Speaker 1: I want to start today with a bit of a
visualization exercise. Oh okay, I know, I know. Usually we
just jump right in, but trust me on this one.
I want you to close your eyes unless you are driving,
in which case, please, for the love of physics, keep
them open. I want you to picture.
Speaker 2: The universe, all right, I'm picturing it the void.
Speaker 1: What do you see? What's in that void? Uh?
Speaker 2: The usual, you know, a vast infinite blackness. Maybe some
scattered diamond dust, which you know that represents the stars. Sure,
maybe a spiral galaxy or two floating in the distance
like frisbees. It's mostly empty, right, that's the main takeaway.
Speaker 1: Right, that's the classic view, kind of random speckled darkness.
But I want you to wipe that image away, just deleted.
I want you to replace that majestic, silent void with something, well, something.
Speaker 2: Uglier, uglier. I mean, how can the universe be ugly?
Speaker 1: Oh? It can?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I want you to picture an orc.
Speaker 2: An orc, an orc like from a fantasy novel, green skin,
protruding tusks, holding a crude club, ready to rate a village.
Speaker 1: That kind of work, exactly, that kind of ork. Because,
according to a stunning new paper we are breaking down today.
If you look at the structure of our specific corner
of the universe, I mean the distribution of matter and
the void surrounding us, and you visualize it just right,
the universe is making a face at us, and that
face looks like an orc.
Speaker 2: It sounds absolutely ridiculous when you say it out loud,
It really does. It sounds like we've completely lost our minds,
I know. But the physics behind that image, the density
maps that actually create that face, are incredibly serious.
Speaker 1: And here's the kicker and the real reason we are
doing this show today. That orc face implies that we
are living in a cosmic sandwich.
Speaker 2: A sandwich.
Speaker 1: Specifically, we are living in a thin, compressed pancake of
dark matter that is being squeezed between two massive empty voids.
Speaker 2: It is a striking, almost claustrophobic image when you really
think about it, and honestly, it changes the way you
look at the right. It turns out our neighborhood, our
entire galaxy cluster, isn't just a random suburb in space.
It's a structural anomaly. It's a special place.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads. I'm your host, and today I
am ready to have my perception of reality completely flattened
like a crape.
Speaker 2: And I'm here to help pick up the pieces and
hopefully explain why living in a pancake might solve one
of the biggest crises in modern physics.
Speaker 1: We are unpacking a really fascinating and honestly kind of
kind of troubling new paper today. It suggests that our
place in the universe isn't just random, it's statistically weird,
and it might force us to completely rewrite what we
think we know about the invisible stuff that makes up
well most of the cosmos, that.
Speaker 2: Is the core of it. This isn't just about mapping
where we are. It's about understanding the invisible scaffolding, the
dark matter, the dark matter, the stuff that holds the
universe together, or, as this paper suggests, the invisible scaffolding
that might be oh, it might be crumbling under the
weight of new observation.
Speaker 1: So we have an orc, we have a pancake, and
we have a potential crisis in the standard model of cosmology.
Let's get into the set. Before we get to the sandwich,
we need to talk about the ingredients, or maybe more accurately,
the missing ingredients.
Speaker 2: Right. To understand why this new paper is such a bombshell,
we have to establish the baseline. For decades now, the
dominant theory and cosmology, the gold standard has been the
Lambda CDM model Lambda CDM.
Speaker 1: It sounds like a fraternity for physicists. Can we break
that acronym down quickly for everyone, just so we're all
on the same page.
Speaker 2: Sure, it's essentially the standard model of the Big Bang.
Lambda represents dark energy.
Speaker 1: The mysterious force that is accelerating the expansion of the.
Speaker 2: Universe exactly, that's the pushing out force. And then CDM
stands for cold.
Speaker 1: Dark matter, cold dark matter.
Speaker 2: Yes, the theory posits that the vast majority of matter
in the universe is this slow moving stuff. That's the
cold part, and it's invisible, that's the dark part. We
call it dark matter, and that's.
Speaker 1: The famous eighty percent figure, right or something like that.
Speaker 2: Roughly, Yeah, The idea is that about eighty percent to
eighty five percent of all the matter in the universe
is this invisible substance. It has mass, so it exerts gravity,
and it basically acts as the glue holding galaxies together.
Speaker 1: So without it, galaxies would just fly apart.
Speaker 2: They would if you just look at the visible matter stars,
gas planets, you me this microphone. There isn't enough gravity
to keep a galaxy like the Milky Way from flinging
itself apart as it spins.
Speaker 1: So dark matter is the safety belt at the galaxy.
Speaker 2: It's even more fundamental than that. It's the scaffolding. Okay,
imagine a building where you can only see the dry wall,
but you can't see any of the steel beams. The
dark matter is the steel beams. We assume it's there
because well, because the building is standing up, and we
all know drywall doesn't stand up on its own.
Speaker 1: That is a great analogy. But and here is the
butt that keeps me up at nine, and I know
it bothers a lot of people in your field. We
have never actually seen this deal beams.
Speaker 2: We haven't, not directly, and that is the source of
all the tension. We haven't found decisive evidence that it
is a particle. I mean, we have built these massive detectors,
buried them deep underground, and abandoned minds to shield them
from cosmic radiation, like.
Speaker 1: The lux z Plen experiment, a giant tank of xenon.
Speaker 2: Exactly huge tanks of liquid xenon, just waiting, waiting for
a dark matter particle to bump into one of its nuclei.
We've smashed atoms together at the Large Hadron Collider, hoping
to produce one and nothing. We haven't found a single
particle that fits the description.
Speaker 1: So it's a ghost in the machine. But I mean,
we haven't proven it doesn't exist either.
Speaker 2: Have we No, And that's the problem. We have no
decisive evidence against it being a particle either. The math
just works so well on large scales that we can't
let it go. We are stuck in this scientific limbo,
as the source material for Today puts it. And I
love this quote. It's really infuriating.
Speaker 1: I love that too. It's infuriating. You can feel the
visceral frustration of the physicists in that line, can't you. Absolutely,
it's not just a puzzle anymore. It's an annoyance. It's
like looking for your keys when you know they are
in the house, but you've torn the catch up part
three times and they're just not there.
Speaker 2: And you're starting to wonder if the keys ever existed
in the first place, or if you just you know, hallucinated.
Speaker 1: Them exactly and this is where the drama really starts
to build, because the standard theory of dark matter, the
one we've all been taught in school, the one on
all the posters at the science Museum, is starting to
feel a little bit shaky.
Speaker 2: Shaky is a very polite way to put it.
Speaker 1: The source goes even further. They imply that the standard
theory is starting to feel less like hard science and
more like a creative writing exercise.
Speaker 2: That is a stinging critique, but it captures the mood
in the community perfectly. We are seeing a trend where
to keep the dark matter theory alive in the face
of new data, we have to keep adding new rules.
We have to keep tweaking the story.
Speaker 1: It's like a plot hole in a movie that the
writers try to fix with a really convoluted backstory, and
then that creates another plot hole, so they have to
write a prequel to explain that one precisely.
Speaker 2: And that brings us right back to this new paper,
because if this paper is right, we are sitting in
a very very peculiar structural anomaly that the standard simple
models struggle to explain naturally, not without even more creative writing.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's get into segment one, the shape of our reality.
I want to go back to this pancake because when
I hear pantake, I think breakfast. But we're talking about
a galactic scale here. What exactly is the local sheet?
Speaker 2: So to understand this you have to know about way
way out, way past the Milky Way. Okay, we are
part of a group of galaxies called the local group.
You've got Us, Andromeda a few others, and the local
group is part of a larger structure.
Speaker 1: A supercluster. Is that the right term?
Speaker 2: Essentially, yes, and the paper describes our local environment. The
technical term is the local sheet as a flat, thin
concentration of mass. Imagine a vast, flattened region where all
the galaxies, including the Milky Way, Andromeda, and our neighbors
in the Virgo cluster, are all clustered together.
Speaker 1: Why is flat weird? I mean, the Solar system is flat, right,
the planet's orbit in a disc. Galaxies themselves are flat discs.
Why shouldn't the cluster be flat?
Speaker 2: That's a great question, and it's an important distinction. Solar
systems and galaxies are flat because of angular momentum.
Speaker 1: They're spinning.
Speaker 2: They spin, and that spinning flattens them out like pizza do.
But on the scale of galaxy clusters we are talking
tens of millions of light years across. Gravity usually just
pulls things into filaments or big spherical blob like a spun.
Speaker 1: I've heard it called the cosmic web.
Speaker 2: Exactly. The cosmic web usually looks like a three D
spund or aus spider web. Finding a distinct razor thin
sheet that extends for this enormous distance is well, it's unique.
It implies a very specific type of compression happened.
Speaker 1: Okay, so instead of a big round ball of galaxies
or a scattered cloud, we are living in a cosmic
shaitt a pancake.
Speaker 2: Precisely, and this pancake of dark matter is sandwiched on
either side of this flat sheet. There are two huge,
almost void regions, bubbles of nothingness, almost empty bubbles, is
how the source describes them. One of them is called
the local void.
Speaker 1: The local void that sounds like a dive bar in
a sci fi movie.
Speaker 2: It does, doesn't it. It's a massive region of space
with very very few galaxies. And on the other side
you have another underdense region, often associated with something called
the North Polar spur.
Speaker 1: So let me see if I have this right, you
have this high density wall or sheet in the mirror
axis and then just deep emptiness on both sides.
Speaker 2: That's the picture that is.
Speaker 1: Such a weird mental image. It's like we are living
on a partition wall between two gigantic empty rooms, or
like the cream filling in an oreo if the cookies
were made of nothingness.
Speaker 2: That is a great analogy. And the paper suggests that
dark matter, if it exists in the way Lambda CDM
says it does, must be strongly concentrated along this mirror axis.
It squeezed into the pancake, leaving the bubbles empty, and this.
Speaker 1: Is where the orc comes in. The source mentioned that
if you look at the visualization of this structure, the
pancake and the voids, it looks like an orc. I'm
still trying to picture it. Are the voids the eyes.
Speaker 2: It's a bit of a roar shot test for cosmologists,
you know. But yes, if you look at the density
maps from the simulation, the voids act as these large
hollowed out eye sockets. They are dark and empty.
Speaker 1: Okay, I can see that, and the local.
Speaker 2: Sheet, the dense region where we live forms the bridge
of the nose, the heavy brow ridge, and maybe the mouth.
Speaker 1: It's funny, but it's also kind of haunting. The universe
has a face, and it's not a friendly face. It's
an orc.
Speaker 2: It definitely has character. But the point the author was
making is playful but serious. The universe isn't just a
uniform fog. It has structure, it has distinct features, and
we happen to live in one of the most distinct
features of all.
Speaker 1: And when we say we are in the pancake, we
need to clarify we. I'm assuming we don't just mean
Earth or the Solar System.
Speaker 2: No, no, not just Earth, not just the Solar System, not
even just the Milky Way galaxy. When the paper says we,
it refers to the entire cluster of galaxies. We are
surrounded by our whole cosmic neighborhood.
Speaker 1: That is a massive neighborhood.
Speaker 2: It is the scale is tens of millions of light years,
and yet on that enormous scale, it's flat. It's a sheet.
Speaker 1: It makes you feel kind of special, doesn't it. I mean,
we aren't just floating in some random soup. We are
in the pancake of destiny.
Speaker 2: We'll hold that thought on destiny because usually in cosmology,
if you find yourself in a special place, that is
a massive red flag.
Speaker 1: Why everyone wants to be special. My mom told me
I was special.
Speaker 2: Your mom is definitely right. But in physics, special is
a problem. We rely on something called Copernican.
Speaker 1: Principle, the idea that we are not the center of
the universe.
Speaker 2: Right, we are not in a privileged position. The universe
should look roughly the same no matter where you are standing.
That's a core assumption called homogeneity.
Speaker 1: So if the universe is supposed to be the same everywhere,
finding ourselves in this highly specific odd structure that looks
like an orc, well, it raises some mybrows.
Speaker 2: Exactly. It suggests that maybe our local patch of the
universe is violating the standard rules, or perhaps more disturbingly,
that the standard rules don't actually predict what we see around.
Speaker 1: Us, which is a perfect segue. Okay, so we are
in an orc shaped dark matter sandwich. That's the one.
Now I want to get into the why this is
a problem. This brings us to segment two, the trouble
with dark matter. You mentioned earlier that the theory is
becoming a creative writing exercise, let's uttack that what exactly
is going wrong with the theory.
Speaker 2: This is where we have to look at the track
record of the dark matter theory over the last decade
or so. The issue is that the observations what we
actually see through a telescopes keep contradicting what the dark
matter computer models predict.
Speaker 1: And every time that happens, the theorists have to go
back and fix the model.
Speaker 2: Right, and in science, you want a theory that predicts things,
not a theory that you have to constant patch up
after the fact. If you have to keep adding what
we call epicycles, extra little distinct rules to make it work.
Eventually you have to ask if the core theory is flawed.
Speaker 1: Okay, give me a concrete example. What's the first big anomaly.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about galactic cores. This is often called the
cusp core problem.
Speaker 1: The cusp core problem sounds pointy. Lay it on me
in plain English.
Speaker 2: Standard cold dark matter theory is very very clear on
how gravity works. It predicts that dark matter should clump
effectively in the center of galaxies. It should get very
very dense in the middle. We call this a cusp.
A cusp think of it like a sharp mountain peak
of density.
Speaker 1: So if we could see dark matter, there should be
a big, bright, well invitible ball of heavy stuff right
in the middle of the Milky Way, a sharp.
Speaker 2: Spike, correct a very sharp spike in density. But when
we observe the way stars and gas move near the
centers of galaxies, we don't see evidence for that sharp spike.
Speaker 1: What do we see instead?
Speaker 2: The observation suggest the core is much smoother. It's flat.
It's a core, not a cusp. Imagine a flat plateau
instead of a mountain peak. The dark matter seems to
be spread out evenly, not clumped up in the middle.
Speaker 1: So the map doesn't match the territory. Yeah, the theory
says mountain, and the telescope says plateau exactly.
Speaker 2: So what do the theorists do. They don't throw out
the theory, of course not. They tweak the model. They
introduce what they call baryonic feedback.
Speaker 1: Buryonic feedback. That sounds suspiciously technical.
Speaker 2: It's a fancy way of saying supernova's. They say, well,
maybe supernova explosions in the center of the galaxy push
the dark matter out, or maybe there's some complex feedback
mechanism between gas and dark matter that smoothed out the bump.
Speaker 1: Is that plausible? I mean, could that actually.
Speaker 2: Happen physically possible? Supernovas are incredibly powerful, but you have
to fine tune the math just right to make it
happen in every galaxy we see. As the source says,
one can make that work, but it feels forced.
Speaker 1: One can make that work. Yeah, it sounds like when
I'm trying to to fix a waterly table and I
just keep shoving folded paper under the leg until it
stops moving. It works, but it's not exactly elegant engineering.
Speaker 2: That is a distressingly accurate analogy. You're patching the theory
and it happens again with satellite galaxies. Okay, this is
the missing satellites problem.
Speaker 1: I've heard of this. This is about the little, tiny
galaxies that orbit big ones like ours.
Speaker 2: Yes, the dark matter simulations predict that large galaxies like
our Milky Way should be surrounded by hundreds, potentially thousands,
of smaller clumps of dark matter, each one hosting a
tiny dwarf galaxy like.
Speaker 1: A swarm of bees around a hive.
Speaker 2: Exactly because the dark matter is messy, right, it should
break off into little chunks. Gravity is fractal in these simulations.
It makes big clumps and little clumps. The simulation says, look.
Speaker 1: For the swarm, and whether we see a swarm.
Speaker 2: We see a few. We have the Magellanic clouds, which
are beautiful, and we've found a handful of other ultra
faint dwarfs. But we don't see hundreds. We see vastly,
vastly fewer. And the theory.
Speaker 1: Predicts so the swarm is missing. Where did they go?
Speaker 2: That's the multi billion dollar question? So how do they
make that work?
Speaker 1: Let me guess they adjust the model again.
Speaker 2: They adjust the model. They say, well, maybe the small
clumps of dark matter exist, but they just didn't manage
to attract enough gas to form stars. So the clumps
are there, but they are invisible. They are dark galaxies.
Speaker 1: That feels incredibly convenient. The invisible stuff is there, it's
just doubly invisible now because it didn't light up.
Speaker 2: It protects the theory from being falsified. If you can
always claim the missing evidence is just too faint to see,
you can never really be proven wrong.
Speaker 1: You see the pattern, one can make that work.
Speaker 2: And then there's the big one. The new kid on
the block, A not only number three courtesy of the
James Webb Space Telescope.
Speaker 1: The Early Universe. I remember the headlines when JWST started
sending back those first pictures. People were freaking out.
Speaker 2: They were right to freak out, because under the standard
dark matter model, galaxies build up slowly. It's a bottom
up process, right. Gravity takes time to pull things together.
You start small and messy, and over billions of years
you get big, structured galaxies, slow and.
Speaker 1: Stead He wins the race. You don't get a skyscraper
five minutes after you break around.
Speaker 2: That was the prediction. But JWST looked back at the
very early universe. We're talking red shifts of ten or eleven,
almost right after the Big Bang cosmologically speaking, and what
did it find?
Speaker 1: Big galaxies, huge fully.
Speaker 2: Formed, bright galaxies, some of them massive enough to rival
our own Milky Way, but existing at a time when
the universe was just in its infancy.
Speaker 1: It's like walking into a nursery and finding a newborn
baby who was already six feet tall, wearing a suit
and trading stocks.
Speaker 2: A perfect analogy. It completely defies the developmental timeline we
expected the universe shouldn't have been able to organize itself
that quickly if it was relying on the slow, steady
trickle of cold dark matter gravity.
Speaker 1: And what was the response? Did they scrap the theory?
Speaker 2: Oh? They said, well, maybe star formation was just more
efficient back then, or maybe our calibration was off, maybe
the dust obscures the real mass. They find a way
to keep the dark matter framework, but they have to
bend it into a pretzel to make it fit, and.
Speaker 1: That's why the source calls it a creative writing exercise.
Speaker 2: Yes, the critique is this, at what point does a
theory stop being predictive and start being merely reactive? If
you have to modify the story after every single new discovery,
are you actually explaining the universe or are you just
describing it after the fact.
Speaker 1: That is a savage burn on the physics community. But
I mean, given the list you just gave, it feels
kind of justified.
Speaker 2: It is a valid scientific concern. Science is supposed to
be about falsifiability. You have to be able to be
proven wrong. If your theory acts like a chameleon and
changes color to match whatever background you put it against,
it's not a very useful theory anymore.
Speaker 1: Which brings us back to the pancake, because this new
paper is essentially saying, Okay, if you want to keep
the standard model, if you want to keep LAMB to CDM,
here is the extremely weird shape you have to accept
we live in.
Speaker 2: Right. They are testing the limits of the model by
looking at our local address in the cosmos.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's move to segment three. How did they find it?
Because we've established pretty clearly that dark matter is invisible,
So how do these researchers know we're in a pancake
between two voids? Did they just look at the stars
and guess?
Speaker 2: No guessing involved. They used a very sophisticated tool called
structure simulation models. Specifically, they used a technique called constrained realizations.
Speaker 1: Okay, break that down for me. Constrained realizations. That sounds
like a therapy technique. I had a constrained realization about
my childhood.
Speaker 2: Today, Doc, It does, doesn't it? But in physics it
means running a simulation that isn't random. Oka. Usually when
cosmologists simulate the universe, they just throw in some random
initial conditions, press play and see what kind of universe
pops out. They get a generic universe.
Speaker 1: A generic universe like buying a universe starter pack from
a store exactly.
Speaker 2: But that doesn't help us understand our specific neighborhood. So
these researchers did something different. They started with the standard
cosmological model Lambda CDM, but they added.
Speaker 1: Constraints, constraints, what kind of constraints.
Speaker 2: They forced the simulation to match the actual position of
the galaxies we see in the sky today. They basically said, okay, computer,
simulate a universe from the Big Bang forward. But at
the end of the simulation, the Milky Way must be here,
Andromeda must be over there, and the Virgo cluster must
be in that exact spot.
Speaker 1: So they rigged the game. They started with the answer.
Speaker 2: In a way, Yes, they rigged it to match reality.
They reverse engineered the Big Bang. They asked the question,
what must the initial conditions have been, and more importantly,
where must the unseen dark matter be today to produce
this specific arrangement of visible galaxies that we observe.
Speaker 1: Ah, I see so because the galaxies are just the
tip of the iceberg. They're like the lights on the
Christmas tree. If you know exactly where all the lights are,
you can figure out the shape of the invisible branches
holding them up exactly.
Speaker 2: That is the perfect metaphoras. Galaxies are the tracers. They
follow the gravitational pull of the dark matter. So if
you see a sheet of galaxies, the computer deduces that
there must be a sheet of dark matter holding them there.
Speaker 1: And they didn't just run this once.
Speaker 2: Oh no, they ran it thousands of times. They created
thousands of potential universes that all ended up looking exactly
like our local neighborhood in terms of the visible matter.
Speaker 1: And what was the common denominator? What did they all
have in common?
Speaker 2: In every single simulation that matched our visible reality, the
underlying dark matter structure was the same. It was that
specific pancake shape with the two massive voids on either side.
Speaker 1: WHOA. So they didn't just see the pancake. They deduced
that the pancake must be there for our reality to
make sense under the current rules.
Speaker 2: Exactly. There was no other way to get the visible
result without that specific invisible structure To explain why our
galaxies are arranged the way they are. The dark matter
has to be squeezed into this thin sheet between empty bubbles.
Speaker 1: So it's not just a pretty pick or a funny
orc face. It's a mathematical necessity of the LAMB to
CDM model when you apply it to our specific location.
Speaker 2: Correct. If the standard model is true, then the orc
is real.
Speaker 1: That's incredibly cool and also incredibly weird, which leads us
to segment four, the odds and the significance. Is this normal?
Are their cosmic pancakes everywhere? Or are we the odd
ones out?
Speaker 2: That is the big question. How rare is a cosmic work?
Speaker 1: I'm guessing pretty rare. I mean orcs in fantasy usually
travel in hordes, but maybe cosmic orcs are solitary creatures.
Speaker 2: The paper tries to quantify this. They looked at how
often structures like our local sheet and these specific voids
appear in those generic random universe simulations we talked about earlier.
Speaker 1: Okay, lay the stance on me. How special are we?
Speaker 2: Earlier estimates and these are from studies looking at similar
structures put the probability of finding ourselves in such a
spot at somewhere between two point five and three point
three sigma.
Speaker 1: Okay, speak English, professor, what is this sigma? I know
it's a Greek letter, but what does it mean in
this context?
Speaker 2: Sigma is a measure of statistical significance. It tells you
how far away a result is from the average from
what's normal. In this context, one sigma is like flipping
a coin and getting heads.
Speaker 1: Totally normal happens all the.
Speaker 2: Time, exactly. Five sigma is the gold standard in particle physics.
For a discovery that's winning the lottery, it's basically considered proof.
Speaker 1: And two point five to three point three sigma where
does that land?
Speaker 2: That translates roughly to a one in one hundred to
a one in one thousand chance.
Speaker 1: So if I have a bag of a thousand universes,
only one of them has us living in this specific
orc sandwich.
Speaker 2: Roughly, Yes, that's the idea.
Speaker 1: That feels rare, but it's not impossible. It's not one in.
Speaker 2: A billion exactly. It's what we call statistically significant but
not impossible. It's in that uncomfortable middle ground. It's just
rare enough to make you wonder if something else is
going on, but not rare enough to completely disprove the
theory on its own.
Speaker 1: It's like winning a raffle at a school for that
you didn't even know you entered. It happens, but you're
pretty surprised.
Speaker 2: Yes, and this brings us to the bullshit meter.
Speaker 1: I love that the source used a bullshit meter. We
need more of those in science. So what was the
score for this paper?
Speaker 2: She gave it a one out of ten?
Speaker 1: Wait, one is low rate or is one high?
Speaker 2: One is very low bullshit? A ten would be total nonsense.
A one means this is solid science.
Speaker 1: Okay. So despite the weird ORC imagery and the strange result,
the methodology behind it is sound.
Speaker 2: It is, but she noted a limitation, which is why
she gave it a one and not a perfect zero.
She can't personally judge the computer simulations. These codes are
incredibly complex, written by teams over years. You have to
trust that the researcher set up the simulation correctly.
Speaker 1: Trust but verify the old motto exactly.
Speaker 2: And she had one other minor annoyance. Oh, the paper
didn't calculate the exact probability for their specific new model.
They relied on those earlier two point five to three
point three sigma estimates from previous studies. She wanted them
to run the numbers fresh for this particular.
Speaker 1: ORC, so we know it's rare, but we don't know
exactly how rare this specific pancake orc situation is correct.
Speaker 2: Hopefully another team will run the numbers soon and give
us a precise figure. But the qualitative result stands we
live in a rare squeezed environment.
Speaker 1: So let's get to segment five, the bigger picture, the
so what question? Why does it matter that I live
in a pancake? I mean, my rent is still the same,
my coffee still tastes the same this morning. Why should
the average listener care about the local sheet?
Speaker 2: It matters because it connects right back to that creative
writing problem we discussed. The more we try to fit
our observations to the standard dark matter model, the weirder
and more special our local environment appears to be.
Speaker 1: It's imagine you have a suit that doesn't fit. You
can tailor it, you can tuck it, you can pin
it here and there, but eventually you look in the
mirror and you just look ridiculous. The proportions are all wrong, And.
Speaker 2: At that point you have to ask yourself a fundamental question,
is my body weird? Or is the suit just the
wrong size?
Speaker 1: Or maybe it's the wrong suit entirely.
Speaker 2: That is the philosophical point at the heart of this
is the universe naturally weird and we just happen to
land in a one in one thousand spot by sheer luck.
Or is our theory of dark matter wrong? The source
suggests that we might be missing something.
Speaker 1: Big, something big, like maybe dark matter isn't a particle
at all.
Speaker 2: That is the leading alternative. There are theories like MOND,
which stands for modified Newtonian dynamics, that suggest we don't
need invisible matter, we just need to tweak our understanding
of gravity itself.
Speaker 1: So maybe gravity just works differently on really big scales,
like how boiling water behaves differently than a single water
molecule exactly.
Speaker 2: And if you change the laws of gravity, maybe this
pancake structure isn't an anomaly anymore. Maybe it's exactly what
you'd expect to see.
Speaker 1: Well, that would certainly solve the creative writing problem. You
wouldn't need to invent invisible galaxies or use supernovas to
push matter around to explain things.
Speaker 2: But mon D has its own set of problems. It's
not a perfect fix either. It really struggles to explain
the cosmic microwave background radiation, for instance, But the tension
between these ideas is leading us somewhere new. And you
mentioned quantum gravity before. How does that fit in?
Speaker 1: Yes, the holy grail of physics.
Speaker 2: That is the ultimate prize. Right now, we have two
different rule books for the universe. We have general relativity,
which handles big stuff like gravity, pancakes, and galaxies, and
we have quantum mechanics, which handles the tiny stuff like
atoms and subatomic particle And.
Speaker 1: They don't get along at all.
Speaker 2: They hate each other, they don't mathematically work together. We
are desperately searching for a theory of quantum gravity, the
one single theory that.
Speaker 1: Unifies them, and solving the dark matter mystery can help
us find it.
Speaker 2: The source argues that, yes, absolutely, if we finally solve
the riddle of dark matter, why the universe looks like
an orc, why the galaxy is spin too fast, it
won't just tell us what the invisible stuff is. It
might give us it's the crucial clue we need to
understand the fundamental nature of quantum gravity.
Speaker 1: It's a two for one deal, two.
Speaker 2: Unsolved mysteries for the price of one. If dark matter
turns out to be a misunderstanding of how gravity works
on a quantum level, it might reveal the bridge between
the quantum world and the cosmic world.
Speaker 1: I love that it turns this frustration, this infuriating creative
writing exercise, into a massive opportunity. The fact that the
model is breaking isn't a failure. It's actually good news.
It means we are about to learn something profound.
Speaker 2: That is the best way to look at it. The
anomalies aren't failures, they are clues. The orc is a clue.
Speaker 1: All right, let's wrap this up. This has been a
wild ride. We started with an orc, moved to a pancake,
realized our scientific model is held together by tape and
creative writing, and we ended up at the holy grail
of physics.
Speaker 2: Just a typical Tuesday and cosmology.
Speaker 1: But there's something really beautiful about it, isn't there. The
source had this lovely reflection at the end of her analysis.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's so easy to get lost and the math
and the sigmas and all the jargon. But if you
step back for a moment, everything we talked about today,
the voids, the pancake, the galaxies, the orc, it all
formed from minuscule quantum fluctuations over billions and billions of.
Speaker 1: Years, Tiny little jitters in the energy of the early universe.
Speaker 2: Tiny jitters, literally random quantum noise that gravity amplified into
the massive cosmic structures we see today. As the host said,
if you ever feel let down by the world, just
remember it's all just quantum fluctuations that evolved into little
human beings crawling around on planets.
Speaker 1: That is weirdly comforting. I'm just a highly organized quantum
fluctuation with a podcast.
Speaker 2: And really the only thing to blame for all of this,
the mess, the mystery, the ork is physics.
Speaker 1: Blame physics. I'm going to use that next time I
relate for a meeting. Sorry, physics made the universe weird
and I got got in the local sheet.
Speaker 2: It might not hold up in court, but it is
on a fundamental level, technically true.
Speaker 1: So here is the summary of today's thrilling thread. We
are very likely living in a dark matter pancake sandwich
between two giant voids. The theory we use to explain
this is struggling to keep up with reality, requiring more
and more creative writing to make sense. And the universe
is wonderfully, stubbornly beautifully strange.
Speaker 2: A perfect summary.
Speaker 1: Now I want to turn this over to you, the listener.
We've presented the evidence, we've shown you the fixes and
the patches the scientists are making to the theory. So
what do you think?
Speaker 2: Yes, that is the real question. Do you think the
dark matter model is just going through some growing pains
and we'll eventually find that particle in a lab and
it will all make sense. Or is it time to
scrap it?
Speaker 1: Is it time to burn the creative writing, the manuscript
and start a new book. Are we missing something big?
Speaker 2: It is the biggest question in modern science, and honestly,
right now your guess is as good as ours.
Speaker 1: Leave a comment let us know where you stand. Are
you team dark matter or are you on team something new.
Speaker 2: I'm very curious to see what people think about this one.
Speaker 1: Me too. As always, thank you for joining us on
this journey through the cosmos. Keep looking up and watch out.
Speaker 2: For the orcs and mind the voids.
Speaker 1: This has been thrilling threads. See you next time.