Brought to you by the all new Toyota Corolla. Welcome to you stuff you should know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and with us today is our friend and rotating guest producer Matt. That's right, stuff they don't want you to know. Yeah. At Frederick, he winsome and charming. At Frederick, yeah, he wins some. He drunk texts me, Oh my god, you can't tell people there. Sure again, Oh that's not very nice. He sober texts me too. So uh, we're Matt. He's all right, he's great, dude, and we're glad you're here. Matt. Can you see us here? You Before we get started, I feel like we should um give a shout out to our buddies over at co ED. Yeah, you want to tell everybody about COED real quick? Who doesn't know? Yes, the Cooperaate for Education. We went on a trip to them with Guatemala a few years ago and they are a nonprofit who tries to break the cycle of poverty through education for school children in Guatemala and the model. Yeah, it's very it's good stuff. And UM, we'd like to give them shout outs because we genuinely believe in their organization. And we said that any stuff you should know listener who became a scholarship sponsor with co ED, UM, we would read your name on the heirs. Thanks, that's right. So we're going to do that now because we've already done it once and stuff you should know listeners, just keep continuing to give. So we have another batch of people. And if you're interested in giving, you don't have to. We don't have to read your name on the air. I mean I think you need to give permission to co ED to tell us, like, yes, read these people's names. Um, you can do it anonymously. You can do whatever you want. But just go to uh C, O E d UC dot org and you'll learn all about co ED and there's all sorts of places for you to sign up to help in a lot of different ways. Um. So we've got some people some stuff you should know listeners that became scholarship sponsors, UM, starting with Chris Marino, Way to go, Chris, Linda McCarty and Mike Trick. I knew you were gonna give me this way, Cameron. Yes, nice, Is that right? Viceness or that viciness? Yeah, the W is pronounced like a V in Germanic languages from what I understand. Yeah, well you know, yeah, who else, Chuck, I've got Raymond Breen. You skipped over justin Sechina. That's why, that's why c H E n A justin Sechina, and I think we have we got one more on their, Caleb Weeks. Hey, we know Caleb. We know Caleb. He's all over like Twitter and Facebook and emails us and hey Caleb, Yeah, he's he's he's a big fan and a big supporter of us as well. That's very nice. And finally we have Joe Barkovich. That's right. Thanks a lot, guys, we appreciate you giving the co ed and uh we hope that more of you who are just hearing about this. Now we'll go out and do it yourself. C O E d U see dot org. That's right, all right, so Chuck, Yes, we're talking about a guy, very special, guy special. His name is Stephen Hawking with a pH that's right, with a pH d like that. Uh, brilliant physicists, brilliant mind. If you haven't seen the Errol Morris documentary. Oh, I didn't know there was one on him. Yeah, he did The Brief History of Time, which is neat a documentary about Stephen Hawking, not really about the book. I think there's a movie version of the book. I think I have heard that too, but I haven't seen that. I haven't either, But that was his best seller. Um basically explaining making kind of doing what we do, explaining things in a more accessible way that are complex. But he doesn't way better than I. That's why he's like a darling of the media and of everybody, basically, because he's really really good typically at explaining really complex stuff in in a way that the average joke can kind of understand, which is that is, I mean, what we strive to do. They're making a movie about him now, actually, oh yeah, played by Jared Leto No good guess played by Eddie Redmaine. Who U. He sounds like a World War One ace pilot or something. It kind of looks like one. Yeah, have you seen the lay Miss movie? No? Have you seen My Week with Maryland? No? Okay, he was in those anything else he was another stuff, But those are the two most notable things. It's called The Theory of Everything. It's the new one, and it's really about the love story between he and his first wife. And I saw pictures of him, and he looks just like him. They did a really good job. Yeah, I think they gave him some different teeth than you know, put on the glasses and messed up his hair and but then the wheelchair and yeah, yeah you're now Stephen Hawking. But I think they're shooting that like literally right now. So I'm looking forward to that one. And he released stayed on that. I have no idea. Okay, it seems like a long time for that. Yeah, they're really putting their heart and soul into it, I guess. So. So there's plenty of stuff that, I mean, everybody's heard of Stephen Hawking, but there's um some pretty interesting little tidbits about the man, the myth, his life, um that I didn't know about until we read this article that I think is worth sharing frankly, because if we don't share it, what are we doing here? That's right. So one of the things, um, just to start off, is that he never won the Nobel Prize. As smart as the stude is, Yeah, has not yet won the Nobel Prize. He's still got time. Oh yeah, for sure, I think I said has never Yeah, I hope I did. It sounded like there was some finality. It's just never gonna happen. Try all you on, but this pillar of the physics and mathematics community has never won a Nobel Prize. Yeah, it is surprising. We're gonna rely on punts for this one, okay. Uh. He was born on January eight, nine two, which was also the three anniversary of Galileo's death, right, which is just mere coincidence, but it's a nice did bit, he says, who uh And he is obviously was diagnosed with ALS at the age of twenty one, Luke Garrig's disease and given just a few years to live. And um, that was a long time ago. It was. Um. He was born in nineteen forty two, so he's what, um, seventy one now. Um. No, he'll be seventy four very soon, in about a month or so. Anyway, he um. When he was just before his twenty one birthday, he started noticing. He was in grad school at Oxford, and he started noticing that he was getting clumsier running into stuff, having like tripping that kind of thing, and it was apparently pronounced enough that his family said, you're going to the doctor while you're home visiting for Christmas break and so he um went into the hospital for a battery of tests for two weeks. That's an awful experience as in and of itself, I'm sure. But then to top it off, they said, oh, well we found out what's wrong with you. You have a LS, which stands for immo trophic lateral sclerosis YEA or Luke Garrig's disease, because Luke Garret most famously had it. That's right, And it's just a neurological condition where you're voluntary muscle control is lost, right, Yeah, and uh, typically you will die a few years after contracting it from a couple of things. Well, after symptoms show up, but what motor neurons running your breathing muscles start to fail for uh, deterioration of your swallowing muscles. That's a big one. So basically you drown like it ends up being respiratory. Yeah, usually go, but it's there's a lot of forms of it, and he doesn't have either one of those conditions, so he's good to go. Basically and has or has been for a long time, especially with this talking box. Yeah, he controls that with his cheek. Now, I have no idea how that works though. So Um, he's got the A L. S. Luke Garrig's disease, that's right, Um, but he hasn't really let it slow him down. Prior to that, he wasn't exactly like a real athletic type anyway. But he was on the rowing team at Oxford, which was a huge deal. Rowing team at Oxford equals um football team at Georgia, sure, maybe even more. What's more than that football team in Ohio state? Even Oh that's more lately? Did you see the Vanderbilt came Yeah, I don't want to talk about that. I don't neither. So um, he was the coxswain on the rowing team. He's the guy who goes stroke stroke stroke, And I did know this until I read this article. The coxwain doesn't just set the rhythm for a rowing they also steer. You didn't know that, No, I had no idea. Yeah, I thought it was strictly um being basically like a human metronome, you know. But he, Um, this little pip squeaky guy was on the rowing team as the coxwain and like really became popular, so much so that while he was at Oxford, he kind of threw himself into the rowing team or crew as we call it in America. Yeah, to the detriment of his studies, even for a while. Um and speaking of studies, he getting an Oxford wasn't a foregone conclusion for this guy because he wasn't a great student in grade school. And um, I wasn't so surprised by that that he was average too poor in grade school, because I think a lot of these super geniuses, it's like it's so not even beneath them, but they're still beyond that. They might have a hard time and just in regular class room settings, you know. Oh yeah, so it was challenged, like you're probably not going to do very well in school. So those of you who are board in school and don't have good grades, don't go up. Hope you may be a genius. Yeah, But even at the time, uh, there was something about him, like he was obviously a smart kid even though he wasn't getting good grades. Because his school his classmates named him, nicknamed him Einstein, which is about as pression as you can get and it wasn't because of his fluffy white mustache in the fourth grade. But his parents both went to Oxford and they wanted him to go there. And um, he was a great test taker and he aced his exams, almost got a perfect score on the physics exam unsurprisingly, but rather than going into physics, his father, Frank I believe his name is, said, no, I want you to be a doctor. You're going to serve the world by being a doctor. And so uh, a little Stephen goes and tries to take some biology classes and says, this is sciences is imprecise, it's descriptive, it's subjective, Like I can't be no, I don't want to do this. Yeah. He was not into biology. Um, and I wasn't either, but he was way into physics, whereas I was not. Um And when he went to Oxford, they were like, well, we got a couple of programs. We have the traditional particle physics where you study sub atomic particles and that's old school, where we have this newish kind of thing called cosmology, which isn't even a isn't even a real field yet, like we're trying it out here. Yeah, and he was like, I am all over that because I want to learn about bigger things, not smaller things. Yeah, because they're basically the two different approaches to the same thing. Like particles studies the very small parts that make up the universe, and cosmology is the sum of those parts and how they interact. Yeah, of course he would get into both eventually. Yeah, well, I think you kind of have to have an understanding both else you're just Although bet if your particle physicist, you can just kind of be in your lab running tests and setting out data, and the cosmologists use that as well. Yeah, but because back, I'm sure it's I bet cosmology. I bet they study particle physics more than particle physics. People study cosmology. We'll prove us wrong. People prove us wrong. That was the nerdiest like exchange we've ever had. I think it's up there for sure. So out of the study of cosmology, UM, his probably his biggest contribution to date to science to cosmology popular culture would be A Brief History of Time, But his biggest contribution to his field is UM something that the author of this article calls the boundless universe theory, which I couldn't really find anywhere else every everywhere else on the internet. If the type in boundless universe theory, it just brings up this article and like people copying and pasting this article in the body. Yeah, did this guy invent this title? And I don't. Yeah, I guess so, because there is something out there that describes this, but nobody else calls it boundless universe theory. Really yeah, but this is the big contribution. And here it's about the time that your brain will start to melt. Uh. Yes, he worked with the guy named Jim Hartle and came up with a theory in that the universe is limitless. Yet why is that funny? I could actually hear the hyphen in the Yeah. Uh, it is a contained thing yet it has no boundaries. Right, So, like I said, your mind melts. But wait, this is why Stephen Hawking is awesome. How can that be? Josh, Well, he says, visualize the Earth, the service of the Earth. It's it's contained, but it's also boundless. Like if you travel across the edge of the Earth, you never reached the edge. True, So he said, it's just visualize the surface of the Earth. But the surface of the Earth is you know, two dimensional, This is four dimensional. See, that's where my mind is already blown. Yeah. I didn't even try to follow that. But what what they're saying is um and the larger implication of this is that what Um, Hardle and Hawking did was they took Richard Feynman's quantum theory of the universe and married it to Einstein's theory of relativity to come up with this idea that the universe didn't emerge from a black hole. Um. Instead, it it came out of the Big Bang, and as a result, spacetime, which is exactly what it sounds like, travels if you're looking at it like a a the Earth, the Big Bank takes place of the north pole. So as you're traveling southward towards the equator, these lines of latitude get bigger, right, and Um, those represents space time. So it's kind of like time doesn't exist. And I don't think that's true, So don't email me. I'm just saying my own interpretation of this. At the Big Bang Big Bang happens, time and space start to exist. They go outward expanding, and then once you hit the equator, that's the apex, that's the peak, and then they start to come back in. And the the upshot of this is that eventually, by Hawkings reckoning, in about twenty billion years, spacetime will collapse in on itself again, meaning our entire universe will collapse upon itself. Yeah, it's finite, but it's boundless, mind blown, right, And like Chuck, what we just did, like isn't even It's probably the most rickety terrible interpretation of the of that ever, but I think that that's generally the it's it's an interpretation. Hey, I got one for you, okay, if we're listening Hawking things, And I just found this out today, did you know that he had a really bad situation with his second wife. No, he married his first wife, Jane, and credits her with giving him reasons to live, like right after he was diagnosed, Like he met her the week he was diagnosed, and that's what they're making this love story about. And they were married for quite a long time until the mid nineties and they divorced and he married one of his nurses, Elaine Mason, and reportedly she was an awful, awful person. Reportedly reportedly like basically everybody who knew her, like he was sort of strange from his family for a long time because of her controlling, manipulative bullying and rumors and investigations into the fact that she may have physically abused him. Yeah, his wife and nurse uh fractured his wrists by slamming it onto a wheelchair. And this is all allegedly because he denied it. But people close to him said he would never admit that, because that would admit that he really screwed up by making this decision. Ah let him pee himself by like not giving him his you know, the means to do so. She uh submerged him in a bathtub, like letting his tricky outomy tube fill up with water. Oh my god, and left him out in the sun and like the hottest days of the year. He had heat stroke and severe sunburned. And he denied that. They investigated, and basically the cops wal there was nothing we can do. He's saying the stuff didn't happen. Yet he would show up like bruises and cuts and things and say, yeah, like I've ran into a door again today. They're like, you're in a wheelchair. You can't really do that. I guess you can. Um And they divorced in two thousand six, when did they get married? So there's a Vanity Fair article about it was like really disturbing. Any of that true, that's awful, let alone all of it combined together. Jeez. So there's that that was that was uplifting, Chuck, I've got one for you. Um he. A couple of years back, HuffPo reported that, um he was a frequent visitor to a California sex club, Freedom Makers, and like some somebody who went there said that like he, they'd seen him there more than a handful of times. Interesting like basically getting laft and it's pretty unmistakable guy. Yeah, doubt he would confuse him. But Oxford, I believe it was Oxford came out and said that is b s. He did go to this place once basically like as a joke, as the guest of a friend or something like that. But he's certainly not a member. He's certainly not a frequent visitor. And like this person who's saying this is a liar. Thin got dropped after that, but he, um he, he does have a great wit. That's another thing he's known for being a charmer. Yeah, and um the he was asked I think the Guardian asked him, like, if there's anything that he didn't understand or that baffled them in the universe. And his answer was women said, they're a total mystery to me. So there is at least one thing, but black holes not the case. Yeah, he lost a bet on black holes and was man enough to admit it. In two thousand four. Uh, he made a bet with um, a fellow scientist named John Preskill. Yeah, and they did well. I let's talk about black holes for a second here. I guess. Stars are these big, huge things that burned tons of energy, the sons of star Son is a star. You should go back and revisit our Sun podcast. That's a great one. Uh. And they have a ton of mass and a ton of gravity, which is great as long as they're burning and doing fine because there are nuclear explosions pushing outward. Yeah, just gravities ing it inwards. So they find this happy balance massive amounts of mass and gravity. When they die, though, something bad happens and the gravity says, I am funny, something bad happened. That's hilarious. Well, if you're a star, I guess, um, unless like that's the apex of being a star. Maybe, man I get to be a black hole to burn out. Well, that was a spoiler. They become black holes because gravity wins out and becomes stronger and it collapses on itself. And that that is what a black hole is, right. It's just all the matter in the star combined in this little dense ball that's so dense and has such an amount of mass clustered into one little part that it actually bends the fabric of space and time. And so that's your black hole. It's really a black well in the fabric of space and time. Uh. And so that's a black hole. And supposedly, no, not, not even light can escape once it passes an event horizon. And um, who did he have the bet with pres Skill? So press Skill and Hawking disagreed about whether or not anything called information, which would be light, particles, anything, anything at all escaping black holes. Hawking said no, Preskill said yes. And then later on Hawking figured out that Prescoe was right, um, that if you did go into a black hole, you would get all jumbled up and distorted, but you information about you, particles, whatever could escape. Um. And therefore there's no such thing as a true event horizon. There's a pseudo event horizon, because if you have a genuine event horizon, nothing could ever come back out. I wonder what the bet was. They don't, they don't say. I found out it was a m because it was information escaping a black hole. They they they bet um and an encyclopedia of the winner's choice, and encyclopedia being a place from which information is easily retrieved. And I think press Gil wanted a baseball encyclopedia because you know, smart guys, they're into sports. They're into baseball. Yeah, that's true. It's the thinking man's game. Um. I thought it might have been a trip back to the gentleman's club freedommakers. Yeah, you're buying all right. Here's one that I didn't realize. Uh. He's written to children's books with his daughter Lucy, and they have a trilogy and uh, the first one in two thousand and seven was called Georgia's Secret Key to the Universe and it's about a little boy named George who has these leadite parents that he can't stand, so he kills them. He doesn't kill them, um, but technology to kill him. Nobody has a neighbor who he really cottons too because he's a physicist and has a computer. It just happens to have the most powerful computer in the world at his house, that's right. And that computer offers offers portals that they can see into outer space. So George is super stoked about this, right, So there's Georgia's Secret Key of the Universe. They followed that with George's Cosmic Treasure Hunt, and then in two eleven they had George in The Big Bang. Yeah, and that was their children's book trilogy. And I think when they interviewed Lucy In and him, people are like, we shouldn't be surprised because this is sort of just another extension of what he's trying to do his whole life, which is explained things. And that's what the book does for children. It's it's not just a fantastical story. It kind of introduces them to things like physics and black holes and or black wells. Right, you're gonna coin that, I think if somebody else already has um. All right, well, chuck, before we keep going. We got some more stuff up our sleep, possibly the most surprising things you can think of, That about Hawking coming up after this message break. All right, so you're about to blow my doors with some surprises. Okay, I think you know all this. You read the same article I did, being coy okay. Um Hawking has said publicly that he believed in the possibility of alien life, and not just primitive alien life, which he suggests is possibly common. He's actually a proponent of panspermia, which is um basically like say a meteor bringing the basics of life from Mars to Earth um, but also possibly intelligent life, although he says it's probably few and far between. Yeah, but the fact that he was on record for this is pretty surprising. Sure, he said it to NASA. He was. He came out as an alien life supporter to NASA. I wonder if belon though, and told his wife he was like, I get this. I told NASA I thought there might be intelligent line over there. Here's where my mind was blown a little bit. He says, we might need to be uh wary of them though, if they come, because they probably won't be DNA based, which you just can't even wrap your head around. Well, yeah, you know, um, I remember having my mind blown. The younger person, I think it was Michael Crichton. In one of his books, he just was mentioning off handedly how aliens might not even be like might they might be intelligent crystals or something like that. They can something we just had, we wouldn't recommise at all. Yeah, which is I think probably the likelier case. Like he's saying, d n A is not essential a life. It can be a lot of other things as long as you have some sort of replicating basis of life. That there you go. That's sort of old school like Lovecraft and all those early sci fi horror writers. Remember, their common method was always to be like it cannot even be described. That was always their copse unnamable. Um. But the way he describes aliens and potentially smart aliens is sort of just like you would see in the movies, like, hey, they may be nomads who ran out of resources and they're coming to Earth for hours and then that's straight out of a sci fi movie. Or are we the aliens? No, I'm just saying like that's kind of what the we're at the very cusp of that as well. Yeah, I remember when like an elementary school, when at some point the first mind blow is probably like we could be just a speck on the fingernail, like some giant in some other world. Wun't that neat that they ended? Um? Uh the Grinch like that the movie? Yeah, I don't remember. Yeah, that's how it ends. What do you mean like it? He Ron Howard starts panning out out and out and out from pulling out. Yeah, so pan is only going in now. Panting is left and right okay, other where you push interor pull out Okay, Well he's pulling out and out and out now. And um you finally realize that Whoville is part of like a Adam that makes up a snowflake. Oh, I don't remember that. Yeah, that was a great way to end it. Pretty brilliant. Um. Also, Stephen Hawking believes in time travel. He's been on the record about that. Remember in our time travel episode that we did at Yeah, we he like theorized this huge machine that you could use to travel forward in time. Yeah, but not back when his Yeah? Yeah? Uh do you have anything else any surprising Hawking Hawk facts? Uh? He held a chair for thirty years, which is basically like a position at Cambridge um the Lucazian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in this chair of this position at this university dates back to sixteen sixty three. He held it for thirty years. The guy who held it the second position, the second person to hold that was Isaac Newton. Yeah, that's not bad. That's pretty cool. So his nickname was Einstein. He had the same job literally as Isaac Newton. He's doing pretty good for himself. Presidential Medal of Freedom here and Commander of the British Empire, which is what non brit skit I think, instead of being knighted. But still James Bond is the commander. Oh yeah, but still no Nobel prize. No for Bond or Hawking. Yeah, well, I mean breaking bad wanted on their last season. That's funny. Didn't they win the Nobel? I don't think so. I don't think they did. They wanted to me. Uh. If you want to learn more about Stephen Hawking, you can type that into the search bar Stephen with the pH remember um at how stuff works dot com. And since I said search bar, friends, it is time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this last call for alcohol. And this guy Dan describes something that we're familiar with, but we're gonna read it anyway in case people don't know. Hey, guys, and Dan and I'm a big fan of live in New York City and listen to you drop knowledge on my way to and from work at an East Harlem beer and wine bar called a b v uh. And it was here where I discovered it unique use for your work. I don't know if you guys are aware, but bars have something called last call. That is when the bartender offers folks one last drink before finishing up, usually about fifteen minutes before standard closing time. The idea is that the customer will use the remaining fifteen minutes to finish up the drinks and then hit bricks. Uh. This system has served quite well for quite some time and is one of the unwritten rules of bar etiquette. But, as Newton's Law would suggest, sometimes that the system breaks down. Sometimes folks just don't get the whole idea of a timely closed want to linger. Here in lies one of the tougher spots for a bartender. How to get those loiterers out without offending or upsetting anyone's delicate sensibilities. Um, but most bartenders really didn't give a care about that at closing time. Well, the bars that I went to like in college, it was pretty rough. The Georgia Bar, you know, it was profanities, consulting people will many families. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here, or playing really awful music was a great mess, you know, which is where we come in. Um. Yeah, you can stop the music, you can flash the lights, you can walk over and plainly tell them uh to leave. But you can try my new method, peak oil. Nothing will clear room of helpless, helpless drunks, philanderers and miscreants like a thorough, thoughtful and well meaning discussion of the ins and outs of peak oil from the middle of the show and without warning our context. This tactic is subtle, it is funny, and it is amazingly effective. I cannot begin to describe the joy I experience watching the Dilly Daliers suddenly gained self awareness and scurry for the exits for climped but one can only hope better informed. But in all seriousness, guys, you're doing the world in excellent service. Information is rarely conveyed with such grace and wit, and for that I thank you. And if you find yourselves in need of a libation in New York, see seek me out. Oh we will Dan Morton at A B V and East Harlem. Awesome, we'll go do Peak Oil Live. Let's all that is really cool. Yeah, what had great use for that one man? Thanks a lot, Dan, thanks for the invite to you and anybody hanging out in New York. Go check out Dan and A B B and you can get a little free stuff you should Know action going on there at closing time, that's right. Yeah. Uh so, if you have figured out a new use for stuff you should Know, we always want to hear about stuff like that. You can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know So, you can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at Discovery dot com, and as always, you can join us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com? Yeah. Brought to you by the all new fourteen Toyota Corolla

Brought to you by the all new Toyota Corolla. Welcome to you stuff you should know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and with us today is our friend and rotating guest producer Matt. That's right, stuff they don't want you to know. Yeah. At Frederick, he winsome and charming. At Frederick, yeah, he wins some. He drunk texts me, Oh my god, you can't tell people there. Sure again, Oh that's not very nice. He sober texts me too. So uh, we're Matt. He's all right, he's great, dude, and we're glad you're here. Matt. Can you see us here? You Before we get started, I feel like we should um give a shout out to our buddies over at co ED. Yeah, you want to tell everybody about COED real quick? Who doesn't know? Yes, the Cooperaate for Education. We went on a trip to them with Guatemala a few years ago and they are a nonprofit who tries to break the cycle of poverty through education for school children in Guatemala and the model. Yeah, it's very it's good stuff. And UM, we'd like to give them shout outs because we genuinely believe in their organization. And we said that any stuff you should know listener who became a scholarship sponsor with co ED, UM, we would read your name on the heirs. Thanks, that's right. So we're going to do that now because we've already done it once and stuff you should know listeners, just keep continuing to give. So we have another batch of people. And if you're interested in giving, you don't have to. We don't have to read your name on the air. I mean I think you need to give permission to co ED to tell us, like, yes, read these people's names. Um, you can do it anonymously. You can do whatever you want. But just go to uh C, O E d UC dot org and you'll learn all about co ED and there's all sorts of places for you to sign up to help in a lot of different ways. Um. So we've got some people some stuff you should know listeners that became scholarship sponsors, UM, starting with Chris Marino, Way to go, Chris, Linda McCarty and Mike Trick. I knew you were gonna give me this way, Cameron. Yes, nice, Is that right? Viceness or that viciness? Yeah, the W is pronounced like a V in Germanic languages from what I understand. Yeah, well you know, yeah, who else, Chuck, I've got Raymond Breen. You skipped over justin Sechina. That's why, that's why c H E n A justin Sechina, and I think we have we got one more on their, Caleb Weeks. Hey, we know Caleb. We know Caleb. He's all over like Twitter and Facebook and emails us and hey Caleb, Yeah, he's he's he's a big fan and a big supporter of us as well. That's very nice. And finally we have Joe Barkovich. That's right. Thanks a lot, guys, we appreciate you giving the co ed and uh we hope that more of you who are just hearing about this. Now we'll go out and do it yourself. C O E d U see dot org. That's right, all right, so Chuck, Yes, we're talking about a guy, very special, guy special. His name is Stephen Hawking with a pH that's right, with a pH d like that. Uh, brilliant physicists, brilliant mind. If you haven't seen the Errol Morris documentary. Oh, I didn't know there was one on him. Yeah, he did The Brief History of Time, which is neat a documentary about Stephen Hawking, not really about the book. I think there's a movie version of the book. I think I have heard that too, but I haven't seen that. I haven't either, But that was his best seller. Um basically explaining making kind of doing what we do, explaining things in a more accessible way that are complex. But he doesn't way better than I. That's why he's like a darling of the media and of everybody, basically, because he's really really good typically at explaining really complex stuff in in a way that the average joke can kind of understand, which is that is, I mean, what we strive to do. They're making a movie about him now, actually, oh yeah, played by Jared Leto No good guess played by Eddie Redmaine. Who U. He sounds like a World War One ace pilot or something. It kind of looks like one. Yeah, have you seen the lay Miss movie? No? Have you seen My Week with Maryland? No? Okay, he was in those anything else he was another stuff, But those are the two most notable things. It's called The Theory of Everything. It's the new one, and it's really about the love story between he and his first wife. And I saw pictures of him, and he looks just like him. They did a really good job. Yeah, I think they gave him some different teeth than you know, put on the glasses and messed up his hair and but then the wheelchair and yeah, yeah you're now Stephen Hawking. But I think they're shooting that like literally right now. So I'm looking forward to that one. And he released stayed on that. I have no idea. Okay, it seems like a long time for that. Yeah, they're really putting their heart and soul into it, I guess. So. So there's plenty of stuff that, I mean, everybody's heard of Stephen Hawking, but there's um some pretty interesting little tidbits about the man, the myth, his life, um that I didn't know about until we read this article that I think is worth sharing frankly, because if we don't share it, what are we doing here? That's right. So one of the things, um, just to start off, is that he never won the Nobel Prize. As smart as the stude is, Yeah, has not yet won the Nobel Prize. He's still got time. Oh yeah, for sure, I think I said has never Yeah, I hope I did. It sounded like there was some finality. It's just never gonna happen. Try all you on, but this pillar of the physics and mathematics community has never won a Nobel Prize. Yeah, it is surprising. We're gonna rely on punts for this one, okay. Uh. He was born on January eight, nine two, which was also the three anniversary of Galileo's death, right, which is just mere coincidence, but it's a nice did bit, he says, who uh And he is obviously was diagnosed with ALS at the age of twenty one, Luke Garrig's disease and given just a few years to live. And um, that was a long time ago. It was. Um. He was born in nineteen forty two, so he's what, um, seventy one now. Um. No, he'll be seventy four very soon, in about a month or so. Anyway, he um. When he was just before his twenty one birthday, he started noticing. He was in grad school at Oxford, and he started noticing that he was getting clumsier running into stuff, having like tripping that kind of thing, and it was apparently pronounced enough that his family said, you're going to the doctor while you're home visiting for Christmas break and so he um went into the hospital for a battery of tests for two weeks. That's an awful experience as in and of itself, I'm sure. But then to top it off, they said, oh, well we found out what's wrong with you. You have a LS, which stands for immo trophic lateral sclerosis YEA or Luke Garrig's disease, because Luke Garret most famously had it. That's right, And it's just a neurological condition where you're voluntary muscle control is lost, right, Yeah, and uh, typically you will die a few years after contracting it from a couple of things. Well, after symptoms show up, but what motor neurons running your breathing muscles start to fail for uh, deterioration of your swallowing muscles. That's a big one. So basically you drown like it ends up being respiratory. Yeah, usually go, but it's there's a lot of forms of it, and he doesn't have either one of those conditions, so he's good to go. Basically and has or has been for a long time, especially with this talking box. Yeah, he controls that with his cheek. Now, I have no idea how that works though. So Um, he's got the A L. S. Luke Garrig's disease, that's right, Um, but he hasn't really let it slow him down. Prior to that, he wasn't exactly like a real athletic type anyway. But he was on the rowing team at Oxford, which was a huge deal. Rowing team at Oxford equals um football team at Georgia, sure, maybe even more. What's more than that football team in Ohio state? Even Oh that's more lately? Did you see the Vanderbilt came Yeah, I don't want to talk about that. I don't neither. So um, he was the coxswain on the rowing team. He's the guy who goes stroke stroke stroke, And I did know this until I read this article. The coxwain doesn't just set the rhythm for a rowing they also steer. You didn't know that, No, I had no idea. Yeah, I thought it was strictly um being basically like a human metronome, you know. But he, Um, this little pip squeaky guy was on the rowing team as the coxwain and like really became popular, so much so that while he was at Oxford, he kind of threw himself into the rowing team or crew as we call it in America. Yeah, to the detriment of his studies, even for a while. Um and speaking of studies, he getting an Oxford wasn't a foregone conclusion for this guy because he wasn't a great student in grade school. And um, I wasn't so surprised by that that he was average too poor in grade school, because I think a lot of these super geniuses, it's like it's so not even beneath them, but they're still beyond that. They might have a hard time and just in regular class room settings, you know. Oh yeah, so it was challenged, like you're probably not going to do very well in school. So those of you who are board in school and don't have good grades, don't go up. Hope you may be a genius. Yeah, But even at the time, uh, there was something about him, like he was obviously a smart kid even though he wasn't getting good grades. Because his school his classmates named him, nicknamed him Einstein, which is about as pression as you can get and it wasn't because of his fluffy white mustache in the fourth grade. But his parents both went to Oxford and they wanted him to go there. And um, he was a great test taker and he aced his exams, almost got a perfect score on the physics exam unsurprisingly, but rather than going into physics, his father, Frank I believe his name is, said, no, I want you to be a doctor. You're going to serve the world by being a doctor. And so uh, a little Stephen goes and tries to take some biology classes and says, this is sciences is imprecise, it's descriptive, it's subjective, Like I can't be no, I don't want to do this. Yeah. He was not into biology. Um, and I wasn't either, but he was way into physics, whereas I was not. Um And when he went to Oxford, they were like, well, we got a couple of programs. We have the traditional particle physics where you study sub atomic particles and that's old school, where we have this newish kind of thing called cosmology, which isn't even a isn't even a real field yet, like we're trying it out here. Yeah, and he was like, I am all over that because I want to learn about bigger things, not smaller things. Yeah, because they're basically the two different approaches to the same thing. Like particles studies the very small parts that make up the universe, and cosmology is the sum of those parts and how they interact. Yeah, of course he would get into both eventually. Yeah, well, I think you kind of have to have an understanding both else you're just Although bet if your particle physicist, you can just kind of be in your lab running tests and setting out data, and the cosmologists use that as well. Yeah, but because back, I'm sure it's I bet cosmology. I bet they study particle physics more than particle physics. People study cosmology. We'll prove us wrong. People prove us wrong. That was the nerdiest like exchange we've ever had. I think it's up there for sure. So out of the study of cosmology, UM, his probably his biggest contribution to date to science to cosmology popular culture would be A Brief History of Time, But his biggest contribution to his field is UM something that the author of this article calls the boundless universe theory, which I couldn't really find anywhere else every everywhere else on the internet. If the type in boundless universe theory, it just brings up this article and like people copying and pasting this article in the body. Yeah, did this guy invent this title? And I don't. Yeah, I guess so, because there is something out there that describes this, but nobody else calls it boundless universe theory. Really yeah, but this is the big contribution. And here it's about the time that your brain will start to melt. Uh. Yes, he worked with the guy named Jim Hartle and came up with a theory in that the universe is limitless. Yet why is that funny? I could actually hear the hyphen in the Yeah. Uh, it is a contained thing yet it has no boundaries. Right, So, like I said, your mind melts. But wait, this is why Stephen Hawking is awesome. How can that be? Josh, Well, he says, visualize the Earth, the service of the Earth. It's it's contained, but it's also boundless. Like if you travel across the edge of the Earth, you never reached the edge. True, So he said, it's just visualize the surface of the Earth. But the surface of the Earth is you know, two dimensional, This is four dimensional. See, that's where my mind is already blown. Yeah. I didn't even try to follow that. But what what they're saying is um and the larger implication of this is that what Um, Hardle and Hawking did was they took Richard Feynman's quantum theory of the universe and married it to Einstein's theory of relativity to come up with this idea that the universe didn't emerge from a black hole. Um. Instead, it it came out of the Big Bang, and as a result, spacetime, which is exactly what it sounds like, travels if you're looking at it like a a the Earth, the Big Bank takes place of the north pole. So as you're traveling southward towards the equator, these lines of latitude get bigger, right, and Um, those represents space time. So it's kind of like time doesn't exist. And I don't think that's true, So don't email me. I'm just saying my own interpretation of this. At the Big Bang Big Bang happens, time and space start to exist. They go outward expanding, and then once you hit the equator, that's the apex, that's the peak, and then they start to come back in. And the the upshot of this is that eventually, by Hawkings reckoning, in about twenty billion years, spacetime will collapse in on itself again, meaning our entire universe will collapse upon itself. Yeah, it's finite, but it's boundless, mind blown, right, And like Chuck, what we just did, like isn't even It's probably the most rickety terrible interpretation of the of that ever, but I think that that's generally the it's it's an interpretation. Hey, I got one for you, okay, if we're listening Hawking things, And I just found this out today, did you know that he had a really bad situation with his second wife. No, he married his first wife, Jane, and credits her with giving him reasons to live, like right after he was diagnosed, Like he met her the week he was diagnosed, and that's what they're making this love story about. And they were married for quite a long time until the mid nineties and they divorced and he married one of his nurses, Elaine Mason, and reportedly she was an awful, awful person. Reportedly reportedly like basically everybody who knew her, like he was sort of strange from his family for a long time because of her controlling, manipulative bullying and rumors and investigations into the fact that she may have physically abused him. Yeah, his wife and nurse uh fractured his wrists by slamming it onto a wheelchair. And this is all allegedly because he denied it. But people close to him said he would never admit that, because that would admit that he really screwed up by making this decision. Ah let him pee himself by like not giving him his you know, the means to do so. She uh submerged him in a bathtub, like letting his tricky outomy tube fill up with water. Oh my god, and left him out in the sun and like the hottest days of the year. He had heat stroke and severe sunburned. And he denied that. They investigated, and basically the cops wal there was nothing we can do. He's saying the stuff didn't happen. Yet he would show up like bruises and cuts and things and say, yeah, like I've ran into a door again today. They're like, you're in a wheelchair. You can't really do that. I guess you can. Um And they divorced in two thousand six, when did they get married? So there's a Vanity Fair article about it was like really disturbing. Any of that true, that's awful, let alone all of it combined together. Jeez. So there's that that was that was uplifting, Chuck, I've got one for you. Um he. A couple of years back, HuffPo reported that, um he was a frequent visitor to a California sex club, Freedom Makers, and like some somebody who went there said that like he, they'd seen him there more than a handful of times. Interesting like basically getting laft and it's pretty unmistakable guy. Yeah, doubt he would confuse him. But Oxford, I believe it was Oxford came out and said that is b s. He did go to this place once basically like as a joke, as the guest of a friend or something like that. But he's certainly not a member. He's certainly not a frequent visitor. And like this person who's saying this is a liar. Thin got dropped after that, but he, um he, he does have a great wit. That's another thing he's known for being a charmer. Yeah, and um the he was asked I think the Guardian asked him, like, if there's anything that he didn't understand or that baffled them in the universe. And his answer was women said, they're a total mystery to me. So there is at least one thing, but black holes not the case. Yeah, he lost a bet on black holes and was man enough to admit it. In two thousand four. Uh, he made a bet with um, a fellow scientist named John Preskill. Yeah, and they did well. I let's talk about black holes for a second here. I guess. Stars are these big, huge things that burned tons of energy, the sons of star Son is a star. You should go back and revisit our Sun podcast. That's a great one. Uh. And they have a ton of mass and a ton of gravity, which is great as long as they're burning and doing fine because there are nuclear explosions pushing outward. Yeah, just gravities ing it inwards. So they find this happy balance massive amounts of mass and gravity. When they die, though, something bad happens and the gravity says, I am funny, something bad happened. That's hilarious. Well, if you're a star, I guess, um, unless like that's the apex of being a star. Maybe, man I get to be a black hole to burn out. Well, that was a spoiler. They become black holes because gravity wins out and becomes stronger and it collapses on itself. And that that is what a black hole is, right. It's just all the matter in the star combined in this little dense ball that's so dense and has such an amount of mass clustered into one little part that it actually bends the fabric of space and time. And so that's your black hole. It's really a black well in the fabric of space and time. Uh. And so that's a black hole. And supposedly, no, not, not even light can escape once it passes an event horizon. And um, who did he have the bet with pres Skill? So press Skill and Hawking disagreed about whether or not anything called information, which would be light, particles, anything, anything at all escaping black holes. Hawking said no, Preskill said yes. And then later on Hawking figured out that Prescoe was right, um, that if you did go into a black hole, you would get all jumbled up and distorted, but you information about you, particles, whatever could escape. Um. And therefore there's no such thing as a true event horizon. There's a pseudo event horizon, because if you have a genuine event horizon, nothing could ever come back out. I wonder what the bet was. They don't, they don't say. I found out it was a m because it was information escaping a black hole. They they they bet um and an encyclopedia of the winner's choice, and encyclopedia being a place from which information is easily retrieved. And I think press Gil wanted a baseball encyclopedia because you know, smart guys, they're into sports. They're into baseball. Yeah, that's true. It's the thinking man's game. Um. I thought it might have been a trip back to the gentleman's club freedommakers. Yeah, you're buying all right. Here's one that I didn't realize. Uh. He's written to children's books with his daughter Lucy, and they have a trilogy and uh, the first one in two thousand and seven was called Georgia's Secret Key to the Universe and it's about a little boy named George who has these leadite parents that he can't stand, so he kills them. He doesn't kill them, um, but technology to kill him. Nobody has a neighbor who he really cottons too because he's a physicist and has a computer. It just happens to have the most powerful computer in the world at his house, that's right. And that computer offers offers portals that they can see into outer space. So George is super stoked about this, right, So there's Georgia's Secret Key of the Universe. They followed that with George's Cosmic Treasure Hunt, and then in two eleven they had George in The Big Bang. Yeah, and that was their children's book trilogy. And I think when they interviewed Lucy In and him, people are like, we shouldn't be surprised because this is sort of just another extension of what he's trying to do his whole life, which is explained things. And that's what the book does for children. It's it's not just a fantastical story. It kind of introduces them to things like physics and black holes and or black wells. Right, you're gonna coin that, I think if somebody else already has um. All right, well, chuck, before we keep going. We got some more stuff up our sleep, possibly the most surprising things you can think of, That about Hawking coming up after this message break. All right, so you're about to blow my doors with some surprises. Okay, I think you know all this. You read the same article I did, being coy okay. Um Hawking has said publicly that he believed in the possibility of alien life, and not just primitive alien life, which he suggests is possibly common. He's actually a proponent of panspermia, which is um basically like say a meteor bringing the basics of life from Mars to Earth um, but also possibly intelligent life, although he says it's probably few and far between. Yeah, but the fact that he was on record for this is pretty surprising. Sure, he said it to NASA. He was. He came out as an alien life supporter to NASA. I wonder if belon though, and told his wife he was like, I get this. I told NASA I thought there might be intelligent line over there. Here's where my mind was blown a little bit. He says, we might need to be uh wary of them though, if they come, because they probably won't be DNA based, which you just can't even wrap your head around. Well, yeah, you know, um, I remember having my mind blown. The younger person, I think it was Michael Crichton. In one of his books, he just was mentioning off handedly how aliens might not even be like might they might be intelligent crystals or something like that. They can something we just had, we wouldn't recommise at all. Yeah, which is I think probably the likelier case. Like he's saying, d n A is not essential a life. It can be a lot of other things as long as you have some sort of replicating basis of life. That there you go. That's sort of old school like Lovecraft and all those early sci fi horror writers. Remember, their common method was always to be like it cannot even be described. That was always their copse unnamable. Um. But the way he describes aliens and potentially smart aliens is sort of just like you would see in the movies, like, hey, they may be nomads who ran out of resources and they're coming to Earth for hours and then that's straight out of a sci fi movie. Or are we the aliens? No, I'm just saying like that's kind of what the we're at the very cusp of that as well. Yeah, I remember when like an elementary school, when at some point the first mind blow is probably like we could be just a speck on the fingernail, like some giant in some other world. Wun't that neat that they ended? Um? Uh the Grinch like that the movie? Yeah, I don't remember. Yeah, that's how it ends. What do you mean like it? He Ron Howard starts panning out out and out and out from pulling out. Yeah, so pan is only going in now. Panting is left and right okay, other where you push interor pull out Okay, Well he's pulling out and out and out now. And um you finally realize that Whoville is part of like a Adam that makes up a snowflake. Oh, I don't remember that. Yeah, that was a great way to end it. Pretty brilliant. Um. Also, Stephen Hawking believes in time travel. He's been on the record about that. Remember in our time travel episode that we did at Yeah, we he like theorized this huge machine that you could use to travel forward in time. Yeah, but not back when his Yeah? Yeah? Uh do you have anything else any surprising Hawking Hawk facts? Uh? He held a chair for thirty years, which is basically like a position at Cambridge um the Lucazian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in this chair of this position at this university dates back to sixteen sixty three. He held it for thirty years. The guy who held it the second position, the second person to hold that was Isaac Newton. Yeah, that's not bad. That's pretty cool. So his nickname was Einstein. He had the same job literally as Isaac Newton. He's doing pretty good for himself. Presidential Medal of Freedom here and Commander of the British Empire, which is what non brit skit I think, instead of being knighted. But still James Bond is the commander. Oh yeah, but still no Nobel prize. No for Bond or Hawking. Yeah, well, I mean breaking bad wanted on their last season. That's funny. Didn't they win the Nobel? I don't think so. I don't think they did. They wanted to me. Uh. If you want to learn more about Stephen Hawking, you can type that into the search bar Stephen with the pH remember um at how stuff works dot com. And since I said search bar, friends, it is time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this last call for alcohol. And this guy Dan describes something that we're familiar with, but we're gonna read it anyway in case people don't know. Hey, guys, and Dan and I'm a big fan of live in New York City and listen to you drop knowledge on my way to and from work at an East Harlem beer and wine bar called a b v uh. And it was here where I discovered it unique use for your work. I don't know if you guys are aware, but bars have something called last call. That is when the bartender offers folks one last drink before finishing up, usually about fifteen minutes before standard closing time. The idea is that the customer will use the remaining fifteen minutes to finish up the drinks and then hit bricks. Uh. This system has served quite well for quite some time and is one of the unwritten rules of bar etiquette. But, as Newton's Law would suggest, sometimes that the system breaks down. Sometimes folks just don't get the whole idea of a timely closed want to linger. Here in lies one of the tougher spots for a bartender. How to get those loiterers out without offending or upsetting anyone's delicate sensibilities. Um, but most bartenders really didn't give a care about that at closing time. Well, the bars that I went to like in college, it was pretty rough. The Georgia Bar, you know, it was profanities, consulting people will many families. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here, or playing really awful music was a great mess, you know, which is where we come in. Um. Yeah, you can stop the music, you can flash the lights, you can walk over and plainly tell them uh to leave. But you can try my new method, peak oil. Nothing will clear room of helpless, helpless drunks, philanderers and miscreants like a thorough, thoughtful and well meaning discussion of the ins and outs of peak oil from the middle of the show and without warning our context. This tactic is subtle, it is funny, and it is amazingly effective. I cannot begin to describe the joy I experience watching the Dilly Daliers suddenly gained self awareness and scurry for the exits for climped but one can only hope better informed. But in all seriousness, guys, you're doing the world in excellent service. Information is rarely conveyed with such grace and wit, and for that I thank you. And if you find yourselves in need of a libation in New York, see seek me out. Oh we will Dan Morton at A B V and East Harlem. Awesome, we'll go do Peak Oil Live. Let's all that is really cool. Yeah, what had great use for that one man? Thanks a lot, Dan, thanks for the invite to you and anybody hanging out in New York. Go check out Dan and A B B and you can get a little free stuff you should Know action going on there at closing time, that's right. Yeah. Uh so, if you have figured out a new use for stuff you should Know, we always want to hear about stuff like that. You can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know So, you can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at Discovery dot com, and as always, you can join us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com? Yeah. Brought to you by the all new fourteen Toyota Corolla