#428 - CERN Physicist: "We Found Something That Shouldn't Exist" | Daniel Whiteson

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I always like to have the big CERN guys in here to find out all the - I love all the CERN conspiracies, so it's always good to get some of the guys who have boots on the ground in that place. On the show. Well, I don't know how big I am, it's CERN, but I've been to CERN, I work at CERN, I love CERN, so happy to talk about things. How'd you get involved in this work on CERN? Well, I've always been doing particle collider physics, smash protons together, see what kind of stuff you can make, learn about the universe. That's the best way to figure out what is the universe made out of, just by smashing stuff together and seeing if something new comes out. To me, that was always the best way to answer the deepest questions, what's the universe made out of? So I did my PhD outside Chicago at Fermilabs Tevitron, used to be the biggest collider in the world, and then CERN built a bigger one. So we all moved over there into the whole community, moves to follow the biggest accelerator in the world, because the bigger the accelerator, the higher the energy, the more you can explore what the universe is made out of. So I actually had one kid born in Chicago near that accelerator, another kid born in Geneva near that accelerator, so I've been following particle colliders my whole life. That's incredible. So what kind of stuff were you specifically working on when you were at CERN? I was looking for dark matter. I was hoping we could figure out what is dark matter made out of. You know, we know that dark matter is out there, we know that it's a matter, we know how much there is, we know roughly where it is, but we don't know what is it. You know, like is it made out of particles? Is it made out of one kind of particle, two kind of particles? Is it made out of something not particle at all, something totally new and weird that would blow our minds? And so we want to try to figure this out, and one way to do that is to try to make it in the lab, like if we collide protons together, maybe sometimes those things turn into dark matter. And if so, we could find evidence for that in our collisions and learn something about dark matter as a particle, if it is indeed a particle. We don't know that. So you're trying to make something you have no idea what it even is. Yes, and that's exactly, and that's the magic of colliders. You don't have to know what you're looking for, you don't have to know what's out there, you just smash the stuff together, and eventually the universe will reveal everything it can make. So the crucial thing about particle colliders is they're not chemistry. Like when you do chemistry, you have hydrogen and oxygen, you combine it, you get water. But you still have the hydrogen and oxygen in there, it's just like a rearrangement of what went in, right? It's like the same Lego bricks clicked together. That's not what happens in a particle collider. The particle collider, you smash them together, the bricks annihilate, they're gone, they turn into something new. It's alchemy, not chemistry. So it smashes together, it turns into this intermediate fuzzy state, and then it can turn into anything the universe knows how to make. So whatever's on nature's menu of stuff, you know, God's list or whatever the list is of the stuff the universe can make, the different kinds of particles that are out there, we'll see it at the large hydrogen collider if it can be made. So we like exploring the universe. As you say, we don't have to know what we're making in advance. We just smash it together and look to see what comes out. And if dark matter is real, and if it's a particle, and it interacts with our kind of matter at all, we'll see it at the colliders. So far, nothing. But that was my goal at first, is to try to figure out what is dark matter, is it a particle? What kind of particle, is it ten particles? These kind of questions. Unfortunately, so far we haven't seen any dark matter. Which doesn't mean that it's electrometrically undetectable, right? Well, it is undetectable electrometrically, which means that if we did make it at the collider, we wouldn't see it directly. So how would you measure it? Yeah, we would see it like bouncing off of something else. Like if you make dark matter and you also make something else at the same time, they go back to back, and then we'd see an imbalance. We'd see the thing that was made with and not the dark matter. And we know that the collisions have to be balanced. And so if there's not a balance there, we only see one thing and not something else, we know something invisible was made. And so that's how we would detect the presence of something invisible. So it's a bit of an indirect search for dark matter. Would there be any theoretically any other way to detect dark matter or measure dark matter other than on the electromagnetic visual spectrum? Well, we don't know. It's possible, right? What's the possibility? Dark matter definitely has mass. That is the thing we know about dark matter is that it's matter and it has mass because it's giving us gravity. Like we know that it's changing how galaxies rotate, it changed how the universe, the structure of the universe formed. Like without dark matter, we wouldn't have galaxies right now. It's the mass of dark matter that pulled together all the gas in the early universe to make galaxies. There wasn't dark matter. We just have like floating gas at this point in the universe. Take like many more billion years to get galaxies. So this is the idea of the spin rate of the galaxy. When they measure it, they say that the center of the galaxy is spinning at the same exact rate as the outer rim. And they're saying that because dark matter is surrounding the galaxy and dark matter has mass, that's why it's flattening that rate. Because essentially the center should be spinning a lot faster, right? That's one line of evidence for dark matter. And it's an important one because it's one of the first ones we had. But it's also important to understand it's not the only piece of evidence. It's not like, oh, we saw this and we fudge things to make it work. We have like nine or something independent lines of evidence for dark matter. But the first one is really interesting because they went out there and they said, let's look at galaxies. Galaxies are spinning and think about what happens when you spin like a merry-go-round. If you put a bunch of ping-pong balls and then a merry-go-round, you spin it. What happens? Well, ping-pong balls fly out, right? So galaxies are spinning. Why aren't the stars flying out into intergalactic space? Something's holding them on, right? Like if you're on a merry-go-round, you hold on, which is why you're not being thrown off the merry-go-round. So what's holding it on? Well, gravity. So then they go at their measure. They say, is there enough gravity from all the stars in the galaxy to hold it together? We know how fast it's spinning. We know how many stars there are. We can add up all their mass. And that's where the discrepancy was. They were like, wait a second. There's not nearly enough mass, not nearly enough gravity from the stars to hold it together. And yet, because it's spinning way too fast, but it's not throwing stars out into space. And so the answer is, there must be more mass in there, giving more gravity, holding the galaxy together to keep it from throwing the stars out into space. So that was the first line of evidence for dark matter. But you know, that's one piece of evidence and people might think, hmm, maybe you're wrong. Maybe something's weird about gravity or, you know, maybe something else is wrong. And so that wasn't enough to make people think, okay, dark matter is real. It wasn't until we saw it in many other ways that people were like, you know, it smells like an elephant. It leaves footprints like an elephant. It eats like an elephant. All sorts of stuff. Maybe there's an elephant here. So we have lots of different lines of evidence. What we don't know again is what is it made out of? Is it a particle? Is it two particles? Is it 17 particles? And the challenge is that we know it has mass, we know it feels gravity, but gravity is not a great way to study something, because gravity is super duper weak. Like think about how weak gravity is compared to magnetism. You have a fridge magnet on your fridge. It's tiny, right? But it's overcoming the entire gravitational pull of the earth. Tiny fridge magnet versus the earth, right? The earth is a huge mass, but gravity is so weak that the gravity of the entire earth is feeble compared to like what a fridge magnet can do. So gravity is super duper weak, which means how are you ever going to detect dark matter using gravity if you want to see one dark matter particle? Like what is the gravity from one particle? Basically zero. You'll never study dark matter just with gravity if you want to understand it at the particle level. We can see dark matter at the galaxy level, at the solar system level, right? Maybe even the planet level, but like particles of dark matter will never study those with gravity. So to see dark matter as a particle, we need to have some other kind of force, some new kind of like dark force that's helping us interact with dark matter. You're right. It can't interact electromagnetically. You can't see it. It doesn't give off light. It doesn't reflect light, but there might be some new kind of dark force that lets us interact with dark matter. And what are the other compelling lines of evidence to you? Yeah, of dark matter. So one of them is the structure of the universe. Like when you look out in the universe and you say, wow, we have galaxies and we have clusters of galaxies and we have super clusters. of galaxies and you ask, how do those form? You need dark matter to explain those. Like without dark matter, there just isn't enough time to make all this structure. There isn't enough gravity from just the gas and the stars and the planets to pull that stuff together. Like it would take 50 billion years for that to happen and we only have 14 billion. So there's not enough time for mass to pull stuff together without dark matter. That's like another line of evidence. Another one is that we've seen light from the very early universe, it's called the cosmic microwave background light. Right. It's like a baby picture of the universe. You know, 14 billion years ago, almost, the universe was filled with hot dense plasma and it was glowing like the center of the sun and it was giving off light like the center of the sun. And when that light was emitted, it was also almost immediately reabsorbed just like at the center of the sun, like if you give off light at the center of the sun, it doesn't make it out to the surface, it gets reabsorbed. Same thing happened in the early universe, but the universe was cooling and it was expanding. So at some point, it went and became transparent and so light could fly through the universe. And that's the oldest light that we can still see. The light from when the universe went from being opaque to being transparent, those photons are still around. Oh, wow. It's called the cosmic microwave background light and when we look out into the sky, we can see them. We can see them in this direction. We can see them in that direction. We can see them in every direction. This is the discovery in like 1965 of this light from the early universe. It proved to us that the universe used to be hot and dense. And the reason this long answer to your question about dark matter is that there's evidence in that light for dark matter in the early universe because there are ripples in that light. It's equally hot and cold if you Google CMB light, you'll see this weird map with blue spots and red spots. Is that what you were just showing? Yeah. That's the famous map. Is that that? Is that this? Yeah. That one right there. Exactly. And so some spots, spots of it are a little more intense and some spots are a little bit colder, so hotter and colder. Right. And those correspond to places in the universe that used to be more dense or less dense. So you're looking at like a map of the early universe of where there was more stuff and when there was less stuff or when the plasma was hotter or colder. And that contains evidence for dark matter because how those ripples existed in the early universe like places where more or less dense and how things sloshed around was affected by dark matter because dark matter has gravity. And we can see evidence for that. And if there wasn't any dark matter, the CMB light would look very, very different. So that's like another completely independent line of evidence for dark matter. And there's several more. So people say of dark matter is a fudge factor. Dark matter is a fudge factor. Yeah. People complain about that. Or they say, you know, this is scientists just trying to make their equations work or whatever. And, you know, I think there are some fudge factors in science, usually they're like placeholders who are like, we don't really understand they see it. Let's just put it in a number and then we'll figure it out. But dark matter is not like that. Dark matter is something we're fairly confident in. It is real. It's out there. It's matter. Again, don't know what it's made out of. Like if you zoomed in on dark matter, how do we know it's a particle? We don't. We don't know at all. But it's what else could it be? What are the other options? Yeah. So do we even have any way of conceptualizing this in our little monkey brain? We have a lot of blind spots. Like, you know, you might ask, well, if we don't know it's a particle, why is Dana looking for it as a particle? Right. And, you know, this is the process of science. It's like, okay, here's a really big hard question. What is most of the universe made out of? Who knows how to even begin? Well, you begin by doing like the simplest thing. Like well, let's just assume it looks like the kind of other stuff we've seen. Maybe that's right. And we'll find it. Maybe that's wrong. And eventually we'll have to back up and be like, well, that didn't work. Let's try something different. And it's hard. It's hard to think outside the box and be like, what if it's not a particle? What else could it be? You know, imagine matter where if you zoomed in on it, it never changed how it looked. Like currently we have matter and if you zoomed in on it, you see atoms, where you see structure. You know, water looks smooth, but when you zoom in on it, you see, eventually you see the little molecules of water. What if there's a kind of matter that wasn't like that, that no matter how much you zoomed, it was always smooth. And that's like far out from anything we've ever seen before. But there's a danger in extrapolating from what we've experienced to what we don't know. We've studied matter for a thousand years, but we've only said to this little slice, atoms, the kind of stuff that we're made out of, me and you and ice cream and lava and stars. That's a little slice of the universe, it's 5%. So to then say, well, maybe the rest of it is also like that, you know, that's a, it's a big guess. On the other hand, it's, it's all we know. So it's hard to think outside of that and be like, maybe it's some other new thing. I personally hope it's something totally crazy, something that when we figure it out, we're like, they can't be possible because those are my favorite moments in science. You know, when the universe confronts you with its weirdness, when it's like, your little monkey brains thought of work this way, but actually it's this other secret way. A lot of people like to reach for a drink, a smoke or a toque at the end of a stressful day. But I found something that helps me wind down. That's way better for your body. That's the mushroom amonita muscaria and it's not psilocybin like most people think is a completely different botanical that doesn't leave you groggy or foggy. The brain is called amantara, they focus on clean sourcing, lab testing, and no synthetics or mystery blends. For me, something I'll do is take three of the amonita capsules at the end of a long stressful day and I can finally sit back, relax, be in the zone with my family and leave all the stress behind. And avoiding alcohol has definitely kept my mornings going way smoother. You got the capsules, gummies, chocolates, and raw mushrooms themselves. Just go to amantara.com/go/dj and use the code djp22 for 22% off your first order. Again, AMENTARA.com/go/dj and use the code djp22. What was like for you the biggest kind of like moment where it was like, holy shit, this changes everything? Yeah. I think the discovery that the universe expansion is accelerating. That was a mind-blowing moment for me and I think for almost all the community. Because until then, we knew the universe is big, we knew it was filled with galaxies, and we knew those galaxies were moving away from us. But the question was, is there enough gravity in the universe to pull those galaxies back into like a big crunch, or is there not enough gravity and things are just going to drift away forever? Those are the two hypotheses people were thinking about. If we wanted to know, what is the future, are we headed toward some crazy cosmic crunch which would seem insane, or are we going to drift away forever? Those are the two options people were considering and so they went off to measure it to see like, well, let's look through the history of the universe and see how it's been expanding. Is that expansion slowing down or is it mostly continuing? What they found was a total surprise. They found that it wasn't slowing down at all. It was accelerating, which wasn't even the realm of possibilities. It wasn't like one of the things people were considering. It was a complete surprise, and the universe was like, secret option C, you know, things are very, very different from what you imagined. And so the whole community had to be like, what? But look, this is what the data say, and you have to follow the data, right? Dogma mainstream narrative, all that stuff out the window when the data tells you you're wrong. And what was the consensus before that and what year was that, did we actually find this discovery? 2001, I think. 2001. Yeah. And what was the belief before then? I think the prevailing consensus was that there wasn't enough stuff in the universe for it to slow down and turn down to a big crunch. Things would just slow down forever, but never come back, right? Like the two options were, you know, we had the big bang, massive expansion, but things were slowing down. Everything eventually will like stop to a standstill. Yeah, but I think people thought it was just going to drift forever and never turn around. Slow down gradually, like somebody's hitting the brakes and we're never going to actually like stop and go into reverse, that was the other option. So those are the two options. Are we going to reverse into a big crunch or just sort of gradually drift slowing down forever? And then they discovered, oh, are you going to need either of those, we're going to speed up, right? Instead of how much are we breaking and are we going into reverse? The answer is, no, we're hitting the gas pedal. Something out there in the universe is speeding up all the galaxies. It's insane idea. It's insane realization that I saw at the time. I think I sent you an article about this recently, didn't I? I was looking up, I texted you an article about this. There was something recent that I saw pop up in the cosmology on a cosmology website. Is this it? Yeah, the debate over whether the universe is really accelerating, is reignited. When was this published? Go up to the top. August 30th. 30th. Oh, yesterday. Holy shit. Okay. Go down. The controversy over one of modern cosmologies found, "Dational ideas has been renewed with the new research that points to critical issues in a recent analysis, defending the view that are your universe is expanding." Last year, a research team in Yonsei University in South Korea presented new findings that challenged the long standing view about the universe expanding. Following new analysis of type IA supernova, these stellar explosions hold a significant place in the modern debate since measurements of their brightness have helped measure the apparent expansion of the cosmos. What are they saying here? So they're talking about the way they're going. we discovered the universe, expansion was accelerating, which is this special kind of supernova. Supernova are super cool. Stop there, Steve, go up. Supernova are super cool because there are these massive explosions, like stars, collapse, pseudogravity, and then they bounce back, and they're momentarily like brighter than a whole galaxy. It's insane. And there's a special kind of supernova, type 1a, when you had like a pair of stars, and one of them collapsed, but didn't go supernova, and then later it steals more mass from its neighbor, and so that it can collapse and go supernova. So it's a special kind of thing, and it happens in a very predictable way, so that if you see a supernova, you can tell, you can calculate how bright is that supernova. And that's important because that tells you how far away it is. Because if you know how bright it is at the source, and you measure how bright it is from Earth, you can tell how far away is it so that we can get this sort of reduction in brightness. The light here, and one meter from you, it's bright, and if I walk away 10 meters, it's dimmer, and so if you knew how bright the light was for real, you could tell how far away I was by measuring how bright it is. Exactly. And that was the real challenge before that is, how do you measure how far away a galaxy is for real? Okay. It's a type 1 supernova or how we measure distance to those galaxies, and then we look back through time, and we see how the distances to galaxies have been changing, and that gives us the history of the expansion of the universe. And so this was the key to that dark energy discovery as a team at Berkeley and in Australia, the figure that had a spot this and make this measurement. And so these guys are like, wait, what if you're wrong? They're saying based on the team argued that the type 1A supernova are affected by their age, a factor that resulted in biases and past cosmological measurements. After correcting for this, the team's new results shook the world of cosmology as they implied that the cosmic expansion scientists have long observed, may have already transitioned from acceleration to deceleration. So this is science of work, right? People said, look, we saw this stuff from supernova, we think it means the universe is expanding and accelerating, and that's crazy. And so it deserves scrutiny. And so people said, well, what if you're wrong? All right. What if this assumption that we know how bright the supernova is based on whatever measurements is wrong? That could be changing our assumptions about the distance. And so we could get everything wrong. And so these guys found, you know, a potential mistake. And there's a discussion about it. And you see even scroll down, Steve, below in that same article, this folks are like, hmm, actually, we think that this isn't an issue. And this is why we measure stuff. And then we cross check. And you always want to have like two or three independent lines of evidence that something is happening before you really believe it. Right. In the case of expansion, the universe, the type one, a supernova tells it's happening. And there are other independent lines of evidence that this is happening. So I'd be surprised if this was overturned. But you know, anything that if the data, if the data is turned, yeah, exactly. I'd be surprised if we learned later, oh, the universe expansion is not accelerating if that was wrong. Oh, it could be like you never know. And you've got to be able to say, so this is in layman terms, this is essentially saying that from the way we're measuring how the universe is expanding, it's too hard to know because of how far away the shit we're measuring is. Yeah. And we don't know exactly how far away those supernova are. They're saying they're like, I see actually, you could be making mistakes. So this isn't even making a whole new claim. This is just pointing out one like pillar of evidence that the people are using exactly trying to share some nuance or some questioning that evidence. And it's good stuff. Like this is what you should be doing, which would be checking things from all angles. And if it's true, it should hold up, right? A true story survives scrutiny for many directions. And an illusion doesn't. And so this is why we do this. And this is why this is out in the open. Also, I love that this is out in the open. It's like people like, no, you're wrong. And other groups like actually we think we're right. And let's discuss it and debate it. You see a lot of stuff online about science protecting dogma. But I think this is a great example of how like actually when we don't know, we say we don't know and we talk about it, we argue about it. And then eventually we figure it out. Right. And sometimes we yell at each other, but that's the process. Yeah. Well, science is run by a bunch of human beings with egos. Yes. Well, science is a human endeavor like everything else. And so there's politics. There's egos. There's incentives. But in the end, it's by people for people. And mostly, it's just curious people trying to figure out how the universe works. Right. Right. So how long were you working at Surn trying to find a black hole or not a black hole dark matter. Yeah. So I worked on dark matter for about 10 years. Whoa. And we came up with lots of new ways to like look for dark matter. Maybe it's looking this way. Maybe it's that way. Maybe it's this other way. We didn't see anything. And eventually I was like, I don't think we're going to see things so move on. There's something else. They're still doing it. They're still, you know, more data more data. You can always find something. But I got interested in other stuff. I'm more interested now in like finding surprises. Maybe there's something in the data, not even dark matter, something else new and crazy. The dark energy example is an example of that one of those moments in science when you're like, what? That's what the dark energy. Yeah. Dark energy, the expansion of the universe. And that's what I got into science for. It's like to have some moment of Eureka where you're like, oh my gosh, we thought X and it turns out to be Y. And so right now me and my team were looking for surprises. We're looking for something totally unexpected in our day. Right. My favorite theory about dark matter is the one from Wheeler. I'm familiar with that one. I think he believed dark matter was like a computational cloud of data like ones and zeros. Wow. And it's kind of like a fun little analogy he uses that I think actually somebody we had a computer scientist in here. Roman, you know, I'm posky, or whatever his name is. I forget can't pronounce his last name. But he after we got down with the show, I pitched this to him and he's like, he blew it out of the water. Like almost like a fuck. But it's still fascinating to think about. Basically, the idea is he, I think Wheeler was the one who thought that dark matter could have been like computational cloud. That's a data storage type thing because using the analogy like a hard drive, like a brand new hard drive is all ones are all zeros, very low entropy. Then you record data on it and it becomes high entropy. Right. So now, you know, it's got all these ones and zeros, which mean nothing to us until we plug it into a computer. And then, you know, we sit on a screen and then it gives us meaning. But from a from a strictly mathematical viewpoint, it's just ones and zeros and it's higher entropy. So what happens when you when you erase that hard drive or you take all the data off the hard drive and you completely wipe it clean? Well, it's going from chaotic high entropy to back down to low entropy. All ones are all zeros. So from the laws of thermodynamics, that energy can't be created or destroyed. And it's also interconvertible with mass. That means you had mass on the hard drive theoretically. Right. So that mass that energy or mass has to leave the hard drive and go out into whatever dark matter. And there was somebody who came up with a theory that if you weighed all of the hard drives in the world right now, including all the data centers and everything else you would have. And you may have heard this before. I don't know. You would have if we had we don't have measurement devices that are sensitive enough, but if we could all the data on every hard drive and server and NSA server across the face of the earth would be like less than a kilogram. Yeah. Or something like that. 50 grams. What? 50 grams. 50. Depending on how it's measured, the data in the world would weigh either 50 grams. The weight of a strawberry. Okay. Well, this was this guy said this year decades ago. So anyway, so 50 grams. Basically, this point was like, but with the exponential growth of technology and AI and supercomputing and all this stuff, it's not a linear acceleration every year. So every year, it's like it's compounding the amount of data that's being stored. And you know, what they're doing with all these data centers now, who knows what it's going to look like. So like, eventually all that stuff's going to create a massive, a lots of mass on the surface of the earth. So he was using that analogy to say like, you know, what if what was in that hard drive was dark matter. You know, it's an interesting thought experiment that can probably be easily debunked by somebody smarter. Well, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on there. I think the people don't agree necessarily whether information has mass because, you know, the difference between entropy and energy, right? This organization of ideas and stuff can give you entropy, but that's not the same as energy. And it's energy that gives you mass. So I think there's there's some debate there. But also, you touched on something else. I, you know, I hope maybe we could talk about which is conservation of energy. As you say, like, energy can't be destroyed or created. But actually, we've discovered that's not true, right? That conservation of energy is something people assume and talk about and it seems obvious. But what we've discovered is the expansion of the universe tells us that energy can be created and destroyed. And it's happening all the time. What like black holes? No, just like as the universe expands, dark energy is this substance in the universe that has constant density. So, you know, like, if you have 10 ping-pong balls in a volume of space and then you increase the room, but you don't add any more ping-pong balls, the density goes down, right? You don't increase the volume, you don't increase the mass, the density goes down. That's what matter does. But dark energy, this thing that's accelerating the expansion of the universe, that acts differently. That has a constant density. So you increase the space, it's like you get more ping-pong balls to keep the density constant. Nobody knows how this happens or why it happens or what dark energy is, but the thing we know about dark energy is that it has constant density. So what happens as the universe expands, more space comes with more dark energy, that's more energy. So the amount of energy in the universe is constantly going up as it expands because every new chunk of space that's created comes with new dark energy. But we don't know what the dark energy is or the dark matter. We don't know what it is. Absolutely. And energy is also being destroyed as the universe expands. Take a photon, like we talked about these photons from the early universe. When they were emitted, they were super high energy because the plasma was super dense and super bright. It was like 3,000 Kelvin. But as the universe expands, photons get redshifted, right? They get, go from blue to red, they get stretched out. But going from blue to red, going from blue to red means going from high energy to low energy. Like a red photon is less energy than a blue photon. Where do the energy go when the universe expands and it stretches out all the photons? All those photons from the early universe are now super duper low energy. Where did that energy go? Nowhere. It just went. So that's an example of the expansion of the universe destroying energy. Right. If you create energy, it can destroy energy. So energy is only conserved in a universe that's not expanding in a static universe. But that's not our universe. So we're not actually required to conserve energy. One of the biggest hacks to growing a business is realizing you don't have to do it all yourself. We've been using upwork for years from everything from editors, designers, all kinds of different specialized work. 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That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help grow your business. Again, it's spelled UPORK.com, upwork.com. So, this rewrites the laws of thermodynamics? No, the laws of thermodynamics are still valid, but there's always an assumption when you say energy can be considered a story that's like assuming a closed system, assuming space is not expanding, and so the assumptions that you don't usually mention, when you mention it, those assumptions are wrong. Yeah, if the assumptions don't apply, then the rules don't apply. Right. And that's another like amazing like, wow, that's breaking curse. Yeah, and you know, it's not small like the dark energy in the universe. It's like 70% of all the energy in the universe. 5% is atomic matter, 25% is dark matter, 70% of it is dark energy. So it's huge. It's not like a tiny little detail and it's expanding. It's taking over like about 9 billion years after the beginning of the universe, dark energy became most of the energy in the universe. And now it's 70% and then it's going to be 90% and then 99% because it causes the expansion. So as you have more dark energy, you get more expansion, which gives you more dark energy, which gives you more expansion, it's a runaway effect. So dark energy is just like taking over the universe. Wow. Wow. It's crazy. Yeah, exactly. So this is a diagram that says the what, the contents of the universe, Steve. So you roll out what's the top of it, sorry? This is basically the energy density of the universe. Can you go higher? Contents of the universe. Okay. Yeah. If you took like a cubic light year space and you said, how much the energy in this cubic light year is due to atoms, that'd be 5%. How much of it is due to dark matter, that's 27% and how much of it is dark energy, that'd be 67%. So it's the energy density of the universe. But, you know, as the universe expands, these fractions change because dark energy doesn't get diluted and everything else does. That's fucking crazy. And that's actually another piece of evidence that dark matter is matter because as the universe expands, dark matter's density goes down. It gets diluted just like matter does. Oh, it does. It does. It's dark matter does. Dark energy does not. These two things, they sound similar. Dark matter. Dark energy increases at the same rate. Exactly. Yeah. So dark matter is like stuff. It's out there. We know what it is. We know that it's matter. We don't know what it's made out of. But it's definitely matter. And it dilutes as the universe expands. Dark energy does not dilute. So if it's matter, wouldn't it be particles? We don't know. Right? All the kind of matter we've ever seen is particles. Right. So maybe. But look at how small normal matter is. To say, the rest of the matter should also be like this kind of matter. That's an extrapolation. Right. Like, hey, I've only ever lived in Tampa, everybody in the world must be like people from Tampa. Right. Like, you know, probably there's something different, probably there's things to learn. But dark matter is also all around us right now, right? It is. Absolutely. We don't know for sure, but we think that we are in a dark matter wind. And like, dark matter is passing through us. Like, right now, in this room, there is dark matter, passing through us. We haven't been able to detect it. We've looked for it. We have these huge experiments underground filled with, like, tanks filled with, you know, a kilaton of xenon waiting for the dark matter wind to bump into one xenon nucleus, so we can see it, haven't seen it yet. But we do think this is a certain, not it's certain. This one is in northern Italy, and there are other experiments around the world that are looking for dark matter, passing through the world. There's several different ways to detect dark matter. One is, so this isn't like a money issue. This is just a brain's issue. I need people to be more creative to come up with different ways to measure or theoretical creative ideas to detect dark matter. Yeah. I think so. You know, it's, we tried the simplest thing, like, let's assume dark matter is a particle because maybe it is, and let's assume it's one kind of particle, and let's assume it has a very simple interaction, and let's go look for it. And you know, all of those are assumptions that could be wrong, but it's worth looking for, right? Like, if it is the easiest possible thing, it would be ashamed not to find it. So we've been doing that. We haven't found anything, and it's definitely time to think more broadly, like, okay, let's back up. Which of those assumptions was wrong? Maybe it's not particles. Maybe it's many particles. Maybe it's a new weird other thing. Definitely we need more creativity. So the whole industry of people coming up with ideas for what dark matter might be, might be this, might be that might be the other thing. We definitely need creativity there. And what are you familiar with this thing that came out, I think in 2024, about the James Webb telescope detecting something, it detected some sort of shift or something, where it said that these galaxies are too early. Are you familiar with that? Yeah. This was, I think, this was a paper that came out. Yeah. So the James Webb Space Telescope, awesome instrument, right? It's up in the Lagrange point, looking out into the universe, and it's an infrared telescope. So it sees really, really old or really, really distant light. Light has been redshifted from the early universe. So like Hubble can look out into the universe, but it sees visible light. It's kind of like we can see. So light from really early galaxies are really far away, it's too red for Hubble to see. So that's why we have to build a special infrared telescope to see these things. And now let's us see earlier into the history of the universe. And so what it, what they did is they looked for galaxies forming. Like we think that the universe history was like a bunch of gas and then gravity and dark matter pulled it together and formed stars and galaxies and whatever. We have a whole story about how that might have happened. But we haven't seen a lot of that happen. We could be wrong. And so James Webb went and looked, okay, it can be see early galaxies forming. And it saw a bunch of stuff that was a surprise. Number one, which I think you're mentioning is it saw galaxies forming way earlier than we thought. Like it should take a while. You form stars. They get together. They pull together. They mini galaxies, other galaxies collide with that mini galaxy to make bigger galaxies. So you can predict how long should it take to make big galaxies. But when they look, they saw the much earlier than they expected to. So like, something's happening, right? Anytime there's a difference between, you know, your expectation and your reality, that's a moment to learn about the universe. Is this it? No, this is 2026. There's tons of articles. Say it. There's a bunch of these. The same information. Okay. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered that massive early galaxies contain far more small faint stars than expected that hidden population, hidden population could make some of these galaxies three to four times more massive than previously estimated. The finding makes it even harder to explain how enormous mature galaxies formed so soon after the Big Bang. It could also suggest that planets around low mass stars were more common in the early universe than scientists realized. Super fun, right? That means aliens. Right. Yeah. I love how they word it. Yeah. So what this means is that we don't know how galaxies formed as well as we. expected. There's some surprise here. Now, with this pushback, the timeline that we currently have, like the Big Bang. No, this doesn't change the age of the entire universe. Probably not. We think we know when that CMB light happened and when the universe was filled with plasma. We don't actually know when the universe began. The Big Bang theory doesn't tell us when the universe started. It tells us when the universe was filled with hot dense matter. The created that early glow. We've seen that. We know that happened. Where that matter came from. What happened before that? Was it a moment before that? Was it a millisecond before that? Was it a million years? Was it a trillion years? We don't know. The Big Bang theory often misquoted is saying the universe began with this singularity, this point exploding out into space. That's like a common misunderstanding of the Big Bang. It's not about the start of the universe and it doesn't tell us that the universe began in a point. We just have a time frame. We have an estimate of how long ago it was. We have an estimate of how long ago the universe was filled with hot dense stuff. Where that came from? What created it? We don't know. The Big Bang theory doesn't claim to know. There's a bunch of other speculative theories, inflation, cosmic cycles, whatever that's speculated about what might have happened. But the Big Bang theory itself doesn't tell us how old the universe is. It tells us how long it's been expanding since that hot dense unexplained state. Right. I think a lot of the stuff could be us just trying to project things that we understand as biological life forms onto the galaxy and the universe. Assuming that there has to be a beginning, middle, and end, like human life has. Does there have to be a beginning? That's a philosophical question. You argue both sides of it and smoke banana peels and convince yourself either way. But we don't have evidence that there was a beginning. People often misunderstood the Big Bang is saying that we know that there was a beginning. It's not. We know that we know something happened a long time ago. We know the universe was once really, really dense. We don't know that there was a beginning. Right. So what is this, Steve? So this is related to, this is talking about the James Webb. This was posted January 23. Okay. So within just the last two years, Big Bang theorists have had to push back estimate to estimated dates for the first stars by about 150 million years from 400 to 250 million years after the supposed Big Bang. Okay. Well, in the, you know, the time scale of the universe, 100,000, 100 million years is not much. Yeah. So this is talking about like, okay, you have that gas. How long does it take for it to come together and start? When do they start burning? Because that's the foundation of galaxies. And we want to understand that because we want to understand like, you know, how did our universe come to look the way that it did? Could it have been something else? What does it tell us? And we want all the pieces to fit together and do a story because we want to know that story. And if the pieces don't fit, it means it's something wrong. And there's lots of mysteries about that. Like we don't know how supermassive black holes came to be at the heart of galaxies and how they got to be so big so quickly. It's the same question. So the heart of our galaxy is a massive black hole. Absolute monster black hole. In the heart of almost every galaxy we've seen has a monster black hole in it. And some of them are like billions of stars worth of mass. Incredible. Just enormous curvature of space time. How big is the black hole at the center of our galaxy? I don't know that one off top of my head. I think it's millions of solar masses. Millions. So it's definitely bigger than our solar system. Yes. But it's small compared to the mass of the galaxy. Usually supermassive black holes, they're monsters, but they're like, you know, 0.1% of the mass of the galaxy. So compared to like the whole galaxy of stars, they're pretty small, but they are bigger to present the mass of the galaxy. I think 0.1 usually. 0.1%. Yeah. Wow. So it's just, you know, there's so many scales to the universe that boggle your mind. The size of a supermassive black hole is huge. The size of the galaxy is even bigger. Sagittarius A is the name of the name of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy and has a mass of about 4 million times the mass of our sun at a physical diameter of roughly 14 to 16 million miles. Geez. Exactly. And the mystery is how did these black holes get so big if you are understanding of the universe and you simulate it, well, you get black holes at the hearts of galaxies, but they're much smaller. Like there isn't enough time for them to get so big, so early, which tells you this something we don't understand about the formation of the early universe. Something about how these galaxies got formed and how the supermassive black holes that their hearts got formed. There's some really fun ideas like primordial black holes. Primordial black. Primordial sounds my favorite theories. The idea is very, very early in the universe before we even had particles or before we even had protons and electrons, everything was really, really dense. What if back then, way before everything, black holes were made. So before we even had quantum fields and particles, those are primordial black holes and they could still be around and they could explain the dark matter. There could be dark matter as a bunch of these super early universe black holes and they could have kickstarted the formation of supermassive black holes at the hearts of galaxies. This is like one fun speculative theory about how things could be the way they could look the way they do. And Surn was also studying black holes, right? Yeah, absolutely. So how the hell do you study? When you're at Surn, like dark matter is one thing, then how the hell are you trying to, what specifically, I heard that they were trying to figure out what happens to stuff when they go into black holes, is that right? Well, we were hoping to create black holes because we wanted to observe them disappearing. So one of the central mysteries in physics right now, the biggest question in physics is quantum gravity. We have a theory of general relativity that explains the big stuff, how the universe behaves and gravity. And then we have quantum mechanics which explains the small stuff, particles and stuff. But the two are very, very different. One assumes that the universe is classical and smooth. The other one assumes the universe is discrete and made out of pieces. And nobody's been able to bring them together. And one place when you need both of them is inside a black hole because the black hole has super duper gravity. So gravity is important. And it's super duper compact. So quantum mechanics is important. So they disagree about what's going on inside a black hole. And if we could see a black hole and study it, we might learn how to develop a theory of quantum gravity. So we were hoping to create black holes and then watch them evaporate. So you might have heard of this famous thing called Hawking radiation. The black holes aren't actually totally black. They glow. There's these fields near the edge of the black hole that because of the distortion of space time, they have a faint glow, very, very faint glow. But the cool thing about Hawking radiation is that the bigger the black hole, the more faint the glow. So the smaller the black hole, the brighter the glow. So if you have a black hole and sitting out there in space, and it's really, really big, it's going to glow really faintly. And it's going to shrink because that glow is sapping its energy. So it's shrinking really slowly. But then as it gets smaller, the glow gets brighter. And it gets smaller, it gets brighter, smaller, even brighter. And eventually it's going to disappear in a flash or really, really brilliant flash of light. And what happens if you're close to that black hole? Oh, yeah, you get fried. Yeah, absolutely. Now I recommend it. I got to imagine there are some planets that are pretty close to that black hole. Like if you look like the way we look up and see our moon, they could probably see that damn black hole like in the sky. Yeah, but it would be very fast at the end. And but we've never seen this happen. You know, we've looked out into space to see, can we see black holes evaporating? It would be pretty awesome. We've never seen one. And that's actually one of the biggest challenge to this theory of primordial black holes. Like look, if they're black holes everywhere, we should see one evaporate sometime and we never have. So, but what we're hoping to do is make super tiny ones. And see them evaporate. What could go wrong? There was a lot of hoopla about this, right? Like, do you guys know what you're doing? Is this really right? And, you know, people took that seriously. And the truth is that it's if it were dangerous, the earth would already have been destroyed by a black hole because collisions like this happen all the time every day already, naturally. Like particles from space. Space is not empty. It's filled with high-speed particles shooting at us all the time. Cosmic rays. Cosmic rays, exactly, which is why if you go out into space, or even if you fly in an airplane, you're exposed to radiation. Space is filled with dangerous radiation. And it's really high energy. It's much higher energy than any collisions we make at CERN. Like much, much like a thousand times more energy. So, if colliding particles made black holes which could eat the earth, it would have happened already. Right? It happened yesterday. It would have happened a week ago. It would have happened a billion years ago. So, we're pretty confident that these collisions were not risking the planet. But, you know, if we did make black holes, we would see these brilliant flashes of light as they evaporate. And then from the patterns of that light, we might learn something about what's inside of them. Right. And we could confirm, oh, Hawking radiation is real. It's just a theory right now. And so that. So, the idea of general relativity and quantum mechanics, we're trying to, we've been trying to reconcile those. And the theory that we're trying to come up with, or the theory that we're trying to fit into the box of quantum gravity is the answer to that equation. Yes. Because we know they're both there. You know, what would happen if Einstein knew about this stuff would have changed everything he did. And this is one of the, this is one of the things I've heard Eric Weinstein talk about. He talks about we've been working on trying to unify this theory since for like 70 something years, right? That's right. He rants and raves about, and this is way above my pay grade, so I can't say whether he's right or wrong or whether anyone's right or wrong. I just find it interesting. He says that for 70 years, thousands of people have been spending billions of dollars trying to figure out how this works and it's been stagnant for 70 years. Well, a lot to say there. I think it's one of the biggest mysteries in physics, right, like how do we understand the universe? We want one explanation. We don't, you don't want two explanations because sometimes they disagree. So that's incoherent. You can't have like two theories about the universe to make different predictions because something is happening. So what? One coherent explanation. Neither of these work, general relativity predicts things that quantum mechanics disagrees with. Like general relativity says, you have singularities. Quantum mechanics says you can't, right, general relativity assumes that particles move through space smoothly. Quantum mechanics says, no, they don't. So they're just incompatible. We want one theory. As you say, that's quantum gravity. Problem is, nobody's been able to come up with a theory of quantum gravity that works mathematically. It's not easy. Gravity's really complicated. Quantum mechanics is really complicated. Put them together. Definitely a big challenge. People have been working on it for a long time. There is one theory that works. It's called string theory. It's a theory of quantum gravity. It works. I mean, in the sense that like it doesn't mathematically explode. Quantum theories, when you try to put them together, generate nonsense. Like if you say, hey, how much gravity should I feel in your black hole? It says infinity or zero or negative seven are just like nonsense numbers. It's not easy to put together a theory of gravity that predicts anything. That's not nonsense. String theory is one example. Problem with string theory is very hard to test. It's like, you know, can we prove the string theory is right? Not today. So there's been a lot of criticism of like, well, you guys came up with string theory but we still don't know if it's real. And when it's up first, come up with. When did string theory first? String theory first came as an explanation for forces between particles inside the nucleus. Right. And they're like, oh, that's not going to work. Let's ditch it. And then folks in the 80s or I think it was the 70s came up with it as an explanation for everything. And then Ed Witten, super smart dude in Princeton realized, oh, I can put it all together into this beautiful package. And the mathematics of it are really beautiful and gorgeous, and so people got excited. And it was the first time people had a theory at all that worked at all. So it felt like really exciting. But you know, there are opposing theories. There's a theory called loop quantum gravity that says, maybe all of space time is built to these pixels and that's how things work. And there's other theories like Eric Weinstein has his own theory of how the universe all of us. I feel like everyone has their own theory of everything. Everyone has their own theory. And that's something that's his is called what is this called geometric unity or geometric unity. Yeah. And something that's universal among scientists is everybody feels like their theory doesn't get enough attention. And you know, as a scientist, I have lots of ideas and I'm always pitching them to the government or funding agencies or whoever and they're always getting turned down. And I'm like, man, that was a good idea. And they said, no, and that's a constant feeling of rejection in science. It's like, yeah. Like being a screenwriter or a novelist, like, you write a bunch of stuff. You love it. You're like, my stuff is great. And then you said it off to the studio to send you a bunch of money. Jerry Breck, and they don't read your script or they read it and they say, no, or whatever. It's a constant feeling of rejection. And so it's universal. And so it makes sense that people are frustrated, like Eric Weinstein doesn't feel like his theory has gotten enough attention, which is confusing because it's gotten more attention than almost anything else. Certainly not. I mean, you know about it. Yeah. It's very popular. Exactly. Not many theories of quantum gravity discussed on Joe Rogan, et cetera. And so, and this is this is criticism of stagnation, you know, that you hear a lot about, which I think is, I don't know, I think it's PR nonsense. We've made a lot of progress in fundamental physics over the last 70 years. You know, we just haven't gotten it in a direction. Some people think is exciting. And that's fine. We can all disagree. I think this is exciting. You think that's exciting. Let's agree to disagree. You know, so we've got to spend the money somewhere. We need a process for figuring out how to do that. We have a process. It's open. People can participate. Everybody's going to disagree about where the money is spent. Starting and running a business is a big deal. And what really surprised me was how much easier Shopify made this whole process. We use Shopify for armor store and recently revamped the whole thing with fresh new gear. And from day one, it felt like the tools were simple and easy instead of feeling like I was wasting time learning a new profession. 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We've been blasting chemicals at the back of exhaust pipes and jet fuel and jet engines for, since whatever, how it's been like 80 years, something crazy. And we went from the Civil War to detonating fusion devices in less than 80 years, but we can't figure out a better way to propel rockets. We're still blowing shit up. To me, I feel like that is one of the most boggling things to me with the evolution of physics and all the money that goes into science and all this stuff. People are working on that. There's ion drives which are super cool. They're very different from chemical rockets and they're much more efficient and they use a much smaller amount of fuel. So you can get from here to Mars on a few kilograms of fuel instead of kill a tons or fuel or tons of fuel. An ion drive. So basically what you do is you have, it's like a little particle accelerator and you just throw ions out the back. So you speed them up in a little gun with electric fields and you shoot them out the back. How does a rocket work? You throw stuff out the back. If you're in a rowboat and you have a bunch of rocks in your boat and you throw them out the back, you'll move forward by conservation momentum. You're pushing stuff out the back. So rockets have fuel which you burn and it has propellant which comes out the back. But an ion drive says let's separate those. Instead of having the fuel store the energy and also be the thing that goes out the back, let's just throw little particles out the back and then have a separate way to make the energy like maybe a nuclear reactor, maybe solar power, maybe something else. And so it can be much more efficient that way. But it can provide the same amount of thrust. So it's like a very gentle kind of push. It'd be very hard to get off the earth. Right. You can't get into space. Exactly. That can be way more beneficial. So you use chemical rockets to get off the earth or you build your stuff in space. Yes. That would be awesome. Move in space. Right. Exactly. And then you can just like fly to Mars with much less fuel. So that would be pretty awesome. And we have those technologies and like NASA has a mission to use ion drives to explore the solar system. So that's like something. Really? I don't remember the name of it. So I had this gentleman on these two guys on the podcast a couple of weeks back who one of them is the top guy at NASA in electrostatics. Awesome. He worked on the James Webb telescope. He worked on the space shuttle missions. He worked on the ISS like a bunch of those legendary NASA projects. And he's got this side project he started in his garage that he's about to go full-time on. He's about to quit NASA and go full-time on this. And they're calling it Exodus. And essentially like high level view, I don't ask me any like details on it, but basically high level is he's using electrostatic propulsion. And they've created a drive already on electrostatic drive that can produce enough thrust to propel its own weight. So it's like one to one essentially. Not even close to being able to fight earth's gravity, but like they said, like once they get into the vacuum of space, it'll be able to get to Mars and what four days he said. Yeah. Something like that. Four days. Yeah. So he's partnered with another guy who has worked in the aerospace industry his whole life on the west or the east coast of Florida. He used to work for Blue Origin and in this guy Charles, he worked for NASA. He's worked for NASA like for decades. And they've literally been testing this in their own lab for years now. And they had like videos showing how it works and they explained it's all like a very open source on their website. And I was like, why is it NASA funding this? If I was NASA, I'd be giving you guys all the money, you know? Well, four days would require a huge amount of time. velocities, which would mean really high accelerations. So it's hard to imagine how like a human would survive that even if you could build this thing. Maybe for cargo, that could be very cool. Right, yeah, for cargo. Yeah, human life. We talked about it. It was like a four-hour podcast. I don't remember everything. Do you remember what you said, Steve? I mean, it's really, it's just a bunch of modules that you stack. Pull up their website so we can see what their description is. Yeah, so they said that they could stack it up. They could essentially, from what they've already built, they could scale it up. And they basically, they have the formula to do that. Now it's just, I think it's funding for them. So, okay, electrostatic, go up. What was that? You just had something on the homepage. Electrostatic propulsion systems that harness momentum in electricity. Okay. And like give it the high level about. X, this is developing propulsion technology intended to create measurable force through controlled electrostatic interactions rather than expelling onboard propellant. Go down. No propellant, that's hard to do. Yeah. What a propulsion system behave more like a light bulb than a fire extinguisher. Traditional spacecraft propulsion relies on chemical reaction that accelerates mass through a nozzle. Once it's stored, once the store propellant is exhausted, maneuvering capability is limited. Exodus explores a different platform using interactions between electrostatic fields to produce momentum for spacecraft motion while drawing energy from electricity. Yeah, it's freaking wild. They have all these videos demonstrating this thing operating. It's pretty bizarre. I see. I mean, I've seen some claims of things like EM drives that have propellantless propulsion that never seen actual experiments that are verifiable. So you can find more of the videos, Steve. They've got videos on the website. It's pretty cool. Oh, that's the podcast that we did. Keep going. Do they have any demonstrations? Try that one. Yeah, try that. He probably use a brief explanation of what's going on in your language so you can actually understand the headphones I go to here. The major issue is conservation of momentum. Oh, what do you got there? There's something. There we go. Glass, can you turn just by anything? Today semester of class or just use your imagination. So this is Charles. He's the head of electrostatics at NASA right now. It was this guy that led to the electrostatic pressure discovery force. Oh, the reason why he did that is because I would put this guy into any kind of volume. This is one of the volumes that we have many different volumes, different flasks and different ground planes. And then some cases that were not a ground plane. Like for example, in this case, you're in a glass flask. So there's no ground no conductive. That's for us. If you can find any videos of them operating. Do I even need the current? No, I might see this before. Oh, that's him explaining the module. Okay. Is there any video that I'm actually using it? Steve? The copper foil tapes together with some wire or whatever. Some carbon paper. It doesn't really matter. You just want them. Anyways, it works. They showed us videos. We can't find them right now. Well, it's something we'd all love to have. It is a drive that doesn't need propellant. Because as he says, once you run out of propellant, even an ion drive, you've got to bring along something to push back. It's like rocks to throw it back to your robot. So it would be great. There's a history here of claims that don't stand up to scrutiny. They will EM drive. They claim to thrust. And then when independent measurement doesn't support it. And then it turns out that most of the thrust was really small and within their uncertainties. So this would be cool if it was real. It needs independent third party proof for somebody who doesn't have a financial incentive or whatever personal incentive in it to measure it and say like, yeah, I see the same thing. So I'm all for it if it's real. Yeah. I mean, like somebody working on electrostats, I can't think of anyone more credible than a guy who's been the head of the electrostatic department at NASA for 30 years. That guy, I felt like a caveman in here talking to that guy. But in the end, it's science. So the data has to speak, right? Yes. It can't be like, you have impressive degrees. So you must be right. It's like sure. The data says yes. So the data says no. Totally. Totally. And I think these guys are doing it, which is why they're making it open source. They're not keeping it a secret. So like everything is like completely laid out on their website. And they demonstrate it publicly on video and all that stuff. So that would change everything. But you know, even that would like maybe make it easier to explore the solar system a little faster. But it wouldn't solve the bigger problem, which is like, well, how do we get to Alpha Centauri? How do we get to the other side of the galaxy? Because we're still limited by the speed of light. You know, even if you can solve the propellant issue, how do you get us out of this little bubble of our solar system? So we can interact with the galactic community if there is one. And that's the bigger problem that I think. Well, we can we can communicate with those Voyager satellites that we just set out there like in the 70s or something, right? We can do that. We can communicate with them. And they've gotten nowhere. How far out are they? Do you know? Like right at the edge of the Heliopods, the place where the sun's radiation dominates. So, you know, they're nowhere near the next solar system. They've been going for decades. And they're just like still in our neighborhood. I mean, they're far away. That's amazing. It's impressive. They're out of the solar system, right? Yes. Yeah. Which is incredible. But that's still nowhere on like a cosmic scale. Can you find like a diagram? Oh, this is a, okay, here's a video of their thing working. It's pretty slow because they only have like a, I mean, the modules need to be bigger and they need to be stacked more. This is just two modules. But it's doing its own thrust. Yeah. And they they actually built vacuum chambers that they put this thing inside like legitimate vacuum chambers. And they they show it working inside of the vacuum. Well, that'd be awesome. I hope they figure it out. But this thing they have they had the thing on the one end or whatever. And it's rotating it like super slow. Yeah. Interesting. Can you find out like show like find a, a diagram where it shows how far the Voyager probes are like how far out of the solar system. I'd be very curious to see. Yeah, there's the Voyager and there's the Pioneer. Yeah. And those are like some of the most distant man made items, which is really awesome. We had Nadia Drake in here the other day and she was, she was showing us all of the records, the golden record that they put on that thing. Yeah. And we really sneak to it. It's hilarious. They were playing like sounds of the jungle. They were playing like the rain forest, the thunderstorms. What is an alien going to make? Right. It just shows you like how much our understanding and like the evolution of our thinking has evolved since they did that, right? It's pretty bonkers. It's pretty wild to think about. So, okay, this is what, what are we looking at? Trying to find something that actually shows the distance. That shows it right there. It does have measurements. Bottom left. Right. It doesn't really give you a context of like other, but it gives you a pretty picture of. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they see Pluto, right? And so we're definitely, they're definitely outpathed Pluto, which is really far away. Right. So there's not really anything we can learn from it, right? Because it's just like in the middle of a desert, essentially. Well, we can learn about, you know, what's going on out there. We can learn about what cosmic rays are out there and all sorts of like interesting physics. I don't think we can learn much about aliens. And I think the interesting question is like, imagine aliens get the voyage or probe, right? Like we're the pioneer probe. Like they have that plaque on it that Drake and Carl say in design that's supposed to communicate like we're human. Here's how we think about the universe. And trying to imagine like what would it like be like for aliens to get that? Could they actually understand it? And you know, Drake and Sagan did their best. I think NASA only gave them like two weeks to design the first plaque. They did their best to try to communicate in a way that like is universal. But like if you'd call up like the pioneer plaque, you see this the diagram. It's what's bizarre looking. It's funny looking. It's got like naked people on it. And yeah, there it is. Yeah. And you know, the top left, for example, they try to communicate something about physics. It's like a quasar or something, right? Yeah. So look at the top left diagram. The two circles. What do you think that is? Right. I have no idea what that is. The aliens will be smart enough to find out, right? Maybe. Maybe Sagan was hoping that the aliens would think about the universe the way we do and that they wouldn't understand it. It's supposed to be a hydrogen atom on the left with the electron and the proton on the two lines. Yeah. And what the hydrogen atom does is the electron has a spin and it flips and it happens constantly back and forth all the time. So if you're like an expert in hydrogen or you look at hydrogen because the universe is mostly hydrogen, you might recognize this as a diagram intended to communicate what hydrogen is doing. And if you're an alien and you see this, you might be like, okay, these guys think about hydrogen and there's a little one there between them and it's supposed to indicate we call this one unit of time. So it's like a cosmic clock. Like let's find a way to talk about time with aliens. Let's do it by identifying this basic natural process that happens very, very regularly. Maybe the aliens have found it too and maybe we can use this diagram to like connect to that idea in their brain. It's brilliant because you know it's Sagan and Drake and they're smart guys. But it also makes a huge number of assumptions about how an alien mind might work, how alien physics might happen. And you know, I think frankly, it's probably hopeless for an alien physicist to get this and be like, oh yeah, I understand what you're talking about. I mean, I actually showed this diagram to a bunch of physics-peach-d students at UC Irvine and asked them, like, what do you think this is, and give them all afternoon. And then they didn't come up with any ideas anywhere close to what's in the drink we're thinking. And that's like, that's the easy mode, right? These are humans studying human physics on Earth with the same biological brain. They couldn't figure it out. And so the chances that like an alien sees this and gets it, I think, are pretty small. Yeah. Even the golden record is pretty wild. Oh, yeah. You know, like, to think that they even gives them the record needle, to play the record solution here, all the music. And I don't mean to criticize Carl Sagan, like, I couldn't come up with anything better. Right, right, right, right. They just mean to say that, like, this is maybe an impossible problem. To imagine how alien see the universe and to communicate with them without being able to sit across the table. Like, if we had an alien here and we could talk to them, I think we could come up with and we could probably make a lot of progress. Like we could figure out, you know, how to talk about numbers or time or whatever, because we'd have like, we could point to things and we could build a common language. But if we're just like sending a message or getting a message, I think it's probably hopeless to decode what they mean or how they think about the universe, do I love to. What did you think about that Steven Spielberg movie that just came out? It just closed your day. It just wouldn't have closed your day. Yeah. Well, it's number one. It was fun. Like, it's a fun movie. Spielberg, dude knows how to tell a story, but I thought it avoided really the hard question. You know, the movie was all about like, let's assume aliens are here. Let's assume the government knows about them and is hiding them. How would that play out if it was revealed? And it avoided the hard question, which is like, well, what does the government know? And should they tell us, you know, in the movie, they assume that if you release this information, it's dangerous somehow that it would like cause chaos. And I don't know if I believe that. Like if the government announced tomorrow, oh, yeah, by the way, we have aliens and we've been experimenting with them for 50 years, I don't think it would cause uproar. I think it would be like, oh, cool. Yeah. Oh, no, no. It might have if you dropped it in the 50s or 60s. Maybe. I don't know, but I think I think that overstates it. I think I don't think that's their primary mode. If they were, if there is, if this is true, like his concept that the government is hiding this stuff and they have been doing this, I don't think that the reason for them to hide it would be to keep people psychologically sound. I don't think or like for chaos to, I believe there would be other incentives for them to keep it quiet. I guess so. I mean, I don't know. And I also think it'd probably be impossible for them to keep it quiet, especially in the 60 years. Totally. Even keep nuclear weapons from the Russians from right for a decade. So now imagine like an even better secret for so much longer. I mean, I've worked on government projects like, I know it's impossible to keep things. Right. To keep things that quiet. But it was a fun movie, you know, for sure. So what does your take on this whole UFO, UAP nonsense? So do you take, give it any merit or do you pay any attention to it or are you too busy doing real stuff? Of course, I pay attention to it because look, I want to meet the aliens. I want the aliens to be here. I imagine there's some super advanced aliens out there and they know the answer to quantum gravity. They know how the universe started. They know how to build propellantless drives. They know how to build wormholes between star systems. And I want to know, I mean, imagine there's somebody out there that knows the answers to the questions like, how do the universe begin? What is it all made out of? And they just know and they could tell us. So yeah, I want aliens to be here. I want them to visit. But because I want it so badly, I feel like I have to be skeptical because you know, you can easily convince yourself of something you want to be true. You know, I'm losing weight or I'm a good looking or like, you know, whatever. It's very easy to fool yourself. So I got to be skeptical and none of the evidence that's out there to me is very compelling. You know, there's like these videos, actually had a congressperson call me up, he listens to my podcast and say he'd seen all the classified videos and he wanted to ask me some questions about the physics. Yeah. I was like, wow. Let's talk. It was super cool. And he'd heard some crazy theories about wormholes and plasma orbs and whatever. And he wanted to know what I thought about it. And I was like, I'll tell you, but first you guys tell me what you saw in those videos. And he's like, no, it's nothing interesting. Apparently it all just looks like the stuff that's out there. But it looks like what's out there? So there's a few videos that are out there, like the Navy videos, like TickTack and GoFast and Gimbal or whatever. And the rest of the stuff that they haven't released, apparently there's a lot of videos out there. There's a lot of videos that aren't out there. They haven't released them. And those apparently don't look like anything more exciting. Which is too bad. I'm very skeptical of those videos. We got satellites that can read the newspaper or somebody sitting on the bench in a park from outer space. You're like, can't you tell me this is all we got? Yeah. They exist in this low information zone, right? They're like, always fuzzy. You don't quite have enough information. I don't discount Navy pilots. They're awesome people. I'm sure they're telling us what they saw. But to me it's not enough to really believe it. I need physical evidence that we can study that independent people can measure and be like, yeah, this is not from Earth or something. Stories are never enough, right? First hand stories are never enough. Unfortunately, I got to be skeptical. So I want them to be here. But the curious thing to me about those Navy pilots is that when they came down back to the aircraft carrier after seeing that stuff and they reported it to their superiors, their superiors didn't seem surprised. I thought that was very strange. Yeah. Well, I'm not an expert in psychology. It's complicated for sure how people react to this stuff and how they reported it. It was all near, you know, training sites and it was all near big bases and in, like, active zones where they did, they did, they rehearsed missions and operations and stuff like that. But if something was being tested on our own equipment, that would be the ideal place to do it, right? It's true. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. But, you know, we should be looking. We should be checking. There's been a lot of cool stuff. I don't know if you've seen the studies where they have what they claim to be evidence of satellites orbiting the Earth from before humans put anything into it. Oh, it's Beatrice V.O. Yeah. Right. Yeah. She published a paper on this. It's called the Vasco study. Cool. Very creative. Vasco love that idea, like really brilliant concept. And there's now like a lot of scientific debate about, you know, is there really a signal for it? Are they just smears in the plates or whatever, and people are digging into the detail. So they're going back to it. So the overall idea is that she found over a hundred thousand mere like reflective objects in space around where satellites would be anomaly. These were anomalous. And this was before Sputnik was even out there. Before Sputnik. I don't expect any Earth junk up there, right? And she sees a bunch of stuff that reflects like a satellite. And then when it goes into Earth's shadow, it doesn't reflect anymore, right? Because you might say, well, how do you know it's not just a star? Well, if it's going into the Earth's shadow, it must be nearby. And so that's the really the key idea. Problem is that these are early, early plates. This is from the Palomar Observatory decades ago, and they took these huge beautiful images. But there's a lot of crap in those images. A lot of what? A lot of crap. They're photographic plates, and there's dust, and there's also artifacts. And it's really hard to tell if what you're seeing is actually something from space or some fuzz on the telescope or some fuzz on the photograph. It's really hard to tell. There's a lot of noise. So she doesn't have a lot of people would scrutinize this, though, like when she was getting it published, don't you think this would be the lowest hanging fruit of we need to eliminate this question right here? Like, could it be this? Yeah, well, people haven't really exploded before this because they realized how hard it was to tell the real stuff from the noise. So she doesn't have like, here's a bunch of crystal clear examples of something that can't be anything else. She has, okay, there's a huge amount of noise, but there's more than you would expect from noise. It's like a statistical argument. It says like, oh, there's more of these flashes on the plates than you would expect from just dust and from just, you know, fuzz on the photography. So it's like a statistical argument and some people say like, well, you can't know that. Like it's, there's too much uncertainty is just too much noise to pull this signal out of there. It's like you're listening to fuzz. What year was it? What year? So this would have been what year specifically in the fifties? I don't remember exactly. I think it was in the forties. In the forties? In the, that these images. The polymer observatory. Yeah. I don't remember exactly the year. Because these plates span the fifties. Okay. They span the fifties? Yeah. So that's when you pull it up. It was in the fifties because another fascinating claim is that these things coincide with nuclear tests, which is like, what? Yeah. Right. Oh, okay. So, excuse me a little bit, two new peer review papers, catapulted the mid-century astronomical archive into global headlines when Dr. Beatriz Viorial of VASCO Project at the center of a debate about UAP's disappearing stars and whether historical records contain real physical signals or a long chain of misleading artifacts. Brief star like transients on a 1950s palamar scar survey plate appears to cluster in time around nuclear testing and also track in a weaker way the day-to-day volume of UAP report. Oh, interesting. Yeah. I didn't know that part. are provocative. The data set is old and the The stakes are high and the real story is less about certainty than about what it would take to turn a weird archival signal into a reproducible present-day measurement. That's very interesting because all of the UFO accounts and testimonies coincide with nuclear tests going back to Roswell, which was on the site of a nuclear testing ground. That's where they were literally testing the first nuke, so it's right where that Roswell thing was. Yeah. I think there's actually Alamogordo in New Mexico, yeah. Right. Right. And then there's been dozens and dozens of people who have gone public at least, who work at nuclear sites, who claim seeing these things, like top level people who have their fingers on the nuclear button, you know, these aren't just kooks, like these are people who are in charge of, are we going to go into global thermonuclear war or not, right? A serious people for sure. And that's one of the craziest things. There was even a, there was a great video that James Fox put in one of his documentaries, where essentially, but you could probably find a section of it cut out specifically on YouTube, where it shows a map of the whole world, and it shows on the bottom, there's a timeline, and it shows the date of every nuclear bomb being tested around the world. And then it also shows recorded UFO sightings that were reported by people or by military or whatever, and the correlation is astonishing. And it shows you the date of like all the nukes that are being blasted, and it's just like, it's so crazy how correlated they are and how the UFO sightings match up around nuclear type nuclear sites or nuclear tests. Yeah. You got to be careful with correlations though, right? Things don't prove causation, right? There's like correlations between how much people use the Netscape browser and like murder rates. And like obviously, there's, you know, when the Netscape doesn't cause murders. So you got to be really careful about correlations. And that's the thing about this study, but the flashes, the transients, and nuclear testing, like, is there, is a correlation enough to prove that there's something real there? And there's some, another guy published a paper re-analysing and saying, she measured it wrong, and if you measure it correctly, the correlation goes away. So this is like a vigorous debate about these things. And I think it's exciting. And it's interesting. I'm glad that these papers are being published, and it's out there in the open, you know, people arguing about it scientifically. I think there should be less like stigma about talking about U.S. and aliens, like we should treat it like a scientific question, and because I think it's exciting. And we should have an answer to these questions and we should do it through open scientific discussion, and the data should be out there for everybody. Steve, did you find that map that animated map of the nuclear detonations? No, I'm still looking. Okay. Yeah, it's, it's super curious, right? Like, it doesn't correlation is an equal causation, but it's very interesting, like, why? Why are all these UFO sightings happening around nuclear science and like seem to be correlated with nuclear, nuclear detonation? That's when we first started seeing them, right, was around Nagasaki, and when we bombed Japan, and like the history of that history, the UFO sightings are also correlated with other stuff. Like, if you look at the worldwide map of where UFO sightings happen, it's mostly like in the United States. Is that true? Huh. Yeah. So, you know, there's like a, I thought there was lots of them, I've been, I mean, I've heard of tons of them being, but yeah, I guess you're right, but we also live in the United States, right? We see more U.S. news. Yeah. I don't, I don't, I don't know, I've seen these plots that show that where the UFO sightings happen and they're clustered in the United States, and so it makes you wonder like how much of that is a cultural phenomenon and how much of it is, you know, we're seeing something out there. It's definitely right that the cultural phenomenon aspect of it is huge, and you can't deny that, right? And I'm an expert in this stuff, so yeah, I'm totally just an amateur. Yeah. That's not my, but it's just very, yeah, it's true though, like it's that, how much does that distort, you know, how many, how many times were people claiming they got abducted by aliens when they were just, you know, having a schizophrenic break or something like that or saw a movie, had a bad dream or whatever, like there's so many, so many moving parts to this phenomenon. And the thing about it is that it's like, it's, it's God for atheists, right? People want to, they use aliens and the UFOs to fill that God-shaped hole in the brain, right? Because it's one of those things we don't know the answer to, it's one of the biggest questions of the universe or their aliens are we alone. So people, people find meaning in that stuff, right? And it defines, it becomes their identity and it becomes obsessed with it. And you know, it's just like, it's one of those things that we may not in our lifetimes at least find the answer to, like is there a God or aliens real and, you know, what is consciousness? What happens when we die? Absolutely. It's one of those things. It's like, I can't imagine what it would be like if that question did get answered. You know? Absolutely. Because we would just find the next crazy fucking thing to chase. Well, you can think back to like early times, you know, like what did cavemen and cavemen think when they looked up at the stars? They had no idea what those things were. And you know, we can't imagine what it was like to be them, to be so clueless about the nature of the universe. And that's the incredible thing about science is that we knock down these questions. Like, some of these may not be answerable, you know, is there a God? We don't know. We might not never know. Maybe not a scientific question. But some of these like, how do the universe begin? What's it all made out of? You know, are we alone? These are questions we could get answers to. Like scientific, like reproducible objective answers to. And then people in a thousand years will look back and be like, what was it like to be those dudes? Right. And do not know whether we're alone. How could you survive being so clueless about the context of your lives? And to me, this is what's so exciting is that there's so much science left to figure out. Like we have understood like the tiniest fraction of the universe. And what's left are huge like context defining surprises, you know, probably when we figure out the deal with aliens, it's not going to be what I think or what you think or what some guy in a farm field in Iowa thinks. It's going to be something so bizarre and alien nobody imagined it because the universe is going to surprise us. It's going to be like secret option C, right? Well, one of the things is like, I think the idea that if there were aliens, they're going to be these bipedal hominids with a forward-facing eyes, exactly, with like a croissant on their forehead. Right. Like what is the chances in a planet that has totally different gravity, totally different atmosphere, maybe even a fucking water world. Who knows that they're going to evolve to look exactly like us. Exactly. And extrapolating from our experience, the way we're like, hey, maybe dark matter is made out of particles. It's the same mistake we've been making forever, which is like put ourselves at the center of the universe, assume that we are alone. Like these kind of things are our moments when we discover that we're unusual or not unusual or typical or not. And those are the really exciting times in science. And you know, one thing is like, what is their biology like, do they have legs? Do they move the same way we do? But to me, another really interesting question, which touches on this business with the pioneer plaque is, how do they think about the universe? You know, I have this fantasy that aliens come and they tell us about the universe and they tell us about quantum gravity and, you know, you see this in sci-fi all the time. You know, like aliens come and we make contact via math or whatever. And then we are talking about physics. But I think it's probably going to be much harder because I think probably aliens the way they think about the universe is probably really, really alien in ways we can't even imagine. Right. The way we can't imagine their biology or their culture, you know, or their perspective on anything. Yeah, I probably won't fit into our framework of how we view the world in the universe. Exactly. And it'll teach us something about the assumptions we've been making because we are always making assumptions based on our experience without even knowing, without even really realizing that we are because we don't think that there are any other options. And then when we discover the universe is different from what we expected, that's when we realize we were making assumptions and that they were wrong. Right. You know, for example, we could meet the aliens and we could discover, oh, they do science, but they don't use math. Like maybe their science is not like built on mathematics at all, maybe mathematics is part of how we think about the universe, not part of the universe itself, or maybe aliens don't even do science. Right. Maybe they're probably not constrained by auditory language, like the terrible language that really strains our thinking and our imagination and the way our brains work. Maybe they're telepathics. Right. And think about how much faster you could use your emotions to communicate or something that we can't even comprehend. Yeah. Or if you weren't forced to like take your ideas and compress them into sound waves to transmit them to another brain. If you could just be like brain, brain, brain, brain, brain, brain, think, think, think. Yeah. You know, I don't know. Maybe that'd be better. Maybe that'd be worse because it's like like that's one of them. That's one of the downfalls of like one of the biggest pitfalls of human, human interaction is the communication gap, right? Not just like us sitting across the table using our native language to communicate ideas and stuff like that. But like the way technology is evolving here, it's separating that. It's pushing humans apart and it's letting us communicate via like texting on a phone where you can't really convey emotion or like the volume or like where your inflections are and all that kind of stuff. And then you want to throw gasoline onto that, put it on social media where now everyone can post a tweet about something and like it's going to raise themselves at different meaning with different cultural assumptions, different context. Right. And so now try to imagine communicating with aliens. And that's why I was saying earlier, like, you see, you see, you see, you see, you see, And then when you finally find something you love, but it's too expensive, maybe you start to wonder if there's an alternative for a cheaper price. And that's why I use Duped.com all the time. You can take basically anything you're thinking about buying, paste the product link into Duped, even upload a photo, and it searches for something that you can do. And then compare prices on them. There's lots of the same quality and very different prices. Duped works for clothing, shoes, jewelry, electronics, and tons of other stuff. You can even just describe what you need, like noise-canceling headphones for traveling, and let Duped do the research for you. It's completely free, and you don't even need an account. Using Duped.com is insanely simple. Just go to duped.com, paste any product URL, upload any photo, and it will instantly show you similar items for way less. There's also an app and a browser extension if you want to make it even easier. No account needed, totally free. So start saving money with Duped.com today. How hard is it to learn an alien language? Well, we can't know, of course. But we can think about how hard it is to learn ancient human languages, and think about ancient human societies that wrote stuff down, and then we found it, and we're like, "Okay, let's decode it." Turns out that's really hard. It's like, mostly, we don't know how to do that. We have a couple of examples of having figured that out. The Greek had almost two million unique words. Wow. How crazy is that? That's a lot. I think how many words do we have? I think 200,000 in modern English? That's astonishing. And they used to walk around singing. That's how they memorized books. The Greek is still around. We never lost it. Ancient Greek is a different language. I think it's a completely different language than modern Greek. But I don't know how I'd be curious to know how many actual words are in modern Greek compared to ancient Greek. But it's crazy. Just to measure the explosion of intellect that happened in that period of antiquity, when the Greeks were really thriving and doing that stuff, where you had Socrates and Plato and all these people that were coming up with all this stuff. But yeah, I don't know what this says. Well, this is modern Greek as 200,000 to 200,000. Well, that number is wrong for ancient Greek. We already proved that with Luke Gordon. 120,000. Yeah, but isn't it weird because you can combine the Greek words to make new ones. Yeah. So like, how do you measure it? I don't know. Well, unique words. Did you search for unique words? I know I didn't say you're unique. Yeah. That's another thing about ancient Greek, because people were walking around just creating word forms all the time. They were combining different words to create new words, corning new words all the time. It's insane. So there are assumptions about language that don't hold, like, and there are other languages from that same era, like a trusskin, nobody's ever figured out how to crack it. We have a bunch of examples of written a trusskin, and nobody knows what they say. Really? Is nobody around who reads a trusskin anymore speaks it? It's just lost. Just a lost deadline. Yeah. And it's not like they're weird, right? They lived alongside the Romans. The Romans wrote about them. They knew the Romans. It's like very culturally adjacent to us, but we just can't figure it out. Because it's hard to translate a new language, because it could be anything. When you write something down, you're creating these words, and the words are symbols, and they're just arbitrary. We've decided chocolate means chocolate, but we could have called it, you know, blue, good, blah, blah, blah, whatever. It's totally arbitrary. We just agree on it. So now, if somebody comes along and tries to reverse engineer that, without any cultural knowledge, it's basically impossible. Like our one example of figuring it out, like hieroglyphics, that turns out to be like more of a cautionary tale than like a story of triumph. You know, like the only reason we ever figured out hieroglyphics is because of the Rosetta Stone, right? We found this example where it's like, here's some hieroglyphics, and the same text also in Greek and in another language, basically like a cheat sheet. But even still, after the Rosetta Stone, it took 20 years to crack hieroglyphics. Like 20 years is a long time. Even after you get the cheat sheet, and the reason is that we are making the wrong assumption about how the language worked. Like we assumed, and everybody assumed for centuries, that hieroglyphics were like pictograms. Like if there's a bird in it, it's about birds. If there's waters in it, it's about water. And people were like, wow, the Egyptians had this incredible language that superseded words and whatever. Or wrong, turns out hieroglyphics are phonetic, just like our language. Like this symbol makes a sound, and the other symbol makes another sound. So people made the wrong assumption about how hieroglyphics work, and it took them an extra 20 years to figure it out, because they made that wrong assumption. So there's like, there are these landmines, these assumptions everywhere, not just in translating language, but in science, where we're assuming things have to be a certain way, and that's blinding us to other possibilities. And those are the times when we need some new fresh data to show us, to tear us out of those assumptions, to be like, no, you guys are always wasting your time. This is the right way to go. But that's another huge problem with science, which I've only learned since starting this podcast, is that one of the things that shocked me was how stove piped and how everyone in science has their blinders on their show. So little interdisciplinary people coming together and trying to solve or bit solve bigger problems. You can stay in their lanes, and you can talk to somebody who studies ancient texts, like, oh, well, how many archaeologists have you talked to, or how many forensic examiners have you talked to, the actual DNA that's going into these people, the dead bodies that correlate the text, the correlate the megalithic stonework, or whatever archaeology you pulled up, it's none. It's all, they all stay in their exact academic lane, which is, it's crazy to me, that's that way. Well, I think it's a product of the system, you know, you, to get somewhere, you have to be at the top of the game. Like, to get an academic position, you have to beat out like hundreds of people for one job. Yes, the rat race. You have to be like, at the very, very top of this mountain of people working on this particular thing. So you've got to be really, really focused, and that's how it works. But once you get tenure, then you can bridge out, you can do other stuff, you can like, join the philosophy department, you can find interdisciplinary work. And actually, I think AI is going to be really, really helpful to facilitate that. To facilitate what interdisciplinary work? Okay, yeah. One of the challenges is like, say I want to do physics, but I also want to use ideas from statistics or some other field or something. Well, they speak a whole different language, and like, I'm going to learn how to read their papers and like understand what they're doing. It's going to take me like five years. Right. And so that's been a real challenge. And I've been doing interdisciplinary work between physics and machine learning and statistics, and it's taken a long time to develop these bridges. But now with AI, like, I can call up some statistics paper, I can be like, translate this into my language. Right. And boom, it's done. Right. And I can also ask it like, hey, go find me papers about this, but in other fields that I don't really know how to search or where the papers are, who does the work. And it can go and read all of those and find them and translate. So I think AI is going to be a really powerful bridge between these fields, helping translate between these different ideas and these different disciplines and make these connections. It makes it a lot easier to do all that work. Yeah, that's true. And I wonder like with the exponential growth of AI and how it's kind of like ever accelerating and advancing and self-updating and all this stuff, like how this is going to affect science in general. And you know, how this is going to affect the people that are working as certain. We're going to large Hadron Collier. Like if this thing becomes like so insanely intelligent and powerful that we're, you no longer need people employed working on in labs and in, you know, physics laboratories and all this stuff colliding particles together because the AI can solve all the problems. Like what is that? What does that do? Because I think it's like one of the fundamental things about human beings is that they're curious. Yeah. Right. So we're always going to need people being curious. Like I agree with you. It's going to change how we do science. Yeah. It's going to accelerate things. It's going to take things that used to take months and make them take days. But in the end, that's just powering human curiosity. It's human. People asking questions. That's the point. It's human. Yeah. So when you're, when you're subbing all that stuff out to a machine, how does that change? Because like one of the fundamental things about being human is like human motivations. Right? People want to acquire more resources. They want to reproduce. They want to find a mate. They want to understand the universe. Crime, the hierarchy. And they want to do all this stuff too. Because they know eventually they're going to die. Right? Life is finite. Now if you're saying like, now if artificial intelligence is doing that, then what does that do to humanity? Yeah. Well, they don't have the same motivations that we do that machines don't. Yeah. Well, I don't think that AI will replace that human curiosity or it should. Like, it's going to allow humans to do more. Allow things to happen faster and more efficiently. Make connections. Make progress. But it's not going to like stop us from being curious. It's not like AI is going to come up with quantum gravity. And then I'm going to be like, okay, cool. I'm going to retire on board. Like, no, I'm going to have questions. I'm going to have new questions. AI will help us answer today's questions and help inspire tomorrow. Those answers will inspire tomorrow's questions, but it's not going to replace curiosity. You can't, as you say. It's like, it won't replace curiosity. Right. What will it do to human drive, right? Because a lot of the reason that people do things, people try to make big achievements is because they wanna make a name for themselves, right? Before they die, they wanna be known for something, they want to, and generally just across, you know, throughout time that has been the struggle of humanity is where territorial apes we kill each other for territory and resources and for the attractive mate, that's baked into us from the beginning. So, and that, that is, it's a double-edged sword to why we have been able to innovate and create newer and newer things with technology and with war with weapons and exploring outer space and all that stuff. - I mean, I don't think everybody like gets into physics to find mates and get lots of resources, you know, it's not like a, so simple. I think also everybody doesn't get into physics for that, for sure, right? There's a lot of people that are just genuinely curious and they wanna find a career in something that they're really interested in. They wanna make a better life for themselves, right? But I'm just like, I'm generalizing. - Okay. - So, and with the way technology is like, you're rewarded for creating better and better technology. Human beings, they're rewarded. Like corporations, they make more money, they sell it to more people, people get to show off, look, I got the brand new iPhone, you know, I got the iPhone 17 Plus Pro or whatever, it does all this, I can see the moon with it. Like, what kind of iPhone do you have? It's a human reward system, right? So, what happens to science? Like, if that is no longer a fundamental thing that is necessary, 'cause we have AI to answer all these questions for us, what happens then? Like, what happens to us? I don't know. - Well, I think you still need somebody directly in the AI. It's like, think about what happened to science when we had computers. Like, we could do calculations much faster, we could do more calculations. It accelerated science massively. Like, when they first came up with the idea of predicting the weather, it used to take six weeks to predict what was gonna happen six hours later. So, like, totally useless because it took longer to do the calculation than a different time to pass. Then, when computers came on the scene, like, oh my gosh, we could predict the weather in six hours and it took six minutes. Now, it's actually useful, huge advance. And since then, like, obviously huge advance, but it haven't like replaced humans, it's just made humans more effective. And I think that's what's gonna happen with AI. It's just a powerful tool that makes human curiosity more powerful, more effective. There's no point where you're like, we don't need the large haze on collider, 'cause like, AI's not gonna do experiments, just analyze data. And it's not like you're gonna say, oh, we don't need theoretical physicists, because even if some of their work can be made more effective, you're having gotten rid of the need to try to want to understand the universe and to think about the questions that we want answers to. So, I don't think AI is gonna replace humans in science, because humans are in science because we have questions and that's not gonna change. And you see a lot of these, you know, Sam Altman says, we're gonna solve physics in AI. And like, I don't even know what that means. Like, what does it mean to solve physics? - It's all physics. - Yeah, like, what does that mean? There's no time in which humans are not gonna be curious about the universe, even if aliens came. And they're like, Daniel, here's the theory of everything and it works, right? I'd be like, okay, well, why that theory? Why is there a seven in it? Why is this other thing? Like, I'm always gonna have questions. That's nature of being human. So, I think AI is gonna change how we do science, but I don't think it's gonna stop us from doing science. But I think it is really, really good at something we're bad at, which is combining ideas. Like, if you think back in the history of human scientific breakthroughs, a lot of them came from some guys of problem, somebody else independently came up with a solution and then they figured out how to put them together. Like Einstein in general relativity, he was like struggling with that and then he learned, oh, these mathematicians came up with these mathematical tools, not to solve my problem just because they were nerds and they thought these number of problems were fun. And they developed all these techniques that perfectly solved his problem. So, this is interdisciplinary work, right? If he'd never met those mathematicians, he might not have figured out general relativity. Same with quantum mechanics, like relies on this thing called group theory, which a bunch of French nerds invented a hundred years earlier 'cause they like playing games with numbers, not to like understand the nature of the universe, just like chocolate and peanut butter. And AI is great at that. AI is like, oh, you're working on this problem? Have you read this paper over there? 'Cause that solves that problem. Much, much better than we are. So, that's gonna happen very quickly. That's great if AI is completely not fucked with or tinkered with by any humans, right? As long as there's no bias, there's no hidden agendas or anything like that that's baked into it, they can be completely objective on its answers, right? There's always bias. - That would work. - There's always bias with humans. But like if you could completely remove human beings from the equation, from the AI, that would be ideal. - There's always bias in AI based on what it's been trained on. - Right. - Well, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's been some bad examples. There was the early Google one, did you see that? Where they said, they said, show me Nazis. And it had a bunch of black people with dreadlocks, like women and stuff like that. Like, oh, it's like, yeah, they're hopefully weeding that stuff out of it over time. But that's gonna be something that we're gonna have to contend with for a long time. But like one of the greatest examples of interdisciplinary science would be like the Manhattan Project, right? Where we took all those Nazis and we brought them here and we had them create the bomb for us. Like, that was human ingenuity at its finest, right? Not for any good reasons, for terrible evil reason. Well, I don't know if we had Nazis in the Manhattan Project. We had like Jews, but we had lots of Nazis. - We had a lot of Ron. - Yeah, but he was like building rockets after the war. And was he involved in the Manhattan Project? - I believe he was. Yeah, I believe he was. - Find out, let's fact check me there. Say were there any Nazis and former Nazis, former in air quotes, involved in the Manhattan Project? Yeah, he was a charge of NASA. - Yeah, he did believe he was a good guy. - I think he was a part of the Manhattan, maybe I'm wrong. - Well, this is what it says. - Oh, Google. - No bias found here, right? - Yeah. - Okay, refugees, not Nazis. - I actually grew up refugees. - Yeah, see like Einstein and Enrico Fermi. These were guys, they were definitely not Nazis. - So Bob Ron is a refugee, not a Nazi? - What? - He was a full-blown carcorderly Nazi. - He says there he is a former Nazi rocket engineer. - Yeah. - Oh, okay, yeah. - Okay, so it already-- - Oh, such as Warner von Braun. - Okay. - He was during Operation Paperclip for the space and-- Go up, go up, go up, go up. So this is a no captured Nazi scientist were involved in the Manhattan Project. I was wrong. So while the U.S. later employed former Nazi rocket engineers like von Braun during Operation Paperclip for space and missile programs after World War III or II, the atomic bomb was fully developed and tested before any German nuclear research-- Oh, yeah, that makes sense. - And heisenberg was leading the German version of the Manhattan Project. There's actually a cool question there, historically, about like, 'cause he made a mistake in some of his calculations, which led their whole project down the wrong path. - Oh, really? - He had a question about whether he did that intentionally or not, and he had this conversation with Niels Bohr just beforehand. They had this famous walk they took through the park in Copenhagen, and it's hard to believe that Heisenberg would make this mistake, and so people speculate that on this conversation, Bohr was like, you can't let the Germans have the bomb. Let's agree, you should make this mistake and think the program down the wrong way. It's a great play actually, it's called Copenhagen. That's all about that. - That's all really. - But I actually grew up in Los Alamos. - You grew up in Los Alamos? - Yeah, both of my parents worked the lab. - They worked in Los Alamos. - Yeah, on Weapons Projects. - What were they doing? They meet Pablo Tsar? - I don't know. - I don't know what they got in there. - I never asked what they met Pablo Tsar. - I never asked them if they met Pablo Tsar. - Yeah, you have. You're gonna tell me after this, Steven, shut the cameras off. (laughing) - That was when Bob said he was there. - Yeah, is that right? - Well, I grew up in Los Alamos. It's a crazy place. I'm in a Hatton project, like deeply infused in that whole climate. But my parents both worked on Weapons Programs. But I don't know what they worked on 'cause I don't have a security clearance. - They weren't allowed to tell you. - They weren't, I never saw their office. - Sorry, sorry son. (laughing) - Sorry young Daniel, one day you'll learn. - No, I don't wanna work on nuclear weapons programs. Like one reason I work at CERN is because there's no immediate practical applications for weapons of anything we do. Like of course, when you develop new ideas about the universe, you could always imagine it may be down the road it gets turned into a weapon. But it's not like what we're doing is to develop death rays or something like that. I wanted to work on something that was more fundamental, more separate from like immediately developing weapons of mass destruction that are pointed at civilian populations. To me, that was always, I mean, it put food on my table as a kid, but it was always sort of morally questionable. So I wanted to move away from that a little further from direct development of weapons. - Yeah, well, I mean, certainly during the Cold War was like the time in America where the most money was going towards this kind of stuff for weapons and spying and all this stuff. - Yeah, Los Alamos was at the heart of that. - Yeah, at the heart of that. - They got a lot of money. And you know, for a lot of scientists, it was not an easy question. Like, this is what's being funded. And then, so that's where the jobs are. So if you wanna do physics research, like, well, you're gonna end up working on that. And so a lot of people I know, in these days work on weapons programs or work for the defense industry or whatever, 'cause those were the odds for all the money was. That's where the most innovation was. If you wanted to make the most money being like cutting edge of physics and scientific research and blue sky research stuff where they throw just infinite money and at the wall to try to get these scientists to, you know, they were meeting with, we had this amazing journalist, Andy Jacobson in here who wrote a book all about this, called the Pentagon's Brain. And the Pentagon was literally inviting and science fiction writers to the Pentagon to just like have creative meetings on like, let's fantasize about future weapons and technology. What could we create? They had like the writer of Terminator in there, the writer of Alien in there. And they do this like every year. - I think it's great. I mean, I think science fiction writers are very creative and they're out there thinking about how the universe might be. And, you know, to me, there's not a divide between science fiction writers and theoretical physicists. It's a spectrum, you know, theoretical physicists are also thinking maybe the universe works this way or maybe works that way. And so I think they have a lot of influence and a lot of a lot of role to play in understanding the universe. I just wish that there was more money for that kind of blue sky research that was not connected to weapons and immediate application. You know, the amount of money you're talking about. - You're a territorial ape, man. That's what we do. - Well, it's just like it's such a tiny fraction of what we do is like give money to people to just be curious and think about the universe. Like defense spending versus basic research. Even like, you know, how much money do we spend on rune buzz as a society every year? Vastly, vastly more than we spend on like, understanding the universe. You know, or cell phones or, you know, chewing gum. Like, as a, as a society, we have made this very, very low priority. And I think this is the reason why we have a lot of these problems in academia. Like, why are people so siloed? And why are people, why are there these incentives? It's because we've starved everything of money. So there's no room for creativity. We have to have like an idea that's gonna be compelling. They get you a job. If we had more money in these areas than people would be more free to explore. So anyway, that's just my little soapbox that we share. - Yeah, man. You should have fun with science more. - Yeah. - I completely agree with you, man. And you know, another one of the crazy things that's kind of happening right now with space exploration in particular, is just like become super privatized. - Yeah. - You know, with like Elon and a lot of the guys that were the head of NASA, there was the NASA AIM Center in California. And a lot of money has been getting sucked out of NASA and into this private space industry where it seems like all of the budget is all of these rocket, there's rockets that go up every single day in Cocoa Beach, Kennedy Space Center. And they're just putting up satellites for contractors, for defense contractors and things like that. And that seems to be where all the budget's going to. Just spy satellites and stuff like that and defense satellites. And like, you know, they're paying Elon a fee to shoot the rockets up there. And he's in partnership with all these companies as well. And they're all tied to the military industrial complex. You know, they're all tied with, not just SpaceX, but like Palantir and OpenAI. And there's another company in Venezuela that's partnered with them. This guy from Venezuela has a company called Satellogic, which are like these super sophisticated satellites that's like basically Google Earth on steroids, where they can zoom in super tight and switch on different types of AI modes or whatever. And they're somehow combining all this stuff with, with they're using the data centers to sort of process all this data somehow and build more data centers. And there's a big push to do those things in Argentina right now in like Patagonia. And there's no, it's all for profit type stuff, for intelligence and military applications like that. There's no more like, let's go to the moon. Let's go to Mars, it's all. - Yeah, and I think it is an important divide there. Like on one hand, should we be privatizing launches and like clearly Elon knows how to do that. And that's cool. And it's awesome what he's been able to do with reusable rockets. But people think that that's all that NASA does, but it's not, right? NASA also does like, let's land rovers on Europa and drill through the ice to see if there's like crazy aliens living in the oceans underneath the ice of Europe. But they could be there right now. - I wish they did. - Are they doing that? - They have ambitions to do that. - They have ambitions to do that, but they don't have the money. Like it would cost a few billion, which is like nothing. It's chump change. You imagine we found out what's in this ocean under the ice of Europe. - Imagine we found alien life in our solar system. It would change everything. We could do that, but we've just decided not to. And so when we defund NASA because we're funding SpaceX, we're also defunding a lot of these science missions. Like Elon is not doing science. He's good at what he's doing and more power to him, but he's not doing science, right? And NASA also does this science and that's being starved and that's a tragedy because we're like kids in a candy store. We're surrounded by all this candy. We have the money in our pocket, but we're just like, let's not spend the money to go answer these questions. - In 1960s, NASA received a peak of about 4.4 to 4.5 of the total federal budget during the Higher the Apollo Moon program. Today's NASA's funding is dropped dramatically to 0.4 to 0.5 of the federal budget. - Yeah. - And it's a political thing. We did it when we were trying to beat the Russians. - That's a spot on. - Absolutely. We were trying to beat the Russians and look, it should be political. This is a political decision. Like, how much money should we spend on science? And it's not like there's a right answer or a wrong answer. - Am I probably the first thing? - When these new appointees, like the new head of NASA, heads of NASA get appointed. Like, how come we're not paying attention? It's like, oh, this guy has some business tie with, you know, SpaceX or with whatever company. Like, there's always these backdoor deals and financial entanglement between all these people. It's just, it's frustrating. It's more complicated than quantum entanglements, even. - Yeah. (laughing) Quantum entanglement, yeah. - But, you know, I think that people want science to happen. They want answers to these questions. Like, if you ask people, like, would you pay a dollar so that we could get, and the answer to the question, like, are there aliens on Europa? People would be like, yeah, sure, I'd be a dollar for that. You know, or, but there's not a whole lot of political support for science right now. - No. - Broadly. And it's part of this, like, anti-expert, anti-elite movement in this country, which is, unfortunately, also meaning less funding for science. And fewer answers to basic questions about how the universe works, which are cheap, and they're out there, and we could just buy them. We have the technology to do this. We have the know-how to do this. We just don't have the political will to spend the money to answer these questions. Which is, to me, a tragedy. But, you know, it shouldn't just be me making these decisions. It's a society-wide decision. And this is the way politics are going right now. But I just wish people understood better what that money was being spent on and how valuable it is. And also, how that money comes back. Like, every dollar we spend on basic research has a huge return on investment in terms of, like, our children and our future. You know, a blue sky research is like what led to transformers and lasers and all these things that completely change, sorry, transistors and not transformers, that's completely transformed our society, right? The reason we have wealth right now is because previous generations invested in basic science. They're like, give nerds money and let them mess around 'cause they will invent cool stuff. And it might not be tomorrow and it might not be predictable. But in 20 years, you're gonna be glad you spent that money. And if we don't spend that money now, then, like, China is, or somebody else is, and somebody's gonna revolutionize society. And it's not gonna be us anymore. And I think, listen, how does this make me any money? That's right, how am I making money here, I don't understand. Well, if you believe in America and you wanna invest in America, this is the best way to do it, is like, you know, spend money for our future, which is investing in basic science research. And I also think it's cool, like, even if it didn't yield any economic benefits, which, of course, it always does, it's just worth it to spend a little bit of money to understand the universe. But, you know, I chose to spend my life in this. So obviously, I have a certain perspective on it, but I just want people out there to know, like, what that money's being used for and how valuable it is. - What is your view on sort of trained subject, so roughly on you? - Sure. - The whole simulation hypothesis. I had this guy in here named Jim Gates, who, I believe he's a MIT theoretical physicist, and Celeste James, he calls himself Jim Gates. He said that he was trying to understand the fundamental nature of reality, and it led him to a set of equations that he said was indistinguishable from search engines and computers. Are you familiar with this? I haven't heard that argument in particular, but I know a lot about the simulation hypothesis generally. That, to me, was astonishing. And I don't remember exactly how he said he got to those equations, but there's a great video of him talking about it with Neil DeGrasse Tyson in an interview years ago, where he's talking about those equations. I think there's a name for those equations he came up with. But him and I were talking about that for a while when he was in here, and he's a very high level guy. He knew, he knew I was, who's the guy in the wheelchair? - Hawking. - Hawking, yeah, yeah, he knew Hawking. Had a bunch of those legendary guys. He had photos of all of them, they were cool. I mean, I think it's a really fun idea. Like, and I love it. And it's cool to remember what we don't know, because fundamentally, we like take in the universe through this narrow set of senses, right? And we don't know what's really generating that input. Is there some objective reality out there or is it like being generated by a computer or whatever, right? So that's definitely true. But I think that we tend to, I think you said this earlier, we tend to like see our own culture reflected in it. Like computers are the thing these days. And so now it's like, oh, maybe everything is a computer, right? And I think it's just how we interpret our questions about the universe. And I also think the argument often is, look, we look at the description of the universe and it looks like something you might put into a computer. [Music] The universe is the most important thing in the world in the past two to three months. It's the most important thing in the world, because it's the most important thing in the world to have a technical experience. Even though we have a lot of research and research in front of us, it's still in the past. It's true. If Shopify had been a part of the world, it would have been a part of the world. So we're going to have a lot of fun and we're going to have a lot of fun. We're going to have a lot of fun in the future. Shopify is the most important thing in the world. [Music] Like the universe seems to operate the way a computer simulation does. Like how does a computer simulation operate? You start with the description of the universe and then you evolve it forward. You say what are the laws to move the universe forward, one step or another step or another step? So you simulate the universe step by step and that's how the universe works because we discover laws that describe how the universe changes with time. And so there's some similarity there. But I think there's also a big flaw in that argument, which is this, that if we are in a simulation, then we're running inside a computer, the way like Super Mario, he's in a simulation. He's running inside a Nintendo box, right? But it doesn't mean that the rules in our universe reflect the rules of the universe in which our computer is in. Like Super Mario, he's learning, if he was a scientist, he could learn about how the Super Mario universe works. It doesn't tell him anything about how our universe works. He's trapped in his universe. He doesn't know anything about our universe. And the computer that's running his simulation is in our universe. It follows our laws. So if we are inside a computer, that computer is following laws of the outer universe. We're Super Mario, right? We can't learn about the laws of that outer universe. So we can't say that this simulation resembles the laws of that universe because we have no idea what those laws are. They could be totally different. We could be running on a quantum computer. That outer universe, if it exists, could be running any sort of crazy, weird physical laws, it ought to resemble ours at all. So how could we argue that our simulation or the code for our universe looks like how a computer would work in that outer universe when we don't know anything about that universe? So it's like Super Mario somehow discovering that he's in a simulation by saying that his universe seems to resemble a simulation. Like there's no way he could understand how a simulation works in our universe because he has no access to our universe. So I've always struggled with that. But usually in video games, stuff you model, we kind of model our own universe, sometimes the new Grand Theft Auto, have you seen it? He's saying so like. Well, I hope our universe is not too much like that video game. But also you can create anything you want. Right? Like Super Mario doesn't follow physics. You know, there's also crazy stuff in there. So you can, but you also don't have to. So there's no guarantee that the way our universe works if we're a simulation tells us anything about the meta universe. I know, I've always struggled with that. I think it's awesome science fiction concept and it would be super cool. But there are some fun speculation I've heard. Like there are some mysteries and cosmic rays that some people speculate are evidence that we're living in a simulation. Oh, really? Yeah, because one of the big mysteries and cosmic rays is how did they get so much energy? The cosmic rays are just particles from space, right? And space is filled with these particles. They're everywhere. And they come from the sun, they come from black holes, they come from whatever. But there's some particles out there we've seen that have insanely high energy. Like so much energy, it's hard to imagine. You know, like a single particle having the energy of like a fastball, like a whole baseball at 100 miles an hour. And there's nothing out there in the universe that we know of that can make particles with that energy. Like you shoot them out of a supernova, you sling shot them around a black hole, there's nothing that gets up to that energy. So, but we do see them. We measure them. But there's nothing in the universe we know of that can make them, which means there's something new out there or something happening. So, I read this paper from a guy at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. And he's saying, well, look, if the universe is a simulation and it's cut into huge cubes, in which the simulation is being done, really, really fast particles might like make it through the cube too quickly, so that they get caught by the update. And it's basically a glitch in the simulation. So, he's arguing that these superduper-high energy particles are a glitch in the simulation. They're moving too fast. They cross these cubes that the simulation is based on. I mean, there's no interesting. It's just like a cool thought experiment. You know, ways you might identify that the universe is a simulation by looking for flaws in the assumptions that are built into it. That, I think, is really cool. Like, because then you're looking for internal inconsistencies. Maybe the laws of physics break down in certain scenarios in a way that might be consistent with the simulation. To me, that, I think, is really cool. Yes, Steve, play this quick clip real quick of him explaining this theory to Neil deGrasse Tyson. So, I know I kind of butchered his explanation of it, but I know-- - I think the word you're looking for was supersymmetry. - Super-symmetry? Yeah, he's a, that's his big thing is supersymmetry. But play that little clip of him explaining how his equation, what his equation was. I think it'll be, I think it's a pretty interesting. - These are pictures of equations. I've been, for the last 15 years, trying to answer the kinds of questions that my colleagues here have been raising. And what I've come to understand is that they're these incredible pictures. - Oh yeah, yes. - That contains all the information of a set of equations that are related to string theory. And it's even more bizarre than that, because when you then try to understand these pictures, you find out that buried in them are computer codes, just like the type that you find in the browser when you go surf the web. - You're saying your attempt to understand the fundamental operations of nature leads you to a set of equations that are indistinguishable on the equations that drive search engines and browsers on our computers. - That is correct. So, - Well, wait. I'm still, wait, I have to just be silent for a minute, here. So you're saying, as you dig deeper, you find computer code rich in the fabric of the cosmos. Into the equations that we want to use to describe the cosmos, yes. - Computer code, computer code, strings of bits of ones and zeros. - It's not just sort of resembles computer code, you're saying it is computer code. - It's not even just is computer code, it's a special kind of computer code that was invented by a scientist named Claude Shannon in the 1940s. That's what we find very deeply inside the equations that occur in string theory. And in general in systems that we can say are supersymmetric. Some of those codes are showing on the screen behind you right now. They don't look like codes, but these pictures, which we call a ding-gros, are graphical representations of sets of equations that are based on codes. That in the description of our universe, that it's a supersymmetrical universe, which we were gonna test in the LHC. If you believe that description, I can show you the presence of these codes. That's my statement. - Do you have any predictions in your ideas or any ways to test any of your ideas any more than say the guy over on the screen? - The work that I'm doing is in fact, so theoretical that we don't understand yet whether it is even possible to complete the program. We have found these strange graphs. We know that they are equivalent to equations and we have found in these equations, computer codes. And so that's where we are right now. So I cannot give you a prediction. This work is less than two years old. - Well, that's trippy. - Theoretical, super trippy, right? - Well, I mean, there's some pieces in there that I think are worth unpacking. Super symmetry is a common idea you hear about a lot, but it doesn't really have to do with the simulation hypothesis. It just says like all the particles that we know about, maybe they all have hidden partners we haven't discovered yet. Like the electron, maybe there's another version of a called the selectron and the photon, maybe there's another version of a called the photono. And theoretically, it's very attractive because it creates a symmetry where we didn't have them before. We have like an asymmetry now. We're like, why do we have the photon and the electron and no partners for them? And in physics, we see lots of symmetries. Like we see the electron has a symmetry with the anti-electron. Like there's this matter, anti-matter symmetry. And we see other symmetries like the electric. is very similar to the muon, which is very similar to the towel. So we're constantly seeing patterns and symmetries and looking for how the universe has reflections within it. As of super symmetries, this idea that maybe there's this like mega symmetry where all the particles were reflected in this new way, very cool, solves a lot of theoretical problems, no evidence for it. - Right. - It's like, it was a little big thing. We were hoping to see the Large Hadron Collider. Some people made a big deal about how we were definitely going to see it, which was a bit of a overhype, but in general, there's been no evidence for it. So we don't know if it's part of the universe at all. It is a big part of string theory. Like the strings themselves are super symmetric. There's that they have this kind of relationship. So what he's talking about in that video is saying that he sees evidence for structure within string theory that's similar to computer code. And I think that's a bit of a reach. - Well, he said it was not similar. He said it was identical to a specific computer code that Claude Shannon came up with. - Yeah, I think the 1950s or whatever. - Yeah, there are these error correcting codes. Shannon was super genius. Came up with lots of foundational concepts in computing. But and you can always draw these connections, but that doesn't mean that the universe is written in this code. I think it's a bit of artistry there, if you ask me. - Yeah, I'm strange. And by the way, just he didn't, he's not like a big proponent of like the whole simulation theory like he says what he says and he doesn't extrapolate for whenever reason. I don't know why, maybe because he's like high in academia and he's afraid to like get, you know. But I'm sure he's like, he's pretty safe, right? He's got to be 10 year by now, for sure. But it's funny how people like him, they like to only color inside the lines. They don't like to speculate about things too much because you can get shunned or outcast or. - Well, I don't know. I think big ideas are also welcomed. I mean, but there's, you know, institutional inertia. You come up with some crazy new idea that's gonna change everything, you know. It takes a while for people to like absorb that idea. And that's because people have limited time and attention, you know, like I get 10 emails a day with people like, I figured out the universe. And like, I read all of them actually and I write back to everybody. But, you know, I don't have time to give everybody like a week to dig into their idea and see maybe this is the new idea. And maybe one of them does have the right idea about the universe. But everybody's got limited time and attention. We're all just people. And I have to decide where to spend my day. And that's true of everybody in academia. And so like, if you have to decide what to work on, should you gamble on some crazy new idea or should you work on the thing you know has been producing something useful? - Well, I think the interesting thing about this simulation hypothesis and the Claude Shannon thing, like if these, if these air correcting binary bits are somehow a fundamental part of reality, right? If I'm gonna take his, what he claimed to have found and I wanna make that like a hypothesis that this is the nature of reality. Well, the interesting thing about that is it reconciles very well with this whole parapsychology stuff, right? Of like consciousness and telepathy and like remote viewing and all these things, right? There's this book called, I think it's called The Secret Life of Plants where this guy put a lie detector test on a plant and put it on fire and it started going off the charts and think, the idea is that consciousness is everywhere, even plants are conscious to a certain degree. And like if you think about things like morphic resonance where like on one side of the world and this is Rupert Sheldrick, I think it came up with this, like a problem is solved and like a remote tribe on an island somewhere in here, Australia, like somewhere else, like not much farther after that is discovered by another group of an uncontacted tribe somewhere else, like the same way that world records have been broken and like running and sprinting, like as soon as it's broken somewhere, it's like immediately broken somewhere else. So like how that reconciles is that like if we are in this computer simulation, this is just a conservation of energy. Like, right, if we've already figured out the problem in one spot, now we can figure it out somewhere else. The same way a computer program would do it, right? I mean, so it could make parallels but there are also like simpler explanations, you know, like as soon as somebody breaks a record, that motivates other people and they learn, okay, well, it's possible and so much of like running is a mental game, like what do I think I can do? And that's why like you run much faster when you know it's a passer. - Someone tells you it's possible. - Exactly, I believe that this is exactly. That's why like they broke the form in a mile and then very quickly other people did because they used to think it was impossible and like my son is a runner. He, I know he runs faster when he's running against faster people. He runs faster than he even thought he was possible because he like, he just pulled along by their momentum. So so much of this stuff is mental. I think the pan-psychism stuff is really cool because there is a lot about consciousness we don't know, like super basic questions we do not know, like are electrons conscious? We don't know and there's like there's a very reputable theory pan-psychism that the whole universe is conscious that everything has a little bit of it and that our consciousness comes together from the emergent property of all of our conscious bits and it's not like a yes or no, it's a spectrum and like everything in the universe is conscious and that sounds nuts. - Is consciousness inside the brain or is looking for consciousness inside the brain the same as looking for a TV show inside the TV? - Yeah, I don't know and I don't think anybody knows and I don't even know if it's a scientific question. It's like very philosophical because like how do you even define consciousness? How do you measure it? - It's philosophical, right? - It's not, it might not be physical matter. It's not physical matter. - Obviously, yeah. - Can you build up to, it doesn't make sense. I don't, I can't in my head come up with an idea of how you can build up to consciousness from atoms and protons and neutrons and matter. - Yeah, like is it just an emergent thing the way like hurricanes are emergent from water droplets and wind? Like I can't imagine how to go from water drops to the wind to hurricanes, but it happens, right? Lots of stuff emerges in the universe that we have a hard time with. Doesn't mean it doesn't happen. But you know, is it possible for inert not conscious things to come together to make consciousness? I don't know and to me the basic problem is it's not something we can measure. I just like, I have to trust you that you're conscious. I have no access. - Exactly. - I have no idea. - You could be a robot. - You could be a robot that sounds very much like a conscious person, right? And how would I know? And even though I feel very strongly other people's consciousness, like I have a wife, I'm in love, I think she's a person. I think there's a being in there, I feel it. And even when I look at my dog, I think my dog loves me. I feel that connection, right? But I don't know. And there's nothing I can do to measure that. I can't get any data. And that I think is the biggest obstacle to any scientific exploration of consciousness is that there is no data to say this or that. And I don't think we even have a good definition of consciousness. So, but I think there's a long history of philosophy, taking really hard problems. We don't really know how to grapple with and smoke and banana peels and thinking about over a thousand years. Till eventually we figure out a way to start to make it into data and then start to really tackle it. What is the universe? Now we can actually make measurements and figure that stuff out. Consciousness, we might need another thousand years of banana peels before we figure out like how to turn that into a real scientific question. But I'm definitely not an expert in this stuff. Yeah, it is super weird, right? And there's all kinds of weird things that happen to people in their lives where it's just like, what the fuck was that? Like how did you read my mind? I can think of like dozens of times where that's happened to me where I've been thinking about something and my wife immediately says it like, what is that? What are the, is there an antenna between us connecting us? Is this, am I being deceived here? Is this some sort of like basic, there's a basic explanation for this that I'm missing or whatever? People like to say that like, you know, I was thinking about this person and then they called me. Right, oh my God, what was that? But like mine, like that's, that one for me is like, well, how many times have you been thinking about that person where they didn't fuck? Exactly. Or I don't know how many times you think about people when they don't call you, those don't register. It registers when you are thinking about them and they call you and it's like, oh my God, meaning this has so much meaning to it. Exactly. That's why we need science because we're so influenced by events and we're bad at this stuff when we need like careful, rigorous ways to learn about the world. But you know, from a scientific point of view, there is no biological impediment to leopathy. Like, also leopathy requires is that your brain generates some kind of signal that another brain can pick up and like our brains are electrical, they can generate electromagnetic pulses and your brain is electrical. It can read electromagnetic pulses. Like, leopathy is not like physically prohibited. Like, I don't know why we didn't evolve it. And really? Yeah. Like, why doesn't it exist? Do you think it's possible it's devolved? Do you think it's possible? Maybe humans had it at one point? I mean, anything is possible, but it's hard to imagine why you would give that up. Well, you alien imagine, like hypothetically, you could see how the development of language in the written word could, if we started using that, that would atrophy, right? I suppose, but that's so much less efficient, right? It's just the right connection. So I don't know, I've seen all this stuff like the telepathy tapes and a lot of that is built on, you know, facilitated, facilitated communication, which is scientifically, I think, very questionable. Yes. So I think it's easy to believe some things because you want to like why it would be a dream come true if artistic kids had a rich inner life and were communicating it telepathically. Everybody wants that to be true, which makes it easier to convince yourself that it is, but I don't think it's totally. If you look into the science underneath it, it's pretty shaky. - Yes. - Unfortunately, I agree. I think, if I- I would say that these cases of telepathy or the things you hear about in the telepathy tapes, I think it's true to some level, but I don't think you can perform it at will. It might be something that boils to the surface with some people, maybe young children before they're indoctrinated into the world and hardened to the world and their senses are locked in. Maybe before that, when things are more malleable, right, when the brain is more plastic, maybe some other sense can pop through that maybe we had millions of years ago. But the idea that you can just perform that like a magic trick, I think is very unlikely. That makes it hard to test then. It was like this guy, Erie Geller, who's a famous guy who's a part of the Stargate program. He's famous for bending spoons and all this stuff. Maybe when he was a kid, he was able, I believe it's possible that he was maybe able to manipulate it with his consciousness. But as he got older, he started like, I'm becoming famous. I'm making tons of money from this, selling books, I'm getting paid to fly across the world to do conferences. I got to figure out a way to fake this now. You know what I mean? It could be a combination of both, where it's like the answer somewhere in the middle. The guy's got a total charlatan and he's also not like a habitual spoon vendor, right? Like maybe this was something that he was able to do at one point and that is possible in human consciousness or baked within us. But we got to tell us, right? We got to keep an open mind because there's lots of times we've been blinded to ideas because we thought we understood something. In the case of the brain, we definitely don't. Like so many open questions about the brain. So we should be very open to big surprises, but we should let the data speak. Like we should only believe stuff if we can show it because there's a lot of reasons to believe stuff otherwise. You want this to be true, you don't want this to be true. So it needs real data, unfortunately. You know, scientifically is the only way to untangle these questions is like, let the data speak. Yeah, there are some people who think that certain psychedelic drugs are what break you out of the simulation. You know, people relate to seeing like people have taken psychedelic drugs and like had crazy experiences where they communicate telepathically with the person in the room with them. And like it's this profound meaningful experience. I had professors at my university go on these like, you know, trips. They took Paioti and Ayahuasca and whatever they came back with like understandings of quantum mechanics. And I was like, came and talked to me about it. And I was like, wow, man, sounds like you had a good time for real. Yeah, I think it's possible that people just sometimes describe too much meaning to things that happened in their inner psyche. Whether it be psychedelic experiences or phone calls when people when you're thinking about somebody across the world, they call you like some people can like, they just put too much meaning towards it and they can fall into that trap, you know. Yeah, it's hard to disentangle. Yeah, because there's a lot of people that have proven that have like a long time like psychedelic researchers have said scientists have said that like that stuff or living. They say that what psychedelics do is they're like a placebo to the inner psyche. Like they bring out what's already there and they show it to you in a way that's like novel. So you think that like this is something you're getting this revelatory cosmic divine download from something. But really if you really dig into it and you look at the data across all the experiments of studies that have been done from John Hopkins and everyone else. Like there was this famous John Hopkins study that they did this study on religious professionals from Jewish Christian Hindu, all of the other religions. It basically took four or five heads of religions and they put them together, gave them to the Simon and they document their experience and each of them had very profound intensified experiences based on their pre-existing belief in their religion. Fascinating, yeah. So yeah. And basically like that seems to be the idea is that it's a placebo effect and brings forward what's already there. Well, it's fascinating that your experience can be so obviously affected by chemistry, which tells you that some part of it definitely is emergent from the underlying chemistry. It's not just the brain by itself. We are constant fluctuating hormones and we're a bag of chemicals that's always alternating with cortisol, hormonal imbalances and all that stuff. And that directly affects the brain and cognition and how the brain works and what state you're in. It's a very, it's not like the brain's not just a computer, right? It's definitely more than that. It's very intertwined with like the biology of our entire anatomy. Well, if somebody wrote this into the simulation, they made it really complicated. Yeah. They definitely did. But like, I mean, it's not impossible that we will create, especially with like AI right now, we're going to create simulations that are name distinguishable from reality. Yeah, absolutely. And I can't imagine in a couple of years we're going to be able to do this where we're both sitting here right now or in opposite sides of the world with some fucking thing plugged into us. A spinal tap, who knows how they do it by then. But I guess the biggest problem is you can't disprove it. Yeah, well, I think the interesting question is like, AI already can claim to be conscious. And then like, again, we don't have any data. We can't access it. Like, is it just claiming it the way you claim it? My dog might, you know, or my wife claims it, or is it real? Is it not? Like, we can't tell we have no access. And you know, there's a deep question there about like, can a simulation of a consciousness be conscious? Like, is it about the substrate? Is it have to be in like wet wear, like your actual, like messy wet neurons? Or is a simulation of it have this equivalent experience? We don't know. We can't know deep questions that maybe eventually we'll learn how to figure out how to probe. Having creating an AI that can have the same kind of expression of claiming of self-awareness, I think really brings to a forefront this question of like, is claiming to be conscious the same as being conscious? And I think it's not. No, right. But, you know, how can we tell? It's just so, it's so crazy how we have created something that is 100 times more intelligent than we are. You know, like, we are the gods to AI. I don't know. And it is a so much more intelligent than us and it's going to become like another god. Why do you think it's more intelligent? Like, I find it's still pretty dumb sometimes. You know, like, I try to get it to do my job. Sometimes I'm lazy. I'm like, hey, could you read these things? Well, that's basic LLMs. You know, they haven't even released some of the best AI's to the public yet that are solving equations. I mean, I see stuff in the news every single day of equations being solved that have never been solved. It was done in like a matter of minutes. And then when you start to integrate that with super computing, it's going to be like, you know, off the chain. Yeah, well, I think it's worth digging into like what that means because what the AI has been able to do so far is what I said earlier is take open problems, find existing solutions and apply them. And it's made a lot of breakthroughs. Like because the mathematical literature is huge and nobody can read all of it. And so it turns out if you can read all of it, then you can find problems and solutions that fit together. And that's basically what it's done. And that's great. Have you heard the stories of like the different AI's communicating with each other? Yeah, stuff like that. And then also building societies and sacrificing each other and all this stuff. Oh, I didn't hear that. Yeah. Well, there's like a bunch of them that made some security break. But to do so, they had to like sacrifice some of them to get through. And there's a lot of that. Are you talking about the one where they blackmailed the people? No, this is okay. They worked together to escape some black box they were stuck in. Oh, wow. Yeah. But there's a lot of interpretation there, a lot of like putting human emotions and human motivations on a machine. It's not really clear how much of it is really there and how much of it is us telling stories about it. So you got to be careful. But in terms of like transforming research. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's totally transformed mathematics. But interestingly, it hasn't yet done that for physics. Like, so you don't see lots of physics papers being done where like an AI has come up with a new strategy to solve a physics problem. It's happened in math that hasn't yet really happened in physics one or two where like some calculation was assisted by AI. But I think that's interesting. Interesting. It's a different category of problem and so the AI's can't do it as well yet. And I think the reason is that math is very crisp and clean and it's like, you know, very clear when something is correct. And physics is a little more fuzzy. Like, mathematicians are always laughing at us because they look at our math and they're like, oh my god, you guys are so sloppy. Because physics is not about like, let's build the most perfect mathematical machinery. It's like, let's think about this question. Let's try to answer our, you know, let's address our curiosity. Let's, you know, slap together a few ideas. So it's less rigorous. It's more intuitive. And so I think LMs aren't there yet. I think they'll get there. And I think they'll have a transformational change in physics, though they have in math in the same way that they're going to notice like existing solutions to existing problems and put them together. But there's more fuzz in physics, which I think makes it harder. Yeah. It's just scared to me how ubiquitous it is becoming. Not just with the LLMs, but with everything. Everything is using AI. I think it's very important for everyone. I think there's a lot of this flock camera thing. Yes. A lot of cameras are being installed everywhere. And they're using AI and stuff like that to like create some like 3D digital control grid using the satellites as well. So like, no, actually, they just did a thing. I read this morning where they're getting rid of all of them in Florida. I don't know if that's going to happen, but that's what scares me the most about AI is like just complete and total lockdown police state and being able to track and corroborate everything and it just gets rid of total privacy, which essentially is human control, right? That's a very human thing. That's human nature being driven driving that AI, right? Well, I already had I get off the rails like it's just you came and fathom, right? Like you can't you can't fathom what something that's a thousand times smarter than you would do. That's right. Just like a squirrel can't fathom what we what our next move can't game out what our next move is going to be. Yeah, that's true. Well, I've already had the experience of being replaced by an AI because I was texting with my daughter just a minute ago before we started recording and she has a physics problem she couldn't solve. So she asked AI and I'm like, I'm a physics professor. Why didn't you ask me? She's like, well, you weren't here today. Apparently she's just like asking chat GBT for help because that's another thing about it too, right? Like it's going to be doing like the hard work, the hard-heavy lifting for us now. So it's going to make us lazier. We're not going to have to do the hard work, crunch the numbers, everything's going to be instant gratification or it's going to allow us to think about bigger problems and harder questions like the way computers have, right? Like, I don't have to sit down and do a page of calculations anymore. I get to think bigger and let the computer do those calculations. So you know, science is constantly transforming and the new tools allow us to ask harder, bigger, broader, deeper questions because we're the ones asking the questions and I think the interesting thing is like, say we have that AI, it's a thousand times more powerful than us. We are the squirrel, right? We're still the ones in charge. We're still the ones asking the questions. So what is it like when a squirrel is in charge and a super intelligence, like, all right, maybe, you know, it's doing what the squirrel wants, but still the squirrels in charge. And so, you know, as long as we're still the ones asking the questions and running the data centers and whatever, even if it's more intelligent than we are, it's answering our questions. And so, I'm not so worried about that. I mean, my brother's a professor of AI and he's not worried about the AI taking over. He's like, we'll just unplug them if we have to. You know, they are in the end reliant on our infrastructure. Yeah, but you have to imagine you have to take into consideration the people who are running those things and the people that are in charge of those things and what those people's motivations are and do they really care for the general public that we survive, you know? How do they make their money? You know, there's a lot of financial and twinglements. Do they make their money by doing good for the world and feeding the homeless and, you know, fixing the pollution problems and the starvation problems all across the world? No, they do quite the opposite. And those are the guys that are in charge of plugging and unplugging the AI, then I'm fucking terrified. Yeah. Well, private control of this stuff is scary, right? Yeah. The public should have a say and our representatives should have some influence over it. So, that is what's terrifying and what we're seeing in science is that move away from funding it in a public open way to funding science through these companies. Exactly. There's this big Genesis mission recently, which takes a lot of money away from fundamental research and funnels it to these private companies. Genesis? Yeah. A recent massive funding program by the government, it's like a AI version of the Manhattan project. Can you look this up, Steve? To revolutionize how we do science in America, but mostly it's about funneling money to private companies. Basically, like, let's let open AI do physics. And, you know, initially, it's like, we'll partner with open AI, but it seems like clear that the trend is like, let's take money away from academia and universities and fund towards these private companies. Right. But wouldn't those private companies have to fund the academia and universities? No, they just do the research in-house, you know? Genesis mission is a US government initiative launched by executive order in November of 2025 last year to accelerate scientific discovery, accelerate scientific discovery and secure national technological dominance by integrating AI with federal supercomputing, national laboratories and proprietary data sets led primarily by the US Department, oh, God, Department of Energy. The program functions as a whole of government platform, utilizing dozens of federal agencies and private tech sector partners. Private tech sector partners. That's the key. Taking all the agencies out of research in the government that was going towards national labs in academia and they're sending it to anthropic and open AI and et cetera, et cetera, basically like, take our data and use it to solve physics is the plan. Hold on a second. Zoom in on that. Okay. What are the objectives? Connects the nation's most powerful supercomputers, automated robotic labs and massive government data repositories into a single closed loop ecosystem. That's does not sound good. National science challenges focuses cross-sector resources on designated challenges such as advanced energy fusion, quantum science and material design to double research productivity and then public and private collaboration partners with major technology companies and research institutions, including open AI, Google, Microsoft, AWS, Nvidia, to pull infrastructure. So you're saying this is going to take funding away from public institutions and universities and stuff like that. There's no new money here. It's a redirection of existing research. And it's moving all of that, those funding and those grants and things to private companies. Yes, exactly. And the idea is, look, the private companies have the best AI so we should be taking advantage of that working together with them, but it is moving this money away from academics towards these companies and expanded from the Department of Energy Centric Initiative into a multi-agency operation in Bali over 15 federal departments, including NASA, the Department of Defense, and the National Institute of Health, the latter running in parallel with the biogenesis mission for biomedical innovation. Jesus. The whole thing was announced last minute and they gave everybody like a few weeks. They put programs together and the whole thing was ridiculous. But it's just this, this is the way things are going is take money away from universities and towards private companies. And they're like outsourcing the fundamental research in this country, which to me is scary. Oh my God. Olen Shannon Maldonado. Käsintehtuja artessaanituotteita myüven jaui lahjakaupanperustaja. Allitzin Shopify, because of the challenge of testing and testing, put it in the first place of the development of the company. I had been looking forward to working with them in the future. All of them have been working together for a long time, since they've been working together for a long time, but they've been working together for a long time, but they've been working together these new colliders are really big, really expensive because you need more room to accelerate the particles up to higher energies, so the way that works is we have like a string in these little accelerators you stack them together, you get a big accelerator, you want a bigger one, you stack more of them, so you need a bigger tonal, bigger accelerator, more billions of dollars, it's just using the same technology, but bigger, that's cool, and I think it's worth it, but there are other technologies like plasma weak field accelerators that potentially could accelerate particles at the same high speeds with much, much smaller facilities. In principle, it'd be amazing to have the same capability in like a lab this size, right? You don't have to build billions of dollars of tunnels or whatever, so we should investigate and we should invest in those kind of technologies because that will change the whole game because at some point it just gets too big and too expensive to do, you know, the LHC cost $10 billion, that's like already the limit of like what the public would support, it's a lot of money, right? It's not a small amount of money, you get schools they don't have crumbling buildings, you have roads falling apart, so asking for $10 billion is it's a big ask. Now you're asking for $100 billion for a bigger one, there's how much they're asking for the new one. It's going to be expensive, I think it's maybe $40, $50 billion. Where's that money coming from? It's a European money, mostly, it's going to be built at CERN, but they don't know for sure. There's hopes that, you know, it'll be international, definitely a lot of that, at least oil will pay for this new clatter. The Chinese have been talking about building a really big one, but I think we need new technology to make these things smaller and cheaper, and there are ideas out there, so we should invest in plasma weak field and other technologies to make it so these things can be smaller because Because, you know, say we build a bigger one and we don't find anything, what are we going to do? Build one in the moon, build one in the solar system? Like, at some point, you need a new technology rather than just going bigger. So that would be my dream is develop a new technology to make colliders smaller. Interesting. Now, what about the LIGO thing? Like, the LIGO are these lasers that detect gravitational waves. Right? Yeah. Super awesome. Right. This was an idea that Einstein had, like a hundred years ago, his theory predicted ripples in spacetime and he famously said, like, yeah, but nobody's ever going to be able to see them. And I remember touring Caltech when I was choosing where to go to grad school and they were trying to get me to join this experiment. I remember thinking, like, these guys are never going to see this is never going to work. It's impossible. And, you know, then 10 years later, they won the Nobel Prize for finding them. So clearly, I was wrong, but they have these incredible sets of mirrors, they shoot lasers in two directions and they bounce back and then the lasers interfere and they use that as a really high precision way to tell, like, did one leg get shorter or one leg get longer? Because if one leg gets slightly shorter, then the lasers interfere differently. And that tells you of a gravitational wave came by because that's what gravitational waves do is they squeeze space this way and then that way. So really amazing. And we have one in New Orleans and one in, well, it's somewhere near New Orleans and one in Washington and there's one in Italy. They want a bigger one and they want to build one in space. And so, yeah, it's called Lisa and it would be basically three satellites. Lisa. Yeah. And it was going to build this. It's a conglomeration. I think it's European and American, but I'm not sure. But it's like three satellites linked with lasers. And so it's measuring how space wiggles as they float there. So they use the lasers to measure how far away are we from each other and then they look for deviations. Because deviations come when a gravitational wave comes through and shrink space between them or expands space between them. So that's a super awesome. There's like, like ripples in time, essentially. Yeah, ripples in space time. And so when space gets more curved like near a black hole or near the center of the earth, time goes more slowly. And so ripples in space time have the same effect, but at a much, much smaller level. These are really, really gentle ripples. So we want to see even gentler ripples from like more distant black hole mergers or from the very, very early universe, like one way to learn about the early universe is to look for really, really old light. We talked about that, but that comes from that moment when the universe became transparent. And that was like almost 400,000 years after that earliest moment we can think about. Gravitational waves can look much further back because the universe has always been transparent to the gravitational waves. Because they can pass through anything. And so if we find gravitational waves from the very early universe, they'd be like seeing that cosmic microwave background light, but from much, much earlier. Oh, wow. So this is like seeing like a fetal picture of the universe instead of a baby picture, you know. There's so much about the very beginning of the universe. So that's a really exciting technology and these gravitational waves like a new way to look at the universe, to listen to the universe. And that's exciting because every time we develop a new technology to explore the universe, we see something bunkers, something we're like, what? And that's why it's so worthwhile, you know, just like the other data about what's going on. Yeah, like this new satellite that they put in somewhere in South America that's detecting all these interstellar objects that are coming through, you know the name of that satellite? This is new observatory that we have, which was the best one we've ever created. And since they built it in like 2018 or 2017, oh, the pan stars. Yeah. Maybe that's it. Yeah. And we've detected all these interstellar objects. And now we've, we've seen what like three or four of them. Oh, moo, moo, moo, moo. And there's three eye out. That's one. Exactly. But like this is the first time we've ever been able to detect interstellar objects. So we look at them and they're like, they're avi loves like, oh my god, it's a spaceship, but like we've never seen, we've only seen three so far. So we can't really, you know, we can't, we don't have a good library of interstellar objects. And until we opened that new kind of eyeball, we had no idea. How many there were? We didn't know if they were coming once a century, once a minute, right? We just don't know. And now we know, fortunately, they're coming pretty often, which means we can learn something about the universe. I wonder where the next one's going to be. Look at that thing. Yeah, that's the, that's the Ruben Observatory. Yeah. That's not the right one. That I think is looking to study dark energy and dark matter. But I think that I think it's the pan stars, the pan star, pan star, steveau and where is this one? I think it's in South America. Yeah. It's like the glorious photo ever. Steve, get us some, some, some info on it. Go to, go to you, or Google, yeah. The pan star observatory, the panoramic survey telescope and rapid response system observatories located this summit. Oh, that's in Hawaii. No, this is, this one was in South America. Oh, no, this is the one that found a Mua Mua. Yeah. Okay. So you were right. This one's in Hawaii. So his main job is to find near earth objects and dangerous asteroids that could threaten earth. Massive camera system uses digital cameras with roughly 1.4 to 1.5 billion pixels to image large areas of the sky very quickly. Really awesome. They found a Mua Mua, which is the first known interstellar object to visit our solar system. Did this one discover the three eye Atlas as well? I don't know. Go down. Type in, did it find three eye Atlas? Three, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye. No, pan stars are not find three eye Atlas. Interstellar comet. You're right, Chile. Oh, the Chile one. Right. Find a picture of that one in Chile. The Atlas survey. There you go. Atlas. What is the, I assume that Chile one's a newer one. Cool. Okay. Looks similar. Crazy. It just shows you like every time we look at the universe, we learn something because it's always going to surprise us. We've got to keep an open mind and we've got to gather as much data. Think about how much information about the universe we're ignoring. Like the universe is screaming information at us when we have these tiny little telescopes. Yeah. Like they don't have the senses yet. Yeah. They're photons hitting the sidewalk outside right now that have secrets of the universe encoded in them and they're just getting absorbed by the sidewalk, right? Most of the information that's coming to us from the universe is being ignored and we build these tiny little telescopes to look at the universe and every time we do we learn something shocking and so to me, it's astounding that we don't do more of that, you know. We should have 10 times as many space telescopes looking out into the universe. It is amazing also what we have learned, like we've never left this planet or its neighborhood. Yet we've learned about like the structure of the universe and its history. Just from gathering these few photons we've been able to collect, it's incredible, right? What we've been able to do, what we've been able to learn, I just feel like there's so much more to understand and it's crazy. It's crazy that we've, you know, we still haven't been able to figure out much about the moon or Mars or Mars, you know. And like the moon is one of the ones that's so bizarre because it's like the size of it and the distance between us and the sun is like creates this perfect eclipse and if it wasn't for that moon being exactly where it is, the size it is and everything, life would cease to exist here. Like it seems like every other moon that we know about is like a potato and it's a different size and they're not. They none of them have that distance where they may create the perfect eclipse. Yeah. It seems like a divine miracle that we have that distance. Sometimes there are just coincidences though, right? Yeah. It's amazing that it's just the right size. It's awesome. Have you ever seen totality? It's an incredible experience. Have I or what? Seen as total eclipse, like been in the path of totality where, you know, the day becomes dark. Yeah, there was one not too long ago, right? A year ago, maybe. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. It's pretty crazy. I'm not a religious person but it felt like a spiritual experience to me. I was like, imagining what it was like at 5,000 years ago when you see that, I think like, whoa. Something crazy. What is God mad at us? What did we do? We've just sacrificed some people quick. Yeah, man, the mysteries are never ending. Yeah. And you're right. Like with the new technology, like these telescopes and the other things that we're trying to come up with, it's like, and combining all that with the AI and the supercomputers, I think that the shit's going to sort of accelerating and a tremendous speed that I don't know if we're ready for it. Yeah. Well, I'm looking forward to it. Well, thank you for doing this, man. Thanks for having me on. I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed it. Tell people where they can find, you have a podcast, right? Yeah. Daniel and Kelly is extraordinary universe. We talk about all the mysteries in the universe, break it down in a fun way, make a bunch of silly jokes. And I have a book out recently called Do Aliens Speak Physics? All about these questions of like, how would aliens think about the universe? How would we figure it out? We like when aliens came and tried to talk science with them. So yeah, check me out. Daniel Whitesin. You can just Google me, find all my stuff. Okay. Fantastic. We'll link all that below. Do we have Patreon questions? We have one. It's right up there. I think it'd be nice to know. Oh, I'll read it for you. Nathan Bennett. So we have a Patreon where we have people like paid subscribers that ask you direct questions. Often. Are we going to end the show? Are we going to put this in the show? No, we can just put it in the show. Put it in the show. All right. All right. All right. All right. And how long can you make stable plasma exist to CERN? Is that a good question? Yeah. So there's lots of different kinds of plasma you can make. And at CERN, we don't make anything that lasts long. very long. Like things last like 10 to the negative 20 seconds. So CERN is about reproducing things over and over again. We have a collision every 24 nanoseconds that's CERN, over and over and over and over again because we're looking for rare stuff. So the way to find rare stuff is to have collisions really often. So you see that the one in a billion, one in a trillion kind of stuff. So nothing that's CERN is very stable and that's by design. Right. Yeah, we don't want to stable black hole. No, we wanted to evaporate and go away. Perfect, man. All right, we'll link all your stuff below for folks that want to find more and thanks again. I really enjoyed this man. Thank you. You're a lot of fun. Right. Good night, world. [Music]