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Speaker 4: Hey, welcome to Ologies. I'm your Alie Warren the host.
Speaker 4: Now each week I sit down with an ologist, I
Speaker 4: ask why do they love what they do? What is
Speaker 4: your deal? What should we know about it? And this
Speaker 4: week we cover the whole fucking universe which has existed
Speaker 4: and it's expanding in your floating in it, and you're
Speaker 4: made out of particles and matter and forces we don't
Speaker 4: even understand, and maybe there are multiverses and is this reality?
Speaker 4: And what are you doing here and does anything matter?
Speaker 4: And of course it does. But should you be afraid
Speaker 4: of wearing bright lipstick or dancing in public? Probably not. No,
Speaker 4: in the scope of things, and the scope of things
Speaker 4: is really it's giant. It's called cosmology. Now, if you
Speaker 4: think that you listen to this episode already because you
Speaker 4: learn some stuff about beard care and face wash, think again, suckers.
Speaker 4: That was cosmetology. This week is cosmology, the study of
Speaker 4: the cosmos. And so when I say this episode is
Speaker 4: like everything, it's actually everything. It's the whole universe. It's
Speaker 4: a lot, it's a lot, it's so much. It's a
Speaker 4: two parter, it's a two fur So this week we'll
Speaker 4: get the nuts and bolts of what astrophysics is, and
Speaker 4: after about an hour you will walk away cocktail party
Speaker 4: literate on goddamn astrophysics. Kind of. I don't know. I'm
Speaker 4: learning here with you. Of all the episodes I've done,
Speaker 4: this was probably the one I need the least about.
Speaker 4: So let's learn together, shall we? Part two of this
Speaker 4: next week are your questions submitted via Patreon and the
Speaker 4: Ologies Podcast Facebook group. Y'all had good ones. Next week
Speaker 4: will address them. Now, the etymology of cosmology. Cosmos with
Speaker 4: a K is the kicky little Greek word for world
Speaker 4: or order. So cosmology is a study of planets and such, sure,
Speaker 4: but also why and what and how where? What's huh?
Speaker 4: It's the study of what. This week's cosmologist is someone
Speaker 4: I've had a fawning Twitter fascination with for a while,
Speaker 4: and I met through a group of science friends I love,
Speaker 4: known to some as the nerd Brigade or kind of
Speaker 4: like a gang but with a website. But I was
Speaker 4: always kind of intimidated by her because she is, in
Speaker 4: her own words, an academic nomad, and she continent hops
Speaker 4: while studying particle physics and black holes and gravitational waves,
Speaker 4: and she hangs out with Stephen Hawking. So when I
Speaker 4: met her through friends, I usually just sat at brunch
Speaker 4: like a barnacle and tried to look away when she
Speaker 4: caught me staring at her, So I asked her to
Speaker 4: be on the podcast. She said yes, and I immediately
Speaker 4: started perspiring. So she came to my apartment. We sat down,
Speaker 4: and my usual hour interview stretched to almost two, hence
Speaker 4: the two parter. Hours before she politely reminded me that
Speaker 4: we were supposed to be meeting people for a movie
Speaker 4: and we should stop. I'm so so glad we did
Speaker 4: this podcast because I got to know her even better
Speaker 4: as a friend, which, y'all, I'm going to be cheesy
Speaker 4: and say it's a true honor. So in this episode,
Speaker 4: you'll learn about the things that make you you and
Speaker 4: the stars that exploded to make the things that make
Speaker 4: you you, and the scale of our existence in space,
Speaker 4: and what it feels like to be heckled by Stephen
Speaker 4: Hawking and if this is real life, and if astrophysicists
Speaker 4: are just like making bullshit up that the rest of
Speaker 4: us just accept because we're like, man, I don't even
Speaker 4: know how to read these equations. So okay. So you'll
Speaker 4: get at the very least a loose grasp on just
Speaker 4: the whole of existence and maybe steel yourself to be
Speaker 4: the biggest you you ought to be, and more importantly,
Speaker 4: get to know better one of the world's finest voices
Speaker 4: in cosmology. You know her as astro Katie on Twitter
Speaker 4: aka astrophysicist Katie mac. So take me back to defining
Speaker 4: some stuff because as a layman, as a lay woman
Speaker 4: over here, a lay human, yes, I don't know that
Speaker 4: difference between a physicist, an astrophysicist, a particle physicist, an experimentalist,
Speaker 4: a cosmologist, and an astronomer. I don't know what those are,
Speaker 4: and I'm either going to have to Wikipedia this or
Speaker 4: I can have you give me a rundown.
Speaker 5: So these things are, they're a little bit like fluid,
Speaker 5: these definitions. So astronomer is basically somebody who studies space
Speaker 5: in some way. And usually when people say astronomer versus astrophysicists,
Speaker 5: usually astronomer is like more on the observational side or
Speaker 5: sort of describing stuff in space. Astrophysicist is more about
Speaker 5: like trying to understand how the physics of the thing
Speaker 5: in space works. So you can be an astrophysicist trying
Speaker 5: to understand how galaxies form, for example, and so you're
Speaker 5: applying physics to this stuff in space. If you're a
Speaker 5: particle physicist, you're working on like how particle interactions work,
Speaker 5: so like you know atoms, fasters and things. Large Hadron
Speaker 5: collider exposon usually I mean the like classic particle experiment,
Speaker 5: does you take two particles and you smash them together
Speaker 5: and you see what comes out. Huh, that's what the
Speaker 5: Large Hadron Collider is doing now.
Speaker 4: The LHC. That's what you call the Large Hadron Collider
Speaker 4: when y'all are tight, So you've maybe heard of it,
Speaker 4: you kind of know, like it's a thing in Europe,
Speaker 4: maybe has something to do with atoms. I looked into it.
Speaker 4: The Large Hadron Collider is located near the France Switzerland border,
Speaker 4: and it's a circular tunnel. It's over five hundred feet
Speaker 4: deep in some parts, and it's seventeen miles around. It
Speaker 4: is the largest machine in the world. So this thing
Speaker 4: consists of over twelve hundred magnets and they're cooled to
Speaker 4: a temperature colder than outer space, and then the magnets
Speaker 4: accelerate protons to almost the speed of light, and then
Speaker 4: the protons are bashed together. It's very punk rock, very expense.
Speaker 4: The LHC was mostly completed in two thousand and eight.
Speaker 4: Over ten thousand scientists and engineers worked on it. Now
Speaker 4: in photos it looks kind of like a giant, well
Speaker 4: lit subway tunnel, but with less p and rats. If
Speaker 4: you're like, I can't remember what a proton is because
Speaker 4: I'm not required to anymore. I'm not in school, don't worry.
Speaker 4: Neither did I I had to google, like, how does
Speaker 4: an atom work? I forgot, so I'll brush you up.
Speaker 4: So matter is stuff, and molecules are some atoms stuck together.
Speaker 4: Atoms are made of a nucleus, which is a little
Speaker 4: cluster of neutrons and protons. Protons have a positive charge,
Speaker 4: pro electrons have an equal negative charge, and electrons are
Speaker 4: bebopping zooming around whirling dervish style outside of the nucleus.
Speaker 4: So the neutrons and protons, which are the ones that
Speaker 4: are just cuddling in the nucleus, those are made of
Speaker 4: smaller powder called quarks. And the quarks come in a
Speaker 4: couple different varieties. So what gives these particles their mass?
Speaker 4: What are they? Where do they come from? We've got
Speaker 4: all these little tiny things that make up matter. Okay,
Speaker 4: So I heard it explained that there's a field called
Speaker 4: the Higgs field. It's named after one alive and well
Speaker 4: Scotsman physicist named Peter Higgs. And how a particle interacts
Speaker 4: with the Higgs field gives it its mass, kind of
Speaker 4: like drag and water. So Higgs bosons are particles. They're
Speaker 4: an excitation of the Higgs field. It's kind of like
Speaker 4: a drop of water. Splashing from an ocean. So the
Speaker 4: Large Hadron Collider smashed protons together to see if they
Speaker 4: could prove that the Higgs boson exists, and guess what,
Speaker 4: bitches it does. You're not bitches. Some people call this
Speaker 4: the god particle because it's so fundamental to all matter
Speaker 4: in the universe. Does Doctor Higgs like this name? No,
Speaker 4: he's an atheist. He thinks it sucks. And the guy
Speaker 4: who coined did the God particle actually wanted to call
Speaker 4: it the goddamn particle, but his publisher made him change
Speaker 4: it in a book. So the Large Hadron Collider. One
Speaker 4: of the things it does smashes these protons together into
Speaker 4: smaller things to figure out why matter has mass. There
Speaker 4: you go. Also, the Large Hadron Collider accidentally has its
Speaker 4: name spelled wrong on its own website as Large hard
Speaker 4: On Collider once would be mortifying. But what if they
Speaker 4: did it more than once, like twice or five times?
Speaker 4: That's impossible, is it? Because a search on their site
Speaker 4: revealed they'd spelled it large hard On Collider one hundred
Speaker 4: and sixty five times. Thank God particle for that. That's
Speaker 4: just precious. So whenever you're like, I don't understand this stuff.
Speaker 4: Maybe I'm not smart enough. Just think someone typed in
Speaker 4: large hard on collider over one hundred and fifty times
Speaker 4: and they built the thing. So how else do people
Speaker 4: figure this shit out? About very important things that we
Speaker 4: can't see.
Speaker 5: But there are other ways to do particle physics measuring
Speaker 5: how particles interact with each other, throwing particles at other things,
Speaker 5: accelerating stuff, and seeing what happens, all of that kind
Speaker 5: of stuff. On the experimental side and on the theory side,
Speaker 5: it's a lot about trying to understand like the fundamental
Speaker 5: forces of nature, so like how how atoms hold together,
Speaker 5: how you know particles can change into other particles in
Speaker 5: certain conditions, how gravity fits into all that, which it
Speaker 5: doesn't at the moment theoretically, Okay, okay, it's very hard
Speaker 5: to get gravity and particle physics to work together. This
Speaker 5: is kind of yeah, it's it's sort of This may
Speaker 5: be another topic, but like, this is the reason string
Speaker 5: theory was invented.
Speaker 4: Real quick, What is string theory? Well, in a very
Speaker 4: quark sized, tiny nutshell, the premise of strength theory is
Speaker 4: that basic objects are not point like, but they're string like.
Speaker 4: So a quark might be made of a loop that
Speaker 4: kind of vibrates and moves around. Every kind of particle
Speaker 4: is like a different wiggly string. So why does anyone care?
Speaker 4: Why are people so horny for string theory? Well, number one,
Speaker 4: it's from the eighties, and maybe this is like the
Speaker 4: scrunchy of particle physics. I don't know. More importantly, string
Speaker 4: theory is a theory that works with both Einstein's general
Speaker 4: relativity and that mister Einstein pose that what we perceive
Speaker 4: as the force of gravity is the curvature of space
Speaker 4: and time. More on that in a minute, and quantum mechanics,
Speaker 4: which is the physics of the tiniest building blocks that exist.
Speaker 4: So remember those quirks that made up protons and neutrons?
Speaker 4: What are those made of? Maybe these stringlike loops of matter.
Speaker 4: Every time I hear string theory mentioned, I think of
Speaker 4: string cheese. I cannot And I was writing and researching
Speaker 4: this episode, and I found myself on a website like
Speaker 4: two thirty in the morning learning that string cheese, as
Speaker 4: we know what, was invented in Wisconsin in nineteen seventy six,
Speaker 4: and the way they get it to string is to
Speaker 4: heat it to one hundred and forty degrees fahrenheit, and
Speaker 4: that aligns all the milk proteins. Also, the first iterations
Speaker 4: of string cheese were bigger and chunkier and served to
Speaker 4: drunks in bars. Should we get back to physics, Okay, I'm.
Speaker 5: Sorry, And this is like the big question in physics
Speaker 5: is that, like, so, there there are a few sort
Speaker 5: of fundamental forces of nature. Right, there's electromagnetism, and that's
Speaker 5: like light and you know, like static cling and all
Speaker 5: of those kinds of things, right, and magnetism. And then
Speaker 5: there's the weak nuclear force, which has to do with
Speaker 5: like how particles decay in radioactivity that kind of thing,
Speaker 5: and how particles can change into other particles under certain conditions.
Speaker 5: There's the strong nuclear force, and that holds particles together
Speaker 5: in the centers of at Okay, and those all kind
Speaker 5: of make sense together theoretically, like you can write down
Speaker 5: equations that make those all fit in some way more
Speaker 5: or less.
Speaker 4: When Katie says you can write down equations that make
Speaker 4: those all fit, I appreciate her being inclusive with the
Speaker 4: second person, But I cannot write down equations to make
Speaker 4: those all fit in some way. I cannot do that.
Speaker 5: But then there's gravity, and gravity just doesn't follow any
Speaker 5: of the same rules. It's like it's very hard to
Speaker 5: put together a theory that includes those the fundamental forces
Speaker 5: of particle physics and gravity.
Speaker 4: So so it's gravity like the bad boy in a
Speaker 4: teen drama. It's just like it's just not following any rules.
Speaker 5: It's weird. It's like like gravity is all about space time,
Speaker 5: you know, so gravity like, So the theory of gravity
Speaker 5: that we have is Einstein's theory of relativity, so general relativity.
Speaker 5: This is the theory of gravity.
Speaker 4: Where okay, yeah, heres Einstein. Here's how the universe of
Speaker 4: which you are a part works.
Speaker 5: The basic picture is that you can think of space
Speaker 5: as this malleable thing, and if you have something that
Speaker 5: has mass, it creates like a dent in space. It
Speaker 5: sort of bends space around it, okay, and so other
Speaker 5: things moving past will respond to that and like fall
Speaker 5: into that dent. And that's like how gravitational attraction works.
Speaker 5: You can think of it in this geometric way, okay,
Speaker 5: and it works really well like geometrically to think of
Speaker 5: it like that. But then there are fundamental principles that
Speaker 5: happen in that like the speed of light, as a
Speaker 5: limiting factor and all sorts of things like that, so
Speaker 5: only certain paths things can follow and everything. But then
Speaker 5: the particle physics stuff, like all the equations of particle
Speaker 5: physics are done without thinking about gravity because on those scales,
Speaker 5: like gravity isn't important. It's a really really weak force, okay.
Speaker 5: But also like there are the way that the particle
Speaker 5: physics is is formulated in the standard model of particle physics,
Speaker 5: which is what we use to talk about all these interactions.
Speaker 5: It doesn't have the same like, it doesn't follow the
Speaker 5: same rules as gravity, Like there are ways in which
Speaker 5: the whole like speed of light thing is violated in
Speaker 5: one way that you can formulate how particles move around,
Speaker 5: which is kind of like there's kind of like there's
Speaker 5: this way of formulating it where a particle going from
Speaker 5: point A to point B passes through every possible path
Speaker 5: on the way between point A and point B, and
Speaker 5: it's only by by using that idea that you get
Speaker 5: the right answer for how that particle is moving in
Speaker 5: the particle physics point of view, And that doesn't work
Speaker 5: with relativity. So there are a couple of things like that,
Speaker 5: where like quantum mechanics and relativity just do not like
Speaker 5: each other really, And it gets especially problematic when you
Speaker 5: get to black hole because a black hole is this
Speaker 5: very like intense gravitational system mm hmm. It's basically a
Speaker 5: dent in space time that's so deep that like everything
Speaker 5: falls into it if it gets close enough. But at
Speaker 5: the edge of a black hole, the event horizon, you
Speaker 5: have this weird quantum mechanical thing happening where you can
Speaker 5: have like particles evaporating off of it, and that sets
Speaker 5: like a sort of scale of the black hole, and
Speaker 5: that means there's quantum mechanics happening in a strong gravitational system,
Speaker 5: and then just everything breaks. It just goes totally haywire,
Speaker 5: because if you look at it from a gravitational point
Speaker 5: of view, like a relativity point of view, you should
Speaker 5: see nothing at all interesting happening when you when you
Speaker 5: fall into the black hole, like aside from like you're
Speaker 5: you're killed by the gravity, right, Like you don't see
Speaker 5: like nothing weird happens when you pass the horizon. But
Speaker 5: from a particle physics point of view, like there there
Speaker 5: might be like this like firewall, like there might be
Speaker 5: like a sort of like boundary of intense radiation there
Speaker 5: because of the way you have to think about how
Speaker 5: the particle physics works. This is a complicated story, but.
Speaker 6: Basically the astrophysics typically is yeah, I'm not explaining it
Speaker 6: very well, but but basically, like like, basically, when you
Speaker 6: get to that point when you have a black hole
Speaker 6: has an evaporation happening where particles are coming off the
Speaker 6: edge of the event horizon, one way of looking at
Speaker 6: it says that that that means that whatever you.
Speaker 5: Fought through into the black hole, you can't ever find
Speaker 5: out what it was. That information is destroid. But quantum mechanics,
Speaker 5: like the particle point of view, says you can't do that,
Speaker 5: and so there has to be some kind of loophole
Speaker 5: and then gravity doesn't like that and you just you
Speaker 5: just end up with chaos. And so there's this there's
Speaker 5: this big problem called the black hole information paradox, which
Speaker 5: has been around forever, and every once in a while
Speaker 5: somebody's like, oh, I solved it, and then it's really
Speaker 5: complicated and people don't really understand how that works.
Speaker 4: Has anyone actually solved that?
Speaker 5: I mean, I so technically I'm just not qualified to
Speaker 5: know that for sure, because it requires understanding quantum gravity
Speaker 5: in a way that I do not. But there have
Speaker 5: been some solutions suggested, but in general there's still a
Speaker 5: lot of discussion, so I don't know.
Speaker 4: Okay, wait, so what does a cosmologist do.
Speaker 5: A cosmologist just means you study the universe as a whole, right,
Speaker 5: so you study maybe the beginning of the universe, the
Speaker 5: end of the universe, how it changes over time. But
Speaker 5: you can be a physicist cosmologist or an astronomer cosmologist,
Speaker 5: and those are different, and it's culturally different. Like, but
Speaker 5: the so if you're a physicist, if you hang out
Speaker 5: with particle physics people and you say you're a cosmologist,
Speaker 5: then then the implication is that you work on like
Speaker 5: the beginning of the universe and the forces of nature
Speaker 5: and maybe the end of the universe something like that.
Speaker 5: If you hang out with astrophysicists and you say you're
Speaker 5: a cosmologist, then you just study things that are really
Speaker 5: far away, or you study you know, some something you
Speaker 5: know more fundamental. But like, you can be a cosmologist
Speaker 5: in astrophysics and you're a cosmologist because you study very
Speaker 5: very distant galaxies. The reason that counts as cosmology is
Speaker 5: because that means you're studying the very distant past of
Speaker 5: the universe.
Speaker 4: So there are different flavors of cosmology, but they're all
Speaker 4: kind of linked, at least in my opinion, by like, oh,
Speaker 4: where are we? What are we? What are we made of? AKA,
Speaker 4: it's a branch of astronomy that involves the origin and
Speaker 4: evolution of the universe. That's a less panicky way to
Speaker 4: put it.
Speaker 5: And so so then you're studying like how the universe
Speaker 5: has changed over time. So there are kind of different
Speaker 5: ways of doing it. And I've done all of those
Speaker 5: different kinds of cosmology, I guess because I've spent my
Speaker 5: time kind of bouncing back and forth between the particle
Speaker 5: physics and the astrophysics communities. So I've worked on you know,
Speaker 5: the Big Bang and like theories of the early universe,
Speaker 5: and I've worked on distant galaxies and how galaxies form.
Speaker 5: And I've worked on black holes and weird stuff like
Speaker 5: cosmic strings and just all sorts of things.
Speaker 4: What is a cosmic string?
Speaker 5: A cosmic string is kind of like a sort of
Speaker 5: line or wiggly line of energy that stretches across the cosmos.
Speaker 5: Might not exist, probably doesn't exist, but there could be
Speaker 5: this like whole network of strings. Of like it's kind
Speaker 5: of like if you think of like a black hole,
Speaker 5: but you like stretch it out across the whole universe.
Speaker 5: You get it's kind of like that, what does it do?
Speaker 7: What?
Speaker 4: It?
Speaker 5: So really interesting things. So if you have two cosmic
Speaker 5: strings and they cross each other they collide, they can
Speaker 5: like reconnect in a different way. So you can have
Speaker 5: two cosmic strings that are about to collide and then
Speaker 5: they like change so that now you have two sort
Speaker 5: of loops of cosmic strings. They're going into deficite directions,
Speaker 5: like so they sort of passed through each other by
Speaker 5: branching off in this weird way.
Speaker 4: So cosmic strings may or may not exist. Now, if
Speaker 4: they do exist, some theorists have used them to maybe
Speaker 4: sketch out some stuff about time travel. Please figure that out,
Speaker 4: please fix some stuff, thank you.
Speaker 5: And you can make a loop of cosmic string, and
Speaker 5: then that loop of cosmic string will like wiggle around
Speaker 5: and make gravitational radiation and disappear into nothingness. And if
Speaker 5: you have a cosmic string, like if you have a
Speaker 5: cosmic string between you and some distant galaxy, then you
Speaker 5: might see two pictures of that galaxy because it like
Speaker 5: splits the space kind of. It's really cool.
Speaker 4: Now, how much do you think about all of this
Speaker 4: in your day to day life? And like when you're
Speaker 4: deciding if you should upgrade your rental car and like
Speaker 4: if you should cut bangs and what happens to your
Speaker 4: molecules after you die? Like how much do you let
Speaker 4: this kind of get to your own existence? Ah?
Speaker 5: Yeah, somebody asked me that the other day, Like how
Speaker 5: much do I like get sort of just overwhelmed by
Speaker 5: these ideas or whatever? It's not very often, Like most
Speaker 5: of the time this is like this is fun stuff
Speaker 5: to work on, but like most of this time it
Speaker 5: feels more like some kind of combination of science fiction
Speaker 5: and a fun puzzle, you know. So like I'm trying
Speaker 5: to solve a problem. I'm trying to calculate something and
Speaker 5: trying to come up with a new idea for how
Speaker 5: to do something, and so it's like a puzzle. It's
Speaker 5: like some kind of neat thing to work out, And
Speaker 5: I don't think of it as connecting to my own
Speaker 5: life or existence because it's way far away or way
Speaker 5: in the past, or you know, probably doesn't exist. Or whatever. Right,
Speaker 5: But then every once in a while, like I'll be
Speaker 5: I'll be thinking about this stuff and I'll be like,
Speaker 5: oh my God, like there's this stuff is out there.
Speaker 5: Like I'll be thinking about black holes or gravitational waves
Speaker 5: or like the inflation period in the early universe or
Speaker 5: something like that, and I'll be like I'll have to
Speaker 5: like hold on to something and be like, oh God,
Speaker 5: because these are huge, like mind bendingly intense forces and
Speaker 5: massive things and like the kinds of energies and the
Speaker 5: kinds of like force and just I don't know the
Speaker 5: explosions and everything. It's just we cannot comprehend this stuff.
Speaker 5: I mean, the Earth is really tiny and really unimportant,
Speaker 5: like in a big way. So, okay, you know there's
Speaker 5: this there's this famous photograph, the Pale Blue Dot. Yes,
Speaker 5: huh yeah, So this is a picture that was taken
Speaker 5: by the Voyager spacecraft.
Speaker 4: So the Pale Blue Dot photo was taken on Valentine's
Speaker 4: Day in nineteen ninety as Voyager one was leaving the
Speaker 4: Solar System. It was like by by I'm out, and
Speaker 4: astronomer Carl Sagan said, Oh, let's turn that lens around.
Speaker 4: Let's take a pick of all of us far away.
Speaker 4: What do you say, might as well? And it was
Speaker 4: three point seven billion miles away. It's little galaxy's longest range.
Speaker 4: Selfie this photo itself. It looks like you accidentally took
Speaker 4: like a blurry image of a few Christmas lights and
Speaker 4: there was like a speck of dust on your lens.
Speaker 4: Those lights are just a few scattered rays of sun.
Speaker 4: And someone would have to point out that that dust
Speaker 4: is our planet is such a tiny speck. And I'll
Speaker 4: let Carl Sagan put this in context. He's the pro here,
Speaker 4: that's here.
Speaker 7: That's home, that's us on it.
Speaker 8: Everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of,
Speaker 8: Every human being whoever was, lived out their lives the
Speaker 8: argregate our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religion, ideologies
Speaker 8: and economic doctrines. Every hunter and forager, every hero and coward,
Speaker 8: every creator.
Speaker 2: And destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young
Speaker 2: couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor
Speaker 2: and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar,
Speaker 2: every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history
Speaker 2: of our.
Speaker 7: Species lived there on a motive. Dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Speaker 7: The Earth is a very small stage in a vast
Speaker 7: cosmic arena.
Speaker 5: Sometimes when I give talks about cosmology, I'll end with
Speaker 5: this picture, and I'll be like, you know, she's thinking
Speaker 5: about how vast the universe is and how really insignificant
Speaker 5: we are. And the insignificant is even deeper than just
Speaker 5: what you see from that picture, because in that picture
Speaker 5: you see like there's a whole lot empty space and
Speaker 5: then there's a little tiny rock. Yeah, and we're on
Speaker 5: that little tiny rock, right, oh, and there's a lot
Speaker 5: of space. But it's even worse than that because because like,
Speaker 5: not only are we not the center of like the
Speaker 5: universe or a galaxy or a solicism or anything like that,
Speaker 5: the matter that we're made of is also really unimportant
Speaker 5: because because like like just the kind of stuff that
Speaker 5: we are and that we can understand and interact with,
Speaker 5: regular matter is like five percent of the universe. So
Speaker 5: most of the universe is something called dark energy that
Speaker 5: we really don't understand, but it's some sort of mysterious
Speaker 5: stuff that's making the universe expand faster and faster and
Speaker 5: it's going to take over eventually. And then there's dark matter,
Speaker 5: which is some kind of invisible matter that is most
Speaker 5: of what the galaxy is made of, and most of
Speaker 5: what all galaxies are made of. So like our galaxy,
Speaker 5: you know, we think of it as like this pretty
Speaker 5: disc of stars, but it's actually embedded in this invisible
Speaker 5: blob of extra stuff that we can't see. And that
Speaker 5: blob is way bigger than the stuff that we can
Speaker 5: actually see. So dark matter is like eighty five percent
Speaker 5: of the matter in the universe or something like that,
Speaker 5: Oh my god. And then dark energy is like seventy
Speaker 5: percent of all of the stuff in the universe. Like
Speaker 5: so so then we're this like tiny five percent slice
Speaker 5: and that's just the kind of matter that we can understand,
Speaker 5: that we can do experiments on, that we can see
Speaker 5: or touch or interact with in any reasonable way. And
Speaker 5: then it's like not only not only are we like
Speaker 5: a tiny speck of dust on a tiny speck of dust,
Speaker 5: like who's you know, Like we are so insignificant, Like
Speaker 5: the universe doesn't even it doesn't even matter that we're
Speaker 5: like that our kind of stuff is there.
Speaker 4: You know, the best thing about this conversation is, yeah,
Speaker 4: I'm having it with a cosmologist, and like an astrophysicist,
Speaker 4: but I could also be having the same conversation with
Speaker 4: any of my college roommates who had like a seven
Speaker 4: foot bong in their garage. Astro Physicists and cosmologists get together, yeah,
Speaker 4: is it just kind of like a round robin of
Speaker 4: like stoner existentialism, Like because they feel like there's such
Speaker 4: a fine line, like and then you're either incredibly incredibly
Speaker 4: smart and thoughtful and knowledgeable about this stuff, or you're
Speaker 4: just like you've just numbed yourself enough or you allow
Speaker 4: yourself to think about it, and then and it's like
Speaker 4: the Bell curve. There's this big white swath of people
Speaker 4: who are like I can't even think about it. It's
Speaker 4: too much, you know.
Speaker 5: I mean, so when I do get together with other
Speaker 5: cosmologists and we talk shop, it's usually very very technical,
Speaker 5: and so we don't get into this stuff at all,
Speaker 5: like we're it's it's usually you know, we're just talking
Speaker 5: about we're talking in a lot of jargon about like
Speaker 5: some measurement or something, and we're throwing out numbers and
Speaker 5: we're trying to like figure out like is this a
Speaker 5: reasonable measurement to make or whatever, Like what kind of
Speaker 5: plot can we make to to, you know, to illustrate
Speaker 5: this point, or what kind of calculation should we do,
Speaker 5: or like what's the important variable? It would not be
Speaker 5: interesting to somebody who is not in the field. So
Speaker 5: it's really only when I'm talking about people who are
Speaker 5: not in cosmology, where like I have these moments of like,
Speaker 5: oh god, you know, but the thing I mean, but
Speaker 5: it's it's a little bit dangerous to talk about this
Speaker 5: stuff though, because then sometimes people get the idea that
Speaker 5: we really are just kind of sitting around making stuff up,
Speaker 5: you know, like and so then people think like, oh,
Speaker 5: I can be a cosmologist, Like what if the universe
Speaker 5: is shaped like a football?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 5: And I think that that the sort of disconnect there
Speaker 5: is that like the ideas themselves, if they're not backed
Speaker 5: up by the data or by like a very rigorous model,
Speaker 5: are really not that important. Like once we have data
Speaker 5: and we have some kind of unifying theory that says
Speaker 5: that this is probably the way things are, then it's
Speaker 5: like super cool, right, But if somebody had said, like, oh,
Speaker 5: you know, maybe the universe is like this, like we
Speaker 5: don't really know what to do with that, and it does,
Speaker 5: it's not really helpful and you.
Speaker 4: Can just spitball.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, exactly, like like you have to. It has
Speaker 5: to be connected to something we can test or or
Speaker 5: write down mathematically or else. It just it's kind of
Speaker 5: not helpful, which which is, you know, it's a bummer.
Speaker 5: But but once you do have the sort of mathematical
Speaker 5: tools and stuff and you can speak that language, you know,
Speaker 5: then you can get really creative and then you can
Speaker 5: just do really fun things. So like I have I
Speaker 5: have a project I'm working on that has to do
Speaker 5: with I have a few interesting projects actually, so I
Speaker 5: have one. So here's one that it could be fun.
Speaker 5: So it has to do with black holes and galaxies
Speaker 5: and the bending of space. Okay, So so every time
Speaker 5: there's a massive object, it bends space around it, and
Speaker 5: so that means that light when it goes past bends
Speaker 5: around so like a lens. Like the massive object acts
Speaker 5: like a lens for light, and so light gets bent around.
Speaker 5: So there's this way to study like what galaxies are
Speaker 5: made of by having a very bright light behind the galaxy,
Speaker 5: like really far away and looking at how that light
Speaker 5: like bends around inside that galaxy and like how the
Speaker 5: light fluctuates as things move and stuff like that, and
Speaker 5: that's called gravitational micro lensing in this case the kind
Speaker 5: of thing I'm working on, but the details aren't important,
Speaker 5: but it's this thing where like the thing that's making
Speaker 5: the bright light is also a black hole. Because it
Speaker 5: turns out when you have a super massive black hole,
Speaker 5: like billions of times as massive as the sun, those
Speaker 5: things can be pulling matter into themselves and that matter
Speaker 5: lights up like a whirlpool of stuff, and it can
Speaker 5: make this incredibly bright light that you can see like
Speaker 5: across the universe. And so we use that as like
Speaker 5: a back light to study this stuff in a more
Speaker 5: nearby galaxy to find out how many black holes there
Speaker 5: are in that galaxy.
Speaker 4: So black holes make lights sometimes, Yeah, it's supposed to
Speaker 4: be confusing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's like I think, I mean, I think it's
Speaker 5: like it's one of these things that's like the biggest
Speaker 5: misconception about black holes is that they're dark. Usually they're not,
Speaker 5: like the ones we know about are usually not dark,
Speaker 5: and it's it's yeah, it's because they're not. It's it's
Speaker 5: because like technically the black hole itself can't be seen,
Speaker 5: but it's doing so much that it like affects everything
Speaker 5: around it, and so usually you can see black holes
Speaker 5: because they're like really destructive and like the stuff is
Speaker 5: falling into them, kind of like if you if you
Speaker 5: had a drain at the bottom of a bathtub, uh huh,
Speaker 5: Like you might not be able to see the drain
Speaker 5: through like the you know, bubbles or something, but you
Speaker 5: can see that there's like a whirlpool of stuff falling
Speaker 5: in at that point, oh man. And that's how we
Speaker 5: see black holes in space usually is we see that
Speaker 5: they're they're pulling in a lot of matter and so
Speaker 5: they like that matter lights up and so once it
Speaker 5: goes into the black hole, we can't see it, but
Speaker 5: it spends a lot of time whirling around really fast.
Speaker 4: It's like an intergalactic garbage disposal.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, and it can be. It's some of the
Speaker 5: brightest things in the universe are black holes. We call
Speaker 5: them quasars when they're when they're the super massive ones
Speaker 5: and they're pulling matter in like that and and we
Speaker 5: have so so that's like those are for black holes
Speaker 5: that are like millions or billions of times as massive
Speaker 5: as the sun.
Speaker 4: And how far away are those pep beats?
Speaker 5: All right? Well, Okay, super massive black holes, the ones
Speaker 5: I was just talking about millions or billions of times
Speaker 5: the mass of the Sun. Those seem to exist at
Speaker 5: the centers of pretty much every reasonably sized galaxy we
Speaker 5: know about at the centers.
Speaker 4: Yes, so including ours?
Speaker 5: Yes, really, yes, so our galaxy.
Speaker 4: Okay, quick note, let's do a few cosmological basics. Our
Speaker 4: galaxy is Smoky Way, right, And this next analogy I
Speaker 4: got right off of NASA's Night Sky website, which I
Speaker 4: think is for children, but it's so helpful. So okay,
Speaker 4: imagine our Sun. It's one star among hundreds of billions
Speaker 4: of stars in our Milky Way. Right. So if we
Speaker 4: shrink the Sun down to smaller than a grain of sand,
Speaker 4: our little solar system Venus Mercury Earth, all of those
Speaker 4: would be small enough to fit the whole solar system
Speaker 4: in the palm of your hand. Now, on that scale,
Speaker 4: with our solar system in your hand, the Milky Way
Speaker 4: galaxy would be the size of North America. And the
Speaker 4: Milky Way's big. But our next, our neighbor and Drameda galaxy,
Speaker 4: it's about twice as big as the Milky Way. Scale
Speaker 4: is important here, I suppose, But at the center of
Speaker 4: our galaxy there's a black hole. So the Milky Way.
Speaker 5: Is like a disc of stars and gas and dusts
Speaker 5: and stuff, and we're sort of out toward an edge
Speaker 5: and at the center there's a bulge of stars and
Speaker 5: gas and nusts, and then in the middle of there's
Speaker 5: a black hole. It's four million times as massive as
Speaker 5: the Sun.
Speaker 4: I didn't know that.
Speaker 5: Do we have a name for it, Yeah, yeah, we
Speaker 5: have a name for it. We call it Sagittarius a star, okay,
Speaker 5: which is a silly name. It's because it's the kind
Speaker 5: of I think it was like I think a radio source,
Speaker 5: and because it was pulling in some matter and so
Speaker 5: it was lighting up in the radio a little bit,
Speaker 5: and so ours is not pulling in very much matter
Speaker 5: at all, Like very occasionally it'll lead a little blobb
Speaker 5: of gas and the astronomers get super excited, but like
Speaker 5: there's very little happening with it, but it does. It
Speaker 5: is really big, and it's got a bunch of stars
Speaker 5: orbiting really closely around it, and so you can actually
Speaker 5: go online and see like data follow like tracing out
Speaker 5: the paths of some of these stars, and you can
Speaker 5: see them like whip around as they go really close
Speaker 5: to the black hole in their orbits. So some of
Speaker 5: them have these orbits that they're really far away and
Speaker 5: they come in really close and they go boom like
Speaker 5: that right around the black hole. And so you can
Speaker 5: figure out exactly like how big it is and where
Speaker 5: it is by watching these stars go around it really quickly.
Speaker 4: So I did a little looking and if you google
Speaker 4: European Southern Observatory and s AS in SAM too, you'll
Speaker 4: find this, oh my god, like a rim shot in
Speaker 4: a basketball game, like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, like that, except it comes back around. You know,
Speaker 5: it's on an orbit. So yeah, so there's stuff orbiting
Speaker 5: really close. So that black hole, that one is like, well,
Speaker 5: let's see, it's eight thousand parsecs away. I don't know
Speaker 5: how much that is. A parsec is about three something
Speaker 5: light years. So a light year is how far how
Speaker 5: far to how far light travels in a year? Right,
Speaker 5: So light moves very quickly, so that's a very long way.
Speaker 5: So for example, light travels it takes light eight minutes
Speaker 5: to get between the Sun and us. There's a rule
Speaker 5: of thumb. Actually, if you want to know how far
Speaker 5: how fast light speed is, it goes about a foot
Speaker 5: per nanosecond.
Speaker 4: A foot per nanosecond. Yes, oh, that's easy to calculate. Yeah,
Speaker 4: just a punch of zeros, right, yea, just put a
Speaker 4: zero on it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, it's easy and now, but it's kind of
Speaker 5: cool because then you can like you can say, like,
Speaker 5: if somebody is like ten feet away from you, they
Speaker 5: are ten nanoseconds in the past.
Speaker 4: They're ten nanoseconds in the past. Oh man, I'm going
Speaker 4: to trip out.
Speaker 5: So like we're like three nanoseconds apart, right, So.
Speaker 4: Weird, it's so weird. It's great though, And I learned
Speaker 4: this recently and I've already forgotten it, which is embarrassing.
Speaker 4: The distance between us and the Sun is a certain
Speaker 4: what is the U?
Speaker 5: Oh that's an astronomical unit.
Speaker 4: Astronomical unit.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that was the distance between us and the Sun.
Speaker 4: I just learned that and then completely forgot it all
Speaker 4: in the span of a couple of weeks.
Speaker 5: It's okay, there's no reason to know that stuff.
Speaker 4: I want to know a little bit more about when
Speaker 4: you were a kid. By the time Katie was about
Speaker 4: ten years old, she was inspired to pursue some form
Speaker 4: of cosmology, and she was already a fan of British
Speaker 4: cosmologist and theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, she was already hip
Speaker 4: to him. She's like, I know this dude. Now. If
Speaker 4: you need a quick brush up on him as a
Speaker 4: person after this podcast, watch the twenty fourteen Eddy Redmain
Speaker 4: film The Theory of Everything. I'm a cosmologist, what's that?
Speaker 4: I study the marriage of space and.
Speaker 6: Time, the perfect couple.
Speaker 4: Or you can just watch the trailer and start crying
Speaker 4: like somebody you know. Now, if thinking about living on
Speaker 4: a dust moat floating in a sunbeam was an inspiration
Speaker 4: to do what you want to do in life, consider
Speaker 4: a human who's figuring out the mysteries of the cosmos,
Speaker 4: doing computations and cracking theories about which I can't even comprehend.
Speaker 4: The first paragraph of the Wikipedia page Also while living
Speaker 4: with als, Katie is one of several billion people inspired
Speaker 4: by Stephen Hawking. What was it that Stephen Hawking did
Speaker 4: or what did you How did you become aware of
Speaker 4: him and how did you kind of absorb what he did? Well?
Speaker 5: I'm not sure how I became aware of him. I
Speaker 5: think that you know, he was on TV every once
Speaker 5: in a while, and I had A Brief History of
Speaker 5: Time the book, and I read that and I just like,
Speaker 5: I don't know, Like I was interested in black holes,
Speaker 5: and I was interested in like the Big Bang.
Speaker 4: The Big Bang theory being that the universe began those
Speaker 4: thirteen billion years ago with high temperatures and high density
Speaker 4: it's continued to expand Also note if you google Big
Speaker 4: Bang theory, all roads lead to Sheldon, so just be
Speaker 4: cash call it big Bang as far as Wikipedia is concerned.
Speaker 5: And so I would read about that stuff. And Stephen
Speaker 5: Hawking was a big figure in those those areas, and
Speaker 5: he was doing a lot of science communication and he
Speaker 5: would visit cal Tech every once in a while. And
Speaker 5: I was growing up in LA and St. Long Beach,
Speaker 5: and so I would sometimes, like my mom would take
Speaker 5: me to see talks by by physicists because I was
Speaker 5: super excited about these things. And so I remember seeing
Speaker 5: talked by him. I remember seeing a talk by Paul Davies,
Speaker 5: and like, you know, just prominent theorists would give talks sometimes,
Speaker 5: and somehow my mom would find out about them and
Speaker 5: take me along because she's she's really into science and
Speaker 5: science fiction and physics and everything.
Speaker 4: Have you gotten to meet have you gotten to meet
Speaker 4: stupid Hawking.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, So when I was at Cambridge. So I
Speaker 5: spent a year at Cambridge during grad school, just kind
Speaker 5: of visiting and working with people on some research. And
Speaker 5: I was mostly based in his department and my office
Speaker 5: was like directly below his. Yeah, and we were in
Speaker 5: the same like research group basically, I mean like like
Speaker 5: we didn't talk, like we weren't. I wasn't in his
Speaker 5: research group, but we were in the same as the
Speaker 5: center for the article cosmology, and like we were both
Speaker 5: based there. So there were you know, half a dozen
Speaker 5: professors who were told to that he was one of them.
Speaker 5: And I was a grad student visiting and so I
Speaker 5: would go to all these like you know meetings and
Speaker 5: the coffee and stuff. And shortly after I was shortly
Speaker 5: after I started being a visitor there, somebody asked me
Speaker 5: to do one of the like lunch seminars.
Speaker 4: So basically, if you're a physicist and you're visiting another department,
Speaker 4: you're kind of obligated to give a talk. That's kind
Speaker 4: of how it works. So they say, hey, can you
Speaker 4: give a talk. She's like, yeah, I'll give a talk
Speaker 4: for the Thursday lunch seminar.
Speaker 5: So she does it, and it turns out that it
Speaker 5: was the lunch seminar that like Hawking goes to. I'm
Speaker 5: getting ready to give the talk, and I see like
Speaker 5: several of my professors in the audience like looking expectantly
Speaker 5: at me, and this is when I'm like freaking out.
Speaker 5: But he wasn't there. Hawking wasn't there. So I was like,
Speaker 5: it's fine, it's fine, and I'm getting ready to give
Speaker 5: the talk. And then I hear this like beee pee pee.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, my stomach is cramping just hearing this.
Speaker 5: And he shows up.
Speaker 4: Oh gets so much worse.
Speaker 5: Oh god. So I told this story before, but it's
Speaker 5: it's still it's still like is it makes me like sweat?
Speaker 5: So so I was I was getting ready to give
Speaker 5: the talk, and so I start the talk, like I
Speaker 5: put up the title side, and I was the The
Speaker 5: topic was primordial black holes, which is a concept that
Speaker 5: Hawking came up with along with some other people.
Speaker 4: Pressure.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And as I'm starting, like as I after I
Speaker 5: introduced the title and stuff, I hear this this voice
Speaker 5: say and it was his voice, and I was like,
Speaker 5: and everybody kind of laughed, you know, and I thought
Speaker 5: maybe he was like thanking me for talking about the
Speaker 5: thing that he invented, you know, but I don't know,
Speaker 5: and you can't ask him to elaborate because he's his
Speaker 5: speech is very like slow. So he uses this machine
Speaker 5: thing and it just it's very slow.
Speaker 4: Attracks his eye movements.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well no, not exactly. It tracks there's a little
Speaker 5: sensor that looks at his cheek and so he kind
Speaker 5: of winks and that like selects words on this like
Speaker 5: list and it takes a couple of minutes per words sometimes, right,
Speaker 5: So you weren't like I couldn't elaborate, Yeah, yeah, so
Speaker 5: I had, so so I just kept going and then
Speaker 5: eventually like I heard it again, yes, or later on
Speaker 5: or I don't know, or just random things as I'm going,
Speaker 5: And every time, like I'd look at him and I'd
Speaker 5: be like, you know, but he would just kind of
Speaker 5: look blankly at me. And the person who was like
Speaker 5: taking care of him is the lunch seminar, So the
Speaker 5: person who was taking care of him like feedium, and
Speaker 5: she just kind of looked blankly at me, and like
Speaker 5: I had no idea what was going on, and so
Speaker 5: I would just kind of pause and then continue because
Speaker 5: like what am I gonna do?
Speaker 4: What was happening here?
Speaker 5: Had no idea, and I was so nervous, and like
Speaker 5: all the professors were there and already one of the
Speaker 5: other professors had been like asking a whole bunch of
Speaker 5: really tough questions on like the second slide. So I
Speaker 5: was already like freaked out.
Speaker 4: Just imagine being in this situation. It's a nightmare. It's
Speaker 4: like the best nightmare ever.
Speaker 5: But like I answered the questions and that he seemed
Speaker 5: to be okay with it. So I finished the talk
Speaker 5: and Hawking left and he hadn't asked any questions. And
Speaker 5: I asked one of the seminar organizers, like what what
Speaker 5: was that? And he was like, oh, well, when he eats,
Speaker 5: the machine is chewing and it just picks random stuff
Speaker 5: from like the quick select menu, So nothing to do
Speaker 5: with you at all. It was just like it was
Speaker 5: just like here's the you know, here's the most common phrases. Yes, no,
Speaker 5: maybe I don't know. I don't think so.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, this is like the worst deodorant ad ever.
Speaker 4: Like this is the most stressful situation you could possibly
Speaker 4: ever be.
Speaker 5: Oh my god, And like they could have told.
Speaker 4: Me, yeah, they could have given you every time.
Speaker 5: Oh my god, they just like they just didn't mention.
Speaker 4: It any word on whether or not he like you talk.
Speaker 5: I have no idea.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, could you ever tell him that you
Speaker 4: went into cosmology because of him?
Speaker 5: I don't well. So the first time I met him
Speaker 5: when I was sixteen, oh just by fourteen fourteen, baby baby,
Speaker 5: I did tell him then that I was a big fan.
Speaker 4: So Hawking was at cal Tech and Katie got her
Speaker 4: mom to drive her and a friend there to hear
Speaker 4: him speak. And afterward they were walking the same way
Speaker 4: that he was going. When they were leaving, and she
Speaker 4: was too nervous to say hi.
Speaker 5: I my friend went up to him and said, my
Speaker 5: friend would like to speak to you.
Speaker 4: She had a wingman.
Speaker 5: So I went up and said that I was a
Speaker 5: big fan and I enjoyed his work, and I thanked him,
Speaker 5: and he said.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much.
Speaker 4: Oh Now, what happens to you when you get that?
Speaker 4: Because you're really I mean, I'm not going to fangirl
Speaker 4: right here, I'll do it in the intro. But you're
Speaker 4: like a very big voice in science communication, Like you're
Speaker 4: a very well known astrophysicists, cosmologist. How do you feel
Speaker 4: when people come up to you and say I was
Speaker 4: inspired to study this or you've changed my course, Like,
Speaker 4: what kind of reactions do you get?
Speaker 5: It's I mean, it doesn't so it's not I'm not
Speaker 5: like Stephen Hawking, Like I'm not that level of famous,
Speaker 5: and I'm not that level of like important in physics
Speaker 5: and stuff and and you know, so it's it's kind
Speaker 5: of a different thing, but I do. You know, sometimes
Speaker 5: people do like tell me that they like So one
Speaker 5: of the messages I've gotten a couple of times is
Speaker 5: a like a teenage girl will say that she didn't
Speaker 5: think she could do astrophysics, but she really loved it
Speaker 5: and then she saw what I was saying on Twitter
Speaker 5: or something, or she saw me speak and then she
Speaker 5: decided she was going to go for it.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 5: So I do get that sometimes, and I like my feelings,
Speaker 5: don't know what to do with that, but it's really
Speaker 5: it's really sweet.
Speaker 4: And roam in a black hole no feeling here.
Speaker 5: I mean, it is really sweet. It's really like rewarding
Speaker 5: when that happens, and it makes me feel like maybe
Speaker 5: like this stuff is maybe the stuff I'm doing is worthwhile.
Speaker 5: When people say stuff like that or like a little
Speaker 5: kid will sometimes say that they want to be an
Speaker 5: astrophysicist or something, and they'll be really excited to meet me,
Speaker 5: like I was. I was in Raleigh a couple of
Speaker 5: weeks ago, and I was I was sitting in a
Speaker 5: cafe and I was wearing my NASA jacket with a
Speaker 5: little NASA badge on it that I got it JPL.
Speaker 4: JPL, by the way, is NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and
Speaker 4: it's nestled in the Golden Hills of Pasadena, California, and
Speaker 4: it's responsible for things like rovers on Mars. And according
Speaker 4: to press materials, JPL's function is to engineer and fabricate
Speaker 4: cool ass shit. That's like so dope, that's very bold.
Speaker 4: NASA also do not fact check that part and is
Speaker 4: not true.
Speaker 5: And this little girl came up to me and she
Speaker 5: was probably like eight or something, and she asked me
Speaker 5: if I work for NASA, and I said, I don't
Speaker 5: work for NASA, but I am an astrophysicist and and
Speaker 5: so we'd like talk a little bit. And she said
Speaker 5: that she really is into space and stuff, and I
Speaker 5: was like, well, I'm giving a talk at the museum
Speaker 5: in a couple of days you can come and hear
Speaker 5: my talk. And so she and her mom came to
Speaker 5: my talk and she asked a question and it was
Speaker 5: just really sweet, and I was like, oh, what was
Speaker 5: her question? I think her I think her question was
Speaker 5: about like what's inside a black hole?
Speaker 4: M h, which is a good question, like a bunch
Speaker 4: of space garbage.
Speaker 5: Well, yeah, so it's I mean, that's it's not as
Speaker 5: straightforward answer really because once stuff goes inside the black hole,
Speaker 5: it has to go straight to the singularity, and I
Speaker 5: can't do anything else, and so then does it really
Speaker 5: exist at that point? Like that's kind of subtle, But anyways,
Speaker 5: a good question. And apparently, like she was talking about
Speaker 5: the talk later on and I was like, hey, you know,
Speaker 5: I inspired somebody.
Speaker 4: She's going to be in your department later and give
Speaker 4: your lunch Shami dumb questions. Explain the singularity?
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, yeah, So a singularity is so it comes
Speaker 5: up in the context of the Big Bang and in
Speaker 5: the context of a black hole. A singularity is like
Speaker 5: a point of infinite density. Okay, Usually in physics, when
Speaker 5: you have a singularity, I mean, a singularity basically means
Speaker 5: it's a point where something infinite happens like where things
Speaker 5: diverge in some way, and usually when that happens in physics,
Speaker 5: it means you've done something wrong, okay, and it's a
Speaker 5: sign that the theory is broken and you just can't
Speaker 5: deal with that because it is none of the none
Speaker 5: of the theory like really works at a point of infinite anything, Okay.
Speaker 5: In the black hole, like the way that black holes
Speaker 5: are defined and the way that we understand how the
Speaker 5: gravity works, there really should be a singularity at the
Speaker 5: center of the black hole and everything has to move
Speaker 5: toward it. So so the you know, the black hole
Speaker 5: has this is this thing that like the way you
Speaker 5: make a black hole go back up.
Speaker 4: One, yeah, no, backup, because they're like, where do they
Speaker 4: come from? What's the deal?
Speaker 5: Yeah, So the way you make black holes you take
Speaker 5: a really massive star and you wait a while millions
Speaker 5: of years, and the star will explode and the core
Speaker 5: of the star will collapse on itself. And if it's
Speaker 5: massive enough, then I mean the reason that the star
Speaker 5: didn't collapse before is because it had nuclear burning happening.
Speaker 5: It was kind of keeping it puffed up, okay, right,
Speaker 5: and so you had this energy source that's sort of
Speaker 5: pushing against it, kind of like if you have like
Speaker 5: a balloon in the air inside is pushing the plastic
Speaker 5: the rubber out right. When the star explodes, there's nothing
Speaker 5: to keep it from collapsing under its own gravity. You know,
Speaker 5: you get to a point where there's you can't do
Speaker 5: any more nuclear fusion.
Speaker 4: So nuclear fusion is when atoms join to become a
Speaker 4: different kind of atom and they give off energy in
Speaker 4: the process, like two hydrogens becoming a helium and giving
Speaker 4: off energy. Now, this happens with atoms up to the
Speaker 4: size of iron, at which point that fusion starts to
Speaker 4: take energy.
Speaker 5: You can't get any more energy out of those processes
Speaker 5: because you've gotten to a point where you've just the
Speaker 5: whole center of the star is iron basically, and it
Speaker 5: can't go farther than that. And so then you have
Speaker 5: this like huge chunk of iron that's not being held
Speaker 5: up by anything, and so it starts to clapse under
Speaker 5: its own gravity. Like that stuff just falls in and
Speaker 5: it has to go toward the center, and it has
Speaker 5: to keep going toward the center, and it can't go
Speaker 5: any other direction, and so you end up with this singularity,
Speaker 5: this point of infinite density. Technically, what is this shape?
Speaker 7: Like?
Speaker 4: Is it like an ice cream cone that has an
Speaker 4: infinite tail?
Speaker 5: Or what I mean? You can visualize it that way
Speaker 5: if you think about it in terms of like a
Speaker 5: two D analog. Like usually when we think of space time,
Speaker 5: like the pictures are always like a big rub rubber sheet.
Speaker 4: The rubber sheet visual is so helpful for comprehending space time.
Speaker 4: But also when I think of rubber sheets, usually the
Speaker 4: situation is not comfortable. It's either like an awkward grad
Speaker 4: school slumber party explanation or some suburban dungeon kink that
Speaker 4: sounds exasperating at best. But for space rubber sheets, thumbs up.
Speaker 5: And you have this big rubber sheet, and you put
Speaker 5: a bowling ball in one spot and that bends around,
Speaker 5: and so then when you take your tennis ball and
Speaker 5: you try and roll it past the bowling ball, it
Speaker 5: makes a little orbit and falls in rightow. This is
Speaker 5: the usual visualization for space time. But that doesn't have
Speaker 5: the right number of dimensions because space is space is
Speaker 5: three dimensional, and then you can think of time as
Speaker 5: another dimension, but that's kind of separate.
Speaker 3: Mum, why did they call it Scottish cheese?
Speaker 4: It's cottage cheese, honey. And I'm not sure the dogs
Speaker 4: in other countries speak different languages. Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 3: Well when we get there.
Speaker 4: Well, we've got to fix the car first, but there's
Speaker 4: someone coming to help us. Is it the man from Geneva.
Speaker 4: He's from a Viva Oh there's the van.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 4: For car insurance with breakdown rescue, it takes a Viva
Speaker 4: visit a Viva Data eat to say fifteen percent.
Speaker 3: Acceptance criteria, terms and conditions apply minimum premium of three
Speaker 3: hundred and ten year old fifteen percent discan't applies to
Speaker 3: new policies bought online. See a Viva Dota E for details.
Speaker 3: Car insurance is underwritten by a Viva Insurance Ireland DOC
Speaker 3: A Viva Direct Arland Limited is regulated by the Central
Speaker 3: Bank of Ireland.
Speaker 4: I am curious about time is a fourth dimension?
Speaker 5: Okay, well we can talk about that.
Speaker 4: Okay, I'm sorry I have so many questions.
Speaker 5: But anyways, So if you if space is three dimensional,
Speaker 5: then the way gravity like works on it is that
Speaker 5: it kind of like pulls space inward toward itself. So
Speaker 5: like a massive thing kind of pulls space inward toward itself.
Speaker 5: So in the context of a black hole, it would
Speaker 5: be like a place where space gets really scrunched up, right,
Speaker 5: But it's easier to think about it in the two
Speaker 5: dimensional case. So it would be like you have your
Speaker 5: rubber sheet and you pinch a piece of the rubber
Speaker 5: sheet and you just pull it down and you just
Speaker 5: keep pulling it down, and it just goes to a
Speaker 5: point and it's like, you know, forever, and it gets
Speaker 5: deeper and narrower whatever. Right, So you can think about
Speaker 5: it like that, But then you think about like a
Speaker 5: three dimensional analog, and your brain kind of breaks and
Speaker 5: it's fader. But yeah, so it's basically a place where
Speaker 5: space is really supercurved, okay, really super bent inward. And
Speaker 5: so there's a point. So if you think again about
Speaker 5: the two D kind of thing the rubber sheet, you
Speaker 5: can you can still move past, Like if you have
Speaker 5: your your like little hole that you pulled down on
Speaker 5: rubber sheet, you can still take your tennis ball and
Speaker 5: roll it past that and it'll keep going. But if
Speaker 5: it gets too close, it'll fall in and there's nothing
Speaker 5: you can do about it, and it'll always go toward
Speaker 5: the deepest point. And so that's like there's this horizon
Speaker 5: this this distance from this from that singularity where if
Speaker 5: you get closer than that, you will fall in no
Speaker 5: matter what, and you will just keep going and you
Speaker 5: can't ever escape. And light itself will fall in too,
Speaker 5: because light follows the curve of space, and so if
Speaker 5: space is curved enough, then light will just follow that
Speaker 5: curve all the way down. Oh man, So once you know,
Speaker 5: so you throw flow a flashlight into a black hole
Speaker 5: like that light never comes out again, It just goes
Speaker 5: that that light beam. No matter which direction the flashlight
Speaker 5: is facing, the light beam will bend toward the center.
Speaker 4: And what is that danger zone called the event horizon. Okay,
Speaker 4: that is the event.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's the event horizon. I mean you should probably
Speaker 5: stay farther than the event event in general, because other
Speaker 5: bad things can happen to you if you get close
Speaker 5: to the black hole.
Speaker 4: If you listen to Ology's episode one Volcanology and thought
Speaker 4: jumping into a volcano was intense, like hang on to
Speaker 4: your butts right now.
Speaker 5: I mean, so, for one thing, the most of the
Speaker 5: most of the ones that we've seen directly with light
Speaker 5: are pulling in matter, right, and so that means that
Speaker 5: there's a lot of hot stuff falling into the black
Speaker 5: hole in the form of a disk, and so that'll
Speaker 5: radiate you to death if you get too close. And
Speaker 5: then if you if you get close, if it's a
Speaker 5: small enough black hole, then when you get close, the
Speaker 5: tidal forces will kill you. So tidal force is where
Speaker 5: you have like, it's where you have more more gravity.
Speaker 5: The gravity is pulling stronger on part of you than
Speaker 5: another part. Oh, so like if like if you imagine,
Speaker 5: you know, you're falling feet first toward a black hole,
Speaker 5: the gravity goes the strength of the gravity goes up
Speaker 5: so steeply because it's such a compact, steep thing. Then
Speaker 5: your feet will be pulled on much more tightly than
Speaker 5: your head and you'll be stretched out. And it's it's
Speaker 5: there's a word for it. It's called spaghettification. It's actually
Speaker 5: called that.
Speaker 4: That's honest thing I've ever heard of my life.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, So you have to watch out for spaghetification
Speaker 5: if you get too close to a black hole. Who
Speaker 5: the hell, maybe I don't know, I don't know. I
Speaker 5: mean Hawking uses it, I don't And maybe he came
Speaker 5: up with it. I'm not really sure.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, But of all of the things to
Speaker 4: call it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it turns you to spaghetti. I don't know, Like
Speaker 5: that's just what else are you gonna call it? Like
Speaker 5: it's title disruption, But I love it the most.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Spaghnification was indeed coined by Hawking in his book
Speaker 4: A Brief History of Time, And if you happen to
Speaker 4: Google image search this you will find a bounty of
Speaker 4: photoshopped images of astronauts being tapered into space noodles by
Speaker 4: cosmic forces. I'm so impressed by this astrophysical whimsy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there are a lot of There are a lot
Speaker 5: of really silly names in astronomy.
Speaker 4: Who gets to name this stuff?
Speaker 5: Whoever comes up with it? I mean people come up
Speaker 5: with a name it, but like sometimes the community names it,
Speaker 5: like the Big Bang. That that was a joke, Like
Speaker 5: that was the word was a joke, the term the
Speaker 5: Big Bang. Like somebody came up with the idea that,
Speaker 5: you know, the universe started small and has been expanding,
Speaker 5: and somebody was like, oh, the Big Bang, and that
Speaker 5: it stuck.
Speaker 4: No, it was a throwaway.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was like it was mocking.
Speaker 4: Did that person get pissed and it stuck?
Speaker 5: I'm not sure.
Speaker 4: Okay, So English astronomer Fred Hoyle coined the term big bang.
Speaker 4: It was during a radio broadcast in the late nineteen
Speaker 4: forties and it was kind of an accident. Now the
Speaker 4: story is he's so bent that it's stuck, but apparently
Speaker 4: he denies that. So drama in ms. What in terms
Speaker 4: of what your output is? You're you're a professor, you
Speaker 4: give talks, you travel all over the world, Like what
Speaker 4: is your big goal as a cosmologist? Like do you
Speaker 4: want to write an encyclopedia about cosmology? Like what's your endgame?
Speaker 5: So I'm almost a professor, you are, I'm going to
Speaker 5: be a professor. Well, I'm going to be an assistant
Speaker 5: professor starting January first, yay. Yeah, so I'm not quite
Speaker 5: a professor yet.
Speaker 4: So in a matter of days pretty much, Katie will
Speaker 4: be assistant professor of physics at North Carolina State University.
Speaker 4: So tweeted her and say, congrats.
Speaker 5: So what my goal? I mean? I want to figure
Speaker 5: stuff out, but I don't have like there's not like
Speaker 5: one thing where it's like I must solve this problem.
Speaker 5: I kind of like, uh, just working on whatever fun
Speaker 5: stuff comes up, which is not what you're supposed to do.
Speaker 4: But it's what you like.
Speaker 5: It's always what I like. I mean. So the big
Speaker 5: thing I'm working on right now has to do with
Speaker 5: dark matter. So dark matter is this invisible stuff, you know,
Speaker 5: And it's possible that dark matter has this weird property
Speaker 5: where if you take a dark matter particle and another
Speaker 5: dark matter particle and you you like, collide them into
Speaker 5: each other in just the right way, they'll annihilate and
Speaker 5: create other kinds of particles. So that's a possibility. And
Speaker 5: if that's the case, if that's a thing that happens,
Speaker 5: then it can mess with how the first stars and
Speaker 5: galaxies form, because those form and like blobs of dark matter,
Speaker 5: and the formation of those is kind of delicate because
Speaker 5: you have to get the right balance of the gravity
Speaker 5: and the gas and all this stuff. So if dark
Speaker 5: matter is going and like annihilating all the time, then
Speaker 5: that sort of messes with that balance, and so it
Speaker 5: can change the way the first stars and galaxies form,
Speaker 5: and then we can look for the evidence of that
Speaker 5: with telescopes. So this is the kind of problem that
Speaker 5: I like, where you have like a sort of fundamental
Speaker 5: particle physics problem and then you try and figure out
Speaker 5: how to look for it. With telescopes.
Speaker 4: So what is your work involved. Do you have like
Speaker 4: a moleskin that's just filled with like gobbledygook equations, or
Speaker 4: are you working on a computer with data sets like
Speaker 4: when you're like when you get down to work, what
Speaker 4: does that look like?
Speaker 5: So I do have my muleskin with full of equations
Speaker 5: over there. I brought it with me, so I have that.
Speaker 5: I also have a whole bunch of code that I've
Speaker 5: written to try to solve some of these equations that
Speaker 5: are in the moleskin. I mean, so the usual thing
Speaker 5: is like, Okay, you talk to people who work on
Speaker 5: similar things, and you try and come up with like
Speaker 5: what is it how can we answer this question? Or
Speaker 5: what is a question we can answer with this obser
Speaker 5: or like what would be a cool thing that might
Speaker 5: happen that we could find out if it does happen.
Speaker 4: So then physicists talk to each other and writes it
Speaker 4: down and look at papers and write down more equations.
Speaker 4: And I was kind of surprised to realize how collaborative
Speaker 4: this could be. I always imagine physicists needed to be
Speaker 4: like sequestered in a well appointed lab or a classy
Speaker 4: den to just think clearly, but now there's like a
Speaker 4: lot of chatting happening.
Speaker 5: And then once you figure out like what equations you
Speaker 5: need to solve and what things you need to calculate,
Speaker 5: then you then you go to the computer and you
Speaker 5: write code to calculate those things and to put out
Speaker 5: numbers and draw graphs, and then you see if you
Speaker 5: have something interesting or not.
Speaker 4: If it all kind of clicks yeah, yeah, and.
Speaker 5: You see if like, you know, does this tell us
Speaker 5: that this is going to be an interesting technique to
Speaker 5: test the theory or not? And then depending on you know,
Speaker 5: because this is all theoretical work. Sometimes sometimes you find well,
Speaker 5: this is just really uninteresting and is going to care,
Speaker 5: so I'm not going to write it up. Sometimes you're like, well,
Speaker 5: you know, it turns out you can't measure this thing
Speaker 5: with this technique, but we should write that down anyway,
Speaker 5: because people might have tried otherwise. And then sometimes it's like, oh,
Speaker 5: we can measure this thing with this thing and that'll
Speaker 5: be a really interesting result and we'll get a better
Speaker 5: answer than anybody's gotten before, So we're gonna write it
Speaker 5: up and be really happy about it.
Speaker 4: And then you go toward writing it up and publishing it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, and then and then you write the paper,
Speaker 5: and then you publish the paper, and then you know,
Speaker 5: or you send it to the journal, and the journals
Speaker 5: the editors or the referees are like, yeah, you should
Speaker 5: do this differently, and so you do that differently, and
Speaker 5: then eventually it gets published.
Speaker 4: What is the craziest paper that you've ever had published?
Speaker 4: When the title of the craziest paper, because just looking
Speaker 4: at paper titles is, yeah, so funny to me because
Speaker 4: they're so specific and wonderful.
Speaker 5: I mean, I guess it depends on what you mean.
Speaker 5: I wrote a paper called known Unknowns of dark Matter
Speaker 5: Annihilation over Cosmic Time that.
Speaker 4: Sounds like the best like Norwegian metal album them Ever,
Speaker 4: it was like, well, yeah, so that was all about
Speaker 4: like what we know we don't know about this problem?
Speaker 5: Mm hmm. I've calculated a bunch of stuff. I've I
Speaker 5: had some papers about, uh like axions and and those
Speaker 5: are theoretical particles that are super cool.
Speaker 4: Is there an upper limit to how many words your
Speaker 4: paper title can be?
Speaker 5: Yeah, you don't want to. I mean you kind of
Speaker 5: wanted to be punchy, right, like like the whole non
Speaker 5: unknowns thing is I wanted it to be like eye catching.
Speaker 4: Right, it's good marketing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, so you got to think about marketing to
Speaker 5: some degree, and you don't want it to be a
Speaker 5: long title because people are going to be skimming out.
Speaker 4: This part is crazy. It's like trying to buy Beyonce tickets.
Speaker 4: So the way that people find papers to read is
Speaker 4: every day, every weekday. The website, it's a r xiv
Speaker 4: dot org. There's like a hundred new papers about astronomy
Speaker 4: and physics and math and stuff.
Speaker 5: So the way that people find papers to read is
Speaker 5: every day, every single day, every weekday. The archive website,
Speaker 5: it's a r xiv is how it's spelled, but we
Speaker 5: call it the archive. The archive website displays like one
Speaker 5: hundred papers, new papers about astronomy, and there's just a
Speaker 5: list and the titles. So there's the titles and the
Speaker 5: authors and maybe like the abstract depending on how you
Speaker 5: read the archive. And if you're a responsible astronomer, then
Speaker 5: every morning you wake up and you read the archive
Speaker 5: and you skim the papers and the and the abstracts
Speaker 5: and you see which ones are relevant to your work,
Speaker 5: and then you you know open those and read, you know,
Speaker 5: skim those papers and find out if like they tell
Speaker 5: you something interesting, you get information. This is how you
Speaker 5: keep up with the field. It's so much work. It's
Speaker 5: like of a lot of work. And if you're somebody
Speaker 5: who maybe does you know particle theory stuff as well,
Speaker 5: then there's a whole other archive for like particle theory,
Speaker 5: and then part of phenomenology, which is more like the
Speaker 5: phenomenology is like where you try and figure out what
Speaker 5: you would see in this in the universe that's closer
Speaker 5: to what I do. So then if you're trying to
Speaker 5: read particle theory and phenomenology and astronomy, you can get
Speaker 5: like one hundred and fifty papers or something every day.
Speaker 4: It's a black hole.
Speaker 5: It's just it's impossible to keep up.
Speaker 4: Oh my god.
Speaker 5: But anyway, so because of that, you want your paper
Speaker 5: title to be punchy and eye catching. But the other thing,
Speaker 5: so there's a this is like so totally inside baseball,
Speaker 5: but there's there's this ridiculous thing that happens.
Speaker 4: So the order of the papers as they appear on
Speaker 4: the website is determined just by what time they were
Speaker 4: sent in and after not too long. These are literal geniuses.
Speaker 4: They were like duck.
Speaker 5: There's a cutoff time of like four pm and sometimes
Speaker 5: on I don't remember which one, where if you get
Speaker 5: your paper in as close as possible after that time,
Speaker 5: it will appear at the top of the god. And
Speaker 5: so there's this you can people have written papers about
Speaker 5: like the spike insubmission times, where like everybody's trying to
Speaker 5: get like, for you know, a clock zero zero one second,
Speaker 5: Like they all want to get it like exactly at
Speaker 5: that moment so that their paper will be on the
Speaker 5: top of the list. Because a lot of people, you know,
Speaker 5: like they open the archive and then they just get
Speaker 5: like exhausted by the time they've gone through five papers,
Speaker 5: and so they don't get to the end of the list.
Speaker 5: And so there's this ridiculous, like this ridiculous ritual of
Speaker 5: when you're when you submit your paper to the archive,
Speaker 5: you're trying like you watch the clock and you try
Speaker 5: and hit the submit button exactly the right moment.
Speaker 4: That makes me so anxious. It's like when someone people
Speaker 4: comment first on YouTube vation it should.
Speaker 5: Be randomized because like it's also been shown that it
Speaker 5: does matter in terms of like citations.
Speaker 4: That's not right, it's not right. Oh my god. Yeah,
Speaker 4: Oh wait, what was the question that I had right
Speaker 4: on top of that? It was definitely a dem one.
Speaker 4: It was definitely a stupid question.
Speaker 5: I don't think any questions are stupid, Are you sure?
Speaker 5: I think these are good questions. These are important questions
Speaker 5: because like what it doesn't like you know, these are
Speaker 5: like if you're asking questions about something because you're not
Speaker 5: an expert in that field, Like you can't be an
Speaker 5: expert in every field. If I ask questions about entomology,
Speaker 5: I'm gonna have no idea what's going on? Okay, But
Speaker 5: I'm like, I'm still trying to remember what the difference
Speaker 5: beviews between a bug and not a bug, right, Like,
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 4: I'll give you some clearance on that, okay. But the
Speaker 4: problem is is you study the universe? Yes, so could
Speaker 4: your field be any broader? Like no, no, it could not
Speaker 4: literally everything.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And this can be a problem too, Like when
Speaker 5: I give talks, I have to be prepared for anything
Speaker 5: the questions and that used to just freak me out
Speaker 5: a lot, and now I just feel like like I
Speaker 5: just have to I have to read as widely as possible,
Speaker 5: and sometimes I'll be like, I have no idea but like, like,
Speaker 5: I gave the talk about gravitational waves in Raleigh the
Speaker 5: other week and one of the questions was, tell me
Speaker 5: about the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, And I was like,
Speaker 5: it's a storm, it's been shrinking. There's a spacecraft looking
Speaker 5: at it. You should maybe talk to somebody who studies
Speaker 5: about that.
Speaker 4: The Great Red Spot, by the way, that's its actual name.
Speaker 4: It's a little on the nose. Also, people mix it
Speaker 4: up sometimes with the Great Dark Spot, which was near
Speaker 4: Jupiter's northern poul. So y'all call me, let me name
Speaker 4: some of these things. Also, how did Katie feel about
Speaker 4: the detection of gravitational waves? This was the Lago project
Speaker 4: you may have heard about in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 5: The detection of gravitational waves by the Lego instrument was
Speaker 5: probably the biggest discovery in physics in my lifetime.
Speaker 4: Damn.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's a big deal. It's a super big deal.
Speaker 5: I when so the first the first detection was last
Speaker 5: year sometime. Well, the detection was the end of twenty
Speaker 5: fifteen and it was announced I guess during twenty sixteen.
Speaker 5: The announcement was in I don't remember what times when
Speaker 5: it was or whatever, but it was such that it
Speaker 5: was going to be two am local time in Melbourne,
Speaker 5: and so a bunch of us got together and like
Speaker 5: had a party in a university department. Like we brought
Speaker 5: food and booze and like we watched videos and like
Speaker 5: we took like we took selfies. It was really late,
Speaker 5: but we were just like we got to see this live,
Speaker 5: you know. And and there were there were two people
Speaker 5: in the room who were part of the collaboration, so
Speaker 5: they they already knew what was going to be done.
Speaker 5: But the rest of us, like we'd heard rumors, but
Speaker 5: we didn't know for sure what was what that was
Speaker 5: going to be announced. And yeah, it was. It was
Speaker 5: just a huge party and it was a we were
Speaker 5: really excited and like we just everybody was like clap
Speaker 5: and stuff when it happened, and I mean it was
Speaker 5: it was a huge deal.
Speaker 4: Of the way that it was announced was like a
Speaker 4: press conference from like an awesome eighties movie.
Speaker 8: Yeah, ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves.
Speaker 3: We did it.
Speaker 4: I mean, how cute is that? So that was Dave Ritzi.
Speaker 4: He's a laser physicist and he's director of the Lego Lab,
Speaker 4: And I love that audio so much. It's just like
Speaker 4: pure triumph, like the last scene of a Schwarzenegger movie
Speaker 4: or something. We have detected gravitational waves. It was like
Speaker 4: the best.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, no, I remember that very clearly.
Speaker 4: So explain to me why the detection of gravitational waves
Speaker 4: is such a big deal.
Speaker 5: Okay, So, first, gravitational waves are are ripples in this
Speaker 5: fabric of space time. So you know, the space space
Speaker 5: can be bent around massive objects. And when massive objects
Speaker 5: are moving through space, if they're moving in an accelerated way,
Speaker 5: which could be in an orbit in orbit as a
Speaker 5: kind of accelerated motion, that creates ripples in this sort
Speaker 5: of space time fabric, which is kind of hard to
Speaker 5: visualize and explain, but it ripples through space. And so
Speaker 5: like when you have really massive objects moving really quickly,
Speaker 5: that can make large disturbances relative to other things. I mean,
Speaker 5: if I wave my hands, I'm making gravitational waves, but
Speaker 5: like that's not detectable. So so two black holes orbiting
Speaker 5: each other make really big detectable gravitational waves, especially when
Speaker 5: they get so close that they're about to merge into
Speaker 5: one thing. So you can have two black holes in
Speaker 5: a binary orbit orbiting each other, and then as they
Speaker 5: get closer and closer, the signal gets stronger and stronger,
Speaker 5: you know, the waves get stronger and stronger, and then
Speaker 5: they merge and that makes this big sort of burst
Speaker 5: of gravitational waves. And the way that gravitational waves work,
Speaker 5: they're not like ripples on a pond. Usually when you
Speaker 5: see a visualization, it's like ripples on a pond, but
Speaker 5: that's that two dimensional analog, you know again, And they're
Speaker 5: not like if you're standing there, the gravitational wave like
Speaker 5: moves your space that you're in, but it doesn't just
Speaker 5: like move you up and down. What it does is
Speaker 5: it stretches and squeezes the space that you're in. So
Speaker 5: let's say that you're standing there and a gravitational wave comes,
Speaker 5: it hits you in the face. What that does to
Speaker 5: you is it stretches your space a little bit, so
Speaker 5: you get a little bit taller and at the same
Speaker 5: time a little skinnier, and then a little bit shorter
Speaker 5: and a little wider, and like it oscillates back and forth.
Speaker 5: So as the waves are coming at you, each wave
Speaker 5: is giving you that that stretch and squeeze, stretch and squeeze,
Speaker 5: and so it's actually distorting your shape. Oh my god,
Speaker 5: what is happening.
Speaker 4: This is like a big boy and it it keeps
Speaker 4: like for everything that creates gravitational waves. Is this doing
Speaker 4: this to us all the time? Micro micro basis?
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, So the Lego experiment is built to detect
Speaker 5: these things. So they have two detectors, and each detector
Speaker 5: is like it's an L shaped thing. Each arm is
Speaker 5: four kilometers long.
Speaker 4: Now, if you've seen photos of this, you might think
Speaker 4: from a distance, is some shit that we build like
Speaker 4: on Mars, because there's just this treeless, ocre landscape in
Speaker 4: the desert. It seems to look lonely in every direction.
Speaker 4: But no, it's just Washington State.
Speaker 5: And they shoot lasers back and forth along these two
Speaker 5: arms there. They meet at the center and they're measuring.
Speaker 5: The lasers are just there to measure the length of
Speaker 5: those arms, basically, and when a gravitational wave comes and
Speaker 5: hits that detector, it makes one of the arms a
Speaker 5: little longer while the other one gets a little shorter,
Speaker 5: and vice versa, depending on the direction and the you
Speaker 5: know and everything. So if it does that, then the
Speaker 5: detector can detect that the length of the arms has
Speaker 5: changed and then that's the signal, is the changing of
Speaker 5: the length of the arms and the level on which
Speaker 5: that happened. So this is four kilometers right, Yeah.
Speaker 4: That's about two and a half miles America.
Speaker 5: The first detection, when it was detected, the length of
Speaker 5: that four kilometer arm changed in length by a thousandth
Speaker 5: the width of a proton.
Speaker 4: Oh my god.
Speaker 5: Yeah that's a teensy tiny that's really small.
Speaker 4: And this was a huge collision.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, this was like it was one point three
Speaker 5: billion light years away, so it's very far. But it
Speaker 5: was like the black holes were around thirty times as
Speaker 5: massive as the Sun and they collided, and so it
Speaker 5: was a pretty strong signal, Like it was a surprisingly
Speaker 5: strong signal, Like if you actually looked at the data,
Speaker 5: raw data, like you could see it, which is not
Speaker 5: usually the case in this kind of field. Usually, like
Speaker 5: you have to do lots of processing, but like you
Speaker 5: can see the signal is very strong. So but yeah,
Speaker 5: thousands the width of a proton, so that you know,
Speaker 5: your own height is changing much less than that, right,
Speaker 5: because you're not four kilometers long, sure.
Speaker 4: So I'm getting a little bit not quite as tall
Speaker 4: and not quite as skinny, and not kind of quite
Speaker 4: as short as fat as it's not noticeable in a photograph.
Speaker 5: Say, yes, yeah, yeah, it's really it's a really subtle effect.
Speaker 5: But but yeah, so that's the gravitational wave. It's the
Speaker 5: detection of that change in length, that sort of stretching
Speaker 5: and squeezing of space time. And each time the black holes,
Speaker 5: you know, black holes or something collide, you get this
Speaker 5: kind of like the the wiggles will come faster and
Speaker 5: closer together. And so the frequency of this changing of
Speaker 5: shape is going up, and the amplitude is going up,
Speaker 5: and so it makes this kind of rising sound if
Speaker 5: you transmit it, if you change it into sound, it's
Speaker 5: like a sort of like the like end part is
Speaker 5: when they collide. And the reason people change it to
Speaker 5: sound a lot is because the frequency of these waves coming,
Speaker 5: like how how quickly the stretching and squeezing happens, is
Speaker 5: about the same frequency as like sound waves. Okay, so
Speaker 5: it is kind of audible, Like if you change it
Speaker 5: to sound, it's kind of audible.
Speaker 4: And that was like the the boop heard around the world, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, it's called a chirp, A chirp, yes, just.
Speaker 4: Okay, you ready for this? This is the sound of history.
Speaker 4: So what does that mean going forward for astrophysicists, And like,
Speaker 4: how many more have we heard since then?
Speaker 5: So there have been oh gosh, I didn't even know
Speaker 5: the number, like something like five scene now and the
Speaker 5: most recent, most recent one was was two black holes.
Speaker 5: But the one before that was the neutrons. There was
Speaker 5: two neutrons stars and those were a big deal because
Speaker 5: those when they collided, also created a gamma ray.
Speaker 4: Burst gamma ray burst super energetic explosion, so we can't
Speaker 4: see gamma rays but the pack of punch and a burst.
Speaker 5: And so we were able to see the collision from
Speaker 5: the gravitational waves but also from light and that was
Speaker 5: a huge deal. And I can talk about that for hours,
Speaker 5: but it's it's a big deal. The whole thing is
Speaker 5: a big deal for a bunch of reasons. One is
Speaker 5: that this, like the existence of gravitational waves was kind
Speaker 5: of known indirectly because we'd seen systems where like you
Speaker 5: had two pulsars orbiting each other, So pulsar is a
Speaker 5: kind of neutron star. A neutron star is like the
Speaker 5: core of a dead star. It's so we'd seen things
Speaker 5: orbiting each other where the changing of the orbit could
Speaker 5: only really be easily explained by gravitational waves kind of
Speaker 5: radiating energy away from the orbit, and so the orbit
Speaker 5: got smaller because gravitational waves were pulling energy away, oh
Speaker 5: and sort of shrinking that orbit. So so we had
Speaker 5: indirect evidence the gravitational waves existed, but we'd never seen
Speaker 5: them directly. And seeing like directly, like detecting, like feeling
Speaker 5: the gravitational wave is a huge deal, right, And the
Speaker 5: gravitational waves were like the last, the last prediction of
Speaker 5: Einstein's relativity to be confirmed.
Speaker 4: Einstein's theory of relativity. Remember, our perception of the force
Speaker 4: of gravity is a bendy spacetime thing. I'm very paraphrasing
Speaker 4: a lot.
Speaker 5: So he predicted them one hundred years about one hundred
Speaker 5: years before the first detection was made, So it was
Speaker 5: it took a long time to see these things, but
Speaker 5: so it was confirmed that And it's just this incredible
Speaker 5: laboratory for relativity for physics because by detecting the gravitational
Speaker 5: waves and looking at the signal, we were able to
Speaker 5: determine that gravitational waves travel at the speed of light.
Speaker 5: We didn't know for sure before. That was part of
Speaker 5: the theory, but we didn't know for sure, so we
Speaker 5: figured that out. It told us stuff about how black
Speaker 5: holes are made, like what black holes are made of,
Speaker 5: sort of like the properties of black holes, by examining
Speaker 5: very closely how they come together and merge, how much
Speaker 5: energy the gravitational wave burst creates, you know, a lot
Speaker 5: of stuff about about that. And then because now we
Speaker 5: can we can watch black holes colliding in the distant universe,
Speaker 5: we can learn about how black holes grow, you know,
Speaker 5: by when they collide with each other, and that tells
Speaker 5: us something about how black holes grow. It tells us
Speaker 5: something about how galaxies grow. It tells us something about
Speaker 5: how stars form, because black holes are the end results
Speaker 5: of stars.
Speaker 4: When you were a kid, were you ever hoping that
Speaker 4: this that we would be able to detect gravitational waves
Speaker 4: where you like, I've been waiting since I was a
Speaker 4: little girl.
Speaker 5: So so I didn't know a whole lot about gravitational
Speaker 5: waves when I was a little kid. But there was
Speaker 5: there was a really beautiful moment during one of the
Speaker 5: detection of the neutron star collisions when one of the
Speaker 5: scientists was he was he was talking about the neutron
Speaker 5: star collision and the neutron stars when they collide, they
Speaker 5: make a slightly different kind of like chirp sound.
Speaker 4: Okay, here's the sound of the neutron stars booping themselves together.
Speaker 5: So the black hole one is actually a lot quicker
Speaker 5: than what I said, But the neutron star one goes
Speaker 5: like it takes it. It takes a while and it
Speaker 5: does it. So and there'd been simulations of this for years.
Speaker 5: I mean, the scientists who was talking about the discovery
Speaker 5: said that he'd been waiting to hear that sound from
Speaker 5: nature for twenty years and he just did and it
Speaker 5: was really touching.
Speaker 4: I mean.
Speaker 5: So for me, I knew about LEGO because it was
Speaker 5: it was partly headed by people at cal Tech, and
Speaker 5: I was an undergrad at Caltech, And so when I
Speaker 5: was an undergrad there people were talking about a lot
Speaker 5: and there was there was a famous bet between like
Speaker 5: Kip Thorn and Stephen Hawking or something.
Speaker 4: Kip Thorn, by the way, is a theoretical physicist, the
Speaker 4: twenty seventeen Nobel.
Speaker 5: Laureate about whether or not gravitational waves would be detected
Speaker 5: by the year two thousand. I started cal Tech in
Speaker 5: ninety nine, so they were not detected by year two thousand,
Speaker 5: so that bet was lost. But it was a funny
Speaker 5: thing because when I first got to cal Tech, they
Speaker 5: were building LAGO and it was this big deal and
Speaker 5: everybody's like, we're going to detect gravitational waves. It's gonna
Speaker 5: be amazing. And then you know, and LEGO is being built,
Speaker 5: and I was like, oh, it's any minute now. And
Speaker 5: then I left cal Tech and I went to grad
Speaker 5: school and then after a while, I was like, I
Speaker 5: haven't heard anything about this for a while, you know,
Speaker 5: And I realized that like they kind they'd kind of
Speaker 5: like they'd been like, yeah, we're going to detect gravitational waves,
Speaker 5: and then they kind of got quiet for a while,
Speaker 5: and I found out later on asked about it, and
Speaker 5: they were like, oh no, it's advanced.
Speaker 4: LIGO was so there were some upgrades over the years
Speaker 4: from initial LAGO to Enhanced LAGO to advances LAGO. It's
Speaker 4: kind of like the tall Grande and Venti gravitational wave
Speaker 4: detectors just then maybe need a little more to get
Speaker 4: the job done.
Speaker 5: Really going to do the detection. The initial LEGO was
Speaker 5: like maybe it would get lucky, but advanced LAGO will
Speaker 5: really see something. I'm like really, So, like for a while,
Speaker 5: I was like, I don't know what I feel like,
Speaker 5: I don't know if I believe that this is really
Speaker 5: going to happen. But then you know, as soon as
Speaker 5: they turned advanced lago on, like within like a week
Speaker 5: or something, they saw this thing. So that's like they
Speaker 5: really they really did it. And it's the most like
Speaker 5: it's the most precise instrument ever built by humans. I
Speaker 5: think I read that somewhere. It's like the I mean,
Speaker 5: you're measuring something so tiny.
Speaker 4: It's crazy.
Speaker 5: It's it's impossible. I use, it's incredible. How like what
Speaker 5: went into it in terms of the engineering and you know,
Speaker 5: just the physics and like they had to they had
Speaker 5: to correct for things like the like how how much
Speaker 5: the photon's hitting the mirrors would move them.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, Oh my god.
Speaker 5: That's a big part of the noise in the signal
Speaker 5: that's called the photon shot noise. They have to deal
Speaker 5: with that. Yeah, so stuff like that. I mean, it's
Speaker 5: it's incredible that they were able to do this.
Speaker 4: So can you get the chirp as a ring tone?
Speaker 5: I believe you can. You can, I believe so, Yeah,
Speaker 5: would you get the the neutron whoop? Or would you
Speaker 5: get the the black hole one? The black hole one,
Speaker 5: you have to speed it up to make it sound cool,
Speaker 5: so you can still hear it, but it's more like
Speaker 5: a like so so in the actual data, it's like that,
Speaker 5: that's kind of what it sounds like. But then when
Speaker 5: you when you speed it up, it goes whoop whoop,
Speaker 5: but it's very quick, whereas the neutron star one, it's
Speaker 5: like ooop.
Speaker 4: I feel like, yeah, I feel like that's the way
Speaker 4: to go.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Let's say someone is interesting cosmology but doesn't know a
Speaker 4: lot about it and is intimidated by it. What is
Speaker 4: the best book to pick up? I actually, and this
Speaker 4: is that. I don't know if you've ever read this,
Speaker 4: but I was. I was in Thailand and I was
Speaker 4: staying in a hut and there was some there was
Speaker 4: a free book pile, and I picked up a book
Speaker 4: called Quantum Mechanics Can't Hurt You. This book was actually
Speaker 4: called Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You. It's by Marcus Choone
Speaker 4: and it's delightful. I found my copy. It's still moldy
Speaker 4: from a monsoon. It was good, it was very it
Speaker 4: was very layperson's terms, but I clearly don't didn't retain
Speaker 4: any of it. But is there a book or a
Speaker 4: documentary or something that's just a good primer, because like
Speaker 4: in this episode, there's no way to describe everything, but like,
Speaker 4: what's a good go to, like astrophysics for dummies? What
Speaker 4: are we talking here? Is there a pamphlet? Uh?
Speaker 5: So I wish I had a really good answer for
Speaker 5: this that.
Speaker 4: It makes me feel like you don't you're winter.
Speaker 5: So the thing is like, I don't. I don't read
Speaker 5: a lot of popular level stuff. And there's a couple
Speaker 5: of reasons for that.
Speaker 4: So number one, she doesn't have much time to read
Speaker 4: non papers because there's like a billion papers, and when
Speaker 4: she does, she likes to read about spaceships. Okay too,
Speaker 4: when something is written for the general public, astro physicists
Speaker 4: have to take that lay information and kind of back
Speaker 4: translate it to a more technical version in their head.
Speaker 4: So it's like if you're a bartender and someone writes
Speaker 4: she drank a whiskey, but you're distracted wondering a whiskey,
Speaker 4: Well it like a bourbon? Is this a single malt scotch?
Speaker 4: Was it a rye Tennessee whiskey is this on the
Speaker 4: rocks was in a cocktail? There's so much detail a minute.
Speaker 5: I mean, Sean Carroll's written several books that are really good,
Speaker 5: so take a look at those. There's a physicist Katie Freeze,
Speaker 5: Catherine Freeze, who's a dark matter theorist like me. Oh,
Speaker 5: she's a dark menical corismologist, and she's written a book
Speaker 5: called Cosmic Cocktail and it's all about about dark matter
Speaker 5: and also like some audibiographical stuff. It's really cool.
Speaker 4: What about What about movies? Do you have a favorite
Speaker 4: or a least favorite movie about space or cosmology?
Speaker 5: You're like, could I not answer some of these?
Speaker 4: Yes?
Speaker 5: Yes, yes, okay, so so favorite yes. So there aren't
Speaker 5: a lot of movies where I feel like the cosmology,
Speaker 5: Like cosmology is hard to have as a topic of
Speaker 5: a movie because it's just too big a topic, and
Speaker 5: like stuff happens on cosmological time scales, which is like
Speaker 5: incredibly long times, and so having something happen within a
Speaker 5: movie timeframe is really hard. But there's a movie that
Speaker 5: I really liked for how it portrayed the scientists and
Speaker 5: it had some cosmology ish stuff in it, So that
Speaker 5: was sunshine okay, which the science is wrong, just putting
Speaker 5: that out there. It's about the sun has like burned
Speaker 5: out or is burning out and they have to fix it,
Speaker 5: and none of that can happen. All of that's false,
Speaker 5: All that's fake. But it's done really well in terms
Speaker 5: of like they have physicists who who acts like a physicist,
Speaker 5: and like they have people who talk like scientists. And
Speaker 5: I kind of just enjoyed it. Okay, so I thought that,
Speaker 5: and then there's like a monster thing, so anyway, but
Speaker 5: I thought that was done really well. I really enjoyed gravity.
Speaker 5: There's also bad physics in gravity in some places, but
Speaker 5: I thought it was a beautiful movie and it portrayed
Speaker 5: space very well.
Speaker 4: How do you feel about space balls?
Speaker 5: I think it was funny. It's been a long time.
Speaker 4: Oh hell yes, that was good.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Other space movies like The Martian was fun. Interstellar
Speaker 5: had a very pretty black hole in it.
Speaker 4: Okay, that's that you are being very complimentary, and that
Speaker 4: is duly noted. You are being a very nice person.
Speaker 5: The black hole and the wormhole and Interstellar were very
Speaker 5: beautifully done and done with with proper relativistic equations. It
Speaker 5: was very clever because what they did is they they
Speaker 5: had these simulations that are very very difficult and take
Speaker 5: a very long time on supercomputers, and they gave them
Speaker 5: to the the the people who do movie graphics, who
Speaker 5: have really powerful supercomputers, and they're like, no, we need
Speaker 5: to do this black hole properly. So they calculated it,
Speaker 5: and now they got some like papers out of it
Speaker 5: because the result was such such a good calculation that
Speaker 5: they were able to get actual science out of the
Speaker 5: calculation done for the graphics in the movie.
Speaker 4: Because movies are better funded.
Speaker 5: Then yeah, yeah, yea, so it was a very good move.
Speaker 5: But but you should you should know that that the
Speaker 5: black hole in Interstellar, although there are some aspects that
Speaker 5: are done very faithfully, they did have they did tweak
Speaker 5: some things, so it actually would look pretty different if
Speaker 5: we saw an actual black hole in real life. So
Speaker 5: there are a couple of things that were tweaked that
Speaker 5: were a bit different.
Speaker 4: So, speaking of movies, Katie and I were supposed to
Speaker 4: go to one after this interview, and we did, but
Speaker 4: we barely made it. Because this is all really great information.
Speaker 4: We hadn't even gotten to the rapid fire around of
Speaker 4: all of your questions, so I asked your questions. We
Speaker 4: race to the showing and this poor woman had to
Speaker 4: smuggle a burrito and eat it in the theater. I'm
Speaker 4: so sorry. By the way, we saw murder on the
Speaker 4: Oran Express. It features a very bizarre mustache. I will
Speaker 4: give it that, So stay tuned the first two parter
Speaker 4: Anology's history when we resume with your questions, so you
Speaker 4: now have a solid base, Tune in next week to
Speaker 4: hear Astro Katie address your questions, including is there a
Speaker 4: name for the disorientation and panic one feels when considering
Speaker 4: the vastness of the universe there is Are any of
Speaker 4: the sci fi movie methods to save the planet plausible?
Speaker 4: Or are we basically doomed if an asteroid uses us
Speaker 4: as a target? Will the universe expand forever? What's the
Speaker 4: deal with multiverses? Are there aliens? And speaking of your submissions,
Speaker 4: I wanted to let you know I totally see the
Speaker 4: reviews you write on iTunes and it's so appreciated. Rating
Speaker 4: and reviewing and subscribing is free, It takes very little time,
Speaker 4: and it helps ologies stay up there in the science charts,
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Speaker 4: Katie is at astro Katie on Twitter, where she has
Speaker 4: approximately one billion trillion followers, and she is academic Nomad
Speaker 4: on Instagram. So thank you to all you ologites for
Speaker 4: tweeting and gramming and meming at us, and to all
Speaker 4: the folks on Patreon who make the show possible. It
Speaker 4: is currently four am on a Friday night and I'm
Speaker 4: recording this to send it off to Steven ray Morris.
Speaker 4: He's going to help edit it, and your funding is
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Speaker 4: We have new pins in stock Horology clockpins and amazing
Speaker 4: shimmery bird pins for eight bucks each, designed by Shannon
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Speaker 4: you to know that, yes, it's super late at night,
Speaker 4: and I'm recording this partly because the mass of porridge
Speaker 4: that occupies the space where a brain would be. I
Speaker 4: had to spend a little longer trying to understand and
Speaker 4: explain these concepts that I thought. And right now, as
Speaker 4: I record this middle of the night, my neighbors had
Speaker 4: been blasting techno Christmas pop songs for four hours while
Speaker 4: I was learning about wormholes. The world feels very surreal. Also,
Speaker 4: congratulations to anyone who made it to the end of
Speaker 4: this episode. Man, you stuck it out. I appreciate that.
Speaker 4: As a special thanks, I'm going to tell you a
Speaker 4: secret that no one in the world knows. Earlier tonight,
Speaker 4: I ate cereal. I bought from a gas station and
Speaker 4: I loved it. So if you listen to the end
Speaker 4: of this episode, feel free to holler at ologies or
Speaker 4: Ali Ward. I'm sure I'll have a new secret for
Speaker 4: you next week at the very end, when we are
Speaker 4: back with Katie, Max Q and A. So until then,
Speaker 4: ask smart people dumb questions because they love it and
Speaker 4: we're just tiny meat blobs on a dust spec So
Speaker 4: let's just live. Can we live? Okay? Byebye? Pacadermatology, hobbiology
Speaker 4: or do zoology, lithology, technology, meteorology and pedatology, ethology, zeriology, elenology,