StarTalk Radio - Cosmic Queries – Pure Spacetime

Episode Date: July 7, 2026

Is there no single shared "now" for everyone in the universe? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Paul Mecurio dive into another grab bag of fan questions about superconducting asteroids, what memories are made of, and if you could ever experience pure unwarped spacetime. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here:  https://startalkmedia.com/show/cosmic-queries-pure-spacetime/ Thanks to our Patrons Alex Sadashiv Nayak, Raviteja K, Lian Zhalka, Thomas Davis, Alex Yumashev, Charles Koehl, Matthew Maldonado, Aleksandre Khatiskatsi, Grig Coker, Matthew Ardebi…Decided to restructure names into comma-separated formatDecided to restructure names into comma-separated formatAlex Sadashiv Nayak, Raviteja K, Lian Zhalka, Thomas Davis, Alex Yumashev, Charles Koehl, Matthew Maldonado, Aleksandre Khatiskatsi, Grig Coker, Matthew Ardebili, Japeth Mitchell, Gaaary, Ian Patton, Casey Steelspine, Veninator, Hannu Latvakoski, Santiago Aguirre, Jonathan Caples, Ryan Wetmore, Dan Lepping, Chris Frank Betz, William Massar, Jason Durden, Jenny Patton, LiveAlive42, Kesh Iyer, scott ezell, Jesse Jensen, Javier E. Gonzalez, rk89, Courteney Kawalek, James Martin, seth forever, Why So Serious, Jared Kennington, andrew bash, David Pillado, Jennie Hrobak, Mariana, Robbie Rogers, Michael Huckey, Anthony Torres, Luke Gilliam, David Hasenauer, Libby Higgins, Willie Lo, and Mike B. 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.

Paul, that was a good set of questions. Oh, my gosh. It's amazing. We learned a lot about sponges and webs and all sorts of things. Coming up, another installment of Cosmic Queries, Grab Bag edition. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

This. is StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition. This time I got Paul McCurio. Paul, welcome back, dude. All right, good to see you again. Neil. How are you, buddy? All right. Paul, at some point, somebody christened you barren, Paul McCurio. That is true. And we had a, we had a ceremony, which was quite lovely in your office. If you remember, you... Did we use my Excalibur?

Yes, we did the whole thing. Yeah. For some reason, there's no red... carpet here, but, you know. And are you, you still have your traveling show? Permission to speak. I do, yeah. This is a theater show, right? It's a, it's a wagon and I sell medicines. I'm a medicine man now because I'm going to be out of a job at the late show. So yes, touring with that, and I've got my podcast inside out with Paul McCurio because it's the law and everyone's supposed to have a podcast now. And you've been in the biz a while. Yeah, I go back to, I go back to the daily show. and one of the original guys on that.

But even predating John Stewart. John Stewart, that tiny little man. Yes, he's only this big. A lot of people don't know. The cameras are amazing that we would have. Yes, with Craig Kilbourne. And Lewis Black was on and we would have all this crazy fun. And nobody knew what they were doing,

but they were letting us, we were like, you know, you would appreciate this. Like in the lab, just said, just go make it and blow things up. And then we'd get yelled at by the president of the network every once in a while because we went too far. He would literally yell at you like your father would yell at you like that. He couldn't get, why did you think that that could be okay on TV? And he's like screaming at you. We got a grab bag this session.

So that means. So great questions, by the way, some really good questions. Whatever subjects just sort of landed in your lap. And these are questions asked by our Patreon members. And whenever I do these, I'm always, and this isn't false praise, like you're the fans of our show, just how smart they are about this stuff. Like they did the really great questions. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, oh my gosh, we should be handed out degrees at the end of it.

Except for this first guy. This first guy is an idiot. No, I'm just kidding. No. Okay, so what you got for me? This is Farouk from Uzbekistan, writing from Norwich, UK. It's my favorite movie Interstellar. after I've seen your interview with Kip Thorne, there's something that bothers me now.

When they were on Miller's planet with giant water waves next to the black hole being immensely time dilated relative to one of their crew that remained behind on the ship and aged faster, what if they had telescopes and looked through the windows of the ship at their crewmate aging years for their minutes? wouldn't they be able to see the faster passage of time or would it have, well, or what would it have looked like? Or is light itself affected and won't allow this to happen? So if you had a telescope and look down at them near the surface of the black hole, everything would be going in slow motion. I understand, but it's also kind of insensitive. Listen to looking through the telescope. Hey, guys, look at this.

Look at it. He's aging so fast. He just took out a reverse mortgage on his house. He's turning gray while we watch it. I just had a sandwich, and during that time he's been divorced three times, and he doesn't have any visitation rights. Like what? They would look down and see them moving slowly,

and when you're near a black hole, you see the rest of the universe unfold in rapid speed. And so, yeah, there's nothing special about the light that happens. It arrives to you at a different pace, depending on how deep into a gravitational well you are. And the reason why that orbit was chosen to be very close to the black hole, it was to maximize the time dilation. It's called time dilation when you create this difference in the rate of time.

By the way, that exists for our GPS satellites. We are closer to the center of the earth than the GPS satellites are. So we experience slower time than they do. Yet we get our precise time from them. So when they send down their time from orbit, they pre-correct it for Einstein's general theory of relativity so that our time works at our location on Earth's surface. Got it. So in saying you're looking through the telescope, you're seeing things in slow motion, essentially. Is that right?

Well, if you're looking at their behavior on the planet, yeah. Oh, yeah. because even if the guy, because light itself gets stretched, and so it looks like he's buffering basically. Is that what we're saying? Buffering. That's an interesting word to bring into relativity.

I have to think about that. So, no, just the timeline. So here's the thing. You are a prisoner of the present for forever transitioning between your inaccessible past and your unknowable future. That's all you know about your own timeline. There are other timelines that are proceeding at different paces than your timeline,

depending on how fast they're moving in space relative to you, and depending on how much gravity they're subjected to. So time is not absolute. This was the big discovery of Einstein. Isaac Newton was turned in in his grave upon hearing this. If he could hear it. Who's president? it's basically like who's present are we talking about, right? Does this relativity, does this

mean there's no shared now? So the idea of watching someone age across frames is already kind of the wrong question in a way? Yeah, yeah, some of those questions, you're right, some of those questions just kind of lose meaning. Like, what is the now for everybody if your timeline is unfolding more slowly than mine? Right? Right, because you can't watch them age and fast forward because the universe won't let you skip ahead to the consequences. It won't let you skip ahead, but you can watch a timeline unfold faster than yours. And if time is that dilated, does that mean you couldn't actually watch him aging and fast forward because the light carrying that information is stretched and delayed as well?

So the universe who per- Yeah, I think if you're tracking time, the stretching of the, so rather than think of stretching of the light, think of light pulses, right? Got it. And so what's the interval between pulses? And that's a nice way to sort of tick out the time. The pulses you would see down on the planet, I guess it was called Miller's Planet.

I didn't remember the name of it. Yes, Millers. If you all agreed, let's pulse every second. And then you see their pulses down there, and their pulses happen every two or three seconds, even though according to their watches, it's every one second. So it's not that the light stretches so much as the pace at which time unfolds shifts. And so, yeah, and they did it right. We did it right.

Mark Phillips, Florescent, Missouri. Hi, Dr. Tyson. This is Mark Phillips. Florescent? That's a town? Florissant. F-L-O-R-I-S-A-N or fluorescence. Oh, F-S-A-N. If we are living in a simulation, would you want to know? and would you choose to embrace your place or attempt to break the cycle and communicate to the overlords knowing you, Neil, you'll need to communicate because it's got a lot of that. I love that question. And third part of the question, what would you wish to gain from contact with them or have you already and you are just controlling us? I'm not authorized to comment. That's a great question.

love it. I embrace all objective truth, no matter what. I mean, it's not that long ago in the era of our grandparents, perhaps, where it was perfectly acceptable for the doctor to lie to you, to tell you you don't

have terminal cancer and no, you're not going to be dead in six months. That was somehow accepted. That was... In fact, I think there was such a scene in, was it a streetcar name Desire. What's the story that has Big Daddy in it? Oh, that's Mandacity. That's a cat on a hot tin roof. Oh, cat on a hot tin, cat on a hot tin. I don't know why I confuse those too. So Cat on a

hot tin roof, Big Daddy, or whatever his name was, he was told everyone else knew he was going to die and the doctor told him he was like just fine. Right. That is to me, that is today completely unacceptable, at least for me, I want to know all truth so that I can recognize. with that truth in whatever way I see fit. To live a lie is to not fully be in touch with all that controls your life, all that matters, all that. So, yeah, maybe that's because I'm a scientist. Some people just say, lie to me. Lie to me.

That happens a lot of politics, right? Lie to me. Tell me there is no global warming. Tell me we're not. Tell me, just lie to me and I know everything will be better. And that's okay temporarily. And then it catches up with you and by then it's too late. Yes.

So, yeah, I would want to know if I was in a simulation. I agree. I would want to know. B, I totally want to talk to the overlords. Absolutely. I want to talk to the manager. I have questions. You want to be Karen, right?

I want to speak to who's in charge. Who's in charge? First of all, who picked my avatar? Why don't I have a better body? That would be one. You had infinite rendering power and you chose to make me a guy who pulls a hamstring tying his shoe. That would be number two. Why did you give me mild acid reflux?

I have a lot of issues with this overlord person. And with our luck, it's a 14-year-old kid who gets like a triple A plus. It's an alien kid in his parents basement. Yeah. Listen, if we're in a simulation, I just want the patch notes. That's all I want. Okay. The programmer of this simulation in which we live gave you freedom to join a fitness center,

which you haven't done. It is obvious to me. You've never stepped into a fitness center. Wow. Okay. This is why I don't want to know all truths. This is why I want. There are some things I don't want to know.

So what would you change? No, no. Questions. What would I ask? I would ask, is every bit of this universe knowable through laws of physics? Or is there something you just got lazy programming and it will never make sense to anybody and no one can never create a law for it because you just pulled it out of your ass? That's what I'd want to know.

Because if they didn't, then I would still continue to explore with the laws of physics. Well, it's funny because in my mind, when I read this question before we came on the air, It was like, it's sort of maybe the other side of the coin of what you just said, which is, is there only a simulation or is there some being or power, ephemeral, ethereal, that has some hand than how we exist? Does that be? I don't know that we would ever be able to deduce the difference. Well, but could you, that's the point, right? So the simulation maybe only exists because of this greater power of being. Like, we don't, you'll never know the answer.

The simulator is the greater powerful being. Yeah, but that's, but that's, yeah, but we don't know what the sim is a simulator or a human being. Is it a, is it an alien of some kind? Like, what is who is the simulator? Does it matter? I mean, I'm saying, it's someone vastly smarter than us. Whoa. It's like an ant form.

Speak for yourself, buddy. Mr. Insecure, low IQ guy. I can care. First of all. in this one question, you told me I have arms like limp spaghetti noodles in terms of my body's type and I'm dumb as a stump. Is this how we're going to do the whole show or is it going to end here? I only talk about your arms. I didn't talk about your brain. You have a brilliant brain. And spaghetti noodle arms.

No, no, so that's what I would do. I would say, shall I continue as a scientist exploring the no ability of the universe or is there some point where you just gave up and it's all random? That's what I want to know. It has good precedent. There was a day before Newton, you'd look up and the planets would move against the background stars and the moon and the sun. And no one really understood it. We could sort of trace it. But an understanding eluded us, but that was okay because the sky was the realm of God. And how could you possibly understand the mind of God?

And then Isaac Newton says, here it is. It's three equations. and some accused Newton of heresy for stepping where previously only God had tread. And so in this case, is God a deity as known through religious texts, or is God a programmer in an alien basement? In either case, whatever is going on is created by them and is vastly more complex than we are. And we're just inside of it just poking. Well, but is it? I mean, if it's so sophisticated that it can create all of this, one question I would have in all seriousness is why have you created so many imperfections when you have this amazing ability to create this simulation?

Okay, so I have an answer to that. I have an answer. Okay. Okay. Just when everything is going fine. Just when everything is going fine. The programmer gets bored. They say, let's throw in COVID.

Yes. Stir the pot. I know. Let's throw in the feature where Paul has to get up three times a night to pee. How about that? Let's throw that in there just to make it like, you know. That's TMI, Paul. I don't need to know about your bladder condition.

So then we finally get through COVID, okay? And we have the vaccine. Then a billionaire New York real estate developer becomes the most powerful person in the world. Stir the pots some more. If there were ever evidence that an alien programmer were in charge just for their entertainment, is that. Hi, I'm Ernie Carducci from Columbus, Ohio. I'm here with my son Ernie because we listen to StarTalk every night and support

StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. So Paul, here's an interesting fact. If we reach the point where, in our exploration of the universe, where it's all random because the programmer got lazy, right? That's, that's interesting. At that point, science loses all utility. Science exists only because something I figure out here applies.

over there. And I can predict its behavior and understand it and manipulate it and use it in the service of my own survival. And if it were all random, there would be no such thing as science. Well, but no, but couldn't you use science to help explore and try to explain the randomness and the chaos? Seriously. So, so you want a scientist to say, okay, Paul, today, your whole day will be chaotic. I predict that. Go forth. What, what are you expecting? No, no, no, no. But can't you make the argument that you could use science to sort of explain chaos? I mean, isn't, not if it's truly random. I mean, chaos is a very specific thing and in mathematical, mathematically. And the interesting thing about chaos is you can predict with precision how uncertain, certain

certain quantities will become over time. And you can watch the chaotic regime unfold. This is what makes weather predicting so challenging because there's so many variables. The heat from the sun, the absorption of the earth, the reflectivity of the earth, the oceans, which are different temperature from the land, how much moisture is in the air.

All of these factors come together. And the more they come together and the more in the future you try to understand it, the more chaotic it becomes. So we try to get handles on it. That's why they say the models, we have this model and we have that model and here's where they agree.

So you go where they agree to try to boost your chances of understanding the objective reality in the system. But I'm just saying if no laws discovered here apply over there. And it doesn't matter where it is and it doesn't matter where there is,

then that undermines the entire profession of science. Right. It makes it. The fact that I tell you that on Earth, as it is in the heavens, laws of physics on Earth applied to the moons, planets, stars, and galaxies not only across space, but through time, that is not an assumption. That is a measurement we have made.

And that's extraordinary. There's any reason? Is there a tablet in the sky that says that must be so? I don't know. I'm delighted we live in a universe that it is. so. Absolutely. All right, let's move on to the next question. This is Michael from Canada. Since it's around 3 Kelvin in space, could an asteroid be a superconductor? And if so, would it get stuck if it went too close to a huge magnetic feel like the suns or ours? There you go. I love that question.

Very clever. What's the person's name? This is Mikhail. McHale. So thank you for that question. McHale knows that metals, certain metals and other materials, when you reduce the temperature in which they're immersed, the behavior of electron changes so that they no longer act separately from one another. As the temperature drops, as they get cooler, the wavelength of each electron grows bigger and bigger and bigger. Until it reaches, I'm simplifying this, but it's basically what's happening. Until the temperature is so low, by the way, this is a quantum phenomenon.

Was that absolute zero? It's three degrees above absolute zero, right? Right, so no more heat can be taken out. When it gets to zero, right? So as you drop the temperature, the wavelength of the electrons gets bigger and bigger. Quantum mechanics dictates this. To a point where the wavelength is so large,

all the electrons, behave as one electron because their waves overlap and synchronize. And when that happens, electrical current passes through without any resistance at all. And so it's called superconductivity. At three degrees ought to get some superconductivity in some metals. I haven't checked the chart lately at who goes superconducting at what temperature. Some go superconducting at even cooler than three degrees Kelvin. So let's start with that.

So great question. I'd have to check my numbers to see who would be superconducting at those temperatures. A, B, it's not entirely three degrees if you're near a star. So the asteroids are orbiting the sun. Many of them are very dark. Sunlight gets absorbed, raising their temperature. So you're only going to hit three degrees like an intergalactic space. We're so far away from nearby stars that there's very little heat.

added to your, to your, to your, to your, to your, to your, to your, to your, Jason Ashton from Liverpool, Liverpool. The Beatles are from Liverpool. Yeah. Yes. Wait, wait, if he's from Liverpool, you have to read it with a Liverpool accent. Oh, please. All right. Well, that's not Liverpool. That's like Irish or something.

Yeah, Paul, Paul. The home of the Beatles. Yeah. I like you on a yoke. You know, I had Paul McCarney on my podcast, you know, along with you. I do know that. Okay, let's move on. I've been a Patreon member for over a year and finally have a question that is probably more basic than my and your expectations are.

So I'm feeling a little bit dumb here. If the moon left the Earth's orbit, would the oceans no longer have tides? They would still have tides caused by the sun. Yes. The sun's tides are about one-third the strength of the moon's tides, or to put more precisely, whatever is the height of the tide that you measure, a third of that height is attributable to the sun. Yeah, small or less dramatic.

It's like what I like to call decaf gravity. It's like decaf gravity. That works. That works. And what's more important here, and by it, it's a perfectly legitimate question. I love it. And so, in fact, there's a whole book. written by a colleague of mine called What If There Were No Moon?

And then the whole book just talks about the consequences of that. And we probably wouldn't have months because they're named after the Moon. That's true. Yeah, yeah. We have some other sort of reckoning of time. So the Moon has the dominant tidal bulge. So there it is. And the Earth turns in and out of that bulge.

That bulge is always there. However. And it's always in the same place. Well, it's a little bit ahead of the moon in the moon's orbit, right? But we rotate faster than moon's orbit around us. So we rotate into and out of the tidal bulge. And because the moon still moves around us, high tide shifts each day by about 45 or 50 minutes. Because of this effect.

It's all one synchrony of time space. Because of the effect of the tidal bulge being slightly ahead of us. It's slightly ahead of the moon, but the moon is orbiting the earth. So how far does the moon go in a day? It goes about, you know, one, you know, 45, 50 minutes worth of your clock time around the earth. So therefore, the tidal bulge has shifted by that much. But that's not even my point. The bulge is always there.

When we line up with the sun, the sun's high tide. adds to the moon's high tide, and you get full moon high tides. So when people think the full moon has some extra tidal forces on us, no. It's the sun added to the moon's tide, and the moon's tide is just always there. But the sun adds to it. And so it's a delusion. We think, oh, the rays of the sun, the moon, we have werewolves, we have all like canthropic stories that have been written.

got all of this about moonlight. And plus the moon is only reflected sunlight. So if the werewolf turns into a werewolf under full moon, it should definitely do it under sunlight. And a lot faster. And with a lot more hair, bigger teeth, bigger fangs. But what, so what is the remind us the full moon high tide, which means sort of the sun and the moon have sort of aligned. That happens every how often. What is the frequency of that? Once a month. Well, actually, twice a month. So it'll work for full moon because Earth, moon, and sun are lined up.

And it works for New Moon, where the moon is on the other side. And you get the tidal bulge. So you get the highest of the high tides during New Moon and Full Moon. So people aren't thinking that the new moon has special powers, even though it's making tides just as high as full moon. Because you can't see the new moon. So people are very influenced by what they see and what they think is true. rather than all that they can't see and what we otherwise know is true.

Chew all that way. Yeah, that is, yeah, there's a lot there. It's sort of, hello from Flesherton, Ontario. Not going to be a part of the 51st state Canada. But we need your health care. We need your health care. Your pleasant qualities, your lovely manner with people. people, your maple syrup. We've only got a couple of states that really generate that. Come on.

Vermont, New York. That's his son, New Hampshire. Maybe some Maine, too. Neil, my 13-year-old son was so blown away by our experience at your show. He wanted me to pass on this question. Why are your T-shirt so expensive after the show? No, that's not the question. I don't sell T-shirts after the show. I have no merch. I mean, people said I should, but there's No merch. There's no merch. It's just me. You sell those Neil deGrasse Tyson fake moustaches for $15 each. I know you do. All right. Neil, my 13-year-old son was so blown away with our experience at your show. He wanted me to pass on this question. Could you ask if he thinks your memories and consciousness are made from Adams? Love you guys and keep the laughs coming. Andrew Nisker. So this is my favorite joke that's safe for elementary school. Okay. Never trust Adams.

They make up everything. That's safe for like third graders. We're good there. So, yeah, I mean, we so want to believe that there are forces and things going on that defy account or description or investigation by the laws of physics. That urge is very strong because you'll never, you might explain, you know, language or whatever, but you'll never explain love. You know, and I say, is it because you don't want us to ever explain love?

Would you have some reason for thinking that this is really true? So a couple of things about our consciousness or our thoughts. Let's just talk with our thoughts. We have come to learn that the brain operates via electrochemical signals between the synapses of our nerve cells, of the brain cells in your head. Okay. And there it is. By the way, the medical profession could not have known that before the discovery and the harnessing of electricity. think about that.

So much of physics has fed the medical profession's powers to diagnose and treat the human body that if anyone says, okay, we're done with physics, now let's invest all in medicine. There's a limit to how far that'll go given how much they've tapped discoveries by my people in my fields. Okay. So when you know that thoughts are communicated through electrochemical signals, and then you stick a probe in there and stimulate a part of the brain that you know behaves in a certain way, and then you see the person react, you kind of know what's going on there. This is atoms. Yeah, atoms are the building blocks of everything. Adamson, the building blocks of cells, and the cells are the building blocks of our neurophysiology.

Okay. So, but the real evidence here, because you can't just experiment on people's brains that, you know, we can't do that. All right. Ethically. Hang on a second. All right, let them go. We can't. That's your kids, your kids in the lockbox.

Yeah, get them out of the box and give them some peanuts and hit them to that. We can't do the experiment. Go ahead. Sorry. People who have mini strokes. right? So a stroke of broken blood vessel, this oxygen doesn't get to a part of the brain. In many strokes, the identity of the person begins to fade,

depending on what part of their brain was touched by the stroke. And so is it their facial recognition? Is it their spatial recognition? Is it their appetite for food? Is it their ability to speak? Is it their hearing, sight, locomotion, if you have a series of mini strokes, bits and piece of you basically disappear. So everyone who says, what happens to your consciousness when you die, a series of many strokes

are mini deaths of your brain. And as far as we can tell, that's what's happening to you when you die. None of that works. So now that's not very comforting to people, especially not to religious people, have a whole story of what happens to you when you die. All I'm saying is if you're going to ask a scientist to answer that question, the point is, once your brain ceases to undergo electrochemical changes, then you don't exist anymore. Everything we know about you no longer exists. So, I mean, dementia is sort of in that family, right? So that's, for example, correct. And that's not even a stroke.

I should have included that. But it's in that family of, you know, so my mother has it right now. And you can see there's just pieces of it. But the fascinating thing is her long-term memory is insanely accurate. It's stored differently and possibly even in a different place. I would introduce you to her and 10 minutes later, she'd be like, how do you know my son again? But then she can, in the same breath, relay a story when she was 12 of spending a day with her father with great exactitude.

And so is it the shifting of the atoms in the cells? Is it the shifting of the atoms of the cells that's happening? there? Is it the death of some atoms in cells? Like what is? No, the atoms don't have life or death. They just comprise larger molecules. And the cells are composed of the molecules. So you can't blame atoms directly. You have to credit or blame the functioning of living tissue. Okay, that's really what it is. The atom is just an atom. Now, if I may, I mean no disrespect. but I heard this joke told by another comedian who said that if you're a comedian, being around people with dementia is excellent because you could tell the same joke every 10 minutes.

Absolutely. People with short-term memory dementia. It also helps with guilt because, like, you can say to your mother, well, I haven't seen you a while. No, I was just here yesterday. Oh, that's right. You know what I mean? So, like, you don't have to feel so bad.

You know, listen, yeah, exactly. It's like, oh, you're such a good son. I know. I was here yesterday, and I painted the whole house. The point is atoms, everything that is not empty space or energy in the form of photons represents as particles in the universe. And certain combinations of particles we call atoms. If you have a nucleus and at least one electron, it's an atom.

And so atoms comprise everything. That's hence the joke. Don't never trust atoms. They make up everything. If you go down to like a snowflake and a snowflake is six-sided snowflake, it's a crystalline structure of the water molecule. Water is H2O. You break that apart. You have two hydrogen atoms, one oxygen atom.

So atoms are everywhere. But atoms don't have agency. They just, well, sorry. They might want to combine with other atoms to make molecules. But it's a very simple, are we mating or not? It's not otherwise, let me give Paul Mercurio dreams. That happens based on life experience and leftover neurosynaptic history of your brain and stuff used unresolved, trauma that might have happened in your life, joys.

So, yeah, atoms are everywhere. So Paul, we got enough time for like a, lightning round. This is Todd Chambers from Yuba City, California. In the system of the universe, what is or are the purposes of a black hole? Do they recycle matter and energy? To speak of purpose implies intent. And in physics, we generally don't think of the universe as having intent. There's just laws and forces and things flow according to those forces, guided by the laws of physics as we've come to describe them. So you can ask what role they play. And if you wander too close to a black hole, that's all she wrote. You'll get pulled in, spaghettiified, and you won't be able to tell

anybody about it. So to think of a role, no, there's roles. There's no roles. There's just what it does. And by the way, if the sun became a black hole today, Earth would plunge in to darkness, but we can still continue to orbit around it in just the same way we are right now. We wouldn't be pulled in? Yeah, black holes are not giant sucking machines. But there's stronger gravitational force. Only at its surface. Don't disagree with me.

You don't know what you're talking about. No, I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just simply saying you're wrong. There's a difference. Two politicians will disagree. Yes. Okay. But if one person is wrong, you're just wrong.

It's not that we disagree. It's flat out wrong. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, yeah, so it doesn't become a giant sucking machine. We speak of the high gravity of a black hole because of the high surface gravity. Because the black hole is so small, you get really close to its center. And that's where the extreme gravitational phenomenon occurs.

Got it. Okay. Lighting around, we'll keep going here. Liam Corcoran. Hi, Neil. This is Liam from Rhode Island, my home state, the best little state in the union. Is there anywhere in the universe that you could be outside the gravitational influence of any matter beside your own? And would this be the closest you could get to experiencing pure space time, totally unworped by matter? I love that question. I love that question. So there is, oh, I forgot what the metric is.

called. There are approximations we make when we're doing some calculations. We assume space has no matter or energy in it, so that it's perfectly flat. And then you can do some calculations more easily than if you admit that there are stars or planets or black holes distorting that space time. The mathematics becomes much more complicated if the space time is curved than if it's flat. So now, in 1968, if memory serves, Walter Cronkite, the anchor for C.B. news was describing in December the voyage of Apollo 8 to the moon. And he says, as of 922 this afternoon, Apollo 8 astronauts have left the gravity of Earth. And I remember hearing it's like, what? They're on their way to the moon. And last I checked, the moon orbits Earth. So I know what he

meant, but that's not what he should have said. Okay. What he meant was we reached a point where the moon's gravity, pulling it in, is stronger than our gravity trying to come back to Earth, so that the moon's gravity takes over and it just falls towards the moon. That's not the end. Earth's gravity extends to infinity, as does every other gravitational field. You cannot escape the extent of gravity, no matter what. But it weakens over time. The farther you get away from Earth, it dissipates in strength.

The weaker and weaker it is, but it's never zero. Right. That's true for everything. The sun, the galaxy, galaxy clusters, everything. My name is Emily from Berkeley. I am a first-time poster. I hope this is an interesting question. Many times when people talk about particle pairs being separated at outer surface of black holes, where one half of the pair is on the outside and one half is doomed to the inside, they will say that it should be theoretically possible to reconstruct the information. that fell into the black hole. Why is it important to theoretically retain this possibility?

Oh, this comes from information theory, because there's a certain amount of information, and if you fall into a black hole, was the information destroyed? That's the question. And so there's a big debate about information. Information theory is relatively new. You know, it's sort of,

well, it comes out of entropy. So in the last 100 years or so, especially in the last 50, 50 years puts it in the 1970s, I guess. Wow. Yeah. And if you believe or want it to be so that information is never destroyed, then when the black hole later evaporates,

which it will do by hawking radiation, well, that is, excuse me, that is the way it evaporates. Okay. So that particle pair is conjured out of the gravitational field. And if you took an inventory of the particles that appear out of the gravitational field of the black hole, they will exactly match everything the black hole is ever eaten in its life. How so? Well, what's freaky is it's not the same particle coming out.

that survived the trip in and survived the trip out. Particles are being created from the energy field of the black hole. Energy is creating it, and it has a memory of what was there before. That's tantamount to preserving the information that went in. So now, there's a little bit that I'm unsure of. We're going to have to bring Jana Levin on this. If you throw in a DNA molecule, there's a lot of information there, your whole identity.

It's not going to come back out as a DNA molecule in particle pairs. No. So where's the information? It'll come back altered in some way. It won't come back as a molecule at all. It'll come back as particles. So how do I recover the information that the DNA molecule contained as a representation of you?

I don't have an answer for that. We've got to check with either one of the two Bryans or with Jan 11 on that. We'll bring them back on. Don't worry about it. I got it. I got it. You got this. Yeah. What happens is it goes in and then centrifugal force that happens along with a certain level of radiation red wave and then you get your thing. All right, moving on. Mercedes-Dominguez. Hello, Mercedes here from Denver, Colorado. I've heard of the cosmic web before. My question is, is that a real thing? And if so, what is it? Yeah. So it's just a word that we apply to. to how we find the galaxies configured in the universe.

So galaxies are not evenly separated. There's gravity operating, and there were some fluctuations in the early universe that preloaded some parts of the universe relative to others. When you step back and take a look at it all, you see this sort of network of filaments and clusters, and it's as though you took a sponge, cut it in half, like a nice thick spons, cut it in half, and look at the textures and structures.

There are places where the fibers meet. There are places where it's empty. It's almost like a honeycomb in a way, not as symmetrical. Yeah, but not as organized, not as structured, correct. So the galaxies aren't sprinkled evenly. They line up along huge strands of matter, mostly dark matter, with these, like, empty voids in between and it looks like a three-dimensional spider web in a way. Or a sponge.

Yeah. I mean, cosmic web sounds a little more romanticized than cosmic sponge. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's a little, that's a tough cell to the, yeah. But the point is the universe isn't random. It's organized. I mean, it's not like Pinterest organized. I wouldn't even use the word organized.

I mean, gravity collects it. You want to call that organization. It's like a garage with stuff piled into the corners of every possible. That's a good point. In fact, here's an interesting phenomenon. If you look at a movie where they show a scene in the fall, basically they're set designers scattering leaves onto the street, okay, if it's not actually in the fall. What they always get wrong is they try to scatter the leaves evenly on the street.

It's never that. A breeze comes by and it piles into one corner, some other new leaves fall down, but it's never evenly distributed. you can always tell because people don't understand random. They think random is scattered everywhere. Random has clumps. That's how that is. So I can always tell if they fake the street for that reason.

But science can't answer the randomness question here, right? Like, isn't that to me the fascinating thing here? It's sort of organized, it's in a way organized chaos. Maybe that's not the right technical term. Forces of gravity are operating on it. So there's nothing more mysterious than that. And dark matter is mysterious. We don't know what that is,

but that's operating on the gravitational fields around which all of this is collecting. So we speak of that entire map of the universe as the cosmic web. So Paul, that's all the time we have. Plus, I think I hear your mother calling you for lunch. Bob, meatloaf. It's great to be on with you.

Yes, man. And keep us posted on the end of Colbert, the end of days. Oh, you'll know. Because I'm going to be, I'm coming out to your neck of the woods. I'm doing, I'm doing landscaping after this. I need to, I need the money, buddy. Can you buy a place and get a lawn so I can cut it? I need the cat. Come on, be a friend. Be a friend. Be a friend. Will you, Neil? All right. We'll work on it. All right. All right, Paul Mercurio. Always good to have you, ma'am. Yeah, always great. Chau chubby Terry Cruz.

This has been another installment of Cosm McQuarrie's Grab Bag Edition with Paul McCurio. Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always bidding you to keep looking up.