Speaker A
[music] Well, Daniel, it's a pleasure to have you here today, brother. Uh, I always like to have the big CERN guys in here to find out all the deep. I love all the CERN conspiracies, so it's always good
CERN physicist Daniel Whiteson discusses dark matter, particle colliders, and the mysteries of the universe in this deep dive interview.
Key Takeaways
- Particle colliders allow scientists to explore unknown particles by smashing protons at high energies.
- Dark matter is known to exist due to gravitational effects but has not yet been directly detected.
- Indirect detection in colliders relies on missing energy and momentum balance in particle collisions.
- Dark matter plays a fundamental role in galaxy formation and the overall structure of the universe.
- Scientific exploration in particle physics often involves searching for unknown phenomena without predefined expectations.
What the video covers
- Daniel Whiteson explains his background in particle collider physics and his work at Fermilab and CERN.
- The video explores the search for dark matter, its properties, and why it remains undetected directly.
- Whiteson describes how particle colliders smash protons to create new particles, potentially revealing dark matter.
- The discussion covers indirect detection methods for dark matter through collision imbalances.
- Evidence for dark matter is explained, including galaxy rotation curves and gravitational effects.
- The video clarifies why dark matter is crucial for galaxy formation and the structure of the universe.
- Whiteson emphasizes the exploratory nature of collider experiments without needing prior knowledge of what will be found.
- The transcript touches on the challenges and surprises in dark matter research and particle physics.
- The conversation includes the broader implications of dark matter on cosmology and astrophysics.
- The interview also addresses common misconceptions and the scientific process behind collider experiments.
Chapters
- 00:00 Introduction and Daniel Whiteson's Background
- 08:32 Searching for Dark Matter at CERN
- 16:15 How Particle Colliders Work
- 23:40 Indirect Detection of Dark Matter
- 37:30 Evidence for Dark Matter in Galaxies
- 47:10 Challenges and Surprises in Dark Matter Research
- 58:10 Broader Implications for Cosmology and Physics
- 71:00 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
to get some of the guys who have boots on the ground in that place on the show.
Speaker A
Well, I don't know how big I am at CERN, but I've been to CERN. I work at CERN. I love CERN. So, happy to talk about.
Speaker B
How did you get involved in working with CERN? Well, I've always been doing particle collider physics, like smash protons together, see what kind of stuff you can make, you know, learn about the universe. That's the best way to figure
Speaker B
out like what is the universe made out of, just by smashing stuff together and seeing if something new comes out? That's to me that was always the best way to answer like the deepest questions like what's the universe made
Speaker B
out of. So I did my PhD outside Chicago at the at Fermilab. Tevatron used to be the biggest collider in the world and then CERN built a bigger one. So we all moved over there. You know the whole community moves to follow the biggest
Speaker B
accelerator in the world because the bigger the accelerator the higher the energy the more you can explore what the universe is made out of. So actually had one kid born in Chicago near that accelerator and another kid born in
Speaker B
Geneva near that accelerator. So I've been following particle colliders my whole life.
Speaker C
That's incredible. So what kind of stuff were you specifically working on when you were at CERN?
Speaker C
I was looking for dark matter.
Speaker D
I was hoping we could figure out what is dark matter made out of. You know, we know that dark matter is out there. We know that it's matter. We know how much there is. We know roughly where it is,
Speaker D
but we don't know what is it. You know, like is it made out of particles? Is it made out of one kind of particle, two kind of particles? Is it made out of something not particle at all? Something totally new and weird that would blow
Speaker D
our minds? And so we want to try to figure this out. And one way to do that is to try to make it in the lab. Like if we collide protons together, maybe sometimes those things turn into dark matter. And if so, we could find
Speaker D
evidence for that in our collisions and, uh, and learn something about dark matter as a particle. If it is indeed a particle. We don't know that.
Speaker D
So, you're trying to make something you have no idea what it even is. Yes. And that's [laughter] exactly and that's the magic of colliders is you don't have to know what you're looking for. You don't have to know
Speaker D
what's out there. You just smash the stuff together and eventually the universe will reveal everything it can make. See, the crucial thing about particle colliders is they're not chemistry. Like when you do chemistry, you have, you know, hydrogen and oxygen. You combine it, you get water. But you
Speaker D
still have the hydrogen and oxygen in there. It's just like a rearrangement of what went in, right? It's like the same Lego bricks click together. That's not what happens in a particle collider. Particle collider, you smash them together, the bricks annihilate. They're gone. They turn into something new. It's
Speaker D
alchemy, not chemistry. So, it smashes together, it turns into this intermediate fuzzy state, and then it can turn into anything the universe knows how to make. So whatever's on nature's menu of stuff, you know, God's list or, you know, whatever the list is of the stuff the universe can make, the
Speaker D
different kinds of particles that are out there, we'll see it at the Large Hadron Collider if it can be made.
Speaker E
So we're like exploring the universe. As you say, we don't have to know what we're what we're making in advance. We just smash it together and look to see what comes out. And if dark matter is real and if it's a particle and it interacts with our kind of matter at
Speaker E
all, we'll see it at the colliders. So far nothing. But that was my goal at first is to try to figure out what is dark matter? Is it a particle? What kind of particle? Is it 10 particles? These kind of questions.
Speaker E
Unfortunately, so far we haven't seen any dark matter. Um, which doesn't mean that
Speaker F
it's electromagnetically undetectable, right?
Speaker A
Well, it is undetectable electromagnetically, which means that if we did make it at the collider, we wouldn't see it directly.
Speaker B
So, how would you measure it? Yeah, we would see it like bouncing off of something else. Like if you make dark matter and you also make something else at the same time, they go back to back and then we'd see an imbalance. We'd see the thing that it was made with and not
Speaker B
the dark matter. And we know that the collisions have to be balanced. And so if there's not a balance there, if we only see one thing and not something else, we know something invisible was made. And so that's how we would detect
Speaker B
the presence of something invisible. So it's a bit of an indirect search for dark matter. Would there be any theoretically any other way to detect dark matter or measure dark matter other than on the electromagnetic visual spectrum?
Speaker C
Well, we don't know. It's possible, right? One [laughter]
Speaker D
dark matter definitely has mass. That is the thing we know about dark matter is that it's matter and it has mass because it's giving us gravity. Like we know that it's changing how galaxies rotate.
Speaker D
It changed how the universe, the structure of the universe formed. Like without dark matter, we wouldn't have galaxies right now. It's the mass of dark matter that pulled together all the gas in the early universe to make galaxies. There wasn't dark matter, we'd just have like floating gas at this
Speaker D
point in the universe. Take like many more billion years to get galaxy to get galaxies.
Speaker E
So this is the idea of the spin rate of the galaxy. When they measure it, they say that the center of the galaxy is spinning at the same exact rate as the outer rim. And they're saying that
Speaker E
because dark matter is surrounding the galaxy and dark matter has mass, that's why it's flattening that rate because essentially the center should be spinning a lot faster, right? Yeah. That's one line of evidence for dark matter and it's an important one because it's one of the first ones we had, but
Speaker E
it's also important to understand it's not the only piece of evidence. It's not like, oh, we saw this and we fudged things to make it work. We have like nine or something independent line independent [clears throat] lines of
Speaker E
evidence for dark matter. But the first one is really interesting because you know they went out there and they said let's look at galaxies. Galaxies are spinning and think about what happens when you spin like a merry-go-round. If
Speaker E
you put a bunch of ping-pong balls in a merry-go-round, you spin it. What happens? Well, ping pong balls fly out, right? So [clears throat] galaxies are spinning. Why aren't the stars flying out into intergalactic space?
Speaker E
Something's holding them on, right? Like if you're on a merry-go-round, you hold on, which is why you're not being thrown off the merry-go-round.
Speaker E
So what's holding it on? Well, gravity. So then they go out, they measure, they say, "Is there enough gravity from all the stars in the galaxy to hold it together? We know how fast it's spinning. We know how many stars there
Speaker E
are. We can add up all their mass." And that's where the discrepancy was. They were like, "Wait a second. There's not nearly enough mass, not nearly enough gravity from the stars to hold it together." And yet because it's
Speaker E
spinning way too fast, but it's not throwing stars out into space. And so the answer is there must be more mass in there giving more gravity holding the galaxy together to keep it from throwing the stars out into space. So that was
Speaker E
the first line of evidence for dark matter. But you know that's one piece of evidence and people might think, "Maybe you're wrong, like maybe something's weird about gravity or you [clears throat] know maybe something else is wrong." And so that wasn't enough
Speaker E
to make people think, "Okay, dark matter is real."
Speaker E
sorts of stuff that maybe there's an elephant here. Um, and so we have lots of different lines of evidence. What we don't know again is what is it made out of? Is it a particle? Is it two particles? Is it 17 particles?
Speaker E
And the challenge is that we know it has mass. We know it feels gravity, but gravity is not a great way to study something because gravity is super duper weak. Like think about how weak gravity is compared to magnetism. You have a
Speaker E
fridge magnet on your fridge. It's tiny, right? But it's overcoming the entire gravitational pole of the earth. Tiny fridge magnet versus the earth, right?
Speaker E
The earth is a huge mass, but gravity is so weak that the gravity of the entire earth is feeble compared to like what a fridge magnet can do, right? So gravity is super duper weak, which means how are you ever going to
Speaker E
detect dark matter using gravity if you want to see one dark matter particle? Like what is the gravity from one particle? Basically zero. You'll never study dark matter just with gravity. If you want to understand it at the
Speaker E
particle level,
Speaker F
we can see dark matter at the galaxy level, at the solar system level, right? Maybe even the planet level, but like particles of dark matter, we'll never study those with gravity. So to see dark matter as a particle, we need to have some other kind of force, some new kind
Speaker F
of like dark force that's helping us interact with dark matter. You're right. It's it can't interact electromagnetically. You can't see it.
Speaker F
Doesn't give off light. Doesn't reflect light. But there might be some new kind of dark force that lets us interact with dark matter.
Speaker F
And what are the other compelling lines of evidence to you? Yeah.
Speaker A
Of dark matter. So one of them is the structure of the universe. Like when you look out into the universe and you say, "Wow, we have galaxies and we have clusters of galaxies and we have superclusters of galaxies." And you ask, "How do those
Speaker A
form?" You [clears throat] need dark matter to explain those. Like without dark matter, there just isn't enough time to make all this structure. There isn't enough gravity from just the gas and the stars and the and the planets to
Speaker A
pull that stuff together. Like it would take 50 billion years for that to happen. And we only had 14 billion. So there's not enough time for mass to pull stuff together without dark matter. That's like another line of evidence.
Speaker A
Interesting.
Speaker B
Another one is that we've seen light from the very early universe. This called the cosmic microwave background light,
Speaker C
right? It's like a baby picture of the universe. You know, 14 billion years ago almost, the universe was filled with hot dense plasma and it was glowing like the center of the sun and it was giving off light like the center of the sun. And
Speaker C
when that light was emitted, it was also almost immediately reabsorbed. Just like at the center of the sun, like if you give off light in the center of the sun, it doesn't make it out to the surface. It gets reabsorbed. Same thing happened
Speaker C
in the early universe. But the universe was cooling and it was expanding. So at some point it went and became transparent and so light could fly through the universe. And that's the oldest light that we can still see. The
Speaker C
light from when the universe went from being opaque to being transparent. Those photons are still around.
Speaker D
Oh wow. That's called the cosmic microwave background light. And when we look out into the sky, we can see them. We can see them in this direction. We can see them in that direction. We can see them in every direction. This is the
Speaker D
discovery in in like 1965
Speaker E
of this light from the early universe. It proved to us that the universe used to be hot and dense. And the reason this long answer your question about dark matter is that there's evidence in that light for dark matter in the early universe because there are ripples in
Speaker E
that light. It's not like equally hot and cold. If you Google CMBB light, you'll see this weird map with like blue spots and red spots.
Speaker E
Is that what you were just showing?
Speaker F
Yeah, that's the famous map. Is [clears throat] that the Is that this? Yeah, that one right there. Exactly. And so some spot spots of it are a little more intense and some spots are a little bit colder, so hotter and colder. And
Speaker F
those correspond to places in the universe that used to be more dense or less dense. So you're looking at like a map of the early universe of where there was more stuff and when there was less stuff or when the plasma was hotter or
Speaker F
colder. And that contains evidence for dark matter because how those ripples existed in the early universe like where places were more or less dense and how things sloshed around was affected by dark matter because dark matter has gravity.
Speaker A
Yeah. And we can see evidence for that. And if there wasn't any dark matter, the CMBB light would look very very different. So that's like another completely independent line of evidence for dark matter. And there's several more. So you
Speaker A
know, people say, "Oh, dark matter is a fudge factor. Dark matter is a fudge factor."
Speaker B
Yeah. People complain about that or they say, you know, this is scientists just trying to make their equations work or whatever. And uh you know, I think there's there are some fudge factors in science. Usually they're like placeholders for like we don't really
Speaker B
understand this yet. Let's just put in a number and then we'll figure it out. But dark matter is not like that. Dark matter is something we're fairly confident in is real. It's out there. It's matter. We just again don't know
Speaker B
what it's made out of. Like if you zoomed in on dark matter, how do we know it's a particle?
Speaker C
We don't. We [snorts] don't know at all that it's a
Speaker D
What else could it be? What are the other options?
Speaker E
Yeah. So, do we even have any way of conceptualizing this in our little monkey brains? [laughter]
Speaker F
We have a lot of blind spots. Like, you know, you might ask, well, if if we don't know it's a particle, why is Dana looking for it as a particle? And you know this is the process of science.
Speaker F
It's like okay here's a really big hard question. What is most of the universe made out of? Who knows how to even begin. Well you begin by doing like the simplest thing like well let's just assume it looks like the kind of other
Speaker F
stuff we've seen. Maybe that's right and we'll find it. Maybe that's wrong and eventually we'll have to back up and be like well that didn't work. Let's try something different. And it's hard. It's hard to think outside the box and be
Speaker F
like what if it's not a particle? What else could it be? You know, imagine matter where if you zoomed in on it, it never changed how it looked. Like currently we have matter and if you zoomed in on it, you see atoms, right?
Speaker F
You see structure.
Speaker A
You know, water looks smooth, but when you zoom in on it, you see eventually you see little molecules of water.
Speaker A
What if there's a kind of matter that wasn't like that? That no matter how much you zoomed, it was always smooth.
Speaker B
Now, that's like far out from anything we've ever seen before. But there's a danger in extrapolating from what we've experienced to what we don't know. Like we've studied matter for a thousand years, but we've only studied this little slice. Atoms, the kind of stuff
Speaker B
that we're made out of, me and you and ice cream and lava and stars. That's a little slice of the universe. It's 5%. So to then say, well, maybe the rest of it is also like that. You know, that [laughter] that's a it's a big guess. On
Speaker B
the other hand, it's it's all we know. So, it's hard to think outside of that and be like, maybe it's some other new thing. I personally hope it's something totally crazy, something that when we figure it out, we're like,
Speaker B
that can't be possible.
Speaker C
Because those are my favorite moments in science. You know, when the universe confronts you with its weirdness, when it's like, your little monkey brains thought it worked this way, but actually it's this other secret way. A lot of people like to reach for a drink, a
Speaker C
smoke, or a toke at the end of a stressful day, but I found something that helps me wind down that's way better for your body. It's the mushroom Amonita Mascaria, and it's not psilocybin like most people think. It's
Speaker C
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Speaker C
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Speaker C
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Speaker C
What was like for you the biggest kind of like moment where it was like holy this changes everything.
Speaker D
Yeah. I think the discovery that the universe expansion is accelerating that was a mind-blowing moment for me and I think for almost all the community because you know until then we knew the universe is big. We knew it was filled with galaxies and we knew those galaxies
Speaker D
were moving away from us, but the question was, is there enough gravity in the universe to pull those galaxies back into like a big crunch or is there not enough gravity and things are just going to drift away
Speaker D
forever? Those are the two hypotheses people were thinking about and we wanted to know like what is the future? Are we headed towards some crazy, you know, um, cosmic crunch which would seem insane or are we going to
Speaker D
drift away forever? And those were the two options people were considering. And so they went out to measure it to see like, well, let's look through the history of the universe and see how it's been expanding. Is that expansion
Speaker D
slowing down or is it mostly continuing? And what they found was a total surprise. They found that it wasn't slowing down at all. It was accelerating which wasn't even in the realm of possibilities. It wasn't like one of the
Speaker D
things people were considering. It was a complete surprise. And the universe was like secret option C. You know, things are very very different from what you imagined. And so the whole community had to be like, "What?" But look, this is
Speaker D
what the data say. And you have to follow the data, right? Dogma, mainstream narrative, all that stuff out the window when the data tells you you're wrong.
Speaker E
And what was the consensus before that? And what year was that? Did we actually find this discovery?
Speaker E
This is like 2001, I think.
Speaker F
2001. And what was the belief before then? I think the con prevailing consensus was that there wasn't enough stuff in the universe for it to slow down and turn around to a big crunch.
Speaker F
Things would just slow down forever but never come back, right? Like the two options were, you know, we had the big bang massive expansion, but things were slowing down.
Speaker A
Everything eventually will like stop to a standstill.
Speaker B
Yeah. But I think people thought it was just going to drift forever and never turn around. Slow down gradually like somebody's hitting the brakes. We're never going to actually like stop and go into reverse. That was the other option. So those are the two options is are we
Speaker B
going to reverse into a big crunch or just sort of gradually drift slowing down forever? And then they discovered, oh, we're going to do neither of those.
Speaker B
We're going to speed up, right? Instead of how much are we breaking and are we going into reverse? The answer is no. We're hitting the gas pedal. Something out there in the universe is speeding up all the galaxies. It's insane idea. It's
Speaker B
insane realization that I saw, see I think I sent you an article about this recently, didn't I? I was looking up uh I I texted you an article about this.
Speaker B
There was something recent that I saw pop up um in the cosmology on a cosmology um website. This is this it the debate over whether the universe is really accelerating is reignited.
Speaker B
[laughter] When was this published? Go up to the top. August
Speaker C
30th. 30th. Oh, yesterday. Holy Okay. [laughter] Go down. So, zoom in. The controversy over one of modern cosmologies foundational ideas has been renewed with the new research that points to critical issues in a recent analysis defending the view that our universe is expanding. Last year, a
Speaker C
research team in Yonci University in South Korea presented new findings that challenged the long-standing view about the universe expanding. Uh following a new analysis of type IA supernova, these stellar explosions hold a significant place in the modern debate since measurements of their brightness have
Speaker C
helped measure the apparent expansion of the cosmos. U what are they saying here? So they're talking about the way that we discovered the universe expansion was accelerating which is this special kind of supernova.
Speaker C
Mhm.
Speaker D
Supernova are super cool. It's not there. Steve, go up. Supernova are super cool because there are these massive explosions. Like stars collapse due to gravity, right? And then they bounce back and they're momentarily like brighter than a whole galaxy. It's
Speaker D
insane. And there's a special kind of supernova, type 1A, when you had like a pair of stars and one of them collapsed but didn't go supernova and then later it steals more mass from its neighbor and so that it can collapse and go
Speaker D
supernova. So it's a special kind of thing and it happens in a very predictable way so that if you see a supernova you can tell you can calculate how bright is that supernova and that's important because that tells you how far away it is because if you
Speaker D
know how bright it is at the source and you measure how bright it is from earth you can tell how far away is it so that we can get this sort of reduction in brightness like you know if some if I hold a light here
Speaker D
and I'm one meter from you it's bright and if I walk away 10 meters it's dimmer and so if you knew how bright the light was for real. You could tell how far away I was by measuring how bright.
Speaker E
Right. Exactly. And that was the real challenge before that is how do you measure how far away a galaxy is for real.
Speaker F
Okay. So, type one supernova are how we measure distance to those galaxies and then we look back through time and we see how have the distances to galaxies been changing and that gives us the history of the expansion of the
Speaker F
universe. And so this was the key to dis to that dark energy discovery is a team at Berkeley and a team in Australia that figured out how to spot this and make this measurement.
Speaker A
And so these guys are like, "Wait, what if you're wrong?" They're saying based on uh the team argued that the type 1A supernova are affected by their age, a factor that resulted in biases in past cosmological measurements. After correcting for this, the team's new
Speaker A
results shook the world of cosmology as they imply that the cosmic expansion uh scientists have long observed may have already transitioned from acceleration to deceleration.
Speaker B
So this is science at work, right? People said, "Look, [clears throat] we saw this stuff from supernova. We think it's it means the universe is expanding and accelerating." And that's crazy. And so it deserves scrutiny. And so people said, "Well, what if you're wrong?"
Speaker B
Right?
Speaker C
What if this assumption that we know how bright the supernova is um based on whatever measurements is wrong? That could be changing our assumptions about the distance and so we could get everything wrong. And so these guys found, you know, a potential mistake and
Speaker C
there's a discussion about it. And you see even scroll down
Speaker D
below in that same article there's folks are like actually we think that this isn't an issue. And this is why we measure stuff and then we cross check. And you always want to have like two or three independent lines of evidence that something is happening before you really
Speaker D
believe it.
Speaker E
Right? In the case of expansion of the universe, the type [snorts] 1A supernova tell us it's happening. And there are other independent lines of evidence that this is happening. So I'd be surprised if this was overturned, but you know,
Speaker E
anything that if the data
Speaker F
Yeah, exactly. I'd be surprised if we learned later, oh, the universe expansion is not accelerating. If that was wrong. Oh,
Speaker A
it could be like you never know and you got to be able to
Speaker B
this saying so this is in layman terms this is essentially saying that uh from the way we're measuring how the universe is expanding it's too hard to know because of how far away the we're measuring is.
Speaker C
Yeah. And we don't know exactly how far away those supernova are. This is what they're saying. They're like actually you could be making a mistake in those distance.
Speaker C
So this isn't even making a whole new claim. This is just pointing out one like pillar of evidence that that people are using and trying to show some nuance or some questioning that evidence
Speaker D
and it's good stuff like this is what you should be doing. You should be checking things from all angles and if it's true it should hold up, right? A true story survives scrutiny from many directions
Speaker E
and an illusion doesn't. And so this is why we do this and this is why this is out in the open also. I love that this is out in the open, you know? It's like people are like, "No, you're wrong." and
Speaker E
another group's like actually we think we're right and let's discuss it and debate it. Um you know you see a lot of stuff online about you know science protecting dogma but I think this is a great example of how
Speaker E
like
Speaker F
actually when we don't know we say we don't know and we talk about it we argue about it and then eventually we figure it out right
Speaker A
you know and sometimes we yell at each other but that's the process.
Speaker B
Yeah. Well science is run by a bunch of human beings with egos.
Speaker C
Yes. Yes. Well science is a human endeavor like everything else. And so there's politics, there's egos, um there's incentives, but in the end it's it's by people for people. And mostly it's just curious people trying to figure out how the universe works.
Speaker C
Right. Right. So how long were you working at CERN trying to find a black hole [laughter] or not a black hole, dark matter?
Speaker C
Dark matter. Yeah. Um so I worked on dark matter for about 10 years. Whoa.
Speaker D
Um and we came up with lots of new ways to like look for dark matter. Maybe it's looking this way. Maybe it's that way.
Speaker D
Maybe it's this other way. We didn't see anything. Um, and eventually I was like, I don't think we're going to see anything. So, let's move on. Look for something else. Uh, they're still doing it. There's still, you know, more data,
Speaker D
more data. You can always find something. Um, but I got interested in other stuff. I'm I'm more interested now in like finding surprises. Like maybe there's something in the data, not even dark matter, something else new and crazy.
Speaker E
You know, the dark energy example is an example of that. One of those moments in science when you're like, what? That's dark energy.
Speaker F
Yeah. Dark energy. the expansion of the universe.
Speaker A
Um, and that's what I got into science for, you know, it's like to have some moment of eureka where you're like, "Oh my gosh, we thought X and it turns out to be Y." And so, right now, me and my team, we're looking for surprises.
Speaker A
We're looking for something totally unexpected in our data. My favorite theory about dark matter is uh the one from Wheeler.
Speaker A
Are you familiar with that one? Mhm.
Speaker B
Uh where I think he believed dark matter was like a computational cloud of data like ones and zeros.
Speaker B
Wow.
Speaker C
Um and uh it's kind of like a fun little analogy he uses that I think actually somebody we had a computer scientist in here um Roman Yolamposki or whatever his name is. I forget can't pronounce his last name. But he after we got done with the show I pitched this to him and he's
Speaker C
like he blew it out of the water. Like I was like [laughter] But it's still fascinating to think about. Basically, the idea is he I think Wheeler was the one who thought that dark matter could have been like a computational cloud. Um
Speaker C
that's a data storage type thing because and using the analogy of like a hard drive like a brand new hard drive. Yeah.
Speaker D
Uh is all ones or all zeros, very low entropy. Then you record data on it and it becomes high entropy. Right. So now, you know, it's got all these ones and zeros, which mean nothing to us until we
Speaker D
plug it into a computer and then, you know, we see it on a screen and then it gives us meaning, but from a from a strictly uh mathematical viewpoint, it's just ones and zeros and it's higher entropy. So what happens when you when
Speaker D
you erase that hard drive
Speaker E
or you take all the data off the hard drive and you completely wipe it clean?
Speaker F
Well, it's going from chaotic high entropy to back down to low entropy, all ones or all zeros. So from the laws of thermodynamics that energy can't be created or destroyed and it's also interconvertible with mass that means you had mass on the hard drive
Speaker F
theoretically right so that mass has that energy or mass has to leave the hard drive and go out into whatever
Speaker A
dark matter [snorts] and there was somebody who came up with a theory that if you weighed all of the hard drives in the world right now including all the data centers and everything else you would have and you may have heard this before I don't know uh you would If we
Speaker A
had we don't have measurement devices that are sensitive enough, but if we could, all the data on every hard drive and server and NSA server across the face of the earth would be like less than a kilogram. Yeah.
Speaker A
Or something like that.
Speaker B
50 gram. What?
Speaker C
50 gram. 50 [laughter] depending on how it's measured. The data in the world would uh weighs either 50 grams, the weight of a strawberry. Okay.
Speaker C
Well, this was this guy said this decades ago. So anyway, so 50 g basically his point was like but with the exponential growth of technology and AI and supercomputing and all this stuff, it's not a linear acceleration every year. So every year
Speaker C
it's like it's compounding the amount of data that's being stored and you know what they're doing with all these uh data centers now. Who knows what it's going to look like.
Speaker D
So like eventually all that stuff's going to create a massive lots of mass on the surface of the earth. So, um, he was using that analogy to say like, you know, what if what was in that hard drive was dark matter? You know, it's an just an interesting
Speaker D
thought experiment that can probably be easily debunked by somebody smarter than me.
Speaker E
Well, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on there. I think that people don't agree necessarily whether information has mass because, you know, the difference between entropy and energy, right? this organization of ideas and stuff can give you entropy,
Speaker E
but that's not the same as energy. Um, and it's energy that gives you mass.
Speaker E
So, I think there's there's some debate there. But also, you touched on something else I you know, I hope maybe we could talk about, which is conservation of energy. As you say, like energy can't be destroyed or created.
Speaker E
But actually, we've discovered that's not true, right? that conservation of energy is something people assume and talk about and it seems obvious but what we've discovered is the expansion of the universe tells us that energy can be created and destroyed and it's happening all the time.
Speaker E
What like black holes?
Speaker F
No, just like as the universe expands, dark energy is this substance in the universe that has constant density. So, you know, like if you have 10 ping-pong balls in in a in a volume of space and then you increase the room, but you don't add any more ping-pong balls, the
Speaker F
density goes down, right? Increase the volume, you don't increase the mass, density goes down.
Speaker A
That's what matter does. And um but dark energy, this thing that's accelerating the expansion of the universe, that acts differently. That has a constant density. So, you increase the space, it's like you get more ping pong balls to keep the density constant.
Speaker A
Nobody knows how this happens or why it happens or where what dark energy is.
Speaker A
But the thing we know about dark energy is it has constant density. So what happens as the universe expands? More space comes with more dark energy.
Speaker A
That's more energy. So the amount of energy in the universe is constantly going up as it expands because every new chunk of space that's created comes with new dark energy. So
Speaker B
but we don't know what the dark energy is or the dark matter. We don't know what it is. Absolutely. And energy is also being destroyed as the universe expands. Take a photon. Like we talked about these photons from the early universe.
Speaker B
Yeah.
Speaker C
When they were emitted, they were super high energy cuz the plasma was super dense and super bright.
Speaker C
It was like 3,000 Kelvin.
Speaker D
But as the universe expands, photons get redshifted, right? They get go from blue to red. They get stretched out.
Speaker D
But going from blue to red,
Speaker E
going from blue to red means going from high energy to low energy. Like a red photon is less energy than a blue photon.
Speaker F
Where did the energy go when a when the universe expands and it stretches out all the photons, right?
Speaker A
All those photons from the early universe are now super duper low energy. Where did that energy go? Nowhere. It just went.
Speaker B
So that's an example of the expansion of the universe destroying energy. It can create energy. It can destroy energy.
Speaker B
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Speaker B
So, this rewrites the laws of thermodynamics. No, the laws of thermodynamics are still valid, but you know there there's always an assumption when you say energy can't be conservative destroyed. That's like assuming a closed system, assuming assuming space is not expanding. And so those assumptions that you don't usually
Speaker B
mention when you mention it, those assumptions are wrong. Yeah. If the assumptions don't apply, then the rules don't apply, right?
Speaker C
And that's that's another like amazing like wow, the universe breaking rules.
Speaker D
Yeah. And you know, it's it's not small. Like the dark energy in the universe, it's like 70% of all the energy in the universe.
Speaker E
5% is atomic matter. 25% is dark matter. 70% of it is dark energy. So, it's huge. It's not like a tiny little detail and it's expanding and it's taking over.
Speaker F
Like about 9 billion years after the beginning of the universe, dark energy became most of the energy in the universe. And now it's 70% and then it's going to be 90% and then 99%. Because it causes the expansion. So, as you have more dark energy, you get more
Speaker F
expansion, which gives you more dark energy, which gives you more expansion. It's a runaway effect. So, dark energy is just like taking over the universe.
Speaker F
Wow.
Speaker A
It's crazy. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker B
So, this is an diagram that says the what? The contents of the universe. Steve, scroll up. What's the top of it say?
Speaker C
This is basically the energy density of the univer.
Speaker D
Can you go up higher? Contents of the universe. Okay.
Speaker E
Yeah. If you took like a cubic lightyear space and you said, "How much of the energy in this cubic lightyear is due to atoms?" That'd be 5%. How much of it is due to dark matter? That's 27%. And how
Speaker E
much of it is dark energy? That'd be 67%. So it's the energy density of the universe. But you know, as the universe expands, these fractions change because dark energy doesn't get diluted and everything else does.
Speaker E
That's crazy.
Speaker F
And that's actually another piece of evidence that dark matter is matter because as the universe expands, dark matter's density goes down. It gets diluted just like matter does.
Speaker F
Oh, it does.
Speaker A
It does. Dark matter does. Dark energy does not. These two things, they sound similar. Dark matter. Dark energy increases with at the same rate.
Speaker B
Exactly. Yeah. So, dark matter is like stuff. It's out there. We know what it is. We know that it's matter. We don't know what it's made out of, but it's definitely matter. And it dilutes as the universe expands. Dark energy does not dilute.
Speaker B
So, if it's matter, wouldn't it be particles? We don't know, right? All the kind of matter we've ever seen is particles, right?
Speaker C
So, maybe. But look at the how small normal matter is. to say the rest of the matter should also be like this kind of matter. That's that's an extrapolation, right? It's like saying, "Hey, I've only ever lived in Tampa. Everybody in the world must be like people from Tampa,
Speaker C
right?
Speaker D
Like, you know, probably there's thing there's something different. Probably there's things to learn.
Speaker E
Dark matter is also all around us right now, right?"
Speaker F
It is absolutely. We don't know for sure, but we think that we're in a dark matter wind and like dark matter is passing through us. Like right now in this room, there is dark matter passing through us. We haven't been able to detect it. We've
Speaker F
looked for it. We have these huge experiments underground filled with like tanks filled with, you know, a kiloton of xenon waiting for the dark matter wind to bump into one xenon nucleus so we can see it. Haven't seen it yet, but
Speaker F
we do think
Speaker A
this is CERN, not at CERN. This one is in northern Italy and there are other experiments around the world that are looking for dark matter passing through uh the world. This several different ways to detect dark matter. One is
Speaker A
So, this isn't like a money issue. This is just a a brains issue. We need people to be more creative to come up with different ways to measure or theoretical creative ideas to detect dark matter.
Speaker B
Yeah, I think so. You know, it's we tried the simplest thing like let's assume dark matter is a particle because maybe it is and let's assume it's one kind of particle and let's assume it has a very simple interaction and let's go look for it. And you know all of those
Speaker B
are assumptions that could be wrong but it's worth looking for, right? Let's if it is the easiest possible thing, it'd be a shame not to find it.
Speaker B
So, we've been doing that. We haven't found anything. And it's definitely time to think more broadly like, okay, let's back up. Which of those assumptions was wrong? Maybe it's not particles, maybe it's many particles. Maybe it's some new
Speaker B
weird other thing. Definitely, we need more creativity. So, there's a whole industry of people coming up with ideas for what dark matter might be. It might be this, it might be that, might be the other thing.
Speaker B
Um, we definitely need creativity there. And what is are you familiar with this thing that came out I think in 2024 about the James Webb telescope detecting something. It detected some sort of shift or something where it said like
Speaker B
these galaxies are too early.
Speaker C
Are you familiar with that? Yeah.
Speaker D
This was I think this was a paper that came out.
Speaker E
Yeah. So the James Webb Space Telescope, awesome instrument, right? It's uh up in the Lrangee Point looking out into the universe and it's an infrared telescope. So it sees really really old or really really distant light. Light light that's been redshifted from the early universe.
Speaker E
So like Hubble can look out into the universe but it sees visible light like the kind of light we can see. So light from really early galaxies are really far away is too red for Hubble to see. So that's why we had to build a special
Speaker E
infrared telescope to see these things and it lets us see earlier into the history of the universe.
Speaker F
And so what it what they did is they looked for galaxies forming. Like we think that the universe history was like a bunch of gas and then gravity and dark matter pulled it together and formed stars and galaxies and whatever. We have a whole story about how that might have
Speaker F
happened but we haven't seen a lot of that happen and we could be wrong. And so James Webb went and looked okay can we see early galaxies forming and it saw a bunch of stuff that was a surprise. Number one which I think you're
Speaker F
mentioning is it saw galaxies forming way earlier than we thought. Like it should take a while. You form stars. They get together. They pull together.
Speaker F
They many galaxies. Other galaxies collide with that mini galaxy to make bigger galaxies. So you can predict how long should it take to make big galaxies. [clears throat] But when they look they saw them much earlier than they expected to. So like something's happening, right? Anytime there's a
Speaker F
difference between how you know your expectation and your reality, that's a moment to learn about the universe.
Speaker A
Is this it? No, this is 2026. There's there's tons of articles. They they all the same information.
Speaker A
Okay. Astronomers using the James Web uh space telescope have discovered that massive early galaxies contain far more small faint stars than expected. That hidden population uh hidden population could make some of these galaxies three to four times more massive than previously estimated. Uh,
Speaker A
the finding makes it even harder to explain how enormous mature galaxies formed so soon after the Big Bang. It could also suggest that planets around low mass stars were more common in the early universe than scientists realized.
Speaker B
Super fun, right? That means aliens, [laughter]
Speaker C
right? Yeah. I love how they worded it. Yeah. So, what this means is is that we don't know how galaxies formed as well as we expected. Right. There's some surprise here. Galaxies. And would this push back our like the timeline that we currently have
Speaker C
of like the big bang?
Speaker D
No, this doesn't change um you know or the age of the entire universe.
Speaker E
Probably not. No. Um we think we know when uh you know when that CNB like happened and when the universe was filled with plasma. You know, we don't actually know um when the universe began. The big bang theory doesn't tell us when the universe
Speaker E
started. It tells us when the universe was filled with hot, dense matter that created that early glow. We've seen that. We know that happened. Where that matter came from, [clears throat] what happened before that, was it a moment
Speaker E
before that? Was it a billisecond before that? Was it a million years? Was it a trillion years? We don't know.
Speaker F
The Big Bang theory often misqued as saying the universe began with this singularity, this point exploding out into space. That's like a common misunderstanding of the Big Bang. It's not about the start of the universe and it doesn't tell us that the universe
Speaker F
began in a point.
Speaker A
We just have a time frame. We have an estimate of how long ago it was.
Speaker B
We have an estimate of how long ago the universe was filled with hot dense stuff.
Speaker B
Where that came from, how what what created it, what happened before that, we don't know. And the Big Bang theory doesn't claim to know. There's a bunch of other speculative theories, inflation, cosmic cycles, whatever, that speculate about what might have happened. But the big bang theory itself
Speaker B
doesn't tell us how old the universe is. It tells us how long it's been expanding since that hot, dense, unexplained state.
Speaker B
Right. Yeah. I think a lot of the stuff could be us just trying to project things that we understand as biological life forms onto the galaxy and the universe, you know, like assuming that there has to be an beginning, middle,
Speaker B
and end like like human life has.
Speaker C
Right. Exactly. Like does there have to be a beginning? Like that's a philosophical question and you can argue both sides of it and both and smoke banana peels and convince yourself either way, right?
Speaker D
But um we don't have evidence that there was a beginning.
Speaker E
People often misunderstood the big bang as saying that we know that there was a beginning. It's not. We know that we know something happened a long time ago. We know the universe was once really really dense. We don't know that there was a beginning.
Speaker E
Right. So what is this Steve?
Speaker F
So this is related to um this is talking about the James Web. This was posted January 2022. Okay.
Speaker A
And so within just the last two years, big bang theorists have had to push back estimate estimated dates
Speaker B
for the first stars by about 150 million years from 400 to 250 million years after the supposed big bang.
Speaker B
The [laughter] supposed big bang.
Speaker C
Okay. Well, in the in the you know the time scale of the universe 100,000 100 million years is not much, right?
Speaker C
Yeah. So this is talking about like okay, you have that gas. How long does it take for it to come together and make stars? When did they start burning?
Speaker C
Um because that is the foundation of galaxies. And we want to understand that because we want to understand like, you know, how did our universe come to look the way that it did? Could it have been something else? What does it tell us? And we want all the pieces to fit
Speaker C
together into a story because we want to know that story. And if the pieces don't fit, it means there's something wrong.
Speaker D
And there's lots of mysteries about that. Like we don't know how super massive black holes came to be at the at the heart of galaxies and how they got to be so big. so quickly. It's the same question. So, the heart of our galaxy is a massive black hole.
Speaker D
Absolute monster black hole. And the heart of almost every galaxy we've seen has a monster black hole in it. And some of them are like billions of stars worth of mass. Incredible. Just enormous curvature of spaceime. How big is the
Speaker D
black hole at the center of our galaxy?
Speaker E
I don't know that one off the top of my head. I think it's millions of solar masses.
Speaker E
It's a million. So, it's definitely bigger than our solar system. Yes, but it's small compared to the mass of the galaxy. Usually super massive black holes, they're monsters, but they're like, you know, 0.1% of the mass of the
Speaker E
galaxy. So compared to like the whole galaxy of stars, they're pretty small, but they are big
Speaker F
compared to% the mass of the galaxy. I think 0.1 usually
Speaker A
0.1%. Wow. So it just, you know, there's so many scales to the universe that boggle your mind. The size of a super massive black hole is huge. The size of the galaxy is even bigger. Sagittarius A is the name of the milk is the name of the black
Speaker A
hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy and has a mass of about 4 million times the mass of our sun and a physical diameter of roughly 14 to 16 million miles.
Speaker B
Yeah. Jeez.
Speaker C
Exactly. And the mystery is how did these black holes get so big? If you take our understanding of the universe and you simulate it, well, you get black holes at the hearts of galaxies, but they're much smaller. like there isn't enough time for them to get so big so
Speaker C
early, which tells you there's something we don't understand about the formation of the early universe. Something about how these galaxies got formed and how the super massive black holes of their hearts got formed. There's some really fun ideas like um primordial black holes.
Speaker C
Primordial black holes.
Speaker D
Primordial one of my favorite theories. The idea is very very early in the universe before we even had particles or before we even had like you know protons and electrons everything was really really dense. What if back then, way before everything, black holes were
Speaker D
made. So before we even had like quantum fields and particles, those are primordial black holes and they could still be around and they could explain the dark matter. Like it could be dark matter is a bunch of these
Speaker D
super early universe black holes and it could they could have kickstarted the formation of super massive black holes at the hearts of galaxies. So this is like one fun speculative theory about, you know, how things could be the way
Speaker D
could look the way they they do.
Speaker E
And CERN was also studying black holes, right?
Speaker F
Yeah, absolutely. So how the hell do you study what when you want to when you're at CERN, like dark matter is one thing,
Speaker A
but [clears throat] then how the hell are you trying to what specifically? I heard that they were trying to figure out what happens to stuff when they go into black holes. Is that right?
Speaker A
Well, we were hoping to create black holes because we wanted to observe them disappearing. See, one of the central mysteries in physics right now, like the biggest question in physics is quantum gravity. Like we have a theory of
Speaker A
general relativity that explains the big stuff, how the universe uh behaves and gravity. And then we have quantum mechanics which explains the small stuff, you know, particles and stuff. But the two are very very different. One assumes that like the universe is classical and smooth. The other one
Speaker A
assumes the universe is discreet and made out of pieces, right? And nobody's been able to bring them together. Mhm.
Speaker A
And one place when you need both of them is inside a black hole because a black hole has super duper gravity. So gravity is important and it's super duper compact. So quantum mechanics is important. So they disagree about what's
Speaker A
going on inside a black hole. And if we could see a black hole and study it, we might learn how to develop a theory of quantum gravity. So we were hoping to create black holes and then watch them evaporate. So you might have heard of
Speaker A
this famous thing called Hawking radiation that black holes aren't actually totally black. They glow. There's these fields near the edge of the black hole
Speaker B
that because the distortion of spaceime, they have a faint glow. Very, very faint glow. But the cool thing about Hawking radiation is that the bigger the black hole, the more faint the glow. So the smaller the black hole, the brighter the glow. So if you have a black hole and
Speaker B
sitting out there in space and it's really really big, it's going to glow really faintly and it's going to shrink because that glow is sapping its energy.
Speaker B
So it's shrinking really slowly. But then as it gets smaller, the glow gets brighter and it gets smaller, it gets brighter, smaller, even brighter. And eventually it's going to disappear in a flash, a really, really brilliant flash of light. And what happens if you're close to that black hole?
Speaker B
Oh yeah, you get fried. Yeah,
Speaker C
absolutely not recommended. So, I got to imagine there's some planets that are pretty close to that black hole. Like if you look like the way we look up and see our moon, they could probably see that damn black hole like in the sky.
Speaker C
Yeah, but it would be very fast at the end. And um but we've never seen this happen. You know, we've looked out into space to see, can we see black holes evaporating? It would be pretty awesome. We've never seen one. And that's
Speaker C
actually one of the biggest challenge to this theory of primordial black holes. Like look, if there are black holes everywhere, we should see one evaporate sometime. And we never have. So,
Speaker D
but what we're hoping to do at CERN is make super tiny ones and see them evaporate.
Speaker D
What could go wrong? [laughter] There was a lot of hoopla about this, right? Like, do you guys know what you're doing? Is this really right? And you know, people took that seriously.
Speaker D
And the truth is that it's if it were dangerous, the Earth would already have been destroyed by a black hole because collisions like this happen all the time, every day already naturally. like particles from space. Space is not
Speaker D
empty. It's filled with high-speed particles shooting at us all the time. Cosmic rays.
Speaker E
Cosmic rays. Exactly. Which is why if you go out into space or even if you fly in an airplane, you're exposed to radiation. Space is filled with dangerous radiation.
Speaker E
And it's really high energy. It's much higher energy than any collisions we make at CERN. Like much much like a thousand times more energy. So if colliding particles made black holes which could eat the Earth, it would have
Speaker E
happened already. what happened yesterday, what happened a week ago, would have happened a billion years ago.
Speaker F
So, we're pretty confident that these collisions, we're not risking the planet. Um, but you know, if we did make black holes, we would see these brilliant flashes of light as they evaporate. And then from the patterns of that light, we
Speaker F
might learn something about what's inside of them and we could confirm, oh, Hawking radiation is real. It's just a theory right now. Um, and and see that. So the idea of general relativity and um quantum mechanics,
Speaker A
we're trying to we've been trying to reconcile those and the theory that we're trying to come up with or the theory that what we're trying to fit into the box of quantum gravity exactly
Speaker B
is the answer to that equation. Like because if we know they're both there,
Speaker C
you know, what would happen if Einstein knew about this stuff? Would it change everything he did? This is this is one of the this is one of the things I've heard Eric Weinstein talk about.
Speaker C
Mhm.
Speaker D
He talks about uh we've been working on trying to unify this theory since for like 70s something years, right?
Speaker E
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So, he he rants and raves about and this is way above my pay grade, so I can't say whether he's right or wrong or whether anyone's right or wrong. Um I just find it interesting. He says that for 70 years, thousands of people have
Speaker E
been spending billions of dollars trying to figure out how this works and it's been stagnant for 70 years. Well, a lot to say there. Um, I think it's one of the biggest mysteries in in physics, right? Like how do we
Speaker E
understand the universe? We want one explanation. We don't you don't want two explanations because sometimes they disagree. So that's incoherent. You can't have like two theories about the universe that make different predictions because something is happening. So we want one coherent explanation. Neither
Speaker E
of these work. General relativity predicts things that quantum mechanics disagrees with. Like general relativity says you you have singularities. Quantum mechanics says you can't.
Speaker F
Right? General relativity assumes that particles move through space smoothly. Quantum mechanics says no, they don't.
Speaker F
So they're just incomp incompatible. We want one theory. As you say, that's quantum gravity. Mhm.
Speaker A
Problem is, nobody's been able to come up with a theory of quantum gravity that works mathematically. It's not easy.
Speaker A
Gravity is really complicated. Quantum mechanics is really complicated. Putting them together, definitely a big challenge. People have been working on it for a long time. There is one theory that works. It's called string theory.
Speaker A
It's a theory of quantum gravity. It works. I mean, in the sense that like it doesn't mathematically explode. Some theories when you try to put them together generate nonsense. Like if you say, "Hey, um, how much gravity should I
Speaker A
feel near a black hole?" It says infinity or zero or negative -7 or just like nonsense numbers. It's not easy to put together a theory of gravity that predicts anything that's not nonsense. String theory is one example.
Speaker A
Problem with string theory is is very hard to test. It's like, you know, can we prove the string theory is right? Not today. So there's been a lot of criticism of like, well, you guys came up with string theory, but we still
Speaker A
don't know if it's real. And and um
Speaker B
when was that first come up with when did string theory first
Speaker C
string theory first came as an explanation for forces between particles inside the nucleus and they're like oh that's not going to work let's ditch it
Speaker D
and then folks in the 80s or I think it was the 70s came up with it like as a explanation for everything and then Ed Whitten super smart dude in Princeton realized oh I can put it all together into this beautiful package and you the mathematics of it are really
Speaker D
beautiful and gorgeous and so people got excited and it was the first time people had a theory at all that worked at all. So, it felt like really exciting.
Speaker D
Um, [clears throat] but you know, there are opposing theories. There's a theory called loop quantum gravity that says maybe all of spaceime is built of these pixels and and and that's how things work. And there's other theories like
Speaker D
Eric Winston has his own theory of how the universe all I feel like everyone has their own theory of everything.
Speaker D
Everyone has their own theory.
Speaker E
And the something that's his is called uh what is this called? Geometric unity or something.
Speaker E
Geometric unity. Yeah. And something that's universal among scientists is everybody feels like their theory doesn't get enough attention.
Speaker E
And you know, as a scientist, I have lots of ideas and I'm always pitching them to the government or funding agencies or whoever and they're always getting turned down. And I'm like, man, that was a good idea. And they said no.
Speaker E
And that's a constant feeling of rejection in science. It's like it's like being a screenwriter or a novelist. like you write a bunch of stuff, you love it, you're like my stuff is great and then you send it off to
Speaker E
trying to get the studio to send you a bunch of money and they don't read your script or they read it and they say nah or whatever.
Speaker E
[snorts] It's a constant feeling of rejection and so it's universal and so it makes sense that people are frustrated like Eric Weinstein doesn't feel like his theory has gotten enough attention which is confusing because it's gotten more attention than almost any other certain. I mean you know about
Speaker E
it it's like
Speaker F
it's very popular. Exactly. not many theories of quantum gravity discussed on Joe Rogan etc.
Speaker F
Um and so and this is this is criticism of stagnation you know that you hear a lot about which I think is I don't know I think it's PR nonsense. We've made a lot of progress in fundamental physics over the last 70 years.
Speaker F
You know we just haven't gone in a direction some people think is exciting and that's fine. Like we can all disagree. I think this is exciting. You think that's exciting. Let's agree to disagree.
Speaker F
You know we got to spend the money somewhere. We need a process for figuring out how to do that. We have a process. It's open. People can participate. Everybody's going to disagree about where the money is spent.
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Speaker A
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Speaker A
shopify.com/dannyJones. Sopy.com/dannyJones. One of the things for me that just blows my mind is we haven't come up with a better way of propulsion. M
Speaker B
we've been blasting chemicals at the back of, you know, exhaust pipes and jet fuel in jet engines for since how whatever how it's been like 80 years or something crazy.
Speaker B
And we went from we went from the Civil War to detonating [laughter] uh fusion devices in like less than 80 years, but we can't figure out a better way to
Speaker C
propel rockets. Yeah, we're still, you know, blowing up. So like to me I feel like that is one of the most boggling things to me with you know the evolution of physics and all the money that goes into science and all this stuff you know.
Speaker C
Yeah. Well people are working on that. There's ion drives which are super cool. Um they're very different from chemical rockets and they're um much more efficient and they use a much smaller amount of fuel.
Speaker C
So you can like get from here to Mars on a few kilograms of fuel instead of you know kilotons of fuel or tons of fuel. Probably an ion drive.
Speaker D
Yeah. with ion wind like using ion. So basically what you do is you have um you have it's like a little particle accelerator and you just throw ions out the back. So you speed them up in a little gun with electric fields and you shoot them out the back.
Speaker D
Like how does a rocket work? You throw stuff out the back. Like if you're in a rowboat and you have a bunch of rocks in your boat, you throw them out the back.
Speaker D
You'll move forward by conservation momentum, right?
Speaker E
You're pushing stuff out the back. Mhm. Chemical rockets have fuel which you burn and it has propellant which comes out the back. But an ion drive says let's separate those.
Speaker E
Instead of having the fuel store the energy and also be the thing that goes out the back. Let's just throw little particles out the back and then have a separate way to make the energy like maybe a nuclear reactor, maybe so maybe
Speaker E
solar power, maybe something else. Mhm.
Speaker F
And so, um, it can be much more efficient that way, but it can't provide the same amount of thrust. So, it's like a very gentle kind of push.
Speaker A
It'd be very hard to get off the Earth, but once you get into spa into space, that can be way more beneficial.
Speaker A
So, you use chemical rockets to get off the Earth or you build your stuff in space. That would be awesome. Right. Exactly. And then you can just like fly to Mars uh with much less fuel. So, that would be pretty awesome. and and we have
Speaker A
those technologies and like NASA has a mission uh to use ion drives to explore the solar system. So that's like something we built. Yeah. Today I don't remember the name of it.
Speaker B
So I had this gentleman on uh these two guys on the podcast a couple weeks back uh who one of them is the top guy at NASA in electrostatics.
Speaker C
Awesome. Um he worked on uh the James Webb telescope. He worked on the um the space shuttle missions. He worked on the ISS, like a bunch of those leg legendary NASA projects. And he's got this side project he started in his
Speaker C
garage that he's about to go full-time on. He's about to quit NASA and go fulltime on this. And they're calling it Exodus. And essentially like high level view. Don't ask me any like details on it, but basically a high level is he's
Speaker C
using electrostatic propulsion
Speaker D
and they've created a drive already um an electrostatic drive that can produce enough thrust to propel its own weight.
Speaker D
So it's like one one essentially.
Speaker E
Um not even close to being able to fight Earth's gravity, but like they said like once they get into the vacuum of space, it'll be able to get to Mars in what, four days, he said.
Speaker E
Yeah,
Speaker F
something like that. Four days. Four days. Yeah. So, he's partnered with another guy who has worked in the aerospace industry his whole life on the west or the east coast of Florida. He used to work for uh Blue Origin.
Speaker A
And then this guy Charles, he worked for NASA. He's worked for NASA like for decades.
Speaker A
And uh they they've literally been testing this in their own lab for years now. And they had like videos showing how it works. And they explain it's all like very open source on their website. And I was like, why isn't NASA funding
Speaker A
this? Like if I was NASA, I'd be giving you guys all the money, [gasps] you know.
Speaker B
Uhhuh. Well, 4 days would require huge velocities, which would mean really high accelerations. So, it's hard to imagine how like a human would survive that. Even if you could build this thing, maybe for cargo that could be very cool,
Speaker C
right? Yeah, for cargo. Yeah, human right might not be I I we talked about it. It was like a 4-hour podcast. I don't remember everything.
Speaker D
Do you remember what he said, Steve? Uh, I mean, it's really it's just a bunch of modules that you stack. pull up their website so we can see what their their description is. Yeah. So, [clears throat] they said that they could they could stack it up. They could
Speaker D
um essentially from what they've already built, they could scale it up. Um and they they basically they have the formula to do that and now it's just I think it's funding for them.
Speaker E
So, okay. Electrostatic go up. What was that? You just had something on the homepage. Electrostatic propulsion systems that harness momentum in electricity.
Speaker E
Okay. and like give it the high level about um Exodus is developing propulsion technology intended to create measurable force through controlled electrostatic interactions rather than expelling onboard propellant.
Speaker F
Oh, go down.
Speaker A
No propellant. That's hard to Yeah. What if propulsion system behave more like a light bulb than a fire extinguisher? Traditional spacecraft propulsion relies on chemical reaction that accelerates mass through a nozzle. Once it's stored, once the store propellant is exhausted, maneuvering capability is limited. Exodus explores a
Speaker A
different platform using interactions between electrostatic fields to produce momentum uh for spacecraft motion while drawing energy from electricity.
Speaker A
Yeah, it's freaking wild. They have all these videos uh demonstrating this thing uh operating. It's pretty bizarre.
Speaker B
I see. I mean, I've seen some claims of things like EM drives that have propellantless propulsion. I've never seen actual experiments that are verifiable.
Speaker B
So, you can find one of the videos, Steve. They got videos on the website.
Speaker B
It's pretty cool.
Speaker C
All right. Where do we go? Oh, that's the podcast that we did. Keep going. Do they have any demonstrations?
Speaker C
Try that one.
Speaker D
This might be it. Yeah, try that. He probably He probably gives a brief brief explanation of what's going on in your language so you can actually understand it. [laughter] Yeah.
Speaker E
Throw the headphones on. You would hear the major issue is conservation of [music] momentum. What is going Oh, what do you got there?
Speaker F
There's something. There we go.
Speaker A
Glass. You can turn just about anything into an asymmetrical capacitor. Just use your imagination. [laughter] So, this is Charles. He's the head of electrostatics at NASA right now.
Speaker A
It was this guy that led to the electrostatic pressure discovery force. Oh, okay.
Speaker B
The reason why he did that is because I would put uh this guy into any kind of volume.
Speaker B
This is one of the volumes. And we had many different volumes, different flasks and different um ground planes. And then some cases there was not a ground plane like for for example in this case you're in a glass
Speaker B
flask. So there's no ground plane. There's no conductive path. Pass for see if you can find any videos of them operating.
Speaker B
So I said but do I even need the current? Why am I still force? This is This is the module.
Speaker B
That's him explaining the module. Okay.
Speaker C
Is there any uh video of them actually using it?
Speaker D
Copper foil tapes together with some wire or whatever some carbon paper. It doesn't really matter. You just want them all to be
Speaker E
Well, anyways, it works. They showed us videos. We can't find them right now.
Speaker F
Well, it's uh you know, something we'd all love to have is a drive that doesn't need propellant. Cuz as he says, once you run out of propellant, even an ion drive, you got to bring along something to push back. you got like
Speaker A
rocks to throw out the back of your rowboat. So, it would be great.
Speaker B
But, you know, there's a history here of claims that don't stand up to scrutiny. Like the old EM drive, they claimed a thrust and then when independent measurement uh doesn't support it and then it turns out that most of the thrust was really small and within their
Speaker B
uncertainties. Mhm.
Speaker C
So this would be cool if it was real, but it needs like independent third party proof or like somebody who doesn't have a financial incentive or whatever personal incentive in it to measure it and say like, "Yeah, I see the same thing." So I'm all for it if it's real,
Speaker C
you know?
Speaker D
Yeah. I mean, like somebody working on electrostatics, I can't think of anyone more credible than a guy who's been the head of the electrostatic department at NASA for 30 years, you know? Like that guy's that guy I I was I felt like, you know, a caveman in here talking to that
Speaker D
guy. But in the end, you know, it's science, so the data has to speak, right?
Speaker E
It can't be like you have impressive degrees, so you must be right. It's like, well, the data says yes or the data says no.
Speaker F
Totally. Totally. And I think these guys are doing it, which is why they're making it open source. They're not keeping it a secret. So like everything is like completely laid out on their website and they uh they demonstrate it publicly on video and all that stuff. So
Speaker F
that would change everything. But, you know, even that would like maybe make it easier to explore the solar system a little faster, but it wouldn't solve the bigger problem, which is like, well, how do we get to Alpha Centauri? How do we get to the other side of the galaxy? Because
Speaker F
we're still limited by the speed of light, you know, even if you can solve the propellant issue. Um, how do you get us out of this little bubble of our solar system so we can interact with the galactic community if if there is one,
Speaker F
right? And that's the bigger problem that I think we can um we can we can communicate with those Voyager satellites that we sent out there like in the 70s or something, right?
Speaker F
We can talk to them.
Speaker A
We can communicate with them. Mhm.
Speaker B
Yeah. And uh but they've gotten nowhere.
Speaker C
How far out are they? You know, they're like right at the edge of the helopause. So like the place where the sun's radiation dominates. So, you know, they're nowhere near the next solar system. They've been going for decades.
Speaker D
Oh wow. And they're just like still in our neighborhood. I mean, they're far away. It's amazing. It's impressive.
Speaker D
They're out of the solar system, right?
Speaker E
Yes. Which is incredible. But that's still nowhere on like a cosmic scale.
Speaker F
Can you find like a diagram? Oh, this is a Okay, here's a video of their thing working.
Speaker F
It's pretty slow because they only have like a I mean, the modules need to be bigger and they need to be stacked more. This is just two modules, but it's doing its own thrust.
Speaker A
Yeah. And they they actually built vacuum chambers that they put this thing inside, like legitimate vacuum chambers, and they they show it working inside of a vacuum.
Speaker A
Well, that'd be awesome. I hope they figure it out. But this thing, they have it they have the thing on the one end or whatever, and it's rotating it like super slow.
Speaker B
Yeah. Interesting. Can you find out like show like find a a diagram where it shows how far the Voyager probes are? Like how far out of the solar system? I'd be very curious to see. Yeah, there's the Voyager and there's
Speaker B
the Pioneer.
Speaker C
Yeah, those are like some of the most distant man-made items, which is really awesome.
Speaker C
We had Nadia Drake in here the other day and she was uh Oh, wow.
Speaker D
she was showing us all of the records, the golden record that they put on that thing and we were listening to it. It's hilarious. [laughter]
Speaker E
They were playing like Sounds of the Jungle. They were playing like the rainforest, the thunderstorms.
Speaker E
What is an alien going to make it? Like [laughter] seriously, it just shows you like how much our understanding and like the evolution of our thinking has evolved since they did that. Right.
Speaker E
Right. Right.
Speaker F
It's pretty bonkers. It's pretty wild to think about. So, okay, this is what what are we looking at?
Speaker F
Trying to find something that that actually shows the distance there. So, look, that that shows it right there.
Speaker F
Well, it doesn't measurements bottom left, right? It doesn't really give you um context of like other
Speaker A
but it gives you a pretty picture of Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker B
Yeah. Well, there you see Pluto, right? And so we're definitely they're definitely out past Pluto, which is really far away,
Speaker C
right? So, there's not really anything we can learn from it, right? Because it's just like in the middle of a desert essentially.
Speaker C
Well, we can learn about, you know, what's going out on out there. We can learn about what cosmic rays are out there and all sorts of like interesting physics.
Speaker D
Um, I don't think we can learn much about aliens.
Speaker E
And I think an interesting question is like imagine aliens get the Voyager probe, right? like or the Pioneer Probe like they have that plaque on it that Drake and Carl Sean designed that's supposed to communicate like we're human here's how we think about the universe
Speaker E
um and trying to imagine like what would it like be like for aliens to get that could they actually understand it and you know Drake and Sean did their best I think NASA only gave them like two weeks to design the first plaque they did
Speaker E
their best to try to communicate in a way that like is universal but like if you call up like the pioneer plaque you see this the diagram Mhm. Mhm. And
Speaker F
that's bizarre looking. It's [clears throat] funny looking. It's got like naked people on it. And uh Yeah. There it is. [snorts]
Speaker A
Yeah. And you know the top left for example, they try to communicate something about physics.
Speaker A
It's like a quazar or something, right?
Speaker B
Yeah. So look at the top left diagram. This the two the two circles. What do you think that is?
Speaker B
Right. I have no idea what that is. [laughter] The aliens will be smart enough to find out. Right. Maybe maybe Sean was hoping that the aliens would think about the universe the way we do and that they would understand it. It's supposed to be a hydrogen atom on the left with the
Speaker B
electron and the and the proton are the two lines. And what the hydrogen atom does is the electron has a spin and it flips and it happens constantly back and forth all the time.
Speaker B
So if you're like an expert in hydrogen or you look at hydrogen because the universe is mostly hydrogen, you might recognize this as a diagram intended to communicate what hydrogen is doing. And if you're an alien and you see this, you
Speaker B
might be like, "Okay, these guys think about hydrogen." And there's a little one there between them and it's supposed to indicate, we call this one unit of time. So it's like a cosmic clock. Like let's find a way to talk about time with
Speaker B
aliens. Let's do it by identifying this basic natural process that happens very very regularly. Maybe the aliens have found it too. And maybe we can use this diagram to like connect to that idea in their brain. H it's brilliant because you know it's Sean and and Drake and and they're smart
Speaker B
guys, but it also makes a huge number of assumptions about how an alien mind might work, how alien physics might happen.
Speaker B
And you know, I think frankly it's probably hopeless for an alien physicist to get this and be like, "Oh yeah, I understand what you're talking about." I mean, I actually showed this diagram to a bunch of physics PhD students at UC
Speaker B
Irvine and asked them like, "What do you think this is?" And I gave them all afternoon and they didn't come up with any ideas anywhere close to what Sean and Drake [laughter] were thinking. And that's like that's the easy mode, right?
Speaker B
These are humans studying human physics on Earth with the same biological brain. Yeah.
Speaker C
Um they couldn't figure it out. And so the chances that like an alien sees this and gets it, I think, are pretty small.
Speaker C
Yeah. Um
Speaker D
even the golden record is pretty wild. Oh yeah.
Speaker E
You know, like to think that they even gives them the record needle to play the record so they can hear all the music.
Speaker E
And I don't I don't mean to criticize Carl Sean like I couldn't come up with anything better.
Speaker F
Right. Right. [laughter] I just mean to say that like this is maybe an impossible problem to imagine how aliens see the universe and to communicate with them without being able to sit across the table. Like if we had an alien here and we could talk to them,
Speaker F
I think we could probably make a lot of progress. Like we could figure out, you know, how to talk about numbers or time or whatever because we'd have like we could point to things and we could build a common language. But if we're just
Speaker F
like sending a message or getting a message, I think it's probably hopeless to decode what they mean or how they think about the universe.
Speaker F
Um, I'd love to.
Speaker A
What did you think about that Steven Spielberg movie that just came out?
Speaker B
Disclosure day. No. Disclosure day.
Speaker C
Yeah. Um, well, number one, it was fun. Like, it's [clears throat] a fun movie.
Speaker D
Very Spielbergy. Very Spielbergy. Dude knows how to tell a story. Um, but I thought it avoided really the hard question. You know, the movie was all about like, let's assume aliens are here. Let's assume the government knows about them and is
Speaker D
hiding them. Uh, how would that play out if it if it was revealed? And it avoided the hard question, which is like, well, what does the government know?
Speaker D
And should they tell us? You know, in the movie, they assume that um if you release this information, it's dangerous somehow that it would like cause chaos.
Speaker D
And I don't know if I believe that. Like if the government announced tomorrow, oh yeah, by the way, we have aliens and we've been experimenting on them for 50 years. I don't think it would cause uproar. I think it would be like, oh,
Speaker D
cool. Yeah, I've seen
Speaker E
probably not now. It might have if you dropped it in the 50s or 60s.
Speaker F
Maybe. I don't know. But I think I think um that overstates it. I think
Speaker A
I don't think that's their primary motive. If if they were if there is if this is true like his concept that the government is hiding this stuff and they have been doing this stuff I don't think that
Speaker B
the reason for them to hide it would be to keep people psychologically sound. I don't think or like for chaos to I I believe there would be other incentives for them to keep it quiet.
Speaker B
I guess so. I mean I don't I don't know. And I also think it'd probably be impossible for them to keep it quiet especially over 60 years.
Speaker B
Totally. I mean, we couldn't even keep nuclear weapons from the Russians for more for a decade. So, now imagine like an even bigger secret for so much longer.
Speaker C
I mean, I've worked on government projects. Like, I know it's impossible to keep things to keep things that quiet, but it was a fun movie, you know. Um, for sure.
Speaker D
So, what is your take on this whole UFO UAP nonsense? Are you do you take give it any merit or do you pay any attention to it or are you too busy doing real stuff? Uh, of course I pay attention to
Speaker D
it because look, I want to meet the aliens. I want the aliens to be here. I imagine there's some super advanced aliens out there and they know the answer to quantum gravity. They know how the universe started. They know how to
Speaker D
build propellantless drives. They know how to build wormholes between star systems.
Speaker E
And I want to know. I mean, imagine there's somebody out there that knows the answers to the questions like, "How did the universe begin? What is it all made out of?" And they just know and they could tell us. So, yeah, I want aliens to be here. Um,
Speaker E
I want them to visit. Um, but [clears throat] because I want it so badly, I feel like I have to be skeptical because, you know, you can easily convince yourself of something you want to be true.
Speaker E
You know, I'm losing weight or I'm good-looking or like, you know, whatever. Um, it's very easy to fool yourself.
Speaker E
So, I got to be skeptical. And none of the evidence that's out there to me is very compelling. You know, there's like these videos. Um, I actually had a congressperson call me up. He listens to my podcast and say he'd seen all the
Speaker E
classified videos and he wanted to ask me some questions about the physics. Yeah. I [laughter] was like, "Wow, let's talk." Uh, it was super cool. Um, and he'd heard some crazy theories about wormholes and plasma orbs and whatever.
Speaker E
And he wanted to know what I thought about it. And I was like, I'll tell you, but first you got to tell me what you saw in those videos. [laughter] And he's like, no, it's nothing interesting. Apparently, it all just
Speaker E
looks like the stuff that's out there. Um, but it looks like what's out there? it look. So, there's a few videos that are out there like the Navy videos like Tic Tac and Go Fast and Gimbal or whatever and
Speaker E
the rest of the stuff that they haven't released. Apparently, there's a lot of videos out there that there's a lot of videos that aren't out there. They haven't released them
Speaker F
and those apparently don't look like anything more exciting, which is too bad. I'm very skeptical of those videos. We got satellites that can read the newspaper. Somebody sitting on a bench in a park from outer space like can't
Speaker F
you're telling me this is all we got?
Speaker A
Yeah, they they exist in this low information zone, right? They're like always fuzzy, always, you don't quite have enough
Speaker B
information. Um, I don't discount Navy pilots,
Speaker C
right? They're awesome people. I'm sure they're telling us what they saw, but to me, it's not enough to really believe it. I need physical evidence that we can study that independent people can measure and be like, "Yeah, this is not from Earth
Speaker C
or something."
Speaker D
Um, stories are never enough, right? Firsthand stories are never enough.
Speaker E
Unfortunately, I got to be skeptical. So, I want them to be here. But
Speaker F
the curious thing to me about those Navy pilots is that when they came down back to the aircraft carrier after seeing that stuff and they report it to their superiors, their superiors didn't seem surprised.
Speaker A
H I [clears throat] thought that was very strange. Yeah. Well, I'm not an expert on psychology. It's complicated for sure.
Speaker A
How people react to this stuff and how they report it. It was all near, you know, training sites and it was all near big bases and in um
Speaker B
like active zones where they did they did uh they rehearsed missions and operations and stuff like that. So like if something was being tested on our own equipment, that would be the ideal place to do it, right?
Speaker C
That's true. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But, you know, we should be looking. We should be checking. There's been a lot of cool stuff. I don't know if you've seen the studies where they where uh they have what they claim to be evidence of satellites orbiting the Earth from
Speaker C
before humans put anything into orbit. Oh, Beatatrice uh Valale, right? Yeah. She published a paper on this.
Speaker D
It's called the Vasco study. Super cool. Very creative. I love that idea.
Speaker E
Like really brilliant concept. And there's now like a lot of scientific debate about, you know, is there really a signal for it? Are they just smears in the plates or whatever? And people are digging into the detail back. The overall idea is that she found over a
Speaker E
100,000 mirror like reflective objects in space around where satellites would be anomaly. These were anomalous and this was before Sputnik was even out there
Speaker F
before Sputnik. So you would not expect any Earth junk up there, right? And she sees a bunch of stuff that reflects like a satellite and then when it goes into Earth's shadow doesn't reflect anymore, right? Cuz you might say, "Well, how do you know it's not just a star?" Well,
Speaker F
if it's going into the Earth's shadow, it must be nearby. And so that's the the really the key idea. Problem is that these are early early plates. This is from the Palomar Observatory decades ago and they took these huge beautiful images,
Speaker A
but there's a lot of crap in those images. You know, there's a lot of what?
Speaker B
A lot of crap. Like there's, you know, they're photographic plates and there's dust and there's all sorts of artifacts and it's really hard to tell if what you're seeing is like actually something from space or like some fuzz on the telescope or some fuzz in on the
Speaker B
photograph. It's really hard to tell. There's a lot of noise. So, she doesn't have a lot of people would scrutinize this though, like when she was getting it published, don't you think this would be like the lowest hanging fruit of like
Speaker B
we need to eliminate this question right here? Like is it could it be this?
Speaker B
Yeah. Well, people haven't really explored it before this because they realized how hard it was to tell the real stuff from the noise. So, she doesn't have like here's a bunch of crystal clear examples of something that can't be anything else.
Speaker C
She has okay, there's a huge amount of noise, but there's more than you would expect from noise. It's like a statistical argument says like, oh, there's more of these flashes on the plates than you would expect from just dust and from just, you know, fuzz on
Speaker C
the photography.
Speaker D
So, it's like a statistical argument. And some people say like, "Well, you can't know that." Like, it's there's too much uncertainty. There's just too much noise to to pull this signal out of there.
Speaker E
It's like you're listening to fuzz. What year was the what year? So, this would have been what year specifically?
Speaker E
In the ' 50s.
Speaker F
I don't remember exactly. I think it was in the 40s that these images
Speaker A
Polomar Observatory. Yeah. I don't remember exactly the year.
Speaker B
It says these plates span the 50s. Okay.
Speaker C
They span the 50s. Yeah. Can you pull it up? It was in the 50s because another fascinating claim is that these things coincide with nuclear tests.
Speaker C
Um, which is like what?
Speaker D
Yeah. Right. Oh, okay. So, zoom in a little bit. Two new peer-review papers catapulted the mid-century astronomical uh archive into global headlines when Dr. Beatatric Voriel of Vasco project at the center of a debate about UAP's disappearing stars
Speaker D
and whether historical records contain real physical signals or a long chain of misleading artifacts. Um, brief starlike transients on a 1950s Palomar Sky Survey plate appears to cluster in time around nuclear testing and also track in a weaker way the day-to-day volume of UAP report. Oh, interesting. Yeah,
Speaker D
I didn't know that part. The claims are provocative. Um, the data set is old and the stakes are high and the real story is less about certainty than about what it would take to turn a weird archival signal into a reproductible present- day
Speaker D
measurement. Well, that's very interesting that it because all of the UFO accounts and testimonies coincide with nuclear tests going back to Roswell, which was on the site of a nuclear testing ground. Like that's where they were literally testing the first nuke. It was right where that
Speaker D
Roswell thing was.
Speaker E
Yeah. I think there was actually Alamordo in New Mexico. Yeah.
Speaker F
Right. Um. [clears throat]
Speaker A
Right. So there seems there and then there's been dozens and dozens of people who have gone public at least who work at nuclear sites who claim seeing these things like top level people who have their fingers on the nuclear button
Speaker B
you know they're not these aren't just cooks like these are people who are in charge of are we going to go into global thermonuclear war or not right
Speaker C
serious people for sure um and that's one of the craziest things there was even a um there was a great video that uh James Fox put in one of his documentaries where essentially but you could probably find a a section of it cut out specifically on YouTube where
Speaker C
it shows a map of the of the whole world and it shows on the bottom there's a timeline and it shows the date of every every nuclear bomb being tested around the world and then it also shows recorded uh UFO sightings that were
Speaker C
reported by people or by military or whatever and the correlation is astonishing. And it it shows you the date of like all the nukes that are being blasted. And it's just like it's so crazy how correlated they are and how the UFO sightings match up around nuclear type
Speaker C
nuclear sites or nuclear tests. Um
Speaker D
yeah, you got to be careful with correlations though, right? Correlations don't prove causation, right? There's like correlations between how much people use the Netscape browser and like murder rates. And like obviously there's, you know, one Netscape doesn't cause murders. Um so you got to be really careful about correlations and
Speaker D
that's the thing about this study about the um flashes the transients in nuclear testing like is there is a correlation enough to prove that there's something real there and there's some another guy published a paper reanalyzing and saying
Speaker D
she measured it wrong and if you measure it correctly the correlation goes away. So there's like a vigorous debate about these things and I think it's exciting and it's interesting and I'm glad that these papers are being published and
Speaker D
it's out there in the open, you know, people arguing about it scientifically. I think there should be less like stigma about talking about UAPs and aliens like we should treat it like a scientific question.
Speaker D
Um, and because I think it's exciting and we should have answers to these questions and we should do it through open scientific discussion and the data should be out there for everybody. Steve, did you find that map that
Speaker D
animated map of the nuclear nuclear detonations? No, I'm still looking.
Speaker E
Okay. Yeah, it's it's it's super curious, right? Like doesn't correlation equal causation, but it's very interesting like why why are all these UFO sightings happening around nuclear sites and like seem to be correlated with nuclear nuclear detonation? That's
Speaker E
when we first started seeing them, right, was uh around Nagasaki and uh when we bombed Japan
Speaker F
and like the history of that is just
Speaker A
But UFO sightings are also correlated with other stuff. Like if you look at the worldwide map of where UFO sightings happen, it's mostly like in the United States.
Speaker A
Uh is that true? Huh?
Speaker B
Yeah. So, you know, there's like a I thought there was lots of them. I I mean, I've heard of tons of them being But you Yeah, I guess you're right. But we also live in the United States, right? So, we see more US news. [laughter]
Speaker B
Yeah. I don't know. I've I don't I don't I don't know. I've [clears throat] seen these uh plots that show that where the UFO sightings happen and they're clustered in the United States. And so, it makes you wonder like how much of
Speaker B
that is a cultural phenomenon um and how much of it is, you know, we're seeing something out there.
Speaker C
It's definitely right. the the cultural phenomenon aspect of it is huge.
Speaker D
Yeah. And you can't deny that, right?
Speaker E
And I'm not an expert in this stuff, so I'm totally just an amateur.
Speaker F
Yeah. As am I. But it's just very Yeah. It's true, though. Like it's that how much does that distort, you know, how many how many times where people claiming they got abducted by aliens when they were just, you know, having a schizophrenic break or something like
Speaker F
that or saw a movie, had a bad dream or whatever. Like there's so many so many moving parts to this phenomena. And the thing about it is that it's like it's it's God for atheists, right? People want to they they use aliens and
Speaker F
UFOs to fill that god-shaped hole in the brain, really, right? Because it's one of those things we don't know the answer to. It's one of the biggest questions of the universe. Are there aliens? Are we alone?
Speaker F
So people will people find meaning
Speaker A
in that stuff, right? And it define it becomes their identity and they become obsessed with it. And you know, it's just like it's one of those things that we may not in our lifetimes at least find the answer to like is there a god? Are aliens real? And you know, what is
Speaker A
consciousness? What happens when we die?
Speaker B
Absolutely. It's one of those things. It's like
Speaker C
I can't imagine what it would be like if that question did get answered. You know, [laughter] we would just find the next crazy thing to chase.
Speaker C
Well, you can think back to like early times, you know, like what did cave men and cave women think when they looked up at the stars? They had no idea what those things were.
Speaker D
And you know, we can't imagine what it was like to be them. To be so clueless about the nature of the universe.
Speaker D
And that's the incredible thing about science is that we knock [snorts] down these questions. Like some of these may not be answerable. You know, is there a god? We don't know. We might not never know. Maybe not a scientific question,
Speaker D
but some of these like how did the universe begin? What's it all made out of? You know, are we alone? These are questions we could get answers to, like scientific, like reproducible, objective answers to, and then people in a
Speaker D
thousand years will look back and be like, what was it like to be those dudes and not know whether we're alone? How could you survive being so clueless about the context of your lives? And to me, this is what's so exciting is that
Speaker D
there's so much science left to figure out. like we have understood like the tiniest fraction of the universe and what's left are huge like contextdefining surprises.
Speaker E
You know, probably when we figure out the deal with aliens, it's not going to be what I think or what you think or what some guy in a farm field in Iowa thinks. It's going to be something so
Speaker E
bizarre and alien nobody imagined it
Speaker F
because the universe is going to surprise us. It's going to be like secret option C, right? Well, one of the things is like I think the idea that if there were aliens, they're going to be these bipeedal homminids with forward facing eyesact is crazy.
Speaker F
With like a croissant on their forehead,
Speaker A
right? Like what is the chances in a in a planet that has totally different gravity, totally different atmosphere, maybe even a water world, who knows that they're going to evolve to look exactly like us.
Speaker B
Exactly. We're again extrapolating from our experience the way we're like, hey, maybe dark matter is made out of particles. It's the same mistake we've been making forever, which is like put oursel at the center of the universe, assume that we are alone. Like
Speaker B
these kind of things are are moments when we discover that we're unusual or not unusual or or typical or not. And those are the really exciting times in science.
Speaker C
And you know, one thing is like what is their biology like as you say, do they have legs? Do they move the same way we do? But to me, another really interesting question which touches on this business with the pioneer plaque is how do they think about the universe?
Speaker C
You know, I have this fantasy that aliens come and they tell us about the universe and they tell us about quantum gravity and you know, you see this in sci-fi all the time, you know, like uh aliens come and we make contact via math
Speaker C
or whatever and then we are talking about physics. But I think it's probably going to be much harder because I think probably aliens, the way they think about the universe is probably really really alien in ways we can't even
Speaker C
imagine.
Speaker D
The way we can't imagine their biology or their culture, you know, or their perspective on anything.
Speaker D
Yeah. It probably won't fit into our framework of how we view the world and the universe, right? And it'll it'll teach us something about the assumptions we've been making
Speaker E
because we are always making assumptions based on our experience without even knowing without even really realizing that we are because we don't think that there are any other options and then when we discover the universe is different from what we expected
Speaker E
that's when we realize we were making assumptions and that they were wrong. Right?
Speaker F
You know for example we could meet the aliens and we could discover oh they they do science but they don't use math.
Speaker F
Like maybe their science is not like built on mathematics at all. Maybe mathematics is part of how we think about the universe, not part of the universe itself.
Speaker A
Or maybe aliens don't even do science, right? Maybe they're probably not constrained by auditory language, like verbal language that really constrains our thinking and our imagination and the way our brains work. Maybe they have a telepathic, right? And think about how
Speaker A
much faster you could make
Speaker B
emotions to communicate or or something that we can't even comprehend.
Speaker C
Yeah. or if you weren't forced to like take your ideas and compress them into sound waves to transmit them to another brain. If you could just be like brain brain brain brain brain think.
Speaker C
Yeah.
Speaker D
You know, um I don't know. Maybe that would be better. Maybe that'd be worse cuz they never because it's like like that's one of the that's one of the downfalls of like one of the biggest pitfalls of human human interaction is the communication gap,
Speaker D
right? Not just like us sitting across the table using our native language to communicate ideas and stuff like that, but like the way technology is evolving here, it's it's separating that. It's pushing humans apart and it's letting us
Speaker D
communicate via like texting on a phone where you can't really convey emotions
Speaker E
emotion or like the the volume or like where your inflections are and all that kind of stuff. So, and then you want to throw gasoline onto that, put it on social media where now everyone can post a tweet about something and like
Speaker F
and the words themselves have different meaning with different cultural assumptions, different context, right? And so now try imagine communicating with aliens and that's why I was saying earlier like you send the pioneer plaque to aliens, there's no chance [laughter]
Speaker F
they're going to figure it out. Online shopping has become ridiculous. There's 100 different variations of every single product and the prices get so insane you just end up getting frustrated and wanting to throw your laptop out the window. And then when you finally find something you love, but it's too
Speaker F
expensive, maybe you start to wonder if there's an alternative for a cheaper price. And that's why I use dupe.com all the time. You can take basically anything you're thinking about buying, paste a product link into dupe, even upload a photo, and it searches for similar products at different prices. I
Speaker F
mean, look at this array of masculine comfort. Where else in the world can you find a gorilla couch? and then compare prices on them. There's lots of the same quality and very different prices. Dupe works for clothing, shoes, jewelry,
Speaker F
electronics, and tons of other stuff. You can even just describe what you need, like noise cancelling headphones for traveling, and let Dupe do the research for you. It's completely free, and you don't even need an account.
Speaker F
Using dupe.com is insanely simple. Just go to dupe.com, paste any product URL, upload any photo, and it will instantly show you similar items for way less.
Speaker F
There's also an app and a browser extension if you want to make it even easier. No account needed, totally free. So, start saving money with dupe.com today. I actually spent some time digging into this, thinking about like how hard is it to learn an alien language. Well, we can't know, of
Speaker F
course, but we can think about how hard it is to learn like ancient human languages. Like, think about ancient human societies that wrote stuff down and then we found it and we're like, "Okay, let's decode it." Turns out that's really hard. Yeah.
Speaker A
It's like mostly we don't know how to do that. Like, we have a couple of examples of having figured that out. Well, ancient Greek had like like almost two million unique words.
Speaker A
Wow.
Speaker B
How crazy is that? That's a lot. Yeah.
Speaker C
And our I think how many words do we have in I think 200,000 in modern English.
Speaker C
Wow.
Speaker D
That's astonishing. And they used to walk around singing. [laughter]
Speaker E
That's how they memorized books. Yeah.
Speaker F
Unfortunately, Greek is still around and so we like we never lost it. Right.
Speaker A
Well, ancient Greek is a different language. Sure.
Speaker B
I think it's a I think it's a completely different language than modern Greek. But I don't know how I'd be curious to know how many actual words are in modern Greek compared to ancient Greek. But it's it's crazy like just to just to measure like the explosion of intellect
Speaker B
that happened in that period of antiquity, you know, when the Greeks were really thriving and doing that stuff where you had Socrates and Plato and all these people that were coming up with all this stuff.
Speaker B
Um, but yeah, I don't know what this says. What does this Well, this is modern Greek as uh up to
Speaker C
100,000 to 200,000. Okay. Well, that number is wrong for ancient Greek. We already proved that with Luke Luke Gorton.
Speaker D
120,000. Yeah. But but isn't it weird because you can combine the Greek words to make new ones?
Speaker E
Yeah. So, like how do you measure it? I don't I don't know. Well, unique words. Did you search for unique words?
Speaker E
Oh, no. I didn't say unique.
Speaker F
Yeah. Yeah. That's another thing about ancient Greek is you could like you could people were walking around just creating word forms all the time like they were combining different words to create new word cing new words all the time.
Speaker F
It's insane.
Speaker A
Yeah. So there are assumptions about language that don't hold like and there are other languages from that same era like at Truskin.
Speaker B
Nobody's ever figured out how to crack it. We have a bunch of examples of written at Truskin and nobody knows what they say. Like there's nobody around who reads at Truskin anymore or speaks it. It's just lost.
Speaker B
Just a lost dead language.
Speaker C
Yeah. And it's not like they're weird, right? They lived alongside the Romans. The Romans wrote about them.
Speaker C
They knew the Romans. It's like very culturally adjacent to us, but we just can't figure it out because like it's hard to translate a new language because it could be anything, right? Like when you write something down, you're creating these words and the words are symbols and they're just
Speaker C
arbitrary.
Speaker D
Like we've decided chocolate means chocolate, but we could have called it, you know, blue blah blah or whatever.
Speaker D
It's totally arbitrary. We just agree on it, right? So now if somebody comes along and tries to like reverse engineer that without any cultural knowledge, it's basically impossible. Like our one example of figuring it out like hieroglyphics that turns out to be like
Speaker D
more of a cautionary tale than like a story of triumph, you know, like the only reason we ever figured out hieroglyphics is because the Rosetta Stone, right? Where we found this example where it's like here's some hieroglyphics and the same text also in Greek and in another language. Basically
Speaker D
like a cheat sheet. Mhm.
Speaker E
But even still, after the Rosetta Stone, it took 20 years to crack hieroglyphics. Like 20 years is a long time.
Speaker E
That's a very long time.
Speaker F
Even after you get the cheat sheet and the reason is that we were making the wrong assumption about how the language worked.
Speaker A
Like we assumed and everybody assumed for centuries that hieroglyphics were like pictograms. Like if there's a bird in it, it's about birds. If there's waters in it, it's about water. And people were like, "Wow, the Egyptians had this incredible language that
Speaker A
superseded words and whatever." But they were wrong. Turns out hieroglyphics are phonetic just like our language. Like this symbol makes a sound and the other symbol makes another sound.
Speaker A
So people made the wrong assumption about how hieroglyphics work and it took them an extra 20 years to figure it out because they made that wrong assumption.
Speaker A
And so there's like there are these landmines, these assumptions everywhere, not just in translating language, but in science where we're assuming things have to be a certain way. And that's blinding us to other possibilities. And those are the times when, you know, we need some new fresh data to to show us to tear us
Speaker A
out of those assumptions to be like, "No, you guys are all wasting your time.
Speaker A
It's this is the right way." All right. Well, that's that's another huge problem with science which I've only learned since starting this podcast is that one of the things that just shocked me was how uh how stovepiped and and how like
Speaker A
everyone in science has their blinders on. so little interdiciplinary people coming together and trying to solve solve bigger problems like people stay in their lanes and like you can talk to somebody who studies ancient texts like oh well how many archaeologists have you talked to or how
Speaker A
many uh you know uh forensic examiners have you talked to that study the actual DNA that's going into these people's the dead bodies that correlate the text that correlate the
Speaker B
megalithic stonework or whatever archaeology you pulled up. It's none. It's all they all stay in their exact academic lane,
Speaker C
which is uh it's crazy to me that that that's it's that way.
Speaker D
Well, I think it's a product of the system. You know, you to to get somewhere, you have to be at the top of the game. Like to get an academic position, you have to beat out like hundreds of people for one job.
Speaker E
Yeah. It's the rat race. So, you have to be like at the very very top of this mountain of people working on this particular thing.
Speaker F
So, you got to be really really focused, you know, and that's how it works. But once you get tenure then you can branch out. You can do other stuff. You can like join the philosophy department. You can find in interdisciplinary work. And I actually think AI is going to be
Speaker F
really really helpful to facilitate that
Speaker A
to facilitate what interdisciplinary work. Like one of the challenges is like say I want to do physics but I also want to use ideas from statistics or some other field or something. Well, they speak a whole different language and like am I going
Speaker A
to learn how to read their papers and like understand what they're doing? It's going to take me like 5 years,
Speaker B
right? And so that's been a real challenge and I've been doing interdisiplinary work between physics and machine learning and statistics and it's taken a long time to develop these bridges.
Speaker C
But now with AI like I can call up some statistics paper, I can be like translate this into my language, right?
Speaker C
And boom, it's done, right? And I can also ask it like, hey, go find me papers about this, but in other fields that I don't really know how to search or where the papers are or who does the work. And it can go and read all of those and find
Speaker C
them and translate. So I think AI is going to be a really powerful bridge between these fields helping translate between these different ideas and these different disciplines and make these connections. It just it makes it a lot easier to do all that work. Yeah, that's true. And I wonder like with the
Speaker C
exponential growth of AI and how it's kind of like ever accelerating and advancing and self-updating and all this stuff like how this is going to affect science in general and you know how this is going to affect the people that are
Speaker C
working at CERN working on a large hydron collider like is if this thing becomes like so insanely intelligent and powerful that we're you no longer need people employed working on in labs and in you know physics laboratories and all this stuff colliding particles together
Speaker C
because the AI can solve all the problems like what is that what does that do because I think it's like one of the fundamental things about human [clears throat] beings is that they're curious.
Speaker C
Yeah.
Speaker D
Right. So like so we're always going to need people being curious. Like I agree with you it's going to change how we do science. It's going to accelerate things. It's going to take things that used to take months and make them take days.
Speaker D
But in the end [snorts] that's just powering human curiosity. We still need people asking questions.
Speaker E
That's the point. It's human. Yeah.
Speaker F
So when you're when you're subbing all that stuff out to a machine,
Speaker A
how does that change? Because like one of the fundamental things about being human is like human motivations, right? People want to acquire more resources. They want to reproduce. They want to find a mate. They want to
Speaker B
understand the universe, climb the hierarchy, and they want to do all this stuff to because they know eventually they're going to die, right? Life is finite. Now if you're saying like now if art artificial intelligence is doing that then what [clears throat]
Speaker B
does that do to humanity?
Speaker C
Yeah. Well they don't have the same motivations that we do that machines don't. Yeah. Well I don't think that AI will replace that human curiosity or it should like it's going to allow humans to do more allow things to happen faster
Speaker C
more efficiently make connections make progress but it's not going to like stop us from being curious. It's not like uh AI is going to come up with quantum gravity and then I'm going to be like okay cool. I'm going to retire. I'm
Speaker C
bored. Like, no. I'm going to have questions. I'm going to have new questions. AI will help us answer today's questions and help inspire tomorrow. Those answers will inspire tomorrow's questions, but it's not going to replace curiosity. It can't, as you say, it's like
Speaker C
No, it won't replace curiosity. But what will it do to human drive, right? Because a lot of the reason that people do things it people try to make big achievements is because they want to make a name for themselves right before
Speaker C
they die. They want to be known for something. They want to and and generally just across you know throughout time that has been the struggle of humanity is we're territorial apes. We kill each other for territory and resources and for the attractive mate that's that's baked into
Speaker C
us from the beginning. So, and and that that is it's a double-edged sword to why we have been able to innovate and create newer and newer things with technology and with war with weapons and exploring outer space and all that stuff. I
Speaker C
mean, I don't think everybody like gets into physics to find mates and get lots of resources, you know, it's not like a so simple. I think all everybody doesn't get into physics for that for sure, right? There's a lot of
Speaker C
people that are just genuinely curious and they want to find a career in something that they're really interested in. and they want to make a better lives a better life for themselves, right?
Speaker D
But I'm just like I'm generalizing. Okay.
Speaker E
So, um,
Speaker F
and with the way technology is like you're rewarded for creating better and better technology. Human beings, they're rewarded. Like corporations, they make more money. They sell it to more people.
Speaker F
People get to show off. Look, I got the brand new iPhone. You know, I got the iPhone 17 Plus Pro or whatever. It does all this. Has I can see the moon with it. Like, what kind of iPhone do you have? It's a it's a it's a human reward
Speaker F
system, right? So So what happens to does science like if that is no longer a fundamental thing that is necessary cuz we have AI to answer all these questions for us what happens then like what happens to us? I don't know.
Speaker A
Well, I think you still need somebody directing the AI. It's like think about what happened to science when we had computers. It's like we could do calculations much faster. We could do more calculations. It accelerated science massively. Like when they first
Speaker A
came up with the idea of predicting the weather, it used to take 6 weeks to predict what was going to happen 6 hours later. So like totally useless because it took longer to do the calculation than it did for time to pass.
Speaker A
Then when computers came on the scene like oh my gosh, we could predict the weather in six hours and it took six minutes. Now it's actually useful. Huge advance. And since then, like obviously a huge advance, but we haven't like
Speaker A
replaced humans. It's just made humans more effective. And I think that's what's going to happen with AI. It's just a powerful tool that makes human curiosity more powerful, more effective.
Speaker B
There's no point where you're like, we don't need the large hydron collider cuz like AI is not going to do experiments to just analyze data. And we it's not like you're going to say, oh, we don't need theoretical physicists. um because even if some of their work can be made
Speaker B
more effective, you haven't gotten rid of the need to try to want to understand the universe or to think about the questions that we want answers to. So I don't think AI is going to replace humans in science because humans are in
Speaker B
science because we have questions and that's not going to change. And you see a lot of these um you know Sam Altman says we're going to solve physics in AI and like I don't even know what that means. Like what does it mean
Speaker B
to solve physics physics?
Speaker C
Yeah. Like what does that mean? There's no time at which humans are not going to be curious about the universe. Even if aliens came and they're like, "Daniel, here's the theory of everything and it works, right?" I'd be like, "Okay, well, why
Speaker C
that theory? Why is there a seven in it?" You know, why this other thing?
Speaker C
Like, I'm always going to have questions. That's the nature of being human. So, I think AI is going to change how we do science, but I don't think it's going to stop us from doing science.
Speaker C
But I think it is really, really good at something we're bad at, which is combining ideas. Like if you think back in the history of human scientific breakthroughs, a lot of them came from some guy has a problem, somebody else
Speaker C
independently came up with a solution and then they figured out how to put them together. Like Einstein in general relativity. He was like struggling with that. And then he learned, oh, these mathematicians came up with these mathematical tools not to solve my problem just because they were nerds and
Speaker C
they thought these number of problems were fun. They developed all these techniques that perfectly solved his problem.
Speaker C
Right? So this is interdisiplinary work, right? If he'd never met those mathematicians, he might not have figured out general relativity, right?
Speaker D
Same with quantum mechanics, like relies on this thing called group theory, which a bunch of French nerds invented 100 years earlier because they like playing games with numbers, not to like understand the nature of the universe, just like chocolate and peanut butter.
Speaker D
And AI is great at that. AI is like, "Oh, you're working on this problem.
Speaker D
Have you read this paper over there? Cuz that solves that problem much, much better than we are." So that's going to happen very quickly.
Speaker D
That's great if if AI is completely not with or tinkered with by any humans, right? As long as there's no bias.
Speaker D
Yeah.
Speaker E
There's no hidden agendas or anything like that that's baked into it. It can be completely objective.
Speaker E
Yeah.
Speaker F
On its answers, right? [clears throat] There's always bias.
Speaker A
That would work. There's always bias with humans, but like if you could completely remove human beings from the equation,
Speaker B
yeah, from the AI, that would be ideal.
Speaker C
There's always bias in AI based on what it's been trained on. Right. Right.
Speaker D
Well, yeah. Yeah. There's been some bad examples. [laughter] There was the early Google one. Did you see that?
Speaker E
Where they said they said, "Show me Nazis." And it had a bunch of black people with dreadlocks and like women and stuff like that. Like,
Speaker F
oh, it's like, yeah, it they're hopefully weeding that stuff out of it over time. Um, but that's going to be something that's we're going to have to contend with for a long time. But like one of the greatest examples of interdisiplinary science would be like
Speaker F
the Manhattan Project.
Speaker A
Yeah. Right. Where we took all those Nazis and we brought them here [laughter] and we had him create the bomb for us.
Speaker B
Like that was human ingenuity at its finest. Right.
Speaker C
Not for any good reasons, for a terrible evil reason.
Speaker D
Well, I don't know if we had Nazis in the Manhattan Project. We had like Jews who Lots of Nazis.
Speaker D
Yeah, but he was uh he was like building rockets after the war. And if was he involved in the Manhattan Project?
Speaker E
I believe he was. Yeah, I believe he was. Find out. Uh let's fact check me there. Say, were there any Nazis in former Nazis former in air quotes involved in the Manhattan Project?
Speaker E
Yeah, he No, he was uh in in charge of NASA. I believe I think he was a part of the Man if I maybe I'm wrong. Well, this is what it says.
Speaker E
Oh, Google.
Speaker F
Bias found here, right? Yeah.
Speaker A
Okay. Yeah. Refugees, not Nazis.
Speaker B
I actually grew up refugees.
Speaker C
Yeah. See, like Einstein and Enrique Fermy, these were guys, they were definitely not Nazis.
Speaker C
So, von Braun is a refugee, not a Nazi.
Speaker D
What? He was a full-blown card carrying Nazi.
Speaker E
It says there he is a former rocket Nazi rocket engineer. [laughter]
Speaker F
Oh, yeah. Okay. So, there it already
Speaker A
Oh. such as Warner Von. Okay. During operation paperclip for the space and go up, go up, go up, go up.
Speaker A
Okay. So, this is saying no captured Nazi scientists were involved in the Manhattan project. I was wrong.
Speaker B
Uh while the US later employed former Nazi rocket engineers like Von Braun during Operation Paperclip for space and missile programs after World War II or two.
Speaker B
Uh the atomic bomb was fully developed and tested before any German nuclear research. Oh yeah, that makes sense. Duh.
Speaker B
Yeah. and Heisenberg Heisenberg was leading the German version of the Manhattan project.
Speaker C
There's actually a cool question there historically about like
Speaker D
because he made a mistake in some of his calculations which led their whole project down the wrong path.
Speaker D
Oh, really?
Speaker E
And there's a question about whether he did that intentionally or not. And he had this conversation with Neil's Boore um just beforehand. They had like this famous walk they took through the park in um in Copenhagen about and and it's like hard to believe that Heisenberg
Speaker E
would make this mistake and so people speculate that on this conversation bore was like you can't let the Germans have the bomb you know let's agree you should make this mistake and uh and lead the program down the wrong way.
Speaker E
It's a great play actually. It's called Copenhagen. It's all about that. Oh really?
Speaker F
But I actually grew up in Los Alamos. Um
Speaker A
you grew up in Los Alamos? Yeah. Both of my parents worked at the lab.
Speaker A
They worked at Los Alamos. Yeah. On weapons uh projects. What were they doing? They meet Bob Lazar.
Speaker A
I don't know. I don't know what they got. You never asked them if they met Bazar. [clears throat] I never asked them if they met
Speaker B
Oh, come on. Yeah, you [laughter] have. You're going to tell me after this. Stephen, shut the cameras off.
Speaker B
That's when Bob said he was there.
Speaker C
Yeah. Is that right? Well, um I mean I grew up in Los Alamos. It's a crazy place. Um the Manhattan Project like deeply infused in that that whole climate. But my parents both worked on weapons programs. But I I don't know what they worked on cuz I don't have a
Speaker C
security clearance. And
Speaker D
they weren't allowed to tell you. They weren't I never saw their offices.
Speaker E
Sorry. Sorry, son. [laughter] Sorry, young Daniel. One day you'll learn.
Speaker F
No, I don't want to work on uh nuclear weapons programs. Like one reason I work at CERN is because there's no immediate practical applications for weapons of anything we do. Like of course when you develop new ideas about the universe, you could always imagine and maybe down
Speaker F
the road it gets turned into a weapon. But it's not like what we're doing is to develop death rays or something like that. I wanted to work on something that was more fundamental, more separate from like immediately developing weapons of
Speaker F
mass destruction that are pointed at civilian populations. To me, that was always I mean, it put food on my on my table as a kid, but it was always sort of morally questionable. Um, so I wanted to move away from that a little further
Speaker F
from direct development of weapons.
Speaker A
Yeah. Well, I mean, certainly during the Cold War was like the time in America where the most money was going towards this kind of stuff, you know, weapons and spying and all this stuff.
Speaker A
Yeah. And Los Alamos was at the heart of that. Yeah. At the heart of that.
Speaker B
They got a lot of money. And, you know, for a lot of scientists, it was not an easy question. Like, this is what's being funded and so that's where the jobs are. So, if you want to do physics
Speaker B
research, like, well, you're going to end up working on that. And so a lot of people I know these days work on weapons programs or work for the defense industry or whatever because those were the that's where all the money was. That's where the most innovation was. if you
Speaker B
wanted to make the most money being like cutting edge of physics and scientific research and blue sky research stuff where they throw just infinite money at the at the wall to try to get these scientists to you know they were meeting
Speaker B
with we had this amazing journalist Andy Jacobson in here who wrote a book all about this
Speaker C
called um the Pentagon's brain and the Pentagon was literally inviting in science fiction writers to the Pentagon
Speaker D
to just like have creative meetings on like let's fantasize about future weapons and technology what could we create they had the writer of Terminator in there, the writer of Alien in there, and they do this like every year.
Speaker D
I think it's great. I mean, I think science fiction writers are very creative and they're out there thinking about how the universe might be. And, you know, to me, there's not a divide between science fiction writers and theoretical physicists. It's a spectrum.
Speaker E
You know, theoretical physicists are also thinking maybe the universe works this way or maybe it works that way. And so, um, I think they have a lot of influence and a lot of, uh, a lot of role to play in understanding the universe. I just wish that there was
Speaker E
more money for the that kind of blue sky research that was not connected to weapons and immediate application. You know, the amount of money apes, man, that's what we do.
Speaker F
Well, it's just like it's such a tiny fraction of what we do is like give money to people to just be curious and think about the universe like defense spending versus basic research. Even like, you know, how much money do we spend on Roombas as a society every
Speaker F
year?
Speaker A
Vastly vastly more than we spend on like understanding the universe. Mhm.
Speaker B
You know or cell phones or you know chewing gum like as a spe as a society we have made this very very low priority and I think this is the reason why we have a lot of these problems in academia
Speaker B
like why
Speaker C
like why are people so siloed and why are people why are there these incentives? It's because we've starved everything of money.
Speaker D
So there's no room for creativity. You have to have like an idea that's going to be compelling that gets you a job. If we had more money in these areas, then people would be more free to explore. So
Speaker D
anyway, that's just my little soap box that we should Yeah, man. We should have fun science more.
Speaker E
Yeah, I completely agree with you, man. And you know, another one of the crazy things that's kind of happening right now with uh with space exploration in particular is just like become super privatized.
Speaker F
Yeah. you know, with like um [clears throat] Elon and a lot of the guys that were the head of NASA. There was the NASA AIM center
Speaker A
in California and a lot of money has been getting sucked out of NASA
Speaker B
and into this private space industry where um
Speaker C
it seems like all of the budget is all these rocket there's rockets that go up every single day in Cocoa Beach. Yeah.
Speaker C
Kennedy Space Center
Speaker D
and they're just putting up satellites for contractors for defense contractors and things like that.
Speaker D
And uh that seems to be where all the budget's going to just spy satellites and stuff like that and defense satellites and like you know they're paying Elon a fee to shoot the rockets up there and he's in
Speaker D
partnership with all these companies as well and they're all tied to the military-industrial complex. you know, they're all tied they're tied with um uh not just SpaceX, but like uh Palunteer and Open AI.
Speaker D
And there's another company in Venezuela that's partnered with them. Uh this guy from Venezuela has a company called Satellogic, which are like these super sophisticated satellites that's like basically Google Earth on steroids.
Speaker E
Cool. where they can like zoom in super tight and um switch on different types of AI modes or whatever. And they're somehow combining all this stuff with what they're using the data centers to sort of process all this data somehow and
Speaker E
build more data centers. And there's a big push to do those things in Argentina right now in like Patagonia. [clears throat] And um there's no it's all forprofit type stuff for intelligence and military applications like that. There's no more like let's go to the
Speaker E
moon, let's go to Mars. It's all
Speaker F
Yeah. And I think you're right. There's an important divide there. Like on one hand, should we be privatizing launches?
Speaker F
And like clearly Elon knows how to do that and that's cool and it's awesome what he's been able to do with reusable rockets. But people think that that's all that NASA does, but it's not, right? NASA also does like, let's land rovers
Speaker F
on, you know, Europa and drill through the ice to see if there's like crazy aliens living in the oceans underneath the ice of Europe. They could be there right now.
Speaker A
I wish they Are they doing that? Do they have ambitions to do that?
Speaker B
They have ambitions to do that, but they don't have the money. Like, it would cost a few billion, which is like nothing. It's chump change.
Speaker C
Do you imagine we found out what's in this ocean under the ice of your own?
Speaker D
Imagine we found alien life in our solar system. it would change everything. We could do that, but we've just decided not to. And so when we defund NASA because we're funding SpaceX, we're also defunding a lot of these science missions. Like Elon
Speaker D
is not doing science. He's good at what he's doing and more power to him, but he's not doing science, right? And NASA also does this science and that's being starved. And that's a tragedy because we're like kids in a candy store. We're
Speaker D
surrounded by all this candy. We have the money in our pocket, but we're just like, let's not let's not spend the money to go answer these questions. In 1960s, NASA received a peak of about 4.4 to 4.5 of the total federal budget
Speaker D
during the height of the Apollo moon program. Today's NASA funding has dropped dramatically to point4 0.4 to 0.5 of the federal budget.
Speaker D
Yeah.
Speaker E
And it's a political thing. We just we did it when we were trying
Speaker F
It's all political. That's that's spot on.
Speaker A
Absolutely. We were trying to beat the Russians. And look, it should be political. This is a political decision.
Speaker A
like how much money should we spend on science? And it's not like there's a right answer or a wrong answer.
Speaker B
And my problem is though when these new appointees like the new head of NASA heads of NASA get appointed like how come we're not paying attention to like oh this guy has some business tie with you know SpaceX or with whatever company like there's always these back
Speaker B
deal backdoor deals and financial entanglements between all these people. It's just
Speaker C
entanglements. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker D
It's frustrating. It's more complicated than quantum entanglements even. [laughter]
Speaker E
quantum entanglement. Yeah. But you know, I think that people want science to happen. They want answers to these questions. Like if you ask people like, "Would you pay a dollar uh so that we could get the answer to the question like, are there aliens on Europa?"
Speaker E
People would be like, "Yeah, sure. I'd pay a dollar for that." You know, or um but but there's not a whole lot of political support for science right now.
Speaker E
No. Broadly. um and is part of this like anti-expert, anti- elite movement in this country, which is unfortunately also meaning less funding for science and fewer answers to basic questions about how the universe works, which are cheap and they're out there and we could just buy them.
Speaker E
You know, we have the technology to do this. We have the knowhow to do this. We just don't have the political will to spend the money to answer these questions,
Speaker F
which is to me a tragedy. But, you know, it shouldn't just be me making these decisions. It's a societywide decision and this is the way politics are going right now. But I just wish people understood better what that money was being spent on and how valuable it is
Speaker F
and and also how that money comes back. Like every dollar we spend on basic research has a you know huge return on investment in terms of like our children and our future. You know, blue sky research is like what led to
Speaker F
transformers and lasers and all these things that completely changed sorry transistors not transformers that completely transformed our society.
Speaker F
Right? The reason we have wealth right now is because previous generations invested in basic science. They were like give nerds money and let them mess around cuz they will invent cool stuff.
Speaker A
And it might not be tomorrow and it might not be predictable but in 20 years you're going to be glad you spent that money. And if we don't spend that money now, then like China is or somebody else
Speaker A
is and somebody's going to revolutionize society and it's not going to be us anymore. And I think
Speaker B
listen, how does this make me any money? Okay, how am [laughter] I making money here? I don't understand.
Speaker B
Well, if you believe in America and you want to invest in America, this is the best way to do it is like, you know, spend money to for our future, which is investing in in basic science research. And I also think it's cool like even if
Speaker B
it didn't yield any economic benefits, which of course it always does, it's just worth it to spend a little bit of money to understand the universe. But you know, I chose to spend my life on this. So obviously I have a certain
Speaker B
perspective on it, but I just want people out there to know like what that money is being used for and how valuable it is.
Speaker B
What is your view on start to change subject so abruptly on you? Sure. Um the whole simulation hypothesis. I had this guy in here named Jim Gates who uh I believe he's an MIT theoretical physicist and uh Sylvester James Jim he
Speaker B
calls himself Jim Gates. He he said that he was trying to understand the fundamental nature of reality
Speaker C
and it led him to a set of equations that he said was indistinguishable from search engines and computers.
Speaker C
Are you familiar with this? I haven't heard that argument in particular, but I know a lot about the simulation hypothesis more generally.
Speaker C
That to me was astonishing.
Speaker D
And I don't remember exactly how he said he got to those equations and but there's a great video of of him talking about it with Neil deGrasse Tyson in an interview years ago.
Speaker D
Um where he's talking about those equations. I think there's a name for those equations he came up with. But um him and I were talking about that for a while when he was in here and he's a very like high level guy. He knew um
Speaker D
he knew uh um I always forget the guy's name. Who's the guy in the wheelchair?
Speaker E
Hawking. Hawking. Yeah. Yeah. He knew Hawking. Had a bunch of those legendary guys. He had photos with all of them.
Speaker F
Very cool. I mean I think it's a really fun idea like and I love it. Um, and it's it's cool to remember what we don't know because fundamentally we like take in the universe through this narrow set of senses, right? And we don't know what's
Speaker F
really generating that input. Is there some objective reality out there or is it like being generated by a computer or whatever, right? So, that's definitely true,
Speaker A
but I think that we tend to um I think you said this earlier, we tend to like see our own culture reflected in it.
Speaker A
Like computers are the thing these days. And so now it's like, oh, maybe everything is a computer, right? And I think it's just um how we interpret uh our questions about the universe. And I also think there's a the argument often
Speaker A
is look, [snorts] we look at the the the description of the universe and it looks like something you might put into a computer. Like the universe seems to operate the way a computer simulation does. Like how does a computer
Speaker A
simulation operate? It's you start with a description of the universe and then you evolve it forward. You say what are the laws to move the universe forward one step or another step or another step. Right? So you simulate the
Speaker A
universe step by step and that's how the universe works because we discover laws that describe how the universe changes with time. And so there's some similarity there. Right.
Speaker B
Right. But I think there's also a big flaw in that argument which is this that if we are in a simulation, right? Then we're running inside a computer the way like Super Mario, he's in a simulation. He's running inside a Nintendo box, right?
Speaker B
But it doesn't mean that the rules in our universe reflect the rules of the universe in which our computer is in. Like Super Mario, he's learning. If he was a scientist, he could learn about how the Super Mario universe works,
Speaker B
right? It
Speaker C
doesn't tell him anything about how our universe works. He's trapped in his universe. He doesn't know anything about our universe. And the computer that's running his simulation is in our universe. It follows our laws. So if we are inside a computer, that computer is
Speaker C
following laws of the outer universe. We're Super Mario, right? We can't learn about the laws of that outer universe. So we can't say that this simulation resembles the laws of that universe because we have no idea what those laws
Speaker C
are. They could be totally different. We could be running on a quantum computer. the that outer universe if it exists could be running any sort of crazy weird physical laws. They don't have to resemble ours at all.
Speaker C
So how could we argue that our simulation our the code for our universe looks like how a computer would work in that outer universe when we don't know anything about that universe. So it's like Super Mario somehow discovering
Speaker C
that he's in a simulation by saying that his universe seems to resemble a simulation. like there's there's no way he could understand how a simulation works in our universe because he has no access to to to our universe.
Speaker C
So, I've always struggled with that.
Speaker D
But usually in video games and stuff, you model we kind of model our own universe, right? Like the new Grand Theft Auto, have you seen it? It's insane. [laughter] So, like,
Speaker E
well, I hope our universe is not too much like that like that video game.
Speaker F
But also, you can create anything you want, right? Like Super Mario Brothers doesn't follow physics. You know, there's all sorts of crazy stuff in there. Totally. So, you can, but you also don't have to. So there's no guarantee that the way our universe
Speaker F
works, if we're a simulation, tells us anything about the meta universe. I I've always struggled with that. I think it's awesome science fiction concept and it would be super cool. Um but there are some some fun speculation I've heard
Speaker F
like there are some um mysteries in cosmic rays that some people speculate are evidence that we're living in a simulation.
Speaker F
Oh, really?
Speaker A
Yeah. Because one of the big mysteries in cosmic rays is how did they get so much energy? The cosmic rays are just particles from space, right? And space is filled with these particles. They're everywhere. And they come from the sun. They come from black holes. They come
Speaker A
from whatever. But there are some particles out there we've seen that have insanely high energy. Like like so much energy, it's hard to imagine. You know, like a single particle having the energy of like a fast ball, like a a whole
Speaker A
baseball at 100 miles an hour. And there's nothing out there in the universe we know of that can make particles with that energy. like you you shoot them out of a supernova, you slingshot them around a black hole.
Speaker A
There's nothing that gets up to that energy. So, but we do see them, we measure them, but there's nothing in the universe we know of that can make them, which means there's something new out there or something happening. So I read
Speaker A
this paper from a guy at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton and he's saying,"Well, look, if the universe is a simulation and it's cut into huge cubes in which the simulation is being done, really really fast particles might
Speaker A
like make it through the cube too quickly so that the they like get caught by the update and it's basically a glitch in the simulation." So he's arguing that these super duper high energy particles are [clears throat] a
Speaker A
glitch in the simulation. They're moving too fast. They cross these cubes that the simulation is based on. I mean, there's no interesting.
Speaker B
It's just like a cool thought experiment. You know, ways you might identify that the universe is a simulation by looking for flaws in the assumptions that are built into it.
Speaker B
That I think is really cool. Like cuz then you're looking for internal in inconsistencies, right? Like maybe the laws of physics break down in certain scenarios in a way that might be consistent with the simulation. To me, that I think is really cool.
Speaker C
Yeah. Steve, play this quick clip real quick of him talk explaining this theory to Neil Degrass Tyson. So I I know I kind of butchered his explanation of it, but I I think the word you're looking for was super symmetry, right?
Speaker C
Super symmetry. Yeah, he's a that's his big thing is super symmetry, but play that little clip of of him explaining how uh his equation what what his equation was. I think it'll be I think it's pretty interesting.
Speaker C
These are pictures of equations. I've been for the last 15 years trying to answer the kinds of questions that my colleagues here have been raising. And what I've come to understand is that there are these incredible pictures that contain all the information of a set of equations that are [music]
Speaker C
related to string theory. And it's even more bizarre than that because when you then try to understand these pictures, you find out that buried in them are computer codes just like the type that you find in [music] a browser when you
Speaker C
go surf the web. You're saying your attempt to understand the fundamental operations of nature leads you to a set of equations that are indistinguishable from the equations that drive search engines and browsers on our computers.
Speaker C
That is correct. So
Speaker D
wait wait I'm still wait I have to just be silent for a minute here. So you're saying as you dig deeper, you find computer code written in the fabric of the cosmos into the equations that we want to use to describe the cosmos. Yes.
Speaker D
Computer code.
Speaker E
Computer code. Strings of bits of ones and zeros.
Speaker F
It's not just sort of resembles computer code. You're saying it is computer code.
Speaker A
It's not even just is computer code. It's a special kind of computer code that was invented by a scientist named Claude Shannon in the 1940s. [music] That's what we find buried very deeply inside the equations that occur in string theory and in general in systems
Speaker A
that we say are super symmetric. Some of those codes are showing on the screen behind you right now. They don't look like codes but these pictures which we call adincras are graphical representations of sets of equations that are based on codes that in the description
Speaker A
of our universe that is a super symmetrical universe which we were going to test in the LHC. If you believe that description I can show you the presence of these codes. [music] That's my statement. Do you have any predict um
Speaker A
predictions in your ideas or any ways to test any of your ideas any more than say the guy over on the screen?
Speaker B
The work that I'm doing is in fact so theoretical that we don't we don't understand yet whether it is even [music] possible to complete the program. We have found these strange graphs. We know that they are equivalent to equations and we have found in these
Speaker B
equations computer [music] codes and so that's where we are right now. So I cannot give you a prediction. This work is less than two years old.
Speaker B
Wow, that's trippy.
Speaker C
Theoretical. Super trippy, right? Well, I mean, there's some pieces in there that I think are worth unpacking.
Speaker C
Like super symmetry is a a common idea you hear about a lot, but it doesn't really have to do with the simulation hypothesis. It just says like all the particles that we know about, maybe they all have hidden partners we haven't
Speaker C
discovered yet, right? Like the electron, maybe there's another version of it called the selectron. And the photon, maybe there's another version of it called the fotino. And theoretically, it's very attractive because it's it creates a symmetry where we didn't have one before. We have like an asymmetry
Speaker C
now. We're like, why do we have the photon and the electron and no partners for them? And in physics, we see lots of symmetries like we see the electron has a symmetry with the anti-electron. Like there's this matter antimatter symmetry.
Speaker C
And we see other symmetries like the electron is very similar to the muon which is very similar to the tow. So we're constantly seeing patterns and symmetries and looking for how the universe has reflections within it. And so super symmetry is this idea that maybe there's this like mega symmetry
Speaker C
where all the particles reflected in this new way. Very cool. Solves a lot of theoretical problems. No evidence for it, right?
Speaker D
It's like it was a big thing. We were hoping to see the large hydron collider. Some people made a big deal about how we were definitely going to see it, which was a bit of a overhype.
Speaker D
Um but in general there's there's been no evidence for it. So we don't know if it's a part of the the universe at all.
Speaker E
It is a big part of string theory like the strings themselves are super symmetric. They have this kind of relationship.
Speaker F
Um so what he's talking about in that video is saying that like he sees evidence for like structure within string theory that's similar to computer code. And you know I think that's a bit of a reach.
Speaker A
Well he said it was not similar. He said it was identical to a specific computer code that Claude Shannon came up with.
Speaker A
Yeah. And you know
Speaker B
I think the 1950s or whatever. Yeah. there are these error correcting codes. Shannon was super genius, came up with lots of like foundational concepts in computing. Um, but and you can always draw these connections, but that doesn't mean that, you know, the universe is
Speaker B
written in this code. I think it's a there's a bit of artistry there, if you ask me.
Speaker C
Yeah. Strange. And he and by the way, just like he didn't he's not like a big proponent of like the whole simulation theory. Like he uh he says what he says and he doesn't extrapolate for whatever reason. I don't know why. Maybe because he's like high in academia. He's afraid
Speaker C
to like get, [laughter] you know,
Speaker D
but I'm sure he's like he's pretty safe, right? He's got to be tenured by now.
Speaker E
For sure. But it's funny how, you know, people like him, they like to only color inside the lines. They don't like to speculate about things too much because, you know, you could get you could get shunned or outcast or
Speaker E
Well, I don't know. I I think big ideas are also welcomed. I mean, but there's um you know, institutional inertia. You come up with some crazy new idea that's going to change everything. you know, it takes a while for people to like absorb
Speaker E
that idea. And that's because people have limited time and attention. You know, like I get 10 emails a day with people like, I figured out the universe and like I read all of them actually and I write back to everybody,
Speaker E
but you know, I don't have time to give everybody like a week to dig into their idea and see maybe this is the new idea and maybe one of them does have the right idea about the universe.
Speaker F
But everybody's got limited time and attention. We're all just people and I have to decide where to spend my day.
Speaker F
And that's true of everybody in academia. And so like if you have to decide what to work on, should you gamble on some crazy new idea or should you work on the thing you know has been producing something useful?
Speaker F
Well, I think the interesting thing about this simulation hypothesis and the Claude Shannon thing like if these if these error correcting binary bits are somehow a fundamental part of reality, right? if if I'm going to take his what
Speaker F
he claimed to have found and I want to make that like a hypothesis that this is the nature of reality.
Speaker A
Well, that the interesting thing about that is it reconciles very well with this whole uh parasychology stuff, right, of like consciousness and telepathy and like um remote viewing and all these things, right? There's this there's this book called uh I think it's called The Secret Life of Plants where this guy put a um a
Speaker A
lie detector test on a plant and he lit it on fire and it started going off the charts. I think the idea is that like
Speaker B
consciousness is everywhere. Even plants are conscious to a certain degree. And uh like if you think about things like um morphic resonance where like on one side of the world and this is Rer Sheldrake I think who came up with this like a problem is solved in
Speaker B
like a remote tribe on an island somewhere near Australia like somewhere else like not [clears throat] much farther after that is discovered by another group of an unconted tribe somewhere else like the same way that world records have been broken and like running and sprinting like as soon as
Speaker B
it's broken somewhere, it's like immediately broken somewhere else. M so like how that reconciles is that like if we are in this computer simulation this is just a conservation of energy like right if we've already figured out the
Speaker B
problem in one spot now we can figure it out somewhere else the same way a computer would a computer program would do it right I mean you can make parallels but there are also like simpler explanations you know like as soon as somebody breaks a record that motivates other people and
Speaker B
they learn okay well it's possible and so much of like Running is a mental game. Like what do I think I can do?
Speaker C
And that's why like you run much faster. If someone tells you it's possible, you may not believe that this is exactly. That's why like they broke the 4-minute mile and then very quickly other people did because they used to think it was impossible. And like my kid
Speaker C
my son is a runner. He I know he runs faster when he's running against faster people. He's runs faster than he even thought it was possible because he like he just pulled along by their momentum. So so much of this stuff
Speaker C
is mental. Um, I think the pansychism [clears throat] stuff is really cool because there is a lot about consciousness we don't know.
Speaker C
Like super basic questions we do not know. Like are electrons conscious? We don't know. And there's like there's a very reputable theory pansychism that the whole universe is conscious. Everything has a little bit of it. And that our consciousness comes together from the emerging property of all of our
Speaker C
conscious bits. And it's not like a yes or no. It's a spectrum. And like everything in the universe is conscious. And that sounds nuts. Is consciousness inside the brain or is looking for consciousness inside the brain the same
Speaker C
as looking for a TV show inside the TV?
Speaker D
Yeah. I don't know. And I don't think anybody knows and I don't even know if it's a scientific question. It's it's like very philosophical because like how do you even define conscious? How do you measure it?
Speaker E
It's philosophical, right? It's not m it might not be physical matter. You know, it's not physical matter obviously. Can you build Can you build up to It doesn't make sense. I don't I can't in my head come up with an idea of how you could build up to consciousness from atoms.
Speaker E
Yeah.
Speaker F
And protons and neutrons and matter. Yeah. Like is it just an emerging thing the way like hurricanes are emerging from water droplets and wind? Like I can't imagine how to go from water droplets and wind to hurricanes, but it happens, right? Lots of stuff emerges in
Speaker F
the universe that we that we have a hard time with. Doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Um but you know it is it possible for inert not conscious things to come together to make consciousness? I don't know. And to me the basic
Speaker F
problem is it's not something we can measure. I I just like I have to trust you that you're conscious.
Speaker A
I have no access. Exactly. You could just [clears throat] be a robot. You could be a robot that sounds very much like a conscious person. Right.
Speaker A
And and [clears throat] how would I know? And even though I I feel very strongly other people's consciousness like I have a wife. I'm in love. I think she's a person. [laughter] I think there's a being in there. I feel it like
Speaker A
and even when I look at my dog, I think my dog loves me. I feel that connection.
Speaker A
Right.
Speaker B
But I don't know. And there's nothing I can do to measure that. Right.
Speaker C
Right. I can't get any data. And that I think is the biggest obstacle to any scientific exploration of consciousness is that there is no data to say this or that. And and I don't think we even like have a good definition of consciousness. So, but I think there's a long history
Speaker C
of like philosophy taking really hard problems we don't really know how to grapple with and smoking banana peels and thinking about for thousand years till eventually we figure out a way to start to make it into data and then
Speaker C
start to really tackle it. You know what is the universe? Now we can actually make measurements and figure that stuff out.
Speaker C
Consciousness we might need another [laughter] thousand years of banana peels before we figure out like how to turn that into a real scientific question. But I'm definitely not an expert in this stuff.
Speaker C
Yeah, it is super weird, right? And there's all there's all kinds of like weird things that happen to people in their lives where it's just like, "What the was that?" Like, "How did how did you read my mind?" You know, I can I
Speaker C
can think of like, you know, dozens of times where that's happened to me where I've like been thinking about something and my wife immediately says it like, "What is that? [laughter]
Speaker D
What are is there an antenna between us connecting us? Is this am I being deceived here? Is this some sort of like basic there's a basic explanation for this that I'm not I'm missing or whatever." People like to say that like, you know, I was thinking about this
Speaker D
person and then they called me,
Speaker E
right? Oh my god, what was that? But like my like that's that one for me is like, well, how many times have you been thinking about that person where they didn't up or how many times you think about people when
Speaker E
they don't call you? Those don't register. It registers when you are thinking about them and they call you and it's like, oh my god, meaning this has so much meaning to it.
Speaker F
That's why we need science because we're so influenced by events and we're bad at this stuff and we need like careful, rigorous ways to learn about the world. But you know from a scientific point of view there's no biological impediment to telepathy. Like all telepathy requires
Speaker F
is that your brain generates some kind of signal that another brain can pick up. And like our brains are electrical. They can generate electromagnetic pulses. And your brain is electrical. It can read electromagnetic pulses. Like telepathy is not like physically prohibited. Like I don't know why we
Speaker F
didn't evolve it.
Speaker A
And really Yeah. Like why why doesn't it exist? [laughter] Do you think it's possible it devolved? think it's possible. Maybe maybe humans had it at one point.
Speaker B
I mean, anything is possible, but it's hard to imagine why you would give that up. But imagine though, like like hypothetically, you could you could see how the development of language and the written word could if we started using
Speaker B
that that would atrophy, right?
Speaker C
I suppose, but that's so much less efficient,
Speaker D
right, than just like direct connection. So, I don't know. I've seen all this stuff like the telepathy tapes and a lot of that is built on
Speaker E
you know facilitating facilitated communication which is scientifically I think very questionable. Yes. So I think um it's easy to believe some things cuz you want to like wow it would be a dream come true if autistic kids had a rich inner life and were
Speaker E
communicating it uh telepathically. Everybody wants that to be true. Uh which makes it easier to convince yourself that it is. But I don't think there's totally if you look into the science underneath it it's pretty shaky unfortunately.
Speaker F
I agree. Yeah, I think if I was to bet, I would I would say that like these cases of of telepathy or the things you hear about in the telepathy tapes, I think it's true to some level, but I don't think you can perform it at will,
Speaker F
right? Like it might be something that's that boils to the surface with some people. Maybe like young children before they're indoctrinated into the world and uh hardened to the world and their senses are like locked in. Maybe before
Speaker F
that when things are more malleable, right? When the brain is more plastic, maybe
Speaker A
some other sense can like [clears throat] pop through. Yeah.
Speaker B
That maybe we had millions of years ago. And but like the idea that you can just perform that like a magic trick I think is very unlikely.
Speaker B
That makes it hard to test then.
Speaker C
It was like this guy Urie Geller who's a famous guy was a part of the Stargate program. He's famous for bending spoons and all this stuff. Like maybe when he was a kid he was able I believe it's
Speaker C
possible that he was maybe able to manipulate it with his consciousness or whatever. [laughter] But like as he got older he started like I'm becoming famous. I'm making tons of money from this. I'm selling books. I'm getting paid to fly across the world and do conferences. I got to figure out a way
Speaker C
to to fake this now. Like
Speaker D
I see. You know what I mean? Like it could be a combination of both where it's like the answer is somewhere in the middle. Like the guy's not a total charlatan and he's also not like a habitual spoon bender, right? Like maybe [laughter]
Speaker D
this was something that he was able to do at one point and that is possible in human consciousness or in, you know, baked within us that um
Speaker E
but we got to let the data tell us, right? We got to keep an open mind because lots of times we've been blinded to ideas because we thought we understood something and in the case of the brain like we definitely don't like so many open questions about the brain.
Speaker E
So we should we should be very open to big surprises but we should let the data speak like we should only believe stuff if we can show it because there's a lot of reasons to believe stuff otherwise. You want this to be true you don't want
Speaker E
this to be true.
Speaker F
So it it needs it needs real data unfortunately. It's the, you know, scientifically is the only way to like untangle these questions is like let the data speak.
Speaker F
Mhm. Yeah. And there's some people who think that like certain psychedelic drugs are what break you out of the simulation, you know, cuz people relate to seeing like people have taken psychedelic drugs and like had crazy experiences where they communicate telepathically with the
Speaker F
person in the room with them and like
Speaker A
it's this profound meaningful experience.
Speaker B
I had professors in my university go on these like, you know, trips. They took Pyote and Iawaska and whatever and they came back with like understandings of quantum mechanics and I was like came and talked to me about it. I was like, "Wow, man. [laughter] Sounds like you
Speaker B
had a good time."
Speaker C
Yeah, for real. Yeah.
Speaker D
Yeah. I think it's possible that people uh just sometimes ascribe too much meaning to things that happen in their inner psyche, whether it be psychedelic experiences or phone calls. When people when you're thinking about somebody across the world, they call you like
Speaker D
some people can like
Speaker E
they just put too much meaning towards it and they can like fall into that trap, you know?
Speaker E
Yeah.
Speaker F
Because it's hard to disentangle. Yeah. Because there's a lot of people that have proven that have like a long time like psychedelic researchers have said, scientists have said that like that study this stuff for a living. They say that uh what psychedelics do is
Speaker F
they're like a placebo to the inner psyche. Like they bring out what's already there and they show it to you in a way that's like novel. So you think that like
Speaker A
this is something you're you're getting this revelatory cosmic divine download from something but really if you really dig into it and you look at the data across all the experiments and studies that have been done from John Hopkins and everywhere
Speaker A
else
Speaker B
like there was this famous John Hopkins study that they did this study on religious professionals from Jewish Christian uh Hindu all all the other religions they to basically took four or five like heads of religions and they put them together, gave them psilocybin and they
Speaker B
documented their experience and each of them had very profound intensified experiences based on their pre-existing belief in their religion.
Speaker B
Fascinating. Yeah.
Speaker C
So, yeah. And basically like that seems to be
Speaker D
the idea is that it's a placebo effect. It brings forward what's already there.
Speaker E
Well, it's fascinating that your experience can be so obviously affected by chemistry. Yeah.
Speaker F
Right. which tells you that like some part of it definitely is emergent from the underlying chemistry cuz you it's not just the brain by itself like we are constant fluctuating hormones and we're a bag of chemicals that's always alternating with you know cortisol
Speaker F
hormonal [clears throat] imbalances and all that stuff and that directly affects the brain and cognition and how the brain works and what state you're in and [snorts]
Speaker A
it's a very uh it's not like the brain's not just a computer right it's definitely more than that it's very intertwined with like the biology of our entire anatomy.
Speaker A
Mhm. Well, if somebody wrote this into the simulation, they made it really complicated.
Speaker B
Yeah. [laughter] They definitely did. But like I mean it's not impossible that we will create especially with like AI right now, we're going to create simulations that are indistinguishable from reality.
Speaker C
Yeah. Absolutely right. Like if and I can imagine in a couple years we're going to be able to do this where we're both sitting here right now. We're on opposite sides of the world with some thing plugged into us. A spinal tap. Who knows
Speaker C
how they do it by then.
Speaker D
[sighs] But the I guess the biggest problem is you can't disprove it, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think the interesting question is like AI already can claim to be conscious and then like again we don't have any data. We can't
Speaker D
access it. Like is it just claiming it the way you claim it? Uh way my dog claim you know or my wife claims it or is it real? Is it not? Like we can't tell. We have no access.
Speaker E
And you know there's a deep question there about like
Speaker F
can a simulation of a consciousness be conscious? Like is it about the substrate? Does it have to be in like wet wear like your actual like messy wet neurons or is a simulation of it have this equivalent experience? We don't know. We can't know. Deep questions that
Speaker F
maybe eventually we'll learn how to figure out how to probe. But having creating an AI that can have the same kind of expression of of claiming of self-awareness, I think really brings uh to a forefront this question of like is
Speaker F
claiming to be conscious the same as being conscious? And I think it's not. No. But uh but you know how can we tell?
Speaker A
Mhm. It's just so it's so crazy how we have created something that is 100 times more intelligent than we are. [laughter]
Speaker B
You know like we are the gods to AI. I don't know.
Speaker C
And it is a so much more intelligent than us and is going to become like another god.
Speaker C
Why do you think it's more intelligent? Like I find it's still pretty dumb sometimes, you know? Like I try to get it to do my job. Sometimes I'm lazy. I'm like, "Hey, could you read these things?" And basic LLM. We there's
Speaker C
there's cra, you know, they haven't even released some of the best AIs to the public yet that are solving equations. I mean, I see stuff in the news every single day of equations being solved that have never been solved. It was done
Speaker C
in like a matter of minutes. And then when you start to integrate that with supercomputing, it's going to it's going to be like, you know, off the chain.
Speaker C
Yeah. Well, I think it's worth digging into like what that means because what the AI has been able to do so far is what I said earlier is take open problems, find existing solutions and apply them. And it's made a lot of
Speaker C
breakthroughs
Speaker D
like because the mathematical literature is huge and nobody can read all of it. And so it turns out if you can read all of it then you can find problems and solutions that fit together and that's basically what it's done and that's great. Have you heard the stories of
Speaker D
like the different AIs communicating with each other and stuff like that and then also
Speaker E
building societies and sacrificing each other and all this stuff?
Speaker F
Oh, I didn't hear that. Yeah. Well, there's like a bunch of them that made some security break and but to do so they had to like sacrifice some of them to get through. But there's a lot of
Speaker A
Are you talking about the one where they blackmailed the people?
Speaker B
No, this is um Okay. They work together to to escape some black box they were stuck in. But Oh, wow.
Speaker C
Yeah. But there's a lot of uh interpretation there. a lot of like putting human emotions and human motivations on a machine. It's not really clear how much of it is really there and how much of it is us telling stories about it. So you got to be
Speaker C
careful. But in terms of like transforming research, absolutely. [laughter]
Speaker D
Absolutely. It's totally transformed mathematics. But interestingly, it hasn't yet done that for physics. Like you don't see lots of physics papers being done where like an AI has come up with a new strategy to solve a physics problem. It's happened in math. that
Speaker D
hasn't yet really happened in physics one or two where like some calculation was assisted by AI but I think that's interesting you know that hasn't that that's it's a different category of problem and so the AI's can't do it as
Speaker D
well yet and I think the reason is that math is very crisp and clean and it's like you know very clear when something is correct and physics is a little more fuzzy like the mathematicians are always laughing at us because they look at our
Speaker D
math and they're like oh my god you guys are so sloppy because physics is not about like let's build the most perfect mathemat mathematical machinery. It's like let's think about this question. Let's try to answer our uh you know
Speaker D
let's address our curiosity. Let's you know slap together a few ideas. So it's it's a less rigorous. It's more intuitive.
Speaker D
And so I think LMS aren't there yet. I think they'll get there. And I think they'll have a transformational change in physics the way they have in in math in the same way that they're going to notice like existing solutions to
Speaker D
existing problems and put them together. But there's more fuzz in physics which I think makes it harder. Yeah, it's just scary to me how ubiquitous it is becoming, not just with the LLMs, but with everything.
Speaker D
Everything is using AI.
Speaker E
I don't know if you follow this flot camera thing.
Speaker F
Yes. Unfortunately, these flot cameras are being installed everywhere and they're using AI and stuff like that to like create some like 3D digital control grid using the satellites as well. So, like actually they just did a thing I read this
Speaker F
morning where they're uh getting rid of all of them in Florida.
Speaker A
Oh. So, I don't know if that's going to happen, but that's what scares me the most about AI is like just complete and total lockdown police state
Speaker B
and being able to track and corroborate everything and it just gets rid of total privacy.
Speaker B
Um,
Speaker C
which you know essentially is human controlled, right? Like that's a very human thing. There's that's human nature being driven driving that AI, right?
Speaker D
Yeah. Um, but well, I already have
Speaker E
and it gets off the rails like it's just you can't even fathom, right? Like you can't you can't fathom what something that's a thousand times smarter than you would do,
Speaker F
right? Just like a squirrel can't fathom what we what our next move would can't game out what our next move is going to be.
Speaker A
Yeah, that's true. Well, I've already had the experience of being replaced by an AI because I was texting with my daughter just a minute ago before we started recording and she has a physics problem she couldn't solve and so she asked AI and I'm like, I'm a physics
Speaker A
professor. Why don't you ask me? [laughter] She's like, well, you weren't here today.
Speaker B
Apparently, she's just like asking Chad GBT for help because [laughter] cuz I'm not home.
Speaker B
Yeah,
Speaker C
that's another thing about it too, right? Like it's going to be doing like the hard work, the hard heavy lifting for us now. So, it's going to make us lazier. We're not going to have to do the hard work, crunch the numbers, everything's going to be instant
Speaker C
gratification.
Speaker D
Or it's going to allow us to think about bigger problems and harder questions
Speaker E
like the way computers have, right? Like I don't have to sit down and do a page of calculations anymore. I get to think bigger and let the computer do those calculations.
Speaker E
So, you know, science is constantly transforming and and the new tools allow us to ask harder, bigger, broader, deeper questions because we're the ones asking the questions. And I think the interesting thing is like say we have that AI it's a thousand times more powerful than us. We are the squirrel,
Speaker E
right? We're still the ones in charge. We're still the ones asking the questions. So what is it like when a squirrel is in charge of a super intelligence? Like all right, maybe you know it's doing what the squirrel wants,
Speaker E
but still the squirrel's in charge. And so, you know, as long as we're still the ones asking the questions and running the data centers and whatever, even if it's more intelligent than we are, it's answering our questions. And so I'm not
Speaker E
so worried about that. I mean, my brother's a professor of AI and he's not worried about the AI taking over. He's like, we'll just unplug them if we have to. [laughter]
Speaker F
You know, they are in the end reliant on our infrastructure.
Speaker A
Yeah. But you have to imagine, you have to take into consideration the people who are running those things and the people that are in charge of those things and what those people's motivations are and do they really care for the general publics that we survive?
Speaker A
You know,
Speaker B
how do they make their money? Yeah, there's a lot of financial entanglements. Do they make their money by doing good for the world and feeding the homeless and
Speaker C
suff, you know, fixing the pollution problems and the starvation problems all across the world? And no, they do quite the opposite. And if those are the guys that are in charge of plugging and unplugging the AI,
Speaker D
then I'm terrified. [laughter] Yeah. Well, private control of this stuff is scary, right? The public should have a say and our representatives should have some influence over it. So that is what's terrifying. And what we're seeing in science is a a move away
Speaker D
from funding it in a public open way to funding science through these companies. Exactly.
Speaker E
Like there's this big Genesis mission recently which takes a lot of money away from fundamental research and funnels it to these uh private companies.
Speaker F
Genesis. Yeah. A recent massive funding program by the government to it's like a AI version of the Manhattan Project.
Speaker A
Can you look this up, Steve? to revolutionize how we do science in America, but mostly it's about funneling money to private companies. Basically, like let's let Open AI do physics. Um, and you know, initially it's like we'll partner with Open AI, but it seems like
Speaker A
clear that the trend is like let's take money away from academia and universities and fun towards these private companies.
Speaker A
Uh,
Speaker B
but wouldn't those private companies have to fund the academia and universities? No, they just do the research in house. You know, Genesis mission is a US government initiative launched uh by executive order in November of 2025, last year to accelerate scientific discovery, accelerate scientific
Speaker B
discovery and secure national technological dominance by integrating AI with federal supercomputing, national laboratories, and proprietary data sets.
Speaker B
Led primarily by the US department oh god department of energy. [laughter] The program functions as a whole of government platform utilizing dozens of federal agencies and private tech sector partners.
Speaker B
Private tech sector partners. That's the key. They're taking all this money out of research in the government that was going towards national labs and academia and they're sending it to anthropic and open AI and etc etc. Basically like take
Speaker B
our data and use it to solve physics is the plan. Hold on a second. Zoom in on that. Okay. What are the objectives? Connects the nation's most powerful supercomputers, automated robotic labs, and massive government data repositories into a single closed loop ecosystem. That's
Speaker B
does not sound good.
Speaker C
[laughter] National Science Challenges focuses cross- sector resources on dis designated challenges uh such as advanced energy fusion, quantum science and material design to double research productivity and then public and private collaboration partners with major technology companies and research institutions um including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, AWS, Nvidia
Speaker C
to pull infrastructure. So, you're saying this is going to take funding away from like public institutions and universities and stuff like that.
Speaker D
Yeah. There's no new money here. It's a redirection of existing
Speaker E
and it's moving all of that those funding and those grants and things to private companies.
Speaker E
Yes. Exactly. And you know the idea is like look the private companies have the best AI so we should be taking advantage of that and working together with them but it is moving this money away from academics towards these uh companies and
Speaker E
wow expanded from the department of energy ccentric initiative into a multi- agency operation involving over 15 federal departments including NASA the department of defense and the national institute of health the latter running in parallel with the biogenesis mission for biomedical innovation. Jesus,
Speaker E
the whole thing was announced last minute and they gave everybody like a few weeks to put programs together and um the whole thing was was ridiculous.
Speaker E
But it's just this this is the way things are going is take money away from universities and towards private companies. Uh and they're like we're like outsourcing the fundamental research in this country which to me is scary.
Speaker F
Oh my god. Yeah. That is up. I mean, I think that uh giving money to universities to investigate the nature of the universe has paid off and we should keep doing it. And I think this we should also do this. We should
Speaker F
definitely partner with AI and and take advantage of it to accelerate our research. I'm not against that, but it shouldn't be instead of what we're doing. It should be in addition to
Speaker A
Yeah. You know what do you think is like the next frontier of technology when it comes to CERN or whatever it is to like pushing the boundary of physics like I know there's the large hydron collider there's a bigger one
Speaker B
that they're building like what do you think like in your in your ideal world if you had unlimited money to do whatever you wanted what would it be
Speaker C
yeah well they do have designs for a bigger collider um I if I had unlimited money I would not invest in that I would invest in new technology ology to make colliders smaller because these new colliders are really big, really expensive because you need more room to
Speaker C
accelerate the particles up to higher energies. So the way that works is we have like a string of these little accelerators, you stack them together, you get a big accelerator. You want a bigger one, you stack more of them. So
Speaker C
you need a bigger tunnel, bigger accelerator, more billions of dollars. It's just using the same technology but bigger. That's cool and I think it's it's worth it. But there are other technologies like plasma wakefield accelerators that potentially could accelerate particles to the same high
Speaker C
speeds with much much smaller facilities. In principle it'd be amazing to have the same capability in like a lab this size, right? You don't have to build billions of dollars of tunnels and whatever. So we should investigate and
Speaker C
we should invest in those kind of technologies because that will change the whole game because at some point it just gets too big and too expensive to do. You know, the large the LHC cost 10 billion dollars. That's like already at
Speaker C
the limit of like what the public would support. It's a lot of money, right?
Speaker C
It's not a small amount of money. You got schools that don't that have crumbling buildings. You have roads falling apart.
Speaker C
So asking for 10 billion is it's a big ask. Now you're asking for a hundred billion for a bigger one. Like
Speaker D
that's how much they're asking for the new one.
Speaker E
It's going to be expensive. I think it's maybe 40 50 billion.
Speaker F
Where's that money coming from? It's a European money mostly. It's going to be built at CERN. Um but they don't know for sure. Um there's hopes that, you know, it'll be international, but depending on
Speaker A
steal some of that Middle East oil will pay for this new collad. [laughter] Um the Chinese have been talking about building a really big one, but I think we need new technology to make these things smaller and cheaper. And there are ideas out there. So we should invest
Speaker A
in plasma weak field and other technologies to make it so these things can be smaller because you know, say we build a bigger one and we don't find anything. What are we going to do? Build one in the moon? Build one in the solar
Speaker A
system? Like it's at some point you need a new technology rather than just going bigger.
Speaker B
Mhm. So that would be my dream is develop a new technology to make colliders smaller.
Speaker C
Interesting. Now what about the LIGO thing? Like the LIGO are these lasers that detect gravitational waves. Is that right?
Speaker D
Yeah. Super awesome, right? This was an idea that Einstein had like a hundred years ago. His theory predicted ripples in space time and he famously said like, "Yeah, but nobody's ever going to be able to see them." And I remember um touring Caltech when I was choosing
Speaker D
where to go to grad school and they were trying to get me to join this experiment. I remember thinking like these guys are never going to see this is never going to work. It's impossible. And you know then 10 years later they
Speaker D
won the Nobel Prize for for finding them. So clearly I was wrong. But they have these incredible sets of mirrors. They shoot lasers in two directions and they bounce back and then the lasers interfere. And they use that as a really
Speaker D
high precision way to tell like did one leg get shorter or one leg get longer because if one get leg gets slightly shorter then the lasers interfere differently and that tells you if a gravitational wave came by because
Speaker D
that's what gravitational waves do is they squeeze space this way and then that way. So really amazing. And we have one in um New Orleans and one in um well it's somewhere near New Orleans and one in Washington and there's one in in
Speaker D
Italy. but they want a bigger one and they want to build one in space. And so yeah, it's called LISA and it would be basically three satellites. Lisa. Yeah.
Speaker D
And
Speaker E
who's gonna build this? Um it's a conglomeration. I think it's European and American, but I'm not sure.
Speaker E
Um but it's like three satellites linked with lasers. And so it's measuring how space wiggles as um as they float there. So they use the lasers to measure how far away are we from each other. And then they look for deviations because
Speaker E
deviations come when a gravitational wave comes through and shrinks space between them or expands space between them.
Speaker E
So that's a super awesome.
Speaker F
These are like like ripples in time essentially.
Speaker A
Yeah. Ripples in spaceime. And so when space gets more con uh curved like near a black hole or near the center of the earth, time goes more slowly. And um so ripples in spaceime have the same effect but on a much much smaller level. These are really really gentle ripples. So we
Speaker A
want to see even gentler ripples from like more distant black hole mergers or from the very very early universe. Like one way to learn about the early universe is to look for really really old light. We talked about that.
Speaker A
But that comes from that moment when the universe became transparent and that was like almost 400,000 years after that earliest moment we can think about.
Speaker A
gravitational waves can look much further back because the universe has always been transparent to gravitational waves because they can pass through anything. And so if we find gravitational waves from the very early universe, it'd be like seeing that cosmic microwave background light but
Speaker A
from much much earlier.
Speaker B
Oh wow. This is like seeing like a a fetal picture of the universe instead of a baby picture. You know, you could learn so much about the very beginning of the universe. So that's a really exciting technology and these gravitational waves
Speaker B
like a new way to look at the universe to listen to the universe and that's exciting because every time we develop a new technology to explore the universe we see something bonkers something we're like what and that's why it's so worthwhile you know to just like gather data about
Speaker B
what's going on.
Speaker C
Yeah. like this new satellite that they put in uh somewhere in South America that's detecting all these um interstellar objects that are coming through.
Speaker C
You know the name of that satellite?
Speaker D
Mm. There's this new observatory that we have which was like the best one we've ever created and since they built it in like 2018 or 2017 Oh, the pan stars. Yeah.
Speaker E
Maybe that's it. Yeah. We've detected all these interstellar objects and now we've we've seen what like three or four of them.
Speaker F
Muam Mua. AmuA Mua and there's a three eye atlas one. But like this is the first time we've ever been able to detect interstellar objects. So we look at them like Alvie Lo's like, "Oh my god, it's a spaceship." But like we've never seen,
Speaker F
we've only seen three so far. So we can't really, you know what I mean? We can't we don't have a good library of interstellar objects.
Speaker A
And until we open that new kind of eyeball, we had no idea how many there were. We didn't know if they were coming once a century, once a minute. Right. We just don't know. And now we know.
Speaker A
Fortunately, they're coming pretty often, which means we can learn something about the universe.
Speaker B
And I wonder where the next one's going to be. Look at that thing.
Speaker C
Yeah. That's the That's the Reuben Observatory. Yeah,
Speaker D
that's not the right one. That I think is looking to study dark energy and dark matter, but Oh, I think I think it's the pan stars. That's panar.
Speaker E
Panar steo. Pan star.
Speaker F
And where is this one? I think it's in South America. There it is. Um it's like the bluriest photo ever.
Speaker A
Steve, get us some some some info on it. Go to go to you or Google. Yeah. The Panstar Observatory, uh, the Panoric Survey Telescope and rapid response system observatory is located at the summit. Oh, that's in Hawaii.
Speaker B
No, this is this one was in South America.
Speaker C
Oh, no. This is the one that found a muamoa.
Speaker D
Yeah, this is the one that Okay. So, you you were right. This one's in Hawaii. So, it main job is to find near Earth objects and dangerous asteroids that could threaten Earth. Um, massive camera system uses digital cameras with roughly 1.4 four to 1.5
Speaker D
billion pixels to image large areas of the sky very quickly. Pretty awesome.
Speaker E
It found a MUA MUA, which is the first known interstellar object to visit our solar system. Did this one discover the threeey atlas as well?
Speaker F
I don't know. Scroll down. Type in did it find three Atlas? Three. No, Pan Stars did not find three Atlas. Interstellar comet.
Speaker F
Oh, you're right. Chile.
Speaker A
Oh, the Chile one. Right. Uh, find a picture of that one in Chile. The Atlas survey. There you go.
Speaker A
So, is the I assume the Chile one's a newer one. Chile. Cool. Okay. Looks similar. Crazy.
Speaker A
And just shows you like every time we look out at the universe, we learn something because it's always going to surprise us. And we got to keep an open mind and we got to gather as much data. Think about how much information about
Speaker A
the universe we're ignoring. Like the universe is screaming information at us. When we have these tiny little telescopes, we don't have the senses yet.
Speaker B
Yeah. Like there are photons hitting the sidewalk outside right now that have secrets of the universe encoded in them and they're just getting absorbed by the sidewalk. Right. most of the information that's coming to us from the universe is being ignored. And we build these tiny
Speaker B
little telescopes to look at the universe. And every time we do, we learn something shocking. And so to me, it's astounding that we don't do more of that. You know, we should have 10 times as many space telescopes uh looking out
Speaker B
into the universe. It is amazing also what we have learned. like we've never left this planet or its neighborhood. Yet, we've learned about like the structure of the universe and its history just from gathering these few photons we've been able to collect. It's incredible, right? What we've been able
Speaker B
to do, what we've been able to learn. I just feel like there's so much more to understand. And it's it's crazy. It's crazy that we've, you know, we still haven't been able to figure out much about the moon or Mar or Mars, you know,
Speaker B
and like the moon is one of the ones that's so bizarre because it's like the size of it and the distance between us and the sun is like creates this perfect eclipse. And if it wasn't for that moon being exactly where it is, the size it
Speaker B
is and everything,
Speaker C
life would cease to exist here. Like it seems like every other moon that we know about is like a potato and it's a different size and they're not they none of them have that distance where they create the perfect eclipse.
Speaker D
Yeah. where it's [snorts] like it seems like a divine miracle that we have that movie.
Speaker D
Sometimes there are just coincidences though, right? Like it's amazing that it's just the right size. It's it's awesome. Have you ever seen totality? It's an incredible experience.
Speaker D
Have I ever what?
Speaker E
Seen a total eclipse? Like been in the path of totality where the you know the day becomes dark.
Speaker E
Yeah, there was one not too long ago, right? Like a year ago [clears throat] maybe.
Speaker F
Yeah, it's pretty crazy. It's pretty crazy. I'm not a religious person, but it like felt like a spiritual experience to me. I was like imagining what it was like to 5,000 years ago. When you see that, you think like, whoa, something crazy.
Speaker F
What is God mad at us?
Speaker A
Exactly. [laughter] What did we do? We have to sacrifice some people quick. [laughter and gasps] Yeah, man. The mysteries are are never ending. And you're right, like with the new technology, like these these telescopes and the other things that
Speaker A
we're trying to come up with, it's like and combining all that with the AI and the supercomputers, I think that the shit's going to start accelerating at a tremendous speed that
Speaker B
I don't know if we're ready for it. Yeah. Well, I'm looking forward to it. [laughter] Well, thank you for doing this, man. Um, thanks for having me on.
Speaker B
I really enjoyed it.
Speaker C
Tell people where they can find uh You have a podcast, right?
Speaker D
Yeah. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. We talk about all the mysteries in the universe, break it down in a fun way, make a bunch of silly jokes. Um, and I have a book out recently called Do Aliens Speak Physics? All about these questions of like how
Speaker D
would aliens think about the universe? How would we figure it out? What would be like when aliens came to and trying to talk science with them. Um, so yeah, check me out, Daniel Whitson. You can just Google me, find all my stuff.
Speaker D
Okay, fantastic. Um, we'll link all that below. And do we have Patreon questions? Uh, we have one that's right up there. I think it'd be nice to Oh, I'll read it for you. Nathan Bennett. Yeah. So, we have a Patreon
Speaker D
where we have people like uh paid subscribers that ask you direct questions.
Speaker E
Uh are we going to end the show or we going to put this in the show?
Speaker F
No, we need to put it in the show. Put in the show. All right. Fine. All right. Uh how many different types of plasma are there and how long can you make stable plasma exist at CERN?
Speaker F
Is that a good question?
Speaker A
Yeah. Um so there's lots of different kinds of plasma you can make. And at CERN, we don't make anything that last very long. Like things last for like 10 to 20 seconds.
Speaker A
Oh wow.
Speaker B
So CERN is about reproducing things over and over again. And we we have a collision every 24 nanconds at CERN over and over and over and over again because we're looking for rare stuff.
Speaker B
So the way to find rare stuff is to have collisions really often. So you see like the one in a billion, one in a trillion kind of a stuff.
Speaker B
So nothing at CERN is very stable and that's by design, right?
Speaker C
Um yeah, we don't want a stable black hole. [laughter] No, we want it to evaporate and go away.
Speaker D
Exactly. Perfect, man. All right. Well, we'll link all your stuff below for folks that want to find more. And uh thanks again. I really enjoyed this, man.
Speaker D
Thank you. A lot of fun. fart. Good night
Topics:
CERN
Daniel Whiteson
dark matter
particle collider
Large Hadron Collider
particle physics
universe
galaxy rotation
cosmology
physics research
