Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Jorge talk about what would happen if dark energy increased and tore the Universe apart.
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Hey, okay, I'm confused about something in the Star Wars universe.
Well, I've seen those movies, which means I have a PhD in them. That's how they give out PhDs.
Right, Yeah, it's Star Wars University. I think that's the only.
Requirement Swu go wookies.
So my confusion is the Star Wars universe has humans in it, right, like people.
Ah, well that's never clear. You know, they look like humans, but technically they're all aliens, right, they're ets extraterrestrial.
Well, they're definitely biological humans. But they also have like super advanced technology, right, like far future stuff.
Yeah, yeah, they have warp drives and spaceships and lightsabers.
But it also says that it takes place a long, long time ago, So like, is it the past or is it the future with fancy technology?
Yeah? Yeah, I know. That's the beauty of Georgie Lucas's opening line. A long time ago in a galaxy far far away. This is something that happened a long time ago, that's happening right now, or it's going to happen in the future.
Maybe in the future I'll finally understand it.
Maybe you just need to rewatch the movies a few times.
Maybe it's time I get a second PhD.
Am Jorhem a cartoonist and the co author of Frequently Asked Questions about the Universe.
Hi, I'm Daniel I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I'm not prepared to defend the physics of Star Wars.
There's physics in Star Wars.
That's the problem. There isn't that much, so we can't defend it.
Well. I think from the beginning they say it's a fantasy. They never claim it's science. I think that's how George Lucas conceived it. He always thought of it as a fantasy. It's like fantasy plus Westerns in space. Yeah, anything's better in space, right except breathing.
I guess. I don't know. Is dessert better in space necessarily?
If it's ice cream, sure that's going to stay nice and cold, isn't it.
I've had astronaut ice cream. It doesn't compare.
Welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we think that the mysteries out in space are actually quite delicious. We take a deep sip of all of the questions we have about the nature of the universe, the way things work, the way things are, the way they come together to make this universe that we can somehow amazingly inexplicably analyze and understand. With our tiny little brains, we can cast our simple mathematical stories over them and try to get some understanding for why things happen and how things happen.
That's right. It's an amazing universe, and we like to use the Force here in this podcast to understand things like forces in the universe and particles and stars and galaxies and black holes, because one day we might be able to get really up close to these kinds of things.
We use the force. Really, are you using the Jedi mind sh on me right now?
I'm using the electromagnetic force, That's what we're transmitting on.
That's true, we are using forces. But I thought there was a big difference between forces and the Force. I mean, in the Star Wars universe, they have the normal forces, right, they also have the Force.
M Well, we've always talked in this podcast how there might be one unifying force to the universe, right, so maybe there is the force, So we also discuss midichlorians or it's that far too controversial even for us.
See that's an attempt to describe the force in terms of a scientific explanation. Maybe that's why it wasn't so popular.
You mean, the Star Wars movies weren't popular the prequels.
Man.
Mmmm, yes, there's a lot of controversy there.
Yeah, they only made three kajillion dollars.
Yeah, but it is an awesome universe, full of galaxies that are far far away and lots of events that happened a long, long time ago. Because the universe has been around for a pretty long time, and hopefully it will be around for quite a while longer maybe.
But because it is a physical universe, it is at the mercy of forces. We think that forces in this universe control the shape of everything we experience, from the reason that you don't fall through your chair to the reason you are held onto the Earth and the Earth orbits around the Sun. The very structure of the galaxy and the large scale structure of the universe are determined by forces.
Wait wait, wait, are you saying gravity is a force? Gravity is a fictitious force. Yes, absolutely, it's a Star Wars force exactly.
It's the Star Wars of forces.
I always wonder how they can stand up in those spaceships when they're out in space fiction.
That's how they can do it. But in our universe, forces do determine the large scale structure of everything if you include gravity on that list, and they control how the universe in the past has turned into the universe we see today, and also they will determine the universe's future.
That's right, because as still and ever lasting as the universe may seem, it's actually changing. It has been changing, and it will keep on changing. It used to be super super diverse small, or at least super super dens and now it's much bigger, and it might keep changing in the future.
Yeah, it can be difficult to sort of think on the timescale of the universe. You're used to looking up in the night sky and seeing it always be the same. The stars are not disappearing, they're not changing, they're not dancing. But we have learned in many situations that the universe or even just the Earth changes on time scales that are well beyond what humans are used to thinking about. Millions of years ago, the Earth looked quite different. Billions of years ago, the Earth didn't even exist, And so the universe itself is rapidly changing. And we don't know if we are a significant fraction of the way through the history of the universe or if this is just the first brief flash of a universe that will last for trillions or quadrillions or quintillions of years.
Are you asking if the universe is peaked already?
Exactly is it time to buy or sell shares in the universe?
Well?
I think you buy shares of the universe, you just won't be alive, probably by the time someone catches.
In the universe. Who exactly can you see ellier shares the universe too? I suppose is there a market out there, the multiverse stock market?
Mean? You just enjoy the dividends. Life is pretty good, right, Life.
Is pretty good. In fact, I enjoy the universe. But I wonder how long this situation will last? How long will we be able to sit on a nice cozy rock toasting our toes by the fire of a distant sun. Is this something which will last for billions or trillions of years in our universe? Or is it a brief moment of respite on this resort we call Earth.
Yeah, because the universe has been changing and it will keep on changing probably, And so we can ask what does the future hold? Can we predict what's going to happen to the universe? Can we measure it? And how do we know that's what it's going to do?
Are we better able to predict the future of the universe than we are able to predict the future of the stock market, for example?
And so today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question what is the Big Rip? Does this related to anyone's pants? Daniel, It's what happens if you eat too much astronaut ice cream or you sit down to watch the Star Wars movies one too many times.
No, it's a fun speculative idea about the potential future of the universe. Because we are still developing our understanding of how the universe works and what all the forces at play are, and there are enormous gaps remaining in that understanding. There's a large set of possible futures for the universe, and the Big Rip is one of the craziest ones.
Yeah. I think we've talked a little bit in this podcast about the end of the universe. Right. We had Katie mag here talk about her book The End of Everything, and she kind of walked us through a couple of the possible scenarios for the universe.
Yeah, that was a lot of fun and it's a great book. Folks should check out if you're interested in cosmology in reading about depressing ways we can all die. And we also talked in great depth on the podcast about some of the forces that are at play there and what we understand about them and what we don't understand about how they are still shaping our universe today.
Now this is called the big Rip. Now our physics is gonna change the name a little bit it later on, though, the bigger rip or the even larger, the even bigger rip.
I'm looking forward to the super rip because then the rs blend together.
The cosmic rip. Wouldn't the cosmic rip be a better name.
For it, yeah, or the cosmic rift.
Well, we do have a lot of ideas about how the universe might evolve and what might happen to it trillions of years into the future or maybe billions of years into the future, and this is one of those ideas, and it's pretty interesting. It's one of maybe what like three or four possible things that might happen to the universe.
I think it's actually an infinite spectrum of possible outcomes to the universe. So, yeah, this is one of.
Those right right, that's right. There could be a big rip, a bigger rip, small rib, a medium size rip, a pocket size rip, and.
Then of course there's all the ideas we just can't anticipate because we are just so clueless about how the universe works. We've only understood recently pretty basic stuff about things that are controlling the evolution of the universe. So we should definitely avoid being too confident by even categorizing the amount of our understanding.
All right, so today we're going to focus in one possible thing that might happen to the universe, and so it's usually over. Were wondering how many people had thought about the big rip or what it could be.
So thanks very much to everybody who answers these questions for the podcast, and if you would like to participate for future episodes, please don't be shy. It's easy, it's fun, it doesn't hurt at all. Just write to me two questions at Danielandhorge dot com.
So think about it for a second. What do you think the big rip is? Here's what people have to say.
I think the big Rip is one of the possible ways the universe might end, where something in the subatonic level, basically the whole universe unravels on itself, and I want to say it has something to do with antimatter.
Maybe this was discussed too, like a meeting.
Took place where a lot of known physicists We're talking about how the universe might end and theories, and reportedly at this meeting, buttono burritos were served, So I think somehow it's linked to dimitting.
So the big Rip is a scenario for the end of the universe where basically space time expands so quickly that every particle, every subparticle gets ripped apart from each other and basically can never meet another because the distance between anyone and another is expanding faster from the speed of light, so not very fun.
The big rip is when the universe just rips itself apart because it doesn't have enough mass for the gravity to crunch back in on itself.
The Big Group is a theory that posits that at the autos the end of the universe, there would be almost like an inflation that causes everything in the universe to move further apart, but at a rapid rot almost like an explosion.
I think, all right, some pretty definite ave answers here. It's when everything rips apart.
Yeah, in that sense, you might say it's a well named physics theory.
Yeah, yeah, I'll get I'll get it to them.
Ah.
Well, let's find out what it is first.
Though, and see if it's related to a banana burrito.
And ripping into a banana.
You mean, I'm not sure where that comment was going. It was like a burrito made out of banana peels. Is that the reference?
Yeah, I don't know. That's a slippery slope there to mess with burrito wrappings.
I don't know if you're supposed to eat a banana burrito or smoke it.
Oh, that's actually not a bad idea to put plantains instead of a burrito. I think you got something here, listener, Well, let's get into a Daniel step us through what is the big rip?
So the Big Rip is sort of like a super accelerated version of what we already think is happening to our universe. Current accepted idea of the cosmology of the universe is that the universe is expanding, and that that expansion is accelerating, meaning things are getting further and further apart. New space is being created all the time everywhere in the universe, and that's happening faster and faster every year. So even our current universe is sort of already tearing itself apart. That expansion is happening, and it's happening faster and faster every year. The Big Rip is like a super charged version of that that's going to accelerate the acceleration of that expansion, so that everything gets pulled apart to the tiniest bits at the end of time.
Right, that's something we only learned about recently, right, maybe in the last hundred years, that the universe is actually expanding, it's not sitting still.
Yeah, we learned about one hundred years ago that the universe is not just like a bunch of stars floating in space. Back before Edwin Hubble, in the beginning of the last century, people thought the universe was just like one galaxy. There's just a bunch of stars out there floating in space, and it was the way it was, and it always had been, And the most natural theory for the universe was that it always had been that way and it always would be that way. It was just sort of like static and constant. But then Hubble saw other galaxies super dup or far away. He identified smudges in the telescopes, not as nebula in our galaxy, but actual separate galaxies far away, and he was able to measure the velocity of those galaxies to see they were all moving away from us. So, surprise, surprise, the universe is actually expanding.
Super interesting. How did he measure that the galaxies were moving away.
You can measure the red shift of the light from those galaxies.
So if it looks a little redder than the lighte from our galaxy, then you know it's moving away from you. If it looked a little bluer, it would mean that it was moving towards us.
Things that emit light and have a relative velocity, the frequency of that light changes. It's a basic Doppler shift kind of effect, and things that are moving away from us, the light gets stretched out to make it redder. And Hubble was also able to measure the distance to these things, so he was able to show that things that are further away are moving away from us faster than things that are closer.
Now that this makes sense, but our sort of like theories about the universe and the makeup of it and what it could do, like what did Einstein think of this?
Now, this was really confusing too folks like Einstein at the time. You know, before Einstein, we had an idea of gravity as a force. Mass pulls on other masks, stuff tugs together gently. Right. Einstein came up with this idea that actually gravity is not a force, it's a curvature of the universe. That space itself is bent by mass and energy, and that's why things tend to sort of roll together. The problem Einstein faced even before Hubble's realization, was that this predicted that the universe would collapse, that all the mass and the energy in the universe would sort of pull itself together and shrink the universe. At the time, they thought the universe was static, right, They thought that it was just sort of hanging out there. So Einstein needed to invent something to balance the mass pulling everything together. So he added a fudge factor to his theory. So, I mean we now call the cosmological constant, which would given outwards pressure to balance all the mass coming in. So Einstein had this idea of a universe sort of balanced on a knife edge, this outward pressure providing exactly what you need to balance the inward pull of all the mass, and then Hubble literally blew that all up.
Right, because I guess if you imagine a bunch of stuff just floating out there in space, as far as we knew back then, they should just all come together because of gravity, right, Like if you put two rocks out there in space away from a lot of other stuff, is that their two rocks are going to attract each other and come together, right, And so if you have a bunch of stars or a bunch of planets out there in space, in the universe as we saw it, should have all sort of crunched together by now, right.
If things are just hanging out there, they have no relative velocity to start with. You put two rocks anywhere in the universe, they will tug on each other, and you give them enough time, they will come together. So Einstein was sort of like puzzled, like, why does my theory predict that the universe should collapse right into one giant black hole effectively? So he added a fudge factor.
Couldn't the universe be sort of like our Solar system? Like our Solar system is out out there in space, but it's not collapsing, right, Things are moving around in orbits.
Yeah, there is something that's keeping the Solar system from collapsing rapidly, which is angular momentum. So the Earth, as you say, is in orbit around the Sun, just doesn't immediately collapse into the Sun. That orbit, though, will decay, you know, eventually the Earth will lose some of that velocity because it's bumping into stuff and it's radiating away energy and gravitational waves. So if you're talking about like the really deep future, then in Einstein's picture, eventually everything would collapse into a black hole.
But why did Einstein feel like you needed to add a fudge factor to make the universe static? Couldn't the universe be on its way to crunching down into a black hole.
It could have been, and we didn't have great measurements, but the sort of prevailing view of the universe was that it was static. We didn't see anything moving, We didn't have great measurements. That was just sort of like the universe we thought we lived in.
It looked static.
It looks static. Yeah, And so Hubble used this really cool observation by another astronomer, Henrietta Levitt, who discovered a certain kind of star called sephids. These are a particular kind of starr, and you can use a trick to tell how far away they are just by looking at the light from them. We have a whole episode about Hubble's discoveries. But Hubble was the first one to really be able to tell how far away things were, and so he could measure these velocities and he could tell that there was this trend that things further away were moving away from us faster and faster. So that was the first clue that actually the universe is expanding.
Yeah, that must have blown people's minds. How do you think that was received, that people believe Hubble at first? Or were they like, nah, you're crazy.
I think the results were pretty solid because they were based on these sephids, which were pretty hard to dispute. And you can verify sephids using other distance metrics like parallax. For things that are close enough up, you can actually tell how far away something is based on how it wiggles in the sky as we go around the sun. So there were a bunch of sephids that people could verify exactly how they work using other methods, and so it was kind of hard to dispute, but it did lead to a big puzzle. Right, People were like, hold on a second, we don't really understand what's going on. So then Einstein actually abandoned the cosmological constant. He's like, well, scratch that. If the universe is expanding, we don't need the cosmological constant to resist the expansion. Things are just already zooming away from each other faster than gravity could otherwise pull them together.
So the Einstein's fudge factor was actually holding back the universe in a way. In his view, just by virtue of Einstein's equations, you're saying the universe would expand. So what you're saying, no, you're saying the opposite. Right.
Einstein's new view was like a, all right, maybe mass is pulling the universe together, but it was already expanding. There's sort of two different aspects to think about there. One is the rate of the expansion and the other is sort of the acceleration. Mass tends to like slow down the rate of the expansion, but Einstein figured it's already expanding and expanding so fast that the mass doesn't have time to slow it down. It's sort of like hitting the brakes on a car that's already going super duper fast.
Mm. So then he decided you didn't need that fudge factor.
Yeah, he figured, look, the expansion is positive, maybe the acceleration is negative. Maybe mass is pulling everything forward, but we don't need the fudge factor the cosmological constant to explain why the universe is expanding anymore.
Or he said, we don't need the fudge factor to explain why the universe hasn't crunched down.
Yes, exactly, that's more accurate, thank you.
Because it's already like growing out of control, So you don't need to explain why it's not crunching that because it's on steroids the universe exactly.
He invented the cosmological constant to explain why we had a static universe, and then we discovered, oh, the universe isn't static. So he sort of tossed it in the bin and apologized for it.
Did it really well?
Famously, he said that he thought it was one of his biggest scientific blenders.
Yeah, that guy couldn't get anything right.
I like to see humility in our great geniuses, you know.
All right, well, let's talk about what could be costing this expansion and whether or not it's going to stay the same or maybe rip the universe apart. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're talking about the big rip, and so Daniel let it rip.
So for a long time we knew that the universe was expanding, that we didn't really understand what had caused it to expand, and we thought maybe that mass in the universe was going to slow down that expansion, but we didn't understand like, is there enough mass in the universe to slow that expansion down eventually to zero and maybe bring it back to a big crunch, or is there not enough mass in the universe to slow down that expansion, Like a rock that you throw from the moon that will just go out forever. Right, there's not enough mass on the moon to pull that rock back. Maybe the universe was like that. It would continue to drift further and further apart if there wasn't enough mass in the universe. So people wanted to know the answer to that question. They wanted to know will the universe keep drifting apart forever, gradually slower and slower, or will eventually it slowed down and come back into a big crunch That was sort of the big question around the mid nineties.
Right, or is there a big plot twist in the middle there that will totally change what we thought we'd been watching on the show.
So spoiler alert for those of you who've been saving papers from the mid nineties and haven't gotten to read them yet. People developed a new way to measure distances to even further objects, to things much much further away, using type one a supernova, a special kind of explosion of stars that tends to happen in the same way every time, so we know how bright it should be. So we can tell just by looking at the light curve of those stars how far away they are. So then by looking at the red shift of them, we can also tell how fast things are moving away. And this let us look even further back in time to see the deeper history of the expansion of the universe, and we hoped it could help us decide between these two options. Is the universe going to eventually slow down into a big crunch or is it going to keep drifting apart forever, gradually slowing down but never stopping.
Couldn't they guess at the time, I mean, if we had an idea of the expansion of the universe, wouldn't at the time you just be able to figure out if you had enough masks to bring everything back to God.
Yeah, but the data were not sufficient to distinguish those two things. It's like, if you're tracking an asteroid in space, you can give a much better prediction of its future if you have more data points, if you can look further back in time to understand its trajectory, you can nail down its future. In the same way, we didn't have enough data points to distinguish between these two scenarios until we look much further back in time and give us like a longer lever arm to understand the evolving history of the universe.
But I guess if all we had was mass out there in the universe, then even if the universe was expanding pretty fast, wouldn't it all eventually come back down? Wouldn't gravity eventually win?
Gravity doesn't always win over velocity. Like if you're on the surface of the Moon and you throw a baseball fast enough, it will leave it. We'll have enough kinetic energy to overcome the potential energy of gravity and it can't escape.
But if there's only the Moon and that rock in the entire universe, wouldn't that rock eventually come back?
No, it's possible for it to escape the gravitational attraction of the Moon. If you give it enough velocity, it will lose some that velocity because of the gravitational pull of the Moon. But as it gets further and further away, that gravitational pull gets weaker and weaker, so it starts to lose velocity slower and slower.
But it never goes to zero, so eventually you'll feel it slow down, wouldn't it.
No, it's possible to have escape velocity, right, That's what escape velocity is. Having enough kinetic energy to overcome the potential energy of the gravity of an object.
Well, you can escape grave it until you maybe fall into another potential gravity. Well, but if it was just you and the moon, eventually you would come back to the moon, wouldn't you.
If it's just you and the moon and you have enough velocity, you can escape it. Think about it this way. Two particles moving in opposite directions in the universe don't necessarily have to fall back together if they have enough velocity. There's a threshold there where, if they're moving fast enough, they overcome their gravitational.
Attraction, even given infinite time.
Even given infinite time. Yeah, that's the definition of escape velosity.
I mean, I can escape the velocity of the Earth, but eventually I'll come back to the sore system. Right.
One way to understand how you can actually escape the gravity of an object to think about the reverse process of falling into the object. So think of ball starting like at rest, zero velocity, super duper far away, basically infinity away. Now you're right that the Moon will tug on it, and eventually it'll fall onto the Moon, and it'll hit the Moon with a certain speed, not an infinite speed. That speed represents basically the energy difference between being on the Moon and being infinitely far away. So now instead, if you throw the ball away from the Moon with that same speed, then what happens, Well, it reverses the process and it loses all that velocity as it moves away, but it has just enough to get infinitely far away before it comes to a stop. So what that means is that it takes a finite amount of velocity to get infinitely far from the Moon's surface, and the same thing is true for any surface, it's just a different velocity. So now what happens if you throw the ball from the Moon's surface a little bit faster than the escape velocity, then it basically gets to infinity and bill has some speed left over, so it's not falling back even after infinite time.
All right. So then we expanded our view of the universe and we measured the expansion of things that were really far away. And what do we find.
We found as we look deeper into the history of the universe that we could make more confident predictions of the future. And what we found was really shocking. We found that the expansion of the universe wasn't decreasing slowly or quickly. It wasn't decreasing at all. In fact, it was increasing. That is, at more recent times, the expansion seemed to be happening faster and faster. That means that the expansion of the universe was accelerating rather than slowing down. So Einstein's picture of the universe expanding and somehow mass slowing that down was wrong. There was another piece. There was something else that actually was pushing out on everything in the universe, making it move away from each other faster and faster every year.
Interesting, So the universe wasn't just expanding, it was expanding faster and faster. What if that was alarming or if it was just interesting, or how interesting would have been to find out that the universe is actually collapsing.
I remember when this discovery happened. I was starting grad school. It was a huge shock. Everybody was stunned. Nobody expected this result. It was a massive revelation. It's the kind of thing you always dream about in science, seeing something out there which surprises everybody, which completely changes the way you think about the universe, Like those are the best moments in science. So we were all shocked, but we also knew that it was a far future thing, like it was not going to change our lives tomorrow or next year or even in a billion years. We're talking about the very very deep future of the universe, not prediction for whether or not you should have a picnic tomorrow.
Right, And so we learned I guess that the universe wasn't just expanding in like a coasting kind of way. It was actually like somebody was hitting the accelerator pedal on it, which means there must be some kind of force or energy making this happen right exactly.
And immediately people went back to Einstein's Great blunder. Remember, Einstein added his cosmological constant, his little bit of energy to the universe to balance the mass that he thought was going to collapse the verse. And then he got rid of it when he discovered the universe wasn't static. And then people revived it. They're like, well, we kind of need something to push out on the universe. This cosmological constant. You stick it into Einstein's equations, and it does just that. Creates this negative pressure pushes out on everything, It expands space as time goes on. So people plug this into Einstein's equations, just to describe what they saw was happening out there in the universe, that the expansion was accelerating, as you said, instead of slowing down.
So he was a genius, right, He didn't have to be falsely modest. History justified his geniusness exactly.
His equations were so powerful in general they can even describe discoveries made after his death.
Yeah, So they called this mysterious or energy making the universe expand faster and faster. They give it a name dark energy.
Yeah, and dark energy is really just our observation that the acceleration of the universe is expanding. We can describe it using Einstein's equations. If we plug a number in, we can measure that number out what number we have to put into Einstein's equations. That doesn't mean we understand why that number is there or what this mechanism is dark energy. It's not like dark energy is a theory, a piece of physics that we understand we can make predictions for. It's really just sort of like a descriptive framework for something we don't yet understand.
Right. And the name comes from two words dark in energy, and it's dark because you can't see it, right, It's not like the universe is glowing from this energy and it's energy because it's doing work. Right.
Yeah, you definitely can't see dark energy. I've always something called it dark because it was mysterious, something we'd been missing, something we couldn't yet explain. It was like a gap in our understanding. But yeah, it is also technically invisible. You can't look at a piece of space and see whether or not there's dark energy in it.
Wait, do you think they named the dark energy just for the it's mysterious sounding name, not because it's invisible to the visible light.
I think so. For example, there are also theories of like dark gravity gravity that we hadn't accounted for yet. I think in general, dark is applied to like mysterious things in physics.
That doesn't seem very scientific.
Daniel, I'm not going to defend the name of dark energy.
Well, it just so happens that it's also invisible, right, which is which makes it, either by coincidence or on purpose, an app name for it.
I suppose. I mean to me, dark would describe something that's not invisible, but black, like charcoal, is dark. It's not invisible. The invisible man is not dark, right, you can't see through him, So a more accurate name would be like invisible energy or invisible matter. To me, dark is not a very visually descriptive name for it.
Well, darkened as in it's not glowing.
Yeah, that's true. It's definitely not glowing.
And it's an energy because it's doing work. I guess. But where is this energy coming from?
I guess, Well, that's the big question. We don't know where this energy is coming from. Einstein's equations tell you what the sort of shape of space is and how it transforms, but as input, they require you to describe the universe, to say how much mass is there, how much radiation is there, and also how much potential energy is there. So Newton's said gravity is only between massive objects. Einstein's generalization is to say no, gravity comes not just from objects with mass, but all forms of energy, including potential energy and potential energy actually has the opposite effect gravitationally as mass does, so things with potential energy form a negative pressure. They can expand the universe, they can push things apart. So in order to describe the expansion of the universe, you have to have some fields with potential energy that fill the universe that give you enough energy to accelerate the expansion of the universe super dramatically.
So you're saying that maybe the universe just by itself, in a vacuum, in nothingness, just space itself has this potential energy, right, which is making things expand. But why is it called potential Like what's its potential like it has the potential to do work?
Or what potential energy? Is the energy of configuration? Right, Like a book on a shelf has gravitational potential energy rather than kinetic energy, and waves can also have potential energy. If you have a guitar string, for example, and you pull it out so you don't yet release it, then the tension in that string is giving it a lot of potential energy. When you release it, the string that vibrates it turns into kinetic energy. But that energy is swashing back and forth between potential and kinetic as the string vibrates. And quantum fields are the same way. The fields that we think fills space can either oscillate with kinetic energy and those are particles, or they can have potential energy because of their configuration. For example, the Higgs field we think has energy stored inside of it, even when it's not wiggling, sort of like stuck on this shelf. It has a bunch of energy stored inside of it just because of its configuration, and so we think that's what dark energy is. It's some kind of potential energy that the universe has, or that space has. We know that space has some potential energy because of these quantum fields. We think the quantum fields are real, We think they have potential energy. We think all of space really does have some potential energy. We also observe that the universe is expanding, as if there is some potential energy causing this gravitational repulse. We try to bring these two ideas together and say, hmm, is our estimate of the amount of potential energy we already know exists in space enough to describe this repulsion we see in the universe, this expansion of the universe. People do that calculation, but those two numbers do not agree. In fact, they disagree by more than ten to the one hundred. So we don't have an understanding of where the potential energy comes from to create the expansion that we see in space. We know the space has some potential energy in it. It doesn't seem to have the right amount of potential energy to cause the expansion we see out there in the universe.
You mean from a quantum field.
We can measure how much potential energy there has to be in order to create this expansion, and then we can calculate how much potential energy we think there is from the quantum fields. And those two numbers disagree by ten to the one hundred.
Well, at least you can't explain it with the quantum fields.
That you know about, right exactly?
Could there be another quantum field or something or something you're not seeing or thinking about.
Absolutely, there can be. There has to be. There has to be some other explanation. The point is just that we observe some expansion, we think it might be due to some potential energy, but we really do not have any understanding of the mechanism for that potential energy to exist in the universe.
All right, Well, let's then assume there is some sort of potential energy hidden in the universe, and there's quite a lot of it, right, because it's making the universe expand faster and faster. But it's just it's one of those things that only you can only tell from over the whole universe, right. You can't tell, like looking at your hand in front of you, that there is dark energy between you and your hand, although there is dark energy between you and your hand.
That's right. Something people are often confused about is why this expansion seems to be happening only between galaxies or clusters of galaxies, and not between you and your friend or you and your lunch. And the answer is that it is happening everywhere. All of space is expanding. The distance between us and the Moon, the distance between us and the Sun, all of space is expanding simultaneously at the same rate, all the time. It's actually a very very small amount of expansion over many millillions of light years. Every second space grows by like seventy kilometers. It's a tiny tiny level of expansion over short distances, and over short distances like between me and my chair or between the Earth and the Sun, other forces are more powerful. So, for example, the Sun is powerful enough to hold the Earth in its orbit even if space is very gently expanding between it. But over very long distances, like between galaxies, gravity gets very very weak and dark energy gets very very powerful, and so over those bigger distances dark energy winds. So in our current understanding of the universe, dark energy is only effective at pushing apart things that are very very far away from each other, like galaxies, not things that are closer together like you and your lunch.
Well, it's more noticeable for things that are really far apart, like galaxies. But it is sort of affecting our orbit with the Sun, right Like, it's making it just a little bit harder for the Sun to keep the Earth in its orbit in a way, it's sort of helping the Earth from collapsing into the Sun a little bit.
Yeah, it definitely plays a role. It's almost negligible, but yeah, not quite. The universe would be a little bit different if that didn't happen.
All right, Well, I think the assumption so far is that this dark energy is constant, that it's sort of like there as a feature of the universe, and it's always been there and maybe always will be there. But the question is what if it's not. What if dark energy changes, What if it decides that it wants to join the dark side, And so let's get into what might happen. But first let's take another quick break.
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Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientists at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads. We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much? Why is it so hard to keep a secret, When should you not trust your intuition?
Why do brains so easily fall for magic?
And why do they love conspiracy theories? I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about what's running under the hood, better we can steer our lives. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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We think of Franklin as the doddling dude flying a kite in the rain, but those twerments are the most important scientific discoveries of the time.
I'm evan RIGHTLFF.
Last season, we tackled the ingenuity of Elon Musk with biographer Walter Isaacson. This time we're diving into the story of Benjamin Franklin, another genius who's desperate to be dusted off from history.
His media empire makes him the most successful self made business person in America.
I mean he was.
Never early to bed, an early to rise type person. He's enormously famous. Women shut wearing their hair in what was called the coiffor a la Franklin.
And who's more relevant now than ever.
The only other person who could have possibly been the fresh president would have been Benjamin Franklin. But he's too old and once Washington been doing.
Listen to on Benjamin Franklin with Walter Isaacson on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts.
Or wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, we're talking about the Big rip now, Daniel. Is that what happens when the Minnichlorians decide to go and strike and the whole universe falls apart.
No, that's when Disney buy Star Wars and puts out a bunch of low quality stuff. It's called the Big rip off.
Not a fan huh, all the news stuff? When did you just join the Star Trek camp while you're at it?
I'm in both camps. I love Star Wars and Star Trek.
You just like stars?
I do.
I do like stars in fact, anything with stars in spaceship almost anything. Yeah, but have you seen end or Daniel, I have seen it. Yeah, all right, I'm guessing your son me is it not a fan either?
I like to say positive or silent on the podcast.
All right, Well, we're talking about the Big Rip, which is a possible thing that might happen to the universe, and it's related to dark energy, which is making the universe expand faster and faster right now. But the universe hasn't always been expanding at the same rate in its history.
Right, Yeah, the history of the expansion in the universe is quite complicated. We have some very rapid expansion early on that we call inflation. It's sort of like the last stages of the Big Bang, when things expanded like by a factor of ten to the thirty in ten to the minus thirty seconds. And then for a while the universe was matter and radiation dominated, so the expansion was still happening, but it was decelerating, it was slowing down a bit, but dark energy was quietly building. And around five billion years ago, dark energy became the dominant component of the universe and that's when the acceleration really took off. And so the last five billion years the expansion has been accelerating.
Now when you say that dark energy kind of grue. Did it actually grow or is it just that the universe got bigger?
What's the difference between those two, Well, like.
For the same size, if the universe had been the same size, are you saying that dark energy got stronger in the meantime or did it just get more powerful because the universe got bigger and dark energy gets bigger, the bigger space is now.
The current theory is that dark energy is constant, that in a certain amount of space you have a certain amount of potential energy and that doesn't change. So dark energy, we think, is a constant strength through time. But we do think that the universe is expanding and is making new space and therefore making more dark energy. Most of the stuff in the universe dilutes as space gets bigger, Like you have a certain amount of mass in the universe and then things expand, then the mask gets less dense. Dark energy doesn't get less dense as the universe expands, because it's an aspect of space itself. It's like inherent in space, and so as the universe expands, dark energy doesn't shrink, and so proportionally it grows to be a larger fraction of the energy budget of the universe.
So when you say that the universe like it inflated really rapidly, then it slowed down, then it picked back up again, that's still consistent with a constant dark energy. But is that only because you're assigning the acceleration and the slow down to other things that you also don't know what they are?
Well, we think we know if the rest of the universe is right. We think there's normal matter, there's some radiation. We think there's a lot of dark matter. We don't know exactly what dark matter is made out of, but we have a pretty good sense of how much of it there is and where it was and how it controlled the large scale structure of the universe. But in order to describe the expansion history that we see, you need to plug in a certain amount of energy per unit of space, and then it actually describes the history quite nicely.
But we still don't know what caused in the initial inflation, right, the big bank that could have been also dark energy, but instead you're assigning it to something else, right.
Oh, I see, yes, And there's still a lot of confusion about what happened early on. The current theory as in inflation, may have been due to some other field with a lot of potential energy, like the Flaton field, because that expansion was quite different from the expansion we're seeing.
Now, different in just the rate, or different in the nature of it.
Definitely different in the rate, possibly also different in the nature. It could have been a different field providing potential energy to create that expansion. We just don't know.
Huge question mark, or it could have been dark energy too right, Or it could.
Have been dark energy that was changing. And in fact, it's not quite accurate to say that the picture of dark energy its constant describes the universe very well, because there's some controversy there. We measure the dark energy in the universe in late times using supernovas and also in early times using its effect on the cosmic microwave background radition, we actually get different numbers by a little bit, and that's been a persistent tension. It's called the Hubble tension. Whole podcast episode about that. That inspires people to come up with other ideas, something called early dark energy, to like add a little bit more dark energy early on in the universe. So the very very beginning of the universe. Big question marks about how much expansion there was and what caused it. After that, it's more steady and it's well described by universe with almost constant dark energy.
But I say it's sort of a theory, right, there's still the possibility that maybe dark energy will increase again, or maybe this mysterious you know, imfloton or other quantum field with potential energy might kick back in.
Exactly because we don't have a good theoretical description, so we can't really make predictions. We're just observing things. It's like if you're watching the weather and you're noticing some trends, like, hey, in southern California, it seems to be the same temperature every single day. Does that mean I could predict confidently it's always going to be the same temperature, only if I actually understood what caused them, Like why is it the same temperature every day? If I had some understanding of the underlying mechanism, then I could make some prediction. Otherwise I'm just observing and extrapolating ignorantly, And that's basically what we're doing now. We don't understand the mechanism underlying it at all. We just see these trends and we make simplifying assumptions.
I feel like you just describe my job on this podcast anyway to extrapolate ignorantly for money, and.
Listeners shouldn't take this as a criticism, right, This is the first step. This is very very fresh science. We only discovered this was happening a couple of decades ago. And the first thing you do is observe and characterize and look for patterns, and then you try to build up some theory that describes it. And people are hard at work at exactly that, trying to understand what's causing this and what its future might be, because, as you say, we don't know what's causing it. We don't know if it's going to change in the future.
Right, And so I think we've talked about it in the podcast before. How there are three possibilities. So the dark energy, or at least whatever is powering or whatever power is the expansion of the universe could do one of their things. It can go away, it can stay the same, or it can get even stronger. Right, and so if it goes away, then what happens to the universe. It crunches down.
Yeah, if it goes away, then the universe is now matter and radiation dominated, and those things tend to pull things back together. And so then it's back to the question of like, is there enough matter to slow things down and pull them back together into a big crunch, or is there enough velocity already in that expansion so that things skate away from each other, slowing down but never actually coming back together. If you just like turned off the dark energy.
We don't know we can make that calculation.
I can't make that calculation today on the podcast, but maybe somebody out.
There knows, but nobody's ever done it.
It's sort of a particular scenario where you had dark energy in the universe or fourteen billion years and then suddenly turn it off. I don't know if anybody's actually done that calculation.
All right, Well, that viewers may or may not crush together. What happens if dark energy stays the same, it's if it stays constant the way it is now.
Then the expansion of the universe continues, and it continues to accelerate, which means that space between things grows faster and faster, and over very large distances. That expansion is faster than the speed of light, which means that things are disappearing past the edge of our cosmic horizon. There are galaxies out there who are shooting photons at us, and those photons will never arrive because the space between us and that galaxy is increasing faster than light is making progress through that space. So, in that scenario where dark energy stays constant, the observable fraction of the universe gets smaller and smaller as time goes on, things start to disappear. We don't think in that scenario the galaxy will get rid of the party. It'll always have enough gravity to hold itself together, and the Earth will still orbit around the Sun. But our galaxy will become more and more isolated relative to other galaxies.
Right.
We talked about how in this scenario the night sky gets dark and darker, right, because all the stars, or at least all the galaxies out there, will move out of our view. But will are the stars move out of our view the ones in our galaxy? Isn't the opposite going to happen?
No, the galaxy is probably strong enough has enough gravity to hold itself together if dark energy stays constant, So the other galaxies will disappear, and future astronomers will look up at the night sky and only see stars in our galaxy, and they will think our galaxy is the whole universe because they won't be able to see anything else.
WHOA, but how about future future future astronomers. Isn't there enough stuff in our galaxy that it will eventually crunch down to a black hole eventually?
Yes, it will crunch down into a black hole. Gravity will eventually win. Things are swirling around and avoiding the inevitable. But you know, things bump into each other and lose angular momentum and they radiate energy through gravitational waves. So the very very far future is that the supermassive black hole eats our galaxy. So the very deep future of the universe, if dark energy is constant, is a bunch of black holes isolated from each other.
Yeah, too far away to even see each other, right or affect each other.
Yeah, exactly, Each one will be past the other's cosmic horizons.
Wow, not a bright future for the universe.
You don't want to buy shares in that universe.
Unless shares are for flashlights. Then yeah, those are going to become very very valuable in the future. So then there's a last scenario, which is that maybe dark energy will somehow kick back in or whatever may the initial inflation of the universe happen, that might come back, and which will make the universe expand even faster than it is now.
Yeah, there's this fun idea that dark energy will convert into something called phantom energy. This is energy which will grow even more rapidly than just the expansion of space, so that as space expands, the fraction of energy in each chunk of space also goes up, which means that the acceleration increases faster and faster.
Wait, the idea is that dark energy somehow evolves like a pokemon like it levels up.
You just need to buy more and more packs. That's all that has to happen for this scenario to unfold.
Nobody is that the idea. Then it's like the same energy, but somehow it gets kicked up a level or something.
The theoretical underpinnings of phantom energy are pretty fuzzy. They require a bunch of really weird fields that have strains, things like negative kinetic energy. It's possible for them to exist in the universe and sort of wake up only in late times. This is the theories that people have developed and they would, yeah, accelerate the expansion of the universe in even more surprising ways because they have very strange kinetic and potential energy.
I guess is that it levels up to something called phantom energy, because that just sounds more mysterious.
I guess it's actually named after the movie The Phantom Menace. Guy wrote this paper called The Phantom Menace the Future.
Of the Universe, So he was a fan. He was the fan.
He writes the paper quote, A phantom is something which is apparent to the site or other senses, but has no corporeal existence, an appropriate description for a form of energy necessarily described by unorthodox physics. So he's sort of putting it in the ghostly category.
But did he reference the movie?
Oh? Absolutely, It was very much a reference to the movie The Phantom Menace that.
Was mentioned in the economic paper.
The Phantom Menace is part of the title of the paper. Yes, so phantom energy totally named after the movie The Phantom Menace.
Or maybe he just named the title after the movie. Doesn't mean that phantom energy was based on the movie, does it.
Well, the science of phantom energy is not based on the movie. But yeah, he named it phantom energy because he was inspired by the use of the word phantom from the Phantom Menace.
I guess you could say he was a fan.
I don't know if his name was Tom, he should have changed.
It, But I guess the point is that maybe this energy is going to increase level up, get stronger, which is going to make the universe expand faster and faster and faster and faster and faster, which might rip the universe apart.
Right exactly. Dark energy by itself will already rip galaxies apart, but phantom energy will get more powerful, and so eventually it will overcome even the gravity of our galaxy, pulling the galaxy itself apart, and as time goes on, it will increase in power, eventually pulling our Solar system apart, and then shredding the Earth, and in the deep deep future, even pulling all atomic bonds apart.
WHOA, So you're saying, like like space itself will become like inhospitable almost in a way. Space will be expanding so much, even at the molecular sub atomic level, that not even quarks will be able to hang on to each other.
Not even quarks will be able to pull each other apart. All bonds eventually will be weaker than the phantom energy, which will overcome everything, which will overcome everything.
So like two quarks will be hanging on to each other, but then space will rip it apart, and then they'll never see each other again ever.
Right, Yeah, the final end of the universe is sort of similar to what we described with dark energy, where you had black holes separated by essentially infinitely expanding space, so they can't communicate as no interaction except the phantom energy version of that is that particles are now separated by infinitely expanding space, so they can't interact with each other. They can't even tell that there are other particles in the universe. Whoa.
So then like every single particle in the known existence in the universe will be by itself with no way to communicate with any other particle unless I guess the space makes a new particle next to it or something.
Right.
Well, that's the really complicated thing about quarks, right, is that quarks do not like to be by themselves. We think that as you pull quarks apart, there's so much energy in the strong force that it pops new quarks out of the vacuum, So nobody actually knows what's going to happen to quarks. It might be that as phantom energy pulls them apart, it creates this exponential cascade of particles being produced, filling space with all sorts of quarks. So we don't know who's going to win in the end. There the strong force or phantom energy.
You mean, like as the universe rips apart, it's also going to make new quarks. So what you're saying, like opening a bag of popcorns, you rip it open, all these quarks pop out.
That's what happens when we make pairs of quarks that the large Hadron collider that have a large velocity relative to each other. They're created back to back. They're zooming away from each other near the speed of light, and they create this enormous shower of new quarks between them out of the energy contained in the strong force bonds between them. And so we think the same thing might happen to all quarks in the universe when phantom energy tries to pull them apart from their partners. Hmm.
But I guess it'll be sort of I mean, things will happen in order, like we won't be around to see that, right, Like, first the galaxy is gonna you know, rip the stars within the guys that are going to rip apart, but maybe it's not strong enough to rip apart solar systems. But eventually it's going to rip apart solar systems, and then eventually it's going to rip apart stars and planets.
Mm hmmm. So the final big rip, according to some calculations, is going to be in about twenty billion years.
Wait, what we have a time estimate here?
We have a time yes, based on estimates of the amount of phantom energy that might be in the universe. This is total speculation, just like pick some numbers and see how it plays out. But it's fun to think about.
Like if dark energy starts to accelerate, now, is that what you mean at a certain value like a random value or what would value.
Like at a random value. Yeah, there's a whole spectrum of possible different levels of phantom energy that might exist in the universe, and they just sort of like pick a number and they put it in and they can make specific predictions. So these are not like weather reports. You shouldn't base your life around these. It's just like illustrative, like to think about how fast things would happen, but with.
Enough phantom energy happening tomorrow, the universe could rip apart the day after tomorrow. Right, So the twenty two billion years is just based on a number.
It's just based on a number, but it's that plausible number when that's not completely inconsistent with what we see today in the universe.
Oh, meaning like if our measurements are a little bit off and that we're wrong in the sense, then maybe the universe is expanding faster and faster and dark energy is not constant, then this is how much time we have, Like, this is the worst case scenario based on the fuzziness of our measurement.
Yeah, and the good news is that we have twenty billion years until the final big rip. And the double good news is that we think that the Earth will survive until about thirty minutes before the end.
Oh, that's good.
So we'll be around except for the last thirty minutes of it. And between thirty minutes and the end is when the Earth will get ripped apart and then eventually atoms. So we'll miss the last fireworks, but we'll still be here for most of it.
Well, assuming the Earth is still here, right, this is the Earth supposed to be swallowed up by the Sun in like eight billion years.
Yeah, the Sun only has a few more billion years. But assuming that we know we moved the Earth to some other Sun, or we rehab the Sun or something like that, or we maybe change the Earth's orbit and we end up orbiting a white dwarf for billions of years, that could happen if we manage to do that sort of solar system engineering, then the timeline is we have twenty billion years until phantom energy pulls the universe apart. If phantom energy even.
Is a real thing, right, it might even be like the descendants of Luke Skywalker who are watching this happen may or may not be human, as we discussed.
Earlier, they certainly look human.
Well so do I, Daniel.
I do have my doubts about that. And you know, the current evidence suggests that dark energy seems mostly constant. We don't see it ticking up. That we do have some questions about what's going on in the early universe. There are a few measurements that disagree with that, like studies of distant quasars that might suggest some slight increase in the energy density of dark energy in recent times, but for the most part, mainstream cosmologists think that dark energy is constant. That's a simple explanation. So again, we don't understand the mechanism for it, so we can't confidently make hard predictions. Right, we don't know.
What it is. And in fact, I feel like we're sort of defining it to be constant, and so we're measuring it to be constant. But actually the history says that it maybe wasn't constant.
That's exactly true. And as we make observations, we add bells and whistles to our models to accommodate what we see, and then we try to explain it and describe it.
Wow to me. In the far future, they'll somebody who will make a movie that says, a long time ago, nic galaxy, far far away, they figured out the phantom energy and two guys talked about it on a podcast. Not a very exciting movie. But you know, that's as you say, as you need to think, that's the trend.
For these Disney Plus shows. No comment, We're.
Just doing it in the in the fall with less special effects. All right, Well, I guess stay tuned for two twenty two billion years, and then we'll find out if that's true or not exactly.
And as time goes on, we'll learn more and more about the universe, and we will refine our models and hopefully be able to anticipate it long before it happens, or.
Just hang on as long as we can. All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, See you next time.
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 waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House you as 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.
Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America.
I mean neuroscientists at.
Stanford and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads.
Join me weekly to explore the relationship.
Between your brain and your life, because the more we know about what's running under the hood, that or we can steer our lives. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Parents looking for a screen free, fun and engaging way to teach your kids the Bible. As a mom, I was looking for the same thing, so I created Kids' Bible Stories podcast. Thousands of families are raving about it, and kids actually request to listen. With captivating sound effects, voices, and an apply section at the end to spark meaningful conversations, it's a hit with both kids and parents. Listen to Kid's Bibles Choice podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
