Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Listener Questions Volume #2

Episode Date: December 19, 2024

Daniel and Kelly answer questions from curious listeners, about big black holes, nuking hurricanes and the philosophy of photons.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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and how we could be misunderstanding like all of it. And I love talking about parasites, teeny tiny little wasps, and dung beetles. But judging from my husband's face at the dinner table, it's possible that not everyone shares exactly my interests. So what do you want to hear about? For the podcast, we usually pick topics that excite us and that we think you'll enjoy, but, you know, we both have our weird quirks and preferences. So we want to hear from you. We'd love to answer questions you have about the universe, what you think is extraordinary and interesting. and needs more explanation.

Sometimes we turn your idea into a whole episode. Sometimes we give you a 15-minute answer during a listener question session. And the questions you send us will help us more generally to gauge our audience's interests, which help us pick additional topics for the future. So please don't be shy, send us your questions.

We want to hear from you. We want this podcast to be about what you are curious about. And today we're tackling three fantastic, hilarious, amazing questions sent to us by listeners, just like you. And if you want to be on the next show, you can email us at Questions at Danielandkelly.org. Your science podcast fame awaits.

Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I've never run out of questions. Hi, I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith, and every question I ask leads to even more questions. Why is that, do you think? Because we know so little about everything, I think, at the end of the day. See, we even have questions about questions. There's never an end to them.

So my question for you today, Daniel, is when you were working on a PhD, did you get a satisfying answer to your big question? Oh, no, you're really going to ask me that? That's so embarrassing. You know, I did a Ph.D., which was pretty technical. I was measuring how often two top quarks are made and decay in a very specific way. And it was only when I was writing up my thesis five years into the project that I did enough reading of the literature to understand like, hey, is this interesting at all? And how am I contributing to the scientific conversation? And that's when I learned I basically wasn't.

Oh, no. What did you publish it anyway? I guess at that point you have to? Yeah, absolutely you have to. And, you know, that's just part of the process because when you start graduate school, you're like a science baby. I mean, you have your inspiration for why you want to study particles, but you don't know what the interesting questions are and what we could actually learn in a reasonable amount of time. So you rely on senior people to guide you and help you pick a topic and get started on it. And so it was only when I finished my thesis that I feel like I knew enough to know what was interesting and what wasn't. Oh, man. That's frustrating. I always tell the students that I work with, Do you feel like you've read enough? Yeah, you haven't. Keep reading. Go back and read.

And they're like, no, no, I'm good. I'm like, oh, you're good? Read twice as much. You are not good yet. You just need to keep reading. That solves a lot of problems, but, man, it's hard to know when to stop. And that's why your book has such a lengthy bibliography, Kelly. At least I practice what I preach.

Yes, yes. And how about you? Do you feel like your thesis was exciting, was compelling that you got to answer a big, fat, juicy question? I was asking whether or not this brain-infecting parasite. changes, like, some personality traits in the fish that it affects. And after, like, seven years, it took me a really long time to get my PhD. The answer is like, no. But, you know, negative answers are just as important, right?

You can't not publish it because the answer is not exciting or not that interesting. It's important to cross things off the list, you know? I've been doing particle physics for decades. I've never discovered a new particle. Every single paper I've written is like, and we didn't find this. and we didn't find that, and we didn't find this other thing. Mm-hmm. I felt like I had designed a really good experiment,

and so when I decided the answer was no, I was like, oh, the answer's really no. I feel good about the answer being no. So yeah, no can be a satisfying answer also, but my PhD advisor would like me to finish publishing that paper. Wait, still? Are you joking? No, I mean it, yeah.

What? I've published a lot of side projects, and actually all of those side projects ended up becoming my dissertation. So we have had a lot of publications together, but the main project ended up being so massive and overwhelming and hard to analyze that I still haven't had a chance to write it up. But that is my 2025 project. And that's why I wrote a bunch of my other collaborators to say, I'm not doing anything

else this year. I'm finally going to publish my PhD. Was it also your 2020 project and your 2015 project? Yeah. Science takes a while, people. Science takes a while. It does, unfortunately. But you know what?

Doesn't take a while? sending an email to you and me. That's right. And our amazing listeners have done that. And we have three fantastic questions today. All of them sort of more Daniel-centric, but we've got a lot of Kelly-centric questions queued up for our next audience questions episode.

But should we jump into our first audience question today? Absolutely. Let's do it. And as a reminder, we're going to be answering this question from a listener and then reaching out to the listener to give us a grade to see, did we answer your question or did we just confuse the even?

more. Or leave you unsatisfied with nobody knows the answer, which is usually the way things turn out. But at least that's a real answer. So here we go. I have a question about the presence of supermassive black holes in our galaxy. So my understanding is we have evidence that a number of smaller galaxies have merged with the Milky Way in the past, right? And pretty much all galaxies have supermassive black holes at their center, right? So what happened with, those other black holes when they entered our galaxy. Unless it was a direct hit, they wouldn't have merged with our black hole immediately, right? So how long did this merger take? And in the interim, it seems like there could have been just several supermassive black holes flying through

our galaxy, circling the center. Do we have evidence of that happening? It seems like they must have left quite a path of destruction through the Milky Way. If not, is it strange that we can't find evidence of this and could any still be out there right now? Wow, this is a super interesting and super informed question. Where do we start here, Daniel? Maybe we start with what happens when galaxies merge, because this was all sort of new to me. Yeah, this is a really fascinating question, basically wondering like, why don't we see a bunch of black holes zooming around the center of the galaxy? Why does it seem like there's only one in the center of the Milky Way? Chris is a pretty sophisticated understanding of how galaxies merge, and that suggests to him,

like there should be a bunch of black holes. And that's my favorite kind of question. When you hear a listener having internalized something about physics and then drawing some conclusion, comparing that to the understanding and being like, wait, something's not fitting here. What am I missing? Because that's the essential process of science, right? Build that model, compared to the data, update it.

It's wonderful to see it happening in real time. So yeah, I agree. We should start by reminding the listeners, at least, who might not know as much as Chris does about how galaxies come together. Based on what you just said, I just want to be. to confirm. Is it actually the case that every galaxy has a black hole at the middle? Because I hadn't realized that, but we've seen a lot of galaxies. So we should know if that's a consistent thing or not. So that's a great question. We don't have a definitive answer because we can't

look at every galaxy in the universe, but every single galaxy we've looked at has a supermassive black hole at the center. Or we can explain where it went, like it got kicked out or there was a collision or something. So there's very strong evidence that every galaxy has a supermassive black hole, but it's not something we understand. If we try to model the formation of those black holes of the centers of galaxies, the models don't describe the data. Like, we can't get our black holes to be as big in the models as we see in reality. Like, they're huge black holes at the center of galaxies only a billion years after the universe forms. We have no idea how you make such a big black hole so quickly. So there's a lot we still don't understand about supermassive

black holes for sure. know why there's a supermassive black hole at the center of every galaxy? Does that make sense? We don't know why they're so big, but it makes sense that, you know, galaxies are big pools of stuff and stuff pulls on itself and falls towards the center. And eventually, if you get stuff dense enough, you're going to get a black hole. So it makes sense to have a black hole at the center of every galaxy. It's the densest point. And you cross that threshold, you get black holes. So yeah. Okay. All right. So then let's back up to what happens when galaxies merge. Yeah, because Chris is asking why we don't see multiple black holes.

holes at the center of the Milky Way from multiple galaxies merging. And this touches on the whole story of how galaxies form. We think that all the galaxies we see today are made up of a bunch of little baby galaxies that came together to make big galaxies. So we don't think big galaxies were like formed all at once in some huge gravitational collapse in the early universe. We think that a bunch of little galaxies were made. And then those galaxies come together to make bigger galaxies.

It's like a hierarchical bottom up formation rather than just like. a single formation of a big galaxy. Is it easy to explain why we think it started with little galaxies coming together, as opposed to just lots of big galaxies forming? For a long time, there were both of those theories that sort of top down and the bottom of approach, but you can tell the difference in the models, like the age of the stars and the formation and the structure of the galaxies are different if you start from little ones, which then build up together to make big ones.

And we can see evidence for this, for example, in our Milky Way and surrounding the Milky Way, we see a bunch of little galaxies. We call them dwarf galaxies that are not fully incorporated, that are sort of in the gravitational grasp of the Milky Way, but not completely eaten. So we see a lot of evidence for this theory that galaxies are formed sort of bottom up. All right, so galaxies are formed, bottom up.

They all have super massive black holes at the center. I think we did talk in another episode about how sometimes galaxies merge, and this is one way the Earth, we could all be in trouble if we got too close and we merged with another system. That's coming back to me. And so these supermassive black holes at the center, just to remind folks, these are not

little normal stellar black holes, like a black hole that you think about from a collapsing star, like a star burns up all of its gas, and then it can no longer resist gravity and eventually collapses and forms a black hole. That's the kind of thing we expect to be like 10 solar masses, 10 times the mass of our sun maybe. A supermassive black hole is something that's like 10,000 or a million or a billion times the mass of our sun. So like really extraordinarily massive objects that are out there at the center of these galaxies. Even these dwarf galaxies have them up to like 50,000 times the mass of our sun. So if we know that dying suns cause black holes, how do we get super massive black holes?

Is it like a dying sun party? Like they all get together to see the sunset or something? We don't know the answer to that. Like if you design a model where you say, I'm going to use all the known physics we have and the gravity and you create these galaxies, you get black holes at the center, but they don't get this big. Like, they don't get as big as we see them out there in the universe. So they get massive, and you even call them super massive, but they don't get as big as we see. So we don't understand exactly how they form.

There's lots of crazy theories. One theory is that black holes may have formed much, much earlier. They're called primordial black holes. Before even there was matter when the universe was still cooling and coalescing. Instead of making protons, maybe it made a bunch of black holes. So the black holes are much older than we think, and they've been forming matter for a long time. Nobody's ever seen one of these primordial black holes. You know, there's a lot of ideas for how these black holes could have gotten so massive.

But for Chris's question, the point is all of these galaxies come with a supermassive black hole. So what happens to the black hole during the merger, right? When two galaxies come together, make a bigger galaxy, do the black holes always combine? How long does that take? Why don't we see black holes in our Milky Way? This is super fascinating because black holes are really awesome objects and they're really massive. And the short version of the story is that we think galaxies come together and then black holes merge. We think that super massive black holes can merge into bigger black holes just the same way like two stars that are binary stars, both collapsed to black holes.

They can combine into a bigger black hole. And we've seen evidence of the smaller black hole collapse and merger. That's where the famous gravitational waves are from. They're from two black holes orbiting each other, going faster and faster and faster as it coalesce into a bigger black hole. So we've seen gravitational waves from stellar mass black holes. And then last year, we saw a lot of evidence a little bit less direct for gravitational radiation from supermassive black hole mergers, which we think correspond to galaxy mergers. Supermassive black holes at the hearts of galaxies coming together, swirling around each other, generating gravitational radiation. and eventually collapsing into a super duper massive black hole.

Is this a possible explanation for why supermassive black holes are bigger than theory predicts, or has this already been explored? Like, are they bigger because actually you're just looking at one and it was three that came together? Or that doesn't explain it? No, that doesn't explain it. We include that in our model and it can't describe the black holes that we see out there. You need something else. Some other process that's juicing them up.

You know, there was this paper last year about how black holes could be causing dark energy. And this is correlation between the acceleration of the universe and the size of supermass of black holes. But people don't really know if that's anything or nothing. There are papers examining like the size of the bulge in the galaxy and the size of the black hole. Those seem to be correlated, which suggests that it's not just something local. It's a bigger process across the galaxy. It's a very active area of research. And in a few years, I think we'll know a lot more because we're gathering a lot more data about

supermassive black hole mergers from these pulsar timing arrays, you use the whole galaxy basically as a gravitational wave detector by looking at how the gravitational waves ripple across pulsars. It's really super interesting. One of the most fascinating things to me is that we actually don't understand how these supermassive black holes merge. Like theoretically, it's a little complicated when they get really close together. I mean, when they get really close together, I guess I would just assume that they like

attract each other and just like pull each other. into each other or is that too simple? No, you're exactly right. And if they're heading right towards each other, boom, they just suck into each other. But remember, they're moving fast already. And if they're not exactly angled at each other, they're going to end up orbiting each other, right? There's going to be angular momentum. They're spinning around each other.

Basically, if one black hole passes by the other one instead of hit directly hitting it, it's going to swing around and the two are going to end up orbiting each other. Now, if those black holes are surrounded by a bunch of other stars, then they're going to lose energy and they're going to fall towards each other. And you might be thinking, well, what about the gravitational radiation? Isn't that going to sap the black holes rotational energy so that they end up falling towards each other? Yeah, that's true.

That happens. But that's not a lot of energy. It's not fast enough to explain how they actually fall together. What they need is the friction, the tugging from stars and gas and dust to slow them down and help them fall in. Gravitational waves are not enough. But when they get really close and there's no other stars, and it's just two black holes orbiting each other,

we don't understand why they eventually collapse. We think that's a stable situation. Like two black holes orbiting each other without any stars to slow them down or whatever, they should do that for a long, long time. We don't really understand why they close that final gap. We know that it happens because we've seen evidence gravitational waves

from those mergers, but theoretically it doesn't quite make sense. It's called the final parsec problem. It's still an open question right now in physics. And I'm assuming that we don't have a lot of these instances where you have two black holes orbiting each other that you can look at to try to get data because that's probably a pretty rare thing to see. It is hard to see because supermassive black holes are in galaxies far, far away, and it's very difficult to see these things and observe them. And the time scale of these things is very, very long. So we have not yet detected individual supermassive black hole mergers.

What we've detected with these gravitational wave observatories that span the galaxy is like a, general hum from lots and lots of them so we know that it's happening but if we get data from an individual and you're absolutely right and track like what's happening over those last few seconds we could learn a lot about how these things collapse and so it's something we haven't understood but still now to answer chris's question now that we have sort of the background on like how these galaxies merge and how the black holes mysteriously merge even though we don't quite understand it chris is basically asking if the milky way is made up of all these galaxies and those galaxies have black holes and they emerged, why don't we see a bunch of black holes at the center of the

galaxy instead of just one, right? And the answer is that the Milky Way hasn't had a big collision recently. For some reason, the Milky Way is pretty smooth and chill. There hasn't been a lot of activity. So if we had recently in the last, you know, a few hundred million years collided with a big mama galaxy, then yes, we probably would have two supermass of black holes at the center swirling around each other and we could watch it happen and maybe learn something about this final parsec problem. But we're sort of lucky, I guess, in that over the last few billion years, we haven't had as many collisions, which is probably one reason why we're not as big. Like, if you look at Andromeda, the nearby galaxy, it's much bigger than the Milky Way. It's a big mama

galaxy. And pretty soon, in a few billion years, we are going to collide with it and form some super duper galaxy. But we're, I guess, a little bit quieter and a little bit smaller. And that's the reason we don't have surviving multiple supermassive black holes at the center. And just to be clear, the physicist in you would really like to be around when our galaxy merges with another, but Kelly and her children would not want to be around because that could be a very chaotic time. Is that right? That would be a very chaotic time.

Yeah, exactly. You know, even though it would be far away, like the collision of two galaxies doesn't necessarily involve like collision of stars directly. It's a lot of gravitational perturbation. And we talked in a whole other episode about what that would be like. And it's pretty risky stuff. But yes, we would learn so much about black holes and how they work and how galaxies form and the history of the universe and our place in it. And it would be totally worth it.

Sorry for your children. I don't think it's going to happen in our lifetime. So we're all right. So let's reach out to Chris and see if this answered his question. And then we're going to take a break before we come back for a question about setting off nuclear weapons in extreme weather events. So I sent our answer to Chris and he wrote back to me in a. an email to say, quote, that was a great discussion and a very satisfying answer. Thank you. So thank you, Chris, and you're welcome.

I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford. And in session 421 of Therapy for Black Girls, I sit down with Dr. Athea and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. 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. We talked about her recent 40th birthday celebrations, co-hosting a podcast with her fiancé Sue Bird,

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about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills, and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face. When you think about emotion regulation, like, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it, if it's going to be beneficial to you.

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Your State Forester and the Ad Council All right, and we're back. Our next question is from Margie, and this one is a doozy. The other day, I heard that a certain politician wanted to use nuclear bombs to get rid of hurricanes. Politics aside, even though it's a bad idea, it made me wonder. What would happen if a nuke went off in a hurricane? Would it blow it out? what about the radiation in the ocean?

Thanks. This is a really fun question, and it's what I've heard a few times people talking about. So I thought, you know what, let's hammer this out on the podcast in case somebody out there with their finger on the nuclear button happens to be a listener.

All right, so I thought that this was an incredible question. As soon as I read it, I was like, oh, yeah, I absolutely want to know the answer to this. And you said you've heard this question before. This was totally new to me. So let's start with how hurricanes even work. If we want to talk about how you would blow one out, let's know how they get started. Yeah, hurricanes are amazing demonstration of pretty basic physics.

You know, heat flow combined with the rotation of the earth, gives you this effect. And there's a little bit of a naming thing going on here. The broader category is called a cyclone. And if it's in the Atlantic or the northeastern Pacific, then you call it a cyclone. In the same storm in the northwestern Pacific, you call it typhoon. and if it's in the South Pacific or the Indyat Ocean, you call it a tropical cyclone. So you may have heard all these terms. They're actually all the same thing.

They're all just cyclones. Hurricanes are like our version of them. Why? Why did they do that? Were they described by different groups living in different areas at different times and those names just stuck? Or science sometimes goes a little crazy with our jargon. Is that what happened here? It's actually really fun because we're not 100% clear why we have three names.

I mean, the most likely general. explanation is the same reason why we have like multiple names for carbonated beverages, Coke or soda or pop. They originate in different groups organically and then it becomes hard to reconcile once we realize, hey, these are all the same thing. We think the word hurricane comes from the Caribbean god Huracan or the Mayan god of wind Huracan. I might be mispronouncing those and then the words were later adopted by Spanish colonizers.

The word cyclone comes from the Greek word Ku Klos, which means circle. It was coined in 1840 by Henry Pittington of the East India Company to describe storms in the South Pacific. And typhoons, that word doesn't have a clear origin. It might be from the Greek name of a monster associated with the wind or a Persian word that means to blow furiously. But we don't know exactly where that word comes from. We're like, oh, that's actually the same thing. You call it a hurricane. We call it a typhoon.

Let's call the whole thing off. But, you know, sometimes in science, it's more dramatic than that. There's like competing groups and we think it's called a typhoon. We call it a hurricane and then, you know, their minions propagate this kind of stuff. And we had an event like that in particle physics. We had the same particle named by two different people. And these days we give it both names because we couldn't settle the debate. We have species descriptions like that.

Two people didn't realize they were naming the same species. But whoever got their paper published first has precedence, I think. Maybe it differs by field. Maybe the person who did it better. But anyway, I've been reading papers from the 1900s. And sometimes they even do name calling and stuff. It's intense. But okay, all right.

So different names. It's all cyclones. You say tomato. I say tomato. Yeah, exactly. What causes them? So a cyclone basically comes from warm water. It heats and moistens the air above it.

Right. So the ocean is warm. You get hot air above it. That hot air rises that causes low pressure because the air is going up. So now more air is going to move in. So you have this effect where like air is getting sucked in and pushed up, right? The second step is to get it to spin. The reason it's spinning is because the earth itself is spinning.

And this is super fascinating. It comes because the atmosphere at different latitudes is spinning at different velocities. Like think about how fast the atmosphere is moving at the poles where the earth is spinning. It's just in place, right? An air molecule above the North Pole is not moving anywhere. But an air molecule above the equator, it's sticking with the land. It's going a lot faster. right? So the air velocity depends on the latitude.

The closer you are to the equator, the faster you're going. The closer you are the poles, the slower you're going. All right, that's cool. Now, what happens if you're sucking air in? Imagine this cyclone. We have a low pressure region. We're sucking air in from the north and we're sucking air in from the south.

Well, the air that's coming from the south, if you're in the northern hemisphere, is going to be moving faster. And the air that's coming from the north is going to be moving slower. So the air moving from the north is moving slower. slower it falls behind the air moving the south is moving faster it gets sped up and that's where the spin comes from and that's why they spin the opposite direction in the southern hemisphere toilet thing exactly

the famous fallacious toilet thing but this is actually true right if you could flush your toilet with a hurricane it actually would flush a different direction in the northern southern hemisphere except you couldn't call it a hurricane you could call it like a tropical cyclone in the south pacific so yeah in the northern hemisphere they spin in a different direction and in the southern hemisphere super cool okay and let's be clear for anyone who missed that toilets do not flush in opposite directions in different hemispheres because it's all about the way the holes are put in the toilet seat right and that just makes it go in one direction i have no idea how it actually works i just know that it's apocryphal okay but so that's the basic mechanism or hurricane right starts with warm water you get air rising air rushes in from the

size, it's coming in at different speed, so it ends up spinning. So it's spinning because the Earth is spinning. Like if the Earth didn't spin, we wouldn't have hurricanes or cyclones or typhoons or any of that kind of stuff. Okay, so ways to disrupt this weather pattern would either be to like mess with the temperature or to like put a giant fan in there trying to counteract the spin. But we're talking about nukes. So nukes would heat things up.

Could that stop it? I love the idea of using nukes because it's like, what's the biggest thing we got? We have this hammer. What can we do with it? I mean, you see this in space all the time. People are like, how do we power a spaceship? What if you blow up nukes behind it? And that's actually not a crazy idea, right?

We're going to talk about that pretty soon on the podcast. Well, and Project Plowshares was a whole project in the U.S. to figure out what you could use nuclear weapons for. We use them to build like bays and stuff like that. Like, let's blow that up too. Okay, so anyway, what about a hurricane? So it's not completely insane on the face of it because what is a hurricane? You have a hot spot.

It's all about energy. flow, right? You have this warm air heated by the ocean is rising and all this stuff is coming in. So if you could like disrupt that somehow, if you could create a hotspot somewhere else or move the heat or disperse it or something, could you disrupt this flow? So it's not insane, right? It's not just like, hey, I'd love to nuke that. Let's do it. But the problem is that hurricanes are energy flow on a much, much bigger scale than even our nuclear bombs. Like there was so much energy captured in a hurricane i looked it up hurricanes release like a hundred terawatts of energy and the global power use annually is 25 terawatts so like this is an enormous amount of energy

it's four times as much as like human use okay so the biggest nuclear bomb ever exploded was by the soviet union it was czar bamba right how does that compare so you would have to blow that guy up every 20 minutes to compare to the energy of a hurricane. Wow. So it's a big deal. Like a hurricane is just a massive movement of air. It's because of the mass. Well, there are high speeds as well.

You know, these winds can get up to hundreds of miles per hour. But there's just such a huge mass. I mean, you can see the things from space, right? It's big. And anytime you have something really big moving high speed, there's a lot of energy. And it would take an enormous amount of energy to deflect it. So if you're going to nuke it, it's going to require like all. of the Earth's arsenal dropping down

on this thing. It's not like a single tactical nuke is going to deflect this thing. You want to have an impact, it's going to have to be huge. And then you're causing a nuclear winter. So I don't think you really accomplished anything. You haven't solved any problems there. We started by saying that cyclones are

because of heat. Is it possible that by trying to stop a cyclone when we set a nuclear weapon off, we're just going to make it worse because that's more heat? Oh, yeah. Is that what would happen or we don't know if it would get worse. Well, hurricanes are not something we totally understand, right? Anyway, we can't, like, look at a hurricane and say, we know what's going to happen here because we understand all the

physics. We understand the microphysics, but it's such a chaotic system that a little wrinkle here, but if fly flaps that swings there, the hurricane goes somewhere else. These things are difficult to model. We think that probably what would happen is you'd produce a shock wave, a pulse of high pressure, but we don't think that would actually have a big effect on like the pressure of a hurricane. In order to change, like, a big category five hurricane, you do a category, to hurricane, you'd have to add like a half ton of air for each square meter inside the eye of the hurricane, which is like 500 million tons of air. So, you know, it's hard to imagine like moving that much air around in terms of like changing the pressure. We don't have like

the tool to do this right. And you know, fundamentally like you have a big warm spot in the ocean. Unless you're going to completely disperse that heat, you might temporarily disorganize a hurricane, but the same forces that create it are just going to reorganize it. I mean, as you say, you're adding heat usually to the system. And so it's just going to come back stronger, you know, like a monster in a terrible movie. Plus, you're going to have, like, dump a bunch of radiation into your atmosphere and very high velocity winds that are going to go everywhere.

All right. So you have just made me even more amazed that there are some people who don't evacuate when hurricanes come through because I hadn't realized how much stronger they were than the explosions of nuclear weapons. We've established that heat equals bad, in this case. Can you cool it down somehow? I'm guessing the answer is no, because this is just energy on a scale that is uncontrollable. Has anyone ever tried to, like, cool it down?

So the U.S. government has sponsored a bunch of projects to try to interfere with hurricanes, which makes sense. Like, these are destructive things. Is there anything we can do? And in the 60s, there's this project called Storm Fury, which is a pretty awesome name, where the thought was, could we somehow disrupt the flow? Because the hurricane has these walls, there's a cloud circulating around the center.

And they thought if they maybe seeded the clouds by dumping it a bunch of silver iodide, which nucleates ice crystals, that this silver iodide would make these ice crystals, which could make a new ring of clouds, which would somehow compete with the natural circulation of the storm and basically disorganize it. Sort of actually releasing some of the heat

by forming these ice crystals, right? releasing some of that water, and then, like, growing the rainy part instead of this spinny part. The idea was sort of reasonable, and they actually tried it on a few hurricanes, but it didn't work. And these days, we think that probably it failed because there isn't enough super-cooled water to react with that silver iodide to have enough of an effect. And so people have tried stuff. Nobody's ever made it work. But, you know, people are out there thinking about how can we protect ourselves from hurricanes, what are some things we can do? to me this is kind of scary. It's in the category of like geoengineering, right? Like,

hey, should we put something in our atmosphere to reflect sunlight? Like, you're dumping a lot of stuff into a storm. It could have a big effect. You have no idea where that storm is going to go. And then you feel responsible for it, right? What if the storm was going to hit a fairly uninhabited area? And then you steered towards New York City. Now you're responsible for that. So I don't know whether it's a good idea or not. I don't know either. Actually, I'd love to have a whole episode on geoengineering stuff because it is so tempting. What if there was some way that we could all just keep doing exactly what we're doing, but just, like, throw some stuff in the sky to take care of it. But, yeah, I don't think we understand things well enough.

Yeah, but they did. And in the 60s, they did it for Hurricane Esther and Hurricane Bula, Hurricane Debbie, and then Hurricane Ginger in 1971. I wasn't able to find more recent experiments. I don't know if those are, like, still classified or whatever. But it's definitely something people tried. Nobody's ever tried to nuke a hurricane as far as I'm aware, which I'm grateful for, though I know that our president. intellect, it's an idea that he bounced around within his previous administration. Well, I hope he listens to our podcast, and we can help out in that way.

I also remember seeing videos during some recent hurricane in Florida of people shooting the hurricane, which seems like I get what you're expressing, your frustration, and this is the only tool you have, but like you don't want the hurricane picking up those bullets and throwing them at high speeds at anything. So don't shoot hurricanes, people, with nukes, or with bullets, or really anything. Just get out of there. Yeah, don't contribute to the problem. Just leave.

That's sound advice there. So let's see what Margie thinks of our sound advice and see if she felt like this was a good answer. Maybe we can convince her to slowly slide her finger off of that big red button. I wonder how much power Margie has. Spare us, Margie. All right, well, here Margie's response, and then we'll take a break. Well, I'm a little surprised that it would just reform after.

a blast. But let's say a nuke was shot off in a hurricane in the middle of the ocean. And then it started spreading radiation all over the place. Would it still be spreading radiation when it came ashore?

Very glad we were able to answer your question, Margie, and that's a great follow-up question. Yeah, it would be very bad to release a lot of radiation into a hurricane. The sort of long range danger from a bomb going off is exactly having high winds, would spread those radioactive materials around.

And so dropping one into a hurricane, it's basically the worst case scenario for containing that radiation. So, yeah, the winds and the water would spread that radiation really far and cause a lot of damage. Again, not a good idea. Please don't drop a bomb into a hurricane. I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Brand-Brandt. And in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Athea 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, we're real. It's how our hair is styled. We talk about the important role

hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the 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 just. You can't replicate. You can't get back. Showing up to locker room every morning just to shit talk. We've got more incredible guests like the legendary Candice 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 pissed. 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 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 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 i'm dr scott barry

coffman host of the psychology podcast here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential i was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills and i get eye rolling from teachers or i get students who would be like it's easier to punch someone in the face when you think about emotion regulation like you're not going to choose an adapted strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it if it's going to be beneficial to you because it's easy to say like go you go blank yourself right it's easy it's easy to just drink the extra beer it's easy to ignore to suppress seeing a colleague who's bothering you and just like walk the other way avoidance is easier ignoring is easier denials easier drinking is

easier yelling screaming is easy complex problem solving meditating you know takes effort Listen to the psychology podcast on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Smokey the Bears. Then you know why Smokey tells you when he sees you passing through. Remember, please be careful. It's the least that you can do. Because it's what you desire. Don't play with matches.

Don't play with fire. After 80 years of learning his wildfire prevention tips, Smokey Bear lives within us all. Learn more at Smokey Bear. dot com and remember only you can prevent wildfires brought to you by the usda forest service your state forester and the ad council so our next question is from kevin so here we go this is a kevin from china and i'll have a question about philosophy If a photon turns into an electron and a positron, and the electron and positron inlilates into another photon, are the two photons exactly the same?

If they are the same, how can the photon appear and disappear out of the air? And if they aren't the same, is there a point when the first becomes the second? Oh, thank you, Kevin, for asking such a fun physics-slash-philosophy question. Totally love this one. And I absolutely love hearing that we have international listeners. This totally made my day. And Daniel is clearly the right guy to answer your question. So what's happening, Daniel?

So what's going on here is that photons, when they fly through space, you might just imagine, like, it's a little packet of energy, it wiggles through space. That's it, right? But we also talk about photons doing other stuff, like photons can fly along, and then we say sometimes they can turn into a pair of particles, call this conversion. Like a photon is flying along, and it turns. into an electron and a positron, two particles, so maintaining the overall charge of zero. And then those particles can annihilate. They can turn right back into a photon. So you can imagine like either just a photon flying along, which turns into like a little loop of particles and then turns back into a photon. And Kevin is asking like, what does that mean about the

photon? Is that the same photon that comes out after this particle loop or is it not? And if it's not, then, like, exactly when does the new photon get born? So is this philosophically the same as the transporter problem? It's actually very similar to the transporter problem. And it touches on, you know, what do you mean by this photon? And how do you kill a photon and all sorts of stuff? And because in the end, these are quantum processes, right? And the transporter problem in the end comes down to like any time an object moves from place to

place, it's equivalent to making a copy of it and destroying the old one, especially people are all just ripples in quantum fields. It's just your information sliding along. And so basically, every moment in your life, you're being transported through space and time, the same way a teleporter works, just smaller distances. And so, yeah, does that matter? Are you being killed every instant and being recreated some other place? What does that mean about being killed?

I don't know. Anyway, it's a big rabbit hole of philosophy. But here we're focusing on a single photon. Okay, so you're not going to answer that question for us by the end of this answer. What do we mean then by same? If it's the same photon, what would that mean? Yeah. So there's two issues here we have to grapple with if we're going to think about what this means, and that's one of them.

And the short answer, the big picture answer to this question is that there is no good answer to this question. Because the picture that I just described and that Kevin probably has in his head and a lot of people think about for photons, it's a cartoon picture. It's not like our microphysical explanation for what's really happening. Like, you know, in biology, you can have a microscopic explanation. You can say, oh, the reason you're sick is a virus came in and attacked your cell and penetrated the cell wall. And you can have this picture in your mind of these tiny things happening that explain what we're experiencing on the big scale.

And that can be reality. So that if you, like, zoom in with a microscope, you can actually watch it. That's awesome, right? And we try to do the same thing in physics, provide a microscopic explanation for what we think is happening. And that can be very satisfying. but it's sometimes a cartoon and it's misleading because what's happening at the microscopic scale

is fundamentally very, very different from what's happening in biology or in the classical scale. It's not like tiny little balls are bouncing off each other or converting into particles. You can't slow these things down and watch them like a movie

and get a version of the microscopic story. So, you know, what we mean by a photon isn't just like a photon is flying through space or a photon flies through space and makes a particle loop. It's sort of all of those things mixed together. So that's why we have to identify what we mean by a photon and what we mean by same. So does this go back to our what is a particle discussion and do they work as waves or strings or so the question is hard to answer because we don't even really know how to describe these things?

Yeah, exactly. And Kevin is picking out one aspect of that cartoon and really a photon is all of those things. So let's start by talking about what a photon is and then we can dig into what do we mean by the same photon. Okay. If you think about a photon, just you're thinking about a single packet of light that goes through space. Quantum mechanically, Kevin is right that the photon could do that, but it could also convert into this pair of particles and go back. It could also convert into those pair of particles, and then those particles emit photons, which then turn into other stuff and turn into other stuff. There's an infinite number of things that a photon could do when it goes from A to B.

And each of those things comes with a probability. And when we talk about the photon, we don't mean one of those particles in one of those particles in one. one of those stories, what we really mean is that whole bundle. We mean the whole thing all mixed together because we don't know what's happening. And there is no what's really happening. The photon, the thing that we think about, the thing we should identify with is all of those possibilities, not any individual one of them or any part of them. So when we were doing the What is a Particle episode, we talked about how you don't explain the wave theory of how you describe particles until grad school.

And so this question is making me wonder how the fact that we are all taught to think about these as like little points that are moving around, how much does that inhibit all of our abilities to think about these things? Like, should we be changing the way we address this in high school? I know it's much harder to explain it as a wave, but it's wrong. It sounds like the way we explain it. Yeah. Quantum field theory in kindergarten, that's what I think.

No, it's a great question, and I think you're right, and you see it in physics students as they learn this stuff. You teach them to think about particles, and then you're like, actually, all your intuition is wrong. You have to unpack that and learn this whole other thing. And I'm very interested in physics education. We have these conversations, like what is the right order to teach people in? But there's sort of this canonical order that everybody uses that sort of follows the historical development. It's like, we thought this, then we thought that, then we thought that. And as you move through your physics education, you sort of catch up to modernity.

And I think it is important to understand where these ideas came from, like why people thought this and why people thought that. Because just like with the names of hurricane and typhoon, there's a lot of like weird patchy stuff that doesn't really make sense unless you understand the history. So you kind of got to teach people the current ideas, but you also want to give them a tour of how we got here so they can understand why some of it seems weird and ugly. So I don't know the right answer to your question Okay I mean yes you know reason why we couldn't start with

Here's the wave theories and string theories of particles And then after be like one here's the history Let's talk about how we got here So that people would be less confused But anyway I'm not a physics educator But I guess I kind of am Yeah I guess so we have opinions at least So in that episode about a particle

We also talked about how you can think about particles As you know little dots flying through space Turning into other stuff you could also think of them as fields, right? Instead of imagining a bit of stuff, imagine a field filling the universe and particles are ripples in those fields. And those two things are actually mathematically equivalent.

You can think about everything as particles and they pull and pushing each other by passing other particles between them, or you can think of just fields and energy is flowing between the fields. And I think the fields picture is really helpful to think about for this question because what we're talking about

is not just one particle, it's a particle interacting with another particle, right? Photons turning into electrons and back and forth. And in the field picture, that's kind of beautiful. What we see there is two fields interacting. Like a photon, as it flies through the universe, is not just a ripple in the electromagnetic field, as we say, because the electromagnetic field affects the electron field and vice versa. So when you say in the particle picture, okay, a photon is flying along and he can turn into an electron and positron and go back, in the field picture, that's the same thing as saying

energy can slosh from the photon field to the electron field and back. And what's really happening is not that there is an electron there or there is a photon there, but the thing we call a photon is this interaction between the two fields. So that's the problem with putting your finger on, like, is it the same photon? Well, what do you mean by a photon? Do you mean just the electromagnetic field, like theoretically pure concept? Or do you mean the thing we see in the universe, which is this like buzzing interaction between photons and electrons or the photon and electron fields. That's really what a photon is. A photon that hits your eye from Andromeda has interacted with the electron field all the way between there and here. Okay. Can we give a two sentence answer to summarize? Yeah. So what

is a photon? A photon, I think, is all the possible things that could happen between A and B when the photon is created and the photon is observed. You can't really dig into what happens in between because there are multiple possibilities, and all of them play a role, right? So now, to Kevin's question, what do we mean by the same photon? Well, you know, I think that you can't really think about those individual photons and say,

is it the same? And if you tried, you get yourself into all sorts of other hairy misses that we touched on earlier. Like, think about an individual photon, not just flying through space, but like bouncing off of a mirror. What happens when a photon bounces off of a mirror?

Well, we think it's absorbed and re-emitted at the right angle. Is that the same? photon? Well, you know, it's like if you shine a light in the mirror, the light hits your eyes. We think of the light is bouncing off and hitting your eyes, but it's been reabsorbed and re-emitted. Is that the same? If you say that's not the same, that means that every time particles interact, they're no longer the same particle. But particles are interacting constantly all the time. You are a huge pile of particles interacting, which means that

you are not the same you, you were a millisecond ago. So that leads nowhere. If you say that particle interaction means they're not the same particle anymore, then you have no useful meaning for the word same. Then you have to say, well, then maybe a particle is the same if it's like mostly unchanged. You shot the photon at the wall. It bounced off and it's mostly the same energy and the same frequency and all that kind of stuff. So it's mostly the same photon, even though it's interacted.

So from that point of view, then the answer to Kevin's question would be like, yeah, it's the same photon. And I think philosophically unpealing it, it's a big blob of energy, it's flowing through the universe, it's oscillating between the different fields. It doesn't really matter that has a chance to be an electron here. a chance to be a photon there. It's the same blob of energy that was sent to you from Andromeda. So I think it's the same photon.

So does that make sense to you? Kelly, what do you think? Yes. All right. That makes sense to me. Here, let me see if I can explain it. Okay, so the reason that it's a complicated question is because it's hard to think of a particle as like a point in space.

They're like packets of energy that are interacting with other packets of energy. And they can be hard to describe. You know, they're interacting like they're a wave, like they're a string, but they're just sort of things that are interacting with other things, and that's what they're doing all the time. And so to try to figure out, is this the exact same thing when part of how we understand it is that these things are changing and interacting over time? It makes it an awkward question. Yeah. Yeah. Is that an okay way to summarize it? Yeah. I think that's great. I'm giving you a

PhD in internet physics right now. Yes. Right. Okay, but grades are really important to me. And I haven't gotten one in like 15 years. So can you tell me I got a A? Actually, I kind of feel like that was more like a B answer. No, that was a solid A answer. And now I'm curious what Kevin thinks about our answer. So in a moment you'll hear Kevin giving us a grade on our physics answers to his philosophy question. Hi, Daniel and Kelly. Thank you for answering my question. I think you mean that a photon is quantum mechanical. So it's a mix of the probabilities of all the possible things that can happen. Also, depending on the meaning of same. The photon is the same and not the same at the same time, which is mind-boggling. I totally

love these kinds of answers. Thank you so much to Chris, Margie, and Kevin for their amazing questions today. We had so much fun thinking about these problems. And if you have a question that you would like to share with us, please write us at questions at daniel and kelly.org. We would love to hear from you. We would. And your friends will be so impressed to hear your voice on a podcast, especially a nerdy podcast like ours. Huzzah. Thanks, everyone. Keep asking questions

and stay curious. See you later. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by IHeart Radio. We would love to hear from you. We really would. We want to know what questions

you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, We will get back to you. We really mean it.

We answer every message. Email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D&K Universe. Don't be shy. Write to us. How serious is youth vaping?

Irreversible lung damage serious. One in ten kids vape serious, which warrants a serious conversation from a serious parental figure like yourself. Not the seriously know-it-all sports dad or the seriously smart podcaster. It requires a serious conversation that is best had by you. No, seriously, the best person to talk to your child about vaping is you. To start the conversation, visit talk about vaping.org, brought to you by the American Lung Association and the Ad Council.

Have you ever wished for a change but weren't sure how to make it? Maybe you felt stuck in a job, a place, or even a relationship. I'm Emily Tish Sussman, and on Shee Pivots, I dive into the inspiring pivots of women who have taken big leaps in their lives and careers. I'm Gretchen Whitmer, Jody Sweetie. Monica Patton. Elaine Welteroth. Learn how to get comfortable pivoting because your life is going to be full of them. Listen to these women and more on She Pivots. Now on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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

The U.S. Open is here, and on my podcast, Good Game with Sarah Spain. I'm breaking down the players. the predictions, the pressure, and of course, the honey deuses, the signature cocktail of the U.S. Open. The U.S. Open has gotten to be a very wonderfully experiential sporting event. To hear this and more, listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain, an IHeart Women's Sports Production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports Network.

Hey, I'm Kurt Brown-Oller. And I am Scotty Landis, and we host Baner. The podcast where we share the weirdest, funniest, real news stories from all around the world. And sometimes from our guest's personal lives, too. Like when Whitney Cummings recently revealed her origin story on the show. There's no way I don't already have rabies. This is probably just why my personalities like this. I've been surviving rabies for the past 20 years.

New episodes of bananas drop every Tuesday in the exactly right network. Listen to bananas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.