I remember the first time I started to see snippets of this interview on my social media feed, and some of what Professor Neil DeGrasse Tyson said took my breath away. He has a poetic way of presenting Science (astrophysics) in a way that captivates wider audiences, making Science accessible for a wider audience.
“Our current understanding of how this universe got here tells us there are plenty of other universes and that’s the Multiverse idea. Parallel universe sounds a little more cool than just other universes in a Multiverse but sure, there’s likely an infinite number of them. Hence the possibility that I’m interviewing you on my show from London, and you’re here, and all the combinations of all atoms and molecules and thoughts and neurosynaptic firings would exist in the infinite universes that are out there.”
“There’s a lot of variations in this and some of these universes would have slightly different laws of physics, so you don’t want to visit them without a full understanding of the consequences of that… you don’t want to collapse into a pile of goo because the molecular forces that previously held your body together in this universe don’t work in the other universe.”
Piers Morgan’s Question: “Is there anyone else out there professor?”
“By anyone you mean just life at all? Yes, probably. We are made of the most common ingredients in the universe: hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, iron – this stuff is everywhere in the universe. Life on Earth was opportunistic – it didn’t take the rare ingredients and figure out what planet out of eight planets and one star among hundreds of billions in a galaxy among hundreds of billions. To suggest that we are alone in the universe would be inexcusably egocentric, driven by some philosophy that is not grounded in observational science.”
Piers Morgan’s Question: “What’s inside a black hole?”
“We think we know – our equations tell us what’s in a black hole but we’ve never tested this. (our equations) tell us that within a black hole a whole new space time can open up in the future history of this universe and so by that reasoning, we in this universe may be the other side of a black hole that lives in somebody else’s universe. That is perhaps the most intriguing part of the equations that give us black holes.”
“What’s the most important thing that most of us don’t know about the universe that we should?”
Answer by Neil de Grasse Tyson: “For me it’s the greatest gift that modern astrophysics has given civilisation: In 1957 a research paper was published demonstrating that the atoms in your body; the nitrogen, the iron, the carbon – all of this are traceable to cosmic crucibles deep in the centres of stars – it manufactures them by thermo-nuclear fusion. The star explodes and scatters that enrichment into gas clouds that make the next generation of star systems… such as we. So it’s not like you’re out in the universe looking up and you say “I’m alive in this universe but I feel small: no; the universe is alive within you and you should feel large! That revelation that we are not poetically, but literally stardust, borders on the spiritual and I think everyone – it is their duty to know that.”
This last paragraph above just about sums up the main ‘Big Bang’ idea around this research. It started with the well known idea that we are all made of stardust. The Science to back this up is well documented and widely available. The idea that we are all interconnected and entangled is also not a new idea. But so many practitioners have so many ideas about how they explain or prove our interconnectedness, when I feel that the Scientific proof of our interconnectedness is as plain and simple as the stardust idea: we are all made from the same stuff. And by ‘we’ I mean mammals, insects, plants, sea life, rocks, the earth’s crust, the atmosphere, other planets and the entire knowable cosmic universe. Is it even up for debate then, that we are all interconnected? We came from the same stuff.
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As if that wasn’t enough proof, Gee, H (2013) in The Accidental Species – Misunderstandings of Human Evolution, makes a fundamental point on page 16: “…the chemistry that animates you is virtually identical to that which animates every other living creature. Because of this, there is very good reason to suspect that all life shares a single common ancestor. This is more than a supposition – the notion of a single common ancestry has been tested, formally and rigorously, and has been found to support the pattern of extant life far better than any model positing independent origins. It follows, therefore, that any fossil we find will be a cousin, in some degree, of any other creature, living or extinct, discovered or undiscovered – even if we can never show that anyone was anyone else’s ancestor.”
Imagine if we were compelled to treat all other (living things, non-living things, earth, the universe) as we would a close relative…. Would we be at war? Would we have a need for weapons research and invention? Would we have borders to keep each other off certain pieces of land? Would we do more selfless work in our day-to-day lives? Would Scientific Enquiry be more inclusive? Would our matters of care extend to all instead of just looking after our immediate kin at the expense/ignorance of all other, as if we are not interconnected? Hard yes to all of these questions.
References:
- Gee, Henry (2013) The Accidental Species – Misunderstandings of Human Evolution. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
- Morgan, P. (Host). (30 September 2022). Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Fascinating Interview With Piers Morgan. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYV5glYwCH8
- Wikipedia contributors. (February 2024). Periodic table (crystal structure). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table_(crystal_structure) (Accessed 16 February 2024)
- Wikipedia contributors. (February 2024). Composition of the human body. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_the_human_body (Accessed 16 February)
Debbie New 