Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you,
Speaker 2: Bob Berman with us. One of America's top astronomy writers,
Speaker 2: author of twelve very popular books. He has contributed to
Speaker 2: the popular night Watchman column for Discover for seventeen plus years,
Speaker 2: and is a science editor and chief astronomer of the
Speaker 2: Old Farmers Almanac. He also directed the summer astronomy program
Speaker 2: at Yellowstone Park. He's been on The Today Show, David
Speaker 2: Letterman's program, and here he is back on Coast to Coast. Hello, Robert,
Speaker 2: how are you?
Speaker 3: Ah, George, great to be here, Thanks my pleasure.
Speaker 2: Are you still conducting the special Global Astronomy Tours?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I have Special interest tours.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: We every year we take people to see the Northern
Speaker 3: lights in Alaska and we go for wherever there's a
Speaker 3: total teller eclips and we go to places like the
Speaker 3: Ala Kama Desert. Just amazing astronomy stuff. Yeah, it's fun.
Speaker 2: I've noticed a lot of things on the web these
Speaker 2: days with astronomy, But some of these pictures, Bob, don't
Speaker 2: look like the real deal. What's going on there.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, thanks for bringing that up. You know, it's
Speaker 3: it's it's troubling because, yeah, you go on YouTube or
Speaker 3: you know, I'm not even going to name sight. I'm
Speaker 3: just we'll just say it the way you did. On
Speaker 3: the web, you come across tons of nature and astronomy
Speaker 3: pictures and they look I guess they look spectacular, but
Speaker 3: they didn't look like anything that anyone has ever seen
Speaker 3: or will see because they're fake. It's so easy to
Speaker 3: photoshop these days. So there's there's rainbows that can't exist,
Speaker 3: and and and hablo and suppose that halo's that the
Speaker 3: circle above the sunset?
Speaker 1: And uh.
Speaker 3: A few tips of how to spot fakes, but most
Speaker 3: of these things are fake. And it's a little crazy
Speaker 3: because when I went to college studying stuff, there was
Speaker 3: no real fake astronomy, and these days is just a
Speaker 3: lot of clickbaita astronomy. I'm not even sure why.
Speaker 2: A How do people to tell the difference then between
Speaker 2: the real and then unreal?
Speaker 3: Well, okay, one thing, a popular thing is rainbows. You'll
Speaker 3: see all sorts of images showing rainbows and all sorts
Speaker 3: of positions. One quick fakery is if you see a
Speaker 3: sun like a sun setting and then a rainbow above it,
Speaker 3: like forming an arch above the sunrise or the sunset.
Speaker 3: Rainbows are always opposite the sun. And if you think
Speaker 3: about it in your life experience, you know, you'll realize, oh, yeah,
Speaker 3: that's true. Rainbows are always opposite of the sun. So
Speaker 3: you can never point a camera at the sun and
Speaker 3: see a rainbow at the same time. So any picture
Speaker 3: that shows a rainbow and the sun setting in the
Speaker 3: same picture, that's automatically sake. For example, so.
Speaker 2: What do you recommend people do to get their good stuff?
Speaker 2: But the real stuff?
Speaker 3: You know, you don't learn astronomy or basic science, you know, overnight.
Speaker 3: So there's no few words that I can suggest to
Speaker 3: spot a fake. But since rainbows are popular fake images
Speaker 3: on the web, just realize that a rainbow has to
Speaker 3: be opposite the sun. And so if you see it
Speaker 3: rainbow in an image, check out the lighting on the
Speaker 3: other things in that picture, the lighting on clouds, lighting
Speaker 3: on mountains, if there's mountains in the picture, and if
Speaker 3: it's a genuine image or real picture, not a photoshop image,
Speaker 3: the lighting should tell you which way the sun is
Speaker 3: coming from, that the sun is coming from behind the
Speaker 3: photographer behind the camera, not toward the camera. If you're
Speaker 3: looking toward a rainbow, the light has to be the
Speaker 3: sunlight has to be from behind you. So it's really
Speaker 3: kind of as simple as that.
Speaker 2: How long have you been an astronomer?
Speaker 3: Well? Ever since I was a kid. I mean the
Speaker 3: first thing I remember is being wheeled in some kind
Speaker 3: of carriage I guess it must have been, and looking
Speaker 3: up at the night sky. So I loved it. So
Speaker 3: I was a kid, studied, of course in school, taught it.
Speaker 3: Used to teach a college astronomy at Merritmount College here
Speaker 3: in upstate New York, and so it's a life, lifetime thing.
Speaker 3: How I became editor of a Discover magazine and a
Speaker 3: columnist in astronomy, and now the editor of the Old
Speaker 3: Farmer's Almanac the last thirty years is just I don't know.
Speaker 3: I think good luck because it's fun and not everyone
Speaker 3: gets to do that.
Speaker 2: So my father bought me a telescope when I was
Speaker 2: a kid, and I just loved it. I grew up
Speaker 2: in Detroit, Michigan, so I would take it out in
Speaker 2: the winter time. Sometimes it was crystal clear twenty degrees
Speaker 2: out at night, but it was just a marvelous thing.
Speaker 2: And I will always remember Bob aiming it at Saturn,
Speaker 2: and I saw the rings of Saturn with this little
Speaker 2: three inch telescope, and I have never seen anything as
Speaker 2: gorgeous as that in the sky.
Speaker 3: I know just what you're talking about, you know. I
Speaker 3: still marvel at the at the at the moon. After
Speaker 3: I didn't even want to say how many years reveal
Speaker 3: how many years I have been doing this, but how what
Speaker 3: the heck, it's about half a century. I've been looking
Speaker 3: at them, and I have two observatories here in the
Speaker 3: nice dark skies of upstate New York. And I'm still
Speaker 3: not tired of the George. Still love exploring the lighting
Speaker 3: because it changes every day on the moon.
Speaker 2: It really does. Yeah, can you help us with the
Speaker 2: Big Bang theory, Bob, I don't I don't get I've
Speaker 2: interviewed physicists, planetary experts. Nobody can tell me how things
Speaker 2: started from nothing.
Speaker 3: Well, you just said it. If the Big Bang theory
Speaker 3: is true, and there's a lot of evidence that it
Speaker 3: must be true, it would mean that the universe started
Speaker 3: from nothing. Now, come on, can you really get anything
Speaker 3: from true nothingness? Isn't it against logic?
Speaker 1: Exactly.
Speaker 3: So we're left with a universe that since the nineteen
Speaker 3: twenties we've known that everything's flying apart from everything else,
Speaker 3: and the farther something is from us, the faster it
Speaker 3: is flying away. In fact, I can even give the
Speaker 3: figure of people, like anyone out there likes math, for
Speaker 3: every million light years farther from Earth that you are,
Speaker 3: things are flying away thirteen miles a second faster. Think
Speaker 3: of that speed, thirteen miles per second. That's pretty fast.
Speaker 3: So every million light years further from Earth, things are
Speaker 3: going thirteen miles per second faster. That means you can
Speaker 3: just sort of trace everything back and everything must have
Speaker 3: been in one place at one time. That time was
Speaker 3: thirteen point eight billion years ago, So that shows us
Speaker 3: the Big Bang or something started the universe expanding. It
Speaker 3: was all in one spot thirteen point eight billion years ago,
Speaker 3: and it's been expanding ever since. Also, if the Big
Speaker 3: Bang is real, there ought to be a left over
Speaker 3: a signal or radiation as some call it, heat two
Speaker 3: point seventy three degrees of heat coming from the entire
Speaker 3: sky evenly, and there is. We discovered that in the
Speaker 3: nineteen sixties, so that supports it. Also, if the Big
Speaker 3: Bang was real, the universe ought to have a about
Speaker 3: the concentration of hydrogen, helium, and lithium, the three lightest
Speaker 3: elements that it actually does. So, George, all that evidence
Speaker 3: is pretty much proof that the Big Bang really happened.
Speaker 3: But as you just said very correctly, that means that
Speaker 3: the universe started from nothingness. And how can anything start
Speaker 3: from nothingness?
Speaker 2: That's what I don't get that.
Speaker 3: I just don't The reason all your astrophysicists are saying
Speaker 3: things that don't make sense is that if you really
Speaker 3: follow the truth is the Big Bang had to have happened,
Speaker 3: and the Big Bang couldn't have happened.
Speaker 2: Do they bring God into the equation?
Speaker 3: Well, well, some do. There's astronomers that are atheists, like
Speaker 3: Neil degras Tyson. He lectures for atheist organizations and loves
Speaker 3: to talk about how religion sets back astronomy, and you know,
Speaker 3: I understand his being upset. I'm still not over. I
Speaker 3: remember I was a teenager when I first read a
Speaker 3: first time to count from the year sixteen hundred about
Speaker 3: this poor guy named Giudano Bruno in the year sixteen
Speaker 3: hundred who has burned at the stake and their are
Speaker 3: eyewitnesses that talks about his screams. I mean, this is
Speaker 3: horrible stuff. And all he had done really was say
Speaker 3: things like there might be life on planets around other stars,
Speaker 3: which kind of everyone says these days. But he said
Speaker 3: that back then, so he was ahead of his time,
Speaker 3: and for that they burned him at the stake. So
Speaker 3: I don't blame anybody for being anti religion if that's
Speaker 3: what religions did to scientists. But on the other hand,
Speaker 3: people like Neilde Gresseeisen get upset if you believe that
Speaker 3: there's some kind of intelligence underlying the universe, that okay,
Speaker 3: we can I don't mind the word god. I'm not
Speaker 3: bothered by Some people are because they had bad experiences
Speaker 3: I guess in church when there were kids or something.
Speaker 3: But it doesn't bother me any But you know what
Speaker 3: I mean, George, If you open the window and you
Speaker 3: look out the window at nature, doesn't it seem as
Speaker 3: if like there's a smart that nature is smart, that
Speaker 3: there's intelligence out there. It seems obvious. Even people say
Speaker 3: things like you can't fool the mother nature, you know.
Speaker 3: I think everybody sort of thinks that nature has intelligence
Speaker 3: behind it. And if there's intelligence that's everywhere in the universe.
Speaker 3: We have a worship that we call that God. I mean,
Speaker 3: there's other attributes we can also say about it, and
Speaker 3: I don't have a problem with that.
Speaker 2: Is it conceivable that we will really never get the answer? Uh?
Speaker 3: You know, I think it depends. There there are states.
Speaker 3: Now this is going to sound a little weird if
Speaker 3: you'll just bear with me a little bit on this.
Speaker 3: In the about half the world is Hindu and Buddhists,
Speaker 3: and they believe that there is a state of perception
Speaker 3: or state of mind, or a state of experience in
Speaker 3: which you actually experience the truth of reality of the universe.
Speaker 3: They call that realization or enlightenment or satory or somebody
Speaker 3: or nirvana. There's a lot of words for it, or
Speaker 3: cosmic consciousness or God consciousness, a million words for its. Supposedly,
Speaker 3: saints in the West and in the East over the
Speaker 3: centuries have experienced it, and ordinary people have experienced it.
Speaker 3: And if you actually experience this state of consciousness, but
Speaker 3: it's not logic. We're not talking about figuring this stuff
Speaker 3: out logically. We're talking about actually being in a different
Speaker 3: state of consciousness, then you know the truth of the
Speaker 3: universe and know that there's no such thing as death actually,
Speaker 3: and know that time doesn't exist, and all sorts of
Speaker 3: stuff that just sounds crazy when you put it into words. So, yes, George,
Speaker 3: I think you can know the truth behind the universe,
Speaker 3: but not through logic, not through figuring it out, not
Speaker 3: through science. I mean, science is great at what it does.
Speaker 3: If you want to build a bridge, you don't use
Speaker 3: Eastern religion, you use science. If you want to figure
Speaker 3: out how to build the best jetliner, you use science.
Speaker 3: But if you really want to know the truth behind
Speaker 3: the universe, whether God exists, whether whether time exists, whether
Speaker 3: there's really such thing as death, or what happens after life,
Speaker 3: then then you're not going to just use science or
Speaker 3: logic or math. No, then you meet something else.
Speaker 2: What would you say, might be the single most amazing
Speaker 2: scientific fact that nobody really has been aware of.
Speaker 3: Okay, this is what I'm going to say now is
Speaker 3: really real. And I don't think one person in a
Speaker 3: foundsand knows it. And that is in vision. When we're
Speaker 3: looking at anything using our vision of course, our language,
Speaker 3: and even what is taught to kids at school, is
Speaker 3: that anything you look at, let's say you're looking across
Speaker 3: the room. Right now, Let's say you're indoors or driving
Speaker 3: in a car and you're looking at something. We all
Speaker 3: assume that what we're seeing is thought our bodies in
Speaker 3: the distance, maybe a few feet away, maybe following, and
Speaker 3: that any colors that we see are really out there,
Speaker 3: and that the eyes are like clear glass windows that
Speaker 3: let those colors in so that we experienced them. But
Speaker 3: science tells us something that nobody seems to be aware of,
Speaker 3: and that is there really are no colors out in
Speaker 3: the real universe. Now how do we know this? Because
Speaker 3: what light is We haven't known this for a long time,
Speaker 3: more than a century, but not beyond that light is
Speaker 3: made up of electrical pulses and at ninety degrees to
Speaker 3: it magnetic pulses. So light are electric and magnetic bits
Speaker 3: of energy. In fact, we even call it electromagnetic energy.
Speaker 3: So red light, blue light, green light, whatever is really
Speaker 3: pulses of electricity and magnetism. All right, now, the eye
Speaker 3: is blind. The human eye can't see magnetism. We know
Speaker 3: that the eye can't see electricity. We know that too,
Speaker 3: So the eye really can't see what light really is
Speaker 3: real light, And we call those photons, little bits of
Speaker 3: lighter called photons, don't have color or brightness. They have
Speaker 3: magnetic and electrical energy. And what happens is that when
Speaker 3: this reaches the retinas of our eyes. The retinas are
Speaker 3: head and there's three different types of cone shaped retinal selves.
Speaker 3: They're stimulated by that energy. It creates kind of heavy
Speaker 3: duty signals that go into our brain, and our brains
Speaker 3: create a experience because of that in our brains. And
Speaker 3: this is just not my idea, although it sounds crazy
Speaker 3: because somehow people don't know this. If you open any
Speaker 3: physiology book, even just basic college phys theology book about
Speaker 3: the vision, it'll say that in the brain, especially near
Speaker 3: the back of the brain, the occipt the lobe of
Speaker 3: the brain, that's where colors are created and perceived. So
Speaker 3: when we see red and blues and greens, all of
Speaker 3: that is being created just in the brain, and they're
Speaker 3: not it's not really out there. So if you if
Speaker 3: you tell somebody that science tells us that the sky
Speaker 3: isn't really blue, that it has it's either blank or
Speaker 3: black because real light, photons of light are only magnetic
Speaker 3: and electrical impulses which we can see, and that the
Speaker 3: mind or the brain, if you prefer, is what responds
Speaker 3: to that by creating sensations of color. So the world
Speaker 3: that we see is in our brains or in our minds.
Speaker 3: And that means, and this is going to sound really
Speaker 3: like almost kookie and crazy, that when we look around us,
Speaker 3: all the brightnesses and colors that we see are really
Speaker 3: the inside of our own brains. Now that does mean
Speaker 3: they're not real. Nobody's saying that that's not real what
Speaker 3: we're seeing. What it does sort of is blurs the
Speaker 3: difference between the internal and the external. We're not when
Speaker 3: we see a visual world, we're not really seeing an
Speaker 3: external universe. We're seeing really the inside of our own minds,
Speaker 3: because that's the only place that colors exist. Now, scientists
Speaker 3: realized this, not everyone, but most scientists. Isaac Newton knew
Speaker 3: this four hundred years ago, which is really amazing, because
Speaker 3: how the heck could he have known that colors come
Speaker 3: from the brain. I don't even understand how he knew that.
Speaker 3: But he wrote a little piece that he called the
Speaker 3: rays like rays of light, the rays are not colored.
Speaker 3: He actually wrote that, So he knew that of stuff
Speaker 3: four hundred years ago. And I think that's the single
Speaker 3: most truth scientifically, that's basic truth. People who study physiology,
Speaker 3: how vision works, how the brain works, knows this and
Speaker 3: knows that colors are only in the brain. They're not
Speaker 3: in the outside world. And probably not one person in a.
Speaker 2: Thousand knowsis you say that those who created the quantum theory,
Speaker 2: those people about a century ago stumbled into something about
Speaker 2: the universe. What was that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, these guys were really really smart, I mean lot
Speaker 3: smarter than me. We were talking about people like we
Speaker 3: started with Max Plank and Heisenberg and Werner Heisenberg and
Speaker 3: when Schrodinger and I mean we use quantum mechanics. That's
Speaker 3: been probably the truest uh science theory ever. You know,
Speaker 3: everybody knows about Einstein and mass and energy being the
Speaker 3: same and equals mc square, and give Einstein lots of credit,
Speaker 3: but it's quantum mechanics that's responsible for the transistor and
Speaker 3: for for for for more technological achievements than anything else.
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