Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - How will the Universe die?

Episode Date: November 1, 2018

How long will the Universe last, and what are the possible fates? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. 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. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want or gone.

Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and 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, denial 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. You're basically telling me that the universe could end tomorrow. Right? It's very unlikely. Why?

Because it didn't end yesterday until the universe. The possibility that the laws of physics won't change is small. Yes, exactly. Hi, I'm Jorge. And I'm Daniel. And this is Daniel and Jorge, explain the universe. The entire God-forsaken universe and everything in it. That's right.

Even the parts we can't see. Even the parts we will never see. We're going to explain them all. All to you. Today on the program, the end of the universe. How will the universe end? Will it end? What's it going to be like and what should you order in order to prepare?

Should we have a spoiler alert at the top of the episode? Well, do you know the fate of the universe? I'm curious to hear it. You have me at the edge of my seat now, Jorge. Spoil it for me. I'm desperate to know. How will the universe end? Most days have internet rumors.

I think, you know, some plot points have leaked. Well, you know, the Internet is always right. It's sort of wisdom of the crowd thing, right? So this is an interesting question. So, Daniel, assuming that we survive the next couple of years, why is this an important question? Why is it an important question? Why do we want to know how the universe ends? Well, you had me just a minute ago on the edge of my seat because I thought you were going to tell me the answer.

I think it's a basic human curiosity. You know, there's this desire to understand where we came from, why we're here, how this all works. What's the point of existence? Basically, what's the context? And I think people want to know how the universe is going to end because it's part of that framing. It's like as interesting as knowing how the universe began. Yeah, or like how you're going to die. Yeah, exactly. Or if you're going to die, if you're going to get uploaded to the cloud or downloaded into a robot or... I'm actually talking to you from the cloud, Daniel. Well, you're talking to a robot, so ha-ha, gotcha. I think that there's the sort of the large-scale human curiosity answer, like, you know, what is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?

And then there's also the short term, like, are we going to survive the next couple of years? Are our kids going to have a place to live? You know, why do we care about the environment? Why do we care about human survival of human society? Because we want to be around. So when you say we, you mean, like, us as a species. No, I mean we as a me and my direct genetic offspring. Oh, I see, I see.

Nobody else matters. You can cut off all of the other parts of the evolutionary tree. That's right. Well, this is a deep question, and as usual, we went out and asked people how they thought the universe would end. And here's what people on the street had to say. How do you think the universe is going to end? I've heard a lot of theories about this. The sun reaches the end of its life cycle.

And, like, I was just combusting in this huge ball of fire. the universe a whole shabang well doesn't the Big Bang eventually predict that the universe will collapse upon itself I feel like it's going to end up collapsing on itself basically sort of just like snuffing out the light

in this sort of way take everything in using force action in order to be able to pull into a different dimension that we don't know of all right well first I like how people were not very optimistic like nobody said the universe is going to end

I thought it was going to go on forever in this amazing state of euphoria. Everyone's like, I don't think we're going to survive the next 10 years. Yeah, or we're going to get swallowed by the sun or something. Yeah, everyone had a pretty dark view of the future. But I

thought it was fascinating. I had a little bit of trouble getting people to actually answer the question or maybe to hear the question. Most of the people, if you notice, answer the question what's going to be the fate of the Earth. Or humans. If I pushed them, I reminded them, I said, no, no, no, the whole universe, then they would maybe think as far

as the solar system. But I think very few people have thought about the universe as a whole coming to an end. Maybe nobody even imagines that's a possibility. That it would end or that it would even kind of matter to the human species, right? Like maybe we're just this tiny little blip in the history of the universe. Yeah, absolutely. I think people are not very confident that humanity is going to last a long time, but I suspect that there's this underlying confidence that the universe is going to be here forever. I mean, think about how big it is, how vast, how much stuff there is. Like, how would you even get rid of it all, you know. If your job, Jorge, was to end the universe, that would take a long

time, right, going around hoovering up all these stars and planets that have been created. And throwing it in a trash compactor or something. Otherwise known as a black hole, yeah. Yeah. Well, it's interesting to think about the universe even ending. Like you said it, like it's so vast, it's so huge. What would it even mean for it to end? You know, like, is it get thrown out somewhere? Does it explode? Does it turn into something else? Like, if it turns into something else, like, if it turns to something else, isn't it still the universe? That's right. And it's a perfect reflection of the other really deep question, which is

how did the universe begin, right? You ask these questions, what would it mean for the universe to end? What would be after that? It's the same as asking what came before the universe started. How did it begin? But we think now that the universe did have a beginning, right? It has an age. It started a certain moment 14 billion

years ago. In the Big Bang. It's actually pretty natural to think that it might also have an end point, right? I mean, if it had a starting point, Why not an end point? If it could go from nothing to something. Yeah. Everything that has the beginning has an end.

Yeah, except for things that haven't ended, but yes. Oh, yeah. Such as the universe and this podcast, which is still going on. So you think it's more natural to think of, since the universe we think had a beginning, the Big Bang, you think it's natural that it might have an end? Like it can't just be an open-ended thing. It could be, but it also could be something that has a finite life. I mean, it had a specific beginning.

So it could also have a specific end. And what happens after that? Well, it just could be something else we don't really call the universe because it's so alien and different. The way before the universe began, we think of there being no space and no time. I mean, maybe there was something, you know, inflatons or pre-inflationary matter or whatever, but not anything recognizable, not anything that follow the laws of physics as we know them or anything that would make any sense to us.

I mean, what does it even mean to not have any space or time, right? Right, right. And it's also amazing that we can even consider this question, right? Like, we are standing here 14 billion years after the Big Bang, and possibly the end of the universe is not for another, like, trillion years. But we, like, here in this moment in time, can think about and look around this and be like, all right, this is where things are headed. Yeah, yeah.

And I love that feeling. Like, we don't know if we're halfway through the lifetime of the universe. We're like one, one trillionth of the way through the universe. I see. I mean, imagine if we had been, if there was life. you know, 100,000 years after the universe began in that hot plasma. They would figure, wow, look, the universe is pretty old. It's already 100,000 years old, right?

But, you know, so much was left to happen. They didn't even have stars or planets or black holes or anything exciting, right? Maybe we're still in those first initial blip. It's just the first slice of time. And most of the history of the universe is deep ahead of us. It could go on for 10 to the 1,000 years. Like we could be in the universe's prepubescent years. Like, this is the awkward twin years.

Or it could be the birth. Physicists in a trillion years could classify this whole part as the Big Bang. They're like, oh, that was just, you know, the first part of the Big Bang and the second part of the Big Bang. And then the last dregs of the Big Bang before we really got started. Like, this is the Empire Strikes Back of the Big Bang trilogy. So, yeah, so we could be like at, this could be like just the universe is getting started. Or it could be like maybe the fading years. like this is it, like we've plateaued.

Or it could be like we are on the decline of the universe. So I think we figured it out. We need to know whether the universe will end so that we know whether it should have a midlife crisis, right? You don't want to miss your midlife crisis, your opportunity to drive fast cars and... Yeah, buy some new galaxies maybe. That's right.

Those galaxies are way too young for you, universe. That's disgusting. So we don't know where we are in the lifetime of the universe. Like we could be at the youth or we could be in the middle age of the universe. We don't know. So I guess what do we know from looking around us about the lifetime or the age of the universe? Well, basically nothing. Basically nothing.

We have no concrete evidence that the universe will ever end. I mean, as far as we know. But we're extrapolating from, as you say, a very small amount of information. Only 14 billion years of history. And now we're trying to extrapolate into billions and trillions and gazillions of years, right? So currently we know, and if you listen to our podcast episode about dark energy, you know that the universe is expanding and that expansion is accelerating. So things are moving away from each other. And every year that movement happens faster and faster.

Things are spreading out, right? Yeah, the universe is getting bigger and things are getting more spacious. Yeah. So we have to think carefully about what we mean for the universe to end. For a while, people thought the universe's expansion might stop and slow down. And it might even be that there was enough gravity to pull everything back in to collapse it back into a dot. Sort of the way the universe started. There's a nice symmetry there.

Yeah. The big crunch. Yeah, the big crunch. And in theories where you have a big bang and then expansion and then a big crunch, which starts another big bang. You don't think of that big crunch as a big crunch. You call it the big bounce because it's sort of like the universe has these cycles. So you have bang and crunch and bang and crunch. And so there's more like a bunch of bounces where the universe expands and contracts. It's kind of like when you're like hyperventilating and you grab a paper bag and you're like breathing into it and out of it, into it and out of it.

That's kind of like the view of the universe, right? Like it's expanding and then it collapses. Expands, collapse. That's right. Exactly. And there you get into some semantic distinctions. Like if the universe expands and then collapses back down to a singularity or something really small and dense again, is that really the end of the universe and the size? start of a new universe, or is it really just, you know, another cycle in the lifetime

universe? In which case, the universe could have been going on forever, bouncing and bouncing and bouncing along merrily as we live and breathe, you know? Or it could be that between bounces, it could be very different. It's like the same energy would be the same energy, but maybe not the same particles, right? Because like when they get compressed at small, they just kind of turn into pure energy and then when it expands again, it becomes other particles, right? Yeah, if you're like naming this electron, then an individual electron named Fred no longer exists in the next universe. Fred E. Fred E, exactly, right? And it's antiparticle, anti-fredi, and just like pasta and anti-pasta. But the energy is, of course, the same. And so,

and even the rules of physics would probably be the same. So it's not like you'd get a dramatically different universe, although, you know, the quantum fluctuations in those blobs could give you all sorts of weird things and weird different structure in future universes. So that's one possibility is that the expansion could turn around and crunch. I have so many questions for you, but before we dive in, let's take a short break. ripping 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. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra cranks. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone.

Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him.

because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast 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, got you. 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. Before we only knew about gravity and stars and matter, and we assume that gravity at some point it's just going to bring everything.

Because if you put a bunch of dust particles out in space, the gravity will pull them together, right? That's right. Gravity's really weak, but it's got a lot of time. And so eventually it'll gather it all together and crunch it down into a planet or an asteroid or a star or a black hole, depending on how much stuff there is. And that's what people thought.

People thought like all those stars and galaxies eventually would slow down and get pulled together into this one ginormous black hole thing point. Yeah. That was one idea people had. And then, you know, we discovered dark energy. We discovered that the universe is expanding faster and faster every year right now.

So then for a long time, this idea of a big crunch was crossed off the list. But I think prematurely. Oh, you mean like, so we discovered dark energy, meaning that there's some kind of energy permeating the whole universe that's making it expand faster and faster. And so we said it's not going to crunch back in, guys. Like this dark energy is a big deal. It's pushing everything further away faster and faster.

We're never going to come back together again. Yeah, that was sort of the new. new prevailing wisdom as about 20 years ago. But I think that's premature. Right. Because we don't know. Like, we don't know what dark energy is. We don't know how it works.

We don't know what it's going to do in the future. We do know that it has some time dependence. Like, it turned on five billion years ago. Wow. Is it going to keep going? Is it going to accelerate more? Is it going to stop? I mean, to extrapolate from the last few billion years into the next trillion

requires a lot of confidence. And we can't do that extrapolation. Like dark energy could. flame out or something right or flip yeah flip exactly it could turn around and make a massive crunch it might even like bring everything back together or something yeah nobody can predict what it's going to do because we don't understand it at all we're just watching it happen dark energy is the observation that the universe expansion is accelerating recently but it's not really a solid prediction what's going to happen so most of the prevailing wisdom these days about the future universe assumes dark

energy is going to continue but there's no guarantee there and you know there could be a new things in waiting in the future for us. Dark energy only came around 5 billion years ago. There could be like a dark er energy that comes on in 5 more billion years and it totally drowns out dark energy and dominates it, right? Darker energy.

Oh my God. Exactly. And then the sequel, the third part of the trilogy, Darkest Energy. It's like 50 shades of the universe. Fifty shades of dark energy exactly. That's the erotic version of this. So what are the scenarios that physicists are considering if dark energy doesn't change?

Yeah, so if dark energy doesn't change, then it continues pulling the universe apart, meaning creating new space between us and other galaxies, and doing that faster and faster every year. So this scenario is sometimes called the big rip, because essentially feels like somebody's taking the universe, something shouldn't anthropomorphize, something is taking the universe and pushing it apart, ripping it to shreds. things get farther and farther apart every year. And if you look up in the night sky,

things start to disappear because they move outside of our observable horizon. So things get further and further and spaced apart. Now, is that like the same franchise, like the big rip, the big crunch, the big bang? Is it all like copyrighted by physicists? That's right, yeah. It's all owned by the same agent somewhere in Hollywood, who we now have to pay royalties to if we want to option this.

Yeah, exactly. And there's lots of fascinating scenarios there. If things just continue to spread out, then things get more and more dilute, right? And things, because everything gets further and further apart. And then you can just sort of let the laws of physics play out. And like what's going to happen to our galaxy, for example? Well, we know that in a few billion years, our galaxy is probably going to collide with a nearby galaxy, Andromeda. And that's going to be less dramatic than it sounds, because it's mostly just going to mean the star shifting around a little bit.

and, you know, we might get some new asteroids passing through our solar system, but galaxies are mostly really diffuse, right? They don't, when they hit each other, they don't, the stars don't actually collide and smash into each other and create enormous cosmic explosions. But they sort of affect each other, right?

Like we might get a giant star flying near us and disrupt our whole orbit, maybe. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so it's like if two whirlpools join, if you ever see that happen in a pool, they sort of join and merge and their combined spin forms one new spinning blob. And so for the individual stars, you know,

they might get a little disrupted here and there. And in some cases, maybe by a lot in rare circumstances. But mostly we just form a big combined galaxy. But, you know, then fast forward another few zillion years and eventually the stars burn out, right? So at some point, if we keep fast-forwarding, the stars are going to snuff out. Like they're just going to become embers,

and then eventually just kind of like hot stones and then just rocks. then just rocks yeah and we've already gone through several cycles i mean the first stars that were in the universe are no longer around we can't even see their light no kidding there's several cycles of stars that have already happened the first stars were all hydrogen and they formed and they burned and they imploded and they exploded right and then those materials gathered together make new stars and that's happened i'm not sure how many times or several times we're in several cycles deep which is why we have such interesting atoms like gold and heavy stuff lying around right

Wait, aren't there new stars being formed right now out of hydrogen? But none of them are hydrogen stars. There are still new stars being formed, but there's being formed out of a mix of hydrogen and heavier stuff. So like stars 1.0, nobody knows what that looks like. Yeah. I think recently people found some light they think comes from the first stars, but it's still very preliminary stuff. Yeah, so the stars get heavier and heavier, and eventually you run out of stuff that burns, and then the universe goes dark, right?

Then it's just like the era of stars is over. And it could be that the era of stars is just like a little blip in the history of the universe. And then it goes on for like another gazillion years before anything interesting happens. Of complete darkness. Of complete darkness. Or other things that bread burn, right? Aren't like quasars and black holes on those emit radiation and light? Yeah, some of them emit some sort of radiation, but nothing as powerful as stars.

Wow. So what we're facing is a pretty dark time, you know. This could be like the only bright period in the universe. Yes, exactly. You know, and the way I think about the very early universe is this hot plasma. That only lasted a brief period of time, you know, three or 400,000 years. And then it was over. And from the point of view of that hot plasma, the universe now is very dark and quiet and cold.

Oh, I see. But we could be looking forward to another period, which is even darker, even quieter, even colder, right? It's just these rocks floating around. Bumping into each other in the dark. Yeah. And then black holes take over. What do you mean to take over? Like things just keep bumping into each other in the dark and forming black holes.

Yeah, because eventually gravity coalesces these things together. And, you know, we're talking about two different forces at the same time. Dark energy is pulling galaxies apart. But we think probably gravity has enough power to locally hold a clump of stuff together. It's a dark energy can't rip a black hole apart. For example, or rip a star apart. It has enough energy to push away between things, but probably not to shred those things themselves. So a gravitationally bound group of matter will probably survive even though dark energy is pushing it away from things.

Right. And it'll gather together and form a black hole. But this is still the same fate that we would get if you didn't have dark energy, right? Like eventually the stars would also go out and things would form into black holes. It's kind of like what happens after that that depends on dark energy. Yeah, that's right. Dark energy just tells you essentially how closely grouped these things are. Are we going to do this all by ourselves and all the other galaxies are going to be,

invisibly far away or are we going to be able to watch the same thing happen to andromeda that's happening to us that's sort of the question but yeah you're right on a local scale i think it's going to be the same uh one scenario is that you know black holes take over and then we have a period of the universe where it's just basically only black holes only black holes yeah or you know 99 percent black holes wow and that makes a lot of sense to me you know like what happens when gravity pushes stuff together eventually it gets dense enough to form black holes. And so give gravity enough time and it'll get that done. Right. But the problem is black holes, these black holes are going to eventually evaporate,

right? Yeah, black holes do not last forever. As powerful as they are at some point, they like disappear. Yeah, they evaporate because they have energy to them and everything that has energy gives off radiation, even black holes. And if you're wondering, how can a black hole give off radiation. You know, think about a little particle that's living right at the edge of the event horizon of the black hole. These particles can split into two other particles, you know, sometimes just briefly, and this

happens all the time. A photon that's flying through the air in front of you, splits into an electron and a positron, and then back into a photon. But if that happens right at the edge of the black hole, then one of them can get sucked into the black hole and one of them can escape. And that's what's called hawking radiation. So,

yeah, they can lose energy by radiating these particles one at a time. Just at the surface of the event horizon, right? Yeah, exactly, at the surface of the event horizon. And then things get really uncertain. Meaning, so we have these black holes, they're evaporating at the surface, and so they get smaller and smaller, or less massive and less massive. But that radiation that gets emitted out, where does that go?

Doesn't that keep bouncing around the universe? Yeah, and it can get grabbed up by other black holes or can form new black holes or do other interesting stuff. Or, you know, if black holes have shredded. enough matter, then maybe you can start to get enough simple matter around that you can make hydrogen and maybe even make another star or two. This

is where things get really speculative because the time, we don't understand black holes very well. Our understanding of black holes is very primitive. And so like speculating about how long they live and what happens to that radiation, how much radiation there is exactly. This is all still very theoretical.

Okay. And so then other theoretical questions start to come in like how stable is matter itself. One question we don't know the answer to is like, how long does a proton live? We don't know. We don't know. We've never seen a proton decay as far as we know protons are stable. That is, you have a proton floating out in the middle of empty space, it will stay there forever as far as we know.

Meaning so protons are made out of quarks, and so the three quarks inside of a pronoun just never ever split off on their own. We've never seen it happen, yeah. And so we think that a proton lives at least billions of years. But, you know, it could be that its lifetime is only 100 billion years or 500 billion years, and then it decays. And so it could be that all the protons in the universe eventually decay. And into quarks or smaller particles. Yeah, exactly, into quarks or other arrangements. There could be a new arrangement that they decay into, something else we haven't seen before.

But if everything was in a black hole, and then these black holes evaporate from hawking radiation, that hawking radiation, does that include, like, protons, or is it only, like, you know, like photons and gamma rays and things like that? That's a good question. I'm pretty far outside my air of expertise, but my understanding is that it can include any kind of particle because black holes are very democratic when it comes to particle physics. They can create any kind of particle because we're talking about the creation of virtual particles, which means any kind of particle that can be created would be created. But I think predominantly by the lighter particles, because those are. those dominate for these virtual processes. Well, this is a perfect point to take a 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. 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. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit.

Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out. with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now hold up, isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet.

So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I had this overwhelming sensation that I had to call her right then. And I just hit call. I said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick.

I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation. And I just wanted to call on and let her know there's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling. And there is help out there. The Good Stuff Podcast Season 2 takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a nonprofit fighting suicide in the veteran community.

September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own mark to suicide. One Tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place, and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. I don't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head.

Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Thuneration. stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. So now we went from hot plasma to stars and planets to rocks floating around in dark to black holes. Now all these black holes have evaporated and now we're like in the sea of particles. Yeah, exactly. We're well out of our comfort range here because we're extrapolating our knowledge into the zillion year future and you know we don't have enough information to confidently say what happens to a black hole after it's been alive for a zillion years or how long does a proton survive and can it really decay into something else and so we really don't know and that's

a really fascinating question is how long can we apply the laws of physics for like are they stable you know do they are they the same forever we think they've been the same for the last few billion years, but it could be that they change on the time scale of a trillion years and we just haven't noticed. So even like the rules of the game you're saying could change. Exactly. And there's one really fascinating, slightly

scary scenario that I love that people thought about a lot since the discovery of the Higgs boson. And that's that all the rules of physics could change and they could change kind of suddenly. What do you mean? Like the rules that tell you how things are might suddenly

change for everywhere in the universe at same time. It wouldn't be all everywhere at the same time, but it could happen all of a sudden in one moment and then spread. So let me tell you how that might happen. The way the Higgs boson works, it gives mass to other particles, and it does so by filling the whole universe with this thing called the Higgs field. And if you want to know more about that, listen to our episode on the Higgs field. But the basic idea is that the Higgs field has energy, even in empty space. There's nothing there in no matter or nothing happening in a cube of space, but there's still the Higgs field there. It has non-zero energy. And that's what gives things mass, interacting with this field that

has non-zero energy, even when it's empty. But what we don't know is, is that field itself stable? Like, is it stuck in some local minimum? You know, is it like caught on a ledge somewhere and just got stuck and it's going to roll out and find a more comfortable, relaxed configuration where it has zero energy? Is that temporary that it has this amount of energy stuck into it? Or is it permanent and there are a lot of theories in particle physics that suggest that it might be temporary and then it might also be kind of fragile and then if the right thing happens you could shatter that field or disturb it and perturb it and break it and so that it could collapse and that collapse could spread very rapidly oh my god not that i'm saying that the large hadron collider

is going to destroy the whole universe i'm not saying that people i'm very definitely not Saying that. But... But there are some physics theories in which the Higgs vacuum, this lowest energy state, is not stable, and it could collapse into a true vacuum,

which would mean there's no Higgs field, which means no particles have mass, which means everything changes, right? The very laws of physics would be totally different if the Higgs field was different. And the universe, as we know it, would suddenly turn into something else. Turn into something else, yeah.

I mean, all of chemistry relies on, the structure of the periodic table, which relies on the masses of the particles that make up the atoms, and that would all be different. And the new universe with the zero Higgs vacuum would also probably be fascinating and beautiful and interesting, but it would be very different. And you know, your Maserati would no longer work. And your bank account would no longer be relevant. We wouldn't work. Exactly. We would not work. So what you're saying, I feel like you're saying like, hey, don't worry about us. We're just doing physics here. We're not going to blow things up. But

Well, you know, you can always say that. Jorge, you're just cartooning in your garage, right? You're not intending to destroy the universe with your cartoons, but... But I might draw something of such incredible beauty. Such comic power. Yes, it will collapse the laws of physics. You know, these theories about how the Higgs vacuum might be unstable, these are just ideas people have, and it's fun to think about,

and people write papers about how they might end the universe to be dramatic. But I don't think anybody's serious. I'm certainly not worried at all that any particle physics experiment is going to destroy the Higgs vacuum and change the universe. Right, right. Keep sending those checks.

Exactly. So you can tune in next week to download another podcast episode. Well, it is sort of kind of like knowing when you're going to die, right? Like if you knew you were going to die in a week, you would live your life totally different. That's right.

As opposed to if you knew you were going to live till you're 120, calmly, peacefully, in bed, surrounded by your loved ones, you would change the way you make decisions every day, right? That's right. And I think that's what's reflecting in people's answers to our on the street interviews,

that they were thinking more immediately. What is the future of the human race? What is the future of my family? How is this all going to affect us? Right. And it is totally possible that, like, my genes, what makes me who I am now, that might live on in my kids, my ancestors, and

trillions of years from now, there could be a little piece of me, like, looking out at the sky and being like, why is it so dark? That's right. It's possible. The humans live for a trillion years. It's absolutely possible. And so we should be concerned about the fate of the universe, not just because we're curious about how the story ends and it's fascinating from a scientific point of view, but yeah, because it could be our home for the next trillion or two trillion years. Yeah. If things go well.

Right. If people listen to this podcast. Yeah. That I put your minds at ease or did I unsettle you? A little bit, a little bit. I mean, I thought that this was far away into the future and I wouldn't have to worry about it. But now, like, the universe could end tomorrow. Yeah, so, you know, organize your finances and get your stuff in order. It's a good idea anyway.

Appreciate the bright period of the universe. That's right, yes. This early, beautiful, glamorous, star-lit, star-filled period of the universe. Yeah. All right. Thank you very much for joining us. This has been Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe. And it's end.

If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line we'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge. That's one word. Or email us at Feedback at danielandhorpe.com. Ah, come on, why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech?

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The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order, Criminal. criminal justice system on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts my boyfriend's professor is way too friendly and now i'm seriously suspicious wait a minute sam

maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit well dakota luckily it's back to school week on the okay story time podcast so we'll find out soon this person writes my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot he doesn't think it's a problem but i don't trust her now he's insisting we get to know each other but i just want her gone oh hold up Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is an IHeart podcast.