Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Listener Questions goes bananas!

Episode Date: August 20, 2024

Daniel and Jorge answer questions about banana decays and black hole velocities.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

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

Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people, an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino, to the show. And we had a blast. Take a listen. Sue and I were like riding the line. Bikes the other day. And we're like,

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The Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the Ad Council have mental health resources available for you at loveyourmindtay.org. That's loveyourmindtay.org. See how much further you can go when you take care of your mental health. Hey, Jorge, do you like your bananas really, really fresh or, like, gently decayed? Decade? What do you mean? Like, rotten? You know, bananas are on the spectrum from, like, crunchy and green to black and mushy, and everybody likes them differently. Where do you sit on that spectrum?

I like him yellow, but with a little bit of a speckled to them. So, slightly decayed. Slightly decayed, but only a little bit. But, you know, I'm flexible. It depends on how desperate I am for banana. And how desperate you are to keep from decaying. What do you mean? The bananas helped you live longer?

Probably longer than chocolate. Hi, I'm Jorge I'm a cartoonist and author of Oliver's Great Big Universe. Hey, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I honestly think bananas and chocolate don't mix. You've never had it together before? Oh, no, I've tried them. It's just not a good combination. The texture just clashes. Hmm. I wonder if you had it the right way, like on a fondue. Have you had it on a fondue? Then they're both kind of soft and delicious. Yeah, but the banana still got that squishiness to it, you know, where the chocolate is like smooth.

And smooth and luxurious. Do you like anything with your chocolate or are you a chocolate purest? No, pretzels and chocolate's good. Bread and chocolate are good. Some fruits with chocolate, like a raspberry with chocolate is good. Cherries and chocolate. Blueberries and chocolate. Bananas just doesn't fit.

It sounds like you've done a lot of experimenting. I like to think of myself as very thorough. Thorough in your chocolate consumption. But how thorough are you, though? Have you tried chocolate covered? You know, sometimes you just want to explore and sometimes you want to be guided by the theory. And the theory tells me chocolate sardines are disgusting. Chocolate covered broccoli, perhaps?

Chocolate covered garbage, yeah. Do you just call broccoli garbage? No, but I think the combination of chocolate and broccoli is garbage. In theory. In theory, I could be wrong. But you don't know for sure. Yeah, you could be wrong. Somebody out there tell me about your savory chocolate.

exploration. That's right. And then write a paper about it. And then maybe Daniel will believe you. Yeah. I'll even cite your paper. In your own paper. In journal. On a chocolate covered pretzels or about chocolate covered sardines. Yes, exactly. There's an academic field for everything. But anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe, a production of IHeard Radio. Where we don't just talk about chocolate or bananas or chocolate and bananas. We talk about big questions about the universe, things that actually matter. Things that make you go, hmm,

I wish I knew the answer to that question. Or my life would be different if I knew the answer to this question. Those are the kind of questions we dig into on the podcast. How big is the universe? Where did it all come from? How does it all work? And we want to answer not just the questions that are in the minds of professional scientists, but your questions, the ones that you struggle with when you're trying to make sense of the universe

or the ones that keep you up at night. So send us your questions to questions at danielanhorpe.com. You'll get an answer. This story, we'd like to address all kinds of questions, the kind that make you think that the universe is amazing and sometimes a little bit bananas. Those amazing facts about the universe that make the cosmos such a slippery subject to study, but at the same time, so darn appealing. What seems to continuously amaze listeners is that I'm promising on air to answer all of their questions, and then I get an email from somebody, and they're amazed that I actually write them back. I got an email from a listener this morning saying, wow, you really do right. back to all of us. It's like, yes, call my bluff, write to me with your questions. I really do

want to answer them. Why do you think they're surprised? I think that there's a lot of science communicators out there that don't respond to their emails and that publicly complain about how many emails they get and are negative and standoffish about it. And yeah, I take the opposite approach and so maybe that's surprising to people. I am a busy guy. Of course, I got lots of things going on, but to me this is a real joy. I don't want this podcast to just be a one direction, a lecture. I want it to be a conversation with everybody out there who's excited about these things who doesn't have a friendly neighborhood physicist they can ask these questions too. So yeah, send us your questions. Engage with us. Have a conversation. Do you know any friendly

neighborhood physicists or friendly physicists? I think you know one, yeah. But anyways, we do like to answer listener questions here. And sometimes we like to answer them here on the podcast, live or at least pre-recorded on the internet. Live and heavily edited. Are we heavily edited? I didn't know that. How heavily edited are we? Can I just say anything and someone's going to censor me? You should check out our behind the scenes episode where we talk to Corey about how much he cuts and how much he keeps. Mostly it all ends up on the air, but sometimes, you know, we back up and say things another way. But we do like to answer questions and so today on the podcast we'll be tackling. Listener questions. Number 65. We're getting four closer to

to one number we might have to skip, Daniel. Well, we have three awesome questions here today from listeners. We have questions about banana radiation, the half-life of tiny particles, and how fast things spin around a black hole. I guess whether or not they're bananas or not. Well, let them make them go bananas. What if they're half bananas?

You'll have to ask that question and find out. All right, well, let's get right down to. Good. Our first question comes from Samia, who hails from Morocco. Hi, Daniel. Hi, Jorge. So I have been pondering something lately. How do scientists define the half-life of nuclides? I always assumed it was determined experimentally, but then I stumbled upon those massive numbers in billion of years. An example of this is potassium, commonly found in Jorge's favorite snack bananas. They have half-life of 1.4 billion years.

years. So it's definitely not just experimental and also not a guesswork. So I am really curious about the actual answer. All right. Interesting question. I guess Samia's question is how do you know stuff, Daniel? Like have you actually measured the half life of some things that maybe take billions of years to decay? Yeah, it's a good question. And I like that way he rooted in something very practical bananas, of course. And it's a good question. And it's a good question how we can measure these things that take like a billion years to happen because we haven't been doing science for a billion years, right? Right. Humans haven't been around for a billion years, right? Yeah. So if something takes a billion years to happen, you can't possibly measure it, right?

But the answer here lies in understanding what people mean when they say half-life. If the half-life of potassium is 1.4 billion years, that doesn't mean you have to wait 1.4 billion years for anything to happen. The half-life is the time it takes on average for half-life. half of the atoms to decay. So if you wait 1.4 billion years, that means half of them have decayed and half of them have not. But some of them may have decayed very early on in the first few seconds you were watching or the first few minutes you were watching. Because half-life is per atom. It's really the time for an atom to have a 50% chance of decaying. Well, what's kind of interesting about the half-life is that it's almost always true, right? Like if you have a ton of a material,

it'll take a certain number of years to decay down to half. But if you have a little bit of that material, you'll still take the same amount of time to decay down to half of that much material. Yeah, because it's relative and it's per atom, right? Every atom is independent. They don't affect each other. It doesn't matter how many atoms you have.

You start from 100. It takes the half-life to get down to 50. You start from a billion. It takes that half-life to get down from a billion to half a billion. Because you could just break that billion into chunks of 100, each of which then decay down into 50s. Right, right.

Like a banana would take a billion years to decay, whether it's a tiny little banana or a humongas galaxy size banana. Yeah, exactly. Because they don't interact, right? They're all independent. And so it doesn't matter how many you have. And the key to understanding how you could measure something that takes a billion years is that stuff is happening even in the first few moments potentially. And that's because every atom has the same probability.

They don't have like an age. There's not like a clock inside of them that says, oh, somebody's been watching me for a billion years or for a million years. It's time for me to decay. every moment the atom has like a fresh chance to decay and it like rolls a die. It's like a die with 60 million sides or something. And one side says decay and the other side say don't. And every moment the universe is rolling that die. So the probability for an individual atom to decay is constant in time, right?

Which means there's always a chance for any atom to decay. It's just a question of like how long it takes for half of them to eventually hit that number. Or as you said, how long it takes for it to have that particular atom to have a 50% chance? of decaying. Exactly. If you just give it a minute, probably the probability that it's going to decay is probably super duper small. If you give it 10 years, it's a little bit bigger.

If you give it a billion years, then there's a 50% chance that it's going to decay by that. Exactly. And even after a minute or a moment, there's still a non-zero chance of it decaying, right? You have a single potassium atoms, say the half-life is a billion years. I haven't even looked it up. It still has a chance of decaying after the first moment. It rolls that dye and it might hit it. very first time, right? And decay right there, even if it's half-life is a billion years. A long

half-life comes from having a small probability of decaying at any given moment. A short half-life comes from having a high probability of decaying. If, like, 90% of the sides of that die say decay, then the stuff's going to decay away pretty quickly. Right, but I think Tommy would maybe have the same question about the single atom. Like, how do you know a single atom of potassium takes a billion years to have a 50% chance of decaying if you've never measured one, for a billion years. Yeah, and the key is not to look at a single atom. So if you're looking for something really rare to happen,

but it could happen at any moment, or you don't have to wait a billion years. It could happen at any moment. The key is to look at a lot of atoms, right? If you have like one in a billion chance for potassium atom to decay at any moment, then you just need a billion of them, or 10 billion of them, or 50 billion of them,

and then you'll see one of them decay. So if you start with a big enough blob of potassium atoms, you'll start to see them decay almost instantly. It'll still take a billion years for half of them to decay because it's very rare for any individual one to decay. But if you got lots of them, just like lots of monkeys in your room with typewriters, pretty quickly one of them is going to type up Shakespeare. Right, but you're not measuring individual atom. Even if you have a billion atoms of potassium, your experiment is not going to be looking at an individual atom that decay. It depends on the decay.

Sometimes you can see an individual decay. If it's, for example, generates radiation, then you could pick up a single particle. You know, we have these very sensitive detectors that can see individual particles. So in principle, yeah, you could see an individual atom decay. In practice, you don't even have to be that sensitive. So mostly you can just look for the decay products and you'll see plenty of them. Because the trick is it's not hard to have 10 to the 30 atoms, right? Atoms are so small that just like a handful of any element is a huge number of atoms.

So it's not hard to get a huge number of them, which means you can see really rare things happening. just because you got so many little monkeys in that room all typing away. I wonder if maybe the real answer or maybe the best way to explain this is to explain that the half-life of something is really just an arbitrary number, right? Like we just call it a half-life because that's something that's kind of easy for our mind. So it grabs like, oh, it's when 50% of it decays. But really, that number of the half-life is just the rate of decay. And you can measure that also in like not the half-life, but like the quarter life of something.

Or the one-tenth of a life of something. something or the one millionth time of something. And all of those rates are basically the same. They're all related. Like once you know one, you know all the other ones. Yeah, there's definitely an arbitrary element there, right. The fact that we choose to define the half life at 50%. You're right. You could choose to define the quarter life or the 10th life or the 90% life or whatever. Half life is an arbitrary choice. But it also does reflect something which is not arbitrary, which is the decay probability. So it determined by that decay probability. But you're Right. That decay probability at any given moment also could determine the quarter life or the

10th life. It's just a standard we choose for comparing things. And we know that a short half life means a high probability to decay at any moment. A long half life means a smaller probabilities to decay at any moment. That's why you get more of them. But you can't actually measure things that happen very, very rarely as long as you have enough examples. Right. So then like if you wanted to measure the half life or the decay rate of potassium, you wouldn't have to wait a billion years. You would just wait one year or 10 years and see how much of that blob of potassium you have decays and maybe it's you know one millionth or one billionth of the material has decayed but even that one billionth tells you basically the rate of decay which then lets you extrapolate to what the half life would be

yeah exactly you don't have to observe half of a decaying to measure the half life you just have to measure the decay rate and as long as you have enough examples you'll see some decay and you can measure that decay rate you can even do crazy things like measure the lifetime of a proton to be longer than the age of a universe. Which is true, right? That's what you've measured. Yeah, because we've never seen a proton decay. So we don't know, do protons live forever, or do they just live a very, very long time? And we've watched a bunch of protons waiting to see if one of them decays and never

seen one. And so we can say, well, the lifetime of a proton is at least 10 to the 31 years, which is a huge number, right? The age of the universe is like 10 to the 13. But have you ever seen a proton decay? Never seen a single one. Never seen one. But you've also never seen an electron decay.

That's right. But for electrons, you say that it never decays. We say it never decays. We don't actually know that. We just know that they're stable on time scales that are much longer than the life of the universe. But yeah, they could decay. Did you just say that you say things without really knowing them? I mean, there's always a qualification when we say we know something, right?

Nothing we know about physics could be true. It could be that everything is upturned later. or shown to just be an approximation. In the case of an electron, we call it stable because that's what stable means for us. Like, it doesn't decay over billions and billions of years. It might live forever. Or it might decay after 10 to the 50 years. We definitely know a lot about the lifetime of the electron, but we don't know everything about it.

But then what's the difference between an electron and a proton that makes you think that a proton has a half life, but an electron does not? Yeah, that's a good question. Because the proton is not fundamental, right? It's an assembly of smaller bits. We all already know that. The electron might be fundamental. It might just be the electron is made of the electron, in which case it's stable. But if it's made of smaller things that could change their configuration and turn into something else,

it'd be more likely to be unstable. And we know the proton is made of smaller bits, right? It's just an arrangement of quarks. And a slightly different arrangement of those same corks, the neutron is not stable. The neutron only lasts for like 11 minutes. You got a bunch of neutrons in space. They'll decay really quickly. So it's sort of a mystery why the proton is stable.

And there's lots of juicy theories out there that particle theorists like because they solve other problems that predict the proton should decay. And all those theories are ruined by the fact that the proton doesn't decay. So there's a bunch of experiments out there hoping to see a proton decay. Interesting. Do you have a juicy theory about the decay of bananas? Yes. Like can you make banana juice? Is that such a thing?

It's called a smoothie. My theory is that when bananas decay, they get way too juicy and gross. Too soft. Too soft. But it's really cool to think that you can say something about protons over like 10 to the 30 years, even though no proton has existed that long, not even a tiny fraction of that length. Yeah, or even about potassium, right? It's amazing we can say that the potassium in a banana is not going to decay for 1.4 billion years because we know we've seen it decay and it decay super duper slowly. So from that you can extrapolate that it's going to take 1.5 billion years to decay to half of its initial.

quantity yeah exactly so if you want to see something do something rare just get a whole lot of them that's the answer are you saying people should go out there and get a lot of bananas if you want to see bananas do something right if you think bananas get up and dance in the middle of the night and you think that's pretty rare then yeah get a lot of bananas watch them all at night and see what they do well the half life of bananas in my house is pretty short now that my son is growing up and he's doing all the kinds of exercise and he's he's downing those bananas pretty fast. Does he do that thing kids do, which is like just eat half a banana and then leave it

around? Is that what half life of a banana means in your house? Well, I think he learned that for me, but yeah, he takes a knife and he cuts a banana and then he'll eat the other half the next day. All right. Well, great question. Thank you, Samia. And let's get to our other questions here today.

We have questions about more bananas, it seems, and black holes and or maybe both. So let's dig into that, but first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In Season 2, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio. video app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious.

Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now hold up, isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age.

It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, 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. Afea 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. 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcast. Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people and an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino, to the show, and we had a blast. We talked about her recent 40th birthday celebrations, co-hosting a podcast with her fiancé Sue Bird, watching former teammates retire and more. Never a dull moment with Pino.

Take a listen. What do you miss the most about being a pro athlete? The final. The final. and the locker room. I really, really, like, you just, you can't replicate, you can't get back. Showing up to the locker room every morning

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And we're the host of the Good Mom's Bad Choices podcast, brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Historically, men talk too much. And women have quietly listened. And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribes. With guests like Corinne Steffens. I've never seen so many women protect predatory men.

And then me too happened. And then everybody else wanted to get pissed off because the white said it was okay. Problem. My oldest daughter, her first day in ninth grade, and I called to ask how I was going. She was like, oh, dad, all they were doing was talking about your thing in class. I ruined my baby's first day of high school. And slumflower. What turns me on is when a man sends me money.

Like, I feel the moisture between my legs when the man sends me money. I'm like, oh my God, it's go time. You actually sent it? Listen to the Good Mom's Bad Choices podcast. on the Black Effect Podcast Network, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you go to find your podcast. It must take some time for an atom of one element to turn into another element and various particles. Is this time unmeasurably short?

Does it vary for different types of decay? Thanks. All right. Another banana radiation, half-live question. Is that a theme today? Were you feeling really bananas today? It wasn't me. I think Bill and Samia just wrote in about bananas decaying

at the same moment. It's sort of amazing. At the same time? Mm-hmm. Like the same timestamp. Yeah, I think some potassium particle must have triggered inside their brains. Yeah, exactly. What's the probability of that happening? It's bananas.

Their brains are banana tangled. Quantum banana mint. But you know, you don't have to answer these in order, Daniel. We could have saved, spread out some of the banana conversations across several listener question episodes. I'm too busy answering listener emails to organize these. I see. You're too busy directing your grad students to answer the emails. I am not allowed to get my grad students to work on this project for free. Absolutely not. Oh, for free?

I see, but if you pay them bananas, then it's totally kosher. Do you want to pay my grad students out of the podcast? Let's do it. If we can pay them in bananas, sure. It sounds like a great deal. And it'll be good for them. You know, the grad students here unionized recently, so bananas are definitely off the table for payment. Oh, I don't know.

Are they? Have you read the union rules? Maybe they make exceptions for bananas. I don't think they do. That was not a clause on the bargaining table. I see, I see. It's a slippery point of contention. All right, well, back to the question. Bill has a question, but it's kind of a different question about banana radiation and decay.

He's not asking how long it takes the potassium in a banana to decay, but basically how long it takes for something to decay. Like if something decays, does it happen instantly or does it take a certain amount of time? Yeah, this is a super awesome question because it really reveals the limits of our knowledge and also how those limits have changed. I mean, the short answer is, for some things, it's effectively instantaneous because we can't measure how fast it is, like an individual decay, how long does it take one atom to turn into another kind, or for a neutron to turn into a proton or for inverse beta decay to happen. For some processes, we can't measure it, so we treat it as instantaneous, though we don't actually know. What do you mean we can't measure? Like, it happens too fast or is just impossible to measure? I don't think it's impossible to measure in principle, like if we had higher energy probes,

and we could look inside and see the mechanics of what was happening, then we would see that something is happening and that takes time. And because we can't see inside, we don't have like fast enough measuring devices. It's as if it's instantaneous in some cases, but not in others. And we've made some progress. So, for example, we used to treat beta decay when a neutron turns into a proton and emits an electron as an instantaneous thing.

We're like, well, this is just one thing that happens. A neutron turns into a proton and an electron, boom. And like 50 years ago, we couldn't see inside the neutron or the proton to understand, like, what was actually happening there. We just treated them all as point particles. And we said, there was a before and there was an after. And in the middle, we don't know what happens. We just treat it as an instantaneous step. But I guess maybe more fundamentally, do you think these things are happening instantaneously?

Or do you think all of these things, decays, particle interactions, do they all take some time? Everything in the universe definitely takes some time, even if you're transitioning between. fundamental states. Like say, for example, you have a photon and it's turning into an electron and a positron, right? We don't know what's inside the photon. We don't know what's inside the electron, the positron. We don't know what's happening there. So assume that those are fundamental things in the universe. When a photon turns into an electron and positron, you can ask like, is that instantaneous? Is there a moment when it's a photon and then a moment when it's an electron of positron and nothing in between? The way to think about it

quantum mechanically, which is the right way to think about everything microscopically, is to think about the probability is changing. It's like 100% chance of being a photon, and then that probability starts to drop. And now it's like 50% chance of being a photon and 50% chance of being an electron or two other particles. And then that probability changes. And now it's like 1% chance of still being a photon. So the probability changes smoothly.

So you're saying, so there's two things that can happen that can change. Like the actual electron can change, and then the probability of it, what it is can also change. Are you saying, like, in quantum mechanics, nothing is ever something. Like, nothing is ever an electron or nothing's ever a proton or a photon. Things just have the probability of being an electron or the probability of being a photon if you probe them. Yeah, exactly. And we can try to make it simpler, even just think about, like, what a single electron does.

We talked once in the podcast about, like, how an electron changes from energy levels. Is that instantaneous? When it absorbs a photon, does it, like, jump from one energy level to another? or does it move from that energy level to the other? Well, the electron can't be in between energy levels. So how does it like get from here to there? What happens is that the probability for it to be in the lower energy level starts to drop and the probability for it to be in the higher energy level starts to raise until it's

effectively 100%. Now, do you know that for sure, though? Or, I mean, isn't it technically possible for these probabilities to change instantaneously? Because they're just math, right? They're just math. I love that. We know this for sure, only in the sense that this is how the theory works, and the theory so far describes everything we've seen, so it accurately predicts it. But there's always bits of the theory that are like behind the curtain that we can't see directly.

And right now we're talking about stuff we can't see. We're talking to things that are not observed. This is a calculation of what's happening really behind the scenes. All you can do is shoot a photon at the electron and measure its old energy level and its new energy level and make predictions for that. You can't see these probabilities themselves transitioning. That's probably what you mean. But you could potentially, right? I guess maybe that's what I'm asking.

Is it that you can't see them change or that we don't have the technology to see them change? Like let's say I gave you magical powers and I gave you the ability to create this measuring device. It has infinite time resolution and infinite size resolution. Would you be able to see these probabilities change or would you maybe see them change suddenly? You can't see the probabilities directly, right? The probabilities are consequences of the wave function, which is not something physically we can measure. All we can do is measure the electron and measure the photon. So if you gave me infinite experimental powers, I could like set up a huge number of these devices and shoot photons

at them simultaneously. And just like in the previous question, I could say like, oh, look, 40% of the photons were absorbed or 90% of them were absorbed. So that way I could sort of measure the probabilities, but for an individual photon or electron, I can't say, oh, here, this one has a 40% chance there and that one has a 40% chance here. I can calculate those things using the theory, but I can't actually observe those things directly. And also, crucially, in the theory, probabilities never change suddenly. They always evolve smoothly with time. That's, again, just part of the theory.

And the theory could be totally wrong. We have lots of questions about quantum mechanics and what's going on inside this stuff. That could be totally wrong. But in our current picture, none of this stuff happens instantaneously. But the way to think about it is the probabilities changing smoothly, not the particles changing instantly. According to the theory, though, right? according to the theory.

And sometimes you can zoom out and understand, like, the internal mechanisms of these particles. Like we were talking about earlier, we used to understand a neutron just like changing into a proton and an electron the way we just described. Like, hey, there's a probability for it to happen. Now we know, though, about what's going on inside the neutron. So we can talk about what's actually happening and how long that takes. We've, like, zoomed in. And we can see, oh, when that happens, that's a downcork turning into an upcork and emitting

a W boson. We've like resolved this thing. thing, which you should just be a point in our theories. Now we've like zoomed in and we've seen, oh, no, it's actually these little pieces interlocking and changing and doing their thing. And that does take some time. And how do you measure that time then? I know in the Large Hadron Collider, you have like a series of detectors or sensors and you can sort

of trace the path and the track and the what happens to these things after they smash up. Is that how you tell how long something takes or are you just guessing from the theory? Just guessing from the theory. The highest level of understanding of the universe ever achieved by humans, or he calls guessing from the theory. I love it. No, in some cases, this is just guessing from the theory. Like, for example, the decay we just described talks about a W boson.

A W. boson lives for a very, very short amount of time, 10 to the amount is 24 seconds, which is much faster than anything we could actually measure. So, again, we have a theoretical description of this, and we think it takes that much time for this decay to have. happen 10 to minus 24 seconds, but we could never measure that for the probability to shift from being one thing to the other. Yes, exactly. But I wonder if maybe Bill's question is like, when it actually happens, does it take time or is it instantaneous? Because, you know, like these things are wiggles in some quantum field out there in the universe. Do those wiggles suddenly like pop into a different

configuration or do they, you know, morph from one to the other? The right way to think about it is that it always takes time. Everything takes time. Nothing in the universe. is discontinuous. It's not like a slice where it's this and then all of a sudden it's that, right? Everything is smooth in the universe as far as we've discovered, you know. And so even quantum mechanics, right, which likes to have things be discreet and in chunks, it transforms things smoothly through time. If you look at the Schrodinger equation, for example, that's an equation for how wave functions change through time as they interact with stuff. And that's always smooth. And so instead of thinking about like things popping from one spot to another, you should think

about their probabilities is like sloshing around. And so that always takes time. That always takes time. And I guess part of Bill's question was, do different things take different amounts of time? And that's the answer is yes, right? Some things maybe or maybe not. Yes, absolutely.

Different things take different amounts of time. For example, the W boson is very short-lived. But if you decay and you use a photon, instead photons can live for a very long time. And so some of these decays can take much longer. Wait, wait. I feel like maybe there's two things here. And I wonder if this is what's confusing, Bill, enough for him to ask this question,

which is, you know, some things take a long time to decay, right? Like they have a long half-life, as we talked about in the first third of the episode. Like maybe a potassium takes a billion years for half of them to decay. Right. Because the probability of that is so small for it to decay. So that there's one thing. The probability of it to decay is small, therefore the half-life is really long. But then when an individual potassium atom actually decay,

does that take an amount of time? And it sounds like you said yes, but does it take a different amount of time depending on the thing? Yeah, so potassium atoms, they should all take the same amount of time, but something else, they decays in a different way.

If it doesn't decay with a W boson, for example, if it decays through some other mechanism, it can take longer or shorter. What does that depend on then? It depends like on the mass of the particle involved. The W boson, for example, is very heavy, and so it doesn't live for very long.

It decays very, very rapidly. But if you decayed with another particle involved, You know, for example, you didn't make a W boson. You made a photon. Instead, photons can live for a very long time. And so that decay process can take longer. Is it possible for something to have like a short half life but a long decay time? And conversely, like something can have a long half life but a short decay time?

Yeah. I don't think the two things are connected. Mm-hmm. At all. If think if you dug into it, there might be some connections because the reason things decay quickly is that they have a high chance of decaying at any moment. which probably means a stronger force, which might mean you end up using gluons and photons

rather than W and Z bosons. So there might be some sort of loose connection there. All right. Well, I guess, and then the last part of Bill's question was, are these times unmeasurably short? Have we measured actually any of these decay times? Or are they still beyond our technological reach? Most of these things happen much faster than we could actually measure.

So we can't measure most of these decays, like to see them halfway, for example. You can see them before, you can see them after. But as we talked about in a recent episode about the fastest time slice, we know we're close to being able to measure things like down to the 10 of the minus 24 seconds. Which is how fast do you think these decays are happening? Like the actual decay of the probability function. Yeah. But what about bananas?

Bananas we can measure those pretty easy, right? Yeah, those take days or weeks to decay or in your house just minutes. Yeah. We are well within the bounds of our physical. abilities. It sounds like it's improving every day. Yeah, yeah, he is getting bigger. And so he's eating more.

I think there's a correlation there, actually. All right. Well, thank you, Bill, for that great question. Now let's get to our last question. And this one is about black holes and whether things spiral into them or whether they fall straight in, sort of. We'll dig into that. But first, let's take another quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulance. This is 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 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. According to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. It's even more likely that they're cheating.

He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeartRadio 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. Afea and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal.

Because I think hair is a complex language system, right? In terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyper fixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. 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 IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game was Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people and an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino to the show,

and we had a blast. We talked about her recent 40th birthday celebrations, co-hosting a podcast with her fiancé Sue Bird, watching former teammates retire and more. Never a dull moment with Pino. Take a listen. What do you miss the most about being a pro athlete? The final. The final.

And the locker room. I really, really, like, you just can't replicate you can't get back, showing up to the locker room every morning just to shit talk. We've got more incredible guests like the legendary Candace Parker and college superstar AZ Fudd. I mean, seriously, y'all. The guest list is absolutely stacked for season two. And, you know, we're always going to keep you up to speed on all the news and happenings around the women's sports world as well. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. The OGs of Uncensored Motherhood are back and badder than ever. I'm Erica. And I'm Mila. And we're the host of the Good Mom's Bad Choices podcast, brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Historically, men talk too much. And women have quietly listened.

And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribes. With guests like Corinne Steffens. I've never seen so many women protect predatory men. And then me too happen. And then everybody else want to get paid. and stuff because the white said it was okay. Problem.

My oldest daughter, her first day in ninth grade, and I called to ask how it was going. She was like, oh, dad, all they were doing was talking about your thing in class. I ruined my baby's first day of high school. And slumflower. What turns me on is when a man sends me money. Like, I feel the moisture between my legs when a man sends me money. I'm like, oh my God, it's go time.

You actually sent it? Listen to the Good Mom's Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcasts network the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you go to find your podcast all right we're answering listener questions here today and our last question is about black holes and it comes from julian from brazil hi danio horre my question is about black holes a question disk does the matter closer to the actual black hole spins faster than the matter that's more distant from the center. I mean, is it more like a galaxy

where everything spins more or less at the same speed because dark matter is holding everything together? Or is it more like the solar system where Mercury spins around the sun why faster than Neptune? That's it, big fan of the podcast, the books, and everything. Thanks, bye. All right, interesting question.

Here today, it's got my head spinning a little bit. Is he asking how fast things spin as they fall in? Or do they spin faster as they fall in? Yeah, I think he wants to know about the rotation speed of the accretion disk. This disk of matter that's like on deck to fall into the black hole. He's wondering, does it spin faster near the outside or near the center? And he's comparing that to his understanding of the solar system and the galaxy and those spinning systems and he wants to know like which one is more like the accretion disk.

Because I guess, you know, he mentions the solar system and the planets, like the planets around our sun, they're all, uh, have different. different orbital speeds, right? Like some take 100, 200 years to go around the sun, some take less time. Yeah, and not just orbital periods because they're going further, but their actual, like, speed relative to the sun is different at different distances from the sun. And that's also true and really powerful and important for galaxies, right?

Understanding how stars are moving around the center of the galaxies, how we discovered that dark matter was a thing. So this is a really important and interesting question. Right. And at the same time, like the planets are spinning in place. too, right? Yeah. Everything is spinning.

Yeah. That's a nice way to spin it. All right. So then I guess maybe step us through. What is an accretion disk of a black hole? Yeah. So an accretion disk is the stuff you see sort of like at the belt of the black hole. Most black holes are spinning and the stuff around them is spinning.

And that's because stuff doesn't just like fall into a black hole. You might have a mental picture of a black hole like a giant space vacuum sucking stuff up. But black holes just have gravity the way anything else has gravity. Like you replace. the sun with a black hole at the same mass, then the Earth's orbit wouldn't change, wouldn't get like magically sucked in. And things can orbit something with gravity

and not fall in, the way the Earth orbits the sun and doesn't fall in. The way the sun orbits the center of the galaxy and doesn't fall in. You can also orbit a black hole and not fall in. So the accretion disk is stuff that's near the black hole. It's come in like at an angle, so it's whizzing around the black hole before it falls in.

Hmm. I feel like maybe we covered this in our book. Frequently asked questions about the universe now available for sale, but is the accretion disk of a black hole continuous or does it only exist in the band, you know, sort of like Saturn's rings. They don't go out there into infinity. They sort of have an extent to them. There are definitely regions near a black hole where you can be in a stable orbit and regions where you can't. Like if you get close enough to a black hole, you're definitely just going to fall in and you're done unless you're like a photon. So there's like a photon

ring where photons can orbit a black hole stably, like where if you shot a flashlight forwards, you would hit you in the back of the head, for example. But stuff with matter can't orbit there stably. It will just fall towards the event horizon. So there's definitely like a region near the black hole where you can't have any stable orbits and then regions further out where you could have stable orbits. So maybe it does have like an extent, like an outer limit and an inner limit. It may. But there's an important difference between what's happening in an accretion disk and what's happening with like planets orbiting the sun or the sun orbiting the center of the galaxy and that's friction like in our orbit we're mostly not interacting with other stuff we get like

a little bit of a tug from jupiter now and then and from mars but mostly we're alone in an orbit and we're just orbiting the sun and the sun is orbiting the center of the galaxy and it's mostly not like bumping into stuff and losing energy and so things can be in stable orbits for billions of years right The Earth has been going around the sun for billions of years and the sun has been going around the center of the galaxy all of that time. And that's pretty stable. But an accretion disk is hot and nasty in a very different way. There's a lot of interactions happening between this stuff in the accretion disk. Because I think just like in our sun, you can orbit a black hole for a long time, right?

Like you could be a planet with life on it orbiting your black hole and you think like, and that would be normal to you. Like instead of a sun, you would have a dark circle in the sky. Exactly. If you found a black hole that was all by itself and didn't have an accretion disc, you can, like, put a planet there and it would orbit stably and be happy. No problem. Or even without an accretion disk, right? Like if you're maybe far enough away from it?

Yeah. If you're far enough away, then that's not a problem. But an accretion disk, there's stuff everywhere and it's all interacting and it's rubbing against itself. And that's why accretion disks glow because they're hot, because they're bumping into each other, they're moving fast. There's lots of energy exchange. So very little stuff in the accretion disk is orbiting the way our planet.

it's orbiting or the sun is orbiting the center of the galaxy, mostly it's spiraling in. So the trajectory, the dynamics of an accretion disk are very different from the dynamics of the solar system or the galaxy. Almost nothing is moving in a circle or an ellipse. Almost everything is moving in a spiral as it's losing energy and falling in. Right. Well, I think you said kind of the key word there, which is friction, which is like, you know, you can orbit the sun or a black hole forever as long as you're not losing energy.

But once you start losing energy because maybe things are bumping into you or you're rubbing against other space debris, then you're going to start falling in. Yeah, exactly. And the key concept here is angular momentum. The thing that keeps the Earth in orbit around the sun and the sun in orbit around the center of the galaxy is its angular momentum. That's what keeps you going. It makes a stable orbit.

Things in the accretion disk of the black hole will bump into each other. Like how do you lose angular momentum? Something has to apply a torque to you. And that's that other thing you bumped into. So you knock something further away and you get knocked in closer to the accretion disc. And then you start to fall in. So you actually gain energy, right? You gain velocity.

This is, I think, what Julian was asking about. As you get closer to the black hole, you've lost angular momentum, but now you're pointing towards the core of the black hole. You're speeding up as you come in. So you're getting faster. So you actually sort of gain energy, but lose angular momentum. So you are spinning faster as you get closer. You're moving faster.

You have a higher velocity, but your angular velocity is decreasing. You're not like whizzing around the black hole as much. That's what was keeping you away from the, the center is that you're moving around it, you're like missing the black hole. Like the reason the moon doesn't fall to the earth is that it's enough angular velocity to sort of miss the earth, even though the earth is pulling on it. But if you lose that angular velocity, then the pull is just going to pull you straight in towards the center.

And it will speed you up as you fall in. The same way that like if you drop a rock from the moon to the earth and it falls in, it's going to be going really fast by the time it hits the surface of the earth. You're going to be going really fast if you bump into a rock in the accretion disc and head towards the black hole. What if you slip on a banana Near a black hole And then as you fall in

You can blame it on your son I told you to clean up Yeah I told you not to cut the banana Are you telling me you cut bananas I mean bananas come with like a handy device You can just peel them and eat them You don't need any utensils But yeah but if you only want to eat half

You can cut it Because otherwise you peel half And then you got this hanging peel That eventually looks close But if you cut a banana Then it's clean. I have this argument with my kids all the time. They like to eat apples by cutting them.

And I'm like, you don't need to cut. You just hold it in your hand. You have teeth already. Like, it's beautiful. It's utensil-free eating. Sure. I mean, you can say that about any kind of eating, then. You can eat spaghetti without a fork as well.

Why not? They make this argument as well. They make this argument as well. Oh, I see. Well, dinner time must be really entertaining at your house. You know it is. Rangis just has their face in a bowl spaghetti. But anyways, black holes, sort of sounds like you're saying that if you're far away from the black hole and you start to fall in, maybe you will start to spin faster, right?

Because the stuff around the accretion in the accrucian disk near the black hole, that stuff is glowing and getting intense because it is spinning so fast. Are you saying that once you fall into the black hole, then you slow down? Well, I think that you're not spinning faster as you fall into the black hole. You're moving faster. So it's a little bit of a nuance there between velocity and angle. velocity, right? You're moving faster towards the center of the black hole, but your angle relative to the black hole is not changing anymore. And so you lost angular momentum, you definitely have higher velocity. And that's why, as you say, things glow, right? These

things are moving very, very fast and fast moving objects, if they have electric charge, they will emit photons. And that's why the accretion disk of black holes can be very, very bright. That's why we can see them. That picture of the black hole that's so famous, right? It's a ring around this black circle. It's the accretion disc, what we're seeing. It's those high-speed particles as they fall in. Now, what happens once you pass the event horizon? Are you even going faster? That's a question for quantum gravity. General relativity says, depends on the observer. If you're far away, then you'll never actually see that person across the event horizon because time slows down. If you're that actual

particle, you can measure your velocity as you accelerate towards the singularity. But I think we covered this in our book, frequently asked questions about the universe. Now for sale. for sale, yes, that the accretion disk is not sort of continuous down to the black hole or even to the event horizon. Like there's a gap, right, between the event horizon or at least the shadow of the black hole and this glowing disk. Well, yeah, there's a gap where you can't have a stable orbit, but you could still have stuff falling in actively, right?

So below, for example, the photon ring, you can't have anything orbiting. That's outside the event horizon, but inside the photon ring, you can't have anything orbiting stably there. But you can still have stuff there. If it's falling in actively and currently, then you could still see stuff there. So it doesn't have to be empty. There's stuff, but there is a little bit of a gap there, right? It depends on the black hole, right?

If it's not actively feeding, then yes, there will definitely be a gap there. And you could imagine stable stuff orbiting further out from the photon ring. But, you know, if you dump like a whole spaceship full of gravy, for example, then you can fill up that whole area with gravy particles briefly, right? Then they're all going to fall in. They can't stay stably there in that gap. Now, when you eat gravy in your house, do you use utensils too? We use a gravy boat and we just like pour it all over the table.

Oh, you believe in the gravy boat. Okay. I'm just trying to find out where your line is forcibility. Super soakers filled with gravy? That's the way to do it. Gravy super soakers? Yeah, I just open my mouth and the kids just shoot the gravy in. That sounds like a lot more trouble than a spoon, Daniel.

Because then you have to clean up, you have to clean up the super soaker. Yeah, well, you got the fire hose afterwards. You know, it all cleans up pretty well. Waterproof house. Another tool you need just to clean the soup or soakers. Did you hear about that lady who made her entire kitchen the inside of a washing machine so she could just wash the whole kitchen by the press of a button? I have not heard of this now. It sounds like a great idea.

Isn't that like those public restrooms and parks they have in some cities where you like you close the door and then it turns into a washing machine in there? Yeah, exactly. Great idea. And anybody with toddlers understands why that's a good idea. Just make your whole house that way. Yeah, exactly. It's just like make the whole plane out of the black box, right? Yeah, it'll clean itself up like a black hole.

Unless you clog it with too many, too much gravy. But people are really interested in studying the dynamics of accretion disks because it tells us something about what's happening there. Like you can learn a lot about what's going on just by looking at the velocity of stuff. Like one of the ways that we know black holes exist is by looking at stars orbiting them and seeing their velocity. We can use that to measure the mass of the black hole. like the black hole at the center of our galaxy. This is a recent Nobel Prize from studying the motion of stars

nearby that black hole. Their velocity tells us the mass. This is incredibly powerful probe in the same way that like looking at the velocity of stars in the galaxy told us how much mass there was because there had to be mass to hold in all those high-speed stars. And so it's a really powerful way to see things that you can't see directly.

All right. Well, great question. Thank you, Julian. And I guess the basic answer for Julianne is that Yeah, things kind of spin at different speeds around a black hole, just like they do around the solar system. Yeah, just like they do around the solar system. Like Mercury is going much faster than Earth, which is going much faster than Saturn, which is going much faster than Neptune. And so an accretion disk is a little bit more like that, though there's a lot more bumping and grinding going on in the accretion disk than in the solar system.

Oh, you make it sound very sexy there. But it sort of depends also on the mass, right? Like something can be close, but moving slow, but something could be far and moving fast. There's going to be a lot of variation because an accretion disk has a lot of chaos in it. But in general, things will definitely be faster, closer to the black hole because they've fallen in that gravitational potential. But within the accrucian disk, there might be some things moving faster than others, right? Yeah. All right.

Well, three great questions. Two of them about banana radiation. Boy, I wonder if that decay ratio is going to be increasing over time. Are we going to hit 100% full-life banana topics on our listener questions? Tune in, find out next time. I guess that could be easily hacked. You just have to coordinate with a couple of your friends, let's say six friends, and then just have you all ask a banana question at the same time,

and then technically, because of Daniel's your rules, you would have to have a full banana episode. Oh, my gosh, let's go for it. Man, that would be bananas. All right, well, thanks again, everyone who asked the question. 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 IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order, Criminal Justice. system on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious.

Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway.

We just welcomed one of my favorite people, an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino, to the show. And we had a blast. Take a listen. Sue and I were like riding the lime bikes the other day and we're like, we're like, we're like this. People write bikes because it's fun. We got more incredible guests like Megan in store, plus news of the day and more. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports Network. Don't let biased algorithms or degree screens or exclusive professional networks or stereotypes.

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You know, you hear our story, how we grew up, how I grew up. And you get a chance for people to unpack and get beyond race. All the Smoke featuring Michelle Obama. To hear this podcast and more, open your free IHeart Radio app. Search All the Smoke and listen now. This is an IHeart podcast.