Latest / Stuff You Should Know / Seriously, What Is Dark Matter?
Transcript
- 0:01Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
- 0:04Speaker 1: dot com. Hey you, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
- 0:14Speaker 1: and there's Charles w. Chuck, Bryan, there's Jerry, and um,
- 0:18Speaker 1: we're about to try some physics. Oh yeah, this is
- 0:21Speaker 1: stuff you should know. We're about to try some food. Yeah,
- 0:25Speaker 1: this did not break my brain like I thought it would. Yeah.
- 0:28Speaker 1: I think it's a pretty surface level explanation, but like
- 0:32Speaker 1: it gets the point across, and I don't see any
- 0:34Speaker 1: reason for us to try to go any deeper. I
- 0:36Speaker 1: think we're very quickly spin out of control, like a
- 0:39Speaker 1: up down cork or something. Yeah. So dark matter is
- 0:42Speaker 1: invisible glue that holds everything together the end, the end.
- 0:46Speaker 1: We just don't know what it is. No, we'll get
- 0:48Speaker 1: into it, but you might notice, dear listener, a new
- 0:53Speaker 1: thing in your feed popping up next week next week,
- 0:56Speaker 1: next Wednesday, Wednesday, Wednesday Wednesdays. We are debuting a new
- 1:02Speaker 1: thing called short stuff, which is just the cutest name
- 1:06Speaker 1: it is. It's stuff you should know. Short Stuff, I
- 1:09Speaker 1: guess is the full name probably or not, who cares,
- 1:12Speaker 1: but it's just it's a stuff you should know episode.
- 1:14Speaker 1: It's you, Me and Jerry but over the years of
- 1:18Speaker 1: of recording, like we've got these lists of topics we
- 1:22Speaker 1: want to do, and this one, like part of the
- 1:25Speaker 1: list is kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger because
- 1:28Speaker 1: they're like topics out there that are really interesting, but
- 1:31Speaker 1: they're just not big enough for a full episode, even
- 1:34Speaker 1: with Tangent upon Tangent, And we could have, like we
- 1:37Speaker 1: could have been like, well, we'll put like three of
- 1:39Speaker 1: them together randomly. We thought about doing that one. It
- 1:41Speaker 1: just didn't feel right. So what we did was spin
- 1:44Speaker 1: off like a new podcast called short Stuff, which is
- 1:48Speaker 1: just a smaller sized episode of stuff you should know.
- 1:52Speaker 1: Just because the topic wasn't quite big enough to warn
- 1:55Speaker 1: a full episode or a large size episode, we're doing
- 1:58Speaker 1: a small size episode. Yeah, so look for like ten
- 2:02Speaker 1: to fifteen minutes tops. I think we're in the wheelhouse
- 2:05Speaker 1: of about twelve minutes. We seem to like magically hit
- 2:07Speaker 1: twelve every time. Yeah, and it's like it's kind of fun.
- 2:10Speaker 1: I think it's it's a great idea. I'm really happy
- 2:13Speaker 1: with him. Yeah, same here. And I think the first
- 2:15Speaker 1: four we recorded, we didn't know what we're gonna call
- 2:17Speaker 1: it yet, And I don't believe we went to the
- 2:19Speaker 1: trouble of going back and changing that. Are we gonna
- 2:22Speaker 1: we might do that? Are we doing that? Jerry? She
- 2:23Speaker 1: just shrugged. No, she said, now, she said, that sounds
- 2:27Speaker 1: like a lot of work. Yeah, it would be just
- 2:28Speaker 1: like us to just sort of waddle our way into
- 2:31Speaker 1: this thing, and which is exactly what we did. But
- 2:34Speaker 1: hopefully you guys enjoy them. It didn't cost you anything. Um,
- 2:38Speaker 1: so don't complain. Actually do complain if they're way off
- 2:41Speaker 1: base or they could be better. We want to hear
- 2:43Speaker 1: about it. No, I think people will be like, oh,
- 2:45Speaker 1: this is just like a little bite size stuff you
- 2:47Speaker 1: should know. So that's exactly what it is. It's like
- 2:48Speaker 1: a Snicker's miniature, but of stuff you should know. That's right,
- 2:51Speaker 1: And you know our love of small things here, especially
- 2:54Speaker 1: Snickers or like tiny Tabasco bottles. This is the tiny
- 2:57Speaker 1: Tabasco bottle version of over show. Those things are priceless,
- 3:01Speaker 1: all right, So physics dark matter go, let's do this,
- 3:06Speaker 1: all right? So this wasn't as hard as I thought. No,
- 3:10Speaker 1: and it's actually pretty easy to get across. Here's the thing.
- 3:14Speaker 1: So astronomers have gotten to the point it's starting in
- 3:17Speaker 1: about on astronomers and physicists and astrophysicists and even particle
- 3:25Speaker 1: physicists guys to the point where all of their combined
- 3:28Speaker 1: knowledge was refined enough that they could look out into
- 3:32Speaker 1: the universe and be like, we can figure out how
- 3:34Speaker 1: much this ways, to put it more scientifically, we can
- 3:37Speaker 1: figure out what the mass of the universe is. It's
- 3:40Speaker 1: going to take us a really long time, but we
- 3:42Speaker 1: are now at the point where our level of observation
- 3:45Speaker 1: and our level of understanding of physics is such that
- 3:49Speaker 1: we can do it. We're there now. Yeah, And it's
- 3:53Speaker 1: not just like, oh, well that weighs this the end,
- 3:56Speaker 1: Like knowing something's mass tells you a lot about it,
- 4:00Speaker 1: the way it behaves and the nature and future of
- 4:03Speaker 1: the universes we'll see, yeah for sure. So it's not
- 4:05Speaker 1: just weight, it's it's more complicated than that, and what
- 4:08Speaker 1: weight can tell us, right. The problem is that you
- 4:11Speaker 1: can't just like put a galaxy or star or something
- 4:14Speaker 1: on the scale. They have to broke the scale pretty quick. Uh,
- 4:18Speaker 1: it actually vaporized it. But the the there are ways
- 4:22Speaker 1: you can infer the mass of something. Yeah. Um. One
- 4:26Speaker 1: of the ways that you can infer the mass of
- 4:27Speaker 1: a star from what I understand is to measure it's luminosity,
- 4:30Speaker 1: how bright it is. Yeah, I've also heard that's a
- 4:33Speaker 1: mixed bag because they have different um different sizes in
- 4:39Speaker 1: their lifespan. Um, I've just heard luminosity and mass is
- 4:44Speaker 1: not is not just straightforward like like most things in
- 4:48Speaker 1: astro physics are. Yeah, that's the word on the street right. So. Um.
- 4:53Speaker 1: When they started getting to the point where where they
- 4:55Speaker 1: could infer the weight of a star, or of a
- 4:57Speaker 1: galaxy or of a galaxy cluster, which is basically like
- 5:01Speaker 1: a galaxy of galaxies, they started to notice something really weird.
- 5:05Speaker 1: All of the matter that they could see, the stars,
- 5:09Speaker 1: the gas clouds, the cosmic dust, the everything, matter, things
- 5:14Speaker 1: that make up you and me, things that everything has
- 5:18Speaker 1: a common basic unit and atom that's made up of
- 5:21Speaker 1: elementary particles like protons and neutrons and electrons. Matter, Every
- 5:25Speaker 1: non living and living thing on in the galaxy you
- 5:30Speaker 1: would think is made of matter. The problem is is
- 5:33Speaker 1: they started finding that, you know, this galaxy over here,
- 5:37Speaker 1: in this galaxy cluster and everywhere we're looking, the amount
- 5:41Speaker 1: of matter that we're seeing is way too small for
- 5:45Speaker 1: the amount of mass that the thing we're looking at
- 5:48Speaker 1: appears to have and a cosmological mystery was launched. What
- 5:53Speaker 1: the heck is going on? Was the question of the day. Yeah,
- 5:57Speaker 1: so all that matter that we know about, they call
- 5:59Speaker 1: that barrionic matter. Uh. And they were like this, the
- 6:03Speaker 1: calculations are off or something like, there's got to be
- 6:06Speaker 1: something else there to account for this. Well, that's the
- 6:09Speaker 1: to the two possibilities. Well. Uh, and so way back
- 6:14Speaker 1: in uh geez was at nineteen thirty two an astronomer,
- 6:20Speaker 1: a Dutch astronomer named Jan hendrik Ert because he's Dutch,
- 6:27Speaker 1: he actually I believe was the first person to use
- 6:30Speaker 1: the term dark matter. Is that right? That's what I saw?
- 6:32Speaker 1: So dark matter is a is a sort of a
- 6:36Speaker 1: placeholder name for what they came up with for this,
- 6:41Speaker 1: for lack of a better word, this invisible uh matter
- 6:45Speaker 1: that has to be out there is it's sort of
- 6:48Speaker 1: like wind, Like you can't see wind, but that doesn't
- 6:51Speaker 1: mean it's not out there because you can measure it
- 6:53Speaker 1: in different ways, see how it reacts on other things.
- 6:56Speaker 1: And so they called started calling it dark matter. This
- 6:59Speaker 1: in sable. Well we'll talk about what it ends up
- 7:02Speaker 1: sort of looking like in a minute. I want give
- 7:04Speaker 1: that away yet. But this invisible matter that they think
- 7:08Speaker 1: is there, right, but it doesn't. It doesn't emit or
- 7:13Speaker 1: absorb light or electromagnetic magnetic energy. So it's it's way different.
- 7:19Speaker 1: It behaves differently such that people were very confused as
- 7:23Speaker 1: to what the heck was going on, and they still are. Yeah. Sure,
- 7:27Speaker 1: So there's so this term dark matter, like you said,
- 7:29Speaker 1: it's a placeholder, and it's a placeholder for the current
- 7:33Speaker 1: point we are in our understanding of the universe, which
- 7:35Speaker 1: is when we look out at galaxy clusters and galaxies
- 7:40Speaker 1: and all this stuff, there's not enough matter to account
- 7:43Speaker 1: for the amount of mass that we're seeing. So again,
- 7:46Speaker 1: that means one of two things. Either there's something there
- 7:48Speaker 1: that we can't detect, or our our understanding of physics
- 7:54Speaker 1: is off, and the term dark matter stands for both
- 7:56Speaker 1: of those. It could be a thing, an underscovered particle
- 7:59Speaker 1: or something like that, or it could be a misunderstanding
- 8:04Speaker 1: of physics that we need to eventually correct. Either way,
- 8:07Speaker 1: there's a lot of mass that is unaccounted for throughout
- 8:11Speaker 1: the universe, and it seems like there's a lot more
- 8:15Speaker 1: what we call dark matter then there's regular matter. And
- 8:19Speaker 1: the more we look into it, the more it seems
- 8:21Speaker 1: like there's something there that we haven't discovered yet. Yeah.
- 8:25Speaker 1: So right now, barrionic matter, all the stuff that we
- 8:27Speaker 1: know about counts for about four and a half percent. Uh,
- 8:34Speaker 1: where they peg dark matter. Then we have something that
- 8:37Speaker 1: I don't even know if I ever want to cover,
- 8:39Speaker 1: called dark energy, which makes up the other SEV. But
- 8:42Speaker 1: they know it's there because there's something out there that
- 8:45Speaker 1: we can account for that has a significant gravitational force. Right,
- 8:51Speaker 1: that's where the whole the whole thing started where they
- 8:53Speaker 1: first detected it. Right, so, um, when they first started
- 8:57Speaker 1: looking out at galaxies and stuff like that. There's this
- 9:00Speaker 1: whole thing that Newton came up with the second law
- 9:03Speaker 1: of motion where and this is like a tried and
- 9:07Speaker 1: true law. It's a law. This isn't Newton's suggestion of
- 9:10Speaker 1: motion or Newton's second what about this of motion? It's
- 9:14Speaker 1: a scientific law. That's how that's has proven and accepted
- 9:19Speaker 1: as a scientific observation can be is to be made
- 9:21Speaker 1: a law. And it said that when you're looking at
- 9:25Speaker 1: a galaxy far far away, and the most of the
- 9:30Speaker 1: matter is accumulated towards the center of the galaxy, then
- 9:33Speaker 1: that means most of the mass is accumulated towards the center. Okay, yes, okay,
- 9:38Speaker 1: So that means that the stars near the center are
- 9:41Speaker 1: going to spin. They're going to rotate around the galaxy
- 9:46Speaker 1: a lot faster than the ones on the fringes, because
- 9:49Speaker 1: the ones on the fringes are going to go a
- 9:51Speaker 1: lot more slowly because they're further away from that center
- 9:54Speaker 1: of mass. So the gravitational pull is going to be weaker. Yeah,
- 9:58Speaker 1: I mean, that's the easy ist way to say it
- 10:00Speaker 1: is in the center, you have more mass. More mass
- 10:03Speaker 1: means things are spinning faster, there's more gravitational pull. So
- 10:08Speaker 1: all the astronomers supposed, like you said, the stuff on
- 10:11Speaker 1: the outskirts are probably hanging out there spinning a lot slower, right. Well,
- 10:15Speaker 1: when they looked, they found that's not the case at all.
- 10:18Speaker 1: As a matter of fact, the stars on the outside
- 10:20Speaker 1: are spinning around the center of the galaxy just as
- 10:23Speaker 1: fast as the stars near the center of the galaxy,
- 10:26Speaker 1: which makes zero sense. Yeah, it's almost as if there's
- 10:30Speaker 1: some invisible force out there, right Like if you look
- 10:33Speaker 1: at this, if you look at this um this galaxy.
- 10:36Speaker 1: The situation that they started to find and it wasn't
- 10:38Speaker 1: just one galaxy. They found it in this galaxy too,
- 10:41Speaker 1: in this galaxy too, and even stranger than that, they
- 10:44Speaker 1: found it in those clusters, those galactic clusters. So rather
- 10:48Speaker 1: than stars that make up a galaxy, this is galaxies
- 10:51Speaker 1: making up a huge, giant mega galaxy. The same thing
- 10:54Speaker 1: happened the galaxies on the outer edge of the cluster.
- 10:58Speaker 1: We're circling just as fast as the ones towards the center,
- 11:03Speaker 1: and it just must have knocked their socks off. I
- 11:05Speaker 1: can't imagine how many times they went over the same
- 11:08Speaker 1: thing to make sure that they had gotten it. This
- 11:11Speaker 1: is for uh clarity. This was the nineteen fifties and
- 11:15Speaker 1: nineteen sixties when the yeah, okay, so what they figured
- 11:20Speaker 1: out was that either there was something really wrong or
- 11:23Speaker 1: there was something that they hadn't picked up yet. Because
- 11:25Speaker 1: those stars on the outer edges of the galaxy, or
- 11:28Speaker 1: those galaxies on the outer edges of the cluster, for
- 11:31Speaker 1: as fast as they were flying they should have spun
- 11:35Speaker 1: off into space. There was something missing that explained what
- 11:39Speaker 1: was holding that galaxy or that cluster together as fast
- 11:44Speaker 1: as the stars of the galaxies were spinning around on
- 11:47Speaker 1: the outside. That was the first clue that something was
- 11:51Speaker 1: way up with that, that that that astronomy was missing
- 11:56Speaker 1: something big, right, And they knew this was off because
- 11:59Speaker 1: they had been using luminosity, like you said, to take
- 12:02Speaker 1: measurements for years and it was pretty good. But then
- 12:06Speaker 1: when they started, uh, measuring the rotational velocity of things,
- 12:11Speaker 1: like how fast something was spinning in relation to where
- 12:14Speaker 1: it was like towards the center, it, like you said,
- 12:18Speaker 1: there was a missing ingredient there that didn't match whatever
- 12:21Speaker 1: these luminosity readings were showing. So you're right, luminosity was
- 12:24Speaker 1: clue one. The um angular rotation was or acceleration of
- 12:30Speaker 1: the outer stars was clue number two. So now we've
- 12:33Speaker 1: got to two different ways of measuring the mass and
- 12:36Speaker 1: gravity of remote bodies in the universe, and they don't
- 12:41Speaker 1: align our point. Well, they're they're aligning in that there's
- 12:44Speaker 1: something missing here um. And I think that's a pretty
- 12:47Speaker 1: good cliffhanger for a breakdown too. I think people are
- 12:50Speaker 1: going to be like, what, Yeah, well, why don't you
- 12:53Speaker 1: guys go listen to the first half of this podcast
- 12:56Speaker 1: or first part again and we'll see you after these messages.
- 13:26Speaker 1: I really hope we're putting this like well, I feel
- 13:30Speaker 1: like we are, but sometimes you know, you just can't tell. Now,
- 13:33Speaker 1: this isn't the sun re ducks. Oh god, no, no, no,
- 13:37Speaker 1: this is much more simple. So, uh, like you said,
- 13:41Speaker 1: they not only studied regular galaxies, but they started to
- 13:45Speaker 1: study what what you referred to as and you didn't
- 13:48Speaker 1: make it up, but galactic clusters. These knots of galaxies
- 13:52Speaker 1: could be thousands of them, could be hundreds of them,
- 13:56Speaker 1: but they were bound together by gravity. And they were like,
- 13:59Speaker 1: you know what, let's study these because maybe what we
- 14:01Speaker 1: can find or you know, this is what we suppose
- 14:04Speaker 1: at least, is there might be be these big giant
- 14:07Speaker 1: pools of hot gas that we never could detect before
- 14:10Speaker 1: and that would account for all of this mass. And
- 14:13Speaker 1: they did find these superheated gas clouds and we're like, great,
- 14:18Speaker 1: that's it. But they're like, it still doesn't account for everything.
- 14:21Speaker 1: That's like a small percentage of of the of what's
- 14:25Speaker 1: what is needs to be accounted for. Right, So it
- 14:29Speaker 1: was a it was a breakthrough, but it wasn't the
- 14:32Speaker 1: solution solver that they were looking for. It was because
- 14:35Speaker 1: so if you can find, um, you know, something that
- 14:39Speaker 1: we know has mass, like huge clouds of gas. That again,
- 14:44Speaker 1: you know, particle has mass, and if you put enough
- 14:46Speaker 1: particles together, it has a lot of mass. If you
- 14:48Speaker 1: could fill in the blanks of the missing matter, um,
- 14:52Speaker 1: that explains the mass of this thing you're looking at, great,
- 14:57Speaker 1: especially if it's something we already know about, like hot gas.
- 15:00Speaker 1: And they did find some hot guests. But say that
- 15:01Speaker 1: that explained five of the missing of the missing mass.
- 15:07Speaker 1: It didn't explain everything. And what that did do also was, Okay,
- 15:11Speaker 1: we've gotten that much more sophisticated and it still hasn't
- 15:15Speaker 1: answered this dark matter thing. It's pointing to the idea
- 15:18Speaker 1: that there's something we haven't discovered yet that is accounting
- 15:22Speaker 1: for all of this. It's very foreboding, it is, but
- 15:24Speaker 1: it's also I think very exciting. Sure yeah, yeah for them,
- 15:28Speaker 1: uh and us. So the other thing that happened when
- 15:31Speaker 1: they started studying these galactic clusters was that they found
- 15:34Speaker 1: out that these clusters and superclusters can and this is
- 15:38Speaker 1: really neat. You can look up images of this. It
- 15:39Speaker 1: can distort space time because their mass is so great.
- 15:44Speaker 1: So if you're on planet Earth, uh, and there is
- 15:48Speaker 1: a light so you're looking from like a telescope on Earth,
- 15:52Speaker 1: you're looking at a distant light, like who knows how
- 15:55Speaker 1: far away, like a star three billion light years away?
- 15:58Speaker 1: Sounds great. In between mean you and that is a
- 16:01Speaker 1: galactic cluster. Let's say that will just that will act
- 16:04Speaker 1: as a lens, and depending on where it's situated to
- 16:08Speaker 1: where you are relative on Earth, it will distort that
- 16:11Speaker 1: light uh into one of several things. If you're in
- 16:15Speaker 1: perfect alignment in it, uh, it's gonna form what's known
- 16:18Speaker 1: as an Einstein ring. And if you look it up
- 16:20Speaker 1: on the internet, it's like this beautiful like circle of light. Yeah,
- 16:23Speaker 1: it's really cool looking. Uh. It could be elliptical or oblong.
- 16:27Speaker 1: They call it the Einstein cross basically splits it into
- 16:30Speaker 1: four so it just looks like four little stars, all
- 16:33Speaker 1: like perfectly lined four copies of the same image. Yeah, yeah,
- 16:37Speaker 1: and like a cross, yeah, perfect cross. Or it could
- 16:40Speaker 1: be a cluster. And this one is sort of cool
- 16:43Speaker 1: just because it's like kind of scattered. It looks like
- 16:45Speaker 1: a bunch of like arcs and banana shaped arcs and arklets.
- 16:49Speaker 1: But it's all different versions of the same image that
- 16:52Speaker 1: we're seeing. And what you're seeing is that far away star,
- 16:55Speaker 1: but you're seeing it through that galaxy cluster that is
- 16:58Speaker 1: a distortion of spacetime that the the mass of these
- 17:02Speaker 1: clusters are so big and so huge that the gravity
- 17:07Speaker 1: in them bends light, just like a mound of glass
- 17:12Speaker 1: can bend light. Same thing. Now we've gotten to the
- 17:17Speaker 1: point where we are so good at math and physics
- 17:20Speaker 1: that we can look at that reflection that bend and
- 17:23Speaker 1: say this, this galaxy has that much gravity, and since
- 17:27Speaker 1: this galaxy um has this much gravity, it must have
- 17:32Speaker 1: this much mass. Now if you take that number, this
- 17:36Speaker 1: much mass, and you examine the luminosity of the galaxy, yeah,
- 17:41Speaker 1: you're like, this is like not off by you know,
- 17:44Speaker 1: like the luminosity is ten, but the mass is ten
- 17:47Speaker 1: and a half. There's like factors sometimes factors of of
- 17:52Speaker 1: like times a hundred. Sometimes like there's just no way
- 17:55Speaker 1: that your math is off. It's it's there's a huge discrepancy.
- 18:00Speaker 1: So there's a third clue that there's something missing. Yeah,
- 18:03Speaker 1: I mean that's basically all these are are little hints
- 18:07Speaker 1: along the way that we're still not able to account
- 18:10Speaker 1: for something with our calculation. Yeah, and rather than the
- 18:13Speaker 1: better and more sophisticated our observations and exploration of space
- 18:18Speaker 1: in the universe becomes it doesn't become like this. This
- 18:23Speaker 1: blank is not getting filled in. It's just becoming clear
- 18:26Speaker 1: and clear that that blank is there. Yeah, exactly, there's
- 18:29Speaker 1: a void in either our understanding or our discovery. So
- 18:34Speaker 1: then computers started getting better and better and more advanced.
- 18:38Speaker 1: I love how this, uh this article puts it. They
- 18:41Speaker 1: turned to the computer. It sounds like they turned to
- 18:45Speaker 1: the bottle or something to compute. Uh. So computer started
- 18:49Speaker 1: getting so good, and our knowledge of what was out
- 18:51Speaker 1: there and our measurements of matter and mass was so
- 18:54Speaker 1: great that we could take a pretty good guess on
- 18:57Speaker 1: how much baryonic matter there was out there, maybe how
- 19:00Speaker 1: much dark matter there might be. Design a program and
- 19:03Speaker 1: a model that you could feed this information into to
- 19:07Speaker 1: spit out what it might quote look like end quote. Yeah.
- 19:12Speaker 1: They basically said, this is how much barionic matter we
- 19:14Speaker 1: think there's. This is how much dark matter we think
- 19:16Speaker 1: there is. Go computer, and they hit start on the
- 19:20Speaker 1: Whopper machine, and it spit out what was sort of
- 19:26Speaker 1: like a It turns out that it wasn't on the edges.
- 19:30Speaker 1: It was everywhere. It was like a web that wound
- 19:34Speaker 1: through everything invisible to us. That sort of acted like
- 19:38Speaker 1: this cosmic glue. Yeah, and so in some places it clumped.
- 19:43Speaker 1: In other places there were long filaments and it kind
- 19:46Speaker 1: of looked like it had galaxies or galactic clusters trapped
- 19:50Speaker 1: in a spider's web. But it just permeated everywhere. And
- 19:53Speaker 1: like you said, it seemed to be like this cosmic
- 19:55Speaker 1: glue or cosmic connective tissue um, and it was pretty
- 19:59Speaker 1: so prizing. So they said, okay, well that's that's the
- 20:02Speaker 1: computers take see if we can replicate that. And that
- 20:06Speaker 1: kicked off a series of projects that are still going
- 20:09Speaker 1: on today to map dark matter in the universe, which
- 20:14Speaker 1: I want everybody to stop for a second, because this
- 20:18Speaker 1: is about as nuts as it gets. They have gotten
- 20:21Speaker 1: to the level of sophistication where astrophysicists are mapping in
- 20:27Speaker 1: three D models stuff that isn't there. They're mapping three
- 20:32Speaker 1: D models avoids based on how how much light bends
- 20:40Speaker 1: around a galaxy three billion miles light years away light
- 20:47Speaker 1: years right, and then using that to infer the gravity
- 20:51Speaker 1: and then the mass, and then they're using that information
- 20:54Speaker 1: to create a three D map of something that may
- 20:57Speaker 1: not exist. And the coolest thing about all this to
- 21:00Speaker 1: me is it's based on stuff that Isaac Newton and
- 21:04Speaker 1: Einstein came up with, and well, well we won't spoil it,
- 21:09Speaker 1: but they weren't wrong. But that is nuts. This is
- 21:12Speaker 1: either either physics has gone totally insane, yeah, or this
- 21:17Speaker 1: is the pinnacle of human ingenuity. Thus far, well, thus
- 21:21Speaker 1: far for sure. I'm glad you added that. So let's
- 21:23Speaker 1: talk about a couple of these. About seven years ago,
- 21:26Speaker 1: in two thousand and eleven, there were a couple of
- 21:28Speaker 1: teams using data from uh Schandra's X ray observatory. And
- 21:34Speaker 1: what they're trying to do here, like you said, is
- 21:36Speaker 1: take these create this real map based on direct observation
- 21:40Speaker 1: instead of this speculative computer map. What they found out
- 21:44Speaker 1: is the computer map was pretty on, which was great, um,
- 21:48Speaker 1: but they needed the real things. So they are looking
- 21:52Speaker 1: at a cluster or have been called a bell three
- 21:55Speaker 1: three two point three billion light years from Earth, and
- 22:00Speaker 1: what they saw was what looks like sort of a
- 22:02Speaker 1: football and American football, we're a n Ausi football for
- 22:05Speaker 1: that matter. Are they similar? I just got one in
- 22:07Speaker 1: the mail. I bought one. You need to get Simon
- 22:11Speaker 1: to sign it, go Melbourne. I should, but it would
- 22:14Speaker 1: coust so much to ship it there and back maybe
- 22:16Speaker 1: able to see Simon again one day. Is Melbourne your team? Now? Yeah,
- 22:19Speaker 1: that's what I got on. That's that's a good city. Yeah.
- 22:22Speaker 1: I like it so. Uh it looks like a football
- 22:27Speaker 1: with one end pointing towards us or you know, we're
- 22:30Speaker 1: we're on Earth, so we're the observer in this case.
- 22:33Speaker 1: And uh they Here's the one thing they didn't agree
- 22:37Speaker 1: on though, was the density of the dark matter on
- 22:41Speaker 1: able three in the center. Yeah, which is weird because
- 22:44Speaker 1: some people calculated it was more dense in the center
- 22:47Speaker 1: and matter increase, and other people said it was the opposite,
- 22:50Speaker 1: not like, well, we're not sure, but they thought it
- 22:52Speaker 1: was uh less dark matter at the center, which is
- 22:55Speaker 1: a big deal. But they yes, but they both came
- 22:57Speaker 1: up with virtually the same shape and same orientation. Yeah,
- 23:00Speaker 1: separately and independently, which showed we're onto something or else. Again,
- 23:05Speaker 1: we're all collectively out of our minds based on some
- 23:09Speaker 1: shared delusion that we're all working under. Right. Then there
- 23:13Speaker 1: was another one. This one is super cool. Uh in
- 23:15Speaker 1: January two thousand twelve. Uh, anytime I see international team
- 23:19Speaker 1: of researchers, I get excited. But the Canada, France Hawaii
- 23:24Speaker 1: telescope has a three forty megapixel camera, so you can
- 23:28Speaker 1: actually take pictures of stuff that far away. It's like
- 23:33Speaker 1: the iPhone Excess camera. Is that one of the new ones? Yeah? Okay,
- 23:39Speaker 1: is it good. I think it's pretty good camera. It's
- 23:42Speaker 1: not three forty megapixel. No, it's not. I have to
- 23:45Speaker 1: say I've been to this observatory before. Oh really, it's
- 23:48Speaker 1: really cool. Did you look at like the photos on
- 23:52Speaker 1: display and stuff. No? No, they had like telescopes that
- 23:54Speaker 1: you walked around and looked out into the universe and
- 23:56Speaker 1: it's amazing. Did they let you take pictures? Uh? Yeah,
- 24:00Speaker 1: I guess so with your phone? Oh I thought you meant,
- 24:05Speaker 1: I mean with the me I'm probably. I'm sure they
- 24:09Speaker 1: were taking picture the US or anything. But what's crazy
- 24:12Speaker 1: is it's on Hawaii, so it's just hot and muggy
- 24:15Speaker 1: and humid, and then you drive up this mountain and
- 24:17Speaker 1: you're like freezing in another face coat with like a
- 24:20Speaker 1: hat on, and then you just go back down the
- 24:22Speaker 1: mountain and in Hawaii. Again, it's very very cool experience.
- 24:26Speaker 1: So what they did here was basically stitched all these
- 24:30Speaker 1: photos together. It was like photos of ten million galaxies
- 24:35Speaker 1: and four different regions over five years, stitched it all together,
- 24:40Speaker 1: and what they finished up with was basically saying that
- 24:44Speaker 1: computer model was pretty on target because what this looks
- 24:48Speaker 1: like is what it's spit out so many years ago. Yeah,
- 24:51Speaker 1: so they're they're they're definitely onto something. It seems like,
- 24:57Speaker 1: should we take another break? Yes, all right, we'll talk
- 24:59Speaker 1: about what dark matter is. Hint, we don't know. Alright, Chuck,
- 25:30Speaker 1: we're back, which is where I start to get a
- 25:32Speaker 1: little like brain breaking. I understood all that stuff, but
- 25:36Speaker 1: this stuff is where I was like, what, well, we're
- 25:38Speaker 1: transferring from astrophysics to particle physics. Maybe that's my hang up,
- 25:43Speaker 1: And particle physics is hard. I actually had to teach
- 25:45Speaker 1: myself particle physics to UM write one episode of UM
- 25:50Speaker 1: The End of the World. Maybe that's my problem. It's
- 25:52Speaker 1: it's and even still I'm like, wait, what there's it's
- 25:56Speaker 1: really hard to understand. Yeah, I've always been an astrophysicist,
- 25:59Speaker 1: though at heart I think so that's just goes against
- 26:02Speaker 1: my nature. Okay, I'm with you. But they're they're very
- 26:04Speaker 1: much tied together, like you need particle physics to explain
- 26:07Speaker 1: these larger cosmic structures, right, So the big question here
- 26:11Speaker 1: is at the end of the day, Uh, is it
- 26:15Speaker 1: the fact that we just can't really observe this stuff
- 26:17Speaker 1: and it's just like all the other matter, or is
- 26:20Speaker 1: it some new matter that we don't even know about yet.
- 26:23Speaker 1: That's the question, that's the big question. Or the third
- 26:25Speaker 1: option is that our physics are understanding of physics is wrong, right,
- 26:30Speaker 1: which means, well, we'll see some people go back in
- 26:33Speaker 1: tamper with things. Newton said he didn't like that much
- 26:36Speaker 1: to the dismay of brain. So, um, if if it's
- 26:42Speaker 1: just stuff that we already know exists but we just
- 26:45Speaker 1: can't observe yet, those fall under the umbrella of Macho's
- 26:50Speaker 1: massive compact halo objects, which are huge massive structures that
- 26:57Speaker 1: we already know about Neutron stars, black holes, round dwarf
- 27:01Speaker 1: stars that are huge massive it have a tremendous amount
- 27:05Speaker 1: of mass and thus exert a lot of gravity around them, um,
- 27:10Speaker 1: but are too dim to show up clearly when we're
- 27:14Speaker 1: looking at say a galaxy or galactic cluster. Yeah, like
- 27:17Speaker 1: we talked about luminositi, they have low luminosity. We know
- 27:20Speaker 1: they're there, but they're not shining, But we don't know
- 27:24Speaker 1: that that's them. That is one proposal for what dark
- 27:27Speaker 1: matter is. They're just things that we already have identified.
- 27:30Speaker 1: No exists, we just can't see them in these particular things.
- 27:34Speaker 1: That's actually doesn't have for as as Acam's razory as
- 27:38Speaker 1: that is, that actually does not have as much support
- 27:42Speaker 1: in the physics community as the other idea that that
- 27:47Speaker 1: dark matter is made up of some particle that we
- 27:51Speaker 1: have not discovered yet. Yeah, so that's where I got
- 27:54Speaker 1: a little confused with the whimps and the scimpse. WHIMPS
- 27:57Speaker 1: stands for weakly interacting massive particles, uh, huge amounts of mass,
- 28:03Speaker 1: but difficult to detect because they just interact weekly with
- 28:06Speaker 1: ordinary manner. Right, Here's why they're difficult to attack. To
- 28:09Speaker 1: detect that they interact weekly with matter. That's not stating
- 28:13Speaker 1: it very well. There's the weak nuclear force is one
- 28:18Speaker 1: of the four fundamental forces, and it's found almost exclusively
- 28:21Speaker 1: in the nucleus of an atom. What what these WIMP
- 28:24Speaker 1: particles weak interactive um massive particles are. They're hypothetical. We
- 28:31Speaker 1: don't know that they exist. Mathematically, they fit the bill
- 28:34Speaker 1: of dark matter um the fact that they interact with
- 28:38Speaker 1: gravity and with the weak force only means that, no,
- 28:44Speaker 1: we can't detect them. We don't have weak force detectors.
- 28:48Speaker 1: We have detectors along the electromagnetic spectrum. So everything we
- 28:52Speaker 1: do when we look out in the universe, we use
- 28:55Speaker 1: X rays or microwaves or radio waves, all of those
- 28:58Speaker 1: are electromagnetic. If these particles don't interact with the electromagnetic force,
- 29:03Speaker 1: that has no effect on them whatsoever. We have no
- 29:06Speaker 1: way of detecting them. All we can do is since
- 29:10Speaker 1: they have a gravitational pull, because they have so much mass,
- 29:13Speaker 1: we can just sense their gravity and be like, what
- 29:15Speaker 1: the heck is going on? Which is exactly the position
- 29:18Speaker 1: we're in now. Whimps were a big um They were
- 29:22Speaker 1: promoted as as the particle I think starting in the
- 29:25Speaker 1: eighties because there does because there was something called the
- 29:31Speaker 1: whimp miracle. And this breaks my brain. But apparently if
- 29:36Speaker 1: you take the the relic density, which is really unimportant
- 29:42Speaker 1: for getting into here, but say the density of a whimp,
- 29:45Speaker 1: like how how dense the universe would have to be
- 29:47Speaker 1: for a whimp to exist, it corresponds with the weak
- 29:52Speaker 1: um force number. And that made everybody say, oh, well,
- 29:57Speaker 1: they're particles that don't interact with the elect a magnetic force,
- 30:00Speaker 1: they disinteract with the weak force. Nowadays they've kind of
- 30:04Speaker 1: moved to the strong nuclear force simps. And the strong
- 30:08Speaker 1: nuclear force also has found just basically in the nucleus
- 30:11Speaker 1: of an atom. It's the thing that holds an atom
- 30:13Speaker 1: together super tightly, holds the corks into the proton and
- 30:17Speaker 1: hold the holds the proton and the and the um
- 30:20Speaker 1: the what's the what's the neutral charge one neutron. Yeah,
- 30:26Speaker 1: the neutron and the proton together and keeps them together.
- 30:29Speaker 1: That's the strong nuclear force. And they think that that
- 30:32Speaker 1: that is probably the particle. Now so the same thing
- 30:35Speaker 1: though doesn't interact with the electro magnetic spectrum, so we
- 30:38Speaker 1: have no way of detecting it, but it would still
- 30:41Speaker 1: have mass and hence exert a lot of gravity. So
- 30:43Speaker 1: that's sort of the takeaway, right. Well, not everyone is
- 30:48Speaker 1: on board with this UH period, Like some people, there
- 30:52Speaker 1: are some astronomers out there who say they dare say
- 30:58Speaker 1: maybe Newton got it wrong and maybe we should crack
- 31:02Speaker 1: open the Bible and rewrite it, like Thomas Jefferson and UH.
- 31:09Speaker 1: In the eighties, there was a dude physicist name Mordecaig
- 31:13Speaker 1: mill Grom. He suggested that Newton's second law of motion,
- 31:18Speaker 1: which is force equals mass times acceleration, which I got
- 31:23Speaker 1: wrong in the board breaking episode. That's right, but we're
- 31:26Speaker 1: not physicist. We just played them on the air. Uh.
- 31:30Speaker 1: He said, maybe we should look at that again and
- 31:32Speaker 1: maybe he was wrong, and maybe we should modify this.
- 31:35Speaker 1: And he called this modification mind modified Newton Newtonian dynamics.
- 31:41Speaker 1: And Uh, the way that I read this was it
- 31:44Speaker 1: almost sounded like it's probably not quite right, but almost
- 31:48Speaker 1: sounded like he had some answer. So he was sort
- 31:50Speaker 1: of rewriting the question to fit it was at hawk. Yeah,
- 31:53Speaker 1: that is what he was called out on that. It
- 31:55Speaker 1: wasn't like, oh, here is a new understanding of a
- 31:58Speaker 1: physical law around the Uni verse. This just applied to
- 32:01Speaker 1: those galaxies in the rotational momentum or rotational acceleration. His
- 32:06Speaker 1: whole position was that that breaks down at very small accelerations,
- 32:12Speaker 1: like a planet on the outside or a star on
- 32:15Speaker 1: the outside of a galaxy, but over a long distance. Yeah.
- 32:18Speaker 1: And so a lot of people were like, that's ad hoc.
- 32:21Speaker 1: It doesn't hold any water. Anyone can do that. Get
- 32:23Speaker 1: out of here. Yeah. Um. And then apparently there was
- 32:26Speaker 1: a study in two thousand seven that showed that even
- 32:30Speaker 1: down to accelerations as slow as five hundred trillions of
- 32:34Speaker 1: a meter per second squared, which is really low acceleration,
- 32:39Speaker 1: Newton's second law of motion still held fast. So mind
- 32:44Speaker 1: is pretty much out out the window. From what I understand,
- 32:46Speaker 1: Newton is giving the finger from the grave to see
- 32:50Speaker 1: what you get. He very famously liked to say, bite it.
- 32:54Speaker 1: It's on his tombstone. I think, Uh, what else do
- 32:58Speaker 1: we have here? Um? Alternative wise, this guy, I love
- 33:02Speaker 1: this dude's name. I looked it up, Dragon H. Kovic.
- 33:07Speaker 1: Oh he is he one of the guys at CERN. Yeah.
- 33:09Speaker 1: I can do better than that, Dragon, Hey Dukevich, hy Dukevich, Sorry,
- 33:15Speaker 1: draw on, but yeah, he said that there's such things
- 33:18Speaker 1: as um gravit pollar gravitational polar opposites to particles and
- 33:23Speaker 1: anti particles have not only opposite electrical charges, but opposite
- 33:27Speaker 1: gravitational charges. Yeah. So if those are near a galaxy,
- 33:30Speaker 1: then it would strenk sort of like a magnet almost,
- 33:33Speaker 1: they'd form pull a dipole. Yeah, so it would strengthen
- 33:36Speaker 1: the gravitational field. So that's what's accounting for. Uh. In fact,
- 33:40Speaker 1: I guess he's saying there is no dark matter, right, Yeah,
- 33:43Speaker 1: he's saying that that's dark matters dipoles gravitational dipoles, which
- 33:46Speaker 1: is interesting because that means if that's correct, then if
- 33:49Speaker 1: you got your hands on an antiparticle, it would fall
- 33:52Speaker 1: upward because they have it would have an opposite gravitational energy. Yeah,
- 33:58Speaker 1: that's pretty neat. It's pretty neat. I would love to
- 34:01Speaker 1: have like a pencil made of any particles used to
- 34:04Speaker 1: be like, watch this right, just knock everyone sucks right off. So, uh,
- 34:10Speaker 1: should we talk about that? That's what I would do
- 34:12Speaker 1: if I had a whole bunch of anti particles. That's
- 34:14Speaker 1: that's where my imagination ends. Should we talk about the
- 34:17Speaker 1: Big Bang a little bit? Yeah? Because this is the thing,
- 34:20Speaker 1: Like if you've been sitting here going like, come on,
- 34:22Speaker 1: why does this matter at all? It actually does matter
- 34:25Speaker 1: if we want to figure out how the universe can
- 34:28Speaker 1: possibly end, right, which is your specialty these days. Man,
- 34:33Speaker 1: I'm so excited about this coming out. Yeah, we're talking again.
- 34:36Speaker 1: Josh's upcoming tin part series, The End of the World.
- 34:40Speaker 1: The End of the World. Yeah, it's um slated to
- 34:43Speaker 1: come out in November seven, and it's this and more
- 34:47Speaker 1: time Sten literally Timesten. Yeah, what other stuff you talk
- 34:52Speaker 1: about ai I know that's in there, ai UM, reckless
- 34:56Speaker 1: experiments with viruses, FAMI paradox, the Great filter, um, the
- 35:01Speaker 1: whole things about existential risks. Man, it's you're getting smarter.
- 35:05Speaker 1: I'm just talking about the old movies. It's down. Yeah,
- 35:07Speaker 1: but you're like getting in there with people, you know,
- 35:09Speaker 1: like the heart of people. It's just different. It's not better. Well,
- 35:12Speaker 1: you've got interviews and stuff though, with like like leading experts, right, yeah,
- 35:16Speaker 1: but I kind of used them as like a Greek
- 35:18Speaker 1: course to kind of chime in and help like explain
- 35:20Speaker 1: it or be like, yeah, Josh is actually right here,
- 35:22Speaker 1: you know that kind of like it's not just me
- 35:24Speaker 1: saying it's all right. So look for that everyone. But
- 35:29Speaker 1: with the Big Bang, the idea is that the universe
- 35:32Speaker 1: is expanding, and the big question is where what's the endgame? There?
- 35:36Speaker 1: Are we gonna expand forever? And what does that mean
- 35:39Speaker 1: in relation to dark matter? So again, this is the
- 35:42Speaker 1: point that we're at. We've actually figured out what the
- 35:46Speaker 1: density of the universe has to be. There's something called
- 35:49Speaker 1: a critical density, and it's tend to the negative twenty
- 35:52Speaker 1: nine grams per cubic centimeter, which this article says is
- 35:58Speaker 1: equivalent to a few hydrogen atoms in a phone booth.
- 36:01Speaker 1: That density of matter, and if the unit that is
- 36:04Speaker 1: the critical density of of matter in the universe, if
- 36:08Speaker 1: it's more than that, equal to that, are less than that,
- 36:10Speaker 1: there are three different possible outcomes for the universe depending
- 36:14Speaker 1: on how dense the universes with matter. Right, and a
- 36:17Speaker 1: phone booth everyone is a thing, a box that used
- 36:21Speaker 1: to hold public telephones that you would step into to
- 36:23Speaker 1: make a call. Yeah, what's a good movie you can
- 36:26Speaker 1: go watch to see? There's one called booth. Oh yeah,
- 36:29Speaker 1: I said a good movie the right. Uh, Superman changes
- 36:33Speaker 1: his clothes in a phone booth. There you go go
- 36:34Speaker 1: watch the original Christo Reef Christopher reef um Superman. Right.
- 36:38Speaker 1: Or imagine if you were laying dead in a casket
- 36:42Speaker 1: and someone set you up, and you were on your
- 36:45Speaker 1: cell phone, but you were only three hydrogen atoms and
- 36:48Speaker 1: your cell phone is connected to a machine chord r exactly.
- 36:53Speaker 1: Oh all right, So where we were talking about the
- 36:56Speaker 1: critical density of the universe, right, So there are a
- 36:58Speaker 1: few different uh outcomes here that they've they've come up
- 37:03Speaker 1: with as far as where we're headed. Yeah, So if
- 37:07Speaker 1: if the universe has a density of matter, all the
- 37:10Speaker 1: matter in the universe, if you could, if you could
- 37:13Speaker 1: just slice the universe up into phone booths and equally
- 37:18Speaker 1: spread out all of the matter in the universe across
- 37:20Speaker 1: all those phone booths, if that equals just a few
- 37:24Speaker 1: hydrogen atoms per phone booth. Again, that's the critical mass density.
- 37:29Speaker 1: And if that is actually the same as the density
- 37:33Speaker 1: of matter in the universe, then what we have is
- 37:35Speaker 1: a universe that keeps expanding forever, because the universe started
- 37:39Speaker 1: inflating at some point after the Big Bang. And this
- 37:42Speaker 1: is a huge discovery in and of itself. Right, everybody
- 37:46Speaker 1: thought the universe is just kind of there and unchanging. No,
- 37:50Speaker 1: the universe is actually expanding inside. It's inflating, and the
- 37:54Speaker 1: matter in the universe is actually spreading away from it.
- 37:57Speaker 1: So everybody's like, like you said, what's the endgame that
- 38:00Speaker 1: if it's if the universe, if the universal mass is
- 38:03Speaker 1: the same as the critical mass density, it's gonna just
- 38:06Speaker 1: keep expanding forever. But eventually it'll it'll get kind of cool,
- 38:10Speaker 1: and everything's gonna die and stop. I think it's called
- 38:12Speaker 1: the heat death of the universe. Yeah, and that's called
- 38:14Speaker 1: critical or flat universe. If the actual mass density is
- 38:18Speaker 1: greater than the critical mass density, they call that the
- 38:21Speaker 1: big crunch. That's not good to close the universe. That
- 38:24Speaker 1: means it'll expand and then eventually slow down, stop expanding,
- 38:30Speaker 1: and then collapse on itself. Right like you you know
- 38:32Speaker 1: those a bungee uh um swings. Yeah, my daughter was
- 38:37Speaker 1: just on one of those. Okay, So they launched up
- 38:39Speaker 1: in the air, right, yep, Well they she she she
- 38:42Speaker 1: went that way, and then she came back this way,
- 38:44Speaker 1: she did. So when you come back this way. When
- 38:47Speaker 1: when you came back this way is because the universe
- 38:49Speaker 1: is closed and the gravity because of the mass, was
- 38:52Speaker 1: greater than the critical mass density, and so gravity overcame
- 38:55Speaker 1: it and brought it back together in what was called
- 38:58Speaker 1: the big crunch, which I'm assuming she did not undergo.
- 39:01Speaker 1: I tried to explain that to her, and all she
- 39:02Speaker 1: said was again again, I don't blame her. Uh. And
- 39:05Speaker 1: then finally we have another outcome. If actual mass density
- 39:08Speaker 1: is less than critical mass density, then we keep expanding,
- 39:12Speaker 1: but there's no change in the rate of expansion. Doesn't
- 39:15Speaker 1: we don't start expanding faster and faster, right, and I
- 39:18Speaker 1: think nothing really cools off. It just keeps going forever,
- 39:21Speaker 1: which is kind of the all good one. Really. That's
- 39:23Speaker 1: called the Waterson universe, right, alright, alright, alright, or specifically
- 39:29Speaker 1: the coasting or open universe. I like that, ak Waterson.
- 39:33Speaker 1: So the only way to figure this out for Shure
- 39:35Speaker 1: is to live until the end of the universe, and
- 39:37Speaker 1: we're talking billions, possibly trillions of years into the future,
- 39:41Speaker 1: or we could just figure out how much matter there
- 39:44Speaker 1: really is. The problem is, even if we can account
- 39:47Speaker 1: for all the regular matter, every bit of things that
- 39:50Speaker 1: makes up you, me, and everything we can see in
- 39:52Speaker 1: the universe, we still have to account for dark matter.
- 39:55Speaker 1: Hence the reason why people are mapping dark matter. So
- 39:59Speaker 1: we can figure truly how much matters in the universe,
- 40:02Speaker 1: and then we can predict how it's gonna end. Yeah,
- 40:04Speaker 1: it's not just uh folly and like, hey, this would
- 40:08Speaker 1: be neat. I mean part of it is. Yeah, there's
- 40:12Speaker 1: a part of sandwich and a glass of milk at
- 40:14Speaker 1: the end of that calculation. That's true. Uh, And I
- 40:18Speaker 1: want to say you got anything else, but I'm not
- 40:20Speaker 1: going to say that I got nothing else. All right,
- 40:22Speaker 1: well that's dark matter. Don't even get us started on
- 40:25Speaker 1: dark energy. Please, please, God, don't get us started on
- 40:28Speaker 1: dark energy. Uh. If you want to more about dark matter,
- 40:31Speaker 1: type that word into the search bar. Of those words
- 40:33Speaker 1: in the search bar. And since I said that it's
- 40:35Speaker 1: time for listening to mail, I'm gonna call this uh
- 40:40Speaker 1: something on game shows, Hey, guys, always um wonder what
- 40:43Speaker 1: it was like to have a moment where they say
- 40:46Speaker 1: I have to write into stuff you should know for
- 40:47Speaker 1: listener mail. Well I just had that moment yesterday. I
- 40:50Speaker 1: listened to the Select podcast on Game shows that wasn't
- 40:55Speaker 1: a Select podcast, that was just a live show. Oh yeah, right,
- 40:59Speaker 1: and they fooled me. I love all your episodes, but
- 41:01Speaker 1: I found this one particularly fascinating. Last forwarded. This evening,
- 41:05Speaker 1: my fiance and I were sitting down to watch a movie.
- 41:07Speaker 1: I'm not much of a movie person, sorry, Chuck. So
- 41:10Speaker 1: I told Peter Guess her fiance to just pick something
- 41:14Speaker 1: to watch. He puts on quiz show, Oh Emil, not
- 41:18Speaker 1: realizing it was based on the real life of it.
- 41:20Speaker 1: So I started telling Peter about your podcast. And now
- 41:22Speaker 1: quiz shows like this one on the movie were rigged
- 41:25Speaker 1: in the fifties and it almost killed game shows. I
- 41:27Speaker 1: was like a sponge releasing all the information I had
- 41:30Speaker 1: heard yesterday. The chance that he selects that movie the
- 41:33Speaker 1: day after I listened to your podcast just blows my mind. Awesome.
- 41:37Speaker 1: It's a Mandela effect, right, syncretism. Anyway, thank you for
- 41:41Speaker 1: what you do for keeping me company as a drive
- 41:42Speaker 1: around d C on the belt Way every day. Oh
- 41:45Speaker 1: you poor person. I know when one of your episodes
- 41:48Speaker 1: cueues up, I know my drive will go so much faster.
- 41:50Speaker 1: Lots of love, Kristen, Thanks a lot, Kristin. I was
- 41:53Speaker 1: a greed email. We're glad we could help you out.
- 41:55Speaker 1: Make it look pretty good in front of Peter. Yeah.
- 41:57Speaker 1: Good luck with the upcoming wedding, yeah, which we assume
- 42:00Speaker 1: is impending. Okay, um, well, if you want to let
- 42:04Speaker 1: us know you're getting married, let us know, we'll say
- 42:07Speaker 1: best wishes. Every once while, somebody will send an invitation in.
- 42:11Speaker 1: We're not taking them up, but we usually sign it
- 42:13Speaker 1: and send it back at least. Yeah. I mean, if
- 42:16Speaker 1: someone was getting married here in the studio on a
- 42:18Speaker 1: Tuesday at one o'clock, we'd be there, and we'd also
- 42:21Speaker 1: be like, we need the studio exactly. Uh so maybe
- 42:25Speaker 1: make it twelve o'clock. Uh. If you want to get
- 42:28Speaker 1: in touch with us, you can hang out with us
- 42:29Speaker 1: on social media. Just go to what's our website dot com.
- 42:35Speaker 1: That's right, um, and you'll find all the links there
- 42:38Speaker 1: and um. You can also send us an email. Just
- 42:41Speaker 1: wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send
- 42:43Speaker 1: it off to Stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com.
- 42:52Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics. Does
- 42:54Speaker 1: it how stuff works dot com.