>> guest: oh, well, optics had taken -- there was a lot of -- the dutch were very good at optics and lenses and this sort of thing, and we knew about what one lens would do. you could make a little magnifying glass out of it. but when you start combining them, you get other properties of your optical system, enabling you to get a microscope. and once you did that, that just opened the floodgates to what else you would do. and then galileo made a really good version of it back in the early 1600s and then sky's the limit as he looked up. >> host: was gal galileo treates kind of a devil, in a sense? >> guest: well, a little bit of cleansing -- depending hon how long is the write-up on the account of his time, life and times, that'll determine how much background information you'll get. so the simple story is he makes these discoveries, they conflict

with the teachings of the catholic church, they put him on trial, they find him guilty of saying that the earth goes around the sun and not vice versa as well as other discoveries he's made with his devil's instrument, and then they put him under house arrest. what they don't tell you or they would tell you if you read a longer biography about him is that he actually made fun of the pope. public fun of the pope. he wrote a book in italian. not in latin, which is the academic language of the day, in italian. which means the local people can read it. and in it he invents a conversation between the simpleton and someone who was wise of the ways of the universe. and all -- [laughter] if you track the statements of the simpleton, they're all statements that have come by official decree from the catholic church. so he's, he's really a pompous a-hole, basically.

[laughter] can i say that? >> host: yeah, we're okay. >> guest: this is c-span, can i -- [laughter] and so socially he did not express the respect he really should have for people who had much more power over him. he could have published in latin, had it spread around the world in academic circles, and i'm betting he probably would not have gone to trial. it is the renaissance, after all. that's my read of this. and, you know, new thought and fresh thought was not some weird thing. so, yeah, he was just -- he had it coming because he didn't know how to appease authority. [laughter] >> back to your book astrophysics for people in a hurry, 14 billion years ago the universe started, you say. how do we know, how do we know that? >> guest: so the way knowledge is acquired scientifically is you have an idea and you propose

an experiment to test the idea. and then you -- if it's an expensive experiment, you probably don't have the money to do it in your garage, so now you propose to get funding from sources, typically if it's pure research, it'll be a government source. the national science foundation, nasa has a research arm. if you're in the other fields like biology, human fizz untile, you might be getting a grant from the national institutes of health. physiology. so you have this idea, you build an experiment and you test it. and if the results of that experiment match your expectations, then the foundation of your idea gains currency in the conversations you might have at the scientific coffee lounges, at workshops or in the journals. then you're a competitor of mine and you say, you know, i never liked you. [laughter] i have a different, you know, it's not just a human, you know,

we're people too, right? so, and i think you're wrong. and here's the experiment i'm going to build to show that you're wrong. so then you build an experiment, and you get a result that kind of matches my result. that's interesting. because you had no intent of matching me. you don't even like me. but now the results match. and someone else does it. you'll always have some outliers just because of the experimental uncertainties that exist in all experiments. there'll always be some outliers. but when there's a general, a general lean towards a truth, an emergent truth, you look back and say, oh, okay, all of these experiments point to approximate hi the same result -- approximately the same result. and you have these few outcryiers here. now we come to recognize this is the new truth, the new objectoffly established truth. and that's what science does. it is the most effective way we

have ever devised as a species, as a culture in decoding what is and what is not true about the natural world. nothing rivals it at all. and so, so once we've done this, then i say here is how the world works. then we go on to the next problem. and this is a celebrated thing. i mean, it's what got us relltivity and quantum physics and gravity. and it empowered the entire industrial revolution. you couldn't have these machines, you know, what is a machine? it's something that converts energy that lives as one form into energy that's useful to us in another form. so what is a car? it takes chemical energy and gas and turns it into energy of motion, kinetic energy of your car. and that requires machines to do that. all this came out of the industrial revolution.

before the industrial revolution there were no, or there were no machines such as this. they had what we call simple machines, a lever and a pulley. those don't require high technology. technically in the world of physics those are called machines, okay? a lever, a pulley, an inclined plane. what they do is they make your job a little easier. it's simple. so watch how this works. so i have in the ledge and i have a very heavy thing, and i want to lift it up to that ledge. well, i'm not strong enough to do that. but if i make a ramp, then i can just lift it up little bits at a time. now, the distance over which i have to lift it is longer, but it takes this height and spreads that out over time so that it makes it easier for me to complete the task. the same amount of total energy is exerted, but the rate at which i expend that energy is different, and that's what the simple machines have always done

for us, and modern machines basically empower all civilization. >> host: first ten seconds of the universe, what happened? >> guest: wow, some busy moments -- oh, sorry, i didn't really focus in on your question about how do we know 14 billion years. so here's what we do, we look up in the universe, and we say, okay, we see galaxies. hub el discovered that these fuzzy things in the night sky are entire galaxies such as our milky way. my your discovery -- major discovery in 1926. and then? 1929 he discovers that these fuzzy things that we now identify as whole galaxies are hurtling away from one another, and this is the first evidence that the universe is expanding. so people didn't just think this up, oh, it must be -- no. it was an observation. and then we looked to see if it fit einstein's general theory of relativity, and it did.

general theory of relativity is the modern understanding of gravity. and if anything's happening in the universe, it's going to involve gravity. so you check to see if it works with his e occasions -- equations, it does. so that means we didn't have to reinvent the theory of the universe. because it worked. and so then e say, all right, if the universe is getting bigger, if the universe is bigger today than it was yesterday, that must mean it was bigger yesterday than it was the day before. and then the day before. and then the day before. what happens if we just turn the clock back? when you do this, because you see how fast we're expanding, just reverse that, you can to it on pen and paper, on the back of an envelope. just calculate9 what happens if you reverse this rate of expansion.

and the whole known universe is in the same place at the same time 14 billion years ago. that is the origin of the idea of the big bang. >> host: fist ten seconds. >> guest: first ten seconds. so everything we know about matter that is compressed and under pressure tells us that the temperature will rise. the simplest example of this is if you ride a bicycle and your tire gets a little flat, so you pump -- hand pump, you pump area into the bicycle tire. and then you feel the valve when you're done. it's hot. you were come pressing air through it, okay? so that's just an example. so it's related. it's not exactly the same thing, but it's related thermodynamically. the science, the movement of energy from one medium to another is called thermodynamics. as the universe gets smaller and

smaller, it actually would have been hotter in the past than it is in the present. so now you keep -- because the universe actually now has a temperature, you can measure it. got measured in the 1960s, very cool. you look at every direction and you see the heat signature left over after the 14 billion year, and so now you go back in time, and you say, okay, the universe was hotter and hotter and hotter and hotter. how much hotter would it have been 14 billion years ago when the universe was this big? and you get a stupendously high temperature. and now you ask what is the behavior of matter and energy under those temperatures. so now you turn to particle accelerators that slam particles together under high pressure, high energy, high temperature -- mean, high -- so you start approximating the conditions of the early universe. is that what an atom does, is that what a nucleus does, is

that what happens. so now you take knowledge if gleaned from modern atomic physics and particle physics and you apply it to what's going on in the first few moments of the universe when it was hot, small and dense. and that gives you a pathway in, a pathway of insights into what was going on there, and you know what we find? you have an area where all particles are formed that everything else is comprised of. we have light in the form of photons, we have corks that make up pro tons and neutrons. we've all heard of protons and newt terrors. they're -- neutrons. they're made of what we call quackers. quarks. and also as far as we know electrons, and they all have anti-matter counterparts. it's called the positron.

very cool name. something that science fiction people rapidly picked up on. just to be clear, we invented antimatter and discovered it. that was not a science fiction invention, although it works great in science fiction storytelling i. happened in the real universe first. so now you, you put -- you bring your insights no those first few moments of the universe and say what must have happened then given what we know goes on in our particle accelerators. and it tell you at the rate we were expanding at those temperatures, you would be make hydrogen as the predominant atom in the universe. the simple atom. it has only one proton in the nucleus. you make this much hydrogen, this much heel yum, you'll -- helium, you'll make trace amounts of lithium, and nothing else. we will be a universe born with hydrogen and helium and barely

any lithium. wait a minute. then you say if that's so, it would mean that the very oldest stars we can find, ones born closest to the big bang that would still be alive today would be comprised of only hydrogen and helium. that is exactly what we measure. the very old stars have the least amount of heavier elements, which we know, we know this from the mid 20th century from craigses enabled -- calculations enabled by the nuclear research from the a manhattan project and the atomic bomb because we're calculating what atoms do. we know that that after that time stars are born, pure hydrogen and helium. they manufacture heavy elements in their core, then some of them explode, scattering this enrichment to gas clouds that

have yet to form clouds. now, they form a next generation of stars that have a little bit of extra enrichment. they make even more enrichment, explode and then carry that next enrichment to the next generation. and this continues through. we, our solar system, was born four and a half billion years ago. so that's more than nine billion years after the start of the universe. so we've had the benefit of multiple generations of enrichment. so now when our protocloud collapsed to make the sun, or it had all these otherren end ingredients in it that it used to make planets. rocks are not made of hydrogen or helium, they're made of silicone and oxygen and aluminum and arsenic. all these other -- iron. cobalt, nickel. all of that manufactured later is in abundance in very late

generation stars that were formed. so the lesson here so however weird it is to assert that 14 billion years ago the universe was this big, literally this big and exploded from there, you say, well, you weren't there, how do you know? you're right, i wasn't there. but if everything we know happens to matter happened then, then it accurately predicts things we do measure. that's what gives us the confidence to sit here and describe the first ten seconds of the universe like we were there. and it all started with a big bang. [laughter] >> guest: is there a song in there? [laughter] >> host: do we know what that big bang was? >> guest: do we know what it was? >> host: yeah. >> guest: what we can tell you is that the big bang account of the beginning of the universe is

a description of what matter and energy was doing from the earliest moments onwards. now, there's a point before which it's a little mysterious to us. it's called the plank time, named after max plank, one of the many fathers of quantum physics. there's a point earlier in which than is kind of the limits of our ability to understand what nature is doing. so we pick it up right after that plank time. i forgot the exact -- the plank time is like one trillion trillionth of a send after after the big -- no, one billion trillion trillionth. is that right? 15, 12, 24 -- yeah, that's about right. [laughter] the one million trillion trillionth of a second after whatever was the beginning, then our fizz ins that we now measure in our labs apply, and then we can talk about what's going on. >> host: in your book "welcome

to the universe" from 2016 you write that in five billion years the earth will be a charred ember. >> guest: oh, yeah. you know, it's the weird, every now and then i tweet that, every couple years i tweet that, and apparently it blows people's minds. and i don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but so the tweet goes, it varies anytime i do, but it goes something like this, in five billion years the sun will expand so large that it will engulf the entire orbit of our planet. as we -- it will engulf the entire, it will engulf earth as earth, and earth will be a charred ember as it descends into the star while it vaporizes. have a nice day, something like

that. [laughter] and people, so it's, it's just a reality. i mean, it's remarkable that we can know our fate in that way over that much time. but how do we know it? will we be there? probably not. so how do we know? other stars. there's no shortage of stars in the universe. we can see stars being born, we see stars living out their lives, we see stars in the act of dying. and you can staple these bits of information together and create a coherent story. in other words, we don't live long enough to see a star born, live out its life and die. it takes millions, billions and sometimes in some cases trillions of years, and we're around for a few decades. how is it that we know this? because there's so many stars that in any snapshot of the universe we see stars being born, stars in middle age, stars dying. and we look to see, oh, these are the -- that's the same arc of a star.

they're just different as far as, but we're catching it at different times. it wouldn't be any different from if you were an alien and took a snapshot of civilization, you would see some humans in a box underground. you'd say what are they doing there? you'd see other humans who were like little things crawling on the carpet. you'll see other humans who are, who don't have any hair that are little and others that don't have any hair who are older, right? this is just a snapshot because you don't live long enough to see the whole thing. if you're an alien and you live just 90 seconds, all right? so you'll say how do i make sense out of this? are people born in a box in the ground, and they're all shriveled, and then they come out of the box and they get littler and littler and then disappear inside of another person?

or is it the opposite? so you keep studying all these photos that you have, and then you can piece together a coherent story of what's going on. and for the stars in the universe, this took decades. we didn't just look at one snapshot and say, oh, that's born there and dies there. no, this took effort. this was major telescopes being brought to bear, a lot of human capital, intellectual capital invested in trying to understand what stars are and how and why they work. a lot of this traces back to the harvard college observatory in cambridge, massachusetts, where there's a room full of computers, these are human calculators, computers, and they're all women. because that was judged to be menial work. and the men stayed in their offices, you know, doing high-level thinking. in this room of womenning --

women was the foundation of our understanding of stellar revolution. and there was a book just written on this called "the glass universe," i think -- >> host: we've covered it. >> guest: yeah, just as an homage to the glass ceiling, "the glass universe." little did the high and mighty men know that when you calculate data that was collected from all the world's telescopes on stars, therein was the source of the, the seeds of how and why stars are born, live out their lives and die. >> host: and this is booktv on c-span2. this is our monthly "in depth" program, and this month we have author and astrophysicist neil degrasse tyson as our guest. as you know if you watch this program, we spend three hours with one author talking about his or her body of work, and this month it's dr. tyson. beginning in 1989, dr. tyson has

written several books. "merlin's tour of the universe" was his first." universe down to earth" came out in 1994. "just visiting this planet," 1998. "the sky is not the limit," that was his fourth book, 2000. "one universe" also came out in 2000. "origins" came out in 2004. "death by black hole," 2007. space crop cls -- chronicles three years later, and last year "star talk" came out as well as "welcome to the universe." and his most recent book, "astrophysics for people in a hurry." here's how you can participate, we'll put the phone numbers up. 202 is the area code, 748-8200 for those of you in the east and central time zones. 748-8201 if youly in the mountain and and pacific time

zones. if you can't get through on the phone line, still want to participate in our program, try us on social media. @booktv is our twitter handle, you can also make a comment op our facebook page. you'll see dr. tyson's picture there, just make a comment right underneath, facebook.com/booktv. and finally, e-mail. booktv@c-span.org. and we'll begin taking those in just a few minutes. dr. tyson, back to your most recent book, "as to physics for people in a hurry," 40 billion earth-like planets in the milky way alone. eve got two questions. -- i've got two questions. what is the milky way, and how big a space are we talking about? 40 billion everett-like planets -- earth-like planets. >> guest: so it was hard-earned to learn what the milky way was. consider that term that we use dates from ancient rome. rome, when they built streets,

they didn't call them streets, they called them ways. you look up in the night sky, and you'll see this milky band of light x they just called it the milky way, the milky street, literally. and in china where milk is a less popular beverage into adulthood, they don't call it the milky way, they call out the silver river. so this is a well known feature in the night sky. imagine to just be some cloud of light crossing from one horizon to the next. and it would not be until gal lay owe and other -- galileo and other large telescopes brought to bear on this question did we learn that when you put a telescope on the milky band of light, it reveals itself into stars, countless stars. that, without a telescope, are just so far away the light sort of puddles together. so we say, wow, all right.

but is this all there is, just stars in front of our face and then the stars that are far away that a make this band? it would be, it would take until 1920 before we resolved the debate about whether the spiral, fuzzy things in the night sky were actual other galaxies separate from our milky way. that got resolved very quickly after 1920 and especially with hubbel's observations that these are other entire galaxies beyond the milky way. and so there's, we now know there's nearly 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, and each galaxy has hundreds of billions of stars on average. and so there's a range, big galaxies, little galaxies, but if you count them up, 100 billion stars per galaxy, 10 billion galaxies. and there you have the observable universe. and these are scattered

throughout the landscape like cities dotting a countryside when viewed from space. the local areas of light. >> host: you've mentioned them a couple times, edmund hubbel. who was he? >> guest: well, so there's the telescope, of course, the telescope was named after him. he was a bit of a pompous kind of snooty astrofizz wrist back in the -- astrophysicist back in the early '20s. he had access to the biggest telescope. so that always leaves open the question would anybody with access to the world's biggest telescope be making the world's greatest discoveries, or does it also require some kind of insight to empower you to even know what question to ask. so for him, the probably a combination of both. but story about him, he wore

these tweed suits and smoked a pipe and donned a partly british accent when he's from, like, backwoods america. [laughter] but anyhow, good thing about science, your personality is completelier realm haven't to the quality of the -- completely irrelevant to the quality of work that comes out of your lab. so you can praise someone's work without that having to be being praiseworthy of the person themselves. we can just separate the two. so he worked for the carnegie observatories in california and, or yeah, i think back then if they figured out that they should have, they would have given him a nobel prize for these discoveries. but astronomer types didn't start getting a nobel prize until 1960s. so it would be the nobel prize in physics begin to an astrophysicist. so we get them maybe once a decade or so for something we do.

>> host: you use this example in "astrophysics for people in a hurry." you talk about the earth as an apple, and the skin of the apple is basically where we've traveled, in a sense. i'm probably getting it a little wrong. >> guest: oh, yeah, i can tighten that up. so people, we think to ourselves that here we are walking around on the surface of a planet, and we're at the bottom of this ocean of atmosphere, okay? whereas the thickness -- the functional thick theness of our atmosphere is to the size of the earth what the skin of an apple is to an apple. what the shellac is to a schoolroom globe. that's on that schoolroom globe. so this atmosphere is not some infinite extent of air molecules. it is a fragile, thin skin on this thing we call earth. and i can quantify this for you.

the atmosphere has particles associate with it that go up thousands of miles. but the part that -- i know i said it's functional thickness because it's not an edge. not on this side, not on that side. no, no, it fades. but you can say at a what distance -- so in the daytime, how come you can't see stars? you can ask that question. well, because the sun is out. no that's no it. we have an atmosphere, and the atmosphere scatters sunlight rennering itself aglow -- rendering itself aglow. so in the daytime our atmosphere glows sky blue, and that prevents you from seeing the stars in the daytime sky. if you go to the moon, you can be in broad daylight, but there is no atmosphere. you look away from the sun, have your eyes adapt, there's the full nighttime sky.

.. humans, we gone to the far side of the moon when the moon, the moons orbit around earth is not perfect circle. so apollo eight -- wasn't apollo 13? apollo 1313 went to the moon when the moon was its farthest

point from the earth. when it went around the moon before they may -- they neverland. they wanted to but remember they had their oxygen tank got destroyed. so on the backside of the moon in the trajectory they were the farthest humans have ever been from earth. and so how far is that? about 240,000 miles away. in terms of spacecraft, just a few years ago launched in 1977 given some gravity boosts by slingshot it around jupiter and saturn, multiple planet, multi-cushion shot to exploit the orbital energy of these various planets. we could launch it with enough energy to escape the solar system. it had to be, it had to steal

energy from planets in order to make this happen. we did this on purpose. you do this, void or one is basically left all faces of the solar system. it doesn't mean going just past neptune, the last planet in the solar system. there's like comets beyond that, of which pluto is a happy member. the aunt and beyond and beyond, and you reach a point where the sons influenced on the electronics of your spacecraft are now infused with the influence of everything else in the galaxy. that's a punctual place to stay you let the solar system. voyager has done just that. how far away? i forgot the number. several hundred times the earth distance but i have to look that number up. the farthest, it's out there.

are we still learning anything and it cost money toys keep something online and keep talking to it. by the way, we go through these funding episodes often. yet something that is kind of working but it's exhausted its useful life but it still taking money. do you shut this off and get a fresh project that will have new questions you are answering? would you keep this going because you don't still works and you might discuss something? we have what are called the senior review each year were some of the most respected among us get together and decide which gets turned off and which is which gets turned on. that's why it's important it's our most respected scientist among us because then we judge that they're being fair to these assessments. the pointer spacecraft, father and with ever sit. by the ray, the rate at which it is traveling if you aim to to the nearest star, it would take

70,000 years to get there. so give up all expectations that will be visiting other planets outside of our solar system anytime soon. >> host: 1973, how did you end up in the mojave desert? >> guest: yeah, 73. so i attended a camp, a special astronomy camp for like geeky schoolkids. i was in, 73, i was in ninth grade. that was my first year in high school because back then what they called -- sorry, i was transitioning from ninth grade to tenth grade. ninth grade was the oldest great in my junior high school. today they call it middle school and into an eighth-grade. i was transitioning between the two. i was a geeky kid as is every of the kid at the skin. we would end the mojave desert far away any lights, very low

atmospheric humidity which is one of the definitions of a desert. that means there's no cloud formation, very few clouds, and we all lived nocturnal leg. we would wake up at night and there's a whole slew of telescopes. we had research projects. computers were very early at the time. we were programming, hovered around this computer. we all try to program it. one of this program to dispute out prime numbers which is a a calculation we may to do. this is early, like computation bc. those are some formative years of my life, ninth grade, tenth grade and 11th grade transitioning out of middle school and high school. i attended the bronx high school of science, the borough i grew up in. i had a telescope and the camera. i was just, that was a happy

summer. as a city kid, that was my first up and the desert and through all these creatures at night. tarantulas and black widows -- not tarantulas. black widows and scorpions. they said don't put your food in your boot in to shake out the boot, otherwise you'll get them injected into -- it's like him get me back to the city where i just might be mugged, that's all. at least i could talk to the mugger, you know. but it was fun. it was fun and -- so my mother saw an ad for this camp and she knew that i had been interested in the universe for the previous five years of my life, and she, why would i know where to even look for an ad or even have that as an ambition? so my parents were particularly sensitive to what the interests

of were of me, my brother and my sister, so they didn't and impt interest upon us. they carefully absorbed where we expressed interest and then fed those interest, in whatever way best serve our curiosity. >> host: i just lost my father in december. he was 89 so was a full life. i still miss him. he was a wise wise man. and i think in modern times we forget what wisdom is. there are people who know a lot in the talk a lot and the abundance. white people don't talk a lot. they do more observing than talking, and then somewhere in your head mixed with life experience that adjusted and, with simple, easy to understand perspectives that thin sort of

live with you. of course they live with you because they are the digestion of so many different pieces that you didn't necessarily have access to but they did because they live longer than you do and observant their whole life. >> host: 2012 your book space chronicles came out and in that book you write that our nation is turning into an idiotic. >> guest: was i that harsh? >> host: that's what why i wroe the page number in case you -- >> guest: yeah, okay, sure. i'm normally softer with my critiques than that. normally the way i would present such a statement would be we are behaving this way in these situations, if that continues we would then become a nation, and a theocracy. that's generally how i would word that. i would double check.

301 when the cameras shut off. >> host: we can do it right now while you're talking. [laughing] >> guest: so i think if, if people go for the stop valuing discovery -- just as backdrop for "space chronicles", ," if in just tell a brief back story to that. we've got three hours or i'm assuming i can -- may be how i worded that. our nation is turning -- okay. okay. >> host: did i misquote you? >> guest: no, it is verbatim. verbatim, so thank you. an idiotic receipt and the context in which i've discussed it, it's not a system where people simply don't know things,

okay? if you don't know something, there's no crying in that. maybe you didn't study it. maybe didn't spend 16 years in school and you spent only 12, or 20 years in school at some people do to get advanced degrees. so as an educator, i will never hold someone's absence of knowledge against them. the problem arises if you have an absence of knowledge and you either know or, worse, don't know that you have this absence of knowledge, and then you have power over legislation that should be informed by that knowledge and is not, and then you have, you come to it aggressively in your ignorance. that is a recipe for societal disaster. so part of what it is to be educated is to have a keen sense of when you don't know

something, and you either do the homework yourself. you do, just because you are in school doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't do homework, right? just because your not in school doesn't mean you shouldn't keep learning. that's an obvious point to the viewers of course, but for the general population consider how many people you know the might of rundown the steps on the last day of school and have thrown their notes in the air, schools out. whether or not it's the last isco because their graduating. even just any any of the year l graduation. summer, i don't have to learn anymore. where does it come from? how is it that your time in school can lead you to celebrate being out of school? what's that about? what is missing in the educational pipeline that people resent being in school? what is missing where, in

college you tend to lecture but the word lecture outside of college is otherwise a bad word? stop lecturing me. i don't want to be lectured. it's a bad word. what's going on? so maybe what we're missing in the educational system is a reminder that they can be fun to learn. and the last it's cool people should walk down the steps sad, that now there's an entire summer when they won't be learning. what a world that would be. oh my gosh. so do we teach it differently? are we selecting our teachers are lightweight? are the curriculum -- i don't have an answer for that. i simply sharing the observation. i know this is not helpful to just point it out but i would

claim a lot of the world's problems would be solved if education became a joyous experience rather than something you want to escape from as quickly as possible. so i draw that word from the film, it was an indie film called it theocracy. you might be able to netflix it or something, but it was a world with the people in charge did not fully understand the consequences of the decisions they were making, and the absence of understanding came from an absence of awareness of how nature works. and there's a scene where they are feeding gatorade to plants, because the ads for gatorade set it replenishes your nutrients. so they said i bet it works for our plants.

just, you have just got to see official government decisions that have little or no anchor in reality. yet, everyone kind of thought it was the right thing to do. so in "space chronicles" it contains an exploration of all the elements of society that might not be in a position to judge or make an informed decision about the value of space exploration going forward. >> host: that was in 2012. just recently in the "wall street journal," an article, an op-ed, this is a quote, in the trump era, says celebrity physicist neil degrasse tyson, who adds that this is a most important thing he has ever said, , people, quote, have lost the ability to judge what is true and what is not.

>> guest: okay. that sentence, that was from a video that was posted just before the science march. that sentence did not include reference to trump at all. that was added in that editorial. i just said we live in a time where people are lost the ability to judge what is true and what is not. if you want to call the pre-election era, part of the trump era, okay. but if you're looking at something on the internet and you think it's true and do not have the capacity to judge whether it's not true, that is another element, that is another ingredient in the recipe for disaster. so this is, trump is a manifestation, the trump era, where what is true and what is not, almost that distinction is not made, where that has risen to high heights, i would claim

those seeds were germinating long before, and it has to do with what people think is a true after they read on the internet. our susceptibility to this. and your something else. i hate to sound like a broken record if anyone remembers what a broken record is, that in k-12 summer in their rather than pouring knowledge into peoples heads and declaring them to be educated for having done so, somewhere in there we need to train people how to think, how to analyze, how to interpret, how to be skeptical of information and then how to recognize when sufficient data has been put forth, to turn something you might be skeptical about into something that is a newly established objective truth. that is not taught in schools. this should be a class just on what science is and how and why it works. that would transcend the physics class, the chemistry class, a

biology class, the geology class, the joe science class. this would be its own course. so that when you are college educated, and some institution has declared you graduated and a learned member of society, if you turn around and say i choose not to believe this consensus, no, you don't have that option. it's not how objectively established scientific truths are determined. it is true whether or not you believe it, and in retrospect you think maybe that's what you should base legislation on. not something you want to be true or feel should be true or something that you don't allow to be true because your religion prevented or because your political philosophy prevents it. you don't have that option, if it's an objectively established truth. and like i said earlier, that is

the entire point of the scientific enterprise, knowing what is true, what is not, and in particular, the ghostlike ascent scientists are humans, too, and we have buys and with all the stuff that goes on with every other human in the world, also touches scientists. so we built the system to double check against that. if i am biased in my bias shows up in some result because it took some data and not others and i could've done it this way and not, somebody else is going to get famous for checking my result and showing i'm wrong. tyson is wrong. the nest appear. and if it is shown that my bias did influence it, i get the marriage. that's not a real thing but it's -- it will interfere with the next time i have an interesting result and what people to pay attention to it. -- demerit. so there's a huge cost of a

scientist is some a meddling with the data because they have an idea of what they want their data to chew. it comes at a huge cost to the career but even if they think they can get away with it, somebody else will ultimately find it. if they show its wrong then we don't have any result at all and everybody is back to the drawing board. objective truths, i'm thinking that's what any law legislation break should be based on. if you base it on anything else, and you are imposing what might be your personal truth. your personal truth is everyone should then for themselves and not get it government handout. let's say you feel really strongly about that. well, that's how you feel, and in a free country, go right ahead. if you want everyone else to feel that, that's politics, fine, go have that political

discussion on the floor of congress. that will affect where monies go, do you find the support program, do not? do you put in a care? do you subsidize, do not? that's a political conversation, go right ahead. and then the law that comes out will have political flavor to it. i don't have problem with that, but if you law somehow pivots on something that is not scientifically true, you're building a house of cards where the first two floors look stable but they are completely hollow and empty. by the time you put on a third-floor whole thing collapses. nature is the ultimate judge, jury, and executioner of what is true. >> host: "space chronicles," 2012. we need to go back to the moon. >> guest: i will not say what we need to do. all i will do, i'm not abundant

trying to get anyone to agree with an opinion i might have. what i do instead, "space chronicles" is a collection of everything i have ever thought and written on space exploration. and so it contains like beds and articles, speeches. it's in the malcolm, and -- amalgam, it's very easy to dip in and out of, but i'm not going to tell you we should go to the moon, no. what i'm going to say is that highly ambitious exercises conducted by government have huge, exhibit huge force on the ambitions of the nation, on the creativity of a nation, on the innovations of a nation. i don't think it's an accident that steve jobs and bill gates for 12 and 14, somewhere around

there, when we landed on the moon. how impressionable can you get? there it is, there's the future, and you see this and you don't even have to be interested in space. you just have to be interested in the fact that new frontiers are being breached, and it's possible to do so. and then it gets infused into your goals, into your trajectory of life. so i'm offering space exploration, the the moon, mars, beyond, doesn't matter, but if you go into space, it is adventurous. you have to invent stuff to make that come if you're advancing a frontier, you're going to have to invent something because you can't just use off-the-shelf things. you are going to have to use and invent things that are never been used for invented before. that takes ingenuity, innovation, clever engineers, scientists working together, and

you might even need clever lawyers. why? because, oh, i want to live on the moon. who owns that plot of moon surface? and my homesteading? i want to might an asteroid for natural resources. who owns the asteroid? should anyone own the asteroid? these are legal questions. that's a whole legal frontier. so everyone can become a participant in this, and when that happens, the government does it first because the government doesn't have to satisfy a quarterly report. the government can open industries as it is done before, as it did with aviation. the government, monies from the government prompted innovations in aviation in its earliest days. because i'm saying, an airplane, now we can carry mail through the air. who wants the contract?

i want the contract, i can carry four mac bags of mail in somebody else's i'm using the same plane as you but i can make a modification. i can carry more fuel. i can carry six bags of mail, and so there was a race to see who then get these government contracts to carry airmail. so what happened? the fifth person says, i can carry 30 bags, whatever, i'm making up these numbers. they said wait a minute, i don't need to carry mail. i just put chairs, now i can sell seats and thus is for an entire industry of aviation. because of certain investments that a government makes that then enable subsequent entrepreneurs to exploit the new place that technology is taken i serve the whole fleet of space

vehicles. where do you want to go today? mine and asteroid? that's fine, but these two rockets together and bring your own equipment because i don't have to take on an asteroid. your eye biologist and want to look for life on the surface of mars? strap these together, a big rocket and there you go. we want a tourist jot around the moon. all of a sudden the solar system becomes our backyard, again, to do all this requires huge levels of innovation. i would clean once there's a first round of innovation that can establish the cost and the risk and the returns on investment, then private enterprise consent and they do their thing as they always do. no different from the dutch east india trading company, in after christopher columbus, who himself was sent by spain, and he comes back and says, where, how long it took. he quantifies things, that you can make a business case to

exploit. if you can find another way to infuse an entire nation, even the world, with ambitions of tomorrow, that will trigger innovations of today, thereby assuring a future of health, wealth, and security, because that's coming from technology. it's not coming from any other branch of human existence, science and technology are going to give us tomorrow's health, wealth and security. i simply offering the expiration of the universe as a force of nature operating on our innovation, on our urge to innovate. if you something else, bring it in. if it works and it works better, go ahead. i have yet to hear a better example. >> host: another quote from "space chronicles." nasa operates on hearts, our minds, honor educational

pipeline, all for one have sent on the tax dollar, on a $20 billion a year -- >> guest: yes, even take 20 billion and divided by the budget -- i forgot what, 3 trillion, whatever the number is, it comes into about half a penny on the tax dollar. if you hold up a little dollar and then take scissors and cut one half of 1% of its with computer even get into the ink from the side of the dollar. and when people say what is nasa spending all this money up there when we have problems here on earth? that's assuming that if it took all the money we spent a nasa and then apply them to the problems on earth, all the profits would get solved, that every statement presupposes that. yet most of those people who utter that sentence actually know how much nasa is getting. i've done it might, people in

the street, right? so you ask the people who complain nasa can i say his attack scholar, how it's to think they're getting? 10%, 15%, 5%. no, one half of 1%. when i tell them that, , i did know that. that made the space station and the space shuttle, the hubble telescope and all the nasa centers and the cassini mission which is now at saturn club this is in the one half of 1% on attacks politics i posted question two, how much is the universe worth to you? >> host: one more observation and then we're going to take your calls. you would been very patient. we have spoken for an hour now. we have two hours to take calls. first, i want to show this and are not getting it right. there are four but you have here, the pluto files, "death by black hole," "space chronicles"

and origins. what's special about these books? >> guest: they did this, and i'm very impressed with your publisher, the publisher norton, so these four different books and they all have different covers, okay? very spacey covers as you might expect, because all the books on the universe, and so they decided to make the findings match up into a coherent image. so this is the famous ring nebula. our get it. there we go. the ring nebula. >> host: which is what? >> guest: the death throes of a star. our son will look something like that. so in the center of this is the remains of a star that once was, and it expanded into oblivion. and so now these have expanded

hugely, much bigger than what is the extent of our orbiting planets. and so in terms of these, this is how all stars die. this is a non-explosive death. we we have examples of explosive deaths and their much courier. it really looks like star guts spewed forth. this is rather stately, view it like a smoke ring. now you have to get all four books. >> host: which i couldn't do. let's begin with a question via e-mail. this is from a young man named bradley. is both parents work at c-span, dave in april have both worked at c-span for a long time. >> guest: did you given preference. >> guest: ? >> host: this is from april, she says my son bradley 11 has a question of dr. tyson. here's the question. when going to a different planet, what aspect of traveling

will be most important? >> guest: great question. there's a lot of thinking about this, especially at the johnson space center in houston, nasa's headquarters for sort of the manned space flight. they worry about food. not only is there enough food, but what you like the food? if you get bored with the food will that affect your morale? and then your less effective doing other tasks here do you need comfort food? do you want exotic food, international food? the water supply, is there enough water? do you recycle the water? if you recycle the water that means that collects all of your urine, filter it and then you drink it back. is that too freaky for you to do? water is not uncommon in the universe, but in space it's hard

to get to. you got to lasso a , if you wana whole supply fresh water and we don't know how to do that. other things, the time in close quarters with only one or two or three other people months and months and in some cases years. there's a whole psychological dimension to that. can we remain emotionally stable over those times? on earth people kill one another. another. they get into fights. even in the film interstellar there's an astronaut fight scene which was like more of that. but nonetheless they showed it. of course it's two guys in astronaut suits fighting on an alien planet. so there's that. will they miss their family or their loved ones at home? there's the fact that if you fly without creating artificial gravity, that you are weightless the whole time. are you perpetually motion sick,

or do you get used to it? and if you get used to it, are there any other factors on the body? your body expects one gravity, 1g we call it, which is the equivalent of earths surface gravity. if you go to centrifuge, you can decrease the gravity. but through space it you can create artificial gravity, good. if you can't, what is a like to be weightless for a year en route to your destination, or longer? we already know some of the answers, you begin to lose bone density. you have the bones of a frail, old woman if you keep this up. so have to figure out what exercise will give you the kind of resistance that we live in moving against gravity. i reach for this cup. i have two lifted against against gravity. little things we take for granted are not something that is normal when you're in space. so all these factors have to come together, which is why you

can't just send any old person into space. they have to be healthy, also want them to be competent in performing tasks, engine might want to throw in a medical doctor if your crew is large enough to get something might happen to you physiologically. then you need some engineers, you need the combination of expertise so that the collective safety of the crew is preserved. so all of this matters. there's another book i can recommend by mary roach called packing for mars, where all the little things you got to keep track of it we interviewed her for "star talk" and is a whole section in the "star talk" book which you didn't bring today. >> host: i went through it but it was too heavy to bring. too much gravity. >> guest: i'm sorry, the universe has some weight, all right? we would do this in 0g ex-im and you have no excuse. they can toss the book and it will float in your letter.

so great question, thanks. >> host: mary roach has been on this program. you can go to booktv.org and watch the three hours with author mary roach as well. bernie and new york, you've been very patient. you on with neil degrasse tyson. >> caller: thank you. it's a pleasure to listen to mr. i have a couple of questions. first, does the big bang violate the conservation of energy? could it be that we are going to have a bigger crunch followed by another big bang followed by another big crunch add in for an item? and i would love -- ad infinitum. i would love to see run for congress. senator tyson sounds really good to me, thank you. [laughing] >> host: why have you thought about this big bang? do you work in some kind of scientific field?

>> caller: no, i took physics when i was in school, and the big bang especially is interesting because it's almost a religious question. i think that still possible that you can make the case for the universe to have been here all the time, forever. originally there were something like a steady-state theory, which was abolished by the big bang, but it doesn't seem to preclude the idea that the universe was always here. if the universe was always here, well then, we don't need a creator, do we? iq. >> host: tragic i think i havel record of each one of those in sequence. a couple things. first, all evidence we have ever

obtained in the history of this exercise, since the beginning of cosmology which basically came to us with einstein and edwin hubble and others that supported it, includes a belgian priest even by the name of george lamacchia who was generally considered the father, figuratively, father of the big bang itself. he wrote down equations using einstein theory of gravity to show that we would have a beginning and a past. so all data with ever obtained is unequivocal in its conclusion that we are on a one-way expansion trip, one way. >> host: so no crunch? >> guest: no slow down, stop, and we collapsed. not that it is prohibited by einsteinian gravity or by any other since what the universe

could do. we happen to be in the universe where that is not the case. it's just simple. now, given that it's only on one-way trip, that means we had a beginning, and the entire big bang description takes us from the beginning into the unlimited future. you might then ask him and of putting these words into the questioners mouth but it gets to his of the question, what was around before the beginning? we don't have data for that so we don't know but we have top working people on it. one of the ideas which actually comes naturally out of the extensions of einstein gravity and extensions of quantum physics is that there may have been a multi-verse, and a multi-verse would then preexist our universe where just a public came out of it among a possibly infinite number of other burbles of these or other universes with slightly different laws of

physics manifest within them. so to imagine the universe is always there, not our universe because we had a beginning, but maybe the multi-verse multi-ves there. that's possible, or maybe the multi-verse had a beginning. maybe the multi-verse is one expression of what a metaverse creates. i mean, if there's a metaverse that each has bubbles of multi-verses, these create universes, is anything to prevent that in principle? no. that philosophical trajectory is not fundamental different from thinking earth is it. we are one of eight planets. get over it. it is a demotion. we say what about the sun? of course. it is just one of 100 billion other signs in the milky way.

the milky way, of course. it's one of 100 billion other galaxies. so we have good precedent for recognizing that the universe is really bad at making things in one's, and that may be true even for the universe itself. that they could simply be multiple universes. i think that maven two out of three of his questions. you are keeping notes. >> host: he asked, you know, you talk about this in several of your books, in your talks, is there a religious aspect to the big bang theory? and then have you ever considered running for office. >> guest: the thing is when you use the word religion it comes with certain expectation of what it means. here in the west, most places in the world when you say religion, it involves a document of some kind, a holy document, a holy book that