Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Listener Questions 2.0

Episode Date: March 26, 2019

Join Daniel and Jorge as they respond to 4 questions from listeners, just like you! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, Jorge, you know how we end most of our podcast episodes by asking people to submit questions? Yeah. Do people actually send in questions? Yeah. Do you know that a lot of people actually write in? Well, and how are the questions? Oh my God, the questions. are awesome. They reflect

like people's real desire to understand things about the universe. Wow. You read all of them? You know, I'll admit, I love the question so much that I actually read and answer all of them. But some of the questions are so fun and I think other people probably

share the same questions that I'll ask those people to record themselves asking the question and send it in so we can do a whole podcast episode just about some listener questions. So is somebody going to write asking why they couldn't understand this episode? Not if we do a good job explaining it.

What kind of question would you have, Daniel, if you were a listener? If I was listening to my own podcast, I would be like, who is that guy with my voice? And how did he get a podcast? What question would you ask, Corain? I would probably ask, how do we get more people to listen to this podcast? Hey, I'm Jorge. And I'm Daniel. And welcome to our podcast.

Daniel and Jorge explain the universe. Or more accurately today, Daniel and Jorge answer questions about the universe. That's right. Or explain the universe inside your mind. That's right. Every week, twice a week, we are beaming information and explanations about the incredible mystery that is the universe straight through your

ears and into your brain. And we try to make it fun, we try to make it engaging, we try to make sure that you can actually understand what we're talking about. We don't want to impress you with fancy words. We want to impress you with the incredible majesty and wonder that is this universe we find ourselves in.

Yeah, and sometimes, you know, we don't get all the information out there or some people don't quite understand everything that we covered in, we were able to cover in the podcast, and so people still have questions. Yeah, or sometimes we'll explain one thing, and it inspires another question, makes somebody wonder, ooh, what about this or what about that? And often, I think Jorge does an amazing job of anticipating those questions. A lot of people have written in saying,

Jorge asks the questions I have in my mind. So kudos to you, Jorge, for the great follow-ups and for asking the right questions. That feels like a backhanded compliment. No, it's not backhanded at all. It's a great compliment. You're a good science communicator. You understand what is clear and what is not. But sometimes there's a question rattling around in somebody's head that they just really need an answer to. And so they write in and ask us. Yeah. So today on the podcast will be answering listener questions.

That means questions from people like you. If you're listening to this and you have questions, you could hear your own voice next time. Write to us at questions at Daniel and Jorge.com with your questions. about the universe or life or whatever's going on around you. Or you can also reach out to us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. Right? You check all of those, right, Daniel? I do. I respond to Twitter questions and Facebook questions and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, engage with us. We're eager to hear from you.

Yeah, you can ask us about the universe, about how rude we are. How engaging we are to each other. What our favorite fruit is? Nobody has a question about what your favorite fruit is, Jorge. Right now, everybody knows. It's papayas, clearly. I feel like I don't know you, Daniel. I feel like you don't know me.

I think bananas are clearly your favorite fruit, but I wonder, like, is that the favorite fruit to say? I mean, to eat, sure, but what about saying? Like, isn't papaya more fun word than banana? More fun than banana? Yeah. It's a tough call. It's just fun about the word papaya.

I think you need to go out into the street and ask people this question. No, here's another question What's your favorite fruit to draw Like as a cartoonist What's a fun fruit to draw Because papaya is just kind of a blob I feel like if I say banana People are going to infer something

From that That's a dangerous Or if I say papaya People might also infer something from that So let's just stay clear out of Cartooning plus fruits All right, all right Too bad

Well, I'm still curious You can tell me offline later Well, so today we're going to be answering four questions from all over the universe, or at least all over the planet Earth. That's right. And so here's the first question. It comes from Alessandro from Italy. And he wants to know about how we see so far into space.

Hi, guys. It's Alessandro from Italy. I really enjoy your podcast and I'm curious to know. How can we see so far through the space without being hidden by Das Nessna? Nebula and Adel Mattel. Thank you, and I will enjoy your answer. Well, Alessandro certainly sounds Italian. He didn't have to tell us where he was from. Yeah, he's a beautiful accent. Yeah, it's gorgeous. It is the language of love, or is that French? Although I feel like Italian shouldn't just be heard. It should be seen, right? I'm sure there's some

hand gestures that he couldn't capture in that audio file. Save it for the YouTube podcast. That's right. That's right. But it's a great question. Yeah, it's an interesting question. How can we see so far out through space without being obscured or blocked by nebula and other clouds of dust and stuff that's out there? How is it that we're able to see these stars that are billions and billions of light years away without anything blocking our view? Yeah, like, is it lucky that we can see so far? Is it coincidence? You know, is there some reason for it? I think first, let's just take a moment to appreciate that view, you know? We say, like, if you stand at the top of a mountain and you can see hundreds of miles, it seems like a great view.

But we don't often realize or consider the fact that the view above our heads, the ones out into the night sky, is the best view we will ever see. You know, it's sort of, it can give you vertigo just to imagine that you're standing on the tip of a rock, you know, that rock being Earth, and staring out billions of miles across this ocean of space to these other tiny little pinpricks. Yeah. So it's really pretty incredible, not just the space is vast, but that you can see so far through. it, right? Right. Yeah, because like if you stand up top mountain, you can't see out there forever, right? Like, if you look at the next mountain, it's going to look a little bit

hazy, and if you look at the mountain behind it, it's going to look even hazier. And so I think the question is, how is it that we can see with such crystal clarity out there into space? Right, and it's a great question. And, you know, the answer is that mostly space is transparent, right? Transparent

to light. Because mostly what we're doing is we're seeing with light. And so light can pass through space without interacting. And that's what we mean by being transparent. We mean that a particle, like a photon, a piece of light, can fly through it without being affected, without being changed. So it's not that, I mean, there is stuff out there.

It's not like space is completely empty. But you're saying that we can see really far because the stuff that's there doesn't necessarily block the light. That's right, exactly. Transparent doesn't mean non-existent, right? There is stuff out there in space, but mostly the light can pass through it. just the way the light can pass through the window in your living room, right? Mostly unaffected.

Now the window is not completely transparent, just like, as you said, the air is not completely transparent, but it's mostly transparent. And so there can be stuff there, but as long as the particles don't interact, then they fly through and you can observe them on the other side, basically unchanged. Okay, but what's out there in space that could be blocking our view, but isn't?

Yeah, and so there actually are some things that block our view. So mostly space is empty, you know, from the point of view of light. like there's just nothing there. They're little particles, but mostly it's empty. And the reason that we can see light from other stars is that there just isn't much stuff between us and them. But sometimes that's not true. So, for example, closer to the center of the galaxy,

there are these really big nebulas of gas and dust, and we can't see it through them with normal light, the kind of visible light that we're used to seeing with our eyes. And so, for example, if you want to study the center of the galaxy, you have to find other ways to do it because you can't see it with visible light. Oh, I see. So the dust and gas out there do block our view, but most of it is concentrated in certain spots, like the center of galaxies. Yeah, exactly. And so if you want to look out, you know, away from the center of the galaxy to nearby stars, there's not a whole lot between us and them.

The thing that mostly blocks your view is our atmosphere, right? Our atmosphere interferes with light, and that's probably most of the stuff that's going to do that. So that's why we sometimes launch telescopes into space so we can get a clear view of what's coming at us from far, far away. Oh, so if the Earth just happened to be, like if our solar system just happened to be inside of a nebula, we would be totally blind to the outside universe. Yeah, that's right. If we happen to be embedded inside a gas cloud or a dust cloud, absolutely. And remember, our sun probably was born in a gas cloud or a dust cloud. Most of those places are stellar nurseries. Those where SARS are born. And eventually, though, all that stuff coalesces and it doesn't just hang out. It coaleses into stars and planets. And that's, you know, the ancient history of,

of our solar system. So we really are sort of lucky to have such a good view, right? Because we could have been born in like a, our planet could have been in the middle of a, of a, the equivalent of Los Angeles, right?

Yeah, we could be. But I think that most of the time gravity will do its job and by the time the planets are formed and life has evolved, etc., that gravity will have done his job and cleared out that space.

We'll pull it together into other objects, you know, planets and stars and whatever. Oh, it concentrates all the gas, yeah. I see it. It makes stars which clears the view. Yeah. And you know, it's no coincidence that the kind of light that we can see that our eyes can pick up is also the kind of light that can pass through space. Because that light comes from the sun, it has to pass through space

to get to us, right? And then it has to survive the atmosphere. And so the kind of light that is around on Earth is the kind of light that we've evolved to see. So obviously it can get here from the sun. And so it has to be able to pass through space for us to see it. Right. But what's kind of cool too is that just because there is a gas or a nebula in front of us, it doesn't mean that we can't see through it because other kinds of light do go through that kind of stuff. That's right. When we say visible light, we mean light of certain frequencies, you know, red, green, blue, all those other colors that we can see. But light has lots of other frequencies, right? You can wiggle more quickly into the ultraviolet. You can wiggle more slowly

down into the infrared or really slowly down into the radio waves. So we don't usually call those light. They call them radio waves or gamma rays or whatever, depending on the frequency. But they really are just still electromagnetic radiation. They're another form of light. And depending on the wavelength, they have different properties. Some of them can pass right through gas and dust. So for example, radio waves, which have really long frequencies compared to visible light,

it can pass through gas and dust, and we can use that to see into the center of the galaxy. Yeah, that's pretty cool. It's like having x-ray vision. Yeah, exactly. And we can actually use x-rays also. X-rays do also pass through gas and dust. Now, some of these things like x-rays, they won't penetrate our atmosphere. So if you want to see that, you have to have something really high in the atmosphere, like on a balloon, or maybe even into space, like an x-ray telescope in space to see them. That's interesting, huh? You have to go up. You have to fly up like Superman to have x-ray vision. And these days, we even have other ways to see the universe that are not.

not just light. Like we can see the universe through neutrinos. There's some weird stuff out there that just makes neutrinos, and neutrinos pass through almost everything. So they're a really good way to see really, really far away. And then recently we developed this ability to see gravitational waves. And this is not even stuff, right? Gravitational waves are the ripples in space itself.

So they can pass through basically everything. Matter, yeah. All right, so that's the answer. The answer is the question was, how can we see so far through space without being blocked by nebula and other stuff. And the answer is that there isn't that much stuff out there. Space is pretty empty. And even the stuff that's out there doesn't really block our view.

Yeah, and we have other ways to see through the stuff that does block our view. And if we were blocked by nebula and other stuff, eventually all of that stuff would have turned into stars or moved around. Yeah, just wait a few billion years and the view will change. Yeah, yeah. Just hang out. Just hang out. You don't need to graduate anytime soon, do you?

If you're a PhD thesis, just wait a few bills. No big deal. No biggie. All right. Thank you, Alessander from Italy. That was a great question. And before we go on, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

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

Law and order criminal justice. system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness the way it has echoed and reverberated

throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories.

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All right, we're answering listener questions today. And the next question we have here is from Shelley, from Australia, from Down Under. And Shelley... Shelly asks a really awesome question. I think a lot of people wanted the answer to. She's questioning whether you have a real job or not, Daniel. And I'm brave enough to play this question on the podcast. Here we go. Hi, Daniel and Jorge. I'm Shelley from Brisbane, Australia.

and what I would like to know is how does physics actually work? How do you come up with a theory and then create an experiment to test that theory? What does a physicist actually do every day? You get up, you get your coffee, you go to work, and then what? How do you go from a theory to an experiment, then to an explanation? I love that question. I love when she says, and then what? My question is, is Shelley your wife, Daniel?

Or is this, does she send in a question? Is she wondering what you do all day? No, but it's hilarious because that's what I do. I get up, I drink coffee, then I go to work, and then I go, okay, now what? Now what I do today? So that's pretty much the answer. The question is the answer. No, that's the two sides of academic freedom.

You know, as a professor, you basically get to do whatever you're like. On the other hand, nobody tells you what to do, so you have to come up with stuff to do yourself, right? So every day you answer that. question today what yeah but it's a great question it sort of goes to the heart of you know how is science done right i think she's maybe wondering like what's your day-to-day like like um she probably knows that there is this general process but at any point how do you decide what to do yeah so you know day-to-day of course you get up you get your coffee then you start answering the 300 emails that came in while cern was awake in geneva nine time zones ahead and i was sleeping and then when you

get through all that, you get to start to think about sort of the higher level science, right? And she asked a question, you know, how do you go from theory to experiment? Like, how do you come up with an experiment? And I think that's a really interesting question because a lot of times that is the way it works. Like a theorist comes up with an idea saying like, I think maybe there's this new particle or I think maybe there are black holes out there. And then it's the job of the experimentalist to figure out the answer, right? Is that correct or not? Do these things really exist or not. But there's sort of a step before that, right, where you, I mean, you have to know what's going on in the field. You can't just posit these things out of the blue. You sort of have to

know, you have to read what everyone else is done and what everyone else is doing, and you kind of have to try to ask a question nobody else is answered. Yeah, that's certainly true. Although I get a lot of crackpot ideas from homegrown theorists that haven't yet done that, you know, but yeah, you want to come up with an idea, you want to come up with an idea that's new. Like maybe the difference between a professional physicist is that you spend your life on it, right? You go to conferences, you talk to people, you know what's going on.

Yeah, you definitely have to know how things are done and, you know, what questions have been answered. In that perspective, you can sort of think of science like a conversation. You know, we're trying to figure out what is the universe, how does it work, and you want to say something relevant. And so you have to think of, like,

what is the question at hand? What is it we're trying to figure out right now and how can I test it? And that's the bit of, about being an experimentalist. I'm an experimentalist. And, you know, what is the job actually involve? Well, it involves coming up with a way to ask a question of nature that will reveal the answer. You know, some theorist says, I think this is a new particle the squigglyon. Well, then you can't just ask nature the question, does the squigglyon exist or not? It's not like nature some

oracle, right, that just answers whatever question you want. You have to trap it. You have to trick it. You have to corner it. You have to come up with an experiment you can do, something that physical thing you can build that will tell you whether this thing exists because if you do your experiment and the data is this, then you know the answer is yes, this is squiggly on. If you do the experiment and the data comes out differently,

then you know the answer is not a squigglyon. But that's not trivial, right? That requires some cleverness. You have to think about the right way to sort of corner nature and make it tell you whether this thing exists by revealing the answer in your experiment. And part of that has to do with the null hypothesis,

Like this idea that where you sort of assume that the squiggly on doesn't exist and you run some experiments. And if you see something that clearly shows you that the squiggly not existing is not quite likely, then that means you have something. Yeah, exactly. We need conclusive evidence. We need to see data that couldn't have been produced if the squiglion didn't exist, right? They could only be produced if the squiglion existed. We need something that's in that sense unique, right? It has to be necessary and sufficient.

And so often what we do is, in my particular case, because I'm a particle physicist, is, you know, we're colliding protons together. And if we want to ask the question, does the squigglyon exist? And we think, well, what would the squigglyon look like in our data? How would it appear? You know, would it leave splashes of energy over here? Would it leave traces of its motion over there? And then we sort of look for those telltale signs. But then we have to think about what else could look like that.

Is there anything else that could mimic it? anything else that could look like the squiggly on but not actually be the squiggly on so a lot of the experimental work that I actually do involves that kind of statistics like figure out a way to look for this thing in a way that nothing else could mimic yeah and then

but it also works the other way around like somebody maybe did an experiment to look at something else and they found something weird and said that doesn't fit the theory and so then theories have to come up with an explanation for the data yeah and in my view this doesn't happen enough and I think a lot of people especially in particle physics think that it always starts, theorist has an idea for a new particle.

Experimentalists just go check to see if that's true, right? And there's actually a really lively debate right now about how do we do this in particle physics because the theorist predicted, oh, super symmetric particles will appear at the large Hadron Collider, and then we didn't find them. And some people think, oh, that's a failure. But I think that experimentalists can be explorers, that we don't have to just answer the question, does this new particle exist? we can go out and look for weird stuff, right?

Let's just see what's out there, you know, the way like when you land on Mars, you don't ask the question, are there purple cats and dogs there? You just walk around and look to see if there's some new kind of life that will blow your mind. So, yeah, you're absolutely right. Sometimes an experimentalist find something weird, something that can't be explained with our current understanding and it forces us to come up with a new theory, one that can explain that. Yeah.

And those are the greatest moments in science, if you ask me. Okay, cool. So, okay, that's, okay, cool. So that's what you do? And then it's like 11 a.m. and then what do you do? Then it's time for my nap, right? Then I do this awesome podcast with this cartoonist. Yeah, I have no moral stand to criticize a lazy lifestyle or work life. But I think that's kind of the general answer is that, you know, it's like a, it's a conversation, right? Like you're, it's not just you in a room trying to come up with ideas and theories and experiments. It's like you're conferring with other people.

You're reading other people's work. You're trying to, you know, come up, get clues from other people's results and things like that, right? It's sort of a conversation and it's a process. Yeah, and it has to be a conversation because science is just people, right? If you do some science and nobody reads it, then you haven't really pushed human understanding forward at all, right? So you have to do something people are interested in so that they will listen and it will change sort of the common understanding. You'll move forward the wayfront of human thought. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Shelley from Australia, that's your answer. Basically coffee. Coffee. It's all coffee fueled. Yeah, exactly. All right.

Our next listener question comes from Alex from. Connecticut. Here we go. Hey guys. This is Alex from Connecticut and I'm wondering if there's anywhere in the universe where dark matter is not present. Thanks. Keep up the good work. Alex sounds pretty excited

about his question. He has a great traitor voice. He should do movie traitors. In a world where dark matter is not present everywhere. This is a great question because we've talked about how dark matter is much more dark matter in the universe than normal matter.

So it's a very natural question to wonder, like, is it filling the universe? It's invisible, but is it everywhere? Yeah. I mean, there's not a little bit of dark matter out there. There's five times more dark matter than all the stars and gas and clouds and planets out there, right? Yeah, exactly. It's a huge amount.

And so it's very natural to ask, where is it? And the answer to his question is, yes, there are lots of places in the universe without dark matter, because it turns out that dark matter and normal matter basically follow the same distributions. That is, you can tell where the dark matter is just by looking for the non-dark matter. So who's following who?

Who's a stalker and who's the end celebrity? It's something of a dance, right? We know about dark matter only because if it's gravitational effect on stuff, right? And so gravity affects dark matter and normal matter, and the two pull on each other. And so it's something of a dance as they tug on each other. And that's why they're linked together.

That's why dark matter and normal matter are in the same places because they're gravitationally attracted to each other. Now, because there's more dark matter than normal matter, you could probably say the normal matter is following the dark matter. So in fact, that's the only way that dark matter can interact with our matter, right, that we know of, is gravity. So far that we know, it's the only way you can interact with our matter. It might have some interactions with itself that we don't know about,

but to interact with our matter, to see it, to affect our... You know, the things that we can test and observe, gravity is the only way for us to probe that. And, you know, people, really interestingly, people do simulations of the universe without dark matter. They're like, what would have happened if there wasn't dark matter? And things just don't coalesce as quickly. You run the universe, but you run it without dark matter, and you get totally different results. Yeah, this is amazing, right? You can simulate the whole universe.

It's pretty incredible. And they ask, you know, what would the universe look like under various scenarios? And that's really important because it helps them understand what was the various fraction of things in the very beginning and how sensitive are we to that? Like, is any configuration mostly going to give you galaxies and stars and planets or is it really sensitive? And it turns out that if you didn't have dark matter,

then it takes a lot longer for stuff to clump, right? The only reason we have stars and galaxies and planets is because gravity has gathered this stuff together. Turns out it's gotten a huge boost from all the dark matter helping to pull it together. And without that dark matter, it would take billions more years to get all this structure. So we wouldn't even be around without the dark matter. So yeah, dark matter follows normal matter and helps out.

Yeah, so pretty much when you look out into the universe and you see where all the shiny stuff is, like stars and planets and light, that's kind of pretty much where dark matter is also. Roughly, that's correct. But if you look at, for example, a galaxy, there's a huge blob of dark matter also at the center of the galaxy. But then there's a, we call it a halo. It extends beyond the way the visible. galaxy is, but mostly it's a blob centered at the visible galaxy. Right, right. I think the question is

like you wouldn't see, for example, like between here and Adromeda, you wouldn't see a giant blob of dark matter just floating by itself. Would you? You might. Probably not, though. Yeah, probably not. But it's possible for dark matter, normal matter to get separated, like in the bullet cluster.

You know, some of the dark matter and the normal matter got separated because of a big collision and the normal matter interacts with itself and the dark matter passes through as far as we know. So there could be blobs of dark matter, but it's not like it's evenly distributed, right? So there's lots of places where we think

there probably isn't any dark matter. Okay. All right. So the answer to Alex's question is yes. There are probably many places in the universe without dark matter. Dark matter clumps together in specific locations. That's exactly right.

This is one case we can give a very crisp answer, yes. That's the TLDR. Yes, Alex. Yes. Cool. Before we keep going, let's take a short break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush.

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

In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, it's HoneyGerman, and my podcast, Grasias Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years.

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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. But the whole pretending and cold, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasasas Come Again as part of my Cultura podcast network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

I had this, like, overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then. And I just hit call. Said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation, and I just wanted to call on and let her know. There's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling. And there is help out there. The Good Stuff Podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community.

September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took himself home. have to suicide. One tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. Don't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and the traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

All right, and so our last question today comes to us all the way from Iran. So Farzum from Iran has a pretty interesting question about the shape of galaxies. Yeah, here he is. Hi, guys, my name is Farzum. I'm from Iran. After listening to your episodes about the galactic collision and the gravity, I have a question to ask, why all the galaxies and solar systems in the universe? are disc-shaped.

I mean, if the gravity extends through all the dimensions the same, why they are planar? Yeah, this is a great question too, right? You look out of the sky, you look at these galaxies, you look at the solar system, and they all seem to be organized in these disks. Yeah, they look like flat blobs, right?

Not like perfectly spherical blobs, but like flat blobs, right? Yeah, exactly. They're mostly flat, and they're not spherical, yeah, exactly. And so it's a very natural question. It's a totally typical thing to see out there in the universe. Like if you look at all the models of our solar system, they look like hula hoops, right? One inside of the other. Why doesn't it look like the model, the old model of the atom where the hula hoops are in all kinds of directions?

Why are the orbits of all the planets sort of pretty much in the same plane or at the same level? Yeah, exactly. It's a great question. Because you could imagine otherwise maybe the planets would all be zing, sagging around in lots of different directions, right? Even if they each have their own circle, they could be all sorts of different directions. The short answer to your question is angular momentum, right?

That there's this conserved quantity. This is something you just can't get rid of. If an object, if a cluster of objects has angular momentum, it just can't get rid of it. Let's dig into that just for a moment. Let's just think about momentum at first. If you have like a rock in space and you push it, then that rock's going to go on forever unless something stops it, right?

If it runs into something or whatever. Otherwise, it will go on forever, and that's because it has momentum. And in our universe, momentum is conserved. Why is it conserved? We don't know, but we know that it is. And so things keep going if you push them. There's another kind of momentum, which is about spinning. It's called angular momentum.

You start something spinning, it'll keep spinning, right? Right. Unless something stops it. Right. And you're saying, applies to, like, the Earth going around the Sun, that's spinning around the Sun, and it's hard to not spin, right? Like, it's hard to suddenly stop and go straight into the Sun. Yeah, the only way for that to happen is for something from the outside to come and, like, bang into the Earth.

And that could stop the Earth from going around the Sun or stop the Earth from spinning. If you want to stop your angular momentum, you need to have something from the outside. But a closed system, like the Earth and the Sun or the Galaxy or whatever, can't just stop spinning. that angular momentum can't just disappear. It has to be transferred somewhere or balanced out by the opposite momentum somewhere else. Right. Like two objects flying through space can stop if they bang into each other, right?

Right. In the same way, two things spinning opposite directions could both stop spinning if they touch and their angular momentum cancels out. Right. And things kind of have angular momentum because they didn't start from rest. You know, like if you put two stones out in space, they're just going to,

and there's nothing else around them, the two stones are just going to fly straight into each other. But if they're going at different speeds, then they're going to start circling each other as they get closer to the other. Right? Exactly. Exactly. And so you can imagine sort of the history of our solar system or

galaxy, depending what you're thinking about, and start as a big cloud, right? A big chaotic cloud. Everything's shooting in random directions. And it might feel like, well, everything just sort of cancels itself out. But there's one place where you can draw a line through it and turns out that everything is orbiting around that, right? That's called

the center of rotation. Yeah. And it's sort of like if you're holding up a stick, right? There's one place that balances the stick, where it'll be pulled on by gravity the same amount on both sides. The same way you find this big cloud, there's some line you can draw through it

around which everything is rotating. Yeah, and that point is where basically the center of the galaxy or the center of the solar system is going to form, right? Yes, exactly. And so, So everything is rotating around that, and then gravity does its thing. It pulls things together as much as it can, but it can't shrink everything down too much because it's spinning, right?

And the spinning keeps it sort of fluffed out, but only in the direction perpendicular to that line, to that rotational axis. So along that rotational axis, gravity can squish things down as much as it wants, right? There's nothing preventing it. But around that axis, things have to keep spinning, and that spinning keeps them from getting. too close to the center the same way like the reason that the moon doesn't fall to the earth is because it has velocity right it's spinning around us yeah and so angular momentum can't go away and has to go somewhere and it keeps the stuff from falling too far into that central axis

so that's why everything becomes a disk yeah and that's kind of why all the hula hoops sort of merge right like like let's say um the earth is on a hula hoop orbit around the sun uh right so we're we're on a disc, in a circle there, on an oval. And like, let's say that there was another planet that was also going around the sun, but it was going in a totally different hula hoop, like totally maybe perpendicular to ours. And I think the idea is that, you know,

the attraction between our planet and that other planet, it's not going to make us go closer to the sun or, like, destroy our orbit, but it is going to make the hula hoops sort of merge together, right? I think over a long period of time, yeah, they would both come to orbit in another plane, that's sort of like the average between the two. Because the rotational center would be some axis that's perpendicular to that new plane.

This is the kind of thing. It's easier to describe in front of a chalkboard. We'll use the chalkboard of the mind. That's kind of the idea, is that everyone, at the beginning, everyone's rotating and going in their own orbits. But over time, all these orbits sort of align with each other. And so that's why galaxies and solar systems, they all look like flat disks. Yeah, exactly. the direction perpendicular to that disk

things can pull together and collisions and attraction and all that stuff helps balance it all out and pull it together. Yeah, it's flattened in. But along that disc, it can't get too close in because of angular momentum. He has to keep spinning, and that spinning keeps it from falling in towards the center.

Yeah. So gravity just squishes it in one direction, but it can't squish it in the other directions because that's where the spinning is happening. Yeah, and his question was really interesting because he asked about the dimensions, And you're right that gravity works in all these dimensions, right? But because we have angular momentum,

and angular momentum is defined along a plane, two dimensions, it makes it sort of asymmetric, right? That it doesn't get treated the same way. One really fun exercise is to think about, like, what would physics be like in four dimensions or in five dimensions that can kind of blow your mind? But if we had like four-dimensional space, then you would actually have two different axes of angular momentum

that would be conserved. And so things would look even crazier. Wow. What would you call that? A blob. And this is why I'm not on the physics naming committee. All right, cool. So the idea is that gravity does work in all directions, but it has trouble bringing things together in the direction where they're spinning. Yeah, exactly.

But it can bring things together in the direction. They're not spinning. And so that's why maybe things start out as a big blob, but then they eventually get squished down and they pick kind of the average spin direction. Yeah, exactly. So gravity is the great flattener of the universe. The great flattner. The great squisher. We should just rename it. Yeah, we should just rename it. Squishity. Yeah, there you go. You got Newton, you got Einstein, and then you got Cham.

What was Cham's contribution to the theory of gravity? Oh, a better name. That's definitely, definitely is up there. And then when I break into quantum physics, it'll be the Squishikon. I'm going to go devise an experiment. to look for the Squishita. That's right. I'm going to call it to Squishiton and then go get some coffee and then I'm done. Boom, there's my day. Yeah.

And then what? And then what? All right. So those were awesome questions. I love your questions. You might think, I'm going to send him a question he's never going to answer. I will surprise you. Send us a question.

You'll get an answer. You might even hear your voice on this podcast eventually. Yeah. And if you're Daniel's wife and have also a question about his lifestyle or habits. Just interrupt me any time. Anytime. He'll probably answer that question without interrupting you. So it may even work out. Podcast with an audience of one. Well, thanks for joining us once again. And again, if you have questions, please send it to us at questions at danielanhorhead.com. Thanks for listening and thanks for asking questions.

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. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA, right now in a backlog, will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell, and the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen.

I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, we'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. 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.

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