Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What came first matter or energy?

Episode Date: May 3, 2022

Daniel and Jorge answer listener questions about the solar system and the early Universe.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. It is a slippery question, so watch out. All right, so which came first? Physics or math? Ooh, tough one. I'm inclined to say math because people have been doing that since there was like money. I think there are cuneiform tablets they have found with receipts for like cows that somebody bought in 2000 BC. So economics came first?

Well, you know, economics is doing math to describe the physical world like cows. So in a way, they're secretly physicists, aren't they? I see. You're just trying to point it all back to physics. So even if I buy a hamburger, I'm being a physicist. Well, you know, if you spend money doing it, then I guess you're like a mathitarian. Wait, are you saying that I eat math or I eat mathematicians? That depends on your ethical framework, man.

What came first? Ethics or physics. Maybe philosophy came first. Would you get a doctorate in those? I think podcasts definitely didn't come first. Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I definitely liked math before I liked physics. Really? Math is your first love? Or does your first experience with academics?

Well, you know, you learn math in elementary school, but they don't really teach you a lot of physics in elementary. school. I mean, maybe you do a little bit of like, this is what's inside a rock. But you definitely don't talk a lot about astrophysics in elementary school. I see. So Daniel Whiteson was a mathematician before he was a physicist. Yeah, my dad was really into math. And so I learned a lot of math at home and I really enjoyed math in elementary school. I was definitely a math nerd before I was a physics nerd. That kind of makes me a little sad. I feel like that's like learning that Michael Jordan really wanted to be a baseball player and not a basketball player. I think that's true actually, isn't it? It is true. Yeah. His first love was baseball. But I'm pleased with any

analogy that puts me in the same phrase as Michael Jordan. I'd like to be the Michael Jordan of anything. You are full of air, hot air sometimes. But you know, don't they say that all babies are kind of physicists when they're born? You know, they're trying to explore the physical world around them and they're trying to, you know, learn the loss of physics in a way. Yeah, it sounds to me like you're saying everybody who's curious about the world is a physicist. No, just curious about the physics of the world, you know, like, how do I stand up or what happens if I dropped this ball? Or how do I get more food? Although babies come from biology. So maybe biology came first? Now I'm confused. It's all philosophy in the end. But anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge

Explain the Universe, a production of I-Hard Radio. In which we treat the entire universe as one grand physics question. We ask how does it work? Why does it work this way and not some other way? And how will it work in the future? And most of all, we ask, is it possible for our tiny little mathematical biology, economics, philosophy-loving brains to understand it. Yeah, it is an amazing universe and it makes you wonder if we are still just kind of babies in it, trying to figure out the basics of how it works, or are we PhD holders who pretty much are going to understand everything there is to know about the universe right now? It is fun to look back at the sort of history of physics and how it developed people stumbling

forward, having silly ideas, having to backtrack, having new ideas, and then bursts of progress. it really is similar to the way kids develop. You mean, physicists are just like banging blocks together. In a way, in a way, that's kind of what you're doing. Just banging particles together, seeing what happens. Yeah, well, there definitely are false leads and stumbling blocks. You know, I was reading some history of physics yesterday. And even after, like, the Michelson-Morley experiment that light travels at the same speed,

no matter who measures it, most physicists still believed in the ether for years and years afterwards. It takes physics a long time sometimes to change it, direction and figure out a new course. It's the same way it takes kids time to break old habits. Yeah, tell me about it. We try telling a kid what to do or try to instill a habit of cleaning up the room. Impossible. Impossible. And so I hope that we are still babies when it comes to the physics of the universe because that suggests we're going to grow up into some new, deeper understanding of the way the cosmos works that in our future are some revelations. Yeah, we're going to get PhDs in PhDs

or something, a meta PhD. But there is still plenty to understand about the universe and all the mysteries of the cosmos, how it works, how things swirl around each other, how things form, how they burn, how they die, generate questions, not just in the minds of academic physicists, but in children and in everybody out there. Yeah, maybe in a way before math or before physics or biology or philosophy

came just asking questions. Like, that's kind of how everything starts by a human asking a question about how something works. Yeah, proto-humans asking questions like, how fast do I have to throw my spear to get that mammoth? Yeah, it sounds like more of an engineering problem, Daniel. We're all proto-engineers. Is that what you're saying?

That's what you're saying. Before asking questions, we're engineers. We ask questions, and the answers lead to engineering problems. Like, all right, I need a spear this long. Somebody build me one. Yeah, well, regardless of who came first, what's important is that we ask questions. That seems to be a very common human trait that everyone does it, no matter how old you are or where you come from,

because we all look at the universe and we wonder, like, what's going on? How does it all fit together and what's going to happen next? And if you're listening to this podcast, probably you're the kind of person who desperately wants to know the answer to these questions. It feels like there is a truth out there about how the universe works and how it began and what its future holds. And we want to know it because we believe that if we apply our minds, we can understand the universe. Yeah, it's not just physicists asking these questions, it's people like you asking these questions. And sometimes listeners like you send their questions to us. And we invite you to send your questions as well.

If there's something about the universe you don't understand or you'd like to hear us talk about and make silly jokes about, please write to us to questions at danielanhorpe.com. Yeah, Daniel answers every physics questions he gets, even if they are crazy out there, right? That's right. And not just physics questions, I answer every message. I get from our listener. Even funding requests? Do you take that funding request? I guess you can always answer no.

I'd always answer. No, sometimes people write in with life advice questions. Like, I'm 40 years old and I'm a computer programmer, but I always wanted to be a physicist, and is there a way for me to get there? Cool. Life advice. Career advice from a physicist.

Life advice from somebody who doesn't really know how the real world works. Yeah. Yeah, and so sometimes we get these questions, and sometimes they're so interesting, Daniel puts them up to answer on the podcast, live in front of a studio audience. Who's the studio audience exactly? You've got a laugh track now? It's a studio in my head. We have a live audience in my head. In front of a studio audience of nobody. Sometimes I get a question that I think will be fun to talk about, or I suspect other people will want to hear the answer to. And so then we get audio from that listener so we can talk about it here on the podcast.

Yeah, so to the end of the program, we'll be tackling. Listener questions, number 26. That's the 26 episode in which we answer questions from listeners. That's right. And last time we did this, Jorge, you had so much fun. You said, we should do this more often. And so here we are again, just a couple weeks later, doing it more often. Oh, man, I didn't know I had that kind of influence in the universe.

Should I wish for more things? Oh, man, Daniel, I wish I had a bazillion dollars. You can submit a request to the Daniel Science Foundation, but they usually say no. Do they ever say yes? What's your track record? Zero percent? We responded to all requests, 100%. I see.

You have 100% response rate, zero percent affirmative response rate. We have issued 100% of our foundation of bank account. We have issued 100% noes in your operations. That's right. But anyways, so we're answering questions from listeners today, and we have some Awesome questions here today, some from kids about the solar system and the planets and the sun and the moons around us. And also some interesting questions about asteroids that may or may not kill us. And also about matter and energy at the Big Bang.

We're going all the way back to the beginning. That's right. We want to understand everything about the universe from the way it is today to the way it started. Yeah. So we have awesome questions here. And the first few are from a couple of kids who listen to the podcast. and they have questions about kind of our immediate neighborhood. So the first one is from Kendall, who is seven years old.

Hi, my name is Kendall. I'm seven years old. I would like to know why our star is so hot. Jorge, you're a star. Why are you so hot? I don't know. You know, I work out. I eat well.

I'm a cartoonist. I think that adds to that air of, you know, attractiveness. Yeah, so great. Another piece of life advice from somebody who doesn't live a typical life. That's right. Someone who doesn't leave their house. pretty much. But thank you, Kendall, for sending in this question. That's awesome that you're curious about the sun, about stars, about what's out there in space. That's amazing. And it's a

great question because it sounds like a simple question on the surface, but actually gets into a lot of really interesting physics. And it's not that simple a question to answer. Wow. See, Kendall, you just dumped a 47-year-old physicist. So Kendall's question is, why are stars so hot? I guess stars are pretty hot, right? They're not cold. stars are pretty hot. The reason we can see them is because they're so hot. Remember, everything in the universe glows and the frequency at which it glows depends on its temperature. So the sun is hot enough to glow in the visible spectrum, which is pretty cool or pretty hot. Well, it's interesting because I guess, you know, maybe people your age and mine associate light and something bright as something being hot, right? Because light bulbs are hot. You don't want to touch a light bulb from when we came from. But nowadays, you know, know with LED lights, you can have like cool lights, right? You can have a cold light bulb. Yeah, because the light generated by an LED is not like black body radiation. The way light from like a tungsten filament is, it comes from a quantum mechanical process, which is pretty

super cool. But one of the interesting things about stars is that they are hot, but in order for them to even get formed, they have to actually start out very, very cold. So they have a really interesting sort of thermal history to them. Right, right. Because I guess all stars out there in space in the universe, start off as cold clouds of gas, right? That's how they all start. Like the gas isn't hot. It's just like a, it's just floating out there in space and space is really cold. So really it comes from cold gas.

It comes from cold gas. And if you have a big cloud of gas, if it starts out too hot, it can't form stars. Because remember, stars are formed by gravity pulling together all these little bits of stuff. But gravity is super duper weak. So for gravity to succeed, pulling together a big cloud of gas, It can't be too hot. If it's too hot, it'll just ignore the gravity. So a cloud has to cool down enough for gravity to be able to take over and compress it.

And so if a cloud is more than like 10 or 20 degrees Kelvin, it just can't form stars. So a star starts off as cold gas and then gravity makes it all sort of clump together into one kind of smaller ball of super hot gas. Exactly. And it's that gravitational pressure that provides the heat. A lot of people think that stars are hot. hot because they have fusion going on because they are burning, but it's the other way around. Stars get hot from gravity and that temperature allows fusion to happen and then the fusion sustains them.

But the reason that they're hot is that gravity takes the gas and squeezes it into a smaller space and that heats up the gas. Maybe step us through a little bit because that's kind of a tricky step. Like when you start up with a big cold cloud of gas, well, why does crunching it together make it hotter? Yeah, it's an interesting bit of chemistry, right? If you compress something, you make it hotter. And that feels weird because you're like, hold on a second.

It's the same amount of stuff. I'm not doing anything. I'm just squeezing it down. You're just like storing it closer together. Yeah, it feels counterintuitive to think about it getting hotter. And it's helpful to think about the temperature of that gas as like the speed of the molecules of gas flying around in it. Temperatures are really complicated topping. We have a whole podcast about just that.

But a simple way to think about it is that temperature is like a speedometer of the particles in the gas. So a hotter gas means particles moving faster and a colder gas means particles moving more slowly. So when you take a big cloud of gas and you squeeze it together, somehow that makes the molecules, the little gas particles inside in the cloud move faster? Exactly. Because what you're doing when you squeeze it is that you're pushing in on it. You're providing energy. You're actually putting energy into that gas by squeezing it down. Think about, for example, throwing a tennis ball against the wall. It comes back at the same speed as you threw it. Cool.

but what if you threw a tennis ball against the front of a train, then when it comes back, it would be going faster. So if you're a tennis ball inside a box and that box is shrinking, then every time you hit the wall, you're going to bounce off with more energy. And so very gradually, as the box gets compressed, the balls start moving faster and faster, and they have a higher temperature. Interesting. Now, just to be clear, Kendall,

seven-year-olds should not be throwing balls in front of moving trains, right? That's a parenting question. I'm not going to step in because I don't have realistic life advice. That's right. Ask your parents first, always for all things. But that's interesting, and that's an interesting analogy. Like if the walls are closing in on you, they're going to be imparting some energy on the balls hitting the walls. But I guess in space, there are no walls. It's just gravity moving things together. So where does that extra energy come from? Right. Well, gravity is pulling stuff together. And the way it creates more pressure is that it's like pulling gas on the outside of you in. So the wall is like the next layer of gas, which is less and less pressure. But effective, effectively it acts like a wall. So gravity is pulling everything in. It creates this gravitational well, which makes it harder for the particles to leave. So each shell of gas is sort of compressing the next shell of gas. Interesting. All right. So then you have a big cold cloud

of gas that gets compressed, then that gets hot. And at some point it gets so hot, it starts to explode in the middle. Yeah. When it reaches like 12 million degrees Kelvin internally, it can start to fuse hydrogen into helium and that releases a bunch of energy. And that helps a star stay hot. And actually also keeps the star from collapsing further. If you just let gravity do its thing, it would turn those particles into a black hole. But fusion pushes back and then you get this balance between the energy released from fusion,

the outward pressure and the inward pressure of gravity and the star burns for a few million, billion, or trillion years depending on its size. I see. So then I guess the answer to Kendall's question is that stars are hot because they can't have to be. Otherwise, you won't have a star. Like, you can't have a cold star, right?

You can't have a cold star unless you call it black dwarf, a star, which is a remnant from a white dwarf that has cooled off. But yeah, you can't have a cold star. So I guess by definition, right, a star is something that is hot. But I think the most direct answer to his question is that gravity is what makes a star hot to begin with. It ignites the star. And then fusion keeps it hot. Yeah, because I guess, you know, once gravity crunches everything together, it'll stay hot, even if there's no fusion, right? True.

But if there was no fusion, it would compress into a black hole. And then you get me to questions of like, what's the temperature of a black hole? That's a subject of another podcast. That's a whole rabbit hole. All right. Well, thank you, Kendall. Hope that answered the question. And so we have another question from Megan, who's 10 years old, who is a question about the moon.

Hi, my name's Megan, and I'm wondering why they are craters on the moon. Yeah, why are there craters on the moon? Like, if you look at the moon, great question, Megan, by the way. If you look at the moon, it's not like a perfect little sphere or a perfect circle. It's not just all one color or one smooth surface. It has a bunch of holes and pop marks in it, right? Yeah, there are a lot of craters on the moon. By last count, there were 9,137 recognized craters with names.

9,000. That's a lot. I have a friend who did her PhD in, like, moon craters. Like she was in a moon crater when she did her Ph.D. That sounds pretty remote. Yeah. Suddenly she became a lot cooler. You're right.

Yeah. Yeah, there are a lot of these craters. craters. And it's fascinating because you look up at the moon, you're like, wow, the moon is filled with craters, but the earth is not. And so that's an interesting question. Yeah, we don't have like giant holes here on Earth, at least not that are visible. And it's not a question we actually knew the answer to until we went to the moon. This was an open question about the source of these craters. Some people thought maybe there was like volcanic activity on the moon. And each crater was like a little mini volcano. And other people thought they were impact from rocks from space. And there's, There were even crazier ideas. And until we went to the moon and got samples and studied the age of the surface, we didn't know the answer to Megan's question. Interesting. Yeah, they could have been like holes on a piece of cheese. Was that your friend's thesis topic?

Yeah, it was the on the lore of the moon cheese hypothesis. Well, now we know that the surface of the moon is about as old as the surface of the Earth, about four and a half billion years old. But the moon, unlike the Earth, doesn't have an atmosphere, right? It doesn't have like cloud of gas surrounding it. And so the short answer to Megan's question is that it's rocks from space. Space is filled with rocks that are constantly hitting everything in the solar system. And if you have a shield like the Earth does, then most of those don't hit the ground. But the moon doesn't have a shield.

And so it gets smacked by every rock that comes its way. Yeah. It's kind of interesting to think like that happened or is happening all over the solar system, right? Like there are planets who also don't have an atmosphere who are filled with craters too. Yeah. Basically, every surface on the solar system will get impacted with craters. And so you need some kind of protection if you're going to live there, either an atmosphere or like a really strong umbrella. All right.

So to answer Megan's question, the moon has craters because it gets hit by a lot of rocks from space. And it doesn't have a coating of air to kind of protect it. Yeah. And some of these craters are like more than two billion years old. No wind or water on the moon. So if you form a crater, it will last a very, very long time. There's one crater on the moon that might even be four billion years old. And scientists think that an asteroid more than 150 miles across smashed into it about four billion years ago, such a big explosion, it probably rained a debris down on the surface of the Earth.

Interesting. Also, I think another part of the answer is that there's no lava on the moon, right? Like we have lava here on Earth, and that's kind of making the surface move a lot, which kind of gets rid of all of the craters that we used to have. But in the moon, there's no lava, so it does nothing ever move. And the surface of the moon really interestingly is covered in this really fine-grained soil. If you look at the astronauts' footsteps, for example, you notice that they were walking through like several centimeters of what looks like dust. And this lunar dust, it basically has shattered surface.

There's been so many impacts on the moon that its surface is basically covered with shattered little pieces of rock. I guess the question is, like, are there still new craters being formed on the moon? Like, does the solar system now have fewer asteroids flying around? Or are there still, is the moon still getting bombarded by meteors? It's still getting bombarded. We actually saw one happen in 2013, which was visible to the naked eye. A 90 pound meteoroid strike the surface at like 90,000 kilometers per hour and left a new crater.

So it's still happening. Wow. But is it happening faster or at the same rate as before? Or has the solar system sort of calmed down a little bit? The solar system definitely has calmed down in the very early part of the history of the solar system. There was the heavy bombardment period when the solar system was a huge mess. Since then, things have calmed down and larger objects have pulled together to make fewer objects. And so you have fewer rocks out there than you used to.

I see. Yeah, we've made it past purity, right? Moonskin is now going to clear up a little bit more. All right. Well, thank you, Kendall and Megan, for these awesome questions. We hope you keep asking questions. And so now let's get to our other question. about asteroids that might kill us here on Earth

and also about the nature of matter and energy. But first, let's take a quick 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

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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. 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 in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. I had this, like, overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then.

And I just hit call, said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation. And I just wanted to call and let her know there's a lot of people battling some of the very, same things you're battling, and there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission.

I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own life to suicide. One Tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place, and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. Don't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head.

Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we are answering questions from listeners and we've just answered some awesome questions about the stars and the moon. And so now let's get into some cheerier topics like the possible extension of humankind. Hi, Daniel Nahorhe. This is Sean calling from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. We always hear about asteroids and comets hitting the earth at thousands of kilometers per second

and wiping out life as we know it. But I was wondering, is it possible for a comet or an asteroid to come in, in and slowly hit the earth where it won't kill us all. Maybe if we're both on the same trajectory and it can come in and just gently land somewhere on earth and not destroy everything. Anyways, thanks for the great podcast. Bye. All right. Awesome question.

Thank you, Sean. It's an interesting question, yeah, because I guess when you think of asteroids hitting the earth, you usually think of them as coming in fast and crashing on Earth. But he's asking, you know, could one somehow sort of like creep up on Earth? us and kind of shimmy onto our planet and gently, you know, land in the middle of the ocean or something. Yeah, it's very Canadian. He's looking for like a friendly asteroid that just comes and settles down gently.

Yeah, maybe we'll land in Canada and apologize for causing a disturbance. It is an awesome question. Why do we always think about asteroids as basically like bullets aimed at the Earth? Can't we think about them like moving in parallel to the Earth and very gently? coming into the surface. It's a really cool question. I guess it maybe seems unlikely that something would just come out of the blue and then just happen to fly right next to it slowly. And that's the answer. It is possible, but it's much less likely.

If you just picked like random trajectories for rocks in space that are going to come in contact with the earth, it's just much easier for those rocks to be going the opposite direction of the earth or to be going opposite direction of the earth, at least at some level. It's possible for a rock from the asteroid belt or the Kuiper belt or even the orc cloud to end up in like the Earth's orbit. But it would take a very special circumstance. You mean like it is possible maybe for one of the asteroids around us to like suddenly kind of jump into our orbit? It is possible. But everything right now in the solar system hasn't orbit.

The reason it's still around is that it hasn't fallen into the sun. It's in some orbit. So even to come into contact with the Earth would require it most likely to change its orbit. And a collision happens when the trajectory of one of those objects intersects with the Earth, right? Which is very unlikely to happen in parallel. In order for one of those things to like jump into the Earth's orbit, it would need to change its trajectory, which means like hitting something else and bouncing off. So you need like two things to come into contact and change each other's orbit so that one of them happens to end up in Earth's orbit. And kind of going at the same speed.

But I guess couldn't it also happen that the Earth, you know, maybe passes by close enough. to a cloud of asteroids that maybe like pulls one along with our gravity. Yeah, that is possible. And in fact, there are some things out there that have been sort of like captured by the Earth. They haven't landed on the Earth when they came close enough to the Earth, but they're sort of now in orbit around the Earth or sharing the Earth's orbit around the Sun at least. One of these things is called the space being because it traces out this weird path

relative to the Earth. It's this five kilometer diameter rock. Wait, there is a rock like that that has somehow falling into our orbit and is kind of going along with us. Yeah, officially it's like a quasi-satellite of the Earth. It's got a fancy name which I can't pronounce and it has its own elliptical orbit around the sun that's sort of in resonance with the Earth's. And so from our perspective, it has this like weird bean-shaped orbit around the Earth. But effectively it's been captured and in a very similar orbit to the Earth. But of course, it's not landing on our surface. Right, right. But it's interesting that it's

possible, right? Like maybe it can happen again and we could pick up another bean. Well, this one, the closest it ever comes is like 7.5 million miles from the surface of the Earth, which is like 30 times further than the moon. I see. I see. But maybe it eventually could it somehow, you know, creep into the Earth? Like maybe not now, but maybe in a million years, could it somehow, you know, start creeping in and maybe go into orbit around the Earth at some point? It's certainly possible, right? If it impacts something or something else comes along and tugs on it, it could change its orbit. and it is possible for something to get even closer to the Earth and eventually even come into the atmosphere.

And in theory, it could come in slowly. It could, like, gently approach the Earth's atmosphere. Interesting. Well, as you said, it's not very likely because I guess we have most asteroids out there kind of catalog. So I imagine if any two sort of surprises, they're going to be coming in pretty fast. But maybe just for fun, let's assume that Sean's scenario here comes through in,

would just like make an asteroid appear right next to Earth, would it kill us or would it just kind of gently bump us? Yeah, I just want to make one more comment on the likelihood of it. Another way to think about why it's unlikely is that these objects are moving typically faster than the Earth. You know, the Earth moves at like 30 kilometers per second around the sun and these asteroids move like 40, 50 or even faster if they're comets from the outer solar system. And if you think about like two velocity vectors in order for one of these to catch the Earth, they basically have to be perfectly aligned with the Earth.

Otherwise, to impact, they could have at any angle. So it's just unlikely for these things to be perfectly aligned with the Earth's direction. But you ask a great question, like, what would happen if this thing like gently came up to the Earth's atmosphere? Would that actually hurt us? And I like Sean's fantasy that this thing would like gently sink down to the surface of the Earth so we could like, you know, touch it and build a monument to it or whatever. But actually, I don't think that's likely either. I guess maybe let's paint the picture a little bit better.

So the Earth is moving through space. spinning and somehow like another, an asteroid kind of chimies up to us going at the same speed in the same direction, maybe in the same orbit, and then just little by little, just kind of bumps into the earth. Is that possible? It's possible for it to get close to the Earth and like join our orbit, but then it's going to be captured by the Earth and it's going to fall into the Earth's gravitational well. Remember, the Earth itself has a lot of gravity. So if you just like dropped a big rock at zero velocity at the top of the atmosphere, what would happen? Well, the Earth would pull on it.

By the time it reached the surface, it would have a lot of kinetic energy. Imagine what would happen if you drop like a penny from the top of the atmosphere. It would be going super duper fast by the time it hit the ground. Oh, I see. You're saying like even if I parked this asteroid close to us, just the Earth gravity is going to pull it in and make it go faster towards us. Yeah, the escape velocity of the Earth is like 11 kilometers per second. And so that means if you're going at like zero kilometers per second at the top of the atmosphere, then by the time you get to the bottom,

you're going to be going at 11 kilometers per second. So it's a lot of kinetic energy. Right. But I guess maybe Sean's point was that even if it's going at 11 kilometers per second, that's still not as fast as most asteroids that hit Earth are going. And so maybe he's saying it might survive the atmosphere, right, not get burned up by all the friction from the air. And maybe it will sort of crash into Earth.

Yeah, and I think that's likely that it would make it to the surface of the Earth. You know, it wouldn't actually get to 11 kilometers per second by the time it hits the Earth because of the resistance from the air. It would heat up and parts of it would blow off. But probably it would survive, but it might make a crater when it lands because it would be going pretty fast. But even asteroids that do hit the Earth at high speed, some of them make it to the surface if they're big enough to survive the trip through the atmosphere. Interesting.

I guess maybe then the real answer to Sean's question of could an asteroid hit slowly without killing us? The answer is no, because an asteroid can hit us slowly. I think any asteroid that hits is going to be coming in pretty fast because the Earth's gravity pulls it in and it's going to pick up speed. You might imagine another scenario where a rock comes near the Earth and it has like negative velocity. Like the Earth is catching up to it, but it's running away and the atmosphere gradually slows it down so it lands on Earth.

But that's even more unlikely. The Earth would have to like sneak up on this rock. Right. It's less likely but much cooler to think about. So you're saying that there could be. an asteroid flying through space sort of in our orbit. And so Earth sort of sneak, like we sneak up behind it and we're in such a trajectory and it's in such a trajectory that it really just kind of slowly touches us. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. I think that's probably possible. I haven't

run the simulation, but you'd have to have a lot of factors exactly align to make that work. Like what's the slowest it could hit Earth? You know what I mean? Like would it still pick up 11 kilometers per second? Or is there a scenario in which it literally like just, slowly kind of touches the earth. Well, there's some things you have to balance there because in order for it to be going slower when it hits the earth, you want to just start with like negative velocity, velocity away from the earth at the top of the atmosphere. But then, you know, how is it getting to the top of the atmosphere if it has velocity

away from the earth? So it can't be going too fast away from the earth. The earth has to like sneak up behind it while it's moving fast away from the earth. And then the atmosphere somehow slows it down and pulls it in. So it's a pretty tricky set of circumstances. But I bet it's technically possible. And, you know, if the solar system's around for long enough, maybe it'll happen. Right, right.

Just got to do the mass, right? Anything's possible with that. But are you envisioning that this could like literally just like touch down like a spaceship? Or would it crash land anyways? Just because, you know, the sky is big and it's going to fall. Well, the slower you wanted to hit the Earth's surface, the less likely this scenario is because the faster it would have to be going away from us at the top of the atmosphere. But I think technically it might be possible for it to like gradually sink into the Earth's atmosphere.

You know, if it has enough initial velocity away from us and the atmosphere just sort of like slurps it in gradually. Interesting. That would be pretty cool just to see a giant rock slowly land on Earth. I don't expect that to happen. And after this, I'm going to have to go write some code to simulate this to see if it would actually work. But that's my instinct. All right. Stay tuned while Daniel writes a scientific paper about it.

And when it comes out, we'll let you know. That's right. And Sean will make you a co-author. Oh, wow. Nice. See what can happen when you write questions to us. You might become a physicist for real. All right.

Well, let's get into our last question about the nature of matter and energy at the Big Bang. But first, let's take another quick 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,

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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. 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 2, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop.

Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio 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, 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. Hello, it's Honey German. And my podcast, Grasias Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations

with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in, like, over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors,

musicians, content creators, and culture shifters, sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs, and those amazing vivas you've come to expect. And of course, we'll explore deeper topics

dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me. But the whole pretending and code, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasasas Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

And all right, we are answering listener questions and we've answered questions from kids about the sun and the moon and also a question about an asteroid slowly, killing us slowly with its song. Is that? with its space song, I guess. It's telling our whole life with its trajectory. I guess that's kind of a philosophical question. If an asteroid is going to come and kill us, do you want it to be fast or do you want it to be slow

and you want to see it coming? I definitely want to see it coming so we can potentially divert it so it doesn't come and kill us. What if, like, you do see it coming, but there's nothing we can do about it? We always have Bruce Willis, man. Did you see that latest movie with Leonardo DiCaprio? And the asteroid?

Don't look up. Yeah. Yeah, I did. That was a lot of fun. I heard that he couldn't write the equations himself on the board, so they had to have a hand double doing the math close-ups for those shots. Whoa. That could have been you, Daniel.

Now I have a new life goal. Be Leonardo DiCaprio's physics hand model. It's like being a stuntman, basically. It's just that dangerous. Right, right, yeah. You could get carpal tunnel from doing it, yeah. Or I could become a movie star and then I can. could brag and say, I do my own math.

Well, let's see what happens first. It's more likely that a huge rock will slowly touch down the atmosphere than that any of that happens. Yeah, I guess if you become a movie star, that would be the end of the world. Here you go. Is that what you're saying? That's one of the signs of the apocalypse right there. Frogs falling from the sky. Daniel co-starring in a movie with Leonardo DiCaprio.

Yeah. Although Neil deGrasse Tyson has been. in big movies, right? So it's possible. There are physicists out there that have broken into Hollywood. Oh man, it is the end of the world then. But anyways, we're answering listener questions. And our last question of the day comes from Gilles, who has a question about which came first in the universe. Hello, Daniel and Jorge. How are you guys? My name's Chio, and I was curious about the following. I know that matter and energy are intimately connected. But I was wondering, what came first? Matter or energy? I would appreciate if you guys

can address this in your podcast. Thanks a lot. Bye-bye. All right. Awesome question. I feel like this is getting back to like elementary school philosophy, you know, like which came first, the chicken or the egg. It's a deep question about the early history of the universe. I love this stuff. Yeah. So Geo's kind of acknowledges, first of all, that matter and energy are really close. related. And I always thought that matter is energy, right? Isn't that what EMC square says, that they're the same thing? Sort of, but it's not entirely symmetric. The way I would explain it is that mass is a form of energy, right? The reason things have mass is because they have internal stored energy. And so you can think about mass as like a form of energy, or you can think about mass as

like a little dial that tells you how much stored energy is inside this thing. But you can turn mass into other kinds of energy like velocity, or you can turn velocity into mass. And so you can think about mass as like a form of energy. But energy is not a form of mass. So they're not entirely symmetric. Oh, I see. It's not really an equivalence. E equals MC square. It just says that mass is energy, but it doesn't say that energy is mass. Yeah. E equals MC squared tells you how much energy is stored in an object at rest with mass M. I see. So I guess you're saying that matter is a subset of energy and therefore therefore it can't be first can it yeah that's right matter is a kind of energy so it can't really predate energy you can't imagine a scenario where you have matter in the

universe without energy because matter is a kind of energy it's like saying an egg is really a baby chicken so therefore the chicken came first not a biologist not going to weigh in on that one but it sounded good it sounded good the math sounded right we'll go with that I'll have to do a simulation later, but yeah, it sounds good. Another paper. Oh, man. We are cranking out these signs here. So I think it's pretty clear that energy came first because you can't have matter without energy.

But it's interesting to think about sort of what forms of energy were created in the universe at what time. When did matter come about? When did we get radiation? What came first? How did that all happen? Because the history is quite complicated and really nuanced. Oh, interesting.

Because you're saying that, you know, in the Big Bang, maybe there was sort of an opportunity for matter to be... more dominant. Yeah, the way we think about it in the very early universe is that you have very high energy density, right? The universe used to be much more dense. It used to be much more compact. It used to be higher temperature. So things were flying around. They were crazy. And there was such high energy that all the quantum fields were buzzing with so much energy that doesn't even really make sense to talk about particles in the way we think about it. There was a moment very early on in the universe when there was a lot of energy, but there weren't even really particles flying around in

the universe. I had to like cool down a little bit before you can even start to talk about the quantum fields buzzing in the way that we think about it today is like these little discrete pockets of energy flying around the universe. It was just more like a huge ocean of energy. Whoa. Like pure like everything was just pure energy. I guess the question now that I have is which came first? Energy or quantum fields? Yeah, that's a great question. And we don't know the answer. We have a description of the universe in terms of quantum fields for certain energies, like for the energies that exist today in the universe, which are very, very cold, we know that we can describe the universe in terms of quantum fields. And for higher

energies, like what happens inside the large Hedron Collider and going back to the early moments of the universe, we can describe that in terms of quantum fields. Beyond that, we don't know. Like, we have quantum fields, and we suspect that those theories and the description of the universe in terms of quantum fields probably works at very, very high temperatures, very early on in the universe, but the truth is that we just don't know. One of the reasons we don't know is that we don't understand how gravity works in a quantum sense. So what you're really asking about is like, can you give a quantum field description of the universe when gravity was just as important as all these other forces? And we don't know because we don't have a theory of quantum gravity. So we're

really pretty clueless about sort of a quantum picture of the universe when gravity was very important early on. Well, interesting. I guess you're saying, you know, that in the beginning of the universe, at the Big Bang, things were so crazy, so crunched together and so high energy density that we really don't know what was going on at that moment. Yeah, in the same way that we don't know today, what's going on inside a black hole for the same reasons. Like you send a particle inside a black hole. We think of it like a little wiggle in a quantum field.

What happens when it goes inside a black hole? Well, now it's under very strong gravitational pressure. Is it still a quantum wiggle? Is it turn into something else, a new kind of matter? are the gravitational quantum fields, we just don't know. In the same way, we don't know what was the state of the universe when gravity was really strong and very important early on. So it might be that we can describe it in terms of wiggles in quantum fields,

but it might be that we can't. But we do have a pretty nice picture of what happens like after the universe drops in temperature to a point where it like turns into particles. And we can then think about like how much of the energy in the universe is in terms of these particles or in terms of the photons so that go between them and that kind of stuff. Oh, I see. But I guess before that it starts to cool off, does it even make sense to talk about energy as we know it? Like inside of a black hole, does it make sense to talk about energy? Or can you still, you know, define energy in such a scenario? We can define energy, but you're right, we don't know if it's the most important quantity. People think about energy as fundamental to the universe and a really insightful way to think

about the state of the universe. Remember that we've discovered recently that energy is not even conserved in the universe, right? It turns out it's something we can measure and it seems to be conserved in most of our experiments, but we know that in an expanding space, if the universe is growing, if space itself is changing, then the amount of energy in the universe is also changing. So energy might not be the right way to think about the nature of the universe. We talked a few weeks ago about what happened in those first few moments of the universe, this inflation theory.

And you know, we have some like pictures of what that means. Maybe there was this inflaton field with these inflaton particles which decayed into normal matter. So you can possibly think about it in terms of like weird new quantum fields. But we just don't know if any of those theories are at all accurate. They're just more like sketches of ideas that we're using to try to think about it in terms of stuff we already know. But there's no guarantee that the kinds of ideas we have are the right ideas. Well, I feel like you're saying, like we almost don't even know if math worked at the beginning of the universe. You know, like maybe one plus one was three back then, you know, because energy and things were just popping out of nothingness.

There's definitely a very weird situation. And I'm pretty sure there's going to be mind-blowing surprises when we figure out how that worked and how to even think about it and how to talk about it. And that's one reason why we do crazy collisions at super high energy because we want to probe the most extreme situations to see. see when do our theories break down? When do we need a new kind of structure? You know, quantum field theories themselves are only a few decades old. And they came into play to explain collisions at high energy that we couldn't otherwise understand. And so it may be that at crazier high energies, we need a whole new kind of idea about what's going on in the universe. Or maybe quantum field will describe everything up to the plank scale. We just don't know. Yeah. I think that's how I would

describe my childhood as well. A lot of weird things happen. And I'm still trying to understand it. Did you break mathematics? I probably thought I could. Yeah, that broke a lot of things when I was a kid. But I think your main point, though, is that we maybe don't know what happened during the Big Bang or before the Big Bang, but right after the Big Bang, we do have kind of a clear picture of how much of the universe was matter and how much of it was kind of like flying

energy, which you call radiation. Yeah. So some mysterious thing happens. The universe exists. and then some other mysterious thing happens, the universe inflates and expands and cools down rapidly. And just after that, we can start to talk more concretely about quantum fields.

And in that situation when the universe is still very, very hot, but we can talk about it in terms of quantum fields, it's a really interesting situation because every particle back then was massless. This is before the Higgs boson even came into play. And so every particle, the electron, the W, the Z, all these particles had zero mass. Whoa, yeah.

That's wild. Yeah, at some point the universe had nothing had mass because the Higgs field hadn't come into being. Yeah, none of these initial particles had mass. You could still have mass by combining particles into some like object, the same way like if you put a bunch of photons into a mirrored box, it actually gains mass because any stored energy turns into mass.

But the particles themselves, none of them had mass in the very early universe until the Higgs boson sort of settled into this weird state that it's in today that gives them that mass. So if nothing had mass, that means nothing mattered kind of in a way, like it didn't have matter. Particle physicists talk about the difference between matter and radiation. And it's sort of a fuzzy line because, you know, when we talk about radiation chemically, we say like, oh, electrons are alpha particles. That's radiation, even though they have mass.

So we have all sorts of totally inconsistent definitions of radiation. But in terms of like early universe physics, we divide things into matter and radiation, things that are radiation or things that are traveling at light. speed and things that are matter, things that are traveling not at light speed. But in the very early universe, everything was massless, so everything was moving at light speed. So it was just 100% radiation. Oh, interesting. So we don't know which came first, matter or energy, but we know which came second,

I guess, which is radiation, which is really energy, right? Yeah. So in the first moments of the universe that we can really talk about, we have all these buzzing quantum fields with massless particles flying everywhere. The whole universe was radiation. Then the Higgs field broke that symmetry between electromagnetism and the weak force, made the W and the Z massive, and also made a bunch of other particles massive. And then you have matter.

And then the electron has mass. You know, the quarks have mass. And so that happened very early on in the universe. But still, most of the energy in the universe was in terms of radiation, photons and other massless particles. Meaning like it was in particles, but it was in particles moving at the speed of light. And so the first like 50,000 years of the universe was a radiation dominated era. Most of the energy in the universe was in terms of massless speed of light particles for the first 50,000 years. Wow.

Which sounds like a lot in human years, but in terms of the age of the universe, it's like it's like just the first blink. Yeah, exactly. It's just like a blip. Like if you ruled for 50,000 years, that sounds pretty impressive. But if the universe is 14 billion years, then it's almost forgettable. all right so then at first it was all radiation and then what happened when did it change things are expanding and things are cooling down and that expansion affects matter and radiation differently because as the universe expands matter gets dilute right the same amount of matter exists but you have more volume so the density of matter drops that makes sense but radiation is affected in another way as space expands radiation gets dilute it also gets red shifted like if you have a photon in space and that space expands It doesn't just make the photon have fewer neighbors. It makes the photon have a longer wavelength, which means less energy.

So this red shifting of radiation means that radiation loses energy faster than matter does as the universe expands. Whoa, interesting. It's like it slows down light, but you can't slow down light, but it makes it kind of less energetic. Yeah, it steals away energy from light. And we know that happens. We see it all the time.

like the cosmic background radiation was generated actually really high energies like 3,000 degrees Kelvin. We see it now like 3 degrees Kelvin, really long wavelengths because the universe has expanded and redshifted all of that. And so radiation sort of lost out after about 50,000 years. And then for a long time, the universe was matter dominated. Most of the energy in the universe was in the form of matter. And a lot of that came because matter kind of transformed from that early energy, right?

Like things kind of clumped together and then they became matter. Yeah, the Higgs boson gave math to a lot of those particles and shifted them from the radiation category into the matter category because now they had mass. And so then there was this huge universe filled with particles, you know, electrons and protons and protons and stars were formed and galaxies were formed. And that was most of the energy budget of the universe for billions of years was in terms of stuff, mostly dark matter actually. but in terms of things we would think of today as stuff. It was the stuff-dominated era of the universe. Whoa, well, you just blew my mind a little bit here. Ether in the dark matter here as a surprise twist here.

Like we know where dark matter came from. Is that what you're saying? Like we can trace the history of dark matter? We know that dark matter was made at the same time as all those other particles. When the energy in the early universe coalesced into the different fields, electrons, and quarks, that happened equally across all of the fields. And so if dark matter is a part, particle and it's described by a quantum field, then it was also made in the early universe and it's

been around since then. We're pretty sure about that because it's changed the way the universe has evolved. Like the reason we have stars and galaxies is because of the gravity of dark matter early on in the universe. So it had to have been around for a long time. So when you say that the universe became matter dominated, really you mean dark matter dominated because there's like even since the beginning of time and or those early moments, there's been. you know five times more dark matter than regular matter yeah although the ratio between dark matter and regular matter does change through the history of the universe we think there was even more dark matter early on and some of it converted into normal matter that's a whole other podcast episode

we talked about the wimp miracle once about how we think dark matter converted into normal matter but yes there's been dark matter since the very beginning wow and so when really in this period of matter domination really you're saying it's dark matter domination yeah dark matter ruled for about billion years. Long live dark matter. But then something happened, the dark energy revolution. Yes, dark energy took over. Remember that the universe is expanding. And so as the universe gets bigger and bigger, every new chunk of space that's created comes with its own dark energy. So unlike matter and radiation, which get more and more dilute as space expands, dark energy doesn't get diluted because a new chunk of space comes with its own fresh dark matter.

So as the universe expands, dark energy starts to climb. And eventually, at some point, it crosses over and there's more dark energy in the universe than there is energy in the dark matter. And that happened about four or five billion years ago. I see. Yeah. And we're still in that period, right? We're still in that period.

And this period's going to last for a long, long time, maybe forever. Because once dark energy is dominant, it accelerates the expansion of the universe, which makes more dark energy more rapidly. And so now dark energy is like completely dominant, 70% of the energy of the universe and the future suggests it's going to get higher and higher. And it might even expand the universe to almost nothing that's right. And so it's nothing left. Yeah, although remember, dark energy is something we observe. We see it happening.

We have these ideas about how it works, but we're really not very confident in it, which makes it very difficult to make solid predictions for the future of dark energy. It could turn out that dark energy is much more complicated than we imagine. some weird oscillations in it, for example. And maybe it's going to turn around and cause a big crunch. We really just can't say for sure because we don't understand it like at all. But I guess we go back to Joe's question, he kind of just wanted to know which came for his matter or energy. I think what you're saying is that the picture is kind of complicated.

It's not just kind of about the sequence of things. It's, you know, to physicists, it's kind of like which is more dominant. And that question has changed over the Big Bang and the history of the universe. Yeah, it's a really fascinating history and nuanced. One that we've only really picked apart in the last couple of decades. So we're just at the very beginning of understanding the whole history of the universe in terms of its energy budget, how it formed and how that evolved. I see. But I guess to answer the question, the answer is that energy came first.

That's kind of for sure you sort of have high confidence in. But in terms of what came second and third and four, that's been changing. And it's a more complex picture. And can we describe the early moments of the universe in terms of energy? That is an open question. Yeah. Mathetarians, I think. people who ate math.

That's a question for people to chew on. I'm sure I'll have a very filling answer. All right. Well, thank you, Giles, for that great question. And thank you to everyone who sent in their questions. We really enjoy answering them on the podcast. We absolutely do. We love your messages with or without questions.

So please don't be shy. If it's something you've been thinking about, don't hesitate. Write to us to Questions at Danielanhorpe.com. Yeah, we look forward to your awesome questions. Until then, keep being curious about the universe. Come up with questions. and look at the things around you

and think about what might have come first or second or third or whether or not you can get a PhD of a PhD. Because science is just people asking questions and that includes you. We hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.

Thanks for listening. And remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of Eye Heart Radio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. won't quit. And push your gameplay beyond limits with Intel Core Ultra processors. That's the power of Lenovo with Intel inside. Maximize your edge by shopping at Lenovo.com during their back-to-school sale.

That's Lenovo.com. Lenovo, Lenovo. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage. 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. This is an IHeart podcast.