The Baby Universe (ft. Katie Mack)

00:00:08
Speaker 1: Sometimes it drives me crazy thinking about the secrets that are buried in the past, you know, things that actually happened that we just don't know the institude. You mean, like who killed JFK. No, No, I'm thinking bigger, Like where are my socks after I put them in the dryer? That's a big mystery. But I'm thinking cosmic size mysteries. I mean, like who thought two introverts could make his science podcast? That's an enduring mystery for sure. But I'm talking about like universe size mysteries, you know, like, you know, the universe started in one way and no other way, And what if we could just go back to the past and watch it and and unearthed these mysteries from the past. Wouldn't that be amazing? What was it like as a baby? Basically? Right? Like, was it awkward? Cute? Funny? Tantramy? Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm the creator of PhD Comics, and I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist work at the Large Hadron Collider smashing particles together. And this is our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, where we trying to explain basically everything in the universe. In a way that makes sense to you everything the whole universe. Yeah, so to be on the program, we have the question what did the baby universe look like? That's right? What did the universe look like when it was really young, when it was just formed, or just after it got started to look totally different from today? Did it look basically like today? What did it look like? Daniel? What did you look like as a baby? I looked like a universe as a baby. Actually, oh good, that's better than me. I looked really different as a Maybe then I do now because I have one of these noses that grows sort of tectonically. So when I was a kid, I had a tiny, little button nose, and now I have sort of a very large alpine nose that just continues to grow through my lifetime. Well, that sounds better than me. I just looked like an old bald man. Did you look like Winston Churchill when you were born? I did a little bit. Actually, my father was named after Winston Churchill, which is which is a coincidence there. Okay, So the question today is what can we learn about the universe from its baby picture? What did the universe look like as a baby? Yeah, this is an interesting question because I was thinking the other day, you know, Daniel, how do you know that you were actually born? Like, how do you know that you were a baby? I mean you think I came out this size? Yeah? Basically, right, Like, how do you know how do you know you didn't just pop into existence when you were five years old or you know, like you were growing out of a test tube and then and then um and then extra rooted when you were five years old, which is when sort of your memories start to kick in. Right, extruded. That sounds like such a pleasant experience. I wasn't born, I was extruded. Technically we're all extruded. Yeah, but you're you're right. There's a there's a sort of a larger question there, which is like how do you know about yourself and your context and where you came from? And why is that important? Right? Like I might say to you, like, I don't know if I was born, you know, at ten, out of the laboratory and implanted with all these memories to make it feel like I had a childhood, But what does it matter? Right? You might say that it doesn't matter, but I think it does matter. I think it matters where we come from, what our context is, what our culture is. In the same way we wonder about larger things like how is the Earth made? Right? The Earth's baby picture looked like, how is the Earth extruded? Yeah, I guess I'm talking about like evidence, you know, Like, um, it's nice that I have there are pictures of me, or at least that I'm told it's me as a baby, so I can sort of trace my development. But if I didn't have those pictures, I might wonder did I just pop into existence when I was five? Right? And you can look at those pictures, and you can see things about yourself that, you know that tell you something about who you are, like to your old Jorges already holding a banana or already cracking silly jokes or you know, doodling on the wall or something. Their truths about you that are emerged early on. Right, Like, man, look at that cute baby. I can only imagine what the baby is going to grow up to be, Like, how did such a cute baby turn into this? You know, there's the mystery, right, there's awesome, magnificent specimen. Yeah, And I think that every time, for example, I see like an old time picture of my hometown. You know, I grew up in Los Almos, and they're all these pictures of what it looked like during World War Two, and you know that shaped the history of the town. And when I see these old pictures, I like saying, like, oh, look that building, I still recognize that it's an enduring feature. And all this is destroyed, it was just transient. So in the same way, I like thinking about the history of the universe because it teaches us something about how it was all put together, and you know what it all. You see things that make it and what it is like unique, make it, yeah, exactly special. Yeah, And it tells us a lot about what's happening in the future. You know, we want to know what's going to happen to the future because we're invested, we're going to live in it. Then we better look into the past. And you know, we've made startling discoveries by doing this. You know, the whole discovery of dark energy, the fact that the universe is being shredded apart by some massive, not understood energy, right that was only discovered by looking into the past and understanding what the universe used to look like. Right, yeah, baby talk aside, we're talking about the universe, right, and how can we tell what the universe was like, you know, not just a hundred years ago, two thousand years ago, but fourteen billion years ago? Yeah, exactly what did it look like? And what can we learn from that? So, as usually, we were curused to hear what people out there thought about this question, and so here's what they had to say. What do you think the early universe looked like? Um, the baby universe I would think would be something really compactly dnce in like probably in a circular looking thing. I would think, yeah, um, probably nothing in particular, just a bunch of gases and like crazy, maybe spirals. I don't know, like you know, not no stars or anything, that's for sure. I guess like a more extreme version of what it looks like now because everything was kind of more close even though it's expanding, so it's like, I know, there was less space in between everything, So I guess more bright and intense. I guess. Delete. On the program, we have astrophysicist Katie mac Hi. Katie, Hi, how are you good? So you're probably one of the most famous astrophysicists on the internet. Do you have a huge Twitter following, and uh, that's really cool. Thanks. Yeah, it's been really interesting. I don't know where all the people come from, but I'm glad that they are hanging out and listening to me talk about astrophysics. Can you tell us a little bit about where you work. I'm in the physics department at North Carolina State. I'm an assistant professor, and I'm also part of the Leadership in Public Science Cluster, which is a new initiative to encourage connection between scientists and the general public. Very cool. Yeah, And I think it's important for people that people to understand that you're not just somebody on Twitter who likes to talk about science, but you're actually a practicing scientist who's chipping away at the mysteries of the universe. Yeah. I'm doing the best I can at that. And your expertise is in um Yeah, So I do theoretical cosmology, which is the study of the universe from start to finish and the evolution of the universe and what's in it. And my area of specialty at the moment is dark matter. So I'm interested in what dark matter is and how it did what it did in the early universe and all of that, and I'm also interested in black holes and in the very early universe and the very end of the universe. What did you think about people's general knowledge of what the early universe is like? This surprise you. I think everybody kind of gets the idea that it was real, different than now and maybe not as structured um, and that the structure in the universe has come about over time, which is true. And so help the people out there understand that. How can we possibly know that? How do we know what the early universe looked like at all? We know what the early universe looks like because we can look right at it. We can actually see it. We can watch the Big Bang happening. And there's caveats to that in terms of what I mean when I say a big bang and what I mean, but when I say watch it happened. But the nature of the early universe is one of the most certain things we we have in cosmology because we can actually see it directly. So tell us what that means. Where do you look to see the Big Bang? Well, you look everywhere? Um, okay, so let me go back a couple of steps, billion steps. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Why do we even think there was a big bang? There was one guy who we talked to without the universe is like this forever. How do we know that's not true? Right? We know that the universe is changing with time because we can see that it's expanding UM. And the way we see it's expanding is that we look at really distant galaxies and we see that they all seem to be moving away from us. The whole universe is getting bigger, and so the spaces between all of the galaxies is getting bigger, and that means that every galaxy we see is going to look like it's moving away from us. And in fact, the more distant galaxy, the more quickly it seems to be moving away from us. And so you know, beyond a certain distance UM, when we get out into like the open universe, outside of our little local area, everything is moving apart. And that only makes sense if the universe is expanding, and if it's expanding like the same in every direction. So you can look at that and then you can say, well, if it's getting bigger than it was smaller in the past, and you can just kind of extrapolate back and say that there had to have been a time when everything was really really really close together. But that's sort of the question is like, what did things look like when they were are all sort of on top of each other, when the universe was that small? How do we know what it sort of looked like. If you have some kind of box with stuff in it, and then you make that box bigger than things get farther apart, it's sort of cools down because there's there's more space and things are not bumping into each other as much. And so if you go the other direction, then the early universe should have been a lot hotter and denser and you know, in some sense sort of smaller than it is now. And so because of that sort of extrapolation, a bunch of physicists um back in the day said, well, if that's the case, then all of that heat and radiation from the early universe should actually still be out there somewhere. Well why should it still be out there? I mean, wouldn't it have been absorbed or bounced around? Since then? What do you mean all that heat and radiation? Okay, so so this is where it gets a little bit trippy and complicated, But this is where it also gets really cool. I love trippy and complicated, but it's really cool because this is this is where we're actually seeing the Big Bang. Okay, so the speed of light is not infinite, which means that if you look at like the nearest star other than the Sun, you're looking at something that's four light years away roughly. That means that the light that you see from that star is four years old by the time it gets to you. So you're saying that to look into the past, you just have to look at things that are far away. Yeah, yeah, exactly, And so the farther away that you look, the farther in the past you're seeing. And we have telescopes where we can see galaxies where the light has been traveling for like thirteen billion years, you know, So we can actually see galaxies that are like some of the first galaxies ever formed in the universe. We can see really really early objects. If we just keep looking farther and farther away, then we're looking farther and farther back, and we're looking at a time when the universe was so hot and so dense that that part of the universe was on fire. Every part of the universe was like this sort of giant fireball. I mean, not are exactly, but like plasma, right, And so there's some part of the universe that's so far away that the last like a little bit of radiation from that fire has been sort of streaming through the universe just in every direction. And there's a part of the university so far away that that little bit of radiation from that fire has been traveling through the universe and is just reaching us. Now, that's awesome, And I think the really mind blowing thing about that is that it comes from every direction. Like, as you're saying, you look out into the universe, you look at something that's the age of the universe away. You're seeing something that was really far away a long time ago. Now you look at the opposite direction, you're seeing something which was the other side of the universe when it was born. Hold On, I have so many questions for you. But before we keep going, let's take a short break. Let me change back off a second. I'm still a little bit confused. Um, So what you're saying is that you know, there's there are the galaxies that are the furthest that we can see. Yeah, but you're saying, like if we point our telescope just to the right of that oldest galaxy into literally like black nothingness. Anything we get when we point our telescopes to that black spot sort of must be as old as the universe. Like if we see it in an optical telescope, then we're probably saying something else. But just to the right of that old old galaxy, there's radiation coming from that point that has not hit anything until it's hit us. Then that's been traveling for like thirteen point eight ish billion years from a time when the universe was only about years old. Oh, I see, but it somehow ended up there and then it had to make its way to us. Well, it was everywhere, I mean, every part of the universe put out radiation at that time. Like the universe is this like fireball kind of state, and the whole universe is cooling at the same time, right, and so you have the gas is cooling down, and there's this radiation that's traveling in every direction. That's like escaping from the time when the whole universe is on fire, and that light goes in every direction. So if we look in one direction and we're seeing the early universe, and then we look in another direction. We're not seeing the same part of the early universe, right, right, right, We're seeing different parts of the early universe. But you have to think of time in a kind of geometric way for this to make sense, right, So I kind of like to think of like we have these like spherical shells of time around us. Okay, so yeah, yeah, imagine you have your your head is inside this sphere one ft in radius that's a nanosecond in the past, and then you know, you build another sphere that's two nano seconds in the past, and then you build a sphere that's you know, a light year in radius, and then you're that's your one one year ago sphere, and then you just kind of keep going. So you have these sort of nested spheres of deeper and deeper time. And at the very end of that, the largest sphere is the observable universe, and that sphere is this fireball universe. So you're saying the universe when it was really young looked like a fireball. Yeah, I mean every part of it was was plasma. What does that mean, like a cloud like a gas. Yeah, it was too hot for Adams to be neutral, so it was protons and electrons flying around and radiation, so it would have looked like a fire in the sense that it was just glowing hot and then over time it's cooled down. So you wouldn't want to be around in the early universe. No, it would not be safe. The dangerous baby. Yes, yes, definitely if you get into like even earlier times, like the first few seconds and before, like it's like nuclear reactions in every point of space at all times. You know it's bad. It gets real bad you go earlier and there there in the universe. So it was such a hot mass of soup soupy mess that nothing could even form. And so that you're saying that fireball um expanded, that's the big bang, and it dissipated, but we're still sort of seeing kind of the afterglow of it. Yeah, And I don't want to I don't want to imply that the universe was like an expanding sphere, because it might just be infinite in every direction and not really have like a shape to it per se. It might be infinitely huge. We don't know. We don't know for sure, but but the idea I guess is that you know, when people go outside and night or even during the day, they're getting an image of the baby Universe when they look up. That kind of the idea if they could see in the microwave spectrum, then yeah, they'd get a little bit of that sort of glow from the early universe. It turns out if you if you have one of those old TVs that picks up broadcast, you know, not not the digital kind. Little bit of the static on those things is is the afterglow of the Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background. So you can actually see the Big Bang in the snow on old televisions. But but the picture of the baby Universe is not like snow. It's not um like a glow or noise. It actually has like a it's a picture right like it. It's got a specific texture on it, right yeah. Yeah, So we can map it out. If we take these microwave telescopes and look at every point on the sky and map out the microwave radiation, then we can see where some points were a little bit hotter than others, and you can see kind of these patterns of little splotches for hotter and colder spots on the you know, background light and the background light. You know, it looks like a sphere around us, just like if you were in a planetarium, you'd see, you know, um, the stars and a sphere around you. And we can look at those patterns and figure out where, like there was a little bit more matter in a spot, a little bit less matter in that spot. And we can see traces of like sound waves traveling through the early sort of fireball universe, because it turns out when the universe is that dense, sound can travel through space. Yeah. Yeah, so the early universe was like ringing with sound waves and you can see those in the picture. Yeah, you can see, um, you can see like patterns associated with like sound waves traveling through the sort of plasma. So it wasn't just a hot mess. It was a hot, noisy mess. Yeah. It sounds a lot like my house on a Saturday afternoon. Yeah yeah, kind of like real babies, Yeah, exactly, kind of like a baby hordhead. There you go. So, um, are you're talking about this very early universe and things we can learn about how what it meant? And so what might you learn about the early universe, Like what kind of result could you get about the early universe that would surprise you or make you feel differently about like your life and our rule here in the whole context. What kind of is could you could you learn that would change your feeling about, you know, the human experience, how our universe came to be and why it is the way it is. That would be really exciting to find out. There could be other universes that may have like collided with our universe at early times, and there are ways to look for evidence of that with the couse of microwave background, and if that happened, that would be really interesting to see. And one of the possibilities for that is that the Big Bang happened because two universes kind of collided in the past and bounced off each other, and so there could be like this parallel universe out there that we might be doomed to collide with again twins, So that would be really interesting as well to know that, like there's more spatial dimensions that we can see, so you know, the universe is kind of bigger in some direction that we don't understand, So that would be really interesting. That's amazing. Would it shock you if fourteen billion years from now people could still see your baby picture I was such an ugly baby. The analogy really works because you can look back at kids, for example, when there were two or three, and you can see in them the seeds of their current personality. You can see, oh, it was a fighter, it was a screamer, a curious baby. So I think there are truths about us that are hidden in our baby pictures, the same way our truths about the universe that are secreted away in the in the cosmic bac away background. Well, thank you so much, Katie for joining us. It's good to chat about the the universe. I'm always happy to do that. Yeah, you're welcome any back, anytime, and people can find you on Twitter, right, Katie, your your handle is at a stro Katie. One word right A S T R O K A T I E. Great, Yes, that's right. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Katie. I hear you're working on a really great project these days. A new book. Yeah, I'm working on my first book. It's for general audiences, so um, you know, not not technical, but the topic is the end of the universe, So where it's all going to go, how it's all gonna end, um, what that's going to look like. What it means for the universe to have an end um It's it's should be really fun. It's called the End of Everything, and it'll be out in hopefully before the end of the universe. Yeah, it would be really inconvenient if the universe ended before the book came out. So I'm crossing my fingers and hopefully will have a happy ending or is it a spoiler alert? There aren't very many pleasant ways to destroy the entire cosmos. This is not a Disney book or hey, unfortunately great, So I hope everyone checks it out and keeps an eye for it. Thank you, Katie. Thanks, So that was really fascinating. Katie told us a lot about how we can see the history of the universe from these really really old photons that are come from deep in space and deep back in time, all the way back to four hundred thousand years after the Big Bang. Yeah, when the universe became transparent. That's an interesting constant, right, Like we think of space is black and full of stuff in it, but relatively speaking, it's kind of transparent, right, it's empty, Yeah, which is fantastic. Right. It's good luck because if the universe was not transparent, we couldn't have learned all these amazing things we learned about the universe, right, And you might think, well, of course space is transparent, but that's the thing, it wasn't always right. Around four hundred thousand years after the Big Bang is the first time that it cooled down enough that the hot plasma Kittie was talking about moved from being ions into being neutral atoms so that photons could fly through them unimpeded. Right, So it makes me wonder, what was it? How could we ever see before that? Can we see before four hundred thousand years after the Big Bang? We can, but we can't use photons. You know. It's like staring at the Sun. Right, you can see the surface of the Sun because it's shooting our photons, But you can't see photons from the inside of the Sun because those get absorbed. And so looking at the earlier history of the universe requires somehow looking inside this big ball of plasma, and we can't do that with photons, but looking sort of in time, right, we want to pierce into it in time, that's right, And so we can't see directly. One thing we can do is that we can do experiments to recreate it. You know, we can say, well, what was it like when there was so much energy focused in one place? You mean, we can make babies in a test tube. I'm not proposing that you and I make babies in a test before, as much as that would be on the frontiers of science. And also I think it's sort of inappropriate to raise that like on air in the podcast. I mean that should be a private conversation. You're like buying me a glass of wine. At least for as Joe, I'm not that easy. Um, we can recreate the conditions of the Big Bang sort of, um, just by smashing particles together, so you know, the large Hadron collider, we smash protons together. Sometimes we even smash heavier stuff together like lead or gold nuclei and try to recreate the big hot mess that was that ball of plasma, just to see what was it like and what's the physics of it and what happens. So what do you mean, recreate the conditions like the temperature or just like the crazy the pure energy nous of it. Yeah, the density of energy, right, that's essentially what temperature is in my in my understanding. You know, we're just trying to create a lot of energy into in one place, so that quirks, for example, which usually are bound tightly together, can feel free because there's so much energy around that. Everybody has so much energy, they don't they don't get tied down. You're like, be free, quargs, be free, take off your foes. It's the Cork Liberation Front is whatever. The Q left is sort of a militant group there. Um. Yeah, so you can sort of think of the LHC is like a big bang machine. You know, every time we collid were like recreating these collisions and so we can study that experiment. Makes me a little nervous that, Daniel, just like, what's what's the big deal? Because me like a big bang machine. First of all, it sounds kind of it sounds a little inappropriate. But like you made a machine that makes the universes. That's a that's a little worrying, isn't it. Well, it only makes forty million universes a second, what what could go wrong? No, seriously, people don't worry. We're not We're not creating universes at daily. See, we're creating the We're recreating the conditions of the early universe by making something that's as hot and dense in a very small space, and we're all wearing life jackets and hard hats and nobody should be concerned and diversion. Yeah, and the point is that what we're just trying to study it, and because we have these theoretical models that say, we think we know what happened before four thousand years after the Big Bang, that's the last thing we can directly see. We think we know what happened before that, so let's test it and check and try to recreate those So I see, like you have theories about what happened before four hundred thousand years into the Big Bang, and so you're trying to do small experiments that will sort of confirm parts of that theory. So that didn't you feel confident about using a theory to peer into the Big Bang? Yeah, exactly. So it's extrapolating into what we can't see, and then we're trying to test it in the lab and said, like, let's see if our theory works in similar conditions. So it's kind of like a it's like math vision, you know, like we can't technically see inside the sun, but we can see an inside using math only put on my math goggles and now I can see anything. Well, I guess, I mean you could call a that applied math or math vision. But yeah, I think we should rename all the applied math departments around the country as math vision departments. Be a math visionary. But the speaking of vision, there is another way now to see into that plasma, to look inside, and that's because we have a new way to look out into the universe, and that's with gravitational waves, which are only recently discovered. We can listen not to see. Oh my god, I hate that analogy. We're not listening. Gravitation waves don't make a sound, you know, They're just waves like everything else. So it's you mean, like there's stuff happening, but underneath that, like a rumble, you can see sort of these waves coming out. Right. Well, what I mean is that the hot plasma is is opaque to photons, right, but it's not opaque to other things, right, It's transparent to other things. It's transparent, for example, to gravitational waves. So the current theory of what happened just after the Big Bang, like ten to the minus thirty five seconds after the universe was born, is that there was a huge shock wave in space. Gravitational waves were made just at the very very beginning of the universe, and gravitational waves can pierce plasma, they can go through anything because they are the shaking of space itself, right, so nothing can block them. So those can pass through that plasma. When those waves have dispersed out into the infinity by now, when we have lost them by now, well, it's just the same as with the photons from the cosmic microwave background. If the Big Bang happened everywhere all the time, then those waves were created everywhere and went in every direction. If we want to see them now, we just listen, you know, in some direction a long long time ago, and they should be arriving now. Gravitation always made super far away fourteen billion years ago, should just be arriving on Earth now. And you're right, it's very hard to see. It's like the whole room is reverberating, right, kind of like, yeah, exactly, reverberberating. And the cool thing is maybe you've heard this story, but you know, there's a collaboration that had a telescope listening for these and they thought they heard them. This is the bicep collaboration, and they claimed the discovery and then it turned out that it was just dust and they were actually totally wrong and they had to walk back their discovery, which is kind of embarrassing. Yeah, but you know, it happens in science, right, Yeah, it totally happens, you know. Yeah, it's they didn't do anything wrong. They just you know, they claimed they discovered it. They made their best statement, and then they learned more and they said oops. And that's fine. That's the process of science. Um. But there are ways to see those. We just haven't heard those vitational waves yet, but people are working on it. One day we'll find them. So those might tell us what happened inside of the the really really baby universe, right yeah, exactly, you know, the fetal universe or something, you know, and just after it was born. And that would be fascinating because we could learn a lot. First of all, if we see them, that confirms that these gravitational waves were made and that we think inflation probably happened, and that would be incredible, right that would that would go from math vision to like you know, I don't know, um, math discovernment. That's the worst probably anyway, Yes, so we could see very very early on and that would be cool. Um, But we haven't heard those yet. People are working on it. So how far how far into the Big bank could we listen with these gravitational waves? Yeah, tend the minus thirty five seconds after the Big Bang? Why not just call that zero like it's so much happy because zero and math. Put on your math goggles. There's a difference between zero and tend of the minus thirty five. Although I'll admit I don't even know what prefix goes before that could have second or a yapto second or something. What do you think it is? Um? I think it's a sound second. I think it's a Jorge second channel a second or something. It's a baby second because it's because it's so tiny. No. Um. So that's a really exciting way to probe the very very very early universe. But wait, wait, where does that number come from? Tend to the minus thirty five? That seems very like definitive. Oh, there's a lot of uncertainty there, but it comes from calculations about how inflation happened. You know. Inflation is the process of the universe stretching really really fast just after it was born. You go from a tiny microscopic dot um or every tiny microscopic dot was then just stretched out to a really big universe. The universe expanded by a huge amount in a really tiny amount of time. We should do a whole podcast on what is inflation? Sometimes, Um, that's when inflation stopped. Yeah, but that's just it's an estimate, and there are different theories of inflation. And you know, it could be tend in the minus thirty six seconds or tenda minus thirty two seconds. And but of course, as you say, why isn't it ji zero? And we love to see zero, and we'd love to see the first moment when time was created. Did something happen at ten to the minus thirty five that's when inflation stopped? Yeah? Yeah, So, very very briefly, the history of the universe is the universe is created somehow mysteriously totally unknown process, and then it's stretched really really dramatically, really really quickly for about ten of the minus thirty five seconds, right, and then it's been expanding ever since. And then about five billion years ago, I started stretching again, and that's what we call dark energy. Oh I see, so you couldn't these waves gravitational waves wouldn't tell you what happened when it was stretching or before it stretched. Yeah, there's sort of the results of the stretch. You know. It's like, oh, if you jump onto a trampoline, you know, these are the waves that moved through the trampoline. Inflation caused these waves. It's like the bang of the Big Bang. It's the bang just after the Big Bang, and you lived just down the street from the Big Bang, and this is what you hear, all right, So then, um, but then who knows, how would we ever see what happened before? I know, I'd love to see at zero, right or even negative, like what happened before? What was there before and what made the universe start? And that's it's hard to imagine how we could ever see that, even see before tend of the minus thirty five, to see what was happening at zero and fierce that veil and go through it and see what happened before. That's just the realm of science fiction. It may literally be impossible. You know, maybe that no information from before that was even preserved. It's just like destroyed um in the Big Bang. We don't even know. You don't think even math vision could get us through. I mean, like, you know, like, could we form a theory that just put on two math goggles and right, what's the big deal? Uh? No, we certainly could. And you know, this is an interesting question of like can you even study that. Is this philosophy or is this science? Can you talk seriously about what happened before the Big Bang or what caused the Big Bang? And people like to talk about crazy ideas like the Big Bang was the result of the collisions of two other universes and higher dimensions, and I mean, I know it sounds like I just made up those words. I don't mean anything, But that's a real theory. You mean, like, could we talk about anything before there was anything? That's right? Yeah, when there was nothing? Can we talk about something right? That sounds like that bid in spaceballs or something? But but yeah, and it's it's a reasonable question. And some people say you can't it's just philosophy because we can never test it. We can never know what happened because we can never get any data that confirmed or denied any of those theories. But other people say, you know, you could. Sean Carroll, for example, he argues that you can talk about what happened at a time or a place you can never visit, because you can build theories that extrapolate, as you were saying, using math vision into that time, and you can confirm or deny those theories in time and places that you can test, and you can think about whether that extrapolation is valid and test those in other ways. So it's indirect, but you know, there are ways to talk about what might have happened. Then it's just it would be hard to kind of put your finger on it and really kind of see it, especially because a time equal zero, your finger doesn't exist. To put it anywhere does it be really hot? So don't put your finger right now. People don't put your finger on a big bang. Yes, So, you know, if you look deep into the history of the universe, you learned about how the Earth was made. You learned about how the Solar system was formed, You learned about how galaxies came together, You learned about how the universe is expanding. You learned about the first stars. You go all the way back to the very initial moments when the universe became transparent, and that's you know, what we think about when we think about the universe and you learn all this rich history and it's told us so much about who we are and uh and how everything works and you know what's gonna happen. So it's it's pretty fascinating. I love looking at the universe's baby picture. Yeah. Now, there's a certain definitely comfort to know in your origins, right, Like if you didn't know if you were born or where you came from, it kind of tends to unseckle you, right, Like, what is my place in the universe? It all could just be a manufactured, you know, illusion from the creators of the simulation that we're living in, right, So it could all just be a lie. Yeah, but we're what what were they like as a baby? Though? That's right, it's a recursive question. But I totally agree with you. It tells you something about who you are, and you like to know that thing those things because it tells you how to live your life. Right. If you know where you came from, you have an idea of where you're going and how to get there, and what's important, what your place in the universe is, you know? Yeah, and your place turns out is very small, almost nowhere, pretty cold, cold, it's pretty cold. Yeah, but you should still go on and live your life and be nice to people. Yeah. If 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 at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one Word, or email us at Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com.