Ologies with Alie Ward - Cosmology PART 2 with Katie Mack

Episode Date: December 19, 2017

Listener questions! The universe, dimensions, asteroid bags and cosmic vertigo with the amazing Dr. Katie Mack. Part 1 was a primer on all things cosmological, from particle physics to black holes, so listen to that first then hop to this episode to get all your questions answered.Follow Katie Mack on Instagram and TwitterMore episode sources & linksSupport Ologies on Patreon for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Hey, this is Allie Ward here with Allergies. Now a few things up top. If you like Allergies, I personally myself would love it. If you took a second to rate and or review it on iTunes, have you done that yet? It doesn't cost any money, you just do it. This week we were in the top 20 of Science Podcasts, which gets the show seen by so many people. I was nestled between literally four shows about ghost crimes, which is like, okay.

But I think the allergists I've gotten to talk to deserve to be heard and I would love to see allergies climb up. And I also totally read all of your reviews. I'm thrilled by them. Today someone named Smileness, there are six S's in that, said, the actual best. Yep, the actual best. When things get all jargony, Allie fills in the gaps. Great guess, great topics.

And a genuinely lovable host, which by the way, I read that while walking into the post office and I almost started crying or skipping. So thank you everyone for these. When you leave reviews and you rate it, other people say, hey, what's this thing? Now, cosmology, part two. If you listened to the very, very end of part one last week with the just phenomenal Dr. Katie Mack, AKA Astro Katie, then you learned a lot about particle physics and the large hard-on collider, string cheese, black holes, the world's most expensive selfie and your

own aching insignificance, all of ours. If you haven't listened, give it a go. I also tell you a somewhat embarrassing secret at the very end of the podcast. Maybe I'll do that again. So part two with Dr. Mack means getting right into the nitty gritty, your questions. And trust me, I had a million. But Katie and I were late to meet up with friends to see murder on the Oregon Express. So I could only ask about half an hour's worth of questions.

So I may have to nab her in the future to ask the rest because there's so many good questions. I have so many questions for you. Okay. It's like a rapid fire round. Sure. Yeah. I'm just going to throw it. I'm here for it.

Okay. I'm going to throw a bunch of questions at you. If you want to skip any of them, you can just pass. First question is I'm going to ask her from the Patreon page. Okay. So people are patrons. Yeah. We appreciate them very much.

They're great people. They are great people. They're fantastic. And we want them to continue and ask lots of questions, which are all very good questions. Yes, exactly. Yes. I'm going to ask her for $104.25 an episode. Which is an amazing deal.

Isn't that a good deal? Yeah. People should totally do that. Yeah. We're going to make it accessible. Yeah. If you did feel like tossing a dollar a month to keep this podcast continuing free of obnoxious ads, then get yourself overdue patreon.com slash oligies.

I post calls for questions, some behind the scene photos or some patron only videos. And for $25 a month, I'll be your emergency contact, which I hope you never need. And also, I may not be reliable. So for a dollar a month, your questions get bumped to the top. This is a question. I'm just going to say one of the questions, but three different people asked a variation of it. Erin Herdman and Alex Intronini.

Intronini? Alex? Did I do that right? I'm sorry. Both wanted to know. Is there a name for the disorientation and panic one feels when considering the vastness of the universe? Also do you know of a way to get past it?

There is a name. So there are a couple of names. One is Cosmic Vertigo. Okay. And the other is Cosmophobia. And I don't know if these are like official names, but these are names that I've heard. There's so a couple of friends and colleagues of mine have a podcast called Cosmic Vertigo where they talk about cosmology and stuff and space and things.

But it's based on that topic. And Cosmophobia I know about because I occasionally get emails from people who say that they have severe cases and want my help. So it is a thing. Sometimes people get really, really upset about like the vastness of space or just like the fact that we have no control over these huge forces. I mean, that is something like, I have moments where I'm like, whoa, right? Because there are things like, you know, black holes are colliding with each other.

And like the universe is expanding and it's accelerating and it's expansion and like it's getting bigger and bigger and faster and faster and like sometimes, you know, that stuff is really, you know, I mean, you think about your little life and what's going on in your day to day. And at the same time, like stars are exploding and, you know, and we have, we can look at we can look at the Big Bang, like we can actually see the primordial fireball of the Big Bang. How?

Ladies and gentlemen, Allie Ward, zero chill. The reason is that the Big Bang Theory TV show, beginning of the show, nearly 14 billion years ago, expansion started. Anyway, that's the Big Bang Theory. That is, that's a very good explanation of the Big Bang Theory. Thank you, bare naked ladies, which is the first and maybe the only time I'm going to say that sentence. The whole universe was hot and dense and smaller than it is now.

So the Big Bang Theory is just the idea that the universe in the past was smaller and denser and hotter than it is now. And so if you kind of dial back the current expansion of the universe, then you get to to the universe being very, very small and dense and hot. And so every point in the universe now was at some point much hotter and filled with like radiation, right? So like this part of the universe now in the very distant past was full of radiation and very hot and very dense, right?

But so when we look out into other parts of the universe, because light takes time to travel, every time we look farther away, we're looking farther into the past. And so we're looking at that part of the universe as it was maybe a billion years ago or five billion years ago or whatever. And there's a part of the universe that's so distant that when we look at it, we're looking at it as it was during the time when it was still on fire, right? So as we look into the distance in any direction, we're seeing that part of the universe as it was when it was still in that primordial fireball kind of state.

Which was how long ago? Well, that was around, so the fireball started to cool around 380,000 years after the Big Bang, whatever, after the moment of the beginning, whatever you call that, because that's still part of the hot Big Bang, which is like the hot phase. So we can actually see radiation coming from every direction in the sky that is the radiation of that heat, like that radiation from that early time just reaching us now from really distant parts of the universe. And so we can look at it, and we're looking at the fireball universe.

We're looking at that primordial plasma, and so we see the Big Bang. And so we know that it happened, because we can see it, and we can watch it, and we can actually see parts of the universe that are still there as far as we're concerned. And that can give you cosmic vertigo. Yeah, just thinking about, that was a big important event. So this sort of nice, gentle, stable universe is not, that's not how it always was. And we don't know, we think that most cosmologists think at the beginning of the universe before that hot phase, there was a period of very rapid expansion of the universe called inflation.

We don't know why that started, we don't know why that ended, we don't know that that couldn't just start happening again right here right now. There are theories of the, there are theories where you could have the universe end right here right now in this room. Oh God. Oh God. So this is an idea called vacuum decay, where you can have the universe have a quantum event happen where one point in the universe transitions to this other state.

It's called another vacuum, true vacuum state. And that would create this bubble of like death, again, bubble of death, that expands out at the speed of light in every direction, so you would never see it coming. And it's a probabilistic event, it's a quantum event, so it could happen at any moment. It probably won't. Oh God. You know, it probably, well, probably we're just wrong about the theory. And even if we weren't wrong about the theory, like the, the sort of time scale that we calculate

for it, it would probably take like, you know, trillions of years or something. But like it's a probabilistic event, it could happen at any moment technically, just with very low probability. So like that could freak you out. And I've gotten emails from people like they read about that and they're like, I can't sleep. And I'm like, I'm sorry. Do you have any advice for that?

I mean, you know, I tell them like, so they, so about vacuum decay, I can tell them like a few things. One is that we don't know, we don't have any, we don't know for sure that, that this is even possible. If it were possible, it probably would have happened in the very beginning of the universe because the conditions for it happening then were much more favorable. So it probably would have already happened if it was going to happen already, or if it was possible at all.

And then I say, well, if it's going to like you, there's nothing you can do. Yeah. I mean, like, like it's, it's traveling at the speed of light. You won't even see it coming. That's the best way to die. Yeah. You won't, I mean, you won't notice. Basically, like, like, so it is absolutely the best because you don't see it coming.

So you can't be scared of it. Yeah. You don't even really notice it because it's happening at speed of light and you're not like around afterward. And everything is around. Yeah. Everyone you love dies at the same time. Yeah.

Everything dies. Everything's gone. I mean, like at the same time, there's no, there's no FOMO. Right. There's nothing, you're not missing out on anything because the whole universe is done now. Right. Like, and so it's kind of, in the some sense, it's like really inconsequential because

there's like no consequences of it. Yeah. So it doesn't matter. Like you could just blink, you know, and then like, like, you know, you blink and like maybe you open your eyes again, maybe you were consumed by a vacuum bubble of death. But like, who cares? Like, you don't know. If I could vote on a way for everything to end, I would be like, Oh, totally.

Yeah. Vacuum. Vacuum decay. Vacuum decay. Yeah. That's going to be my platform. I'm going to run for 2020. Vacuum decay is my platform.

It is the best way to end the universe. Okay. So that's one way to chill out. Yeah. Paula Herrera wants to know, how scared should we be of a giant asteroid destroying Earth? Are any of the sci-fi movie methods to save the planet plausible or are we basically doomed should an asteroid come our way? Yeah, that's that's a little bit of a sadder point because like, okay, so we're basically

not really monitoring about half the sky right now. What? Okay. No big deal. No big deal. We used to have some monitoring stations in the Southern Hemisphere and they lost funding. Oh, right. So we don't have as good a handle on like the number of objects out there that could cause

really big problems. There is like, we have, there's some kind of like goals about how many, like what fraction of objects above a certain size we should be, you know, aware of, right? And it's like, you're supposed to see 90% of objects above some size or whatever. And we're not really there. Oh no. So I think there are programs being put together now and there's, there's efforts to have a better catalog.

It's not like we're due for a giant, you know, impact or anything like it's, you know, these are still things that are probably not going to happen anytime soon, but, but I, I can't honestly tell you that like, we're on top of it. Wow. You know, we're monitoring a lot, but we're not monitoring enough to say that like, we definitely don't have anything coming in. So, okay, so whether or not we could stop it, like, okay, so there's, there are a couple of methods.

If we find out about it early enough, like five years ahead, 10 years ahead, then there's a possibility of sending a spacecraft to it and changing the course of it in some way. You don't want to just blow it up partially because some of these things are like kind of loose rubble piles. And so it wouldn't really work to try to blow it up, but also because like, if you have a huge asteroid and then you blow it up, then you have like a bunch of smaller asteroids and that's not always better. Yeah.

But, but there are, there are a bunch of really cool ideas for just nudging it a little bit. And if you find out about long enough in the, you know, before it comes, then you don't have to nudge it very far at all to get it totally off course, it will miss the earth. So like one of them is to take a really, really massive spacecraft and just like park it next to the asteroid in the orbit for a while. And so then it gets like pulled a little bit by the gravity of the spacecraft. And that can, if you get it early enough, that's called a gravitational tractor. Yeah.

If you get it early enough, that can work. There are other ideas about like creating like a giant sack and like, like capturing it in a sack because you can't necessarily, it's not necessarily like a solid thing. How are you going to make a bag big enough to put around an asteroid? I mean, it depends on the size of the asteroid, right? But I mean, I don't know. What is that made out of? Like mylar?

I don't know. Capt on tape? I don't know. I'm sorry. I'm a little activated by this. I looked up asteroid bags and I was distracted for a few minutes on some galaxy printed totes and duffels. And I was like, oh, that's nice.

And then, okay, I realized that space people call these capture bags. Like it's just no big deal. Like just used to collect fallen leaves or a dog doodle. But NASA introduced the plan a few years ago and I asked the search engine gods what the bag might be made of. And I found out it could be inflatable, could be metal mesh, or could just be high strength material. Sounds like they're figuring that out too.

My guess is it's just a very large blue IKEA bag. Toe that fucker in. Those things are strong. It's another idea, which is even, which is also really cool where you like spray, spray paint half of the object so that it changes like the reflectivity and then that means that like the solar wind will push a little bit more on one half than the other in some way and that can change the trajectory. So there are a couple of possibilities.

Those are some good options. Yeah. Yeah. But you need a lot of lead time and a lot of paint and a really big bag. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my God. I just can't believe that we're kind of sleeping on the job there.

I mean, it's like we're not, I mean, there are people, there's a lot of, a lot of these things are being monitored and there's nothing that we know about that's anytime soon coming as a threat. But there's also like we're not, we're not fully on top of this in the way that I feel like we should be. Oh man. Good to know. Yeah.

Russell Kelly wants to know, will the universe expand forever or will it eventually collapse in on itself? That is a great question. Based on our current understanding and the data that we have now, it looks like it will expand forever, which will lead to something called the heat death, which is the most depressing way for the universe to end, which is that like we have dark energy, dark energy is whatever is making the universe expand faster and faster if it's a cosmological constant, which is just a kind of dark energy that first invented by Einstein, but it seems to be the case.

Then what will happen is that over time, the other galaxies will get farther and farther away, not Andromeda, the Andromeda galaxy is coming for us now. It's on its way. It's going to collide with the Milky Way in about four billion years. That'll be fine, whatever. But then, you know, the more distant galaxies will just get farther and farther away and eventually we won't be able to see any other galaxies outside of our little local group. This is like when all your friends grow up and move out to the suburbs or like get rich

and go to Santa Monica. And then, you know, we won't be able to see like the cosmic microwave background anymore that after glow of the big bang, so the universe will just get really, really dark and really empty. And then our little group of galaxies will kind of be combined into one big blob. But eventually, like all the stars will burn out because they'll run out of fuel and there's no more like gas coming in to make new stars from other galaxies. The stars will burn out and then like a bunch of things will collapse into black holes and

the black holes will evaporate and like the protons will decay and like everything will just kind of like decay into nothingness and then like there'll be this like, it'll be this really empty, cold, dark universe with nothing in it and no like, and just like this tiny amount of radiation and no ability for any new structures to form, except maybe through some kind of quantum process, which is kind of a cool thing, but that's another topic. That's so goddamn lonely. Yeah. Yeah, it's called the heat death.

So what happens when the Andromeda galaxy collides with the Milky Way though? You glazed right over that. What the hell is that about? That's really cool actually. So the Andromeda galaxy is a spiral galaxy like our own. It's got about a trillion stars. It's more massive than the Milky Way and it's got a super massive black hole and they're all coming toward us at something like, I think it was like a hundred kilometers a

second. Anyway, they're all, they're all coming toward us right now and is it going to smushy smash? Yeah, it's going to, it's going to come and in about four billion years it'll get here and it'll, it'll collide with the Milky Way galaxy and the way that galaxies collide is kind of cool. They like sort of merge and like they make these long trails of stars coming out and it'll be this sort of like really spectacular light show of like, gas'll collide and make new stars and there'll be this burst of star formation and the black holes might like turn

on and start like pulling in matter and like getting really bright and stars will be flung out into space and on these long tails. This sounds like a warehouse space rave. I'm not going to lie. I'd be down for this. But because galaxies, because there's so much space between stars and galaxies, probably our solar system will not be affected. Okay.

Like probably we'll just like this, this guy will get really interesting. But you know, it'll also be four billion years from now. So the sun will be burning out and you know, the earth will already have its oceans boiled away and life on earth will be impossible. But if you know, we left something here to take pictures, they would be really pretty. Yeah. Mike, uh, Mel, Mel choir, Melchior wants to know, are Uranus jokes still funny? It's really Uranus, isn't it?

So actually, I don't know which is a better pronunciation. I usually say Uranus just cause I don't want to, I don't want to deal with it. But then it's got the name Uran in it too. I know. Like it doesn't really help. Um, no, they're not, they're not particularly fine. Okay. Good.

Just checking. No. So I use an AI for transcription for this podcast and it transcribed to your and ass. And I'm sorry, but yes, that is funny. Megan Gerard wants to know, um, slightly more on a local practical level. We love stargazing, but even in a small city, it's hard to do because of light pollution. So can you recommend any tactics, resources, organizations for helping reduce light pollution? Um, also she thinks maybe light pollution is bad for us and animals.

Yeah. And, um, so good way to stargaze and good way to reduce light pollution. So there are, there are national organizations for like dark skies. I don't remember the names, but if you, if you look them up, there's, they have, um, there are charities that, that their whole purpose is to try to get better lighting in cities so that more, more of the light goes down and not up and, um, changing like what the lamps are made of and stuff like that. Um, so you can get involved in these campaigns and, um, they're really, they're really helpful.

Um, yeah, I can't remember the name of the organizations right now, but, but there are a few of them out there. darksky.org has a bunch of information on getting involved in dark sky advocacy and membership in this kind of a dark sky club. So hit that up. I will try to do my part and stop falling asleep with the lights on. I fell asleep with them on again last night, but tonight, tonight's a night, international dark sky association, I'm going to do my part.

If you want to go stargazing and your city's too bright, you just have to go somewhere else, basically. Um, so when I was living here and when I was growing up in LA in Long Beach, um, I was part of the LA astronomical society and they would have dark sky star parties where we would drive like four hours into the mountains and it would be really dark there. So you don't have to get that far out of the city to do good stargazing. So getting the fuck out of dodge. Yes.

Got it. Yeah. That's pretty much it. There's, there's a really great film called, uh, the city dark, um, which is about, um, it's about light pollution and what it does to us and what it does to astronomy. And I'd recommend checking that out. I fell asleep with the lights on last night. Oh, it's not good for your brain.

It's not good for you. And now this set of questions comes from the Facebook group. There's an oligies podcast Facebook group. Yes. They get next crack at questions. Isabel Laurian wants to know, what do you think the shape of the universe is? Hyperbolic, toroid. What do you think?

Did I sell it? Did I say toroid? Okay. You said toroid. Okay. Okay. Um, toroidal is the adjective. Okay.

But yeah. It's, uh, so a toroid, it's a, a, a, a torus is a donut shape. Oh. That's all, that's what, that's all she's saying. Yeah. So a toroid cake would be a donut? Yes. Yes.

I went my whole life not knowing this somehow, but also a torus apparently technically would be like an inner tube, hollow, and a solid torus is a donut. But I want to say I was on a dessert show called unique sweets for like a lot of seasons. I have to say a cake donut seems like a solid torus, but if it's a fluffier yeast donut, there's all kinds of air pockets in there and the volume and density seems somewhere between a torus and a solid torus. And I need a physicist to get on this for me. Thank you.

Okay. Oh, yeah. Back to the shape of the universe. The universe, the, the, the way she's asking the question, the answer is the universe is probably flat. Okay. Which just means, it just means that there's no large scale curvature to the universe. So I said that matter curves space, so you get these like dense in space.

On the very large scales, the space is flat in the sense that it's not large scale curved. It's still probably three dimensional. I mean, the space part is three dimensional and then there's time that's a fourth dimension. But you know, it's, it's flat in the sense that if you had two beams of light that were parallel, they would stay parallel forever. Okay. That, that seems to be the case, at least as far as we can measure, there could be some larger scale curvature that we don't measure because it's just so big.

Like if, if you have a ball that's big enough, it looks flat, like the surface of the earth looks flat. Um, but, um, but the universe on the whole, as far as we know, appears to be flat. There's no evidence for curvature, but it could be curved around on some really large scale. Okay. We'll find out in, before the stars all collapse on themselves, hopefully. Maybe.

Maybe not. I don't know. I don't know. TJ King and Laurie March both had kind of the same question. Um, is there a reason why some stars appear to twinkle more than others? Oh, yeah. Uh, well, so stars appear to twinkle when you're looking through the atmosphere because the atmosphere, um, is bending the light a little bit just by being like a little bit hotter,

a little bit wetter or something in different parts. And so when you look through that, that sort of, you know, um, messy, uh, air, um, it makes the position of the star move around a little bit, um, from your perspective. And that means that sometimes it'll look a little bit brighter and sometimes it'll look a little bit dimmer. And that makes the twinkling. Um, so the brighter a star is, uh, sometimes that makes it look less twinkly or, or more or it depends on kind of what the air is doing, um, but planets don't twinkle.

Why not? So the reason planets don't twinkle is because so the re the, the twinkling of a star comes from the fact that, um, we, uh, like it's, it's just a point of light from our perspective. It's just a single point of light. And so it can be moved around and that little point of light can be sort of, um, magnified a little bit and that makes it look brighter or less, but a planet is a disc of light from our perspective. Really, really small disc, but it's a, it's a disc of light that's big enough that the

little, the little sort of, um, uh, turbulence cells or whatever in the atmosphere, um, only like just move the light around within the disc mostly. And so it doesn't get significantly brighter or dimmer because the, um, the, the moot motion of the air is not enough to, to really change the, the sort of size and shape of that disc. So if you twinkles, you got a star. If it doesn't twinkle, you got a planet. More or less. Yeah.

Yeah. More or less. So if you see something pretty bright in the sky and it's not twinkling and other things are, then you've probably seen a planet and they're probably seeing Jupiter, Saturn, Mars or Venus. That's so great. Yeah. If you, and if that does happen and it's the first time you've heard this, then you

should high five Katie on Twitter. Lauren Oaks wants to know what is the deal with other dimensions. This might not be the right person to ask, but I still want to know. Okay. So we have three dimensions of space. So that's forward, backward, left, right, up and down. We also considered time to be a bit dimension. So when you think about things like relativity, you have to include time as like part of your

coordinate grid, basically. And so that coordinate grid has to have four dimensions. So the time is the fourth dimension. And the reason for that is that space and time can affect each other. Moving through space at a higher speed changes the way you move through time. And when you're close to a gravitating object, that changes the way you move through time. And so it has to be part of the same malleable fabric in some mathematical sense. There could be higher, there could be other dimensions of space and that we just can't

interact with, we can't see, we can't perceive. And in some cases, those other dimensions of space might be kind of wrapped around themselves. Okay. Which is a weird concept, but it's kind of like if you imagine a string, right? A string is a three-dimensional object. Two of those dimensions are kind of wrapped around really tight. So it only has a little bit, a little direction. You can go in two of the dimensions, you can go a really long way in the other one.

And so it might be that in space, in our universe, we can go as far as we want in our three dimensions, but the other dimensions are so small that we don't notice them because they're all wrapped up. And one of the reasons that those extra dimensions are hypothesized is that it might be that all of our sort of particle interactions and stuff can only happen in this three-dimensional space, but gravity can leak out into the other ones a little bit. And so if that were happening, that would explain why gravity is so weak compared to all the other forces, so that's a hypothesis.

So there could be other dimensions that might solve that problem. But what about multiverses, then? Is there another me with a better life living in a different dimension? So when people say dimension in that sense, they just mean another universe. The dimensionality, the dimension doesn't mean space anymore, it means something else. So there could be other universes depending on how you define a universe, because you could just define a universe to be everything, and then everything is part of the universe by definition.

There can't be a second everything. Yeah. Okay. But you can define a universe as just the observable universe, so what's within our sort of the distance out to which we can observe anything, which is a set distance. And then there could be stuff beyond that. We know there's stuff beyond that, so that's kind of outside of our universe. You can think of that as another universe.

And then you can have other universes that are separated by higher dimensions from us. So you can have like, you can imagine our universe is a flat sheet, and there's another flat sheet, so we just take one dimension down, and they could collide maybe. And there's a theory for the Big Bang that comes from these two sheets collide, and that makes a Big Bang, and they come apart, and then they collide again later on, it's called the Ekpirotic model. My thesis advisor was one of the people who came up with that. So there, and then there are other ways to have other universes, like with the many

worlds idea of quantum mechanics, which says that every time a quantum event happens, basically another universe branches out from ours in a way that somehow makes sense mathematically, but sounds ridiculous when you think about it. Is that kind of like an alternate reality? Kind of, yeah. Is there another me in another universe, in another reality, who brushes her hair more regularly? Well, in the many worlds hypothesis, I guess technically that would be the case.

So if that's like a rabbit hole that you want to go into, just like start googling. Because in many worlds, like there's another universe where like a photon just went through that window, or didn't, and that's the only difference. Oh my God. Oh my God. So like every possible thing. RiccaLan wants to know, is there actual scientific proof that there might be life beyond our planet?

Aliens? Yes, no. Probably. Okay. So what does Katie hate about her job? What does she hate? So one is the uncertainty of the kind of academic career ladder. So I spent the last eight years as a postdoc, which means I had my PhD and I was doing research,

but I didn't have a permanent job and I didn't know where I was going to go next or how long I would be there or whether or not I would be able to continue in science because it was just applying for jobs. And it's a difficult thing to be doing and all jobs have some uncertainty at some stage, but I feel like in academia that uncertainty and that sort of tenuousness lasts a really long time. And if you get to the stage where you're definitely not going to get an academic job and you wanted one, then you have spent many years making not very much money when you could

have done something more lucrative and it would have been better off in like every way. So I mean, I enjoyed doing the research and so for me it was like, well, I'll just keep doing science as long as I can, I enjoy it, I'm willing to make that sacrifice. But for a lot of people it's just so disruptive and it's so difficult that it's like it's a really high anxiety time and it's really hard and a lot of people leave because that is just really hard to deal with, so that's the main thing. And then the other thing is that like it's just it's really easy to have a lot of like self-doubt and you have to be very kind of self-driven and it's hard to know if you're

doing a good job and like it's academia can be very competitive and you don't get a lot of like positive feedback and so it can be just hard to kind of like keep doing what you're doing and know that you're doing it well or know how to do it well or you know all of that stuff can be difficult. Which is great that you're a science communicator as well because you get to get a lot of feedback from the public. Yeah I mean that does help a lot like if I'm you know sitting in my office banging my head against something that I feel like I really should know this thing or I really should

understand it that this should come more easily and then you know I feel like I'm a total failure and I don't know anything and then I go talk to you know room full school kids and suddenly like I'm an expert you know like then I feel like I know a lot of things and then it helps a lot. So yeah for me it's made a big difference in like just keeping me from getting too depressed about you know not understanding the universe as well as I wanted to. What about your favorite thing about the job or cosmology or physics or? My favorite thing is that I get to ponder the deep questions of reality as my job you

know. Yeah. Like I was at a conference a couple weeks ago and it was most of the topics in this conference were not stuff I work on so it was like really deep questions about the nature of reality and like whether or not space time is really a thing and how particles really work and all of that and I was just like like I didn't it's not the area I work in so there was a lot I didn't understand about it but I could grasp some of it and I felt like I just felt so privileged to be able to be in that room and to think about these things

and to have some grasp of these huge concepts and like I get to that that was part of my work you know and that that was just an amazing that's just every time that happens it's an amazing feeling that I get to do these mental exercises and learn about the fundamental properties of the universe and that's my job and I mean and you know I mean writing the papers and teaching and all that stuff is also my job so there's a lot of other aspects to it but just learning about the universe is a big part of my job and I love that. So baller. Yeah.

Alright. Thank you for letting me talk to you for so long. I'm so sorry. This is the longest interview I've ever done because there's too many questions. There's too many questions. Okay let's go to a movie. Okay. Bye.

So we barely made it to the movie which was a very forgettable mystery romp about a train stuck in the snow but stellar mustaches and I will remain forever shooketh by this conversation. I'm glad we took as long as we did. Now to follow Dr. Mack you can find her on Twitter or Facebook as Astro Katie or on Instagram at academicnomad and this podcast is at oligies on Twitter and Instagram and I'm at Ali Ward on both and for t-shirts and totes and mugs and to support the podcast while also covering your nude body go to oligiesmerch.com and of course if you like the podcast and want to support just tell a friend or make a post about it or rate it on iTunes.

That's huge and yeah I'll give you a secret this week. This week's secret is that I record all this narration in my closet because the sound is pretty good. There's all these clothes to dampen it but the real nugget here is that I have a real laundry situation and about half my body currently sitting on a pile of towels which I will get to this weekend after I obtain some soap. So yeah I'm podcasting from a laundry nest like a cozy little woodland rodent talking at you through a machine.

Big huge thanks to Stephen Ray Morris patron saint of podcasts for editing this episode and to Shannon Feldes and Bonnie Dutch for all of their help with merch and Hannah and Erin for running the oligies podcast Facebook group and the theme song was composed and performed by Nick Thorburn aka Nick Diamonds of the band Islands. He's great. Check out his music. Now next week a little episode on carbohydrates comes out the day after Christmas. So what the hell are they?

Why do we like them? And why do our cells wear them like hats? Because they do. A glycobiologist spills the starch beans. Until then, ask smart people all the dumb questions you want. The universe is big and regret is maybe the scariest thing there is. Okay, bye bye. Thank you.

See you next time.