Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Jorge answer questions from listeners, like you!
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Hey, Daniel, if you are the dictator of a country, what would do in terms of science?
Ooh? In terms of science, I think I'd like to explore, like, what is the biggest cookie that's possible to bake and still be tasty?
Hmmm, that's something physicists wonder about.
I wonder about that because you know, a cookie is a complicated thing. It has to be crispy, it has to be soft in the inside. You make it too big, then it's all just going to be gooey. How do you get the heat dispersed? It's a hard physics problem.
So you think you need all the resources of a country to figure out the answer to this question.
Hey, if you're going to do something, do it ten billion dollars big, Right, That's the way I rolled.
The ten billion dollar cookie.
That's right.
You would be your science project, your dreams shigence project.
How about you? Would you aim higher?
I would probably just make sure everyone understands science, you know, throw all that money into educating people about science.
You should find like an awesome podcast about it.
Yeah, oh man, you know, and maybe like get two people on it, and.
Two really good looking people. We eat a lot of cookies, but stay trim anyway.
Yeah, and then just give them the ten billion dollars.
I'm sure they'll be responsible with it.
Yeah, sure, totally not spending on cookies or anything like that.
That's right, that's right.
Hi. I'm Joorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD Comics.
And I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist by day and a podcaster by I don't know afternoon, and I'm a big fan of cookies and science.
And welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we look around and wonder what is weird, what is amazing, what is crazy about this universe, and then we talk about it in a way that we hope you will understand.
And we're also the authors of the book We Have No Idea, a Guide to the Unknown Universe. So if you would like to hear more from us or learn more about all these great and amazing questions about the universe. Go check it out.
That's right, And we also love to hear from you about your questions about the universe. At the end of every episode we tell people please write in if you have something you'd like to hear us talk about. If you have a question you can't quite figure out the answer to just using Google, send it to us. We'll break it down for you.
And a lot of people write us, right Daniel. We get a couple of a dozen a day. Right.
Oh yeah. We got a lot of nice emails, and some of them are just appreciation, people saying, hey, thanks for the show. We're enjoying it, which is wonderful to read. And then people send us their crackpot theories of the universe, like hey, I figured out dark matter, and you know quantum gravity, and you know why airline food tastes so bad? All with my one theory?
Uh Daniel, actually that one was for me. What do you mean it's a crackbok? They didn't you read it?
I read all the theories that people send us. Sometimes I read them carefully. Sometimes I skimmed through them, I'll admit, but I do love reading them, and I love getting people's emails, and mostly I love the emails where people ask questions, where people say, here's something I don't understand, something I'd love to figure out. Could you please explain something to me.
Have you ever gotten a question that you had never thought about before?
Oh? For sure. Yeah. Lots of questions people ask I had never heard before, never even thought about, like how to answer that question before? Those are my favorite ones.
And so Danniel will answer your emails. But every once in a while we have an episode where we answer your questions on the podcast, and today is one of those episodes.
Can I tell you about one of the questions that we got that totally blew my mind? Oh?
Please?
Somebody wrote in and said, what if the sun is actually a giant banana wrapped in hydrogen gas? Think about it?
Think about it?
So I did that. I thought about it. You know, Yeah, that's a fascinating idea. I'd never thought of that idea before. I've never answered that question before. I don't know how to answer that question, so I thought, maybe you're the banana expert.
What would be preventing the sun from being a banana wrapped in hydrogen? What would be preventing it exploding hydrogen?
Well, I guess it'd be like a roasted banana, right, because it's pretty hot there. So if you like, you know, banana's flambay, then maybe they'd be good. But I'm not sure how you would assemble all those hydrogen atoms and fuse them in the right way they get potassium and all that stuff to make it into a banana. Right, So I think that was not a sincere question. Is maybe actually a joke aimed at you?
Oh, but technically is it possible, like you know, just out of random you know, fluctuations, somehow a banana forms for an instant in time, So it could be true.
Yes, And if you believe in the multiverse, then there is some universe in which the Sun spontaneously forms a giant space banana in its core for you know, for an instant.
Yes, yeah, there you go, There you go, And that's the universe I want to live in.
We live. This is an aspirational podcast, folks. We talk about the universe we live in and the universe we wish we lived.
That's right, and the answer is always in the multiverse, anything is possible, So technically you can be optimistic about anything that's right, even space bananas.
It's right. I feel good people because it's all possible.
It's all possible. Yeah. And so today on the podcast, we'll be tackling listener questions.
Some of them are questions that I get a lot, and I thought people might be interested to hear the answer. Maybe other people have these questions. Some of them are questions I'd never heard before and had to do a bit of research, so mix it up a little bit.
Yeah, and so today we have some pretty exciting questions. We have a question about a giant space gun. We have questions about photons, and we have questions about why isn't everything exploding?
Or is it? Or is it?
So we'll get into that today.
So buckle up, folks, it's going to be a crazy ride today.
So today's first question comes to us from Paul, and Paul had a question about how is there a better way to get to space? So here is Paul's question.
Hi, Daniel and Jorge.
When I was a kid, I remember reading in an old Guinness Book of World Record about a gun in Barbados that can fire sixteen inch shell weighing about three hundred and thirty pounds to an altitude of two hundred and fifteen thousand feet. Now that's less than half of the lowest orbital altitude, but that was fifty seven years ago. So can a gun put an object into orbit? And if so, why aren't we doing it? It has to be cheaper than rockets.
Thanks all right, thank you Paul for that awesome question. This has the distinction to be you're the only person to ever write in asking that question.
Really, it's it's not a burning question in the public's.
Mind, apparently not. Not everybody's thinking about what they could launch into space using a really big gun. But I love the end of his question when he says, if we can do it, why aren't we doing it all the time? I mean, if this is within our grasp, man, I would be like shooting banana pies in the space all the time.
I think. I think it's interesting because the corollary to his question was what he was sort of really asking, was isn't this cheaper than rockets? Because really, it seems anything should be cheaper than rockets.
It's true rockets are not cheap, right, and so a lot of people spend a lot of time thinking about other ways to get stuff into space because rockets cost millions and millions of dollars.
Right, yeah, So the question really is like, can you build a giant space gun, and that's how you put things into orbit. You just shoot them out as super fast and up, I guess vertically up is how you would do it, or maybe not, and then that would just go off into space. It wouldn't stop. We would go into space and get into orbit. That's the question, right, Yeah, that's the question. And let's unpack it a little bit because there's a couple of problems with this idea. First is just getting it up high enough, right, Like can you shoot something from the ground and make it all the way into space?
Right? M And if you just want to leave the Earth, it's a whole separate question of could you shoot something from the ground and get it into orbit. But let's just say you want to escape the Earth, you're on a mission, you want to flow down into space, and you just want to leave Earth's gravity, right.
Meaning shoot something with a gun and not have it fall back down exactly.
Yeah. So the question is then how fast does it have to go? Right? That's called the escape velocity of the Earth. And the escape velocity of the Earth is really high, like if you're going to leave the surface and not get any more pushes. Right, Remember a rocket gets continuous pushes. It brings the push the pusher with it as it's going up in the air, keeps getting more and.
More pushes, keeps accelerating.
Yeah, so you're going to get all that push in the very beginning. So you have to have your maximum speed is immediately after you leave the gun because you're gonna lose it pretty quickly. So then the question is how fast you have to be going to leave Earth's orbit?
Okay, so like what's your the initial velocity you need to have in order to keep going into space and not fall back down.
That's right, exactly. And on the surface of the Earth, the escape velocity you'd need is about eleven kilometers per second.
So in one second you'd have to be going you have to cover eleven kilometers.
Yeah, exactly. And you know, for scale, that's like thirty three times the speed of sound, so you know, like jets can go like mock one, mock two, mock three, this is mock thirty three.
Wow, how much is that in miles per hour?
In miles per hour, I think that's like twenty five thousand miles per hour.
Wow, So that's a pretty car goes up that h I think. I don't think my prius is enough digits. I think in its digital readA.
Yeah, I don't think the digits is the problem with your prius. But that's exactly the problem, Like number one, is how do you get something going that fast? Right? Like shooting stuff from a rifle doesn't get anywhere near that speed. Like rifles, they can shoot a bullet fast in the speed of sound, but not thirty three times a speed of sound. Oh, I see, So you need like a really big gun. You need a lot more explosive to get it up that speed. I see.
So even if you take a rifle and point it up and you shoot, the bullet would eventually come back.
Then do not do that, Yes, do not point a rifle straight up, because that bullet will come right back down at you or the guy standing next to you. This happens every year at New Year's Eve. People fire guns into the air and you think, like, where do you think those bullets are going. They're not going into space, not into space, not into space. Then they're coming back down and maybe you're hurting somebody. So do not fire bullets into the air. They will not go into space. And the other problem is, say you did manage to shoot a gun or you know, you had some payload and you shot it at this incredible speed, so it had enough energy. Well, it's not easy to go through the atmosphere at that speed. What happens when you go through the atmosphear at high speeds is friction from the air air resistance, so you heat up, just like you know how space ships when they land, they have to come through the atmosphere and you know there's all that fire and burning and stuff. That's because the friction with the air. So this way you'd have so much speed, you'd have friction on the way up.
Oh So it's kind of like the re entry problem, but in.
Reverse exactly exactly, it's the re entry problem on the way out. So if you build like a three hundred million dollars satellite and then want to launch it into space when you don't want it going twenty five thousand miles per hour through the air because it'll melt.
What if you put shielding on it, you know, like they do with the Shuttle and the Landers.
Yeah, but the Shuttle doesn't re enter the atmosphere twenty five thousand miles per hour, and that's on purpose, right, It slows down a lot, and it does it very gradually. Wow, So you'd need a lot of shielding, and then this thing would get heavy, and then it gets more expensive, and you're going to get this thing plus it's shielding up to twenty five thousand miles per hour. It's not easy.
It's hard to imagine that cold air can burn you to a crisp, right.
Yeah, Well, imagine it's sandpaper, right, Imagine somebody's gonna you're gonna do it. You're you have one of those bananas slipping slides in your backyard, except instead of slippery plastic, somebody puts sandpaper. Right, that's what we would be like, Yeah.
That is a horrific scenario, Daniel, and trying to raise it from my mind.
There, right, Well, that is why we don't do this. I mean there's other problems too, right, but that's those are reasons number one and two.
Reason number three, this is why we don't go on slip and slides of twenty five thousand miles per hour.
You're saying, it's everything feels like sandpaper. At twenty five thousand miles per hour.
That's the point, Okay, So it's really hard to do just to just to accelerate any kind of mass or object up to twenty five thousand miles per hour and also would burn up with air. So what are some of the other problems.
The other problem is getting into orbit. I mean, what we talked about just now is getting it out of Earth's atmosphere and out of Earth's gravitational pull. That's actually harder than getting something in or orbit because you have to go higher. Right, So you might think, well, what if we just wanted to go to like low Earth orbit, we didn't want to actually leave Earth, and you think, well, that might be easier. That's true, but you can't actually shoot something from the ground into orbit.
You cannot.
You cannot because remember you're shooting it, you give it one push, right, You can't land in a stable orbit has a fixed trajectory, and that trajectory includes intercepting the ground, so eventually it will reintercept the ground. The way to get into orbit is you fly up into there and then you adjust your speed so you have the right speed and direction to be in orbit. But there's no way to get there from the ground without additional pushes once you're up in the atmosphere.
Oh, but you're saying you need minor adjustments once you get up there, or you need like a lot of adjustment.
No, it could be fairly minor adjustments. So, like one scenario is you have stuff on the ground and you shoot it up to fairly low Earth orbit or just below using your massive space gun that you build because you're a dictator, and then you have something catch it, something in low Earth or but like catch it and then readjust it and shoot it out into orbit. So that kind of system might work. But you can't just shoot something into orbit from the ground because no trajectory that starts from the ground will lead to a stable orbit.
Like, even if you're a superman, you could not put a football in orbit, no matter how hard you try.
That's right, that's right. And football, and even Superman, if he threw a football twenty five thousand miles per hour, it would melt right, like unless it's a super football from his original planet or something.
Yeah, kryptonite football, that's right. But well then he couldn't hold it, yeah exactly, But that's just a detail.
Yeah, The thing is, and and Paul mentioned this in his question, is that people have tried this, right, People have worked on this problem. People have shot stuff pretty far up, so you know, people are not daunted by the fact that this seems impossible slash in practice.
Wait wait, didn't they do the math?
Yeah, you know, but these our dictators were talking about and so sometimes you know, they're not bothered by math. You know, the rules don't apply to them. These are autocrats we're talking about. Math is just fake news.
All right. So that's a pretty amazing thing to learn, is that people have tried this, and both people who have tried it are sort of pretty notorious.
Yeah, this is not a community of folks you want to go to conferences with. Because the first person to really do this significantly was Hitler. And Hitler had this cannon called the V three cannon, and he could launch projectiles ninety kilometers away. Again, the Germans were also working in rocket technology, but this is just launching it from the ground with no more pushes.
Well, I was wondering when our discussions would eventually devolve into talking about Hitler, and.
Everything on the internet gets compared to Hitler eventually, right, there's a.
Rule eventually, why not physics?
Here we are.
So he tried it. He tried to build a giant cannon that would launch things into space.
Yeah, And I don't think his goal was to get into space. I think his goal be able to like launch shells to France from Germany. Right. They wanted like really long distance bombardment. I think that was their goal. I don't think they cared that much about shooting stuff into space.
Oh, I see, just like, what's the biggest missile you can build?
Yeah? Exactly. But it inspired another guy, a guy named Gerald Bull, and he convinced some combination of American and Canadian governments to give him a bunch of money for something called Project Harp, which is basically, build a huge gun and see if you can launch stuff into space. And he didn't do a terrible job.
Really. He came up with a pretty good name, Project Cart, Project Cart. Project that's built a giant gun, and Chason thinks into.
Space, project crazy dictators fund this, Yeah exactly.
So how far did he get?
Well, his record still stands today. He shot a four hundred pound object one hundred and ten miles above the Earth's surface, so that counts like he got something into space. Now it came back down. It didn't escape the earth, right, he shout it up and it came back down. But that's the record today for in terms of launching something from the ground and not giving it any more pushes. It's one hundred and ten miles.
How did he do it? What did this gun look like?
It just looks like a really big gun. I mean, it's just like a really big tube. I mean, there's not a whole lot of cleverness here right right, It's just a big tube but a big explosive in it, you know. And the question is can you get enough money to build a bigger and bigger gun? And you know, some of these things don't scale that easily. In the strength of the cylinder, etc. You have to take into account. But basically it's just spend more money, make it bigger. It's kind of like particle physics, right, spend more money, make a bigger accelerator.
I guess the idea is that you sort of make it like a rocket, but instead of having the propellant and the fuel on the rocket on the missile, you just keep it on the ground exactly. You know what I mean, like, that's what a giant gun solves, is the idea that you don't need to bring the fuel with you, you just exploit it all here on Earth and then that sends you into space.
That's right. The problem with a rocket is you're not just lifting your payload, you're lifting the fuel. You need to lift the fuel, You need to lift the fuel, et cetera, et cetera, So it gets by the time you're actually launching your like ninety percent fuel. So this solves that problem by basically blowing up all the fuel at once on the ground and seeing how far it goes, right, But it doesn't really solve the problem. I think a more clever idea is like laser supported rockets, like shoot the energy at it using beams basically, so you don't have to transport the fuel. You can send it up from the ground as it goes.
Wow, and shoot it with lasers which would absorb the lay and they would absorb the laser and redirect it to their propulsion.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, if I was a dictator and I was funding crazy science projects getting stuff in the space, I would definitely put some money in laser propulsion.
You're like I'm not going to be one of those crazy dictators that want to build a giant gun. I'm just going to be a dictator that makes giant lasers.
Yeah, exactly. But the story doesn't end there. This guy, Gerald Bull, he ran out of money from the US and Canada and didn't finish his gun. But then he sold the idea. He sold the idea to set I'm Hussein right to what Yes, inspired by Hitler and then employed by Saddam Hussein, and he said, look, I'm gonna build you the biggest gun ever. And I guess that sales pitch worked. You know, he must have had a killer PowerPoint slide deck, and he was building the mother of all guns.
He had three words, biggest gun ever, like.
I wanted, I don't know, yeah, And so he was in the middle middle of building the biggest gun ever, like I think Saddam called it the mother of all guns. And you know, Saddam probably had the same idea that the Hitler had, like launch shells to Israel or launch shells to anywhere in the Middle East or something nefarious. But Bull was actually assassinated by we don't know who while he was working on the project. So it didn't end very well for the scientist. Wow.
Yeah, and that's a movie or a comic book right there.
Yeah, exactly. Ben Affleck is probably writing the screenplay as we speak.
He's the YA agent assassinating the big Gun.
So Jerald Bill got a bunch of money from a rock, but he never matched his original high score that he did on his own using Project harp. So that stands today. So one hundred and ten miles is the record. I don't think it's a practical way to launch things because remember the kind of things we want to launch in a space are usually delicate, right, telecommunication satellites or people, and you got to be pretty careful. So the rocket approach is much more gentle because you never achieve as high a speed.
Interesting, So putting your delicate object on top of like tons and tons of explosives not recommended. That's the safest way to do it in a rocket.
Yes, that is the safest way to do it. Yeah, gradually blow up all those explosives, right, don't blow it up all at once on the ground.
All right. So that's the answer for Paul. Can you shoot stuff into space unit using a gun? That's the question. The answer is technically.
Yes, but it's not a great idea.
It's really hard, not a good idea. And also you can't put it into orbit. You need something else, that's right, Yeah, you need another stage.
I mean to catch it and redirect it or something once you get up into orbit. Yeah.
And also for Paul, stop trying to make this gun because they're going to assassinate you. Little pro tip there from your podcast.
Yeah. Also, funding from dictators doesn't always end out well.
All right, thank you, Paul. And so we have two more questions about particle collisions and about dark energy. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, Daniel, so today we are answering reader or more more like listener questions questions that our listeners out there send us. And so we answered one about building a giant space gun. And so our second question comes from Jacob, and Jacob has a question about your job, right, Daniel.
That's right, yeah, Hey, Daniel and Jorge, I was just wondering how you guys isolate and manipulate the particle or particles that you use for the large Hadron collider.
Thanks.
That's a great question, right, He's asking us, like, how do you get one particle into the collider and slam it into into the other particles? And how do you control them and manipulate them.
It's a great question, yeah, because you know, we know that in a particle collider you're smashing particles together, and so I guess, I guess the question is how do you how could you possibly get two of these particles to hit each other right on the head. That seems like an impossible problem.
It is an impossible problem. And that's why we don't do that, because that's basically impossible.
Yeah, all right, yeah, you don't. You don't. You don't aim one particle to hit another particle.
No, that would be really hard. It's like, imagine you're like throwing a water balloon from La and somebody else to throwing a water balloon from New York, and you have to have them like meet somewhere over Kansas. Right, that's basically impossible. So that's level.
But wait, wait, what if you use a space gun?
Totally will work. Absolutely, a water balloon will survive twenty five thousand miles per hour, no.
Problem, a space a potato gun or water balloon gun.
Yeah, now, the it's a good question. That's impossible. And so it's also very hard to just isolate individual particles. I mean, there's a whole field of physics that works on that atomic molecular optics and stuff like that where the trap individual particles. But that's really hard to do. And so what we do instead is we don't send individual particles flying against individual particles. We send a little gas of particles, like a bunch of particles against a bunch of particles coming.
The other direction is that the official physics name bunch of a bunch.
We actually use the word bunch, and the reasons really we use yeah, exactly bunches. You can look it up at the LEDC and The reasons for that are is that even if the particles do hit each other, the chances of a collision are not great. Like mostly they just you know, gently brush off each other. So what you want actually is a bunch of collisions happening at the same time, so that you have a higher chance of seeing something interesting. Plus it's just hard to get took.
It, so even if you so, even if you could align one particle and aimit directly add another particle, they might not collide at all.
Yeah, exactly, I mean, what do we really mean by a collision? A collision is an interaction. We think of collision as the edges of two things hitting each other, right, because we're used to macroscopic objects. But in that case, you know, the zoom in microscopically and think about what's happening when the two edges touch. What happens really is that the particles in one push away from the particles in the other. That's an interaction that's like a force. So now strip that all away, and you have just two particles pushing against each other. Right, if they're going really really fast, unless they hit immediately right on each other, then they'll just whizz right by each other, and even still, even if they go, they go right on top of each other. It's quantum mechanical, and so sometimes just nothing happens most of the time, very little happens most of the time. The thing that happens is boring is that the two particles just like slightly deflect. So what we want to see is the rare stuff at times when two particles smash together make something weird and crazy nobody's ever seen before. So make that happen. We have to send a bunch of particles in at once.
But what's the difference between them interacting and not interacting? Do you know what I mean? Like, how do they decide? Or yeah, is it just that they're more head on than others or that they have no other option but to smush together or what?
There's a real quant mechanical mystery there, because you know, quantum mechanics tells us that you can repeat the same experiment. You can like shoot two particles exactly the same angle at each other the same way and get two different outcomes. So you're asking, like what determines whether they interact or they don't, or that the interaction is a boring one or an interesting one. It's random, like there's somewhere in the universe a die gets rolled. Every time these two particles collide. That determines like are they going to bounce off each other gently? Are they going to create a Higgs boson? Are they going to create something else these folks have never seen and blow their minds, or are they just going to miss?
And so the strategy you guys use is to just go for the numbers. You just throw a whole bunch of particles. You don't try to hit individual particles together. You just throw a whole bunch of them together, and you hope that you get some of them hitting each other.
Exactly. It's like you're looking for your first job, and so you send out like thousands of resonates, right, you know, just email one and then wait a week. Right, you send out a lot of resumes and in our.
Case, sounds like my faculty source when I was for a.
Professor, exactly right. You go for the numbers, and so in this case, we have ten to the eleven protons in every bunch. That's one hundred billion protons in a little bunch.
And they're all in a really small space.
Right, Yeah, exactly, and we focus them using magnets. So the other part of his question was like how do you control them? How do you maintain them? Basically, we use magnets because you can't like you can't like have a little ziplock bag with just ten to the eleven protons in it, you know, you carry it around, So we have a magnetic bottle. Essentially, we use magnets to keep these things moving in a circle. Right. Magnets bend the path of a charge particle, so we focus it using magnets and we get it down to two and a half micrometers. Right, So we want we want as many protons as possible and as small as an area as possible because it's the greatest density, the greatest possibility is something exciting is going to happen. Wow. So and you might think, well, that's a lot of particles, right, it is, but it's also a small number, right, Like you know a mole, which is you know the atomic unit has you is Avagadre's numbers like ten to the twenty three particles, right, And a really really good vacuum has ten to the twelve particles in it per cubic meter, So ten to the eleven particles is a lot if you just count them. But it's also it's very diffuse, rights, It's not like this is a very dense thing. This this bunch of protons. Wow.
And you don't just send one bunch at a time. You send a whole bunch of bunches at each other.
That's right. It's organized like a Swiss clock, which makes sense because it's a huge circle in Switzerland.
Geneva.
Yeah, and we have more than two thousand bunches in the accelerator at all times, and you know, the thing is like tens of kilometers around, and so they're all synchronized. And so every twenty five nanoseconds, one bunch hits another bunch, and then twenty five nanoseconds or another bunch is coming down the line and they collide. And so it's just like all day, all night, every twenty five nanoseconds we collide one bunch of protons against another bunch of protons.
It's like a ferris wheel, but instead of each pod, you have twenty eight hundred bunches just going around and around.
Yeah. First World makes it sound like it's all fun and enjoy but these guys are slamming into each other. It's like an assembly line, you know, they're just coming down the line and getting smushed into each other. And also you can reuse the bunches, like the bunches passed through each other, some tiny fraction that may be interact, but most of them are untouched, so you can send them through again.
So they go through each other and then they just come back around again. Yeah exactly, you don't discard them. Yeah, so it's called a fill. We fill the accelerator. We put all these bunches and we get them going. We slam into each other, and then you know, eventually you lose some of them because you can't have perfect containment, and so the effective number of collisions you're getting starts to drop. So then you empty it and you refill it start again.
Hmm.
All right, well, so that answer is Jacob's question. The he has how do we control how do you control the particles in the collider and how do you get like single particles who hit each other? And the answer is using a bunch of bunches.
Yeah exactly. So we don't throw one water balloon at another water balloon. We throw like one hundred billion water balloons at one hundred billion water balloons, and then we it's so much fun. We just get to watch what happens. We like, you know, create explosions and watch them all day long. Best job in the world.
Okay, here's here. Here's a question. Then for me, what if you aimed this collider into space, would you get the protons up into space into.
Well, protons are definitely moving fast enough to escape Earth's velocity, but the atmosphere would stop them because they would slam into other particles and they would, you know, very quickly, So one proton would hit another proton, and then those two protons would share the original proton's energy. You have two particles at half the energy, and then you have four particles that a quarter the energy, and eventually you'd have a trillion particles that a trillionth the energy.
But some of them might make it out into space, right.
Yeah, some of them might bleed out over the edge of the atmosphere, but you wouldn't have like you know, you're imagining like Superman rocketing from the surface of the Earth triumphantly arm raised, Right, that's not what would happen. You just gently heat the atmosphere.
Basically, hmmm, yeah, but some of them might leak out into space.
Yeah, exactly. Some of them might leak out in space, but not into Earth's orbit.
Okay, got it, got it all right, Jacob, Hope, that answered your question. And so well, we have one more question about the exploding universe. But before we get to it, let's take a quick break.
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All right, today we're answering listener questions questions from you, the listeners of this podcast, and so our third question of the day for this episode comes to us from someone in Dallas.
Hi, Daniel and Jorge. This is Tom from Dallas. I love the show and always leads me to more questions. And one thing that I've been really grappling with is the expansion of the universe. Right, So, if the entire universe is expanding fa than the speed of light because of dark energy, and it's not expanding from a central point, but rather from all points in space time simultaneously, then wouldn't everything just kind of be exploding around us? How do I even exist? If I'm imploding at faster than the speed of light? I don't feel like I'm imploding Anyways, Guys, I really appreciate you taking my question, and I really enjoy the show. Thanks for everything you do.
Yeah, I love that question. I love that he had his mind blown. You know that he's thinking about this cosmic sized questions he wants to understand, and that's my favorite thing. Is when you can get you can give people a piece of information that they didn't know about the universe, and then they try to fit it into their brain. They're like, Okay, if that's crazy thing you just said is true, then why doesn't this happen? Why doesn't that happen? Then that's physics, right, that's like, how do I reconcile this thing with all the things I know? And so I love seeing people do that. They're basically being physicists.
Yeah. I feel like we're doing our job if it makes people think and have their own questions.
That's right, not if we're making people worried that they're exploding. But you know, it's a good question.
To ask, are Daniel they are Their minds are exploding, that's right, their mental consciousness, their connection to the universe.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, And it's a great question. And I think the question comes from hearing that dark energy is expanding the universe, right, stretching it out.
Yeah, because we had an episode where the title of the podcast episode was is the Universe exploding? And we said at the end that, yes, the universe is exploding.
That's right, the universe is exploding. And I think a lot of people are tempted to think about that like an explosion which has a center. Right, you blow up a bomb, things fly out from the center, and so you imagine, oh, the expansion is happening from the center, things are getting pushed out. But we made the point in that episode, which is true, that that's not the way it's happening. That dark energy expands all of space, So every point in space is being affected by dark energy. New space is being created all the time, everywhere.
Right, It's like the dark energy is not just acting in the center of the universe or at the end. It's like all the way through there's just a little bit of dark energy that's pushing everything apart.
That's right. And it also it sounds really violent because we say that dark energy is almost three fourths of the energy of the universe is dark energy, So it sounds like, wow, this must be a really powerful force. It's pushing galaxies apart, and galaxies have hundreds of billions of stars, so what could possibly have the energy to push those apart? And if that's applying to me too, If you could push galaxies apart, why isn't it just just shred me? Like tissue paper, right, I think that's the essence of the question.
Yeah, And in particular, he said that if we are if the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, how is it that we don't feel it right now?
Like?
Why why isn't my hand moving away from my other hand at the speed of light? If the whole universe is expanding faster than the speed of light.
Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. Well, the answer. The thing to understand to grapple with this question is that dark energy is the most powerful thing in the universe in that it has the biggest slice of the energy budget. But remember that dark energy is everywhere, right, Most of the stuff in the universe is not everywhere, Like the matter in the universe is clumped up into stars and galaxies, and it's in most of space doesn't have matter in it, right. Dark energy doesn't work like that. Dark energy is uniform. It's spread equally everywhere, So it doesn't have to be very powerful to add up to a really, really really big number because most of the places where there's nothing, there's dark energy.
Do we know that for sure that dark energy is evenly spread out, it's not at all clumped together? Or in imperceptible clumps.
That's right. We know very little about dark energy, but that's the model that fits the data that dark energy is expanding the universe everywhere, and we don't know what dark energy is. Right, it's really just a description of the fact that the universe is expanding. But it's consistent with something which is a property of space, meaning that it's uniform. It's everywhere. I mean, whether you're in the middle of a star or you know, in the middle of one of our listeners, or in the middle of one of these huge voids in the supercluster sheets and bubbles. Right, it's everywhere.
It's like a it's like an even glow that the universe.
Has exactly and because it's everywhere, it's not really very strong anywhere. Okay, so, yes, it's creating new space between our galaxy and other galaxies, but there's a lot of space there, so it adds up, right, it can have a big effect. But between like your hand and your other hand, there's not a lot of space. So it is creating new space there, but it's very weak compared to the other forces at play, namely the chemical bonds holding your body together. Right, the reason that you don't fall apart is that the stuff in your body is holding onto the other stuff in your body, and those bonds are more powerful than dark energy.
Right. But you know, I think Tom was maybe wondering how it can be that the univer is expanding faster than the speed of light, but yet you don't feel it here.
Yeah, well you don't feel it here because it's a very small effect here, right, Like, it's creating a very small amount of space per space, and that adds up to making things, to creating space faster than light can travel. Right, Like, imagine all the space between here and another galaxy. So every piece of that space increases by one percent, and then another one percent, and another one percent, and it's increasing at a rate that it's faster than light can go through it. Remember, nothing can go faster than light through space, but there's no limit to how fast you can create space. So all those little bits of space between us and that other galaxy are working hard enough to create more space than light can fly through.
I was thinking maybe a good analogy was that, you know, if you grab a rubber band or a strip of rubber ban and you stretch it, you know, the ends of the rubber ban can be moving fast relative to each other, but if you're somewhere in the rubber band, you wouldn't feel the stretch that violently.
Yeah, I think that works, except you know, we don't know if the universe has an edge, right, right, But if you just pick two points, right, like two galaxies, you can think of them as the edges of the rubber band, and all the space between them is like the rubber bandy part of the rubber band, then yeah, I think that works, right, because the distance between the two galaxies is the sum of all the increasing distances and the little bits of space in between, right, yeah. Yeah, So dark energy is there, it's out there, it's everywhere in the universe. It's also inside you. And the reason it like isn't ripping you away from the Earth is that, like the force of gravity is strong enough to keep you on Earth. The force of gravity, even though it's so weak, is stronger than dark energy is right here, right. Dark energy, you remember, is very weak on a local scale, but only only great when it adds up over huge pieces of space.
So you're like you're in one point of the rubber band, and the ground the ravan is stretching a little bit, but you're keeping yourself together stronger than the rubberban is stretching you at that little point in the.
Rubberband exactly right. Like if you're you know, you're it's a windy day and somebody's getting blown, but they can grab onto something, right. You can grab onto a pole or to your friend or something. You can overcome the power of the wind just by holding on right. It's the same thing. Dark energy is just like wind, expanding everything in space, but it's it's a bit of a gentle breeze, and so it doesn't take that much of a force to overcome it. And that's why, for example, our galaxy is not getting torn apart. Right, the space between galaxies is increasing. Why isn't our galaxy getting shredded? The reason is gravity. There's enough gravity in our galaxy to hold itself together to battle dark energy. Now, we don't know how long that's gonna that's going to be the case because dark energy turned on like five billion years ago and started expanding the universe. We don't know why. We don't know how long it's going to keep going. We don't know if it's going to increase the intensity of the expansion or stop up and turn around. We don't really know, so we'll forever be weaker than you know, local gravity and local chemical bonds, and we don't know. It could be in the future it's much more powerful and it shreds everything, right, or it could turn off and get bored and go do something else.
Looking forward to that. All right, So Tom asks, why isn't dark energy exploding everything, even the things around us? And the answer is that it is. It is exploding everything, Tom.
That's right, even you, Tom Boom. We just literally blew your mind.
But we used the word exploding and the word faster than this speed of light kind of on a universe scale, right, Like, on a universe scale, it's sort of exploding. And the ends of the universe, if there are ends, or two extreme ends of the universe, are maybe moving faster than the speed of light relative to each other, but on like a local, little tiny, hey my house scale, it's not such an incredible effect.
Right, Well, those ends are not moving faster than the speed of light relative to each other, but space is being created between them faster than light can move through it, which is a slightly technical difference in the way you say it.
Yeah, but yeah, exactly, yeah, okay, all right, cool. So those are three awesome questions, mostly from the Southern United States.
That's right, randomly selected, but this time they mostly ended up from the Southern US. But we get questions from all over the world. So if you're a listener from a far flung place, please send us your questions. Or if you just have a burning question about something in the universe and you'd like us to explain it, please write it in. I love getting your emails. Yeah, so please send them into questions at Danielandjorge dot com.
Well, thanks for listening. We hope you guys enjoyed that.
Tune in next time.
And if you're a dictator of a country with a billion dollar signs budget, consider investing it in a podcast.
Or a giant space gun using rubber bands to fly protons into outer space.
There you go, give this man some money that I will agree with. 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 Danielandhorge dot com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. 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 use, waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House 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.
There are children, friends, and families walking, riding on pass and roads every day. Remember they're real people with loved ones who need them to get home safely. Protect our cyclists and pedestrians because they're people too.
Go safely.
California from the California Office of Traffic Safety and caltrans.
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