StarTalk Radio - Cosmic Queries – Wormhole Universe

Episode Date: August 22, 2023

Does an evaporated black hole leave a trace? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian co-host Chuck Nice answer questions about the fabric of spacetime, black holes, cosmic evolution and more. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://startalkmedia.com/show/cosmic-queries-wormhole-universe/Thanks to our Patrons Cory James Hohs, Barbara Christian, Massimiliano Squire, Nickthelight, Stacey Kelch, and Joe Edwards for supporting us this week.Photo Credit: ESO/WFI (Optical); MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A.Weiss et al. (Submillimetre); NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al. (X-ray)Derivative work including grading and crop: Julian Herzog, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Nobody said there's no gravity in space. This is one of the biggest delusions that pervades our culture and our storytelling. Yeah, Joe, why are you so delusional? Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Hey, everybody. Neil deGrasse Tyson here.

And I'm Lindsay Nix-Walker. And Neil and I, we just co-authored a brand new StarTalk book, and it's coming out very soon. Yeah, this is the third in a series of collaborations with National Geographic Books. And this one is titled, To Infinity and Beyond. And it's available for pre-order

from the StarTalk website, startalkmedia.com slash books. If you pre-order it, you gain access to a live stream that Lindsay Walker and I will do from this office. And you have the occasion to submit questions that we will answer. Yep, that's right. So if they go to startalkmedia.com slash books,

they can pre-order and ask us their query, whatever they want. I mean, I know that Startalk fans can ask some really fun off-the-wall questions, so I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with here. All right. Right now, get ready for the next episode of StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. I got with me Chuck Nice. Chuck.

Yo, what's up, Neil? Chuck, is this themed or is it unthemed Cosmic Queries? What do you got for me today? This is completely unthemed. Okay, so grab bag. This is grab bag. I think people like grab bag. Yeah.

It seems that. It feels like they get totally into it. You know why? Because it's kind of like, you know, the prize in a Happy Meal or a box of crackers. You don't know what you're going to get. It's the Forrest Gump of StarTalk shows. No, no, box of chocolates. Okay.

It's the box of chocolates. Okay. All right. You don't know what you're going to get. So let's get into it, I guess, right? Okay, we'll start with GR. Box of chocolates. Who had the idea that you could improve chocolate by putting a gooey liquid that's not chocolate inside of it?

This is one of the biggest mysteries of my life. I'm sure it was someone from the sugar industry. You don't want all that nasty chocolate. No, that chocolate. Let's put in a gooey cherry. Corn syrup, baby. That's where the action is. Chocolate.

Who wants that crap? Corn syrup. And it's probably all cheaper than the chocolate that would have been in that volume in all of those candies. A hundred percent. You know it. Good chocolate is expensive, man. in all of those candies. A hundred percent. You know it. Yeah, good chocolate is expensive, man. There's a great place not too far from where you live that they have like just tremendously

like high-grade chocolate. No, I know that place where they have a big window you can see. It's like Willy Wonka or something. Yeah, yeah. And good chocolate. You're making the Easter bunnies coming off the assembly line, you know, off the factory line.

Yeah. Yeah, man. Yeah. All right, here we go. This is GR. He says, when on Star Trek, they talk about subspace. What the hell are they talking about? Okay, so.

Is it just a plot device? Is subspace a real thing? What the hell are they talking about? Okay, so... Is it just a plot device? Is subspace a real thing? What the hell is going on? Thank you, George Rader. Radier. Okay, so my answer is, I don't know. We would need Charles Liu for that. Charles Liu.

But what I can tell you is, yes, I think it was a plot device because otherwise they can't communicate with anybody. Okay? If you're across the galaxy and I send you a signal, you're going to wait 100,000 years for the signal to get you at the speed of light. So subspace is some way that I don't know and I don't understand. I don't care that it's not actually physical.

I don't even know how it works within the world of Star Trek. But you know Charles Liu knows it. So we'd have to do an emergency call to him. That gets up on the line. But as a plot point, you need that because without it, how are they going to talk back to headquarters? Because if you send a signal and they're halfway across the galaxy, that signal will take 50,000 years to reach them. Yes. And a round trip will take 100,000 years if one of them is in the middle of the galaxy and one is at the edge.

So you need some way for signals to reach their destination as though you're just having a phone call with them. And they're talking in real time. Basically real time, correct. Yeah, it's like... So as I understand it, subspace enables this. Otherwise, communication would just be pointless and impossible. Yeah.

Witty repartee would not be a thing. We can't even talk to Voyager 37 hours. 37 hours at a time. It takes us to talk to Voyager. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Exactly. So they had to figure out how to get around that. Yeah, okay. That's it. All right, George. Radier or Radier, Radier,

whatever, George. It's not a, Radier, whatever. George. It's not a whatever. It's the man's name. Whatever his name. Oh, you know, you should have an easier name, George. I don't say Chukeniche. Chukeniche. Oh, whatever.

No, I'm Chuck Nice. See? I got to tell you, I don't really mind the Chukeniche. Chukeniche. I'm kind of digging the Chu-K-Ni-Che. You know, you said it. It had a little ring to it. I gotta be honest.

Because in Italian, a C is a C-H. And a C-H is a C sound. Right. So C-H-E is K in Italian. And C-E is Cha. Cha. We'll call you Nietzsche. Yeah Ch. So it's Nietzsche. We'll call you Nietzsche.

Yeah, Nietzsche. Here we go. This is the artist formerly known as James Smith. And James says, hey, Neil. Hey, Chuck. James from Indianapolis here. So in the very far future, when a black hole is done with Hawking radiation, what is left over once the black hole is gone? Does the space in which the black hole occupied

have a large rip in it? Or is the space around the black hole reverted into the form which was there before the black hole was formed? Thanks, guys. So does black hole do something to the fabric of space where it makes a divot? Does the Black Hole leave

a paw print? A paw print. Black Hole was here, right? Or did it pee in that section of the universe? Yeah, another Black Hole comes along, sniffs it, and goes, okay, I either gotta mark this or move on.

So, it is an actual, literal evaporation. I mean, by a different mechanism, of course, by Hawking radiation. But,

so, the size of the event horizon, as the black hole shrinks from Hawking radiation, the size of the event horizon shrinks with it. It gets smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller.

And the nature of the radiation that comes out is you can approximate it by the wavelength of the light that it emits is approximately the same size as the size of the event horizon itself. Oh, wow. So big black holes give off radio waves as Hawking radiation. As they get smaller and smaller, they give off higher and higher energy light. So radio waves and microwaves, then infrared, then red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. Gamma.

X-rays, gamma rays. So the gamma rays have the tiniest wavelengths. So as the black hole gets littler and littler and littler, the evaporation rate increases and the nature of the Hawking radiation changes to become higher and higher energy radiation. Did not know that! Yes, so that in the last instant,

it's just a puff of gamma rays. And then it disappears completely. That's amazing. And in fact, I think the original paper, one of the original papers of Hawking, describes this as a source of gamma rays in the universe that you might observe.

Right, right, right, right. That's really cool. So it is a literal evaporation, like a pool of water drying up. Except it might leave some residue, like mineral residue or something. Black hole leave no residue at all. There's nothing. There's nothing. Right. Correct. Cool. Wow. Now, the weird thing is, black holes, there's some mathematics derived from Einstein that tells us that inside a black hole, it opens up to another

universe, another space-time system. And so if that's the case, what happens to that universe when the black hole evaporates? Nice. Whoever was smoking weed in that universe stobbers up and it's over. That little universe is gone. I saw that universe before. I can't believe I saw this universe, man. It was just right there in my thumb. So you're going to write a book, The Universe According to We. Is that what you're going to do? Yes.

It's a good book. I'll call it Astrophysics for Stoners in a Hurry. That's so funny. No, for stoners who ain't in a hurry. I never see anybody in a hurry. That's right. That's true. You never see anybody rushing when they're high.

That is so very... Urgency is not a matter when you are stoned. Plus, I've been in a car where the person driving was stoned, and it's like they're driving real slow. It's a funny thing to feel safe. Let me stay on the right-hand side. I'll drive real slow so that no one will know I'm high. Of course.

And everybody knows, like, yeah, clearly, as tricycle pass you, they know that you are. Oh, tricycles. Get on a tricycle pass, you know, that you are. Tricycles. Get on a tricycle pass. You know, okay, this dude is stoned. Yeah. Yeah, that's cool. All right.

What's next? Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. All right. This is David Sargent. And he says, speaking of driving,

look at what he says. Things StarTalk make me contemplate while I'm driving. With the size of planets affecting space-time, i.e. gravity, would cultures of huge planets, say the size of Jupiter, only solid, have everything in life moving slower? Slow music, for example, or in the opposite extreme, a tiny planet, everything moving fast. So there you go. Yeah.

So he's talking about general relativity. What's the person's name again? This is David Sargent. David Sargent. So he's talking about, he knows, maybe he might remember from the Interstellar film where they went down to a black hole planet and they were deep in a gravitational well. And if you were in an environment of high gravity,

time will tick more slowly for you than if you're in a place of low or no gravity. So it's relative, okay? Right. So planets, their gravity is not high enough for any of the big planets, little planets, is not high enough for any of this to make any important difference in anybody's life. So don't confuse the fact that the black hole planet in the film Interstellar

was in the gravitational well of the black hole itself. Of the black hole. Exactly. The black hole was doing the work, not the planet. The black hole was doing the time dilation rather than the planet itself. So, if you're just talking about

planets orbiting the same star or regular star, this is not something to think about or worry about. Gotcha. Now, what about in Star Trek where the people from heavy gravity planets are super strong?

Would that be feasible? That could happen. Okay. That could happen. That could happen. Because you, whatever you weigh here on Jupiter, so if you weigh, let's say 150 pounds here, you weigh 500 pounds on a planet.

And so if you are thriving there, you'll have muscles that will accommodate this extra weight of your body. The really thick stubby legs. Like, I mean, think about it. If you want to be heavy, you need stuff like a hippopotamus. Right. Like an elephant. Right. Now, a giraffe is big, but they're not really all that heavy. Right.

So they can get away with these spindly legs. I'm talking about big, chunky, you know. So if you put a giraffe on a heavy planet, it'll break its legs. Yeah, it'll crush itself. Crush itself. Right, correctly. Whereas a hippo would probably do just fine. Right, exactly. No. Yeah, crush itself. Crush itself. Right, correctly. Whereas a hippo probably do just fine. Right,

exactly. No, no, no. So, yeah, so you'd have to, your physiology would have to be strong enough to accommodate that. And then you come to a light planet, like Earth, and you would be stronger than other people probably, is my bet.

I am from Jupiter. Okay. In a movie, oh, what was the movie? This kid was born on Mars. The Space Between Us. There was an astronaut. It takes about nine months to get to Mars.

There was an astronaut who got on board and I don't remember the plot line, whether she knew or did not know if she was pregnant, okay? Or she, like, made love the night before she went on. But anyhow, she gives birth on Mars. And NASA has to keep that covered up, because you know you can't. So this kid was a secret kid raised on Mars.

And then they brought him back like in his teens. And the Earth's gravity was like so heavy because Mars, you weigh less. So he was feeling the stress of Earth's gravity. And yeah. That actually sounds like my life. Stop. I too had a secret kid. I too had a secret kid.

I forgot all about that. With the maid. With the maid. That's right. Oh, okay. Chuck. You don't let nothing go by here. No, no. Well, listen.

God bless him. That's all I can say. I'm Joel Cherico, and I make pottery. You can see my pottery on my website, CosmicMugs.com. Cosmic Mugs, art that lets you taste the universe every day. And I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Why Kos says this. Hello, Neilil what's up chuck uh could the universe have started off with a much

higher initial entropy if so how would the universe have been different also what's what's entropy entropy. Thanks a million. I love that. That's pretty funny. Okay. So, entropy is, we quantify it in physics, but in a spoken way,

entropy is a way to measure how disordered a system is. So let's take, you have a rectangular box and there's air inside the box. And I take all the air and shove it to one half the box. Okay? And the other set part of the box, there's like, there's nothing. Okay? That is more ordered than it would become if I remove the separator from the middle

of that box. Because you know, if I remove the separation, what would happen? All the air would just rush all over the place and all the molecules in the air would be like, right. Yeah, yeah. It would just become evenly spread throughout. And so, because the air would just do that naturally. That is going from a

high-ordered state to a lower-ordered state. And another one. I have a glass of water. Right. And I take a drop of ink, and I drop it into one corner of the one

little bit. And in that moment, there's ink here and there's water everywhere else. There's an ordering to that. Okay? Because you can point to something here and it's not there and that's over there and it's not over here. You give it time, the ink dissipates. It's all

caught up in everything. All the molecules take it in and the ink gets completely spread. In my high school- That's why we don't want no ink moving in our neighborhood, because that's how it happens. That's how it happens. Starts off with one little house, one little ink house. One little ink house, then before you know it, you got four or five ink houses in your neighborhood.

Hey, what's going on here? Now what's happening to the schools? Oh, wait a minute. So in my high school, we had this huge cylinder. We call it graduated cylinder. Those are the educated ones, the graduated cylinder. It's an old joke.

It's an old science joke. So we had a huge, it was like three feet tall. It was huge. And it was in one of the display cases. In most high schools, in their display case, what do you find? Trophies. Trophies of the sports.

But my high school was the Bronx High School of Science. There were no sports trophies. That's funny. So there's a huge graduated cylinder. And there was a layer of ink at the bottom, and they slowly put water on top of it. And throughout the year, you would watch the ink work its way up into this cylinder. So it was like a living exhibit of the diffusion of one liquid into another. Nice.

Rather than just stir it, of course. Stir it, it'll happen. So it'll do that naturally. It'll become higher disorder than it previously had. So that's entropy. Okay. Okay. So we were very highly ordered

at the beginning of the universe. Right. Because all the matter, energy, was all in one place, in one very localized place as stuff expands it's like the gas going into the other half of the day like the ink going into the thing the entropy um so it was highly ordered and so then we go to high disorder as the universe expands. And so there you have it. And the end of the universe is total, total disorder.

No order at all. There'll be no machines, no phenomenon. Because if there's a phenomenon, it means there's order to make the phenomenon happen. Okay? If everything is completely spread out, nothing can happen. So we will die.

The universe will end not with a bang, but with a whimper. And not in fire, but in ice. Look at that. As the temperature cools. So anyhow,

I mean, you can't get more ordered than the universe occupying less than the size of an atom. So you can't really adjust that. Right. everything is very localized okay okay so there you go uh that's it all right oh by the way this the the disorder is natural in a closed system so that box is a closed system. You can reverse entropy if you add energy to it. Okay? Oh!

We are alive and our molecules are scattered all over the world. We are a higher order of things than what preceded us here on Earth. Okay? So, religious communities, for the longest while, who knew a little bit about this entropy rule of thermodynamics said, see, we have order, and that's against the second law of thermodynamics, and so

therefore God made us. So, you don't hear them give that argument anymore because one of them must have taught the others, after they took some physics, that Earth is not a closed system. You can't get a closed system and have sunlight. Yes, exactly. I mean, we could only be a closed system

with a giant umbrella. Correct. Correct. Completely enclosed Earth. And watch what happens. All right? So you take out the base of the food chain, which are all the plants that are undergoing photosynthesis.

Then you kill all of the animals that depend on the plants. So all the herbivores, the plants die first, then the herbivores, then the animals that live off the herbivores, the predators, they die. And we all die and decompose in the earth. And there you have entropy at work. Look at that.

That's the coolest explanation of entropy I've ever heard. And there's a way to quantify it with equations. Okay. Yeah. Very cool, man. All right, here we go. This is Christian Holmes. And Christian Holmes says,

Hello, Dr. Tyson. Lord, nice. I have a question about time. I recently learned from watching Dr. Brian Greene that the fabric of space-time emerges from quantum entanglement. This explains that space is woven of quantum wormholes. But does that mean time emerges also? If so, what collection of quantum phenomena does time emerge from? Or is time merely the passing of one quantum phenomena to the next? I really

appreciate both of your thoughts. Hey, thank you, Christian from Pennsylvania. So there you have it. I too only recently learned from Brian Green the recent thinking, this emergent thinking, that the virtual particles in the vacuum of space that pop in and out of existence, that they're quantum entangled while they are separated. And that quantum entanglement may itself be the thread that stitches the fabric of the space-time continuum.

But notice I said space-time. So is it also stitching time? I don't know the latest thinking on that. But if time, according to Einstein, was invented to make motion look simple, motion looks simple, then time is just something we create to measure the flow, to measure sequences of events, to know what happened before what, and the intervals that separated these events from those. So in that sense, I don't know if time is a fundamental property of space-time or whether we've attached it afterwards.

I don't know. Interesting. Oh, man. Well, look at that, Christian. There you have it. Now you got some deeper looking to do. That's all. You gave Neil some homework, Christian. No, could one of these threads be the time thread? You know, I don't know. It could be, right? What I do know is threads you can always unweave. Whereas for time, as I've said before, we are prisoners of the present. Right. Forever transitioning between our inaccessible past and our unknowable future. Interesting.

Let me ask you this. If we're prisoners of time, which we are, of course, meaning that we can't go back, undo things, and go forward again. Our prison is one direction. What about dimensionally? Let's say I'm a higher being in a higher dimension. Could I screw with our time in this lower dimension?

There's no reason why you wouldn't. So, for example, you're inside a room there where you're doing this recording. Right. So if you had access to a higher dimension so you could see the timeline, then you're no longer a prisoner. You can just rejoin the timeline.

I can pick a point in the timeline and do whatever. That's right. So I'll give an example. So let's say you're an ant and you're living in just two dimensions. And I draw a box around you. Sorry, a square around you. You're in prison. You can't get out.

Until the ant learns, wait a minute, there's a third dimension. Let me just go up into that third dimension, step out of the square, and I'm free from this prison. I can't believe you're saying this. I just saw this online two days ago where somebody put an ant on a white piece of paper. As the ant crawled, they took a ballpoint

fountain pen and they drew, and wherever they drew the ant would not go. It thought that it was blocked from going there. Really? Okay. Yeah. So cool.

Like an edge. Okay. So there it is. So it's not thinking of a third dimension to go up and around and over it. So you can imprison two-dimensional creatures with a square. Okay? Right. Because they don't know about the third dimension.

Now, we can imprison three-dimensional creatures with a cube. Okay? Right. I'll put you in the cube. Unless you have access to your timeline. If you have access to your timeline, if you step into the timeline, occupy a timeline when you're not in the cube, go back into your timeline, and you just escaped.

You never had to open a door or a window of your room to do so. Amazing! I love it! There it is. Super cool. There you go. Alright. Okay, cool. Alright, let's move on. This is C. Spinos. And C. Spinos says, could black holes just

be wormholes? I mean, do we just don't know? I'm just thinking out loud, guys. So I think he wants black holes to be wormholes. I think that's what he really wants is for black holes to be wormholes. There was more work done on wormholes,

especially inspired by Carl Sagan's novel Contact, when he was buds with Kip Thorne, a relativist physicist, astrophysicist at Caltech, where you run through more of the equations, and you can, in principle, just punch a wormhole through the fabric of space without reference to a black hole or a white hole.

But you need some way to pry open space and keep it there. So you need like negative, negative matter that can pull open space rather than collapse space. And so that works, our equations give it to you, but we don't know any substance such as negative matter. So wormholes are really just, for now, the realm of science fiction. There you go. Look at that. Yeah. But they do work out mathematically. That's fascinating. Yes, they do. Yes, they do. That's super cool, man. That is just super cool. All right. This is Anthroposcopic Dylan. Love it. Anthroposcopic, I'm sorry, anthropocosmic. Anthropocosmic Dylan.

Okay. Greetings, Dr. Tyson and Dr. Comedy. Neil, build off of your past StarTalk episodes, can you talk about the lineage of the stars? How are the elements that we are made of connected to our sun's generation, or put another way, the cosmic and stellar evolution of the universe. Thank you, Dylan from San Diego.

I love it. So in my field, we've binned the star populations into three, four, yeah, four groups. So with Roman numerals except we have a zero and the Romans

didn't have a zero, right? There's no zero in Roman numerals. That's why there's no zero in the Julian calendar where they try to put the birth of Jesus at the beginning of the calendar. There's no zero. It went from 1 BC to AD 1. But anyhow, you don't invent the zero or the Hindus invented the zero.

And then it migrated to Baghdad. And then the Arabs did great things with it. And, you know, fully developing algebra and other things. Bam! That's a whole other side. Nice. So, the first stars in the universe, we call those Population 3. Okay?

Population 3. Yes. Well, sorry. The stars right here, we call those Population 1. Okay. Population 1. All right. What does that mean?

Stars like the sun Have a certain amount Of heavy elements in it You can measure them How much iron Silicon Nitrogen Oxygen

Heavier than hydrogen and helium Okay As we looked In certain parts of the galaxy We found stars That had way less Heavy elements We call those

Population two Population two Okay Population 2. Okay. These did not have the benefit of multiple generations of stars before them, only maybe a couple of generations of stars, enriching their heavy element abundance. Got you. We're Pop 1.

Those are Pop 2. And someone said, well, let's imagine a Pop 3, which would be the very first stars, and they have no heavy elements at all. Right. So we are, by this measure, a third generation star system. And if a star born today, we might call that Pop 4. No, am I doing it the right way? No, Pop 0.

I'm sorry. Pop 0, right. Yeah, we might call it Pop 0. We should have probably numbered it the other way, but it's too late. The other way so we could keep going, yeah. You need to keep going. Yeah, yeah. And the stars that look like cute little boys that make girls scream would be K-pop.

I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that. I don't know what the hell I was thinking. What? I just, I just took my daughter to a K. Yeah. I took my daughter to a,

it was crazy. It was, I went to a K-pop concert not too long ago. And there it is. You're absolved. And I'm, and I'm scarred. That's what it is.

You're absolved. And I'm scarred. That's what it is. You're absolved. All right. Let's go back to our questions. And this is Ryan A. He says, greetings, Neil. Greeting your lordship. This is Ryan from Ontario, Canada here. Neil, you once said you had an answer to the simulation theory where either we are first or the last in the series.

And since we haven't invented the ability yet, it can't be real. However, what if the simulation is not produced by our species, but another in the universe? Thanks for making my brain bigger every week, Neil. So there you go. That's Ryan A., who wants to know, are you saying… If someone else is creating us, that's fine. However, it only works as something that's scary if it's self-propagating.

All right? That's the whole idea here. If the original authentic universe creates a model, you know, a computer universe, and they believe they have free will, so then they create one, and they create one,

and it's that all the way down until the last one, which hasn't evolved yet, to create one. So, this is a real universe creating fake universes. Right. What you're saying is you want… Just a super intelligent species that has supercomputers, they're all quantum, and they're able to create… That's fine, but then they have to make a different one and they make another one and that's more effort. So yeah it could be.

I'm not denying that but you don't get this sort of runaway effect where everybody is making versions of itself within their own computing system. Right. Okay. Yeah. Your way is more fun is what you're saying. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Your way is more fun is what you're saying.

All right. This is Joe Ingracia. And Joe Ingracia says this. Hey, Neil. Hey, Chuck. This is Joe from Missouri. If you're in space where you are not affected by any gravity, how do you know if you're going up, down, left, right,

or any direction if you don't have, down, left, right, or any direction if you don't have any instruments to tell you? Okay, first of all, nobody said there's no gravity in space. This is one of the biggest delusions that pervades our culture and our storytelling. Yeah, Joe, why are you so delusional? You go into space en route to the moon. You can't say there's no gravity there because what do you think the moon is orbiting? Right.

Okay. The moon feels our gravity and is in orbit around us. gravity and is in orbit around us. This whole notion that space has no gravity comes about because of the way we travel between destinations in space. You know how we do it? I'm going to head for Mars. I'm going to fire my engines right now, cut them off, and coast to Mars. If you're coasting anywhere in the universe, you are weightless. Period. But if you turn on the engines, you're going to feel some G-forces, and that G basically counts as weight,

according to your body. So you have weight that way. That's if you want to get anywhere fast. And what was the film where they had the moon pirates? That crazy film. Ad Astra. In the film Ad Astra. Yes. Brad Pitt was Astra, I think Brad Pitt

was that. That was Brad Pitt? Yeah, yeah. They had these scenes where everyone just wait, listen to the spaceship, even though the engines are firing. Right. So thorough is their belief that being in space makes you wait. So, that's the first point.

Second, down, it's whichever direction you're falling. Yeah. That's funny. Right? That's funny. So if you're coasting towards the moon, down is towards the moon. Right.

All right. I think it's that simple. There you go. That's really, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. It's very simple. All right? I think it's that simple. There you go. That's really, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. It's very simple. That's how you can find out. All right.

Super cool. Super cool. All right, here we go. This is Walker Foland. And Walker Foland says, Hello, Dr. Tyson. Lord, nice. This is Walker Foland from West Branch, Michigan.

Recently, I read that the fabric of space-time may be wormholes that are entangled between particles. Is it possible that the correlation of the… Like the previous question. Like the previous question. This is getting around. People are on to this, man. Is it possible the correlation of mass and gravitational pull have to do with the number of entangled particles that are in that mass?

particles that are in that mass. In other words, the more dense a body is, the more entangled particles it has. Therefore, the more micro wormholes would go to that mass. Could this explain the very nature of gravity and why its relation and its relation to time? I imagine that wormholes would act as a conduit for mass to accumulate. I imagine that wormholes would act as a conduit for mass to accumulate. I would love to hear your thoughts.

Wow. I got to think about that. I got to. You know, we'll hold that question next time we bring a drag Brian Greene. Yeah, exactly. Into a cosmic craze. So what he's saying is,

if the wormholes are part of the fabric of space and time, and wormholes can attract objects to them, not only other wormholes, but just more stuff, could that in fact be what causes gravity? And I don't have a good answer for that. Yeah, that's a pretty wild question, bro. I got to give it to you. Well, how about Margaret Berry here?

So now we got to have Brian Green on. Thanks for giving us a reason to have Brian back. Okay, here's Margaret Berry. She says, hi, Chuck. Hi, Neil. This is Margaret from North Carolina. My question is this. If all forms of energy have both

particle and wave attributes, doesn't this itself define string theory? Ooh. Ooh. No. And that's our show, people. Thank you so much.

Bye. And that's our show, people. Thank you so much. Strings are one-dimensional concentrations of energy living in a higher dimension. And yes, they vibrate. And depending on how they vibrate, they will manifest as one kind of particle or another. A wave, however, is not a string.

Right. Okay? It's just not. So I don't know that you can connect the wave particle duality with the string that you'd find in string theory. Yeah, I don't think you can do that. Yeah. Okay.

Well, there you go, Margaret. I mean, it was a nice try. Nice try. That was a nice try, Margaret. She was like, I'm on to something. Well, there you go, Margaret. I mean, it was a nice try. It was a nice try, Margaret. She was like, I'm on to something. Let me tell you. Like, listen, I figured out the strength theory. No, that

was very cool. Very cool, Margaret. Thank you. All right. That's all we have. So those are Patreon members at $5 a month. Get your access to this. Listen, people. I think those numbers are growing. Maybe this was a carrot that everybody needed. I don't know. But yeah, the numbers are growing.

For those of you who want to submit your questions, go to patreon.com slash StarTalk and sign up for the $5 level, the tier. And for that, for the price of a cup of coffee, you can go ahead and be a part of our Patreon family.

All right, that's all the time we got for it, Chuck. All righty. All right, this has been a StarTalk Cosmic Queries Grab Bag Edition. Always fun. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, as always. Keep looking up.