Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Listener Questions 6

Episode Date: October 8, 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. It's important that we just reassure people that they're not alone, and there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, season two, 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. One Tribe saved my life twice. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff.

Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I was diagnosed with cancer on Friday and cancer-free the next Friday. No chemo, no radiation, none of that. On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us podcast, I sat down with Warren Campbell, Grammy-winning producer, pastor, and music executive to talk about the beats, the business, and the legacy behind some of the biggest names in gospel, R&B, and hip-hop. Professionally, I started at Deadwell Records. From Mary Mary to Jennifer Hudson, we get into... to the soul of the music and the purpose that drives it.

Listen to Culture raises us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Why are TSA rules so confusing? You got a hood of you. I'm take it all. I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devin.

And we're best friends and journalists with a new podcast called No Such Thing, where we get to the bottom of questions like that. Why are you screaming? I can't expect what to do. Now, if the rule was the same, go off on me. I deserve it. You know, lock him up. Listen to No Such Thing on the.

the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. No such thing. Are you the kind of person that wonders if black holes have hair on them? Do you ever think about what it's like to be in a fighter jet and roll down the windows? Do you ever wonder if light gets, you know, tired on its way across the universe from distant stars all the way to earth. If so, then you're the right person to be listening to this podcast, because that's exactly the kind of stuff we're going to be talking about today. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm the co-author of the book, We Have No Idea,

a guide to the unknown universe. My co-author, Jorge Chem, is usually the co-host of this podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, brought to you by iHeart Radio. Today, Jorge has to be a way, so I'm going to do the podcast by myself. And today we're doing something which is absolutely my favorite, which is answering listener questions. I love listener questions because they give me feedback and help me understand what people out there are thinking, what they're understanding, and what they're confused about. When Jorge and I do lectures live, we talk about all the amazing mysteries of the universe, and then people ask questions. And those questions are so valuable because they show me exactly what people have misunderstood. If I said something

and I thought I was super clear, and then somebody asked the question, it helps me see how to better explain something. So I really value listener questions. Thank you to. everybody who has written in either with a point of confusion about something that we said on the podcast or something totally crazy that they were thinking about and they wanted us to explain. And for all of you who have not written into the podcast, what are you waiting for? We want to hear your questions. When I say I answer every email, I mean it. And when I say I love getting questions from listeners, I am being totally serious. So please send us your questions to questions at Daniel and Jorge.com.

You might even hear yourself on the podcast. So today we'll be answering listener questions, questions about light, questions about black holes, questions about flying at the speed of sound with the windows open. And all these questions have something in common, which is they're sort of like what if questions, like how could you do this or how could you make this work or what would happen if you did this thing?

And all of these reveal people's just desire to understand what happens in the universe, to reveal secrets of the universe by cooking, up crazy scenarios, scenarios where nature has to reveal the truth. And in the end, that's really what experimental physics is. We want to know the answer to a question. Does the universe work this way or that way? And so we come up with some scenario where nature has to reveal to us the answer. We corner nature and say, well, show us. You know, is light a particle or is it a wave? Does the Higgs boson have this much mass or that much mass? Really all experimental physics is, is constructing

physical scenarios where nature has to show us her cards. And so a lot of the questions you'll hear about today are exactly that kind of question. So today we have three questions. Let's dive in. Hey guys. My question is, what would happen if we quantum entangled two particles and took particle one and shot it into a black hole? Could we learn anything and what do you think we could learn, if we can, from particle two. Shout out to South Dakota and Lexi. All right, I got this question, and it blew my mind, and it blew my mind because it combines so many different things that I love.

You got black holes, you got quantum mechanics, you got inventing new ways to explore the universe, right? So I love when listeners think up new ideas for how we could solve ancient questions. All right, so first let's talk about why would we want to know what's going on inside of black hole. Like, why does anybody care? Isn't it just basically the garbage disposal of the universe jammed filled with rejected matter that's got swooshed down the toilet bowl and into the black hole? Well, that's what we don't know. General relativity tells us that black holes might have a singularity in the center of them, right? A tiny dot of matter with infinite

density, something which is, you know, hard for us to imagine. What does infinite density mean? But according to Einstein's equations, that's exactly the conditions you need to create. a black hole. Fine. And we know that Einstein's equations have been validated many, many times and nobody's ever found a flaw in them. They predicted gravitational waves. We've seen them. They predicted all sorts of other crazy gravitational phenomena and they've been verified and checked. So as far as we know, Einstein's equations are correct. Except quantum mechanics tells us that you can't have a singularity at the center of a black hole. Remember, quantum mechanics tells us the universe is not smooth and continuous. Instead, the universe is discrete. Space itself is probably pixelated

into tiny little units, right? Mass is probably pixelated. Time is probably pixelated. All these things are probably discrete and not continuous. And that means you can't have an infinitely small dot, certainly not one with an infinite mass inside of it. In addition, there's all sorts of issues about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Can you have so much matter localized in one spot for such a long time? Enoch says that you should not find a singularity inside a black hole. The problem, of course, is it's awfully difficult to look inside a black hole. So I think that's probably what motivates this question, the desire to see what's inside a black hole.

And I'll be honest, if I could see inside a black hole, I would do it in a second. I would love to know what is going on inside there. All right. So the idea from this question is to quantum entangle two particles and shoot one into a black hole and I guess use the other one to sort of learn something about what's going on inside the black hole, right? Well, let's talk about quantum entanglement. Quantum entanglement is a very tricky topic, and we discussed it in some depth on our quantum computing episode. The short version is that it links two particles, potentially across gray distances or great barriers, like the edge

of a black hole. The link is a kind of constraint. If one particle spins up, the other one has to spin down. So by knowing something about one of the particles, discovering that it's spin up, for example, you can learn something about the other, such as knowing that it's spin down, even if you never see it or can't possibly see it because it's hidden. So you see the attraction for potentially probing a black hole using pairs of entangled particles to sort of extract some information from one particle by looking at the other one. All right, well, the short answer is we would learn nothing. And the reason is that there are pretty solid theorems about getting information out of the black hole. All right? So the no hair theorem, I'm not joking, it's literally

called the no hair theorem. And I don't know if it was invented by a physicist without hair. But the no hair theorem says that the only information you could get about a black hole is its mass, its total electric charge, and its momentum. That's it, right? You can't get any other information. Nothing that's going on inside the black hole can never leave, right? You certainly can't see things escaping the black hole. Nothing can escape. So no light can come out to reveal to you what's inside the black hole. But more than that, you cannot get any information no matter how clever you are other than those three pieces of information.

And this raises all sorts of fascinating questions. Like the listener was asking about quantum entangled particles where one is inside and one is outside the black hole. That actually happens already. There's something called hawking radiation. where a photon inside the black hole will decay to two quantum entangled particles, and the decay will happen so close to the event horizon that one of the particles slips out of the event horizon and gets to leave. That's hawking radiation.

It requires this quantum fluctuation, right, right at the edge of the event horizon. And so you might ask, can we learn something about the side of the hawking radiation that got slurped into the black hole by looking at what happens outside the black hole, by measuring that hawking radiation? Well, the answer is no, right? No information can leave the black hole. It's just impossible to extract any information. Even though that electron and that positron are entangled with each other, right?

They do not contain any information about what's going on inside the black hole. And the short answer is, as soon as you're trying to interact with the electron and positron, you will anyway break that entanglement, right? The entanglement only exists when those particles are isolated from the rest of the system. So as soon as you try to measure something about that electron, you're probably going to break that entanglement anyway, which is usually, usually the problem with entanglement is that you can't really use it to convey information because interacting with the particles breaks that entanglement. All right. This brings us to another fascinating and current topic in black hole physics, which is people are wondering where the information goes. Like according to black hole theories, no information can leave the black hole, right?

But according to hawking radiation, particles do escape the black hole, which means the black hole can shrink. In fact, for small black holes, black holes could even evaporate and disappear. So what happens to the information that went into the black hole? What happened to all those quantum states and all that stuff that went into the black hole? And then the black hole disappeared. Because there's another law of quantum mechanics that says, it says that all the information about past states in the universe is contained in the arrangement of the current universe, right?

No information should be lost. For those mathematically inclined, this means essentially that the wave function is unitary, right? The transformations through time do not change the overall normalization of the wave function. So if black holes can evaporate and disappear, but no information can leave the black hole, that suggests that information is destroyed.

And that particular puzzle goes by the name of the black hole information paradox. And people have proposed all sorts of crazy solutions to this, including firewalls and all sorts of crazy stuff that we might actually see at the edges of black holes one day. So thank you for this wonderful question about black holes and quantum mechanics and entanglement and information and all sorts of crazy amazing stuff. One of my favorite things about these kinds of questions is that they seem theoretical. They seem crazy abstract. But these are real. Like black holes, they're real objects. They are out there.

And one day, if we build the right kind of spaceship and the right kind of probes, we could go and we could observe them, and we might learn the answers to some of these questions. So thanks for sending in that question and keep writing. Well, this is a perfect spot to take a break. We'll be right back. December 29, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage. kids gripping their new Christmas toys.

Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back.

In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. 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. 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. 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 hyperfixation and observation of our hair, right?

That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. You talk about the important role hairstyles 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 podcast.

This is a wonderful question. that we got recently from a listener and from that listener's dad. Hi, my name is Phineas and I'm in fourth grade and I live in Sika, Alaska. I was wondering if you were in an airplane going faster down the speed of sound and you said something to the person next to you, would they actually be able to hear what you said? This is Phineas's dad. Phineas asked me this question a while ago and it got me wondering if one was traveling at or above the speed of light, would they be able to?

to see the person next to them. So I love this question for so many reasons. I love that that young boy is imagining what it's like to be on a spaceship or what it's like to be on a plane traveling past the speed of sound. And it's a great question. He's wondering about how this information is processed, how this information is transmitted. Essentially, are you leaving that information behind, right? Well, first of all, I want to break his bubble and say, if you're on a fighter jet that's

traveling faster than the speed of sound, probably you don't. have the windows open, right? Which means that you're in a little air bubble. That air bubble is moving with you fast in the speed of sound. If you had the windows open and the air was rushing past you fast in the speed of sound, it would probably tear you to shreds. And that's why FighterJez, for example, have that little bubble, right? The window that protects them from what's going on outside. All right. So they have a little bubble of air. And that's the key. Because sound is a wave, right? Sound is just vibrations of the air. And so what it does is it moves relative to the air, right? It's like if you have a bathtub of water and you're slapping it to make, to make waves,

the waves move relative to the water. If that water, if that bathtub was on a train traveling a super duper fast, it wouldn't make any difference, right? You could still have a bath and you could still make splashes and they wouldn't be any different. In the same way, if you're on a fighter jet, and you're in a little bubble of air inside the fighter jet, you can turn to the person next to you, you can say, hello, would you please pass the peanuts or whatever you say to somebody in a fighter jet? And the air between you is not moving relative to you,

so you can send waves through it normally, just as you would if you were sitting on your couch in your living room. So the sort of cheap answer to the question is that there's no difference if you're in a little bubble of air that's moving with you. All right, so that's no fun. Let's imagine what happens when you open the windows, right? You're going Mach 2, you're zooming through the atmosphere, you open the windows. All of a sudden, the wind is screaming past you at 2,000 miles per hour, right?

Now that's an interesting question. What happens if you turn to your friend and you say, pass the bananas, right? Can they hear you? The key thing to remember is that sound moves at a fixed speed relative to the air. So if you shout into a wind blowing at your back, then your shout gets carried away from by the wind more quickly than if there had been no wind. Similarly, if the wind is blowing in your face, it can slow down your shout. If the wind blows in your face at the speed of sound,

ouch, then when you scream, your scream doesn't actually go anywhere. It stays right there on top of you. So in the fighter jet, if the windshield is down or whatever they call it in a fighter jet, then they can just talk normally, right? They're in a bubble of air. Just like if you're in a bathtub and you make waves, it doesn't matter if you're on a train at the time because the water is moving with you. But if they open the windshield, the wind is whipping by them at faster than the speed of sound.

And so they will leave their words behind. There's no way that they can talk even if they shout straight forwards. This is also why planes make sonic booms. If a plane is traveling faster than the sound it's making, then it's catching up to its own sound. And the sound from two seconds ago gets piled up on top of the sound from one second ago. and the sound from right now. It's the same amount of sound total. It doesn't generate more sound,

but it gets concentrated in certain places because the plane is out racing the sound it's making. Just like with a boat in the water. If it travels faster than the waves in water, then those waves pile up and you get a wake. A sonic boom is just a plane's wake. All right, awesome question. And my favorite part I think of this

is that his dad couldn't help but jump in and ask an even more physical. Z question, right? A question about traveling at or faster than the speed of light. Wonderful. And I love this because it allows us to draw this contrast between the speed of sound and the speed of light. Now, first of all, of course, you can't travel at the speed of light, right? Nothing that has mass can travel at the speed of light. Only things that are massless travel at the speed of light. And everything that's massless travels at the speed of light. Photons, gravitons, if they exist, anything that does not.

have mass, has to travel at the speed of light, and always at the speed of light, it can't go any slower. The amazing thing about photons is not only that they travel at the speed of light, which is super duper fast, but that they don't travel relative to some medium. Sound and water waves travel at fixed speeds relative to their medium, air or water, but the rules are totally different for light. It's a wave, but it always moves at the speed of light relative to the person measuring it, not relative to the medium, because it doesn't have a medium. Now, for a while, people thought that there has to be some medium that light traveled through, and they called it ether and searched for it.

But now we know that there is no ether, no medium that's doing the waving for light like air does for sound. The Michelson-Morley experiment showed us that, because they measured the speed of light in two different directions and found them to be identical, even though the earth is obviously moving in one direction or the other. as it goes around the sun. The reason is because light doesn't have a medium. It's the waving of quantum fields that are the properties of space itself. So space can be empty and still have light in it. And the way we showed it is that we discovered that light moves at the speed of light

relative to everybody no matter how fast you're going. So if you are standing on Earth and you turn on a flashlight, those photons leave your flashlight at the speed of light. Right? Cool. Now what happens if you jump in a Lamborghini and you turn on a flashlight? The Lamborghini is going to 200 miles per hour. You're in the Lamborghini. You turn on the flashlight. What happens? Well, the light leaves your flashlight at the speed of light relative to you. No big deal. What about somebody on the ground, right? The person you left behind who you didn't offer a ride in your Lamborghini to. When they, when you turn on the flashlight in your Lamborghini, how fast did they see the light going. Well, you might think, well, it's the speed of light plus the speed of the

Lamborghini, right? Because the flashlight itself is moving at 200 miles per hour. But that's where you'd be wrong, right? That's why light is weird. That's how our whole universe is super bizarre. Frankly, it's bonkers. But we know that light always travels at the speed of light no matter what the speed of the thing making it is, right? And everybody who measures the speed of light always sees it moving at the speed of light relative to them. And that's different. from sound, right? Sound travels relative to a medium like air. And that's sort of an absolute reference frame. And sound always moves at the same speed relative to the air. And so if you're moving with respect to the air, like you're in a fighter jet and you're moving at the speed of sound,

if you scream, then you're moving with that sound. Right. So if you scream in a fighter jet and you're moving at the speed of sound, you can basically just like stay inside your scream. You can fly along through the air with your scream. That's not true with light. Right. Light will always move at the speed of light relative to you. You turn on that flashlight. Even if you were traveling very close to the speed of light, you couldn't stay with those photons. It would leave you at the speed of light. And so if you're traveling very close to the speed of light, because you can't travel at the speed of light and you look next to you, right? And the person next to you has a flashlight, it's going to act totally normally for you, right? It doesn't matter what's happening

outside. Light always travels at the speed of light relative to you. So the short end, to your question is if you're traveling nearly at the speed of light, then everything will feel normal inside your spaceship. Clocks will run normally. Everything will seem normal. Now, if you look outside your spaceship at things that are not traveling at that high speed, that's when relativity kicks in. Things seem to run slow and they seem to get shrunk, right? But light always travels at the same speed no matter what. I hope that was an answer to your question. Thank you so much for writing in. thank you for wondering about the universe and thank you to all the parents out there who are sharing their wonderings about the universe with their kids and sharing this podcast with their kids

and letting their kids ask us crazy, awesome, amazing, super fun questions about the universe that we totally love to answer. Let's get to our last question, but first, let's take a break. In 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious.

Oh, 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. 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. 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 hyperfixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a real.

It's how our hair is styled. We talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Okay, we're back and we're answering listener questions today. We talked about zooming around at the speed of sound or the speed of light, and we talked about quantum entanglement and black holes. And our last question is also related to light and zooming across the universe. Here it is. Hello, Daniel and Jorge. My name is Marcella, and I'm from Rio Janeiro to Brazil.

I'm a big fan of your podcast and your book. So my question is about how does light carry information? information or how exactly does a photon transmit or carry within itself a pixel so that we are able to see the images we see on our telescopes? How does it not disintegrate after traveling so far? Thank you so much. All right. That's not really one question. That's like a bunch of questions all stuck together, but totally fair. We'll answer all of them. The first part of the question was essentially what information does light carry? I think the question is trying to ask like when you see a picture of like a distant star, what is it that the photon is carrying? How does it, how does that

picture come from the star and end up in my eyeballs or in my telescope? First, let's be really microscopic about it, right? What happens when you see a star is that you're seeing photons from that star? So somewhere really far away, billions of miles away, that big ball of fusion is shooting out photons. And once the photons leave the star, they have nothing to do with the star anymore, right? They are flying through space and the fact that they came from the star is irrelevant, but they do carry information. They're pointing in a specific direction, right? That's information. If you see light coming from one direction or another left versus right, it tells you where that object is, right? So where in the sky the light is coming from is very important information to know where

that star might be. So first piece of information light carries is its direction. Second, very important piece of information is its energy. Every photon has a certain amount of energy. And this is the critical thing about photon. This is the reason we know photons exist is that light comes in these little packets of energy. That's basically what a photon is. And the specific energy that a photon has also determines its frequency.

Remember, photons, they're particles, their waves, but when you think about them as waves, you have to think about them as sort of electromagnetic fluctuations, like vibrations in the electromagnetic field. Those vibrations have a certain frequency. And you probably heard of visible light having frequencies in the range of hundreds of nanometers. So every photon has a certain amount of energy. That energy determines a few things about the photon.

It determines the frequency of the wiggles, because remember, photons are just electromagnetic waves and they're wiggling along through space. They're vibrations in the electromagnetic field or the quantum photon field, if you want to think about it, in terms of quantum field theory. So it determines its frequency, and also its wavelength.

And in addition, those things determine the photon's color. But color, of course, is something even more complicated. We're going to have a whole episode about that soon, what it means to see different colors. But essentially, the energy carries all this information. So, so far, we have a photon zooming through space, and it's carrying information about its direction, and it's carrying information about the energy.

And that's most of the information you need from a photon. If you think about all the photons coming off the sun, for example, then there's a big mix of frequencies, there's green, there's red, there's blue, there's all those together, and together they make white. So the image you see of the sun, if you look at the sun, please don't, or if you take a picture of the sun, is you see all those photons coming together into your telescope or your camera or your eye, and it's making that image. It's summed up all those little bits of photons together make that image. It's really similar to the way you look at a screen. A screen is a bunch of pixels. It's an image broken down into little pieces.

And the same thing happens in nature, even without a screen, even without a device, right? Just your eye essentially just gathers all those photons and builds an image in your mind. So the second part of the question was, how does a photon carry within itself a pixel so that we're able to see the images we see on our telescopes? Remember the photons don't carry the pixels. Pixels themselves are a way to see photons, a way to detect photons. So if you think about what happens inside a telescope, these days telescopes are all digital, meaning you have a bunch of lenses to gather the light and focus the light, but the light in the end

is focused onto a digital device, a digital camera basically, that gathers and measures the amount of light. And the way those work is essentially they have a bunch of little buckets. And if a photon lands in that bucket, then it gets counted. And you just count the number of photons you see, and the picture is formed by having the places where more photons landed be more intense, and the places where fewer photons landed be less intense. So you divide up the whole space into these buckets, and in each one you count how many photons you saw, and that forms your image. So that's how you might form

like a black and white image. If you're just counting the number of photons, you don't care what the energy was for any individual photon. That's how black and white camera works. We, of course, are very interested in color photography, or color images of things that come from space. We want to know not just what's there, but how bright is it in red or in green or in blue. So the way that works is instead of just having a bunch of individual buckets that capture photons regardless of their energy, we have different kinds of buckets. Just like in your eye, how you have different kinds of things in the back of your eye, the rods and the cones, some of which can capture light and some of which can capture light of only specific wavelengths.

In the same way, a digital camera has different kinds of buckets, buckets with filters over them. So they capture light in different wavelengths, different frequencies, different energies. All those things are equivalent. And so you'll have like a red bucket that only captures reddish photons or a blue bucket that captures things around the blue part of the spectrum and a green one that captures things around the green part of the spectrum. In an ideal world, for every pixel in your image, you would have a red, a green, and a blue bucket so that you could figure out afterwards exactly what the color was by combining them back from red, green, and blue.

and figuring out exactly what the mixture was and telling you what color it is. But you can't really have these buckets on top of each other. So practically what happens in most digital cameras is that for one pixel, you'll only have one kind of bucket. So for a certain pixel, you might have a blue bucket. The next pixel will be only a red bucket, and the next one will be only a green bucket.

And then later when you want to understand how much green light is there in a place where there was only a red pixel, you don't know because you didn't measure it, because you didn't have a green bucket there. So what they do is they interpolate. They say how much green was there over there on the right and how much green was there on the left and it figures it out,

it guesses how much green there might have been. So color photography is much more complicated and even color photography using digital cameras attached to telescopes is much more complicated than you might imagine. So that's the way that photons carry information that creates the pixels we see in our images, right? They don't carry the pixel.

They don't show up and say, Hi, you should make this pixel a certain amount. The pixels instead add up, they integrate over all the photons that they detect. All right, wonderful question. And my favorite part is this last bit, that how do photons not disintegrate after traveling so far? Right? Because the photons have gone really far away. They might have left their star a biz million miles away and flown through space for

oodles of years before finally landing on your telescope or on your eyeball or on that rock, right? Think about how many amazing things have happened. in the universe and the light from them has just been ignored. It's just like, you know, hit a dog or hit a street light or just, you know, hit the earth when it was daytime, so we couldn't even see it. Anyway, the question is, how does it not disintegrate? How does it last for so long? Well, a photon can go forever. It has the energy it needs and it can fly through space. If it doesn't hit something, if it doesn't bounce into an electron or hit some atmosphere, it could literally fly forever. A photon is self-sustaining. It's, it's this amount.

amazing combination of electric fields and magnetic fields that sloshed back and forth to be completely self-sustaining. So in an empty universe, if you shot a photon, it would fly forever. Nothing, there's nothing there to stop it. In the same way that if you pushed a ball through space, through empty space, it would fly forever. So photons don't get tired. They're happy to fly through the whole universe to bring to you pictures from amazing and crazy things that are happening super far away. And we're glad that they are. We're glad that they get here that they deliver this information into our eyeballs because we get to see this beautiful spectacle that is the universe. All right, so that was a wonderful listener questions episode. Thank you very much to

everybody who wrote in and sent us their questions. And to those of you who have sent us your recording of your questions but not heard yourself yet on the air, be patient. We will get to you. Thanks everybody for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed hearing about traveling at the speed of sound and hairy black holes and photons limping their way through the universe after billions of miles of journeys. And I hope that your journeys take you to a place where you can appreciate this incredible, beautiful, but perplexing universe that we find ourselves in. Send your questions to questions at Daniel and Jorge.com. Thanks for tuning in. 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. It's important that we just reassure people that they're not alone, 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. One Tribe saved my life twice.

Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Culture eats strategy for breakfast, right? On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us, I was joined by Belisha Butterfield, media founder, political strategist, and tech powerhouse for a powerful conversation on storytelling, impact, and the intersections of culture and leadership. I am a free black woman. From the Obama White House to Google to the Grammys, Valicia's journey is a master class in shifting culture, and using your voice to spark change.

Listen to Culture raises us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Why are TSA rules so confusing? You got a hood of you. I'm take it all! I'm Manny. I'm Noah.

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