Cosmic Queries - Black Hole Universe

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Paul, there were a lot of cosmology questions in there.

Oh, it's big bang multiverse black holes.

Negative gravity.

Yeah.

You know, people into that.

Yeah.

I see you as a negative gravity person.

Tend to be negative.

Coming up, Cosmic Fairies on Star Talk.

Welcome to Star Talk,

your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

Star Talk begins right now.

This is Star Talk.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.

This is going to be a Cosmic Queries grab bag edition.

And to help me get through these questions, I got Paul Mercurio.

Paul, how you doing, man?

I'm doing well.

It's Baron, Paul Mercurio.

Baron?

Oh, yeah.

Sorry.

Not barren, as in you cannot reproduce.

Your womb is barren.

No.

I actually am.

I'm trying to keep that under mind.

You have one son, so that's

it.

By the way, look at you all dressed up like a little schoolboy.

Look at you.

I dressed up for you.

Clearly, you have no such reciprocal feeling for me.

Well, because you asked me to help you move furniture, and so that's what I did.

Plus, like, you're out of a job.

I'm out of a job.

What What the hell?

What did you do?

What did you do to piss off Carol?

I broke CBS and Paramount apparently on the late show.

You're on the staff of the late show.

I work on the late show, perform on the show, and we're not going to be in existence come May.

Wow.

And I am going to be sleeping outside in your bushes, looking for any nickels I can find.

I live in Lower Manhattan.

I don't have bushes in my backyard.

I'm going to get you something.

Yeah, so,

you know, I'm looking, you know, whatever.

All right.

You know, if you know anybody.

If I know someone who needs law enforcement.

He needs an ex-lawyer.

Ex-lawyer?

I forgot.

You went to law school.

I could do M ⁇ A deals and make you laugh and make you ravioli all at the same time.

Come on, but I'm Baron.

In case people are wondering, during one of our Patreon exclusive segments, one of our Patreon members, where they get to view a Q ⁇ A session live, felt sorry for Paul Mercurio for not having a

And he came up with a great commensurate with Lord Nice of Chuck Nice.

So he got knighted some number of episodes ago.

So they felt pity upon you and said, as a lot of people do.

And so they decided to call you Baron.

Yes.

I thought, Baron, that feels right.

Baron Paul Mercurio.

I command trez.

I have a presence.

I command attention.

I felt that worked.

And so I happened to have Excalibur in the office.

Why wouldn't I?

I got everything else here.

I got Excalibur.

And so we

did you.

Right.

Baron.

You did.

Paul McCurry.

Cut me on the neck, eight stitches, but otherwise it was great.

So I'm honored, and I want to thank you.

How did you know that was an accidental cut?

What makes you think that was an accident?

I need security when I come on this show.

Tamson's got my back.

So we're going to do some.

Yeah, let's do some Q ⁇ A here.

All right.

All right.

Just some general grab bag.

Or you're at least employed through June, is that?

Through May.

May.

May of 2020.

Unless something happens and I screw something else up and get us fired earlier.

But May.

And I'm also doing my off-Broadway show Permission to Speak, touring with it, and we have it on Patreon now.

So people can go and enjoy it there and support it because

I don't have any money.

I'm poor.

I'm out of a job.

You know,

I'm eating hay.

If you care.

I'm a baron.

I shouldn't be eating hay.

I'm a baron.

Okay.

All right, here we go.

Opo Lehman.

Hello, everyone.

Opo from Atlanta.

I'm 15 years old and was wondering, you said recently that we only know 4% of the universe.

Well, Neil does.

We know more.

4% of the universe, which includes everything we know.

So do you think there are more types of science out there, left, sorry, to create or discover, or would the rest of what we would know about the universe just be branches?

of what we already know.

Love that question.

That is a great question.

Ooh, good one.

Good one.

So let me not just, let me never say that something's just a branch of something else.

That makes it sort of subservient to it.

Let me give a slightly longer answer than you might have bargained for.

Oh, good.

Beginning in the 1990s.

You know, it's bad when Neil says it's going to be a long answer.

In the 1990s, NASA realized that there were some scientific questions that needed answering that did not sit comfortably within the

of the stove.

Yes, but certainly not even within the siloed sciences as they have been laid out, as we've come to think of them in college.

You major in chemistry, I'm majoring in physics, I'm majoring in this, majoring in that.

Nature doesn't draw those boundaries.

We did.

So one of the questions was origins.

Origins of life.

Is that just biology?

No, life began on a planet

in a solar system.

It could be stellar or equally?

No, no, just the forces operating on this.

And how is a biologist going to answer that question without knowing what the sun was doing at the time life began or what Earth was doing?

So what NASA created were these origin centers, rather, they created funding umbrellas,

origins funding umbrellas, where you could enter into the room with

the figurative room.

from all these different branches of science.

And they would come together and ask questions of each other because they're interdependent to interdependent to answer this other question some of these some of these questions i don't want to call that a spin-off i want to say that's a whole brand new way right to explore the world right so an extrapolation or an extension of so yes there's new sciences to be plumbed i don't want to think of them as an entire branch of science i'd like to think of them as new things out there where people with different expertise may have to come together to address those questions.

And I would say, that being said, probably the newest science out there is neuroscience.

We're in our infancy.

And I look forward to when it's in its maturity.

Then we nip-tuck and fix all your, especially your mental problems.

Well, you need a nip and a tuck.

You really do.

That's not even a real mustache, anybody.

What about AI?

Does AI potentially bring us to

not either through the use of AI or AI itself, other types of science or the uses of various sciences.

I haven't seen AI,

that doesn't mean it won't still happen.

Right.

But AI at its best today, I've yet to see

discover something

that was not otherwise on the internet

or put together, it's putting together things on the internet.

But suppose you had a thought that no one ever thought of before and it's not on the internet.

Does AI have access to that thought?

The answer is no.

Could AI come up with that that thought?

That's my question.

If it can't come up with a thought that none of us have ever had, nor have ever put it on the internet,

there's a limit to where AI can take it.

But my thought is a manifestation of several things that I know, and the chances are statistically that AI knows some of those things as well.

Of course.

No, just chances are it does.

And so it could...

Provided those things are online.

Right, which

statistically probably also could probably formulate the same question.

Not as good as my explanation.

Definitely.

My point is, to make a completely new discovery,

could AI have come up with the general theory of relativity?

Could AI have invented cubism?

Cubism doesn't look like it came from much before it.

Okay.

You know, there's no early cubistic paintings of Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo.

Can you tell me what branch of science?

Can you tell me what branch of science we can use that compels people to take their bike on the subway?

It's a bike.

Ride Ride the bike.

It's not a moving bike rack.

Okay?

I don't take my car to the airport

and check it on the plane.

It is a little weird.

No, it's a lot weird, and it needs to stop.

It's a little weird.

And I don't care if you live in New York or don't.

Try to get it out of your way.

They'll lift up the front wheel.

They'll tuck it to the side where the door is.

Yeah, and their handlebars end up my butt, and that's not what I paid $2.90 for, whatever I'm paying.

Okay, so the neuroscience surgery will adjust that first in your brain.

Don't defend it.

Please.

Dalmir de Silver.

De Silva.

Dalmir de Silver.

Hey, Dr.

Tyson.

Oh, this is from Brazil.

Ronado Zalanzo, Brazil.

Assuming I got this right,

we can intuitively think of Hawking radiation as matter escaping a black hole when a pair of virtual particles is created outside of it.

The antiparticle.

That's precisely correct.

Okay, you got that part right, and you get a dishwasher.

The antiparticle falls into the black hole and it annihilates itself with its counterpart already in the black hole.

This sounds like a movie, leaving the other one loose to fly away.

And since particles don't have identity.

You made an adjustment there.

It wouldn't have to be the antiparticle.

But one of those two particles would fall in.

One of the two.

Okay.

And since particles don't have identity, it's like that particle just escaped from the BH.

My question is.

The BH.

The BH.

She's on a friendly basis with this.

With the black hole.

No black hole ever told me I could call it BH.

Well, you know, someday you'll be cool enough.

You got to hang out with the cool kids to hang out with the BH.

The question is, why do black holes favor antiparticles?

The creation of virtual particles should be random all the time, every direction.

So it should be 50-50.

Yeah, and my understanding is that's the case,

as is his understanding.

If I'm wrong, I don't know why why I'm wrong.

So, but because when the particle anti-particle pair is created, the momentum that they have is in random directions.

So

it's by

quantum design random.

So

they have to go exactly opposite directions so that their momentum cancel, okay, into that spot.

At the same speed.

Well, sorry.

It depends on what the momentum was of the photons that begat the particles.

The point is everything has to check out in the end.

And when it checks out, check out meaning arithmetically balance out.

So my understanding is you could just as equally have an antiparticle going to the black hole as a particle.

If it's not that, I don't know why it's not that.

And if that's the case, you got to check with Jan 11 on that.

So

yeah, his whole question.

is predicated on something that I also don't think is true.

Which is that...

That only the antiparticles fall back in and the regular particles escape.

But we don't have proof that it is that we don't have proof of that.

Isn't that the case?

No, I'm saying if it's true that only the antiparticles go in, I don't know why that's true.

Any understanding I have of particle pair creation, they fly off in opposite directions and those

that set of directions are random to each other.

So you can just as easily have a regular particle going in as an antiparticle.

So he's right to be suspicious of this.

Right.

It should be 50-50.

i'm thinking yes yeah okay okay got it all right great question

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Hi, I'm Ernie Carducci from Columbus, Ohio.

I'm here with my son Ernie because we listen to Star Talk every night and support support Star Talk on Patreon.

This is Star Talk

with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

This is Kratik Nagar.

Hello, Dr.

Tyson.

My name is Araya, 12 years old.

I'm from Salt Lake City, Utah.

I love watching your explainers and the fun and knowledge that comes with it.

While in class, the question came up in size: which are we humans closer to?

The universe or an atom?

I was very intrigued by this question, especially because atoms are incomprehensibly small and the universe is incredibly big.

If we are closer to the size of the universe, could there be a time knowing that the universe is expanding that we are closer to the size of an atom?

Cool question.

Yeah.

I've actually answered that question in my next book.

Whoa.

Called Just Visiting This Planet.

And I will read you that question and an answer from my book.

Okay.

If I may.

Yes.

Can someone pass my computer?

Go ahead, read me a bedtime story.

May I read you a bedtime story?

Yes.

So

as you may know, for 12 or so years, I wrote a question and answer column for the public under a pen name, Merlin.

That's why I have Excalibur in this office.

I didn't know you did that.

Because me and Merlin go way back.

You're tight.

You're like this, literally.

We're tight.

We're totally tight.

And so people ask Merlin these questions.

Merlin was the pen name.

So here it is, if I may.

Dear Merlin, I am six feet tall.

Comparatively speaking, which is the farthest away from my eye?

The atomic particles in my little toe or the most distant galaxies?

That's the same question.

Right.

Since you're only six feet tall, there is no doubt that the distant galaxies are farther from your eyeballs.

than your pinky toe.

Another way to address your inquiry, however, is to imagine you suddenly became 10 times taller, 10 times taller again, and so forth.

After about 25 of these stretching exercises, your head will brush up against the most distant galaxies in the visible universe.

Returning to your eyeball, imagine you now shrink in successive steps so that each shift takes you within one-tenth of the distance to the atoms in your toe.

So we

increase by factors of 10, decrease by factors of 10.

It would take only 15 shrinks to enter the nuclei of your toe atoms.

Adding the two sets of jumps reveals that the entire known universe spans about 40 powers of 10.

In one direction.

No, you add them together.

It's 40 powers of 10.

But this is.

Just from small to large.

And I don't mean this.

So what this means is you are closer to the atoms in your toe.

It's only 15 powers of 10 down.

And it's 25 powers of 10 to the edge of the universe.

Right, and I'm not trying to...

That's the only way to answer.

This seems like, and I'm not saying this to be particularly...

By the way, that book is Just Visiting This Planet.

Available October 2025.

Okay.

Not available in paperback.

This seems like an obvious question that doesn't even need to be asked.

And I don't mean that to be mean-spirited, but like, to me, I'm a complete lay person.

The answer was your toe.

Of course it's 15 versus 25.

No, you didn't know that in advance.

These are powers of 10.

I understand, but there's no question that the atoms in your toe.

If I take a tape measure, the toe is six feet away and the universe is a

14 billion light years.

Right.

If you want to say it's obvious, the answer is obvious, that's what you should be citing.

But in powers of 10, it's not obvious.

But this question wasn't in the context of powers of 10.

Yeah, but that's the only sensible way to answer it in the way they were debating it in their class.

Elevate yourself to the level of the 12-year-old.

Man, you were asking a lot of me today.

That's impossible.

Okay, so online,

there's a, on YouTube somewhere, it's there, there's a 10-minute movie called Powers of 10.

It's made in the 1970s, 78.

And it starts with a man laying down at a picnic on a, on a, in a park outside of Chicago.

And it says, we start with a scene one meter wide and one meter tall of a man with a, and every 10 seconds, we're going to go 10 times farther away.

And we do that.

And you see how many jumps.

It's an early CGI, but it wasn't even used on computers.

It was very well done in its day.

10 times farther away.

Every 10 seconds.

And you go to the edge of the universe.

They said, now,

then we zoom back and it says, now we're going to go 10 times closer every 10 seconds.

And so you go 10 times closer.

And it takes fewer fewer 10 times.

It's 10.

10s, right?

Right.

And that's all I'm saying is it's obvious that that would take

15 tens to.

You were not thinking in powers of 10 to justify saying that.

You don't know what I was thinking.

That's true.

I don't know what you were thinking.

And that's why this relationship has never worked and we need marriage counseling because you don't bother to think what I think.

So I think we hooked up our guy with his answer.

Very good question.

Yes.

And this is 12 years old.

Amazing.

All right.

This is Master Builder EJ.

No, but he's one of our fans.

so it's not amazing that he says that, it's expected.

All right, average question, 12-year-old.

Try better the next time.

That's Neil talking, not me.

I thought it was amazing.

Hello, everyone.

This is Ethan Henning from Houston, Texas.

I have a question about power sources.

What would be the best power source for a moon base that would have the purpose of mining and sustaining the lives of astronauts for six months?

Could it be fission?

Maybe it's solar.

I would love to know what you think.

I love this podcast.

It's my favorite.

Ask me why I'm dressed up.

I lied to you and said I dressed up for you at the beginning of this.

Why are you dressed up?

Because hours ago, I was on CBS Mornings, their morning show.

Oh, right.

I fell asleep during that segment.

They asked me.

I get dressed up for TV, but with a little bit of

a good, yeah, when you come on the lake show, which I work on, you wear a tie.

I show some tie or the vest.

The vest.

One or the other.

Both would be

break the lens.

People will bleed from their eye sockets.

So they asked me about nukes on the moon.

And first, we're making portable, not quite the right word, transportable nuclear power plants.

that could fit in a truck, for example.

If you fit in a truck, it can fit in a big rocket.

Okay.

And these are nuclear fission power plants.

We've talked about this on the show, needing portable nuclear plants to drive AI.

What you would do is, if you have

a computation farm somewhere where AI is intensely using energy,

you take it off.

Yeah, you're calculating for Bitcoin.

You just take it off the grid, give it its own power supply.

You can't put it near a waterfall or this, and then you don't know if the sun is shining all the time.

A nuclear power transportable power plant.

The word plant overstates it at that level.

Power station.

Power station.

Then, yeah.

Yeah, that was the expert that we had on the show who talked about

a lot of those.

We did.

So right now, NASA is considering fast-tracking a nuclear power generator

about the size that I described.

And one of those would give you 100 kilowatts.

Are you kilowatt fluent?

Yeah.

Live rather than not.

Okay, no, I can't.

KW.

Let's.

See?

I I know.

Okay, let's...

I'm not dumb.

I'm smart.

I'm not dumb.

Let's become fluent together.

You ready?

Yeah.

So 100 kilowatts.

Kilo is what?

Mm-hmm.

Thousand.

Thousand.

So 100,000 watts.

Okay, that's the power that it can generate.

100,000 watts.

Do you know the power drain of a hair dryer?

I'd say a kilowatt.

Yeah, 1,000 watts.

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

So, how many hair dryers could a 100-kilowatt power generator?

100,000.

I'm sorry, we're just trying to speak

apparently

100,000 watts generator

Your hair dryer draws a thousand watts Oh 10,000 yeah

wasn't that the question

start from scratch all right okay go ahead 100,000 watts a kilowatt okay 100,000 watts.

A hair dryer uses a thousand watts.

So how many hair dryers can this sustain?

It's

a thousand.

You're just pulling it out of your pocket.

100,000 watts.

Yeah.

So the hair dryer is a thousand watts.

It can sustain a hundred hair dryers.

Okay.

So that's the energy level that NASA is looking at to create and send to the moon right now.

So it's not some Mondo power plant.

It can keep 50 hair dryers going on the moon.

Okay.

And by the way, you wouldn't need a hair dryer because it's 200 degrees Fahrenheit.

That's true.

Just stick your head out the window.

Just stick your head out the window for a second, right?

It'll completely dry.

So these power plants at that size and with that wattage can run for eight to 10 years.

How do they deal with maintenance and that kind of thing?

No, no, these are these are this new generation.

There's no maintenance.

No maintenance at all.

And it's very efficient in how it distributes heat to, and it's not going to over

meltdown.

It's nuclear fission of

fissionable uranium, which is not the same uranium as you might learn from a explainer we did on

isolating uranium for energy or for bombs.

So there's how pure the uranium is for what your use might be.

It's got to be really pure if you're going to make a bomb out of it.

If you're going to make a power station, it doesn't have to be that pure.

And so it's much more readily obtainable.

So anyway, so you, so nukes would do it for eight years.

You never have to maintain maintain it.

If you had solar panels,

by the way, no matter where the sun is in the sky on the moon, it's just as bright as it is anywhere else because there's no atmosphere.

So, the sun is just as bright on the horizon as it is directly overhead.

So, you can have solar panels that just track the sun, you'll get a hundred percent sunlight as long as the sun is above the horizon.

Do you know how long a day lasts on the moon?

24 hours, a moon

it lasts a month.

What is a month?

Where do you think the word month came from?

Have you thought about it?

No, hang on.

How long it takes the moon?

Ah.

Okay.

That's all the moon goes around the earth.

But as it does that, it has,

and it goes through phases.

As it's doing that, it's experiencing a lunar day.

So a lunar day is a month.

Okay.

A month long.

Okay.

So two weeks.

I thought you had a speech impediment.

That's why you stared at me like, what does he say?

Like a dog?

Yeah, exactly.

So two weeks of sunlight, two weeks of darkness.

So you got two weeks of solar power generation.

Problem is, if you exceed your power needs, the energy's got to go to somewhere, so put it to storage batteries.

When it's dark for two weeks,

you might want to use the energy.

However, batteries don't work well in the cold.

And as soon as the sun sets, the temperature drops from 200 degrees Fahrenheit to 200 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

We haven't been able to come up with a battery that can be done.

We haven't.

You'd have to like insulate the batteries and have some other heating source.

So just put a Tesla up there.

Just take care of it.

Have you driven a Tesla in the winter?

The battery?

It took me an hour to get across town when it should have taken me five minutes.

So,

yes, nuclear fission makes complete sense given what we've done with it lately.

You can create a reactor and just send it to the moon.

One last question on this, then we'll move on.

So how do you protect the reactor from whatever something could hit it, happen?

What could happen on the moon that is yeah, a meteor could hit it right because there's no atmosphere and there's nothing protecting you.

Right.

Meteor could also hit you.

I'm like, you can say, we finally have it protected.

Bam.

No.

You're dead.

No, I'm coming to your house and I'm going to just hide under the couch.

Yeah, so a big enough meteor, you're not going to protect.

Maybe you could bury it, for example, protect it that way.

How far away are we from this, realistically?

The military already has prototypes that they're using

of just the size I'm describing.

And

so

I think we're very close within years, not decades.

Yeah.

All right.

Let's move on.

Next question.

Derek Evans, Dr.

Tyson, this is Derek from South Windsor, Connecticut.

I know where that is.

Longtime listener and attendee of live events.

Nice.

Thank you for coming to us.

First time Patriots.

We give three or four live events a year, typically in the region, one in Connecticut, the Beacon Theater here in Manhattan, and we sometimes go to Jersey and to Philly.

But yeah.

Those are great.

I think you need a juggler at the beginning of it just to kind of loosen things up.

In a recent conversation.

You also juggle.

I'm going to do anything come May.

Whatever you need.

In a recent conversation you had about micro black holes, it had me wondering about interstellar travel.

How could you travel vast distances while being sure to avoid these tiny black holes and what time dilation or other unintended consequences would exist?

Or do they radiate away fast enough not to pose any problems?

So, the larger the black hole, the slower it evaporates.

It's obviously the inverse is then true.

As the black hole gets smaller, the rate at which it radiates increases and grows exponentially.

As it gets smaller.

As it gets smaller.

So it gets smaller, it gets smaller faster still.

Because it's compressing on its own.

No, it's not compressing.

It's because its rate of evaporation has to do with its surface area.

And the smaller it gets, the more surface area it has relative to the volume.

It's an interesting fact about the geometry of surface area going as R squared, radius squared, and the volume going as R cubed.

The surface area.

Of the sphere.

Doesn't it decrease as it...

It does, but the volume decreases faster than the surface area.

And why is that?

It's just the arithmetic of it, because the volume is...

Not a good enough answer.

Specifically, why?

Don't duck the question.

Don't be a politician.

Answer.

So, this manifest, I think we have a whole episode on this.

It's on size and life.

So, if you can ask, here's a certain surface area you have, and how much flesh is associated with that surface area.

You can do that.

As you get smaller, the amount of flesh associated with the surface area drops faster than the size of your flesh that protects it.

Within the body.

Within the volume.

That's correct.

Okay.

And

since the evaporation rate is related to the surface area, the rate, it is sucking, sucking.

Extracting.

There's no such thing as gravity.

Black holes suck.

Sorry.

You should put that on a business card.

So, what's a business card?

Gotta explain that.

So as it gets smaller, the amount of volume that's going to evaporate out gets smaller faster relative to the surface area.

And so it evaporates in a flash of light.

So a tiny enough black hole will not last long enough for you to come upon it and then put your life at risk.

Plus, we don't expect there to be many of them, even if they were there.

And space is really vast and really empty.

You ever see the video, the video, the sci-fi movies where person is trying to navigate the asteroid belt?

Duck left, duck right, duck, duck, duck, duck.

Even in the expanse, they did this.

They got asteroids.

No, you know, the average distance between any two random asteroids in the asteroid belt?

It's like 50 miles.

Some number way bigger

than literally ever show.

So if you're driving through that, you could literally like use your knee to drive and eat a Big Mac and then eventually

put on makeup, answer some texts.

Yell at your kids in the backseat.

In fact, Pioneer 10 was the, I think it was, the first spacecraft to traverse the asteroid belt.

Americans, Americans, remain the only country to have probes outside of the asteroid belt.

Okay.

There was some concern.

Will it survive?

Yes, it survived.

Of course it survived.

So

we packed a lot in there in terms of Derek's question, or do they radiate fast enough

to not to pose any problems?

That's the answer.

Yes.

That's the answer because of the dilation.

Okay, got it.

All right.

Lily Rose.

Hello, Dr.

Tyson and Lord Nice, or,

but he's not here.

All right.

So put in your name with your new title.

Put it in right now.

Okay.

Graft it in.

Go.

Okay.

Hello.

Hello, Dr.

Tyson and Baron McCurio.

Okay.

Lily Rose here from, that really does roll off my tongue.

Lily Rose here from Virginia.

My question is, was the wow audio signal ever solved?

Have scientists determined what was heard or do you have any theories on what it was?

Thank you and love the show.

Yeah, so back in the day when we had chart recorders,

there was a radio signal.

And by the way, radio is not the same thing as sound.

We equate the two because we used radio waves to transmit audio into a box called a radio.

And we associate the word radio with sound.

But radio is a band of light that travels at the speed of light.

Sound is the result of...

You can transmit sound with optical light, as you can do with fiber optics, for example.

They have fiber optic speaker connections to your...

So you have to be clever about the modulation of

the electromagnetic signal and know how to read that and turn that into sound on the other end.

So the WOW signal was

a radio signal that rose up out of the din of cosmic noise.

And then it never rose up again.

How long did it, how long did it last?

I don't remember how long it lasted, but the astronomers duty, they said, wow.

That's why it was called the WOW signal.

Like a wow, and an exclamation.

Can I just say something?

What?

You guys couldn't have come up with it.

I know.

What?

Holy shit.

No.

What did you want?

Well, don't have a six-year-old name it.

Golly G.

Whiskers.

Like, what's the...

Gee Williger's.

And it was before OMG.

You know, no one knew how to do that yet.

What's the speculation on

what the source of this was?

If that has been solved with some explanation, explanation, I don't know.

But how close was there anything?

Here's what the thing is.

If we want it to be aliens, and aliens should know better than this, you don't just send out one pulse of signal.

You want a rhythm in there so that anyone eavesdropping on you will know it's not from the universe itself.

So you can't do just one blip.

And if you send any blips at all, send them at regular intervals.

But it was a consistent signal.

No, it was one blip.

Maybe it was from another star system.

An alien left the TV on and fell asleep.

It could have.

Yeah,

sure.

Well, you're going to mock me, Mr.

Wow.

That's as plausible as naming this thing Wow Audio.

No, I'm saying I don't know what it is.

And just because you don't know what it is doesn't mean you know what it is.

Wow.

Wow.

You said wow.

God.

Busted.

Oh, my God.

Busted.

It's not fair that you take acid for these and I don't.

No, go ahead.

No, just to be clear, there are people who see something in the sky that they don't understand.

Right.

They don't know what it is.

And they say, because I don't know what it is, I know what it is.

It's intelligent aliens visiting from another planet.

No, but that's just people wanting to believe that.

Well, that's my point.

Just because you don't know what you're looking at, it doesn't mean you know what you're looking at.

That needs to be a bumper sticker.

Exactly.

Okay.

Has the WOW signal,

has that been left alone?

Is anybody still pursuing that?

They went back to the

fifth.

It's been revisited, as they say.

Hey, Fidelity.

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Huh, that sounds easier than I thought.

You got this.

Yeah, I do.

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You will find them where you left them.

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We're going to move on.

Conrad Dunphy, Dr.

Tyson, Conrad Dunphy here from Portland, Oregon.

Portland, Leviticus.

Yeah.

On the multiverse-ish

JWST coming out with a lot of data supporting the black hole universe hypothesis.

What is the likelihood that physics within a different black hole would be similar to ours?

And if those physics are similar, what would be the first guess at how we escape our black hole universe to visit another?

Wormhole?

Wow, it's a lot there.

So there's only some

tentative maybe for those watching that don't know jwst

my people

oh you know just because you don't know what jwster it might be somebody new just because you don't know what they're okay oh okay so i'll explain it for others and not you because you already know it okay

Compelled by Paul to bring everyone onto the same page, JWST James Webb Space Telescope has, in one recent measurement, found evidence of possible rotation among an ensemble of galaxies which we don't expect if the universe is

was born in the ways we expected via the big bang okay it would mean there was some net rotation of the universe we know from equations that are in one of these books that inside a black hole opens a whole new space-time continuum So a black holes, however, accrete matter that circulate toilet bowl style.

We expect black holes to have rotation rates.

Wait a minute, if our universe has a rotation rate, and we are a space-time existing with that,

and we have a horizon,

are we in a black hole?

There's a chance of that.

Can't rule that out.

Okay, now, if...

That means we're in a contained universe with our own laws of physics.

In the multiverse, every multiverse would have a different, slightly different laws of physics.

Quantum physics tells us that.

You don't want to visit those other universes.

Why?

Because the charge on the electron might be slightly different from what's going on in your body, and you would collapse into a pile of goo, totally mess you up.

So like Star Trek, the whole like transport me, beat me up, it could be a mess.

You'd be a pile of goo.

Yes.

So if you do find one with, I would, dare I say, identical laws of physics, then I don't mind being the the first to step in there.

You would need a wormhole to connect us.

Do you think it's plausible that there's one with an identical

yeah, if there's an infinite number, there'd be one with identical, yes.

Do you think we're ever going to be capable of discovering that?

Wormholing to another universe?

I don't know.

I want wormholes as badly as the next person.

And I like the way.

I like the way Rick makes wormholes.

You know, he has a

gun or some device that'll do.

He uses real science.

Whereas this guy from, who's this guy?

You know what I'm talking about?

Dr.

Strange from Marvel.

He uses magic.

What's that?

That's the worst.

No, I'm telling you, it should be outwood.

All right.

That was a great question.

So

you could probably do it with a wormhole, but otherwise, the universes are not connecting.

Connected.

That's kind of what defines them as independent.

And even if you could go visit, you're not sure you want to because you don't know what you're going to do.

Plus, you don't know if they're made of antimatter.

Right.

The antimatter is not in our universe.

Where did it go?

If it exists anywhere, maybe it made another universe.

So here's what you do.

Bring a little coin with you.

You see a person in the other universe, you know, flip him a coin.

If he spontaneously explodes, quickly go back to the universe.

It's not the same.

No, but the minute I entered the black hole through the wormhole, that universe, that's the same thing.

But you have to come in contact with other matter.

Right.

And

space is pretty empty.

Deep space is very empty.

So, yeah.

Time for one more.

All right, John.

John Swiley.

Hi, Dr.

Tyson, a longtime listener, first-timer inquirer from Athens, Georgia.

With all the excitement around JWST's discoveries of unexpected...

That would be James Webb Space Telescope.

So annoying.

Unexpected mature galaxies.

A question struck me.

Why does

Neil Tyson have friends?

That's a weird question.

What if we're not actually seeing galaxies from the early universe, but instead light entering from beyond it?

Not unlike a pinhole camera.

Could the Big Bang have been a narrow portal from a parent universe and JWST is now picking up photons that bled through that pinhole event horizon?

Maybe

those galaxies look so evolved because they are.

Thanks for everything.

Wow.

Or we don't fully understand the formation of galaxies.

I mean, just have a look at how extraordinary is your explanation to account for

a mystery.

Because we have mysteries all the time in modern astrophysics.

So to say there's a portal to another universe,

okay,

but

Occam's razor remains a very good tool to apply here.

Do you know Occam's razor?

It was like Occam said, one ought not posit multiplicity without necessity.

I say that every day.

He stole that from me.

So how is that relevant?

What it means is if you have a complex hypothesis to explain something and someone else is walking around with a simpler explanation, the simpler explanation is probably correct.

Right, but that's sort of answering the question from 30,000 feet.

It's so if we're not actually seeing galaxies from the early universe, but instead light entering from beyond it, not on like a pinhole camera.

Yeah, so that's implying that we can see beyond the universe.

rather than within the universe itself.

So pick.

You just make judgment as to what is most likely to you.

And for me, extraordinary explanations, as Carl Sagan famously said, require extraordinary evidence.

And while it's unusual to have these mature galaxies so early, maybe we don't fully understand galaxy formation.

And the whole point of JWST, why it looks at the universe in the infrared, is to

see galaxies being born that emit ultraviolet.

And over the lifetime of the universe, Redshift had expanded it until it has become infrared.

Is it a constant that when a galaxy forms, it'll always emit ultraviolet?

I mean, there's so many, to me, as we talk about this, just things we think we know, but we don't know, that anything could be happening out there, right?

Yeah, but

that's true, and we have to be open for that.

But if you have some sense of how things do happen,

there's no harm in starting with that assumption.

Right.

Another great question.

No harm.

Yep.

No harm.

One more.

It's a lightning round.

One more.

Okay.

Paradox.

Hello, this is Dennis from Salisbury, Indiana.

Dr.

Tyson, if gravitons do exist, shouldn't we be able to cancel gravity waves when putting them under close scrutiny?

Can an equivalent to the double-slit experiment be set up at LIGO to cancel the wave?

So the bigger story is...

If you can cancel out light, such as in the slit experiment, there's a bright line and a dark line,

it's bright, dark, and bright because the troughs add together and you get darkness, and the crests add together and you get bright.

All right, they're wondering if you can take gravity, if it's a wave, cancel it out.

And if you cancel it out, did you cancel out the gravity itself?

That's an interesting question.

Can you create negative gravity in this way

or zero out the gravity in this way?

And

I don't think so.

Why are you hesitant on that?

Well, no, well, also,

what LIGO is detecting is a change in the gravity, not the gravity itself.

So, yeah, you can surely.

But if you can have change, then you could have negative gravity.

Yeah, in principle.

Isn't that possible?

Yes.

But we've not.

However, is it really negative gravity if it's just the part of the wave that is

a trough, right?

So isn't negative gravity basically static?

I would think, correct.

Right?

Correct.

Or frozen?

Correct.

And you would need that if you wanted to make a wormhole, because wormholes take negative gravity and expand the words.

Well, therefore, if the wormhole exists, then negative gravity must exist, right?

No, but you can use negative gravity.

Oh, sorry.

Oh, yes.

Well, I don't know.

Unless aliens found another way to make a wormhole.

If we see a wormhole out there, somebody discovered negative gravity.

That's correct.

Okay.

There you go.

That was it.

All right.

Great questions.

questions.

Done.

Love you, man.

Thanks for coming through.

Always great to see you.

All right.

And I think I'm going to try to dress up a little bit more when I come here.

I am a Baron now, so you know.

I don't know how Barons dress.

So this has been another installment of Star Talk Cosmic Query's Grab Bag Edition with Baron

Paul Mercurio.

If you see me on the street, please salute and curtsy.

And he's out of a job beginning May.

May.

And the late show.

Anybody needs their house painted?

Help moving?

I'm handy with tools.

All right.

This is Star Talk, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.

As always, keep looking up.

Honey, do not make plans Saturday, September 13th, okay?

Why, what's happening?

The Walmart Wellness Event.

Flu shots, health screenings, free samples from those brands you like.

All that at Walmart.

We can just walk right in.

No appointment needed.

Who knew we could cover our health and wellness needs at Walmart?

Check the calendar Saturday, September 13th.

Walmart Wellness Event.

You knew.

I knew.

Check in on your health at the same place you already shopped.

Visit Walmart Saturday, September 13th for our semi-annual wellness event.

Flu shots subject to availability and applicable state law.

Age restrictions apply.

Free samples while supplies last.