Special 200th episode!

What happened in the first 200 microseconds of the Universe? What can you see within 200 light years from Earth?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Yeah, orgey, do you know what today is? Is it
a special day today? Oh my god, I can't believe
your forgot? Is it your birthday? Try again? Is it
the anniversary of the Higgs Boson closer? It's actually our anniversary.
Today is our two hundredth episode of Daniel and Jorge
Explain the Universe. Two hundred episodes. Oh my gosh, it's

(00:32):
a lot of physics and a lot of banana jots.
It's a whole universe of banana physics. Hi am orhand

(00:54):
my cartoonists and the creator of PhD comment. Hi. I'm Daniel.
I'm a particle physicist, and I know at least two
hundred things about physics, and I know at least two
hundred bad jokes about physics. I've made ten to the
two hundred bad jokes about physics, but our editor has
removed most. And Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge
Explained the Universe, a production of I Heart Radio, a

(01:16):
project we started to explain to you all the amazing
and crazy things out there in the universe, all the
things we do know, the facts we've learned about the universe,
the secret truth that we've revealed, and also the incredible questions,
the things that science still has to figure out, the
questions that scientists are asking, and the questions that you
are asking, the deep mysteries of the universe around us.

(01:37):
Because it turns out that there are more than two
hundred questions you can ask about the universe and more
than two hundred amazing facts to learn and to discover
about how this crazy cosmos works. At least that's what
we've discovered in doing this podcast. We had no idea
how long we could keep going on. Yeah, today is
a very special episode. It's our two hundred episode. What

(01:59):
does that make it anial? Is it like a birthday,
a broadcast day at pot day? I don't know, but
you know, if you look up anniversaries, like you know,
the fifth anniversaries paper, and the tenth anniversary is silver
or whatever, the fiftieth anniversary is diamond. There is no
culturally acceptable gift for two hundredth anniversary because he's ever

(02:19):
lasted that long. I think they give you a Nobel
price if you somehow managed to celebrate two hundredth anniversary,
Maybe you should be the fossil anniversary something, because you've
become fossilized. But congratulations Daniel, two hundred episodes. Did you
ever think we would get to two hundred episodes? No?
I thought you get sick of talking to me about
physics after about ten or twenty. No, congratulations to you. Also,
it's been a really fun ride. And thank you to

(02:41):
all of our listeners who have listened to us talking
about science and joking about bananas and shared your goofy
curiosity with us. That's really what's powered us forward. So
thanks for listening, and thanks for all the feedback and support. Well,
I have definitely not gotten tired of listening to amazing
physics and to listen to you explain rated. Um, I
feel like I could go another two hundred episodes. Let's

(03:04):
do it. Well. In honor of our two hundredth episode,
I put out a tweet asking folks what we should
do to celebrate our two hundredth episode, and as usual,
I put out some silly suggestions and we did a
little Twitter poll. Yeah, and so Daniel asked what should
we do for a two hundred episode? And the options
were one, eat two hundred bananas, to answer two hundred questions,

(03:26):
three to two hundred different accents, and number four just
shut up. And explain. That's right, and clearly I was
going to do the explaining, but I was hoping that
you would do the bananas in the accents seems a
little lopsided. Daniel, Well, you're the creative one, right. How
can I eat bananas and accents at the same time?
Those count as different accents, you know, like Scottish or

(03:49):
Scottish with the banana in your mouth sound very different.
It was a close pole. It was a close poll, yes,
exactly what it was. It dramatic like as you saw
the numbers come in. Um, well, bananas was racing to
the lead in the beginning, but eventually people voted for
Answer two hundred questions got about thirty five Eat two
hundred bananas in second place, and you know in last

(04:11):
place was due two hundred accidents, which I was sort
of hoping for. I think we have to trust the
wisdom of the crowd here and not offend two hundred
countries we can. There aren't two hundred countries to offend,
so that would be pretty impressive if we could offend
non existing countries. Yeah. So the top option was Answer
two hundred questions, which when Daniel told me, I said

(04:32):
it was a little impractical for a fifty minute podcast,
that's right. They have to be like true or false questions,
or you know, yes or no, or something which wouldn't
be too satisfied, right. I started to think, if we
take five minutes to answer each question, that's a thousand
minute episode. That's basically the next two hundred episodes. Basically,
we'd be done. We could celebrate our four hundred anniversary

(04:53):
next week. Then, well, this podcast is really accelerating the
logarithmic scales. We'll be doing our four thousand one in
a month, that's right. And I started looking through the
list of questions we've answered over email, because I answered
hundreds of questions a week from listeners, and there's a
lot of common things in there. But then or I
had a better idea something else we could do to
celebrate our two hundredth episode. Yeah, so it's be on

(05:15):
the podcast. We'll be asking two hundred questions, but not
two hundred number of questions, but a couple of questions
about the number two hundred. That's right, because while the
number ten and the number one hundred, and therefore the
number two hundred are really just artifacts of the number

(05:35):
of fingers we have in the way the human mind works.
It's also an interesting way to ask questions about the universe,
to think about like how far away are things or
what happened in certain moments of time in the universe.
It gives you like a fixed window to examine the universe.
We'll be asking coincidentally to two hundred questions here in
the podcast, and the first question has to do with

(05:57):
what happened at the beginning of the universe. So the
question is what happened in the first two hundred micro
seconds of the universe. And then later on we'll tackle
the another question about with the number two hundred, which
is what can we find within two hundred light years
of Earth? So a little bit of time and a
little bit of space, a little bit of space time, Daniel,

(06:18):
that's right. What can you find within two hundred light
years of Earth? Makes me think like, are you looking
for your keys? Are they somewhere out there in space?
I do lose my keys a lot, even even in
a pandemic where you don't go anywhere. Somehow I managed
to lose my keys like every day. Well, we'll see
if we can find them, all right, we'll tackle this
first question first, which is what happened in the first

(06:40):
two hundred micro seconds of the universe. Now, two hundred microseconds,
that's like, boy, that's like point to milliseconds. It's not
a lot of time. But it turns out a whole
lot of stuff happened in the first two hundred microseconds
to the universe. Basically everything's been boring ever since. Well,
two d micro seconds. That's that's shorter than a blink, right,

(07:01):
Like a blink is maybe a couple of microseconds, a
couple of milliseconds. It's a very small amount of time. Absolutely, Yeah,
So a lot happened in those first microseconds. A lot happened.
And one of the most interesting questions really is how
you even define like moment zero. If you're gonna say,
let's take a window of time from the very beginning
of the universe to two d microseconds afterwards, it's interesting

(07:24):
to think about, like how the universe expands and cools,
and we'll get into all of that. But then you
have to wonder, like where does T equal zero? How
do you define that moment? Do we even know that
there was a T equal zero? So already like anchoring
the left side, the early side of that window is very,
very difficult. It makes me think, like was there a
T minus one or like a countdown to the universe.

(07:46):
Nobody really knows, And the problem is that we don't
think about the history of the universe in that sort
of forward way because we don't really have anything to
build on. We don't know what was in the beginning
or when the beginning was. Usually we think about it
sort of in the reverse. We look at the universe now,
and we look backwards in time as we look further
further out into space, right, because remember the further out

(08:08):
in space, you look older the universe is. So we
can see how the universe looked a hundred years ago,
a thousand years ago, a million years ago, a billion
years ago, etcetera. And we can project backwards in time.
So we tend to think of the history of the
universe sort of from now and running the clock backwards,
and we can do it pretty well, you know, back
about thirteen billion years or so, But then it gets

(08:31):
pretty murky and we have trouble extrapolating back. We don't
know if there was a T equal zero, if there
was like a T equals question mark, or who knows
what was happening at the very beginning. That's interesting. Now,
why does the picture he get fuzzy beyond if you
rewind back to more than a few hundred thousand years
from what what might be the beginning of time? Like

(08:53):
what what? What actually marks up? Well, the reason is
that things change, Things get really hot and dense. Right,
the overall history of the universe is cooling and expanding,
and so if you run that backwards from now we
have a cold, large universe. You run that backwards, things
get hotter and denser. And of course you could just
do that naively, like assume that the laws of physics

(09:14):
we have learned today from our cold universe still work
back then, and just run the clock backwards and you
get infinite density and you call that T equal zero.
You could do that, but we don't think that's right.
We don't think the laws we have work anymore as
things get that hot and dense, just like you know,
the physics of gases is different from the physics of

(09:35):
liquids and the physics of solids, and so things change
as you get hotter and denser, and then it becomes
difficult to extrapolate because we're reaching into regions that we
can't see anymore and we have no experience of because
there's a moment in the early universe when the universe cooled.
It was a hot, dense, nastiness, will talk about it,
and it cooled to a place where light could fly through.

(09:57):
It became transparent, And that's the last moment in the
early universe that we can actually see. Beyond that, we're
just really sort of guessing and extrapolating and using models,
but those models are very uncertain. We really don't know
what we're talking about. So a lot of the details
we'll talk through today in this episode are really speculative.
They're like, maybe it was this, and maybe it was that,

(10:19):
and under various assumptions which seemed reasonable but could be
totally wrong. You know, maybe this happened, But it's really guesswork.
Is it guesswork because we don't know, like our simulations
don't aren't very definitive, or like the physics of the
universe might actually change it in those kind of conditions.
We don't know how the physics of the universe operates

(10:39):
in those very hot and dense environments. You know, we've
only experienced it when it's pretty cold and separated, and
so we're extrapolating back. We think we have ideas or
how it might work, and we can simulate various ones
of them, but we can't necessarily like tell the difference
between if it's like this or if it's like that,
and so we just we're extrapolating into the unknown, and

(11:00):
and that's always very dangerous and delicate. Now, even the
concept of time equals zero is weird, right, because I've
heard people say that, you know, like it's it's almost
like asking what is more north than the north Pole?
Because once you get to the north pole, there's no
more north? And is it the same? Also that you know,
maybe time started at T equal zero and there was

(11:22):
no time before that. It sounds bonkers to say that, right,
like there was no time before that, because it's before
mean if there was no time, right, It's it's confusing.
It's hard to really get these ideas into your head.
But it's true that some theories of the universe say
that space and time were created at some moment and

(11:44):
things have expanded and cooled since then, and before that point,
there was no time, There was no space, there was
no before that point. That's really hard to grasp your
mind around because your mind lives in that space in
that time. It's all you've experienced, and so it's all
you can really imagine how you organize your thinking. It's
how we think about causality and logic, and a it happens,

(12:06):
then be happens, then see happens. But it doesn't mean
it's the only way the universe can be. And so
it's extraordinarily difficult to sort of extrapolate your brain and
you're thinking into something completely unfamiliar, right, And so what
we do is we have these frameworks like general relativity
and quantum mechanics that try to tell us about what
might have happened, But those aren't very conclusive either. I

(12:28):
guess the North Pole analogy kind of works also in that,
you know, like here where we are. You know, if
you have like a compass, it's pretty clear how to
use it, Like, you know, it tells you north and
right and south and east and west, and you can
walk around pretty easy blue. But if you are like
near the North Pole, it might be a little tricky
to use a compass, right, Yeah, if you're at the

(12:48):
North Pole, you'd be a little disoriented. Yeah, if you're
at the north pole. There is no more north to go, right,
you can't go any north eier than that. But we
don't know if time works that way. It could be
that there was stuff for you know, these early moments,
these singularities. There was a whole other universe perhaps which
came down into a big crunch or something else totally different,

(13:09):
some sort of other weird kind of thing which gave
birth two hours space and time. You know, our entire universe,
Our space and time could be a bubble of that
other pre universe stuff like decaying into a universe. There
could be a whole spectrum of other universes also that
were created in the same moment, or the could that
are still being created now. There could be like you know,

(13:29):
moments of creation happening right now, really far away in
this other meta space. It sounds like bonker speculation because
it is mostly because we're so clueless. You mean, like now,
like as we speak, there could be some time equal
zero moments right now for other universes in this universe. Yeah.
One idea of how our universe got started is that
there was some sort of like pre universe stuff some

(13:53):
Inflaton fields, and that our universe is essentially some random
spontaneous decay of at and that's when our universe began,
and that influence on Field is just like expanding and
creating and eternally inflating. But all the time it's parts
of it are decaying and starting whole new universes, their
universes that haven't even gotten started yet, in universes that

(14:14):
are trillions of years old. And none of this is
anything we know. It's just like it's a crazy idea,
and in a thousand years people will read about these
ideas the way we think about, you know, the Greek's
ideas about air, water, fire, and earth. We're like, well,
that's cute, you know, and it could have been true.
I suppose, yeah, it's it's well meaning, carefully thought out,

(14:36):
totally wrong, And that could be the way we describe
all of our current ideas about what happened to T
equal zero and whether T equal zero even makes sense.
It could be like cute to future busicists, exactly lessly
cute to a future five year olds. Man, five year olds,
and a thousand years will laugh at our ideas that
were like, oh, you're ridiculous, that's silly, oh man, well,

(14:58):
five year olds already laugh at me, Daniel, so that
that's going to be We'll pretend that's on purpose though,
all right, so it seems like, okay, so we can't
see that well beyond a few hundred thousand years into
the universe. So really asking like what happened in the
first twohundred microseconds is really speculative, then that's right. All
you can do is say, like, you know, extrapolate backwards

(15:20):
from where we are it gets hotter and denser, hotter
and denser, and pretend that you know how to extrapolate
back to some point like general relativity says you can
extrapolate all the way back to a point of infinite
density and temperature. But you know, we know that general
relativity is probably wrong when it talks about singularities and
stuff like that, because it ignores important things like quantum mechanics,

(15:42):
which tells us that you can't have an infinite amount
of stuff in a tiny zero volume point and know
all about it. So definitely something wonky happens. But you know,
you can extrapolate sort of naively and say we'll call
this t equal zero and we'll move forward from there.
I see, I see so we're gonna plant the flow.
I can say this is tequals zero, and then we're

(16:02):
going to see what can the universe do to get
us to where we are today? Kind of yeah, exactly.
All right, well let's get into that and to the
question of what is within two hundred light years of Earth?
But first let's take a quick break. All right, Daniel,

(16:28):
we're celebrating our two birthday. Does that mean that I'm
two years old and you're two hundred years old, or
we're each a hundred years old? It means we should
have retired a hundred and thirty years ago. I feel
like this podcast has aged me two years. I feel
like I'm two hundred light years from where I started. There,
you go, all right, well, so we're talking about the
first two hundred microseconds of the universe, and so we'll

(16:51):
start with time equals zero. What what happened at times zero? Daniel?
We don't know, but one idea is that there was
a singularity that you know, the universe was super hot
and super dense. And I think a lot of people
imagine this as a single point. They hear singularity to
think a single point. They think one hot, dense spot
like the entire energy and all the matter of the

(17:12):
universe was in a really tiny dot. But it's better
not to think about it as one place, but more
to think about it as the density. Because we don't
know if the universe is finite or infinite. Possible that
when the universe started it was already infinite, and that
this singularity we're talking about was everywhere like multiple singularity, yes, yes, precisely,

(17:36):
like a non singular singularity. Yes. Like the singularity refers
not to how many of them there were, but the
fact that the density becomes infinite singularity refers to what
happens to the equations, that the equations get infinities in them,
because the density becomes infinite, not the size of it.
And there's a i think a very common misconception that
the Big Bang or pre Big Bang starts with a dot,

(17:59):
and a dots small than an adam becomes the entire universe.
And because we don't know how big the universe is,
it could have been a little blob, it could have
been an infinite extent. It's better to think about it
in terms of infinite density, or like an infinite number
of dots, an infinite number of dots. Yeah, The thing
we do know is that the universe was denser and
harder back then. We don't know how much of it

(18:20):
there was, could have been infinite, could be finite, and
loop all around on itself. That's a whole other episode
about the size and shape of the universe, which is fascinating.
But to think through the history of the universe is
mostly to think about the density changing da days that
you know, there's no real reason for this to exist,
just somehow the universe what we know was really dance,

(18:41):
almost like infinitely dance. Yeah, there must have been a
reason for it to exist, because it does. And we
think the universe follows reasons and laws. We just don't
know what they are and we can't argue for it.
We don't know why there was something instead of nothing,
and why there was this, and could there have been
other things, and you know, just really shockingly basic questions
that we have really no clue about. Okay, so we
had to super dance state almost infinitely dense, maybe everywhere,

(19:04):
maybe just one dot, and then what's next thing that
happened and what happened in the first tend to the
minus you know, forty three seconds, so The picture you
should have in your mind is that we have space,
and space is really really hot, like there's a huge
amount of energy. Right. The density we're really talking about
there is energy density. And if you've been following the podcast,
you know that we like to think about space in

(19:25):
terms of quantum fields. Every point in space has fields
in it, the electron fields of cork fields, the photon fields, etcetera.
And particles that we think about today are little blobs
of excitations of those fields. Today, most of those fields
are very very low energy. Most of space is empty
in those fields are zero. But back then, infinite density

(19:46):
really means all those fields are going nuts. They're going crazy,
they're oscillating, they're just full of energy. And so instead
of thinking about individual particles, it's like having an ocean, right,
you don't think about a drop of water. When you
have an ocean. You can just think about the entire crazy,
turbulent blob and it's doing all sorts of stuff. So
the first ten to the minus forty three seconds of

(20:07):
the universe we called this the plant epoch. Everything was
hot and dense in these fields were just going crazy.
Now I have a question, though, somebody's talk about that.
It's not just like stuff that was crammed in together
really tightly. It's also that space itself was smaller, much smaller.
So it's like it's both those things. It's like everything

(20:28):
was crowned in together and also space was smaller. That's right.
There's two kinds of expansion we're gonna talk about later.
One is the expansion of stuff through space as things
spread out into existing space. The other is the expansion
of space that you create more space, and new space
itself is created. Because remember that space is not just

(20:48):
like a backdrop on which things happen. There's a dynamical
connection between space and energy. Space curves and bends and
expands in response to the mass and energy that's in it,
and then it shapes the motion of that mass and energy.
So space and mass and energy are two things that
are very tightly coupled and respond to each other. Okay,

(21:10):
so in the first you know point zero zero zero
zero down to forty zeros one seconds, you said, that's
called the planet. Yeah, and back there we had a
bunch of really hot fields. And the thing to think
about here is that there are no particles. What it's
it's like too hot for particles like particles just kind
of everything is just crazy. That's right. There are no

(21:30):
isolated particles because everything is just too hot and too intense.
It's all just energy in these fields. It's slashing around.
You know, later on things will cool down enough for
particles to form. But particles are like you know, when
you have a few little isolated blobs of energy in
the field. Here we have like an incredible turbulent ocean.
So it makes no sense to think about in terms
of particles. I mean, technically you could, you could say

(21:53):
this field is ten ca jillion particles in it, but
it doesn't really make any sense. It's really just energies,
not discrete packets being around through space. It's just a
huge blob of energy slashing around in the field. I see.
There's no moment where you're like, oh, there's an electron.
It's just that the whole field is just sit on fire. Yeah, precisely.
You can't follow a drop of water in the ocean, right.

(22:13):
And the other thing to think about is that the
fields here behave differently, just like the way materials on
Earth have phases as you cool them or or heat
them up. The physics of them changes completely, right, The
same thing happens for fields. They tend to act in
different ways at different temperatures and different energy densities. And
this is not like the laws of physics changing. It's

(22:34):
just like how you can think about it, how you
can describe it. The effective the emergent results of it
are very different at different temperatures, just the same way
they are for solid But can we still use the
same equations we have, Like do our equations still work?
We don't think they do. We think the equations that
we have now only describe physics sort of at lower temperatures,

(22:54):
that they're sort of like the falling at the effective
equations for what happens when things are old. We don't
think we have like the fundamental equations. Our equations should
be like the low temperature limit of the true equations,
which we haven't found yet. But for example, and we
think that a very hot temperature is the early moments,
all of the forces acted like one gravity, electromagnetism, the

(23:18):
weak force, and the strong force. We think they're probably
all just one force that acted together. What do you
mean of force? Don't forces depend on particles to no?
Forces are also just fields? Right, But we think that
there was a single field that represents all those forces
but combined into one. And we think when it was
really hot and dense, that they acted together. They all
had the same strength, and there were all just different

(23:40):
components of one mega force which exists in the universe. Well,
I think you just coined the term right there at
the megaphorce. This is like to call it the grand
unified theory. I like megaphorce better megaforce. It is, then,
all right, so those are the first ten to the
minus forty three second. Is then what happened? And things

(24:01):
start to cool, things start to expand a little bit,
and the first breaking happens. Here the force splits into two.
You have gravity on one side, and then all the
other forces electromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force
combined still into one single force, which we call electro strong.
And so here the temperature has dropped enough that the

(24:22):
force has split. It's like cracked. You know how. Sometimes
when you cool something, you can freeze, or it can crack,
or it can end them as some weird configuration. As
the universe cooled, gravity sort of like froze and split
off from the other forces. Interesting like inevitably or is
it like a random you know, like an ice when
you freeze eyes, you you sometimes get crystals here or

(24:42):
crystals there. Is it random like that or is it
like inevitable? Do you think that the equations were like
we were always going to get gravity and these other
forces we don't know. We call it spontaneous symmetry breaking
because we think there's a random element in it and
all the forces you'll see as we go through time,
all the forces split off, and we think that those
splittings are spontaneous, that they're essentially the result of one

(25:04):
little quantum fluctuation which then gets propagated through the universe.
You know, like when everybody sits down at a dinner table,
do you drink from the glass to your left to
your right? Well, if one person chooses left, then you know,
everybody around them starts to choose left and it spreads
across the whole dinner table. Right, they could have chosen
to drink from the one to their right and then
everyone would use that one. So one little fluctuation like

(25:25):
that can propagate itself through the whole universe. And we
don't know if gravity splitting off was inevitable or at
what temperature it should have split off? We just don't know.
We think gravity split off first because it's the weakest force,
and so we think it would take the hottest temperature
to combine all the forces. And then fourteen billion years later,

(25:45):
everyone's like, is this my glasses? Is your glass? Did
you drink from mine? Because I thought I had more
wine left over? And then people are spitting up what
And then it's it's like back to the big bank,
all right, So things start to split off and cool down,
and then we start to get more forces defined. Uh,

(26:06):
and then what happens next? And then the next thing
to split off is the strong force. So gravity split off,
and then the strong force splits off. So now we
have gravity, we have the strong force, and we have
the electro weak force electro week being the combination of
electromagnetism and the weak force. Remember still we have no particles,
so these things aren't like forces that we think of
today that are balancing particles around. It's just the fields

(26:29):
now have different properties. They operate differently, they contain energy differently,
they have different strengths. As the universe is coolest, so
gravity split off, but it's not like bringing anything together
because there is no thing. Well, gravity is doing what
gravity does. It's you know, the bending of space. But
you know, even talking about merging gravity with these other
forces requires a conceptual leap that we haven't made yet,

(26:51):
which is thinking about gravity as a quantum field, which
we don't know how to do, especially in the early universe.
So we are really out on very thin ice, or
conceptually would like maybe if gravity can be unified with
the other forces, then it was the first thing to
split off of some mega force which might exist. And
I can't emphasize enough how much respeculating cluelessly here, Okay, right, right,

(27:14):
if gravity is a quantum field, this is kind of
what we might expect. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But it's not
like we have a firm prediction that we can like
interrogate and explore. It's just like, hopefully somebody clever comes
along and figures out how to make gravity quantum field
and maybe it would work like this. All right, So
now that and we split off the strong force, now
we have more forces, and then something dramatic happens at

(27:35):
around ten to the minus thirty two seconds. Right, Yeah,
here's where the excitement really happens, and we don't know why,
but we think at this point, for some reason, the
universe started to expand extraordinarily rapidly, like space itself expanded,
not just stuff flying through space slashing around, but space
itself got stretched. Remember that space can expand based on

(27:58):
the mass that's in it, Like we know the space
is expanding right now. In their current universe is something
called dark energy, which is creating new space, not just
pulling on space, not pushing things further apart through space,
but actually like adding new bits of space between galaxies.
So that can definitely happen, and we know that it
did happen in the very early which were created more space.

(28:21):
The universe just started just creating at a crazy rate. Right.
It's the kind of this kind of the bang in
the Big Bang theory. Yeah, this is sort of the
bang and the Big Bang theory. I mean, originally people
thought of the Big Bang is like a dot and
things explode through space. These days, we have this period
we're talking about now, which we call inflation, and then
we think of the hot Big Bang is basically at
the very end of inflation. But you know, the terms

(28:43):
are a little fuzzy, but essentially here you have the
biggest bang. I mean, the universe expands by a ridiculous amount.
It's ten to the seventy eight ten ten to zero.
So you take a piece of space that's like a
nanometer across, very very quickly, in like ten to the
minus thirty two seconds, you expanded to a hundred trillion kilometers. Crazy.

(29:07):
So in ten to the minus thirty two point zero
zero zeros one seconds, the universe for some reason just
was like come out of here. Yeah, exactly, And and
we don't know why. We we have, like you know,
given fancy names to this theory to make it sound
like it's a thing we know how to deal with.

(29:27):
We call the inflation theory. We think maybe it was
generated by the inflaton field, but that's really just like saying, oh,
you know, the answer is a fluctuation in my cluelessness field,
like I really just don't know. For this into the
framework of ideas, so it sounds clever, so they're like, oh,
they blew up. And it could be, you know, that

(29:49):
it's triggered by the electroweak breaking that like maybe breaking
off the strong force from the electroweak force created the
infloton field or settled the infloton field into a way
that made it do this crazy expansion. But this is
guessing upon guess. We are very confident that inflation happened.
I mean the things that it predicts are very specific

(30:10):
and very concrete. You know, like before inflation, the universe
is very hot and dense, but not totally uniform because
it's quantum mechanical, and so you get subspots that have
like little quantum fluctuations of a little bit more density
and quantum fluctuation is a little bit less density, really
really tiny variations. But then this inflation is stretching, turns

(30:31):
those little seeds of over densities into big structures which
then form the structure of the universe. And we can
do all those simulations and it describes very well what
we see today is thing. And I guess one question
is where did all the space come from? Like when
you make space, does it require energy? Yeah, we don't
really know. I mean, we know that the universe is

(30:51):
not closed, and so an energy conservation is not required
by general relativity to make space, you don't need energy. Maybe, well,
you know space is energy, like space has energy in it.
When you create space, it has all these fields, and
those fields have energy in them, and so when you
create space, it's like creating energy. So it's not something
that we understand. It's not something we know how to do,

(31:13):
or that we understand the rules about. We see it
happening in our current universe. We don't understand the mechanism
behind it. We call it dark energy because we're clueless.
We know that it happened in the very early universe.
Maybe it's the same mechanism, maybe it's something totally different.
We really just don't know, all right, So now we're
getting almost to the two microsecond mark, So let's finish
off what happens in the first two microseconds, and then

(31:35):
we'll go on to our next question. But first let's
to get quick break, all right, Daniel, we just exploded
the universe. We just went through inflation. In the first

(31:57):
tent of the minus thirty two seconds, one ter became
a hundred trillion kilometers. Now things are expanding like crazy.
Quantum fluctuations make a huge difference. Now what happens now
we finally get particles. Things have cooled down enough that
the energy that's in the field is distinct and discretized,

(32:17):
and you can follow it around. You can say, oh,
this little blob of energy in the electron field is
moving through space in a coherent way. You can call
this an electron and the same for the other fields.
And so you start to get particles made, and you
get the last moment of breaking that we're aware of
the electro weak force, which at the time was just

(32:37):
one force. You know, there wasn't like a separate photon
and W n z bosons acting separately. It was a
single force with four of its own bosons. This field
now breaks, and it breaks into electromagnetism and the weak force.
It becomes two forces. It becomes two forces that are
still closely connected. I mean, they're two broken pieces of
a larger force. You can sort of like fit them

(32:59):
together roughly the way you can fit continents together, you know,
like you can think of the mega continent breaks into
little continents and now they're a little different, but the
contours sort of match, and so you can think about
their history. Right, And this is another example spontaneous symmetry.
Breaking the Higgs field gives the photon no mass, and
it gives the ws and z s a lot of mass,

(33:20):
So all of a sudden, the weak force becomes really
really weak. Interesting, and so then that's what kind of
gives rise to the Higgs field, which is the one
that gives mass to everything. Yeah, so the Higgs field,
like all the other field started out really hot. It
was cooling down and cooling down, and most of the
other fields they like settled down to zero, but the
Higgs field got stuck, got stuck at a certain point

(33:42):
where it couldn't go any lower because it has a
really weird shape to It's like you know, on the
edge of a canyon wall. It's got a little like
dip in it, so you can get stuck in a
little like on the precipice, like a little buzz right,
And it got stuck there. And because it got stuck
there and not somewhere else, it gave mass to the
ws and disease, but not the photon and also to

(34:02):
the other part of it. So all the other particles
their mass then gets fixed because the Higgs field got
stuck at this value. And before so before that we
didn't have mass, or we just didn't have like consistent mass,
or you can't even talk about mass. It's harder to
talk about mass before. The particles really are like separate,
identifiable spots. But the mass of the particles depends on
the energy of the Higgs field. So as the universe

(34:24):
is cooling down and the Higgs field is cooling down,
you can think of it as like the masses of
the particles are decreasing because the Higgs field is cooling down.
All right, So now all of our forces are in motion.
Now they're in play, and particles now exist, which is
crazy to think about that. We didn't have particles before. Yeah,
and now they have mass or they interact with the

(34:45):
Higgs field, and and so is that then? Kind of
is that it like is it a straight line from
there to here? Or are there there still things we
don't know. There's a lot of things we don't know,
but it's basically a straight line. I mean, now you
have particles, and the interactions in play are the ones
we're familiar with. There's electromagnetic fields, the weak force, the
strong force, there's gravity. But you know, it's still pretty

(35:06):
hard to understand, Like it's a hot, dense and nasty mess.
Like it's mostly quarks and leftons, but they are too
hot to form any larger particles, Like you don't have
protons and neutrons and stuff like that, which are bound
states books just quarks quarks and flying around annihilating each other,
constantly turning into photons, turning back into particles. It's still

(35:27):
hot and dense, and then things are cooling off, so
like you know about after one micro second you get
this cork glue on plasma. Things start to cool off,
and then you get things like protons and neutrons and whatever.
And there's a really interesting mystery there about like what
happened to all the anti matter. If everything was symmetric,
you would expect the fields to create like as much

(35:48):
matter and antimatter should all annihilate into a universe filled
with light. But instead there was some asymmetry there. We
ended up with like a little bit more matter than antimatter.
Most of it is gone, but a little bit of
matter or was left, and that's what led in a
straight line to where we are today. I think the
lesson here is a lot happened in the first two
hundred microseconds. We missed the big party. I just feel

(36:11):
like we went through an hour of just to cover
a two d microseconds. That's amazing, So a lot happened, right,
and a lot could have happened. Yeah, the history of
the universe has been pretty boring ever since. You know,
like most of the excitement was in the first few
tiny slices of time, and ever since then it's been
pretty slow. But you know, think about it, like on

(36:32):
the cosmic time scale, like trillions and quadrillions of years,
it could be that, you know, intelligent species in septillion years.
Think about the first few billion years of the universe
as like, you know, the first moments, because you know,
it could be that the universe is very different in
a trillion years, that it's all just black holes separated

(36:52):
by vast distances or something else forms. You know, there's
so many fascinating emergent phenomena they're really hard to anticipate,
and so you know, maybe this will seem exciting to
people who come much much later. Yeah, I'm sure they'll say, like,
you know, that day where they post the two hundred
episode of Daniel and Horge Explained the Universe, that's the
equal zero to us. That's when that's when the party

(37:15):
really started. Before then, it's not even really worth there,
all right, Well, I think the answer is a lot
happened in the first two hundred microseconds of the universe,
which is amazing. All right, we have one more question here.
I think we might have to talk about it in
two hundred microseconds, Daniel. But the question is pretty interesting.

(37:36):
It's something I thought about as we try to brainstorm
ideas for this episode. But the question is what can
we find within two hundred light years of Earth? So
I guess, first of all, how much is two hundred
light years? Like a few Brazilian kilometers? Yeah, a light
year is really far. So a light year is like
nine point five times ten to the twelve kilometers. That's

(38:00):
why we use light years, because the distances in the
universe are so vast the kilometers become an absurd unity.
So it's like two hundred million million kilometers. So if
you could hop in a spaceship and go two hundred
million million kilometers, where could we go visit? Yeah? So
mostly the universe is empty. You know, you pick our
random spot outside the Solar system and you go in

(38:21):
a straight line, you'll see nothing for two hundred light years. Like,
it's just not much there. The universe is not very
dense anymore. And you know, I read these science fiction
novels about people flying through space and like hitting asteroid
fields and bumping into stars, and I'm like, it's just
not that much stuff out there. Likely, No, It's like
swimming in the ocean. How often do you really encounter

(38:42):
a desert island? Like? Really not that often? Oh, I see,
that's a good analogy. Like if you were in the
middle of the ocean and you went a few hundred kilometers,
you know, what are the chances that you'll hit another island?
Pretty small? Yeah, pretty small. It's mostly just ocean out there.
But there are things out there, and mostly within two
hundred light years of Earth. There are a bunch of stars,
but you know, not that close. Like the closest star really,

(39:04):
once you leave our Solar system, the closest thing that
you can find to our Solar system is a star
called Proximus Centauri. It's about four point two light years away.
It's done the name of an Avengers villain. I feel
like I've heard that name before. Are you auditioning to
be in the next Marvel movie? That's what happening here?
To be the voiceover? I think Proximate can Centauri, the

(39:24):
Marvel villain can do two hundred accents. So if you
really want to audition, then we've got to hear some accents. Yeah,
all right, so that's the nearest star. I guess how
how many stars can we find within two hundred light years?
You know, surprisingly, you can find a lot of stars. Now,
on one hand, stars are not very dense. I mean,
in our galactic neighborhood, there's about one star per two

(39:45):
hundred and fifty cubic light years. But as the radius
of your sphere grows, the volume of it goes up
very quickly, goes up with radius cubed. So a sphere
with radius two hundred light years has a lot of
cubic light years, like thirty million. If you go at
about two hundred light years, there's something like, you know,

(40:05):
tens of thousands or maybe a hundred thousand stars in
that volume. Really, yeah, I could visit a hundred thousand
stars within two hundred light years. Yes, But you know,
if you travel in a straight line two hundred years,
you would probably find very small number of stars. If
you completely visited a spear with radius two hundred light years,
would be a hundred thousand stars there. But you know,

(40:27):
like the list of destinations I can go. Is it's
like a hundred thousand stars. Yeah, there's a lot of options.
I mean, if you like decisions and you like choices,
then there's a lot of options. Most of them are
pretty far away. I mean, the vast majority of those
hundred thousand are on a thin shell on the outside
of that sphere, mostly because that's where most of the
volume is. But they say that, you know, about one

(40:48):
in five star has an Earth like planet, So we're
talking about like there's twenty thousand earthlike planets I could visit. Yeah,
there are definitely a lot of Earth like planets, and
we think that most of those solar systems have planets
like multiple planets, which is fascinating. We don't know a
lot about like what those solar systems look like, and
how often do you get big gas giants and rocky
inner worlds, And is our solar system unusual or totally typical.

(41:12):
Something that is unusual about our solar system that you'll
discover as you look around in the solar system is
how many solar systems have multiple stars. Like in the
closest fifteen light years is like fifty something stars, and
about half of them are single stars, just like a
star with planets around it. But there's like ten of
them that are binary systems, like two stars orbiting each

(41:34):
other and then planets around the wo that's common. That's common.
And even within fifteen light years there are four systems
that are trinary systems that have three stars in orbit
around each other. That's pretty cool. So in Star Wars
when Luke is looking out at the two suns on
the horizon, that's like maybe more common than you think.
That's not rare. It's a lot more common than you think.

(41:56):
And if you think about how things form, you start
from a big cloud and things cold less, and so
it's not necessary for its all coalesceent to one really
big blob in the center of a solar system. If
you have like a little bit of density here, in
a little bit of density there, it can form two.
Or if two stars form close enough to each other,
they'll pull on each other and form one of these systems.

(42:16):
Some listeners send me an awesome question recently. He said,
are there any stars out there that have sort of
two planetary disks, Like one planetary disc aligned in one
way and then the second one aligned you know, at
an angle to it like two hula hoops. Yeah, like
two hula hoops. And I don't know if one, but
there's no reason to think there couldn't be. Like if

(42:37):
you had two solar systems that sort of merged and
the stars combined in the center, or you get a
binary star system in the center, they could keep each
of their planetary disks and it would be at different angles,
and so that could totally happen. I think that would
be an awesome setting for a science fiction right, but
every year you go around the Sun, you'll be like,
watch out for those other this other planet is would
be a drama every year. It would have to work

(43:00):
like clockwork, but it might make for some pretty cool
nighttime observations. All right, cool, So there's about a hundred
thousand stars within two hundred light years. What else can
we find in this bubble? Well, it's mostly it. I
mean in the galaxy we have stars. Of course, we
have gas clouds, which are the birthplace of stars, but
there aren't any of those within two hundred light years.

(43:20):
Like the closest one is about four hundred and something
light years away. It's called Taurus, and it's where stars
are being born. There are stars in there. They're like
one or two million years old, But we don't have
any of those big blobs inside our like two hundred
light year windows, because like a cluster itself is pretty big.
It's almost as big as two hundred light years. Yeah,

(43:42):
some of these gas clouds are are hundreds of light
years across. They're really vast. There's like the birthing regions
of stars. But there is a cluster of stars. Like
there's a big major cluster of stars. It's called the
Hyades cluster, and it's about a hundred and fifty light
years away. It's like six hundred something million years old,
and it's just like a big blob of stars that

(44:02):
are all together. It's probably comes from a really dense
region of of gas and molecules that got formed early on,
and so that's like a big blob of stars. So
I see, oh wow, that must be pretty amazing to
go near or to visit there. Yeah, And you know,
if you're looking to visit a lot of stars and a
a lot of planets at once, it's probably a good destination.
On the other hand, it's a hundred and fifty light

(44:22):
years away, so it's to take you a while to
get there. Well, I think this kind of tells you
how big the universe is, you know, two hundred light years,
Like that's even like if we prolong human life and
double it and was able to go at the speed
of light, that's as far as like any one person
could probably go without any kind of special awards beat
or wormhole, right. Yeah, And you know the thing that's

(44:45):
furthest away, the human device that's furthest away from the
Solar system right now is voyage or one. It's traveling
at sixty one thousand kilometers per hour, and if it
kept going, it would take another seventy thousand years to
reach the nearest star. Like, these distances are just incredible,
and it's already eighteen billion kilometers away from us, but

(45:09):
that's just like a tiny fraction of the distance to
approximates centauri. I see, seventy thousand years, that's like what
three thousand more episodes, Daniel, I got all those ideas. Yeah,
I've sketched them out already. You would really like to
work ahead. Yeah, And you know, if you think about
the larger context you know of our galaxy. Our galaxy

(45:31):
is a hundred thousand light years across. So a bubble
two hundred light years is really a tiny neighborhood. You know,
the Sun itself is just like is twenty something thousand
light years from the center of the galaxy. So even
like the most we might right now could imagine traveling
to for a single human is is a drop in
the bucket of the size of our galaxy. Yeah, if

(45:52):
you were looking at a map of the galaxy, you
wouldn't even notice that distance, right, Wow, alright, Well, I
feel like we covered a lot in the first two
seconds this podcast. And uh, we also got this kind
of amazing view of how big the galaxy is and
spaces and how empty it is. It's incredible how dense
and hot the universe used to be and how big

(46:14):
and cold it is today, and yet it's still filled
with mystery and our whole concept of the universe, where
it came from, how it began, what it looks like now,
what's out there could be totally rocked by discoveries that
are coming, discoveries made by scientists working today, over by
somebody out there listening to this podcast right now that's thinking, Hey,
maybe I could crack one of the biggest questions in

(46:37):
the universe because you know you could. Yeah, yeah, and
then we'll cover it here in our episode. That's right,
And so I want to say a personal thank you
to all the fans and listeners for tuning into all
these episodes, for sending us supportive messages, for letting us
know that you're enjoying what you're hearing, and for sharing
with us all of your wonder and your curiosity, and

(46:57):
for going on this crazy journey with us. Absolutely believe
we wouldn't be doing this without you. And thanks also
for letting all your friends know and all your context
note because the more people that are listening, the more
episodes we can make. All right, well, thanks again for
helping us celebrate our two hundred episode. We hope you
enjoyed that. See you next time. Thanks for listening, and

(47:25):
remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast For my
Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows