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June 4, 2019 42 mins

Daniel and Jorge answer questions from listeners, like you!

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, Daniel, if you are the dictator of a country,
what would you do in terms of science? In terms
of science, I think I'd like to explore, like, what
is the biggest cookie that's possible to be you can
still be tasty. That's something physicists wonder about. I wonder
about that because you know, a cookie is a complicated thing.
It has to be crispy, has to be soft on
the inside. You make it too big, then it's I'll

(00:28):
just gonna be gooey. How do you get the heat dispersed?
It's a hard physics problem. So you think you need
to all the resources of a country to figure out
the answer to this question. Hey, if you're gonna do something,
do it ten billion dollars big right. That's the way
I rolled the ten billion dollar cookie. That it would
be your science project, your dream science project. How would
you would you? Would you aim higher? I would probably

(00:49):
do just make sure everyone understand science. You know, for
all that money to educating people about science, you should
fund like an awesome podcast about it. Yeah, oh man,
you know, and maybe like get two people on it
and two really good looking at people. We eat a
lot of cookies with stay trim anyway. Yeah, and then
just give them the ten billion dollars. I'm sure they'll

(01:10):
be responsible with it. Yeah, totally, not spending on cookies
or anything like that. That's right, that's right. Hi. I'm Jorge.

(01:36):
I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD Comics. And
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist by day in a
podcaster by I don't know afternoon, and I'm a big
fan of cookies and science. And welcome to our podcast,
Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I
Heart Radio in which we look around and wonder what
is weird, what is amazing, what is crazy about this universe,

(01:58):
and then we talk about it in a way that
we hope you will understand. And we're also the authors
of the book We Have No Idea, a Guide to
the Unknown Universe. So if you would like to hear
more from us or learn more about all these great
and amazing questions about the universe, go check it out.
That's right, and we also love to hear from you
about your questions about the universe. At the end of
every episode we tell people please write in if you

(02:21):
have something you'd like to hear us talk about if
you have a question you can't quite figure the out
the answer to, just using Google send it to us
will break it down for you. And a lot of
people write us, right Daniel, And we get a couple
of a dozen a day. Right, Oh yeah, we got
a lot of nice emails, and some of them are
just appreciation people saying, hey, thanks for the show. We're
enjoying it. It is wonderful to read. And then people

(02:42):
send us their crackpot theories of the universe, like, hey,
I figured out dark matter, and you know quantum gravity,
and you know why airline food tastes so bad? All
with my one theory? Daniel, Actually that that one was
for me. What do you mean it's a crack poc?
Didn't you read it? I read all the theories that
people send us, sometimes everything carefully. Sometimes I skimmed through them,

(03:04):
I'll admit, but I do love reading them, and I
love getting people's emails, and mostly I love the emails
where people ask questions. When people say, here's something I
don't understand, something i'd love to figure out. Could you
please explain something to me? Have you ever got a
question that you had never thought about before? Oh? For sure. Yeah,
lots of questions people ask I had never heard before.
I never even thought about, like how to answer that

(03:26):
question before. Those are my favorite ones, and so Daniel
will answer your emails. But every once in a while
we have an episode where we answer your questions on
the podcast, and today is one of those episodes. Can
I tell you about one of the questions that we
got that totally blew my mind? Oh? Please? Somebody wrote
in and said, what if the sun is actually a

(03:48):
giant banana wrapped in hydrogen gas? Think about it? Think
about it? So I did that. I thought about it.
You know, Yeah, that's a fascinating idea. I've never thought
of that idea before. I've never answered that question before.
I don't know how to answer that question. So I thought,
maybe you're the banana expert. What would be preventing the

(04:08):
sun from being a banana wrapped in hydrogen? What would
exploding hydrogen? Well, I guess it'd be like a roasted banana, right,
because it's pretty hot there. So if you like, you know,
banana's flambay and then maybe they'd be good. But I'm
not sure how you would assemble all those hydrogen atoms
and fuse them in the right way, they get potassium
and all that stuff to make it into a banana.

(04:30):
So I think that was not a sincere question. Is
maybe actually a joke aimed at you. But technically is
it possible, like um, you know, just out of random
you know, fluctuations, somehow a banana forms for an instant
in time, So it could be true. Yes, And in fact,
if you believe in the multiverse, then there is some
universe in which the Sun spontaneously forms a giant space

(04:53):
banana in its core for you know, for an instant. Yes, yeah,
there you go, There you go, And that's the universe
I want to live in. We live This is an
aspirational podcast, folks. We talked about the universe we live
in, in in the universe we wish we lived in. That's right.
And the answer is always in the multiverse, anything is possible.
So technically you can be optimistic about anything, even space bananas.

(05:16):
That's right. I feel good, people, because it's all possible.
It's all possible. And so today on the podcast will
be tackling listener questions. Some of them are questions that
I get a lot, and I thought people might be
interested to hear the answer. Maybe other people have these questions.
Some of them are questions I had never heard before

(05:37):
and had to do a bit of research, So mix
it up a little bit. Yeah, and so today we
have some pretty exciting questions. We have a question about
a giant space gun. We have questions about photons, and
we have questions about why isn't everything exploding? Or is it?
Or is it? So we'll get into that today. So
buckle up, folks, it's going to be a crazy ride today.

(06:03):
So today's first question comes to us from Paul, and
Paul had a question about how is there a better
way to get to space? So here is Paul's question. Hi,
Daniel and Jorge. When I was a kid, I remember
reading in an old Guinness Book of World Record about
a gun in Barbados sticking fire sixteen inch shell weighing
about three hundred and thirty pounds to an altitude of

(06:26):
two hundred and fifteen thousand feet. Now that's less than
half of the lowest orbital altitude, but that was fifty
seven years ago. So ken a gun put an object
into orbit? And if so, why aren't we doing it?
It has to be cheaper than rockets. Thanks all right,
thank you Paul for that awesome question. This has the
distinction to be you're the only person to ever write

(06:47):
in asking that question. Really, it's not a it's not
it's not a branding question in the in the public's mind.
Apparently not. Not everybody is thinking about what they could
launch in the space using a really big gun. But
I love the end this question when he says, if
we can do it, why aren't we doing it all
the time? I mean, if this is within our grasp, man,
I would be like shooting banana pies into space all

(07:08):
the time. I think, I think. I think it's interesting
because that the corollary to his question was what he
was sort of really asking was isn't this cheaper than rockets?
Because really, it seems anything should be cheaper than rockets.
That's true. Rockets are not cheap, right, and so a
lot of people spend a lot of time thinking about
other ways to get stuff into space because rockets cost

(07:31):
millions and millions of dollars, right, Yeah, So the question
really is like, can you build a giant space gun?
And and that's how you put things into orbit. You
just shoot them out as super fast and up. I
guess vertically up is how you would do it, or
maybe not, and then that would just go off into space.
It wouldn't stop, would go into space and get into orbit.

(07:53):
That's the question, right, Yeah, that's the question. And let's
unpack it a little bit because there's a couple of
problems with this idea. First is just stting it up
high enough, right, Like can you shoot something from the
ground and make it all the way into space? Right?
And if you just want to leave the Earth, it's
a whole separate question of could you shoot something from
the ground and get it into orbit. But let's just
say you want to escape the Earth, you're on a mission,

(08:14):
you want to flow down into space, and you just
want to leave Earth's gravity, right, meaning shoot something with
a gun and not have it fall back down exactly. Yeah.
So the question is then how fast does it have
to go? Right? That's called the escape velocity of the Earth.
And the escape velocity of the Earth is really high,
like if you're gonna leave the surface and not get
any more pushes, right, Remember, a rocket gets continuous pushes.

(08:36):
It brings the push the pusher with it as it's
going up in the air, keeps getting more and more
pushes keeps accelerating. Yeah, so you're going to get all
that push in the very beginnings. You have to have
your maximum speed is immediately after you leave the gun
because you're gonna lose it pretty quickly. So then the
question is how fast you have to be going to
leave Earth's orbit? Okay, so like what's your the initial

(08:57):
velocity you need to have in order to keep going
on into space and not fall back down. That's right, exactly.
And on the surface of the Earth, the escape velossity
you'd need is about eleven kilometers per second, So in
one second you'd have to be going you have to
cover eleven kilometers, yeah, exactly. And you know, for scale,
that's like thirty three times the speed of sound, so

(09:20):
you know, like jets can go like Mack one, Mack two,
Mock three. This is mock thirty three. Wow. How much
is that in in miles per hour? In miles per hour,
I think that's like twenty five thousand miles per hour. Wow,
So that's a pretty big h I think I don't
think that my prius has enough digits. I think in
its digital readA. Yeah, I don't think the digits is

(09:42):
the problem with your prius. But that's exactly the problem.
Like number one is how do you get something going
that fast? Right? Like shooting stuff from a rifle doesn't
get anywhere near that speed. Um Like rifles can. They
can shoot a bullet fast in the speed of sound,
but not thirty three times the speed of sound. So
you need a really big gun. You need a lot
more explosive to get it up that speed. I say so,

(10:05):
even if you take a rifle and point it up
and you shoot, the bullet would eventually come back. Now,
do not do that, Yes, do not point a rifle
straight up, because that bullet will come right back down
at you or the guy standing next to you. This
happens every year in New Year's Eve. People fire guns
into the air and you think, like, where do you
think those bullets are go? And they're not going into space,
not into space, not into space. Then they're coming back

(10:26):
down and maybe hurting somebody. Um, So do not fire
bullets into the air. Um, they will not go to space.
And the other problem is say you did manage to
shoot a gun, or you know, you had some payload
and you shot it at this incredible speeds, had enough
energy well, it's not easy to go through the atmosphere
at that speed. What happens when you go through the
atmosphere at high speeds is friction from the air air resistance,

(10:49):
So you heat up, just like you know how spaceships
when they land, they have to come through the atmosphere,
and you know there's all that fire and burning and stuff.
That's because of the friction with the air. So this way,
you'd have so much speed, you'd have friction on the
way up. Oh so it's kind of like the re
entry problem, but in reverse exactly exactly, it's the re
entry problem on the way out. So if you build

(11:10):
like a three million dollar satellite and then want to
launch it into space when you don't want it's going
twenty five thousand miles per hour through the air because
it'll melt. What have you put shielding on it, you know,
like they do with the Shuttle and the landers. Yeah,
but the Shuttle doesn't re enter the atmosphere twenty five
thousand miles per hour, and that's on purpose, right. It
slows down a lot, and it does it very gradually,

(11:34):
so you need a lot of shielding. And then this
thing we get heavy and then it gets more expensive
and you're gonna get this thing. Plus it's shielding up
to twenty five thousand miles per hour. It's not easy.
Start to imagine that cold air can burn you to
a crisp right, Yeah, we'll imagine it's sandpaper. Right. Imagine
if somebody's gonna you're gonna do you're you have one
of those bananas slipping slides in your backyard, except instead

(11:55):
of slippery plastic, somebody puts sandpaper. Right, that's what it
would be like. Yeah, that is a horrific scenario, Daniel,
and trying to raise it from my mind there, right, Well,
that is why we don't do this. I mean there's
other problems too, right, but that's those are reasons number
one and two. Reason number three, this is why we
don't go on slip and slides of miles per hour,

(12:17):
saying it's everything feels like sandpaper miles per hour. That's
the point. Okay, So it's really hard to do just
to just to accelerate any kind of mass or object
up to twenty miles per hour, and also it would
burn up with air. So what are some of the
other problems. The other problem is getting into orbit. I mean,

(12:37):
what we talked about just now is getting it out
of Earth's atmosphere and out of Earth's gravitational pull. That's
actually harder than getting something in orbit because you have
to go higher. Right, So you might think, well, what
if we just wanted to go into like low Earth orbit,
we didn't want to actually leave Earth, And you think, well,
that might be easier. It's true, but you can't actually
shoot something from the ground into orbit. You cannot. You

(13:01):
cannot because remember you're shooting it, you give it one push, right,
You can't land in a stable orbit has a fixed trajectory,
and that trajectory includes intercepting the ground, so eventually it
will re intercept the ground. The way to get into
orbit is you fly up into there and then you
adjust your speed so you have the right speed and
direction to be in orbit. But there's no way to

(13:21):
get there from the ground without additional pushes once you're
up in the atmosphere. But you're saying, is it you
need minor adjustments once you get up there, or you
need like a lot of adjustment. No, it could be
fairly minor adjustments. So, like one scenario is you have
stuff on the ground and you shoot it up to
fairly low Earth orbit or just below using your massive
space gun that you built because you're a dictator. And

(13:44):
then you have something catch it something in low Earth orbit,
like catch it and then readjust it and shoot it
out into orbit, so that that kind of system might work.
But you can't just shoot something into orbit from the
ground because no, no trajectory that starts from the ground
will lead to a stable orbit. Like I know, if
you're a Superman, you could not put a football in orbit,
no matter how hard you try. That's right, that's right.

(14:05):
And and football and even Superman, if he threw a
football thousand miles per hour, it would melt right, like
unless it's a super football from his original planet or something. Yeah,
kryptonite football, that's right. But then he couldn't hold it, Yeah, exactly.
But that's just a detail. The thing is and and

(14:28):
and Paul mentioned this in his question, is that people
have tried this right, People have worked on this problem.
People have shot stuff pretty far up, so you know,
people are not daunted by the fact that this seems
impossible slash in practice. Well wait, didn't they do the math? Yeah,
you know, but these are dictators were talking about and
so sometimes you know they are not bothered by math.

(14:51):
You know they rules don't apply to them. These are
autocrats we're talking about. Math is just fake news, all right.
So that's a that's a pretty amazing thing to learn
that people have tried this, and they both people who
have tried it are are sort of pretty notorious. Yeah,
this is not a community of folks you want to
go to conferences with. Because the first person to really

(15:11):
do this significantly was Hitler. And Hitler had this cannon
called the V three cannon, and he could launch projectiles
and nine away. Again, the Germans were also working in
rocket technology, but this is just launching it from the
ground with no more pushes. Well, I was wondering when
our discussions would eventually devolve into talking about Hitler. So
everything on the internet gets compared to Hitler eventually, right there,

(15:34):
eventually here we are. Um, so he tried, he tried
to build giant cannon that would launch things into space. Yeah,
and I don't think his goal is to get into space.
I think his goals be able to like launch shells
to France from Germany, right, they want to like really
long distance bombardment. I think that was their goal. I

(15:54):
don't think they cared that much about shooting stuff into space.
Oh I see, just like, what's the biggest, uh missile
you can build? Yeah exactly. But it inspired another guy,
a guy named Gerald Bull, and he convinced some combination
of American and Canadian governments to give him a bunch
of money for something called Project Harp, which is basically,

(16:15):
build a huge gun and see if you can launch
stuff into space. And he didn't do a terrible job,
really he um. He came up with a pretty good name,
Project Card, Project card project, that's build a giant gun
and she takes into space. Project crazy dictators fund this,
yeah exactly. So how far did he get? Well, his
record still stands today. He shot a four hundred pound

(16:37):
object a hundred and ten miles above the Earth's surface,
so that counts like he got something into space. Now
it came back down. It didn't escape the Earth, right,
he shot it up and it came back down. But
that's the record today for in terms of launching something
from the ground and not giving it any more pushes
is a hundred and ten miles. How did he do it? What?
What did this gun look like? It just looks like

(16:58):
a really big gun. I mean, it's just like a
really big tube. I mean, there's not a whole lot
of cleverness here, right, It's just a big twoe but
a big explosive in it, you know. And the question
is can you get enough money to build a bigger,
bigger and bigger gun. And you know, some of these
things don't scale that easily, and the strength of the cylinder, etcetera.
You have to take into account. But basically it's just
spend more money, make it bigger. It's kind of like

(17:19):
particle physics, right, Spend more money, make a bigger accelerator.
I guess. The idea is that you sort of make
a like a rocket, but instead of having the propellant
in the fuel on the rocket on the missile, you
just keep it on the ground exactly, you know what
I mean. Like, that's what a giant gun solves, is
the idea that you don't need to bring the fuel
with you. You just exploit it all here on Earth

(17:40):
and then that sends you into space. That's right. The
problem with the rocket is you're not just lifting your payload,
you're lifting the fuel. You need to lift the fuel.
You need to lift the fuel, etcetera, etcetera, so it
gets by the time you're actually launching your fuel. So
this solves that problem by basically blowing up all the
fuel at once on the ground and seeing how far
it goes. Right. Um, but it does really solve the problem.

(18:00):
I think a more clever idea is like laser supported rockets,
like shoot the energy at it using beams basically so
you don't have to transport the fuel. You can send
it up from the ground as it goes wow, and
shoot it with lasers which would absorb the late and
they would absorb the laser and redirected to their propulsion.
Yeah exactly. I mean if I was a dictator and

(18:21):
I was funding crazy science projects getting stuff in the space,
I would definitely put some money in laser propulsion. You're like,
I'm not going to be one of those crazy dictators
and build giant gun. I'm just gonna be a dictator
that makes giant lasers. Yeah exactly. Um, But the story
doesn't end there. This guy Gerald Bull, he ran out
of money from the U. S. And Canada and didn't

(18:42):
finish his gun, but then he sold the idea. He
sold the idea to Saddam Hussein right to what Yes,
inspired by Hitler and then employed by Saddam Hussein, and
he said, look, I'm gonna build you the biggest gun ever.
And I guess that sales pitch worked. You know, he
must have a killer powerpoints slide deck, and he was
building the mother of all guns. Had three words, biggest

(19:05):
gun ever. And it's just like I wanted. Um. Yeah,
And so he was in the middle middle of building
the biggest gun ever. Like I think Saddam called it
the mother of all guns. And you know, Saddam probably
had the same idea that the Hitler had, like I
launched shells to Israel or launch shells to anywhere in

(19:25):
the Middle East or something nefarious. Um. But the Bull
was actually assassinated by we don't know who, um while
he was working on the project. So it didn't end
very well for the scientist. Wow. Yeah. And that's a
movie or a comic book right there, Yeah, exactly. Ben
Affleck is probably writting the screenplay as we speak. Yeah,
he's the CIA agent task with assassinating the Big Gun.

(19:51):
So Gerald Bull got a bunch of money from Iroq,
but he never matched his original high score that he
did on his own using Project Harp. So that stands today,
um so and miles is the record. I don't think
it's a practical way to launch things because remember the
kind of things we want to launch in a space
are usually delicate, right, tele communications, satellites or people, um,
and you've got to be pretty careful. So the rocket

(20:11):
approach is much more gentle because you never achieve as
high as speed. Interesting, so putting it, putting your delicate
object on top of like tons and tons of explosives
not recommended. That's the safest way to do it in
a rocket, Yes, that's that is the safest way to
do it. Gradually blow up all those explosives, right, don't
blow it up all at once on the ground. All right.

(20:33):
So that's the answer for Paul. Can you shoot stuff
into space using a gun? That's the question. The answer is, um,
technically yes, but it's but it's really hard, not a
good idea. And also you can't put it into orbit.
You need something else, that's right, Yeah, you need another stage,
I mean to catch it and redirect it or something
once you get up into orbit. Yeah. And also for Paul,

(20:55):
stop trying to make this gun because they're going to
assassinate you. Little little pro tip there from your podcast. Also,
funding from dictators doesn't always end out well. All right,
thank you, Paul. And so we have two more questions
about particle collisions and about dark energy. But first let's

(21:16):
take a quick break, all right, Daniel, So today we
are answering reader or more more like listener questions, questions

(21:36):
that are listeners out there sentence and so we answered
one about building a giant space gun. And so our
second question comes from Jacob, and Jacob has a question
about your job, right, Daniel's Hey, Daniel and Jorge. I
was just wondering how you guys isolate and manipulate the
particle or particles that you use for the large Hay

(21:58):
John collider. Thanks. That's a great question, right, He's asking
us like, how do you get one particle into the
collider and slam it into into the other particles and
how do you control them and manipulate them. It's a
great question, yeah, because, um, you know we know that
in a particle collider you're smashing particles together, and so
I guess, I guess the question is how do you

(22:20):
how could you possibly get two of these particles to
hit each other right on the head. That seems like
an impossible problem. It is an impossible problem. And that's
why we don't do that because that's basically impossible, right, Yeah,
you don't. You don't. You don't aim one particle to
hit another particle. No, that would be really hard. It's like,

(22:40):
imagine you're like throwing a water balloon from l A
and somebody else that throwing a water balloon from New York,
and you have to have them like meet somewhere over Kansas. Right,
that's basically impossible. But wait, wait, what if you used
a space gun? Totally will work. Absolutely, a water balloon
will survive miles per hour, no problem, a space a

(23:02):
potato gun, or a water builon gun. Yeah, now, the
it's a good question. That's impossible. And so it's also
very hard to just isolate individual particles. I mean, there's
a whole field of physics that works on that, atomic
molecular optics and stuff like that where they trap individual particles.
But that's really hard to do. Um And so what
we do instead is we don't send individual particles flying

(23:24):
against individual particles. We send a little gas of particles
like a bunch of particles against a bunch of particles coming.
The other direction is that the official physics name bunch
of a bunch. We actually use the word bunch, and
the reasons you use, yeah, exactly, bunches. You can look
it up at the lhc UM and um. The reasons
for that are is that even if the particles do

(23:46):
hit each other, the chances of a collision are not great,
like mostly they just you know, gently brush off each other.
So we want, actually, is a bunch of collisions happening
at the same time, so that you have a higher
chance of seeing something interesting. Plus it's just hard to
get it, so even if you so, even if you
could align one particle and aim it directly at another particles,

(24:07):
they might not collide at all. Yeah exactly. I mean
what do we really mean by a collision? A collision
is an interaction. We think of collision is the edges
of two things hitting each other, right, because we're used
to macroscopic objects. But in that case, you know the
zoom in macroscopically and think about what's happening when the
two edges touch. What happens really is that the particles

(24:28):
in one push away from the particles and the other.
That's an interaction, that's like a force. So now strip
that all away, and you have just two particles pushing
against each other. Right if they're going really really fast,
unless they hit immediately right on each other, then they'll
just whizz right by each other. Um And even still,
even if they go they go right on top of

(24:49):
each other. It's quantum mechanical, and so sometimes just nothing happens.
Most of the time, very little happens most of times.
The thing that happens is boring is that the two
particles just like slightly deflect. So what we want to
see is the rare stuff at times when two particles
smashed together make something weird and crazy nobody's ever seen before.
So to make that happen, we have to send a
bunch of particles in at once. But what's the difference

(25:10):
between them interacting and not interacting? Do you know what
I mean? Like, how do they decide? Or is it
just that they're more head on than others and or
that they have no other option but too smushed together
or what? There's a real quantum mechanical mystery there, because
you know, quantum mechanics tells us that you can repeat
the same experiment. You can like shoot two particles exactly
the same angle at each other the same way and

(25:32):
get two different outcomes. So you're asking, like what determines
whether they interact or they don't, or that the interaction
is a boring one or an interesting one. It's random,
Like there's somewhere in the universe a die gets rolled
every time these two particles collide. That determines like are
they going to bounce off each other gently? Are they
going to create a Higgs boson? Are they going to

(25:52):
create something else these folks have never seen and blow
their minds, or are they just gonna miss? And so
the strategy you guys use is to just go of
the numbers. You just throw a whole bunch of the particles.
You don't try to hit individual particles together. You just
throw a whole bunch of them together, and you hope
that you get some of them hitting each other exactly.
It's like you're looking for your first job, and so
you send out like thousands of resumets, right, you know,

(26:15):
just email one resume and then wait a week, Right,
you send out a lot of resumes and in our case,
like my faculty search when for a professorship, exactly right,
you go for the numbers um. And so in this case,
we have ten to the eleven protons and every bunch
that's a hundred billion protons in a little bunch, and

(26:37):
they're all in a really small space, right, yeah, exactly,
and we focus them using magnets. So the other part
of his question was like, how do you control them,
how you maintain them? Basically, use magnets because you can't,
like you can't have a little zip block bag which
just tend to the eleven protons in it, you know,
you carried around. So we have a magnetic bottle. Essentially,
we use magnets to keep these things moving in a circle. Right.

(26:59):
Magnets bend path of a charged particle. So we focus
that using magnets, and we get it down to um
two and a half micrometers. Right, So we we want
to we want as many protons as possible and as
small as an area as possible, because it's the greatest density,
the greatest possibility that something exciting is going to happen. So,
and you might think, well, that's a lot of particles, right,

(27:20):
it is, but it's also a small number right, like
you know UM a mole, which is you know the
atomic unit as UM you know is Avogadre's numbers like
tend to the twenty three particles, right, And a really
really good vacuum has tended to twelve particles in it
um per cubic meter. So tend to eleven particles is
a lot if you just count them. But it's also

(27:41):
it's very diffuse, right, it's not. It's not like this
is a very dense thing. This this this bunch of
protons and you you don't just send one bunch at
a time, You send a whole bunch of bunches at
each other. That's right. It's organized like a Swiss clock,
which makes sense because it's a huge circle in in
in Switzerland. Geneva up, and we have more than two

(28:02):
thousand bunches in the accelerator at all times, and you know,
the thing is like tens of kilometers around, and so
they're all synchronized, and so every twenty five nanoseconds, one
bunch hits another bunch, and then nanoseconds later, another bunch
is coming down the line and they collide. And so
it's just like all day, all night, every five nanoseconds,

(28:22):
we collide one bunch of protons against another bunch of protons.
It's like a ferris wheel, but instead of each pod,
you have twenty eight hundred bunches just going around and around. Yeah,
first world makes it sound like it's all fun, enjoy,
but these guys are slamming into each other. It's uh,
it's like an assembly line. You know, they're just coming
down the line and getting smushed into each other. Um.

(28:44):
And also you can reuse the bunches, Like the bunches
passed through each other, some tiny fraction that maybe interact,
but most of them are untouched, so you can send
them through again, so they go through each other and
then they just come back around again. Yeah, exactly, you
don't discard them. Yes, when we come out, it's called
to fill. We fill the accelerator. We put all these
bunches and we get them going. We slam into each

(29:04):
other and then you know, eventually you lose some of
them because you can't have perfect containment um and so
the the effective number of collisions you're getting starts to drop.
So then you empty it and you refill it start again.
All right, Well, so that answers Jacob's question the he
has how do we control how do you control the
particles in the collider, and how do you get like

(29:25):
single particles who hit each other? And the answer is
using a bunch of bunches. Yeah, exactly. So we don't
throw one water balloon at another water balloon. We throw
like a hundred billion water balloons at a hundred billion
water balloons, and then we have it's so so much fun.
We just get to watch what happens. We like, you know,
create explosions and watch them all day long. Best job

(29:46):
in the world. Okay, here's here. Here's a question. Then
for me, um, what if you aimed this collider into space,
would you get the proteins up into space into proteins
are definitely moving fast and to escape Earth velocity, but
the atmosphere would stop them because they would slam into
other particles and they would, you know, very quickly, so

(30:08):
one proton would hit another proton, and then those two
protons would share the original protons energy to have two
particles at half the energy, and then you have four
particles at accord of the energy, and eventually you have
a trillion particles at a trillion the energy. But some
of them might make it out into space, right, Yeah,
some of them might bleed out over the edge of
the atmosphere. But you wouldn't have like you know, you're
imagining like Superman rocketing from the surface of the Earth triumphantly,

(30:31):
arm raised, Right, that's not what would happen. You just
gently heat the atmosphere, basically. Yeah, but some of them
might leak out into space, Yeah, exactly. Some of them
might leak into space, but not into Earth orbit. Got it,
Got it? All right, Jacob. Hope that answered your question,
and so we'll we have one more question about the
exploding universe, but before we get to it, let's take

(30:53):
a quick break, all right, Today we're answering listener questions
questions from you, the listeners of this podcast, and so
our third question of the day for this episode comes

(31:15):
to us from someone in Dallas. Hi, Daniel and Jrge.
This is Tom from Dallas. I love the show and
always leads me to more questions. And one thing that
I've been really grappling with is the expansion of the universe. Right, So,
if the entire universe is expanding faster than the speed
of light because of dark energy, and it's not expanding

(31:36):
from a central point, but rather from all points in
spacetime simultaneously. That wouldn't everything just kind of be exploding
around us? How do I even exist? If I'm imploding
at faster than the speed of light? I don't feel
like I'm imploding Anyways, Guys, I really appreciate you taking
my question, and I really enjoy the show. Thanks for

(31:57):
everything you do. Yeah, I love that question. Um, I
love he had his mind blown. You know that he's
thinking about this cosmic sized questions he wants to understand.
And that's my favorite thing is when you can get
you can give people a piece of information that they
didn't know about the universe, and then they try to
fit it into their brain. They're like, Okay, if that's
crazy thing you just said is true, then why doesn't

(32:18):
this happen? Why doesn't that happen? And that's physics, right,
that's like how do I reconcile this thing with all
the things I know? And so I love seeing people
do that. They're basically being physicists. Yeah, I feel like
we're doing our job. If it makes people think and
have their own questions, that's right. Not if we're making
people worried that they're exploding. But you know, it's a
good it's a good question to ask. They are their

(32:41):
minds are exploding, their mental consciousness, their connection to the universe. Yeah, yeah, exactly,
And it's a great question. And I think the question
comes from hearing that dark energy is expanding the universe, right,
stretching it out. Yeah, because we had an episode where
the tide of the podcast episode was is the universe exploding?

(33:03):
And we said at the end that yes, the verse
that's right, the universe is exploding. And um, I think
a lot of people are tempted to think about that
like an explosion which has a center. Right, you blow
up a bomb, things fly out from the center, and
so you imagine, oh, the expansion is happening from the center,
things are getting pushed out. But we we made the
point in that episode, which is true, that that's not

(33:25):
the way it's happening. That dark energy expands all of space.
So every point in space is being affected by dark energy.
New space is being created all the time, everywhere. Right,
It's like the dark energy is not just acting in
the center of the universe or at the end. It's
like all the way through there's just a little bit
of dark energy that's pushing everything apart. That's right. And

(33:47):
it also it sounds really violent because we say that
dark energy is you know, almost three fourth of the
energy of the universe is dark energy, So it sounds
like maw and this must be a really powerful force.
It's pushing galaxy is apart, and galaxies have hundreds of
billions of stars, So what could possibly have the energy
to push those apart? And if that's applying to me too,

(34:08):
if you could push galaxies apart, why isn't just just
shred me like tissue paper? Right? I think that's the
essence of the question. Yeah, And in particular, he said
that if we are if the universe is expanding faster
than the speed of light, how is it that we
don't feel it right now? Like? Why why isn't my
um hand moving away from my other hand at the

(34:28):
speed of light? If the whole universe is expanding faster
than the speed of light. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. Um Well,
the answer, the thing to understand and to grapple with
this question is that dark energy is the most powerful
thing in the universe in that it has the biggest
slice of the energy budget. But remember the dark energy
is everywhere, right, Most of the stuff in the universe

(34:49):
is not everywhere, like the matter in the universe is
clumped up into stars and galaxies and it's in most
of space doesn't have matter in it. Right. Dark energy
doesn't work like that dark energy. She's uniform. It's spread
equally everywhere, So it doesn't have to be very powerful
to add up to a really, really really big number
because most of the places where there's nothing, there's dark energy.

(35:12):
Do we know that for sure that dark energy is
evenly spread out, it's not at all clumped together or
in in you know, imperceptible clumps. That's right. We know
very little about dark energy, but that's the model that
fits the data. That dark energy is expanding the universe everywhere.
And we again, we don't know what dark energy is, right.
It's really just a description to the fact that the
universe is expanding. But it's consistent with something which is

(35:34):
a property of space, meaning that it's uniform. It's everywhere,
you know, whether you're in the middle of a star
or you know, in the middle of one of our listeners,
or in the middle of one of these huge voids
in the in the super supercluster sheets and bubbles. Right,
it's everywhere, Right, it's like a it's like an even
glow that the universe has exactly, And because it's everywhere,

(35:55):
it's not really very strong anywhere. Okay, So, yes, it's
creating new space between our galaxy and other galaxies, but
there's a lot of space there, so it adds up. Right,
it can have a big effect, but between like your
hand and the your other hand, there's not a lot
of space. So it is creating new space there, but
it's very weak compared to the other forces at play,

(36:18):
namely the chemical bonds holding your body together. Right. The
reason that you don't fall apart is that the stuff
in your body is holding onto the other stuff in
your body, and those bonds are more powerful than dark energy. Right.
But you know, I think Tom was maybe wondering how
it can be that the universe is expanding faster than
the speed of light, but yet you don't feel it here. Yeah,

(36:39):
Well you don't feel it here because it's a very
small effect here, right, Like it's it's creating a very
small amount of space per space, and that adds up
to making things, to creating space faster than light can travel. Right, Like,
imagine all the space between here and another galaxy. So
every piece of that space increases by one per cent,

(37:00):
and then another one percent, and another one percent, and
it's increasing at a rate that that it's faster than
light can go through it. Remember, nothing can go faster
than light through space, but there's no limit to how
fast you can create space. So all those little bits
of space between us and that other galaxy are working
hard enough to create more space than light can fly through.

(37:21):
I was thinking maybe a good analogy was that, you know,
if you grab a rubber band or a strip of
rubber band and you stretch it. You know, the ends
of the rubber band can be moving really fast relative
to each other, but if you're somewhere in the rubber band,
you wouldn't feel the stretch that violently. Yeah, I think

(37:41):
that works, except you know, we don't know if the
universe has an edge, right, But if you just pick
two points, right, like two galaxies, you can think of
them as the edges of the rubber band, and uh,
and all the space between them is like the rubber
bandy part of the rubber band, Then yeah, I think
that works, right, because the distance between the two alexis
is the sum of all the increasing distances um and

(38:04):
the little bits of space in between. Right, yeah, yeah,
So dark energy is there, is out there, it's everywhere
in the universe. It's also inside you. And the reason
that like isn't ripping you away from the Earth is that,
like the force of gravity is strong enough to keep
you on Earth. The force of gravity, even though it's
so weak, is stronger than dark energy is right here, right,
Dark energy, remember, is very weak on a local scale,

(38:26):
but only only great when it adds up over huge
pieces of space. So you're like you're in one point
of the rubber band and the ground the ribband is
stretching a little bit, but you're keeping yourself together stronger
than the rubber band is stretching you at that little
point in the band exactly right, Like if you're you know,
you're it's a windy day and somebody's getting blown, but

(38:47):
they can grab onto something, right, You can grab onto
a pole or to your friend or something. You can
overcome the power of the wind just by holding on. Right,
It's the same thing. Dark energy is just like wind,
expanding everything in space, but it's it's a bit of
a gentle ease, and so it doesn't take that much
of a force to overcome it. And that's why, for example,
our galaxy is not getting torn apart, right, the space
between galaxies is increasing. Why isn't our galaxy getting shredded?

(39:10):
The reason is gravity. There's enough gravity in our galaxy
to hold itself together to battle dark energy. We don't
know how long that's gonna that's gonna be the case
because dark energy turned on like five billion years ago
and started expanding the universe. We don't know why. We
don't know how long it's going to keep going. We
don't know if it's going to increase the intensity of

(39:31):
the expansion or stop and turn around. We don't really know.
So we'll forever be weaker than you know, local gravity
and local chemical bonds, and we don't know. It could
be in the future it's much more powerful and it
shreds everything, right, or it could turn off and get
board and go do something else. Looking forward to that
all right, So Tom asked, why isn't dark energy exploding everything,

(39:53):
even the things around is? And the answer is that
it is. It is exploding everything. That's right, You've and you,
Tom Boom, we just literally blew your mind. But we
use the word exploding and the word faster than the
speed of light kind of when a universe skill, right, like,
on a universe scale, it's sort of exploding. And the

(40:13):
ends of the university, if there are ends, or two
extreme ends of the universe, are maybe moving faster than
the speed of light relative to each other. But on
like a local, little tiny, hey my house scale, it's
not such an incredible effect. Right, Well, those ends are
not moving faster than speed of light relative to each other,
but space is being created between them faster than light

(40:36):
can move through it, which is a slightly technical difference
in the way you say it, but yeah, exactly, yeah, okay, alright, cool.
So those are three awesome questions, mostly from the Southern
United States. That's right, randomly selected, but this time they
mostly ended up from the southern US. But we get

(40:57):
questions from all over the world. So if you're a
listener from a far flung place, please send us your questions,
or if you just have a burning question about something
in the universe and you'd like us to explain it,
please write it in. I love getting your emails. Yeah,
so please send them into questions at Daniel and Jorge
dot com. Well, thanks for listening. We hope you guys
enjoyed that. Tune in next time, and if you're a

(41:17):
dictator of a country with a billion dollar signs budget,
consider investing it in a podcast or a giant space
gun using rubber bands to fly protons into outer space.
There you go, give this man some money that I
will agree with. See you next time. If you still

(41:44):
have a question after listening to all these explanations, please
drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you.
You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at
Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or email us at
Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening,
and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is
a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast from

(42:07):
my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio, a Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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