Neil deGrasse Tyson debates Van Gogh’s Starry Night (1889) as art reflecting cosmic emotion, linking it to science denialism—like vaccine or climate skepticism—that risks economic and security harm. He frames Mauna Kea’s TMT controversy as a clash between sacred indigenous land and scientific progress, noting desalination’s $10K/lb space cost and future freshwater conflicts. On gravity, Tyson clarifies Einstein’s spacetime curvature resolves "action at a distance," while dismissing philosophical "why" questions as theological. A mysterious black hole in an unexplained mass regime stumps theories, though media sensationalizes it as "impossible." His upcoming October book, Letters from an Astrophysicist, answers letters from prisoners and terminal patients, blending science with humanity’s deepest struggles. [Automatically generated summary]
Yet is there any other war ever fought in the history of the world where a household name is the name of the person who told other people the enemy was coming?
We can mention his name, but we can't list the generals that all fought in that war.
Why?
It's because a poem was written about him.
And he had this mundane job, let me tell people the enemy is coming.
And so the artist, in this case the poet, Elevated the mundane to something that forces you to reckon it with your understanding of this world.
What's Joyce Kilmer's most famous poem?
It's about a tree.
Dogs piss on trees.
trees.
You drive by trees, you don't even know they're there.
Yet a poem about a tree, I'll never see something as lovely as a tree.
Oh my gosh.
So the art forces you to pause and just reflect on things that you took for granted, things that became ordinary in your life and they were elevated to, they get beatified by the talents of artists.
To make supremely happy, Christianity declared to have attained blessedness of heaven and authorized the title blessed and limited public religious honor.
He beatified Juan Diego, an Indian believed to have a vision of a Virgin Mary.
Synonyms, canonize, sanctify, hallow, consecrate.
So I think if you take something ordinary and you subject it to the interpretation of an artist, it can be beatified and elevated on a level where it becomes a household recognition of its importance in this world.
And, of course, the whole STEAM movement, science, technology, engineering, and math, the artists got in there and said, wait, the STEM movement, science, engineering, and math, they want to throw in the A to get art as part of that movement, science, technology, engineering, art, and math.
Change it from STEM to STEAM. It's just STEAM, so you get full STEAM ahead.
Yeah, you can add letters, but if it doesn't spell anything, then the memorization has to kick in.
But Steam, you don't have to memorize that.
It's already there for you.
So it's cleverly conceived.
I think the abbreviation was...
It's tacit recognition that these are elements in society that advance civilization and grow the economy, actually.
So, in fact, there's hardly any growth economy in the world that isn't growing because it has been – not having been touched by science or technology.
Everything.
Just think about it.
So, if you're around running – you don't have them on your show.
But if you run around saying, I don't like science, science is bad, science is evil, okay, well, then you will die in poverty if you elect officials who believe that as well.
And there's a whole chapter on just angry people who don't like anything, including science.
And one of them, it's a riff.
He just says, I hate that science brings some of the worst things that's ever happened to humanity and pollution and this.
He goes on and on and on and on and on.
And so I reply.
It's letters from an astrophysicist.
And I reply as calmly and as rationally as possible.
It's possible when you get attacked that way.
But what I'm saying is not everyone embraces everything that science does.
And some will cherry pick it.
You have the science deniers for global warming.
You have science deniers with vaccines.
You have science deniers with GMOs.
There's all manner of science denying going on in modern society.
You know, in a free society, what are you going to do, right?
That people can think what they want.
But if thinking what they want influences policy, which then affects everybody, then your science denial has consequences to the economic health of the nation.
And by the way, it's not only economics, it's your, the economic health, it's your physical health, because medicine flows through advances in science, as well as our security.
What I'm trying to say is that is a demographic that has cherry-picked science to deny human-caused global warming.
There are other demographics that have cherry-picked other science to deny other things.
And it's not all located in one political spectrum, I mean one political branch.
So you tend to find liberal folk complaining that the conservatives who have embraced no global warming platform are denying science and they need science on their side.
And many of those same people are rubbing crystals together to be healed by the crystal energy or they're denying vaccines, thinking that they're somehow bad for you.
And so...
All of this requires some or total rejection of mainstream science.
And we're living in that world now.
And I don't know.
I don't think it'll stop the progress of civilization, but it can certainly slow it down and occasionally stall it.
That's why I don't beat politicians over the head.
Ever.
I don't do that.
We're a republic.
We're a democracy.
Whatever they believe, if they think Earth is 6,000 years old and they got elected, it's because the people elected them believe Earth is 6,000 years old.
Yeah, if you read his encyclical from a couple of years ago, it's a scientifically literate Yeah.
Okay, so he's still religious, right?
So Jesus still rose from the dead, and there were still miracles and all the rest of that in the New Testament.
So he's not in denial of that.
But given that, he is saying, oh my gosh.
Here's something we, the religious community, and scientists can partner behind, and that is we want to save life on Earth.
And so we have to be better shepherds of what is going on on this Earth.
And one of them is we don't want to flood low-lying countries in the South Pacific, where the average sea level is 10 feet above sea level, or whatever it is.
You're going to lose these countries if you keep melting our...
Ice caps.
Not the ice caps because that would include a north and there's no land in the north.
So the glacier ice, that's land-based ice, right?
Because any ice that's in the water floating, that can melt and it's not going to change the water level.
So it's why you can do this experiment.
It's really cool.
Fill up your glass.
Put a few cubes of ice in a glass of water.
Fill the glass up as much as you possibly can without spilling it.
And the ice is bobbing above that level.
Because ice is about 10% buoyant on that.
About 10% of an ice cube will be lifted above.
This is the iceberg equation, right?
That's the tip of the iceberg.
Well, you see 10% above and 90% is not visible to you.
This is, by the way, I don't want to get too many off-ramps here, but that's one of the things that they did right in Titanic.
Okay?
If you look at the earliest Titanic movie that was in black and white, they see this huge iceberg on the horizon and they can't swear away from it because it, oh my gosh, it doesn't have, no, no.
The iceberg that cuts the bottom of your boat is a little bit of ice sticking out above the water because 90% of it is underwater and that's where the damage occurs.
And in the James Cameron Titanic, The iceberg that they hit above water looks like a little chunk of ice.
Oh, that couldn't hurt anything.
All the damage was underwater.
Anyhow, so back to this.
So do this experiment and then let the glass sit there and let the ice melt.
And the water level will stay the same.
Because when ice melts, it takes up lower volume than it was when it became ice.
The water wants to turn to ice, but it can't because the pipe is containing it.
So it just sits there at 32 degrees as water, even though the temperature outside is dropping below 32 degrees.
And it still sits there.
It gets to 30 degrees.
29. The pipe is squeezing the attempt of this water to become ice.
And the act of squeezing it prevents the temperature from dropping.
Okay?
And you, as the temperature drops, depending on how strong the pipe is, and the temperature gradient across it, as the outside temperature continues, it gets to now 25 degrees.
The pipe is still holding on to the liquid water.
And it's still 32 degrees inside there.
And it holds on to, and it keeps happening, and it keeps happening.
You get a point where the pipe can no longer contain the water.
And the water freezes spontaneously.
It just goes right down to that temperature and the pipe is helpless in the face of this.
So the point is, the stronger the pipe is, the lower the temperature has to be outside for the freezing water to break it.
So if you had some sort of a pipe that could physically constrict, like something that had threads in it that could wind down to a smaller size, you could stick a cylinder of ice in it and you could slowly crank it down.
And the colder the ice is, the harder it would be for you to squeeze it to accomplish that.
So it's sort of fun with ice.
In fact, you know what else you can do?
This is a harder experiment to do.
If you take a mesh, like a screen mesh, it has to be sort of wider openings than a screen door would.
So what would this be?
Like a fence, like a chain link fence.
And hold it horizontally and get a big block of ice and just place it on top.
A block of ice that's heavy.
What'll happen is the ice, the weight of the ice Will melt the ice in the contact points of the chain itself because it's feeling that pressure to squeeze it into a smaller volume.
But by the time it melts, the ice has now passed through the grate and it will refreeze on the other side.
So you can actually pass a block of ice through a chain link fence vertically just by pushing it.
So you can have a simultaneous bath in certain regions of Mars.
A simultaneous bath because the air pressure is so low.
It's like 1 100th Earth's air pressure.
It's very, very low.
So you have a place where a pot of water, ice cubes, and steam are coming out all at once.
It's at the triple point.
The lesson here is we live life in our world at one atmospheric pressure, at one room temperature, atmospheric pressure, and we define what is normal based on that life experience, based on how our senses interact with that environment.
But the actual universe is far...
Freakier than what our five senses are exposed to on Earth.
So, first of all, it happens with or without us, because we are in the shooting path of countless thousands of asteroids and comets.
So what you would do is, you'd find one that's headed close to us anyway.
In the seventh orbit down the line, or the hundredth orbit down the line, and then you'd slightly deflect it in such a way that it would then collide with Mars or even Earth if you wanted, if Earth needed some more fresh water.
Yes, the TMT, 30 meter telescope, which would be the largest ever by far of any kind of telescope.
The history of astronomy is one where Bigger telescopes become bigger buckets to collect light.
Telescopes today are the same as telescopes when they were invented.
They're just bigger.
The principle behind them is bigger because what they're doing is simple.
All you're trying to do is get as much light as possible.
And the more light you get, the dimmer is the object you can detect and the farther away is the object you can see.
And so for every generation of new large telescopes that have been built, It has increased and deepened our understanding of our place in the universe.
So that's just the background.
The proposal is for a 30-meter telescope, largest ever, on the big island of Hawaii, in Mauna Kea, where there are other telescopes there.
I think they sighted it in a place that's sort of tucked behind most sight lines to it.
But that's not so much what's important here.
It's that the native Hawaiians, from what I've read, view the mountain as a sacred place.
And so...
To put a telescope, yet another telescope there becomes sort of invasion of sacred land.
And so, yeah, there's a standoff last I looked.
I mean, people protesting in the streets.
And there's some native Hawaiians who embrace this because it means jobs, high-quality jobs, engineering jobs, because you've got to build it, you've got to maintain it.
There's an entire...
Supportive infrastructure for that that means jobs.
And it's done in collaboration with the University of Hawaii.
And all the other telescopes are partnered with the University of Hawaii, where people are educated there.
You have to ask, well, how are you going to make decisions going forward?
Are you going to make them democratically?
Then you take a vote.
Do you want the natives to be the deciders of their own fate?
And is that democratic?
Okay, so the natives vote.
Or is it the few people who are protesting?
Do they win the day?
I mean, it's complicated, and there are a lot of nuanced issues going on there.
There's a branch of thinking that the United States government and normal municipal leaders have no authority over it.
There are some who claim that this is native Hawaiian property that does not belong to any municipal entity of the U.S. government, so therefore...
Even state representatives have no say.
So there's a lot going on there.
But if I were to weigh in, this is how I would do so.
I would say first, I think what should happen is, I don't know if they even have the infrastructure, I don't know how the system is set up, but if they could set it up this way, if the mountain is viewed as sacred by the natives, The natives should have entire say of what happens to the mountain.
Okay?
That's how I think that should be.
So now, what you want to make sure is that whatever decision gets made and voted upon by the natives, that it's fully informed.
You don't want to vote being misinformed or under-informed in any election, let alone whether you're voting for a telescope on your sacred mountain.
Okay?
Otherwise, you're voting out of nowhere, right?
You're influencing your future based on partial information.
And decisions based on partial information are bad decisions no matter what.
Okay?
So, I would say...
Hold a vote with the natives and make sure everybody's fully informed.
And here's a bit of information I just want to add to the information.
Okay?
You know what we do as astrophysicists.
We study the universe.
Rather passively at that.
We sit there at the end of a telescope and wait for light to reach us.
It's not a petri dish where we stir it or heat it or freeze it or crack it or we're just kind of there, communing with the cosmos.
My PhD thesis was significantly fed by data that I obtained from mountaintops at telescopes.
I got my data from mountains in Chile, Cerro Tololo, and it employed all the natives, the local people.
That's another telescope.
So there's all these telescopes that all have specific Access points to the universe.
They're not all asking the same questions.
And so it's the collection of all the data that gives us the complete understanding of what we think is a complete understanding of the universe.
So what we do is try to understand our place in the universe.
And all I'm going to say is that if you have power over what happens on that mountain and it's sacred to you because Whatever that is, it is something important to you and your sense of your understanding of your place in this world that would be spiritual significance.
I can tell you that what we learn as astrophysicists from those mountaintops gives us a deeper understanding Of who and what we are in this universe.
So I would say that whatever is your concept of God, be it the creator of the universe, the spirit energy that pervades all of space and time, whatever is your concept, the discoveries of astrophysicists bring you closer to the discoveries of astrophysicists bring you closer to it.
And when they vote, I want them to understand that fact.
I could take it one step further and say...
Mountaintops, because of the access they give astrophysicists, and by proxy us all to the universe, are sacred places to scientists.
Okay?
Now it's not sacred in a religious sense, but it's sacred in a, in terms of a pathway to knowing and understanding who and what we are in this universe.
Not only that, if there was a moon out and you did ascend up through the clouds, the moonlight illuminates the clouds and you are an island in the middle of white cotton.
With the gods up there and it's kind of – it's their place.
So, yes.
And so my brethren, my fellow astrophysicists who have also observed from mountaintops, by the way, it's becoming a lost art.
Well, it's not lost, but it's becoming something we don't do anymore.
It's something called service observing, where you put in your observing program and it's handed to a technician at the telescope who points the telescope, gets the data, and sends it back to you.
So the next generation doesn't have the experience that my generation did because it was a pilgrimage to the top of the mountain and you converted your life's path, you converted your life's schedule to become nocturnal.
And in so doing...
You know, the journey was long enough because you're in the middle of nowhere.
Now you've got to go nocturnal.
And by the time you're ready for this, you are communing with the cosmos.
It is you, the detector, the telescope, and the universe.
And there's an eerie silence up there, too, because you don't hear any.
The hum of maybe the motor of the telescope, but that's it.
And so all I'm saying is, If they choose to not have it, the telescope will go somewhere else.
One of them is the Canary Islands.
These are also volcanic hilltops, not as high as Mount Akea.
It's at 14,000 feet, by the way.
I should have checked what temperature water boils at the top of Mount Akea.
We could have rounded that story out.
I think it's around 180 degrees, actually.
I think I did actually calculate it one time.
But anyhow, so you'd find a mountaintop and we'll put it somewhere else.
And the data won't be as good, but that'll be a consequence of it.
Yeah, and so when you get celebrity types to put the weight of their name behind it, it magnifies the cause of others, even if they're in the minority.
And so, like I said, I think natives should...
Does everyone know who all the natives are?
Is there some listing so that they can all vote for this one thing?
You wouldn't want people voting who are not native if you're voting on whether it's so sacred you don't want to put a telescope there.
You'd want people who have an indigenous concern for what goes on there.
So do you think what they're concerned with is the eventual spoiling of this beautiful natural resource that slowly but surely people are putting up houses there and...
Developments and all these different things.
And then the scientists are saying, we need this sacred land because we're going to put a volcano.
And they're like, look, there's already a telescope.
There's already a telescope up here.
Enough.
You think that's what it is?
They're trying to halt the progress of civilization?
He said, we've got to preserve these lands because they're beautiful.
And by the way, he said that after he shot all those elephants and tigers and lions and tigers and bears, yeah, I mean, I hail from a museum, the American Museum of Natural History, where he's the patron saint of that museum.
What happened was he realizes how important this land is and how beautiful it is, and he is the patron saint of the national park system.
So, that's the secular version of sacred, right?
We don't say it's sacred, but we've all decided as a community that we care about these lands, and you don't want to drill on it, you don't want to put housing...
Was it Lyndon Johnson's wife, Lady Berg Johnson, who said, our freeways that we're so carefully building after the Second World War, the Eisenhower Freeway Project, okay, you know, the interstate system, is...
This is our country.
We want to keep it beautiful.
So certain stretches of it, there are no billboards.
Billboards would, you know, would change your relationship to nature.
So certain stretches of interstate are secularly sacred, if I can say that.
So I remember visiting Australia.
And there's the famous rock out in the outback, the Uluru.
Please help me get my correct pronunciation of this.
Uluru.
I'm told it's one coherent geologic rock.
It's not just an assembly of rocks.
And so I don't know enough about the geology of it, but I do know that the Australian Aborigines, Uluru, iconic red rock.
I rented a bicycle with my wife and kids, and we rode around it, okay?
So now...
That is sacred to the local indigenous peoples.
So they don't want you to climb on it.
Well, I'm a rock climber.
You know, what do you care?
I'm not going to ruin it.
I'm not going to...
They don't want you to climb on it.
And I try to think to myself, is there a counterpart to this?
That would sort of wake up a Westerner to say, I get it.
Now suppose some people from, some natives from Alaska or some tribes from Africa or some Aborigines came up from these remote places of the world, walked up to the Vatican and said, we want to climb the walls of this Vatican just for sport.
What would we say?
We want to climb the walls of St. Paul's Cathedral in downtown London.
It depends on how important that detail is to you.
All I'm saying is, on the level of, we say this is sacred, you say that is sacred, and now you're going to have different rules for who's climbing what.
I'm trying to get my Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure list going here, okay?
You just ruined it.
But yes, Jesus would be included in that.
So would Socrates, yes.
So that is the, by the way, the same is true with breaths of air.
There are more molecules of air in every breath you take than there are breaths of air in all the atmosphere of the earth.
So when you exhale, there's enough of those molecules to scatter, and the air currents will do this, to scatter into every breath of air that is inhaled.
So when you take a breath of air, you have molecules of air that went through the lungs of Jesus.
We're all connected, and there's no way around it.
But this is now non-salty water going into the ocean.
So you're mixing fresh water with brackish water.
And they occupy different places in the vertical profile of the ocean.
Because salt water is heavier than fresh water.
So fresh water occupies the top, but it's not as salty as the water below.
And there are circulations in the ocean, not only up and down northern latitude, southern latitude like the Gulf Stream, there's also circulation top to bottom.
And the combinations of all these circulations create the stability of the ocean.
If you disrupt that, oh my gosh.
There are animal fishes that can't live anymore where they used to be because the salt level is different.
And so some animals might go extinct.
Some weather patterns will change because the ocean affects climate.
So this is why climate modeling is so critical yet so complicated.
It's because there are a lot of variables that show up.
Just to finish the point, so you evaporate the water, and the salt left, maybe you might want to use that and make some sea salt out of it, table salt, and that evaporated water condenses out over here, and that is distilled water.
Now, you might want to mineralize it so it tastes good because distilled water doesn't taste good.
Plus, it's not really healthy to drink it, as you probably know.
You drink distilled water, it goes into equilibrium with your minerals, sucking minerals out of you so it has the same minerality that your body does.
And then you pee it out and you'll systematically drain yourself of important minerals.
Yeah.
So generally the water that you would say tastes good and you enjoy has some mineral bits, some kind of minerals in it.
Basically, all of our electricity today comes from essentially – mostly electricity is coming from turbines that convert steam to electricity.
So, sorry.
So, you heat water.
The water makes steam.
The steam turns the turbine, and the turning turbine generates the electricity.
Isn't there – To boil the water.
That's what it comes out.
Is it coal?
Is it oil?
Is it nukes?
Is it wind?
Is it hydro?
All of this.
You get a hydro plant.
Oh, by the way, in a hydro plant, they don't have to make steam because they have the water pressure at the base of the dam moves through the turbines and turns the turbines and they make electricity.
They don't have to heat anything because they have the water pressure to do that anyway.
That is also solar power, by the way.
Because the sun evaporated ocean water.
The water lifts up, becomes a cloud.
The cloud moves over the land.
The cloud rains into the lake that is above the dam.
So the energy that got the water up there in the first place is all solar.
So you should think of hydroelectric as solar as well as wind energy because wind is the unequal heating of air on Earth's surface and that creates air currents.
Isn't it conceivable that you could come up with a combination of desalination and power plant where you're using the heat to combine, you know, to make the turbines move and then you steam it off and that's where you get the water from?
I have high hopes for tidal energy, because there are certain places on Earth where tides are very powerful, and you just put some paddles in there, and it works both ways when the water comes in and out.
It has a lot of – but basically it was sold as a security need because if you're at war, you need to move material and personnel and you might have to land an airplane.
In an emergency way.
And so all freeways do this.
If you're going to crash a plane, do it on a freeway.
You know, have you seen this new, Porsche has a new electric vehicle that they're about to release, and it's got revolutionary groundbreaking technology that allows it to charge much faster.
You could charge up to 80% in 20 minutes, because it's double the, well, pull up the information, was it wattage or amperage?
So, yes, some batteries charge faster than others, but what really drives the charging speed of battery is the voltage over which you charge the battery.
The big price point of that was, when did the average cost to garage a car for a month in Manhattan equal the average cost of a two-bedroom home in the United States?
Speaking of Tesla and electricity, what did you think about Tesla's initial idea that Westinghouse shot down to sort of broadcast electricity so that people could just pull it out of the air?
Yeah, so the people in the Nikola Tesla fan club somehow feel that he got wronged in his life, okay?
And surely some of that is true with regard to his business acumen and patents and who owns the patent and does he have good business sense?
Is he as savvy or as sneaky, whatever other words you might apply to Edison, all right?
So I get that.
But his contributions to electromagnetism are real and recognized in the world of physics.
Like I said, there's a unit of electromagnetism named after him.
So don't come crying to me and say he was not recognized by my people.
Okay?
He's recognized.
He had some ideas that were a little out there.
And out there on a level where...
It almost certainly would have not worked.
And here's why.
Okay?
Electromagnetic energy is communicating between us.
I see you.
That's because visible light is reflecting off of your scalp.
Okay?
To me.
It's reflecting off of my nose back to you.
You can ask, how much energy is in that?
Well, not much.
There's not much energy in visible light photons.
If you stayed there long enough, you might feel a little warmth from it.
But no, you're not going to drive a car with that energy.
You're not going to run a motor with it.
Okay.
Well, of what good is it?
Oh, you know what we found?
We can use electromagnetic radio waves, which are the lowest form of electromagnetic energy, lowest energy level of all of our...
We can use radio waves not to transmit energy.
That's not the point of it.
The point is to transmit information.
And information became what characterized the modern era.
And that's why in the 1950s and 60s, when everyone is imagining flying cars and motorized sidewalks, everything is running on energy because they're thinking energy is going to be free in the future.
But what they didn't figure was that information would be free or easy to transmit and to generate and to store and to delete.
And whereas the energy that it would take to move things and to drive things, that would be a problem.
No one saw that coming.
Nobody saw that coming.
So...
As your photons get higher and higher energy, yes, you can start doing things with them.
You get X-rays and gamma rays.
But that's not what Tesla was referring to.
He was talking about moving radio waves through the space that would charge things up.
You can't pack sufficient energy in your radio wave to do anything we need to do mechanically.
These are microwaves of a frequency that can penetrate walls, send information to my cell phone, and I can communicate using information and not have that energy kill me.
So another way to do it is, the signal comes to me, and I reflect it in a direction that is not back to you.
So the B-2 bomber is not only non-reflective, Back to you.
It takes the signal and reflects it and double bounces it so that all your energy gets sent in other directions and not back to you.
So it doesn't then keep the energy that was sent to it.
So that's another way to do it.
There's another stealth, which was featured in one of the recent, not recent, four years ago, James Bond movies, where light that comes at it, the light that's behind it, Goes around it coherently and continues to come towards you so that you think you're seeing what's behind it and it's not there.
You are seeing what's behind it, but the path of that light went around the vessel and continued on its way to you.
So you think you're just seeing the grass and the tree, but there's a car sitting right there.
Whereas if you needed functional stealth, everybody looking at it should be – every path – Every sight line to it should be able to see what's behind it on the other side of that sight line.
And my old man sensibility is, if you track what I shop at a store, what I buy at a store...
And then send me coupons based on what you think I'm going to buy next, based on what I've bought before, which is kind of the same thing you're describing.
You have denied me the chance of stumbling upon something that I never thought of buying.
And that takes away my freedoms and I don't want that.
Okay, so that is how I feel and that's how I think about my interaction with this world.
I like the randomness.
The randomness of it enriches my life.
And if you're going to advertise to me because you think you know who I am, maybe you do, but I'll ultimately end up spending less money because it's the diversity of how I think and what I buy and what I think of buying and how I buy it and how much money I spend that is the richness of the life I lead.
You're trying to channel me into some product, something that fulfills a, what do you call it when they have the study, whether you're going to buy something or not?
On the positive side, what they're doing in terms of, particularly Google, in terms of your driving, right?
And in terms of using of Google Maps and documenting the history of all these people driving, and especially with things like Waze, which they acquired, is they've developed a much more efficient product than Apple.
I can ask it how long it'll take me to go somewhere, rather than it knowing what my daytime schedule looks like, and then coming in, like you said, how do you know, bitch?
You know?
I had that same reaction as you did.
And I said, I wonder what's causing this.
It's a little creepy.
And again, I'm the old man syndrome.
So a 10-year-old kid that's only ever known this and becomes 15 and 20, that is life to them, right?
But do you think that this sort of intrusiveness, or at the very least, this connection that you have to these devices and that they have to your patterns and your information, it seems inevitable.
That doesn't mean I have to welcome it with open arms, but I agree it's inevitable.
I agree.
Plus, we have security cameras everywhere.
Everybody knows where you are.
If the KGB had access to people the way we, during the Cold War, the way modern United States has access to us, We would say, oh my gosh, you have taken away your country's freedoms.
We're the leaders of the free world and you guys have imprisoned your entire population.
Oh my gosh.
the KGB would give their right arm to have the monitoring devices that are actively in place here in the United States today.
We know where you are.
We know how long you stayed there.
We have records of it.
We know what street you were walking on.
We don't necessarily monitor it, but we can dig it up if we have to.
And with facial recognition, I can track...
can track you wherever you are.
I feel like there was a- You use a facial recognition.
I use it now.
It doesn't care if I'm wearing, if I'm wearing a hat or sunglasses, it still knows who the hell I am.
No, it's not, because you're talking about surveillance.
Camden, New Jersey had such a crisis of funding that I think there was a brief period of time, at least I don't know if it's changed, where they literally didn't have a police force.
And one of their solutions was to put surveillance cameras everywhere.
And the idea was to sort of try to capture all the shit that was going down.
Here it is.
The surveillance city of Camden, New Jersey, a community beset by crime and the intrusive tools they're using in hopes of stopping it.
Well, they're also changing the ID system, where if you don't want to travel with a passport, you're going to have to have a new federal ID. I've already been through that.
Not even a handful in this moment, just historically handful of people.
We all say, yes, take my luggage, x-ray my luggage, take away my liquids, pat me down, and I'm okay with that.
That's a transition.
And I'm okay with security cameras in the street.
It was okay in banks.
We understood that.
But now, when I exit the bank and I'm in the street, when I'm walking in the park, so I don't know the future of that.
I really don't know.
I saw the movie 1984 recently.
Not a very good movie.
The book is better than the movie and I hate to be one of the people who say that.
But I was reminded how you can create an entire state Where everyone is kept in line because somebody is telling you, we are fighting this battle out on the front lines.
I'd forgotten this from the book.
They're fighting a war on the front lines.
You never see the war.
You never hear about the war.
You don't know anything about the war other than it exists.
And you have to do things a certain way in country.
So that your country can protect itself from these evil people that want to take over and destroy your way of life.
It's Twitter and Facebook and Google and all the stuff that we use on a daily basis that has access to everything that you do.
It's almost...
It was inconceivable to someone outside of this generation that there would be a company that would provide a service, and through that service you would give up all notions of privacy.
Generally, if you have something good and it gets abused, you regulate it.
That's the whole point.
We're here alive today because of regulation.
Because there are nefarious people who, in control of powerful forces operating on society, would gain at the expense of everyone else and would not be good for the progress of civilization.
So you regulate.
Okay?
Airlines are regulated so that you don't die.
All right?
We have the safest record now ever for commercial airlines, American carriers.
The safest ever.
Look at not only how many people have not died relative to when we grew up.
We grew up through at least one or two planes crashed each year.
You'd lose between one and three hundred people every year.
That was like the baseline number.
That number...
It's near zero now and way more planes are taking off and landing than at any time when we were kids.
So it's a double progress point for not only the Transportation Safety Administration but engineering, technology, and everything we care about.
We want to fly.
So you regulate.
You make sure these are inspected this often.
The pilots don't fly more than this many hours.
This gets oiled.
This gets replaced.
It's one of the triumphs of modern engineering, aerodynamics.
Aerospace engineering as a branch of what we do as civilization is one of the greatest achievements there ever was.
There's a bunch of videos of that, but it seems like they're just using After Effects, like Adobe or something like that, to fuck with the video rather than create an actual product.
Because there was a woman in an office that had a blanket, and she held up the blanket, and you could only see the whole office.
You wouldn't see the blanket at all.
You'd see what's behind her.
And as she lowered the blanket, you could see her, and then from the blanket down...
It's not the GDT. It's the TMT. 30 meter telescope.
Part of what it is to explore is not knowing what it is that You will find.
And all these telescopes, the launched ones as well as the ground-based ones, we have enough foresight.
We're mature enough as a field to know that even though it's designed to look for certain things that were part of the program that you set up for it, You want to have a serendipity mode for it.
You want to be able to say, let's point it in some random direction and see what shows up.
Without that, you could miss something in plain sight.
If you're only looking for one thing that you think is there, extrapolate it from what you knew before.
And the way I think of it is, you know, there's the old saying, as the area of our knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of our ignorance.
In letters from an astrophysicist, which isn't out yet, but again, I don't know how the hell you got the book, but there's an entire chapter where I am conversing with people who are strongly religious.
There's a conversation I have in there with an Orthodox Jewish person, a Muslim, multiple...
We're fundamentalist Christians, and we're talking about the age of the earth and why, and why do we think one way or another?
And so there's a lot of intimate stuff in there that I generally don't go public with, but I did it one-on-one with those who had written to me about these challenges they were facing in life, and they wanted to know what an astrophysicist had to say about it.
You know, I was once, I don't know if you know this, I was once quoted after I think the Scientology documentary came out on HBO and everybody was talking about it.
Going clear.
I think that was it.
And there was a lot of chat about it for a couple of weeks.
And one of the news outlets, I forgot who, called me up and said, do I think Scientology should be a religion?
Classified as a religion, as an authentic religion.
So my answer was, we live in a country that protects the free expression of faith-based systems, provided they don't subtract from the rights of others.
So I will not sit here and judge whether thetans from space exhume souls from volcanoes At least a third of what I just said is accurate from Scientology.
Or whether a man born of a woman is the son of God who died and rose from the dead.
I'm not going to compare those and judge whether one of them is more authentic than another when they're both founded on belief systems.
And so, in this country, belief systems are protected.
But isn't it more interesting when they do do that and then inside the actual article itself they give your full quote so people can see the deception.
The real confusing thing is when they take a chunk of your quote and they kick it out of context, which they love to do.
And allow me to just answer it from a how-why point of view, and then we can apply it to gravity after I say that.
In science, if we can describe how something works and predict its future behavior, we claim to understand it and we move on.
You can ask deeper questions about it.
Why is there gravity?
What is the meaning?
What is the purpose?
And go ahead, but I'm good with what I've done and I can land a spacecraft on Mars inside of a crater in a hole-in-one using my understanding of gravity, so I'm pretty good with it, okay?
So, I'm not distracted by the more philosophical side of that.
So, Newton was deeply puzzled by how you can have something called, in which he coined the phrase, action at a distance.
Okay?
He wrote down the equation that worked.
He wrote down the equation.
The moon goes around the Earth, Earth goes around the Sun.
The moons of Jupiter go around Jupiter.
He...
Accurately describe that with his equations of gravity.
Okay.
He said, one day I think we're going to find some way that they're connecting to each other, but I don't know what that is right now, but I know my equations work.
He called it spooky.
It was spooky to him.
That's his word.
Spooky action at a distance.
All right.
Fast forward 300 years.
300?
No.
Fast forward 230 years.
Get to Albert Einstein.
Um...
Gravity is the curvature of space and time.
And you're moving on the curvature of that fabric.
That's gravity.
Oh my gosh, is it even a force then?
Is it even?
So there's no need to think of it as an action at a distance.
And in a phrase first uttered by, I think it was John Archibald Wheeler, a student of Einstein.
And I learned relativity from John Archibald Wheeler.
In fact, that's where I met my wife in relativity class in graduate school.
It's space.
So matter tells space how to curve.
Space tells matter how to move.
It moves along the curvature of space.
You don't need an action at a distance.
There is no action.
It can't do anything else but do that.
It's like you have a funnel and you take a ball and you roll it on the funnel.
The ball can only do what that funnel tells it to do.
And if you give it a sideways motion, it'll start spinning around.
There's no magic hand coming in there.
It is following the curvature of its space-time continuum.
This construct that you provided for it.
So now, I can describe what gravity is doing.
I even have a mechanism for it.
Are you going to still ask me why is there gravity?
Is that answer not fulfilling enough to you, even in the why department?
You can say, well, why would a particle curve space?
You can just keep doing that.
That's fine.
But is there a point where you'll be satisfied with the answer?
Oh, that answer is my why.
I can say, well, why did this half liter of water drop Off the edge here.
Well, it's no longer the forces are imbalanced.
No, but why did it fall?
Well, there's nothing holding it up.
Why did it...
There's a point where it's not especially productive to continue to think about the world that way.
Because what I'm claiming is, answers to the how, when you understand the how enough, are tantamount to having answered the why question.
I think we do, which is why your cell phone gets time from GPS satellites that is pre-corrected for Einstein's general theory of relativity because they're in a different gravitational field in orbit than you are on Earth's surface.
And we think we understand the formation of stars well enough to say, well, a star is born with this much mass, and it'll lose a certain amount of mass over its life.
All stars lose mass because there's so much pressure and so much energy coming out, it carries particles with it.
So they lose mass.
The sun is losing mass as we speak.
It's called the solar wind.
So everybody loses mass out there.
The question is, at what rate are you losing mass?
Is it a lot compared to your total mass?
Is it small?
So, very high mass stars are not especially stable objects.
They remain stars for 100,000 at most a million years and they'll explode and become a supernova.
If you're more massive than that, they will not explode because the gravity is so strong that it cannot explode against the strength of the gravity and it collapses into a black hole.
So, we expect black holes to have It's slightly less mass, somewhat less mass than the most massive stars that we know how to make.
So if you have a hundred times the mass of the Sun star, it'll lose half its mass over its life and you have a black hole that's 30 times the mass of the Sun or 50 times the mass of the Sun.
Fine.
Put a pin in that.
In the centers of galaxies, there are supermassive black holes.
Hundreds of thousands, millions times the mass of the Sun.
And they're supermassive, and they're black holes.
We call them supermassive black holes because that's how we roll as astrophysicists.
All right.
Well, could you have black holes somewhere in the middle of these two extremes?
We do not know a phenomenon...
That will give you a black hole that will birth a black hole that's in between these two categories.
You can make a black hole that eats its way there.
Fine.
But we don't know how to make one.
And we think, my colleagues who've done this, think they've discovered a black hole that is sitting in this sort of netherworld where there's no evidence that it ate to become that massive.
And we don't know how to explain it by the formation and death of stars and is nowhere near the supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy.
And it adds to the knowledge base that we already have whenever they do discover things, and then it becomes what we know and understand, like the supermassive black holes at the center of every galaxy.
That was a fairly recent discovery in terms of human history.
It was hypothesized, because we saw the centers of the galaxy were behaving really weirdly.
Things, stars were moving faster than they should have, given how much gravity was tugging on them.
And we said, dude, something's got to be there.
And it's got to be really small because we're tracking stars really close to the middle.
Well, if it was made of ordinary matter, how big would it have to be?
It had to be really, really big.
So this has to be really, really small in order for this to happen.
The only thing we know that could fill that small volume and have that much gravity is a black hole.
So it was suspected for a long time.
It was confirmed that as a common thing by the Hubble telescope and first photographed, By this recent result in the galaxy M87. Messier 87 is the name of the galaxy.
We can determine the mass of the black hole by how fast stars are moving at the distance they are from it.
So in other words, so we're Earth orbiting the Sun and we have a certain speed.
We're going about...
I forgot how, what, 18 miles per second?
I think that's the number.
30 kilometers a second.
That's our speed around the sun.
That's pretty fast, okay?
If the sun had more mass instantly, that speed is not enough to maintain our orbit, and we'll start spiraling in towards it.
If the sun had less mass, that speed is too high To be in this orbit, it'll take it to a...
Sorry, it's too fast to maintain this orbit.
It'll climb us out to a higher orbit, slow us down, and we'll be in a higher orbit with a slower speed.
So in other words, for any object...
At any distance, there's only one speed you can maintain and have a stable orbit around it.
So when we see stars orbiting something in the center of the galaxy, it is a straightforward Astro 102 equation to calculate how much mass the thing is orbiting.