In short
The episode explains what scientists think happened at the start of the universe, focusing on “what came before the Big Bang,” and why that question is hard to test.
Guests
Daniel (particle physicist; smashes protons at CERN; also a cartoonist) and Jorge (cartoonist/host partner; asks speculative questions; no separate professional background given beyond the conversation).
Key claims
The universe is expanding, measured via redshift/Doppler shift, so extrapolating backward suggests it was once much smaller and denser. The Big Bang is not just a singularity “point,” but a hot, dense early state followed by rapid “inflation,” where space itself expanded by about 10^30 in about 10^-30 seconds. Before that, we only have speculation.
Notable examples
Cosmic microwave background “hiss” detected by a radio telescope; inflationary “ripples” in that radiation; untestable ideas like other “pocket universes,” cyclic big crunch/big bang, or “nothing” (no space/time) before time.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOIntroducing the Universe and the Big Bang
2:02 to 2:31
Discussion about the Big Bang and the universe's origin.
“Hey, I'm Jack Lees-Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit.”
Introducing the Universe and the Big Bang
4:30 to 5:48
Discussion about the Big Bang and the universe's origin.
“All the stars were just sort of hanging out there in space, not moving, and they'd been like that forever.”
Understanding the Big Bang Theory
5:48 to 8:07
Explains the concept of the Big Bang and how it was theorized.
“What do you imagine might have happened before the start of our universe?”
The Evidence of the Big Bang
8:07 to 10:40
Explores the evidence supporting the Big Bang theory, including cosmic microwave background radiation.
“Like the highway patrol measuring your speed.”
The Nature of the Early Universe
10:40 to 13:41
Discussion about the nature of the early universe and unanswered questions.
“and then it blew up and expanded into things we know.”
Understanding the Big Bang
18:56 to 23:20
Learn about the Big Bang, its timing, and the universe's expansion.
“And so the next thing people should know is that the Big Bang happened about 14 billion years ago.”
The Concept of Inflation in the Universe
23:20 to 24:59
Explore the idea of inflation and how it affects the universe's expansion.
“Inflation is not why your money doesn't work as well every year.”
Questions about Pre-Big Bang
24:59 to 25:17
Discuss the unknowns surrounding what happened before the Big Bang.
“Like before this little bubble blew up, what happened before?”
Exploring Speculation Beyond the Big Bang
28:00 to 30:20
The segment discusses the theories surrounding what may have existed before the Big Bang, including inflation and cosmic implications.
“and still be in relationships with each other.”
The Nature of Time and Space Pre-Big Bang
30:20 to 36:29
The hosts delve into the philosophical implications of time and space, discussing theories of cyclical universes and the notion of nothingness before the Big Bang.
“We have pretty good theories about what happened during the Big Bang, this idea of the inflation.”
Show all 13 chapters
The Significance of Understanding Cosmology
36:29 to 38:25
This segment examines the broader implications of knowing what came before the Big Bang and how it can influence global consciousness.
“There's no time for that to happen, right?”
The Significance of Understanding Cosmology
40:00 to 40:25
This segment examines the broader implications of knowing what came before the Big Bang and how it can influence global consciousness.
“But the people in the dairy industry are.”
The Significance of Understanding Cosmology
41:00 to 42:02
This segment examines the broader implications of knowing what came before the Big Bang and how it can influence global consciousness.
“Laurie Santos, host of the Happiness Lab podcast.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. I'm Mange Shachikular and I'm back with a new season of my podcast, Skyline Drive. This time I talk to scientists, biopunks, curmudgeons, blues owners, super seniors, and Goa's top cryotherapy lab to try to understand this obsession with living forever and what it means for all of us. And I get into a bit of trouble along the way. I'd say probably start bone smashing. That doesn't work. Make it look more defined. They say it works. I don't know. Listen to Skyline Drive, How to Live Forever on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:36This is Michael Rappaport and my podcast, the I Am Rappaport Stereo Podcast, is unlike anyone you've ever heard. If you're looking for strong opinions about sports, entertainment, politics, pop culture, and whatever else catches my attention, then subscribe now. This kid Jafar Jackson should absolutely, positively get nominated for his portrayal as Michael Jackson. Listen to I Am Rap Report on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Bill, why is my eye twitching? Does this mean I'm in perimenopause? Where's my phone? Juliana, maybe we can ask an actual human. Yes, because I have questions, and I bet you do too.
1:17Like, is it normal to sleep in separate bedrooms? We do that. And I still need to know why my poop's been green. We've got actual people answering these exact questions. Listen to Bill and Juliana. The podcast. On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you love iPhone, you'll love Apple Card. It comes with the privacy and security you expect from Apple. Plus, you earn up to 3 % daily cash back on every purchase, which can automatically earn interest when you open a high-yield savings account through AppleCard. Apply for AppleCard in the Wallet app. Subject to credit approval, savings is available to AppleCard owners subject to eligibility.
1:58AppleCard and Savings by Goldman Sachs Bank, USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Member FDIC. Terms and more at AppleCard.com. Hey, I'm Jack Lees-Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit. The podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners. for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
2:31The Black Effect Podcast Network is sponsored by Diet Coke. From tips for healthy living to the latest medical breakthroughs, WebMD's Health Discovered Podcast keeps you up to date on today's most important health issues Through in-depth conversations with experts from across the healthcare community, WebMD reveals how today's health news will impact your life tomorrow. It's not that people don't know that exercise is healthy. It's just that people don't know why it's healthy. And we're struggling to try to help people help themselves and each other. Listen to WebMD Health Discovered on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
3:05I'm Dr. Laurie Santos, host of the Happiness Lab podcast. As the U.S. elections approach, it can feel like we're angrier and more divided than ever. But in a new, hopeful season of my podcast, I'll share what the science really shows, that we're surprisingly more united than most people think. We all know something is wrong in our culture, in our politics, and that we need to do better and that we can do better. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. In 1982, Atari players had one game on their minds, Sword Quest. Because the company had promised 150 grand in prizes to four finalists.
3:46But the prizes disappeared, leading to one of the biggest controversies in 80s pop culture. I'm Jamie Loftus. Join me this spring for The Legend of Sword Quest. We'll follow the quest for lost treasure across four decades. Listen to The Legend of Sword Quest on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
4:30All the stars were just sort of hanging out there in space, not moving, and they'd been like that forever.
4:46Hi, I'm Daniel. Is this Jorge? So I'm a particle physicist. I smash protons together at CERN in my day job to try to figure out what is the basic nature of matter. What do you smash as a hobby, then? Yeah, we know when you're a particle physicist, you learn to solve problems by smashing stuff together. So whatever's around me. And I'm a cartoonist and my job is to sit in my pajamas all day and draw funny things. That's not how you started, right? You didn't grow up thinking, I'm going to be a cartoonist. No, I started off as a researcher. I'm an engineer. I studied robotics. I have a PhD in robotics.
5:18But somewhere along the line, I started drawing comics and that kind of took off for me. And this is our podcast, Daniel and Jorge. Explain the universe. Today we're going to talk about how it all began. The biggest of questions.
5:37The Big Bang. What happened at the very beginning of the universe? What happened before the Big Bang? It's a pretty deep, basic question about the origin of our universe. What do you think about it? What do you know about it? What do you imagine might have happened before the start of our universe? We went out and we asked people on the street, what they thought happened just before the Big Bang. Well, there was a bunch of particles in the universe, and then they combined together, and poof, we created. It had all the energy of the universe, so then when it happened, that's how it was all dispersed.
6:17So most people seem to have some idea that, first of all, the Big Bang is more than just a TV show, right? Right, right. The idea for the science came before the TV show. Yeah. I was kind of relieved to hear that. Everyone seems to know it sort of marks the beginning of the universe. Right. It's the moment of creation or the starting of the clock of the universe, where everything came from. But what exactly happened during the Big Bang? And most interestingly, what happened before the Big Bang? Right. And that's fascinating to me. And these are the best questions, the ones that try to answer the question, where did everything come from?
6:52It sort of touches on the philosophical, like why are we here? if you knew how the Big Bang happened and how the universe was created, you might get some insight into what the purpose of life is or how to live your life or stuff. So to me, these are really good, deep, basic questions.
7:11So we made a list of the four things we think you should know about the Big Bang. The first one is that the entire universe was once really small. Maybe, we think. Let's talk about that. What do you mean maybe? Well, it's an interesting question. We know that the universe had a beginning, right? And how do we know that? We know that because things are expanding. Things are moving away from each other. That was the major discovery like 100 years ago. People looked out in the stars and discovered that they're all moving away from us. Okay, so we thought everything would still, like we were frozen in a gel or something.
7:44The stars were just like there, sitting there, generally speaking. But then they discovered that actually things are moving away from each other. That's right. And everything is moving away from us. and everything is moving away from everything else. They just looked at stars and you can measure how fast a star is moving relative to us by seeing how its light is stretched or shrunk depending on whether it's moving away from us or towards us. It's like a Doppler shift. Like the highway patrol measuring your speed. You can tell how fast you're going. Yeah, exactly. It's not like they looked at the stars and said, oh, now that one's over there.
8:17It must have moved. It's some other information, right? Right, so they looked out there and they measured all this stuff and they said, whoa, everything's stretching out and moving away from each other. So then the very natural consequence is to say, well, run that backwards, what does that mean? It means things might have been smaller and more dense and maybe even come from a little spot. Like if you hit the rewind button, if you see things getting bigger now, if you hit the rewind button, for a while, what happens? Exactly. And those are the mental games people were playing. And actually the phrase Big Bang was a joke that people made up to mock that idea.
8:50They're like, look how ridiculous this idea is. It is kind of a silly sounding name, right? Yeah, it was whimsical. It was like a Donald Trump insult for somebody else's... Bigly Bang. Yes, exactly. The Bigly Bang. Well, if you were a respectable scientist today and you had to name this event, you wouldn't call it the Big Bang or you think that it was a good name. Oh man, if I was on a marketing committee to discover a new name for it, the moment of creation. No, I think Big Bang is actually pretty good. You got your alliteration, it's short, it's pithy, it's pretty well done. I think that's probably why it survived so long.
9:27Because everyone wants the universe to start with a bang. That's right. So you play back the movie of the universe and it tells us that everything was once much closer together and then much, much closer and then much, much closer. And if you keep thinking about it, things may have been really, really, really close together. That's right. Yeah, they just keep extrapolating down to a point. And around the same time, Einstein came up with all of his ideas of general relativity and thinking about gravity and how the universe works. And people were playing with those equations and discovering that those equations actually predicted that the universe could start from a point.
10:04They were consistent with Einstein's ideas of gravity. What do you mean it was consistent? Meaning that you can construct a universe that starts from a point and then blows up and expands. and that totally makes sense from an Einstein gravity point of view. It follows the rules. It's allowed. Meaning that nothing weird happens. You can cram that much stuff into such a small space. According to Einstein. What does he know? Which is pretty well accepted as a smart guy. He knows what he's talking about. But there are some issues there. The original idea was the Big Bang was this really dense hot blob of stuff and then it blew up and expanded into things we know.
10:48And that was a weird idea for a long time, and people didn't believe it for a long time. It was in the 60s that they finally found the first concrete piece of evidence that maybe the Big Bang had happened. And that's when they discovered the thing called the cosmic microwave background radiation. So it was weird to think about so much stuff and matter and stars being crammed into small space. Yeah, because it meant the universe wasn't always this dark and cold and empty place that we know today. It was like a hot, dense blob, like the center of the sun. It was a hot mess. It was a hot mess, exactly.
11:22The universe was not well organized when it was young. So yeah, so they said, okay, but now they saw something, like you called it the cosmic microwave background radiation, that said, yes, that's a clear indication things were a hot mess before. Yeah, they said, if things were really hot and dense a long time ago, then they should have given off this special kind of light, and we should still be able to see it today. And they went out and they found it. You can see it. You can see it if you have a special radio telescope. And some guys built a fancy radio telescope. They weren't even actually looking for this background radiation.
11:58And they just had a hiss in their telescope. They had this noise in their telescope. And coincidentally, some people a couple of years earlier had predicted, oh, if you build this kind of telescope, and the Big Bang happened, you'll hear this hiss. And they turned on their telescope, they heard this hiss, And they're like, what is this? We can't get rid of this noise. And then two years later, they won the Nobel Prize. That's a great discovery. It's a pretty happy discovery. You're afraid you're going to get fired, but then they're like, oh, that mistake you made? It's the discovery of the universe.
12:26That's right. So that's the Big Bang. It's everything was once really small, and then it just kind of exploded out into what we have today. That's right. That's the whole idea, is that the universe has a beginning, and that it expanded into what we know today. And that was the sort of first idea of the Big Bang. Like maybe everything came from a point. And people, a lot of people, when they think about the Big Bang, they think about the universe starting in a singularity, meaning a bunch of stuff in zero volume. All of it on top of each other in the same zero space. Exactly. And it's mind-blowing to imagine like take the sun and cram it down into the amount of space you have for a grain of sand.
13:05Hard to imagine, right? Now make it even smaller. Now add every other star in the universe on top of it it's like your brain can't even fathom it's not really the same thing it's just all the energy all the energy density that we currently have in the universe was crammed into that tiny little space that was sort of the early idea and you can imagine like a big empty universe of space with a tiny dot of matter in it and of course that engenders a lot of questions like where did that tiny dot of matter come from? was there only one? how was it created? right? But before we keep going, let's take a short break.
14:11OCI is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds, offers one consistent price instead of variable regional pricing, and of course, nobody does data better than Oracle. So now you can train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half the cost of other clouds. If you want to do more and spend less, like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic, take a free test drive of OCI at oracle.com slash strategic. That's oracle.com slash strategic. oracle.com slash strategic. I'm Buzz Knight, and I'm the host of the Take and a Walk podcast, Music History on Foot.
14:52John Oates. Great songs endure, and I'm very proud and happy to know that I was part of something that will endure. The podcast is an audio diary of insightful conversations with musicians and the inside stories behind their music. Russ Kumkel. The basic connection that I had with someone that was great coming out of the whiskey was David Crosby. David, I met David and Stephen and Graham kind of around the same time, basically through my wife, Leah, who was Cass Elliott's sister. The message of the podcast is simple, honest conversation with musicians about the music they create. Mike Campbell of The Heartbreakers.
15:32It is correct. I rarely work things out. I like to go off the cuff and try to grab things out of the air while you're playing the song and try to catch a little magic. Listen to the Take It a Walk podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom and refuge between the chapters.
16:20From thought provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Laurie Santos, host of the Happiness Lab podcast. As the U.S. elections approach, it can feel like we're angrier and more divided than ever. Please stick to policy. Don't get personal.
16:59But in a new, hopeful season of my podcast, I'll share what the science really shows. that we're surprisingly more united than most people think. We all know something is wrong in our culture, in our politics, and that we need to do better and that we can do better. With the help of Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki. It's really tragic. If cynicism were a pill, it'd be a poison. We'll see that our fellow humans, even those we disagree with, are more generous than we assume. My assumption, my feeling, my hunch, is that a lot of us are actually looking for a way to disagree and still be in relationships with each other.
17:34All that on the Happiness Lab. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
17:48I'm Keri Champion, and this is Season 4 of Naked Sports, where we live at the intersection of sports and culture. Up first, I explore the making of a rivalry, Caitlin Clark versus Angel Reese. I know I'll go down to history. People are talking about women's basketball just because of one single game. Every great player needs a foil. I ain't really hear them voice. I just come here to play basketball every single day, and that's what I focus on. From college to the pros, Clark and Reese have changed the way we consume women's sports. Angel Reese is a joy to watch. She is unapologetically black.
18:21I love her. What exactly ignited this fire? Why has it been so good for the game? And can the fanfare surrounding these two supernovas be sustained? This game is only going to get better because the talent is getting better. This new season will cover all things sports and culture. Listen to Naked Sports on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Black Effect Podcast Network is sponsored by Diet Coke.
18:55Well, so that's the Big Bang. And so the next thing people should know is that the Big Bang happened about 14 billion years ago. Billion with a B. Billion years ago. Man, I can't even remember what I did 14 minutes ago. That's how old the universe is from that moment of the Big Bang. Yeah. So the universe has been around since the Big Bang about 14 billion years. And for scale, the Earth has been around about four and a half billion years. That's when our solar system was formed. Right, right. Well, how do we know how old the universe is? Yeah, how can you tell? Yeah, well, we are seeing it expand.
19:32And so the simplest way is to just extrapolate back. Say, how fast is it expanding? And extrapolate that expansion back until the zero point. So if you look at the furthest stars, you know how fast we're going, you can just hit the rewind button. It would take about 14 billion years for it to connect to everything else. Yeah, so we're pretty sure that something happened 14 billion years ago. This expansion of space happened 14 billion years ago. But these days, scientists are a little fuzzier on what exactly the Big Bang was. So idea zero was a tiny dot with all the matter, and it explodes into the universe.
20:11Problems with this idea are, one, that you can't really have tiny dots of infinite density. You just told me before you could. Well, that was Einstein's idea. and the idea is consistent with Einstein's gravity. But Einstein's theories of gravity don't account for quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics, something that came after Einstein, he was never really very comfortable with. And quantum mechanics is a whole big long story, but the thing we need to understand is that it says you can't have things that are super duper tiny. There might be a smallest space. There might be a smallest distance. Things get fuzzy.
20:44Yeah. Like at some point, you can get unfuzzier. That's right, exactly. There's a basic unit of fuzziness. Imagine space being pixelated. You can't talk about something smaller than one pixel. So we think that quantum mechanics is probably correct. The big pixel. The big pixel, that's right. The first pixel of the universe. So we think if you try to follow Einstein and extrapolate the universe down to a point, general relativity probably works, but we think it probably breaks when you get down to really, really tiny distances and really heavy stuff. But nobody's ever seen that happen. because you'd have to look inside a black hole or go back in time and see the Big Bang.
21:23But these days we have a slightly fuzzier version of the idea of the Big Bang. Rather than a point of matter that then explodes into space, we think of the universe as being created as a blob of space and matter. A blob of space and matter. Yeah. It's like a blob of space. Like a tiny universe with not much space. So instead of an infinite universe with a tiny blob of matter in it, Now imagine a tiny piece of space filled with energy and matter. Okay, and what's outside of that little space? We have no idea. Like seriously, we can't even imagine. Inconceivable. Right, but we do know that space can be variable in size.
22:02Space can expand. And these days we have a more modern idea of the Big Bang as that expansion of that space. So it's kind of like a bubble that's a space and then there's stuff in the bubble. So you're saying both those things blew up. Exactly. And this is the more modern idea that space itself can expand. And so if you're out there thinking, what is he talking about? How can space expand? What is it expanding into? Everything has to be in something, right? And the answer is we don't know. We used to think of space as just like emptiness. And we could go a whole episode about just what space is.
22:36Yeah, we will. So keep listening. But these days we think of space as a thing because it can expand, it can bend, and it can ripple. So we know it has all these properties. So it might be that this bubble of space in the early universe was in some sort of super meta deep space that we have never really discovered. Or nothing. It could be that it doesn't have to hang in something else. It's just the edge. But space itself was smaller. That much we know. Space was small. Space was smaller and the stuff in it was crammed in really, really small. That's right. And then about 14 billion years ago, for some reason, do we know why?
23:12We don't know why. it decided it didn't want to be that small anymore. That's right, yeah. And that was the moment that space was created and then it expanded like crazy. It's something we call inflation. Inflation is not why your money doesn't work as well every year. I mean, that is inflation. I don't know, why do we do this in science? We take an idea, a word that everybody uses to mean one thing, and we just use that same word to mean something totally different. But it fits what it describes. is the universe inflated like a balloon, like a bowl, right? Yes. It's a good descriptive name from that sense.
Read the full transcript
23:47So the universe inflated, that whole balloon inflated, and everything inside it got stretched. And the amount of stretching that happened is crazy. It's like the universe expanded in space by a factor of 10 to the 30. That's 10 with 30 zeros on it, some crazy huge number. And it did it in this really small amount of time, 10 to the minus 30. So that's zero with 30 zeros after the decimal place, and then a one. So this incredible expansion, a huge expansion of space of 10 to the 30, in this tiny amount of time, 10 to the minus 30, it's hard to really even fathom. It was in a rush to get big. Yes, and it's still getting bigger today.
24:25And the other thing that's important to understand is that space didn't get created on the outside of the universe. It's not like they made more room. It's stuff, the space inside the universe stretched and was created. So between two particles, you had a certain amount of space. Then all of a sudden, you had extra space between particles. More space. Yeah, everything's getting stretched out from the inside also, not just from the outside. That's also continuing to happen. The expansion of the universe today, the fact the universe is getting bigger and bigger, is happening all around us. There's more space being created.
24:58The third thing we should talk about today is that we don't know what happened before the Big Bang. Like before this little bubble blew up, what happened before? But before we get into that, let's take a quick break.
25:17I'm Buzz Knight, and I'm the host of the Take It a Walk podcast, Music History on Foot. John Oates. Great songs endure. And I'm very proud and happy to know that I was part of something that will endure. The podcast is an audio diary of insightful conversations with musicians and the inside stories behind their music. Russ Kunkel. The basic connection that I had with someone that was great coming out of the whiskey was David Crosby. David, I met David and Stephen and Graham kind of around the same time, basically through my wife, Leah, who was Cass Elliott's sister. The message of the podcast is simple, honest conversation with musicians about the music they create.
26:00Mike Campbell of the Heartbreakers. It is correct. I rarely work things out. I like to go off the cuff and try to grab things out of the air while you're playing the song and try to catch a little magic. Listen to the Take It A Walk podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories.
26:38Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom and refuge between the chapters. From thought provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
27:18I'm Dr. Laurie Santos, host of the Happiness Lab podcast. As the U.S. elections approach, it can feel like we're angrier and more divided than ever. Please stick to policy. Don't get personal. But in a new, hopeful season of my podcast, I'll share what the science really shows. that we're surprisingly more united than most people think. We all know something is wrong in our culture, in our politics, and that we need to do better and that we can do better. With the help of Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki. It's really tragic. If cynicism were a pill, it'd be a poison. We'll see that our fellow humans, even those we disagree with, are more generous than we assume.
27:55My assumption, my feeling, my hunch, is that a lot of us are actually looking for a way to disagree and still be in relationships with each other. All that on the Happiness Lab. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
28:18In 1982, Atari players had one thing on their minds, Sword Quest. This wasn't just a new game. Atari promised 150 grand in prizes to four finalists. But the prizes disappeared. And what started as a video game promotion became one of the most controversial moments in 80s pop culture. I just don't believe they exist. My reaction is shock and awe. That sword was amazing. It was so beautiful. I'm Jamie Loftus. Join me this spring for The Legend of Sword Quest, a podcast about the fall of Atari and the disappearing Sword Quest prizes. We'll follow the quest for lost treasure across four decades. It's almost like a metaphor for the industry and Atari itself in a way.
29:05Listen to The Legend of Sword Quest on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
29:15We think of Franklin as the doddering dude flying a kite in the rain, but those experiments are the most important scientific discoveries of the time. I'm Evan Ratliff. Last season, we tackled the ingenuity of Elon Musk with biographer Walter Isaacson. This time, we're diving into the story of Benjamin Franklin, another genius who's desperate to be dusted off from history. His media empire makes him the most successful self-made business person in America. I mean, he was never early to bed and early to rise type person. He's enormously famous. Women start wearing their hair in what was called the coiffure a la Franklin.
29:54And who's more relevant now than ever. The only other person who could have possibly been the first president would have been Benjamin Franklin. But he's too old and wants Washington to do it. Listen to On Benjamin Franklin with Walter Isaacson on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
30:19This is like totally territory for speculation and philosophy. We have pretty good theories about what happened during the Big Bang, this idea of the inflation. We even have some experimental evidence to back it up, and it's a pretty solid theory these days that inflation happened. But what do you mean experimental? Like we can't measure the Big Bang, can we? Right, so we can't go back in time and see it, right? But we can do things like detectives do after a murder, and we can look for clues and say, are the clues that we see in the universe today consistent with this story or with that other story?
30:50So we can sift through the clues from the Big Bang and say, It looks like the universe was created. And if inflation happened, it probably created these ripples in that plasma. We can see those ripples in the cosmic microwave background radiation. It's really an incredible golden age of cosmology. They're doing all this really precision work to understand exactly what happened and what we know. But we can only see up to a certain point. Before that, it's just speculation. Before that, it's just speculation. So one popular idea is that there's this kind of matter called inflationary matter or inflatons.
31:22and it has some weird gravitational properties and those gravitational properties cause inflation. Like suddenly they came into being inside of this hot mess and it's like, we need to get out of here. Yeah, it's this never-ending loop of questions, right? So you say, well, the Big Bang was inflation. What caused inflation? Inflationary matter. Well, what created inflationary matter? It's like dot, dot, dot. You could just keep asking that question forever. And I think we will be asking that question forever. We'll always be pushing back and trying to understand and until we get back to negative infinity in time, we're never going to have a solid answer.
31:57But that's part of the fun, right? It's not like it's the journey as much as the destination. There's some cool ideas there about what happened before that point, right? That's right, yeah. Maybe the whole universe was filled with inflationary matter and in some places it decayed into normal matter and then inflation happened. And if that's the case, then you have like our universe is one spot inside some huge mega universe of inflationary matter. And maybe at other points in that mega universe, there are also other dots that turned into what we call pocket universes. Or like the zits of the face of the mega universe.
32:37Mega zits on the mega universe, yeah. And that might be true. So maybe like our universe is just like a little bubble in a big sea of other bubbles. That's right, exactly. That's one idea. That's one idea. And we have no way really to test that idea as the problem because there's no way for us to ever reach those other bubbles because if that's the case, if that's really the reality of the situation of nature, it means that inflation is still happening because that inflationary matter is still constantly expanding. So those other universes, those other bubbles, are getting pushed away from us much, much faster than the speed of light.
33:14So it will never hang out. You can't send a message there. You can't ever see it. You can't ever go there. And scientifically, that's a big problem. Not because I really want to go to the beaches in some other bubble universe, but because if you want to prove that it's true, you have to do an experiment. You have to find some evidence. You have to have a theory that can be confirmed. If you have a theory that predicts something you can never test, then it's not really a scientific theory or a useful one. Right. It's just a guess. Yeah, it's a guess. So that's one theory, maybe we're a bubble. in a sea of other universes.
33:50What's another idea for what happened before the Big Bang? Well, another idea is that maybe there's a cycle, right? Maybe the Big Bang was caused by a big crunch, right? And to understand that, you have to think about sort of the future first. Like, so the Big Bang happened, everything expands out. And then one question is like, are things going to keep expanding? We don't really know, but one possibility is they keep expanding forever and the universe just sort of drifts out into this endlessly cold, boring, bland situation. But another possibility is that it slows down, stops, and then falls back in.
34:25Everything rushes back and gravity pulls everything back to recreate that hot mess. Yeah, deflation. I think you just invented a scientific theory called... Oh, can I go back and change it to my son's name?
34:40Oliveration, yeah. Oliveration. The deflation theory would say that the universe comes back, falls into... And then collapses back into a little hot mess again. A little hot mess. It's like recovering your youth, right? It's like a middle-aged crisis or whatever. And then it just bounces back out again. Yeah, and that would be a cycle. So big crunch, big bang, big crunch, big bang. That could be... Big bang, us, big crunch, big bang again. Maybe somebody else. Somebody else. Better looking versions of us. Yeah, impossible, impossible. Yeah, so that's another idea is that what happened before is like more and more universes.
35:17Yeah, and there's something nice about that because it explains both that our universe had a beginning and it also gives you an explanation for what happened all the way back to the beginning of time because it returns you to the possibility that the universe is infinitely old, right? Because that could have been happening forever. It allows you to have this sort of finite length of time for our universe without limiting you to finiteness for the whole universe. Right. So time could be infinite, but space could be finite. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And that brings us to the last crazy idea, which is maybe there was nothing before the Big Bang.
35:55Nothing. Yeah, nothing. Not even time. Not even time, right? We think space was created in the Big Bang, and space is expanded and all that stuff. So there could have been no space before. No space and no time, right? And it's hard to even wrap your mind around what that is. I mean, we have a hard time imagining like what will happen after we die? Will the universe continue without us, right? Now try to imagine the universe without space and time. What does that even mean? And you have to think also about what time is itself. Like what does it mean for there to not be time, right? There's no time in which there's no time.
36:29There's no time for that to happen, right? and a lot of people think about time as sort of the organizing principle of the universe maybe you've heard of the second law of thermodynamics it tells us that entropy is always increasing in the universe and so they imagine things are getting messier forward in time that's right, getting more and more spread out forward in time and so some people think that that is time that time is measured by entropy and created by entropy and that before the Big Bang if there was nothing no space, then there was no time. And that sounds like an odd idea, but in other ways we're very familiar with it.
37:08Like, you know, if you stand on the North Pole and you ask which way is north, well, there is nothing north of the North Star. Oh, I gotcha. You blew us up into the real-dimensional world there. I'm going to write to Stephen Hawking telling you he was wrong. Thank you, yeah. Thank you, Jorge. That's actually his phrase, is, you know, maybe there's no north of north. No north. There's no before the zero time. Yeah, because if you're standing on a sphere and you're the north pole of it, there's nowhere to go. There's nowhere to go. There's no more northiness than the north pole. You can't. The tape ends when you try to rewind it more.
37:41That's right. And that's something we're comfortable with. We're accepting the fact that a sphere has a limit, an edge, and it's reasonable for there to be nothing beyond it. But when we think of time, we tend to think of it in a line. And so we want there to be something before it, or at least for there to be a reason why it started here and not somewhere else or some other time. It's a very natural, I think, idea to have intuitively to think that something should have been before then. But it could be that there was nothing, that things were created at that moment and there was nothing before then.
38:13And then we came. We dropped the mic. We came, we made this podcast. And that's a summary of all the... That's all you need, really. That's the whole universe, basically. The most eventful thing. In a nutshell. And any of those theories, first of all, those are very difficult to test. And it's hard to imagine how we'll ever know. It might be that there aren't any clues in the rubble of the universe to tell us which one is which. It might be. Although I like to have faith in future scientists coming up with clever ideas for ways to test these theories, which right now seem impossible to test, but in the future, people can be clever about it.
38:49Maybe they'll be able to see beyond the Big Bang. Yeah, maybe. Maybe they'll find some evidence in the current rubble that tells them, oh, it was this or it was that or it was the other thing. But even if you get there, imagine having an answer to one of these questions. Yeah, like what do you think knowing what happened before the Big Bang would tell you? Like how would it change your life? I think it would change everybody's life. I think it's the kind of knowledge that would filter into like the global consciousness. Think about like how quantum mechanics has changed the way people think about things.
39:19There's randomness in the universe, where the universe is not following a fixed set of rules, but that those rules have fuzz in them. You think it's changed the global consciousness? Yeah, absolutely. And not just in new agey people, but in everybody thinking about the universe as being a little different from what they imagined.
39:43Do you have a question you wish we would cover? We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge. That's one word. Or email us at feedback at danielandjorge.com.
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From the publisher
What could have caused the Big Bang, and what came before it?
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