Why Do We Exist with Hakeem Oluseyi

Welcome to StarTalk cosmology

0:00Chuck, I don't think we can find a container to hold a full Akeem Olishayu. No, I don't even think a magnetic field would do it. It's coming up. Boundless energy coming your way. Delivered from the universe.

0:15Welcome 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. Chuck Nice right next to me. What's up, Neil? All right, man. How are you, buddy? Doing good? Doing good? Doing great. We've got a Cosmic Queries today. Yes, we do. Inquiring minds want to know. Indeed. And in fact, it's on cosmology as a topic.

0:48It is the expertise of our guest. Third time on StarTalk? Yeah. I think so. That's right. Okay, Hakeem Ulusheye. Thank you so much. And it is the fourth time. Fourth time. Oh, that's right. Because this, yeah, no, wait, fourth time? Memoir, Cosmic Queries, both remote, and then finally. Oh, you know, remote. That's right. The remote, but yeah, it kind of messed me up. Well, we've got an astrophysicist cosmologist, which is a subdivision of all astrophysicists

1:20who thinks about the origin, evolution, and fate of the universe. Ooh. Ooh. Right. Plus, he's been practicing my open for this show. Mm. And I don't know if I should be happy about it or kick his ass later. Let me hear. Go. Let's see. Hey, this is StarTalk. You know, that's pretty good. Not bad. That's, you know. Gotta tell you. You know. Yeah. Right now, with three black guys up here, I don't know who's who. Wait a minute, wait a minute. I want to get back to this kick your ass comment.

1:52That's hilarious. Yeah. So, you're a host of the podcast, Particles of Thought. I love that title. And it's a NOVA podcast. It's a NOVA podcast. PBS NOVA, GBH out of Boston. Very good. Very nice. And CEO. How many people get to say they're CEO? Because you're CEO, you're the man. That's right. CEO of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Very nice. And I'm going to ask you about that in a minute. And you've also associated with NASA's IMAP satellite.

2:23Yes. Remind me what IMAP stands for. Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe. Nice. Who's accelerating? The sun's magnetic fields, both at the surface of the sun, and interactions with the sun, solar wind, and particles trapped in the heliosphere. Uh-huh. Right? And those generate neutral atoms that come back into the solar system and get measured by IMAP. Wow. Wow. Yeah. Okay. All right. And may I ask, why? And if you're worried about the sun, that doesn't sound very cosmological.

2:58It doesn't. So how do you stitch that together? Because I started out doing instrumentation and calculations, computational, and understanding plasmas really well. Very nice. So it's kind of like I have this toolbox that I can travel from field to field with, right? So I've done propulsion. Because plasma is everywhere in the freaking universe. Yes, it is. Absolutely. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. And tell people we're not talking about blood plasma. No. What kind of plasma? I forgot about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a whole other kind of, there's a different plasma. So this is when you take a gas, heat it even more, you break more bonds, right? And you break the solid to liquid bond, liquid to gas.

3:29Now, once you're a gas, you're just molecules or atoms, you start breaking those apart. So once you break apart electrons from atoms, you now have a plasma. Yeah. It's an electron soup, basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so this gas will respond to magnetic fields. Right. You can do really cool things with it. Right. Including feed a fusion reactor. Exactly. For the future of energy. Very nice. If that's where anybody's going to go. Yeah. And that'd be the only way you would be able to hold the energy is in a magnetic field bottle, right?

3:59Not necessarily. No, really? You can also put it in a little pellet and close it in a metal and blast it, generating X-rays that create fusion. Oh, but that's not a, I'm sorry. I was thinking fusion. That's not a plasma. You're starting with a little seed, right? But yeah, so if you're going to confine a plasma, you're going to do that with magnetic fields. Okay. Yeah, magnetic bottles. You were right. You were on the cast. Okay, okay. Totally on the cast. Yeah, you totally shook my confidence there.

The nine realms of reality

4:22Last you were here, you've been busy and you wrote a book. I did. A book with the audacious title, the bodacious title, the out-of-this-world title, why do we exist? Wow. The nine realms of universe that make you possible. This sounds very Asgardian. So wait, the realms. That's right, the realms. Yeah. Wait, wait, so you say they make you exist.

4:52Does that mean, because you're speaking to the reader, does that mean you have a different point of origin? Because otherwise that word really should be a we. Just saying. Just saying. I think it is a we.

5:03Why do we exist? Absolutely. The nine realms of the universe that make you possible. That's right. That's right. That's kind of like, you know, when you're talking to your spouse and you say, let me tell you something. Your son. Okay. Gotcha. Okay.

5:18Okay. When you're about to tear a new one right there, that's what that, okay. That sums it up, because I've said those words many times.

5:27Sometimes you might hear, you mean our son? Yeah. So what is a realm? So in this case, what I do is I listen to what the universe told me, and I report on it. Essentially, what I realize as a physicist is that when you study the universe, we typically do it in just a disjointed way, right? But there is a cohesive story, but what the average person doesn't understand is how the rules that our intuition gives us just doesn't scale.

5:57And the universe, as it scales, the rules change fundamentally. So you have to really start looking at the universe completely differently. So here, we're in the middle realm. I call the middle realm bigger than an atom or molecule, smaller than a galactic arm, right? It's middle earth. Yeah, exactly. What about second breakfast? Are you going to the shower? What happened?

6:22So anyway, the cosmological realm, right? So now the dynamics of space-time dominate. In the middle realm, and what dominates is based on the flow of energy through that realm. So what you see, the trend is, is energy is constantly leaving matter, going from, and it's really a story of quantum fields, going from the matter, the fermionic quantum fields, into the electromagnetic quantum fields. Okay. So every day, there is more photons than there were the day before. There's less energy in matter, right? Ultimately, leading to this heat death, right? The long time in the future.

6:53Now, we go, if you study the cosmological realm, you realize something ain't right. That leads you to the dark realm. So these are energy realms, in a sense. Well, no, they're realms of emergence as well, right? So when you go to, for example, the temporal realm, the story of how time unfolds. But listen, in other realms, there are still unfoldings. In the middle realm, I discuss how stars and planets come into existence. In the realm of life, we talk about abiogenesis and how that leads ultimately, you know, through this energy ladder from chemosynthesis to, you know, anoxic photosynthesis to oxygenic

7:28photosynthesis to oxygenic respiration, right? This energy ladder that leads to a brain like yours. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, exactly. And then you have the realms beyond horizons, beyond our cosmic event horizons, within the black hole event horizons. Okay. Yeah. That's unknowable. Yeah. Yeah. Then you have the multiverse. So now, when you look at the cosmic microwave background radiation's super horizon signature, that seems to indicate that inflation occurred. So is that just the edge of the observable universe?

7:59What's the super horizon? I don't know that. Yeah. So if you look at the TT spectrum of the cosmic microwave background radiation, which you get from looking at the sizes of these, the blobs, the whole blobs, right? Right, right. Yeah. You'll see to the, beyond the biggest lump, there's a dip, right? And that's known as the super horizon fluctuation. Okay. So when you look at the inflationary epic of the universe, right, you have a situation now where our boundary, the cosmic event horizon is moving outwards, right? Right. But at early times during inflation, right, it could have been moving inwards.

8:30And so areas that were separated that were within your, you know, outside your horizon now would have been inside your horizon. So you can get these bigger fluctuation, you know, I screwed up when I, when I described the Andromeda paradox here slightly, even though the world now knows it and I'm screwing this up too, all right, but the super horizon fluctuation signal is in the data at a high precision. Okay. And that suggests, you know, that signal is predicted by the inflationary model. Okay. So when you look at the inflationary model, what you find is that if you say, how did this

9:04happen? You come upon this idea of the inflaton field, right? And so if there is this field that's popped out our universes, our universe wasn't the first time and it would not be the last time. And in fact, it should be happening all the time, right? If, and just to be clear, inflaton is a hypothetical particle. It's like a graviton. That has a field that is responsible for the inflationary epochs. Exactly. So all these universes are popping out all the time. So that means that we do live in a multiverse, not the, you know, my cosmic event horizon doesn't

9:37overlap with your event, right? So it's different from the bubble version of the multiverse, but it is the bubble. It is the bubble, but there's two ways people think of the bubble version. Yes. One way is you're so far away that you're not within my cosmic event horizon. Right. You're not within my observable universe, right? That's one type of bubble universe, but you're still in the same universe. Right. Right. The other bubble you're talking about is that inflaton field inflates so rapidly, even if you pop off one universe side by side next to another with a nanosecond later, the

10:09distance between them is so great, they'll never overlap, right? Just because of the rapid expansion of the inflaton field. So you're isolated forever. So the distinction is there's a space time that has expanding bubbles within it versus multiple space times with each its own independently expanding bubble. Right. Exactly. That's wild. That's wild. That's wild. It's a loaf of bread with the pockets of air and the bubble, air bubbles in it. You know, the loaf of bread has its own life and each bubble has its own history. What we buy in the store, you mean like a baguette with all the little bubbles inside.

10:43That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I got you. Well, what do you want people to take away from your book? Well, first thing is, the title is a provocation. It is not a book that provides the answer. And so what I'm doing is- So it's an authentic question. It's an authentic question. It's a question, and I want you to put your mind to it. And what that book does is it sets you up. I'm not buying a book where I got to put my mind. I'm buying your expertise. Well, listen, you're right. That's like I go to a Broadway play and they want me to sing with them. Here's the book. I don't want to participate. I pay good money for you to act your ass off, and I don't want to do a damn thing while

11:15I'm sitting here except listen to you. Wait a minute. Why do we exist? You open it up. It's just blank pages. Have at it.

11:22It comes with a little pen. It comes with a pen. Tell me your thoughts. So you're telling me you want me to work and bring my own interpretive powers while I'm reading your book? After you finish my book. While you're reading it, this is going to be so mind-blowing at every moment that you're just going to be like, wow, damn. Oh, I never knew that. Oh, my God. But then at the end, you now have a full picture. You now have a full cognitive map of reality across scale, across emergence, across time, and across realms.

11:53And so now you are in a place where you can now, because I feel like Einstein felt, right? Imagination. We've not, since dark energy, what have we discovered new about the universe that's fundamental, right? Everything we've found is, oh, yeah, we're right about our predictions for the most part. So, you know, I think we need to tap the hive mind. Just to put a temporal thing on this. So dark energy got the Nobel Prize in 1998, was it? It was discovered in 1998. I think he got the prize in like 2010.

12:23Exactly. Okay. So what you're referring to is a 28-year gap in a discovery of something truly fundamental. Exactly. We can make a discovery of a new kind of galaxy, a new formation, a new this, a new that. Okay. Right. Okay. Right. Right. The next one is probably life, right? But outside of our universe. Oh, and in there, I do give the Oluseyi equation. I never called it that before today. The Oluseyi equation. Well, my equation predicts the number of stellar systems that should host a planet with multicellular

12:55life, which I think is where it's at, right? Looking for civilizations, I think that's- Was it different from the Drake equation, but truncated? Essentially, it is. But the difference is, is that the way it's constructed is different. But that already has a name, the Drake equation. No, it doesn't. Because Drake wrote his how many years ago? So there were things we know that he did not know, right? It was in the 60s, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So he's like, what fraction of stars have plans? Now we know, yeah, all of them. Oh, yeah. And so mine is very simple, right? It's just like the just-right stars, just-right planets, and then whether or not life actually arrives, right?

13:25Fair enough, fair enough. But I get a number. I get a number. Interesting. I just want to make it clear, using a truncated version of the Drake equation- It ain't a truncated version. It's a very differently motivated equation. Okay. Very differently motivated. And when you read it, you'll be like, damn. I see. So you're saying the information that was unavailable to him, you took and used that as the basis for your equation? Not exactly. Okay. Here's what I did. I started my equation. He started his. His equation is written in many ways in terms of outcomes. Life is formed.

13:56A civilization forms. Technology is formed. Mine is around the drivers for life, right? So if you look at the just-right stars, what defines a just-right star? It has to have- Gotcha. Right. Exactly. Gotcha. Now what defines a just-right planet? That's valid. What you're saying is very valid. Okay. So it's the only Shea equation inspired by the Drake equation. And the Seeger equation, I'll have to add, right? Because Sarah Seeger from MIT also came out with an equation that has to do with this. I'm not familiar with Sarah Seeger. I know, but what's a Seeger?

14:27The big planet person. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. All right. And now astrobiology. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. Very cool. Well, that's excellent. Yeah, man. So they're going to come away with a cognitive map of reality that will allow them to- Okay, so I think I spoke wrong about it. What you're saying is, well, read the book and then come away reflecting on it. Absolutely. Gotcha. Yeah. Read the reviews. That's what, you know, it's like, wow, this is something different to think about. And then when you're a physicist, here's the thing, you're going to like, so you're

14:58different from the average person because you've heard it all. And you're probably at a point now where you've probably heard it all. So you have a new perspective. See, that's what I love about you. Man, when I first met you, you didn't meet me. But when I first met you, I was like, man, like the thing you did that went super viral where you're talking about the stars, where somebody asked you- Yeah, they asked me what's the most mind-blowing fact about the universe. Yeah, as an astronomy dude- That's still going viral. I had heard that. I had heard this. You know, we all hear that young, right? Yeah. But I never heard it like that. I never heard- nobody made me feel it, right?

15:30You know what I'm saying? And so I think this particular provocation is going to hit in a different way for physicists like that. Got it. Because you've seen it all, and now somebody comes at it from this other angle, and you're just like, oh. I see what you're saying. Yeah. So you're taking information that we already thought about in bits, you put it together in a new way. And there's new material. Yeah. Okay. And there's a lot of new original thinking. So that bit you're thinking, it was called The Most Astonishing Fact. I was asked by Time Magazine, sitting in this chair. Really? It had a long interview. He said, what's the most astonishing fact?

16:01And then I had to think about it for a moment. Yeah. And then I delivered an answer, which then other people plucked, and then put B-roll visuals behind it. And that's what really took off. Yep. Not just me sitting here delivering the answer. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's what. Okay. So that's a noble goal. It is. It is. It is. Yeah. Okay.

16:35Space fact. If you took all the mass of all the asteroids in the solar system and balled it up into one object, it would have barely 3% the mass of our moon.

16:51If you like that fact, you can find 4,999 more in Lost in Space. 5,000 facts to help navigate the universe. Latest collaboration between StarTalk and National Geographic Books.

17:14Lost in Space is now available for pre-order wherever books are sold.

17:29So there's an acronym associated with you called SWAG. SWAG. SWAG. Of course there is. SWAG as an acronym. Yeah. What is, how do you get that? How do you get those letters? That's a scientific wild ass guess. Wild ass guess. I like it. What a scientist. That's black for hypothesis. No.

17:49Informed. Hypothesis. Informed. Hypothesis.

17:57That's very funny. So tell me. Give me an example. What's that? Well, everything I've been telling you. I tell you right in the book. The whole book is my SWAG. Right? I got you. This is a scientific wild ass guess, but it's highly informed. Right? I've been thinking about this. Okay. But normally, like you write a paper, get it published, peer reviewed. That's right. And then a book comes after that. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is not that kind of work. This is not for them. So, you know, I've been in a world of the pros forever. Yes. And, you know, this is for everybody else. Okay. Yeah. But for the pros too.

18:28So, you know, this is not a, it's not a quantitative study. Only one tiny part of the book has a couple of equations in it. Okay. So there's no data. So it's an exploration of ideas. It's deeper than that, man. You know. It's an exploration of deep ideas. Deep ideas. Right? But it's also a, man, it is just so dope. So, but if we unpack this idea, it's anyone could come up with a wild ass guess. That's right. But not all of them would be scientifically tracked. Exactly.

18:58So help me understand that distinction. Well, the distinction is if I were going to submit a paper, I would have a hypothesis. Okay. And typically you're going to study some very narrow question. Right? This is very broad. And what I'm doing is something that a professional in my position doesn't really normally do. So when a physicist interviewed me, he said, Hakeem, what I don't understand about you, bro, is how are you so courageous? How are you so brave? You just throw out your ideas and you don't care what people think.

19:31And that's what I've done in this case. I've, you know, we talk about crazy ideas privately. Right? But, hey, I'm putting it out there for the world. Once I snitched on myself in my memoir, I might as well tell you my crazy thoughts about the universe, too. But they're well-grounded. Okay. So these are well-formed, scientifically-based imaginings. Isn't everything an imagining? In many respects, yes. But, no, it's not that. It is—I'm a serious empiricist.

20:03So I have to stay within the boundary of what we have observed to be true. I have to stay within the boundary— Well, that's what I said, scientifically-informed. That's the scientifically-informed part. That's the scientifically-informed part. So if you're imagining what can be within the boundaries of scientific soundness, that's what I'm talking about. Exactly. For example, one of the things that you often hear people say is, we have to become an interstellar species because we must leave Earth. Right? One day the sun's going to go red giant. Well, that's true. But look at it like this. Here's another one of my scientific wild-ass guesses.

20:35If you have the ability to be an interstellar species, you don't need to leave your solar system. Okay. Right? You can just go right out there to Titan, build your own suns, i.e. fusion reactors, and keep on harvesting energy. You don't need the sun anymore. Better yet, move Earth. That sounds more monumental. Then packing up a billion people and shipping them to a moon of Jupiter and pitching tent and rebuilding civilization, I think it would be way easier to move Earth.

21:05In fact, they do that. Wait, who's that a billion people? There's a film series made in China called Wandering Earth, which is exactly that. I'm looking that up. That sounds good. Wandering Earth. You've got to look at the second episode, which is where they actually— The first one is—I don't know what it is, but the second one, they put rockets strategically placed on Earth, and Earth goes—what it does, it doesn't go to a bigger orbit. It goes to another star system.

21:36Ah. Earth becomes the spaceship. Interesting. Yeah. Very interesting, and I'd like to see how they did that. Okay. All right. Well, we've got to get to some questions. Let's get to some questions. We can do this for the rest of the day. Our Patreon members. So cool. Yeah. All right. And, of course, as always, thank you to the Patreon members for your financial support that allows you to submit these questions, which also allows us to do many other things with StarTalk.

Emergence and fundamental physics

22:02Let's go to Patrick. Hi, Hakeem. Dr. Tyson. Patrick, just another science nerd from Southeast Texas here again. And why do we exist? You traced the chain of events that made our existence possible. Do you think that chain points towards increasingly deeper layers of emergent organization, or do you believe physics will eventually reach a truly fundamental level beyond which there is no deeper explanation? Ooh. I like that. Look at that. So, when you go turtles all the way down, is there a point where it's just, hey, man,

22:36we don't even know? You know, it seems like that question went in both directions at the same time. It kind of did. It sounds like it's like where it's going and what it is at this deepest, most fundamental level. Because in the book, I describe the deepest, most fundamental level. It seems to me the evidence points to the same thing that allegedly Albert Einstein said or believed at one point, which is that the only thing that exists are these fundamental quantum fields and energy, right? And so, again, I also say, and this is one of the things I say in the book, where I differ and diverge from the community.

23:07Like, a lot of people think that space and time are emergent. And if energy and fields are required to be fundamental, which in this inflaton model of the universe, they are, a field requires a geometry and energy requires time because it makes change, which requires a before and an after, right? So, if you have those two fundamental quantities, you also have space and time existing as fundamental within our universe. Okay. Does that answer the question?

23:38If you go all the way to the bottom, that's what you got, space, time, energy, and fields. So, you don't think there's anything remaining to be discovered or gleaned? Yes. Beneath that level. Yes. What? Context. Okay. Above that level. In the other direction. Here's what I mean by that. Suppose you, here's one of the mind experiments. Now, before you go into the experiment, Hakeem. Yeah. I have to ask you this because sometimes I get this impression. You're, you're, yes, yes, I am. Do you smoke weed?

24:08On, like, every, like.

24:16Now, you read my memoir, Chuck. I did. You read my memoir. I did, I did. You mean today? No, no. I'm joking, man. Come on. Are you asking me that I just vape at LaGuardia? Is that what you're asking me? That's hilarious. No, go ahead. Back to what you were saying. Coincidentally. Go ahead. Let's get back to the fundamentals. Seriously. Let's get back to context. So, space and time would be fundamental. Space and time is fundamental. And not emergent. Not emergent. Because if quantum fields, which require a geometry, choose your dimensionality, you must have a geometry. Yeah, but that makes sense.

24:47The quantum field thing, that totally makes sense for fundamentals. Yeah. And if you have energy, you have to have time. Even quantum mechanics shows you the fundamental nature, marriage of energy and time. So, you separate. Go ahead. Therefore, what was the question?

25:04Back to that weed.

25:08Fundamental.

25:10So, energy makes time fundamental. Context. So, here's the thing. I get it. So, you're separating them off. If you accept that energy is fundamental, you must therefore accept that time is fundamental. Time is fundamental. Because of change. All right. Because energy is a changed state. Now, let's move that to what's beneath that and above it, which is context. How? And what's that mean? Well, here's. Suppose you were to study. When we talk, we teach observational astronomy to students. You know, people don't walk in having a cosmological perspective.

25:43So, we try to give them my way of analogy of perspective. So, one of the things I used to say is, is that just like the cell is the fundamental building block of the body, the galaxy is the fundamental building block of the universe. Then, one day I said, well, what if I take that seriously? What if I shrink myself down so small that the size of a cell to me is the same ratio, 20 orders of magnitude, as a ratio of me to the size of my galaxy? And then, I studied my universe from that perspective. What would I do?

26:14I would do what Hubble did. He looked around and said, oh, there are these things called galaxies. They come in different types. Spiral, elliptical, dwarf, right? I'd look around. There's different cells. Blood, muscle, bone, right? Then I'd say, hey, you know, they have internal structure, a bulge, arms, right? I'd be like, oh, they got, you know, what the hell is in a cell? A Golgi body, a nucleus, a riboflavin. No, that's not it. Ribosome. Ribosome.

26:38Riboslavin. Mitochondria. There you go. Ribosome is a mineral vitamin on the cereal box.

26:47Hilarious. But then you can zoom out, and you see we discovered the large-scale structure, right? There's the cosmic web, and you would do the same thing. But after doing all that, would you have any idea if you're in a whale, if you're in a horse, if you're in a tree? I mean, if you're seeing muscle bones, you're definitely not in a tree. But the point is, you can't get the context of our existence from the inside of the damn animal. Oh, wow. Okay. Damn. You know. Can the unborn child know what its mother looks like? Ooh. Well, if you ask any Christian, yes.

27:23I'd have been in a lot of churches. I don't know where that comes from. I don't know where that comes from. I mean, I don't know what it is. No, no, no. I'm joking. But, okay. That is really— That's what you mean by context. That's the context. We don't know. We understand the context. And it's definitely not a bauble on a cat's necklace. Hakim, I've got to give it to you, man. That's profound. You mean the galaxy on the belt of Orion. Right. Oh, is that the cat's name, Orion? Right. Yes. Oh. That's a really good example. That's a great example. And the belt was the necklace.

27:54Right. The little pendant on the collar. Correct. Right. That was the belt of Orion. Wow. So cool, man.

Relativistic effects on a pulsar

28:01All right. Here we go. Let's go to some guy. Two, three, three, four. That's his name? Well, that's what he put. Okay. Yeah. Hey, Neil, Lord Nice, and Dr. Oleshee. Lord? Yeah, he's Lord. Oh, you didn't know? Yeah. You didn't know that? No. Yeah. He says, I'm Graham from Marina del Rey, California. A long-time listener and a first-time caller. I recently learned about a millisecond pulsar whose equator moves at nearly a quarter the speed of light. Imagine two indestructible astronauts, one standing at or near the pole and one on the equator.

28:34What would each see when they look towards each other? Rotational speeds would be much faster at the equator, so how would relativity show up for these, probably quite dizzy, observers? A fun analogy, if Earth were somehow rotated that fast, could familiar landmarks appear in places that seem impossible because of relativistic effects? That's the second question. Thanks so much, and you make astrophysics fun and accessible. The first question is blowing my mind right now.

29:07It reminds me. Pole and equator, but a pulsar, relativistically, what would they see? This reminds me of that old joke, what's the last thing to go through an insect's mind when it hits your windshield? What? It's ass. Ha, ha, ha, ha. That's not bad.

29:27Yeah, yeah. Place you on a neutron star, bro, and you're going to be a puddle. She gave us a very good qualifier. Which was? Two indestructible astronauts. Yes. Okay. So they are able to maintain their perspective and their physical integrity while one is at the pole, and one is at the equator of the pulsar. All right. So one is definitely spinning faster because it's at the equator. If you're rapidly spinning, does rapidly spinning create?

30:00Well, here's the question. So this is a calculation one, right? Because relativistic effects show up at extremes of speed and gravitational energy. So on a neutron star, you have both, a rapidly rotating neutron star. So then the question becomes, what are they looking at? Are they looking at the distant universe? Are they looking at each other? They're looking at each other. They're looking at each other. So that means that this body is typically like, we're talking like 10 miles or something across.

30:33So you're not going to look at each other unless you're super tall.

30:37Okay. They're beyond each other's horizon. Okay. They're beyond each other's horizon. And if you're super tall, you're not, well, you're indestructible, but it doesn't pay to be super tall. Because that's the thing, right? If you're on a super earth, the body, the greater the gravity, the lower you need to be to survive. Right. Yeah. Okay. So, but I guess the question they're getting at is, you know, is one of those, like, how much is space-time curved? And what would be the effect of, your light is traveling to me, you're no longer there, and then the next bit of light is coming, and the next bit of light is coming, and the next bit of light is coming, right?

31:13And their paths are kind of something weird, right? So you're going to be distorted and smeared, is my guess. There you go. Because the light rays are not coming as one color image. They're being smeared out. Yeah, and then you get a whole blurb. There you go. That's it. But they're coming from a weird angle, too, right? Yeah. So basically, it's going to be a mess. A mess is what you're going to see. You're going to see a little mess. Yeah. And by the way, you have to do that on the pulsar because anything else, its gravity isn't strong enough to hold it together as one object while spinning that fast. Exactly.

31:44Which spin itself apart. Right. Yeah. Right. So pulsars can do that. Yeah, well, that was a great question there, man. That was really cool. From who again? Some guy. Some guy. Two, three, three, four. That's it. Didn't even give a name. Hey, some guy. Hey, some guy.

31:58This is Charles Coel, who says, Aloha from Honolulu. Hi, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice, and Dr. Olesje. Could Schroender's cat and the Cheshire cat have a kitten? Although the lightest primordial black holes have been ruled out as dark matter or dark gravity, as Dr. Tyson prefers, because they evaporate too quickly. Could they still leave something behind like a Cheshire cat's smile? When Hawking radiation separates the very last virtual particle pair at the event horizon and the black hole winks out of existence, could the breaking of the final entanglement leave a topological scar?

32:39Not mass, not energy, just a knot in space-time that was never there before. I think these people are smoking more weed than either one of us. This is insane. Is that last sentence about, give me that last sentence again? He said, not mass, not energy, just a knot in space-time that was never there before. This sounds a lot like the so-called topological defects from the early universe, but the scenario in which they're generated is, so basically what they're saying is, is do a GR calculation, right?

33:18Model the evaporation of the black hole, and then from that, can you derive the metric that's left over, right? The space-time configuration that's left over. Okay. And if it has fully evaporated, by definition, a space-time metric only exists in the presence of a mass energy density or pressure, right? So it sounds like the answer will be a no, but at the same time, you know, this is going to be a little bit controversial maybe.

33:53But there's a lot of stuff we predict, and then we see it. We're so good at that, right? But not everything that pops out of the equations comes to fruition, right? You know, sometimes people play with equations in such a way and they find something interesting, and it turns out— We did a little explainer on that, I thought. Yes, we did. Oh, excellent. Yeah, we had equations that have solutions. Solutions, yeah. That don't have any correspondence to— Exactly. To observational reality. That means nothing to the person who might need it at for— Right. Right. So, with that being said, you know, we've not actually observed black hole evaporation.

34:25Right. Right. And, you know, makes sense. Everything, you know, all the GR stuff is being found exactly as predicted to high precision. So I have no reason to say GR is crap. But for a physical phenomenon that has never been observed and to then to speculate what would happen, right? That's a lot of the conversation in physics these days. And I think that, you know, black holes get more attention than they deserve in that type of discussion, right? I think there's a practical universe discussion on black holes.

34:59Casting shade on black holes. He really is. No, no, no, no. I'm like, I didn't think they could get any blacker. But damn, you did it. Well, they no longer swim. That helps. Right. So, okay. So we want to speculate on the speculation and the speculation. You know, there's too many layered speculations for me. I got you. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, yeah. Okay. Well, thanks a lot for that one, Charles.

Cosmic origins and biology

35:25This is Marion who said, hello, Dr. Oleshay, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice. Marion from Pennsylvania. My question is, since Dr. Oleshay was first on StarTalk, I believe five years ago. Wow. She's keeping track. What's the most interesting discovery about the universe you have learned since then? Also, what do you think of the recent proposal that the ancient little red dots are now globules where massive stars are born?

35:56Thanks. It's all good. Yeah, it's all good. So, the first part of that intrigues me. So, how do you take that? So, since then, I've studied a lot of biology and a lot of geology. Here is, you know, I wish I could channel you, man. And when we started out talking about that, like, about the stars making stardust, I want to describe in such the same way the origin of the vertebrate. And because I went around telling everybody, because one day I had a realization, I was like, wait a minute.

36:29Because I have a medical condition that brought me to this realization. There's a tube that goes from my mouth to my exit. Okay. I'm a worm with just some appendages, right? Some locomotion, some defense, right? I'm like, we're all worms, right? I was going around telling all my friends and family this life, hey, we're all worms. Ha, ha, ha, ha, right? And then one day I thought, you know what? What is the real origin of vertebrates? Do you know the origin of vertebrates? No. Because fish.

36:59No. No, no, pre-fish. The origin. The pre-b... So it's chordates, right? It's the notochord. Before there's a bone wrapped around it, it's just a chord. So where did it come from? We're a freaking filter feeder, bro. So these little filter feeders, like corals and these little lemones, when they're in their larval stage, they go around, they taste little spots to figure out where they want to sit down. And so they look like a little sperm cell. They're a little globular tadpole with a little tail, right? So to power that tail, they had a little nerve going down it to power those muscles.

37:31And then eventually they decided, you know what? I'm going to skip my adult phase. And eventually it becomes the first notochord. And then the coronates. And then you get a... From that backbone. And then there is the new DNA data on race, which is now all over YouTube, right? So we all had the story, oh, ultraviolet light. That's what makes skin color this or that. And the old story was, right, that the evolution of light skin depigmentation happened from 40,000 years to 20,000 years ago. No, it started 8,000 years ago due to agriculture, right?

38:05Agriculture created depigmentation. And 5,000 years ago, Europe was only 50% depigmented. That's 3,000 years ago. So we're talking like 1,000 BCE, man. At this point, the freaking pyramids are already 1,500 years old. So when you look at these ancient, you know, Europeans 40,000 years ago, you find the oldest math in Germany, in Europe, 40,000 years ago. And you think, oh, it's the ancient Germans. Bro, they're not... They're brown.

38:36Yeah. You know, there's going to be a lot of Germans who are upset with you right now. I was just hanging out with Germans and... They've changed. They've changed. So I've been told. Oh, good.

39:01I'm Lani Lum, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

39:13All right. So that's the... So biology is your big fascination now. So the second question... And geology. And geology. Okay. Because another thing about geology that is little appreciated is the fact that our freaking outer core is liquid, bro. Liquid metal. Right? So from like 19% radius out to like 55%, the Earth's interior is liquid metal. Yes. Liquid metal. That's the core. We're on a freaking... What is that cake? You cut it in the lava cake. Oh, it's a lava cake. Yeah. Earth is a lava cake. Yeah, that's cool. We're like a nut in the middle.

39:44Right. Bro. Yeah, well, that's cool. People think the ground beneath our feet is solid. No. Well, and guess what? The great thing about that is if it wasn't, we wouldn't be here. Exactly. Because that is what gives us the magnetic field that protects us all. Which IMAP is. Yeah. Very cool. All right. So here's the second thing she said. Also, what do you think about the recent proposal that the ancient little red dots are now globules where massive stars were born? Okay. My understanding is based on the latest paper, they see that the sources of the light from those globules is reprocessed light from an accretion disk.

40:20So it looks like it's a baby supermassive black hole with an accretion disk in there. And so there's, what is it called? You see scattered light and you see, what is the word? Phosphorescent? What the hell is it called? It's polarized. It's polarized. So it's absorbed and reemitted by the gas. So you essentially have. Oh, okay. Yeah, I didn't understand. Fluorescence. Yeah, fluorescence. Okay, I didn't understand you at first, but damn. So supermassive black hole accretion disk. Accretion disk is emitting higher than radiation. That'd be emission nebulae.

40:51Where the atoms are charged up and then they. Exactly. Decharge and they reemite. Reemite. Exactly. Because of emission nebula. Okay, that's cool. Plus scatter light. Light coming directly from the disk. They just got. Yeah. Gotcha. All right. Just to remind people, what are these red things? So it looks like it is a baby supermassive black hole being born in the very, very, very early universe. Super early universe. Right. Yeah. In the dark ages. In the dark ages. So the question that we've been having is which came first, the supermassive black hole or the galaxy? That's been an eternal question. Internal question.

41:22It's looking like it's the hole. Wow. Dude. So that's super cool, man. The hole precedes the dirt. Right. That's so cool. The reason why it's not entirely obvious is a supermassive black hole might have a billion times the mass of the sun. Yeah. But the galaxy would have a hundred billion times the mass of the sun. So the black hole is less than 1%. 1%. Yes. So how are you going to get everybody to join this? So it was not a completely obvious pathway.

41:53Okay. Yeah. To know who came first. Right. In this. Yeah. That's fascinating. Yeah. That is really cool, man. I did not know that. Chuck, we have time for one last question.

Spinning a bowling ball

42:02One last question. Here we go. Tristan Phillips says, hello, Neil. Chuck Hakeem. I hope you're all doing swell. Coming from Jensen Beach, Florida here, I have what may be the most important unanswered question in astrophysics. Let's say I somehow acquire a completely indestructible 16-pound Brunswick bowling ball. It's immune to heat, pressure, radiation, basically everything. I gently place it on the equator of the fastest spinning pulsar we know of. Let it rotate with the star. And then through the power of plot armor, I magically turn off the pulsar's gravity just

42:35long enough for the bowling ball to escape. Okay. Did I just throw the fastest strike in the history of the universe? And how fast is that bowling ball actually leaving? If that's not ridiculous enough, let's say I somehow recover the bowling ball, take it over to a supermassive black hole and launch it into one of its relativistic plasma jets. Once it's far enough away that it escapes the black hole's gravity and won't end up orbiting anything, how fast is it moving now? Two different scenarios, but I like the first one better.

43:08You basically use a pulsar as a catapult with an indestructible bowling ball sitting at the equator. It's spinning, spinning, spinning. When it gets to a terminal velocity, you stop it, boom, it goes off. How fast is it going? Well, at first, it's going the speed of the spin, right? Okay. But it has to climb out of that gravitational well of that neutron star. Oh, there you go. But she said she turns off the gravity. Oh, because it's, okay. So she turns off the gravity.

43:38Oh, turns off the gravity. Yeah. This is a powerful being we're dealing with.

43:44Oh, my God. Oh, I love it. I think she, did she say turn off the gravity? Yeah, she said turn off the pulsar. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So she turns off the pulsar. So you know what's really interesting is that I saw someone who actually modeled this. Because, you know, the idea that we always have, you have something spinning and you let it go. It takes off on this tangent line. Yeah. And they found that actually it doesn't. At the very beginning, there's some little glitch thing that happens. I don't remember the details. And then it goes on a straight line. And, but conservation of momentum, that sucker's going to. It's just going to go. Yeah. So typically a fast spinning pulsar, the equator's moving at some appreciable fraction of the

44:19speed of light. The speed of light, right. Like half the speed of light maybe, or quarter the speed of light. I have no idea. Yeah. So the ball goes off at that speed. At that speed. Right. And that's all you got. That's pretty, that's all you got. Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a pretty ornate way to just say what happens if the ball goes at half the speed of light. Right, right. But you know what it reminds me of? That new launch company that spins the. Oh, yeah. It's a. The centrifuge rocket thing? Yeah. It's a. What do they call it? Yeah. I mean, in fact, I saw some old sci-fi movies where they had a mechanism like this.

44:50Before they figured out multi-stage rockets. Deep in the 50s before we. Oh, that makes sense. We had that going. Right. Yeah. It was a spinner. That makes sense, yeah. And then they deconnect, they detached it. And then shoot it through a tube and it goes. Yeah. And then it goes out. That would be kind of cool, though. They're doing it. Yeah. It's fun to think about. Yeah. You know? I mean, I like it. Yeah. All right. Joaquin, man, you are like, I'm tired.

45:16I mean, damn. It's so cool having you here, man. But. No, it is. No, man. That was full stop. It's so cool having you here. That's it. Thank you, man. It's good to be a person, man. You're brilliant. People know it, too. It sounds like half of him is in this book. Why do we exist? Like, you open it up, he pops out. Right. The nine realms of the universe that make you possible. Yeah. And one of them has to be Asgard, because that is a realm of the universe.

45:46I think you missed an opportunity. Yeah. I got one thing I got to say. I'm not a Marvel fan. Oh, but I am. But I am. But I am. Okay, good. But I have one thing I have to say about the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Please. And that is we have just launched a YouTube channel called Astrobeat, where I do explainer videos. It's about time. It is. Because the mission is to spread the love of the universe. Absolutely. Far and wide. That's right. And even though it's called Of the Pacific, that's just incidental that it's on the West Coast outside of San Francisco.

46:20So, our new DBA, doing business as, is the Astro Society. So, that's been our website forever, astrosociety.org. Right. So, the YouTube channel is the Astro Society. So, in the future, all ASP things that don't have to do with the publications and the awards are going to be labeled as the Astro Society. And I'm a huge supporter of their work, because it makes my job easier. And he is appreciated.

46:45That's awesome. All right, dude. Thanks for coming through town. Thank you for having me. I'm honored. Thanks again. And how do we find you? Are you anywhere on the internet? I am not.

46:56But, you can find me at theastrosociety.org. You can find us. We have all our socials. I'm on the socials of the Astro Society these days. Okay. And occasionally, you come through town and help out the History Channel. Absolutely. I help out the History Channel. I help out Nova. Part of the thought. We work together. Yeah, yeah. All right. That was great. That's all the time we have. This has been StarTalk, another Cosmic Queries. The Hakeem Olishayi edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, four-star talk. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.

47:28All right. We got it there. The Hakeem Olishayi edition. The Hakeem Olishayi edition. The Hakeem Olishayi edition. The Hakeem Olishayi edition. The Hakeem Olishayi edition. The Hakeem Olishayi edition. The Hakeem Olishayi edition. The Hakeem Olishayi edition. The Hakeem Olishayi edition. The Hakeem Olishayi edition. The Hakeem Olishayi edition. The Hakeem Olishayi edition. The Hakeem Olishayi edition. The Hakeem Olishayi edition. The Hakeem Olishayi edition. The Hakeem Olishayi edition. The Hakeem Olishayi edition.