Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Is the Universe pixelated?

Episode Date: December 27, 2018

Is there a shortest possible distance? Or can you cut space in half forever? 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 easier complex problem solving takes effort listen to the psychology podcast on the iheart radio app apple podcasts 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 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, have you heard of the Xeno's paradox? Yeah, is that the one where you can't get to

work? You keep going half the distance and then half that distance and half that distance. Yeah, it's kind of like this thought experiment where you say, all right, I'm trying to get home. So I'm going to get to half of the distance to my home. And then you stop. And you say, all right, now I'm going to get half of the distance to my home. And so you go another half of that. And you say, now I'm going to go half of the distance to my home. And you do that half.

And so the question is, will you ever get home? I mean, it sounds like you would always get there because you're always going half of what's left. But you might never get there, right? It raises an interesting question, right? because if you can cut a mile and then cut that in half to a quarter mile and cut that in half to an eighth of a mile, can you keep cutting it to infinitely small distances? Like, are those distances even meaningful on a physics point of view?

Or is there a shortest possible distance in the universe? After which, Zeno has to actually take that step, right? So physics could be like Zeno's paradox, more like Zeno's Paranaut. That's right. Zeno's paradox unraveled. Hi, I'm Jorge. And I'm Daniel. And welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, explain the universe. Where we take the universe, cut it in half, and then cut it in half again, and cut it in half again and again until it's small enough for everybody to understand and happily digest.

This is Daniel Jorge's podcast Paradox. And unlike that paradox, this will actually end at some point in about 30 to 35 minutes. That's right. Not if you listen to half the podcast and then half of what's left and then half of what's left, right? Infinitely slicing the podcast, you can enjoy it forever. Yeah. At some point you'll be like, uh, it, that's right. You'll be listening to one unit of laughter.

But that's sort of the question we want to talk about today. can you slice up space into smaller and smaller pieces can you divide it into shorter and shorter distances or is space pixelated like a video game that's right or your latest iPhone

you look around you and it seems like the universe is continuous and smooth right but it might be that the universe is actually pixelated that you can be here or the adjacent pixel but you can't be in between that there's a shortest possible distance to the universe. So not the stuff is pixelated, but the actual like the universe itself,

the space in it is like a video game. It's pixelated. It's not continuous and infinite resolution. Exactly. And it's a perfect analogy to the stuff, right? In particle physics, we love taking things apart. We say your body is made of molecules and those molecules are made of atoms

and those atoms are made of smaller particles and those little particles get down to corks and leptons. We're looking for the tiniest particle, the base particle, out of which everything is built. But in a completely parallel track, we can ask the same questions about space. Is a mile built out of half miles, which is built out of quarter miles,

which eventually is built out of the smallest unit, or can you infinitely divide it? So this is a mind-blowing question, and so we were curious what you thought the answer was. Do you think the universe is pixelated? Yeah, so I went around. I asked a random selection of UC Irvine undergraduates, who were not put off by a weird physics professor

holding a mic in their face and ask them this question. Do you think the universe is pixelated? Here's what they had to say. It's quantized, basically, so atoms cannot be... I mean, of course, they're made by subatomic particles, but I think after that, like, it can't be continuous. I think it's particulate.

I think it's like an asymptote. Like, you reach smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller, but you never get to, like, a finite, Like, this is a smallest thing. I think it would probably get smaller and smaller forever. I really don't know about this. This is a tough question. Yeah, right.

What's your best guess? What do you think? Yeah, gutsy. Really, you know, this one is really beyond my understanding of this whole word right now. Yeah. All right, so people were kind of skeptical about this? There was a whole spectrum of answers. I mean, some people are like, no, you can chop things down infinitely far.

Other people are like, no, quantum mechanics says everything is quantized, and therefore there must be pixels. And other people are like, wow, I have no idea. What are you talking about? And I totally regret agreeing to answer your questions. It's like I've never heard these two words at the same time, universe and pixels. That's right. That's right. And it is a weird question, you know.

But the pixels is a perfect analogy because, like, if you have a modern iPhone and you look at the screen, it seems like the pictures are fluid. smooth, right? You can't see the pixels because they have this retina display, which gives the illusion that is completely smooth. But it's kind of interesting because if you look at an old phone, like just from five to ten years ago, it looks horribly pixelated. That's right. It looks crunchy and chunky and you think, how could I ever have seen this and thought this was anything of quality? That's right. And even old-fashioned photographs, the ones that are analog, not digital, ones that use chemistry, those in effect have pixels as well. They're just so small that you can't see them.

Because, you know, the development process is a chemical process, and so it's based on, you know, molecules and drops of fluid and whatever. It's just the pixels are so small. So if the pixels are small enough that you can't see them, it gives you the illusion that it's perfectly continuous and that you could, you know, zoom in forever and see more and more details. You know, like on those cop shows where they're like, enhance the image and they can just like zoom in forever.

and read the time on somebody's watch or something, right? Right. Or get like a face match. Yeah, but in a real picture, there's a limit to the information that's been captured. And if you look from far away, it looks like you could zoom in forever, but at some point, as you start zooming in, you notice the pixels. And so that's the question we're wondering about today. Sure, space seems continuous around us, but is it possible that if we zoomed in far enough,

the pixels could appear at some point? Yeah. So that's kind of related to the question of space. itself? Like, we know stuff is made out a little bit, but is space itself also pixelated like an iPhone screen or an old photograph? Yeah, and this question is newly fascinating because we're only recently learning what space is, right? Like, the question of is space pixelated is a reasonable question in parallel to is matter quantized and made out of smallest particles because we've recently realized that space really is a thing also. It's not just like

emptiness. Those of you are out there saying, this is silly. space is nothing, and so of course you could be anywhere in it and you can divide it infinitely. We've recently realized this space is not nothing. Before we thought it was nothing, just the absence of anything. But actually, it's not, right? It's almost like a medium or

like what the ocean is to fish. Yeah, exactly. It's a thing. It has dynamical properties, right? We know that it's not nothing because it can do things that nothing can't do. For example, space can expand. That's what dark energy is. And for those of whose minds were just

blown about the meaning of the phrase space can expand go off and listen to our dark energy episode where we talk all about that and space can wiggle right like things in space can expand and contract with these wiggles as gravitational waves pass through them and you know those are you interested in that go off and listen to our gravitational waves episode and we also know that space can bend right that's what general relativity tells us it tells us that gravity is not a force but instead it's a bending of space so space definitely is a thing it has properties and we've only just recently discovered that it's a thing and begun to investigate it. And so it's a very reasonable question to ask, is space pixelated like we think matter might be?

Like what is it made out of it? Or what's it like, really? You know, it's not nothing. So if it's something. It's like space is some famous celebrity you know, right? What's space like, you know, on the weekends? What does it eat for breakfasts? Is it egotistical? It seems egotistical, you know? It seems so into itself. What space is favorite color? Black, come on, but space is big of color. That one, I think we know. That's a settled question in science. No, I think it's important to think about this question, like,

what is the smallest unit of space, right? What is space built out of? And I think the analogy, you know, understanding what matter is built out of works there, like, is space built out of little bits, right, these pixels? And then the next question, if you discover space is built out of pixels, is what are those pixels made out of it? Yeah. It could be that those pixels are made out of something smaller and deeper that's nothing like space.

So that space itself is an emergent phenomenon, not a fundamental thing in our universe. That's something that arises, you know, like wetness or economics. You know, so not something that's built in at the very beginning of the universe, but something that comes out of how things interact. Well, let's take this approach. So let's assume that space is pixelated. Okay. What does the space pixel mean?

or feel like, or look like, or what would it do to things? Yeah, well, what it would mean is that you can't be just anywhere you want in space. You know, just like Zeno, the beginning of this episode, it would mean that at some point, if you're small enough, or you can zoom down enough, it would mean that you have to make a choice. Are you at location N or location N plus one, right? It would mean the space is discrete the way integers are instead of being continuous, the way real numbers are, right? There's an infinite number of numbers, for example, between one and ten.

two. There's one, 1.5, 1.27,84. And you can always squeeze more numbers in there. It's an infinite amount of numbers between one and two. If you're talking about real numbers, a continuous line of numbers. But for integers, like, there's just one and there's two. There's no more integers in between. Space could be like that, where you're like, I'm at this spot. And if I want to take a step, there's a shortest distance I can step. And so you have to go to two. It's kind of like if you were on your iPhone, you were animating one pixel dot, black dot on a white background. This dot can't just be anywhere on the screen. It has to move from one box to the next box.

That's right. It can't cross over the boundary. You can't be halfway between one pixel and another because then each pixel would have to be half white and half black, which they can't be. A pixel is the basic unit. It's either on or it's off. So like if you look at the iPhone from a distance, this dot would look like it's moving smoothly across the screen. but really it's taking little jumps between squares, right? Like it's in this square ones at this moment

and then it's suddenly in the next square and then suddenly it's in the next square. You're saying that maybe I'm not really moving continuously through space. Maybe I'm just kind of like jumping from one box to the next. Exactly. And the illusion of smoothness, the way you feel that you are moving smoothly, is your brain stitching that together.

And it's easy to do because the pixels, if they exist, would be super duper tiny. But they only have to be smaller than we can notice. For example, if you slow down a movie, it's nothing but a bunch of still images, right? And if you watch them fast enough, the key is faster than your eye can register the differences than it appears to be an infinitely smooth sequence.

It seems like you're watching something in real life. Slow it down, of course, and you can see, oh, it's just a bunch of still images. In the same way, space might be discrete. We just haven't noticed, but that if you get small enough, you realize that these nodes. You know, it's like you can't get off halfway between subway stations, right?

It might be that space is like that every location in space is like a subway stop. You don't want to get off the train halfway between stations and get stuck in the tunnel. You can't, right? The universe forbids it. Right. But if you're the pixel, like in a screen, the pixel isn't really moving. You just turn it off in one square and you turn it on the next square. So it sort of disappears and it appears.

Yes. Are you going to ask if that's really like teleportation? Yeah, right? Like, is that mean as I'm moving through space, I'm actually like disappearing here and appearing in the next spot? Yeah, I guess it does, you know? I guess it means that you zap from one spot to the other without going in between them, right? And so that really is a kind of teleportation. I hadn't thought of that before.

It's sort of awesome. In the same way, like, if time is quantized, then, you know, you're sort of slicing your way through time in the same way. That's fascinating. Yeah. So if space is pixelated, then we're all teleporting right now all the time. Only have you moved. Only have you moved. Oh, my God. We just invented teleportation right here live on the podcast. Oh, my goodness.

Get the legal team on the patent, please, will you? And there goes your physics professorship, right? Out the door right there. That's right. Boom, I'm officially a crackpot. Well, let's take a quick break before we go on. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. 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. I'm Dr. Joy Hardin-Bradford. And in session 421 of Therapy for Black Girls, I sit down with Dr. Afea and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right? In terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief.

But I think with social media, there's like a hyperfixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. We talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss Session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety.

Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people and an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino, to the show, and we had a blast. We talked about her recent 40th birthday celebrations, co-hosting a podcast with her fiancé Sue Bird, watching former teammates retire and more. Never a dull moment with Pino. Take a listen.

What do you miss the most about being a pro athlete? The final. The final. And the locker room. I really, really, like, you just, you can't replicate, you can't get back. showing up to the locker room every morning just to shi-talk. We've got more incredible guests like the legendary Candace Parker and college superstar AZ Fudd. I mean, seriously, y'all. The guest list is absolutely stacked for season two.

And, you know, we're always going to keep you up to speed on all the news and happenings around the women's sports world as well. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Okay, so that's what it means for the universe to be pixelated, that we're all just kind of trapped in an iPhone screen and we can't really move anywhere. We have to move within these boxes. That's right.

But if it is, it's a really fancy, super modern iPhone because the pixels would be super duper tiny, right? And it has an awesome graphics processor. Wow. What would you call it? The iPhone, you. for universe. It'd be like a quantum display.

That's right. iPhone QU of quantum universe. Tim Cook, give us a call. That's right. Somebody put a trademark on that. Man, we need like a constant legal team standing by just to get down all the great ideas we come up with on the fly in the show.

So how could we tell if we are in a pixelated universe or not? Yeah, well, that's hard. Because to see that we are in a pixelated universe, and we'd have to see the pixels, right? So we'd have to zoom in somehow far enough to be able to see them. And, of course, so far we haven't. So far, everything seems continuous. We don't notice discontinuities in the way things move.

And we also have no idea how big these pixels are, right? So far, we have explored space and matter using high energy particle colliders. And that's let us probe down to about 10 to the minus 20 meters. That's 0.0. then 20 zeros and a one. I mean, that's a tiny little distance. I don't even know what the prefix is for that. It's some super tiny distance.

We've studied space down about that distance using particle colliders, where we smash these tiny particles together and use the protons to look inside the other protons, and that lets us study space. So we know that if there are space pixels, they have to be smaller than that. Right. Meaning at the Large Hadron Collider, you can poke things at that distance, meaning you can tell if things match together

within that small of a distance apart, right? Yeah. Essentially, our current theory assumes that space is continuous. And our current theory doesn't break down down to 10 to the minus 20. And so we would notice some deviation. Something would be different. The calculations would be wrong

if space became pixelated at a level that we didn't expect. And so far, we're pretty sure space seems continuous down to 10 to the minus 20. So the pixels, if they exist, have to be really small. Right. But I wonder, you know,

if there's a philosophical limit there, you know, in the sense that, like, do you think Super Mario, if he's in a video game, and he's a pixelated character, could he tell that the world was pixelated? You know, because he's pixelated and he thinks in pixelated thoughts.

Could he notice... He thinks in pixelated thoughts? Yeah, you know what I mean? What does that mean? I think in terms of thought units. Here's a three-pixel unit thought. I think that's an interesting. question. If the pixels, say we lived in a universe where the pixels were fairly large in

comparison to our bodies. Like we were Minecraft characters. Yeah. I mean, I think that's hard to imagine that realistically because it would mean there's a pretty strong limit on how complex our bodies could be. I mean, if your body was made out of pixels there were like six centimeters across, then you just couldn't be very complicated if you were a meter tall. In order to have enough complication to have an interesting mind, you know, you need a huge complicated brain, so the brain would have to be enormous compared to the size of the pixels. Oh, I see. So I think it's pretty hard to

have complex enough life to ask that question and still be small compared to the size of the pixels. So if Super Mario is an idiot, then yeah, he'd probably be pretty close to the size of the pixels, but then he's not going to be asking the question, why am I pixelated? Well, his intelligence would be pixelated, so.

He probably has zero units. And then if he takes a mushroom, is that going to grow too? That's just, you know, I always wondered about those mushrooms. Does that change the way he thinks? What is going on with those mushrooms? That's what it is. Where do I get some? He doesn't actually get bigger, just his pixels in his

mind. That's right. Then the other question is, would he even think to ask the question? If pixels were obvious in the universe, you wouldn't ask why is the universe pixelated? It would just be one of the basic assumptions that you accept day to day, you know? Oh, I see. And that's one of the things I find fascinating about physics

is that we keep unraveling basic assumptions about the universe that we didn't even really think to question. You know, questions like, is time the same for everybody, right? Of course, we used to think, of course it was. Like, time is time, and a clock here and a clock there are the same. And now we know it's not. Time is relative

and depends on your speed and all sorts of weird stuff. So physics is helping us peel back the universe and figure out where our perceptions have led to biases in the way we view the universe. And so that's why this space pixelization is just like another one on the list. It might be eventually, physics

shows us that space is different than we we always imagined, you know, that it's made up of these little units. So I think what you're saying is that as far as we know, we look at the world around this and the complexity of it, it's such that we're pretty sure that it's not pixelated up to a certain scale, which is 10 to the minus 20. Yeah, we certainly do. And if we were close to the pixel scale, it would limit how much complexity we could have in our universe, right?

If the pixels were a centimeter across, then our one meter scale life couldn't be very complex at all, right? Right. Like, what kind of interesting thing could you build out of actual real-sized Legos, right? You can't make a machine that's very complicated. Right. You know. You want to see these rich effects that you see when you poke the world around you.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, so what makes scientists even think that the universe could be pixelated? I think they were just hanging out in the 70s and smoking too much weed and they were like, whoa, man. Playing media games while eating mushrooms. No, it's not like, um, it's, it's not like, um, it's, it's not like, um, it's Some people might think, oh, it comes from the idea that the universe is a simulation. And if it's a simulation, then, of course, it's pixelated because computers in the outside universe are pixelated.

No, it comes from a deeper place. It comes from noticing that quantum mechanics seems to work really well, right? Quantum mechanics has described everything we know, except for gravity. And it seems to be a fundamental description of the universe that everything is quantized, you know. Packets of light, for example, can't have an arbitrary amount of energy. They can only have certain units of energy. matter itself is made out of particles which are little quantized bits of stuff, right?

So it seems like for a reason we don't understand the universe is quantized and quantized of course just means little units of stuff and so it's very natural to imagine that space also might be quantized that space also instead of being infinitely divisible might also be made out of pieces

because the universe seems to like quantum mechanics. So you were saying that the stuff that we see around us does have smallest bits. Like there is a Lego piece of matter. You can't split an electron really. You can't have half an electron or a quarter of electron. So maybe that says

something about the universe as a whole. Like maybe everything is just kind of blocking. That's right. It would make sense. It would feel natural and it would feel coherent with what we think about modern physics if space was also quantized. And then there's some technical reasons. Like there

are some theories of physics which just don't work if you get small enough. What do you mean? You know, some theories of quantum mechanics and the way it describes interactions below a certain distance, you just start to get infinities. Like you, you know, how does a theory of physics work? Well, it's a, it's something that predicts an experiment, right?

Say, I think this is going to happen. What does my theory of electromagnetism tell me? And so you can do some calculation. It tells you, oh, the electron's going to turn left and go at this angle. But sometimes the theories break, and they give you numbers that make no sense. like, oh, the electron's going to turn and it's going to go to infinite angle or have infinite energy. So there's some theories, and it's a bit too technical to get into, that break down at really,

really small scales. Wow. And they just start to give infinities. And so some of those problems are solved if you have a smallest distance, because then you don't have to go to those smallest scales, right? Right. And this especially is a problem when people try to describe gravity using quantum mechanics. It comes up with all sorts of crazy problems.

And one solution to that is to say, well, what if this is the shortest distance? Then we don't have to think about doing these calculations down to infinitely small distances, right? So nothing can happen at such a small scale. So in theory, the theory doesn't break down. It's just nothing can happen at that scale. So why even worry about it? Yeah, it's like a clue. It's saying, oh, this theory doesn't work.

It can't describe a universe where there's infinitely small distances. So then the idea is, well, maybe the theory is wrong, or maybe the universe doesn't have infinitely small distances, in which case the theory works. right? There's lots of fun ways to make your theory work. And one of them is just to imagine that the places where it breaks are the places where it's not physical, where it's not actually describing what's happening. Well, this is a perfect point to take a break. 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. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, and in session 421 of Therapy for Black Girls, I sit down with Dr. Othia and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right?

In terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyper fixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a real. It's how our hair is styled. We talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together,

and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people and an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino, to the show, and we had a blast. We talked about her recent 40th birthday celebrations, co-hosting a podcast with her fiancé Sue Bird, watching former teammates retire and more. Never a dull moment with Pino. Take a listen. What do you miss the most about being a pro athlete? The final. The final. And the locker room. I really, really, like, you just, you can't replicate. You can't get back.

Showing up to locker room every morning just to shit talk. We've got more incredible guests like the legendary Candice Parker and college superstar A.Z. Fudd. I mean, seriously, y'all. The guest list is absolutely stacked for season two. And, you know, we're always going to keep you up to speed

on all the news and happenings around the women's sports world as well. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding part partner of I Heart Women's Sports. Well, this is interesting. So there's apparently a number that physicists think might be the pixel of the universe.

Like there's a like a concrete number, they think might tell you what the pixelation, the resolution of the universe is, right? A little bit. I mean, I think that's overstating it. There is a number which we think might have something to do with a pixelization. of the universe. But the argument is pretty weak. I'll walk you through it, but you'll be unimpressed with how strong

the argument is. Just trying to manage your expectations a little bit. All right. All right. I'll make them pixel size. There you go. Yeah, go for one unit of expectation. Here's the argument. The argument is we've noticed there are some fundamental constants in the universe, like the speed of light. And that has units

meters per second, right? And that's just a number, and we measure it. And it's a parameter of the universe. We don't know why it's this and why it's that. And we have, of course, We have a whole podcast episode about that, but it is a number. And there are other units we've noticed, like the strength of gravity, right? It's called Big G, the gravitational constant appears in Newton's formula. And the plank constant, the one that appears in quantum mechanics,

it tells you how well you can know two numbers at the same time. So there's all these basic units that we've measured and we've discovered, and we think they reveal something about the universe. We think they tell us something about why the universe is this way and not that way. We don't know where they come from. They're kind of like the pie or just the number that exists in the universe. Yeah, well, pie is an especially fascinating one because it's unitless, right? So it's pure in some sense.

But these numbers have units. You know, they're like joules per second or meters per second or whatever. And so we think they tell us something about why the universe is this size or has this or you can go this fast or, you know. It's some sort of like ratio between two things. Yes, exactly. They fix the relationship between things. Like the speed of light fixes the real. relationship between distance and time, right?

It's meters per second. Oh, I see. The speed of light is like a universal physics number. Yes, exactly. And so there's other numbers like these in physics theories. Yeah, there's a few that we've discovered along the way, and we think they're deep and fundamental. And, you know, some future theory of physics might reveal why they are the way they are, but

currently they're just numbers. And we imagine that they could have been set to something else, and that's a whole other discussion. Here's the thing you can do, though, is that you can manipulate these numbers. You can multiply them by each other until you get a number that has units. of distance. So you multiply the plank's constant and you have the gravitational constant, the speed of light squared. You can cancel out all the units until you get a number that has just units of distance. Okay. So what is that number? Well, they call it the plank length because it has

Planck's constant in it. And it's a number. And the number is 10 to the minus 35 meters. That's 0.35 zeros and then a one. So that's a tiny, tiny number. And because it comes from these simple, basic units, we imagine it has special meaning. We imagine that it's a clue that it tells us something about the way the universe works. And because it's just units of distance, we like to think that it tells us something about the fundamental nature of distance in the universe. Does it? I mean, who knows? It's just a bunch of numbers we multiply it together, you know? And we thought those numbers were important, but maybe they're not. It's kind of like if you take the smallest things and the fastest things you know,

like the smallest bit of matter and going at the fastest possible speed and what would be the smallest distance that it could go. That's kind of what it is to mix all of these numbers together, right? Yeah, it's not that much smarter an argument than that.

Oh, great. I felt like that was an insult. I don't say that to insult physics, right? Like, it's not a great argument, but it's the first thing you do. It's unit analysis. Well, if we have no clue, what can we do?

Well, let's combine these numbers. and maybe that will give us a clue. So it's not, no physicist are out there saying this is definitely the fundamental unit of the distance. It just says, if there is one, it might be around this number. I mean, within a factor of 100 or 1,000 would be still a pretty good clue, right? 10 to the negative 35, which sounds really small. It is really small.

It is really small. It's not small compared to infinity. Do you know what I mean? Yes. Like the number pi, you can take decimals out to 35. 3,500, 35 million decimals. Yeah. But you're saying maybe the universe only goes up to 35 decimals.

Yeah, that's right. It's a lot bigger than, you know, 10 to the minus 100 or 10 to the minus 1,000 or 10 of the minus 10,000, right? These are much, much smaller numbers. The thing is, it's also much smaller than the thing we've seen. Remember, we've studied space down to about 10 to the minus 20. So that means that we are a factor of 10 to the 15 away from seeing these people. pixels if, in fact, they exist

and if they are at that scale. Yeah, I mean, for a sense of scale, like the solar system is 10 to the 15 meters across, I believe. So if you could only see things down to 10 to the 15 meters, you'd be missing a lot of interesting detail, like you'd miss Earth

and life and planets and stuff. And us? What a tragedy. I know. How could you study the universe without seeing the most important and best looking two dudes in it, right? Like, if you were a giant, the size of a galaxy, and you had an iPhone the size of, you know, the Milky Way and the biggest pixel in it was the size of a solar system.

There would be a lot you'd be missing. Exactly. So between where we've seen at 10 to the minus 20 meters and how far things might go at 10 to the minus 35 meters, there could be a huge amount of complexity and richness down there that we're totally ignorant of. Little tiny pixel people. That's right.

Asking these same questions, it could be a little pixelated alien going, Mama Mario, what's good? Hold on a second. I don't think I've ever heard your Italian accent. That was pretty good. And we just lost all of our Italian listeners. That's right. Yeah, Italian listeners, please write in and comment at Jorge's accent at danielandhorpe.com.

Jorge offends a whole country.com. Okay, well, let's get some perspective here. What do you think it would mean for us? and our understanding of ourselves and our universe if we found that that the universe is pixelated. It would be a really deep insight just into the very nature of the universe, you know, to know that number tells you something about the scale at which the universe was built, right? Everything in the universe happens from its basic elements. So we have fascinating structure, you know, galaxies and super clusters and all that stuff.

But all that arises from the interactions of smaller pieces, you know, particles and electrons, everything is. determined by what happens at the smallest scale, right? So everything in the universe comes out of these basic elements. So to learn how big the smallest unit is tells you how the universe was constructed. And in the end, what is science and physics about other than this goal of trying to deprogram the universe or look at the source code or figure out how this thing is organized? And so that would be pretty awesome. But it would actually just be a first step.

Yeah. No, you just made me realize it would really kind of blow your mind to just have this sense that the universe has a structure, right? That it somehow feels built. Yeah. Like there's a scaffolding to the universe. Yeah, like a graph paper, right? Yeah. And then you have to ask questions like, who made that graph paper? And why that size, right? Why is it 10 of the minus 35 meters and not 10 of the minus 500 meters or 10 of the minus 30 meters, right? What does that mean? There's like a clue there about the very structure of the universe. Is it a random number and it generated arbitrarily when all the multiversions were created?

Or does it give you a clue somehow about something deep about the universe? On the other hand, we talked about like galaxies just being emergent phenomena, right? They're a really cool thing, but they're just formed out of smaller bits and their complex behavior arises into this thing called a galaxy.

A lot of people think these days that space itself could be an emergent phenomenon. What? Okay, that these pixels of space could be built out of something smaller that's not space. Oh, wait. So space is not space, is what you're saying.

Space is actually, you know, A and B, or a combination of things. Yeah, yeah. The way like, you know, cookies are not their ingredients, right? You mix them together, you bake them, you get a cookie. But if you start with flour and butter and sugar, and none of those things are cookies, right? So cookies are an emergent phenomena in your kitchen. They're not a fundamental unit.

Unless you buy a lot of cookies and that's all you buy, in which case they are the fundamental pixel of your kitchen. Like there's even some hidden forces inside of space, is what you're saying, right? Like there's something... Yes. Wow. Yeah, and there's some pretty cool theories about that. Like, there's one that's called quantum loop theory, and it builds space out of these tiny little loops.

It says maybe the fundamental unit of location in the universe is not space. It's something else. It's these little tiny loops. And those would be quantized, of course, quantum loop gravity. And out of those, the way those things are connected, space. is formed. And that could tell you all sorts of things like, well, maybe that tells you why there's a maximum speed to how fast information can travel through space, because it's how fast these loops can talk to each other. Like space is not like a jelly or like a space. It's more

like a mesh or like a weave. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Or a really complicated subway system and connected by these other forces. And so you hear people eminent science communicators saying things like maybe space emerges from the quantum foam and like I was to hear that and I think what does that even mean man and that's what it means it means that it's not a basic element of the universe

but that it comes out of the interaction of smaller stuff right the way cookies come out of ingredients like as I'm walking on the street what's actually happening is that all of my electrons and protons and corks are actually like moving around in this mesh this invisible mesh

that is the universe no no no I think it's even it's trickier to think about than that because you can't think of these elements of this mesh as bits of space. They're not, right? You can't move from one to the other. Somehow, space arises from that. This whole concept

of location and motion through it could be an emergent phenomenon, right? And one that doesn't have any meaning below that distance. So you're not moving through the mesh. Somehow, you know, information is propagating through the mesh or the mesh is interacting with itself in some way. But this

notion of moving comes out of your assumption that, like, space is fundamental. And we have to rethink that if space is not fundamental. Meaning like a Super Mario moving around the screen in your TV, it's not actually moving. He's just like a table of data in some program. Yeah. That doesn't look like space. It's just numbers related to each other. Exactly. That's the perfect way to think about it. What makes those pixels, right? Not smaller pixels, right? It's some calculation inside the iPhone. There's a little bit of technology there that lights that up. And, you know, it's not motion. So it's something totally different underneath. And so it could be that the universe is made out of things that this gradation, these granularity of space. These grains are made

out of something totally new and alien to us. And discovering them could peel back a layer and reveal something really deep about the universe. So, you know, pass the joint man because we're that has a mushroom. We're getting pretty deep here. So what do you think, Jorge? Do you think space is picking? or you think this is just a crazy idea? You know, intuitively it seems impossible, right? Like space seems so smooth. And like we said before, it would mean that we're always sort of teleporting from one spot to the other.

But, you know, like you said, who knows, right? We used to think matter was perfectly smooth, but it turned out not to be. So it sounds like modern physics has uprooted you from all of your beliefs about the way the world works, huh? You now have skepticism about everything. Yeah. Are you even there, Daniel? No, I think that's a healthy attitude, you know. And I think it's hard to hold that in your head.

I mean, on one hand, you go around your daily life, you drive your car, you buy coffee, you do all these things without thinking about the way the world is working underneath you. And then sometimes I'm just struck breathless by realizing the incredible complexity of things that are happening invisibly around us. And, you know, the things might be totally different from the way we imagine. It's hard to hold that in your head a lot, which is why it's nice sometimes to just read a magazine and drink a cup of coffee

because it's breathtaking, you know? It's disorienting the way learning that we're tiny specks on a little mode of dust in a huge universe is, but it's also fun. Wow. Well, I hope that you guys out there listening also maybe see the world a little bit differently.

All right, thanks very much for listening, and enjoy the rest of your day. 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. 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 is 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 easier. Complex problem solving takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grazias, come again.

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