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Q&A Edition: Spaghettification, Neutron Stars, and the Mysteries of Wormholes
In this mind-bending episode of Space Nuts, hosts Andrew Dunkley and Professor Jonti Horner tackle fascinating questions from listeners that delve into the depths of cosmic phenomena. From the peculiar concept of spaghettification to the nature of black holes and the theoretical existence of wormholes, this episode is a treasure trove of astronomical insights and engaging dialogue.
Episode Highlights:
- Understanding Spaghettification: Buddy from Oregon asks if spaghettification is real or merely an illusion. Andrew and Jonti break down the science behind this phenomenon, explaining how the immense gravitational forces near a black hole stretch objects into long, thin shapes, much like spaghetti.
- Neutron Stars vs. Black Holes: Istok from Slovenia inquires about the density of neutron stars and what happens to matter inside black holes. The hosts explore the fascinating properties of neutron stars and the limits of our understanding regarding black holes and the nature of singularities.
- Theoretical Wormholes: Foster from Norway poses a question about the parameters needed for wormholes to exist, inspired by the film Interstellar. Andrew and Jonti discuss the theoretical framework of wormholes, their implications for space travel, and the challenges of proving their existence.
- Pre-Big Bang Theories: Rob's thought-provoking question leads to a discussion about singularities and the potential existence of black holes before the Big Bang. The hosts explore the philosophical implications of what may have existed before time and space as we know them.
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00:00:00 --> 00:00:03 Andrew Dunkley: Hi again, Andrew Dunkley here. And, uh,
00:00:03 --> 00:00:06 thanks for joining us, uh, on Space Nuts Q
00:00:06 --> 00:00:08 and A edition. And coming up, we've got
00:00:08 --> 00:00:11 questions from Buddy about spaghettification,
00:00:11 --> 00:00:13 and I'm pretty sure he's not talking about an
00:00:13 --> 00:00:16 Italian restaurant. Uh, we're also looking at
00:00:16 --> 00:00:18 news. Neutron stars versus black holes. I
00:00:18 --> 00:00:20 think we've had similar questions in the
00:00:20 --> 00:00:23 past, but it keeps coming up. Uh, we're
00:00:23 --> 00:00:26 also looking at wormholes. And,
00:00:27 --> 00:00:29 uh, somebody has a pre Big Bang
00:00:29 --> 00:00:32 theory which we'd like to discuss. We'll talk
00:00:32 --> 00:00:35 about all of that on this episode of Space
00:00:35 --> 00:00:36 Nuts. 15 seconds.
00:00:36 --> 00:00:39 Generic: Guidance is internal. 10,
00:00:39 --> 00:00:42 9. Ignition sequence start.
00:00:42 --> 00:00:44 Jonti Horner: Space Nuts. 5, 4, 3, 2.
00:00:44 --> 00:00:47 Generic: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 4, 3,
00:00:47 --> 00:00:48 2, 1.
00:00:48 --> 00:00:50 Jonti Horner: Space Nuts astronauts report it feels
00:00:50 --> 00:00:51 good.
00:00:51 --> 00:00:53 Andrew Dunkley: And I do love the Q and A edition because,
00:00:54 --> 00:00:56 um, somebody else other than us sets the
00:00:56 --> 00:00:59 agenda. The downside is we have to think.
00:00:59 --> 00:01:02 And joining me now is Jonti, uh, Horner,
00:01:02 --> 00:01:03 professor of Astrophysics at the University
00:01:03 --> 00:01:06 of Southern Queensland. Jonti, hello again.
00:01:06 --> 00:01:08 Jonti Horner: Hello again. Good afternoon. Good evening.
00:01:09 --> 00:01:11 Andrew Dunkley: Good to see you. Got, um, some interesting
00:01:11 --> 00:01:13 questions today. Do you want to get straight
00:01:13 --> 00:01:13 into it?
00:01:13 --> 00:01:16 Jonti Horner: Yes, can do. And I will give the usual caveat
00:01:16 --> 00:01:17 right at the start of this. I'm quite happy
00:01:17 --> 00:01:20 to admit my ignorance to a lot of this. Um, I
00:01:20 --> 00:01:23 am not a cosmologist, so this is pushing
00:01:23 --> 00:01:25 the boundaries of my knowledge to places that
00:01:25 --> 00:01:27 it has never gone m before. And I'll do my
00:01:27 --> 00:01:30 very best, but my apologies, other answers
00:01:30 --> 00:01:32 are available. And you know, there's a film
00:01:32 --> 00:01:34 critic in the UK who often says other
00:01:34 --> 00:01:35 opinions are available. They're wrong, but
00:01:35 --> 00:01:38 they're available. Um, in the case of this
00:01:38 --> 00:01:40 one, it may well be that other answers are
00:01:40 --> 00:01:42 available and they are more likely to be
00:01:42 --> 00:01:43 right than mine. But I will do my best.
00:01:44 --> 00:01:46 Andrew Dunkley: Fred often throws in the same caveat, so it's
00:01:46 --> 00:01:47 all good.
00:01:47 --> 00:01:50 Uh, our first question today comes from a
00:01:50 --> 00:01:53 regular contributor. His name is Buddy.
00:01:53 --> 00:01:56 Generic: Hello, space. This is Buddy from Ontario,
00:01:56 --> 00:01:58 Oregon. Hey, um, I got a
00:01:59 --> 00:02:02 question about spaghettification. Is it an
00:02:02 --> 00:02:05 illusion or is it a. Is it real?
00:02:05 --> 00:02:08 Is it. Is it just, uh, a distortion of
00:02:08 --> 00:02:10 our eyes to the fourth dimension? Or are
00:02:10 --> 00:02:13 things actually being stretched? And
00:02:13 --> 00:02:16 on that same page, they say that photons
00:02:16 --> 00:02:19 and photonic particles act like a wave and a,
00:02:19 --> 00:02:21 uh, particle at the same time. Is that what
00:02:21 --> 00:02:23 makes it a wave? Maybe. Is that a form of
00:02:23 --> 00:02:26 spaghettification? Maybe. All
00:02:26 --> 00:02:28 right, thanks, guys. Love your podcast.
00:02:29 --> 00:02:31 Andrew Dunkley: Thank you, Buddy. Buddy's always thinking. I
00:02:31 --> 00:02:33 can hear his mind from halfway across the
00:02:33 --> 00:02:36 planet, just tumbling and tumbling, trying to
00:02:36 --> 00:02:38 figure out all this Stuff because he comes up
00:02:38 --> 00:02:39 with so many interesting questions.
00:02:40 --> 00:02:43 Spaghettification, uh, first part of his
00:02:43 --> 00:02:46 question is, is it an illusion? Or, you
00:02:46 --> 00:02:48 know, if you were there, would you get
00:02:48 --> 00:02:49 spaghettified good and proper?
00:02:50 --> 00:02:52 Jonti Horner: It's a really good question. And that thing
00:02:52 --> 00:02:54 of constantly thinking, constantly
00:02:54 --> 00:02:55 questioning everything is fundamentally what
00:02:55 --> 00:02:58 science is. We find things we don't
00:02:58 --> 00:02:59 understand and we come up with ideas to
00:02:59 --> 00:03:01 explain them and try and figure it out. And
00:03:01 --> 00:03:03 there's always more to learn. So that's
00:03:03 --> 00:03:06 fabulous. In terms of spaghettification, the
00:03:06 --> 00:03:08 idea here is that if you were to fall into a
00:03:08 --> 00:03:11 black hole, it would not be pleasant and
00:03:11 --> 00:03:14 you would be stretched out gradually so
00:03:14 --> 00:03:16 that you got stretched out like spaghetti.
00:03:16 --> 00:03:18 And it would be a very painful and unpleasant
00:03:18 --> 00:03:20 death. Um, from the point of view of the
00:03:20 --> 00:03:22 observer looking down from above, it would
00:03:22 --> 00:03:24 also be a death that takes an incredibly long
00:03:24 --> 00:03:27 time because there is, as you fall into
00:03:27 --> 00:03:30 a black hole, the light that's emitted
00:03:31 --> 00:03:32 is slowed down by gravity. So you get this
00:03:32 --> 00:03:34 kind of time dilation effect where somebody
00:03:34 --> 00:03:36 watching you would see your clock tick ever
00:03:36 --> 00:03:39 slower. So they get to watch your suffering
00:03:39 --> 00:03:42 in great and slow and painful detail, which
00:03:42 --> 00:03:44 is wonderful. But the idea behind
00:03:45 --> 00:03:47 spaghettification comes from the
00:03:47 --> 00:03:50 fact that if you are falling into
00:03:50 --> 00:03:52 a black hole and your feet are nearer to the
00:03:52 --> 00:03:55 black hole than your head is, your feet will
00:03:55 --> 00:03:57 experience a stronger gravitational pull.
00:03:58 --> 00:04:01 Now, this is kind of how the tides work on
00:04:01 --> 00:04:03 Earth, to be honest. It's also how the
00:04:03 --> 00:04:05 concept of the Roche limit comes about, which
00:04:05 --> 00:04:08 is where we can work out how close to a
00:04:08 --> 00:04:09 massive object like the Earth a smaller
00:04:09 --> 00:04:12 object can get before it gets torn apart. All
00:04:12 --> 00:04:13 of these things are built around the same
00:04:13 --> 00:04:15 idea, which is that, uh, the strength of the
00:04:15 --> 00:04:18 gravitational pull that you experience
00:04:19 --> 00:04:22 from a given object falls off
00:04:22 --> 00:04:24 as one over the distance squared. So the
00:04:24 --> 00:04:26 further away you are, the weaker the
00:04:26 --> 00:04:29 gravitational pull is. Now, if you're falling
00:04:29 --> 00:04:31 into a black hole, that is
00:04:32 --> 00:04:35 a solar mass black hole, if you
00:04:35 --> 00:04:37 get a black hole, the mass of the sun,
00:04:38 --> 00:04:40 it's tiny. We can actually work out
00:04:41 --> 00:04:43 the radius of that black hole. I've not got
00:04:43 --> 00:04:45 the number off the top of my head, but it's
00:04:45 --> 00:04:47 very, very small. It's probably only a few
00:04:47 --> 00:04:49 meters across, right? A
00:04:49 --> 00:04:51 neutron star, the mass of the sun will be
00:04:51 --> 00:04:53 about 2 km. A black hole will be much, much
00:04:53 --> 00:04:56 smaller. What that means is that if you're
00:04:56 --> 00:04:57 falling into that when you're getting very,
00:04:57 --> 00:05:00 very close to it, the difference in
00:05:00 --> 00:05:02 distance between your feet and your head from
00:05:02 --> 00:05:04 the middle of that is actually a significant
00:05:04 --> 00:05:06 fraction of the distance distance that you
00:05:06 --> 00:05:08 are from it. So if you are 2 kilometers away
00:05:08 --> 00:05:11 from this thing and you're 2 meters tall,
00:05:12 --> 00:05:14 then your feet are 1 1000th nearer
00:05:14 --> 00:05:17 than your head is. And that means that the
00:05:17 --> 00:05:19 difference in distance leads to a very big
00:05:19 --> 00:05:21 difference in gravitational pull between your
00:05:21 --> 00:05:22 feet and your head. So you will get
00:05:22 --> 00:05:25 stretched, and the closer in you get, the
00:05:25 --> 00:05:27 more dramatic that gradient is
00:05:28 --> 00:05:30 in the gravitational pull between your feet
00:05:30 --> 00:05:33 and your head. Now you might think,
00:05:33 --> 00:05:34 okay, well, that's fine, I'll just fall in
00:05:34 --> 00:05:37 lying on my stomach. You'll still have the
00:05:37 --> 00:05:39 same problem because the difference in
00:05:39 --> 00:05:40 gravitational pull between your nose and the
00:05:40 --> 00:05:42 back of your head will be bad. So your nose
00:05:42 --> 00:05:43 will get stretched out and you look a bit
00:05:43 --> 00:05:46 like Pinocchio, as would other parts of your
00:05:46 --> 00:05:48 body be equally stretched out. So you're
00:05:48 --> 00:05:51 doomed either way. But it is a very
00:05:51 --> 00:05:54 real thing that would happen. The reason
00:05:54 --> 00:05:56 that you could probably argue it's an
00:05:56 --> 00:05:58 illusion is to the best of our knowledge,
00:05:59 --> 00:06:00 we've never dropped a human into a black hole
00:06:00 --> 00:06:03 yet. So the only times you see this are in
00:06:03 --> 00:06:05 thought experiments or in expensive high
00:06:05 --> 00:06:08 budget Hollywood movies. But the
00:06:08 --> 00:06:11 physics behind it makes sense. Now, one of
00:06:11 --> 00:06:14 the quirky outcomes of this is, uh, as you
00:06:14 --> 00:06:15 increase the mass of a black hole, you'd
00:06:15 --> 00:06:18 increase its radius, but
00:06:19 --> 00:06:22 the, um, force
00:06:22 --> 00:06:24 due to gravity falls off of one over, uh,
00:06:24 --> 00:06:26 radius squared. So you have this slightly
00:06:26 --> 00:06:27 bizarre thing that you would get this
00:06:27 --> 00:06:29 happening if you were falling into a solar
00:06:29 --> 00:06:30 mass black hole or an earth mass black hole
00:06:31 --> 00:06:33 hole, if one existed. Supermassive black
00:06:33 --> 00:06:36 holes, though, are so incredibly big
00:06:37 --> 00:06:39 that the gradient between your
00:06:39 --> 00:06:41 feet and your head would be very small when
00:06:41 --> 00:06:43 you were near the event horizon, and you
00:06:43 --> 00:06:45 wouldn't get spaghettified. So if you think
00:06:45 --> 00:06:46 about the supermassive black hole in the
00:06:46 --> 00:06:49 middle of our galaxy, the radius of that, I
00:06:49 --> 00:06:52 believe, is wider than the orbit of Neptune,
00:06:52 --> 00:06:55 30 astronomical units. So if you're near the
00:06:55 --> 00:06:57 event horizon for a black hole of that size,
00:06:58 --> 00:07:01 you are something like billions of kilometers
00:07:01 --> 00:07:03 from the middle. And, uh, the distance
00:07:03 --> 00:07:04 between your feet and your head is still 2
00:07:04 --> 00:07:07 meters. So 2 meters out of billions of
00:07:07 --> 00:07:10 kilometers is a very tiny difference. So
00:07:10 --> 00:07:13 you wouldn't really be spaghettified. So if
00:07:13 --> 00:07:15 you wanted to not be spaghettified while
00:07:15 --> 00:07:17 falling into a black hole, I'd recommend you
00:07:17 --> 00:07:20 go to the middle of the galaxy. Um, but I
00:07:20 --> 00:07:22 would personally choose not to fall into a
00:07:22 --> 00:07:24 black hole, given the choice. So it worked
00:07:24 --> 00:07:24 out in white To Live.
00:07:25 --> 00:07:27 Andrew Dunkley: It worked in the movie Interstellar. They
00:07:27 --> 00:07:30 managed to get into one, but, um, yeah, that
00:07:30 --> 00:07:32 was science fiction. Although I do Believe a
00:07:32 --> 00:07:34 lot of the science they developed
00:07:35 --> 00:07:37 for that film was, was based on
00:07:38 --> 00:07:41 actuality. They just augmented it to suit
00:07:41 --> 00:07:41 themselves.
00:07:41 --> 00:07:43 But, uh, and the second part of Buddy's
00:07:43 --> 00:07:46 question was, um, photons,
00:07:47 --> 00:07:49 uh, can there be a wave and a particle at the
00:07:49 --> 00:07:49 same time?
00:07:50 --> 00:07:53 Jonti Horner: Yeah. This is going back to the
00:07:53 --> 00:07:54 dawn of things like general relativity,
00:07:54 --> 00:07:57 special relativity, and the dawn of the 20th
00:07:57 --> 00:08:00 century where you get this wave particle
00:08:00 --> 00:08:02 duality concept. And it's in
00:08:02 --> 00:08:05 part based around the observed properties of
00:08:05 --> 00:08:07 light and how it behaves. And you do
00:08:07 --> 00:08:09 experiments when you do an undergrad physics
00:08:09 --> 00:08:11 degree where you reproduce what they did 120
00:08:11 --> 00:08:14 odd years ago. And, um, you can
00:08:14 --> 00:08:16 get both kinds of behaviors.
00:08:17 --> 00:08:19 The famous one is what's called Young's
00:08:19 --> 00:08:20 double slit experiment. So you've got a light
00:08:20 --> 00:08:23 source, like the light illuminating me at the
00:08:23 --> 00:08:25 minute. And, um, you pass that light through
00:08:26 --> 00:08:28 a wall where there are two very thin slits.
00:08:29 --> 00:08:30 And then you look down from above and you can
00:08:30 --> 00:08:33 see the light waves expanding away from
00:08:33 --> 00:08:35 those two slits and interfering with each
00:08:35 --> 00:08:37 other because they get diffracted through the
00:08:37 --> 00:08:39 gap. And you usually illustrate this. I've
00:08:39 --> 00:08:41 done this before in my undergrad teaching by
00:08:41 --> 00:08:44 photographs of waves in the ocean passing
00:08:44 --> 00:08:46 around barriers or passing through gaps. And
00:08:46 --> 00:08:48 you see the same diffraction thing. So you've
00:08:48 --> 00:08:50 got short waves coming towards the gap, and
00:08:50 --> 00:08:52 then they go through two little holes and you
00:08:52 --> 00:08:55 get circular ripples going out that interfere
00:08:55 --> 00:08:56 with each other and you get these
00:08:56 --> 00:08:57 interference patterns.
00:08:57 --> 00:08:57 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah.
00:08:57 --> 00:09:00 Jonti Horner: And, uh, that type of behavior is like acting
00:09:00 --> 00:09:02 as a wave. It's behaving just like waves in
00:09:02 --> 00:09:05 the ocean do. What you get,
00:09:05 --> 00:09:07 though, is if you dim your light down, and
00:09:07 --> 00:09:10 dim it down and dim it down, there's a weird
00:09:10 --> 00:09:12 quantization effect. That light of a given
00:09:12 --> 00:09:15 color you can't make
00:09:15 --> 00:09:18 infinitely faint because you've got a
00:09:18 --> 00:09:20 certain amount of energy carried by
00:09:20 --> 00:09:23 photons. And so if you make your
00:09:23 --> 00:09:26 light dim enough, you can isolate individual
00:09:26 --> 00:09:28 packets of energy, which is what people
00:09:28 --> 00:09:31 describe as photons. So if you get a really,
00:09:31 --> 00:09:33 really, really, really faint light source,
00:09:33 --> 00:09:36 the photons, and you have them
00:09:37 --> 00:09:39 that double slit again, the light source
00:09:39 --> 00:09:41 behind it, light going through the slit and
00:09:41 --> 00:09:43 then hitting a sensor that measures the
00:09:43 --> 00:09:45 light, you get individual flashes of light
00:09:45 --> 00:09:48 where the photons hit. And so the photons
00:09:48 --> 00:09:50 appear to be moving as packets or particles
00:09:50 --> 00:09:53 of light, and you get a single flash. If you
00:09:53 --> 00:09:56 record millions of those flashes, they
00:09:56 --> 00:09:58 will form that same diffraction pattern.
00:09:59 --> 00:10:02 So the light is behaving as both
00:10:02 --> 00:10:05 a particle and a wave at the same time. The
00:10:05 --> 00:10:07 really bizarre part of this for me, is the
00:10:07 --> 00:10:10 fact that what this means is that
00:10:10 --> 00:10:12 from a probability point of view, because you
00:10:12 --> 00:10:14 get that diffraction pattern, because you get
00:10:14 --> 00:10:15 those maxima and minima, all the
00:10:15 --> 00:10:18 interference, what that means is that while
00:10:18 --> 00:10:20 light is behaving as a particle, it's
00:10:20 --> 00:10:22 technically going through both slits at once.
00:10:22 --> 00:10:24 So that particle is in two places at one
00:10:24 --> 00:10:27 time. And it all gets really, really bizarre.
00:10:28 --> 00:10:29 Ties into, again, something I was talking
00:10:29 --> 00:10:32 about in my, um, tutorial today for my
00:10:32 --> 00:10:33 undergrad students. We were talking about
00:10:33 --> 00:10:36 something called the Akovsky effect, which
00:10:36 --> 00:10:39 is to do with light from the
00:10:39 --> 00:10:41 sun being absorbed by an asteroid and then re
00:10:41 --> 00:10:44 emitted by that asteroid, and you get a
00:10:44 --> 00:10:47 transfer of momentum. If the asteroid's
00:10:47 --> 00:10:49 rotating a little bit, the direction the
00:10:49 --> 00:10:51 light is emitted is not the same as it goes
00:10:51 --> 00:10:52 in. And that means you get a little bit of a
00:10:52 --> 00:10:54 rocket thrust on the asteroid, and that can
00:10:54 --> 00:10:56 change its orbit on really long periods of
00:10:56 --> 00:10:58 time. One of my students said, I don't quite
00:10:58 --> 00:11:01 get this. How can photons, which have no
00:11:01 --> 00:11:04 mass, have momentum? Because you
00:11:04 --> 00:11:06 need momentum in order to transfer momentum
00:11:06 --> 00:11:09 to apply the thrust to the asteroid. So I
00:11:09 --> 00:11:11 had to look into it then, and it turns out
00:11:11 --> 00:11:13 that the concept of momentum is
00:11:13 --> 00:11:16 fundamental to photons. So these packets of
00:11:16 --> 00:11:19 energy traveling at the speed of light that
00:11:19 --> 00:11:21 have no mass still have momentum.
00:11:22 --> 00:11:24 And that momentum is entirely contained in
00:11:24 --> 00:11:26 the energy and the oscillation of the
00:11:26 --> 00:11:29 electromagnetic waves that make up that
00:11:29 --> 00:11:32 packet of energy, that particle. And, uh, it
00:11:32 --> 00:11:34 ends up going back to the famous equation
00:11:34 --> 00:11:37 equals MC squared, which is the
00:11:37 --> 00:11:39 relationship between energy and matter. Now,
00:11:39 --> 00:11:41 equals MC squared is a simplification of a
00:11:41 --> 00:11:43 more complex equation Einstein came up with,
00:11:44 --> 00:11:46 which, off the top of my head, I think it's E
00:11:46 --> 00:11:48 squared equals P squared C
00:11:48 --> 00:11:51 squared plus M m squared C to the
00:11:51 --> 00:11:54 4. So this is the total
00:11:54 --> 00:11:57 energy is proportional, is related to the
00:11:57 --> 00:12:00 momentum times the speed of light, plus
00:12:00 --> 00:12:02 the mass times the speed of light squared. So
00:12:02 --> 00:12:04 if you've got something moving very slowly,
00:12:04 --> 00:12:07 then it simplifies to equals MC squared
00:12:07 --> 00:12:08 because there's not much momentum. But if
00:12:08 --> 00:12:10 you've got something traveling at the speed
00:12:10 --> 00:12:13 of light, the mass is zero. So the MC squared
00:12:13 --> 00:12:16 bit vanishes, and you just get the energy is
00:12:16 --> 00:12:18 equal to the momentum times the speed of
00:12:18 --> 00:12:20 light. So in other words, the momentum of a
00:12:20 --> 00:12:23 photon is equal to the energy of the photon
00:12:23 --> 00:12:26 divided by the speed of light. Which means
00:12:26 --> 00:12:28 that even though photons have no mass,
00:12:29 --> 00:12:31 they still carry momentum, and it's a
00:12:31 --> 00:12:33 fundamental part of them. And what this tells
00:12:33 --> 00:12:34 you more than anything else is when you get
00:12:34 --> 00:12:37 to the quantum scale. Tiny little things.
00:12:37 --> 00:12:39 When you start dealing with relativity,
00:12:39 --> 00:12:42 nothing makes sense. It's not common sense.
00:12:42 --> 00:12:44 And, um, we're still trying to understand it,
00:12:44 --> 00:12:46 and it's all really hard. But all of that is
00:12:46 --> 00:12:49 tied into this wave particle duality and the
00:12:49 --> 00:12:51 Young's double slit experiment. And, um, to
00:12:51 --> 00:12:53 be honest, it makes all our heads hurt.
00:12:53 --> 00:12:56 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, it does. But great, um, question,
00:12:56 --> 00:12:57 buddy. Thanks for sending it in.
00:13:00 --> 00:13:02 Okay, we checked all four systems, and.
00:13:02 --> 00:13:04 Jonti Horner: Being with a girl, Space Nuts.
00:13:04 --> 00:13:06 Andrew Dunkley: Uh, our next question. Jonti comes from
00:13:06 --> 00:13:09 istok. Uh, he says hi. I like your
00:13:09 --> 00:13:12 Space Nuts podcast. So do we. Uh, a, ah,
00:13:12 --> 00:13:14 neutron star is very dense as it contains
00:13:14 --> 00:13:17 only neutrons. So no empty
00:13:17 --> 00:13:20 space between the core and electrons. Right.
00:13:20 --> 00:13:23 What happens to the matter at a
00:13:23 --> 00:13:26 black hole? Is there empty space, uh,
00:13:26 --> 00:13:29 also inside neutrons? And can they
00:13:29 --> 00:13:32 be even denser? Thank you. ISTOK
00:13:32 --> 00:13:35 from Slovenia. We haven't had many questions
00:13:35 --> 00:13:38 from Slovenia. Nice to hear from you. Um,
00:13:38 --> 00:13:40 this one, um, I got to confess, is
00:13:40 --> 00:13:42 way out of my ballpark.
00:13:43 --> 00:13:46 Jonti Horner: This is a really, ah, awesome question. And
00:13:46 --> 00:13:48 it's pushing the boundaries of, we don't know
00:13:50 --> 00:13:52 the way all this works. We talked about white
00:13:52 --> 00:13:54 dwarfs earlier. If you compress
00:13:54 --> 00:13:57 matter into a smaller and smaller space, you
00:13:57 --> 00:13:59 can get nuclear fusion happening, propping up
00:13:59 --> 00:14:01 a star. And that's why stars shine. Star,
00:14:01 --> 00:14:03 like the sun, gets to the end of its life,
00:14:03 --> 00:14:05 blows off its outer layers, can't support
00:14:05 --> 00:14:07 itself with nuclear fusion anymore because it
00:14:07 --> 00:14:10 can't get the fusion going. So gravity wins
00:14:10 --> 00:14:13 and collapses everything in. And eventually
00:14:13 --> 00:14:16 you get to a point where atoms are propped up
00:14:16 --> 00:14:18 against each other, held up by something
00:14:18 --> 00:14:21 called electron degeneracy pressure. Um, and
00:14:21 --> 00:14:23 what that is effectively is you've got of a
00:14:23 --> 00:14:25 given atom, as Iztoch's inferring here,
00:14:25 --> 00:14:27 you've got the nucleus in the middle, and,
00:14:27 --> 00:14:29 um, then way, way on the outside, you've got
00:14:29 --> 00:14:31 this cloud of electrons going around it. And
00:14:31 --> 00:14:34 those electrons are negatively charged. And
00:14:34 --> 00:14:35 the analogy people often use here is
00:14:35 --> 00:14:37 something like the nucleus is like a grape at
00:14:37 --> 00:14:39 the middle of a football field, and the
00:14:39 --> 00:14:41 electrons are, like, running around the
00:14:41 --> 00:14:43 boundary. So there's a lot of empty space in
00:14:43 --> 00:14:45 there. Which means if you take the mass of
00:14:45 --> 00:14:48 the sun and compress it down so that
00:14:48 --> 00:14:51 all the atoms are, ah, butted up against each
00:14:51 --> 00:14:53 other, so their electron clouds are pressing
00:14:53 --> 00:14:54 on each other, and you've got rid of all the
00:14:54 --> 00:14:57 space outside the atoms. You get an object
00:14:57 --> 00:15:00 about the size of the Earth. So you take an
00:15:00 --> 00:15:02 object, the mass of the sun, um, squash it to
00:15:02 --> 00:15:04 the size of The Earth. And at that point, the
00:15:04 --> 00:15:06 electron clouds around each atom butt up
00:15:06 --> 00:15:08 against each other, and uh, the negative
00:15:08 --> 00:15:10 charge and the negative charge repel each
00:15:10 --> 00:15:12 other and you get a pressure that holds it
00:15:12 --> 00:15:15 up. That's called electron degenerative
00:15:15 --> 00:15:18 pressure. And that works. And you can keep
00:15:18 --> 00:15:20 adding mass and adding mass, but eventually,
00:15:20 --> 00:15:22 if you get to about 1.4 times the mass of the
00:15:22 --> 00:15:24 sun, a point you call the Chandrasekhar
00:15:24 --> 00:15:27 limit, the gravitational pull is strong
00:15:27 --> 00:15:29 enough to overcome the repulsion of those
00:15:29 --> 00:15:32 electrons, and gravity wins. And so things
00:15:32 --> 00:15:35 keep collapsing further, and that squashes
00:15:35 --> 00:15:37 the electrons and the protons in the atoms
00:15:37 --> 00:15:40 together, making neutrons. And so the atoms
00:15:40 --> 00:15:42 of those, well, m, all those atoms that made
00:15:42 --> 00:15:45 up the white dwarf get turned
00:15:45 --> 00:15:48 into neutrons. And so
00:15:48 --> 00:15:50 suddenly you've gone from a football pitch
00:15:50 --> 00:15:52 size to a grape. Everything's squashed into
00:15:52 --> 00:15:54 the nucleus and everything keeps
00:15:54 --> 00:15:56 collapsing. But eventually neutrons butt up
00:15:56 --> 00:15:59 against each other and the strong nuclear
00:15:59 --> 00:16:01 force I think it is stops them
00:16:02 --> 00:16:04 collapsing any further. There's a new
00:16:04 --> 00:16:05 pressure, which is called neutron degeneracy
00:16:05 --> 00:16:08 pressure, and that holds neutron stars up.
00:16:09 --> 00:16:12 And so you get something the mass of the sun,
00:16:12 --> 00:16:14 but the size of a city a few kilometers
00:16:14 --> 00:16:16 across. Okay, Keep adding mass to that and
00:16:16 --> 00:16:18 you eventually reach critical mass. I've
00:16:18 --> 00:16:19 forgotten the name of it. But the critical
00:16:19 --> 00:16:21 mass for neutron stars is thought to be about
00:16:21 --> 00:16:24 three times the mass of the sun. And at that
00:16:24 --> 00:16:26 point, gravity is strong enough that the
00:16:26 --> 00:16:28 strength of the neutrons pushing apart cannot
00:16:28 --> 00:16:30 hold them up against gravity, and gravity
00:16:30 --> 00:16:33 wins. So things collapse down
00:16:33 --> 00:16:35 even further. And this is where it gets to
00:16:35 --> 00:16:37 the point of our understanding starting to
00:16:37 --> 00:16:40 fail. There are some suggestions that if
00:16:40 --> 00:16:42 you squash neutrons together with enough
00:16:42 --> 00:16:45 force, you can compress them down
00:16:45 --> 00:16:48 so that inside, inside that neutron,
00:16:48 --> 00:16:50 you've got a lot of empty space and some
00:16:50 --> 00:16:53 subatomic particles, quarks. And you could
00:16:53 --> 00:16:55 squash them together until the force between
00:16:55 --> 00:16:57 the quarks prevents them
00:16:57 --> 00:16:59 squashing in. Any further. And you could get
00:16:59 --> 00:17:01 an additional kind of thing, which is why you
00:17:01 --> 00:17:03 get the concept of a quark star. And some
00:17:03 --> 00:17:05 people have speculated that within quarks
00:17:05 --> 00:17:07 you've maybe got sub subatomic particles,
00:17:07 --> 00:17:09 which I think are called pions or P Os or
00:17:09 --> 00:17:12 something like this. So maybe after a quarks
00:17:12 --> 00:17:13 are, you can get smaller still.
00:17:14 --> 00:17:17 Fundamentally though, every time
00:17:17 --> 00:17:19 mass scale, you'll reach a point where no
00:17:19 --> 00:17:21 force we can imagine is strong enough to hold
00:17:21 --> 00:17:24 it up and it'll collapse further. What you
00:17:24 --> 00:17:27 get with a black hole is secondary
00:17:27 --> 00:17:29 to this. It's kind of separate to it, which
00:17:29 --> 00:17:32 is that the amount of mass you've got
00:17:32 --> 00:17:35 means that to escape from that mass within
00:17:35 --> 00:17:37 that small area, you'd have to travel faster
00:17:37 --> 00:17:40 than the speed of light. So that's where you
00:17:40 --> 00:17:42 get the event horizon of a black hole. But
00:17:42 --> 00:17:44 the physical object inside the black hole, if
00:17:44 --> 00:17:45 there is one, and we don't know if there is
00:17:45 --> 00:17:47 one, is probably smaller than the size of
00:17:47 --> 00:17:50 that event horizon. Now, I
00:17:50 --> 00:17:52 am not an expert in this. My understanding
00:17:52 --> 00:17:54 from what I've seen written is that people
00:17:54 --> 00:17:57 think quark stars would be big
00:17:57 --> 00:18:00 enough that the gravity on their surface is
00:18:00 --> 00:18:02 low enough that light could escape, so they'd
00:18:02 --> 00:18:03 be bigger than the event horizon, so that
00:18:03 --> 00:18:06 we'd see them as physical objects. But it may
00:18:06 --> 00:18:08 be that the next step down is smaller than
00:18:08 --> 00:18:10 the event horizon. So you have a black hole.
00:18:10 --> 00:18:12 Fundamentally, what happens with the matter
00:18:12 --> 00:18:15 inside a black hole and, um, what empty space
00:18:15 --> 00:18:17 you have inside neutrons and stuff is pushing
00:18:17 --> 00:18:19 the boundaries of our knowledge of how matter
00:18:19 --> 00:18:22 works and how particle physics works. We do
00:18:22 --> 00:18:24 think there are these subatomic particles.
00:18:24 --> 00:18:25 There's a lot of evidence for that. And
00:18:25 --> 00:18:27 that's where the RDF quark stars come from.
00:18:28 --> 00:18:30 Knowledge of what quarks are made upon is
00:18:30 --> 00:18:32 really pushing the boundaries of what we
00:18:32 --> 00:18:34 know. And I'm, um, nowhere near qualified to
00:18:34 --> 00:18:36 comment on that, other than that there is
00:18:36 --> 00:18:39 speculation that you could possibly have even
00:18:39 --> 00:18:42 smaller components that behave
00:18:42 --> 00:18:44 differently. And this is where, as we get
00:18:44 --> 00:18:46 more energetic particle colliders in the
00:18:46 --> 00:18:49 future, as we get more better telescopes,
00:18:49 --> 00:18:51 better instrumentation all around, these are
00:18:51 --> 00:18:53 the kind of questions that people want to
00:18:53 --> 00:18:55 answer as we push that boundary of knowledge
00:18:55 --> 00:18:58 back. But it's really, at this point is
00:18:58 --> 00:19:00 SOC is asking questions that are at the
00:19:00 --> 00:19:02 boundaries of what our knowledge of modern
00:19:02 --> 00:19:04 physics is. And, uh, it's by asking these
00:19:04 --> 00:19:06 kind of questions that we'll learn the
00:19:06 --> 00:19:08 answers. But we're not there yet.
00:19:08 --> 00:19:11 Andrew Dunkley: No, no, we're not. But if, uh, we didn't ask
00:19:11 --> 00:19:13 questions like this, we'd never go looking
00:19:13 --> 00:19:16 for the answers, and we'd probably
00:19:16 --> 00:19:17 stagnate as a species.
00:19:18 --> 00:19:20 Jonti Horner: So, I mean, if you go back a long time, you
00:19:20 --> 00:19:22 know, if we didn't ask questions, we'd
00:19:22 --> 00:19:23 probably still be sitting around saying, me
00:19:23 --> 00:19:26 wish fire hot and not actually having the
00:19:26 --> 00:19:28 ability to have fires in. A day like today
00:19:28 --> 00:19:30 will be extremely miserable with the drizzly
00:19:30 --> 00:19:31 rain, because at least the fire that I've had
00:19:31 --> 00:19:33 on has kept me warm.
00:19:33 --> 00:19:36 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Uh, thanks for
00:19:36 --> 00:19:38 the question. Istok. Lovely to hear from you.
00:19:38 --> 00:19:40 Hope all is well in Slovenia.
00:19:40 --> 00:19:42 This is Space Nuts with Andrew Duckley and
00:19:42 --> 00:19:43 Jonti Horner.
00:19:46 --> 00:19:48 Generic: Three, two, one.
00:19:49 --> 00:19:52 Andrew Dunkley: Space Nuts. Our next question
00:19:52 --> 00:19:55 is, uh, an audio question I do
00:19:55 --> 00:19:58 believe. Now, forgive me, I may have got your
00:19:58 --> 00:20:00 name wrong. I couldn't quite pick it up. Uh,
00:20:00 --> 00:20:02 maybe it was the accent, maybe it was just my
00:20:02 --> 00:20:05 lousy capacity to translate, but
00:20:05 --> 00:20:07 I think it's Foster.
00:20:07 --> 00:20:10 Speaker D: Hello, Andrew. Hello, Fred. And
00:20:10 --> 00:20:13 hello, Jonathan. I am from
00:20:13 --> 00:20:16 Norway, and I have a question for you.
00:20:16 --> 00:20:19 Uh, in relation to Interstellar, the
00:20:19 --> 00:20:21 movie, probably my favorite space
00:20:21 --> 00:20:24 movie of all time. And
00:20:24 --> 00:20:27 I have a question about the wormhole. And
00:20:27 --> 00:20:29 what kind of parameters
00:20:29 --> 00:20:32 theoretical. Has to be in order or to
00:20:32 --> 00:20:35 be in place for this to be possible and
00:20:35 --> 00:20:38 everything that we will discover or
00:20:38 --> 00:20:40 maybe, uh, youth, such a
00:20:40 --> 00:20:43 phenomena at some point. Thank you.
00:20:44 --> 00:20:47 Andrew Dunkley: Okay. Um, thank you, Foster. I think that's
00:20:47 --> 00:20:49 what your name was. Norway. I was there
00:20:49 --> 00:20:51 recently. Um, only in the last few months.
00:20:51 --> 00:20:53 And what a beautiful country you have.
00:20:54 --> 00:20:57 I got to stop in, I think, four or
00:20:57 --> 00:21:00 five different places, um, throughout
00:21:00 --> 00:21:02 Norway. And I learned a lot about the. The
00:21:02 --> 00:21:05 country, uh, uh, Jonti.
00:21:05 --> 00:21:07 Because, uh, they don't have much arable
00:21:07 --> 00:21:08 land. It's a.
00:21:08 --> 00:21:09 Jonti Horner: It's.
00:21:09 --> 00:21:11 Andrew Dunkley: They've got water and they've got mountains.
00:21:11 --> 00:21:14 There's not much flat ground. It's so un
00:21:14 --> 00:21:16 Australian. Very un
00:21:16 --> 00:21:19 Australian. Um, and because they've got so
00:21:19 --> 00:21:21 much water, uh, they can generate a lot of
00:21:21 --> 00:21:23 electricity. And nobody pays for electricity
00:21:23 --> 00:21:26 in Norway, from what I was told. Um,
00:21:26 --> 00:21:29 but they don't really have much
00:21:29 --> 00:21:32 room to grow crops. And, uh, and it's too
00:21:32 --> 00:21:35 cold most of the time anyway. Uh, that said,
00:21:35 --> 00:21:37 when we went to North Cape, which is the
00:21:37 --> 00:21:39 northernmost tip of Europe, which is
00:21:39 --> 00:21:41 obviously in Norway, as in north,
00:21:42 --> 00:21:44 um, 28 degrees. It was
00:21:45 --> 00:21:47 28 degrees. And the locals were freaking out.
00:21:47 --> 00:21:50 That was a heat wave. Uh, to us it was just
00:21:50 --> 00:21:53 beautiful. But, um, one
00:21:53 --> 00:21:55 thing I did notice, and you'd probably be
00:21:55 --> 00:21:57 aware of this being, uh, from the Northern
00:21:57 --> 00:21:59 hemisphere, their summer,
00:22:00 --> 00:22:03 where most of the population lives, their
00:22:03 --> 00:22:06 summer is not like a summer here
00:22:06 --> 00:22:09 because they are further north than we are
00:22:09 --> 00:22:11 south, if that makes sense.
00:22:11 --> 00:22:14 So our summers can be much more severe. Uh,
00:22:15 --> 00:22:16 um, but
00:22:18 --> 00:22:20 their summers are very mild,
00:22:22 --> 00:22:23 especially when you get to places like
00:22:23 --> 00:22:26 Greenland and Iceland and, uh,
00:22:27 --> 00:22:30 even in Canada, places like that. It's a
00:22:30 --> 00:22:30 different world.
00:22:31 --> 00:22:33 Jonti Horner: Yeah, I mean, I know for a fact, having grown
00:22:33 --> 00:22:35 up in the uk, and I, uh, suspect that heat
00:22:35 --> 00:22:38 wave in Norway was brutal that he hits
00:22:38 --> 00:22:39 different in those countries because the
00:22:39 --> 00:22:41 buildings are engineered to keep you warm,
00:22:41 --> 00:22:42 not to keep you cool.
00:22:42 --> 00:22:43 Andrew Dunkley: Correct.
00:22:43 --> 00:22:45 Jonti Horner: And so, yeah, I'm complaining about the
00:22:45 --> 00:22:47 horrible night I had the other night with the
00:22:47 --> 00:22:49 power outage and the heat wave that we had.
00:22:49 --> 00:22:52 But it was made more bearable by the fact
00:22:52 --> 00:22:54 that the design of this house is more around
00:22:55 --> 00:22:56 keeping people cool in summer and keeping
00:22:56 --> 00:22:59 them warm in winter. Whereas when I was doing
00:22:59 --> 00:23:02 my PhD in Oxford back in 2003, we
00:23:02 --> 00:23:03 had what was then the hottest summer on
00:23:03 --> 00:23:06 record in the UK and now is a footnote in
00:23:06 --> 00:23:07 history because things are much warmer now
00:23:07 --> 00:23:09 than they were. But we had a couple of days
00:23:09 --> 00:23:12 that were in the mid-30s. And I'm in this old
00:23:12 --> 00:23:14 building that is a couple of hundred years
00:23:14 --> 00:23:17 old with south facing windows to get the
00:23:17 --> 00:23:19 light, northern hemisphere, the sun's in the
00:23:19 --> 00:23:21 south, um, on the ground floor. So you could
00:23:21 --> 00:23:23 only open these floor to ceiling windows by
00:23:23 --> 00:23:25 about an inch because they're security locked
00:23:25 --> 00:23:28 down. And uh, no air conditioning. A lot of
00:23:28 --> 00:23:30 computers in there. It was absolutely awful.
00:23:31 --> 00:23:33 Um, the other thing that I really notice is
00:23:34 --> 00:23:37 I'm into one where I'm 27 degrees south. The
00:23:37 --> 00:23:39 day length barely varies. When I grew up, you
00:23:39 --> 00:23:41 know, in the winter I'd go to school in the
00:23:41 --> 00:23:44 dark and come home in the dark. And here the
00:23:44 --> 00:23:46 day length barely varies. But we're already
00:23:46 --> 00:23:48 well off topic from, um, the awesome
00:23:48 --> 00:23:48 question.
00:23:49 --> 00:23:52 I should say that my movie viewing
00:23:52 --> 00:23:55 over the last decade or 10 or 15 years has
00:23:55 --> 00:23:57 been much more limited thanks to how busy
00:23:57 --> 00:23:59 I've been in my career. And Interstellar has
00:23:59 --> 00:24:02 been on my to watch list for years and never
00:24:02 --> 00:24:04 quite happened. No, we've got Brilliant,
00:24:04 --> 00:24:07 Gotta do it. And um, it's on the list and I
00:24:07 --> 00:24:08 wish I'd seen it at the cinemas, but it's
00:24:08 --> 00:24:11 always been a not today thing. It's never
00:24:11 --> 00:24:12 quite happened.
00:24:12 --> 00:24:15 Andrew Dunkley: You know, I've watched it four or five times.
00:24:15 --> 00:24:18 Yeah, I love it. And I think
00:24:18 --> 00:24:20 what makes it for me being someone in radio
00:24:20 --> 00:24:23 is the musical score that goes with
00:24:23 --> 00:24:25 it. It is phenomenal.
00:24:27 --> 00:24:29 Jonti Horner: It's meant to be amazing and I'm just sad
00:24:29 --> 00:24:30 I've not got around to seeing it yet. But one
00:24:30 --> 00:24:33 of the things I know about it is that it is
00:24:33 --> 00:24:35 pretty hardcore on the science. But they did
00:24:35 --> 00:24:36 a really good job of getting some of the
00:24:36 --> 00:24:39 world's really leading theoretical physicists
00:24:40 --> 00:24:42 to give input and get really good scientific
00:24:42 --> 00:24:45 advice. And it does to my understanding.
00:24:45 --> 00:24:47 And I say this with a bit of a caveat that
00:24:47 --> 00:24:48 I've not seen it. But my understanding,
00:24:48 --> 00:24:51 talking to colleagues is it does really well.
00:24:51 --> 00:24:53 What I like in good science fiction is where
00:24:53 --> 00:24:55 it gets the science right, except where it
00:24:55 --> 00:24:57 needs to get the science wrong to make the
00:24:57 --> 00:24:59 plot advance. Um, exactly. And I'm always
00:24:59 --> 00:25:01 really happy with that. I get really grumpy
00:25:01 --> 00:25:03 with films that get the science wrong to no
00:25:03 --> 00:25:06 good reason. I watch films and they've
00:25:06 --> 00:25:08 got a night sky, and it's not the Earth night
00:25:08 --> 00:25:11 sky. And it's like you're on Earth. It is
00:25:11 --> 00:25:13 really cheap to point a camera at the sky and
00:25:13 --> 00:25:15 get a picture. Why would you make up a false
00:25:15 --> 00:25:18 night sky? There's no need for that. But if
00:25:18 --> 00:25:20 you do everything you can to get the science
00:25:20 --> 00:25:23 right, or the science to fit our best current
00:25:23 --> 00:25:25 understanding in the case of things we've
00:25:25 --> 00:25:28 never directly experienced or seen, but you
00:25:28 --> 00:25:30 circumvent that to make the plot work, I'm
00:25:30 --> 00:25:32 totally cool with that. That's a very knowing
00:25:32 --> 00:25:33 use of science.
00:25:34 --> 00:25:36 This is all about wormholes, which are a
00:25:36 --> 00:25:39 staple of science fiction because
00:25:39 --> 00:25:41 they are a hypothetical way that we could
00:25:41 --> 00:25:43 move from one place in the universe to
00:25:43 --> 00:25:45 another at speeds much greater than the speed
00:25:45 --> 00:25:47 of light, by essentially cutting out the
00:25:47 --> 00:25:50 middleman. And the way it's always envisaged
00:25:50 --> 00:25:52 is to envisage the universe drawn on a two
00:25:52 --> 00:25:54 dimensional sheet of paper and then folding
00:25:54 --> 00:25:56 the sheet of paper so that two places that
00:25:56 --> 00:25:59 are nowhere near each other touch and saying,
00:25:59 --> 00:26:00 what if you could tunnel between them?
00:26:01 --> 00:26:04 Wormholes have their origins in
00:26:04 --> 00:26:06 particular solutions to the equations from
00:26:06 --> 00:26:09 Einstein's general relativity. And they are
00:26:09 --> 00:26:11 purely theoretical constructs at the minute.
00:26:11 --> 00:26:13 They're possible solutions to the model that
00:26:13 --> 00:26:16 Einstein developed that offer the
00:26:16 --> 00:26:19 possibility that you could have
00:26:19 --> 00:26:21 instantaneous travel between two distant
00:26:21 --> 00:26:23 points. There's a lot of debate over whether
00:26:23 --> 00:26:26 they are anything more than a theoretical
00:26:26 --> 00:26:28 construct. And of course, this is all
00:26:29 --> 00:26:31 predicated on, um, the idea that
00:26:31 --> 00:26:34 Einstein's model of the universe is
00:26:34 --> 00:26:36 a correct analysis of what's actually there.
00:26:37 --> 00:26:39 And it may well be that in 50 years or 100
00:26:39 --> 00:26:40 years, when we've got incredibly more
00:26:40 --> 00:26:42 powerful observing tools than we have now, we
00:26:42 --> 00:26:45 start to see the cracks in Einstein's model
00:26:45 --> 00:26:46 just the same way that we did with Newton's
00:26:46 --> 00:26:49 gravitation a couple of hundred years ago.
00:26:50 --> 00:26:52 There are a few variants of wormholes that
00:26:52 --> 00:26:54 have been proposed based on different
00:26:54 --> 00:26:56 solutions to those
00:26:57 --> 00:26:59 theories. Some of them have even come about
00:26:59 --> 00:27:01 kind of tied to. You could potentially have a
00:27:01 --> 00:27:04 rotating black hole that would turn into,
00:27:04 --> 00:27:06 that would allow you to travel through the
00:27:06 --> 00:27:08 black hole without getting destroyed and use
00:27:08 --> 00:27:11 it as a tunnel to somewhere else. There
00:27:11 --> 00:27:14 are also solutions to those equations
00:27:15 --> 00:27:17 which could let you set up one of these
00:27:17 --> 00:27:19 wormholes. One of the variants of this is
00:27:19 --> 00:27:21 known as an Einstein Rosen bridge, I believe,
00:27:21 --> 00:27:24 um, that could set up a permanent tunnel that
00:27:24 --> 00:27:26 could be traversable. But in order to make
00:27:26 --> 00:27:29 that work, you need material which has
00:27:29 --> 00:27:31 negative energy, which often gets talked
00:27:31 --> 00:27:34 about as exotic matter. And I've been
00:27:34 --> 00:27:36 listening to an audiobook series that's very
00:27:36 --> 00:27:38 good, fun, but very pulpy, called
00:27:38 --> 00:27:40 Expeditionary Force. And they use wormholes
00:27:40 --> 00:27:41 all the time. And they're always talking
00:27:41 --> 00:27:43 about things made of exotic matter by
00:27:43 --> 00:27:46 technologically advanced species millions of
00:27:46 --> 00:27:48 years more advanced than we are. It's become
00:27:48 --> 00:27:51 a staple of science fiction as uh, to
00:27:51 --> 00:27:54 whether we will ever find them or ever
00:27:54 --> 00:27:56 be able to use them. We simply don't know yet
00:27:56 --> 00:27:57 at uh, the minute. They're a purely
00:27:57 --> 00:27:59 theoretical constructs. So they're kind of an
00:27:59 --> 00:28:02 extreme prediction of one model of how we
00:28:02 --> 00:28:05 think the universe could work. They are
00:28:05 --> 00:28:07 possibly something that with sufficiently
00:28:07 --> 00:28:10 advanced far future technology, you could
00:28:10 --> 00:28:12 envision the ability to make them and control
00:28:12 --> 00:28:15 them. But that would require us to have
00:28:15 --> 00:28:17 technological advances beyond what we can
00:28:17 --> 00:28:19 imagine here and probably physics to work
00:28:19 --> 00:28:21 differently to how we currently understand
00:28:21 --> 00:28:24 that it would do. I'm loath to say we
00:28:24 --> 00:28:26 couldn't do it because that strikes me as a
00:28:26 --> 00:28:28 bit like the people who in 1910s said we will
00:28:28 --> 00:28:30 never have heavier than air flight just
00:28:30 --> 00:28:33 before the Wright brothers flew. Um,
00:28:33 --> 00:28:36 because we don't know everything. We, we're
00:28:36 --> 00:28:37 in this little bubble of knowledge in an
00:28:37 --> 00:28:40 ocean of things, um, that we don't
00:28:40 --> 00:28:43 know yet in an ocean of darkness. And um,
00:28:43 --> 00:28:46 these things like wormholes are uh, natural
00:28:46 --> 00:28:48 products of our efforts to push that boundary
00:28:48 --> 00:28:51 of knowledge further. All of this is a
00:28:51 --> 00:28:54 very long winded, say, way of saying I don't
00:28:54 --> 00:28:56 have the real knowledge of how all this
00:28:56 --> 00:28:59 works. I'm not that kind of theoretical
00:28:59 --> 00:29:01 physicist. It's all very much
00:29:01 --> 00:29:04 beyond me. I greatly admire the kind
00:29:04 --> 00:29:06 of scientists that have come up with these
00:29:06 --> 00:29:08 ideas. I think they are fabulous, fabulous
00:29:08 --> 00:29:10 ideas. And if the model is
00:29:10 --> 00:29:13 correct, then wormholes could exist.
00:29:13 --> 00:29:15 You then have the leap of could they be
00:29:15 --> 00:29:17 stable for long enough for us to ever observe
00:29:17 --> 00:29:19 them? And of course the most important thing
00:29:19 --> 00:29:21 about a theory is it makes testable
00:29:21 --> 00:29:23 predictions. And so I'd love to see
00:29:23 --> 00:29:25 observations in the future confirm that
00:29:25 --> 00:29:28 wormholes can exist. To then have a leap
00:29:28 --> 00:29:30 beyond that to could we ever develop them and
00:29:30 --> 00:29:33 use them? I'd love to think we will do. But
00:29:33 --> 00:29:35 I think unlike the search for life elsewhere,
00:29:35 --> 00:29:36 where I think there's a chance we'll know the
00:29:36 --> 00:29:39 answer in a lifetime, I think with this it's
00:29:39 --> 00:29:41 very unlikely we'd know the answer within our
00:29:41 --> 00:29:44 lifetime. Unless the answer is no. And the
00:29:44 --> 00:29:46 answer is no would come about Us getting a
00:29:46 --> 00:29:48 newer model for how all these things work to
00:29:48 --> 00:29:51 explain new observations that no longer
00:29:51 --> 00:29:53 offers this as a possibility. Um, I don't
00:29:53 --> 00:29:55 think that's going to happen in all honesty.
00:29:56 --> 00:29:59 But yeah, it's an awesome question.
00:29:59 --> 00:30:00 I wish it was something I could be more
00:30:00 --> 00:30:02 knowledgeable about. But, um, if you went
00:30:02 --> 00:30:05 back 400 years, it was possible for one
00:30:05 --> 00:30:07 person to have the entirety of the world's
00:30:07 --> 00:30:08 knowledge. And that's why you've got these
00:30:08 --> 00:30:11 incredible polymaths who could be chemists
00:30:11 --> 00:30:13 and engineers and biologists and physicists
00:30:13 --> 00:30:15 and astronomers all at the same time.
00:30:16 --> 00:30:18 Nowadays the breadth of human knowledge is so
00:30:18 --> 00:30:21 incredibly vast that nobody
00:30:21 --> 00:30:22 can be an expert in all of it. In fact,
00:30:22 --> 00:30:24 you're normally an expert in a very narrow
00:30:24 --> 00:30:26 area. And it's very fair to say that
00:30:26 --> 00:30:29 wormholes and um, the
00:30:29 --> 00:30:32 complexities of higher dimensional space time
00:30:32 --> 00:30:34 and theoretical physics in that sense, and
00:30:34 --> 00:30:36 you know, the extreme extrapolations of
00:30:36 --> 00:30:38 general relativity are uh, way outside my
00:30:38 --> 00:30:40 wheelhouse. I'm not really qualified to say
00:30:40 --> 00:30:42 much more than that, even having done a bit
00:30:42 --> 00:30:43 of reading around it.
00:30:43 --> 00:30:45 Andrew Dunkley: I like to think that
00:30:47 --> 00:30:49 fundamentally all things are possible. But
00:30:49 --> 00:30:52 uh, I know, um, traveling faster than
00:30:52 --> 00:30:54 light speed isn't because of the amount of
00:30:54 --> 00:30:57 energy it requires, but maybe folding space
00:30:57 --> 00:30:59 or developing wormhole technology could
00:30:59 --> 00:31:01 be the workaround.
00:31:02 --> 00:31:05 So um, yeah, let's put a pin in
00:31:05 --> 00:31:07 that one for future reference when they've
00:31:07 --> 00:31:09 got it all figured out. But um, yeah,
00:31:09 --> 00:31:12 wormhole technology comes up in
00:31:12 --> 00:31:14 interstellar, uh, as created by a fourth
00:31:14 --> 00:31:17 dimension race. Um, I won't say any
00:31:17 --> 00:31:20 more than that, but uh, Foster, thanks for
00:31:20 --> 00:31:22 the question. Uh, I loved it, it was
00:31:22 --> 00:31:24 terrific. And yes, I agree with you. Probably
00:31:24 --> 00:31:26 my favorite,
00:31:27 --> 00:31:30 if at the very least in my top
00:31:30 --> 00:31:32 three, um, um,
00:31:32 --> 00:31:35 science fiction films, uh, although it's
00:31:35 --> 00:31:37 pretty close to not science fiction in many,
00:31:37 --> 00:31:39 many ways. Good on you, Foster. Thanks for
00:31:39 --> 00:31:40 the question.
00:31:42 --> 00:31:44 Jonti Horner: Okay, we checked all four systems and.
00:31:44 --> 00:31:46 Andrew Dunkley: Being with a go space nets now, final
00:31:46 --> 00:31:49 question today comes from Rob.
00:31:49 --> 00:31:52 As I understand the only way
00:31:52 --> 00:31:54 out of a singularity is by Hawking
00:31:54 --> 00:31:57 radiation. However, isn't the Big Bang
00:31:58 --> 00:32:01 another example? If so, then at a
00:32:01 --> 00:32:04 critical universal size an explosion
00:32:04 --> 00:32:07 is imminent. Uh, this suggests that
00:32:07 --> 00:32:09 there were a number of singularities before
00:32:09 --> 00:32:11 the Big Bang that combined to reach
00:32:11 --> 00:32:14 critical Big Bang mass. What do you think?
00:32:14 --> 00:32:17 Uh, could the very early black holes suggest
00:32:17 --> 00:32:19 that a, ah, number were floating around
00:32:19 --> 00:32:21 before the Big Bang and attracted mass
00:32:22 --> 00:32:24 from the Big Bang to form the galaxies?
00:32:25 --> 00:32:25 Jonti Horner: Wow.
00:32:25 --> 00:32:27 Andrew Dunkley: Rob put a lot of thought into that one.
00:32:28 --> 00:32:31 Jonti Horner: Absolutely. And this is yet another one that
00:32:31 --> 00:32:33 gets to pushing the boundaries of any of our
00:32:33 --> 00:32:36 knowledge, to be honest. And this
00:32:36 --> 00:32:39 question from Rob is a really
00:32:39 --> 00:32:41 good illustration of where the boundaries of
00:32:41 --> 00:32:43 analogy when it comes to cosmology and
00:32:43 --> 00:32:45 cosmogenesis, the origin of the universe,
00:32:46 --> 00:32:48 are, ah, where science and philosophy meet,
00:32:49 --> 00:32:51 where you start getting to the point where
00:32:52 --> 00:32:54 you are going so far beyond what we can
00:32:54 --> 00:32:57 observe and what is possible
00:32:57 --> 00:32:59 to understand with our current laws of
00:32:59 --> 00:33:01 physics. That discussion of it moves away
00:33:01 --> 00:33:03 from science and into the realms of physics,
00:33:03 --> 00:33:05 philosophy and thinking about how we think.
00:33:06 --> 00:33:08 And uh, the reason I say that is that our
00:33:08 --> 00:33:11 current best understanding, as I remember it
00:33:11 --> 00:33:14 from the things I've learned, is that,
00:33:15 --> 00:33:17 uh, space and time are inherently properties
00:33:17 --> 00:33:20 of the universe. Which means
00:33:20 --> 00:33:23 that the question of what is before
00:33:23 --> 00:33:25 the Big Bang or the question of what's
00:33:25 --> 00:33:28 outside the universe are things that are
00:33:28 --> 00:33:30 questions of philosophy rather than science.
00:33:31 --> 00:33:33 Because by definition you can't have a before
00:33:33 --> 00:33:35 the Big Bang when time only started at the
00:33:35 --> 00:33:37 Big Bang and time is a property of the
00:33:37 --> 00:33:39 universe. Similarly, you can't have a concept
00:33:39 --> 00:33:42 of outside the universe when space is of the
00:33:42 --> 00:33:44 universe. Yeah, now as I say this, to me
00:33:44 --> 00:33:47 really gets to be philosophy rather than
00:33:47 --> 00:33:49 science because that makes my head hurt. And
00:33:49 --> 00:33:51 I think anything that makes my head hurt can
00:33:51 --> 00:33:53 be described as philosophy. Um,
00:33:54 --> 00:33:56 but it is a lot of it's about how we think
00:33:56 --> 00:33:59 and how we visualize stuff. So I suspect
00:33:59 --> 00:34:01 if we got somebody on who was one of the
00:34:01 --> 00:34:02 world's leading cosmologists, they could
00:34:02 --> 00:34:04 answer this a lot more clearly. But they'd
00:34:04 --> 00:34:06 probably be saying that we can't really say
00:34:06 --> 00:34:08 anything about what was happening before the
00:34:08 --> 00:34:11 Big Bang because before the Big Bang is a
00:34:11 --> 00:34:13 meaningless concept. Before the Big Bang,
00:34:13 --> 00:34:14 time didn't exist.
00:34:15 --> 00:34:17 Andrew Dunkley: Well, the question has been asked
00:34:17 --> 00:34:19 directly to us in the past, what was there
00:34:19 --> 00:34:22 before the Big Bang? And Fred's answer is
00:34:22 --> 00:34:25 always nothing. Well,
00:34:25 --> 00:34:27 no, no, no, he doesn't say nothing. He says
00:34:27 --> 00:34:28 we don't know.
00:34:29 --> 00:34:31 Jonti Horner: It is really a we don't know. Now
00:34:31 --> 00:34:34 there are a number of theories out there
00:34:34 --> 00:34:36 because this verges on philosophy and um,
00:34:37 --> 00:34:39 religion. Not in the, not in the sense of any
00:34:39 --> 00:34:41 given named faith, but rather
00:34:42 --> 00:34:45 the point at uh, which you move from
00:34:45 --> 00:34:48 evidence and theory and prediction
00:34:48 --> 00:34:51 to faith. Um, and
00:34:52 --> 00:34:54 I'm not myself religious, but I've got a lot
00:34:54 --> 00:34:56 of colleagues that are. And there is, despite
00:34:56 --> 00:34:58 what some people try and manufacture, there
00:34:58 --> 00:35:00 is no conflict between religion and science
00:35:00 --> 00:35:03 at all. Um, Terry Pratchett, who I
00:35:03 --> 00:35:04 obviously put a lot of salt by because I
00:35:04 --> 00:35:06 mentioned him very, very often, had some
00:35:06 --> 00:35:07 really good discussions of this in the
00:35:07 --> 00:35:10 discworld books and the concept
00:35:10 --> 00:35:12 that. I think it's in the science of
00:35:12 --> 00:35:14 Discworld books that science and religion are
00:35:14 --> 00:35:17 orthogonal and that science. Science operates
00:35:17 --> 00:35:19 in the absence of belief because it's about
00:35:19 --> 00:35:22 evidence, whereas belief operate. Religion
00:35:22 --> 00:35:25 operates in the domain of outside of evidence
00:35:25 --> 00:35:27 because it's about belief. And,
00:35:28 --> 00:35:30 you know, I don't need to believe. This table
00:35:30 --> 00:35:32 in front of me is there because I put the
00:35:32 --> 00:35:34 evidence of my hand resting on it in my
00:35:34 --> 00:35:36 microphone set. There's a lot of really
00:35:36 --> 00:35:37 interesting stuff there. And, uh, the reason
00:35:37 --> 00:35:39 that I've gone on that little bit of a detour
00:35:39 --> 00:35:42 is that questions about what happened before
00:35:42 --> 00:35:45 the Big Bang are questions that, uh, are
00:35:45 --> 00:35:47 beyond what we can. What of. Beyond what we
00:35:47 --> 00:35:49 can know. Because all of our ability to
00:35:49 --> 00:35:52 observe and measure is limited to
00:35:52 --> 00:35:55 the results of the Big Bang in terms
00:35:55 --> 00:35:57 of space and time.
00:35:58 --> 00:36:00 Those started at the Big Bang. So to try and
00:36:00 --> 00:36:02 understand anything about before the Big Bang
00:36:02 --> 00:36:04 with those in our current understanding of
00:36:04 --> 00:36:07 how it works becomes a matter of religion or
00:36:07 --> 00:36:08 faith, because there is no way of having
00:36:08 --> 00:36:11 evidence either way. Um, apologies for a
00:36:11 --> 00:36:13 bit of a background noise, by the way. The
00:36:13 --> 00:36:15 rain is pounding on the wonderful roof here,
00:36:15 --> 00:36:16 which is a very Australian experience.
00:36:16 --> 00:36:18 Andrew Dunkley: Uh, now I'm a thousand kilometers away from
00:36:18 --> 00:36:20 you, but it just started raining here as
00:36:20 --> 00:36:20 well.
00:36:21 --> 00:36:24 Jonti Horner: Spooky action at a distance is what that is.
00:36:24 --> 00:36:26 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, it was probably a wormhole.
00:36:26 --> 00:36:28 Jonti Horner: Yeah, absolutely. It's teleporting through,
00:36:28 --> 00:36:30 which is why it's been so dry here recently.
00:36:30 --> 00:36:32 You're getting all the fun. Yeah.
00:36:32 --> 00:36:35 So with this question from Rob, the challenge
00:36:35 --> 00:36:36 is that you're asking the questions that
00:36:36 --> 00:36:38 we're all asking, trying to understand,
00:36:39 --> 00:36:41 but they're not questions we can really
00:36:41 --> 00:36:43 answer when it comes to things outside of the
00:36:43 --> 00:36:46 current universe. What that's led to is a
00:36:46 --> 00:36:48 number of different proposals of theoretical
00:36:48 --> 00:36:51 before the Big Bangs. One is that the Big
00:36:51 --> 00:36:53 Bang is the first thing that there ever was
00:36:53 --> 00:36:55 and will expand for forever, and that's it.
00:36:55 --> 00:36:57 And it's doom. One is that
00:36:58 --> 00:37:00 you have these Big Bangs followed by Big
00:37:00 --> 00:37:02 Crunches, and you get the cyclical nature of
00:37:02 --> 00:37:04 the universe with a reset. Um, a lot of our
00:37:04 --> 00:37:06 current theories suggest that the expansion
00:37:06 --> 00:37:08 of the universe is speeding up rather than
00:37:08 --> 00:37:10 slowing down, which argues against that.
00:37:10 --> 00:37:13 But we know in the past,
00:37:13 --> 00:37:15 and this is where it gets more to philosophy
00:37:15 --> 00:37:18 and religion and faith and complexity as
00:37:18 --> 00:37:20 well, is that, uh, in the early days of the
00:37:20 --> 00:37:23 universe, the different forces were unified
00:37:23 --> 00:37:25 and you get phase changes in the universe as
00:37:25 --> 00:37:27 the expansion happens in the universe cools.
00:37:28 --> 00:37:30 Um, and that's all in the very early time.
00:37:30 --> 00:37:33 But it's possible. And I've never found
00:37:33 --> 00:37:35 anyone who can explain to me that this
00:37:35 --> 00:37:36 wouldn't be possible. But it might be
00:37:36 --> 00:37:38 entirely wrong. This is jaunty speculation.
00:37:39 --> 00:37:40 Who's to say that there isn't another phase
00:37:40 --> 00:37:42 change at some point where something that we
00:37:42 --> 00:37:44 can only see as one force freezes out into
00:37:44 --> 00:37:47 two separate forces? Now we see examples of
00:37:47 --> 00:37:50 this all over the place. It's a total hop.
00:37:50 --> 00:37:53 But when I was doing my second postdoc, I was
00:37:53 --> 00:37:55 at the Open University in the UK and at
00:37:55 --> 00:37:57 uh, one of the conferences I went to, I met a
00:37:57 --> 00:37:59 young woman who was doing a chemistry based
00:37:59 --> 00:38:01 degree looking at chemistry on the moon
00:38:01 --> 00:38:04 Titan. And she was interested in
00:38:04 --> 00:38:05 the availability of different chemical
00:38:05 --> 00:38:08 reactions as to whether a place like Titan,
00:38:08 --> 00:38:11 180 degrees below freezing, could have the
00:38:11 --> 00:38:13 potential for life, given that there's liquid
00:38:13 --> 00:38:14 there in the form of liquid ethane and
00:38:14 --> 00:38:17 methane. And the standard accepted wisdom is
00:38:17 --> 00:38:19 no there isn't, because the more you cool
00:38:19 --> 00:38:20 down, the fewer chemical reactions are
00:38:20 --> 00:38:23 available. Just doesn't happen. But she
00:38:23 --> 00:38:26 looked at benzene, which is a chemical, a,
00:38:26 --> 00:38:27 ah, compound that at uh, room temperature
00:38:28 --> 00:38:29 there's a single version of benzene. You have
00:38:29 --> 00:38:32 the benzene ring. What she found was
00:38:32 --> 00:38:34 that if you cool benzene down to the
00:38:34 --> 00:38:37 conditions you get on Titan, benzene forms
00:38:37 --> 00:38:40 three different isomers. They're all benzene,
00:38:40 --> 00:38:42 but they're different shapes of those six
00:38:42 --> 00:38:44 carbon atoms in a ring. At, uh, room
00:38:44 --> 00:38:46 temperature, it's got enough energy that it
00:38:46 --> 00:38:48 vibrates around and they all blur out and you
00:38:48 --> 00:38:49 just get a single version. But you cool it
00:38:49 --> 00:38:51 down and you freeze it out to three distinct
00:38:51 --> 00:38:54 versions of benzene with slightly different
00:38:54 --> 00:38:56 chemistry. So suddenly by cooling it down and
00:38:56 --> 00:38:57 freezing it out, you get three times the
00:38:57 --> 00:38:59 availability of different chemical reactions
00:38:59 --> 00:39:02 as more chemistry can go on. And the
00:39:02 --> 00:39:04 freezing out of the forces and the breaking
00:39:04 --> 00:39:07 of them into other forces seems to be a bit
00:39:07 --> 00:39:09 like that. Now it's way beyond my expertise
00:39:09 --> 00:39:12 and my knowledge. But this is what
00:39:12 --> 00:39:14 happens when you push really at the boundary
00:39:14 --> 00:39:16 of not just what we currently understand and
00:39:16 --> 00:39:18 we know, but what we can possibly observe.
00:39:19 --> 00:39:21 And so questions like this about the origin
00:39:21 --> 00:39:23 of the universe, about primordial black holes
00:39:23 --> 00:39:26 and where they come from, about what the
00:39:26 --> 00:39:29 conditions were before the Big Bang,
00:39:29 --> 00:39:31 even though that's meaningless. These are
00:39:31 --> 00:39:33 really at the limits of what we know and what
00:39:33 --> 00:39:35 we understand, and they're pushing beyond
00:39:35 --> 00:39:37 them, but they're also at the limits of what
00:39:37 --> 00:39:40 we believe that we could ever observe
00:39:40 --> 00:39:43 if our current models of how everything works
00:39:43 --> 00:39:45 are correct. And that's always a big caveat,
00:39:45 --> 00:39:47 because they might turn out not to be. But at
00:39:47 --> 00:39:49 the minute, the received wisdom seems to be
00:39:49 --> 00:39:52 that we can never know
00:39:52 --> 00:39:54 of something earlier than the Big Bang
00:39:54 --> 00:39:55 because that's when time and space
00:39:55 --> 00:39:58 originated. We can never know about anything
00:39:58 --> 00:40:01 outside the universe because the concept of
00:40:01 --> 00:40:03 space is you can't have an outside, because
00:40:03 --> 00:40:05 if you were outside, there will be no space
00:40:05 --> 00:40:07 and therefore you're not. Yeah, it's all a
00:40:07 --> 00:40:08 bit weird unless.
00:40:08 --> 00:40:10 Andrew Dunkley: You go down the multiverse part.
00:40:10 --> 00:40:12 Jonti Horner: Yes, and that's what I was going to say. You
00:40:12 --> 00:40:14 get some people speculating that you can have
00:40:14 --> 00:40:17 multiple universes in parallel
00:40:17 --> 00:40:19 kind of spaces that cannot really strongly
00:40:19 --> 00:40:20 interact with each other, but where they
00:40:20 --> 00:40:22 overlap, you might see ripples in the
00:40:22 --> 00:40:24 microwave background. And so you might see
00:40:24 --> 00:40:26 some evidence in the structure of our
00:40:26 --> 00:40:28 universe about the existence of other
00:40:28 --> 00:40:30 universes that we can't ever touch. But like
00:40:30 --> 00:40:32 ripples on the surface of water are evidence
00:40:32 --> 00:40:35 of the wind. You can't see the wind, but you
00:40:35 --> 00:40:38 can see its effect. So I appreciate. Rob,
00:40:38 --> 00:40:40 I've probably not got anywhere close to
00:40:40 --> 00:40:42 answering your question, but what I've done
00:40:42 --> 00:40:44 instead is explained why I can't. And part of
00:40:44 --> 00:40:46 that is that I'm not qualified to. I don't
00:40:46 --> 00:40:48 have the knowledge. But it's also, I think
00:40:48 --> 00:40:50 you're asked asking questions that
00:40:50 --> 00:40:52 fundamentally we cannot yet answer and, ah,
00:40:52 --> 00:40:55 we may never be able to answer. And that's
00:40:55 --> 00:40:56 why these kind of discussions are fun. It's
00:40:56 --> 00:40:57 the kind of thing where you sit around a
00:40:57 --> 00:41:00 campfire and have a couple of drinks or
00:41:00 --> 00:41:02 whatever and have these deeper, meaningful
00:41:02 --> 00:41:03 discussions, because it's part of trying to
00:41:03 --> 00:41:05 understand the entirety of what there is to
00:41:05 --> 00:41:06 know.
00:41:07 --> 00:41:10 Andrew Dunkley: Gotcha. Yeah, look, I'm with you there. It's,
00:41:10 --> 00:41:12 um. How can we know?
00:41:13 --> 00:41:14 That's the question that comes to my mind
00:41:14 --> 00:41:17 when I hear a question like Rob's, which I'd
00:41:17 --> 00:41:18 love to know the answer to.
00:41:19 --> 00:41:19 Jonti Horner: Me too.
00:41:19 --> 00:41:22 Andrew Dunkley: How can we possibly know? It's. Yeah,
00:41:23 --> 00:41:25 um, what, what, what was before the Big
00:41:25 --> 00:41:28 Bang? What's outside the universe? Um,
00:41:29 --> 00:41:31 yeah, they're all just
00:41:32 --> 00:41:33 impossible.
00:41:33 --> 00:41:35 Jonti Horner: Even beyond that, even if we could get an
00:41:35 --> 00:41:37 answer, would we be able to understand it? It
00:41:37 --> 00:41:40 may well think there are answers to this that
00:41:40 --> 00:41:41 are there, but are so far beyond us at the
00:41:41 --> 00:41:43 minute that we don't even have the framework
00:41:43 --> 00:41:45 to formulate those answers.
00:41:47 --> 00:41:49 Andrew Dunkley: Correct. All right, Rob, thanks for your
00:41:49 --> 00:41:50 question. Lovely to hear from you.
00:41:50 --> 00:41:53 Thanks to everyone who contributed to this
00:41:53 --> 00:41:55 week's Q and A session. If you would like to
00:41:55 --> 00:41:58 do so, jump on our website SpaceNuts
00:41:58 --> 00:42:01 IO and click on the AMA link at
00:42:01 --> 00:42:04 the top. And you can send us a text question
00:42:04 --> 00:42:06 by giving us your name, your email address
00:42:06 --> 00:42:08 and uh, putting your message in there. Don't
00:42:08 --> 00:42:10 forget to tell us who you are or where you're
00:42:10 --> 00:42:12 from. But if you scroll, uh, down a bit,
00:42:12 --> 00:42:15 there's the uh, start recording button. If
00:42:15 --> 00:42:18 you've got a device with a microphone, like
00:42:18 --> 00:42:20 a, I don't know, a smartphone
00:42:21 --> 00:42:23 or most computers these days, particularly
00:42:23 --> 00:42:25 laptops and MacBooks and things like that,
00:42:26 --> 00:42:28 uh, you can send us an audio question. We'd
00:42:28 --> 00:42:30 love to get some of those as well. So please
00:42:30 --> 00:42:32 send them in to us and have a look around on
00:42:32 --> 00:42:34 our website while you're there. And don't
00:42:34 --> 00:42:36 forget social media, where, uh, we've got a
00:42:36 --> 00:42:39 strong presence on Facebook and Instagram
00:42:39 --> 00:42:42 and the um, the group that was created
00:42:42 --> 00:42:45 by Space Nuts listeners, the Space Nuts
00:42:45 --> 00:42:46 podcast group on Facebook.
00:42:48 --> 00:42:50 Very, uh, much worthwhile joining that group
00:42:50 --> 00:42:52 and talking amongst each other and solving
00:42:52 --> 00:42:53 all the problems of the universe, including
00:42:54 --> 00:42:56 Rob's probably. Uh, so, yeah,
00:42:57 --> 00:42:58 check um, it out. Just do a search for Space
00:42:58 --> 00:43:01 Nuts on Facebook or Space Nuts podcast group.
00:43:02 --> 00:43:03 Uh, they're both there. Both have,
00:43:05 --> 00:43:07 um, thousands upon thousands of followers. So
00:43:07 --> 00:43:10 it's fantastic. Love it. Uh, and
00:43:10 --> 00:43:12 Jonti, we are done. Thank you so much for
00:43:12 --> 00:43:14 tackling all of that. They were some pretty
00:43:14 --> 00:43:15 curly questions, especially the spaghetti
00:43:15 --> 00:43:17 one. Lots of curls in that.
00:43:18 --> 00:43:19 Jonti Horner: Make me hungry as well.
00:43:19 --> 00:43:22 Andrew Dunkley: Yes, yes, I had spaghetti for dinner earlier.
00:43:22 --> 00:43:24 In fact, uh, we'll catch you next time.
00:43:24 --> 00:43:26 Jonti, thank you so much.
00:43:26 --> 00:43:27 Jonti Horner: It's a pleasure. Thank you and awesome
00:43:27 --> 00:43:29 questions. Really enjoyed it. Even if my head
00:43:29 --> 00:43:30 now hurts.
00:43:31 --> 00:43:34 Andrew Dunkley: You can take something for that. Uh, and,
00:43:34 --> 00:43:36 uh, thank you for, for listening. Don't
00:43:36 --> 00:43:39 forget, uh, to, um. Yeah, as I said, uh, send
00:43:39 --> 00:43:41 your questions in via our. And thanks to Huw
00:43:41 --> 00:43:43 in the studio, who couldn't be with us today
00:43:43 --> 00:43:45 because he and his wife were having a big
00:43:46 --> 00:43:48 night out, which is terrific and they deserve
00:43:48 --> 00:43:50 it. And from me, Andrew Dunkley, thanks for
00:43:50 --> 00:43:52 your company. Catch you on the next episode
00:43:52 --> 00:43:55 of Space Nuts. Bye. Bye.
00:43:56 --> 00:43:58 Jonti Horner: You'll be listening to the Space Nuts
00:43:58 --> 00:44:01 podcast, available at
00:44:01 --> 00:44:03 Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
00:44:03 --> 00:44:06 iHeartRadio or your favorite podcast
00:44:06 --> 00:44:07 player. You can also stream on
00:44:07 --> 00:44:09 demand@bytes.com.
00:44:09 --> 00:44:12 Andrew Dunkley: This has been another quality podcast
00:44:12 --> 00:44:14 production from bytes.um com.