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Sept. 30, 2022 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
50:32
20220930_piers-morgan-uncensored-neil-degrasse-tyson
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
The Rock Star Astrophysicist 00:04:30
Well good evening and welcome to a special edition of Piers Morgan Uncensored Professor Neil deGrasse Tyson one-on-one.
In a world where politicians can't answer questions like what is a woman, we need more people like Neil deGrasse Tyson.
He's a man with the answers to the toughest questions on the planet and the toughest questions about the planets.
What would happen if the Earth stopped rotating for a second?
Oh yeah that would be disastrous.
By day he's the boss of the world famous Hayden Planetarium in New York.
By night he's the Stargazer superstar, a familiar face on America's top talk shows.
Please welcome our friend Neil deGrasse Tyson is over here.
He's made cameos and everything from the Big Bang Theory.
Is that the guy you were telling me about?
Oh yeah.
Family guy?
Mean-spirited thoughts from the stars can take thousands or even millions of years to reach the Earth.
And his Star Talk podcast is an unlikely smash hit.
Infrared can actually peer into gas clouds.
And his best-selling books, of course, like Astrophysics, the people in a hurry have made him a household name, renowned for demystifying the Milky Way.
Well tonight, the most powerful nerd in the universe answers the 10 burning questions about the universe and much more.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is uncensored.
And Neil deGrasse Tyson joins me now live.
Well, intros don't get better than that, Neil.
Oh, oh, come on.
Now I have to live up to that introduction.
You put pressure on me here.
Somebody who went into this just to be an astrophysicist, and you've ended up being a rock star astrophysicist.
Let me start with that.
Do you like the fame that comes with this?
Or do you accept this just goes over territory?
Yeah, I don't have feelings about it.
Really, what I want to do is go back to the lab.
Once I know others are on this landscape of sort of public discourse of science, I'll back up, sneak into the lab, and then you won't even know I'm missing and I can do science again.
The way this all occurred was, no, there I was.
People would, you know, the news, folks like you or others, would need a sound bite because some cosmic phenomenon or event would take place.
And so you go to your local planetarium or whoever who has some expertise.
So I was called early on and they said, oh, tell us about this new planet or Pluto.
And I'd give them a couple of lines and they liked it.
And then they came back for more.
But I remembered distinctly the first exoplanet, 1995.
It was NBC News.
They sent an action camera to the Hayden Planetarium, you know, the van, action cam van, to the planetarium.
And I gave my best professorial explanation for how you discover exoplanets, where they orbit their host star and the host star jiggles in response to the gravity.
And I talked about the spectra.
But I looked that evening.
The only thing that ended up on the news was me doing this with my body.
I said, okay, he didn't come for the lecture.
They came for a soundbite.
And so I went home and I practiced sound bites because if that's what you want, why don't I give that to you?
And so I just took random words from the universe, black hole, quasar, Saturn, Pluto, stars, and I came up with two or three sentences that would be informative, make you smile, you know, you want to enjoy the learning, and then make you want to come back for more.
And then when I started doing that, then floodgates opened, and then I started showing up on documentaries, and people wanted me to be a correspondent for their news service, which, of course, I didn't agree to.
But that desire was there.
And I said to myself, wait a minute, science, people like science.
If it's packaged in a way that they can see and feel and embrace and come to want more.
So I just kept doing it.
And then I ended up getting invited to make cameos in first-run films.
I was in Batman versus Superman in a short role.
I'm not an actor.
But by the way, I don't mean to brag, but I was also in Shark NATO 6, okay?
I don't want to make you feel bad, but I actually turned down a cameo.
Oh, you did.
Science as Social Change 00:14:50
Okay.
But yeah, I think I got overlooked by the Academy that year.
You've written any book.
First of all, I wanted to say, I wanted to get you back on for a longer interview because you very kindly came in to my studio a couple of months ago.
And the segment we did about when's the world going to end blew up and it's become one of our most watched segments that we've done in the show's entirety since we launched back in April.
So I want to get you back on because clearly there's a huge public hunger for information that you provide.
I'm curious about this part of it, which is your new book, Starry Messenger, Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization.
I loved the way it was described here.
Starry Messenger is a wake-up call to civilization.
People no longer know who or what to trust.
We sow hatred of others fueled by what we think is true or what we want to be true without regard to what is true.
Cultural and political factions battle for the souls of communities and of nations.
We've lost all sight of what distinguishes facts from opinions.
We lob grenades at one another when we could be sharing beers and pubs.
I wanted to cheer from the rooftops when I read that because it's so important, I think, to now have this proper debate.
Because I often talk about, you know, 2,000 years ago when we lived in tribes where everyone in the tribe dressed the same, spoke the same, had the same mentality, same attitudes, you know, ate the same food and so on.
And then slowly we edged out and we met other tribes who looked different, behaved differently, thought differently.
And both tribes concluded the only way to deal with this was to kill each other.
And it strikes me that social media now in particular, Twitter especially, has almost degraded back to 2,000 years ago, to the tribal world that we lived in there where the only answer to anyone that was different to us or thought differently was to kill them.
Yeah, Piers, that's a very insightful observation of the regressive forces that social media broadly, but definitely Twitter, brings to modern civilization.
I would call it a cesspool, really.
And to couch it in the way you did, I think unpacks it and reveals sort of the core forces operating.
I remembered the day when you were able to express an opinion and someone would say, oh, that's interesting.
Well, here's my opinion.
What do you think of that?
And then you'd actually have a conversation about opinions.
If you put any opinion on social media, especially Twitter, you will get attacked because that opinion does not agree with that of the attacker.
And I'm thinking to myself, that is not how you advance culture or civilization or anything.
And yeah, it's a highly regressive force and it's unfortunate.
I'm sad.
One of the worst aspects of it, actually, is the war on science.
Now, science, it always seems to me, is almost the perfect personification of what you've just been talking about, because what scientists do is they try and establish facts.
And when facts change through the scientific work, scientists change their opinions.
And yet when you see that happening, for example, in a pandemic with a novel new coronavirus, like COVID-19, when you had a scientist like Anthony Fauci, for example, very eminent in his field, when you have someone like that who becomes public enemy number one to large swathes of America and indeed around the world, because he is changing his mind based on new information,
it seems to me that that is putting science itself under attack.
Yeah, so part of the problem here is people don't fully know or understand what science is or how and why it works.
And you also have a gap between people who are professional scientists and how they communicate what they do to those who are not.
Let me just say what Fauci should have done, easy, very easy to be, you know, Monday morning quarterback or whatever the phrases are that refer to the hindsight of wisdom.
What he should have done would says, here is our advice based on the research that has accumulated thus far.
And as that research continues to come in, we may make adjustments to the advice we're giving you now.
Stay tuned.
That's how that should have been presented at the beginning.
But we lived in a society where everyone is waiting for the commandment up from on high.
And then it comes out and then you do it.
And then if it changes, then you lose all hope or trust in what is true and what is not.
Well, the problem seemed to me with Dr. Fauci, it seemed to me, was that he would say things like, you know, that masks are not that efficient for COVID-19, which was his initial position about it.
And then what he should have said was, no, he should have said, our current understanding of the propagation of this virus tells us that masks are not as important as washing your hands or whatever.
Right, so by being more definitive.
The rules that came out.
Right, so by being definitive.
So unfortunately, what then happens is Twitter keeps that clip, and then when he changes his assessment based on new science, Twitter goes, Fauci's making it up as he goes along.
He's now saying the complete opposite.
And all the conspiracy theorists who think that this is some sort of government plot and so on to control the minds of the people, they all go, well, there you go.
Look, there you go.
And actually, I just wonder, I mean, as a scientist, that must be incredibly frustrating because it sort of then puts all science into this world where people say, well, how can we believe a word they say, these people?
It's frustrating on both sides.
And like both sides of that equation, when I see scientific discoveries or knowledge communicated without being properly couched in what is the degree of our understanding of what is being conveyed, then I see people who want to presume that there is this only one understanding that will never change.
And it just sort of ossifies in place.
And then when they see a change, it somehow undermines their entire confidence in the industry, in the entire branch of what it is to do science in a nation.
And it's unfortunate.
So I think you can fix some of this going back through kindergarten through 12th grade, where every science class has a part of it where you learn what it means to ask questions, what it means when you have the moving frontier of science that is influenced by new data and new understandings and new interpretations.
And especially when there's a novel virus that comes around, you don't have 30 years of data on it.
So we all should have participated in that moving frontier of discovery and it all just became mudslinging.
Also, it seemed to me, Neil, when this was all happening, the pandemic, I took quite firm views throughout it, like a lot of people, I guess.
One of which was when it was believed, when the vaccines first came along, that they would stop transmission, it seemed to me if you refuse to be vaccinated, you shouldn't be entitled to the same rights to go to nightclubs and stuff as those who'd taken the vaccine and were therefore not able to transmit it.
However, when it was established that vaccines actually didn't stop transmission, they just stopped a lot of people getting very sick and dying, the argument to then suppress any liberties or freedoms of the unvaccinated, to me, it went away.
Because in that instance, if the ability to pass it on is pretty well the same whether you've been jabbed or not, then really it's down to the individual if they want to protect themselves from this virus.
So I changed my mind.
I got pilloried when I said my original statement.
I got pilloried when I changed my mind.
I got pilloried like everybody in this pandemic about all of it.
And yet to me, it seemed perfectly logical, honestly, to just change my mind because facts changed.
Yes, and so, like I said, it's a societal problem where we need to train ourselves to understand what it means to eavesdrop or participate on the moving frontier of scientific discovery.
By the way, that's a very different place, texturally, informationally, from the parts of the scientific enterprise that have been multiply verified by scientific observations and experiments.
Those facts are objectively true, whether or not you believe in them.
And so you get people on the frontier seeing the ping-pong match of information, and then they take that same uncertainty and bring it to the core of what it is that has built this civilization.
That's the understanding of how the chemistry, physics, and biology of nature works.
So, yeah, we need to be ready the science curriculum so that when you become an adult, you don't behave, you don't behave like a child.
Right.
And I don't know any other way to say it.
I think that's perfectly well put, actually.
I want to take a short break.
When we come back, I want to talk to you.
The book claims that astrophysics can teach us about every aspect of society, including war, politics, religion, truth, beauty, gender, and race.
We're going to go through all of those, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and see how you're going to fix the world.
Well, welcome back.
I'm still here with astrophysicist and author Neil deGrasse Tyson for a one-hour special.
It Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Professor, you in the book, it's a fascinating read this, but it's about how we sort of recast, I guess, major social debates of our age, using the cosmos, astrophysics, as a way to do this.
And there are various headings that you go through.
I want to go through these one by one.
They're obviously huge issues, each one of them.
But I'm curious if you can just go through them and explain to me what you mean.
So take war, for example.
Right now we have a war in Europe, which I didn't think I'd see again in my lifetime.
How can astrophysics or the cosmos, how can that help us to understand warfare and to deal with trying to avoid warfare?
So let me couch it a little differently.
Yes, there is explicit science we can learn by studying the universe that can be directly applied to activities and conflicts here on Earth.
But more broadly, it's a scientific worldview that informs how you ask questions, how you resolve disputes, which is why scientists are some of the most collaborative people of any branch of what we do in civilization.
You might remember a year ago or so, there was the banner headlines of the first black hole ever photographed.
And you say, wow, okay.
But then you unpack that and you realize there's like a thousand scientists in a hundred observatories that collaborated to obtain that photo.
And you say, well, how do you do that?
You know, what happens if you do that in the UN?
Everybody's fighting each other and throwing their shoe at each other.
So there's certain ethos when two scientists argue.
We know there's an unwritten rule that either I'm right and you're wrong, you're right and I'm wrong, or we're both wrong.
So the argument isn't to harm the other person.
The argument is to explore ways to ultimately agree.
And maybe we need more data.
What do we do though?
What do we do though in an era of disinformation that is promoted aggressively through the internet?
And I'm talking specifically, for example, Vladimir Putin's propaganda to the Russian people that actually what he's doing in Ukraine is a special operation to remove Nazis from a country that is actually run by a Jewish president.
And of course, the irony being it is the Russians who are behaving actually like Nazis and what they're doing there.
But this mythology, which he's pumping to the Russian people morning, noon, and night, then blows around the internet and a lot of people around the world start to buy in to this completely false narrative.
How does science help when you have that kind of active, aggressive disinformation?
So in the chapter Truth and Beauty, I spend a fair amount of time evaluating what the meaning of truth is, especially as different people interpret it.
And one branch of that would be a personal truth, let's say.
And this is like, let's say, Jesus is your savior, right?
In a free country where we have freedom of religious expression, no one is going to take that from you.
That's a personal truth.
But if you want to have other people agree with that truth, and they might have a different savior or a different religious tradition, then it will require some serious act of persuasion, but in the limit, as we've seen in the history of civilization, outright warfare and bloodshed and death.
So in a pluralistic society, your personal truths really need to be kept to yourself or casually attempting to influence others.
But then there's another kind of truth, which our brain is susceptible to.
If you repeat something over and over, your brain natively says, it must be true.
And once you reach that point, you lose all curiosity to unravel whether or not it isn't true.
You don't go back to it, you just accept it.
And what the internet has done, especially social media, has become the world's greatest propaganda machine.
If Hitler had access to social media, no telling what would have happened to the world at the time.
So propaganda is one of these things where somebody's trying to influence you in a surreptitious way, and then you end up fully agreeing without you even having consciously done so.
And that's dangerous.
There's the other kind of truth, an objective truth, where the methods and tools of science are exquisitely tuned to distinguish that which is true and that which is not.
And how does that happen?
I just say to you, here's some tools.
Use them in whatever way you can to make sure you don't conclude that something is true that is not or that something is not true that is.
Objective Truth vs Charisma 00:14:49
And when you do that, you are an independent thinker and you're no longer susceptible to any of that.
When you have a leader like Donald Trump, who is very popular and divisive in equal measure as president of the United States, but when he could look at the sky when it was blue and say it's gray, and a lot of his supporters would then think it's gray because he had such a hold over them, how dangerous is that?
Yeah, so what happens is if you're in a democracy, if the electorate, in a democracy, you expect some power of sway that is given to those with personality, with charisma.
President Kennedy had a bit of a charisma about him.
So you kind of expect that you even want a little bit of that.
I don't have a problem with this.
We don't put people into the presidency based on their resume.
If we did, half the presidents that were voted in would have never become presidents.
They're voted in because there's something about them that you like, that you like their panache, their attitude.
One of my favorite quotes from Harry Truman, just coming out of the Second World War, his moniker was, give him hell, Harry, right?
And they say, Mr. President, why are you always giving people hell?
And his response was, it was, no, I tell them the truth.
They think it's hell.
So he was an honest guy.
So I think it's okay to be to like someone on a personal level.
People said of George W. Bush that, you know, my issue with him was that he couldn't pronounce the word nuclear, yet he had access to nuclear codes.
So as a physicist, that a little worrisome.
But people said you can have a beer with him.
And I spent some time, a little bit of time, in that Bush White House.
And one time we made eye contact, and I felt like I'd known him my whole life.
There was some extra chemistry there.
And I see that and I understand how politicians can rise because of it.
But at some point, they cannot be the total source of your knowledge and your enlightenment and your wisdom because you're an individual.
And especially in the American documents, there's probably at least some of this in other Western world democracies, but certainly the American documents.
It is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
It's our government.
It's not the leader's government.
And we can forget that after a while.
We can say, I want the leader to make all decisions for me.
Then what are you?
Then you're, yes, you're a follower, but it's the leader who actually should be following you in a democracy, even in a republic where you have someone in between you and the top dog.
So it was a problem that his cult of following was so potent that people would lose sight of what is true and what is not because they would just follow whatever he said.
That's just at the end of the day, dangerous.
You made a very good point in the book that there are not many people left alive who probably remember what it was like to actually endure Nazism, for example, fascism at its worst.
And that because of that, when it comes round again in the way that we're seeing now in certain parts of the world, people don't really understand the danger or how bad it can get very quickly.
I just suggested that that might be a cause because like you just said, not just signs of it in the United States, but many other parts in the world.
There are leaders that are rising up where their personality and their charisma to their followers is bigger than any analysis of objective truths that should be behind the decisions that are getting made.
And once you control the public, your electorate at that level, then they're putty in your hands.
So I hate to be so cynical, but the last person a politician wants is somebody who can completely think for themselves.
It means they're not susceptible to...
And by the way, I'm not even blaming politicians because why do politicians lie?
Because they're telling us what we want to hear.
Because we know if they told us the truth, we wouldn't vote for them.
So politicians, I think, are a symptom of the public's, of the state of the public, not the other way around.
Let's take a short break.
By the way, why are you listening to an astrophysicist say all this?
Because I study science and how the world works and the causes and effects of decisions that are made.
And what do they look like statistically, probabilistically?
How do you classify ideas?
How do you test ideas for whether or not they're going to work?
All of that analysis can apply to the universe and it can apply to everyday life.
And that's kind of what drove the inspiration of the book.
Right.
And of course, science should be applied historically.
So you can say, look, we can learn from what we did wrong on this occasion and not do it wrong again.
But too often we fall into the, I think it was an apocryphal Einstein quote, actually, but the quote about the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
Exactly.
Yeah, it's attributed to Einstein for sure.
Yeah, so it's a different world.
And again, as an educator, I try to address the public.
I try to address the educational system.
The politicians are at the tip of this iceberg.
And people saying, oh, let's get, the Trump haters are saying, let's get rid of Trump.
He's the problem.
He's a problem.
But wait a minute.
Wasn't it 86 million Americans voted for him?
And more people voted for Trump in 2020 than had ever voted for anyone in the history of elections except that same election with Biden?
So if you remove Trump, there's still the matter of the 86 million people and what they want to see as their leader.
So as an educator, I don't look at the politicians.
I look at my fellow citizens and I ask, how are they thinking about this problem?
Can I help them improve or strengthen whatever ideas they have, but because then you can base it in an objective reality rather than on what you feel should be true.
Right.
Let's take a short break.
I want to come back and talk to you about beauty, gender, and race.
That should keep people hanging on.
Also about space exploration.
What do you think of it?
Welcome back to my special edition with astrophysicist and author Neil deGrasse Tyson, his brilliant new book, Starry Messenger, Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization, is a much needed clarion call for a belief in science and facts, that old trick to try and get through the world's complexities.
Neil, let's talk about gender.
Gender is probably the most divisive theme in the world right now.
It's almost like you can't even talk about it without people losing their minds.
And I guess at the center of it is this core belief, which many put forward, that there is a biological science towards sex, and then there is gender.
And that is an identity issue which is separate to sex and biology.
What is your view of this and why has it got so toxic?
And what is the way through this debate?
Yeah, so I think I have some insights there brought to you by how we end up classifying things in the universe.
In the universe, very few things are discrete in what they are.
There's in almost all cases a continuum between one kind of object and another.
Now, it's hard to have conversations about continua.
So you divide it up into as many categories as is sensible.
And then you have a way to discuss what's going on in the universe with others.
So here we have human beings where, let's go back to the bio part of this, where you have the chromosomes, X, X, X, Y. There's intersex where one of the chromosomes is doubled up.
No one is arguing that.
Just give that to the biologists.
And you can call that what sex?
Is it male sex or female sex?
I don't have a problem with that.
What I do know is that in the real world, in the real world, in a free country where, because I remembered some document that said the pursuit of happiness, it seems to me freedom, which is so heavily championed in the West, is accompanied by a pursuit of happiness.
Okay.
That's foundational to what I'm about to say.
So we all know growing up that in the classroom, every year, there were girls who were a little more tomboy-ish.
In fact, we probably, Tom Boy, who came up with that word, they're really tom girls, right?
A Tom cat is a boy cat.
A tom girl would be a sort of a boy girl, right?
I don't know where Tom Boy came from, but there were tom girls.
They didn't wear skirts.
They wanted to play in the mud with the boys.
We know they existed.
There were boys that were slightly effeminate relative to the others.
We know they existed.
And so, but we had words for them.
They were ridiculed, whatever.
We live in a time now where people are emboldened to say, you know, today I feel part female and part male.
All right?
So today, in fact, I will be neutral to you.
I will be androgynous.
But you know something?
If you're trained in this, you got to be A or B, you got to be a boy, you got to be a girl, you know what you're doing?
You're taking your inability of your human mind.
By the way, this is true for all human minds, because we got to categorize.
We always have to categorize.
It makes it easier to think about it, but in the end, it's just lazy.
So you say, boy or girl, are you a boy or a girl?
And then someone is androgynous, and it makes you feel uncomfortable.
But just because you feel uncomfortable, does that give you the right to come back to a person who's expressing their freedom of self?
It doesn't.
But what I would say.
Right, but what I would say to this, here's where it gets more complicated.
Take the issue of transgender athletes in women's sport, for example.
Okay, no, no.
I got two more sentences and I'll jump right into that.
I just want to set the table here.
I'm setting the table where, okay, that if we allow gender to appear on a spectrum, gender expression, to appear on a spectrum, as is apparently the case in the real world, where people have the freedom to do so, then for you to put your limited capacity to think on a spectrum in a law that inhibits the freedom of others, that's not a free country.
Okay, so now take it to the next step.
Where do you want to take that?
Well, what I want to take it to is I don't disagree with that.
I think in a free country, you should be allowed to identify whatever the hell you want to identify as it's fine.
I've got no problem with that.
Okay, so now where are you taking it?
So what I'm taking it, I'm taking it specifically to, say, the issue of transgender athletes in women's sport, which I think has in an attempt to provide fairness and equality for trans athletes in women's sport.
It doesn't apply the other way in men's sport.
In women's sport, it's created a new inequality and unfairness where you have trans women born with superior, powerful male biological bodies who are beginning to beat women with comfortable ease in many sports, and yet they were very unsuccessful comparatively when they competed against other biological males as they were before.
They transitioned.
So my question, I guess, there is, isn't that a clear case where science has to be the determining factor?
Because if you remove that from this equation, then you end up with gender-neutral Olympics and women don't ever win Olympic medal again.
Well, there are certain events that the men, like the uneven bars, you won't find men on the uneven bars.
It doesn't work with both.
There might be.
Okay.
But my point being, there are reasons why we divide the sexes in sport, is my point.
And the moment you start allowing gender identity to overcome biology, I see there's a problem.
Okay.
So all that means is we are on a frontier that has not been previously breached, which is what do you do in a sport where now there's an inherent advantage or disadvantage based on the rules that existed for that sport, whereas previously those advantages or disadvantages didn't exist.
So this is not complicated.
In high school, in college, and a little bit of graduate school, I wrestled.
Okay, I was captain of my high school wrestling team and undefeated.
I weighed in high school 190 pounds.
Do I wrestle the 125-pounder?
No, that would be unfair because I'm 65 pounds heavier, twice as strong, and maybe even faster.
So they set up a rule.
I only wrestle people my weight.
Wrestling has 10 weight categories to make it an interesting contest.
Okay, so let me just make this up now, just as a starter point.
The transgenderism usually involves hormone readjustments, okay?
Testosterone, estrogen.
And so we can imagine a future of sports where you're not contesting men against women.
You're contesting people in certain brackets of hormone levels.
And why not?
Because it doesn't matter.
It's different from separation.
I hesitate to lecture you about science, Professor Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Hormone Brackets in Sports 00:04:37
I really do.
But I'll tell you why not, because they've already tried to do this.
They've already tried to reduce hormone levels.
What it doesn't do, that process, is reduce body mass or strength.
Which comes from the male biology.
Right.
If you went through puberty as a male and then transitioned afterwards, right, then you will have a bigger, strong, typically bigger, stronger human.
And that's where I just think it's unfair.
Look, I don't have a transphobic bone in my head.
I'm getting more fairness and equality for trans athletes, but there's a big but here, I think.
I'm working my way up to that.
So, so one possibility, like I said, I'm just making this up on the fly, is you have hormone categories.
If that does not solve the problem, or to the extent that it doesn't, then you put in other rules that separate who's competing with whom.
Like I said, we do this all the time.
Right.
All right.
And by the way, are you going to go to Michael Phelps and say, you're genetically taller and we have a floppier, I don't know if all of this is true, but some of it is true.
You have floppier ankles and webbed fingers.
And so we're not going to compete you in this race because you have an advantage that other people don't.
We don't do that, do we?
In fact, when you really analyze it, practically every gold medal, record-setting Olympic athlete has some genetic thing going on in them that other people don't know.
They do, but my response to that.
Okay, my response to that would be, I think Serena Williams has been on record as saying that she would lose to the top 1,000 male tennis players.
So my point being you could be number 999 best in the world as a male tennis player and become immediately, if you decided to identify as a woman, the greatest woman tennis player of all time.
Is that fair?
I don't think it is.
Okay, so now watch.
So watch.
So it turns out, and I've done this, but others have done it as well, but I did it for myself to know it.
If you look at world records from world-class athletes, let's say track and field, the 100 meters, men are about 10% faster.
200 meters, 10%.
It fluctuates, but on average, it's about 10%.
The marathon, the men do it about 10% faster, okay?
And you look at reflexes, it's about 10% faster.
The way you have the biggest difference is in weightlifting.
But for speed and reflexes, it's about 10% faster.
So if you wanted to find out where the top women's athlete would land among men, you look at serving speeds, for example, because that's how fast you can bring the racket to the ball and find the point where the women's serving speeds match up with the men's serving speeds.
Okay?
And then that's where you would land in the world rankings.
What I will tell you is, people pay to watch sports not for how good the athlete is, they watch sports for how good the contest is.
Let's remind ourselves of this.
If we only watched sports for the greatest of athletes, you would never watch college football.
Never.
Because the worst NFL, the National Football League, in the London audience here, National Football League, the worst National Football League team there ever was could wipe their ass with the best college team there ever was.
Because everyone in the professions, each one of them was the best in their college.
Okay?
So, but we love watching college football.
Why?
Because the contest is equal and you don't know who's going to win in advance.
If you knew who's going to win in advance, you would never know.
Even if it was the best.
To bring this bit of the individual to a closure, I would say I get that completely, but the most important thing as a sports fan is you want to get a sense it's a fair playing field.
That I think is really the crux.
So what you do is, in the future, what you would do is, so if the hormone levels categories don't work, then there are other categories, reflex categories, okay?
Have people compete in reflex categories.
I would love that.
Okay?
Then there are people with pretty slow reflexes.
They'll have different strategies and how they would win and group them together.
By the way, in chess tournaments, your chess rating puts you in a category where you only compete with other people in that rating.
You don't compete against people where you beat them in 10 moves.
So we are still at the dawn of how we will or should organize the future of sports in recognition of the gender spectrum.
And we just have to put some creativity behind it.
I don't see any problem with it.
Multiverse and Infinite Universes 00:10:51
That's why I never wrestled 120-pound person.
I would love to have seen that.
That would have been quite entertaining.
When we come back in the Octagon, you'd pay to see that.
I've actually seen some very, very skillful 120-pound wrestlers.
It wouldn't be a given.
Sometimes the big guys go down.
Even you, Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Undefeated.
Very impressive, by the way, undefeated.
Let's take a look in high school.
In high school.
I want to come back.
I want to ask you the 10 burning questions about the universe that we reckon, me and my team, are the ones that you probably get asked more than any other.
Rapid fire, instant analysis of all the problems facing the universe.
Only you can answer.
Welcome back to the final part of my fascinating hour with author and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.
So, no, let's try on a cliffhanger.
The 10 burning questions about the universe, rapid fires.
Here we go.
What was there before the beginning of the universe?
Everyone asks this question.
What's the simple answer?
I'm delighted I can respond to you.
We don't know.
But we've got top people working on it.
Okay.
You know what?
There may have been a multiverse.
I like that.
I like the honesty.
So we genuinely don't know.
People just don't know, right?
We don't know.
There might have been a multiverse that's birthing universes, and we're one of them.
But that just pushes the question one step further before that.
What was around before the multiverse?
So we just don't know.
It's a frontier question right now.
How will the universe end and what will there be afterwards?
We have several ideas for how it will end.
One, it'll just continue to expand forever as the temperature descends asymptotically towards absolute zero, and all phenomena and all processes will cease.
All stars will burn out.
They will shut off in the night sky one by one.
And the universe will be cold and dark.
But if the expansion of the universe, which is rapid and accelerating, is real and continues, that'll take us to the big rip, which we may have talked about on my last visit.
That terrifies me.
Because if the fabric of the universe stretches faster than the material substance can sustain it, then it rips into the...
Oh, so that's in 22 billion.
That's in 22 billion years.
I know.
That was the only comforting part of that conversation.
It takes 22 billion years to happen.
Right.
Will we in the next hundred years live on the moon or Mars or any other planet other than planet Earth?
Human beings?
It's not that we can't do it, not that we couldn't figure out to do it.
We'd have to ask, what is your motivation to do it?
Do you realize Antarctica is wetter and balmier than every spot on Mars's surface?
And you don't see people lining up to build condos in Antarctica.
So I can see them as tourist destinations.
I'll totally take a tour to and have maybe the moon Olympics.
That'd be fun.
Okay.
And moon chefs shows.
And the joke I always like telling, and it never gets old for me, is like the new cuisine on the moon and restaurants would be great.
It's just that they wouldn't have any atmosphere.
That's brilliantly terrible, that joke.
Is the universe infinite?
And if not, what's on the other side of it?
So the observable universe has a boundary.
It's not a physical boundary.
It's a consequence of how fast light travels and how old the universe is.
So that sets a horizon.
A ship at sea, there's a horizon.
Is the ship captain saying, is this all there is?
Or does the ocean go on?
And they know from their experience the ocean continues.
We're pretty sure the universe goes well beyond our horizon.
We don't know how far, and it's possibly infinite.
And if it is infinite, then it wouldn't make sense to talk about an edge.
No, then the second question becomes superfluous.
Is time travel possible?
We can definitely travel into the future by moving faster relative to everybody else.
And then you'll come back less aged than those you left here on earth.
I rather like the sound of it.
The tricky part.
Yeah, the tricky part comes if you want to go into the past.
And that's really dangerous.
It is so dangerous that Hawking was thinking to himself that there must be some law of physics we have yet to discover that prevents it.
Physically, it's called a time travel protection conjecture, right?
Because if you go back and prevent your parents from meeting each other, then you will never be born to go back in time to prevent your parents from meeting each other.
And this whole thing with the Terminator movie, where he's killing everybody who might give birth to the, whose person who's going to overthrow the regime, all you have to do is prevent people from meeting each other or have them have sex 10 minutes later or earlier than they might have otherwise.
And a different sperm would have fertilized the egg.
You got a different person.
This whole shoot-em, it was so needlessly violent.
So, yeah, it might not be likely that we can do this.
But there are equations in the general relativity that allow it.
Hawking just wondered whether we'll come up to a boundary, a rule that says, nope, nope.
The equation tells us, but a higher understanding of the universe might actually prevent it.
Parallel universes, do they exist?
All our current understanding of how this universe got here tells us there are plenty of other universes.
And that's the multiverse idea.
And parallel universe sounds a little more cool than just other universes in a multiverse.
But sure, then there's likely an infinite number of them.
Hence the possibility that I'm interviewing you on my show from London and you're here in the world.
You know, all combinations of all atoms and molecules and thoughts and neurosynaptic firings would exist in the infinite universes that are out there.
You've actually suggested, I think you suggested in the book, didn't you?
You suggested that there could be a parallel universe where dreams are reality and realities are dreams.
Yeah, yeah.
Or where stars are gazing down at you rather than you gazing up at the stars.
There's a lot of variations in this.
And some of these universes would have slightly different laws of physics.
So you don't want to visit them without full understanding of the consequences of that.
You don't want to collapse into a pile of goo because the molecular forces that previously held your body together in this universe don't work in the other universe.
That would be a dangerous, dangerous freeways to take.
Okay.
Is there anyone else out there, Professor?
Anyone?
You mean just life at all?
Yes.
Probably.
We are made of the most common ingredients in the universe.
Hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, iron.
This stuff is everywhere in the universe.
Life on Earth was opportunistic.
It didn't take the rare ingredients and figure out what it could do, the most common ingredients.
And life started almost as quickly as it possibly could have.
And would just one planet out of eight get over it.
Eight planets.
One star among hundreds of billions in a galaxy among hundreds of billions.
To suggest that we are alone in the universe would be inexcusably egocentric, driven by some philosophy that is not grounded in observational science.
What's inside a black hole?
Do you want to go find out?
Oh, no.
We think we know.
What is the short answer to you?
We don't have.
Okay.
Okay.
So we have equations tell us what's in a black hole, but we've never tested this, just so you know.
So it tells us that within a black hole, a whole new space-time can open up in the future history of this universe.
And by that reasoning, we in this universe may be the other side of a black hole that lives in somebody else's universe.
So that is perhaps the most intriguing part of the equations that give us black holes.
What's the most important thing that most of us don't know about the universe that we should?
For me, it's the greatest gift that modern astrophysics has given civilization.
In 1957, a research paper was published, including a leading female scientist, by the way, who's under-celebrated, but maybe one day we'll get a good biographer for her.
Her name is Margaret Burbage.
But anyway, they published a paper demonstrating that the atoms in your body, the nitrogen, the iron, the carbon, all of this are traceable to cosmic crucibles deep in the centers of stars.
It manufactures them by thermonuclear fusion.
The star explodes, scatters that enrichment into gas clouds that make the next generation of star systems, such as we.
So it's not like you're out in the universe looking up and you say, yeah, I'm alive in this universe, but I feel small.
No.
The universe is alive within you, and you should feel large.
That revelation that we are not poetically, but literally stardust, borders on the spiritual.
And I think everyone, it is their duty to know that.
To be honest, that is the...
I've been very well aware that I am stardust for a long time, Professor, just to clarify.
No.
Just don't sweep you into the dustbin.
You know, we just throw away.
My final quick fire question for you of the 10.
What is your favorite fact about the universe?
Of the unbelievably large number of facts you must have ascertained, along with your scientist colleagues, what's the number one fact that you love most?
I am astonished every day I wake up that the universe is knowable, even on the small scales that we've, the nuts that we've cracked for it,
that it's knowable at all, that we are just, you know, billion-year-old carbon, as Joni Mitchell puts in her song Woodstock, we can rise to consciousness and pose questions about our origin.
It's been suggested that we are a way for the universe to know itself.
But the fact that the universe is knowable at all, to me, is stupefying.
Because who said it had to be that way?
That we measure laws on earth and they are the same as they are in the heavens.
A Knowable Universe 00:00:53
It enables my profession in the first place.
But I'll end with this thought: that as the area of our knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of our ignorance.
So this might be a never-ending journey.
So the more we know, the more stupid we get.
Is that the bottom line?
You got to say it more poetically than that.
Just put it out there like that.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, what an absolute pleasure to spend more time with you.
The book, Starry Messenger, Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization, is utterly riveting and hugely entertaining, as indeed are all interviews with you.
Thank you very much for joining Piers Morgan Uncentered tonight.
Thanks, Peter.
Well, that's it from me.
Whatever you're up to.
Keep it cosmically uncensored.
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