StarTalk Radio - Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

Is “now” just an illusion? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Paul Mecurio answer questions on the Higgs Field, dark energy, and the feasibility of Dyson spheres with astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi.NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://startalkmedia.com/show/hubble-trouble-with-hakeem-oluseyi/Thanks to our Patrons Omar Video, Dan Carson, Joy Jack, Christine Bryant, Andrea Andrade, mahmoud hassan, Kyal Murray, Mercedes Dominguez, Christopher Rogalski, Eric De Bruin, Telmore, Gabe Ramshaw, James Edward Humphrey, Laurel Herbert, AJ Chambers, Bill WInn, Mayson Howell, Julianne Markow, Manthan Patel, Sonya Ponds, Depression Rawr, David Leys, Garon Devine, Vishal Ayeppun, BIIZZxGaming, Kurt Clark, Max Goldberg, Beth McDaniel, Shelby Staudenmaier, Kinnick Sutton, Jane von Schilling, Joanne karl, Walter Kinslow, and Eric Johnston 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.

So Paul, Dr. O came back to my office. Oh, he's the man. He's the man, Dr. O. He knows his stuff. Man, we love it. He's in charge of a lot of acronyms. Wait till you hear the acronyms. Right, and his expertise in the universe,

cosmology, dark matter, dark energy. Dark energy. It's the future of the field. On StarTalk, coming right up. Welcome to Star Talk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. Star Talk begins right now.

This is Star Talk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. I got with me Paul McCurio. Paul, good to see you. Always great to be back. Love you man. Love you. Yeah, you're a comedian and you got a show on Broadway

or off Broadway or traveling. It was off Broadway and then Broadway and now we're out on the road. Out on the road. It's called Permission to Speak. One man show and you interact with the audience and stuff. Yeah, yeah, it's about stories from people, from me. Frank Oz is directing it.

We love Frank Oz. Created Yoda. Try being directed by Yoda. He's never wrong. Well, we're is directing it. We love Frank Oz. Created Yoda. Try being directed by Yoda. He's never wrong. Well, we're going to do Cosmic Queries today. Yeah, I love these. With an old colleague and friend of mine, Hakeem. Thank you, thank you.

I'll get you last name. Olashay. So far away. Way to do your research before the day. Hakeem, here, let me give you a mnemonic. Think O-U Shady. So far away. Way to do your research before the death. Hakim, here, let me give you a mnemonic. Think O-U-Shady. Hakim O-U-Shady.

But instead of you, it's Lou O-Loo-Shay-ee. Hakim O-Loo-Shay-ee. Yes, sir. There you go. We got you. You were on my podcast. We had a great conversation. Awesome book.

I got your bio here. It's great. Astrophysicist, cosmologist, you're a previous guest on Star Talk for a few years back. And recently, like practically minutes ago, CEO of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. I'm going to ask you about that in a minute.

I didn't know from your sweatshirt that you were a CEO. You're looking good, man. Man, we're taking the CEO vibe in another direction. Right? No pretension. Yeah, we don't need that. Congrats, man, that's awesome. Appreciate you, sir.

That's awesome, man, absolutely. Yeah, thank you. So you got a podcast, Does It Fly? By Roddenberry Entertainment, Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek fame, and you've got a memoir out there. It's been out for a few years now, A Quantum Life. It keeps getting released.

My Unlikely Journey, From the Street to the Stars. And that's the book that we talked about on the show. That's right. That reminds me of the quote from Oscar Wilde. We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking to the stars. Ooh, that's good. You didn't know about that quote.

You could have put that in the book. You could have put that in the book. You could have put that in the book. That could have been in the book. You could have called me next time. Unless you're drunk on Thunderbird, then you're not looking up at the stars. And you've also involved with NASA's IMAP satellite. Yes.

So NASA has no shortage of acronyms. So unpack IMAP for me. The Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe. Can't wait to talk to you about it. Okay, we'll get there in like a minute. So, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. I'm a big supporter of theirs, like from way back. And they say, it sounds like it's only the Pacific,

but they have a mission statement that's functionally international, getting people to look up. Yeah, and not only that. That's why I try to do that every day. You're succeeding. Okay. You're succeeding, right?

It's cool now, when I was a kid, you know, it wasn't so cool to be a nerd. Okay. Right now, nerds are cool science, everybody loves space. Plus, we were blurred. All right, that's true. Black nerds.

There's no way there's a black nerd. No, there's two of them, trust me. At least. They don't know each other yet, but they're there. Oh, I can give you a list. Is that right? Oh, woo. Do you have a secret meeting black nerd, no there's two of them, trust me. They don't know each other yet, but they're there. Oh, I can give you a list. Is that right? Do you have a secret meeting before it was like public

that you guys are black nerds? Yeah, it's called National Society of Black Physicists. Blurreds are a special subspecies of the whole world. Yeah, because people could ask you what kind of nerd are you? They come in different ilks, right? What type, isn't there just one general type of nerd? Science nerd, like a TV nerd, like that kind of nerd are you? They come in different ilks, right? So. Isn't there just one general type of nerd? Science nerd, like a TV nerd, like that kind of thing.

Yeah, well, you know, the first question is the difference between a nerd and a geek, right? So, no, here's the thing, I got this. I got it. So, a geek can be a geek in any specific category. You can be a music geek. Okay, well, you're just into music. So, but you're not necessarily associated with science if you're a geek. You're a, well you're just into music. So, but you're not necessarily associated with science

if you're a geek. You're a geek, you're just into your thing. But a nerd, it says something about your personality and your behavior and your things you care about. The quality of your personality. I'll give you some examples. I was in the Navy back in the 80s, and a guy asked me,

yo, how come you the only brother that don't wear hella gold? And my answer was, it never occurred to me. And he said, what does occurred mean? Like, I couldn't even tell the difference, you know, like dudes love cars, I couldn't tell two cars apart. Yeah, but you care, you care about different things.

You care about different things, exactly, yeah. So, do you have a vision for the Society of the Pacific? I do, I do. So the Pacific has, well, what's that? Let me just remind people, it's an organization that promotes public awareness and understanding of astronomy at all levels. At all levels.

But at the amateur level, you get a telescope. That's right. Why the term Pacific? Well, that's where it began in San Francisco Bay Area. So the first president was the director of Lick Observatory, but it's known as America's first and oldest national astronomy organization. And Lick Observatory is the observatory of Santa Cruz.

In the Bay Area, I used to observe supernovae there back in the day when I was a postdoc. Great place to drink. You know, you go with a bottle and then boom. Eat chips, you gotta eat chips at the observatory. So the ASP, one thing that made it different when it was founded was this egalitarian perspective. So they accepted professional astronomers,

amateur astronomers, and educators at all the same level. Because it was all about sort of just lifting everybody. We're all together. All together. And you wanna get it out there. We're all here at the same level. It's like, you know, yeah. The more you include, the better the knowledge. Highly laudable fact.

High laudable fact. Because he doesn't hang out with riff-raff. Don't make me slap you. But later, they added a new group that is labeled as enthusiasts. Good. Yeah, yeah. So here's the thing about it.

So I discovered them. I went to the Bay Area in 91 for graduate school and there was this guy at the nearby community college, your name you're gonna recognize, Andy Fracknoy, who was the CEO. He was teaching at the community college. Excuse me, yeah, he was teaching at Foothills. Foothills, yeah.

That's right, and so I'm looking at Mercury Magazine, I'm looking at the proceedings of ASP. ASP produces the magazine for the public, Mercury Magazine, and they produce proceedings of scientific conferences. So they're in everything. There is probably one of these books from that conference.

But you know what else they do? So there are 90 astronomy journals in the world. PASP is typically between 15 and 20 of the 90 astronomy journals. So they're typically the top, we're on 17% of astronomy journals. And there you go, a proceedings of the, yeah. Those books.

This is for every meeting of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, every professional meeting, there are proceedings. And they're beautifully published. Everybody has them. And they line them up. We all have these. And these are just two that are here

relative to others that I have on a different part of the shelf. Galaxy evolution, the Milky Way perspective. Is there data? They made that into a film. Starring Tom Cruise. He jumps through a Milky Way, covered in Vaseline. It's an amazing scene.

An equation. An equation. So, I mean, there are now hundreds of these. I mean, it's been around a long time. Oh, absolutely. So very, very good to hear that. That's right. So I saw them as a rigorous, scientifically rigorous organization

that had the social consciousness to do this educator training. Which nobody else was doing because no one else was doing it. No one else was doing it. It was very impressive. They were deign to even talk to the public. Exactly.

And so the ASP has been everything I care about as a professional scientist is fulfilled by that mission. Well why haven't other societies picked up on that part of it? Why have, I mean, you know, it's out there, it's a good example, and be inclusive. I have an answer.

He probably has an answer, but I have an answer. In our field, there aren't many fields where it can reach the enthusiastic amateur and they can still participate. Well, but your show does, Cosmic Queries is a perfect example of that. What I'm saying, that's astronomy and astrophysics. You can't really do, can you do that with physics really? Well, you can if you're not pompous, like you are.

No, but it's harder, because everybody's looking up. And you know, when we discover a supernova, a black hole, anything, it's headlines. Yeah, splitting an atom is less relatable than looking up at You know, when we discover a supernova, a black hole, anything, it's headlines. Yeah, splitting an atom is less relatable than looking up at the stars. How many other sciences make a headline with that frequency? Think about it.

Yeah, that's true. And how many families own their scientific instruments that they use professionally? Like people buy telescopes. Telescopes, yeah. That's all I'm saying. Yeah, so good luck with that. Sometimes you need a little bit of that,

but you're at the helm of a very important organization. Thank you, sir. And there it is. So now tell me about the latest NASA acronym. Yes, Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration. And Acceleration Pro. But you can't have a thing that says IMAP and then the word mapping is in the middle of it.

Yeah, that's bad. It's not working. We're gonna have to redo this. The word and the the word mapping is in the middle of it. Yeah, that's bad. It's not working, we're gonna have to redo this. The word in the acronym can't be in one of the words in the acronym. It's like, Gnu's not Unix. Mr. Smart Alec over here. Remember, Gnu's not Unix, Gnu? Oh yeah.

Gnu, Lennox, Unix, you guys aren't that old, okay. Nevermind, it's the white hair. So here's the thing, before this. He's not nerdy enough. I was working on a satellite called the Supernova Acceleration Probe, and now I'm working on the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe.

No, you're working on Earth. Related to the probe. I'm not working on the probe. Did I just use the word on? Yes, you did. Okay, so this is awesome. So why is the word acceleration in the probe? Because essentially, what happens is

the sun accelerates particles, right? It creates this bubble and the example. That's the solar wind. The solar wind, right? So the heliosphere. But it's moving fast. It is supersonic, right? The heliosphere.

But when it hits the. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What do you mean supersonic if it's moving through the vacuum of space? Space, is it exactly a vacuum? Oh, it's approximately a vacuum. It's approximately a vacuum. Yes, it is, yes it is. Okay, so cool. So it's approximately a vacuum. It's approximately a vacuum, yes it is, yes it is.

Okay, so cool. So it's moving faster than the speed of sound would be in that very reduced vacuum. Exactly, and what happens is, is that, you know, so it's almost like a boundary where information only travels one way, which is out. That's the heliopause, isn't it? No, the heliopause is what I'm getting to.

So just like the example that's given is when you run water. That's not showing off how much you know. I know, right? Let him catch up with you. And then. Where do you find these two comedians? I don't know where to get them. These guys know more science than the other scientists. I don't know.

I'm done, that's the only thing I know. You know how you want to water. We gotta lobotomize them first before we put them in. You know when you run water in a faucet and it makes this, and then there's that ring? Yeah. Right, that's like the heliopause, where it goes from supersonic to subsonic.

Right. So our heliopause is where it goes from supersonic to subsonic. So our heliopause is doing that in the interstellar medium, but here's the thing, there was a previous satellite, so the guy who's running his professor out of Princeton named Dave McComas, okay? So I don't know if you remember the Ulysses satellite that went over the poles. It went to the sun, didn't it?

It went to the sun, went over the poles of the sun, and we got to see that the solar wind around the mid-latitudes, you have the regular wind, 400 kilometers per second, out of the poles, the high speed wind, 800 kilometers per second. Didn't know that. So young Dave McComas is the guy who made that famous plot. All right? Okay.

So then he had an idea, and the idea is crazy. Let's look at neutral atoms coming toward Earth from outer space. Who looks at neutral atoms? We look at photons,'s look at neutral atoms coming toward Earth from outer space. Who looks at neutral atoms? We look at photons, we look at different higher particles. There's nothing more boring than a neutral atom. Nothing more boring.

It's not ionized. It's not. But here's their origin. These electrons from the sun go out, they hit the heliopause, so there's magnetic fields there. There's ions trapped in those magnetic fields. Those electrons get captured by those ions and they become neutral.

So it's like neutering a dog. No. So, okay, well anyway, while the ion is ionized, it is tied to the magnetic field and it's stuck out there. But once it becomes neutral, it is no longer stuck. It's no longer tied to the magnetic field because it has no charge, Because it has no charge.

So some of them stream into the inner solar system. So you can get a map of the stuff that is in the magnetic field. Raining back down. Raining back down. And they discovered that if you look at the galactic magnetic field, it wraps around our bubble,

and perpendicular to that is a, just like we have a radiation belt around our planet, there is a belt around our heliopause. And so NASA goes, that's interesting, now let's do a satellite that will look at that in way more detail, study the sun. As these things go. You make a tiny discovery.

Yeah. And it can open up a whole. Yeah, opens up, now you can build an entire experiment just for that discovery. That's right. What do you anticipate that you might find there? I mean, you must have some. Just the unknown.

It's the exact same thing. You're gonna find something you've never seen before just like they did with IBEX. So now they're looking at acceleration from the sun, they're looking at acceleration of those magnetic fields, and they're testing the interstellar medium and what it's made of, because those particles also stream in. So that's why it's the interstellar medium and what it's made of because those particles also stream in.

So that's why it's the interstellar mapping and acceleration probe. I'm Alexander Harvey and I support Star Talk on Patreon. This is Star Talk with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. So, Donald Goldsmith, who's an astronomy writer and co-wrote the original Cosmos, and I actually co-authored a book with him on origins, he has his own LLC company, and because he writes books and writes for TV, it's called Interstellar Medium. No, Interstellar Media, Interstellar Media. Interstellar, I love that. That's great.

It's so simple and perfect. So I have an LLC too, and that's QuarkStar. Okay. I thought no one would think of that, turns out there is a lighting company on the West too. QuarkStar. Okay. I thought no one would think of that. Turns out there was a lighting company on the West Coast named QuarkStar. Whoa, QuarkStar, all right. Here's a little bit more heady than theirs though.

Well this is a Cosmic Queries. We can't just like shoot this shit forever. All right, okay, let's do it. All right, this is James H. English. Greetings, he's from Denmark. I read recently that the universe is expanding too fast for our theories and models to fit, increasing the Hubble tension.

Do you think the problem is with our models, or is there some physics we just haven't discovered to explain this? I.e. is the rate not constant due to some undiscovered property of space time? Or is there something wrong with the data? So are models off? do we trust the data, or do we need new physics?

If the data's off, the model's off by definition, no? Maybe, no? That ain't different. I spent time at Princeton where they have a lot of theories. They say never trust an observation unless it's backed up by a theory. Well that's happened, I know of two cases where observation was made and it did not fit with the theory.

I'll give a very simple one. It was Art Walker's research. When he first got the images, so when you see the pretty images of the sun with the plasma loops, Art did that first, right? And so the plasma loops had a constant cross section. And so the solar physicists were like, dude, there's something wrong with your telescopes

because we know magnetic fields diverge with altitude. So they should get fatter at the top. They're not getting fatter. But just to be clear, so the magnetic field is confining the plasma. That's right. So the shape of the plasma is the shape of the magnetic field.

Exactly. And so he's saying that the magnetic field is just a constant cross-sectional tube. That's what they showed. But it should be something more dynamic than that. Yeah, at the top they should get fatter, right? Just like if you look at a bar. The theory said that.

Theory said that, right? And Art was like, ain't nothing wrong with my telescopes. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna have the same passband, but I'm gonna give you three different configuration telescopes. I'm gonna give you a Casagrande, a Herschelian, and a Richie Cretion, so you can't say it's the optics. And not only that, so we would fly 16 to 22 telescopes

with all these passbands, which ended up being a subset of them, the same passbands on SDO and EIT, the solar satellites, and show, no, this is what nature is doing. It's not an issue with the passbands, it's not an issue with the optics, this is what nature is doing.

And now, that's what everyone knows. So the theory had to be adjusted. The theory had to be adjusted, right. You had to come up with a mechanism. It can happen. So let's get back to Hubble tension. Hubble tension, right? So, right. You had to come up with a mechanism. It can happen. So let's get back to Hubble tension. Hubble tension, right? So people have been like that.

There's been a lot of articles. There's been a lot of articles, right? And so essentially, and everybody wants to just throw out the Big Bang. Or throw out dark energy. It's click bait. Click bait, yeah, right. Exactly, it's click bait, right?

So essentially what's been happening is you have the cosmic microwave background radiation, which has been a treasure trove of cosmological information. Then you have the standard way that we measure expansion. I have some object, I know- How fast it's moving? How fast it's moving away, it's redshift, and I also know its distance based on its brightness, right?

And so now, I can make a Hubble diagram. I fit the Planck data, I get a value of the Hubble constant. They don't agree. But the Planck is the cosmic background. Right, right. The Planck satellite from Europe, the European satellite. I can say stuff, don't you know, I be leaving stuff out, man.

That's why I'm here. That's why you're here, thank you, thank you. To keep you continuous. So now there's new James Webb space telescope data. Wait, wait, just set the stage. So you have data from the early universe, you get a Hubble rate, you get the traditional galaxies, usually with supernova or some other standard candle,

and those two numbers do not match. They do not match. In my day, measurements of the expansion rate of the universe differed by a factor of two. A factor of two. And so now they differ by just a few percent, but the error bars, the uncertainty, is way smaller than the difference

in those two measurements. So that is a more severe fact than not knowing the expansion rate of the universe by a factor of two. So we had a similar problem with the ages of stars and the age of the universe, which depends on the Hubble thing, right? And so it was the cosmological data that had to be adjusted. Somebody found stars that were older than the universe.

Stars in the halo looked like they were older than the age of the universe, right? But then, and the headlines were, oh, catastrophe! Oh my God, yeah, yeah, people like, ready to give up on the universe. But then we realized, oh no, our cosmology needs to be improved. And so, you know, what happened in the 90s,

really, you know, post-Coby, that changed everything in cosmology, right? Not Kobe Bryant. Not Kobe Bryant, the Kobe Satellite. What you mean, right after that game, after he got 80, he scored 81 points, that game. No, not that Bryant. Not Kobe Bryant. The Kobe Satellite. You mean right after that game, after he scored 81 points at that game? No, not that game. It hasn't changed.

Cosmic background explorer, one of the first high precision measurements of the cosmic background. Mather and Smoot. So do it. Nobel laureates, because of it. Nobel laureates, yeah, yeah. So circling through the Hubble tension.

So tell me, so what's, something's gotta give. Yeah, something's gotta give. So I think that there's something that we don't understand. I think I'm trusting the measurements and I think that I trust the theory. The measurements look good, don't they? The measurements look good. I was involved in supernova cosmology, right?

And also weak lensing studies for looking at structure of growth and these sort of things. And so all this different data, there's more than one probe, right? People are using different types of stars. That's where you get the confidence from. It's not just one data point from one telescope.

It was accurate. So what James asked is, is there some physics we just haven't yet discovered? Are we missing physics? Or do we just have to adjust the model? Well, people come up with these models that may be the expansion rate of the universe. We have it like, okay, there's this initial impulse, right?

And then the universe evolves based on the energy densities of the constituents, of which there are three main ones, right, And then the universe evolves based on the energy densities of the constituents of which there are three main ones, right? Radiation, which is stuff that moves very fast through phase space, but almost not at all through time. Matter, which moves very fast through time and almost not at all through space. And space time, which has its own energy density

that we call dark energy, which doesn't move through either one, right? And so initially radiation dominates, then matter comes to dominate, then dark energy, i.e. space time energy density, comes to dominate. We think on dark energy. That's what he, right?

In each one, you can look at what the expansion rate would be of the universe. But here's the thing. Once we discovered the Higgs particle, first time we discovered what is known as a scalar quantum field. What do I mean by that, right? So, let me ask you that.

What do you mean by that? You want to ask yourself these questions? That's for us to do. So, one of the things that we look at is square. What is a square like a quantum field? You know what, you and I don't need to be here. Let's go. Let's go get a beer.

I'll just ask myself questions and answer them. Who needs a query? I'll query myself. Yeah, you read them. Let's just back up. In the United States, we surely would have discovered the Higgs boson with our superconducting supercollider whose budget was canceled right around

when peace broke out in Europe. Right between 89 and 93. Unauthorized procurement. Yeah. So the center mass of particle physics moved to Europe, to CERN, to the Large Hadron Collider, they discovered the Higgs boson. So now what happened?

So here's the deal, here's why I bring this up, because it's what is known as the scalar field. So when you think about the fields that you know of, they're like, oh, the electric field, I have a charge, it has an electric field. Magnetic field, I have a charge that's moving and generates a magnetic field. Gravitational field, oh, there's this matter,

so every field you know of, there's some source in matter. But then here come the particle physics, they're like oh yeah, you know why every electron is identical? They don't say it this way, this is mine. No, why every electron is identical? Same reason every C note, musical note is identical, because they're not the real thing.

The real thing is the string or the air that's vibrating. So they invoke this idea of quantum fields. So the quantum field just permeates all of space time and is just there. But nothing is real in that quantum field. Well, excitation of the field are particles, right? So they're the permanent ones and they're the virtual ones. So we measure the excitation as particles.

As particles, right. Now here's what happens though. They say, oh, there's this thing called a Higgs field. It's just there. It's just everywhere in space at all times. It's just there, right? Scalar field, no source. And I'm like, in my mind, as a young scientist,

I'm like, is that real? Then they discover, they ring that damn field and create the particle. I'm like, wow. So now what can you do? Oh, inflation, it looks like Alan Guth creates inflation. It looks like the universe rapidly expanded. Oh, I know what I'll do.

I'll create another scalar field. I call it the inflaton field. So now you see some dynamics happening, you can just create a new field. So, but it sounds like you're pulling stuff out of your ass. It does, it does, but you're supposed to like, use it to make predictions. So you know, to test whether what came out of your ass

is real. But you're using one as a jump in. That's right. Right. It's testable. Shit is testable. I actually have a device that does that. I'll bring it to the next show. Oh, right, do you remember the shit list from the 90s?

No. Oh, it was like a joke, and it lived on the internet, the early internet, and it was like all these different types of shit. One of them was ghost shit. You felt it come out, you wiped, there was nothing on the toilet paper, there was nothing in the toilet,

but you know what happened. Oh, wow, okay. Okay. So, some people are doing that. They're saying maybe the universe's expansion rate hasn't just been what we think it of, as simple as we think it is. And it could, and then another question is. It could be yet another phenomenon acting

on the expansion rate beyond the three that we have characterized. What do we, do we have an idea of what it might be? Is there any? Some weird, quantum people. You come up with something. Yeah, you come up with something. Is weird the scientific term you're going with here? Sure.

So, let me clarify here. So, this notion that the expansion rate is misbehaving, let me characterize it that way, that just means it doesn't match what our three most potent models would give us for it. Right. Okay, so, do we introduce a fourth accounting or do we say that one of these are wrong?

Or they're all working in harmony? Or each of those have to be adjusted? There's an assumption within there as well that comes from the cosmological principle that the universe is isotropic homogeneous. And now people are looking, if I look in that direction, I look in that direction, I look in that direction,

is the expansion rate the same versus distance in every particular direction? So, you know, that's why we have big surveys coming on, like the Vera Rubin Telescope LSST, because we typically have pencil beam surveys for the most part, or surveys that don't go too deep. LSST was the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, but we're astronomers and we don't like going that way.

We don't play that. So we just named it after one of our. You guys just like acronyms. You're just the laziest group of people. Vera Rubin Telescope. She discovered dark matter in the Milky Way. Wow, and speaking of, you know, another telescope that's on the coming is

the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. Let's look at dark matter, dark energy, or both? Both, both of them. It's gonna be a survey telescope. Everybody knows that, Neil. Yeah. So Nancy Grace Roman, going back to the ASP,

she valued ASP so much that when she passed away recently, she left the organization a few million dollars. Whoa. Yeah, yeah. Okay, well listen. Whoa, astronomers have millions of dollars? Yeah. Nancy Grace Roman had millions of dollars.

We're gonna jump to the next, that was a great question, James. We're gonna jump to the next one. Adam Omelon, hi Dr. Tyson and Dr. Olusi. Adam from Poland here, first, all of all, first of all, I am a big fan of everything Dr. Tyson is involved in. I love his books, all his programs he's been on.

My question is about the ability to detect various particles in the atmospheres at very distant planets. We know that the light is altered as it travels towards us, but how exactly does this happen? Ooh. Yeah. Absorption spectrum.

Yeah. Yeah. So it happens in two ways. So what's absorbing what? So what happens is that when you look at a transit of an exoplanet, so that means that it'll go in front of its star, right? And so at that time, the light from the star

will pass through the atmosphere of the planet. Through the edges of the planet. Yeah. All right, so we're with you. You have this transit and the planet is moving across the surface. Now you don't see that. You don't see it. You just see light.

Yeah. Okay, so I'm getting light in my telescope. So as that planet is going in front of a star, if it has an atmosphere, the light from the star passes through the planet's atmosphere, and that light interacts with that atmosphere. Around the edges.

Right, yeah. That light interacts. And so certain wavelengths of light aren't gonna make it out the other side. They're gonna be absorbed. And that's gonna be the center. By the chemistry of the atmosphere. By the chemistry of the atmosphere.

But remember, the star has its own spectrum as well. So you get a spectrum of the star by itself, you get a spectrum when the light is passing through the planet's atmosphere, and you subtract them. And what's left over is a spectrum of the planet. And now you can say, oh, I see this element or a molecule in that particular atmosphere. And is that a constant?

In other words, that is a proven theory that works every time. Well, it's hard to do. And so James Webb Space Telescope was built to do that job and it actually has succeeded in doing that job. Those are some of the early releases, like, hey, we can do it. It hasn't just succeeded, it's badass.

It's badass, yeah. It's opened up the whole industry, the whole cottage industry to make that happen. Yeah, yeah. All right. All right, we're gonna go on to Jordan Visina from North Dakota. I've been curious about dark matter.

So you went from Denmark, Poland, North Dakota. Okay, just clarifying. Three places I've never been to. Okay. It may not ever go. Now I've been curious about dark matter. Is it possible that the reason why we don't understand dark matter is because it defies our understanding

of the laws of physics? Meaning, is it possible that dark matter is something that can travel faster than light? Or how massive gravitational effect without having large mass? Love the show. Let me shape that another way and throw it right in your lap. So we probe the universe using our methods and tools

of science that we have developed to this day. Could dark matter simply be awaiting some brilliant theoretical understanding coupled with some brilliant new kind of telescope that would see it in ways that no one had previously dreamt? So is it awaiting technology? Is it awaiting new physics? I think it's more basic than that.

Or is it gonna plug in with just a new kind of particle that just doesn't interact? Well, first off, trivia, my very first physics research. That's what I was wondering, you were in that. Was summer of 91 on the cold dark matter, CDMS, right, in the basement in Berkeley. Okay. Building a dark matter direct detection, right,

which we've not detected any dark matter yet. So your PhD is from? No, no, no, it's a funny thing. I got accepted, I applied to Berkeley and Stanford. I got rejected from Berkeley, accepted by Stanford. When it did. The idiot got rejected by Berkeley. Right?

I know, right? But here's the thing. Send him off to Stanford. When it works, when the idiots go. Exactly, right, rejects. But no, here's what happened. I worked at Berkeley this summer between undergrad and grad on that project.

At the end of the summer they said, dude, if you want to come to Berkeley, come. But I didn't know Stanford was this highfalutin' school. I didn't know that. Wait, you didn't know that? Dude, I was from the country, man. You didn't have the internet? You're a smart guy.

His memoir is called From the Street. All right, that's right. To the Star. What part of that out the mud? What part of that title do you not understand? All right, you thought it was a town in Connecticut, not a university. I didn't know Connecticut existed.

So, I still haven't seen it. But anyway. And the town in Connecticut has an M, I think. It does, but just go along with the calc, boy. Here's how I like to think about this dark matter and dark energy stuff, right? Nothing at the scale of galaxies and larger, basically over 20,000 light years,

bigger than the galactic arm, nothing moves consistent with the laws of physics. And so there's two ways, right? There's this like alternative gravity theories, which, you know, just like when you think they're dead, they come back and they're stronger than ever. And then there is this, oh, there's other stuff, dark matter. Oh, we got some great ideas for what that is.

It's black holes, it's machos, it's super symmetric particles, oops. Machos would be massive compact halo objects. So we come up with our better instruments and look for them. So machos and whips are two kinds of, they don't exist. We look for them, they're not there.

The super symmetric particles, sorry, I should have saw them, they're not there. But at what point in all seriousness do you go, let's stop looking and move on to something else? It's like looking for a second sock and you just don't find it. No, no, because when do we have to admit that we're stupid or that we're not? Yes, exactly know, we're just. It's like looking for a second sock and you just don't find it. No, no, no, because when we'd have to admit that we're stupid or that we're not.

Yes, exactly. But we are driven by the uncertainty. There are ambulance chasing theorists out there. Yes, there are. The slightest observation that's a little quirky, they're gonna come up with a whole theory to understand. Oh, really? Maybe several, right?

Because all they have to get it right once. Is that what they call it? I call them that. So the answer is that sort of, we're never gonna stop trying to pursue this theory. Something is a mess. The question is, what is it? But is it possible that dark matter

is something that could travel faster than light? What is your theory on that? Well, we have those tachyons. Is it tachyons? Is that what it is? If dark matter is some kind of matter. We call it matter, but we don't know what it is. Well, no, here's the thing why we know it's not that.

Because there are these two models. It's not moving faster than light. Because the two models that were competing were is it hot dark matter or is it cold dark matter? So particles moving very fast would be hot dark matter. And we know that the best model is lambda CDM, cold dark matter. Dark matter just feels, every time I read about it,

it just feels like, I don't know, like a guy shows up at a party or something and he just, it's there, but it makes, it's a weird vibe. It makes every, it's the person that makes it. The only thing left is axions and I don't find that to be well. People making a particle that'll do this. Yeah, yeah, well, they made up a particle

to cancel out the electric dipole moment of the proton, which should exist, right? If the quarks have electric charges and there's separation between the moment of the proton, which should exist, right? If the quarks have electric charges and there's separation between the minus and the negative, there should be some what's called separation between them, which we call a dipole moment, but one is not measured. So Helen Quinn and Al, they came up with this idea, maybe there's this other field that cancels it.

So it's the Wild West. It's the Wild West. Which is actually makes it exciting. You come up with all these ideas and you go through all of them. But because we know that whatever the dark matter is, it's cold and not warm, it can't be going faster than light.

Exactly. Because it would have evidence. It would give evidence of that. Yeah, and it's clumping gravitationally, right? And then you'd see, I imagine, shrink off radiation, right? That's when you travel faster than light in some medium. You emit light.

So dark matter wouldn't be dark, baby. ["Dark Matters"] Here we go, next one, David from upstate New York. I recently watched a side channel show with Hakeem. What? And I fell asleep, it was really boring. That was weird, why would you write that, David? I'm the guy who wakes everyone up. No, you're the best, you're the best.

I recently watched a side channel with Hakeem, it was about gravitational waves. Just wondering, can they also alter time? If a huge collision occurred near our solar system, how would we feel them? Would we be alive to physically notice? So will it do damage, first of all? And we know it's a disturbance in the gravitational field,

and everybody knows after the movie Interstellar that if you're in a different gravitational field, you're gonna age differently. So what kind of consequences? That's a good question. Like the perturbations of time travel. This is a good time to bring up the Andromeda paradox. Okay, you know, I was thinking the same thing.

I was not. What? What? What is the Andromeda paradox? Well, the Andromeda paradox is the fact that if you and I are looking at Andromeda. Andromeda Paradox? Well, the Andromeda Paradox is the fact that if you and I are looking at Andromeda. Andromeda the galaxy. The galaxy.

Not the stars that make the constellation. Yeah, not the constellation. And not the strain that killed millions of people. Not the Andromeda strain, right? Two and a half million light years away. Then what happens is, suppose you're sitting in your chair and I'm running by, and at the second I run by you,

we both look up at Andromeda. Because I'm moving and you're sitting in your chair and I'm running by, and at the second I run by you, we both look up at Andromeda, because I'm moving and you're stationary, we're gonna see events that are days apart, even though we're in the same location looking at the same time. And you think that relativity, and you think that the light of life is. Don't just say relativity and keep talking.

How far, wait, in this scenario, how far away from me are you when you're running by me? We're in the same place. We're in the same place, essentially. So you're like literally running here. I've never heard of this paradox. And you look up. It's a little known paradox.

And the thing that you see and I see are days apart. Days apart. Because of our physical perspective on that? Well, here's what you would think. You would think the light is arriving right now, we should all be receiving this light, but that's not how it works. Motion changes the perception of time.

And so we know about that in terms of the local universe. We call it relativity of simultaneity. You're moving, I'm not. You see events as simultaneous. I see them as happening one before the other. But then when you add the distance component in it, now we see very different times. So there could be a third person

moving in the other direction seeing a different time. So how do you define what now is? So we don't even understand time. Even though you're in the same place. Even though you're in the same place, yeah. While we're sitting here, I'm here, you're running by, we look up at the drama at the same time, and we're seeing some things from the same location,

essentially, we're seeing things days apart. Days apart. And that leads to the idea of what is now, and your now and my now are two different nows. There is no now. There is no now. No, there is now, there's always there's always there's an illusion of now because we're so close together And we're so small the speed of light makes it feel like we have a now right but now doesn't really exist on larger scales There's no such thing but but there is always has to be a now and also no no that is your bias

That is your bias. That's so that's so Galilean That's so Galilean, Newtonian. That's so backwards. Wow. I've never gotten heckled from the left and the right at the same time. That's right. All right, so wait, so what is the upshot of this? Well, what was the question again?

Because they're talking about time, right? They're talking about now or something. And I'm just like, that now doesn't exist. It was about gravitational waves, wondering can they also alter time? If a huge collision occurred near our solar system, how would we feel them? Would we be alive to physically notice?

Right, you curve space and you stretch time, right? It's kind of like the idea like what a black hole does, right? You curve space, you know, time moves more slowly, relatively, but these phenomena of gravitational waves are incredibly subtle, and so the real calculation to do is what type of gravitational wave would be necessary. It's like the big one.

It's for that to happen. For that to happen. To be felt. To be felt, right? Or to be, you know. Yeah, because the one, the first one that was measured, it jiggled the experiment by 1 20th the diameter of a proton.

There you go. You ain't feeling that. You ain't feeling that. But we know they were gravitational waves. Well, yeah, we measured them, right? by 1 20th the diameter of a proton. There you go. You ain't feeling that. You ain't feeling that. But we know they were gravitational waves. Well yeah, we measured them, right? So you know, you want to think of what event, what magnitude of wave do you need, intensity,

and then calculate what sort of event. And that event would surely kill you before you had any experience of the wave. I was gonna say, but there are a whole host, it's an infinite number of things that could cause a gravitational wave, right? You mean you can. Wait, wait, the gravitational wave

moves the speed of light. So it can't kill you before the wave hits you. That would all happen at the same time. Oh, that's a good thing, if you add those things. Oh, well that's the upside. No, you don't even know. You don't even know. So you get compressed to nothingness,

you get ripped apart, this is like a sci-fi thing, right? The gravitational waveavenator. Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha!

Exactly. All right, we're gonna move on. Can we do a lightning round now? Yeah, absolutely. We got some great ones. Here we go. Allen guys, query. Lightning round, dude.

You know what that means? Be even more loquacious. Yes, exactly. Right, right. Yeah, okay, here we go. I've always been bothered by physicist preoccupation with conservation of information, especially in regard to particles falling into a black hole.

Firstly, it sounds more like a philosophical position than one derived from through mathematics or scientific method. Correct me. Secondly, Mr. Heisenberg taught us that one can never know all information about a particle. Thus, can't we consider that information to never have existed in the first place,

and thus can't be destroyed? I have one thing for Alan. Alan, if you're going to ask a question on acid, you got to send the tablets to us too, so we can be on the same wavelength and answer the question. Wait a minute, tablets? Go.

You mean tabs? There you go. There you go. There you go. There you go. Alan Geist, go ahead, answer that question. He actually remembers the 60s. Exactly. What? If you lived in the 60s, go ahead, answer that question. He actually remembers the 60s. Exactly.

What? If you lived in the 60s, you shouldn't remember that. All right. Yeah. So I like that. I say here, here. I say here, here. Catch yourself on the information.

This is a cultural phenomenon. Nerds ain't cool. And so they try to make something cool that ain't cool. All right, so this whole thing about, oh, real, do black holes have hair? We made a bet. Man, nerds, shut the hell up. Nobody care.

I don't care. So here's what I think they're saying. If I look at the sun, I can take a spectrum of the sun. Just to clarify, he said black holes have no hair. What he meant was that when matter becomes a black hole, it should have only three physical parameters, like angle, momentum, mass, and charge. So the idea was whatever it looked like before,

it has none of that later once it becomes a black hole. So it says it has no hair. But that's back when enough people had hair that that was part of how you identify them. But now that bald look, the Lex Luthor, the billionaire bald look. Speaking of which, you know something I realized? So I grew up in segregated Mississippi.

So I go to graduate school, and I would play basketball all the time, and I noticed that- You sucked at it. Oh man, I didn't suck until I joined the Cambridge Athletic Club League at the age of 49. Then I sucked. In the 90s, I was great.

But here's the thing, I noticed something. And that is, if there was a white dude who wasn't present and you're trying to describe him to someone, they'd invoke his hair color. Yes. We didn't do that. It's not our vocabulary. I don't know.

It's like in China. Wait, you mean they'd say like, you know, Paul McHure, the guy with the dark hair. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's like in China, you don't imagine people are IDing each other. No, because when I talk about.

You're invoking hair color. Right, exactly. It's the person with the black, straight hair. That's not helpful. But where I'm from, we invoke skin color. Oh, the light skin dude, the red bone, the yellow bone. See, I do it with voice, like, you know, Neil Tyson, he talks like James Earl Jones.

I do it like that. You do basically. This is CNN. So we're gonna move on. So, but the point is that, yeah, some nerd thing that nobody, but let me tell you what, unlike a black hole, take the sun, right? You can reconstruct what made the sun.

That's how we know, oh, the sun looks like three dozen supernovae constituted. You can look at what is made of today and reconstruct where it must have come from. You can't do that with a black hole, right? That's the, I think that we're in that. So you're in the we lost information camp in the black hole, or clearly.

Or information that's too much made of this information idea. Both, exactly, both. Okay, this is where he's coming from. Yeah, okay. Give me another one. There we go. My name is Ross, I live in Madison, Wisconsin.

Could dark energy, whatever it is, be the mechanism behind the big squeeze? As an analogy, consider a magnetic field that comes out of one pole, folds back on itself, goes into the other pole. Imagine this magnetic field being the fabric of space-time. Is that something about dark energy? No, the point is the dark energy

is making us expand and never return. So maybe he meant dark matter. So is there sufficient dark matter to close us back and then have the big squeeze? No, not even close. Not even close, okay. We'll give up on that one. Lighten and answer.

Right, right, okay, next. When were we, this is Christopher from St. Louis, when were we looking into the cosmos for possible Dyson spheres? What criteria were you using to tell the difference between a Dyson sphere and something else. Let me get that Dyson sphere out of your mind right now. All right.

All right, because I did a little calculation, right? So did I, go ahead. Okay, oh, by the way, just to make it clear, there are people who when they want to know stuff, they look it up on the internet, but when you're a scientist, you calculate the answer. Okay, right. I gave someone an answer one time, what source did you use?

In my education. The brain app. You should try it. Okay, try it sometime. It's called book learning. So basically, you're not gonna have enough matter to build a Dyson sphere. If you took all of Jupiter,

and you try to make a Dyson sphere around the sun using all of it, the idea is that that matter, that's like taking a human eyeball and trying to make a sphere around a basketball using that material. So you're trying to harness the energy of a star using this artificial.

You're trying to absorb it in matter, right? And then convert it to useful energy, right? And so you do not have enough matter in the solar system. To create something larger. To create something that you could put around. Because it's not large enough or because it can't hold. Cause it's not large, it's like. The stars are so much bigger than their planets.

Have you seen the garbage bags that Costco sells? You put one of those around the star, come on guys. So they're hot. Let me add to what you just said, cause it's a brilliant revelation regarding the material necessary. If you had that much material, it means you're visiting other star systems.

Why would you be interested in it? This is not even an interesting extra star. You don't even need it at that point. It's like, what are you doing? You're scooping up the planets of 1,000 solos to get the energy from one star? What the hell are you doing? Hey guys, we already got the energy.

Why are we trying to create the energy? You know what? The sun already has a Dyson sphere. You know what it's called? So when you think of the sun or star, you think of it as two parts, the core and the envelope. The envelope is a damn Dyson sphere. It's already there.

It's glowing. It's glowing. 50% of the matter, right? 50% of the matter is in the core, 50% is in the envelope, and it's absorbing the energy that's coming out and radiating into a useful form that we can build our solar arrays and capture.

Let me add to that. Last year, there was a research paper on an observing project to look for Dyson spheres. Wow. Now you know how they're gonna do this? They're looking for very, very red star systems. Oh, so they're like, they're not getting all the energy. They're just stepping it down.

They're just saying that if you absorb all the energy from a star at this greater radius, then it would then radiate. Yeah, in the infrared. In the infrared. And so they're suggesting that they're aliens. So they have a data set of a handful of- They're cheating, because there's all these stars

that are shrouded in dust that do the exact same thing. That's exactly the rebuttal to that, that there's stars, when you're in dust, they absorb the energy and it rerates and it radiates. It makes a star look very red. So that was the ordinary explanation for those very red stars in that experiment. We gotta wrap.

Okay, can I say one more thing? No, okay. Astrosociety.org. Oh, Astros No, okay. Astrosociety.org. Oh, Astrosociety. Astrosociety.org, come join us. Yeah, at the Society of the Pacific, yes. The Astronomical Society, and it may very well soon be the Astronomical Society of the Planet.

And you can be a nerd, you can be a geek, you can be an enthusiast, you can be a. You can be an educator, you can be a learner, all of that. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, you can give more than you want, but we have a very low donation we ask to become a member of our community. Like 20 bucks.

Here we go, it's about money. No it's not, man, but you can give more. Okay, so here you go. Under your leadership, will it become the astronomical society of the planet? I think so. Okay. And the other thing is, let me tell you my other thing.

As it should have been. My big thing is gonna be, I'm gonna take humanity, and when I look at the history of mathematics, so here's the thing, right? The big bottleneck for people getting into STEM is math. Right? When people go to college, they ask themselves three questions when they choose their major.

What do I like? How much math is it? How much money can I make doing it? And what has the least amount of math? Right? And so what needs to happen is, so when I look at the, I look at it historically, and I look at it in four phases.

There's the early phase, let's forget that. Here's how I named them. The Library of Alexandria, that's where you have Euclid, you have the Pythagorean theorem, all that exists. You got basic geometry. Then you go to Nalanda or the City of Learning. This is Aryabhatta, Brahmagupta, the Gupta dynasty, right? Where they come up with the place of learning, this is Aryabhatabrahma Gupta, the Gupta dynasty, right?

Where they come up with the place value system, the numerals that become Arabic numerals, zero. Because they're really Hindu numerals. That's how they started. They're really Hindu numerals, right? And the zero comes out of there too. Exactly, right? And then the third step is the house of wisdom, right?

This is where you get quadrismi, solving equations, the stuff we do in STEM every day. And then you go to Cambridge, all right? So right now, the average, Newton, right now, Cambridge, England, the average human on Earth, if you stop them and ask them any math question, they got the first two steps covered. We need to raise humanity to the house of wisdom.

Which is arithmetic and a little bit of algebra. Exactly. Yeah, trigonometry maybe, yeah. Here's what I mean, if you go up to the average person, you say, hey, what a little bit of algebra. Exactly. Trigonometry, maybe, yeah. But here's what I mean. If you go up to the average person, you say, hey, what's two dogs plus three dogs? They'll say five dogs. What's two galaxies plus three galaxies? Five galaxies.

What's two X squared Y cubed Z plus three X squared Y cubed Z? Get out of my face, nerd. It's the same problem, but they don't realize it, because we haven't learned the house of wisdom. See, I don't say get out of my face. I whip out my Texas instrument, bang, bang, bang. Texas instrument. Holy cow.

There you go. Yeah, he keeps it right next to. Holy cow. There you go. Yeah, he keeps it right next to his palm pine. There you go. So anyway, I want to raise a level of humanity. I have an HP. Join us. HP 45 in there.

I got a Klebschidra and a Star, what is that thing, sundial? There you go. Boy, I got a stone circle. Oh, nice. Stonehenge, you got a stonehenge in your backyard. I got a nap to playa. All right, we out.

We out here. Peace. Yeah, Hakim, really good to see you again. Thanks. Your first time in my office here at the Hayden Planetarium. First time I've touched you in 20 years. That sounds a little creepy.

You're welcome. Good boy. So this has been Star Talk Cosmic Queries edition, pulpuree, with my old timey friend and colleague, Hakeem. Welcome back, and of course, Paul. Great to be here. All right, until next time, I bid you to keep looking up.