Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 2: is Robert Lamb, and Hey on today's episode, I am
Speaker 2: welcoming back to the show. Daniel Whitson, co host of
Speaker 2: the new podcast Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. Daniel's been
Speaker 2: on the show, I believe twice before. It's always a
Speaker 2: fun chat talking about you know, the nature of the universe,
Speaker 2: human science and everything in between. So without further ado,
Speaker 2: let's just jump right into this fun conversation. Hi, Daniel,
Speaker 2: welcome back to the show.
Speaker 3: Hey, thanks so much for having me on. So excited
Speaker 3: to be here to talk to you.
Speaker 2: Absolutely so. When we last spoke, and I guess it's
Speaker 2: been probably a couple of years now, the podcast was
Speaker 2: Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe. But we're onto a
Speaker 2: new chapter. I can you tell us a little bit
Speaker 2: about Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.
Speaker 3: Yeah, This new podcast, The Extraordinary Universe, is with an
Speaker 3: old friend of mine, Kelly Wiener Smith. She's a very
Speaker 3: well known and highly awarded author of popular science books
Speaker 3: like A City on Mars, and also an old friend
Speaker 3: of mine and a wife of Zach Weener, smith of
Speaker 3: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and together we have this podcast
Speaker 3: about everything we find amazing and wonderful and mysterious and
Speaker 3: delightful in the universe, which is basically the whole universe,
Speaker 3: from tiny particles to big black holes, to the mysteries
Speaker 3: of the Big Bang, to leeches and all sorts of
Speaker 3: crazy mysteries. In biology, we basically just have a lot
Speaker 3: of fun gazing in awe at the universe and wondering
Speaker 3: how it all works.
Speaker 2: So would you say this kind of like opens up
Speaker 2: the concept a bit into more of like the general
Speaker 2: science realm.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Kelly's background is in biology. She's a parasitologist, so
Speaker 3: she studies like, you know, wasps that get infected and
Speaker 3: then change their behavior, and you know, things that crawl
Speaker 3: in your body and take advantage of you. And so
Speaker 3: she brings an alternative science background, not aalt science, but
Speaker 3: like a different kind of science background, and so we
Speaker 3: can ask different kinds of questions. And you know, when
Speaker 3: I talk about particles, she can ask questions for the
Speaker 3: audience like what do you mean higgs boson? What is that? Anyway?
Speaker 3: And when she talks about the details of parasocial behavior.
Speaker 3: I can be like, hold on, what does that mean?
Speaker 3: So we play off each other really well, and you know,
Speaker 3: she's an old friend, so we have a lot of
Speaker 3: fun talking.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I tuned into an episode or two there,
Speaker 2: and yeah, you guys seem to have a good vibe.
Speaker 2: Ky you talking about turkey and Thanksgiving, which is time license,
Speaker 2: you know, just coming off of Thanksgiving break here in
Speaker 2: the US.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we were talking about the physics of Thanksgiving, you know,
Speaker 3: like how many turkeys could you cook with a nuclear
Speaker 3: bomb explosion? And also the biology of Thanksgiving, like is
Speaker 3: tripped a fan or real thing or is that just
Speaker 3: a myth? So you know, we dig trying to we
Speaker 3: try to dig deep into the science and then also
Speaker 3: keep it fun.
Speaker 2: Now, you mentioned a book that she co wrote, as
Speaker 2: she co wrote this with her husband, I Believe a
Speaker 2: City on Mars, which I haven't read, but it sounds
Speaker 2: sounds like a very interesting read. I need to pick
Speaker 2: it up because I was recently looking at a book
Speaker 2: titled Dinner on Mars by Leonora Newman and Evan Frazier.
Speaker 2: It tis more like a food oriented approach to some
Speaker 2: of the same questions. I imagine you know, how how
Speaker 2: would colonization on Mars? Look, how did it work? And
Speaker 2: what are the extreme challenges of carrying it out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a really good book. I recommend it for everybody.
Speaker 3: It's a City on Mars by Zach and Kelly Weener Smith.
Speaker 3: And it came about they're like tech boosters. You know,
Speaker 3: these guys are nerds. They're big fans of the future
Speaker 3: and technology and science and this kind of stuff. And
Speaker 3: they started out trying to write a book about how
Speaker 3: awesome it would be to colonize Mars and what it
Speaker 3: would be like and the technology we're going to use there.
Speaker 3: And what they found when they were doing the research
Speaker 3: was like, people haven't figured out a lot of really
Speaker 3: basic stuff about what it would be like to live
Speaker 3: on Mars. For example, can you get pregnant in zero G?
Speaker 3: Nobody knows? Can you just state in zero G? What's
Speaker 3: it like when you have a baby in zero G?
Speaker 3: Can you do surgery in low gravity environments? All this
Speaker 3: kind of stuff. Nobody's figured out a lot of these questions.
Speaker 3: So they ended up kind of writing a throw cold
Speaker 3: water on the idea of colonizing Mars book, which turned
Speaker 3: out to be very timely because of the rise of
Speaker 3: Elon Musk and his you know, let's just go and
Speaker 3: do it, move fast and break things. Might mean breaking
Speaker 3: like a million people's lives if you send a lot
Speaker 3: of people to Mars without figuring out some of this stuff.
Speaker 3: So in the book they dig into the science stuff
Speaker 3: at what we do know, we don't know how we
Speaker 3: might figure it out. It's a great read and really
Speaker 3: really well researched. Recently won a Hugo Award and a
Speaker 3: bunch of other prizes for popular science.
Speaker 2: Speaking of Elon Musk and Mars, do you think that
Speaker 2: recent political event have pushed up the timeline regarding possible
Speaker 2: human travel to Mars and even colonization. Do you think
Speaker 2: it's going to have any impact at all on how
Speaker 2: soon or how far off something like that would be.
Speaker 2: M M.
Speaker 3: It's a really good question, and it's so hard to
Speaker 3: know because on one hand, he has a great track
Speaker 3: record of pushing hard on difficult technical tasks and succeeding,
Speaker 3: you know, like his reusable rockets amazing, right, nobody thought
Speaker 3: that was possible. He made it happen, even you know,
Speaker 3: electric cars, all this kind of stuff. He also has
Speaker 3: a track record of promising stuff and then not delivering,
Speaker 3: you know, the boring company for example, hyper loop, all
Speaker 3: this kind of stuff. Sometimes his proclamations, you know, people
Speaker 3: argue like he pushed the hyper loop to kill California
Speaker 3: high speed rail. So it's not always clear whether his
Speaker 3: grand visions are to push his companies forward or to
Speaker 3: slow down another track. Something I do worry about, though,
Speaker 3: is the rise of anti science popularism. You know, you
Speaker 3: see the rounds. It's cost cutting strategy, picking out individual
Speaker 3: elements of science and saying, look, how ridiculous it is
Speaker 3: that we're studying the reproduction health of beetles. What a
Speaker 3: waste of tax payer dollars. And you know, it's not
Speaker 3: hard to draw dotted lines between like understanding beetles and
Speaker 3: a billion dollars in agriculture for wheat for example. So
Speaker 3: you know, in the funding, basic science is a great
Speaker 3: way to advance technology and colonization on Mars. And so
Speaker 3: I think there's a danger that if we cut basic
Speaker 3: science too much, we could be inhibiting these kinds of
Speaker 3: visions that he's espousing, that he's pushing, right, he wants
Speaker 3: us to be a multiplanetary species. I think the best
Speaker 3: way to get there is to do the science and
Speaker 3: fund basic research, not cut anything that doesn't have obvious
Speaker 3: value immediately.
Speaker 2: Plus, I mean, obviously, you know, we have such challenges
Speaker 2: here on this planet and they're not abating. So I suppose,
Speaker 2: on one hand, it just feels even more ludicrous that
Speaker 2: we would accelerate in this direction, you know, setting our
Speaker 2: sights on such a prospect and a world that is
Speaker 2: so lifeless, that is not this shining gem that we
Speaker 2: are squandering here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and as Kelly and Zach point out in their book,
Speaker 3: you know, the goal of making humans multiplanetary is a
Speaker 3: great one, but it's sort of impossible to achieve on
Speaker 3: a short time scale in the way that he wants
Speaker 3: to achieve it. I think his idea is, let's make
Speaker 3: sure we don't have all of our eggs in one basket.
Speaker 3: If an asteroid hits the Earth and wipes out everybody,
Speaker 3: it'd be great to have civilization and consciousness already established
Speaker 3: on Mars, right, But any sort of realistic colony on
Speaker 3: Mars is going to be utterly dependent on Earth for
Speaker 3: so long that there's really no chance of having an
Speaker 3: independent Mars that could survive that kind of cataclysm. On
Speaker 3: Earth for a long long time. I mean that doesn't
Speaker 3: mean we should figured that out and we shouldn't get there,
Speaker 3: and we shouldn't push hard now to make it happen.
Speaker 3: But the way to do it isn't just send a
Speaker 3: million people to Mars. Is to figure out those technical
Speaker 3: challenges so that it's more successful.
Speaker 2: Now, your focus, of course, is the world of physics.
Speaker 2: And this past year, of course, there's been a lot
Speaker 2: going on. It's been easy to focus and ruminate on
Speaker 2: all these other issues, but what's been going on in
Speaker 2: the world of physics, Like what was exciting in the
Speaker 2: realm of physics in twenty twenty four, and how does
Speaker 2: it look going into twenty twenty five.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, you know, physics is a lot of fun.
Speaker 3: There's always a lot of things going on. My particular
Speaker 3: realm is particle physics, and these days the conversation in
Speaker 3: particle physics is essentially what's next. We've been running the
Speaker 3: Large Hadron Collider for a lot of years now, since
Speaker 3: around two thousand and eight, so almost twenty years we
Speaker 3: found the Higgs boson, we measured the particle properties out
Speaker 3: the wazoo, and people are wondering, like, should we build
Speaker 3: another one. A big question in the field is can
Speaker 3: we ask for another ten twenty fifty billion dollars to
Speaker 3: build another particle collider to try to discover something new,
Speaker 3: especially if we don't know in advance what we're going
Speaker 3: to find. So a lot of discussions and particle physics
Speaker 3: are about that, what should we build? Do we have
Speaker 3: the political will to ask for all that money? How
Speaker 3: do we defend that? Are we at risk at overshooting
Speaker 3: if we ask for something too big and having another
Speaker 3: debacle like the superconnecting SuperCollider in Waxahachie, Texas in the nineties.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's part of that kind of slides back into
Speaker 2: what we were just saying about, like anti science, popularism
Speaker 2: and so forth. You know, it's like, how how do
Speaker 2: you end up making an argument for these kinds of
Speaker 2: projects in that kind of climate? And if you do,
Speaker 2: how do you do so like responsibly?
Speaker 3: Right? Yeah? And I don't have a hard time making
Speaker 3: that kind of argument. I mean, I'm a particle physicist.
Speaker 3: I have an interest in this obviously, But to me,
Speaker 3: the conversation is funny because people say, we need to
Speaker 3: promise some kind of discovery if we're going to ask
Speaker 3: for a twenty billion dollar project, and I don't think
Speaker 3: that at all. I think that we should be arguing
Speaker 3: for the value of pure research research without knowing in
Speaker 3: advance what you're going to discover. To me, it's like exploration,
Speaker 3: Like is it worthwhile to send a probe to sample
Speaker 3: the oceans of Europa? Absolutely yes, because we could discover
Speaker 3: alien life and blow our minds and learn incredible things.
Speaker 3: You know, the history of basic research is surprises, right,
Speaker 3: and those surprises very often lead to transformational technologies and developments.
Speaker 3: The way to move forward as a society is not
Speaker 3: to pull back, but to invest in ourselves. And the
Speaker 3: best investment we can make is basic research. Yes, particle physics, yes,
Speaker 3: you know, viruses, Yes, all sorts of stuff. It costs money,
Speaker 3: but it pays for itself. So if you believe in humans,
Speaker 3: and you believe in our ingenuity, and you're amazed at
Speaker 3: the mysteries of the universe and believe that we can
Speaker 3: crack them, then everybody should think, hey, we should ten
Speaker 3: x our research budget because it's going to pay off,
Speaker 3: and we have the money now, we should spend it
Speaker 3: because it's going to help our kids and our grandkids
Speaker 3: and everybody in the future. The present that we live
Speaker 3: in today is because people made those investments fifty years ago,
Speaker 3: one hundred years ago in basic research, which transformed our society.
Speaker 3: So particle physics is just one example of that. I
Speaker 3: don't think we need to be able to promise we're
Speaker 3: going to discover the squiggly on particle in order to
Speaker 3: ask for twenty billion dollars. We just need to say, hey, look,
Speaker 3: the universe is worth figuring out. Let's go do it.
Speaker 3: Let's explore. Who knows what we're going to find? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, and in doing so, yeah, avoiding stagnation.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Which leads me to something. We were chatting back and
Speaker 2: forth on email about things you might want to chat about,
Speaker 2: and you brought up an idea that I wasn't really
Speaker 2: plugged into all that much. This idea that some people
Speaker 2: say that physics itself is stagnating, that fundamental physics is
Speaker 2: like in a rut, or it's going down the wrong path.
Speaker 2: Tell us a little bit about this idea, and then
Speaker 2: how you feel about it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is something you hear about a lot in
Speaker 3: sort of popular science. I don't want to name any names,
Speaker 3: but there's quite a few folks who are sort of
Speaker 3: on the edge of theoretical physics, not really in the mainstream,
Speaker 3: who criticize the mainstream of theoretical physics and say, we
Speaker 3: haven't figured out anything in fifty years, and those guys
Speaker 3: are wasting their time and our money. And you know,
Speaker 3: it's part of this sort of broader anti science, anti elite,
Speaker 3: anti expertise movement in America that we've seen various political
Speaker 3: figures and business figures encouraging. And I think it's troubling,
Speaker 3: and I think it's dangerous, and I think also there
Speaker 3: is some merit to it. But you know, I think
Speaker 3: it's worth teasing that apart and thinking like, what can
Speaker 3: we learn about the progress or lack of progress in
Speaker 3: fundamental physics and how should we move forward. We shouldn't
Speaker 3: just tear everything apart because it's easy to criticize things
Speaker 3: from the outside.
Speaker 2: It also seems like it's probably a real cherry picking
Speaker 2: of the idea of progress, scientific progress, right, Like I was,
Speaker 2: you know, I think a lot of us probably did
Speaker 2: some traveling over the last couple of weeks at least,
Speaker 2: and like, you know, sometimes you might ask yourself, well,
Speaker 2: am I really getting anywhere? I haven't driven through a
Speaker 2: major city in an hour, Like, well, yeah, maybe not,
Speaker 2: but that doesn't mean I'm not progressing towards a destination
Speaker 2: or into new territory, right, I Mean it's like, like
Speaker 2: what is progress? Yeah, if you want to really in
Speaker 2: a zero win on like huge events and huge revelations, maybe,
Speaker 2: so maybe you can make that case, But then you've
Speaker 2: got a discount out a lot of just the other
Speaker 2: knowledge that and all the other findings that have been accumulated.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And I think that physics or fundamental physics has
Speaker 3: made itself vulnerable to this kind of criticism because for
Speaker 3: many years it did oversell itself. You know, the problem
Speaker 3: that fundamental physics is trying to solve. One of the
Speaker 3: crucial questions in physics today is what is the nature
Speaker 3: of the universe at the smallest scale? How can we
Speaker 3: describe it? And the problem is that we have two
Speaker 3: different descriptions of it. We have relativity, which tells us
Speaker 3: what space is and time is, and how they interact
Speaker 3: and how they bend and curve to create the appearance
Speaker 3: of the illusion really of gravity. It's wonderful theory, and
Speaker 3: it describes the expansion of the universe and motion of
Speaker 3: the planets and basically everything that's big. And then we
Speaker 3: have quantum mechanics, which tells us that nothing in the
Speaker 3: universe is continuous, everything is made of little chunks, and
Speaker 3: that at the fundamental particle level things are probabilistic and random.
Speaker 3: That works beautifully and describes particle collisions and all sorts
Speaker 3: of details about the early universe that we've been able
Speaker 3: to observe and calculates an incredible theory. And the problem is,
Speaker 3: nobody knows how to bring these two theories together, to
Speaker 3: make them work together, to do things like figure out, well,
Speaker 3: what happens if you have a bunch of particles that
Speaker 3: have enough mass to bend space time and then space
Speaker 3: time effects those particles in a probabilistic way. This classical
Speaker 3: theory of relativity and the quantum fundamentally random theory of
Speaker 3: quantum mechanics. Nobody's been able to pull those two things together.
Speaker 3: That's the open question for like literally one hundred years.
Speaker 3: And in the eighties and nineties there was this sense
Speaker 3: that maybe we had a glimmering of the answer. String
Speaker 3: theory rows up out of failed efforts to describe another
Speaker 3: fundamental quantum theory. Fundamental quantum phenomenon the strong force, and
Speaker 3: it was very promising and it was very mathematical, and
Speaker 3: people had this sense like, wow, maybe we're just getting
Speaker 3: our fingers around the solution. And there were a lot
Speaker 3: of bold claims that were made about how we were
Speaker 3: going to figure this out quickly and all sorts of stuff,
Speaker 3: and that hasn't come to pass. That doesn't mean, as
Speaker 3: you say, that we haven't made progress. The mathematics of
Speaker 3: string theory has helped people figure out a lot of stuff,
Speaker 3: and they've been definitely making a lot of progress. But
Speaker 3: some people feel like, hey, we haven't figured that out yet.
Speaker 3: And there were all these big claims, and so clearly
Speaker 3: these guys are wasting our time. And also maybe they're
Speaker 3: doing it and in bad faith. Maybe they're just writing
Speaker 3: grants to get government money and they know they're wasting
Speaker 3: their time and they're just fooling themselves. And this is
Speaker 3: cabal at the heart of fundamental physics that's like captured it,
Speaker 3: and they're just like writing grants for themselves and supporting
Speaker 3: each other. And that's the part that troubles me, Like
Speaker 3: you can disagree with what people are doing and the
Speaker 3: questions they're asking and even the methods they're useding to
Speaker 3: ask those questions. But once you start suggesting that physicists
Speaker 3: are like lying that, you know, they're not actually interested
Speaker 3: in solving the problem. They're just interested in like getting
Speaker 3: their you know, academic salaries, which, let's be clear, physics
Speaker 3: academic salaries are not really that impressive compared to like
Speaker 3: what physicists earn when they go off into Wall Street,
Speaker 3: for example. Then I think you entered a different kind
Speaker 3: of discourse. You know, you're really implying that people are
Speaker 3: lying and acting in bad faith. That's not the physics
Speaker 3: that I see, and that's that's not physicists I recognize.
Speaker 3: I think everybody's doing their best trying to figure stuff out.
Speaker 3: Some people are excited by string theory, some people are
Speaker 3: excited by alternatives loop quantum gravity or post quantum gravity,
Speaker 3: or all sorts of other ideas. I think there's a
Speaker 3: healthy debate, and I think you never know what's going
Speaker 3: to lead to success. You should fund all of these things.
Speaker 3: You should fund crazy ideas on the fringe, you should
Speaker 3: fund them the mainstream. The real tragedy is that we
Speaker 3: have such a timey amount of money for fundamental physics
Speaker 3: I mean the amount of money we spend training lms
Speaker 3: to make ridiculous hallucinations versus the amount of money we
Speaker 3: spend trying to understand the fundamental nature of the universe.
Speaker 3: It dwarfs it. It's you know, it's factors of millions
Speaker 3: and millions, so you know there, I think there is
Speaker 3: progress being made in fundamental physics. People can disagree about
Speaker 3: how it happens, but I think we should remember that
Speaker 3: everybody's doing their best.
Speaker 2: Now, how long is this this? I guess we can
Speaker 2: sort of think of it like anti physics establishments mentality,
Speaker 2: Like how long has this been cooking? And is it
Speaker 2: is it something that like stems out of like some
Speaker 2: of the like the anti climate change ideas out there,
Speaker 2: or is it been sort of percolating in its own column.
Speaker 3: It has a long history. You know, there have always
Speaker 3: been folks who think science is taking the wrong path.
Speaker 3: And you know, I get emails from retired engineers every
Speaker 3: day saying, look, I figured out the universe. I have
Speaker 3: a theory, and why won't anybody listen to me? Why
Speaker 3: won't anybody read my paper? How come my paper isn't
Speaker 3: getting discussed and criticized the same way ed Witten's paper
Speaker 3: is about superstring theory, you know, and I get that
Speaker 3: it's frustrating, like, you are a smart person, you have
Speaker 3: a great idea, Why won't anybody listen to you? So
Speaker 3: I think there's always been a community of people who
Speaker 3: feel like they're on the outside of academia, and academia
Speaker 3: is insular and doesn't listen to ideas from everybody, because
Speaker 3: there is this conception that academia is like this faceless
Speaker 3: meritocracy where ideas come in and something happens where they
Speaker 3: want best ones rise to the top. And so if
Speaker 3: you have an idea and you try to get attention
Speaker 3: for it and nobody responds to your email, then you
Speaker 3: get the feeling like, oh, this is an insular bunch.
Speaker 3: The only want to hear ideas from their friends. So
Speaker 3: I think that's a long standing problem, and I'm personally
Speaker 3: trying to overcome that in my small way because I
Speaker 3: answer every single email I get from the general public.
Speaker 3: You send me a theory of physics, I give you
Speaker 3: twenty minutes. I'm gonna read your theory, I'm gonna comment
Speaker 3: on it. I'm going to write you back. People don't
Speaker 3: always like my comments, but you know, they get what
Speaker 3: they ask for a little bit of attention, whether you
Speaker 3: like it or not. Sometimes I find a flaw on
Speaker 3: page one, and that's got to be disheartening. Another time,
Speaker 3: some woman wrote to me because she had found in
Speaker 3: her father's papers a theory that he'd been working on
Speaker 3: in retirement, in secret for like ten years after retiring
Speaker 3: from Boeing as an engineer, and she just wanted to know, like, Hey,
Speaker 3: can you look at this and tell me is this anything?
Speaker 3: This is my father's project in his retirement, and I
Speaker 3: hate to think it just went ignored. So I took
Speaker 3: a look at it for her and tried to gently
Speaker 3: let her know that, you know, there were some interesting
Speaker 3: ideas there, but nothing really new. So I feel I
Speaker 3: think a lot of people feel like they're on the
Speaker 3: outside of science and it's hard to break in because, look,
Speaker 3: science is just people. You know, I'm a person. A
Speaker 3: science is nothing more than just a bunch of people
Speaker 3: trying to figure out the universe and also run their lives.
Speaker 3: And people have too much to do. So most people
Speaker 3: you send them at your theory of everything, they're like, thanks, man,
Speaker 3: but I'm working on my own theory. I don't really
Speaker 3: have time for yours. So I think that's the root
Speaker 3: of it. And then there are some folks, you know,
Speaker 3: Eric Weinstein, for example, who are on the fringes and
Speaker 3: have their own theory, and I don't know whether they
Speaker 3: actually want it to be examined in detailed, because Eric Weinstein,
Speaker 3: for example, has a theory called geometric unity, and it
Speaker 3: has received some attention and some criticism, which to my understanding,
Speaker 3: he's mostly disregarded, so that he can continue to say
Speaker 3: that it's that his theory hasn't been given any attention.
Speaker 3: For some folks, I think there's a you know, there's
Speaker 3: a benefit to being ignored by the mainstream, and they
Speaker 3: might want to preserve that. But I think more broadly,
Speaker 3: there's this rise recently in the last you know, twenty
Speaker 3: years of rejection of expertise, of saying, as you say,
Speaker 3: climate scientists, you know, try to undermine their expertise by saying, oh,
Speaker 3: they're doing it for the grant money. And I think
Speaker 3: that's a shame. I think it's a tragedy if there's
Speaker 3: a disconnect between the academic elite to people who are
Speaker 3: trained to think deeply about these topics, which we definitely
Speaker 3: need in our society. We need experts on all sorts
Speaker 3: of stuff to guide us and the general public who
Speaker 3: are funding it, who's curiosity city is the reason it exists.
Speaker 3: We need a better connection between those two. We need
Speaker 3: everybody to feel like they're part of it in some way.
Speaker 3: And you know, not to shamelessly plug our podcast, but
Speaker 3: one of the reasons why this podcast is important to
Speaker 3: me is because I feel like there are a lot
Speaker 3: of people who are out there who want to understand. Hey,
Speaker 3: what's going on in physics or in biology? I want
Speaker 3: to understand better, And that's what we try to do
Speaker 3: on the podcast, is like, let's break these ideas down
Speaker 3: and make them accessible to everybody, so people understand why
Speaker 3: are we trying to build a new collider, or why
Speaker 3: are those graduate students purposely letting themselves get beaten by
Speaker 3: leeches or whatever. We want to make science accessible because
Speaker 3: it's in the end for the people and by the people.
Speaker 2: That's a great point, Yeah, because you need to make
Speaker 2: the h the core scientific ideas accessible, because it's been
Speaker 2: my observation that the fringeier ideas are often inherently accessible.
Speaker 2: You know, they're on the fringes, you know, for a reason,
Speaker 2: but there is often something about them that is attractive
Speaker 2: in that it seems to explain everything, or it seems
Speaker 2: to or of course it'll scratch other itches that are
Speaker 2: there in one's identity or values, you know, And I like,
Speaker 2: you know, I instantly think to some examples from like
Speaker 2: theories of hypotheses of consciousness, you know, ideas that are
Speaker 2: not like well regarded in the mainstream, but you know
Speaker 2: there's something about them that you know that that really,
Speaker 2: you know, enraptures you on the outside. And I imagine
Speaker 2: it's that way with a lot of a lot of
Speaker 2: these these fringier ideas.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, and I'm not an expert in it at all,
Speaker 3: but I'm watching with fascination almost the same phenomena happening
Speaker 3: in the field of archaeology. You have Graham Hancock, for example,
Speaker 3: He's got this Netflix special about where he has this
Speaker 3: theory that there was a civilization many many thousands of
Speaker 3: years ago that was much more advanced. And anybody thinks
Speaker 3: and he's claiming archaeologists or ignoring this idea, and you
Speaker 3: know that the mainstream is protecting some narrative. It's exactly
Speaker 3: the same story people tell about fundamental physics, but now
Speaker 3: just transplanted to archaeology. And as you say, it's a
Speaker 3: very compelling idea that, you know, the concept that our
Speaker 3: history could be different from what we imagined and it
Speaker 3: could be maybe hidden from us in a sort of
Speaker 3: you know, Dan Brown sort of way, and we could
Speaker 3: be pulling back the veil and understanding the truth. It's
Speaker 3: it's exciting, right. I wish it were true. It would
Speaker 3: be fantastic. And I know archaeologists and just like fundamental physicists,
Speaker 3: they're busy people and they're curious people. But if you
Speaker 3: came to them with some evidence of some world changing,
Speaker 3: transformational discovery of an ancient civilization, their instinct wouldn't be like,
Speaker 3: oh my gosh, we better bury that because that challenges
Speaker 3: the narrative. It would be like, let's go find some
Speaker 3: more evidence, let's go figure this out. Oh my god.
Speaker 3: How exciting, because that's why scientists got into this, to
Speaker 3: figure yourself out, not to protect some ridiculous mainstream narrative.
Speaker 3: But it's frustrating because Graham Hancock, he's got a Netflix special,
Speaker 3: two of them. Keanu Reeves was on the second one. Like,
Speaker 3: the guy's a huge audience. He's on Joe Rogan all
Speaker 3: the time. This stuff is compelling, it's very easy to sell,
Speaker 3: and it's very hard to back up in a sort
Speaker 3: of rigorous scientific way, which is why archaeologists are like,
Speaker 3: that's crazy, there's no evidence for that. And we saw
Speaker 3: a flint dibble go on Joe Rogan and you know,
Speaker 3: bring receipts and all sorts of data and you know,
Speaker 3: carefully dismantle this, and then later Joe Rogan just dismisses
Speaker 3: him and calls him a liar. You know. So it's
Speaker 3: hard to engage with these folks because it's not always
Speaker 3: clear that they're operating in good faith, and their stories
Speaker 3: are easier to tell. You're right, they're compelling, and they
Speaker 3: don't have the same rules of evidence and logic that
Speaker 3: you know, like understanding the nature of the universe and
Speaker 3: making progress in archaeology requires you know, real detailed evidence
Speaker 3: and careful work. So it's a problem. Yeah, it's a problem,
Speaker 3: and I think we need to bring more people into
Speaker 3: the fold and make people feel like science is that
Speaker 3: that they're part of the scientific process.
Speaker 2: Because the irony here is that, to use the the
Speaker 2: alternative archaeology example is that often they're they're they're promising
Speaker 2: something that is already present in mainstream archaeologist, like the
Speaker 2: idea that oh, the past isn't what you think it is. Okay,
Speaker 2: that that is always in my experience, it's always the
Speaker 2: case when I start reading about the past, it's like, oh,
Speaker 2: it is different than what I thought it was. And
Speaker 2: people were more advanced than I sometimes give them credit for.
Speaker 2: You know, like all of these things are true if
Speaker 2: you take the the the deeper, longer path of like
Speaker 2: legitimate research and instead of this promise shortcut that ultimately
Speaker 2: does not lead to a place of truth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. And these alt science folks often describe mainstream
Speaker 3: archaeology or mainstream physics in not such a charitable way
Speaker 3: and not such a fair way. It's really it's a
Speaker 3: straw man that they're attacking, not the real, thoughtful process
Speaker 3: at the heart of science. And it's unfortunate because you know,
Speaker 3: if we had that kind of energy in that platform
Speaker 3: Joe Rogan and Netflix Specials for real science, we could
Speaker 3: really engage people. We could inspire young people to come
Speaker 3: and do science and contribute. We could encourage you know,
Speaker 3: elected representatives to put more money towards researching these things.
Speaker 3: I think everybody would want that and everybody would benefit
Speaker 3: from that from my perspective, Like, I don't understand why
Speaker 3: basic research isn't a bipartisan winner. Like you want future
Speaker 3: economic power, fund basic research. You want military power, that's
Speaker 3: the most important thing to you. Cool, fund basic research.
Speaker 3: You want cultural dominance like, fund basic research, Like it
Speaker 3: gets you all of these things, you know, education, it's
Speaker 3: it's something for everybody, no matter where you are in
Speaker 3: the spectrum. You want freedom of you want truth, you
Speaker 3: want you know, more tools to help the poor, or
Speaker 3: all this stuff comes from basic research. It's the best
Speaker 3: investment anybody's ever made in anything, basically.
Speaker 2: The foundation, right, and that's what you build on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. So it seems to me like a classic
Speaker 3: mistake to say, oh, we're rich now, we don't need
Speaker 3: to spend money on basic research. Like that seems like
Speaker 3: the kind of thing that we're going to regret in
Speaker 3: twenty or fifty or one hundred years. But anyway, you know,
Speaker 3: I'm a physicist and I benefit directly from basic research funding.
Speaker 3: So yes, I have a conflict of interest there, but
Speaker 3: you know, it's really just that I'm excited about this
Speaker 3: stuff and I think everybody should be I think these
Speaker 3: questions are amazing, and you know, understanding the nature of
Speaker 3: the universe, the origin of the universe, These are fascinating
Speaker 3: mysteries that go right to the heart of like what
Speaker 3: is it like to be a human? Why are we here?
Speaker 3: How should we live our lives? And everybody deserves to
Speaker 3: be a part of that and to understand what we
Speaker 3: know and what we don't know, and what we're working
Speaker 3: on and how we're trying to figure it out. I
Speaker 3: want to do as much as possible to bring people
Speaker 3: into the fold and share with them these incredible mysteries
Speaker 3: and what we're doing to figure it out.
Speaker 2: Well, let's go ahead and get back into another mystery here,
Speaker 2: so as we move to close out another year. It's
Speaker 2: of course easy to get caught up in ideas of
Speaker 2: endings and beginnings, and of course it's easy for our
Speaker 2: minds to turn to the Big Bang. But I understand
Speaker 2: you'd like to settle some misunderstandings out there regarding the
Speaker 2: Big Bang, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's incredible to me when there's a gap between how
Speaker 3: science describes something and the story in the mind of
Speaker 3: the public and something I run into all the time
Speaker 3: is people's confusion about what we mean by the Big Bang.
Speaker 3: So I think in the minds of most of the public,
Speaker 3: the Big Bang is an event that began the universe
Speaker 3: around fourteen billion years ago, when a tiny dot of
Speaker 3: matter exploded out into empty space. I think this is
Speaker 3: the concept a lot of people have in their minds
Speaker 3: when you say the Big Bang, And that's not the
Speaker 3: concept that most scientists have. It's not the scientific view
Speaker 3: of what happened thirteen point six billion years ago in
Speaker 3: a couple of crucial and really fundamentally different ways. And
Speaker 3: I see this all the time because people write to
Speaker 3: me and ask me questions about stuff, and I see, oh,
Speaker 3: you must have the wrong idea of what the Big
Speaker 3: Bang is, which is why you're asking this question. And
Speaker 3: the two misconceptions there are one. The Big Bang in
Speaker 3: no way is the start of the universe. I mean,
Speaker 3: what I really should say is we have no idea
Speaker 3: what happened before a moment thirteen point six billion years ago.
Speaker 3: We don't know that it was the start of anything.
Speaker 3: It's just as far back as we can tell the
Speaker 3: story before that because we don't know how quantum mechanics
Speaker 3: and general relativity merged together. We don't even know how
Speaker 3: to think about it. We have no idea what happened,
Speaker 3: what the rules were. So it's not the beginning of
Speaker 3: the universe in any sense. That's number one, and we
Speaker 3: can dig deeper into it into how we know that
Speaker 3: and what that means. And number two is that it
Speaker 3: wasn't a tiny dot in empty space. It was everywhere.
Speaker 3: The Big Bang filled the universe. There's no special point
Speaker 3: from which the Big Bang came. But the universe is
Speaker 3: infinite now we think, and probably was infinite always, which
Speaker 3: means the Big Bang was infinite. Is literally everywhere in
Speaker 3: an infinite universe. And that's a very different conception in
Speaker 3: your mind, from a tiny dot exploding out into infinite
Speaker 3: space to a universe already filled infinitely with stuff. And
Speaker 3: this is something we know very well. And so when
Speaker 3: you talk to scientists about the Big Bang, they think, Okay,
Speaker 3: we're talking about a moment when the universe was very dense,
Speaker 3: almost fourteen billion years ago, and then the expansion that
Speaker 3: comes afterwards. You know, how things spread out. That's what
Speaker 3: scientists mean by the Big Bang. But the general public
Speaker 3: they think of this dot that began the universe and
Speaker 3: exploded out into empty s. People often write to me
Speaker 3: and say, hold on a second. If the universe began
Speaker 3: as a tiny dot of stuff and now we think
Speaker 3: it's infinite, how do you go from one to the other,
Speaker 3: Which is a great question, because you can't go from
Speaker 3: one to the other. You can't go from a tiny
Speaker 3: finite dot of stuff which explodes out and then have
Speaker 3: a universe that's infinite with stuff everywhere. And this is
Speaker 3: my frustration with these misconceptions is that people get confused
Speaker 3: and when they try to think about it for themselves,
Speaker 3: which they definitely should do, they can't match up what
Speaker 3: we know because they have this misunderstanding, this misconception of
Speaker 3: what the big bang is. Instead of thinking about the
Speaker 3: universe as starting from a tiny dot, they should think
Speaker 3: about the whole universe filled with stuff that expanding space itself,
Speaker 3: stretching out so that stuff becomes more and more dilute,
Speaker 3: more and more spread apart and colder, and that's what
Speaker 3: leads to an infinite universe filled with infinite stuff. It
Speaker 3: always was infinite, It always had an infinite line of
Speaker 3: stuff in it. What came before that, where that stuff
Speaker 3: came from, we don't know. We don't have an answer
Speaker 3: for that. That's another problem with the misconception is people
Speaker 3: imagine that the Big Bang theory claims to explain why
Speaker 3: we have a universe, why we have something rather than nothing,
Speaker 3: where it all came from. But it doesn't not at all.
Speaker 3: It says, hey, we can rewind the clock using the
Speaker 3: laws of physics to go back about thirteen point eight
Speaker 3: billion years to the moment when everything was hot and
Speaker 3: dense and filled the universe before that question mark. I mean,
Speaker 3: there are theories, there are ideas, there's speculations, have formed,
Speaker 3: prospects and research and progress, but nobody knows what happened
Speaker 3: before that. And so if people think that science is
Speaker 3: making that claim, becomes very easy to criticize, especially you know,
Speaker 3: from an anti science crowd. They're like, look at the
Speaker 3: hubris of these scientists who claim that the universe began
Speaker 3: in this ridiculous way for which there's no evidence, and
Speaker 3: yet science not making that claim. It's sort of analogous
Speaker 3: to like people who criticize the theory of evolution when
Speaker 3: they say, how could you possibly explain how you got
Speaker 3: life from abiotic chemicals? But the theory of evolution doesn't
Speaker 3: claim to explain that it says, if you have life,
Speaker 3: we can explain this development. We don't know how it began.
Speaker 3: It becomes very easy to criticize evolution if you say
Speaker 3: it's making claims that it isn't making. And in the
Speaker 3: same way, physics, I think suffers because people misunderstand some
Speaker 3: of the central concepts in it, and it's actually fascinating.
Speaker 3: I dug through the history of it a little bit
Speaker 3: to understand, like, where did we go so wrong? Why
Speaker 3: is it that we have this gap between the public's
Speaker 3: understanding and the concepts in the minds of the scientists
Speaker 3: who are working on it.
Speaker 2: So to refresh. We have a dense infinity that then
Speaker 2: expands into a less dense infinity. But this is not
Speaker 2: the beginning. This is not book one in the series.
Speaker 2: This is book question mark in the series, and we
Speaker 2: don't know how many volumes come before it exactly.
Speaker 3: We have no idea. It could be the universe began
Speaker 3: just before that in some crazy event, or it could
Speaker 3: be the universe is infinitely old. It could be that,
Speaker 3: you know, time itself doesn't have a meaning. Time is
Speaker 3: some weird emerging thing and only coalesced just before that.
Speaker 3: We really just don't know. Any of these answers could
Speaker 3: very plausibly be the reality. So calling the Big Bang
Speaker 3: the beginning of the universe, or saying that science claims
Speaker 3: that it is not fair because that's not our theory
Speaker 3: of the Big Bang. It's definitely an open question. This
Speaker 3: is one of the fuzziest things, I think for folks
Speaker 3: outside of physics to understand what is solidly known and
Speaker 3: what it's sort of like, h, here's a speculative idea
Speaker 3: and we're working on which is kind of fun, so
Speaker 3: maybe worth telling you about, or like, what's an idea
Speaker 3: we had and we kind of moved on from, but
Speaker 3: it sort of stuck in the minds of the public.
Speaker 3: And I think that might be the case with the
Speaker 3: Big Bang. I went back and read some of the
Speaker 3: original science journalism on this topic, and there's an article
Speaker 3: in nine teen sixty five in the New York Times
Speaker 3: by Walter Sullivan, who's a famous science journalists got a
Speaker 3: bunch of prizes in science journalism named after him. He
Speaker 3: won all the prizes and now they're naming the prizes
Speaker 3: after him, and he wrote this article in the New
Speaker 3: York Times like a paper of record, and you know,
Speaker 3: he describes the Big Bang incorrectly in that article, you know,
Speaker 3: he describes it as galaxy's receding from a single point
Speaker 3: out into infinite space. And I read a bunch of
Speaker 3: science journalism that followed that, and I suspect that that
Speaker 3: sort of misdescription of it planted the seed, because I
Speaker 3: think a lot of science journalists they don't read the
Speaker 3: original science papers, They read the other coverage, They talk
Speaker 3: to their friends, they try to get an idea of
Speaker 3: the concepts, and I think then it gets reinforced and reinforced,
Speaker 3: and I think that probably led to a lot of
Speaker 3: misunderstanding about the nature of our understanding of the beginning
Speaker 3: of the universe. And there's also a lot of blame
Speaker 3: on the part of the scientists also, you know, scientists
Speaker 3: have used the same words to mean different and things.
Speaker 3: When I say the big Bang, I'm talking about the
Speaker 3: evolution of the universe from this dense state. But Stephen
Speaker 3: Hawking wrote a paper in the seventies about a big
Speaker 3: bang singularity where he was proposing exactly what people have
Speaker 3: in mind, like singularity where time began and the universe
Speaker 3: was born. So he sort of reused that word to
Speaker 3: mean something new which must be very confusing for well
Speaker 3: meaning science journalists who have a very very difficult job
Speaker 3: to translate these ideas into something that's understandable for the
Speaker 3: general public. So, you know, I think it was all
Speaker 3: very well meaning and everybody tried their best, but there
Speaker 3: was a you know, a game of telephone there where
Speaker 3: things were lost in translation and then preserved in the
Speaker 3: minds of journalists and just propagated on and on and
Speaker 3: so it's important to me to try to correct some
Speaker 3: of these to like make people understand, Hey, what do
Speaker 3: scientists actually think about when they think about the Big Bang?
Speaker 3: How do we know that? So I think it's fun
Speaker 3: and I think it's worth doing because again it's part
Speaker 3: of a larger project of like, let's make people feel
Speaker 3: like they're involved in science because they are. It's the
Speaker 3: curiosity of the whole public that means we get to
Speaker 3: do our jobs and and you know, we have an
Speaker 3: audience for it.
Speaker 2: Do you think that the sort of stickiness of this
Speaker 2: incorrect idea of the Big Bang might have to do
Speaker 2: as well with the idea that it matches up with
Speaker 2: some of these religious models and mythological models of the
Speaker 2: creation of things, you know, the idea that you know,
Speaker 2: there's like a flip that is switched by some great
Speaker 2: invisible hand, you know, and we go from nothing to something,
Speaker 2: we go from you know, from from from otion to
Speaker 2: sky and so forth. And therefore, like, even though that
Speaker 2: the model is is not exactly what the scientists were explaining,
Speaker 2: it sticks to us because it matches up with these
Speaker 2: other cultural ideas.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it could be that. It's also fascinating to see
Speaker 3: how the different stories feel natural or unnatural through time.
Speaker 3: Like about one hundred years ago, before we under stood
Speaker 3: that the universe was expanding, the general idea was that
Speaker 3: the universe was static. It was just like stars hanging
Speaker 3: in space the way they always had. And the idea
Speaker 3: that the universe exists and it always existed it was
Speaker 3: very natural to scientists. So the idea that the universe
Speaker 3: was changing, it was expanding, it was getting less dense
Speaker 3: over time, and maybe in the deep deep past was
Speaker 3: incredibly dense beyond our ability to describe. That was a
Speaker 3: weird and unnatural idea was sort of initially rejected, you know,
Speaker 3: sort of like you know, uugh what by a lot
Speaker 3: of folks, And now it feels much more natural. It
Speaker 3: feels like, well, of course the universe had to have
Speaker 3: a beginning. It's weirder to imagine an infinite past, right,
Speaker 3: a universe without cause? I think so philosophically, we tend
Speaker 3: to have intuition and biases and prejudices that are difficult
Speaker 3: to pin down. And I wondered the same thing that
Speaker 3: you did. And I actually read some folks who were
Speaker 3: writing about con between religious thoughts and Big Bang theory.
Speaker 3: And some folks do find, you know, credence in the
Speaker 3: Big Bang theory for their religious beliefs, about as you say,
Speaker 3: flipping a switch. But other people find contradiction because like
Speaker 3: in the Bible, it says God created the heavens and
Speaker 3: the earth, So in the first moment of creation, there's
Speaker 3: the earth, whereas in our scientific description of the evolution
Speaker 3: of the universe, the earth doesn't appear until like nine
Speaker 3: billion years in right when when our solar system is
Speaker 3: formed and our star is formed. So there's a little
Speaker 3: bit of a you know, an issue there to reconcile
Speaker 3: for the folks looking to bring together the scientific and
Speaker 3: religious aspects. But yeah, I think that there's something appealing
Speaker 3: in some of these stories, Like you were saying, earlier.
Speaker 3: These all science stories. Some of them have a real
Speaker 3: appeal to us about being told the true story or
Speaker 3: ancient aliens building the pyramids or whatever. You know, there's
Speaker 3: some things we want to hear, and so it's easier
Speaker 3: for us to accept those stories, and we have to
Speaker 3: really guard it. And that's why science is so valuable.
Speaker 3: It demands it requires evidence and logic and mathematics to
Speaker 3: make sure that we're not just telling ourselves the story
Speaker 3: we want to hear, but that we're actually revealing something
Speaker 3: true about the universe.
Speaker 2: You know, I don't want to give any ammunition to
Speaker 2: intelligent design folks and anti science movements, but the one
Speaker 2: that always gets me is and no one's using this
Speaker 2: to make this argument, so I hesitate to give it
Speaker 2: to them. But anytime I cut into a spaghetti squash,
Speaker 2: that's my moment of doubt where I'm like, well, maybe
Speaker 2: this is, you know, the will of God, or God's
Speaker 2: revealed because I just cut into this squash and now
Speaker 2: it is spaghetti. Maybe I'm standing on the wrong side
Speaker 2: of things.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well maybe you should join me in the Church
Speaker 3: of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You know, you have it
Speaker 3: raw men, No, it is amazing. The natural world is
Speaker 3: mind boggling. And every time we look out into the
Speaker 3: stars or cut open something, or we find some new
Speaker 3: critter or living in a place we thought it was impossible.
Speaker 3: I'm just so impressed by the universe. The universe could
Speaker 3: have been boring, it could have been sterile, it could
Speaker 3: have been simple. It's incredible to me that the universe
Speaker 3: is complicated enough that it's taking us a long time
Speaker 3: to figure it out, but simple enough that we can't
Speaker 3: actually make progress. Right to me, that's the fascinating fine tuning,
Speaker 3: Because if the universe was so simple that, like Aristotle
Speaker 3: had figured it out in an afternoon, and like physics
Speaker 3: was really done five thousand years ago, that would be
Speaker 3: too bad. It wouldn't be as fun. It's like a puzzle.
Speaker 3: It's like trying to play tic tac toe. It's like, well,
Speaker 3: that was boring. But if the universe is so complicated
Speaker 3: that we could never figure it out, we can't even
Speaker 3: make progress, you know, like a toddler trying to play go.
Speaker 3: That would be really frustrating, and we can like throw tantrums,
Speaker 3: But the universe seems to be perfectly balanced. It's like
Speaker 3: we're playing a game that's right at the edge of
Speaker 3: our abilities. Incredible to me that the universe, that it
Speaker 3: can't make sense at all, That our mathematics and our
Speaker 3: concepts can explain the universe, and that it steadily feeds
Speaker 3: us these mysteries so that we can stay engaged. It
Speaker 3: makes me really excited to talk to alien scientists to wonder, like,
Speaker 3: what was their experience of figuring out the universe? Are
Speaker 3: they much smarter than we are and the whole thing
Speaker 3: took their Aristotle in afternoon? Are they dumber than we
Speaker 3: are but it took them a billion years and now
Speaker 3: they're more advanced, you know? Or is most of our
Speaker 3: science just in our minds? Is just our description of
Speaker 3: our mental thought patterns to make sense of the stimulus
Speaker 3: we receive. I think we'll learn a lot about the
Speaker 3: nature of the universe and ourselves when we get to
Speaker 3: sit across the table at the first like intergalactic science conference.
Speaker 2: Until that day, though, we have science podcasts to listen
Speaker 2: to this right and the podcast in question here is
Speaker 2: Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe Podcast. A question I always
Speaker 2: ask folks when they come on the show and they
Speaker 2: have a podcast that they're promoting is okay, We're going
Speaker 2: to have some new listeners coming in. What is a
Speaker 2: current episode or a past episode that they should seek
Speaker 2: out for a first listen, and then what's coming off
Speaker 2: on the horizon that they should look out for.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you, great question. So you know, we have
Speaker 3: a fun mix of physics and biology. If you're interested
Speaker 3: in fundamental physics. We have some episodes about what is space,
Speaker 3: what is time? Digging into like very basic questions about
Speaker 3: the nature of the universe and what are modern theories
Speaker 3: of them? You know, what is a particle? We have
Speaker 3: an episode coming out next week about more applied things
Speaker 3: called why do Planes Fly? Because it turns out there's
Speaker 3: still a lot of controversy about why planes hang in
Speaker 3: the air. And then we have biology episodes about cannibalism.
Speaker 3: We have one about leeches coming out very soon. We
Speaker 3: have a bunch of fun episodes where Kelly digs in
Speaker 3: to life on Mars, how do you grow crops on Mars?
Speaker 3: How do you have babies on more Ours? All sorts
Speaker 3: of stuff. So with a big spectrum of concepts there,
Speaker 3: pick and choose or listen from the beginning.
Speaker 2: Awesome, Well, Daniel, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for coming
Speaker 2: back on the show and chatting with me about the
Speaker 2: universe and human civilization everything between.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks very much, and thanks to all your listeners.
Speaker 2: All right, thanks once more to Daniel Whitson for taking
Speaker 2: time out of his day to chat with me here
Speaker 2: on Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Again. There are a
Speaker 2: number of episodes already out there that you can dive
Speaker 2: right into, and it sounds like there's some exciting episodes
Speaker 2: on the way. Just a reminder that this podcast, Stuff
Speaker 2: to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast,
Speaker 2: with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes
Speaker 2: on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious
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Speaker 2: those are the ones that I'm more likely to look
Speaker 2: at myself. And as always, thanks to the excellent JJ
Speaker 2: Possway for producing the show and stitching everything together and
Speaker 2: making sure it sounds right. Couldn't do it without him.
Speaker 2: And if you want to reach out to any of
Speaker 2: us here at stuff to Blow Your Mind, if you
Speaker 2: have you know, questions about books or films that we reference,
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