Thing You Thought You Knew – Red Hot, Blue Hot

Hey Star Talkians, we've got yet another Things You Thought You Knew episode. We're talking about small molecules, the temperature of light, and food gone bad. Check it out. Welcome to Star Talk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. Star Talk begins with.

Do you have any idea how small molecules are? Well, seeing uh as I can't see them, I'm gonna say I do not. Right. And even if you did say you knew, I would say you didn't know. I'm just pulling rank here. I'm just saying molecules. I mean, think about it. Our understanding of the existence of atoms. did not even come into age until the 20th century. Adams was were still a hypothesis.

All right, that there be this sort of smallest unit of a material called the atom. By the way, the word atom from the Greek means indivisible. So they imagined that there was some individual minimal part of a thing. But of course we break at bust atoms all the time. So no, they're not indivisible, but we kept the term. Right. So we kept the term atom to describe the electrons, protons, neutrons, the classical particles you learn about in in high school.

chemistry and maybe physics. So uh so molecules are um I I could give an example. Okay, and and this is my favorite example of them all. So I ask you think about how much water there is in the world in all the oceans. Okay. And if you go in the middle of the ocean, it's miles deep. Okay, the Titanic was like three and a half mile. I forgot the exact number. Multiple miles below Earth's surface. Okay. That's a lot of water. It's a lot of water. And what is the water molecule?

H two O. H two O. Okay. So two hydrogen, one oxygen, H two O. So that is salts and dissolved salts and fish poop and stuff like that. But buying it's basically H two O all over the world. All right. I love that you throw in the fish poop. I'm so proud of you. Thank you. That's the juvenile part. Yes. There's there's also fish poop i in the ocean. So where else does it go, right? Um and just to recite the title of a book they may have grown up on,

Everything poops. Yeah. And it shows it's just a story. It's for little kids. I know. Because they poop and they know they poop and they're fascinated by it. And it's just an account that everybody poops. And all the fish poop in the ocean, okay? They don't go onto land to poop. Yeah. I I read that book to my daughter. She thought it was crappy. Oh.

I couldn't help it. So they don't have outhouses on the land, right? It's all in there. That would be amazing though. Wouldn't that be oh God, you just gave me the best thought in the world where a fish, a fish. just shows up at somebody's apartment door or house. And just lets one go and goes.

How do you like it? Huh? Put it into your own house. Because we put all our sewage into your own house. Right, we put it into theirs, right? How great would that be? Now you know how it feels. All right. So I now uh take a glass and fill it with water. Mm-hmm. Okay. A regular a cup a cup, okay? That you might drink water out of. Okay. Fill it up. So stare at that cup, and I will tell you. That there are more molecules of water in that cup.

Then there are cups of water in all the world's oceans. Holy crap. Wow. Okay, now the reason why I couched it that way is because that leads to fascinating conclusions. Okay, if this cup of water has more molecules than there are cups of water in all the world. That means when I drink this cup of water and it comes out of me eventually, right, through snot, spit, uh uh, sweat, right, pee, whatever, it'll come out of you and it goes back into the environment.

Okay, you have excreted enough molecules to populate every single cup of water that is ever drawn from the ocean. Just gotta give it enough time. Okay. So this moisture goes back into the environment and m the molecules that pass through my kidneys are now working their way around the world. Give it enough time, I can guarantee you that there will be some molecules in that next cup of water you scoop that pass through my kidney.

So I get to make the following statement. Every glass of water you drink contains molecules that pass through the kidneys of Abe Lincoln. uh Genghis Khan, uh Joan of Ark, uh pick pick your favorite historical character. Okay. Well, all I can say is that somehow you've done it, Neil. You've done it. You've made it so I am never again going to drink water. And I think I di I ran the calculation. It's about a hundred molecules.

Per per cup of water. That's how that's how small molecules are. That's that's my point. That's the whole point of this exercise. Like I'll give you one more. You ready? Go for it. All right. There are more molecules. Get a breath of air. Okay, this would be now nitrogen molecules, mostly nitrogen and then oxygen. Okay.

uh N2 and O two, because they're each in a molecular form. A little bit of argon and and some carbon dioxide, but it's predominantly nitrogen and oxygen. There are more molecules, air molecules in a breath of air you take. then there are breaths of air in all of the Earth's atmosphere. Oh, gotcha, right. Okay. So it means when you exhale. Right. Air that comes out of your lungs.

scatters back into the air, and there are plenty of air molecules to scatter into every other breath that will ever be taken in the future history of the world. Wow. So you're not only sharing water molecules that people have come before you, you're sharing air molecules that you have breathed.

That's how small they are. This this is my point. And and so so um it's remarkable that we were able to discover them at all, much less the atoms that they comprise. What you do is you look at things that they do that you can see through microscopes, electron microscopes, this sort of thing. And you say the only understanding of this is if the atoms got together and made a molecule.

But nobody's holding up a molecule. Here, take this and plug it in this way. All right, there there's some ways to image molecules. We're on the verge of that. It's something called quantum. Uh construction. You can take a molecule and put it here and add an atom and build things at a molecular level, the way carpenters or construction workers uh assemble buildings by putting bricks together. Okay, that's freaky and scary.

that's a smaller part of a larger hole, you just need tools that can maneuver the bricks. Right. If I want to make a molecule that's never been made before, and I make sure that it's a stable molecule, How am I going to do that? Do I just put all the money and jiggle them? Maybe they won't want to do that on their own. But if I make it happen with with quantum tweezers, then I can start making molecules. And you might even be able to make life.

At that point and not wait for it to happen by chance. So so a a frontier is our ability to manipulate those things that we could never see. Interesting. That is amazing. That's so but but why think of it not as creepy that you're you're you're

Um, drinking water that passed through someone else's kidneys. No, that I don't want I don't ever want to have that thought again. I'm so sorry that you brought it up. Let me tell you the whole time you've been talking, I've been wanting to drink this right here. I'm not doing it. You're not doing it. I'm not doing it now.

No, I just can't. I can't drink water anymore. I don't have to go my whole life now. It's going it's gonna have to be great Kool-Aid because guess what? I know that I'm not sharing that. With with Jesus and Genghis Khan. I know that Jesus and Genghis Khan did not have Kool-Aid. So now I can only drink great Kool-Aid. Thank you.

So um yeah, so it's just they are impressively little. Yeah. And here we are in our big macroscopic scale. I mean think about most of the history of research and investigation and trying to understand the world around us, we were anchored to our five senses. as the one and o as the only means of Of measuring and decoding what the world was doing around us. Right. And f forget molecules we didn't even know about bacteria or viruses.

All right. And so you catch a disease, you find somebody to blame, or you were a sinner. correspondence with an objective reality that we would not then glean Until many, many centuries later. I don't know what you're talking about. We still haven't learned that lesson. Oh, that's true. People say Yeah, people don't know how to relate to viruses. They still don't know. Oh man.

Oh, that is really cool though. Yeah, so so so there it is. I I have nothing more to add to that. Oh, and by the way, this is how you get um Avogadro's number. That's that's that's the count of molecules. Right. In in a mole. What's what's the mole number? Th yeah, so so you have to look at the element on the periodic table or the the the atomic weight of the molecule itself. Right. And so l let's look at carbon. It carbon has is its n atomic number is twelve. S the natural carbon has

six electro six protons and six neutrons. So a mole of carbon is twelve grams of carbon. Gotcha. Okay, a mole of of silicon. Would be 18 grams of silicon. Okay. So because its atomic number is 18. Right. I'm sorry. Sorry. So I didn't say this right. Carbon's atomic number is six because you're counting protons, but its atomic weight is six plus six, you get twelve. Okay. All right. So that's six.

protons, six neutrons. So my my only point here is uh so you can ask if you have a mole of a substance, how many molecules is that? Okay. So 12 grams, you know, 12 grams is not very much. No, it's not. Okay? It's re it's not. So 12 grams is a third of an ounce of carbon. How many molecules in it? Well, it's Avogadro's number of molecules. And that's six point oh two two, just call it six, times ten to the twenty third power. Right. Okay, cool. Twenty third That's insane. That's insane. Yeah.

Yes. I mean that's I I I mean that's really not a conceivable number. It's a hundred times bigger than the number of stars in the observable universe. Yeah, I was gonna say that's not a conceivable number because like the twenty-three zeros Like once a You can't say, Oh, it's twice as big as this other thing you already know about. Exactly. It's crazy. That's crazy.

Right, right. This is a problem when you are dealing with extremes and we confront this all the time in astrophysics, right? Um how do you talk about the biz the biggest explosion in the universe? By w how do you measure that, right? Usually you measure something'cause you have other things that are bigger, other things that are smaller, and then you say it's somewhere in there, and then you triangulate on it. Oh now I understand.

But if it's more than anything you've seen before, it becomes a challenge to explain. It's it's a it's a philosophical issue of communication, right? And and our own physiology's ability to to uh come to terms with things that fall far outside of our life experience. I'm Olikon Hemraj and I support Star Talk on Patreon. This is Star Talk with Neil Degrasse Tyson. I, as an astrophysicist, Uh no.

Uh the we have something called color temperature. Okay? We I am aware of that. We practically invented that concept. Okay. Well I like photography, so that's how I know color temperature. Well th I'm gonna get there and you're gonna find out why I have issues, okay. So So uh here's what here's what happens. If you have an object that is of a given temperature Uh if it's higher, if it's hotter than absolute zero, it will be radiating some electromagnetic energy.

Okay. Right. So so the colder it is, the longer are the wavelengths of light it emits, radio waves. Uh the universe is pretty cold. It's only three degrees Kelvin. That's emitting microwaves. And the hotter it gets The more it emits light

Of higher and higher energy. So let's keep going. Uh eventually you can heat this thing up so that some of the energy that's comes out g that it emits comes out in the red part of the spectrum. That object, if you looked at it with your eyes, you'd say it's red. Okay. It'll start doing that at a you know, thousand, fifteen hundred degrees. Okay? Keep increasing the temperature. It's not only giving you red light, it's also giving you light from the rest.

of the rainbow from the rest of the optical spectrum. So it'll give you not only red, but also orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. If you do that, in roughly equal amounts, the glowing object turns white. Okay. Because you have equal amounts of all the colors of the rainbow. So now if you keep raising the temperature, this energy output continues to shift and now it's emitting more blue light than red light. If you're emitting more blue than red through the spectrum, that object will look blue.

Okay. Okay. So I'm going from like a couple of thousand degrees to like six thousand degrees.

I'm getting there, I'm getting there, I'm getting there. So what I'm getting there's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. Hang with me. Hang with me. So an object goes from what is basically invisible to you unless you had radio wave eyeballs or microwave eyeballs to something that's glowing kind of uh uh uh red and then it goes to amber and then it starts glowing white and then it'll start glowing blue.

And it'll forevermore glow blue, but it keeps giving you higher and higher energy. It'll give you uh X-rays, it can even give you gamma rays. But the part of it that comes through the spectrum is more in the red than in the blue. So, hot things are blue. Medium temperature things are white. Cooler things that are still glowing are red. Okay. So if you have an electric stove

When you first turn it on, it feels warm, but you can't see it in the dark. No. Okay? That's giving you infrared. We can't see infrared. It's got to glow so hot. That is giving you a little bit of red. Right. And then you say, oh, it's glowing red hot. Right. But a red hot object is the coolest of all hots.

Okay. Damn. Damn. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. Sorry, red. Dad. Okay. So when I see red hot this and red hot that, I'm saying that ain't so bad. Right. That ain't so bad. Okay, so now watch.

Okay, so that is what's happening astrophysically. That's what's happening in the to in the laws of physics. But now bring in the artistic photographer. Okay? Okay. And in art, if you're gonna paint a picture, a painting, you're gonna create a painting and you want the scene to feel cool, like it's in the Arctic, what is your predominant color in the painting? N not just white. Blue. Blue. Especially blue. Okay?

So they say that it's cool. Right. This is this a cool color. And okay, and then when they want to show something hot, like hell and devils and everything, they use the color red. All right. S because that's how our emotions we see ice cubes and it's bluish and anything that got hot enough to hurt us is glowing red hot. It's rare that you'll see something so hot that it's glowing white or glowing blue.

Because that stuff gets hot enough when it's red hot. All right. So our entire life experience is shifted to the cool end of the spectrum with us thinking that red hot is actually hot. As a result, we have the absurd conversation between an astrophysicist and a photographer. It's um okay, I need a cooler lamp for this. Right. So what do they do? They get the 6,000 degree bulb instead of the 3,000 degree bulb.

This is in the days when you use tungsten, but we still think of those temperatures even in the LED world. Okay? So when they say make this scene cooler, they mean get a higher temperature lamp. And when they say we want to make this scene warmer, it means they want to put in a lower temperature lamp that glows at like 3,000 degrees or 2,500 degrees. And I'm pissed off at this.

I'm just saying Yeah, that's great. If if you're gonna if you're gonna be numerical about whether something is warm or cool Do you have permission to leave the artists behind in this conversation? You scientifically illiterate troglodyte? No, I'm just saying Damn photographers. I'm just saying if you wanna say the the it scene is cool blue. and and and warm red fine, but don't hand it a temperature. Right, don't give it temperature.

Because you have the absurd conversation. Increase the color temperature of the lamp so that the scene it's illuminating is cooler. Well see, you gotta hate that. You have to talk to each other in temperatures, otherwise we wouldn't know. So if if you're ever shooting something and somebody says, all right, yo, let's Let's uh give me that give me that daylight and daylight is fifty six hundred. Right. Between that and six thousand. And by the way, that is that is the temperature of the sun.

Right. Okay. And wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. And that is the temperature of the sun. And so so and daylight, does that look blue to you? No, it I mean but but it's bluer than a Then a a a cooler qu cooler uh lamp blue than a low temperature lamp. Right. But but if you look at the five thousand six that's daylight. By the way, it's not yellow. That is not a yellow lamp. Yet you still have people saying the sun is yellow. Sun is yellow. No, it's not. The sun is freaking white. Okay?

All right. Well I interrupted you. I mean that's that you basically that's what it is. But the it's really like the only reference that photographers have. But what you're saying is photographers need to come up with a new reference. Um because what they're saying is scientifically wrong. It's it's artistically sensible, but then don't put numbers on it. Because with these numbers mean things.

Right. If you're gonna put a ten thousand degree lamp, that's a hot lamp. And that's a very blue lamp. Blue is hot. In the universe. That makes sense. I mean now But then we have blue stars, they're twenty, thirty thousand frickin' degrees. We have red stars, they're called red giants, they're hovering around a thousand, fifteen hundred, two thousand degrees, barely gr glowing. So I'm Um I like what you're saying. I just like the fact that I'm I'm changing red hot.

to white hot from now on. You know. Now some people know that white hot is hotter than red hot. Right. It's just not it's just not common in society. But blue hot is my newest thing. I'm going blue hot all the time. You know what I mean? Don't make you know what? That's what I want for you. Oh no, the problem is it's melted by then. You mean a fireplace poker.

Yeah, that's a problem. That's right. You're right, because it's oh yeah, that would melt. Damn. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You start melting stuff. That's a that's a problem. That's why we we have very little experience with white white hot and blue hot. Um but red hot you can get almost anything to red hot temperatures. And you don't see a lot of white hot though. No, you don't You know my dad was a printer and so in printing he owned a printing company and the coolest thing in the plant.

was how you make photo plates. So the plate is treated with a chemical that when exposed to this super white hot light The image is burned onto the plate and it's called burning a plate, right? And then that image is the only thing on the plate now that will transfer ink. But they use I forget the name of these little tubes. They came together and they and I forget the Oh it's an arc lamp. That's probably That's a very high temperature arc between there. That's correct.

And it was the coolest thing in the world and you weren't allowed to look at it'cause it would make you blind. And it's a big thing. And what they do is they have these carbon rods basically, and you you attempt to send current through it.

But it has to gap across an air gap. And depending on what your separation was and how big your current was, you could determine how what the threshold was before you jumped the arc. Right. And there there it was. That's exactly it. And the whole thing was just the those two tubes.

and the light in between and you had to look at it with like the same way you look at I forget the glass. The welders goggles you gotta look at it with that same thing you look at a uh uh uh uh an eclipse with And it was the it was the coolest thing in the world, but it was white hot.

Yeah, yeah. And and and hot very clearly hotter than anything red hot, right? That's what that is. So I so these are my issues that I bringing to you, Chuck. I don't have a solution for them. I'm just highlighting them. And and by the way, when I walk up to a water cooler And and one and the the the two spigots are color-coded. Yes. One is red, and and I say, okay, I'm no longer in my lab, I'm in the real world.

And so blue is not hotter than red. They think blue is cold, so that's my go I I waste I can't tell you how much of my life I've wasted staring at twin spigots on a water cooler, figuring out which one is the cold water. R so what we should do is maybe the red is hot. And then maybe... Pink.

For like the cooler blue. For the cooler one. Like you want the water. Keep working on that, Chuck. I don't know about that. Keep working on it. Oh grey. Grey. No, nobody wants to drink gray water, that's for sure. I'm trying to think about it. All right, that's all that's the that's all I want to do on this explainer. That's a really cool but see now you got me mad at the fact that all these things exist in life that tell us that blue

It's cooler than red. Because now that you said that, it's everywhere. And even the photographers know it's hotter because they ask for a higher temperature. That's right. That's that's that's the insidiousness of it all. All right, cool. Anyhow. I know what we should do. Here's the solution. Next time you see a photographer people, just punch.

Did that work for you so far? Is that really? Is that how you you did that to your boss a few times? How far did that get you? Uh no. Exactly. Did we find you on the street before you had this game? Right I punched my boss one too many times.

I want to talk about when food goes bad. Okay. See already you got me. I love it. When food goes bad, because l something I'm very well aware of because I come from a childhood where Mom and grandmom Almost uh refuse to almost throw away I mean it's a refuse to throw away they don't want to waste food. They don't want to waste never. Even if the food would kill you, they st they wouldn't throw away the food. I'm just like, Mom, this thing is moving.

What are you talking about? You know? Well, you put that in a pan it'll be just fine. You cut that mold off of there and you just fine. These are people who like grew up in the depression, you know, and where hunger was a thing. Yeah, man. So they don't want them young whippersnappers just throwing away food. When the potato salad goes bad.

And you go inside the refrigerator and the potato salad's got a gun and it's holding it up to the lettuce or something. It's it's like mugging other foods. When it goes bad, right. You chose the right thing, the potato salad, right? Because that's the one you gotta watch out for. Exactly. So Uh why am I an astrophysicist talking about that? I'll tell you why. Because there's the normal kind of way food goes bad. All right. You leave it in there too long, and something grows on it.

All right, something else wants to eat the food. And it's some kind of microbe, some bacteria or combination of bacteria that start eating the food. And it could be mold that's enjoying the food that you were gonna eat. All right. Now D first of all, there's this bacteria's on the food all the time. It's just a matter of how much is there, right? And you have a digestive tract and uh depending on what you ate.

the food will take a certain amount of time to go from your mouth to come out the other side or to get metabolized. All right, so If you ingest bacteria on your food that would otherwise be bad for you, that bacteria begins to multiply. All right. It's multiplying at some rate in the refrigerator. But when it warms up to your body temperature because you've just eaten it.

Duplicate faster. Okay, so there it is. Duplicate. Now it's in your throat and it's in your stomach, duplicating faster. It's in your your small intestine, your large intestine. If it gets out, Before it takes over, then you don't even think anything of it. No, it's no problem. It's no problem. So, but there are these thresholds. Where, if you ingest a certain amount, the doubling time of that bacteria will then manifest itself while it's still in your digestive tract.

Probably end up with nausea, vi you know, diarrhea, whatever. Okay. So that's sort of normal food poisoning. All right. Normal. And we also we have we've developed a a means to detect By the smell when something goes bad. Okay. Evolutionarily, if you casually ingested things that would make you sick and possibly die. If you enjoyed the smell of rotting food,

That's a branch that is a genetic branch that's headed for extinction. Because right? Because you and all your descendants who like the smell of rotting food that would kill you, you would end up with none of you to then propagate this feature about yourself. Right. Unless you're a vulture. Unless you're a vulture. Right. Right. But they they're cool. They got But they're cool with it. Yeah. Depending on, you know, how digestive your gastric juices are.

From one species to another. For humans we know what those limits are. You smell it, ooh, that's bad, and you throw it away. Except for your mama. That's right. All right. So that's the normal kind of when food goes bad. Right? But suppose you got rid of all the microbes and then you sort of vacuum sealed it. Now there are no microbes. Anyway. And you put it in a really cold temperature. Because all as far as we have been able to measure, chemical and biological processes.

double their rate every ten degrees Celsius. Okay. Okay, that's why cooling things make them last longer. Right. That's why so you you can do this. You can So does it mean it stops at zero? It would have to stop, yes. Okay at zero. Yes, nothing happens at absolute zero.

Oh no, I don't mean absolute zero. I mean if you just start you say every ten degrees Celsius. Oh okay, yeah. So you it would stop at absolute zero. At absolute zero. Oh you think zero just on the on the Yeah, I was thinking on a regular. There's nothing special about that zero. The only special zero is on a Kelvin.

Absolutely scared. And we did a whole explainer video on we put a link in there somewhere. Okay. That's right, that's right. All right. So g every ten degrees, it's half. So you can just keep halving all the way down. Okay, so uh you can do the experiment if you want it. You know, have uh get milk and bring it to room temperature, okay? Then get milk, put it at um in the refrigerator temperature, and then get milk, put it like right at near freezing. And then get milk and just freeze it.

And just sit back and just watch what happens. All right, the microbes that are already in it are doing their thing. And you can look at the temperature differences and you can calculate this up. And basically the milk might last a day or two. If oh, by the way, what does ultra pasteurized mean? Ultra pasteurized? They they took out even more microbes than were there in the normal pasteurize.

Wow. Okay. Now with twice as little. Twice as little. I would say half as much, but you can say twice as little. That's fine. So when you do that, the pasteurized milk look at the expiration date on the ultra pasteurized milk. versus the regular pasteurized milk. It's way longer in the future. Because there's so few microbes there, they're slowly coming along and they're doubling time. They still have a doubling time, all right, but they started out with fewer.

So they're not going to get their this milk smells nasty threshold until much later. Okay. So that's the biological when food goes bad. But I want to take this up a notch. Are you ready? Okay. Go ahead. Let us get rid of all microbes. Let us irradiate the food. All right. So now there's nothing living on it at all. Now we don't want anything to come to it after the fact. So now let's vacuum seal it. Okay. So now nothing's getting to it. Nothing's on it.

Okay, so now I have a slab of meat vacuum sealed. Okay. Now I don't have to refrigerate it because there's no microbes that I don't I can put out on a counter. I can put it up in the cabinet. Okay. You can put it there for years. And here. And year. Might you know why I know about this and think about it? Because when you're gonna store food on a sp long space mission, you don't wanna carry freezers with you and refrigerators. You want food that can just

You want food that could just survive on the shelf. That could just be. Be. You need food that just is. That food that is. Right. You need your steak to be a Twinkie. I'm I'm eating Twinkie steak. Twinkies from eight years ago taste just the same as if you bought them yesterday. Right. My steak is good for 20 years. All right. So but here's what happened.

Okay? Right. And this is where quantum physics comes in. So you didn't see that coming, did you? I did not. You did not see that coming. All right. You you totally had me. All right. So molecules exist in a state of existence. All right. All molecules do. And you can ask yourself, is the molecule happy in that state of existence? Is it happy? In other words, is there a lower state of energy that this molecule can occupy? Because if there is, it's going to want to go there.

Is that state of energy, I'm such a big molecule, let me break into two. Now I have less energy than before because molecules don't like remaining in higher states of energy. And those two molecules Can break and then they settle into a lower and lower form of energy. That's how the molecule wants to exist. Gotcha. Okay? Right. All right.

So how does it get access to that lower form event? If you made the molecule and it's happy here, how does it decide one day to not be happy? It has me as a father. Okay. It is it is so think of it as it's in a well. But there's a lower well off to the side. How do you get to that low? You have to go up a little hill before you go down to that lower well. So this molecule has to find a way to get over that hill and it'll immediately go to a lower energy state.

If there's nothing to stick it over that hill, it would last forever. But quantum physics said all these molecules and particles are also waves. And the wave has an existence on the other side of that hill. And there's a chance that this particle can disappear from this state and reappear on the other side of that hill in a state where it slides down to a lower, a lower energy level. Quantum physics takes it there.

That's called tunneling. Okay? So these bonds that are formed chemically, they're not forever if there's another bond it could think about that has a lower energy. By the way, it gives has lower energy, it gives off energy. So this so this so your food. has complex molecules in it. There are these protein fibers and it's it's complex, right? So given enough time, quantum physics degrades the texture of the food. So Your meat will still be meat in five years.

But you'll start noticing it start can taste a little mealy. Right. Where's that chewing? What is happening? What's happening to that? Why does my meat now taste like soyl and greens? Soylent greens. Because it is. Hey, what happened to Mac the astronaut? Where is he? Well he died. He died. Why is his suit still here? Yeah. So so all I'm saying is food can go bad biologically and food can go bad chemically. Wow. Now, the you know the lowest energy state of anything?

Something at absolute zero. Uh well yes, that's in by temperature, but in terms of uh configuration, the lowest energy state, one of the lowest energy states you can occupy is crystal. Oh. Crystal form. So that's why it's weird that there's whole there's a whole cult around crystals. Crystals. Like they'cause I get so much energy from the city. They get crystal energy when c crystals have the lowest energy of that molecule. That's

So it's just weird to knowing physics and chemistry to see this unfold. That's funny. Have you ever done this? I are you kidding me? I actually have some Jesus salt in my cupboard. So so plus when do you get salt? It gets mined from places that have been there for million millions of years, okay?

Right. That's just salt. It's been there. It hadn't been touched. That's right. Okay. It didn't become something else. It is salt. It has been salt. So f crystalline things. Diamonds are forever. Diamond is crystal. Okay? Um now I learned that there's another state of carbon that's a slightly lower energy than diamond. So diamonds are not actually forever, but they're really, really long lived. Okay. And so another crystal is sugar.

Okay. By the way, if sugar goes bad, it's not because that something happened to the crystal, because you put it next to the barbecue pit or something and it took on the smells. Right. Or or it absorbed water somehow. Yeah, exactly. And then the other things are what then messes with it. But the sugar crystal itself is is happy.

So yes, I think salt does have dates on it, but that's just that you can use it and buy the next one. Right. Exactly. Better put some more salt on that man. It's about to go bad. What happened with the toba with Tabasco salt? I I don't think this is apocryphal. I think this is real. You know what happened? You know Tabasco sauce, the little thing. Yeah, I love Tabasco sauce. You kidding me? Okay. Yeah. Um they figured out how to double your consumption of Tabasco sauce. How's that?

Someone in the company suggested that they make the hole twice as big. Brilliant. So you still think you're not using much? Using twice as much as you used to? And guess what? That makes perfect sense. And they just double the sales and that person got a raise. So anyhow, so I just want to say that when food goes bad, it can go bad by the this other way that we don't think about much.

But for very long term storage, like in the apocalyptic earth, this sort of thing. That's how you you would need to think about that and want to know about. But that'd be true for any food stuffs at all. So you have to watch out. You can't you can't really stop the quantum phenomenon from going on. So so it it would still taste like steak.

But the texture tends to be one of the things that goes first. So the moral of this story is during the nuclear apocalypse, you better make sure that you have some salt. By the way, salt itself is a preservative of other foods. I was about to say,'cause your meat's gonna taste like crap. And your salt's the only thing that's gonna last. So

So there you have it, Chuck. So that was a just a quick one. Nah, that was a good one. I like that. The chemical decomposition of food of molecules. Any molecules in general. That's right. Yeah. Super cool, man. There you have it. All right. This has been another Star Talk Explainer video. Neil deGrasse Tyson. Chuck, always good to have you. Always a pleasure. As always.