StarTalk Radio - Things You Thought You Knew – Rocks Float

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

What would happen in a world with too much oxygen? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice break down how rocks actually float, warm blankets, and why oxygen isn’t actually flammable.  NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here:  https://startalkmedia.com/show/things-you-thought-you-knew-rocks-float/ Thanks to our Patrons Oli H, Michael, Dodo Moon, Dylan Halse, David Kovner, Alex Morales, Anthony Cole, Mark Stephenson, Dane, Lisa LaVergne, TheCamo1989, Peter, Alyce Adams, Gabriel Prusan, Abby, Rose, Hal Crimm, Khawaja Rashid, Deb Driscoll, Unknown, Robert Scholl, Kristin Laskey, Rahh, Oleg Dashevsky, Mark, Shayan Alvarez, Andre, C.J. Meyer, Kipley Kerley, Jaimie Mcneil, Carmen Hairapetian, Melissa Clark, Alan, Christian Vermeulen, Matt Rosenberg, Elisa Huertas, Chiren C, Tom, Lisa Wade, Emiliano Munoz, Wayne Bell, DM Peterson, Maxwell Warner, John Antoniou, Craig Lowry, Steve, Erica Waterman, Bailee's Clubhouse, Tim Weil, Katie Morphonios, Riley, MotionChickness, Ryan, David Jenkinson, Talon Scherwinski, Troy Taylor, Conrado, Hanes Welday, NA NA, Travis Osborne, Pasquale, Zach Truett, Jacqueline Thompson, HorrificFang, Mike Preston, Mike Meyers, CC, Mandy Potts, Mandy, Erik Rosales, Nate Harter, Daniel Kerrigan, Carl Celizic, Tyler Blankenship, William Haglid, David Martinez, Khayyal Cameras, Panch Jeyakumar, and Dylan Halcomb for supporting us this week. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of StarTalk Radio ad-free and a whole week early.Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey, StarTalkians, Neil here. I've got another Things You Thought You knew episode coming right up. This time, Chuck and I explain how rocks are light, not heavy, warm blankets, and oxygen. Check it out. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. I'm excited to know what we've got going today.

We're going to just talk about oxygen. Oh, man. What's the matter? Yeah, normally you come to me with some, like, super exciting stuff. Like, you know, today we're going to talk about the moon and albedo. Do you know what albedo is? No, man, what is that? That sounds really cool.

I'm sorry oxygen doesn't excite you, but maybe by the end of these 10 minutes, it will. That's all I'm saying. All right. Give it a chance, dude. Give it, well, listen, I give oxygen a chance every day. Okay. Okay. Many people who have never had atmosphere chemistry.

Right. They know that we breathe oxygen to survive. We know this. Right. But not everyone knows how much oxygen is in our atmosphere. Okay. Well, already. Now I'm interested.

Right. So the first guess is, well, it's all oxygen. Right. Of course, we're breathing us. That's not the case. Right. Most of the air we breathe is nitrogen. Nitrogen, okay.

Which has no value in its gaseous form as we inhale it. So we just inhale it and then exhale it. Okay. Nitrogen is 78% of the air we breathe. Wow. It's most, most. Did not know that. Did not know that.

Okay. So now, oxygen is between 20 and 21% of the air we breathe. So it's about a fifth of the air we breathe. Got it. All right. Right. So just let me. put that out there, first of all.

Second, as you know, trees and other photosynthesizing life makes oxygen. Right. One of the delusions of the Star Trek, the early Star Trek series was they, you ever notice, I've said this in other explainers, they never wear spacesuits when they visit planets. No. Every time they come down to a planet, they're just like, well, isn't this nice? No, so they check. Oxygen-Nitrogen atmosphere, Captain.

It's a Class M planet, Captain. Right, so then they go down and it's got oxygen. As though in the mix of all the planets that are out there, some of them will just happen to have this mix. And so it'll be just fine to be human and then walk down on its surface. Okay? All right. But if you think it through, the entire source of our oxygen is green plants.

If you take away the green plants, Take away the green plants, oxygen is highly reactive as a chemical element. And so the oxygen that's in the atmosphere will glom on to other ingredients on Earth's surface, and it will systematically drain out of the Earth's atmosphere, leaving us with none. So if you find a planet that has sustained oxygen, that is evidence of something generating that oxygen. Right. That is evidence of something generating that oxygen. And in our case, it's plants that could be some other mechanism.

None we have ever dreamt of or divined. But if you find a planet with oxygen, it's going to have plant life. Wow. Right. Or something that is generating oxygen in real time. And in the planets they went to, that was never discussed. Because I think they just believed in the planet lottery. Some planets have oxygen and others don't.

And you know what's funny that you say that, many of the planets that they beamed down to were very Mars-like. Yes. Yes. They're very rocky. Rocky. There's no vegetation at all. I think the rocks are easier for the prop people to make than whole trees with plumage. Right.

Yeah. It was very barren. Correct. You remembered this. So that's one little thing about the oxygen put out there. Okay. Also, by the way, on the planets they landed on, they were never sort of bounding the way the astronauts did on the moon.

Those planets all had about 1G, just like Earth. Yes. And the atmospheric pressure was about that of Earth. That same as Earth. There are some planets that are the same size as Earth and the same gravity as Earth, but the atmospheric pressure is 100 times that of Earth. So they'd beamed down and just get flattened. Flattened like they got hit with a fly swatter.

Yeah, basically. Wow. Yeah. Okay, so more about oxygen, there's this belief that oxygen is flammable. Okay, maybe that's because every oxygen tank I've ever seen has the word flammable written all over it. That might be why people believe that. You go to any hospital, you're going to see a tank, you'll see a tank in a corner, and on that tank is going to be a little fire emoji with the word.

Lavable. Is that what's on text? Emoges. I didn't know that. Okay. All right. So, so,

I should clarify what's going on there. Okay. Okay. Oxygen promotes combustion. That's why they have those labels there. So if you,

this, won't happen today ever, but in the day, you walk into a hospital smoking a cigarette. If you go into a hospital room, wait a minute, now I'm just seeing a doctor. Smoking a cigarette. Scalpel! With a hole through the mask. Scalpel. Wait, let me coronerize this.

Exactly. Oh, God. Ah, there we go. Oh, Jesus. I think I dropped my butt in this guy's open. Abdomen. Anybody's seen a cigarette butt? And you got this smoker's voice, too.

Exactly. Oh, my God. Your doctor sounds like a diner waitress. Well, listen, dear. I don't want to give you bad news, but here's the low, here's the lowdown, hon. Let me get you a coffee and then we'll talk about this. Talk. The smoking New York Diner.

Diner doctors. Oh, man. Okay. All right. So here's what I have it. It promotes combustion. So if you're in a room of oxygen and you bring in a lit cigarette, the cigarette would instantly go up and smoke.

Wow. Instantly. I mean, it would go from the lit spot, but it would go and the whole thing would just ignite instantly. Gotcha. But you're not going to ignite the gas in the room. That's my point. Aha. The oxygen itself does not burn.

So oxygen, because, no, I was about to say, it's like a non-burning accelerant. Okay. I can, yes, sure. I mean, that's, I'm trying to make sense of this because it's like. I'll allow that, but I think in firefighter talk, accelerant. Accelerant burns. Might mean something else. Right.

So this is what happened. one. Apollo one. All right. Nobody's ever heard of Apollo one because it never went anywhere. It was that through Apollo 6, I think it was, was a set of designs of the capsule that would take three astronauts to the moon. There they are on the launch pad, testing, on a testing pad. And in the capsule is pure oxygen.

Here's why. because if they had an oxygen-nitrogen mix, you would have to pressurize the inside to equal atmospheric pressure. Right. So that you'd have the right amount of oxygen that you're accustomed to breathing. If you do that,

you have to overbuild the strength of the capsule to contain one atmospheric pressure against the vacuum of space. Gotcha. So all the joint, the bolts and the hinges and the door closures and the window, would have to be extra strong. So they said,

why burden ourselves with this? Let's instead put in pure oxygen, then we don't need to have it at full pressure. That's actually kind of brilliant. It's brilliant. It's brilliant. Now we can be much lower pressure, but it's all oxygen.

So now you take in a breath, it's less total air, but it's the right amount of oxygen that your body is expecting, okay? All right. In that capsule, there was an electrical fire. Oh. There was a spark that immediately burned all of the insulation,

their thing, their suits, and they could not open the hatch in time. All three astronauts were burned to death. Oh, gosh. Yep. That is just awful. Yeah, it's terrible. So, again, it's accidents like. that where we think the oxygen was burning, but that's not what was burning.

The oxygen enabled everything burnable to burn, including the astronauts themselves. Correct. We lost three astronauts in that fire. Damn, that is, oh my God, that's just terrible. Right, right. So now what did they do to, listen, because let me just tell you, let me just say this. First of all, it's a tragedy, and I would dare never infringe upon the sanctity of those men and their lives.

But I will say this, if I'm the next three astronauts, I just quit the space program. No, no, what's up? Here's what they did. Instead of saying, okay, let's try Apollo 2. Okay? No, what they did was they scrapped six Apollo designs

and came up with Apollo 7. I think it was 7 or 8. No, Apollo 7. And so they were nowhere near what that design was by the time they had the next vessel in place. Okay. All right. That would have satisfied you, I think.

So that's another thing with oxygen. Now, here's another one. You're ready? In the movie, Jaws. Okay. There's a tank of oxygen. Yes. On deck at the end.

Right. And the captain, I think Richard Dreyfus character, bumps into it. Watch out. That's oxygen. Okay. All that mattered for the movie was that what was in the tank was compressed gas. Right. But they're saying, watch out.

oxygen. Right. Oxygen. So what happens? How do they finally defeat the Great White Shark? Okay? I forgot, which has been a while

since I've seen the film. One of them, I think while the shark is munching on the boat, takes that oxygen tank and shoves it into the mouth of the shark. Right.

Then dives off the boat. I'm making some of this up because I don't remember the details, but the shark, you can see the tank in the shark's mouth. The guy takes his high powered rifle, shoots the tank, and the tank explodes, blowing the head of the shark off, and then peace reigns in Nantucket, or wherever the hell this was.

Yep. Okay. So, what mattered there was not that it was oxygen, but that it was gas under pressure, and when you punched a bullet hole in it, probably it just would have been a hole and would have gone, I was going to say, the shark should have just shot off into the distance. Yeah, he would have had a little retro rocket, little rocket mouth. So it's rocket mouth now And it's just like

So that's probably what would have happened But if this tank is not structurally sound And it can't accommodate a hole It could conceivably blow up But it blew up not because it had oxygen in it Right Because it was gas under pressure So that's different from

If you leave your gas and your stove on And all your windows are closed And you go out and you come back Right Now there's gas everywhere in the house, a spark won't just burn what sparked, all the gas will now ignite and explode. And that's the difference between methane gas, which is flammable, and oxygen gas, which is not. Right, right.

And, you know, and the other difference is normally that's kind of like insurance fraud. Oh, yes, yes, okay. In the old days, I don't know if there's as much of that today. Yeah, they got too much forensic science now. They got too much science. You're people screwed it up. We can science the shit out of whatever you just did. Right, I can't collect the insurance on my failing business now thanks to you.

You guys. Ass in jail. So a couple more things. Okay. As you may know, plant life likes carbon dioxide. Of course. It absorbs it. Okay, and that carbon becomes part of the fibers of the wood and out comes oxygen, which we breathe.

Okay. If you have too much plant life and it creates, let's call it excess oxygen. Okay. Let's say 30% oxygen in the atmosphere. Uh-huh. And there are calculations that do this, which I can't quote precisely, but just some number above the 21% that we now have. Right.

Take it to 30, 40, 50% oxygen. Imagine a world where plants are just pumping this out and they're loving it. Okay? In that world, forest fires never end. Oh, that makes sense because they have, they're being fed by oxygen all the time. By oxygen, correct. So there's a threshold. Fuel of the wood and then the oxygen is also, you know, fueling it too.

So in a way, it's self-correcting. too much plant life creates too much oxygen so it's a next lightning strike will take it out preventing more oxygen from coming in oh well it's it's it's it's its own check and balance correct correct so it's just interesting to think about how you end up pegging oxygen at one level versus another interesting one other thing and i think we talked about it in our surface area explainer. Insects don't, most of them don't have lungs, the way we think of, we breathe in and we have lungs and that's how we get our oxygen.

Insects, many of them rely on absorbing oxygen through their surface. Right. Which is why they never need breath mints. That's right. Is that right? Thank you for telling us. Okay. So they, and so if you have more oxygen in your air,

this is like rocket fuel for them. Wow. And they can grow bigger. Oh. Because when you're bigger, your surface area to volume is lower. But if you have, we did that in an explainer. You have to dig that one up. If you're bigger, you have more volume to your surface area.

So now you're not going to get enough oxygen to feed your fat body. But if the oxygen levels are higher, you can. And so that's why you had those huge dragonflies back. at the time of the dinosaurs. Right. Okay. Oxygen levels were higher back then. You had these huge insects.

So oxygen levels have consequences in the biota of Earth. Nice. Wow. So who knew that all of this, who knew all this about O2? Exactly. Exactly. And oxygen wants to combine, and so it combines with itself best. So you have an O2, 2 oxygen.

And one last thing. People talk about humans, wrecking the earth, you know, the only species ever to change the ecosystem of the earth, that is just false. The creature that had the greatest effect on the climate and conditions of the earth were the cyanobacteria. Ah. When it was this, three and a half billion years ago, something like that. At that time, Earth's atmosphere was mostly carbon dioxide.

Hardly any oxygen at all. they taken carbon dioxide and spew out oxygen. Wow. And they built the oxygen supply of our atmosphere to levels that were caustic to animals that don't like oxygen. Right. So this killed off entire branches of the tree of life who were doing just fine in their carbon dioxide atmosphere. but it enabled other forms of life to rise up that would exploit the oxygen for their own benefit.

Wow. Wow. So why can't we just use cyanobacteria as a carbon scrubber for our current situation where we have to mitigate the amount of carbon in the atmosphere? Yeah, that's a good... Okay, so sure. You have to watch out for unintended consequence. Right.

Because guess what? We already saw one unintended consequence of cyanobacteria. Thanks, cyanobacteria. You know, I mean, it's, who knows? We should probably get people to look into that. To have biological CO2 scrubbers, which is what plants are. Right. But again, they're putting more oxygen in the air, and that also has consequences.

So, yeah. Wow, that was great. Anyhow, you got it, dude. I started off saying oxygen, was boring, but, you know, I was raw. Yeah, and by the way, if oxygen were actually flammable, every time he lit a match, it would just burn. Your air would burn out.

That would be, actually, that'd be kind of cool. Or you could just pump oxygen through the gas, right? Your gas stove, but no, we don't, because it's not flammable. That's all I got to tell you about oxygen. Do we have any good reason to think that aliens would be evil? Where did we get that idea from? aliens could be the most peace-loving creatures the universe has ever generated, yet our representations of them tend to be diabolical, which gets me to wonder that these representations of evil aliens

are not based on how we think they will behave, that maybe they're really based on how we know we have behaved to one another, especially when there's a conflict between a higher technology and a lower technology. So exploring the topic of aliens can not only give us insights into all the ways of being alive in the universe, it can, on occasion, hold up a mirror to our greatest fear,

which might, in fact, be ourselves. That and more, in my latest offering, take me to your leader, perspectives on your first alien encounter. I narrated the audiobook that's available with the print version, and I'm kind of thinking you should get it now. It'd be too late.

If you have your first alien encounter and have not yet read the book, you want to be ready. I can go on for you. You're ready? Go ahead. That rocks are light. You mean pebbles?

No, rocks. As in... Rocks. Little teetis. Boulders. I don't care what size. I don't care. They're all light.

What I mean by light is that they're low density. Now, you might say, No, they're not. Yeah. I was going to say, okay, Hercules. Rocks are so damn light boulders. But we went over weight and density on another explainer.

Yes, we did. We can say a big tree is heavy, but it floats. Okay? So how heavy could it be if it floats? Well, there you go. But a battleship floats, too. Battleship floats. So the average density of a battleship or even an aircraft carrier

is less than water because we need to do a cruise. Cross sections through an aircraft area. It's mostly air. Okay? Okay, most of a ship is ever air. And so that's why great discovery, by the way, to realize you can make a boat out of something that itself, the material doesn't float.

Float, right. It's the design of the hull that... I guarantee you, that guy was not well received. No, what he did with it, it transformed naval warfare. You didn't have to make a ship out of wood anymore. You can make it out of steel. Just put enough hole in there. and you're good.

God, that would have been cool to be on the first steel battleship going up against wooden dudes. Yeah, you would just plow through. That's called asymmetric advantage in warfare. Nice. Okay? I like that.

Yeah, so the first person with a gun when all you have is a bow and arrow, asymmetric advantage, okay? Also called winner. You won that battle, okay? If you're there with a bow and hour and somebody's shooting you down, you say, okay, we're good, we good.

That's like aliens with Ray, guns and you're up there with a pistol shooting at it's like no can you just see the situation here i am so glad you said that because i hate when they do that where in the movies when the movies when the earthlings go up against the aliens and the earthlings are shooting bullets and the aliens are shooting like laser beams that vaporize their homes right and i'm like really come on and we win come on all right but a butt a pistol to a Laser fight. Get out.

All right. Back to rocks. Rocks are dense or not dense? No, they're light. They're light. Now here's why. Earth was once molten. Okay.

In the early days of formation. When you're molten and you're as big as the earth, gravity will do things to that molten mixture. Okay. That makes sense, right? So you, if you're denser, if you're heavier, if you're denser, you will sink to the middle. Right.

That makes sense. If you're lighter, you'll float. This happens with any, if you're mixing oil and vinegar for your salad, okay, you're mixing anything. Layered cocktails. For example. And that generally, well, always, the lower density stuff will float on top of the higher density stuff. Some things you can mix and it'll stay mixed for a while.

That's cool. But that's how things work. Okay. So, why is it that when you walk around Earth's surface, you find rocks. Okay. Earth does not have rocks in its core. You know what it has in its core?

Iron. Iron. Nickel. Right. Magnesium. Right. Okay. It's got heavy metals in its core.

Because all the heavy stuff sank to the middle. And all the light stuff floated to the top. So, Earth's crust, where the active, ingredient is rock is the lightest stuff in earth when it formed. So the, oh my God. Sorry, sorry, sorry, it's the third lightest. Third lightest. The very lightest stuff are the gases, okay?

Okay, yeah. So they're floating over your head. Right, okay. And next is the water. Okay, that's all right, yeah. Okay, so the water sank to the bottom of the gas. Makes sense. Okay, that's Earth's surface.

All right. And what sinks to the bottom of the water? Rocks. Rocks. And what sinks below the rocks? All the rest of the crap that Earth is made of that's heavier than the rocks. So rocks are the third lightest thing

that came about in the creation of the earth. Yes, basically. Basically. And it's made our crust. Now, everything didn't solidify in the same instant. Okay. So, and plus you have volcanoes that communicate lower layers

with upper layers and things. So there is some of this, but that's why if you're looking for iron, you've got to find the iron ore. Okay. The iron or what? You know exactly. I'm sorry.

I had to do it. I had to do it. It was so bad, but I couldn't resist. It was so bad. It was good, okay? I know. It was so bad. It was good.

Okay. So there's iron ore, nickel, or. So it's not everywhere. There are these places where these veins had been preserved at the point Earth was solidifying. Okay. So you get this remnants. of the stuff, you want to find out where most of the iron is and most of the nickel is on Earth.

It is in the center of the Earth. And the universe has a lot of nickel and iron in it. So Earth got, it's plenty of its share of those two ingredients and it's in our core. And you might say, well, how you know, you've never been there? Let me hear it. Well, how do you know you've never been there? I like that accent, you bought that, that was the obnoxious kid in the classroom. How do you know, Mr. Astrophysicist?

You never been there. So we have geophysicists who anytime there's an earthquake, they can time the passage of the earthquake signals through the different layers of the earth. And depending on where and when they receive them at other stations, they can map the density profile of the entire Earth. Holy crap. Because the wave moves through dense materials differently from new light materials. And once you know that, you can figure that out. And bottom bang, we've got an iron core. That's amazing.

So we think we're about the density of water, all right. Approximates. Some people float, some people sink that humans are about the density of water. So we think of rocks as heavy. And relative to us, they're heavy. Relative to water, they're heavy, relative to the air, but not relative to the rest of the earth. that's why you don't have to have a mining operation to find rocks. They're sticking out of the side of the mountain.

They have floated to the top of the earth. They're floated to the top, and they're there for the taking. And by the way, that's why it's so hard to find meteorites on Earth's surface. Because most meteorites are rocky. And so it'll land, and it just looks like any other rocks. So you've got to go to places where they would. stand out. And there are two kinds of places where that happens. One is the desert, sandy desert. Sand and rocks. One problem is that sand will cover it over often. However, sand will also blow away.

And if you see a rock sitting in the middle, because you can scan, you can scan like many square miles at a pop. Okay. So you say, oh, there's something sticking out of the sand over there that just got revealed. Go over. It's probably a meteorite. Wow. Okay. A, B, another place you can go is Glacier Ice Sheets in Antarctica and in Greenland. So most meteorites in our collections, in our modern collections, come from Greenland and Antarctica for just that reason. Because every other place on Earth

is made of freaking rocks. Right. So there's probably tons of them there, but they're just hanging out with other rocks. Because some people ask, how come all the meteorites are aiming for Antarctica? Right. Or that's like the thing.

How come I only find my car keys near the lamp post? Right. At night. Right. Well, because that's the only place you would have seen them. Right. Okay. But we're good.

Wow, that was cool, man. Rocks are light. Rocks are light. Rocks are light, people. And Pumis is even lighter because it's got air in it. Air is helping it out. Yeah, that's the fast solidifying rock from a volcano when it hits the ocean. It's also great for taking dead skin off your feet.

No, I don't want. That's just, that's why God put bullets on this world. Exactly, man. That's the best, that's the best use of it. Never mind that God could have made it so that you never got rough feet in the first place, okay? I didn't perfect that foot thing. Let me give you something else to help that. Okay.

That's the second round of creation, right? Okay. Yes, exactly. The first round was, you know, the actual body and the second round was cosmetics. Cosmetics. For those days where even God couldn't help you. Right. Yeah.

It's like, hmm. I can't even do anything with this. Here, take some of boomers. Take some of his other stuff. You do it. You need L'Oreal, baby. I can't help you. You need Max Factor.

I cannot help you. You need oil of old age, you know. Exactly. I'm Brian Futterman, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. I got a topic for you. Okay. Warm blankets.

All right. What is happening to us? What is going on that warm blankets are a topic? It's a topic. It's a topic. What's the next explainer going to be snuggling? I'm just saying there's physics everywhere

and I just want to sort of bring warm blankets time has arrived to come to understand warm blankets first of all warm blankets sounds like a new emo band and secondly I am so... It's an underused

title for something out there. Yeah, warm blankets. But I will say that I'm excited to see the physics in warm blankets. Okay, so here you go. You ready? Okay, here we go.

Okay. Here we go. We look at a coat or a blanket or an item of clothing. So that's a warm item of clothing. Right. Obviously, when it's sitting on the hanger, the temperature of the clothing is the same as the temperature of the air. Okay. Okay.

So you don't say, oh, that's a, if there's a blanket sitting on the tile floor, you don't say, oh, that's a warm tile. You say, oh, that's a warm blanket. But they're the same temperature. Right. If they're just sitting out there in the air, they'll be the same temperature as each other. So why are we thinking the blanket is warm, but the tile is cold when they're the same temperature? Interesting. And the funny thing is we do make that distinction because you will look at the blanket and call it warm and call the tile cold or cool. Even though they're sitting there together. Sitting there together at the same temperature. Okay. So here's the thing.

If the blanket were actually a source of warmth, you could put it over the tile, wait a while, peel back the blanket, and then the tile would be warmer than the surrounding tiles. Now I just picture tile on the floor just going, oh, man. It's not only tiles. Oh, that was so good. I'm tired of people calling me cold. Oh, man, why did you do that? Why does it put the blanket back? So the point is the blanket doesn't make anything warm.

It is completely passive in this. It's not a source of warmth. If it were, you could put it on something cold to warm it up. True. That's all I'm saying. It is not a source of warmth. It is not a source, even though our language calls it. in a warm blanket or warm mittens or warm anything else.

Okay. So what we really mean when we say a garment is warm is that it does not transmit heat energy. Right. That's all we mean, even though that's not what we're saying. Well, first of all, that doesn't sound very comfortable. I just want to get under a blanket that doesn't transmit heat energy.

A new catchy ad for the blanket commercial, right? Come on under here and let's get under this thing that doesn't transmit heat energy. So there's the point. If you put the blanket on the tile, there is no heat difference between them. So nothing is happening.

There's no, okay, so now watch. Now I put it on you. Mm-hmm. So you are warmer than the blanket, if you got the blanket out of the closet or on the shelf. Okay? Right. The blanket is just room temperature. You are warmer than the room than the blanket.

And right now, you are radiating heat to the air. Yes, I am. Losing heat. Because I am hot, baby. No, you are radiant. I am coming in hot. Coming in hot. That's what I am.

So you come on in. And so you feel cold because you're, losing heat to the air. Okay? And then you say, oh, there's a warm blanket. Let me go get it. So now you bring the blanket. And now the blanket doesn't let you lose the heat to the air.

You keep that heat and you interpret what's going on as the blanket being warm. When all that's happening is that you are no longer losing the heat you were a minute before you put on the blanket. Now, you might. You might say that's just semantic. No. Okay? Because let's say you brought in some cold beer. Okay?

And so you don't have any ice yet, but you got it out of the refrigerator cabinet. It's cold beer that's sitting on the floor. And you say, I don't want the beer to warm up. Let's get a warm blanket to put on it. Okay. Okay? Because how does the beer get warm? It's taking heat from the air, okay?

Because the air is warmer than the beer. So what you need is super blanket that does not transmit heat energy across its thickness. So you take a blanket, put it on the beer, it'll keep the beer cold by preventing heat from coming from outside of the beer from entering the beer. Oh, man. So. So the point is, so the blanket that you're calling a warm blanket is also a cold blanket. It's a cold blanket too. And by the way, we have another word for things like that that you carry around,

and it's called the thermos. Okay, that's true, right. Yes, whether it's a thermos cooler or a thermos for liquids. It's the thermos keeps hot things hot and cold things cold. It's cold, right. The thermos is the ideal blanket for the food that's contained within it. So if you wanted the best bed of the mall, turn it into a thermos.

It's just not cuddly, but boy, you will stay. In fact, you'll become too hot because your body needs to actually cool off. Otherwise, you'll overheat. So I just wanted to clarify the fact that warm blankets are simply blankets that don't transmit heat energy and it'll work keeping your beer cold or you warm. And more broadly, it'll maintain the temperature of whatever it is it's covering. there it is. And if you're not having a good time, then that's a wet blanket, but that's a whole other

explainer. Whole other explainer. That's another, whole other another another. So basically this is what insulation is. Insulation. We don't think of blankets as insulation, but that's what they are. And if one blanket is not working for you, you get a second blanket. Right.

So the two combined make it even harder for heat to transfer from one place to another. Okay, so now How does that How does that explain why No matter how many blankets I put on my wife Her feet are still cold We have top scientists working on that right now How can your feet be cold?

You're wearing boots, thermal socks, and three blankets. How are your feet cold? It's possible. So, We may have talked about this in another explainer, Chuck. I'm not sure. But you will feel cold if you are losing heat to your environment.

Right. And you will feel warm if you are gaining heat from the environment, or if your heat does not lose to the environment has a hard time leaving your body going into the environment. Yeah, we talked about that during wind chills. But windchills, we did talk about that. Yeah, we talked about that during wind chills. I had some memory of that.

So warm mittens, you know, what makes mittens warm? They keep in your fingers touching each other. Right. In a mitten, when one finger loses heat, it goes to the next finger. Right. Well, you want that heat. So you're radiating to yourself inside the mitten, right? Whereas gloves where all your fingers are separated, it's trying to prevent your skin from making thermal contact with the air,

but you have all this surface area on each finger for each finger of the glove. And so that's why it's harder to keep your fingers warm in gloves than it does in mittens. That's all this is ever doing. And that's a wonderful metaphor for where we are in America right now. America, the country that prides itself on being a glove

where each finger is independent of one another when right now what we really need to be is a mitten, each one of the one of, of us giving heat to one another, relying upon each other in order to be warm together. So. Kumbaya. Kumbaya. Kumbaya.

Oh, shit. I'm sorry. Chuck, I didn't think you had it in it. Chuck, that was beautiful. That's beautiful. Kumbaya is great. I forgot about that. But what that means?

But what that means is if you jump into, if you have a partner in bed who's been there for some time, holding aside your wife's feet, which top researchers are still working on, if you have a partner that's been in bed under the covers, under the, quote, warm blanket, and you've been outside, and you feel cold because you're losing heat

faster than your body is comfortable, and you say, I'm going to jump in bed. The moment you jump in bed, you will touch your partner, and start taking heat from them. Right. The moment you start taking heat from them, you feel warm.

And you say, oh, honey, you're warm. And what do you feel like to her? Oh, my gosh. What I feel like to her is a call to her divorce lawyer. So you're taking heat from her. The fact that she's losing heat from you means she feels cold. Right.

So two people cannot feel warm with each other at the same time. You can be neutral. One will feel cold, the other hot. One will feel hot, the other cold. But you both can't feel warm touching each other. Thermodynamics, that's not possible. Nor can you both feel cold touching each other.

Somebody is either neutral or somebody's taking heat from the other. Right. Well, judging on my marriage, clearly, we know who's going to be taking what from whom. What kind of heat energy? Who's got what? I'm just saying. So that's it. That's what I got to say about blankets.

All right. You pulled it off. I'm going to give it to you. So think of it not as a warm blanket, just as a blanket. As a blanket. It's serving as a thermos in your life to keep the cold beer cold or the hot or you warm at your body temperature. One last thing before we wrap. Reptiles are the same temperature as their environment because,

they're cold blood. That's what cold blood. It doesn't mean the blood is cold. It just means they don't regulate it and make it a higher temperature. So it's the same temperatures they air. So you could put a blanket on a reptile, but it'll be vastly yet less useful to it than if it were warm-blooded. Well, now I feel bad about making my iguana wear a sweater.

Damn, all that for nothing. All that knitting for nothing. How much knitting could that have been? And just quickly, if the iguana goes out into the cold weather, you're going to want to bring him a sweater because then they will be losing their body heat to the air. And maybe they don't want to do that at that moment. Right.

Because they live that way, but maybe they want to stay warm. And snakes, you ever see snakes in the summertime? They'll come out and sunbathe on the rocks because that feels good. Right. But that's because a source of energy is being handed to them by sunlight. right you can't just give a blanket to a snake and say you don't need the sunlight just snuggle up in the blanket that they're that's not going to work right and the reason why you don't give a blanket to a snake is because they're a snake thank you for figuring that one out Chuck right they just they don't deserve anything damn it don't give a blanket to a snake because it's a snake Because it's a snake.

What kind of reasoning is that? I don't like snakes. That's where that reasoning comes from. It's that simple. All right. That's cool, man. There you go. And what I learned is this.

If you are using a blanket to keep your beer warm, I invite you to a little place called Walmart or Target to buy a cooler. Because you wouldn't use the blanket to keep your beer warm. You use the blanket to keep people warm. I'm sorry. I said it wrong. Damn it. I must have it.

it up. Damn. Anyway. Oh, well. All right. Be good, Chuck. This is great. Star Talk.

Explain her over and out. Keep looking up.