Name: Theo and Neil deGrasse Tyson Discuss Science Going On in Louisiana
Uploaded: 2023-04-14T00:53:09.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Theo and Neil deGrasse Tyson Discuss Science Going On in Louisiana' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-04-14. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Theo and Neil deGrasse Tyson Discuss Science Going On in Louisiana' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-04-14. Transcript available.

- In our area, they had a thing called LIGO, L-I-G-O.
- Laser Interferometer Gravitational Observatory.
- There's only two of them in the--
- The United States, in Louisiana, and I visited them.
Louisiana and up in Oregon, or Washington, Washington State.
- Yeah, so that was another thing in our area.
So, you know, there was a lot--
- By the way, just to be clear,
that is discovering colliding black holes
in other galaxies across the universe.
- Damn, bro.
- It's a new kind of telescope,
and you got it there in your home state.
- I knew they were up to something.
- Oh, yeah.
- All we heard was that they had gravity hunters out there.
- That's a good way, that's a poetic way to put it.
- So that's what we heard, and so there'd be people like,
if you saw somebody that could dance real good,
you'd say they were like one of those gravity babies,
or whatever, or sometimes people would have parties,
and people would say, oh, you know, we're gonna get so,
and they would live near there, in Livingston Parish,
Louisiana, where that LIGO Center is,
and they'd say, we're gonna get so fucked up,
we can't even feel the gravity.
- Yeah, yeah, there it is, yeah, up on the--
- Wow, zoom in on that, that's crazy.
- Yeah, yeah, so what's going on there,
if your listeners have access to this,
the viewers, so those are two long tubes,
and they send a beam of light from that central building,
simultaneously, the full length of both tubes,
and then there are mirrors at the end of those two,
both tubes, and it reflects back,
and they recombine the light.
And if the light recombines perfectly,
then nothing happened between those two reflections.
But if a gravitational wave washes over Earth and goes through this facility,
one of those beams will be slightly delayed compared to the other.
- They're doing that out there?
- And they can measure it.
- I know people that can't read out there.
- Oh, that's a delay.
And so they're looking for a variation in a fraction of the diameter of a
proton.
And that is a completely evacuated tube that goes up and back.
- So tell me this, so say there's some variation.
What does that tell them, that there's some pull on the Earth?
- Of course, it tells you that the thing actually happened.
Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves.
This discovered them 60, 70 years later, okay?
No, no, more than that.
This was 2000, when was that?
This century, Einstein made the prediction in 1916.
So you're talking basically 100 years.
A century, there's a prediction and then a discovery.
And this is ground truth that our ideas actually match objective reality.
And you want to say, well, how does that put food on your plate?
It doesn't, but it advanced technology in a way that will surely have
applications later on.
Einstein wrote down the first equation in a paper called
"On the Stimulated Emission of Radiation,"
obscure quantum physics paper in the 1920s, late teens.
And why are you doing that?
You're a smart guy.
Why don't you help put food on people's plates?
Do you know what that's the foundation of?
The laser, which would not be built until the 1950s.
And lasers back then were like cost tens of thousands of dollars in their room
size.
Now they're impulse items at Walmart for laser pointers, right?
Oh, yeah.
But lasers are now, you know, barcode, now photos can do it, but in the day,
barcode reading,
laser surgery, LASIK surgery for your eyes, laser cosmetics removal.
So who--
Oh, lasers.
You put a laser on anything and somebody will buy it.
On anything.
I do think Einstein is saying, yes, we're going to have LASIK surgery with this
equation that I wrote.
No, he didn't think that.
Nobody's thinking that.
So the people say, why are we doing this with smart people when the smart
people could be solving the homeless problem?
Because we don't know what the future is going to be.
You don't know what the future is going to be.
Somebody might invent a laser that makes homeless people happy.
Okay.
So you don't know.
What about this, though?
So say that thing picks up some sort of gravitational wave.
What does it mean?
It means that there's a black hole that's kind of sucking on Earth a little?
No, it meant two black holes collided and the collision is quite catastrophic
and it sends a ripple.
It's like tossing a pebble in a pond and you see the ripple go out in all
directions.
Because the pond surface is only two-- it's flat.
In space, this is a ripple that goes through full three dimensions of space.
And it's moving at the speed of light and it washes over Earth at the speed of
light.
And by the way, remember I said, make sure you don't think something that's
true that's not?
You feel what you want to be true rather than what is true.
Suppose you're just a mischievous graduate student and you're in that facility.
Say, I'm going to tweak this and everyone else is going to think they actually
discovered something, okay?
Yeah.
Yeah, all right.
Suppose you're diabolical.
Or you're just a prankster.
Oh, I would do that easily.
Oh, you're just a prankster, all right?
We have built-in protections against that.
Oh, damn.
We have another one.
They got a ring camera or whatever?
We have an entire other LIGO in Washington.
Oh, making sure.
Yes, okay.
So you would have to coordinate with another prankster to do it at the exact
moment, okay?
Whatever, now, okay?
They both made the measurement, but separated by a fraction of a second.
Just what you'd expect.
If the wave came from one direction, continues to wash over Earth, and goes
across and comes out Seattle on the other side of the Earth.
Okay?
That 1,500 miles, whatever that distance is, takes like time to do that.
They were able to measure that precisely.
It was good.
In Louisiana, we had a primate testing facility where they created the polio
vaccine was in our town.
So Tulane University had their primate testing facility in St. Tammany Parish,
Louisiana.
And I remember one time, a bunch of the monkeys had gotten out, right?
And they came and got us out of YMCA summer camps.
The police did the tallest kids to help them.
And so we're out there by like-
Because the monkeys are on the trees, and you got to reach for them?
Or how are you going to get them?
The monkeys are just out.
And they wanted like a chain of people, I guess.
Oh, okay.
And so-
By the way, when the monkeys get out, there's no way.
That's a scary fact, right?
Oh, in hindsight, knowing now what I know about monkeys and chimpanzees, I
think it was a bad idea.
Oh, okay.
But at the time, we didn't know.
So, you know, it was a smaller town then.
And so we're out there just wrangling chimps out by this Kenny Rogers roasters.
He used to have like a-
Kenny Rogers had a chicken establishment for a while.
And they had like kind of rotisserie chicken.
It was pretty good.
Monkeys are running.
Escape monkeys achieved consciousness and intelligence.
I wouldn't be shocked, bro.
That's a Planet of the Apes shit going on.
I would not be shocked, dude.
I've seen some people there that work at some of the gas stations.
Definitely.
They have a banana for lunch.
I'll say that, dude.
There's some interesting folks there.
You know, chimpanzees peel the banana from the bottom.
Do they really?
Yeah.
You know what my friend does?
He breaks the banana in half like that.
If it's unripe, yeah, that'll work.
Yes, that's true.
Otherwise, you got some mashed banana right there.
Hope you enjoyed that video.
And you can watch another.
And you can watch this one.
You can watch this one.
Different options, different choices.
Some guy just brings you one option, not this guy.
Two options.
Watch one.
This one or this one.