Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi

22:45I 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 is real. But you're using one as a jump. That's right. Shit is 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.

23:18One 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, okay. So some people are doing that. They're saying maybe the universe's expansion rate hasn't just been what we think it of, as simple as we think it is. And it could, and then another question is - It could be yet another phenomenon acting on the expansion rate beyond the three that we have characterized. Do we have an idea what it might be? Is there any - Some weird quantum field. You come up with something. Yeah, you come up with something.

23:47Is weird the scientific term you're going with here? Sure. But 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 yeah or do we say that one of these are wrong right or maybe working in harmony or each of those have 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.

24:24Is 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 too deep. LSST was the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. But we're astronomers and we don't like going that way. We don't play at. So we just named it after one of our... You guys just like acronyms. You're just the laziest group of people. The Vera Rubin Telescope. Yeah, she discovered dark matter in the Milky Way. Wow. Speaking of, you know, another telescope that's oncoming is the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope.

25:01The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. So let's look at dark matter, dark energy, or both? Both. Both of them. It's gonna 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 When she passed away recently, she left the organization a few million dollars. Whoa. Yeah, yeah. Okay, well listen, we did - Astronomers have millions of dollars? Nancy Grace Rowland had millions of dollars. We're gonna jump to the next, that was a great question, James. We're gonna jump to the next one. Adam Omelon, hi Dr. Tyson and Dr. Olusi.

25:35Adam from Poland here. First, 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 in two ways. So what's absorbing what? So what happens is, 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.

26:20Through 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. 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 light interacts with that atmosphere. Around 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?

26:49And 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 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.

27:24Those are some of the early release, 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, the whole cottage industry, to make that happen. Yeah, yeah. All right. All right, we're going to go on to Jordan Vecina from North Dakota. I've been curious about dark matter. So you went from Denmark, Poland, North Dakota. Three places I've never been to. It may not ever go. I've been curious about dark matter. Is it possible 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.

28:11Love 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 than that. 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.

28:51That's what I was wondering. You were in that. It was summer of 91 on the cold dark matter, CDMS, right, in the basement in Berkeley. Okay. Building the dark matter direct detection, right, which we've not detected any dark matter. 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. You idiot. Got rejected by Berkeley. Right? I know, right? But here's the thing. Send him off to Stanford. When it works, when the idiots go rejects. But no, here's what happened. I worked at Berkeley a summer between undergrad and grad on that project.

29:23At 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 internet. He's a smart guy? His memoir is called From the Street. To the start. I got that out the mud. What part of that title do you not understand? All right, you thought it was a town in Connecticut, not a university. I didn't know Connecticut existed. And I still haven't seen it. But anyway. And the town in Connecticut has an M, I think. Yeah, it does.

29:50But just go along with it. Here's how I have to think about this dark matter and dark energy stuff. Nothing at the scale of galaxies and larger, basically over 20 ,000 light years, bigger than a 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's 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.

30:22Oops. Machos would be massive compact halo objects. So we come up with our better instruments and look for them. Machos and whips are two kinds of... Yes. They don't exist. We look for them. they're not there the super symmetric particles certainly should have saw them they're not there but at what point in all seriousness do you go let's stop looking and move on to something else it's like looking for it's like looking for a second sock and you just don't find it no no no because when we'd have to admit that we're stupid or that we're not yes exactly but we are driven by the uncertainty there are ambulance chasing theorists out there yes there are the slightest observation that's a little quirky they're going to come up with a whole theory to understand it maybe several yeah 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 and you know Something is a mess.

31:07Yeah, what is it? But is it possible that dark matter is something that could travel faster than light? What is your theory on that? Well, we have dark matter Is it tacky on is that what it is if dark matter is some corner kind of matter? Yeah, we call you matter, but we don't know here's the thing why we know it's not that because we know models is 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 cdm, 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.

31:50It makes, it makes every, The only thing left is axions and I don't find that to be well, People making up particles that'll do this. Yeah, yeah. Well, they made up a particle 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.

32:19Which actually makes it exciting. You come up with all these ideas and you go through all of them and there's none 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. Yeah, and it's clumping gravitationally, right? And then, you know, you see, I imagine, shrank off radiation, right? That's when you travel faster than light in some medium. Yeah. You emit light. Mm-hmm. So dark matter wouldn't be dark, baby.

33:05here 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 you're the best i recently watched side channel with Akeem, 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 wanna age differently.

33:48Yeah. 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 make the constellation. Yeah, not the 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 in your 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 Don't just say relativity and keep talking Wait, in this scenario how far away from me are you when you're running by me?

34:44We're in the same place essentially So you're like literally running here I've never heard of this paradox And you look up. It's a little known paradox. And the thing that you see and I see are days apart. Days apart. Because of our physical perspective on that. 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.

35:12I 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? Even though you're in the same place. 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 nows.

35:44There 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. 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, no. That is your bias. That is your bias. That's so Galilean Newtonian. That's so backwards. Right. Wow. I've never gotten 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?

36:18And they're talking about now or something. And I'm just like, now is this? 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? Curve space, 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 big rip. In order for that to happen.

36:50For that to happen. To be felt. To be felt, right? Or to be, you know. Yeah, because the first one that was measured, it jiggled the experiment by one-twentieth 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. And that event would surely kill you before you had any experience of the wave. I was going to say, but there are a whole host of, it's an infinite number of things that could cause a gravitational wave, right?

37:27But actually, 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. Oh, that's a good thing. You add those things. Oh, well, that's the upside. You don't even know. You don't even know. So you get compressed to nothingness, you get ripped apart. This is like a sci-fi thing, right? The gravitational wave-inator.

37:49Exactly. All right, we're going to move on. Can we do a lightning round now? Yeah, absolutely. We got some great ones. Here we go. Okay, go. Alan Geist, 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 from through mathematics or scientific method. Correct me. Secondly, Mr. Heisenberg taught us that one can never know all information about a particle.

38:19Thus, 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. There you go. Alan Geist, go ahead. Answer that question. He actually remembers the 60s. Exactly. If you live through the 60s, you shouldn't remember. There you go. All right. Yeah. So I'd like that. I say here, here. I say here, here. I felt the same way.

38:55Catch yourself 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, do black holes have hair? We made a bet. man, nerds, shut the hell up. Nobody cares. I don't care. So here's what I think they're saying. If I look at the sun, I can take a spectrum of the sun. 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 three physical parameters. Like angle momentum, mass, and charge. So the idea was whatever it looked like before, it has none of that later, once it becomes a black hole.

39:42So it says it has no hair. But that's back when enough people had hair that that was a part of how you identify them. Right, exactly. But now that bald look, you know, Lex Luthor, the billionaire bald look. Yeah, exactly. Speaking of which, you know something I realized? What? So, you know, I grew up in segregated Mississippi. So I go to graduate school, and I would play basketball all the time, and I noticed that— But 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.

40:13And that is, if there was a white dude who wasn't present and you're trying to describe him to someone, they invoke his hair color. Yes. We didn't do that. It's not our vocabulary. I don't know. It's like in China. Wait, you mean they'd say like, you know, Paul McCurie, 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— Invoking hair color. Right, exactly. It's the best thing with the black, straight hair. That's not helpful. But where I'm from, we invoke skin color. Oh, the light skin dude, the red bone, the yellow bone.

40:41See, 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. So, but the point is that, yeah, some nerd thing that, 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, I think that's the way in that. So you're in the, we lost information camp in the black hole.

41:16Clearly. Or information, there's too much made of this information idea. Exactly. Okay, this is where he's coming from. Yeah. Okay, give me another one. There we 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 propelled by dark energy. No, the point is the dark energy is making us expand and never return. So maybe he meant dark matter. So is there sufficient dark matter to close us back and then have the big squeeze?

41:50Oh, no, not even close. Not even close, okay. 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 to 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.

42:22Okay? I gave someone an answer one time. What source did you use? In my education. It's called the brain app. I should try it. Okay, try it sometime. 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 using this artificial. You're trying to absorb it in matter, right? and then convert it to useful energy, right?

42:59And so you do not have enough matter in the solar system to create something larger. To create something that you could put around the sun because it's not large enough or because it can't hold? Because it's not large. It's like stars are so much bigger than their planets. Have you seen the garbage bags that Costco sells? You put one of those around the star. Come on, guys. So let me add to what you just said because it's a brilliant revelation regarding the material necessary. Right. If you had that much material, it means you're visiting other star systems. Why would you be wasting it? This is not even an interesting exercise.

43:35You don't even need it at that point. It's like, what are you doing? Right. You're scooping up the planets of a thousand solos to get the energy from one star. 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 star, you think of it as two parts. It's 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.

44:03And it's absorbing the energy that's coming out and radiating into a useful form that we can build our solar arrays and capture. All right, 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. Well, they're just saying that if you absorb all the energy from a star at this greater radius, then it would then radiate. Yeah, in the infrared. In the infrared. And so they're suggesting that they're aliens.

44:41So they have a data set of a handful. They're 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. Yeah. That there's stars. When you're in dust, it absorbs the energy and it re-rates it and 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 Plan.

45:15And you can be a nerd. You can be a geek. You can be an enthusiast. You can be an educator. You could be a learner. All of that. And 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. 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 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?

45:46The big bottleneck for people getting into STEM is math. 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? And so what needs to happen is, so when 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 named them. The Library of Alexandria, that's when you have Euclid. You got the Pythagorean theorem. All that exists. You got basic geometry. Then you go to Nalanda or the city of learning.

46:21This is Aryabhata, Brahma-Gupta, the Gupta dynasty, right? Where they come up with the place value system, the numerals that become Arabic numerals, zero. Because they're really Hindu numerals. That's how they started. They're really Hindu numerals. Right, yeah. And the zero comes out of there, too. 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 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.

46:59We need to raise humanity to the house of wisdom. Which is arithmetic and a little bit of algebra. Exactly. Trigonometry maybe, yeah. But 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 for three galaxies? Five galaxies. What's two X squared Y cubed Z plus three X squared Y cubed Z? Get out of my face, nerd. It's the same problem, but they don't realize it. Because we haven't learned how to do it. See, I don't say get out of my face. I whip out my Texas instrument. Bang, bang, bang. Texas instrument.

47:23Holy cow. There you go. Yeah, he keeps it right next to his palm pie. There you go. So anyway, I want to raise a level of humanity. I have an HP. Join us. HP 45 in there. I got a Klepshedra and a Star. What is that thing? Sundial. There you go. Boy, I got a stone circle.

47:42Stonehenge. You got a stonehenge in your backyard. I got a nap to playa. All right, we out. We out here. Yeah, peace. Hakim, really good to see you again. Thanks. Man. Your first time in my office here at the Hayden Planetarium. First time I've touched you in 20 years. That sounds a little creepy. You're welcome. Okay. So this has been StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition. and potpourri with my old-timey friend and colleague, Hakim. Welcome back. And, of course, Paul. Great to be here. All right. Until next time, I bid you to keep looking up.