hi dr tyson uh a long time listener first time we inquire from athens georgia with all the excitement around JWST's discoveries of unexpected... That would be James Webb Space Telescope.

You're so annoying. Unexpected mature galaxies. A question struck me. Why does Neil Tyson have friends? That's a weird question. What if we're not actually seeing galaxies from the early universe, but instead light entering from beyond it? Not unlike a pinhole camera,

could the Big Bang have been a narrow portal from apparent universe? and JWST is now picking up photons that bled through that pinhole event horizon. Maybe those galaxies look so evolved because they are. Thanks for everything. Wow. Or we don't fully understand the formation of galaxies.

I mean, just have to look at out how extraordinary is your explanation to account for a mystery. Because we have mysteries all the time in modern astrophysics. So to say there's a portal to another universe they're okay, but Occam's Razor

remains a very good tool to apply here. Do you know Occam's Razor? It's like, Occam said one ought not posit multiplicity without necessity. I say that every day.

He stole that from me. So how is that relevant here? What it means is if you have a complex hypothesis to explain something and someone else is walking around with a simpler explanation the simpler explanation is probably correct. Right, but that's

sort of answering the question from 30,000 feet. So if we're not actually seeing galaxies from the early universe but instead light entering from beyond it, not on like a pinhole camera. Yeah, so that's implying that we can see beyond the universe rather than within the universe itself. So pick, you just make judgment as to what is most likely

to you. And for me, extraordinary explanations, as Carl Sagan famously said, require extraordinary evidence. And while it's unusual to have these mature galaxies so early, maybe we don't fully understand

galaxy formation. And the whole point of JWST, why it looks at the universe in the infrared, is to see galaxies being born that emit ultraviolet. And over the lifetime of the universe, red shift head expands it until it has become infrared.

Is it a constant that when a galaxy forms, it'll always emit ultraviolet? I mean, there's so many, to me, as we talk about this, just things we think we know, but we don't know, that anything could be happening out there, right? Yeah, but that's true, and we have to be open for that, but if you have some sense of how things do happen, there's no harm in starting with that assumption.

Right. Another great question? No harm. Yep, no harm. One more. I'm going to be, it's a lightning round. One more. Okay, go.

Paradox. Hello, this is Dennis from Salisbury, Indiana. Dr. Tyson, if gravitons do exist, shouldn't we be able to cancel gravity waves when putting them under close scrutiny? Can an equivalent to the double slit experiment be set up at LIGO to cancel the wave? So the bigger story is, if you can cancel out light,

such as in the slit experiment, there's a bright line and a dark line. and it's bright, dark, and bright. Because the troughs add together and you get darkness and the crests add together and you get bright. All right?

They're wondering if you can take gravity, if it's a wave, cancel it out. And if you cancel it out, did you cancel out the gravity itself? That's an interesting question. Can you create negative gravity in this way or zero out the gravity in this way?

And I don't think so. Why are you hesitant on it? Well, also, what Liga was detecting is a change in the gravity, not the gravity itself. So, yeah, you can surely... But if you can have change, then you could have negative gravity. Yeah, in principle. Isn't that possible?

Yes. But we've not... However, is it really negative gravity if it's just the part of the wave that is a trough rather than a craft? Well, is a negative gravity basically static? I would think, correct. Right? Correct.

Or frozen? Correct. And you would need that if you wanted to make a wormhole. Because wormholes take negative gravity and expands holes in space time. If a wormhole exists, then negative gravity must exist, right? No, but you can use negative gravity. Oh, sorry. Oh, yes.

Well, I don't know. Unless aliens found another way to make a wormhole, if we see a wormhole out there, somebody discovered negative gravity. That's correct. Okay. There you go. that was it All right

Great questions Done Love you man Thanks for coming through Always great to see you All right And I think I'm going to try to dress up A little bit more

When I come here I am a baron now So you know I don't know how Barron's dress So this has been another installment Star Talk Cosmic Quarry's grab bag edition With Baron

Paul McCurio If you see me out of the street Please salute and curtsey And he's out of a job Beginning May May When the late show. Anybody needs their house painted,

out moving. I'm handy with tools. All right. This is StarTalk. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, keep looking up.