Latest / Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe / Did the James Webb Space Telescope disprove the Big Bang Theory?

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Did the James Webb Space Telescope disprove the Big Bang Theory? · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: And Daniel, what are the chances that physics is wrong?
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: I would guess something about What do you mean everything
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: you've been telling us is wrong? There's percent chance that
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: we don't have everything right? So what are we even
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: doing here? What do we pay you for them? Well?
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: You know our idea right now is sure to be wrong,
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: but it's the least wrong theory we've ever built. Well,
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: that's good. I always aim to be the least wrong
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: person in the room. But what does that mean? Does
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: that mean the other theories are more than wrong? It
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: means the long arc of science bends towards the truth
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: but might never actually get there. It doesn't sound like
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: a band at all. That's where like the straight line
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: towards wrongness or least wrongness. No, it's a random walk
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: through late nights and lots of frustration in coffee. Right. Well,
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: have you ever thought of just blowing it all up
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: and starting from scratch? Oh? Yeah, every day? That's the dream.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: But if only I had the right idea. It's never
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: too late to change careers. Maybe you can be in
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: one that's a little less least wrong. There's some joy
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: in being wrong? Are you right about that? Probably? Wrong?
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: I am more handmade cartoonist and the co author of
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: frequently asked Questions about the Universe. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: I'm an expert at being wrong. Oh yeah, how do
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: you know you're not wrong about being an expert about
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: being wrong? Well, I wrote a whole book about it
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: with you, So I guess that qualifies me not knowing
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: what's going on about the universe. Well, now, the book
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: was called we Have No Idea, None, We are wrong.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: I think you're wrong about the title of the bontanil.
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: It means that all of our ideas about the universe
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: are almost certainly wrong, and the truth that's out there
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: is something that would shock us if we could only
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: know it and understand it. Well, I guess that's the
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: point of an idea. It's just an idea, right, It's
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: not really a law or truth until you prove it. Yeah.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: And the process of science is iterative. Right. We start
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: with one idea, it works for a while, and we
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: find some flaws and we make it better. Sometimes that's
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: a gradual evolution of an idea to a better idea.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: Sometimes it's a revolution, like when we over it throw
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: the mechanistic universe for quantum mechanics. That's kind of a
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: philosophical question, right, if an idea is is right a
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: little bit of the time or for a while was
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: it wrong in retrospect? It's really an interesting question in philosophy.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: What is something you have to satisfy in order to
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: be true? Newton's theory of gravity worked really, really well,
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: but is it true? It's hard to say that it
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: is because it's missing one of the basic ideas about
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: the universe, that space is a thing that bends and
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: curves and instead describes gravity in terms of this like
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: fictitious force that doesn't really exist, Right, but it's right,
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: and that it works for like n of the situations
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: here on Earth. Right, Yeah, it certainly does work for
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: lots of situations. But does it describe what's actually happening?
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: Or is it just a recipe that seems to work? Yeah,
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: and I guess also, like, how do you prove that
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: the theory is not right? Right? Like, isn't it hard
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: to prove a negative kind of thing? It is hard,
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: and it's even possible. We may come up with two
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: theories of the universe both of which work equally well,
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: but have different conceptual structures that tell us different stories
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: about what's going on out there in the universe. In
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: that scenario, what do we do which one is true?
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: They can't both be true if they disagree about what's happening,
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: and yet they both work. So that's a future crisis
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: for philosophy. Yeah, that's just what the universe needs, a
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: two party system for us to devolve into political mess
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: But anyways, welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: the Universe, a production of My Heart Radio in which
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: we try to tease apart the mess that is the universe,
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: this glorious, beautiful, incredibly wonderful mess that we find ourselves
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: in and that we puzzle over, and then we try
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: to pull apart so that we can have some understanding
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: of it. It seems to us to be incredible that
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: it's possible to translate the workings of the universe into
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: mathematical models in our minds. But somehow we have made
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: some progress. We don't think that the answers we have
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: are correct. In fact, we're pretty sure they're all somewhat wrong,
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: but we're enjoying making progress, and we love talking about
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: it with you. That's right, because it is an amazing universe.
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: And what better thing to be gloriously wrong about than
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: the entire universe and trying to understand it. Hey, if
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: you're gonna go wrong, go big, that's right, go a
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: thousand percent wrong, or maybe infinity wrong. Yeah, and don't
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: be wrong about tiny little things like you know, when
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: you were supposed to pick up the dry cleaning. Be
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: wrong about the fundamental nature of reality, man, Yeah, because um,
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: I guess nobody can disprove you that you're right about
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: being wrong. But joking aside. Science is a process, right,
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: We're continually refining our theories. Sometimes we throw them out
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: the window and start again from scratch, because the goal
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: is not to prove this theory or that theory. We
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: don't have a vested interest in one particular idea. The
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: goal is to come up with a theory that describes
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: the universe as best as possible, and sometimes that does
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: mean throwing out something we've been working on for decades
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: or hundreds of years. Yeah, because I think you know,
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: science kind of has this image of being pretty much
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: settled in the general public. New people think, oh, scientists
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: got it. These theories about the origin of the universe
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: and how big it is, and whether it's flat or
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: curve and things like that. But actually these things are
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: still being debated. In any day now, there could be
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: a result from one of our experiments or one of
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: our observations that totally disproves everything we thought was right.
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: That's right, there are deep questions about the universe. At
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: the smallest scale, what is everything made out of and
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: how's it all come together to make our reality? And
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: at the biggest scale, what is out there? How big
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: is the universe? How did it all start? And especially
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: at the biggest scale of questions about the universe, We've
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: had a series of incredible surprises over the last few decades.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: As we look further out into the universe and build
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: new eyeballs to see even deeper back into the history
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: of our cosmos, we discover things that shock us as
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: the process, that really do upend our understanding of where
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: we live. Yeah, And in fact, just recently there was
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: a big headline that seemed to say that everything we
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: thought about the origin of the whole universe is maybe wrong.
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: And so, Daniel, you got an avalanche of comments from
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: listeners asking us to talk about this. That's right. There
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: was an article that whizzed around on social media claiming
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: that maybe the Big Bang didn't happen, that maybe the
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: latest data from our fanciest, newest eyeball, the James web
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: Space telescope, might be disproving the Big Bang. So lots
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: of listeners wrote to me on Twitter, and on email,
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: and on Discord and on every possible channel. I think
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: I even got some skywriting asking if this was for real?
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: Did anyone send you like actual mail. I don't check
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: my department mail very often, like once every few months
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: or so. There could be a whole avalanche of comments
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: there for waiting for you go check it in a minute.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: But yeah, this was an article that seemed to have
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: everyone a buzz about whether or not we are right
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: about something as fundamental as the beginning of the universe.
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: And so today on the podcast, we'll be asking the
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: question did the James web Space telescope disprove the Big
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: Bang theory? I mean, did it explode the Big Bang?
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: Isn't that sort of an oxymoron? How can you blow
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: up a big bang? Right? Can you make it bang
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: year or bigger or bigger bang? Hear. Yeah, you would
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: think that it's already banged, But I guess you can
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: blow up the explosion too. You think that the origin
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: the universe would be the biggest bang there could be,
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: but still there is something to explode, the humongous bang.
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: Maybe it just needs to be upgraded the theory the bigger.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: I guess you could should go both ways. You could
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: have a smaller bang and the even bigger bang. So
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: this article that seemed to cause all this stirring social
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: media and on the Internet as kind of a funny title.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: That's right. The title of the article is the Big
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: Bang didn't happen, So that's some nice clickbait for you.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: And the article goes into detail about what the James
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: web Space Telescope has seen and why it might cause
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: doubt on theories that describe the very very early universe.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: But the article is not exactly like very strong scientific arguments.
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: For example, it references a reasoned paper by a cosmologist.
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: The title of that paper is Panic at the Discs,
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: which has to do with seeing very very distant galaxies.
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: This article refers to that as cosmologists are panicking about
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: what they are seeing in the universe. When really, Panic
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: at the discs is actually just a reference to like
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: a two thousands email band called Panic at the Disco.
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: So it's just a case of astronomers making bad jokes,
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: not actual crisis in the field. Wait, so let me
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: get this straight. Um. So the article that went viral
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: is an article about a research paper. It's an article
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: about some data that came from James web Space telescope,
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: and it references this research paper as evidence that cosmologists
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: are panicking because the research article you put the word
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: panic in its title. But it was just as a joke.
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: It's just as a joke and a reference to this
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: astronomer's favorite band, Panic at the Disco. So they saw
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: an opportunity for a bad pun, and you know, they
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: took it. And I gotta respect that because we do
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: that all the time. But in this case it led
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: to a bit of a misunderstanding. Oh I see, but
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: you know we're not publishing a research paper here, So
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: why would you make a joke in a research paper.
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: It might cost some panic, you know, like primely it did.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: It's sort of the trend these days to try to
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: come up with witty research papers. I wrote an astrophysics
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: paper ones whose title was two lines or not two lines?
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: That is the question. So you know people make jokes
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: sometimes in research papers. All right, so this is all
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: kind of all goes back to a research paper that
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: and that use the work panic in the title. But
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: they didn't really mean to convey panic, but it did
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: sort of maybe mean to convey something wrong, right, that
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: something was off. That's right. There is something really interesting
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: and weird and fascinating about the data from the James
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: web Space telescope. There really is something to dig into there,
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: and it does raise some questions about the Big Bang. Oh,
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: I see. I think what you're saying is that there
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: is reason to panic, but it's just a normal amount
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: of panic that is involved in science. I don't think
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: anybody is actually panicking. People are licking their lips. This
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: is exciting, This is what we want. You know, people
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: aren't worried when we're about to overthrow a theory. They're
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: excited because overthrowing a theory is like the biggest party
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: in physics. When we can prove that something we always
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: thought was true is wrong. That's the moment of discovery.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: When we were revealing something else, even truer about the universe,
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: something less wrong about our theories. So this idea that
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: like physicists would be worried about a theory being overthrown,
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: business would love it. Well, come on, I'm sure most
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: physicists would love it, except the one that came up
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: with the original theory that's being proven wrong. I'm sure
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: that that physicist not feeling a lot of zen right now. Yeah.
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: I don't know how Newton would have felt if he
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: was in the seminar room when Einstein presented general activity.
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: Probably not good. I think Newton was also famously not
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: a very humble dude, and so probably he would have
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: asked a very sharp question. Everyone has big egos, even physicists. Right,
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: that's true. But there are plenty of people out there
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: who are looking to overthrow the establishment. So don't get
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: the impression that like physics is desperately defending one idea.
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: You know, we're out there trying to find the truth,
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: or trying to find cracks in our current ideas which
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: will lead us to the deeper truth. That's right. Imagine
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: a whole bunch of nerds and they're all trying to
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: be right. Yeah, that's the picture of size you should
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: have in your head. Everyone's trying to one up each other. Yeah,
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: everyone's happy to put down the other one. Yeah. It's
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: impossible to imagine a conspiracy of censorship keeping out the truth.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: It just can't happen. Yeah, you can't. You can't get
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: a hundred nerds degree on anything except except that the
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: other person might be wrong. All right, Well, let's dig
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: into this because this article did cause a lot of ripples,
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: it seems, and a lot of people are concerned maybe
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: that the Big Bang theory is not quite right. So
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: let's start with the basics. What is the Big Bang theory?
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: This is a good opportunity to actually to clear up
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: some misconceptions about what the Big Bang is. I think
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: a lot of people when they hear big Bang, they
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: imagine a tiny dot of dense matter in empty space
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: which then blows up and that stuff flies out through
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: the universe, filling that empty space with stuff, and that
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: the Big Bang happened like in one location at one time,
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: and things have been flying out from that dot ever since.
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: That's probably what people mostly have in their heads when
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: they think about Big Bang. But when we talk about
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: the Big Bang scientifically, we actually have something very different
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: in mind. It's different in a few important ways. The first,
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: and maybe a harness to wrap your mind around, is
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: that we think the Big Bang didn't happen in one spot.
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: We think it probably happened everywhere. That the universe was
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: filled with this very hot, very dense matter and that
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: expanded and cooled and the universe became dilute. But that
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: this happened all through the universe, not just at one point. Well,
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: that sort of depends on what you assume is the
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: size of the universe, Right, Like, if you assume that
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: the universe is infinite, then yet it was like sort
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: of like a dot everywhere all at once. But if
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: it had a sort of a finite volume, and it
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: really kind of was kind of a smaller dot. Right,
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: If the universe is finite but doesn't have any edges,
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: if it loops over around itself, then the Big Bang
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: would still happen everywhere in that finite universe. At the
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: same time, you're right that we don't know whether the
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: universe is finite or infinite. But the sense we have
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: is that no place in the universe is special. The
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: laws of physics are the same everywhere, so there no
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: reason for the Big Bang to happen here or there
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: or around the corner. It should happen everywhere at once,
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: and what we see out there in the universe is
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: consistent with that, with there being no center. The expansion,
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: for example, is happening everywhere at the same time, right.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: I think maybe what you're trying to say is that
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: maybe most people think of the Big Bang as like
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: this thing, like the universe kind of exploding, but really
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: it's more like before the Big Bang, the universe was
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: just there was just a lot less space, and so
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: everything was crammed into a smaller space. And then after
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: the Big Bang there was just a whole lot more space,
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: and so everything was more spread out, and the part
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: of the universe that we can see, the observable universe,
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: was much much smaller. We don't know what's beyond that.
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: It might be that the universe is infinite and it
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: expanded from something infinite to something more infinite. It might
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: be that the universe's finite. We can only see a
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: part of it, and the part of it that we
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: can see now was much much smaller before this expansion,
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: not like a tiny dot or an atom, but something
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: much much smaller before the expansion. Right, we can look
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: at the universe, we see that this expansion happened. We
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: can dial it backwards to a much denser, earlier stage.
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: But we don't think it happened in just one location.
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: We think it probably happened everywhere. The other important details
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: to sort through about the Big Bang is exactly what
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: we mean by time equal zero, Like, when did the
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: Big Bang happen? A lot of people probably imagine that
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: we start with a gravitational singularity, a point of infinite
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: density from which everything started, and that's T equal zero,
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: that's the first moment. But really the Big Bang theory
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: doesn't go back that far, goes back to a very hot,
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: very early, very dense state, but not infinitely dense. We
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: don't know how to describe something that's infinitely dense. We
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: think that's actually like a failure of general relativity. We
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: think that our theories of the universe work up to
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: a certain temperature, a certain sort of density of the universe.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: Beyond that, we just don't know what to do. So
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: when we say T equal zero, when we say the
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: Big Bang, we really just mean we start from a
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: very hot, very dense state, not actually infinite. We can
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: use general relativity to try to extrapolate further back to
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: maybe infinite density a singularity, but we think that's probably wrong.
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: We don't think that general relative it is applicable at
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: those stages. Right, But I think you still put TI
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: equal zero at the point where the universe would be
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: infinite kind of right. The theory just doesn't claim to
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: know what actually happens in that infinity, you know, the
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: Big Bang theory. We put equal zero at the point
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: when the universe is at the Plank temperature, this highest
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: temperature that we can imagine beyond which we don't think
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: our theories are valid. That's what T equal zero is,
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: is this early, very dense universe, not at the singularity,
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: because we don't even know if there was a singularity
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: or something else or a bounce or whatever. Extrapolate back
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: as far as we can, which is up to the
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: Plank temperature, and that's what we say T equal zero is,
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: and we can model our universe from that point forward.
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: We don't know how to go any further back from that.
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: Before that is maybe something else like an infloton field
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: that decayed into that state. Huge question mark. Lots of speculation.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: But TI equal zero. The actual Big Bang doesn't start
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: from that singularity. It starts from the hottest, densest state
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: that our physics can currently describe. Okay, I see what
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: you're saying. You're saying the Big Bang theory does actually
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: start at the beginning you just said to equal zero,
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: like a few moments, or at least it starts like
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: you're starting the movie a few minutes into the action. Yeah,
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: we don't know how far into the action. We don't
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: even know what time means. In that state? Are laws
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: of physics breakdown there? You know? And that's because we
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: think the laws of physics that we have are applicable
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: in certain regimes the way like fluid mechanics. It works
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: for water flow, right, it doesn't really work for gas.
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: If you heat the water up too much. Your laws
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: of fluids are sort of useless. We think that the
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: laws that we have are kind of like that, they
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: are applicable in a certain temperature range of the universe.
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: Beyond that they're basically useless because we don't have the
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: true fundamental theory. But we say T equals zero sort
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: of like the earliest point that we can describe. We
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: think maybe there was something before that, big question marks
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: about what that might have been. Well, almost certainly there
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: were things before then, right the tegual zeros the stuff
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: that was there equals equals zero must have come from somewhere,
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: must have come from somewhere. But you know, the spectrum
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: of ideas is really wide. It's like maybe the universe
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: was filled with this other kind of field, an insulton field,
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: which is then decayed. Or maybe space didn't even exist
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: before that. Right, Maybe space itself is emergent. It comes
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: together from quantum bits weaving themselves together with entanglement to
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: form this fabric that we call space. And before that,
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: the universe as we know and describe it with our
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: laws didn't even really exist in the same sense the
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: way that like a fluid doesn't exist once it turns
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: into a gas. Or maybe even time also was emergent.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: So there's a huge range of possible ideas for what
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: happens sort of before T equal zero. Right, And I
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: guess I'd ranged me to my question, which is like,
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: is there actually just one Big Bang theory or is
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: it kind of like a general family of ideas or
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: one idea that's incomplete? But there are many different possibilities
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: about it, you know what I mean, Like is it
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: one established theory or is it just kind of like
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: a general idea, great questions. So before to equal zero,
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: there's like a wild West of theories, like a huge
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: number of crazy ideas, some of which are super fun
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: to talk about it. We explore them in some episodes.
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: After T equal zero, there's a pretty solid idea of
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: describing that expansion and understanding how it shaped the universe
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: that we see today, and that's really very rigorous. We
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: have measurements, we have observations, We have theories with very
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: precise predictions about for example, like how much helium was
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: produced in the first minute of the Big Bang and
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: how much lithium was produced and all this stuff which
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: we can actually measure and check. So after T equal
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: zero and we think like our laws are enforced, there
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: really is a fairly well established idea for what happened.
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: I mean, still some uncertainty, still some question marks, but
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: it really hangs together very nicely. That is until maybe
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: this latest set of data from the James web Space Telscope,
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: which some people might argue throws the whole theory into
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: disarrayan maybe even disproves it. So let's get into what
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: this data is and whether or not it really does
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: disprove the Big Bang theory. But first let's take a
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: quick break. All right, we are disproving the Big Bang
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: theory here today, right, Daniel. That's we're aiming big here.
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: We're blowing it all up. Yep, we're going. We're going
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: for the biggest bank possible. We are having a crazy
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: sale come by a galaxy. It's a thousand percent off.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: What what would you do with the gals? I don't know,
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: but real estate is the best investment. That's what everybody's
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: telling me. All right, well, um, so we have a
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: theory of the Big Bang, or at least a general
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: model of what happened at the beginning of the universe,
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: at least starting from a certain point in time. But
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: now there's some data from the James Web telescope which
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: some people are maybe interpreting as disproving the Big Bang.
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: What's going on here exactly? And so one of the
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: key predictions of the Big Bang theory, when we start,
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: as we say, from t qual zero, we model the
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: universe getting less and less hot and more and more
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: spread out. One of the key predictions is exactly how
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: the universe came to look the way that it does,
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: which means that things cool old and gas formed and
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: stars formed and galaxies formed. And we have a model
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: for how we think that happens. There's this dark ages
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: before there are any stars, and then the stars collapse
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: and start to burn and they come together gradually to
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: form galaxies. We have this sort of like bottom up
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: theory of formation of galaxies. So galaxies should start out
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: very small, very dim, sort of like many galaxies merging
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: together to make the big galaxies that we see today.
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: And this is exactly what James Webb can do. James
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: Webb can look into the very very early part of
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: the universe and watch those galaxies form and check our
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: understanding of how those galaxies came together. Right, because the
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: James Webb Space Telescope is it's a specialty is looking
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: in the infrared and also looking really far away and
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: both of those things that you kind of see backwards
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: in time, right, Like, the further out do you see
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: in the universe, the older the things are, because um,
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: it just took that much longer to get to you.
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: So the light we're getting from them now is really
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: old or was made a long time ago, Yes, both
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: of those things. You want to see things that happened
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: at the very beginning of the universe. You have to
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: find old light, light that's been coming to you since
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: that time, and those photons screamed down into the universe
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: and have now just arrived at our instruments. And the
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: James Web Space Telescope, as you say, can see the infrared,
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: which means it sees the lowest energy photons, photons that
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: are well below what we can see. It's sort of
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: a cool science fact. We look at these James Webb
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: telescope pictures. That's not what you would see if your
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: head was out there in space pointing in the same direction.
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: In fact, if all you could see with the photons
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: that hit the James Webb telescope, you would see blackness.
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: You would see nothing. Right, The images that you see
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: are actually false color, they're shifted. The wavelengths are not
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: the ones that the James Web saw. James Webb saw
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: them lower and the sort of moved up into the
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: visual frequencies so that you can see them. Right. And
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: so looking at this light, let's you see things that
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: were really old, maybe even like towards the beginning of
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: the universe. What's like, what's the oldest thing that the
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: James Webbs that lescope can see. Well, it's really exciting. Actually,
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: in the first few days people started looking at these
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: pictures and spotting things that are old, and then older,
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: and then even older and then oldiest. It was amazing,
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: like every day their record was broken. They just kept
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: knocking down the barrier seeing things that were in the
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: very early universe. As far as I can tell, the
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: record right now is seeing things that formed a hundred
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: and eighty million years after the Big Bang, So you know,
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: it took about four hundred thousand years for the universe
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: to cool to the point where we had neutral hydrogen,
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: and then it took a long time for things to coalesce,
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: to form stars and to form galaxies. You know, we're
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: talking hundreds of millions of years, but we didn't really know.
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: We've never seen that far back in time. But now
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: that James Webb telescope can see those, you know, specifically,
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: one of the reasons we can see further back in
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: time with James Webb than we can with Hubble is
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: not just because it's bigger, not just because we can
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: see dimmer things because it can gather more light with
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: its larger mirrors, but also specifically because it sees these
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: low energy photons. As they've been flying through space for
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: billions of years, their wavelength has been stretched by the
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: expansion of the universe. So things that started out in
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: the visual spectrum when they left their galaxies billions of
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: years ago are now in the infrared, and we need
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: this special technology to see them. You couldn't see these
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: galaxies with the hubble. Now when you say that we
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: see things that have been a hundred and eighty million
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: years after the Big Bang, do you mean like actual
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: things like we can see stars at that time where
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: their stars at that time? Or are we seeing things
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: like the background microwave radiation. We are seeing early galaxies,
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: so we can't resolve individual stars. These things are very far,
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: very faint. James Webb itself can even just barely pick
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: out that they exist. We see these smudges that we
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: think our galaxies, meaning you know, many many stars. So
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: what we're seeing our real objects we can't resolve, you know,
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: like stars with planets around them, But we can tell
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: that there are galaxies out there in the very early universe,
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: and that's exactly what we're trying to understand. How quickly
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: did these galaxies form, how big we're today, how bright
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: were they, and does that agree with our model for
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: how the universe evolved from a very hot, dense state
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: to the cold, glitterally beautiful cosmos that we have today.
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: What you're saying, they were actually galaxies already a hundred
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: and eighty million years after the Big Bang. That seems
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: like really soon. It seems like really soon. I mean
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: it's eight million years, but you know, if you're talking
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: about the universe, it's fourteen billion years old. It's it's
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: like having purity in when y're one year year old. Yeah,
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: it didn't take that long for galaxies to form. And
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: galaxies are actually really really old, Like the Earth is
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: only four and a half billion years old. Our Solar
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: system didn't exist for the first nine billion years of
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: the universe, but the Milky Way is much older. We
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: think it's at least thirteen billion years old, and so
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: the Milky Way has been around for almost the entire
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: time of the universe, even though our Solar system for
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: more recently. And so this is one of the biggest
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: questions that James Webb con probe is exactly how early
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: did galaxies form? Do we understand how they formed and
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: how they emerge and how they grew to be the
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: glittering monsters that they are today? Right? And so the
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: space telescope can see little smudges that we think are
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: that old that happened that the chind a hundred and
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: eighty million years after the Big Bang. But then how
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: do we know that little s mudge is that old?
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: Like we just see as much, how do we know
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: it's it's came from those early galaxies. So what we
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: can do is we can measure how far away these
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: smudges are, and we can measure the distance from here
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: to there, and that tells us how long the light
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: has been going. And we measure the distance to these
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: galaxies by seeing how much the light has been red shifted.
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: We talked about this in the podcast recently. Measure the
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: distance to these far away objects by seeing how the
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: light from them has been shifted in frequency by their velocity.
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: Because things that are further away from us are moving
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: away faster. So the further something is away from us,
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: the faster it's moving away from us. And the more
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: it's light is shifted in frequency. So if you can
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: measure the red shift of an object, you can tell
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: how fast it's moving away from us, and therefore you
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: can tell how far away it is, and therefore you
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: can tell how old it is, right, Because I guess
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: you assume that when these early galaxies, when they emitted
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: all this light, that it was light like regular light
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: like the kind of our star emits, right, that's at
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: a certain frequency. And so if you see it shifted
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: in frequency, that means that something's going on. And what's
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: going on in here is that the universe is expanding, right,
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: which is thretching and moving those frequencies exactly. We answered
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: this question on the pot recently. How can you tell
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: if light is red shifted? And you can't by looking
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: at an individual photon. You can't say, this photon used
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: to have one frequency and now it has another, and
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: I can tell, let's just arrive with a certain frequency.
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: But if you look at the distribution of frequencies from
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: a galaxy, you can tell that they've been shifted because
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: galaxies have a characteristic spectrum based on the atoms that
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: are in them. Because atoms tend to glow at certain frequencies.
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: So you look at that fingerprint, you say, oh, this
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: fingerprint looks like it's shifted to the right by a
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: hundred animeters, And that's how you can tell how much
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: it's been red shifted. From that, you can figure out
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: the relative pity of it, and from that you can
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: figure out the distance and therefore the age. And so
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: the king right now is something with the red shift
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: of twenty which means that it's a hundred and eighty
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: million years after the Big Bang, because I guess the
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: more red shift, the more it's shifted from its original frequency,
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: the older it is, because you assume that if it's
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: that red shifted, it must have been traveling through expanding
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: space for a long time, which then can it tells
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: you that it's it's really old exactly. So people have
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: been pouring through one of these deep field pictures from
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: James Webb. This is of Smacks O seven to three,
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: which is about five billion light years away, and James
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: Webb has spotted all sorts of tiny little galaxies in
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: the background of this. So astronomer has been pouring through
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: this picture looking at these things trying to figure out
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: what is the red shift and finding older and older
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: ones every day. It's been very exciting. Yeah, let's get
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: into what the James Webb Space Telescope actually saw that
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: might be disproving the Big Bang. You're saying that it's
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: seeing some galaxies that are at a certain distance or
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: is this like like super duper far away, like behind
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: what we're actually thinking or trying to see. So it's
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: seeing really really old galaxies, which is great because we
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: want to understand what's happened in the early universe as
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: these galaxies were forming. The issue is, the surprise is
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: that the galaxies we are seeing with James Webb they're
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: sort of like too big and too bright. We expected
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: the galaxies would form gradually, that you'd have a blob
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: of stars, they would tract another blob of stars, you'd
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: have many galaxies combining to form larger and larger galaxies
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: that if you look really far into the past, you
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: would expect to only see many galaxies that wouldn't be
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: very bright and that wouldn't be very big. But instead,
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: what we're seeing when we look at these galaxies that
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: are really really far away and really far into the
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: early universe is that they're much bigger and brighter than
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: we expected. I see. So wait, so first of all,
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: I guess where are these galaxies that they must be
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: at the edge of the observable universe, right, because that's
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: that would be where the oldest stuff is. Or is
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: it closer? Now? You're right there, very far away there
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: at the edge of the the rubble universe. There's a
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: little bit of trickery there also, because when we talk
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: about where they are, we mean where they are now,
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: not where they were when they emitted these photons. So
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: these photons they emitted a long long time ago, they've
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: been moving away from us ever since, so they are
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: now much further away than they were when they sent
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: us this light. Okay, I was confuised because I think
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: you mentioned some field that was closer than the edge
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: of the observable universe. Oh right, well, this Smacks field
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: is about five billion light years away. That's what James
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: was focused on. But there's lots of other stuff you
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: can see in the background, and so sort of behind
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: that you can see lots of other more distant galaxies
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: that are close to the edge of the observable universe.
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: I see. So we're like picking apart the things we
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: see in the background of these images exactly, and astronomers
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: are hunting for them, and like, oh, look, what is
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: this smudge is at a galaxy? Is that the new
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: record holders that the oldest thing we've ever seen in
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: the universe. That's pretty exciting, right, right? How do you
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: know it's not just as much in the in your lenge.
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: It's a beautiful instrument, man and insulted. Now, these things
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: look like galaxies, right, They have a spectrum of light
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: that looks familiar, that looks like what we expect to
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: see from galaxies, and so you can fit that spectrum.
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: You can say, well, this looks like a galaxy, but
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: it looks like at a certain distance. You can also
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: measure the magnitude of it, like how much light are
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: we getting? That tells you basically how bright is it,
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: how many stars are in that galaxy. You can also
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: look at the details of the spectrum and try to
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: guess at the mass of the galaxy, because there's some
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: connection between the brightness of the various frequencies and the
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: mass of a galaxy. And so what we're seeing our
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: galaxies that seem to be brighter than what we expected
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: and more massive than we expected. We didn't expect galaxies
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: to form this quickly in the universe. So when we
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: say that James web Space telescope, is it blowing up
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: the Big Bang theory? We don't mean it's disproving Einstein
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: or it's talking about the singularity. We mean it's challenging
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: how galaxies formed in the early universe because what we're
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: seeing out there are bigger, brighter galaxies earlier than we expected.
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: I see. So we're looking at the acron of these
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: pictures and we're seeing super duper like the oldest galaxies
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: we've ever seen, and they're bigger than what we thought
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: they were they should be at that point in the universe.
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: Is that going to kind of what you're saying. Yeah,
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: Like you go to visit your brother and he's got
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: kids and they're supposed to be one years old, but
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: they're already taller than you, and you're like, well, something's
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: going on here, right, That would be a big bang.
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: There's so many jokes I could make there, but I'm
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: not going to because this is a family friendly show. Yeah,
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: let's keep it safe for work here, all right. Well,
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: I guess, first of all, how do we know how
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: bright these things are, And how do we know how
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: massive and that they're bigger than they should be, like
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: just from the size of this mudge or or what
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: we can tell about how bright they are just by
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: counting how many photons arrived per second. Right, the more
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: stars that there are there, the more photons we're going
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: to get. So it's just like a crude way of measuring,
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: like how many stars are in the galaxy? Is how
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: right is it in the sky. That's the way to
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: tell how many stars there are. We can also try
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: to estimate the overall mass of the galaxy by looking
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: at the spectrum and seeing like, oh, how red is it?
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: How green is it? Are these ideas for how the
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: spectrum of a galaxy looks as it gets more and
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: more massive. How does that change with the size? The
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: change with the size because remember that bluer stars are
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: hotter stars and don't burn as long, and so some
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: galaxies have more blue stars and some galaxies have more
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: red stars. And this depends on whether or not they're
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: still making stars and how old the stars are in them,
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: and that depends on the mass of the galaxy, because remember,
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: making stars is not that easy. It depends a little
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: bit on having just the right conditions. You need big
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: blobs of cold gas to form together. So by looking
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: at like the different colors of light that come from
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: a galaxy, we can get a sense for whether it's
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: been recently making stars or not. And from that we
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: can get a sense for the mass of the galaxy.
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: And if that sounds a little bit tenuous to you,
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: you're right, it's not something we understand super duper well.
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: It's like a trend we've noticed among a bunch of
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: galaxies we've been studying, but it's not something we have
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: like a hard and fast rule for. I think what
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: you're saying is that you can look at younger galaxies,
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: like galaxies that we can see they are closer to us,
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: and you do see this trend of like, Okay, if
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: it's this big and this massive and this bright, we
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: should be seeing this in the in the light specdroom.
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: And so you're saying that we're seeing this light spectrum
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: from the old old galaxies, and so we can sort
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: of make guesses about how big and bright it is. Yeah,
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: and we see some weird stuff, like there's some galaxies
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: out there in the very very early universe that seemed
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: to be already as massive as the Milky Way, Like,
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: how can you get such a huge galaxy so early
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: on in the history of the universe. And so that's
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: really the puzzle is why are we seeing galaxies that
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: are so far away and so big and so bright. See,
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: because I guess we had a guess about how galaxies
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: should evolved with the history of the universe, and this
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: is kind of um not fitting that history. Yeah, we
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: have a model. We can simulate the universe from the
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: very beginning when we think our laws apply, and say,
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: start out with gas and how clumpy was it, And
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: we can predict how clumpy it was because of the
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: distribution of dark matter and quantum fluctuations in it. And
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: we can also check those assumptions. Right, this is not
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: just a story we're telling. We can see the very
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: very early universe in the cosmic microwave background radiation, this
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: light that was admitted just before it became transparent. We
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: can see those ripples from the very early universe in
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: the CMB. So we're pretty sure we know how the
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: universe slashed around in the very early moments and how
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: that led to the formation of structure. Vast pools of
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: dark matter that pulled themselves together and then pulled in gas,
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: which then forms stars and galaxies. So we thought we
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: had a pretty good story, and you're right, that story
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: predicts that we should not see really big galaxies very
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: early on in the universe, or really bright galaxies really
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: really far away. So it is a surprise to see
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: these galaxies. Well, the theory didn't say that we shouldn't
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: see them. It's just that they were rare or something. Right,
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: It's possible to get super duper massive galaxies very early on,
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: but not this many, and you should take a longer
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: to find them. So we're seeing a lot of these
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: giant old galaxies. Is that what you're saying. Yeah, we've
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: only just started to look and we're already seeing giant, old,
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: bright galaxies. So it's sort of like if you're looking
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: for four leaf clovers and you expect to find one
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: in a football field and you look down and you
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: find ten under your feet, and you're thinking, something about
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: my estimate is wrong, right, this seems very unlikely, right,
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: Or maybe since they are bigger and brighter, you just
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: see them more easily. Well, we definitely do see them
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: more easily. Than the dimmer ones, but they shouldn't even
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: be there. We just have the first scoop of data
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: from James Webb, and already in this like little tiny
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: patch of space we see many, many more of these
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: bright massive galaxies than we expect to see. So either
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: it's a huge fluctuation, or there's something fuzzy about our measurements,
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: or there's something wrong about our understanding of the early
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: universe right, right, and also maybe about its composition, right,
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: because a lot of this theory are our story of
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: what happened has to do with dark matter as well. Yeah,
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: it's all tingled together, the dark matter and the photons
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: and the normal matter slashed together in this motion the
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: very early universe. And we do think that we understand
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: that part fairly well. I mean, we can measure things
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: like sound waves moving through the early universe and the
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: acoustic oscillations that it forms in the structure of galaxies
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: we see today, So that part feels pretty secure. So
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: this one really was a big surprise to see something
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: that sort of contradicts it all right, Well, we seem
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: to have actual data that maybe throw us our theories
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: about what happened after the Big Bank or after the
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: universe sort of grew up in evolved. And so what
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: does it all mean. Is the Big Bang theory right
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: or is it off a little bit? Let's get into that,
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: but first let's take another quick break. All right, we're
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: talking about the new data from James web Space telescope.
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: Then maybe um sees old Gala sees that are bigger
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: than they should be, which means that maybe our model
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: of the Big Bang and what happened afterwards could be
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: a little bit off or a lot off. Daniel, is
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: this a big deal or just like a tweak in
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: the parameters of the model. It's definitely a big deal.
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: It's a lot of fun for cosmologists. It's exactly what
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: we were hoping to happen when we look deep into
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: the universe to see something surprising. It's exactly the kind
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: of thing we see every time we do look in
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: a new part of the universe. For the new eyeball
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: is something that makes us scratch our heads and go huh.
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: And so it's very exciting and there's a lot of
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: different ideas being floated out there for how to explain it.
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: First of all, there's a lot of caution, you know, like,
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: are we sure about these measurements? I think probably the
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: number one explanation that most cosmologists and astrophysicists are thinking
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: about is how well we know the brightness and the
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: size of these early galaxies, Because you know, these are
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: really dim smudges from very very faint things, very very
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: far away. How confident are we in these measurements of
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: dis and age and size? Right? I wonder also of maybe,
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: like early galaxies or back then, things just emitted light differently.
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: Is that possible? Well, what we're talking about is emission
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: of light from hydrogen and hydrogen is pretty basic stuff.
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: We've studied it for a long time. We're pretty sure
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: that hydrogen emitted light the same way a billion years
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: ago and ten billion years ago as it does today.
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: Physics of hydrogen and light emission is pretty well understood.
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: So unless like the very laws of physics are changing
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: with time, which would be awesome and cool, we're pretty
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: sure that it emits light the same way. But there's
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: an issue there, which is James Webb by itself, just
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: looking at these distant galaxies once is not great at
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: measuring these red shifts. It's a bit of a quick
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: and dirty measurement, and so there could be a lot
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: of uncertainty there. What do you mean, quick and dirty?
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: How does it measure these spectrum of light? So the
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: way you'd like to do with the gold standard is
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: to look at this galaxy in a lot of different
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: wavelengths right all the way from the UV down to
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: the visible, down to the infrared down to the rate
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: you so you could see as many atomic lines as possible.
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: That would give you like a really precise measurement. You
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: see like fifty fingers from atoms, and you can see
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: them all slid over the same amount. That would give
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: you a lot of confidence. We haven't done that yet
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: with these galaxies because we've only just discovered them. We
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: didn't even know they were there. And so the next
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: step is like point other telescopes at them that can
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: see them in other frequencies, optical telescopes on the ground,
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: u V telescopes in space to get the full spectrum
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: of these galaxies. We have right now is a really
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: partial spectrum just from the James Webb, which you can
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: only see in the infrared, and so it's got like
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: the very edge of the spectrum from which we can
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: get an estimate but there's a lot of uncertainty there
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: can really just sort of only see the very tail
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: end of the spectrum. You mean, like the measurement of
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: these freaking sees is kind of fuzzy. It's in itself. Yeah.
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: Also because these things are faint, right, so we don't
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: have great data. You look at this data, it's not
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: like really crisp and beautiful. You can see the statistical
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: fluctuations because a limit it a number of photons that
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: have made it this far. So there's just an inherent
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: uncertainty in these red shift measurements. Nice, so maybe our
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: estimate of how old they are is wrong, or maybe
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: our estimate of how big they are or how bright
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: they are is wrong, so both Right now, we're just
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: talking about how old they are, so specifically these red
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: shift measurements. That's sort of a quick and dirty approach.
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: What they're doing right now is just sort of looking
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: for the edge of the spectrum. A neutral hydrogen atoms
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: floating in space will absorb and emit radiation, but sort
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: of like a maximum radiation that they will absorb and emit,
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: and that corresponds to like an electron from the lowest
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: level absorbing enough energy to be totally ionized to fly
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: out into space, so it's sort of like a maximum
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: frequency there for hydrogen. And what they're doing is they're
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: looking at these galaxies and different frequencies and they're looking
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: for that disappearance of looking for like the edge of
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: the spectrum where it sort of falls off. So it's
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: really just like one feature that they're looking at. If
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: you really want to precise measurement, you should have the
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: whole spectrum and see lots of different features. So it's
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: totally reasonable and it's exactly what they should be doing
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: with the first data. But there's also a lot of
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: uncertainty in these numbers. So it's one galaxy that we
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: think of that red shift to twenty eight million years
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: after the Big Bang, it could be different. It could
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: be that that's actually five hundred million years after the
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: Big Bang, So it might be that it's exactly where
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: we think it should be. It's just that we mismeasured
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: at the age. I see. We don't have great resolution
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: to measure these red ships, is what you're saying. We
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: just have a first glimpse from James Webb, and what
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: we need to do is either like focus James web
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: on it for a while, so we get more data,
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: we get crisper resolution, or look at it with other
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: telescopes also in other frequencies, so we can get a
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: bigger handle on it, a better fit for how much
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: of the red shift there really is. Yeah, nobody likes
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: it when photos make you look older than you really are.
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: That's always a bummer. It could be that these galaxies
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: actually are maybe younger than what we initially think and
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: so and that everything is fine, but then the other
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: possibilities and maybe are model are a little bit off.
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: There's also this question of the mass of the galaxies, right.
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: We talked about how we look at these spectra and
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: we try to guess the mass based on how the
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: different colors of light come in, and you know, there's
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: a lot of uncertainty there. Also, we're talking about comparing
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: our galaxies to very early galaxies, and there's just sort
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: of a lot of assumptions that go in and the
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: relationship between the spectrum of the mass that are not
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: really very well understood. You know, for example, maybe one
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: of these galaxies has a black hole the center of it,
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: and it has an active galactic nuclei like a quaisar
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: emitting a lot of light, so we think we're counting
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: the brightness of the galaxy and using that to figure
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: out what the mass, But actually there's a huge quasar
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: in the middle that's changing our estimation of the brightness
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: and the whole spectrum and throwing the whole thing off.
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: So there's also a lot of uncertainty in the mass measurements.
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: So I'd say overall, people are excited about this data
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: and it's interesting, but I'd say it's still too fuzzy
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: to draw any strong conclusions that it's really in contradiction
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: with our models of the early universe. Yeah, nobody likes
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: it when photo make you look more massive either, But
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: it's possible, right, it could be that this is the
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: first glimpse of something which really does pull the rug
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: out of our idea for how structure formed in the
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: early universe. And actually it wouldn't even be the first hint.
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: We had another infrared telescope, the Spitzer, and the Spitzer
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: also looked at really old galaxies. It wasn't as big
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: in this fancy it couldn't see as much light, and
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: it wasn't as powerful as James Webb, but it also
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: saw some galaxies which seemed too massive, So this sort
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: of aligns with what people were already seeing with another
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: telescope m So James Webb is not the first one
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: to sort of see this maybe old galaxies that are
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: too big to be to fit our model. But what
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: does it mean that it that are maybe our models
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: are wrong. Is it just that we're missing a piece
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: of it? Or maybe I mean, it's not going to
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: throw the whole Big Bang theory out into the trash bin, right,
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: It's probably just going to maybe tweak our models of
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: what happened or after the Big Bang, or you know,
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: maybe what elements are there to determine how things evolved. Yeah,
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: not throwing the Big Bang away, because the Big Bang
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: is very successful predicting so many details. You know, the
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: abundances of helium and hydrogen in the universe, and the
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: cosmic web and the microwave background radiation. All that are
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: elements of the Big Bang which are very very solid.
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: We're talking about is tweaking something about how quickly structure
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: formed and how quickly do you get clumps of stuff
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: pulling it together forming galaxies. If these data are right
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: and more precise measurements bear them out. Then it just
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: means that there's something missing in that early structure formation.
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: And you know, there are other hints that that might
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: be true. We've talked about early dark energy, these models
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: that the universe might have another component that accelerated its
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: expansion and its structure formation early on in the universe.
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: That changes our idea of like how old the whole
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: universe is. It could give like higher dark matter density
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: in the early universe, which pulled things together faster than
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: we expected, and then we give galaxies forming more rapidly
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: than we expected. So it's sort of in that direct
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: it it would be a tweak on the parameters, maybe
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: adding one more component, But we're definitely not throwing the
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: whole thing in the trash, right because I think we've
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: talked about this before, how things like dark energy and
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: dark matter they're not necessarily constant throughout the history of
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: the universe, right, Like there's the idea that maybe dark
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: energy was faster or slower at some points earlier in
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: our history. Yeah, this is this idea of early dark energy,
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: which is confusing because people don't think it's actually dark energy.
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: They think it's something else. Dark energy like which came
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: around in the very early universe and sort of changed
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: how things expanded and were shaped, and then fizzled out
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: after a few hundred million years, and so we don't
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: see it anymore. So it might just be that there's
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: something else going on in the early universe that we
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: don't understand that affects how the whole thing evolved. And
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: we have clues about this because we look at the
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: expansion of the universe as we see it today from
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: like Type one A supernova, we see it expanding at
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: a certain rate, and then we look at the expansion
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: of the universe very early on from the cosmic microwave
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: background radiation, and they don't really add up right. They
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: tell two different stories about the bansion of the universe.
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: And so this discovery from James Webb might be pointing
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: in that same direction that the very early universe is
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: a little bit different from what we expected. Not radically different.
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: It's not like it was all purple dinosaurs swimming through
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: space back then. We're not going to start from scratch.
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: But it might be that the details are wrong and
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: need a little bit of tweaking. But that does sound
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: pretty fun. Purple dinosaurs swimming around when when you want
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: to switch to that field, Danniel, I mean you're gonna
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: be wrong of the time. You might as well be
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: wrong of time with a wild and fun idea. Yeah, no,
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: I'm not anti purple dinosaur. Absolutely a pro purple dinosaur
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: if it fits the data right, but currently we have
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: no evidence for purple space dinosaurs right. Well, I think
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: generally what you're saying is that you know, we're looking
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: at they basically baby pictures of the universe of galaxies
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: in the universe, and they look a little trunkier and
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: a little bigger than they should be. So it could
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: be that our pictures are wrong, or it could be
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: that maybe you don't know what happened in between, Like
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: maybe these babies went on a diet and started working
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: out on and so they lost a lot of weight
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: in between, and that's how they are the size they
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: are now. I'm so glad this is not a parenting
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: podcast because boys so many red flags there. But yes,
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: as an analogy, I think that describes it perfectly. These
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: babies were really fat when they were born, and now
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: they've gotten thinner, right, due to maybe changing dark energy
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: or something like that, or some new baby diet fat
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: that was popular fourteen billion years ago, exactly, only eating
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: smoothies made out of purple space dinosaurs for example. Oh
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: my god, now now you're having the babies eat the dinosaurs. Boy,
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: that that is wrong in other levels, better than the
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: other direction, right, would you rather have the dinosaurs eat
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: the babies? I mean, I don't think we want to
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: go there. It's wrong either way. Okay, so then it's
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: very scientific. But the lesson is that we're just learning
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: about the early universe, and we have this fantastic new
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: tool which is giving us incredible power to see those
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: early moments, to watch these galaxies form, and to compare
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: them to the ideas we've long had about how the
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: universe forms, and maybe to update them and correct them.
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: And this is just the very first blush of data
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: from the telescope. So it tells you that we're heralding
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: in a completely new era of astronomy and cosmology with
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: this new incredible eyeball. Yeah, these incredible um chob baby pictures.
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: I think the lesson is that, you know, we have
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: these theories about the universe, but they kind of have
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: to fit the data, right, They had to fit what
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: we see today, and they also have to fit what
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: we see in the past through these powerful telescopes exactly.
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: And contrary to what people read in that article, there's
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: still a huge amount of data supporting our idea roughly
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: for the early universe and how are the structure of
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: the universe we see today was created through those processes.
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: We're not tossing that all out, but we might need
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: to update it. Right, It's not a panic. It's more
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: like a whoop. It's more like, oh, this is exciting. Well,
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: not for the people who polished the original papers. They're
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: just gonna get more citations. You get citations if you're
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: right or if you're wrong. That seems like a right there. Well,
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: all of humanity is winning because we're all just learning
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: more about the universe. Yeah, or at least learning that
• 50:10
  Speaker 1: we're least less least wrong. Maybe little by little we're
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: least year at least year wrong every year. Well, stay
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: tuned as we get more resolution on these pictures from
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: the James Webb telescope and more confirmation about its red
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: shifting and the exact measurement of these really old galaxies.
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: I guess we'll learn more soon. And I look forward
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: to the next wave of space telescope that I hope
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: will launch in the twenty thirties, and even larger, more
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: powerful set of eyeballs to teach us the secrets of
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: the universe. We hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us,
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: see you next night. Thanks for listening, and remember that
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of
• 50:55
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• 50:59
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• 51:03
  Speaker 1: listen to your favorite shows. H