Neil deGrasse Tyson on How Monster's Inc Got the 4th Dimension Right

Hello freak bitches. And aren't binary star systems really common? Yeah, more than half the stars you see in the night sky are binary or multiple systems. In fact, the iconic image from Star Wars, the original Star Wars movie, before they numbered them, I think. Star Wars IV. Tatooni, right? Is that what it was? Well, yeah, whatever that desert planet that Luke was on. And he comes out after visiting his... what is his step-parent? No, his adoptive parents. I don't remember. Where we were visiting. He comes out and you see a double sunset. So that's basically the only accurate science in the entire series. That's it? Star Wars series. That was another thing I really enjoyed, is you're taking a part of gravity, movie gravity, and how many people got mad at you for that? The movie. Yeah, you know, so I stopped comic on movies. I don't need to piss people off. When I watch a movie, I'm having those thoughts anyway. So I might as well share them with people if you're interested. So I did just that. And then people, the last time I did it was for Star Wars, The Force Awakens, Star Wars VII. I had a series of tweets. You know, one of them was, BB-8, a smooth, rolling, metal, spherical ball, would have skidded uncontrollably on sand. People got angry. Someone tweeted back, shut the fuck up. OK? So I said, OK, I'm not here to get people angry. I'm just here to enlighten to help people enhance their movie-going experience. But to the extent that it's not accomplishing this, I don't need to do it. I'm just saying, I'm an educator. I thought I was being nice. I don't need to do so. I haven't tweeted about a movie since then. Don't let them stop you. I have tweets I could post about Arrival. Please do it while I didn't watch that. I watched a little bit of it. I shut it off. OK. No, you got to give it a chance. As soon as I see a movie that starts out, I don't... Spoiler alert, starts out with a sick kid. I'm like, fuck you. I know what you're doing. No, in fact, it's very not about the kid. I'm sure. That's what I keep hearing. It's totally not about the kid. Jamie hated it. Oh, yeah? Yeah. OK. So you just give it a chance. But anyhow, so I just stop. Maybe I'll come back, but I'm... Do it! Yeah? People need to know. Gravity. That was good that you explained that not only is this not plausible, those two satellites aren't anywhere near each other. Oh, my gosh. They weren't set. Oh, there's the International Space Station, and I'm on the Chinese Space Station. Let me just jet pack my way there. Yeah. Do you realize... Excuse me, lady. Hey, lady. Do you know how far away these are from one another? You can just jet around from one space station to another. No. Can't do it. They're tens of thousands of miles from one another. For goodness sake. But anyhow, so, yeah, you remember these tweets. Please keep doing it. It was like 15 tweets, and I didn't know. That was when I realized, like, the press was reading my movie tweets. And those tweets... Now, a couple of years ago, when Gravity came out with Sandra Bullock and... What's the dude's name? George Clooney. George Clooney. So I tweeted it, and they got talked about on the Today Show, the weekend Today Show on NBC. Then it was talked about on NBC Nightly News. Then my tweets were talked about on Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update. It was like, the NBC trifecta. And I said, my gosh, this was... That was not the point. I didn't seek this. Fine. I'm glad they are reacting this way, because that means they care about the science, maybe. But what Seth Meyers did, because he was doing Weekend Update at the time, he said, Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson harshly criticized the movie Gravity, saying it contains a number of scientific inaccuracies. For example, there is no way George Clooney would have spent that much time talking to a woman his own age. Ah! That's hilarious. I think Sandra Bullock is still younger than George Clooney, though. So they should have got their facts right. But not by much. I mean, yeah. They were in the same neighborhood. Yes. They were in the neighborhood. Yeah. I think it's important. I think you enjoy the movie. It's great. It's fun and everything like that. But it's important to point out what the science errors are. I think the movie could have done better, honestly. I think they could have made the same movie with correct science. People thought I didn't like the movie when all I was doing was pointing out things that got wrong. By the way, they did some stunning things correctly. For example, this is brilliant. If you're in zero-g, a fire basically puts itself out. So think about it. When you burn a candle on Earth, so you light the wick. If people have candles anymore, they forgot what a candle is. You light it with a match that you used to get from smoking flouches at bars. All right. So you light the candle and it stays lit. The fuel is the wax. The oxygen continually comes in because it heats the air around it and the air rises. Hot air rises. And fresh air comes in from below and has fresh oxygen. So the candle will stay lit until it burns all the way down. In space, if you light a candle, you can light the candle. It'll heat the air, but the air will not know where to go because it's not lighter than everything because it's in zero-g. It'll stay clustered around the candle. The candle will use up all the oxygen in that bubble, and then it'll put itself out. They did this in the movie. So why do they have some good science? Because you can't think of everything. Why don't they just have you on staff? Bring you in. What's wrong with my shitty movie? So you can't think of everything. So I wasn't judgmental so much as this movie. The fact that it got so much right is what put it on my map to criticize what it got wrong. That makes sense. Does that make sense? Yes. Okay. It earned the right. Yeah, oh, the hair. Her bangs. Should have been floating. Floating all over the place. Now, if you might think, am I nitpicky? No, because if you look at any picture of somebody with hair, okay, in space, in zero-g, their hair is flying everywhere. It's the first thing you notice about them. It is so obvious. Like, wow, that's the cool. You're not thinking about the spaceship or the Thai technology. You're looking at the hair doing stuff you will never see happen on Earth unless someone is like underwater and they're jiggling their head. So they would have to film it all in zero gravity. They would have to film it all in one of those drop things. Yeah, or the drop thing. They'd have to be clever about it. And she only had bangs. That's all you had to figure out how to do. They did other clever things. So anyway, that's all I did. By the way, in all fairness to movies, I'll call out something that's good, that a movie got right, that otherwise got no science right. I'm the first in line to do that. Like what? Oh, in the movie Monsters, Inc.? Oh my gosh. You didn't think I was going there, did you? No. Those doors were four-dimensional portals to another... That's possible? Well, if you had four dimensions, that's what it would look like. Do you remember the movie? Yes. They take the doors home. Yes. They open the door and they're in the closet of the kid that they're going to terrorize. Yes. That's a wormhole. That's what access to the fourth dimension looks like. Do you think scientifically that's possible one day? I hope so. I hope so. Really? Because here's the example. We've got a nice broad desk we hear at this interview, right? So, desk is two dimensions. It's got length and width. And I can start putting papers on this desk, and I can lay them out mosaic style. And then all of a sudden I have no more room to put a sheet of paper. If I'm an ant living in the surface of the desk, I say, no more room, but wait a minute. We are three-dimensional people. And I can put an organizer and stack things vertically. So I can take a sheet of paper and I can put it higher up than the surface of the desk. The ant will say, where did it go? Oh, my gosh. It disappeared in some portal. No, no. What is that? It went into the third dimension and the ant bound to... Ant obviously is a three-dimensional thing. Imagine it only lives in two dimensions. You would have made that paper disappear into a third dimension and it will have no clue where it went because you had a portal. You had access to that extra dimension. So look at how much you can store on a desk when you have access to a third dimension above it. Vastly more than just papers mosaicked out on the surface. So now let's up this example by a dimension. You're storing boxes in a room. Oh, I ran out of room. No, you didn't. Let's open this four-dimensional door. You open it, put the boxes through the door, close the door, boxes gone. That would be awesome for hoarders. You look around the other side of the door, there's nothing there. Your side of the door, nothing there. It's just a door. That is a portal to a fourth dimension that can hold vastly more content than what you're stuck storing in the three-dimensional space of your room. That's a brilliant concept. And even though it has monsters that don't exist, that all speak English, and one of them is a cyclops, and one of them is a... I'm not judging the biophysiology of these creatures, but they've got the physics of four-dimensional portals completely accurate. Now, the concept of dimensions is where it gets really abstract with people. I love me some dimensions, and it is abstract. It is. And that's why you let the math take you into those higher dimensions, because our intuition will fail for us. www.mooji.org