Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
Speaker 1: let's let's take a minute here to listen to the
Speaker 1: music of the spheres. It's lovely, right. We forget that planets,
Speaker 1: stars and queens, oars are all giving off radio signals,
Speaker 1: and if you have the right equipment you can actually
Speaker 1: use drop on space and hear all these sort of
Speaker 1: bubble squeaks. Yeah, we're talking about the sonification of this
Speaker 1: radio wave information. And this kind of stuff has made
Speaker 1: the rounds on the Internet time and time again. Before
Speaker 1: the Internet, it was even available on vinyl. And it's
Speaker 1: it is. It's haunting, it's beautiful. It's like the sound
Speaker 1: of space whales um, you know, singing in the cosmos.
Speaker 1: But just imagine, just imagine that you go to eavesdrop
Speaker 1: on space one day. Can you hear something that is
Speaker 1: ferociously loud? Yeah, something that sounds a little like this. Okay,
Speaker 1: maybe not exactly that. Yeah. That that I want to
Speaker 1: be clear is is not an actual sonification of anything
Speaker 1: from our universe. That is a creation by our our
Speaker 1: sound designer and producer, Noel Brown, and we wanted to
Speaker 1: include that clip because we're not exactly sure what this
Speaker 1: space war which actually exists sounds like. Yeah, so all
Speaker 1: we know it's six times louder than anything else out there,
Speaker 1: and it is a mystery. It is this haunting, perhaps
Speaker 1: even disturbing on an intellectual level. Uh, noise, just discordia
Speaker 1: emanating from the universe, and uh we throw our best
Speaker 1: theories at it, and nothing so far has really stuck. Uh,
Speaker 1: you can't help but let your imagination run wild, of course,
Speaker 1: like I instantly, I instantly they turn to Lovecraft's HP
Speaker 1: Lovecrafts Demon sultan as is Off, which was quote that
Speaker 1: amorphous blight of nethermost confusion, which blasphemes and bubbles at
Speaker 1: the center of all infinity, who gnaws hungrily, admits the muffled,
Speaker 1: maddening beat of vile drums anothermost confusion. Yeah, we're gonna
Speaker 1: have to use that. Um. Yeah, And this is not
Speaker 1: the first time that we've had this kind of nice,
Speaker 1: deep mystery to chew on, right, like we have had
Speaker 1: sounds emanating from the depths of the ocean, from the
Speaker 1: depths of space. Now, um, that make us wonder what
Speaker 1: exactly is going on. And so that's what we're going
Speaker 1: to try to do today, plumb the depths of this
Speaker 1: sound and figure out what it is and where it's
Speaker 1: coming from. Indeed, we're gonna examine this universe wide phenomenon
Speaker 1: of the space roar. Now, let me just clarify a
Speaker 1: couple of things to start off. When we're talking about
Speaker 1: listening to the space roar or any of these these
Speaker 1: cosmic sounds, the soonification of the data. You know, we're
Speaker 1: not talking about actual sound traveling through space. Sound travels
Speaker 1: and waves just like light, just like heat, But unlike
Speaker 1: light and heat, sound travels by making molecules vibrate. So
Speaker 1: for sound to actually travel, say from a ringing bell
Speaker 1: to your ear, there has to be a molecule filled
Speaker 1: medium for it to travel through. Here on Earth, air
Speaker 1: molecules provide the pathway, but in space, particularly deep space,
Speaker 1: there are just no molecules to vibrate, that's right. So
Speaker 1: what we are relying on when we talk about eavesdropping
Speaker 1: in space, we're relying on radio waves and in n
Speaker 1: American physicist Karl Jansky first detected radio static from our
Speaker 1: very own milky way galaxy and similar emission from other
Speaker 1: galaxies creates this kind of background hits of radio noise.
Speaker 1: So when we talk about radio waves, where we're talking
Speaker 1: about well, they are one of what we call electromagnetic waves.
Speaker 1: So electromagnetic waves include light, radio, X ray, gamma ray,
Speaker 1: and infrared and ultra for violet. And the thing that
Speaker 1: differentiates them is their wavelength. So a wavelength of say light,
Speaker 1: stretched out over a long, long, long and long distance
Speaker 1: ratchets down its energy and then it shifts it into
Speaker 1: a radio wave. So in other words, radio waves are
Speaker 1: just another form of light. And this means that light
Speaker 1: from a distant galaxy can't perceive by sight, but it
Speaker 1: can be heard by radio telescopes. Hence all those bubbles
Speaker 1: and squeaks we can hear when a radio telescope homes
Speaker 1: in on say Uranus or Jupiter. So that brings us
Speaker 1: to ARCADE. ARCADE being a two thousand and six NASA
Speaker 1: experiment developed by the Goddard Space Flight Center. ARCADE stands
Speaker 1: for Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, astrophysics, and Diffuse emission, and
Speaker 1: essentially it's uh it was. It was a high altitude
Speaker 1: balloon payload designed to study the early universe by measuring
Speaker 1: the frequency spectrum of the ca es make microwave background
Speaker 1: or c m D and searching for signals from the
Speaker 1: first stars to form after the Big Bang. See heat
Speaker 1: from the Big Bang still permeates the universe today, and
Speaker 1: scientists can observe it as this faint glow of deep
Speaker 1: space microwaves. This is the cosmic microwave background, and it
Speaker 1: contains what some scientists dub quote a fossil record of
Speaker 1: every of every early universe. I like that idea, that
Speaker 1: fossil record. I really like the fossil record analogy too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the instrumentation aboard this device is pretty crazy. The
Speaker 1: official Arcade website makes the following comparison. Imagine warming your
Speaker 1: hands by the light of the stars in the night sky,
Speaker 1: you know, standing out on a cold day, raising your
Speaker 1: palms up and warming yourself by that those distant pinpricks
Speaker 1: of light. Impossible right now. Imagine trying to detect the
Speaker 1: heat from stars we can't even see, like you mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: than the light from those stars just turning nothing but
Speaker 1: radio waves after a while. That's why NASA's Gotta Space
Speaker 1: Flight Center designed Arcade to measure temperature differences as small
Speaker 1: as one one thousandth of a degree in the background
Speaker 1: only three degrees above absolute zero, while also avoiding confusing
Speaker 1: data from everything else in the universe. So the entire
Speaker 1: instrument inside this ballooned uh lifted package was cooled with
Speaker 1: liquid helium to to a to a temperature of two
Speaker 1: point seven degrees above absolute zero. So they made it
Speaker 1: as cold, if not a little colder than the CMB,
Speaker 1: so there's no confusion for its seven cryogenic radiometers. So
Speaker 1: July two thousand six successfully launched this sucker from Columbia
Speaker 1: Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas. It ascended to an
Speaker 1: altitude of one thousand feet or thirty seven kilometers, and
Speaker 1: after four hours of observation, parachuted back to Earth. Oh
Speaker 1: and what did Dr Alan Cogert, a research scientist at
Speaker 1: Nassas Cattard Space Flight Center and head of the Arcade project, Fine, Well,
Speaker 1: he found something was absolutely astounding, and honestly, he was
Speaker 1: just hoping to find confirmation of the cosmic microwave background
Speaker 1: and gather a few nude radio emission points. But says quote,
Speaker 1: the universe really threw us a curve instead of the
Speaker 1: faint signal we hope to find there was this booming
Speaker 1: noise six times ladder than anyone had predicted. He says,
Speaker 1: the energy alone that could generate this level of signal
Speaker 1: is incomprehensible. And Uh, I've seen accounts of it. It's
Speaker 1: been described as a static like noise coming from all directions.
Speaker 1: And the discovery is based on noise measurements and the
Speaker 1: microwave frequency bands at three, eight thirty and ninety giga
Speaker 1: hurts which peaked NASIS detectors at three and eight giga hurts.
Speaker 1: So they were observing about seven percent of the sky
Speaker 1: when they had this booming sound come to them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so we have a big fat mystery on our
Speaker 1: hands here. Um. It's uh, it's important to to drive
Speaker 1: home that this is not like a one time signals.
Speaker 1: This isn't like the Wow signal or the bloop uh
Speaker 1: that came from the ocean that we've discussed in the
Speaker 1: vast UH. This is a universe wide phenomenon that is ongoing.
Speaker 1: But Arcade was the first instrument to meant to that
Speaker 1: was actually able to measure the radio sky with enough
Speaker 1: precision to detect this mysterious signal. Uh. And ironically, the
Speaker 1: roar hides the signal uh or seems to hide the
Speaker 1: signal from the earliest stars, thus interfering with the very
Speaker 1: mission we originally sent Arcade up for to begin with.
Speaker 1: All right, so let's take a quick break and we
Speaker 1: come back. We're not going to provide an answer to
Speaker 1: this mystery. We're not gonna solve them, but we're gonna
Speaker 1: We're gonna talk about some of the ideas that have
Speaker 1: been thrown out there, most of which are have been
Speaker 1: shot down as well. But I think the theories, even
Speaker 1: the ones that ultimately don't hold up, helped to illuminate
Speaker 1: what might be happening and just the sphere of possible answers.
Speaker 1: All Right, we'll back. Have you ever seen those maps
Speaker 1: that say you are here, shows you in the middle
Speaker 1: of the Milky Way. Oh no, I was just thinking
Speaker 1: about the zoo. But the zoo, Yeah, you're here at
Speaker 1: the zoo. Yeah, I get lost enough there without even
Speaker 1: taking into account I see the map, right, But you
Speaker 1: maybe have seen those illustrations before which say, hey, by
Speaker 1: the way, the Solar system is located within the Milky
Speaker 1: Way galaxy, so it makes sense that one of the
Speaker 1: first places we would look to to try to solve
Speaker 1: the mystery of the roar is of course the Milky Way,
Speaker 1: because it produces something called synchrotron radiation, which is electromagnetic
Speaker 1: energy emitted by charged particles. We're talking about electrons and
Speaker 1: ions that are moving at speeds close to that of
Speaker 1: light when their paths are altered as by magnetic fields.
Speaker 1: It is so called because particles moving at such speeds
Speaker 1: in a variety of particle accelerator that is known as
Speaker 1: synchrotron produce electromagnetic radiation of this sort. Now, okay, great,
Speaker 1: it's creating electromagnetic radiation. We can pick up on that
Speaker 1: as we know. Um that being said, it doesn't look
Speaker 1: like our galaxy is the culprit because, according to dal
Speaker 1: Dale Fixen, a University of Maryland research scientists and a
Speaker 1: member of the Arcade team, infrared radiation goes hand in
Speaker 1: hand with syncrotron radiation, and the already measured amount of
Speaker 1: the Milky Ways infrared radiation radiation is not on the
Speaker 1: same order of magnitude required to create that kind of roar.
Speaker 1: So already we can look at the Milky Way and saying, no,
Speaker 1: you are not it. You're not the culprit alright, so
Speaker 1: we we slashed that one off the list. Um, you know.
Speaker 1: Dale Fixen also looked into the idea that the roar
Speaker 1: could be emanating from the very first stars that Arcade
Speaker 1: was actually looking for. Right, these first stars, thought to
Speaker 1: have formed about thirteen billion years ago, didn't have any dust.
Speaker 1: That's because the first dust in our universe was formed
Speaker 1: within these very stars. So in theory, possibly these stars
Speaker 1: could have created a lot of synchrotron radiation without that
Speaker 1: correspondingly high amount of infrared radiation, which we would have
Speaker 1: theoretically already detected. So there's one possible loophole. But it's
Speaker 1: not an answer. Dubious about it, well, I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: I'm dubious about I trust Fixing on this. If he
Speaker 1: says that it's not a slam dunk, then I'm gonna
Speaker 1: have to take his word for it. Wise, all right,
Speaker 1: what about other far flung galaxies, well, clusters of galaxies
Speaker 1: formed by gravitational murder of smaller clusters and subclusters. And
Speaker 1: we know from radio telescope observations that sometimes there's the
Speaker 1: presence of large regions of diffuse steep spectrum synchrotron emission
Speaker 1: and galaxies that emit more light at radio wavelengths than
Speaker 1: a visible wavelengths. These are known as radio allowed galaxy.
Speaker 1: So there is this idea that there could be these
Speaker 1: radio allowed galaxies out there that could have created the
Speaker 1: space roar. However, cog art are a man at arcade
Speaker 1: says quote typical radio galaxies can't account for the noise,
Speaker 1: as you would need the entire universe filled of them
Speaker 1: to produce signal strengths this high six times higher than
Speaker 1: the combined emission of all known radio sources in the universe. Or,
Speaker 1: more specifically, as fix In puts it, you'd have to
Speaker 1: pack them into the universe like sardines. There wouldn't be
Speaker 1: any space left between one galaxy universe. Not again, not
Speaker 1: an answer. Alright, Well, here's another theory, and this one
Speaker 1: I do want to preface is is out there, and
Speaker 1: it takes us a little more into the fringes of
Speaker 1: what we know and into some of the uh, the
Speaker 1: more complex and uh mind melting, mind melting theories regarding
Speaker 1: our universe, in our place in the universe. American physicist
Speaker 1: David brown Um has a take on space war that
Speaker 1: plays into cellular automaton and in theory, Okay, cellular automaton
Speaker 1: is a whole area that we could we could easily
Speaker 1: spend a whole podcast on, So I'm gonna try and
Speaker 1: keep it short here, but uh, this basically, this model
Speaker 1: involves the use of colored or shaded cells on a
Speaker 1: grid that evolved through a number of discrete time steps
Speaker 1: according to a set of rules based on the states
Speaker 1: of neighboring cells. So you may have seen footage of this.
Speaker 1: It plays into the game of life um experiment where
Speaker 1: it looks sort of like I guess they were digimon
Speaker 1: the sort of little primitive computerized things where you canna
Speaker 1: have like a little digitized pet. Kind of looks like that,
Speaker 1: except more abstract little dancing pixels. Uh. And essentially it's
Speaker 1: a model of complexity. Uh. It allows uh scientists to
Speaker 1: observe complexity evolving, so that cellular automaton serves is a
Speaker 1: general model of complexity, a level of complexity that ultimately
Speaker 1: theoretically is on par with our entire universe. And you
Speaker 1: could argue that the complexity that we see in reality
Speaker 1: could essentially begin as a little program of dancing squares
Speaker 1: on a computer screen. Okay, if you're still with me,
Speaker 1: all right? If if you're still with me, that's that's
Speaker 1: the first slab on the sandwich. We are in a
Speaker 1: computer simulation. That's where it often leads to, is this
Speaker 1: idea that you can think of in a way, you
Speaker 1: can think of reality as a as a computer simulation
Speaker 1: based on automaton. But the next layer on the sandwich
Speaker 1: is in theory, a branch of string theory that presents
Speaker 1: a model for the basic structure of the universe and
Speaker 1: allows for the existence of additional universes. So Brown argues
Speaker 1: that in theory describes the sailor automaton, and it real
Speaker 1: photons are constantly leaving our universe to enter an alternate one.
Speaker 1: Uh and this would mean that over time, the scentage
Speaker 1: of real matter in our universe has decreased and the
Speaker 1: percentage of virtual matter or dark matter has increased. So
Speaker 1: this would mean there would have been more matter in
Speaker 1: the early universe, meaning much more radio noise. And that
Speaker 1: is what Arcade is detecting when it gazes through space
Speaker 1: and time to those early stars. Okay, we are in
Speaker 1: a computer simulation, right, a leaky one, a leaky one.
Speaker 1: And as a result, uh, well, I should say. An
Speaker 1: indirect result of that is the space roar, which is
Speaker 1: really just uh maybe photons exchanging energy between other universes. Yeah, close, yeah,
Speaker 1: pretty much. Yeah, we're in the matrix and and there's
Speaker 1: this big crashing sound in the in the in the distance,
Speaker 1: and that's pixels and programs being flushed out. Meanwhile, there's
Speaker 1: a there's dark matter flowing back in. It's all very drama,
Speaker 1: it is. It's very dramatic. And again it's it's an
Speaker 1: out there theory and it and it does not again
Speaker 1: solve our mystery. We're still left with this mystery of
Speaker 1: the space roar, and we may always be right. It
Speaker 1: may just be that we don't have the instruments that
Speaker 1: are sensitive enough to pick up on whatever it is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's kind of it's kind of the
Speaker 1: great Unknown, maybe, you know, giving us the finger a
Speaker 1: little bit, saying you think, yeah, say, you don't have
Speaker 1: it all, you don't have all the answers, and here
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna make a big loud raspberry noise at
Speaker 1: you and and leave you with that. Try and figure
Speaker 1: this out. Humans. So it's like a cosmic fart joke.
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe the biggest fart joke in the universe. You know,
Speaker 1: I like the scatological chips. All right, Well, let's put
Speaker 1: the space war aside and let's call over the robot
Speaker 1: and do a couple of listener mail. All right, This
Speaker 1: one comes to us from Alex. Alex writes in and says,
Speaker 1: how my name is Alex. As part of my job,
Speaker 1: I tend to do a lot of driving, so podcasts
Speaker 1: like yours really keep me saying for that, I thank you, essentially.
Speaker 1: I just finished listening to your Mean World Syndrome episode
Speaker 1: and I thought I would add to it. Recently, a
Speaker 1: game called blood Born was released. You can probably guess
Speaker 1: from the promo art, and he included this is a nice, dark,
Speaker 1: dreary image of some dude with horns on his helmet
Speaker 1: and weapons and a dreary sort of dark fantasy, grim
Speaker 1: dark fantasy setting. Yeah uh, he says you probably a
Speaker 1: guest from the promo art. It's not a pleasant, feel
Speaker 1: good game. Without giving any spoilers, the world the player
Speaker 1: is presented with is hopeless, desolate and oppressing. It's a
Speaker 1: very good game. However, I found that after I played
Speaker 1: for long periods, I became very forlorn and quiet. I
Speaker 1: found myself feeling apathetic and even resentful towards the upcoming
Speaker 1: general election. I live in the UK. I've actually stopped playing,
Speaker 1: despite how good the game is, as a direct result
Speaker 1: of feeling so crappy straight after playing. Listening to your
Speaker 1: podcast just after noticing this was a great little coincidence
Speaker 1: and one I thought i'd share. Keep doing what you
Speaker 1: guys are doing. I look forward to every single episode.
Speaker 1: You don't have to read this out. I just wanted
Speaker 1: to give you guys what I thought was a fresh
Speaker 1: perspective and example. Cool X, thanks for writing in about that.
Speaker 1: We also got some feed We got a lot of
Speaker 1: feedback from our episode of the Gordian Knot of Race.
Speaker 1: We expected to get a lot of feedback. We got
Speaker 1: confirmation of unconscious bias from listeners. We got some people
Speaker 1: saying that unconscious bias doesn't exist, and we're not too
Speaker 1: happy that we covered it. I think we had at
Speaker 1: least one person say that they don't see race. We did,
Speaker 1: and uh so we thought we would share this one
Speaker 1: from Melissa. She says, and this came through Facebook. Says,
Speaker 1: I just finished listening to your podcast and the Gordian
Speaker 1: not of race. This is a topic that has always
Speaker 1: fascinated me, how something so seemingly inconsequential as how you
Speaker 1: look could and does affect all areas of life. I
Speaker 1: thought you did a very good job of talking about
Speaker 1: unconscio a racial bias and how things woven into our
Speaker 1: culture can affect how we feel about a person, even
Speaker 1: if we don't know it. I took the test linked
Speaker 1: on the landing page for the podcast, and I thought
Speaker 1: the results were very interesting and much different than what
Speaker 1: I was expecting. For some background, I live in a
Speaker 1: very heavily wide area. There are very few minorities of
Speaker 1: any race in my childhood as well as today. Best
Speaker 1: friend is mixed, black father, white mother. I love my
Speaker 1: friend dearly and I have very few early memories without
Speaker 1: her in them. We met at about age four or five,
Speaker 1: and as a result, I have very few memories that
Speaker 1: do not include her family. I expected that I would
Speaker 1: have a slight preference for white faces. She's talking about
Speaker 1: the I A T, which is the implicit association test
Speaker 1: that she took. UH slight preference for white faces simply
Speaker 1: due to culture, cultural factors and what a white area
Speaker 1: I live in and grew up in. However, when the
Speaker 1: results came back, that came back as your data suggests
Speaker 1: little to automatic preference between African American and European American.
Speaker 1: This greatly surprised me and got me thinking. Could my
Speaker 1: lack of unconscious prejudice have something to do with my
Speaker 1: best friend of so many years and her family? Could
Speaker 1: it be a reflection of how, having been exposed to
Speaker 1: them at such a young age, and caring so deeply
Speaker 1: for them, I developed the necessary empathy to get such
Speaker 1: a score. Could this mean that if more schools had
Speaker 1: a more even mix, or neighborhoods were not so prominently
Speaker 1: one race over the other, unconscious race preferences could go
Speaker 1: away as well. All rather abstract questions with no easy answers.
Speaker 1: I was just curious if you found any information about
Speaker 1: this in your research. Keep up the great work. You
Speaker 1: are always a fun listen, Melissa. So thank you, Melissa
Speaker 1: that that's a excellent firsthand account of not only the
Speaker 1: results that you got on your test, but what your
Speaker 1: own experience m has been. Indeed, and if if anyone
Speaker 1: else wants to take the I A T you can
Speaker 1: either of course find it search or I've also we
Speaker 1: also included a link to it on the landing page
Speaker 1: for the Gordian Knot of Race episode. Now, I'm not
Speaker 1: surprised that you know, at such a young age, with
Speaker 1: her experience with her friend who is a mixed race,
Speaker 1: that she would have those results, because I'm thinking back
Speaker 1: to the episode when we were talking about kids. I
Speaker 1: believe as young as seven begin to express unconscious bias um,
Speaker 1: so you can see how the positive side of that
Speaker 1: could be reflected, and that that's why I thought it
Speaker 1: was so great that she shared that with us, because
Speaker 1: it is the positive side. Indeed, it's good to hear
Speaker 1: about the positive side of that point. Sody, you have it,
Speaker 1: We'll send the robot back to its chamber once more,
Speaker 1: and hey uh. In the meantime, you would like to
Speaker 1: check out more episodes of the podcast, If you want
Speaker 1: to check out blog pose, videos, links on to social
Speaker 1: media accounts, whatever, you can find it all at stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind at dot com. And if you
Speaker 1: have some thoughts you'd like to share with us, please
Speaker 1: send them our way. You can do that by emailing
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