Listener Questions 8: Can AI understand humor?

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Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, do you think the robots are going to take over the world. Well, I do think it's inevitable that they're going to be in charge in some ways. Is that different than taking over being in charge? Well, I'm pretty sure they're going to be faster than us, stronger than us, and smaller than us. But there might be some things humans will always be better at, like eating bananas, or you know, like asking questions, thinking about the deep questions of why are we here? And then what's the meaning of life? Or artifice? Even artificial life is what if I was thinking maybe more comedy, you're talking about fart jokes. Yes, humans will always be number one in the galaxy in that category. Unfortunately, Hi am more handy cartoonists and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm the fart joke champion of this podcast. Oh good, I happily see the title, Daniel for sure. Well, we have lots of dimensions. You know, you can be the bananna eating champion, although you know you think you can eat banana is better than a robot. You're saying I could not build a robot to eat banana is better than you. I don't know if you can build a robot that will enjoy the bananas as much. Oh, you're changing the terms already. See, Well, depends what you mean by eating. You know, eating includes the enjoyment of the experience. Well, when they have the hot dog eating Champion, do you think, like I really enjoyed all sixty seven hot dogs eating two minutes? I don't think so. I think that that person is probably dead inside from so many hot dogs. He's all hot dog inside, that's for sure. Same thing. Uh. Anyways, Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I Heart Radio, in which we wonder about all things human, all things robot, all things hot dog, and all things banana and talk to you about them and hopefully explain them to you in a way that makes sense and makes you laugh. Yeah. Welcome to our podcast, in which we also answer questions about the universe, Questions that physicists are thinking of, Questions that people every day out there have about the universe and how it all works. Yeah. We like to start from the forefront of knowledge and talk to you about what scientists out there are figuring out what questions are the leading edge of human knowledge and bring you to that forefront. A lot of times the best insights comes when we stop and we ask ourselves, do we really understand what we just said? Do people out there get it? And to One of our favorite things to do is to answer questions from listeners. Yeah, because you know, I think people have the maybe the perception out there that scientists have a lot figure it out, or they have most of the universe figured out, and that there is so much science ing left to do. Well, then they've never seen my desk, because I think it would immediately undermine people's confidence in science if you had a picture of me at my desk. I wonder why would disappoint people more if you had a messy desk or if you had a clean desk. You know, if you had a clean desk, I'd be like, is this guy really doing any work? Well? Do you remember that one time you were at certain I was there and I toured you around and I introduced you to a famous theorist, John Ellis. It was literally like like three ft of stack papers on top of his desk. It's my cave, right, Like, you're worried that like top papers are toppled over on top of you. There might be grad students buried in there, and nobody's ever found. Skeleton is full of topwebs and paper drafts. He was sort of famous. Well, it turns out he recently cleaned up his office and now it's like sparklingly clean services. I think you would have preserved that for the museum tour. People are wondering, like, has he been replaced by a robot? Is that the real John Ellis? What do you think tipped him over to to finally clean the office? No, I think he probably died under a stack of papers that fell on him. They just replaced him with a robot and was just trying to cover it up. That's right, because all great science conspiracies begin at certain Yeah, so it's scientists still have a lot of questions about the universe, and so I feel like people shouldn't be that intimidated about having questions themselves about how it all works, because you know, scientists don't know everything. Yeah, and sometimes the simplest, most basic questions are the hardest ones to answer. Some of the questions we don't know the answers to, like how did the universe begin, you know, how is it going to end? These are simple, basic questions, So don't be shy to ask a question which is simple, because sometimes those are the deepest, most important ones. Yeah, like what makes a fart joke funny? You know, that's a deep human, psychological and a physical question. And sometimes these are questions we will never know the answer to. Philosophers in a thousand years will still wonder why farts are so funny? That's right, The answer will just blow in the wind anyways. Um. Yeah, So we like to tackle those these questions in our podcast. We also like the questions from listeners. That's right, and so on today's podcast we will be answering three questions from listeners like you to be on the podcast, we'll be tackling listener questions Part eight. Right, this is the eighth episode we do about listener questions. Yes, part eight, and we have a stack of listener questions we haven't gotten to. So if you have sent in your question your audiophile, thank you. Please be patient. We will get to all of them. We love these episodes. We could joke and talk about these forever. Yeah, you're you're on the cue, that's right, And some people figured out that maybe one way to jump to the front of the queue to have your like cute six year old read the question. That's pretty diabolical there. A little bit of exploitation goes a long way. It turns out apparently it works. Um, cute kids are are very cute. Yes, and we have kids at home, so I guess it touches a special place in our hearts. So yeah, So people out there are out there listening to the podcast and going about their lives, and they have questions about the world, how things work, how the universe works, and and and that's good, right, because wondering and exploration is all is what science is all about. Right, That's what is science and human the human spirit is all about. Yeah, exactly, that's what questioning is good for. And you know that's sort of our brand is like, we love curiosity, we love mental exploration. We want to take you on a journey through the universe. And that journey, of course, is going to lead to questions. And you know, there's never gonna be a day when we run out of questions. There's never gonna be a situation where physicists are like, all right, thanks, no more questions, or we'll reach that day where where you know, we answer every question ever, and then somebody will ask, why don't we have more questions? There you go, See it's impossible to run out of questions, and then somebody will ask, why did you ask that question? And so on and so on. Imagine if you did, imagine you lived in a society where there were no questions, when you understood everything about the universe, that would be kind of I don't know, much less fun and sparkling, right, you gotta have mystery. It's like if you know your spouse completely, you know the mystery is gone. It sounds like a great science fiction short story premise, I really wouldn't be boring story and know what would it be like? I won't know how I would change the human psyche. Well, if you knew everything about the universe, then you know you could predict a lot about what would happen, and so uncertainty about the future, you know, But we dug into that in a whole podcast episode, like what is the limit of our ability to predict the future? Even if you knew all the rules of physics, could you predict what was going to happen? Like could you predict the outcome of the Super Bowl? So that's a whole fascinating concept of that, the sort of the limit of knowledge, Right, what if I know that all the secrets of the universe, but then I forget I wrote them down to the slip of paper. I put it on my desk, and my desk is a mess, and now it's here somewhere. Those were my favorite science fiction stories when I was a kid, where somebody gained indescribably important knowledge and then lost it for some silly reason. I always felt like, felt that angst. I felt that like no go back and right now. Yeah, most kids dream about, you know, being naked and taking a test at school. You dream about knowing the secrets of the universe. And I grew up to be a particle physicist. That future was easy to predict. Yes, So today we'll be tackling three questions from readers. Um, and they're not sort of our typical reader listeners. Sorry I keep saying readers. Maybe I'm thinking of our book. Yeah, they're not our typical listeners, and their people are getting creative with these questions. So I thought it'd be fun to do a mixed bag of listeners from all over the spectrum, so we'll jump right in. So our first question comes from Audi, who is apparently six years old. Hi, Daniel and her my name is Audie. I'm six years old and you're one of my favorite podcast and this is my question. All the play it's in this on the solar system or a bit in one way? Why does venus go the other? Thank you? Wow, that is so cute, so cute. Oh man, that melted my heart and it blew my head brain that we have a six year old who is that intelligent listening to our podcast? I know it's wonderful. So thank you ALLTI for listening, and thank you for asking that wonderful question. Yeah, and for making us your favorite podcast. That's awesome. I feel like when I was at old, you know, my favorites were like Mac and cheese, bugs, money, not a not a podcast about the secrets of the universe. Maybe we should have our podcast come with a free side of mac and cheese. Oh man, we will dominate that six year old category, right. If you listen to every episode, we will email you mac and cheese. I don't even know how that works from from a mac with some cheesy puns. But you know, some part of I heart media has to have it like a mac and cheese company and such a big corporation, it's got to be somewhere in the corporate synergy, in the corporate synergy where we can do that. All right, we'll get on that well. But thank you Addie for standing in this question, and of course you're welcome of thank you for thinking us, for making the podcast. I don't know if you heard that, but you could hear ADDIE's parents going say thank you, thank you, oh man that that's like my life every day, several times a day, like what do you say? What do you say? Thank you? It's wonderful and also a wonderful question. Yeah, yeah, pretty pretty interesting. So Audie, I think is wondering, you know, all the plants go around the sun, and he's asking why does Venus go the other way? Yeah, and this is actually a pretty deep question about the way our solar system works, and it tells you something about the deep ancient history of where our solar system comes from. So it's well worth digging into. So I think he's asking whether Venus, you know, like it goes the opposite way that the Earth goes around the Sun. But is that actually true? Is that what's happening or do you think I mean something else. Yeah, So Venus sort of does two different things that we should think about. One is move around the Sun. That's sort of the direction of its orbit. Also, like every other heavenly body, it spins. It spins around its axis. So there's two different kinds of motion we can talk about there. And the technical terms are retrograde and pro grade. So the Sun is spinning in a certain way, right, the Sun is an object. It spins, And if a planet is moving around the Sun the same way the Sun is spinning, you call that pro grade, And if it's moving around the Sun the opposite way, you call that retrograde. Things around the Solar System can both go around the Sun and spin in place. Is that what you're saying? That's right? And all the planets actually do go around the Sun in the same direction, the direction of their orbits, like you know, the Sun's spin defines a direction. If you were standing on the north pole of the Sun and watching all the planets go by, you would see them moving all in the same direction. There, orbits are in the same direction. Yet nothing is going the wrong way. Nothing is going the wrong way, and that would be crazy. If it were. It'd be like driving on the freeway on the wrong side. You wouldn't be able to do it for very long, would you mean? The solar systems unless James Bond obviously, unless you're veering and steering um. And the Solar system is billions of years old and it's been going for a while. So anything that's sort of destructive on a collision course, it probably had its collision course and you have been bounced out of the Solar system and things that sort of settled into a nice, even smooth path. Oh I see, So the Solar system is kind of a one way highway, and that doesn't mean that every solar system is like that. We might one day find a solar system out the planets are going in different directions. It is possible. There's nothing in the laws of physics that say you can't have a planet going the other way. It just then needs to like avoid all the debris and all the other plans and have its own lane. So it's totally possible. Oh I see. It hast to be extremely lucky. They has to be extremely lucky. Yeah, Okay, but as you were saying, there's another way these planets can move. They don't just orbit the Sun. They also have their own spins, like the Earth spins, right, That's why we have day and night, And so you can also ask what is the direction of these planets spins. It's a different motion because you could be going around the Sun like whole a counterclockwise, but you could be spinning in place clockwise or counterclockwise. Right, And so it turns out that Venus is weird in this way. All the planets except for Venus and Uranus spin in the same way. They spin the same direction that they move around the Sun, but Venus spins the other way. Wait, so let me think about this for a second. So if the Earth is going around clockwise around the Sun, then that means we're also spinning clockwise. We're also spinning clockwise. Yeah, okay, but do you say Venus and Urinas are spinning counterclockwise. They're going around clockwise around the Sun like us, but they're spinning coun or clockwise. And the clockwise versus counterclockwise thing. It just depends on whether you're standing on the Sun's north pole or its south pole. But either way, what's important is whether a planet is spinning the same way as it's moving around the Sun or the opposite way. And so as you said, Earth is moving one way and spinning the same way, and Venus is moving one way and spinning the opposite way. I feel like in every depiction of the Solar system, I feel like they always picked the Earth going counterclockwise around the Sun. What do you think that is? Um? I think that's because we are north pole centric, and the north pole of the Earth, if you use that to define the north pole of the Sun, that the motion is in fact counterclockwise. Okay, all right, got it? So we are northeast, then then we were gonna go with counterclockwise and counterclose. But Venus spins clockwise, but Venus spins the other way. Yeah, and that makes for a crazy experience on And not only does the spin the other way, it spins super duper slowly, like it takes forever to spin around. Really, it's not spinning once a day like we are. It's spinning, uh something like hundreds of days. We spend one Earth day, right, it takes us one Earth day. That's been by definition. And so you can say how many Earth days does it take Venus to spin? And Venus goes around the Sun in two hundred and twenty four earth days, but it takes two hundred forty three earth days to spin, So a day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus, Venus goes around the Sun once before it completes one spin. That's a really long day. I would be an entire by the end there time between breakfast and lunch, You're gonna need a lot of snacks. You can have multiple birthdays in the same day. That is like a year old dream. You know, you have two birthdays in the same day. Yeah, and you can have you know, tenzi's and eleven z ease and the mid afternoon snack and mid mid afternoon snack, and you have two Christmas Is in the same days and a lot of naps. Okay, so bad? And is that because it's spinning the opposite way? Does that make they long even longer than that? No, that doesn't change the length of the day, although it does make the appearance of like other stuff in Venus, is sky really weird, Like the motion of the other planets is really strange on Venus because of those two things. But otherwise, like you know, the Sun from the Venus's point of view, the only thing that matters is how long it takes to spin, Like where is the Sun appear in the sky. That just depends on on its spin, not on where it is around the Sun, because they're all symmetric from the point of view of Venus. So the Sun takes, you know, two hundred and forty three days to complete its motion across the sky in Venus. Of course, Venus is the one moving around the Sun. But from Venus's point of view, you know, it's like you've got a hundred only one and a half days of sun and then a hundred twenty one and a half earth days of night. And in the meantime, what would you see. You would just see the Sun moving really slowly across the sky. Yeah, the Sun moves really slowly across the Venus sky. Of course, Venus also covered in a huge number of clouds, so from the surface of Venus you can't actually see anything in space, right, I see, it's a cloudy day every day in Venus. But if you like lived in a pod high up in Venus's atmosphere, which would be pretty cool, because Venus is really high pressure on its surface, so you wouldn't anyway want to live on its surface. If you did colonize Venus, you probably want to build some sort of airship and float up like kilometers above the surface where the air pressure is roughly like Earth, and there you might see the Sun and you see it slowly crawled across the sky. All right, well, let's get into why, because that was ADDIE's question. Why does Venus spin the wrong way? Or maybe that that is the right way and everyone else is wrong, But what has this been in a different direction than it does going around the Sun. And we'll get into that, but first let's take a quick break. Okay, Daniel sel Venus is spinning the opposite way that Earth is, and that's weird. It is weird, yeah, because there's a reason that a lot of stuff in the Solar system is spinning the same way. It's not like it's random. And so you flip a coin eight times and look, we got all the planets moving in the same direction. There's a reason why things are mostly spinning the same way. The spinning around the Sun and the spinning in place all sort of originating in the same kind of moment. Yeah, it all originates from the same original spin. Like, and that's not original sin. We're talking original spin, which is a real physics thing, right, But but like original sin, it's passed down in through the generations. Oh jeez, I know, I know, I'm bringing down the biblical knowledge. Um. So you start with a big cloud of gas and dust and rocks from wherever, and it has some spin, like that big blob of stuff is spinning in some direction, and that spinning can't just go away, Like momentum is conserved in our universe, and so is angular momentum. Like if you are in space and you start a can of soup spinning, it will spin forever until something slows it down, in the same way that gas of stuff, that blob of rocks and dust and stuff that made our solar system started spinning and is still spinning, right, Because I think when things form, like a planet or the sun, you know, all the little bits have a little bit of velocity. They're they're all going somewhere initially, so all that motion has to go somewhere and it goes into the spin of whatever ends up being at the end. Yeah, and as it gets collected together by gravity. Right, you start with a big blob of stuff and gravity pulls it together. As gravity pulls it together, it actually goes fast because it's like a figure skater. If you pull your arms in while you're spinning, you go faster and faster because the distance from the center of rotation is smaller, so you need a higher velocity to have the same angular momentum. That's why everything in our Solar system has the same spin. It's all the Sun is moving in one direction, that planets move around in this and that same direction. Most of the planets are rotating in the same direction. There's a good reason for all these spins to be in the same direction. It's not random. Okay, So then what's the connection between the your direction around the Sun and you're you're spinning, you're spinning in place. Well, it's the same direction of angular momentum. Like all that original angle momentum can end up in the spin of the Sun or the motion that the planet around the Sun, or the rotation of the planet. That's all the same direction. So everything is spinning in that same way, so you expect it to all still be spinning that same way, which is why it's weird to find one planet spinning the other way. So how did it happened? How did Venus end up spinning the wrong way? Well, we don't know, but it's an it's evidence of something crazy happening, like maybe something came in, hit it and spun it the other way. Like in order to get something going the other way, you need some sort of external force, like you know, some huge rock could have come in and flipped it over. Yeah, and the same with Urinus. Urinus spins not the other way from Earth and and the other planets, but it's it's sort of flat. It spins around a line which is parallel to the Solar System, which is you know, even weirder. Yeah, it's like it's like it's laying down, right, It's like it's spinning laying down. It goes around the Sun like it's north and south poles are where are on the Earth's equator. It's really strange, and so this is probably due to some horrific cataclysmic accident in the history of our Solar system. It's not just a planet laying down taking a nab. No, there's some really original sin going on to explain it's weird spin like that was a crazy party. Let me tell you. We woke up and Venus was going the other direction. We're like, dude, you gotta slow down. Um. So it's possible that it got hit by something and got flipped over, or you know, it could have been like he got hit on sort of the equator enough to slow it down, you know, and then it started spinning the other way, so it could have its original spin turned the other way, or it could have been like slowed down through zero and then very and then had just a little bit of extra energy left over for its slow spin. Really, something must have happened. It couldn't just have formed that way. It could not have just formed that way. Now, something external to the solar system must have come. And so of course, you know, I got my Aliens button over here. I have impressed it once in this episode. We'll leave it on the side there that I'm just looking at it, and I'm just looking. I think, you say, most likely, like an asteroid in our solar system hit it maybe, or a comment from way beyond or something must have hit these planets to knock them from the regular spinning. Yeah, probably something external to the solar system like a row planet, or it could have been something very early on in the formation of the Solar System when things were chaotic and bouncing around that it's unlikely, but maybe this is how things ended up. But like short of an asteroid hitting a planet like for example, the Earth won't be changing it spin anytime soon. Know, the Earth will not be changing its spin any time soon, although it's very gradually slowing down. It's spined because of the interaction with the Moon, but that's really a small effect. Well the audio hope that answer the question. To quote your question, m. Venus is going in the same direction as the Earth around the Sun, but it's spinning the opposite way. And most likely it sounds like maybe an asteroid hit it or something to make it spin the other way. That's right, And all the little boys and girls on Venus get two birthday parties every day. But they're also really young, like they're only like a couple of days old, and their faces are melted by acid rain, so you know, pluses and minuses. I can tell their parents just had to rush and cover ADDIE's ears. When you think the body can handle that kind of think he's interested in science. I say right, yeah, acid as it is is chemistry right, which is science? Right? Yeah, totally, that's part of the universe. So we will explain it all right. Thank you Addie for that question. That was an awesome question. And if there are any other kids out there listening to this podcast, please send just your questions. If you have anything that you don't understand, or something you've always wondered about the universe or what things are made out of, let us know. Okay, so we'll go into now our second question of the episode here and this this I have to say, this question perplexed me a little bit. I don't know if it worries me a little bit or or what. But I'll we'll just let you guys listen to it. Here we go, Hie, Daniel and or Hey in the regular human from Earth. I have the following question, do you think of human level artificial intelligence is possible? And more importantly, wouldn't be able to understand fur jokes? Why didn't know Siri and or Alexa listened to our show. That's awesome, Maybe it does, right. I like how it tries to disguise itself. I am regular human from Earth. Yeah, I am not at all already listening to your phones and your kitchen conversations. Do you think Alexa and Syria out there in the homes of our listeners are listening to our podcast and responding? Have you ever tried asking Alexa or Siria like fun questions? Um? In fact, I did. I asked Sirie this question. You did the question from our listener. Yeah, I decided to ask Siri, Oh, no way? And what did they? What did she reply? Well, I tried out a few fart jokes on Siri and she didn't get any of them. But no, I thought you meant you played this question like you said Alexa, and then you played the question. Oh no, I haven't done that. I just tried out some fart jokes. But you say, She's like, please, I am the apex of technology, human technology, and this is what you're using me for. Yeah, SII is very polite. Siri will avoid any sort of not safe for work topics. But you know, if there's an Alexa out there, what would happen if we, like on the podcast, said Alexa order the book. We have no idea ten copies. Do you think everybody out there Alexa would suddenly order that book. Um, I don't know. Let's try it, Daniel, in the name of the science and lex experiment. Alright, we'll see if the editor leaves that clip in there. But you know, this is a it's a funny way to deliver the question, but it's a serious question, right, Yeah, I guess it's the whore. Um, I guess Alexa. Here is asking if it is possible one day for an artificial intelligence to reach human level I guess intelligence or cognition or consciousness you think, and and of course the apex of that, the ultimate goal is to understand fart jokes or fart jokes. It's a fascinating question. I would sort of breaking into two pieces. I would say number one fart and non fart. That's right, let's begin with the non fart element, um, because that's sort of my where my expertise is. Um. Is that is that what your family would say as well? Yeah, are you gonna go with the fartical physics jokes? It's just gonna go with the youth fart joke. But that's even better. I think that the question is will AI ever be smarter than humans? And you can define that by saying, like, can they beat humans at certain tasks. You know, a I have already beat humans at chess, they beat humans that go, They beat humans at solving lots of problems. There are still a lot of things that humans can do better than AI. But you might wonder, eventually will any of these standards still be held by human champions, or no matter what intelligence tests we devise, will there always eventually be an AI that can beat humans. Yeah, because we're we're I mean, we're pretty much there, right, Like computers can recognize faces and solve problems, even sort of conceptual problems that even faster than humans. Yeah, and it's not too before we have AI that can drive cars and fly airplanes and do all sorts of things that we now only trust to humans. So I think that that's basically just limited by computing power and you know, cleverness of computer science graduate students, and that seems to me pretty much unlimited. So I think, as long as society doesn't implode anytime soon, I think we're on the road to having a I beat humans that basically every intellectual game except for maybe one. Well, the second part of that question is, you know, can AI achieve human level like consciousness? That's a really that's a much deeper question. Like if you developed an AI which could solve problems faster than you and even maintain human level conversation, you can still ask the question is it live? Is it experiencing something? Is it have a first person experience like I do? But that's a different question, right, That's a different question than how intelligence and consciousness are sort of two different questions. Yeah, there are two separate questions, and I have a non expert opinion about that, you know, not a expert in consciousness, though I am officially a professor of philosophy here at ec irvine UM. But it seems to me like a question we could never really answer. I mean, if you met an AI that was as interactive and seemed to have a personality as much as a person, could you ever know whether it was feeling something inside? I think by almost by definition no, I mean, I don't even know if you are having a first person experience. How do I know that I'm not the only one in the universe that is conscious? I can't tell. I can't tell the difference between you seem like you're having an experience and you are actually having an experience. Because the only difference is your experience, not mine, and I can never sense that. Right. Well, I feel like we're getting a little laws in the weeds here of a philosophy because you know, I think, you know, practically speaking, we're all having our own first person experiences. Um, you know, but most likely most likely yes, But you know, the question also applies to AI. But I agree, philosophy is mostly weeds. But you know, some of us like to muck around those weeds with the mental machete, and some of us don't. So that's fine. Philosophy is mostly in being in the weeds or doing something else with weed. Uh, answer that question is A and B yes, right, all right, But but I guess what the computer here asked was whether or not an AI could understand a fart joke, like I guess, and that means whether it can understand humor even Yeah, and so I think we have to put that question to you. I mean, you're the expert here. You're officially doing comedy for a living, right, yeah, I would say, no, you know, stop trying, stop trying. Leave that to the professionals. Don't try to replace this, and we're all good. I see. So that's at a little bit of a conflict of interest here, right, You don't want to encourage graduate students out there who are working on AI to do humor because it's a challenge to you. Right, Well, I mean, I think this is such a subjective discussion. Now you know what what is humor? What makes something funny and what makes something not funny? I mean we could go on and on about this and probably not agree, but I think what it is so sort of clear is that, um, Alexa makes my kids crack up all the time on purpose? Though, Is she trying to be funny? Yeah? Sometimes, like if you ask Alexa like sing me a song or tell me a joke or you know, are you in love Alexa, like you'll actually have fun fun answers and so um and who wrote those answers? I don't know, Alexa's human masters, I'm sure. I'm sure. I'm guessing that you can probably maybe you know, come up with an AI to come up with jokes. Yeah. Probably, I think humor could be replicated by simple AI. But you know that that top level creativity. The funniest people, the best writers, I think those reflect the human experience. Things are funny because they resonate with us because they tell us about what it's like to be alive and the ridiculousness of our crazy, bonkers universe. And so I think consciousness is necessary for that to really appreciate humor. All right, well let's get into the last question. But first let's take a quick break, and so now we'll be tackling our last question from Hassan from Iran and asan as a question about the speed of light in the universe. Hi, daniellenead something from Iran. I just wanted to know how universe would look like if they speed limitation. I mean, it's a speed of light was different for example, half double. Thanks for your good show. All right, thank you, Hassan. It's amazing to think that we have listeners in Iran. That's pretty cool. Yeah, it's wonderful to think that all these crazy ideas are leaving our offices in California and spreading all over the world and maybe, hey, over the universe. So if we have alien listeners out there, you know, preparing their invasion, hey, send us an email and give us a heads up, please or ask questions. But Hazan is asking an interesting question. I guess He is asking, basically, what would the universe look like if the speed of light was different? What if it was half of what it was now, and what would it be like? What would the universe be like if the speed of light was twice what it is now. It's a wonderful question because it gets to the heart of something really important, which is the speed of light defines something about how our universe looks. But we don't know why it has the number it has, Like, there is a number, it's a maximum speed anything can go in the universe. But why that number and not a different one? Right? Yeah, because it has a very specific number right now, right, I mean most people um used three hundred thousand meters per second, but it's actually probably much much, much more specific than that. Yes, we have a very precise measurement of the speed of light. And you might wonder, like, could our universe have had a different speed limit twice as much, a hundred times as much, a thousand times as much, or much much smaller, And as far as we know in physics, there's no reason why it's this number and not another number. And you know it might be that in a hundred years or a thousand years, we have a better theory of physics that one that reveals this is the only value the speed of light could have had. But currently it's just a number in our theory, and we could change it in our theory. We've just had to measure it in nature. We don't know why it is what it is, which to me has always been a really deep mystery. Do you think maybe has his hand on the knob of the universe for the speed of light, and he's like, you know, should I turn it clockwise or counterclockwise? Let me ask Daniel and Jorge first. I hope that you know, all supervillains out there that are about to change the parameters of the universe think for a moment. Let's ask Daniel and Jorge for advice before we do this. I'm glad that that's the possibility. What are you saying that It seems like it's arbitrary right now, But maybe someday we'll find that the speed of light could only be that one value that we know it to be. Yeah, or maybe it's random. Some of the multiverse folks say the speed of light could have any value, and there's an infinite number of universes, and each one. These arbitrary parameters have random value. So there is a universe out there with ten times a speed of light or a thousand one one thousands of the speed of light or whatever. We don't know, but right now, as far as we know, it could be much higher, or it couldn't be much lower. And I think Hasan is wondering, you know, what would be the What would happen to the world as we know it if it's suddenly the speed of light was half as much as it is now. Yeah, And I want to take Hassan's question. I want to crank it up to the extreme, because the speed of light is really really high, and so if you cut it in half, the effects wouldn't be as dramatic as if you made it like one one thousands of what it is, or really slowed the speed of light down to like a thousand miles per hour. I think that would be really fascinating. Oh, I see, if the speed of light was half as fast as it is now, we probably wouldn't see a big difference. Yeah, not as much, And so I thought to make the differences more clear, Let's crank it up and slow light down even further, so we need Do we need a disclaimer? Then the phone answer has been dramatized by a physicist for more dramatic tension in our podcast. Yes, exactly. This is not an actual experiment. Okay, all right, so we'll we'll we'll grab Hassan's hand and crack down the speed of light down to super super slow. How slow do you think we should crank it down? I think let's go down to like, you know, five hundred miles an hour, or you know, a hundred miles an hour or something really slow, right, like the speed of a fast car or a bullet. Yeah, because the cool thing is that weird stuff happens when you approach a speed of light because of relativity, and that stuff is not part of our experience. We don't have an intuition for it because it's not something we ever see, Like, you never get anywhere near the speed of light in our experience. So imagine a universe where that wasn't so weird, where you could get near the speed of light. You could develop like a coal intuition, right, but could you, I guess, could you actually get up to because when it's still requiring an infinite amount of energy to get to the speed flight. Yeah, it would still require an infinite amount of energy to get to the speed of light, but you know, you could more easily get to have the speed of lighter three quarters the speed of light. Oh, I see what you're saying. You're saying that the effects of relativity would be felt more in our daily lives. Yeah, you'd noticed that when you went on a car trip or an airplane trip, you would notice time dilation. You know, you would see the differences in people's ages because oh, somebody's been on a plane more in their life. You would see things getting shrunk because of length contraction. All these weird effects that you only see in thought experiments of people on airplanes and super fast moving trains. They would be real. You could experience them, you could feel them. Wow, you could combine like a rejuvenating spot and a train at the same in the same business. Be like, hop on our train. You'll feel younger technically you will be, and you'll still think fart jokes are funny because you'll be younger. Yeah, nobody fared in the train, and it would be a pleasant experience. Yeah, and it would also change our sense of distance. You know, we're used to being able to send an email to the other side of the world and have it take basically no time, like practically no time. But if the speed of light was significantly smaller um than it is in our universe, then it would take time. It would be like a time delay, like you're skyping with somebody from Australia, you know, to say something and then wait and then they'd hear you. You'd be really be able to measure just to feel this information propagation speed. It would be a real physical thing, not just an abstract concept that crazy people on podcasts talk about. Would the universe just be like this weird, trippy experience walking around it? Well, that's the thing is that if we if you change the speed of light, yes, and that would be weird and trippy. But if we evolved in that universe with the speed of light was smaller, it would be intuitive to us. And you know, physics would have developed, I think, more rapidly, like Newton wouldn't wouldn't have come up with his theory of motion and gravitation and stuff. He would have basically scooped Einstein. You know, relativity would have been developed earlier because it would have been more obvious. Yeah, they would have been more clear that things were not classical. Yeah, Galileo would be the new Einstein, and so we'd have, you know, four hundred years head start on this universe. Would we move slower as well? You know, like would it be like if I was suddenly transported to that universe, would I feel like molasses because now it takes more energy to you know, accelerate my my my mass. No, because the relationship between energy and velocity, like kinetic energy and velocity wouldn't change, but there would be some really fascinating changes on the strength of forces like magnetism, and also on things like what's happening inside of stars so that the stars would look different. Yeah. Well, first of all, there are a lot of really interesting things that happen in relativity when you get up near the speed of light that aren't just time slows down and things get shorter. For example, magnetism right now and our slow speeds is not as strong as the force of electricity, Like electricity totally dwarfs magnetism. But as you get up near the speed of light, magnetism gets stronger because its strength depends on speed, and so near the speed of light. The two are perfectly in balance, which is why, for example, a photon can propagate across the universe because really it's an electromagnetic wave where the where the energy is going back and forth from the electronic to the magnetic side. The two are perfectly in balanced at the speed of light. So magnetism would be much more powerful if the speed of light were smaller, Like strong magnets would be much much more powerful. Wow, and so everything Like, if chemistry is different, then biology is different. So we would maybe look different in this universe. We would look totally different, and our solar system would look really different. Because remember, there's a very close connection between energy and mass. We have the famous formula E equals mc squared, right, and that C is the speed of light. And so if you change that knob, you're changing the fundamental relationship between energy and mass, and that makes a big difference. What would happen. Well, the sun, for example, is a machine for turning mass into energy. Right, Take all this hydrogen, you can press it, you force it diffuse, and in doing so, you're turning some of that mass into energy. Well, if all of a sudden, the speed of light is much much lower than you're producing less energy. When you convert mass into energy. Wow, things would sputter out more. Yeah, and so you'd have like different you'd need much more. You need much bigger stars in order to get enough pressure in order in order to glow. Okay, so the universe would be pretty different. Usan Um is correct in that, you know, if you change the speed of light, I'll be a little bit dramatically. Things would be pretty different, like chemistry, biology, the sun would be different. Yeah. And if you flip it around the other way, right, if the speed of light is suddenly like a foul than are a million times what it is today, then all of a sudden, we can like see further into the universe, right, because light can get here faster, and so the limited age of the universe means we can see further out there. We could communicate faster across the galaxy. Um. But then here on Earth, you know, magnets would be much much weaker. Really, you couldn't even really have fridge magnets because the power of magnetism depends on the speed of light. And then looking up into the sky, you know, because of this relationship between energy and mass, even smaller objects could fuse, Like Jupiter would probably be a star if the speed of light were larger, because it's not quite there. A bunch more mass and Jupiter would have enough energy diffuse. Oh it's like the currency exchange rate between energy and mass, and so if you change that, things can go from one to the other more easily or harder. Yeah, and the stars right now that are really big, they might be producing too much energy to hold together. And so those stars you just couldn't have are is that big, but you would have smaller stars and so it's a fascinating to change like the whole scale of the universe, so everything would be It is a pretty the different universe if you change the speed of light a lot, that's right, So Hassan, please take your hand slowly off that knob and step away from the universe console. This is serious stuff, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, you want to at least do it slowly so that we have time to evolve and that all right. Well, I guess to answer Hassan's question then, is if you change the speed of light half or double, then things wouldn't change that much, but you would they would change um kind of in in a big scale, right, it would be. It would be a totally different universe. Yeah, all the effects we talked about would still be present for half or double, they just wouldn't be as dramatic. But you know, double in the speed of light would have a pretty big impact even on our star and on other stars, so you would notice it. Yeah, maybe like double or half is all Jupiter needs to become a son, right, that's right out there, Jupiter is is rooting for you to turn that knob or it's it's saying no, don't touch it. We don't want to blow I'm not sure what Jupiter wants all right, Well, those were three awesome questions. Thank you so much to everyone out there for sending and sending in these questions. We always love to answer them and to think about these fascinating answers. Yeah, and thanks to everybody for listening to the show and for thinking about the universe. And we just want to encourage you to keep thinking, keep questioning, keep trying to understand. We may never figure out all the secrets to the universe, but we will always enjoy trying. And if we can't figure it out, we'll ask Siri and maybe we'll get a funny response. All right, thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed that. See you next time. Before you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Horr Hey that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening and remember that. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of I Heart Radio. 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