Cosmic Queries – Pure Spacetime

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (0:00)
Paul, that was a good set of questions. Oh my gosh.

**Paul Mecurio** (0:03)
It's amazing. We learned a lot about sponges and webs and all sorts of things.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (0:09)
I think. Coming up, another installment of Cosmic Queries Grab Bag Edition. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.
This is StarTalk, Cosmic Queries edition. This time, I got Paul Mecurio. Paul, welcome back, dude.

**Paul Mecurio** (0:40)
Hi. Good to see you again, Neil. How are you, buddy?

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (0:43)
All right. Paul, at some point, somebody christened you Baron, Paul Mecurio.

**Paul Mecurio** (0:49)
That is true. We had a ceremony, which was quite lovely in your office.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (0:55)
If you remember, did we use my Excalibur store?

**Paul Mecurio** (0:59)
Yes, we did the whole thing. Yeah. For some reason, there's no red carpet here.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (1:04)
But you still have your traveling show, Permission to Speak?

**Paul Mecurio** (1:08)
I do. Yeah.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (1:09)
It's a theater show, right?

**Paul Mecurio** (1:11)
It's a wagon and I sell medicines. I'm a medicine man now because I'm going to be out of a job at the late show. So yes, touring with that. I've got my podcast Inside Out with Paul Mecurio because it's the law, and everyone's supposed to have a podcast now.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (1:26)
You've been in the biz a while.

**Paul Mecurio** (1:29)
Yeah. I go back to the Daily Show and one of the original guys on that.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (1:35)
Even predating John Stewart.

**Paul Mecurio** (1:38)
John Stewart, that tiny little man. Yes.
He's only this big. A lot of people don't know. The cameras are amazing. That we would have. Yes. With Craig Kilbourne and then Louis Black was on. And we would have all this crazy fun. And nobody knew what they were doing. But they were letting us. We were like, you know, you would appreciate this. We were like in the in the lab. Just they just said, just go make it and blow things up. And then we'd get yelled at by the president of the network every once in a while because we went too far. He would literally yell at you like your father would yell at you like they couldn't. Why did you think that could be OK on TV? And he's like screaming at you.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (2:19)
We got to grab bag this session.

**Paul Mecurio** (2:21)
So that means some great questions, by the way, some really good questions.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (2:25)
Whatever subjects just sort of landed in your lap. And these are questions asked by our Patreon members.

**Paul Mecurio** (2:31)
And whatever I do these, I'm always and this isn't praise, like you're the fans of our show, just how smart they are about this stuff. Like they did the really great questions.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (2:41)
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, oh my gosh, we should be handing out degrees at the end of it.

**Paul Mecurio** (2:45)
Except for this first guy. This first guy is an idiot. No, I'm just kidding. No.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (2:51)
Okay, so what you got for me?

**Paul Mecurio** (2:52)
This is Farouk from Uzbekistan writing from Norwich, UK. It's my favorite movie interstellar. After I've seen your interview with Kip Thorne, there's something that bothers me now.
When they were on Miller's planet with giant water waves next to the black hole being immensely time dilated relative to one of their crew that remained behind on the ship and aged faster, what if they had telescopes and looked through the windows of the ship at their crewmate aging years for their minutes? Wouldn't they be able to see the faster passage of time or what would it have looked like? Or is light itself affected and won't allow this to happen?

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (3:39)
So if you had a telescope and looked down at them near the surface of the black hole, everything would be going in slow motion?

**Paul Mecurio** (3:45)
I understand, but it's also kind of insensitive listening to them looking through the telescope. Hey guys, look at this! Look at, he's aging so fast, he just took out a reverse mortgage on his house. Like what?

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (3:57)
He's turning gray while we watch it.

**Paul Mecurio** (4:02)
I just had a sandwich and during that time he's been divorced three times and he doesn't have any visitation rights.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (4:09)
They would look down and see them moving slowly. And when you're near a black hole, you see the rest of the universe unfold in rapid speed. And so, yeah, there's nothing special about the light that happens. It arrives to you at a different pace depending on how deep into a gravitational well you are. And the reason why that orbit was chosen to be very close to the black hole, it was to maximize the time dilation. It's called time dilation when you create this difference in the rate of time. By the way, that exists for our GPS satellites.