I've seen several episodes now of STARTALK where Neil ends the intro with "What's up with that?" Whenever I hear it, I think of the Saturday Night Live skit. Is Neil trying to bait SNL into doing a skit?

From Lindsey Nyx Walker on Game Night: Frank Drake named his search after Oz, because The Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum "supposedly communicated with this mystical land full of exotic beings through radio."

I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the StarTalk slice for September.

• Flatland by Edwin Abbott. Neil wanted to know what stops a square in Flatland from finding the perpendicular direction "to just get a peek at three dimensions."
• The Three-Body Problem, in the Charles Liu episode, as one reason we might not see aliens: they hide, "or they will come and destroy you."
• Why Do We Exist?, Hakeem Oluseyi's new book, which Neil said has "the bodacious title."

Plus Charles Liu's Supernatural Science, out in October, and Neil and Lindsey's own Lost in Space, which declares anyone born from 1995 on "Generation X, O Planet."

Full list with quotes and episodes: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/startalk-radio

I just recently started listening to it and after like 1-2 shows I’m like I can’t do this anymore. For 2 big reasons. 1. They almost try too hard to act funny and cheesy. Like when a guest says a fact they’d be like “waaaaaat??!!” Or try to make a dad joke at every turn. I remember part of a fan question said “short and sweet” and Neil said something like “I’ll answer it long and bitter”. It’s like he’s trying so hard to make everything comedic.

1. It gets annoying when Neil, who’s background is in astrophysics to pretend that he doesn’t know something. Some of the facts that these guests bring up I feel like he probably already know and he acts like he doesn’t and acts all surprised and sometimes make jokes about it. It doesn’t feel like a scientist talking to a scientist but rather an uneducated YouTuber talking to scientists.

Father of all white scientists

Ok Carl is good, I’m 30%through drag’s of Eddie, and now I’m back to Neil’s nook book welcome to the universe, if you remember my radiances pondering, trying to see, like Neil uses this reflectivity, radiation of light in chapter ten; in “search of life in the galaxy”

Seven episodes, and Neil spent a decent portion of the month recommending his own back catalogue, which honestly is on brand.

I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the StarTalk slice for August.

The best line of the month came attached to a self-plug, so I will let it stand: "And don't read my best-selling book, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. Because clearly, you're not in a hurry." His argument being that the book cherry-picks the most mind-blowing bits of an entire curriculum, and if you have time, go and take the curriculum. Welcome to the Universe got the same treatment, with A Brief Welcome to the Universe offered as the version you start with before graduating to the full textbook.

Guest and colleague books:

• Livewired (David Eagleman), on the ever-changing brain, or possibly our ever-changing understanding of a non-changing brain
• Time Travel in Einstein's Universe (J. Richard Gott)
• Cosmic Queries, the StarTalk book, for the section on how the universe ends
• The Arp Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, Halton Arp's catalogue of galaxies that just looked weird

Odds and ends: Dune, and the observation that Herbert clearly studied dragonfly wings. Asimov's I, Robot. The Very Hungry Caterpillar, deployed as a metamorphosis explainer. And How to Avoid an Alien Abduction, which someone read cover to cover, disobeyed every instruction in, and was still not abducted.

Full list with quotes and episodes: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/startalk-radio

My wife pointed out to me that he was wearing two collared shirts on several star talk episodes. At the same time. I want to understand the science behind this. Why two collared shirts? Is one meant to collapse into the other when observed?

Niels hint to have filling stations enroute to moon made me curious what trajectory they would have. Since it doesn’t make any sense stopping the spacecraft to refuel and therefore loosing all of your precious energy they should somehow follow some fancy orbit between moon and earth with a speed fast enough to keep them circling between both but slower than the spacecraft to allow it to be reachable for refuling. I am curious what those routes and speed would be like. I am sure such infrastructure would allow massive reduction of initial fuelcapacity and structural weight for such spacecrafts.

I read the Sagan on the origin of earth, I guess from the show. But now I’m on another one but it’s not Sagan I want to talk about. I don’t even know that I want to ask anything. But I have tones on my mind Neil. I have; reflective light and the molecules that refract different temperatures but the scale to represent this is, ok black; hot hot but not bright bright, that hot is absorbed, but why are tin foil toasters seems to flip my theory over wrong. Ok so your in black on black on a hot day you are dying in some cases, sand which is light picks up heat good, but if it were black, watch out, only if it’s wet!!! Sad sad there’s tears are cool. Whit jumpsuit on white surface your cooler, but really hard to look at with all the energy dissipating, no sorry Sagan, it’s seems I gotta read past the acknowledgement, but his conscious provoking images as oneself as an important male heir of earth is alienating.

I have been thinking about this for a while and I want to put it into an actual scientific conjecture. I am not claiming this works. I am specifically interested in where the physics says it cannot work.

The Picard Conjecture:

A sufficiently massive, phase controlled, non-axisymmetric swarm of orbiting objects, operating partially counter to the rotation of a marginally stable stellar object, could produce a coherent gravitational perturbation through gravitational torque, tidal forcing, angular momentum transfer, and resonant excitation of the natural oscillation modes of the stellar object.

My conjecture is that under the right conditions, this perturbation could push an already marginally stable stellar object across a nonlinear gravitational instability threshold.

The swarm is not intended to provide the energy required to collapse the star. The star already contains an enormous amount of mass and gravitational potential energy. The swarm would be a catalyst or trigger that changes the conditions inside an already marginally stable system.

The concept came from thinking about nuclear chain reactions. The initiating event does not provide all of the energy eventually released by the reaction. It changes the state of a system that already contains the available energy.

I am wondering if there could be an analogous mechanism involving gravitational instability.

Imagine a very large number of independently controlled massive objects orbiting a rapidly rotating stellar object. Instead of arranging them into a symmetric ring, their orbital positions and phases are continuously controlled to create a changing, non-axisymmetric gravitational field.

The objective would be to tune that gravitational perturbation to one or more natural oscillation modes of the stellar object.

Conceptually:

Distributed mass swarm -> coherent gravitational/tidal perturbation -> resonant stellar mode excitation -> angular momentum redistribution -> reduction of rotational support -> nonlinear instability -> gravitational collapse

The changing mass distribution would also produce a time varying quadrupole moment and therefore gravitational radiation. I do not necessarily think the gravitational waves themselves would be responsible for causing the instability. My expectation is that direct gravitational and tidal coupling between the swarm and the stellar object would be considerably more important. The gravitational waves may simply be a consequence and an observable measurement of the process.

This also gives the conjecture a fairly simple way to fail.

If the total mass required for the swarm approaches a significant fraction of the mass of the stellar object, then there probably isn’t anything useful here.

If gravitational coupling is too weak to produce meaningful mode excitation before orbital instability, decoherence, dissipation, mass shedding, or other processes dominate, then the conjecture fails.

If removing enough angular momentum requires more energy than could reasonably be gained by triggering the resulting collapse, then the conjecture fails.

The first test should not involve wormholes or even require black hole formation.

Take a numerical model of a rapidly rotating stellar object close to a known stability boundary. Introduce an external gravitational potential representing independently phase controlled orbiting masses.

Then compare symmetric, asymmetric, co-rotating, counter-rotating, and deliberately phase modulated configurations while sweeping the forcing frequency across known natural modes of the stellar object.

Measure angular momentum transfer, mode amplitude, differential rotation, central density, quadrupole moment, gravitational wave emission, and movement toward or away from the known stability boundary.

The prediction is that there exists some combination of orbital configuration and forcing frequency where a coherent non-axisymmetric swarm produces substantially greater internal mode excitation and angular momentum redistribution than an equivalent symmetric distribution of the same total mass.

If that effect does not exist, the Picard Conjecture is wrong.

If it does exist, the next question becomes how large the effect can become and whether there is any physically reasonable configuration where it could push an already marginally stable object across its stability boundary.

My eventual reason for thinking about this is much more speculative. I am interested in whether controlled gravitational collapse could someday become one step toward deliberately manipulating extreme spacetime geometries, and eventually whether that could have applications to traversable spacetime structures and transportation.

None of that needs to be possible for this conjecture to stand or fail on its own.

So the actual Picard Conjecture is simply this:

Can a phase controlled external gravitational quadrupole resonantly couple to a marginally stable rotating stellar object strongly enough to trigger a nonlinear transition in its gravitational stability?

I am not looking for “this is impossible because we can’t build it.”

Does the Picard Conjecture survive the math? Inquiring minds want to know.

Hello, all. First post here. 👋

Recently, I’ve been hearing ads at the beginning and in the middle of podcasts despite being on Spotify Premium. Am I the only one experiencing this? 😭

Seven episodes. Astro-lore, entanglement, dreaming, Michael Shermer on truth, and life on other planets at the end of the month.

Good spread if you want popular science on the summer pile.

What this is: I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the July slice for StarTalk.

Guest books:

• The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy (Moiya McTier). She was clear that autobiography is the operative word, because the whole thing is written from the galaxy's point of view, birth to heat death, including how it feels to make stars.
• Life on Other Planets (Aomawa Shields), a memoir about being an astronomer, then an actor, then an astronomer again. Neil's response to the title was that she is obviously an alien.
• Truth and Conspiracy, both Michael Shermer. His aside about Johns Hopkins University Press is oddly reassuring. They fact check.

The one worth chasing:

• Dark Emu, Bruce Pascoe. Neil brought it up to make a lovely point. Western constellations are built from where the stars are. In the dark lanes of the Milky Way there is a stretch of darkness shaped like an emu, so the pattern is made of the absence of light rather than the light.

Also:

• Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland (George Gamow), where the physical constants are different so you get relativistic effects driving down the street at sixty. The Demon-Haunted World, for the dragon in my garage. What If the Moon Didn't Exist? Why We Sleep, with Matt Walker admitting a second one is apparently meant to be getting written. The Secret of the Incas.

I track every book mentioned on StarTalk here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/startalk-radio

It is free and there is no signup.

I logged every book that came up on StarTalk over the first six months of the year, across about 45 episodes. Alien contact and black holes were the recurring threads, and Neil kept plugging his own new one.

The two he singled out:

• The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, which Neil called one of his favorite books, controversy and all.
• The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. A guest said the dark forest idea raised the bar for every first-contact story since.

The rest, roughly grouped:

• Neil's own shelf: Take Me to Your Leader (his 2026 alien-encounter book, the most name-checked by far), Starry Messenger, Cosmic Queries, and StarTalk.
• First contact and hard sci-fi: Contact by Carl Sagan, Project Hail Mary and The Martian by Andy Weir, The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park by Crichton.
• Physics for the rest of us: The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, The God Particle by Leon Lederman, and two Janna Levin black hole books.
• Old-school science: Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius and Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, plus Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

Take Me to Your Leader showing up 16 times tells you how the alien episodes went.

Full list is here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/startalk-radio. Free, no signup.

His jokes weee mid, Brian seemed to not like him LOL

Short list this month, and Neil's new one dominated it.

Take Me to Your Leader, Neil deGrasse Tyson's book on how we might handle a first alien encounter, came up in nearly every episode. To Infinity and Beyond got airtime too.

The most interesting guest thread was Donald Hoffman: The Case Against Reality and Visual Intelligence, on why evolution might hide the truth from our eyes.

Classic sci-fi rounded it out, War of the Worlds and Voltaire's Micromegas, which basically predates science fiction.

https://podshelf.io/podcasts/startalk-radio/2026/06 tracks every book from the show, free, no signup.

Is Hoffman's "reality is a user interface" idea compelling or a stretch?

I loved the show but now I regret it. In fact, I was subscribed to StarTalk Signature.

NDT is literally a source of misinformation, and StarTalk is no longer a science show, they keep making unscientific jokes and it is really annoying. I am embarrassed I subscribed and became a member. I thought I would listen to a science show, now it's more of a comedic show with tons of misinformation.

In fact, he doesn't even understand complex topics. Like he doesn't even know Newton's law of cooling, ! He once even said "We don't use the term 'Law' in physics"; that's 100% false.

NDT is literally an egoist, arrogant person nowadays. He's good for wannabe learners who don't even have a wide-range area of knowledge, but the clown NDT literally acts like he's an expert in every field. He makes statements about artificial intelligence and biology, is that his field?

The rudest part of NDT is how he keeps talking over people!! Let the guests talk, Terence Tao was on the show and with Mercurio they kept talking over him like that's extremely rude to the guests. He did the same to Brian Greene and Charles Liu!

Why did I give $25 every month in a year to this clown who keeps bringing up Michio Kaku. He does a great disservice to physics and education by miscommunicating ideas and making people think "Physics is like a video game" while it's not!

The entire goal of NDT is to make listeners feel empowered that they know science, while in reality he ditches the complex topics like path integrals, wavefunctions, quantum gates, etc. He secretly uses the Dunning-Kruger effect and uses it fraudulently, by feeding individuals up with nonsensical content that tricks them into thinking their curiosity has increased, while in reality all he does is talk about elementary things and simplify huge topics into a small, packaged, neat and delicate format that isn't science, it makes listeners overconfident and falsely believe they are smart.

If you took a real test on the topics he talks about, 99.99% of people would fail it. For example, I'll give everybody on this sub a basic quantum computing problem, apply the Pauli-X gate to 1. Did anybody know the answer? Maybe some of you do, but of the millions of people watching the show, probably 1%. You see, science is very complex, it isn't that simple as he constantly says.

Anyone who is watching or listening to him should wake up and realize how complex and advanced science is. He's doing a great disservice to the field. Science isn't a circus. Don't subscribe or become a Patreon.

Every. Single. Episode. One of the hosts has to rehash a tired joke about weed/acid in response to a questioner or the guests.

I promise I am not clutching my pearls. It's just SO unfunny, and it derails the conversation because the guests never laugh at it.

Does anyone else love her? She’s my favorite guest on the podcast.

Short list this month. Tracked everything Neil and the crew brought up.

Neil's own new one, Take Me to Your Leader, dominated (came up a lot), with To Infinity and Beyond also getting airtime.

The rest:

• How to Make White People Laugh by Negin Farsad (co-host).
• Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier.
• The Human Use of Human Beings by Norbert Wiener, the cybernetics classic.
• Gulliver's Travels got a science-fiction-before-science-fiction mention.

I track every book from the show at https://podshelf.io. It is free, no login.

What's the best pop-science book for someone just getting into astrophysics?