Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
48:25 Share

Businesses that are selling through the roof, like Untuckit, make selling and for shoppers buying simple with Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet. And with ShopPay, you can boost conversions up to 50%. Businesses that sell more sell on Shopify. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout Untuckit uses. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash podcast free, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash podcast free to upgrade your selling today.

So Paul. Yes. Dr. O came back to my office. Oh, he's the man. He's the man, Dr. O. He knows his stuff. Man, we love it. He's in charge of a lot of acronyms. Wait till you hear the acronyms. Right. And his expertise in the universe, cosmology, dark matter, dark energy. Dark energy. It's the future of the field. On StarTalk, coming right up. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. I got with me Paul Mercurio. Paul, what's up, my man? Good to see you. Always great to be back. Love you, man. Love you. Yeah, you're a comedian and you got a show on Broadway or off-Broadway or traveling. Yeah, it was off-Broadway and then Broadway. Now we're out on the road. Out on the road.

And it's called Permission to Speak. One man show and you interact with the audience and stuff? Yeah, yeah. It's about stories from people, from me. Frank Oz is directing it. We love Frank Oz. Created Yoda. Try being directed by Yoda. He's never wrong. Well, we're going to do Cosmic Queries today. Yeah, I love these. With an old colleague and friend of mine.

Thank you. Thank you. I better get your last name. Olashay. So far away. Way to do your research before the day. Hakim? Here, let me give you a mnemonic. Think O-U-Shady.

Hakeem Oluseyi. But instead of you, it's Lou Oluseyi. Hakeem Oluseyi. Yes, sir. There you go. Yes, sir. We got you. And you were on my podcast. We had a great conversation. Awesome book. I got your bio here. It's great. Astrophysicist, cosmologist. You're a previous guest on StarTalk from a few years back. And recently, like practically minutes ago, CEO of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

I didn't know from your sweatshirt that you were a CEO. You're looking good, man. We're taking the CEO vibe in another direction. No pretension. Congrats, man. That's awesome. You've got a podcast, Does It Fly? by Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek fame. You've got a memoir out there.

It's been out for a few years now. A Quantum Life. It keeps getting released. My Unlikely Journey from the Street to the Stars. And that's the book that we talked about on my show. That's right. That reminds me of the quote from Oscar Wilde. We are all in the gutter.

but some of us are looking to the stars. - Ooh, that's good. - You didn't know about that quote? - No. - You could have put that in the book. - I could have put that in the book. - That could have been in the book. You could have called me next time. - Unless you're drunk on Thunderbird, then you're not looking up at the stars. - And you've also involved with NASA's IMAP satellite. - Yes. - So NASA has no shortage of acronyms.

So unpack IMAP for me. The Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe. Can't wait to talk to you about it. Okay, we'll get there in like a minute. So the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. I'm a big supporter of theirs, like from way back. And they say it sounds like it's only the Pacific, but they have a mission statement that's phenomenal.

functionally international. Getting people to look up. Yeah. That's why I try to do that every day. You're succeeding. Okay. You're succeeding, right? It's cool now. When I was a kid, you know, it wasn't so cool to be a nerd. Okay. Right now, nerds are cool. Everybody loves space. Plus, we were blurds.

All right, that's true. Black nerd. There's no way there's a black nerd. No, there's two of them. Trust me. At least. They don't know each other yet, but they're there. Oh, I could give you a list. Is that right? Oh, woo. Do you have a secret meeting before it was public that you guys were black nerds? Yeah. It's called National Society of Black Physicists. Nerds are a special subspecies of the whole world. Because people could ask you, what kind of nerd are you? They come in different ilks.

Isn't there just one general type of nerd? Science nerd, like a TV nerd, like that kind of thing. Yeah, well, you know, the first question is the difference between a nerd and a geek, right? So here's the thing. I got this. I got it. So a geek can be a geek in...

any specific category. You can be a music geek. Okay, well you're just into music. But you're not necessarily associated with science if you're a geek. You're geek, you're just into your thing. But a nerd, it says something about your personality and your behavior and your things you care about. - There's like kind of a quality about you. - Yeah, the quality of your personality. - I'll give you some examples. I was in the Navy back in the '80s, and a guy asked me, "Yo, how come you the only brother "that don't wear hella gold?"

And my answer was, it never occurred to me. And he said, what does occurred mean? Like, I couldn't even tell the difference between, you know, like dudes love cars. I couldn't tell two cars apart. Yeah, but you care about different things. You care about different things. Exactly. Yeah.

So do you have a vision for the Society of the Pacific? I do. I do. So the Pacific has, well, one thing- Let me just remind people, it's an organization that promotes public awareness and understanding of astronomy at all levels. At all levels. At the amateur level, you get a telescope. That's right. Why the term Pacific?

That's where it began, in San Francisco Bay Area. So the first president was the director of Lick Observatory, but it's known as America's first and oldest national astronomy organization. And Lick Observatory is the observatory of Santa Cruz. So, yeah. In the Bay Area, I used to observe supernovae there back in the day when I was a postdoc. Great place to drink.

You know, you go with a bottle and then boom. Eat chips. You got to eat chips at the observatory. So the ASP, one thing that made it different when it was founded was this egalitarian perspective. So they accepted professional astronomers, amateur astronomers, and educators at all the same level. Because it was all about sort of just...

lifting everybody up. All together. And you want to get it out there. The more you include, the better the knowledge. Highly laudable fact. High laudable fact. Because he doesn't hang out with Riff Raff. Don't make me snappy. But later, they added a new group that is labeled as enthusiasts.

Good. Yeah, yeah. So here's the thing about it. So I discovered them. I went to the Bay Area in 91 for graduate school, and there was this guy at the nearby community college, your name, you got to recognize, Andy Fracknoy. Yes. Who was the CEO. He was teaching at the community college. Excuse me. Yeah, he was teaching at Foothills. Foothills, yeah. That's right. And so I'm looking at Mercury Magazine. I'm looking at the proceedings of the SPC.

The ASP produces the magazine for the public, Mercury Magazine, and they produce proceedings of scientific conferences. - Of scientific conferences. - So they got it in everything. - There is-- - Probably one of these books is from that conference. - Exactly. But you know what else they do? So there are 90 astronomy journals in the world

PASP is typically between 15 and 20 of the 90 astronomy journals. So they're typically the top, around 17% of astronomy journals. And there you go, a proceedings of those books. - This is for every meeting of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, every professional meeting, there are proceedings. And it's beautifully published.

Everybody has one. And they line them up. Yeah, we all have these. And these are just two that are here relative to others that I have on a different part of the shelf. Galaxy Evolution, The Milky Way Perspective. Oh, that's a great, yeah. They made that into a film. Starring Tom Cruise.

He jumps through a Milky Way covered in Vaseline. It's an amazing scene. And equations. And equations. So, I mean, there are now hundreds of these. I mean, it's been around a long time. Oh, absolutely. So very, very good to hear that. That's right. So I saw them as...

scientifically rigorous organization that had the social consciousness to do this educator training. Which nobody else was doing because no one else was doing it. They were deigned to even talk to the public. Exactly. The ASP has been everything I care about

as a professional scientist is fulfilled by that mission. Why haven't other societies picked up on that part of it? I mean, you know, it's out there. It's a good example. And be inclusive. I have an answer. He probably has an answer, but I have an answer. In our field, there aren't many fields where it can reach

the enthusiastic amateur and they can still participate. Well, but your show does. Cosmic Queries is a perfect example of that. What I'm saying, that's astronomy and astrophysics. You can't really do, can you do that with physics, really? Well, you can if you're not pompous like you are. No, but it's harder because everybody's looking up.

You know, when we discover a supernova, a black hole, anything, it's headlines. Splitting an atom is less relatable than looking up at the stars. How many other sciences make a headline with that frequency? Think about it. Yeah, that's true. And how many families own their scientific instruments that they use professionally? Like people buy telescopes. Telescopes, yeah.

That's all I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah, so good luck with that. Sometimes you need a little bit of that. Oh, absolutely. But you're at the helm of a very important organization. Thank you, sir. And there it is. So now tell me about the latest NASA acronym. Yes. Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration. And Acceleration Pro. But you can't have a thing that says IMAP and then the word mapping is in the middle of it. Yeah, that's bad. That's not working. We're going to have to redo this. We're going to have to...

The word in the acronym can't be in one of the words in the acronym. It's like GNU's not UNIX. Look at this, Mr. Smart Alec over here. Remember, GNU's not UNIX? GNU? Oh, yeah. GNU, Linux, UNIX, you guys aren't that old. Okay, never mind. It's the white hair. So here's the thing. Before this, I was working on a satellite called the Supernova Acceleration Probe, and now I'm working on the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe. No, you're working on Earth.

related to the probe. - Right. - But I misused the word "on." - Yes, you did. - Okay. - So this is awesome. - So why is the word acceleration in the probe? - Because essentially what happens is the sun accelerates particles, right? It creates this bubble. And the example-- - That's the solar wind. - The solar wind, right? - Yeah, so the heliosphere, right? - But it's moving fast. It is supersonic, right? The heliosphere. But when it hits the-- - Wait, wait, wait, wait. What do you mean supersonic if it's moving through the vacuum of space?

Space. Is it exactly a vacuum? Oh, it's approximately a vacuum. It's approximately a vacuum. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Okay, so cool. So it's moving faster than the speed of sound would be in that very reduced vacuum. Exactly. And what happens is, is that, you know, so it's almost like a boundary where information only travels one way, which is out. That's the heliopause, isn't it? No, the heliopause is what I'm getting to. Okay. So just like the example that's given is when you...

It's just showing off how much you know. Let him catch up with you. Where do you find these two comedians? These guys know more science than the other guys. I'm done. That's the only thing I know. You know how you want to bottomize them first before you put them in? You know when you run water in a faucet and it makes this

and then there's that ring. That's like the heliopause where it goes from supersonic to subsonic. So our heliopause is doing that in the interstellar medium, but here's the thing. There was a previous satellite, so the guy who's running this professor out of Princeton named Dave McComas, okay? So I don't know if you remember the Ulysses satellite

Satellite do that went over the pole to the Sun didn't it went to the Sun? Yeah went over the poles of the Sun and we got to see that the solar wind around the mid Latitudes you have the regular wind 400 kilometers per second out of the poles the high-speed went 800 kilometers per second didn't know that so young Dave McComas is the guy who made that famous plot. All right, okay So then he had an idea and the idea is crazy. Let's look at neutral atoms

coming toward Earth from outer space. Who looks at neutral atoms? We look at photons, we look at different higher energy particles. There's nothing more boring than a neutral atom. Nothing more boring. It's not ionized. But here's their origin. These electrons from the sun go out, they hit the heliopause, so there's magnetic fields there. There's ions trapped in those magnetic fields. Those electrons get captured by those ions and they become neutral. So it's like neutering a dog. No. So...

Okay, well, anyway, while the ion is ionized, it is tied to the magnetic field and it's stuck out there. But once it becomes neutral, it is no longer stuck. It's no longer tied to the magnetic field because it has no charge. Because it has no charge. So some of them stream into the inner solar system. So you can get a map of the stuff that is in the magnetic field. Raining back down. Raining back down. And they discovered that if you look at the galactic system,

magnetic field it wraps around our bubble and perpendicular to that is a just like we have a radiation belt around our planet there is a belt around our heliopause and so NASA goes that's interesting now let's do a satellite that will look at that in way more detail as these things go you make a tiny discovery and

And it can open up a hole. Yeah, it opens up. Now you can build an entire experiment just for that discovery. That's right. What do you anticipate that you might find there? I mean, you must have something. Just the unknown. It's the exact same thing. You're going to find something you've never seen before, just like they did with Ibex. So now they're looking at acceleration from the sun. They're looking at acceleration of those magnetic fields. And they're testing the interstellar medium and what it's made of because those particles also stream in. So that's why it's the interstellar mapping and acceleration program.

Businesses that are selling through the roof, like Untucket, make selling and for shoppers buying simple with Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet. And with ShopPay, you can boost conversions up to 50%. Businesses that sell more sell on Shopify. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout Untucket uses. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash podcast free, all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash podcast free to upgrade your selling today.

Hello, I'm Alexander Harvey and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. So Donald Goldsmith, who's an astronomy writer and co-wrote the original Cosmos, and I actually co-authored a book with him on origins. He has his own LLC company and because he writes books and writes for TV, it's called Interstellar Medium.

Interstellar media. Interstellar, I love that. That's great. It's so simple and perfect. So I have an LLC too. What's that? Quarkstar. Okay. I thought no one would think of that. Turns out there was a lighting company on the West Coast named Quarkstar. Whoa, Quarkstar, all right. Here's a little bit more heady than theirs though. Well, this is a Cosmic Queries. Yes. And we can't just like shoot this shit forever. All right, okay. Let's do it. All right, this is James H. English. Greetings.

He's from Denmark. I read recently that the universe is expanding too fast for our theories and models to fit, increasing the Hubble tension. Do you think the problem is with our models or is there some physics we just haven't discovered to explain this? I.e., is the rate not constant due to some undiscovered property of space-time? Or is there something wrong with the data? So are models off?

Do we trust the data or do we need new physics? If the data's off, the model's off by definition, no? Maybe, no? I spent time at Princeton where they have a lot of theories. They say never trust...

an observation unless it's backed up by a theory. Well, that's happened. I know of two cases where observation was made and it did not fit with the theory. I'll give you a very simple one. It was Art Walker's research. When he first got the images, so when you see the pretty images of the sun with the plasma loops, Art did that first, right? And so the plasma loops had a constant cross-section. And so the solar physicists were like, dude, there's something wrong with your telescopes because we know magnetic fields diverge with altitude. So they should get fatter at the top.

They're not getting fatter. But just to be clear, so the magnetic field is confining the plasma. That's right. So the shape of the plasma is the shape of the magnetic field. And so he's saying that the magnetic field is just a constant cross-sectional tube. But it should be something more dynamic than that. Yeah. At the top, they should get fatter.

Right? Just like if you look at a bar and made it. Theory said that, right? And Art was like, ain't nothing wrong with my telescopes. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to have the same pass band, but I'm going to give you three different configuration telescopes. I'm going to give you a Cassegrain, a Herschelian, and a Richie Cretian. So you can't say it's the optics.

And not only that, so we would fly 16 to 22 telescopes with all these pass bands, which ended up being a subset of them, the same pass bands on SDO and EIT, the solar satellites, and show, no, this is what nature is doing. It's not an issue with the pass bands. It's not an issue with the optics. This is what nature is doing. And now that's what everyone knows. So the theory had to be adjusted. The theory had to be adjusted. Right, right. You had to come up with a mechanism. Yeah, so that can happen.

It can happen. So let's get back to Hubble tension. Hubble tension, right? So people have looked at that. There's been a lot of articles. There's been a lot of articles, right? And so essentially, and everybody wants to just throw out the Big Bang.

Or throw out dark energy. That's clickbait. Clickbait. Yeah, right. Exactly. It's clickbait, right? So essentially what's been happening is you have the cosmic microwave background radiation, which has been a treasure trove of cosmological information. Then you have the standard way that we measure radiation.

Expansion, I have some object, I know-- How fast it's moving? How fast it's moving away, it's redshift, and I also know its distance based on its brightness, right? And so now, I can make a Hubble diagram. I fit the Planck data, I get a value of the Hubble constant.

They don't agree. But the Planck is the cosmic background. Right, right. The Planck satellite from Europe. The Planck satellite. I be saying stuff, don't you know, I be leaving stuff out, man. That's why I'm here. That's why you're here. Thank you. Thank you. To keep you continuous. So now there's new James Webb Space Telescope data. Wait, wait, just set the stage. Yeah.

So you have data from the early universe. Yes. You get a Hubble rate. You get a Hubble rate. You get the traditional galaxies, usually with supernova or some other standard candle. And those two numbers do not match. They do not match. In my day, measurements of the expansion rate of the universe differed by a factor of two. Hmm.

a factor of two. Yeah. And so now they differ by just a few percent. Right. But... The error bars. The error bars, the uncertainty is way smaller than the difference in those two measurements. Right. So that is a more severe fact. Mm-hmm.

than not knowing the expansion rate of the universe by a factor of two. So we had a similar problem with the ages of stars and the age of the universe, which depends on the Hubble thing, right? And so it was the cosmological data that had to be adjusted. Somebody found stars that were older than the universe. That's right. Stars in the halo looked like they were older than the age of the universe, right? And the headlines were, oh,

Catastrophe! Oh my God! Yeah, people like ready to give up on the universe. But then we realized, oh no, our cosmology needs to be improved. And so, you know, what happened in the 90s, really, you know, post-Kobe, that changed everything in cosmology, right? Not Kobe Bryant. Not Kobe Bryant. The Kobe satellite. What you mean, right? That game where he scored 81 points? No, not that game. So then Cosmic Background Explorer, one of the first high-precision measurements of the...

cosmic background. - Mather and Smoot. - Mm-hmm. - Nobel laureates because of it. - Nobel laureates, yeah, yeah. - So circling to the Hubble tension. - So tell me, so what's, something's gotta give. - Yeah, something's gotta give. So I think that there's something that we don't understand. I think I'm trusting the measurements.

And I think that I trust the theory. The measurements look good, don't they? The measurements look good. I was involved in supernova cosmology, right? And also weak lensing studies for looking at structure of growth and these sort of things. And so all this different data, there's more than one probe, right? People are using different types of stars.

Right, that's where you get the confidence from. It's not just one data point from one telescope. So what James asks is, is there some physics we just haven't yet discovered? Are we missing physics? Or do we just have to adjust the model? Well, people come up with these models that may be the expansion rate of the universe. We have it like, okay, there's this initial impulse.

Right? And then the universe evolves based on the energy densities of the constituents, of which there are three main ones, right? Radiation, which is stuff that moves very fast through space, but almost not at all through time. Matter, which moves very fast through time and almost not at all through space. And space-time, which has its own energy density that we call dark energy, which doesn't move through either one, right? And so initially, radiation dominates, then matter comes to dominate, then dark energy, i.e. space-time energy density, comes to dominate. We think, yeah.

That's what he thinks, right? In each one, you can look at what the expansion rate would be of the universe. But here's the thing. Once we discovered the Higgs particle, the first time we discovered what is known as a scalar quantum field. What do I mean by that, right? We'll ask you that. What do you mean by that? Don't ask yourself these questions. That's for us to do. One of the things

Let's just back up in the United States we surely would have discovered the Higgs boson Oh, yeah with our superconducting supercollider. Yep, whose budget was cancelled right around when peace broke out in Europe. Mm-hmm

Right, between '89 and '93. - Unauthorized procurements. - So the center of mass of particle physics moved to Europe, to CERN, to the Large Hadron Collider. They discovered the Higgs boson. So now what happened? - So here's the deal, here's why I bring this up, because it's what is known as the scalar field. So when you think about the fields that you know of,

They're like, "Oh, the electric field, I have a charge, it has an electric field. Magnetic field, I have a charge that's moving, it generates a magnetic field. Gravitational field, oh, there's this matter." So every field you know of, there is some source in matter. But then here come the particle physics. They're like, "Oh yeah, you know why every electron is identical?" They don't say it this way, this is mine. "You know why every electron is identical? Same reason every C note, musical note is identical, because they're not the real thing. The real thing is the string or the air that's vibrating.

Right, so they invoke this idea of quantum fields. So the quantum field just permeates all of space time and is just there. But nothing is real in that quantum field. Well, excitations of the field are our particles, right? So there are the permanent ones and there are the virtual ones, right? So we measure the excitations as particles. As particles, right. Now here's what happens though.

they say, oh, there's this thing called the Higgs field. It's just there. It's just everywhere in space at all times. It's just there, right? Scalar field, no source. And I'm like, in my mind, as a young scientist, I'm like, is that real? Then they discover, they ring that damn field and create the particle. I'm like, wow. So now what can you do? Oh, inflation looks like the...

Alan Guth creates inflation. Looks like the universe rapidly expanded. Oh, I know what I'll do. I'll create another scalar field. I call it the inflaton field. So now you see some dynamics happening. You can just create a new field. But it sounds like you're pulling stuff out of your ass. It does. It does. But you're supposed to use it to make predictions. So you know, to test...

whether what came out of your ass is real. But you're using one as a jump. That's right. Shit is testable. I actually have a device that does that. I'll bring it to the next show. Oh, wait. Do you remember the shit list from the 90s? No. Oh, it was like a joke. And it lived on the internet, the early internet. And it was like all these different types of shit. One of them was ghost shit. You felt it came out. You wiped. There's nothing on the toilet paper. There's nothing in the toilet. But you know what happened. Wow.

Wow, okay. So some people are doing that. They're saying maybe the universe's expansion rate hasn't just been what we think it is, as simple as we think it is. And another question is- It could be yet another phenomenon acting on the expansion rate beyond the three that we have characterized. Do we have an idea of what it might be? Some weird quantum thing. You come up with something. Yeah, you come up with something. Is weird the scientific term you're going with here? Sure. Let me clarify here.

So this notion that the expansion rate is misbehaving, let me characterize it that way, that just means it doesn't match what our three most potent models would give us for it. Right. Okay, so do we introduce a fourth accounting or do we say that one of these are wrong? Right.

Or they're all working in harmony. Or each of those have to be adjusted. Well, there's an assumption within there as well that comes from the cosmological principle that the universe is isotropic and homogeneous. And now people are looking. If I look in that direction, I look in that direction, I look in that direction, is the expansion rate the same versus distance in every particular direction?

So, you know, that's why we have big surveys coming on like the Vera Rubin Telescope LSST because we typically have pencil beam surveys for the most part or surveys that don't go too deep. LSST was the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. Yeah. But we're astronomers and we don't like going that way. We don't play that. So we just named it after one of our...

You guys just like acronyms. You're just the laziest group of people. Vera Rubin Telescope. She discovered dark matter in the Milky Way. Wow. Speaking of, another telescope that's coming is the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. Dark matter or dark energy or both? Both. Both of them. It's going to be a survey telescope. Everybody knows that, Neil. Yeah.

So Nancy Grace Roman, going back to the ASP, she valued the ASP so much that when she passed away recently, she left the organization a few million dollars. - Whoa. - Yeah, yeah. - Okay, well listen, we did-- - Astronomers have millions of dollars?

Nancy Grace Roman had millions of dollars. We're gonna jump to the next. That was a great question, James. We're gonna jump to the next one. Adam Omelon. Hi, Dr. Tyson and Dr. Olusi. Adam from Poland here. First of all, I am a big fan of everything Dr. Tyson is involved in. I love his books, all his programs he's been on. My question is about the ability to detect various particles in the atmospheres of very distant planets.

We know that the light is altered as it travels towards us, but how exactly does this happen? Ooh.

Absorption spectrum. Yeah. Yeah. So it happens in two ways. So what's absorbing what? So what happens is that when you look at a transit of an exoplanet, so that means that it'll go in front of its star, right? And so at that time, the light from the star will pass through the atmosphere of the planet. Through the edges of the planet. Yeah. Yeah.

All right, so we're with you. You have this transit, and the planet is moving across the surface. Now, you don't see that. You don't see it. You just see light. Yeah. Okay? So I'm getting light in my telescope. So as that planet is going in front of a star, if it has an atmosphere, the light from the star passes through the planet's atmosphere, and that light interacts with that atmosphere around the edges. Right? Yeah. That light interacts. And so certain wavelengths of light aren't going to make it out the other side. They're going to be absorbed.

Right? And that's going to be the chemistry of the atmosphere. By the chemistry of the atmosphere. But remember, the star has its own spectrum as well. So you get a spectrum of the star by itself, you get a spectrum when the light is passing through the planet's atmosphere, and you subtract them. And what's left over is a spectrum of the planet. And now you can say, oh, I see this element or a molecule in that particular atmosphere. And is that a constant? In other words, that is a proven theory that works every time? Well, it's hard to do.

So James Webb space telescope was built to do that job and it actually has succeeded in doing that job Those are some of the early release like hey, we can do it. It hasn't just to see it is badass. It's bad ass Yeah, it's opened up the whole industry. Yeah to the whole cottage industry to make that happen. Yeah All right. We're gonna go on to Jordan Vecina from North Dakota. I've been curious about dark matter. She went from Denmark, Poland

North Dakota. Three places I've never been to. Okay. It may not ever go. I've been curious about dark matter. Is it possible that the reason why we don't understand dark matter is because it defies our understanding of the laws of physics? Meaning, is it possible that dark matter is something that can travel faster than light? Ooh.

Or how massive gravitational effect without having large mass. Love the show. Let me shape that another way and throw it right in your lap. So we probe the universe using our methods and tools of science that we have developed to this day. Could dark matter simply be awaiting some brilliant theoretical understanding coupled with some brilliant new kind of telescope that would see it? No.

in ways that no one had previously dreamt. So is it awaiting technology? Is it awaiting new physics? I think it's more basic than that. Or is it going to plug in with just a new kind of particle that just doesn't interact? Well, first off, trivia, my very first physics research... That's what I was wondering. You were in that. ...was somewhere of 91 on the cold dark matter, CDMS, right? In the basement in Berkeley. Okay. Building the dark matter direct detection, right? Which we've not detected anywhere.

any dogmatic yet. - So your PhD is from? - No, no, no. It's a funny thing. I got accepted, I applied to Berkeley and Stanford. I got rejected from Berkeley, accepted by Stanford. - You idiot got rejected by Berkeley. - Right? - I know, right? - Send him off to Stanford. - I went to work. - That's where the idiots go. - Rejects. - But no, here's what happened. I worked at Berkeley the summer between undergrad and grad on that project. At the end of the summer, they said, "Dude, if you wanna come to Berkeley, come."

But I didn't know Stanford was this highfalutin school. I didn't know that. Wait, you didn't know that? Dude, I was from the country, man. You didn't have the internet. You're a smart guy. His memoir is called From the Street. All right, that's the start. I got that out the mud. What part of that title do you not understand? All right, you thought it was a town in Connecticut, not a university. I didn't know Connecticut existed. So, I still haven't seen it. But anyway. And the town of Connecticut has an M, I think.

- Yeah, it does, but just go along with the joke. - Here's how I can think about this dark matter and dark energy stuff, right? Nothing at the scale of galaxies and larger, basically over 20,000 light years, bigger than the galactic arm, nothing moves consistent with the laws of physics. And so there's two ways, right? There's this like alternative gravity theories, which, you know, just like,

When you think they're dead, they come back and they're stronger than ever. And then there is this, oh, there's other stuff, dark matter. Oh, we got some great ideas for what that is. It's black holes, it's machos, it's super symmetric particles. Oops. Machos would be massive compact halo objects.

So we come up with our better instruments to look for them. Machos and wimps are two kinds of... Yes. They don't exist. We look for them, they're not there. The supersymmetric particles, sorry, I should have saw them. They're not there. But at what point in our series did you go, let's stop looking and move on to something else? It's like looking for a second sock and you just don't find it. No, no, no, because when we'd have to admit that we're stupid or that we're not. Yes, exactly. But we are driven by the uncertainty.

There are ambulance chasing theorists out there. Yes, there are. The slightest observation that's a little quirky, they're going to come up with a whole theory to understand it. Maybe several, right? Because they only have to get it right once. Is that what they call them? I call them that. So the answer is that we're never going to stop trying to pursue this theory. Something is amiss. The question is, what is it? But is it possible that dark matter is something that could travel faster than light? What is your theory on that?

Yeah. Well, we have those tachyons. Is there tachyons? Is that what it is? If dark matter is some kind of matter. Yeah. We call it matter, but we don't know what it is. Well, no. Here's the thing why we know it's not that. Why we know it's not? Because there are these two models. It's not moving faster than light. Because the two models that were competing were, is it hot dark matter or is it cold dark matter? So particles moving very fast would be hot dark matter.

And we know that the best model is Lambda CDM, cold dark matter. Dark matter just feels, every time I read about it, it just feels like, I don't know, like a guy shows up at a party or something and he just, it's there, but it makes, it's a weird vibe. It makes, it makes every, it's a person that makes. The only thing left is axions and I don't find that to be well,

People making up particles that'll do this. Yeah, yeah. Well, they made up a particle to cancel out the electric dipole moment of the proton, which should exist, right? If the quarks have electric charges and there's separation between the minus and the negative, there should be some what's called separation between them, which we call a dipole moment. But one is not measured. So Helen Quinn et al., they came up with this idea. Maybe there's this other field that cancels it. So it's the Wild West. It's the Wild West, man. Which actually makes it exciting. You come up with all these ideas and you...

- Go through all the moments, none of them. - But because we know that whatever the dark matter is, it's cold and not warm, it can't be going faster than light. - Exactly. - 'Cause it would have evidence. It would give evidence of that. - Yeah, and it's clumping gravitationally, right? And then you'd see, I imagine, shrank off radiation, right? That's when you travel faster than light in some medium. You emit light. So dark matter wouldn't be dark, maybe.

Businesses that are selling through the roof, like Untucket, make selling and for shoppers buying simple with Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet. And with ShopPay, you can boost conversions up to 50%. Businesses that sell more sell on Shopify. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout Untucket uses. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash podcast free, all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash podcast free to upgrade your selling today.

Here we go. Next one. David from upstate New York. I recently watched a side channel show with Hakeem. What?

and I fell asleep. It was really boring. That was weird. Why would you write that, David? I'm the guy who wakes everyone up. No, you're the best, man. You're the best. I recently read a side channel with Akeem. It was about gravitational waves. Just wondering, can they also alter time? If a huge collision occurred near our solar system, how would we feel them? Would we be alive to physically notice?

So will it do damage, first of all? Yeah. And we know it's a disturbance in the gravitational field, and everybody knows after the movie Interstellar that if you're in a different gravitational field, you're going to age differently. Yeah. So what kind of consequences? That's a good question. Like the perturbations of time travel...

This is a good time to bring up the Andromeda Paradox. Okay. You know, I was thinking the same thing. I was not. What is the Andromeda Paradox? Well, the Andromeda Paradox is the fact that if you and I are looking at Andromeda. Andromeda the galaxy. The galaxy. Mm-hmm.

Not the stars that make the constellation. Yeah, not this constellation. And not the strain that killed millions of people. Not the Andromeda strain, right? Two and a half million light years away. Then what happens is, suppose you're sitting in your chair and I'm running by. And at the second I run by you, we both look up at Andromeda.

because I'm moving and you're stationary, we're going to see events that are days apart, even though we're in the same location looking at the same time. How can that be? And you think that relativity, and you think that the light arriving. Don't just say relativity and keep talking. Wait, in this scenario, how far away from me are you when you're running by me? We're in the same place. We're in the same place, essentially. So you're like literally running here. I've never heard of this paradox. And you look up. It's a little known

And the thing that you see and I see are days apart. Days apart. Because of our physical perspective on that. Well, here's what you would think. You would think the light is arriving right now. We should all be receiving this light. But that's not how it works. Motion changes the perception of time. And so we know about that in terms of the local universe. We call it relativity of simultaneity, right? You're moving, I'm not. You see events as simultaneous. I see them as happening one before the other.

But then when you add the distance component in it, now we see very different times. So there could be a third person moving in the other direction seeing a different time. So how do you define what now is? Even though you're in the same place. Even though you're in the same place, yeah. While we're sitting here, I'm here, you're running by, we look up at the dramedy at the same time, and we're seeing something from the same location, essentially. We're seeing things days apart. Days apart.

And that leads to the idea of what is now and your now and my now are two different nows. There is no now. No, there is now. There's always now. There's an illusion of now because we're so close together and we're so small, the speed of light makes it feel like we have a now, right? But now doesn't really exist on larger scales. There's no such thing. But there always has to be a now in all seriousness. No, that is your bias.

That is your bias. That's so Galilean Newtonian. That's so backwards. I've never gotten heckled from the left and the right at the same time. That's right. So what is the upshot of this? Well, what was the question again? Because they're talking about time, right? And they're talking about now or something. And I'm just like that.

- What was it? - It was about gravitational waves, wondering can they also alter time? If a huge collision occurred near our solar system, how would we feel them? Would we be alive to physically notice? - Right, you curve space and you stretch time, right? It's kind of the idea like what a black hole does, right? Curve space, time moves more slowly relatively. But these phenomena of gravitational waves are incredibly subtle, and so the real calculation to do is

What type of gravitational wave will be necessary? It's like the big words for that to happen for that to happen to be to be felt to be felt right or to be you know, because the one that the first one that was measured it jiggled the experiment and

By 1/20 the diameter of a proton. There you go. You ain't feeling that you ain't feeling that but we know they were gravitational waves Yeah, we measure them right so you know you you want to think of what event what what magnitude of wave do you need? Intensity and then calculate what sort of event there are surely kill you before you had any experience But there are a whole host of it's an infinite number of things and

that could cause a gravitational wave, right? - Actually, wait, wait, the gravitational wave moves at the speed of light. So it can't kill you before the wave hits you. That would all happen at the same time.

Oh, that's a good thing. You add those things. Oh, well, that's the upside. You don't even know. You don't even know. So you get compressed to nothingness. You get ripped apart. This is like a sci-fi thing, right? The gravitational wavenator. All right, we're going to move on. Can we do a lightning round? Yeah, absolutely. We got some great ones. Here we go. Okay, go. Lightning round, dude. You know what that means?

be even more loquacious. - Yes, exactly, right, right. Yeah, okay, here we go. "I've always been bothered by physicists' preoccupation "with conservation of information, "especially in regard to particles "falling into a black hole. "Firstly, it sounds more like a philosophical position "than one derived through mathematics "or scientific method. "Correct me. "Secondly, Mr. Heisenberg taught us "that one can never know all information about a particle. "Thus, can't we consider that information "to never have existed in the first place

and thus can't be destroyed. I have one thing for Alan. Alan, if you're going to ask a question on acid, you got to send the tablets to us too so we can be on the same wavelength and answer the question. Tablets? Go. You mean tabs? There you go. There you go. He's not it. There you go. Alan Geist, go ahead and answer that question. He actually remembers the 60s. Exactly.

If you lived in the 60s, you shouldn't remember that. There you go. All right. Yeah. So I like that. I say here, here. I say here, here. I felt the same way. Catch us up on the information. This is a cultural phenomenon. Nerds ain't cool. And so they try to make something cool that ain't cool. All right? So this whole thing about, oh, black holes have hair. We made a bet. Man, nerds, shut the hell up. Yeah.

Nobody care. I don't care. So here's what I think they're saying, right? If I look at the sun, I can take a spectrum of the sun. Just to clarify, he said black holes have no hair. What he meant was that when matter becomes a black hole, it should have only like three physical parameters, like angle of momentum, mass, and charge. So the idea was whatever it looked like before,

It has none of that later once it becomes a black hole. So it says it has no hair. But that's back when enough people had hair that that was part of how you identified it. Right, exactly. But now that bald look, Lex Luthor, the billionaire with the bald look. Yeah, exactly. Speaking of which, you know something I realized? What? So, you know, I grew up in segregated Mississippi. So I go to graduate school and I would play basketball all the time. And I noticed that— That you sucked at it. Oh, man, I was a—

I didn't suck until I joined the Cambridge Athletic Club League at the age of 49. Then I sucked. In the 90s, I was great. But here's the thing. I noticed something. And that is, if there was a white dude who wasn't present and you're trying to describe him to someone, they invoke his hair color. Yes.

We didn't do that. That was... It's not our vocabulary. I don't know. It's like in China. Wait, you mean they'd say like, you know, Paul McCure, the guy with the dark hair? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's like in China. You don't imagine people are IDing each other. No, because when I talk about... You're invoking hair color. Right, exactly. It's the best thing with the black, straight hair. That's not helpful. But where I'm from, we invoke skin color. Oh, the light-skinned dude, the red bone, the yellow bone.

- See, I do it with voice. Like, you know, Neil Tyson, he talks like James Earl Jones. I do it like that. You do basically-- - This is CNN. - So we're gonna move on, all right? - But the point is that, yeah, some nerd thing that nobody, but let me tell you what, unlike a black hole, take the sun, right? You can reconstruct what made the sun. That's how we know, oh, the sun looks like three dozen supernovae constituted. You can look at what it's made of today,

and reconstruct where it must have come from. You can't do that with a black hole, right? That's the- - So you're in the we lost information camp.

In the black hole. Clearly. Or information, there's too much made of this information idea. Exactly. Okay, this is where he's coming from. Yeah. Okay. Give me another one. There we go. My name is Ross. I live in Madison, Wisconsin. Could dark energy, whatever it is, be the mechanism behind the big squeeze? As an analogy, consider a magnetic field. It comes out of one pole, folds back on itself, goes into the other pole. Imagine this magnetic field being the fabric of space-time propelled by dark energy. Is that something about dark energy? No, the

The point is the dark energy is making us expand and never return. So maybe he meant dark matter. So is there sufficient dark matter to close us back and then have the big squeeze? No, not even close. Not even close, okay. Give up on that one. Lighten an answer. Right, right, okay, next. Okay, when were we, this is Christopher from St. Louis, when were we looking into the cosmos for possible Dyson spheres?

What criteria are we using to tell the difference between a Dyson sphere and something else? Let me get that Dyson sphere out of your mind right now. All right. All right, because I did a little calculation. Mm-hmm. Right? So did I. Go ahead. Okay. Oh, by the way, just to make it clear, there are people who, when they want to know stuff, they look it up on the internet. But when you're a scientist, you calculate the answer. Okay? Right. I gave someone an answer one time. What source did you use?

In my education. The brain app. I should try it. Okay.

Try it sometime. It's called book learning. So basically, you're not going to have enough matter to build a Dyson sphere. If you took all of Jupiter and you try to make a Dyson sphere around the sun using all of it, the idea is that that matter, that's like taking a human eyeball and trying to make a sphere around a basketball using that material. So you're trying to harness the energy of a star using this artificial. You're trying to absorb it in matter.

And they convert it to useful energy. And so you do not have enough matter in the solar system to create something larger. To create something that you can put around the sun. Because it's not large enough or because it can't hold... Because it's not large. It's like... The stars are so much bigger than their planets. Have you seen the garbage bags that Costco sells? You put one of those around a star. Come on, guys. So they're hot.

Let me add to what you just said because it's a brilliant revelation regarding the material necessary. Right. If you had that much material, it means you're visiting other star systems. Why would you be visiting it? This is not even an interesting exercise. You don't even need it at that point. It's like, what are you trying? You're scooping up $1,000.

the planets of a thousand solos to get the energy from one star? What the hell are you doing? Hey guys, we already got the energy. Why are we trying to create the energy? You know what? The sun already has a Dyson sphere. You know what it's called? So when you think of the sun or a star, you think of it as two parts, the core and the envelope. Right. The envelope is a damn Dyson sphere. Yeah.

It's already there. It's naturally natural. It's 50% of the matter, right? 50% of the matter is in the core, 50% is in the envelope, and it's absorbing the energy that's coming out and radiating it to a useful form that we can build our solar arrays and capture. All right, let me add to that. Last year, there was a research paper on an observing project to look for Dyson spheres. Wow. Now, you know how they're going to do this? They're looking for very, very red star systems.

So they're like, they're not getting all the energy. They're just stepping it down. They're just saying that if you absorb all the energy from a star at this greater radius, then it would then radiate in the infrared. And so they're suggesting that they're aliens. So they have a data set of a handful of- They're cheating because there's all these stars that are enshrouded in dust that do the exact same thing. That's exactly the-

the rebuttal to that. Yeah. That there's stars, when you're in dust, it absorbs the energy and it re-rates it and radiates it. It makes a star look very red. Yeah. So that was the ordinary explanation for those very red stars in that experiment. We got to wrap. Okay, can I say one more thing? No. Okay. AstroSociety.org. Oh, AstroSociety. AstroSociety.org. Come join us. The Society of the Pacific, yes. And it may very well soon be

the Astronomical Society of Atlanta. And you can be a nerd, you can be a geek, you can be an enthusiast. You can be an educator, you can be a learner. All of that. Yeah. And you can give more than you want, but we have a very low donation. We ask to become a member of our community. Here we go. It's about money. No, it's not, man. But you can give more. Okay, so here you go. Under your...

- Leadership. - Yeah. - Will it become the astronomical society of the planet? - I think so. - Okay. - And the other thing is, let me tell you my other thing. - As it should have been. - My big thing is gonna be, I'm gonna take humanity, and when I look at the history of mathematics, so here's the thing, right? The big bottleneck for people getting into STEM is math, right? When people go to college, they ask themselves three questions when they choose their major.

What do I like? How much math is it? How much money can I make doing it? And what has the least amount of math? Right? And so what needs to happen is, so when I look at the, I look at it historically and I look at it in four phases. There's an early phase. Let's forget that. Here's how I named them. The Library of Alexandria,

That's when you have Euclid, you got the Pythagorean theorem, all that exists. You got basic geometry. Then you go to Nalanda or the city of learning. This is Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, the Gupta dynasty, right? Where they come up with the place value system, the numerals that become Arabic numerals.

Zero. Because they're really Hindu numerals. They're really Hindu numerals. And the zero comes out of there, too. Exactly, right? And then the third step is the house of wisdom, right? This is where you get quadrismy, solving equations, the stuff we do in STEM every day. And then you go to Cambridge, all right? So I, right now, the average...

- Newton. - Right now-- - Cambridge, England. - The average human on Earth, if you stop them and ask them any math question, they got the first two steps covered. We need to raise humanity to the house of wisdom. - Which is arithmetic and a little bit of algebra.

Exactly. Trigonometry. But here's what I mean. If you go up to the average person, you say, hey, what's two dogs plus three dogs? They'll say five dogs. What's two galaxies plus three galaxies? Five galaxies. What's two X squared Y cubed Z plus three X squared Y cubed Z? Get out of my face, nerd. It's the same problem, but they don't realize it because we haven't learned it. See, I don't say get out of my face. I whip out my Texas instrument. Bang, bang, bang. Texas instrument. Holy cow. There you go. Yeah, he keeps it right next to his palm. There you go. So.

So anyway, I want to raise the level of humanity. I have an HP. Join us. HP 45 in there. I got a Klepshydra and a star. What is that thing? Sundial. Okay.

There you go. Boy, I got a stone circle. Oh, nice. Stone hands. You got a stone hands in your backyard. I got a nap to ply ya. All right, we out. We out here. Peace. Yeah, yeah. Hakeem, really good to see you again. Thanks. Man. Your first time in my office here at the Hayden Planetarium. First time I've touched you in 20 years. That sounds a little creepy. You're welcome. Okay. So this has been Star Talk.

Cosmic Queries Edition, potpourri, with my old-timey friend and colleague, Hakeem. Welcome back. And, of course, Paul. Great to be here. All right. Until next time, I bid you to keep looking up.