Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair experts on expert on expert on Dan Shepherd, I'm joined by Minister Mouse. Hi. Hi, we have an expert today in keeping with Thursdays mean experts. We've scrounged one up.
We haven't changed it. He's a very famous expert. Very. He's the face of astrophysics.
Physics physics. I have a face of rational physics. Neil deGrasse Tyson. Yeah.
Yeah. Biggie. Take it in. Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist, best-selling author and director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History.
He has a podcast that's out currently called Star Talk Radio, Science, Pop Culture and Comedy Collide in Star Talk. Radio. He also has a new book out now called Starry Messenger Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization. He's a wordsmith.
He does a little poetry. He does. Yes. He does.
He has his own to do. It was a it was a real hoot getting to meet this legendary astrophysicist. Please enjoy Neil deGrasse Tyson. He's an object.
It was T-Rex Phil here. Very nice. Yeah. Oh, many of your eyes.
We only knew the whole. We're hoping for a real one at some point. Yeah. So that's kind of a wishful film.
It's actually if you get in beef up, then you can't play the geeky roles. I'm done acting. So no problem. Really?
Yes. Yes. Oh, no. Well, I would never say never got no.
Of course. Yeah. Point Tarantino calls me in 10 years. I'll be there, but I do this.
I love it more than anything. And I don't have to put makeup on ever again. Yeah. Cool.
Yeah. Cool. Also, he was never playing geeky roles. It's some stupid roles.
Imagine him beefed up in Iraq. See, that wouldn't work. You already had Terry Crews as the president. Another example.
You can't be a comedian and be especially handsome or especially beautiful. Unless you're black. That's true. That's true.
This is the great debate in comedy. That's an interesting fact. Yeah, because Eddie Murphy was sexiest in the leather suit. Right.
You're doing the type of pants. You're just standing up for Team Ever. Will Smith, very funny, very hilarious. Right.
Martin Lawrence, Dylan Shape. She's a positive. Black dude can do it. Yeah.
Oh, you know why? If you're really beautiful and privileged, how could you make a joke about anything? Yeah. That's right.
If you're black, everyone knows you're still oppressed. Yes. It's true. Even if you're right.
Yeah. And so there's a room between you and the comedic landscape to make things happen. Because you're still able to have objective observations about the world. Correct.
Rather than completely deluded because you're handsome or beautiful. Yeah, you're the recipient of all benefits. Exactly. OK.
You don't even know what a thick and deep conversation you just stepped into. And some examples. Well, I know you're a pop culture phenom. So I've even been told I got in shape for a movie like 15 years ago, right into Adam Sandler.
And he said, buddy, well, you can't do this. Well, you can't get in shape. Joe Pesci. We've got a canary in the coal mine.
Joe Pesci got jacked. As did Carrot Top. Yes, yes, Carrot Top. Immortantly ripped.
Do you know Joe Pesci's story, though? It's a really sad one. Did he get cancer or something? And he wanted to get back in shape?
He got beat up on the street as an adult man and was really humiliated by the experience. Joe Piscopo. It's not Joe Pesci. Joe Pesci is the first thing.
He wasn't saying it wrong. But actually, we got his mafia friend. He's going to take care of that. Joe Piscopo.
And then he was in Bailey's commercials. You remember that? Yes, yes. So that really kind of took him out of the comedy world.
That's the evidence. I said to Adam, I still have this point of view. You can only be yourself. I'm someone who like lifting weights always.
My point of view is me. I can't pretend I don't like being in shape because it fits the archetype of a white comedian. I feel like that's a little crazy. You would have thought this is the most sideline conversation.
But it actually pertains to you in a way that is among the most interesting things I think about you. Is that an astrophysicist, a scientist, is not supposed to be the captain of a wrestling team. Oh, yeah. These two things don't go together.
Right. That's captain undefeated. So if anyone should understand my feelings, I'm like, wait, wait. Yes, I'm going to be whatever I'm interested in at all times.
I'm authentically what I am. Yes. And I can't be anything else. He was simultaneously the captain of the wrestling team and the editor of the science paper.
I read that. It was mixed messages. Isn't it really like this message? Well, I can tell you this.
I can't speak for girls in school, but boys in school with fed images of superheroes and was Charles Atlas, someone kicks sand in your face. So there was this idea that you want to be big and strong. And ideally, be a superhero. Yeah.
And so I asked myself if I was superhero, what would I be? And I would be a defender of the geeks. Oh, wow. Yes.
Because I've studied martial arts and wrestling. And I was bigger than your average kid of my age. So I knew I can kick ass. Yeah.
But I was deeply geeked. I carried slide rules. Let me just put my pro track. I'm going to fuck her in the future.
I'll check her out. I'll teach her a lesson. I'll pro track her in my pocket. I'll put down my trick count for one second.
So I'm old enough to remember slide rules transitioning to calculators. And I went to a geeky high school, the Bronx High School of Science, which boasts eight Nobel words. Get the fuck off. Wow.
As many as the country of Spain. Oh, my God. Can you hit us with a couple of these stand up ones? Steve Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow shared the Nobel Prize.
They would classmates. Their theoretical model merged the weak nuclear force and electromagnetism. And it became the electroweak force. You might have heard or that there are four forces of nature.
Tell us. OK. So four forces of nature, gravity, the strong nuclear force, which operates inside of atoms, like charges repel, right? Yeah.
Well, what's crammed inside of the nucleus of an atom? They're all protons. Yeah. We'll have positive charge.
What's keeping them together? Did you ever ask this? No. So the first thing that we have to do is take the first force takes over.
And it's got to be a really strong force in the nucleus. It's called the strong nuclear force. Oh, wow. That's literally the official name.
It's something called the weak nuclear force, which mitigates and moderates particle decay. So part of one thing that turns into another, there's a weak force involved. And then there's the electromagnetic force, which is the most familiar to us. And that's light molecules attached.
We are held together by electromagnetic forces. And when our body creates energy, we're harvesting the energy with held in the bonds. Yes. Yes.
The man. He knows a lot. I'm trying to slow roll this. The man.
I'll be co-authoring a paper by the end of this. OK. So we're going to be able to make a molecule that's going to be used to be a plant or an animal. And that goes in your body and your body knows how to exploit the energy of that molecule so that you can maintain your body temperature at 98 degrees and you can move and do things.
That's why I don't want to be cremated when I die. Because they'll have killed all your energy. Well, what will happen if you're cremated? They burn your body and all the molecules that you spent your lifetime building off of killing other living things, they all now get broken.
That's what burning means. You're releasing the energy contained in those molecules and that energy goes out into space. However, the energy those molecules is now available to flora and fauna to dine upon my body in death the way I have dined upon them in life. OK.
But now we have to look at it from another angle, which is you're a large man. We just saw each other were a comparable height. You're going to take up a big chunk of real estate. Well, until I'm completely decomposed.
Right. I'm just saying we get into another ecological issue if all seven billion of us want to return to the earth. I did the math on that. Oh, wow.
So if I remember the calculation correctly, I asked myself how much area would be taken up if every human being who ever lived had an existing plot. Can I guess it's 18 square feet? It's not very much. It's about the area of Pennsylvania.
So probably about 78 billion square feet. Three feet wide and six feet tall. So that's 18 square feet. Right there.
And it's a hundred billion. Yeah. And square feet going into square miles. You can bury everyone who's ever lived in the state of Pennsylvania and the whole rest of the world is still available.
What's the annex? We could also stack. That works too. And people do that in family plots.
So I'm not telling other people they should do it. But for me, you can only exist by killing other living things. I want to return the favor. We don't photosynthesize like plants.
We have to eat dead things. And so I just want to get back. Now, that being said, I got a notice from a funeral home. Saying, would I mind writing something on the webpage wall?
It was a 12 year old girl. Oh. Was killed by a school bus that rolled over her. It turns out she was a fan of astrophysics.
And one of her favorite books was a book I had written. It was an astrophysics for young people in a hurry. They cremated her in the casket with a copy of my book. Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah. So I said, I'll see what I can do. I wrote something. I'm busy.
No, no, no. I took me a while to think of what to say. And then she was cremated. So in spite of all that I would say for myself, the fact is, it's the family's choice.
She's cremated. So what can I do with this information? Others have written about this. The title of this article is, Neeler Grasse Tyson Gives Mother of an 11 year old, her first smile, since she was tragically killed in Colorado.
Here it is. The curiosity of children famously knows no bounds around the house, the backyard, the neighborhood, any new place. But when that curiosity includes the universe itself, you're in the presence of someone poised to change the world. To lose Annalise at age 11, brimming with so much cosmic ambition, will forever leave me wondering what she might have done.
What she might have accomplished as a grown up kid. Grown up kids are scientists and anybody else who retains their childhood curiosity into adulthood. Of course, we will never know the answer to that question. But we do know the physics of cremation, the energy content of her body itself reduced to ash, actually enters Earth's atmosphere.
It ultimately escapes to space in the form of infrared energy, radiating in all directions at the speed of light, filling the voids of the cosmos with her presence. At the moment I write this, Annalise's energy has extended a half trillion miles into space, more than 100 times the distance to Pluto. Though she will live in collective memories for all our lives, in the universe, she lives for all eternity, respectfully submitted. That's fantastic.
That is. That's what it means to burn. You're releasing energy. There are objects, things that have no molecules that have energy, and so you can't burn like a lump of iron.
It's just hot, but it doesn't turn to ash. Burnt toast, doesn't burn. Because you've broken all the molecules. And when you burn organic substances, as you know from sci-fi, we are carbon-based life.
Carbon in its base form is black. When you burn something, you break all the carbon bonds, and what's left is the carbon. So that's why when you burn something, it turns black. And then what's really fascinating, and we'll just jump right to that, as stars go through their many cycles of burning elements, some stars are burning carbon.
Yeah, we use the word burn, but it's really thermonuclear fusion. Right. Carbon molecules are fusing, and they're creating when they explode humongous diamonds, isn't that true? Oh, there's some examples on high pressure and temperature, because carbon is all over the universe.
There's not some accident of chemistry that we have carbon as our base element here. So ours is burning hydrogen. Unfortunately, we use the word burning. That's a chemist's word for breaking apart the molecules and oxidizing things.
We say burning, but we don't mean burning. We mean fusion. But our son is converting hydrogen to helium, and later on helium into carbon, it's going to stop there. Right, and then the mass of it is so enormous, right?
And the gravity is so intense on it that it starts compressing the carbon. Yeah, so some stars are like huge diamonds. Wow, that's pretty wild. When you were in wrestling, were you acting like you weren't a big science nerd, or were you totally embracing all of it at once?
So I started wrestling in the Bronx High School of Science. So it's okay, but at the time I was there, it's like a regular high school, with all of the clicks, and with the jocks and the geeks, but it shifted to the geek part of the spectrum. Right. So the jocks are geeks.
Right. The geeks are extra geek. Right. But you still have the jocks and geeks.
So I was both. I was very geeky and very jockey. That was still uncommon in that space. Right.
What weight were you wrestling at? So at the time, 177? That's a big class. There are two classes above that.
When I went to college, I wrestled 190. It's very good incentive to stay at 190, because the next category is unlimited. Oh, God. And then you're wrestling band seven.
Yeah, exactly. So you don't want to be a 395 wrestling at 300 pound. Right. You lose those four pounds.
Although it seems like the optimal, there is diminished returns, right? And it's 260 seems like the cap weight. I think you're noticing that. I think about this all the time.
You ask, what is the weight class where up until then you're stronger and you haven't lost any speed or agility? Yeah. And I would put it in the 165 category. I would.
The 165? Yeah. I would say for heavy weights, it seems to be 265 beyond that. They start to drop.
No, I know it is dropping sooner than that. So when you start getting heavier than 165, you're not moving as fast, but you're doing other kinds of moves that are sort of muscle moves. And you get a little more lumberry. My great advantage was I had the reflexes and the flexibility of someone much lighter.
I just also danced. I did things and I stayed stretched and I studied martial arts where you can't do that. I was in the arts where you can't just walk around and bulked up. Your body has to do things and perform.
Dancing, you also have to be graceful. So I was a performing member of three different dance companies at college and into graduate school. So it wasn't the bullshoe. I'm very excited.
What about acapella? In the shower, I'm carrying holes in the air. Outside, it doesn't really work out. Were you having a hard time meeting the 177?
No, no, no, I was naturally at that. You didn't have to put on the trash bag instead of saun or any of the polon. The trash bag, you sweat more within it. The humidity goes up.
Your body sweats even more. And your temperature is not falling because it's not evaporating off of you. Exactly. So you have to monitor that.
You're already in shape, but I could drop 10 pounds in an afternoon. If I needed to, I wanted to. We look at these boxers. They're on the way in the ging, 10% of their weight back in two days.
Yeah, exactly. Same with MMA when they do the way category. Being a junk or a geek interfere with my social mobility. I would say I grew up in the Bronx, not in an especially tough part of the Bronx, but still there were tough kids there.
And my athletic abilities definitely gave me advantage. So that would not be ridicule older. Can I answer what the ethnic breakdown was of your neighborhood, and this is like in the late 70s, early 80s? Late 60s, early 70s.
We were in 68. 58. Full decade off. I bet you could still pin me quickly.
Only because I know how to. I could do that because I know physics. Not people. Also, you probably still have.
How do you know what you look like now? I would imagine. We post a lot of pictures. My uncle was a state champ wrestler, and his great preoccupation in life was hand strength, because apparently hand strength is the most vital thing for a wrestler.
It works. So I used to squeeze bathroom scales and measure the poundages on it. And I wanted to make sure that I could squeeze at least my weights. Oh.
You should try it. Yeah. It's I got it to probably 250 pounds. Oh my God.
That means I can grab someone who's 250 pounds and just pull them. It'll be hard for them to break. My uncle lived with tennis balls and his hands. And if you shook your hand, he wanted you to break it in the shred.
Yeah. So there were two things. There was the neighborhood, but then there's the people who hung out in the park. And so the basketball courts were a little more diverse than the neighborhood itself.
My earliest memories were the East Bronx, Castle Hill housing projects. And by the time I was in kindergarten, my father's income rose above that level. He's working for the mayor yet? Yeah.
He was still in school at the time in graduate school. Yes, he was. And he actually got a degree teachers college at Columbia. But when that happened, then he got a job at income and then we moved to Riverdale, which is a fancy, fancy part of the Bronx.
Okay. Yeah. That's such a place in the Bronx. It's the fancy part of the Bronx.
Yeah. The crown jeweled the Bronx. Right. But the playground had kids who were tough and kids who were truants and kids who did drugs.
So if you wanted to have income standing in the neighborhood, you had to know how to run fast, defend yourself, get to be quick. And the real measure for me was if you're waiting to be chosen in a pickup game of five on five basketball, what number are you picked? I would never be captain, but I would be picked anywhere between four and six. Okay.
Real Mid Lane. That's great. In the Bronx? Yeah.
In the Bronx. Yeah. So the Bronx basketball was my base level thing. We spent a year in Massachusetts.
My father was a fellow up at Harvard and we lived in Lexington, Massachusetts with like a house and a backyard and like a tree. This is our tree. But then I had to shovel snow and rake leaves. All this.
I had to do this. All right. I went to the park and I start playing basketball with these Lexington kids. So someone gets the ball and is ready to shoot.
Really quick. Is it my stereotype of Boston? Yeah. That's what it is.
I'm the one black kid in a hundred square miles. Yeah. So I jumped to block the shot only to discover that I ended up blocking the shot with my elbow. Oh my God.
Because you're so much taller. I jumped two feet higher than was necessary to block this. Yeah. I'm not a drunk anymore.
You can put it neutral for a little bit. I was shocked by that. Yeah. That here I am kind of average in the Bronx.
Yeah. And now I'm Mr. Amazing. But I can imagine that being in the Bronx.
We say right. Don't Bronx. I'm not going to say. I don't do church first.
You're a truck. So I'm in the Bronx. Look at this can of worms. I see this fucking guys about one seventy seventy six tree.
He's good. He's good. I find out this fucking nerds also a fucking wrestler. So I'm like let's see what this guy's got.
Okay. I can imagine being in the middle is an advantage even to being the best or the worst. The middle child? No, no, no.
You're getting picked four through six. Good point. So I have a story. Yeah.
So in college I got recruited to row. I would say big growing school didn't row in the Bronx or anything. This would be a completely new sport for me. But the coaches they're looking at the freshmen come in and they totally come and try out.
And they have some gold in ergometer. It's a growing machine that accurately measures your energy output. So they put everyone through this. They show you how to do a perfect stroke.
And I got the highest erg score in ten years. Wow. I said what? I was in awesome shape from wrestling.
There's nothing like wrestling shape. And I'd stand up. So I'd show up here and I wrote and I said I want to be the best rower. What?
And so I wrote for a little bit. By the way the camaraderie was fun. So I said I'm going to return to wrestling. And the coach said growing as a sport of gods in the Ivy League.
And if you roll on the shores they'll be cheering you the whole length of the race. And men will come up to you after with their business car and say join my firm. Whereas wrestling was not as big a sport. And so there'd be a few hundred people in the sands rather than thousands of people lining the Charles River.
And I said I'd rather wrestle because I can still grow. Here's a saying that comes to me via my sister who used to work for Dell the computer company and Michael Dell had a saying. He said if you find yourself to be the smartest person in the room change rooms. Easily said.
Yeah. He's going to eventually run out of room. Like where's Eric Lander going to go? I only hang out.
You know. I guess he's at it. Also philosophical. It's got a really good.
So I liked the sport. I like losing to people better than I was so that I could always improve on what that was. Yeah. I still wrote as a fun sport but my heart remained in wrestling.
And so I wrestled for four years. Okay. So that's your story about it. I got the explanation.
And by the way I don't think I've ever spent that much time talking about non-astro-physical subjects ever in a pocket. Well guess what? The reason people listen to the show is they know everything about Mandaman. They want to hear the stuff they haven't heard about Mandaman.
I saw you got a poster of him in your shot. Oh yeah. He's a man. Oh yeah.
So Mandaman. So is it just me? Why do I think that Matt Damon is way more convincing playing any acting role than he is being himself? No.
Yes. As himself is like what is it? I don't know what he is. But what he's acting is like hey that's good.
Hey. No he's just normal. He's perfect. I'm observing.
I thought you were going to make a different point. He's in his acting roles that being himself is not. You think it's boring. I don't know what he says himself.
No I think movies are about exceptional people. He's just a human being. He did go to Harvard and Dink Dink. I thought you were going to make the point.
Why is he more convincing as a scientist than you are as an actual scientist? Now that was your point. You're making me think. I literally thought it's where you were going to go.
Like I can imagine you watching the Martian going like this guy knows he's shit. You're more than I do. I know. He always got pulled out off well.
All right. Cap on wrestling. So further your point about all roads lead to wrestling. So I just wanted to confirm.
Okay. Now I heard your story about why you were interested in going back to wrestling because there was room for improvement. I'm liable to believe that's some percentage of it. But my guess is more that you're just not a team sport person as much as you are an independent pursuer of things.
No, that's not true. I value human contact and human interaction and to be able to have to depend on someone else. And that's at a pinnacle in rowing because every single stroke every single person has to be moving in exactly the same way. Otherwise the boat goes out of synchrony.
Then I'll volunteer as someone who doesn't like team stuff and I'll tell you why. I'm super competitive with myself and it's really almost impossible to break yourself out of the system to evaluate yourself and to be bettering yourself. It's hard. It's better when someone else is right there.
Yes. There are many variables on a rowing team. I don't know how many people are on the skull. Oh, okay.
The big one is eight. I wrote eight. What's that boat called? These are sweeps where both hands are on one.
The work canoes, you know, like Charlie Heston in whatever those old movies were. Right. Okay. So there's a bunch of guys on the boat.
So when you're evaluating yourself post event, it's really hard to know what you did. Don't you think if you're somebody who's constantly monitoring their own growth, once you put yourself in that situation, it's nearly impossible to do that. It is. But you can still measure yourself on the machines that they have at our metrics.
And there's something called seat racing where you row in a four person boat. The coach will do this and you race against another four person boat. And then they take two rowers and swap them and see what effect that has on the times. I'm interested.
You do this enough times. You can isolate who's making the difference in the boat and who isn't. And then they assemble their boats based on this. Okay.
I'm in poke a hole. Yeah, right. She's a two time state champion as a cheerleader. So team spot.
People had to catch you. Oh, yeah. I was a flyer. Right.
Yeah, trust, lots of trust and physics. That's right. I think it's ego to come at it as an individual sport is a bigger achievement. That's not really what you said, but I think it's a far harder achievement for 20 people to come together perfectly.
Right. To have synchronization with an individual great performances is the ultimate symphony of achievement. I agree with you. I was saying my own visualization is that if I take a jog today and then I jog tomorrow, tomorrow I have to jog even if it's one foot further.
It's my nature. We're faster. Whatever the metric is I'm trying to better. Yeah.
And so if I'm anything team, it's very hard to set those little tiny goals. I still think it requires everyone to be at their very best. But he has in control of everyone else. That's a problem.
But that's why I'm saying that the ego is involved. Exactly. I think there's a lot of things. Yes.
You have to share glory. You also get to share defeat, which is a little easier. That's why I love improv. I can handle it.
But there's definitely ego motivation. But the thing that specifically frustrates me is I don't know if I'm improving and I'm in a contest with DAX. I have been since day one. I'm only comparing myself to yesterday's DAX, not you, Neil.
So if you have that disposition, I can see being drawn to. No, I don't think I have that. You don't have that position, right? But it's good to improve.
Whatever you're doing, do it with intensity. Otherwise, go home. What's the point? And by the way, in wrestling, if I'd lost because I got beat and it's like, man, that was good.
I was never resentful because I didn't value winning as much as I value just simply getting better. If I happened to win along the way, that was fine. I was just defeated in high school, but he'd go to college. And then that's when I first met corn fed wrestlers.
These are people on the farm. Six generations. Who had been hauling calves out of the barn. They weren't going to science school.
I think they did. But wrestling them, it was clear that I had way more to go compared to where I was. And I delighted in that. I had no such hesitation to pursue it.
Okay. So father was a sociologist who ended up working for the mayor of New York City for a while. Mother had a degree in gerontology. Yeah, only after we were empty now.
So they had a pact when they got married. This was a 50s wedding that she would be housewife, raise the kids, he would continue his education, and then move on to whatever job would come of that. And when we were emptiness, she would go back to school so that we'd come home. We would not be latchkey kids.
Come home to a mother. They ran that clockwork. Not entirely emptiness. I was a junior in high school.
My sister was four years younger. So I was there when she got home and I cooked dinner and things. She went back to school, got an undergraduate degree, and then a graduate degree in gerontology. And then up working for the feds for the health and human services, administering programs to homeless shelters and homes for aging people.
So they were very into improving the condition of life on earth. And on their son and the universe, that formed a very important progressive social anchor for me and what I care about. Your mother is from Puerto Rico? She was born in New York City.
Both parents were from Puerto Rico. Is she first generation? Both of them were first generation born in the United States. Oh, both were.
But their parents came from elsewhere. Yes. And are they the first college graduates? In the family, yes.
My grandmother had sixth grade education. This is the total American dream. I have to say, with all of the fits and starts and struggles, the racism and all the rest of this, if you just weigh the total arc, yes, there's an American dreaming going on here. Yeah, a bachelor's degree, a master's, then come to you.
Yes, a PhD. A PhD. A 21 honorary doctorates. Yeah.
So it's a complete progression there entirely. Okay. You go to the Hayden Planetarium at a young age. You become obsessed with astronomy.
Well, the universe called me, I think. I have no other way to explain it because it was an early relationship, like from age nine. I could never go outside and not look up. That was the siren call.
What is that object over there? And how far away is it? And what's it made of? I want to know more.
Let me get binoculars and we get a camera to document it. And this was an ascent that continued ever since. And by the time he is 15, he's lecturing. I gave my first public talk at a university, actually.
I just come back from an astronomy camp. Oh, well, this is APEX. This is, this is, oh, no. astronomy camp.
So, yeah, when I was 14, I went for a month into the Mojave Desert of Southern California, lived nocturnally. Oh, my God. Well, how's your name? The Planetarium.
Yeah, you're right. The Sun of a lunar cycle was also built into this nocturnally living because when the moon is out, the night sky sucks. It drops from thousands of stars visible to the unaided eye to a few hundred. I just went to Sedona last week with the sole intention of looking at the stars for the stars for the stars are so spectacular there.
And of course, I did not take the time to see what's happening with the moon. Yeah, there's a full moon. Yeah, totally sucks. At that time, I didn't caught that.
I did not. I just call now that we're diving. I can look you up. You're like, I'm group alert lunar eclipse tonight.
Wait, so just because the light's so bright. Yeah, so the full moon drowns out the light of the night sky. The moonlight as it penetrates through the atmosphere, the atmosphere scatters the moonlight and creates a glow of the atmosphere, not very different except much dimmer from the fact that we have a blue sky in the daytime. You think the sky is just naturally blue.
If we didn't have an atmosphere, it would be pitch black with the sun in the sky. Yeah. Okay, so it's because we have an atmosphere and atmosphere scatters sunlight. We're stealing light from the sun, creating a self-luminous canopy above you, which you call the daytime sky.
The same thing happens at night and that prevents you from seeing dim objects. My old point is, at this camp, during full moon, we went on trips. That's when I went to see the Grand Canyon and Meteor Crater in Arizona. And that was the occasion to not try to get through the moonlight, but let's do other culturally scientifically interesting things.
This is going to be my second time. I tried to impress you. I've kept myself at four. After theocracy, you don't have to impress you.
Okay. Plus, I caught you on bringing. Oh, okay. Back to the atmosphere and the sky being blue.
So specifically, the sun is emanating the full spectrum of light. Yes, it is. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, roigibid. And blue has a wavelength of about 4,500 Angstroms.
And it just so happens that wavelength collides with the material the atmosphere is made out of. And the longer wavelengths, red, anything beyond blue, is passing gracefully through it. Correct. And so the particles in the atmosphere, there's a lot of things that would then interact with that wavelength.
If you are a particle approximately the size of the wavelength, the particle wavelength will have an encounter and the particle will scatter. It will redirect it. That's why the sun that you see actually had a little bit of blue removed from it. It's scattered into like a sunset.
The atmosphere. Oh, gee. So when the sun is at its highest point in the sky, how much atmosphere is going through? There's a thickness that's the least that it would pass through.
As it gets lower in the sky, the path length through the air gets longer and longer until it's on the horizon coming down directly vertical through the atmosphere. It's not traveling horizontally. It's horizontally through. And on the horizon, it's going 50 atmospheric thicknesses worth of air.
So whatever it was doing in the daytime is magnified at sunset, which is why the sky gets even bluer. And then ultimately red. It gets red if you have like California fires. Okay.
The more blue you take out of the sun, the red or the sun gets, which is why the sun set. The sun itself is a deep amber or deep red or yellow. And that's why people think the sun is yellow because you're not looking at it in the broad daylight. You're looking at it as a set on Santa Monica.
It's pure white light. But you're taking it away enough blue. It's going to look yellow. So we have a yellow star.
No, we don't. It's white. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Stay tuned for more armature expert. If you dare. Okay.
Additionally, what I think is completely impossible and you and I share similar thoughts on whether or not there's some grand being or constraining all this. Both of us do not think so. Yet certain things happen that are quite impossible for one to comprehend. One of those being you get the attention of Carl Sagan at a young age.
This is in your life story. This doesn't happen. Right? This is a simulation moment.