Speaker 1: You know, there's a very specific kind of arrogance that
comes with living in the twenty first century. It's a comfortable,
cozy kind of arrogance. We look at our smartphones, we
look at the GPS satellites orbiting the planet, we look
at the photos from the Mars rover, and we we
lull ourselves into this sense of security. We think, Okay,
we've got the map.
Speaker 2: It's the feeling that the hard work is done. We
think we understand the territory of reality. We have the
standard model for particles, we have general relativity for gravity,
and you know, we have the Big Bang for history.
Speaker 1: It feels sweet.
Speaker 2: It feels complete, like we're just filling in the details
at the edges exactly.
Speaker 1: It's like we're just coloring in the lines of a
drawing that Newton and Einstein already finished for us. But yeah,
and here's where things get messy. What if I told
you that if you actually walk into a theoretical physics
department today, or if you look at the raw data
screaming down from our most advanced telescopes, the mood isn't comfortable.
Speaker 2: No, comfortable is definitely not the word. It's closer to panic. Panic, panic, confusion,
and a very specific type of exhilarating terror because the
map we've drawn it doesn't match the territory anymore.
Speaker 1: And we're not talking about a small error.
Speaker 2: No, no, we aren't talking about a blurry photo or
a rounding error. Here. We are talking about data that
is fundamentally incompatible with our understanding of the universe.
Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling threads. Today we are pulling on a
thread that might just unravel the entire sweater. We are
looking at a compilation of papers and debates that some
are calling the broken Universe.
Speaker 2: That's a dramatic name, but it fits.
Speaker 1: We're going to look at eight specific anomalies, eight places
where the laws of physics as we know them seem
to just break.
Speaker 2: And just to set the stage, everything we are discussing
today comes from active, heated debates among top physicists and astronomers.
This isn't science fiction. This is the current crisis in science.
Speaker 1: We have a list of eight eight cracks in the foundation,
and the mission for this discussion is to explore the
horror and the wonder of that.
Speaker 2: It really is a mix of both, because on one hand,
it's exciting, it means there is new physics to discover.
A breakthrough is coming. But on the other hand, some
of these anomalies suggest things like simulation theory or multiverse collisions,
or that our universe is a terrifyingly lonely or perhaps
terrifyingly crowded place.
Speaker 1: Well, I've got my seat belt fastened. Let's not waste
any time. We are starting with what is arguably the
most famous civil war in modern astronomy. It's anominally number
eight on our list, the measurement crisis, or as the journals.
Speaker 2: Politely call it, the Hubble tension.
Speaker 1: The Hubble tension, if this is the big one, this
is the one that keeps cosmologists up at night staring
at the ceiling. I mean, if we can't solve this,
we don't know how old the universe is, we don't
know what it's made of, and we don't know how
it ends.
Speaker 2: It's that fundamental, Okay, So let's unpack this. The Hubble
tension revolves around something called the Hubble constant. This is
the speedometer of the cosmos, right, the speed of expansion. Correct.
In the early twentieth century, Edwin Hubble discovered that the
universe isn't static. It's expanding. That changed everything because it
meant the cosmos had a beginning and will have an ending.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just this eternal unchanging thing.
Speaker 2: Not at all. And the Hubble constant is the rate
of that expansion. If you know the speed, you can
hit rewind on the videotape and figure out exactly when
the Big Bang happened. It is the foundational number for
all of cosmology.
Speaker 1: So it seems like a pretty important number to get right.
If your speedometer's broken, you don't know how long the
road trip took.
Speaker 2: Vital, absolutely vital. But here's the problem. We broke it.
Speaker 1: What do you mean we broke it?
Speaker 2: Well, maybe not us personally, but we have developed two
incredibly precise ways to measure this number. Both are the
gold standards of astrophysics, Both use cutting edge technology, and
they give us two completely different answers.
Speaker 1: Okay, walk me through the methods. I want to understand
how we can be so smart and yet so confused.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Method A, what's the first one?
Speaker 2: Method A looks at the baby picture of the universe.
We use the Plank satellite to look at the cosmic
microwave background or the CMB. This is radiation left over
from just three hundred and eighty thousand years after the
Big Bang.
Speaker 1: So this is looking at the universe when it was
just a soup of particles, before stars, before galaxies, anything
like that.
Speaker 2: Precisely, it was a hot, dense plasma. Now the physics
of that soup are actually very well understood. It's almost
just fluid dynamics. We can look at the sound waves
literally pressure waves rippling through that early plasma sound in
space in a sense. Yes, And by measuring the size
of those ripples and applying our standard model of cosmology,
which is our best theory of how matter and energy interact,
we can predict how fast the universe should be expanding today.
Speaker 1: Okay, I like that. So it's a projection. It's like
taking a baby to the doctor measuring their height and
bone density, and the doctor says, based on this growth chart,
when this kid is thirty years old, he will be
exactly six feet tall.
Speaker 2: That is the perfect analogy looking at the infant universe
and mathematically projecting its growth, and the prediction is incredibly precise.
And the number is sixty seven point four kilometers per
second per megaparsec.
Speaker 1: Okay, sixty seven point four. Stick a pin in that number.
That's the prediction based on the baby picture. What's Method B?
The other team?
Speaker 2: Method B looks at the adult universe. This is the
cosmic distance ladder. We look at the universe as it
is today. We use the Hubble Space Telescope and now
the James Webspace Telescope the JWST to look at specific
stars called standard candles.
Speaker 1: Standard candles, I've always loved that term. It sounds like
something from a fantasy novel. But in physics, these are
siphid aid variables, right, These blinking.
Speaker 2: Stars yes, Cephadaid variable stars are special because they pulsate,
They get brighter and dimmer in a very predictable rhythm,
and a brilliant astronomer named Henrietta swan Livett discovered a
law over one hundred years ago. The speed of the
pulsation tells us exactly how bright the star truly is.
It's intrinsic luminosity.
Speaker 1: So it's a lighthouse where the time of the flash
tells you the wattage of.
Speaker 2: The bulb exactly. And once you know how bright the
bulb truly is, you can compare it to how bright
it looks from Earth. That difference tells you the exact distance.
It's simple geometry.
Speaker 1: Really, it's elegant.
Speaker 2: It is so we measure the distance to galaxies that
have these stars. Then we see how fast they are
moving away from us using red shift, and we get
a number.
Speaker 1: So this isn't a prediction. This is a direct measurement.
We are holding the radar gun at the passing cars.
Speaker 2: Yes, and teams led by Nobel laureate Adam Reese have
spent years refining this and they get seventy three kilometers
per second per megaparsec.
Speaker 1: Okay, sixty seven point four versus seventy three.
Speaker 2: Now, I know what you're thinking, and I know what
the listeners are thinking. That sounds pretty close. You're off
by a few digits. Who cares. It's not a huge
difference in day to day life.
Speaker 1: Ideally, Yeah, it sounds like a margin of error. Maybe
a dirty lens, a miscalculation somewhere.
Speaker 2: That's what everyone thought at first. Oh, maybe we calibrated
the satellite wrong, Maybe cosmic dust is blocking the stars.
But if these teams have checked and rechecked their work
for a decade, they've refined their methods, used new telescopes.
The error margins are now tiny, less than one percent.
Speaker 1: So these two numbers, their error bars don't overlap.
Speaker 2: They don't even come close. The chance of these two
numbers not overlapping, just by a statistical fluke is less
than one in a million.
Speaker 1: Wow, okay, one in a million. So that's not a mistake.
Speaker 2: No, that is a discovery.
Speaker 1: It means we aren't measuring it wrong. The universe is
actually behaving differently than our best model predicts.
Speaker 2: Exactly. Going back to your analogy, we measured the baby,
predicted he'd be six feet tall. We went and measured
the thirty year old adult, and he's six foot.
Speaker 1: Five, which implies that something happened in between a weird
growth spurt.
Speaker 2: Exactly. It implies that between the early universe, the baby picture,
and today the adult universe, something happened. A mysterious force,
a new type of particle, or a change in gravity
itself kicked in and accelerated the cosmos in a way
our model doesn't account for. The standard model is missing
a massive piece of the.
Speaker 1: Puzzle that is deeply unsettling. It's like building a house
on sand, but the sand is moving underneath you. So
what are the theories what could cause this this cosmic
growth spurt.
Speaker 2: Well, there are a few, and they range from weird
to existentially terrifying.
Speaker 1: Let's start with weird.
Speaker 2: One of the leading ideas is something called early dark energy.
Speaker 1: Early dark energy, I thought dark energy was a current
thing it is.
Speaker 2: This would be something different. Imagine a temporary form of
anti gravity that flared up shortly after the Big Bang.
It cooked the universe for a while, accelerated everything, and
then just vanished without a.
Speaker 1: Trace, a ghost force. It just turned on and off.
Speaker 2: Essentially a cosmological constant that was active for a few
hundred thousand years and then switched off. It solves the math,
It bridges the gap between sixty seven and seventy three.
But it feels very contravet. Why would a fundamental force
of nature just appear and then disappear. It feels like
a fudge factor, like we're just writing in numbers to
make the equation work.
Speaker 1: That does, okay, What else is on the table?
Speaker 2: Another theory is that we are living in.
Speaker 1: A local void, A local void that sounds lonely it is.
Speaker 2: The idea is that our galaxy, the Milky Way, just
happens to be in a relatively empty bubble in the universe,
like a hole in Swiss cheese.
Speaker 1: So there's just less stuff around.
Speaker 2: Us, exactly. And because it's emptier than the surrounding space,
the gravity from the denser regions outside the bubble pulls
on us and everything in our neighborhood, making it look
like we are expanding faster than the cosmic average.
Speaker 1: So we might just be living in the boonies of
the universe and our perspective is warped. We think everyone's speeding,
but really we're the ones being pulled.
Speaker 2: Maybe. But the most disturbing implication, and this is the
one that really shakes the foundations, is that the laws
of physics themselves might be evolving.
Speaker 1: Evolving. You mean, like gravity isn't constant, the speed of light.
Speaker 2: Isn't constant, right we assume, Gee, the gravitational constant is
the same today as it was thirteen billion years ago.
We assume, see, the speed of light is fixed. But
what if they aren't. What if these constants of nature
drift over cosmic timescales.
Speaker 1: That is terrifying. That changes everything. It means history is fluid.
If the rules of the game change while you're playing
you can't predict the score. You can't trust any of
your models.
Speaker 2: Building our house of knowledge on shifting sand is the
exact phrase used by some cosmologists. If we can't reconcile
these numbers, we don't just lose the hubble constant, we
lose our grip on the consistency of reality itself.
Speaker 1: Well, if losing the consistency of reality wasn't enough, let's
move to anomaly number seven. Oh, this one involves our
shiny new toy, the JamesWeb Space Telescope, and what they
are calling the Impossible Galaxies.
Speaker 2: Yes, the Universe Breakers.
Speaker 1: I love that name, but I hate what it implies.
So JWST launches on Christmas Day twenty twenty one. The
goal was to peer back into the cosmic dawn right
to see the very first galaxies forming.
Speaker 2: Right the era just a few hundred billion years after
Big Bang, and the theoretical models were very very clear
on what we should see. What was the prediction In
the early universe, matter was chaotic and hot. The first
galaxy should have been small, messy, irregular blobs of gas,
little wisps.
Speaker 1: Taller galaxies, just little clumps slowly pulling themselves together.
Speaker 2: Exactly, slowly clumping together over billions of years to form
the majestic spirals we see today. You don't get a
skyscraper instantly, you start with a mud hut.
Speaker 1: That was the expectation in the reality. What did Jwst
actually see?
Speaker 2: Almost immediately, Jawst beamed back images that sent a wave
of panic through the astronomical community. It found massive galaxies
too big, too bright, and too well formed to exist
that early.
Speaker 1: Give us an example, I want to know what we're
looking at.
Speaker 2: Take a galaxy they nicknamed ZFA one nine three ninety seven.
We're seeing it as it existed just five hundred to
seven hundred million years after the Big Bang.
Speaker 1: Okay, so very early. The universe is an infant at this.
Speaker 2: Point, and in yet ZFA one is massive. It already
has a stellar mass comparable to our own Milky Way galaxy.
Speaker 1: Wait, hold on, comparable to the Milky Way. But the
Milky Way took thirteen billion years of mergers and eating
other smaller galaxies to get this big. How can a
galaxy be that mature when the universe was only five
hundred million years old?
Speaker 2: Precisely, that is the paradox. It's like looking into a
nursery expecting to see infants in cribs and finding fully
grown adults with beards sitting there reading the newspaper. It's
a physical impossibility.
Speaker 1: How is that physically possible? I mean, gas falls together,
it makes stars. Why couldn't it just happen really, really fast?
Speaker 2: Because star formation is violent, that's the catch. It's a
self regulating process. When stars form, they don't just sit
there quietly. They turn on. They ignite right, and they
blast out ultraviolet radiation, powerful solar winds, and eventually they
explode as supernovas. That energy pushes the remaining gas away.
It's a negative feedback loop. Stars regulate their own growth
by blowing away their food source.
Speaker 1: See you can't binge eat. The more you eat, the
more you push the plate away exactly.
Speaker 2: Physics says you can't turn all the gas and a
galaxy into stars instantly. But for these impossible galaxies to exist,
they would have had to convert their available gas into
stars at a rate of nearly one hundred percent efficiency.
Speaker 1: And I take it that's not normal. That's not how
it's supposed to work.
Speaker 2: It's physically impossible under current models defy the laws of
thermodynamics and gravity as we apply them to gas clodes.
Something is wrong with our understanding of how galaxies form.
Speaker 1: So how do we explain the impossible? Did we just
get the distance wrong? Could they be closer?
Speaker 2: That was the first hope. Everyone hoped. Maybe they are
closer and smaller, and we just think they're big and far.
But the spectrostopic conformations are coming.
Speaker 1: In now, and that's where you analyze the light itself.
Speaker 2: Yes, we analyze the red shift of the light, how
much the light has been stretched by the expansion of space.
The red shift confirms they are indeed that far back
in time, the data is solid.
Speaker 1: So if the data is right, what's the scary theory?
How do you build a skyscraper in five minutes? What's
the cheek code?
Speaker 2: Primordial black holes?
Speaker 1: Oh, I've heard of these. These aren't the black holes
that come from dead stars, are they?
Speaker 2: No, not at all. These are black holes from the
Big Bang itself. The theory is that in the first
fraction of a second, the universe was so incredibly dense
that some regions just collapsed directly into black holes.
Speaker 1: But before there were even atoms that were black holes.
Speaker 2: Yes, if the early universe was flooded with these massive
primordial black holes. They could have acted as gravitational anchors
like seeds. Exactly like seeds, they would pull matter together
at impossible speeds, overcoming those feedback loops from the stars.
They would force the gas to collapse into galaxies way
way faster than gravity alone could do.
Speaker 1: So the universe was born filled with monsters.
Speaker 2: That's one way to put it. It solves the math
for these early galaxies, but it introduces a nightmare scenario
where the universe didn't start simple and complex, it started
dangerous and dense.
Speaker 1: What's the other option, or perhaps.
Speaker 2: Even worse for our models, the timeline is wrong. Some
theorists are now seriously dusting off the idea that the
universe is older than thirteen point eight billion years, or.
Speaker 1: That the Big Bang wasn't the absolute.
Speaker 2: Beginning exactly, that we are in a cyclical universe and
these galaxies are leftovers or seeds from a previous eon
that survived the last Big crunch.
Speaker 1: It really feels like every time we open a new door,
we find something that tells us we don't know where we.
Speaker 2: Are or when we are.
Speaker 1: Speaking of where we are, let's bring it closer to home.
We usually think of our Solar system as fully mapped right,
pretty much known territory.
Speaker 2: We do Mercury to Neptune, maybe Pluto, if you're feeling nostalgic,
we think we know the neighborhood.
Speaker 1: But anominally number six on our list says there is
a ghost in the Solar System. This is the ongoing
hunt for planet nine.
Speaker 2: This is a fascinating detective story happening right now in
real time. Way out beyond the orbit of Neptune, in
the freezing darkness of the Kuiper Belt, there are thousands
icy rocks. They're called trans Neptunian.
Speaker 1: Objects like Sedna. Right, that was a big.
Speaker 2: One sedna an object called twenty twelve VP one thirteen,
and a handful of others. The issue is they're behaving strangely.
If these rocks were just drifting randomly out there, their
orbits should be scattered all over the place, pointing in all.
Speaker 1: Directions, like dust motes in the air, just random.
Speaker 2: Right, But they aren't. A group of them are clustered
together in space, and their orbits are all elongated and
tilted in the exact same weird direction. It's like they're
all pointing to the same spot, and what.
Speaker 1: Are the odds of that happening just by chance?
Speaker 2: Mike Brown and constantin Badagen at Celtech calculated it about
point zero zero seven percent.
Speaker 1: Okay, so it's not random. In physics, zero points zero
zero seven percent basically means this is happening for a reason.
It's not a coincidence.
Speaker 2: It is statistically impossible for it to be a coincidence.
Something is out there, something massive is hurting these rocks
like sheep with its gravity.
Speaker 1: So the leading theory is a hidden planet, a ninth planet.
Speaker 2: That's the Planet nine hypothesis. To herd. Rocks that heavy
across that much distance, you need a lot of gravity.
The calculations suggests a world with a mass five to
ten times that of Earth, a super Earth or a
mini Neptune hiding out there in the dark.
Speaker 1: If it's that big, five times the Earth, why haven't
we seen it. We have telescopes that can see galaxies
billions of light years away. Why can't we see a
planet in our own backyard?
Speaker 2: Because of the orbit. It's a huge, huge orbit. We
think Planet nine, if it exists, takes about twenty thousand
years to go.
Speaker 1: Around the Sun twenty thousand years.
Speaker 2: Yes, and its orbit is incredibly elliptical, like a stretched
out circle. Right now, it's likely at aphelion, the absolute
farthest point in its orbit, it would be hundreds of
times further out from the Sun than Earth is.
Speaker 1: The Sun would just be another bright star in its
sky exactly.
Speaker 2: It would be frozen, dark and reflecting almost no light
back at us. Searching for it is like searching for
a lump of coal in a dark cellar while looking
through a drinking straw. Incredibly difficult.
Speaker 1: But there's a darker theory here too, isn't there. You
mentioned primordial black holes earlier.
Speaker 2: I did, and this is the terrifying one. We've been
looking for planet nine for a decade now. We haven't
found a heat signature, we haven't found a reflected glint
of light. So two physicists, Yakoub Schultz and James Unwin
asked a question, what acts like a planet has five
Earth masses but emits absolutely no light. A black hole,
A primordial black hole, a black.
Speaker 1: Hole in our solar system orbiting our.
Speaker 2: Sun, A tiny one the size of a grapefruit or
a bowling ball.
Speaker 1: Wait, a bowling ball with a mass of five earths.
My brain can't even process that density.
Speaker 2: That is the nature of a black hole. If you
squeeze the entire Earth down into the size of a marble,
it would become a black hole. So yes, a grapefruit
sized object with a gravitational pull of a super earth.
Speaker 1: That is the stuff of nightmares. A greapefruit sized invisible
monster lurking in our cosmic backyard.
Speaker 2: It is. It would be completely invisible to telescopes because
it absorbs light, it doesn't reflect it. It would just
be a sinkhole of gravity silently orbiting our sun, hurting
those icy rocks.
Speaker 1: How do we even find something like that If you
can't see it.
Speaker 2: We can't look for light. We have to look for
its shadow, for its distortion of space time. Telescopes are
now looking for gravitational microlensing. Basically, we are watching for
background stars to flicker in a very specific way as
this tiny black hole passes in front of them.
Speaker 1: We are hunting for a flicker in the.
Speaker 2: Dark until we find it or the planet we are
sharing our solar system with a massive phantom. We don't
know which it is.
Speaker 1: From a phantom in our backyard to a bruise on
the nge of reality. Let's talk about anomaly number five,
the CMB cold spot.
Speaker 2: Right, so we're going back to that baby picture of
the universe, the cosmic microwave background radiation.
Speaker 1: And as you said, usually this map is incredibly uniform, right,
the same temperature everywhere with tiny fluctuations.
Speaker 2: It should be, Yes, the Big Bang happened everywhere at once.
The temperature variation should be tiny and random, like static
on an old TV screen. But in the southern hemisphere
of this map there is a hole, a massive region
that is significantly colder, about seventy microkelvins colder than the
average temperature. And it's huge. It's enormous. The probability of
a random fluctuation creating a spot this big in this
cold is less than two percent.
Speaker 1: Two percent is low, but not impossible. Could it just
be a fluke?
Speaker 2: It could be, but it's stubborn and it's so large
that it makes physicists very uncomfortable. So they've tried to
explain it. First, they checked for instrument error, ruled out wmap,
saw it, Plank saw it. It's real. Then they looked
into the supervoid theory. The idea is that maybe it's
a region of space with far fewer galaxies than normal.
Speaker 1: Why would fewer galaxies make it cold? How does that work?
Speaker 2: It's a really cool effect called the integrated sax Wolf effect.
Imagine a photon, a particle of light from the CMB
traveling towards US. If it passes through a big empty void,
it's like it's falling into a valley of space time
it gains energy falling in. Then it has to climb
out the other side. But while the photon is in
the valley, the universe is expanding, the valley stretches out
and becomes shallower, so the light doesn't have to climb
as steep a hill to get out. It should leave
with more energy, making it a hot spot.
Speaker 1: Wait, I thought you said it would make it cold. Ah.
Speaker 2: Right, it's the opposite. In a dark energy dominated universe,
dark energy pushes things apart, so it actually makes the
climb out steeper, so the light loses energy, and losing
energy for a photon means its wavelength gets longer, which
we see as colder.
Speaker 1: So giant empty space acts like a freezer for light
passing through.
Speaker 2: It exactly, But recent surveys have mapped that region of
space in three D, and while there is a void there,
it's not empty enough to account for the chill. The
math doesn't add up. The void accounts for maybe ten
percent of the temperature drop.
Speaker 1: We see, So ninety percent of the cold is still unexplained.
If it's not a mistake and it's not empty space,
what could possibly have cost it.
Speaker 2: This opens the door to the wildest theory in all
of cosmon the multiverse collision.
Speaker 1: Okay, now we're gatting into pure science fiction territory, or
so it seems.
Speaker 2: It sounds like it, but it comes from a legitimate
theoretical physicist, Laura Mercini Houghton. She proposed that our universe
is not a solitary bubble. Imagine an infinite foam of bubbles,
and each one is an entire.
Speaker 1: Universe, the multiverse.
Speaker 2: Yes, she argues, the cold spot is a.
Speaker 1: Bruise, a bruse, What do you mean? A bruise, a.
Speaker 2: Scar, a physical remnant from where another universe, another bubble,
collided with ours during the chaotic expansion of the early cosmos.
Speaker 1: Wait, so our universe crashed into another reality.
Speaker 2: That's the theory. Imagine two soap bubbles touching in the air,
the walls press against each other. That pressure would have
pushed matter and energy away from the point of contact,
leaving a permanent mark, a thinned out and colder region
on the energy distribution of our CMB.
Speaker 1: And that mark is the cold spot.
Speaker 2: Yes, if this is correct, and that is a huge
If the cold spot is the first empirical observational evidence
that reality is larger than our observable universe, that is
just mind bending.
Speaker 1: It implies there are other bubbles, other laws of physics
may be pressing up against our own.
Speaker 2: It does. Skeptics hate it obviously. They call it speculative
fiction because it's so hard to test. But the cold
spot remains stubborn. It's a giant, freezing anomaly on our
map of creation, staring back at us, hinting that we
might just be one bubble in a much darker, much
more crowded ocean.
Speaker 1: That image gives me chills, Speaking of things reaching out
from the dark, Let's move to anomaly number four. This
one sounds like something straight out of a contact movie.
The heartbeat from the deep.
Speaker 2: Fast radio bursts or FRBs.
Speaker 1: So what exactly is an FRB. I know they're powerful
but what are they.
Speaker 2: It's a millisecond long blast of radio energy from deep space.
But don't let the short duration fool you. In that
fraction of a second, a single FRB can release as
much energy as our sun does in eighty years.
Speaker 1: Eighty years of sun power in a milli second. That's
a violent, violent.
Speaker 2: Event, incomprehensibly powerful. For a long time, we thought they
had to be Cataclysm's one off destructive events, you know,
two neutron stars smashing together, or a black hole swallowing
a star.
Speaker 1: Because once things smashed, they're gone. You can't explode the
same star twice. It's a final act exactly.
Speaker 2: But then came FRB one to one zero twelve.
Speaker 1: It didn't stop.
Speaker 2: It repeated, and not just randomly. It's located in a
dwarf galaxy three billion light years away, and in twenty
twenty scientists noticed a pattern. It has a one hundred
and fifty seven day cycle.
Speaker 1: A cycle like a clock your kid.
Speaker 2: Yes, it fires, bursts actively for a period of about
ninety days, and then it goes completely silent for sixty
seven days. Then it starts again right on schedule.
Speaker 1: That just kills the collision theory dead in the.
Speaker 2: Water precisely, you can't have a collision every one hundred
and fifty seven days. So the leading natural theory is
a magnetar, a type of neutron star with a magnetic
field a trillion times stronger than Earth's.
Speaker 1: Okay, so what would a magnetar be doing.
Speaker 2: The idea is maybe starquakes on its surface release these flares.
The crust of the star cracks under the immense magnetic stress.
Speaker 1: Stark quakes, I like that word.
Speaker 2: And because the magnetic field is so ridiculously intense, a
crack in the crust could release a blast of radiation.
Speaker 1: Sounds plausible, but there's always a butt.
Speaker 2: But the regularity is baffling. Why one hundred and fifty
seven day on off switch? Is it wobbling like a top?
Is it orbiting another object that blocks our view? Even
the magnetar theory struggles to explain the focused intensity of
the beam and the strict schedule it keeps.
Speaker 1: And here comes the techno signature theory. Right, the alien hypothesis.
Speaker 2: Enter avi Lobe from Harvard and others. They crunch the
numbers on an artificial origin. They asked if an advanced
civilization a type two civilization on the Kargashchev scale wanted
to propel a massive spacecraft across interstellar distances. How would
they do it?
Speaker 1: A light sail pushed by a powerful beam.
Speaker 2: Exactly a giant reflective sheet pushed by a focused beam
of energy, And the calculation and show that a planet
sized radio transmitter powering a light sale would leak energy
that from our perspective, looks exactly like an FRB okay.
Speaker 1: In the cycle one hundred and fifty seven day period.
Speaker 2: The beam would be sweeping across the sky as its
home planet rotates on its axis or orbit star. So
from our vantage point three billion light years away, we'd
only see the beam when it happens to point in
our direction, creating that periodic on off cycle we observe.
Speaker 1: So we have to ask the question, are we hearing
a dead star burping or are we hearing the engine
leakage of a Type two civilization starship.
Speaker 2: The fact that we cannot rule out the latter is
what's so haunting. We are detecting a heartbeat across three
billion years of darkness, and we don't know if it's
natural or artificial.
Speaker 1: It's fascinating that the artificial explanation fits the data just
as well, if not better, in some ways than the
natural one. And speaking of existence, let's get really existential
with anominally number three. This one isn't about what's out there,
it's about why we're here at all.
Speaker 2: Anti matter asymmetry, this is what I call the existential glitch.
Speaker 1: So the standard model of physics says the Big Bang
should create matter and antimatter right in equal amounts.
Speaker 2: Perfect equal parts. Physics is beautiful and symmetrical. For every proton,
there should be an anti proton for every electron a positron.
They are perfect mirror images with opposite charges, and when
they touch annihilation they instantly turn back into pure energy
gamma rays a puff of light.
Speaker 1: So logically, if the Big Bang create equal amounts of both,
they should have all just canceled each other out instantly
in the first second.
Speaker 2: Correct, the infant universe should have been a brief, brilliant
soup of instant annihilation. The result should have been a boring,
empty universe filled with nothing but light, no stars, no galaxies,
and definitely know us.
Speaker 1: But looks around here we are. I'm pinching my arm,
I'm made of matter. The whole world is matter one.
Speaker 2: For some reason, there was a tiny imbalance for every
billion particles of antimatter. There were a billion and one
particles of matter when the Great Annihilation happened. That tiny
fraction of leftover matter survive.
Speaker 1: So we are the rounding error. The universe is the
stuff that was left over.
Speaker 2: We are the glitch. The universe essentially tried to delete
itself at birth, and we are the leftovers that survive
the purge. Everything you see, everything you are, is that
one in a billion rounding error.
Speaker 1: Why why did matter win? What caused that imbalance?
Speaker 2: We don't know. There is no known law of physics
that favors matter over antimatter. We've been smashing particles at
the Large Hadron Collider looking for a violation of this symmetry.
It's called CP violation. But we haven't found nearly enough
to explain our own universe's existence.
Speaker 1: So are there any theories on where all the antimatter went? Oh?
Speaker 2: There are wild ones. Some physicists suggest hidden anti galaxies.
Speaker 1: You mean, like whole regions of space made entirely of antimatter.
Speaker 2: Yes, vast regions, maybe even entire clusters of galaxies far
beyond our view, made of anti matter self.
Speaker 1: Do not land the spaceship there. That would be a bad.
Speaker 2: Day, definitely not. If a probe from our galaxy touched
an anti afteroid from one of theirs, it would trigger
an explosion larger than any supernova.
Speaker 1: What else could it be?
Speaker 2: A lot of hope is pinned on neutrinos, those ghostly
little particles that pass through us by the trillions every second.
Some theory suggest they might be their own anti particles,
and they could have played some kind of trick in
the early universe converting antimatter into matter. But until we
solve this, our very existence is a fundamental anomaly that.
Speaker 1: Is unbelievably humbling. We are literally the point zero zero
zero zero zero one percent that didn't get deleted exactly.
Moving on to anomaly number two. We talked about aliens
potentially powering FRBs, but this anomaly actually passed right through
our solar system. The mysterious visitor.
Speaker 2: Umoma October twenty seventeen, a date that will go down
in history the first interstellar object humanity ever detected, the
first my own visitor from another star system.
Speaker 1: I remember it so clearly. It was all over the news.
It was shaped like a cigar, right, yeah, or something
really weird.
Speaker 2: Or pancake. It was very, very weird. The data suggested
it had a ratio of at least ten point one
ten times longer than it was wide. We've never seen
a natural asteroid or comet that looks like that. But
the shape wasn't even the weirdest part. It was the movement.
Speaker 1: It didn't move like a normal rock, did it.
Speaker 2: No, as Umuah whipped around the Sun and started heading
back out into deep space. It accelerated, it sped up.
Speaker 1: Now commas do that, right, The heat up, shoot out
gas and dust and it acts like a little rocket thruster.
Speaker 2: That's called outgassing. And it's exactly what everyone expected to see.
But here's the thing. Every major telescope on Earth was
pointed at this thing. We looked for the tail of gas,
we looked for the coma of dust. There was nothing. Zero.
It was a dry rock. Yet it accelerated away from
the Sun, defying gravity. It experienced what's called non gravitational
acceleration without any visible means of propulsion.
Speaker 1: This ignited a firestorm in the astronomical community. What are
the natural explanations people came up with.
Speaker 2: They are strained to say the least. Some said it
was a hydrogen iceberg, a chunk of frozen hydrogen from
a giant molecular cloud that evaporates invisibly.
Speaker 1: But would that survive a trip between stars?
Speaker 2: Probably not. Hydrogen ice is incredibly volatile. It shouldn't have
survived the journey. Others suggested a nitrogen iceberg, a chip
off an exopluto, or even a cosmic dust bunny, a
super light, flucky clump of dust.
Speaker 1: But then there's abul lobe. Again. He had a different idea.
Speaker 2: Yes, he put his reputation on the line. He argued
that the simplest, most direct explanation for an object that
accelerates without any exhaust is solar radiation pressure.
Speaker 1: Sunlight is actually pushing it like wind on a sail.
Speaker 2: Yes, but for sunlight, which is incredibly weak, to push
a rock that big fast enough to account for the
observed movement, the object would have to be incredibly thin
and have a huge surface area less than a millimeter.
Speaker 1: Thick, like a sheet like a sail.
Speaker 2: Nature doesn't make huge, ultra thin sheets of material that
can survive interstellar travel, but engineers do so.
Speaker 1: He thinks it was a light sale, an alien probe.
Speaker 2: A light sale, defunct alien technology, a piece of space junk,
or an active probe. He simply points out that it's
tumbling motion, its extreme shape, its spectral properties, and its
anomalist acceleration all fit the profile of a manufactured object
much better than any natural.
Speaker 1: Explanation, and the scientific community to love that.
Speaker 2: I'm sure they reacted with extreme hostility. The academic world
wants it to be a weird rock, but the data
remains anomalous. Umuas is gone, now lost to the dark forever.
We missed our chance to get a closer look and
know for sure.
Speaker 1: It really makes you wonder, doesn't it. Was it a
strange stone? Or was it the first time we looked
at a piece of garbage thrown out by a neighbor
we didn't even know we had.
Speaker 2: It's a haunting question, and we may never know the answer.
Speaker 1: Right, we've arrived anomaly number one, the big one, the
one you said is a monument to our ignorance, the
worst prediction in history, the vacuum catastrophe.
Speaker 2: This is it. This is the anomaly that suggests we
know well, basically nothing about the fundamental nature of reality.
Speaker 1: So quantum field theory it says that empty space isn't
actually empty, right, It's fizzing with energy.
Speaker 2: Right. It's a bubbling quantum brew of virtual particles popping
in and out of existence constantly. These fluctuations contain energy.
And because Einstein taught us that mass and energy are equivalent, sisa,
this vacuum energy should exert a gravitational pull. It should
have weight.
Speaker 1: Okay, so empty space has weight. It should be pushing
or pulling on the universe.
Speaker 2: Theoretically, yes, And in the late nineties, when astronomers discovered
the universe's expansion is accelerating the discovery of dark energy,
physicists thought, aha, we've found it. This vacuum energy is
the dark energy pushing the universe apart.
Speaker 1: That makes perfect sense. So they went and calculated how
much energy should be there based on quantum theory.
Speaker 2: They did. They use their best, most tested quantum equations.
Then they looked at the actual expansion of the universe
to measure the observed amount of dark energy. And they
compared the two numbers.
Speaker 1: And how bad was the mismatch.
Speaker 2: The theoretical prediction was larger than the observed reality by
a factor of ten to the power of one hundred
and twenty.
Speaker 1: Ten with one hundred and twenty zeros after it. I
can't even visualize that number. That's not a number to joke.
Speaker 2: Put it this way, there are only about ten to
the power of eighty atoms in the entire observable universe.
The error in our prediction is forty orders of magnitude
larger than the number of atoms in existence. It is,
without exaggeration, the most wrong a scientific prediction has ever been.
Speaker 1: That's not an error, that's I don't even know what
that is. It's a complete failure of the theory.
Speaker 2: It's the vacuum catastrophe. Because if the theoretical calculation were correct,
the gravitational repulsion of the vacuum would be so strong
that it would have ripped the universe apart in a
microsecond after the Big Bang. No atoms could have formed,
no stars, no space, no time, just an instantaneous rip
into oblivion.
Speaker 1: We're here. The expansion is real, but it's gentle. It's slow.
Speaker 2: Yes, for some reason, the actual vacuum energy is incredibly weak.
It's just barely strong enough to gently push the galaxies apart.
Over billions of years.
Speaker 1: So why is the prediction so catastrophically wrong? Where did
we mess up?
Speaker 2: That is the biggest question in physics. Some argue for
a cancelation mechanism. Maybe there's some other completely unknown force
or particle that perfectly balances out the vacuum energy to
one hundred and twenty decimal places, leaving just that tiny,
tiny siliver behind.
Speaker 1: That sounds suspiciously fine tuned, like balancing a needle on
its tip for the entire age of the universe.
Speaker 2: It looks artificial. It looks like a setup, which leads
to the anthropic principle. Maybe there are billions upon billions
of universes in a multiverse, all with different vacuum energy values,
and most of them did blow up instantly. We just
happen to live in this one simply because it's the
only kind of universe stable enough to support life.
Speaker 1: To ask the question, that's survivor bias on a cosmic scale,
we won the cosmic lottery exactly.
Speaker 2: Or the scariest and most talked about option simulation theory.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, here we go.
Speaker 2: Maybe our understanding of the vacuum is an illusion because
we live inside a computer. Maybe the parameters of physics
are set arbitrarily low by the programmers to save processing
power in the simulation. Why calculate one hundred and twenty
decimal places if you don't have to.
Speaker 1: It really feels like a giant sign hanging in the
Cosmo saying you know nothing.
Speaker 2: It is a monument to our ignorance. Until we solve
this discrepancy. Everything we think we know about the universe,
from gravity to quantum mechanics, is built on a foundation
that doesn't make any sense at all.
Speaker 1: So where does that leave us. We've got a hubble
tension that says our timeline is broken. We have galaxies
that are too big, too soon. We've got a potential
primordial black hole in our own solar system, a bruise
from a possible multiverse collision, and a vacuum energy error
that defines all logic.
Speaker 2: It leaves us in a very exciting and a very
precarious place. The foundations are shaking.
Speaker 1: It feels like the laws of physics are just waiting
to break, like we're about to find out everything we
know is wrong.
Speaker 2: I think the difference is perspective. You can say science
is broken, or you can say science is about to
have a breakthrough. Every single time in history we've had
anomalies like this, like when Mercury's orbit didn't make sense
to Newtonian physics. It didn't mean physics was dead. It
led to a revolution. It led to Einstein's general relativity.
Speaker 1: So we are on the edge of the next Einstein.
Speaker 2: Moment, I believe. So the data is screaming at us
from all directions. The universe is telling us we're missing
something big. We just need to learn how to listen.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm certainly listening now, and I want to know
what you, the listener, thinks about all this.
Speaker 2: Yes, we really want to hear from you. This is
a conversation.
Speaker 1: Which anomaly keeps you up at night? Do you think
um Wa Mullah was a probe? Or is the vacuum
catastrophe proof that we are living in a simulation. What
is your stand Leave.
Speaker 2: A comment let us know your theory. We read all
of them. Thanks for listening to thrilling threads.
Speaker 1: Keep looking up