Colliding Neutron Stars, Gold, and the Physics of

In climate coverage, we have a phrase problem. "We can't reach net zero by 2050." "Decarbonizing heavy industry is impossible." "There's no pathway to 1.5 degrees." I hear versions of these constantly — from lobbyists, from genuinely discouraged scientists, occasionally from journalists who've confused political intractability with physical law. Neil deGrasse Tyson, in a recent episode of StarTalk's Cosmic Queries, names the confusion precisely: "There's a difference between stuff we haven't figured out how to do yet and things that are forbidden by the laws of physics. Two completely different things."

He's talking about space travel and supersonic flight. But I'm writing this down anyway.

The episode pairs Tyson with comedian Negin Farsad, who hosts the political satire podcast Fake the Nation and brings something the format genuinely needs: productive skepticism from a non-specialist. Where a science co-host might let a shaky claim slide out of disciplinary courtesy, Farsad pushes back instinctively — "what if the laws of physics are wrong?" — and Tyson's best explanations in this episode come in direct response to her pressure. She's not a prop. She's the reason he has to be clear.

The distinction that actually matters

Tyson's framework for impossible-versus-forbidden deserves more traction than it gets. The people who predicted we'd never break the sound barrier weren't wrong because they lacked imagination; they were wrong because they confused an engineering problem with a physical prohibition. Rifle bullets were already supersonic. The tip of a cracking whip briefly exceeds the speed of sound. The phenomenon existed; the application hadn't caught up.

The same confusion runs through climate and energy discourse with damaging frequency. Carbon capture at scale: engineering problem or thermodynamic prohibition? Green hydrogen at competitive cost: economics problem or chemistry problem? Direct air capture: energy-intensive, yes, but forbidden? No. The laws of physics do not prohibit a livable planet. Specific political and economic arrangements make it feel that way, and those arrangements get mistaken for physics.

Tyson's handling of Newton and Einstein sharpens the point further. Newtonian gravity got us to the moon. Einstein's relativity didn't discard Newton — it enclosed him. At low speeds and low gravity, Einstein's equations collapse back into Newton's. What looked like a complete description of reality was actually a special case of a deeper one. Tyson calls this the "worst that can happen to a law of physics" — not that it fails, but that it turns out to apply in fewer cases than we assumed. The law isn't wrong; the boundary conditions need revision.

This is a better mental model for scientific uncertainty than the one most people carry around. Laws don't get overturned like verdicts. They get contextualized.

The gold problem

The episode's sharpest piece of science involves LIGO — the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory — and what it found when it stopped looking at black holes and started looking at neutron stars.

Two colliding black holes produce gravitational waves detectable by LIGO, but emit no light. You can't confirm the event with an optical telescope because there's nothing to see. This is what frustrated Gregory in Ottawa, the episode's questioner on this topic, who wanted a second form of verification before accepting LIGO's findings. Tyson's answer: the detector is the verification. LIGO's architecture — two perpendicular tunnels, laser beams measuring distortions in spacetime at a scale smaller than a proton — is the telescope.

The neutron star case is different. When LIGO detected a binary neutron star merger (the event astronomers now call GW170817), the objects involved do emit light. The gravitational wave signal told other observatories where to look and what masses to expect. They looked. The light was there. That cross-confirmation is what anchored one of the most significant findings in modern astrophysics: that the collision of neutron stars — dense stellar remnants, some of them observable as pulsars before they merge — is the likely origin of most of the universe's heavy elements. Gold. Platinum. Iridium. Silver. Tyson puts it plainly: "That's where we learned that pulsars might be the source of all the world's gold. It's very high-level, high-mass nuclear fusion going on."

A note on precision: Tyson uses "pulsars" loosely here to describe the merging objects, which is how the episode frames it. Technically, LIGO detected a binary neutron star merger. Whether those specific objects were actively pulsing radio emissions before collision — the defining characteristic of pulsars — is not established. The broader point holds: neutron star mergers forge the heavy elements.

The scale implied by this is worth sitting with. The gold in a wedding ring passed through a stellar catastrophe that released more energy in milliseconds than our sun will emit across its entire lifespan. Every gram of platinum-group metal on Earth was forged in violence billions of years ago, then scattered across the galaxy, then swept into a solar system still forming. LIGO reads the echoes of that violence in the present tense.

Selection bias, the full moon, and what we choose to notice

The moon section is where Tyson's reasoning connects most directly to something I think about in a different context: the systematic distortion that happens when dramatic events get reported and undramatic ones don't.

The claim that seizures are more frequent during full moons turns out to be a near-perfect example of reporting bias. Tyson walks through it: the full moon appears full to an untrained eye for roughly four days out of thirty. That means any randomly distributed event has a roughly 13 percent chance of occurring during what people perceive as a "full moon" window. When a seizure happens during that window, the connection gets noted, discussed, remembered. When a seizure happens during a crescent moon, nobody builds a narrative around it. The signal is noise that got selectively amplified.

The mechanism Tyson names — "people are so primed to think of the full moon as a force on us that if someone has a seizure and it's not the full moon, are they going to report that?" — is structurally identical to how attribution bias works in extreme weather coverage. Heatwaves during El Niño years become evidence of climate change in the public mind; cold snaps become evidence against it. The base rate disappears. What's cinematic replaces what's systematic.

He adds a detail about tides that I hadn't considered. Spring tides — the higher tides that correlate with the full moon — are not caused by extra lunar gravity. They occur because the sun's gravitational pull on Earth's oceans, roughly 46 percent as strong as the moon's according to astronomical measurements (Tyson says "about a third," which is on the lower end of common estimates), aligns with the lunar tide when Earth, moon, and sun are in syzygy. That alignment happens during both full moon and new moon. The new moon produces equivalent tidal forces. Nobody talks about new moon energy, because you can't see it. The visible phenomenon gets the mythology; the invisible equivalent goes unnoticed.

The AI parenthetical

Farsad ends the episode asking whether artificial intelligence is "unnatural." Tyson's answer is fast and flat: "Whatever we do, since we are of this universe, is natural." Beavers build dams. Bees build hives. Humans build cities and neural networks. The question of whether something is "natural" does less analytical work than we'd like it to.

What's more interesting is the question the episode doesn't quite ask: natural for whom, and on what timescale? A beaver dam is natural and also changes the hydrology of a watershed for decades. Cities are natural and also reconfigure regional climate patterns. The category of "natural" doesn't tell you anything about consequence, reversibility, or distribution of harm.

Tyson's framing is useful for dissolving false anxieties about AI as some category violation of the cosmic order. It doesn't resolve the practical questions about what AI systems do to labor markets, information environments, or concentrations of power. Those aren't physics problems. They're the other kind.

The frame that travels

Tyson's "impossible vs. forbidden" distinction is doing a lot of work in this episode, and I think it travels. Not to excuse any given failure to act, but to correctly identify what kind of failure it is. When we say we cannot stabilize the climate at 2 degrees Celsius, we mean we haven't built the political will and economic infrastructure to do it — not that the atmosphere has notified us it's off limits.

The laws of physics have not foreclosed a livable planet. That's worth stating without equivocation, because the opposite implication — that we're up against something as fixed as thermodynamics — is precisely the logic that makes despair feel like realism.

As Tyson puts it about the universe's own knowledge frontier: "As the area of our knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of our ignorance." That's not a counsel of helplessness. It's a map of where to push.

Olivia Meng is a climate and environment correspondent for Buzzrag.