Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Did this particle cause the Big Bang?

Episode Date: December 30, 2021

Daniel and Jorge talk about the inflaton particle, and whether its responsible for EVERYTHING. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grazias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in, like, over 25 years.

Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We'll talk about all that's viral and trending, with a little bit of cheesement and a whole lot of laughs. And of course, the great bevras you've come to expect. Listen to the new season of Dacias Come Again on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast.

Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials is easier. Complex problem solving takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. From tips for healthy living to the latest medical breakthroughs, WebMD's Health Discovered podcast keeps you up to date on today's most important health issues. Through in-depth conversations with experts from across the health care community, WebMD reveals how today's health news will impact your life. tomorrow. It's not that people don't know that exercise is healthy. It's just that people don't know why it's healthy. And we're struggling to try to help people help themselves and

each other. Listen to WebMD Health Discovered on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell. And the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, Daniel, do you know anything about economics? Very little, actually. It's a big mystery to me. Can you think about it? you mean like give everything terrible misleading names hey you said it i didn't but i just mean like can you could you explain economics using i don't know particles how would that work you know like what causes a recession answer a particle called the recesson or what causes inflation and infototat yeah i guess though you could apply that strategy to anything like how do cartooners get their ideas

by the carton actually we get our ideas the same way physicists do Using the napton. Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I'm doing experiments to measure the minimum possible nap. Yeah, because I guess your naps are quantum? Also, like, are you napping and not napping at the same time? Because then that way you can get paid for it for your job, right? I am getting paid while I nap.

That's true. But I'm experimenting to see what is the shortest useful amount of nap. Oh, interesting. So you have an alarm clock and you're actually taking data? That's right. I'm exploring the fundamental nature of nap at the smallest scale. I'm wondering like, you know, is a four minute nap really rejuvenating? Can you take a two minute nap and feel better afterwards?

This is the kind of stuff I work on every day. I see. You mean shoddy science. Anecdotal evidence, they call it in other fields. Subjective evidence. Look, if I need to take a lot of data here to prove my point, I'll do it, you know, for the science. Yeah, take naps all day, yeah. But welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, explain the universe, a production of I-Hard Radio.

In which we break down the fundamental nature of the universe, of space and time, of black holes, of neutron stars, of galaxies, of particles, of strings, of everything that came before and everything. that will come. We ask the biggest, deepest, hardest, craziest questions about the universe and we expect answers. Not from you, but from science. And when we don't have the answers, we tell you about everything that science has thought about these crazy, amazing topics and where we might be headed. That's right, because the universe is huge and mysterious and full of questions and the search for answers doesn't take naps. The human quest to find answers to the biggest questions in the universe is ever going. And there's always someone in the world doing. it so technically it never sleeps and thank gosh for that it's sort of incredible to

me that we can tackle these biggest of questions you know how big is the universe where did it come from that we actually have like a mechanism as these tiny little creatures on this tiny little rock in one corner of the universe to reach our minds out and maybe solve these cosmic puzzles yeah it's amazing and we've only been doing it for like a few hundred years i mean in earnest right and so we've been able to do a lot just from this little tiny floating rock in one corner of the universe, we decoded basically a lot of where the universe came from. Yeah. And a lot of those few hundred years were spent napping. And so, you know, it's even more impressive how much we've learned. Right. Most of it was done in Europe, I guess,

right? So it's a siesta, kind of? Afternoon tea. Though sometimes you get great ideas during naps. I often wake up from a nap and have like three good ideas for what to do next. When you say often, do you mean like sometimes you get terrible ideas too and it's a wash at the end what's your hit rate for nap brilliant 95% of all the ideas I have are terrible but that's the process right the first idea is always terrible but sometimes it inspires a better idea maybe in you maybe in the other person you tell this idea too honestly jokes aside that's one of the joys of collaborating with all the young people in my group is that they come in with a terrible idea and it inspires another better idea in somebody

else that's the whole process of science i thought you were going to say that the joy was that you can come up with terrible ideas and then they'll do it and then they'll tell you when it doesn't work so you can keep napping there's that also but it is amazing how these naps and these terrible ideas have somehow coalesced into a pretty nice cohesive view of the whole universe of how it works of its ancient ancient history it's amazing what we've learned without really exploring just by gathering information from the light and the particles that happen to fall on Earth. Yeah. And so we have a pretty good picture of the universe, at least the observable universe and all of the amazing things that happened in it and even its origin. We have a pretty good picture of

what happened when the universe was born and how it happened and how fast it happened. But there are still big questions about it. That's right. One of those questions is exactly how you define when it was born. We keep pushing further and further back in the cosmic history, thinking back to how galaxies were formed and before that how stars were formed and before that how the gas that made those stars were formed and before that, how the particles that went into the gas were formed and even further and further back. But the further back we pushed, the harder it is to understand what the causes of those causes are. Yeah, because looking for the causes of the causes is what science is all about. And in particular, we're asking this question about the beginning

of the universe, the Big Bang, or there's sort of a more technical term for it, right? That's right. These days, an important part of what we used to call the Big Bang is this period of incredible expansion of the universe, which we now call inflation, borrowing a term from economics. Did things get more expensive in the universe also very rapidly in those first moments? Technically, right? I mean, things went up in value a lot. You used to be able to buy a whole solar system with one star. Now you need like a binary star system. Eventually, you need like a trinary star system. Eventually, every star system is going to have like five or six stars in it. Right. Yeah. I mean, technically the universe used to fit in your wallet before. Now you need a whole banking system, if not more. That's right. And we keep getting these descriptions of earlier and earlier times of the universe. But as you say, we don't just want to find the cause of this particular event. We want to find the cause of that cause. And of that cause and of that cause and of that cause. And hanging over this whole question, of course, is the deeper philosophical question of, was there a first cause? Or do the causes just go back forever into the depths of time causing each other?

Yeah, and so today we'll get to the root of the whole universe here by asking a pretty big question about what caused the big bang and inflation. So today on the program, we'll be asking the question. What is an inflaton? Now, Daniel, is that inflaton or inflaton? It's French, so it's inflatant. Infleton. I feel like you insult so many French speakers in both Canada and France when you aim for you. your French accent.

My attempt to speak French is insulting to the very French language. Is that what you're saying? I am not French. I'm just happy you're not trying to do a Spanish accent. Oh, yeah, exactly. Well, you know, in my brief attempts to speak French, people who were actual French speakers told me that my French accent was terrible. So then I tried an exaggerated French accent, like a Pepe Lepeu sort of insulting French accent.

And then they were like, yes, that's much better. No, they said better. They didn't say it was good. No, yeah, exactly. You should always take people up their word. It's always an iterative process. But in this case, physicists call this an inflaton. Usually particles we invent, we have the suffix of on, like photon, boson for me on.

So this would be an inflaton. I guess that gives it sort of an element of individualness or like succinctness, you know, or like, you know, wholeness. There's a unitarity to it. Yeah. I mean, it's not the electronish or the protoning, right? It's the proton, right? And the electron. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And so this is a pretty interesting question. What is an infloton? and did it cause the big bang through inflation? And so as usual, we were wondering how many people out there had heard of this interesting and theoretical and mysterious particle. So Daniel went out there and asked people on the internet, what is an inflaton? And you don't have to be on the internet to participate.

You just have to be a listener who wants to answer silly physics questions without the opportunity to do any research. So reach out to me if you'd like to participate to questions at danielanhorpe.com. I'll email you the question. and you can just zip back the audio to us. Please participate. Everybody's welcome. So think about it for a second.

Do you know what an inflaton is, or how would you try to describe it? Here's what people had to say. The word inflaton makes me think of inflation. So I think an inflaton is a theoretical or mathematical placeholder to explain dark energy. So I have no idea what an inflaton is, but it does make me think of,

maybe particles that are in an electromagnetic shield, like what's happening around Earth. I think inflation has happened at the beginning of the Big Bang where the space and all the matter inflated into what we see now. I have no idea. I've never heard about it. I literally could have just thought like maybe a new particle discovered or based on the name, something to do with. any kind of inflations in the universe, maybe? Other than being some type of particle, I have no idea.

Inflotan is a theoretical particle that is related to the mechanisms of the inflation of the universe. Maybe it helps explain why or how that happened. If I had to guess, I'd say an inflaton has to do with inflation, the inflationary period of the early universe, so maybe a particle that only existed during inflation? So maybe this particle is actually well named. What do you mean? Because nobody knows what it is. Because everybody has the idea that

it's connected somehow to cosmic inflation. Yeah, yeah, it's a pretty good naming this time. Well, I don't know. I mean, let's find out what it does and how it's related to inflation first. Before passing a judgment. You're almost going to say something positive about a particle physics name and then you pull back at the last second.

Caught yourself. Check back with me in an hour here. All right. We'll do. I'll let you know. But yeah, I guess most people connected it to inflation, which is good. Although some people try to connect it to dark energy, maybe. And some people just had no idea. Yeah. And the connection to dark energy is not a terrible one because inflation is a big expansion

of the universe. And dark energy is just the observation that this expansion, this accelerating expansion, is still continuing to present day. So as we might dig into later, there might be connections between inflation and dark energy. All right. Well, let's take the first step here. And let's talk about what is inflation? So we talked about how it's part of the Big Bang, but it's not sort of the whole Big Bang, right?

That's right. And it's sort of an evolution of what we mean by the Big Bang. I think the initial idea for a Big Bang is sort of like a tiny little dot of matter sitting in deeply empty space and then exploding. Then you had infinitely dense matter, singularity like you might imagine exists in the heart of a black hole, which then exploded all the way through space. And then that matter is moving through space. That's sort of like the early ideas of a Big Bang. Right, right. Like we thought maybe it was like a grenade or something that was just sitting there in space. Exactly.

These days we have a different concept of how the Big Bang might have happened. The crucial difference is that it's not an explosion of stuff through space, but an expansion of space itself. The space itself gets stretched. And so you don't need like a tiny dot of matter inside big empty space. You can have space itself be already infinite and already filled with matter. But that matter was hot and dense. And then it got stretched.

out, it got expanded into a cooler, more separated, more dilute universe. So that's the idea of inflation, that you took space itself and stretched it and expanded it. So we've reimagined the Big Bang is having this period we call inflation, where the universe goes from very, very dense to very, very not dense. It's like the whole room where stuff was actually is what also got bigger, right? It's not just like the stuff got bigger. It's like the room got bigger too.

Exactly. And another important difference is that this doesn't need a. singularity. Like one problem with the idea of a Big Bang is this concept of a singularity when the universe was like infinitely dense. Infinities don't really appear in nature as far as we can tell. I mean, the universe might be spatially infinite. It might be infinite all the way back in time, but nobody's ever observed any infinities. This is a concern also for singularities at the heart of black holes, which we think are inconsistent with quantum mechanics. So the singularity, the beginning of the universe for the early Big Bang models, was over.

sort of a problem. And so this replaces it. This says, well, you don't have a singularity. You just start out with something really, really hot and dense. And then you get this massive expansion of it. And this expansion is really dramatic. We're talking about an expansion of the factor of 10 to the 30. That's 10 with 30 zeros past it, right? It's like, I don't even know what the prefix for that is. I think it's an inflow number, right? It's an inflilion. I think it's a gazillion number, maybe but you're gillian anyway it's a huge number it's hard to even really imagine and the whole thing happened in 10 to the minus 32 seconds so it's this incredible expansion you know something the size of a centimeter now becomes trillions and trillions of kilometers long all in 10 to minus 32 seconds

and that's just to paint a picture that's like zero point and then 32 zeros and then a one seconds exactly so it's a really short amount of time obviously especially in the context of whole history of the universe, right, which is 14 billion years. And it's maybe the most dramatic thing that's basically ever happened. It started with a bang. But is it a coincidence that, you know, during inflation, the universe expanded by 10 to the 30 in 10 to the negative 32. Like that seems like pretty symmetric somehow.

They do seem sort of related. But there's a lot of uncertainty in those numbers. Different models of inflation give you different numbers. Some models of inflation have more expansion, 10 to the 50, even up to 10 to the 70. And some models of inflation think this might have happened. and faster down to 10 to the minus 36, even, for example. So there's a lot of uncertainty. So you're saying your theories are like plus or minus than to the 30, you know, just a small error.

Yeah. And later on, we'll talk about, you know, mistakes we've made that are a factor are 10 to the 100. So, you know, when you're taking on big questions, you sometimes make big mistakes. Just like we said, sometimes your first idea is wrong. In fact, 95% of your ideas are probably wrong. Sometimes you have a bad nap by 10 to the 30th. That's right. I overslept by 10 to the 30 hours.

Oops. And now the universe is over. As long as I get overpaid by 10 to the 30, that's no problem for me. And so this is kind of a crazy theory, right? I remember talking about this for our books and for some of the stuff that we do together. And it's sort of a crazy idea, right? The fact that the universe expanded so fast and so much in such a little amount of time. But that's sort of the only thing that makes sense, right, from what we see and from our theories about the universe.

Yeah, this idea is not just something invented by theorists who had a lot. bad nap. It's something which solves a lot of problems with the old Big Bang theory. The old big bang theory of this explosion of a big universe grenade didn't explain what we actually saw out there in the universe. It was hard to sort of make that fit. And one of the biggest problems with that theory is that it didn't explain basically how smooth the universe is. Like we are getting photons right now from parts of the universe that are very, very far apart. Like if you look to the left, you're getting photons from the very beginning of the universe, and those photons are coming from very, very far away. And then you look to the right, and you're getting photons from a totally

different part of the universe that have been traveling for the whole history of the universe. Now, in theory, those photons are meeting for the very first time. So the patches of the universe that they came from have never been in contact before, right? Their photons have been traveling the whole history of the universe just meeting today for the very first time. They've had no chance to coordinate or talk to each other. But what we see out there, the universe is that everything seems to be about the same temperature, like those photons have about the same energy. And that's the kind of thing you expect to happen when stuff is in contact with each other. Like when you first pour cream into your coffee, you have hot spots and cold spots,

but then you wait a little while and this stuff talks to each other and exchanges photons, and everything becomes smooth and evenly temperatureed. The universe seems sort of smooth and evenly temperatured, even though parts of it never have spoken before. Right, right. It's It's like you look to the right and you look to the left and you don't see any like hot spots or cold spots in the universe, right? It's like if the universe had come from a grenade, you might expect like in one direction it would look hotter and the other direction would look colder. That's right. And we do see some very small variations. We'll talk about that in a minute in the cosmic microwave background radiation. That's this very, very old light that we're seeing from the very early universe. But it's remarkably smooth. It's much smoother than it really should be. and so inflation solves this problem because inflation says oh no big deal these guys were in contact

14 billion years ago before I stretched the whole universe these things were close enough to be exchanging photons to be talking to each other to be sharing their energy to smooth out any big lumps any big variations and that's why the universe looks so smooth because it had a chance to sort of mix and become even temperatured before it got stretched out to be so massive I guess Are you assuming that before the Big Bang, before this inflation period, things were stable, like things were hanging out in this super dense state for a while? Or are you saying just from being so crunched together so much that they would have had a chance to even out? Yeah, I wouldn't say a while because we're talking like 10 to the minus 30 seconds, but long enough to thermalize, long enough to come into equilibrium. We think that whatever happened before inflation was therefore long enough for things to smooth out mostly.

to smooth out to the level where all you expect are random quantum fluctuations. Like nothing in the universe is perfectly smooth because of quantum mechanics. You're always getting virtual particles bubbling up and creating tiny little pockets of extra density. But that's the idea that the universe had a chance to even out and smooth out down to the level of quantum fluctuations. And so if that's true, then you should look out into the universe and see it be mostly smooth with a few little wrinkles. But the Big Bang theory would suggest something much more dramatic. right would suggest that things have never been in contact before and so there's no way that these things could be so smooth right so I guess the only way to explain the sort of even temperature

of the universe is if space itself was crunched together before and we don't expect it to be perfectly even right we have these quantum fluctuations any field in space is never going to be like totally even or smooth there's always going to be virtual particles bubbling up and small quantum randomness happening. And so inflation also explains why we have structure in the universe today. Like the universe is not totally smooth. It's not like we have one hydrogen atom per light year or something like that. We haven't spread out matter through the universe like peanut butter on a piece of bread. It is a little bit lumpy, right? You have planets and stars and galaxies. And those lumps come from these little initial quantum fluctuations in the pre-inflationary matter.

whatever that was before inflation, there were little quantum fluctuations. It's mostly smoothed out. You get little quantum fluctuations. And then those get blown up by inflation to be the seeds of the structure that we see today. Right. Well, I guess you expect gravity to give a smooth universe structure. But I think what you said before is that gravity isn't enough to give us the structure that we see today, right? Like the galaxies and the galaxy clusters, like you need something more to explain the structure.

And one good source for that structure to come from is from. the quantum fluctuations, which would only happen if space itself also crunched together. Yeah, so these initial quantum fluctuations get blown up by inflation to be on a larger scale, and then gravity takes over, as you say, and you know, you have a universe filled with matter with some variations in it, and then gravity takes over and clumps that stuff together, and you get big blobs which turn into galaxies and stars and planets and all that kind of stuff. But gravity can only do that if it has something to start with. If it was perfectly smooth to begin with, gravity can't get a foot.

because everything's being pulled in all directions but at the same amount. And so there's sort of nothing to get it going. All right. So then inflation makes sense because it sort of explains the way things are and what we see out there in the universe. And it also makes some predictions about some of the background radiation that we see out there. And so let's get into that.

But first, let's take a quick break. LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy. emerged. And it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance bro? Tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome to Brown Ambition.

This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit or turning to credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from now. When you do feel like you are bleeding from these high interest rates, I would start shopping for a debt consolidation loan, starting with your local. credit union, shopping around online, looking for some online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable. Listen, I am not here to judge. It is so expensive in these streets. I 100% can see how in just a few months you can have this much credit card debt when it weighs on you.

It's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand. It's nice and dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it. And in fact, it may get even worse. For more judgment-free money advice, listen to Brown Ambition on on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change.

Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny, you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hola, it's Honey German, and my podcast, Grasias Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment, with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there.

Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs, and those amazing vibras you've come to expect. And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community.

You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the, code switching. I won't say white watch because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me. Yeah. But the whole pretending and cold, you know, it takes a toll on you.

Listen to the new season of Grasas Come Again as part of my Cultura podcast network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, Daniel, we're talking about inflation and why a hamburger costs more these days.

Because of the Big Bang, right? Because it was made in the forge of quantum fluctuations. It's because of the hamburger on particles, yeah. Now we're talking about the beginning of the universe and the period during the Big Bang in which things blew up really fast and lot, and that's called inflation. And we're talking about what might be causing inflation. But first, we talked about sort of why inflation makes sense because it is a crazy idea. And we know it sort of explains a lot of things.

And it also makes some predictions, which we can verify, right? You have to cast your mind back about 20, 25 years before we had really detailed measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Remember, these are photons, which are the sort of the oldest light in the universe. The universe was a hot and dense plasma, like the center of the sun. And when a photon is emitted in the center of the sun, it doesn't just like fly out of the sun, it gets reabsorbed because the sun is opaque. So the whole universe was like that. It was thick and opaque. And photons that were made were just reabsorbed.

Then things cooled down enough so that suddenly the universe, became transparent. And photons made at that moment are still flying around through the universe. So that's the oldest light that we can see. And that gives us a sense for like what the temperature was at any place in the universe. And there were little hotspots and there were little cold spots. So this light was first discovered in the 60s and was really evidence that the universe used to be hot and dense. And then later on people discovered, oh, there are some hot spots and some cold spots in it. But before all those hotspots were measured to great detail, inflationary models, the folks working on this kind of cosmology, predicted that there would be those wiggles. They said, if you measure this really,

really carefully, you'll find that it's not all the same temperature. It's not all the same energy photons. You should see wiggles. And you should see wiggles that look just like this. And then people develop these satellites and these telescopes to look at that light with great precision. And they saw exactly those wiggles that inflation predicted. Right. And it didn't sort of like predict what the wiggles would exactly look like, but they predicted, like, things about it, right? Like, they should be like this curvy and this bumpy and this, you know, at this, you know, general frequency, right?

It's like it predicted what they should, the general properties of these wiggles. Yeah, they didn't predict like where one wiggle would be, like where you would have a hotspot and where you would have a cold spot. That's random. But what they can do is predict how big should those hot spots be?

How big should those cold spots be? Like, should an entire half of the sky be a hot spot? Or should the hotspots be like, one degree in the sky or 0.1 degree in the sky. And very specifically, what inflation predicts is that you have quantum fluctuations all throughout inflation. It's not like you just had quantum fluctuations before inflation. As the universe is inflating, you keep getting quantum fluctuations. And so what that means is that you should get wiggles of all sizes. You should get wiggles of 1 degree and wiggles of 0.1 degree and 0.001 degrees and all those things. So if you look for these,

you should expect to see all different kinds of wiggles, like basically at all different scales. And that's exactly what they see. And so that's really exciting. It really suggests that you're like, you're seeing quantum fluctuations as inflation is happening. It's almost like a fractal kind of like you should see a certain level of fractalness in the wiggles of the universe. Yeah. Some people think of it like we're watching time click forward as inflation is happening. It's leaving this imprint on the universe as it happens.

So that was pretty exciting. That's pretty convincing that inflation really. really is a good description of what happened. Right, right. And so again, inflation is this idea that space itself expanded by this crazy amount. So everything was crunched together. And then in one point in time, it expanded by a factor of 10 to the 30 in 10 to the minus 32 seconds. And that's pretty wild, right?

Like, that's a huge amount of expansion and space and things moving and exploding. But there has to, I guess, the big question is, like, what cost it? Like, why would the universe suddenly do that? Yeah. What we've done so far is just describe what we think happened. Like, in order to create the universe that we're looking at, what sequence of events do you need to orchestrate? Now we need to take the next step and say, all right, that describes what we think happened,

but why did it happen? What caused that, right? And this is this eternal chicken and egg. Who ordered that? Yeah. Who laid this egg, right? And when we figure out who laid this egg, we're like, all right, well, where did that chicken come from?

And, you know, it might be an eternal question that we keep going further and further back. But it's a fun question. And this is the process, right? We need to nail down what we think happened. And then we can look for explanations for what might have caused that and nail down what the parameters of that are. And then we can ask, okay, well, you know, does that make sense? And what could have caused that and what conditions do you need for that to work?

And this is the process of science. This is how funny little monkeys on a tiny little rock in a corner of the universe can peer out at photons landing on the surface of their planet and learn things about the very origin of the universe. Yeah, just being curious and asking question after question. Sort of like one of those annoying kids sometimes. And asking the government for billions of dollars in fancy eyeballs to use to look at this crazy light.

Right, right. And to think about it doing your naps. That's right. And so to summarize, what we need the universe to have done is to have this crazy period of an expansion, right, really, really rapid expansion, and then stop. Right? We don't think that that expansion is still going on today. It happened and then it stopped happen.

And we also need quantum fluctuations before inflation and during inflation. And then we need it to all somehow turn into the matter that we have today in the universe. Right. And then also the structure and the way it's sort of arranged all that we see today. And so a big idea that might explain this is this idea of an inflaton, like a special particle that caused inflation. Yeah, that's basically the go-to strategy for particle physicists, right? It's like, well, we have some process.

What causes it? a quantum field, right? That's like the only thing we know how to put into the universe. And so the game of particle physics is sort of like, what set of quantum fields can you put together that give you the behavior that we see? Like for electrodynamics, for, you know, electricity and magnetism, we see, well, if we make a photon field and an electron field and we have them talk to each other this way, does that reproduce what we see in the universe? And so now we have a set of requirements. And so people have built this field. It's called the inflaton field, and it's a quantum field that fills the whole universe. And like other quantum fields, you know, it can contain

energy and it can have particles in it. These would be inflaton particles. And they try to construct this field in a way that satisfies all those requirements we just mentioned. A rapid expansion, a stop to the rapid expansion, and allowing some quantum fluctuations and then turning into regular matter. Interesting. So really, you're sort of inserting a new field. That's sort of the more sort of proper way to do it theoretically. And did you consider just calling it the infield? I stopped short at making that idea. That idea comes out of left field, or yeah, it's a deep field idea.

So this field might explain things. And so how does this explain inflation? Like, how can a field do that? And why did it stop suddenly? Why isn't it also expanding things today? So to understand how a field can do that, we need to think about what it means for a field to be vacuum. Like when we talk about empty space.

or the vacuum, what we really mean is that space has no particles in it, no like little objects flying around carrying kinetic energy, energy of motion. We don't mean that it can't have any potential energy, right? Like we think that empty space is filled with quantum fields and those fields do have energy in them. For example, the Higgs field is a field that fills all of space. But at its lowest level, its most relaxed point, it still has energy in it. That's potential energy. And so people think that maybe the inflaton field was some field that started out with a lot of potential energy, no matter at all, no particles, just a lot of potential energy. An interesting thing about a quantum field that has just potential energy is that it causes rapid expansion of space time. And this is

an idea we've run into before when we've talked about dark energy. One way we try to explain why the universe seems to be accelerating its expansion today is this idea of a cause. cosmological constant, which is just like a potential energy that fills all of space. If you put that into the equations of general relativity, it creates this negative pressure, which expands all of space. And so just like adding a cosmological constant sort of makes the universe accelerate its expansion now, if you create a quantum field very early in the universe with a lot of potential energy, it has the same effect. Well, I guess let me step back a little bit.

So there's the idea that maybe that the universe is filled with, fields, like the electron field, the quark fields, and all of the particles have their own fields. And these are like sort of like things that just permeate, sort of like a fog that fills every bit of space in the universe. And you're saying that just having a field with energy in it expands space. That's right. Every quantum field has to have energy in it. That's called this zero point energy. And we've talked about it in the podcast before, like it manifests itself as the Casimir effect and other areas. And so we think that every quantum field, field has a minimum energy in it and any field with energy this is always expanding space so why is that

why does space itself expand when a field has energy space itself will expand when a field has potential energy right when it's in the vacuum state when it has any sort of potential energy because that's the way it enters into the equations for general relativity general relativity is a way to understand the effect of matter and energy on space and mostly it's pretty simple like you put a blob of mass into space, it will curve space. That makes sort of sense because you can imagine that it changes like the way things fly and why photons get bent around the sun, et cetera. And that's also true for energy. You put a lot of energy into space. It'll curve it. But there also are other effects that go beyond sort of like a simple replication of Newton's gravity. You can also do other weird things,

it turns out. And one of those weird things is that if you have potential energy all throughout space, it creates this negative pressure. And negative pressure is really weird because it's like repulsive gravity. We're used to gravity only attracting things like you are attracted to the earth and the earth is attracted to the sun. Well, Einstein's general relativity tells us that gravity comes from this distortion of space and time and that it's sensitive not just to mass, but also to potential energy. But potential energy does something really, really weird that sort of unfamiliar and hard to grapple with, which is that it creates this repulsion, this negative pressure which expand space itself. And you might ask, well, like, why does it do that? And, you know, I don't have

a great clear answer for you. It's just sort of like, that's the structure of the equations in general relativity, which seem to describe what we see. And Einstein, when he first saw this in his equation, he thought, well, that's nonsense. Let's just ignore that because there's no way the universe is doing that, right? And so he overlooked this idea of a cosmological constant, any sort of repulsive gravity. And now we sort of need it to describe the universe that we see. We don't exactly know why that happens, but it's just sort of like the shape of the equations that we can use to describe what we are seeing. I see. So it's sort of like fields have energy and that puts pressure on the universe to make it expand, sort of like air inside of a balloon maybe. Like if you

have a lot of pressure, a lot of energy inside of the balloon, that those tend to want to expand the space it's in, right? Yeah, that's a fine way to think about it. And so if you want to describe the universe as expanding very, very rapidly, you need to have a field that has a huge amount of potential energy. And so this can be like a vacuum. We're talking about no particles, but still a field with a lot of energy. And sometimes we call this in particle physics, we call this a false vacuum because it's not like energy equals zero. We talked about this before in terms of the Higgs field. Higgs field is a field that has energy in it, some vacuum expectation value. It's relaxed. It's sort of like at its lowest state, but that lowest state is not at zero energy. And that's why all the particles have

mass because they interact with this field, which has this energy. And that's where the energy for the mass of all the particles comes from. So it seems like, you know, we have all these fields to describe all these particles and they're all trying to make space bigger all the time. But now we're trying to explain this particular period in the universe's history where things inflated, exploded, expanded super fast in the super short amount of time. And so maybe the theory is that maybe there was a field with a huge amount of energy at that point. And then that caused that huge expansion.

Exactly. So when this field has a huge amount of potential energy, you get rapid expansion of space and time. But remember, we need not just rapid expansion of space time. We also need that to stop, right? Because we don't think inflation is still happening today. So the idea is that instead of this potential energy being stable, you know, instead of this being like a field that sort of like stuck in a well, that it's sort of like unstable, that it's like a boulder at the top of a hill

and that hill's like a little bit slanted. So eventually the universe rolls down from the top of this high potential energy, into a state with lower potential energy. And just like when a boulder rolls down a hill, it turns some of that gravitational potential energy into the energy of its motion, right? And so in this case, what would happen is that potential energy in that field,

that inflaton field, which was driving the expansion of the universe, now that potential energy decreases, so the universe's expansion stops, and that energy has to go somewhere so it creates inflaton particles. So you go from a vacuum with a lot of potential energy to something which is no longer a vacuum, because you have all this energy and all these inflaton particles which are whizzing through space.

Right, right. Well, I'm not sure a boulder is helping me understand this as much, but I think what you're saying is that it had all this energy. It caused the universe to inflate super rapidly. And then it was basically like spent, right? Like it just diluted. Once space expanded that fast, it just basically all that energy went away. Sort of like maybe a balloon once you pop it, the pressure sort of dissipates. But the energy doesn't go away. It just turns into inflaton particles. It goes from one kind of energy into another kind of energy. It goes from high potential energy into energy of these particles. Why don't the particles cause inflation, though?

Because those particles are now mass and energy, which has a different effect on the shape of the universe. You only get that kind of rapid inflation when you have high potential energy. Now, when you have a lot of mass, right? Mass itself doesn't cause accelerated expansion of the universe. Only potential energy does that. Sort of like the energy went from one field to another field, right? Yeah, or the field itself changed. It used to be that the field had a lot of potential energy, and now it doesn't have a lot of potential energy.

And so that energy goes into something else. Just like that boulder, you know, it had a lot of potential energy when it's sitting up on the top of a hill. And then when it falls off the hill, that energy is still there, but now it's like the energy of the motion of the boulder. So you can turn energy from one kind of thing into another kind of thing. Like you can take this potential energy and create particles out of it. So you went from this state of high potential energy, which is inflating the universe, into a state of lower potential energy. inflation has stopped, the expansion is stopped, and you're filled with all these crazy inflaton particles. But also, I mean, I imagine some of it has to do with the dilution of it,

right, because space expanded now suddenly, it's sort of less powerful too, whatever energy was there. Yeah, although it's really tricky to think about the conservation of energy in these terms. Remember, we had a whole podcast about whether energy is conserved, and it's not actually conserved when space is expanding because sometimes more energy is being created, right? As you create more space, you also create more energy. But you're right, that the the energy is getting diluted because we went from very hot, dense universe to one that's not very hot and not very dense. I see.

All right. Well, that might be then where all of the energy from inflation went to and why the universe stopped expanding so quickly. So it might be this inflaton. So let's get into more of this particle and whether or not it's real. And whether we've seen it. But first, let's take another quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances. is just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism.

Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In Season 2, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable.

These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code. on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to

finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance, bro, tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome to Brown Ambition. This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit or turning to credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from now. When you do feel like you are bleeding from these high interest rates, I would start shopping for debt consolidation loan starting with your local credit union shopping around online looking for some

online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable listen i am not here to judge it is so expensive in these streets i 100% can see how in just a few months you can have this much credit card debt and it weighs on you it's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand it's nice and dark in the sand even if it's scary it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it And in fact, it may get even worse. For more judgment-free money advice, listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness, the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories. I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, we continue

to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, Daniel, we are inflating people's minds here today, talking about inflation and the inflaton, which might explain the rapid expansion of the universe during the Big Bang. So I guess the question is, we have this theory of the inflaton and the inflaton field, is it real? Like, have we seen it? Do we have confirmation that it exists? It's a great question. And it's one that we are still struggling

with, you know, first you come up with these ideas, and then you think about their consequences, then you think about ways to test them. And we have some promising ways to maybe explore this because we can think about what happened to those infloton particles, right? The universe expanded, all that potential energy turned into inflaton particles. But those infloton particles are not still around today, the universe is not filled with inflaton particles. We think what happened is that those particles then turned into normal matter, you know, quarks and electrons and all kinds of stuff, which then led to the universe we see today. And so we might be able to trace back and say, well, can we see evidence in sort of the patterns of those quarks and those electrons that

support that they came from inflatons, that their history is sort of inflatons? What? Wait, so are you saying that a lot or most or something? some of the matter that we see today came from this energy that exploded the universe directly? If this theory is correct, it would be all of it. Every little piece of matter which exists today came from an inflaton. Every quark, every electron, every tiny thing out there used to be an inflaton particle. It used to be the whole universe just was this. All it was was the inflaton field and inflaton particles.

And then all of those turned into the matter that makes us up. Right, but through these other fields, are you saying those other fields didn't exist? they didn't have energy before. How does this relate to the other quantum fields that we see today? That's a great question. And we have to remember that our picture of these fields, electrons and quarks and whatever, is something we've only really ever seen when the universe is cold and old. And so it's like a useful description of how things work.

We don't think it's fundamental. We don't think that this is like the basic description of true realities, just sort of like the physics that works today. It's sort of like if you wanted to describe the physics of fluids, you know, How do fluids flow? Well, that works when fluids are a certain temperature. When fluids get really, really hot, all those equations go out the window.

When fluids get really, really cold, those equations go out the window. So one idea is not that sort of the inflaton fields and these fields, the quark fields, and the electron fields all exist at the same time, but that when the universe is hot and dense and crazy, the inflaton field is the way to describe the universe. And then later, when it gets colder,

a picture of the same universe is to use these fields that we have today. None of these fields are like a deep fundamental true story. They're just sort of like an effective mathematical story we tell about today's situation. It's like the story changes, kind of. First, it had these characters and then it had these other characters in it. Yeah, and physicists talk about this as a phase change for a reason, right? Because when phases of matter change, different rules seem to come into play, right?

There's different rules about how crystals work and how plasmas work and how fluids work for a reason. And so because we don't have a fundamental theory of the universe, we can just describe it in terms of different phases. We think the universe at a very hot, dense temperature in the very beginning is described by different physics, and that's the infloton field. And the universe today is described by the physics that we have been developing. Interesting. You're saying that sort of at the very beginning of the universe, when it expanded and it was

super hot and dense and it was expanding super fast, then the star of the show was this inflaton field and inflaton particles were flying all around, and then the story changed, and then those became sort of what we see today. Yeah, exactly. Like the universe sort of cooled down and crystallized and new stuff happened. And that stuff is well described by having electrons and quarks and all that kind of stuff. You were saying we're living in the reboot of the universe with a new cast. Yeah, we're living in the ice ages, man.

The most dramatic thing happened, you know, in Act 1, and we're in like Act 14 billion and everything is cold and desolate. Except that we don't know. This might go into syndication for another 100 trillion seasons. That's right. We should be so lucky is to have 14 billion seasons. So tell me about this inflotone, I guess. Is it just like any other particle?

Could you make things out of this inflaton? Like was there infloton matter at the beginning of the universe during the Big Bang? So this is the wild west of theoretical physics. There's lots of different ideas for these inflatons, what they could look like, how they work, what mass they even have, whether their mass really even makes sense. Because in some sense, the mass of a particle depends on how it moves, which depends on the potential energy. And here we're talking about potential energy that's changed.

And so like, you know, these inflaton particles might have variable mass or they might be ridiculously massive, you know, like trillions of times the mass of the proton, or they could be as light as the Higgs boson. So there's basically every flavor of inflaton theory out there, depending on the one that you like. There's inflation in the number of theories about the inflaton. But that's what happens in physics, right? There's a big problem. Nobody knows what to do. Somebody creates a sort of new class of idea. and all of a sudden it opens up the door

at a lot more creativity. People say, oh, maybe it's this, maybe it's that, oh, look what I did with this. If I just tweak this over here, I get something totally different, which has these exciting properties. So that's sort of like a gold rush

when it comes to theoretical physics. And this is now a huge area of research. But one thing that people are working on is trying to imagine if we can see evidence for these particles, if they left an imprint on the universe today. Interesting. Well, I guess couldn't we recreate some of these conditions? Like when you were smashing parts,

particles, don't you sort of create, you know, matter and energy density to the point where you might see an inflaton or something? That is exactly the goal. And that is why we do collider physics because we want to probe the universe, not just at the cold, boring temperature that it is today, but as far back as we can go. But, you know, our colliders are limited. And so we can create things that are sort of warm compared to a typical environment, but we can't get anywhere near the energies necessary to create an inflaton particle unless we built something like the size of the galaxy. Then again, we don't really know the mass of this thing and we don't really know what the rules are. So it could also just be around the corner. If we build a collider twice as big as we have now, maybe we'd make Infliton particles. We don't know. I think most people suspect that it's somewhere up near the plank mass.

And so you'd need some redonculously large particle accelerator to ever recreate these conditions. I guess you know that the Infloton existed when the universe was 10 to the negative 30 times smaller. they might have existed right up until the very end of that range, right? In which case, we might be right over the range where you could see them. Yeah, or you might need an accelerator that's 10 to the 30 times bigger than hours in order to see it. Which might cost 10 to the 30 times more. Exactly. But we might need to wait for financial inflation of research budgets before we can probe that.

So then could we ever test whether this inflaton exists or do we have to rely on theoretical work? We can test to see if it left an imprint on the universe because, you know, The way to see whether something happened a long time ago is just to look for clues. If you can't recreate the events, you look to see if it left a mark on the universe. And one of those marks might be, for example, gravitational waves. You know, anytime you have expansion of space that way, you're going to create ripples in space itself. So there are theories about the gravitational waves that were left by inflation. And so if we listen really, really carefully for these gravitational waves, we might be able to detect those that come from the very

early universe. And we had an episode about this cosmic gravitational background and whether advanced detectors could detect it. And so there are promising areas of research there. Interesting. Like the echoes of the Big Bang in space itself. In space itself. So far our detectors are only capable of hearing like extremely loud shouts and screams in space, you know, when huge black holes combine with each other. These would be more like whispers, much, much quieter and also harder to pinpoint. All right, they're not like an individual source. And so it takes a little bit more work. But it's possible that they could hear these things.

If you're interested in those details, check out our episode on the cosmic gravitational background. And then I guess another quick question is, you know, is inflation related to the current expansion of the universe? Like, could our current expansion be related or be a part of that inflation and maybe due to inflatants too? We just don't know. I mean, we see that there is a similarity that there was an expansion of space in the very early universe. and there's an expansion of space in the late universe. Remember that dark energy isn't sort of something that's been happening the whole time. We think it turned down about five billion years ago.

So we don't understand like why inflatans would be created now to cause that expansion. Some theories do connect them. There are these theories of quintessence that suggests that the same field might be responsible for that and for these. But fundamentally, we just don't understand it. And we don't understand dark energy either, right? We've tried to do these calculations to say, well, we see the universe is, expanding and that expansion is accelerating. We can measure how big a potential energy, what cosmological constant you would need for that expansion. And then we try to explain that.

We say, well, is there that much potential energy in the quantum fields of space? And we do the calculation and we get a number and that number is 10 to the 100 times too big. So we just don't understand the connection between quantum fields, potential energy and the expansion of space. we're like at the very, very beginning, this is where we really need a theory of quantum gravity that would explain all of this to us. I think I got it, Daniel. I think I know what happened. Oh, and you waited to the end of the podcast and tell me. Yeah. I mean, clearly the inflatants woke up, they did inflation and then they took a nap and they're just now waking up to cause expansion. I mean, I think that my nap theory explains it all, doesn't it? The 10 billion year nap. That's a great

theory. I love that theory. What's a short nap if you consider that the universe. might go on for trillions of years. It could be. And there are also a few other ways we might get hints about whether the inflaton is there other than just gravitational waves. People can look for even more details in this cosmic microwave background radiation. Remember that bicep experiment that thought they saw evidence for inflatons because of the sort of twists and turns in the cosmic microwave background radiation.

And there are folks looking at like correlations of where galaxies are in the sky to look for like triangle shapes, which might come from the way the. inflaton decayed, like three inflaton particles might lead to like a trio of galaxies out there in space. So sort of like late structure of the universe and early wiggles in the universe, we're digging deep into those to look for evidence of these inflatons. Yeah, it's amazing how we're sort of like scraping the bottom of the barrel almost or like we're trying to figure out the whole universe to this little tiny peephole that we have in our little corner of the universe. But it's all we've got and it's amazing what we've been able to do so far. It's sort of like

flabbergasting, you know? And the thing that's wonderful about that is that you can extrapolate forward and think like, what will humans do in 100 years or in 500 years? We would be amazed the things that they might have learned from like tiniest little hints of the tiniest little photons that happen to land on our eyeballs. Yeah, I think we talked about this in our first book about how we're almost sort of going through a big bang in the sense of a human knowledge about the universe, right? Like if you look at the history of humanity, our knowledge about the universe and what it's made out of and how it started and how its range

really sort of exploded in the last few hundred years, right? So we're sort of in the middle of this inflation of human exploration. That's right. We've been making a lot of progress in the last hundred years

and also physicists have been taking more naps than the last hundred years. So maybe there's a connection there. Maybe it's going to stop. Yeah, just like inflation. Is it going to be a 10 billion year nap, Daniel, you think?

When can we expect more progress? If we have 10 billion more dollars, hey, I'll turn that into more science for you. You'll wake up for 10 billion. billion dollars, but not less. No less than that. All right. Well, again, this is a fascinating theory. It's an incredible sort of idea that the universe expanded that fast and that quickly and that we might have an explanation for it and that it might just be another interesting way that quantum fields interact with space. And sort of more like a class of explanations right now

because there's a lot of different ideas. But it's really exciting that we have sort of a framework, a framework that predicts these crazy events that we're now pretty sure did happen and that lets us ask deeper questions about, you know, why would that field exist and what could cause it and, you know, what came before that field. And it's led to some really cool, crazy ideas like this single bounce theory of the universe that the universe has been contracting for infinity down just before the Big Bang and then it bounced and it will only bounce once after the Big bang and now will expand forever. Some really beautiful, interesting ideas that just give you a different sense for the whole scope of the universe. Right. Or can that turn around too and like

keep bouncing through infinity? There are multiple infinite bounce theories, but also there's this new theory of a single bounce, which I find sort of cool. I see. No more naps, I guess. Physics will find a way. That's right. We'll leave that to the engineers maybe, let them figure it that out. But yeah, it's sort of amazing to think about the beginning of the universe because a lot has happened since. So the next time you look around you and think about the things that are around you and the stuff you're sitting on or writing in. Think about how it all came from this incredible state that the universe was in and how maybe we all came from inflotons. And maybe one day we'll discover the chicken that laid that egg that grew up to be that chicken that laid that egg and get all the way back to something

which sort of makes sense on its own and doesn't require an explanation. Or maybe not. Maybe we'll just keep digging forever. Right. Maybe it was the chicken ton, the poultry ton. The fowlon. Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. Thanks for listening. And remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeart Radio. For more podcasts from IHeart Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell, and the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you.

When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy, which is more effortful to use, unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials is easier. Complex problem solving takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. From tips for healthy living to the latest medical breakthroughs, WebMD's Health Discovered podcast keeps you up to date on today's most important health issues. Through in-depth conversations with experts from across the health care community, WebMD reveals how today's health news will impact your life tomorrow. It's not that people don't know that exercise is healthy. It's just that people don't know why it's healthy. and we're struggling to try to help people help themselves and each other. Listen to WebMD Health Discovered on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is an IHeart podcast.