Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Barbara Ryden: A Teacher's Teacher ​(#206)

Episode Date: January 11, 2022

Professor Barbara Ryden has been a member of the Ohio State University faculty since 1992, Prof. Ryden studies the formation, alignment, and shapes of galaxies, and the large-scale structure of the universe, and cosmology, including tests for dark energy, dark matter, and the properties of the primordial density fluctuations. She is internationally known for her textbook Introduction to Cosmology, which won the first Chambliss Astronomical Writing Award in 2006 from the American Astronomical Society, and is now in its second edition, and she co-authored Foundations of Astrophysics with Prof. Bradley Peterson, a beginning-level text in astrophysics for astronomy majors. She is currently editor in chief of the Ohio State Astrophysics Series, a series of graduate-level textbooks now in contract with Cambridge University Press. The first two volumes will be Interstellar & Intergalactic Medium by Prof. Ryden and Prof. Richard Pogge (2021) and Stellar Structure & Evolution by Prof. Marc Pinsonneault and Prof. Ryden (2022). Please join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php  Please contact [e-mail] to learn more about sponsoring Into the Impossible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I like to say that cosmologists sort of like playing chicken with each other. I do Big Bang nucleosynthesis. I talk about what the universe was like when it was only three minutes old. I talk about bariogenesis. I know what the universe was like when it was one second old. And so everybody says, oh, I can go back further in time than you. Observational astronomy at millimeter wavelengths. It does tend to obsess about what we can see, what we can measure.

And from measurements and observations, what can we deduce about what the early universe is like? And I think the section in my textbook about inflation sort of takes that viewpoint. Hello and welcome to another thrilling episode of The Into the Impossible podcast featuring a renowned astronomer, Barbara Ryden, who is a teacher, an educator, a scientist, an astrophysicist, and a professor at the Ohio State University. Her research considers the formation, shape, and structure of galaxies, and she's written numerous books, but the reason that I wanted to interview her is that I've been teaching a cosmology course for advanced undergraduates at UC San Diego since 2006. I can't believe it. My 16th year teaching this class, and by far, the only book I've ever used, despite all the other options, is Barbara's textbook. And she's a little bit unusual in that there aren't so many. textbooks written by women in astronomy or in physics. And so I think, and I claim, and I don't think I was refuted by Barbara, even that this was, is perhaps the most widely read book written by a female physicist, astrophysicist, in her case, that we use as a textbook. And I think that's quite an accomplishment. It's not only, you know, because she's a woman, but because she's such a

phenomenal writer. She's hilarious. She is mesmerizingly intellectual, and she has this mercurial, delightful way of looking at the universe, which I try to convey to my students, and they love her book, and they love her work, and I just thought it would be a treat. So I reached out to her on Facebook, and she responded, and now here she is on the show. Now, this was recorded right after the end of spring semester 2021. And so it's taken me a while to get through to process all the other episodes in the queue. But now that I have, it's such a delight to review it and to re-encounter it. So I think it's really amazing to think about how much she's accomplished and what her career has led to.

I'll just give a short list of her accomplishments or honoraria and so forth. She studied physics at Northwestern. She went to Princeton or she was a PhD student for working with Dr. James Gunn, is a renowned scientist, a recent recipient of the Kyoto Prize here in San Diego, by the way. She was a research fellow at Harvard's Center for Astrophysics and also at CEDA, the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics. She's been at Ohio State since 1992, looking at Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which she and Jim Gunn and others helped to pioneer. year. She won the 1994 National Science Foundation Young Investigators Award, most prestigious award for young faculty that the NSF gives out. She won the Chambliss Astronomy

Writing Award. She's elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science as well in 2016. And like you'll hear, she's just a delight to talk to, to learn from. And I find it just overwhelmingly gratifying that such intellects will grace me, by coming on the podcast. So for now, I want you to sit back, relax, and come along into the impossible with Professor Barbara Wright. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, hell.

Get started today. We're going to kick off this conversation with one of my heroes, my favorite authors. This is Barbara Ryden, Professor Ohio State University, joining. us all the way from the great state, the great Buckeye state. She is an American astrophysicist, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a renowned teacher and educator, and work with a cobbly prize winner last year, Jim Gunn, who won the Cobley Prize, and I was honored to kind of present his award or help present his award at the Covley ceremonies that were delayed and then postponed and then regurgitated. But anyway, Barbara,

how are you doing today? How's your cat? I'm doing fine. My cat, Mrs. Chippy. Hello. Of course, we have to highlight Mrs. Chippy here. Wow. Comes and jumps on my lap whenever she hears me talking to the laptop. So cats are useful to cosmologists as well as to quantum physicists. But no cats will be harmed during the filming of this episode.

Barbara, you're one of my favorite authors. And your book, perhaps, is the book that I've bought the most with my hard-earned money as a state university employee, more than any other person. I'm keeping your cat in charm school. I want to thank you for the books and everything you've done. You have a new book, which you have there, which I have not yet read, but I will. You're also the author of, in addition to introduction to cosmology, now in its second edition, your author of Foundations of Astrophysics, and your new book is called Interstellar and Intergalactic Medium, published by Cambridge University Press, a renowned institution as well. So, Barbara, when I have authors on my podcast, the very first thing I do is I ask them, you know, they say don't judge a book by its cover, Barbara, but what else are you going to judge it on? I mean, besides your reputation, if you've written a book before. So I want to ask you, what is the impetus for the new cover? What was the impetus for the old covers? And by the way, this is like the square root of the number of copies I have. I've got many, many more elsewhere.

So what was the inspiration for the graphics and the cover of both editions? Well, the first edition of Introduction to Cosmology was the very first book that I wrote, putting to one side my PhD dissertation, which, as you know, is kind of a quasi book. But I knew nothing about nothing. Fortunately, Pearson, the publisher of the book, had a great deal of experience. and found this really great cover illustrator. We knew a bit about science. And so on the first edition, you hold up the picture,

you see, it's actually a representation of the expansion of the universe. The big bang is down near the bottom. So you started with the big bag. Every universe starts to expand. Some universes then crunched down again in the big crunch. Some of them keep expanding at a constant right. And the one that flares out. That's an accelerating.

universe. So it's very graphically interesting, and I believe the cover for the first edition actually won some kind of book design award. So really got lucky with the first edition. And the book, yeah, the book did win the Chambliss Astronomical Writing Award, among many other honors and accolades well-deserved. Tell us about the second edition's cover. Well, the second edition, it has to look enough like the first edition that people recognize it. So, so as the title on top, author's name on bottom, the black background. But this time we wanted a punch of color.

So the color image is actually a simulation of the universe. I forget which one, one of the illustrious simulations, I think. It's all on the back cover of course, upperly credited. Yes. But this was number one, to look pretty, nice splash of color. And secondly, to emphasize one of the advances of the second edition, it has more about structure formation, more about the formation of clusters of galaxies and the filaments of the cosmic web, as you see nicely, and that's a nice, brightly colored illustration on front.

Yes, and I mentioned just before we started recording that I am in the office once occupied by the late great Jeffrey Burbage, and his wife, Margaret, was a good friend, also unfortunately no longer with us. One of the things I inherited when I became the office holder is I inherited some of Margaret's plates used from Saratololo, and I treasure these so much. And I wanted to kind of take us back to something

that's not covered in introduction to cosmology, and those are alternative cosmological models which I'm not expecting that you should teach, but I want to get your perspective on those kinds of models. Obviously, Margaret was one of the most eminent astronomers of all time, and she was kind of tenuously affiliated with the quasi-steady state models. But what was your take? Why do people like past guest on my podcast, Giant Narla Kar, a student of Fred Hoyles,

why do you think it's still so resilient, these kind of alternatives to cause the Big Bang model, and certainly inflation. Are those still so resilient in your opinion? Well, in my opinion, for what it's worth, some of it is probably historical. I like pointing out to my students that as recently as the year in 1963, Malcolm Longer, another very eminent cosmologist,

was a graduate student and heard from his advisor, a sentence that he never forgot. in 1963 he was told there are only two and a half facts in cosmology. Two and a half facts. And this is less than 60 years ago. So in 1963, adopting a steady state or quasi-study-study-state model for the universe, that was entirely in an agreement with the two and a half facts that known.

The two-and-a-half facts, by the way, where the night sky is dark, the so-called Olbers paradox. which of course has been known for a long time. Act number two, galaxies show a red shift proportional to their distance. And the half a fact was in the early 1960s, radio surveys of the universe gone far enough out in space, far enough back in time, so that people were starting to believe that, oh, yeah, the population of galaxies has changed significantly with time.

In the past, there were a lot more active galaxies, radio galaxies, quasars than there are now. So kind of hinting that things were different in the past than they are now. And the discovery of the cosmic microwave backgrounds, the mid-1960s by Penzius and Wilson, was really what tipped people towards the hot Big Bang model,

the idea that's a finite but fairly long time in the past, the universe was very much denser and hotter than it is now. the background radiation has been cooling off as the universe expands. Yeah, of course that is a big topic of research that I study, but I think it's still interesting that even afterwards, even after the discovery of the micro-ray background, even after the Nobel Prize was awarded to Penzias and Wilson,

there were still kind of some holdouts and even there was attempts to kind of make the interstellar medium or the intergalactic medium do the heavy lifting of thermalizing starlight energy, and what was it like, you know, you were around Princeton, you know, after that period, but what was it like in that period in the aftermath of kind of the Princeton team getting scooped by Bob Dickie, getting scooped by Penzias and Wilson and my advisor's advisor, David Wilkinson, do you recall that milieu when you were a graduate student at Princeton? And what was your reaction when you, you know, kind of when, during the kind of solidification

of what we now in your book call the benchmark model? Make every get-together chill. This Memorial Day, get up to an extra $1,000 off select top brand appliances like LG. Plus, get free delivery at the Home Depot. Tackle pool towels and camp laundry with a large capacity washer. And host and style with the fridge-serving craft ice, mini-craft ice, cube ice, and crushed ice. Shop appliance savings now through June 3rd at the Home Depot. Offer valid May 14th through June 3rd, US-only.

Free delivery on appliance purchases of $998 or more. See Store Online for detail. Well, it's interesting as a graduate student, I was at Princeton and had Jim T. Bowles as one of my professors. So really tied into the kind of the theoretical Princetonian side. But also, one observational project I did as a graduate student, I went out to Bell Labs and actually worked with Tony Stark. Tony Stark, the radio is fronter, not Tony Stark Iron Man, and observed millimeter emission from carbon monoxide in the Andromeda Galaxy. However, when I was there, Bob Wilson, of Penzius and Wilson, was still working there. And of course, my eyes went like saucers. You have to understand, I was a very naive graduate student. So really in awe of everything that was going on. I thought, oh, wow, Nobel Prize winner. He's probably seven feet tall and wears a laurel wreath every day. And then I met him.

And this average-sized guy at the time was balding a little on top. And when I remember most clearly, he came to the group lunch meeting carrying his lunch in a little brown paper bag. And then I found that very cheering. If you're a Nobel Prize winner, you're not this awe-inspiring person in all ways. most ways you're just a person. Right. Yeah, they put their pants on one leg at a time. And they're like the rest of us.

Anyway, Bob Wilson was such a nice guy. And so encouraging that, you know, I didn't resent him for having, you know, scoop the group at Princeton in the physics department there. And I want to talk about your, as we say, world line in astronomy and research. So what was you? your thesis on in Princeton and where did you go after that and how'd you end up at OSU as a

buck-eye? Okay. My thesis at Princeton was with Jim Gunn, Tamle-I prize winner, and it was on galaxy formation and universe dominated with cold, dark matter. So at the time, cold dark matter, kind of a new idea and people realize that, oh, yeah, the universe early on will be lumpy, not entirely homogeneous, and the dense lumps will collapse. And what my thesis mostly focused on is as they collapse, they feel a torque due to tides from neighboring collapsing objects, so they get spun up. So basically my thesis was, is the spin-up rates of these collapsing objects comparable to the observed spin of galaxies? The basic answer was sort of if you wave your hands around a lot, the total amount of angular momentum was correct. However, the distribution of angular momentum wasn't what the simplest theory.

predicted. You had to have transfer of angular momentum. I think it was from the outer regions, the interregions, or vice versa. It's been a long time since my dissertation. But that was an interesting experience because Jim Gunn, as you know, both this amazing theorist and this amazing observer. And while I was working on my dissertation, he was observing a lot at Palomar. Yes. California, opposite coast from New Jersey. And so he was observing

distant galaxies. He needed dark time. So I called him my wear advisor, as in werewolf, because I only saw him when the moon was full. During New Moon, he was out in California, observing

100-inch at Mount Pallamar. So, you know, he would come back at full moon and look at what I had done. Yeah, that's interesting, but this means that you should probably do X. And if X turns out to be Y, then you can go on to Z. And I said, oh, wow, gosh, I hadn't done of that. And so I would work busily away at his suggestions,

and then I would come to the end of his suggestions, and I would have no idea what to do next. So I would fall into this deep depression, which, of course, would be lifted whenever Jim Gunn returned from California. So it was kind of this extreme mood swing with a period of one sonatic month. I mean, all graduate students I know go to these ups and downs, but mine was just totally correlated with the phases of the moon.

Anyway, having Jim Gunn as your thesis advisor, it's a wonderful thing, because you get the world's best letters of recommendation. And once I got my PhD, I went to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge. I was on the Smithsonian side. It really doesn't matter which side you're on, Harvard or Smithsonian. It's all the same. They're all tossed into the same bin.

The only difference is if you're a Harvard postdoc, you get to wear the Harvard Halo. That's right. When I was there, I started doing some different things. Always a good thing to do in your postdoc. I worked with Bill Press talking about late-time phase transitions, which is a kind of a slightly wonky way of making large-scale structures, which, as it turns out, didn't work very well at making large-scale structures, but it was a very interesting mathematical problem.

Anyway, three years at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, then I got another postdoc at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics. I'm obliged to be bilingual there. But, of course, everybody calls it CEDA, from its acronym. That was an interesting place to be, because basically it was a large number of postdocs and a few professors. I think it's been called the inmates running the asylum. When you put a lot of postdocs together in one place, and they don't have teaching duties,

it does become very intellectually lively. Two years there, Canada wanted to toss me out. So I realized at that point in my career. Wow, if Anna wants to toss you out, that's saying something. I call them the 51st state. They're so nice spots. Even me, they only wanted as a postdoc. I applied for jobs everywhere.

Did some interviews. And it turns out of the places I interviewed, I kind of liked Ohio States the best. And as it turns out, they made me a job offer. So basic reason why I'm at the Ohio State University is they offered me a job. It's a job at a place that I thought was going places. Yeah. They did a lot of faculty hire at,

about the same time I was hired, which made a nice strong cohort. Of course, it now means the group of people that was hired in the 1990s is kind of the thing passing through the python. We're all starting to approach retirement age over the next decade. So there's going to be a lot of turnover soon. Yes. And, you know, when I think about Ohio, first of all, I do recognize that Ohio State is the second best university in Ohio after my alma mom. or Case Western Reserve, go Spartans. I can't deny doing that at least once. But I learned a tremendous amount there.

This book wasn't around when I was a student. I actually never took a cosmology class. I actually never took a cosmology class. Are you serious? I never took a cosmology class as an undergraduates. Me neither. There was a graduate course, you know, cosmology and galaxies and so a lot of stuff thrown together.

So, the cosmology portion of that course was taught by Rich Gots, one of the world's great eccentrics. Yes, yes. And it's proof that... And in the world of astronomers saying somebody's a 3-Sigma eccentric, that's really saying something. I think of you as normal in the best possible sense of the world. But of course, you know, every cosmologist has to be somewhat quirky, at least to get into this field, which is, you know, as you say, requires us to stay up late and wake up at the crack of, or go to bed at the crack of dawn. When we, whenever I teach this wonderful book, I'm always, you know, kind of torn. Do I teach that there are other possible values for the curvature of the universe?

In other words, there are three different possibilities and spatial curvature, and you go through this in tender detail, ranging from flat to, positively curved like a sphere negatively curved like a Pringles chip. But we now know, Barbara, don't we now know that the universe is flat with a with a precision of less than half a percent? So why teach the controversy? Why don't we just keep it, you know, just teach only the flat universe. That's the dilemma I go through every year. Of course, I teach everything in your book, verbatim, but tell me, should I struggle with this? Should I feel guilty about teaching them things that we know aren't, aren't correct? On the one hand, if you're doing all the mathematics and writing things down, yes, go ahead and

assume the universe is flat. It's flat to within a half a percent, and it makes the math so much easier. On the other hand, in ancient Egypt, people assume the earth was flat because the part of it they could see regionally around Egypt. it's pretty gosh darn flat. So we can only see a finite portion of the universe because there's been a finite time elapsed since the Big Bang. So it's possible that the portion of the universe

that we can see with our telescopes is close to flat, but if you could look on much larger scales, it could be positively or negatively curved. So you can approach this from, of course, practical viewpoint, yeah, we're only interested in what we can see. It's so close to flat, then we might as well, might as well say that. It's perfectly flat. Flater than Kansas. Flatter than a pancake in Kansas, flat, flat, flat. From a broader, you might say a more philosophical viewpoint, you know, the idea that it could be positively curved on very large scales and have a

finite volume, I think is appealing to a lot of people, including me. Yeah. I don't know about you, but infinity gives me the hebi-geebies. Explain, explain what that means. The hebe-gibis? You've never had the hebe-jee-geeys? I do, but I want to explain, why does the infinite flatness of the universe of the infinitesimal curvature give you those prescriptive hebe-jibes?

Well, infinity in general, if you're not a mathematician, it's hard to grasp. And there's the idea of, The universe is expanding homogeneously and isotropically on all scales. Now, if it is infinitely large, then some finite time in the past, yeah, any two points were very much closer to each other in the past than they are now, but, you know, infinity divided by a large number, as long as it's finite is still infinity.

So, yeah. So if the universe is finite but very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very big, then you divide it by a large number and you get a small number. I'm not being very coherent, but that's what tends to happen to me when I start talking about infinity. And I always point out that we have no examples of anything infinite in the physical world. We have notions of infinity that a human brain can contemplate, even a computer, like the simulations on the cover of the second edition, they have to make approximations as to what infinity is.

We have no example, kind of like Zeno's paradox, whenever I talk about it. You know, you can't get there from here because you have to go halfway and then halfway to their quarter way, eighth way, et cetera, so you never get to exactly where you're going, according to Zeno. But in an infinity, imagine something infinitely dense, infinitely hot. How does it transition? How does it gracefully taper from something infinite to something less than. infinite that's not infinite so my kids always say i love you infinity and i say you should said infinity squared infinity cubed infinity anyway it doesn't matter but half of infinity still have

and my one of my kids is a wise wise but and he says you know i love you half of infinity but you're right it is kind of paradoxical and it seems that computers can't grasp infinity only human beings can and yet we toss it around like singularities infinite density in a black hole or at the big bang we just kind of play around with it willy nilly and it gives me the heb-gibis to be so willy-nilly. Yes. I think he summed it up perfectly. One of my favorite

undergraduate professors, I was an undergraduate at Northwestern University, we'd say, okay, we take these two charged particles and we move them so they're infinitely far apart. Then we'd stop to explain. That's not real infinity. That's physicist infinity.

Exactly. And he described physicist's infinity as any distance so large that if you doubled it, it would not make a messer measurable difference to anything that you can measure for that system. Right. Exactly.

So you can say the inverse is perfectly flat or has an infinitely large radius of curvature. That really means the radius of curvature is so big, we can't measure it. Yes. And we just make these approximations as if we can really comprehend what we're saying. And then we tell the computer, just divide by the largest. number that you have, but it doesn't matter that's pitiful and indifferent to how big it is. But that kind of brings up one of the questions that I have, and you talk about in the end of the book, and maybe this dovetails into our initial discussion of alternative cosmologies, and that's

about inflation. So you know that there are many different, you know, sorts of concepts for how the universe could have began that don't involve inflation. Inflation is kind of the third rail in some circles of politics, even though it does so many things spectacularly well, there are people like Nobel laureate Sir Roger Penrose or Paul Steinhart, Neil Turrock, Anna EGis, and others who claim, well, not so fast. Maybe there are other models of how cosmogenesis took place. I'm always been curious. Of course, you present in the standard context in a very delightful way, which I'm reproducing

and I'm actually distilling into a separate video that I reference you in, kind of a crash course and inflation derived from my teaching of your book. But what do you make of these alternatives to cosmogenesis? Is that outside the scope of what cosmology is to you? Cosmogenesis. Wow, that's a big word. I don't think I've ever said the word cosmogenesis before. Because, well, because you've read my book so many times,

you realize that it starts out near and now, and then goes back in time. I like to say that cosmologists sort of like playing chicken with each other. Oh, I do Big Bang nucleosynthesis. I talk about what the universe was like when it was only three minutes old. I talk about variegensis. I know what the universe was like when it was one second old. And so everybody says, oh, I can go back further in time than you.

Now, I'm an astronomer. I mean, that observational astronomy at millimeter wavelengths. So, you tend to obsess about what we, can see, what we can measure, and from measurements and observations, what can we deduce about what the early universe is like? And I think the section in my textbook about inflation sort of takes that viewpoint. We look at the universe today. It is, as we can see, very close to flats or Euclidean.

We extrapolate it back in time and you go to say, oh gosh, before dark energy or the cosmological constant or whatever you want to call it, it's over. The density parameter omega, measuring the difference of the curvature from perfect flatness, oh gosh, the universe has become less flat with time as it goes on. Therefore, if it's so close to flat today, at the time of Big Bang nucleosynthesis, for instance, it must have been incredibly impossibly close to flat. So how do you explain extrapolating back to big bag nucleosynthesis, three minutes old, the universe we understood pretty well. How could we explain?

So blinkety, blink, blank, blank, so very close to flat. And the general concept of inflation, there was this period when the universe was temporarily undergoing excess. accelerating expansion, the general concept is very good explaining why the universe is flat. And also, by inflating fluctuations on the quantum scale, explains why it's not perfectly flat. That is, explains why the density is perfectly uniform. So it's a good example of killing two birds with one stone. However, there are, as you mentioned, other ideas about cosmogenesis. that could explain it. So the question, in my opinion, everything I'm saying that is my opinion.

Right, of course. You're not speaking on behalf of big cosmology now. Yeah, I'm in their pocket. They just pay me huge sums of my party line. So you have two hypotheses. They both explain what you can see about it as well. So you need some sort of test between them. You know, like the famous 1919 solar eclipse, Newton, Newton, Newtonian physics predicts one value for gravitational lensing. Einstein's newfangled theory of general relativity predicts a different value for gravitational lensing. You go out and you measure things, and thus you support one theory rather than the other. And when you look at the history of cosmology, of course, we live in a different age where there's things like social media and you're so productive because you're not very often on social media.

Although I did contact you via a social media. But I'm always thinking about these alternative models in the context of imagining a young James Clerk Maxwell. And he's toiling away and it's coming up with these beautiful field theories. He's unifying electricity and magnetism. And his equations are, of course, flawless and still hold to this day in various guises. But then he has to have this mechanical interpretation. How does the electromagnetic wave wave and how does it propagate? Through what does it propagate?

And so he constitutes this kind of mechanistic gear and pulley and sort of vortis system. And can you imagine Facebook back then, Barbara? you know, like, you know, top physicist claims that, you know, microgears are responsible for, you know, maybe they would have believed it. Maybe that would have been better. But certainly it could have nowadays, would have, if Twitter existed, would have cast a lot of doubt on it. I want to ask you, when you look at, you know, novel ideas now versus kind of this, you know, big cosmology we joke about, do you think that social media or, you know, just the rapid rise of the internet channels like this one, YouTube channel, do you think that that's a good thing? Is it, is it, is it,

maybe squelching nascent theories before they have a chance to be tested or properly fleshed out. As you know, as you talk about in the book, you know, Einstein had ideas back in 1914 about GR, but a lot of those were incorrect numerically and so forth, and it took until the, you know, 1919 eclipse until they were verified, so to speak. I'd ask you, do you think that, like, the presence of social media and instant gratification that we need to, like, get your position right now, Is that squashing new, potentially generative ideas in cosmology, or is it not really a big deal? Well, sure that is, I don't know. As you mentioned, I'm not a big part of the Twitter sphere.

And I guess you could argue both ways. You have social media. You have this new outlets. You don't have to become a member of an academy or submits to. one of the established journals. On the other hand, you just send off a random tweet, and it's really just goes tweeting past like a little bird. So I suppose you could say it's too early to tell.

How about that for a waffle statement? So recently I've had on a lot of astrophysicist friends of ours, Seth Shostack. I had Jill Tarter on earlier, actually late last year. And there's a lot of resurgence and interest into whether or not extraterrestrial intelligence exists. And as you know, on August 15, 1977, at the Ohio State University's Big Ear Radio Telescope, there was detected the wow signal. I want to ask you, do you think that there are extraterrestrial intelligence civilizations out in the

universe? Do you think that there aren't? Do you think there's life? Let me start with that. Do you think there's life elsewhere in the cosmos, Barbara? Yes. But I say that confidently because, who can disprove it? Hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, maybe a trillion galaxies within that finite portion of the universe that we can see. It would be astonishing if there weren't another planet out there with life. However, you know, if there exists, you know, if there exists, for instance, a single planet covered with slime mold in the Andromeda galaxy, two and a half billion light years away. How would that affect you?

How would you feel about that emotionally? Would you say, hooray, we're not alone in the universe, there exists slime mold billions of light years away, millions of light years away? Or would you say, yeah, okay. We live in a universe with lots of unusual stuff. So, so many planets surround so many stars out there, you're going to find a lot of stuff, or you would find a lot of stuff if you could examine every planet in the galaxy in detail

and every planet and every other galaxy. And when we look out in the universe, I also feel that you're right. People say, oh, it would be a magnificent day. You know, we discover life on, you know, some planet Proximus Century B or something like that. And I say, yeah, it depends, as you say, on what kind of life it is. If it's a slime mold and it produces some kind of aerobic, you know, excrement like our bacteriological four ancestors did many, many billions of years ago, perhaps, in the great oxidation event, would we feel a kinship towards them because of their existence? I don't think so, because I think,

you know, you can go right up north to Lake Erie and scoop a cup of water and there'll be some kind of life that's living there, even in extremophilic conditions like Jill Tarter is popularized. And I don't think people say, wow, we have this kinship with the universe because of this existence of single-celled organisms. So I think it might be short-lived. I think people would say, wow, unless it is like communicating and then you have to wonder, are they technological, what can they teach us, do they want to eat us? But anyway, I think it's fascinating to discuss these topics, and it's great to get your opinion. And for some reason, it's in the news a lot. So I couldn't resist, you know, I'm pinging you about that. But now, because we're reaching the end,

and now I'm going to have to go and teach a graduate class, but now I don't use this book for that. I want to first point out that I think, and tell me if I'm wrong, Barbara, that this book is such a wonderful book. And the fact that you are a woman and that you wrote it, I think is important because I don't know of any other books that we use in curricula for physics majors that are written by women that's in a standard, you know, this is used by millions of, you know, people or has been used by hundreds of thousands of, do you know of any other book written? Say that again? Tens of thousands.

Tens of thousands. Well, the multiverse is true. There could be millions. It's such a wonderful book. It doesn't matter, you know, to be. But do you know of any other, you know, books that have of such scholarship that are written and to use this textbook so widely, widely as your book is? Well, let me see.

Dive down to stack of textbooks here. My current book, the one that I'm working on now, is on Stellar Structure with Mark Pinsano. And let's see. Introduction to Stellar Structure and Evolution. Danielic, excellent book, female author. Don't worry, I'm coming back out. It's okay.

Maybe your cat can come back up and fill in. Introduction to stellar astrophysics, Erica Boenvi-10s. Very. Very. A few volumes of that. One of the standard works in the field. So, on the one hand, astronomy does have this history of female astronomers. Up until recently, a small minority of astronomers, but they've always been there.

And, well, on the one hand, I think that's. having female textbook writers and female observers and female theorists, females, permeating every form of astronomy is a good thing. And, well, I don't know. If somebody has introduction to cosmology assigned to them in the course, and they find out it's written by somebody named Barbara, and they know enough about Western naming, and they tend to realize that Barbara is a woman's name.

What's their mother's name in my case? Ah, excellent name. It's not going to be a big thing, but many, many small things. Yeah. Big things. Yeah, I mean, UC San Diego, you may not know, but it was the home of Maria Geppert-Mayer, who was the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize. And she was the last female winner of the Nobel Prize until three years ago.

I went down a Strickland one. and now Andrea Gez is one. So the number of women have doubled, but we'd have to give away three Nobel prizes to women every year for the next 100 years to kind of reach par parity between men and women. But I do think it's significant in one sense that, you know, if you do get exposed and it's only, yes,

maybe you will not notice it until it's assigned to you or whatever. But I think students do notice it, and I have about, luckily and happily, I have about half of my students that take the class, Cosmology class are women. And I just love it. And half of my graduate students have been women. And we have this rich tradition with UC San Diego, with Maria Geppar-Mayer. And, you know, she was denied a position for many years because she was a woman. And we were the first institution. Argonne didn't offer her one. Johns Hopkins didn't offer her one. We, of course, had Sally Ride, was my late, great colleague in the physics department, first American woman in space.

and we had Vera Rubin studied with Jeff and Margaret Burbage here, and she learned how to do a lot of the spectroscopic work that she later used to derive rotation curves from Margaret, and she credits Margaret. She credited Margaret. So, yes, and we've had many, many women authors on the podcast from Katie Freeze, Sarah Seeger. We have Sarah Rugheimer coming on, and I think it's wonderful, and I think astronomy in particular does a much better job than physics as a whole. And I think, you know, I'm hoping the trend will kind of percolate over to physics as well, because I think it's, it is necessary for people to see, not that they have to be exactly like me or you for me to learn from them, but it's good to see that there is a trend, at least in the positive direction, as many, because many of the women that I've had on are popular science authors. I don't think any of them have, they've all written books, Jan 11 had her on many times, Sarah Seeger, like us, they're all written popular, so-called popular science.

books, which are wonderful and I love them. But it's great to see a textbook, too. So anyway, I just wanted to throw that in there. And now, if you're willing, I'm going to read the lowest ranked review on Amazon of your, no, I'm not going to do that. Sometimes I have done that. I play a game. I call it high and low. But with a popular author, I say, do you want to read the five-star review with the most helpful votes on Amazon? And then you have to read the one-star review and reply to it. But they have to be verified. In other words, you can't just, like, many people do leave me a one-star review, but they never read my book. Anyway, I want to thank you, and I want to see if we can go into the impossible.

And if you could answer one of my questions that I ask all of my guests, or many of my guests, that I'm honored to have on my podcast. And that has to do with the deep future of the universe. And it relates to Arthur C. Clark, which is the namesake of the center that I co-direct here at University of California, San Diego. And in 2001, a space odyssey. You may recall, if you've seen the movie, Barbara, have you seen it?

Yes. So there are these monoliths, and they're kind of these ominous, maybe time capsules, maybe machines that convey some sort of information, but they're meant to be discovered when human beings have the capacity to unearth what's inside of them

and to really appreciate it. I want to ask you, Barbara, as I asked Andruyen, who actually did this, the widow of Carl Sagan, I want to ask you, if you had to be a woman, a billion-year lasting time capsule. And you guaranteed to last for that period of time. What would

you put in it or on it or, you know, about it, so that you could convey some sort of knowledge or teaching or wisdom or anything that you feel valuable that signifies the human condition and what we've achieved as a species? So, one billion years. Okay, anything I put inside will last for a billion years. If I decided to say the six-pack of beer, the future, a billionaires, it will not go stale inside this magical time capsule. You joke, but beer, of course, was a major step forward in human civilization. The problem, of course, is that a billion years is so long compared to human history, a trifling five or six thousand years since we invented writing. and very long compared to the time that Homo sapiens has been around or even compared to the time that primates have been around. So you'd have to say, well, a billion years in the future,

anybody who's going to open up this magic time capsule is going to be somebody quite different from me. And I can't assume that, for instance, ethanol is going to give them a buzz. So let's let's skip the beer, drink it all ourselves. 10 years in the future.

I'm inclined to be a little humorous here and say, hey, let's put in copies of all of my text books. There's nothing wrong with that. Let them know what conditions were like in this patch of the universe of billion years earlier. So they extrapolate forward,

and get some interesting excited into cosmological evolution. But joking aside, it keeps going back to, you know, books, maybe movies. This reminds

me, in fact, of an essay question. I posed on one of my exams for your basic Astro 101 course. We've been talking in class about the Voyager Golden Records.

and the various sound clips that Carl Sagan decided to say, this is our culture. And the question I asked was, okay, you're sending another probe into space. This time we're going to send out some sort of audiovisual. So not just sounds, but sounds and images. And you can send, let's say, five hours in total. what movies would you pick?

Documentary, comedy, tragedy, something that shows human names in a good light, something highly idealized, something a little bit darker. You just want to show us what humans are like, warts and all. The most interesting thing about

that question was every student came up with a different answer. Peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay.

Explore Google Fi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. So I think the answer would have to be. Just flinging a whole bunch of stuff. Pie culture, low culture. Let's give them people throwing pies in a slap stupid comedy. Let's give them King Lear.

And just show them not only what humans knew intellectually. Sure, let's give them Cosmos, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Cosmos, Carol Sagan. So, you have two different views of the cosmos. But let's just give them this huge cross-section. this is what this species was like at this particular time on this planet. And, oh, by the way, a billion years from now, good luck. I hope that you two laugh and cry the way. I hope you have a USB stick drive reader on your spaceship.

Barbara, that is so beautiful and so thoughtful. And it does remind me I had Andrewian on, who is the widow of Carl Sagan, and they had met just a week or two, and I'll put a link to that in the video description above. but she had met Carl, you know, or fallen in love with him just a few weeks before hand, and he asked her to record her brainwaves, and they put it on the Voyager Golden Disc. And so she's ruminating on her love for this wonderful man, Carl Sagan, whose daughter has also been on the podcast, Sasha Sagan. And it's just so beautiful, because when I asked her, I said, what would you put on it? And what would you put on such a hypothetical time count?

She said, I already have done that, you know, with the Voyager Golden Dism. She's a wonderful woman. She actually gave me a religious answer, which is kind of funny from a secular person, such as herself. But Barbara, I really, I just want to thank you so much. Your book reads like a page-turning novel. I read it, you know, I take it to the beach here in San Diego. It's such a service to young people because it's accessible. It doesn't, it presents it at a high level.

It gives them a taste of what life will be like if they choose to go to graduate school, not all do. So you have enough kind of red meat or red tofu if you're a vegan, you know, that will allow you to really flame the incipient fans of curiosity. And my motto on this channel is ABC, always be curious. And Barbara, I just want to thank you so much. You and I just met this first time we've ever spoken. I hope we can meet in person someday, maybe there, maybe here. And again, I just want to thank you for your graciousness, your good humor, and your written work. and I do want a copy of that new book so I can read it.

And even though I don't do anything in stellar physics whatsoever, I will assume it's going to be as much of a page turner as this one. So Barbara, thank you so much for going into the impossible and for everything you've done for the multiverse. Thank you for talking with me, and I hope we do meet in person, preferably in San Diego. Yeah, maybe in January, yeah.

January, Columbus, Ohio versus January in La Jolla. It's up to you, Bob. Any time. Okay, thank you so much, Barbara. You're welcome. Any sufficiently advanced technology is interesting, sure, should be imagined. Hey, y'all, just a simple request before you head out to the rest of your day or night. And that's to sign up for my Monday Magic Messages.

These are simple, sweet, short conversations that I want to have with you. And they entail the following subjects. One is a memory. One is an appearance that I have had. One is a genius idea from around the universe of ideas that I explore. One is an image or an idea. And the last is a conversation. My podcast are my videos with the guest of Douciman, the guest of the week. So if you'd like to do that, please go to Brian Keating.com. And there's a pop-up and you'll get to subscribe to my mailing list. And I make it very easy. easy to subscribe to, very easy to leave if you should want to leave. And I hope that you'll find these Monday magic messages quite interesting because as Sir Arthur C. Clark said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I like to bring you a new perspective from the universe into the impossible and do so with an eye towards the things that are most interesting. So I hope you'll subscribe. Again, Brian Keating.com, sign up. And

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