Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads.
Speaker 2: It's great to be here.
Speaker 1: I want to start today with a question, a direct
question for you listening right now, and I want you
to take a second and really really think about this.
How much do you trust your own mind?
Speaker 2: Ooh?
Speaker 1: And I don't mean in a you know, did I
lock the front door or did I leave the stove
on kind of way. We all have those moments with
the everyday stuff, exactly. I mean how much do you
trust your fundamental perception of reality itself?
Speaker 2: That is a well, that's a remarkably heavy way to
open the door, but honestly, is the right question for
what we're covering today. Because we operate every single second
of every day on the assumption that what we see,
what we remember, and what we experience is well factual.
We assume it's objective data.
Speaker 1: We assume it's a solid concrete floor. We're all standing
on that it's fixed, immutable. But have you ever been
one hundred percent certain of a memory I'm talking a
specific detail, a logo, a line in a movie, only
to find out later definitively that it never existed, oh?
Speaker 2: Absolutely?
Speaker 1: Or have you ever had a moment where the day
just seemed to, I don't know, skip a beat, like
the universe just buffered for a second.
Speaker 2: I think most people have. But we usually brush those
moments off, don't we. We have a categorization system for them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we file it away.
Speaker 2: We call it fatigue. We call it I need more coffee,
We call it a lapse in attention. We you know,
we rationalize the glitch away because the alternative is just
too uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: But what if it's not fatigue? That is the thread
we are pulling on today. And we aren't just telling
ghost stories around a campfire here, not all. We're looking
at a stack of reports that range from the psychological
to the to the sub atomic. We're talking about the
Mandela effect, yes, which everyone loves to debate, but we
are also talking about hard.
Speaker 2: Physics, real measurable science.
Speaker 1: We are talking about experiments at cern, atomic clocks, flying
on commercial airliners, and literal anomalies in the flow of
time that engineers have to account for just to keep
our phones working.
Speaker 2: So the mission for this deep dive, for this episode
of Thrilling Threads is to explore we're calling the top
ten anomalies in time. We've curated a list of phenomena
that really challenge that linear, solid view of history.
Speaker 1: And physics, and the goal is to try and figure
out are these just tricks of a squishy, fallible human brain, which,
let's be honest, is not the most reliable hard drive,
not even close, or are the evidence that the universe
plays by rules we haven't mastered yet.
Speaker 2: I have to admit, looking through this research, I had
a few moments where I just had to put the
papers down and stare at the wall.
Speaker 1: I believe it.
Speaker 2: I've had these glitch moments and finding out there might
be actual science behind them is well, it's thrilling, but
it's also a little terrifying.
Speaker 1: It is thrilling, but we need to set some ground
rules before we just jump off the cliff.
Speaker 2: Here.
Speaker 1: We are going look at psychological phenomena which are fascinating
in their own right, but we are going to compare
them against actual quantum physics and relativity experiments. We need
to see where the line blurs between you know, my
memory is bad and space time is behaving strangely. Okay,
let's unpack this. Let's start with the stuff that hits
closest to home, the stuff that makes you question your
own childhood. Yes, we're talking about the Mandela effect and
psychological glitches, and I have to start with one that
genuinely shook me. When I read this in the notes,
I actually got angry. I'm talking about we Sports.
Speaker 2: Ah. Yes, the classic Nintendo game. It really defined an era.
Speaker 1: It did. I spent hours, I mean entire summers playing this.
I can see the bowling alley, the tennis court. But specifically,
I'm thinking about the boxing game.
Speaker 2: You know the Oh, yes, split screen. You're throwing punches
with the remote.
Speaker 1: Yes, okay, So visualize the end of the match. You
land that final haymaker, the opponent goes down in slow motion,
the screen flashes, and the announcer, this booming, specific slightly
synthesized voice says, you win.
Speaker 2: You can hear the pitch right, the intonation.
Speaker 1: Clear as day. You win. It's iconic. It's the reward
for the effort. I can hear the exact timbre of
that voice.
Speaker 2: Well, here is where it gets fascinating, and here's where I,
unfortunately have to be the bearer of bad news. According
to the sources we're looking at today, specifically a really
deep case study involving a Reddit user named Rampo seven
that sound bite does not exist.
Speaker 1: Stop. No, it has to exist. I can hear it
in my mind's eye right now. I can hear it
better than I can hear my own grandmother's voice.
Speaker 2: And that is the power of the memory. But the
fact remains, the announcer never says you win.
Speaker 1: Never.
Speaker 2: Never. The text appears on the screen shore big bold letters,
but the audio it isn't there. There's music, there's a
sound effect of the crowd cheering yeah, but no voice.
Speaker 1: I find that impossible to accept, I really do. That
feels wrong on a fundamental level.
Speaker 2: You aren't alone. And that's why this story from ramp
Po seven is so compelling. This user didn't just have
a fleeting thought about it. They were building a physical contraption,
some sort of project, and they wanted to use that
specific you win sound effect as a trigger.
Speaker 1: That's a cool idea, Like when the machine finishes a task,
it plays the WI Sports voice right exactly.
Speaker 2: So RAMPO seven goes looking for the file. They go
to YouTube for searching for WE Sports you Win sound.
Nothing just clips of gameplay with the music.
Speaker 1: So what did they do?
Speaker 2: They figured, Okay, I'll just rope the audio from the
game files myself. They dug into the actual code of
the game. They went through every single sound asset, the grunts,
the tennis racket, hits, the bowling pins, all the little
sound everything. They find strike, they find home run, they
find foul, but you win. It's not there.
Speaker 1: That is maddening. That is the moment where you feel
like you're being gas lit by reality. Because Rampo seven
didn't just accept it, right, They had to check no.
Speaker 2: Of course not. They did what any sane person experiencing
a glitch would do. They crowdsourced a sanity check. Right.
They went to their friends. They didn't lead the witness.
They just asked, hey, what does the announcer say when
you win in WI Sports? And everyone, every single person agreed.
He says you in Ye. It was a shared false memory.
Speaker 1: But that's the scary part. If it was just me,
I'd say, okay, I have a bad memory. I drink
too much soda as a kid. But when an entire
generation of gamers shares the exact same auditory hallucination, that
feels like a glitch. It does that feels like someone
went back and edited the file on the server of reality.
Speaker 2: Well, let's look at the psychological explanation before we jump
to reality editing.
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, real mean.
Speaker 2: Psychologically, our brains are prediction machines. This is a concept
called predictive coding. Your brain doesn't just passively record the
world like a camera. It actively predicts what it's about
to happen to massively efficient. So you see the big
text you win on the screen. You are used to
the announcer reading the text in other parts of the game, strike.
Speaker 1: Foul out right, he reads the other words.
Speaker 2: So your brain anticipates the pattern. It sees the text,
it knows the voice, and it just stitches them together
to complete the pattern. You hear, what do you expect
to hear?
Speaker 1: So you're saying, my brain is just remixing reality in
post production. It's adding special effects that aren't there just
to make the scene feel complete.
Speaker 2: Essentially, yes, it fills in the gaps. It's a shortcut.
But the question is does that make the memory less
real to you? You experienced it, You have the neural
pathways for that sound in your subjective reality. The announcer
did say it.
Speaker 1: It feels incredibly real. But it shakes my confidence because
if I can collectively hallucinate a voice line that millions
of other people also hallucinated. What else am I getting wrong?
Speaker 2: Exactly?
Speaker 1: Let's move to something visual, something we see every single day.
Speaker 2: Coffee ah, the Starbucks logo.
Speaker 1: Right, everyone knows the Starbucks mermaid or the siren, green circle,
two tails, wavy hair. Now, I want you listening to
visualize that logo. Close your eyes if you have to,
unless you're driving. Please don't close your eyes if you're driving.
Speaker 2: Good disclaimer.
Speaker 1: Look at the siren's head, picture her crown. Does she
have a star on her.
Speaker 2: It is a common point of contention, a really famous one.
Speaker 1: A lot of people, and I mean a massive amount
of people swear there is no star. It's just a crown,
a simple, jagged crown. But if you look at your
cup right now, or pull up the image on your phone,
there is a prominent five pointed star right in the
center of the crown. It's not subtle, it's huge. It
takes up half the crown.
Speaker 2: And the counter argument, the skeptics explanation usually brings up
the Burger King logo.
Speaker 1: Right, Burger King the King, you'd expect a crown in
the logo. It feels like there should be one, but
there isn't one. It's just the two bun halves in
the text.
Speaker 2: The human brain is funny with associations. You know. We
associate king with crown, so we imagine a crown on
the Burger King logo where there isn't one. We associate
Starbucks with well stars. The word star is in the.
Speaker 1: Name, so we project a star onto the image.
Speaker 2: Maybe the brain just fills it in. It says, oh Starbucks,
star got it, and it just paints one on there
for you.
Speaker 1: Maybe that sounds plausible, But the source material we looked
at mentions a Reddit thread that really throws a wrench
in that theory. There was a literal Starbucks employee, a
barista okay, someone who wears the green apron, someone who
stares at this logo for eight hours a day cleaning coffee,
spills off it looking at the merch. This person claimed
they had never noticed the star, never They were convinced
it wasn't there until a customer pointed it out.
Speaker 2: Wow. See, that is the inattentional blindness aspect. We see things,
but we don't observe them. We process the simple Starbucks
as a whole unit. You don't scan the details.
Speaker 1: It's like looking at a stop sign. You know, it
says S do P, so you don't check to see
if the font has changed.
Speaker 2: Exactly that, your brain says Starbucks logo and moves on.
The details are irrelevant to the function.
Speaker 1: And I'm just pulling on the thread here because that's
the name of the show.
Speaker 2: Go on.
Speaker 1: What if reality is shifting in these subtle ways and
we're the only ones noticing. What if the star wasn't
there yesterday?
Speaker 2: And that is the jump from psychology to the high
weirdness of the Mandela effect, the idea that these aren't
memory errors but evidence of shifting timelines, that we are
sliding between slightly different versions of reality where the only
difference is a star on a crown or a voice
line in a video game.
Speaker 1: It sounds crazy, I know it does, until you start
hearing stories that are personal, not just logos or video games,
but the fabric of a person's day tearing open. Right,
we have this narrative from a Reddit user. The account
is deleted now, which always adds a little mystery.
Speaker 2: Right, it does feel like they said too much and
had to disappear.
Speaker 1: Exactly this is what they call a personal reality glitch.
Speaker 2: And this story struck me because of how mundane the
setting is. It's not a dark and stormy night. It's
not an abandoned asylum. It's seven point zero pm in the.
Speaker 1: Suburbs, totally normal. So let's set the scene properly. This
user is taking their usual evening walk. It's a routine
headphones in, walking down the street. Everything is normal, the
sun is setting. Then they pass a kid on a bike.
Speaker 2: Very standard suburban occurrence, right.
Speaker 1: But as the kid passes, the user gets this feeling,
a profound, sinking sense of deja vu. They feel certain, absolutely,
one hundred percent certain that they had already passed this
specific kid going the same direction earlier in the walk. Yeah,
that's weird, but they brush it off. I'm tired. Maybe
it's a different kid with the same red shirt. Then
they walk past their neighbor's house.
Speaker 2: And this is where the details get sticky. This is
where it stops being a feeling and starts being like
actual data.
Speaker 1: Exactly. They look at the neighbor's car in the driveway.
They know this car, they see it every single day,
but the license plate is completely different, not just to
digit off, a completely different state, different numbers. It's the
right make and model, the right color, but the wrong plate.
Speaker 2: And just to clarify, the user implies they know the
usual plate, they're familiar with it.
Speaker 1: Yes, they imply they know the car well enough to
notice a swap. It's their neighbor. But it gets weirder.
They keep walking, heart probably beating a little faster, and
they pass the house that usually has specific decorations on
the porch. Okay, now, the users specifically remember seeing the
owners swap those decorations out a few days prior. They
watched the change happen. They saw the old ones go
in a box and the new ones go up.
Speaker 2: They witness the update.
Speaker 1: Yes, but on this walk the old decorations are back.
Speaker 2: So we have a reversion. The timeline is rolled back
on the porch.
Speaker 1: To core exactly old decorations, wrong license plate, repeating kit
on a bike. The user goes home, probably feeling like
they're losing their mind.
Speaker 2: You'd have to be.
Speaker 1: Probably didn't even tell anyone, because how do you explain that, honey,
the neighbor's license plate is wrong. You sound crazy?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: They go to sleep. The next morning, they walk the
route again, and the result everything is back to normal.
The license plate is the correct one, the one they
knew originally. The porch decorations are the new ones, the
ones they saw being put up days ago. The glitches
over the old decorations are gone again.
Speaker 2: Wow. What fascinates me here is the can consistency of
the Uncanny Valley feeling these reports described. The narrator felt
the glish before they saw the evidence. They felt that
sense of wrongness when the kid passed.
Speaker 1: It's like the matrix logic, right when they change something,
you get that sense of disorientation. It's a physiological response
to reality and not matching the map in your head.
Speaker 2: From a skeptical perspective, though we have to play devil's advocate,
we could talk about fatigue. We could talk about autopilot
processing with the brain substitute's old memories, like the old
decorations for current reality, because it's tired and it's simpler
to render the old image than process the new one.
Speaker 1: But the license clate, that's a very specific detail to hallucinate,
and the reversion seeing the old stuff then the new
stuff again, that's not just a blur, that's a continuity error.
Speaker 2: It is it's hard to explain away. But if we
connect this to the bigger picture, stories like this tap
into a universal fear that reality is unstable. We want
the world to be permanent. We want object permanence to
apply to the entire universe. When objects change state without
our permission, it violates our core understanding of physics. It
implies we aren't standing on concrete, We're standing on thin ice.
Speaker 1: Okay, so that's a story on a forum. It's spooky,
it's unsettling, But skeptics can easily say that guy was
just tired. He needs to get more sleep.
Speaker 2: Right, it's anecdotal, So let's pivot.
Speaker 1: Let's move from anecdotal evidence, which is easy to dismiss,
to the hardest of hard sciences. Let's talk about the
machine that is literally designed to break reality to see
what's inside. Let's talk about CERN.
Speaker 2: The large hedgromchlider, the most complex machine ever built by humanity.
Speaker 1: There is a theory of pop culture conspiracy almost that
CERN actually broke reality a few years ago and we
shifted into a weird timeline. That's why everything feels so
chaotic lately.
Speaker 2: I've heard that one.
Speaker 1: But we aren't going to speculate on that the source
material highlights a specific published anomaly involving top quarks.
Speaker 2: Yes, and this isn't conspiracy. This is published data in
peer reviewed journals. This is real. Okay.
Speaker 1: So what happens there?
Speaker 2: At cern? They smash particles together at near light speed.
The resulting explosion creates a shower of new particles. Usually
this is just chaotic, it's random. It's like smashing two
watches together and trying to figure out how they were
built by looking at the springs flying everywhere.
Speaker 1: But a few years ago they saw something that shouldn't happen.
Speaker 2: They were looking at top quarks. Now it's important to
understand what a top quark is. They are the heaviest
known elementary particle, and they are incredibly short lived. They
exist for a tiny, tiny fraction of a second before decaying.
Speaker 1: So they're basically ghosts. They appear in vanish almost instantly, exactly.
Speaker 2: And because they are created in these violent, high speed collisions,
they're usually flying apart from each other at incredible velocities.
Logic and classical physics dictates that once they fly apart,
they are separate entities.
Speaker 1: They're two different bullets fired in opposite directions. They shouldn't
know what the other one is doing.
Speaker 2: They don't have cell phones, they can't signal each other.
Isn't enough time for a signal to travel between them,
even at the speed of light. That is the key constraint.
The speed of light is the cosmic speed limit. If
particle A changes particle B shouldn't know about it until
a light signal could reach it. But researchers noticed a pattern.
Two top quarks created in the same collision, flying apart,
were acting as if they were still connected.
Speaker 1: What does that mean acting connective?
Speaker 2: It means their properties were linked, specifically their spin. Think
of it like a top spinning. If one spun a
certain way, the other matched it instantly, instantly across a distance.
This is the hallmark of quantum entanglement.
Speaker 1: Spooky action at a distance. That's what Einstein called it exactly.
Speaker 2: He hated the idea, but usually we see entanglement and
very controlled, delicate setups in cryogenically cooled labs. To see
it here at the highest energies humans have ever produced,
amidst the chaos of a particle collision, it's shocking.
Speaker 1: What does it imply.
Speaker 2: It suggests that the universe at a fundamental level maintains
connections that defy our understanding of space and time separation.
Speaker 1: So even when things are ripped apart at the speed
of light, they are still one thing.
Speaker 2: In a way. Yes, space might not separate things as
absolutely as we think. Distance might be an illusion. And
if the building blocks of reality, these quirks can ignore
distance and time to stay connected, it raises some pretty
serious questions about the structure of the macro world we
live in.
Speaker 1: If the bricks are magic, maybe the houses too.
Speaker 2: That is a poetic way to put it. It suggests
that separation is a construct of our perception, not a
fundamental truth of the universe.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we have particles that ignore space. Now let's
talk about particles that seem to have an opinion on time.
This one blew my mind because I always thought time
was just time. It ticks forward, that's it.
Speaker 2: But this next one, this is about the physics of
time direction.
Speaker 1: And this brings us to the Beabar experiment.
Speaker 2: Babar sounds like a cartoon elephant, but it's actually a
high tech facility in California, And back in twenty twelve
there were looking at b mesons.
Speaker 1: B mesons, what are they.
Speaker 2: They're fascinating particles because they switch states. They oscillate between
matter and antimatter. Imagine a coin flipping itself over and
over and over again while it flies through the air. Okay,
the researchers analyze billions of these transitions.
Speaker 1: Now, in classical physics, the stuff we learn in high school,
time is supposed to be symmetrical. Right, Can you explain
what that means theoretically?
Speaker 2: Yes, Think about a game of pool. You hit the
cue ball, it hits the eight ball, and a scatter.
If you film that interaction and play the film backward,
it still looks like realistic physics.
Speaker 1: Sure, the balls just come back together.
Speaker 2: Balls come together, transfer energy, and the cueball stops. The
laws of motion work forward and backward equally. Well, there
is no mathematical reason why time has to go forward
in that equation. This is called time reversal symmetry.
Speaker 1: So if time is just a dimension like length or width,
we should be able to walk back and forth along
it just as easily. But the Babbar experiment found something else.
Speaker 2: It did.
Speaker 1: They found that the universe isn't a pool table.
Speaker 2: They found a violation. They found that these b mezsins
would change from state A to state B at a
certain rate, but the reverse process, changing from state B
back to state A happened at a different rate.
Speaker 1: Wait, hold on, explain that so the door opens easily
one way, but it's heavy to push the other way.
Speaker 2: That is a perfect analogy. The forward behavior didn't match
the backward behavior. One of the reports explicitly stated a
violation of time reversal symmetry. It effectively means that the
movie played backward doesn't look right. The physics don't match up.
Speaker 1: So the universe actually has a preference. It prefers time
to move.
Speaker 2: Forward at the quantum level. Yes, it implies that the
arrow of time, the fact that we remember the past
but not the future, isn't just a quirk of human
perception or entropy.
Speaker 1: It's not just in our heads.
Speaker 2: It's baked into the fundamental laws of particle physics. The
universe resists rewinding.
Speaker 1: That feels validating in a way. It's not just us
getting older. The universe really does want to move forward.
But and here is the butt that keeps me up
at night. Just because the universe prefers forward doesn't mean
backward is impossible.
Speaker 2: Exactly. It just means it's.
Speaker 1: Harder, and that brings us to the concept of time loops,
because even if the door is heavy, you can still
push it open if you push hard enough.
Speaker 2: Which leads us into our next section simulating time loops.
Speaker 1: Now, we aren't talking about a Dolorean hitting eighty eight
miles per hour. We aren't talking about HG. Wells. We're
talking about a study from Australia twenty fourteen.
Speaker 2: Twenty fifteen, correct, the University of Queensland. They were investigating
closed timelike curves.
Speaker 1: Which is the fancy physicist way of saying time loop.
Speaker 2: Precisely a path through space time that returns to its
starting point. Now, to be clear, they didn't send a
macro object like an apple or a person back in time.
Speaker 1: No time traveling apples, got it.
Speaker 2: They simulated the mathematics of a time loop using Quibitt's
quantum bits.
Speaker 1: Okay, I need you to break this down because my
brain starts to melt when we talk about quantum computing.
How does one simulate a time loop without actually building
a time machine.
Speaker 2: So they use two quippets. Quibit one represented the present
version of a particle Quibui represented the past version of
that same particle, and they entangled them.
Speaker 1: Okay, so they are connected like the top quarks.
Speaker 2: Yes, and they set up an interaction where the state
of the present could affect the past and the past
could affect the present. It's a feedback.
Speaker 1: Loop, like the grandfather paradox.
Speaker 2: Exactly like the grandfather paradox. If you go back in
time and stop your grandfather from meeting your grandmother, you
are never born, so you can't go back in time.
It's a logical contradiction. It breaks causality. But in this
quantum simulation, something amazing happened. The particles adjusted the probability
distribution shifted so that the paradox never happened. It's like
the universe self corrected, like a.
Speaker 1: Snake eating its own tail, but the tail moves so
the snake doesn't choke.
Speaker 2: In a sense. And the results were staggering. In a
normal computer or a normal timeline, there are limits to
what you can solve. But in this closed loop simulation,
the particles could solve problems that are normally impossible for
linear computers. What kind of problems distinguishing between quantum states
that should be indistinguishable. It implies that if time loops
are possible, the rules of logic and computing change completely.
Speaker 1: It's like using the answer key from the future to
take the.
Speaker 2: Test in the past effectively. Yes, it suggests that if
causality isn't a straight line, information processing becomes infinitely more powerful.
It's a paradox. Yeah, But in their simulation, the MAV
held up.
Speaker 1: So we have particles that stay connected across space. We
have particles that prefer forward time but hint at backward possibilities.
We have simulations of time loops where the universe edits
itself to avoid paradoxes. But these are all quantum things,
tiny things. It's easy to say, well, that happens in
a microscope, not in my living room.
Speaker 2: A fair point.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about something big, something we use every
day on our phones. Let's talk about how time dilation
is not a theory but an engineering fact.
Speaker 2: This is one of my favorite examples because it involves
commercial airplanes and atomic clocks. It's the hefel keating experiment.
Speaker 1: I love this story because it sounds like a buddy comedy.
The year is nineteen seventy one. Joseph Heffel and Richard
Keating have a wild idea, a.
Speaker 2: Really wild idea.
Speaker 1: They want to prove Einstein right. But they don't have
a spaceship. So what do they do?
Speaker 2: They do the next best thing. They take four atomic clocks,
caesium beam atomic clocks, which are incredibly precise time keepers,
and they buy tickets on commercial flights to fly around
the world.
Speaker 1: Just picture that, two guys in suits lugging these massive,
sensitive scientific instruments onto a pan Am flight. Excuse me, ma'am,
Can I put my atomic clock in the overhead bin?
Speaker 2: It was exactly like that. I read that they booked
seats for the clocks they called the mist clock.
Speaker 1: That's amazing. So the setup they leave a set of
identical atomic clocks on the ground at the US Naval
Observatory as a control group. Those clocks aren't moving.
Speaker 2: Right, that's the baseline. Then have failed and Keating fly
around the world twice, once eastward, once westward. They land.
They gather the clocks and they compare them to the
ones that stayed on the ground.
Speaker 1: And this is the moment of truth. Did they match?
Speaker 2: They did not match.
Speaker 1: The clocks that flew were different from the clocks that stayed.
Speaker 2: Yes, and they differed, and exactly the way Einstein's general
and special relativity predicted they would.
Speaker 1: Let's break that down. Why did they differ? Why does
getting on a plane change time?
Speaker 2: Okay, so there are two fighting factors here. First, velocity.
Special relativity says, the faster you move, the slower time
ticks for you relative to a stationary observer.
Speaker 1: So moving fast keeps you young minimally.
Speaker 2: Yes, if you moved at the speed of light, time
would stop for you. But planes aren't that fast. However,
there is the second factor.
Speaker 1: Gravity general relativity.
Speaker 2: General relativity says that the further you are from a
heavy mass like the Earth, the faster time ticks. Gravity
slows down time.
Speaker 1: So being high up in a plane means less gravity,
which speeds up time. Being fast and a plane slows
down time. It's a tug of war.
Speaker 2: Exactly. When they flew eastward, the velocity of the plane
added to the rotation of the Earth. They were moving
very fast relative to the center of the Earth. The
slowing down effect one, they lost time. Their clocks were
behind the ground clocks over they were flying against the
Earth's rotation, so their net speed was lower. The height
effectless gravity one They gained time. Their clocks were ahead
of the ground clocks.
Speaker 1: We're talking nanoseconds here, right, We're not talking about them
coming back years younger we are.
Speaker 2: But it was measurable. It proved that time is not absolute.
Time is personal. It depends on your speed and your
position in gravity. Your head age is slightly faster than
your feet because your head is further from the Earth's
center of gravity.
Speaker 1: That is a deeply disturbing thought. But for anyone thinking
who cares about nanoseconds, I'm late for work anyway, you
should care. If you use GPS.
Speaker 2: This is the Sowet moment. This is the practical application GPS.
Satellites are zooming around the Earth at thirteen thousand kilometers.
Speaker 1: Per hour, so that slows their time down, But.
Speaker 2: There are also twenty thousand kilometers up in space.
Speaker 1: Which speeds their time up. The tug of.
Speaker 2: War again, and the speeding up effect is actually stronger.
For satellites. Their clocks tick faster than clocks on Earth
by about thirty eight microseconds per day.
Speaker 1: Thirty eight microseconds. That sounds like.
Speaker 2: Nothing in the world of light speed signals. It is
in eternity. If engineers didn't program the satellites to compensate
for these relativistic effects. If they didn't intentionally slow the
clocks down before launch, the system would fail.
Speaker 1: How bad would it be if.
Speaker 2: They treated time as absolute? Your GPS accuracy would drift
by roughly ten kilometers every single day. Ten kilometers, Yes,
within days, the entire system would be useless. You'd look
for a coffee shop and your phone would tell you
it's in the next county over.
Speaker 1: So the fact that my phone knows I'm at the
specific intersection is proof that time travel, or at least
time manipulation, is real. It's happening right now.
Speaker 2: It is proof that time is malleable. We are ineering
around the curvature of space time. Every time we open
Google Maps, we are literally navigating using warped time.
Speaker 1: That is wild. It makes you realize how fragile our
linear perception is. It only works because we move slow.
Speaker 2: And stay on the ground precisely.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we've done the micro with quantum, the personal
with psychology, and the planetary with GPS. Now I want
to go bigger. I want to go cosmic.
Speaker 2: Let's do it.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the fly By anomaly because it sounds
like something out of a sci fi novel where the
ship just disappears.
Speaker 2: This is a mystery that has plagued space agencies for decades.
It's one of those things they don't like to talk
about because it doesn't make sense.
Speaker 1: So the concept is simple. We launch a probe like
Galileo or Rosetta or Near to get it to Jupiter
or a comet. We don't have enough fuel to fly
straight there, so we use Earth as a slingshot.
Speaker 2: Correct gravity assists the spacecraft dives toward Earth, steals a
little bit of momentum from our planet's orbit, and flings
itself outward, fasts its standard orbital mechanics. It's high school
physics on a massive scale.
Speaker 1: But there's always a butt.
Speaker 2: But when they looked at the telemetry data for these
missions Galileo, near Rosetta, the numbers were wrong. Raw how
the spacecraft were coming out of the sling shot moving
faster than the math predicted, A lot faster. No, tiny amounts,
a few millimeters.
Speaker 1: Few millimeters, that's nothing. That sounds like a rounding.
Speaker 2: Error in space exploration, where you were traveling billions of kilometers,
a few millimeters per second of error means you missed
the planet entirely. Precision is everything. A few millimeters per
second of unaccounted speed is a massive red flag.
Speaker 1: It's like finding extra money in your buff account that
you didn't earn. Where did the energy come from? Physics
says energy cannot be created or destroyed.
Speaker 2: That is the question, and scientists have looked at everything.
They checked atmospheric drag, they checked ocean tides, they checked
the magnetic field, they checked the spin of the Earth. Ah,
nothing fits all the cases. Some theories suggest it's related
to Earth's rotation, a frame dragging effect that our current
physics formulas aren't capturing perfectly. Others call it a time anomaly,
suggesting the spacecraft's movement through time isn't lining up with
our predictions.
Speaker 1: So the spacecraft might be dipping into a slightly different
flow of time during the flyby.
Speaker 2: It's one of the more exotic possibilities, but it really
just suggests that our formula for gravity is well incomplete.
It is a literal gap in the map, a blind
spot in our physics.
Speaker 1: That is unsettling. We think we have the universe figured out,
and then a spaceship just decides to go a little
bit faster for no reason. Speaking of not knowing everything,
let's talk about the ultimate unknown, the drain of the universe,
black holes, and specifically the information paradox.
Speaker 2: This is the heavyweight champion of physics problems. This is
the one that kept even Hawking up at night.
Speaker 1: So Hawking changed the game when he realized black holes
aren't truly black. They emit radiation.
Speaker 2: Hawking radiation. He discovered that black black holes slowly lose
energy over eons. Eventually they will shrink and evaporate completely.
Boof gone.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the black hole disappears. Why is that a paradox?
Why is that a.
Speaker 2: Problem because of what fell inside? Imagine you throw library
into a black hole, millions of books, histories, biographies, scientific data,
that is information. According to quantum mechanics the laws of
the small. Information cannot be destroyed. It can be scrambled,
like burning a book to ash. But in theory, if
you had a supercomputer, you can analyze the ash and
smoke and reconstruct the book. The rule is everything that
happens leaves a trace.
Speaker 1: But if the black hole evaporates, if the black.
Speaker 2: Hole evaporates completely, and the radiation coming out is just
random heat. Where did the library go? Where did the
information go? It's gone deleted, and that breaks physics. If
information can be destroyed, then we can't predict the past
or the future. History becomes erasable.
Speaker 1: That is a terrifying thought, that the universe has a
delete button.
Speaker 2: It creates a massive conflict between our theory of gravity
general relativity, which predicts black holes, and our theory of
the small quantum mechanics. They're fighting over whether history is permanent.
Speaker 1: So we have a situation where either Einstein is wrong
or quantum mechanics is wrong, or both are incomplete.
Speaker 2: Exactly in the extreme gravity of a black hole, our
understanding of time, cause and effect breaks down completely. Some
physicists think the information is stored on the surface of
the black hole the event horizon, like a hologram. Others
think it leaks out in the radiation in a subtle code.
But right now it's an anomaly.
Speaker 1: It suggests that deep down the universe might not be
as cause and effect as we need it to be.
Speaker 2: It might not be man.
Speaker 1: We have covered a lot of ground today. My head
is spinning a little bit.
Speaker 2: We have is a lot to digest all at once.
Speaker 1: We started with a logo on a coffee cup, something
so small and trivial that you wouldn't think twice about it.
We move to weird memories of video games, where we
hear voices that don't exist. Then we went to the
sub atomic find particles that are connected across space and time.
We looked at clocks that change speed just by getting
on a plane, and we ended at the edge of
a black hole where history might be getting deleted.
Speaker 2: It creates a compelling picture, doesn't it. When you lay
it all out like.
Speaker 1: That, it does. It makes the line between misremembering and
reality shifting feel a lot thinner. When I hear about
b Massan's violating time symmetry, suddenly my memory of the
Starbucks star feels, I don't know, less like a mistake
and more like a symptom of something bigger.
Speaker 2: And that is the value of this kind of inquiry.
Science is about finding the anomalies. We polish our theories
until they are shiny and perfect, and then we find
that one little thing that flyby anomaly, that top quark
behavior that doesn't fit. That jagged edge is where the
next discovery is hiding.
Speaker 1: And it's where the magic is precisely.
Speaker 2: We shouldn't fear the glitches, we should study them. The
glitches are where the system reveals itself.
Speaker 1: So here is where we leave it with you. We've
thrown a lot of what ifs at you. We've talked
about physics and psychology, but I want to bring it
back to your experience. We want to hear your data
points exactly now. I want to ask you, yes, specifically
you listening to this, have you ever experienced a moment
where reality just didn't line up? A memory that everyone
else denies, A glitch in your daily routine, like the
license plate or the repeating bike that you simply can't
explain away with I was tired.
Speaker 2: Are you an observer of a fixed reality or are
you a participant in a shifting timeline?
Speaker 1: Conder that, really, think about it, and if you have
a story, don't keep it to yourself. Leave a comment,
send us a message. We want to know because if
enough of us are seeing the glitches, maybe they aren't glitches.
Speaker 2: Maybe they're features. A fascinating thought to end on.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us on thrilling threads. Keep pulling the
thread and see what unravels.
Speaker 2: Until next time,