Extraordinary Universe, with Daniel Whiteson
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Alright, we're all set for the party. I've trimmed the tree, hung the mistletoe, and paired all those weird-shaped knives and forks with the appropriate cheeses. And I plugged in the partition. Partition? It's a home cocktail maker that makes over 60 premium cocktails, plus a whole lot of seasonal favorites, too. I just got it for

So how about a Closmopolitan or a mistletoe margarita? I'm thirsty. Watch. I just pop in a capsule, choose my strength, and... Wow. It's beginning to feel more seasonal in here already. If your holiday party doesn't have a bartender, then you become the bartender. Unless you've got a Bartesian, because Bartesian crafts every cocktail perfectly in as little as 30 seconds. And I just got it for $50 off. Tis the season to be jollier. ♪

Add some holiday flavor to every celebration with the sleek, sophisticated home cocktail maker, Bartesian. Pick up your phone and shake it to get $50 off any cocktail maker. Yes, you heard me. Shake your phone and get $50 off. Don't delay. Hey, guys. I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. ♪

After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, what's up? This is Ramses Jha. And I go by the name Q Ward. And we'd like you to join us each week for our show Civic Cipher. That's right. We discuss social issues, especially those that affect black and brown people, but in a way that informs and empowers all people. We discuss everything from prejudice to politics to police violence. And we try to give you the tools to create positive change in your home, workplace and social circle.

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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And hey, on today's episode, I'm welcoming back to the show Daniel Whiteson, co-host of the new podcast, Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. Daniel's been on the show, I believe, twice before. It's always a fun chat talking about, you know, the nature of the universe and

human science and everything in between. So without further ado, let's just jump right in to this fun conversation.

Hi, Daniel. Welcome back to the show. Hey, thanks so much for having me on. So excited to be here to talk to you. Absolutely. So when we last spoke, and I guess it's been probably a couple of years now, the podcast was Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, but we're on to a new chapter. Can you tell us a little bit about Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe? Yeah, this new podcast, The Extraordinary Universe, is with an old friend of mine, Kelly Wienersmith.

She's a very well-known and highly awarded author of popular science books like A City on Mars and also an old friend of mine and wife of Zach Wienersmith of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

And together we have this podcast about everything we find amazing and wonderful and mysterious and delightful in the universe, which is basically the whole universe from tiny particles to big black holes to the mysteries of the Big Bang to leeches and all sorts of crazy mysteries in biology. We basically just have a lot of fun gazing in awe at the universe and wondering how it all works.

So would you say this kind of like opens up the concept a bit into more of like the general science realm? Yeah. Kelly's background is in biology. She's a parasitologist. So she studies like, you know, wasps that get infected and then change their behavior and, you know, things that crawl in your body and take advantage of you. And so she brings an alternative science background, not alt science, but like a different kind of science background.

background. And so we can ask different kinds of questions. And, you know, when I talk about particles, she can ask questions for the audience. Like, what do you mean Higgs boson? What is that anyway? And when she talks about the details of parasocial behavior, I can be like, hold on, what does that mean? So we play off each other really well. And, you know, she's an old friend, so we have a lot of fun talking.

Yeah, yeah. I tuned into an episode or two there. And yeah, you guys seem to have a good vibe. I caught you talking about turkey and Thanksgiving, which is timely since, you know, we're just coming off of Thanksgiving break here in the U.S. Yeah, we were talking about the physics of Thanksgiving, you know, like how many turkeys could you cook with a nuclear bomb explosion? And also the biology of Thanksgiving, like is tryptophan a real thing or is that just a myth?

So, you know, we dig trying to we try to dig deep into the science and then also keep it fun. Now, you mentioned a book that she co-wrote as she co-wrote this with her husband, I believe, A City on Mars, which I haven't read, but it sounds sounds like a very interesting read. I need to I need to pick it up because I was recently looking at a book titled Dinner on Mars by Lenore Newman and Evan Frazier. It's more like a book.

food-oriented approach to some of the same questions, I imagine. You know, how would colonization on Mars look? How would it work? And what are the extreme challenges of carrying it out? Yeah, it's a really good book. I recommend it for everybody. It's A City on Mars by Zach and Kelly Wienersmith.

And it came about, they're like tech boosters. You know, these guys are nerds. They're big fans of the future and technology and science and this kind of stuff. And they started out trying to write a book about how awesome it would be to colonize Mars and what it would be like and the technology we're going to use there. And what they found when they were doing the research was like, people haven't figured out a lot of really basic stuff about what it would be like to live on Mars, for example, and

Can you get pregnant in zero G? Nobody knows. Can you gestate in zero G? What's it like when you have a baby in zero G? Can you do surgery in low, in low gravity environments? All this kind of stuff. Nobody's figured out a lot of these questions. So they ended up kind of writing a throw cold water on the idea of colonizing Mars book.

which turned out to be very timely because of the rise of Elon Musk and his, you know, let's just go and do it, move fast and break things, might mean breaking like a million people's lives if you send a lot of people to Mars without figuring out some of this stuff. So in the book, they dig into the science of it, what we do know, what we don't know, how we might figure it out. It's a great read and really, really well researched. It recently won a Hugo Award and a bunch of other prizes for Popular Science.

Speaking of Elon Musk and Mars, do you think that recent political events have pushed up the timeline regarding possible human travel to Mars and even colonization? Do you think it's going to have any impact at all on how soon or how far off something like that would be? It's a really good question, and it's so hard to know because...

On one hand, he has a great track record of pushing hard on difficult technical tasks and succeeding. You know, like his reusable rockets. Amazing, right? Nobody thought that was possible. He made it happen. Even, you know, electric cars, all this kind of stuff.

he also has a track record of promising stuff and then not delivering you know the boring company for example um hyperloop all this kind of stuff sometimes his proclamations you know people argue like he pushed the hyperloop to kill california high-speed rail so it's not always clear whether his grand visions are to push his companies forward or to slow down another track

Something I do worry about, though, is the rise of anti-science popularism. You see the rounds, his cost-cutting strategy, picking out individual elements of science and saying, look how ridiculous it is that we're studying the reproduction health of beetles. What a waste of taxpayer dollars. And

you know, it's not hard to draw dotted lines between like understanding beetles and a billion dollars in agriculture for wheat, for example. So, you know, in the funding, basic science is a great way to advance technology and colonization on Mars. And so I think there's a danger that if we

cut basic science too much, we could be inhibiting these kinds of visions that he's espousing, that he's pushing, right? He wants us to be a multi-planetary species. I think the best way to get there is to do the science and fund basic research, not cut anything that doesn't have obvious value immediately.

Plus, I mean, obviously, you know, we have such challenges here on this planet and they're not abating. So I suppose on one hand, it just feels even more ludicrous that we would accelerate in this direction, you know, setting our sights on such a prospect in a world that is so lifeless, that is not this shining gem that we are squandering here.

Yeah. And as Kelly and Zach point out in their book, the goal of making humans multi-planetary is a great one, but it's sort of impossible to achieve on a short timescale in the way that he wants to achieve it. I think his idea is, let's make sure we don't have all of our eggs in one basket. If an asteroid hits the earth and wipes out everybody, it'd be great to have civilization and consciousness already established on Mars, right? But any sort of realistic colony on Mars is going to be

utterly dependent on Earth for so long that there's really no chance of having an independent Mars that could survive that kind of cataclysm on Earth for a long, long time. I mean, that doesn't mean we shouldn't figure that out and we shouldn't get there and we shouldn't push hard now to make it happen. But the way to do it isn't just send a million people to Mars. It's to figure out those technical challenges so that it's more successful.

All right, we're all set for the party. I've trimmed the tree, hung the mistletoe, and paired all those weird-shaped knives and forks with the appropriate cheeses. And I plugged in the Bartesian. Bartesian? It's a home cocktail maker that makes over 60 premium cocktails, plus a whole lot of seasonal favorites, too. I just got it for

50 off. So how about a closmopolitan or a mistletoe margarita? I'm thirsty. Watch. I just pop in a capsule, choose my strength and wow. It's beginning to feel more seasonal in here already. If your holiday party doesn't have a bartender, then you become the bartender. Unless you've got a Bartesian because Bartesian crafts every cocktail perfectly in as little as 30 seconds. And I just got it for $50 off. Tis the season to be jollier.

Add some holiday flavor to every celebration with the sleek, sophisticated home cocktail maker, Bartesian. Pick up your phone and shake it to get $50 off any cocktail maker. Yes, you heard me. Shake your phone and get $50 off. Don't delay. Even if you think it's a bit overhyped, AI is suddenly everywhere, from self-driving cars to molecular medicine to business efficiency. If it's not in your industry yet, it is coming fast, but

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That's oracle.com slash strategic. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about.

It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High.

It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hey, what's up? This is Ramses Jha. And I go by the name Q Ward. And we'd like you to join us each week for our show Civic Cipher. That's right. We're going to discuss social issues, especially those that affect black and brown people, but in a way that informs and empowers all people to hopefully create better allies.

Think of it as a black show for non-black people. We discuss everything from prejudice to politics to police violence, and we try to give you the tools to create positive change in your home, workplace, and social circle. Exactly. Whether you're black, Asian, white, Latinx, indigenous, LGBTQIA+, you name it. If you stand with us, then we stand with you. Let's discuss the stories and conduct the interviews that will help us create a more empathetic, accountable, and equitable America.

You are all our brothers and sisters, and we're inviting you to join us for Civic Cipher each and every Saturday with myself, Ramses Jha, Q Ward, and some of the greatest minds in America. Listen to Civic Cipher every Saturday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Now, your focus, of course, is the world of physics. And this past year, of course, there's been a lot going on. It's been easy to focus and ruminate on all these other issues. But what's been going on in the world of physics? Like what was exciting in the realm of physics in 2024? And how does it look going into 2025? Yeah, well, you know, physics is a lot of fun. There's always a lot of things going on. My particular realm is particle physics.

And these days, the conversation in particle physics is essentially what's next. We've been running the Large Hadron Collider for a lot of years now, since around 2008, so almost 20 years. We found the Higgs boson, we measured the particle properties out the wazoo, and people are wondering, like, should we build another one? A big question in the field is, can

Can we ask for another 10, 20, 50 billion dollars to build another particle collider to try to discover something new, especially if we don't know in advance what we're going to find?

So a lot of discussions in particle physics are about that. What should we build? Do we have the political will to ask for all that money? How do we defend that? Are we at risk at overshooting if we ask for something too big and having another debacle like the superconducting supercollider in Waxahachie, Texas in the 90s?

Yeah, it's the part that kind of slides back into what we were just saying about, like, anti-science popularism and so forth, you know? It's like, how do you end up making an argument for these kinds of projects in that kind of climate?

And then if you do, how do you do so like responsibly, right? Yeah. And I don't have a hard time making that kind of argument. I mean, I'm a particle physicist. I have an interest in this, obviously. But to me, the conversation is funny because people say we need to promise some kind of discovery if we're going to ask for a $20 billion project. And

And I don't think that at all. I think that we should be arguing for the value of peer research, research without knowing in advance what you're going to discover. To me, it's like exploration. Like, is it worthwhile to send a probe to sample the oceans of Europa? Absolutely, yes, because we could discover alien life and blow our minds and learn incredible things.

You know, the history of basic research is surprises, right? And those surprises very often lead to transformational technologies and developments. The way to move forward as a society is not to pull back, but to invest in ourselves. And the best investment we can make is basic research. Yes, particle physics. Yes, you know, viruses. Yes, all sorts of stuff.

It costs money, but it pays for itself. So if you believe in humans and you believe in our ingenuity and you're amazed at the mysteries of the universe and believe that we can crack them, then everybody should think, hey, we should 10x our research budget because it's going to pay off.

And we have the money now. We should spend it because it's going to help our kids and our grandkids and everybody in the future. The present that we live in today is because people made those investments 50 years ago, 100 years ago in basic research, which transformed our society.

So particle physics is just one example of that. I don't think we need to be able to promise we're going to discover the squiglion particle in order to ask for $20 billion. We just need to say, hey, look, the universe is worth figuring out. Let's go do it. Let's explore. Who knows what we're going to find?

Yeah, yeah. And in doing so, yeah, avoiding stagnation. Yeah.

Tell us a little bit about this idea and how you feel about it.

Yeah, this is something you hear about a lot in sort of popular science. I don't want to name any names, but there's quite a few folks who are sort of on the edge of theoretical physics, not really in the mainstream, who criticize the mainstream of theoretical physics and say, we haven't figured out anything in 50 years, and those guys are wasting their time and our money and, you know,

You know, it's part of this sort of broader anti-science, anti-elite, anti-expertise movement in America that we've seen various political figures and business figures encouraging.

And I think it's troubling and I think it's dangerous. And I think also there is some merit to it. But, you know, I think it's worth teasing that apart and thinking like, what can we learn about the progress or lack of progress in fundamental physics? And how should we move forward? We shouldn't just tear everything apart because it's easy to criticize things from the outside.

It also seems like it's probably a real cherry picking of the idea of progress and scientific progress, right? Like I was, you know, I think a lot of us probably did some traveling, uh, over the last couple of weeks, uh, at least. And like, you know, sometimes you might ask yourself, well, am I really getting anywhere? I haven't driven through a major city in an hour. I go, yeah, maybe not, but that doesn't mean I'm not progressing towards a destination or into a new territory. Right. I mean, um, it, it,

like, like what, what is progress? Yeah. If you want to really, um, you know, zero in on like huge events and huge revelations, uh,

maybe so, maybe you can make that case. But then you've got to discount a lot of just the other knowledge and all the other findings that have been accumulated. Yeah. And I think that physics or fundamental physics has made itself vulnerable to this kind of criticism because for many years it did oversell itself. You know, the problem that fundamental physics is trying to solve, one of the crucial questions in physics today is what is the nature of the universe at the smallest scale? How can we describe it?

And the problem is that we have two different descriptions of it. We have relativity, which tells us what space is and time is and how they interact and how they bend and curve to create the appearance of the illusion really of gravity. It's a wonderful theory and it describes the expansion of the universe and motion of the planets and basically everything that's big. And then we have quantum mechanics, which tells us that nothing in the universe is continuous. Everything is made of little chunks.

And that at the fundamental particle level, things are probabilistic and random. And that works beautifully and describes particle collisions and, you know, all sorts of details about the early universe that we've been able to observe and calculate. It's an incredible theory. And the problem is nobody knows how to bring these two theories together, to make them work together, to do things like...

Figure out well what happens if you have a bunch of particles that have enough mass to bend space-time and then space-time affects those particles in a probabilistic way. This classical theory of relativity and the quantum fundamentally random theory of quantum mechanics, nobody's been able to pull those two things together. That's the open question for like literally a hundred years.

And in the 80s and 90s, there was this sense that maybe we had a glimmering of the answer. String theory rose up out of failed efforts to describe another fundamental quantum theory, fundamental quantum phenomenon, the strong force.

And it was very promising and it was very mathematical. And people had this sense like, wow, maybe we're just getting our fingers around the solution. And there were a lot of bold claims that were made about how we were going to figure this out quickly and all sorts of stuff. And that hasn't come to pass. That doesn't mean, as you say, that we haven't made progress. The mathematics of string theory has helped people figure out a lot of stuff and they've been definitely making a lot of progress lately.

But some people feel like, hey, we haven't figured that out yet. And there were all these big claims. And so clearly these guys are wasting our time. And also maybe they're doing it and in bad faith, maybe they're just writing grants to get government money and they know they're wasting their time and they're just fooling themselves. And this is,

cabal at the heart of fundamental physics that's like captured it. And they're just like writing grants for themselves and supporting each other. And that's the part that troubles me. Like you can disagree with what people are doing and the questions they're asking and even the methods they're using to ask those questions. But once you start suggesting that physicists are like lying and

That, you know, they're not actually interested in solving the problem. They're just interested in like getting their, you know, academic salaries, which let's be clear, physics academic salaries are not really that impressive compared to like what physicists earn when they go off into Wall Street, for example. Then I think you entered a different kind of discourse, you know, where you're really interested.

implying that people are lying and acting in bad faith. That's not the physics that I see, and that's not physicists I recognize. I think everybody's doing their best, trying to figure stuff out. Some people are excited about string theory, some people are excited about alternatives, loop quantum gravity, or post-quantum gravity, or all sorts of other ideas. I think there's a healthy debate

And I think you never know what's going to lead to success. You should fund all of these things. You should fund crazy ideas on the fringe. You should fund the mainstream. The real tragedy is that we have such a tiny amount of money for fundamental physics. I mean, the amount of money we spend training LLMs to make ridiculous hallucinations versus the amount of money we spend trying to understand the fundamental nature of the universe, it dwarfs it. It's, you know, it's factors of millions and millions, right?

So, you know, I think there is progress being made in fundamental physics. People can disagree about how it happens, but I think we should remember that everybody's doing their best.

Now, how long is this? I guess we can sort of think of it like anti-physics establishment mentality. Like, how long has this been cooking? And is it something that like stems out of like some of the anti-climate change ideas out there? Or has it been sort of percolating in its own column?

It has a long history. You know, there have always been folks who think science is taking the wrong path. And, you know, I get emails from retired engineers every day saying, "Look, I figured out the universe. I have a theory. And why won't anybody listen to me? Why won't anybody read my paper? How come my paper isn't getting discussed and criticized the same way Ed Witten's paper is about superstring theory?"

And I get that. It's frustrating. You are a smart person. You have a great idea. Why won't anybody listen to you? So I think there's always been a community of people who feel like they're on the outside of academia and academia is insular and doesn't listen to ideas from everybody because there's this conception that academia is like this faceless meritocracy where ideas come in and something happens where the best ones rise to the top.

And so if you have an idea and you try to get attention for it and nobody responds to your email, then you get the feeling like, oh, this is an insular bunch that only want to hear ideas from their friends. So I think that's a longstanding problem. And I'm personally trying to overcome that in my small way because I answer every single email I get from the general public. You send me a theory of physics. I give you 20 minutes. I'm going to read your theory. I'm going to comment on it. I'm going to write you back.

People don't always like my comments, but you know, they get what they asked for. A little bit of attention, whether you liked it or not. Sometimes I find a flaw on page one and that's gotta be disheartening. Another time, some woman wrote to me because she

She had found in her father's papers a theory that he'd been working on in retirement in secret for like 10 years after retiring from Boeing as an engineer. And she just wanted to know like, hey, can you look at this and tell me, is this anything? This is my father's project in his retirement. And I'd hate to think that.

It just went ignored, so I took a look at it for her and tried to gently let her know that, you know, there were some interesting ideas there, but nothing really new. So I feel, I think a lot of people feel like they're on the outside of science and it's hard to break in because, look, science is just people.

You know, I'm a person, a science is nothing more than just a bunch of people trying to figure out the universe and also run their lives. And people have too much to do. So most people, you send them at your theory of everything. They're like, thanks, man, but I'm working on my own theory. I don't really have time for yours.

So I think that's the root of it. And then there are some folks, you know, Eric Weinstein, for example, who are on the fringes and have their own theory, and I don't know whether they actually want it to be examined in detail, because Eric Weinstein, for example, has a theory called geometric unity, and it has received some attention and some criticism, which to my understanding he's mostly disregarded, so that he can continue to say that his theory hasn't been given any attention.

For some folks, I think there's a benefit to being ignored by the mainstream and they might want to preserve that. But I think more broadly, there's this rise recently in the last 20 years of rejection of expertise, of saying, as you say, climate scientists...

you know, try and undermine their expertise by saying, oh, they're doing it for the grant money. And I think that's a shame. I think it's a tragedy if there's a disconnect between the academic elite, the people who are trained to think deeply about these topics, which we definitely need in our society. We need experts on all sorts of stuff to guide us.

and the general public who are funding it, whose curiosity is the reason it exists. We need a better connection between those two. We need everybody to feel like they're part of it in some way. And, you know, not to shamelessly plug our podcast, but one of the reasons why this podcast is important to me is because I feel like there are a lot of people out there who want to understand, hey, what's going on in physics or in biology or

I want to understand better. And that's what we try to do on the podcast is like, let's break these ideas down and make them accessible to everybody. So people understand why are we trying to build a new collider or why are those graduate students purposely letting themselves get beaten by leeches or whatever? We want to make science accessible because it's in the end for the people and by the people.

That's a great point. Yeah, because you need to make the core scientific ideas accessible because it's been my observation that the fringier ideas are

are often inherently accessible. They're on the fringes for a reason, but there is often something about them that is attractive in that it seems to explain everything or it seems to, or of course it'll scratch other itches that are there in one's identity or values.

Uh, you know, and I like, you know, I, I instantly think to some examples from like theories of, um, and hypotheses of consciousness, you know, ideas that are not like well regarded, um, in, in the, the mainstream, but you know, there's something about them that, um, you know, that, that really, uh, you know, enraptures you on the outside. And I imagine it's that way with a lot of, uh,

a lot of these fringier ideas. - Absolutely, and I'm not an expert in it at all, but I'm watching with fascination at almost the same phenomena happening in the field of archeology.

You have Graham Hancock, for example, he's got this Netflix special about where he has this theory that there was a civilization many, many thousands of years ago that was much more advanced than anybody thinks. And he's claiming archaeologists are ignoring this idea and, you know, that the mainstream is protecting some narrative. It's exactly the same story people tell about fundamental physics, but now just transplanted to archaeology. And as you say, it's a very compelling idea. Yeah.

You know, the concept that our history could be different from what we imagined and it could be maybe hidden from us in a sort of, you know, Dan Brown sort of way. And we could be pulling back the veil and understanding the truth. It's exciting, right? I wish it were true. It would be fantastic.

And I know archaeologists, and just like fundamental physicists, they're busy people and they're curious people. But if you came to them with some evidence of some world-changing transformational discovery of an ancient civilization, their instinct wouldn't be like, oh my gosh, we better bury that because that –

challenges the narrative, it would be like, let's go find some more evidence. Let's go figure this out. Oh my God, how exciting. Because remember, that's why scientists got into this, to figure stuff out, not to protect some ridiculous mainstream narrative. But it's frustrating because Graham Hancock, he's got a Netflix special. Two of them. Keanu Reeves was on the second one. Like the guy has a huge audience.

He's on Joe Rogan all the time. This stuff is compelling. It's very easy to sell. And it's very hard to back up in a sort of rigorous scientific way, which is why archaeologists are like, that's crazy. There's no evidence for that. And we saw Flint Dibble go on Joe Rogan and, you know, bring receipts and all sorts of data and, you know, carefully dismantle this.

And then later, Joe Rogan just dismisses him and calls him a liar. So it's hard to engage with these folks because it's not always clear that they're operating in good faith. And their stories are easier to tell. You're right. They're compelling. And they don't have the same rules of evidence and logic that, you know, like...

Understanding the nature of the universe and making progress in archaeology requires real detailed evidence and careful work. So it's a problem. Yeah, it's a problem. And I think we need to bring more people into the fold and make people feel like science is, that they're part of the scientific process.

Because the irony here is that, to use the alternative archaeology example, is that often they're promising something that is already present in mainstream archaeology. Like the idea that, oh, the past isn't what you think it is. Okay, that is always, in my experience, that's always the case when I start researching.

reading about the past. It's like, oh, it is different than what I thought it was. And people were more advanced than I sometimes give them credit for, you know? Like, all of these things are true if you take the deeper, longer path of, like, legitimate research and instead of this promised shortcut that ultimately does not lead to a place of truth. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, exactly. And these alt-science folks often describe mainstream archaeology or mainstream physics in not such a charitable way and not such a fair way. It's really, it's a straw man that they're attacking, not the real thoughtful process at the heart of science. And it's unfortunate because...

you know, if we had that kind of energy and that platform, Joe Rogan and Netflix specials for real science, we could really engage people. We could inspire young people to come and do science and contribute. We could encourage, you know, elected representatives to put more money towards researching these things. Um,

I think everybody would want that and everybody would benefit from that from my perspective. Like, I don't understand why basic research isn't a bipartisan winner. Like, you want future economic power? Fund basic research. You want military power? That's the most important thing to you? Cool. Fund basic research. You want cultural dominance? Like, fund basic research. Like, it gets you all of these things.

Education, it's something for everybody, no matter where you are in the spectrum. You want freedom of speech, you want truth, you want more tools to help the poor. All this stuff comes from basic research. It's the best investment anybody's ever made in anything, basically.

Basically, it's the foundation, right? And that's what you build on. Yeah, exactly. So it seems to me like a classic mistake to say, oh, we're rich now. We don't need to spend money on basic research. Like that seems like the kind of thing that we're going to regret in 20 or 50 or 100 years.

But anyway, you know, I'm a physicist and I benefit directly from basic research funding. So I guess I have a conflict of interest there, but you know, it's really just that I'm excited about this stuff and I think everybody should be. I think these questions are amazing and, you know,

understanding the nature of the universe, the origin of the universe. These are fascinating mysteries that go right to the heart of like, what is it like to be a human? Why are we here? How should we live our lives? And everybody deserves to be a part of that and to understand what we know and what we don't know and what we're working on and how we're trying to figure it out. I want to do as much as possible to bring people into the fold and share with them these incredible mysteries and what we're doing to figure it out. ♪

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So how about a Closmopolitan or a mistletoe margarita? I'm thirsty. Watch. I just pop in a capsule, choose my strength, and... Wow. It's beginning to feel more seasonal in here already. If your holiday party doesn't have a bartender, then you become the bartender. Unless you've got a Bartesian. Because Bartesian crafts every cocktail perfectly in as little as 30 seconds. And I just got it for $50 off. Tis the season to be jollier.

Add some holiday flavor to every celebration with the sleek, sophisticated home cocktail maker, Bartesian. Pick up your phone and shake it to get $50 off any cocktail maker. Yes, you heard me. Shake your phone and get $50 off. Don't delay. Hey, guys. I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more.

After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together.

You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all.

It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hey, what's up? This is Ramses Jha. And I go by the name Q Ward. And we'd like you to join us each week for our show Civic Cipher. That's right. We're going to discuss social issues, especially those that affect black and brown people, but in a way that informs and empowers all people to hopefully create better allies.

Think of it as a black show for non-black people. We discuss everything from prejudice to politics to police violence, and we try to give you the tools to create positive change in your home, workplace, and social circle. Exactly. Whether you're black, Asian, white, Latinx, indigenous, LGBTQIA+, you name it. If you stand with us, then we stand with you. Let's discuss the stories and conduct the interviews that will help us create a more empathetic, accountable, and equitable America.

You are all our brothers and sisters, and we're inviting you to join us for Civic Cipher each and every Saturday with myself, Ramses Jha, Q Ward, and some of the greatest minds in America. Listen to Civic Cipher every Saturday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Dani Shapiro, host of the hit podcast,

hit podcast, Family Secrets. How would you feel if when you met your biological father for the first time, he didn't even say hello? And how would you feel if your doctor advised you to keep your life-altering medical procedure a secret from everyone? And what if your past itself was a

with your child? These are just a few of the powerful and profound questions we'll be asking on our 11th season of Family Secrets. Some of you have been with us since season one, and others are just tuning in. Whatever the case, and wherever you are, thank you for being part of our Family Secrets family, where every week we explore the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.

Listen to Season 11 of Family Secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, let's go ahead and get back into another mystery here. So as we move to close out another year, it's, of course, easy to get caught up in ideas of endings and beginnings. And, of course, it's easy for our minds to turn to the Big Bang. But I understand you'd like to settle some misunderstandings out there regarding the Big Bang, right?

Yeah, it's incredible to me when there's a gap between how science describes something and the story in the mind of the public. And something I run into all the time is people's confusion about what we mean by the Big Bang. So I think in the minds of most of the public, the Big Bang is an event that began the universe around 14 billion years ago when a tiny dot of matter exploded out into empty space.

I think this is the concept a lot of people have in their minds when you say the Big Bang. And that's not the concept that most scientists have. It's not the scientific view of what happened 13.6 billion years ago in a couple of crucial and really fundamentally different ways. And I see this all the time because people write to me and ask me questions about stuff. And I see, oh, you must have the wrong idea of what the Big Bang is, which is why you're asking this question.

And the two misconceptions there are one, the Big Bang in no way is the start of the universe. I mean, what I really should say is we have no idea what happened before a moment 13.6 billion years ago. We don't know that it was the start of anything. It's just as far back as we can tell the story. Before that, because we don't know how quantum mechanics and general relativity merged together, we don't even know how to think about it. We have no idea what happened, what the rules were.

So it's not the beginning of the universe in any sense. That's number one. And we can dig deeper into how we know that and what that means. And number two is that it wasn't a tiny dot in empty space. It was everywhere. The Big Bang filled the universe. There's no special point from which the Big Bang came.

But the universe is infinite now, we think, and probably was infinite always, which means the Big Bang was infinite. It was literally everywhere in an infinite universe. And that's a very different conception in your mind from a tiny dot exploding out into infinite space to a universe already filled infinitely with stuff.

And this is something we know very well. And so when you talk to scientists about the Big Bang, they think, okay, we're talking about a moment when the universe was very dense almost 14 billion years ago, and then the expansion that comes afterwards. You know, how things spread out. That's what scientists mean by the Big Bang. But the general public, they think of this dot that began the universe and exploded out into empty space. People often write to me and say,

Hold on a second. If the universe began as a tiny dot of stuff and now we think it's infinite, how do you go from one to the other? Which is a great question because you can't go from one to the other. You can't go from a tiny finite dot of stuff which explodes out and then have a universe that's infinite with stuff everywhere.

And this is my frustration with these misconceptions is that people get confused. And when they try to think about it for themselves, which they definitely should do, they can't match up what we know because they have this misunderstanding, this misconception of what the Big Bang is. Instead of thinking about the universe as starting from a tiny dot, they should think about the whole universe collectively.

filled with stuff that expanding, space itself stretching out so that stuff becomes more and more dilute, more and more spread apart and colder. And that's what leads to an infinite universe filled with infinite stuff. It always was infinite. It always had an infinite amount of stuff in it. What came before that? Where that stuff came from? We don't know. We don't have an answer for that.

And that's another problem with the misconceptions. People imagine that the Big Bang Theory claims to explain why we have a universe, why we have something rather than nothing, where it all came from. But it doesn't, not at all. It says, hey, we can rewind the clock using the laws of physics to go back about 13.8 billion years to the moment when everything was hot and dense and filled the universe. Before that, question mark.

I mean, there are theories, there are ideas, there's speculation, there's half-formed prospects and research in progress, but nobody knows what happened before that. And so if people think that science is making that claim, it becomes very easy to criticize, especially

Especially, you know, from an anti-science crowd. They're like, look at the hubris of these scientists who claim that the universe began in this ridiculous way for which there's no evidence. And yet science not making that claim. Sort of analogous to like people who criticize the theory of evolution when they say, how could you possibly explain how you got life from abiotic chemicals?

But the theory of evolution doesn't claim to explain that. It says, if you have life, we can explain its development. We don't know how it began. It becomes very easy to criticize evolution if you say it's making claims that it isn't making. In the same way, physics, I think, suffers because people misunderstand some of the central concepts in it.

And it's actually fascinating. I dug through the history of it a little bit to understand, like, where did we go so wrong? Why is it that we have this gap between the public's understanding and the concepts in the minds of the scientists who are working on it? So to refresh...

We have a dense infinity that then expands into a less dense infinity. But this is not the beginning. This is not book one in the series. This is book question mark in the series. And we don't know how many volumes come before it. Exactly. We have no idea. It could be the universe began just before that in some crazy event.

Or it could be the universe is infinitely old. It could be that, you know, time itself doesn't have a meaning. Time is some weird emergent thing and only coalesced just before that. We really just don't know. Any of these answers could very plausibly be the reality. So calling the Big Bang the beginning of the universe or saying that science claims that is not fair because that's not our theory of the Big Bang. It's

It's definitely an open question. This is one of the fuzziest things, I think, for folks outside of physics to understand what is solidly known and what is sort of like, hmm, here's a speculative idea we're working on, which is kind of fun, so maybe worth telling you about. Or like, what's an idea we had and we kind of moved on from, but it's sort of stuck in the minds of the public. And I think that might be the case with the Big Bang theory.

I went back and read some of the original science journalism on this topic. And there's an article in 1965 in the New York Times by Walter Sullivan, who's a famous science journalist. He got a bunch of prizes in science journalism named after him. He won all the prizes, and now they're naming the prizes after him. And he wrote this article in the New York Times, like a paper of record. And he describes the Big Bang incorrectly in that article.

He describes it as galaxies receding from a single point out into infinite space. And I read a bunch of science journalism that followed that, and I suspect that that sort of misdescription of it planted the seed. Because I think a lot of science journalists, they don't read the original science papers. They read the other coverage. They talk to their friends. They try to get an idea of the concepts. And I think...

Then it gets reinforced and reinforced, and I think that probably led to a lot of misunderstanding about the nature of our understanding of the beginning of the universe. And there's also a lot of blame on the part of the scientists also. You know, scientists have used the same words to mean different things. When I say the Big Bang, I'm talking about the evolution of the universe from this dense state.

But Stephen Hawking wrote a paper in the 70s about a Big Bang singularity where he was proposing exactly what people have in mind, like a singularity where time began and the universe was born. So he sort of reused that word to mean something new, which must be very confusing for well-meaning science journalists who have a very, very difficult job to translate these ideas into something that's understandable for the general public.

So, you know, I think it was all very well-meaning and everybody tried their best, but there was a, you know, a game of telephone there where things were lost in translation and then preserved in the minds of journalists and just propagated on and on. And so it's important to me to try to correct some of these to like make people understand, hey, what do scientists actually think about when they think about the Big Bang? And how do we know that? So I think it's fun and I think it's worth doing because again, it's part of the larger project of like,

Let's make people feel like they're involved in science because they are. It's the curiosity of the whole public that means we get to do our jobs and, you know, we have an audience for it. Do you think that this sort of stickiness of this incorrect idea of the Big Bang might have to do as well with the idea that it matches up with some of these religious models and mythological models of the creation of things? You know, the idea that

You know, there's like a flip that is switched by some great invisible hand. You know, when we go from nothing to something, we go from, you know, from ocean to sky and so forth. And therefore, like, even though the model is not exactly what the scientists were explaining, it sticks to us because it matches up with these other cultural ideas. Yeah, it could be. It's also fascinating to see how the different stories feel natural or unnatural through time. Like,

About 100 years ago, before we understood that the universe was expanding, the general idea was that the universe was static. It was just like stars hanging in space the way they always had. And the idea that the universe exists and it always existed, it was very natural to scientists.

So the idea that the universe was changing, it was expanding, it was getting less dense over time, and maybe in the deep, deep past was incredibly dense beyond our ability to describe, that was a weird and unnatural idea. It was sort of initially rejected, you know, sort of like, you know, ugh, what? By a lot of folks.

And now it feels much more natural. It feels like, well, of course the universe had to have a beginning. It's weirder to imagine an infinite past, right? A universe without cause. I think so philosophically, we tend to have intuition and biases and prejudices that are difficult to pin down.

And I wondered the same thing that you did. And I actually read some folks who were writing about convergence between religious thoughts and Big Bang Theory. And some folks do find, you know, credence in the Big Bang Theory for their religious beliefs about, as you say, flipping a switch. But other people find contradiction because like in the Bible, it says God created the heavens and the earth. So in the first moment of creation, there's the earth.

Whereas in our scientific description of the evolution of the universe, the Earth doesn't appear until like 9 billion years in, right? When our solar system is formed and our star is formed. So there's a little bit of an issue there to reconcile for the folks looking to bring together the scientific and religious aspects together.

But yeah, I think that there's something appealing in some of these stories. Like you were saying earlier, these alt-science stories, some of them have a real appeal to us about being told the true story or ancient aliens building the pyramids or whatever. You know, there's some things we want to hear. And so it's easier for us to accept those stories. And we have to really guard against that. And that's why science is so valuable. It demands, it requires,

requires evidence and logic and mathematics to make sure that we're not just telling ourselves the story we want to hear, but that we're actually revealing something true about the universe. You know, I don't want to give any ammunition to intelligent design folks and

and anti-science movements. But the one that always gets me is, and no one's using this to make this argument, so I hesitate to give it to them, but anytime I cut into a spaghetti squash, that's my moment of doubt where I'm like, well, maybe this is, you know, the will of God or God's reveal because I just cut into this squash and now it is spaghetti. You know,

Maybe I'm standing on the wrong side of things. Yeah, well, maybe you should join me in the church of the flying spaghetti monster. You know? Raw men.

It is amazing. The natural world is mind-boggling. And every time we look out into the stars or we cut open something or we find some new critter living in a place we thought it was impossible, I'm just so impressed by the universe. The universe could have been boring. It could have been sterile. It could have been simple. It's incredible to me that the universe is...

complicated enough that it's taking us a long time to figure it out, but simple enough that we can actually make progress, right? To me, that's the fascinating fine-tuning. Because if the universe was so simple that Aristotle had figured it out in an afternoon and physics was really done 5,000 years ago, that would be too bad. It wouldn't be as fun.

It's like a puzzle. It's like trying to play tic-tac-toe. It's like, well, that was boring. But if the universe is so complicated that we could never figure it out, we can't even make progress, you know, like a toddler trying to play go, that would be really frustrating. And we can like throw tantrums, but the universe seems to be perfectly balanced. It's like, we're playing a game that's right at the edge of our abilities and

And it's incredible to me that the universe, that it can make sense at all, that our mathematics and our concepts can explain the universe and that it steadily feeds us these mysteries so that we can stay engaged.

It makes me really excited to talk to alien scientists to wonder, like, what was their experience of figuring out the universe? Are they much smarter than we are? And the whole thing took their Aristotle an afternoon. Are they dumber than we are? But it took them a billion years and now they're more advanced.

You know, or is most of our science just in our minds? Is it just our description of our mental thought patterns to make sense of the stimulus we receive? I think we'll learn a lot about the nature of the universe and ourselves when we get to sit across the table at the first like intergalactic science conference.

Until that day, though, we have science podcasts to listen to. That's right. And the podcast in question here is Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe podcast. A question I always ask folks when they come on the show and they have a podcast that they're promoting is, OK, we're going to have some new listeners coming in. What is a current episode or a past episode that they should seek out for a first listen? And then what's coming up on the horizon that they should look out

for. Yeah, thank you. Great question. So, you know, we have a fun mix of physics and biology. If you're interested in fundamental physics, we have some episodes where

about what is space, what is time, digging into very basic questions about the nature of the universe and what are modern theories of them. What is a particle? We have an episode coming out next week about more applied things called Why Do Planes Fly? Because it turns out there's still a lot of controversy about why planes hang in the air.

And then we have biology episodes about cannibalism. We have one about leeches coming out very soon. We have a bunch of fun episodes where Kelly digs into life on Mars. How do you grow crops on Mars? How do you have babies on Mars? All sorts of stuff. So we have a big spectrum of concepts there, pick and choose or listen from the beginning. Awesome.

Well, Daniel, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for coming back on the show and chatting with me about the universe and human civilization, everything between. Yeah, thanks very much. And thanks to all your listeners. All right. Thanks once more to Daniel Whiteson for taking time out of his day to chat with me here on Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Again, there are a number of episodes already out there that you can dive right into, and it sounds like there's some exciting episodes on the way.

Just a reminder that this podcast, Stuff to Blow Your Mind, is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short-form episodes on Wednesdays, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.

If you want to follow us on Instagram, we are stbympodcast. If you want to follow us on Letterboxd to keep up with what's going on with Weird House Cinema, we are weirdhouse on that platform. And, you know, we're probably on some other social media platforms as well. But I mean, those are the ones that I'm more likely to look at myself. And as always, thanks to the excellent J.J. Possway for producing the show and stitching everything together and making sure it sounds right. Couldn't do it without him.

And if you want to reach out to any of us here at Stuff to Blow Your Mind, if you have questions about books or films that we reference, if you have ideas for future episodes, or as is always interesting, if you have just feedback, experiences that line up with things we're talking about and you want to share those with us, well, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. ♪♪♪

Alright, we're all set for the party. I've trimmed the tree, hung the mistletoe, and paired all those weird-shaped knives and forks with the appropriate cheeses. And I plugged in the partition. Partition? It's a home cocktail maker that makes over 60 premium cocktails, plus a whole lot of seasonal favorites, too. I just got it for

Tis the season to be jollier.

Add some holiday flavor to every celebration with the sleek, sophisticated home cocktail maker, Bartesian. Pick up your phone and shake it to get $50 off any cocktail maker. Yes, you heard me. Shake your phone and get $50 off. Don't delay. Hey, guys. I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more.

After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, what's up? This is Ramses Jha. And I go by the name Q Ward. And we'd like you to join us each week for our show Civic Cipher. That's right. We discuss social issues, especially those that affect black and brown people, but in a way that informs and empowers all people. We discuss everything from prejudice to politics to police violence. And we try to give you the tools to create positive change in your home, workplace and social circle.

We're going to learn how to become better allies to each other. So join us each Saturday for Civic Cipher on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards.

The forces shaping markets and the economy are often hiding behind a blur of numbers. So that's why we created The Big Take from Bloomberg Podcasts, to give you the context you need to make sense of it all. Every day in just 15 minutes, we dive into one global business story that matters. You'll hear from Bloomberg journalists like Matt Levine. A lot of this meme stock stuff is, I think, embarrassing to the SEC. Follow The Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.