Neil deGrasse Tyson: If Earth Stopped Rotating For a Second

at Johnny bash uh via Twitter wants to know what would happen if the earth stopped rotating for a second oh yeah that would be disastrous disastrous cuz right now here in New York you can calculate at our latitude we are all moving with the earth at 800 miles an hour jus East because earth is rotated if you stopped earth and you weren't seatbelt buckled to the earth you would fall over and roll 800 miles an hour due east it would kill everyone on earth people be flying out of windows and that would just be a

bad day on earth I'm just saying now if you if somehow we all slowed down so anything not bolted to the earth would would slide due east 800 miles an hour that's what happens to you in a car if you hit a brick wall and you're not wearing a seat belt you keep going that's why you get hurt in those kinds of accidents if somehow we all slowed down with the earth then okay it's fine I mean people think we'll somehow we'll be weightless or we'll lose our atmosphere no it's just that you have really

long days at ski boot one ask what's the thing that has surprised you most in the physics world in the physics world I'm surprised can I give a cop-out answer there I'm surprised that the United States could lead the world in particle physics for most of the 20th century and then just abandon that leadership and now the most powerful particle accelerator is in Europe at CERN the Center for European Center for Nuclear Research but if you spell that in French it spells CERN ahead of us and they that it's that particle accelerator that found the

god particle the famous Higgs boson and we're just looking over across the pond saying oh can we do a few of our scientists are on the project but we're not the leaders of it so you ask what surprises me in physics that we could by vote of Congress seed that leadership that quickly and I'm astonished I wonder what country am i living in it's not the one I grew up in it's something different I know it's a cop-out answer but that's our danger Dave 7:23 tweets what obstacles do we have to overcome in order to

facilitate interplanetary travel Oh okay you know Voyager just left the solar system the Voyager spacecraft it was in all the news a few weeks ago traveling fast all right and it's at this boundary between the sun's influence and the galactic influence and so you can say well if you if you hitched a ride on that how long would it take you could have been going for 40 years how long would it take you to get to the nearest stars the nearest star in a galaxy that has a hundred million stars in it excuse me 100

billion stars in it the nearest star take you forty thousand years so the question what does it take to become interstellar space we right have to figure out a way to live a really long time more send a crew of astronauts that are really fertile so that the eightieth of generation down the line is the one who lands at the destination or we have to find out something new about the fabric of space and time so that we can basically invoke the famous warp drive engines that are common in Star Trek allowing them to cross

the galaxy during the TV commercial gene lush our own tweets all of that what can we expect the North and South Poles to shift when can we expect them to shift and what manifestations will we experience they don't shift yeah there was a lot of talk about pole shifting as we went into the year 2012 all the 2012 hysteria which was basically a hoax on scientifically illiterate people of the world and so the pole earth rotates and the pole Bob's up and down over tens of thousands of years and we and we oscillate like this

the way a top does when you see a top begin to slow down but nobody plays with tops anymore I love well you gotta love the top I play with the low you spin it and then it begins mellow the official word is precess we do that and we do one full precession every 26,000 years we don't flip you