We answer questions from listeners! The speed of light, the center of the universe and lasers!
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One of my favorite things when we give our lecture about what we don't know about the universe is the questions we get from people in the audience. The best questions always come from the youngest audience members. I remember one time I gave a talk about liquid nitrogen in front of elementary school kids and some kid asked me the question. He said, if lightsabers were real, with they be made of liquid nitrogen? And that's I didn't even know how to answer that question, and I was like totally stumped by like a six year old.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, Star Wars is not real.
Lightsabers are fictional. Whorhead fictional? Yes, so you need to find some other defense against the invading arm empire. So the questions are a fantastic way to understand Have I really communicated anything? Have people really understood what I'm doing? So that's why I love the live aspect of a presentation, because you get that feedback from the audience. They're getting it, they're asking follow up questions, or they're totally confused and they're asking you questions that seemed to make no sense.
Yeah, if only you had jedime line tricks, Daniel, these are not the questions you're looking for.
This is the podcast you're looking for. However, I am Horehean and I'm Daniel. Welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorgey explain the universe.
In which we try to make that universe understandable to you. And this time we're really going to do our best.
Yeah. Today on the program, we're going to be answering questions from you to listeners.
That's right. People have been sending us questions over email, and some of them really tickled our brain and said we thought, yeah, let's dig into them because we thought other people must have the same questions.
Yeah, we have questions here about the speed of light, about using giant lasers, and about where is the center of the universe.
That's right. And these are just three questions that we chose from the pile. There are other questions I wish we could dig into, but we don't have time, like some of the joke questions.
Yeah, and so as a reminder, if you have any questions, even after today, after we answer some of your questions, if you're a different listener and have a question, you can always send us a question at questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com.
That's right, send us questions about anything, life, the universe, dating, bananas, whatever. We don't promise to be experts in all these fields. Probably get an answered. You don't want to answer dating questions.
Yeah, we can give an answer about dating, but you know, maybe you shouldn't follow dating advice from a cartoonist and a physicist.
I don't know that you're any more or less qualified to give dating advice than anybody else out there giving dating advice.
Orge.
Everybody's only got their own experience.
You know, you should definitely not get dating advice from me because I haven't dated anyone since I was like sixteen.
Yeah, but it was a success, right, So there you go, it was you one hundred percent success, right.
I have one hundred percent. Yeah, yeah, I have one data.
Point every date you take leads to marriage. Right, yeah, there you go.
Yeah, so listener questions. So, and this is one of your favorite parts of teaching and giving talks, right Daniel. We give a lot of talks across the country and other countries about our book, and we always get great questions at the end.
Right, Absolutely, we always get great questions. Sometimes people show up with a question already, you can tell they're burning to ask some physicists, and sometimes they have a question that's inspired by what we've said, and you know, sometimes the questions are pretty random, but it's always a lot of fun because you can really try to explain it to the person and when they get it, you can see that light go on in their eyes, when they finally the pieces have clicked together and they have some understanding. And I love that feeling of like having an idea in my head translating into sound waves which then wiggle across space and get translated back into an idea in their brain. I mean, it's incredible, right that you can even translate an idea from one brain to another. So when it's successful, I feel pretty good. Yeah.
Well, enjoy that feeling. Before you know, we're all plugged into the matrix and it's just all automatic.
That's right, And then we won't need podcasts because we'll all know what everybody knows all the time. There'll be no privacy.
All right, let's just jump into the questions, all right. Our first question comes from Sandy from New York and he has a question about the speed of light.
Hi, Daniel and Horr. My name is Sandy de Leone, originally from New York City. I was hoping you can talk about whether the speed of light has always been the same or whether it is a function of space time. How do we know whether or not the speed of light has been slowing down over time?
Wow, that is a great question. Yeah.
Well, first of all, he said he's originally from New York. What does that mean. That's so mysterious. Where is he that?
Well, right now he's on a rocket ship and at nearly the speed of light heading somebody hoping the speed right away. He needs question for this. Wherever he is he can get the podcast, so we can't be that.
Far away unless he's from the future, that's.
Right, in which case he invented time travel and he knows more about the speed of light than I do, so I should.
Be asking he asked him questions.
Yeah, you're saying these questions, come to my house and show me your time machine.
But this is a great question. Basically, it's the question of whether the speed of light has ever changed. But the first thing I thought was, holy cow, can the speed of light change? Is that even possible? Is that something that might actually happen and not totally break down the universe?
All right? So I'm going to make a classic mistake by saying, yes, all right, so it's possible for the speed of light to not always have been the same. However, as a classical mistake, because most people are just going to hear that and then go off and say this physicist said the speed of light might change. It's possible. And however, nobody takes that idea very seriously. It's pretty well understood that the speed of light is fixed, and we assume that it's not changing in time. We have no evidence to say that it is changing in time, and we can dig in a minute to the experiments that we've done and the evidence we have that suggests is constant. However, you know, there's a limit to the kind of things we can know, and some things are based on assumptions, and so the speed of light is one of those things, like we've never seen it change. We have no reason to imagine it would have changed or will change. But you know, there are things we don't know. So for example, we've measured the speed of light a bunch of times, but we don't know why it is what it is. You know, it's a number three times ten to the eight meters per second. We have no reason to feel like it should be that number or some other number. You know, if we had measured it to be a different number, we would have been like, okay, that's the speed of light instead of this other number. So it's not like it has a special value.
There's nothing in the mathematics of the loss of physics that say the speed of light has to be this.
As far as we know always. I mean, somebody could come up with a deeper theory of physics that doesn't have the speed of light as an arbitrary parameter that predicts the speed of light, you know, that says it has to be this way because space is made out of these quantum loops, and that's and they oscillated some certain frequency and that determines the speed of light. Maybe right, But we're not there yet at this point. It's just a number we measure about the universe, and physicists love doing that. We measure these constants because we think their clues about the way the universe is put together.
Yeah, but I guess what would happen if the speed of light did change, Like if suddenly it was twice as fast as it is now. Would anything change for us right now, like in our everyday lives? Well, if it changed, so the universities fall apart? Yeah, like suddenly, wow, suddenly, a sudden change in the speed of light. That is an awesome thought experiment. I think a lot of things might break because you know, we assume the speed of light is the speed of light, and we use that for lots of things, like in the Internet, for to measure timing of stuff. You know, we assume things travel a certain speed. Wait, wait, wait, it might effect my web surfing. All right, all right, that's all right, let's not even think about that. That's too scary.
Yeah, but you know, on a deeper level, if you're like a philosophical kind of person, you can ask even deeper questions, like do we know the laws of physics themselves change? You know, we have these laws like general relativity and quantum mechanics, and they're pretty well established over you know, one hundred years of experiments, et cetera, and they don't seem to be changing. But that doesn't mean they won't, right, the assumption that experiments are repeatable, this foundational concept of empiricism we have in science, is itself an assumption. You know that the universe has laws, and those laws don't change over time, so that we can bit by bit do experiments to reveal them. That's just an assumption. It seems to work, it works great, it works amazingly. We've never seen hints of things changing, but we don't know why the universe has laws that are discoverable and then don't change. So that assumption is based on a lot of data. But it's not based on like a bedrock principle. It's like, there's no fundamental reason why, and so it could certainly change, or it could be changing really gradually over time. So we haven't noticed yet.
So it can change, but we just haven't. We don't think it's changing. That's right, But I guess the question is has it ever changed in the past, Like, how do we know it wasn't different before?
Right exactly? And so we have this awesome tool for looking into the past, and it's called the universe. So you can look out into the night sky and you can see what happened eight minutes ago if you look at the sun, right, don't stare directly at the Sun, of course, but you know the Sun you're looking at is not the Sun as it looks like now. It's how the Sun looked eight minutes ago. And the further out you look, the further back in time you look, and we can see all the way back to the very early moments of the universe, and we can see physics happening, and we see things rotating, we see things orbiting, we see things smashing into each other. And we apply the laws of physics that we learned about here on Earth in our environment to those systems that we see deep in the deep past, and things make sense, and it make sense using the same speed of light. So we see the speed of light unchanged way way back into the history of the universe. M So that gives us a lot of confidence that things haven't changed.
Oh, I see. So when we look at a star that's really far away and we're seeing the results of physics not only that far away, but that long ago. Yeah, yeah, exactly, And so that gives us confidence that, you know, the universe pretty much works the same way now as it did billions of years ago.
That's right. And you know, the concept that the speed of light may have been different a long time ago is sometimes proposed by advocates of creation theory. You know, they say, well, the universe is only a few thousand years old, and then they have a problem. They have to explain how do the light from stars get here if it's if they're so far away and the universe is only six thousand years old, right, this night sky should be totally black. And so they proposed that maybe the speed of light was super duper fast a long time ago, so the light sort of rushed here and then it slowed down and then you know, and that's the way the light got here in such a short time. So, you know, that seems kind of crazy to me, but that's one motivation for imagining the speed of light might have been different, and there are other ones that are I mean, they're still on the on the on the fringe, but they're not as fringe as creation theory, and they have to do with the very early moments of the universe. The inflation because you know, we can look out into space and we can see that the speed of light is basically unchanged until the fairly early universe a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, but before that is very hard to see because the universe was not transparent back then, and we have these questions about what happened to the very early universe. And one of the theories is called inflation and explains how the universe got so big so quickly, right and is so smooth. And one way that people explain that is that the universe got really stretched out, the space itself got stretched out, and that's called inflationary theory, says the universe expanded really rapidly early on. But there are other ideas, and one of those other ideas is that in the very first moments after the Big Bang, maybe the speed of light was much much faster, and that accounted for how things moved more quickly in the first few moments after the universe was born.
Oh I see but you don't need that if you have the expansion of space itself.
Yeah, inflation is a much more comprehensive theory. It explains a lot of things that's been tested much more rigorously. This is sort of a crazy idea people think about, and I totally encourage crazy ideas. I mean, crazy thinking is what leads to breakthroughs. Not every time, not every crazy theory is the right theory. But you've got to allow for people to think outside the scientific mainstream in order to, you know, sometimes generate a crazy idea which turns out to be true. We've had revolutions in physics and those came from crazy ideas.
All right, So Sandy from New York, that's your answer. We know because we can see well into the past, and we have theories that project well into the past, and that tells us that the speeder light hasn't been changing.
That's right with that.
Let's take a break.
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Our next question comes from Ariel from Russia and he had a question about, or more like a suggestion about what we could do if there's a big asteroid coming to kill zol.
Hi Daniel en Jorge. My name is Ariel. I want to ask you what if instead of using a projectile launched from Earth to intercept an incoming asteroid, we use an arair of lasers and blast asteroid without living Earth.
Wow, a great suggestion. I think Ariel just wants to build a huge laser and point out in this space. Right.
That is an awesome question and it's pretty wild. I wonder what he was doing when he thought of this question.
He's probably building a huge laser and preparing to point out and just yes, right right. So the background here, of course, I mean, why would you want to shoot a laser at asteroids? Other than that sounds really fun And the reason is that we did an episode about death from space or death from above, right, the danger from killer rocks floating out in space, landing on Earth and wiping us all out like the dinosaurs.
And in that podcast we talked about what we could do if we see one coming at us, and we talked about how we can send rockets out there to kind of deflect the asteroid or blow it up or try to break it up.
Right, that's right. And one of the challenges is finding the asteroid early, because the sooner you find it, the less you have to deflect it. Right, If it's really far away, you can give it a pretty tiny nudge, and by the time the asteroid gets to Earth, that tiny nudge is going to turn into a big deviation in its path. If you only find it like one second before it hits the atmosphere, then a tiny nudge is going to do nothing. So the earlier you spotted, the smaller the nudge has to be. And then one problem is, say you bought this asteroid. If you want to send up a nuclear weapon or a gravity tractor or something to tug it off.
Course or a bomb, Yeah, you.
Have to get it up there and get it to the asteroid really fast, right, because every second counts, and so I think that's what motivated Ariel's question. He's thinking, let's get something there that travels at the speed of light like light right right, and using lasers?
Can we build a death star? Can we turn the Earth into a death star? You know, have the guys in the black helmets pull that lever, have the green laser shoot out and destroy the asteroid.
That's right, this fully operational battle station exactly. That's everybody's fantasy to pull that big lever. You know. I love pressing buttons and pulling levers and the saying things happen, So that would be a lot of fun. Well, great question, Ariel, and we didn't cover it our podcast. You're right, and the reason is that it's fairly new idea. So there's a short answer to your question. Yes, it's absolutely possible. People are working on it right now and they're developing this techniquegy.
Yes, are growing ups working on this.
Yeah, there are grown ups building death rays to shoot at rocks in space. That is somebody's job. I mean people, if you work hard, if you study, you could get to work on that kind of question. And there's a labbit.
Wait, wait a minute, you.
Didn't realize that was an alternate career path.
Build giant death star lasers. No, I didn't know. Yeah, well, you know my life would have been so much different.
Yeah, we should educate children about all of their options. There's a labbit you see, Santa Barbara that's working on exactly this. And the reason it's not one of the older ideas you don't hear about this when you read like books from the seventies or eighties about asteroids and asteroid deflections is that only recently do we have lasers that are powerful enough to make this efficient. I mean, you got to put a lot of energy into a laser if it's going to blast something super far away.
Right.
Lasers are really focused, right, the photons are almost parallel. But if you shoot a beam of light, it's going to get wider and wider and wider as it goes, which means less and less intense. Right. So, for example, you can shine your flight flash light at the Moon and you can hit the moon no problem, right, because by the time you're the beam from your flashlight gets to the moon, it's huge. It's wider than the moon. Right.
So the key one of one of the photons you shoot is going to hit the Moon exactly.
But the idea behind laser asteroid deflection is that you want to heat up a spot on the side of the asteroid, so it warms up to like three thousand degrees and then it's going to shoot off a jet of gas like molten rock and gas coming out of the asteroid, which is going to act like a little rocket, pushing it to the side. Right, So if you can heat up one side of the asteroid, you basically can push it off.
Course, so you would aim it to the side of it, not directly at it.
Yeah, I mean you're imagining like COPU compute, right, I'm shooting these things out of the.
Sky direct hit We're like, We're like, we don't.
Have we don't have enough to blow them up, right. The key is to heat it up on one side.
So you're saying, laser technology has been improven all these years and now we can actually maybe a death star rate.
Yeah. Well, we can't blow up planets, right, so we can't make disturbances in the forest like the way you're maybe imagining, but we can shoot lasers at pretty far away objects and deposit significant energy, and so people have been doing studies and the best plan they have so far is to build a space based laser array. Right. You don't want to shoot the lasers from the ground because then they got to go through the atmosphere and they get defocused. So you have to have an orbiting platform of powerful lasers.
Right.
And if you're thinking laser gun, if you're thinking, yeah, that's not going to be misused by by some politicians.
A space gun literally a space gun.
Yeah, I mean, do you want to build this and then put in the hands of the next president, whoever it's going to be, you know, Oprah jay Z or Kid Rock or whoever's gonna be the next president.
Make sure you can't point it back, you know, like exactly, it only works you point it away from the Earth.
Anyway. You got to point it from space. You got to point it at the asteroid and you got to hit it, and you got to cook it for a little while. I mean, because by the time the laser gets there, it's going to be more diffuse, right, So you got to deposit enough energy. So the studies that I read, they estimate that, depending on the power of the laser, it could take between a year and ten years to push the asteroid off.
Course for like a planet killer asteroid.
Yeah, and so that's a long time, which means you've got to see this thing coming well in advance. And in our podcast we talked about how there isn't really a lot of danger from asteroids in our Solar system because the biggest ones we've seen, we know where they are, we know they're not coming for us. The real danger is from comets because they're big, they're fast, and we don't necessarily we haven't necessarily seen their orbits and we might just have like less than a year of warning.
And they're supposed to be made of ice, right.
Yeah, there's like a huge snowball, right, and that'd be pretty dangerous and we'd have less than a year of warning, So that's not terribly optimistic, right. The other plan is to launch the lasers and then send them to the asteroids so they can get closer up, and then you could have small lasers, but you know, then you have to spend time getting them to the asteroid, and it gets pretty complicated.
Where it's the laser itself or you shoot it from Earth would get there at the speed of light.
It would get there the speed of light, but it would be less intense, right, you need a more intense laser if you shoot it from further away. On the other hand, then you can have your space laser and you can use it for whatever you want. You know, you can write your name in cornfields a mile long right.
In Europa, basically exactly.
You could. You could carve your face into you know, Mount Rushmore from space. Yeah, that'd be pretty awesome.
You could add another eye to the Jupiter, may make a smiley face or something.
That's right, you got the red dot and then you got my dot. Yeah. You could change literally change the face of the Solar system. Yeah. So these are dangerous technologies.
There are actual labs working on this idea.
Yeah, exactly. There's the I think the leading one is that U see Santa Barbara and it's called the Directed Energy Planetary Defense Lab.
They couldn't just call it the laser gun lab.
I think probably some students they wanted to call it the death Star lab, but that was probably overruled by the PI.
So Ariel from Russia. The answer is, yes, you could do that, and there are people working on it.
And if you'd like to contribute, you just need to apply to the physics program at you see Santa Barbara.
This is a perfect point to take a break.
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Okay, So, our last question in this episode comes from Russell. And Russell didn't say where he was from, which means we can guess where he's from. Where do you think he's from?
I think he's probably on an asteroid headed to Earth. How about you?
I was just gonna guess, Piji, But I like your apperance. Okay. So Russell has a question about the expanding universe.
Hey, guys, my name is Russell, and I really love the podcast and I've got a question for you.
If the universe is constantly expanding, where is it expanding from?
Does it have a center?
Thanks? Guys, This is a great question. It's actually a common question that we get.
Yeah, but it's kind of tricky. I mean, it's took me a long time to sort of get on my head around this. Concept, right, Like the idea is that if everything's moving away, it is growing, it's stretching. Doesn't that mean that there's a point that is not growing or moving? Do you know what I mean? Like, if you explode a grenade in space and you see all the bits flying off, if you track the motion while the bits, you could track down where all those bits came from, which is sort of like the center of an explosion. And so if somebody tells you the universe exploding or it's expanding, isn't that Doesn't that mean there's a point in the universe that is not grow or expanding.
Yeah, in your grenade theory of the universe, that would be correct. Yeah, So if the universe is a grenade, then there would be a center. But and this misconception comes from thinking about the origin of the universe the Big Bang as an explosion, right, But it's not really an explosion in the sense that just matter is flying through space. It's also an explosion of space, right. Space itself is expanding, and it's expanding everywhere at the same time, so it's like everything is exploding at the same time. So rather than thinking of it like an explosion, you should think of it like an infinite ruler. An infinite ruler suddenly starts to stretch right, and it's stretching everywhere all at once.
Right, Yeah, but isn't doesn't the ruler have a center? The ruler has a center of mass, like a point where you could balance it on your finger.
Okay, So where's the center of mass of an infinite ruler.
Right in the middle?
Right, where's the zero at every point? At every point, you have an infinite amount of mass on both sides, right, So it balances same way everywhere.
Yeah, I guess. But you're assuming the universe is infinite. What if it's not infinite, wouldn't that mean it has the center of mass?
Right? Okay, So let's break the answer into two different possibilities because they're very very different answers. One is, let's assume the universe is infinite, right, that beyond what we can see, it just goes on forever. And in that model, I think the most common scientific understanding is that the Big Bang happened everywhere same at the same time.
Right.
The Big Bang was not like at some location, you know, corner of Fifth Avenue and Broadway and then everything expanded from there, but that it happened everywhere at the same time. So there was a big bang over there, there's a big bang over here. It's all at the same time. And so you can think of it like you know, the surface of a balloon expanding. Right, there's no center to the surface. Every point on the on the surface is expanding simultaneously. Right, obviously the center to the balloon. But here this is two D example. We're just thinking about the surface of the balloon.
Right, like everything came from nothing everywhere.
Yeah, well, what came before the bang? That's a whole other question, right. But if you assume that somehow infinite universe exists, right, and that then the Big Bang started, the Big Bang being just this expansion of space, the stretching of the very fabric of space itself, then that happened everywhere at the same time. There's no preferred location, And it's an important concept in physics that everywhere in the universe is equally preferable to everywhere else.
Right.
We're very democratic in physics when we think about space. We don't like to think about any place being special, right.
But like in a balloon, if I'm inflating the balloon, there's a point the part where I'm holding it and blowing er into it, that's the part that's not moving.
That's true. You're right, I guess I was imagining a balloon without without his lips on infinite exactly. And you know, the universe doesn't have to be infinite for this to work. It just has to be sort of closed, right, Like we talked in our podcast about the size and the shape of space. The universe could be infinite, but it could also be wrapped around itself like a game of asteroids, where you go off in one direction and you loop back around the other way without any discontinuity. And that's the way, like the surface of a balloon is, right, you walk along the surface of a balloon. You could do it forever and everyone ever, you just come back to where you started. There's no end. And in that concept also, the Big Bang is not in any particular place. It has no center, right.
Oh, I see, like a balloon would have the center of the balloon. But you're saying like it's a kind of kind of a three D balloon.
Yes, exactly, it's like a three D balloon where.
Could only be on the center of the balloon and expand balloon really doesn't have a center. Yeah, Like if you were an ad walking on it, you'd be like, where's the center?
Yeah exactly. Like on the surface of the Earth, there is no center to the surface. Right. Every place on the surface of the Earth is the same relative to the Earth, Right, it's the same radius and whatever, all.
Right, So if it's infinite, then it could have no center.
Yeah exactly. But we don't know that, right, And that's the lovely part about questions about the universe is that we know so little about these large contextual questions, you know, like what have we seen about the universe? We've seen what's inside a sphere as fear that's big enough for light to have traveled from those things to us since the start of the universe. It's a little bit more complicated than just being the speed of light times the age of the universe, because there's some actual stretching of space. But we can hand away of that for now, so we call that the observable universe.
Right.
That's everything that we can see, right, And what we don't know is what fraction of the universe is. That is that most of the stuff in the universe is that one bajilliance of the universe or is that basically one over infinity because the universe is infinite, So it's certainly possible that the universe is finite, that there's you know, at some point it runs out of stuff, right, you know, space could be infinite and the stuff could be finite, right.
Yeah, So there's all these possibilities, but there is basically like infinite or not, that's right.
And if it's not infinite, right, if there's a finite amount of stuff in the universe, well then we don't know where the center of that stuff is because we can't see all of it, right, So we have no way of knowing. But if there is a finite amount of stuff in the universe, then yes, it would have a center somewhere, right. But the thing I love about that is that of the observable universe, the center is you, right, You are literally at the center of your observable universe, right, I'm.
More like in the center of my kids universe.
It seems just a little orbiting moon right around there. Some like egos. Yeah, but we all have different observable universes because our heads are in different places, and so we can all catch photons from the early universe at slightly different times, and so like another alien species would have their own observable universe that's a sphere around their planet. So the short answer is to the question is that we really just don't know. If the universe is infinite, then it has no center. If it's finite, then we don't know that it is finite, and we can't see enough of it to know, you know, what would the average location of all that stuff be.
But there could be a hypothetical center to the universe. I mean, if it is finite, there could be a center to the universe.
Yeah. Currently most of our models assume the space goes on forever, and everything we see agrees with that. I think if the universe was finite in the sense that it was, the size of the universe was only a little bit bigger than the observable universe, so that what we're seeing is basically most of it. I think we would see effects of that, you know. I think that the gravitational forces would be ten towards one location or in one direction, right, rather than pulling things everywhere. And what we see now is very homogenous. We've never seen anything that prefers any one direction or any one location, and so the universe seems to prefer no direction and seems to prefer no location.
So that suggests it doesn't seem like we're orbiting around something.
Yeah, that suggests that things are either infinite or really really big compared to what we can see. Right. Of course, we can't tell the difference between those two things, but if I had to place a bet, I would say the universe is most likely either infinite or huge Jungus compared to what we can see, huge jung huge jungest, Yeah, exactly, ginormous compared to what we can see, which would be for all practical purposes, would be infinite. And so from those from that perspective, the universe wouldn't have any well defined center. Right.
In either case, the fact that it's it's space itself that's expanding means that you don't need that sort of center of the grenade, like, yeah, exactly, everything's space itself is expanding. Literally, would sort of look the same whether we're here, or we're in Andromeda, or we're feelings of lighters away, it would all just sort of seem like it's expanding away from us.
Yeah, exactly every point in the universe. It seems like everything is expanding away from you. So everybody feels like, hey, why is everybody going away from me? And that makes me wonder about a little bit about Russell's motivations, like why is the center of the universe important? Like why do we care? It's not like from a scientific point of view, it doesn't necessarily have any meaning, right, it's not like, you know, are we living at the center? Are we in the best real estate in the universe or something, or it's an attempt to understand, like the origin, like this special place. If there was a center to the universe, you could ask why they're right, Imagine space is infinite, but matter is not. That the universe is like a finite blob of matter. They're exploded in space at some point fourteen billion years ago. Then you could ask this question, why that spot and not a billion light years to the left or a billion light years to the right, And that would be an interesting question. It would be interested in clue that there's something that happened here and not somewhere else. So if space did have a center, then you could ask interesting questions about it.
Right, I thought you were going to say that the reason Russell was wondering what everything is moving away from him was that he needed some dating advice.
You gotta be nice to our listeners who are here. They are the reason we get to keep doing this, right, Russell, They're going away from you because they're also intimidated by your good looks and charisma. That's what's going on.
And your ability to ask great questions.
Seriously awesome question, Russell, Thank you very much.
And your taste in podcasts and your.
Taste in podcast is exquisite.
All right, those were all super great questions, and I think you know, it just kind of generally points to the curiosity of people, you know, just like you listen to this podcast like this one, or watch the Science Show and you just you can't help but have questions, deep questions about the universe.
That's right, and we are here to talk about them, and we don't always have the answers. But sometimes that's even more fun when we don't know what the answer is and we can talk about all the crazy possibilities. So please don't hold back. If you are listening to this podcast and you have a question you want us to talk about, send it to us at questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com.
And if you need dating advice, just write as a dating at Daniel and Jorge dot com, or.
Just shout it out your window late at night and Jorge will eventually hear it.
Or just build a death star and write it on the surface of the menient. Well, we'll definitely see it.
I do not endorse that advice, by the way. That is purely from hohohevi. I'm gonna have my lawyers cleared me from liability from your moon Moon vandalism suggestion.
There we need we need a disclaimer at the end, you know, like whenvies have disclaimers.
Yeah, please sign this waiver.
This is a work of fiction.
None of the opinions it's the podcast. We can't say it's the work of fiction. We're supposed to be talking about things that are real.
None of the opinions expressed by the cartoons should be taken seriously.
I'm sorry by listening to this podcast, do you accept responsibility for all of your actions, even if we suggested them? All right, thanks everybody for listening. Please don't go out and vandalize cosmic features of our solar system and ruin them for everybody.
And keep asking questions.
That's true. See you next time, See you next time. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or email us at feedback at danieldorghe dot com. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. How is us dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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