From First Principles - Hidden Star in Betelgeuse, Dancing Atoms, Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays & VR Immunity (EP. 2)

Episode Date: August 5, 2025

Lester and Dr. Krishna dive into:• Beetlejuice & “Bracelet” – why a red super-giant may soon swallow its tiny partner• Atomic Harlem Shake – 0.15 Å resolution images of thermal jiggles in 2-D materials• Too Fast, Too Furious – IceCube’s constraints on proton fractions in 10²⁰ eV cosmic rays• Interstellar Google Maps – New Horizons proves star-pattern navigation works• Mind-Body Woo-Woo – VR coughs that literally raise your white-blood-cell count

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As the crispy chicken sandwich from 7-Eleven, people always call me loud. And I'm like, yeah, I know. I'm crispy. Did you expect me to whisper? If you want quiet, go eat some soup and reflect. Like, I know I'm a handful. I'm bold, I'm juicy. Throw some pickles and barbecue sauce on me, and baby, I'm a whole meal.

And with seven rewards, I'm just $4. Quiet. No. Krispy, saucy, and $4? Very. Only at 711. Valley 3-6, 2326, participating stores only well supplies last to have for full terms. Hello, internet. This is your captain speaking, Lester Nare. I'm joined by my co-host and our resident PhD, Dr. Krishna Chartery. This is from First Principles. We have a great episode this week. We are going to touch on first Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beatlejuice. Found a companion, but this is not Love Island. A great story about a stellar companionship. Second story, atom scale images of atoms vibrating. We've seen Adams doing the Harlem Shake. What does it mean? What are the implications?

Story number three, high energy cosmic rays. We're talking too fast and too furious. Fourth story, navigating the stars using a camera. We've figured out an interstellar Google Maps, or have we? And lastly, we'll end with our mystery box, which is Krishna's story of the day. How are you good, sir? I'm doing well. Second episode.

I'm very excited about this. Yeah, yeah. First one went well. First one went well. Maybe we'll do a third one. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll start with our first episode.

first story. Interestingly, it got all the way to CNN. Yes. Which is, you know, usually when news gets there. It's a little bit dicey about the details. This one's not fake. Okay. This one is not fake. So the title on the story is Beetlejuice, one of the most familiar stars in the sky,

may have a hidden companion star orbiting it. Astronomers have observed what they believe to be a never-before-seen companion star orbiting Beetlejuice, a pulsating red super giant star in the shoulder of the Orion constellation. That's right. What exactly is happening here? Why does it matter? Yeah. And does the galaxy lie on Orion's belt?

The galaxy is not on Orion's belt. Orion's belt is actually just in the galaxy itself. So it's the other way around. Beetlejuice is just one of my favorite stars. And so whenever anything happens with Beetlejuice, I get very excited. This might not matter in the grand scheme of things to human beings, but I still think it's an extremely cool observation that we've made about my favorite star. So, you know what?

Tough. If you guys don't like Beetle Juice, whatever. Just go see Orion, and you'll see him on the top right shoulder. So Beetlejuice makes up the top right shoulder. It's unmistakable. It's red. It looks like Mars except it's blinking, so you know it's a star. Mars is about the same brightness, but it doesn't blink because it's closer to Earth, so it's a little bit bigger. It's like Mars is kind of like a circle, whereas Beetlejuice is 700 light years away, so it's literally a point.

And so it twinkled a little bit. This is a nice little short drive through the interstellar vaster. Honestly, it's not that far. 700 light years, in the grand scheme of things is not that far. It's actually the closest red super giant to Earth. So when you say super giant, is it, it's a star. It's a star. So a lot of people will think, oh, it's like a bigger Jupiter, but that's not true.

No, no, no. This thing is, it's nice that you mention Jupiter. So this star is so big that if you were to put it where the sun is, it would be as big as Jupiter's orbit. Oh, wow. Yes. So it would be like this all the way past the asteroid. Yeah, it would swallow Jupiter. Now you see why it's my favorite star

It's like it's an amazing star It's this red super giant This thing's only 10 million years old Okay Okay So it's like the sun is 5 billion years old Okay And the sun is gonna become a red giant

But not a super giant Oh so this is it's this is it's dying It's on the path This thing is dying It used to be a blue massive star And then it ran out of oxygen Because one of the cool things about stars Is like the bigger you are

The shorter your lifespan It's kind of like you party too hard and then you're just like fucked. Yeah, live free and die hard. Yes, exactly. Yep. Stars do that in exactly. Okay. Like the bigger you are, the faster you deplete the hydrogen.

That gives you life. Right? That gives you life. And then now you ran out of hydrogen. Now you got to start burning helium. Once you run out of helium, now you got to start burning carbon and nitrogen. Once you start running out of that, you get to swell up and then, you know, things are bad. So this is this thing is in its last legs.

Okay. But it's this. massive star, 700 light years away, 700 times the radius of the sun. And it does a lot of really cool things. Okay? One of the cool things it does is every, like, I think it's every 400 days. It has a cycle where it like dims and it gets brighter and it dims and it gets brighter. Now that's okay.

That's pretty close to the Earth's cycle. Yeah, yeah, it is. Like 365, 400. Yeah, right? It dims, it gets brighter. That's like okay for Reds. super giants because things do that. Okay. A lot of these stars do that. Okay. If you if you look at other red super giants that are farther away, they'll do the same thing. So they don't stay at the

static. No, they're called variable stars and they're actually very important for um like that's actually super important for like fundamental science reasons because that tells us how far stuff is by looking at the frequency of, of this. It tells us how bright they really are and then you can tell okay, well, I know how bright it really is because it's oscillating at this frequency. Right. But, I see it as this bright. So why is it this bright when it should be this bright? Oh, it's because it's this far away. And you can tell the distance to stars.

So variable stars are extremely important for fundamental science in terms of like calibrating that. Edwin Hubble did the first kind of survey of that out in Mount Hubble. Oh, yeah. Not Mount Hubble. Mount Wilson right in the outskirts of L.A. This is the same thing you were telling me about the other day, I think, with like how we use quasars for time and for navigation.

Like because they're so consistent. Yeah, because they're so far away and so consistent, you can use them to chart like a 360 degree rotation of the earth. In this case, it's like because these guys are so consistent in the way that they vibrate and how bright they are, we can use them to chart distances as we go out. Yeah. Anyway, so 400 days, it does this cycle. That's fine.

Yep. But every six years, it does another cycle. So there's like a 400 day cycle. And on top of that, there's this slower six year cycle. You see what I'm saying? There's like a slower oscillation on top of this faster oscillation. And that slower oscillation is six years.

And that one's weird. Okay. Okay. So people thought, okay, that's weird. Six years is kind of long. They thought that maybe there's another star that is wobbling it. Okay. That would be impacting this six,

that would be orbiting it every six years. Yep. Okay. But it's been incredibly hard to see because Beetlejuice is so massive. right? It's the size of Jupiter's orbit. So like it's like to try an image the other star. It's like you got you got this one dancing partner that's like outshining you in every form of the word. This is like I don't think people understand the scale of what you're talking about.

Yeah. Like this thing is so incredibly large. I can't. It's hard to even. Yeah. It's hard to even. It's so incredibly large and so incredibly bright because it's large. Right.

Right? Like when we point a telescope at it, all you're going to see is it. You're not going to see the other guy. Right. That's right next to it like four Earth orbits away. Because it's basically gets sort of engulfed in the in the super giant. I mean, this sounds very similar to what we talked about last episode about Earth's one millisecond shift in its orbit time, which was partly because of, we don't know, but other objects. interacting with Earth. So similarly, you're saying that this super giant is having this companion. Yeah. That is what is impacting and creating this six-year cycle in addition to this 400-day cycle. Yes, exactly. Okay. Right. And so like the idea is like you have this interaction and we see it in the brightness of Beetlejuice, but we want to we want to actually see the thing, right? We want to see its partner. Right. So that becomes incredibly hard. Wait, just really quick,

because you're saying we can measure and then make a hypothesis that is being impacted by this thing, but we've not made a direct observation. Yes. Because when you point your telescope at it, all you see is a single point of light. Right. You see a single point of light and that light's brightness is going up and down every six years. Right. Now, what we think is that there are two points of light.

Right. But how do we resolve that two points of light? Got it. Okay. Because I actually did the calculation. Okay. Okay. This thing, it turns out, this thing is about four Earth, um, astronomical units.

So four Earth orbits. Yep. Away from its star. Okay. Yep. And it's got about 4% the brightness of Beetlejuice, this new star. Okay. Okay.

So it's very dim in comparison. Yeah. And this thing is 700 light years away. Mm-hmm. So that's the same as if somebody in New York City. Okay. Went on to top of the Empire State building. Okay.

And put up two iPhones with their, with their flashlight. Yeah. They put them right next to each other. Right? You hold two iPhones. You hold two iPhones. You put the two flashlights. Yeah.

Right. Imaging Beetlejuice and its companion, it's as hard as imaging two flashlights on two iPhones right next to each other on the Empire State Building from Los Angeles. Right? Imagine trying to take a picture of that from L.A. I mean, the Samsung galaxies are pretty good. Hey! You know, right?

The Xiaomi phones are also pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I don't believe. I don't think they, yeah. I don't think if I was, even if I was at Spire 73 in downtown Los Angeles, it's the highest open air bar in Western Hemisphere, at least as of two years ago. It's great bar.

And I pointed it at New York. Yeah. Well, the earth would be in the way because the earth is round. Ah. But let's assume, let's assume it's flat. Let's assume it's flat. Fine. Don't get in the comments.

Don't, don't clip this. Okay. Yeah. But, but, but, like, I don't even know that I would get to. the east side. No, yeah. You wouldn't, yeah. Like even if there was a vacuum, right? You wouldn't be able to resolve these things. They would, it would just, if you were lucky enough to even see the two iPhones, they would be like one dot. This is actually really helpful context for understanding the scale of the challenge that we're solving with these, with these experiments

and these tools. Yeah. So it's an incredible feat that we could do this. And the image that they produced is amazing. They use the Gemini Space Telescope, not the Gemini Space Telescope, Sorry. They use the Gemini telescope in Hawaii. Yep. That's at the peak of Monacoa in the big island of Hawaii. It's a beautiful, massive telescope. Hawaii.

Yeah. It's one of the best parts of Hawaii is the fact that they have these incredible astronomical observatories. Yep. That are like unmatched in the northern hemisphere. Which makes it because no light pollution. Yeah. No life pollution. It's like perfectly poised.

Super high altitude in the middle of the ocean. Right. 13,000 feet above sea level. Like, which is 4,000 feet lower than the Atacama, because the Atacama one is about 17,000. So, yeah, and Atacama is basically a bunch of Europeans. Like, they've, they've colonized the shit out of Chile's high desert. Right. For astronomy.

But it's for astronomy. So, you know. I will make a small caveat. We do respect the desires of the locals in Hawaii and that their lands are theirs. And so this is not a claim to that land as being property of the globe. However, there is a lot of. value for all of us in being able to have these tools in particular locations. Yeah. And we are grateful to the people of Hawaii for that. Yes. We're incredibly grateful for the people of Hawaii for

lending their land to give us these tools to explore what really is the final frontier. Right. Right. Right. Like I, you know, I don't want to digress too much, but it's like in in the cultures, it's like exploring the unknown, right? Exploring the oceans was how they got to Hawaii. And now it's like they're exploring the vast ocean of space. Right. Right. It's incredibly romantic to me that like it's, you know, Hawaii is, Hawaii is the spot where all of this is happening. Yeah.

I will say that my, uh, my wife wanted me to propose when we went to Hawaii and we're looking at the observatories. I did not get the memo. So that did not go over well. Oh, dude. However, we are still here today. So yeah, yeah, yeah, you're good. It could have been worse. It could have been worse. It could have been worse. Yeah. So I proposed on Mount Wilson. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. I know. So I don't think. I don't think. She got the memo, but I had the memo. This is great. So the real story here is we sort of this connection between measurement and direct observation.

Yeah. Or measurement. It's like a hypothesis, right? We're doing the scientific method where we see this thing. And we exhaust all the other possibilities. And we're like, well, it's got to be like a companion. And then we're like, okay, how do we measure this thing? And so we point this Gemini North telescope.

to it. Yep. And we also use this thing called speckle imaging, which was actually developed at UCLA. A lot of it was developed at UCLA to try and image the center of the galaxy to see those beautiful star trails

around the Black Hole Center that won Andrea Ghez the Nobel Prize. Yep. Very recently. It was actually like on the floor above my PhD lab. I was on the fifth floor and then the sixth floor was basically

all an imaging lab that was trying to make imaging these tiny little things possible, right? And they use that to prove the super massive black hole. But in this case, what they used. And speckle imaging is basically like you take a bunch of really fast images. Okay. Okay.

You take a bunch of really fast images and then you average them together. Okay. The reason why you're doing this is you treat each image as an independent sample. So instead of like taking a long exposure where like the atmosphere is in the way and so you get a lot of blurring. What you do is take a bunch and then you. mess around with each image and average it in just the right way, that you can start resolving, like, incredible detail. That's very, right?

Because you want high resolution and high contrast. Right, which you can't get on the long exposure. You can't get with a short exposure, but high volume average. Exactly. So that's called speckle imaging. And some of these exposures, they're like extremely short. They're like 14 milliseconds. 14 milliseconds.

This is, oh my goodness. Right? And you're taking like thousands of these. And then you're averaging them together. And finally you get this beautiful picture of Beetlejuice and its little companion. The little companion is like 4% as bright as Beetlejuice. So obviously we weren't seeing it before. The little bro.

The little bro. The little bro. And unfortunately, it is not a nice relationship. This is not a Disney happy ending. I referenced Love Island earlier because I thought companion is usually referenced in a way that is. It's not going to end well. I imagine the super giant is going to be engulfing

the companion. Yes. We don't support it. That was four, yeah, there's four percent the size. It's not,

it's not. It's like, I think in the next 10,000 years, it's going to, it's going to be gone. We're going to get, I'm so happy we're going to be able to see that in our lifetime. Yeah,

it's going to be, it's going to be pretty cool. That's incredible. One last thing. Yeah. Sorry. No, no,

no, go, go, go ahead. Oh, I was going to say one last thing that I think is, um, very nicely done by the astronomers, right? When you discover a new object,

you tend to get to name it. Okay. Okay? So, beetle juice, Beetlejuice is an interesting name. Spelled, B-E-T-E-L-G-E-U-S-E. Yes.

Not like the beetle juice we know. No. It's like a French. Yes, this is a weird, weird beetle juice. It's actually an Arabic. Okay. Name. Okay.

Okay. It was named by the Arabs. back when, you know, Europe was in the dark ages and Arabia was, you know, where scientific learning and all of that was happening. They don't teach us that in school. No, but it's... They like deliberately ignore, like, centuries. Like algebra is from algebra. Algorithm is like named after an Arabic word. Anyways.

Beetlejuice means the hand of a giant. Okay. Because, like, it's on his shoulder. Yep. Right. Okay. And they probably inherited those constellations from the Greeks. Got it.

Right. And Ljuice means giant in Arabic. So they stuck to that theme and they're naming this new star Siwarha, which means bracelet. Okay. It's like a bracelet on the hand of a giant. I thought that's kind of cool. I don't know. Look, look, I appreciate that you can both be technical and creative at the same time. Yeah, yeah.

And yeah, I think it's nice, you know. So although the ending of the story may not be the most happy, this is not a Disney movie, as you said. No. It is another great example of, again, just the incredible genius of so many of the human beings around us. And so I think now we talked about really, really big stuff. Yes. That star was the size of Jupiter. The orbit, not the planet.

The orbit of Jupiter, like the sun, Jupiter. Yeah. So now we're going to go in the opposite direction. Yeah. So the headline on our second story here is first direct images reveal atomic thermal vibrations in quantum materials. That's right. And then the byline goes, researchers investigating atomic scale phenomena impacting next generation electronic and quantum devices have captured the first microscopy images of atomic thermal vibrations revealing a new type of motion that could reshape the design of quantum technologies and ultra-thin electronics.

So the way I described it was we've seen atoms do the Harlem shake. But it seems like the key idea here is it's an imaging feat of something really, really, really small. And the thing that we image that was really, really, really small was doing a little shimmy. Yes. So how do we go from this really small thing vibrating to ultra thin electronics? Yes. Well, first we got to understand what is the thing that we imaged. Okay. Yes. So for that, have you ever heard of Moray patterns? M-O-I-R-E? Yes. Like with the accent on the-M-R-A. Yeah. That's so moire. You might have seen it.

Yeah, it's kind of like that. You know what it is? In film, you get it on your imaging, like in particular situations. It's like a moray effect. Yes, yes, exactly. And so, yes, but what does that have to do? Right. Like, I get it.

You can get it all the time if you like, if you take your phone and then, like, if I were to take my phone and then take a photo of your LCD screen. Right? Right. And then I zoom in on the, like, if you've ever taken a photo with your phone of like a screen and then you zoomed in on the screen. You're going to get these like weird like like netty patterns. Yes. You know? Yes.

And why is that happening? That's because there's a pattern on the LCD screen. Okay. So because the LCD screen is a bunch of pixels. So there's a there's a regular pattern on there. And then your phone, the way it's displaying it has another pattern, right? So what you're doing is you've got these two patterns. You've got these two patterns that are overlapping.

Yeah. And when you do that, you get these giant patterns. Like there's a third bigger pattern from the sort of the amalgamation. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So what you need is like two small patterns and then he slightly offset it. And you'll get these like nice like looking bigger patterns.

I think some film people would disagree with you about the characterization of nice. Yes. However. I don't know if it's nice. From a quantum materials perspective, it is quite nice. This is okay. Okay. So I do know what you're talking about.

Yeah. And it's a, it's an interference. pattern. Yes, it's an interference pattern between two regular 2D patterns, right? There's like two patterns in 2D. We're making them interfere slightly. It can't be like completely. Got it. It's got to be like just slightly a little bit off. And then you'll get these like long range patterns, right? The, the smaller the difference between them, the longer the range. Right. Okay. And so what you can do now is you can create these like silicon heterostructures. So you can have these like, materials that are made out of silicon and then you like put some other stuff in it yep right like chips

yes i mean chips are yeah chips are exactly like silicon and i think boron or like some other kind of element on top but in this case what we're really trying to do is we're trying to we're trying to measure the properties of tiny like extremely thin silicon heterostructures okay heterostructures okay heterostructure heterode just means different so you're putting some other stuff in there um you get the silicon and usually this structure forms a kind of 2D lattice, right? A 2D grid. Yeah. Now, if you stack two on top.

Like graph paper. Yes. Yes. If you stack two on top, then there's going to be some kind of defect, right, usually. And that's going to cause these more a patterns because you have a lattice of like atoms. Yeah. And then you have another lattice of atoms. These these lattices are like nanometers apart.

Yep. So like, you know, tens of atoms apart. And then and then there's going to be some defect. So you get these more a patterns within the atomic structure of the thing that you're trying to study What it makes me think of is when I was in math class and I would have my notebook and I have graph paper and if I would remove the paper slightly So it wasn't perfectly aligned with the page below it you could kind of see a little bit of the yeah You can exactly see a more a pattern right right like yeah Is it loosely in a simplified way a similar concept I mean no it's literally literally

that concept. Okay. Okay. It's not even loosely. It's literally that, right? You got grid. You got a grid on top and then it's a little bit off and you get a little pattern. Okay. Got it. So, so. So, so what, so these in this pattern, we're trying to image this really, really small structure. Yeah. That has these patterns present. Yes. And so these patterns, um, like these structures, right, these like thin structures with like these interacting sheets. that have this like long periodicity in space. They're really important for things like superconductivity, heat conduction studies, new materials, like stuff of the future. The meta materials. Like the stuff that we want to make in the future, we want to make it cheaply. We want to make it at an industrial scale. But in order to do that, first we need to understand physically what is going on.

So as an analogy, we have a Lego block that's eight by eight. Yeah. That's the level of which we can like. engineer. Yeah. We're trying to get down to a Lego block that's one by one. In some sense, yeah. And a smaller, like an understanding of the Lego blocks.

Understanding of the Lego blocks. Yeah. At that scale. At that scale. And at that, like, even, you're trying to also make the Lego block like incredibly cold so that you can understand the physics at the basic level. I got you. Right.

And you're trying to understand like the atoms within the Lego block in some sense, right? And like how the Lego blocks stretches and, and, and shears. and squishes. That way, when you make a bigger thing, you have a better handle on everything. You understand all of these sort of derivative outcomes that will happen because of effects at this really, really, really, really small scale. Yes, yeah. And so you've got these like Moray patterns, right? Yep. And it turns out these patterns will actually move around. Okay? Okay. Hold on. Yeah. Because because the defect, right? The defect that creates this pattern is going to move because the temperature is not zero. So because temperature is not zero, there's going to be some wiggling.

going on in the lattice. And because there's some wiggling going on in the lattice, the pattern itself is going to move and it's going to be constantly shifting. So understanding how this thing shifts, what's the physics of that, is incredibly powerful and incredibly needed for understanding like how these, these 2D heterostructures work. And that's what these guys did.

They're from the University of Maryland. They did something called electron ticography. That's P-T-Y-C-O-Graphy. Okay. Okay. Tyco means like like to fold in Greek. Okay. And it's a new form of like electron microscopy basically.

Okay. But it's like halfway between x-ray crystallography and electron microscopy. So electron microscopy is the idea of like when we when we think microscope, we think like a light microscope, right? Yeah. Like the stuff in your bio lab. This is how we did in eighth grade. Yeah. We're looking at frog light.

Where it's like, it's like, okay, you're using visible light. You've got a traditional lens. and then and then you try to like see stuff. Now visible light has a size like the wavelength of visible light, the stuff that's in these lights, of about 400 to 700 nanometers. Okay. So the wave has a spatial resolution of 400 to 700 nanometers,

which means you can't see stuff smaller than that, right? If you've ever been to the ocean, if there's a tiny little island and the waves are like 10 meters apart and the island is like a meter. the waves don't give a fuck, they're just going to go through, right? But if the island is massive and the waves are small, then the waves bend around it, and that's when you can actually resolve stuff. Okay, so light, visible light is not going to work,

because visible light, the smallest you can go is like 400 nanometers, right? This is why when people talk about like signals, intelligence gathering, or these kind of detection platforms, right? Yeah. You have optical, you have radio, you have infrared. And the point there is that that range, Is that different? Yeah, it tells you, it tells you the resolution of the stuff.

And there's like some atmospheric effects and the stuff that you're talking about. Yeah. But like, for example, with radio, like if you, if you take like a long wave radio image of something. And the something is like the size of a like, you know, a size of you. Yeah. And you're not going to resolve anything. Right? Because the radio wave is massive.

Right. So what are you doing? What are you doing? No, okay. So the scale of this stuff just continues to always blow my mind. Yeah. That we can even... Yeah, I haven't even told you the resolution that these guys got. Okay, so...

But here's the other thing. Okay. So I told you, right? Like, usually you use light and light microscope in the biolab. But now, like, biologists increasingly, they use electron microscopes. Because of quantum mechanics, electrons have wavelength properties. And the wavelength of electrons is around x-rays. It's extremely small.

Got it. So if you shoot electrons through stuff, through a sample, then you can resolve at the wavelength of electrons. electrons, right? Because they're the same in quantum mechanics. And so now you can like resolve down to like the angstrom level. Right. So we're, but that's not good enough. I'm still not good enough. The angstrom one angstrom is the size of a hydrogen atom. Okay. And that's not good enough for these guys. Okay. Because in order to see these thermal vibrations. Are they Chinese? Um, no, University of Maryland. But were the scientists Chinese? Uh, it might be. Yeah. Yeah. They might be. But I mean, I don't know the, the, the citizen. Um, it might be. But I mean, I don't know the, the citizen. The, uh, the scientist. Um, it might be. Uh, I'm just, I'm just, I mean, I don't know the, the citizen. The. The. The. The. The. I ship of them and things like that, right? That's fair. But I mean, if they're U.S. citizens, then yeah, we got to keep them right here. This is important stuff.

This is important stuff. We want the ultra-thin. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, we want the ultra-thin electronics. I want the self-driving car that can jump over a puddle. Exactly. Anyway. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So these guys, it wasn't good enough for them in Engstrom, right? And so what they did was with electron ticography, what you can do. And this only happens with periodic materials. So with stuff that looks like graph paper. What you can do is you can shoot electrons at something that looks like graph paper and you're going to get what's called a diffraction pattern.

Right? Because like all of the electrons are going to interfere because of the lattice structure because of the periodic structure of stuff. So you're going to get like one lattice pattern. Now what you're going to do is move the samples up and then do it again. And then move the sample up and do it again. And because the sample itself is periodic, right? The fact that you're moving this is going to give you higher resolution.

on the image that comes at the end. That's the genius of electron ticography. This is so mind-wining. The fact that this thing is graph-p-pac-if this thing wasn't graph paper, then you'd be just taking, like, photos of, like, different parts of the stuff. But because it's graph paper, I move it up.

It's the same thing. From before. Right? And so now I can use the spatial invariance to nail down my resolution in space. And then I get down to 15 picometers, which is 0.15.1.5. five angstroms. So it's 15% the size of a hydrogen atom. And that's the images that you're seeing

there in that article. Right. Like those individual dots, those are individual atoms, right? Like that's a single atom in a lattice. And then there's a bunch. Like each dot is a, is an atom. It's incredible. Like the image is incredible. The image we're looking at right now kind of looks like when you were a kid and you go up to the TV really, really, really close and you can see each of the individual pixels on the TV. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Back when it was like, back when it was like, we had like the electron tubes, yes, yeah, yeah,

the vacuum tube, people, yeah, yeah. I like, I'm kind of a loss of words. Yeah, like it's, we're seeing like the nature of, yeah, the material in itself, like, like, yeah, it's incredible. Isn't this like a level at which things start to get a little weird? Like we're getting close. I mean, no, no, things are already getting weird. Things are already weird.

Like this is, yeah, at this level it's already. It's a little... Yeah. Yeah. Now, you're starting to get into like Heisenberg Uncernity Principle style stuff. Okay. Yeah.

This is incredible. Okay. And so I think one, shout out to U.S. academic research institution. Yes. Shout out to how we import the best talent in the world. Like, yeah. You're still going to get funding. Don't worry about it.

We got enough money flowing in. Come here. Help us build and discover incredible. I just, yeah, it's really hard to like, for a layman to, to internalize, because I think the delta between my everyday understanding of science as someone who comes from a family of scientists. Yeah. And then, like, people who just don't have that conversational context or exposure to the information don't really understand how thorough, robust, and outrageous the process is to

do the things we talk about yeah yeah yeah that then make it into papers yeah no it's again it's like it's like point one five the size of a hydrogen atom right that's the resolution that's the that's the that's the size of the pixel that we're imaging this thing it's also reproducible so there's no belief going on here no like somebody else can do exactly what they did and be like oh oh yeah and what you know what will probably happen is like whoever's the competitor is going to do what they did make some tweak make it better and be like well i mean it better Yeah. Like that's how scientists are. We're petty as fuck, dude. Yeah. That second story, I'm going to have to take a second to. Yeah, it's crazy. Because like, because the more we understand these kinds of materials, right, the closer we are to these next generation materials. I mean, of superconductivity.

It could be like, it could be like, like, there's also some talk about like creating like quantum computing using these like these 2D materials. Like maybe the, the, the, the, the, the, the vibrations in these materials can be our zero and one for the for the quantum computer that we want to make yeah yeah yeah I mean that that that may be a little bit caveats caveat yeah like there's there's a lot more work there but like understanding 2D materials that are this thin are incredibly important for like quantum sensing which is very important we can't get to the next step until we get to the first step yeah and the first step is knowing how stuff at this level operates yeah and this is also the first time that um electron ticography has been been used to study this kind of material, right? So the big thing is like using this experimental method, which has been used before. Right. But now it's like being used for this kind of stuff,

applying to these more patterns, right, in these like 2D defect structures. This is, I think, so it opens up like, okay, what else can we do with electron ticography? There's two, there's two there's two big like sort of key insights here. One is that the methodology applied to this use case bears fruit and two the fruit that we got is delicious yeah

it's it's ripe it is nice juicy and we can get more of it mm-hmm yeah okay okay this is great so we started off

really big then we went really small way small yeah a little whiplash we're going to stay small for our third story

which okay let's just jump into it So in Antarctica, we have, would you call it? And it's not an observatory. We have a facility. Yeah. It's not an, it kind of is an observatory.

But not the way people think about it. But not the way people think, yeah. Right. Yeah. So Ice Cube, not NWA Ice Cube. There's no space in between the two words. Neutrino Search sets first constraints on proton fraction of ultra-high-high-energy. cosmic rays.

Neutrinos are subatomic particles with no charge and very little mass that are known to weakly interact with other matter in the universe. Due to their weak interactions with other particles, these particles are notoriously difficult to detect. However,

it seems like we may be on the path here. And so this is where we're talking about too fast, too furious because we're dealing with ultra-high-energy. ultra high energy cosmic rays yeah i mean this sounds both dangerous and exciting yeah it's incredibly exciting because it's a part of physics that like like seriously people don't know okay like how you get something so fast so furious because what we're saying is is

this is after fast five so for the fast and furious franchise watchers who are familiar uh everything up to a fast five was generally speaking realistic. Everyone could be like, oh, I can understand how a car goes that fast. I can understand da-da-da. Makes sense. As soon as they started flying off of cliffs and being in space with cars, then the question, all right, how you do that? How you do that?

And that's what physicists are asking. How do you do that? For these ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, the schick seems to be, in some cases, they're moving so fast that we don't have an idea of how they were able to achieve that level of speed. Yes. Is that accurate? That's exactly right.

Yeah. So let me tell you first about cosmic rays. Okay. Okay. Cosmic rays are basically particles that come from outside the earth. Okay. And they're like big particles. Big particles, I mean like, uh, yes, like immigrating particles from, from way out there.

Okay. This can be something as light as a proton. Okay. to something as big as like a gold nucleus. Okay. Right? A gold nucleus is like hundreds of protons. Okay.

Right. So, and they're incredibly fast. They're going very close to the speed of light. Okay. Now, usually what we do is we measure the energy of these particles using something called the electron volt, which is how much energy it takes to raise, to move an electron across one voltage of,

electric potential. It's just a way of measuring like energy at the particle level. To give you some idea of what that means like CERN, which is the big particle collider. It's where apparently European scientists are interacting with interdimensional beings according to the internet.

Oh, that's new. I should talk to some of my friends who work there and see if they can put us in touch. That'd be a great guest on this podcast, Interdimensional Beings. Tell me, Sir, do you know where cosmic rays come from? Was that you? Was that you?

Well, actually. But CERN is this, it's, it's, it's, it's the same thing as the LHC. Yeah, it's the large Hadron Collider. So the large Hadron Collider, this massive, massive particle collider that builds the biggest, two miles. No, it's like 13 miles. Oh, so. It's like, it's across two continents, like two countries.

Yeah, yeah. Like France and Switzerland share a border and it goes underneath that border. It's that big. It's what created the god particle the Higgs boson Incredibly high energy Some of the highest energies that we can pack into a small space Into individual particles The proton beams that go around CERN right now

Are at 6 TVV which is six times 10 to the 12 So six with 12 zeros electron volts Okay, I want that in my bank account Yeah like that's a lot of electron volts Packed into a single proton right Right. An electron volt is how much energy you would need to take one electron up one volt. Right. This is all of that.

Six times 10 to the 12 into a single particle. Okay. That's a lot of energy. But at least we can imagine how to make it. Okay. And, and, you know, you might have seen all the, you might have seen all the headlines of being like, we're accessing the beginning of the universe. Right. And we are.

Because like at those, at those energies, we're accessing the beginning of space and time itself, right? We're getting as close to the Big Bang as we possibly can. Right, right. Okay. So 10 to the 12, 10 to the 12 electron volts is like, it's pretty nice. We can do it. We can create that. We can understand it. We can understand it. We're good to go. And we have all the frameworks. Yeah, we're good to go. We know the tactics and strategy. Yeah. And then came the biggest cosmic ray of all time. I think I remember this. Okay. It was called the OMG particle. Yeah. Oh my God particle. Oh my. Yeah, it was discovered in Utah randomly.

I mean, not randomly. Obviously, a bunch of physicists had these cosmic ray detectors. It had 10 to the 20 electron volts in a single particle. They detected 10 to the 20, which is a million times the energy of the proton in the LHC. Okay. Okay. So now we're like, okay, what? What, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on a second.

Okay. Hold up. Hold up. How do you, how do you pack so much energy into a single particle? You know what this reminds me of? And it's totally unrelated. But our discussion about vacuum energy, which has a similar question of how can there actually be that much energy. Yeah. It's unrelated, but just the level of.

Yeah, the level of awe about like, how does this, how does this even happen? Right. Right? Like, let me give you some stats because I did some calculations about like what that would mean. Okay. So 10 to the 20 electron volts in a single particle. This is the oh my God particle. It if we wanted to see how fast it was going in terms of the speed of light because nothing can go faster in the speed of light. But the closer you get to the speed of light, the higher your energy is, right? This thing had 0.999999 with 24-9 before other numbers show up. In terms of like, so 0.999, 24 ns and then like 5.4s and then like C times times the speed of light. Okay. Going that fast. If it originated, if it originated 1.5 billion light years away. Okay. Right. Then from our, because of relativity from our reference frame, it would basically take 1.5 billion years to get here. Right. But because of time dilation in relativity, the faster and you move the slugher. lower your clock goes. Yeah, yeah.

From the, from the, particles perspective, from the particles perspective, it would only have lived 1.5 days. Get the, so to us,

get out of here. To us, it's 1.5 billion years, but to the, whatever particle it was, it was just like, oh, 1.5 days, I'm here on Earth.

Hey, it's Utah. It takes us that long to get to like Texas from here. Yeah. Um, mate, like, so the other thing,

it would, it would take a photon 250,000, thousand years. So like if it was in a race with a photon, right? So so there's our particle, the OMG particle, and then there's a photon. If these two were in a race, it would take the photon 250,000 years to get a one centimeter lead on this guy. I, I don't like this. That's, that's, that's what's happening here, right? That's, that's where we're like, okay, like this is a, this is, this is incredibly fast. What makes? What makes? something what it makes a single particle right that is massive it's trivial for photons

to move that fast because they're massless right right right right but this is something that has mass so it requires work and work to actually like accelerate it right yeah no I mean like you can't like photons use create it it it moves because it's mass we're not we're not we're not concerned about the speed of a photon because it has no mass and so of course it can move incredibly yeah yeah like by relativity it's like trivial but like this thing this thing This thing, it has stuff in it. And the stuff is, like, it has a rest mass.

And it's rest mass is also huge, comparatively. Yeah, I mean, it's a proton compared to a photon, which is zero. Yeah, it's like, it's at least a proton, right? It could be a higher nucleus. Right, right, right, right. But it's at least that. Yeah. And all of these calculations are with the least.

This is, this is like, I can't. So, so, and you start wondering, okay, like, where do these big cosmic rays come from? Okay, you might think, okay, it's like supernova, right? Like supernova, it's a massive star, blows up. And then it like, like, sprays a bunch of like mass, like these particles with massive energies. Like fine. No, no, no. But those those cosmic rays should not have 10 to the 20.

Okay. Like for a supernova to have 10 to the 20 is like it's the star is too big to have like. Yeah, yeah. It's like, how to. Nah. Right. And then it's like, so, so there's some theories that suggest that it's, it's a particle that's been like. forming from the great, great beginning of the universe

and then it's interacting with the cosmic microwave background which is just the background light of the universe that's left over from the Big Bang and that light from the universe is bombarding it in just the way to like accelerate it but like that even that seems like crazy right and so the idea is we need

we need more data about this okay so that's where a neutrino observatory like Ice Cube comes in Okay. Okay. So Ice Cube was started by the University of Wisconsin, Madison. One of the great things about America is that like our flagship state institutions are just doing like ridiculous research that like other countries would be jealous of. But ours is like, no, Wisconsin got this.

This is S tier basic research. No, this is like Wisconsin got this. Like all those like alcoholics over there are like, you know what? We're also going to make the greatest neutrino observatory in the world. Shout out UW Madison because this is, this is. It's incredible. No, so this thing, this ice cube observatory is like one of my favorite things the humans have done. Okay?

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This like one to two mile deep tunnels into the ice. So the area, the area of the observatory is about one square kilometer. It's like a few city blocks. And then they board a bunch of tunnels. Yep. That are one to two miles deep. And in it they put photo multiplier tubes,

which are basically like light detectors. Okay. You can think of them as light detectors. Now here's what happens. Cosmic ray comes in. Yep. Okay. slams into the ice.

Yep. Okay. When it slams into the ice, all of that energy, it's going to hit one of the water molecules or something like that. It's going to spray a bunch of neutrinos everywhere, right? Because all of that energy has got to go somewhere. So it's going to spray all these neutrinos. And then those neutrinos are going to bump into other water molecules and so on and so forth.

Pretty soon what's going to happen is there's going to be a charged particle, either a proton or an electron, that's going to move through the ice at faster than the speed of light in ice. Think about that for a second. I don't get it. The speed limit of the universe is the speed of light in a vacuum.

Right. But light moves slower in stuff. Light moves a little bit slower in air. It moves hella slower in water. It moves the slowest in diamond, which is what gives it its sparkle. Okay. In ice, it moves pretty slow.

Right? It's got the water has this crystalline structure, the slowing down the water. That scares me because if that's the case, then what you're about to say is even crazier. Yeah, so when this cosmic ray came in, it knocked out particles,

and those particles had enough energy to move through ice higher at a faster speed than light moves through ice. Does that make sense? Because the speed limit is light in a vacuum, not light in ice. Okay.

That's the speed limit. We're going to take a break because I think my brain is going to explore. It's incredible what we're using to find these things. So you know what happens when something like that happens? Yeah. You would know this.

You're into like you know UAPs and all that kind of stuff. What happens when an object moves faster than speed of sound? Oh, I mean, you're supposed to get massive. Like, you know, you get the sonic boom. Sonic boom. You get a sonic boom. Why? It's too much friction.

Yeah, yeah. Because the thing is moving through the air fast in the speed of sound. And so you're creating this like disturbance. Yep. But like the, what is sound? Sound is the rate at which the disturbance moves. moves through air. So you're piercing through the air faster than speed of sound. So you get this sonic boom. You get this cone shockwave. Oh, does the same. We're creating a light shock wave. A light boom. A light boom.

Yo. And that's what all these photo multiplier tubes, all these light detectors are catching. The light boom. Here comes the boom. Yeah. Wait. These light. So all of those tunnels are catching the light booms from these high energy particles as they knock out other particles and create this. That's actually cool. It's called churn cove radiation. Churnkov radiation after the Russian physicist who first proposed it and stuff like that and studied it. I'm glad you made that connection because that helped solidify it. Yeah, yeah. Because now I get... You've got a charged particle that's moving. So now

the electromagnetic field can't move faster than like the thingy. So you're getting this like shockwave in the electromagnetic field. And that's creating a bunch of light. And that's what you're seeing. Right. And so that's the way that Ice Cube, this giant observatory, observes cosmic rays. Right. Right. And what's the point here is is like we are are actively observing them. Yes. Yes. And we're actively observing them. And what we'd want to do is we want to find these really, really big ones. Okay. And what Ice Cube is done right now is it is it has put constraints on how many of the big ones of these really big ones can be protons and not like heavier stuff. Got it. Because that's important. So they're like a ceiling. Yeah. We want to figure out like how much of it is protons. How much of it. it as like helium nuclei, maybe nitrogen nuclei, maybe even higher gold nuclei, iron nuclei,

right? And so they put a constraint on it. They said that like less than 70% are protons, which means that 30% have to be these higher nuclei, which now that's crazy because 30% are like these bigger nuclei. How did they get that fast? It's like it's, it's, it's already crazy that the proton was going that fast. And then now we're saying there's there's other stuff that's bigger. Yeah. And it's that has the same energy. It's like, you know, so something is not right. Yeah. And it's it's, I mean, it's incredibly exciting, right?

And Ice Cube I think is expanding, or at least it was before the budget cuts. But they were supposed to do an Ice Cube 2.0. Oh, they're going to be. Which is like, like, you know, just bigger area. And so you get higher resolution. You get more resolution about where it came from. One of the cool things about Ice Cube is that it's actually more sensitive to stuff like okay here's the earth right ice cube is on the bottom yep it's more sensitive to

stuff coming from up here because then up here because here there's so much background there's all sorts of random shit but yeah only the big stuff is going all the way through yeah yeah so the earth acts like a filter and so what ice cube is really doing if you're on the north pole you're looking for stuff coming out of the ground isn't that kind of funny it is like you're you're looking for particles coming out of the ground, like from the earth, because the earth has done the work of filtering. And this is stuff coming from God knows how far away and how far away. Yeah, yeah. This is like outside our galaxy. This is like this is very much outside our galaxy. Is this facility because Antarctica has a lot of complicated geopolitical issues. Yeah. It's an international

facility. Okay. So this is kind of like a CERN on Antarctica. Makes sense. Yeah. I think I mean like Wisconsin-Madison, I think, was one of the first people to, like, create the... But, but, like, and they had, like, tour, like, not that many, but... And I think they partnered with other institutions as well, but now it's become this big effort, right? Because it's like, it's just, like, such a... It's such a nice thing. Like, the Earth has provided us with a giant ice sheet. Yeah, yeah, right.

Right, right. That basically doesn't move. Right, right. So we can utilize as a sort of substrate by which to run these experiments. And so this is... I thought that was such a cool story This is no this is really interesting Because what's so funny is this facility

Has so many conspiracy theories about it Really? You've heard about it in the NFL community Because people are like Ah No no no it's just That's where they It's just tunnels The saucers are under the ice

And it's there so that they can No I mean all of the data is publicly available I mean this is this is why We operate from first principles Yeah yeah No it's just a bunch of tunnels with light detectors. And we're trying to look at light booms.

I will say there was an interesting thing I'll ask you about this next week about someone talking about neutrino because so many people, let me ask you this question. There's not that many neutrino detectors. No.

No, there's a big one in Japan that's quite famous. There's one in, I think South Dakota and the Black Hills is quite famous. This one's a really good one. Yeah. Not that many though. This is the reason I bring this up is someone who's making this hypothetical of if you're, I'm always talking about the intelligence agency, if you're an intelligence agency and you're

looking for a communication channel that's extremely difficult to be able to intercept or hack. Yeah. Because there's not that many neutrino detectors, it is a medium by which if you can figure out how to make it a controlled medium, it's, it is a secure channel. Yeah. I'm not saying that's a thing, but a lot of people have talked about this is. No, no, I understand what you're saying. There was, there was a, like, there's a patent So one of my friends, completely unrelated to the UAP community, right? Like one of my friends sent me like this patent that somebody from Johns Hopkins had made about like neutrino communication where instead of using electricity they use neutrinos. I was extremely skeptical, right? Because neutrinos are like incredibly hard to interact.

I mean, we already, we just talked about why. Yeah. I mean it's like dude, like I kid you not in the early days in the early days of like neutrino observations. Yeah. There was like, there's a funny story of a, of a Ph.D. at Caltech who, like, wanted to, like, study neutrinos over his PhD. And he, he observed seven neutrinos in, like, six years. So he had names for every day.

So, like, in his defense, he's like, so then I observed Fred. And then it was like, it was that hard. Now we're getting a lot more because these observatories are getting bigger and bigger. But like, you know, like to communicate, you would need something this big. It's, yeah, it's. And the other thing about neutrino communication is the background is so insane, right? Right. Because like the sun, like we put our, we put our hands out right now.

The sun is putting millions of neutrinos. Kill us. Yeah. Through our hands right now. Right. So like it's, it's tough. I don't think it's as simple as like a telephone. No, I totally agree.

It's just, it is interesting having both feeds of information. Yeah. In terms of sort of talking, talking through this. So that's starting with you. So we went big, small, small. Now we're going to go back to big. And we're talking about our potential interstellar Google Maps. And so this is New Horizons, Images, enables first test.

First, number one, numeral one, of interstellar navigation. By looking at the shifting stars in photos from New Horizons probe, astronomers have calculated its position in the galaxy. A technique, again, we always talk about tools and techniques and frameworks because they're not single use. You can expand and sort of get an incredible amount of value from one key insight like CRISPR in the last episode. This technique can be useful for interstellar missions.

So if I'm trying to go to Alpha Centuri, Centuri, Centuri, I'm going to need navigation. Yes, that's right. You're going to need navigation and you can't rely on the earth. That's the key here. Alpha Centauri is four light years away. Okay, so if you're trying to beam back to Earth

being like, hey, where am I? You're going to have to wait eight years, right? Four years to get there, four years to get back. There's so many movies. Every space movie touches on, oh, we have this big ball like glows or we have this projector hologram and then you're going to use the star of the deep speed.

But navigation is fundamental to every space movie. Yeah. Because you got to know where you're going. Yeah. Because once you start going. Yeah. Once you start going, you got to. And you know what's incredibly romantic to me about this particular story is we're navigating the same way that the big explorers navigated.

Back during. Okay. Okay. European colonization. But like they, they use the stars where, you know. Don't fucking. I didn't think of that. Like I was saying it.

I was like, oh wait, no, no, no. Those are the, that's the bad people. Anyways,

but you know what I mean? Like, it's like Magellan when he went around the world. Well, he died halfway, but when his ship went around the world, he used the stars to navigate. Right.

And we're doing the same thing here at JPL and NASA. It makes logical sense. Yeah. And we, we've talked about this where distances. and frequency of different types of interaction quasars. We talked about the vibration stuff earlier. Allow for a, or the dimming rather, the great dimming,

allow for a consistent reference point in order for us to be able to do so. But this is interesting because I guess, and tell me, like, help me understand. They were using existing imagery. This is another important point. We put the stuff on Earth or in orbit, and we pointed out and we capture data.

Yeah. And it's not like Twitter or the news where that data has a week of value. And then after the first week, all the possible insight that could be derived out of that has already been figured out. No. It doesn't work that way. No, no, no. That data has timeless value. Right.

Right. There's always some messaging we can do to get some new insight, right? Right. And that's what these guys are doing. So basically, like, the New Horizon spacecraft is a spacecraft that was launched in 2006. It was the fastest thing. that humanity is ever thrown out there into the cosmos, okay? So Facts in the Gorge are one and two.

Yeah, yeah. This thing was just on a straight shot to Pluto. Actually, first it was going to Jupiter, and then it was going to use a gravity assist by Jupiter to go straight to Pluto. We watch space movies, so we know about the gravity assist. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you go around like that.

Yeah, you use like Newton's laws, basically, to, like, give yourself a boost. And this thing is currently moving at 10,000 kilometers an hour. It's past Pluto. So it took 10 years to get to Pluto. Just imagine how far Pluto is. That's great. It took these incredible shots of Pluto.

And then now it's just out in the outer solar system. On search for planet nine. Yeah, it's trying to find it. We'll see, right? So usually when stuff like this goes out, like the pioneer that's out into interstellar space, Voyager, which is out in interstellar space, now New Horizons,

usually in order to figure out where you are, You basically beam back to Earth. And JPL has this thing, JPL, which is NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab out in Pasadena, maintains something called a deep space network. Right. Okay. So there's like an antenna dish that's like near death valley in California. There's one in Madrid.

I forget where the third one is. But effectively it's at 120. It's like at a third of a circle around the earth. So there's always a dish pointing in every direction. You know what's seen? we should insert here is that scene from Independence Day where Jeff Goldblum is talking about line of sight to the president and he's saying the reason that they have this global communication network is because of a line of sight. But in this case, there's a line of sight to every part of the

cosmos. Yep. Right? So you've got like Earth with like three beams that are going out in opposite directions. And so what you do is you point to Earth and you say, okay, how long did it take to get there? I know which way the satellite is pointing to an extremely high degree of accuracy. So I can then within tens of meters resolve where I am. Which is pretty good if you're close. Yeah. But it gets increasingly not as good if you're far.

Yeah. That's kind of the point. If we're trying to do this for real. Right. We're trying to go to the stars. We can't be waiting. Like even New Horizons probably has to wait like several hours, right, to get that information.

Yeah. Right. If we're trying to navigate. Right. Not just like coast, which right now New Horizons is. coasting. But if we're trying to navigate, what we're going to have to do is update our location as we're going through our journey. Right. And so what these guys did was they looked at where. So as you're moving, right, we always talk about on this podcast how we're stuck on Earth. Yep. Well, these guys aren't. Right. These guys are not stuck on Earth. Yeah. They're moving through the cosmos. They're now in the interstellar medium away from the sun's influence. And so to them, the positions of the stars are slightly different. Right. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, because we're moving at some incredible speed as a system. Yeah. In a direction. Yeah, in some direction, but they're moving this way. And now the background looks different because they're from a different vantage point. And by looking at that vantage point and our vantage point and taking those pictures exactly, we can now resolve where they are, right? Because it can only look like that from one spot. And so we know where that one spot is. That makes total sense. And that's what this thing did.

Got it. Right. It is creating the next sort of, instead of just looking back at Earth as a single point of reference to, to understand your position in this larger vastness of space, we are now using both that reference point and the reference point. No, this one doesn't even use the Earth. It's just that. It just because we know. Yeah. And so we can back engineer back and calculate from just the snapshot of the sky, which has an orientative.

or like a frame that allows us to be like, oh, yeah, we're from there. Over there's the Hollywood sign, over there's Sunset Boulevard, over there's Venice Beach. Exactly, which means I must be here. Yeah, exactly.

And the camera on New Horizons was not meant for this kind of stuff. So the air bar is like pretty big. It's like an astronomical unit, like the orbit of the earth. Okay. So not great, but it's about the principle.

Yes. Right? Because it's a, yeah, Yeah, exactly. It's about the, this is the first time they used that principle. Yeah, so I think, I think it's a cool, cool story because they use Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359, which are very close stars. They figured out where they were in relation to the background, and then they did the back calculation. I mean, this is, and this is something we're going to use later, right? I was going to say, I'm going to extract.

When we go to the stars, this is how we do it. We upgrade the cameras, so we get higher resolution, which will then bring that, one, that error bar down. Yeah. Right. And when you get that error bar down, I mean, is there a theoretical situation here where on platform, like on the New Horizons 2.0, it has, it can get, this is, I'm getting in the ways, it can get some sort of asynchronous update from our mapping of the whole universe, right? Like happening in the background. But it can be capturing live imagery.

Yeah. And doing a calculation in real time because we're sort of feeding it this background out. algorithm in like yeah totally I mean I mean it could well how I would design it is how I would design is is I would have a computer that would already have the information yep on where the relevant stars are and then use that to Jen then just locally make the make the you can have you can have the LLM on your local machine yeah you don't need to go to the cloud although I don't want to hallucinate and this is an easy enough problem where I could just like brute force it fair Like I don't need a neural network here.

I think this is actually an important insight, though. I might need a neural network to actually identify the dots. But once I have identified the dots, right? Because identifying dots is really good, like, image recognition, in terms of like object recognition stuff. But like once I have the dots, then it's just physics, right? And geometry. This, I think, is really important, though, because it allows untethered interstellar navigation.

Yes, exactly. Like, that's like the... That's the key. That's the key. That's the key. Like, I don't want to depend on the earth, which might be, like, very far away at some point. Which also means you can imagine, right, that you have, you know, light sales, like a fleet of light sales. Yeah.

Or whatever that go out, that have their own onboard system like you described. But also because if you send a bunch of them directionally in like a close proximity, but not, you know, over there, they could also information share. Yeah. Right. In their local context. Oh, yeah. And then, like, do like, a hive mind. type of thing.

Right, right. Quorum sensing. Right. Yeah. The fleet learning, the same way that Tesla learns to do self-driving. I just, what I'm trying to do is like really hone in on the import of like, it's the technical insight and what it unlocks.

Yeah. Is a totally different, you know those games like Age of Empire or Civilizations? Yeah, dude. They have the technology. They have the technology tree. Yes. And the choices you make. unlock different paths.

That's exactly, dude, yes, you're on it. This is like why this kind of stuff, because now we have all of these 5,200 new doors to open. New doors to open, yeah. That if we had not made that kind of fundamental insight, which seems at this point because we don't invest money in these things and like we don't, we don't have wonder anymore and all that stuff. Yeah.

But like there is, it is an, it has interesting implications. Being able to have untethered navigation. Like, imagine having Google Maps online. Yeah, just offline, yeah. That can like update based on like cameras around your car. Like that's kind of cool. That's great. Yeah.

Been on my in my car with no service. Yeah. Several times. Yeah. But if like, but if you're, but if your computer just had the earth memorized. Right. Right.

And then like just looked around with all the cameras and been like, oh, I know that mountain. Yeah. And being like, oh, you're here. This is, that's, right.

I think that's incredible. Yeah. Um, I think it's, I think it's a really cool concept. Yeah. And it's like the obvious thing to do, but like somebody's got to do it.

And New Horizons is a, a great probe because the camera's still working. It's like in good condition. Voyager's like barely holding on. Like it launched in the 70s. It's like bro, just like I'll tell you I'm alive and that's it. Don't ask me to. And again, there is a delta between where we are now and like it being applied in. Yeah, yeah. But somebody's got to make that first leave. We have to start somewhere. Yeah. Someone, we all get fried chicken, chicken wings, burgers. Pee. pizza, someone had to do it first. Yeah.

And so that's why a lot of these stories are so important. We have reached the point in the show, Mystery Box. Mystery Box time. Krishna is going to bring forth a story of the day, of the week rather, that I know nothing about. Yeah. And this week, it's going to be about Wu-Woo. Ah, mind-body, woo-woo. I gave you that little preview, right?

Mind body woo-woo. As LA residents were big fans of the mind-body-woo. Yeah, mind-body woo-woo. This one's real. Okay. So this is a story that involves brain scans. Okay. Blood tests.

And Google's Oculus, the VR system. It sounds like a party I don't want to go to. Yeah. I think I've been to one of those parties. And it was not fun, no. But fundamentally, let me ask a question, okay? Okay.

When you get sick or when you get exposed to a pathogen, how does your body respond? There's an immune response. Yeah, I get sweaty. I got a fever. Yeah, you got a fever. Your immune system goes up. Your first responders in the immune system are like, okay, I'm going to start attacking whoever is coming in, right? What if you just thought that you were getting sick?

Wait a minute. Okay. I have this is funny Not even what if you just thought that you were getting sick What if you just saw a sick person near you Okay It turns out the body Has the same response

The immune system Starts working Even if you see a sick person near you That's what's crazy This makes so much sense. Really? Yes.

I wanted, this is again, mystery box. So. Okay, go on. So my wife and I, I tell her this all the time. Yeah. When I fly, I've gotten sick almost every time I've flown in the last six to 12 months, which is brand new for me. And in one of the recent times I flew out, I told her, I was like, I'm just going to, I'm not getting sick. Yeah.

And I'm like, I'm just going to think. I'm not going to get sick and I won't get sick. Okay. And it has worked. And it has worked. Since I've started saying that. But this idea of me making eye contact with someone with the sniffles. And then your immune system responding?

The like background system being like, uh, yeah, that's what this is. That's, that makes, but it makes sense though. That's what this is. I mean, it kind of makes sense. It's a survival mechanism. Yeah, yeah, no, that's exactly what the authors of this paper are arguing. But to me, no, to me, what's incredible is like, your nervous system is like prying your immune system.

You know what I mean? Like it's this like like like this connection between mind and body that's like so real. So let me let me describe to you before we get into it. Okay. Let me describe to you what the experiment was. Yes. And then how they how they concluded all this stuff because it's in it's pretty interesting. Okay.

So they've got these volunteers. Okay. Split them up into two groups. Okay First group You had these volunteers put on VR headsets Okay These are virtual reality

Because okay You know ethically If you want to do this kind of experiment You can't like literally expose people To sick people All right like all right Okay So let's get past that

What do you do? You put on the Google's Oculus Okay And you got one group That has like Facebooks like people would like Rashes and like sniffles And like

they approach in this virtual reality world, okay? And the other group just has like normal people approach, okay? And then there's a third group that gets flu shots, okay? So the first two groups, the Oculus group that gets the rashes and the coughs, they're being exposed to visible visual stimuli of sick people. The second group in the Oculus cohort, they get exposed to normal people. And then the third group get exposed to real pathogens, right? because a flu shot is like some kind of like inoc like sort of dead virus but it's still a virus and it's going to create an immune response that's the whole point of a vaccine okay so what they found was that the group that had the

oculus like VR experience with the rashes and the coughs had the same kind of immune response as the people who had the vaccine get the F out of here that's not that's not all okay so they went a little bit further and they actually did EEG, which is electroencephalography, like on their brains, where you attach a bunch of electrodes to the skull to try to see, like, what brain areas are active. They also did MRI imaging on the brain to see which brain areas became active during that time. And the part of the brain that became active was the frontal and the parietal cortex, like up here, which has to do with something called the, it's like a preemptive response. It's the part of the body that, like, deals with the stuff that is needed.

you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like this sense of, like, self and, like, personal space. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Your little aura bubble. Yes, yes, your aura bubble. It activated the peripersonal space system.

Okay? So now you've got this, like, mechanistic understanding, right? Where it's like, okay, I see sick people. The part of my brain that deals with, like, my body and, like, the immediate surroundings of my body are being triggered. And then that trigger. triggers, yeah, and that triggers the lymphatic system and the immune system to then release these things called ILCs, which are innate lymphoid cells, which are like the first responders. Yeah, right? So then when you did the blood tests on the patients, on the on the volunteers, you get like the same level of these ILCs that people with like it's it's so weird.

This is like like it's like a conscious like a conscious observation. like an immune response. The way I was thinking about in my head is like the immune system like it has akin to giving a computer computer vision, right? Yeah. It's like giving the immune system access. Yeah. I mean it always had this but this is the first time we measured it. Right. Like it it can and it's like at some point it's like yeah, of course the brain, of course there's like there's like some subconscious pathway right. Sure. That is going to see that and then and then trigger the immune system. Yeah. Right? Just like, how like things are triggered by stress and things are triggered by but it's it's it's a very i like

the way that they did the experiment i was literally right with the vr and with the i think that's the interesting thing it's like even in this manufactured non because you can argue like if it's human to human it's real life right there is something that is subtly different yeah about like the real world interaction versus an abstraction via the VR headset What's almost most fascinating is that it still activates. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Like, obviously they knew they were in Oculus. Right. Right. Like they were consciously aware that they're in a VR system. But like still, the subconscious part of the pathway was like, uh, that person's got a rash. Like, you know, like whatever neural network is working in the background, identifying like, that's like sick people. You know when people say I feel like I'm getting. get that feeling yeah that they feel like they know they're about to get sick it's

kind of like this interact yeah yeah and so yeah and yeah and like yeah wait wait that's actually really really cool yeah the experimental design is interesting because it sort of creates one interesting degree of separation like we just talked about and the fact that the system still has similar activation levels yeah yeah with a with the digital I mean there's there's there's so many like weird implications of that because you could again you're probably There's a lot of people who've had concerns about like digital companions and VR and its ability to affect your like emotional Yeah, but this is this is going even beyond that. It's not even it's like it's like the subconscious immune system thing that I didn't even know I could control but like visible stimuli is not controlling it which sort of brings up this like issue of like okay. So that means right like all of our forms of visual consumption. regardless of whether it's real life or digital.

Yeah. Is is having this at least in this context. Wow, I didn't even think about that. You know what I'm saying? Like that implications of that are actually kind of crazy. That is kind of crazy. Shit. Yeah.

Like which is why it's interesting they did VR with it for ethical reasons. Yeah. No, but no, you're right. It's like where does that stop? Yeah, it's like the content that I consume digitally. How much is that? shaping like a subconscious. Yes.

Part of me like my body. Yes. More than my mind at this point, right? You would maybe make the argument that with VR because it more closely mimics your normal perception. Yeah. I mean, that's the point. That probably has a higher. Yeah.

Yeah. Whatever. Yes, yes. Yes. But it's not a steep cutoff, right? There's going to be some. Yeah. And so the question is what is the delta between the VR context versus the, anyway.

I didn't even think about that, dude. This is why we love mystery box. That's crazy. What a great story, dude. Yeah, I thought it was. I saw this. I was like, oh, dude, Lester's going to love this. I, oh, my God, I hate being sick.

It's the worst thing ever. Yeah. However, it is good to know, you know, don't look at the sick people. Yeah, yeah, just don't look at them, dude. It's like that, what is that? It's not like there's those. Well, but then your immune system won't get primed and then maybe you will actually get sick. So this is, I don't even know.

Yeah. Chicken an egg. Damned if you do. Damn if you do. With that, we are going to wrap up this week's episode of From First Principles. I am your host again, Lester Nare, joined by my co-host and the smartest person I know, as well as our resident PhD, Christian Shattery. You need to get more friends, mate.

We'll see you guys next week. Peace.