Listener Questions #13

Daniel and Kelly talk about warty comb jellies, white holes, and humpback whale navigation.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
What on Earth is a wardy comb jelly? And why
does it sound like it's probably very smelly?

Speaker 2 (00:13):
If the Sun were replaced with a white hole, would
it be very bright or dark as coal?

Speaker 1 (00:19):
How do willes navigate the seas? Magnetics gravity or mysteries
of chemistry?

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Whatever question keeps you up at night, Daniel and Kelly's
answer will make it all right.

Speaker 1 (00:32):
Welcome to another Listener's Questions episode on Daniel and Kelly's
Extraordinary Universe.

Speaker 2 (00:50):
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I've never
been tempted to eat a warty comb jelly.

Speaker 1 (00:56):
Hello. I am Kelly Weener Smith. I also have never
been tempted to eat a warty comb jelly, But I
feel like the existence of the name wharty comb jelly
reveals that biologists have a much more fun time of
naming things than physicists do. What is your favorite species name?

Speaker 2 (01:13):
Daniel wait, I can't get over warty comb jelly, and
I'm not gonna let it slide that you're somehow congratulating
yourself for this name. This name is a mess. I'm like,
is it a wart is it a comb? Is it
a kind of jelly? Is it a jelly made of warts?
Can I comb my hair with it? What is going
on with this name? It sounds like just three random words.

(01:33):
It sounds like a password recommended by XKCD.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
All right, well, so one, I think you must lack
imagination because I imagine a jellyfish that is sort of warty
with some like comy projections. I think they did a
great job.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
I don't know. I've heard this thing is also described
as a sea walnut, So I'm not sure anything in
our vocabulary can really capture the weirdness of this creature.
Maybe biology has gone beyond naming.

Speaker 1 (01:59):
You know, it has two different life stages, and sea
walnut describes one of the stages very well, and warty
comb jelly describes the other very well. So maybe if
you just knew a little more natural history, you'd follow along.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
So it needs five words in its name, not just three.
Oh it's oh that fabulous.

Speaker 1 (02:16):
It's pretty fabulous. But I think my favorite species, or
my favorite common name for a species, is the humped
trash line weaver. It's a spider that has like sort
of a humpy shape, but also it puts trash in
the middle of its web. And I don't remember why
should have looked that up before the show. But it's

(02:37):
got a line of trash and it's got a hump,
and it's a humped trash line. Orb Weaver and I
love them. They live on my farm in Virginia and
they are permanent residents.

Speaker 2 (02:46):
Well, there's a well known spider that I think could
use a better name, And I once heard an episode
of This American Life where they were speculating about a
better name for the black widow spider. And my favorite
suggestion is not family friendly. It has to do with
the fact that until we had running water, most of
the bites were on guys using outhouses because of little
swinging bits that the spiders bit onto.

Speaker 1 (03:08):
Yeah. So I was reading a journal of parasitology and
there were men who were purposefully letting themselves get bit
by black widows to try to get a handle on
how bad the bites are. And the story starts with
how he was like doing experiments on rodents and ends
with how many days he was stuck in the hospital
after he did it to himself. But the doctor treating

(03:31):
him said, yeah, I've seen someone else with a black
widow bite, and it was in the same location, but
alcohol was involved, and so I have since found myself
wondering if men is like, oh, it's because of the outhouse,
I just but it was really just other shenanigans.

Speaker 2 (03:47):
Well, there are so many wonderful questions to ask about
that story and where people get bitten by black widows
and other things about the universe. And today we're going
to be celebrating those kinds of questions because we're here
today not to talk about the things that we wonder
about the universe, but the things that you wonder about
the universe. Our podcast is a conversation between us and you,

(04:09):
and we want to hear from you. We want to
know what you want explained about this extraordinary universe.

Speaker 1 (04:16):
So let's go ahead and jump into our first question
about the wardy comb jelly.

Speaker 3 (04:20):
Hi, Kelly, Hi Daniel wanted to see if you could
discuss the wordy comb jelly things.

Speaker 1 (04:27):
Well. I was excited about this question because honestly, I've
never heard of the wardy comb jelly, and it turns
out and has a number of really fascinating features.

Speaker 2 (04:37):
Well, first of all, what do you think inspired this question?
Is it just the craziness of the name, or is
it some incredible biological magic that's happening in this critter.

Speaker 1 (04:47):
If I had to guess, I would guess that this
listener sent us the question because this species has a
transient anus.

Speaker 2 (04:57):
Another pair of words I never thought would go together.

Speaker 1 (05:02):
Biology is amazing, And.

Speaker 2 (05:04):
I'm hoping that that means exactly what I think it means.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
Yeah. Probably, So let's back up and let's clarify the
appearance and the diet of this thing. And so we're
gonna do the inputs and when we get to the outputs,
we'll talk about the transientanus. So, all right, the warty
comb jelly you know, if you imagine it, it has
sort of like a jellyfish shape, okay, but has two
different stages of its life. When it's small, it's called

(05:28):
a sidipid. And at this point it looks like it's clear,
but it has sort of a walnut shape with two long,
feathery tentacles that come out from the back.

Speaker 2 (05:37):
So why isn't it called a wardycomb jellyfish instead of
a wardycomb jelly Because when I hear wardcomb jelly, I
think of a pot of jam.

Speaker 1 (05:45):
Uh. It was probably not named with you in mind.

Speaker 2 (05:50):
And why not is the real question.

Speaker 1 (05:52):
Well, you know, I think jelly so jellyfish might be
slightly distantly related. There's probably a lot of diversity in
jelly like things out there. These are some very ancient creatures.
And also, you know, jellyfish is sort of confusing because
they're not really fish, and so maybe someone was like,
let's drop the fish because these aren't.

Speaker 2 (06:08):
Really fish, and also it's pretty good on toast.

Speaker 1 (06:11):
I wouldn't suggest eating these, although I think they're mostly
water and I don't think they could sting you, so
maybe it would be fine. Why not? But as they
transition to adults, they lose those long, feathery tentacles and
instead they grow these lobes. So I kind of imagine
like a glass paper weight, but with like ribbons coming

(06:31):
off of the sides kind of, So it has these lobes,
and the lobes have these like iridescent spots on them
that attract little like tiny fish so that they can
eat them.

Speaker 2 (06:40):
This sounds really cute.

Speaker 1 (06:42):
No, it is really cute. You should look up a photos.
It's cute and it has beautiful iridescent colors. I can
imagine having it as a pet, and I've seen it
at some aquarium.

Speaker 2 (06:51):
Because again the name wardicomb jelly doesn't conjure up cute
images in my mind. But your description was beautiful.

Speaker 1 (06:58):
Well thank you. I mean, biologists have a sense of humor,
and that's that's what you need to know. And so
when they're young, they use those feathery tentacles to capture
very tiny creatures living in the water column. As they
get older and they get into the low bait stage
where they have those lobes, I agree, this is not
a very pretty name for the stage when they have

(07:18):
those like ribbons coming off the side. Then they're eating
things like eggs and tiny fish and crustaceans, so they
start eating bigger things, so they have a transition.

Speaker 2 (07:27):
So does this mean they're up near the surface where
they can eat those things or do they go much deeper.

Speaker 1 (07:32):
They're swimming around the surface and they can move throughout
the water column, so you can find them at different depths.
They also will eat each other. So like for the
Daniel and Kelly checklist, we've hit cannibalism. So this species
has a lot of things that you and I love.
So next we're ar at least that I love. So
next we're going to talk about poop. That's point two

(07:53):
for dKu.

Speaker 2 (07:55):
I hope we get to aliens eventually.

Speaker 1 (07:56):
I was gonna say aliens are white chocolate. That's where
we got to get this kind of station two.

Speaker 2 (08:01):
So tell us about how these things spend their time
on the body.

Speaker 1 (08:03):
Okay, So as they eat and they accumulate waste, their
gut expands, and as it expands and kind of balloons out.
At some point it touches the outside of the body.
And as it touches the outside of the body, it
fuses and an anus is formed. So like the gut
and the outside of the body are only like one
cell thick, and so they fuse form a hole through

(08:26):
which waste is expelled, and this happens like every ten
minutes to every hour, depending on how big they are.
And then once the waste has been expelled, the gut
starts shrinking and it pulls away from the outside of
the body, and that hole is completely covered up. It
goes away, it totally fuses, and the anis disappears. What

(08:47):
I know, and it's thought that this is an intermediate
stage between the permanent anuses so many of us know
and love, and this early stage of the anus, and
maybe we should put a warning at the beginning of
the show. But you could talk about butts with kids, right, yeah, And.

Speaker 2 (09:01):
We could just pretend that permanent Anus is the name
of a punk band we both enjoy.

Speaker 1 (09:05):
That's right, That's right, yeah, from the nineties.

Speaker 2 (09:08):
I love their second album, Oh my God, so good?
Are you saying that this is a transition stage sort
of evolutionarily like that there are some critters that didn't
have an anus, and then there were critters with a
temporary anis, and then their critters with a permanent anis.

Speaker 1 (09:20):
So I'm imagining the PhD student who will one day
have the job of working on the phylogenetic tree studying
the evolution of anuses. But I did find a paper
that was hypothesizing that this is a step in the
evolution of the anus that early on, when you've got
very primitive species, they have this transient anis that kind
of comes and goes. But as you move down the

(09:42):
evolutionary tree, we sort of settle on a better method,
because why recreate the wheel every ten minutes if you
don't have to do that? So anyway, yes, this could
have been a step in the evolutionary path that brought
us to where we.

Speaker 2 (09:55):
Are today, and does that allow us to extrapolate into
the future, like go from non to temporary to permanent.
What's beyond that double triple extra permanent. I can't even imagine.

Speaker 1 (10:08):
I don't know, man, we might need like AI and
artificial tech to give us, you know, additional new ones.
I know sometimes you have to move them around following
surgeries and stuff, but I can't imagine that we're going
to end up with too many more of them. I
feel like we've maybe hit the fitness peak on anus
and we're good where we are.

Speaker 2 (10:28):
So I just heard a talk by Brian Mallow, the
science comedian who actually lives near you, and he was
telling me that there's a critter that lives on our
face that doesn't have an anus. It's called a face mite,
and it like walks around your face chomping on stuff,
doesn't have an anus, and events you just explodes all
over your face. And I was like, wow, that's so
many gross details.

Speaker 1 (10:48):
It is one of gross details in one story. I
do feel like there's life stages of insects and stuff
where they don't have an anus. They just kind of accumulated,
and then when they move to the next stage or
when they transition to a different body plan and they
leave the feces behind. I gotta say, it's convenient to
be able to, you know, remove your waste as you
need without yeah, without too much trouble.

Speaker 2 (11:12):
Well, what are the disadvantages of this.

Speaker 1 (11:14):
Of needing to recreate an anus every ten minutes? I
didn't imagine i'd get asked that today. But here we are, Yeah,
I but here we are. I don't know. I mean,
I have not seen reports on, for example, how often
it fails. Needing to create a new sphincter over and
over and over again. Seems less efficient than just having

(11:34):
one that works when you need it, And so I
imagine the downside is that it's a fail point if
it needs to be created so regularly, and it's better
to just I can't say I've thought too hard about this, all.

Speaker 2 (11:49):
Right, Well, then I'm going to connect us to the
last dot and ask you an alien anus question, which is,
if we're landing on an alien planet, do you expect
that aliens are going to have a permanent anus or
where they have a transient one? What do you think
are there permanent anuses all over the universe, is my question, Kelly.

Speaker 1 (12:09):
I would say, uh it, you know, it depends. You
can never know for sure, but if I had to guess,
I would put my money on Yes. It seems like
a very convenient feature. And uh, you know, they maybe
they would have. I'm gonna say, yes, what do you think, Daniel,
I agree with you.

Speaker 2 (12:29):
I think the universe is probably filled with butts?

Speaker 1 (12:32):
Good. Yeah, all right, Well, I'm guessing that's what the
listener wanted us to talk about. But this species is
well known for two other things. One, it lives on
the east coast of the US, and it's been introduced
in Europe into like the Caspi and c the Black
Sea and the Baltic Sea, and it's caused a lot
of problems there. Part of why it causes a lot
of problems is because when it is in the water,

(12:53):
it's consuming a lot of crustaceans and eggs and tiny fish,
and so it's been a problem for the native fish
because it's eating the baby stages of the native fish,
and it's eating the food that those baby stages of
the native fish eat, so it's competing.

Speaker 2 (13:05):
That's not so nice.

Speaker 1 (13:06):
Not so nice, so people have been trying to get
rid of them. But the other thing that they're well
known for is a result that was just published last year,
twenty twenty four. It is one of the few species
we know of that is able to turn back the
clock and transition back to an earlier life stage. So
let me give you some details. So we talked about
how it has that sidipid stage where it's a walnut

(13:29):
with feathery tentacles, and then it has a low bait
stage where it's a paperweight with some ribbons. And if
you've got it in the low bait stage and you
starve it or give it a lob back to me
where you remove one of the lobes, which is not
very nice to no. No, Essentially, if you stress it out,
it's able to essentially go back in time and it

(13:50):
absorbs the rest of its lobes and it goes back
to the sidippid stage, So it goes from having those ribbons,
it absorbs those ribbons, it goes back to looking like
a walnut with feathery appendages. So it can like go
back in time and reverse its development, which not a
lot of species can do. We don't know that that
like extends its life span. But if they go back

(14:11):
in time and then they grow back, they can grow
back that other lobe. So it would be like if
you lost an arm and you can be like, no,
not cool, you like absorb a bunch of body parts,
go back to just being like a ball of cells,
and then you sort of go through the development again
and now you've got both arms or something like that.

Speaker 2 (14:27):
Well, maybe there's a great advantage to having transient bits
is that you can generate bits at will, and so
if you lose one boom, you can grow an arm
or like, hey, I could use a second head today,
let me grow another one.

Speaker 1 (14:39):
Yeah, I don't know that they grow like twice as
many of the ribbons and they usually come back with
the same number of ribbons. But another thought for the
benefit of this reverse development is that if you're going
around and you're trying to eat babyfish and there's like
just no baby fish, it's not the right time of
year and you're starting to starve. When you go back
to that tentacle phase, you can now access a lot
of the much smaller food stuff, and so it could

(15:00):
be a way to like open up the kinds of
foods that you're able to eat at a time when
the foods that you are really well shaped to eat
are no longer available. So they've got this interesting reverse
development that we don't understand very well.

Speaker 2 (15:14):
Fascinating.

Speaker 1 (15:15):
Well that is all I have to say on the
wardy comb jelly.

Speaker 2 (15:19):
And wait, this is the last question, which we teased
in the intro. Oh do you think the wardy comb
jelly is very smelly?

Speaker 1 (15:26):
Oh? No, no, it's mostly water. I'm guessing it. I
don't think it smells bad, but I agree it's got
a kind of stinky name.

Speaker 2 (15:34):
What do you think I think probably if you put
it on toast and left it, it would smell pretty bad,
as basically everything from the sea does.

Speaker 1 (15:41):
I mean, I think just about any organism, if you
let it die and you left it on your toast
for a while, you're going to regret that decision.

Speaker 2 (15:48):
Well, that's just fermentation. And sometimes fermentation is delicious, you know,
you get marmite or whatever, or cheese, and sometimes it's not.

Speaker 1 (15:55):
Yeah. Well, you know our conversation went from transient anisis
to cheese. And let's see what the listener has to say.

Speaker 3 (16:04):
Hi Kelly, Hi Daniel, Thanks for talking about the wordy
comb jelly. Maybe one day we'll all be able to
regrow our parts inside or out, or even flip them around. Thanks.

Speaker 2 (16:36):
All right, we're back from talking about the transient holes
in wordy comb jellies to talking about a very different
kind of hypothetical cosmic hole.

Speaker 4 (16:46):
I'm Sammy, I'm ten, and I want to know what
would happen if this sun was aplace with a white hole?

Speaker 2 (16:57):
All right? I love this question, and I that young
people are thinking about the universe and asking questions. And
thanks to all the parents out there who listen to
the pod with their kids.

Speaker 1 (17:08):
So, Daniel, what are white holes? And do they come
and go depending on how recently youth consumed a meal?

Speaker 2 (17:18):
You know, when we started this episode, I was like, well,
there are no connections between these topics. Now I'm seeing
them more and more. Yes, maybe aliens with transient anuses
are going to use cosmic white holes to come and
visit us and tell us about it and learn all
about our permanent ones.

Speaker 1 (17:34):
We can hope, but hopefully they don't eat us. I
guess that wouldn't be cannibalism. So I'm not really connecting
the dots there, But anyway.

Speaker 2 (17:41):
Yes, So Sam is asking a great question. Basically, he's
wondering what does a white hole look like? And could
his serve as an alternate sun, etc. So let's talk
about what a white hole is. Number one. A white
hole is a hypothetical thing. We don't know that white
holes exist in the universe, and we're not even really
clear on what a white hole is, you know, like
a black hole, we have a very crisp concept for

(18:02):
what it is. It's a prediction of general relativity. We
talk about it, we understand about it, we can calculate
about everybody agrees what a black hole is a white hole,
and we'll get into what it is exactly. Is the
sort of a fuzzy set of concepts that are closely related.
And so if you read about white holes and you
listen to this episode and you might think, on, that's
not what I heard, and then you go read another
article and you're like, that's not what I understood to

(18:24):
be a white hole. That's because there is nothing that
it is to be a white hole. It's like a
set of ideas that people are still sort of developing
that all go by the same name, which can be.

Speaker 1 (18:34):
Confusing, sort of like our study of the anus, you've
got multiple stages. We're not really sure how to define it,
but all right, go.

Speaker 2 (18:41):
On, yeah, yeah, So most commonly, a white hole is
thought as something like the opposite of a black hole.
So a black hole is a region in space, an
event horizon, which nothing can escape. Right. Remember that gravity
is the bending of space time in the presence of
mass and energy. So the Earth and bends the space
around it, which affects the way things move around it.

(19:03):
And if you have enough mass and enough energy, you
bend space so much that you change its shape so
that nothing can escape. It's not that black holes have
intense gravity to pull on things, even light. It's just
that the shape of space is such that nothing can escape.
Space only points in one direction past the event horizon,
towards the center. So no matter how fast you go
or how you wiggle or struggle, you're always going towards

(19:25):
the center. That's the black hole, a region of space
where nothing can escape because of the shape of space itself.

Speaker 1 (19:32):
Okay, so if I were to just guess a white hole,
so you'd imagine it would be exactly the opposite. So
is it is everything running to escape from a white hole.
Nothing can you get pushed away from it if you
get too close.

Speaker 2 (19:45):
A white hole is a region of space that nothing
can enter, so things can escape it, but nothing can
enter it. And the opposite of a black hole. A
black hole things can enter but nothing can escape. A
white hole is a place where nothing can enter, but
things can escape.

Speaker 1 (20:00):
How is that made?

Speaker 2 (20:03):
Yeah, and that's a different question, right, Like what is it?
And could it exist? It's a different question from how
do you make it? That's an important subtlety, right, Like,
for example, a wormhole, which we'll talk about in a minute,
is something which can exist in general relativity, and a
white hole can exist in general relativity. But that doesn't
mean that there are any or that we know how
to go from a universe without one to a universe

(20:24):
with one. It's like the difference between saying, oh, I
know how to eat a soufle. I know soufles exist,
and I know how to make a soupfle from ingredients.

Speaker 1 (20:32):
Right, it's hard to make a soufle, yes, exactly.

Speaker 2 (20:35):
The recipe is a challenge. So those are actually two
different questions, Right, is it possible for them to exist
in the universe? And is there a series of actions
you can take to create one.

Speaker 1 (20:46):
Two different questions are we going to answer either.

Speaker 2 (20:49):
H we have no idea about the second one. We
are going to talk about the first one, right oka, like,
can general relativity accommodate this? What does it even mean?
What are we talking about here? And so the first
concept of a white hole, and I think the most
generally discussed one, is a sort of mathematical extension of
space time. Roger Penrose is famous for thinking about black
holes and the structure of space time, and he came

(21:10):
up with a cute little diagram to draw the whole
universe and like a little square where infinities are like
squeezed down into the corners, so you can draw things nicely.
And they're called Penrose diagrams. You can google them and
see them. They're a little hard to wrap your mind around,
and we're not going to try to explain them today.
But these diagrams do inspire the concept of white holes,
because if you look at the diagram, the whole universe

(21:32):
is like a diamond and black holes are on one side,
and you can ask, hmm, what could be on the
other side, And so it's just sort of like, hey,
let's ask questions about this diagram and is it possible
there's something there we hadn't considered the way you might
be like, oh, there are positive numbers, could there be
negative numbers? There are particles, could there be antiparticles. It's
just like this search for symmetry in the universe and wondering,

(21:55):
and then people realized, well, there's really nothing preventing that.
Like in print, Well you could have a region of
space that nothing could enter, but things could escape from.
And the way to think about it in terms of
these Penrose diagrams is just some region of space where
you can get messages from but you could never reach.
And that seems really weird. I have two sort of
ways to think about it for you. Number one is

(22:17):
to just reverse the black hole. Like if you think
about black holes not as a big blob of stuff
pulling in on you really really hard with its gravity,
but literally a rearrangement of space so that space only
points in so that no matter what you do, you
are moving towards the center. Remember that black holes and
gravity are all about the shape of space itself, not
forces on stuff within space. Now just reverse that. Imagine

(22:42):
a points in space where space points outwards, and the
only way you can go is out. There is no in, right,
there's only motion outwards. So if you accept that black
holes are space pointed in, then white holes are just
space pointed out.

Speaker 1 (22:56):
So for white holes, nothing can get in, but stuff
can come out. Where is the stuff that comes out
coming from?

Speaker 2 (23:05):
Great questions?

Speaker 1 (23:06):
Did the gut gets filled into the white hole?

Speaker 2 (23:08):
And great question? And in general general relativity has no
answer to that, right, It doesn't predict anything that could
come out it nothing comes out, could be that green
eggs and ham comes out, right, General relativity is no
idea what could come out. In general. However, there are
some theories that connect white holes and black holes via
a wormhole. And say, for example, if you have a

(23:30):
black hole where things go in, and then you have
like basically a tube that connects it to a white hole,
things come out the white hole after they've gone in
the black hole. And so in that sense, a black
hole and a white hole are two ends of a
one directional wormhole transit, and so things come out the
white hole that fell in the black hole. But you
can't go the other.

Speaker 1 (23:50):
Direction, right, So I'm tempted to ask how many anuses.
That means the universe has for Sammy, well.

Speaker 2 (23:56):
That would be one, right, because you can think about
your digestive system as a tube. There's an in in
and out and usually one direction always.

Speaker 1 (24:03):
But there's more than one black hole in the universe, right,
So there's more than one anis that's true.

Speaker 2 (24:09):
And we don't think that all black holes are connected
to white holes, right. Some of them just eat stuff.
There's no anus there at all. It just gets bigger
and bigger and maybe eventually explodes like a face mite
on your face.

Speaker 1 (24:18):
I don't know, mmm, love these connections.

Speaker 2 (24:21):
Yeah, So that's sort of the concept of white holes.
Another way to think about white holes that's maybe easier
to grapple with is try to imagine a region of
the universe where you can get messages from, but you
could never send messages too, And that seems contradictory, like
how could you do that? But actually that exists in
our universe already. It's our cosmic horizon. Like there are

(24:42):
galaxies out there that sent us photons, but they are
now past our cosmic horizon because of the expansion of
the universe. If we shout a photon at them, it
would never reach them. So there's a whole region of
the universe where photons have escaped. They've come from there,
but they can't go to there. So I'm not saying
that everything outside the observable universe is a white hole,

(25:03):
but it's just sort of a way for you to
get a handle on what are we talking about.

Speaker 1 (25:07):
Okay, so I've absorbed a lot of information and the
you know, my brain is a box and it's overflown
and some has started to fall out. So I think
you've already said this, but just to confirm, white holes
are not anything that's really supported by physics theory. It's
more of a thought experiment that arose out of a
way that we decided to portray the way the universe
could look. But that could have just been a result

(25:30):
of our artistic way of trying to explain things.

Speaker 2 (25:33):
It could be, yes, it could also be that we're
exploring the true nature of the universe and discovering it
in our minds before we discover it in the universe,
the same way we did with black holes. People thought
exactly the same thing about black holes before we found them.
They were like, well, that's cute, but it's just a
mathematical oddity. I'm sure that doesn't actually exist out there
in the universe. That would be bonkers, And then of

(25:53):
course we found them. And so sometimes mathematically exploring the
corners of our minds can reveal the true nature of
the universe, which is amazing and philosophically deep and incredible
and really kind of a as close as you get
to a spiritual moment, I think in cosmology.

Speaker 1 (26:10):
Yeah, yeah, I'll give you that. That's incredible.

Speaker 2 (26:12):
So everything you said is true, But I think the
implication that therefore is probably not really out there, I
think is a question mark.

Speaker 1 (26:19):
All right, So can you remind me what was Sammy's
question in particular?

Speaker 2 (26:23):
So Samy was like, if you replace the sun with
a white hole, what would it look like? Oh, and
before we get to that, we had to consider one
more idea about white holes, because white holes, again a
broad topic. So we've talked about white holes is sort
of like inverse black holes region of space time that
you can escape and not enter, or maybe the back
end of a wormhole. But there's one more version, which

(26:43):
is the quantum version of a white hole.

Speaker 1 (26:45):
What's that?

Speaker 2 (26:46):
And this suggests that there are no black holes actually
that the things we see out there in the universe
that look like black holes are actually just slowly collapsing
stars because in regions of very high mass, time slows down.
Talked about time dilation many times, and so perhaps what's
happening is stars are collapsing, but time has slowed down

(27:07):
so much that it looks like a black hole. It's
just a very very slowly collapsing star. And there are
folks out there like Carlo Ravelli who thinks that it's
not actually going to collapse all the way to a singularity.
Quantum mechanics will somehow prevent that from happening, push it
back and invert it, and eventually a black hole sort
of bounce back and turn into something which emits all

(27:28):
of its mass.

Speaker 1 (27:29):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (27:30):
So this is Carlo Ravelli's concept of a white hole.

Speaker 1 (27:33):
Ah okay, all right, very cool. And so we've talked
about three different ways to get white holes, or three
different ways of thinking about it. Does each one of
them give a different answer to Sammy's question?

Speaker 2 (27:46):
Yeah, absolutely it does. So you know, if white holes
are just some region of space that you can't escape,
and you replace the Sun with a white hole, then
like maybe nothing would come out right, there's no prediction
for anything to come out. It just depends on what
happened to be in that regional space in the deep
deep past before it formed, right, and so probably nothing.

(28:06):
If the white hole that we put in the center
of our solar system is the back end of a wormhole,
then what comes out depends on what's going in that
black hole. If there are aliens out there and they're
treating that black hole as like a cosmic dumpster. They're
like making really dangerous elements in their crazy experiments and
they're dumping it in a black hole for their safety,
then you know we're going to be the cosmic dumping

(28:29):
yard of some alien physicists, which could be amazing, like wow,
you could see some cool stuff come out of that
white hole though, or it could be really bright, you know,
like what if that black hole eats a star or
something like an enormous amount of radiation could come out
of it. Or it could be just like weird alien leftovers.
Who knows, I.

Speaker 1 (28:50):
Would eat weird alien leftovers, give it a shot.

Speaker 2 (28:55):
If I had to choose between weird alien leftovers and
wardycomb jelly on toe, I'm not sure what I would choose.

Speaker 1 (29:02):
Yeah, it'd be a tough decision. So what about Carlo
Ravelli's vision of a white hole.

Speaker 2 (29:08):
Yeah, so if white holes are actually slowly collapsing black
holes that then reverse, then you're gonna get something with
an enormous amount of radition. It's going to be very,
very bright. And one of the inspirations for white hole
research is that there are things in the universe that
are very bright that we don't understand, things like gamma
ray bursts, these very short lived, incredibly bright waves of

(29:30):
gamma rays, very high energy photons. Nothing in the universe
we know about can make them, and yet we see
them and people wonder like, oh, maybe those are white holes.
People also talk about, you know, the Big Bang maybe
being the result of a white hole in the early universe,
because people like thinking about cyclical universes, like the whole
universe turns into a singularity and then bounces back into

(29:51):
a big white hole. Anyway, Sammy, the answer is, we
don't know if white holes are real, and if they are,
it depends on which flavor of white hole you get.

Speaker 1 (30:00):
Do you think that Sammy wanted to know what would
happen to Earth if the Sun was replaced by a
white hole, or what would it be like if the
Sun was replaced by a white hole? I think in
all of these situations, Earth is toast.

Speaker 2 (30:11):
Earth is not in a great shape in any of
these situations. Yeah, and in many cases the white hole
has mass also, so you could continue to orbit it
while you're getting fried with alien cosmic junk.

Speaker 1 (30:22):
Thumbs down. All right, what do you think, Sammy?

Speaker 4 (30:27):
I prefer if the sun was not a plate to
a white home, although that that end of a wom
hole idea does sound pretty cool.

Speaker 1 (30:57):
All right. Our last question comes from Rhonda and is
about humpback whales.

Speaker 5 (31:02):
Hey, Daniel and Kelly, it's Ronda and I live in
North Alabama. I was recently scrolling through the Internet and
saw a whale of a tail about how whales migrate.
They were saying that whales migrate because the bacteria in
the bumps in their back aligned with magnetic north. I
was just wondering if you might be able to clarify

(31:24):
that a little bit. Let me know if it's true.
Huge fan of the show, Love you guys, and thank
you so much for feeding my curiosity.

Speaker 1 (31:32):
Well, this is a great question, Ronda. I was super
excited to have the opportunity to dig into navigation for
humpback whales. A little bit of background, There are humpback
whales at both of the poles. They tend to feed
in polar regions, and for example, Antarctica has loads of
this crustacean called krill that they eat, and you find

(31:52):
it in really high densities there. So they go to
the polar regions to feed, and then when it comes
time to have babies, they head up to the tropics
where the is warmer and shallower. We think maybe those
are better baby nursery conditions, so they head up there
to breed, and then when the babies are old enough,
they head back down to the cold areas where their
food is found in high abundances.

Speaker 2 (32:13):
So this is similar to how birds migrate, but it's
just much more massive in underwater.

Speaker 1 (32:17):
Yes exactly, and I mean incredibly long distances. Imagine going
from you know, Antarctica to the tropics, like that's a
huge distance, and they often make very straight line paths,
and so it's been for a long time a question
how do they remember, you know, when they're very young,
when they make this journey for the first time, how
do they remember where they've gone, and how they go
back to the same place, and how do they go

(32:38):
there without Like, you know, I get lost when I
go to the grocery store sometimes, like how do they
not get lost?

Speaker 2 (32:43):
And it's a super fascinating question. I heard that these
whales move in a straight line relative to the earth
rather than relative to the water, right, which requires some
kind of navigation because you know, no matter what the
currents are, they find a way to follow the path,
which suggests that maybe they know where they are on
the earth, which is amazing.

Speaker 1 (33:02):
It's crazy. But let me just take a step back
to talk about why it's so hard to answer this
question in humpback whales. So if you were asking this
question in pigeons, for example, you could take a pigeon
from one place and if you thought that maybe they
were paying attention to some queue in the northern hemisphere,
you could transport them to the southern hemisphere and then

(33:22):
see how they change their behavior. If they thought they
were paying attention to magnetic fields, you could, like I
don't know, stick a giant magnet on their back that
confused them and then look to see do they get lost?
If you thought they were looking for visual cues. You
could you know, put them in a giant arena and
move the cues around and see how that messed things up.
And then you could do other things, like you know,

(33:43):
could put blindfolds on them and if you think that
they're just you know, responding to magnetic fields or something.
But with humpback whales, they're endangered, or at least they're threatened.
I can't remember what their status is right now. But
you can't do any of those things to them. Yeah,
you can't move them to the other hemis. You can't
poke their eyes out. You shouldn't poke their eyes out.

(34:04):
You can't do the kinds of manipulative experiments that you'd
need to really try to nail this stuff down. So
the best that we can do at the moment, as
we can look at old records for where humpback whales
were killed in the era where whaling was popular, and
now that we have technology for tracking animals, you can
put trackers on them and you can follow their movements

(34:25):
over time and then you can collect data on how
their movements are correlated to things that you think might
be important for navigation.

Speaker 2 (34:32):
So we basically have to wait for natural experiments like
if the magnetic poles flip, or if the currents change,
or if the visual conditions change, we can look to
see how it affects the whales, but we can't induce
those changes ourselves.

Speaker 1 (34:44):
Right, And unfortunately humans are doing some of those experiments now.
So one of the things we think they queue into
is water temperatures or following certain currents or certain salinities.
And as global climate change is happening, that's impacting water
temperatures and that's impacting where currents go. And I guess
the good news is that for humpback whales these changes
are relevant to their smaller movements, so it's relevant to

(35:07):
where their food sources are. As their food sources, for example,
maybe track certain water temperatures. But even as all of
this stuff is changing, they are still taking pretty straight
line paths up to their breeding ground, which suggests that
that's not the main cue that they're using. So even
as this changes, they're still getting to where they need
to go. So one of the leading hypotheses is that

(35:29):
the Earth's magnetic fields are being used by these giant
whales to try to figure out where they're going to go.
And Daniel I should tell you that while I was
writing this outline, I just assumed that you would be
able to explain these to us, and I didn't give
you the heads up or research it ahead of time.
Was I right?

Speaker 2 (35:48):
You actually were right. I'm really fascinated by this. Okay,
and the folks in my department here at UC Irvine
biophysicists who study this question of how birds migrate, for example,
which is a very similar question and one of the
leading hypotheses has to do with quantum mechanics. Actually, there's
like a protein inside bird's eyeballs which has two different states,

(36:09):
and it flips back and forth between these two states,
and the rate at which it flips depends on the
magnetic field. So this is a thing which actually does happen.
And so in principle, is a mechanism by which an
animal could sense a magnetic field Because like we don't
think humpback whales or Canadian geese are like building little
compasses and strapping them to their bodies, as cute as

(36:30):
that would be, they need some sort of biological mechanism.
What we don't know is if that's really the mechanism.
You know, this is like something inside their body that's happening.
We don't know if it's connected to their sensory organs
or somehow to their brain to allow them to somehow
like see or experience these fields, or actually even use
them in their navigation.

Speaker 1 (36:51):
There's a newer hypothesis that there are bacteria that also
respond to magnetic fields, and they sort of align themselves
with magnetic north And the idea here is that you'd
have these bacteria and then the animals would have some
way of sensing what the bacteria are doing. And this
is what the listener was referring to. But actually what
I had imagined you would explain was why does Earth

(37:14):
have magnetic fields in the first place.

Speaker 2 (37:16):
Yeah, oh that's awesome. It's a little bit of a mystery.
I mean, we know that magnetic fields are generated by
charges in motion, right, Like, give an electron, it just
generates an electric field. You move the electron, you give
it a velocity, you get a magnetic field, which is
already kind of mind bending because it means that like
whether the electron has a magnetic field around it is

(37:37):
frame dependent. You know, Like I'm holding an electron, I
see it as an electric field. You whiz, buy me
in a car, you see that electron having a magnetic field,
So we like disagree about whether there's a magnetic field there,
which is crazy. Yeah, that's a whole fascinating story about
the development of special relativity. But anyway, charges in motion
generate magnetic fields. There are no magnetic charges in the

(37:58):
universe that we know about that could just generate magnetic
field while sitting there. So most of the magnetic fields
are generated either by like electrons spinning that quantum version
of motion can generate a little magnetic field, or you
have the electron itself is like flowing in a current,
And so what's flowing underneath our feet when there's lots
of rock and metal in motion underneath our feet, and

(38:19):
we think that that motion is probably generating the magnetic field,
but we don't totally understand it. The magnetic field is
weird and not reliable. The poles flip and flip it
in a irregular way, like sometimes every fifty thousand years,
sometimes once a million years. The poles are always migrating
a little bit, and sometimes they're like, you know, north
and south will flip, which is weird. Meanwhile, like in

(38:40):
the sun, it's super regular every eleven years, the Sun
flips its magnetic field, and this has to do with
like currents of plasma going through the Sun. Again not
totally understood. So roughly we think it's flowing currents within
the Earth, but there's lots of detailed questions we don't
know the answers to all right.

Speaker 1 (38:57):
Well, so the idea here is that, either through the
bacteria that live with the whales or different senses that
there are organs that they have in their body that
have not yet been identified, they're able to sense these
magnetic fields and follow them from one place to another,
and there's some good evidence that this has happened. For example,
whales tend to get stranded more often during solar storms,

(39:20):
and what they think is happening here is that when
there's a solar storm, it's messing with the whale's ability
to sense the Earth's magnetic fields. So it's not that
it's messing with the Earth's magnetic fields, it's just sort
of giving the wrong information to whatever the whale is
using to figure out where the magnetic fields are, and
so whales are more likely to get stranded. Essentially, the

(39:41):
idea here is that they're not able to read the
Earth's magnetic lines anymore, and so they end up in
places where they're not supposed to be.

Speaker 2 (39:48):
So that's really interesting, and it sort of suggests that
whales are using the magnetic field or that something else
about these solar storms might be affecting their senses. Do
we know anything about the history of whale migration as
the magnetic field shift.

Speaker 1 (40:01):
I did find a paper that tracked humpback whales over
a fifteen year period, and during that period there were
pretty significant shifts in the magnetic fields. And even in
years where there were shifts, the whales were going on
the same paths and essentially a straight line. So these
shifts didn't seem to move them off course, which suggests

(40:22):
that it's not just the electric field. Maybe it's the
electric field plus some other things that they're using to
correct themselves. But it does make it look like this
is not the whole story.

Speaker 2 (40:30):
Could they be using just visual cues, like hey, turn
left at this canyon and then go around this underwater
mountain cause they just have like amazing memories.

Speaker 1 (40:38):
They could They could have amazing memories. They also often
travel with other individuals, so you know, like sometimes when
I think I'm lost. I'll never ask that because that
would just make it worse. But like if i'm you know,
if I'm in the car with a friend, I'll be like,
you know, oh, do you remember Chase Bank being on
that side of us last time? Or should it be
on the other side? Are we going the wrong way?

(40:58):
And so, you know, whales travel with friends might use
each other. And additionally, whale calls can be heard over
very great distances, and so it could be that they can,
you know, hear that, like Frank is way up ahead,
and they're just following the noises that Frank makes or
Fran And so it could be a combination of noticing landmarks,
you know, sharing information with each other, and then listening

(41:20):
to the sounds of the seas to get to where
they're going.

Speaker 2 (41:23):
Is there any chance that they're like popping up to
the surface and opening their eyeballs and like using the
stars to navigate.

Speaker 1 (41:29):
There have been some folks who have proposed that they
think it's more likely that they might be using cues
from the sun than cues from the stars. We don't
know that whale vision would allow them to see the
stars with the level of detail that you would need
to navigate by it. And so there are folks who
are interested in that question. But I'd say at the
moment that's a pretty hotly debated topic in the field,

(41:49):
and there's not a clear consensus. Although I do absolutely
love the idea of the humpback whales navigating by the stars.

Speaker 2 (41:56):
That's beautiful, that would be gorgeous. Well what if they're
just really good good at dead reckoning. You know, what
if they don't need navigational cues, they're just like, I know,
I swim in this direction for forty five minutes and
then I turn, I swim in that direction. It's hard
to conceive of. I mean, imagine like driving to your
friend's house, like across country with your eyes closed. Yea, right,
just like knowing when to turn. That would be crazy.

(42:18):
But hey, maybe whales are just good at that.

Speaker 1 (42:19):
Yeah, I mean, this could be an example where my
personal experience limits my ability to imagine an answer. It
is hard for me to imagine that. But you know,
they've got giant brains. Maybe they're putting some of that
giant mass to like incredible processing abilities to navigate incredible distances.

Speaker 2 (42:38):
All right, So what's the answer then, to the listener's question,
I would say.

Speaker 1 (42:41):
The answer is, we don't completely know. It probably has
something to do with landmarks, something to do with sharing information.
They might be using the magnetic fields to some extent.
They're paying attention to currents and temperature, but even when
those change is not throwing them off course. So it's
probably a what we would call like multimodal signals like it.
They probably making lots of different kinds of information and

(43:01):
integrating it. But at the end of the day, we
can't do the sort of manipulative experiments we'd need to
lock it in, So we're just gonna have to keep
waiting to see what sort of experiments nature throws at
us so that we can collect data as we go.

Speaker 2 (43:13):
Amazing.

Speaker 1 (43:14):
Oh and I forgot. There was one other queue that
has been getting a lot of attention in the papers
that I read, and that's gravity as a sort of landmark.
And so I think the idea here is that there
are like mountain ridges that are made of dense materials,
and so they pull on these giant whales a little
bit more, and so you can use these as sort

(43:35):
of cues as you move around their environment, because these
don't change much you know those mountains. If they're there
one year, they're probably going to be there one hundred
years from now. And so there's some thought that those
are cues that are being used. What do you think
as a I mean, I know, we don't know what
particle makes gravity, but does this make sense?

Speaker 2 (43:52):
It makes sense sort of from a physics point of view.
I mean, we all feel gravity, and gravity mostly points down,
but gravity would points straight down if the Earth was
a perfect sphere. If you're standing next to like a
huge blob of stuff, then you're gonna feel it's gravity also,
and so the net gravity is gonna point like a
little bit to the side. And so if there are

(44:14):
like dense deposits of iron under the ocean floor or something,
and whales are super sensitive to the direction of gravity,
they have some like internal biological pendulum, then in principle
they could detect those and I guess in principle you
could use that to navigate. To me, I'm not sure
how much of a navigation a help it is because

(44:35):
it doesn't provide you like longitude latitude information the way
the stars do, right, It just tells you that you're
near a landmark. To me, it seems like about as
useful as eyeballs, not as useful as celestial navigation.

Speaker 1 (44:48):
Well, but if you can't see the stars, then you
know that doesn't help so much. And we don't know
that the whales can see the stars. Does it matter
that they are so like many orders of magnitude bigger
than we are. Does that make it easier for them
to detect differences in gravity along the Earth's surface.

Speaker 2 (45:06):
You definitely have a larger force on larger masses, right,
But of course they also have larger mass, so it
is the same acceleration which they sense in their stomachs probably,
so like maybe they're sensing shifts in how their stomachs
move or something. I mean, And what I mean by
like as good as eyeballs is that you know, if
you could see underwater features like oh, there's a mountain underwater,

(45:28):
or there's this cliff underwater, that seems to me as
good as this gravitational stuff. It's not like it tells
you where you are on the planet. It's still local
information in that way. But yeah, maybe whales are doing that.

Speaker 1 (45:39):
And that would give a whole different meaning to like,
I've got this gut feeling the mountain is actually pulling
your gut to the right, and you're like, we should
go right.

Speaker 2 (45:50):
I mean, you're joking, But your gut is an accelerometer, right.
That's why on a roller coaster you feel like you're
leaving your stomach behind or it's in your mouth. There's something.
It's for exactly that reason. You are measuring a change
in the local acceleration away from the normal Earth's gravity.
And so, for example, if you walked by some super
dense deposit of material, you would feel the same way.
You would feel a force pulling in a weird direction,

(46:12):
and yeah, it'd be a gut feeling.

Speaker 1 (46:14):
Well, usually it pass out on roller coasters before I
get that feeling. So but maybe if I was slowly
walking along the ocean floor, I'd be able to sense
it better. But all right, so I think the summary
point here is that we don't really have it all
figured out yet. It's probably more than one thing. They're
probably integrating cues from a variety of different sources, but

(46:34):
one way or another, they make these amazing migrations.

Speaker 2 (46:38):
Well, you might be wondering, how is Daniel going to
connect this question of whales back to the aliens and
their auses.

Speaker 1 (46:45):
I'm dying to now.

Speaker 2 (46:46):
It's a lot easier than you might imagine. Any fan
of Star Trek knows that in Star Trek four the
aliens were interested in the humpback whales because it turns
out they're the smartest critters on Earth, and so maybe
aliens will come to Earth to talk to not just
about their navigation, but you know, to get advice about
whether or not they should promote their transient aeuses to
permanent ones.

Speaker 1 (47:07):
Oh my gosh, I am so proud of the way
you tied it all together. It's only missing cannibalism and
a dig on white chocolate. Bravo.

Speaker 2 (47:14):
You know, we try to end these episodes about inspiring humanity,
and I'm not sure that accomplished that, but I did
find some connective tissue.

Speaker 1 (47:22):
I'm impressed. And on that note, let's see if Ron
does impressed. Wow.

Speaker 5 (47:26):
Thank you so much Daniel and Kelly for digging into
that question about humpback whales and how they migrate. I
found it was really fascinating and I've never heard some
of those theories before. I really can't wait until the
aliens get here to interpret the answer for us too.
Thank you again.

Speaker 2 (47:44):
All right, Well, we had a lot of fun talking
about jelly and white holes and whales and tying it
all together in surprising ways. And we also had fun
because we're answering your questions, and we'd like to think
that we're scratching your curiosity inch because there's so many
incredible things to be curious about in this universe. So
please share your curiosity with us and with the other listeners.

(48:05):
Write to us to questions at Daniel and Kelly dot org.

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Speaker 2 (48:22):
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