 One of the nicest things about being the MC is that a lot of really remarkable people who I admire tremendously are compelled to interact with me against their will. And I get to meet these remarkable folks, and one of them is our next speaker, Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Dr. Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, and I will tell you as a former high school planetarium director, the Hayden Planetarium is the big time. We call it the show. He's written eight books, but I think his most remarkable accomplishment is in the year 2000. People magazine named him the sexiest astrophysicist alive. Phil Plade insists the contest was rigged. It would not have mattered, Phil. He did ultimately lease out to Brad Pitt, but we are delighted we think he's a much better keynote speaker. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson. First of all, I was duly impressed by the number of laser pointers chasing each other at the beginning of this session, and I couldn't have thought of something more geeky than that. But then I did, actually, because I want to establish my geek credentials in this audience. Well, everyone, please take out their laser pointer. And you see the arch in the back of the room above the exit sign in the middle. Please touch that region with your lasers. Okay. I will now touch that region with my laser. Okay. There we go. All right. So, I would claim, and I am projecting farther than your lasers. Am I not? Okay. So, just to establish my geek credentials, well, until the screen comes up, allow me to make a few comments. Of course you're going to allow it because I'm standing here for this. You have no choice in the matter. First of all, I'm not a professional skeptic. I'm a professional scientist. And the reason why I'm distinguishing that is normally when I'm invited to a conference, I talk about science. And so to now speak, to talk about science to people who don't know any science. So now I'm invited to talk skepticism to people who are skeptics. All right. Herein was my challenge for this talk this morning. So we're going to leave, do you want to leave it with this? Oh, that's good. We're good. We lose a couple of letters on the edges. I could probably live with that. Okay. So, I guess that one, we'll do that one. Sorry. We'll get there. I need to clarify this people magazine distinction. This astrophysicist alive, consider the category, first of all, it's astrophysicists. I don't know who was in the running. Was it Stephen Hawking? You know, I don't know. I don't know. I just, it's hard to get bigheaded about that distinction. That's all I'm saying, actually, but liberated the microphone. So, there's a lot of science and literacy out there, but what I'd rather do is change the title of my talk to this, brain droppings of a skeptic. So the reason why I do count myself among your ranks is because when I do appear in public and I do talk about science, next come all the questions about Bigfoot, about the moon hoax, about babies under full moons, about astrology. So I've got to be sort of up on all of this. So what I'm going to do is share with you my brain droppings from what I have accumulated over all these years, some of which you'll know and you'll be comfortable with because you've done it yourself. But I guarantee you there will be some stuff here you've never thought of or done. Okay? So we got agreed? We're okay? All right. Now, by the way, often keynote talks such as this are nothing more than, like, veiled commercials for some book the speaker has to sell. This talk is no different from that today. Okay? No. No. Actually, this talk has nothing to do with any of the contents of any of these books. Also allow me to tell you that I am a scientist and there are things I could have talked about but I'm not because this is a skeptic comfort. I could talk about the search for life in the universe, the demotion of Pluto from planet to putoid and I had a little bit of something to do with that, by the way. Get over it. That Pluto is a... Just move on. Okay? A big bang dark matter, the Hubble, Phoenix on Mars and there's a killer asteroid headed towards Earth. If there's time, maybe we can talk about that. But right now, let's get right into it, okay? Bring droppings. There's no coherence to this talk because it's just droppings. Okay? You ready? Let's start. UFO sightings. Here you go. You ready? You ready? All right. Someone says they saw a UFO. Remind them what the U stands for, okay? Unidentified. Because then they say, I saw a UFO. I said, oh, what did it look like? Oh, it was like a spaceship and it landed from another planet and then I said, you just said you didn't know what it was because you said it was unidentified. And so we have this urge, this irrational urge which we all know, it's called argument from ignorance where you don't know something and then you invent something. You go from not knowing anything to knowing everything about it. Just by an invention of a comment or a thought. So what I found when people claim they've seen a UFO, you just get them to describe it and then you get them to the edge where they then want to say it's an alien. And then you simply tell them, you started out by saying you did not know what it was, end of conversation. You have no evidence to say that you know what it is. Now, here's where it gets interesting. If you want to get abducted, that's the fun part. So they get abducted. Now they tell you that they were abducted. You tell them, I'm sorry, your eyewitness testimony is not worth anything to me. Because no matter what eyewitness testimony is in the court of law, it is the lowest form of evidence in the court of science. And so you need something better than that. So the next time, here's what you do. So you tell the person, it's what you do. You tell them, next time you're abducted, and they're doing the sex experiments, right, you're on the slab, because this is what aliens do when they abduct you, and they're poking your organs, this is what you do. Tell the aliens, hey, look over there, right, and quickly grab some off the shelf that's on the spaceship, an ashtray or something. I don't matter what, okay? Because I can tell you, no matter, if they flew here from another galaxy, no matter what you pulled off the shelf, it'll be some unlike anything we have here on Earth. There is stuff we have among us that was unlike anything else on Earth five years ago, three years ago, two years ago, okay? I pull out my iPhone, there's nothing like, I would be burned at the stake ten years ago for pulling this thing out, okay? And this came out of our own culture. So then you just tell them, just grab some off the shelf next time, and until that happens, please leave me alone, okay? There, now, meanwhile, in this United States, the 21st century, you can buy this book, How to Defend Yourself Against Alien Abduction. This is a real book, I bought it, I read it, and I heeded its advice. I remain unabducted. There are things like, don't drive alone down a dark roadway. There's that kind of, the book is all about what not to do. Actually, I think it'd be kind of cool to be abducted by aliens, right? I mean, who in here would not want to, we all want to, you all want to meet the aliens, right? If they're out there, of course. I'm not anti-alien, I'm just anti your account of the alien, that's all. Now, what pisses me off, inept aliens, okay? Here, here, you ready? So, here are aliens from another planet, another galaxy. They traverse interstellar space in their spacecraft, trillions of miles. And they get to Earth and they crash. And I'm thinking, eat these aliens, they can't, they can't land on Earth. Bring me somebody who knows how to navigate, okay? And then I'll have a conversation with those aliens. Until then, stay out of my face, okay? I don't like stupid aliens. Next, oh, and you remember Close Encounters or the third, you know that movie, right? What was weird was, here's the mothership. You know what, we all saw the movie, if you haven't, go ahead. Who's the 15-year-old here? Have you seen that movie yet? Close Encounters or the third kind? Put it on Netflix, okay? All right. So, the mothership comes. And they all knew the mothership was coming. They all knew it was a flying saucer. They all knew it came from another planet through the vacuum of space. And so, what did they do to the left of that monument? They set up runway lights. And I'm thinking, if you could travel through the vacuum of space, you don't need runway lights. Runway lights are like if you're using air for lift. Aliens would not need air for lift. So, the people were not thinking this through. Those were inept producers, okay? Conspiracy theory, again this is brain droppings. Conspiracy theory, here's what you do. A conspiracy theorist is a person who tacitly admits that they have insufficient data to prove their point. Just tell this to their face, okay? Because the conspiracy is the battle cry of the person with insufficient data. Until they produce sufficient data, they got to claim this. And so, just say, come back when you have the data. Then we'll have this conversation. But they're going to claim conspiracy. But just tell them they're missing data. Just tell them that and then walk away. That conversation should be five minutes long. As they say, if a conversation lasts, if an argument, lasts more than five minutes, both sides are wrong, all right? Keep that one in mind. Astrology, this is what you do. Get a classroom of people, a group of people who are believers. And don't do what they want. This is what you do. Go to the horoscope that day. Pluck one at random, read it to that audience and say, whose horoscope did I just read? Two thirds of the hands will go up, okay? Which we know is not how that's supposed to work. It should really be 112th, if it had any sense at all. That's the simplest test that I know, to demonstrate to someone that it's just bunk, other than the rational arguments that you might spend time offering. Like where the sun was when you were born doesn't match where it was 2,000 years ago when this got laid out. And the fact that there are 14 constellations in the zodiac, not 12. One of them is Ophiuchus. Any Ophiuchans here? Okay? Some people know they're Ophiuchans. The sun, after passing through Scorpio, spends more time in Ophiuchus than it did in Scorpius. So if you thought you were Scorpion, you're probably Ophiuchan. And all Ophiuchans and Scorpions are currently Librans. That's how that plays out. So, birth rates in full moons, one of my favorites. There are a couple of municipalities where the birth rates jump a little during the full moon. And everyone says, oh, it's the gravity of the full moon, yanking the baby from the womb. You know? And I'm thinking, maybe there's another explanation. So, if you look at the gestation period of the human female, it's basically about 295 days. Not from the date of mist period, but from when you actually got pregnant. That's the number that matters here, okay? 295 days. Hmm, how long is the average cycle between consecutive full moons? 29 and a half days. So, take 29 and a half days, multiply by 10, you get 295 days. So, if your child was born under a full moon, that just simply meant you got knocked up under a full moon. That's what that meant, okay? And no one argues the romantic effects of a moonlit night, okay? What about behavior? I told you this was brain droppings. I warned you in advance. Behavior and full moons. This one is classic. People say, oh, they acted crazy. The moon pulls the tides. The tides are made of water. The human body is mostly water. The moon must affect the human body until you actually do the math. And when you do the math, you could ask the question, well, what is the tidal force of the moon on your cranium? How about that calculation? You could do that calculation. The tidal force of the moon on your cranium. Because if that were severe, it could be messing with you, right? All right, so you do the calculation, it turns out. If you're one of these people who sleep with a lot of pillows, and one of the pillows is kind of leaning on your head overnight, the pressure from that pillow on your head is a trillion times greater than the tidal force of the moon across your cranium. But nobody talks about the effects of down pillows on your behavior the next day. Why not? I love the talk we just had on medicine. I have a comment about that. Something I just find astonishing, remarkable. I'm so impressed by this, are you ready? Here's what happens. Someone is diagnosed, I'm making up a very common example for the purposes of this explanation. Somebody's diagnosed with terminal cancer. The doctor says you've got six months to live. You say, you mind if I get a second opinion? Course, go ahead. Go to a second doctor. You've got five months to live. Go to third doctor, seven months to live. So basically, you're gonna be dead in six months, plus or minus, okay? What happens? You're alive a year later, okay? You're alive two years later. Three years later, the cancer's in remission. Five years later, it's gone from your body. You happen to have been a religious person, and over that time, you were praying. People were praying for you. Here's what's astonishing, is that if you are that person, you are more likely to believe that God cured you, this invisible force creator of the universe cured you, than that you had three idiot doctors diagnose you. I am astonished by this fact. The American Medical Association, is that what they call, AMA, has gotta be the most powerful organization in the world, because no one questions those diagnoses. They'll credit whatever else was going on because they were sure they were gonna die. I can tell you this, I taught physics to pre-med students who became doctors. Not all of them are smart. I assure you, not only that, they're all trained in the same system. So three separate doctors that all went through the same system of medical schools, that's not actually three different opinions. It's the same opinion, just nuanced by the person after breakfast that morning. It's not three different opinions. Now, just to confirm this, there's a colleague of mine in the front row. Have you taught physics to pre-medical students? You have not, so you don't, I don't have a second opinion on what this is, but. So I'm just impressed that it's impossible for people to think that they just had idiot doctors diagnose them or that it was a diagnostic failure. I'm just, I'm sorry, say again. Okay, we have a physics 101 professor here who said he's failed more students who are pre-med than those who are pre-law. Yeah, it's astonishing. It's astonishing who ends up being our doctors. I gotta keep going. I have way more to come, okay? Swamy levitation. We've seen this, okay? Now, it turns out, it turns out the, now don't criticize it. It turns out there is no law of physics that prevents this, okay? This is physically possible. And so you do the calculation of how to make that possible. And the only way you can make that happen is by invoking Newton's second law of motion. And by doing that, you have to consume mass quantities of beans by my count about 1,000 cans. Then your anal sphincter has to be really tight to hold in the methane effluences that are ready to burst forth. At which point you let it go and then you levitate. For as long as you have gas to provide it. That's, by the way, how the space shuttle takes, not with beans, but it's gas coming out one direction, the recoil goes in the other direction. Now that I found this picture on the internet, this is like combines everything I just said. It's a levitated can of beans. I thought that was kinda cool. The moon hoax, we got people out there who say we never went to the moon. First of all, first of all, we should be proud that we live in a culture that has technology so advanced that some members of that same culture are in denial of it. That's a statement of how advanced we are. So we should be a little more sensitive to their disbelief. Because it's astonishing, we do astonishing things. And some people are so astonishing they just can't believe it. So here's what you do. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the Saturn V rocket launching once again, sending gas out one side and the recoil up the other. Just to remind you how this works, I'm sorry, I can't point to two at one moment at the same time, but all of this is fuel. And the astronauts are right there, okay? And that little bitty capsule right there. That's where the astronauts are. They're sitting on a controlled bomb. All right, so all you have to do is calculate how much fuel is there, invoking the rocket equation. Because when you invoke the rocket equation, you learn that most of the fuel you're burning now is just to launch to a higher point the fuel you have yet to burn. This is how that works. So for every increment of distance you have to go, you've got to have that much bigger spaceship to enable it, to carry the fuel you have yet to burn. And so you do this calculation and you show that this is enough fuel to carry these three astronauts and their rover out of low Earth orbit to the moon and back. All the fuel is there. Where else do you think this was going? Okay, to like the A and P grocery store? What, where is this? What do you think this thing is doing? So the moon hoaxers just challenge them to learn the rocket equation and apply the math to do the math. And then they go away and they never come back. By the way, to show you how big this is, it's huge. These are people right here, standing approaching one of the rocket nozzles of the five at the base of the Saturn V rocket. This thing is huge. All fuel, all fuel. More, the Mars virus. This one, most of you probably don't know about. Phil and I know all about it, okay? It started innocently enough. Four years, five years ago, 2003. Mars, as you may know, is in an elliptical orbit. Sometimes closer to the sun, sometimes farther. So are we in an elliptical orbit. Sometimes farther, sometimes closer. If you look at the combinations of our orbits, what situation do you need for Earth to be closest to Mars? What you want is Earth farthest from the sun and Mars closest to the sun. That pinches that distance the most you can. And then you get really close. Okay, in 2003, we were closer to Mars than we had been in 60,000 years. Well, all people paid attention to was the word close and the words and the number 60,000 in years. And it just took off. And people said, oh, on that particular night in August, Mars will be the size of the full moon, all right? And so this went on, it even captured page one story. Okay, close up. And in these pages, it talks about you might need sunglasses at night because Mars will be so large and bright. Now, I'll tell you how that worked. You ready? Here's how it goes. Here's how it goes. Where are we now? We're in like Vegas. The other way is west. Anybody know which way west is? That way, thank you. So let me come over here. Now, why did I believe you, sir? Cause 20 other hands pointed the same way. It's not that I have that much confidence in you per se. Okay, I did a quick average and it's this way. All right, so here we go. I'm in Vegas. So yes, we were closer than we ever been in 60,000 years by how much? Here's how it goes. You ready? I'm standing here. I suppose I did this. You ready? I have never before been this close to Japan. Okay, that's, so it was a little closer than it is any other time Earth and Mars swing around in their orbits. And here's what happened. That started on the internet every August. The same news story circulates. They forgot that it only happened in that year and they forgot that it was a nothing event anyway. So you're going to see it again. I call it the Mars virus because people want to send it around fear of numbers. Don't get me started. Okay, again, 21st century America, people who make the iPod, people who launched the Saturn five rocket. This is the country we live in except 80% of all the buildings on Broadway in Manhattan. I could have done it for any street, but I did it for Broadway. 80% have panels that look like this. There is no 13th floor. Not only was that true in 80% of the buildings in New York, it's true of this hotel. So what does it say for our future? When we have people afraid of a number. What does that mean? I don't know, but it scares the hell out of me. Not only that, we fear negative numbers. Why do you have to go into a elevator of a tall building and it's five, four, three, two, lobby, S, S, B, S, S, B, I don't, can I buy a vowel, please? I don't know what the hell these things are. They're afraid to go negative. Just say negative one, negative two, negative three. People are afraid to do that. They're afraid to do that on financial ledgers. The number is in parentheses. It's like, what's your problem? We got a symbol for this. It's called negative. So I worry that too many of us fear numbers for the future of America. Now, future of America is not secure. It's not, it's not. I worry. We're fading. We're fading fast. We're fading. Check this out. You go around the world. They've been famous scientists in the past in all the countries, any country that had an academic tradition, they've had famous academics, okay? At one point or another in the past. Go around the world. How do people honor their scientists? They put them on money. There you go. You put them on money so that everybody can see it, so that everybody is reminded of how important these people are. Everybody. We actually have a scientist on our money with a fellow who just spoke. Where did he go? Did he leave? Did he have to leave? Where did he go? The fellow from the Guardian. All the way in the back. Okay. Do you remember who was on the one pound note? And not anymore, it doesn't exist anymore. Do you remember who was once on it when it once did? That's okay, because you're a medical doctor. That's fine, I'll forgive you. It was Isaac Newton. And you'll put the famous scientist on bills that are uncommonly transferred. You do it on the common bills, okay? The one pound note was Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton. Einstein is there. I've got a whole collection of this money. I only show you a sampling here. Einstein is in Israel. We're all the folks who have honored. We haven't honored any scientist. Yes, Ben Franklin is on the $100 bill. Yes, he was a scientist. But there's not a trace of that fact anywhere printed on that bill. There's not even so much as a key on a kite string, okay? He's there because he was a founding father, not because he was a scientist. Wouldn't it be kind of cool if Americans knew that Ben Franklin invented the lightning rod, that he had one of the most important treaties in electricity and magnetism in his day that was read world over? Wouldn't it be kind of interesting to know that he saved lives by putting lightning rods on homes and on churches? Wouldn't it be kind of interesting to know that he was criticized by some pastors for thwarting the will of God? You get hit by a lightning bolt. Somebody up there does not like you. Ben Franklin says, carry this lightning rod and all as well. More money. Look at that. We got Euler and Gauss and Faraday and Pascal and there's your one pound note with Isaac Newton. So maybe you're just too young to remember when he was, that could be it. That could be it. And of course Galileo up there in Italy. Let's zoom in on Gauss. The audacity of the Germans to put a mathematical distribution function on their money. Okay? The day we have a mathematical function on our money, then I know we've been saved. But until then, excuse me. Periodic table of elements. I love this thing, okay? You remember this mysterious chart of boxes that hung in your chemistry class. There it goes. Well, let me show it a couple of different ways. I have a really nifty PTE program where you can show the elements in all different ways. So here they are color coded for melting point. Okay, that's kind of cool. So low melting point is light and high melting point is darker red. And so you see the elements grouped together. You have Wilhelm here, tungsten. And Osmium, meridium. Tungsten is used in Candes and Lightbulbs so that it doesn't melt, okay? So had Edison had access to this, he would have come up with tungsten immediately rather than having taken him all the time that he did in the trial and error of testing different ingredients. Carbon, by the way, has the highest melting point of all elements. So this is just the cool things you can do. You can also code them, well, which elements were known to the ancients? Everything blue there was known to the ancients so that no one is credited with having discovered them. They're familiar, carbon, sulfur, lead, tin, mercury, gold, et cetera. You can move forward in time. Sorry. You can move forward in time. We're backwards in time. And so you can look at the discovery here, color-coded. And so I've knocked this to 1869. So everything in gray was not yet known. So no one had discovered the noble gases over on the right. They were unknown in 1869. So Darwin, origin of species, none of that was known. All the rest in yellow had been discovered, fine. But here's what's the cool part. We can code these by country who discovered the element. And it's very telling. Take a look at that. Country who discovered the element. And you can rank them. United Kingdom leads the way. 24. Why? We got UK in the house. Okay. 24. Why? Because England invested in particle physics at the turn of the century. They were doing things that no other country knew to even do. And so those investments before the empire fell were fundamental to our understanding of atoms, of particles, all of the pre-quantum mechanics understanding of the behavior of matter are traceable to the United Kingdom. Just take a look at that. Sweden is second in the list, but for a reason that is, they slipped in on this list and I'll tell you why in a moment. So Germany, France, and United States is down there, but look at where we show ourselves. Check this out. You come all the way down to the heavy elements and there you go. Look at that. Right after uranium, neptunium, plutonium. And so since we discovered them, we get to name them. So if you look down here, there's americium. There's berklium. There's californium. We had the naming rights for these elements. And not only that, plutonium discovered in 1931, one year after the cosmic object that shares its name was discovered, which is why it got that name. So plutonium became an element on false pretense, by the way. So that plutonium became the fissionable substance in the second of our atomic bombs. So our government knew and understood the value of this enterprise for war. And hence these investments went through. So you get to name things if you invest in them. Whatever was the driver, in this case war. That's why physicists were so important to the 20th century. Which is why the person of the century was Albert Einstein, a physicist. Let's figure out what happened with Sweden. Sweden, there's a little town in Sweden called Yiddurbi. Yiddurbi happens to have a cave that was very rich in undiscovered elements. And so they said, well, let's try to vary the word to try, so the Yiddurbi, so they discovered element number 39 equivalent yttrium. Named after Yiddurbi. But then they found another element a few years later. What do you call that? Well, Yiddurbi, let's call that terbium, okay? Then they found another element. How about erbium, okay? Then they had ytturbium, okay? Then they're like, all right, enough is enough, all right? So, but then still discovered up there in Sweden. Where is Sweden? In Scandinavia, so-called standium, okay? So, all these elements came out of this one cave in Sweden. And so that up there number's higher than it would otherwise be. So, these are just naming rights where when you invest in society and culture you get to name your products. Is there a cost to society if you don't? I think there is. Yes, there is. A bad cost. I spent a lot of time in school not living in the same place long enough to be tracked by the jury duty people, or whatever is the agency that calls you for jury duty. I finally got called. It was walking distance from where I live. I live in Lower Manhattan. And so there I was, proud to serve. At the time I was teaching at Princeton in the Astrophysics Department. In fact, a seminar on, in fact, the evaluation of evidence and what that meant. So I'm there, I'm there, you know, and then they get to the Q and A part. Okay. Any lawyers in the house? What are you called? The Q and A part has some other name that obscures it. What is it, sir? Vaudier. You could have just called it Q and A, but you didn't. Because you want people to think that what you're doing is complicated. You should take cues from the astrophysicists. What do we call spots on the sun? Sunspots, thank you, okay? What do we call big red stars? Red giants. Regions of space. You fall in, you don't come out. Light doesn't, black hole. Origin of space-time, big bang. We are simple people in astrophysics. The universe is complex enough. Not gonna lay down a lexicon so you think what we're doing is more complex than it actually is. I have to get that off my chest. I'm sorry. The Vaudier part. The lawyer asks me, I see you're an astrophysicist. What is that? And everybody's listening. Everybody's listening. I'm there, eager to serve. And I say, I want you to take the laws of physics as discovered on Earth, apply them to the cosmos. It's okay. And I say, it says here, you teach. At Princeton, what do you teach? I said, well, I teach a course on the evaluation of evidence and the relative unreliability of eyewitness systemity. And I was out. I was on the street five minutes after that. They didn't want to hear that. That I understood how to evaluate evidence. I was gone. Until the second time. Three years later, I said, okay, I'm not gonna tell them about this class. So what happens? I go in there. I make it to like the top 15 they've taken it down to 12. I made the first cut. So all squeezed into the box and there's like a couple of extra chairs next to it. And the defendant is there, sitting right there with the lawyer and the judge. And I forgot what this part is called, sir. I don't know what it's called, but the judge reads the facts of the case. Maybe there's another French word for that. Okay, once again, wad year. All right, so I'm there. The judge reads the facts of the case. The defendant was found in Upper Manhattan in possession of 2,000 milligrams of cocaine. This is undeniable. This, we are trying him for the possession of those drugs. And I'm there. And by the way, there's like a maid. There's like a janitor. These are like regular people in the real world up there with me among the 15. And I listen, the judge says, well, do you have any questions about the facts of the case? Do you understand them? As I read them, I said, I got a question, sir. Why did you read, why did you read the cocaine possession the way you did? So what do you read? I said, you said he had two milligrams of cocaine. That's two grams. The milligram is 1,000 divided by the thousand is two grams. Less than the weight of a penny. Why, sir, did you say it just that way? And then he looked at, oh, that's just because that's how it's written here. He didn't understand what he was reading. And so there I am. And I said, because it sounds like you're making the possession sound worse than it actually was. I'm concerned about that. There I was, back on on the street again. Now, the fun part of that one was, I think I contaminated the entire jury. So, I have still yet to serve jury duty. Math, I've seen these headlines. Very depressing, half the schools in the district are below average. Okay, kinda sort of, you kinda need about half to be below. Technically, that would be the mode, but fine. So this person had no clue about statistics. What he probably meant was half the schools were below standards, but not below average. They just didn't understand. These are mathematically illiterate headline writers. We got some more here. 80% of airplane crash survivors had studied the locations of the exit doors upon takeoff. So you read that statistic and you say, I'm gonna read where the exit door, because you wanna, 80%, that's pretty good. You wanna be in that 80%. So you pull out the, in the seat back pocket and you read where the exit door is. Some may be behind you. Until you think about the statistic for a nanosecond and you realize, suppose 100% of the dead people had studied where the exit doors were on takeoff. You would never know because they're dead. So this is a completely meaningless statement. You don't know what the dead people did. And until you do, you can't use this information. Here's one. The state lottery is a tax on the poor. We've heard this one because poor people spend a disproportionate fraction of their salary on the lottery and on Vegas, no doubt, okay? I thought about this. I try to believe this, but I don't. The state lottery is not a tax on the poor. It's a tax on all those people who never did well in mathematics. That's what it is. Don't underestimate that. Why are there all these news stories about the subprime lending disaster? Okay, they talk about predatory lenders and the economy and this and that. Why is it just that the people who borrowed the money couldn't do the math? Couldn't say what happens if the interest rate goes up? What happened? So it's really a math illiteracy problem. Not any other kind of problem because therein is the defenses that you can put up against the charlatans of the world. I got one. This shows up even in Moose copy. This is Bayer, the folks who make Bayer aspirin. This was a actual advertisement that was taken out in a magazine called Physics Today. And here's what it says. By the way, they're boasting that their scientists actually go into schools to get kids excited about science as part of their job to do so. It says, you're on. Try to get them interested. Oh, by the way, they show a black kid and a girl, okay? So in their mind, these are the challenging cases, okay? Okay, the black people and the girls, okay? And I thought, like, who's president of the United States? Is he black or girl? No, I don't think so. Okay, he's neither of the two. So, okay, go on, try to get them interested in why lighter things fall faster than heavier things. And how? Come on, it's your turn. So these are just, so they actually did eventually fix it. And so now it says, try to get them interested in why lighter things fall as fast as heavier things. That's what Galileo, that's the Galileo experiment. They finally fixed that. Moving on. Okay, now, now, what's odd is, I haven't said anything yet. It's just his name. Let's back up for a moment. I live in Lower Manhattan. I live closer to ground zero than the height of the towers. And I was there, September 11th. And these are frames from my camcorder outside my window. The north tower's on fire. If you look very carefully in that picture, you might not be able to see in the back row. But the south tower had just been hit. And you can see some material punching forward. You see the flame, that's the fuel igniting. The fuel doesn't ignite instantly. It actually has to spread, get atomized, and then it ignites. And that's what's happening in that picture. And then the entire building is engulfed. To put this in context, you see the black building standing in front, that's black building. That building outside of the island of Manhattan would be the tallest building on the eastern seaboard. It's a very tall hotel. It's called the Millennium Hotel. And so the tray towers are huge. Two buildings, an acre per floor of office space, times 107 floors per, now here's what happens. George Bush, within a week of this, gave us a speech. Attempting to distinguish we from they. And who are they? These were sort of the Muslim fundamentalists. And he wants to distinguish we from they. And how does he do it? He says, okay? He says, our God, of course it's actually the same God, but that's a detail. Let's hold that minor fact aside for the moment. Allah of the Muslims is the same God as the God of the Old Testament. But let's hold that aside. He says, our God is the God, he's loosely quoting Genesis, biblical Genesis. Our God is the God who named the stars. Okay? Okay, now. I actually took this picture from the West Wing. Actually it's the East Wing. I was there. This is the medal ceremony. You see, if you look carefully in the photo, there are medals on a platform there. For the awarding of the National, the Presidential Medal of Science. I was on the committee to tell him who to give the medals to. And he just did what we told him, which was good. Now, what he did not do, he did not read the citations. Got somebody else to do that. He put the medal around people's necks. But I was invited to the ceremony. Here's the problem with his comment. Say, our God is the God who named the stars. The problem is, two-thirds of all stars that have names have Arabic names. I don't think he knew this. That would confound the point that he was making. Arabic star names. Okay, you ready? Here they are. Okay, screen one. Screen two. Every one of these stars among the brightest stars in the night sky are Arabic. And you say, how does that come to be? How did that happen? Well, first, he said that before I was on his Rolodex, because I could have hooked him up. I said, no, say something different. Okay, not that, because it's just wrong. Let's go back in time. How do the stars end up getting Arabic names? We have to go back 1,000 years to Islam. AD 800 to 1,100. Oops, I can't use AD in this audience. So, C. C-E, common error. I don't have a problem with AD. It's just culture, right? I don't have an issue with that. I don't. I'm sorry, okay? I'm okay with that. I'm okay with saying, oh my God, I'm okay with that. All right? I like listening to Handel's Messiah, okay? I think it's beautiful music. So, but there's more about that. We'll get more in a minute. So, what happened in Islam? The crossroads. While Europe was disemboweling heretics in Baghdad over that period, where the crossroads, the Jews, Muslims, Christians, doubters, the word atheists didn't exist back then, they were all sharing ideas. Great advances were made. In engineering, astronomy, mathematics, these three words are Arabic words, al-jabbar, algorithm. Our numerals are called Arabic numerals. Those are the numerals we use, all traceable to that period because they basically invented algebra there, okay? That went on until the 12th century. You read history books, they say, oh, the Mongols sacked the libraries in Baghdad, and there'll be explanations. What they tend to leave out was another force at work, and that was the efforts of this man, Al Ghazali, who's a Muslim cleric who was to Islam what St. Augustine was to Christianity. What he did was he took all these ways people were practicing Islam, put them together, codified it, said this is what you need to do to be a good Muslim, okay? Just as what Augustine did, which included how to exactly burn the witches, that kind of thing. So it was all in there, it was all in there, and in there was the statement that manipulating numbers was the work of the devil. And that cut out the kneecaps of the entire mathematical enterprise of that period because he gained cultural power and political power with his philosophies. And you know something? Islam has not recovered from that since. And there've been times when it has risen to great cultural force. In Spain, Islam rose to great cultural heights. No scientific or engineering discoveries in that period. It's tragic. How many Muslims in the world is 1.3 billion? Billion. Let's do some analysis, the Nobel Prize, 1900 to 2007. Okay, let's take a look at how many Nobel Prizes were won by the Jews. How many Jews are in the world? 15 million tops? Let's take a look. Doing it for the sciences, of course. Biomedical, chemistry, physics, economics. 25%, one fourth of all Nobel Prizes in the sciences have gone to Jews. I saw two people in back going a high five back there. The Jews did not invent the high five. Okay, I just wanna make that clear. Let's understand that one, okay? Do something else, just. No, we're happy to share the high five with you. So, let's look at practicing Muslims. Are you ready? Here we go. Zero, zero, one, one. And in fact, the one in physics was a Pakistani Muslim, not a Middle Eastern Muslim. And if you count economics as a science, it's like one, one and a half to 0.3% of the total. You wanna look at the relative impact? Relative impact, here it goes. The Jews have won 80 times more Nobel Prizes than the Muslims, and they are 180th of that population. That would be 6,400 times the impact. I lament, I celebrate the Jews, but I lament what might have been discovered had 1.3 billion Muslims had the cultural drive to discover as what happened 1,000 years ago. If that had been the case, they don't have a Nobel Prize. If that tradition had continued, but it is gone, it's not there. And that is a loss to the world, especially given the legacy that it had enjoyed 1,000 years ago. So I fast forward to the United States of America early 21st century, and I ask what forces are operating to somehow squash our scientific curiosities, and then you find billboards like this. The Big Bang Theory, You've Gotta Be Kidding, signed God. Okay, now maybe we should be impressed that somebody actually spent money to pay for the billboard. Well, here's one, here's a bumper sticker. This one is more sort of an intelligent design bumper sticker. It says, the Big Bang Theory, God spoke and bang, it happened. So that puts God like before the Big Bang, where we have no clue. But what that is is signs of intelligent design, this movement, you're all familiar with it, you all track the stories. But it's not just innocent meanderings, it actually affects, for example, advertising. All right, the 2004 ad campaign for an SUV, in the world of rugged SUVs, it's survival of the fittest. But then the intelligent design was gaining power, and then what happened to that same ad a year later? You ready? Its features are nothing short of a miracle, right? So it affected advertising. Now, I think intelligent design gets a bad rap. It gets a bad rap. And let me explain. Let's go back in time to an unimpeachably brilliant scientist, Claudius Ptolemy, author of Alma Jest. The pinnacle of the geocentric understanding of the universe appears in that work. An Arabic name meaning the greatest, protected in the Middle East while Europe was in the dark ages and translated into Arabic at the time. Ptolemy wrote as he was coming up with these epicycles, he looked up and said, as I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch earth with my feet. I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia. He's driven to poetic utterances in the face of not fully understanding what the planets are doing. That's intelligent design. He's crediting Zeus for what's going on, even though he doesn't understand it. Galileo doesn't write that way. He's more candid about his ignorance. Every time Mars comes around, it tugs us. Every time Jupiter comes around, it tugs on Mars, which tugs us. And you have this system that gets impossibly complex for Isaac Newton at the time. He knew enough to say that if you continued this system, it would go unstable and fly apart. But it hasn't. But he knows his equation works for any pair of objects. How do you reconcile that? God steps in and corrects things every now and then. That's in his book. It is the God of the gaps intelligent design argument. He got to the limits of his brilliance, put God in, and said, God fixes it. There you have it. This kept going. And by the way, Newton, I count as the most brilliant guy there ever was. It's up to you whether you want to aspire to become Newton, because when he died, he was a virgin. So there's a cost to being the most brilliant person there ever was. Christian Huygens in a book called Cosmotheros, brilliant in his generation, one of the most brilliant scientists of the day, he wrote about the planets and Newton's laws. And then he got to biology and didn't quite understand why there was life. And then he invoked God in all the places where he didn't understand what he was talking about. So now we get to Laplace, celestial mechanics. Laplace looked at Newton's problem and said, that's kind of cool. I wonder if I can solve that. This multi-body problem where everybody's tugging on everybody else, but there's one main force of gravity at work. So he writes a five-volume tone called celestial mechanics. And in there, he pioneers perturbation theory. That's the theory we have one main force and then other little tugs. How do you treat that mathematically? He pioneers that, solves it for the solar system, demonstrates that the solar system is stable, far beyond anything Newton had imagined. This work was called up by Napoleon. Napoleon was not only everything we know him to be, he was a great reader of mechanics and physics books so that he would know not only how to make the cannonball, he would know where the cannonball would hit when he shot it. And so he summoned up this five-volume tone, read it, said to Laplace, this is a brilliant piece of work, but you make no mention of the architect of the system, making direct reference back to Isaac Newton. And Laplace's reply was, sir, I had no need for that hypothesis. So what worries me is had Newton not stopped and ceded his brilliance to God, he could have easily come up with perturbation theory. Newton invented calculus practically on a dare. Perturbation theory is just an extension of calculus. Perturbation theory, it's a nice, elegant extension, but you know Newton could have knocked us out in an afternoon, you know this, okay? So my problem is not that people have invoked intelligent design, brilliant people have done it before, they'll keep doing it, I don't have an issue with that. I worry if it prevents you from making further discoveries. I don't want the intelligent design person to be the one looking for the cure for Alzheimer's, because they'll get to their ignorance and say, well not only can I not figure this out, no one else in the lab will figure it, no one else will ever be born will figure this out. It is intelligently designed. Then that person is removed from the set of people who would solve that problem. And so I say, sure, there's a lot of beautiful things in the universe, but don't sweep under the rug of the fact that you have evidence of stupid design, completely stupid design, stupid, stuff no one would come up with, nobody. Okay, let's look at humans. There's leukemia, hemophilia, sickle cell, multiple stroke, epilepsy, Parkinson. We have a narrow view of the electromagnetic spectrum. We're practically blind compared with what's out there. And by the way, if you could see microwaves, everybody's cell phone would be like a glow, you know? And you could say, what's that in your pocket? Are you enjoying the show? You know, you can like, you have total access to radiation of all wavelengths. We exhale most of the oxygen we inhale. It's a very inefficient process. That's why you can breathe in and out of a paper bag and not suffocate. You can keep that up for like 20 minutes. This goes on and on and on. We can't detect deadly ionizing radiation, radon. We can't smell CO or CO2. Mosquitoes can smell CO2. We can't. Okay, I'm not asking for much here. Okay? What am I asking for? We eat, drink and speak through the same orifice in our body guaranteeing that some percentage of us will choke to death every year. We can do better than that. Dolphins do better than that. They breathe through a hole someplace else. No dolphin has ever choked trying to laugh as it breathed. Okay? In the start, flipper, flipper laughs, you know? So this is what they're, and humans are earth. Volcanoes level cities. We had an Indonesian tsunami killed 200,000 people. Oh, the Christians say, oh, well that was mostly Muslims. That was God saying you're Muslim. Until you look back at 1755 at Lisbon, the holiest city, one of the holiest cities in Europe at the time. It was Sunday morning, all Saints' Day. 10 o'clock in the morning. Everybody was in church. And a magnitude eight earthquake struck Lisbon killing 80,000 people, mostly in churches as they worshiped. That was basically the birth of the modern atheist movement. It's traceable to that event. Okay? That's true. Voltaire and all these guys wrote inspired by that event. Floods, tornadoes, lightning strike. We can't live on two thirds of it. People talk about earth as some cradle for life. Excuse me, 90% of all life they'd ever lived is now extinct. If you actually look at the evidence, it's clear that earth is actually trying to kill us. The universe. Most planet orbits are unstable on very long time scales. Longer than what Laplace would show. It's, you know, we're about to collide with Andromeda in seven billion years, so don't worry about that one just yet. So one way universe, where supernova could go off and fry our ozone layer. I'm just saying, if you look, you don't have to look hard to find out everything in the universe that's stupid. Stupid defined by not good for us. Okay? And so if there is a designer, the designer is equally stupid as intelligent. You have to accept that fact. I like the bell socket in the shoulder. That's a good idea, right? You can move it around in a circle. Can't do that with your, like your knee. Okay? Your knee doesn't bend this way. Not on purpose at least. But your shoulder can do, that's a good deal. I like that design. I call that intelligent design. Something I would call stupid design is, like, what's that going on between our legs? Got like, a sewage system mixed with an entertainment complex, you know? It's like, bad design, bad design. Okay, we're winding down here. Okay? I wanna make an important point. This is not all people in the world. This is Americans. Religious people, it depends on which study you get. He asked, do you pray to a personal God? These numbers vary, but they're high and they're up around 90%. Okay? There might be 85. That's actually not important. That difference is not important for the point I'm about to make. It's high. Okay? In the West. In America. 90%. Okay? What percent of religious, what percentage of educated people are religious? The number drops. I'm talking about graduate degrees here. Among all people with masters and PhDs, the religiosity drops. Somewhere around 60%, might be 65. The point is it drops with education level. Now let's bring in scientists. How about what percentage of scientists in America are religious? Average of all the branches, it's about 40%, maybe 35%. In there, there's a range, of course. Biologists, physicists, astrophysicists are lower. The sort of engineers and mathematicians are higher. So it averages out to about 40%. So this looks like, this looks like scientists are 40% down from 90% from the general public. But that's the wrong, no. It's 40% down from 60% because all scientists have graduate degrees. So the graduate degree in any subject gets you halfway there. The science is the increment from the educated degrees. I mean from the all educated people. That takes it down to 40%. Now you go to the elite scientists. This is a well-known number. 7% are religious. Claiming a personal God to whom they pray and intervene in their lives. I submit to you that with the current atheist fervor that has taken on over the past several years, I would say launched, the modern atheists are called, launched by the Dawkins book and the Hitchens book and the Sam Harris book and the like. And I was just in borders recently. Couldn't believe it. Sorry, I didn't have a camera. Borders books, there it was. A section called atheism. It was like, I'd never seen that before. It's like, okay, there it was. They had enough critical amounts of books to make a section. So here's my problem. Here's my concern. When you're educated and you understand how physics works and you're mathematically literate and you understand data and you understand experiment and you go up to someone who doesn't have that training and they are religious and you ask them why are you religious in believing in invisible things that influence your life? What's wrong with you? Okay? That's unfair. It's not only unfair, it's disrespectful. For the following reason, until that number is zero, you've got nothing to say to the general public. These are scientists among us in the National Academy of Sciences who are religious and pray to a personal God and I know some of them. And you're fighting the public for the religious beliefs? Figure that one out first because maybe there's an asymptote. Maybe you can't change everybody. Maybe that's telling us something. Maybe there's something in the brain wiring that positively prevents some people from ever being an atheist. And if that's the case, in a way they can't help it and you'll never know it because you're not one of them. So I ask you first for compassion with the public but you should target your exercise and your experiments on understanding that number because that's not zero. Yes, it's low but it's not one percent, it's not one half of a percent or a tenth of a percent. It is seven percent, one out of 14. If this were the National Academy of Sciences with 900, you'd have 100 people in here. Did I do that right? Seven percent. Carry the two, well 65. Sorry, seven times nine, yeah, so six, yeah. You have 65 people in here among elite scientists praying to their personal God. So now I don't care, I ask personally, don't care what people want to believe. This country was founded on religious freedoms. That's kind of, that's how that happened, okay? And what enabled the religious freedoms is that a constitution makes no mention of God at all which means nobody's God reigns supreme over anybody else's and therein is the religious freedom that attracted all these waves of immigrants for centuries. And so I don't have an issue with what you do in the church but I'm gonna be up in your face if you're gonna knock on my science classroom and tell me that I gotta teach what you're teaching in your Sunday school because that's when we're gonna fight. And I'm gonna tell you something. There's no tradition of scientists knocking down the Sunday school door, telling the preacher that might not necessarily be true. That's never happened. There are no scientists picketing out front of churches. There's been this coexistence forever. So to have the religious communities knocking down the science door, there's something wrong there. And I think back to Al-Ghazali and the 12th century and the fall of that intellectual empire. And it's got me scared in America. I wrote, do you remember that case in Jersey where this middle school kid? Forgive me, I forgot his name. I met him. Matthew Leclerc. Do you remember this? He is in his history class. The teacher was saying that Jesus is the only one in true saving, Christianity is the only one in true religion. And if you were not, you were damned to hell. And he pointed to a Muslim girl and said she's damned to hell already. It's too late for her. And that Noah's Ark carried dinosaurs on it and that the Big Bang and evolution are not scientific. He recorded this and submitted it to the New York Times and it became a whole expose on this teacher. And then what happened? The ACLU came out and separation of church and state and it's a violation of separation of church and state. And I said, I don't normally get in those arguments because I got the universe to worry about. I don't normally, I let that go. But then I thought, no, people are missing something here. It's not a case of a separation of church and state. It's not. I looked at the comments and the transcript. I ignored the part about Jesus being your savior. I ignored the part about Christianity being the one in true religion. I paid attention to the statement that Noah's Ark carried dinosaurs. And so I said, I wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times that they printed and I will read to you. To the editor, people cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey school teacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's Ark carried dinosaurs. The case is not about the need to separate church and state. It's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers. Let's fix this one once and for all, okay? Let's just fix this, okay? Once and for all. Yes, Einstein and God were like that, okay? It's like God doesn't play dice with the universe. It turns out God does. That's what quantum mechanics is all about. He was wrong about that, okay? He mentions God a lot. And it's all the religious people like claiming him because he's famous and he's unimpeachably smart. And if you get famous, smart scientists in your camp that boosts your camp, okay? But let's straighten this out once and for all. Here's a letter from Albert Einstein. It is later years, 1954, a couple of years before he died. I was, it was of course a lie what you read about my religious convictions. A lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God. And I've never denied this and have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious, then it's the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. Case closed. So anyone says Einstein was religious? Just show him this letter, okay? I'm way over time. I'm way, I went way long. No, I, no, I'm, but, well, I gotta ask the man here. I gotta, are we, are we? Keep going, keep going. Okay, we got to keep going, son. All right. I'm sorry, I, okay, I got something here I gotta get off my chest. Another one, you ready? A cosmic perspective. I'm gonna tell you something that Phil and I live and breathe. Some people in the public have read enough to feel it as well, but not enough people. But there's a twist at the end. Bear with me, there's a point to this, okay? This is the number one. 10 to the zero, but you all geeks, you know what that is. 10 to the zero is one. If you spelled it out, it would be O-N-E, one. This is not an unfamiliar number. Up by a factor of a thousand, you get the number a thousand. Metric prefix, kilo, kilo. By the way, drug dealers were metric long before America was, all right? Because people lament that, but we're there. We're basically there. Whether our money is metric, our car engine displacement is metric, our Pepsi is metric. You don't buy a quart of soda, you buy liters. So we're basically slowly becoming metric, even though some are kicking and screaming in the process. We know a thousand, population of most cities is represented in thousands, and okay, fine. Up by another factor of a thousand, you get a million, 10 to the six, mega, mega used to mean something in computer worlds. Now you were up to, yeah, this now, if you had megabytes, go home, you know? New York City has eight million people living in it. That's my, all my neighbors there. It's millions, millions. There are more millionaires now than ever before in America. Go up by another factor of a thousand, you get a number made famous by Carl Sagan. And I'll tell you why that's a famous number because if you put your chin out, everybody put your chin out. And on three, say this word with me with your chin out. Ready, on three, one, two, three, billion. See isn't that a beautiful, it's a beautiful word. Giga. There's six billion people in the world. By the way, there's about 6,000 astrophysicists. So you divide those two numbers. We're actually one in a million. Just in case you're wondering. Just, I'm just, I'm just letting you know, just. So if you ever are in the same room with an astrophysicist, that's your chance to ask the questions, okay? So billions, Bill Gates, there's a Bill Gates wealth clock on the internet, linked to his Microsoft stock shareholdings. And it fluctuates by billions of dollars per day, but it's up around 40 to 50 billion. McDonald's has sold 100 billion hamburgers. Anyone here eat at McDonald's? Okay, the rest of you are just lying. Okay? They sold 100 billion hamburgers. Tell you how big that is, I did the math. Take the 100 billion hamburgers, line them side to side. Will it cross America? Yes it will. Will it cross the Pacific? Yes it will. Across Asia? Yes it will. Europe, the Atlantic can come right back here to Las Vegas? Yes it will. You'll have some left over. After you've gone around the world, laying your 100 billion hamburgers end to end. What will you do the rest of them? You'll go around the world another 51 times. You still have some left over. What do you do with those? You're bored with going around the world, so now you stack them. How high a stack can you make after you've been around the world 52 times? You can make a stack high enough to reach the moon and back. And only then would you have used your 100 billion hamburgers. This is terrifying news to cows. Okay. Up by another factor of 1000, a trillion. A trillion. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. You can actually count to a billion. Anyone here 31 years old in the room? 31. This year you will live your billion second. I celebrated my billion second. Okay. With champagne. Because that's much more significant than just how many times earth goes around the sun. That's just so provincial, you know. Plano hasn't been around once since it was discovered, right? So year is just arbitrary for the planet. But seconds, you get a billion seconds. So if 31 years, you can count to a billion, that means you can never count to a trillion. It would take you 31,000 years to count your trillion, so do not try that. So a trillion, trillion seconds ago, we were in caves. So let's go up by another factor of 1000. Quadrillion, one of my favorite numbers, actually 100 quadrillion is the estimated number of sounds and words ever uttered by all humans who have ever lived. Okay, I knew you would pause on that one, right? Okay. Go up by another factor of 1000, quintillion. We were billion, trillion, quadrillion, quintillion. That's about the number of grains of sand on an average beach. And I did the math and it's even the sand that comes home in your groin, you know, in your bathing suit. Add all that up, it's in that number. We go up by another factor of 1000, we get to sextillion. 1000 times bigger than the number of grains of sand on an average beach. It's self 1000 times bigger than the number of sounds and words ever uttered by all humans who have ever lived. 1000 times bigger than all the McDonald's hamburgers. Sextillion, that is the estimated number of stars in the universe. I heard someone say God. I heard someone say God. Stars in the universe. It's staggering. Are we alone? Probably not. Unless you're inexcusably egocentric. Especially since you look at what we're made of. If you were made of some isotope of bismuth, you'd have an argument that maybe we were rare in the cosmos. But we're not, okay? Let's look at the universe. The number one ingredient in the universe is hydrogen. Helium, in order. Oxygen, carbon, nitrogen. And the most famous element of them all, other, okay. Now, life on earth. Number one ingredient in life on earth. A biggest molecule is water. H2O, what's in water? Hydrogen, number one element. Helium, by the way, is chemically inert. We don't have it, okay? You can inhale it and sound like Mickey Mouse. That's about it. Next in life, oxygen. Next, carbon. We are carbon based life. Next, nitrogen. Next, altogether class. Other, there we go. We are one for one, the ingredients of the universe. Not only that carbon is so chemically fertile, more molecules can be constructed with the carbon atom than all other molecules combined. So it's not surprising that the most complex chemistry we know, called life, is based on it. And all these science fiction stories, well how about silicon is right below carbon on the periodic table, so why can't we make silicon based life? Carbon is five times more abundant in the universe than silicon. You don't have to invoke it in order to say there's life out there in the universe, using Earth as some kind of template. The point of all this is, we had a space show in New York that zoomed out from Earth. Earth got little, solar system got little, Milky Way got little, you lost it. You learned that we're part of the universe. The ingredients are in us, we're in the universe, and we're just all out there in space. The next week, after we opened, I got a letter from a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Okay? What did he ask me? I'll read it to you. I'm assistant professor of social cultural psychology at U Penn. I'm writing to discuss the possibility of a research project in collaboration. My research focuses on the psychological experiences associated with feelings of insignificance. It's a bummer of a job there, man. Okay? I recently saw the space show at the planetarium and needless to say, it was the most dramatic elicitor of feelings of smallest and insignificance that I have yet encountered. I submit to you. He has an issue with the universe because he came into the room with a needlessly and unjustifiably large ego to begin with. If he understood how we fit into the cosmos, you can actually celebrate that fact. That it's the human mind that came up with the laws of physics that gives us an understanding of it. You can celebrate that fact. You can celebrate the fact that my molecules are up there and that we all came from stars. There's a sense of participation and belonging that is almost spiritual in the feelings it elicits that if you go in saying, you're the top of the heap, well, I'm human and we're the top and we're the best and we're that, it can only depress you. And so, by the way, of course, you learn in biology, one centimeter of your lower colon lives and works 100 billion bacteria. So who's really in charge of things when you think about it? Just think that one through. My last two slides. In the Bible, there's this phrase, and the meek shall inherit the earth. This is in Psalms. The rest of that goes and live in a world of peace, actually. So it associates peace with being meek. That stands to reason because meek people don't bomb cities, okay? So there's a correlation to that fact. But I went back to the original Hebrew and I studied enough Hebrew to translate this directly and they mistranslated. They got it wrong. What it really says is, and the geek shall inherit the earth, okay? I'll leave you with one slide. I'll leave you with one slide. The American Physical Society in 1984 had their annual meeting here in Las Vegas. This was the newspaper headline. Physicists and therapists, thank you. Thank you all, enjoy the conference. Thank you all. We hope you will remind you of how grateful we were to hear your words and how much we hope to see you again. Thank you, sir. Thank you.