EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,023 words- 0:02 – 1:32
Michelle Thaller’s NASA outreach roots & why she should start her own YouTube
- SPSpeaker
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. [upbeat rock music] I like that.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Absolutely.
- SPSpeaker
It's also, there's some things that are so awesome, it's like, "That's fucking awesome." [laughs]
- MTMichelle Thaller
How, how, I, I was, I was trying to talk about black holes to some high school students just, seriously, earlier this week, and I was, I kept saying, you know, "What the f-," you know?
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- MTMichelle Thaller
So I, I got nothing to pitch, but I, I, uh, um, I, the Shorewood Men's Club, I was giving a talk there. The Shorewood Wisconsin is where I live. The Men's Club invited me to give a talk about astronomy last week, and when I mentioned I was coming to the show, they just freaked out. And so the only thing I have is my Shorewood Men's Club, uh, uh, uh, water bottle.
- SPSpeaker
Well, shout out to the Shorewood Men's Club.
- MTMichelle Thaller
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
That's awesome. That's so cool that you give those speeches. I love your YouTube talks. They're fantastic.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Well, thank you. Wow.
- SPSpeaker
I have watched probably every one you've ever done. I've, I've watched at least... I mean, how many have you done? I've done-
- MTMichelle Thaller
A lot
- SPSpeaker
... I've watched at least, like, 10 of them.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah. I mean, so, I mean, pretty much what I did, at, at NASA I did a lot of sort of the science spokesperson stuff. And so, so most of that was, you know, I, I, the, I, I'm more on the NASA videos. I hosted, like, launch events. I haven't done much privately on, on YouTube. I'm, I'm, I'm thinking about starting some stuff on YouTube.
- SPSpeaker
Oh, you should.
- MTMichelle Thaller
I'll, I'll... Yeah. I, I, I'll work on that.
- SPSpeaker
Please.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Okay.
- SPSpeaker
100%.
- MTMichelle Thaller
[laughs] Thank you.
- SPSpeaker
100%. You've said so many things that made me just go, "What?"
- MTMichelle Thaller
Ah.
- 1:32 – 4:32
Scale of the cosmos: making the Milky Way comprehensible (or trying to)
- SPSpeaker
Like, here's a big one that you said. You were talking about if the size of Earth, if the Earth was the dot of an I in a book, in regular print-
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yes
- SPSpeaker
... that the Milky Way galaxy would be as large as the Earth itself.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Actually a little bigger.
- SPSpeaker
[mimics explosion]
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah. So I mean, the, the thing is, this is an interesting thing-
- SPSpeaker
Wow
- MTMichelle Thaller
... about science communication. You say that i- if the, if the Sun were the size of a dot of an I, and you gotta remember, you can fit a million Earths inside the Sun, right? This is a huge thing. So if that's the size of a dot of an I in, on text, then the galaxy would be the size of the Earth. That's when people's eyes get big and people respond to it.
- SPSpeaker
So it's not just the Earth, it's the, the Sun. So if the Sun was the dot of an I.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yes, that's right. So I, let's, let's make this clear. So if the Sun were the size of a dot of an I on a page of text, so you could fit a million Earths inside that dot of an I, then the Milky Way galaxy would be bigger than the Earth.
- SPSpeaker
[exhales]
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah. Like, it's, it's huge.
- SPSpeaker
So if the Earth was the dot of an I, then-
- MTMichelle Thaller
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
... how big [laughs] is the Milky Way galaxy? 'Cause the Sun is how many millions Earths?
- MTMichelle Thaller
Uh, volume-wise, you could fit over a million Earths inside the Sun. Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Oh.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah. The, the, the Sun is about 800,000 miles across. You could fit about 110 Earths across it, the diameter.
- SPSpeaker
We do those things where you show the, the differences between our Sun and different stars-
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah, absolutely
- SPSpeaker
... you know, immense stars.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yep. Mm-hmm.
- SPSpeaker
And you go bigger and bigger and bigger, and you just, you get to the point where you're like, "I can't... My... This is not working. I can't get, I can't process this. It's too kooky."
- MTMichelle Thaller
There, there's nobody that can process it. I mean, I mean, one of, one of the, the, the really kind of, you know, the thing about sort of demystifying scientists is the idea that our brains somehow work any differently, and, like, we can visualize what a light-year is, right? You know, a light-year is about six trillion miles, the, you know, the, the distance light travels in a year. No, we're human beings. We, we get used to using the terms, we get used to, you know, using the numbers, but, but we've got the same brain as everybody else. Nobody can visualize what a galaxy really is. And you can take pictures of them, you can say the word galaxy, but people have no idea what, what monsters these are. And, and, and then with, like, with the James Webb Space Telescope, you know, all of a sudden you're taking pictures of billions of them, and, you know, they're right in front of your eyes. This is not something that you can argue about. It's an image. And, and you see these, these foggy hazes of, of, of stars. You know, basically so many stars you can't see them individually. And that's real. And, and I mean, it still gives me goosebumps.
- SPSpeaker
That's awesome. [laughs]
- MTMichelle Thaller
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
It gives me goosebumps too, but it's so cool that it gives it to you, and you actually study it your whole life.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Oh, that's, that's, that's the whole point. I, I mean, you know, working for NASA was a huge, huge honor. And I mean, all of us there are doing this. I mean, we were all science fiction fans. You know, we all love imagination. Um, you know, we... Th- that was the best thing about working at NASA, was, was the, was the joy and, and, and the, the teamwork and the camaraderie and the people that you're working with, that, uh, you know, they, they think this is the best thing in the world to do.
- 4:32 – 6:58
Light pollution, lost night skies, and ‘you are not separate from space’
- SPSpeaker
Well, I mean, there's a, a real problem that we have where I think that cities and light pollution have really, for w... You know, it's great that we have cities. It's wonderful. It's wonderful that we have all this electricity and that we can see things at nighttime. But boy, we have done ourselves a massive disservice by not being able to see the stars all the time.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Oh, yeah.
- SPSpeaker
And I think people have kind of lost the wonder of it. When you're only looking at it as images on your phone, or when, you know, y- the only time you get it is on vacation, occasionally you look up in the sky, "Wow, look at all the stars here. It's different here," th- this is something that everyone should be absolutely blown away by. At night, you have a vision of the most spectacular thing any human being has ever seen, ever. Just the Milky Way galaxy alone, it's nuts. It's crazy to think that those are all stars, and that the, you can't count them. It's insane. There's so many of them. And it's above you every day, and we're just blase, blase. We're just, like, so used to it. We're so dismissive of it. It's, it doesn't mean any- It, it's exciting when someone's excited by it, because I'm like, more people need to get the fuck away from the cities and just go see how crazy this is that we're flying through space.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah. [laughs] It, it is profound. And to be that close, I mean, just looking up, you don't even need a telescope or a pair of binoculars. The presence of something so much larger than you-But I mean, if you've, if you've listened to some of my, my podcasts, then I, I think you, you know that the, the, the big deal for me is that you are such a part of this. You are such an intimate, intrinsic part of this. It's not we're separate from space. You know, we, we look up and there's something separate from us. You know, that's the story of us up there. You know, the, the only way the universe makes atoms, the only way that makes, you know, the chemicals all around us, you know, the, the aluminum, the iron, the oxygen, the carbon, you know, the phosphorus, everything that makes me up, you know, the only thing in the universe that makes atoms is the interior of a star. It's the only place where nuclear fusion puts atoms together. So, so everything that you are, the s- the story is up there. And, you know, so you're, you're not looking at something separate and distant, you know? I mean, astrophysics is the story of, you know, the end of your nose, literally. I mean, I mean, we are part of this beautiful, bigger thing.
- SPSpeaker
That's a weird concept. The, uh, I mean, that's from that old song. You know, we are stardust.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah, we are golden.
- SPSpeaker
We, we're a billion-year-old carbon.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Got to get ourselves back to the garden. Yeah, yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Carbon.
- MTMichelle Thaller
That's right.
- 6:58 – 8:09
JWST ‘little red dots’ and why astronomers name everything so plainly
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. Um, that, that's real. That's what we are, and that's what all life is, and that, that's just a very strange thing for people to wrap their heads around as we're sort of slowly getting a greater and greater understanding of the complexity of the universe itself, which is relatively recent in terms of hus- human history. I mean, we really didn't know all, all the, what, what just we know now because the James Webb telescope is so crazy-
- MTMichelle Thaller
Mm-hmm
- SPSpeaker
... where they're seeing these new, these galaxies. They're, they're confusing. Like, why are they formed so early?
- MTMichelle Thaller
Oh, yeah. Oh, I, I, I gave a talk about those just a few weeks ago, the, the, the red dots. Yes.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- MTMichelle Thaller
And they, they never let astronomers name anything, right? Where you're, you're seeing something so dramatic and they call it the little red dots, right? You know, or, you know, there's a storm on Jupiter that's three times the size of the Earth with 400 mile an hour winds and they call it, you know, the red spot, you know?
- SPSpeaker
How come no one's allowed to name them?
- MTMichelle Thaller
[laughs] Well, naming conventions, uh, well, they're, they're, they're complex. So, so if you, if you discover a comet, you get to- no, if you discover an asteroid, you get to name it. If you discover a comet, the comet is named after you. But anything else has to be done by international committee. And so, you know, the, the, because of that, things don't end up with very interesting names. They all end up with, you know, catalog numbers, you, you know, basically phone numbers.
- 8:09 – 12:09
Saturn’s polar hexagon and Titan’s Dragonfly: exploring our ‘neighborhood’
- SPSpeaker
What do they call that weird hexagon on Jupiter? Is it a hexagon?
- MTMichelle Thaller
Oh, it's Saturn. S- the, the hex-
- SPSpeaker
Saturn
- MTMichelle Thaller
... the hexagon.
- SPSpeaker
That's right.
- MTMichelle Thaller
I, I think they call that the, you know, the hexagon on Saturn. They, they, they-
- SPSpeaker
That's it?
- MTMichelle Thaller
... they don't even, they don't really, the hexagonal storm. It's fantastic. Uh, you could fit about two Earths across that, and it, it, it's a, it's a hexi- it's a hexagon jet stream, basically. You've got super fast-moving winds around the pole of Saturn. And, and Saturn is so cold, the gas is so cold that there's almost no friction in the gas. So unlike here, you know, the, the jet stream here, there's kind of this joke-
- SPSpeaker
There it is. We can see it
- MTMichelle Thaller
... oh, there's a picture. Hey, that's fantastic. Um-
- SPSpeaker
That's wild
- MTMichelle Thaller
... one of my favorite pictures NASA ever took, if you look at the little dot in the middle of that, the sort of little eye of the storm, we actually have a picture from Cassini where you can see the sun glinting off of hundreds of mile high. There you go. It's down at the bottom there. It's in the bottom in the middle. Yeah, that picture. W- little more over.
- SPSpeaker
The black one?
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah. That, that, that's a picture, uh, from the Cassini space mission. That's a real image.
- SPSpeaker
Whoa.
- MTMichelle Thaller
And that's the eye of that storm. And, and those are, like I said, hundreds of miles high banks of clouds catching the sunlight on, on the poles of Saturn. And, you know, we did that. You know, we, we went there. We flew over that storm.
- SPSpeaker
That's crazy.
- MTMichelle Thaller
And, uh, uh, and, and yeah, I mean, uh, as amazing as the storm is, it's, um, it, it's at least fairly well understood a- as a very low temperature jet stream. You know, it, I mean, you may be familiar here, people kind of joke about like, you know, the weather's the same, a week from now the weather will be about the same as it is now. There are patterns that get set up in, in the jet stream of the Earth, and you, you take away all the heat and all the friction, and it forms this, this beautiful storm. It's just-
- SPSpeaker
What, why, what is the theories why it forms a hexagon?
- MTMichelle Thaller
It's, it's something called a standing wave. The, the, the, the, the jet stream basically sets up a wave inside this circulation. And, and I'm, I'm, I'll, I will admit I'm not an atmospheric specialist, but that, that's what I know. And, and, and that wave kind of, kind of makes this hexag- hexagonal shape. And then, and then you cool everything down without friction, and that's how the whole thing works. They, they have done computer simulations of very fast-moving jet streams under the conditions of Saturn, and you can get this sort of shape to set up. Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Wow.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah, yeah.
- SPSpeaker
God, it's so fascinating. And it's so fascinating that we think of that as being so far away.
- MTMichelle Thaller
That's just right in our neighborhood. Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
It's just right there.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
It's super hard to get to.
- MTMichelle Thaller
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
Takes a long time, but it's just right there.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Well, we're hoping to launch a, when I say we, NASA's hoping to launch a, a new mission to one of the moons of Saturn, uh, hopefully in, in like 2028. It'll take it something like, you know, six, seven years to get out to Saturn. But there's a, there's that giant moon of Saturn, Titan, which has a, a thick atmosphere. It's the only place where the air pressure, the air pressure's actually even a little bit greater than the room here. And, uh, um, it's, it's very cold. You know, it, it's, it's, you know, almost close to 300 degrees below zero. But it's got this thick atmosphere and tons of organic molecules and evidence of liquid water below the surface. It's one of the places that, that might be friendly for life. And so they're, they're designing, have you heard about this? It's called Dragonfly. It's a, it's an octocopter. It's a big drone. There you go. Yeah, perfect. And so, so, so, so Dragonfly is gonna be this big octocopter that we're gonna land on this moon, Titan. We've already landed on this moon once with the Cassini mission, and it's got this, this really kick-ass, uh, chemical, uh, laboratory inside to look for the conditions for life, you know, and anything, you know, that we might be able to find and, and obviously sample more than one site. You know, it would actually fly around and, and-
- 12:09 – 16:35
Venus landings, alien planets, and how we detect exoplanet atmospheres
- SPSpeaker
Didn't the Russians land something on Venus?
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah. Well, more than once. Yeah, the, the, the, the, the Soviet Union is the only nation, you know, former Soviet Union now, that ever landed on Venus, and Ve- landing on Venus is way hard [laughs] because-
- SPSpeaker
They got crazy pictures, too
- MTMichelle Thaller
... the surface temperature is about 1,000 degrees, and the air pressure is similar to being about a mile b- below the ocean.
- SPSpeaker
That's a photo-
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah, it's a photo
- SPSpeaker
... from it.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yep, that's real. And-
- SPSpeaker
That's a photo taken in a thousand-degree temperature.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yes.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- MTMichelle Thaller
Didn't last long, but, uh, um-
- SPSpeaker
Wow
- MTMichelle Thaller
... everything is crushed flat. I mean, the, the landscape is just crushed flat by that, you know, huge pressure, uh, you know, this incredible dense atmosphere. Uh, the clouds are sulfuric acid. That's why it looks yellow. That's real. Uh, you know, sulfuric acid clouds, I mean, it is like, you know, classic vision of hell. [laughs] It, it's, it's, it's heavy, and deep, and, uh, and, and dense, and, uh, sulfuric acid. Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
It's so interesting too that w- our understanding of planets in terms of, like, w- just what's in our solar system, they're, they're all different. They vary so much, and this is just all we know about the known universe in terms of planets. Is it possible that there could be some planets out there that are set up completely different than the planets in our solar system?
- MTMichelle Thaller
Oh, absolutely. Um, one of my favorite websites, just for fun... I mean, so the, um... It changes every day how many planets around other stars we know about. We call them exoplanets, exterior planets. Um, I think we're up to about 5,000 that we know of.
- SPSpeaker
When did we start noticing them?
- MTMichelle Thaller
Um, so this was-
- SPSpeaker
Or at least detecting them.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah, yeah. The, the... This is something I was been involved with ever since I was in college. When, when I was in college, my, uh, my research advisor was a man named David Latham, and he was trying to, to find the first evidence. I mean, we, we figured other stars have planets. I mean, it can't be just us. But, but they're hard to see. They're tiny. They're dark. I mean, I mean, compared to a star, right? I mean, planets don't glow themselves, right? So they just reflect starlight. I mean, we, we literally said it was like trying to see a, a firefly around a searchlight from 200 miles away, right? I... How would you do it? And, uh, I mean, now we're actually getting so good at it, we find more every, every week, almost every day. I mean, pretty soon it's gonna be, I, I think, thousands of new planets every single year. And, um, and some-
- SPSpeaker
Do we have actual images?
- MTMichelle Thaller
So for the most part, we don't have images, but that doesn't mean we don't have really cool, uh, uh, observations, including the chemistry of their atmospheres. This is really amazing to me. So they're so tiny, it's hard to actually get a pixel. They're, they're smaller than a pixel. But when these things pass in front of their star, right? So there's a star, and they, they, they, they pass in front of it. So you're looking at this thing pass in front of the star. It makes a tiny little solar eclipse. It goes by. It blocks a little bit of the starlight, and we find them that way. We find the stars twinkling as little planets go around them again and again. They have to come back three times for us to say it's a planet, otherwise it could be a spot on the star or something else. And, um, the, the amazing thing is that the starlight will shine through the atmosphere of that planet, and we can actually, we can actually probe the chemistry of the atmosphere. So we find planets that have, you know, they're the size of the Earth, about the temperature of the Earth. They have evidence of water vapor, carbon dioxide, oxygen. And then, uh, last year there was this fantastic controversial discovery. I mean, it's, it's very real. We need to follow it up. Um, we think we're starting to see the evidence of organic molecules. It, it, it, it's not, you know, a very strong signal yet. And this, this, this was, this was a press release from the James Webb Space Telescope, and there were some scientists that wondered if these could be organic molecules that, that, that might someday be traceable even to the presence of life. They, they, they resembled something that plankton might, might give off on an ocean world. And then of course, I... The rest of the scientists said, "The, the data's not good enough yet. We need much better observations before you can say that." You know, we could maybe believe it's an organic carbon-based molecule, but we don't know which one it is yet. So, you know, I mean, stay tuned. I mean, I would never have thought the first evidence of life outside the Earth, like, a really hard chemical scientific evidence, would be on a planet around another star. I thought we'd maybe find it on Mars or on some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. But now with the James Webb Space Telescope and the telescopes that will come afterwards, we might be able to actually, you know, get, get enough of a sense of the atmosphere of these planets to start looking for life signs. Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
So the sun, the star, is passing light through this little tiny thing that's smaller than a pixel-
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... and through the atmosphere-
- 16:35 – 20:30
Spectroscopy 101, helium discovered on the Sun, and the power of ‘squiggly lines’
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... where the light passes through. What are we using to detect that?
- MTMichelle Thaller
It's a technique called spectroscopy, and it's a really, really powerful thing. I mean, this is what most scientists do. As, as beautiful as images are of a gorgeous galaxy or a star, th- that's not really what we do. We, we look at these little squiggly lines. We get very excited. We, we let the light from the star pass through, um, a grating that, that actually draws it into a rainbow. You take, takes that white light. You've seen pictures of, like, prism, you know, Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd. You know, white-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- MTMichelle Thaller
... light goes in, rainbow comes out. If you measure really, really carefully how much light is coming in every color, you can tell astounding things. You, you can tell how hot the star is, how fast it's rotating, uh, in some cases, how far away a galaxy is. That's how we measure how far away they are from us in space, and you can measure the chemistry molecule by molecule. You can tell exactly what atoms and molecules are in that object. Here we go. Look at that. So what your amazing person-
- SPSpeaker
Jamie
- MTMichelle Thaller
... by, by the way-
- SPSpeaker
Oh
- MTMichelle Thaller
... th- that's incredible.
- SPSpeaker
Nice to meet you.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Thank, thank you so much.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- MTMichelle Thaller
Um, every, every, every element, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, has a fingerprint in the rainbow, and it's like, it's... You know it's that. There's nothing else like it. You know that you see carbon and nitrogen if you see these colors of the rainbow shining at that particular light. And it's not just simple things like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, but it's, it's water vapor, carbon dioxide, um, organic molecules. Everybody has their fingerprint in the rainbow.And so when, when the starlight shines through the atmosphere, there you go. That's how we tell what these things are made of. You know, this is a dying star. This is actually in the Carina Nebula, and, uh, the most, it'll be one of the most luminous stars there is. And we, we pass the light through a rainbow, and then looking really, really carefully at how much light comes at every color, you can pick apart exactly what it's made of.
- SPSpeaker
Wow.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah. Did, did, did you know that y- you know, helium, you, you know the element helium, right?
- SPSpeaker
Mm-hmm.
- MTMichelle Thaller
You, you may be familiar that the, uh, the Greek, the Greek sun god's name is Helios. Helium is an element we discovered on the sun before we ever knew it was here. In, in, in the, the turn of the last century, the late 1800s, when they were passing sunlight through a prism and they were looking at all these patterns of light, there was one chemical that we'd never seen before here, and so they named it after the sun, helium. It was on the sun, but not here. We, we, we never knew that helium was here. That was found later. It was later we found it, you know, in like, you know, natural gas, you know, radioactive decay. Helium is such a light gas it just leaves the Earth. It just doesn't stick around. And so, you know, helium, we saw this, this pattern of colors in, in the sun's light, and we were like, "Well, what, what the hell is that?" And, uh, it turned out to be a new element we'd never found before.
- SPSpeaker
What year was that?
- MTMichelle Thaller
We, we should look this up. I don't know exactly, but if we Google what year was helium found, um, yeah, I'm sure [laughs] we can find it.
- SPSpeaker
Well, I mean, I've been thinking about hel- helium balloons and people who, you know, suck helium-
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... and make their voice go really high-pitched.
- MTMichelle Thaller
That's right. But that, we didn't even know about helium until-
- SPSpeaker
1868
- MTMichelle Thaller
... '68. There we go.
- SPSpeaker
That's nuts. So they figured out that there was helium in the sun in 1868.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Long before we ever identified it on this planet.
- SPSpeaker
That is so nuts.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah. Just think what's out there. We didn't even know about helium.
- SPSpeaker
It's not just that it's what's out there, but that there's people out there that can figure out how to do that in 1868. Shout out to Pierre Janssen-
- 20:30 – 29:39
Relativity made practical: GPS time correction, gravity time dilation, and ‘what is a clock?’
- SPSpeaker
The idea that the faster you go, the slower time is, is so hard to wrap one's head around. And one of the things that I heard you talking about, you were talking about GPS satellites.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Mm-hmm.
- SPSpeaker
And you were saying that GPS satellites, because they're going, what, what are they going, like 20,000 miles an hour or something like that?
- MTMichelle Thaller
So actually, if we, we wanna break this down a little bit, there, there are a couple different effects about time. And, and one of the things that, that, you know, NASA does is we, you know, calibrates the GPS satellites and the signal coming. And, and you wouldn't... I mean, I think I heard that, I mean, w- within, within a day, if we didn't take into account the time difference these things are in, that we, we, we'd be about six miles off, I mean, in a s- in a single day.
- SPSpeaker
That's crazy.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Oh, yeah. No, it's, it's a big deal.
- SPSpeaker
That's so crazy.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah. I mean-
- SPSpeaker
That's so crazy.
- MTMichelle Thaller
It-
- SPSpeaker
And that's just above us.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Ti- time really is something. I mean, this, this is not a theory. Ti- time is, is, is variable depending on how fast you're going and also how far off the Earth's surface you are, or how, I should say how far away from a, a big gravity body you are. In the case of the GPS satellites, there's, there's, there's, there's two things going on, and it, it, it's, it's, it's kind of fun because it's actually the reverse for the astronauts. So let's, if I wanna break this down, this is really fun. Okay. We have clocks that are so accurate that if you move about two feet above where, you know, if, if we had a clock on this desk, and then if we moved it up about two feet, we could actually detect time flowing differently because you're just that far away from the Earth's gravity, just two feet. Your head and the f- and your feet, we spend most of our lives, say, standing up, are actually going through time at slightly different rates.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- MTMichelle Thaller
The, the farther away you are from a gravitational source, I mean, you, you probably like movies like Interstellar, right?
- SPSpeaker
Mm-hmm.
- MTMichelle Thaller
With, with, you know, Matthew McConaughey. Remember the big black hole?
- SPSpeaker
Mm-hmm.
- MTMichelle Thaller
And the closer they get to the big black hole, the slower time goes. That's not a theory. That's something we can actually measure with clocks. And a black hole has so much gravity it does it a lot more dramatically, but it's happening right in this room. Seriously, your head is in a different timeframe than your feet right now.
- SPSpeaker
That's nuts.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah. And you, and I mean, it's measurable. You, you, you need extremely accurate clocks. But in the case of the GPS satellites, the GPS satellites are in what we call a m- a medium orbit. They're not as far away as the geostationary satellites. But they're, they're not actually going that fast. They're only going about 9,000 miles an hour around the Earth. The, the astronauts in the space station, by the way, are going much faster. They're, they're, they're going more, let, let's say approximately 20,000 miles an hour. So the GPS satellites are going a little slower. And, and yeah, okay, 8,000 miles an hour is, is a, a lot, and, and that does slow your time down. But the bigger effect for GPS satellites is how far away from the Earth they are.
- SPSpeaker
Wow.
- MTMichelle Thaller
W- we're actually going slower in time than they are because we're closer to the Earth's gravity. And they're so far away, they're actually going a little faster than we are in time. Now, they're, they're also slowed down by their fast velocity. The, the, the faster you go, the slower your time goes. But people don't realize there's another factor, and that's how far away you are from gravity. For the astronauts, the astronauts are closer to the Earth, right? So they, they're actually not so far away as the satellites, and they're going much faster. So for the astronauts, it's the, it's the motion. It's, it's the time dilation from the motion that's a bigger effect. Uh, if you are on the space station for a year, you come back about 1/100 of a second younger than you should be.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- MTMichelle Thaller
And, uh, you know, obviously that's not a big deal, but it's easily measurable.
- SPSpeaker
Wow.
- MTMichelle Thaller
And in the case of the satellites, you wouldn't get the right location, the data wouldn't be right unless we take into account two things, how fast they're going, the closer to the speed of light you go, the slower time goes, but also how far away from the gravitational pull of the Earth they are. The, the f- the f- the closer you are into gravity, the slower time goes.
- SPSpeaker
I think the weirdest thing that I've ever heard anybody say is that all time existsCurrently
- MTMichelle Thaller
That's Einstein. I mean, that goes back, that goes back 120 years.
- SPSpeaker
That's such a bizarre thought.
- MTMichelle Thaller
We don't know if it's true, but, but it's ... I mean, Einstein really thought there wasn't much of a way around it because he said, "Okay, well, if everything is going at different velocities compared to everything else," right? I mean, it's, it's a great question a kid can ask, "How fast am I going through space?" You know, and the Earth, you know, if you're on the equator of the Earth, that goes around at about, uh, uh, you know, about, about 1,000 miles an hour. You know, and then, you know, we go, we go around the sun at about 67,000 miles an hour in our orbit. The sun's going around the galaxy about half a million miles an hour around the galaxy. The galaxy is going towards a g- galactic cluster at more than a million miles an hour. But, you know, how fast are we going really? And th- th- the only thing you can measure is how fast are you going relative to something else. There's no answer. You know, how fast am I going? Well, I mean, am I still or am I actually traveling close to the speed of light right now? I don't know. So, so Einstein said the only way he could really think about how that would work is if the universe was just one big thing. You know, all of time and space exists in a big whole thing. There's only one now. Einstein famously said, "The past, present, and future are, you know, persistently annoying illusions." Now again, do we know this to be true? At the moment, we don't have any better physics, and I, and I doubt that physics will get any less weird than that. But it, w- yeah, I mean, I mean, that's sort of the way modern physics thinks the universe may be, is, is a, a big whole thing that started from beginning to end and is all now-ish.
- 29:39 – 36:19
Why you can’t reach light speed, and why entanglement is even stranger
- SPSpeaker
That if, [laughs] that if you traveled at the speed of light, the, the problem would be you would have infinite mass.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Well, anything with mass, yeah, yeah. That's the thing.
- SPSpeaker
So if a person was-
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... in a spaceship and it traveled the speed of light, that spaceship would have infinite mass.
- MTMichelle Thaller
It's basically, it, it, it's what makes accelerating up to the speed of light impossible, that anything with mass can't travel at the speed of light. I mean, the, the equations blow up. But what does infinite mass mean? Do you have more mass than the whole universe? What the hell is that? It, as you approach the speed of light if you have mass, it takes more and more energy to accelerate you even just a little bit more, so you never get to the speed of light. You know, your spee- you're, you're going 99.9% the speed of light. Okay, I wanna go a little faster. It, it takes more and more energy each little tiny step you make. It's a, it's, it ... Basically, you, you never get to the speed of light. It, it takes an infinite amount of energy.So, you know, when it comes to things like interstellar travel, I, I, I don't think we're ever going to take a spaceship and accelerate it to the speed of light. I, I, I mean, I- we might get very close. There are particles in space that do have mass, like neutrinos, tiny little bits of mass. They travel very close to the speed of light, but they don't travel at the speed of light. But to me, you know, I, I think that the, the, the idea of traveling interstellar distances or even intergalactic distances, you know, the thing that starts to really get me is the question of this, this what is space and what is time at all, quantum entanglement.
- SPSpeaker
Right. Glad you brought that up.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Oh, yeah. Uh, I, I, [laughs] I'm gonna say I, I hope your listeners- I, I, I don't wanna get, I don't wanna, I w- I want people to come along with us.
- SPSpeaker
Oh, they're coming along. Don't worry.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah. I, I don't-
- SPSpeaker
They are
- MTMichelle Thaller
... I don't wanna say things that sound so stupid. They're like, you know, "Why are they saying this?" So, so please stop me if we need some more background.
- SPSpeaker
This does not sound stupid-
- MTMichelle Thaller
Okay, okay
- SPSpeaker
... in any way, shape, or form. But the idea of quantum entanglement, we should explain that to people.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
And what it essentially means is that things are entangled, they're connected at regardless of the distance.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yes.
- SPSpeaker
And it could be an immeasurable amount of distance, like lit-
- MTMichelle Thaller
Any distance
- SPSpeaker
... like, yeah, literally the beginning of the universe distance, like 13.8 billion light years away distance.
- MTMichelle Thaller
It-
- SPSpeaker
You're entangled with that
- MTMichelle Thaller
... it's amazing 'cause once again, let's go back to the idea th- th- this, this is a real experimental fact, right? I mean, a lot of times this is crazy stuff that, you know, it, scientists will, will, will say this stuff and, and people hear it, you know, for the first time and if they say, "Well, that, that sounds like idiotic. That sounds stupid. Why, where did they get that from?" And the, the idea that time changes is now, it- it's one of the most commonly proven facts every day. Like I said, we need it to calibrate the GPS satellites. It's easy to measure. Quantum entanglement was something that, that even Albert Einstein 100 years ago, um, he understood that quantum mechanics was pointing that way, but he really didn't like it. He, he called it, he called it spooky action at a distance. He hated it because he realized that quantum mechan- mechanics w- had this implication that, that if things could somehow be connected quantum mechanically, you could take them any distance away from each other, and they would somehow be able to respond to each other instantaneously with, with no time difference. And, you know, he didn't think that would ever actually happen. And then back in the, in the, in the mid-1990s, we started to do experiments with atoms, and we found out that it was real, that, uh, uh, f- it, it can start off pretty simply. You, you have two atoms that are in an orbit around an, you know... So an, an atom has a nucleus of, of protons and electrons in the middle. Sorry. [laughs] An atom has a nucleus of protons and neutrons. The electrons are flying around in orbits around the, uh, the atom. Um, two electrons can be in the same orbit only if they are spinning in different directions. They, they have an, an angular momentum. It's called spin. And the only way these two electrons can fit in that orbit together is if they're spinning, one is spinning in an upward direction, one, say, spinning in, in a downward direction. Hate the broken finger. [laughs] Um, so if you, if you take these electrons out of the atom, and you can do that, you know that they're in different spins because they had to be to be in that, that orbit together. So now you separate them. You can separate them by any distance you want. You can separate them by centimeters in a laboratory. The Chinese have done this up to the space station that they run and back. You, you, you could conceivably do it to another galaxy. If you take those electrons and you separate them, you know that they were spinning in opposite directions. So if you take an electric field and you change the spin of one, the other one immediately changes in response.
- SPSpeaker
Regardless of the distance.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Regardless of the distance. And we know this to be true. We've done this. And th- the amazing thing is the universe is saying these two things are the same quantum mechanical system. They're basically the same object. They're connected to each other. They're entangled together. And it doesn't matter. Space and time don't matter. You can, you separate them in space any distance you want. How does that work? The universe says the space and time between them doesn't matter, that they're the same system. To me, that's the real intriguing thing about, you know, could a civilization learn how to harness that? You know, you're not really even having to worry about traveling from one part to another. Have, have, did you watch the, um, uh, the, the Three-Body Problem show on-
- SPSpeaker
Yes.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah. So, so you have these things called sophons, right? And sophons are entangled to this alien civilization, and they can respond instantaneously because they're entangled. Yes. I mean, I mean, that's fantastic science, and as far as I can tell, th- that, that could be theoretically possible. Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Well, that's what's bonkers is that we are made out of all this stuff that's entangled.
- MTMichelle Thaller
What's it entangled to?
- 36:19 – 51:52
Advanced civilizations, entanglement travel, and AI as humanity’s evolutionary successor
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. But it, that's not really what's going on. [laughs] It's like, it's way more complex, way bigger, and you were speculating that that could be how some advanced, super advanced intelligent life form travels.
- MTMichelle Thaller
It's always been more compelling to me than the idea of taking a spaceship and traveling somewhere.
- SPSpeaker
This seems super crude.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah. I-
- SPSpeaker
It, so that seems like the idea of making a horse fly.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah, yeah. I, I, uh, you know, we, we, we talked about that movie Interstellar be- because uh, it, it, there were a lot of good teaching moments in that movie for, for a physicist. You know, the idea that time really does slow down close to a black hole. And again, we, we observe this. When we observe things orbiting close to a black hole, you can tell that that happens. And the idea that this advanced civilization that we never actually see in the movie somehow communicates through basically space and time itself, through gravity, um, you know, that's how Matthew McConaughey is able to even like go back, you know, in time and space to, to help his daughter solve, you know, gravity and all that. You know, I was like, yeah, I was like, I wo- I wonder if that's really more what it'd be like, you know? Ad- advanced civilizations ... I mean, you gotta think, right? I mean, you look around the Earth and there are, you know, things like grasshoppers and hamsters that are fantastic, incredibly complex beings, but, I mean, do you, do you try to teach them quantum mechanics or ask them to, you know, crochet a blanket or whatever? They, they don't have the capacity. And you've, you've gotta think that there's this similar jump where, I mean, we don't even know the right questions to ask that sort-
- SPSpeaker
Right
- MTMichelle Thaller
... of a civilization. You know? I mean, can they see the universe as a whole thing? Do they know that they're connected to everything, and can they somehow use that to travel? You know, maybe. Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Maybe, and if you just extrapolate, if you just think about where we've gone from primitive man to what we're currently experiencing, and you take that thousands of years, millions of years, whatever it is-
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... you, you keep going. And as long as civilization gets rid of war and figures out a way to not die of disease and natural disaster, you could potentially continue this process of technological innovation for millions of years, and you would imagine that it would go exponentially greater and greater in its ability to do things.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
In its ability to n- not, not just, not even things that we can imagine. Like, we have a crude understanding, am- amazing understanding of the universe, but crude in comparison to what's potentially out there. What we could pote- we could potentially be observing i- in a physical way every planet on every star one day. But we're not, we can't even think of that as being a possibility now. But, but what we're doing right now is insane to people that lived in the 1400s.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
If you showed someone from the 1400s a nuclear power plant, they would be like, "What the fuck are you guys doing?"
- MTMichelle Thaller
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
Like, "What is this?" You, if you showed them a, a nuclear detona- if you showed them FaceTime on a phone, they'd be like, "This is insanity."
- MTMichelle Thaller
I just got in a little metal tube and came here from Milwaukee, and I'll fly back tonight. Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Nuts.
- MTMichelle Thaller
I, yeah, absolutely.
- SPSpeaker
And we're just accustomed to it. It, it, it becomes normal, and it would become normal as technology increased further and further and further, and this idea that the entire universe would be accessible is just bananas.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Have you ever wondered [clears throat] if maybe the real follow-on to humanity someday will be some form of AI?
- SPSpeaker
I think so.
- MTMichelle Thaller
I mean, yeah. I, I mean, I do wonder if the human brain is just kind of limited. I mean, if you-
- SPSpeaker
Yes
- MTMichelle Thaller
... if you say there are multiple dimensions and time is something that changes, I mean, I just said that, you know what I mean? Scientists are no better than anybody else at comprehending a big number or a big amount of space. We just kinda get used to it. You know what I mean? I mean, will we have a creature someday that we've created, an AI, that then all of a sudden can comprehend these things? You know, is c- is, is that really the, the real evolutionary path of humanity?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, I think so. I think it's just a completely different kind of life in that we're thinking of it as artificial. I don't think it's artificial at all. I think it's a life. It's a, just a different kind of life that we're creating.
- MTMichelle Thaller
It's an earthling. It's, I mean-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- MTMichelle Thaller
... I mean, seriously, it's our children.
- 51:52 – 1:03:56
Meaning, isolation, and the ‘Star Trek’ economy: work after automation
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. Well, I think the unknown gives people a tremendous amount of anxiety.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Sure.
- SPSpeaker
For a good reason, you know? I mean, the unknown could potentially be dangerous, and scary, and terrifying, or awesome, and you really don't know, and so you're like, " [gasps] What is it gonna be?" And there's all these college kids that are really freaking out because they're b- they're went into debt. They're getting these c- college degrees. They're leaving with this, uh, burden, this financial burden that they can never get rid of, and on top of that, they have a degree that might not be worth anything because AI might completely eradicate their field. That's a real concern. And so they, they're, I think kids today that are graduating from college and graduating from high school, they probably have the most amount of anxiety about the future. That, and then there's people that, you know, they haven't saved any money up. They don't even know if money's gonna be valuable in the future. Like, what does it even mean? Are w- are, are we gonna abandon all money? Like, what, what is, what is it gonna mean when AI completely controls all of the resources, all of the government, all of everything, all transportation, and you don't have to do your job anymore? You just get some funds from the government where you can buy food. Like, th- this is what people are talking about. Like, this is a potential-
- MTMichelle Thaller
Mm-hmm
- SPSpeaker
... you know, 100 years from now-
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... future.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Very seriously so. Yes, absolutely.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. Which is terrifying to people that are thinking, "Hey, you know, I wanna do what my dad did, and what my mom did, and I wanna go out there in the world, and I wanna find something that I'm passionate about and make it a career," and, like, maybe that's not possible. That, to kids right now, I think is really freaking them out because the adults, the people like us that are supposed to be the ones that say, "Well, let me tell you how it all works. You're gonna be fine. This is what you have to do, and if you do that, and you just cross your I's and dot your T's, you're gonna be okay, Bob," but maybe you're not gonna be okay. Like, maybe we don't know shit, because that's the reality. The reality is you and I, the adults, have no idea what this world's gonna look like in 50 years. And these poor kids are, they have no one to turn to. There's no one that can explain what this ... And so they're entering out into the world, having to take care of themselves for the very first time, with this real possibility that there might not be any jobs.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Mm-hmm. On the, on the flip side of thatAre you in fact describing the Star Trek universe?
- SPSpeaker
Right
- MTMichelle Thaller
You know, a time where people do not work for, I mean, everybody has, you know, anything they need as far as, you know, apparently survivability, you know, food, whatever. You know, and now you have a chance to say, "Am I going to be a writer or an explorer or an artist or a captain or a musician?"
- SPSpeaker
Yes.
- MTMichelle Thaller
You know? I mean, does it, does it, I mean, I mean, I mean, is there something in that that might be hugely liberating?
- SPSpeaker
100%. And I've talked about this as well, that this idea that you have to toil, and you have to be a hunter-gatherer or, you know, so- y- you have to do this in order to find meaning in life is kind of crazy, because we can find meaning a lot of ways. There's very wealthy people that never have to work that have tremendous meaning in their life 'cause they're doing things all the time without thinking about work at all. They're not thinking about it as work. Whatever hobbies they're pursuing or interests or education they're pursuing, they're doing it just out of pure interest and fascination and love and passion. And that could be all of us, but there's gonna be a tremendous transition period where people are gonna have to rethink what it means to be a human being in society, and that's what's weird. Because our entire society is structured out of getting up in the morning, putting in the work, w- working towards a future. You got a 401 [k] , you got investments, you got this, you got that, you got a mortgage, and this is how we've structured our entire-
- MTMichelle Thaller
Mm-hmm
- SPSpeaker
... existence and, and what we, what meaning we gather from life. It's based on that. And we're gonna have to figure out a way to realize and to rethink this, and it's gonna be very difficult for people that are, like, 40 and 50 that are just s- completely set in their ways, and now their ways change. And I don't know how many of them are gonna be able to make that switch and what could be done to assist them in that, what can be done. And maybe that, that comes with whatever this technological interface is. Maybe that comes with when we become what's essentially a cyborg, that we, you get a, a much greater understanding of what it means to exist, and that this idea that you exist only because of the insurance company you work for is kind of ridiculous, and we abandon that. I mean, the w- in the way that now when you open up your phone and you use Perplexity, you have a- access to a, uh, something that's as smart as every human being on Earth in every field. You can ask it about anything, and it'll give you the state-of-the-art in whatever the science is, whatever the, the understanding of history, whatever mathematics, tax law, whatever it is. It, it can give it to you on your phone instantaneously, and we've just sort of accepted that. This is our new thing. And I think this is, like, a baby step into what it's gonna, what this technology could potentially, if you're looking at things with a glass half full, it could potentially change the way we look at everything, the way we look at ourselves, the way we look at what it means to be a person and what we find meaning out of. And this is, 'cause that's the problem. The problem is meaning and the, the, the feeling like you matter, feeling like you're important, and I think part of that is 'cause we're all so isolated from each other. But that might go away entirely if the boundaries between all thought and consciousness, if we realize, like, oh, consciousness is just a thing that we're all enveloped in, and what our brain is is just a antenna that's, like, tuning into consciousness. And the, depending on how good your antenna is, you're gonna be a little bit better ab- about how you interface with the world and whatever thing you desire and whatever thing you decide to put your energy and attention to. You'll, maybe you'll be better at it than another person 'cause you have a better antenna. But we might understand that, like, we are really truly all one thing. So all our fears about, you know, finding your place in the world, that might be nonsense.
- MTMichelle Thaller
I really like that idea. I like the idea of search for meaning, and I, I agree with you. I think that as, as, like you said, as, you know, Australopithecus, as people that used to exist in these little tribal groups and families, um, the, the, the modern isolated life, I mean, it's something that I struggle with a lot. You know, I, I am always wondering, you know, "Where is my family? Where are my friends?"
- SPSpeaker
Right.
- MTMichelle Thaller
You know, I, I've had to s- to do a lot of sort of interior work about, you know, I, I'm just gonna bring along my own family inside somehow. I mean, I, I've ha- had to, had to provide this all for myself. Th- the idea of being, of being less alone, being less isolated, that's one thing that I wanted from the internet, you know? It started out on Facebook. I could, I could keep up with my friends, you know? I s- I saw what they were doing. They were posting pictures of their life. It was, it was less isolating. And then now it's evolved to I can't even find them on Facebook anymore. [laughs] It's, it's all, you know, all, all the ads and everything like that. But, but, but, but I mean, for me, I mean, you, you talk about meaning, and you talk about solving isolation. Tell m- tell me more about that. I mean, I mean, the, the, the, the w- how has your sense of meaning in your life evolved? How has it changed over your life? How, how do you find meaning?
- SPSpeaker
I find meaning in what... Well, there's a bunch of things, right? First of all, it's the people that are in your life. This is a, a giant factor because without people that you love and people that you enjoy spending time with, life loses all of its value. If you're an insanely wealthy, insanely successful person who has no friends, who lives alone, you're living in hell. And if you are a poor person that has amazing friends, and you're just getting by, you are a happier person. But I guarantee that poor person would switch places with that rich person in a heartbeat because we're programmed to think that success is numbers, that success is what you can, what you can accumulate as far as, like, objects and desired material possessions, but it's not. It's like true success is happiness, and the m- the amount of joy that you get out of life and the amount of satisfaction you get in what you do. So I think for everybody, that answer is a different answer because for some people it's going to be music. For some people it's going to be liter- they're gonna write. They're gonna w- there's gonna be a s- a thing that you enjoy putting yourself into that you feel satisfaction and you feel m- meaning with on top of friends and family. So friends and family I think is foremost, but thenThey can get in the way too if they don't have their shit together. So like [both laugh] they have to have a thing that they're enjoying as well. They have to have a thing that's helping them grow as an individual. And th- there's a thing from martial arts my instructor told me that I w- when I was very young that I never forgot, that it was martial arts is a vehicle for developing your human potential, and that if you find things that test you and you find things that are complex and these puzzles that you have to solve, the more you do that, the more you get of an understanding of who you are and what you can do, and what you can do out there in the world. And the more you do it, the more you can do other things. And I think that's where I find meaning. I find meaning in doing things, and enjoying time with my family, enjoying time with my friends, having joy and fun and laughter, and then also difficult pursuits. I like things that are complex, the things that are hard to solve. I like things that are hard to do, where I, I really have to force myself to do it, and then I feel satisfaction afterwards and I understand my ability to force myself to do things. And in doing that, I find meaning. And, uh, I'm a relatively happy person. I'm b- I'm about, I think I'm very happy in terms of, like, the average person, and I think that's why. But if someone just took that all away, if all that's gone, would you still have happiness? Like, what is happiness, right? What is meaning? And d- what d- i- is it entirely connected to your job? That seems kind of crazy, 'cause a job is just a constructed thing that it would, you know, 500 years ago, didn't even exist. So what do, w- what, i- i- it, do we have to have me- I- are we these complex problem-solving biological organisms that have this thirst for innovation and to ch- constantly make things better? Are we tricking ourselves with jobs and to c- to be happy? Are we filling the need of whatever? Like when a cat chases a ball, what is it doing? Well, it thinks it's killing something. That's its design. This is its biological need. You throw a ball past a cat, it goes after it, because it's got this biological need to chase things that are running away from it so it could kill it and eat. And I think we're kind of doing a similar thing with our hunter, gatherer, tribal organism that we're still trapped in, that we're, we're tricking it. We're tricking it with complex problems and we're tricking it with community. We're tricking it with all these different things that, that keep it happy.
- MTMichelle Thaller
I agree with you, yeah. I, I, th- I think I said that's a, a wonderful answer. I mean, there, there's something about the, you know, the, the happy poor person, uh, isolated rich person thing that I, I, I, I agree with. At the same time, you know, seeing what grinding poverty does to people's minds and breaking them down with-
- SPSpeaker
Yes
- MTMichelle Thaller
... exhaustion and, and demoralization. You know, there, there's obviously some kind of a, a sweet spot for there. You know, I mean, I, I've had to work quite hard at different parts of my life, and I, I was just very aware of the, of the, of the [laughs] of, of the soul-grinding, you know-
- SPSpeaker
Yes
- MTMichelle Thaller
... not having enough and n- wondering w- where your next meal is coming from, and, and, and I have it nowhere near as bad as some. But, you know, the, the thing that was absolutely, for me, um, unbelievable about working for NASA was the idea of solving complex problems with people you trusted and people that you thought really had your back. And, and no organization is perfect, but, you know, the idea that there w- it's n- that's not a zero-sum game, right? I, I mean, the, you want the whole team to succeed. I mean, even if there are missions you think should have been lower priority or maybe we should spend more money on
- 1:03:56 – 1:15:29
Black hole images, neutron stars, and the edge of what physics can explain
- MTMichelle Thaller
this and less money on that, at the end of the day, you, you want whatever's going on to be fantastic, and you want it to succeed, and you want all the people around you to succeed. And the idea that, again, I mean, this isn't hunter-gathering. You know, I mean, we're, we're, we're, we're solving problems. We're saying, you know, "Can you take a picture of the black part of a black hole?" You know, "Can you actually see the light area, the, the event horizon getting sucked in?" You know, I'm talking about the Event Horizon Telescope, n- not a NASA mission. But, you know, there were, there were times in my life, like when I first saw that picture come together, and I didn't think they'd be able to do that. I, I don't think people really understand what happened there. They, they, th- they were doing something right on the, on the, on the fuzzy edge of physics being possible. You, you need to catch the same front of a wavelength of light, right? So light's coming by. It's a wave. It travels at the speed of light. The wavelength of light is tiny. L- l- let's say for a minute, you know, the, the, they, they were, they were dealing with, with microwaves, so let, let's say, like, a, a millionth of a meter. So something that's a, a me- a meter divided by a million is traveling past you at the speed of light. And the Earth is, is round, and the Earth is moving, and they had, they had these eight observatories all around the planet, and they had to catch that same wavefront, the same one. If it was, if it was one wavefront later, [laughs] one, one-millionth of a meter later traveling at the speed of light, they wouldn't have gotten the image. They needed to catch the same wave- wavelength. The same photon, the same wave of light had to be caught in all of those telescopes at once. One was at the South Pole, some were in the, in the United States, some were in Chile. Uh, they were all over the planet. And if you caught the same fricking wave of light-
- SPSpeaker
Here it is
- MTMichelle Thaller
... there you go.
- SPSpeaker
Wow.
- MTMichelle Thaller
They, they managed to make a telescope that's actually as big as the Earth, and they were able to take a picture of the dark parts of a black hole. Now, now, now that's, that's something called the shadow of the event horizon. It's basically the event horizon, where time and space stop. We don't even know if there really is an interior to a black hole. All the equations blow up. Time and space don't exist in there. And, and light, nothing can escape that darkness. The, uh, the, the black spot you're seeing there is a little bigger than the event horizon itself. It's called the shadow of the event horizon because, um, time and space are bent around the black hole, and so some of the light that actually gets sucked in is light that would've gone a- around the black hole. It gets sucked into the back end of the black hole. Literally space and time curve around the black hole.And so that, that dark part is actually a little bigger than the event horizon. It's called the shadow of the event horizon. And, um, they said they were gonna go take a picture of it. A- and I was like, "Y- you have to catch the same wavefront of light i- i-- in all of these telescopes. I mean, that's gonna depend on the height of the mountain, how fast that part of the Earth is moving." They did it. They fucking did it.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- MTMichelle Thaller
And they, they, they, they didn't do it just once, right? And, you know, and, and, and now we can take a picture of an area right in front of your eyes where space and time doesn't exist. I mean, to a, to a lesser extent, one of the NASA missions that I thought was just spectacular was a small, inexpensive mission called NICER. Uh, you're like, "Who's the nicer person?" NICER, N-I-C-E-R. It's the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer. And a neutron star, you, you probably know about these, but, but, you know, uh, if, when a star dies and the nuclear reactions inside a star cease, all of that gravity, this massive object, comes crushing in, and it'll create an object sometimes called a neutron star. They're about 20 miles across, but they have about twice the mass of the sun, and we study many of these at NASA. They're, they're, they're all over the place. They're real. They're something you can take a, an image of, you can take a picture of. And, you know, these neutron stars have physics that we don't understand. You, you, you take, you take two times the mass of the sun, you crush it into 20 miles, we know that we can't describe the interior of that thing yet. You know, we don't have the physics that matches that type of density. And, um, this, this, this, this, this, this crazy little, little contraption, I mean, it's about the size of a washing machine. It was built in a lab just on, on the floor that I used to work at, at NASA. It's cheap, easy to make. I shouldn't say easy. Uh, but I mean, it, it, it's actually able to create maps of what the surface of these objects are like. They're, they're 20 miles across. They're thousands of light-years away. A- and you can actually create a map of what the temperature is like, and one of the things we see on these maps is the distortion where space and time curves around these objects. You know, they'll, they, they rotate very fast, and there are hotspots we see coming in and off the, the, the neutron star. But then as the hotspot goes behind the star, the light bends up and over, and we can actually still see the hotspot because space and time are bending around these objects. You can see that. That, that's not a mathematical simulation. That's not a theory. You can see space and time bending around these objects. You can see space and time bending into that event horizon. You know, I mean, it's absolutely crazy what we've been able to do. And whether it's a, you know, a huge project like the Event Horizon Telescope, where I, I, I would've bet that they would not have been able to make that measurement, and they did. You know, there, there were so many hard drives of data. Uh, one of the, uh, one of the telescopes was at the South Pole, and, uh, you wanted the, you wanted the telescopes to be as far apart on the Earth as possible 'cause then you could basically make a giant telescope the size of the separation of these telescopes. And, uh, um, there wasn't a... I mean, there's, there's pretty good email links down to the South Pole, but, but the, the email link wasn't fast enough for all of this data. They d- they sent back literally, there was a ton, a ton of hard drives-
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- MTMichelle Thaller
... to actually, they, they had to play them all at the same time and make sure they caught the same photon. If they had caught, seriously, one photon following behind the other, the image wouldn't have worked. They had to catch-
- SPSpeaker
Wow
- MTMichelle Thaller
... that same photon. You know, humans are incredible. [laughs]
- SPSpeaker
Some of us. [laughs]
- MTMichelle Thaller
Oh, hey. M- m-
- SPSpeaker
Some of them, I should say.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Maybe, maybe pretty much all of us in different ways.
- SPSpeaker
Yes.
- MTMichelle Thaller
I, I mean, you know, I, I-
- SPSpeaker
Unrealized potential.
- MTMichelle Thaller
No, I, I gotta go back to this. I mean, I mean, one, one of my good... I, I have three friends now who have won the Nobel Prize, which is always like, "You know, what the hell am I doing?"
- SPSpeaker
That's awesome.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Um, but, uh-
- SPSpeaker
Good friend group.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Bet you have good group chats.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Well, see, the funny thing is we, we certainly don't all get together and talk theoretical physics. I mean, that's not really what we do. But I was seated next to one of them at a meal one time, and somebody came by and said, "Oh, look at all the brainpower here." And I, I actually, in this, I, I tried to be kind of nice about it, but I said, "You know, th- there's a single mother working three jobs part-time, you know, who's waiting tables over there." And I mean, the, the, the mental capacity and the strength of that person is something that, you know... I mean, don't look at us. Go, go, go, go praise that person there.
- SPSpeaker
Oh, that's brainpower too. It's just a different thing.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Oh, it's survival.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- MTMichelle Thaller
I mean, it's trying to keep your life and, and, and soul together.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- 1:15:29 – 1:26:51
How supermassive black holes form: JWST clues and early-universe ‘seeds’
- SPSpeaker
When you look at the size of some black holes, we were talking the other day about the largest black hole where the event horizon goes past Pluto-
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... if it was the, uh, the size of our solar system.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Absolutely.
- SPSpeaker
That, that's almost impossible to even think about, that there's a black hole that's bigger than our solar system, and how did it get that big?
- MTMichelle Thaller
[laughs] Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
How much time does it take for it to gather up that much matter to get that big?
- MTMichelle Thaller
Well, you were talking about these little red dots that the Webb telescope is seeing. So I mean, what you've just done is put your finger on, I think, one of the most fascinating unanswered questions in astronomy right now, that e- every major galaxy has the, has a big black hole in the center. You know, the, the one in the middle of our galaxy is about four million times the mass of the sun, and, and physically it's not that big. It's, it's about, let's say, around about the orbit of, say, the inner solar system, Mercury, so kind of around there. But then the, the bigger ones we know in other galaxies can get up to hundreds, you know, I mean, uh, uh, let, let's say, you know, tens of billions of times the mass of the sun, and, and those, the event horizon's about the size of the orbit of Pluto. The, the question is, how do you gather 10 billion times the mass of a star together in the beginning? You know, we, black holes, the only thing we know that forms big black holes like that, uh, so a star collapses, a star dies, and this, you know, this tremendous crush of gravity as the star collapses creates this bottomless pit of gravity called a black hole. So how do you get that many stars to die? How do you... I mean, in the early universe, how many stars, what, how many generations of stars had, had, did, did, did burn through to actually get that to happen? And there was nothing that we could figure out. I mean, I mean, how do you make that big of a black hole? So these, these little red dots that we're seeing with, with, with Webb, and, and, and we don't know exactly what these are, but, but, but right now the observations are pushing us in a very interesting direction. They're, they're about a million times the mass of the sun, and at, at first we thought, "Okay, well, are these whole galaxies?" And, and that was the, the controversy you alluded to, that, that how, how could there be galaxies that far back in time? We're, we're looking back to a time about 400 million years after the Big Bang. We're looking so far away, the light took that long to travel to us. So we, we, we, we saw these, these, these sort of bright objects. At first we thought they were galaxies, and that was like, "Whoa, how'd they get there so fast?" But then we took a better look at them and, and they don't actually shine in the same light a galaxy would. They, and they appear to have the signature of something inside, some of them rotating very fast. Very fastAnd what we're wondering is if the first generation of stars, the very first stars that existed, were nothing at all like the stars we have today. The universe was denser. There was probably more of this stuff called dark matter that had gravity pulling everything together. So maybe at, at that time, the universe had just, there were cores of, of huge amounts of gas that collapsed together. Instead of forming a star, the core basically collapsed into a black hole immediately, and it started pulling in material, and all this sort of hot stuff formed what they call a pseudo star. There's all this, this i- this atmosphere of hot gas being heated up by, by the black hole in the middle. As the, as the, as the gas spirals in towards the black hole, it gets hotter and hotter. So instead of a nuclear fusion core of a star, you have a black hole heating everything up on the inside, accumulating all this mass. And are we looking at, for the first time, the seeds of these giant black holes? That instead of there being, you know, the first thing was stars, the way we think of stars, was the first thing huge amounts of gas and dust collapsing into black holes and heating up sort of a, a, you know, a, a pseudo star around it, millions of times the mass of the sun. And then in a dense area like the heart of a galaxy, these things then start to combine. Over time, gravity pulls them together, and you build bigger and bigger black holes. So once again, we don't know yet that these are what, that, what's, that's what go- that these objects are. But at the moment, it's one of the best explanations we have, and it fits the data quite well. So, you know, w-we will keep observing these things. We will keep finding new ones. Uh, one of the big questions has been why don't they give off more X-rays? 'Cause if there's matter streaming down a black hole, it should give off very high radiation like X-rays. And then just in the last couple of months, there's some, uh, some observations coming out where we're finding some of these are indeed X-ray sources. So we may have found the answer to where you get these big black holes.
- SPSpeaker
Wow.
- MTMichelle Thaller
And, and that was one of the, the, the big hopes for the James Webb Space Telescope, that it would help us answer the question of where do you get these giant black holes in the cores of galaxies. Where do they come from? There shouldn't have been enough time for that many stars to make them.
- SPSpeaker
[sighs] I watched a documentary on black holes once where they were talking about that in, in the center of every galaxy, there's a super massive black hole that's one half of 1% of the mass of the entire galaxy.
- MTMichelle Thaller
It, it seems to be correlated, yeah. The bigger the galaxy, the bigger the black hole, yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Which is nuts. And the, what they were theorizing was that if you went through that black hole, you could potentially be in a completely different universe filled with galaxies, all that have black holes inside of them, through that another universe, that you would have an infinite number of universes that exist. And all, there's these like black holes, and if you can go through them, all of them... And, and, and it broke my brain.
- MTMichelle Thaller
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
'Cause I'm just sitting there. I'm thinking like, "Wait a minute, how many billions of galaxies are there?"
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Like, what? And each one of them has a black hole in the center of it?
- MTMichelle Thaller
Mm-hmm, yeah. Well, and, and [sighs] I mean, we don't know yet how many, uh... I mean, m- there, there, there are these giant black holes in the middle of galaxies, and then there are smaller black holes caused when massive stars dies. And the uni- I mean, our galaxy probably has millions of those. But the, uh, the ones in the, in the, in the center of the galaxies are fascinating. The, um, the, the one in our galaxy, so we're, we're about, about 25,000 light-years away from this guy, so we're safe. But, um, we actually observe stars that are trapped around the black hole that are orbiting the black hole. Th-this was the first way we found the location of the black hole. Stars were orbiting kind of like this angry swarm of bees almost [chuckles] in every direction, and they were orbiting around something you didn't see. And the, the, the mass needed to make all these stars orbit was about four million times the mass of the sun. There was a star called S2 we observed orbiting close to the black hole, kind of like a comet. It would come in and whip around the black hole, then go back out again. And, and S2 at closest approach, when it whips around the black hole, this is a star, goes nearly 20 million miles an hour-
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- MTMichelle Thaller
... as it whips around the black hole. And then just recently, we found another star, uh, that actually gets up to over 50 million miles an hour as the black hole whips it around. And this is how we test the idea that time is different around a black hole. We actually see these stars whipping so close to a black hole, we can tell that there are changes in their orbit, that they're actually going through different time. And, uh, um, and so we see these stars whipping around the black hole at the middle of our galaxy. They will probably eventually go down that black hole. I mean, maybe everything in our galaxy will eventually kind of spiral down into that black hole. But, you know, we, we, this is, this is not conjectural. The, the-these are observations from telescopes. You know, look up S2. Look up, I don't know what the name of the one that it goes faster [laughs] is. It's a telephone, telephone number. But that's real. Now, the question about what happens if you could survive going into a black hole, and this is another place where we need better physics. Quite honestly, our physics gives up. Th-there are all kinds of wonderful, fascinating possibilities. I mean, p-people have pointed out this is not observation. Now, now we're going from observation, we see these things, they're real, to conjecture. People have said that if you take the entire universe, the, the, the entire mass of the universe and the radius, the, the, the diameter of the observable universe almost exactly matches a black hole. You know, could it be that, you know, inside a black hole, a new universe forms when a black hole forms? Is that what the Big Bang was? Was the Big Bang a black hole forming in another universe and popping off our own universe? Are black holes somehow connected to other universes? These are all incredible questions.We, we don't yet have the physics to answer them. But, you know, people have said, you know, why is it the universe has about the same density of a black hole, the same size and mass? Is that just a coincidence, or are we looking at something deeper?
- SPSpeaker
Or is it fractal? Is it-
- MTMichelle Thaller
Um-
- SPSpeaker
The entire universe exists inside of a black hole?
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yes, exactly.
- SPSpeaker
That's bananas.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah. [laughs]
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- MTMichelle Thaller
There, th- there, there, there we have the, the very large array. Uh, that was at the, uh, that, that was in Chile. That's a wonderful observatory. There we have a, a great, uh, a depiction. Oh, he's, uh, y- you, you found... Okay, yeah, so-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, that-
- MTMichelle Thaller
That there, right
- 1:26:51 – 1:45:35
Big Bang: not an explosion, limits of light, and what gravitational waves might reveal
- SPSpeaker
You said another thing that broke my brain. Um, you were talking about what the Big Bang is, and that we shouldn't think of the Big Bang as an explosion, but that before the Big Bang, time and space might not have existed.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Well, pretty much certainly not in the way we experience them, no. I mean, when once again, you know, n- no astronomer thinks the Big Bang came from nothing. The problem is, once again, we have no description of what that state of matter would be, none. Y- y- I mean, the idea that everything we observe of in the universe could have once been at a subatomic scale. Y- y- uh, you'll notice that I'm very careful about this. I talk about the observable universe. We have no idea how big the universe is. We don't know whether it's infinite or whether it has an end. But there's been only a certain amount of time that light has had to travel to us. That's not the whole universe. That, that's centered on us. That's an effect of we look in every direction in the sky, we can only look back as far as there's been time for light to actually travel to us. And you see some incredible things. I mean, one of the things that, uh, one of my friends has the Nobel Prize for is if you look so far away, the farthest away we can see now, we're looking back to a time about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. And this is something where y- we are actually able to see so far away, we're looking back to a time when the whole universe was hot and bright, and it actually was glowing like the surface of the sun, the whole universe. The, the entire universe was so bright, it was like looking at the surface of the sun. And, and this is, is, has now, this radiation has traveled a long time to get to us. It's now lost energy because it's traveling through the expanding universe. And as the universe expands, the, the, the, the wave- the wavelength of light gets stretched out by the expansion of space. This is what we call the microwave background radiation. So there, there's, there's a, there's a microwave, very low energy signal. It comes from every direction on the sky, and it's coming from a time, it's coming from a distance so far away that the whole universe was as bright as the surface of the sun. And, and that's as far as we can see because any farther away from that, the universe is opaque. Literally in every direction on the sky, you eventually look back to a time when the whole universe was so dense and bright, you can't see any farther.
- SPSpeaker
Is this because of how we're capable of measuring? And is it possible that at one point in time when we get better and better telescopes, that we can look past that?
- MTMichelle Thaller
Well, not with light. See, you see, the universe actually does become opaque to light at that point.
- SPSpeaker
Because it's too long ago.
- MTMichelle Thaller
It's, it's, it's basically the universe is so bright itself. Yeah. I mean, so, you know, you, you look in any direction on the sky, you look back to a time, you know, you, we... The, the wonderful thing about the universe changing is we know this is true. The farther out we look with a telescope, the farther light has had to travel, the more, the more time it takes to get to us. So the sun, we see d- the light takes about eight minutes to get from us to the sun, the nearest star about four years, the nearest galaxy to us about two million years.We can see so far away in space that the light took pretty much the age of the universe to get to us, about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. At that point, the universe becomes opaque to light, so there is a limit to how much we can observe with light how much time there has been for, for light to actually get to us.
- SPSpeaker
Is there a potential for being able to observe something other than light?
- MTMichelle Thaller
Absolutely. So your question i- is a really profound one. We don't know how big the universe is. When we talk about the universe, we mainly talk about the observable universe, everything we're able to see. So the question you just asked, can you see farther back even if it's opaque to light? Yes, and, and this is something that, again, we talk about moments in your life where the universe changed, where you thought people, people did something you thought was impossible. And, um, I mean, going all the way back to the mid-'90s, I was a postdoc at Caltech, and, um, I wasn't working with this department, but people were starting to measure something called gravitational waves. And gravitational waves, a- again, I, I never thought they'd be able to actually detect these. The, the universe is, is constantly ... I mean, I mean, every time we move, remember how I said time is different from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet. You know, as I move, I create gravity. You know, gravity actually is, it goes out as a wave into the universe at the speed of light. Can you detect a wave of gravity? Well, a w- gravity is actually a curvature of space and time itself, so you're, you're trying to say, "Could we detect a wave that's actually made of space and time?" And this project is called LIGO, and LIGO stains, um, LIGO stands for the Laser Interferometric Gravitational-Wave Observatory, and it started out with, with two facilities, one in Oregon and one in Louisiana. And LIGO has two extremely long lasers at a, at a corner that are at a right angle. The lasers, I, I believe, are four kilometers on a side. They're huge, right? A four-kilometer laser. They want them to be as, as perfectly the same length as they can, and then there's a laser beam that bounces back and forth. And, and as the laser beam bounces back and forth, if it's exactly the same length, the they, the signal kind of cancels out. But what happens if there's actually a wave of space and time coming by? Space itself compresses. Time changes. All the sudden these two, these two lasers are no longer exactly the same length. Space itself has changed as a, as a wave comes by. Tiny amounts. These gravitational waves are thousands of times smaller than the nucleus of an atom.
- SPSpeaker
Mm.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Incredible, right? How would you detect that? And they're traveling at the speed of light. So you have these four-kilometer lasers. A wave of space and time comes by and compresses space and time in one direction more than the other. All of a sudden the lasers are no longer the same length. You get a signal. The, the noise for this, right? I mean, I mean, every time ... Yeah, so th- this is us detecting an exploding star this way. I'm happy to talk about that, too. But, but I mean, just the fact they did this. Th- these lasers are under vacuums. They're in vacuum chambers. I mean, they, they try ... I mean, every, every time the UPS truck goes by, they must go haywire. Somebody sneezes. They're measuring things thousands of times smaller than the nucleus of an atom. But over time, th- they got this so accurate, they did it so well, that what, what happened, and I, I, c- you can look up the, the year, but it was, um, something on the order of about 10 years ago, l- a long ways away, millions of light years away, um, two black holes spiraled together and actually collided to form a big black hole. That was a lot of gravitational energy, and that created a ripple going out into the universe. And so, you know, there's all of the ... The detectors have all this noise in them. The detectors are detecting all kinds of spurious signals. But then all of a sudden in Louisiana, there was this, the whole detector went wump, wump, wump, wump, wump, boom. And then at the speed of light, the detector in Louisiana did exactly the same thing, wump, wump, wump, wump, the exact same waves at the speed of light difference. And we realized, "Oh my God, they did it." These tiny waves, we shouldn't even be able to detect them. They found them, and, and now it's a r- it's a routine thing. They've now done this many, many times. Waves in space and time itself might be the way we can see even farther back into the universe. Even when the universe becomes opaque to light, the waves of space and time can come through. Gravitational waves can come through that. And if we can somehow figure out how to make these detectors better and better, you know, could we detect the gravitational waves of the Big Bang? You know, d- can we learn something about that moment by the way it, it actually bent space and time and created waves of gravity? And once again, I mean, just step back a sec. Th- detecting waves of space and time traveling at the speed of light is something we do. We've done this. It got the Nobel Prize. Deserved it. Um, there were, there were hundreds of people on that first paper. I think some of them were friends of mine. Um, a- again, they, they, they fucking did it.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- MTMichelle Thaller
You know, I, I, I j- I, I, I just, I, I cannot ... I, I mean, I, I, I, I felt my heart just drop that day. I mean, out of, out of joy. I just, it's, it's, it's like holy fuck. You know, they did it. Um, that may give us the potential to understand the Big Bang better as we get better with that. Um, you know, maybe we can ... I mean, right now y- we, we see black holes colliding. We actually see neutron stars colliding, even stars orbiting each other, maybe, maybe produce a sort of a background o- of all these waves. But maybe we'll be able to figure out how to see those waves from the moment the universe began.
- SPSpeaker
How are we sure that, of the timeline of 13.8 billion years or whatever it is?
- MTMichelle Thaller
Well, you know, I mean, th- these things are never sure, you know, absolutely. But, but, but there, there, there, there's some very good reasons to think it's a- it's about that.So, you know, you, you, you sort of run physics backwards. You know, you basically say, you know, this is how the universe is expanding now, and then you ... Let, let, let's, let's roughly say that, you know, things, you know, came together. And a- as I mentioned, uh, you, you mentioned the podcast, the Big Bang did not have a center. The galaxies are not flying off into space like an explosion. Yeah, what, what, what happened is the, the, the galaxies are all kind of sort of standing where they are, but space itself is expanding in every direction between the galaxies. It was this ... It's a hard thing. I mean, I ... Th- this ... It's a huge misconception about the Big Bang, that the Big Bang was this explosion and galaxies are flying into empty space. The, the expansion of space is space itself. There's no space out there that galaxies are flying into. That's not how it works.
- SPSpeaker
Right.
- MTMichelle Thaller
You know, th- ... When I, when I-
- SPSpeaker
That's a weird thought right there.
- MTMichelle Thaller
W- yeah. Well, the-
- SPSpeaker
That they're not flying into space.
- MTMichelle Thaller
No.
- SPSpeaker
They are space.
- MTMichelle Thaller
When, when, when I used to teach this, you know, I used to, I used to take a, a, a board and I used to have a pie- piece of elastic, and I would, I would hammer two nails in on either side of the board. And then I would say, "Okay, the- these two nails are galaxies, and the elastic between them represents our universe," in this case a two-dimensional depiction of our universe. All of space and time, anywhere light can travel, is on, just on that elastic. Don't think about up or down. There's no space or time there. Everything our universe is is just this piece of elastic. You know, and then I would take the elastic and I would stretch it, and I would say, "By, by, by ... You know, the, the two galaxies aren't moving. They're, they're kinda sitting there. It's the space in between that has now stretched, has now changed." And that's a more realistic idea. The galaxies are not flying through space. It's the space itself that is getting bigger in every direction at once, and that's why there's no center. There's no empty center to the universe. The universe, as far as we can map it, has galaxies everywhere. You know, there's no center to it. The expansion is happening in every direction at once because the, the, the, the elastic of space and time itself in every direction is just getting bigger. D- we don't know why.
- SPSpeaker
So if we are looking at something where the Big Bang created space and time, and as space and time is expanding, what was the environment before the Big Bang?
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah, and that's the problem. So y- you mean, you mean th- we have no description of that. You know, there, there, there are particle accelerators. You know, I've had the, the wonderful chance to go to a s- to go to CERN a couple of times and go to the Large Hadron Collider. And, you know, you know, using, you know, in- incredible accelerating magnets, you know, they, they, they whip, you know, just single protons up to very, very high temperatures. I mean, they're, they're, they're trying to recreate conditions where, you know ... I mean, they can't recreate the conditions of what things were like before the Big Bang, but, you know, can you get matter to such a high energy state that it can recreate what things were like, you know, a millionth of a second after the Big Bang? You know, or maybe even further back. And, you know, but the idea of what was that state of matter before that, that expansion, we have no description of yet. I think we will someday. I don't think it's impossible. But there, there's nothing about our current physics. I mean, it would be like taking somebody from the 1400s and saying, you know, "Describe to me what the interior of the sun is like." They, they, they would have ... They, we ... They would, they would have no knowledge structure to even attempt it. That doesn't mean we didn't figure it out eventually. And, you know, so like I said, th- there's nothing about that I think that's completely off limits, but we'll have to understand space and time very differently, and we'll have to understand what, you know ... Y- you can't even really call it matter or even energy. All of the energy of the universe in a subatomic space, we have no idea what that would behave like. You know-
- SPSpeaker
And what is it existing in?
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah. Well, see-
- SPSpeaker
That's, that's the-
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... what I'm asking, is like the environment-
- MTMichelle Thaller
And that-
- 1:45:35 – 1:56:09
CMB, ‘pigeon poop,’ inflation, and scientific humility about what we don’t know
- MTMichelle Thaller
only evidence we have is that the stuff we can see was once in a very close area, and that goes back to that, that, that radiation, that microwave background. The, the microwave background has been a wonderful story. It was, uh, it was discovered back in the 1970s by, um, two, uh, scientists from Bell Labs called Penzias and, and Wilson, and, uh, they were trying to categorize... They, they, they, they were, they were dealing with Bell Labs. They were trying to deal with microwave signals, microwave communication, and they built a big microwave telescope, and they started to, to catalog what objects in the sky naturally produce microwaves. The sun produces some. Other things produce microwaves. This was all for communications. A- and they discovered that everywhere they looked in the sky, there was this background noise, very low level, but it was there. Everywhere they looked, it was the same. Didn't matter what direction the telescope was pointing. And so the, what a good scientist would assume is that that's probably a problem with your telescope. If you have background noise in every direction you look, it's probably in your detector, and the, the best guess they had was that it was pigeon shit.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- MTMichelle Thaller
So there you go. Pigeon, look at that.
- SPSpeaker
Wow.
- MTMichelle Thaller
So, so, so, so Penzias and Wilson built this... You know, they, they, they were working with this big microwave telescope, and little did I know that pigeon shit actually gives off microwaves. It does. They, um, they trapped all the pigeons in the, in the microwave telescope. You can actually see a pigeon trap in the Smithsonian where they, they did this. They, they scraped out all the pigeon shit, and, and lo and behold, the signal was still there. In every direction you looked, it was exactly the same. Exactly. And, and what they had discovered was the afterglow of the Big Bang, the energy left over from that time when the universe was so hot it was opaque to light, and the crazy thing is it is exactly the same down to fractions of a degree in every direction on the sky. It's sort of like, you know, you look all the way the age of the universe in one direction. It's exactly the same temperature as the age of the universe in that direction, and there shouldn't have been time for those two areas of space to ever get to know each other. There shouldn't have been time. It's like, you know, everything came to the same temperature everywhere you look. Why? It's sort of thinking like if I have, if I have a, a coffee cup, you know, the coffee cup eventually comes to exactly the same temperature. You know, everything becomes thermally equilibrium. Everything comes to the same temperature. You wouldn't expect your coffee cup to ha- be like, you know, 300 degrees on one side and, you know, minus 50 on the other. Somehow the universe had a chance to all come to the same temperature even though those areas of the universe were so far apart they should never have had a chance to touch each other.And that became part of the thinking, that maybe at one point when the universe was that large, things were much smaller. You know, the universe did have a chance to come to this exact same temperature all over. Boy, I hope I ca- I see by your expression I should do a better job of explaining this. Um-
- SPSpeaker
No, you're doing a great job. It's just absolutely fascinating.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
My expression is just perplexed.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah. Well, no, so, so th- this is one of the best proofs that things were small, that you look back to this microwave background radiation, and we're talking fractions and fractions of a degree. The, um, uh, the, the first NASA satellite that observed it was called COBE, and then it, they're the Cosmic Microwave Explorer. And then there was a new one, uh, s- in the 1990s called WMAP, the W- Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. Oh, yes, good. Uh, and, um, they, they measured this, you know, down to, to, to hundreds of thousandths of a degree, right? I, I mean they measured it to tiny little amounts. And, uh, the incredible thing was that it was, it was almost exactly the same temperature. But there were these beautiful large ti- you know, I mean, th- there were variations in the temperature, and the variation in the temperatures corresponded to sound waves propagating across the whole universe at that time. It, it, it's, it's, it's deep. It's wonderful. I, I highly recommend you read about this. Um, w- you know, we have this signal that comes back from basically the first moment the universe became transparent to light. It was so dense, it was opaque beforehand. There was a moment light could finally freely fly through the universe, and, and we found that. We found that signal. It goes back to a time about 100,000 years after, 400,000 years after the Big Bang, and it is breathtaking in its profound nature. You can actually see sound waves go across the whole universe.
- SPSpeaker
Wow.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Wow. Now, when we think of the Big Bang, we think of it as almost being an instantaneous event.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Well, well, yeah. I, I mean, a- again, you, as an experimental scientist, there are all these wonderful theories about, about what things happened like a, a millionth of a second and a billionth of a second after, and I- I'm gonna, I'm gonna take all that with a grain of salt. I don't think we understand it well enough to be all that confident about that. There, there's a great book called The First Three Minutes, which has been around since the, oh, geez, probably since the 1970s, maybe even longer, and it sort of outlines how we think that, you know, the universe in the first three minutes basically went from the Big Bang to just sort of all the hydrogen that, and helium that we have. And in the first three minutes, it, it, pretty much everything was done. The, the, the whole sort of process of the Big Bang was done in, in that, in those first three minutes. The, the, the actual Big Bang itself goes back to something called the Planck epoch, which you see there, 10 to the minus 33rd seconds, twen- uh, 10 to the minus 43rd seconds. So take a decimal point, draw 42 zeros, and then a th- and then a 43, [laughs] yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Singularity, infinite density and temperature-
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... quantum gravity dominates-
- MTMichelle Thaller
Sure
- SPSpeaker
... forces unified.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Absolutely.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- MTMichelle Thaller
I, again, again, big, big chunk of salt there. Yeah. I, I mean, so, so, so this, th- this is not bullshit. Th- this is the, the best model given our understanding of modern physics. Um, do I think this is, is, is right literally? No. I think we've got a lot to understand about how gravity works in high density situations. Um, when, when gravity and quantum mechanics come together, those two theories, they, they don't work well together. And in order to understand how things were like right before the Big Bang or even right after, I think you need to understand that a lot better. I mean, all the stuff that we think may be dark matter and dark energy, none of that is in the current theory of how the Big Bang started. We don't know if it's important or not. That's a good first step. You have to. You have to take your current understanding of physics and take it as far as you can. But in the case of what happened right at the instant of the Big Bang, I don't think we're there yet. I think we need a better understanding of what happens when you have that amount of density in such an entire space. It, it's like, it's like, it's like the interior of a black hole. We, we, we don't have the physics to describe high density, high gravity conditions.
- SPSpeaker
Insane high density.
- MTMichelle Thaller
Oh, oh, yeah, yeah.
- SPSpeaker
I mean, to the point where y- you, you can't even-
- MTMichelle Thaller
Take the known universe and put it inside the, you know, nucleus of an atom. Yeah. We, we, we don't got that yet. [laughs]
- SPSpeaker
And what is it in?
- MTMichelle Thaller
And are there others? You know, I mean, some of the, the, the best ideas about the Big Bang is that the expansion never stops. It kind of pops off universes, like you said, almost fractally all the time. That's the, uh, the idea of, uh, um, Alan Guth. That's the idea of, of, uh, um, Alan Guth's idea. Well, that's, it's not the expanding universe. I'll come up with it later. But, but the, uh, back in the 1970s, a, a man at, at MIT, Alan Guth, uh, had, had his theory of how this expansion might, might never stop. So, um, the, the, we don't know that. That, that may absolutely... There you go, inflation. Inflationary, sorry. That was a complete mental fart. I, I, I know the inflationary universe. But, uh, um, again, I, I think all of this is a necessary first grasp using our current understanding of physics. I don't think we understand how the Big Bang went off yet. I think we have a ways to go. [laughs]
- SPSpeaker
Well, it's gotta be so fascinating to you to know so much and yet still have so many things that we have no idea.
- MTMichelle Thaller
You know, that, that's, I think you, you've just put hit, you just hit it on the head about one of the most beautiful and one of the most frustrating and even scary things about being a scientist. You, you have to be honest about what you don't know. I mean, you, you have to say, "We made this measurement and it's real," you know? We, we, we, we fucking managed to see the ins- the, the, the event horizon of a black hole. We caught the same wavelength of light over, you know, thousands of miles. You, you can say what's real, and then you can say, "These are the things we do not know." And they are major, you know? How did the universe begin? You know, what happens inside a black hole? What happens inside a neutron star?We don't have the, the ability yet to know, and it's, it's hard for humans to stop there, and it, I mean, of course we make better experiments. You find a better theory of physics. But for the moment, you need to sit with that uncertainty. There is no one who knows what happened. And I, I, there, there are so many things in our life that I've had to confront where you have to become comfortable with stopping there, at least for now. You know, I do not understand this. I do not have the answer to this, and I don't think anybody does. And I, I think we'd actually benefit a lot more in humility and joy and maybe even compassion with each other, you know, if we can respect that stop and say, you know, I, I, I... You, you may not have the same answer as to what comes next about life or death or the beginning of the universe or the inside of a black hole. We can respect each other. I, to me, I find a good, a good discipline and the humility to stop and say, "I don't know."
- SPSpeaker
Well, it's very important 'cause otherwise we're not gonna believe you [laughs] with the stuff you do know. There has to be some things that you can't know.
- 1:56:09 – 2:25:40
UFO calls to NASA, consciousness limits, psychedelics, and life’s building blocks from space
- MTMichelle Thaller
all around the world could do the same experiment and get the same result? That's science, and it's limited. You know, I, I, I've had to talk to so many people that called into NASA saying they had profound experiences with, uh, time travel or-
- SPSpeaker
You had to talk to time travelers?
- MTMichelle Thaller
Oh, y- yeah, yeah.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah. Or people would call in-
- SPSpeaker
Did, was there a time traveler hotline like Art Bell?
- MTMichelle Thaller
They, they would often forward the calls to me, and-
- SPSpeaker
Why you?
- MTMichelle Thaller
Um, well, I, I mean, I was, I was doing communications at NASA, and I think they just didn't know what to do with these people. And, and I-
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- MTMichelle Thaller
... um, I think they f- they, they knew... Well, and I, I pride myself on this. I, I try to be kind. I, I try to lead with compassion. And I would listen to people's stories about, you know, "I, I, I was, I, I traveled in time," or, or, "I was abducted by an alien," or, or many things and, you know, and I, I would listen to them. I think that what they mainly wanted to do was find somebody to listen. You know, I, I would say to them, "You know, you have had a profound experience. You know, you have experienced something that, I mean, I hope you, you, you view as a gift." I would say there, there's not much as a scientist that I can do with a, um, an, an individual experience. You know, I can't do an experiment on it. I can't have my colleagues all over the world do the same experiment about what you, you know, you, you, you... Did you have a spiritual experience? Did you have a profound feeling of oneness? I mean, it's not that these aren't real. Science has to be limited 'cause just like what you said, how can you trust it, right? How, how can you trust people are saying... I mean, wh- wh- why are these people at NASA allowed to have telescopes and do all this stuff? I mean, I mean, what, what makes this worthwhile? You have to say there's a limitation. You know, what do we have clear evidence on that everyone could do the same experiment and get a similar result? That doesn't mean other things aren't real.
- SPSpeaker
Hmm.
- MTMichelle Thaller
It means that science is limited to what is, um, i- i- uh, reproducible, consistently reproducible. And what a human experiences could be profound and real but at the moment not in the realm of science.
- SPSpeaker
So you're not discounting the possibility of people having profound experiences, but there's really no way to measure it.
- MTMichelle Thaller
At the moment, no.
- SPSpeaker
At the moment.
- MTMichelle Thaller
I mean, may- maybe when we understand the brain better, um, you know, maybe when if AIs are sharing minds. You know, when we're talking, you know, incredible fun conjecture here. At, at, at the moment, we're, we're limited with the tools of what is reproducible. You know, I mean, if you, if you sh- if you observe in one direction with your telescope for a certain amount of time at a certain wavelength of light, you should see pretty much the same thing, you know, whoever does the experiment. You know, if you're doing experiment with atoms or quantum mechanics or, you know, whatever, it has to be reproducible. That, that, that doesn't mean that profound things that are real are not there. They're just not in the realm of science right now.
- SPSpeaker
When you're communicating with people that supposedly have had experiences with intelligent life from somewhere else-
- MTMichelle Thaller
Mm-hmm
- SPSpeaker
... and you spend so much time looking up at space, like, how much time and how much effort do you spend even considering that possibility of life somewhere else or of whether or not these people have actually b- experienced visitation or whether-
- MTMichelle Thaller
Mm-hmm
- SPSpeaker
... or not it's some sort of mental illness or whether there's some kind of an experience that's available to people occasionally here that defies our understanding of what is measurable and what, what's reproducible-
- MTMichelle Thaller
Absolutely
- SPSpeaker
... that there's, there's something else out there.
- MTMichelle Thaller
I, I, I think, I think that's a wonderful question, and I think this, this may gives you, give you a little bit of a snapshot of, of a, the culture of science and, and a, and a m- a mind of a scientist because it's, it's an odd little tightrope to walk. I'm, I'm very proud of it, actually. I think it's kind of beautiful. Um, all of us to a person at NASA thinks that there must be life out there. The, the idea that there's only life on the Earth seems untenable. I mean, not only do you see the, you know, the billions of stars in our own galaxy, but we see billions of galaxies. How, how could it just be us? How could it? Uh, we're all science fiction fans. We all love the idea of there being life out there.Um, I always keep a bottle of, uh, uh, champagne chilling, I have for decades now, uh, in the hopes that someday we'll have a clear evidence of life outside the Earth. You know, we- we'll have a, a signal that we-
- SPSpeaker
What are you willing to pop the champagne for?
- MTMichelle Thaller
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
Is it molecules? Is it-
- MTMichelle Thaller
Yeah, yeah. I- I- I-
- SPSpeaker
... bacteria?
Episode duration: 2:37:31
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Transcript of episode GZCmYrgOZU0
