Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Special 200th episode!

Episode Date: August 11, 2020

What happened in the first 200 microseconds of the Universe? What can you see within 200 light years from Earth? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This technology's already solving. so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Jorge, do you know what today is? Is it a special day today? Oh, my God. I can't believe you forgot.

Uh-oh. Is it your birthday? Nope. Try again. Is it the anniversary of the Higgs boson? Closer, it's actually our anniversary. Today is our 200th episode of Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe. 200 episodes?

Oh my gosh. It's a lot of physics and a lot of banana jokes. It's a whole universe of banana physics. Hi, I'm Jorge, I'm a cartoonist and the creator of Ph.D. Comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I know at least 200 things about physics. And I know at least 200 bad jokes about physics. I've made 10 to the 200 bad jokes about physics, but our editor has removed most of them. And welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe, a production of I-Hard Radio.

A project we started to explain to you all the amazing and crazy things out there. in the universe. All the things we do know, the facts we've learned about the universe, the secret truth that we've revealed, and also the incredible questions, the things that science still has to figure out, the questions that scientists are asking, and the questions that you are asking, the deep mysteries of the universe around us. Because it turns out that there are more than 200 questions you can ask about the universe and more than 200 amazing facts to learn and to discover about how this crazy cosmos works. At least that's what we've discovered in doing this podcast. We had no idea

how long we could keep going on. Yeah, today's a very special episode. It's our 200th episode. What does that make it, Daniel? Is it like a birthday, a broadcast day, a pod day? I don't know, but you know, if you look up anniversaries, like, you know, the

fifth anniversary is paper and the 10th anniversary is silver or whatever. The 50th anniversary is diamond. There is no culturally acceptable gift for 200th anniversary because nobody's ever lasted that long. give you a noble prize if you somehow managed to celebrate a 200th year anniversary. Maybe it should be the fossil anniversary or something because you've become fossilized. But congratulations, Daniel. 200

episodes. Did you ever think we would get to 200 episodes? No, I thought you'd get sick of talking to me about physics after about 10 or 20. No, congratulations to you also. It's been a really fun ride. And thank you to all of our listeners who have listened to us talking about science and joking about bananas and shared your goofy curiosity with us. That's really what's powered us. forward. So thanks for listening and thanks for all the feedback and support. Well, I have definitely not gotten tired of listening to amazing physics and to listen to you explain it. I feel like I could go another 200 episodes. Let's do it. Well, in honor of our 200th episode, I put out a tweet asking folks what we should do to celebrate our 200th episode. And as usual, I put out some silly suggestions

and we did a little Twitter poll. Yeah. And so Daniel asked, what should we do for our 200th episode? the options were, one, eat 200 bananas, two, answer 200 questions, three, do 200 different accents, and number four, just shut up and explain. That's right. And clearly, I was going to do the explaining, but I was hoping that you would do the bananas and the accents. Seems a little lopsided, Daniel. Well, you're the creative one, right?

How can I eat bananas and do accents at the same time? Those count as different accents, you know, like Scottish or Scottish with a banana in your mouth sound very different. It was a close poll. It was a close poll. Yes, exactly. Was it dramatic? Like, as you saw the numbers come in? Well, bananas was racing to the lead in the beginning. But eventually, people voted for answer 200 questions. Got about 35% with eat 200 bananas in second place. And, you know, in last place, was due 200 accents, which I was sort of hoping for. I think we have to trust the wisdom of the crowd here and not offend 200 countries. There aren't 200 countries to offend, so that would be pretty impressive if we could offend non-existent countries.

Yeah, so the top option was answer 200 questions, which when Daniel told me, I said, was a little impractical or a 50-minute podcast. That's right. They'd have to be like true or false questions or, you know, yes or no or something, which wouldn't be too satisfied. Right. I started to think if we take five minutes to answer each question, that's a thousand-minute episode. That's basically the next 200 episodes. Yeah, basically. We'd be done. We could celebrate our 400th anniversary next week. Wow, this podcast is really accelerating the logarithmic scales. We'll be doing our 4,000 one in a month.

That's right. And I started looking through the list of questions we'd answered over email because I answer hundreds of questions a week from listeners. And there's a lot of common things in there. But then Jorge had a better idea, something else we could do to celebrate our 200th episode. Yeah, so it's on the podcast. We'll be asking.

200 questions, but not 200 number of questions, but a couple of questions about the number 200. That's right, because while the number 10 and the number 100 and therefore the number 200 are really just artifacts of the number of fingers we have and the way the human mind works, it's also an interesting way to ask questions about the universe, to think about like how far away are things or what happened in certain moments of time in the universe. It gives you like a fixed window to examine the universe. So we'll be asking, coincidentally, two 200 questions here in the podcast. And the first question has to do with what happened at the beginning of the universe. So the question is, what happened in the first 200 microseconds of the universe? And then later on we'll tackle another question about with the number 200,

which is what can we find within 200 light years of Earth? So a little bit of time and a little bit of space, a little bit of space time, Daniel. That's right. What can you find within 200 light years of Earth makes me think like, are you looking for your keys? Are they somewhere out there in space? I do lose my keys a lot.

Even in a pandemic where you don't go anywhere. Somehow I managed to lose my keys like every day. Well, we'll see if we can find them. All right. We'll tackle this first question first, which is what happened in the first 200 microseconds of the universe. Now, 200 microseconds, that's like, boy, that's like 0.2 milliseconds. It's not a lot of time, but it turns out a whole lot of stuff happened in the first 200 microseconds of the universe.

Basically, everything's been boring ever since. Well, 200 microseconds, that's shorter than a blink, right? Like a blink is maybe a couple of microseconds, a couple of milliseconds. It's a very small amount of time, absolutely. Yeah. So a lot happened in those first microseconds. Yeah, a lot happened. And one of the most interesting questions, really, is how you even define like moment zero.

If you're going to say, let's take a window of time from the very beginning of the universe to 200 microseconds afterwards. It's interesting to think about how the universe expands and cools and we'll get into all of that. But then you have to wonder like, where does T equals zero? How do you define that moment? Do we even know that there was a T equal zero? So already like anchoring the left side, the early side of that window is very, very difficult. Right. It makes me think like was there a T minus one or like a countdown to the universe?

Nobody really knows. And the problem is that we don't think about the history of the universe in that sort of forward way because we don't really have anything to build on. We don't know what was in the beginning or when the beginning was. Usually we think about it as sort of in the reverse. We look at the universe now and we look backwards in time as we look further, further out into space, right? Because remember, the further out in space you look, the older the universe is. So we can see how the universe looked 100 years ago, a thousand years ago, a million years

ago, a billion years ago, et cetera, and we can project backwards in time. So we tend to think of the history of the universe sort of from now and running the clock backwards. And we can do it pretty well back about 13 billion years or so, but then it gets pretty murky and we have trouble extrapolating back. We don't know if there was a T equals zero, if there was like a T equals question mark, or who knows what was happening at the very beginning. That's interesting.

Now, why does the picture get fuzzy beyond? if you rewind back to more than a few hundred thousand years from what might be the beginning of time. Like what actually marks up our view? Well, the reason is that things change. Things get really hot and dense, right? The overall history of the universe is cooling and expanding. So if you run that backwards from now, we have a cold, large universe. You run that backwards, things get hotter and denser. And of course, you could just do that naively, like assume that the laws of physics we have learn today from our cold universe still work back then and just run the clock backwards and you get infinite density and you call that t equals zero you could do that but we don't think that's right

we don't think the laws we have work anymore as things get that hot and dense just like you know the physics of gases is different from the physics of liquids and the physics of solids and so things change as you get hotter and denser and then it becomes difficult to extrapolate because we're reaching into regions that we can't see anymore and we have no experience of because there's a moment in the early universe when the universe cooled it was a hot dense nastiness we'll talk about it and it cooled to a place where light could fly through it became transparent and that's the last moment in the early universe that we can actually see beyond that we're just really sort of guessing and extrapolating and using models but those models are very uncertain we really don't know

what we're talking about. So a lot of the details we'll talk through today in this episode are really speculative. They're like, maybe it was this and maybe it was that. And under various assumptions which seem reasonable, but could be totally wrong, you know, maybe this happened. But it's really guesswork. Is it guesswork because we don't know, like our simulations don't, aren't very definitive, or like the physics of the universe might actually change in those kind of conditions?

We don't know how the physics of the universe operates in those very high. hot and dense environments. You know, we've only experienced it when it's pretty cold and separated. And so we're extrapolating back. We think we have ideas for how it might work. And we can simulate various ones at them, but we can't necessarily like tell the difference between if it's like this or if it's like that. And so we just, we're extrapolating into the unknown and that's always very dangerous

and delicate. Now, even the concept of time equals zero is weird, right? Because I've heard people say that, you know, like it's almost like asking what is more north than the North Pole because once you get to the North Pole there's no more north and is it the same also that you know maybe time

started at T-Equil zero and there was no time before that? It sounds bonkers to say that right like there was no time before that because what is before mean if there was no time right? It's confusing it's hard to really get these ideas into your head but it's true

that some theories of the universe say that space and time were created at some moment and things have expanded and cooled since then. And before that point, there was no time. There was no space. There was no before that point. That's really hard to grasp your mind around because your mind lives in that space and that time. It's all you've experienced. And so that's all you can really imagine. It's how you organize your thinking. It's how we think about causality and logic and A, that happens, then B happens, then C happens. But it doesn't mean it's the only way the universe can.

can be. And so it's extraordinarily difficult to sort of extrapolate your brain and your thinking into something completely unfamiliar. And so what we do is we have these frameworks like general relativity and quantum mechanics that try to tell us about what might have happened. But those aren't very conclusive either. I guess a North Pole analogy kind of works also in that, you know, like here where we are, you know, if you have like a compass, it's pretty clear how to use it. Like, you know, it tells you north and right and south and east and west and you can walk around pretty easy. But if you were like near the North Pole, it might be a little tricky to use a compass, right? Yeah. If you're at the North Pole, you'd be a little disorienting. Yeah. If you're

at the North Pole, there is no more North to go, right? You can't go any northier than that. But we don't know if time works that way. It could be that there was stuff before, you know, these early moments, these singularities. There was a whole other universe, perhaps, which came down into a big crunch or something else totally different. Some sort of other weird kind of thing which gave birth to our space and time. You know, our entire universe, our space and time could be a bubble

of that other pre-universe stuff like decaying into a universe. There could be a whole spectrum of other universes also that were created in the same moment or that are still being created now. There could be like, you know, moments of creation happening right now really far away in this other meta space.

It sounds like bonkers speculation because it is, mostly because we're so clueless. You mean like now, like as we speak, there could be some time equals zero moments right now for other universes in this universe? Yeah, one idea of how our universe got started is that there was some sort of like pre-universe stuff, some inflaton fields,

and that our universe is essentially some random spontaneous decay of that, and that's when our universe began. And that inflaton field is just like expanding and creating and eternally inflating, but all the time, it's parts of it are decaying and starting whole new universes. There are universes that haven't even gotten started yet, and universes that are trillions of years old. And none of this is anything we know.

It's just like, it's a crazy idea. And in a thousand years, people will read about these ideas the way we think about, you know, the Greek's ideas about air, water, fire, and earth. And we're like, well, that's cute. Totally wrong. And it could have been true, I suppose. Yeah, it's well-meaning, careful.

only thought out totally wrong. And that could be the way we describe all of our current ideas about what happened to T equal zero and whether T equals zero even makes sense. We could be like cute to future businesses. Cluelessly cute. To future five-year-olds, man. Five-year-olds in a thousand years will laugh at our ideas. They'll be like, oh, you're ridiculous. That's silly. Oh, man. Well, a five-year-olds already laugh at me, Daniel, so that's not going to be needed to me. We'll pretend that's on purpose, though. All right. So it seems like, okay, so we can't see that well beyond a few hundred thousand years into the universe. So really asking what happened in the first 200 microseconds is really speculative then.

That's right. All you can do is say like, you know, extrapolate backwards from where we are to get hotter and denser, hotter and denser, and pretend that you know how to extrapolate back to some point. Like general relativity says you can extrapolate all the way back to a point of infinite density and temperature. But, you know, we know that general relativity is probably. wrong when it talks about singularities and stuff like that because it ignores important things like

quantum mechanics, which tells us that you can't have an infinite amount of stuff in a tiny zero volume point and know all about it. So definitely something wonky happens, but you know, you can extrapolate sort of naively and say, we'll call this t equals zero and we'll move forward from there. I see. I see. So we're going to plant the flag and say, this is t equals zero. And then we're going to see what can the universe do to get us to where we are today, kind of. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. All right. Well, let's get into that and to the question of what is within 200 light years of earth? But first, let's take a quick break. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford. And in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Ophia and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health,

and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex. language system, right? In terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyperfixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel. It's how our hair is styled. You talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela

Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about 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 is 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. 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 she pivots, I dive into the the inspiring pivots of women who have taken big leaps in their lives and careers. I'm Gretchen Whitmer, Jody Sweeten, Monica Patton, Elaine Welteroff. I'm Jessica Voss. And that's when I was like, I got to go. I don't know how, but that kicked off the pivot of how to make the transition. Learn how to get comfortable pivoting because your life is going to be full of them. Every episode gets real about the why behind these changes and gives you the inspiration

and maybe the push to make your next pivot. Listen to these women and more on She Pivot. Now on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Daniel, we're celebrating our 200th birthday. Does that mean that I'm 200 years old and you're 200 years old or we're each 100 years old? It means we should have retired 130 years ago. I feel like this podcast has aged me, 200. years. I feel like I'm 200 light years from where I started. There you go. All right. Well, so we're talking about the first 200 microseconds of the universe. And so we'll start with time equals zero. What happened at time equals zero, Daniel? We don't know. But one idea is that there was a singularity. That the universe was super hot and super dense. And I think a lot of people imagine this as a single point. They hear singularity. They think a single point. They think one hot, dense spot.

Like the entire energy and all the matter of the universe was in a really tiny thought. But it's better not to think about it as one place, but more to think about it as the density. Because we don't know if the universe is finite or infinite. What? It's possible that when the universe started, it was already infinite. And that this singularity we're talking about was everywhere. Like multiple singularity? Yes.

Yes, precisely. Like a non-singular singularity. Yes, like the singularity. The singularity refers not to how many of them there were, but the fact that the density becomes infinite. A singularity refers to what happens to the equations, that the equations get infinities in them because the density becomes infinite, not the size of it.

And there's, I think, a very common misconception that the Big Bang or pre-Big Bang starts with a dot, and that dot smaller than an atom becomes the entire universe. And because we don't know how big the universe is, it could have been a little blob, it could have been an infinite extent, it's better to think about it in terms of infinite density. Oh, I see.

Or like an infinite number of dots. An infinite number of dots, yeah. The thing we do know is that the universe was denser and hotter back then. We don't know how much of it there was. Could have been infinite. Could be finite and loop all around on itself. That's a whole other episode about the size and shape of the universe, which is fascinating. But to think through the history of the universe is mostly to think about the density changing.

Okay. And the idea is that, you know, there's no real reason for this to exist. somehow the universe, what we know, was really dense, almost like infinitely dense. Yeah, there must have been a reason for it to exist because it does, and we think the universe follows reasons and laws. We just don't know what they are. We can't argue for it. We don't know why there was something instead of nothing and why there was this.

And could there have been other things? And, you know, just really shockingly basic questions that we have really no clue about it. Okay, so we had this super dense state, almost infinitely dense, maybe everywhere, maybe just one dot. And then what's the next thing that happened? And what happened in the first 10 to the minus, you know, 43 seconds? So the picture you should have in your mind is that we have space and space is really, really hot. Like there's a huge amount of energy, right?

The density we're really talking about there is energy density. And if you've been following the podcast, you know that we like to think about space in terms of quantum fields. Every point in space has fields in it. The electron fields, the quark fields, the photon fields, et cetera. and particles that we think about today are little blobs of excitations of those fields. Now today, most of those fields are very, very low energy.

Most of space is empty and those fields are zero. But back then, infinite density really means all those fields are going nuts. They're going crazy. They're oscillating. They're just full of energy. And so instead of thinking about individual particles, it's like having an ocean. You don't think about

a drop of water when you have an ocean. You can just think about the entire crazy turbulent blob and it's doing all sorts of stuff. So the first 10 to the minus 43 seconds of the universe, we call this the Planck epoch. Everything was hot and dense, and these fields were just going crazy. Now, I have a question, though. Sometimes talk about that it's not just like stuff that was crammed in together really tightly.

It's also that space itself was smaller, much smaller. So it's like both those things. It's like everything was crammed in together and also space was smaller. That's right. there's two kinds of expansion we're going to talk about later. One is the expansion of stuff through space as things spread out into existing space. The other is the expansion of space, that you create more space, that new space itself is created. Because remember, that space is not just like a backdrop on which things happen.

There's a dynamical connection between space and energy. Space curves and bends and expands in response to the mass and energy that's in it. And then it shapes the motion of that mass and energy. So space and mass and energy are two things that are very tightly coupled and respond to each other. Okay. So in the first, you know, point zero zero zero down to 43 zeros one seconds, you said that's called the plant epoch. Yeah.

And back there we had a bunch of really hot fields. And the thing to think about here is that there are no particles. What? It's like too hot for particles. Like particles is just kind of everything is just crazy. That's right. there are no isolated particles because everything is just too hot and too intense. It's all just energy in these fields that's sloshing around.

You know, later on, things will cool down enough for particles to form. But particles are like, you know, when you have a few little isolated blobs of energy in a field, here we have like an incredible turbulent ocean. So it makes no sense to think about in terms of particles. I mean, technically you could. You could say this field has 10 kajillion particles in it, but it doesn't really make any sense. It's really just energy. It's not discrete packets moving.

around through space, it's just a huge blob of energy sloshing around in the field. Oh, I see. There's no moment where you're like, oh, there's an electron. It's just that the whole field is just set on fire. Yeah, precisely. You can't follow a drop of water in the ocean, right? And the other thing to think about is that the fields here behave differently, just like the way materials on Earth have phases as you cool them or heat them up. The physics of them changes completely, right? The same thing happens for fields. They tend to act in different ways at different temperatures, the different energy densities. And this is not like the laws of physics changing.

It's just like how you can think about it, how you can describe it, the effective, the emergent results of it are very different at different temperatures, just the same way they are for solids. Okay, but can we still use the same equations we have? Like, do our equations still work? We don't think they do. We think the equations that we have now only describe physics sort of at lower temperatures, that they're sort of like the falling out the effective equations for what happens when

things are cold. We don't think we have like the fundamental equations. Our equations should be like the low temperature limit of the true equations which we haven't found yet. But for example, we think that a very hot temperature is the early moments, all of the forces acted like one. Gravity, electromagnetism, the weak force and the strong force. We think they're probably all just one force that acted together. What do you mean a force? Don't forces depend on particles too? No, forces are also just fields, right? But we think that there was a single field that represents all those forces but combined into one. We think when it was really hot and dense that they acted together. They all had the same strength. And there were all just different components of one mega force, which

exists in the universe. Well, I think you just coined the term right there, the mega force. This is like to call it the grand unified theory. I like megaforce better. Mega force it is then. There you go. All right. So those are the first, 10 to the minus 43 seconds, then what happened? Then things start to cool. Things start to expand a little bit. And the first breaking happens. Here, the force splits into two.

You got gravity on one side. And then all the other forces, electromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force combined still into one single force, which we call electrostrong. And so here the temperature has dropped enough that the force has split. It's like cracked. You know, sometimes when you cool something, you can freeze or it can. It can crack or it can end up in some weird configuration. As the universe cooled, gravity sort of like froze and split off from the other forces.

Interesting. Like inevitably, or is it like a random, you know, like an ice, when you freeze ice, you sometimes get crystals here or crystals there? Is it random like that? Or is it like inevitable you think that the equations were like we were always going to get gravity and these other forces? We don't know. We call it spontaneous symmetry breaking because we think there's a random element in it. And all the forces you'll see as we go through the time. all the forces split off.

And we think that those splittings are spontaneous, that they're essentially the result of one little quantum fluctuation, which then gets propagated through the universe. You know, like when everybody sits down at a dinner table, do you drink from the glass to your left or to your right? Well, if one person chooses left, then everybody around them starts to choose left and it spreads across the whole dinner table, right?

They could have chosen to drink from the one to their right, and then everyone would use that one. So one little fluctuation like that can propagate itself through the whole universe. And we don't know if gravity splitting off was inevitable or at what temperature it should have split off. We just don't know. We think gravity split off first

because it's the weakest force. And so we think it would take the hottest temperature to combine all the forces together. And then 14 billion years later, everyone's like, is this my glass? Is this your glass? That's right. Did you drink from mine?

Because I thought I had more wine left over. And then people were spitting up. What? It's yours? and then it's like back to the Big Bang. All right, so things start to split off and cool down, and then we start to get more forces defined. And then what happens next?

And then the next thing to split off is the strong force. So gravity split off, and then the strong force splits off. So now we have gravity, we have the strong force, and we have the electro-weak force, electro-week being the combination of electromagnetism and the weak force. But remember, still, we have no particles. So these things aren't like forces we think, of today that are balancing particles around, it's just the fields now have different properties.

They operate differently. They contain energy differently. They have different strengths as the universe is cooling. So gravity split off, but it's not like bringing anything together because there is no thing. Well, gravity is doing what gravity does. It's, you know, the bending of space. But, you know, even talking about merging gravity with these other forces requires a conceptual leap that we haven't made yet, which is thinking about gravity as a quantum field, which we don't know how to do, especially in the early universe. So we are really out on very thin ice here conceptually. But maybe if gravity can be unified with the other forces,

then it was the first thing to split off of some megaphors, which might exist. I can't emphasize enough how much we're speculating cluelessly here. Okay, right, right. If gravity is a quantum field, this is kind of what we might expect. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But it's not like we have a firm prediction that we can like interrogate and explore.

It's just like, hopefully somebody clever, comes along and figures out how to make gravity a quantum field. And maybe it would work like this. All right. So now we split off the strong force. Now we have more forces. And then something dramatic happens at around 10 to the minus 32 seconds, right? Yeah.

Here's where the excitement really happens. And we don't know why. But we think at this point, for some reason, the universe started to expand extraordinarily rapidly. Like space itself expanded, not just stuff flying through space sloshing around, but space itself got stretched. Remember that space can expand based on the mass that's in it. Like we know the space is expanding right now in their current universe is something called dark energy, which is creating new space, not just pulling on space,

not pushing things further apart through space, but actually like adding new bits of space between galaxies. So that can definitely happen. And we know that it did happen in the very early universe. Which is created more space. The universe used to start at a crazy rate, right? This is the kind of the best. in the Big Bang theory.

Yeah, this is sort of the bang and the Big Bang theory. I mean, originally people thought of the Big Bang as like a dot and things explode through space. These days, we have this period we're talking about now, which we call inflation. And then we think of the hot Big Bang is basically at the very end of inflation. But, you know, the terms are a little fuzzy. But essentially here, you have the biggest bang. I mean, the universe expands by a ridiculous amount. It's 10 to the 78.

10 to the 78. 1 with 78 zeros. 780. So you take a piece of space that's like a nanometer across and very, very quickly in like 10 to the minus 32 seconds, you expand it to 100 trillion kilometers. That's crazy. So in 10 to the minus 32, like 0.000, 3201 seconds, the universe for some reason just was like, I'm out of here. Yeah, exactly. And we don't know why. We have like, you know, given fancy names to this theory to make it. sound like it's a thing we know how to deal with. We call it the inflation theory. We think maybe it was generated by the inflaton field. But that's really just like saying, oh, you know, the answer is a fluctuation in my cluelessness field. Like, I really just don't know.

I'm going to force this into the framework of ideas. So it sounds clever. They reached 200 episodes. So they're like, oh, they blew up. And it could be, you know, that it's triggered by the Electra Week breaking that like maybe breaking off the strong force from the electro-week force created the inflaton field or settled the inflaton field into a way that made it do this crazy expansion, but this is guessing upon guessing. Oh, I see. We are very confident that inflation happened. I mean, the things that it predicts are very specific and very concrete.

You know, like before inflation, the universe is very hot and dense, but not totally uniform because it's quantum mechanical. And so you get some spots that have like little quantum fluctuations of a little bit more density and quantum fluctuation is a little bit less density. Really, really tiny variations. But then this inflation, this stretching, turns those little seeds of over densities into big structures, which then form the structure of the universe. And we can do all those simulations. And it describes very well what we see today. Interesting. And I guess one question is, where did all the space come from? Like when you make space, does it require energy? Yeah, we don't

really know. I mean, we know that the universe is not closed. And so an energy, conservation is not required by general relativity. To make space, you don't need energy, maybe. Well, you know, space is energy. Like, space has energy in it. When you create space, it has all these fields, and those fields have energy in them. And so when you create space, it's like creating energy. So it's not something that we understand.

It's not something we know how to do or that we understand the rules about. We see it happening in our current universe. We don't understand the mechanism behind it. We call it dark energy because we're clueless. We know that it happened in the very early universe. maybe it's the same mechanism. Maybe it's something totally different. We really just don't know.

All right. So now we're getting almost to the 200 microsecond mark. So let's finish off what happens in the first 200 microseconds. And then we'll go on to our next question. But first, let's take a quick break. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford. And in session 421 of Therapy for Black Girls, I sit down with Dr. Othia and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our hair.

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. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, 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 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. 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.

Denial is easier. Drinking is easier. Yelling, screaming is easy. Complex problem solving, meditating, you know, takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Adventure should never come with a pause button. Remember the movie pass era where you could watch all the movies you wanted for just $9? It made zero sense, and I could not stop thinking about it.

I'm Bridget Todd, host of the tech podcast, there are no girls on the internet. On this new season, I'm talking to the innovators who are left out of the tech headlines. Like the visionary behind a movie pass, Black founder Stacey Spikes, who was pushed out of movie pass the company that he founded. His story is wild, and it's currently the subject of a juicy new HBO documentary. We dive into how culture connects us. When you go to France, or you go to England, or you go to Hong Kong.

Those kids are wearing Jordans. They're wearing Kobe's shirt. They're watching Black Panther. And the challenges of being a Black founder. Close your eyes and tell me what a tech founder looks like. They're not going to describe someone who looks like me and they're not going to describe someone who looks like you. I created There Are No Girls on the Internet

because the future belongs to all of us. So listen to There Are No Girls on the Internet on the IHurt Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Daniel, we just exploded the universe. We just went through inflation in the first 10 to the minus 32 seconds. One nanometer became 100 trillion kilometers. Now things are expanding like crazy. Quantum fluctuations make a huge difference.

Now what happens? Now we finally get particles. Things have cooled down enough that the energy that's in the field is distinct and discretized and you can follow it around. You can say, oh, this little blob of energy in the electron field is moving through space in a coherent way. You can call this an electron and the same for the other fields. And so you start to get particles made and you get the last moment of breaking that we're aware of. The electro-week force, which at the time was just one force, you know, there wasn't like a separate photon and W and Z bosons acting separately. It was a single force

with four of its own bosons, this field now breaks, and it breaks into electromagnetism and the weak force. It becomes two forces, kind of. It becomes two forces that are still closely connected. I mean, they're two broken pieces of a larger force. You can sort of like fit them together roughly

the way you can fit continents together. You know, like you can think of the mega continent breaks into little continents, and now they're a little different, but the contours sort of match, and so you can think about their history. Right. And this is another example of spontaneous symmetry breaking.

the Higgs field gives the photon no mass and it gives the Ws and Zs a lot of mass. So all of a sudden, the weak force becomes really, really weak. Interesting. And so then that's what kind of gives rise to the Higgs field, which is the one that gives mass to everything? Yeah, so the Higgs field, like all the other fields, started out really hot and was cooling down and cooling down.

And most of the other fields, they like settled down to zero. But the Higgs field got stuck. Got stuck at a certain point where it couldn't go any lower because it has a really weird shape to it. It's like, you know, on the edge of a canyon wall, it's got a little, like, dip in it. So you can get stuck in a little, like, on the precipice. Like a little buzz, right?

And it got stuck there. And because it got stuck there and not somewhere else, it gave mass to the Ws and Zs, but not the photon. And also to the other particles. Wow. So all the other particles, their mass then gets fixed because the Higgs field got stuck at this value. Wow.

And before, so before that, we didn't have mass? Or we just didn't have, like, consistent mass? Or you can't even talk about mass. It's harder to talk about mass before the particles really are like separate identifiable spots. But the mass of the particles depends on the energy of the Higgs field. So as the universe is cooling down and the Higgs field is cooling down, you can think of it as like the masses of the particles are decreasing because the Higgs field is cooling down. All right.

So now all of our forces are in motion now. They're in play. And particles now exist, which is crazy to think about that we didn't have particles before. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And now they have mass or they interact with the Higgs field. And so is that then kind of, is that it? Like, is it a straight line from there to here? Or are there still things we don't know? There's a lot of things we don't know, but it's basically a straight line. I mean, now you have particles, and the interactions in place are the ones we're familiar with.

There's electromagnetic fields, the weak force, the strong force, there's gravity. But, you know, it's still pretty hard to understand. Like, it's a hot, dense, nasty mess. Like, it's mostly quarks and leptons, but there are too hot to form any larger particles. Like, you don't have protons and neutrons and stuff like that, which are bound states of works. Everything's just quarks, quarks, and fun of the particles. Yeah, just flying around, annihilating each other constantly, turning into photons, turning back into particles, it's still hot and dense.

And then things are cooling off. So like, you know, about after one microsecond, you get this quark glue on plasma, things start to cool off. And then you get things like protons and neutrons and whatever. And there's a really interesting mystery there about like what happened to all the antimatter. If everything was symmetric, you would expect the fields to create like as much matter and antimatter. It should all annihilate into a universe filled with light.

But instead, there was some asymmetry. there. We ended up with like a little bit more matter than antimatter. Most of it is gone, but a little bit of matter was left. And that's what led in a straight line to where we are today. I think the lesson here is a lot happened in the first 200 microseconds. We missed the big party. I just feel like we went through an hour of just to cover 200 microseconds. That's amazing. So a lot happened, right? And a lot could have happened. Yeah, the history of the universe has been pretty boring ever since. You know, like most of the excitement was in the first few tiny slices of time. And ever since then, it's been pretty slow.

Wow. But, you know, think about it like on the cosmic time scale, like trillions and quadrillions of years. It could be that, you know, intelligent species in septillion years, think about the first few billion years of the universe as like, you know, the first moments. Because, you know, it could be that the universe is very different in a trillion years, that it's all just black holes separated by vast distances or something else forms, you know. There's so many fascinating emergent phenomena that are really hard to anticipate. And so, who knows? Maybe this will seem exciting to people who come much, much later.

Yeah, I'm sure they'll say, like, you know, that day where they published the 200th episode of Daniel and Horace Explain the Universe, that's T-Equelsero to us. That's when the party really started. Before then, it's not even really worth living. There you go. All right. Well, I think the answer is a lot happened in the first 200 microseconds of the universe, which is amazing. All right, we have one more question here.

I think we might have to talk about it in 200 microseconds, Daniel. But the question is pretty interesting. It's something I thought about as we try to brainstorm ideas for this episode. But the question is, what can we find within 200 light years of Earth? So I guess, first of all, how much is 200 light years? Like a few bazillion kilometers? Yeah, a light year is really far. So a light year is like 9.5 times 10 to the 12 kilometers.

That's why we use light years, because the distances in the universe are so vast that kilometers become an absurd unity. So it's like 200 million million kilometers. So if you could hop in a spaceship and go 200 million million kilometers, where could we go visit? Yeah, so mostly the universe is empty. You know, you pick a random spot outside the solar system. All right.

And you go in a straight line, you'll see nothing for 200 light years. Like, it's just not much there. The universe is not very dense anymore. And, you know, I read these science fiction novels about people flying through space and, like, hitting asteroid fields and bumping into stars. And I'm like, it's just not that much stuff out there. Not likely. No, it's like swimming in the ocean.

How often do you really encounter a desert island? Like, really not that often. Oh, I see. That's a good analogy. Like, if you were in the middle of the ocean and you went a few hundred kilometers. kilometers, you know, what are the chances that you'll hit another island? Pretty small. Yeah, pretty small. It's mostly just ocean out there. But there are things out there. And mostly within 200 light years of Earth, there are a bunch of stars. Okay. But, you know, not that close. Like the closest star,

really, once you leave our solar system, the closest thing that you can find to our solar system is a star called Proxima Centauri. It's about 4.2 light years away. It's not the name of an Avengers villain. I feel like I've heard that name before. Are you auditioning to be the next Marvel movie, that's what happening here. To be the voiceover. I think Proxima Centauri, the Marvel villain, can do 200 accents. So if you really want to audition, then we've got to hear some accents.

With bananas, yeah. All right, so that's the nearest star. I guess how many stars can we find within 200 light years, do you know? Surprisingly, you can find a lot of stars. Now, on one hand, stars are not very dense. I mean, in our galactic neighborhood, this is about one star per 250

cubic light years. But as the radius of sphere grows, the volume of it goes up very quickly. It goes up with radius cubed. So a sphere with radius 200 light years has a lot of cubic light years, like 30 million. If you go out to about 200 light years, there's something like, you know, tens of thousands or maybe 100,000 stars in that volume. Really? Yeah. I could visit 100,000 stars within 200 light years. Yes. But, you know, if you traveled in a straight line, 200 light years, you'd probably find very small number of stars. If you completely visited a sphere with radius 200 light years, then yes, there'd be 100,000 stars there.

But, you know, like the list of destinations I can go is, it's like 100,000 stars. There's a lot of options. I mean, if you like decisions and you like choices, then there's a lot of options. Most of them are pretty far away. I mean, the vast majority of those 100,000 are in a thin shell on the outside of that sphere, mostly because that's where most of the volume is. But they say that, you know, about one in five star has a Earth-like planet. So we're talking about like there's 20,000 Earth-like planets I could visit.

Yeah, there are definitely a lot of Earth-like planets. And we think that most of those solar systems have planets, like multiple planets, which is fascinating. We don't know a lot about like what those solar systems look like and how often do you get big gas giants and rocky inner worlds? And is our solar system unusual or totally typical? Something that is unusual about our solar system that you'll discover as you look around in the solar system is how many solar systems have multiple stars. Like in the closest 15 light years, there's like 50 something stars. And about half of them are single stars, just like a star with planets around it. But there's like 10 of them that are binary systems, like two stars orbiting each other and then planets around those.

Wow, that's common. That's common. And even within 15 light years, there are four systems. that are trinary systems that have three stars in orbit around each other. Oh, that's pretty cool. So in Star Wars, when Luke is looking out at the two suns on the horizon, that's like maybe more common than you think. That's not rare.

It's a lot more common than you think. And if you think about how things form, you start from a big cloud and things coalesce. And so it's not necessary for it all coalesce into one really big blob in the center of a solar system. If you have like a little bit of density here and a little bit of density there, it can form two. Or if two stars form close enough to each other, they'll pull on each other and form one of these systems. Some listeners send me an awesome question recently. He said, are there any stars out there that have sort of two planetary disks, like one planetary

disk aligned in one way, and then a second one aligned at an angle to it? Like two hula hoops kind of. Yeah, like two hula hoops. And I don't know of one, but there's no reason to think there couldn't be. Like if you had two solar systems that sort of merged and the stars combined. in the center, or you get a binary star system in the center, they could keep each of their planetary disks, and it would be at different angles. And so that could totally happen. I think that would be an awesome setting for a science fiction. Right, but every year you go around the

sun, you'd be like, watch out for those other planets. It'd be some drama every year. Yeah, it would have to work like clockwork, but it might make for some pretty cool nighttime observations. All right, cool. So there's about 100,000 stars within 200 light years. What else can we fine in this bubble? Well, that's mostly it. I mean, in the galaxy, we have stars, of course. We have gas clouds, which are the birthplace of stars, but there aren't any of those within 200 light years. Like the closest one is about 400 and something light years away. It's called Taurus. And it's where stars are being born. There are stars in there that are like one or two million years old. But we don't have any of those big blobs inside our like 200 light year window. Oh, I see. Because like a

cluster itself is pretty big. It's almost as big as 200 light years. Yeah. Some of these gas clouds are hundreds of light years across. They're really vast. It's like the birthing regions of stars. But there is a cluster of stars. Like there's a big major cluster of stars. It's called the Haides cluster. And it's about 150 light years away. It's like 600 something million years old. And it's just like a big blob of stars that are all together. It probably comes from a really dense region of gas and molecules that got formed early on. And so that's like a big blob of stars. Oh, I see.

Oh, wow. That must be pretty amazing to go near or to visit there. Yeah. And, you know, if you're looking to visit a lot of stars and a lot of planets at once, it's probably a good destination. On the other hand, it's 150 light years away. So it's going to take you a while to get there. Well, I think this kind of tells you how big the universe is.

You know, 200 light years, like that's, even like if we prolong human life and double it and was able to go at the speed of light, that's as far as like any one person could probably go without any kind of special war speed or wormhole, right? Yeah, and you know, the thing that's furthest away, the human device that's furthest away from the solar system right now is Voyager 1. It's traveling at 61,000 kilometers per hour. And if it kept going, it would take another 70,000 years to reach the nearest star. Like, these distances are just incredible. Wow.

And it's already 18 billion kilometers away from us, but that's just like a tiny fraction of the distance to Proxima Centauri. I see. 70,000 years, that's like, what, 300,000 more episodes, Daniel? I got all those ideas, yeah. I've sketched them out already. You like to work ahead. Yeah, and, you know, if you think about the larger context, you know, of our galaxy, our galaxy is 100,000 light years across. So a bubble 200 light years is really a tiny neighborhood.

You know, the sun itself is just like is 20-something thousand light years from the center of the galaxy. Wow. So even like the most we might right now could imagine traveling to for a single human is a drop in the bucket of the size of our galaxy. Yeah. If you were looking at a map of the galaxy, you wouldn't even notice that distance, right? Wow. All right. Well, I feel like we covered a lot in the first 200 seconds of this podcast.

podcast and we also got this kind of amazing view of how big the galaxy is and spaces and how empty it is. It's incredible how dense and hot the universe used to be and how big and cold it is today and yet it's still filled with mystery and our whole concept of the universe where it came from, how it began, what it looks like now, what's out there could be totally rocked by discoveries that are coming. Discoveries made by scientists working today or by somebody out there listening to this podcast right now that's thinking, hey, maybe I could crack one of the biggest questions in the universe because you know, you could. Yeah. Yeah. And then we'll cover it here in our 10,000 episodes. That's right. And so I want to say a personal thank you to all the fans and

listeners for tuning into all these episodes, for sending us supportive messages, for letting us know that you're enjoying what you're hearing, and for sharing with us all of your wonder and your curiosity and for going on this crazy journey with us. Absolutely. We wouldn't be doing this without you. And thanks also for letting all your friends know and all your contacts know, because the more people that are listening, the more episodes we can make. All right, well, thanks again for helping us celebrate our 200th episode. We hope you enjoyed that. See you next time. from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devin. And we're best friends and journalists with a new podcast called No Such Thing. where we get to the bottom of questions like that. Why are you screaming? Well, I can't expect what to do. Now, if the rule was the same, go off on me. I deserve it.

You know, lock him up. Listen to no such thing on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. No such thing. I'm Dr. Joy Hardin-Bradford, host of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast. I know how overwhelming it can feel if flying makes you anxious. In session 418 of the Therapy for Black Girls Podcast, Dr. Angela Nealbarnett and I discuss flight anxiety.

What is not a norm is to allow it to prevent you from doing the things that you want to do, the things that you were meant to do. Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell. the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology's already solving so many cases.

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