Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Listener Questions 3

Episode Date: June 4, 2019

Daniel and Jorge answer questions from listeners, like you! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want or gone.

Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In sitcoms, when someone has a problem, they just blurt it out and move on. Well, I lost my job and my parakeet is missing. How is your day? But the real world is different. Managing life's challenges can be overwhelming. So, what do we do? We get support. The Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the Ad Council have mental health resources available for you at loveyourmindday.org.

That's loveyourmindtay.org. See how much further you can go when you take care of your mental health. Hey, Daniel, if you were the dictator of a country, what would you do in terms of science? In terms of science, I think I'd like to explore, like, what is the big? as cookie that's possible to bake and still be tasty. Mmm, that's something physicists wonder about? I wonder about that because, you know, a cookie is a complicated thing. It has to be crispy, it has to be soft in the inside.

You make it too big, then it's all just going to be gooey. How do you get the heat dispersed? It's a hard physics problem. So you think you need all the resources of a country to figure out the answer to this question? Hey, if you're going to do something, do it $10 billion big, right? That's the way I rolled. The $10 billion cookie would be your same. science project, your dream science project.

How about you? Would you aim higher? I would probably just make sure everyone understand science, you know? Pour all that money into educating people about science. You should fund, like, an awesome podcast about it. Yeah. Oh, man. You know, and maybe like get two people on it and... Two really good-looking people who eat a lot of cookies, but stay trim anyway. Yeah, and then just give them the $10 billion. I'm sure they'll be responsible with it.

Yeah, sure. Totally not spending on. cookies or anything like that. That's right. Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. And I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist by day and a podcaster by, I don't know, afternoon. And I'm a big fan of cookies and science.

And welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of IHeart Radio. In which we look around and wonder what is weird, what is amazing, what is crazy about this universe, and then we talk about it in a way that we hope you will understand. And we're also the authors of the book, We Have No Idea, a Guide to the Unknown Universe. So if you would like to hear more from us or learn more about all these great and amazing questions about the universe, go check it out. That's right. And we also love to hear from you about your questions about the universe. At the end of every episode, we tell people, please, write in if you have something you'd like to hear us talk about. If you have a question, you can't quite figure out the answer to just using Google.

Send it to us. We'll break it down for you. And a lot of people write us, right, Daniel? We get a couple of a dozen a day, right? Oh, yeah. We got a lot of nice emails. And some of them are just appreciation, people saying, hey, thanks for the show. We're enjoying it, which is wonderful to read.

And then people send us their crackpot theories of the universe. like, hey, I figured out dark matter and, you know, quantum gravity and, you know, why airline food tastes so bad, all with my one theory. Daniel, actually, that one was for me. What do you mean? It's a crack-pack theory. Didn't you read it? I read all the theories that people send to us.

Sometimes I read them carefully. Sometimes I skim through them, I'll admit. But I do love reading them, and I love getting people's emails. And mostly I love the emails where people ask questions, where people say, here's something I don't understand something I'd love to figure out. Could you please explain something to me? Have you ever gotten a question that you had never thought about before? Oh, for sure. Yeah, lots of questions people ask. I had never heard before. Never even thought about like how to answer that question before. Those are my favorite ones. And so Daniel, we'll answer your emails, but every once in a while

we have an episode where we answer your questions on the podcast. And today is one of those episodes. Can I tell you about one of the questions that we got that totally blew my mind? Oh, please. Somebody wrote in and said, What if the sun is actually a giant banana wrapped in hydrogen gas? Think about it. Think about it. So I did. I thought about it.

That's a fascinating idea. I'd never thought of that idea before. I've never answered that question before. I don't know how to answer that question. So I thought maybe you're the banana expert. What would be preventing the sun from being a banana wrapped in hydrogen? What would be preventing it? Exploding hydrogen.

Well, I guess it'd be like a roasted banana, right? Because it's pretty hot there. So if you like bananas flambay, then maybe that'd be good. But I'm not sure how you would assemble all those hydrogen atoms and fuse them in the right way. They got potassium and all that stuff to make it into a banana. Right. So I think that was not a sincere question. It was maybe actually a joke aimed at you.

Oh. But technically, is it possible? Like, you know, just out of random, you know, fluctuations, somehow a banana forms for an instant in time. So it could be true. Yes. And in fact, if you believe in the multiverse, then there is some universe in which

the sun spontaneously forms a giant space banana in its core for an instant. Yes. Yeah, there you go. There you go. And that's the universe I want to live in. This is an aspirational podcast, folks. We talk about the universe we live in and the universe we wish

we lived in. That's right. And the answer is always in the multiverse, anything is possible. So technically, you can be optimistic about anything. That's right. Even space bananas. That's right. Feel good, people, because it's all possible. It's all possible.

Yeah. And so today on the podcast, we'll be tackling... Listener questions. Some of them are questions that I get a lot, and I thought people might be interested to hear the answer. Maybe other people have these questions. Some of them are questions I'd never heard before and had to do a bit of research.

So we mix it up a little bit. Yeah, and so today we have some pretty exciting questions. We have a question about a giant space gun. We have questions about photons, and we have questions about why isn't everything exploding. Or is it? Or is it? That's right. And so we'll get into that today.

So buckle up, folks. It's going to be a crazy ride today. So today's first question comes to us from Paul. And Paul had a question about how, is there a bit of? better way to get to space. So here is Paul's question. Hi, Daniel and Jorge. When I was a kid, I remember reading in an old Guinness Book of World Record about a gun in Barbados that could fire 16-inch shell weighing about 330 pounds to an altitude of 215,000 feet. Now, that's less than half of the lowest orbital altitude,

but that was 57 years ago. So can a gun put an object into orbit? And if so, why aren't we doing it? It has to be cheaper than rockets. Thanks. All right. Thank you, Paul, for that awesome question. This has the distinction of being, you're the only person to ever write in asking that question. Really, it's not a burning question in the public's mind.

Apparently not. Not everybody's thinking about what they could launch into space using a really big gun. But I love the end of this question when he says, if we can do it, why aren't we doing it all the time? I mean, if this is within our grasp, man, I would be like shooting banana pies into space all the time. time. I think it's interesting because the corollary to his question was, what he was sort of really asking

was, isn't this cheaper than rockets? Because really, it seems anything should be cheaper than rockets. That's true. Rockets are not cheap, right? And so a lot of people spend a lot of time thinking about other ways to get stuff into space because rockets cost millions and millions of dollars. Right, yeah. And so the question really is, like, can you build a giant space gun?

And that's how you put things into orbit. You just shoot them out as super fast and up, I guess, vertically up is how you would do it, or maybe not. And then that would just go off into space. It wouldn't stop. We would go into space and get into orbit. That's the question, right? Yeah, that's the question. And let's unpack it a little bit because there's a couple of problems with this idea.

First is just getting it up high enough, right? Like, can you shoot something from the ground and make it all the way into space, right? And if you just want to, like, leave the Earth, it's a whole separate. question of, could you shoot something from the ground and get it into orbit? But let's just say you want to escape the Earth. You're on a mission. You want to flow down to space and you just want to leave Earth's gravity, right? Meaning shoot something with a gun and not have it fall back down. Exactly. Yeah. So the question is then, how fast does it have to go, right? That's called the escape velocity of the Earth. The escape velocity of the Earth is really high. Like,

if you're going to leave the surface and not get any more pushes, right, remember a rocket gets continuous pushes. It brings the pusher with it as a It's going up in the air. It keeps getting more and more pushes. It keeps accelerating. Yeah. So you're going to get all that push in the very beginning. So you have to have your maximum speed immediately after you leave the gun because you're going to lose it pretty quickly.

So then the question is how fast do you have to be going to leave Earth's orbit? Okay. So like what's the initial velocity you need to have in order to keep going into space and not fall back down? That's right. Exactly. And on the surface of the Earth, the escape velocity you'd need is about 11 kilometers. per second. So in one second, you'd have to be going, you have to cover 11 kilometers. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, for scale, that's like 33 times the speed of sound. So, you know, like jets

can go like Mach 1, mock 2, mock 3. This is Mach 33. Wow. How much is that in miles per hour? In miles per hour, I think that's like 25,000 miles per hour. Wow. So that's a pretty big speed. I don't think my car goes up that high. I think, I don't think my Prius has enough digits, I think, in its digital readout. Yeah, I don't think the digits is the problem with your Prius. But that's exactly the problem. Like, number one is how do you get something going that fast, right? Like, shooting stuff from a rifle doesn't get anywhere near that speed.

Like rifles, they can shoot a bullet fast in the speed of sound, but not 33 times a speed of sound. Oh, I see. So you need, like, a really big gun. You need a lot more explosive to get it up that speed. Oh, I see. So even if you take a rifle and point it up and you shoot, the bullet would eventually come back down. Do not do that, yes.

Do not point a rifle straight up because that bullet will come right back down at you or the guy standing next to you. This happens every year at New Year's Eve. People fire guns into the air and you think like, where do you think those bullets are going? They're not going into space. Not into space.

Not into space. Now they're coming back down and maybe hurting somebody. So do not fire bullets into the air. They will not go to space. And the other problem is, say you did manage to shoot a gun or, you know, you had some payload and you shot it at this incredible speeds, so it had enough energy.

Well, it's not easy to go through the atmosphere at that speed. What happens when you go through the atmosphere at high speeds is friction from the air, air resistance. So you heat up. Just like, you know, how spaceships, when they land, they have to come through the atmosphere, and, you know, there's all that fire and burning and stuff. That's because of the friction with the air. So this way, you'd have so much speed, you'd have friction on the way up. Oh, so it's kind of like the re-entry problem, but in reverse.

Exactly. It's the reentry problem on the way out. So if you build like a $300 million satellite and then want to launch it in the space, well, you don't want it going 25,000 miles per hour through the air because it'll melt. What if you put shielding on it, you know, like they do with the shuttle and the landers? Yeah, but the shuttle doesn't reenter the atmosphere 25,000 miles per hour, and that's on purpose, right? It slows down a lot, and it does it very gradually. Wow. So you need a lot of shielding, and then this thing would get heavy, and then it gets.

It's more expensive, and you're going to get this thing plus its shielding up to 25,000 miles per hour. It's not easy. It's hard to imagine that cold air can burn you to a crisp, right? Yeah, well, imagine it's sandpaper, right? Imagine somebody's going to, you're going to do a, you have one of those banana slip and slides in your backyard, except instead of slippery plastic, somebody puts sandpaper, right? That's what it would be like. Oh, man. That is a horrific scenario, Daniel.

I'm trying to erase it from my mind now. Well, that is why we don't do this. I mean, there's other problems, too, right? But those are reasons number one and two. Reason number three. This is why we don't go on slip and slides of 25,000 miles per hour, you're saying? Everything feels like sandpaper at 25,000 miles per hour. That's the point.

Okay, so it's really hard to do just to accelerate any kind of mass or object up to 25,000 miles per hour, and also it would burn up with air. So what are some of the other problems? The other problem is getting it into orbit. I mean, what we talked about just now is getting it out of Earth's atmosphere, out of Earth's gravitational pull. That's actually harder than getting something in orbit because you have to go higher, right? So you might think, well, what if we just wanted to go to, like, low Earth orbit? We didn't want to actually leave Earth.

You think, well, that might be easier. That's true, but you can't actually shoot something from the ground into orbit. You cannot. You cannot. Because remember, you're shooting it. You give it one push, right? You can't land in a stable orbit. It has a fixed trajectory, and that trajectory includes intercepting the ground.

So eventually, it will re-intercept the ground. The way to get into orbit is you fly up into there, and then you adjust your speed so you have the right speed and direction to be in orbit. But there's no way to get there from the ground without additional pushes once you're up in the atmosphere. Oh, but you're saying you need minor adjustments once you get up there, or you need, like, a lot of adjustment? No, it could be fairly minor adjustments. So, like, one scenario is you have stuff on the ground

and you shoot it up to fairly low Earth orbit or just below using your massive space gun that you built because you're a dictator. And then you have something catch it, something in low Earth orbit like catch it and then readjust it and shoot it out into orbit. So that kind of system might work, but you can't just shoot something into orbit from the ground

because no trajectory that starts from the ground will lead to a stable orbit. Like even if you're a Superman, you could not put a football in of it no matter how hard you try that's right oh that's right and and football and even superman if he threw a football 25,000 miles per hour it would melt right like unless it's a super football from his original planet or something yeah kryptonite football that's right but then he couldn't hmm hold it yeah exactly but that's just the detail yeah the thing is and and um paul mentioned this in his question is that people have tried this right people

have worked on this problem. People have shot stuff pretty far up. So people are not daunted by the fact that this seems impossible slash impractical. Wait, wait, didn't they do the math? Yeah, you know, but these are dictators we're talking about. And so sometimes

they're not bothered by math, you know, the rules don't apply to them. These are autocrats we're talking about. Math is just fake news. All right, so that's a pretty amazing thing to learn is that people have tried this and both people who've tried it

are sort of pretty notorious. Yeah, this is not a community of folks you want to go to conferences with because the first person to really do this significantly was Hitler, and Hitler had this canon called the V3 Canon, and it could launch projectiles 90 kilometers away. Again, the Germans were also working

in rocket technology, but this is just launching it from the ground with no more pushes. Well, I was wondering when our discussions would eventually devolve into talking about Hitler. Everything on the Internet gets. compared to Hitler eventually, right? There's like a rule. Eventually.

Why not physics? Here we are. So he tried to build a giant cannon that would launch things into space. Yeah, and I don't think his goal was to get into space. I think his goal is be able to launch shells to France from Germany. Right? They wanted like really long distance bombardment. I think that was their goal.

I don't think they cared that much about shooting stuff into space. Oh, I see. Just like what's the biggest missile you can build? Yeah, exactly. But it inspired another guy, a guy named Gerald Bull, and he convinced some combination of American and Canadian governments to give him a bunch of money for something called Project Harp, which is basically build a huge gun and see if you can launch stuff into space.

And he didn't do a terrible job. Really? He came up with a pretty good name, Project Harp. Project That's Build a Giant Gun and chasing things into space. Project Crazy Dictators Fund this. Exactly. So how far did he get? Well, his record still stands today.

He shot a 400-pound object, 110 miles above the Earth's surface. So that counts. Like, he got something into space. Now, it came back down. It didn't escape the Earth, right? He shot it up and it came back down. But that's the record today in terms of launching something from the ground and not giving it any more pushes.

It's 110 miles. How do he do it? What did this gun look like? It just looks like a really big gun. I mean, it's just like a really big tube. I mean, there's not a whole lot of cleverness here, right? It's just a big tube with a big explosive in it. And the question is, can you get enough money to build a bigger and bigger gun?

And, you know, some of these things don't scale that easily, and the strength of the cylinder, et cetera, you have to take a new account. But basically, it's just spend more money, make it bigger. It's kind of like particle physics, right? Spend more money, make a bigger accelerator. I guess the idea is that you sort of make a, like a rocket, but instead of having the propellant and the fuel on the rocket, on the missile, you just keep it on the ground.

Exactly. Do you know what I mean? Like that's what a giant gun solves is the idea that you don't need to bring the fuel with you. You just explore it all here on Earth and then that sends you into space. That's right. The problem with a rocket is you're not just lifting your payload.

You're lifting the fuel. You need to lift the fuel. You need to lift the fuel, et cetera, et cetera. So it gets by the time you're actually launching, you're like 90% fuel. So this solves that problem by basically blowing up all the fuel at once on the ground and seeing how far it goes, right?

but it doesn't really solve the problem. I think a more clever idea is, like, laser-supported rockets. Like, shoot the energy at it using, you know, beams, basically, so you don't have to transport the fuel. You can send it up from the ground as it goes. Wow. And shoot it with lasers, which would absorb the laser, and they would absorb the laser and redirect it to their propulsion.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, if I was a dictator and I was funding crazy science projects, getting stuff in space, I would definitely put some money in laser propulsion. You're like, I'm not going to be one of those crazy dictators that want to build a giant gun. I'm just going to be a dictator that makes giant lasers. Yeah, exactly.

But the story doesn't end there. This guy, Gerald Bull, he ran out of money from the U.S. and Canada and didn't finish his gun. But then he sold the idea. He sold the idea to Saddam Hussein, right? What? Yes, inspired by Hitler and then employed by Saddam Hussein. And he said, look, I'm going to build you the biggest gun ever.

And I guess that sales pitch worked. You know, he must have a killer. PowerPoint slide deck, and he was building the mother of all guns. He just had three words, biggest gun ever. And then they just like shouted with money. I wanted. I don't know. Yeah, and so he was in the middle of building, the biggest gun ever.

Like, I think Saddam called it the mother of all guns. And, you know, Saddam probably had the same idea that Hitler had. Like, I could launch shells to Israel or launch shells to anywhere in the Middle East or something nefarious. But Bull was actually assassinated by, we don't know who, while he was working on the project. So it didn't end very well for the scientist. Wow. Yeah. That's a movie or a comic book right there.

Yeah, exactly. Ben Affleck is probably writing the screenplay as we speak. Yeah, he's the CIA agent. Task with assassinating. Exactly. So Gerald Bull got a bunch of money from Iraq, but he never matched his original high score that he did on his own using Project Harp. that stands today. So 110 miles is the record.

I don't think it's a practical way to launch things. Because remember, the kind of things we want to launch in a space are usually delicate, right? Telecommunications satellites or people. And you've got to be pretty careful. So the rocket approach is much more gentle because you never achieve as high as speed. Interesting. So putting your delicate object on top of like tons and tons of explosives. Not recommended.

That's the safest way to do it in a rocket. Yes, that is the safest way to do it. Gradually blow up all those explosives, right? Don't blow it up all at once on the ground. All right, so that's the answer for Paul. Can you shoot stuff into space unit using a gun? That's the question. The answer is technically yes.

But it's not a great idea? But it's really hard. Not a good idea. And also, you can't put it into orbit. You need something else. That's right, yeah. You need another stage. Something to catch it and redirect it or something once you get up into orbit.

Yeah. And also for Paul, stop trying to make it. this gun because they're going to assassinate you. Little pro tip there from your podcast. Also, funding from dictators doesn't always end out well. All right, thank you, Paul.

And so we have two more questions about particle collisions and about dark energy. But first, 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 2, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop.

Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone.

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

Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'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 reel is how our hair is styled. You talk about the important role hairstylist play in our hair. our communities, 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.

All right, Daniel, so today we are answering reader, or more like listener questions, questions that are listeners out there send us. And so we answered one about building a giant space gun. And so our second question comes from Jacob. And Jacob has a question about your job, right, Daniel? That's right, yeah. Hey, Daniel and Jorge. I was just wondering how you guys isolate and manipulate the particle or particles that you use for the Large Hadron Collider.

thanks that's a great question right he's asking us like how do you get one particle into the collider and slam it into the other particles and how do you control them and manipulate them it's a great question yeah because um you know

we we know that in a particle collider you're smashing particles together and so i guess the question is how do you how could you possibly get two of these particles to hit each other right on the head that seems like an impossible problem it is an impossible problem and that's why

we don't do that, because that's basically impossible. Yeah. All right. Yeah, you don't aim one particle to hit another particle. No, that would be really hard. It's like, imagine you're like throwing a water

balloon from L.A. and somebody else is throwing a water balloon from New York, and you have to have them like meet somewhere over Kansas, right? That's basically impossible. So that'll never work. But wait, wait. What if you use a space gun? Totally will work. Absolutely. A water balloon will survive

25,000 miles per hour. No problem. A space, a potato gun or a water balloon gun. Yeah. No, it's a good question. That's impossible. And so it's also very hard to just isolate individual particles. I mean, there's a whole field of physics that works on that. Atomic, molecular optics and stuff like that where they trap individual particles. But that's really hard to do. And so what we do instead is we don't send individual particles flying against individual particles. We send a little gas of particles, like a bunch of particles against a bunch of particles coming the other direction. Is that the official physics name? Buncher? A bunch. Yeah, no, we actually use the word bunch. And the reasons we use, yeah, exactly, bunches. You can look it up at the LHC. And the reasons for that

is that even if the particles do hit each other, the chances of a collision are not great. Like, mostly they just, you know, gently brush off each other. So what you want actually is a bunch of collisions happening at the same time so that you have a higher chance of seeing something. interesting plus it's just hard to get them to hit so even if you so even if you could align one particle and aim it directly at another particle it's they might not collide at all yeah exactly I mean what do we really mean by a collision a collision is an interaction we think of collision as the edges of two things hitting each other right because we're used to macroscopic objects but in that case you know we zoom in microscopically and think about what's happening when the two

edges touch. What happens really is that the particles in one push away from the particles in the other. That's an interaction. That's like a force. So now strip that all away and you have just two particles pushing against each other. If they're going really, really fast, unless they hit immediately right on each other, then they'll just whiz right by each other. And even still, even if they go, they go right on top of each other, it's quantum mechanical. And so sometimes just nothing happens. Most of the time, very little happens. Most of the time, very little happens. Most of time the thing that happens is boring is that the two particles just like slightly deflect so what we want to see is the rare stuff the times when two particles smashed together make something weird and

crazy nobody's ever seen before so to make that happen we have to send a bunch of particles in at once but what's the difference between them interacting and not interacting do you know what i mean like how do they decide or is it is it just that they're more head-on than others and or that they have no other option but to mush together or what there's a real quantum mechanical mystery there because you know quantum mechanics tells us that you can repeat the same experiment, you can, like, shoot two particles exactly the same angle at each other the same way and get two different outcomes. So you're asking like what determines whether they interact or they don't or that the interaction is a boring one or an interesting one? It's random. Like there's somewhere in the universe a die

gets rolled every time these two particles collide that determines like, are they going to bounce off each other gently? Are they going to create a Higgs boson? Are they going to create something else these folks have never seen and blow their minds or are they just going to miss? And so the strategy you guys use is to just go for the numbers. You just throw a whole bunch of the particles. You don't try to hit individual particles together.

You just throw a whole bunch of them together and you hope that you get some of them hitting each other. Exactly. It's like you're looking for your first job and so you send out like thousands of resumes, right? You don't just email one resume and then wait a week, right? You send out a lot of resumes. And in our case...

Sounds like my faculty search when I was looking for a professorship. Exactly, right? You go for the numbers. And so in this case, we have 10 to the 11 protons in every bunch. That's 100 billion protons in a little bunch. And they're all in a really small space, right? Yeah, exactly. And we focus them using magnets.

So the other part of his question was, like, how do you control them? How do you maintain them? Basically, we use magnets because you can't have a little zip-block bag with just 10 to the 11 protons in it. You carry it around. So we have a magnetic bottle, essentially. We use magnets to keep these things moving in a circle, right? Magnets bend the path of a charged particle.

So we focus it using magnets, and we get it down to two and a half micrometers. So we want as many protons as possible in as small an area as possible because it's the greatest density, the greatest possibility that something exciting is going to happen. And you might think, well, that's a lot of particles, right? It is, but it's also a small number, right? Like, you know, a mole, which is, you know, the atomic unit has, you know, is Abagadra's number is like 10 to the 23 particles, right? And a really, really good vacuum has 10 to the 12 particles in it per cubic meter. So 10 to the 11 particles is a lot if you just count them, but it's also, it's very diffuse, right?

It's not, it's not like this is a very dense thing, this bunch of protons. Wow. And you don't just send one bunch at a time. you send a whole bunch of bunches at each other. That's right. It's organized like a Swiss clock, which makes sense because it's a huge circle in Switzerland. In Geneva.

Yeah. And we have more than 2,000 bunches in the accelerator at all times. And, you know, the thing is like tens of kilometers around, and so they're all synchronized. And so every 25 nanoseconds, one bunch hits another bunch. And then 25 nanoseconds later, another bunch is coming down the line, and they collide. And so it's just like all day, all night,

every 25 nanoseconds, we collide one bunch of protons against another bunch of protons. It's like a ferris wheel, but instead of each pod, you have 2,800 bunches just going around and around. Yeah, a ferris wheel makes it sound like it's all fun and joy, but these guys are slamming into each other. It's like an assembly line, you know, they're just coming down the line and getting smushed into each other. And also, you can reuse the bunches. Like the bunches pass through each other, some tiny fraction that may be interact, but most of them are untouched. so you can send them through again. So they go through each other

and then they just come back around again. Yeah, exactly. You don't discard them. Yeah, so it's called a fill. We fill the accelerator. We put all these bunches in. We get them going. We slam into each other.

And then eventually you lose some of them because you can't have perfect containment. And so the effective number of collisions you're getting starts to drop. So then you empty it and you refill it. Start again. All right. Well, so that answers Jacob's question.

And he has, how do you control the particles in the collider and how do you get single particles to hit each other? And the answer is using a bunch of bunches. Yeah, exactly. So we don't throw one water balloon at another water balloon. We throw like 100 billion water balloons at 100 billion water balloons. And then it's so much fun. We just get to watch what happens.

We like create explosions and watch them all day long. Best job in the world. Okay, here's a question then. for me, what have you aimed this collider into space? Would you get the protons up into space? The protons are definitely moving fast enough to escape Earth's

velocity, but the atmosphere would stop them because they would slam into other particles and they would very quickly. So one proton would hit another proton and then those two protons would share the original proton's energy. So you have two particles at half the energy and then you'd have four particles at a quarter of the energy and eventually

you'd have a trillion particles at a trillionth of the energy. But some of them might make it out into space, right? Yeah, some of them might bleed out over the edge of the atmosphere, but you wouldn't have like, you know, you're imagining like Superman rocketing from the surface of the earth, triumphantly arm raised, right? That's not what would happen. You'd just gently heat the atmosphere, basically. But some of it might leak out into space.

Yeah, exactly. Some of them might leak out in space, but not into Earth's orbit. Okay, got it, got it. All right, Jacob. I hope that answered your question. and so we'll let we have one more question about the exploding universe but before we get to it let's take a quick break the December 29th 1975 LaGuardia airport the holiday rush parents hauling luggage kids gripping their new Christmas toys then at 633 p.m. everything changed There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal.

Apparently the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight that's harder to predict and even harder to stop listen to the new season of law and order criminal justice system on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your

podcasts my boyfriend's professor is way too friendly and now i'm seriously suspicious oh wait a minute sam maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit well dakota it's back to school week on the okay story time podcast so we'll find out soon this person writes my has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy?

That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not. To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the Iheart

radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford. And in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Ophia 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 reel. It's how our hair is styled. You 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 IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, today we're answering listener questions, questions from you, the listeners of this podcast. And so our third question of the day for this episode

comes to us from someone in Dallas. Hi, Daniel and Jorge. This is Tom from Dallas. I love the show and it always leads me to more questions. And one thing that I've been really grappling with is the expansion of the universe, right? So if the entire universe is expanding faster than the speed of light because of dark energy and it's not expanding from a central point, but rather from all points in space time simultaneously, then wouldn't everything just kind of be exploding around us?

How do I even exist if I'm imploding at faster than the speed of light? I don't feel like I'm imploding. Anyways, guys, I really appreciate you taking my question, and I really enjoy the show. Thanks for everything you do. Yeah, I love that question. I love that he had his mind blown, you know, that he's thinking about this cosmic-sized questions.

He wants to understand, and that's my favorite thing is when you can get people a piece of information that they didn't know about the universe, and then they try to fit it into their brain. They're like, okay, if that's crazy thing you just said is true, then why isn't this happen? And why doesn't that happen? And that's physics, right?

That's like, how do I reconcile this thing with all the things I know? And so I love seeing people do that. They're basically being physicists. Yeah. I feel like we're doing our job if it makes people think and have their own questions. That's right. Not if we're making people worried that they're exploding. But, you know, it's a good question to ask.

But they are, Daniel. They are. Their minds are exploding. That's right. Their mental horizons. Yeah. Their connection to the universe. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And it's a great question. And I think the question comes from hearing that dark energy is expanding the universe, right? Stretching it out. Yeah, because we had an episode where the title of the podcast episode was, is the universe exploding. And we said at the end that, yes, the universe is exploding. That's right. The universe is exploding. And I think a lot of people are tempted to think about that like an explosion, which has a center, right? You blow up a bomb. Things fly out from the center. And so you imagine, oh, the expansion is happening from the center, things are getting pushed out. But we made the point in that episode, which is true, that that's not the way it's happening, that dark energy expands all of space. So every point in space is being affected by dark energy. New space is being created all the time everywhere. Right.

It's like the dark energy is not just acting in the center of the universe or at the end. It's like all the way through, there's just a little bit of dark energy that's pushing everything. everything apart. That's right. And also it sounds really violent because we say that dark energy is, you know, almost three-fourths of the energy of the universe is dark energy. So it sounds like, wow, this must be a really powerful force. It's pushing galaxies apart. And galaxies have hundreds of billions of stars. What could possibly have the energy to push those apart? And if that's applying to me too, if you could push galaxies apart, why doesn't just just shred me like tissue paper, right? I think that's the essence of the question. Yeah. And in particular, he said that

If the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, how is it that we don't feel it right now? Like, why is it my hand moving away from my other hand at the speed of light if the whole universe is expanding faster than the speed of light? Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. Well, the answer, the thing to understand to grapple with this question is that dark energy

is the most powerful thing in the universe in that it has the biggest slice of the energy budget. but remember that dark energy is everywhere right most of the stuff in the universe is not everywhere like the matter in the universe is clumped up into stars and galaxies and it's in most of space doesn't have matter in it right dark energy doesn't work like that dark energy is uniform it's spread equally everywhere so it doesn't have to be very powerful to add up to a really really really big number because most of the places where there's nothing there's dark energy do we know that for sure that dark energy is

evenly spread out. It's not at all clumped together or in imperceptible clumps. That's right. We know very little about dark energy but that's the model that fits the data that dark energy is expanding the universe everywhere. And again, we don't know what dark energy is, right? It's really just a description

to the fact that the universe is expanding but it's consistent with something which is a property of space, meaning that it's uniform, it's everywhere. Whether you're in the middle of a star or in the middle of one of our listeners or in the middle of one of these huge voids in the in the super um supercluster sheets and bubbles right it's everywhere right it's like a it's like an even glow that the universe has exactly and because

it's everywhere it's not really very strong anywhere okay so yes it's creating new space between our galaxy and other galaxies but there's a lot of space there so it adds up right it can have a big effect right but between like your hand and your other hand there's not a lot of space So it is creating new space there, but it's very weak compared to the other forces at play, namely the chemical bonds holding your body together, right? The reason that you don't fall apart is that the stuff in your body is holding onto the other stuff in your body. And those bonds are more powerful than dark energy. Right. But, you know, I think Tom was maybe wondering how it can be that the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, but yet you don't feel it here.

Yeah, well, you don't feel it here because it's a very small. effect here, right? Like, it's creating a very small amount of space per space, and that adds up to making things, to creating space faster than light can travel, right? Like, imagine all the space between here and another galaxy. So every piece of that space increases by 1% and then another 1% and another 1%. And it's increasing at a rate that it's faster than light can go through it. Remember, nothing can go faster than light through space, but there's no limit to how it. fast you can create space. So all those little bits of space between us and that other galaxy are working hard enough to create more space than light can fly through. I was thinking maybe a good analogy was that if you grab a rubber band or a strip of rubber band and you stretch it, you know, the ends of the rubber band can be moving really fast relative to each other. But if you're somewhere in the rubber band, you wouldn't feel the stretch that violently. Yeah, I think that works. except, you know, we don't know if the universe has an edge, right?

But if you just pick two points, right, like two galaxies, you can think of them as the edges of the rubber band, and all the space between them is like the rubber bandy part of the rubber band, then, yeah, I think that works, right? Because the distance between the two galaxies is the sum of all the increasing distances and the little bits of space in between. Right, yeah. Yeah, so dark energy is there, it's out there,

it's everywhere in the universe, it's also inside you. And the reason it, like, isn't ripping you away from the earth is that, like, the force of gravity is strong enough to keep you on Earth. The force of gravity, even though it's so weak, is stronger than dark energy is right here, right? Dark energy, remember, is very weak on a local scale, but only great when it adds up over huge pieces of space. So you're like, you're in one point of the rubber band and the ground, the river band is stretching a little bit, but you're keeping yourself together stronger than the rubber band is stretching you at that little point. in the rubber band. Exactly, right. Like if you're, you know, it's a windy day

and somebody's getting blown, but they can grab onto something, right? You can grab onto a pole or to your friend or something, you can overcome the power of the wind just by holding on, right? It's the same thing. Dark energy is just like wind expanding everything in space, but it's a bit of a gentle breeze.

And so it doesn't take that much of a force to overcome it. And that's why, for example, our galaxy is not getting torn apart, right? The space between galaxies is increasing. Why isn't our galaxy getting shredded? The reason is gravity. There's enough gravity in our galaxy to hold itself together to battle dark energy. We don't know how long that's going to be the case because dark energy turned on like five billion years ago and started expanding the universe. We don't know why.

We don't know how long it's going to keep going. We don't know if it's going to increase the intensity of the expansion or stop and turn around. We don't really know. So will it forever be weaker than local gravity and local chemical bonds? We don't know. It could be in the future. it's much more powerful and it shreds everything, right? Or it could turn off and get bored and go

do something else. Looking forward to that. All right, so Tom asked, why isn't dark energy exploding everything, even the things around us? And the answer is that it is. It is exploding everything, Tom. That's right. Even you, Tom. Boom, we just literally blew your mind.

But we used the word exploding and the word faster than the speed of light, kind of in a universe scale, right? Like on a universe scale, it's sort of exploding, and the ends of the universe, if there are ends, or two extreme ends of the universe, are maybe moving faster than the speed of light relative to each other. But on like a local, little tiny, hey, my house scale, it's not such an incredible effect. Right. Well, those ends are not moving faster than the speed of light relative to each other, but space is being created between them faster than light can move through it, which is a slightly technical difference in the way you see. say it. Yeah. But yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay. All right. Cool. So those are three awesome

questions, mostly from the southern United States. That's right. Randomly selected, but this time they mostly ended up from the southern U.S. But we get questions from all over the world. So if you're a listener from a far-flung place, please send us your questions. Or if you just have a burning question about something in the universe and you'd like us to explain it, please write it in. I love getting your emails. Yeah. So please send them in to Questions at Danielanhorpe.com. Well, thanks for listening.

We hope you guys enjoyed that. Tune in next time. And if you're a dictator of a country with a billion-dollar science budget, consider investing it in a podcast. Or a giant space gun using rubber bands to fly protons into outer space. There you go. Give this man some money. That I will agree with.

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. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio,

visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back-to-school week. on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate.

Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If a baby is giggling in the back seat, they're probably happy. If a baby is crying in the back seat. They're probably hungry. But if a baby is sleeping in the back seat, will you remember they're even there? When you're distracted, stressed,

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