to confront them so it's not going to an answer and i think that's hopeful going forward it's hard to argue against the possibility that all of us are not just the creation of some kid in a parent's basement programming up a world. where their own entertaining thoughts do you have a secret town. who could do that. a great fan of put on the next dot of larry king now. to larry king now when beautiful trondheim norway at the star most festival here in this fabulous city and for the third time we welcome the inevitable neil de grasse tyson to the show astrophysicist author of great communicator of science and now the recipient of the stephen hawking medal his newest book the runaway bestseller

is as still physics for people in a hurry and he's surprised at how well the book's doing yeah i think so i'm delighted i should say anything had it showed up anywhere on the bestseller list that's just a triumph for science whether or not i wrote it but for it to show up there and debut at number one on the new york times was with it whoa among all of these sort of political memoirs and there's always typically a sports biography and there it's or or or celebrity tell all and there it is it landed i say maybe there's more of an appetite for science out there than we've admitted to ourselves so we're both here for the storm as festival i spoke couple panels you were on one of the panels honey explain this festival it's a combination of what the stars and jazz and rock the upstart star most as a word is the mash up of stars and music and the organizer of it gary. israelian

he's a fellow astrophysicist by the way but it works in europe he he's good friends with brian may the lead guitarist of queen and i don't you know brian may has a ph d. in astrophysics and this festival is a reminder that perhaps. creativity is not so divided between science and art and in fact i think you could argue strongly that science and art are the greatest expressions of human creativity that civilization has before i'm amazed at the kind of people here when the amazing five and you you got the stephen hawking medal naive interviewed. the national weather service in mount holly new jersey has issued

a severe thunderstorm warning for central berks county in eastern pennsylvania northwestern montgomery county in southeastern pennsylvania southeastern lake county eastern venia western bucks county in southeastern pennsylvania in till seven thirty pm at six twenty nine pm severe thunderstorms were located along a line extending from allentown to near top and moving southeast at twenty miles per hour hazard sixty miles per hour wind gusts and any size hail source radar indicated impact expects damage to trees and power lines locations impacted include allentown west north and east norton emmaus quick your town perkasie bedminster chalfont hatfield greenville dublin still valley green lane pleasant valley and freaks remain alert for a possible tornado tornadoes can develop quickly from severe thunderstorms if you

spot a tornado go at once into the basement or small central room in a sturdy structure for your protection move to an interior room on the lowest floor of a building in addition to large hail and damaging winds frequent cloud to ground lightning is occurring with this storm moved indoors immediately remember if you can hear thunder you are close enough to be struck by lightning repeating a severe thunderstorm warning has been issued until seven thirty pm for the following counties in pennsylvania burke's books in montgomery. unanswered and i think that's hopeful going forward i who enclosed by the fact that the trumpet administration didn't cut the budget for nasa well there were some there was some weirdness in there yes the net the budget was not cut we were delighted to hear that he's a fan of space but there was talk at some point of we'll keep the budget there were a top it off but we have to remove earth science from it and this is it had that

actually had appeared in that as a regional charter back in one thousand nine hundred eighty eight that would study earth as well as the planets in the stars so if you take away earth and earth is the system that supports us our life on earth and our livelihood i don't know what the consequences of that so so you have to watch the was that sheep in clothing had has that expression wolf and bulls will have a city kit meters going i know that you know that one wolf in sheep's clothing so my hope was always with the trumpet ministries he's a he's a businessman business people you expect them to make decisions that are sort of simple and blunt regarding money for example and any good business person knows that you need a healthy flow of money into the r. and d. part of your company to assure survival going and competitiveness going forward so

it seems to me he ought to be responsive to an argument such as by the way investments in science technology engineering and math the stem fields as a nation will help. america inc to thrive and compete in the out years when the fruits of these investments arrive and that's a business state forget the politics you can make that just as a simple business argument and my hope is that some part of him can listen to that you said recently if i and my advisers had never learned what science is or why it works i'd consider pulling out of the pirates climate accords to saying that it was ridiculous to polos of an educator that was a tweet that you reciting there that i'm an educator so when i see people making decisions that seem under informed to me then i say that maybe they didn't learn this in school or no one taught them after school and so if you're going to pull

out of the paris climate accord. it must mean that you don't fully understand the long term consequences of that i'm thinking and if you don't why do we learn those long term consequences from a fluency in science and technology in the causes and effects of things the consequences of your actions and the consequences of your interactions and people hardly ever talk about in action because what is what is a journalist or what did you do and what consequences came from it rarely do they say what didn't you do and what consequences came from that's not a story people don't write about what didn't happen relative to what then happens later so so my sense was that maybe not enough people who were making that decision knew or understood how science works and what it is by the way if they did understand science and still made that decision for me that's actually

a little more understandable to just how we choose not to care but at least be honest and say that because i tend to take the argument in a whole other regime you recently tweeted we all want to make america great again but that won't happen until we first make america smart again. are you saying the trump isn't smart. i don't i don't i don't invest much energy criticizing politicians politicians are the duly elected representatives of a of an electorate that that that put them there so you can say all you want about the politician but there's still the matter of all the people who voted for him and so what so the starter's now you look around in the last few years and you see the rise of peoples our earth is flat or there is no climate change or and i'm thinking something's not clicking out there there's some absence of knowledge and wisdom and insight that can come to you if you as

a minimum understand for example what science is and how and why it works because that is shaping civilization before our eyes so it's so i said that but as an educator. if you're so smart i don't even like the word smart i prefer it made a better tweet but my preferred word would be you can't make america great again until until america. becomes curious again about what we don't know about the unknown when you're curious there's something that not quite why you investigate it and then you find the answer yourself you become a self driven learner that everyone rises up on their own on the wings of curiosity that we all had us children and we have to reinvigorate that as adults and then when someone says something to you that's a little off he said i want to check on that i've been investigated you don't get handed your opinions by others is religion your enemy no no i mean it's there are factions of most religions especially the the monotheistic religions that

that make statements about the physical world in particular you have genesis in the bible for for example and if you want to take genesis as literal truth the. now that we've got a problem with you you you you don't understand the actual universe if you're referencing big political genesis as your understanding of nature but that's not the majority of religious people you have an entire in the white and class of religious people who for whom religion provides their spiritual fulfillment in their spiritual enlightenment in the not referencing their bible the torah the court they're not going back to it to get an answer to their science quiz so that they're drawing a line in the sand. in fact what's the number it's sixty percent of scientists in the united states pray to god pray rice excuse me forty percent

of western scientists and that spread goes below that and above that obviously that's just the average but that's not zero that's my point if it's not zero and you're productive scientists then the answer is there does not have to be conflict between the two because empirically there are people for whom there isn't so that's the answer evil and must and stephen hawking have sounded the alarm on artificial intelligence and still most called super intelligence humanity's greatest threat you agree yeah i'm fearless of ai and i'm an outlier and i recognize this and you might even say well if i studied the problem more deeply i would be as afraid as others perhaps but in my life i've probably written ten thousand lines of computer code i have some street credit in the can just conducting the science that i've done in my life what i can tell you is that when

we imagine these ai's with thinking of some humanoid thing as though the human form is something to emulate. no no if you have a are you going to task ai in very specific ways if you go back to the era of the jetsons here's what they would imagine oh instead of have a you drive a car have your robot drive the car they're not thinking have the car drive the car . so the car then is an expression of ai at some level and so we we parcel the i the hubble telescope is such an expression of ai we program it and it does it they're all worried about the general intelligence ai where it can deduce that make decisions that you never programmed it to make and i think that's a kind of cool thing if it can do that i don't have a problem with it but and if it gets out of line if it judges humans are a virus in this world in need of expert extermination in america

you could just shoot it all out i get unplugged i i mean. this bring it on i'm ready for and on top of that they're suing in some parts of it that ai will achieve consciousness and thereby have be self-driven but we don't even understand our own consciousness. you tell me when create a machine that on its own achieves consciousness when we don't even understand it in ourselves i'm no stop making so much sense until i'm totally chill with with that even still hip thing to say i will write back but guy from the bronx jewish guy from brooklyn i'm sitting here trying to find a way to be right back. to

. back with the start of this festival in trondheim norway if you ever get a chance to come here do so with neil de grasse tyson and the book is astrophysics for people in a hurry and he won the coveted stephen hawking medal a great honor and a great watch goes with oh yeah to him your watch your appetite after what time it is no one does that anymore because everyone has their own i still do what you got i got to watch it i look at why are you surprised at your celebrity i mean i mean

yes yes i'm surprised i'm more intrigued by it that's how i would say it happened slowly enough so that it wasn't one of these overnight things and so here's how you ended up measuring it not how many times you're in the paper or how big is your name in the. i measured it by how many strangers in a day want to come up and get your autograph in the old days today it would be a selfie and started out maybe five a month maybe twenty years ago five a month and then it became. two or three a day and then ten a day and then just so you just watch it go up now it's several hundred a day and for me yes so i was privacy with that but that's self-inflicted right i could just walk away tomorrow or never have done it so i can't say.

the national weather service in mount holly new jersey has been a flash flood warning for northeastern berks county in eastern pennsylvania lehigh county in eastern pennsylvania southwestern northampton county in eastern pennsylvania until ten forty five pm at six forty three pm doppler radar indicated thunderstorms producing heavy rain across the warn area up to two inches of rain have already fallen flash flooding is expected to begin shortly in the areas of heaviest rain some locations that could experience flooding including allentown emmaus northampton kutztown sleet and fort totten want to makers could be town tripoli jordan valley ancient oaks old schneck still klaus still contract saga to play marconi and now with contracts aqua turn around don't drown when encountering

flooded roads most flood deaths occur in vehicles. all scopes and from our laboratories and from our computers and i don't know if i'm biased but it seems to me that the public has a deep curiosity. for what's going on when they look up and hawking contributed and yes so he he made major discoveries related to black holes he basically broke black holes into into a next generation of understanding fact there's a whole there's a kind of energy that is a emanates from a black hole that bears his name as well hawking radiation and if you where in norway i guess they give the peace nobel prize here but the nobel prize it's he's surely done enough work to get a nobel prize you would think yeah he does if he doesn't get i be disappointed but you know what i think i think he's transcended the nobel prize little but same with einstein if you talk about einstein he did this relativity you don't then say did

you know he want to nobel prize and let me get a call matic he actually accomplished at that level so he may transcend all awards he could possibly be given we do a few a few only new questions inside of a little fun who is i enjoy can i i can look silly if i don't get he'll be anything you like ok who would you trade places with for a day oh in every way isaac newton i want to i want to feel how he thinks about the world so i can write i can read what he's written about how he thinks but i want to get inside his head because he was plugged into the operations of nature like no one else do you have a secret talent. you. could do that but. i had a great fan of calligraphy it's a guilty pleasure you have i a i'm a foodie and my wife and i we go to restaurants slightly more expensive than we should be paying just to see if there's

a dish that might reveal itself to us that we would then emulate and i. the national weather service in mount holly new jersey has issued a flash flood warning for north western berks county in eastern pennsylvania until ten forty five pm at six forty seven pm doppler radar indicated thunderstorms producing heavy rain across the warning area up to two inches of rain have already fallen flash flooding is expected to begin shortly in the areas of heaviest rain some locations that could experience flooding including hamburg for at least forty shoemakers. straus down fairview heights and centerport turn around don't drown when encountering flooded roads most flood deaths occur in vehicles.

something you wish you were better at zero i wish i was better at music and i'm a really great listener and i'm a very careful listener and i love music if i could compose music perform use it maybe as a first step km possibly compose it later in another life i would i would be the librettist for broadway musicals. strangers job the other have to for the full package of paying the college tuition they would be a work study program to get a grant and a loan and in there i cleaned dormitory bathrooms for a year and a half and what was a little odd is clean the bathrooms a fellow student. and so that was just one of the schools that was adopted at harvard and then clean bathrooms of here said you know you have a scholarship yes i did well know this guy so i wasn't poor enough to be completely

scholarship covered so if they judge how much money you have in your capacity to pay they say we'll take this much from you and we'll cobble together the rest of the tuition by the rest as i have later learned that they no longer have students cleaning the bathrooms of other students it just creates an awkward dynamic. in your social life and the bed of the town so that's so it's not odd but it was just for for what it was it was a little weird is there something you long believed to be true and then realize wasn't you know did i tell you what was. i thought i could i calculated this i thought it would take nine seconds to cook a pizza on the window sill in the house if you're on the planet venus. because when this is nine hundred degrees fahrenheit take a pizza put in will close the window up he cooks in one second i calculated this the temperature of venus the density of the air and then i find out i was off

there's a physicist turned sheth who said you missed a term in your calculation is the radiative energy from the air itself that just the radiative not just the touching of the pizza but the molecules but photons infrared photons coming in so that way it will heat the pizza in like two seconds instead of nine seconds so i sit down with that if i was i was so sure about and proud of my calculation and i just got out geek in the moment we have many social media questions for you all to go for it. if you got the chance to fly away tomorrow with some aliens to explore the universe is father's corner without the chance of coming back would you go who if i bring my family will just bring the family not come back nope but if i could bring my family and i would stay i love trumps exploration at least for me yolanda law go vandergrift what do you think is the best things we as humans can do to slow down climate change no better reverse

it you know there's a sippy people who thought seriously about this because you're told so many different things paper or plastic electric or car pool or not and and some of that can just be confusing because if your if your heart is in the right place you want to do the right thing and so i don't i didn't have the expertise to compile this but they did forgive me i forgot the name of the book but it is a list a ranking of the things you can do in order so that you can have the maximum effect based on what you or your habits are and from everything i've seen and heard and read. a change of diet can make a huge difference in and eating locally rather than in. you know where does your how far way does your food come from for example be great if we had farms on rooftops oh my gosh if buildings had their own built in farms. systems imagine. transportation would be not wouldn't be necessary that's one of

the biggest consumers the biggest carbon footprints out there is transportation for commerce and half the congress is in on your roof food you got it you have a go indo why don't you run for congress we need people like you and thank you for that a for me the issue is not how scientifically literate your congress person is it's how scientifically literate is the electorate if you get a scientifically literate electorate i think it would be impossible for them to put someone in congress who is not also that and once you do that you can transform a country overnight altos ninety nine like mr musk things are we living in simulation i find it hard to argue against that possibility meaning meaning if you look at our computing power today and you say i

have the power to program a world inside of a computer well imagine in the future where you have even more power than that you can create characters that have for example freewill or their own perception of free will so this is a world and i program in the laws that govern that world that world will have its own laws of physics and chemistry and biology now your character in that world and you think you have free will is a i want invent a computer so you do hey i want to create a world in my computer and then that world creates a world in its computer and then you have simulations all the way down. so now you lay out all these universes and throw a dart which of these universes are you most likely to hit the original one that started it or the countless simulations the daughter simulations that unfolded there after you're going to hit is simply going to hit one of the simulations so statistically based on that argument which first appeared by a philosopher from oxford named nick both streamed back in the one nine hundred

ninety s. right we computers were coming real enough to think this through. it. it's hard to argue against the possibility that all of us are not just the creation of some kid in a parent's basement programming up a world for their own entertainment and then every time something weird happens in the world. some disruptive leader takes charge and i wonder if that programmers just got bored and had to stir the pot so they throw somebody in there just to just to for their own entertainment for me that's some of the best evidence that we can live in a simulation because this happens every time there's peace and tranquility in the world but if it's true what can we do about it it's like the truman movie was that it didn't we're in now well he can try to escape by go in the truman movie to go through the barrier but yeah if you're if you were programmed by somebody yeah you know there's nothing you can do what difference does it make if i'm programmed by

someone i guess is i don't know what i guess it doesn't make any difference at all on the ally would i would if i could go one place i would go in like to be in your mind for one day. just to think about the things you think about them one do about the nose ok i think you're i'm flattered but before this interview we spent some time together you know last night over dinner and i did have a really spent that much quality time with you you are as curious a person as there ever has been in this world and to be curious you have to also be open to learning something new which you have been and are and all i am is a curious kid who happens to occupy an adult body and when you do that you're a scientist so you're an honorary scientist based on your curiosity alone i have one file i asked stephen hawking what is something he doesn't know about and he said women. why this is the greatest question mankind has never answered

that neil tyson can answer maybe why does peanut but it goes so well with jelly. yeah i think i think about as astrophysics you know know so i thought about this long sure you have long ago long ago and i think what we have found is that. in a traditional sense is that we think of a taste yes or sweet sour salty and now we have the fifth one mommy all right which is which transcends the other four you want to keep it simple brooklyn simple writers you know by the go so well with joe because peanut butter salty and jelly sweet and each of those titillate us we need salt to live we need we need which has high calorie content and it's a survival mechanism to be attracted to those two features this is why we like peanut butter and jelly that is the meaning of life i guess has been the deal de grasse tyson whose book is as still physics for people enough how they were both in

trondheim norway believe in thanks for joining. us. just for that you're watching. us.

hello i'm tom hartman in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture it looks like they're finally figuring out their message problem so why does it seem like democrats are missing a big opportunity to send the republicans acting once and for all as richard asco just a moment.