Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Why Do We Have Stars?

Episode Date: March 7, 2019

Why are there stars and planets and not just smooth matter everywhere? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This technology is already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier.

Ignoring is easier. Denials easier. Complex problem solving takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the. the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grazias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with interviews with

some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We'll talk about all that's viral and trending, with a little bit of cheesement and a whole lot

of laughs. And of course, the great Vibras you've come to expect. Listen to the new season of Dresses Come Again on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. So, I was outside the other night with my son looking up at the sky and we were having a great time

and he turned to me and he asked me a question. He said, hey, dad, why are there stars? You mean, like movie stars? No, no, astronomical stars. He wanted to know. Oh, wow. What did you say?

Well, I thought he was asking me, like, why do stars exist? You know, why do we have bright stars in the sky? So, of course, I gave him a long physics explanation for, you know, how fusion works and all this kind of stuff. I wonder what it's like to have your dad be a physics professor. It's awesome, I'm sure. It's 100% awesome. I wonder how many times he's just like, dad, I just wanted a one sentence answer. I once heard him explaining to his friends about black holes.

And I thought, hey, that dude is cool because of me. I think cool might not be the appropriate adjective here. But was he satisfied with your explanation? No, not at all. In fact, it turns out I totally misunderstood his question. When he asked, why are there stars? He didn't mean like, why does a star burn? He meant like, why are there stars plural?

Like, why don't we just have one star, right? Or, like, why isn't everything just spread out smoothly in the universe? Why does things clump together to make planets and stars and all that stuff? Whoa, that is a good question. Yeah, it's a great question. It's the kind of question kids ask, right? The kind of question you don't necessarily think to ask. It's such a basic, simple question.

That's a question I have, and I'm definitely not five years old. Hi, I'm Jorge, and I'm Daniel. And welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, explain the universe. In which we try to take everything or anything in the universe, even the obvious stuff like stars, and explain it to you. Why is it there? How does it work? Do I have to worry about it? Can I buy one online? We try to answer the smooth questions and also the lumpy questions. And today is going to be a bit of a lumpy episode. Today on the program, we're asking the question,

Why are there stars? The universe has a really strange kind of shape. I mean, it's huge, but it's mostly empty, right? Like, there's vast distances between stars and even vaster ones between galaxies. But then you have these hot little points, right? All this matter concentrated in these little dots. It's a really weird arrangement. Why is it concentrating in these little pinpoints?

Why is it more diffuse? Or why don't all those pinpoints just clump together? Yeah, why don't we have just one megastar or like a big pudding of dilute gas everywhere, right? Why is the universe the way it is and not any of those other ways? It could have been those ways. In some alternate multiverse, it probably is those ways. but in those multiverses, they don't have awesome podcasts to ask this question.

Yeah, yeah, because you look at the night sky and it's beautiful, right? I mean, it's like this black void with little white pinpoints, but you've got to wonder, why does it look that way? Okay, so I have to take a digression here, an artistic question for you, Jorge, which is, why do you think we find the night sky beautiful? I mean, I agree, it's gorgeous. It's the best view in the universe, right? But is it necessary to we find it beautiful?

Did we evolve to find it beautiful? Is it just chance? Like, could we have evolved in a way where we look up at the night's dime? We're like, yuck! That's gross. Well, I think we have an innate appreciation for sparkly things, right?

We like... Well, all pyromaniacs? Yeah, no. I mean, we've all evolved from liking water, maybe, or being attracted to water or sparkly water. I don't know. Sparkling water. They had Evian and Perrier back then

in cave to mind days, right? Yeah, I think people used to carbonate their own water back in caveman days. I'm pretty sure of that. We should have asked that question, Ryan North, when we had them on the podcast. When did they invent? Sparking water. The greatest invention all time, sparkling water.

That's a great question. Why are there stars and planets as opposed to just having a monotonous? Monogamous? No. Homogeneous. Monochromatic. Yeah, I mean, like a plain universe, I guess. Why do we have stars and planets and objects and sparkly objects and things

rather than we just living in a giant gas cloud? That's right, yeah. So that's the question we're going to try to tackle today, give you a solid answer for it. And so as usual, before we answer the question, I went out and I asked a bunch of unsuspecting UC Irvine students off the top of their head. I asked them that question. So think about it at home or wherever you're listening. Why do you think there are stars and planets and not just a smooth universe?

Here's what people had to say. Why is the universe so lumpy? Like, why isn't matter just spread out totally smoothly and evenly through the universe? I want to say gravity. Because there's, like, a certain kind of gravity putting things in place. Okay. I have no idea. Okay.

Gravity. It's a result of the Big Bang. You had matter and anti-matter, and they made clumps, and they kept expanding. And that's just how it occurred, at least that's the model that I've heard. Okay, great. There were at some point areas where there was a slight greater density in the matter in the universe. Because of how gravity works, the greater density will kind of collapse to them become even greater and greater and greater density until you have a galaxy or finance or whatever.

The ions. All right, so that's pretty interesting. I feel like you should maybe stop advertising that they're UC Irvine students, because I don't know if you're helping the marketing there. Oh, I think it's wonderful. All these UCA Irvine students are willing to stop and think about a random question from a random scruffy-looking dude

and think about the universe. Like, 99% of people answer these questions. To me, they get full credit even just for trying, for thinking about it, for engaging, right? To me, that's wonderful. When we first started this project, I was sure I was going to get 1% answers. So the fact that they don't know,

not a big deal. The fact that they try to answer, that's wonderful. I think you should try it on the streets of New York next and see what kind of reaction you get. Get out of here. Yeah, well, as you were suggesting, maybe I should go up to Caltech and see if I get more precise answers.

But everyone seems to say gravity as the answer to the question. Yeah, everybody says gravity. And I think that comes from everybody's feeling correctly that gravity plays a big role, right? Gravity is the thing that made these structures. Gravity is responsible for holding a star together, or gravity controls the shape of the galaxy.

Gravity certainly plays a big role. But I guess the twist is that it's not the only thing you need to make stars, right? Gravity only clumps things together if you already have small clumps to begin with, right? That's right. Gravity is not the complete answer. If you had a universe that was totally smooth, right, completely smooth, then gravity couldn't do anything. Because each particle in the universe would be pulled both left and right.

with equal force because there'd be equal amounts of stuff on both sides of it. And so every object would be sort of like pinned down by gravity, but it couldn't form any structures. Right. So gravity can't make lumps. It can only exaggerate lumps once you've gotten a little bit started. Wait, paint that picture a little bit more for me. So let's imagine a perfectly smooth universe,

meaning that all the particles in the universe are kind of at the same distance from each other as every other particle in the universe. Exactly. So imagine, you know, every particle is on a grid, right? And they give one particle every centimeter or something, right? So it's like a perfectly exact grid. Every one particle is one centimeter apart from the next particle. Exactly. And if you're thinking this is strange and artificial, it's actually very simple, right? And it's very natural. The opposite idea that there's one place where there's particles are closer together or they're denser or something, that's strange. That's unusual. That would be like, well, why there are not here? So having a perfectly smooth symmetric universe as a starting point actually makes the most sense. It's the most natural concept. Like a perfect jelly or like a perfect crystal. Exactly. Like a perfectly smooth chocolate pudding with no lumps in it, right?

And if the universe is infinite, you're saying that cloud of perfectly ordered particles would not clump together. Exactly. So take one random particle, right? And it doesn't matter which one you choose, because we set this up so that all. all the particles are exactly the same. So pick one random particle. Now, that particle is going to get pulled on by all the other particles in the universe

due to gravity and other forces, but let's just think about gravity right now. Now, there's an infinite number of particles pulling it to the left and an infinite number of particles pulling it to the right. And up and down too, right? Exactly.

And in any way you slice it, you get the same answer, right? You divide the universe into two halves around this particle, and one half of the universe is pulling it one way, the other half is pulling it the other way, it exactly balances out. It cancels perfectly, right? It's like if you have two kids and each one is pulling on one arm, you're not going anywhere.

Does that happen to you often? That's a random hypothetical I just invented. It's not that I have two kids who often have totally different ideas about what we should do. Or where they want to go or where they want to eat. That's right. And so in this scenario, every particle is in equilibrium. There's no way to begin lumpiness. because everything is being tugged equally left and right or up and down or you know back and forth so you

would the universe would just sit there it would just stay static it would it wouldn't move right like it would it would just stay there forever because every particle would just be perfectly balanced where it is exactly it's like if you put a ball in the bottom of a bowl right it's just going to sit there it's not going to go anywhere right and that's exactly the situation of each of those particles they're sitting in the bottom of a bowl that bowl is the great gravitational well made by all the other particles in the universe. And so if the universe is infinite, then you can

apply the same argument to every particle, right? And so if you start out with an infinite smooth universe, then you can't get any structure. You can't start to build anything. Hold on. You said that that's only if the universe is infinite, but what happens if we have this perfect

jelly and the universe is finite, meaning that it at some point ends? Yeah. Well, then this argument doesn't apply because there's some point, because then this argument only applies to the very center of the universe, right? Then if the universe is finite, that means that it has a center, right? There's some place where there's an equal amount of stuff to the left and to the right and to the right and this argument would only apply right there.

If you go to the edge of all that stuff, right, this is again, assuming the universe is finite. If you go to the edge of all that stuff, the argument doesn't hold anymore. You have more stuff on one side than on the other. So in the scenario of a finite universe, everything would be attracted towards the center. Everything would be attracted towards the center. So all the particles would just go towards the center and then what would happen? Man, I think you would get like a huge star or a massive black hole or it would be a pretty crazy party. Wow.

So the universe would be just one star or one black hole? I'm not 100% sure because that would be pretty complicated. But I think, yeah, you would end up with one really big blob of matter. And it would be, you know, it wouldn't be completely comprehensive. into a point because matter resists being compressed and if it was spinning right then that keeps it from being compressed further

I don't know if anybody's really studied what would happen if you just like had a huge universeized blob of finite matter and then let it collapse that would be fascinating so it would be kind of this one just one not two not three just one giant lump of stuff

that's right and even in that scenario where the universe is perfectly smooth but finite right you can't get any asymmetries. Everything has to be perfectly balanced in every direction, right? Yes, you have a center, so everything's attracted towards the center, but you can't like make stars clumping along the way as they're getting dragged towards the center. It still has to be perfectly smooth because it's the same in every direction, right? In order to get the kind of structure that we see when we look at the night sky, you have like a star here and no star there and a galaxy

here, no galaxy there. Those are asymmetries, right? That's a structure. It's a lump. Yeah, it's a lump in the universe, exactly. So that's obviously not the universe we're in. We're not in a perfectly smooth jelly universe, and we're not living in one giant, singular, super cluster of stuff. We live in this kind of a stranger universe, right? And thank God we do, right? I mean, it would be pretty boring to live in an infinitely smooth pudding

or even just have, like, one big star. Living in a perfect jelly seems pretty peaceful to me. Again, I think you should have a snack before we do these podcasts, otherwise you tend towards these food analogies that I think just reflect what you're feeling rather than what you're thinking. Well, let's get into how lumpy the universe is and how it got that way. But first, let's take a quick break. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it.

They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha.

On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, it's HoneyGerman, 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 vibras 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 cold, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasasas has come again as part of my Cultura podcast network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford.

And in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Afea and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right? In terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyperfixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or, we're real. It's how our hair is styled. We talk about the important role

hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss Session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

All right, so we don't live in a perfectly smooth universe and we don't live in a universe that's just one giant cluster black hole slash star. That's not the universe we live in, right? We are actually in a very lumpy universe. Yeah, and the universe, the structure of the universe is really fascinating. We should dig into it really deeply in another podcast episode and talk about it and why it is this way and that way. But let's just review briefly sort of where we are in the universe, the status of the lumps, the level of lumpiness of the universe.

Yeah. So we are sitting here on Earth, presumably. That's right. We are two lumps on a rock. Yeah. Presumably most of our listeners are on Earth. And if you're not, by the way, if you're listening to this podcast and you're not on Earth, we really want to hear from you.

Yeah, absolutely. But we are in a big rock, around rock, going around a sun, a star, and that's our solar system, right? And even that is super lumpy. I mean, from the point of view of, like, how smooth is stuff distributed. You know, people are probably familiar with how far away the sun is. It takes a time for light to even get there. It's minutes and minutes and minutes, right? And the sun itself is a huge blob of matter, but it's super far away.

You know, the size of the Earth is enormous and the size of the sun is enormous, but the size of the distance between them dwarfs both of them. Right. So even just the solar system is really, really lumpy in that sense that the matter is concentrated and not spread out. Right. And then our solar system is inside of a galaxy, right? Mm-hmm. And that's even lumpier from that point of view, right? Like, the distance between stars is huge compared to the size of the stars.

And it has some sort of structure, right? Like the galaxy has spirals and it's kind of thicker and more dense in the middle, right? There's some structure at that scale, too. Yeah, the galaxy told me it doesn't like when you talk about it's thickening waistline, Horace. It's lumpiness. But it's true. It's true. No, it's sparkly. I'm talking about it's sparkliness. It's beautiful. It's beautiful, the Milky Way. Yeah, exactly. We got all these stars, 100 billions of stars, but they're not just a blob, right? They're not just distributed evenly.

Although for a long time, people thought that's what happened. But no, we know that they're arranged in this amazing swirl pattern, right? We have the center of the galaxy, and then we have these arms that come out. And because it's rotating, those arms sort of drag behind it. And you get this amazing swirl. And then you can keep going, like the galaxy. is part of a super cluster of galaxies and that's super... No, no, you missed one.

Oh, what? You missed one. The galaxy is part of a cluster of galaxies, right? Oh. And when we talk about a cluster, we mean things that are gravitationally bound to each other that essentially are orbiting each other over billions and billions of years. Oh. So ours is called the local group, right?

Like our cluster of galaxies is very imaginatively called the local group. I know. That sounds like a temporary name. Somebody came up with like, oh, I need to call this something and talk to my advisor. And then it just stuck. And they're like, dang, and I should have named it after my dog. What's the opposite of local? Like, not local, not here.

It means the galaxies near us, right? It's a pretty lame name. Yeah, so that's the cluster. It's good to know how our galaxy cluster is green and, you know, local, sources locally. That's right. That's right. I don't think it's vegan, but at least it's local, right? It's stellar.

Yeah, exactly. our galaxy is part of a structure of other with other galaxies even that cluster is part of another structure in the universe right yeah they call those super clusters and these are basically clusters of clusters right another imaginative name uh-huh and again you might ask like are these totally arbitrary just making this up could you have organized it differently the answer is no there is some science behind it we think about how these groups operate you know, and essentially a supercluster is not just a really, really big cluster.

It's a cluster of clusters, meaning that each cluster inside a supercluster is gravitationally bound to itself, and then those things themselves are gravitationally bound to each other, and that's what makes the super cluster. They're sort of trapped in a sort of gravitational bubble almost. Yeah, the way like, you know, the Earth and the Moon are a gravitational system, right, which is embedded inside the solar system, which is embedded inside the galaxy, right? you might say it's arbitrary to define whether or not the moon is part of the Earth system or the solar system, but it really makes much more sense to consider the Earth to be part of our system,

and then the solar system would be part of the galaxy, rather than just say, like, oh, it's all one big galaxy. So that's why we get these hierarchies. And it's amazing that we have these hierarchies, you know, and also because you can zoom down, right? You get, like, down to the atom and things are orbiting and stuff. So we have this over incredibly different distances from microscopic to, what, mesoscopic? we have similar structures of things orbiting each other on these large scales. It's like an infinite Russian doll.

You can stack them almost infinitely, it seems. Yeah, but infinite, we don't know, right? We talked about that another time. We think the universe probably has a smallest scale, and when we talk about the structure of the galaxy, the structure of the universe in another podcast episode, we'll talk about the biggest structures in the universe, which is a whole other fascinating topic.

You can keep going, and there are bigger, bigger structures, right? Well, there's a point where they stop. Yeah. Oh, at some point they stop. At some point they stop. There's an end to the Russian doll, as far as we know. There is a largest Russian doll, yeah. Anyway, but that's the topic for another day.

Let's talk about why we have structure. Yeah, the point is that there is structure, right? Like, we're not in a smooth universe, and we're not just one giant lump. There's, like, texture to the universe, right? There's features. There's things to look at. There's good stuff to see, exactly. and as our

UCI question answers earlier said gravity is responsible for forming those things but gravity couldn't start those structures right that was the point we were making earlier

so the point is that gravity can't make lumps when you start a lump gravity will accelerate it's like a chain reaction right once you have one point that's denser than everything else it'll have a stronger gravitational pull

and it'll start to attract stuff and then it'll get heavier and have a stronger gravitational pull and it'll feed on itself but if everything is smooth, then you can't. So the question is, so gravity can make lumps bigger, but the question really comes down to where do the first lumps come from? It's kind of like gravity can roll a snowball down a hill, but it can't sort of start the snowball rolling. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Like once it's rolling,

it gets bigger and lumpier, but you need some sort of something to get that snowball going. Yeah, you have to knock it out of equilibrium to get things snowballing. Exactly. Okay. All right, so how did the universe, he had lumps? How is it not perfectly smooth or one giant lump? So that was a big mystery for a long time, right? Because it's very natural to think that the universe started symmetrically. I think probably the most popular model for how the universe started is that the universe is infinite and that has infinite amount of matter in it

and that was created in the first moments, right? That we don't understand at all. But not understanding it means we want to start with the simplest idea, okay? You know, it's not very simple to imagine the creation of an infinite universe with an infinite amount of stuff in it. But if you're going to go there, it makes more sense to say that the universe starts out smooth. That's where this idea of smoothness comes from, right? Right. Right. Like simplicity.

Because the opposite, like, oh, that the universe was created with some initial lumpiness, that's weird. Because then you have to ask why this lumpiness. Why not that lumpiness? Who made that choice, right? Right. And so it was a big puzzle for a long time. And there's really only one way that we know of that you can make lumpiness. lumpiness out of smoothness.

There's only one thing in physics that's capable of doing that. Meaning there's only one thing that can add features to something that should be perfectly plain. That's right. What you need there is something that's not deterministic, something which has a random element to it, right? Because if every particle in universe starts in the same situation, then they should all have the same future. What you need is to distinguish them somehow. For this one, have a different future than that one. For this one, have a different experience somehow.

The only thing we know that can do that, that can break determinism, is quantum mechanics. Because quantum mechanics has real randomness in it. Is that the source then of randomness in the universe? Like without quantum mechanics, we would all be perfectly smooth? Yeah, exactly. But there was still another puzzle, right? So quantum mechanics gives you randomness. But, you know, quantum mechanics is not something you notice.

You don't, like, drive around and notice random stuff happening from quantum mechanics. Like, my phone is here. It's not here and there. That's right. I mean, maybe your bank account seems to fluctuate randomly, but there actually is an explanation, you know. My bank account could use more physics for sure. I'm a quantum mechanic accountant. I'm a quantum accountant. Exactly. And that's why quantum mechanics took such a long time to discover because people thought the universe was deterministic. They thought two particles in the same situation would always have the same future.

Oh, I see. There's no reason for them to be different. Like if you create a universe without quantum mechanics, there's no reason. for all the particles to be different. There's nothing that gives it that initial randomness. Exactly. The problem is that quantum mechanics is a tiny amount of randomness, right? It's at the particle scale. It's super duper small, right? These tiny little fluctuations.

And what are we talking about concretely? We're talking about, like, particles being created out of the vacuum. Quantum mechanics can do that. It can take energy and just turn it into particles, and then they can turn back into energy. Or, you know, this particle can have a chance to go left or right, and, you know, maybe this one goes left and another one goes right, this kind of stuff. It's really, really tiny effects, not really enough to get gravity going,

because gravity is super duper weak, right? Gravity needs more than the tiniest little discrepancy, even if you give it billions of years. But the kicker is that the universe used to be small, right? That's the twist ending, is that the universe used to be really tiny and small. That's right. And so the very first moments of the universe were super dramatic. What happened in the first moments of the universe was inflation. inflation is this idea that the universe used to be much denser

and then it got stretched out, it got inflated, right? And this is not stuff moving through space. This is the actual expansion of space itself, meaning things got stretched, right? More space was made. Everything got inflated and blown up. What that means is that the microscopic became macroscopic. Well, step us through this.

So you're saying this all goes back to the Big Bang, right? Everything goes back to the Big Bang. In the end, you can blame everything on the Big Bang. Technically, I guess, yeah. Officer, I was speeding because the Big Bang, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, I was speeding. Etta, yeah, blame the universe. Yada, yada, yada, I was speeding. Quantum mechanics.

That gets me out of every ticket, trust me. Before we keep going, let's take a short break. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime.

A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases

to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, it's HoneyGerman. 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 auditioned 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 Vibras 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.

I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Brandford, and in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Ophia and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right, in terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a high-year-old. for fixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees

when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. We talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss Session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety.

Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Yeah, so the universe used to be very, very small, and that's where these, that's where quantum mechanics played a big role, right? Yeah, and be careful when you say universe used to be very small, because we're still saying the universe was infinite, right, and an infinite amount of stuff in it, but it was denser, right? It used to be more squished when it was created. And then all that stuff was stretched out due to inflation. Oh, I see. So it's like an infinite ruler getting stretched. It's still infinite, right?

I see. So you're saying that the features we see in the universe today are really just the quantum features that we used to have when we were denser, not smaller. But now when inflation happened at the Big Bang, everything, all these small fluctuations got way, way bigger. Yeah, it's like an ant-man, right, where he can make things much, much bigger, right? Ants can be enormous, and then they can do construction projects, and you can ride in the back of a butterfly and cool stuff. Take the microscopic and make it macroscopic, right? So the timeline is the universe is created perfectly smooth, right?

Little quantum fluctuations happen a little bit this, one particle moves a little bit this way, one particle moves a little bit that way. Then inflation takes over and blows that up, right? inflates it, makes those tiny little fluctuations into bigger fluctuations enough to see gravity and then gravity takes over for the next 14 billion years, yada, yada, yada, I was speeding. Officer. I'm telling you, that story works every time. Yeah, they probably fall asleep before you finish, in which case you can just drive off. Like, oh, another physics professor.

Just let him go. so you're saying the universe used to be small or denser and everything was smoother at that scale except that if we didn't have quantum mechanics but we still had inflation then we would have exploded the universe or expanded the universe and it would remain smooth yes exactly it would remain smooth because we had those quantum fluctuations that a little bit of randomness at the beginning gave the universe texture exactly and those little fluctuations were random, right? And they could have been different.

Different random throws of the universe dice, and we would have a completely different structure. I mean, I think the kinds of structures we would have would still be the same. We would still have galaxies and stars and whatever, but they would be arranged differently. So you might ask, why do we have a galaxy here and not there?

And you can trace the answer to that all the way back to one little particle fluctuating millabillus seconds after the Big Bang. If it fluctuated this way, we get this galaxy. If it fluctuated that way, we get a different galaxy. We're in the same galaxy in a different place. Wow.

You said that provided the seeds for the structure, meaning when it expanded, it would have been smooth, but it had these kind of slightly small shades of a texture. And those shades became exaggerated by gravity, and then things started to clump around those little shades of texture. Exactly. And we can see this. We can look back in time,

and we can see this progression happening. Like if you look back deep, deep into the history, through the universe, you see the first light that we can see, which comes from about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. It's the cosmic microwave background. We've talked about it a few times. This light is really, really smooth.

It's almost the same, no matter where you look at it. It's like the same color, the same temperature, whatever. But if you measure it really carefully, that you can see little variations, tiny little fractions of colder and hotter spots. Those, that took 400,000 years just to get that far, right? those are the seeds from this quantum fluctuations exaggerated by gravity for 400,000 years

then propagate it forward in time give gravity another few billion years and you start to get things like stars and galaxies and all that stuff but we can see these quantum fluctuations from the early universe it's like the pattern that made our cosmos was totally random

it was totally random exactly and we think quantum mechanics is truly random right not like there's some hidden process that's controlling it that we don't understand. We think it's really truly random. As mind-blowing as it is for anything in the universe to be honestly truly random, it is, and it affects our universe's structure at the deepest level, right? Wow.

It's amazing to think that the reason you and I are here, or the whole Earth is here, or the whole sun and our solar system, or even maybe even our galaxies here, is just the random fluctuation of one little tiny particle way back in the Big Bang. Yeah. It's the truth, man. The truth is strange than fiction. That's why I'm a physicist because, you know, the universe will always alarm you.

The universe is like weirder and hotter and nastier and crazier and stranger than anything a human could ever invent. Right. Well, it depends on how crazy and weird you are, but... And hot and how hot and wet and when you are. That's a whole different podcast here. So I'll have to play this podcast from my son. But that basically answers its question, right? Like, why do we have stars and not just a smooth distribution to matter?

You need two elements. You need quantum mechanics to give you any fluctuation to avoid the smoothness. To break the balance. Exactly, to break the balance. And then you need inflation to blow it up so that it matters and that gravity can then take over. So it's a complicated dance. So gravity takes these small fluctuations and basically exacerbates them, right? It makes them lumpier and clumpier than it started.

Yeah, but remember, gravity can only take little lumps and make them into bigger lumps, right? It can't make lumps if something's totally smooth. All right. Thanks to everyone for listening to this lumpy episode and for listening to my long explanation to my son's short question. Yeah, and whether you're a movie star like Tom Cruise or just a scruffy physicist, if you have any, or lumpy or smooth, or hot. Why is that an or? Why do you have to be a movie star or a scruffy physicist?

Are you saying you can't be both? No, you can totally be both. Totally, yeah. Don't ask me for a counter-example. I can't think of one. Maybe in another random role of the universe. That's right. Why are you not a movie star, dad?

Quantum mechanics. So whether you are any of these things, if you have any questions, you can write us. And feedback at daniel and Jorge.com. We love getting an email. We love answering questions on Twitter. So get in touch. Send us your thoughts.

And so the next time you look out into the night sky and you see all those sparkly stars, just think. Everything is there. You are there because of the one random part of them. But you still have to pay your taxes. And you're speeding tickets. Unless you can talk your way out of them. Ha!

If you still have to be. 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 Feedback at Danielandhorpe.com. Hi, it's HoneyGerman, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grasias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music. music and entertainment, with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition?

No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in, like, over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We'll talk about all that's viral and trending, with a little bit of cheeseman and a whole lot of laughs. And, of course, the great bevras you've come to expect. Listen to the new season of Dacias Come Again on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell, and the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology is already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation,

you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials easier. Complex problem solving takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast.