StarTalk Radio - Women in Science, with Summer Ash and Emily Rice – StarTalk All-Stars

Episode Date: November 22, 2016

New StarTalk All-Stars hosts, astrophysicists Summer Ash and Emily Rice, share their take on “Women Crushing It Wednesday” - reclaiming a sexist hashtag by celebrating women in STEM and examining the challenges women scientists face. Chuck Nice co-hosts.NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free. Find out more at https://www.startalkradio.net/startalk-all-access/ Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

This is StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk All-Stars. We're your hosts. I'm Summer Ash. I'm an astrophysicist at Columbia University, and I direct the public outreach program for the astronomy department there. And I'm Emily Rice. I'm an astronomer at the College of Staten Island City University of New York and at the American Museum of Natural History. And today we're gonna be talking about women in science and our first I

should introduce our co-host Chuck Nice. Thanks for being here with us. Hey ladies how are you? Good to be here. And today we're gonna be talking about women in science. You are welcome to participate. Thank you, thank you. And by the way I'm'm looking at myself in the camera here and I'm looking at this sweater. I might just be a woman in science. I'm just saying for those of you at home, that was a joke saying I have breasts. And I do. Okay. Yeah. And we're actually doing it in the form of Cosmic Queries. And the Cosmic Queries are all about, listen, women crushing it Wednesday. Yeah. Now, I'm going to say that I'm a little embarrassed. I don't know what women crushing it Wednesday is.

Now, I've heard of Women Crush Wednesday, which is a hashtag on Twitter. So what is Women Crushing It Wednesday? We kind of made it up. We were not the only ones that made it up. A few other people use this. But we like Women Crushing at Wednesdays better. I do too, to be honest. If you look up what a crush is, Miriam Webster defines a crush.

It's kind of, I don't think it's the greatest compliment, especially when you're talking about women trying to break into a male-dominated field and be treated equally and things like that. A crush is like a temporary infatuation. Right. And when I saw Women Crush Wednesday, I was like, really? Like, that's the, you know, we got two Nobel Prizes out of 100 Nobel Prizes in physics. And that's the best you can do is a temporary infatuation?

Like, no. We're going to profile women crushing it. Right. In their fields. Right. Because now that is not temporary. Because when you are crushing it, in their field right because now that is not temporary because when you are crushing it that is it yeah you have crushed it and that's that's the end that's the that's the finality of it like yo i just crushed that it's over deal with it crushed it you know

so there's a there really is a very different sensibility behind the two just by adding the suffix to crush. So instead of crush. It's subtle, but it makes it much more powerful. It is much more empowering, much less objectifying. And let me just. I think meant to be complimentary. But let me just say, as a feminist, I actually agree with that, you know. And notice, I didn't say as a father of two girls which by the way stop it

yeah okay as a father of two girls i believe shut up because here's the thing um you should not have respect for women and their equality based on the fact of who you have in your family who is a woman yeah because i don't know if you know this but if you are here on this planet, you have a family member who is a woman. All right? So that right there disqualifies that as a reason to respect women. The reason why you respect women is because you are smart enough and evolved enough to understand that their equality is just that.

That's it. That's the end of it. Human beings. Right. They are human beings. That's where their equality lies in the fact that they are human beings. They are a different gender, but that doesn't make them different people. Okay?

The personhood of a woman is different. Sometimes the simplest things are the hardest things to wrap your mind around. What's that? Sometimes the simplest things are the hardest things to wrap your mind around. What's that? Somehow the simplest things are the hardest things to wrap your mind around. Yeah, yeah. But it's a paradigm shift. Right. And we're working on it.

Oh, good. I think it's going pretty well. Right. And, you know, I say all those things because I really do believe them, you know, but I don't believe them as the father of two daughters. Yeah. Okay. So anyway, hey, so we have our cosmiceries and we take them from all over the internet.

And whether it's Facebook and Instagram or Twitter or what have you. And we always start with a Patreon question. And Patreon is a platform where you can support StarTalk financially. And by doing so, we will give you priority to the Cosmic Queries questions. Because, quite frankly, we can be bought. And All Star All Access, right? Is that separate from Patreon? Yes, it is.

Thank you so much for saying that. So StarTalkAllAccess.com is where you can actually watch this podcast that we're doing right now and every podcast that we do in video form. Video form. As well as exclusive original content that you cannot see anywhere else but StarTalkAllAccess.com. So thank you, Emily, for that. All right. Should we get into our first one?

It's a Patreon question. This is from Erica Thotis or Thoits. I'm not sure. It's either Thotis or Thoits. And Erica says this. I realize this is a bit off topic, but I can't stop thinking about it. As a woman who's grappling with the fact that our country has just voted for a man who at best has a sexist view of women, I'm feeling a little bit discouraged and defeated. I sadly imagine you face sexism and setbacks while pursuing your careers as you've worked to bring due recognition to female astronomers and physicists. Wow, that was a deep way to start.

Thanks for bringing us down, Chuck, with your first question. Let's jump in the deep end. Yeah. No, but let's jump right off in the deep end. What she's saying is, now, believe it or not, there are people who believe that, and I swear to God, this was so funny. I watched a panel on C-SPAN.

Yes, I am that guy. I'm sorry, I'm that guy. I watched a panel on C-SPAN where they talked about there is no more sexism. Oh, no! And it was four men and a male host. All of them Washington people. Like, they all have, like, big jobs in Washington.

And they were like, there really is no more sexism. That's pretty good. That's like when Obama was elected, the racism ended, right? Exactly. That was fun. It's over. Yeah, it's over. Racism, like, now we don't anymore.

Hey, what are you talking about? It's done. Oh, my gosh. So even though this is a little bit heavy and she says it's a little bit off topic, it's not. No, it's not off topic at all. Because when you talk about women in science. It's all part of the same thing. Like, that's the, like, I think the lack of representation of women in science and other underrepresented minorities in science is really an extension of the rest of society.

Like, that's what the thing, a lot of people think, like, oh, science is this, it's this facts and this very pure pursuit and, you know, very noble and esoteric sometimes. But science is messy and done by people. And humans. And, yeah, and people have prejudices and people have biases. And definitely, like, our society is reflected in science for better or for worse. I think we wish it weren't. And I think we wish even as scientists that we could, you know, because we think that we're logical, we're trained in certain ways. And we think that we can overcome these things just by thinking about them.

But we're showing that we can't and that we really need to do better. To go back to the question, and actually it can make it harder to convince a scientist that they're being biased. Wow. Because they think, yeah, that's the- There you go. There's the- Because they think that they're-

They think that they're not. Yeah, they think that they're being rational. And they also think that they're very logical people. Yeah. Right. And so they have a harder time of seeing the actual mistakes that they're not. And they also think that they're very logical people. Yeah. And so they have a harder time of seeing the actual, you know, kind of mistakes that they're making. Even when presented with evidence. Oh, yeah. There's been these studies showing that when you provide data, people become more entrenched. Still, you rationalize it away.

I mean, because that's what we do is we look at data and we try to make sense of certain things and we try to dismiss other things in order to understand the physical scientific data. We can do the same thing about people, which is terrible. That's not what we want to do. We want to handle dealing with people in a slightly different way. Right. And so science in that way is kind of a reflection of our society as a whole. And boy, this week has been tough you know and it's especially i think like as a woman in science and having dealt with this actually you know like i'll admit that i've been a little

bit lucky in that you know i kind of didn't realize that that women in science and and was a special thing or like needed defending or talking about for a very long time which was nice i did like in high school I was definitely one of the only girls in my like upper level physics and math classes but damn it I was one of the best too so I was like what up like I don't know where everybody else is um I I always um and then um in kind of college it was a nice mix of of um guys and dolls i don't know you know women and men in my in my physics major and stuff like that and then in grad school i actually had an incoming class of seven six women and one dude and so our grad school like the you know in the higher levels

were also kind of well mixed and well represented and and so when did it all when did it all go to crap? When did it all go to pot? The thing is, with science, it tends to be like the higher you get, the more imbalanced it becomes. The less the normalization happens. For whatever reason, some people call it a leaky pipeline. The idea is that you have

this pipeline from student through to professor. The women drop out for some reason and the men don't drop out. Got you. And so now that I'm an assistant professor, I'm the only female physicist in my department, and there's a couple other female engineers and a female geologist, and that's out of two dozen faculty members.

Oh, wow. Look at that. So that's a little bit disappointing. But you try to find that's a little bit disappointing. You know, but you try to find your tribe a little bit, like you try to find people that also care about changing the representation. And I steal it from Shonda Rhimes, actually normalizing it. It's not diversifying, because we don't just want, you know, we don't want like a rainbow box of crayons just for the sake of having a rainbow, like we want to normal normalize it we want to have science be representative of the population as of a whole because that's

actually a scientific thing if you have a random sample of you know people that want to go into science if you randomly draw from people then science you know people that are scientists should represent the overall population right if you don't, if you have only, for example, white males becoming scientists, you have some kind of selection bias. There are scientific words for that. And yet people say, oh, but women aren't interested, and other people don't have the education or something like that. And it's like, no, it's a selection bias.

There's a large enough population where we should be able to randomize these things out. And so that it would be reflected in the actual field. The field would reflect the population. Yeah. Summer, do you have anything? I just want to add, like, for motivation, you know, what motivates me is that now, because of the Internet, there's all these social channels and social communities. And so even if your institution is very imbalanced with women or minorities, you can find those other people that are like you out there in those other departments. And so then it's kind of like Emily said, you know, you find your group. And I'm motivated every day by the work that they're

also trying to do to change how everything is in science and in the world in general. And so that and that's a way that you can cheer each other on. And that's a way that you can also just discover that there are so many other amazing people out there. Like I've discovered so many amazing women crushing it in science on social media. And that it sounds it sounds to me like what you're both, the common thread through what you both have just said is that community is a big, big, big help in overcoming any of these challenges.

Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. Well, Erica. Yeah, go ahead. I was going to say, Erica, that's a great, great, great question and a great way to start off. I don't care what anybody says.

Well, let's get to something a little easier. This is Dave Smith coming to us from Facebook, and Dave says, I'm doing an informative speech on black holes. What's a good attention-getting tip? Oh, you got this one, I think. Do I? Yeah. Well, I like to say black holes don't suck.

That's exactly what I was thinking about. Oh, I think. Do I? Yeah. Well, I like to say black holes don't suck. That's exactly what I was thinking about. Oh, get out. For me, it's a little double meaning because they don't suck because they're awesome. Right. But they also don't suck because if you actually observe them with radio telescopes, they're also blowing jets. Right. So they're doing multiple types of activities. Nice.

Phenomena. And so that's a nice energetic thing. Sucking stuff. Yeah. You can happily orbit a black hole. Yeah. Like you can orbit, if you have enough energy, you can orbit a black hole as a star, as a planet, as something. As another black hole.

Yeah. As long as you're outside of the danger zone. Right. Yeah. If you're outside the danger zone. Right. The event horizon. You can go ahead.

So that's cool. Right, yeah, if you're outside the danger zone, right. The event horizon, you can go ahead. So that's cool. And there is a perception, though, that a black hole is an all-consuming entity that no matter where you are in the universe, at some point it's going to get you. Yeah, people are afraid, like, the black hole, the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy. They're like, we're going to get eaten, and we're not, because you can calculate. Like, a black hole will eat everything within its reach, but its reach is finite and or growing at a very small rate.

Right. It's because it's governed by gravity and gravity is actually the weakest of the four fundamental forces. Wow. Throwing some physics there. Yeah, and nothing wrong with throwing a little physics in there. Take that gravity, you weakling. I also like the anecdote where you can say, if I could set my fingers and turn the sun into

a black hole, the solar system orbits, everything would remain exactly the same. I mean, there are other reasons why we would not continue to live, but it would not be because we were eaten by the black hole. Really? Yes, because the reach, the event horizon of that black hole, the mass of the sun,

would be tens of miles at the most. Probably less. Three kilometers. Yeah, exactly. So in other words, we would be beyond the reach of that event horizon. We would too. And therefore, Mercury would.

Gravity would stay the same. Which is the closest to the sun. So we, none of the planets would get sucked in. Nothing would change. Everything would just orbit happily. And then we would just be orbiting a black hole, period.

Right? Eight minutes after the sun turned into a black hole, we'd get very, very cold. Yeah. Plants might die. Yeah. Other things might not work. But otherwise, yeah. We'll still make it. Revitation hole, we'd get very, very cold. Plants might die. Other things might not work. But otherwise, yeah.

We'll still make it. Revitationally, we'd be fine. I'm very positive about that. We'll just become chuds. Okay. All right, here we go. Let's... All right.

We're doing Women Crushing It Wednesday. Questions from our Cosmic Queries audience. And this is Jay Birchfield. And Jay wants to know this. What seems to be the biggest barriers for women entering STEM fields? Do these barriers seem to be getting any smaller? So what are the biggest barriers and are there hope when it comes to the barriers that are being removed? Some people say that there's barriers in terms of inspiring girls to be interested in science. Like some people think that girls and women just naturally aren't interested in science, which I think is totally wrong. I think like everybody is born naturally curious. I think like everybody is born naturally curious, but somehow women and girls tend to get discouraged away from it more than men are for some reason, it feels like. And maybe it's a little bit of these kind of unconscious biases. It's also a little bit of, I think, self-doubt that women tend to have more than men have where they think, oh, I have to be smart to be a scientist. And so I'm not that smart. I'm not going to bother. It's also been shown that women tend to have a little

bit higher expectations for themselves. Like they think, you know, is it maybe in classes like, oh, I have to get an A or else I'm not any good at this. You know, or I have to, you know, like they underestimate their skills and they kind of overestimate their expectations. Whereas a dude might. Men overestimate their expectations. Whereas a dude might. Men overestimate everything. Yeah. Seriously. And not be bothered by underperforming.

No, they really aren't. A C student and be like, well, I can be a physicist and a. I can be president. It's happened to people. I wish you were a C student. It's happening. A woman might get a B and be like, oh, I'm not any good at this or something like that and switch to something that she might think is easier. Okay.

And then it kind of gets harder from there at various different levels. But I think most of the barriers are not actually scientific, but they're cultural. So they're cultural, social barriers, psychological barriers. And do you see them, the second part of the question was, do you see them getting better? Is there any empirical evidence that we are getting better at inspiring women going into STEM? Yeah, the empirical evidence is there, right? It's the participation. Okay, there you go.

Right, and the achievements. And, you know, the participation is increasing, not uniformly across the fields and not as fast as we would like it to, but it's there. Cool. I think one of the other things is, yeah, that would be great. In physics. Yep. I think one of the other things is that there are like these studies that show bias in teachers. So that's going to affect no matter what subject you're in, but teachers calling on boys more often

and just the interaction between teachers and students is not in favor sometimes of the female students and building their courage or building their knowledge and allowing them to participate at the same levels. And then also, oh, what was the other thing I was just going to say? I'll stall a little bit. Like the, you know, these things aren't meant to be, I'll stall a little bit. Like the, you know, these things aren't meant to be, they're not necessarily, they're not meant to be negative. Like I don't think people think, oh, I'm going to.

Well, there's not a malicious conspiracy. There's not a malicious conspiracy. It's just unconscious bias. These things happen. But you have one more thing you want to say? Because we're out of time for this. What we were talking about, or one of the reasons that we also do the StarTorialist, our science and astronomy fashion blog, is because there is, because science is dominated by men, then there's a dominant type of scientist that's pictured. And so there's women have a spectrum.

And so some women think that if they are drawn to more things that are classically girly, that that doesn't, there's no place for that in science. Right. And so they also hide that lack of science. Yes. I'll try to change that. Cool. Okay, we have to take a break, and we'll be back with StarTalk All-Stars

right after this. Welcome back to StarTalk All-Stars. I'm one of your All-Star co-hosts. I'm Emily Rice. And I'm another All-Star co-host. I'm Summer Ashe. And thanks, Chuck, for being our third co-host for this show. Absolutely. It's my pleasure. Without a doubt. I'm having fun. And you have all these cosmic queries for us about women crushing it Wednesday. Women crushing it

Wednesday. And we went to the internet and asked people to give us some cosmic queries that we might be able to pose to you guys. And many of them have to do with women in STEM. And some of them just are general science questions. And the cool thing is you can speak to both of them. You can crush it. You can crush it. Both of them. Crushing the cosmic queries.

Someone must know your particular state of being, Emily, because. Oh. And by that, I mean that Emily is with child. Emily is pregnant, okay? Not your state of being like, you know, anything else. I was like, I can read my aura. That's right. I'm pure energy right

now, Chuck. This is Randy G. Sidberry from Twitter says this. Could you please tell us what a birth would be like in outer space? Oh. And by that, I think he means zero G. I was going to say, I'm not that kind of doctor.

I don't know what a birth is going to be like, period, actually. Could somebody tell me, please? I'm a little bit terrified. Does gravity... So the thing that I do know is that there's so much fluid around the baby that they tend to be floating. Yes. And they don't seem to kind of care about gravity very much. Right.

But that said, I don't know, because somehow they, like most of the time, they find their way out. They get head down, and then they get deeper in your pelvis, and then they, you know, eventually they want to come out because of the hormones that go. I'm making stuff up, honestly. No. I really don't know. I can tell you, I actually know the question. Having three children and being there for all of it, it will be so messy.

Oh my God, it'll be so messy. The advice that I've heard is neck up. Just stay neck up and let the professionals deal with everything else. Well, yeah. Do you think it would be like the same as a birth in a bathtub or a birth in a birthing tub, as they call them, where you are mutually buoyant? It helps. I mean, that's how astronauts train, right, for low gravity. They go into a pool.

They train in the deep water. Right. Neutral buoyance facility. Yes, right. And let me tell you something. Here's the deal. It ain't going to make a difference. You could be mutually buoyant, and I've seen those births,

and the women are screaming just as much. It's not like they're just like, thank God I'm in outer space! This is so God darn great! No, it's just like, I'm going to kill whoever did this to me. You son of a bitch! I hate you and your mother! And you know what? I'm just taking the time

to tell you I hate your mother right now because I can and I don't care. Okay. Anyway, that's what my wife said to me. That's all. That left a scar, didn't it? Yeah, buddy. God, I'm scared. No, actually, I wish that was the case. My wife and my mother are actually, my mother likes my wife better than me.

I'm not even joking. That's a good sign that you married well, though. Yes. Or that I'm an awful son. A little bit of both, maybe. A little bit of both. Yeah, exactly. Who needs to choose?

You can be both. I've never thought about giving birth in space. Like, we might have to find out eventually, right? Because that's the idea. If we start to go further and further. If we go further out. Yeah, like, that's, I mean, Buzz Aldrin talks about Mars as a one-way trip. Right.

And it's probably actually cheaper to figure out how to, you know, procreate and give birth on another planet instead of keep sending fresh people. That's true. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Lost another one. Yeah. I don't know why these people keep having sex while they're out there in space, but it's just not working out. All right.

Hey, Randy, that was a really cool question. That was a stumper, but it was a really cool question. All right. Here's a personal question for both of you, and it's from Angela Marone from Instagram. And Angela says, what kind of major challenges did you personally face to get where you are today? Okay. So this is your own personal story. I mean, there's no real right or wrong answer to this.

It's not scientifically based, but it is experientially based. Is there anything that you can think of that from a gender-specific standpoint where you ran into some obstacles on your path or your journey to this point? I think I'm really lucky in that I didn't face any major challenges. But I think, unfortunately, like, you know, for better or for worse, that's one of the reasons that I'm here as a scientist. Oh. Is because I didn't face major challenges. Now, that is a very good point. Yeah.

The fact that you are where you are is because you received the kind of nurturing and assistance necessary to put anybody in your position, and you were just able to do it. Sometimes I kind of think that, yeah. But I do know other people have overcome major challenges, and I know that they're smarter than me and tougher than me. And also thinking about the fact that so many people that did face more challenges than me don't make it even though they want to. And that's got to be fixed. I was going to say that the real problem is those who face the challenges and go, to hell with this.

You know, this is just too much, man. I can't, you know what I mean? And that's fair. I mean, because some of the challenges are just, you know, I grew up with like a house and enough food and things like that. And that's something that, you know, a lot of people don't have. And it actually frightens me on a day-to-day basis, like what we could be missing because not everybody is taken care of. Not everybody has the same opportunities. Like what geniuses are not even living, you know, out of infancy or something like that because we don't take care of everybody kind of equally across the planet.

Yeah, there is a price to be paid by human capital, inhuman capital, by disparity. Disparity exacts a price upon all societies. Yeah, and science is a product of society. And Summer, do you have an actual? I have quite a similar story to Emily, I think, in the sense that I was really fortunate to have amazing women mentors at every step almost. Okay. Even though we were collectively still the minority at every point as far as gender minority.

So, first of all, I'm raised by a single mother. I'm an only child. She's not in technical science fields at all, but she supported me the entire time through my pursuit of it. One of my mentors in college was the only tenured female engineering professor in the department. So I came through engineering, so I have a little winding road story.

But I worked in aerospace engineering, and my boss was a woman. She was one of the few women. Grad school, my advisor was a woman also. And that was kind of random. Like in my particular experience, I didn't get to choose that person. I chose a project and that turned out to be run by one of the women who had been there since she was in undergrad. So it was kind of amazing. And then I think personally, which may have slightly been affected by gender,

when I was in grad school is when I had like a major depressive episode. And that was my first encounter with depression. And I do think that there was being the minority in the group and also just not being confident enough to seek out help at various stages and also share that information in the academic environment that I was in sort of kept me back, made me take a bigger hit due to that. Okay. Yeah. All right. Well, I love the fact that what you both kind of focused on is that when you get the proper push and assistance, it makes things easier. And I say this to everybody, nobody gets anywhere without help. Absolutely. And that's all there is to it. And so the more help that is available for anyone, the better you're going to do at anything. So, you know, and just think of it this way. When you look

at the NFL and the NBA, you would be so shocked to find how many players have a family member, father, uncle, somebody who played professional, that professional sport. Oh, interesting. Yeah. And everybody thinks like these guys are just natural phenoms. They came out of nowhere. You have to recognize. And you got to recognize.

No, that guy had somebody mentoring him from the time he was three years old, put a basketball in his hand, a football in his hand. Look at the Manning brothers. I mean, there's actually three of them, but only two count. I always think about that poor or third one, yeah. He's an insurance salesman or something. But the fact is they're the son of Archie Manning. Yeah.

Okay, so the help thing is a very big thing is what I'm saying. Also, that's a really good lesson, too, for science in general. Like science, you hear the myths of the lone genius and that kind of a thing, but science is a is a community and team effort and group effort and you can't get anywhere and especially in grad school so i used to work on a program that helped um post-bac students sort of get prepared for grad school and the thing that you really have to drill into them is that you need to ask for help right and it's good to ask for help that's right you should identify resources outside yourself.

You can't do it alone. Absolutely. Also knowing that even the grad school is a thing, like the grad school is something where you keep going to school, but you get paid to do it.

And so like... Say that again now? Yeah. You don't get paid very much. I believe Chuck Nice might be going back to grad school. Yeah, but it's not,

you know, it's not like, you know, law school and med school are kind of more popular. You have to pay for those, and it's a huge amount of money. But graduate school, especially in the sciences, is generally paid for. You work, but you're working as teaching or doing research or something like that. You're not paid a huge amount of money, but you're generally paid enough to live on. And you're going to school.

Yeah, and you're going to school to get a PhD or to get a master's degree. And this is something that, because it's a relatively small amount of the population that does it, it's not very well known that it's even a path. Right. And so if you don't already have a scientist in your life, you might not even know that it's a thing that you can do. You also don't have to go to grad school and only become a professor. You also don't have to go to grad school and only become a professor. You can go to grad school and then you can get a PhD in physics and even then work in finance or become an astronaut or work in fashion, all kinds of things. Right.

Wow. Yeah. Who knew? Yeah. I'm making it rain, bitches. I'm going to grad school. Okay. And I think the interesting thing about that, too, is actually it counters the leaky pipeline example. Because I like to think of it more.

It's not that you're losing these people. But you are, for some reasons, the pipeline is not encouraging them to go on. But some of them are making these alternative choices, which we shouldn't even call alternative. Because the idea is that there's just this huge range of careers. There's a lot of options at every level. People with astronomy PhDs that work for like Etsy and Stitch Fix and Netflix and GitHub and, you know, all kinds of software companies and all kinds of Internet companies and things like that. And so you can really do all kinds of different things with a science PhD. Wow, that's amazing.

That's great stuff. Well, there you go, kids. Stay in school. For a long, long time. For a long, long time. All right, here we go. This is Benjamin Needle coming to us from Instagram. This is off topic, but I just want to get your opinions on this.

What is the best and possibly simplest way to refute a climate change denial argument? I know you both are passionate about climate change, and he came to us from Austin, Texas, and climate change is going to be a very, very crucial and serious subject, more so than it has ever been because of the particular administration that is about to take place or take hold here in America. So with that in mind, is there anything that you kind of have a go to when it comes to climate science and climate deniers? Climate science is just another aspect of science. And man, if you don't believe in science, then you don't believe why your cell phone

works or why your computer works. And 99% of scientists scientists of climate scientists in particular this is people that you know have gone to school for 10 plus years studied these the these very intricate detailed things and by the way that's all they do is climate it's it's not like their focus right that's their focus it's not like you're an astrophysicist and dabbling in it and dabbling in climate science these These guys, their concentration is the climate of the planet Earth and sometimes other planets. But go ahead. And yeah, and other planets as well. That's also the thing is that, you know, in order to understand Earth, we can also understand Venus,

we can understand Mars, and everything kind of fits in together. You know, it's still, it's science. And so it's not a set, you know, we don't have an answer, but we have a very good idea of what's going to happen. And if I were a climate scientist, I don't think I'd be able to sleep at night. And it's even, you know, sometimes difficult as an astrophysicist, because they're like, oh, yeah, this is like the best case scenario is, you know, rising ocean levels, rising temperatures, is rising ocean levels, rising temperatures, extreme weather patterns soon, within a century. And it's amazing to talk to them because they're like, yes, absolutely. They have no doubt whatsoever.

And this is 99% of them say the same thing. And the funny thing is that what people don't understand about climate change is that, What people don't understand about climate change is that, and by the way, I implore everyone to stop calling it climate change and start calling it human-caused or man-made climate change. Yeah. Because we keep calling it climate change as if this stuff is just happening. Right. Well, it has happened. And this is one of their arguments is that, oh, number one, we don't know what happened in the past.

Well, we do know what happened in the past. It's a lot coarser than the data that we have now, but we know what happened in the past. Right. And number two, what happened in the past was these tiny little changes, you know, big enough to cause ice ages and a lot of different climates. The Earth has been a very different place for even the last several million years, let alone billions of years. But these are very small changes over long periods of time. And then you put the last 100 years on the same

graph and it shoots up. And it goes off the charts. And it's terrifying. But that's, you know, you can't even, some people don't even understand charts. And's, you know, you can't even, you know, some people don't even understand charts. And so, you know, getting this stuff across is, it's admittedly a complicated thing. And so there are a lot of details to get across. And there's a lot of when something is so complicated, I think people tend to like, they want to believe what they want to believe. And so they want to believe that it's going to be okay or that it's not caused by us or, you, you know, that it's not as bad as, as these crazy people are making it out to be. But no, it's terrible. It's, it's only going to get worse unless we fix things sooner rather than

later. And it's real. Yeah. And it's frightening. It is. Yeah. So would you have any, I thought, I saw you looking at your witness. Yeah. I just wanted to add also like the thing, a lot of times people are talking when they say that climate change isn't real, they're talking about weather. And weather is a short term local phenomenon and climate is longer time scales, larger geographic scales. Right. And so they're also looking, it's like looking at a graph for just a tiny little portion instead of a big, huge trend that you're seeing. Right. And yeah.

And so, and guess what? It's kind of like finding out like, just because you don't think it's real doesn't mean it doesn't exist. You are real. Yeah. Because it believes in you. Science is real.

We have to take a break, but we'll be back with StarTalk All-Stars right after this. Welcome back to StarTalk All-Stars. I'm your All-Star host, Summer Ashe. And I'm Emily Rice. And we're also joined by Chuck Nice. Yes.

I am here. Thank you. It's good to be here. We are doing our Cosmic Queries, and we're going to jump right back into it because we've got some really cool questions about women crushing it Wednesday. Even if it's not Wednesday. Even if it's not Wednesday. Even if it's not Wednesday. It's Wednesday somewhere in the solar system. Define Wednesday.

It's Wednesday on Uranus for like six more months. Right. So there you have it. And also women crush it every day. Yeah. There you go. All right. So this is Reed 126 and he says, or she says, because I can't tell from Reed.

Dog actually. Yeah. What is the possible way, what is the best possible way of increasing science literacy for the general public? It seems people still do not believe in many scientifically settled facts. do not believe in many scientifically settled facts. So what is the best way to increase science literacy for the general public? Because I think once you increase science literacy, you will automatically increase the appeal and the number of women going into science. I think so, yeah.

One of the things that is discouraging people from going into science maybe is that they think science is hard, but science isn't actually that hard. It's hard in a different way than what we're used to, I think. And that's the thing. I think it's just making science more a part of our larger culture. That's what I was going to say too. Yeah, that the portrayal of science should infuse more things

that we consume every day. Yeah. So more shows can have scientists as characters and still not be a show that's about scientists. About scientists. Yeah. Wow, that's true. Not naming names. Right.

No, you're absolutely. You have those too, but you can have just scientists. Science is a career option. So more shows can have, you know, they can be character-based storytelling series, but they can also have characters that are geologists or, you know, even Ross was an anthropologist. Yeah, yeah. Was that? Ross on Friends. That's true.

He was. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you can have females. I think he was in Natural History. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's funny. That was one of the reasons why I love Star Trek.

Everybody on Star Trek is a scientist. There's not like somebody who isn't. Every single person is a scientist on Star Trek. Or an engineer. Right. Or an engineer. But they're all scientists. That's why they're on that ship, you know, which is kind of cool, you know.

They're also shown to be more than just a scientist. Right. Which I think is also one of the things, is that scientists can be multidimensional. Yeah. So like Picard has all of these history books and loves studying Shakespeare. Well, he's an anthropologist. Yeah, exactly. And great.

And Riker is a musician. Correct. And even Data the android plays music and tries to explore all these other things about humanity. But he's not a real boy. No, I'm joking. Hey, that's great. I love that answer. That's what it's about.

Okay, cool. Well, thanks, Reed. Very good question. Let's stay on the same kind of topic. And this is both personal and your opinion. So you can opine and you can actually answer it for your own life. Manarius, I believe that's the name. It's just Manarius from Instagram, says,

what do you think is the most influential book, movie, or show that inspires young women to become more interested in STEM? And then she says, especially astronomy. it in stem um and then she says especially astronomy but um is there do you do you have a particular piece of literature or do you is there some particular movie or television show some art uh you know uh that that actually you think is inspiring for women well i think there's two different questions there it's like, if we are trying to identify what do we think the best thing is, or we're trying to identify things that inspire us?

Both, yeah, both. I think, at least for our generation, this is dating us a little bit, but I hear from a lot of people, I didn't actually watch it growing up because I was into My Little Ponies instead of, but a lot of people say Carl Sagan and Cosmos. And I think one of the great things about Carl Sagan is that he, you know, addressed like humanity in this very like big picture way. And I think that was, you know,

fairly inclusive, even for him being a white dude. And a lot of that resonated with a lot of people. And of course, now we have the new generation of Cosmos that Neil Tyson hosted and kind of a lot more pop culture science stuff that is hopefully getting people interested in science. Maybe even the Big Bang Theory. For all its stereotypes of the different characters on there, they show, I don't know, a handful of... They have the scientist and the engineer and the theoretician and the experimentalist.

And they have a neuroscientist and a biologist. Yeah, and the women are biologists and neuroscientists. And, you know, at least it's getting a little bit more. At least there's a representation, right? It's on primetime TV. I mean, I know TV is not a thing so much anymore, but it's just the fact that it exists is something. Yeah. Yeah.

Yes. And please, I make all my money from TV. Please don't say that. No, it's cool. That's great. Here's I got to move on to this next question. This is kind of a this is a this is for both of your experience in life. This is Sweet Junie, who says my four-year-old daughter wants to ask

me, my four-year-old daughter asked me, how can I become an astrophysicist for real, not pretend? How cool is that? I just want to take a minute to imagine a four-year-old pretending to be an astrophysicist. I love it.

I just see her four-year-old daughter sitting around doing a Neil deGrasse Tyson impression. Just like, yeah, let's do this. Then she says, further, I'd like to grasp on how to help her follow up the path that she is interested in. What does an education for an astrophysicist look like? So what path can she expect to walk? So we've touched on it a little bit. The nice thing is that not everybody takes this path. And so, I mean, I definitely didn't decide what I wanted to do when I was four, thank goodness. I think I would be like, I don't know, a puppy. Like still, but the, you definitely have to at some point in your life, learn physics and learn math. And so the

kind of earlier the better, you don't necessarily have to start when you're four. But, you know, by time you get to say, middle school and high school, you want to take as many math classes as you can, you want to take as many physics and chemistry and computer science classes as you can. My goodness, by the time she's four now in 15 years, who even knows what there might be. What classes and learning things will be available. And things like that. And then you want to go to college. And in college, you want to major in physics or math or computer science or, you know, not all colleges even have astrophysics as a major, but that can be okay. And then you want to go to graduate school. So graduate school, we touched on before, and graduate school is this kind of post-undergrad school-work hybrid

where you do research, you might even teach classes, you earn a higher degree, a master's degree or a PhD, and that's kind of the professional qualification that you typically need to be an astrophysicist. Right. People call you doctor. And then you say, but not that kind of doctor. And you don't put it, you can put it on your magazine subscriptions. Don't put it in your frequent flyer profile because that's for other reasons. Oh, really?

Yeah. Yeah. They want to, they want to know, like, they want to be able to, if there's a medical emergency. They want really? Yeah, do you know that? Yeah, they want to know, like, they want to be able to, if there's a medical emergency, I mean, they want to be able to call on you. They want to be well-trained,

but it's also useful to know if there's medical doctors on the roster. So it's that whole scene, is there a doctor in the house? Yeah. Is there a doctor on the plane? Is there a doctor?

Me? Oh, but I'm an astrophysicist. Like, I'm not helping that guy have a heart attack over there. Sorry. Well, I recently booked a flight on Virgin Atlantic, and one of the options for my title was Baroness. I almost wanted to put that. You should have done it.

I think that's how they know who's bagged to rob or something like that. So I wanted to add, you know, she's only four at this point. And so I think one of the great things, what science is, is science is asking questions and finding answers and then asking more questions. Okay. So just help your daughter answer her questions, like support her in inquiry and curiosity, and then help her try and find the resources that will help her answer those questions, whether that's a person or a book or whatever. But just sort of encourage the interest. The exploration. And also what we were talking about earlier, you know, don't let her get discouraged if she gets a B or a C in a class.

You know, help her figure out then what the resources she needs in order to do better. But, you know, throughout that entire academic career, academic career, she doesn't have to be perfect. Nobody is perfect. Or even if she decides that she doesn't want to be an astrophysicist, but she's still super interested in space. Actually, these are the students that I try to encourage even more, because I want my lawyers and my doctors and my bridge you know bridge engineers and everybody like i want everybody to have an interest journalists and fashion designers i want everybody to know about

space and care about space so that it permeates kind of everyday life if we only have astrophysicists that are the people about who care about space like you know we might lose our funding or you know the public doesn't care about what we're doing. We don't have our TV shows anymore or something like that. And so I want everybody like, you know, if even if you're interested in space, you don't necessarily have to become an astrophysicist. You can like do some other career and still share your love for space and incorporate space and astronomy into that career. Cool. All right. Well, that was a good question. All right. Way to go, sweet Junie. Let's move on to, ooh, oh, I swear these people, they give me these names just to mess with me. I swear they do. All right. This is Saba Ahadiz. Ahadiz, Saba Ahadiz, who says, what is in the black hole?

And if all the matter of everything that goes into a black hole never comes back, where did it actually go? What will happen if we actually get in a black hole to see what we see? Okay. So what happens? What is in the black hole? I mean, what happens to the stuff when it goes in the black hole to see what would we see. Okay? So what happens? What is in the black hole? I mean, what happens to the stuff when it goes in the black hole? Can I give the scientific answer? Yes.

We don't know. Oh, there you go. I think that part A, we don't know. Which is awesome. I love to be able to answer things like that. We also don't know. And part C, we don't know. Okay.

And guess what? If that's what it is, that's what it is. To some extent, it is. I mean, we have lots of different theories, but because black holes eat everything and take in everything, including light, and light is basically our messenger as astronomers. Right. So we get all our information from light, so we have no information coming out of the black hole. We have information very near to it. Going in from the event horizon.

And we don't have information coming out. So then we'd have to turn to theoretical physics and mathematics for predicting Einstein basically with relativity, what space time is doing and what is happening to mass and energy in those regions. And which is funny because just because of what people don't understand is that theoretical physics is based on mathematical models and those mathematical models are predictive of something that could actually happen in the physical world under the right circumstances. Now, with that in mind, more than 100 years ago, Einstein told us about gravity waves through his mathematical models. Gravitational. I'm sorry.

Oh, yeah, gravity waves are different. That's a different thing. Gravity waves are different. Right, gravity was a different but um we he had no way we now know that he was right but he would have had no way of knowing that he was actually right because he's got these models that he put out yeah but that's what models are they make predictions and then we go observe to see if we can verify those predictions yeah that's what makes a successful model. And sometimes there's this leapfrog between when we can predict something and when we can actually have the technology to find it.

Right. And sometimes that can take a couple years. Sometimes that can take decades. Right. Or centuries. Yes, centuries maybe even. So are there any mathematical models right now that are the pervasive accepted belief

on what is happening in a black hole? I mean, or are we at a place now where it's just like, yeah, well, you know, we really don't have the, we don't have the information to do that. I think there's a lot of different models. Or there's a lot of people working on this problem and some of them are going at it the same way and some of them are coming at it completely different ways. So I don't know that I really know what those models say,

but I mean, in theory, it's just one of those crazy things about the universe, this whole idea like that the universe is expanding, but it's actually the fabric of space time that's expanding. So there's things that are separate from our intuition and what we want to be able to conceive and picture. So this whole idea of a singularity is basically infinite density, infinitely small. Right. Which makes no physical sense. Which makes no physical sense whatsoever. Makes no physical sense.

But that's what the math tells us. Wow. Wow, that is exciting. God. God, I love doing this show, man. Black holes don't suck. Black holes don't suck. Black holes don't suck, baby. Awesome.

Awesome. Well, I guess we're out of time. I can't ask any more questions. There you have it. You've been listening to StarTalk All Stars. Thanks to Chuck Nice for co-hosting with us. Such a pleasure. I'm Emily Rice.

I'm Summer Ash. And keep asking questions. And black holes don't suck, but Hubble got you. Thanks for hosting with us. Such a pleasure. I'm Emily Rice. I'm Summer Ashe. And keep asking questions. And black holes don't suck, but Hubble got you. This is StarTalk.