May 25, 2017 8:03 pm

Neil Tyson welcomes comedian Eddie Brill as co-host of Cosmic Queries this Friday.

Time to welcome another member to the first-timers club on StarTalk Radio. Neil deGrasse Tyson welcomes Eddie Brill to serve as comic co-host on this week’s edition of Cosmic Queries. Eddie is a stalwart in the comedy world and served as the warm-up comedian for The Late Show with David Letterman for seventeen years.

Neil and Eddie are in-studio with a new potpourri of fan-submitted Cosmic Queries covering a variety of topics from aliens to magic.

As a film buff, I was happy to hear Neil discuss the innovative science and creativity behind Blade Runner, Arrival, and Interstellar. I was especially happy to hear Neil give a great line reading of the climatic monologue from Blade Runner, which gave me chills!

He also weighs in on who he would bring to meet the aliens in Arrival and it’s not a theoretical physicist and a linguistics expert like they brought along in the film.

Neil and Eddie also chat about superheroes: why they don’t solve world problems, if they could survive the death of the universe, and which superhero Neil wanted to be as a kid. You’ll also hear some great questions about making first contact with aliens.

I enjoyed a conversation on the “magic” of electromagnetism and physics. A fan raises the point that the discoverers of electromagnetism could have proclaimed they discovered magic and Neil argues the same thing for physicists. As he says, if the laws of physics were kept secret from the public, physicists could run the world because people would think they are all-powerful, all-knowing, etc.

Would that be such a bad thing? Personally, I trust a scientist over a politician, and I don’t think I’m alone. Having a fully science-minded structure of society would be very different than the one we have today, but would it be better? In most aspects probably, but you can’t help human nature. I’d have to think that some of the physicists in that society would become power hungry, and use their “physics powers” for evil or to trick people. As Neil points out, in that world you’re not a physicist, you’re a charlatan.

All that, plus, Neil and Eddie discuss being an independent thinker, combating “junk science,” and surviving in a world of alternative facts.

Please join us tomorrow night for Cosmic Queries: Potpourri Vol. 2 at 7pm EDT right here on our website, as well as on iTunes Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and TuneIn. And if you’re an All-Access subscriber, you can watch or listen to this episode ad-free at 7pm, too.

That’s it for now. Keep Looking Up!
–Ian Mullen