Extended Classic – Cosmic Queries Galactic Gumbo

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And today is yet another edition of Cosmic Queries. And I think this one is titled, Galactic Gumbo. Is that right, oh, co-host Chuck Nice? Yes, yes, it is. Galactic Gumbo. I love that. And then I put in the cayenne pepper. Cayenne pepper, that little dark matter, little dark matter. Little dark matter? Little dark matter, little cayenne pepper, little black hole, little sprinkle black hole. And then I put in just a little bit of quasar, little quasar, galactic gumbo. So if you were white and weighed 300 pounds more and were dead, you'd be a split. I'd be a splitting image of Paul Pardone, right? Splitting image of Paul Pardone. Erron Tate, galactic gumbo. Chuck, great to have you. Love you on Cosmic Queries. Of course. Let's do this galactic gumbo. Yeah, and of course, we always glean our queries from all across the internet, no matter where we are found and in what incarnation. And we always start with a Patreon patron, because they support us financially. And very much like your elected officials, we too can be bought. So, yeah, so just to be just to clarify. So, so we experiment on this show in ways that would not otherwise be possible from just pure ad revenue. Because there are things that would be risky there. There are ideas we have that sponsors, they don't believe that it'll work. We also do a few humanitarian things. And so, so that that sort of front money that we get from the Patreon folk. Patreon folks. And we have a new outlet called StarTalk All-Access for those of you out. So you can find that at startalkallaccess.com, which is another revenue stream. And all these things help us grow the StarTalk universe. Trying to bring the universe down to Earth. There you go, baby. So our Patreon patron is Elaine Griffith, who says that... She's from Oakland, California. She says, Hi Neil, this is Kendra from... Oakland, that's where Batman is from, apparently. Superman versus Batman. Like Gotham City and what's the other one? Metropolis. Are across the bay from one another. Oh, okay. So it's Oakland and San Fran. Right. So Wayne, it makes sense because Wayne Industries, of course, like huge company, maybe a tech company. Maybe a tech company, yeah. So it was just, just thought I'd tell you that. That's very cool. So Kendra from Cali, as in Oakland, California, Elaine Griffith is my nomad plume. First of all, I dare one of you to sing this out loud to the tune of Sexy Back, which is, we're bringing quirky back. Without them, atoms don't know how to act. We got some hadrons going to make them smack. We found a boss on now, who's the man? Touch it to the nine now. Okay. So there you go. So that was some hadron smack. Hadron smack is what she said. So guess what, Elaine, I did it for you. I couldn't have pulled that one off. Glad we got our boy in the studio for that. And then here's what she wants to know from you, Neil. Why didn't all the matter and anti-matter created by the big band cancel each other out, leaving nothing but energy? Look at that. Yeah, we take a lot for granted just living in this universe. Right. But it turns out that for every bit of matter in this universe, okay, there are, when all the matter was created, it left over photons. Okay, so let me say that a different way. You, at the beginning of the universe, there was this hot cauldron of matter and energy moving back and forth between one another, according to E equals MC squared. E for energy. M. For mass. Yeah, mass, okay. So that equation allows you, under the right conditions, to freely transform one into the other. Nice. So, just to tell you how this works, if you take energy and convert it into matter, you don't just get regular matter, you get equal amounts of matter and anti-matter. Right. Unlike your data plan with your phone carrier, minutes in your data plan. Do not transfer back and forth equally. That was an obscure reference to the universe, as I have ever heard. Right. Can you hear me now, universe? Can you hear me now? All right, I'm going to stop. So, the way that equation works, you take a pulse of energy, convert it into matter, you get antimatter and matter in equal amounts, equal and identical opposite amounts. Then, the matter and antimatter hang out for brief moments of time, and they recombine and make pure energy again. So, this back and forth requires equal amounts of matter and antimatter. So, as the universe cools, and the energy isn't high enough to make particles out of it, we should be left with an entire universe of just energy, no matter at all. Right. Because once the energy of the light and the photons, the pulses of energy, drops below the energy necessary to make the lightest particle, there's no more particles to make. You're just a low-energy photon. Right. That's all you got. And you can never aspire to become anything other than a photon. Oh, I feel so bad. No, no. It's some other form of energy. You can never go become matter. It's a caste system at this point. What a shame. I didn't know you get all emotional about this. I could have been somebody. So here's what happened. In the very early universe, there was an asymmetry in the matter and energy. For every 100,000 particles, okay, of antimatter, did I say 100,000? For every 100 million, 10 to the 8th, every 100 million particles of antimatter, 100 million and one particles of matter were made. Oh, what? Symmetry in the early universe was broken by that little bit. Just that tiny... You wouldn't even notice that little extra one until, like, in a dance, a dance-off, your dance partners start peeling off. You take off this pair. Everybody thinks they got a pair. And you just keep doing this. Until you're left with one dude just breakdancing in the middle of the party. Whoa, where'd that guy come from? With nobody to mate with. And that one is left. And so our universe is made of matter and not anti-matter and not pure energy because of that one asymmetry. And we know it happened. We have a very good idea of when it happened in the early universe. We don't know why. It's just one of the mysteries of the universe. I hate to sound cheap about this, but I recorded a video series with a great courses company. Called The Inexplicable Universe. You know how I know that? Because I have it. Nice, Chuck. I didn't even give you that copy. You bought that thing. That's right, I did. Oh, my gosh. Thank you. Well, you know, that's how I do my homework. Because it beats reading. Watching the videos. I'm like, let me just get Neil. You don't want to sound like a complete idiot. That's how I do my homework, man. But go ahead. Thanks for telling me that. In the inexplicable universe, one of the topics is this great asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the universe. Right. And so I tell you how we come to learn that that's the case, but I don't tell you why that's the case because it's inexplicable. Hence the title, the inexplicable universe. Exactly. As opposed to the next sequel, which will be the totally explainable universe. That's what all videos are. Every single video. That's what Wiki pages are for. We call that NOVA. Exactly. No, seriously, I'm not even joking. Alright, well that was awesome. Hey, Elaine, what a way to kick off the show because that's really good stuff. Hey, let's go to Gregory from Bar... Wait a minute. Bastrop, Texas? Bastrop, yeah. West Texas? I think it's in West Texas. I've been to that town. Listen, it's a destination, I suppose, for somebody. I'm not going to hate on Bastrop. I don't know anything about it, right? Hey, Neil, it's Greg. Might be Central Texas. Hey, Neil, it's Greg from Bastrop, Texas. I've been thinking about this for a while and it's actually a part of a book that I'm writing. You know when a glass breaks because its sound hits a specific frequency. Okay, so it's that Ella Fitzgerald old time commercial. How old are you, dude? Old enough to remember that I don't know who the product was but I just remember they would put a speaker next to a glass and it would be like, we're going to see if Ella Fitzgerald can break this glass. And the only reason I remember is because Ella Fitzgerald was a friend of my grandmother's. And she'd be like, ahhh! And then the glass would start to vibrate and shatter. So what happens is you can break glass with a frequency of sound that goes through it, or you can just smash the glass. That would not be the only way to break a glass. But the way the question was posed is, this is how you break glass. You can just step on it. So what happened in any Jewish wedding? Exactly, just step on it and mausel and now your life is ruined. So, but he says this, what if the strings in string theory making up the universe are vibrating at a specific frequency and that frequency is what determines the laws of physics in the universe. Maybe each universe making up the multiverse has its own unique frequency and that could be the key to traveling to another universe. He has made many assumptions in this. It's good, I love it. I like it. It's good. Now let me first preface this by saying I don't claim string theory as my center expertise. So, I'll go as far as I can in responding to that question. First of all, the vibrations of the strings in string theory, they are what is the manifestation of the universe we know. If you vibrate them one way, you get an electron. If you vibrate them another way, you get a particular species of quark. If you vibrate them another way, you get a, so all these vibrations come together in this symphony we call our universe. What I do not know is whether the vibrations of the strings are also implicated in the laws of physics themselves. I just don't know. We had to bring somebody in for that. But if they are, I think it's a brilliant premise. He said he's writing a book. I assume it's a science fiction book. It would have to be. No disrespect to Greg, but it would have to be a science fiction book. I think it's a great and fertile idea that what you might do is you go into some vibration room, let's say, and it would have control over the vibrations of your strings in such a way that you would create a different symphony of vibrations that are the vibrations of another universe. In the multiverse, other universes have slightly different laws of physics. We expect that to happen. Quantum physics clues us into how and why that should be the case. If you needed a way to sort of get somewhere, maybe, yeah, give yourself a new vibration. I was about to sing. Alright. Yo, that's great. Hey, Greg, great, great. Are you mixing two songs there? You were mixing? Good Vibrations. So that's Rolling Stones. No, no, no. No, that was Beach Boys. Oh, Beach Boys. Oh, you're talking about Marky. That's what I'm saying. The vibrations. Come on, come on. Isn't that called Good Vibrations? Yes, you're right. It is. I totally forgot about that. So I'm saying. Oh, yeah. Were those other songs called Good Vibrations? I think the Beach Boys was Good Vibrations as well. Yeah, I'm pretty sure. More than one song in the universe. Yeah, there you go. Good vibrations. So it'd be cool if you just, so your transporter room would be a place where they differently vibrated. Look at the strings in different ways. The strings in different ways. So take it and run with it. Yeah, go ahead, man. Guide us to the premiere of the movie. Yeah, good luck with the book. Yeah, we want to be at the premiere of the movie. Yo, super cool. Alright, let's move on to Dawn the Dave. Dawn of the Dave from Instagram just gives us that. He doesn't give us where he's from or anything like that. From Instagram? From Instagram. Alright. By the way, every Instagram post should have a photo, right? Was there a photo attached to this? I'm sure there was, but we probably just took the text. The text, okay. Dawn of the Dave says, if scientists, and I'm going to change this to if you, I'm going to personalize this, had access to 100% of the world's computing power, what would you like to focus on? So every, every possible data bit is going to be pointed at this one thing. So let's, let's go back to Archimedes. Who said, upon understanding how leavers work, give me a place to stand and I can watch from there. I don't know Archimedes. I don't know his famous quote. Give me a place to stand and I can watch TV. I like to watch. Give me a place to stand and I can move the world. Oh, I like that. That's perhaps his most famous quote. I did not know that. Give me a place to stand and I could move the world. Right. In the era of classical physics, it was imagined that if you knew, classical physics is 19th century classical physics. If you knew the position and momentum of every particle in the universe in this moment, you will know all future history of the universe that follows. Okay, now I got to tell you, you lost me on that because just by knowing every position of every particle in the universe. Oh, because then you would know the movement of every particle from that point. From that point. And from that point, so you would be able to, okay, nevermind, I'm getting excited because you can see the light bulb just went off. Okay, this is what happens when a light bulb... Chuck just had a mental orgasm. Yes, like I did, right? It was great. It was like Oprah climbed inside my head and was just like, you get it now! So, go ahead. So, because if you know that moment, then you'll know the next moment. And then all the particles interact with one another. Exactly. And you get the next moment, so then there's nothing unknown for the future of the universe. So... Every single moment from that point forward is knowable because you know exactly... In principle, this is what was proposed. And this is not any different from, let's say, you have a pool table, and the balls are all in motion in a given instant. And then you can say, I will now predict for the future what balls will go in, what pocket and what not. Right. And then, because at that point, if all the balls are in motion, it's a matter of simple geometry. Correct. Well, physics. Yeah. Both. And so, the interesting thing about that is, each ball affects another ball. In that case, not gravitationally. But I hit you, you could hit two other balls before you go in. And so, that was the idea. Right. And then you're taking into account transfer of energy, momentum, all these things, but you know them all, so it doesn't make a difference. Exactly. So, what I would do is try to compute, you load up the position and momentum of every particle in the universe into this supercomputer, and then be able to predict all future movement of everything in the universe. Here's the problem that we learned in the 1920s. This little thing called quantum physics, where the universe in the quantum is not deterministic. It is probabilistic. So, it doesn't respond the way it would in the physical universe. In the deterministic universe. So, it puts a random element to it that prevents you from knowing with certainty what tomorrow will be just for knowing about today. Right. Because even though the known is known, the unknown is always unknown in the quantum. In the quantum. Very nice. But nonetheless, I would go through that exercise and resurrect this old notion that... So, that would be the universe without quantum physics. Sweet. So, if I were to program a universe in my computer, that's the one I would program. Nice. And I would just check it out. The quantum-free universe, for which I know all of future history. Chuck, we got to take a break. Yes. This is StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition. Galactic gumbo. That's right. We'll see you in a moment. You're on, too. We're back, StarTalk, Cosmic Queries edition. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, Chuck Nice. Hey, Neil. Chuck, you're tweeting, Chuck Nice Comic? Chuck Nice Comic, thank you, sir. That is correct. Dude, I like it. Anytime something happens in the world, I go to your Twitter stream, and you're on top of it in some way or another. Yeah, I like to... The politics, or somebody says something stupid. I like getting a little dig in there now. You diggin in. I like to dig in there just a little bit. Yeah, I follow you. And I don't follow many people, just so you know. I know, I know. I find out... I always know when you talk about me ever on Twitter, because my Twitter goes crazy. I'm just like, what the hell, what's going on? Oh, you mentioned, you said something like, Chuck's learning astrophysics every day. I might just turn the reins over to him. I'm just like, no! Please don't say that! Cosmic queries. Let's jump back into where we got a bunch of... Galactic gumbo. Dark matter on the... Galactic gumbo. This is Melissa Wolf from Facebook. Facebook. And she is writing on her Facebook account from Chino Valley, Arizona. Melissa says this. I'm very curious. By the way, Arizona has two of the most famous holes in the world. Not sure where this is going. No, no, it's got the Grand Canyon. Okay. That's the hole in the ground. I look at that more of a ditch than as a hole. Okay, okay, fine, fine. And it's got the Meteor Crater. Yeah, also known as Barringer Crater. And is that the crater, the mass extinction level event crater? Is that that one or is that... That's what you would say if you were where that hit. That's correct. Whatever you would do in there, you would gone. It's almost a mile wide and it can sink a 60-story building from its bottom to the top. So it's the best preserved crater in the world. All right, so now here's what I'm going to ask you. Melissa, I know we're going to get to your question. Well, since I heard she's from Arizona, I got to put Arizona on the map. Now that you brought up this crater, it's mile wide, which I mean that's... I mean, so the impact in just phenomenal, incredible, we know. However, now I got to ask you this. Just to be clear, it was not the one that took out the dinosaurs. I'm just saying. This is like small potatoes. Right, this is right. Compared to that. That was the size of Manhattan or something. Oh, no, the size of Mount Everest. The size of Mount Everest, that's what it is. God, that is mind boggling. So that crater, this meteor hit ground, right? Okay, now here's what I want to know. What if it hit the ocean instead of the ground? That same impact. Okay, so it turns out if an asteroid is big enough, it don't matter, ground or it just doesn't matter. It doesn't matter in the following way. Suppose an asteroid is 10 miles across. Okay, wow. Some are. That is larger than the depths of the oceans. True. So it'll just spread the water. It's like dropping a brick into a puddle. Into a puddle, exactly. It's like dropping a brick in a puddle. Exactly. It doesn't make a difference. It doesn't make a difference. You're going to hit the ground and yes, you'll create great tsunamis, yes. That will be your biggest problem. The tsunami will actually be refreshing compared to the aftermath that follows. The climate change and all that would unfold. Okay, cool. But it is true. On the ground, if a small enough one, that one was the size of the sphere at the road center for Earth and space. You can measure that up and figure that out. And that's tiny compared to Mount Everest. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. There's a shooting gallery out there. So that one, if it hit the ocean, it probably would not have reached the bottom of the ocean. The ocean was really deep. Where the Titanic sank, it was like miles deep. But all that energy would then get deposited into the oceans. Then you get a tsunami that would come in very far in inland. Gotcha. Okay, cool. All right, so Melissa. We would have taken out the coastal cavemen. It would have disrupted the shipping lanes. Oh dear, Trog, I do believe we're going to lose our beachfront property. Trog. Both are, my friend. Do you have any property that isn't beachfront? This was 50,000 years ago. We was totally in caves back then. Oh my goodness. Fellas, grab your women by the hair and let's get the hell out of here. We've lost our beachfront property. Okay, here we go. Again, we'll get to her question in a minute. We're getting to you Melissa. I got one. Wait, wait, so I have to boast of something. All right, go ahead. One of my proudest moments writing was I wanted to come up with a female caveman name. Right. Because all the names we have are male. Male, right. Trog, Lothar. Lothar. These are guy names, okay? Can you think of a female caveman name? That's what I'm saying. Wilma. Wilma. Wilma. Does Betty count? Does Betty? Betty and Wilma. I don't know. That's cheating. I'm cheating. So here's what happened. The reason why I did this for one of my books, a Q&A book, Merlin's Tour of the Universe, someone had asked when the wheel was invented. And we have an idea of when, very early, but we don't know who. Right. So I wanted to invent a conversation that would have had between the people who might have invented it. So I want to be all PC about it. So I said it was invented by a man and a woman at the same time, but they're cave people. So I needed a name for each of them. So I said, what am I going to name them? I don't know. So then I remembered the word troglodyte. Right. And I said, and I'd forgotten what it meant. So I went to the dictionary and it looked up troglodyte and it says cave dweller. Right. Oh, okay. That's why that word popped into my head. Deep down, I had some memory, but there's the dot that separates the syllables of the word in a dictionary. Trog-lodyte. Lodyte. Lodyte! Lodyte! Yo, and it sounds more female, too. I said it was the caveman couple Trog and Lodyte. Trog and Lodyte. Invented the wheel. Right. There it was. You know Lodyte was telling Trog he was doing everything wrong. You know it. You know Lodyte, she's like, Trog, you know this is not how we make wheel. Is that how they smoke? Right. Exactly. Broken English. Right. Because isn't that how whenever we don't know what people did, it's got to be broken English. English. Broken English. Just broken. So yeah. And then Trog is just like, woman, off my back. That's pretty cool. Lodyte. I like it. Lodyte. I'm very proud of that. It's my contribution to literature. Trog and Lodyte, the cave-dwelling couple. Yeah. I like it. You know, that's pretty cool. Melissa, here we go. Melissa wants to know this, coming to us from Chino Valley, Arizona. Hey, Neil. Finally getting to Melissa's question. Finally. Finally. Hey, Neil. I'm curious about your thoughts on somewhat combining creationism with the Big Bang. Although I am agnostic, I was raised Catholic, and I always wonder why no one seems to consider that a possible higher power is behind the Big Bang and, consequently, dark matter. So, do you have any thoughts on that? I mean, from a scientific standpoint, you cannot speak to this because you're speaking about, you know, the fact of a creator or some higher power creating this. Oh, sure you can. If there's a higher power that did anything in the universe, there's no reason why that should be beyond the ability of science to determine that. All right. So, if you do science properly, you're not precluding any one explanation relative to another if you're on the frontier of discovery. Right. So, I'm not going to say there is no higher power there. And let me find something else. If the higher power is there and it manifests, then my methods and tools find it, I'll be the first one to report it. I'll be right there at the front of the press conference. So, just to make that clear. And let's back up. There's a deep question here. It is. There's more going on than she may even know. After Einstein advanced the general theory of relativity in 1916, it was, oh my gosh, the universe, there's a gravity and it shapes the universe in this way. And then in 1929, Hubble discovers that the universe is expanding. Right. You take general relativity and the data that the universe is expanding and a clever physicist named George Lemaitre. He was a Belgian physicist. Looked at that and he said, wait a minute. If we're expanding and I have this new tool, theoretical tool to understand the whole universe, let's go back in time and ask what would the universe have been yesterday compared with today? It would have been smaller. Right. Let's go even smaller. Even smaller. Take it all the way back. So we go all the way back. We got to get down to a singular point. A singular point. Beginning of things. Right. This person is a Belgian priest. Oh. An ordained priest. He must have drank some good beer. A Belgian beer? I don't know that there's beer in the church. I think it's all wine, okay? It's the body and blood of Jesus, not the body and beer of Jesus. I'm not Catholic. It was the body and beer of Jesus that had been hanging out. Here's to you, Padre. So people immediately said, oh my gosh, you have found proof of biblical creation. Oh, really? They said this to him. And he, a Belgian priest, came all back in their face and said, no, because the Bible says the universe was created in six days. The Bible says earth was created before the sun. There's a lot going on in Genesis that is scientifically untenable. But now you want to take just a little bit, that God created it, and say, oh, therefore it proves the Bible when nothing else that follows it has any anchoring in observational science. He was smart enough to know that this, when I say smart enough, he was sensible enough to know that this should not be invoked as evidence for God creating Genesis as described in the Jewish Bible, in the Old Testament. So because nothing else works there. Right. Okay. Nothing. Nothing. Earth is in the middle of things. Everything revolves around the earth. Earth is flat. So this goes on and on and on. So he knew enough about the Bible and about science to not make that connection. So now, so by the way, higher power could be God or it could be some intelligent alien in its basement programming our universe for its own entertainment. That would be a higher power if you think about it. Yes, that would be a higher power. Yes. That guy's really effed up, man. If that's the guy, if that, hey, look, hey, dude, if you're in your basement right now, in your parents' basement, your parents' basement, the alien version, you little pimply face alien bitch, this is effed up what you just did. Then I wonder if we are a simulation programmed by a higher power. Maybe they get bored every now and then and they throw something to just mess with, throw in something in the mix. A little glitch in the matrix. A little glitch in the matrix. Right. You know, they throw down a disruptive politician or a world war or... That would explain so much. What? Completely explain it. Oh, God. Everything's going along just fine and tranquil and they say, you're not entertaining me anymore. Lodi, Lodi, watch this. Look at what I do right here. How many times did I tell you to stop screwing with those people? So, but a broader reference to that question is, we don't know what happened before the Big Bang and we also don't know what dark matter is nor dark energy. If you, and I've said this before, and listen to my words very carefully. If you want, if your understanding of God flows through places where science has yet to tread, because these are frontiers for the Big Bang, if that's your concept of God, then the history of this exercise shows us that God would then be an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance. Well, of course. That only makes sense because you're saying all these other things are provable and knowable. And so we know. These other things at one time in the past, they were not mysterious, correct? They were not. They were not mysterious. So now that we know these are provable and knowable and why they happen, these phenomena are actually explainable, right? Like your plural phenomenon. Your plural phenomenon, phenomena, very good. Do you like that I actually corrected myself there? Very good. I'm checking you out here. I think it's cool. So, and then you say, well, but what I don't know here, I just think that this is God doing this. But then our knowledge, our bubble, our knowledge expands. It encompasses that event. That event is no longer now attributed to God. That event is also now provable and knowable. And then that now cannot be talked about. Philosophers call this the God of the gaps. What's it called? Philosophers call it the God of the gaps. The God of the gaps. In other words, wherever your understanding fails you, you fill it in with God. Fill it in with God. And by the way, this is a long tradition to do so. Isaac Newton did it. Isaac Newton wrote down his equation of gravity and it described Earth and the Moon and the Sun and the Earth, Jupiter and its moons. We would later learn it. But how do you then describe the whole solar system all happening all at once? Everything tugging on everybody in all directions at all different and he tried to calculate this and the solar system was unstable and planets would fly apart. Because every time you came around the back stretch, Mars would tug on you a little bit. Right. Come around the next time Mars would tug on you a little more. Before you know it, you're out. You're out. You're out the door. We out. Right. You and the Kuiper Belt going, it's cold. That's right. So, he said, well, clearly I know my equations work with the one-on-one situation. With the whole system, maybe God steps in every now and then just to fix it. And corrects things. And corrects things. He says this in his 17th century lingo. He says just that. And so, that's basically God of the Gaps. Ptolemy, who put forth the geocentric universe, this is 2000 years ago, has a little bit of God of the Gaps in him. He looked up. People still didn't understand the planets going forward and then retrograde, going back. And he says, when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch earth with my feet. I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia. Wow. Yeah. And he did it poetically. That's a God of the Gaps. He doesn't understand it. Zeus is… Zeus is his God. is hanging with him right there. That's how I explain it. That's how I got it. Super cool. See, my God of the Gap is 40% off and it's not Labor Day. This hoodie is awesome. We got to take a quick break. We'll be back to StarTalk Cosmic Queries in a moment. StarTalk Cosmic Queries edition, especially topic. Galactic Gumbo. I love me some gumbo. There's like 20 ingredients in gumbo, something like that. If it's done right, I gotta tell you, Yvonne Gagne, I do not say her name in vain, but Yvonne Gagne, a woman who grew up in the Friends Quarters. Oh yeah. I mean, when you talk about gumbo, you have never had gumbo until you have had Yvonne Gagne's gumbo. Next time she'll give me the address, I'll be there. Let me tell you, man, next time you're in Philly, I'm going to have her make you some. Okay, no, what we should do is tell her about the Galactic Gumbo show. Right. And then have her rename some of the ingredients to be Cosmic Ingredients. That would be a special... Special, special... I have to go there and eat it. A real galactic. And we can negotiate it. We'll negotiate it. There it is. Let me tell you something, I've never... Galactic gumbo. Never had anything like it. Okay, so I dated Yvonne's daughter for some time. Oh, now the story comes out. Okay. I'm sure she is very happy that I have moved on with my life. But I will tell you this much, from that day till this, I've never had gumbo like that in my... I almost married her daughter just so I could get to that gumbo. But yeah. So when did she stop visiting you in prison? When did that happen? So galactic gumbo. Let's get into it. Here we go. This is Kelly Dean from Facebook, and Kelly says this, Space has been expanding since the Big Bang. When we see a galaxy five billion light years away, would that galaxy not have been closer five billion years ago and thus taken less light time to reach us in the first place? Signed, the Kelly Paradox. Is that her handle? That's her handle, the Kelly Paradox. I like that. I've always loved the word paradox. It's a good word. It's got rhythm and soul. It almost sounds like what it is. Exactly. That's what's cool about it. Paradox. That would be onomatopoetic. That would be onomatopoetic, yes. Paradox. Paradox. You have to just drift off into ignorance. Exactly. Paradox. Let me recast her question to mean exactly the same thing, but give it a little more science anchor to it. We see that galaxy five billion light years away, where it was when the size of the universe was such that it would take its light five billion years to reach us. Got you. Okay. Now that makes sense. Right now. Because it's still expanding. Yes. It has been expanding since the five billion years. Darien is the rub. There's the rub. That's the rub. So we're about 14 billion years old, so 14 minus five, carry the two. You always got to carry the two. In any arithmetic, you carry the two. So it means the universe has been expanding for nine billion years since it emitted the light to reach us. So it is much farther away from us now in this instant than it was at the time it sent us that light. Correct. So I and my colleagues, we're a little bit sloppy. We're precise, but sloppy. You ask how big is the universe? I say 13 billion light years across. Well, right at this moment, it's much larger than that. It's four or five times larger than that because it's grown since then. Because we're measuring the light that we see at that time. At that time. And so you have to put it in the model, figure out how much farther it would have gone, and that gives you the number. So when I just say to you it's 13 billion years, these are observable quantities. They don't come out of a model that you would project into the present for the things that are far away. But the way I like thinking about it is, five billion light years, that's very far away. Let's get one a little closer, 65 million. That's like really close. Compared to 65 million light years away. So that galaxy, if they looked at us, what do they see? So 65 million? Wait, we're 4.5 billion. No, just, what was going on on Earth? Oh, they're seeing us in our, what's the name of that age? But they're seeing us getting wiped out. Yes. Let me just, instead of trying to be all science-y, I forget the name of the actual age. But what they're seeing is us getting wiped out. The wiped out-icus. The wiped out-icus, right. They're looking through their telescope and they're going, Oh, damn! Damn, look what just happened! Look what just happened. So they're seeing the asteroid hit Earth and render 70% of the world's species extinct. It's just arriving there now. Meanwhile, we are 65 million years in the future of that information. Exactly. The larger universe in that future. So it's a fun way to think about it. If you had super-duper telescopes, see the past of other places. Super cool. Hey, look at that, Kelly Dean. Great question. Kelly, the paradox. The paradox. Paradox. You know, there's a wine called Paradox. I did not know that. Except they spell it differently. P-A-I-R-O-F-D-U-C-K-S. Paradox. Paradox. It's like two ducks on the label. It's very good. Paradox. That's pretty cool. The California wine. So here we go. They're not a sponsor of the show, just to be clear. Exactly. We're coming for you, Paradox. This is Tom Hyde from Facebook. Tom says, I've always wondered how the universe expanded faster than the speed of light. Faster than the speed of light. During the Big Bang, when the universe is full of matter and matter can't move, faster than the speed of light. Please explain this to me as if I was four, because I am four. No. I put that last part there. No, no, no. So, wait, wait. If they... If it was, please explain it to me as if I was four, because I am four. If you're asking that question at age four, then I'm answering, I'm answering you for it's a college. I will not be giving you a baby talk answer. That's right. If you're four years old and asked that, but he says, please explain it to me as if I was four. And this is somewhat related to Kelly's last question just a little bit when you talk about the expansion of the universe and how... So, if you go in the early universe, you... The expansion rate was more rapid than it is today. The expansion rate for the moment is slowing down, but it's going to speed up again later because of the influence of dark energy. Mm-hmm. Dark energy, yeah. But that's a separate phenomenon going on. So, in the early universe, you were absolutely right. We expanded faster than light. But that does not violate the you can't move faster than light rule. Mm-hmm. I know that sounds paradoxical. It does. Paradox. So, here's what's going on. The speed of light limit comes about from Einstein's special theory of relativity, which describes the movement of objects through the fabric of space and time. Exactly. Whereas, general relativity describes the stretching of your fabric of space and time, not specifically things moving through it. So, the early universe, it is the fabric of the universe that's stretching. Itself. Itself. So, it's not something traveling through that. So, it's the rubber sheet model. Correct. Where you have just a sheet. And all the galaxies are embedded in that. And the sheet is expanding. The sheet is moving. But you are not moving information through space faster than the speed of light. But if you are expanding the fabric, you can expand at unlimited speed relative to the speed of light. So, it really is like a rubber band. If you and I were pulling a rubber band right now, we could pull it slowly. We could pull it as fast as we want. Really fast. It doesn't make a difference. But if we have something sitting on that rubber band. In the rubber band, it's stuck. However, the ant moving in the rubber band is limited. Exactly. That's right. And Chuck, we have a bell. Lightning round. These are where I answer questions basically with sound bites. I always fail, but let's try. Who cares? Let's see how many we can fit in to the last three minutes of the show. Alright. Ready, go. Matthew calls from Facebook wants to know this. Big Bang causes outward expansion. Do we know with which direction the origin or center is? Yes. We do. It is in every direction. Okay, next. That was great. So, it expands in every direction and we are part of that expansion. So, you cannot look back to any direction in space and say that's where the Big Bang happened. Anymore than you could be on the surface of an expanding balloon and point along that surface and say there's the center of the expansion. Because the center of the expansion is backwards in time at a point where the whole balloon was in that one spot in the same place at the same time. Thomas J. Kastner from Twitter says, Why do so many people imagine alien life as little green men? What or who created this strange image of aliens? Oh, yeah, because little green men with feet and torso and arms and head. Because you have to pay an actor to wear that costume. And before CGI, every animate thing was either stop motion capture or had an actor in it. I think if we were not so limited in the early creativity, especially of the B movie, sci-fi from the 50s, maybe they would have been earlier in the more creative kind of alien. But that was the joy of seeing the movie Alien, where that creature wasn't so traditional. It wasn't a little green man. It wasn't a little green man, nor was the blob in the 1958 Steve McQueen classic The Blob. Which, by the way, very inventive. Very inventive. It was an invertebrate alien. Exactly. What was it? It was a blob. Next, go. All right, Pepsi Rules wants to know this. How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, Neil? Well, you know, when I was a kid, I tried all these things. No. First, how old is this person? Because this is not even an ad anymore. You know, how many licks does it take to get? So I realized that it completely depended on how wet your tongue was. Because if your tongue were dry, it would take essentially forever. Right. So there is no one answer to that question. And I learned this as like a 12-year-old kid. And I said, not all questions have unique answers. Some of them have multiple answers and get over that fact. It could be thousands. It could be three. If you like dog slobber on it. Okay, we might get two more in this. Here we go. This is Tack Neely, who wants to know this. We call the area between planets and solar systems space. So what should we call the area between universes? Nice question, Tack. Great question. So if empty space is where you find nothing, we would later learn that it's a seething cauldron of what we call virtual particles. We learned this from quantum physics. It's another show. But let's for the moment call it empty. Where you find nothing. Well, if nothing is where you find the space between things, no thing. Right. Nothing. Get that? That's good. I'm with you. Can you hang? I'm right with you. Where there is no thing, there is nothing. Okay, fine. But if there's not even nothing... Right... . then you are in a higher dimensional place and our vocabulary cannot really accommodate that beyond just saying it is the absence of nothing. We might then call it nothing nothing. So the answer, attack is Detroit. You're listening to StarTalk Radio. Stay tuned. More up next. Next. StarTalk, Chuck. Hey, Neil. Bringing me to questions. That's right. This is office hours. Office hours, so. It means it could come from anywhere. Anywhere, anything. Anything. Let's jump into anywhere and anything. Here's Wolfprime06 from Instagram. Okay, have you noticed people have been spelling their names phonetically for you? And I appreciate that. I'll take the help wherever I can get it, okay? I am not proud. All right. All right, Wolfprime06 Instagram says, cloning exact particles and cells might be the only chance we have at teleportation. So if we thought it was unethical, then would we stop cloning and therefore never figure out teleportation? There's an assumption there that cloning cells is the way to teleport. Interesting. Okay, so a couple of things. As far as we know, every atom of a particular kind is identical to every other atom of a particular kind. So you don't actually have to move your atoms to another location. Just get the recipe. Right. Right? All right, so grandma's cupcakes, she doesn't make cupcakes for everyone in the universe to have her cupcakes. She makes the recipe. Writes down the recipe. Now you reproduce her cupcakes. Right. Okay, so if I know exactly how all the atoms of your body are configured, and I know what those atoms are, in principle, I can reconstruct you. What we don't understand yet well enough is the mind. And what is it about your mind that you would have to reconstruct to have the memories that you have, the life that you have, that can have your identity? Right. Because by the way, in society, we do have clones. We already have clones. But we shouldn't have clones, it'll be ethical. We have clones already. They're called twins. Okay, twins. Are we taking one twin away and harvesting their organs for the other twin? No. We're pretty sensible about things. Well, that's what I did with my twin. That's what you were saying. All right, I drink a lot. I know this liver ain't gonna- The liver, the liver. Liver and kidneys. Nice too. Well, because it's a clone of yours, it means it's drinking too. There you go. You useless clone. So, I don't know that the ethics of cloning will ultimately become all that people fear it to be. Right. I just don't see that based on the knowledge of already having clones today. There's a danger that if you start cloning preexisting life, then you will lose the biodiversity that assures the survival of the species. Wow, okay, so that's a great episode of Star Trek, by the way, where they go to a planet and the whole planet is made of clones. What happens though is through the replication, they start to see a degradation over a long period of time. And so this degradation- They're not perfect clones. They're not perfect clones anymore. And they're like, oh my God, we're now having clones that are not what they should be. As a result, we have to reintroduce good old fashioned horizontal mambo to get some dot biodiversity. And that becomes like the whole issue of- Horizontal mambo. So the people- That's a thing. You mean in Star Trek? What's an ancient Earth term for- For procreation. Horizontal mambo. But the people are repulsed by the idea of- Because the cloning is so pure and so high level. Right. Interesting. I missed that episode. It's a pretty cool thing. It's not from the original Star Trek. No, I believe this is a, I think this is one of the next generation episodes. Next gen. Yeah. It's a next gen episode. Yeah. So there's the ethics, there's whether it'll happen. I think ideally you would just know exactly what the recipe is for an individual created in another place. Here's the thing you got to remember. Twins are identical to one another, but they have different consciences. Right. So one twin is not thinking it is the other, even though all the molecules are identical. Except they have different fingerprints because that happened later in the womb. But, so that's an interesting fact. Twins are identical except for the fingerprints. So we're talking about identical twins, of course, not- Yeah, not fraternal. Or sororal twins. Sororal. That one from Bill Nye. The two ladies in the womb. Exactly. Or sororal twins. So we don't understand why I wake up as me and you wake up as you. Every day. Right. We just don't understand that. Right. And if we did, maybe we'd be able to clone that. But then you'd have two of you and you'd have a simultaneous shared conscious. That'd be kind of interesting. If you could do that. Yeah. I don't think we need two of me with a simultaneous shared consciousness. That is for sure. That's very cool then. All right. Let's move on to... Two of me. One of me would be like in the lab. The other would be doing the dishes and the other would be seeing the movie I've been missing. They merge the conscious overnight. Wouldn't that be cool if you go to sleep? And then all of you would, you go to sleep and you all share your experiences. It's a syncing program that synchronizes up the consciousnesses. Now that I could deal with. That'd be kind of cool because then you could experience so much more in life. There was a science fiction movie where people shared dreams. I forgot which one that was. I forgot the name. Not Inception. No, that was where you went into the dream. Yeah, it went deeper and deeper into somebody else's dream. Right, and that became the reality. It was one where it might have been an episode of a TV series, but we'll get our crack team of researchers to dig it up. There you go. All right, here's Lamis Pissou, I think. That cannot possibly be. I think it's Lamis Pissou. Lamis Pissou. From Instagram says this very, very succinct question. Where is all the anti-matter? Wow, what a... Hey. I wish I knew. Next question. Actually, there's a friend and colleague of mine, J. Richard Gott III, who wrote a research paper in the 1970s hypothesizing where all the anti-matter went. Interesting. Yeah. I did not read that paper. I did not read it. You missed that? I missed that paper. Oddly enough. And what was his hypothesis? He suggested that at the point that we had this asymmetry between matter and anti-matter in our early universe that there was a… I'm paraphrasing some of what he said because the details are a little fuzzy because it was 40 years ago. But at some point, all of the anti-matter funneled out of this universe and created another universe with an anti-matter matter imbalance that's the inverse of our matter anti-matter imbalance. Oh, man. It's beautiful. Great. It's a really beautiful thing. It's very elegant. It's elegant. He thinks of elegant things, whether or not they're true. Right. They're elegant. Yeah. And the universe just… There's a great comment, I think it was by… Was it Aldous Huxley or the physicist? It was the great tragedy of science, a beautiful theory slain by an ugly fact. I love that. So, it's an elegant concept that there's still balance in the metaverse. Right. Because this imbalance is kind of… It's disturbing. In the greater scheme of things. But there's no evidence for this other universe. Okay. All right. All right. Jloren74 from Instagram says this, I believe in an earlier episode, Neil said that the shape of the universe is a saddle shape. Is that right? If not, please, what shape is it? I can't imagine it not being a sphere. Yeah. So we're flat. If I said saddle, so there are different shapes it can be. It can still be consistent with Einstein's equations. And so one of them is sort of spherical. Another is sort of flat and one is saddle shape. So one is positively curved, one is zero curvature, one is negative curvature. And so if you add up the dark energy and the dark matter and the matter and the energy, add it all up, the universe is flat. Yeah. So there you have it. So it's interesting. So if one of them had a greater value than the other, then we would have one of these other shapes. And what's the difference? In a spherical universe, parallel lines always meet. In a flat universe, which is we learned about flatness in geometry class, parallel lines, you know, they, well, they meet at infinity, I think was the phrase, but basically they never meet. Never meet, right. And in a negatively curved universe, parallel lines diverge. Right. So these are three completely legitimate geometries. And so Euclid was a flat universe. And the others that are not Euclid, you know what we call that? No. Non-Euclidean geometry. I hate calling something in reference to what it's not. Yeah, that's a little disappointing. Right. I wanted Freddy's universes, who Freddy came up with it. Right. No, but I don't like unretouched. Unretouched. Yeah, that meant you didn't do anything to it. You shouldn't have to have a word. You shouldn't have a word. Right. It's just what it is. Non-fiction. I want to invent a new one called faction. I like... Well, do that. I will send out a tweet. Faction. Right. Non-fiction. But I don't want my stuff referencing what somebody else did. Right. No. I ain't doing that. I don't play that. Sweet. Okay. I think we have time for one more question. One more. And here's... This is sebsp at Instagram says this, could the gas giants still be forming planets or a planet in formation? I think that's what they mean. I think you're right. Because otherwise it doesn't make any sense because Jupiter is a gas giant. It is a gas giant and it's not a star. Right. So I guess they mean a planet in formation. So Jupiter radiates more energy than it receives from the sun. Oh. So you want to call it a star? It gives off more energy than it receives from the universe. But generally we define stars as having a source of thermonuclear fusion in their core. You can emit energy if you're slowly collapsing. You get hotter if you do that, if you're just slowly collapsing. Or if heavier things are dropping to the center, as lighter things rise to the surface. These phenomena, it turns out, you will heat from this. It turns out. But gas clouds that make gaseous planets, you know out of the starting box whether they're going to be stars. This is not something that happens. Gee, I want to be a boy one day. I don't want to be my strings attached. The mass is either going to take you there or it is not. There is the Netherland which is what we call brown dwarfs, which are transitional. We say transitional but we don't mean it in the way you might think. You have massive planets like Jupiter. You have low mass stars. And you have this thing in the middle that we call brown dwarfs. They're not transitional in that they're not evolving from one to another. They just occupy this middle zone between what a planet is and what a star is. And they're failed stars or super, they're overachieving planets, failed stars, whatever you want to call them. But we have a term for them. They're called brown dwarfs. Brown dwarfs. Sweet. All right. You got it, Chuck. Thanks for doing this. Always a pleasure. Always there. Hey, listen. You're always there for me. Where else do I have to be? Well, you don't get gigs. I just do them on the side. On the side. We are your main squeeze. Yeah, that's it. You know what I mean? I got my little side pieces. But every time they come calling, I'm like, now you know who my woman is. My woman is StarTalk. This has been StarTalk. You've been listening or watching Cosmic Queries, Office Hours edition. And as always, I bid you to keep looking up.