Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Listener Questions 61.0158: Black holes, gold asteroids and gravitational waves in time!

Episode Date: July 2, 2024

Daniel and Jorge answer questions from listeners like you! Send your questions to [e-mail]  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grazias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in, like, over 25 years.

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Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials easier. Complex problem solving takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 save my life twice welcome to season two of the

good stuff listen to the good stuff podcast on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime on the new podcast america's crime lab every case has a story to tell and the DNA holds the truth he never thought he was going to get caught and i just looked at My computer screen, I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology is already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Daniel, what's the latest news in physics?

We still don't know how anything works. News flash. That's not really news, is it? It's true every single morning. There's been no new discoveries in the last week or so. No, we learn stuff every year, but the fraction of all knowledge we have remains approximately zero. You mean compared to the infinity of the universe or how much you're already forgetting due to age? I think both are true.

The denominator is infinite and the numerator is shrinking. It's decaying with time, yes. Yeah, exactly. I may have reached my peak smartness a few years ago. Oh, I think I reached my peak smartness like when I was five, maybe. You should have retired then, man. I wish I could have, yeah. I could have been playing golf for the last 50 years. There you go, folks.

Advice to all you five-year-olds out there. What's the advice? Be rich and retire early. I am Jorge, I'm a cartoonist and the author of Oliver's Great Big Universe. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I don't plan to ever retire. What do you mean? You'll have to drag you out of your office at some point? Or you plan to die in your office? I plan to die in this job, though I haven't actually.

decided where physically that will be. I guess you can work and die from home, I guess. But really, you don't plan to ever, you know, not do physics. As long as I can keep teaching and thinking, then yeah, I'll keep doing it. You don't believe in like making room for the next generation of physicists? They're all retiring at five. They don't need jobs. Well, you need room for the four-year-olds, you know.

But anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe, a production of I-Hard Radio. In which we make the whole universe our problem. To figure it out, to explain it to you, to understand how it all works, to break it down into its tiniest little bits and make it make sense, if at all possible. That's right.

We try to retire the ignorance that we have about our universe and the beautiful cosmos that we all live in. And we try to make headway into your brain to help you understand how it all works and what it all means about our existence. And step one to figuring it out is understanding what we don't know is examining the questions we still have in our minds. What is it that we want to figure out?

What confusion do we have about how things are fitting together? What topics remain completely unexplored and unknown? And it's not just professional physicists and five-year-olds asking questions about the universe. It's everybody. and we want to encourage you, everybody out there who's listening, who is curious about the nature of the universe, to ask questions. Ask them of yourself. And if you can't figure them out, ask them of us.

Write them to questions at danielanhorpe.com, and you'll get an answer. Yeah, because as we said many times, the process of science, the process of discovery and finding knowledge out there starts with questions, starts with people being curious about what they see and what they think they don't understand.

And if you write to us with your questions, you'll get a reply, at least, even if it's not a complete answer. Because some of these questions, nobody knows the answer to. So all we can do is fast forward you to the current forefront of human ignorance. Right, because sometimes asking a question of a scientist helps them come up with new questions, right? Or think of questions in new ways in their research, right? Has anybody ever written in you? And you're like, whoa, I never thought about that before.

People have definitely written to me with questions I've never had myself, ideas, I've never thought of all the time. I don't know that any of them have like actually spurred new research. Or maybe like a new way to think about what you're doing? I think sometimes the way people ask questions forces me to think about things in a new way, sure. And you know, always the process of teaching and explaining forces you to examine your own understanding and shore it up and make connections you didn't make before.

So this whole podcast is like deep in my understanding of physics because I'm forced to go out there and make connections and find explanations for things that I was pretty sure I understood, but when you go to explain it, you can always find holes in your understanding. Yeah, it's all the big conversations. And we try to make all of you listeners part of the conversation here in our podcast, because sometimes in our episodes, we answer questions that we get from listeners like you. That's right. Sometimes the questions that come in through the inbox are fascinating or tricky or complicated,

or I just think everybody might enjoy hearing the answer. so we select some to answer here on the podcast. Thank you to everybody who sends in your questions. So today on the podcast, we'll be tackling. Listener questions, number 61. So, Daniel, we're back to numbering these sequentially, or is this still a random number with a secret code in it. This is not a random number with secret code, no.

I like to be sequential because when people write in and I tell them we're going to answer it on the podcast, I'd like to tell them which episode to wait for. So numbers are useful for that, though I suppose I could name them also. This could be the elephant episode or we could have a polka dot episode or whatever. Those are just as arbitrary as numbers. Yeah, or like random numbers too, right? This could be 61.753.

Sure. Why not? Intigures aren't special. Fractional names, that's right. Or you can be like Elon Musk and name things with weird symbols in them. Then we'd have to struggle to pronounce. them. Yeah, I guess it is a podcast.

We have to read things out loud. That's a problem. We could just give them weird sounds then, you know. Oh, there you go. This is listener questions number of and then, but then you also have to write them so that might be. Yeah. Maybe we should just stick to numbers.

Wow, it's like numbers are useful. Sequential integers. Yeah, yeah. All right, so 61. I feel like we've been increasing these numbers because I feel like we, just a few weeks ago, we were at number 43. Oh, man. We've been doing about one a week for a while now because we've got so many more questions coming in.

And so our first question comes from Augustine, and his question is about the gravity of black holes. Hello, Daniel and Jorge. This is your friend Augustine Valenzuela. I have a crazy idea. We know that the gravity on a black hole is so strong that it will rip apart matter, or what we call sometimes staggotification. My understanding is that this will happen all the way until even people. particles are pull apart. My brain now is thinking, okay, what about quarks? If I'm correct, the stronger you pull apart a couple of quarks, the stronger the force. And when we put

enough force to pull them apart, we give them force enough to create a new one and they are always in pairs. So now we have like four, eight, sixteen, and plus quarks. So it could be possible that inside black holes, we have an infinite machine of creating quarks that might even be so many at some point that we create a new universe inside a black hole or even more, what if all that energy of the black hole turns into just quarks and making the black hole disappear? Thank you. All right. Really fun question. Basically, I think he's asking, can you make spaghetti out of quarks? Well, you know, all spaghetti is made out of corks and electrons. So yeah, but this is not a cooking show. No, I think he's.

asking a really hard question about what happens to particles inside a black hole. Now, we're talking about black hole, so I suspect the answer will be, we have no idea. But Augustine is sort of a friend of the podcast, right? Yeah, that's right. Augustine has his own Spanish language podcast, which you should go and check out, Kourgasidad, Scientica. It's excellent. And he and I have been in a conversation about physics for several years.

And I think he wrote this in to try to stump me. Cool. So go ahead and check out that podcast. Even if you don't speak Spanish, I imagine. It's interesting. You'll either learn physics or Spanish. Yeah, or both. Oh, my goodness.

Because no los dos. Yeah. All right. So the question is interesting. I think the question is, like, what happens to a particle as it goes into a black hole? Because we've talked about before this idea of spig identification as you get near a black hole. The intensity of the gravitational field is so high that it sort of rips you apart, right? Yeah, that's exactly right.

Gravity is very, very powerful near a black hole. And if you have a physical extent, if you're not just a point particle, like if you're a little blob, then gravity on one side is going to be stronger than gravity on the other side. And that means you're getting pulled harder on one side and that's equivalent to being pulled apart. So, for example, if you are near a black hole and your feet are closer than your head, then the black hole is trying to pull you into spaghetti. It's like trying to pull your head off of your body and your feet off of your ankles. because it's pulling on those things differently. That's where spaghettification comes from. It's the tidal forces of the black hole.

Not directly the strength of the gravity of the black hole, but the difference in its strength as you get closer or further. Right, because gravity depends on distance, right? Gravity gets stronger, the closer you are to the source, just like gravity is stronger here on Earth than it is out there in space. But sometimes the difference can be so big that it can be enough to rip you apart. That's right.

technically the earth is trying to rip you apart because as you stand on the surface the gravity on your feet is stronger than the gravity on your head but that difference is much weaker than the internal strength of your body and so you're able to hold yourself together but that's not true near a black hole because not only is the gravity stronger but the differences are stronger because gravity gets weaker much faster with distance right so it's super intense when you get close to a black hole and so like if you were to jump in head first you would get ripped apart. Now, I think Augustine's question is, what happens

to a particle? Does a particle get pulled apart? And maybe let's start with an atom. Like, would an atom get pulled apart? Yeah, it's a great question. And there's a couple of competing issues here. Like, number one, the tidal forces depend on you having a physical extent. The further apart you are, the greater the distance between one side of

you and the other, the greater the difference in gravitational force will be. So if there's no difference between one side of you and the other, if you're like a point particle, then there's no tidal forces. The title forces only apply to things that are not point particles. And you're right. An atom, for example, is not a point particle. And so in principle, an atom could get pulled apart. But atoms are so tiny, really, really small that the tile forces are going to be super duper tiny compared to like

the strength of the nuclear forces holding it together. Right. I guess it's not just about how much gravity there is. It's about like you said, the slope of the gravity or like the intensity or how quickly gravity is changing. Like the difference between. one end of the atom and the other end of the atom has to be large enough to overcome those forces. But is that possible though? It is kind of possible, isn't it? In principle, it is. If you take the general relativistic view of a black hole as a singularity, then as you get closer and closer to the singularity, the curvature is just increasing. And you might argue, well, the curvature has to be crazy high for the title forces to compete with the internal strength of an atom. But

then you can just keep moving closer to the singularity to get arbitrary or at least strong gravity. And so in principle, somewhere inside a black hole, if there is a singularity there, you can get close enough to it that the tidal forces should overcome the strength of the bonds holding an atom together. And an atom would get spaghettified. So it wouldn't happen outside or as it goes in. It would have to happen way in there. Yeah, I did the calculation once. And outside the black hole, the gravity is not strong enough to spigitify atoms.

But inside, again, if there is a singularity, we don't know that there is, then in principle, you could get close enough inside. Well, doesn't it depend on the size of the black hole? Like the heavier and more intense, the black hole is, the less close you have to get to the center to maybe rip apart an atom. Although if you can get arbitrarily close, then it doesn't really matter what the mass of the black hole is because you're decreasing that distance parameter.

But yeah, for larger black holes, you don't have to get as close. Would it even get to the center? Like, doesn't time stop as you get to the edge or the surface of a black hole? Yeah, that's a little bit tricky. That depends on who's looking. If you're in the outside of a black hole and you're watching things fall in, then time slows down for those objects according to you and you never see them fall into the black hole. But for the object itself, time proceeds normally and they just fall in past the event horizon and proceed towards the singularity and reach it in finite time. General relativity is very tricky when it comes to whose time we're talking about.

Right, but to the rest of the universe, it would never happen, right? For the rest of the university, it would never happen if it's the last thing you throw into the black hole. As you approach the black hole, the black hole's event horizon actually grows out to meet you because the power, the gravitational energy, the black hole increases before the object crosses the event horizon. It's not like it has to physically eat it and then it pops out to be larger. So if you toss something like a banana towards a black hole, its event horizon grows out to meet the banana but never reaches it. Unless you then throw an orange, that orange will pull the event horizon out even. further past the banana. So the last thing to get thrown into a black hole never actually reaches

it, but earlier stuff will? Will it? Like will the banana actually reach the center of the black hole or are things frozen in time inside the black hole? Well, you can only answer these questions from the point of view of some observer and there's no observer on the outside. They can see the inside of the black hole. From within the black hole, the banana reaches a singularity. But I feel like Augustine is asking a question about the interplay between the title forces and the strong nuclear force inside that atom. Right, right. Well, we said that it would maybe pull apart an atom and maybe even a cork,

but only if it gets close to the singularity, I guess, I mean, then now the question sort of hinges, like, will it ever get close to that singularity? According to general relativity, things will approach the singularity. And Augustine is asking about this interesting question that's trying to balance this power of the black hole to pull basically anything apart if it approaches a singularity and the strong force which has this bizarre behavior that if you pull things apart it pops new particles out of the vacuum and I think he's wondering whether that's effectively creating an infinite amount of mass oh I see all right let's dig into his specific scenario so now we're imagining it that a quark

somehow gets inside of a black hole and it does make it close enough to the singularity that it would get pulled apart or I think imagine two quarks like you have a cork anti-cork pair they're bound together into something like a pion or maybe you have three quarks within a proton and then those get pulled apart by the singularity and when those get pulled apart there's now energy in that bond which gets turned into mass in the form of new quarks so then what would happen so now you have a third quark that suddenly appears next to the other two yeah actually you're going to get another pair of corks so if you start for example with a quark anti-cork pair and you pull them apart outside of black hole or inside of black hole, what's going to happen is that there's a huge

amount of energy stored in the strong force between the two corks. Because remember, the strong force is really weird and the force between them doesn't decrease with distance. As you increase the distance between the cork and anti-cork pair, the amount of energy in that bond becomes enormous. And the universe prefers to convert that energy back into mass and it creates a new cork anti-cork pair effectively reducing those distances. So you have like cork anti-cork now turns into quark, anti-cork, quark, quark, anti-quark. So they're like, they multiplied, or they just sort of, like,

divided the energy between two pairs? Because I'm not sure what the difference is. Like, you have one configuration with a lot of energy in the bond. The next configuration, the one the universe prefers, is to have lower energy in the bonds and have more energy in the masses. And the reason the universe prefers that is that there's more possible configurations that way.

You have more particles that can get moved around a lot. In general, the universe prefers to spread energy out because it allows for more options. It's like an effect of entropy. Okay. So then the black hole would split the cork pair and make four quarks. And now what happens next? Then those four corks would fall into the black hole.

Would they also get split? Yep. Those get split and then you get more quarks and then those get more quarks. But at some point, don't you start to dilute the energy? Like, isn't each subsequent pair of quarks, don't they have less energy in their bonds? Yeah, exactly. And that's what happens in real life. Like we do this at the large Hadron Collider all the time.

don't have a black hole yet hopefully that we're aware of the lawyers require me to say we create corks in it at corks all the time and we create them in a way that they're flying apart they have a lot of velocity away from each other and so what happens is you get new pairs of corks that energy is converted into mass and eventually you get a huge number of cork anti-cork pairs and they're flying away from each other so that energy the velocity gets turned into mass effectively what's happening here is something similar, except you have gravitational energy. You're using the gravitational energy of the black hole to basically pull the quarks apart. That kinetic energy then gets turned into mass.

So you're turning the gravitational energy, the black hole into mass. So you're just sort of like churning energy around. You're not creating new energy. You're not destroying energy. You know, the energy still stays within the black hole. It's just that according to your theories, there's going to be a lot of weird sloshing around in there. Yeah, exactly. And Augustine is wondering, like, does this turn into an infinite amount of energy?

Or where does this energy come from? And the energy really comes from within the black hole. It's just the gravitational energy of the black hole. It's just like asking, hey, if you have a particle near the edge of a black hole, doesn't it accelerate as it gets towards the center of the black hole? Where does that energy come from? That energy just comes from the gravitational energy of the black hole. It's converting the potential energy of the black hole into kinetic energy of this particle.

Now, the thing about the black hole is that doesn't change the overall energy of the black hole. It still has the same total energy, which is what in the end controls its gravitational power. So it doesn't really matter what you do within the black hole. Do you have quarks? Do you have the energy in the bonds? Do you have it in the gravitational potential energy? As you say, it's just sloshing around inside the black hole. But do you get like an infinite number of quarks being made or is there at some point does it stop popping off these new quarks?

Or is it that at some point, you know, the quartz you create have so little. energy to them that there's just not enough to make new quarks. It's a great question, and we don't actually know the answer to it. In this simplistic model that I've drawn out where you have like a pure general relativity black hole with an actual singularity in it, and then you have these particles, you get an infinite number of quarks because as you approach the singularity, there's always a place where the new corks are going to get ripped apart to make new corks to make more quarks. But the problem there, the infinity and the number of quarks comes from the infinity in the

singularity, which we don't think is physical. So the real answer depends on knowing what's actually going on inside a black hole. And the infinity in this answer comes from the infinity and assuming that it's a singularity, which is probably not true. I see. So you're saying the answer is we don't know. We don't know. We could have skipped the last 20 minutes, Daniel.

Just come with my answer. No, you were totally correct right off the bat. Because we don't know how gravity and quantum particles interact. We don't even know how to calculate gravity for quantum particles that have unsubstably. certain locations. So the right answer depends on figuring out quantum gravity, which we have not yet done. Right. We don't even know if it'll make it to the center, right? Like, we don't really know what happens even beyond the event horizon, right? Yeah, exactly. Right. There are some theories that black holes have no center, have no interiors, all just smeared on this spherical event horizon,

and there is nothing in the bulk. All the information is just encoded on a 2D surface that the black hole is not actually part of our universe. Sounds like maybe the next question is not, can you make spaghetti out of corks is can you make smear out of corks? All smear has corks in it. And in fact, the Germans have a kind of spread called cork, which is some kind of yogurty spread. It sounds like the Germans know the answer to this question, perhaps. The answer is probably one really long German word. Are there a German science podcast you've been on that maybe could help us illuminate the topic here?

Nine. You've been on nine of them? I'm going to leave you in the quantum superposition of thinking that was nine in English or no in German. I think that was just a bad pun. I think it was a pretty good pun. Or a pretty good pun. All right, well, thank you, Augustine,

for what did you do in your podcast and also for sending us this question. So now let's get to our next questions. We have one here about golden asteroids and one about the effects of gravitational waves on time. So let's get to those. 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 team. PWA 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 either. and harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, it's HoneyGerman, and my podcast, Grasasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities.

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on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I had this, like, overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then. And I just hit call. I said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick, I'm the CEO of One Tribe. foundation and I just wanted to call on and let her know there's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling and there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast season 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

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Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire. that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA.

Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. And I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors.

And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're answering listener questions here today on podcast number 61.0000, right? Now, does a podcast number have those decimals or is it a pure integer? I think it gets rounded by I heart processing system, yeah. I didn't know we had a process for rounding titles. All right.

Our next question comes from Mike. Who comes from Brooklyn? Hi, Daniel and Jorge. Is it possible that somewhere in the universe there are asteroids as big as our moon made entirely of rare metals such as gold or silver? How large an object or system of such objects could there be? Thanks for considering this question. You guys are the best, and Katie and Kelly are awesome co-hosts too.

From Mike and Brooklyn. All right, thank you, Mike. Pretty cool question. I guess the question is, could you have a giant gold asteroid out there? Yeah. And he wants a giant gold moon out there. Or a gold planet. Is that possible? I love the idea. Wow. It's a golden idea. Well, let's dig into it. What are the chances that pure gold things are out there?

There's definitely a lot of gold out there in the universe. Like there is a lot of gold in the earth. And there are big lobs of gold in some sort of like big, heavy, metallic asteroids. But the process by which gold is made in the universe, makes it, I think, pretty unlikely to have, like, just a huge gold bar floating out there in space. What do you mean? How is gold made in the universe? Well, gold is a very heavy element, like many of the very rare, valuable elements.

And it's so heavy that it can't actually be made inside stars, right? The brief history of the universe is that we started out with almost all hydrogen, and then we formed stars after a few hundred million years. Those stars are hot and dense enough to do fusion, which can make heavier elements, but only up to about iron. Up to about iron, when you fuse nuclei, you actually gain energy that releases energy, it powers the star. Above iron, it costs energy to do fusion,

so you're cooling the star, you're consuming the star's energy. So stars basically make elements up to about iron, heavier things than that require more specialized conditions, like the collisions of neutron stars or supernova collapses that briefly create the conditions necessary to consume that energy and make the heavy. elements. And so you need a star to explode to make anything above iron?

Anything above iron is made either in supernova, so star explosions, or in neutron star collisions. And it used to be that we thought it was mostly supernova, but then recently observations of neutron star collisions have sort of tilted the balance, and now we think that probably most of the golden universe is made in neutron star collisions. How do we know that? Well, some neutron star collisions they've observed in a couple of different ways, like they've seen the gravitational waves generated by these really intense massive objects orbiting around each other and then eventually colliding and they also observed them

astronomically like they saw light from the same event and from that light they can measure like how much gold was created because gold like every other element has a very special atomic fingerprint it tends to glow in certain wavelengths and give off light in certain wavelengths so they're able to measure the amount of golden clouds around this neutron star collision by looking at the light that came from it. It's this new era of multi-messinger astronomy, where you see the same event in two different sort of channels. And our understanding is still pretty fuzzy, but it suggests that like huge amounts of gold were made, like more than the mass of the Earth is made in each of

these collisions. But I guess maybe a question is, is it only gold that gets made or is it all materials above, you know, iron get made in an equal amount? Or is it sort of random? It's not just gold that gets made. It's all these heavy elements get made in these kind of special events. It's supernova implosions, in neutron star collisions. And it's definitely not equal, right? Some of these things are easier to make because the pathways for them to happen. Some of these things are very, very unstable.

So even though you make them, they disappear very rapidly and then decay down into other stuff. We had a whole episode recently with Kelly about which elements are more common in the universe where we dig into the science and the chemistry of that. But basically, you're making everything possible and then only the stable. stuff sticks around very long. Now, I know that in a supernova, I think what happens is the inside of the star collapses, and then

it bounces and there's this huge shockwave, and as the shockwave goes through the rest of the star, the outside of the star, it basically squeezes things so much in this shockwave that the neutrons and protons fuse together to make these heavy elements, right? Yeah, that's right. You need very

high pressure and very high temperature in order to create these heavy elements, and you need a lot of energy because these processes absorb energy rather than creating it. Now, is there a sort of a propensity or a tendency as the shockwave goes out to have phases where it's making a lot of gold and then suddenly it's making a ton of other elements and then suddenly, or is it all random all the time? Yeah, that's a great question. It's not something we understand. It's an area of current research, exactly how that's happening. This shockwave physics is very complicated because it's very sensitive to a lot

of the details. It's not like on average, it ends up doing the same thing, a little bit hotter, a little bit colder, or the shockwave starts here or starts there, then the conditions of the shockwave change. So that's something people are working on right now. They have these really complicated models of what's going on inside Supernova. So we don't know yet. But I imagine maybe the conditions to make gold are maybe different than the conditions to make lead or titanium, right? And so I imagine that it's not just all random all the time. Maybe, you know, as the explosion goes out, maybe you get the conditions for gold and then suddenly the conditions change for something else, etc. But it's also not clear that the conditions are the same

across the whole star. The explosion might start in one spot and then end in another spot. And so you might simultaneously have different conditions across different parts of the surface. But I imagine there has to be a reason that you find gold nuggets on Earth, right? Like all those atoms, those trillions of atoms in a gold nugget must have been made at the same time. Or do you think They were made separately in different praises and somehow they got together at some point. I think the formation of the gold that we find here on Earth doesn't reflect how it was actually made in the star. I think it more reflects the differentiation process and the geology, the rock formation of

what's happening here on Earth as the Earth cools. I think likely anyway, gold made in these neutron stars comes out as a huge fine spray, a mist, which then gets mixed out into the universe and these little granules that then sprays. that then spread out. I don't think gold nuggets are formed and then survive in that shape to be dug up on Earth. You're saying maybe it all gets made as dust,

gold dust, and then when the Earth was like a big ball of lava, maybe gold dust sprinkled throughout it, the gold dust somehow, you know, settled in the same spot and then stuck together. Yeah, that's exactly right. The Earth is formed from a huge blob of gas and dust. Some of that is a little flex of gold or heavier elements. And then as that gets squeezed together into a planet,

it gets hot right and it gets molten and then you have all sorts of processes that happen like some of these elements are called iron loving elements they like to mix with iron and they flow with the iron so then as the earth is cooling it differentiates and some of the heavy things sink and some of the lighter things rise and the flow of those molten rocks and elements and oxides and all sorts of complicated stuff determines where things end up and the big blobs that's why like you get veins of heavy metals or veins of copper here and there comes from those molten flows, which then cool. But you're saying that out there in space, in a supernova, we're not sure if these things

get made as dust or as layers or chunks. Yeah, we're not sure. I mean, I think it's most likely because it's just the chaos and the energy of this process that it's sprayed out in terms of tiny granules. But I don't know what the maximum size would be. It's certainly possible that you get big ingots or even enormous blobs. I mean, you can't rule out the possibility that you're making like a blob the size of Los Angeles of pure gold.

you know, quantum mechanically, anything is possible. So in principle, it could be. What about these neutron star collisions? Is the mechanism the same, like a shockwave? Do things it made from the soup of neutrons and quartz that make up the stars? Well, there definitely is a collision there, and that creates a shockwave through both neutron stars. Then they settle down to form one bigger neutron star or a black hole, more likely if they're over the threshold now for a neutron star to be stable.

But we really don't understand what's inside a neutron star and how that all works. So we know that there's a process there that's capable of creating these heavy elements, but we do not have a detailed understanding of it. We don't even understand a single stable neutron star, not to mention like two of them smashing into each other, having complex shock waves bouncing around inside. Because I think neutron stars are basically like a giant ball of soup of neutrons and quarks, right? So, I mean, it seems possible you could just scoop up some neutrons or quarks,

and then, bam, you suddenly get a giant gold planet. Well, neutron star is a little bit more complicated. than that like near the outside they actually have a crust which can have some protons and electrons in it then we think there's probably a layer that's pure neutrons and below that we just don't really know like below that probably doesn't even make sense to call it neutrons as you say it's just like a soup of quarks like a cork glue on plasma where the energy and the density are so high that the whole idea of a neutron doesn't really make sense it's like a drop in an ocean right you don't really call it a drop anymore and then below that we think probably there are new states of matter

nuclear pasta or other weird exotic forms of matter that only exist under these very high pressure and temperature situations. So it's not just a ball of neutrons, though there's plenty of neutrons there to play with it. All right. So it sounds sort of unlikely that in our universe there have born moons or big asteroids of just pure gold, right? Although there aren't there giant asteroids of pure iron out there? There are giant asteroids out there, which are very metallic, like in our solar system, we have a bunch of different kinds of asteroids. There's like C-type that have a lot of water and ice in them, but there is a kind called S-type, which is a lot of metal. For example, like a 10-meter-wide asteroid might have like 600,000 kilograms of metal, including like 50 kilograms of platinum and gold.

And then there's the M-type, which are more rare, but they have like 10 times as much metal. So yes, these asteroids do have a lot of metal in them, but they start from the same basic materials as the Earth. and so roughly they have like a random scoop of the solar system it's just on the earth a lot of this stuff has sunk down into the core and so it's not as prevalent in the crust so you're saying that there are metal asteroids out there but there's sort of a mix of metals yeah exactly it's not a pure gold asteroid very unlikely or pure platinum most of these things are rocks

with a lot of metals mixed in and so yes they are rich in gold and platinum it's definitely out there but a pure gold asteroid or a silver asteroid especially one the size of the moon seems very unlikely. What about gold-plated? I mean, you know, sometimes that's just as valuable. Well, you know, maybe we've been fooled and they actually aren't filled with gold. They just covered.

Maybe it's pure gold inside is just a mix of metals on the outside. Well, you might wonder, like, how do we know the composition of these things? It's mostly by looking at their gravitational behavior, we can deduce their mass, and by looking at their size, we deduce their volume and that gives us a sense of their density and so we estimate from the density of these things what they might be made out of for example NASA is planning a mission to an

asteroid called psyche which is a big m-type asteroid it's like 200 kilometers across and it's so heavy so dense that it has one percent of the mass of the entire asteroid belt in this one very metallic very dense asteroid well I wonder if maybe Mike was also asking the question like, could you make a giant moon out of gold? Like, would it hold? I don't think Mike was asking that. I think you're asking that. I'm wondering what sort of like astrogeoengineering projects you have in mind over there.

Well, he's asking how large an object or such an object could there be? Yeah, that's a good question. In principle, you can make an object about the size of the Earth. Any rocky object, anything primarily made out of heavier elements, you can't really make it much bigger than the Earth because then its gravity just makes it denser and denser. You can make about an earth-sized blob of gold and have it floating out there in the solar system.

Whoa. It's a lot of bling for the solar system. That'd be a pretty cool engineering project. Like if you come to an alien solar system and you find that it's filled with like huge diamonds and earth-sized blobs of gold, you might think like, wow, these aliens know what they're doing. Or maybe gold is so cheap that they,

can make a whole planet out of them. Or maybe they've transcended the Kardashev scale and into the Kardashian scale, as you joked about it. Yeah, there you go. All right, well, thanks Mike for that question. I guess the answer is that it's not likely, but still possible. In the end, we don't really know.

In the end, almost anything is possible, but it seems very unlikely for the universe to arrange for a gold moon in our sky. Unless Mike is secretly a super-dust. trillion air or something. If he finds that gold moon, he'll definitely be one. Then you have to wonder why he lives in New Jersey. Oh.

He said Brooklyn. Oh, Brooklyn. Brooklyn. Oh, that makes more sense. All right. Well, let's get to our last question of the day. And this one is about the effects of gravitational waves on time. So let's get to that.

But first, let's take another quick break. 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, it's Honey German, and my podcast,

Grasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment, with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in, like, over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there.

Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters, sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs, and those amazing vibras you've come to expect. And, of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me.

But the whole pretending and code, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasasas Come Again as part of my Cultura podcast network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness, the way it is echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro.

And these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories, I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season. of Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending

finance bro? Tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome to Brown Ambition. This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit or turning to credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from now. When you do feel like you are bleeding from these high interest rates. I would start shopping for a debt consolidation loan, starting with your local credit union, shopping around online, looking for some online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable. Listen, I am not here to judge. It is so expensive in these streets. I 100% can see how in just a few months you can have this much credit card debt when it weighs on you. It's really easy to just like stick your head

in the sand. It's nice and dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go just because you're avoiding it, and in fact, it may get even worse. For more judgment-free money advice, listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, we're answering listener questions here today, and our third question comes from Max. Hi, Daniel and Jorge. This is Max calling from Stockholm, Sweden.

I have a question about gravitational waves. As they affect the space, which has been proven in Vligo and Virgo, do they also affect time the same way, being compressed and stressed, as space time is basically just one unit? All right, pretty cool. Can you get wavy with time is basically the question? Yeah, I love this kind of question because here again, he's bringing together two ideas we talk about all the time.

Space and time are related, gravitational waves or ripples in space and time. Do they also affect time? Great question, Max. Right, because I guess we know from relativity that gravity is not just about making things come together. It's about distorting space, and it's not just about distorting space, but also distorting time, right? like a black hole, not just bent space around it, but it also bends time around it, right? Yeah, that's exactly right.

And there's a really important progression of subtle ideas here as we go from like Newton's idea of space and time to Einstein's special relativity view of space and time where he brings space and time together to one coherent object where they affect each other, but we still have a clear sense of what time is and what space is. And then into general relativity, where concepts of space and time are much harder to interpret out of a sort of generalized coordinates that people use. So maybe to recap for our listeners, what is a gravitational wave? So gravitational wave is a wave in space time itself.

General relativity says we don't know what space time is, but effectively all we can do is measure the distances between two points. Like we have this point here and that point there, we can measure the distance between them. And we can also measure the curvature of space, which is how those relative distances change. So when space is curved, things get closer together or further apart, depending on exactly the nature of the curvature. And so ripples in that curvature are gravitational waves because everything with energy creates curvature in the universe, according to general relativity.

If I have a big, massive object, then it's curving space, and that's what controls how things move around it. If I then wiggle that object, then how I'm curving space is changing with time because that information takes time to propagate out from the wiggling object. So take a big black hole, it's bending space. Now wiggle it, you're making gravitational waves from that black hole, waves in that curvature of space. Right. It's kind of like about the propagation or how it spreads, the effects, how the groups, effects of gravity spread out, basically, right?

Yeah. If you wiggle a black hole, the curvature at a distant point doesn't instantly wiggle, right? Because it doesn't know that you wiggle, that it takes time for that information to propagate. And that's what the gravitational wave is, is the propagation of that information. Right.

Like, for example, if the sun, for some reason, started moving back and forth or wiggling or rocking back and forth, like we would feel that gravitational effect here on Earth, right? We would feel that wiggling of the sun gravitationally, like the Earth would start to wobble to. But since it takes some time

for that gravitational effect to come from the sun to the Earth, that's kind of what we call the wave, right? Like those wiggles as they propagate out into the universe and then reach us, those are the waves. Exactly. It's very similar to other kinds of waves. You take an electron, it has an electric field. Now you wiggle that electron.

You're making wiggles in that electric field. Those wiggles are photons. Those ripples are updating you about where the electron is now. So the same way you can create ripples in the electromagnetic field by wiggling an electron. You can create ripples in space time by wiggling anything that has mass. All right. Now we've been able to measure those from really incredible events that are happening out there in space. Yeah, it's really sort of amazing.

Einstein predicted these things, but he also said we may never see them because these are very, very small. We're talking about tiny changes in the distances between objects. Like you hold two mirrors a couple of miles apart, the distance between them might change by less than the width of a proton as the gravitational wave passes by. So these things are very difficult to measure, but we actually have been able to. They have these very sensitive interferometers. We shoot laser beams between these mirrors that are very carefully isolated from everything. It's an incredible triumph of experimental physics. And they've seen them a few years ago.

And now we've seen dozens and dozens of these things. Right. Well, as we've mentioned before, like everything moving, any mass moving makes a gravitation wave. If I wave my arm, I'm creating gravitational waves. They're just so small that nobody can ever really feel them. Although I have been working out on my arm is pretty massive lately. technically requires acceleration, not just motion, but yes, any accelerating mass

will create gravitational waves. Right, right. Like if I wave my arm, right? Yeah, if you move it back and forth, that's acceleration and that will create gravitational waves. Those are so tiny, we'll never see them. Gravitational waves we have been able to see are from super incredibly massive objects,

black holes or neutron stars swirling around each other as they collide. Now, does it have to be acceleration? Like if, let's say an asteroid is moving in a straight line, through space, doesn't it create a ripple as it goes along, too? Because I'm going to feel differently its gravitational attraction as it goes past me. Well, velocity is relative, right? And so the gravitational field there doesn't depend on relative quantities.

It only depends on absolute quantities. Acceleration is absolute. And so you don't create gravitational waves just by having a velocity. You can experience a changing gravitational field, but that's not necessarily a gravitational wave. Like, if you're near the Earth and you're moving away from the Earth, you're measuring a change in your local gravity

because you're moving away from the Earth. It's a time dependence in your position and in your velocity. But there's no gravitational wave created unless you have acceleration, which is an absolute quantity. It's sort of a wave, right? Like if an asteroid flies past me,

I'm going to feel no gravity from it, and then I'm going to feel a lot of gravity as it's near me, and then I'm going to feel less gravity as it flies away from me. Then I sort of experience kind of a wave of gravity? Well, again, you experience a change in how much local gravity you measure. Like, if you get closer to an electron, you're going to measure a stronger electric field and if you move away, you're going to measure a weaker electric field, but there's no electromagnetic wave there. It's just your motion relative to the electron that's changing your local measurement. But the effect is the same,

though? Don't I feel a change in my gravitational field over time? If you wanted to create exactly the same set of local measurements, you want an oscillating gravitational field, then you you need to move back and forth, and that's acceleration. So you can't do it without acceleration. Well, let's get to the question here. Now, we know that a gravitational wave affects space. That's how we measure them, right? Like we have giant rulers made out of lasers, very deep underground.

And as they contract and expand, we know that a gravitational wave has passed by us. Yeah. Now, the question is, does it also affect time? Yeah, and the answer is pretty unsatisfying. The answer is you can't really say yes or no because it depends on what time means in general relativity, which is very fuzzy and unclear. That's the short version of the unsatisfying answer. The longer version of the unsatisfying answer, it takes a bit of a tour through special relativity, right? Like Newton says space and time are totally separate things.

Things move through space. There are obviously time moves forward. Space and time are unrelated. Einstein tells us in special relativity, no to know. space and time are two parts of the same thing. It's a beautiful realization that together they make a lot more sense than a part. It's like electricity and magnetism, fused together into one idea, makes much more sense than two separate ideas.

This is not to say that they're the same thing, right? Two things can be two parts of the same thing without being equivalent. Like you say, the front and the back of the elephant are two parts of an elephant. Doesn't mean the front and back are the same thing. So space and time are closely related in special relativity. and space affects time and time affects space, but you can always still say what is time and what is space. Now we get to general relativity.

In general relativity, the coordinates you choose, like which direction things are moving in, are not so physical. They're just sort of like abstract. And you can choose lots of different sort of systems in order to do your calculations. Like are you using polar coordinates or using XYZ or lots of much more complicated abstract coordinate systems.

And some of those coordinates, And it's impossible to say, like, which direction is time and which direction is space. They're all sort of mixed together. For example, as you were saying earlier, what happens as you're going inside a black hole? Well, time and space sort of reverse, right? Like, now your future is the singularity. Every path into your future ends at the singularity. Time and space have sort of reversed roles there.

That's just sort of shorthand way of saying that we have a new interpretation for the coordinates. Now, I imagine this is super complicated. it. But I feel like we're getting a little abstract here. Like, I wonder if Max is asking, you know how in these experiments where we can measure gravitational waves, you can see that the length of something changes as the wave goes past us. I wonder if he's asking, you know, if I had a clock, would I see my clock suddenly take a little faster and then take a little slower as the wave goes past me? The answer is you can't really separate it out into the effects of space and the effects of time and the details of it depend a little bit on exactly how you've built your

clock like let's say instead of having Lego or you have lasers and you're shooting lasers back and forth to measure distance you have like two people far apart from each other and they're constantly sending each other little laser pings right like I'm going to send you a pulse of lasers every one nanosecond or something and then you're going to observe those we're going to try to see if the time between the pulses changes as a gravitational wave goes by right well what's going to happen as the gravitational wave goes by, is that those pings are going to get either redshifted or blue shifted by the gravitational wave. But whether you interpret that as like space expanding or time slowing down depends in general

relativity on these coordinate systems that you've chosen. So somebody could come along and say, look, I interpret this as space bending. Somebody else come along and say, no, I interpret that as time bending. And general relativity, most people tend to work in what's called a synchronous gauge where you basically put all the bending into the space part and you say time doesn't bend at all and that's just sort of like our interpretation but it's totally valid to say no actually time is doing the bending so the answer is sort of like yeah space time as a whole is bending whether you call that space bending or time bending is a little bit arbitrary I wonder if what you mean is like

let's say I'm measuring time using a grandfather clock right with like a swinging pendulum and that's how I'm measuring time. Now if I, if the wave is coming, let's say, from directly at me and I face the grandfather clock in one direction,

then maybe it's not going to affect how it ticks. But if I turn it 90 degrees, maybe it is going to affect how it ticks. And in which case, you might say in one instance that it did slow down time, but in the other instance, you might say,

no, it didn't slow down time. It just stretched, space. Yeah, that's right. And even in the case where it did slow down time, you could argue it did slow down time because time actually went slower or because increased the distance that the pendulum had to swing, right? You can interpret it both ways.

Sort of how even in special relativity, you can interpret like contraction of distances and stretching of time to be two sides of the same coin. Like when I travel to a nearby star at near the speed of light, I see the distance to the star contracted, so it only takes me a minute to get there. Somebody else sees me flying for light years, but my time is slowed down, which is why it only seemed like a minute for me. So I see length contracted. Somebody else sees time dilated.

In many cases, it just depends on your perspective, whether you're calling it a space effect or a time effect. Well, it is super complicated. But I feel like maybe in the past we've talked about or you've mentioned that there are separate effects in terms of the bending of space and the slowing down of time. like if you swing by a black hole then time will move slower for you right that's not up for interpretation is it you're exactly right that there are two separate effects we're talking about here one is like velocity dependent time dilation or length contraction which is a different effect

than gravitational based time dilation which is just due to the curvature of space you're totally right those are two separate effects and you're right that the gravitational one is an absolute effect. It's not like I see your time slowed down and you see my time slowed down. In the gravitational one, everybody agrees, like the person close to the black hole agrees that their time is going slower than the person further from the black hole. So then what's happening as a gravitational wave goes past me? Is it more like a black hole? Like we're getting far from a black hole or is it more like we're speeding up and slowing that? The gravitational wave is a curvature effect. So it's definitely more like being close to a black hole.

But I was going to say that even the story we tell about being close to a black hole, we're interpreting that as an effect on time. You could also change your gauge, they call it in general relativity, redefine the axes, and pretend that that's only happening in space coordinates. So in general relativity, you can basically interpret these things as space or time because the distinction between the two becomes much more fuzzy. Even the case of going near a black hole? Didn't you say that everyone can agree the time slow down?

Everyone agrees about the magnitude of the effect. And if both of you agree on the coordinates, then we interpret that in terms of time. So yeah, everybody agrees that the person close to the black hole has a stronger effect. If you're using a certain gauge, then we interpret that as a time effect. If we choose a different gauge, then we interpret that as a space effect. The thing we agree on is the magnitude of the effect, whether it's space or time is up to interpretation. Wait, so then are you saying that when I go near a black hole, I could interpret that not as a changing time? Yes.

You could choose some weird coordinates in general relativity to interpret that as just a bending of space. It is a bending of space, right? That's curvature. And so if you redefine your time, then you could choose time to be invariant, yeah. But isn't the case, I mean, I know this because I saw the movie Interstellar, that if you go near a black hole and then come back, you'll be younger than me. That's not, that doesn't seem like it depends on a coordinate system. It's like, I'm going to see, you're going to be younger than me.

There's no way that I cannot see that. If one of us takes a trip to the black hole and comes back, then you've completed a loop. You're back to the same location in space. And that makes those calculations invariant. It actually doesn't depend in that case on the choice of coordinates or gauges. So yeah, in that case, like in interstellar, everyone also agrees. All right.

Well, then let's maybe just close it out then. And what would you say is the answer then for Max's question? Does time get dilated as a gravitation away comes through? Or can you just ignore it? I would say that space time does get dilated, absolutely. Which part of space time you're saying gets stretched? out is a little bit arbitrary. Most people tend to work in a choice of gauges where only space is getting stretched.

It's just sort of simpler and it's more natural for people to choose. But in the end, it is a little arbitrary because it really is all of space time getting squeezed. All right. And if Matthew McConaughey were to serve a gravitational wave, would he come back younger or older when he makes it be sure? I think he's frozen in time. He doesn't look like he's aging at all. Right, right. That's what I mean.

Maybe that's a secret. He's surfing gravitational ways up there. Yeah, we should all be in the Matthew McConaughey gauge. There you go. And then maybe we can all retire. All right, well, we tried, Max. Sorry, but it sounds like the answer is that it's really complicated and you need a degree in gravitational relativity to figure it out.

But you're right that space and time are deeply, deeply connected. All right. Well, thanks to everyone who sent in their questions here today. It's always fun to take a deep dive into. people's curiosity and to think about these scenarios that we don't think about every day. Absolutely. We love your curiosity, not just because it tells us that our passion for wanting to understand the universe is shared by so many other people, but because it actually literally powers us. Your support for science and your curiosity is what makes science possible. Thank you

very much. Yeah, and if anyone ever makes a gold asteroid out there, hey, how about you sent me a chunk of it because, you know, about 42 years late on retiring. Yes, so please donate a chunk of your next gold asteroid to Jorge's retirement. Yeah, there you go. All right, well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. For more science and curiosity, come find us on social media where we answer questions and post

videos. We're on Twitter, Discord, Insta, and now TikTok. Thanks for listening. and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeart Radio. For more podcasts from IHeart Radio, 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 two, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September's National Service,

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, save my life twice. Welcome to season two of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, You're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier.

Denials easier. Complex problem solving takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case. has a story to tell, and the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha.

This technology's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.