Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Listener Questions

Episode Date: January 10, 2019

We answer questions from listeners! The speed of light, the center of the universe and lasers! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grasias, 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. of course, the great bevras you've come to expect. Listen to the new season of Dacias Come Again on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. One of my favorite things when we give our lecture about what we don't know about the universe is the questions we get from people in the audience. The best questions always come from the youngest audience members.

I remember one time I gave a talk about liquid nitrogen in front of elementary school kids. And some kid asked me the question. He said, if lightsabers were real, would they be made of liquid nitrogen? And I didn't even know how to answer that question. I was like totally stumped by like a six-year-old. Wait, wait, wait, wait, Star Wars is not real? Lightsabers are fictional, Jorge. Fictional, yes.

So you need to find some other defense against the invading R.M. A Sith Empire, yeah. So the questions are a fantastic way to understand, have I really communicated anything? Have people really understood what I'm doing? So that's why I love the live aspect of a presentation because you get that feedback from the audience. They're getting it. They're asking follow-up questions. Or they're totally confused and they're asking you questions that seem to make no sense.

If only you had Jedi Mindtricks, Daniel, these are not the questions you're looking for. This is the podcast you're looking for, however. Hi, I'm Jorge. And I'm Daniel. Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, explain the universe. In which we try to make the universe understandable to you. And this time, we're really going to do our best. Yeah, today on the program, we're going to be answering

Questions from you, the listeners. That's right. People have been sending us questions over email, and some of them really tickled our brain. And so we thought, let's dig into them because we thought other people must have the same questions. Yeah, we have questions here about the speed of light, about using giant lasers,

and about where is the center of the universe? That's right. And these are just three questions that we chose from the pile. There are other questions I wish we could dig into, but we don't have time, like some of the joke questions. Yeah. And so as a reminder, if you have any questions, even after today, after we answer some of your questions, if you're a different listener and have a question, you can always send us a question at questions at danielanhorpe.com. That's right. Send us questions about anything. Life, the universe, dating, bananas, whatever. We don't promise to be experts in all these fields, but we'll probably get an answer. You don't want to answer dating questions? Yeah, we can give an answer about dating, but, you know, maybe you shouldn't follow dating at the time.

from a cartoonist and a physicist. I don't know that you're any more or less qualified to give dating advice than anybody else out there giving dating advice, Jorge. Everybody's only got their own experience, you know. You should definitely not get dating advice from me because I haven't dated anyone since I was like 16. Yeah, but it was a success, right? So there you go. You have 100% success rate. I have 100%.

Yeah, yeah. I have one data point. Every date you take leads to marriage, right? Yeah, there you go. Yeah, so listener questions. And this is one of your favorite parts of teaching and giving talks, right? Daniel, we give a lot of talks across the country and other countries about our book. And we always get great questions at the end, right?

Absolutely. We always get great questions. Sometimes people show up with a question already. You can tell they're burning to ask some physicist. And sometimes they have a question that's inspired by what we've said. And, you know, sometimes the questions are pretty random. but it's always a lot of fun because you can really try to

explain it to the person and when they get it you see that light go on in their eyes when they finally the pieces have clicked together and they have some understanding and I love that feeling of like having an idea in my head translating into sound waves which then wiggle across space

and get translated back into an idea in their brain I mean it's incredible right that you can even translate an idea from one brain to another so when it's successful I feel pretty good Yeah, well, enjoy that feeling before, you know, we're all plugged into the Matrix and it's just all automatic. That's right. And then we won't need podcasts because we'll all know what everybody knows all the time. There'll be no privacy.

All right, let's just jump into the questions. All right, our first question comes from Sandy from New York, and he has a question about the speed of light. Hi, Daniel and Jorge. My name is Sandy De Leon, originally from New York City. I was hoping you can talk about whether the speed of light has always been the same or whether it is a function of space time. How do we know whether or not the speed of light has been slowing down over time? Wow, that is a great question. Yeah, well, first of all, he said he's originally from New York.

What does that mean? That's so mysterious. Where is he now? Well, right now he's on a rocket ship at nearly the speed of light heading somewhere and he's hoping the speed of light will speed out. He needs to know right away. He needs to know right away. It's a pressing question for this dude. question.

Wherever he is, he can get the podcast, so he can't be that far away. Unless he's from the future. That's right. In which case, he invented time travel, and he knows more about the speed of light than I do. So I should be asking him questions. We should be asking him questions. Yeah. Do you're Sandy, please.

Come to my house and show me your time machine. But this is a great question. Basically, it's the question of whether the speed of light has ever changed. But the first thing I thought was, holy cow, can this? speed of light change? Is that even possible? Is that something that might actually happen and not totally break down the universe? All right. So I'm going to make a classic mistake by saying yes. All right. So it's possible for the speed of light to not always have been the same. However, as a classic mistake, because most people are just

going to hear that and then go off and say, this physicist said the speed of light might change. It's possible. And however, nobody takes that idea very seriously. It's pretty well understood that the speed of light is fixed. And we assume that it's not changing in time. We have no evidence to say that it is changing in time. And we can dig in in a minute to the experiments that we've done and the evidence we have that suggests is constant. However, you know, there's a limit to the kind of things we can know. And some things are based on assumptions. And so the speed of light is one of those things. Like, we've never seen it changed. We have no reason to imagine it would have changed or will change. But, you know,

there are things we don't know. So, for example, we've measured the speed of light a bunch of times, but we don't know why it is what it is. You know, it's a number, three times 10 to 8 meters per second. We have no reason to feel like it should be that number or some other number. And if we had measured it to be a different number, we would have been like, okay, that's the speed of light instead of this other number. So it's not like it has a special value. There's nothing in the mathematics of the loss of physics that say the speed of light has to be this. As far as we know.

Always. I mean, somebody could come up with a deeper theory of physics that doesn't have the speed of light as an arbitrary. parameter that predicts the speed of light, you know, that says it has to be this way because space is made out of these quantum loops and that's, and they oscillated some certain frequency and that determines the speed of light. Maybe, right? But we're not there yet. At this point, it's just a number we measure about the universe. And physicists love doing that. We go out and we measure these constants because we think there are clues about the way the universe is put together. Yeah, but I guess what would happen if the speed of light did change? Like if suddenly it was

twice as fast as it is now, would anything change for us right now, like in our everyday lives? Well, if it changed suddenly... Would the universities fall apart? Yeah, like suddenly. Wow, a sudden change in the speed of light. That is an awesome thought experiment. I think a lot of things might break because, you know, we assume the speed of light is the speed of light, and we use that for lots of things like in the internet, to measure timing of stuff.

You know, we assume things travel at a certain speed. wait wait wait it might affect my web surfing all right that's right let's not even think about that that's too scary yeah but you know on a deeper level if you're like a philosophical kind of person you can ask even deeper questions like do we know the laws of physics themselves

change you know we have these laws like general relativity and quantum mechanics and they're pretty well established over you know 100 years of experiments etc and they don't seem to be changing but that doesn't mean they won't right the assumption that experiments are repeatable, this foundational concept of empiricism we have in science, is itself an assumption, you know, that the universe has laws and those laws don't change over time so that we can bit by bit do experiments to reveal them. That's just an assumption. It seems to work. It works

great. It works amazingly. We've never seen hints of things changing, but we don't know why the universe has laws that are discoverable and don't change. So that assumption is based on a lot of data, but it's not based on like a bedrock principle. It's like there's no fundamental reason why. And so it could certainly change. Or it could be changing really gradually over time so we haven't noticed yet. So it can change, but we just haven't, we don't think it's changing. That's right.

But I guess the question is, has it ever changed in the past? Like how do we know it wasn't different before? Right, exactly. And so we have this awesome tool for looking into the past, and it's called the universe. so you can look out into the night sky and you can see what happened eight minutes ago if you look at the sun don't stare directly at the sun of course

but you know the sun you're looking at is not the sun as it looks like now it's how the sun looked eight minutes ago and the further out you look the further back in time you look and we can see all the way back to the very early moments of the universe and we can see physics happening

and we see things rotating we see things orbiting we see things smashing into each other and we apply the laws of physics that we learn about here on Earth in our environment to those systems that we see in the deep past and things make sense and they make sense using the same speed of light.

So we see the speed of light unchanged way, way back into the history of the universe. So that gives us a lot of confidence that things haven't changed. Oh, I see. So when we look at a star that's really far away and we're seeing the results of physics not only that far away

but that long ago. Yeah, exactly. And so that gives us confidence that the universe pretty much works the same way now as it did billions of years ago. That's right. And you know, the concept that the speed of light may have been different a long time ago is sometimes proposed by advocates of creation theory.

You know, they say, well, the universe is only a few thousand years old. Then they have a problem. They have to explain how do the light from stars get here? If they're so far away and the universe is only 6,000 years old, right? This night sky should be totally black. And so they proposed that maybe the speed

of light was super duper fast a long time ago so the light sort of rushed here. and then it slowed down and that's the way the light got here in such a short time so you know that seems kind of crazy to me but that's one motivation for imagining the speed of light

might have been different and there are other ones that are I mean they're still on the fringe but they're not as fringe as creation theory and they have to do with the very early moments of the universe the inflation because you know we can look out into space and we can see the speed of light is basically unchanged until

the fairly early universe a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, but before that is very hard to see because the universe was not transparent back then. And we have these questions about what happened in the very early universe. And one of the theories is called inflation. It explains how the universe got so big, so quickly, right, and is so smooth. And one way that people explain that is that the universe got really stretched out, the space itself got stretched out. And that's called inflationary theory. It says the universe expanded really rapidly early on. but there are other ideas

and one of those other ideas is that in the very first moments after the Big Bang maybe the speed of light was much, much faster and that accounted for how things moved more quickly in the first few moments after the universe was born. Oh, I see. But you don't need that if you have

the expansion of space itself. Yeah, inflation is a much more comprehensive theory. It explains a lot of things. It's been tested much more rigorously. This is sort of a crazy idea that people think about it. I totally encourage crazy ideas. I mean, crazy thinking is what leads to breakthroughs. Not every time.

Not every crazy theory is the right theory. But you've got to allow for people to think outside the scientific mainstream in order to, you know, sometimes generate a crazy idea, which turns out to be true. We've had revolutions in physics, and those came from crazy ideas. All right, so Sandy from New York, that's your answer.

We know because we can see well into the past, and we have theories that project well into the past, and that tells us that the speed of light hasn't been changing. That's right. With that, let's take a break. 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 audition 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 vivras 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 whitewash, 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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. 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 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. 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. 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. Our next question comes from Ariel from Russia, and he had a question about, or more like a suggestion about what we could do if there's a big asteroid coming to Killsall. Hi, Daniel and Jorge. My name is Ariel.

I want to ask you, what if instead of using a projectile launched from Earth to intercept an incoming asteroid we use an array of lasers and blast the asteroid without living Earth? Wow, a great suggestion. I think Ariel just wants to build a huge laser and point

out in the space, right? That is an awesome question. And it's pretty wild. I wonder what he was doing when he thought of this question. He's probably building a huge laser and preparing to point out into space, right? Right, so the background here, of course, I mean, why would you want to shoot a laser at asteroids other than that sounds really fun? And the reason is that we did an episode about death from space or death from above, right? The danger from killer rocks floating out in space, landing on Earth and wiping us all out like the dinosaurs.

And in that podcast, we talked about what we could do if we see. see one coming at us and we talked about how we can send rockets out there to kind of deflect the asteroid or blow it up or try to break it up right that's right um and one of the challenges is finding the asteroid early because the sooner you find it the less you have to deflect it right if it's really far away you can give it a pretty tiny nudge and by the time the asteroid gets to earth that tiny nudge is going to turn into a big deviation in its path if you only find it like one second before it hits the atmosphere then a tiny nudge is going to do nothing So the earlier you spot it, the smaller the nudge has to be.

And then one problem is, say you spot this asteroid, if you want to send up a nuclear weapon or a gravity tractor or something to tug it off course. Or a bomb, yeah. You have to get it up there and get it to the asteroid really fast, right? Because every second counts. And so I think that's what motivated Ariel's question. He's thinking, let's get something there that travels at the speed of light, like light, right? And using lasers, it's an awesome idea.

Can we build a death star? Can we turn the earth into a death star? You know, have the guy from the black helmets, pull that lever, have the green laser shoot out and destroy the asteroid. That's right. This fully operational battle station. Exactly. That's everybody's fantasy to pull that big lever. You know, I love pressing buttons and pulling levers and the same things happen. So that would be a lot of fun.

Well, great question, Ariel. We didn't cover in our podcast, you're right? And the reason is that it's a fairly new idea. So there's a short answer to your question. Yes, it's absolutely possible. possible. People are working on it right now and they're developing this technology. What? Yes, it's a great idea. There are grown-ups working on this idea.

There are grown-ups building death rays to shoot at rocks in space. That is somebody's job. I mean, people, if you work hard, if you study, you could get to work on that kind of question. And there's a lab at... Wait, wait a minute. You didn't realize that was an alternate career path? And she built giant at Death Star lasers? No, I didn't know.

Yeah, well, you know. My life would have been so much different. Yeah, we should educate children about all of their options. There's a lab at UC Santa Barbara that's working on exactly this. And the reason it's not one of the older ideas, you don't hear about this when you read books from the 70s or 80s about asteroids and asteroid deflections is that only recently do we have lasers that are powerful enough to make this efficient. I mean, you've got to put a lot of energy into a laser if it's going to blast something super far away. Lasers are really focused. The photons are almost parallel.

But if you shoot a beam of light, it's going to get wider and wider and wider as it goes, which means less and less intense, right? So, for example, you can shine your flashlight at the moon, and you can hit the moon, no problem, right? Because by the time the beam from your flashlight gets to the moon, it's huge. It's wider than the moon, right? So the key is... Like one of the photons you shoot is going to hit the moon. Exactly.

But the idea behind laser asteroid deflection is that you want to heat up a spot on the side of the asteroid, sort of warms up to like 3,000 degrees, and then it's going to shoot off a jet of gas, like molten rock and gas coming out of the asteroid, which is going to act like a little rocket pushing it to the side, right? So if you can heat up one side of the asteroid, you basically can push it off course. So you would aim it to the side of it, not directly at it. Yeah, I mean, you're imagining like, kibu, kibu, right? I'm shooting these things out of the sky. Direct hit. We're like, we're like, pucho, ptoo. Come on. We don't have, we don't have lazy. is powerful enough to blow them up, right?

The key is to heat it up on one side. So you're saying laser technology has been improving all these years, and now we can actually maybe build a death star rate. Yeah, well, we can't blow up planets, right? So we can't make disturbances in the force like the way you may be imagining. But we can shoot lasers at pretty far away objects and deposit significant energy. And so people have been doing studies,

and the best plan they have so far is to build a space-based laser array, right? You don't want to shoot the lasers from the ground because then they've got to go through the atmosphere and they get defocused. So you have to have an orbiting platform of powerful lasers, right? And if you're thinking... Orbiting laser gun. If you're thinking, yeah, that's not

going to be misused by some politician. A space gun. Literally a space gun. Yeah, I mean, do you want to build this and then put in the hands of the next president, whoever it's going to be Oprah of Jay-Z or Kid Rock or whoever's going to be the next president? I don't know. Make sure you can't point it back. You know, like it only works you point it away from the Earth.

Anyway, you've got to point it from space. You've got to point it at the asteroid, and you've got to hit it, and you've got to cook it for a little while. I mean, because by the time the laser gets there, it's going to be more diffuse, right? So you've got to deposit enough energy. So the studies that I read, they estimate that depending on the power of the laser, it could take between a year and 10 years to push the asteroid off course. Oh, for like a planet killer asteroid.

Yeah. And so that's a long time, which means you've got to. see this thing coming well in advance. And in our podcast we talked about how there isn't really a lot of danger from asteroids in our solar system because the biggest ones we've seen, we know where they are, we know they're not coming for us.

The real danger is from comets because they're big, they're fast, and we haven't necessarily seen their orbits. And we might just have like less than a year of warning. And they're supposed to be made of ice, right? Yeah, there's like a huge snowball, right? And that'd be pretty dangerous

and we'd have less than a year of warning. So that's not terribly optimistic, right? The other plan is to launch the lasers and then send them to the asteroid so they can get closer up. And then you can have smaller lasers. But, you know, then you have to spend time getting them to the asteroid and it gets pretty complicated. Whereas the laser itself, if you shoot it from Earth, would get there at the speed of light. It would get there at the speed of light, but it would be less intense, right? You need a more intense laser if you shoot it from further away.

On the other hand, then you can have your space laser and you can use it for whatever you want. You know, you can write your name in cornfields a mile long, right? In Europa, basically, right? Exactly. You could carve your face into, you know, Mount Rushmore from space. Yeah. That would be pretty awesome. You could add another eye to the eye of Jupiter,

make a smiley face or something. That's right. You got the red dot, and then you got my dot. Yeah, you could change, literally change the face of the solar system. Wow. Yeah, so these are dangerous technologies. There are actual labs working on this idea. Yeah, exactly.

I think the leading one is the UC Santa Barbara and it's called the Directed Energy Planetary Defense Lab They couldn't just call it the laser gun lab I think probably some students in there wanted to call it the Death Star Lab But that was probably overruled by the PI So Ariel from Russia The answer is yes, you could do that And there are people working on it

And if you'd like to contribute You just need to apply to the physics program at UC Santa Barbara 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. Hola, it's HoneyGerman.

And my podcast, Grasasas 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 audition 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. I feel like this is my destiny. 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 vivas 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 whitewash because at the end of the day, you know what I mean? Yeah. But the whole.

pretending and co you know it takes a toll on you listen to the new season of graces come again as part of my culture podcast network on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast 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 the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Okay, so our last question in this episode comes from Russell. And Russell didn't say where he was from, which means we can guess where he's from. Where do you think he's from? I think he's probably on an asteroid headed to Earth.

How about you? I was just going to guess Fiji, but I like your answer. Okay, so Russell has a question about the expanding universe. Hey, guys, my name is Russell, and I really love the podcast. And I've got a question for you. If the universe is constantly expanding, where is it expanding from? Does it have a center? Thanks, guys.

This is a great question. It's actually a common question that we get, yeah. But it's kind of tricky. It took me a long time to sort of get on my head around this concept, right? Like, the idea is that if everything's moving away, is growing, it's stretching, doesn't that mean that there's a point that is not growing or moving? Do you know what I mean? Like, if you explode a grenade in space and you see all the bits flying off, if you track the motion of all the bits, you could track down where all those bits came from, which is sort of like the center of an explosion. And so if somebody tells you the universe exploding or it's expanding, doesn't that mean there's a point in the universe that is not growing or expanding?

Yeah, in your grenade theory of the universe, that would be correct. Yeah, so if the universe is a grenade, then there would be a center. And this misconception comes from thinking about the origin of the universe, the Big Bang, as an explosion, right? But it's not really an explosion in the sense that just matter is flying through space. it's also an explosion of space, right? Space itself is expanding, and it's expanding everywhere at the same time. So it's like everything is exploding at the same time.

So rather than thinking of it like an explosion, you should think of it like an infinite ruler. An infinite ruler suddenly starts to stretch, right? And it's stretching everywhere all at once. Right. Yeah. But doesn't the ruler have a center? The ruler has a center of mass,

like a point where you could balance it on your finger. Okay, so where, Where is the center of mass of an infinite ruler? Right in the middle, right? Where's the middle? At X equals zero. At every point, at every point, you have an infinite amount of mass on both sides, right? So it balances the same way everywhere.

Yeah. But you're assuming the universe is infinite. What if it's not infinite? Wouldn't that mean it has the center of mass? Right. Okay. So let's break the answer into two different possibilities, because they're very, very different answers. One is, let's assume the universe is infinite, right?

That beyond what we can see, it just goes on for it. And in that model, I think the most common scientific understanding is that the Big Bang happened everywhere at the same time, right? The Big Bang was not like at some location, you know, corner Fifth Avenue and Broadway, and then everything expanded from there, but that it happened everywhere at the same time. So there was Big Bang over there, there was a Big Bang over here, it's all at the same time. And so you can think of it like, you know, the surface of a balloon expanding, right? There's no center to the surface. Every point on the surface is expanding simultaneously, right? Obviously, the center to the balloon, but here, this is a 2D example.

We're just thinking about the surface of the balloon. Right, like everything came from nothing everywhere. Yeah, well, what came before the Big Bang? That's a whole other question, right? But if you assume that somehow an infinite universe exists, right? And that then the Big Bang started, the Big Bang being just this expansion of space, this stretching of the very fabric of space itself, then that happened everywhere at the same time.

There's no preferred location. And it's an important concept in physics that everywhere in the universe is equally preferable to everywhere else, right? We're very democratic in physics when we think about space. We don't like to think about any place being special. Right.

But like in a balloon, if I'm inflating the balloon, there's a point, the part where I'm holding it and blowing air into it, that's the part that's not moving. That's true. You're right. I guess I was imagining a balloon

without Jorge's lips on it. An infinite moment. Exactly. And, you know, the universe doesn't have to be infinite for this to work. It just has to be sort of closed, right? Like we talked in our podcast about the size and the shape of space. The universe could be infinite, but it could also be wrapped around itself, like a game of asteroids, where you go off in one direction and you loop back around the other way without any discontinuity.

And that's the way like the surface of a balloon is, right? You walk along the surface of a balloon. You can do it forever and ever and ever. You just come back to where you started. There's no end. And in that concept also, the Big Bang is not in any particular place. It has no center, right? Oh, I see.

Like a balloon would have the center of the balloon, but you're saying like it's a kind of a 3D balloon. Yes, exactly. It's like a 3D balloon. Like if you could only be on the center of the balloon, an expanding balloon really doesn't have a center. Yeah. Like if you were an ant walking on it, you'd be like, where's the center? Yeah, exactly. Like on the surface of the earth, there's no center to the surface, right?

Every place on the surface of the earth is the same relative to the earth. It's the same radius and whatever. All right. So if it's infinite, then it could have no center. Yeah, exactly. But we don't know that, right? And that's the lovely part about questions about the universe is that we know so little about these large contextual questions, you know, like what have we seen about the universe?

We've seen what's inside a sphere, a sphere that's big enough for light to have traveled from those things to us since the start of the universe. It's a little bit more complicated than just being the speed of light times the age of the universe because there's some actual stretching of space, but we can hand-wave that for now. So we call that the observable universe, right? That's everything that we can see. And what we don't know is what fraction of the universe is that? Is that most of the stuff in the universe?

Is that one bigillionth of the universe? Or is that basically one over infinity because the universe is infinite? So it's certainly possible that the universe is finite. that there's, you know, at some point it runs out of stuff. Right. You know, space could be infinite and the stuff could be finite, right? Yeah. So there's all these possibilities, but there is basically like infinite or not infinite, right?

And if it's not infinite, right? If there's a finite amount of stuff in the universe, well, then we don't know where the center of that stuff is because we can't see all of it, right? So we have no way of knowing. But if there is a finite amount of stuff in the universe, then yes, it would have a center somewhere, right? But the thing I love about that is that of the observable universe, the center is you, right? You are literally at the center of your observable universe. Right. I'm more like in the center of my kids' universe, it seems.

That's right. I just pay their mortgage. You're just a little orbiting moon, right, around their sun-like egos. Yeah, but we all have different observable universes because our heads are in different places, and so we can all catch photons from the early universe at slightly different times. And so, like another alien species would have their own. observable universe that's a sphere around their planet. So the short answer is to the question is that we really just don't know if the universe is infinite then it

has no center. If it's finite then we don't know that it is finite and we can't see enough of it to know you know what would the average location of all that stuff be. But there could be a hypothetical center to the universe. I mean if it is finite there could be a center to the universe. Yeah. Currently most of our models assume the space goes on forever and everything we see agrees with that. I think if the universe was finite in the sense that it was a size of the universe was only a little bit bigger than the observable universe, so that what we're seeing is basically most of it, I think we would see effects of that. I think that the gravitational

forces would be tend towards one location or in one direction, right, rather than pulling things everywhere. And what we see now is very homogenous. We've never seen anything that prefers any one direction or any one location. And so the universe seems to prefer no direction and seems to prefer no location. So that suggests... It doesn't seem like we're orbiting around something. Yeah, that suggests that things are either infinite or really, really big compared to what we can see, right?

Of course, we can't tell the difference between those two things. But if I had to place a bet, I would say the universe is most likely either infinite or huge jungus compared to what we can see. Hugh jungest. Huge jungus. Yeah, exactly ginormous compared to what we can see, which would be for all practical purposes, it would be

infinite. And so from that perspective, the universe wouldn't have any well-defined center. Right. In either case, the fact that the space itself that's expanding means that you don't need that sort of center of the grenade. Yeah, exactly. Everything's

space itself is expanding literally would sort of look the same whether we're here or we're in Andromeda or we're billions of light years away. would all just sort of seem like it's expanding away from us. Yeah, exactly. Every point in the universe, it seems like everything is expanding away from you. So everybody feels like, hey, why is everybody going away from me?

And that makes me wonder a little bit about Russell's motivations. Like, why is the center of the universe important? Like, why do we care? It's not like, from a scientific point of view, it doesn't necessarily have any meaning, right? It's not like, you know, are we living at the center? Are we in the best real estate in the universe or something? Or maybe it's an attempt to understand, like, the origin. in this special place.

If there was a center to the universe, you could ask why there, right? Imagine space is infinite, but matter is not, that the universe is like a finite blob of matter that exploded in space at some point 14 billion years ago. Then you could ask this question, why that spot and not a billion light years to the left

or a billion light years to the right? And that would be an interesting question. It would be an interesting clue that there's something that happened to here and not somewhere else. So if space did have a center, then you could ask interesting questions about it, right? I thought you were going to say that the reason Russell was wondering why everything is moving away from him was that he needed some dating advice.

You've got to be nice to our listeners, Jorge. They are the reason we get to keep doing this, right? Russell, they're going away from you because they're also intimidated by your good looks and charisma. That's what's going on. And your ability to ask great questions. Seriously. Awesome question, Russell. Thank you very much.

And your taste in podcast. And your taste in podcast is exquisite. All right, those were all super great questions. And I think, you know, it just kind of generally points to the curiosity of people, you know? Just like you listen to a podcast like this one or watch a science show and you just can't help but have questions, deep questions about the universe. That's right. And we are here to talk about them. And we don't always have the answers.

But sometimes that's even more fun when we don't know what the answer is and we can talk about all the crazy possibilities. So please don't hold back. listening to this podcast and you have a question you want us to talk about, send it to us at questions at daniel and horhe.com. And if you need dating advice, just write us at dating and daniel and horhe.com. Or just shout it at your window late at night and Jorge will eventually hear it. Or just build a death star and write it on the surface of the morning. We'll definitely see it. I do not endorse that advice, by the way. That is purely from We're having. I'm going to have my lawyers that cleared me from liability from your moon vandalism

suggestion there. We need a disclaimer at the end. You know, like movies have disclaimers. Yeah, please sign this waiver. This is a work of fiction. None of the opinions expressed by it. We can't say it's a work of fiction. We're supposed to be talking about things that are real. None of the opinions expressed by the cartoon is should be taken seriously. That's right. By listening to this podcast, you accept responsibility for all of your actions, even if we suggest it. them. All right, thanks everybody for listening. Please don't go out and vandalize cosmic features of our solar system and ruin them for everybody. And keep asking questions. That's right. See you next time. See you next time.

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. Do we really need another podcast with a condescending finance brof trying to tell us how to spend our own money? No thank you. Instead, check out Brown Ambition. Each week, I, your host, Mandy Money, gives you real talk, real advice with a heavy dose of I-feel uses. Like on Fridays, when I take your questions for the BAQA.

Whether you're trying to invest for your future, navigate a toxic workplace, I got you. Listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your 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.

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