Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi

Summary

StarTalk Radio Episode Summary: "Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi"

Release Date: March 4, 2025

Hosts:

• Neil deGrasse Tyson – Astrophysicist and Director of the Hayden Planetarium.
• Paul Mercurio – Comedian and co-host.
• Guest: Hakeem Oluseyi – Astrophysicist, Cosmologist, and CEO of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

---

1. Introduction and Guest Welcome (02:08 - 04:22)

Neil deGrasse Tyson kicks off the episode by welcoming his co-host, Paul Mercurio, and introducing the esteemed guest, Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi. The discussion begins with light-hearted banter about Hakeem's comedic endeavors and his recent one-man show, "Permission to Speak," directed by Frank Oz.

Notable Quotes:

• Paul Mercurio (02:12): "He knows his stuff, man. He's in charge of a lot of acronyms."
• Neil deGrasse Tyson (04:16): "So you got a podcast. Does It Fly? By Roddenberry Entertainment."

2. Astronomical Society of the Pacific and Hakeem's Role (05:03 - 09:00)

Hakeem delves into his role as CEO of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP), highlighting its mission to promote public awareness and understanding of astronomy. He emphasizes the organization's inclusive approach, welcoming both professional and amateur astronomers, educators, and enthusiasts alike.

Notable Quotes:

• Hakeem Oluseyi (05:38): "When I went to the Bay Area in '91 for graduate school, I discovered the ASP. It was an egalitarian perspective from the start."
• Paul Mercurio (08:07): "Why the term Pacific?"

3. Hubble Tension: Measurement Discrepancies (17:13 - 22:07)

The conversation shifts to the "Hubble tension," a pressing issue in cosmology where measurements of the universe's expansion rate (Hubble constant) from the early universe (cosmic microwave background) and the local universe (supernovae) do not align. Hakeem discusses potential reasons for this discrepancy, contemplating whether it's a flaw in current models, measurement errors, or indicative of new physics.

Notable Quotes:

• James H. English (17:35): "The universe is expanding too fast for our theories and models to fit."
• Hakeem Oluseyi (19:24): "People have been throwing out the Big Bang or dark energy as explanations, but it's more likely there's something we haven't discovered yet."
• Neil deGrasse Tyson (20:55): "Measurements look good. I was involved in supernova cosmology…"

4. Detection of Atmospheric Particles on Exoplanets (27:04 - 30:06)

Responding to a listener's question, Hakeem explains the technique of using transit spectroscopy to detect various particles in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets. By analyzing the light that passes through a planet's atmosphere during a transit, scientists can identify specific elements and molecules based on absorption patterns.

Notable Quotes:

• Adam Omelon (28:35): "How exactly does the light alteration happen when it travels towards us?"
• Hakeem Oluseyi (28:55): "As a planet transits its star, the light interacts with its atmosphere, absorbing specific wavelengths that reveal its composition."
• Neil deGrasse Tyson (30:03): "James Webb Space Telescope has succeeded in doing that job. It's opened up the whole industry."

5. Dark Matter: Theories and Challenges (30:10 - 35:18)

Hakeem and Neil engage in a deep dive into the enigmatic nature of dark matter. They discuss various hypotheses, including MACHOs (Massive Compact Halo Objects) and WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), and the ongoing challenges in detecting dark matter directly. Hakeem reflects on his early research experiences and the iterative nature of scientific discovery.

Notable Quotes:

• Jordan Vesina (30:16): "Is it possible that dark matter defies our understanding of the laws of physics?"
• Hakeem Oluseyi (31:28): "We have models – hot dark matter, cold dark matter – and neither fully accounts for what we observe."
• Neil deGrasse Tyson (33:11): "MACHOs would be massive compact halo objects."

6. Gravitational Waves and Their Effects on Time (36:15 - 40:58)

A listener named David raises a question about gravitational waves and their potential to alter time. Hakeem explains the subtle nature of gravitational waves and their interaction with spacetime, emphasizing that while they can warp spacetime, the effects are incredibly minute and not noticeable to humans without sensitive instruments.

Notable Quotes:

• David (36:25): "Can gravitational waves also alter time? If a huge collision occurred near our solar system, how would we feel them?"
• Hakeem Oluseyi (37:05): "Gravitational waves curve space and stretch time, similar to what black holes do."
• Neil deGrasse Tyson (40:11): "The first gravitational wave measured jiggled the experiment by one-twentieth the diameter of a proton. You ain't feeling that."

7. Listener Questions: Conservation of Information in Black Holes, Dark Energy and the Big Squeeze, Dyson Spheres (41:02 - 48:44)

In the Lightning Round segment, listeners pose intriguing questions:

• Conservation of Information in Black Holes: Paul questions the philosophical underpinnings of information conservation in black holes. Hakeem discusses ongoing debates and theories, referencing the "no-hair theorem" and the challenges in reconciling quantum mechanics with general relativity.

• Dark Energy and the Big Squeeze: Ross from Madison inquires whether dark energy could be the mechanism behind a potential "Big Squeeze" (Big Crunch). The panel clarifies misconceptions about dark energy's role in the universe's expansion, emphasizing that current understanding suggests perpetual expansion rather than a climatic contraction.

• Dyson Spheres Detection Criteria: Christopher from St. Louis asks about the criteria used to differentiate Dyson spheres from natural stellar phenomena. Hakeem debunks the concept by highlighting the impracticality of constructing such megastructures with available materials and underscores that observations of red stars can often be explained by interstellar dust.

Notable Quotes:

• Paul Mercurio (41:02): "Physicists' preoccupation with conservation of information sounds more philosophical than scientific."
• Ross (44:00): "Could dark energy be the mechanism behind the big squeeze?"
• Christopher (45:03): "What criteria are we using to distinguish a Dyson sphere from something else?"

8. Conclusion and Final Remarks (48:44 - End)

As the episode wraps up, Hakeem and Paul share final thoughts, encouraging listeners to engage with the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and continue exploring the cosmos. Neil deGrasse Tyson closes with his signature farewell, urging everyone to "keep looking up."

Notable Quotes:

• Hakeem Oluseyi (48:37): "You could be a nerd, a geek, an enthusiast, or an educator. Join our community at Astrosociety.org."
• Neil deGrasse Tyson (51:17): "Till next time, I bid you keep looking up."

---

Insights and Takeaways:

• Hubble Tension Significance: The ongoing discrepancy in the Hubble constant measurements underscores potential gaps in our cosmological models or hints at new physics yet to be discovered.

• Technological Advancements: Instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope are revolutionizing our ability to study exoplanet atmospheres and search for phenomena like Dyson spheres, though natural explanations often prevail.

• Dark Matter Mysteries: Despite extensive research, dark matter remains elusive, prompting scientists to explore a myriad of theories, each with its own set of challenges.

• Public Engagement: The Astronomical Society of the Pacific plays a pivotal role in democratizing astronomy, fostering an inclusive environment for enthusiasts and professionals alike.

Final Thought: This episode of StarTalk Radio, featuring Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi, offers a profound exploration of some of the most pressing questions in modern astronomy and cosmology. Through expert insights and engaging dialogue, listeners gain a deeper understanding of the universe's complexities and the scientific endeavors striving to unravel them.

Transcript

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[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So, Paul.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Dr. O came back to my office.

[Paul Mercurio]

Oh, he's the man.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

He's the man.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Dr. O.

[Paul Mercurio]

He knows his stuff, man. He's in charge of a lot of acronyms. Wait till you hear the acronyms.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right? His expertise in the universe, cosmology, dark matter, dark energy.

[Paul Mercurio]

Dark energy.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's the future of the field on StarTalk. Coming right up. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil DeGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. I got with me, Paul Mercurio.

[Paul Mercurio]

Paul, what's up, my man? Good to see you. Always great to be back with you. Love you.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You're a comedian and you got a show on Broadway or off Broadway or traveling.

[Paul Mercurio]

It was off Broadway and then Broadway. Now we're out on the road.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Out on the road. And it's called Permission to Speak One man show. And you interact with the audience.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yeah, yeah. It's about stories from people, from me. Frank Oz is directing it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We love Frank Oz.

[Paul Mercurio]

Created Yoda. Try being directed by Yoda. He's never wrong.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Well, we're gonna do cosmic queries today.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yeah. I love these. With an old grab bag.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Old colleague and friend of mine, Huck Akeem.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Thank you, Olache.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I better get your last name, Olache.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

So far away.

[Paul Mercurio]

Way to do your research before the video.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Here, let me give you a mnemonic. Think ou shady Hakeem.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, you shady.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

But instead of you, it's Lou Olu Shey.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Hakeem Olu Sheyi.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yes, sir. There you go.

[Paul Mercurio]

Gotcha.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

There you go.

[Paul Mercurio]

And you were on my podcast. We had a great conversation. Awesome book.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I got your bio here. It's great. Astrophysicist, cosmologist. You're a previous guest on StarTalk from a few years back and recently, like, practically minutes ago. CEO of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. We'll ask you about that in a minute.

[Paul Mercurio]

I didn't know from your sweatshirt that you were a CEO. You're looking good, man.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Man. We're taking the CEO vibe in another direction, right?

[Paul Mercurio]

No pretension.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yeah, we don't need that.

[Paul Mercurio]

Congrats, man. That's awesome.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Appreciate you, sir.

[Paul Mercurio]

That's awesome, man. Absolutely.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Thank you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So you got a podcast. Does It Fly? By Roddenberry Entertainment. Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek fame. And you've got a memoir out there. It's been out for a few years now. The Quantum Life.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

It keeps getting released.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

My Unlikely Journey from the street to the Stars.

[Paul Mercurio]

And that's the book that we talked about on my show.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

That's right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That reminds me of the quote from Oscar Wilde. We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking to the stars. Ooh, that's good. You didn't know about that. You could have put that in the book.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

You could have put that in the book. It could have been in the book.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You could call me next time.

[Paul Mercurio]

Unless you're drunk on Thunderbird, then you're not looking up at the stars.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And you've also involved with NASA's IMAP satellite.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So NASA has no shortage of acronyms. So unpack IMAP for me.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

The Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe. Can't wait to talk to you about it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. We'll get there in, like, a minute. So, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. I'm a big supporter of theirs, like, from way back, and they say it sounds like it's only in the Pacific, but they have a mission statement that's functionally international. Getting people to look up. Yeah, and I try to do that every day. Right.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

You're succeeding.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

You're succeeding. Right. It's cool. Now. When I was a kid, you know, it wasn't so cool to be a nerd, okay? Right now, nerds are cool science. Everybody loves space, but.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Plus, we were blurds, right?

[Paul Mercurio]

That's true.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Black nerd.

[Paul Mercurio]

There is no way there's a black nerd. No, there's two of them.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Trust me.

[Paul Mercurio]

At least they don't know each other yet, but they're there.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Oh, I could give you a list.

[Paul Mercurio]

Is that right? Oh, do you have a secret meeting before, it was, like, public that you guys were black nerds?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yeah. Society of Black Physicists.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Blur are a special subspecies of the whole world. Okay?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Because. Because people could ask you, what kind of nerd are you? They come in different ilks, right?

[Paul Mercurio]

So what type? Isn't there just one general type of nerd? Science nerd, but, like a TV nerd, that kind of thing?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yeah. Well, you know, the first question is the difference between a nerd and a geek. Right?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So, no, here's the thing.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

I got this.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I got it.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

You got it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So a geek can be a geek in any specific category. You can be a music geek, okay, where you're just into music, but you're not necessarily associated with science. If you're a geek, you're a geek. You're just into your thing. But a nerd, it says something about your personality and your behavior and your things you care about, quality of your personality.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

I'll give you some examples, okay? I was in the Navy back in the 80s, and a guy asked me, yo, how come you the only brother that don't wear hella gold? And my answer was, it never occurred to me.

[Paul Mercurio]

And he said, what does occurred mean?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Like, I couldn't even tell the difference. You know, like, dudes love cars. I couldn't tell two cars apart. Like, I. You know.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. What you care. It's. You care about different things.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

You care about different things. Exactly. Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. So do you have a vision for the Society of the Pacific?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

I do.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Absolutely. I do. So the Pacific has.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Well, once you remind people it's an organization that promotes public awareness and understanding of astronomy at all levels.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

At all.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So at the amateur level, you get a telescope.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

That's right.

[Paul Mercurio]

Why the term Pacific?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's where it began. In San Francisco, the Bay Area president.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Was the director of Lick Observatory. But it's known as America's first and oldest national astronomy organization.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Lick Observatory is Observatory of Santa Cruz. So.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the Bay Area there. I used to observe supernovae there back in the day when I was a postdoc.

[Paul Mercurio]

Great place to drink. You know, you go with a bottle.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

And then, boom, eat chips. You gotta eat chips at the observatory. So the asp, One thing that made it different when it was founded was this egalitarian perspective. So they accepted professional astronomers, amateur astronomers, and educators at all the same level.

[Paul Mercurio]

Because it was all about sort of just lifting everybody all together.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

All together.

[Paul Mercurio]

And you want to get it out.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

It's like, you know. Yeah.

[Paul Mercurio]

The more you include, the better. The knowled.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Highly laudable fact.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

High laudable fact.

[Paul Mercurio]

Because he doesn't hang out with riffraff.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Don't make me slappy. But later, like last time, they added.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

A new group that is labeled as enthusiasts.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Good.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yeah, yeah. So here's the thing about it. So I discovered them. I went to the bay area in 91 for graduate school. And there was this guy at the nearby community college. The name you're gonna recognize. Andy Fracknoy.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Who was the CEO.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

He was teaching at the community college.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Excuse me. Yeah, he was teaching at Foothills. Foothills, yeah, that's right. And so I'm looking at Mercury Magazine. I'm looking at the proceedings of asp.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The ASP produces the magazine for the public, Mercury Magazine, and they produce proceedings of scientific conferences, of scientific conferences in everything. Probably one of these books is from that conference.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

But you know what else they do? So there are 90 astronomy journals in the world. PASP is typically between 15 and 20 of the 90 astronomy journals. So they're typically the top around 17% of astronomy journals. And there you go. A Proceedings of the. Yeah, those books.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

This is for every meeting of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, every professional meeting. Their proceedings.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And this. And they're beautifully published.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Everybody has these.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Line them up. Yeah, we all have these. And these are just two that are here relative to others that I have on a different part of the shelf. Galaxy evolution. The Milky Way perspective.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yeah, they made that into a film starring Tom Cruise. He jumps through a Milky Way covered in bathrooms, gasoline. It's an amazing.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

And equations.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So I mean, there are now hundreds of these. I mean, it's been a long time.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yeah. Oh, absolutely.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So very, very good to hear that.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

That's right. So. So I saw them as a rigorous, scientifically rigorous organization that had the social consciousness to do this educator training, which.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Nobody else was doing.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Because no one was professional organization.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They were ordained to even talk to the public.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Exactly.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The ASP has been everything I care about as a professional scientist. Same is fulfilled by that mission statement.

[Paul Mercurio]

Society's picked up on that part of it. Why have. I mean, you know, it's out there. It's a good example. And be inclusive.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I have an answer. He probably has an answer, but I have an answer. In our field. There aren't many fields where it can reach the enthusiastic amateur and they can still participate.

[Paul Mercurio]

Well, but your show does. Cosmic Queries is a perfect example.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

What I'm saying, that's astronomy and astrophysics. You can't really do. Can you do that with physics? Really?

[Paul Mercurio]

Well, you can if you're not pompous like you are.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No, but it's harder because everybody's looking up. You know, when we discovered it's more relatable. Supernova, a black hole, anything. It's headlines.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yeah. Splitting an atom is less relatable than looking up a science.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

How many other sciences make a headline with that frequency? Think about it.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

And how many families own their scientific instruments that they use professionally? Like people buy telescopes.

[Paul Mercurio]

Telescopes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So that's all I'm saying. Yeah. So good luck with that. Sometimes you need a little bit of that. But you're at the helm of very important organization.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Thank you, sir.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And there it is. So now tell me about the latest NASA acronym.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration and Acceleration Probe.

[Paul Mercurio]

But you can't have a thing that says imap and then the word mapping is in the middle of it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, that is.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

That's bad.

[Paul Mercurio]

It's not working. We're going to have to redo this.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The word in the acronym can't be in one of the words of the acronym.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

It's like GNU's.

[Paul Mercurio]

Look at this. Look at this Mr. Smart Aleck over here.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

GNU's not Unix. GNU? Oh, yeah, GNU Lennox. Unix. You guys aren't that old. Okay, never mind. It's the white hair. So here's the thing.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Before this, he's not nerdy enough.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

I was working on a satellite called the Supernova Acceleration Probe. And now I'm working on the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No, you're working on Earth.

[Paul Mercurio]

Related to the probe.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Working on Earth.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

I'll just use the word on.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes, you did. Okay, so.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

So this is awesome.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So why is the word acceleration in the probe?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Because essentially what happens is the sun accelerates particles. Right. It creates this bubble and the exact.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's the solar wind.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

The solar wind, yeah.

[Paul Mercurio]

Right.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

It's moving fast. It is supersonic, Right, right. The heliosphere.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yeah.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

But when it hits.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

What do you mean supersonic? If it's moving through the vacuum of space.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Space is it exactly a vacuum?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, it's approximately a vacuum.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

It's approximately a vacuum. Yes, it is. Yes, it is.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so cool. So it's moving faster then the speed of sound would be in that very reduced vacuum.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Exactly. And what happens is, is that, you know, so it's almost like a boundary where information only travels one way, which is out.

[Paul Mercurio]

That's the heliopause, isn't it?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

No, the heliopause is what I'm getting to. Okay, so just like the example that's given is when you, when you run.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You'Re showing off how much you let him catch up with you. When you find these two comedians.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

These guys know more science than. I don't know.

[Paul Mercurio]

That's the only thing I know.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We gotta lobotomize them first before we put them in.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

You know when you run water in the faucet and it makes this. And then there's that ring, right? That's like the heliopause, where it goes from supersonic to subsonic.

[Paul Mercurio]

Right.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

So our heliopause is doing that in the interstellar medium. But here's the thing. There was a previous satellite. So the guy who's running this professor out of princeton named Dave McCamas. Okay, so I don't know if you remember the Ulysses satellite. Yes, I do. That went over the pole, went to.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The sun, didn't it?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Went to the sun, went over the poles of the sun. And we got to see that. The solar wind around the mid latitudes, you have the regular wind 400 km per second out of the poles. The high speed wind 800 kilometers per second.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Didn't know that.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

So young Dave McComas is the guy who made that famous plot. All right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

So then he had an idea, and the idea is crazy. Let's look at neutral atoms coming toward Earth from outer space. Who looks at neutral atoms? We look at photons. We look at different high.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

There's nothing more boring than a neutral atom. It's not ionized.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

But here is their origin. These electrons from the sun go out, they hit the heliopause. So there's magnetic fields there. There's ions trapped in those magnetic fields. Those electrons get captured by those ions and they become neutral.

[Paul Mercurio]

So it's like. It's like neutering a dog.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

No, so ooh okay. Well, anyway, while the ion is ionized, it is tied to the magnetic field and it's stuck out there. But once it becomes neutral, it is no longer stuck. It's no longer tied to the magnetic.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Field because it has no charge.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Because it has no charge. So some of them stream into the inner solar system. So you can get a map of the stuff that is in the magnetic field raining back down. And they discovered that if you look at the galactic magnetic field, it wraps around our bubble. And perpendicular to that is a. Just like we have a radiation belt around our planet, there is a belt around our heliopause. And so NASA goes, that's interesting. Now let's do a satellite that will look at that in way more detail.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Study the sun as these things go. You make a tiny discovery.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yeah.

[Paul Mercurio]

And it can open up a whole.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, opens up. Now you can build an entire experiment just for that discovery.

[Paul Mercurio]

What do you anticipate that you might find there? Do you have.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

I mean, you must have just the unknown. It's the exact same thing. You're gonna find something you've never seen before. Just like they did with Ibex. Right. So now they're looking at acceleration from the sun. They're looking at acceleration in those magnetic fields, and they're testing the interstellar medium and what it's made of, because those particles also stream in. So that's why it's the interstellar mapping and acceleration probe.

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[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Hello, I'm Alexander Harvey and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So Donald Goldsmith, who's an astronomy writer and co wrote the original Cosmos, and I actually co authored a book with him on origins. He has his own LLC company and because he writes books and writes for tv, it's called Interstellar Medium. No, Interstellar Media. Interstellar Media.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Interstellar.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I love that.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

That's great.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It was so simple and fun.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

So I have an LLC too.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

What's that?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Quarkstar.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

I thought no one will think of that. Turns out there is a lighting company on the West Coast. Name?

[Paul Mercurio]

Quarkstar.

[Rosetta Stone Ad]

All right.

[Paul Mercurio]

Here's a little bit more heady than theirs, though.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Well, this is a cosmic queries.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We can't just, like, shoot this shit forever.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

All right.

[Paul Mercurio]

Okay, let's do it. All right. This is James H. English. Greetings. He's from Denmark. I read recently that the universe is expanding too fast for our theories and models to fit, increasing the Hubble tension. Do you think the problem is with our models, or is there some physics we just haven't discovered to explain this? That is, is the rate not constant due to some undiscovered property of space.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Time, or is there something wrong with the data? Are models off? Do we trust the data? Or do we need new physics?

[Paul Mercurio]

But if the data's off, the model's off. By definition, no. Maybe. No.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I spent time at Princeton where they have a lot of theorists. They say never trust an observation unless it's backed up by a theory.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Well, that's happened. I know of two cases where observation was made and it did not fit with the theory. I'll give a very simple one. It was Art Walker's research when he first got the images. So when you see the pretty images of the sun with the plasma loops. Art did that first. Right. And so the plasma loops had a constant cross section. And so the solar physicists were like, dude, there's something wrong with your telescopes. Because we know magnetic fields diverge with altitude, so they should get fatter. At the top, they're not getting fatter.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But just to be clear. So the magnetic field is confining the plasma.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

That's right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So the shape of the plasma is the shape of the magnetic field.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Exactly.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And so he's saying that the magnetic field is just a constant cross sectional tube.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

That's what it should be.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Something more dynamic than that. Okay.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

At the top, they should get fatter.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Just like, if you look at it, theory said that. Right. And Art was like, ain't nothing wrong with my telescopes. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna have the same pass band, but I'm gonna give you three different configuration telescopes. I'll give you a Cassegrain, a Herschelian, and a Richie Cretian. So you can't say it's the optics. And not only that. So we would fly 16 to 22 telescopes with all these pass bands, which ended up being a subset of them, the same pass bands on SDO and EIT and solar satellites, and show. No, this is what nature is doing. It's not an issue with the pass bands. It's not an issue with the optics. This is what nature is doing. And now that's what everyone knows.

[Paul Mercurio]

The theory had to be adjusted.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

The theory had to be adjusted. Right. You had to come up with a mechanism.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It can happen. So let's get back to Hubble tension.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Hubble tension, right. So people have.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

There's been a lot of articles.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

There's been a lot of articles. Right. And so essentially.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And everybody wants to just throw out.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

The Big Bang or throw out dark energy.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Throw out clickbait.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Clickbait, yeah. Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, Exactly.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

It's clickbait. Right. So essentially, what's been happening is you have the cosmic microwave background radiation, which has been a treasure trove of cosmological information. Then you have the standard way that we measure expansion. I have some object. I know how fast it's moving, how fast it's moving away. It's redshift. And I also know its distance based on its brightness. Right. And so now I can make a Hubble diagram. I fit the Planck data. I get a value of the Hubble constant.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They don't agree, but the Planck is the cosmic background.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Right. The Plonk satellite saying stuff. Don't even know. I'd be leaving stuff out, man.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's why I'm here.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

That's why you're here.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Thank you.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Thank you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

To keep you continuous.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

So now there's new James Webb Space Telescope data.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Wait, just set the stage. So you have data from the early universe.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You get a Hubble rate. You get the traditional galaxies, usually with supernova or some other standard candle. And those two numbers do not match.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

They do not match. Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

In my day, measurements of the expansion rate of the universe differed by a factor of two. A factor of two.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And so now they differ by just a few percent.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But the error bars. The error bars. The uncertainty is way smaller than the difference in those two measurements.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So that is a more severe fact than not knowing the expansion rate of the universe by a factor of two.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

So we had a similar problem with the ages of stars and the age of the universe, which. I remember that one, the Hubble thing. Right. And so it was the cosmological data that had to be.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Somebody found stars that were older than the universe.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

That's right. Stars in the halo looked like they were older than the age of the universe. Right. But then.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And the headlines were, oh, catastrophe.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Oh, my God.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, whatever. Yeah. People, like, ready to give up on the universe. Right.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

But then we realize, oh, no, our cosmology needs to be improved. And so, you know, what happened in the 90s, really, you know, post Kobe, that changed everything in cosmology, right?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Like Kobe Bryant.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Not Kobe, the Kobe satellite.

[Paul Mercurio]

What you mean right out that game, after he got 80, he scored 81 points that game?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

No, not that game.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Cosmic background Explorer. One of the first high precision measurements of the cosmic background Mather and smooth. Nobel laureates.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Nobel laureates. Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Mercurio]

So circling to the Hubble tension.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So tell me. So something's got to give.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yeah, something's got to give. So I think that there's something that we don't understand. I think I'm trusting the measurements, and I think that I trust the theory.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The measurements look good, don't they?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

The measurements look good. I was involved in supernova cosmology, right. And also weak lensing studies for looking at structure of growth and these sort of things. And so all this different data, there's more than one probe, right. People are using different types of stars, Right?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's where you get the confidence from. It's not just one data point from one telescope.

[Paul Mercurio]

So what James asks is, is there some physics we just haven't yet discovered?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Are we missing physics or we just have to adjust the model?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Well, people coming up with these models that maybe the expansion rate of the universe we have, okay, there's this initial impulse, right? And then the universe evolves based on the energy densities of the constituents of which there are three main ones. Right? Radiation, which is stuff that moves very fast through space, but almost not at all through time. Matter, which moves very fast through time and almost not at all through space. And space time, which has its own energy density that we call dark energy, which doesn't move through either one. Right. And so initially, radiation dominates, then matter comes to dominate. Then dark energy, that is space time energy density comes to dominate.

[Paul Mercurio]

We think on that.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Well, that's what he thinks. Right. In each one, you can look at what the expansion rate would be of the universe. But here's the thing. Once we discovered the Higgs particle, first time, we discovered what is known as a scalar quantum field. What do I mean by that? Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So we'll ask you that. What do you mean by that?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Don't ask yourself these questions.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's for us to do.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

So one of the things that we're.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Looking at, what is the square of quantum field?

[Paul Mercurio]

You and I don't need to be here.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Ask myself questions and answers. Who needs the. I'll query myself.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yeah, you read them.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Let's just back up in the United States, we surely would have discovered the Higgs boson.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Oh, yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

With our superconducting super collider, whose budget was canceled right around when peace broke out in Europe. Right. Between 89 and 93 procurements. Yeah. So the center of mass of particle physics moved to Europe, to cern, to the Large Hadron Collider. They discovered the Higgs boson. So now what happened?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

So here's what, here's the deal. Here's why I bring this up. Because it's what is known as a scalar field. So when you think about the fields that you know of, right? They're like, oh, the electric field, I have a charge, it has electric field, magnetic field. I have a charge that's moving. It generates a magnetic field gravitational field. Oh, there's this matter. So every field you know of, there is some source in matter. But then here come the particle physics. They're like, oh, yeah, you know why every electron is identical? Because they don't say it this way. This is mine. No, every electron is identical. Same reason every C note, musical note is identical. Because they're not the real thing. The real thing is the string or the air that's vibrating, right? So they invoke this idea of quantum fields. So the quantum field just permeates all of space time and is just there.

[Paul Mercurio]

But nothing is real in that quantum field anywhere.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Well, excitations of the field are particles, right? So they're the permanent ones and they're the virtual ones, right?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So we measure the excitations as particles.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

As particles, right? Now here's what happens though. They say, oh, there's this thing called the Higgs field. It's just there. It's just everywhere in space at all times. Just there, right? Scalar field, no source. And I'm like. In my mind as a young scientist, I'm like, is that real? Then they discover, they ring that damn field and create the particle. I'm like, wow. So now what can you do? Oh, inflation. Looks like Alan Guth creates inflation. Looks like the universe rapidly expanded. Oh, I know what I'll do. I'll create another scalar field. I call it the inflaton field. So now you see some dynamics happening. You can just create a new field. So.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But it sounds like you're pulling stuff out of your ass.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

It does, it does. But you're supposed to, like, use it to make predictions. So you know, to test whether what.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Came out of your ass, what you're using.

[Paul Mercurio]

One is a jump. That's right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That shit Is testable.

[Paul Mercurio]

I actually have a device that does that. I'll bring it to the next show.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Oh, Ray, you remember the shit list from the 90s? No.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

It was like a joke. And it lived on the Internet, the early Internet. And it was like all these different types of shit. One of them was ghost shit. You felt it came out, you wiped. There was nothing on the toilet paper. There was nothing in the toilet. But you know what happened?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, wow. Okay. Okay.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

So some people are doing that. They're saying maybe the universe's expansion rate hasn't just been what we think it of as simple as we think it is. And in other questions, there'd be yet.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Another phenomenon acting on the expansion rate beyond the 3 that we have characterized.

[Paul Mercurio]

Do we have an idea of what it might be?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Some weird quantum.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You come up with something.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yeah, you come up with something.

[Paul Mercurio]

Is weird the scientific term you're going with here?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Sure. So, but let me clarify here. So this notion that the expansion rate is misbehaving, Let me characterize it that way. That just means it doesn't match what our three most potent models would give us for it, Right? Okay. So do we introduce a fourth accounting or do we say that one of these are wrong or maybe working in harmony or.

[Paul Mercurio]

Each of those have to be adjusted.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

There's an assumption within there as well that comes from the cosmological principle that the universe is isotropic and homogeneous. And now people are looking. If I look in that direction, I look in that direction. I look in that direction. Is the expansion rate the same versus distance in every particular direction. So, you know, that's why we have big surveys coming on like the Vera Rubin Telescope. Lsst. Because we typically have pencil beam surveys for the most part, or surveys that don't go to.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

LSST was the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. But we're astronomers and we don't like going that way. We don't play that. So we just named it after one of our.

[Paul Mercurio]

You guys just like acronyms. You're just the. You're the laziest creator.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Rubin Telescope. Yes. She discovered dark matter in the Milky Way. Wow.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

And speaking of, you know, another telescope that saw it coming is the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. So it's looking for dark matter or dark energy or both?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Both. Both of them. It's going to be a survey telescope.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yeah, Everybody.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

So Nancy Grace Roman, going back to the asp, she valued the ASP so much that when she passed away recently, she left the organization a few Million dollars. Whoa. Yeah. Yeah.

[Paul Mercurio]

Okay, well, listen, we did.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Astronomers have millions of dollars.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Nancy Grace Roman had millions of dollars.

[Paul Mercurio]

And we're gonna jump to the next. That was a great question, James. We're gonna jump to the next one. Adam Omelon. Hi. Dr. Tyson and Dr. Olusi. Adam from Poland here first. All of. Big fan of everything Dr. Tyson is involved in. I love his books, all his programs he's been on. My question is about the ability to detect various particles in the atmospheres at very distant planets. We know that the light is altered as it travels towards us. But how exactly does this happen?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Ooh, absorption spectrome.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yeah, yeah.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

So it happens.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So what's absorbing what?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

So what happens is that when you look at a transit of an exoplanet, so that means that it'll go in front of its star. Right. And so at that time, the light from the star will pass through the atmosphere of the planet to the edges of the planet. Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right, so we're with you. You have this transit, and the planet is moving across the surface of the sun. Now, you don't see that.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

You don't see it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You just see light.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so I'm getting light in my telescope.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

So as that planet is going in front of a star, if it has an atmosphere, the light from the passes through the planet's atmosphere. And that light interacts. That's on the edges with that atmosphere. Around the edges. Right, yeah, that light interacts. And so certain wavelengths of light aren't gonna make it out the other side. They're gonna be absorbed. Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And that's gonna be the chemistry of the atmosphere.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

By the chemistry of the atmosphere. But remember, the star has its own spectrum as well. So you get a spectrum of the star by itself. You get a spectrum when the light is passing through the planet's atmosphere, and you subtract it, and what's left over is a spectrum of the planet. And now you can say, oh, I see this element or a molecule in that particular atmosphere.

[Paul Mercurio]

And is that a constant? In other words, that is a proven theory that works every time.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Well, it's hard to do. And so James Webb Space Telescope was built to do that job, and it actually has succeeded in doing that job. Those are some of the early releases. Like, look, hey, we can do it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It hasn't just succeeded. It's badass.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

It's badass. Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's opened up the whole industry, the whole cottage industry to make that happen.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yeah.

[Paul Mercurio]

All right, we're going to go on to Jordan Vesina from North Dakota. I've been curious about dark matter.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So you went from Denmark. Denmark, Poland, Poland, North Dakota, North Dakota.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Three places I've never been to.

[Paul Mercurio]

It may not ever go. I've been curious about dark matter. Is it possible that the reason why we don't understand dark matter is because it defies our understanding of the laws of physics? Meaning, is it possible that dark matter is something that can travel faster than light? Or how Massive gravitational effect without having large mass. Love the show.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Let me shape that another way and throw it right in your lap. So we probe the universe using our methods and tools of science that we have developed to this day. Could dark matter simply be awaiting some brilliant theoretical understanding coupled with some brilliant new kind of telescope that would see it in ways that no one had previously dreamt? So is it awaiting technology?

[Paul Mercurio]

Is it awaiting new physics? I think it's more basic than that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Or is it gonna plug in with just a new kind of particle that just doesn't interact?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Well, first off, trivia. My very first physics research.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's what I was wondering. You were in.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

That was summer of 91 on the Cold Dark Matter CDMS, right in the basement in Berkeley, okay, Building the dark matter direct detection, Right. Which we've not detected any dark matter.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So your PhD is from.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

No, no, no. It's a funny thing. I got accepted. I applied to Berkeley and Stanford. I got rejected from Berkeley. Accepted by Stanford.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Idiot got rejected by Berkeley, right?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

I know, right? But here's the.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Send him off to Stanford.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

I went at work, where the idiots go, reject. But no, here's what happened. I worked at Berkeley this summer between undergrad and grad on that project. At the end of the summer, they said, dude, if you want to come to Berkeley, come. But I didn't know Stanford was this highfalutin school. I didn't know that.

[Paul Mercurio]

Wait, you didn't know that?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Dude, I was from the country, man.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yeah, it's a smart guy.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

His.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

His. His memoir is called from the Street.

[Paul Mercurio]

All right, that's out the mud.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

What part of that title do you not understand?

[Paul Mercurio]

All right, you thought it was a town in Connecticut, not a university.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

I didn't know Connecticut existed, so I still haven't seen it. But anyway.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And the town, Connecticut, has an M, I think.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yeah, it does, but just go along with it.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Right? Nothing at the scale of galaxies and larger. Basically over 20,000 light years bigger than the galactic arm. Nothing moves, consistent with the laws of physics. And so there's two ways, right? There's this like alternative gravity theories, which, you know, just like when you think they're dead, they come back and they're stronger than ever. And then there is this. Oh, there's other stuff, dark matter. Oh, we got some great ideas for what that is. It's black holes. It's MACHOs, it's super symmetric particles. Oops.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

MACHOs would be massive compact halo objects.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

So we come up with our better.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Instruments And WISPs are two kinds of.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yes, they don't exist. We look for them, they're not there. The super symmetric particles certainly should have saw them. They're not there.

[Paul Mercurio]

At what point, in all seriousness do you go, let's stop looking and move on to something else? It's like looking for.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Then we'd have to say, you know.

[Paul Mercurio]

It'S like looking for a second sock and you just don't find it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No, no, no. Because when we'd have to admit that we're stupid or that we're.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yes, exactly.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But we are driven by the uncertainty. There are ambulance chasing theorists out there.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yes, there are.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The slightest observation that's a little quirky, they're gonna come up with a whole theory to understand.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Maybe several. Right. Cause I only have to get it right once.

[Paul Mercurio]

Is that what they call.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I call them that.

[Paul Mercurio]

So the answer is that sort of. We're never gonna stop trying to pursue this theory. And you know something is amiss.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

The question is, what is it?

[Paul Mercurio]

But is it possible that dark matter is something that could travel faster than light? What is your theory on that?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Well, tachyons. Is there tachyons? Is that what it is?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

If dark matter is some kind of matter, we call it matter but we.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Don'T know what it is. No, here's the thing, why we know it's not that because there's two models. It's not moving faster than light because the two models that were competing were. Is it hot dark matter or is it cold dark matter? So particles moving very fast would be hot dark matter. And we know that the best model is Lambda cdm. Cold dark matter.

[Paul Mercurio]

Dark matter just feels, every time I read about it, it just feels like, I don't know, like a guy shows up at a party or something and he just. It's there, but it makes, it's a weird, it makes every.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

The only thing is axions. And I don't find to be, well.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

People making up particles that'll do this.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yeah, well they made up a particle to cancel out the electric dipole moment of the proton, which should exist. Right. If the quarks have electric charges, and there's separation between the minus and the negative. There should be some. What's called separation between them, which we call a dipole moment, but one is not measured. So Helen Quinn et al, they came up with this idea. Maybe there's this other field that cancels it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So it's the Wild West.

[Paul Mercurio]

It's the Wild west, which actually makes it exciting.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

You come up with all these ideas and you go, still the sound of.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Them, but because we know that whatever the dark matter is, it's cold and not warm.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It can't be going faster than light.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Exactly. Because it would have evidence it's clumping gravitationally. Right. And then, you know, you'd see, I imagine, shrink off radiation. Right. That's when you travel faster than light in some medium.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, you.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

You emit light. So dark matter wouldn't be dark, baby.

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[Paul Mercurio]

Here we go. Next one. David from Upstate New York. I recently watched a side channel show with Hakeem Word, and I fell asleep. It was really boring. That was weird. Why would you write that, David?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

I'm the guy who wakes everyone up.

[Paul Mercurio]

Nah, you're the best, man. You're the best. I recently watched Side Channel with Akeem. It was about gravitational waves. Just wondering, can they also alter time? If a huge collision occurred near our solar system, how would we feel them? Would we be alive to physically notice?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So will it do damage? First of all?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And we know it's a disturbance in the gravitational field. And everybody knows after the movie Interstellar that if you're in a different gravitational field, you're gonna age differently.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So what kind of consequences?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

That's a good. Perturbations of time travel. This is a good time to bring up the Andromeda paradox.

[Paul Mercurio]

Okay. You know, I was thinking the same thing.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I was not. What is the Andromeda Paradox?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Well, the Andromeda paradox is the fact that if you and I are looking at Andromeda.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Andromeda. The galaxy.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

The galaxy.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Not the stars that make the constellation.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yeah, not the constellation.

[Paul Mercurio]

And not the strain that killed millions of people.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Not the Andromeda strain. Right. Two and a half million light years away. Then what happens is, suppose you're sitting in your chair and I'm running by. And at the second I run by you, we both look up at Andromeda. Because I'm moving and you're stationary. We're gonna see events that are days apart, even though we're in the same location, looking at the same time. And you think that relativity. And you think that the light.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You say relativity and keep talking.

[Paul Mercurio]

Wait, in this scenario, how far away from me are you when you're running by?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We're in the same place.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

We're in the same place except.

[Paul Mercurio]

So you're like literally running here.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I've never heard of this paradox.

[Paul Mercurio]

And you look up.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

It's a little known paradox.

[Paul Mercurio]

And the thing that you see and I see are days apart. Days apart because of our physical perspective on time.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Well, here's what you would think. You would think the light is arriving right now. We should all be receiving this light. But that's not how it works. Motion changes the perception of time. And so we know about that in terms of the local universe. We call it relativity of simultaneity. Right. You're moving, I'm not. You see events that are simultaneous. I see them as happening one before the other. Right. But then when you add the distance component in it, now we see very different times. So there could be a third person moving in the other direction, seeing a different time. So how do you define what now is? So we're in the same place even though you're in the same place. Yeah.

[Paul Mercurio]

While we're sitting here, I'm here, you're running by. We look up at the drame at the same time and we're seeing something.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

From the same location.

[Paul Mercurio]

From the same location. Essentially we're seeing things days apart.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Days apart.

[Paul Mercurio]

And that leads to the idea of what is now and your now and my now are two different things.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

There's no now. There is no now.

[Paul Mercurio]

No, there is now. There's always now.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

There's an illusion of now. Because we're so close together and we're so small, the speed of light makes it feel like we have a now. Right, but now doesn't really exist. On larger scales, there's no such thing.

[Paul Mercurio]

But there always has to be a now in all cases.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

No, no, that is Your bias. That is your bias.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's so Galilean. That's so backwards.

[Paul Mercurio]

I've never gotten heckled from the left and the right at the same time.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right, so wait, so what is the upshot of this?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Well, what was the question again? Because they're talking about time, right. And they're talking about now or something. And I'm just like, what was it?

[Paul Mercurio]

It was about gravitational waves wondering, can they also alter time? If a huge collision occurred near our solar system, how would we feel them? Would we be alive to physically notice?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Right. You curve space and you stretch time. Right. It's kind of the idea like what a black hole does. Right. You curve space, you know, time moves more slowly, relatively. But these phenomena of gravitational waves are incredibly subtle. And so the real calculation to do is what type of gravitational wave would be necessary. It's like the big order.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

For that to happen.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

For that to happen.

[Paul Mercurio]

To be felt.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

To be felt. Right. Or to be.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, because the one that. The first one that was measured, it jiggled the experiment by one twentieth the diameter of a proton.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

There you go.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You ain't feeling that.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

You ain't feeling that.

[Paul Mercurio]

But we know they were gravitational waves.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yeah. We measure them, right. So, you know, you want to think of what event, what magnitude of wave do you need? Intensity. And then calculate what sort of event.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That event would surely kill you before you had any experience of the wave.

[Paul Mercurio]

But there are a whole host of. It's an infinite number of things that could cause a gravitational wave. Right?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Wait, wait. The gravitational wave moves the speed of light, so it can't kill you before the wave hits you. That would all happen at the same time.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Oh, that's a good thing. If you add those things.

[Paul Mercurio]

Oh, well, that's the upside.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So you don't even know.

[Paul Mercurio]

You don't even know.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

So you get compressed to nothingness. You get ripped apart. This is like a sci fi thing, right? The gravitational wavinator. Exactly.

[Paul Mercurio]

All right, we're gonna move on.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Can we do a lightning round?

[Paul Mercurio]

Yeah, absolutely. We got some great ones. Here we go.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Paul Mercurio]

Go island, guys.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Lightning round, dude.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You know what that means?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Be even more loquacious.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yes, exactly right. Okay, here we go. I've always been bothered by physicists preoccupation with conservation of information, especially in regard to particles falling into a black hole. Firstly, it sounds more like a philosophical position than one derived from through mathematics or scientific method. Correct me. Secondly, Mr. Heisenberg taught us that one can never know all information about a particle, thus can't we consider that information to never have existed in the first place and thus can't be destroyed. I have one thing for Alan. Alan. If you're gonna ask a question on acid, you gotta send the tablets to us, too, so we can be on the same wavelength and answer the question.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Tablets.

[Paul Mercurio]

Go.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

You mean tabs.

[Paul Mercurio]

There you go. There you go.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

There you go.

[Paul Mercurio]

Alan Geiss. Go ahead, answer that question.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

He actually remembers the 60s.

[Paul Mercurio]

Exactly.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

If you live from the 60s, you shouldn't remember. Right?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So I'd like that.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

I say here, here. I say here, here.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Catch us up on the information.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

This is a cultural phenomenon. Nerds ain't cool. And so they try to make something cool. That ain't cool. All right, so this whole thing about, oh, you know, do black holes have hair? We made a bet, man. Nerds, shut the hell up. Nobody cares. I don't care. So here's what. Here's what I think they're saying, right? If I look at the sun, I can take a spectrum of the sun.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Just to clarify, he said black holes have no hair. What he meant was that when matter becomes a black hole, it should have only, like, three physical parameters, like angle, momentum, mass, charge, and charge. So the idea was, whatever it looked like before, it has none of that. Later, once it becomes a black hole. So it says it has no hair. But that's back when enough people had hair that. That was an important part of how you identify that.

[Paul Mercurio]

Right, Exactly.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But now that bald look, which is the most thing. The billionaire bald look.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yeah, exactly.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Speaking of which, you know something I realized so. You know, I grew up in segregated Mississippi, so I go to graduate school, and I would play basketball all the time. And I noticed that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And you sucked at it.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Oh, man. I was a. I didn't suck until I joined the Cambridge Athletic Club League at the age of 49. Then I sucked, okay? In the 90s, I was great. But here's the thing. I noticed something, and that is if there was a white dude who wasn't present and you're trying to describe him to someone, they invoke his hair color.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

We didn't do that. That was.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's not our vocabulary.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

I don't know.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's like in China.

[Paul Mercurio]

Wait, you mean they'd say, like, you know, Paul Mercuri, the guy with the dark hair?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's like in China. You don't imagine people are IDing each other.

[Paul Mercurio]

No.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Cause when I talk about invoking hair color. Exactly. It's the best straight hair. That's not helpful.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

But where I'm from, we invoke skin color. Oh, the light skinned dude, the red bone, the yellow bone, the.

[Paul Mercurio]

See, I do it with voice like you. Neil Tyson, he talks like James Earl Jones. I do it like that. You do? Basically.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

This is cnn.

[Paul Mercurio]

So we're gonna move.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

On, but the point is that. Yeah, some nerd thing that nobody. But let me tell you what, unlike a black hole, take the sun, right? You can reconstruct what made the sun. That's how we know. Oh, the sun looks like three dozen supernovae constituted. You can look at what it's made of today and reconstruct where it must have come from. You can't do that with a black hole. Right. That's the.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So you're in the we lost information camp in the black hole.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Or clearly.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Or information. There's too much made of this information idea. Both.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Exactly.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. This is where he's coming from.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, give me another one.

[Paul Mercurio]

Here we go. My name is Ross. I live in Madison, Wisconsin. Could dark energy, whatever it is, be the mechanism behind the big squeeze? As an analogy, consider a magnetic field that comes out of one pole, folds back on itself, goes into the other pole. Imagine this magnetic field being the fabric of space time.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No, the point is the dark energy is making us expand and never return. So maybe he meant dark matter. So is there sufficient dark matter to close us back and then have the big squeeze?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

No, not even close.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Not even close.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Okay, give up on that one lightning answer.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right, Right. Okay, next.

[Paul Mercurio]

Okay, when were we. This is Christopher from St. Louis. When were we looking into the cosmos for possible Dyson spheres? What criteria are we using to tell the difference between a Dyson sphere and something else?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Let me get that Dyson sphere out of your mind right now.

[Paul Mercurio]

All right, all right.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Cause I did a little calculation, Right?

[Paul Mercurio]

So did I. Go ahead.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, by the way, just make it clear. There are people who when they want to know stuff, they look it up on the Internet. But when you're a scientist, you calculate the answer.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Okay. Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I gave someone an answer one time. What source did you use in my education? The brain app.

[Paul Mercurio]

You should try it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, Try it sometime.

[Paul Mercurio]

It's called book learning.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

So basically, you're not gonna have enough matter to build a Dyson sphere. If you took all of Jupiter and you tried to make a Dyson sphere around the sun using all of it. The idea is that that matter, that's like taking a human eyeball and trying to make a sphere around a basketball using that material so you're trying to.

[Paul Mercurio]

Harness the energy of a star using this artificial.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

You're trying to absorb it in matter. Right. And then convert it to useful energy. Right. And so you do not have enough matter in the solar system to create something large, to create something that you could put around.

[Paul Mercurio]

Because it's not large enough or because it can't hold?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Because it's not large.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's like stars are so much bigger than their planets.

[Paul Mercurio]

Have you seen the garbage bags that Costco sells? You put one of those around the star.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Come on, guys, they're hot. Let me add to what you just said. Cause it's a brilliant revelation regarding the material necessary. If you had that much material, it means you're visiting other star systems.

[Paul Mercurio]

Why would you be wasting it?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

This is not even an interesting.

[Paul Mercurio]

You don't even need it at that point.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

It's like, what are you trying.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You know, we're scooping up the planets of a thousand solar system to get the energy from one star. What the hell are you doing?

[Paul Mercurio]

Hey, guys, we already got the energy. Why are we trying to create the energy?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

You know what? It already has? A Dyson sphere. You know what it's called? So when you think of the sun or a star, you think of as two parts, the core and the envelope. The envelope is a damn Dyson sphere.

[Paul Mercurio]

It's already there. It's naturally natural.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

It's 50% of the matter. Right. 50% of the matter is in the core. 50% is in the envelope. And it's absorbing the energy that's coming out and radiating into a useful form that we could build our solar arrays and capture.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Let me add to that. Last year, there was a research paper on an observing project to look for Dyson spheres.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Wow.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Now you know how they're gonna do this. They're looking for very, very red star systems.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Oh. So they're like. They're not getting all the energy.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They're just saying that if you absorb all the energy from a star at this greater radius.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yeah, yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Then it would then radiate.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yeah. In an infrared.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

In the infrared. And so they're suggesting that they're aliens. So they have a data set of a handful.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Because there's all these stars that are enshrouded in dust that do the exact same thing.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's exactly the rebuttal to that. That there's stars when you're in dust, that absorbs the energy and it rerates and irradiate it. It makes a star look very red. So that was the ordinary explanation for Those very red stars in that experiment. We gotta wrap.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Okay. Can I say one more thing?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No. Okay.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Astrosociety.org oh, Astrosociety. Astrosociety.org Come join us.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The Society of the Pacific. Yes.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

And it may very well soon be the Astronomical Society.

[Paul Mercurio]

And you could be a nerd, you could be a geek, you could be an enthusiast, you could be an educator.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

You could be a learner, all of that. Yeah. And, you know, you can give more than you want, but we have a very low donation. We asked to become a member of our community.

[Paul Mercurio]

Here we go. It's about money, but you can give.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. So here you go. Under your leadership.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Will it become the Astronomical Society of the planet?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

I think so.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

And the other thing is. Let me tell you, my other thing.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

As it should have been.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

My big thing is gonna be I'm gonna take humanity. And when I look at the history of mathematics. So here's the thing, right? The big bottleneck for people getting into STEM is math, right? When people. Yep. Go to college, they ask themselves three questions when they choose their major. What do I like?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

How much math is it?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

How much money can I make doing it? And what has the least amount of math? Right. Y. And so what needs to happen is. So when I look at the. I look at it historically, and I look at it in four phases. There's an early phase. Let's forget that. Here's how I name them. The Library of Alexandria. That's when you have, you know, Euclid, you have the Pythagorean theorem, all that exists. You got basic geometry. Then you go to Nalanda, or the City of Learning. This is Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, the Gupta Dynasty, right? Where they come up with the place value system, the numerals that become Arabic numerals. Zero.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Cause they're really Hindu numerals. Right? And the zero comes out of there, too.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Exactly right. And then the third step is the house of wisdom, right? This is where you get quadrismi, solving equations, the stuff we do in STEM every day. And then you go to Cambridge. All right? So right now, Cambridge Newton.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right now, Cambridge, England.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

The average human on Earth, if you stop them and ask them any math question, they got the first two steps covered. We need to raise humanity, which is.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Arithmetic and a little bit of algebra.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Exactly.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yeah. Trigonometry, maybe.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

But here's what I mean. If you go up to the average person, you say, hey, what's two dogs plus three dogs? They'll say, five dogs. What's two galaxies for three galaxies. Five galaxies. What's 2x squared y cubed z plus 3x squared y cubed z? Get out of my face, nerd. It's the same problem, but they don't realize it because we haven't.

[Paul Mercurio]

See, I don't take it out of my face. I whip out my Texas instrument. Bang, bang, bang.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Texas instrument. Holy cow.

[Paul Mercurio]

There you go.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Yeah, he keeps it right next to his palm.

[Paul Mercurio]

There you go.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

So, anyway, I want to raise a little humanity.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I have an HP.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Join us.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

HP 45 in there.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

I got a clepsidra and a star. What is that thing? Sundial.

[Paul Mercurio]

There you go.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Wait, I got a stone circle.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, nice stone hinge. You got a stone hinge in your backyard?

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

I got a nap to playa.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right, we out.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

We out here. Yeah. Peace. Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Hakeem, really good to see you again.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

Thanks.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Your first time in my office here. First time at the Hayden Planetarium.

[Hakeem Olu Sheyi]

First time I've touched you in 20 years.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That don't that your W's a little creepy. So this has been Star Talk Cosmic Queries Edition potpourri with my old timey friend and colleague, Hakeem. Welcome back. And of course, Paul.

[Paul Mercurio]

Great to be here.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right, till next time. I bid you keep looking up.

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