The Stuff You Should Know Doin’ Science Playlist: How Big Bang Theory Works, with Neil deGrasse Tyson

11:16Josh Clark:Yeah, and you know what? When Strickland and scientists and cosmologists talk about that, that is what is known as a singularity. Right. That thing with zero volume and infinite density.

11:28Chuck Bryant:Right. So I think it bears repeating at least one more time. What we're talking about is all of the matter, all of the energy, all of the heat, all the radiation, everything in the universe that is here or ever was here over the last 13 point roughly 7 to 9 billion years was in a point that was 23 orders of magnitude smaller than the diameter of an atom.

11:58Josh Clark:You almost, you just caught yourself wanting to say it's like a little ball, but there's not even circularism.

12:04Chuck Bryant:Right, yeah. Is that a word? Yes.

12:06Josh Clark:There was nothing circular.

12:08Chuck Bryant:And so at this time, at this point, we know that it was very, very hot. Sure, makes sense. Mind-bogglingly hot. Like you can't even think of all the zeros associated with the degrees of Kelvin or Fahrenheit or Celsius, right? Right. And it was incredibly dense. And then something happened. We don't know what that was. science simply isn't equipped to explain it or understand it or detect it. Something happened to make this incredibly dense ball or whatever it was. Yeah, there was no ball.

12:41Josh Clark:Expand. Yes, and it was not like the smoke snake. It wasn't a child with a lighter. You don't know that? Neil deGrasse Tyson doesn't know that? Nobody knows that. So this expanding happened really, really, really fast, And we'll talk later about just those first few seconds afterward. Like, that's how fast we're talking.

13:03Chuck Bryant:Well, few, like, trillions of a second is how they break it down. Like, so much happened in that first, literally the first second of the origin of the universe. Yeah. That there are different ages and epochs that happened in, like, trillions of a second.

13:22Josh Clark:Yeah, it's really mind-blowing. So as things expanded, though, in those first few seconds and today, things are still expanding. Right. Things are expanding and things are cooling down even as we speak. Right. Literally every second that we're on the earth, we're expanding and, well, not us, but the universe is expanding and cooling.

13:41Chuck Bryant:Right, exactly. And as a matter of fact, from what I understand, our region of the universe, which is something like 90 billion light years across, is no longer expanding. but other parts of the universe are expanding. Right. And there's this really great article about cosmology and where it stands right now. It's in Aeon. Not cosmetology. No, cosmology. Yes. And it was written by a guy named Ross Anderson and I think it's called In the Beginning and it's incredibly well written but he makes a really great analogy. He says that that 90 billion light year across portion of the universe that we inhabit, that we consider our own, is but a small section of one tiny bubble that floats along on a frothy sea whose proportions defy comprehension.

14:33Chuck Bryant:Isn't that neat? Yeah. And that's just our section of the universe, right? That's our little neighborhood. So the universe is unknowably large. We sound like H.P. Lovecraft here describing this stuff. Yeah. And still some parts of it are expanding. And apparently in the early universe when it was a singularity, the four forces, the four fundamental forces. The dark side? Oh, wait.

14:59Josh Clark:Yeah. I thought you meant the Star Wars universe. Yeah, I was. Oh, okay. Yeah. So the force, the dark side, midichlorians. And Mark Hamill's hair. Yeah, and prequels. The four basic forces, as everyone knows, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, and gravity.

15:18Chuck Bryant:Right, and that singularity before the universe expanded began to expand, all of them were coupled together into a single unified force. Yeah, which we don't understand how. No, we don't. And as a matter of fact, trying to get them back together is one of the great pursuits of physics because if we can figure out how they were all unified, we can start to understand the science we need, the paradigm we need to understand the origins of the universe, but we just can't figure out how to do it, right?

15:46Josh Clark:Yeah, one thing that kind of blows my mind with this is when we get to this stuff later on about does it defy other laws of physics and stuff? Basically, every answer is the further you travel back toward that singularity, the less all these rules that we think we understand apply. Right, it falls apart. We'll probably never understand this stuff. Yeah. At that very singular moment.

16:12Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I don't know. I disagree. I think I disagree. I think that we are maybe a century or two away from understanding it?

16:21Josh Clark:Well, you just clearly pulled that out of your hat. Well, I totally did. Oh, okay. But we've made some - You're thinking, another 126 years?

16:27Chuck Bryant:Well, no, we've made some incredibly huge strides in the last 150, 200 years in our understanding thus far, right? So I think that's not a bad guess, right? So it'd be a string theorist, right, to marry all these - I don't know. Probably? I don't know, and that's what NDT said. That's what we call him now. Yeah. That's what he said. He was like, who knows? It could be string theory. maybe someone will be able to come up with a unified theory, what's called the theory of everything that unifies the four fundamental forces back into their single version of a force. Man. Or maybe we just don't understand quantum physics enough quite yet.

17:04Chuck Bryant:Yeah. And when we figure that out a little more, that will unlock some keys for us.

17:10Josh Clark:Unbelievable.

17:10Chuck Bryant:So Chuck, before we get into how we started to come to understand the Big Bang and the origin of the universe, Let's take a break real quick, all right? I'm going to go wipe my brow. You're doing great.

17:39Josh Clark:Organic Valley Protein Plus Ultra-Filtered Milk is pasture-raised from cows that might take more steps than most people. That's a plus. And it has 50 % more protein and 50 % less sugar than regular milk. That's a big plus. And the fact that I didn't make a pun about moving, also a plus. Organic Valley Protein Plus Ultra-Filtered Milk. Protein plus pasture-raised. Learn more at organicvalley.com. Go on, get a little out there into the big heart of Nevada, where you can go off-road and off the map on two lakes or on horseback. Dip into hot springs and dive into deserts. Climb a mountain or make your best effort.

18:24Josh Clark:See thousands of stars in some of the darkest skies. Stake out haunted hotels. Can you make it to sunrise? There's always something new to see because we've got plenty of space to just be. Plan your trip at TravelNevada.com. You're building your career, your routine, your future. But this summer, that's for you. This season, escape into stories that feel like golden hour, rooftop drinks, and the kind of love that sneaks up on you when you least suspect it. Sourcebooks' Summer of Romance brings together the rom-coms everyone's talking about, from Laugh Out Loud favorites by Lucy Score and Megan Quinn, to binge-worthy reads you'll want to finish in one sitting.

19:03Josh Clark:Find your next summer read at Sourcebooks.com. That's Sourcebooks.com. Getting stuffed with Joshua and Charles. Stuff you should know. All right, I sort of get this part, so. The history part? I'm going to talk a little bit about it. And this makes a lot of sense to me. Go back in time. Let's get in the Wayback Machine. Oh, yes, let's.

19:37Josh Clark:Boy, it feels so safe and comfortable in here I know It stinks of kerosene It does, weirdly It's the 1800s And astronomers started using something called a spectroscope Which is pretty nifty We've talked about light waves in here before A spectroscope is something that Divides that light spectrum up Into the wavelengths Blue on the left, red on the right And as you go further toward the red the wavelengths grow longer. So that's part one.

20:05Chuck Bryant:Right, right. That was spectroscopes.

20:09Josh Clark:Yes, that's light waves.

20:10Chuck Bryant:Right, and around the same time, a guy named Christian Doppler was tinkering with the frequency of sound waves, right? He was studying those.

20:20Josh Clark:Because he's a smart guy. He is. And he said, you know what, it's weird that when I sit by a train, it sounds different as it goes by me, approaches, then goes by me and goes further away from me.

20:31Chuck Bryant:Right, it sounds different, and that doesn't really make any sense.

20:34Josh Clark:Yeah, and whereas most people would just eat their figgy pudding and go about their day, he wanted to try and explain it. Anybody else would have been like, this new Charles Dickens book is top notch. So he said, you know what, as this noise approaches you, the sound waves it generates compress, and it's going to change that frequency, or at least how you perceive it, in a different pitch. So as it moves away from you, those waves are going to stretch, that pitch goes down, and I'm gonna name this effect after myself. Right, well I'll let my wife do it so I don't look like a jerk. Right, so basically you marry these two things, light, wavelengths, and the Doppler effect, and it sort of led us down this path to where we could understand the Big Bang Theory.

21:16Chuck Bryant:Right, it would indicate that something that was emitting light out there in the universe, whose light moved toward the red end of the spectrum would be emitting longer wavelengths, which would suggest, based on Christian Doppler's findings, that it was moving away, right?

21:35Josh Clark:Yeah, and they found that. They said, look at these stars. Some of the light is falling into this right-hand side, and does that mean it's moving away and it's getting faster? Right. Like it wants to get away from us.

21:48Chuck Bryant:That's where Edwin Hubble came in. He basically said, yeah, this is really weird, guys, because some of these stars appear to have a velocity that's proportional to its distance from the Earth. Like there seems to be some sort of rhyme or reason here to it. And it's suggested to Hubble and later on to everybody else, including Einstein, as we'll see, that the universe itself was expanding. And this is where we came to the genuine origin of the Big Bang Theory, the idea that the universe was expanding. and at a constant rate too, right?

22:25Josh Clark:Yes. Is that the idea? Is that the Hubble constant?

22:28Chuck Bryant:No, no, no. The Hubble constant is the proportion between or the relationship between how fast something is moving away from us to its distance from us. Well, yeah, I guess it is a constant rate.

22:43Josh Clark:I mean.

22:44Chuck Bryant:And actually, no, the universe appears to be expanding more quickly than it was before. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it's increasing, which is. That's what I meant. but it is constant in its relationship. Does that make sense? Yeah, the Hubble constant has to do not necessarily with the inflation of the universe itself or the expansion of the universe itself, but how fast, say, a star is moving away from us. And the further away from us it is, it appears to be moving faster than others that are closer.

23:12Josh Clark:Yeah, and we should point out, you said inflation and or expansion, and apparently if you're an insider, if you're a scientist, you probably say inflation.

23:20Chuck Bryant:Sure. So expansion is the basis of the Big Bang Theory. It's the idea that the universe has expanded over time so that by logic, since time is one of the four dimensions that we live in, right? You've got the three dimensions plus time, so therefore space-time describes the fabric of the universe and the reality we live in, right? That's right. So by logic of that, if you went backward in time, the universe would be smaller and smaller and smaller. And the more they started looking into it, the more their minds started popping as they realized, like, wow, this thing was really, really small once.

23:56Chuck Bryant:And that's the basis of it. Inflation theory comes in and suggests how that happened, how that expansion happened. And it fills in a lot of blanks that we'll also talk about.

24:06Josh Clark:Yeah, so you mentioned Einstein earlier. He's a noted smart guy.

24:11Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

24:12Josh Clark:And he actually had some issues because it conflicted somewhat with his general relativity theories. Because he subscribed to his own theory that the universe was static. It's not expanding.

24:23Chuck Bryant:Right. I think he was like a member of, there was a way of viewing the universe. That it was always this way. It was always spread out this way. Right. It wasn't getting bigger. That's nuts. And so he figured that his general theory of relativity would prove this. and actually he was extremely surprised to find that his own general theory of relativity actually said, no, the universe is either expanding or contracting, it's certainly not steady. And then Edwin Hubble came along and he had his findings and Einstein said, you know what, I was wrong. Yeah, I'm a big enough man to admit it. Yeah, that's the kind of guy I am.

24:58Chuck Bryant:And one day people are gonna keep my brain in a jar in a barn. Slice it up. It's gonna go on a car trip. That was a good episode we did too.

25:06Josh Clark:Yeah, did we do one on that? Oh yeah. On its own?

25:08Chuck Bryant:Einstein's Brain. Oh, yeah, that's right.

25:09Josh Clark:Boy, those were the good old days. Einstein's Brain episodes? Sure. Yeah. All right, so let's talk about some of the predictions that rose from the theory that the universe is expanding. One is, and Strickland says, the universe is homogeneous and isotropic, which is a fancy way of saying it's made up of the same materials and completely uniform.

25:34Chuck Bryant:Yeah. Here is one of the first times we run into something where you're like, what are you talking about? It's funny. If you read Strickland's article, and I sent him an email saying as much that I was like, this is really well written. Yeah. But if you just read the words you're saying, it sounds like it was written by someone who is totally insane. Yeah. You know? I know. And he makes the point, too. He's like, well, yeah, all you have to do is look out into the Milky Way or anything like that. Anything we can see easily and see that it looks different. Like there's not a star that looks just like our sun with the same number of planets looking around.

26:07Chuck Bryant:Right. The point is that you look, if you go out of several orders of magnification and look at the universe outside of any given galaxy, you're going to see that actually, yeah, everything's distributed pretty evenly throughout the universe. And so that makes it homogenous. And then secondly, it's isotropic, meaning that there is no center to the universe. There's no central point.

26:28Josh Clark:Yeah, which some people posit that the Earth is the center of the universe. Well, we'll talk a little bit about that later. Okay. But that's wrong, right?

26:37Chuck Bryant:I mean, it hasn't been disproven, but it's just extremely unlikely, I think.

26:41Josh Clark:Yeah, I think it's a very human-centric thing to say.

26:44Chuck Bryant:But the reason why some people say that is that they are, if you look around, that expansion that we're seeing, everything's going away from us. Right. Which is like, why is that happening? Like we should be going along at least with something else. But the idea is that we're not because we're the center of the universe. But the implications of that are so mind-boggling that it's just not possible almost. Yeah. That we're actually at the center of the universe when we're just this small segment of a tiny bubble in a frothy sea that defies proportions. There's no way that's the center of the universe.

27:22Josh Clark:So another prediction was, and we talked a little bit about the intense heat at the very first moments of the Big Bang. And if that were true, then you would feel and see this radiation. I guess not see it, but you would have this radiation expanded over the entire galaxy in roughly equal proportions.

27:44Chuck Bryant:Yeah, because again, remember, the universe is homogenous and isotropic, so if there was radiation, it should be evenly distributed.

27:51Josh Clark:Yeah, they call it an echo I've seen described in some circles.

27:55Chuck Bryant:Right, okay. So apparently back in the 40s they detected this stuff and didn't know what they were looking at. And in the 60s they figured out, holy cow, this is the cosmic microwave background, which is basically, I think of it as more like a fingerprint, the fingerprints of the universe, right? Yeah. And it's evenly distributed. It's this trace radiation that's still around from the Big Bang. Yeah. Which is pretty amazing. So when you put that and the discovery that the universe does seem to be homogenous and isotropic, along with the fact that we discovered this cosmic radiation background that's evenly distributed throughout the universe, it really gives a lot of credence to the Big Bang Theory.

28:35Chuck Bryant:And so, too, does this gravitational wave. Yeah. The gravitational wave discovery, they apparently found curls in the cosmic microwave background that are remnants of gravitational wave from the Big Bang, too. So it's just getting supported all over the place, and everybody's super happy about it.

28:54Josh Clark:Yeah, there's like real observational data there. Right. All right, we teased those first nanoseconds, nanomoments, after the Big Bang. So let's talk about them right now. The earliest thing that scientists can even talk about, like with a straight face, like later on when they're having drinks at the bar, I bet they talk about before this. But if they're like on a podium in front of an audience, they can go back as far as, I'll just say the equation, even though it will make no sense to anyone. T equals one times 10 to the negative 43 seconds.

29:34Chuck Bryant:May I? Yes. Okay. So T equals the time after the creation of the universe. Yep. And as far back as they've gone is point 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0. Zero, zero, one second after the creation of the universe. That's how far back they've been able to trace the Big Bang. 43. Nice work. Isn't that amazing? That fraction of one second is how far back they've been able to figure it out. And so much happened in that first second, Chuck, that just fractions of that fraction are, like I said before, like different epochs in the age of the universe.

30:35Chuck Bryant:Like entire epochs happen in trillions of a trillionth of a second. I know. It's just so mind-boggling. I know. I love it, though. Like I've really given myself over to this. I was fighting at first. Like, well, that doesn't make sense. I don't want to. How does that make sense? And I did look plenty of stuff up. Yeah. But I also just kind of was like, I'm just taking this on faith. Despite what NDT says, like you do kind of have to take this on faith, especially if you're not an astrophysicist. And I just kind of gave myself over to it. And I love it.

31:05Josh Clark:You know what happens when my mind gets bent like that too far? I just have some pie.

31:10Chuck Bryant:Oh, that's good stuff. Yeah. What kind?

31:12Josh Clark:I just kind of stare at the wall and have some pie.

31:13Chuck Bryant:What do you recommend?

31:14Josh Clark:Doesn't matter. Pecan. Okay. So something super sweet, not fruity. What's a fruity pie? Like a cherry pie or apple pie? I like a good apple crumble pie. Oh, yeah. I do too. But not like the one with the crisscross pastry on top.

31:30Chuck Bryant:I don't really discriminate against pie. Sure. I tend more toward the fruity section of the pie spectrum. And I tend to think of pecan like right in the middle. Yeah. But then on the other end, you have like your creamy and chocolate mousse pies and stuff like that. I tend to be on the other side a little more.

31:46Josh Clark:Or a good lemon pie, lemon icebox. Oh, yeah. It's good stuff. What I don't get is the cheddar on the apple pie. I've never gotten that either. I've never tried it. So maybe I should. Those people are obviously crazy. I like sweet and savory together. So maybe I should give it a whirl. Oh, yeah. Do we have to start talking about this again?

32:02Chuck Bryant:Dip a french fry in a frosty and call it a day.

32:05Josh Clark:Alright, so at that point that you described, that, you know, don't say all the zeros again, but at that point, the universe was tiny, tiny, tiny, and small, and dense, and hot, and the area of the universe spanned a region of about 3.9 by 10 to 34 inches. Everything.

32:26Chuck Bryant:And that area, right, 10 to the negative 33 centimeters, Again, the average diameter of an atom, or roughly something like that, is 10 to the negative 10. Yeah. This is that much smaller than an atom, and everything that's in the universe now was encapsulated in that tiny little thing, whatever it was. That's right. And again, surely astrophysicists and cosmologists, when they were coming up with these calculations, were like, this can't be right. Yeah. And I guess over time they were like, it seems to be right. Either we're all just totally off our rockers and really somebody forgot to carry a one and everybody forgot to carry a one, or this is really how things started.

33:12Chuck Bryant:And it's just mind boggling to think.

33:14Josh Clark:All right, so in that very first, first, first, first moment, theorists think that those four primary forces that we mentioned are still hanging together. They're still united. and that matter and energy were inseparable at this point.

33:29Chuck Bryant:Which is another, don't feel bad if you're sitting there going, like, how is that possible? No one knows. Yeah. They just see, the calculations bear that out is another way to put it. That's right. But that's how it was. Matter and energy were one and the same.

33:43Josh Clark:And as things expanded, and we'll go into these in detail, we go through something called baryogenesis, particle cosmology, and then standard cosmology. And as this time passes, things become a little more easy to understand. And when I say easy to understand, I mean extremely difficult. But at least your mind can wrap around it. Yeah, start to at least, right? Yeah.

34:04Chuck Bryant:So remember we started at T, which is the time after the creation of the universe. T equals 1 times 10 to the negative 43 seconds. Yeah. The next big part where things start, and actually in between the two, to gravity separated from the four fundamental forces. Yeah, just a little thing like that. Right. But the next big one that came along was at 10 to the negative 36 seconds. And this is where baryogenesis happened. And around this time also, this is where the electroweak, which is electromagnetic and weak force combined together, separated from the strong magnetic force. And apparently here, at that 10 to the negative 36 power seconds, that was where inflation happened.

34:50Chuck Bryant:That's where the expansion began.

34:52Josh Clark:Right, and that's where we actually could begin to observe some kind of matter.

34:57Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and they think that what happened was a tremendous amount of matter and antimatter were created. Yeah. But that, and we did it, I don't remember a lot about the details, but remember we did a podcast on antimatter spacecraft. Oh, yeah. How amazing those were. Sure. But antimatter and matter like to destroy each other and effectively cancel one another out. But apparently at the beginning of the universe, at the origin of the universe, it's suggested by this, that there was a slight imbalance in whatever makes matter and whatever makes antimatter so that there was slightly more matter that was created than antimatter.

35:38Chuck Bryant:Which is a good thing. Right. So that that stuff survived. Yeah. Had the balance been the other direction, there would be slightly more antimatter than matter now. And who knows what kind of loopy, bizarro universe that would have created.

35:48Josh Clark:Seriously. Or if there would have been anything at all.

35:51Chuck Bryant:So all that matter that survived is the matter that we see in the universe now. Yeah. And that's a lot of matter. So imagine, since this is just a tiny fraction of the matter that was created and destroyed by the antimatter that was also created, how much matter and antimatter was created at 10 to the negative 36 seconds? Yeah. Through baryogenesis. Again, it's just mind-boggling. And that was the result, Chuck, of energy and matter uncoupling as well, right? That's right.

36:20Josh Clark:Alright, and this is the point where we can actually start to, you know, we did one on the Large Hadron Collider. It's a particle accelerator, the biggest and best that we have on the Earth. And this is where you can actually use a particle accelerator to recreate and look at this stuff. Right. So we can actually observe this at this point.

36:40Chuck Bryant:Yeah, we can smash things together and be like, kaboom! Look at that! Early universe. That's what they do at CERN. Oh, yeah? Uh-huh. All right.

36:52Josh Clark:Well, people should listen to that one, too, by the way. Oh, yeah. That would be a good primer.

36:56Chuck Bryant:That was the one where we wondered whether it was going to end the universe or not.

37:00Josh Clark:All right. It did not. Not yet. So at this point, there is still no light. Things are too dense, and it is still just a dark, dense area. Right, exactly.

37:10Chuck Bryant:And I think during the particle cosmology epoch, the electromagnetic force and the weak force break off into separate forces.

37:21Josh Clark:That's right, and we still can't, at this point, these subatomic particles still can't bond. They're there, they can form, but they can't hook up and party.

37:30Chuck Bryant:Right, exactly. That actually didn't start to take place until we reached the standard cosmology age, which is the age that I believe we are in now, right? Yeah, which started 0.01 seconds after the initial bang. Right, one hundredth of a second. So we've gone through that many ages, and we haven't even mentioned them all. No. In those within that first second.

37:52Josh Clark:Yeah, it's crazy.

37:53Chuck Bryant:It is crazy. So that standard cosmology, this is about where the astrophysicists and cosmologists say, we understand it from about here on out. Right. Everything else is a little shaky, but we've got some observational data that backs it up. But here is where neutrons and protons were formed, and a little after that they started to be able to form nuclei through nucleosynthesis, right? And they would ultimately be the building blocks of atoms.

38:23Josh Clark:Right, so at this point, things are still expanding and cooling at a rapid rate, and we can actually, there are no atoms yet, but like you said, but it's too hot at this point for electrons to complete that process. Right. Still too hot in the hot tub.

38:40Chuck Bryant:Yeah. I mean, after 100 seconds, the universe had cooled to a temperature, cooled after 100 seconds to 1.8 billion degrees Fahrenheit or a billion degrees Celsius. That was how hot it was still after 100 seconds. Should we take another break here? Let's.

38:58Josh Clark:All right, let's do that, and we'll come back and explain the rest of it in great, easy-to-understand detail.

39:20Josh Clark:Organic Valley Protein Plus Ultra-Filtered Milk is pasture-raised from cows that might take more steps than most people. That's a plus. And it has 50 % more protein and 50 % less sugar than regular milk.

39:33Chuck Bryant:That's a big plus. And the fact that I didn't make a pun about moving, also a plus. Organic Valley Protein Plus Ultra-Filtered Milk.

39:43Josh Clark:Protein plus pasture-raised. Learn more at OrganicValley.com. Go on, get a little out there, into the big heart of Nevada, where you can go off-road and off the map, on two lakes or on horseback. Dip into hot springs and dive into deserts. Climb a mountain or make your best effort. See thousands of stars in some of the darkest skies. Stake out haunted hotels. Can you make it to sunrise? There's always something new to see because we've got plenty of space to just be. Plan your trip at TravelMevada.com. You're building your career, your routine, your future. But this summer, that's for you. This season, escape into stories that feel like golden hour.

40:29Josh Clark:rooftop drinks, and the kind of love that sneaks up on you when you least suspect it. Sourcebooks' Summer of Romance brings together the rom-coms everyone's talking about, from Laugh Out Loud favorites by Lucy Score and Megan Quinn, to binge-worthy reads you'll want to finish in one sitting. Find your next summer read at Sourcebooks.com. That's Sourcebooks.com. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles. Stuff you should know All right, buddy. When we left off, things were expanding and cooling. And they still are, actually. The end. Yeah. Nope. Good night, everyone.

41:12Chuck Bryant:And everyone, here's Neil deGrasse Tyson. To take us home. So 56 ,000 years after the creation of the universe, or after the Big Bang, we were at a temperature of 15 ,740 degrees Fahrenheit. Nice and cool. Or 8 ,726 degrees Celsius, right? After another 324 ,000 years, so at 380 ,000 years after, it had cooled down to just under 5 ,000 degrees Fahrenheit and just under 3 ,000 degrees Celsius. And finally here, atoms started to form because protons and electrons could combine. And the other thing that happened too was the density had expanded out enough. The volume had increased is a better way to put it.

42:02Chuck Bryant:And the temperature had cooled so that suddenly the universe was now transparent. We could see through it. Up to this point, 379 ,000 years, you still couldn't see through it. It was too dense and too hot. And at about 380 ,000 years, it hits that point and you can see it like we do now.

42:19Josh Clark:Yeah, we finally have light. At that point, those cosmic microwave background radiation that we talked about earlier, it's locked in. I don't think we mentioned earlier where we're at now, temperature-wise, just to kind of put it in perspective. We currently are at roughly negative 454.8 degrees Fahrenheit, negative 270.4 degrees Celsius.

42:43Chuck Bryant:Yeah, that's the temperature of space right now, right? Yeah. Yeah. So it's definitely cooled. Apparently, it's still cooling. It's still not at absolute zero yet, which is the lowest temperature or the lowest activity that atoms will move at ever. So it's still cooling and still expanding.

43:01Josh Clark:All right. So here's when things really heat up or I guess really cool down. Sorry. Bad fun. Strickland points out for the next 100 million years or so, this is when the universe is really cooling. It's expanding. And then you have matter clusters together. eventually forms gas, and this is the quick view. We'll dive into it. Those gases form stars. Those stars cluster into galaxies, and those galaxies cluster together into solar systems. Right. That's the overview.

43:32Chuck Bryant:And so what they think happened was, because this really doesn't make any sense. As a matter of fact, one of the criticisms of Big Bang theory is that it violates the law of entropy that organizations become more disordered and chaotic over time. Right. And the idea that planets and galaxies and things formed. It seemed like it became more orderly. That's the opposite, right, exactly. And so they've really kind of looked into how anything would have formed at all. And what they think happened was that back in, say, the 10 to the negative 43 second era, there were quantum fluctuations, little vacuum energy fluctuations within this universe, this tiny little universe.

44:12Chuck Bryant:And that as the universe expanded very quickly, those fluctuations grew tremendously in size. And the vacuum energy in the cosmic microwave background, those little fluctuations that are on there, were just different enough from the other spots in the universe that they had slightly more density and thus exerted slightly more gravitational pull than other areas. and so more matter started to attract around them and they started to form stars and the stars started to form galaxies and planets started to form around them and all of a sudden what had just started out as little vacuum energy became ultimately universal hot spots where you could find matter clustered together which explains why so much of it is deep of deep space is just void and why some of it has stuff apparently it all began with these little tiny quantum fluctuations way back, trillions of a trillions of a second after the universe was created.

45:14Josh Clark:So like a really cool dude at a party the size of all humankind, and he's so cool that people start hanging out with him and that his party grows a little bigger? Sure. Is that a good way to describe it?

45:25Chuck Bryant:I think that's better than anybody could ever hope to.

45:28Josh Clark:So it's an attraction, basically, that drew things together ever so slightly enough to form larger bodies and then larger bodies.

45:37Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and the reason why they think this happened is because these tiny little fluctuations, little details in this little universe grow bigger over time, right? Especially if you look at this inflation growing as a process of time rather than just like volume expansion. It's also time is a dimension to it, right? Yeah. So it makes total sense in that just these little things would get bigger as the universe itself got bigger too.

46:08Josh Clark:Well, does that mean that the universe, and I'm being coy here, does that mean the universe will ever expand for all of time infinitely?

46:16Chuck Bryant:So, I mean, you're talking about like that debate, right? Yeah. Yeah, there's a whole debate over whether or not it's ever going to stop. And all of it comes down to how much matters in the universe, which we don't quite know yet. That's right. When they calculate the matter we do know about, they realize that there's actually some that you can't account for and that's dark matter because we know that there's something that's making stars behave differently or there's clearly some matter that we can't detect that's out there. So we can't account for all the matter in the universe. So we don't know how much matter is in the universe.

46:48Josh Clark:Right, but the idea is if there's enough, then that gravity will reverse and things will start to contract again, right?

46:54Chuck Bryant:Right, because gravity is this force that attracts matter to other matter. And yeah, eventually if there's enough matter, it'll counteract that expansive force that came out of it. And then yeah, probably we'll either stop is one school of thought. Right. Or the universe will contract and form what's called the big crunch. Right. And some people say that's what our universe is. It's just the cycle of expansion and contraction that takes place over many billions of years. but we're just one part of a cycle that is ongoing perhaps forever.

47:29Josh Clark:It makes it sound, when we talk about it like that, it makes it sound like the universe is just breathing.

47:34Chuck Bryant:It does, doesn't it?

47:35Josh Clark:Yeah. Yeah. In a creepy way. Yeah.

47:38Chuck Bryant:And Chuck, that has to do also, the reason why they don't know if it's going to keep expanding or contracting, they don't know if it's what's called a closed universe with positive curvature or one with negative curvature, right? And it also has to do with the shape of space to a certain degree. And Strickland also wrote a really top-notch article called Does Space Have a Shape? Yeah, that's a good one. It really is. And something from studying this that they figured out is that really it doesn't seem like it has a positive or a negative curvature. It seems flat. It seems like it has a zero curvature.

48:17Chuck Bryant:Right. And this is what's called the flat problem of the Big Bang Theory. Why should it be flat? That doesn't make any sense. Because if you look at the spectrum between positive curvature and negative curvature, there's a lot of places on that spectrum where the universe could fall one way or the other. But it's so close to the middle that astrophysicists and cosmologists have no idea if it's positive or negative in its curvature. And they've started to wonder, like, why should we be almost exactly in the middle? That doesn't make any sense. It would suggest that the early universe was so finely tuned that we're only slightly off of center.

48:59Chuck Bryant:So it would have had to have started almost completely at center. Because remember, small fluctuations grow bigger and bigger over time and on a larger scale. So since we're still so close to center right now with the universe as big as it is, It would have had to have been basically on top of exactly in the middle between a negative and a positive curvature at the very beginning of it, which is kind of puzzling in and of itself. That's like, well, that indicates some sort of weird fine-tuning. So does that mean that the astrophysicists are off a little bit in their own fine-tuning of the Big Bang Theory and inflation?

49:36Chuck Bryant:Or what? Who knows? Or is there a little kid with a lighter who set the snake off? That's right. And the snake was very well manufactured.

49:45Josh Clark:Well that's just one thing that we can't quite explain. We talked earlier about the fact that at the very beginning that the Big Bang Theory wasn't meant to address a lot of questions. One of which is that we touched on was what happened before the Big Bang and we just don't know. It doesn't even try. It doesn't, it can't right now. Yeah, like trying to explain time before timing existed is futile.

50:12Chuck Bryant:Right, because you get into stuff that I just suggested, which basically amounts to intelligent design or whatever, and that's beyond science. Like, science isn't equipped to say, oh, well, what about this, or what about that? And I tried really hard to get Neil deGrasse Tyson to say something, and he was not going to bite.

50:30Josh Clark:Well, no, and smartly, you know, I think a scientist looks at the observational data and extrapolates from there, and not, and I'm sure, like I said, I'm sure, and I think he even said in the interview that sure people like to talk about these things, but it's not like hard science.

50:45Chuck Bryant:Right, and also to answer that flat problem that I brought up, apparently inflation theory does answer it, it does satisfy it by saying the universe appears flat to us because we're looking at it strictly on a very local level, even though we're looking at 90 billion light years or something like that. Right. But it's really just a very small segment of something. So if you take a balloon and you blow it up, it's still curved, but if you're just looking at just a pinpoint segment of it, it's going to appear flat to everybody looking at it from just that tiny perspective. So it's basically our perspective that we're looking at the universe right now makes it seem like it's flat, but it's really actually curved one way or the other.

51:32Chuck Bryant:That's the answer to that.

51:34Josh Clark:Well, should we talk about some of the problems with the Big Bang Theory?

51:37Chuck Bryant:Sure.

51:38Josh Clark:There are criticisms, and there will continue to be. One is that it violates the first law of thermodynamics, that you can't create or destroy matter or energy. And proponents will say that that's unwarranted for a couple of reasons. One is, like we already said, it doesn't address the creation of the universe. It was never meant to. But just how it evolved or inflated over the years. Over the years. over the 60 or 70 years. Right. And another reason is, kind of like we said earlier, is that the further back you go, the rules don't apply. So maybe the law of thermodynamics is just completely moot when you go back that far.

52:17Josh Clark:Yeah. Like it didn't come into being until later.

52:20Chuck Bryant:Yeah, if matter and energy are like one in the same, I can imagine that some of our current laws don't necessarily apply.

52:27Josh Clark:Yeah, well, probably a lot of them.

52:29Chuck Bryant:Right. And then one of the other things, too, is that inflation that supposedly happened when the strong nuclear force decoupled from the electroweak force and the universe suddenly expanded. Within that one second, it just kept growing and growing and growing way faster than the speed of light. And a lot of people are like, wrong, nothing can go faster than the speed of light. Well, there was no light. Well, nothing you could see. Yeah, there were definitely photons, but they had the proponents of Big Bang have the same answer. They say, well, again, dude, you're talking general relativity. That wouldn't have applied at all.

53:10Josh Clark:Yeah, the answer is kind of consistently, don't even come at me with that. Right. Your laws.

53:15Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

53:17Josh Clark:Should we talk about, should we finish with a few other alternative explanations?

53:22Chuck Bryant:Yeah. Like we said, there are alternative models, right? One of them is that same one that Einstein was a proponent of, the steady state model. that it is not actually expanding.

53:36Chuck Bryant:And apparently, this is hard for me to wrap my mind around, the people who say that it's not expanding explain away expansion by saying that matter's created in proportion to the original density of the universe. Right. So maybe the universe is expanding some and more matter has to be created to keep the same density. So I think what they're saying is the universe has been at the same density all the time. And sure, it's expanding, but it's also creating more matter. Right, which holds it static. Yeah, I guess so.

54:13Josh Clark:Oh, the eck-py-rotic. Eck-py-rotic? Eck-py-rotic? Eck-py-rotic? I know those two letters should not be.

54:22Chuck Bryant:Eck-py-rotic?

54:23Josh Clark:Eck-py-rotic model? Yeah, I think that's it. Man, that's just, we're the worst. That suggests a universe is the result of a collision of, well, that's the one you brought up earlier, of two three-dimensional worlds and that there is some hidden fourth dimension out there.

54:39Chuck Bryant:Well, that's part of, the fourth dimension is part of, like, standard astrophysics and cosmology. But this was, like, this thing says our universe came out of two universes colliding. Right. in the fourth dimension, which that defies me a little bit. But the idea that there are four dimensions and one of them is time is definitely a part of, like, standard stuff. All right. Still hard to think of. Sure. And then plasma cosmology, I like that one a lot because it's just totally different from the way we think of the universe. It seeks to describe it based on its, basically, its electrical charge state, you know?

55:22Chuck Bryant:Okay. rather than the temperature of it or the density or anything like that. It's more involved in the plasma aspects of it because plasma is ionized gas, and it's like a fourth state of matter. Plasma cosmology looks at it through that lens, which is basically totally alien to everything we just talked about from what I can gather.

55:43Josh Clark:Did you just say there's totally aliens out there?

55:45Chuck Bryant:There's aliens out there, and the universe was started by a little kid with a lighter. Wow. That's my stand. Well, if you like this, then stick around because right now, Chuck, we have an interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson. We weren't joking. Yeah, great job on that one too, buddy. Thanks, man. We missed you. He was like, where's Chuck? No, he didn't. Yes, he did. Well, how are you guys doing? Good. How are you doing? Are you assuming I know how stuff works? I have an inkling that you may have a clue. Okay. So I guess my first question is then how do you specifically, how do you think of the universe when you think of the universe as a whole?

56:24Chuck Bryant:Like do you think of it as something like a speck of dust underneath a giant fingernail or is it part of a branching multiverse or is it a bubble that kind of pushes up against other bubbles? Like what is the universe when you think of it? I don't think – I think of the universe in a fundamentally different way from that of my colleagues. what you want to do is separate the things we have data and observations to support and the things that live and thrive on the frontier of theorizing about what the universe was, is, or will one day be, or what larger system it could be a part of. So if you live in the realm of data, then we are in an expanding universe, and it's been expanding for nearly 14 billion years.

57:11and it was smaller in the past and hot in the past, and it's getting larger and cooler by the minute. And we exist on this planet we call Earth, born 4.6 billion years ago with the rest of the solar system in some undistinguished part of an undistinguished galaxy we call the Milky Way. And this scenario, this picture, was very hard-earned, and it's no more than about 80 or 90 years old in total. Edwin Hubble, the man in this particular usage of the word, Edwin Hubble in the 1920s, so about 90 years ago, 1926, discovered that there are other island universes, if you will, not the way we might think of that term today, But back then, there were these spiral fuzzy things in the night sky.

58:08Imagine to be just spiral fuzzy things in the Milky Way. He would show that those spiral fuzzy things are not in the Milky Way. They are entire other Milky Ways, other galaxies. And that was a profound expansion of our worldview, if you would. And then just three years after that, he would show that these spiral fuzzy things are rapidly moving away from us. coupled with Einstein's general theory of relativity, we would learn that it's not just galaxies spreading apart within a preexisting space. It is the fabric of the space and time itself that's expanding. All of this is supported by data. So if you have discomfort thinking that the universe had a beginning and that we will expand forever, then too bad.

58:57That's just what the universe says. And the universe, I've said this before, the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you, especially when what we learn of the universe comes to us from methods and tools that completely transcend our native inborn biological senses, which in fact is the great ascent of science. What are all the ways we can decode the operations of nature without having to rely on the limits that our biological senses force us to occupy?

59:31Chuck Bryant:So when science is furthered decades down the road and the vision we have or the view we have of the universe we live in is magnified by orders of magnitude from what we're looking at through right now, what shape do you suspect it's going to take? Do you have suspicions? And if you don't, how do you keep yourself from making that leap? Like, yes, of course, this is what it's going to be. This is what we're really living in. Well, we all have biases, and let me not call them biases. Let's say we all have longings for how we think or want the universe to be. And if you begin to believe your longings too strongly, then you might miss some realities that don't fit your expectations, and someone else will catch them and make the discovery.

1:00:27So it's okay to lean in one direction or another, but don't do so while being blind to what else could be true, in spite of how you think it might be. So now the scenario I gave you is very well established in terms of observations and data, and basically a century of thinking about and observing the universe and posing questions and answering them. So beyond that, we can ask, is there a multiverse? This seems to come naturally out of certain thinking about the behavior of the universe when you try to bring together quantum physics and Einstein's general relativity. There are good arguments to suggest that we could be in a multiverse.

1:01:19And it's not obvious, at least to me, how one would test that just yet. But the theories of the universe that point to a multiverse are themselves well-tested. So this is what gives you the confidence that maybe our multiverse folks are onto something. And there are other frontiers. For example, quantum physics, which is the theory of the small, and general relativity, the theory of the large, they work perfectly well in their own regimes. General relativity describing the large-scale universe, quantum physics describing with very high precision atoms, molecules, nuclei, particles, this sort of thing.

1:02:10But in the early universe, when the entire universe was the size of an atom, then we might suppose that quantum forces override whatever was going on with general relativity because now the entire universe is of the size that quantum laws significantly manifest. And so, and right now we do not have a good way to merge those two theories. And we've got top people working on it. So these are collectively the string theorists and others in that realm who are thinking long and hard about, is there a third theory that needs to be introduced that will enclose quantum physics and general relativity into a deeper, broader understanding of what's going on, or will quantum physics absorb general relativity?

1:03:01I don't know that people know just yet. And it involves very high levels of math and higher dimensions and this sort of thing. And some people have criticized string theory for not really being a legitimate theory because you can't test it in any traditional way. But it's the only game in town. And they're not very expensive. You give them a pencil and a pad and throw in a laptop, and a string theorist is in business. So I let them go as far as they can take it.

1:03:29Chuck Bryant:So it does seem like there is either, like you said, quantum physics may be the answer to all this. We just don't fully understand that field yet enough to get back to the moment of the Big Bang or what happened before the Big Bang. But it could also be, from what I've seen, the unified field theory that gets us back to that point. But either way, to get to a point where we go further beyond our current understanding, further back in time in the Big Bang, including before the Big Bang of what was before, It seems like it's going to take a vast leap forward. Do you think that leap is going to come from a genius that hasn't been born yet or has been born but hasn't been educated and entered the field yet?

1:04:18Chuck Bryant:Is that how it's going to happen? Is it going to happen from this person combining this work with this work and that work and this work, and then suddenly the pieces are going to fall together in that sense? That's a great question that also has a philosophical dimension to it. such that in modern times, great leaps in science, do they happen by the lone genius burning the candle at midnight, coming up with a eureka moment, or do they come about because you have huge, expensive, highly collaborative scientific projects, such as LIGO discovering gravitational waves, such as the next generation space telescope.

1:05:02It's called the James Webb Space Telescope, not yet launched. But that will enable us to see galaxies being born in the early universe, as well as a host of other frontier observations that were not possible with previous telescopes. Well, that telescope had to be designed by whole teams of people with questions that they had in mind that they want answered by the new data. So I'm not convinced that we're just waiting for a new smart person to come along and have it all make sense. I think we're waiting for someone to obtain new data that we've never seen before that then force us into new ideas and understandings of the universe.

1:05:48Maybe there's some new theory that, maybe, I'm not discounting it, but what I can tell you is we're in an era, look at the Higgs boson, for example, that required the Large Hadron Collider and thousands of scientists and tens of thousands of engineers who built the thing in the first place. So we're kind of in a collaborative era right now. And so if I were a betting man, I would say that the great discoveries to come will come about from huge collaborations, possibly even international collaborations. Now, that doesn't remove the question as to whether there is an Einstein walking among us who happened to have been born into poverty in a developing country, and then we will never know.

1:06:35Well, that would be one of the great tragedies of modern civilization. So I, as an educator, feel very strongly about what kind of access people of the world should have to knowledge, to learning, to health. A person should be able to live a day and not have the entire day be preoccupied about whether you have food or whether or not you're going to die from a disease that your neighbor just died of. So I think we should be able to measure our state of our civilization by the extent to which we are in the position to discover another Einstein rising up from the midst. And that's one way to get an Einstein.

1:07:25Another one is to wait around until one is born into the right circumstances. We've got 7 billion people on Earth. somebody in there's got to be badass enough to help us out.

1:07:35Chuck Bryant:So you brought up your role as an educator and you're a world-class science popularizer and explainer. What is it that got you into science as a kid? I was nine years old and it was a first visit to the Hayden Planetarium right here in New York. My local planetarium. I think most big cities have planetariums. Even medium-sized cities will have a planetarium. And my family, my parents, took my brother, my sister, and me to all the cultural institutions of the city every weekend. So one weekend it was the Natural History Museum, another it was the zoo, another it was the aquarium. We even went to other things that sort of talented grown-ups did, like we'd go to a baseball game or the opera or theater.

1:08:21And that exposure enabled the three of us to see what is possible beyond the traditional, you want to be a doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, the three traditional options that you're given as a six -year-old or a seven-year-old. And so out of that arose my interest in the universe that really got cemented by the time I was 11. I knew that. In fact, I was so convinced that I wanted to do astrophysics that I began to question whether or not it was, in fact, the universe that chose me.

1:08:56Chuck Bryant:That's really cool. Well, thank you very much, Dr. Tyson. We appreciate you joining us. This was like you just took our Big Bang episode and moved along light years. So thank you. Oh, okay. Thank you. The light year is not actually very far in the scale of the universe. So I'd feel bad if I had taken it along billions. How about a parsec or something? A parsec is only 3.26 light years. So that still won't even happen. All right. Billions of light years. You know, a parsec is not even far enough away to get to the nearest star to the sun. Okay. So you're just in the wrong zone there. Okay. Well, then how about billions of parsecs?

1:09:36Nice.

1:09:37Chuck Bryant:Okay. thank you very much what a guy huh

1:09:40Josh Clark:great job yeah he was man he's just such a cool customer that's why he is where he is now

1:09:46Chuck Bryant:yeah and if you want to hang out with him head on over to the Hayden Planetarium I'm sure he'd be happy to see you sure you can see him on tour you can see him with StarTalk Live he's got a podcast for those of you who don't know with our pal Eugene Merman

1:10:00Josh Clark:he was on our TV show even he was

1:10:03Chuck Bryant:I didn't get a chance to ask him if he remembered that I'm sure he didn't That's why I didn't get a chance. Yeah.

1:10:09Josh Clark:That just would have been embarrassing.

1:10:11Chuck Bryant:Well, if you want to know more about the Big Bang, type those words into the search bar at howstuffworks.com, and they'll bring up some great stuff. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail.

1:10:23Josh Clark:I'm going to call this, is Russia European? Nice. Remember that debate? Sure. Well, it wasn't so much a debate. We just kind of wondered. Right. In the Continents episode, hey, guys, thanks for cracking me up with the show. It's astonishing how many film references you can fit into a geography lesson. Yes, Russia is definitely a European country! Historically, it's always been considered a part of Europe. For example, it was named as one of the six major European countries in World War I, and the Tsar was closely related to other royalty in Europe. This is very different from China or India, always much more distant and mysterious to the east.

1:11:01Josh Clark:Also considered that maps are very deceptive. Over 75 % of Russia's population is on the European side, including every major city from Moscow to St. Petersburg. From Milan to Minsk. I knew you were going to say that. Very nice. I would have been so disappointed had you not. Most of the land you see to the east is empty and largely uninhabitable, only there to look pretty on a map. Well, I don't know about that.

1:11:26Chuck Bryant:That's what the little kid with the lighter put it there for.

1:11:29Josh Clark:So cheers, that is from Timothy And that was one heck of a Seinfeld reference

1:11:34Chuck Bryant:Timothy or Timothay? Is he Russian? Yeah, good point It's Timothay Moskov Who just wrote it Using his pseudonym, Timothy Milan Dimitz If you want to get in touch with me and Chuck and Jerry You can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast You can join us on facebook.com Slash stuff you should know And you can send us an email to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

1:12:07Josh Clark:For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

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