Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, This is Katie Mack, your friendly neighborhood cosmologist
Speaker 1: and connoisseur of cosmic catastrophes. It's been a while since
Speaker 1: I've talked to on ologies, and a lot of things
Speaker 1: have been happening since that time. I have published a
Speaker 1: book called The End of Everything, Astrophysically Speaking, which is
Speaker 1: all about different ways the universe might end and what
Speaker 1: those would look like. And I've moved to a new place.
Speaker 1: When I recorded this, I was just about to start
Speaker 1: a job at North Carolina State University, where I was
Speaker 1: an assistant professor of physics, and about a year ago
Speaker 1: I moved to the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, Canada,
Speaker 1: and there I have a really cool job title, which
Speaker 1: is the Hawking Chair in Cosmology and Science Communication. And
Speaker 1: at the Perimeter Institute, I continue my research on dark matter,
Speaker 1: and I work on a number of other early universe
Speaker 1: kinds of questions, and I do a bunch of public
Speaker 1: engagement outreach things like that, give a lot of talks,
Speaker 1: I do radio things, and I'm working on a new
Speaker 1: book which will come out in a couple of years
Speaker 1: that's about particle physics. So this episode is an episode
Speaker 1: from twenty seventeen. The end of twenty seventeen, and a
Speaker 1: lot has happened in physics since then. In terms of
Speaker 1: what I talked about on the episode, there's a bit
Speaker 1: of an update for the Ligo experiment. At the time,
Speaker 1: there were just a handful of detections of black holes
Speaker 1: colliding and other galaxies, which is just amazing. But now
Speaker 1: there have been something like ninety detections of black holes
Speaker 1: colliding in other galaxies. There'll be some discussion in the
Speaker 1: episode about gravitational waves that we see from those. Another
Speaker 1: thing that we talked about is super massive black holes
Speaker 1: and what they would look like if you could see them,
Speaker 1: and in the movie Interstellar there was a simulation of
Speaker 1: what that would look like. Since then, astronomers I've actually
Speaker 1: seen that they've actually seen the light from stuff falling
Speaker 1: into black holes and the black hole shadow that's produced
Speaker 1: when the light gets eaten by the black holes. So
Speaker 1: there's an experiment called the Event Horizon Telescope project where
Speaker 1: astronomers basically linked together telescopes all over the world and
Speaker 1: created an image of a couple of supermassive black holes. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: really exciting stuff. Check out those things, and I hope
Speaker 1: you enjoy this little blast from the past of cosmology.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Ologies. I'm your Allie Warren, the host.
Speaker 2: Now each week I sit down with an ologist, I
Speaker 2: ask why do they love what they do? What is
Speaker 2: your deal? What should we know about it? And this
Speaker 2: week we cover the whole fucking universe which has existed
Speaker 2: and it's expanding and you're floating in it and you're
Speaker 2: made out of particles and matter and forces we don't
Speaker 2: even understand, and maybe there are multiverses and is this reality?
Speaker 2: And what are you doing here? And does anything matter?
Speaker 2: And of course it does. But should you be afraid
Speaker 2: of wearing bright lipstick or dancing in public? Probably not. No,
Speaker 2: in the scope of things, and the scope of things
Speaker 2: is really it's giant. It's called cosmology. Now, if you
Speaker 2: think that you listen to this episode already because you
Speaker 2: learn some stuff about beard care and face wash, think again, suckers.
Speaker 2: That was cosmetology. This week is cosmology, the study of
Speaker 2: the cosmos. And so when I say this episode is
Speaker 2: like everything, it's actually everything. It's the whole universe. It's
Speaker 2: it's a lot, it's a lot, it's so much it's
Speaker 2: a two parter. It's a two fur So this week
Speaker 2: we'll get the nuts and bolts of what astrophysics is,
Speaker 2: and after about an hour you will walk away cocktail
Speaker 2: party literate on goddamn astrophysics. Kind of I don't know.
Speaker 2: I'm learning here with you. Of all the episodes I've done,
Speaker 2: this was probably the one I knew the least about.
Speaker 2: So let's learn together, shall we? Part two of this now?
Speaker 2: Next week? Are your questions submitted via Patreon and the
Speaker 2: Ologies Podcast Facebook group. Y'all had good ones. Next week
Speaker 2: will address them now. The etymology of cosmology Cosmos with
Speaker 2: a K is the kicky little Greek word for world
Speaker 2: or order. So cosmology is a study of planets and such, sure,
Speaker 2: but also why and what and how? Where? What's huh?
Speaker 2: It's the study of what. This week's cosmologist is someone
Speaker 2: I've had a fawning Twitter fascination with for a while,
Speaker 2: and I met through a group of science friends I love,
Speaker 2: known to some as the nerd Brigade. Were kind of
Speaker 2: like a gang but with a website. But I was
Speaker 2: always kind of intimidated by her because she is, in
Speaker 2: her own words, an academic nomad and She continent hops
Speaker 2: while studying particle physics and black holes and gravitational waves,
Speaker 2: and she hangs out with Stephen Hawking. So when I
Speaker 2: met her through friends, I usually just sat at brunch
Speaker 2: like a barnacle and tried to look away when she
Speaker 2: caught me staring at her, so I asked her to
Speaker 2: be on the podcast. She said yes, and I immediately
Speaker 2: started perspiring. So she came to my apartment. We sat down,
Speaker 2: and my usual hour interview stretched to almost two, hence
Speaker 2: the two parter. Hours before she politely reminded me that
Speaker 2: we were supposed to be meeting people for a movie
Speaker 2: and we should stop. I'm so so glad we did
Speaker 2: this podcast because I got to know her even better
Speaker 2: as a friend, which, y'all, I'm going to be cheesy
Speaker 2: and say it's a true honor. So in this episode,
Speaker 2: you'll learn about the things that make you you, and
Speaker 2: the stars that exploded to make the things that make you,
Speaker 2: and the scale of our existence in space, and what
Speaker 2: it feels like to be heckled by Stephen Hawking and
Speaker 2: if this is real life, and if astrophysicists are just
Speaker 2: like making bullshit up that the rest of us just
Speaker 2: accept because we're like, man, I don't even know how
Speaker 2: to read these equations. So okay, So you'll get at
Speaker 2: the very least a loose grasp on just the whole
Speaker 2: of existence and maybe steel yourself to be the biggest
Speaker 2: you you want to be, and more importantly, get to
Speaker 2: know better one of the world's finest voices in cosmology.
Speaker 2: You know her as astro Kti on Twitter aka astrophysicist
Speaker 2: Katie mac. So take me back to defining some stuff
Speaker 2: because as a layman, as a lay woman over here,
Speaker 2: a lay human, Yes, I don't know the difference between
Speaker 2: a physicist, an astrophysicist, a particle physicist, an experimentalist, a cosmologist,
Speaker 2: and an astronomer. I don't know what those are, and
Speaker 2: I'm either going to have to Wikipedia this or I
Speaker 2: can have you give me a down.
Speaker 1: So these things are, they're a little bit like fluid,
Speaker 1: these definitions. So astronomer is basically somebody who studies space
Speaker 1: in some way. And usually when people say astronomer versus astrophysicists,
Speaker 1: usually astronomer is like more on the observational side or
Speaker 1: sort of describing stuff in space. Astrophysicists is more about
Speaker 1: like trying to understand how the physics of the thing
Speaker 1: in space works. So you can be an astrophysicist trying
Speaker 1: to understand how galaxies form, for example, and so you're
Speaker 1: applying physics to this stuff in space. If you're a
Speaker 1: particle physicist, you're working on like how particle interactions work,
Speaker 1: so like you know anomsmasters and things. Large Tadron Collider
Speaker 1: exposon usually. I mean the like classic particle experiment is
Speaker 1: you take two particles and you smash them together and
Speaker 1: you see what comes out. That's what the Large tadronical
Speaker 1: is doing.
Speaker 2: Now. The LHC, that's what you call the Large Hadron
Speaker 2: Collider when y'all are tight. So you've maybe heard of it,
Speaker 2: you kind of know, like it's a thing in Europe,
Speaker 2: maybe has something to do with atoms. I looked into it.
Speaker 2: The Large Hadron Collider is located near the France Switzerland border,
Speaker 2: and it's a circular tunnel. It's over five hundred feet
Speaker 2: deep in some parts, and it's seventeen miles around. It
Speaker 2: is the largest machine in the world. So this thing
Speaker 2: consists of over twelve hundred magnets and they're cooled to
Speaker 2: a temperature colder than outer space, and then the magnets
Speaker 2: accelerate protons to almost the speed of light, and then
Speaker 2: the protons are bashed together. It's very punk rock, very expensive.
Speaker 2: The LHC was mostly completed in two thousand and eight.
Speaker 2: Over ten thousand scientists and engineers worked on it. Now
Speaker 2: in photos it looks kind of like a giant, well
Speaker 2: lit subway tunnel, but with less p and rap. If
Speaker 2: you're like, I can't remember what a proton is because
Speaker 2: I'm not required to anymore I'm not in school, don't worry.
Speaker 2: Neither did I. I had to google, like how does
Speaker 2: an atom work? I forgot, so I'll brush you up.
Speaker 2: So matter is stuff, and molecules are some atoms stuck together.
Speaker 2: Atoms are made of a nucleus, which is a little
Speaker 2: cluster of neutrons and protons. Protons have a positive charge,
Speaker 2: pro electrons have an equal negative charge, and electrons are
Speaker 2: bebopping zooming around whirling derbish style outside of the nucleus.
Speaker 2: So the neutrons and protons, which are the ones that
Speaker 2: are just cuddling in the nucleus, those are made of
Speaker 2: smaller particles called quarks, and the quarks come in a
Speaker 2: couple different varieties. So what gives these particles their mass?
Speaker 2: What are they? Where do they come from? We've got
Speaker 2: all these little tiny things that make up matter. Okay,
Speaker 2: so I heard it explained that there's a field called
Speaker 2: the Higgs field. It's named after one alive and well
Speaker 2: Scotsman physicist named Peter Higgs. And how a particle interacts
Speaker 2: with the Higgs field gives it its mass, kind of
Speaker 2: like drag in water. So Higgs bosons are particles. They're
Speaker 2: an excitation of the Higgs field. It's kind of like
Speaker 2: a drop of water splashing from an ocean. So the
Speaker 2: Large Hadron Collider smashed protons together to see if they
Speaker 2: could prove that the Higgs boson exists. And guess what,
Speaker 2: bitches it does. You're not bitches. Some people call this
Speaker 2: the God particle because it's so fundamental to all matter
Speaker 2: in the universe. Does doctor Higgs like this name? No,
Speaker 2: he's an atheist. He thinks it sucks. And the guy
Speaker 2: who coined it the god particle actually wanted to call
Speaker 2: it the goddamn particle, but his publisher made him change
Speaker 2: it in a book. So the Large Hadron Collider one
Speaker 2: of the things it does smashes these protons together into
Speaker 2: smaller things to figure out why matter has mass. There
Speaker 2: you go. Also, the large hadron collider accidentally has its
Speaker 2: name spelled wrong on its own website as large hard
Speaker 2: on collider Once would be mortifying. But what if they
Speaker 2: did it more than once, like twice or five times?
Speaker 2: That's impossible, is it? Because a search on their site
Speaker 2: revealed they'd spelled it large hard on collider one hundred
Speaker 2: and sixty five times. Thank god particle for that. That's
Speaker 2: just precious. So whenever you're like, I don't understand this stuff,
Speaker 2: maybe I'm not smart enough, just think someone typed in
Speaker 2: large hard on collider over one hundred and fifty times
Speaker 2: and they built the thing. So how else do people
Speaker 2: figure this shit out? About very important things that we
Speaker 2: can't see?
Speaker 1: But there are other ways to do particle physics measuring
Speaker 1: how particles interact with each other, throwing particles that other things,
Speaker 1: accelerating stuff, and seeing what happens. All of that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. On the experimental side and on the theory side,
Speaker 1: it's a lot about trying to understand like the fundamental
Speaker 1: forces of nature, so like how how atoms hold together,
Speaker 1: how you know, particles can change into other particles in
Speaker 1: certain conditions. How gravity fits into all that, which it
Speaker 1: doesn't at the moment theoretically, Okay, okay, it's very hard
Speaker 1: to get gravity and particle physics to work together. This
Speaker 1: is kind of yeah, it's it's sort of. This may
Speaker 1: be another topic, but like, this is the reason string
Speaker 1: theory was invented.
Speaker 2: Real quick, what is string theory? Well, in a very
Speaker 2: quark sized, tiny nutshell, the premise of string theory is
Speaker 2: that basic objects are not point like, but they're string like.
Speaker 2: So a quark might be made of a loop that
Speaker 2: kind of vibrates and moves around. Every kind of particle
Speaker 2: is like a different wiggly string. So why does anyone care?
Speaker 2: Why are people so horny for string theory? Well, number one,
Speaker 2: it's from the eighties, and maybe this is like the
Speaker 2: scrunchy of particle physics. I don't know. More importantly, string
Speaker 2: theory is a theory that works with both Einstein's general
Speaker 2: relativity and that mister Einstein pose that what we perceive
Speaker 2: as the force of gravity is the curvature of space
Speaker 2: and time. More on that in a minute, and quantum mechanics,
Speaker 2: which is the physics of the tiniest building blocks that exist.
Speaker 2: So remember those quirks that made up protons and neutrons,
Speaker 2: what are those made of? Maybe these string like loops
Speaker 2: of matter. Every time I hear string theory mentioned, I
Speaker 2: think of string cheese. I cannot And I was writing
Speaker 2: and researching this episode, and I found myself on a
Speaker 2: website like two thirty in the morning learning that string cheese,
Speaker 2: as we know what, was invented in Wisconsin in nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy six. And the way they get it to string
Speaker 2: is to heat it to one hundred and forty degrees fahrenheit,
Speaker 2: and that aligns all the proteins. Also, the first iterations
Speaker 2: of string cheese were bigger and chunkier and served to
Speaker 2: drunks in bars. Should we get back to physics, Okay, I'm.
Speaker 1: Sorry, And this is like the big question in physics
Speaker 1: is that, like, so, there there are a few sort
Speaker 1: of fundamental forces of nature. Right, there's electromagnetism, there's that,
Speaker 1: and that's like light and you know, like static cling
Speaker 1: and and all of those kinds of things, right, and
Speaker 1: and magnetism, and then there's the weak nuclear force, which
Speaker 1: has to do with like how particles decay in radioactivity
Speaker 1: that kind of thing, and how particles can change into
Speaker 1: other particles under certain conditions. There's the strong nuclear force
Speaker 1: and that holds particles together in the centers of atoms. Okay,
Speaker 1: and those all kind of make sense together theoretically, like
Speaker 1: you can write down equations that make those all fit
Speaker 1: in some way more or less.
Speaker 2: When Katie says you can write down equation that make
Speaker 2: those all fit, I appreciate her being inclusive with the
Speaker 2: second person, but I cannot write down equations to make
Speaker 2: those all fit in some way. I cannot do that.
Speaker 1: But then there's gravity, and gravity just doesn't follow any
Speaker 1: of the same rules. It's like it's very hard to put
Speaker 1: together a theory that includes those the fundamental forces of
Speaker 1: particle physics and gravity.
Speaker 2: So so it's gravity like the bad boy in a
Speaker 2: teen drama. It's just like it's just not following any rules.
Speaker 1: It's weird. It's like like gravity is all about space time,
Speaker 1: you know, so gravity like, so the theory of gravity
Speaker 1: that we have is Einstein's theory of relativity, so general relativity.
Speaker 1: This is the theory of gravity where.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, ready, heres Einstein. Here's how the universe of
Speaker 2: which you are a part works.
Speaker 1: The basic picture is that you can think of space
Speaker 1: as this malleable thing, and if you have something that
Speaker 1: has mass, it creates like a dentist space sort of
Speaker 1: bends space around it, okay, and so other things moving
Speaker 1: past will respond to that and like fall into that dent.
Speaker 1: And that's like how gravitational attraction works. You can think
Speaker 1: of it in this geometric way, okay, and it works
Speaker 1: really well like geometrically to think of it like that.
Speaker 1: But then there are fundamental principles that happen in that,
Speaker 1: like the speed of light as a limiting factor and
Speaker 1: all sorts of things like that, so only certain paths
Speaker 1: things can follow and everything. But then the particle physics stuff,
Speaker 1: like all the equations of particle physics are done without
Speaker 1: thinking about gravity because on those scales, like gravity isn't important.
Speaker 1: It's a really really weak force, okay. But also like
Speaker 1: there are the way that the particle physics is formulated
Speaker 1: in the standard Model of particle physics, which is what
Speaker 1: we use to talk about all these interactions, it doesn't
Speaker 1: have the same like it doesn't follow the same rules
Speaker 1: as gravity, Like there are ways in which the whole
Speaker 1: like speed of light thing is violated in one way
Speaker 1: that you can formulate how particles move around, which is
Speaker 1: kind of like there's kind of like there's this way
Speaker 1: of formulating it where a particle going from point A
Speaker 1: to point B passes through every possible path on the
Speaker 1: way between point A and point B, and it's only
Speaker 1: by by using that idea that you get the right
Speaker 1: answer for how that particle is moving in the particle
Speaker 1: physics point of view. And that doesn't work with relativity.
Speaker 1: So there are a couple of things like that where
Speaker 1: like quantum mechanics and relativity just do not like each
Speaker 1: other really, And it gets especially problematic when you get
Speaker 1: to black hole because a black hole is this very
Speaker 1: like intense gravitational system HM. It's basically a dent in
Speaker 1: space time that's so deep that like everything falls into
Speaker 1: it if it gets close enough. But at the edge
Speaker 1: of a black hole, the event horizon, you have this
Speaker 1: weird quantum mechanical thing happening where you can have like
Speaker 1: particles evaporating off of it, and that sets like a
Speaker 1: sort of scale of the black hole, and that means
Speaker 1: there's quantum mechanics happening in a strong gravitational system and
Speaker 1: then just everything breaks. It just goes totally haywire, because
Speaker 1: if you look at it from a gravitational point of view,
Speaker 1: like a relativity point of view, you should see nothing
Speaker 1: at all interesting happening when you when you fall into
Speaker 1: the black hole, like aside from like you're you're killed
Speaker 1: by the gravity, but like you don't see like nothing
Speaker 1: weird happens when you pass the horizon. But from a
Speaker 1: particle physics point of view, like there there might be
Speaker 1: like this like firewall, like there might be like a
Speaker 1: sort of like boundary of intense radiation there. Because of
Speaker 1: the way you have to think about how the particle
Speaker 1: physics works. This is a complicated story, but.
Speaker 2: Basically the astrophysics typically is yeah, I'm not explaining it
Speaker 2: very well, but but basically.
Speaker 1: Like like basically, when you get to that point when
Speaker 1: you have a black hole that has an evaporation happening
Speaker 1: where particles are coming off the edge of the event horizon,
Speaker 1: one way of looking at it says that that that
Speaker 1: means that whatever you fought through into the black hole,
Speaker 1: you can't ever find out what it was. That information
Speaker 1: is destroid. But quantum mechanics like the particle point of
Speaker 1: view says you can't do that, and so there has
Speaker 1: to be some kind of loophole and then gravity doesn't
Speaker 1: like that and you just you just end up with chaos.
Speaker 1: And so there's this there's this big problem called the
Speaker 1: black hole information paradox, which has been around forever, and
Speaker 1: every once in a while somebody's like, oh, I solved it,
Speaker 1: and then it's really complicated and people don't really understand
Speaker 1: how that works.
Speaker 2: Has anyone actually solved that?
Speaker 1: I mean, I so technically I'm just not qualified to
Speaker 1: know that for sure, because it requires understanding quantum gravity
Speaker 1: in a way that I do not. But there have
Speaker 1: been some solution suggested, but in general there's still a
Speaker 1: lot of discussion. So I don't know.
Speaker 2: Okay, wait, so what does a cosmologist do.
Speaker 1: Cosmologist just means you study the universe as a whole, right,
Speaker 1: so you study maybe the beginning of the universe, the
Speaker 1: end of the universe, how it changes over time. But
Speaker 1: you can be a physicist cosmologist or an astronomer cosmologist,
Speaker 1: and those are different and and it's culturally different, like
Speaker 1: but the so if you if you're a physicist, if
Speaker 1: you hang out with particle physics people and you say
Speaker 1: you're a cosmologists, then then the implication is that you
Speaker 1: work on like the beginning of the universe and the
Speaker 1: forces of nature and maybe the end of the universe
Speaker 1: something like that. If you hang out with astrophysicists and
Speaker 1: you say you're a cosmologist, then you just study things
Speaker 1: that are really far away, or you study, you know,
Speaker 1: some something you know more fundamental. But you can be
Speaker 1: a cosmologist in astrophysics and you're a cosmologist because you
Speaker 1: study very very distant galaxies. The reason that counts as
Speaker 1: cosmology is because that means you're studying the very distant
Speaker 1: past of the universe.
Speaker 2: So there are different flavors of cosmology, but they're all
Speaker 2: kind of linked, at least in my opinion, by like,
Speaker 2: oh where are we? What are we? What are we
Speaker 2: made of? AKA, it's a branch of astronomy that involves
Speaker 2: the origin and evolution of the universe. That's a less
Speaker 2: panicky way to put it.
Speaker 1: And so then you're studying like how the universe has
Speaker 1: changed over time. So there are kind of different ways
Speaker 1: of doing it. And I've done all of those different
Speaker 1: kinds of cosmology. I guess because I've spent my time
Speaker 1: kind of bouncing back and forth between the particle physics
Speaker 1: and the astrophysics communities. So I've worked on you know,
Speaker 1: the Big Bang and like theories of the early universe,
Speaker 1: and I've worked on distant galaxies and how galaxies form.
Speaker 1: And I've worked on black holes and weird stuf like
Speaker 1: cosmic strings and just all sorts of things.
Speaker 2: What is a cosmic string?
Speaker 1: A cosmic string is kind of like a sort of
Speaker 1: line or wiggly line of energy that stretches across the cosmos.
Speaker 1: Might not exist, probably doesn't exist, but there could be
Speaker 1: this like whole network of strings of Like it's kind
Speaker 1: of like if you think of like a black hole,
Speaker 1: but you like stretch it out across the whole universe.
Speaker 1: You get It's kind of like that, what does it do? What?
Speaker 3: It?
Speaker 1: So really interesting things. So if you have two cosmic
Speaker 1: strings and they cross each other they collide, they can
Speaker 1: like reconnect in a different way. So you can have
Speaker 1: two cosmic strings that are about to collide and then
Speaker 1: they they like change so that now you have two
Speaker 1: sort of loops of cosmic strings. They're going intopposite directions, like,
Speaker 1: so they sort of pass through each other by branching
Speaker 1: off in this weird way.
Speaker 2: So cosmic strings may or may not exist. Now, if
Speaker 2: they do exist, some theorists have used them to maybe
Speaker 2: catch out some stuff about time travel. Please figure that out,
Speaker 2: please fix some stuff. Thank you.
Speaker 1: And you can make a loop of cosmic string, and
Speaker 1: then that loop of cosmic string will like wiggle around
Speaker 1: and make gravitational radiation and disappear into nothingness. And if
Speaker 1: you have a cosmic string, like if you have a
Speaker 1: cosmic string between you and some distant galaxy, then you
Speaker 1: might see two pictures of that galaxy because it like
Speaker 1: splits the space kind of. It's really cool.
Speaker 2: Now, how much do you think about all of this
Speaker 2: in your day to day life? And like when you're
Speaker 2: deciding if you should upgrade your rental car and like
Speaker 2: if you should cut bangs and what happens to your
Speaker 2: molecules after you die? Like how much do you let
Speaker 2: this kind of get to your own existence?
Speaker 1: H Yeah, somebody asked me that the other day, Like
Speaker 1: how much do I like get sort of just overwhelmed
Speaker 1: by these ideas or whatever? It's not very often like
Speaker 1: most of the time this is like, this is fun
Speaker 1: stuff to work on, but like most of this time,
Speaker 1: it feels more like some kind of combination of science
Speaker 1: fiction and a fun puzzle, you know. So like I'm
Speaker 1: trying to solve a problem, I'm trying to calculate something
Speaker 1: and trying to come up with a new idea for
Speaker 1: how to do something, and so it's like a puzzle.
Speaker 1: It's like some kind of neat thing to work out.
Speaker 1: And I don't think of it as connecting to my
Speaker 1: own life or existence because it's way far away or
Speaker 1: way in the past, or you know, probably doesn't exist
Speaker 1: or whatever. Right, But then every once in a while,
Speaker 1: like I'll be I'll be thinking about this stuff and
Speaker 1: I'll be like, oh my god, Like there's this stuff
Speaker 1: is out there. Like I'll be thinking about black holes
Speaker 1: or gravitational waves or like the inflation period in the
Speaker 1: early universe or something like that, and I'll be like
Speaker 1: I'll have to like hold on to something and be like,
Speaker 1: oh God, because these are huge, like mind bendingly the
Speaker 1: intense forces and massive things and like the kinds of
Speaker 1: energies and the kinds of like force and just I
Speaker 1: don't know, the explosions and everything. It's just we cannot
Speaker 1: comprehend this stuff. I mean, the Earth is really tiny
Speaker 1: and really unimportant, like in a big way. So okay,
Speaker 1: you know, there's there's this. There's this famous photograph, the
Speaker 1: pale Blue Dot. Yes, huh yeah, so this is a
Speaker 1: picture that was taken by the Voyager spacecraft.
Speaker 2: So the Pale Blue Dot photo was taken on Valentine's
Speaker 2: Day in nineteen ninety as Voyager one was leaving the
Speaker 2: Solar System, it was like bye bye, I'm out, and
Speaker 2: astronomer Carl Sagan said, Yo, let's turn that lens around.
Speaker 2: Let's take a pick of all of us far away.
Speaker 2: What do you say, might as well? And it was
Speaker 2: three point seven billion miles away. It's little galaxy's longest range.
Speaker 2: Selfie this to itself. It looks like you accidentally took
Speaker 2: like a blurry image of a few Christmas lights and
Speaker 2: there was like a speck of dust on your lens.
Speaker 2: Those lights are just a few scattered rays of sun.
Speaker 2: And someone would have to point out that that dust
Speaker 2: is our planet is such a tiny speck. And I'll
Speaker 2: let Carl Sagan put this in context.
Speaker 4: He's the pro here, that's here, that's home, that's us
Speaker 4: on it. Everyone You love, everyone you know, everyone you
Speaker 4: ever heard of, every human being whoever was, lived out
Speaker 4: their lives, the aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands
Speaker 4: of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager,
Speaker 4: every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization,
Speaker 4: every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every
Speaker 4: mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher
Speaker 4: of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader,
Speaker 4: every saint and sinner in the history of our species
Speaker 4: lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
Speaker 4: The Earth is a very small stage in a fast
Speaker 4: cosmic arena.
Speaker 1: Sometimes when I give talks about cosmology, I'll end with
Speaker 1: this picture, and I'll be like, you know, just thinking
Speaker 1: about how vast the universe is and how really insignificant
Speaker 1: we are, and it's and the insignificant is even deeper
Speaker 1: than just what you see from that picture, because in
Speaker 1: that picture you see like there's a whole lot of
Speaker 1: empty space, and then there's a little tiny rock and
Speaker 1: we're on that little tiny rock, right, and there's a
Speaker 1: lot of space. But it's even worse than that because
Speaker 1: because not only are we not the center of like
Speaker 1: the universe or a galaxy or a solitist or anything
Speaker 1: like that, the matter that we're made of is also
Speaker 1: really unimportant because because like like just the kind of
Speaker 1: stuff that we are and that we can understand and
Speaker 1: interact with. Regular matter is like five percent of the universe.
Speaker 1: So most of the universe is something called dark energy
Speaker 1: that we really don't understand, but it's some sort of
Speaker 1: mysterious stuff that's making the universe expand faster and faster,
Speaker 1: and it's going to take over eventually. And then there's
Speaker 1: dark matter, which is some kind of invisible matter that
Speaker 1: is most of what the galaxy is made of and
Speaker 1: most of what all galaxies are made of. So like
Speaker 1: our galaxy, you know, we think of it as like
Speaker 1: this pretty disc of stars, but it's actually embedded in
Speaker 1: this invisible blob of extra stuff that we can't see,
Speaker 1: and that blob is way bigger than the stuff that
Speaker 1: we can actually see. So dark matter is like eighty
Speaker 1: five percent of the matter in the universe or something
Speaker 1: like that, oh my god. And then dark energy is
Speaker 1: like seventy percent of all of the stuff in the universe.
Speaker 1: Like so so then we're this like little tiny five
Speaker 1: percent slices, and that's just the kind of matter that
Speaker 1: we can understand, that we can do experiments on, that
Speaker 1: we can see or touch or interact with in any
Speaker 1: reasonable way. And then it's like, not only not only
Speaker 1: are we like a tiny speck of dust on a
Speaker 1: tiny speck of dust, Like who's you know, Like we
Speaker 1: are so insignificant, Like the universe doesn't even it doesn't
Speaker 1: even matter that we're like that our kind of stuff
Speaker 1: is there.
Speaker 2: You know, the best thing about this conversation is, yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm I'm having it with a cosmologist and like an astrophysicist,
Speaker 2: but I could also be having the same conversation with
Speaker 2: any of my college roommates who had like a seven
Speaker 2: foot bong in the garage. When astrophysicists and cosmologists get together, yeah,
Speaker 2: is it just kind of like a round robin of
Speaker 2: like stoner existentialism, like because they feel like there's such
Speaker 2: a fine line, like and then you're either incredibly incredibly
Speaker 2: smart and thoughtful and knowledgeable about this stuff, or you're
Speaker 2: just like you've just numbed yourself enough or you allow
Speaker 2: yourself to think about it, and then and it's like
Speaker 2: the Bell curve. There's this big white swath of people
Speaker 2: who are like I can't even think about it. It's
Speaker 2: too much, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, so when I do get together with other
Speaker 1: cosmologists and we talk shop, it's usually very very technical,
Speaker 1: and so we don't get into this stuff at all,
Speaker 1: like we're it's it's usually you know, we're just talking
Speaker 1: about we're talking in a lot of jargon about like
Speaker 1: some measurement or something, and we're throwing out numbers and
Speaker 1: we're trying to like figure out like is this a
Speaker 1: reasonable measurement to make or whatever, Like what kind of
Speaker 1: plot can we make to you know, to illustrate this point,
Speaker 1: or what kind of calculation should we do, or like
Speaker 1: what's the important variable? It would not be interesting to
Speaker 1: somebody who is not in the field. So it's really
Speaker 1: only when I'm talking about people who are not in
Speaker 1: cosmology where like I have these moments of like, oh god,
Speaker 1: you know, but the thing I mean, but it's it's
Speaker 1: a little bit dangerous to talk about this stuff though,
Speaker 1: because then sometimes people get the idea that we really
Speaker 1: are just kind of sitting around making stuff up, you know,
Speaker 1: like and so then people think like, oh, I can
Speaker 1: be a cosmologist, Like what if the universe is shaped
Speaker 1: like a football? You know, And I think that that
Speaker 1: the sort of disconnect there is that like the ideas themselves,
Speaker 1: if they're not backed up by the data or by
Speaker 1: like a very rigorous model, are really not that important.
Speaker 1: Like once we have data and we have some kind
Speaker 1: of unifying theory that says that this is probably the
Speaker 1: way things are, then it's like super cool, right, But
Speaker 1: if somebody had said, like, oh, you know, maybe the
Speaker 1: universe is like this, like we don't really know what
Speaker 1: to do with that, and it does, it's not really
Speaker 1: helpful and you can't just spitball like yeah, yeah exactly,
Speaker 1: like like you have to. It has to be connected
Speaker 1: to something we can test or or write down mathematically
Speaker 1: or else. It just it's kind of not helpful, which is,
Speaker 1: you know, it's a bummer. But once you do have
Speaker 1: the sort of mathematical tools and stuff and you can
Speaker 1: speak that language, you know, then you can get really
Speaker 1: creative and then you can just do really fun things.
Speaker 1: So like, I have a project I'm working on that
Speaker 1: has to do with I have a few interesting projects. Actually,
Speaker 1: So I have one. So here's one that it could
Speaker 1: be fun. So it has to do with black holes
Speaker 1: and galaxies and the bending of space. Okay, so every
Speaker 1: time there's a massive object, it bends space around it,
Speaker 1: and so that means that light when it goes past
Speaker 1: bends around so like a lens, Like the massive object
Speaker 1: acts like a lens for light, and so light gets
Speaker 1: bent around. So there's this way to study like what
Speaker 1: galaxies are made of by having a very bright light
Speaker 1: behind the galaxy, like really far away and looking at
Speaker 1: how that light like bends around inside that galaxy and
Speaker 1: like how the light fluctuates as things move and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. And that's called gravitational microlensing in this case
Speaker 1: the kind of thing I'm working on, but the details
Speaker 1: aren't important, but it's this thing where like the thing
Speaker 1: that's making the bright light is also a black hole.
Speaker 1: Because it turns out when you have a super massive
Speaker 1: black hole, like billions of times as massive as the sun,
Speaker 1: those things can be pulling matter into themselves and that
Speaker 1: matter lights up like a whirlpool of stuff what, and
Speaker 1: it can make this incredibly bright light that you can
Speaker 1: see like across the universe. And so we use that
Speaker 1: as like a back light to study this stuff in
Speaker 1: a more nearby galaxy to find out how many black
Speaker 1: holes there are in that galaxy.
Speaker 5: So black holes make lights sometimes. Yeah, it's supposed to
Speaker 5: be confusing. Yeah, it's like I think, I mean, I
Speaker 5: think it's like it's one of these things. It's like
Speaker 5: the biggest misconception about black holes is that they're dark.
Speaker 5: Usually they're not, like the ones we know about are
Speaker 5: usually not dark, and it's it's yeah, it's because they're not.
Speaker 5: It's it's because like technically the black hole itself can't
Speaker 5: be seen, but it's doing so much that it like
Speaker 5: affects everything around it. And so usually you can see
Speaker 5: black holes because they're like really destructive and like the
Speaker 5: stuff is falling into them, kind of like if you
Speaker 5: if you had a drain at the bottom of a bathtub,
Speaker 5: uh huh, Like you might not be able to see
Speaker 5: the drain through like the you know, bubbles or something,
Speaker 5: but you can see that there's like a whirlpool of
Speaker 5: stuff falling in at that point.
Speaker 2: Oh man.
Speaker 1: And that's how we see black holes in space usually,
Speaker 1: is we see that they're they're pulling in a lot
Speaker 1: of matter and so they like that matter lights up
Speaker 1: and so once it goes into the black hole, we
Speaker 1: can't see it, but it spends a lot of time
Speaker 1: whirling around really fast.
Speaker 2: It's like an intergalactic garbage disposal.
Speaker 1: That yeah, yeah, and it can be. It's some of
Speaker 1: the bright things in the universe are are black holes.
Speaker 1: We call them quasars when they're when they're the super
Speaker 1: massive ones and they're pulling matter in like that, and
Speaker 1: and we have so so that's like those are for
Speaker 1: black holes that are like millions or billions of times
Speaker 1: as massive as the Sun.
Speaker 2: And how far away are those puppets?
Speaker 1: All right? Well, okay, super massive black holes, the ones
Speaker 1: I was just talking about millions or billions of times
Speaker 1: the mass of the Sun. Those seem to exist at
Speaker 1: the centers of pretty much every reasonably sized galaxy we
Speaker 1: know about.
Speaker 2: At the centers, yes, so including ours?
Speaker 1: Yes, really, yes, so our galaxy.
Speaker 2: Okay, quick note, let's do a few cosmological basics. Our
Speaker 2: galaxy is the Milky Way, right, And this next analogy
Speaker 2: I got right off of NASA's Night Sky website, which
Speaker 2: I think is for children, but it's so helpful. So okay,
Speaker 2: imagine our sun. It's one star among hundreds of billions
Speaker 2: of stars in our milky right, So if we shrink
Speaker 2: the Sun down to smaller than a grain of sand,
Speaker 2: our little solar system Venus, Mercury Earth, all of those
Speaker 2: would be small enough to fit the whole solar system
Speaker 2: in the palm of your hand. Now, on that scale,
Speaker 2: with our solar system in your hand, the Milky Way
Speaker 2: galaxy would be the size of North America. And the
Speaker 2: Milky Way's big. But our next, our neighbor and Drameda galaxy,
Speaker 2: it's about twice as big as the Milky Way. Scale
Speaker 2: is important here, I suppose. But at the center of
Speaker 2: our galaxy there's a black hole.
Speaker 1: So the Milky Way is like a disc of stars
Speaker 1: and gas and dusts and stuff, and we're sort of
Speaker 1: out toward an edge, and at the center there's a
Speaker 1: bulge of stars and gas and dust, and then at
Speaker 1: the middle of that there's a black hole. It's four
Speaker 1: million times as massive as the Sun. I didn't know that.
Speaker 1: Do we have a name for it, Yeah, yeah, we
Speaker 1: have a name for it. We call it Sagittarius a star, okay,
Speaker 1: which is a silly same. It's because it's the kind
Speaker 1: of I think it was, like I think a radio source,
Speaker 1: and because it was pulling in some matter and so
Speaker 1: it was lighting up in the radio a little bit,
Speaker 1: and so ours is not pulling in very much matter
Speaker 1: at all, like very occasionally it'll lead a little blobb
Speaker 1: of gas and the astronomers get super excited, but like
Speaker 1: there's very little happening with it, but it does. It
Speaker 1: is really big, and it's got a bunch of stars
Speaker 1: orbiting really closely around it, and so you can actually
Speaker 1: go online and see like data follow like tracing out
Speaker 1: the paths of some of these stars and you can
Speaker 1: see them like whip around as they go really close
Speaker 1: to the black hole in their orbits. So some of
Speaker 1: them have these orbits that they're really far away in
Speaker 1: and they come in really close and they go boom
Speaker 1: like that right around the black hole. And so you
Speaker 1: can figure out exactly like how big it is and
Speaker 1: where it is by watching these stars go around it
Speaker 1: really quickly.
Speaker 2: So I did a little looking, and if you google
Speaker 2: European Southern Observatory and s AS in SAM too, you'll
Speaker 2: find this, Oh my god, like a rim shot in
Speaker 2: a basketball game, like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, like that, except it comes back around.
Speaker 1: You know, it's on an orbit. So yeah, so there's
Speaker 1: stuff orbiting really close. So that black hole, that one
Speaker 1: is like, well, let's see, it's eight thousand parsecs away.
Speaker 1: I don't know how much that is. A parsec is
Speaker 1: about three something light years. So a light year is
Speaker 1: how far? How far to how far light travels.
Speaker 4: In a year?
Speaker 1: Right, So light moves very quickly, so that's a very
Speaker 1: long way. So for example, light travels it takes light
Speaker 1: eight minutes to get between the Sun and us. There's
Speaker 1: a rule of thumb. Actually, if you want to know
Speaker 1: how far how fast light speed is, it goes about
Speaker 1: a foot per nanosecond.
Speaker 2: A foot per nanosecond.
Speaker 5: Yes, oh that's easy to calculate, Yeah, just to punch
Speaker 5: of zeros, right, yeah, put a zero on it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's easy. But it's kind of cool because
Speaker 1: then you can like you can say, like, if somebody
Speaker 1: is like ten feet away from you, they are ten
Speaker 1: nanoseconds in the past.
Speaker 2: They're ten seconds in the past. Oh man, I'm gonna
Speaker 2: trip out.
Speaker 1: I'm so like, we're like three nanoseconds apart right now.
Speaker 2: Weird. It's so weird. It's great though, And I learned
Speaker 2: this recently and I've already forgotten it, which is embarrassing.
Speaker 2: The distance between us and the Sun is a certain
Speaker 2: what is the U?
Speaker 1: Oh, that's an astronomical unit.
Speaker 2: Astronomical unit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was the distance between us and the Sun.
Speaker 2: I just learned that and then completely forgot it all
Speaker 2: in this span of a couple of weeks.
Speaker 1: It's okay, there's no reason to know that stuff.
Speaker 2: I want to know a little bit more about when
Speaker 2: you were a kid. By the time Katie was about
Speaker 2: ten years old, she was inspired to pursue some form
Speaker 2: of cosmology, and she was already a fan of British
Speaker 2: cosmologists and theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. She was already hip
Speaker 2: to him. She's like, I know this dude now. If
Speaker 2: you need a quick brush up on him as a person.
Speaker 2: After this podcast, watch the twenty fourteen Eddy Redmain film
Speaker 2: The Theory of Everything.
Speaker 1: A cosmologist. What's that? I study? The marriage of space
Speaker 1: and time.
Speaker 2: The perfect couple. Or you can just watch the trailer
Speaker 2: and start crying like somebody you know. Now, if thinking
Speaker 2: about living on a dust moat floating in a sunbeam
Speaker 2: was an inspiration to do what you want to do
Speaker 2: in life, consider a human who's figuring out the mysteries
Speaker 2: of the cosmos, doing computations and cracking theories about which
Speaker 2: I can't even comprehend. The first paragraph of the Wikipedia
Speaker 2: page also while living with als, Katie is one of
Speaker 2: several billion people inspired by Stephen Hawking. What was it
Speaker 2: that Stephen Hawking did or what did you How did
Speaker 2: you become aware of him? And how did you kind
Speaker 2: of absorb what he did?
Speaker 1: Oh, I'm not sure how I became aware of him.
Speaker 1: I think that you know, he was on TV every
Speaker 1: once in a while, and I had a Brief History
Speaker 1: of Time the book, and I read that, and I
Speaker 1: just like, I don't know, Like I was interested in
Speaker 1: black holes, and I was interested in like the Big Bang.
Speaker 2: The Big Bang theory being that the universe began those
Speaker 2: thirteen billion years ago with high temperatures and high density,
Speaker 2: it's continued to expand Also note if you google Big
Speaker 2: Bang theory, all roads lead to Sheldon, So just be
Speaker 2: cash call it big bang as far as Wikipedia is concerned.
Speaker 1: And so I would read about that stuff. And Stephen
Speaker 1: Hawking was a big figure in those those areas, and
Speaker 1: he was he was doing a lot of science, communication
Speaker 1: and he would visit cal Tech every once in a while,
Speaker 1: and I was growing up in LA and St. Long Beach,
Speaker 1: and so I would sometimes, like my mom would take
Speaker 1: me to see talks by physicists because I was super
Speaker 1: excited about these things. And so I remember seeing talked
Speaker 1: by him, I remember seeing up talk by Paul Davies
Speaker 1: and like, you know, just prominent theorists give talk sometimes,
Speaker 1: and somehow my mom would find out about them and
Speaker 1: take me along because she's she's really into science and
Speaker 1: science fiction and physics and everything.
Speaker 2: Have you gotten to meet Have you gotten to meet
Speaker 2: stupid Hawking?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, So when I was at Cambridge. So I
Speaker 1: spent a year at Cambridge during grad school just kind
Speaker 1: of visiting and working with people on some research. And
Speaker 1: I was mostly based in his department and my office
Speaker 1: was like directly below his. Yeah, and we were in
Speaker 1: the same like research group basically, I mean like like
Speaker 1: we didn't talk, like we weren't. I wasn't in his
Speaker 1: research group, but we were in the same as the
Speaker 1: center for the article cosmology, and like we were both
Speaker 1: based there. So there were you know, half a dozen
Speaker 1: professors who were involved to that. He was one of them,
Speaker 1: and I was a grad student visiting, and so I
Speaker 1: would go to all these like you know, meetings and
Speaker 1: the coffee and stuff. And shortly after I was shortly
Speaker 1: after I started being a visitor there, somebody asked me
Speaker 1: to do one of the like lunch seminars.
Speaker 2: So basically, if you're a physicist and you're visiting another department,
Speaker 2: you're kind of obligated to give a talk. That's kind
Speaker 2: of how it works. So they say, hey, can you
Speaker 2: give a talk. She's like, yeah, I'll give a talk
Speaker 2: for the Thursday lunch seminar. So she does it, and.
Speaker 1: It turns out that it was the lunch seminar that
Speaker 1: like Hawking goes to. I'm getting ready to give the talk,
Speaker 1: and I see like several of my professors in the
Speaker 1: audience like looking expectantly at me, and this is when
Speaker 1: I'm like freaking out. But he wasn't there. Hawking wasn't there.
Speaker 1: So I was like, it's fine, it's fine, and I'm
Speaker 1: getting ready to give the talk, and then I hear
Speaker 1: this like beep beep beep.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, my stomach is cramping just hearing this.
Speaker 1: And he shows up. Oh gets so much worse. Oh god,
Speaker 1: So I've told this story before, but it's it's still
Speaker 1: it's still like is it makes me like sweat? So
Speaker 1: so I was, I was getting ready to give the talk,
Speaker 1: and so I start the talk, like I put up
Speaker 1: the title slide, and I was the topic was primordial
Speaker 1: black holes, which is a concept that Hawking came up
Speaker 1: with along with some other people and pressure. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: as I'm starting, like as I after I introduced the
Speaker 1: title and stuff, I hear this this voice say and
Speaker 1: it was his voice, and I was like, and everybody
Speaker 1: kind of laughed, you know, and I thought maybe he
Speaker 1: was like thanking me for talking about the thing that
Speaker 1: he invented, you know. But I don't know. And you
Speaker 1: can't ask him to elaborate because he's his speech is
Speaker 1: very like slow. So he uses this machine thing and
Speaker 1: it just it's very slow.
Speaker 2: At tracks his eye movements.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well no, not exactly. It tracks there's a little
Speaker 1: sensor that looks at his cheek, okay, and so he
Speaker 1: kind of winks and that like selects words on this
Speaker 1: like list and it takes a couple of minutes per
Speaker 1: words sometimes, right, So you weren't like I couldn't elaborate. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So I had, so, so I just kept going and
Speaker 1: then eventually like I heard it again yes or later
Speaker 1: on oh, or I don't know, or just random things
Speaker 1: as I'm going, And every time, like I'd look at
Speaker 1: him and I'd be like, you know, but he would
Speaker 1: just kind of look blankly at me. And the person
Speaker 1: who was like taking care of him is the lunch seminar,
Speaker 1: so the person who was taking care of him like feedium,
Speaker 1: and she just kind of looked blankly at me, and
Speaker 1: like I had no idea what was going on, and
Speaker 1: so I would just kind of pause and then continue.
Speaker 1: I guess, like what am I gonna do?
Speaker 2: What was happening here?
Speaker 1: Had no idea, And I was so nervous, and like
Speaker 1: all the professors were there, and already one of the
Speaker 1: other professors had been like asking a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: really tough questions on like the second slide, so I
Speaker 1: was already like freaked out.
Speaker 2: Just imagine being in this situation. It's a nightmare. It's
Speaker 2: like the best nightmare ever.
Speaker 1: But like I answered the questions and that he seemed
Speaker 1: to be okay with it. So I finished the talk
Speaker 1: and Hawking left and he hadn't asked any questions. And
Speaker 1: I asked one of the seminar organizers, like, what what
Speaker 1: was that? And he was like, oh, well, when he
Speaker 1: eats the machine, my step one is chewing and it
Speaker 1: just picks random stuff from like the quick select menu.
Speaker 1: So nothing to do with you at all. It was
Speaker 1: just like it was just like, here's the you know,
Speaker 1: here's the most common phrases. Guess no, maybe I don't know.
Speaker 1: I don't think so.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, this is like the worst deodorant ad ever,
Speaker 2: Like this is the most stressful situation you could possibly
Speaker 2: ever be.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. And like they could have told me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they could have given you every time, Oh my god.
Speaker 1: They just like they just didn't mention it.
Speaker 2: Any word on whether or not he liked your talk.
Speaker 1: I have no idea.
Speaker 2: Oh god, could you ever tell him that you went
Speaker 2: into cosmology because of him?
Speaker 1: I don't.
Speaker 5: Well.
Speaker 1: So the first time I met him, when I was sixty, oh,
Speaker 1: just by fourteen fourteen, baby baby, I did tell him
Speaker 1: then that I was a big fan.
Speaker 2: So Hawking was at cal Tech and Katie got her
Speaker 2: mom to drive her and a friend there to hear
Speaker 2: him speak, and afterward they were walking the same way
Speaker 2: that he was going when they were leaving, and she
Speaker 2: was too nervous to say hi.
Speaker 1: I my friend went up to him and said, my
Speaker 1: friend would like to speak to you. She had a wingman,
Speaker 1: so I went up and said that I was a
Speaker 1: big fan and I enjoyed his work, and I thanked him,
Speaker 1: and he said.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much.
Speaker 4: Oh.
Speaker 2: Now, what happens to you when you get that? Because
Speaker 2: you're really I mean, I'm not going to fangirl right here,
Speaker 2: I'll do it in the intro. But you're like a
Speaker 2: very big voice in science communication. You're like, you're a
Speaker 2: very well known astrophysicist, cosmologist. How do you feel when
Speaker 2: people come up to you and say I was inspired
Speaker 2: to study this or you've changed my course, Like, what
Speaker 2: kind of reactions do you get?
Speaker 1: It's I mean, it doesn't so it's not I'm not
Speaker 1: like Stephen Hawking, Like I'm not that level of famous
Speaker 1: and I'm not that level of like important in physics
Speaker 1: and stuff and and you know, so it's it's kind
Speaker 1: of a different thing. But I do you know, sometimes
Speaker 1: people do like tell me that they like So one
Speaker 1: of the messages I've gotten a couple of times is
Speaker 1: a like a teenage girl will say that she didn't
Speaker 1: think she could do astrophysics, but she really loved it,
Speaker 1: and then she saw what I was saying on Twitter
Speaker 1: or something, or she saw me speak and then she
Speaker 1: decided she was going to go for it.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: So I do get that sometimes and I like my
Speaker 1: feelings don't know what to do with that. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: it's really it's really sweet and.
Speaker 2: Throwing in a black hole no feelings.
Speaker 1: He I mean, it is really sweet. It's really like
Speaker 1: rewarding when that happens, and it it makes me feel
Speaker 1: like maybe, like this stuff is maybe the stuff I'm
Speaker 1: doing is worthwhile. When we'll say stuff like that, or
Speaker 1: like a little kid will sometimes say that they want
Speaker 1: to be an astrophysicist or something, and they'll be really
Speaker 1: excited to meet me, like I was. I was in
Speaker 1: Raleigh a couple of weeks ago, and I was I
Speaker 1: was sitting in a cafe and I was wearing my
Speaker 1: NASA jacket with a little NASA badge on it that
Speaker 1: I got JPL.
Speaker 2: JPL, by the way, is NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and
Speaker 2: it's nestled in the Golden Hills of Pasadena, California, and
Speaker 2: it's responsible for things like rovers on Mars, and according
Speaker 2: to press materials, JPL's function is to engineer and fabricate
Speaker 2: cool ass shit. That's like so dope, that's very bold.
Speaker 2: NASA I also do not fact check that part, and
Speaker 2: it's not true.
Speaker 1: And this little girl came up to me and she
Speaker 1: was probably like eight or something, and she asked me
Speaker 1: if I work for NASA, and I said, I don't
Speaker 1: work VANASA, but I am an astrophysicist, and so we'd
Speaker 1: like talked a little bit, and she said that she
Speaker 1: really is into space and and I was like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm giving a talk at the museum in a couple
Speaker 1: of days. You can come and hear my talk. And
Speaker 1: so she and her mom came to my talk and
Speaker 1: she asked a question and it was just really sweet,
Speaker 1: and I was like, oh, what was her question? I
Speaker 1: think her I think her question was about like what's
Speaker 1: inside a black hole m hm, which is a good question.
Speaker 2: Like a bunch of space garbage.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, so it's I mean, that's it's not as
Speaker 1: straightforward answer really, because once stuff goes inside the black hole,
Speaker 1: it has to go straight to the singularity and it
Speaker 1: can't do anything else. And so then does it really
Speaker 1: exist at that point? Like that's kind of subtle, but anyways,
Speaker 1: a good question. And apparently like she was talking about
Speaker 1: the talk later on, and I was like, okay, you know,
Speaker 1: I inspired somebody.
Speaker 2: She's going to be in your department later and give
Speaker 2: a talk a your live sham explained the singularity.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah. So a singularity is so it comes
Speaker 1: up in the context of the Big Bang and in
Speaker 1: the context of a black hole. A singularity is like
Speaker 1: a point of infinite density. Okay. Usually in physics, when
Speaker 1: you have a singularity, I mean a singularity basically means
Speaker 1: it's a point where something infinite happens, like where things
Speaker 1: diverge in some way. And usually when that happens in physics,
Speaker 1: it means you've done something wrong, okay, and it's a
Speaker 1: sign that the theory is broken and you just can't
Speaker 1: deal with that because it is none of the none
Speaker 1: of the theory like really works at a point of infinite anything, Okay.
Speaker 1: In the black hole, like the way that black holes
Speaker 1: are defined and the way that we understand how the
Speaker 1: gravity works, there really should be a singularity at the
Speaker 1: center of the black hole, and everything has to move
Speaker 1: toward it. So so the you know, the black hole
Speaker 1: has this is this thing that like, the way you
Speaker 1: make a black hole, you get back up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, backup, because they're like, where do they come from?
Speaker 2: What's the deal?
Speaker 1: Yeah, So the way you make a black hole is
Speaker 1: you take a really massive star and you wait a
Speaker 1: while millions of years, and the star will explode and
Speaker 1: the core of the star will collapse on itself. And
Speaker 1: if it's massive enough, then I mean the reason that
Speaker 1: the star didn't collapse before is because it had nuclear
Speaker 1: burning happening. It was kind of keeping it puffed up, okay, right,
Speaker 1: and so you had this energy source that's sort of
Speaker 1: pushing against it, kind of like if you have like
Speaker 1: a balloon in the air inside is pushing the plastic,
Speaker 1: the rubber out. Right. When the star explodes, there's nothing
Speaker 1: to keep it from collapsing under its own gravity. You know,
Speaker 1: you get to a point where there's you can't do
Speaker 1: any more.
Speaker 2: Nuclear fusion, So nuclear fusion is when atoms join to
Speaker 2: become a different kind of atom and they give off
Speaker 2: energy in the process, like two hydrogens becoming a helium
Speaker 2: and giving off energy. Now, this happens with atoms up
Speaker 2: to the size of iron, at which point that fusion
Speaker 2: starts to take energy.
Speaker 1: You can't get any more energy out of those processes
Speaker 1: because you've gotten to a point where you've just the
Speaker 1: whole center of the star is iron basically, and it
Speaker 1: can't go farther than that. And so then you have
Speaker 1: this like huge chunk of iron that's not being held
Speaker 1: up by anything, and so it starts to collapse under
Speaker 1: its own gravity. Like that stuff just falls in and
Speaker 1: it has to go toward the center, and it has
Speaker 1: to keep going toward the center, and it can't go
Speaker 1: any other direction, and so you end up with this singularity,
Speaker 1: this point of infinite density. Technically, what is this shape?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 2: Is it like an ice cream cone that has an
Speaker 2: infinite tail?
Speaker 1: Or what is I mean? You can visualize it that
Speaker 1: way if you think about it in terms of like
Speaker 1: a two D analog. Like usually when we think of
Speaker 1: space time, like the pictures are always like a big
Speaker 1: rub rubber sheet.
Speaker 2: The rubber sheet visual is so helpful for comprehending space time.
Speaker 2: But also when I think of rubber sheets, usually the
Speaker 2: situation is not comfortable. It's either like an awkward graded
Speaker 2: school slumber party, explanation or some suburban dungeon kink that
Speaker 2: sounds exasperate at best. But for space, rubber sheets thumbs up.
Speaker 1: And you have this big rubber sheet and you put
Speaker 1: a bowling ball in one spot and that bends around,
Speaker 1: and so then when you take your tennis ball and
Speaker 1: you try and roll it past the bowling ball, it
Speaker 1: makes a little orbit and falls in right. Wow, this
Speaker 1: is the usual visualization for space time. But that doesn't
Speaker 1: have the right number of dimensions because space is space
Speaker 1: is three dimensional, and then you can think of time
Speaker 1: as another dimension, but that's kind of separate thing.
Speaker 2: I am curious about time as a fourth dimension.
Speaker 1: Okay, we can talk about that, Okay, but.
Speaker 2: We're going to take a quick break for sponsors of
Speaker 2: the show. Sponsors. Why sponsors, You know what they do?
Speaker 2: They help us give money to different charities every week.
Speaker 2: So if you want to know where Ologies gives our money,
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Speaker 2: fifty different charities that we've given to already, with more
Speaker 2: every single week. So if you need a place to
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Speaker 2: sure where to go. Those are all picked biologists who
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Speaker 2: to give a ton of money to them. So thanks
Speaker 2: for listening and thank sponsors. Okay, I'm sorry, I have
Speaker 2: so many questions.
Speaker 1: But anyway, So, if space is three dimensional, then the
Speaker 1: way gravity like works on it is that it kind
Speaker 1: of like pulls space inward toward itself. So like a
Speaker 1: massive thing kind of pulls space inward toward itself. So
Speaker 1: in the context of a black hole, it would be
Speaker 1: like a place where space gets really scrunched up, right,
Speaker 1: But it's easier to think about it in the two
Speaker 1: dimensional case. So it would be like you have your
Speaker 1: rubber sheet and you pinch a piece of that rubber
Speaker 1: sheet and you just pull it down, and you just
Speaker 1: keep pulling it down, and it just goes to a
Speaker 1: point and it's like, you know, forever, and it gets
Speaker 1: deeper and narrower whatever. Right, So you can think about
Speaker 1: it like that, But then you think about like a
Speaker 1: three dimensional analog, and your brain kind of breaks and
Speaker 1: it's righter. But yeah, so it's basically a place where
Speaker 1: space is really super curved, okay, really super bent inward
Speaker 1: and so there's a point. So if you think again
Speaker 1: about the two D kind of thing, the rubber sheet,
Speaker 1: you can you can still move past. Like you if
Speaker 1: you have your your like little hole that you pulled
Speaker 1: down on a rubber sheet, you can still take your
Speaker 1: tennis ball and roll it past that and it'll keep going.
Speaker 1: But if it gets too close, it'll fall in and
Speaker 1: there's nothing you can do about it, and it'll always
Speaker 1: go toward the deepest point. And so that's like there's
Speaker 1: this horizon, this, this distance from this from that singularity
Speaker 1: where if you get closer than that, you will fall
Speaker 1: in no matter what, and you will just keep going
Speaker 1: and you can't ever escape, and light itself will fall
Speaker 1: into because light follows the curve of space, and so
Speaker 1: if space is curved enough, then light will just follow
Speaker 1: that curve all the way down. Oh man, so once
Speaker 1: you know, so you throw flo flashlight into a black hole,
Speaker 1: like that light never comes out again. It just goes
Speaker 1: that that light beam. No matter which direction the flashlight
Speaker 1: is facing, the light beam will bend toward the center.
Speaker 2: And what is that danger zone called.
Speaker 1: The event Horizonka, that is the event, Yeah, that's the
Speaker 1: event horizon. I mean you should probably stay farther than
Speaker 1: the events event in general, because other bad things can
Speaker 1: happen to you if you get close to the black hole.
Speaker 2: If you listen to Ology's episode one Volcanology and thought
Speaker 2: jumping into a volcano was intense, like hang on to
Speaker 2: your butts right now.
Speaker 1: I mean, so for one thing, that most of the
Speaker 1: most of the ones that we've seen directly with light
Speaker 1: are pulling in matter, right, and so that means that
Speaker 1: there's a lot of hot stuff falling into the black
Speaker 1: hole in the form of a disk, And so that'll
Speaker 1: radiate you to death if you get too close. And
Speaker 1: then if you if you get close, if it's a
Speaker 1: small enough black hole, then when you get close, the
Speaker 1: tidal forces will kill you. So tidal force is where
Speaker 1: you have like it's where you have more more gravity.
Speaker 1: The gravity is pulling stronger on part of you than
Speaker 1: another part. So like if like if you imagine, you
Speaker 1: know you're falling feet first toward a black hole, the
Speaker 1: gravity goes the strength of the gravity goes up so
Speaker 1: steeply because it's such a compact steep thing, then your
Speaker 1: feet will be pulled on much more tightly than your head,
Speaker 1: and you'll be stretched out and it's it's there's a
Speaker 1: word for it. It's called spaghettification. It's actually called that. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you have to watch out for spaghettification if you
Speaker 1: got too close to a black hole. Who the hell?
Speaker 1: Maybe I don't know, I don't know. I mean Hawking
Speaker 1: uses it, I don't and maybe he came up with it.
Speaker 1: I'm not really sure.
Speaker 2: Oh my god. But of all of the things to
Speaker 2: call it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, of all the turns you to spaghetti, I don't know,
Speaker 1: Like that's just what else are you gonna call it?
Speaker 1: Like it's title disruption? But I love it the most. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Spaghnification was indeed coined by Hawking in his book A
Speaker 2: Brief History of Time, And if you happen to Google
Speaker 2: image search this you will find a bounty of photoshopped
Speaker 2: images of astronauts being tapered into space noodles by cosmic forces.
Speaker 2: I'm so impressed by this astrophysical whimsy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there are a lot of really silly names in astronomy.
Speaker 2: Who gets to name this stuff?
Speaker 1: Whoever comes up with it? I mean, people come up
Speaker 1: with a name it, but like sometimes the community names it,
Speaker 1: Like the Big Bang that was a joke, like that
Speaker 1: the word was a joke, the term the big bang,
Speaker 1: like somebody came up with the idea that you know,
Speaker 1: the universe started small and has been expanding, and somebody
Speaker 1: was like, oh, the big bang, and that it stuck.
Speaker 2: No, it was a throwaway.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was like it was mocking.
Speaker 2: Did that person get pissed and it stuck?
Speaker 1: I'm not sure?
Speaker 2: Okay. So English astronomer Fred Hoyle coined the term big Bang.
Speaker 2: It was during a radio broadcast in the late nineteen
Speaker 2: forties and it was kind of an accident. Now the
Speaker 2: story is he's so bent that it's stuck, but apparently
Speaker 2: he denies that. So drama in terms of what in
Speaker 2: terms of what your output is, You're you're a professor,
Speaker 2: you give talks, you travel all over the world, Like
Speaker 2: what is your big goal as a cosmologist? Like do
Speaker 2: you want to write an encyclopedia about cosmology? Like what's
Speaker 2: your what's your endgame?
Speaker 1: So what my goal? Uh? I mean I want to
Speaker 1: figure stuff out, but I don't have like there's not
Speaker 1: like one thing where it's like I must solve this problem.
Speaker 1: I kind of like, uh, just working on whatever fun
Speaker 1: stuff comes up, which is not what you're supposed.
Speaker 2: To do, but it's what you like.
Speaker 1: It's always what I like. I mean. So the big
Speaker 1: thing I'm working on right now has to do with
Speaker 1: dark matter. So dark matter is this invisible stuff, you know,
Speaker 1: And it's possible that dark matter has this weird property
Speaker 1: where if you take a dark matter particle and another
Speaker 1: dark matter particle and you you like, collide them into
Speaker 1: each other in just the right way, they'll annihilate and
Speaker 1: create other kinds of particles. So that's a possibility. And
Speaker 1: if that's the case, if that the thing that happens,
Speaker 1: then it can mess with how the first stars and
Speaker 1: galaxies form, because those form and like blobs of dark matter,
Speaker 1: and the formation of those is kind of delicate because
Speaker 1: you have to get the right balance of the gravity
Speaker 1: and the gas and all this stuff. So if dark
Speaker 1: matter is going and like annihilating all the time, then
Speaker 1: that sort of messes with that balance, and so it
Speaker 1: can change the way the first stars and galaxies form,
Speaker 1: and then we can look for the evidence of that
Speaker 1: with telescopes. So this is the kind of problem that
Speaker 1: I like, where you have like a sort of fundamental
Speaker 1: particle physics problem and then you try and figure out
Speaker 1: how to look for it with telescopes.
Speaker 2: So what is your work involved. Do you have like
Speaker 2: a moleskin that's just filled with like gobbledygook equations or
Speaker 2: are you working on a computer with data sets like
Speaker 2: when you're like when you get down to work, what
Speaker 2: does that look like?
Speaker 1: So I do have my moleskin with full of equations
Speaker 1: over there. I brought it with me, so I have that.
Speaker 1: I also have a whole bunch of code that I've
Speaker 1: written to try to solve some of these equations that
Speaker 1: are in the moleskin. I mean, so the usual thing
Speaker 1: is like, Okay, you talk to people who work on
Speaker 1: similar things, and you try and come up with like
Speaker 1: what is how can we answer this question? Or what
Speaker 1: is a question we can answer with this observation, or
Speaker 1: like what would be a cool thing that might happen
Speaker 1: that we could find out if it does happen.
Speaker 2: So then physicists talk to each other and write sut
Speaker 2: down and look at papers and write down more equations.
Speaker 2: And I was kind of surprised to realize how collaborative
Speaker 2: this could be. I always imagine physicists needed to be
Speaker 2: like sequestered in a well appointed lab or a classy
Speaker 2: den to just think clearly, but now there's like a
Speaker 2: lot of chatting happening.
Speaker 1: And then once you figure out like what equations you
Speaker 1: need to solve and what things you need to calculate,
Speaker 1: then you go to the computer and you write code
Speaker 1: to calculate those things and to put out numbers and
Speaker 1: draw graphs, and then you see if you have something
Speaker 1: interesting or.
Speaker 2: Not, if it all kind of clicks yeah, yeah, and.
Speaker 1: You see if like, you know, does this tell us
Speaker 1: that this is going to be an interesting technique to
Speaker 1: test the sery or not. And then depending on you know,
Speaker 1: because this is all theoretical work. Sometimes sometimes you find well,
Speaker 1: this is just really uninteresting and nobody's going to care,
Speaker 1: so I'm not going to write it up. Sometimes you're like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, it turns out you can't measure this thing
Speaker 1: with this technique, but we should write that down anyway,
Speaker 1: because people might have tried otherwise. And then sometimes it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: we can measure this thing with this thing and that'll
Speaker 1: be a really interesting result and we'll get a better
Speaker 1: answer than anybody's gotten before. So we're going to write
Speaker 1: it up and be really happy about it.
Speaker 2: And then you go toward writing it up and publishing it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, and then and then you write the paper,
Speaker 1: and then you publish the paper, and then you know,
Speaker 1: or you send it to the journal, and the journals
Speaker 1: the editors or the referees are like, yeah, you should
Speaker 1: do this differently, and so you do that differently, and
Speaker 1: then eventually it gets published.
Speaker 2: What is the craziest paper that you've ever had published?
Speaker 2: When the title of the craziest paper, because just looking
Speaker 2: at paper is yeah, so funny to me because they're
Speaker 2: so specific and wonderful.
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess it depends on what you mean.
Speaker 1: I wrote a paper called known Unknowns of dark Matter
Speaker 1: Annihilation over Cosmic Time.
Speaker 2: That sounds like the best like Norwegian metal album ever.
Speaker 1: It was like, well, yeah, so that was all about
Speaker 1: like what we know we don't know about this problem.
Speaker 1: M h. I've calculated a bunch of stuff. I've I
Speaker 1: had some papers about, uh, like axions and and those
Speaker 1: are theoretical particles that are super cool.
Speaker 2: Is there an upper limit to how many words your
Speaker 2: paper title can be?
Speaker 1: Yeah, you don't want to. I mean you kind of
Speaker 1: wanted to be punchy, right, like like the whole Known
Speaker 1: Unknowns thing is I wanted it to be like eye catching.
Speaker 2: Right, it's good marketing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, So you got to think about marketing to
Speaker 1: some degree, and you don't want it to be a
Speaker 1: long title because people are going to be skimming it.
Speaker 2: This part is it's crazy. It's like trying to buy
Speaker 2: Beyonce tickets. So the way that people find papers to
Speaker 2: read is every day, every weekday. The website, it's a
Speaker 2: r xiv dot org. There's like one hundred new papers
Speaker 2: about astronomy and physics and math and stuff.
Speaker 1: So the way that people find papers to read is
Speaker 1: every day, every single day, every weekday. The archive website,
Speaker 1: it's a r xiv is how it's spelled, but we
Speaker 1: call it the archive. The archive website displays like one
Speaker 1: hundred papers, new papers about astronomy, and there's just a
Speaker 1: list and the titles. So those the titles and the
Speaker 1: authors and maybe like the abstract depending on how you
Speaker 1: read the archive. And if you're a responsible astronomer, then
Speaker 1: every morning you wake up and you read the archive
Speaker 1: and you skim the papers and the and the abstracts,
Speaker 1: and you see which ones are relevant to your work,
Speaker 1: and then you you know, open those and read you
Speaker 1: know ski those papers and find out if like they
Speaker 1: tell you something interesting, you get information. This is how
Speaker 1: you keep up with the fields. So much work, it's
Speaker 1: so much work. It's heck of a lot of work.
Speaker 1: And if you're somebody who maybe does you know particle
Speaker 1: theory stuff as well, then there's a whole other archive
Speaker 1: for like particle theory and then particle phenomenology, which is
Speaker 1: more like the phenomenology is like where you try and
Speaker 1: figure out what you would see in this in the
Speaker 1: universe that's closer to what I do. So then if
Speaker 1: I if you're trying to read particle theory and phenomenology
Speaker 1: and astronomy, you can get like one hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: papers or something every day.
Speaker 2: It's a black hole.
Speaker 1: It's just it's impossible to keep up.
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: But anyway, so because of that, you want your paper
Speaker 1: title to be punchy and eye catching. But the other thing,
Speaker 1: so there's a this is like so totally inside baseball,
Speaker 1: but there's there's this ridiculous thing that happens.
Speaker 2: So the order of the papers as they appear on
Speaker 2: the website is determined just by what time they were
Speaker 2: sent in and after not too long, these are literal geniuses.
Speaker 2: They were like, duh, there's.
Speaker 1: A cutoff time of like four pm and sometimes on
Speaker 1: I don't remember which one, where if you get your
Speaker 1: paper in as close as possible after that time, it
Speaker 1: will appear at the top of the archive. And so
Speaker 1: there's this you can people have written papers about like
Speaker 1: the spike insubmission times, where like everybody's trying to get
Speaker 1: like four you know, a clock zero zero one second,
Speaker 1: Like they all want to get it like exactly at
Speaker 1: that moment so that their paper will be on the
Speaker 1: top of the list. Because a lot of people, you know,
Speaker 1: like they open the archive and then they just get
Speaker 1: like exhausted by the time they've gone through five favors,
Speaker 1: and so they don't get to the end of the list.
Speaker 1: And so there's this ridiculous, like this ridiculous ritual of
Speaker 1: when you're when you submit your paper to the archive,
Speaker 1: you try and like you watch the clock and you
Speaker 1: try and hit the submit button at exactly the right moment.
Speaker 2: That makes me so anxious. Yeah, it's like when someone
Speaker 2: people comment first a YouTube videation.
Speaker 1: It should be randomized because like it's also been shown
Speaker 1: that it does matter in terms of like citations.
Speaker 2: That's not right.
Speaker 1: It's not right.
Speaker 2: Oh my god. Yeah, oh wait, what was a question
Speaker 2: that I had right on top of that? It was
Speaker 2: definitely a stupid question.
Speaker 1: I don't think any questions are stupid.
Speaker 2: Are you sure?
Speaker 1: I think these are good questions. These are important questions
Speaker 1: because like what it doesn't like you know, these are
Speaker 1: like if you're asking questions about something because you're not
Speaker 1: an expert in that field, Like you can't be an
Speaker 1: expert in every field. If I ask questions about entomology,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna have no idea what's going on? Okay, I'm like,
Speaker 1: I'm still trying to remember what the difference beviews between
Speaker 1: a bug and not a bug, right, Like, I don't know.
Speaker 2: I'll give you some clearance on that, okay. But the
Speaker 2: problem is is you study the universe? Yes, so could
Speaker 2: your field be any broader? Like no, no, it could
Speaker 2: not literally everything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And this can be a problem too, Like when
Speaker 1: I give talks, I have to be prepared for anything
Speaker 1: from the questions, and that used to just freak me
Speaker 1: out a lot, and now I just feel like like
Speaker 1: I just have to I have to read as widely
Speaker 1: as possible, and sometimes I'll be like, I have no idea,
Speaker 1: but like I gave the talk about gravitational waves in
Speaker 1: Raleigh the other week and one of the questions was,
Speaker 1: tell me about the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. And
Speaker 1: I was like, it's a storm, it's been shrinking. There's
Speaker 1: a spacecraft looking at it. You should maybe talk to
Speaker 1: somebody who studies about that.
Speaker 2: The Great Red Spot, by the way, that's its actual name.
Speaker 2: It's a little on the nose. Also, people mix it
Speaker 2: up sometimes with the Great Dark Spot, which was near
Speaker 2: Jupiter's northern Paul. So y'all call me, let me name
Speaker 2: some of these things. Also, how did Katie feel about
Speaker 2: the detection of gravitational waves. This was the Lego project
Speaker 2: you may have heard about in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1: The detection gravitational waves by the Ligo instrument was probably
Speaker 1: the biggest discovery in physics in my lifetime.
Speaker 4: Damn.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a big deal. It's a super big deal.
Speaker 1: I win the announcement. So the first the first detection
Speaker 1: was last year sometime. Well, the detection was the end
Speaker 1: of twenty fifteen and it was announced I guess during
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen. The announcement was in I don't remember what
Speaker 1: times when it was or whatever, but it was such
Speaker 1: that it was going to be two am local time
Speaker 1: in Melbourne, And so a bunch of us got together
Speaker 1: and like had a party in a university department. Like
Speaker 1: we brought food and booze and like we watched videos
Speaker 1: and like we took like we took selfies. It was
Speaker 1: really late, but we were just like we got to
Speaker 1: see this live, you know. And and there were there
Speaker 1: were two people in the room who were part of
Speaker 1: the collaboration, so they they already knew what was going
Speaker 1: to be done, but the rest of us, like we'd
Speaker 1: heard rumors, but we didn't know for sure what was
Speaker 1: what that was going to be announced. And yeah, it was.
Speaker 1: It was just a huge party and it was a
Speaker 1: we were really excited and like we just everybody was
Speaker 1: like clapping and stuff when it happened, and I mean
Speaker 1: it was it was a huge deal.
Speaker 2: Of the way that it was announced was like a
Speaker 2: press conference from like an awesome eighties movie. Yeah, ladies
Speaker 2: and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves.
Speaker 1: We did it.
Speaker 2: I mean, how cute is that. So that was Dave Rightzi.
Speaker 2: He's a laser physicist and he's director of the Lego lab,
Speaker 2: and I love that audio so much. It's just like
Speaker 2: pure triumph, like the last scene of a Schwarzenegger movie
Speaker 2: or something. We have detected gravitational waves. It was like
Speaker 2: the beast.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, no, I remember that very clearly.
Speaker 2: So explain to me why the detection of gravitational waves
Speaker 2: is such a big deal.
Speaker 1: Okay, So, first, gravitational waves are ripples in this fabric
Speaker 1: of space time. So you know, space can be bent
Speaker 1: around massive objects. And when massive objects are moving through space,
Speaker 1: if they're moving in an accelerated way, which could be
Speaker 1: in an orbit in orbit as a kind of accelerated motion,
Speaker 1: that creates ripples in this sort of space time fabric,
Speaker 1: which is kind of hard to visualize and explain, but
Speaker 1: it ripples through space. And so like when you have
Speaker 1: really massive objects moving really quickly, that can make large
Speaker 1: disturbances relative to other things. I mean, if I wave
Speaker 1: my hands, I'm making gravitational waves, but like that's not detectable.
Speaker 1: So two black holes orbiting each other make really big
Speaker 1: detectable gravitational waves, especially when they get so close that
Speaker 1: they're about to merge into one thing. So you can
Speaker 1: have two black holes in a binary orbit orbiting each other,
Speaker 1: and then as they get closer and closer, the signal
Speaker 1: gets stronger and stronger, you know, the waves get stronger
Speaker 1: and stronger, and then they merge and that makes this
Speaker 1: big sort of burst of gravitational waves. And the way
Speaker 1: that gravitational waves work, they're not like ripples on a pond.
Speaker 1: Usually when you see a visualization, it's like ripples on
Speaker 1: a pond, but that's that two dimensional analog, you know again,
Speaker 1: And they're not like if you're standing there, the gravitational
Speaker 1: wave like moves your space that you're in, but it
Speaker 1: doesn't just like move you up and down. What it
Speaker 1: does is it stretches and squeezes the space that you're in.
Speaker 1: So let's say that you're standing there and a gravitational
Speaker 1: wave comes, it hits you in the face. What that
Speaker 1: does to you is it stretches your space a little bit,
Speaker 1: so you get a little bit taller and at the
Speaker 1: same time a little skinnier, and then a little bit
Speaker 1: shorter and a little wider, and like it all oscillates
Speaker 1: back and forth. So as the waves are coming at you,
Speaker 1: each wave is giving you that that stretch and squeeze
Speaker 1: stretch and squeeze. What and so it's actually distorting your shape.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, what is happening?
Speaker 2: This is like a big boy are yowing? And it's
Speaker 2: it keep like for everything that creates gravitational waves?
Speaker 1: Is this doing this to all the time? Micro micro basis? Yeah? Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the Lego experiment is built to detect these things.
Speaker 1: So they have two detectors, and each detector is like
Speaker 1: it's an L shaped thing. Each arm is four kilometers long.
Speaker 2: Now, if you've seen photos of this, you might think
Speaker 2: from a distance, is some shit that we built like
Speaker 2: on Mars, because there's just this treeless, ocre landscape in
Speaker 2: the desert. It seems to look lonely in every direction.
Speaker 2: But no, it's just Washington State.
Speaker 1: And they shoot lasers back and forth along these two
Speaker 1: arms there. They meet at the center and and they're measuring.
Speaker 1: The lasers are just there to measure the length of
Speaker 1: those arms, basically, and when a gravitational wave comes and
Speaker 1: hits that detector, it makes one of the arms a
Speaker 1: little longer while the other one gets a little shorter,
Speaker 1: and vice versa, depending on the direction and the you know,
Speaker 1: phase and everything. So if it does that, then the
Speaker 1: detector can detect that the length of the arms has changed,
Speaker 1: and then that's the signal, is the changing of the
Speaker 1: length of the arms and the level on which that happens.
Speaker 1: So this is four kilometers right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: That's about two and a half miles America.
Speaker 1: The first detection, when it was detected, the length of
Speaker 1: that four kilometer arm changed in length by a thousandth
Speaker 1: the width of a proton.
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's a teensy tiny that's really small.
Speaker 2: And this was a huge collision.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, this was like it was one point three
Speaker 1: billion light years away, so it's very far. But it
Speaker 1: was like the black holes around thirty times as massive
Speaker 1: as the Sun, and they collided, and so it was
Speaker 1: a pretty strong signal, Like it was a surprisingly strong signal,
Speaker 1: Like if you actually looked at the data, raw data,
Speaker 1: like you could see it, which is not usually the
Speaker 1: case in this kind of field, usually, like you have
Speaker 1: to do lots of processing, but like you can see
Speaker 1: the signal is very strong. But yeah, thousands the width
Speaker 1: of a proton, so that you know, your own height
Speaker 1: is changing much less than that, right, because you're not
Speaker 1: four kilometers long.
Speaker 2: Sure, so I'm getting a little bit not quite as
Speaker 2: tall and not quite as skinny and not kind of
Speaker 2: quite as short as fat as it's not noticeable in
Speaker 2: a photograph.
Speaker 1: Say, yes, yeah, yeah, it's really it's a really subtle effect.
Speaker 1: But but yeah, so that's the gravitational wave. It's the
Speaker 1: detection of that change in length, that sort of stretching
Speaker 1: and squeezing of space time. And each time the black holes,
Speaker 1: you know, black holes or something collide, you get this
Speaker 1: kind of like the the wiggles will come faster and
Speaker 1: closer together. And so the frequency of this changing of
Speaker 1: shape is going up and the amplitude is going up,
Speaker 1: and so it makes this kind of rising sound if
Speaker 1: you transmit it, if you change it into sound, it's
Speaker 1: like a sort of like and the like end part
Speaker 1: is when they collide. And the reason people change it
Speaker 1: to sound a lot is because the frequency of these
Speaker 1: waves coming, like how how quickly the stretching and squeezing happens,
Speaker 1: is about the same frequency as like sound waves. Okay,
Speaker 1: so it is kind of audible, Like if you change
Speaker 1: it to sound, it's kind of audible.
Speaker 2: And that was like the the boop heard around the world, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's called a chirp, a chirp, Yes.
Speaker 2: Okay, you ready for this? This is the sound of history.
Speaker 2: So what does that mean going forward for astrophysicists? And like,
Speaker 2: how many more have we heard since then?
Speaker 1: So there have been oh gosh, I didn't even know
Speaker 1: the number, like something like five seen now and the
Speaker 1: most recent, most recent one was two black holes. But
Speaker 1: the one before that was a neutrons. There was two
Speaker 1: neutron stars, and those were a big deal because those
Speaker 1: when they collided, also created a gamma.
Speaker 2: Ray burst, a gamma ray burst super energetic explosion, so
Speaker 2: we can't see gamma rays, but they pack of punch
Speaker 2: and a burst.
Speaker 1: And so we were able to see the collision from
Speaker 1: the gravitational waves but also from light. And that was
Speaker 1: a huge deal. And I can talk about that for hours,
Speaker 1: but it's it's a big deal. The whole thing is
Speaker 1: a big deal for a bunch of reasons. One is
Speaker 1: that this, like the existence of gravitational waves, was kind
Speaker 1: of known indirectly because we'd seen systems where like you
Speaker 1: had two pulsars orbiting each other. So pulsar is a
Speaker 1: kind of neutron star. A neutron star is like the
Speaker 1: core of a dead star. It's so we'd seen things
Speaker 1: orbiting each other where the changing of the orbit it
Speaker 1: could only really be easily explained by gravitational waves kind
Speaker 1: of radiating energy away from the orbit, and so the
Speaker 1: orbit got smaller because gravitational waves were pulling energy away
Speaker 1: and sort of shrinking that orbit. So we had indirect
Speaker 1: evidence that gravitational waves existed, but we'd never seen them directly.
Speaker 1: And seeing like directly, like detecting, like feeling the gravitational
Speaker 1: wave is a huge deal, right, And the gravitational waves
Speaker 1: were like the last, the last prediction of Einstein's relativity
Speaker 1: to be confirmed.
Speaker 2: Einstein's theory of relativity. Remember, our perception of the force
Speaker 2: of gravity is a bendy spacetime thing. I'm very paraphrasing
Speaker 2: a lot.
Speaker 1: So he predicted them one hundred years, about one hundred
Speaker 1: years before the first detection was made, so it was
Speaker 1: it took a long time to see these things, but
Speaker 1: so it was confirmed that And it's just this incredible
Speaker 1: laboratory for relativity for physics because by detecting the gravitational
Speaker 1: ways and looking at the signal, we were able to
Speaker 1: determine that gravitational waves travel at the speed of light.
Speaker 1: We didn't know for sure before that was part of
Speaker 1: the theory, but we didn't know for sure, so we
Speaker 1: figured that out. It told us stuff about how black
Speaker 1: holes are made, like what black holes are made of,
Speaker 1: sort of like the properties of black holes, by examining
Speaker 1: very closely how they come together and merge, how much
Speaker 1: energy the gravitational wave burst creates, you know a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff about about that. And then because now we
Speaker 1: can we can watch black holes colliding in the distant universe,
Speaker 1: we can learn about how black holes grow, you know,
Speaker 1: by when they collide with each other, and that tells
Speaker 1: us something about how black holes grow. It tells us
Speaker 1: something about how galaxies grow. It tells us something about
Speaker 1: how stars form, because black holes are the end results
Speaker 1: of stars.
Speaker 2: When you were a kid, were you ever hoping that
Speaker 2: this that we would be able to detect gravitational waves
Speaker 2: where Like, I've been waiting since I was a little.
Speaker 1: Girl, So I didn't know a whole lot about gravitational
Speaker 1: ways when I was a little kid. But there was
Speaker 1: there was a really beautiful moment during one of the
Speaker 1: detection of the neutron star collisions when one of the
Speaker 1: scientists was he was he was talking about the neutron
Speaker 1: star collision and the neutron stars when they collide, they
Speaker 1: make a slightly different kind of like chirp sound.
Speaker 2: Okay, here's the sound of the neutron stars booping themselves together.
Speaker 1: So the black hole one is actually a lot quicker
Speaker 1: than what I said, But the neutron star one goes
Speaker 1: like oo, it takes it. It takes a while, and it
Speaker 1: does it. So and there'd been simulations of this for years.
Speaker 1: I mean, the scientist who was talking about the discovery
Speaker 1: said that he'd been waiting to hear that sound from
Speaker 1: nature for twenty years and he just did and it
Speaker 1: was really touching. I mean. So for me, I knew
Speaker 1: about LOGO because it was it was partly headed by
Speaker 1: people at cal Tech, and I was an undergrad at
Speaker 1: cal Tech, and so when I was an undergrad there,
Speaker 1: people were talking about it a lot, and there was
Speaker 1: there was a famous bet between like Kip Thorn and
Speaker 1: Stephen Hawking or something.
Speaker 2: Kip Thorn, by the way, is a theoretical physicist, the
Speaker 2: twenty seventeen Nobel Laureate.
Speaker 1: About whether or not gravitational waves would be detected by
Speaker 1: the year two thousand. I started cal Tech in ninety nine,
Speaker 1: so they were not detected by the year two thousand,
Speaker 1: so that bet was lost. But it was a funny
Speaker 1: thing because when I first got to cal Tech, they
Speaker 1: were building LOGO and it was this big deal and
Speaker 1: everybody's like, we're going to detect gravitational waves. It's going
Speaker 1: to be amazing. And then you know, and LIGO is
Speaker 1: being built, and I was like, oh, it's any minute now.
Speaker 1: And then I left cal Tech and I went to
Speaker 1: grad school, and then after a while, I was like,
Speaker 1: I haven't heard anything about this for a while, you know,
Speaker 1: And I realized that like they'd kind of like they'd
Speaker 1: been like, yeah, we're gonna detect your reputation wise, and
Speaker 1: then they kind of got quiet for a while, and
Speaker 1: I found out later on asked about it, and they
Speaker 1: were like, oh no, it's advanced.
Speaker 2: LEGO was so there are some upgrades over the years
Speaker 2: from initial LAGO to Enhanced LAGO to advanced LEGO. It's
Speaker 2: kind of like the Tall Grande and Venti gravitational wave detectors.
Speaker 2: Just then maybe you need a little more to get
Speaker 2: the job done.
Speaker 1: Really gonna do the detection. The initial LEGO was like
Speaker 1: maybe it would get lucky, but advanced lago will really
Speaker 1: see something. I'm like really, so like for a while,
Speaker 1: I was like, I don't know what I feel like,
Speaker 1: I don't know if I believe that this is really
Speaker 1: going to happen. But then you know, as soon as
Speaker 1: they turned advanced Lago on, like within like a week
Speaker 1: or something, they saw this thing. So that's like they
Speaker 1: really they really did it. And it's the most like
Speaker 1: it's the most precise instrument ever built by humans. I
Speaker 1: think I read that somewhere. It's like the I mean,
Speaker 1: you're measuring something so tiny. It's crazy, It's it's impossible.
Speaker 1: I use, it's incredible. How like what went into it
Speaker 1: in terms of the engineering and you know, just the
Speaker 1: physics and like they had to they had to correct
Speaker 1: for things like the like how much the photons hitting
Speaker 1: the mirrors would move them.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, Oh my god.
Speaker 1: That's a big part of the noise in the signal
Speaker 1: that's called the photon shot noise. They have to deal
Speaker 1: with that. Yeah, so stuff like that. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: it's incredible that they were able to do this.
Speaker 2: So can you get the chirp as a ring tone?
Speaker 1: I believe you can. You can I believe? So, yeah,
Speaker 1: would you.
Speaker 3: Get the neutron whoop? Or would you get the the
Speaker 3: black hole one? The black hole one, you have to
Speaker 3: speed it up to make it sound cool, so you
Speaker 3: can still hear it, but it's more like a like so,
Speaker 3: so in the actual data it's like that, that's kind
Speaker 3: of what it sounds like. But then when you when you.
Speaker 1: Speed it up, it goes whoop whoop, but it's very quick,
Speaker 1: whereas the neutron star one it's like ooop.
Speaker 2: I feel like, yeah, I feel like that's the way
Speaker 2: to go.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Let's say someone is interesting cosmology but doesn't know a
Speaker 2: lot about it and is intimidated by it. What is
Speaker 2: the best book to pick up? I actually, and this
Speaker 2: is I don't know if you've ever read this, but
Speaker 2: I was. I was in Thailand and I was staying
Speaker 2: in a hut and there was some there was a
Speaker 2: free book pile, and I picked up a book called
Speaker 2: Quantum Mechanics Can't Hurt You. This book was actually called
Speaker 2: Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You. It's by Marcus Choone and
Speaker 2: it's delightful. I found my copy. It's still moldy from
Speaker 2: a monsoon.
Speaker 1: It was good.
Speaker 2: It was very it was very layperson's terms, but I
Speaker 2: clearly don't didn't retain any of it. But is there
Speaker 2: a book or a documentary or something that's just a
Speaker 2: good primer because like in this episode, there's no way
Speaker 2: to describe everything, But like, what's a good go to,
Speaker 2: like astrophysics for dummies? What are we talking here? Is
Speaker 2: there a pamphlet?
Speaker 1: Uh? So I wish I had a really good answer
Speaker 1: for this.
Speaker 2: I fel like, you don't You're winter.
Speaker 1: So the thing is like, I don't. I don't read
Speaker 1: a lot of popular level stuff. And there's a couple
Speaker 1: of reasons for that.
Speaker 2: So number one, she doesn't have much time to read
Speaker 2: non papers because there's like a billion papers, and when
Speaker 2: she does, she likes to read about spaceships. Okay too,
Speaker 2: when something is written for the general public, astro physicists
Speaker 2: have to take that lay information and kind of back
Speaker 2: translate it to a more technical version in their head.
Speaker 2: So it's like if you're a bartender and someone writes
Speaker 2: she drank a whiskey, but you're distracted wondering a whiskey? Well,
Speaker 2: is it like a bourbon? Is this a single malt scotch?
Speaker 2: Was it a Rye, Tennessee whiskey is this on the rocks?
Speaker 2: Was in a cocktail? There's so much detail omitted.
Speaker 1: I mean, Sean Carroll's written several books that are really good,
Speaker 1: so take a look at those. There's a physicist Katie
Speaker 1: Freeze Catherine, who's a dark matter theorist like me. Oh,
Speaker 1: she's a dark matter cosmologist and she's written a book
Speaker 1: called Cosmic Cocktail and it's all about about dark matter
Speaker 1: and also like some aati biographical stuff. It's really cool.
Speaker 2: About What about movies? Do you have a favorite or
Speaker 2: a least favorite movie about space or cosmology?
Speaker 1: You're like, could I not answer some of these?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, okay, so so favorite yes. So there aren't
Speaker 1: a lot of movies where I feel like the cosmology,
Speaker 1: Like cosmology is hard to have as a topic of
Speaker 1: a movie because it's just too big a topic, and
Speaker 1: like stuff happens on cosmological time scales, which is like
Speaker 1: incredibly long times, and so having something happen within a
Speaker 1: movie time frame is really hard. But there's a movie
Speaker 1: that I really liked for how it portrayed the scientists
Speaker 1: and it had some some cosmology ish stuff in it,
Speaker 1: so that was sunshine, okay, which the science is wrong,
Speaker 1: just putting that out there. It's it's about the sun
Speaker 1: has like burned out or is burning out and they
Speaker 1: have to fix it and none of that can happen.
Speaker 1: All of that's false, All that's fake. But it's done
Speaker 1: really well in terms of like they have physicists who
Speaker 1: acts like a physicist, and like they have people who
Speaker 1: talk like scientists. And I kind of just enjoyed it. Okay,
Speaker 1: so I thought that, and then there's like a monster thing,
Speaker 1: so anyway, but I thought that was done really well.
Speaker 1: I really enjoyed gravity. There's also bad physics in gravity
Speaker 1: in some places, but I thought it was a beautiful
Speaker 1: movie and it portrayed space very well.
Speaker 2: How do you feel about space balls?
Speaker 1: I think it was funny. It's been a long time.
Speaker 2: Oh hell yes, that was good.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Other space movies like The Martian was fun. Interstellar
Speaker 1: had a very pretty black hole in it.
Speaker 2: Okay, that you are being very complimentary, and that is due.
Speaker 2: We noted you are being a very nice person.
Speaker 1: The black hole and the wormhole and Interstellar were very
Speaker 1: beautifully done and done with with proper relativistic equations. It
Speaker 1: was very clever because what they did is they they
Speaker 1: they had these simulations that are very very difficult and
Speaker 1: take a very long time on supercomputers, and they gave
Speaker 1: them to the the the people who do movie graphics,
Speaker 1: who have really powerful supercomputers, and they're like, no, we
Speaker 1: need to do this black hole properly. So they calculated
Speaker 1: it and now they got some like papers out of
Speaker 1: it because the result was such such a good calculation
Speaker 1: that they were able to get actual science out of
Speaker 1: the calculation done for the graphics in the movie.
Speaker 2: Because movies are better funded.
Speaker 1: Then yeah, yeah, so it was it was a very
Speaker 1: good move. But but you should you should know that
Speaker 1: that the black hole in Interstellar, although there are some
Speaker 1: aspects that are done very faithfully, they did have they
Speaker 1: did tweak something so it actually would look pretty different
Speaker 1: if we saw an actual black hole in real life.
Speaker 1: So there are a couple of things that were tweaked
Speaker 1: that were a bit different.
Speaker 2: So, speaking of movies, Katie and I were supposed to
Speaker 2: go to one after this interview, and we did, but
Speaker 2: we barely made it. Because this is all really great information.
Speaker 2: We hadn't even gotten to the wrapid fire around of
Speaker 2: all of your questions, so I asked your questions. We
Speaker 2: raced to the showing and this poor woman had to
Speaker 2: smuggle a burrito and eat it in the theater. I'm
Speaker 2: so sorry. By the way, we saw murder on the
Speaker 2: Oran Express. It features a very bizarre mustache. I will
Speaker 2: give it that, So stay tuned the first two parter
Speaker 2: Anology's history when we resume with your questions, so you
Speaker 2: now have a solid base, Tune in next week to
Speaker 2: hear Astro Katie address your questions, including is there a
Speaker 2: name for the disorientation and panic one feels when considering
Speaker 2: the vastness of the universe? There is are any of
Speaker 2: the sci fi movie methods to save the place in
Speaker 2: it plausible? Or are we basically doomed if an asteroid
Speaker 2: uses us as a target? Will the universe expand forever?
Speaker 2: What's the deal with MultiVersus? Are there aliens? And speaking
Speaker 2: of your submissions, I wanted to let you know I
Speaker 2: totally see the reviews you write on iTunes and it's
Speaker 2: so appreciated. Rating and reviewing and subscribing is free. It
Speaker 2: takes very little time, and it helps ologies stay up
Speaker 2: there in the science charts, so more folks know about it,
Speaker 2: so thank you so much. Katie is at astro Katie
Speaker 2: on Twitter, where she has approximately one billion trillion followers,
Speaker 2: and she is academic Nomad on Instagram. So thank you
Speaker 2: to all you ologites for tweeting and gramming and meming
Speaker 2: at us, and to all the folks on Patreon who
Speaker 2: make the show possible. It is currently four am on
Speaker 2: a Friday night, and I'm recording this to send it
Speaker 2: off to Stephen Ray Morris. He's going to help edit it,
Speaker 2: and your funding is making this dream project possible and
Speaker 2: putting a lot of facts in a lot of human minds.
Speaker 2: You can also keep the show going by stopping at
Speaker 2: ologiesmerch dot com. I also want you to know that, yes,
Speaker 2: it's super late at night and I'm recording this partly
Speaker 2: because the mass of porridge that occupies the space where
Speaker 2: a brain would be. I had to spend a little
Speaker 2: longer trying to understand and explain these concepts that I thought.
Speaker 2: And right now, as I record this middle of the night,
Speaker 2: my neighbors had been blasting techno Christmas pop songs for
Speaker 2: four hours while I was learning about wormholes. The world
Speaker 2: feels very surreal. Also, congratulations to anyone who made it
Speaker 2: to the end of this episode. Man, you stuck it out.
Speaker 2: I appreciate that. As a special thanks, I'm going to
Speaker 2: tell you a secret that no one in the world knows.
Speaker 2: Earlier tonight, I ate cereal. I bought from a gas
Speaker 2: station and I loved it. So if you listen to
Speaker 2: the end of this episode, feel free to holler at
Speaker 2: Ologies or Ali Ward. I'm sure I'll have a new
Speaker 2: secret for you next week at the very end, when
Speaker 2: we are back with Katie, max Q and A. So
Speaker 2: until then, ask smart people dumb questions because they love
Speaker 2: it and we're just tiny meat blobs on a dust
Speaker 2: spec So let's just live. Can we live? Okay? Byebye pacadermatology,
Speaker 2: hobbiology or do zoology, lithology, technology, meteorology, pology, anthology, zeriology, elinology,