Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - The Baby Universe (ft. Katie Mack)

Episode Date: November 20, 2018

What did the Universe look like as a baby? How do we know? Join Daniel and Jorge as they talk with Katie Mack about the early universe, and what they all looked like as babies. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA. terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

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

Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It drives me crazy, thinking about the secrets that are buried in the past. You know, things that actually happened that we just don't know the answer to. You mean, like, who killed JFK? No, no, I'm thinking bigger. Like, where are my socks after I put him in the dryer? That's a big mystery, but I'm thinking cosmic-sized mysteries. I mean, like, who thought two introverts could make his science podcast?

That's an enduring mystery for sure. But I'm talking about, like, universe-sized mysteries, you know? Like, you know, the universe started in one way and no other way. And what if we could just go back to the past and watch it and unearth these mysteries from the past? Wouldn't that be amazing? What was it like as a baby, basically, right? Like, was it awkward, cute, funny, tantrumy?

Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm the creator of Ph.D. Comics. And I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist at the large Hadron Collider, smashing particles together. And this is our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, explain the universe. Where we try to explain basically everything in the universe in a way that makes sense to you. Everything. The whole universe. Yeah. So today on the program, we have the question, what did the baby universe look like?

That's right. What did the universe look like when it was really young, when it was just formed or just after it got started? Did it look totally different from today? Did it look basically like today? What did it look like? Daniel, what did you look like as a baby? I looked like a universe as a baby, actually.

Oh, good. That's better than me. I looked really different as a baby than I do now because I have one of these noses that grows sort of tectonically. So when I was a kid, I had a tiny little button nose, and now I have sort of a very large alpine nose that just continues to grow through my lifetime. Well, that sounds better than me. I just looked like an old bald man.

Did you look like Winston Churchill when you were born? I did a little bit. Actually, my father was named after Winston Churchill, which is a coincidence there. Okay, so the question today is, what can we learn about the universe from its baby? picture. What did the universe look like as a baby? Yeah, this is an interesting question because I was thinking the other day, you know, Daniel,

how do you know that you were actually born? Like, how do you know that you were a baby? I mean, you think I came out this size? Yeah, basically, right? Like, how do you know? How do you know you didn't just pop into existence when you were five years old? Or, you know, like you were growing out of a test tube and then and then extruded when you were five years old, which is when sort of your memories start to kick in, right? Extruted. That sounds like such a pleasant experience. I wasn't born. I was extruded.

Technically we're all extruded. Yeah, but you're right. There's a sort of a larger question there, which is like, how do you know about yourself and your context and where you came from? And why is that important, right? Like, I might say to you, like, I don't know if I was born, you know, at 10 out of the laboratory and implanted with all these memories to make it feel like I had a child, But what does it matter, right? You might say that, it doesn't matter.

But I think it does matter. I think it matters where we come from, what our context is, what our culture is. And the same way, we wonder about larger things, like, how is the Earth made, right? What does the Earth's baby picture look like? How is the Earth extruded? Yeah, I guess I'm talking about, like, evidence, you know? Like, it's nice that I have, there are pictures of me, or at least that I'm told, it's me as a baby. So I can sort of trace my development.

But if I didn't have those pictures, I might wonder that I just pop into existence when I was five. Right. And you can look at those pictures and you can see things about yourself that tell you something about who you are. Like two-year-old Jorge's already holding a banana or already cracking silly jokes or, you know, doodling on the wall or something. There are truths about you that emerged early on, right? Like, man, look at that cute baby. I can only imagine what that baby's going to grow up to be like. How did such a cute baby turn into this?

Now, there's the mystery, right? This awesome, magnificent specimen. Yeah, and I think that every time, for example, I see, like, an old-time picture of my hometown. You know, I grew up in Los Alamos, and there are all these pictures of what it looked like during World War II. And, you know, that shaped the history of the town. And when I see these old pictures, I like saying, like,

oh, look, that building, I still recognize it. It's an enduring feature, and all this is destroyed. It was just transient. So in the same way, I like thinking about the history of the universe, because it teaches us something about how it was all put together and what it all means. You see things that make it

what it is, like unique, that make it special. Yeah, and it tells us a lot about what's happening in the future. We want to know what's going to happen to the future because we're invested, we're going to live in it, then we better look into the past.

And we've made startling discoveries by doing this. The whole discovery of dark energy, the fact that the universe is being shredded apart by some massive, not understood energy, that was only discovered by looking into the past

and understanding what the universe used to look like. Right. Yeah, baby talk aside, we're talking about the universe, right? And how can we tell

what the universe was like, you know, not just 100 years ago, 2,000 years ago, but 14 billion years ago. Yeah, exactly. What did it look like and what can we learn from that?

So as usual, we were curious to hear what people out there thought about this question, and so here's what they had to say. What do you think the early universe looked like? Um, the baby universe, I would think, would be something really compact, really dense in, like, probably in a circular looking thing, I would think, yeah.

Um, probably nothing in particular, just a bunch of gases and, like, crazy, maybe spirals. I don't know, like, you know, no stars or anything, that's for sure. I guess, like, a more extreme version of what it looks like now, because everything was kind of, kind of. more close, even though it was expanding, so it's like, I don't know, there was less space in between everything, so I guess more bright and intense, I guess. Today on the program, we have Astrophysicist Katie Mack. Hi, Katie. Hi, how are you? Good. So, you're probably one of the most famous astrophysicists on the internet. You have a huge Twitter following, and that's really cool. Thanks. Yeah, it's been really interesting. I don't know where all the people come from, but I'm glad that they are hanging out and listening to me

talk about astrophysics. Can you tell us a little bit about where you work? I'm in the physics department at North Carolina State. I'm an assistant professor, and I'm also part of the leadership in public science cluster, which is a new initiative to encourage connection between scientists and the general public. Very cool. Yeah, and I think it's important for people to understand that you're not just somebody on Twitter who likes to talk about science, but you're actually a practicing scientist who's chipping away at the mysteries of the universe. Yeah, I'm doing the best I can at that. Cool. And your expertise is in...

Yeah, so I do theoretical cosmology, which is the study of the universe from start to finish and the evolution of the universe and what's in it. And my area of specialty at the moment is dark matter. So I'm interested in what dark matter is and how it did what it did in the early universe and all of that. And I'm also interested in black holes. and in the very early universe and the very end of the universe.

What did you think, Katie, about people's general knowledge of what the early universe was like? Does this surprise you? I think everybody kind of gets the idea that it was real different than now and maybe not as structured and that the structure in the universe has come about over time, which is true. And so help the people out there understand that. How can we possibly know that? How do we know what the early universe looked like at all? We know what the early universe looks like because we can look right at it.

We can actually see it. We can watch the Big Bang happening. And there's caveats to that in terms of what I mean when I say Big Bang and what I mean when I say watch it happen. But the nature of the early universe is one of the most certain things we have in cosmology because we can actually see it directly. So tell us what that means. Where do you look to see the Big Bang? Well, you look everywhere. Okay, so let me go back a couple steps.

A few billion steps. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why do we even think there was a big bang? There was one guy who we talked to who thought the universe was like this forever. Yeah. How do we know that's not true, right? We know that the universe is changing with time because we can see that it's expanding. And the way we see it's expanding is that we look at really distant galaxies and we see that they all seem to be moving away from us.

The whole universe is getting bigger. And so the spaces between all of the galaxies is getting bigger. And that means that every galaxy we see is going to look like it's moving away from us. And in fact, the more distant in galaxy, the more quickly it seems to be moving away from us. And so, you know, beyond a certain distance, when we get out into, like, the open universe outside of our little local area, everything is moving apart. And that only makes sense if the universe is expanding and if it's expanding, like, the same in every direction. So you can look at that and then you can say, well, if it's getting bigger than it was smaller in the past, And you can just kind of extrapolate back and say that there had to have been a time when everything was really, really, really close together.

But that's sort of the question is, like, what did things look like when they were all sort of on top of each other? When the universe was that small, how do we know what it sort of looked like? If you have some kind of box with stuff in it and then you make that box bigger, then things get farther apart, it sort of cools down because there's more space and things are not bumping into each other as much. So if you go the other direction, then the early universe should have been a lot hotter and denser and, you know, in some sense, sort of smaller than it is now. And so because of that sort of extrapolation, a bunch of physicists back in the day said, well, if that's the case, then all of that heat and radiation from the early universe should actually still be out there somewhere. Why should it still be out there? I mean, wouldn't it have been absorbed or bounced around since then? What do you mean all that heat and radiation?

Okay, so this is where it gets a little bit trippy and complicated, but this is where it also gets really cool. I love trippy and complicated. But it's really cool because this is where we're actually seeing the Big Bang. Okay. So the speed of light is not infinite, which means that if you look at like the nearest star other than the sun, you're looking at something that's four light years away, roughly.

That means that the light that you see from that star is four years old by the time it gets to you. So you're saying to look into the past, you just have to look at things that are far away. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so the farther away that you look, the farther in the past you're seeing. And we have telescopes where we can see galaxies

where the light has been traveling for like 13 billion years. So we can actually see galaxies that are like some of the first galaxies ever formed in the universe. We can see really, really early objects. If we just keep looking farther and farther away, then we're looking farther and farther back, and we're looking at a time when the universe was so hot and so dense that that part of the universe was on fire.

Every part of the universe was like this sort of giant fireball. I mean, not fire exactly, but like plasma, right? And so there's some part of the universe that's so far away that the last little bit of radiation from that fire has been sort of streaming through the universe just in every direction, and there's a part of the universe that's so far away that that little bit of radiation from that fire

has been traveling through the universe and is just reaching us now. That's awesome. And I think the really mind-blowing thing about that is that it comes from every direction. Like, as you're saying, you look out into the universe, you look at something that's the age of the universe away,

you're seeing something that was really far away a long time ago. Now you look at the opposite direction. You're seeing something which was the other side of the universe when it was born. Hold on. I have so many questions for you. But before we keep going, let's take a short break. Ah, come on. Why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient.

Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, ultra-light, ultra-powerful, and built for serious productivity. With Intel core ultra-processors, blazing speed, and AI-powered performance, it keeps up with your business, not the other way around. Whoa, this thing moves. Stop hitting snooze on new tech. Win the tech search at Lenovo.com. Lenovo, Lenovo.

Unlock AI experiences with the ThinkPad X1 Carp, powered by Intel Core Ultra processors, so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone.

Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet.

So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend, really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the T-Dub.

AWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even hard.

harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let me just back up a second because I'm still a little bit confused. So what you're saying is that, you know, there are the galaxies that are the furthest that we can see. Yeah. But you're saying like if we point our telescope, just to the right of that oldest galaxy into literally like black nothingness, anything we get when we point our telescopes to that black spot sort of must be as old as the universe.

Like if we see it in an optical telescope, then we're probably saying something else. But just to the right of that old, old galaxy, there's radiation coming from that point that has not hit anything until it's hit us. and that's been traveling for like 13.8-ish billion years from a time when the universe was only about 380,000 years old. Oh, I see. But it somehow ended up there and then it had to make its way to us. Well, it was everywhere.

I mean, every part of the universe put out radiation at that time. Like, the universe is this like fireball kind of state and the whole universe is cooling at the same time, right? And so you have the gases cooling down and there's this radiation that's traveling in every direction that's escaping from the time when the whole universe is on fire. And that light goes in every direction. So if we look in one direction and we're seeing the early universe

and then we look in another direction, we're not seeing the same part of the early universe, right? Right, right. We're seeing different parts of the early universe. But you have to think of time in a kind of geometric way for this to make sense, right? So I kind of like to think of like we have these like spherical shells of time. around us.

Like a Russian doll? Yeah. Yeah. Imagine you have, your head is inside this sphere one foot in radius. That's a nanosecond in the past. And then, you know, you build another sphere that's two nanoseconds in the past. And then you build a sphere that's, you know, a light year in radius. And then you're like, that's your one year ago sphere.

And then you just kind of keep going. So you have these sort of nested spheres of deeper and deeper time. and at the very end of that the largest sphere is the observable universe and that sphere is this fireball universe so you're saying the universe when it was really young looked like a fireball

yeah I mean every part of it was plasma what does that mean like a cloud like a gas yeah it was too hot for atoms to be neutral so it was protons and electrons flying around and radiation so it would have looked like a fire in the sense that it was just glowing hot and then over time it cooled down.

So you wouldn't want to be around in the early universe? No. It would not be safe. It's a dangerous baby. Yes, yes, definitely. If you get into like even earlier times, like the first few seconds and before, like it's like nuclear reactions in every point of space at all times.

You know, it's bad. It gets real bad if you go earlier and early in the universe. So it was such a hot mass of soup, a soupy mess that nothing could even form. And so you're saying that Farball expanded. That's the Big Bang. And it

dissipated, but we're still sort of seeing kind of the afterglow of it. Yeah. And I don't want to imply that the universe was like an expanding sphere because it might just be infinite in every direction and not really have like a shape to it per se.

It might be infinitely huge. We don't know. We don't know for sure. But the idea, I guess, is that, you know, when people go outside a night or even during the day, they're getting an image of the baby universe when they look up. Is that kind of the idea? If they could see in the microwave spectrum, then yeah, they'd get a little bit of that sort of glow from the early universe. It turns out if you have one of those old TVs that picks up broadcast, you know, not the digital kind, a little bit of the static on those things is that. the afterglow of the Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background. So you could actually see the Big Bang in the snow on old televisions.

But the picture of the baby universe is not like snow. It's not like a glow or noise. It actually has like a picture, right? Like it's got a specific texture on it, right? Yeah, yeah. So we can map it out. If we take these microwave telescopes and look at every point on the sky and map out the microwave radiation,

Then we can see where some points were a little bit hotter than others. And you can see kind of these patterns of little splotches for hotter and colder spots on the, you know, background light. And that background light, you know, it looks like a sphere around us, just like if you were in a planetarium. You'd see, you know, the stars in a sphere around you. And we can look at those patterns and figure out where, like, there was a little bit more matter in this spot, a little bit less matter in that spot. And we can see traces of like sound waves traveling through that early sort of fireball universe because it turns out when the universe is that dense, sound can travel through space. What?

Yeah, yeah. So the early universe was like ringing with sound waves. And you can see those in the picture. Yeah, you can see like patterns associated with like sound waves traveling through that sort of plasma. So it wasn't just a hot mess. It was a hot and noisy mess. Yeah. It sounds a lot like my house on a Saturday afternoon, yeah.

Yeah. Kind of like real babies. Yeah, exactly. Kind of like a baby Jorge. There you go. So you're talking about this very early universe and the things we can learn about what it meant. And so what might you learn about the early universe? Like what kind of result could you get about the early universe that would surprise you or make you feel differently about your life and our role here and the whole context?

What kind of result could you learn that would change your feeling about the human experience? How our universe came to be and why it is the way it is. That would be really exciting to find out. There could be other universes that may have collided with our universe at early times, and there are ways to look for evidence of that with the Cosm Microwave background. And if that happened, that would be really interesting to see. And one of the possibilities for that is that the Big Bang happened, because two universes kind of collided in the past and bounced off each other.

And so there could be like this parallel universe out there that we might be doomed to collide with again. It's twins. So that would be really interesting as well to know that like there's more spatial dimensions than we can see. So, you know, the universe is kind of bigger in some direction that we don't understand. So that would be really interesting. That's amazing. Would it shock you have 14 billion years from now, people could still see your baby picture? I was such an ugly baby

The analogy really works because you can look back at kids for example when they were two or three and you can see in them the seeds of their current personality you can see oh he was a fighter or it was a screamer or was a curious baby so I think there are truths about us that are hidden in our baby pictures the same way

there are truths about the universe that are secreted away in the cosmic microwave background well thank you so much Katie for joining us It's good to chat about the universe. I'm always happy to do that. Yeah, you're welcome back anytime. And people can find you on Twitter, right, Katie? Your handle is...

Astro-K-K-E. One word, right? A-S-T-R-O-K-A-T-I-E. Great. Yes, that's right. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Katie. I hear you're working on a really great project these days, a new book. Yeah, I'm working on my first book.

It's for general audiences, so, you know, not technical, but the topic is the end of the universe. So where it's all going to go, how it's all going to end, what that's going to look like, what it means for the universe to have an end. It should be really fun. It's called The End of Everything, and it'll be out in 2020. Hopefully before the end of the universe. Yeah, it would be really inconvenient if the universe ended before the book came out, so I'm crossing my

fingers. And hopefully we'll have a happy ending, or is that a spoiler alert? There aren't very many pleasant ways to destroy the end. entire cosmos. This is not a Disney book, Jorge. Unfortunately. Great. So I hope everyone checks it out and keeps an eye out for it. Thank you, Katie. Thanks. Ah, come on. Why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, Ultra light, ultra powerful, and built for serious

productivity with Intel core ultra processors, blazing speed, and AI power performance. It keeps up with your business, not the other way around. Whoa, this thing moves. Stop hitting snooze on new tech. Win the tech search at Lenovo.com. Lenovo, Lenovo. Unlock AI experiences with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, powered by Intel Core Ultra processors

so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back. to school week on the okay story time podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her.

Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him?

Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants to them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal.

Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides me. plain sight that's harder to predict and even harder to stop listen to the new season of law and order criminal justice system on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts

so that was really fascinating katy told us a lot about how we can see the history of the universe from these really, really old photons that come from deep in space and deep back in time all the way back to 400,000 years after the Big Bang. Yeah, when the universe became transparent, that's an interesting concept, right? Like, we think of space as black and full of stuff in it. But relatively speaking, it's kind of transparent, right? It's empty. Yeah, which is fantastic, right?

It's good luck because if the universe was not transparent, we couldn't have learned all these amazing things we've learned about the universe, right? And you might think, well, of course, space is transparent. But that's the thing. It wasn't always, right? Around 400,000 years after the Big Bang is the first time that it cooled down enough that the hot plasma, Katie was talking about, moved from being ions into being neutral atoms so that photons could fly through them unimpeded.

Right. So it makes me wonder, how could we ever see before that? Can we see before 400,000 years after the Big Bang? We can, but we can't use photons. You know, it's like staring at the sun, right? You can see the surface of the sun because it's shooting off photons, but you can't see photons from the inside of the sun because those get absorbed. And so looking at the earlier history of the universe requires somehow looking inside this big ball of plasma.

Wow. And we can't do that with photons. But looking sort of in time, right? We want to pierce into it in time. That's right. And so we can't see directly. One thing we can do is that we can do experiments to recreate it. You know, we can say, well, what was it like when there was so much?

energy focused in one place. You mean we can make babies in a test tube? I'm not proposing that you and I make babies in a test tube, Jorge, as much as that would be on the frontiers of science. And also, I think it's kind of inappropriate to raise that on air in the podcast. I mean, that should be a private conversation. You're like, buy me a glass of wine at least first, Jorge. That's right.

I'm not that easy. But we can recreate the conditions of the Big Bang, sort of, just by smashing particles. together. So, you know, the large Hadron Collider, we smash protons together. Sometimes we even smash heavier stuff together, like lead or gold nuclei, and try to recreate the big, hot mess that was that ball of plasma, just to see what was it like, and what's the physics of it, and what happens. What do you mean, recreate the conditions, like the temperature or just like the crazy, the pure energiness of it? Yeah, the density of energy, right? That's essentially what temperature is in my understanding. You know, we just try to create a lot of energy density in one place,

so that quarks, for example, which usually are bound tightly together, can feel free because there's so much energy around, that everybody has so much energy, they don't get tied down. You're like, be free, quarks, be free. Take off your clothes. Show us what you're like.

It's the quark liberation front is what it is. The QLF is sort of a militant group there. Yeah, so you can sort of think of the LHC as like a big bang machine. You know, every time we collide, we're like recreating these collisions. And so we can study that experimentally. makes me a little nervous, Daniel, just like...

What's the big deal? What do you mean, like a big bang machine? First of all, it sounds kind of, it sounds a little inappropriate. But, like, you made a machine that makes universes? That's a little worrying, isn't it? Well, it only makes 40 million universes a second. What could go wrong? What could go wrong?

No, seriously, people don't worry. We're not creating universes at the LAT. We're creating the, we're recreating the conditions of the early universe, by making something that's as hot and dense in a very small space, and we're all wearing life jackets and hard hats and nobody should be concerned. Yeah, and diapers.

Yeah, and the point is that what we're just trying to study it, and because we have these theoretical models that say, we think we know what happened before 400,000 years after the Big Bang. That's the last thing we can directly see. We think we know what happened before that. So let's test it and check and try to recreate those conditions.

Oh, I see. Like, you have theories about what happened before 400,000 years into the Big Bang, And so you're trying to do small experiments that will sort of confirm parts of that theory so that didn't you feel confident about using a theory to peer into the Big Bang? Yeah, exactly. So we're extrapolating into what we can't see, and then we're trying to test it in the lab. It's like, let's see if our theory works in similar conditions.

So it's kind of like a, it's like math vision. You know, like we can't technically see inside the sun, but we can see inside using math. I'll let me put on my math goggles and now I can see anything. Well, I guess, I mean, you could call that applied math or math vision, but yeah, I think we should rename all the applied math

departments around the country as math vision departments. Yeah, and it could be a math visionary. But speaking of vision, there is another way now to see into that plasma, to look inside. And that's because we have a new way to look out into the universe, and that's with

gravitational waves, which are only recently discovered. We can listen, not just see. Oh my God, I hate that analogy. We're not listening. Gravitational waves don't make a sound. They're just waves like everything else. Meaning there's stuff happening, but underneath that, like a rumble,

you can see sort of these waves coming out, right? Well, what I mean is that the hot plasma is opaque to photons, right? But it's not opaque to other things, right? It's transparent to other things. It's transparent, for example, to gravitational waves. So the current theory of what happened just after the Big Bang, like 10 to the minus 35 seconds after the universe was born, is that there was a huge shockwave in space.

Gravitational waves were made just at the very, very beginning of the universe. And gravitational waves can pierce plasma. They can go through anything because they are the shaking of space itself, right? So nothing can block them. So those can pass through that plasma. But don't those waves have dispersed out into the infant? infinity by now? Wouldn't we have lost them by now?

Well, it's just the same as with the photons from the cosmic microwave background. If the Big Bang happened everywhere all the time, then those waves were created everywhere and went in every direction. If we want to see them now, we just listen, you know, in some direction a long, long time ago, and they should be arriving now. Gravitational waves made super far away 14 billion years ago should just be arriving on Earth now. And you're right. It's very hard to see.

It's like the whole room is reverberated. right? Kind of like a... Yeah, exactly. Reverberibrating. Reberberburping. Reberping, yeah. And the cool thing is,

maybe you've heard this story, but there was a collaboration that had a telescope listening for these and they thought they heard them. This is the bicep collaboration and they claimed the discovery and then it turned out that it was just dust

and they were actually totally wrong and they had to walk back their discovery, which is kind of embarrassing. Yeah, oops. But, you know, it happens in science, right? Yeah, totally happens. you know. Yeah, they didn't do anything wrong. They just, you know, they claimed they discovered it. They made their best statement and then they learned more and they said, oops, and that's fine. That's the process of science. But there are ways to see those. We just haven't heard those gravitational waves yet, but people are working on it. One day we'll find them. So those might tell us what happened inside of the really, really baby universe, right?

Yeah, exactly. You know, the fetal universe or something, you know, and just after it was born, and that would be fascinating because we could learn a lot. First of all, if we see them, that confirms that these gravitational waves were made and that we think inflation probably happened, and that would be incredible, right? That would go from math vision to like, you know, I don't know, math discovery. Sound vision. It's not sound, man. Gravitational waves are not sound. That's the worst analogy.

I don't know why that got propagated. Anyway, yeah, so we could see very, very early on. And that would be cool. But we haven't heard those yet. People are working on it. So how far into the Big Bank could we? listen with these gravitational waves. Yeah, 10 to the minus

35 seconds after the Big Bang. Why not just call that zero? Like, is there's so much happening between zero and 10 to the negative? Put on your math goggles. There's a difference between zero and 10 to the minus 35.

Although, I'll admit, I don't even know what prefix goes before 10 to minus 35. Is that like a Zippo second or a biopto second or something? What do you think it is? I think it's a sound second. I think it's a Jorge second or a chandel second or something.

It's a baby second. Because it's so tiny. So that's a really exciting way to probe the very, very, very early universe. But wait, where does that number come from, 10 to the minus 35? That seems very, like, definitive. Oh, there's a lot of uncertainty there. But it comes from calculations about how inflation happened. You know, inflation is the process of the universe stretching really, really fast just after it was born.

You go from a tiny microscopic dot, or every tiny microscopic dot was then just stretched out to a really big universe. The universe expanded by a huge amount in a really tiny amount of time. We should do a whole podcast on what is inflation sometime. That's when inflation stopped, yeah. But that's just, it's an estimate. And there are different theories of inflation. And, you know, it could be 10 in the minus 36 seconds or 10 of the minus 32 seconds. And but of course, as you say, why isn't it just zero?

And we'd love to see zero. We love to see the first moment. When time was created. Did something happen at 10 to the minus 35? That's when inflation stopped, yeah. Oh. Yeah, so very, very briefly, the history of the universe is, the universe is created somehow a mysteriously, totally unknown process.

And then it stretched really, really dramatically, really, really quickly for about 10 to the minus 35 seconds, right? And then it's been expanding ever since. And then about 5 billion years ago started stretching again, and that's what we call dark energy. Oh, I see. So you couldn't, these waves, gravitational waves, wouldn't tell you what happened when it was stretching or before it stretched. Yeah, there's sort of the results of the stretch. You know, it's like a...

Oh, I see. If you jump onto a trampoline, you know, these are the waves that move through the trampoline. Oh, I see. So inflation caused these waves. It's like the bang of the Big Bang. It's the bang just after the Big Bang. And you look just down the street from the Big Bang,

and this is what you hear. All right. So then, but then who knows? How would we ever see what happened before 10 to the minus 5 seconds? I know. I'd love to see at zero, right? Or even negative. Like what happened before?

What was there before and what made the universe start? And it's hard to imagine how we could ever see that. Even see before 10 to the minus 35 to see what was happening at zero and to pierce that veil and go through it and see what happened before. That's just the realm of science fiction. It may literally be impossible. It may be that no information from before that was even preserved. It's just like destroyed. in the Big Bang. We don't even know.

You don't think even math vision could get us through? No, I mean, like, you know, like, could we form a theory that? Just put on two math goggles and we'll get you there, right? Like, what's the big deal? Yeah. No, we certainly could. And, you know, this is an interesting question of, like, can you even study that? Is this philosophy or is this science?

Can you talk seriously about what happened before the Big Bang or what caused the Big Bang? And people like to talk about crazy ideas like the Big Bang was the result of the collisions of two other universes in higher dimensions. And I mean, I know it sounds like I just made up those words that don't mean anything, but that's a real theory. You mean like, could we talk about anything before there was anything? That's right. Yeah, when there was nothing, could we talk about something, right?

That sounds like that bit in space balls or something. But yeah, and it's a reasonable question. And some people say you can't. It's just philosophy because we can never test it. We can never know what happened because we can never get any data that confirmed or denied any of those theories. Wow.

But other people say, you know, you could. Sean Carroll, for example, he argues that you can talk about what happened at a time or a place you can never visit. Because you can build theories that extrapolate, as you were saying, using MathVision into that time. You can confirm or deny those theories in time and places that you can test. You can think about whether that extrapolation is valid and test those in other ways. So it's indirect, but, you know, there are ways to talk about what might have happened then. It'd be hard to kind of put your finger on it and really kind of see it. Yeah, especially because at time equals zero, your finger doesn't exist.

So you know, how to put it anywhere. Plus it be really hot, so. Yeah, don't put your finger on that hot. People don't put your finger on a big bang. Yes, so, you know, if you look deep into the history of the universe, you learn about how the Earth was made, you learn about how the solar system was formed, you learn about how galaxies came together, you learn about how the universe is expanding, you learn about the first stars, you go all the world. back to the very initial moments when the universe became transparent. And that's, you know, what we think about when we think about the universe. I mean, you learn all this rich history and it's told us so much about who we are and

how everything works and, you know, what's going to happen. So it's pretty fascinating. I love looking at the universe's baby picture. Yeah. Now, there's a certain definitely comfort to knowing your origins, right? Like if you didn't know, if you were born or where you came from, it kind of tends to unsettle you, right? Like, what is my place in the universe?

It all could just be a manufactured illusion from the creators of this simulation that we're living in, right? So it could all just be a lie. Yeah, but what were they like as a baby, though? That's right. It's a recursive question. But I totally agree with you. It tells you something about who you are, and you'd like to know those things,

because it tells you sort of how to live your life, right? If you know where you came from, you have an idea of where you're going and how to get there and what's important. Yeah, what your place in the universe is. Yeah, and your plays to, turns out, is very small, almost nowhere. Pretty cold, a little cold.

It's pretty cold, yeah. But you should still go on and live your life and be nice to people. Yeah. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge. That's one word, or email us at

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