Neil DeGrasse Tyson brings his podcast, Startalk, to life with a live episode in downtown Los Angeles

On January 15, Neil DeGrasse Tyson — celebrated astrophysicist and author —  led a special live taping of his podcast at the Novo Theater, attracting science fiction enthusiasts from the surrounding area. 

Tyson’s podcast, StarTalk, is one segment on the StarTalk Media entertainment platform, created to integrate science with popular culture. The radio show aired its first episode in 2009 and was an instant success, garnering 5.5 million Youtube subscribers, as well as four Emmy Awards since.

Tyson was joined by David Saltzburg, a particle physicist and UCLA professor, Erin McDonald, an astrophysicist and science fiction consultant, as well as comedians Sasheer Zamata and Pete Holmes to discuss some of the cosmological topics that have been spotlighted in science fiction media recently. 

The show began with a discussion on dark matter and dark matter candidates. While it takes up space and has mass, much like normal matter, dark matter is difficult to understand, as it does not emit light and is invisible to current scientific instrumentation. 

“It should be called the invisible matter.” Salzburg told the audience.

Dark matter was first discovered in the 1930s through the collaborative work of astronomers over time beginning with Fritz Zwicky, who first observed the Coma Galaxy Cluster and noted how the speed of their rotation and masses were abnormally fast. He postulated that they were held together by an unknown force. 

Vera Rubin later used Zwicky’s insights to map out the Milky Way Galaxy and the movement of stars within them. She found that, based on the speed of the Milky Way’s rotation, the galaxy had to be much more massive than it current estimates. From there, she formulated dark matter, an imperceptible material in the universe that allows for life as we know it. 

During the taping, McDonald expressed her deep admiration for Rubin. In the television series “Star Trek Discovery,” the dark matter nebula, Verubin Nebula, was named after her. 

“Any opportunity to shine a light on that [women in physics] was awesome,” she said.

Science fiction continues to evolve just as our knowledge of science does. Although one of the oldest and most renowned fictitious science films, it is still only beginning to brush the surface of some of this ever-evolving field.

“Only recently has Star Trek kinda sprinkled in some dark matter stuff,” McDonald said. 

Dark matter is not the only aspect of science to break into the world of fiction.

“Many people’s first encounter with antimatter was Star Trek,” Tyson said.

In StarTrek, the characters use matter antimatter collisions to get the energy necessary to power their rocket ship and make it travel faster than the speed of light. 

Salzburg shared the historical recount of Paul Dirac, a British theoretical physicist, who was trying to reconcile special relativity and quantum mechanical particles. During one of his calculations, he had to take the square root — a mathematical operation that always leads to both a negative and a positive answer. Thus, alluding to the electron and its corresponding antimatter particle, the positron. “Since we are regular matter, there might be a whole other place filled with antimatter,” Salzburg said. 

McDonald added that, upon contact, matter and antimatter annihilate each other and transform into pure energy. 

“If you met your matter counterpart and you shook hands, you both turn into energy,” she said. “Yeah, so don’t do that,” Tyson responded. 

“Does life imitate science fiction? Or, does science fiction imitate life?” Tyson questioned.  “Or, maybe we are needlessly turning that into a binary question and perhaps as we go forward, it is the interplay of the two that will shape the future of civilization. A future world that we be proud to live in and not embarrassed that we created. And that is a cosmic perspective.” 

As his final note of the evening, Tyson turned around to thank all of the guest speakers and left the audience with his iconic catchphrase: “As always, keep looking up.”