# The Stuff You Should Know Doin’ Science Playlist: How Big Bang Theory Works, with Neil deGrasse Tyson

An episode of [Stuff You Should Know](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/278981407), 19 Jun 2026, 1 h 08 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/a91018a4-ea4f-4130-bf55-ae270180c327/6947420c-76e9-45d4-998c-b46e00fde7d5/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=44710ecc-10bb-48d1-93c7-ae270180c33e

There are a number of theories for how the universe evolved but none are more widely accepted than the Big Bang theory. Learn about the mind-boggling details of the early universe and hear Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson talk about what it will take for us to know its origins. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:01] Speaker 1: Yes, indeed you read that right, if you made it
[0:03] Speaker 1: all the way to the end of the very lengthy
[0:05] Speaker 1: title of this Science Playlist episode. We got Neil deGrasse
[0:09] Speaker 1: Tyson to sit in for an interview with us and
[0:12] Speaker 1: it was pretty boss. And a couple years later he
[0:14] Speaker 1: was nice enough to have me come on Star Talk
[0:17] Speaker 1: to talk about my End of the World series. He
[0:20] Speaker 1: had this rapid fire question segment that he does every time,
[0:23] Speaker 1: and he wondered aloud at some point why it was
[0:25] Speaker 1: going so slow, and the secret answer was that my
[0:28] Speaker 1: tangents were derailing the rapid fire part at any rate.
[0:32] Speaker 1: Even without NDT, this episode is pretty great. As everyone knows,
[0:36] Speaker 1: any talk about the origin of time and space is cosmologorrific,
[0:41] Speaker 1: So I hope you feel that way about this episode, too.
[0:45] Speaker 2: Welcome to you stuff you should know from HowStuffWorks dot com.
[0:55] Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Chipper, Josh Clark.
[0:58] Speaker 1: There's Chipper Charles Pryant. Oh, that's your new nickname, Chipper
[1:02] Speaker 1: Charles yep. Yeah. And then there's that Jerry. She's not Chipper,
[1:07] Speaker 1: she is actually Chipper.
[1:08] Speaker 2: Today, I'm not Chipper, I'm Crumpy because this man, oh man,
[1:12] Speaker 2: my head has already melted.
[1:13] Speaker 1: You guys should see the vein in Chuck's forehead.
[1:15] Speaker 3: It is protruding.
[1:17] Speaker 2: Well, we'll do our best, of.
[1:19] Speaker 1: Course, due we're not astrophysicists, but we do have an
[1:23] Speaker 1: astrophysicist coming on as a guest at the end of
[1:25] Speaker 1: the episode, don't we.
[1:26] Speaker 2: Yes, my friend, you interviewed doctor Neil deGrasse Tyson, or
[1:32] Speaker 2: as I like to call him in d T.
[1:34] Speaker 1: Sure, that's what I call him to h in d T.
[1:38] Speaker 1: He's Dyna Mike.
[1:39] Speaker 2: Yeah, but uh, I was unable to be on the
[1:41] Speaker 2: interview for various tooth related reasons, so you took it
[1:45] Speaker 2: upon yourself. And I think an interview like that it's
[1:48] Speaker 2: probably just better for one person. Anyway. It gets a
[1:49] Speaker 2: little clumsy if two people that don't know anything about
[1:53] Speaker 2: astrophysics are trying to glean information.
[1:56] Speaker 1: Oh here's my question.
[1:57] Speaker 2: Yeah, right, would you eat for breakfast? Doctor?
[2:02] Speaker 1: But yeah, it was very kind of him to come on,
[2:04] Speaker 1: and we want to thank our friends at the Fox
[2:07] Speaker 1: Theater where he's going to be on April twentieth. You're
[2:10] Speaker 1: in Atlanta. That's right for hooking that up. So thanks
[2:13] Speaker 1: to everybody who made that happen. Because it's a great interviews.
[2:16] Speaker 1: You guys will hear at the end of this episode.
[2:17] Speaker 2: Yeah, I loved listening to it, and I'm gonna go
[2:20] Speaker 2: ahead and say my two favorite parts are probably one
[2:24] Speaker 2: that won't make it in When you said that you're
[2:25] Speaker 2: happy to plug the Fox Theater show and he was like,
[2:27] Speaker 2: don't bother, it's going to be sold out.
[2:29] Speaker 1: Yeah, I like that too.
[2:30] Speaker 2: And then at the end when you thanked him for
[2:32] Speaker 2: advancing our understanding of this light years and he was like,
[2:36] Speaker 2: that's not nearly enough. Yeah, he's like a light years
[2:38] Speaker 2: not very far.
[2:39] Speaker 3: Thanks.
[2:39] Speaker 1: Yeah, so I changed the parsex. He's like, you're getting closer.
[2:42] Speaker 4: I know.
[2:43] Speaker 2: It was very funny. Actually, I hope you leave that
[2:45] Speaker 2: part in there. I hope so.
[2:46] Speaker 1: And later on I immediately regretted not saying, well, you
[2:51] Speaker 1: advanced our show billions and billions of light years.
[2:54] Speaker 2: He would have appreciated that, Yeah, you would have.
[2:56] Speaker 1: And I didn't do it. Yeah, didn't. I wasn't sharp enough.
[2:58] Speaker 2: It was a good interview, though, so feel free to
[3:01] Speaker 2: skip right ahead to that.
[3:03] Speaker 1: But we'll lay here and go to sleep. So we're
[3:06] Speaker 1: talking about the Big Bang theory and not the TV show.
[3:10] Speaker 1: So settle Down nerds.
[3:12] Speaker 2: I think he was on that show though, wudn't he
[3:13] Speaker 2: I'm sure, yeah, sure, yeah, he made an appearance.
[3:17] Speaker 1: I think all you have to do is say, like,
[3:19] Speaker 1: you will further science if you appear on this. He's like,
[3:22] Speaker 1: I'll do it.
[3:22] Speaker 2: Yeah. I've never seen one episode of that show.
[3:26] Speaker 1: I guess I've maybe seen some here or there. It's
[3:28] Speaker 1: it's i think, literally the most popular show in the world,
[3:34] Speaker 1: or it was like last season or the season before.
[3:36] Speaker 1: Like it's just taken off like a rocket. And hats
[3:39] Speaker 1: off to them too, because they like mix actual science
[3:42] Speaker 1: and science jokes and all that stuff. It's it's like
[3:45] Speaker 1: smartening up the world.
[3:47] Speaker 2: Well, I'll tell you one quote I got from mister Tyson,
[3:50] Speaker 2: doctor Tyson, from the Internet, and it was actually heard
[3:55] Speaker 2: him say it, so I know it was a real quote.
[3:58] Speaker 2: He said that, you know, people ask do you believe
[4:01] Speaker 2: in the Big Bang theory? And only the way that
[4:04] Speaker 2: he can. He was like, well, it's not a matter
[4:06] Speaker 2: of believing, he said, I'd only believe in things that
[4:08] Speaker 2: are evidence based. And he said the question should be
[4:11] Speaker 2: that you posit to people, of all the data and
[4:14] Speaker 2: evidence out there, what theory is best supported, and he
[4:18] Speaker 2: said it's the Big Bang theory.
[4:19] Speaker 1: Sure, right, And our colleague Jonathan Strickland who wrote the
[4:22] Speaker 1: article that this is based on, and kudos to that
[4:25] Speaker 1: cat because he took some really really difficult concepts and
[4:31] Speaker 1: explained it really well.
[4:33] Speaker 2: He explained it in a way that I came close
[4:34] Speaker 2: to understand.
[4:37] Speaker 1: But he makes that same point too, that not only
[4:40] Speaker 1: is the Big Bang theory of theory which obviously cannot
[4:43] Speaker 1: be proven can only be disproven, but that there are
[4:46] Speaker 1: other competing theories out there too, which we'll talk about later. Sure,
[4:50] Speaker 1: but that for the most part it has the most
[4:53] Speaker 1: observational evidence backing it up, including the recent confirmation of
[4:57] Speaker 1: gravitational waves which made a huge st and that as
[5:02] Speaker 1: a result, it's the most widely subscribed to theory among
[5:06] Speaker 1: scientists as describing the early universe, and that's a big thing.
[5:10] Speaker 1: There's a big distinction about that. A lot of people
[5:12] Speaker 1: think that the Big Bang describes the formation of the universe.
[5:16] Speaker 2: Not true.
[5:16] Speaker 1: No, the Big Bang describes the time starting very soon
[5:22] Speaker 1: after the universe formed, but it does not go back
[5:27] Speaker 1: into where the origin of the universe came from what
[5:30] Speaker 1: came before it, And it actually doesn't even go all
[5:33] Speaker 1: the way back to that point where everything started. It
[5:37] Speaker 1: just can't because science falls apart. As we'll see the
[5:39] Speaker 1: further you try to go back in time because you know,
[5:42] Speaker 1: time ceases to exist at that point.
[5:45] Speaker 2: Yeah, if the universe were a human being, it's the
[5:48] Speaker 2: big Bang theory sort of describes the point where the
[5:51] Speaker 2: sperm and the egg meet up.
[5:55] Speaker 1: It describes the time a trillionth of a trillionth of
[5:58] Speaker 1: a second after they met up.
[6:01] Speaker 2: What about that, Yeah, which is you know, it's close.
[6:04] Speaker 2: It's a pretty great time, it is.
[6:07] Speaker 1: So another misconception, Chuck, is that the Big Bang was
[6:11] Speaker 1: an explosion, and that's not that's not correct.
[6:15] Speaker 2: No. In fact, a man named Sir Fred Hoyle is
[6:18] Speaker 2: the one who gave it a name almost, well not almost.
[6:21] Speaker 2: He gave it to it in jest as sort of
[6:23] Speaker 2: an insult because he was a believer. I don't know
[6:27] Speaker 2: if he always was, but he was a believer at
[6:29] Speaker 2: the time in the steady state theory. Sure, and it
[6:32] Speaker 2: was like, yeah, the explosion, this big bang, but it's
[6:35] Speaker 2: not an explosion at all, So, Chuck, it's a rapid expansion.
[6:40] Speaker 1: It wasn't the best way to think of it, as
[6:41] Speaker 1: like this so like an explosion. Right, Let's say you
[6:44] Speaker 1: have a planet and that planet is actually the universe,
[6:47] Speaker 1: and it's just floating there in space, and Darth Vader
[6:49] Speaker 1: shoots it with the Death Start and he goes right,
[6:52] Speaker 1: and it goes everywhere, starts scattering everywhere, but it's scattering
[6:56] Speaker 1: within the boundaries the confines the space as we understand it.
[6:59] Speaker 1: Sure that that would be the popular conception of what
[7:02] Speaker 1: the Big Bang represents, not at all. What the Big
[7:05] Speaker 1: Bang actually says is that space itself inflated. Yeah, it expanded,
[7:11] Speaker 1: and that all the stuff that was in it was
[7:14] Speaker 1: in this very tightly wound, dense, incredibly hot core that
[7:22] Speaker 1: was a singularity basically that expanded into the universe. That's
[7:28] Speaker 1: as big as we understand it now.
[7:29] Speaker 2: Yeah, something that was so tiny and hot, it had
[7:33] Speaker 2: an infinite amount of density because everything we know was
[7:37] Speaker 2: crammed in. You know what it's like, It's like if
[7:41] Speaker 2: Neil deGrasse Tyson listens to this, he's going to love this. Okay.
[7:44] Speaker 2: You know the little pellets that you would get with
[7:46] Speaker 2: your fireworks, a little black pellet, uh huh, and then
[7:48] Speaker 2: you light it a smoke snake and then it snakes
[7:51] Speaker 2: out to like, you know, several feet, right, That's that's
[7:54] Speaker 2: like it, except if that pellet were like thousands and
[7:57] Speaker 2: thousands and thousands of fraction of the size of ahead
[8:00] Speaker 2: of a pin.
[8:01] Speaker 3: Right.
[8:02] Speaker 1: I think that's a great analogy.
[8:03] Speaker 2: And I'm just gonna leave the room, right, and I'll
[8:06] Speaker 2: come back in forty minutes.
[8:08] Speaker 1: But even still, Chuck, take that analogy, right, when you
[8:11] Speaker 1: imagine that, you imagine that snake growing that you on
[8:15] Speaker 1: a sidewalk and maybe there's kind of grass in your
[8:17] Speaker 1: view and it's at night, and there's a car park
[8:20] Speaker 1: there because you're outside, right, Well, sure, that's where our
[8:23] Speaker 1: brain wants to take us. Yeah, we want to confine
[8:27] Speaker 1: what we know within the boundaries of our universe. What
[8:30] Speaker 1: we're talking about is the universe itself growing, yeah, expanding
[8:36] Speaker 1: in nothingness.
[8:37] Speaker 2: Yeah. And he points out in the interview. I don't
[8:39] Speaker 2: want to spoil it, but he kind of blows my
[8:41] Speaker 2: mind when he starts talking about like this goes beyond
[8:44] Speaker 2: what our human senses can understand, right, and sight and
[8:47] Speaker 2: sound like forget about it.
[8:49] Speaker 1: Yeah, And that's how nobody's gonna be able to pin
[8:51] Speaker 1: anything on us, because we'll be like, well, we just
[8:54] Speaker 1: can't comprehend that. So how could you blame us for
[8:56] Speaker 1: getting it wrong?
[8:57] Speaker 2: Yeah, so chuck, Now I'm gonna leave the room, okay,
[9:02] Speaker 2: and you need what a half an hour?
[9:04] Speaker 1: It may take a little longer than that.
[9:06] Speaker 2: Now I get parts of it, So I'll just chime
[9:08] Speaker 2: in when I feel confident.
[9:09] Speaker 1: There's a there's a line right that Strickland had in here.
[9:13] Speaker 1: It was he says that the earliest moments of the
[9:16] Speaker 1: Big Bang, all of the matter, energy and space we
[9:19] Speaker 1: could observe was compressed to an area of zero volume
[9:23] Speaker 1: and infinite density. Doesn't that sound like the line from
[9:25] Speaker 1: a religious text or something like that? Isn't it just
[9:28] Speaker 1: like right there on that border between like science and
[9:32] Speaker 1: religion basically.
[9:33] Speaker 2: Yeah. Like, and now take this drug, and everyone take
[9:35] Speaker 2: their clothes off and follow me right into the grand.
[9:37] Speaker 1: Room, and we'll understand what I'm talking about.
[9:40] Speaker 2: Yeah. And you know what, when Strickland and scientists and
[9:44] Speaker 2: cosmologists talk about that, that is what is known as
[9:47] Speaker 2: a singularity, right, that thing with zero volume and infinite density.
[9:52] Speaker 5: Right, So.
[9:54] Speaker 1: I think it bears repeating at least one more time.
[9:57] Speaker 1: What we're talking about is all of the matter, all
[9:59] Speaker 1: of the energy, all of the heat, all the radiation,
[10:03] Speaker 1: everything in the universe that is here or ever was
[10:06] Speaker 1: here over the last thirteen point roughly seven to nine
[10:09] Speaker 1: billion years, was in a point that was twenty three
[10:19] Speaker 1: orders of magnitude smaller than the diameter of an atom.
[10:23] Speaker 2: You almost you just caught yourself goanting to say, it's
[10:25] Speaker 2: like a little ball. But there's not even circularism.
[10:29] Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, is that a word?
[10:30] Speaker 2: Yes, there was nothing circular.
[10:32] Speaker 1: And so at this time, at this point, we know
[10:36] Speaker 1: that it was very, very hot. Sure makes sense, mind
[10:39] Speaker 1: bogglingly hot, Like you can't even think of all the
[10:41] Speaker 1: zeros associated with the degrees of kelvin or fahrenheit or celsius. Right,
[10:46] Speaker 1: And it was incredibly dense. And then something happened. We
[10:51] Speaker 1: don't know what that was. A science simply isn't equipped
[10:54] Speaker 1: to explain it or understand it or detect it. Something
[10:57] Speaker 1: happened to make this incredibly dense ball or whatever it was.
[11:03] Speaker 2: Yeah, there was no ball expand yes, and it was
[11:07] Speaker 2: not like the smoke snake. It wasn't a child with
[11:11] Speaker 2: a lighter.
[11:12] Speaker 1: You don't know that. Neil de grass Tyson doesn't know that.
[11:15] Speaker 1: Nobody knows that.
[11:17] Speaker 2: So this expanding happened really really really fast, and we'll
[11:22] Speaker 2: talk later about just those first few seconds afterward, like
[11:26] Speaker 2: that's how fast we're talking.
[11:28] Speaker 1: Well, few like trillionths of a second is how they
[11:32] Speaker 1: break it down, Like this, so much happened in that
[11:35] Speaker 1: first literally the first second of the origin of the universe. Yeah,
[11:39] Speaker 1: that that there are different ages and epochs that happened
[11:44] Speaker 1: in like trillions of a second.
[11:46] Speaker 2: Yeah, it's really mind blowing. So as things expanded though
[11:50] Speaker 2: in those first few seconds, and today things are still expanding, right,
[11:54] Speaker 2: Things are expanding and things are cooling down even as
[11:57] Speaker 2: we speak. Literally every second that we're on the Earth,
[12:01] Speaker 2: we're expanding, and well not us, but the universe is
[12:05] Speaker 2: expanding and cooling right exactly.
[12:06] Speaker 1: And as a matter of fact, from what I understand,
[12:09] Speaker 1: our region of the universe, which is something like ninety
[12:13] Speaker 1: billion light years across, is no longer expanding, but other
[12:19] Speaker 1: parts of the universe are expanding. And there's this really
[12:22] Speaker 1: great article about cosmology and where it stands right now.
[12:25] Speaker 1: It's in aon not cosmetology, no cosmology, Yes, and it
[12:31] Speaker 1: was written by a guy named Ross Anderson, and I
[12:32] Speaker 1: think it's called in the beginning and it's incredibly well written,
[12:36] Speaker 1: but he makes a really great analogy. He says that
[12:39] Speaker 1: that ninety billion light year across portion of the universe
[12:44] Speaker 1: that we inhabit, that we consider our own, is but
[12:48] Speaker 1: a small section of one tiny bubble that floats along
[12:53] Speaker 1: on a frothy sea whose proportions defy comprehension, and that neat. Yeah,
[12:59] Speaker 1: that's just our section of the universe, right, that's our
[13:02] Speaker 1: little neighborhood. So the universe is unknowably large. We sound
[13:07] Speaker 1: like HP Lovecraft here describing this stuff. Yeah, and still
[13:11] Speaker 1: some parts of it are expanding. And apparently in the
[13:15] Speaker 1: early universe, when it was a singularity, the four forces,
[13:19] Speaker 1: the four fundamental forces.
[13:21] Speaker 2: The Dark Side. Wait, yeah, I thought you were going
[13:25] Speaker 2: I thought you meant the Star Wars universe. I was, oh, okay, Yeah,
[13:28] Speaker 2: So the force the Dark Side, Middi, Chlorians.
[13:31] Speaker 1: And Mark Hamill's hair, Yeah, prequels the four basic forces,
[13:36] Speaker 1: as everyone knows, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force,
[13:41] Speaker 1: and gravity. Right, And that that singularity, before the universe
[13:45] Speaker 1: expanded began to expand, all of them were coupled together
[13:49] Speaker 1: into a single unified.
[13:50] Speaker 2: Force, which we don't understand how no, we.
[13:53] Speaker 1: Don't, And as a matter of fact, trying to get
[13:55] Speaker 1: them back together is one of the great pursuits of
[13:58] Speaker 1: physics because if we can figuregure out how they were
[14:00] Speaker 1: all unified, we can start to understand the science we need,
[14:05] Speaker 1: the paradigm, we need to understand the origins of the universe,
[14:08] Speaker 1: but we just can't figure out how to do it right.
[14:10] Speaker 2: Yeah. One thing that kind of blows my mind with
[14:12] Speaker 2: this is when you know, we get to the stuff
[14:14] Speaker 2: later on about does it defy other laws of physics
[14:18] Speaker 2: and stuff? Like basically every answer is like the further
[14:22] Speaker 2: you travel back toward that singularity, the less all these
[14:25] Speaker 2: rules that we think we understand apply right falls apart. Yeah,
[14:28] Speaker 2: so just you know, we will probably never understand this stuff. Yeah,
[14:33] Speaker 2: you know that very singular moment.
[14:37] Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know. I disagree. I think I disagree. Yeah,
[14:40] Speaker 1: I think that we are maybe a century or two
[14:44] Speaker 1: away from understanding it.
[14:45] Speaker 2: Well, you just clearly pulled that out of your hat.
[14:47] Speaker 1: Well I totally did. Okay, but we've made.
[14:50] Speaker 2: Another one hundred and twenty six years.
[14:51] Speaker 1: Well, no, we've made some incredibly huge strides in the
[14:55] Speaker 1: last like one hundred and fifty two hundred years in
[14:58] Speaker 1: our understanding thus far. Right, So I think that's not
[15:01] Speaker 1: a bad guess, right, So.
[15:02] Speaker 2: Be a string theorist right to marry all these Uh.
[15:05] Speaker 1: I don't know.
[15:06] Speaker 2: Probably I don't know.
[15:07] Speaker 1: And that's what NDT said, that's what we call him, now, Yeah,
[15:10] Speaker 1: that's what he said. He was like, who knows. It
[15:12] Speaker 1: could be string theory. Maybe someone will be able to
[15:15] Speaker 1: come up with a unified theory or what's called the
[15:17] Speaker 1: theory of everything that unifies the four fundamental forces back
[15:20] Speaker 1: into their their single version of a force man. Or
[15:25] Speaker 1: maybe we just don't understand quantum physics enough quite yet. Yeah,
[15:29] Speaker 1: and when we figure that out a little more, that
[15:32] Speaker 1: will unlock some keys for us.
[15:34] Speaker 2: Unbelievable.
[15:35] Speaker 1: So chuck, before we get into how we started to
[15:38] Speaker 1: come to understand the Big Bang and the origin of
[15:41] Speaker 1: the universe, let's take a break real quick.
[15:43] Speaker 2: All right, I'm gonna go wipe my brow.
[15:46] Speaker 3: You're doing great, softly, jawsh.
[16:07] Speaker 2: So, all right, I sort of get this part. So
[16:15] Speaker 2: the history part, I'm gonna talk a little bit about it.
[16:19] Speaker 2: And this makes a lot of sense to me. Go
[16:20] Speaker 2: back in time. Let's get in the way back machine.
[16:22] Speaker 2: Oh yes, let's boy, it just feel so safe and
[16:30] Speaker 2: comfortable in here.
[16:32] Speaker 1: Thinks of kerosene.
[16:33] Speaker 2: It does, weirdly. It's eighteen hundreds and astronomers started using
[16:38] Speaker 2: something called a spectroscope, which is pretty nifty. We've talked
[16:41] Speaker 2: about light waves in here before. A spectroscope is something
[16:45] Speaker 2: that divides that light spectrum up into the wavelengths blue
[16:49] Speaker 2: on the left, red on the right, and as you
[16:52] Speaker 2: go further toward the red, the wavelengths grow longer. So
[16:55] Speaker 2: that's part one right, right, that was spec yes, the
[17:01] Speaker 2: light waves right.
[17:02] Speaker 1: And around the same time, a guy named Christian Doppler
[17:08] Speaker 1: was tinkering with the frequency of sound waves. Right. He
[17:11] Speaker 1: was studying those because.
[17:12] Speaker 2: He's a smart guy, he is. And he said, you
[17:14] Speaker 2: know what, it's weird that when I sit by a train,
[17:17] Speaker 2: it sounds different as it goes by me, approaches, then
[17:21] Speaker 2: goes by me and goes further away from me.
[17:22] Speaker 1: Right, it sounds different than that doesn't really make any sense.
[17:25] Speaker 2: Yeah, And whereas most people would just eat their figgy
[17:27] Speaker 2: pudding and go about their day, he wanted to try
[17:30] Speaker 2: and explain it.
[17:31] Speaker 1: He was like anybody else would be like this new
[17:33] Speaker 1: Charles Dickens book is top notch.
[17:37] Speaker 2: So he said, you know what, as this noise approaches you,
[17:40] Speaker 2: the sound waves it generates compress, It's going to change
[17:42] Speaker 2: that frequency, or at least how you perceive it in
[17:45] Speaker 2: a different pitch. So as it moves away from you,
[17:48] Speaker 2: those waves are going to stretch, that pitch goes down.
[17:51] Speaker 2: And I'm going to name this effect after myself.
[17:53] Speaker 1: Right, Well, I'll let my wife do it so I
[17:56] Speaker 1: don't look like a jerk.
[17:58] Speaker 2: Right. So basically, you marry these two things's light wavelengths
[18:02] Speaker 2: in the Doppler effect, and it sort of let us
[18:05] Speaker 2: down this path to where we could understand the Big
[18:08] Speaker 2: Bang theory.
[18:08] Speaker 5: Right.
[18:08] Speaker 1: It would indicate that something, something that was emitting light
[18:14] Speaker 1: out there in the universe whose light moved toward the
[18:18] Speaker 1: red end of the spectrum would be emitting longer wavelengths,
[18:22] Speaker 1: which would suggest, based on Christian Doppler's findings, that it
[18:26] Speaker 1: was moving away, right.
[18:27] Speaker 2: Yeah, And they found that. They said, look at these stars,
[18:30] Speaker 2: some of the light is falling into this right hand side,
[18:34] Speaker 2: and does that mean it's moving away and it's getting faster, right,
[18:39] Speaker 2: and that it wants to get away from us.
[18:41] Speaker 1: That's where Edwin Hubble came in. He basically said, yeah,
[18:44] Speaker 1: this is really weird, guys, because some of these stars
[18:48] Speaker 1: appear to have a velocity that's proportional to its distance
[18:51] Speaker 1: from the Earth. Like there seems to be some sort
[18:53] Speaker 1: of rhyme or reason here to it. And it suggested
[18:56] Speaker 1: to Hubble and later on to everybody else, including Einstein,
[19:00] Speaker 1: as we'll see that the universe itself was expanding, and
[19:05] Speaker 1: this is where we came to the genuine origin of
[19:09] Speaker 1: the Big Bang theory, the idea that the universe was
[19:13] Speaker 1: expanding and at a constant.
[19:16] Speaker 2: Rate too, right, yes, is that the idea is that
[19:19] Speaker 2: the Hubble constant?
[19:20] Speaker 1: No, no, no, the the Hubble constant is the proportion between,
[19:25] Speaker 1: or the relationship between how fast something is moving away
[19:29] Speaker 1: from us to its distance from us.
[19:32] Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I guess it is so constant rate.
[19:36] Speaker 1: And actually no, the universe appears to be expanding more quickly.
[19:39] Speaker 2: Than it was before. Yeah.
[19:40] Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, so it's increasing, which is that's what makes.
[19:43] Speaker 2: A lot of people really ner relationship. Yeah, makes sense.
[19:46] Speaker 1: Yeah, the Hubble constant has to do not necessarily with
[19:49] Speaker 1: the inflation of universe itself or the expansion universe itself,
[19:52] Speaker 1: but that how far or how fast, uh say, a
[19:56] Speaker 1: star is moving away from us, and the further away
[19:59] Speaker 1: from us it is, it appears to be moving faster
[20:02] Speaker 1: than others that are closer.
[20:03] Speaker 2: Yeah, and we should point out you said inflation and
[20:07] Speaker 2: or expansion, And apparently if you're an insider, huh, if
[20:10] Speaker 2: you're a scientist, you'd probably say inflation.
[20:12] Speaker 5: Sure.
[20:12] Speaker 1: So expansion is the basis of the Big Bang theory.
[20:17] Speaker 1: It's the idea that the universe has expanded over time,
[20:22] Speaker 1: so that by logic, since time is one of the
[20:24] Speaker 1: four dimensions that we live in, right, You've got the
[20:26] Speaker 1: three dimensions plus time, so therefore space time describes the
[20:30] Speaker 1: fabric of the universe and the reality we live in. Right,
[20:33] Speaker 1: So by logic of that, if you went backward in time,
[20:37] Speaker 1: the universe would be smaller and smaller and smaller. And
[20:40] Speaker 1: the more they started looking into it, the more their
[20:42] Speaker 1: minds started popping as they realized, like, Wow, this thing
[20:46] Speaker 1: was really really small ones, and that's the basis of it.
[20:49] Speaker 1: Inflation theory comes in and suggests how that happened, how
[20:54] Speaker 1: that expansion happened, and it fills in a lot of
[20:56] Speaker 1: blanks that we'll also talk about.
[20:58] Speaker 2: Yeah, so you mentioned Einstein earlier, he's a noted smart guy. Yeah,
[21:04] Speaker 2: and he actually had some issues because it conflicted somewhat
[21:08] Speaker 2: with his general relativity theories, because he subscribed to his
[21:12] Speaker 2: own theory that the universal static, it's not expanding, right.
[21:16] Speaker 1: I think like he was like a member of the
[21:18] Speaker 1: there's a way of viewing the universe that like it
[21:21] Speaker 1: was always this way, it was always spread out this way, right,
[21:24] Speaker 1: it wasn't getting bigger, that's nuts. And so he figured
[21:27] Speaker 1: that his general theory of relativity would prove this, and
[21:31] Speaker 1: actually he was extremely surprised to find that his own
[21:34] Speaker 1: general theory of relativity actually said, no, the universe is
[21:37] Speaker 1: either expanding or contracting. It's certainly not steady. And then
[21:40] Speaker 1: Edwin Hubble came along and he had his findings in
[21:43] Speaker 1: Einstein said, you know what, I was wrong.
[21:46] Speaker 2: Yeah, that's big enough of man to admit it.
[21:48] Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the kind of guy I am.
[21:50] Speaker 2: And one day people are going to keep my brain
[21:52] Speaker 2: in a jar in a barn.
[21:53] Speaker 1: And slice it up. It's going to go on a
[21:55] Speaker 1: car trip. That was a good episode we did.
[21:57] Speaker 2: Too, Yeah did we do one on that?
[21:58] Speaker 1: Oh yeah, on its own Einstein's brain.
[22:00] Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that's right, boy. Those were the good old.
[22:02] Speaker 1: Days Einstein's Brain episodes.
[22:05] Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, all right, so let's talk about some of
[22:08] Speaker 2: the predictions that rose from the theory that the universe
[22:13] Speaker 2: is expanding. One is, and Strickland says the universe is
[22:19] Speaker 2: homogeneous and isotropic, which is a fancy way of saying
[22:23] Speaker 2: it's made up of the same materials in completely uniform.
[22:26] Speaker 5: Yeah.
[22:26] Speaker 1: Here is one of the first times we run into
[22:29] Speaker 1: something where you're like, what are you talking about. It's
[22:32] Speaker 1: funny if you read Strickland's article, and I sent him
[22:34] Speaker 1: an email saying as much that I was like, this
[22:37] Speaker 1: is really well written. Yeah, but if you just read
[22:39] Speaker 1: the words you're saying, it sounds like it was written
[22:41] Speaker 1: by someone who is totally insane.
[22:43] Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I know.
[22:45] Speaker 1: And he makes the point too, He's like, well, yeah,
[22:47] Speaker 1: all you have to do is look out into the
[22:48] Speaker 1: Milky Way or anything like that, anything we can see
[22:51] Speaker 1: easily and see that it looks different, Like there's not
[22:54] Speaker 1: a star that looks just like our son with the
[22:56] Speaker 1: same number of planets looking around.
[22:58] Speaker 5: Right.
[22:58] Speaker 1: The point is that you look if you go out
[23:02] Speaker 1: as several orders of magnification and look at the universe
[23:05] Speaker 1: outside of any given galaxy. You're gonna see that. Actually, Yeah,
[23:09] Speaker 1: everything's distributed pretty evenly throughout the universe, and so that
[23:14] Speaker 1: makes it homogeneous. And then secondly, it's isotropic, meaning that
[23:17] Speaker 1: there is no center to the universe. There's no central point.
[23:20] Speaker 2: Yeah, which some people positive that the Earth is the
[23:22] Speaker 2: center of the universe. Well, we'll talk a little bit
[23:25] Speaker 2: about that later, Okay, but that's wrong, right.
[23:28] Speaker 1: I mean, it hasn't been disproven, but it's just extremely unlikely,
[23:32] Speaker 1: I think.
[23:33] Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's a very human centric thing to say.
[23:36] Speaker 1: But the reason why some people say that is that
[23:39] Speaker 1: they are if you look around, that expansion that we're
[23:43] Speaker 1: seeing is everything's going away from us, which is like,
[23:48] Speaker 1: why is that happening? Like we should be going along
[23:51] Speaker 1: at least with something else. But the idea is that
[23:55] Speaker 1: we're not because we're the center of the universe. But
[23:58] Speaker 1: the implication that are so mind boggling that it's just
[24:01] Speaker 1: not possible almost, yeah, that we're actually at the center
[24:05] Speaker 1: of the universe when we're just the small segment of
[24:08] Speaker 1: a tiny bubble in a frothy sea that defies proportions.
[24:11] Speaker 1: There's no way that's the center of the universe.
[24:14] Speaker 2: So another prediction was and we talked a little bit
[24:18] Speaker 2: about the intense heat at the very first moments of
[24:22] Speaker 2: the Big Bang, and if that were true, then you
[24:26] Speaker 2: would feel and see this radiation I guess, not see it,
[24:30] Speaker 2: but you would have this radiation expanded over the entire
[24:33] Speaker 2: galaxy in roughly equal proportions.
[24:35] Speaker 1: Yeah, because again, remember the universe is homogeneous and isotropic,
[24:39] Speaker 1: so if there was radiation, it should be evenly distributed.
[24:43] Speaker 2: Yeah, there'd be like they call it an echo I've
[24:45] Speaker 2: seen described in some make circles.
[24:47] Speaker 1: Right, Okay, So apparently back in the forties they detected
[24:50] Speaker 1: this stuff and didn't know what they were looking at,
[24:52] Speaker 1: and in the sixties they figured out, holy cow, this
[24:56] Speaker 1: is the cosmic microwave background, which is basically I think
[25:00] Speaker 1: of it as more like a fingerprint, the fingerprints of
[25:03] Speaker 1: the universe, right, Yeah, and it's evenly distributed. It's this
[25:07] Speaker 1: trace radiation that's still around from the Big Bang, which
[25:12] Speaker 1: is pretty amazing. So when you put that in the
[25:14] Speaker 1: discovery that the universe does seem to be homogeneous and isotropic,
[25:18] Speaker 1: along with the fact that we discovered this cosmic radiation
[25:21] Speaker 1: background that's evenly distributed throughout the universe, it really gives
[25:24] Speaker 1: a lot of credence to the Big Bang theory, and
[25:27] Speaker 1: so too does this gravitational wave, the gravitational wave discovery.
[25:32] Speaker 1: They apparently found curls in the cosmic microwave background that
[25:38] Speaker 1: were our remnants of gravitational wave from the Big Bang too,
[25:41] Speaker 1: So it's just getting supported all over the place, and
[25:44] Speaker 1: everybody's super happy.
[25:45] Speaker 2: Yeah, there's like real observational data there, all right, we
[25:48] Speaker 2: tease those those first nano seconds, nano moments after the
[25:54] Speaker 2: Big Bang, So let's talk about them right now. The
[25:59] Speaker 2: earliest thing that scientists can even talk about like with
[26:03] Speaker 2: a straight face, like later on when they're having drinks
[26:06] Speaker 2: at the bar, that they talk about before this, right,
[26:09] Speaker 2: but if they're like on a podium in front of
[26:12] Speaker 2: an audience, yeah, they can go back as far as
[26:16] Speaker 2: I'll just say the equation, even though it will make
[26:18] Speaker 2: no sense to anyone. T equals one times ten to
[26:24] Speaker 2: the negative forty three seconds.
[26:26] Speaker 1: Man, Yes, okay, so T yeah equals the time after
[26:31] Speaker 1: the creation of the universe, yep. And as far back
[26:34] Speaker 1: as they've gone is point.
[26:38] Speaker 4: Zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero
[26:42] Speaker 4: zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero
[26:47] Speaker 4: zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero
[26:52] Speaker 4: zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero
[26:56] Speaker 4: zero zero.
[26:58] Speaker 1: One second after the creation of the universe. That's how
[27:02] Speaker 1: far back they've been able to trace the Big Bang
[27:05] Speaker 1: forty three nice work in the amazing That fraction of
[27:09] Speaker 1: one second is how far back they've been able to
[27:12] Speaker 1: figure it out. And so much happened in that first second. Chuck,
[27:17] Speaker 1: that just fractions of that fraction are, like I said before,
[27:22] Speaker 1: like different epochs in the era or the age of
[27:26] Speaker 1: the universe, like entire epochs happened in trillions of a
[27:29] Speaker 1: trillionth of a second.
[27:30] Speaker 2: I know.
[27:31] Speaker 1: It's just so mind boggling.
[27:33] Speaker 2: I know.
[27:34] Speaker 1: I love it though, Like I've really given myself over
[27:36] Speaker 1: to this. I I was fighting at first, like, well
[27:38] Speaker 1: that doesn't make sense. I don't want to how does
[27:41] Speaker 1: that make sense? And I did look plenty of stuff up, yeah,
[27:43] Speaker 1: but I also just kind of was like, I'm just
[27:45] Speaker 1: taking it to submit on faith, despite what NDT says,
[27:49] Speaker 1: like you do kind of have to take this on faith,
[27:51] Speaker 1: especially if you're not an astrophysicist. And I just kind
[27:54] Speaker 1: of gave myself over to it, and I love it.
[27:56] Speaker 2: You know what, happens when my mind gets bent like
[27:58] Speaker 2: that too far. I just have some pie.
[28:01] Speaker 1: Oh that's good stuff.
[28:02] Speaker 2: Yeah, we's kind of stare at the wall and have
[28:04] Speaker 2: some pie.
[28:05] Speaker 1: What do you recommend that matter began? Okay, so something's
[28:08] Speaker 1: super sweet not fruity.
[28:10] Speaker 2: Uh, what's a fruity pie, like a.
[28:12] Speaker 1: Cherry pie or apple pie?
[28:14] Speaker 3: Hmmm.
[28:14] Speaker 2: I like a good apple crumble pie. Oh yeah, I
[28:17] Speaker 2: do too, but not like the one with the crisscross pastry.
[28:21] Speaker 1: On top, don't. I don't really discriminate against pie.
[28:24] Speaker 2: Sure.
[28:24] Speaker 1: I tend more toward the fruity section of the pie spectrum,
[28:30] Speaker 1: and I tend to think of peacon like right in
[28:31] Speaker 1: the middle. But then on the other end you have
[28:33] Speaker 1: like your creamy and chocolate moose pies and stuff like that.
[28:36] Speaker 1: I tend to be on the other side a little or.
[28:38] Speaker 2: Good lemon pie, lemon ice.
[28:40] Speaker 1: That's good stuff.
[28:41] Speaker 2: What I don't get is the cheddar on the apple pie.
[28:43] Speaker 1: I've never gotten that.
[28:44] Speaker 2: I've never tried it. Maybe I should.
[28:46] Speaker 1: Those people are obviously crazy.
[28:48] Speaker 2: I like sweet and savory together, so maybe I should
[28:51] Speaker 2: give it a whirl. Oh yeah, you have to start
[28:53] Speaker 2: talking about this again.
[28:54] Speaker 1: Dip a French prye in a frosty and call it
[28:56] Speaker 1: a day.
[28:57] Speaker 2: All right. So at that point that you described, you know,
[29:00] Speaker 2: don't say all the zeros again, But at that point
[29:04] Speaker 2: the universe was tiny, tiny, tiny and small and dense
[29:08] Speaker 2: and hot, and the area of the universe spanned a
[29:12] Speaker 2: region of about three point nine by ten to thirty
[29:15] Speaker 2: four inches everything.
[29:18] Speaker 1: And that area right ten to the negative thirty three centimeters. Again,
[29:24] Speaker 1: the average diameter of an atom or roughly something like
[29:27] Speaker 1: that is ten to the negative ten. Yeah, this is
[29:30] Speaker 1: that much smaller than an atom. And everything that's in
[29:34] Speaker 1: the universe now was encapsulated in that tiny little thing,
[29:39] Speaker 1: whatever it was.
[29:40] Speaker 2: That's right.
[29:41] Speaker 1: And again, like surely astrophysicists and cosmologists when they were
[29:45] Speaker 1: coming up with these calculations are like this can't be right. Yeah,
[29:49] Speaker 1: and I guess over time they were like, it seems
[29:52] Speaker 1: to be right.
[29:53] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[29:53] Speaker 1: Either we're all just totally off our rockers and really
[29:57] Speaker 1: somebody forgot to carry one and everybody forgot the carry
[30:00] Speaker 1: you one, or this is really how things started, and
[30:04] Speaker 1: it's just mind boggling to think.
[30:05] Speaker 2: All right. So in that very first, first, first, first moment,
[30:10] Speaker 2: theorists think that those four primary forces that we mentioned
[30:14] Speaker 2: are still hanging together. Sure, they were still united, and
[30:17] Speaker 2: that matter and energy were inseparable at this point.
[30:20] Speaker 1: Which is another don't feel bad if like you're sitting
[30:22] Speaker 1: there going like, how.
[30:23] Speaker 2: Is that possible? No one knows.
[30:25] Speaker 1: Yeah, they just see, like the calculations bear that out.
[30:29] Speaker 1: Is another way to put it, you know, that's right,
[30:31] Speaker 1: But that's how it was. Matter and energy were one
[30:33] Speaker 1: and the same.
[30:34] Speaker 2: And askings expanded. We'll go into these in detail. We
[30:37] Speaker 2: go through something called bariogenesis, particle cosmology, and then standard cosmology. Right,
[30:43] Speaker 2: and as this time passes, things become a little more
[30:48] Speaker 2: easy to understand. And when I say easy to understand,
[30:50] Speaker 2: I mean extremely difficult, but at least at least your
[30:53] Speaker 2: mind can wrap around it.
[30:54] Speaker 1: Yeah, start too, at least right. Yeah, So remember we
[30:57] Speaker 1: started at tea, which is the time after the creation
[30:59] Speaker 1: of the universe. T equals one times ten to the
[31:01] Speaker 1: negative forty three seconds.
[31:02] Speaker 5: Yeah.
[31:03] Speaker 1: The next the next big part where things start and
[31:07] Speaker 1: actually in between the two gravities separated from the from
[31:12] Speaker 1: the four fundamental forces.
[31:13] Speaker 2: Yeah, just a little thing like that.
[31:14] Speaker 1: Right, But the next big one that came along was
[31:18] Speaker 1: at ten to the negative thirty six seconds, and this
[31:22] Speaker 1: is where bariogenesis happened. And around this time also, this
[31:26] Speaker 1: is where the electro week, which is electromagnetic and weak
[31:30] Speaker 1: force combined together, separated from the strong magnetic force. And
[31:34] Speaker 1: apparently here at that ten to the negative thirty six
[31:38] Speaker 1: power seconds, that was where inflation happened. That's that's where
[31:43] Speaker 1: the expansion began.
[31:44] Speaker 2: Right, And that's where we actually could begin to observe
[31:47] Speaker 2: some kind of matter.
[31:49] Speaker 1: Yeah, and they think that what happened was a tremendous
[31:52] Speaker 1: amount of matter and anti matter were created.
[31:55] Speaker 2: Yeah, but that and we did it.
[31:57] Speaker 1: I don't remember a lot of about the details, but
[31:59] Speaker 1: remember we a podcast on antimatter spacecraft, how amazing those were.
[32:05] Speaker 1: But antimatter and matter like to just destroy each other
[32:09] Speaker 1: and effectively cancel one another out. But apparently at the
[32:14] Speaker 1: beginning of the universe, at the origin of the universe,
[32:17] Speaker 1: it's suggested by this that there was a slight imbalance
[32:20] Speaker 1: in whatever makes matter and whatever makes antimatter, so that
[32:24] Speaker 1: there was slightly more matter that was created than antimatter,
[32:29] Speaker 1: which is that right, so that that stuff survived. Had
[32:33] Speaker 1: the balance been the other direction, there'd be slightly more
[32:35] Speaker 1: antimatter than matter now, and who knows what kind of
[32:38] Speaker 1: loopy bizarro universe that would.
[32:39] Speaker 2: Have created, or if there would have been anything at all.
[32:43] Speaker 1: So all that matter that survived is the matter that
[32:46] Speaker 1: we see in the universe now, and that's a lot
[32:49] Speaker 1: of matter. So imagine, since this is just a tiny
[32:52] Speaker 1: fraction of the matter that was created and destroyed by
[32:56] Speaker 1: the antimatter that was also created, how much matter and
[32:59] Speaker 1: antimatter was created at ten to the negative thirty six seconds? Yeah,
[33:03] Speaker 1: through barriogenesis.
[33:04] Speaker 2: Again, it's just mind boggling.
[33:06] Speaker 1: And that was the result chuck of energy and matter
[33:10] Speaker 1: uncoupling as well.
[33:11] Speaker 2: Right, that's right, okay, all right, and this is the
[33:13] Speaker 2: point where we can actually start to you know, we
[33:17] Speaker 2: did one on the Large Hadrink collider. It's a particle accelerator,
[33:20] Speaker 2: the biggest and best that we have, yeah, on the Earth.
[33:22] Speaker 2: And this is where you can actually use a particle
[33:25] Speaker 2: accelerator to recreate and look at this stuff, right, so
[33:29] Speaker 2: we can actually observe this at this point.
[33:31] Speaker 1: Yeah, we can smash things together and be like kaboom,
[33:35] Speaker 1: look at that early universe. That's what they do, Sara.
[33:42] Speaker 2: Oh yeah, huh. All right, well, people should listen to
[33:45] Speaker 2: that one too, by the way, Oh yeah, that would
[33:47] Speaker 2: be a good like primer.
[33:48] Speaker 1: That was the one where we wondered whether it was
[33:50] Speaker 1: gonna end the universe or not.
[33:52] Speaker 2: Right, it did not not yet. So at this point
[33:55] Speaker 2: there is still no light. Things are two dents, and
[33:58] Speaker 2: it is still just a dark dent area, right exactly.
[34:02] Speaker 1: And about I think during the particle cosmology epoch, the
[34:09] Speaker 1: electromagnetic force and the weak force breakoff into separate forces, that's.
[34:13] Speaker 2: Right, and we still can't at this point. These subatomic
[34:16] Speaker 2: particles still can't bond. They're there, they can form, right,
[34:20] Speaker 2: but they can't hook up and party.
[34:22] Speaker 1: Right exactly. That actually didn't start to take place until
[34:26] Speaker 1: we reach the standard cosmology age, which is the age
[34:30] Speaker 1: that I believe we're in now, right.
[34:33] Speaker 2: Yeah, which started point oh one seconds after the initial bang.
[34:36] Speaker 1: Right one hundredth of a second. So we've gone through
[34:38] Speaker 1: that many ages and we haven't even mentioned them all
[34:41] Speaker 1: now in those that within that first second.
[34:44] Speaker 2: Yeah, it's crazy, it is crazy.
[34:46] Speaker 1: So that standard cosmology this is about where the astrophysicists
[34:50] Speaker 1: and cosmologists say, we understand it from about here on
[34:54] Speaker 1: out right. Everything else is a little shaky, but we've
[34:57] Speaker 1: got some observational data that backs it up. But here
[35:00] Speaker 1: is where neutrons and protons were formed, and a little
[35:05] Speaker 1: after that they started to be able to form nuclei
[35:09] Speaker 1: through nucleosynthesis, right, and they would ultimately be the building
[35:14] Speaker 1: blocks of atoms.
[35:15] Speaker 2: Right. So at this point, things are still expanding and
[35:19] Speaker 2: cooling at a rapid rate, and we can actually there
[35:23] Speaker 2: are no atoms yet. But like you said, it's too
[35:27] Speaker 2: hot at this point for electrons to complete that process, right,
[35:30] Speaker 2: still too hot in the hot tub.
[35:32] Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean after one hundred seconds, the universe had
[35:35] Speaker 1: cooled to a temperature cooled after one hundred seconds to
[35:39] Speaker 1: one point eight billion degrees farentheight or a billion degrees
[35:42] Speaker 1: since celsius. That was how hot it was still after
[35:45] Speaker 1: one hundred seconds.
[35:47] Speaker 2: Should we take another break here? Let's all right, let's
[35:50] Speaker 2: do that and we'll come back and explain the rest
[35:53] Speaker 2: of it in great easy to understand detail.
[36:11] Speaker 5: Man soft wee jaw shu.
[36:17] Speaker 4: Soft.
[36:22] Speaker 2: All right, buddy, when we left off, things were expanding
[36:25] Speaker 2: and cooling.
[36:26] Speaker 1: And they still are actually the end yep, nope, good
[36:29] Speaker 1: night everyone.
[36:31] Speaker 2: And everyone hears Neil degrass tyson.
[36:33] Speaker 1: That take us home. So uh fifty six thousand years
[36:37] Speaker 1: after the creation of the universe, or after the Big Bang,
[36:43] Speaker 1: we were at a temperature of fifteen thousand, seven hundred
[36:47] Speaker 1: and forty degrees farentheit nice and cool or eighty seven
[36:49] Speaker 1: hundred and twenty six degrees celsius. Right after another three
[36:53] Speaker 1: hundred and twenty four thousand years, So at three hundred
[36:56] Speaker 1: and eighty thousand years after it had cooled down to
[37:00] Speaker 1: four thousand, just under five thousand degrees fahrenheight and just
[37:03] Speaker 1: under three thousand degrees celsius, and finally here atoms started
[37:08] Speaker 1: to form because protons and electrons could combine. And the
[37:14] Speaker 1: other thing that happened to was the density had expanded
[37:18] Speaker 1: out enough, the volume had increases a better way to
[37:21] Speaker 1: put it, and the temperature had cooled so that suddenly
[37:24] Speaker 1: the universe was now transparent. We could see through it.
[37:27] Speaker 1: Up to this point, at three hundred and seventy nine
[37:30] Speaker 1: thousand years, you still couldn't see through it. It was too
[37:32] Speaker 1: dense and too hot. And at about three hundred and
[37:34] Speaker 1: eighty thousand years it hits that point and you can
[37:37] Speaker 1: see it like we do now.
[37:38] Speaker 2: Yeah, we finally have light. At that point, those cosmic
[37:41] Speaker 2: microwave background radiation was that we talked about earlier. It's
[37:46] Speaker 2: locked in. I don't think we mentioned earlier where we're
[37:49] Speaker 2: at now temperature wise, Just to kind of put it
[37:51] Speaker 2: in perspective, we currently are at roughly negative four hundred
[37:57] Speaker 2: and fifty four point eight degrees fahrenheit negative two seventy
[38:01] Speaker 2: point four degree celsius.
[38:02] Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the temperature of space right now, right, yeah, yeah,
[38:04] Speaker 1: so it's definitely cool. Apparently it's still cooling, like, it's
[38:07] Speaker 1: still not at absolute zero yet, which is the lowest
[38:11] Speaker 1: temperature or the lowest activity that atoms will move at ever. Right,
[38:16] Speaker 1: So it's still cooling and still expanding.
[38:20] Speaker 2: All right, So here's when things really heat up or
[38:23] Speaker 2: I guess really cool down. Sorry, bad fun. Strickland points
[38:27] Speaker 2: out for the next hundred million years or so, this
[38:29] Speaker 2: is when the universe is really cooling. It's expanding, and
[38:33] Speaker 2: then you have matter clusters together, yeah, eventually forms gas.
[38:39] Speaker 2: And this is the quick view. We'll dive into it.
[38:42] Speaker 2: Those gases form stars, so stars cluster into galaxies, those
[38:46] Speaker 2: galaxies cluster together into solar systems. Right, that's the overview.
[38:51] Speaker 1: And so what they think happened was because this really
[38:53] Speaker 1: doesn't make any sense. As a matter of fact, one
[38:55] Speaker 1: of the criticisms of big bang theories that it violates
[38:58] Speaker 1: the law of entropy, that organizations become more disordered and
[39:02] Speaker 1: chaotic over time, and the idea that planets and galaxies
[39:06] Speaker 1: and things formed became more that's the opposite, right exactly,
[39:10] Speaker 1: And so they've really kind of looked into how anything
[39:13] Speaker 1: would have formed at all, and what they think happened
[39:16] Speaker 1: was that back in say the ten to the negative
[39:18] Speaker 1: forty three second era, there were quantum fluctuations, little vacuum
[39:26] Speaker 1: energy fluctuations within this universe, this tiny little universe, and
[39:32] Speaker 1: that as the universe expanded very quickly, those fluctuations grew
[39:37] Speaker 1: tremendously in size, and the vacuum energy in the cosmic
[39:42] Speaker 1: microwave background, those little fluctuations that are on there were
[39:47] Speaker 1: just different enough from the other spots in the universe
[39:50] Speaker 1: that they had slightly more density and thus exerted slightly
[39:55] Speaker 1: more gravitational pull than other areas, and so more matters
[39:59] Speaker 1: so attract around them, and they started to form stars,
[40:02] Speaker 1: and the stars started to form galaxies and planets started
[40:06] Speaker 1: to form around them, and all of a sudden, what
[40:08] Speaker 1: had just started out as little vacuum energy became ultimately
[40:12] Speaker 1: universal hotspots where you could find matter clustered together, which
[40:18] Speaker 1: explains why so much of it is deep of deep
[40:20] Speaker 1: space is just void, and why some of it has stuff.
[40:24] Speaker 1: Apparently it all began with these little, tiny quantum fluctuations
[40:29] Speaker 1: way back trillions of a trillions of a second after
[40:32] Speaker 1: the universe was created.
[40:33] Speaker 2: So like a really cool dude at a party the
[40:36] Speaker 2: size of all humankind, and he's so cool that people
[40:39] Speaker 2: start hanging out with him, and that his party grows
[40:42] Speaker 2: a little bigger. Sure, is that a good way to
[40:44] Speaker 2: describe it?
[40:44] Speaker 1: I think that's better than anybody could ever hope to.
[40:47] Speaker 2: So it's an attraction basically that drew things together ever
[40:52] Speaker 2: so slightly enough to form larger bodies and then larger bodies.
[40:56] Speaker 1: Yeah, And the reason why they think this happened is
[40:57] Speaker 1: because these tiny little fluctuations, little little details in these
[41:02] Speaker 1: little this little universe grow bigger over time, right, especially
[41:09] Speaker 1: if you look at this inflation growing as a process
[41:12] Speaker 1: of time rather than just like volume expansion. It's also
[41:17] Speaker 1: time is a dimension to it, right, Yeah, So it
[41:20] Speaker 1: makes total sense in that just these little things would
[41:24] Speaker 1: get bigger as the universe itself got bigger too.
[41:27] Speaker 2: Well, does that mean that the universe and being coy here,
[41:30] Speaker 2: does that mean the universe will ever expand for all
[41:33] Speaker 2: of time infinitely?
[41:35] Speaker 1: So I mean you're talking about like that debate, right, Yeah, Yeah,
[41:38] Speaker 1: there's a whole debate over whether or not it's ever
[41:41] Speaker 1: going to stop, and all of it comes down to
[41:43] Speaker 1: how much matters in the universe, which we don't quite
[41:46] Speaker 1: know yet.
[41:47] Speaker 2: That's right.
[41:47] Speaker 1: When they calculate the matter we do know about, they
[41:51] Speaker 1: realize that there's actually some that you can't account for,
[41:53] Speaker 1: and that's dark matter, because we know that there's something
[41:56] Speaker 1: that's making stars behave differently, or there's clearly some matter
[42:01] Speaker 1: that we can't detect that's out there, So we can't
[42:03] Speaker 1: account for all the matter in the universe. So we
[42:05] Speaker 1: don't know how much matters in the universe.
[42:07] Speaker 2: Right, But the idea is if there's enough, then that
[42:10] Speaker 2: gravity will reverse and things will start to contract again, right.
[42:13] Speaker 1: Right, because gravity is this force that attracts matter to
[42:16] Speaker 1: other matter, and yeah, eventually, if there's enough matter, it'll
[42:20] Speaker 1: it'll it'll counteract that expansive force that came out of it,
[42:25] Speaker 1: and then yeah, probably will either stop. Is one school
[42:28] Speaker 1: of thought, or the universe will contract and form what's
[42:32] Speaker 1: called the Big Crunch. And some people say that's what
[42:35] Speaker 1: our universe is. It's just the cycle of expansion and
[42:38] Speaker 1: contraction that takes place over many billions of years. But
[42:42] Speaker 1: we're just one part of a cycle that is ongoing,
[42:47] Speaker 1: perhaps forever.
[42:49] Speaker 2: It makes it sound when we talk about like that.
[42:50] Speaker 2: It makes it sound like the universe is just breathing.
[42:53] Speaker 1: It does, doesn't it.
[42:54] Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, in a creepy way.
[42:57] Speaker 1: And Chuck, that has to do also the reason why
[43:00] Speaker 1: they don't know if it's going to keep expanding or contracting.
[43:05] Speaker 1: They don't know if it's what's called the closed universe
[43:08] Speaker 1: with positive curvature or one with negative curvature. Right, And
[43:11] Speaker 1: it also has to do with the shape of space
[43:15] Speaker 1: to a certain degree. And Strickland also wrote a really
[43:19] Speaker 1: top notch article called does space have a shape?
[43:21] Speaker 2: Yeah? That's it really is.
[43:23] Speaker 1: And something from studying this that they figured out is
[43:28] Speaker 1: that really it doesn't seem like it has a positive
[43:32] Speaker 1: or a negative curvature. It seems flat. It seems like
[43:35] Speaker 1: it has a zero curvature. And this is what's called
[43:37] Speaker 1: the flat problem of the Big Bang theory. Why should
[43:41] Speaker 1: it be flat. That doesn't make any sense because if
[43:44] Speaker 1: you look at the spectrum between positive curvature and negative curvature,
[43:49] Speaker 1: there's a lot of places on that spectrum where the
[43:52] Speaker 1: universe could fall one way or the other. But it's
[43:54] Speaker 1: so close to the middle that astrophysicists and cosmologists have
[43:58] Speaker 1: no idea if it's positive or negative in its curvature,
[44:02] Speaker 1: and they've started to wonder, like, why should we be
[44:06] Speaker 1: almost exactly in the middle. It doesn't make any sense.
[44:09] Speaker 1: It would suggest that the early universe was so finely
[44:14] Speaker 1: tuned that we're only slightly off of center. So it
[44:19] Speaker 1: would have had to have started almost completely at center,
[44:22] Speaker 1: because remember, small fluctuations grow bigger and bigger over time
[44:26] Speaker 1: and on a larger scale. So since we're still so
[44:29] Speaker 1: close to center right now, with the universe as big
[44:32] Speaker 1: as it is, it would have had to have been
[44:33] Speaker 1: basically on top of exactly in the middle between a
[44:36] Speaker 1: closed and or a negative and a positive curvature at
[44:40] Speaker 1: the very beginning of it, which is kind of puzzling
[44:43] Speaker 1: in and of itself. That's like, well, that indicates some
[44:46] Speaker 1: sort of weird fine tuning. So does that mean that
[44:49] Speaker 1: the astrophysicists are off a little bit and their own
[44:52] Speaker 1: fine tuning of the Big Bang theory and inflation or
[44:55] Speaker 1: what who knows? Or is there a little kid with
[44:58] Speaker 1: a lighter who set the snake off? That's right, and
[45:01] Speaker 1: the snake was very well manufactured.
[45:04] Speaker 2: Well, that's just one thing that we can't quite explain.
[45:08] Speaker 2: We talked earlier about the fact that at the very
[45:10] Speaker 2: beginning that the Big Bang theory wasn't meant to address
[45:14] Speaker 2: a lot of questions, one of which is that we
[45:18] Speaker 2: touched on was what happened before the Big Bang? And
[45:21] Speaker 2: we just don't know.
[45:22] Speaker 1: It doesn't even try it doesn't.
[45:24] Speaker 2: It can't, right, Yeah, that, like trying to explain time
[45:27] Speaker 2: before timing existed is futile.
[45:31] Speaker 1: Right because you get into stuff that I just suggested,
[45:34] Speaker 1: which is basically amounts to intelligent design or whatever, and
[45:37] Speaker 1: there's that's beyond science. Like science isn't equipped to say, oh, well,
[45:42] Speaker 1: what about this or what about that? And I tried
[45:44] Speaker 1: really hard to get Neil de grasse Tyson to say
[45:46] Speaker 1: something and he was not going to bite.
[45:49] Speaker 2: Well, no, and smartly, you know, I think a scientist
[45:51] Speaker 2: looks at the observational data and extrapolates from there, and
[45:55] Speaker 2: I'm sure. Like I said, I'm sure, and I think
[45:57] Speaker 2: even said in the interview that sure, people like to
[46:00] Speaker 2: talk about these things, right, but it's not like you know,
[46:03] Speaker 2: hard science.
[46:05] Speaker 1: And also, to answer that flat problem that I brought up,
[46:08] Speaker 1: apparently inflation theory does answer it does satisfy it by
[46:12] Speaker 1: saying the universe appears flat to us because we're looking
[46:17] Speaker 1: at it strictly on a very local level. Even though
[46:19] Speaker 1: we're looking at ninety ninety billion light years or something
[46:23] Speaker 1: like that, it's really just a very small segment of something.
[46:30] Speaker 1: So if you take a balloon and you blow it up,
[46:34] Speaker 1: it's still curved. But if you're just looking at just
[46:38] Speaker 1: a pinpoint segment of it, it's going to appear flat
[46:41] Speaker 1: to everybody looking at it from just that tiny perspective.
[46:43] Speaker 1: So it's basically our perspective that we're looking at the
[46:46] Speaker 1: universe right now makes it seem like it's flat, but
[46:49] Speaker 1: it's really actually curved one way or the other. That's
[46:52] Speaker 1: the answer to that.
[46:53] Speaker 2: Well, should we talk about some of the problems with
[46:56] Speaker 2: the Big Bang theory. Sure there are criticisms and there
[46:59] Speaker 2: will continue to be. One was that is that it
[47:01] Speaker 2: violates the first law of thermodynamics, that you can't create
[47:05] Speaker 2: or destroy matter or energy, and proponents will say that
[47:09] Speaker 2: that's unwarranted for a couple of reasons. One is it,
[47:13] Speaker 2: like we already said, it doesn't address the creation of
[47:15] Speaker 2: the universe that it was never meant to, but just
[47:18] Speaker 2: how it evolved or inflated over the years, over the years,
[47:22] Speaker 2: over the sixty or seventy years. And another reason is
[47:26] Speaker 2: kind of like we said earlier, is that the further
[47:29] Speaker 2: back you go, the rules don't apply. So maybe the
[47:32] Speaker 2: law of thermodynamics is just completely moot when you go
[47:35] Speaker 2: back that far. Yeah, like it didn't come into being
[47:38] Speaker 2: until later.
[47:39] Speaker 1: Yeah, if matter and energy are like one and the same,
[47:42] Speaker 1: I can imagine that some of our current laws don't
[47:45] Speaker 1: necessarily apply.
[47:46] Speaker 2: Yeah, well probably a lot of them, right.
[47:49] Speaker 1: And then one of the other things, too, is that
[47:51] Speaker 1: that inflation that supposedly happened when the strong nuclear force
[47:58] Speaker 1: decoupled from the electra a weak force. Yeah, and the
[48:01] Speaker 1: universe suddenly expanded, you know, within that one second, it
[48:05] Speaker 1: just kept growing and growing and growing way faster than
[48:08] Speaker 1: the speed of light. Yeah, And a lot of people
[48:10] Speaker 1: are like wrong, nothing can go faster than the speed
[48:13] Speaker 1: of light. Well there was no light, Well nothing you
[48:17] Speaker 1: could see. Yeah, there are definitely photons, but they had that.
[48:20] Speaker 1: The proponents of Big Bang have the same answer. They say,
[48:23] Speaker 1: well again, dude, you're talking general relativity. This this that
[48:27] Speaker 1: wouldn't have applied at all.
[48:29] Speaker 2: Yeah, the answer is kind of consistently. Don't even come
[48:32] Speaker 2: at me with that, right your laws. Yeah, should we
[48:36] Speaker 2: talk about should we finish with a few other alternative explanations.
[48:41] Speaker 1: Yeah, Like we said, there are alternative models, right, one
[48:44] Speaker 1: of them is that same one that Einstein was a
[48:47] Speaker 1: proponent of, the steady state model. That it is not
[48:51] Speaker 1: actually expanding, and the apparently this this is hard for
[48:57] Speaker 1: me to wrap my mind around. The people who say
[49:01] Speaker 1: that it's not expanding explain away expansion by saying that
[49:05] Speaker 1: matters created as in proportion to the original density of
[49:12] Speaker 1: the universe. Right, so maybe the universe is expanding some
[49:15] Speaker 1: and more more matter has to be created to keep
[49:20] Speaker 1: the same density. So I think what they're saying is,
[49:21] Speaker 1: I think that's what it means. The universe has been
[49:23] Speaker 1: at the same density all the time, and sure it's expanding,
[49:26] Speaker 1: but it's also creating more matter, so.
[49:28] Speaker 2: Which holds it static.
[49:29] Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess so.
[49:32] Speaker 2: Uh, the ek piotic, epiotic pyrotic.
[49:38] Speaker 1: I know this should not be ech pyotic ech pyotic model. Yeah,
[49:43] Speaker 1: I think that's that.
[49:44] Speaker 2: Man, that's just we're the worst that suggests the universe
[49:49] Speaker 2: as a result of a collision of well, that's the
[49:53] Speaker 2: when you brought up earlier of two three dimensional worlds
[49:55] Speaker 2: and that there is some hidden fourth dimension out there.
[49:59] Speaker 1: Well, that's part of the fourth dimension is part of
[50:02] Speaker 1: like standard astrophysics and cosmology. But this was like this
[50:08] Speaker 1: thing says our universe came out of two universes colliding
[50:14] Speaker 1: in the fourth dimension, which that defies me a little bit.
[50:18] Speaker 1: But the idea that there are four dimensions in one
[50:21] Speaker 1: of them's time is definitely part of like standard stuff.
[50:25] Speaker 1: It's still hard to think of. And then plasma cosmology.
[50:29] Speaker 1: I like that one a lot because it's just totally
[50:31] Speaker 1: different from the way we think of the universe. It
[50:33] Speaker 1: seeks to describe it based on its basically it's electrical
[50:39] Speaker 1: charge state, you know, rather than like the temperature of
[50:44] Speaker 1: it or the density or anything like that. It's more
[50:46] Speaker 1: involved in like the plasma aspects of it, because you know,
[50:50] Speaker 1: plasma's ionized gas and it's like a fourth state of matter,
[50:54] Speaker 1: and plasma cosmology looks at it through that lens, which
[50:57] Speaker 1: is basically totally alien to everything we just talked about.
[51:01] Speaker 2: From what I can gather, did you just say there's
[51:03] Speaker 2: a totally aliens out there?
[51:04] Speaker 1: There's aliens out there and the universe was started by
[51:07] Speaker 1: a little kid with a lighter. Wow, that's my stand. Well,
[51:12] Speaker 1: if you like this, then stick around because right now, Chuck,
[51:16] Speaker 1: we have an interview with Neil deGrasse Tys and we
[51:19] Speaker 1: weren't joking.
[51:20] Speaker 2: Yeah, great job on that one too, buddy.
[51:21] Speaker 1: Thanks man, we missed you. He was like, where's Chuck?
[51:24] Speaker 1: No we didn't, Yes, he did.
[51:27] Speaker 5: Well. How you guys doing good?
[51:28] Speaker 1: How are you doing?
[51:29] Speaker 5: Are you assuming I know how stuff works?
[51:32] Speaker 1: I have an inkling that you may have a clue,
[51:35] Speaker 1: So I guess my first question is then, how do
[51:38] Speaker 1: you specifically? How do you think of the universe when
[51:41] Speaker 1: you think of the universe as a whole, Like, do
[51:43] Speaker 1: you think of it as something like a speck of
[51:46] Speaker 1: dust underneath a giant fingernail or is it part of
[51:48] Speaker 1: a branching multiverse or is it a bubble that kind
[51:52] Speaker 1: of pushes up against other bubbles? Like, what is the
[51:55] Speaker 1: universe when you think of it?
[51:57] Speaker 5: I don't think I think of the universe in a
[52:00] Speaker 5: fundamentally different way from that of my colleagues. What you
[52:03] Speaker 5: want to do is separate the things we have data
[52:06] Speaker 5: and observations to support and the things that live and
[52:10] Speaker 5: thrive on the frontier of theorizing about what the universe
[52:15] Speaker 5: was is or will one day be, or what larger
[52:19] Speaker 5: system it could be a part of. So if you
[52:22] Speaker 5: live in the realm of data, then we are in
[52:26] Speaker 5: an expanding universe, and it's been expanding for nearly fourteen
[52:30] Speaker 5: billion years, and it was smaller in the past and
[52:33] Speaker 5: hot in the past, and it's getting larger and cooler
[52:36] Speaker 5: by the minute. And we exist on this planet we
[52:41] Speaker 5: call Earth, born four point six billion years ago, with
[52:45] Speaker 5: the rest of the Solar System in some undistinguished part
[52:53] Speaker 5: of an undistinguished galaxy we call the Milky Way. And
[52:57] Speaker 5: this scenario sure was very hard earned, and it's no
[53:03] Speaker 5: more than about eighty or ninety years old in total.
[53:07] Speaker 5: Edwin Hubble the man in this particular usage of the
[53:11] Speaker 5: word Edwin Hubble in the nineteen twenties, so ninety years ago,
[53:15] Speaker 5: nineteen twenty six discovered that there are other island universes,
[53:20] Speaker 5: if you will, not the way we might think of
[53:22] Speaker 5: that term today, but back then there were these spiral
[53:26] Speaker 5: fuzzy things in the night sky, imagined to be just
[53:28] Speaker 5: spiral fuzzy things in the milky Way. He would show
[53:33] Speaker 5: that those spiral fuzzy things are not in the milky Way,
[53:35] Speaker 5: they are entire other milky ways, other galaxies. And that
[53:39] Speaker 5: was a profound expanding expansion of our worldview, if you would.
[53:45] Speaker 5: And then just three years after that, he would show
[53:47] Speaker 5: that these spiral fuzzy things are rapidly moving away from us.
[53:51] Speaker 5: Coupled with Einstein's general theory of relativity, we would learn
[53:55] Speaker 5: that it's not just galaxies spreading apart within a pre
[53:58] Speaker 5: existing space. It is the fabric of the space and
[54:02] Speaker 5: time itself that's expanding. All of this is supported by data.
[54:07] Speaker 5: So if you have discomfort thinking that the universe had
[54:11] Speaker 5: a beginning and that we will expand forever, then too bad.
[54:16] Speaker 5: That's just what the universe says. And the universe, I've
[54:20] Speaker 5: said this before, the universe is under no obligation to
[54:23] Speaker 5: make sense to you, especially when what we learn of
[54:26] Speaker 5: the universe comes to us from methods and tools that
[54:29] Speaker 5: completely transcend our native, inborn biological senses, which in fact
[54:34] Speaker 5: is the great ascent of science. What are all the
[54:38] Speaker 5: ways we can decode the operations of nature without having
[54:42] Speaker 5: to rely on the limits that sent our biological senses
[54:48] Speaker 5: force us to occupy.
[54:50] Speaker 1: So when science is furthered, you know, decades down the
[54:55] Speaker 1: road and the vision we have, or the view we
[54:59] Speaker 1: have of the universe we live in is magnified by
[55:03] Speaker 1: orders of magnitude from what we're looking at through right now,
[55:07] Speaker 1: what do you suspect? What shape do you suspect it's
[55:10] Speaker 1: going to take? Do you have suspicions? And I mean
[55:13] Speaker 1: if you don't, how do you keep yourself from making
[55:15] Speaker 1: that leap?
[55:16] Speaker 5: Like?
[55:16] Speaker 1: Yes, of course, this is what it's going to be,
[55:18] Speaker 1: this is what we're really living in.
[55:21] Speaker 5: Well, we all have biases, and let me not call
[55:24] Speaker 5: them biases. Let's say we all have longings for how
[55:28] Speaker 5: we think or want the universe to be. And if
[55:31] Speaker 5: you begin to believe your longings too strongly, then you
[55:38] Speaker 5: could you might miss some realities that don't fit your expectations,
[55:43] Speaker 5: and someone else will catch them and make the discovery.
[55:46] Speaker 5: So it's okay to lean in one direction or another,
[55:49] Speaker 5: but don't do so while being blind to what else
[55:52] Speaker 5: could be true in spite of how you think it
[55:56] Speaker 5: might be. So, now, the scenario I gave you is
[56:00] Speaker 5: sort of is very well established in terms of observations, data,
[56:06] Speaker 5: and basically a century of thinking about and observing the universe,
[56:12] Speaker 5: imposing questions and answering them. So beyond that we can
[56:16] Speaker 5: ask is there a multiverse? A right? This seems to
[56:21] Speaker 5: come naturally out of certain thinking about the behavior of
[56:26] Speaker 5: the universe. When you try to bring together quantum physics
[56:29] Speaker 5: and Einstein's general relativity, there are good arguments to suggest
[56:37] Speaker 5: that we could be in a multiverse, and it's not obvious,
[56:39] Speaker 5: at least to me, how one would test that just yet.
[56:44] Speaker 5: So but the theories of the universe that point to
[56:49] Speaker 5: a multiverse are themselves well tested. So this is what
[56:54] Speaker 5: gives you the confidence that maybe our multiverse folks are
[57:00] Speaker 5: onto something. And there are other frontiers. For example, the
[57:04] Speaker 5: quantum physics, which is the theory of the small, and
[57:09] Speaker 5: general relativity, the theory of the large. They work perfectly
[57:14] Speaker 5: well in their own regimes. General relativity describing the large
[57:19] Speaker 5: scale universe, quantum physics describing with very high precision atoms, molecules, nuclei, particles,
[57:28] Speaker 5: this sort of thing. But in the early universe, when
[57:31] Speaker 5: the entire universe was the size of an atom, then
[57:35] Speaker 5: we might suppose that quantum forces override whatever was going
[57:40] Speaker 5: on with general relativity. Because now the entire universe is
[57:45] Speaker 5: of the size that quantum laws significantly manifest. And so
[57:51] Speaker 5: right now we do not have a good way to
[57:53] Speaker 5: merge those two theories. And this we got top people
[57:56] Speaker 5: working on it. So these are collectively the string theorists
[58:00] Speaker 5: and others in that realm who are thinking long and
[58:03] Speaker 5: hard about these Are there a third theory that needs
[58:06] Speaker 5: to be introduced that will enclose quantum physics and general
[58:10] Speaker 5: relativity into a deeper, broader understanding of what's going on,
[58:16] Speaker 5: or will quantum physics absorb general relativity. I don't know
[58:21] Speaker 5: that people know just yet. And it involves very high
[58:24] Speaker 5: levels of math and higher dimensions and this sort of thing.
[58:28] Speaker 5: And some people have criticized string theory for not really
[58:31] Speaker 5: being a legitimate theory because you can't test it in
[58:34] Speaker 5: any traditional way. But it's the only game in town.
[58:37] Speaker 5: So and they're not very expensive, you know, you give
[58:40] Speaker 5: them a pencil and a pad and throwing a laptop
[58:43] Speaker 5: and a string. Theorist is in business, so I let
[58:46] Speaker 5: them go as far as they can take it.
[58:48] Speaker 1: So it does seem like there is either like you said,
[58:53] Speaker 1: quantum physics may be the answer to all this, we
[58:56] Speaker 1: just don't fully understand that field yet to get back
[59:01] Speaker 1: to the moment of the Big Bang or what happened
[59:04] Speaker 1: before the Big Bang. But it could also be, from
[59:07] Speaker 1: what I've seen, the unified field theory that gets us
[59:11] Speaker 1: back to that point. But either way, to get to
[59:14] Speaker 1: a point where we go further beyond our current understanding,
[59:19] Speaker 1: further back in time in the Big Bang, including before
[59:23] Speaker 1: the Big Bang, of what was before, it seems like
[59:26] Speaker 1: it's going to take a vast leap forward. Do you
[59:29] Speaker 1: think that leap is going to come from a genius
[59:32] Speaker 1: that hasn't been born yet, or has been born but
[59:35] Speaker 1: hasn't been educated and entered the field yet. Is that
[59:38] Speaker 1: how it's going to happen. Is it going to happen
[59:39] Speaker 1: from you know, this person combining this work with this
[59:43] Speaker 1: work and that work and this work, and then suddenly
[59:45] Speaker 1: the pieces are going to fall together.
[59:48] Speaker 5: In that sense, that's a great question that also has
[59:53] Speaker 5: a philosophical dimension to it sure, such that in modern
[59:57] Speaker 5: times great leaps in science. Do they happen by the
[1:00:01] Speaker 5: lone genius burning the candle at midnight coming up with
[1:00:05] Speaker 5: a Eureka moment, or do they come about because you
[1:00:08] Speaker 5: have huge, expensive, highly collaborative scientific projects such as LIGO
[1:00:14] Speaker 5: discovering gravitational waves. Such as the next generation space telescope
[1:00:21] Speaker 5: it's called the James Web Space Telescope, not yet launched,
[1:00:24] Speaker 5: but that will enable us to see galaxies being born
[1:00:30] Speaker 5: in the early universe, as well as a host of
[1:00:33] Speaker 5: other frontier observations that were not possible with previous telescopes. Well,
[1:00:38] Speaker 5: that telescope had to be designed by whole teams of
[1:00:40] Speaker 5: people with questions that they had in mind that they
[1:00:42] Speaker 5: want answered by the new data. So I'm not convinced
[1:00:50] Speaker 5: that we're just waiting for a new smart person to
[1:00:53] Speaker 5: come along and have it all make sense. I think
[1:00:55] Speaker 5: we're waiting for someone to obtain new data that we've
[1:01:01] Speaker 5: never seen before that then forced us into new ideas
[1:01:05] Speaker 5: and understandings of the universe. Maybe there's some new theory
[1:01:09] Speaker 5: that maybe I'm not discounting it, but I can tell
[1:01:14] Speaker 5: you is we're in an era. Look at the Higgs boson,
[1:01:18] Speaker 5: for example, that required the large Hadron collider and thousands
[1:01:22] Speaker 5: of scientists and tens of thousands of engineers who built
[1:01:25] Speaker 5: the thing in the first place. So we're kind of
[1:01:29] Speaker 5: in a collaborative era right now. And so if I
[1:01:34] Speaker 5: were a betting man, I would say that the great
[1:01:37] Speaker 5: discoveries to come will come about from huge collaborations, possibly
[1:01:40] Speaker 5: even international collaborations. Now that doesn't remove the question as
[1:01:46] Speaker 5: to whether there is an Einstein walking among us who
[1:01:49] Speaker 5: happened to have been born into poverty in a developing country,
[1:01:53] Speaker 5: and then we will never know. Well, that would be
[1:01:55] Speaker 5: one of the great tragedies of modern civilization. So I,
[1:01:59] Speaker 5: as an education feel very strongly about what kind of
[1:02:03] Speaker 5: access people of the world should have to knowledge, to learning,
[1:02:07] Speaker 5: to health, to you know, a person should be able
[1:02:12] Speaker 5: to live a day and not have the entire day
[1:02:16] Speaker 5: be preoccupied about whether whether you have food or whether
[1:02:20] Speaker 5: or not you're going to die from a disease that
[1:02:22] Speaker 5: your neighbor just died of. So this is a So
[1:02:27] Speaker 5: I think we should be able to measure our state
[1:02:30] Speaker 5: of our civilization by the extent to which we are
[1:02:34] Speaker 5: in the position to discover another Einstein. Rising up from
[1:02:39] Speaker 5: the midst and and that's so that's one way to
[1:02:44] Speaker 5: get an Einstein. Another one is to wait around until
[1:02:46] Speaker 5: one is born into the right circumstances, right, I'd rather,
[1:02:48] Speaker 5: i'd you know, we've got seven billion people on Earth.
[1:02:51] Speaker 5: Somebody in there's got to be badass enough to help
[1:02:53] Speaker 5: us out.
[1:02:54] Speaker 1: So you, I mean, you brought up your your role
[1:02:57] Speaker 1: as an educator and your world class science popular and explainer.
[1:03:01] Speaker 1: What is it that got you into science as a kid?
[1:03:06] Speaker 5: I was nine years old and it was a first
[1:03:08] Speaker 5: visit to the Hayden Planetarium right here in New York,
[1:03:11] Speaker 5: my local planetarium. I think most big cities have planetariums,
[1:03:15] Speaker 5: even medium sized cities will have a planetarium. And my family,
[1:03:19] Speaker 5: my parents took my brother, my sister, and me to
[1:03:23] Speaker 5: all the cultural institutions of the city every weekend. So
[1:03:27] Speaker 5: one weekend it was the Natural History Museum. Another it
[1:03:30] Speaker 5: was the zoo, another it was the aquarium. We even
[1:03:33] Speaker 5: went to other things that sort of talented grown ups did,
[1:03:36] Speaker 5: like we'd go to a baseball game or the opera
[1:03:39] Speaker 5: or the theater. And that exposure enabled the three of
[1:03:44] Speaker 5: us to see what is possible beyond the traditional you
[1:03:49] Speaker 5: want to be a doctor, lawyer, indian chief. You know,
[1:03:52] Speaker 5: the three traditional options that you're given as a six
[1:03:56] Speaker 5: year old or a seven year old, And so out
[1:03:58] Speaker 5: of that arose my interest in the universe that really
[1:04:01] Speaker 5: got cemented. By by the time I was eleven, I
[1:04:03] Speaker 5: knew that, in fact, I was so convinced that I
[1:04:07] Speaker 5: wanted to do astrophysics that I began to began to
[1:04:10] Speaker 5: question whether whether or not it was in fact the
[1:04:13] Speaker 5: universe that chose me.
[1:04:15] Speaker 1: That's really cool. Well, thank you very much, doctor Tyson.
[1:04:18] Speaker 1: We appreciate you joining us. This was like you just
[1:04:21] Speaker 1: took our big big Bang episode and moved a long
[1:04:25] Speaker 1: light years, so thank you. Oh okay, thank you.
[1:04:28] Speaker 5: And the line year is not actually very far in
[1:04:30] Speaker 5: the scale of the unit, so I feel better if
[1:04:33] Speaker 5: I had taken it along billion.
[1:04:35] Speaker 1: How about how about a PARSEK or something.
[1:04:37] Speaker 5: PARSEK is only three point twenty six light years, so
[1:04:40] Speaker 5: that still won't even all right? You know, PARSK is
[1:04:45] Speaker 5: not even far enough away to get to the nearest
[1:04:47] Speaker 5: star to the Sun. Okay, so you're just in the
[1:04:50] Speaker 5: wrong zone there.
[1:04:51] Speaker 1: Okay, well then how about billions of parsecs?
[1:04:55] Speaker 5: Nice?
[1:04:56] Speaker 1: Thank you very much. What a guy huh job, Yeah.
[1:05:01] Speaker 5: He was.
[1:05:01] Speaker 2: Man, he's just such a cool customer. That's why he
[1:05:04] Speaker 2: is where he is now.
[1:05:05] Speaker 1: Yeah, and if you want to hang out with him,
[1:05:07] Speaker 1: head on over to the Hayden Planetarium. I'm sure he'd
[1:05:09] Speaker 1: be happy to see you. Sure, you can see him
[1:05:11] Speaker 1: on tour. You can see him with Star Talk Live.
[1:05:15] Speaker 1: He's got a podcast for those of you who don't
[1:05:17] Speaker 1: know with our pal Eugene Merman.
[1:05:19] Speaker 2: He was on our TV show. Even he was I.
[1:05:22] Speaker 1: Didn't get a chance to ask him if he remembered that.
[1:05:24] Speaker 2: Sure he didn't.
[1:05:25] Speaker 1: That's why I didn't get a chance.
[1:05:27] Speaker 2: Yeah, that just would have been embarrassing.
[1:05:30] Speaker 1: Well, if you want to know more about the Big Bang,
[1:05:32] Speaker 1: type those words into the search part HowStuffWorks dot Com
[1:05:35] Speaker 1: and they'll bring up some great stuff. And since I
[1:05:37] Speaker 1: said search part's time for listener mail.
[1:05:42] Speaker 2: I'm gonna call this is Russia European nice. Remember that debate? Sure, well,
[1:05:48] Speaker 2: it wasn't so much a debate, we just kind of
[1:05:50] Speaker 2: wondered in the Continents episode, Hey guys, thanks for cracking
[1:05:54] Speaker 2: me up with the show. It's astonishing how many film
[1:05:56] Speaker 2: references you can fit into a geography lesson, Yes, Russia
[1:06:00] Speaker 2: is definitely a European country exclamation point. Historically, it's always
[1:06:04] Speaker 2: been considered a part of Europe. For example, was named
[1:06:07] Speaker 2: as one of the six major European countries in World
[1:06:09] Speaker 2: War One, and the czar was closely related to other
[1:06:12] Speaker 2: royalty in Europe. This is very different from China or India,
[1:06:17] Speaker 2: always much more distant and mysterious to the east. Also
[1:06:20] Speaker 2: considered that maps are very deceptive. Over seventy five percent
[1:06:23] Speaker 2: of Russia's population is on the European side, including every
[1:06:27] Speaker 2: major city from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, from Milan to Mince.
[1:06:31] Speaker 2: I knew you were going to say that very nice.
[1:06:33] Speaker 2: I would have been so disappointed, as you know, most
[1:06:37] Speaker 2: of the land you see to the east is empty
[1:06:39] Speaker 2: and largely uninhabitable, only there to look pretty on a map.
[1:06:43] Speaker 1: Well, I don't know about that, but that's what That's
[1:06:46] Speaker 1: what the little kid the lighter put it there for.
[1:06:49] Speaker 2: So cheers. That is from Timothy, and that was one
[1:06:52] Speaker 2: heck of a science field reference.
[1:06:54] Speaker 1: Timothy or Timothay? Is he Russian?
[1:06:56] Speaker 2: Oh good point, Yeah, it's.
[1:06:58] Speaker 1: Timothey Moscow, who just wrote it using a pseudonym Timothy belontimates.
[1:07:05] Speaker 1: If you want to get in touch with me and
[1:07:07] Speaker 1: Chuck and Jerry. You can tweet to us at sysk podcast.
[1:07:10] Speaker 1: You can join us on Facebook dot com slash stuff
[1:07:12] Speaker 1: you Should Know, and you can send us an email
[1:07:15] Speaker 1: to stuff Podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com. As always, join
[1:07:18] Speaker 1: us at a home on the way stuff you Should
[1:07:20] Speaker 1: Know dot com.
[1:07:26] Speaker 2: For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
[1:07:29] Speaker 2: HowStuffWorks dot com.

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