The “Bang” in Big Bang with Charles Liu
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So, Paul, those are some fun questions in a Cosmic Race grab bag. And from all over the world, literally. All over the world. And, you know, what I think what people are going to see in the upcoming episode is that we pretty obliterate time. Time. Time is, succumbs to our logic and rational thought. Coming up on StarTalk. StarTalk.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I got with me as co-host today, Paul Mercurio. Paul, welcome back. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Great to be back with you, buddy. Yeah. This is the attorney, stockbroker turned comedian? Yes. Attorney, investment banker turned comedian. There's nothing funny about lawyers and stockbrokers. No, exactly. Okay. I found a way to like run from it as fast as I could. All right.

So, Paul, we're going to do grab bag cosmic queries. We are. We got some great queries here. And I don't trust myself in grab bag mode. Yeah.

I need backup. Yes, you do. I got to go for the big guns. You need your Starsky. Starsky and Scots, yeah. Wait, I'm sorry. 70 to get that reference. He did pull up in a Ford Torino. Charles Liu, welcome back to StarTalk. Hi, Neil. It's great to be back. Charles, longtime friend. Our families are friends and we're colleagues. Yes. You were here when we built the new Rose Center for Earth and Space 25 years ago.

Has it been that long? It's been a quarter century. Jeez, it feels like yesterday that I came over here and this place was a hole in the ground. Yeah, it does feel that way. And it was, you have intellectual and sweat equity in what we built here. So we're thankful for that. Ah, it was fun. That's weird because when we were talking, he wasn't here, you said he didn't do much. You took a lot of the credit. Ah.

Well, you know, he's not wrong. I mean, I was just hanging out here all night having a great time. Yeah, that's all it was. Just jump right in? Okay. All right. Let's do it. This is Galaxy. Hey, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Liu. Galaxy is the person. Yeah. Galaxy. Galaxy. Okay. That's there. I am Brian from Roseville, California. I just recently joined the Patreon and I'm excited to have my question answered. Welcome. Yes. Thank you. Welcome.

Welcome to the universe. Okay. We dim the lights when you do that. I have always wondered how giant gas clouds and nebula exist in space. Shouldn't the vacuum cause all gas to disperse evenly to the point of not being even being able to see it?

I love that, 'cause on Earth, any cloud of gas disperses. That's right. As dogs know. That's right. Dogs will smell you from far away because whatever is your stank. One minute in and he says the gas has stank.

This is a lesson anybody watching on how not to host a show. At least it's not smell-o-vision. Goodness gracious. Yeah, so it does dissipate. It's a great question. You look at blood in the water and that... Does it dissipate evenly? Well, it's a diffusion equation where you have...

it wouldn't happen in solid, 'cause all the molecules are just rigid, but in a fluid. They can vibrate. No, but you're not gonna move it through the system. No, there's a phase issue. I'm saying it's not gonna move through the system. Just trying to get technical. Okay, and-- Wow, this is getting tense already. Well, he called me skank. I mean, what am I supposed to do? I didn't say skank, I said stank. You know what, oh, stank, excuse me, excuse me. We don't need this, we'll do our own show. There we go, okay, Paul, we're outta here.

So the diffusion equation, so you have a molecule that can move like all the others and it just works its way through. In my high school, there was a diffusion experiment

where they is a long tube it was one of these display because we didn't have any athletic trophies So you can put other stuff in your hallway display cases. It's a hall of beakers Very tall beaker. Yes about this tall if I remember correctly I was little it not much littler, but I think it was this big and There was ink

At the bottom. Ah, yes. And they carefully put water on top of it. Yep. And throughout the year you got to watch, because the ink is slightly denser, but still they're both fluids. And so you get to watch the ink work its way up real slowly. At my high school, they had diffusion experiments every afternoon after the school lunches were served bean soup. Yeah.

And in every classroom, there would be experiment of different particles suspended in the atmosphere moving from one side of the classroom to the other after you first heard that something was coming. And people didn't figure out to not eat the bean soup. Right, exactly. And that's where you got your name, Skank. Stank, Stank, Stank, Stank. So did you, could you do that with ink? Could you do it with oil, like cooking oil? Yes. Well, it's harder. No, because oil would float.

And the miscibility between oil and water is very different between... Because ink is... Most inks that we use are water-based anyway. So the water is finding the water molecules. So, Brian, the answer is basically...

The conditions out in space make it so that these gas particles tend to disperse unless they have a reason to collect. Okay, here on Earth you have different kinds of things like buoyancy involved and things like that. That also happens in space. But in space, when the temperatures are very low, say 400 degrees below zero Fahrenheit,

gravity can actually overcome a lot of the motional sort of dispersive, diffusive. - Emotional? - Motional. - Motional? - Motional, yes.

It could be emotional. You know what I'm saying? I ain't doing this. It's very moving. That's right. You tear up. You start crying a lot. Emotional. I never heard that word. Okay, emotional. I have to become a star. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Yeah, some guys have to become stars. Yeah, when it's cold, the random motions of the gases are actually overcome by the mutual gravity.

that they exert on each other. Does it happen? Is it dispersing in an even nature? Not at all. Everything is turbulent. If you go see, for example, beautiful pictures of say the Orion Nebula or other interstellar clouds, you see that they're streaky and strange and unusual shape. They look like horse head. They look like helixes and cat's eyes and things like that. And that's completely because the turbulence is still going on. Is it that or because you're smoking something funny?

Is that right? You know? Both worked. We got to ask these stars that are emitting their planetary nebulae, what are they smoking? I think that would be a very, very good idea. But the bottom line is that

In space, you have gravity holding these clouds together long enough for them to do things like form stars and planets. But there's always these forces and these different energies and so forth trying to disperse them. And so you get beautiful combinations, and that's why you get beautiful nebulae, and you get things like stars and planets. I will add that you have a gas cloud that makes a family of stars.

So that eats up most of the mass of the gas cloud. But there's part of the gas that didn't participate.

in the formation of the planet. - A little snooty, like you were in high school. A little snooty, a little standoffish. - It just wasn't, and that gas doesn't always land on a star. - Do we know why, in all seriousness? - Well now the gas doesn't have enough gravity to make it a next star. We're done. - No, but at the time, and I'm not trying to be funny. - Oh no, it's too far away. So watch your head, I got this. - That gas, like all the other gases had an equal opportunity to be part of that. - It's not an equal opportunity system. If you're a little too far away,

You might not feel the strong enough gravity to participate. And the stars form without you. And then the whole galaxy is rotating. Okay? So your whole system with your stars and your gas is moving. And there's other stuff. So your gas can get stripped off.

and scatter into the galaxy, never to make another star. So that gas just continues as gas throughout the universe. And these are the particles that comprise the interstellar medium, even between the gas clouds. It's not completely empty. Okay.

- Okay, and can that gas marry with other gases eventually and sort of possibly be part of another? - Again, it depends completely on like what Neil was saying. What is the rotational shear? What is the temperature in the environment? How much of it just happens to gather at this moment, whether it can actually collect or not collect. It's really beautiful and fascinating dynamic. But the funny thing is it is very, very sparse.

Here on Earth, we have trillions upon trillions of particles of gas, even in the tiniest beaker or vial. But out in space, just even a couple of hundred miles above Earth's surface, we're lucky if we even get one gas particle. It'd be the best vacuum ever created on Earth is just space. So people who study interstellar clouds are literally studying nothing. And yet that's the nothing from which we

Right. So it's endlessly fascinating. Such is the layout of this cosmic ballet. Well said. Choreographed by the forces of gravity. It's more like a Martha Graham kind of ballet. Makes it too orderly. I don't know. I'm feeling Alvin Ailey. Okay. A little Alvin Ailey going on. Yeah, we go Alvin Ailey. I've been buged. Wins every time. All right, we're moving on. Great question, great answers. Christopher Wynn. Hello, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Liu. I am Chris Wynn from Ottawa on TVN.

Ontario, Canada. I'm new to preaching and love to show. My question is during the big bang, what went bang? If we don't know, what are your best guesses? There's only one answer here. It's the universe went bang. Right. Okay. Next question. I could take that. Well, we know the idea. We know the idea of personal space was blown. Look, the term big bang was actually coined, uh,

by or attributed to. But it's so misleading because it's about expansion. That's right. It's not about bang. It's attributed to. And why don't you guys fix that? I've tried. I've tried. We, there's a lot of legacy language that permeates our field and it's,

makes it historically interesting. Can I ask a question? No. In all seriousness, how would that process work within the scientific community if you wanted to sort of take on the task of changing the terminology? Oh, you mean like if you change the status of...

I'll kick you out of this office and throw you off the roof. No, I'm saying that. I'm already stank, so I mean, why not, right? Think about it, stank. No, no, no, no. Wait, no, no. Go ahead, go ahead. Two very important points here. So finish your big bang story. Okay. The big bang term is attributed to a guy named Fred Hoyle.

It was an interview done early on in the middle of the 20th century. Back when ideas for the beginning of the universe were still uncertain. Right. And they were still contesting. Right. And so he himself did not like the idea that the universe started from nothing or something very small and became something big.

And so the journalist that he was speaking with or interviewer or whatever says something like, so you're thinking of the universe as kind of like a big bang of some kind. And that just stuck. Did he do it to make science and all sorts of sexy? Like sort of to get people sort of more excited? Today no one really knows.

I've seen it historically expressed as it was derisive or that it was spectacular, one or the other. But yes, the right answer is it's an expansion of space and time from something small to something big. It was not an explosion. And now we have this problem where we think, oh, if the Big Bang is an explosion, what did it explode into? You know, things like that. Well, a key part of that- What did it explode from? Yeah, there's a lot of other- And then there's this thing called, this is, you know, cosmic inflation, right? That's right. Which happened in the first,

- Tiny fraction of a second? - Which is an expansion within an expansion. - Right. - You know, imagine if you're blowing up a balloon slowly and then suddenly someone slaps you on the back and your air all goes out at once, you know, and it blows up. And we call that inflation, which gets mixed in with all kinds of other things. - Name during the Jimmy Carter era hyperinflation that existed at the time. - Just before, just before, Nixonian times.

Are you sure? But there is a theory. I'm pretty sure, but it was like 10%. It was in the 70s. Yeah, it was 10% inflation. When this happened, okay, this cosmic inflation, there is a theory that a gas cloud formed the initials WIN, which is WIP inflation now. Jimmy Carter. Come on, that was good. Okay. See how I brought that back? Okay, come on. It's historical, though. Yeah. Right? Oh, by the way, just a quick, just while we're on the, how does it relate back to society? Mm-hmm.

I came of age, I'm a little older than you. I came of age when people... You're a lot older than me. I think I heard him whisper, you're old as dirt. And I didn't think it was a very scientific term, but that's what he used. I think I'm 20% older than Charles here, plus or minus. So he...

I came of age when we applied computing power to what galaxies would do to each other when they encountered. Classic paper by two brothers, Alar and Yuri Tumray in 1972. Tumray and Tumray, yes. Terrific paper. What kind of data are you inputting into the computer? So we saw these weird-looking galaxies out there.

This is just an analog, so I don't want to spend too much time on it. Really weird-looking galaxies. And there was someone in our field who compiled them into one catalog. TripARP. Called the Atlas of... Peculiar galaxies. Yeah, these are galaxies. They're just weird. They don't match any form. So I don't know why, but here they are. And everyone's saying, what could make these galaxies? Are they...

Are they born that way? And then Gerard de Vaucouleur, who was at Galaxy. Jerry. I call him Jerry. Yeah. We're like this. He was very French. He was pretty sure that a

A crashed Lexus is not a different kind of car. It's still a Lexus. Okay? So he... It becomes a Toyota, actually. So he... Sorry, Toyota. It becomes a Toyota. Good one. Good one. So the idea that... No, they're not peculiar. They changed because they had these encounters, these collisions. These galaxies colliding. Yes, and they're colliding all the time. Right. Okay. Now, I forgot why I was even going to mention this. Pounds make inflation. Where was I going to get non-inflation? Oh, yeah. Chip Arp. At the time...

At the time, this is now in the 80s, okay? These are your people now in the 80s. We called this. Wait a minute. No, no, you'll understand why in 10 seconds. Come on, Eileen. So we called it in our field.

Mergers and acquisitions. Oh my God. We did. Are you serious? Yes. I had no idea. Yes, gougy mergers and acquisitions. Oh my God, because that was so hot then. It was so hot right out of Wall Street. So we have inflation and mergers and acquisitions. And now look where we are. That's right. We're with Dr. Stank.

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The big bang within the bang, big bang at the tiny fraction of that moment when it happened. Yep. Is there still yet an explanation as to why that had happened? There are numerous competing hypotheses, but we don't have the experimental evidence to show the initial burst or the thing that caused it to happen. We're pretty sure it did happen. And we got close to that energy. The bigger is our particle accelerator, the earlier in time it can...

it can see, not see, but represent. Right.

in the temperature density in the particle accelerator, you can say in the first microsecond or the first nanosecond of the universe, what was the temperature? Oh my gosh, it was this high. Have we ever reached that temperature in the lab? No, not yet. The day we do, we get to say, we think we have sampled what the early universe would have looked like. Do new particles pop in? Is there a dark matter particle that shows up? We don't know. But do you both understand as brilliant scientists that lay people like myself are looking for something

in all seriousness, solid answers, right? Like I'm still trying to figure myself out. Hang on a second. Trying to figure myself out through counseling, therapy, whatever. The universe hasn't been able to figure itself out in 13.8 billion years. Can you guys get on the stick and give us an answer? I would like to, I would like to, but this is the, you've hit the key point in the difference between- Thank you. Yes. You've hit the key point between what I think is the difference between scientific truth and non-scientific truth.

With scientific truth, we always put in the, but maybe we're wrong part, that we don't know for absolute sure part. And that's really, really important, right? Science could not have progressed if somebody said, this is the right answer. And then everyone just, oh, okay, okay. People would have stopped exploring. It's incredibly important to recognize that we have ignorance. Neil has a terrific term for this, the perimeter of ignorance.

We have to understand that there's a space beyond which we don't know the answer yet. Or even what we think we know could be wrong because of this, this, this, this, and this. Which is why, Paul, you need to love the questions themselves in your search for answers. That is too profound. Dude. Too profound. No, that's Rainer Maria Rilke in a poem. Yes. Plus, I have to adjust what he just told you here.

Like a chiropractor. He's going to cut. Wrong word. I need a different word. He's going to straighten your mental back out. Your mental vertebrae. Yeah. So I put a lot of thought and energy into defining what true means. And I've settled in a way that I think

is highly defensible and should be adopted. Okay? Okay. So, a scientific truth is that which has been established by repeated observations and measurements. When that happens, it is not later shown to be false. So we can talk about it as an objective truth. Equals mc squared is not one day going to be found to be false.

that Earth goes around the Sun, that the Sun is hot, that the Sun undergoes thermonuclear fusion, is not going to one day be found to be false. Where Charles is referring to, we have to have some acceptance that we could be wrong,

Yes. About things that we are not definitively- Correct. On the frontier, we're wrong most of the time. But there are some- 90%, 90%. There are some things that we've reached- At least, at least. The community is comfortable saying, you're saying that there are some things equals MC squared, et cetera, where we're not questioning that anymore. The huge things, huge things.

Huge swaths. Otherwise you can't do the— Otherwise we're not flying airplanes. Otherwise you can't do the exploration into the things that you don't know. Airplanes wouldn't fly. Rockets don't go to Mars and land exactly where we tell them. You could continue to research that there's another rationale, but I think what you're saying is— No, no, no. Hold on. Let me finish. I'm almost done. Okay. It doesn't mean that we will not one day find a deeper truth in which the experimentally verified truths are embedded. Right.

Such was the case with Newton's laws of gravity and motion. Those laws in the realms in which they were tested are still valid. We went to the moon using Newton's laws and not Einstein, okay? There was no relativity in the Apollo voyages. It was all Newton's laws of gravity and motion. We then learned that at high speeds, high gravity,

Newton's laws break down. Holy shit. Do we discard Newton? What's going on? Well, there's gravitational waves. So Einstein finds a deeper understanding of gravity and motion, and he gets his theories of relativity, the special theory in general relativity.

Guess what? When you plug low speeds and low gravity into Einstein's equations, they become Newton's equations. People say, oh, we've Newton out, Einstein in. That misrepresents what's actually happening here. Well, it's chicken and egg. You can't have one without the other. Well, no. I mean, in terms of the pathways of discovery, you get the restricted case before you discover the general case. My only point is the uncertainty that a scientist brings to the frontier is

is in the realm of things that we have not yet experimentally verified. And it's completely uncertain at that level. And we're just duking it out at conferences and the like. And the press eavesdrops on the conferences and they say, oh, the scientists don't know what they're,

what they're talking about and then people say i don't trust science yeah yeah as they're on their smartphone talking to someone a thousand miles away i don't trust science you know so i just want to clarify that and two other truths there's your personal truth like is jesus your savior is muhammad your last prophet is is beyonce your queen rather than taylor swift right so that's a personal and you have political truths which are things that become true in your head

simply because they were repeated so often. Yes. Which are the foundations of- Or because you read it on Twitter. Yeah, no, it's how many times you read it. It's how many times. And so- But is that any different than- Because the foundations of propaganda. But is that any different than commercial advertising? No, exactly the same thing. You're going to show you this toy Toyota 50 times and by the end of the week, you're going to be like, I got to get a Toyota, that's a great car. And no matter what they're telling you, that becomes true. Right. So those are the three truths. Right. And I will never speak of an absolute truth because that's not what science does.

Newton's gravity was proven to be wrong is true. It was wrong because in certain conditions in the universe, it was not correct. But that's an eye-opening moment. But those are extreme conditions well beyond the experimental realm. But that expands our... Correct. It's a good thing. When a bad thing happened like that, it's a good thing because it expands our base of knowledge. And you don't call it

- It's not bad. We don't invest emotions in it. Some people do, but it's not good if you do. - Well, I talk like a six year old. - No, so do I. - Well, this is perfect because this next question is about gravitational waves. I'm telling you, this is eerie. Okay, this is Mitchell Ransom.

Mitch from the UK. I would love to know more about what we can learn from gravitational waves. It's cool we can detect them, but what can that do for our understanding of the universe? Marvelous question. Perfect segue. Marvelous question. You take this out back cleanup on it. Okay, go.

I will be the one Soto to Yulian Otani. And then I'll be the guy who shouldn't steal second and doesn't get thrown out and ruins the inning. Well, if Otani were stealing, he'd actually make it. Oh my God, yeah. Or if you're going to steal second, do it.

deep into the count of a batter you want to see come up again in the next inning. Yes, also the, that's true. Right, because they get fresh. Right. This is fundamental baseball, which doesn't get talked about nearly as much as it should. We should do a whole thing on baseball. Oh my God. Oh my gosh. I mean, I think the pitch clock

Well, it's helped speed the game up. I mean, stealing is so much more interesting and fun to watch because you go over there twice, you know you're going to get, you can't go back a third time. That's right. They're very interesting. Rules are always fun too, talking about rules. It's the most interesting sport to watch, I think, baseball because of all of the machinations. But anyway. Yeah, okay. Well, here's the deal. Gravitational waves are essentially...

to the universe and space and time as say ripples are in a pond, right? So if you see ripples going on in a pond or any body of water, you can deduce things about that pond. What is the water made out of? Is there duckweed on the top? How deep is it? Is there ice? You know, things like that. All the different things about that puddle. By the way, the depth.

affects the amplitude of the ripple. Completely, right. So it's why when you're at the beach, how come, you see a swell sort of out there, but then it gets closer to the shore, it becomes a big wave. So the energy that is out there in the ocean, which is shared vertically to the bottom of the thing, as you get shallower and shallower, that energy has to manifest somehow, and the height of the wave grows.

And so the energy is the same, but the height and how you experience it as a beach goer. But where does wind come into this? Because wind can create a ripple, right? Wind can also create a ripple. It doesn't have to just come from. That's right. The top has an effect. The bottom has an effect. And the side has an effect.

Where is it coming from? In other words, it's bouncing off the sides of the lake. The edges make a difference if you're in a bay or if you're just hitting a wide shoreline. Also, what is the material of the beach? Is it rocky? Is it sandy? So gravitational waves literally have the opportunity, if we're sensitive enough to detect them,

to tell us about space-time, the structure of the universe, the things that these ripples go through. - Gotta add real quick, Charles is talking about things you would know beyond just the simple detection.

That's right. It's one thing to know that there's a wave there. Now, what's the amplitude? What's the wavelength? How many of these are there? Are they coming from this direction? There's different layers, but the Nobel Prize went to basically the first time it was ever discovered. And then you can keep asking more detailed questions when your telescopes become better to do so. That's right. But this gets to Newton's law of universal gravitation, right? Absolutely. Which does not provide for the existence of gravitation in ways that asserts that gravity has infinite

instantaneous effect, which is wrong. That's right. Because I dropped a 1982 bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild and it fell in slow motion. Did you seriously do that? It landed on a pillow, I'm sure. And it fell in slow motion. Everything slowed down. So Newton's wrong, I'm right. So that's where Newton and Einstein, right? No, wait, just to be clear. Newton...

did not have a strong investment in any expectation that things happen instantaneously. His big concern was that it was action at a distance and there was nothing in between. That was just a little weird. He knew it worked, but he couldn't explain it in any way. But he was not deeply invested. Put an example of that for me. So there's something in the distance, but nothing in between. Let's say I turn off that light over there. It actually takes a fraction of a second for that light—

for that information to get to me, that the light is no longer shining. Right. Except for Muhammad Ali, who, you know what he said? He said, I'm so fast, I could turn out the lights and be in bed before it's dark. He also floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee. That guy was pretty amazing. Yeah. So that speed at which that light and that dark travels to my eye is so incredible.

that I as a human being could never detect it. But if I had a very sensitive camera that could really stop down time to billionths of a second or trillionths of a second at a time, you can actually see it getting darker as it moves forward. Oh, to your eye. Light moves one foot per nanosecond, per billionths of a second. So you just need billionths and you can catch. Yeah. From the side, if you look at it from the side.

You would literally see it. Right now, there's a straight white line of light and then you'd see it getting darker, darker, darker. Well, there's also background light, right? Remember, our light is primarily illuminating. If you have a laser and put chalk dust in there and you see it through and then you do this. That would work. That would be a great way to do that. Absolutely. But people don't know what chalk dust is. Go to a baseball game. There you go. Oh, yeah, yeah. So Newton really didn't get the sense

or understand that there was a time lag, right? Einstein- Which is what gravitational waves is all about, right? Right, right. Well, they move at a speed limit. Einstein showed that information in the universe, especially carried by light, right, and waves, has a speed limit. And then folks wondered- It's not just a good idea. It's the law. Sorry, I had to say that. It's a great commercial.

Dad joke. What is going on in your brain? It's a dad joke. I love the dad jokeness of that. No, it's great. It's really very good. So what happened is that Einstein showed that there was this reasonable sort of speed limit to the universe. Right. And the speed at which light travels in the vacuum

And then folks said, well, you know what? If that's the speed limit of light, maybe that's also the speed limit of these things, these other things, any information at all, you know? And so- Like gravity. Yeah. So maybe gravity only travels at the speed of light. And that's important to know. When we see gravitational waves, we infer the existence of little tiny particles called gravitons that travel through space in order to have this wave happen.

We still have never detected the existence of gravitons in the laboratory. We may never be able to unless we can get a particle accelerator the size of the solar system. But what we can do is to say, well, this proves that speed of light and speed of gravitational waves and so forth are so close to one another that there must be something there. So that in itself, I guess, is another example.

By gravitational waves existing, you start putting strict upper limits on the mass of the graviton. Just to be clear, before we knew anything about photons of light, light was described as waves. And then we learned that the wave particle

Duality. It can manifest as a particle, the photon, that you can detect, or as waves, which you can also detect as waves. By analogy to that, gravitational waves...

are granted a particle counterpart, the graviton. Which is a counterpart to the photon. Correct. And you need different mechanisms to detect it in that mode. When we say particles collide to create virtual particles, do they really fist bump each other down at the Planck scale, occupying the same voxel at the same time, or do they just get close enough and then, you know, magic happens? Great question. They get close enough.

As an undergraduate, I learned about a very technical, silly term called the impact parameter.

And that means that if you have two things coming toward each other, how close do they have to be before they impact each other, affect each other? They don't have to touch each other. They don't actually have to touch. So like if I did this to you, right? I'm not touching you. I'm not touching you. He's not touching me. Stop not touching me. I'm annoying you. Let's go a layer deeper. We did a whole episode of Cosmos on this.

Because of electromagnetic forces, which hold your body together, when I go up to Charles and I touch him, if you actually analyze what's going on at the molecular and atomic level, I'm not actually touching him. There are forces in a field surrounding the particles, and it's the forces that are bumping off each other. And this impact parameter exists within...

when there are fields that surround the objects that are coming near each other. - I can see my finger, my skin touching that surface. - So? - So you're telling me that what I'm seeing-- - At a very microscopic scale. - There's something between that plastic and my skin. - There is space between that plastic and your skin. But what happens is that the fields transfer

So your skin still feels as if it is physically touching something. But that's something coming from the bottle and the bottles coming from the skin. Right. So there is a tiny bit of space in between and there is stuff passing between it. Otherwise your finger would just pass through the plastic. So there's a space like my emotional relationship with my wife. There's a sliver. We don't want to get into. Shut up.

So I love this, I love this what Charles says because we don't hear that term much, but it's kind of, it's almost self-explanatory. It's the distance within which you can declare there was an interaction between the two objects. Is there a way to, there's a way to measure that? You can put it in the mathematical equations and say, okay, well, I have some force field in my finger. You have some force field in that plastic container.

When they come together, how close do they have to be before I feel the force of those container particles pushing on my finger particles? It's more precise than that. So you have two... I'm pulling this out of my 30-year memory. 30. You can ask. Okay. 30. So if two objects, two gravitational objects would come by and one just gets pulled a little bit... That's right. You can say...

All right, what does that mean? But you can define just for conversational and mathematical purposes, the impact parameter is the distance within which

its trajectory will be altered by more than 90 degrees. It's pretty cool. So that's why when we talk about, say, colliding galaxies, the stars in the galaxies actually never hit each other. They never touch. Almost never have direct collision. Passes through. But they go by each other. And as they go by, it's like a swarm of angry bees. In fact. And they affect each other. To the point where there can be an explosion. To the effect where, at times, you will have an explosion.

That's right. So if I'm touching this, is there a force that's strong enough or can be measured at which I can push

those magnetic fields apart and I'm actually touching it, is it ever possible to eliminate that field that's between the thing, my finger and the pen? It is almost never possible because there is a limit beyond which the math breaks down. You see, in the quantum field,

structure of the universe. By the way, I feel like I'm asking to use the car and he's saying maybe and my dad's saying... Go ahead. No! Sorry, back up for a minute. Keep it under 30 miles an hour. You'll be all right. Back up to story time real quick. Okay. Okay. I'll be reading from Merlin. Can I have some milk? Warm milk? Hot cocoa? Can I get some hot cocoa, Alex? Merlin's tour of the universe.

"Dear Merlin, is there a chance that another star will one day collide with the sun?" "Yes, but you should know that if there were just four snails randomly carousing across the continental United States-" Snails don't carouse. Do they not?

Stale's crude. What are they, alcoholics? Hey, stale, how's it going? Drug addicts. It is more likely for two of them to accidentally bump into each other than it is for another star and the sun to collide. Yeah, so then my artist brother drew

two snails colliding here. One of which has a bandana and a gun. That's really weird. It's a carousing, that's a carousing. There you go. It's mostly empty space. So two galaxies colliding. The stars just pass through, but they definitely affect each other gravitationally. So this star, this star is going by. There's enough energy there that it can cause each to explode? Not necessarily. They'll cause each other to change their trajectories. Yeah. But once every four seconds or so in the whole observable universe,

this is an estimate made a few years ago, there is actually a direct collision.

Okay. This is most likely to happen in dense clusters of stars. Very dense. Okay, like globular clusters. And near the center of the dense cluster. Right. In the center of the star where, say, for example, in the space, which is normally, say, a few light years between me and us and Alpha Centauri, for example, there could be a million stars in that space. When the overdensities are a million to one compared to, say, our solar neighborhood, you can actually have stars hitting one another.

and they could actually explode. But the chances of even a collision causing an explosion are tiny because stars are mostly made out of gas. So imagine like a star going through another star, you're basically just having gas clouds smashing into gas clouds and go through. You need the cores. But there are molecules within each gas cloud that could sort of collide. They could, but then they don't cause a collision because they're so small, right? They're so low energy. But if you can get the core of a star, hit the core of a star,

Then you can actually create a star happening. And you create collisions and explosions. - Let's make that happen. - Come on. At once every four seconds? - You guys are doing crazy stuff in the basement. - Somewhere in the huge universe. - Somewhere in the huge observatory universe. - That's higher than I would have guessed. - I know, you guys are doing crazy stuff in the basement of this place. Let's make that happen. Okay, I have more questions, but I don't wanna- - I'm not authorized to divulge anymore to you. - I don't have the clearance. - Are your ulcerative colitis symptoms proving difficult to manage?

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Paul, time for a couple more. Oh, absolutely. Very good question here. This is from Morten Lurkjaar. This is, I hope... Who? Don't make me say it a second time. It's greetings from Norway. Sorry, Morten. Okay. Morten Lurkjaar. Lurkjaar.

I hope you can help clarify something for me. If our sun is a third generation star, how is it that we can observe earlier generation stars when looking back in time, since we are made up of the stardust from those earlier stars, wouldn't their light have already passed? Perfect answer is the following. I am a third generation from my grandfather.

but I can still see my great-grandfather if he's still alive. Right. The idea is that the generation in which you are created may have happened while those earlier generations are still alive. Right. So our sun is about four and a half billion years old. But if a first generation star that created it was four billion years old,

And then the star that was before it was a few billion years old. But then there's a generation of stars that's 13 billion years old. We can still see them because they've still lived. They're alive still. But that first generation star is always going to be mom's favorite. The third generation son. Yeah, it's awesome.

You know, you leave the kid home alone, let him smoke cigarettes when he's 12. That third generation. You wipe the binky on the pants instead of sterilizing it. You don't care. By the third kid. You take the kid to the track instead of taking him to the zoo. You do. I'm sorry. I'm really putting a lot of my personal stuff coming out here. Wait, Charles, I think you missed the point there. I did. I think. Oh, no. I think. Sorry.

Sorry, Morgan. I knew that, but I didn't want to say it. I think. Okay. The generation of stars that gave their lives to create the elements out of which we are made are not there anymore. You're not going to see your grandfather if you were made out of the flesh of your grandfather or your great-grandfather. They're not going to be there.

They're dead because they gave their lives for you. What's going on here is, as we look out in space, we look back in time and see the universe not as it is but as it once was. So we can look far enough out into space to see the first generation stars do their thing. And beautiful. We can look 8 billion years ago.

Eight billion years ago, those are stars manufacturing the elements, and they're about to die to make room for the second generation. And that light is only now just reaching us. But those elements continue to exist like my great-great-grandfather's DNA exists in me. Yes, but he ain't around. He lives in you. Thank you. Okay, yeah. Is that Lion King? Yes. Oh, yeah, good. Very good. We're mixing two points. I know, but there's two different points. One point is look-back time.

and the other is the age of things. Okay. Okay, when you have a generation of stars form, you have some stars that die quickly, but then you have a bunch of stars that live longer.

So those that died quickly contributed their information or their materials to the next generation. The elements that they made. Meanwhile, that first generation still exists. And then that generation goes and then they form another generation. But those old stars from the first generation still exist. The stars that did not give their lives for us happen to live for a trillion years.

Minimum. Yeah, at least. So they're all still around in every galaxy, and that's not even about look back time. But some of them gave their lives for us. That's right. So the notion that we are second or third generation

Generally, that only matters because we have elements that earlier generations don't. Well, those elements, isn't it the third generation star of the sun is composed of heavier elements like iron and oxygen? Yes. So because they're heavier, they can exist longer? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. They pass on? Low mass stars live forever and high mass stars die. And first generation high mass stars died for us.

The first generation of stars, like the very, very first generation of stars, may have only formed short-lived stars.

This is something that has been speculated. We're not 100% certain yet. It's like the 0th generation star. I'm sorry, only formed short generation stars? Short-lived stars. Short-lived. Right. So it's possible that the original, the OG generation of stars is all gone. Okay. Okay. But certainly we can look back several generations and see that there are stars from previous generations that still existed. Going back to your sort of analogy of the great-grandfather, it's like, it's as if,

if you can see those stars from previous generations, it's like your great-grandfather's still alive and you could go see him somewhere. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, but he's not the one who gave you your elements.

If you can still see them, they're not giving you the elements if they're in your own galaxy. We have all generations of stars within our own galaxy. It has nothing to do with look back time. Yeah, but the elements in that star that I can see that's a previous generation to the sun. They'll have fewer heavy elements than we do. Okay, but doesn't it share some of the same elements that the sun shares generationally? It might, yeah. Yes, the sun has all of it plus the next generation's worth mixed into it. Okay. Yeah.

Great question. Great point. Yeah, yeah. Good one. Okay. Menaid Shandigai. Who? From North Wales. Who? What? Yeah. Who? What's his name? Menaid Shandigai from North Wales. Wow. Wow. Where'd you learn your Welsh? That's amazing. Or Michael is his name. Okay. Uh...

Given the relationship between speed and time and the relationship between speed and mass, is there also, therefore, a direct relationship between time and mass? In other words, if time were somehow to stop, would everything become infinitely massive? And would we be dragged by intense gravitational forces back into singularity? Man. Man. Well, I love that. That's a drop the mic moment, everybody. Come out and do it.

The mic's on a mic stand. They get some amazingly thoughtful people in Wales that are asking questions like this. Yes, that's incredible, right? That's incredible, man. So do you interpret that the way I do? He's saying we know from relativity that as you go faster, time slows down. Yes. And your mass increases. So instead of having it happen that way, let's figure out a way to slow down time. Yep. And would that then...

have associated with it an increase in everybody's mass? - That's right. - That's an interesting question. - I think that's a great question. I don't think that can happen. That's not how time works. Because what we're doing when we're measuring speed

is how fast you are going through space, right? It's the distance you travel through space divided by the amount of time it took you to get there. Is this question suggesting you could be dragged backwards in time somehow? The suggestion is that you slow time down, right? I think.

that instead of going at one second per second, it becomes 0.9, 0.8, 0.7, 0.6. To the point where everything becomes singular. Right, and I don't think that can work because the physics of time, which is still mysterious at certain fundamental levels, suggests that you can't really manipulate time that way, the way you manipulate space, or the way you manipulate your speed traveling through space. That's a good point. And my favorite thought about time is that we are prisoners of the present.

forever transitioning between our inaccessible past and our unknowable future. You just gave me a headache. I don't even know what you're talking about. You know, I know you'd like that, but I prefer master. You're going to mess with that? No, but I'm going to provide an alternative from that incredible, deep document. Kung Fu Panda. Kung Fu Panda. From Master Oogway. Okay. The past is history. The future is a mystery.

All we have today is a gift, and that is why it's called the present.

That was from Kung Fu Panda. Yes, it was. Okay. It ain't over till it's over. Yogi. That has a time aspect to it. If you think about it. Most profound of all. Don't look down your nose at that. That only works in baseball. No. If you think about it on a deeper level. If you're in the Super Bowl and one team is down by 21 points. How about it's getting late early? And it's three minutes late. Don't you love it's getting later? The game is over. Okay. It's not over. You still have to put the two minute warnings commercials in. Exactly.

Right. You got to sell some soap, buddy. But the full significance of that comment can only exist in baseball where there is no clock, except now there is with the pitcher. I think that's all the time we have. No. So, Charles, you finished a book recently. Yes. I loved it. The Quantum Something. The Handy Quantum Physics Answer Book. To have the word handy and quantum in the same title, that's badass. Right.

The goal is to help everyone understand. Which we need, like this is basic levels, basic explanations of complex things. You know, quantum feels scary. It feels unknown, but actually we interact with it every day. And so think of it as a handbook. Don't think of it as a textbook. Okay. Yeah. Good. Yeah. Nice reference guy. And Paul-

Where can we find you next? Permission to speak, my Broadway show directed by Frank Oz. Wow. The original Yoda and all of that and the great director. We're taking it on a national tour. We're going to be in Florida, in Orlando, Florida and in Fort Lauderdale at the Broadway Center for the Performing Arts.

Dr. Phillips Center in Orlando. I'm going to be in Rhode Island. These are all the good places. Yeah. This is a real theater. Your show. Very nice. We've got a set designed by the set designer for The Late Show and we have animation. Oh, because you also moonlight. I work at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Wow. Stephen Colbert. I'm through that show. You warm up the- Warm up and do, I'm going to be making another appearance. I'm going to be making another stand-up appearance on the show right after the first day or two. And so we got a really cool set. Oh, so you don't only warm up with the audience. Occasionally he'll bring you on for the broadcast. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've done a bunch of appearances on the show. That's fantastic. I do sketches.

But a few times, you came and said hi to me. Yeah, every time. Yeah, absolutely. And he's like, don't make eye contact with me. I'm like, okay. And we got really cool animation in the set. It was J.J. Settlemyer who did Beavis and Butthead and all the SNL TV funnels. We created this, it's a multimedia show with a set with this really cool animation

We're going to look for you. It's really cool. So, yeah, people can go to paulmccurio.com, get tickets, come out, support the show. It would be great. We got it. Permission to speak is the name of it. Permission to speak. This has been really great to be on with you. Hey, what fun. I've read some of your work, and it's really great. Thank you. He never shook my hand. He never shook my hand. Come on. I love you, buddy. I love you. All right, that's all the time we have. This has been a StarTalk Cosmic Queries Grab Bag.

That was definitely some bag grabbing right there. All right. Until next time, Neil deGrasse Tyson bidding you all to keep looking up. Celebrate Black History Month with the Rap and Hip Hop Pre Game Station presented by Target and celebrate Black creators with the Target Black History Month Collection. Because the more we come together, the more we create together. Launch Rap and Hip Hop Pre Game now. Brought to you by Target.

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