The Stuff You Should Know Doin’ Science Playlist: How Big Bang Theory Works, with Neil deGrasse Tyson

There are a number of theories for how the universe evolved but none are more widely accepted than the Big Bang theory. Learn about the mind-boggling details of the early universe and hear Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson talk about what it will take for us to know its origins.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Yes, indeed you read that right, if you made it
all the way to the end of the very lengthy
title of this Science Playlist episode. We got Neil deGrasse
Tyson to sit in for an interview with us and
it was pretty boss. And a couple years later he
was nice enough to have me come on Star Talk
to talk about my End of the World series. He
had this rapid fire question segment that he does every time,

(00:23):
and he wondered aloud at some point why it was
going so slow, and the secret answer was that my
tangents were derailing the rapid fire part at any rate.
Even without NDT, this episode is pretty great. As everyone knows,
any talk about the origin of time and space is cosmologorrific,
So I hope you feel that way about this episode, too.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
Welcome to you stuff you should know from HowStuffWorks dot com.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Chipper, Josh Clark.
There's Chipper Charles Pryant. Oh, that's your new nickname, Chipper
Charles yep. Yeah. And then there's that Jerry. She's not Chipper,
she is actually Chipper.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
Today, I'm not Chipper, I'm Crumpy because this man, oh man,
my head has already melted.

Speaker 1 (01:13):
You guys should see the vein in Chuck's forehead.

Speaker 3 (01:15):
It is protruding.

Speaker 2 (01:17):
Well, we'll do our best, of.

Speaker 1 (01:19):
Course, due we're not astrophysicists, but we do have an
astrophysicist coming on as a guest at the end of
the episode, don't we.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
Yes, my friend, you interviewed doctor Neil deGrasse Tyson, or
as I like to call him in d T.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
Sure, that's what I call him to h in d T.
He's Dyna Mike.

Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yeah, but uh, I was unable to be on the
interview for various tooth related reasons, so you took it
upon yourself. And I think an interview like that it's
probably just better for one person. Anyway. It gets a
little clumsy if two people that don't know anything about
astrophysics are trying to glean information.

Speaker 1 (01:56):
Oh here's my question.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
Yeah, right, would you eat for breakfast? Doctor?

Speaker 1 (02:02):
But yeah, it was very kind of him to come on,
and we want to thank our friends at the Fox
Theater where he's going to be on April twentieth. You're
in Atlanta. That's right for hooking that up. So thanks
to everybody who made that happen. Because it's a great interviews.
You guys will hear at the end of this episode.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
Yeah, I loved listening to it, and I'm gonna go
ahead and say my two favorite parts are probably one
that won't make it in When you said that you're
happy to plug the Fox Theater show and he was like,
don't bother, it's going to be sold out.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
Yeah, I like that too.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
And then at the end when you thanked him for
advancing our understanding of this light years and he was like,
that's not nearly enough. Yeah, he's like a light years
not very far.

Speaker 3 (02:39):
Thanks.

Speaker 1 (02:39):
Yeah, so I changed the parsex. He's like, you're getting closer.

Speaker 4 (02:42):
I know.

Speaker 2 (02:43):
It was very funny. Actually, I hope you leave that
part in there. I hope so.

Speaker 1 (02:46):
And later on I immediately regretted not saying, well, you
advanced our show billions and billions of light years.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
He would have appreciated that, Yeah, you would have.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
And I didn't do it. Yeah, didn't. I wasn't sharp enough.

Speaker 2 (02:58):
It was a good interview, though, so feel free to
skip right ahead to that.

Speaker 1 (03:03):
But we'll lay here and go to sleep. So we're
talking about the Big Bang theory and not the TV show.
So settle Down nerds.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
I think he was on that show though, wudn't he
I'm sure, yeah, sure, yeah, he made an appearance.

Speaker 1 (03:17):
I think all you have to do is say, like,
you will further science if you appear on this. He's like,
I'll do it.

Speaker 2 (03:22):
Yeah. I've never seen one episode of that show.

Speaker 1 (03:26):
I guess I've maybe seen some here or there. It's
it's i think, literally the most popular show in the world,
or it was like last season or the season before.
Like it's just taken off like a rocket. And hats
off to them too, because they like mix actual science
and science jokes and all that stuff. It's it's like
smartening up the world.

Speaker 2 (03:47):
Well, I'll tell you one quote I got from mister Tyson,
doctor Tyson, from the Internet, and it was actually heard
him say it, so I know it was a real quote.
He said that, you know, people ask do you believe
in the Big Bang theory? And only the way that
he can. He was like, well, it's not a matter
of believing, he said, I'd only believe in things that

(04:08):
are evidence based. And he said the question should be
that you posit to people, of all the data and
evidence out there, what theory is best supported, and he
said it's the Big Bang theory.

Speaker 1 (04:19):
Sure, right, And our colleague Jonathan Strickland who wrote the
article that this is based on, and kudos to that
cat because he took some really really difficult concepts and
explained it really well.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
He explained it in a way that I came close
to understand.

Speaker 1 (04:37):
But he makes that same point too, that not only
is the Big Bang theory of theory which obviously cannot
be proven can only be disproven, but that there are
other competing theories out there too, which we'll talk about later. Sure,
but that for the most part it has the most
observational evidence backing it up, including the recent confirmation of

(04:57):
gravitational waves which made a huge st and that as
a result, it's the most widely subscribed to theory among
scientists as describing the early universe, and that's a big thing.
There's a big distinction about that. A lot of people
think that the Big Bang describes the formation of the universe.

Speaker 2 (05:16):
Not true.

Speaker 1 (05:16):
No, the Big Bang describes the time starting very soon
after the universe formed, but it does not go back
into where the origin of the universe came from what
came before it, And it actually doesn't even go all
the way back to that point where everything started. It

(05:37):
just can't because science falls apart. As we'll see the
further you try to go back in time because you know,
time ceases to exist at that point.

Speaker 2 (05:45):
Yeah, if the universe were a human being, it's the
big Bang theory sort of describes the point where the
sperm and the egg meet up.

Speaker 1 (05:55):
It describes the time a trillionth of a trillionth of
a second after they met up.

Speaker 2 (06:01):
What about that, Yeah, which is you know, it's close.
It's a pretty great time, it is.

Speaker 1 (06:07):
So another misconception, Chuck, is that the Big Bang was
an explosion, and that's not that's not correct.

Speaker 2 (06:15):
No. In fact, a man named Sir Fred Hoyle is
the one who gave it a name almost, well not almost.
He gave it to it in jest as sort of
an insult because he was a believer. I don't know
if he always was, but he was a believer at
the time in the steady state theory. Sure, and it
was like, yeah, the explosion, this big bang, but it's

(06:35):
not an explosion at all, So, Chuck, it's a rapid expansion.

Speaker 1 (06:40):
It wasn't the best way to think of it, as
like this so like an explosion. Right, Let's say you
have a planet and that planet is actually the universe,
and it's just floating there in space, and Darth Vader
shoots it with the Death Start and he goes right,
and it goes everywhere, starts scattering everywhere, but it's scattering
within the boundaries the confines the space as we understand it.
Sure that that would be the popular conception of what

(07:02):
the Big Bang represents, not at all. What the Big
Bang actually says is that space itself inflated. Yeah, it expanded,
and that all the stuff that was in it was
in this very tightly wound, dense, incredibly hot core that

(07:22):
was a singularity basically that expanded into the universe. That's
as big as we understand it now.

Speaker 2 (07:29):
Yeah, something that was so tiny and hot, it had
an infinite amount of density because everything we know was
crammed in. You know what it's like, It's like if
Neil deGrasse Tyson listens to this, he's going to love this. Okay.
You know the little pellets that you would get with
your fireworks, a little black pellet, uh huh, and then
you light it a smoke snake and then it snakes

(07:51):
out to like, you know, several feet, right, That's that's
like it, except if that pellet were like thousands and
thousands and thousands of fraction of the size of ahead
of a pin.

Speaker 3 (08:01):
Right.

Speaker 1 (08:02):
I think that's a great analogy.

Speaker 2 (08:03):
And I'm just gonna leave the room, right, and I'll
come back in forty minutes.

Speaker 1 (08:08):
But even still, Chuck, take that analogy, right, when you
imagine that, you imagine that snake growing that you on
a sidewalk and maybe there's kind of grass in your
view and it's at night, and there's a car park
there because you're outside, right, Well, sure, that's where our
brain wants to take us. Yeah, we want to confine
what we know within the boundaries of our universe. What

(08:30):
we're talking about is the universe itself growing, yeah, expanding
in nothingness.

Speaker 2 (08:37):
Yeah. And he points out in the interview. I don't
want to spoil it, but he kind of blows my
mind when he starts talking about like this goes beyond
what our human senses can understand, right, and sight and
sound like forget about it.

Speaker 1 (08:49):
Yeah, And that's how nobody's gonna be able to pin
anything on us, because we'll be like, well, we just
can't comprehend that. So how could you blame us for
getting it wrong?

Speaker 2 (08:57):
Yeah, so chuck, Now I'm gonna leave the room, okay,
and you need what a half an hour?

Speaker 1 (09:04):
It may take a little longer than that.

Speaker 2 (09:06):
Now I get parts of it, So I'll just chime
in when I feel confident.

Speaker 1 (09:09):
There's a there's a line right that Strickland had in here.
It was he says that the earliest moments of the
Big Bang, all of the matter, energy and space we
could observe was compressed to an area of zero volume
and infinite density. Doesn't that sound like the line from
a religious text or something like that? Isn't it just
like right there on that border between like science and

(09:32):
religion basically.

Speaker 2 (09:33):
Yeah. Like, and now take this drug, and everyone take
their clothes off and follow me right into the grand.

Speaker 1 (09:37):
Room, and we'll understand what I'm talking about.

Speaker 2 (09:40):
Yeah. And you know what, when Strickland and scientists and
cosmologists talk about that, that is what is known as
a singularity, right, that thing with zero volume and infinite density.

Speaker 5 (09:52):
Right, So.

Speaker 1 (09:54):
I think it bears repeating at least one more time.
What we're talking about is all of the matter, all
of the energy, all of the heat, all the radiation,
everything in the universe that is here or ever was
here over the last thirteen point roughly seven to nine
billion years, was in a point that was twenty three

(10:19):
orders of magnitude smaller than the diameter of an atom.

Speaker 2 (10:23):
You almost you just caught yourself goanting to say, it's
like a little ball. But there's not even circularism.

Speaker 1 (10:29):
Right, Yeah, is that a word?

Speaker 2 (10:30):
Yes, there was nothing circular.

Speaker 1 (10:32):
And so at this time, at this point, we know
that it was very, very hot. Sure makes sense, mind
bogglingly hot, Like you can't even think of all the
zeros associated with the degrees of kelvin or fahrenheit or celsius. Right,
And it was incredibly dense. And then something happened. We
don't know what that was. A science simply isn't equipped

(10:54):
to explain it or understand it or detect it. Something
happened to make this incredibly dense ball or whatever it was.

Speaker 2 (11:03):
Yeah, there was no ball expand yes, and it was
not like the smoke snake. It wasn't a child with
a lighter.

Speaker 1 (11:12):
You don't know that. Neil de grass Tyson doesn't know that.
Nobody knows that.

Speaker 2 (11:17):
So this expanding happened really really really fast, and we'll
talk later about just those first few seconds afterward, like
that's how fast we're talking.

Speaker 1 (11:28):
Well, few like trillionths of a second is how they
break it down, Like this, so much happened in that
first literally the first second of the origin of the universe. Yeah,
that that there are different ages and epochs that happened
in like trillions of a second.

Speaker 2 (11:46):
Yeah, it's really mind blowing. So as things expanded though
in those first few seconds, and today things are still expanding, right,
Things are expanding and things are cooling down even as
we speak. Literally every second that we're on the Earth,
we're expanding, and well not us, but the universe is
expanding and cooling right exactly.

Speaker 1 (12:06):
And as a matter of fact, from what I understand,
our region of the universe, which is something like ninety
billion light years across, is no longer expanding, but other
parts of the universe are expanding. And there's this really
great article about cosmology and where it stands right now.
It's in aon not cosmetology, no cosmology, Yes, and it

(12:31):
was written by a guy named Ross Anderson, and I
think it's called in the beginning and it's incredibly well written,
but he makes a really great analogy. He says that
that ninety billion light year across portion of the universe
that we inhabit, that we consider our own, is but
a small section of one tiny bubble that floats along

(12:53):
on a frothy sea whose proportions defy comprehension, and that neat. Yeah,
that's just our section of the universe, right, that's our
little neighborhood. So the universe is unknowably large. We sound
like HP Lovecraft here describing this stuff. Yeah, and still
some parts of it are expanding. And apparently in the

(13:15):
early universe, when it was a singularity, the four forces,
the four fundamental forces.

Speaker 2 (13:21):
The Dark Side. Wait, yeah, I thought you were going
I thought you meant the Star Wars universe. I was, oh, okay, Yeah,
So the force the Dark Side, Middi, Chlorians.

Speaker 1 (13:31):
And Mark Hamill's hair, Yeah, prequels the four basic forces,
as everyone knows, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force,
and gravity. Right, And that that singularity, before the universe
expanded began to expand, all of them were coupled together
into a single unified.

Speaker 2 (13:50):
Force, which we don't understand how no, we.

Speaker 1 (13:53):
Don't, And as a matter of fact, trying to get
them back together is one of the great pursuits of
physics because if we can figuregure out how they were
all unified, we can start to understand the science we need,
the paradigm, we need to understand the origins of the universe,
but we just can't figure out how to do it right.

Speaker 2 (14:10):
Yeah. One thing that kind of blows my mind with
this is when you know, we get to the stuff
later on about does it defy other laws of physics
and stuff? Like basically every answer is like the further
you travel back toward that singularity, the less all these
rules that we think we understand apply right falls apart. Yeah,
so just you know, we will probably never understand this stuff. Yeah,

(14:33):
you know that very singular moment.

Speaker 1 (14:37):
Yeah, I don't know. I disagree. I think I disagree. Yeah,
I think that we are maybe a century or two
away from understanding it.

Speaker 2 (14:45):
Well, you just clearly pulled that out of your hat.

Speaker 1 (14:47):
Well I totally did. Okay, but we've made.

Speaker 2 (14:50):
Another one hundred and twenty six years.

Speaker 1 (14:51):
Well, no, we've made some incredibly huge strides in the
last like one hundred and fifty two hundred years in
our understanding thus far. Right, So I think that's not
a bad guess, right, So.

Speaker 2 (15:02):
Be a string theorist right to marry all these Uh.

Speaker 1 (15:05):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (15:06):
Probably I don't know.

Speaker 1 (15:07):
And that's what NDT said, that's what we call him, now, Yeah,
that's what he said. He was like, who knows. It
could be string theory. Maybe someone will be able to
come up with a unified theory or what's called the
theory of everything that unifies the four fundamental forces back
into their their single version of a force man. Or
maybe we just don't understand quantum physics enough quite yet. Yeah,

(15:29):
and when we figure that out a little more, that
will unlock some keys for us.

Speaker 2 (15:34):
Unbelievable.

Speaker 1 (15:35):
So chuck, before we get into how we started to
come to understand the Big Bang and the origin of
the universe, let's take a break real quick.

Speaker 2 (15:43):
All right, I'm gonna go wipe my brow.

Speaker 3 (15:46):
You're doing great, softly, jawsh.

Speaker 2 (16:07):
So, all right, I sort of get this part. So
the history part, I'm gonna talk a little bit about it.
And this makes a lot of sense to me. Go
back in time. Let's get in the way back machine.
Oh yes, let's boy, it just feel so safe and

(16:30):
comfortable in here.

Speaker 1 (16:32):
Thinks of kerosene.

Speaker 2 (16:33):
It does, weirdly. It's eighteen hundreds and astronomers started using
something called a spectroscope, which is pretty nifty. We've talked
about light waves in here before. A spectroscope is something
that divides that light spectrum up into the wavelengths blue
on the left, red on the right, and as you
go further toward the red, the wavelengths grow longer. So

(16:55):
that's part one right, right, that was spec yes, the
light waves right.

Speaker 1 (17:02):
And around the same time, a guy named Christian Doppler
was tinkering with the frequency of sound waves. Right. He
was studying those because.

Speaker 2 (17:12):
He's a smart guy, he is. And he said, you
know what, it's weird that when I sit by a train,
it sounds different as it goes by me, approaches, then
goes by me and goes further away from me.

Speaker 1 (17:22):
Right, it sounds different than that doesn't really make any sense.

Speaker 2 (17:25):
Yeah, And whereas most people would just eat their figgy
pudding and go about their day, he wanted to try
and explain it.

Speaker 1 (17:31):
He was like anybody else would be like this new
Charles Dickens book is top notch.

Speaker 2 (17:37):
So he said, you know what, as this noise approaches you,
the sound waves it generates compress, It's going to change
that frequency, or at least how you perceive it in
a different pitch. So as it moves away from you,
those waves are going to stretch, that pitch goes down.
And I'm going to name this effect after myself.

Speaker 1 (17:53):
Right, Well, I'll let my wife do it so I
don't look like a jerk.

Speaker 2 (17:58):
Right. So basically, you marry these two things's light wavelengths
in the Doppler effect, and it sort of let us
down this path to where we could understand the Big
Bang theory.

Speaker 5 (18:08):
Right.

Speaker 1 (18:08):
It would indicate that something, something that was emitting light
out there in the universe whose light moved toward the
red end of the spectrum would be emitting longer wavelengths,
which would suggest, based on Christian Doppler's findings, that it
was moving away, right.

Speaker 2 (18:27):
Yeah, And they found that. They said, look at these stars,
some of the light is falling into this right hand side,
and does that mean it's moving away and it's getting faster, right,
and that it wants to get away from us.

Speaker 1 (18:41):
That's where Edwin Hubble came in. He basically said, yeah,
this is really weird, guys, because some of these stars
appear to have a velocity that's proportional to its distance
from the Earth. Like there seems to be some sort
of rhyme or reason here to it. And it suggested
to Hubble and later on to everybody else, including Einstein,
as we'll see that the universe itself was expanding, and

(19:05):
this is where we came to the genuine origin of
the Big Bang theory, the idea that the universe was
expanding and at a constant.

Speaker 2 (19:16):
Rate too, right, yes, is that the idea is that
the Hubble constant?

Speaker 1 (19:20):
No, no, no, the the Hubble constant is the proportion between,
or the relationship between how fast something is moving away
from us to its distance from us.

Speaker 2 (19:32):
Well, yeah, I guess it is so constant rate.

Speaker 1 (19:36):
And actually no, the universe appears to be expanding more quickly.

Speaker 2 (19:39):
Than it was before. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:40):
Yeah, yeah, so it's increasing, which is that's what makes.

Speaker 2 (19:43):
A lot of people really ner relationship. Yeah, makes sense.

Speaker 1 (19:46):
Yeah, the Hubble constant has to do not necessarily with
the inflation of universe itself or the expansion universe itself,
but that how far or how fast, uh say, a
star is moving away from us, and the further away
from us it is, it appears to be moving faster
than others that are closer.

Speaker 2 (20:03):
Yeah, and we should point out you said inflation and
or expansion, And apparently if you're an insider, huh, if
you're a scientist, you'd probably say inflation.

Speaker 5 (20:12):
Sure.

Speaker 1 (20:12):
So expansion is the basis of the Big Bang theory.
It's the idea that the universe has expanded over time,
so that by logic, since time is one of the
four dimensions that we live in, right, You've got the
three dimensions plus time, so therefore space time describes the
fabric of the universe and the reality we live in. Right,

(20:33):
So by logic of that, if you went backward in time,
the universe would be smaller and smaller and smaller. And
the more they started looking into it, the more their
minds started popping as they realized, like, Wow, this thing
was really really small ones, and that's the basis of it.
Inflation theory comes in and suggests how that happened, how

(20:54):
that expansion happened, and it fills in a lot of
blanks that we'll also talk about.

Speaker 2 (20:58):
Yeah, so you mentioned Einstein earlier, he's a noted smart guy. Yeah,
and he actually had some issues because it conflicted somewhat
with his general relativity theories, because he subscribed to his
own theory that the universal static, it's not expanding, right.

Speaker 1 (21:16):
I think like he was like a member of the
there's a way of viewing the universe that like it
was always this way, it was always spread out this way, right,
it wasn't getting bigger, that's nuts. And so he figured
that his general theory of relativity would prove this, and
actually he was extremely surprised to find that his own
general theory of relativity actually said, no, the universe is

(21:37):
either expanding or contracting. It's certainly not steady. And then
Edwin Hubble came along and he had his findings in
Einstein said, you know what, I was wrong.

Speaker 2 (21:46):
Yeah, that's big enough of man to admit it.

Speaker 1 (21:48):
Yeah, that's the kind of guy I am.

Speaker 2 (21:50):
And one day people are going to keep my brain
in a jar in a barn.

Speaker 1 (21:53):
And slice it up. It's going to go on a
car trip. That was a good episode we did.

Speaker 2 (21:57):
Too, Yeah did we do one on that?

Speaker 1 (21:58):
Oh yeah, on its own Einstein's brain.

Speaker 2 (22:00):
Oh yeah, that's right, boy. Those were the good old.

Speaker 1 (22:02):
Days Einstein's Brain episodes.

Speaker 2 (22:05):
Sure, yeah, all right, so let's talk about some of
the predictions that rose from the theory that the universe
is expanding. One is, and Strickland says the universe is
homogeneous and isotropic, which is a fancy way of saying
it's made up of the same materials in completely uniform.

Speaker 5 (22:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (22:26):
Here is one of the first times we run into
something where you're like, what are you talking about. It's
funny if you read Strickland's article, and I sent him
an email saying as much that I was like, this
is really well written. Yeah, but if you just read
the words you're saying, it sounds like it was written
by someone who is totally insane.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
Yeah, you know, I know.

Speaker 1 (22:45):
And he makes the point too, He's like, well, yeah,
all you have to do is look out into the
Milky Way or anything like that, anything we can see
easily and see that it looks different, Like there's not
a star that looks just like our son with the
same number of planets looking around.

Speaker 5 (22:58):
Right.

Speaker 1 (22:58):
The point is that you look if you go out
as several orders of magnification and look at the universe
outside of any given galaxy. You're gonna see that. Actually, Yeah,
everything's distributed pretty evenly throughout the universe, and so that
makes it homogeneous. And then secondly, it's isotropic, meaning that
there is no center to the universe. There's no central point.

Speaker 2 (23:20):
Yeah, which some people positive that the Earth is the
center of the universe. Well, we'll talk a little bit
about that later, Okay, but that's wrong, right.

Speaker 1 (23:28):
I mean, it hasn't been disproven, but it's just extremely unlikely,
I think.

Speaker 2 (23:33):
Yeah, I think it's a very human centric thing to say.

Speaker 1 (23:36):
But the reason why some people say that is that
they are if you look around, that expansion that we're
seeing is everything's going away from us, which is like,
why is that happening? Like we should be going along
at least with something else. But the idea is that
we're not because we're the center of the universe. But

(23:58):
the implication that are so mind boggling that it's just
not possible almost, yeah, that we're actually at the center
of the universe when we're just the small segment of
a tiny bubble in a frothy sea that defies proportions.
There's no way that's the center of the universe.

Speaker 2 (24:14):
So another prediction was and we talked a little bit
about the intense heat at the very first moments of
the Big Bang, and if that were true, then you
would feel and see this radiation I guess, not see it,
but you would have this radiation expanded over the entire
galaxy in roughly equal proportions.

Speaker 1 (24:35):
Yeah, because again, remember the universe is homogeneous and isotropic,
so if there was radiation, it should be evenly distributed.

Speaker 2 (24:43):
Yeah, there'd be like they call it an echo I've
seen described in some make circles.

Speaker 1 (24:47):
Right, Okay, So apparently back in the forties they detected
this stuff and didn't know what they were looking at,
and in the sixties they figured out, holy cow, this
is the cosmic microwave background, which is basically I think
of it as more like a fingerprint, the fingerprints of
the universe, right, Yeah, and it's evenly distributed. It's this
trace radiation that's still around from the Big Bang, which

(25:12):
is pretty amazing. So when you put that in the
discovery that the universe does seem to be homogeneous and isotropic,
along with the fact that we discovered this cosmic radiation
background that's evenly distributed throughout the universe, it really gives
a lot of credence to the Big Bang theory, and
so too does this gravitational wave, the gravitational wave discovery.

(25:32):
They apparently found curls in the cosmic microwave background that
were our remnants of gravitational wave from the Big Bang too,
So it's just getting supported all over the place, and
everybody's super happy.

Speaker 2 (25:45):
Yeah, there's like real observational data there, all right, we
tease those those first nano seconds, nano moments after the
Big Bang, So let's talk about them right now. The
earliest thing that scientists can even talk about like with
a straight face, like later on when they're having drinks

(26:06):
at the bar, that they talk about before this, right,
but if they're like on a podium in front of
an audience, yeah, they can go back as far as
I'll just say the equation, even though it will make
no sense to anyone. T equals one times ten to
the negative forty three seconds.

Speaker 1 (26:26):
Man, Yes, okay, so T yeah equals the time after
the creation of the universe, yep. And as far back
as they've gone is point.

Speaker 4 (26:38):
Zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero
zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero
zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero
zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero
zero zero.

Speaker 1 (26:58):
One second after the creation of the universe. That's how
far back they've been able to trace the Big Bang
forty three nice work in the amazing That fraction of
one second is how far back they've been able to
figure it out. And so much happened in that first second. Chuck,
that just fractions of that fraction are, like I said before,

(27:22):
like different epochs in the era or the age of
the universe, like entire epochs happened in trillions of a
trillionth of a second.

Speaker 2 (27:30):
I know.

Speaker 1 (27:31):
It's just so mind boggling.

Speaker 2 (27:33):
I know.

Speaker 1 (27:34):
I love it though, Like I've really given myself over
to this. I I was fighting at first, like, well
that doesn't make sense. I don't want to how does
that make sense? And I did look plenty of stuff up, yeah,
but I also just kind of was like, I'm just
taking it to submit on faith, despite what NDT says,
like you do kind of have to take this on faith,
especially if you're not an astrophysicist. And I just kind

(27:54):
of gave myself over to it, and I love it.

Speaker 2 (27:56):
You know what, happens when my mind gets bent like
that too far. I just have some pie.

Speaker 1 (28:01):
Oh that's good stuff.

Speaker 2 (28:02):
Yeah, we's kind of stare at the wall and have
some pie.

Speaker 1 (28:05):
What do you recommend that matter began? Okay, so something's
super sweet not fruity.

Speaker 2 (28:10):
Uh, what's a fruity pie, like a.

Speaker 1 (28:12):
Cherry pie or apple pie?

Speaker 3 (28:14):
Hmmm.

Speaker 2 (28:14):
I like a good apple crumble pie. Oh yeah, I
do too, but not like the one with the crisscross pastry.

Speaker 1 (28:21):
On top, don't. I don't really discriminate against pie.

Speaker 2 (28:24):
Sure.

Speaker 1 (28:24):
I tend more toward the fruity section of the pie spectrum,
and I tend to think of peacon like right in
the middle. But then on the other end you have
like your creamy and chocolate moose pies and stuff like that.
I tend to be on the other side a little or.

Speaker 2 (28:38):
Good lemon pie, lemon ice.

Speaker 1 (28:40):
That's good stuff.

Speaker 2 (28:41):
What I don't get is the cheddar on the apple pie.

Speaker 1 (28:43):
I've never gotten that.

Speaker 2 (28:44):
I've never tried it. Maybe I should.

Speaker 1 (28:46):
Those people are obviously crazy.

Speaker 2 (28:48):
I like sweet and savory together, so maybe I should
give it a whirl. Oh yeah, you have to start
talking about this again.

Speaker 1 (28:54):
Dip a French prye in a frosty and call it
a day.

Speaker 2 (28:57):
All right. So at that point that you described, you know,
don't say all the zeros again, But at that point
the universe was tiny, tiny, tiny and small and dense
and hot, and the area of the universe spanned a
region of about three point nine by ten to thirty
four inches everything.

Speaker 1 (29:18):
And that area right ten to the negative thirty three centimeters. Again,
the average diameter of an atom or roughly something like
that is ten to the negative ten. Yeah, this is
that much smaller than an atom. And everything that's in
the universe now was encapsulated in that tiny little thing,

(29:39):
whatever it was.

Speaker 2 (29:40):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (29:41):
And again, like surely astrophysicists and cosmologists when they were
coming up with these calculations are like this can't be right. Yeah,
and I guess over time they were like, it seems
to be right.

Speaker 2 (29:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (29:53):
Either we're all just totally off our rockers and really
somebody forgot to carry one and everybody forgot the carry
you one, or this is really how things started, and
it's just mind boggling to think.

Speaker 2 (30:05):
All right. So in that very first, first, first, first moment,
theorists think that those four primary forces that we mentioned
are still hanging together. Sure, they were still united, and
that matter and energy were inseparable at this point.

Speaker 1 (30:20):
Which is another don't feel bad if like you're sitting
there going like, how.

Speaker 2 (30:23):
Is that possible? No one knows.

Speaker 1 (30:25):
Yeah, they just see, like the calculations bear that out.
Is another way to put it, you know, that's right,
But that's how it was. Matter and energy were one
and the same.

Speaker 2 (30:34):
And askings expanded. We'll go into these in detail. We
go through something called bariogenesis, particle cosmology, and then standard cosmology. Right,
and as this time passes, things become a little more
easy to understand. And when I say easy to understand,
I mean extremely difficult, but at least at least your
mind can wrap around it.

Speaker 1 (30:54):
Yeah, start too, at least right. Yeah, So remember we
started at tea, which is the time after the creation
of the universe. T equals one times ten to the
negative forty three seconds.

Speaker 5 (31:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (31:03):
The next the next big part where things start and
actually in between the two gravities separated from the from
the four fundamental forces.

Speaker 2 (31:13):
Yeah, just a little thing like that.

Speaker 1 (31:14):
Right, But the next big one that came along was
at ten to the negative thirty six seconds, and this
is where bariogenesis happened. And around this time also, this
is where the electro week, which is electromagnetic and weak
force combined together, separated from the strong magnetic force. And
apparently here at that ten to the negative thirty six

(31:38):
power seconds, that was where inflation happened. That's that's where
the expansion began.

Speaker 2 (31:44):
Right, And that's where we actually could begin to observe
some kind of matter.

Speaker 1 (31:49):
Yeah, and they think that what happened was a tremendous
amount of matter and anti matter were created.

Speaker 2 (31:55):
Yeah, but that and we did it.

Speaker 1 (31:57):
I don't remember a lot of about the details, but
remember we a podcast on antimatter spacecraft, how amazing those were.
But antimatter and matter like to just destroy each other
and effectively cancel one another out. But apparently at the
beginning of the universe, at the origin of the universe,
it's suggested by this that there was a slight imbalance

(32:20):
in whatever makes matter and whatever makes antimatter, so that
there was slightly more matter that was created than antimatter,
which is that right, so that that stuff survived. Had
the balance been the other direction, there'd be slightly more
antimatter than matter now, and who knows what kind of
loopy bizarro universe that would.

Speaker 2 (32:39):
Have created, or if there would have been anything at all.

Speaker 1 (32:43):
So all that matter that survived is the matter that
we see in the universe now, and that's a lot
of matter. So imagine, since this is just a tiny
fraction of the matter that was created and destroyed by
the antimatter that was also created, how much matter and
antimatter was created at ten to the negative thirty six seconds? Yeah,

(33:03):
through barriogenesis.

Speaker 2 (33:04):
Again, it's just mind boggling.

Speaker 1 (33:06):
And that was the result chuck of energy and matter
uncoupling as well.

Speaker 2 (33:11):
Right, that's right, okay, all right, and this is the
point where we can actually start to you know, we
did one on the Large Hadrink collider. It's a particle accelerator,
the biggest and best that we have, yeah, on the Earth.
And this is where you can actually use a particle
accelerator to recreate and look at this stuff, right, so
we can actually observe this at this point.

Speaker 1 (33:31):
Yeah, we can smash things together and be like kaboom,
look at that early universe. That's what they do, Sara.

Speaker 2 (33:42):
Oh yeah, huh. All right, well, people should listen to
that one too, by the way, Oh yeah, that would
be a good like primer.

Speaker 1 (33:48):
That was the one where we wondered whether it was
gonna end the universe or not.

Speaker 2 (33:52):
Right, it did not not yet. So at this point
there is still no light. Things are two dents, and
it is still just a dark dent area, right exactly.

Speaker 1 (34:02):
And about I think during the particle cosmology epoch, the
electromagnetic force and the weak force breakoff into separate forces, that's.

Speaker 2 (34:13):
Right, and we still can't at this point. These subatomic
particles still can't bond. They're there, they can form, right,
but they can't hook up and party.

Speaker 1 (34:22):
Right exactly. That actually didn't start to take place until
we reach the standard cosmology age, which is the age
that I believe we're in now, right.

Speaker 2 (34:33):
Yeah, which started point oh one seconds after the initial bang.

Speaker 1 (34:36):
Right one hundredth of a second. So we've gone through
that many ages and we haven't even mentioned them all
now in those that within that first second.

Speaker 2 (34:44):
Yeah, it's crazy, it is crazy.

Speaker 1 (34:46):
So that standard cosmology this is about where the astrophysicists
and cosmologists say, we understand it from about here on
out right. Everything else is a little shaky, but we've
got some observational data that backs it up. But here
is where neutrons and protons were formed, and a little
after that they started to be able to form nuclei

(35:09):
through nucleosynthesis, right, and they would ultimately be the building
blocks of atoms.

Speaker 2 (35:15):
Right. So at this point, things are still expanding and
cooling at a rapid rate, and we can actually there
are no atoms yet. But like you said, it's too
hot at this point for electrons to complete that process, right,
still too hot in the hot tub.

Speaker 1 (35:32):
Yeah, I mean after one hundred seconds, the universe had
cooled to a temperature cooled after one hundred seconds to
one point eight billion degrees farentheight or a billion degrees
since celsius. That was how hot it was still after
one hundred seconds.

Speaker 2 (35:47):
Should we take another break here? Let's all right, let's
do that and we'll come back and explain the rest
of it in great easy to understand detail.

Speaker 5 (36:11):
Man soft wee jaw shu.

Speaker 4 (36:17):
Soft.

Speaker 2 (36:22):
All right, buddy, when we left off, things were expanding
and cooling.

Speaker 1 (36:26):
And they still are actually the end yep, nope, good
night everyone.

Speaker 2 (36:31):
And everyone hears Neil degrass tyson.

Speaker 1 (36:33):
That take us home. So uh fifty six thousand years
after the creation of the universe, or after the Big Bang,
we were at a temperature of fifteen thousand, seven hundred
and forty degrees farentheit nice and cool or eighty seven
hundred and twenty six degrees celsius. Right after another three

(36:53):
hundred and twenty four thousand years, So at three hundred
and eighty thousand years after it had cooled down to
four thousand, just under five thousand degrees fahrenheight and just
under three thousand degrees celsius, and finally here atoms started
to form because protons and electrons could combine. And the

(37:14):
other thing that happened to was the density had expanded
out enough, the volume had increases a better way to
put it, and the temperature had cooled so that suddenly
the universe was now transparent. We could see through it.
Up to this point, at three hundred and seventy nine
thousand years, you still couldn't see through it. It was too
dense and too hot. And at about three hundred and

(37:34):
eighty thousand years it hits that point and you can
see it like we do now.

Speaker 2 (37:38):
Yeah, we finally have light. At that point, those cosmic
microwave background radiation was that we talked about earlier. It's
locked in. I don't think we mentioned earlier where we're
at now temperature wise, Just to kind of put it
in perspective, we currently are at roughly negative four hundred
and fifty four point eight degrees fahrenheit negative two seventy

(38:01):
point four degree celsius.

Speaker 1 (38:02):
Yeah, that's the temperature of space right now, right, yeah, yeah,
so it's definitely cool. Apparently it's still cooling, like, it's
still not at absolute zero yet, which is the lowest
temperature or the lowest activity that atoms will move at ever. Right,
So it's still cooling and still expanding.

Speaker 2 (38:20):
All right, So here's when things really heat up or
I guess really cool down. Sorry, bad fun. Strickland points
out for the next hundred million years or so, this
is when the universe is really cooling. It's expanding, and
then you have matter clusters together, yeah, eventually forms gas.
And this is the quick view. We'll dive into it.

(38:42):
Those gases form stars, so stars cluster into galaxies, those
galaxies cluster together into solar systems. Right, that's the overview.

Speaker 1 (38:51):
And so what they think happened was because this really
doesn't make any sense. As a matter of fact, one
of the criticisms of big bang theories that it violates
the law of entropy, that organizations become more disordered and
chaotic over time, and the idea that planets and galaxies
and things formed became more that's the opposite, right exactly,
And so they've really kind of looked into how anything

(39:13):
would have formed at all, and what they think happened
was that back in say the ten to the negative
forty three second era, there were quantum fluctuations, little vacuum
energy fluctuations within this universe, this tiny little universe, and
that as the universe expanded very quickly, those fluctuations grew

(39:37):
tremendously in size, and the vacuum energy in the cosmic
microwave background, those little fluctuations that are on there were
just different enough from the other spots in the universe
that they had slightly more density and thus exerted slightly
more gravitational pull than other areas, and so more matters

(39:59):
so attract around them, and they started to form stars,
and the stars started to form galaxies and planets started
to form around them, and all of a sudden, what
had just started out as little vacuum energy became ultimately
universal hotspots where you could find matter clustered together, which
explains why so much of it is deep of deep

(40:20):
space is just void, and why some of it has stuff.
Apparently it all began with these little, tiny quantum fluctuations
way back trillions of a trillions of a second after
the universe was created.

Speaker 2 (40:33):
So like a really cool dude at a party the
size of all humankind, and he's so cool that people
start hanging out with him, and that his party grows
a little bigger. Sure, is that a good way to
describe it?

Speaker 1 (40:44):
I think that's better than anybody could ever hope to.

Speaker 2 (40:47):
So it's an attraction basically that drew things together ever
so slightly enough to form larger bodies and then larger bodies.

Speaker 1 (40:56):
Yeah, And the reason why they think this happened is
because these tiny little fluctuations, little little details in these
little this little universe grow bigger over time, right, especially
if you look at this inflation growing as a process
of time rather than just like volume expansion. It's also

(41:17):
time is a dimension to it, right, Yeah, So it
makes total sense in that just these little things would
get bigger as the universe itself got bigger too.

Speaker 2 (41:27):
Well, does that mean that the universe and being coy here,
does that mean the universe will ever expand for all
of time infinitely?

Speaker 1 (41:35):
So I mean you're talking about like that debate, right, Yeah, Yeah,
there's a whole debate over whether or not it's ever
going to stop, and all of it comes down to
how much matters in the universe, which we don't quite
know yet.

Speaker 2 (41:47):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (41:47):
When they calculate the matter we do know about, they
realize that there's actually some that you can't account for,
and that's dark matter, because we know that there's something
that's making stars behave differently, or there's clearly some matter
that we can't detect that's out there, So we can't
account for all the matter in the universe. So we
don't know how much matters in the universe.

Speaker 2 (42:07):
Right, But the idea is if there's enough, then that
gravity will reverse and things will start to contract again, right.

Speaker 1 (42:13):
Right, because gravity is this force that attracts matter to
other matter, and yeah, eventually, if there's enough matter, it'll
it'll it'll counteract that expansive force that came out of it,
and then yeah, probably will either stop. Is one school
of thought, or the universe will contract and form what's
called the Big Crunch. And some people say that's what

(42:35):
our universe is. It's just the cycle of expansion and
contraction that takes place over many billions of years. But
we're just one part of a cycle that is ongoing,
perhaps forever.

Speaker 2 (42:49):
It makes it sound when we talk about like that.
It makes it sound like the universe is just breathing.

Speaker 1 (42:53):
It does, doesn't it.

Speaker 2 (42:54):
Yeah, yeah, in a creepy way.

Speaker 1 (42:57):
And Chuck, that has to do also the reason why
they don't know if it's going to keep expanding or contracting.
They don't know if it's what's called the closed universe
with positive curvature or one with negative curvature. Right, And
it also has to do with the shape of space
to a certain degree. And Strickland also wrote a really

(43:19):
top notch article called does space have a shape?

Speaker 2 (43:21):
Yeah? That's it really is.

Speaker 1 (43:23):
And something from studying this that they figured out is
that really it doesn't seem like it has a positive
or a negative curvature. It seems flat. It seems like
it has a zero curvature. And this is what's called
the flat problem of the Big Bang theory. Why should
it be flat. That doesn't make any sense because if

(43:44):
you look at the spectrum between positive curvature and negative curvature,
there's a lot of places on that spectrum where the
universe could fall one way or the other. But it's
so close to the middle that astrophysicists and cosmologists have
no idea if it's positive or negative in its curvature,
and they've started to wonder, like, why should we be

(44:06):
almost exactly in the middle. It doesn't make any sense.
It would suggest that the early universe was so finely
tuned that we're only slightly off of center. So it
would have had to have started almost completely at center,
because remember, small fluctuations grow bigger and bigger over time
and on a larger scale. So since we're still so

(44:29):
close to center right now, with the universe as big
as it is, it would have had to have been
basically on top of exactly in the middle between a
closed and or a negative and a positive curvature at
the very beginning of it, which is kind of puzzling
in and of itself. That's like, well, that indicates some
sort of weird fine tuning. So does that mean that
the astrophysicists are off a little bit and their own

(44:52):
fine tuning of the Big Bang theory and inflation or
what who knows? Or is there a little kid with
a lighter who set the snake off? That's right, and
the snake was very well manufactured.

Speaker 2 (45:04):
Well, that's just one thing that we can't quite explain.
We talked earlier about the fact that at the very
beginning that the Big Bang theory wasn't meant to address
a lot of questions, one of which is that we
touched on was what happened before the Big Bang? And
we just don't know.

Speaker 1 (45:22):
It doesn't even try it doesn't.

Speaker 2 (45:24):
It can't, right, Yeah, that, like trying to explain time
before timing existed is futile.

Speaker 1 (45:31):
Right because you get into stuff that I just suggested,
which is basically amounts to intelligent design or whatever, and
there's that's beyond science. Like science isn't equipped to say, oh, well,
what about this or what about that? And I tried
really hard to get Neil de grasse Tyson to say
something and he was not going to bite.

Speaker 2 (45:49):
Well, no, and smartly, you know, I think a scientist
looks at the observational data and extrapolates from there, and
I'm sure. Like I said, I'm sure, and I think
even said in the interview that sure, people like to
talk about these things, right, but it's not like you know,
hard science.

Speaker 1 (46:05):
And also, to answer that flat problem that I brought up,
apparently inflation theory does answer it does satisfy it by
saying the universe appears flat to us because we're looking
at it strictly on a very local level. Even though
we're looking at ninety ninety billion light years or something
like that, it's really just a very small segment of something.

(46:30):
So if you take a balloon and you blow it up,
it's still curved. But if you're just looking at just
a pinpoint segment of it, it's going to appear flat
to everybody looking at it from just that tiny perspective.
So it's basically our perspective that we're looking at the
universe right now makes it seem like it's flat, but
it's really actually curved one way or the other. That's

(46:52):
the answer to that.

Speaker 2 (46:53):
Well, should we talk about some of the problems with
the Big Bang theory. Sure there are criticisms and there
will continue to be. One was that is that it
violates the first law of thermodynamics, that you can't create
or destroy matter or energy, and proponents will say that
that's unwarranted for a couple of reasons. One is it,
like we already said, it doesn't address the creation of

(47:15):
the universe that it was never meant to, but just
how it evolved or inflated over the years, over the years,
over the sixty or seventy years. And another reason is
kind of like we said earlier, is that the further
back you go, the rules don't apply. So maybe the
law of thermodynamics is just completely moot when you go

(47:35):
back that far. Yeah, like it didn't come into being
until later.

Speaker 1 (47:39):
Yeah, if matter and energy are like one and the same,
I can imagine that some of our current laws don't
necessarily apply.

Speaker 2 (47:46):
Yeah, well probably a lot of them, right.

Speaker 1 (47:49):
And then one of the other things, too, is that
that inflation that supposedly happened when the strong nuclear force
decoupled from the electra a weak force. Yeah, and the
universe suddenly expanded, you know, within that one second, it
just kept growing and growing and growing way faster than
the speed of light. Yeah, And a lot of people

(48:10):
are like wrong, nothing can go faster than the speed
of light. Well there was no light, Well nothing you
could see. Yeah, there are definitely photons, but they had that.
The proponents of Big Bang have the same answer. They say,
well again, dude, you're talking general relativity. This this that
wouldn't have applied at all.

Speaker 2 (48:29):
Yeah, the answer is kind of consistently. Don't even come
at me with that, right your laws. Yeah, should we
talk about should we finish with a few other alternative explanations.

Speaker 1 (48:41):
Yeah, Like we said, there are alternative models, right, one
of them is that same one that Einstein was a
proponent of, the steady state model. That it is not
actually expanding, and the apparently this this is hard for
me to wrap my mind around. The people who say
that it's not expanding explain away expansion by saying that

(49:05):
matters created as in proportion to the original density of
the universe. Right, so maybe the universe is expanding some
and more more matter has to be created to keep
the same density. So I think what they're saying is,
I think that's what it means. The universe has been
at the same density all the time, and sure it's expanding,

(49:26):
but it's also creating more matter, so.

Speaker 2 (49:28):
Which holds it static.

Speaker 1 (49:29):
Yeah, I guess so.

Speaker 2 (49:32):
Uh, the ek piotic, epiotic pyrotic.

Speaker 1 (49:38):
I know this should not be ech pyotic ech pyotic model. Yeah,
I think that's that.

Speaker 2 (49:44):
Man, that's just we're the worst that suggests the universe
as a result of a collision of well, that's the
when you brought up earlier of two three dimensional worlds
and that there is some hidden fourth dimension out there.

Speaker 1 (49:59):
Well, that's part of the fourth dimension is part of
like standard astrophysics and cosmology. But this was like this
thing says our universe came out of two universes colliding
in the fourth dimension, which that defies me a little bit.
But the idea that there are four dimensions in one

(50:21):
of them's time is definitely part of like standard stuff.
It's still hard to think of. And then plasma cosmology.
I like that one a lot because it's just totally
different from the way we think of the universe. It
seeks to describe it based on its basically it's electrical
charge state, you know, rather than like the temperature of

(50:44):
it or the density or anything like that. It's more
involved in like the plasma aspects of it, because you know,
plasma's ionized gas and it's like a fourth state of matter,
and plasma cosmology looks at it through that lens, which
is basically totally alien to everything we just talked about.

Speaker 2 (51:01):
From what I can gather, did you just say there's
a totally aliens out there?

Speaker 1 (51:04):
There's aliens out there and the universe was started by
a little kid with a lighter. Wow, that's my stand. Well,
if you like this, then stick around because right now, Chuck,
we have an interview with Neil deGrasse Tys and we
weren't joking.

Speaker 2 (51:20):
Yeah, great job on that one too, buddy.

Speaker 1 (51:21):
Thanks man, we missed you. He was like, where's Chuck?
No we didn't, Yes, he did.

Speaker 5 (51:27):
Well. How you guys doing good?

Speaker 1 (51:28):
How are you doing?

Speaker 5 (51:29):
Are you assuming I know how stuff works?

Speaker 1 (51:32):
I have an inkling that you may have a clue,
So I guess my first question is then, how do
you specifically? How do you think of the universe when
you think of the universe as a whole, Like, do
you think of it as something like a speck of
dust underneath a giant fingernail or is it part of
a branching multiverse or is it a bubble that kind
of pushes up against other bubbles? Like, what is the

(51:55):
universe when you think of it?

Speaker 5 (51:57):
I don't think I think of the universe in a
fundamentally different way from that of my colleagues. What you
want to do is separate the things we have data
and observations to support and the things that live and
thrive on the frontier of theorizing about what the universe
was is or will one day be, or what larger

(52:19):
system it could be a part of. So if you
live in the realm of data, then we are in
an expanding universe, and it's been expanding for nearly fourteen
billion years, and it was smaller in the past and
hot in the past, and it's getting larger and cooler
by the minute. And we exist on this planet we

(52:41):
call Earth, born four point six billion years ago, with
the rest of the Solar System in some undistinguished part
of an undistinguished galaxy we call the Milky Way. And
this scenario sure was very hard earned, and it's no

(53:03):
more than about eighty or ninety years old in total.
Edwin Hubble the man in this particular usage of the
word Edwin Hubble in the nineteen twenties, so ninety years ago,
nineteen twenty six discovered that there are other island universes,
if you will, not the way we might think of
that term today, but back then there were these spiral

(53:26):
fuzzy things in the night sky, imagined to be just
spiral fuzzy things in the milky Way. He would show
that those spiral fuzzy things are not in the milky Way,
they are entire other milky ways, other galaxies. And that
was a profound expanding expansion of our worldview, if you would.
And then just three years after that, he would show

(53:47):
that these spiral fuzzy things are rapidly moving away from us.
Coupled with Einstein's general theory of relativity, we would learn
that it's not just galaxies spreading apart within a pre
existing space. It is the fabric of the space and
time itself that's expanding. All of this is supported by data.
So if you have discomfort thinking that the universe had

(54:11):
a beginning and that we will expand forever, then too bad.
That's just what the universe says. And the universe, I've
said this before, the universe is under no obligation to
make sense to you, especially when what we learn of
the universe comes to us from methods and tools that
completely transcend our native, inborn biological senses, which in fact

(54:34):
is the great ascent of science. What are all the
ways we can decode the operations of nature without having
to rely on the limits that sent our biological senses
force us to occupy.

Speaker 1 (54:50):
So when science is furthered, you know, decades down the
road and the vision we have, or the view we
have of the universe we live in is magnified by
orders of magnitude from what we're looking at through right now,
what do you suspect? What shape do you suspect it's
going to take? Do you have suspicions? And I mean

(55:13):
if you don't, how do you keep yourself from making
that leap?

Speaker 5 (55:16):
Like?

Speaker 1 (55:16):
Yes, of course, this is what it's going to be,
this is what we're really living in.

Speaker 5 (55:21):
Well, we all have biases, and let me not call
them biases. Let's say we all have longings for how
we think or want the universe to be. And if
you begin to believe your longings too strongly, then you
could you might miss some realities that don't fit your expectations,

(55:43):
and someone else will catch them and make the discovery.
So it's okay to lean in one direction or another,
but don't do so while being blind to what else
could be true in spite of how you think it
might be. So, now, the scenario I gave you is
sort of is very well established in terms of observations, data,

(56:06):
and basically a century of thinking about and observing the universe,
imposing questions and answering them. So beyond that we can
ask is there a multiverse? A right? This seems to
come naturally out of certain thinking about the behavior of
the universe. When you try to bring together quantum physics

(56:29):
and Einstein's general relativity, there are good arguments to suggest
that we could be in a multiverse, and it's not obvious,
at least to me, how one would test that just yet.
So but the theories of the universe that point to
a multiverse are themselves well tested. So this is what

(56:54):
gives you the confidence that maybe our multiverse folks are
onto something. And there are other frontiers. For example, the
quantum physics, which is the theory of the small, and
general relativity, the theory of the large. They work perfectly

(57:14):
well in their own regimes. General relativity describing the large
scale universe, quantum physics describing with very high precision atoms, molecules, nuclei, particles,
this sort of thing. But in the early universe, when
the entire universe was the size of an atom, then

(57:35):
we might suppose that quantum forces override whatever was going
on with general relativity. Because now the entire universe is
of the size that quantum laws significantly manifest. And so
right now we do not have a good way to
merge those two theories. And this we got top people

(57:56):
working on it. So these are collectively the string theorists
and others in that realm who are thinking long and
hard about these Are there a third theory that needs
to be introduced that will enclose quantum physics and general
relativity into a deeper, broader understanding of what's going on,

(58:16):
or will quantum physics absorb general relativity. I don't know
that people know just yet. And it involves very high
levels of math and higher dimensions and this sort of thing.
And some people have criticized string theory for not really
being a legitimate theory because you can't test it in
any traditional way. But it's the only game in town.

(58:37):
So and they're not very expensive, you know, you give
them a pencil and a pad and throwing a laptop
and a string. Theorist is in business, so I let
them go as far as they can take it.

Speaker 1 (58:48):
So it does seem like there is either like you said,
quantum physics may be the answer to all this, we
just don't fully understand that field yet to get back
to the moment of the Big Bang or what happened
before the Big Bang. But it could also be, from
what I've seen, the unified field theory that gets us

(59:11):
back to that point. But either way, to get to
a point where we go further beyond our current understanding,
further back in time in the Big Bang, including before
the Big Bang, of what was before, it seems like
it's going to take a vast leap forward. Do you
think that leap is going to come from a genius

(59:32):
that hasn't been born yet, or has been born but
hasn't been educated and entered the field yet. Is that
how it's going to happen. Is it going to happen
from you know, this person combining this work with this
work and that work and this work, and then suddenly
the pieces are going to fall together.

Speaker 5 (59:48):
In that sense, that's a great question that also has
a philosophical dimension to it sure, such that in modern
times great leaps in science. Do they happen by the
lone genius burning the candle at midnight coming up with
a Eureka moment, or do they come about because you

(01:00:08):
have huge, expensive, highly collaborative scientific projects such as LIGO
discovering gravitational waves. Such as the next generation space telescope
it's called the James Web Space Telescope, not yet launched,
but that will enable us to see galaxies being born

(01:00:30):
in the early universe, as well as a host of
other frontier observations that were not possible with previous telescopes. Well,
that telescope had to be designed by whole teams of
people with questions that they had in mind that they
want answered by the new data. So I'm not convinced

(01:00:50):
that we're just waiting for a new smart person to
come along and have it all make sense. I think
we're waiting for someone to obtain new data that we've
never seen before that then forced us into new ideas
and understandings of the universe. Maybe there's some new theory
that maybe I'm not discounting it, but I can tell

(01:01:14):
you is we're in an era. Look at the Higgs boson,
for example, that required the large Hadron collider and thousands
of scientists and tens of thousands of engineers who built
the thing in the first place. So we're kind of
in a collaborative era right now. And so if I
were a betting man, I would say that the great

(01:01:37):
discoveries to come will come about from huge collaborations, possibly
even international collaborations. Now that doesn't remove the question as
to whether there is an Einstein walking among us who
happened to have been born into poverty in a developing country,
and then we will never know. Well, that would be
one of the great tragedies of modern civilization. So I,

(01:01:59):
as an education feel very strongly about what kind of
access people of the world should have to knowledge, to learning,
to health, to you know, a person should be able
to live a day and not have the entire day
be preoccupied about whether whether you have food or whether

(01:02:20):
or not you're going to die from a disease that
your neighbor just died of. So this is a So
I think we should be able to measure our state
of our civilization by the extent to which we are
in the position to discover another Einstein. Rising up from
the midst and and that's so that's one way to

(01:02:44):
get an Einstein. Another one is to wait around until
one is born into the right circumstances, right, I'd rather,
i'd you know, we've got seven billion people on Earth.
Somebody in there's got to be badass enough to help
us out.

Speaker 1 (01:02:54):
So you, I mean, you brought up your your role
as an educator and your world class science popular and explainer.
What is it that got you into science as a kid?

Speaker 5 (01:03:06):
I was nine years old and it was a first
visit to the Hayden Planetarium right here in New York,
my local planetarium. I think most big cities have planetariums,
even medium sized cities will have a planetarium. And my family,
my parents took my brother, my sister, and me to
all the cultural institutions of the city every weekend. So

(01:03:27):
one weekend it was the Natural History Museum. Another it
was the zoo, another it was the aquarium. We even
went to other things that sort of talented grown ups did,
like we'd go to a baseball game or the opera
or the theater. And that exposure enabled the three of
us to see what is possible beyond the traditional you

(01:03:49):
want to be a doctor, lawyer, indian chief. You know,
the three traditional options that you're given as a six
year old or a seven year old, And so out
of that arose my interest in the universe that really
got cemented. By by the time I was eleven, I
knew that, in fact, I was so convinced that I
wanted to do astrophysics that I began to began to

(01:04:10):
question whether whether or not it was in fact the
universe that chose me.

Speaker 1 (01:04:15):
That's really cool. Well, thank you very much, doctor Tyson.
We appreciate you joining us. This was like you just
took our big big Bang episode and moved a long
light years, so thank you. Oh okay, thank you.

Speaker 5 (01:04:28):
And the line year is not actually very far in
the scale of the unit, so I feel better if
I had taken it along billion.

Speaker 1 (01:04:35):
How about how about a PARSEK or something.

Speaker 5 (01:04:37):
PARSEK is only three point twenty six light years, so
that still won't even all right? You know, PARSK is
not even far enough away to get to the nearest
star to the Sun. Okay, so you're just in the
wrong zone there.

Speaker 1 (01:04:51):
Okay, well then how about billions of parsecs?

Speaker 5 (01:04:55):
Nice?

Speaker 1 (01:04:56):
Thank you very much. What a guy huh job, Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:05:01):
He was.

Speaker 2 (01:05:01):
Man, he's just such a cool customer. That's why he
is where he is now.

Speaker 1 (01:05:05):
Yeah, and if you want to hang out with him,
head on over to the Hayden Planetarium. I'm sure he'd
be happy to see you. Sure, you can see him
on tour. You can see him with Star Talk Live.
He's got a podcast for those of you who don't
know with our pal Eugene Merman.

Speaker 2 (01:05:19):
He was on our TV show. Even he was I.

Speaker 1 (01:05:22):
Didn't get a chance to ask him if he remembered that.

Speaker 2 (01:05:24):
Sure he didn't.

Speaker 1 (01:05:25):
That's why I didn't get a chance.

Speaker 2 (01:05:27):
Yeah, that just would have been embarrassing.

Speaker 1 (01:05:30):
Well, if you want to know more about the Big Bang,
type those words into the search part HowStuffWorks dot Com
and they'll bring up some great stuff. And since I
said search part's time for listener mail.

Speaker 2 (01:05:42):
I'm gonna call this is Russia European nice. Remember that debate? Sure, well,
it wasn't so much a debate, we just kind of
wondered in the Continents episode, Hey guys, thanks for cracking
me up with the show. It's astonishing how many film
references you can fit into a geography lesson, Yes, Russia
is definitely a European country exclamation point. Historically, it's always

(01:06:04):
been considered a part of Europe. For example, was named
as one of the six major European countries in World
War One, and the czar was closely related to other
royalty in Europe. This is very different from China or India,
always much more distant and mysterious to the east. Also
considered that maps are very deceptive. Over seventy five percent
of Russia's population is on the European side, including every

(01:06:27):
major city from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, from Milan to Mince.
I knew you were going to say that very nice.
I would have been so disappointed, as you know, most
of the land you see to the east is empty
and largely uninhabitable, only there to look pretty on a map.

Speaker 1 (01:06:43):
Well, I don't know about that, but that's what That's
what the little kid the lighter put it there for.

Speaker 2 (01:06:49):
So cheers. That is from Timothy, and that was one
heck of a science field reference.

Speaker 1 (01:06:54):
Timothy or Timothay? Is he Russian?

Speaker 2 (01:06:56):
Oh good point, Yeah, it's.

Speaker 1 (01:06:58):
Timothey Moscow, who just wrote it using a pseudonym Timothy belontimates.
If you want to get in touch with me and
Chuck and Jerry. You can tweet to us at sysk podcast.
You can join us on Facebook dot com slash stuff
you Should Know, and you can send us an email
to stuff Podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com. As always, join

(01:07:18):
us at a home on the way stuff you Should
Know dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:07:26):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
HowStuffWorks dot com.