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