Latest / PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast / Jupiter, Space Time, And a Preview to Our Interview with Dr. Jackie Faherty (GeoShort)

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Jupiter, Space Time, And a Preview to Our Interview with Dr. Jackie Faherty (GeoShort) · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: Alright, let's do some introductions real quick.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: You are Chris Belhois, a nationally recognized and award-winning Earth science teacher in the great state of Michigan.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: I am Dr.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: Jesse Rymink, a geoscience professor at Penn State, and your former student.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: About 15 or 20 years ago, who's really counting anyways, I remember sitting in your class learning the basics of geoscience from you.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: And this is Planet Geo, a podcast where you and I talk about some amazing aspects of our planet, how it works, and why the geosciences are really important to society.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: And today we are giving you a little bit of a preview for our interview with Dr.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: Jackie Faraday, an astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: And the full interview will come out next week, but we wanted to give you a little preview here.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so here is just one part of our discussion with Jackie, the full part, which will air next week.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: Take a listen.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_02: Here we go.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: Next question, Jackie.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_02: Jupiter has been called the bully of the solar system.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_02: You've called it the bouncer.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_02: What's going on?
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I don't like the bully phrase.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Again, I like I prefer positive takes on things.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, Jupiter's position is one that's critical to the inner solar system in that you need a Jupiter, which is so large.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like to remind everybody, you can fit the mass of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, the whole asteroid belt, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, the whole Kuiper belt, the Oort cloud, all of that into Jupiter.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Jupiter's massive, right?
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: And as a result, it's a gravitational sink for objects.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so if objects come inward to the inner solar system where they may be dangerous for us, Jupiter takes the hits and it doesn't allow them.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: So that's why I call it the bouncer.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's the bouncer, it won't allow you in.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: So it'll take the hits from the inner solar system.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_02: It's the protector.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I also say if I'm gonna be convinced that there's a habitable planet out there, I want to see a solar-type star with an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone, Earth-sized, Earth distance, but I also want to see a Jupiter at Jupiter's distance because I think Jupiter is that important for clearing the material from hitting us and having an asteroid dinosaur extincting experience all of the time.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's a really that's really interesting.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_02: That's awesome.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Jackie, when was the last time do you know it that Jupiter took a major hit for us?
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know that we can tell because we don't have constant eyes on the like the back side of Jupiter.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, all right.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_02: That's because I know in 1994 that there was a big comet that tore into it and it broke up into like 12 chunks and so on.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the the Schumacher Levy 9 impact.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: But since then, there was one four years ago that was huge and was discovered by an amateur.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: Really?
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, cool.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_02: So everybody is curious about space-time.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_02: Not a lot of people understand it.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I was wondering if you could give a three-minute explanation.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I will all ultimately say that I get lost in the space and um the space-time issues because I don't know that we can easily comprehend it since we it's not intuitive.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, what it is, and the best way to understand it, is that you understand dimensions.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: You understand what the X, Y, and Z is of an object.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: So we understand height, we understand length, and we understand width.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: Time is another dimension to any given space in the universe.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: And from that perspective, it's a a component that can be stretched or dilated.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't mean you should let your brain stop there.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: Like, don't allow it to go too far down the like, well, can I reverse time then?
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like, can I make it go can I make it go backwards if I wanted it to?
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: You don't go backwards, you dilate or you contract the same way you do with length and width.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: So, in that analogy, leave it there.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Don't allow yourself to think about time in the thing you exist inside of.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's not your watch, it's not, it's not the clock on the wall, it's none of that.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's just the same thing as any other aspect of the structure that you're looking at, and you stretch it and move it around the same way.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: The problem with space-time is that if you go too far down the rabbit hole of the analogy, you get lost because the human experience exists within time as our construct, as our experiences.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: But we cannot think of it that way.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost like you have to let go of the human experience and just think only of the physical world and what how it perpetuates, which is why it's a lot easier if you think of it as a mathematical formula.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: As soon as we start imparting the human experience upon the space-time analogy, you get lost.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: If I have a couple papers on my on my desk in front of me and an ant is crawling on the desk, and the ant can only see in two dimensions.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: So if I take one of those papers and I stack it on top of the other paper, now the ant can't see the paper that I just put on top of the other paper because he can't see in three dimensions.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_02: He can't comprehend three dimensions.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: Is that kind of what you're talking about?
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: I do think that that is that's the is the first thing I came to when I was switching to physics, is that I decided, like anything, that I can't see how an ant can possibly understand the size and scope of planet Earth.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: So how are we supposed to understand the the components of the universe that rule it?
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Now, you're also asking about the dimensional aspect of that.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Can a two-dimensional object ever realize that it exists in three dimensions?
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that is complicated because there are ways for a two-dimensional object to realize it's in three dimensions, but it does not mean that you can fully grasp what a three-dimensional object looks like, if you see what I mean.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: There's a great book called Flatland that I would suggest people read if this is like, ah, you're blowing my mind.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: And Flatland is great, and it starts with the concept.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: You're a flat, you're the two-dimensional stick figures that we draw, but you live in a three-dimensional world.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: What does it feel like?
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: What does it look like?
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: And we can kind of relate to that because we've all drawn stick figures, and then we've all kind of learned how to make them three-dimensional.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: But are they three-dimensional?
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: You know that they're not three-dimensional.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: They're your drawing, your your projection of a three-dimensional world.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: I I think that the the universe is way more complicated than we're going to be able to comprehend.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's an interesting perspective.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: And something you said there about, you know, assuming that the ant or the ant might not be able to understand the scale of our planet, so why should we be able to understand the scale of the universe?
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is maybe where astronomy and geoscience kind of cross over.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: We're dealing with huge distances in astronomy and huge timescales in astronomy.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: And the timescales in geoscience, you know, we throw these numbers around of millions or billions of years, but I can never really understand what that means.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: If I think too deeply about it, it becomes too scary.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: So I straight don't think about it.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: It must be the same in astronomy, the distances.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, do you ever get intimidated by the thinking of these things?
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: All the time.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: It actually keeps me up sometimes, and I get lost in it because it's because then I start studying things and I get used to them as being close by, but they're not close by.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: You know, like when I say, like, I study the stuff that's spitting distance away.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: We can't go there though.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's not humanly possible to locate ourselves around these places that I study, and they're the nearby things.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: So I was just on a Skype call today, actually, and I called a three billion-year-old Rocky Young, and my colleague was like, Wow, your calibration point is really quite strange.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: If three billion years is young view.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_02: It's just the similarity between geoscience and why I'm attracted to both fields, I think are there's a definite parallel.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I was attracted to the power of the earth and and what it can create.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_02: And astronomy takes all that to a whole nother level.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I will say it's something that I reflect on all of the time, which is humans, based on our our fragile forms, we're pathetic when it comes to existing outside of even like plus or minus environments on this planet, which is basically what we were made to live in.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: We can't we die if we're on Mount Everest, the tallest mountain, you know, because there's not enough oxygen.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: We die if we go too far underwater because there's too much pressure.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a small amount that we can exist in.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: We don't live for very long.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: We're basically astronomically speaking to only live for 70 plus years.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: Are you freaking kidding me?
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's like you see nothing, you experience nothing in terms of the universe.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: So why do we think we can really understand that much about the space?
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yet we're seeing it, we're looking at it, and I feel special.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like our the species, human species, is quite special because we are using and building tools to study things that are so much larger than us and are so beyond what I think that we should be seriously capable of.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: Totally.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's super inspiring, super terrifying, and uh fun to think about for most of the time.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it hurts.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_02: Oftentimes it hurts in astronomy.
• 10:01
  unknown: Yeah.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: All right, that's a wrap for our sneak peek.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: Tune in next week for the full interview with Dr.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: Jackie Fardy.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: It was a fun one.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: We absolutely love doing it.
• 10:12
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• 10:17
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• 10:21
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• 10:26
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• 10:31
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• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: Take care.