Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi

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So, Paul,

Dr.

O came back to my office.

Oh, he's the man.

He's the man, Dr.

O.

He knows his stuff.

Man, he's in charge of a lot of acronyms.

Wait till you hear the acronyms.

Right.

His expertise in the universe, cosmology, dark matter, dark energy.

Dark energy.

It's the future of the field on Star Talk.

Coming right up.

Welcome to Star Talk.

Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

Star Talk begins right now.

This is Star Talk.

Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist.

I got with me Paul Mercurio.

Paul.

What's up, my man?

Good to see you.

Always great to be back.

Love you.

Yeah.

you're a comedian, and you got a show on Broadway or off Broadway.

You're traveling.

It was off Broadway and then Broadway.

Now we're out on the road.

Out on the road.

And it's called Permission to Speak.

One-man show, and you interact with the audience?

Yeah, yeah.

It's about stories from people, from me.

Frank Oz is directing it.

We love Frank Oz.

Created Yoda.

Try being directed by Yoda.

He's never wrong.

Well, we're going to do Cosmic Queries today.

Yeah, I love these.

With an old grab bag.

Old colleague and friend of mine.

Hakeem.

Thank you.

I better get your last name.

Olachey.

So far away.

Way to do your research, Hakeem.

Here, let me give you a mnemonic.

Think, oh you shady.

Hakeem, oh you shady.

But instead of you, it's Lou, O Lu Shayi.

Hakeem, Olu Shayi.

Yes, sir.

There you go.

We got you.

And you were on my podcast.

We had a great conversation.

Awesome book.

I got your bio here.

It's great.

Astrophysics, cosmologist.

Your previous guest on Star Talk from a few years back.

Yeah.

And recently, like practically minutes ago, CEO of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

I'm going to ask you about that in a minute.

I didn't know

from your sweatshirt that you were a CEO.

You're looking good, man.

Oh, man.

We're taking the CEO vibe in another direction, right?

No pretension.

Yeah.

No need.

Congrats, man.

That's awesome.

I appreciate you, sir.

That's awesome, man.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

So you got a podcast, Does It Fly?

Yeah.

By Roddenberry Entertainment.

Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek fame.

And you've got a memoir out there.

It's been out for a few years now.

Yeah.

A Quantum Life.

It keeps getting released.

My Unlikely Journey from the Street to the Stars.

And that's the book that we talked about on my show.

That's right.

That reminds me of the quote from Oscar Wilde.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking to the stars.

Ooh.

That's good.

You didn't know about that quote.

You could have put that in the book.

I could have put that in the book.

You could have been in the book.

You could have called me next time.

Unless you're drunk on Thunderbird and you're not looking up at the stars.

And you've also been involved with NASA's IMAP satellite.

Yes.

So NASA has no shortage of acronyms.

So unpack IMAP for me.

The Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe.

Can't wait to talk to you about it.

Okay, we'll get there in like a minute.

So the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, I'm a big supporter of theirs, like from way back.

And they say, it sounds like it's only the Pacific, but they have a mission statement that's functionally international, getting people to look up.

Yeah.

I try to do that every day.

You're succeeding.

Okay.

You're succeeding, right?

It's cool now.

When I was a kid, you know, it wasn't so cool to be a nerd.

Okay.

Right now, nerds are cool.

So everybody loves space.

Of course, we were blurred.

Right, that's true.

Black nerds.

There's no way there's a black nerd.

No, there's two of them, trust me.

At least.

They don't know each other yet, but they're there.

Oh, I could give you a list.

Is that right?

Oh, whoa.

Do you have a secret meeting before it was like public that you guys were black nerds?

Yeah.

The lercher society of black physicists.

Lerds are a special subspecies of the whole world.

Okay.

Because people could ask you, what kind of nerd are you?

They come in different ilks, right?

Isn't there just one general type of nerd?

No.

Science nerd, like a TV nerd, like that kind of thing.

Yeah, well, you know, the first question is the difference between a nerd and a geek.

So here's the thing.

I got this.

I got it.

You got it.

So a geek can be a geek in any

specific category.

You can be a music geek.

Right.

Okay.

Where you're just into music.

But you're not necessarily associated with science if you're a geek.

Right.

You're a geek.

You're just into your thing.

Right.

But a nerd.

it says something about your personality and your behavior and your

things you care about

yeah

the quality of your personality i'll give you some examples okay i was in the navy back in the 80s and a guy asked me yo how come you're the only brother that don't wear hella gold and my answer was it never never occurred to me

and he said what does occurred mean like i couldn't even tell the difference you know like dudes love cars i couldn't tell two cars apart like i you know i yeah what you care it's you care about different things you care about different things exactly yeah yeah so uh do you have a vision uh for the society of the pacific i do i absolutely i do so the pacific has well one let me just remind people it's an organization that promotes public awareness and understanding of astronomy at all levels at all at the amateur level you you get a telescope.

That's right.

Why the term Pacific?

Well, that's where it began in San Francisco.

So the Bay's president was the director of Lick Observatory, but it's known as America's first and oldest national astronomy organization.

And Lick Observatory is the Observatory of Santa Cruz.

So, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In the Bay Area there.

I used to observe supernovae there back in the day when I was a postdoc.

Great place to drink.

You know, you'd go with a bottle and then boom.

Eat chips.

You got to eat chips at the observatory.

So

the ASP, one thing that made it different when it was founded was this egalitarian perspective.

So, they accepted professional astronomers, amateur astronomers, and educators at all the same level because it was all about sort of just lifting everybody

all together.

It's like, you know, yeah, we're not going to be able to do that.

The more you include, the better the knowledge gets a highly laudable fact.

A high laudable factor.

Because he doesn't hang out with Riffrax.

Don't make me smacky.

But later,

they added a new group

that that is labeled as enthusiasts good yeah yeah so here's the thing about it so i discovered them i joined i went to the bay area in 91 for graduate school and there was this guy at the nearby community college name you're going to recognize andy fracknoy yes who was who was the senior who was teaching at the community college excuse me yeah he was teaching at foothills foothills yeah that's right and so i i'm looking at mercury magazine i'm looking at the proceedings of

the sp produces the magazine for the public mercury magazine and they produce proceedings of scientific conferences of They're guided in everything.

In fact, there is probably one of these books

from that conference.

But you know what else they do?

So there are 90 astronomy journals in the world.

PASP is typically between 15 and 20 of the 90 astronomy journals.

So they're typically the top around 17% of astronomy journals.

And there you go.

A proceedings of the, yeah, this is books.

This is for every meeting of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, every professional meeting, they're proceedings.

Yeah.

And and it's beautifully published.

Everybody.

And they line them up.

Yeah, we all have this.

And these are just two that are here relative to others that I have on a different part of the shelf.

Galaxy Evolution, The Milky Way Perspective.

Oh,

data.

Yeah.

They made that into a film

starring Tom Cruise.

He jumps through a Milky Way

covered in Vaseline.

It's an amazing.

An equations.

An equations.

So, I mean, there are now hundreds of these.

I mean, it's been around a long time.

Oh, absolutely.

So very, very good to hear that.

That's right.

So I saw them as a rigorous, scientifically rigorous organization that had the social consciousness to do this educator, which nobody else was doing because no one's special organization.

That's very interesting.

They weren't deigned to even talk to the public.

Exactly.

The ASP has been...

Everything I care about as a professional scientist

is fulfilled by that mission.

Why haven't other societies picked up on that part of it?

Why have, I mean, you know, it's out there.

It's a good example and be inclusive.

I have an answer.

He He probably has an answer, but I have an answer.

In our field,

there aren't many fields where it can reach

the enthusiastic amateur where they can still participate.

Well, but your show does.

Cosmic Queries is a perfect example.

What I'm saying, that's astronomy and astrophysics.

You can't really do, can you do that with physics, really?

Well, you can if you're not pompous, like you are.

No, but it's harder because everybody's looking up.

And, you know, when we discover

a supernova, a black hole, anything, it's headlines.

Yeah, splitting an atom is less less relatable than looking at the light.

How many other sciences make a headline with that frequency?

Think about it.

That's true.

And how many families own their scientific instruments that they use professionally?

Like people buy telescopes.

Telescopes.

Right, yeah.

So that's what I'm saying.

Yeah.

So good luck with that.

Sometimes you need a little bit of that, but you're at the helm of a very important organization.

Thank you, sir.

And there it is.

So now tell me about the latest NASA acronym.

Yes, Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration.

And Acceleration Probe.

But you can't have a thing that says IMAP, and then the word mapping is in the middle of it.

Yeah,

that's bad.

It's not working.

We're going to have to redo this.

The word in the acronym can't be in one of the words in the acronym.

It's like GNU's LucasneaNet.

Look at this.

Mr.

Smart Alec over here and internet.

GNU's not Unix.

GNU?

Oh, yeah.

GNU.

Unix CIs aren't that old.

Okay.

Never mind.

It's the white hair.

So here's the thing.

Before this,

I was working on a satellite called the Supernov Acceleration Probe, and now I'm working on the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe.

No, you're working on Earth related to the probe.

Did I just use the word on?

Yes, you did.

Okay, so

this is awesome.

So why is the word acceleration in the probe?

Because essentially, what happens is the sun accelerates particles, right?

It creates this bubble.

And the exact...

That's the solar wind.

The solar wind, right?

But it's moving fast.

It is supersonic, right?

The heliosphere.

But when it hits...

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

What do you mean supersonic if it's moving through the vacuum of space?

Space is exactly a vacuum.

It's approximately a vacuum.

It's approximately a vacuum.

Yes, it is.

Yes, it is.

Okay, so cool.

So it's moving faster than the speed of sound would be in that very reduced vacuum.

Exactly.

And what happens is, is that, you know, so it's almost like a boundary where information only travels one way, which is out.

That's the heliopause, isn't it?

No, the heliopause is what I'm getting to.

Okay.

So just like the example that's given is when you're showing off how much water

let them catch up with you.

and then when you find these two computers

know more science i don't know

that's the only thing i know you know how you bottomize them first before you put them in you know when you run water in a faucet and it makes this and then there's that ring yeah right that's like the heliopause where it goes from supersonic to subsonic right so our heliopause is doing that in the interstellar medium but here's the thing there was a previous satellite so the guy who's running is professor out of princeton named dave mccamas okay so i don't know if you remember the Ulysses satellite that went over the poles.

Went to the sun, didn't it?

It went to the sun.

Went over the poles of the sun.

And we got to see that the solar wind around the mid-latitudes, you have the regular wind, 400 kilometers per second.

Out of the poles, the high speed went 800 kilometers per second.

Didn't know that.

So young Dave McComas is the guy who made that famous plot.

All right.

Okay.

So then he had an idea.

And the idea is crazy.

Let's look at neutral atoms coming toward Earth from outer space.

Who looks at neutral atoms?

We look at photons, we look at different hydrogen.

There's nothing more boring than a neutral atom.

Nothing more boring.

It's not ionized.

But here's their origin.

These electrons from the sun go out, they hit the heliopause, so there's magnetic fields there.

There's ions trapped in those magnetic fields.

Those electrons get captured by those ions and they become neutral.

So it's like, it's like neutering a dog.

No.

Okay, well,

anyway, while the ion is ionized, it is tied to the magnetic field and it's stuck out there.

But once it becomes neutral, it is no longer stuck.

It's no longer tied to the magnetic field.

Because it has no charge.

Because it has no charge.

So some of them stream into the inner solar system.

So you can get a map of the stuff that is in magnetic field

raining back down.

And they discovered that if you look at the galactic magnetic field, it wraps around our bubble.

And perpendicular to that is a, just like we have a radiation belt around our planet, there is a belt around our heliopause.

And so NASA goes, that's interesting.

Now let's do a satellite that will look at that in way more detail, study the sun.

As these things go, you'd make a tiny discovery.

Yeah.

And it can open up a whole.

Yeah, opens up.

Now you can build an entire experiment just for that discovery.

What do you anticipate that you might find there?

Do you have, I mean, you must have.

Just the unknown.

It's the exact same thing.

You know, you're going to find something you've never seen before, just like they did with Ibex, right?

So now they're looking at acceleration from the sun.

They're looking at acceleration in those magnetic fields, and they're testing the interstellar medium and what it's made of, because those particles also scream in.

So that's why it's the interstellar mapping and acceleration probe.

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Hello, I'm Alexander Harvey, and I support Star Talk on Patreon.

This is Star Talk with Dr.

Neil deGrasse Tyson.

So Donald Goldsmith, who's an astronomy writer and co-wrote the original Cosmos,

and I actually co-authored a book with him on origins.

He has his own LLC company, and because he writes books and writes for TV, it's called Interstellar Medium.

No, interstellar media.

Interstellar media.

Interstellar.

I love it.

That's great.

It was so simple and so.

So I have an LLC too.

Corkstar.

Okay.

I thought no one would think of that.

Turns out there was a lighting company on the west coast there.

Whoa,

whoa, whoa, Corkstar.

All right.

Here's a little bit more heady than there's, though.

Well, this is a Cosmic Aquarius.

Yes.

And we can't just like shoot the shit forever.

Right.

All right.

This is James H.

English.

Greetings.

He's from Denmark.

I read recently that the universe is expanding too fast for our theories and models to fit, increasing the Hubble tension.

Do you think the problem is with our models, or is there some physics we just haven't discovered to explain this?

I.e., is the rate not constant due to some undiscovered property of space-time?

Or

is there something wrong with the data?

So,

are models off?

Do we trust the data?

Or do we need new physics?

But if the data's off, the model's off by definition.

Maybe, no?

I spent time at Princeton where they have a lot of theorists.

They say, never trust an observation unless it's backed up by a theory.

Well, that's happened.

I know of two cases where observation was made and it did not fit with the theory.

I'll give a very simple one.

It was Art Walker's research when he first got the images.

So when you see the pretty images of the sun with the plasma loops, Art did that first, right?

And so the plasma loops had a constant cross-section.

And so the solar physicists were like, dude, there's something wrong with your telescopes because we know magnetic fields diverge with altitude.

So they should get fatter at the top.

They're not getting fatter.

But just to be clear, so the magnetic field is confining the plasma.

That's right.

So the shape of the plasma is the shape of the magnetic field.

Exactly.

And so he's saying that the magnetic field is just a constant cross-sectional tube.

That's what's going on.

But it should be something more dynamic than that.

At the top, they should get fatter, right?

Just like if you look at the array.

Theory said that, right?

And Art was like.

ain't nothing wrong with my telescopes.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to have the same pass band, but I'm going to give you three different configuration telescopes.

I'm going to give you a Casagrain, a Herschelian, and a Rich Accretion.

So you can't say it's the optics.

And not only that, so we would fly 16 to 22 telescopes with all these pass bands, which ended up being a subset of them, the same pass bands on SDO and EIT and solar satellites, and show, no, this is what nature is doing.

It's not an issue with the pass bands.

It's not an issue with the optics.

This is what nature is doing.

And now that's what everyone knows.

The theory had to be adjusted.

The theory had to be adjusted.

Right, right.

You had to come up with a mechanism.

So

it can happen.

So let's get back to Hubble Tension.

Hubble tension.

Hubble tension, right?

So people have

a lot of articles.

There's been a lot of articles, right?

And so essentially.

And everybody wants to just throw out the Big Bang.

Or

throw out dark energy.

Yeah, right.

Exactly.

It's clickbait, right?

So essentially, what's been happening is you have the cosmic microwave background radiation, which has been a treasure trove of cosmological information.

Then you have the standard way that we measured expansion.

I have some object.

I know.

How fast it's moving?

How fast it's moving away.

It's redshift.

And I also know its distance based on its brightness, brightness right and so now I can make a Hubble diagram I fit the Planck data I get a value of the Hubble constant they don't agree but the Planck is the cosmic background right right satellite

saying stuff don't you know I be leaving stuff out man that's why that's why I'm here that's why you're here thank you thank you yeah so to keep you continuous

so now there's new James Webb Space Telescope data.

Wait, wait, just set the stage.

So you have data from the early universe.

Yes.

You get a Hubble rate.

You get the traditional galaxies, usually with supernova or some other standard candle.

And those two numbers do not match.

They do not catch.

In my day, measurements of the expansion rate of the universe differed by a factor of two.

A factor of two.

And so now they differ by just a few percent.

Right.

But the error bars.

The error bars, the uncertainty.

is way smaller than the difference in those two measurements.

Right.

So that is a more severe fact than not knowing the expansion rate of the universe by a factor of two.

So we had a similar problem with the ages of stars and the age of the universe.

I remember that one, the Hubble thing, right?

And so it was the cosmological data that had to be

somebody found stars that were older than the universe.

That's right.

Stars in the halo looked like they were older than the age of the universe.

Right.

And the headlines were, oh, catastrophe.

Oh, my God.

Yeah,

people like ready to give up on the universe.

But then we realize, oh, no, our cosmology needs to be improved.

And so, you know, what happened in the 90s, really, you know, post-Kobe, that changed everything in cosmology, right?

Not Kobe Bryant.

Not Kobe Bryant.

The Kobe satellite.

You mean right at that game after he got 80, he scored 81 points?

That game.

No, not that game.

Cosmic Background Explorer, one of the first high-precision measurements of the Cosmic Background.

Batherin Smoot.

No Man Laureates.

No Man Laureates.

Yeah, yeah.

So circling to the Hubble tension.

So tell me.

So

something's got to give.

Yeah, something's got to give.

So I think that there's something that we don't understand.

I think I'm trusting the measurements and I think that I trust the measurements look good, don't they?

The measurements look good.

And I was involved in supernova cosmology, right?

And also weak lensing studies for looking at structure of growth and these sort of things.

And so all this different data, there's more than one probe, right?

People are using different types of stars.

Right.

That's where you get the confidence.

It's not just one data point from one telescope.

So what James asked is, is there some physics we just haven't yet discovered?

Are we missing physics?

Or

we just have to adjust the model?

Well, people come up with these models that maybe the expansion rate of the universe, we have it like, okay, there's this initial impulse, right?

And then the universe evolves based on the energy densities of the constituents, of which there are three main ones, right?

Radiation, which is stuff that moves very fast through space, but almost...

not at all through time.

Matter, which moves very fast through time and almost not at all through space.

And space-time, which has its own energy density that we call dark energy, which doesn't move through either one, right?

And so initially radiation dominates, then matter comes to dominate, then dark energy, i.e.

space-time energy density, comes to dominate.

We think.

Well, that's what, that's what he thinks, right?

And each one, you can look at what the expansion rate would be of the universe.

But here's the thing.

Once we discovered the Higgs particle,

first time we discovered what is known as a scalar quantum field.

What do I mean by that?

Right.

So we'll ask you that.

What do you mean by that?

Don't ask yourself these questions.

That's for us to do.

So

One of the things that we're going to do is

you and I don't need to be here.

Let's go.

Let me ask myself questions and answers.

Who needs a query?

I'll query myself.

Yeah,

you're reading up now.

But let's just back up.

In the United States, we surely would have discovered the Higgs boson

with our superconducting super collider, whose budget was canceled right around when peace broke out in Europe.

Right between 89 and 93.

Yeah.

And so the center of mass of particle physics moved to Europe, to CERN, to the Large Hadron Collider.

They discovered the Higgs boson.

So now what happened?

So here's the deal.

Here's why I bring this up, because it's what is known as a scalar field.

So when you think about the fields that you know of, right, they're like, oh, the electric field, I have a charge, it has an electric field.

Magnetic field, I have a charge that's moving, it generates a magnetic field.

Gravitational field, oh, there's this matter.

So every field you know of, there is some source in matter.

But then here come the particle physics.

They're like, oh, yeah.

You know why every electron is identical?

They don't say it this way.

This is mine.

You know why every electron is identical?

Same reason every C note, musical note is identical, because they're not the real thing.

The real thing is the string or the air that's vibrating, right?

So they invoke this idea of quantum fields.

So the quantum field just permeates all of space-time and is just there.

But nothing is real in that quantum field.

Where excitations of the field are our particles, right?

So they're the permanent ones and they're the virtual ones, right?

So we measure the excitations as particles.

As particles, right.

Now, here's what happens, though.

They say, oh, there's this thing called a Higgs field.

It's just there.

It's just everywhere in space at all times.

It's just there, right?

Scalar field, no source.

And I'm like, in my mind, as a young scientist, I'm like, is that real?

Then they discover they ring that damn field and create the particle.

I'm like, wow.

So now what can you do?

Oh, inflation.

Looks like Alan Guth creates inflation.

Looks like the universe rapidly expanded.

Oh, I know what I'll do.

I'll create another scalar field.

I call it the inflaton field.

So now you see some dynamics happening.

You can just create a new field.

But it sounds like you're pulling stuff out of your ass.

It does.

It does, but you're supposed to like use it to make predictions.

So, you know, to test whether what came out of your ass.

That's right.

It's testable.

I actually have a device that does that.

I'll bring it to the next show.

Oh, man.

You remember the shit list from the 90s?

No.

Oh, it was like a joke.

And

it lived on the internet, the early internet.

And it was like all these different types of shit.

One of them was ghost shit.

You felt it came out.

You wiped.

There's nothing on the toilet paper.

There's nothing in the toilet.

But you know what happened.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

So some people are doing that.

They're saying maybe the universe's expansion rate hasn't just been what we think it is, as simple as we think it is.

And it could, and then another question.

It could be yet another phenomenon acting on the expansion rate beyond the three that we have characterized.

Do we have an idea of what it might be?

Some weird quantum.

You come up with something.

Yeah, you come up with something.

Is weird the scientific term you're going with here?

Sure.

So

let me clarify here.

So this notion that the expansion rate is misbehaving, let me characterize it that way, that just means it doesn't match what our three most potent models would give us for it.

Right.

Okay, so do we introduce a fourth accounting

or do we say that one of these are wrong

working in harmony?

Or each of those has to be adjusted.

There's an assumption within there as well that comes from the cosmological principle that the universe is isotropic and homogeneous.

And now people are looking.

If I look in that direction, I look in that direction, I look in that direction, is the expansion rate the same versus distance in every particular direction?

So, you know, that's why we have big surveys coming on like the Vera Rubin telescope, LSST, because we typically have pencil beam surveys for the most part, or surveys that don't go to the LSST was the large synoptic survey telescope.

Yeah.

But we're astronomers and we don't like going that way.

We don't play that.

So we just named it after one of our astrologers.

You guys just like acronyms.

You're just the lazy.

You're the laziest person.

Vera Rubin Telescope.

Yes, she discovered dark matter in the Milky Way.

Wow.

So, yeah.

Speaking of, you know, another telescope that's on coming is the Nancy Grace Roman.

The Nancy Grace Roman telescope.

Dark matter or dark energy or both?

Both.

Both of them.

It's going to be a survey telescope.

Everybody knows that, Neil.

Yeah.

So Nancy Grace Roman, going back to the ASP, she valued the ASP so much that when she passed away recently, she left the organization a few million dollars.

Whoa.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, listen, astronomers have millions of dollars.

Nancy Grace Rollbitch had millions of dollars.

We're going to jump to the next one.

That was a great question, James.

We're going to jump to the next one.

Adam Omalon.

Hi, Dr.

Tyson and Dr.

Olusi.

Adam from Poland here.

First,

all of all, first of all, I am a big fan of everything Dr.

Tyson is involved in.

I love his books, all his programs he's been on.

My question is about the ability to detect various particles in the atmospheres at very distant planets.

We know that the light is altered as it travels towards us, but how exactly does this happen?

Ooh.

Absorption spectrum.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it happens.

So what's absorbing what?

So what happens is that when you look at a transit of an exoplanet, so that means that it'll go in front of its star.

Right.

And so at that time, the light from the star will pass through the atmosphere of the planet.

To the edges of the planet.

Yeah.

All right.

So we're with you.

You have this transit and the planet is moving across the surface of this.

Now you don't see that.

You don't see it.

You just see light.

Yeah.

Okay.

So I'm getting light in my telescope.

So as that planet is going in front of the star, if it has an atmosphere, the light from the star passes through the planet's atmosphere and that lights with that atmosphere.

That's the edges.

Right?

Yeah.

That light interacts.

And so certain wavelengths of light aren't going to make it out the other side.

They're going to be absorbed, right?

And that's going to be the chemistry of the atmosphere.

By the chemistry of the atmosphere.

But remember, the star has its own spectrum as well.

So you get a spectrum of the star by itself, you get a spectrum when the light is passing through the planet's atmosphere, and you subtract them.

And what's left over is a spectrum of the planet.

And now you can say, oh, I see this element or a molecule in that particular atmosphere.

And is that a constant?

In other words, that is a proven theory that it works every time?

Well, it's hard to do.

And so James Webb Space Telescope was built to do that job, and it actually has succeeded in doing that job.

Those are some of the early releases, like, hey, we can do it.

It hasn't just succeeded.

It's badass.

It's badass.

Yeah.

It's opened up the whole industry.

Yeah.

The whole cottage industry to make that happen.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

All right.

We're going to go on to Jordan Vicina from North Dakota.

I've been curious about dark matter.

So he went from Denmark.

Denmark.

Poland.

Poland, North Dakota.

North Dakota.

Yeah.

Three places I've never been to.

Okay.

It may not ever go.

And I've been curious about dark matter.

Is it possible that that the reason why we don't understand dark matter is because it defies our understanding of the laws of physics?

Meaning, is it possible that dark matter is something

that can travel faster than light?

Or how massive gravitational effect without having large mass?

Love the show.

Let me shape that another way and throw it right in your lap.

So we probe the universe using our methods and tools of science that we have developed to this day.

Could dark matter simply be awaiting some brilliant theoretical understanding coupled with some brilliant new kind of telescope that would see it

in ways that no one had previously dreamt.

So is it awaiting technology?

Is it awaiting new physics?

I think it's more basic.

Or

is it going to plug in with just a new kind of particle that just doesn't interact?

Well, first off, trivia, my very first physics research.

That's what I was wondering.

You were in that.

Well, summer of 91 on the cold dark matter, CDMS, right?

In the basement in Berkeley.

Okay.

Building a dark matter direct detection, right?

Which we've not detected any dark matter.

So your PhD is from.

No, no, no.

It's a funny thing.

I got accepted.

I applied to Berkeley and Stanford.

I got rejected from Berkeley, accepted by Stanford.

Got rejected by Berkeley.

Right?

I know, right?

You sent him off to Stanford.

I went and worked.

20 idiots go.

Lejects.

But no, here's what happened.

I worked at Berkeley the summer between undergrad and grad on that project.

At the end of the summer, they said, dude, if you want to come to Berkeley, come.

But I didn't know Stanford was this highfalutin school.

I didn't know that.

Wait, you didn't know that?

Dude, I was from the country, man.

You didn't have the interview.

His memoir is called From the Street.

All right, that's right.

Good story.

But we read that out the mud.

What part of that title do you not understand?

I read it, Mud.

All right, you thought it was a town in Connecticut, not a university.

I didn't know Connecticut existed.

So, and I still haven't seen it.

But anyway.

And the town of Connecticut has an M, I think, doesn't it?

Yeah, it does, but just go along with the universe.

But if you think about this dark matter,

energy stuff, right?

Nothing at the scale of galaxies and larger, basically over 20,000 light years, bigger than the galactic arm, nothing moves consistent with the laws of physics.

And so there's two ways, right?

There's this like alternative gravity theories, which, you know, just like when you think they're dead, they come back and they're stronger than ever.

And then there is this, oh, there's other stuff, dark matter.

Oh, we got some great ideas for what that is.

It's black holes.

It's machos.

It's super symmetric particles.

Oops.

Machos Machos would be massive compact halo objects.

So we come up with our better instruments.

Machos and windows are two kinds of.

We look for them.

They're not there.

The supersymmetric particles, sorry, I should have saw them.

They're not there.

At what point in all seriousness do you go, let's stop looking

and move on to something else?

It's like looking for.

So then we have to say, it's like looking for a second sock and you just don't find it.

No, no, because when we'd have to admit that we're stupid or that we're

but we are driven by the uncertainty.

There are ambulance chasing theorists out there.

Yes, there are.

The slightest observation that's that's a little quirky, they're going to come up with a whole theory to understand.

Maybe several.

Right?

Because they only have to get it right once.

Is that what they call them?

I call them that.

So the answer is that sort of there we're never going to stop trying to pursue this theory.

Something is amiss.

The question is, what is it?

But is it possible that dark matter is something that could travel faster than light?

What is your theory on that?

Yeah.

Well,

if dark matter is.

Is it tachyons?

Is that what it is?

If dark matter is some kind of matter, we call it matter, but we don't know.

No, here's the thing why we know it's not that.

Because there's

two models.

It's not moving faster than light.

Because the two models that were competing were, is it hot dark matter or is it cold dark matter?

So particles moving very fast would be hot dark matter.

And we know that the best model is lambda cedium.

cold dark matter.

Dark matter just feels every time I read about it, it just feels like, I don't know, like a guy shows up at a party or something, and he just, it's there, but it makes, it's a weird vibe.

It makes, it makes everybody

axions, and I i don't find that to be well uh people make it of particles that'll do this yeah yeah yeah well they made of a particle to to cancel out the electric dipole moment of the proton which should exist right if the quarks have electric charges and there's separation between the minus and the negative there should be some what's called separation between them which we call a dipole moment but one is not measured so helen quinn et al they came up with this idea maybe there's this other field that cancels it so it's the wild west it's the wild west man which actually makes it exciting you come up with all these ideas and you go through all the fun of them but because we know that whatever the dark matter is it's cold and not warm yeah it can't be going faster than light exactly because it would have evidence it would give evidence something gravitationally right and then you know you'd see i imagine shrink off radiation right that's when you travel faster than uh right light in some medium yeah you you emit light

so dark matter wouldn't be dark maybe

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Here we go.

Next one, David from upstate New York.

I recently watched a side channel show with Hakeem.

What?

And I fell asleep.

It was really boring.

That was weird.

Why would you write that, David?

I'm the guy who wakes everyone up.

No, you're the best, man.

You're the best.

I recently watched a side channel with Hakeem.

It was about gravitational waves.

Just wondering, can they also alter time?

If a huge collision occurred near our solar system, how would we feel them?

Would we be alive to physically notice?

So will it do damage, first of all?

Yeah.

And we know it's a disturbance in the gravitational field.

And everybody knows after the movie Interstellar that if you're in a different gravitational field, you're going to age differently.

Yeah.

So what kind of consequences?

That's a good question.

Like the perturbations of time travel.

This is a good time to bring up the Andromeda paradox.

Okay.

You know, I was thinking the same thing.

I was not.

What is the Andromeda paradox?

Well, the Andromeda paradox is the fact that if you and I are looking at Andromeda.

Andromeda, the galaxy.

The galaxy.

Not the stars that are

constellation.

Yeah, not this constellation.

And not the strain that killed millions of people.

Not the Andromeda strain, right?

Two and a half million light years away.

Then what happens is, suppose you're sitting in your chair and I'm running by.

And at the second I run by you, we both look up at Andromeda.

Because I'm moving and you're stationary, we're going to see events that are days apart, even though we're in the same location looking at the same time.

And you think that relativity and you think that the relationship.

Did you say relativity and keep talking?

How far away?

Wait, in this scenario, how far away from me are you when you're running by?

We're in the same place.

We're in the same place, essentially.

So you're like literally running.

I'm not even heard of this paradox.

And you look at that.

It's a little no paradox.

And the thing that you see and I see are days apart.

Days apart.

Because of our physical perspective.

Well, here's what you would think.

You would think the light is arriving right now.

We should all be receiving this light, but that's not how it works.

Motion changes the perception of time.

And so we know about that in terms of the local universe.

We call it relativity of simultaneity, right?

You're moving, I'm not.

You see events as simultaneous.

I see them as happening one before the other, right?

But then when you add the distance component in it, now we see very different times.

So there could be a third person moving in the other direction, seeing a different time.

So how do you define what now is?

So even though you're in the same time, even though you're in the same place.

Yeah.

While we're sitting here, I'm here.

You're running by.

We look up at the drama at the same time.

And we're seeing something

from the same location, essentially.

We're seeing things days apart.

Days apart.

And that leads to the idea of what is now, and your now and my now are two different things.

There's no now.

There is no now.

No, there is now.

There's always now.

There's an illusion of now because we're so close together and we're so small that the speed of light makes it feel like we have a now, right?

But now doesn't really exist on larger scales.

There's no such thing.

But there always has to be a now in all seriousness.

No, that is your bias.

That is your bias.

That's so Galilean.

But that's it.

But that's it.

That's so backwards.

Wow.

I've never gotten heckled heckled from the left and the right

at the same time.

That's right.

All right, so wait, so what is the upshot of this?

Well, what was the question again?

Because they're talking about time, right?

And they're talking about now or something.

And I'm just like, what was it?

It was about gravitational waves, wondering, can they also alter time?

If a huge collision occurred

near our solar system, how would we feel them?

Would we be alive to physically notice?

Right.

You curve space and you stretch time.

right it's kind of the idea like what a black hole does right you curve space you know time moves more slowly relatively.

But these phenomena of gravitational waves are incredibly subtle.

And so the real calculation to do is what type of gravitational wave would be necessary.

It's like the biggest for that to happen.

For that to happen.

To be felt.

To be felt, right?

Or to be, you know.

Because the first one that was measured, it jiggled the experiment by 1 20th the diameter.

of a proton.

There you go.

You ain't feeling that.

You ain't feeling that.

But we know they were gravitational waves.

Well, yeah, we measured them, right?

So, you know, you want to think of what event, what magnitude of wave do you need, intensity, and then calculate what sort of event.

That event would surely kill you before you had any experience of it.

But there are a whole host of, it's an infinite number of things that could cause a gravitational wave, right?

Wait, wait, the gravitational wave moves at the speed of light, so it can't kill you before the wave hits you.

That would all happen at the same time.

time.

Oh, that's a good thing.

You can add those things.

Oh, well, that's the upside.

So you don't even know.

You don't even know.

So you can get compressed to nothingness.

You get ripped apart.

This is like a sci-fi thing, right?

The gravitational wave innator.

Exactly.

All right, we're going to move on.

Can we do a lightning round?

Yeah, absolutely.

We got some great ones.

Here we go.

Alan Geis, quirky.

Lightning round, dude.

Portland round.

You know what that means?

Be even more loquacious.

Yes, exactly.

Right, right.

Yeah, okay, here we go.

I've always been bothered by physicists' preoccupation with conservation of information, especially in regard to particles falling into a black hole.

Firstly, it sounds more like a philosophical position than one derived through mathematics or scientific method.

Correct me.

Secondly, Mr.

Heisenberg taught us that one can never know all information about a particle.

Thus, can't we consider that information to never have existed in the first place and thus can't be destroyed?

I have one thing for Alan.

Alan, if you're going to ask a question on acid, you've got to send the tablets to us too so we can be on the same wavelength and answer the question.

Tablets.

Go.

You mean tabs?

There you go.

There you go.

There you go.

He's not it.

There you go.

Alan Geis, go ahead, answer that question.

He actually remembers the 60s.

Exactly.

If you live through the 60s, you shouldn't remember.

All right.

Yeah.

So I like that.

So I say here, here.

I say here, how I do.

Picture stuff on the information.

This is a cultural phenomenon.

Nerds ain't cool.

And so they try to make something cool that ain't cool.

All right.

So

this whole thing about, oh, you know,

black holes have hair.

We made a bet.

Man,

nerds, shut the hell up.

I don't care.

I don't care.

So

here's what I think they're saying, right?

If I look at the sun, I can take a spectrum of the sun.

So just to clarify, he said black holes have no hair.

What he meant was

that when matter becomes a black hole, it should have only like three physical parameters, like angle of momentum, mass,

charge.

Charge.

So the idea was whatever it looked like before,

it has none of that later once it becomes a black hole.

So it says it has no hair.

But that's back when enough people had hair that that was important.

That's part of how you identify them.

Right, exactly.

But now that bald look, the

billionaire

is bald look.

Yeah, exactly.

Speaking of which, you know, something I realized?

So, you know, I grew up in a segregated Mississippi.

So I go to graduate school and I will play basketball all the time.

And I noticed that you sucked at it.

Oh, man,

I didn't suck until I joined the Cambridge Athletic Club League at the age of 49.

Then I sucked.

Okay.

In the 90s, I was great.

But here's the thing.

I noticed something.

And that is, if there was a white dude who wasn't present and you're trying to describe him to someone, they'd invoke his hair color.

Yes.

We didn't do that.

That was.

It's not our vocabulary.

I don't know.

We're like in China.

Wait, you mean they'd say like, you know, Paul McCurry, the guy with the dark hair?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

It's like in China.

You don't imagine people are IDing each other.

No, because when I talk about it.

He's invoking hair color.

Right, exactly.

It's the best.

Straight hair.

That's not helpful.

But where I'm from, we invoke skin color.

Oh, the light-skinned dude, the red bone, the yellow bone.

See, I do it with voice.

Like, you know, Neil Tyson, he talks like James Earl Jones.

I do it like that.

You do basically.

This is CNN.

So we're going to move on.

No, no, so.

But the point is that, yeah, some nerd thing that nobody.

But let me tell you what.

Unlike a black hole, take the sun, right?

You can reconstruct what made the sun.

That's how we know.

Oh, the sun looks like three dozen supernovae constituted.

You can look at what it's made of today and reconstruct where it must have come from.

You can't do that with a black hole, right?

That's the

we lost information camp in the black hole.

Clearly.

Or information, there's too much made of this information.

I don't know.

Exactly.

Okay, this is where he's coming from.

Yeah.

Okay.

Give me another one.

There you go.

My name is Ross.

I live in Madison, Wisconsin.

Could dark energy, whatever it is, be the mechanism behind the big squeeze.

As an analogy, consider a magnetic field that comes out of one pole, folds back on itself, goes into the other pole.

Imagine this magnetic field being the fabric of space-time.

No, the point is the dark energy is making us expand and never return.

Maybe meant dark matter.

So is there sufficient dark matter to close us back and then have the big squeeze?

No, not even close.

Not even close.

Okay.

Let me give up on that one.

Lightning answer.

Right, right.

Okay, next.

Okay.

When were we, this is Christopher from St.

Louis, when were we looking into the cosmos for possible Dyson spheres?

What criteria are we using to tell the difference between a Dyson sphere and something else?

Let me get that Dyson sphere out of your mind right now.

All right.

All right.

Because I did a little calculation.

Right.

So did I.

Go ahead.

Okay.

Oh, by the way, just make it clear.

There are people who, when they want to know stuff, they look it up on the internet.

But when you're a scientist, you calculate the answer.

Okay.

Right.

I gave someone an answer one time.

Oh, what source did you use?

In my education.

The brain act.

Try it.

Okay.

Try it.

It's called book learning.

So basically, you're not going to have enough matter to build a Dyson sphere.

if you took all of jupiter and you try to make a dyson sphere around the sun using all of it the idea is that that matter that's like taking a human eyeball and trying to make a sphere around a basketball using that material so you're trying to harness the energy of a star you're trying to make this artificial you're trying to absorb it in matter right and then convert it to useful energy like right right and so you do not have enough matter in the solar system to create something to create something that you could put around because it's not large enough or because it can't hold because it's not large it's not it's like stars are so much bigger than their planet have you seen the garbage bags that Costco sells you put one of those around a star come on guys

so the hot so let me add to what you just said because that's a brilliant revelation yeah regarding the material necessary right if you had that much material It means you're visiting other star systems.

Why would you rewind the energy?

This is not even an interesting energy.

You don't mean you don't even need it.

What are you drive?

Wow.

You open up thousands, the planets of a thousand solar systems to get the energy from one tree.

What the hell are you doing?

Hey, guys, we already got the energy.

Why are we trying to create the energy?

You know what?

The sun already has a Dyson sphere.

You know what it's called?

So, when you think of the Sun, or a star, you think of its two parts: the core and the envelope.

The envelope is a damn Dyson sphere.

It's already there.

It's naturally natural.

It's 50% of the matter, right?

50% of the matter is in the core.

50% is in the envelope.

And it's absorbing the energy that's coming out and radiating it to a useful form that we can build our solar arrays and capture.

Let me add to that.

Last year, there was a research paper on an observing project to look for Dyson spheres.

Wow.

Now, you know how they're going to do this?

They're looking for very, very red star systems.

Oh, so they're like, they're not getting all the energy.

They're just saying that if you absorb all the energy from a star at this greater radius,

then it would then radiate

in the infrared.

And so they're suggesting that they're aliens.

So they have a data set of

cheating because there's all these stars that are enshrouded in dust that do the exact same thing.

That's exactly the rebuttal to that.

That there's stars, when you're in dust, they absorb the energy and it

radiates it.

It makes a star look very red.

So that was the ordinary explanation

for those very red stars in that experiment.

We got to wrap.

Okay, can I say one more thing?

No.

Okay.

AstroSociety.org.

Oh, AstroSociety.

AstroSociety.org.

Come join us.

It's Society of the Pacific, yes.

And it may very well soon be the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

And you can be a nerd.

You can be a geek.

You can be an enthusiast.

You could be an educator.

You could be a learner.

All of that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, you know, you can give more than you want, but we have a very low donation.

We ask to become a member of our community.

Here we go.

It's about money.

No, it's not, man.

But you can give more money.

Okay, so here you go.

Under your...

Leadership,

will it become the Astronomical Society of the Planet?

I think so.

Okay.

And the other thing is, let me tell you my other thing.

As it should have have been.

My big thing is going to be, I'm going to take humanity.

And when I look at the history of mathematics, so here's the thing, right?

The big bottleneck for people getting into STEM is math, right?

When people

go to college, they ask themselves three questions when they choose their major.

What do I like?

How much math is it?

How much money can I make doing it?

And what has the least amount of math?

Right.

And so what needs to happen is, so when I look at the, I look at it historically and I look at it in four phases.

There's an early phase.

Let's forget that.

Here's how I name them.

The Library of Alexandria.

That's when you have, you know, Euclid, you got the Pythagorean theorem.

All that exists.

You got basic geometry.

Then you go to Nalanda or the city of learning.

This is Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, the Gupta dynasty, right?

Where they come up with the place value system, the numerals that become Arabic numerals.

These are really Hindu numerals.

That's really Hindu numerals.

And the zero comes out of there.

Exactly.

Right.

And then the third step is the house of wisdom, right?

This is where you get quadrisme, solving equations, the stuff we do in STEM every day.

And then you go to Cambridge.

All right.

So I, right now,

the average

Newton.

Right now, Cambridge, England.

The average human on earth, if you stop them and ask them any math question,

they got the first two steps covered.

We need to raise humanity to the business.

Which is arithmetic.

We've taken a little bit of algebra.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Trigonometry.

But if you, here's what I mean.

If you go up to the average person, you say, hey, what's two dogs plus three dogs?

They'll say five dogs.

What's two galaxies plus three galaxies?

Five galaxies.

What's two x squared y cube z plus three x squared y cube z?

Get out of my face, nerd.

It's the same problem, but they don't realize it because we haven't.

Yeah, I don't see it out of my face.

I whip out my Texas instrument, bang, bang, bang.

Texas instrument.

Texas.

Holy cow.

There you go.

Yeah, he keeps it right next to his palm pop.

There you go.

So anyway, I want to raise a little bit of

an HP.

Join us.

HP 45 in there.

I got a klepshidra and a star.

What is that thing?

Sundial.

There you go.

Boy, I got a stone circle oh

nice a stone hinge you got a stone hinge in your backyard i got a nap to playa

all right we out we out here yeah peace yeah yeah uh hakeem really good to see you again thanks man your first time in my office here first time at the hayden planetarium first time i've touched you in 20 years that don't let your wounds a little creepy

so this has been star talk cosmic queries edition pulpiery with my old-timey friend and colleague hakeem welcome back and of course, Paul.

Great to be here.

All right.

Until next time, I bid you to keep looking up.

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I'm going to put you on, nephew.

All right, Uncle.

Welcome to McDonald's.

Can I take your order?

Miss, I've been hitting up McDonald's for years.

Now it's back.

We need snack wraps.

What's a snack wrap?

It's the return of something great.

Snack wrap is back.