Chapter 1: What is the grab bag concept in cosmic queries?
Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition. I got Chuck Nice, my co-host.
Chuck. Hey, Neil. What's happening?
Chuck, this is a grab bag.
It is indeed. We used to call it the Cosmic Potpourri. We used to call it Cosmic Gumbo, which was my favorite. Galactic, not Cosmic.
Galactic Gumbo, of course. Galactic Gumbo was my favorite.
You guys get that alliteration. But now we have a grab bag, which... It makes me wonder, where does that come from, grab bag? You know it means just like an assortment of pretty much miscellaneous items.
Yeah, yes, the presents in the holiday season where you reach in and grab and you don't know what you're getting.
Is that really what it is?
From Santa Claus. Why wouldn't it be?
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Chapter 2: How does the moon's wobble affect Earth's observations?
Please go look at that. Because I believe you're wearing a fur coat too, which is nice of you.
It's a shoulder wrap fur coat. It's not, I don't think it's a full coat. I think it was just something around my upper shoulders and neck.
Yeah, like a, they called that a stole back in the day.
Stole, it was a stole. Right, right, right. And then I sort of turn my head and then I give the expression. Just to be clear, Chuck. Yeah. Okay. I've been in four movie franchises. Okay. And for three of them, There were no more movies made after I was in. It ended. That's pretty damn hilarious. Okay. So I was in Ice Age 5. Okay.
And the critics said, it's about time the series went extinct like all the creatures in it. Oh, damn. Oh, my God. I thought it was a pretty good movie, though, because it had a lot of science in it. So I was science biased. That's why I was one of the characters. So that was the last of the Ice Ages. I was in Sharknado 6. Okay. You didn't know there were five others, did you?
Well, I did not, number one.
Okay.
And I'm so glad to hear that there's not a Sharknado 7. I'm just saying.
So unlike the Fast and the Furious.
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Chapter 3: What makes mercury a liquid at room temperature?
There's nothing there. Because I can, all right? I'm the director. I'm the H-D-I-C. The head director in charge, bitch.
Okay. So the funny thing is, you're absolutely right. The Hubble Deep Field was a spot on the sky that was the least interesting spot you can possibly find. There were no interesting stars, no previously discovered interesting galaxies, black holes, nothing.
And he says, let me take the most potent, powerful telescope in the world and aim it there and hang there and let those meager photons accumulate. And let's see what's lurking in the dark. Thus was born the Hubble Deep Field. It may have been the most significant image taken by the telescope itself. And so we allow for that kind of creative thinking that might not otherwise get through.
By the way, what a great story. I love my people. These are my people. I mean, seriously, that's probably equally as exciting as the discovery itself. All right. This is Dale Buen. And Dale says, Hey, Neil, photons don't experience time. They don't ever decay. Would they decay forever? Wait a minute. Would they decay if they did experience time?
Yeah. So decay means you are this... this form of matter in one moment, and later on you're a different form of matter, and you can time that out, and there's usually some variance there, but there's a very tight average that we give for, like, it's called the half-life of, for example, carbon-14. Any radioactive element has a half-life.
Well, if all the atoms know that they're supposed to convert within some statistical time frame, then they must have a measure of time. There must be some kind of clock going on within them. All right, photons moving at the speed of light, time stops for them. So if you have no measure of time, then you cannot know to turn into anything else later in life because there is no later.
If photons did happen to experience time, it means they would not be going at the speed of light. Okay. And they would not be pure energy as they currently are. And then they would have the ability to transform into another kind of particle.
Wow.
Yeah.
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