Speaker 1: Have you ever walked into a room in your house
perfectly comfortable, totally familiar surroundings, and just completely forgotten why
you went in there?
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely all the time, right.
Speaker 1: Or maybe you're just sitting on your couch late at night,
totally alone, reading a book or grolling on your phone,
and you feel a sudden, inexplicable chill.
Speaker 2: Like a physical weight in the.
Speaker 1: Air er exactly, not just a temperature drop, but a weight,
the distinct prickling feeling on the back of your neck
that someone or something is watching you.
Speaker 2: And we all do the exact same thing when it happened.
Speaker 1: You brush it off.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we immediately rationalize it.
Speaker 1: We blame our tired brains, a lack of sleep, maybe
just a drafty window we forgot to close. We write
it off, as you know, fatigue playing tricks on our
mammalian threat detection software. Right, But what if that's not
the case at all. What if that momentary glitch in
your reality, that sudden physical weight pressing against your chest
is actually the physical friction of an alternate universe bleeding
into ours.
Speaker 2: It sounds like science fiction, but the math says otherwise.
Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling threads. I am so intensely glad you're
here with us, because today we are going to completely
dismantle your understanding of the space around you.
Speaker 2: It is truly fantastic to be here. And I have
to say, the stack of sources we are synthesizing today
is it's nothing short of paradigm shifting.
Speaker 1: It really is.
Speaker 2: Our mission for this episode of thrilling Threads is to
examine a staggering convergence of data data that spans multiple
historically separate disciplines.
Speaker 1: We've got a lot of ground to cover, we do.
Speaker 2: We are pulling directly from the European Space Agency's plank telescope,
cutting edge quantum mechanics experiments, and the high level multidimensional
mathematics of m.
Speaker 1: Theory, telescopes, underground detectors, chalkboards.
Speaker 2: Exactly all of these incredibly diverse sources are pointing toward
a singular, terrifying but undeniably thrilling conclusion, which is our
universe is not a sealed, safe, isolated bubble.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: It is heavily damaged. It is drowning in a chaotic,
crowded cosmic ocean, and most importantly, it is actively colliding
with other realities.
Speaker 1: Hold on, I need to stop you right there, because
the implications of that are just massive. You're saying that
the empty space around us, the literal vacuum between stars,
or even the space between you and your speakers right now,
isn't actually empty.
Speaker 2: It's not empty at.
Speaker 1: All, and our universe isn't some pristine snow globe sitting.
Speaker 2: On a shelf far from it.
Speaker 1: By the end of this thrilling threads, you, the listener,
are going to completely rethink what nothingness actually is. You're
going to understand why gravity feels the way it does,
and why the actual end of the universe might be
completely terrifyingly invisible.
Speaker 2: It's going to be a wild ride.
Speaker 1: So let's jump right in. Let's start with the universe itself.
We've always been taught it was this perfect, isolated system
born from the Big Bang. But the physical data says
there's a literal scar on the universe.
Speaker 2: Right exactly right. To truly understand how radical this data is,
we have to start with the foundational assumption of the
Standard model of physics.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this.
Speaker 2: The standard model is the set of rules that dictates
how every single atom in your body holds together how
galaxies spin, how stars burn, and it relies heavily on
a concept called isotropy. Isotropy, Yes, isotropy assumes that the
Big Bang was a perfectly symmetrical explosion. It states that
if you look at the universe in any direction on
a large enough scale, the temperature and the distribution of
matter should be exactly the same.
Speaker 1: Right. The classic analogy here is pouring milk into a
cup of black coffee.
Speaker 2: That's a great way to visualize it.
Speaker 1: When you first pour it, it swirls, right, you get
these chaotic ribbons of white and dark brown. But if
you take a spoon and stir it perfectly, eventually that
mixture becomes entirely uniform.
Speaker 2: Right, It blends completely.
Speaker 1: There are no lumps of milk, there are no weirdly
dark patches of espresso. It just becomes a completely smooth,
even soup.
Speaker 2: And that is exactly what the early universe was supposed
to look like, a smooth, even soon loop of radiation
with no special directions, no heavy sides, and absolutely no scars.
Speaker 1: But the data changed.
Speaker 2: It did. That expectation held up the entire field of
cosmology for decades, but in twenty thirteen, the European Space
Agency launched the Plank telescope.
Speaker 1: And what was its goal?
Speaker 2: His primary mission was to test this exact assumption of
isotropy by mapping the cosmic Microwave background, or the CMB.
Speaker 1: Which is the oldest light in existence right exactly.
Speaker 2: It's the thermal afterglow of the Big Bang itself, frozen
in the sky from when the universe was just three
hundred and eighty thousand years old.
Speaker 1: Basically a baby picture of the universe.
Speaker 2: A very detailed baby picture, and the map the Plank
Telescope sent back completely destroyed the idea of a perfect
stirred cup of coffee.
Speaker 1: It wasn't smooth, not at all.
Speaker 2: It revealed a massive, unexplained violation of symmetry. The southern
half of the sky is significantly colder and structurally completely
different from the northern half.
Speaker 1: That is just wild to me, and we should clarify
for the listener. We aren't talking about a tiny glitch in.
Speaker 2: The data right now, not a smudge on a telescope
lends or a software error.
Speaker 1: This is a physical deformity in the shape of space
time itself. The thermal map of the oldest light in
existence is lopsided.
Speaker 2: It is fundamentally warped.
Speaker 1: Imagine you are sitting exactly where you are right now,
believing you live inside this perfectly spherical, balanced architectural dome.
But the structural engineer comes in, runs a scan and
proves that the entire southern wall of the building is
warped and freezing cold.
Speaker 2: The structure of our reality is bent.
Speaker 1: And it gets even crazier because inside that colder southern hemisphere,
the telescope found something even more disturbing.
Speaker 2: The cold spot.
Speaker 1: Yes, what physicists call the cold spot.
Speaker 2: The cold spot is essentially a concentrated bruise on the
fabric of reality.
Speaker 1: A bruise. I love that description well.
Speaker 2: In a closed thermodynamic system, where energy is conserved and
heat naturally flows from hot areas to cold areas until
everything's perfect equal, a spot this cold and this astronomically
large is statistically impossible.
Speaker 1: It simply shouldn't.
Speaker 2: Exist, right. The fact that this specific region has refused
to heal or equalize over the thirteen point eight billion
years of the universe's existence suggests something incredibly profound.
Speaker 1: That something is actively keeping it open.
Speaker 2: Exactly, it implies our universe is not an isolated bubble
expanding into a peaceful nothingness, but a physical object that
has been struck by something else.
Speaker 1: But wait, struck by what exactly? Because this is where
my brain starts to break a little.
Speaker 2: It's a natural reaction.
Speaker 1: If the universe is defined as everything that exists, what
could possibly exist on the outside to hit it? Are
we talking about a rogue black hole or something completely
outside of our physics?
Speaker 2: So to figure out what hit us, astronomers pointed their
optical and radio instruments directly at the center of this anomaly.
Speaker 1: Which happens to be in the constellation Eridanus.
Speaker 2: Correct. They were looking for something massive to explain this
temperature drop, a supercluster of gala lexies, maybe a dense
cloud of dark gas absorbing the light.
Speaker 1: And what did they find?
Speaker 2: Nothing? Literally nothing. They discovered the Aridanus supervoid.
Speaker 1: And we really need to pause and appreciate the staggering
scale of this nothingness.
Speaker 2: The scale is hard to comprehend.
Speaker 1: The Aridanus supervoid is a continuous, spherical region of emptiness
that spans one point eight billion light years across.
Speaker 2: Let that number sink in for a second. One point
eight billion light years It.
Speaker 1: Is the largest single structure ever identified in the history
of astronomy. But unlike a supercluster of galaxies, this structure
is defined entirely by what is missing.
Speaker 2: According to the cosmological principle, matters should be spread out evenly,
like butterscrape smoothly over toast. In a region of space
one point eight billion light years wide, the math rigorously
predicts we should see roughly ten thousand galaxies.
Speaker 1: Ten thousand entire galaxies.
Speaker 2: We should see vast gas clouds, sprawling webs of dark matter,
and the light of trillion the pond trailer of stars.
Speaker 1: But when we look into the air in a supervoid,
the lights are just off. The matter isn't dim, it
is completely missing.
Speaker 2: It's a true void.
Speaker 1: Imagine you are walking through a bustling, noisy, crowded city
like New York or Tokyo. There are people everywhere, cars
honking food vendors, towering skyscrapers, blocking out the sun. It's
an overwhelming sensory experience. And then you take one single
step across an intersection and suddenly you hit a block
where everything, the buildings, the people, the sound, the atmosphere
has just vanished.
Speaker 2: Everything is just gone.
Speaker 1: You aren't in a park. You are standing on cold, dead,
empty pavement that stretches for miles in every direction. It's
eerily silent. That is what this void is like. On
a cosmic scale.
Speaker 2: It contains thirty percent less matter than the rest of
the universe.
Speaker 1: It is this freezing, dark, barren desert sitting right in
the middle of a lush galactic rainforest.
Speaker 2: What's absolutely fascinating here is the physical impossibility of its formation.
Gravity on a cosmic scale is actually a relatively weak,
slow force.
Speaker 1: Slow to build things.
Speaker 2: Yes, they take immense amounts of time for gravity to
tuget matter and clump it together into galaxies. To naturally
clear out a space one point eight billion light years
across to physically push ten thousand galaxies out of the
way to create a clean void would take vastly longer
than the current age of the universe.
Speaker 1: So thirteen point eight billion years isn't enough.
Speaker 2: Time, nowhere near enough. Gravity simply hasn't had enough time
to dig a hole this big by itself. The shovel
isn't big enough, and the clock hasn't been taking long enough.
Speaker 1: So naturally, the skeptic in me, and probably the listener
right now is asking, could it just be a massive fluke,
a statistical anomaly, Yeah, a random roll of the cosmic
dice where galaxies just coincidentally happen not to form in
that one specific spot.
Speaker 2: It's a completely fair question, and researchers tested that exact hypothesis.
They crunched the numbers to calculate the statistical probability of
avoid this large and this empty forming randomly in our
standard model universe, and the result the answer they got
was less than one point eighty five percent. Wow, in
statistical physics, when you were dealing with the unimaginably massive
sample size of the entire cosmos, one point eighty five
percent effectively rounds down to zero.
Speaker 1: Think about the room you are sitting in right now.
The oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the air are bouncing
around completely randomly. It is theoretically mathematically possible that, by
sheer dumb luck, every single air molecule could suddenly rush
into the top left corner of your ceiling, leaving you
sitting in a suffocating vacuum. Math allows it that the
odds of that happening are so infinitesimally low that you
bet your life on it every single day without a
second thought. The cold spot is that vacuum. The dice
didn't just happen to roll a double six a billion
times in a row.
Speaker 2: Someone reached onto the table and physically turned the dice over.
Speaker 1: Yes, exactly.
Speaker 2: This statistical failure forces us to consider that the anomaly
wasn't formed by internal luck. It was formed by external pressure.
The void is a footprint.
Speaker 1: A massive footprint.
Speaker 2: But what makes this truly breathtaking is that this wasn't
just an after the fact explanation physicists invented to fit
the new data. A theoretical physicist named Laura Mersini Houghton
actually predicted this exact specific hole in the universe seven
full years before the Plank telescope ever launched to look
for it.
Speaker 1: This is the part that gives me goosebumps. She used
string theory equations right, Yes she did. Because for a
long time people criticized string theory as just being philosophical math.
It felt impossible to actually test in a lab. String
theory says our universe is made of tiny vibrating strings
existing in ten or eleven dimensions, and that there is
something like ten to the power of five hundred different
ways to fold these dimensions.
Speaker 2: An astronomical number of possibilities.
Speaker 1: Which creates a massive, almost incomprehensible landscape of possible universes.
Speaker 2: For decades, most physicists viewed that landscape as purely a
mathematical abstraction, just a chalkboard list of possibilities, a quirk
of the.
Speaker 1: Equations, But she sought to currently she did.
Speaker 2: In two thousand and six, Mersini Hoton published papers arguing
that this landscape is a literal physical place. She envisioned
our universe as just one bubble emerging from a high
energy background, very much like a bubble of steam rising
from the bottom of a pot of boiling water.
Speaker 1: And if you've ever watched boiling water, you know the
bubbles don't rise perfectly alone.
Speaker 2: They crowd each other, They jostle for space.
Speaker 1: And inevitably they collide.
Speaker 2: She ran the incredibly complex equations to see what would
physically happen if two of these massive cosmic bubbles bumped
into each other during their early hyper fast expansion.
Speaker 1: Phase, and her math predicted that the collision would unleash
a massive gravitational shock wave that would push matter away
from the point of impact. She literally made a falsifiable
prediction years before we had the satellite data to back
it up. She said, and I am roughly quoting the
concept here, that if the multiverse is a real physical place,
the upcoming Plank satellite data will show a giant void,
a cold spot, specifically in the southern hemisphere of the
CMB sky.
Speaker 2: She even calculated its approximate size.
Speaker 1: And then Boom twenty thirteen arrives, the Plank data drops,
and the cold spot is exactly where her equations said
it would be.
Speaker 2: The exact size, the exact shape, and the exact temperature drop.
Speaker 1: The odds of guessing those coordinates by accident are practically zero.
This transformed the cold spot from a weird little data
glitch into the very first experimental evidence of the multiverse.
Speaker 2: We are looking at a verified crash site of two realities.
Speaker 1: So if we connect this to the larger mechanics of
the cosmos, we have to ask the visceral question, what
actually happens to physical matter when it gets hit by
the gravity of a completely different universe.
Speaker 2: Mersini Houghton's equations describe these mechanics perfectly. When two universes touch,
they don't smash together in shatter like glass. They interact
through a massive gravitational transfer.
Speaker 1: Gravity.
Speaker 2: Yes, gravity is a uniquely persistent force. According to multiverse models,
gravity is the one fundamental force that can leak across
the boundary between universes.
Speaker 1: This springs up one of my absolute favorite analogies from
the source material because it makes this terrifying cosmic event
so easy to picture.
Speaker 2: The vacuum cleaner analogy.
Speaker 1: Yes, imagine you are holding a vacuum cleaner nozzle against
a loose sheet of fabric. The fabric represents the space
time of our universe. The vacuum represents the immense hungry
gravity of the neighboring universe. Right when the nozzle touches
the fabric, it doesn't immediately rip a hole in it. Instead,
it pulls. It creates a deep, stretched bulge. It forcefully
sucks every loose thread, every speck of dust toward that
exact point of contact.
Speaker 2: And remember, in the early moments of the Big Bang,
our universe wasn't made of solid stars and rocky planets.
It was a fluid like, incredibly hot, dense soup of plasma.
Speaker 1: So when this cosmic collision.
Speaker 2: Happened, the gravity of the neighboring universe acted exactly like
that vacuum cleaner nozzle. It grabbed onto the plasma in
that specific southern region of our sky and pulled it
incredibly hard.
Speaker 1: Like drawing water up a straw.
Speaker 2: It dragged the primordial gas, the dark matter, and the
potential energy away from that spot, pulling it toward the
boundary wall between the universes. It literally siphoned the building
blocks of reality right out of our sector.
Speaker 1: Which perfectly explains why the Aridana supervoid is so unimaginably empty.
It isn't a quiet cosmic neighborhood where the galactic houses
just didn't get built because of a lack of interest.
Speaker 2: No, it's a literal crime scene.
Speaker 1: Those ten thousand missing galaxies aren't missing because they forgot
to form. They are missing because the raw material needed
to construct them was violently stolen by a neighboring universe.
Speaker 2: We are looking at a region of space that was
cosmically strip mined by the gravity of a heavier reality
next door.
Speaker 1: And this raises a crucial, terrifying question. If this external
force is strong enough to move the fundamental furniture of
the universe, what creates the friction that stops it from
pulling the rest of our universe down with it.
Speaker 2: This leads us per perfectly to the work of astrophysicist
Stephen Feenie and his team at University College London in
twenty ten. They took a completely different, highly statistical approach
to looking at these cosmic scars.
Speaker 1: What were they looking for?
Speaker 2: Well, they realized human eyes are heavily flawed. We suffer
from peridolia.
Speaker 1: That's our brain's tendency to see faces in clouds, whether our.
Speaker 2: Nun right exactly, and conversely, we easily miss actual, subtle
mathematical structures buried in noise. So Phoene's team built a
sophisticated computer algorithm specifically designed to hunt for one distinct,
faint shape in the cosmic microwave background. Rings. We it
rings though, because physics is beautifully consistent, If our universe
is a bubble in a larger multiverse, a collision shouldn't
just leave a single, shapeless, stagnant bruise. It should leave
a dynamic ripple.
Speaker 1: Think about throwing a heavy stone into a perfectly still pond.
The impact doesn't just make a hole in the water.
It creates concentric circles that expand outward.
Speaker 2: Exactly if the early universe was a fluid like plasma,
a collision with another membrane should send a massive circular
shock wave of temperature variants rippling across the cosmos.
Speaker 1: Sophoeni's algorithms scan the entire sky tirelessly looking for these
faint circular echoes that no human could ever spot in
the static.
Speaker 2: And the computer found them.
Speaker 1: You didn't just find the cold spot.
Speaker 2: No, the algorithm identified four distinct, massive circular patterns embedded
deeply in the radiation of the Big Bang.
Speaker 1: Finding four impact rings fundamentally changes the terrifying narrative of
our existence. Think about it like this. You walk out
to your car in the morning to go to work
and you see a single, massive dent on your bumper.
Speaker 2: You probably assume it was a freak accident, right.
Speaker 1: Maybe a stray shopping cart in the grocery store parking lot,
or someone backed into you while you were asleep. You
write it off as bad luck. But imagine you walk
out to your car and you find massive caved in
dents on the hood, the passenger doors, the roof, and
the trunk.
Speaker 2: You instantly stop thinking about a rogue shopping cart.
Speaker 1: You instantly realize your car has been entered into a
demolition derby while you weren't looking. The presence of four
separate impact rings means this collision wasn't a one off
freak event.
Speaker 2: Our universe is like a battered vehicle driving through a
hailstorm of other realities.
Speaker 1: We haven't just been hit once. We are enduring a systemic,
ongoing bombardment. We are navigating a dense, chaotic foam where
universes are constantly jostling, merging, and aggressively bouncing off one another.
Speaker 2: That is a phenomenal transition into our next major revelation,
Because if you were in a car that he's getting
hit over and over again from different angles, eventually you
have to accept a horrifying truth.
Speaker 1: You weren't just parked in a bad spot.
Speaker 2: You are actively driving into oncoming traffic. If we are
constantly colliding with something, it implies we are moving toward it.
And to understand this movement, we need to leave the
ancient light of the Big Bang and look at the
modern galaxies. We need to talk about the dark flow
and the cosmic river.
Speaker 1: Right, So let's look at the cosmological principle again, the
absolute golden rule of astrophyts is. It says that on
a large enough scale, the universe looks the same everywhere.
Speaker 2: Matter is distributed randomly.
Speaker 1: There are no special directions, no top or bottom, and
absolutely no giant cosmic currents. The standard model cosmology says
that galaxies should essentially move like bees in a swarm.
Speaker 2: Precisely, in a swarm of bees, individual bees are buzzing
around randomly, attracted to the pheromones of their nearest neighbors.
Some fly left, some fly right, some dart up, some
dive down.
Speaker 1: But the swamp itself, as a collective macro entity, stays put.
Speaker 2: The average net velocity the universe should be zero. The
random motions of all those billions of galaxies should mathematically
cancel each other out perfectly, And we measure this against
the absolute north of our universe, the cosmic microwave.
Speaker 1: Background, the CMB.
Speaker 2: Again, Yes, if you are sitting perfectly still relative to
the CMB, the temperature of that ancient light looks exactly
the same in every direction. If you start moving, the
light in front of you gets slightly bluer and hotter,
and the light behind you gets slightly redder and colder
due to the Doppler effect.
Speaker 1: It's the exact same physics as an ambulance siren, changing pitch,
sounding higher as it drives towards you and lower as
it drives away.
Speaker 2: And if this fundamental rule of random motion is wrong,
our entire understanding and physics pretty much crumbles.
Speaker 1: But when Alexander Kowshlinsky and his team at NASA actually
looked at the data, they found that the swarm isn't
buzzing randomly at all.
Speaker 2: The cosmological principle might actually be a massive, comforting lie.
Speaker 1: Instead of random chaos, they saw order, they saw a coherent,
terrifying flow. It's like someone opened a window in a
sealed quiet room and a massive, unstoppable draft is suddenly
blowing through.
Speaker 2: The galaxies aren't just drifting, They're being steered.
Speaker 1: To prove this unequivocally, Koshlinsky couldn't just use the standard
redshift of starlight, could he.
Speaker 2: No normal redshift is contaminated by the actual expansion of
space itself. Space stretches the light waves, which muddies the
data about how fast the galaxy itself is physically traveling
through that space. He needed a pristine spinometer.
Speaker 1: Then he found one.
Speaker 2: His team utilized a brilliant phenomenon called the kinematic Sunyazoldovitch
effect or KSZ. This is a masterbl piece of physics.
Instead of measuring the light emitted by the stars within
the galaxies, they measured how the electrons and the incredibly
hot gas of those galaxies physically interact with the photons
of the background radiation.
Speaker 1: Okay, let me make sure I'm wrapping my head around
the kaz effect perfectly, because I really want to break
this down for the listener. It is a brilliant concept.
Imagine the cosmic microwave background as a steady, gentle rain
of photons falling evenly across the entire universe since the.
Speaker 2: Dawn of time, a cosmic rain.
Speaker 1: Now, imagine a massive cluster of galaxies, this huge, violent
ball of hot gas and millions of stars as a
giant heated semi truck driving through that rain.
Speaker 2: The CMB photons hit the hot gas of the galaxy cluster.
Speaker 1: The electrons inside that gas physically scatter the photons like
rain drops bouncing off the hot hood of the truck
and give them a tiny energy boost exactly.
Speaker 2: If the truck is moving towrtoise, the photons get a
specific blue kick. If it's moving away, they get a
red drag.
Speaker 1: This shift has absolutely nothing to do with the universe expanding.
It is a direct, undeniable speedometer reading of the galaxy
cluster itself pushing through the cosmic rain.
Speaker 2: And Kashlinsky didn't just look at one or two galaxies.
He gathered data for roughly fourteen hundred massive galaxy clusters
scattered entirely across the sky up to three billion light
years away.
Speaker 1: That sample size covers about ten percent of the entire
visible universe.
Speaker 2: According to the standard model, the random motions of fourteen
hundred massive clusters should look like pure static on a graph.
The average should be a flat, undeniable zero.
Speaker 1: But when they process the Kaz signal, the average wasn't zero.
Speaker 2: The clusters were moving in absolute lock step. Thousands of
galaxies separated by billions of miles of empty space. We're
all drifting in the exact same direction at a speed
of nearly one thousand kilometers per second.
Speaker 1: They weren't acting like a random swarm of bees. They
were acting like a solid, cohesive object. Caught in a
raging invisible river. Ten percent of the visible universe is
moving as a single coherent body at the speed of
a bullet.
Speaker 2: It's staggering.
Speaker 1: So the most obvious glaring question is where is the drain?
If we are moving, we have to be moving towards something.
Gravity needs a source. You don't get a current without a.
Speaker 2: Waterfall, exactly. Astronomers plot in the trajectory of this massive flow,
and it points directly toward its specific patch of sky,
between the constellations of Centaurus and Hydra.
Speaker 1: But looking there is difficult.
Speaker 2: Frustratingly difficult, because it lies perfectly behind what astronomers call
the zone of avoidance.
Speaker 1: The zone of avoidance.
Speaker 2: Yes, this is the thick, dense, dusty band of our
own Milky Way galaxy that blocks our view of the
deep universe behind it. It's effectively like trying to drive
down a highway at two million miles per hour with
a windshield completely caked in thick mud.
Speaker 1: But using highly sensitive radio telescopes that can punch through
the dust, they found their first suspect, the Great Attractor.
Speaker 2: Great Attractor.
Speaker 1: It just sounds like a sci fi villain. It's this massive,
dense gravitational anomaly located in the Norma cluster about two
hundred and fifty million light years away. For years, scientists
breathed a sigh of relief. They thought, Okay, mystery solved.
We're just falling into a local cosmic pothole.
Speaker 2: But when they finally upgraded their instruments and calculated the
true mass of the Great Attractor, the math totally broke.
Speaker 1: It's huge, yes, but it is nowhere near strong enough
to drag ten percent of the visible universe at one
thousand kilometers per second, not even close. It's the equivalent
of trying to move a massive, fully loaded freight train
by pulling it with a novelty refrigerator magnet. The force
just isn't there.
Speaker 2: So, realizing the Great Attractor wasn't the engine, they looked
further deeper behind it and found something even more monstrous.
This Shaply supercluster.
Speaker 1: This Shaply supercluster.
Speaker 2: This is the single largest concentration of galaxies in the
nearby universe, containing the mind boggling mass of ten thousand
milky ways. It is a true gravitational.
Speaker 1: Titan, But once again the speedometer ruined the theory gravity
strictly gets weaker with distance.
Speaker 2: If the Shaply supercluster were the sole engine driving this
cosmic river, the galaxies closer to it should be moving
much much faster than the galaxies further away.
Speaker 1: That Kashlinski's data showed the velocity vector was constant.
Speaker 2: Galaxies one billion light years away were moving at the
exact same speed as galaxies three billion light years away.
The flow does not fade with distance.
Speaker 1: Which means the Shaply supercluster, despite having the mass of
ten thousand milky ways, is just pebble caught in the
exact same stream we are. It's not pulling us, it's
being carried along with us.
Speaker 2: The force pulling us is not local.
Speaker 1: And if the gravity isn't getting weaker the further out
we look, it means the monster pulling us is simply
too big to fit inside our universe. We've mathematically weighed
everything we can see, and it only accounts for about
twenty percent of the speed we are traveling.
Speaker 2: The other eighty percent of this poll is coming from
a ghost.
Speaker 1: What's truly breathtaking here is that this confronts the absolute
hard limit of our physical reality, the cosmic event horizon.
Speaker 2: Because the speed of light is finite, and the universe
has only existed for a finite amount of time. We
can only see a bubble roughly forty six billion light
years in radius.
Speaker 1: Beyond that edge, the universe is permanently dark to us.
Light from there hasn't had time to reach our telescopes.
Speaker 2: The gravity doesn't care about light. Gravity is a physical
curvature of space time itself, and it can ripple across
boundaries that photons cannot cross.
Speaker 1: The fact that we are being yanked in one specific
direction with such overwhelming, unyielding force implies that just beyond
the forty six billion light year edge of our map,
in the unobservable dark, there is a Titanic Aliens structure.
Speaker 2: Something larger than any supercluster.
Speaker 1: Possibly larger than our entire observable bubble, sitting just over
the horizon and physically tilting the floor of the entire cosmos.
Speaker 2: It's an unsettling thought. We are being dragged by an
alien gravitational force we will never ever be able to see.
Speaker 1: It's terrifying. But it gets even crazier because, in twenty seventeen,
cosmologist J. Huta Hoffman at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
looked at all this data and realized the map still
wasn't perfectly balanced.
Speaker 2: We were so completely obsessed with the monster in front
of us pulling us into the dark, we forgot that
gravity is a game of tug of war.
Speaker 1: If something pulls you to the right, but something equally
heavy pulls you to the left, you don't move. Hoffman
realized we were only looking at half the picture.
Speaker 2: Hoffman discovered that the region of space directly behind our
Milky Way, opposite the dark flow, isn't just average, It
is profoundly, remarkably empty.
Speaker 1: He found a vast localized void, almost completely devoid of galaxies, in.
Speaker 2: The dense interconnect did gravitational web of the cosmos. This
incredibly empty patch acts exactly like negative mass. Because there
is so little matter there to pull backward on us.
The gravitational tug of war is heavily rigged.
Speaker 1: The unseen titan ahead pulls us forward, and the staggering
lack of gravity behind us effectively pushes us away.
Speaker 2: Hoffman named this the dipole repeller.
Speaker 1: It transforms our universe into a dynamic, terrifying engine. We
are trapped in a massive cosmic current on one side,
the void is a high ground, pushing matter out, shedding
its weight. On the other side, the superclusters and the
unseen Titan are the drains collecting everything in.
Speaker 2: Our little milky Way just happens to be caught in
the steepest part of the slope, surfing a gravitational wave
that spans hundreds of millions of light years.
Speaker 1: If we extrapolate this data forward in time, it paints
a very different, far more violent picture of the end
of the universe than the one we are usually taught
in school.
Speaker 2: The standard LAMBA CDM model predicts a heat death.
Speaker 1: Where dark energy slowly pushes all galaxies apart over trillions
of years, until the Milky Way is completely isolated, lonely
and freezing in a dark, empty void.
Speaker 2: But the dark flow data contradicts this. Locally, the velocity
vectors of these thousands of galaxies are converging. We are
not heading toward a peaceful, lonely isolation. We are heading
toward a chaotic traffic jam of cosmic.
Speaker 1: Proportions, a localized big crunch. We are falling into a
massive gravitational funnel. As we get closer to the drain,
the density of matter is going to absolutely skyrocket.
Speaker 2: Galaxies will violently merge, tearing each other apart. Trillions of
stars will be ripped entirely from their orbits, smashing into
each other.
Speaker 1: This immense accumulation of mass is going to create a
gravitational well so deep, so heavy that it might actually
mimic the singularity that started the Big Bang.
Speaker 2: Think about water swirling down a drain. At the outer edges,
it moves slowly, lazily, but as it gets closer to
the center, it spins faster, tighter, and clumps together violently.
Speaker 1: We are currently swirling at six hundred to one thousand
kilometers per second, spiraling inward, and drains usually lead somewhere else.
If we are concentrating all this massive energy and matter
into a single point, we might literally be punching a
hole through the fabric of space time.
Speaker 2: To truly understand what happens when we reach the violent
bottom of that funnel, or what lies beyond that punched hole,
we have to transition into the realm of m theory
and the true hidden nature of our dimensions.
Speaker 1: Let's go back in history to nineteen nineteen. A virtually
unknown German mathematician named Theodore Cluza sent a highly audacious
letter to Albert Einstein.
Speaker 2: Einstein's theory of general relativity worked beautifully in four dimensions,
three of space, one of time, describing gravity as the
elegant curvature of space.
Speaker 1: And time, but electromagnetism, formulated by James Clerk Maxwell felt
like a completely different, incompatible language.
Speaker 2: Calusa did something mathematically radical. He simply added a fifth
dimension to Einstein's equations. He just wrote plus one in
the math to see what would happen.
Speaker 1: And what happens is one of the most beautiful moments
in physics. When Kaluzo work through the math with that
extra room to move, the extra leftover components of the
gravitational field didn't just disappear or break the equation.
Speaker 2: They automatically perfectly transformed into James Clerk Maxwell's exact equations
for electromagnetism.
Speaker 1: It was the first successful unification theory in history. It
proved mathematically that gravity and light are likely the exact
same fundamental force, just vibrating in different dimensions.
Speaker 2: But obviously, this immediately begs a massive intuitive question.
Speaker 1: If there is a fifth dimension all around us, why
can't we see it? Why can't I just wave my
hand into it right now?
Speaker 2: That riddle was brilliantly solved in nineteen twenty six by
physicist Oscar Klein. He proposed the concept of compactification. He
argued that dimensions in our universe come in two very
distinct types, extended and compactified.
Speaker 1: Our familiar dimensions up, down, left, right, forward, back are extended,
They go on for billions of light years, but the
fifth dimension is rolled up.
Speaker 2: I love the garden hose analogy for this because it
takes something impossible to visualize and makes it real.
Speaker 1: Imagine you are in an airplane flying high over a
grassy yard and you look down at a green garden
hose lying on the grass. From the plane, it looks
like a one dimensional line. It only has length. You
could draw it with a single pencil stroke.
Speaker 2: But if you zoom all the way down and imagine
you are a tiny ant crawling on that exact same hose,
you realize it has a second dimension circumference. You can
walk around the circular loop of the hose.
Speaker 1: Clyining argued that the fifth dimension is curled up into
a tiny, imperceptible circle. At every single point in space.
It is curled up inside every single atom of your
body smaller than a proton. But it is there.
Speaker 2: It is the hidden microscopic loop where gravity vibrates to
become light.
Speaker 1: And this elegant mechanism of compactification became the mathematical bedrock
for modern theoretical physics.
Speaker 2: But fast forward to the nineteen nineties, and physics was
in a massive, frustrating crisis. The unification dream had fragmented
into five different, highly conflicting versions of string theory.
Speaker 1: Some had twenty six dimensions, some had ten. They all
seemed to mathematically true, but wildly contradicted each other.
Speaker 2: Then, in nineteen ninety five, at the University of Southern California,
a physicist named Edward Witten sparked the second superstring revolution.
He proved that the five different theories were actually just
five different limited shadows of a single massive mathematical framework.
He called it M.
Speaker 1: Theory, magic, mystery, membrane, or matrix. No one even knows
for sure what the M stands for, which just adds
to the lore. But to make the math of M
theory work perfectly, Witten had to add one more dimension.
He took us to eleven dimensions and.
Speaker 2: In that eleventh dimension, the tiny vibrating strings of matters
stopped being just one dimensional lines. They stretched out into
vast sheets and massive volumes. This birth the concept of
the brain for sure. For remembr m theory states that
our entire observable universe, every star, every galaxy, every atom
in your living room, your body itself, is trapped on
a single three dimensional brain floating in a much larger,
higher dimensional hyperspace called the bulk.
Speaker 1: A phenomenal way to visualize this terrifying confinement is the
loaf of bread analogy.
Speaker 2: Yes, imagine the bulk is an entire thick loaf of
slice bread. Our entire universe is just one single slice.
Speaker 1: We can move left, right, up and down within the
crumb of our specific slice, but we absolutely cannot move
out of the slice into the neighboring piece of bread,
or into the air around the loaf.
Speaker 2: We are intrinsically fundamentally stuck to our surface. The universe
is just a flat island, and the bulk is a vast,
unfathomably deep ocean.
Speaker 1: But wait, if there are other slices of bread, other
entire universes literally floating right next to us in this
cosmic loaf. Why can't we see them? If I walk
outside and look up at the night sky, why don't
I see the glowing edge of a neighboring reality shining
down on us.
Speaker 2: The answer lies in the deeply structural shape of matter
and light in string theory. In this framework, matter and
light are made of open s.
Speaker 1: Think of an open string as a tiny piece of
thread with two loose ends.
Speaker 2: The rigid mathematical rule of M theory is that the
ends of an open string cannot just float freely in
the multidimensional bulk. They must be physically anchored, glued to
a brain. They are chemically attached to our three D reality.
Speaker 1: It's exactly like the hair on your arm. The hair
can wave around in the breeze, it has some freedom
of movement, but the root is firmly, stubbornly stuck in
your skin. It can't just leave your body and float away.
Speaker 2: Every proton, neutron, and electron that makes up your body
is physically rooted to our three D brain. We are
stuck like flies on flypaper.
Speaker 1: But the real tragedy, the reason we are blind, is
light itself. Photons, the particles that allow us to see,
are also open strings. Their ends are pinned tightly to
our brain.
Speaker 2: Light literally cannot travel off our three D space. You
cannot shine a flashlight up into the bulk. The beam
will just travel in a straight, flat line along the
surface of our screen.
Speaker 1: We are entirely, permanently blind to the bulk because our
vision is shackled to our dimension.
Speaker 2: We are trapped in a prison of light. However, there
is one monumental world breaking exception.
Speaker 1: Gravity.
Speaker 2: The hypothetical particle that carries the force of gravity, the graviton,
is fundamentally different. It is a closed string. It is
a perfect continuous loop with no sticky ends.
Speaker 1: Because it has no ends, it cannot be anchored to
our three D brain. It is chemically and mathematically impossible
for our universe to hold onto it, which.
Speaker 2: Means gravity is completely free to float off the surface
of our world. It freely leaks off our brain and
drifts out into the hyperspace of the bulk.
Speaker 1: This elegantly solves one of the most frustrating head scratching
mysteries in physics, the hierarchy problem.
Speaker 2: Think of about a tiny cheap fridge magnet holding up
a paper clip. That tiny piece of metal is easily
defeating the gravitational pull of the entire planet Earth. Gravity
is shockingly bizarrely weak compared to electromagnetism.
Speaker 1: It makes no sense unless gravity isn't actually.
Speaker 2: String theory suggests gravity is just as strong as the
other forces, but we only feel a tiny, diluted fraction
of it because most of it is rapidly bleeding out
into the extra dimensions, like loud music leaking through a
thin apartment wall.
Speaker 1: This is where the implications become deeply chilling, because if
a wall is porous enough to let our gravity leak out,
it means gravity from the bulk can leak in.
Speaker 2: We might be completely blind to a neighboring universe, but
if it has mass, if it has heavy stars and planets,
we would absolutely feel its weight pressing against our reality.
Speaker 1: And this brings us to the groundbreaking nineteen ninety nine
work of physicists Lisa Randall and Raman Syndrome. Their models,
widely known as RS one and RS two, completely destroyed
the comfortable sci fi idea that parallel universes are billions
of light years away, safely distant.
Speaker 2: Oh man, this gives me actual chills every time I
think about it. They built a rigorous mathematical model of
warped five dimensional geometry that shows the extra dimension. The
bulk isn't vastly wide.
Speaker 1: It is terrifying croustrophobically thin.
Speaker 2: The spatial distance between our universe and the neighboring universe
could be as small as one single millimeter, the thickness
of a dime, less than the width of your own skin.
Speaker 1: It implies that the multiverse is spatially superimposed right on
top of you. There could be an entire other universe,
with its own massive stars, weird planets, and entirely different
laws of physics, hovering less than an inch from your face.
As you listen to this.
Speaker 2: You can't see it or touch it because you were
trapped in three D space, exactly like a two D
video game character who cannot move out of the television
screen toward the player sitting on the couch.
Speaker 1: But because gravity can cross that tiny one millimeter gap,
if a massive object in that neighboring universe passed by,
we would intimately feel it.
Speaker 2: We would experience invisible gravity appearing out of nowhere. The
other isn't distant, It is intimately hovering right over our retinas.
Speaker 1: Which perfectly sets up our next massive pivot, the shadow biosphere,
because if another reality is literally a millimeter away, its
gravity is already effect this. But what if the mirroring
isn't just happening across the bulk.
Speaker 2: What if this bizarre overlap is happening right here inside
our own galaxy.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about parity violation. In nineteen fifty six, the
foundational rules of physics basically broke right.
Speaker 2: It did, and it shocked the scientific establishment. Until nineteen
fifty six, scientists firmly believed in parity conservation, the comforting
idea that nature is fundamentally symmetrical and balanced. The laws
of physics shouldn't care about left or right.
Speaker 1: If you watch a physical process in a mirror, it
should operate exactly the same way.
Speaker 2: But two young, brilliant physicists, Sungdali and chen Ning Yang
deeply studied the radioactive decay of cobalt sixty atoms and
found something completely impossible. The subatomic particles the electrons, strongly
preferred to fly out in one specific left handed direction.
Nature was biased. The universe had a preferred handedness.
Speaker 1: To fix this terrifying imbalance. Because physicists hate a messy universe,
scientists proposed a radical, elegant solution. They hypothesize that for
every left handed particle we know, every proton, every electron,
every quark, there must exist a corresponding mirror matter particle
out there to restore the balance.
Speaker 2: A completely invisible right handed version of the entire periodic table.
Speaker 1: And it is crucial to clarify for our listeners, mirror
matter is not antimatter. Antimatter annihilates violently and explodes when
it touches regular matter.
Speaker 2: Mirror matter simply ignores you completely. It has its own
isolated version of the electromagnetic force, meaning it has its
own mirror photons.
Speaker 1: Mirror matter can form massive stars that shine blindingly bright
with mirror light, but because those mirror photons do not
interact in any way with our retinas or our scientific cameras,
that light is utterly, permanently invisible to us.
Speaker 2: A massive mirror star can be blazing in the sky
right now, bathing the Earth in high intensity mirror radiation,
and to us looking up, it would look like pitch blackness.
Speaker 1: Mirror light passes right through your roof, right through your skins,
straight through the Earth itself, as if it were nothing,
which brings us back to physicist Lisa Randall.
Speaker 2: In twenty fourteen, she proposed a theory that completely shakes
up how we view dark matter. For decades, astronomers lazily
assumed dark matter was is a boring, collisionless, fluffy halo
of ghost particles surrounding the Milky Way's a giant static
spherical cloud, providing extra gravity to keep the galaxy spinning.
Speaker 1: But Randall asked a brilliant disruptive question, why should dark
matter be simple? Visible matter is incredibly complex. It forms atoms, molecules, rocks, planets,
and people because it can radiate heat and cool down.
Why wouldn't the dark sector do the same.
Speaker 2: Randall proposed the deeply unsettling double disc dark matter model.
She argued that a fraction of the dark sector has
its own dark electromagnetism, allowing it to shed energy, cool down,
and collapse into dense, highly complex structures.
Speaker 1: Instead of a fluffy, harmless cloud, it flattens into a dense,
rotating disk.
Speaker 2: Her calculations strongly suggest that embedded directly inside our own
Milky Way galaxy, rotating in the exact same plane as
our visible stars, is a second invisible.
Speaker 1: Dark disc, a shadow galaxy superimposed perfectly on top of
our own. Because if dark matter canform a dense disc,
it can formed dark atoms. If it conformed dark atoms,
it conformed dark chemistry. We are talking about dark stars
burning with invisible physion, orbited by shadow earths made of
invisible dark rock.
Speaker 2: And because this dark disc is denser and thinner than
our visible galaxy, these shadow objects are constantly intersecting and
passing right through our star systems.
Speaker 1: We are sharing our cosmic living room with an invisible
ghost galaxy that is just as complex and just as
heavy as ours, and.
Speaker 2: This inevitably leads astrobiologists to the concept of the shadow biosphere.
Scientists at NASA have seriously proposed that if the dark
sector has its own stable protons and electrons, it has
its own periodic table.
Speaker 1: This implies that right here, occupying the exact same volume
of space as the Earth, there could be a dark
matter planet governed by dark chemistry.
Speaker 2: Once you have complex polymer's thermodynamics in billions of years
of evolution, the jump to dark biology is highly probable.
Speaker 1: So really visualize this for a second. Imagine a shadow
entity standing in the middle of your room right now.
Because it's dark, atoms don't interact with our photons. It
has no electromagnetic field pushing against ours solidity as we
experience it is an illusion.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: We don't fall through the floor because the electrons in
our shoes fiercely repel the electrons in the wood.
Speaker 2: But a shadow being has no such repulsion. It is
completely totally intangible to us. It could walk straight through
a thick concrete wall or straight through your body, and
as atoms would simply glide smoothly between your nuclei. To them,
we are the ghosts.
Speaker 1: But here is the terrifying, unavoidable exception to that ghost rule.
Gravity mass is mass, no matter what dimension or sector.
It belongs to.
Speaker 2: A dark proton warp space time exactly the same way
a normal proton does. So while a shadow entity wouldn't
touch your electrons, you would absolutely feel its mass.
Speaker 1: If a dense biological shad passed through your house, the
local gravity would spike. You'd feel a sudden, inexplicable physical
heaviness pressing down on you.
Speaker 2: I am immediately thinking about sleep paralysis. Millions of people
around the world experience this terrifying phenomenon. You wake up
in the dead of the night, entirely paralyzed, unable to scream,
and you feel a distinct crushing weight physically pressing down
on your chest.
Speaker 1: You sense a dark, hovering presence in the room that
you cannot see. Neurologists eagerly dismiss this as a simple
brain glitch, a misfiring of the sleep cycle.
Speaker 2: But if you look at it through the lens of
double disc dark matter, this is exactly what a gravitational
collision with a shadow entity would physically feel like.
Speaker 1: If a heavy being made of mirror matter decided to
lie down right on top of you, if atoms would
pass cleanly through your ribs, but its gravity would not,
its mass would physically tangibly pull on your lungs. It
would compress your heart.
Speaker 2: You would feel the literal physical weight of an invisible
creature that your eyes cannot register. Makes you wonder if
every ghost story or demon myth is just an ancient
interpretation of encountering dark biology.
Speaker 1: It is a profoundly unsettling, highly physical explanation for ancient
psychological phenomena, and this terrifying gravitational overlap extends to massive
planetary threats as well. Let's look at the famous Tunguska
event of June thirtieth, nineteen oh eight.
Speaker 2: A staggering fifty megaton explosion roughly three thousand times more
powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, flatten two thousand
square kilometers of remote Siberian forest. The shockwave was so
massive it went around the world twice.
Speaker 1: Yet when scientists finally reached the devastated site, they found
absolutely nothing. No impact crater, no meteorite fragments, no chemical
trace of an airburst comet.
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate locked room mystery on a planetary scale.
On Guska left nothing but flattened.
Speaker 1: Trees, which leads to physicists Robert Foot and Zurab Siligazy
proposing a horrifying idea. The impactor wasn't a normal space
rock at all. It was a mere asteroid.
Speaker 2: The physics fits the devastation perfectly. A massive rock made
entirely of mirror matter entering our atmosphere wouldn't interact with
the air molecules. There would be no friction, no heat,
no blazing glowing meteor trail to warn us.
Speaker 1: It falls completely silently, entirely invisible to humanize telescopes and
radar systems. It only releases its devastating energy when its
massive internal pressure destabilizes deep underground, or when its sheer
gravity violently crushes the dense crust of the Earth.
Speaker 2: A mere asteroid could be on a collision course with
a major city like London or New York right now,
and we wouldn't have a single second of warning until
the city simply ceased to exist.
Speaker 1: And we actually have hard experimental data suggesting we are
constantly driving through this invisible, dangerous debris. Deep beneath the
Grandsasso Mountain in Italy, heavily shielded by fourteen hundred meters
of solid rock to block out cosmic rays is the
Demolibret experiment.
Speaker 2: For over two decades, it has been tirelessly looking for
the gentle touch of dark matter, but instead of looking
for single random particle hits, it looks for a distinct
seasonal weather pattern.
Speaker 1: The logic is brilliant. Our entire solar system is moving
through a stationary massive cloud of dark matter at two
hundred and twenty kilometers per second, creating a constant dark
matter wind.
Speaker 2: And because the Earth orbits the Sun in June, our
orbit has us driving in the same direction as the
solar system, moving directly into the headwind, so the wind
should be faster and hit the detector more frequently.
Speaker 1: In December, we are on the other side of the sun,
moving away, so the wind is slower. The detector should
basically breathe with the seasons up in June down in December.
Speaker 2: And for twenty straight years the doma libra signal has
done exactly that. It modulates perfectly with the seasons at
a nine sigma certainty.
Speaker 1: In physics, a five sigma result is a guaranteed Nobel
Prize discovery. A nine sigma result means the probability of
it being a statistical fluke is virtually zero.
Speaker 2: It proves beyond almost any doubt that we are flying
through a massive storm. Right now, as you sit comfortably
listening to this, you're being blasted by a relentless wind
of invisible dark particles moving at nearly a million miles
an hour. Millions of these microscopic entities are passing through
your skull, your brain, your DNA every single second.
Speaker 1: And while most don't interact, the detector flashes because occasionally,
very rarely they do hit something solid.
Speaker 2: But this invisible wind of dark matter isn't just an
astronomical curiosity happening out in cold space. It is happening
inside your room, passing to your brain right now.
Speaker 1: And that brings up a terrifying question about quantum mechanics.
What happens to our reality on a microscopic level when
these invisible particles actually hit something inside you. Let's talk
about physicist Hugh Everett, the third at Princeton in nineteen
fifty seven. He looked deeply at the famous Schrodinger equation
and realized something that horrified the scientific community.
Speaker 2: To understand Everett's horror, we look at the standard Copenhagen
interpretation of quantum mechanics. It states that a particle exists
as a sneered out wave of probability until you look
at it, until you measure it. Then the wave collapse
into one single solid reality. The spinning coin lands on heads,
and the possibility of tails vanishes forever.
Speaker 1: But Everett realized the pure mathematics of the Schrodinger equation
do not actually contain a collapse function. The math just
keeps smoothly evolving.
Speaker 2: So Ever, propose the many world's interpretation or MWI, the
wave function never collapses. Instead, the universe physically violently bifurcates.
Every single time a quantum choice occurs, the universe physically
fractures into two equally real, equally massive timelines in a vast,
endlessly branching Hilbert space.
Speaker 1: So in one timeline the coin is heads, in another
its tails, and you split as well. There is a
physical version of you who sees heads and a physical
version of you who sees tails, and both of you
think you are the original only version.
Speaker 2: This means that right now, every millisecond, there are infinite
variations of you branching off. In one branch, you pause
this thrilling threads to get a snack. In another, you
spilled your coffee. In another, a dark matter particle hit
your DNA in just the wrong way and mutated a cell,
starting a terminal disease.
Speaker 1: And these aren't just fun hypothetical what ifs. MWI says,
they are physical, heavy places, with real mass, real energy,
and real suffering.
Speaker 2: Historically, physicists comfort themselves with the concept of decoherence, the
comforting idea that once the timeline split, the branches never
ever touch again. The doors are firmly permanently closed, keeping
our specific reality stable and isolated.
Speaker 1: However, recent highly controversial experiments by physicists Yakir Aranoff involving
weak measurement have found a microscopic crack in that wall.
By touching a particle incredibly gently, barely looking at it,
so to speak, ar and Off could see the quantum
state just before the universe fully splits, and.
Speaker 2: He found that the branches actually interfere with each other
before they fully separate, the realities physically rubbed together.
Speaker 1: I love the swimmer analogy for this because it makes
sense of the impossible. Imagine two swimmers doing aggressive laps
and parallel lanes in a pool. They never actually touch
each other, but the heavy waves churning from one swimmer
spill over the plastic lane line and physically push against
the other swimmer.
Speaker 2: Aharnov proved that non existent objects ghosts from an alternate
timeline can exert measurable physical force on existing ones. The
alternate timeline where a particle went left physically pushes the
particle in our timeline that went right.
Speaker 1: Now apply this terrifying interaction free measurement to the human brain.
The firing of your neurons. The very basis of your
consciousness is governed by microscopic ion channels opening and closing,
a chaotic process strictly dictated by quantum mechanics. If weak
measurement interference is real, then the electrical signals in your
brain are actively, constantly subject to interference from your alternate selves.
Speaker 2: It means your mind is not entirely private. The version
of you in the neighboring branch, the one who made
a completely different, maybe much darker choice, might literally be
chemically bumping into your neural pathways right now. When you
get a sudden, bizarre, highly intrusive thought that feel totally
alien to who you are, or an urge to swerve
your car that you can't explain, is it really your
thought or is it a weak measurement signal bleeding through
the cosmic wall from a timeline where you are a
very different, very dangerous person.
Speaker 1: It forces us to entirely reevaluate cultural phenomena like the
Mandela effect large groups of people distinctly remembering historical facts differently,
like the famous example of Nelson Mandela supposedly dying in
prison in the nineteen eighties. Psychologists easily call it false
memory or social contagion. But through the lens of multiverse physics,
weak measurement, and colliding brains, this might be a literal
data overwrite. If our brain briefly violently rushes against a
neighboring timeline where Mandela actually did die in prison, the
information structures become quantumly entangled.
Speaker 2: Imagine two computer hard drives violently copying files back and
forth during a crash. When the timelines finally separate again.
The macroscopic physical record of our world, the heavy history books,
the digital news archives might get physically overwritten by the
collision to reflect the new truth. But your brain is
an isolated quantum system. The microscopic quantum state of your
neurons might stubbornly retain the old data. So you aren't hallucinating,
You aren't crazy. You are a temporal refugee. You are
holding onto a perfectly accurate memory of a world that
physically no longer exists. The deep dissonance you feel is
the friction of a mind formatted in world A trying
to operate in world B. You are the only one
who didn't get the cosmic software update.
Speaker 1: This naturally inevitably leads to the darkest, most inescapable implication
of the Many world's interpretation quantum immortality, or as some
grimly call it, quantum suicide. The logic here is profoundly,
fundamentally unsettling. Consciousness requires a physical substrate, a working oxygenated brain,
to exist. You cannot subjectively experience nothingness. Therefore, from your
own first person subjective perspective, the only timeline you could
ever possibly inhabit is the one where you are biologically alive.
Speaker 2: To ab this thought experiment is horrifying. Imagine a game
of Russian Roulette. One bullet a spinning cylinder. In the
single normal universe, you have a one and six chance
of dying, pretty straightforward. But in the many worlds model,
pulling the trigger is a massive quantum event. The universe
violently splits into multiple branches. In five branches, the gunfires,
and you die instantly. The U in those branches ceases
to exist. The screen just goes permanently black. But the
U in the sixth survival branch here's a simple click.
You're still there. From your continuous subjective point of view,
the gun simply refused to fire.
Speaker 1: Now, imagine pulling the trigger fifty times in a row.
In the vast, overwhelming, astronomical majority of universes, you are
dead and buried. Your family is mourning. But in that
one infinitesimally thin, impossibly unlikely sliver of probability where the
gunjam fifty times due to microscopic quantum flukes, you are
still observing. You are trapped in the survival timeline. The
theory of quantum immortality suggests that you, the core observer
sitting behind your eyes, can never subjectively die.
Speaker 2: You will miraculously survive every terrifying car crash, You'll survive
every terminal disease diagnosis. As everyone you love ages and dies,
and the probabilistic branches around you, you are forced to
just keep going, eternally, transferring to increasingly unlikely, increasingly bizarre
branches where you remain biologically alive, perhaps oape to machines
or as a freak medical anomaly aging infinitely. Think back
to a moment in your life where you narrowly avoided
death a car on the highway that missed you by
niche a terrible illness. Are you truly sure you survived
or did you violently die? In the main timeline and
the consciousness. Listening to this audio right now is just
the backup copy that loaded into the highly improbable surviving branch.
Speaker 1: It is a staggering existential thought that redefines human fragility.
But while quantum immortality traps the individual observer in an
endless loop of survival, the macroscopic universe itself has its
own massive, unavoidable alarms ringing warning us of an impending
complete end to the entire system. Let's look at two
thousand and six, NASA launched the Arcade Balloon instrument to
the very edge of the Earth's atmosphere. Its mission was
simple and peaceful. Listen to the faint static radio waves
left over from the very first stars igniting in the
early universe. They expected to hear a quiet, calculable, ancient whisper.
Speaker 2: But when they turned the incredibly sensitive microphone on, they
didn't hear a whisper. They heard a deafening, terrifying screen.
The instrument detected a radio signal six times louder than
mathematically possible for our universe to produce. They panicked. They
ruled out interference from Earth. They ruled out the Sun.
They ruled out every galaxy, every quasar, every black hole.
They mathematically subtracted every single known radio source in the cosmos,
and the massive signal remained, a booming, omnipresent wall of
static noise coming from every direction at once. They dubbed
it the space roar. It's like expecting to hear a
pin drop in a silent, empty library and hearing a
mass of seven forty seven jet engines pooling up inside
the room. Instead.
Speaker 1: The math unequivocally states the source cannot be inside our universe.
There simply isn't enough raw matter to generate that level
of noise. This leaves only one terrifying option in the
context of brain cosmology. The walls of the room are vibrating.
If our universe is a membrane rubbing violently against another
neighboring universe, the intense cosmic friction would generate exactly this
type of immense radio energy. Think of two massive rubber
balloons pressing and sliding against each other. They squeak, But
when the balloons are the size of entire universes filled
with trillions of galaxies, that squeak manifests as a deafening
roar of radio energy flooding the cosmos. We are literally
listening to the friction of the fifth dimension, the physical
grinding of our brain against a neighbor that is getting far,
far too close.
Speaker 2: And while NASA's high tech ballooms here the roar up
in cold space, normal people on the ground are feeling
it too. Have you heard of the hum? Since the
nineteen seventies, In places like Bristol in the uk taus,
in New Mexico, windsor in Canada, thousands of ordinary people
report this maddening, persistent, low frequency sound. It sounds like
a massive diesel truck idling just outside your window, or
a giant industrial generator Bury did keep underground. It rattles winders,
It causes severe insomnia and nausea and nose bleeds. Acoustic
engineers rigorously hunt for the source and find absolutely nothing,
no factories, no pipes, and worst of all, it doesn't
fade if you wear industrial earplugs. It vibrates directly inside
the bone of the skull.
Speaker 1: Medical doctors often quickly dismiss it as mass hysteria or tenitis.
But tonitis is high pitched internal ringing, and it doesn't
strike Thousands of people in specific, localized geographic clusters simultaneously
cosmologists suggest a much darker, much grander origin. If two
massive membrane universes are drifting closer together, they interact via
gravitational waves long before they physically touch. These waves are
literal ripples in the fabric of space time. If a
massive gravitational wave from the approaching brain passes through the Earth,
it would rhythmically compress and stretch the planet's rocky crust.
To a fragile human being, a crustal vibration at around
ten hertz wouldn't feel like a normal earthquake. It would
feel like a deep, oppressive sound infrasonic resonance, felt deep
in the bones. The hum might be the literal physical
creaking of the Earth as it is squeezed by the
gravity of an approaching universe, the immense pressure building up
before the pop.
Speaker 2: But why are we colliding? What is driving us toward
this impact? Why is the gap between the universes closing?
This comes down to a bizarre quantum phenomenon called the
Casimir effect. In quantum mechanics, empty space isn't actually empty.
It is violently seething, with virtual particles popping in and
out of existence, creating immense vacuum pressure. If you put
two perfectly flat, uncharged metal plates extremely close together in
a hard vacuum and a lab, they are mysteriously powerfully
pushed together. Why because only tiny small quantum waves can
fit in the microscopic gap between them, but massive waves
of all sizes push from the infinite outside. The vacuum
physically crushes them.
Speaker 1: Together, and massive cosmic brains act exactly like those tiny
metal plates. If our universe is floating just a single
millimeter away from another heavy members, the immense quantum fluctuations
in the bulk create a massive Casimir force. The entire
system is fundamentally unstable. The vacuum pressure of the fifth
dimension acts like a colossal cosmic zipper, magnetically pulling the
parallel universes together. The closer they get, the stronger the
crushing force becomes, and the faster they accelerate toward each.
Speaker 2: Other, which leads right into the deeply controversial expirotic model
proposed by physicists Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok at the
prestigious Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton back in two
thousand and one. This model terrified the scientific community because
It completely stole our beloved origin story. We've always been
comforted by the idea that the Big Bang was a
one time miracle, a beautiful explosion out of a tiny singularity.
But Steinhardt and Turok looked at the advanced math of
string theory and realized the Big Bang looks exactly like
a high speed collision. In their model, our brain and
a heavy shadow brain drift together every few trillion years.
When they violently touch, The kinetic energy of the crash
instantly converts into unimaginable heat and radiation. To us living
inside the brain, this violent impact looks exactly like a
Big Bang.
Speaker 1: It implies a radical paradigm shift. The Big Bang was
not the beginning of time. It was just the latest
violent clap of thunder and an internal, unending storm, a
brutal cycle of complete destruction and rebirth. We're currently in
the peaceful cooling phase, drifting apart after the last massive crash,
but the Casimir gravity is already pulling us back, and
this perfectly elegantly explains the greatest, most stubborn mystery in
modern cosmology, dark energy. In the late nineties, astronomers realize
the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Galaxies are flying
apart faster every single day. We assume some mysterious invisible
push called dark energy was responsible, But.
Speaker 2: In the ecorotic model, dark energy isn't a push at all.
It's a massive pull. Think about two strong magnets slowly
getting closer. As the distance shrinks, the magnetic force gets
exponentially stronger, so they rapidly accelerate toward each other. Steinhardt
and Turok mathematically argue that the acceleration we see in
our telescopes is actually the gravitational attraction of the neighboring
shadow brain. The universe is stretching because we are in
terrifying free fall toward a solid wall. The accelerating expansion
of the cosmos is the smoking gun that the dimensional
gap is rapidly closing. We are playing the gas pedal
entirely to the floor toward the final impact.
Speaker 1: And if that grand cosmic collision feels too vast or
abstract to worry about, there is a much more immediate,
highly microscopic way for physics to abruptly end. Vacuum decay.
In quantum field theory, a vacuum is the lowest possible
energy state of a given field. Imagine a heavy ball
resting peacefully at the very bottom of a deep valley.
If you kick it, it just rolls back to the bottom.
It is entirely permanently stable. That is a true vacuum.
But imagine a ball stuck in a small, shallow dip
halfway up the side of a steep mountain. It looks stable,
it stays put for millions of years, but if you
give it a hard enough kick, it rolls over the
edge and crashes violently all the way down to the
real bottom of the valley. That is a false vacuum.
Speaker 2: For decades, physicist didn't know if our universe was in
a true sat a vacuum, or a dangerous false vacuum.
Then in twenty twelve, the Large Hadron Collider found the
holy grail of physics, the Higgs boson. This is the
fundamental particle that gives mass to absolutely everything. They measured
its exact mass at approximately one hundred and twenty five
giga electron volts or GIV, and that specific exact number
is the absolute worst possible news for reality. If the
Higgs were lighter, we would be perfectly permanently stable. If
it were heavier, the universe would have violently collapsed. Eons
ago at exactly one twenty five GV. We were sitting
right in the Goldilocks zone of the apocalypse. We are manaestable.
We are the fragile balls stuck halfway up the mountain
waiting for a breeze.
Speaker 1: It implies our universe's vacuum is not the true safe bottom.
There is a much lower, much more stable energy state
waiting below us. All it takes is one high energy
quantum fluctuation, a random microscopic kick, perhaps from a black
hole evaporating or a high energy particle collision, to knock
the Higgs field over the precarious edge. If that happens,
a microscopic bubble of true vacuum will. Inside this tiny bubble,
the very laws of physics are completely, irreversibly rewritten. The
fundamental constants of nature instantly change, Chemistry becomes mathematically impossible,
atoms cannot hold their electrons, crotons repel each other, and
this bubble of new physics expands outward in all directions
at the exact speed of light, consuming absolutely everything in
its path. The solid ground beneath our feet as a
trapdoor held shut by a rusty, decaying latch, and.
Speaker 2: Because it expands perfectly at the speed of light. Here
is the cruelest, most ironic joke in all of physics.
The exact same law that lets us beautifully see the
stars entirely blinds us to their destruction. If a lion
runs at you in the savannah, you see it coming.
If a massive hurricane approaches the coast, you see the
dark clouds on the horizon. Days in advance, we naturally
instinctively assume that if a bubble of true vacuum or
a colliding dimensional brain was coming to end the universe,
we would see the sky dramatically darken. We imagine stars
winking out one by one. But physics absolutely forbids any warning.
The destructive shockwave travels at exactly the speed of light.
No warning signal, no visual image, no radio wave can
travel faster than the wave of destruction itself.
Speaker 1: The horrific news of the apocalypse arrives at the exact
same nanosecond as the apocalypse itself. It could be looking
through a telescope directly at the point in the sky
where the vacuum decay bubble originated. A billion years ago.
To your human eyes, that patch of sky looks perfectly normal, peaceful,
and filled with twinkling stars. The ancient light from those
stars is hitting your retina at the exact same moment
the invisible wall of destructive energy hits your face. There
is no before, there is no during, There is only
a permanent after.
Speaker 2: You wouldn't even have the time to feel pain. The
electrical nerve impulse is traveling from your skin to your
brain move about one hundred meters per second. That is
agonizingly hilariously slow compared to the three hundred thousand kilometers
per second of the speed of light. The invisible wall
of new physics would completely dismantle your neurons, your carbon atoms,
and the very seat of your consciousness before the electrical
pain signs will even reach your spine. One second, you're
drinking your morning coffee, stressing about an annoying email, listening
to this deep dive into the material, and the very
next nanosecond, without a flash of light, without a single sound,
you simply cease to be. The continuity of your consciousness
is snipped like a physical film reel. It's just a sudden,
painless switch to absolute black.
Speaker 1: And from a strictly thermodynamic perspective, it is the ultimate
format see command on a computer. In standard quantum physics,
unitarity dictates that information is never truly lost. If you
burn a heavy encyclopedia, the information is scrambled into smoke
and mash, but theoretically, with a powerful enough computer, reconstructible.
But a brain collision or vacuum decay breaks this sacred
rule entirely. It rewrites the foundational laws of physics that
allow matter to hold a shape. The strong binding energy
holding quirks together is instantly released. All matter aggressively returns
to a smooth quark gluon plasma, a primal boiling soup
with zero structure, zero memory, and zero history. A carbon
atom from a majestic dinosaur bone becomes mathematically and physically
indistinguishable from a carbon atom.
Speaker 2: In William Shakespeare's Brain, everything humanity has ever built, loved,
or suffered, for the Great Pyramids, the vast Internet, the
Apollo Moon landings, the art and the Louver. The very
recording of this podcast instantly converted into perfectly random thermal noise.
There will be no grand ruins left behind for the
next alien civilization defined no golden voyager probe drifting in
the dark to prove we were beautifully here. The cosmic
car drive is violently melted down and cast into a
completely new shape. In the ecuotic model, this horror is
just the standard cleaning process, so the cosmic cycle can
start again. We are just temporary, fragile patterns in the
dust before the next heavy wind blows. Countless magnificent civilizations
have likely risen, look up at the stars, built empires,
and been erased just like us, leaving absolutely zero trace.
Speaker 1: So we synthesize all of this overwhelming data. The lock
sided plant cold spot, Kashlinsky's terrifying dark flow pulling ten
percent of our universe, the seasonal demolober dark matter wind,
the booming space roar. It all aggressively points to one
undeniable conclusion. The system is profoundly unstable, heavily damaged, and
we are absolutely not in control. Logically, the sheer scale
of this cosmic nihilism should absolutely terrify you.
Speaker 2: It's a lot to take in, but.
Speaker 1: Honestly, I want you to really hear me on this.
If you flip your perspective just a few degrees, this
is the most incredibly liberating news you will ever hear
in your entire life. We spend our entire brief lives
completely stressed out because we inherently think we are the
main characters of reality. We think the heavyweight of the
world is resting solely on our shoulders. We agonize over
making the wrong career choices, saying the wrong thing, failing.
But this physics tells us we are just tiny passengers
on a rock falling violently through a massive gravity well
inside a fragile bubble, floating in a multi dimensional bolt,
governed by forces so unimaginably massive they make the entirety
of human history look like a microscopic rounding error. You
cannot stop the massive brains from colliding, You cannot steer
the milky way out of the raging dark flow. You
cannot patch the false vacuum because you absolutely cannot control it.
You are completely, wonderfully free.
Speaker 2: It completely reframes human anxiety. The sheer, overwhelming scale of
these cosmic mechanics successfully cancels out personal everyday dread.
Speaker 1: Exactly did you embarrass yourself at a party last night?
Who cares? The universe is literally colliding with another dimension?
Are you worried about paying your mortgage or what your
boss thinks of you. It literally doesn't matter. The vacuum
might decay tomorrow at the speed of light. This cosmic
nihilism feels like a massive collective sigh of relief. It
gives you the ultimate permission to stop taking everything so
crushingly seriously. We are the lucky chemical scum that miraculously
woke up for a brief shining man of second right
in the middle of a violent, beautiful, cosmic fireworks show.
We got to see the light of ancient stars. We
got to feel the warmth of the sun on our skin.
We got the massive cognitive capacity to look at the
dark and ask why that is an unbelievable miracle. We
are walking a frayed tightrope over a bottomless, terrifying pit,
but the view from up here is just spectacular. So
stop looking down at the terrifying abyss, look up, grab
a coffee, hug someone you fiercely love, and appreciate the
absolute miracle that, right now, in this improbably stable second,
your atoms are holding together just long enough to feel
something real.
Speaker 2: It's a beautiful, essential synthesis of the sheer terror and
the immense privilege of our brief existence.
Speaker 1: We've talked so much about how physical gravity violently leaks
between these parallel universes, acting like a cosmic tether, but
it leaves you wondering something deeply provocative. If gravity can
cross the terrifying void of the bulk, could consciousness? If
the human brain operates on delicate quantum principles, as we
discussed with weak measurement, Are our sudden gut feelings, our
intense instincts, or our moments of inexplicable dread actually warnings?
Are they desperate signals being transmitted through the bulk from
a shadow version of ourselves in a neighboring reality who
already made the wrong choice. Drop a comment, let us
know where you stand on that, and, as always, keep
looking up. Thanks for listening to this episode of Thrilling Friends.