Neil deGrasse Tyson - How Christopher Columbus Was a Dick - Joe Rogan

Spoken Alliance. It's not a secret. It's just it's not there. It's there but it's not nobody's talking about it Do you realize I'll just give an example? Okay, if you needed more reasons to think that Columbus was a dick, okay Let me add one to it. There's a difference between when we were kids and today. Yeah, I know I know but actually I do have something Mildly redeeming to offer about Columbus if you have the time. Oh, I just wanted okay, okay You want me started with that? Well, how you want to do it? No, I'll do the dick part. It's a dick part Okay, so on his third voyage He's in by the time is of his third voyage he had already planted enough Spanish flags that Spain had already begun to set up governments and infrastructures in these places that he had found yeah, basically conquered and so so In one of the places I was it's in the book accurately But I think it's Hispaniola one of the island today. He has to get back as his third voyage 1503 or 1504 he's got to get back to Spain. He doesn't have enough resources not enough food for his crew So he asks the natives Would you please give us some of your stock that you have? Collected from your farming now this particular group of natives only makes exactly the amount of food They need to tie to the next crop. They don't have surplus So they said no, we don't have surplus. Sorry Columbus knew that one week hence Coincidentally there was going to be a total lunar eclipse where the moon in its orbit around earth enters earth's shadow the full moon enters earth's shadow and disappears and that The geometry of that event. It's just a simple lunar eclipse But the geometry is such that sunlight passes around earth through earth's atmosphere and takes on sunset colors that leech into earth's shadow Giving the moon if you can see it at all a deep red amber hue almost the color of blood Columbus said and he knew about this because he had read the tables the eclipse tables All right, we had known enough about the solar system at the time to We got that. Okay, actually back then it was just the known world with earth in the middle of the known universe But that didn't matter the rhythms of the universe were known. He says to the natives if you do not give us food My god, which is more powerful than your god will make the moon disappear and it will turn blood red That will happen in one week. You have one week to comply. Some of them were skeptical What you can't what others said shit. We gotta do what this guy said. Look at the ships. They came in their guns Their power their their culture. Look what they've got Sure enough right on cue The moon begins to disappear According to that that is a famous woodcut You got this some those viewing the video of this. Yeah There's a famous woodcut and notice the natives bowing to him and he stands proudly because he knows the science He knows the astronomy he knew this and so he invokes this to dominate People who are not yet scientifically literate and within seconds of this beginning They bring him all the resources he wants and he gets and I don't we don't know what happened You know back at the island whether the people survived the winter, but he got back to the island that is one microcosm I'll just of ways that the universe has been invoked in this. I'll give you another example Los Alamos one of the National Labs they today as basically since their inception are charged with Tracking the nuclear arsenal of the United States our nuclear power And the the nukes that would go into nuclear weapons. They think about this. Do you realize they hire astrophysicists? I had colleagues working there, you know why because there's a room There are two rooms. I mean, I'm simplifying this but basically there are two rooms adjacent to one another and a computer between the two of them the most powerful computers in the world and there is code running on those computers that calculates the energy yields of hydrogen fusion That's exactly what an astrophysicist cares about when stars blow up okay, the Sun is undergoing nuclear fusion right now and That's how it's making energy and when the when high-mass stars dies. They explode is supernova This is a natural thing going on in the universe on the other side. That's a classified room. They're calculating yields of hydrogen bombs and They have lunch together and they compare notes The government doesn't always have the best people But if you hire some of the best people to do whatever it is They want and their calculations happen to relate to a military project there you have a two-way street in progress Why do you think the Hubble telescope that the the The mirror issues notwithstanding which were ultimately fixed when it was first launched. Why was that so successful? There were versions of the Hubble telescope previously launched by the military Looking down that that the model for that telescope had already been conceived and built and was operating Then we say oh we want one of those Okay, but we don't that's not public that this is going on We design the telescope gets designed has the benefit of previous versions of it having been used successfully but looking down and we look up this is the perennial two-way street of Astronomy in the old days and in modern times astrophysics and the invention of the telescope you haven't said anything yet Oh, you just you look you're a good listener. I'll should I keep just keep talking Am I preventing you from interrupting? Don't worry about me. Okay fine Galileo perfects the telescope. He learned that it had just been invented in the Netherlands The the Dutch were were opticians All right So they invented the telescope and the microscope within a couple of years of one another this transform science When did they invent the eye glass the reading glass the reading glass? Earlier than that, but I don't I don't know when the real advance was putting two lenses in line with one another Sounds trivial in modern times, but that was a huge leap Conceptual leap and what you would accomplish and in so doing Depending on how you curve them and how you grind them grind the shape of those lenses you would get a microscope or a telescope and and we're off to the races that's basically the birth of modern science as we now think of it and and and and Conduct it because you say to yourself my senses. I don't trust them to be the Full record of what's going on in front of me you pull out a microscope. Oh my gosh Lee one hoke He got the microscope guy he thought he got a drop of pond water puts it under his microscope Just to think to do this. It's just water. Why do you think that's something interesting to do? He said I wonder He was curious. He puts it under and sees little what he described as animacules Happily a swimming animacules these are like the amoebas in paramecia and oh it is and so he writes he reports on this to To the you know the scientific authorities and they don't believe him. They say You know van Lee one hook we think you might have had too much gin before you wrote this letter Why would anyone believe this that there's entire creatures an entire universe of creatures thriving in a drop of pond water And so the way science works is one report does not make it true you need verification They send people to the Netherlands to verify his results and there it was the birth of microscopy and Then they looked at everything cells. You know they need vocabulary to describe what you're now seeing well That was the the journey down small then the journey went up big and Galileo Perfects the telescope he looks up. He said whoa. I see craters mountains valleys on the moon the Sun has spots Venus goes through phases This became the corpus of evidence for earth going around the Sun in Support of Copernicus idea that earth went around the Sun my point is what was the second thing? He did with his telescope he telephone no He contacted the doge of Venice Invited him to the clock tower and said look at what this instrument can do for you as we look out into the lagoon You can identify a ship's intentions friend or foe By its flag ten times farther away than you can with the unaided eye Then it's bought a boatload of these telescopes in the service of their military defense And this was a source of money to Galileo now. He could go look at the universe This has been a two-way street ever since people have looked up So this is this is an accounting of that this is it's and it goes on and on the first x-ray machines for airports You're old enough to remember Why were they put in because of hijackings to Cuba basically that they were armed hijackings of airplanes of American carriers to Cuba and Congress said we got to do something about that Oh by the way There's a company in Boston called American science and engineering that was building an x-ray detector Small enough to put on a satellite to observe the universe in x-rays And because no one had zerp we've used visible light but not x-ray. That's a branch of the electromagnetic spectrum We think if they're black holes out there their region surrounding them will give us x-rays It's a new window on the universe and then they said oh my gosh There's a call for x-ray machines at airports We've got the technology that we've perfected to put in a frickin satellite So the technology for those ones you walk through at the airport initially came initially. Yes. Yes. Yes There was a two-way street. There was oh my gosh. We need this for security Oh by God, I'm not sure why they're here Security. Oh my god, we would we were using let's let's let's apply that technology to these detectors Well, that's been a lot of the stuff with the space program Right a lot of the stuff that they devised for use on the space station and many other technologies have trickled their way down