October 6, 2016 8:10 pm

On Friday’s Extended Classic, Neil Tyson, Bill Nye and Steven Soter trade Carl Sagan stories

Neil deGrasse Tyson leaning on Bill Nye the Science Guy, Photo Credit: © Elliot Severn, All rights reserved

Photo Credit: © Elliot Severn, All rights reserved.

This week, we’re revisiting Cosmic Queries: Astrophysics 101 with Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-host Leighann Lord. And, like so many of our Extended Classics, even if you’ve already taken this class, it’s one worth auditing all over again.

In part, that’s because the subject isn’t necessarily an easy one to grasp. There are plenty of people who have trouble wrapping their heads around questions like, “How can you measure the weight of a planet when it’s the planet itself that provides the gravitational force by which you make the measurement?” Or, “If light has no mass, why does the gravity of a black hole affect it?” Or, “If the universe is expanding, does that mean that I am too?”

But even though the questions are mind-boggling, the answers can be pretty simple, especially in the hands of our host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who uses the act of slurping a strand of spaghetti to explain the concept of conservation of angular momentum.

If you’re a fan of our show, you know that Neil is pretty good at making convoluted concepts easier to understand.

Which brings us to the “Extended” portion of this week’s show.

Because this week, in the “Cosmic Crib” (Neil’s office at the Hayden Planetarium), Neil and his friends, astrophysicist Steven Soter and Bill Nye the Science Guy, trade stories about another person who was pretty good when it came to explaining science to the masses: Carl Sagan. Carl was a common thread in each of their lives, including the fact that Steven Soter was Carl’s TA when Bill Nye took his course at Cornell.

Small world?

Yes, but one that still exists in an expanding universe, which, as mentioned earlier, Neil will discuss in Friday’s episode.

Join us for Extended Classic: Cosmic Queries: General Astrophysics 101 tomorrow, October 7th at 7:00pm EDT right here on our website, or on iTunesPodcasts, Google Play Music, Stitcher, TuneIn and SoundCloud.

That’s it for now. Keep Looking Up.
–Jeffrey Simons

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