StarTalk Radio - Cosmic Queries – Total Darkness

Episode Date: April 21, 2026

Are all the galaxies orbiting a superstructure in the middle of the universe? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice are reaching into the grab bag to cover questions from absolute zero to the nature of gravity, and much much more.  NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here:  https://startalkmedia.com/show/cosmic-queries-total-darkness/ Thanks to our Patrons RY, The Kilted Bard, Istvan Leel-Össy, Matthew, lrs.2010, Devin Caldwell, Shaneeb Kamran, Leondre Dow, Cool, Greenhornet658ky, Nikola Lacković, Steve Shirley, Lani Lum, Paulis, John Bower, Purp, Josh S, Craig Booth, wrae, Richard Francisco, Mike, Subhransu Mishra, Jaden R Peters, Andreas, Raimund Stock jr, Brian Banks, robert margerum, Amiri Mouhab, Alan Moylan, Marianne sperry, William Benjamin Broes, Paul Sanchez, Mark Evans, Fiona Rawls, Nick L, Shaun H, Marcin Majdanski, Justin Satterwhite, Rolando Cosme, Darkphoenix, Praxis, Vexonar, User Profile Name, twon, V-Thrax, Oymilius The Great, DFH, Senad Bajramovic, Joe Kava, Lucas Harlan, Ty Jayne Breathe, Malcom, Muttey, Ana i Vinko, Lewis Alley, Layee Chau, Zachary Lang, Dave, Sweet T, Rich Wolf, c l, MyCatSaysHi!, Apoorv Lathey, Sondre Hellingsrud, Robert Steenberge, naveen v, Dennis L. Friedman, Dr Mark, Karsten Schäfer, Tim Thomas, Joe Messer, andrew nathan, Darayat Chowdhury, Dan Gillespie, NK, Anthony Sclafani, Nicholas Flores, Murphstein, justin thomas, Valerie, Alexis, Lior Gross, Melissa Harrison, Elizabeth Engelhardt, T, Makayla, 9000 H.A.L.s, Brian Maurer, Shahar Avenstein, Robert, O P, RDH, Paul Hill, Annie Saenz, Mike Mohler, Peter Petrov, Kyle, Isaac Hach, W Pops, Brittney Jacobs, and BRambo 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.

So Chuck, we just rolled out another grab bag, Cosmic Queries. That's right. And people grabbed all parts of the bag on that one. Black holes, personal questions about me and my telescopes? Yes. What's up with that? We got it off. We're coming up 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. Chuck Nice over here. What's up? All right, Neil.

We're going to do another cosmic queries. A grab a bag. That's all we're doing lately, our grab bags. It's a fan favorite, man. It's like you close your eye, reach in the bin and pull it out. Pull out a snake. You know, I actually have a black hole bag over there. Did I ever show you that?

Wait, I thought it was the black hole lunch box. Can I only have one black hole thing? Is this what you think? I know, who am I talking to? I'm going to show you. Wait, hang on. I'm sorry. You might have shown me this a long time ago.

This is a black hole bag. Oh, Lord Jesus. What the hell? What the? Okay. I love it. And then there's the eyes. Oh, no, I forgot what I put in here.

Okay. I put a hole in here. You put a hole in the hole. Yes. What a place to put a hole. Doesn't. Don't you remember the hole? Oh, I remember the hole now.

You remember the hole? This is a hole. We did that whole thing where we cut the square. This is a hole. And then you could walk through it. What I said was like, here's a sheet of paper. I'm going to cut a hole in this sheet of paper that you can walk through. That's right.

And you said no. And I said, no, you can't. No, you can. But you did. And I still in here. That's a very cool thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Chuck, what you got for me? All right. Grab bag. This is the grab bag. And I will pull it out of this black hole made by Apple computers. Galactic Gumbo. The Galactic Galactic Gumbo. Oh, no, I think he was showing no got my daddy new.

This is Dalton. Hey, Dr. Tyson, Lord and I, greetings from Huntsville, Alabama. I was watching an old... Rocket City. Rocket City. Which Trump officially named. Well, by the way, it was always named Rocket City.

Right. And then Trump decided to... I'm going to officially name it, Rocket City. Not to be confused with Little Rocket Man. That's like coming to New York and say, I'm going to rename New York the Big Apple. Which he would do that, by the way. Anyway, that's so funny.

Greetings from Huntsville, Alabama. I was watching an old explainer on Absolute Zero and why it's impossible to reach it. If it is impossible by quantum physics to have a particle become completely stationary, then would it not be possible to extract infinite energy from it in the form of heat?

In doing so, violating the first and second laws of thermodynamics. It seems a bit paradoxable to never be able to reach absolute zero, since you seemingly can always have something colder. But I don't know why you would say you seemingly could have something colder. No, no, it's a, he's, he's, he's, what this is, Dalton. He's merging a classical brain with a quantum brain, okay? Right.

In terms of his, his interest in answering the question. Right. So just let me talk you through this. All right. Talk you off the ledge, Dalton. It's going to be okay. Talk you off to the absolute zero ledge. All right.

So let me just remind people that there's no such thing as cold. Right. You can't put cold in something. That's where I was going when I said it's... If you could do that, then you can make something like infinitely cold. Add more cold. So what we sense is cold is just the absence of heat. Right.

So you start pulling heat out. Right. This is what your refrigerator does. Right. It pulls heat out of... your food. Right. We don't think of it that way.

Right. You put in something that's room temperature, it takes the heat out. Right. If you take heat out of something, what happens to its temperature? It goes down.

And you take it out. Where does that heat go? It's got to go somewhere. You got to go somewhere? It goes out the back of your refrigerator. It's hot as hell that thing. You ever go around back? Those coils are dissipating coils

to send out the heat. It not only radiates the heat, but it's in touch with air. Right. So the air will conduct heat away as well. Right. Okay. Whether this is a major issue with spacecraft.

Okay. Because if you're in space and you have machines that generate heat, right? How do you get rid of the heat? You got to dump the heat somehow. Okay. So you can't just have, well, you can have radiators, yes. But each radiator has to be pointing away into space. They can't point to each other.

You can't have a battery of radiators. Right. Right. Not a literal battery, but like an array. An alignment. An array of radiators that are, like, if they point to each other, nothing, it just feeds each other the same heat. I'll heat you, you heat me. Exactly.

So they all have to face space, but it doesn't have the benefit of air whisking away the heat. It can only radiate it away. Whereas on earth, you can release heat both ways. Okay. It can radiate away, and you can convect air around it, and it just takes it away. Very efficient. Right. When you have a medium such as an atmosphere to do that.

All right. Cool breeze. Yeah, and a cool breeze will cool you down faster than just you radiating your heat. You're rating it anyway your whole heat. Okay. Right. It's slightly different. The cool breeze is forcing your sweat to evaporate.

Right. And the evaporation takes energy out of you. But, so let's get back to the absolute zero. So I keep taking heat out and the temperature gets lower and lower and lower. You reach a point where quantum phenomena dominates and you can no longer use classical reasoning. this by the way Dalton's not alone in this in this

intersection this troubled paradoxical intersection between classical physics and what we call modern physics. So you get down there and you try to take more heat out and you can't because the and by the way taking heat out means that

particles are moving slower and slower right okay the heat is vibrational energy typically okay so you take that out and there's a regime where the quantum fluctuations prevent it from ever stopping its motion. All right. Okay. So you're saying let me, that means there's energy there. Right.

Let me pull that energy out. Let me utilize that energy. I think I'd have to confirm this with our cosmology trio. Brian and Brian and Jana. Jana. Brian Cox, Brian Green. Brian Cox, of course, is in the UK. But he comes through, and he's a good friend.

And then sometimes Sean. Sean Carroll. Oh, yeah, yeah, he's a good guy, too. When we speak of zero point energy of the vacuum of space, I think that's what they're referring to. The energy below which you cannot go. Because it's zero point, but it's not really zero. But if you try to get to zero, that's what you're stuck with.

And that's quantum fluctuations. And I don't think you can extract energy out of that. lowest energy fluctuation because it needs a, to take energy out, you need a lower energy state to land on. Right. And you can't. Right. Because that's it. Who's that guest we had in another show, a biologist who said, the universe is just electrons looking for a place to rest.

That's it. Yeah, that was bitool. A bitool. Yeah, Boutel from University of Massachusetts in Wisconsin. Yes. The universe, everything that happens in the universe is an electron. Looking for a place to rest. Looking to hang its hat.

And so... Honey, I'm home. A hard day in the circuit. So, yeah, but people are... Imagine that you could tap the zero point energy and make, like, rockets out of it and travel through space. And I don't have problems with people imagining that. It doesn't seem likely to me, though, based on what we know of the behavior of quantum physics.

Gotcha. So there you have it. All right, Dalton, way to go, brother. Mm-hmm. I hope that keeps you from, you know, from jumping off the ledge. All right, this is Rachel Ambrose. Rachel says, Rachel, here from Austin, Texas,

photons have to be literally everywhere all the time, even in a dark room. If I can see, then there's photons hitting my eyeballs. I feel like people don't talk about this enough. They are filling every inch of space all the time. They're everywhere. Furthermore, somehow photons from the Big Bang are still here right now in the form of cosmic microwave background radiation. Neil, can you please speak to this? Yes. I think Muhammad Ali said it best.

Mm-hmm. Okay. Hmm. I'm pretty. That's right, Howard. Look at me. I'm pretty, Howard. Howard Cocell.

Howard Cocell. I'm so fast. Mm-hmm. I'm so fast. I turn off the lights and I'm in bed before the room. Get dark. That's the one I'm talking about. Oh, really?

Yeah. That's the one I'm talking about. Yeah. So he knows that photons have to go, you know. Right. Well, he's thinking that dark is penetrating the room, but light is exiting the room. Right. When you turn off the light.

The light gets absorbed and it's gone. Your eyes are not the ultimate arbiter of whether there are photons in the room. Right. Because your eyes only see red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. Right. Biv. Oh, sorry, indigo, violin. If you got to get the BIV going there.

Yeah. You know, Isaac Newton put in the eye. Did he? Yeah. Because he was fascinated, mystically fascinated by the number seven. Ah. The spectrum can't have six colors.

Can't have six colors. You got to, yeah. Kind of animals do you have six colors. What a stupid universe would that be? Throw some indigo in there. Yeah. No, but if he got deeply religious,

he could say, well, the universe was created six days. Right. You know, not seven days, six days. People forget. It was six days. Seven day he rested. He rested.

Which I'm just saying, what kind of God is this? He needs to take a break. God, God, me is so damn hard. Oh, me is hard. Oh, me. Oh, my me. It's so hard to make a universe. I need a rest.

Oh, Lord, I can't do no more. Did I say, Lord, how am I talking to? Lord me, it's hot in this, oh, I'm so tired. Anyway, okay. But. Now, I forgot what we were talking about. Photons everywhere. Right.

So, anything that is at any temperature at all is radiating photons. There you go. That's all I was going to say, because if you're a predator, you see photons all the time. You mean the movie character? Yeah, the monster with the dreadlocks. He had dreads. He had dreadlocks. So, Creditor could see an infrared.

Right. Okay. Now, you know what's interesting? Ahead. This is a little fact. Right. I think about movies all the time. Okay.

So that was only cool because the infrared was the shadowy shape. Right. That means he has low-resolution infrared cameras. Right. Yeah. We got better cameras than that today. We do. High-resolution, you see the full person there.

Depending on your temper. it will determine what kind of light you're predominantly going to emit. Right. So at our temperature, we emit primarily infrared, so we'll show up in infrared. We reflect visible light. Right. But we emit infrared. Your walls are room temperature.

So emit a little less infrared because they're not as warm as we are. All right. You keep dropping the temperature. What's on the other side of infrared? Microwaves. Okay. radio waves. So the colder it is, the further down the spectrum it shifts so that when you're only three degrees Kelvin, three degrees above absolute, you're giving off microwaves. That's it. And that's the

cosmic microwave space, right. That's it. Cosmine microwave background. So, so yeah, and it can be dark for you, no problem. Not many people have been in complete total darkness in their life. True. Do you know how to get it? I'm going to say, blindfold and then bury yourself a lot I was thinking of other ways for that if you go a slunking

oh you mean to a cave that's way you go deep into a cave right make a few turns so there's no light getting in at all turn off your flashlight right you cannot see anything anything yeah see now and no disrespect

to anybody but that's some white people stuff No black man never died. You will never find a black man dead in a cave with no light at all. First of all, I'm not going in there because even with the flashlight, be like, where it Chuck go? I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it. Okay.

These are jokes, don't write. Don't write. All right. I'm going to stop. Let's move on. All right. So there you go. There you go, Rachel.

Yeah. But I like the Mohammed Tates. Give me the Muhammad Ali comment. That's right. I'm so fast. I turn off the light. I'm in the bed before the room get dark.

Yeah, that's good. That's a really good one. Hello, I'm Finky Broke Allen, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Nailed Grass Tyson. This is Max Wilburn, who says, Hey, Chuck, hey, Neil. This is Maxwell from Lexington, Kentucky.

And I know Neil thinks very highly of Newton, as he has accomplished so much. But recently I learned about Newton's Law of Cooling. Although it's not as fundamental and such a stepping stone for the world of physics, I just find it insane that as a side quest, he did that. What a badass.

What are your thoughts? I did not know about his law of cooling. I think his law of cooling was, don't you love my hair, look how cool I did. But I think that was a wig he was wearing. Oh, no. I was so. distraught upon learning this.

Really? Yes. So his hair notwithstanding, do you have anything to say about the law of cooling? So I didn't know he came up with that, but it is a well-known means of calculating the rate of temperature change in physics class.

Okay. Yeah. So the way you do it is you have two materials at different temperatures. All right. Okay. And you bring them in contact in some way. either physically, so that atoms are touching each other,

or have air molecules bouncing back and forth, or they're radiatively connected. Connect them in some way. Okay. Okay. And then you measure the rate at which the temperature changes so that they reach equilibrium to each other. Cool.

Okay? Right. So it's not just that the hot, sorry, sorry. One of them might have a continual source of energy going in. So then the cool thing comes. up to its temperature. You see what I'm saying? But if the two isolated objects at different temperatures,

they will meet in the middle somewhere. Right. At a temperature lower than the high one and higher than a low one. Gotcha. All right. So you can calculate the rate at which the temperature changes. Oh, okay. Okay?

And deduce as Isaac Newton apparently did. I own everything that man's ever written, and I've got to go dig that up. You've got to go get up below cooling. That must be a chapter I missed. Yeah. Okay. So what it states is, the bigger the temperature difference, the faster the rate of change of temperature will be.

Okay. Which kind of makes sense. It just kind of makes sense. Absolutely. Yes. Right. And if you do some measurements of that, you can actually represent it with an equation. Okay.

And you can make a prediction. Right. This is the temperature difference. They'll be the same temperature in 10 minutes. Right. Or, by the way, this is happening every day. you get a glass of water, you put ice in it. Right.

Eventually. It's going to be water. It's going to be water. And then you have water that's cold, but it's still air temperature out here. That's right. Eventually that comes up. And that comes up. That was an assignment in physics class when I was in eighth grade.

And what we had to do was plot the melting of the ice in a graph to see whether or not it was linear. And it was. Yeah. That would be a cooling curve. Yeah, that's a cooling curve. It's gaining heat from the outside. Exactly. Yeah.

So there you go. Look at it. See, people, these are the things you can think of when you are not busy thinking about sex. Like Isaac Newton. This is what happens. You become a genius because he's just like, well, I ain't having sex. So I might as well think about how do things melt. Yeah, he never married, had no children, had no known intimate relationships.

And so we're pretty sure when he came up with his law of gravitation and motion and calculus that he was a virgin. Right. there you go, babe, that's it. Like a prize fighter? You know what they say? You know, you're going to stay hungry. All right, here we go. Ben Grun says, hey, StarTalk.

This is God. Here to bestow upon you the keys of limitless energy. Ooh. What do you do? Oh. Well, first, I don't think it requires God. We just have to tap the energy from the sun There you go, bro, we got this thanks

I said God, we got, yeah, we're worried about somebody else Take care to that homeless man in the street We got the energy thing We're kind of slow on the go here But the sun has basically unlimited energy And the Chinese are now want to put up a solar array in orbit Which, where there's no clouds And if it's far enough away from Earth

it always sees the sun, 24-7, beam it down to Earth by microwaves. So then you have this column of microwaves. What could go wrong? I want to cross that path, for sure. So, so, but unlimited energy. Here's what I would do.

You ready? Go ahead. I would do what they did in Iceland. What's that? Iceland is sitting on top of volcanoes, you know this. Yeah. Okay.

It's Volcano land. It's not Iceland. It's not Iceland. Yeah. Greenland. Iceland and not Greenland. Right, exactly. All right, this is the opposite here.

So, I want to do what they do in Iceland. Go ahead. They heat their water at these lava pits, okay, up in the mountains, and then send the water into town, but they do it under the streets so that snow never accumulates. Genius. You never, you don't need snow plows, you don't need salt, you don't need accident reports. Nope. It snows and then the streets are just, they're just clear.

I would run hot water under everything. And then you just snow, snow be damned. It's radiant heating for your whole city. Yes. Wow, that's cool. Yes, and other things I might use unlimited energy for. I'll tell you what I'd use it for. pretty much shutting down every war that's ever been fought.

Because most of these wars that we fight are over some form of energy. And so it's just like, well, guess what? It's unlimited, guys. What are you fighting over? Well, it could also be over food or water supplies. There are other causes. There are other scarcity resources. Right, but I think we'd be smart enough.

But on unlimited energy, you would make water. Today, nobody is going to. hungry because there's not enough food in the world. Exactly. If you're going hungry, it's because somebody... Some greedy bastard is keeping you from getting food. Disrupting the food chain. Exactly.

So I don't think that was predicted back in 1900. We saw the population growing exponentially. And we saw the food supplies growing linearly. Yes. And... There was a point where people thought that we would run out of food. And just completely starve. Right.

And so run out of food to feed everyone. Right. Well, most people always going to eat now. Right. Exactly. Wow. So that's cool, man. I love the idea of radiant heating for your city, though.

Yeah, just so you don't have to do it. Yeah, especially since we got two feet of snow. All right, I love that answer. All right. By the way, I think this is why Trump wants Greenland. Because he really thinks he wants Iceland. I think if you gave him Greenland, he'd be like, what is all this snow everywhere?

I don't understand. I don't get it. There's so much ice here. Plus, there are references to penguins there. There are no penguins in the north. Yeah. They're all... Any...

There are no free penguins north of the equator. Right, exactly. They're in captivity. They're in captivity. Wow. All right, this is Scott Openlander, or Oppenlander, not open, Oppenlander. And he says, hey, Neil, hey, Lord Nice. Scott Oppenlander here.

Tuning in from Phoenix, Arizona. Which I'm told is a quarter mile from the surface of the sun. I was in Phoenix one time for my first time and the sun came out and I said oh this is a beautiful day the sun is out no one is in the streets

no one is in the parks and when they walk in the streets they walk on the side of the street that's shadowed and they only follow shadows around it gets hot you know yeah yeah Scottstale's it's like night night the sun goes down and all the vampires

come out Where were you people all day? Like, anyway, since our universe appears to be a pancake shape, like planetary systems and galaxies, do galaxies orbit around some larger central structure, like an even more super mega, massive black hole? Or are galaxy motions just more random or ununiformed? There you go. Universe is not pancake shaped. So, next question.

Well, there you have. It's waffle sick. No, but to the point, galaxy motions are mostly random. And what I mean by random is they're not coordinated in some big way unless you're part of a galaxy cluster. Okay. Then there's some ballet of movement.

However, some structures in the universe are so large that the average speed of the galaxy moving among other. galaxies in that cluster is insufficient for the galaxy to have made one complete loop through that cluster. Okay. So that has significant consequences to what's going on there. It's called, it's not virulized.

A virulized cluster is a cluster that has a very mature shape where, like a beehive, all the galaxies are moving around. You step back, it has a spherical kind of envelope. Okay. That contains them. Gotcha. But if it's kind of ratty, like that, it's not yet virulized. It comes from what's called the virial theorem,

which talks about how energy can be transmitted, shared, from objects with high energy to objects with lower energy so that everybody has approximately the same energy at the end of the process. Very cool. So virulization is the sharing of that energy. So it drops the energy of the high energy objects. It could be thermal energy.

It could just be orbital energy, and the lower energies come up. So, by there, it's a whole branch of physics. We talk about virilization of galaxies. Of matter in whatever situation. So the ratty-looking galaxy clusters tend to not have been virulized. Gotcha.

And so, yeah. All right. And by the way, we, moving around the center of our galaxy, takes about 200 million. years? 200 million years. That's much smaller than the age of the galaxy,

which is 13 billion. 13 billion years, right. Yeah, so galaxy is a mature shape. And we're in a spiral galaxy. Correct, correct. That's very cool, man. Good question. This is MX self-destruct.

Okay. Is that a... That's what it says here. Is that a thing here? MX self-destruck, I have no idea. But his name is Seamus, and he says... Shamus? Yeah, he says, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice.

Seamus here from Los Angeles. We know that gravity is... is the result of the way space-time curves. So wouldn't it be more likely that gravity is simply a side effect of this curvature rather than a force with a carrier particle like a strong weak or an electromagnetic force? If there is a carrier particle, why is it not just the Higgs boson? Since that imparts mass, thus providing the curvature for the universe that we call gravity. Wow.

It's like, man, people, man. People are doing some work, man. People are doing some thinking. Man, so I can answer 80% of that question. All right. It's an assumption that gravitation as a force in the universe has a force carrying particle. Right. And the assumption is that if you represented classical gravity, even Einsteinian gravity, with quantum physics, it would have to have a particle.

So we even named this hypothetical particle. Okay. The graviton. The graviton. Right. Exactly. So the hunt for the graviton is on. Right.

All right. And so the effect of the graviton and mass and energy is to curve the fabric of space and time. Forcing you to move in certain ways that would not otherwise be the case if that were not occupying that space. Right. John Archer-Bull-Wieler, a great physicist of the 20th century. I had him as a professor in graduate school. Wow. Okay.

In fact, I met my wife in relativity class that he was teaching. Cool. I was sitting in the back row. She was in the front row. And then you guys made relatives. What I can't quite wrap my head around is if gravity is just the curvature of space and time, maybe it's not a force. Okay. Because forces have these carrier particles.

Right. And if you're just falling along a curvature of space and time, what does it even mean to think of that as a force? Right. Right. So maybe it sits outside of the quantum paradigms that would require that there be a graviton. Boy, that's something, that's kind of cool, man, in a way,

because that means that there would be something in between the quantum. An understanding that we don't yet have. And an understanding we don't have. Right, right, right. It's a frontier. Yeah, that's cool. All right. Well, there you go, buddy.

I mean, listen. You did some good, that's a great question. This is John Mayer. I think it's Meyer, or Meyer. He says, M-E-I-E-R. Meyer. Meyer. John Meyer.

Salutations from John and Carlsbad, California. Caldbent, California. Yeah, Carlsbad, California. He says, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice, the great defenders of Art Curiosity. I have a question that has plagued me. Oh, that's a T-shirt if there ever was one. Yeah, the great defense of... Start talk. The defenders of curiosity.

He says, as budgets seem to be one of the significant components of innovation in science. Yes. It's not a component of whether or not something is found to be true. It's a component of whether or not the research is conducted at all. Exactly. He says, if we were to greatly increase the national or hypothetically the global science budget for building telescopes, What would you propose to maximize mankind's current technological possibilities and what could they deliver in order to create the most powerful telescope possible?

What would it look like? What would you point it at and what might we see? I would put an entire array of telescopes on the far side of the moon. Right. There's no atmosphere, so there's no clouds or anything. So there's no value to be on a mountaintop. There's no value to be in an orbit. The whole point of the orbit is you're outside the atmosphere.

On the moon is no atmosphere, you're good. You're good to go. So I put them all on the far side of the moon. And it doesn't even have to look towards Earth where we have all of this contaminating radio wave noise and everything. I mean, Earth is just this messy thing in space. It is terrible.

That's a great idea, though, put it on the far side of the moon, though, to watch. Put all the telescopes there. Yeah, and then I would, you put, of all bandwidths. Right. You put all the telescopes of all the windows of the electromagnetic spectrum. The radio waves.

Everything. Everything. Everything. And now what would you like to see? I want, I'm ready for the next generation of telescope that can see gravitational waves and neutrinos. Wow. That is not electromagnetic. Not electromagnetic. Yeah. That would be fantastic.

I know. Look at that. Hey, great question, John Meyer. Way to go. All right, this is Tuomaz Li Mata. Okay. Tuomaz. Li-Mata.

How do you, how do you spot? Okay, T-U-O-M-A-A-M-A-T-A-A-M-A-A-M-A-M-A-M-A-M-A-Mata. There you go, I'm going to say that. All right. And he says, hey, is Tu-O-M-M-A-S from O-LU-F-L-LU-L-LU-R-R-L-T-L-R-E. Long-Lur-Ler. Yeah, so he's been watching forever, but he's a start-the-d-d-d-d-R- You just look over the shoulder. So now he pulled the trigger and now he's welcome aboard, my friend.

He says, I have a small question that I've been pondering for a very long time. Is time permanent? Thank you. Wow. I don't know. Mm-hmm. I mentioned John Archerbaud Wheeler a moment ago. He's famous for uttering the following sentence.

Matter tells space how to curve. Space tells matter how to move. Yeah. And that motion is defined to make time look simple. I love that. That's so great. Motion is defined to make time like simple. That's right.

That's right. Yeah. So, so it's time. So without that, who knows? Yeah, I mean, I want to believe that your whole timeline is just there and you're occupying this point in the present. On the arrow.

That's correct. Right. That's correct. I want to think that, and I can sort of do it. Because I can lay out what's going to happen. That's what a schedule is. What's your schedule? You're, you know, all going to be here on Thursday and there on Friday and there on Saturday.

And that's your future history. I don't know how you would live outside of a timeline. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Because where there is no time reckoning, then nothing moves. Exactly. Because then you can measure time by that.

otherwise right otherwise yeah so is that be kind of cool though i mean no it wouldn't be i hate that to be outside of time i hate the idea however that's what many people think um eternity in the afterlife is is that it's in a dimension that exists outside of time and that's why it's eternity because time does not exist you know right right right i see yeah okay that's the that's the reasoning given that's the reason in giving you know so you you know anyway um that's very cool man what a What a great thing to think about. By the way, if that's the case, if you're outside of time, then that's the realm of divinity, the realm of spiritual, these sorts of things.

I just don't know how a material object could be. Could you actually be there? Correct. Right. No, yeah, that's the whole idea. History allows us to remember our future. Nice. Yeah.

Anyway, Gavin Bambor says this, hello from North Vancouver. Please visit and please tell me How much does the universe weigh? In fact, I'm going to be in Vancouver Giving a public talk May 4th. May the 4th be with you. Yes.

May the Neil be with you, Vancouver. How much does the universe weigh? So you can just do that on the back of an envelope. Back of an envelope. Back of an envelope. Sound like a big envelope. Let's be in Manila. envelope at least.

So, yeah, you've got, we know the mass of the sun. We know the mass of all the planets, a fraction that of the sun. We can practically ignore them because it's just in the roundoff error. Then we know how many stars there are in the galaxy. Okay. Then we know how many galaxies there are in the universe. Okay. Then we know, because we have, we know where the edge of the observable universe is right.

Exactly. We know these numbers. Okay. All you have to do is multiply it up. Right. Okay. So the sun is two times ten of the 33 grams times, let's say 100 billion stars in the galaxy. So two times 10 to 33 times 10 to the 11th.

Mm-hmm. That's 100 billion. So that's two times 10 to the 43rd grams times possibly a trillion galaxy. Cs to the 12th power. So that 10 to the 50-something grams. Now, grams are small units, you want to measure the tons or something. Who cares? At that point, who cares?

The number is too big. The number is too big they even conceive of anyway. The real answer is, how much does the universe weigh? Fuck ton. That is the biggest unit of measure there is. That's right. You can't get bigger than that. I told you, I created this.

That's where I got it from. That's what you got it from. It's the vulgar, the vulgar metric system. Yeah, that's where I got it from. That's why I said it. So, because it's like, it's a, you know,

isn't there like an ass load of something? There's a shit load. A shit load. No, ass load is less than that. Right? Take this ass load of them, take it to the market. We've got more than that.

That's a shit load. And then, yeah. Yeah. So it's online somewhere. I think I had it at a Facebook post, but then it kind of hit it. Yeah. But it's out there. I know.

I know. I just remember it from that we. And when I did that, someone wrote it and said, this is beneath you. Yeah, of course. This is. Listen. Then I said, well, I've been hanging around Chuck. I was going to say, just blame me because I get that letter every day.

You bring down Dr. Tyson. Okay. What is he? Why is he sullying himself being around you, Chuck? Like so many. Really? surprised. You know what's interesting.

Wait, this guy wrote me, he went, I'm sorry, I'm got to, I got to say this because it's so funny. He goes, hey man, no disrespect, but I hate you. He's just like, please shut up. Please, just sit there and don't say anything. Right? And then he's just like, he's like, let Dr. Tyson give his talk, right? And I'm just like, bro, that's not the show.

What you're talking about is his lectures. If you want that, go go watch a lecture. Yeah, yeah. But anyway, it just tickles me, you know, when people, like, you know, there's a contingency out there that feels like I sell you. I mean no disrespect. I mean no disrespect. We get your head out of your ass. But I hate you.

Oh, it's so great. So that's how you measure the mass of things. You just multiply it all over. We got the numbers. Oh, oh, sorry. Sorry, I left out. Go ahead. Okay.

there's six times as much gravity in the universe as is what is created by that mass that I just calculated. Right. So if that extra gravity comes from matter, then we legitimately are calling it dark matter. So you take whatever number you multiply it, multiply by six. That's phenomenal.

Right. And we can do that without going out there with a scale. Right, yeah. There are ways to do this. Yeah. Didn't we have an explainer, was an explainer or question? But we weighed a truck. Yes. Yeah, we did that.

And basically it was about using the air tires in the truck and all that kind of stuff. Anyway, let's move on because we're getting derailed. Time for just a couple more. All right. This is Miele from Macedonia. She says, hey, Chuck, hey, Neil. Miele from Macedonia, Balkan Europe world. Japanese astrophysicists have defined, have identified a strong,

Gamma ray glow near the Milky Way Center matching predictions for annihilating dark matter particles, WIMPS. Okay? Weekly interacting massive particles. They call Wimps. Could you explain how these particles are different from regular matter? No. There you go.

I'm sorry. That's so great. The hunt for dark matter? Right. You know, you know who was doing that was. Katie Freeze. Right. We've had her as well.

You go dig up Katie Freeze. Yeah. Watch, that's actually a really fascinating episode that we have. Yeah, Freese. Yeah. Freese, F-R-E-E-E-S-E. Yes.

She's an expert on dark matter detection. She's theorist. She's a theorist. So she would think about what particle would interact with a dark matter particle for that to happen. Now, I'd be surprised if dark matter interacted

with such ferocity that would be giving us gamma rays. Right. That's a little bit mysterious to me. Right. Because it's, it's, we would see that everywhere. Right, exactly. You'd think.

Yeah, exactly. You can't take this one example in our own Milky Way and say, see? What do you have a trillion other galaxies? Right, right, right. That should be a common phenomenon. It should show up someplace. Our sample size is so large, you can see even rare phenomenon every night. Boom, that's awesome.

Yes. I love that. Mm-hmm. All right. A quick reference to medicine. If I have a new pill, a new cure for something. Okay. And it's medicine that you take.

It's not safe for This is an old saying in the field It's not safe for anyone Until everyone has tested it Exactly Think about that You can test on a thousand people But if you have a condition that's one in a million

It's not likely that you weren't in that sample You're not in that sample Exactly, yeah So ideally you would test on everyone They know exactly who For whom it works and who it doesn't That's not realistic It isn't realistic

Whereas the universe is big enough so that extremely rare things happen all the time. Yeah. Right. Last question, Chuck, is all we have time for. All right. Let's go with Larry McGuire, who says, hey, Dr. Tyson. Jerry McGuire? Show me the question.

This is Larry McGuire. This is Larry McGuire. He says, hey, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice. Larry from Caledon, British Columbia. just down the road from the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory. I use software that they wrote. Oh, really? There's an important colleague of mine from that observatory who wrote data reduction software.

All right. And it was the primary software I used for my thesis, which is sitting right there. That big old fat book down there. Yeah, yeah. So he says, I'm curious about your tools to keep looking up. What was your first telescope? and do you still have a telescope and what type is it? Okay, very good, thank you.

That's a question to end on. All right. So my first encounter with the night sky was this dome of the Hayden Planetarium. Oh, that's so cool. Because I grew up in the Bronx. There's no night sky to New Yorkers. We had no relationship. Right.

And so that was my first night sky. Okay. Then a friend of mine, my best friend growing up, he was smarter than me in like many countable ways. He taught me chess, he taught me poker, he taught me gambling, he taught me... Wow, that doesn't sound like a good friend. I'm just saying, that's how people feel about me hanging around you. He was your Chuck Nice.

He was just like, all right, let me show you how to gamble. All his grades were higher than mine and everything. So, oh, in fact, I'll give his name. His name is Philip Branford. And when I was on Celebrity Jeopardy, I pointed him out in the audience. Oh, really? Yeah. He came to the show.

He came to the show. Came to the show, I pointed him out, and I say, he first got me to watch Jeopardy. First got me to watch Jeopardy and first dude to give me drugs. What was your first telescope? Okay. So, he had a pair of binoculars. Oh, cool. And so I'd look through the binoculars, and I never knew.

We weren't wealthy enough to have, like, binoculars just laying around. Yeah. That's a different, you know. Yeah, that's a whole other income. That's an income level thing. Exactly. It's income, just a level. Just a level.

Just a level. Just a level. Just a level. Just a level. lane around the house. Right, exactly. Oh, get the binoculars when we go to the... Abder!

Look at what they're doing over there, Abner. When should you get Abner? I don't know. Anyway. Okay. So, he invited me to look up with them, and I saw the moon. And the moon wasn't just bigger. Yeah. It was better.

Yeah. It was, oh my gosh. And you don't want to look at a full moon because that sucks. Yeah. You want to look like a half moon. It's blown out. Yeah. Any photographer knows.

Yeah. You don't directly... illuminate something. Right. There are no shadows. There's no depth. You wait for this, there to be shadows.

Any other phase, ideally half moon, which is officially called the first quarter or last quarter, first or third quarter, moons. So, yeah, longest shadows visible.

I'm looking at it with a binoculars, it's like, whoa, this is like a whole other thing. Nice. Oh my God. I felt like I was there. Nice. Yeah.

So that was like, tip me off that stuff was going on up there that the human eye does not notice. Right. So then... That was your gateway. This... This...

This... Yes. The binoculars were the gateway drug. That was your gateway drug. Curiosity. Yeah, yeah. Cosmic curiosity. Then when I'm 11...

Okay. We moved to Lexington, Massachusetts. Okay. We spent just a year there. My father had an academic appointment. Okay. And for just one year, in the Kennedy School of Government.

All right. Yeah. Now it's just called... The Trump... School of government. But no one wants to perform that. You're talking about the Kennedy Center? Okay.

You know, I'm a city kid and we're living in a private house. What's up with that? Right. You want me to do what with this shovel? You want me to do what with this rake? Right, right, right. Oh, isn't it snow pretty?

Right. And then they hand me a shovel. Of course. Right. It's like, what? Yeah. Okay. And then it's autumn.

And the leaves on the ground. What? Yeah. The grass gets long. Okay. What? Yeah. I'm a city kid.

Yeah, you're like, you're pining for the city again. We just stayed. It was someone else's private home for a year. Right. That's what it was. Yeah. They were on sabbatical or something. Anyway, my interest in the universe was stoked.

Because I learned that Harvard had a center for astrophysics. Interesting. The whole department event. It was like, whoa. That's like really cool. And so my parents saw this, and they took me there from one of their open house nights. They had telescopes. Wow.

And it was like, I died and went to heaven. And I'm 11 years old. Wow. For my birthday, in October, that year when I turning 12, they bought me my first telescope. It was a 2.4 inch refracting telescope. that telescope I rapidly outgrew. But, I mean, I saw the rings of Saturn, the weather bands on Jupiter,

Jupiter's moons, nebulae, the Andromeda galaxy, the sunspots, I had special filters for that. And then, like, 12 of my parents just let me out and observed the sun. They never even asked. I think they... That's cool, man. They just trusted that I knew what the hell I was doing.

Well, no kid walks out with a telescope to go get in trouble. Hey, guys, I'll be right back. Yeah, I'm going to go rob a bank with this telescope. No. No. I'm just, in retrospect, they would never concern that I did not know what I was doing. Right.

That's, I'm not kind of angry. Listen. Yeah. I mean, you can't, you're not going to question your kid when they're just like, yeah, I want to go look at the sky. Yeah, with a telescope. With the telescope. Okay, yeah. So, and then when it did snow, you know, it's, you know, it's.

This is New England, right? So there's a lot of snow there. I'd want to take the telescope out back. And winter nights are long. Right. Anywhere, they're long. And the air is crisp. There's much less humidity.

Right. And so the really good, some of the best observing is in very cold nights. So I dug a path into the middle of our back. We had a backyard and a little circle. And that was my little observatory circle. And I would take the telescope out there and I had several eyepieces. And that's what I did. That's very cool.

Okay, so within a year, I outgrew the telescope. Okay. Okay. Tad of looking at this thing. Stuck. No, so they, we sold it to a friend, like, acquaintance, and then I would then buy my own telescope the next year. Gotcha.

When I was 13, maybe a year and a half later. I'd buy my own telescope with money I earned by walking dogs. And that was a six-inch new telescope. Optics reflecting telescope. Well, okay. It's six inch telescope. Nice. That telescope I took to Africa to view a total solar eclipse when I was 14.

And I lied until everyone I was 15. Oh, yeah, because that made a difference. Because I wanted to respect. I was 16. I went alone on this cruise. It was like a science expedition to the... Very nice. So I took my telescope with a big old...

The telescope is huge at a big old crate. That telescope was, has since been gifted to a museum of science in Kentucky who decided to make an exhibit of famous people's first telescope. Interesting. They have my telescope. They have your telescope. It's like on permanent loan there. That's great. I haven't visited there.

I don't know if it's on display or anything. Right. They got my telescope. That's cool. And it also took into the Mojave Desert where I was, an astronomy, lived nocturnally in an astronomy camp. Very nice.

Talk about geeking out. Yeah, man. Who else is going to be there? But like crazy other... Other, yeah, geeks. That's it. That's funny. Girl geeks and boy geeks.

And we were all there. And since then, I went a long period without a telescope when I went to college. And I said, time, I got to get back in the game here. Much later, when I had some cash, then I bought a very high. high quality optical telescope.

And since then, I have two digital telescopes. Which takes some of the fun out. You know, you just set it. You just set up the tripod. Go back into your warm. It's the rompopee of telescope. Set it and forget it. You just, you go back in to your warm living room.

Right. And you just guide it with your iPad. Love it. So, I'm old school. Make it hard for me. Love that. Love it. So, yeah.

So at the time I was a member of the amateur astronomers club, which had monthly meetings here at the American Museum of Natural History under the shadow of the Hayden Planetarium. So I go way back in this. Nice. That's what it is. Those are my telescopes. Very nice.

Oh, and in this office, I have a 2.4-inch refracting telescope, which is not my original, but it's exactly the same side. Like, right. Okay. And in the hallway of the astrophysics department, there's a six-inch Newtonian reflecting telescope, which is exactly the size of my telescope. But they were selling them in the shop 50 years ago. Wow. And this one was the display model, and we just kept it now that the shop is all blended with

the other shops. Very nice. And so those are my two members. No, you were the first. No one in the department knows this. Right. That I had that telescope there and this telescope there. that same optics.

And so when I see them, I feel a little nostalgia. A little nostalgia. Yeah, except for when I was on the roof with my telescope. Right. And then neighbors call the cops. Oh, well, yeah. Because, you know, you can't have a black man on the roof. With something that looks like a bazook.

With something that looks like a bazoo. I think he's going to murder the president. I'm not sure. He's up there with a big scope. Yeah, yeah. It's a cop approaches me hand over his gun. It's like, what the hell? I'm a 15-year-old.

kid. That's funny. You know, just absorbing the universe. Nice. One last thing, and then we got to call it quits here. Okay. So there's some children's books that tell my story growing up. Okay.

And one of them retells that story of me on the roof. And they show the cops showing up. Uh-huh. And, but then the cops show up and I say, have you ever seen Saturn through a telescope before? Right. And then they're enchanted. They're on.

But up until that moment, it's actually quite tense. Of course. Because they don't know what I'm telling them to look at. Right. You know. You got them with Saturn. You gotta have the moon or Saturn and ready to...

That's a good one to get anybody. Get anybody. And that children's book, which showed the cop was banned in Pennsylvania. Oh, no. For what? Because it was showing...

A police officer in a bad light? Yes. Do you remember there was a period of book banning that wanted to protect the image? Yeah, and so... And I tracked it. And it was only on the ban list for about six months, six to eight months. Those people who banned those books, they would like the version where the cops show up and they go,

oh, well, hello, young Negro. And then they'd like to introduce you to somebody. And then all of a sudden they bring out Carl Sagan. And you're like, oh, my God. And everybody loves happily. It's not how that one went down. Exactly. Right.

All right. So that's my story of my telescope. Oh, well, that was cool. Yeah, thank you for that question. Yeah. Very good. All right. All right.

We got to call it quits there. Well, there you have it. That was as popioree a selection of questions as there ever was. That's why they're fun. There you go. Chuck, always good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. Neil deGrasse Tyson for StarTalk Cosmic Queries.

Until next time, keep looking up. With or without a telescope.