Things You Thought You Knew – Is Everything Light?

Introduction

0:00Feeling overwhelmed by caring for a loved one? Help is close at hand. AARP connects you to free resources and guidance that address your biggest challenges. Find the support you need now at aarp.org slash family care. You know, one of the nice things about Hertz right now is that they have a whole fleet of new cars. So whatever trip you're planning, it's easy to find a new car that fits your adventure. Heading out for a sunny drive, then a new convertible with very little roof is for you. Considering a fishing trip with your mini me, then you need a new minivan that's anything

0:33but mini. And if you're planning on some stargazing, a new SUV will give you plenty of space. Get paired with our newest fleet yet at Hertz.com. StarTalk Radio is presented by Pluto TV. It's a universal truth. Pluto is not a planet. Pluto TV, on the other hand, holds a universe of free entertainment we can stream from our own planet. Check out the ever-expanding list of supernatural favorites including Fringe, The X-Files, Battlestar Galactica, and a full fleet of Star Trek series you can stream

1:08for free. No payment, just pure discovery. See what's landing on Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never. Coming up on StarTalks, things you thought you knew. Three topics of immense interest to me, maybe even to you. We're going to talk about albedo, followed by light pollution, and ending with the electromagnetic spectrum. Be there.

Albedo Introduction

1:39StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

1:54Hi, Chuck. I got one for you. All righty. I'm ready. One of my favorite words. Okay. Albedo. All right. Now, what language is that? It's the language of science. Really? Albedo. Okay. First of all, it sounds like a scientist, not a scientist. Albedo. Hey, how you doing? I'm Albedo. Perhaps you're familiar with my equations. But albedo, albedo.

Albedo Definition

2:23Albedo. So albedo is a very precise measurement of how reflective something is. Really? At a given wavelength, but typically just at any wavelength. So for example, if you have an albedo of – an albedo can range from zero to one. Okay? So think of it as a percentage. So zero percent to 100 percent. So an albedo of 0.5, that means half the light that hits it gets reflected.

2:57Gotcha. So what happens to the other half? It's absorbed. Absorbed. Absorbed. Absorbed. Okay. An albedo of 100 percent is – A mirror. A mirror. Precisely. Cool. So nothing gets absorbed. Okay. And an albedo of zero means 100 percent of the light energy gets absorbed and nothing gets reflected back. Wow. Okay. Can that even exist? Yeah, it's called a black hole, but – No, but also stars have basically zero albedo, but no one thinks about it that way because they are generating light of their own.

3:39They're radiating light. They're radiating. Yeah, so it turns out that these glowing stars out there, they absorb all energy that hits it, and they manufacture their own energy to come back out. But it's – They're just greedy little somethings. I know. The absorbed energy is not as interesting to talk about when it is an energy-generating source unto itself. Right. So let's see how albedo affects us. So if you didn't have anthropologists saying, let us divide the world into races, okay?

4:15Right. If they really wanted to be sort of scientific about it, they could just have an albedo. You just get to have an albedo. Right. Because – Yeah. Because that's a full spectrum. Right. I mean, that's so much – that's so much more specific. There's more information. The arbitrary designations that we give people based on their skin color and their culture. Yeah, right. Because what we do is we say, everybody who has this range, put them in this one bin, and we'll describe them all that way. Exactly. And that way. But if you thought about albedo from the beginning, you'd realize that the human species fully populates the entire spectrum, the entire range of albedos.

4:54Right. Okay? They're very highly reflective white people. They're very highly absorptive black people. Right. And so – dark-skinned people. Like – so like Jiamun Hanzu. The actor. The actor. He'd be like a 0.1. Yeah, way down there. Way down. Very way down there. Right. Okay? Reflecting very little light that hits him. Right. And so this tells you a lot of things. Okay? Yeah. Yeah. So if you're very fair-skinned, you're reflecting most of the sunlight that hits you. Right. Even so, fair-skinned people are susceptible to sunburn.

5:29Right. Even though they're reflecting most of the light that hits them. The little bit that gets through is sufficient to do skin damage. Right. If darker-colored skin, you're absorbing most of the light that hits you. Right. So the role of melanin is extraordinary in that regard. Okay? So – but let's keep going.

Albedo Applications

5:51The – take a guess what the albedo of the moon is. Just take a guess. Okay. You see it at night? I see it at night. Well, I got to tell you, it's pretty bright, but it's nowhere near as bright as the sun. So I'm – Well, the sun gives off – sun irradiates it. Albedo is a reflectivity thing. Right, that's what I'm saying. So it's just – you know, it's not a mirror because it would be as bright as the sun. So I'm going to say – I'm going to say 5. 0.5. Yeah, 0.5. Okay. So, no, no. The albedo of the moon is around 0.1.

6:22Wow. The moon is almost as dark as the sidewall tires on a car. Wow. Yep. That's just how bright the sun is. Guess! Yes! That's how bright the sun is. Yes! That it takes 0.1 albedo and makes it look like – Look like – Ambient light. And you can read by the light of the moon at night. Yes! From Earth. That's right. How romantic. I love it. So 0.1. And so the moon is basically dark.

6:53Dark. Now, so when you measure the daytime temperature on the moon, that's kind of why it gets up to the hundreds of degrees. Right. Okay? Where's it getting this temperature? Because it's absorbing all that sunlight. Wow. If you're absorbing the energy, reflecting very little, the consequence is your temperature rises. That's cool. Okay. So now – I mean, that's hot. Okay.

7:17That was good. That was good.

Earthshine Explanation

7:18That was good. All right. So now let's look at the fashion industry. Summertime. Right. Okay. Are they rolling out their black shirts and black dresses and black blouses and black – no. Super light colors and white. The colors lighten. So that in the summertime, where you want to stay cool even when you're outdoors, here's this sunlight and you wear white clothes. It reflects the sunlight. Right. And if you wore dark clothes, not only are you hot because the air is hot, you'll get hot because you're actively absorbing sunlight.

7:53Right. And so that's – it's not just a fashion thing. It's a physics thing that if you want to stay cooler in the summer, then you wear lighter colored clothes. Unless – it's the Arctic summer.

8:09And it might warm – in the Antarctic, it might warm up to 28 degrees, you know, in the heat of the summer. Oh, that's a hot day in the summer, huh? A hot day in the summer. There you might want to wear extra black to absorb as much sunlight as you can. And so – Or you're just from New York. You just – you can be strategic about the color of the clothing that you wear. And then you put the fashion element on it. You can't wear white after – Labor Day. Labor Day or whatever. Right. But still, I am strategic when I put on clothes depending on the – whether the – forget the air temperature.

8:44Is the sun out? But do I want the sun's energy or do I not? And so I will factor all this in before I step out the front door of that day. Wow. Okay, so now – Go ahead. What do you think of the albedo the earth is? Okay, so I'm looking at the earth. It's mostly water. I'm going to say that it's 0.3. That's exactly 0.3. What? So – Well, it fluctuates. It depends. Chuck doing a happy dance. Okay.

9:15So the earth is harder to give a single value to it because if it happens to be cloudy on that side that's facing the sun, clouds are white and they're highly reflective. So in that case, the albedo is higher than average. If there are no clouds and the oceans are pointing towards the sun, oceans do reflect a lot of sunlight, but they're basically dark. And so the average comes out to about 0.3. Cool. Okay. So that means 70% of the sun's energy that's hitting the earth is absorbed.

9:52Right. Wow. And you know – wow, man. You just broke my heart when you said that because, you know, the fact is that we're trapping heat and then we got this heat coming in and 70% is already absorbed. And then we're trapping what is being reflected. We're trapping what's being reflected. We're stupid as hell. What is wrong with us? What is wrong with us? Chuck, I didn't mean for you to blow a gasket on that little bit of data there.

10:23It's like, why is it we doing that? Oh, exactly. So 70% gets absorbed and basically stays here unless it can re-radiate back. But that amount goes – gets to the earth's surface. That's the point. Wow. And gets absorbed. Look at that. And what happens later is how much greenhouse gases are there and this sort of thing. Yeah. All right. So – but wait, there's more. I love it. So earth is about four times as wide as the moon is.

10:54Moon is about 2,000 miles across. Earth is 8,000 miles in diameter. So it's four times away. If you do the math, earth on the sky seen from the moon is 16 times larger than the moon in the sky as seen from earth. That's – If you do the math. Okay. It must be so great to stand on the moon and earth watch. So watch. So watch. So full earth on the moon is not only 16 times larger, it is also three times more reflective than the moon.

11:29Ugh. Because it has an albedo of 0.3 instead of 0.1. So that means full earth seen from the moon is three times 16, so it's nearly 50 times brighter. Brighter. On the moon than full moon is on earth. Ugh. God, the moon has it so much better than we do. It's like you can sit there – I mean, to watch an earth rise on the moon is just like so much better than what we get.

12:02Yeah, yeah. So you're talking about people – lunar beings. Yeah, lunar beings. Have it real good. Moon men.

12:12Moon people. Yes. So, yes. And so they could easily read by the light of the earth if they needed to do so. Now, the earth is so bright that the crescent moon – Right. The crescent moon, if you do the geometry on this, if you see the crescent moon in the sky, you're looking towards where the sun is, and the entire side of the earth that's lit by the sun is facing that crescent moon. Okay. Okay? So, what that means is, if you're in the darkened area of the moon – not the crescent.

12:45So, there's the crescent and the rest of the moon. Stand where it's not crescent. The earth is this bright orb in the sky. Okay, so now watch. The sunlight goes from the sun to the earth, goes to you on the moon, and you're impressed that we're 50 times brighter. And it is so bright on that darkened area of the moon that it reflects back to earth. Oh. That's why you can see the outline of the rest of the moon from the crescent. Have you seen this? Yes! In the twilight sky? Yes! I was just about to say!

13:17That happens! You can't – the sun isn't illuminating that. There's no reason at all in this universe for that to be visible to you, except that it's double-reflecting earth light. Oh, that's amazing. That is really cool. I mean, that is just – that's amazing. And it's called Earthshine. Earth – oh! And I think it really should have been called Moonshine. Maybe that's me. That's just me. That's just me. Right. But it's the sun illuminating full Earth, illuminating the darkened moon, coming back to Earth. And that's why that's visible.

13:50That's – that's – yo, that's great. And it's all about the albedo. It's all about – mm. You know what? I'm going to make some moonshine and call it albedo.

14:04Albedo moonshine, baby. When you want to shine twice as bright. Count me in on that. I want to be an early investor on your moonshine albedo. And one last thing before we land this plane here.

Light Pollution

14:17For the longest while, people assumed that the moon was the source of its own light. Right. Okay. Then you have to come up with explanations for why it would go through phases, which was hard. But that was just assumed. And basically, that's traceable back to biblical Genesis. You know, God created the moon to light the night and the sun to light the day. And no one understood the geometry of what was going on. And it was just widely assumed that that meant the moon was making its own light. So, Earthshine was unexplained until Leonardo da Vinci.

14:49My man. And in his notebooks, which are all – he's left-handed and he writes backwards and he illustrates what he's talking about. And he's a brilliant artist. So, he figures out, because he saw where the sun is, where Earth is, what must be illuminated, what must not. He has a picture. I think it's in his Codex Leicester. Codex Leicester, which is these opuses of his writings. And in it, he draws a ray of sunlight coming to the Earth, going back to the moon, and then coming back to Earth.

15:20Wow. And so, he first figured it out, 15th century. God, he's a genius. We got it. He's a utterist to it. That's amazing. There it is. So, that's albedo. And you see why I like the word? It's fun to say. It's fun to think about. And it applies to so many things in this world. Including Earthshine, which is my new thing. I love it. All right, Chuck. That was great, man. That was albedo. Yes. I got an applause for that one. Thank you. I'm telling you, that was really cool, man. I'm going to name my next son albedo. I'm going to name her clairvoyant, right?

15:51No.

15:55Okay. All right. And if you have a daughter, you're going to name her clairvoyant, right?

16:03And people, then that's when child services comes to your house. Right. Exactly. That's what they say. Yeah, we're here to pick up albedo and clairvoyant, because you certainly are in no mental state to take care of these kids. Support for StarTalk Radio comes from TalkAboutPD.com.

16:37Let's talk about a condition many people haven't heard of. And it turns out it's more common than you'd think. Peyronie's disease, or PD for short. PD can happen when scar tissue builds up under the skin of the penis. This can cause a curve with a bump during an erection, and for some men, lead to pain during intimacy, and may impact mental health. It may also lead to anger and frustration, depression, lower self-esteem, and even withdrawal from sexual activity and physical intimacy. Because of this, some men could feel embarrassed or reluctant to talk about PD.

17:12The actual cause of PD isn't always known. In some cases, it may be linked to a minor injury or repeated injuries during sex or other physical activity. The good news is, PD is treatable. If you notice a curve with a bump, a trusted urology specialist can help diagnose it and walk you through your options, including non-surgical treatment. To learn more about Peyronie's disease, visit talkaboutpd.com. Ever notice that after 30, a couple of drinks can hit harder the next day?

17:45That's because it's not just dehydration. Your brain and liver are doing extra work overnight. Cheers Restore is designed to support your body while you sleep. Take it after your last drink or before bed and wake up feeling like yourself. With ingredients like DHM and cysteine, it helps support normal alcohol metabolism and liver function. They offer a feel 50% better or your money back guarantee. Cheers is backed by doctors, PhDs, and over 1,000 verified clinicians.

18:17And they've sold over 50 million doses. Take Cheers Restore after your last drink or before going to bed and wake up feeling at least 50% better or your money back. For a limited time, our listeners are getting 20% off their entire order by using code STARTALK at cheershealth.com. Just head to cheershealth.com and use code STARTALK for 20% off. After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them.

18:47So please support our show and tell them that Chuck sent you. And by that, I mean STARTALK. Feeling overwhelmed by caring for a loved one? Help is close at hand. AARP connects you to free resources and guidance that address your biggest challenges. Find the support you need now at aarp.org slash family care.

19:08Why do UFO sightings persist? Are at least some of them figments of our imagination? Or are we missing something? In my latest book, Take Me to Your Leader, I separate science from speculation. I actually explore what's possible in this universe, given the universal laws of physics. Because if the aliens are out there, the laws of physics will dictate how they find us. I also narrated the audiobook. So I'm duly informed that the audiobook and the print version are available now, wherever books are sold.

19:51So Chuck, how often do you think about pollution?

Pollution Discussion

19:55Quite a bit, honestly. I mean... Yeah, okay. I actually... You're a green guy. You're a green guy. I am a green guy. I think about it quite a bit. And the deleterious effect that it is having on our existence. Our ecosystem. So not all pollution is made of plastic. So very early on, the astronomers of the world have complained about light pollution. When you have the electrification of the cities, all of a sudden, the night sky was competing

20:28with lights that were shedding photons up into the atmosphere. And I grew up in a city, so I had no understanding of the night sky until my first visit to the Hayden Planetarium at age nine. Nice. And I know it was nice. And I looked up, and the lights dimmed, and the stars came out. I said this before. I'll say it again. I thought it was a hoax. Way too many stars. You're like, wait a minute. All that is up there? I don't know what this is. I'll go along with it for now.

21:00But stop trying to pull my leg. Next time I come back, show it how it really is. Fake news. Fake news. It was totally fake news. Right. And to this day, from mountaintops, when I've gone to high-level mountaintops with high-level telescopes, I look up at the night sky, and I say, it reminds me of the Hayden Planetarium. Wow. That's an urban frame of reference. Urban frame of reference, that was. So, plus, I'm old enough to remember what not only was there light pollution, as there

21:31still is, but back then there was also air pollution. And today we think of the polluting the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is transparent. So, that's not what I was thinking at the time. I was thinking auto exhaust and this sort of thing. So, not only did lights, but auto exhaust disrupt your ability to see all objects in the night sky, especially the dimmest objects. And we should do a whole explainer on noise of all kinds. So, remind me to do this.

22:02Yes. But let me just say, if you're in a perfect dark night and you can just barely see a very dim star, and then other light gets added to this, the first things to go are the dimmest stars. So, you start hacking away at the dimmest things available to you simply because other light is competing with it. And it no longer shows up on your retina or even in a camera. So, these are problems.

22:32And so, we've been living with this like our whole lives. In fact, there's something called the IDA, International Dark Sky Association. Okay. They sound like a group of supervillains. The IDA. That's all I'm saying.

22:50That's all I can tell you about them. Yes, exactly. We've called this meaning of the International Dark Sky Association to finalize our plans to permanently block out the sun. That is true. Dark skies for everyone, 24 hours a day. Like, that's so funny. I've never heard of that. And how much will it cost? It will cost a million dollars. One million. Sir, I just want to let you know that's not a lot of money these days. Okay.

23:21Five million dollars?

23:24What's the inflation rate? How much should we ask for? Should we ask for something more? Did he add? Was that whole conversation in the movie? I think so. I don't know how it went, to be honest, but it was something like that. Just like, oh, and how much now is it? What? So, that organization has gotten more and more powerful. Power not in a, let's override you, but there's a lot of interesting, sensible things to do. For example, let's say you're in an airplane and you're flying over a city and you look down

23:56and you see the suburbs and you see the streetlights illuminating the streets. Right. At night from your airplane. Right. Do you know why you can see the streetlight?

24:08Because it's bright? I don't know.

24:12Because somebody in that town is paying for electricity to go into this lamp to generate photons that are going up into the, through the window of my airplane. I got you. So, I got you. Like a lantern, the light's going everywhere. Everywhere. It's not directed. You don't need the light everywhere, do you? You only need it on the street. If I see your light, it means you are paying to illuminate my airplane flying overhead. That's amazing. If you can see any light at all directly from its source, somebody's paying to illuminate the sky.

24:47Right. So, the IDA simply makes the economic argument. Do you want to save money? Okay. So, you put a little hat on each lamp. Oh, that's adorable. Now, wait a minute. And make it reflective. So, hey, that light that used to be going upwards is now coming downwards, and I don't need that much light. I was wasting half of it. Right. So, now I can cut the wattage in half or by whatever fraction. Right. Use less light, and now I'm not illuminating the airplanes flying overhead.

25:19It's that simple. And that's why we don't do it. Because it's that simple. It's simple. Because it's… And anything that simple, we just can't do. Which can't wrap our head up. So, the town of Tucson, Arizona, which is proximal to Kid Peak Mountain, which has Kid Peak Observatory, which is one of the major observatories of the nation's astronomers, long ago came into an agreement with the municipal leaders to say, look, if your place keeps getting brighter, we can't do our science.

25:51We got to move our base because the home base is in town where all the scientists hang out before they go to the mountain. And so, but they like this distinction. Plus, Arizona is beautiful, and it's got deserts. And, you know, so why not preserve it all? And so, they got together, and there are ordinances, city ordinances that control how bright the lights can be, what kind of hat should be on them, when you should turn them off, all of this. And so, that was successful. That became a model for other towns to emulate. And so, that's the light pollution, and like they said, the air pollution is essentially gone relative to when I was growing up.

26:27When I was growing up, I'd come home from school, from elementary school, you could brush the ash off your shoulders from incinerated garbage that had gone into the sky and just send it back to Earth. That is just crazy. It was snowing garbage? Snowing ash, correct. Every day. That's amazing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, now, so that's that, but we have more pollution than that. Right. Wait, let me just say this about the light pollution that I just thought about right now because of what you just said. Mm-hmm.

26:58When they were building the big hotels in Atlantic City, of course, I'm from Philly, so Atlantic City, they were building these giant hotels.

27:08And the conservationists in the area, the scientists that, you know, care for animals and sea life and birds, they basically realized that you're killing all the birds because they never know that it's nighttime. Oh, yeah. And people were just like. Okay, so at least I didn't lose my, at least I didn't lose my life over this channel. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So the birds, just completely disrupting all of their. Just all, everything. Their bio rhythms.

27:39They had no more circadian rhythm and they were flying until the, and they were dying of exhaustion and all kinds of crazy stuff. It was, it was a weird little study that they did, but I don't know what they did about it because they haven't changed anything. But I think the consensus from the public was they're seagulls. Who gives a crap?

28:01Seagulls and pigeons, right? Seagulls and pigeons? Plenty more of them where they came from. You want us to care about that? I mean, first of all, we could see if they were chickens. They're delicious. But, you know, it was terrible. It was terrible. So Chuck, it's not only light pollution that worries astronomers.

Electromagnetic Spectrum

28:18When we think of light, you think of like visible light, right? But we don't only use visible light to communicate with the universe or to receive the universe. We also have radio waves, huge radio telescopes. Okay. Well, wait a minute. We have TV, you know, AM, FM, satellite, microwave. All those are in the radio parts of the spectrum. So not only is there light pollution with visible light that interferes your eyes from seeing dim objects, there's radio wave pollution that prevents our radio telescopes from seeing dim objects.

28:55Right. So other bands of the electromagnetic spectrum are also polluted. And so our best radio telescopes have to be put in places where there's like a radio-free zone around it. All right. Just so that we don't get noise, radio noise coming in, disrupting our observations of radio galaxies, the microwave background of the formation of the universe, and all of this. Well, there you go, people. Cool it on the hot pockets.

29:25Microwave. Yes. Take it easy on the hot pockets, people. And you know what else? The remote fobs for cars also creates a background noise of radio waves to a radio telescope that is extremely sensitive. Right. So leaving the realm of light in that sense, there's also a new kind of pollution called satellite pollution. Oh, my gosh. And so what happens here is the effect of this is the satellite is moving across your field of view and it's reflecting sunlight, so you get a streak.

29:59So other parts of your photo might be okay, but suppose that streak goes to the one object you're trying to look at. Right. So you need a way to sort of subtract it out from the process. We have people working on software to accomplish that right now. We don't know how this is all going to shake out in the coming years. So we're preloading our data reduction utilities just to try to subtract them out. Now, I'm told I just attended a workshop on satellite pollution where there was an agreement with Elon Musk for some of his satellites to use a sunshade.

30:33Okay. So even though they're up there, the sun will not reflect off of it down to us. And it did improve the seeing conditions. Gotcha. It did improve it. But I think whatever might be a long-term solution to this has not yet arrived. So that's what we're in the middle of now. That is kind of crazy. And the current most powerful telescope on Earth is called the Vera Rubin Telescope, and it is designed to take movies of the night sky every single night.

31:05That is pretty dope. Okay, because think about it. Up until now, we've been taking just snapshot, okay? Exactly. So if the thing did something different an hour later after you're on the way back to the computer. Ah, tough tucks. You missed it. Tough tucks. You missed it. Right. Missed out. Okay? So it's taking a movie. So it's called – there's an entire branch of my field that concerns itself with things that change over time. Right. Because most images you're seeing is just a static picture of something, right?

31:36Right. So the people who care about stuff that changes in the universe, this will be a delight for them. But now that we're taking movies, we basically have movies of all these satellites crossing our field of view. And we have to distinguish between that and what might be a killer asteroid moving across the field of view because this has an asteroid alert system built in. Wow. Wow. So without – I mean, this sounds more important than it might appear because this ain't just looking at a telescope and going, what is that?

32:08Oh, that's some old Elon Musk junk. Don't worry about it. And then it ends up being a killer asteroid. Yeah. What is that? Oh, that's a killer asteroid that we almost mistook for an Elon Musk satellite. Right. Right. Yeah. So, yeah, that's what we're confronting with right now. The buckets of pollution that influence the modern astrophysicist knows no bounds. Wow. And none of it has anything to do with plastic or carbon dioxide. What do you think of that? Well, what we should have is an astrophysicist standing next to a rocket with a single tear rolling down their face.

32:40Oh, stop! Stop! Stop!

32:46Ah! That'll be a public service announcement. All right. Right. Well, I'll volunteer. I'll be the tearing astrophysicist for that. That'd be great. Space pollution. Only you can stop space pollution. Only you can stop space pollution. save now at whole foods market it's the summer splash event with great everyday prices on 365

33:24brand ground beef for the grill and ice cream for dessert they have yellow sales signs on ready to cook beef or chicken kebabs to level up with savory marinades spices and rubs and complete your cookout with a crowd-pleasing cherry pie and their balsamic chicken salad available at the prepared foods counter get summer splash savings now at whole foods market eczema is unpredictable but you can flare less with epglyss a once-monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema after an initial

33:56four-month or longer dosing phase about four in ten people taking epglyss achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks and most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing epglyss lebrikizumab lbkz a 250 milligram per two milliliter injection is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies epglyss can be used with or without topical corticosteroids don't use if

34:28you're allergic to epglyss allergic reactions can occur that can be severe eye problems can occur tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems you should not receive a live vaccine when treated with epglyss before starting epglyss tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection ask your doctor about epglyss and visit epglyss.lily.com or call 1-800-lily-rx or 1-800-545-5979 ryan reynolds here from it mobile i don't know if you knew this but anyone can get the same premium wireless for 15 a month plan that i've been enjoying it's not just for celebrities so do like i did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to mint mobile today i'm

35:02told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch up front payment of 45 for three-month plan equivalent to 15 per month required intro rate first three months only then full price plan options available taxes and fees extra default terms at mintmobile.com this is ken the nerd neck zibera from michigan and i support star talk on patreon this is star talk radio with neil degrasse tyson

Personal Story

35:27tell you a story from a childhood okay so yeah yeah so i as a kid or even as an adult who doesn't love potato chips right okay so i have potato chips and then you know you go to a fast food restaurant and then i ordered french fries okay that's kind of cool and then you know for turkey dinner there's mashed potatoes right and then in the in the breakfast brunch you know diner you can get hash browns yes

36:04okay i think i was 11 maybe 10 before i figured out that all of those were the same food right well potato it's nothing to think about when you're 11 or 12 it's just food it's just food and it's delicious and only one of them two of them have the word potato in it that's uh mashed potatoes and potato chips but they are completely different from each other oh without a doubt and french fries that no one says potato and hash browns they don't say potato so and my kids grew up on freedom fries

36:39so they don't even know what french fries freedom fries okay so so it was it was a revelatory moment for me to realize that one food could be made so different and so interestingly different to have its its own place within our culinary offerings each one of those could do that right oh another one i like were the potato sticks remember those oh god yes man do you remember the potato sticks that um uh oh well yeah they're the same thing never mind so they had they were like

37:12french fries they had the big potato sticks and then they had the tiny little matchsticks potato the matchstick those were the best because there's like a lot of salt and that okay so the point is okay i am starving i'll be back i'll be right back so they were all different yet they were the same right right and so too was my revelation of middle school early middle school it was probably probably sixth grade now where because i was an early geek but realizing that okay you've heard of these things called microwaves

37:45you've heard of radio waves you've heard of uh infrared ultraviolet you've seen rainbows visible light you've heard of x-rays you've heard of gamma rays it's all the same thing right it is it is just different ways of preparing your light okay to use my potato analogy and it is basically 11 years old and you're making this discovery for yourself after i realized about the potatoes yes okay because i was 37

38:18so so i said my gosh it's all light it all travels at the speed of light and this word light where you're talking about what the human retina can see that's very limiting for if you want to talk about the universe because so what's the our favorite light colors red orange yellow green blue violet white detail okay continue there you go the other side of violet you get ultraviolet you go beyond

38:49violet that's how it got its name it's beyond violet and we abbreviate it uv but i like fleshy ultraviolet give me give me all the syllables that it's got okay and this is the sounds far more harmful in fact it is because this in this direction we are reducing the wavelength of light that's coming to us and when you reduce the wavelength of light more energy is packed into one pulse of that light and so the energy goes up okay okay so the higher the frequency it's how many

39:24crests go by per second the higher is the energy of that light so the red orange yellow green blue violet is all sort of pretty harmless you get into ultraviolet light it has enough energy to break apart biological molecules and this will give you skin sunburn and skin cancer right okay so i heard a dj talk about when he just learned that the temperature on venus was 900 degrees he said well you better bring sunblock a million for that so he's wrong he's thinking that you you're protecting from the heat

39:59that you can block that right no right you're not blocking heat right the point of the sunblock is to block just the uv just the uv okay right so so you still you still getting dark and crispy no matter what you want to yeah you'll get toasted you're toasted no matter what no matter what so then you go beyond the ultraviolet and that's when you get the x-rays right x-rays is a part it is continuous with the ultraviolet right you we put a line there just because our convenience of words

40:31and machines built on it but but ultraviolet smoothly transitions to x-rays interesting okay and and you know x-rays are bad for you because when you go in the x-ray room what does the x-ray tech do um they go to a bomb shelter they leave the room they say are you okay are you comfortable yeah okay boom door closes exactly and they look through a lead lead glass and then they okay so

41:03uh so x-rays can actually penetrate your skin unlike ultraviolet and in doing so uh it can actually harm your organs all right and so you get organ failure from it and organ cancers are triggered by this now it's once again it's a continuum of a change of wavelength of light and then you get to beyond x-rays you get to gamma rays right and by the way gamma rays just keep getting higher and higher energetic but we don't have more words for it all right it's just the last word we've got but you

41:35could have divided that up even more we just don't okay and so gamma rays get omega rays or something like that yeah i wonder what superhero would be made from omega rays well gamma rays are um in the early days before we fully understood what the sources of energy were there were alpha particles beta particles and gamma particles alpha beta gamma and the alpha particle is a helium nucleus the beta particle is an electron and the gamma ray is a photon but they all had energies that we could measure so

42:11we're measuring the energies not knowing what the thing was that caused it at the time but that all splits out so we have um like i said ultraviolet x-rays gamma rays there you have it all right go the other direction wavelengths are getting longer the energy is dropping so you go below the red you get infrared below the red all right by the way you can't see infrared you can't see ultraviolet if you buy i want an ultraviolet bulb we used to call them black light bulb i want an ultraviolet bulb

42:42and you turn it on and you see it you say i can see the ultraviolet no you're not you're seeing the violet right okay there's a little bit of violet spilling out the actual ultraviolet you don't see at all same with the infrared lamps you buy an infrared lamp if that was pure infrared you turn it on you wouldn't see a damn thing okay right you're not a predator that's exactly so a little bit spills into the red part so you see the red emitted by the infrared lamp all right we can detect infrared not by our eyes but by our skin you you detect infrared as warmth right all right it's a detector

43:21think of it that way all right a warmth detector so there's the infrared and then you go beyond infrared below infrared the what used to just all be called radio waves and then they said well there's a section of the radio waves that have special utility for us for communicating it's just the shortest of the radio waves and they call them micro waves sweet short radio waves micro waves so that that gets that got a labeled right there between infrared and radio waves and beyond

43:53microwaves we have radio waves but and now we're getting physically realizably sized wavelengths of light so microwave is about a centimeter long we can actually show that between a millimeter up through a few centimeters and then we get into the meter zone yards and things those are radio waves and once again like like gamma rays these just continue forever and we don't have more words for them right which is why we have so many different broadcasts or as those just frequencies but the frequency is the wave you can call they call them wavelengths right but it's our habit to call them

44:28frequencies right right so each frequency when you're tuning right on in the old days you'd have an am or an fm radio when you're turning the dial you are changing the frequency of your detector to receive a signal sent through that zone wow there you have it that is that's great and in the old days when you turn old timers you turn the knob to change the channel on the tv you're actually changing the frequency detector inside the television and there's that secondary knob that you could tune in a little

45:00sharper i don't know if you knew that okay that that got you honed in on that one frequency was it channel seven channel eight we just numbered them we didn't give you the frequency because that's why when you can just number them which is what we did in the day so anyway all of these move at the speed of light it is all light most of it is invisible to you in fact if you put this on a scale on on a on a on a if you drew all of these things and you ask well how much of this whole

45:31electromagnetic spectrum can we see right and we see this tiny slice this tiny slice among all these broad zones in the electromagnetic spectrum we are practically blind oh and we didn't even know that until william herschel discovered infrared light right look at that that is and i think i said in another explainer how he discovered i'll do it real quick now you ready yeah i love this i love

Infrared Discovery

46:03this yeah i do remember and okay herschel herschel's a big fan of newton newton has a spectrum he shows sunlight is composed of colors and you put a sort of slit in the curtains so the beam of light comes through your prism so that it's dark elsewhere except where the prism light goes and herschel said i wonder what the temperatures are of each of these different colors to even think to ask that yeah all right so he's got a thermometer and he puts it in the blue and then he puts and by the way it's an

46:34experiment so you need a control thermometer so you put the control thermometer someone where somewhere where the colors are not all right on the same table but just put it outside the colors which is what he did and he checked the temperature of the blue and the violet and the green and the orange and the red and he wrote down all these temperatures and what he noticed is that the temperature sitting outside of the visible spectrum read the highest temperature of them all right and now why didn't he just say oh it must be hot in this room i didn't realize how hot it was in here maybe there's

47:10something wrong with me i can't i can't feel heat anymore so so there it was and because he didn't put the thermometer somewhere else he put it right next to the right next to it right next to it because the same environment is there and he said oh my gosh there must be a form of light quote unfit for vision that's a i love the terminology unfit for vision light that is unfit for vision and had that thermometer been on the other side of the violet it's not clear that ultraviolet would have warmed

47:42the thermometer in this way but he happened to have it on the side where the red was and he discovered infrared infrared light with that experiment and so so so when i when i look at my microwave oven and i look at a radio transmitter i look at my cell phone and i look at my lamp on my table it is one happy family of electromagnetic spectrum coming to us that's that's so cool that it's dope and it's called electromagnetic because it it's a wave that simultaneously moves between being an electrical

48:15wave and a magnetic wave and it's self-propagating through space so it's a wave that can move through the vacuum of space without having needed a medium through which that will to vibrate to send it through like sound does right so look at all those movies star wars they'd all be silent movie because no explosions are in space but light has no problem moving through space even though it's a wave because it's a very different kind of wave it's it's a self-propagating electrical and magnetic wave that's why we call it the electromagnetic spectrum there you have it chuck that's great and it all

48:48started with my potatoes just saying and what wavelength are they on a delicious way the delicious we keep them warm with infrared it all comes full circle that's so true eczema is unpredictable but you can flare less with epglyss a once monthly treatment for moderate to

49:22severe eczema after an initial four month or longer dosing phase about four in ten people taking epglyss achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks and most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing epglyss lebrikizumab lbkz a 250 milligram per two milliliter injection is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies epglyss can be used with or without topical corticosteroids

49:55don't use if you're allergic to epglyss allergic reactions can occur that can be severe eye problems can occur tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems you should not receive a live vaccine when treated with epglyss before starting epglyss tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection ask your doctor about epglyss and visit epglyss.lily.com or call 1-800-lily-rx or 1-800-545-5979 you