Neil deGrasse Tyson sounds stoned as he approaches the speed of light

Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and host of the new incarnation of Cosmos, was speaking at the University of Toronto's Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics last Friday, and he showed this hilarious video that makes him sound like he's stoned.

You can watch the video in its original form, sans the laughter, here.

There's nothing wrong with Dr. Tyson in the video, though. He's not on anything, and actually, from his perspective, he's speaking at a completely normal rate. It's just that we're seeing him slowed down, because the Dr. Tyson in the video is travelling at 85 per cent of the speed of light (or a little over 900 million kilometres per hour).

When Einstein came up with the concepts of his theory of relativity, he figured out that things get very strange as you approach the speed of light. If you were on a ship flying at 85 per cent of the speed of light, you wouldn't see any difference in what you were doing or how you were talking. However, if someone was able to watch your ship zipping past and they glanced into a window, they'd see you moving slower than normal. This effect is called time dilation.

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If we were able to get up to these speeds, it would make interstellar travel a possibility, and we could get to the Alpha Centauri star system in just over five years (much better than the tens of thousands of years it would take with today's fastest spacecraft). However, it takes a tremendous amount of energy to get up to those speeds, so much so that you can never actually achieve lightspeed because you'd have infinite mass and thus require infinite energy to move! A much better method of interstellar travel will have us bypass these 'rules' altogether, by warping space itself. That may be only science fiction now, but real scientists are actually working on this problem now.

Until they figure that out, though, we can simply enjoy the strangeness of relativity and time dilation.

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