Jorge Cham Teaches Us The Universe: Big Bangs and Quantum Hangs

Summary

Ridiculous History: Jorge Cham Teaches Us The Universe: Big Bangs and Quantum Hangs

Release Date: June 24, 2025

Hosts:

• Ben Bullen
• Noel Brown

Guest:

• Jorge Cham, creator of PhD Comics, Stanford PhD graduate, author, and science communicator.

---

Introduction and Guest Background

The episode kicks off with Ben Bullen and Noel Brown introducing their special guest, Jorge Cham. They highlight Jorge's impressive background, emphasizing his ability to simplify complex scientific concepts for a general audience.

Notable Quote:

• Ben Bullen [07:39]: "Jorge Cham is not only the creator of the fantastic web comic strip Piled Higher and Dryer Comics, but is also a PhD grad from Stanford University, has published multiple books, you've worked with NPR, you created the PBS Kids series Eleanor, and most recently, you have masterminded the new podcast Science Stuff."

Jorge expresses his enthusiasm for the collaboration, stating, "This was super fun. It was ridiculously fun." ([61:57])

Understanding the Big Bang Theory

The conversation delves into the fundamentals of the Big Bang Theory. Jorge explains the core concept, breaking it down into understandable terms.

Key Points:

• The Big Bang Theory posits that the universe originated from an extremely hot and dense singularity approximately 14 billion years ago.
• This singularity expanded rapidly, leading to the formation of galaxies, stars, and other cosmic structures.

Notable Quote:

• Jorge Cham [12:12]: "The Big Bang is this theory that everything that you see in the universe right now... was crammed into a space smaller than a pinhead. And then at 14 billion years ago, it all just kind of suddenly expanded and exploded out into the universe we see today."

The Observable Universe and Its Expansion

Jorge elaborates on the concept of the observable universe, clarifying common misconceptions and explaining its significance in cosmology.

Key Points:

• The observable universe encompasses all regions of the universe from which light has had time to reach us since the Big Bang.
• Due to the finite speed of light and the age of the universe, we cannot observe beyond a certain distance.
• Edwin Hubble's discovery of cosmic redshift provided evidence that the universe is expanding.

Notable Quote:

• Jorge Cham [17:33]: "Basically, it turns out that the universe is so big, we can't see all of it yet. There are parts of the universe that are so far away that we haven't been able to see them because the light hasn't reached us in the 14 billion years since the Big Bang."

Dark Energy and Accelerating Expansion

The hosts explore the mysterious force driving the accelerated expansion of the universe—dark energy.

Key Points:

• Dark energy constitutes approximately 68% of the universe and is believed to be responsible for its accelerated expansion.
• The exact nature of dark energy remains one of the most significant unanswered questions in physics.
• The discovery that the expansion is accelerating was surprising and led to the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Notable Quote:

• Jorge Cham [23:27]: "The universe is expanding faster and faster, and nobody knows why. And that big question mark about why, that's what scientists call dark energy."

Alternative Theories of the Universe

Jorge introduces intriguing alternative theories about the universe's origin, challenging the conventional Big Bang narrative.

Key Points:

• One theory suggests that our universe exists within a supermassive black hole in another universe.
• This multiverse concept posits the existence of infinite universes, each potentially with its own set of physical laws.
• Such theories, while speculative, open avenues for understanding the cosmos beyond observable evidence.

Notable Quote:

• Jorge Cham [30:34]: "Our universe could just be two rocks hitting each other inside of a black hole. And that's where we are right now. And inside our universe, you can have more black holes with more universes, and inside those universes, you can have more black holes with more universes inside of them."

Quantum Physics: The Foundation of the Microcosm

The discussion transitions to quantum physics, highlighting its departure from classical mechanics and its implications for our understanding of reality.

Key Points:

• Quantum physics deals with phenomena at the atomic and subatomic levels, where particles can exist in multiple states simultaneously.
• Concepts like quantum entanglement and the double-slit experiment demonstrate the probabilistic nature of the quantum world.
• The behavior of particles in quantum mechanics challenges our classical intuition about how the universe operates.

Notable Quote:

• Jorge Cham [42:37]: "Classical physics is like a pool table... that's how our everyday world works. But quantum physics applies to things at the really tiny, like atomic sizes, where you see these weird quantum effects."

Quantum Computing: Bridging Theory and Technology

Jorge explains the advancements in quantum computing and how quantum mechanics principles are harnessed to create more powerful computational systems.

Key Points:

• Quantum computers use quantum bits (qubits) that can represent and store information in both 0s and 1s simultaneously, unlike classical bits.
• They excel at solving certain types of problems much faster than classical computers, such as factoring large numbers and simulating quantum systems.
• Applications of quantum computing extend to cryptography, optimization, and understanding complex biological processes.

Notable Quote:

• Jorge Cham [48:03]: "Quantum computers can like, feel things out all in parallel. And once you do the math in the quantum kind of notation, the answer kind of bubbles up to the surface."

Science and Spirituality: Reconciling the Two Worlds

The hosts touch upon the intersection of scientific theories and spiritual or religious beliefs, exploring whether they can coexist.

Key Points:

• Jorge emphasizes that science focuses on empirical evidence and experiments, whereas spirituality often addresses the "why" behind existence.
• The scientific community generally maintains that while some philosophical or metaphysical questions lie outside its scope, the two realms don't necessarily have to be in conflict.
• Historical figures like Georges Lemaitre, who was both a scientist and a deeply religious person, exemplify the potential harmony between science and spirituality.

Notable Quote:

• Jorge Cham [37:44]: "Scientists are very good at saying only things or believing in things only that they know they can prove with experiment."

Future Implications and Ethical Considerations

The conversation wraps up by contemplating the future of scientific advancements, particularly in AI and quantum computing, and their ethical implications.

Key Points:

• The rapid development of AI and quantum technologies poses challenges, including security concerns and the potential erosion of privacy.
• The ability of quantum computers to break current encryption standards necessitates the development of new cryptographic methods.
• There are broader societal implications regarding trust, misinformation, and the ethical use of powerful technologies.

Notable Quote:

• Noel Brown [51:43]: "Things are definitely different now... Here's hoping humanity can address these same breakthroughs the way civilization was able to soldier through and adapt to previous huge game changers."

Conclusion and Future Episodes

Ben and Noel express their gratitude to Jorge for his insights and hint at future episodes where they will delve deeper into topics like the history of brain science, building on the foundations laid in this episode.

Notable Quote:

• Ben Bullen [58:49]: "We have a lot more to discuss here. We had some other topics that we were considering, but... we may well just book a part two for this soon down the road and explore some of these other topics that we had, like the history of neuroscience, for example, brain science."

---

Where to Find Jorge Cham's Work:

• Podcast: Science Stuff
• Books: Various titles on the universe and brain science
• Children’s Series: Oliver's Great Big Universe
• Web Comics: PhD Comics

Final Thoughts: This episode of Ridiculous History offers a captivating exploration of the universe's origins, the enigmatic forces driving its expansion, and the quantum mechanics underpinning modern technology. Jorge Cham's ability to distill complex scientific ideas into relatable conversations makes this episode both enlightening and entertaining for listeners curious about the cosmos and the quantum realm.

Transcript

[Ben Bullen]

Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show, fellow ridiculous historians. Thank you as always so much for tuning in. Let's hear it for our super producer, Mr. Max Williams. Oh, we've got, we've got someone throwing up some hands there in celebration. You were Noel Brown. I am Ben Bullen and we are pleased as Punch over the moon to have a very special episode today. Noel. We are exploring some heady concepts that no offense to us, we're not qualified to explore on our own.

[Noel Brown]

Well, sure, we're not qualified to explore much on our own, but we get by. Yeah. Today we're talking about one of our favorite topics, which is Mind Science of the mind or brain science or Mind Science of the brain. I know there's a band called Mind Science of the Mind and I just always thought that was fun and a nice catch all for these types of explorations, but it's true. We're joined by our buddy Jorge Cham from Science stuff of Science Stuff fame, Daniel and Horticulture, Daniel's Universe. And he's coming to us from the void, the emptiness that is the origin of all things. Things in the universe.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, we're gonna talk about the universe.

[Jorge Cham]

Hello. Hello.

[Ben Bullen]

Hello, Jorge, thank you for joining us. How are we feeling today?

[Jorge Cham]

Oh, I'm feeling pretty good. It looks like I'm in a black hole, but that's just my recording booth.

[Noel Brown]

Oh, dang.

[Jorge Cham]

It's kind of a black hole to be honest.

[Noel Brown]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ben Bullen]

With the soundproofing now. Jorge, you are a polymath. We were talking earlier, not too long ago when we. We were asking you to hang out with us on air. I just want to bonafides for the audience. I'll keep it brief so it's not, you know, too embarrassing or anything, but.

[Noel Brown]

You have to be awake for this. This is an iHeart podcast.

[Jorge Cham]

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[Noel Brown]

Are there any pictures of you online? Then you could already be in a massive police database without even knowing it. Clearview Scrap together images from Facebook, from LinkedIn, from Venmo accounts. I'm Dexter Thomas, host of Kill Switch, a podcast about how living in the future is affecting us right now. Police, they are trusting this software with this magical ability to lead them to the right suspect. In this episode, we dive into how cops are using AI and facial recognition and sometimes getting it wrong and putting innocent people behind bars.

[Jorge Cham]

So if your accuser is this algorithm.

[Noel Brown]

But you're not even being told that it was used, let alone given any of the details about how it works. Listen to Kill Switch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ben Bullen]

OpenAI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be an aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley.

[Noel Brown]

And I'm gonna tell you why on my show Better Offline, the rudest show in the tech industry where we're breaking down why OpenAI, along with other AI companies, are dead set on lying to your boss and that they can take your job. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to Better offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you happen to.

[Ben Bullen]

Get your podcasts, a body, a suspect, and a hundred years of silence. Buried Bones is a podcast about the forgotten crimes history tried to leave behind. A common misperception about serial predators is that every single time they commit a crime, they comm it the same way. The past has a way of talking, if you know what to listen for new episodes every Wednesday on the Exactly Right network, listen to Barry bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Fellow ridiculous historians, our pal Jorge Dr. Cham is not only the creator of the fantastic web comic strip Piled Higher and DE short name PhD comics, but is also a PhD grad from Stanford University, has published multiple books, you've worked with npr, you created the PBS Kids series Eleanor wonders why most recently you have masterminded the new podcast Science Stuff, which asks deep questions in a I think one of the things that amazes me the most personally about it is how you are able to take very complex concepts and break them down into an approachable, understandable way, which is really we Always say it. Right. In science, that's the hallmark of. That's the hallmark of really knowing what you're talking about, being able to elegantly explain it.

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah, yeah. You know, it's super. It's a super fun show. Science stuff. We just try to make science fun and accessible. You know, we start with very interesting and fascinating questions that, you know, we think everyone wants to know the answer to. Like, is your dog lying to you?

[Noel Brown]

Yes, definitely is dog. Results may vary.

[Jorge Cham]

That's right. That's right. Might be pet dependent. Or questions like, do you really have to wait 30 minutes after eating to go swimming? You know, I think we all need to know that.

[Ben Bullen]

Yes. Yeah. Do you have pets?

[Jorge Cham]

Do I have pets? Sort of. I have kids. Does that count?

[Noel Brown]

The ultimate pet.

[Jorge Cham]

Oh, wait, I'm their pet. I'm sorry, I forgot.

[Noel Brown]

All so true. All so true. Well, you know, Jorge, it's funny, we actually come from a similar background. We didn't go to Stanford and we are not PhDs, but we did come from the stuff world of Internet explaining edutainment, as we like to call it. The how stuff works family of, you know, articles and podcasts that are other podcast stuff they don't want you to know is one of and ridiculous history really spiritually is kind of like a continuation of that whole sort of demystification through exploration, you know, in podcast form and you know, science stuff is absolutely a continuation of that demystification exploration.

[Jorge Cham]

Yes, yes. I heart is my overlord on this podcast as well.

[Ben Bullen]

Now, Jorge, as we're diving into some of these big questions, history of brain science, the history of the. The Big Bang Theory, not the TV show and other heady concepts, could you tell us a little bit about your own origin story in your words? Because I think it's something that would be quite amazing for our audience.

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah, yeah, sure. What's the ridiculous history of Jorge Cham is what you're asking? Let's hear it. All right, here we go. So I was born and raised in Panama. Actually. My grandparents were from China, but they emigrated there. My parents were born there. They worked for the Panama Canal. I worked there one summer. Super.

[Noel Brown]

What, what a summer job.

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah.

[Noel Brown]

Okay.

[Jorge Cham]

Actually it was really boring. I worked in like the ac like the H VAC design department.

[Ben Bullen]

I feel like they probably do need a lot of air con.

[Jorge Cham]

They do. That's right. It is critical to keeping us cool. But yeah, then I came to the US I went to actually Georgia Tech to study engineering, which is near where you all are. And then I Went. And then I decided I wanted to study robotics. I was like, wait a minute, you can get a job making robots. I was like, yeah, sign me up.

[Noel Brown]

If I could just interject really quickly, I'd love to get your hot take on the state of robotics and specifically some pretty funny pr, let's say kerfuffles involving Elon Musk's company and like robots that are supposed to be sentient and self propelled but are actually being remote controlled by interns from other rooms. Any thoughts on that, Jorge?

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah, I think we're all doomed, friends.

[Noel Brown]

These are the ones pulling the strings.

[Jorge Cham]

Those robots look pretty, pretty amazing, I have to say. I didn't think we'd get there so quickly, you know, that's part of the reason I kind of changed fields. But yeah, it's pretty amazing what they can do now and how they can basically move as humans around the world.

[Noel Brown]

Well, I guess what I was getting at though is they are definitely mechanically amazing, but I don't know that they're fully there yet in terms of the singularity and all of that, because Elon's having them kind of serve drinks as bartenders with the impression that they're actually doing all of this on their own. But then there are actually folks remote controlling, piloting them from other places. I think that's very. It's a funny story.

[Jorge Cham]

I think it might be a little overhyped right now, but I think we're almost there. You know, like just imagine taking all that AI that's happening online and then putting it on a robot and you're going to have robots drawing you as Studio Ghibli in like a week. Probably.

[Ben Bullen]

Yes. And then they'll also be able to set up on, you know, the boardwalk of your local tourist attraction. A new age of caricatures. Now, what we're talking, we're talking about how. I love that you mentioned there, Jorge, that these breakthroughs and innovations arrived much more quickly than previous scientific consensus had concluded. When we tell the story of robots, Noel, let's see if I can pull off this segue. We're talking about a culmination of, of a, of a vast, vast chasm of history. And it's fascinating to me, and I think to all of us, that human beings are now creating technology that arguably human beings themselves don't fully understand. And that question only becomes more interesting when we think about the origin story, not just of you, Jorge, not just of our silly little show, but the origin of, of what we call the universe. And I must confess, not Being the brightest crayon in the box, I have often been amazed by how much scientific rigor goes into understanding the history of the universe. Until you get to a certain point and some of the smartest people in the world will say, yeah, at one point, and then the universe. So what is the Big Bang?

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah, the Big Bang is this theory that everything that you see in the universe right now, like all the stars and planets and galaxies, everything out there, and all the stuff that you can't even see or feel, all that at some point about 14 billion years ago, was crammed into a space smaller than a pinhead. So imagine all those trillions of stars out there crammed to a small space like that. And actually it should be smaller, but pin. It is usually the smallest thing people can imagine. And then at 14 billion years ago, it all just kind of suddenly expanded and exploded out into the universe we see today. That's the basic gist of it.

[Ben Bullen]

Okay, now, cool.

[Noel Brown]

Got it. Let's move. Right, sorry, I got some questions.

[Ben Bullen]

Just a couple.

[Noel Brown]

How'd they get everything so small, Jorge? How'd they get everything. So how come it then became regular sized or like way bigger than regular size? I don't understand. I'm sorry. My pen sized brain cannot comprehend this theory.

[Ben Bullen]

This is a. This is currently the most widely accepted theory right now. How did people begin sort of coalescing and agreeing on this? Is there a pivotal moment where someone, a particular academic or something, found irrefutable proof of the Big Bang?

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah, yeah. It's a super fascinating story. It involves Einstein being sketchy with his math. It involves people discovering things through pigeon poop. It's really kind of an interesting story.

[Noel Brown]

We're in. You had us at pigeon poop.

[Jorge Cham]

Pigeon poop, yeah. Yeah. That usually gets people going there. But if you think about hundreds of years ago, or Even before the 19th century, when you looked out into the night sky, you just see stars, right? You just pinpoint the stars and you actually don't see that many. And they're all pretty static. They're not moving. The earth moves. And so they moved in the sky. But year after year you look at these stars and they're basically the same. The constellations are still the same. So I think mostly throughout human history, people thought, oh, the universe, it's just the way it is. And maybe it's always been like that, or maybe it got created in a snap by some deity, but it's not really changing. And it's kind of like that's all you can see. A few stars. So maybe that's the whole universe. Right. Because if the universe had more stars, we would see them. Right? Yeah. And so that's what mostly people thought. But then one interesting one was moment. One interesting moment was in the 1910s when Einstein was working out how gravity works, how physics works. And he sort of came up with this theory about the whole universe called general relativity. And the theory kind of told him something weird, which was that the universe should be either shrinking or expanding. Those were kind of the two options. And he's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's crazy. I mean, I'm Einstein, but even for me, that's crazy.

[Noel Brown]

Either or, right?

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah, either or kind of. Yeah. Basically, that's what the math kind of told him. And he looked out at the sky and he thought, we're not shrinking. We're not expanding. Must be something weird. So there's something famous called the Einstein fudge factor. So he just added a number at the end of his equation to make it seem like the universe was not changing at all.

[Ben Bullen]

Hang on.

[Noel Brown]

Isn't that kind of bad science? Isn't that sort of an example of someone having a preconceived idea about something and just sort of being like, nah, nah, let's just fix it so that this is the result that we get?

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah, yeah, it's not great. Sorry. It doesn't look good on Einstein. And later on in his life, he basically called it, like, the biggest blunder of his life, of his career. So he added this fudge factor. And then in 1924, people kind of figured out that the universe was bigger than it seemed. So when you look out into the night sky, you see stars, but you also see these kind of fuzzy things. They look like little cotton balls. And people just thought like, oh, those are gas clouds. Right. They're just little fuzzy things in the universe. But then someone called Edwin Hubble, for whom the Hubble telescope is named, basically figured out that these things are not fuzzy clouds of gas. There are actually galaxies. And so there's. The sky is just full of these galaxies. So basically, our universe went from, like, oh, we're like, about the size of the Milky Way, to, like, we're trillions of times bigger than that.

[Noel Brown]

And think of it as, like, being able to zoom in and zoom in and zoom in, and every time you zoom, there's another layer with more stuff and more stuff, right?

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah, yeah. Kind of blew people's mind. And that's.

[Ben Bullen]

That's the observable universe, Right? Which we'll come to Find.

[Jorge Cham]

Yes.

[Ben Bullen]

Could you tell us a little bit about. Because I think it's a phrase that can be misleading to a lot of lay folk. You hear the phrase observable universe and you automatically think, yeah, man, I got up earlier today. I observed all kinds of stuff.

[Jorge Cham]

There it is.

[Ben Bullen]

So what is the observable universe? Why is that an important concept?

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah, yeah. Basically, it turns out that the universe is so big, we can't see all of it yet. Like, there are parts of the universe that are so far away that we haven't been able to see them. A, because the light. Light has a speed limit, and B, because the universe is not infinitely old, we figured out that the universe is 14 billion years old. So basically, we can only see things that have been able to get to us in those 14 billion years. Oh.

[Noel Brown]

Cause if I'm not mistaken, I'm looking at a cool little pictogram or graph of the Big bang expansion. And it's sort of a timeline as well, because it's sort of this cone shaped where on one end it sort of tapers into, like, this flat circle. And the first stars are calculated to have formed 400 million years ago. And those are the ones that were, like. Those are the ones that we are, like, seeing, or those are the ones that we have not seen yet. I'm just like. Because it is a time travel equation as well, because of the way light works. So I'm just trying to wrap my head around that.

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So stars are being made all the time in the universe, and they have been made all throughout the history of the universe. And stars also die. Have been dying throughout the universe. Some stars explode. Some of them just kind of taper out and simmer for a long time. So the stars you're seeing, they could have been born, like, if they're close to us. They were probably born recently. They were really far away. They were probably born a long time ago.

[Ben Bullen]

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[Noel Brown]

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[Ben Bullen]

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[Noel Brown]

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[Ben Bullen]

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[Noel Brown]

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[Jorge Cham]

You still get to keep it.

[Noel Brown]

There's always a trade in.

[Jorge Cham]

Not right now.

[Noel Brown]

@ T Mobile. I feel like I have to give.

[Ben Bullen]

You something in return for car.

[Noel Brown]

That's okay. I don't really have much in my purse.

[Ben Bullen]

Oh, let's see. Hand Sanitizer.

[Noel Brown]

It's lavender. I'm good.

[Ben Bullen]

Seriously.

[Noel Brown]

Let me check this pocket. Oh, mints. Really, I'm fine. Oh, I have raisins.

[Ben Bullen]

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[Noel Brown]

Wait, wait one sec. I've got cupcakes in the car.

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[Noel Brown]

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[Jorge Cham]

Police, they are trusting this software to.

[Noel Brown]

Lead them to the right suspect. But you're not even being told that.

[Jorge Cham]

It was used, let alone given any.

[Noel Brown]

Of the details about how it works. This is not Minority Report. This is happening right now. People are getting arrested and doing actual time in jail after being picked out by a computer. I'm Dexter Thomas, host of Kill Switch, where every Wednesday we explain the right now of living in the future. You can turn off the computer, but do not let the computer turn you off. Listen to Kill Switch in the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ben Bullen]

OpenAI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be an aberration, a symbol of rotation at the heart of Silicon Valley.

[Noel Brown]

And I'm going to tell you why.

[Ben Bullen]

On my show, Better Offline, the rudest.

[Noel Brown]

Show in the tech industry where we're breaking down why OpenAI, along with other AI companies, are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to Better offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts. Wherever you happen to get your podcasts.

[Ben Bullen]

A murder happens. The Case goes cold. Then, over 100 years later, we take a second look. Look. I'm Paul Holes, a retired cold case investigator. And I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a journalist and historian. On our podcast Buried Bones, we re examine historical true crime cases using modern forensic techniques. We dig into what the original investigators may have missed. Growing up on a farm, when I heard a gunshot, I did not immediately think murder. Unless this person went out to shoot squirrels, they're not choosing a.22 to go hunting out there. These cases may be old, but the questions are still relevant and often chilling. I know this chauffeur is not of concern.

[Noel Brown]

You know, it's like, well, he's the.

[Ben Bullen]

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[Noel Brown]

App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ben Bullen]

That's kind of cool. It's the. It's one of my favorite things to think about whenever I can get away from the light pollution so ubiquitous in. In, you know, various human cities. I don't know the answers that. I think you have explained it in the best way I have heard. Sorry, Carl. Sergey Jorge.

[Noel Brown]

You think science communication s on this one?

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah.

[Noel Brown]

Can you tell us a little bit about how the concept of dark energy plays into this? I've always been fascinated with dark matter and dark energy, but isn't that. That's a force that aids or in some way has contributed to this whole expansion proposition?

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah, absolutely. Well, probably the best thing we know about dark energy is that it has a cool name and that. And that's about it. It's actually related to the Big Bang as well. So kind of picking up the story. In 1929, Hubble not only discovered that those fuzzy things were galaxies, he also discovered that they were moving away from us. So, you know, like, if you've heard of the Doppler shift effect, like kind of what cops use to measure your velocity when you're speeding down the highway, Obviously always within the speed limit, but that's how they measure your.

[Noel Brown]

You can also hear it in audio form as sound source moves from you. It is interpreted as almost like a pitched kind of envelope. Like it sort of changes in pitch as it moves away, which I believe is an aural representation of the Doppler effect.

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah, that is exactly correct.

[Ben Bullen]

Is this related to what's called redshift?

[Jorge Cham]

Exactly, that's what it is, yeah. So, like, you know, like when an ambulance is driving towards you, it kind of sounds like higher pitch, but as it moves past you and away from you, it sounds a little bit lower. Woo, woo, woo. The same thing is happening with light because light kind of behaves like a wave. And so you can tell from the redshift of the light of galaxies that they're moving away from us.

[Ben Bullen]

That is both fascinating and frightening for some reason I cannot yet articulate in this language. So the universe is running away from us, folks. Anybody with abandonment issues, just think about that.

[Noel Brown]

It's true. Yeah. And how does this affect us in a functional way? Like, it's super interesting and knowing about all this history, but is this something that there is sort of an actionable, you know, effect in our daily lives?

[Jorge Cham]

Kind of, yeah. So how they measured. The galaxies are all moving away from. Everything's moving away from each other, but from our perspective, it looks like it's moving away from us. And so that's how they extrapolated the Big Bang, basically. Like, if everything's moving apart, if you just run the clock back, that means everything at some point was really scrunched together. And that's kind of the Big Bang, and that's kind of what dark energy is, which is that a little bit later or actually kind of recently, they found that the galaxies are not just moving away from us. They're getting faster and faster. It's like they're not just moving away from us. It's like they're hitting the pedal to the metal, trying to get away from us as fast as possible.

[Ben Bullen]

Wow. Well, we've all seen Earth. We can't blame them.

[Jorge Cham]

We want to see what's going on.

[Noel Brown]

I'd have to imagine that has to do with some sort of exponential curve, perhaps, or just the way things sort of over time, kind of the curve sort of becomes steeper. And I don't know. I'm trying to put it in. I'm a sound guy, so maybe I'm thinking of it in those terms. But can you explain a little bit about why that phenomenon occurs, this whole speeding up?

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah. So the universe is expanding faster and faster, and nobody knows why. And that big question mark about why, that's what scientists call dark energy. Because you need something to be pressing the pedal on these galaxies. Something's pushing them away. And so you need some kind of force, some kind of energy. And so they don't know what it is, so they just call it dark energy.

[Ben Bullen]

So if the world's brightest minds, the eggheads, and the boffins, if they're like police investigators on the case of universe expansion, they've got this big board, right, with their suspects. You know, there's a little thumbnail picture of gravity. There are pictures of strong, weak nuclear force. And they've got this one picture that's just a question mark, and they wrote dark energy.

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah, basically. Well, they call it dark because you can't see it. And it's an energy because it's like, causing acceleration. It's causing things to move. And it's kind of really relevant to us because since we don't know what it is, we don't know what it's going to do in the future. So, like, in the future, dark energy might be like, oh, you know what? I'm done. I'm going to stop accelerating the universe. In which case then gravity might take over the whole universe and then scrunches down back into a little tiny spot.

[Ben Bullen]

Fun.

[Jorge Cham]

Like at the Big Bang. Yeah.

[Noel Brown]

Oh, no, it's like a reverse Big Bang.

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah. They call it the Big Crunch. Very imaginative.

[Ben Bullen]

The Big Crunch. Not to be confused with a cereal brand. That's. That must be the. That must be what gave me that terrifying, inexplicable sense of unease.

[Jorge Cham]

So, like, we don't know what it's going to do. Yeah.

[Ben Bullen]

Nor when. Right.

[Jorge Cham]

Or when. Yeah, it might be tomorrow, it might be in a trillion years. Nobody knows.

[Ben Bullen]

Oh, my gosh. Everybody be nice to your friends just in case.

[Noel Brown]

Can you tell us a little bit about this guy, Georges Lemaitre, I believe. I'm sorry, I'm maybe over pronouncing his name, but it's my understanding that his paper is what kind of solidified some of the first discussions of the Big Bang theory that were then kind of accepted.

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah. Yeah, sort of. So, like, if we go back to the point where we didn't know what those fuzzy things in the sky were, so we could see these fuzzy things in the sky and we could tell that they were redshifted. So, like they. Because they were moving away from us, the light kind of gets slower, and so it turns red. When light gets slower, it turns red. And so we could tell these things were redshifted and so moving away from us. And so he was a guy who kind of floated the idea that maybe it means things are moving away from us, and maybe it means things are expanding.

[Ben Bullen]

And to date, when we're talking about concepts like this. Right. We are able to gather a lot of data. We are able to. To draw or construct our Most reasonable, rational theories about it. But as anybody reading pop science in the news today or throughout history knows, there for one person that makes an agreed upon, you know, going theory, There are easily a rogues gallery of dozens of other people who come up and say, yeah, but what if I got another idea? So would love to hear, just from your expertise, would love to hear some of your favorite alternative explanations for the universe, Because I know science stuff has been talking about black holes quite recently. One theory that I think came back into resurgence quite recently was a group of scientists, I'll have to find their names, who proposed that proposed an old theory that the universe was not created by a big bang, but instead dwells within somehow within a supermassive black hole. What are some of your favorite alternative theories? Bonus points for crazy.

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah, well, I think that ranks up pretty high. So we recently did an episode on science stuff about what could be inside of a black hole. And we had five theories, and this was number five, like the most craziest one. And the idea is that if you take a black hole and you throw two rocks into it, like you throw a rock in one direction and a rock in the other direction, they're both going to fall down to the center. But near the center of the black hole, those rocks are going to be moving so much that one of them is actually going to kind of curve around the center of the black hole, inside of what's called the singularity, and actually hit the other rock that you threw in that was going the other way. Because everything gets warped inside of a black hole down to a point. So those two rocks are going to hit each other, and they're going to hit each other with so much energy that it's going to have the same or more energy than what was at the Big Bang. And so scientists think like, oh, whoa. So these are just two rocks hitting each other inside of a black hole. And it's probably happening, happening all the time in every black hole that we know out there. And it's energy as big as the Big Bang. Maybe that's how our universe started. Like, our universe could just be two rocks hitting each other inside of a black hole. And that's where we are right now. And inside of our universe, you can have more black holes with more universes, and inside of those universes, you can have more black holes with more universes inside of them.

[Noel Brown]

Not to get too, like, sci fi about it, I guess, but given that potential for all of these infinite other universes, doesn't it seem a little Bit kind of, I don't know, self centered to think that this is the only universe that supports life and that this is the only universe that has like, you know, stuff going for it. I don't know, I've always kind of had a hard time accepting that. Like, I don't know if I believe in extraterrestrials, and I'm much more of an atheist and agnostic than any kind of religious person, but I have a hard time believing that this is all there is, given these infinite possibilities.

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah, yeah. And that's not even getting into like the multiverse, which is like the quantum physics version of multiple universes. This is like the actual. Just in our universe, there could be other universes and other people in those as well.

[Ben Bullen]

A world in a grain of sands. Right. As they used to say. This is. Okay, this is fascinating. First off, again, not being an expert, I love the Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide vibe of explaining the universe as two rocks bumped together and then everything happened. This also, I think, leads us to a fantastic and natural segue on something that has been an area of fascination for ourselves and a lot of our audience members for a long time. Quantum physics. We've been circulating this clip from a fantastic professor named Ramamurti Shankar. And he had this line where he's speaking with his students and it's the day they start studying quantum physics. And he says, here's my goal. Right now. I'm the only one who doesn't understand quantum mechanics. In about seven days, all of you will also be unable to understand quantum mechanics.

[Jorge Cham]

The famous physicist Richard Feynman is famously quoted as saying, like, if you think you understand quantum physics, you don't understand. Understand quantum physics. Basically. Like, not even the smartest people in the world really understand it.

[Noel Brown]

Yeah, and I guess that's what I was getting at in terms of, you know, there comes this crossover point where you have to accept the things that you don't know. And, and Ben and I have often talked about is that the point where things become in the realm of spirituality or in the realm of magic or all of that? You know, it just seems like there has to be room for the things we don't know. And what is the scientific community's perspective on that? The guy that I mentioned earlier, this dude Lemaitre, a Belgian astronomer, cosmologist rather. He was also a deeply religious person and had a lot to do with talking about this Big Bang theory stuff, but also kind of looked at it in a way that reconciled it with the Creation of the universe in a religious sense. I just wonder what your thoughts are around that and where those worlds meet and if there's room for these worlds to coexist.

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah, yeah. Well, I should, well, I should sort of clarify. So people don't understand quantum mechanics because it's based on math. That's very unintuitive to us. We're not trained. Like, our brains didn't evolve to really kind of have an intuitive feel for things that are random and things that are in two places at the same time or they have equal probability of being at the same place at the same time in this universe. And so most of what people know about quantum physics comes from experiments. So if you run experiments, this is what the universe tells you. That's how things are. And so when people say they don't understand it, it's like people are saying, like, well, it's crazy that it is that way, but if you poke at the universe, that's what it shows you how it is. So it's experimentally based is what I wanted to just clarify. But, yeah, I think science is very clear, and scientists are very good at saying only things or believing in things only in things that they know they can prove with experiment.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, yeah. We've often, I, I, I try to condense that thought down, often in by explaining it this way. Science attempts to answer how a thing occurs. Right. And spirituality, metaphysics, we could call it, attempts to address why that occurs. So the how and the why can sometimes seem quite separated. And then when you get to the bleeding edges of physics and our understanding, the two things get weirdly combined. You know, and I'm doing, since we're an audio podcast, I'm doing little hand gestures.

[Noel Brown]

Yeah. And I think just the last thing on this lemaitre dude who's just fascinating to me, I want to dig more into him. He had this to say about exactly what you're talking about. As far as I can see, such a theory, talking about Big Bang remains entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question. It leaves the materialist free to deny any transcendental being. For the believer, it removes any attempt at familiarity with God. It is consonant with Isaiah. Speaking of the hidden God, hidden even in the beginning of the universe. I just think that's a badass quote.

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there are definitely things that are beyond what scientists can say or even understand. And there are things that may possibly never be able to be understood by scientists. But until then, you know, we just gotta use our best approach to understanding the World, which is science. It's better than making things up.

[Ben Bullen]

It is.

[Noel Brown]

Yeah. No doubt it is.

[Ben Bullen]

Even if you add a little bit of fudge to your equation.

[Jorge Cham]

Even Einstein. Yeah, it happens. You know, it happens. We're just humans.

[Ben Bullen]

I love these. Happens. While we're on.

[Jorge Cham]

Touch Happens.

[Ben Bullen]

Hi, Zoe Saldana.

[Noel Brown]

Welcome to T Mobile. Here's your new iPhone 16 Pro on us. Thanks. And here's my old phone to try. You don't need a trade in. When you switch to T Mobile. We'll give you a new iPhone 16 Pro. Plus we'll help you pay off your old phone. Up to 800 bucks and you still get to keep it. There's always a trade in.

[Jorge Cham]

Not right now.

[Noel Brown]

@ T Mobile. I feel like I have to give.

[Ben Bullen]

You something in return for karma.

[Noel Brown]

That's okay. I don't really have much in my purse.

[Ben Bullen]

Oh, let's see. Hand sanitizer.

[Noel Brown]

It's lavender. I'm good. Seriously. Let me check this pocket.

[Jorge Cham]

Oh, mints.

[Noel Brown]

Really, I'm fine. Oh, I have raisins.

[Ben Bullen]

I'm a mom.

[Noel Brown]

Wait, wait one sec. I've got cupcakes in the car.

[Ben Bullen]

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[Noel Brown]

New line, 100 plus a month. I experience beyond Finance Agreement 999.99 and qualifying ported for well qualified plus tax and 10 connection charge.

[Ben Bullen]

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[Noel Brown]

Send and balance due if you pay.

[Ben Bullen]

Off early or cancel CT mobile dot com.

[Noel Brown]

Are there any pictures of you online? I'm not just talking about Google. I'm talking anywhere. Clear View scrapes together images from Facebook, from LinkedIn, from Venmo accounts. That database is now being used by police departments all across the country to match criminal suspect photos. And sometimes it makes mistakes. So in this one case, two of their search results that I think were in the top 10, the search results were Michael Jordan. A picture of Michael Jordan. But cops are still using it to make arrests.

[Jorge Cham]

Police, they are trusting this software to.

[Noel Brown]

Lead them to the right suspect. But you're not even being told that.

[Jorge Cham]

It was used, let alone given any.

[Noel Brown]

Of the details about how it works. This is not Minority Report. This is happening right now. People are getting arrested and doing actual time in jail after being picked out by a computer. I'm Dexter Thomas, host of Kills, where every Wednesday we explain the right now of living in the future. You can turn off the computer, but do not let the computer turn you off. Listen to Kill Switch in the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ben Bullen]

OpenAI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be an aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley.

[Noel Brown]

And I'm gonna tell you why on my show Better Offline, the rudest show in the tech industry where we're breaking down, why Open AI, along with other AI companies are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to Better offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts. Wherever you happen to get your podcasts.

[Ben Bullen]

A murder happens. The case goes cold. Then over 100 years later, we take a second look. I'm Paul Holz, a retired cold case investigator. And I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a journalist and historian. On our podcast Buried Bones, we re examined historical true crime cases using modern forensic techniques. We dig into what the original investigators may have missed. Growing up on a farm, when I heard a gunshot, I did not immediately think murder. Unless this person went out to shoot squirrels. They're not choosing a 22 to go hunting out there. These cases may be old, but the questions are still relevant and often chilling. I know this chauffeur is not of concern.

[Noel Brown]

You know, it's like, well, he's the.

[Ben Bullen]

Last one who saw our life, so how did they eliminate him? Join us as we take you back to the cold cases that haunt us to this day. New episodes every Wednesday on the exactly right network. Listen to Buried bones on the iHeartRadio.

[Noel Brown]

App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ben Bullen]

Jorge, could you tell us about the history of quantum physics? We know that there's something afoot, right, with the double slit experiment. The other concept in popular culture would be like Schrodinger's cat, for instance. When did people really start clocking onto this idea of quantum physics and later quantum mechanics? Was there a light bulb moment? Was there one guy or one person who stood up and said, eureka, I'm in two places at once.

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah, well, it's rarely like one guy or girl, you know, it's usually a group of people. But what's fascinating about quantum physics is it all sort of happened within the same, like, 10 years, 10, 15, 20 years at the beginning of the 19th century. So the way I think of physics is like, think of Coke. Coca Cola, Coke, right? There's classic Coke, and then there's New Coke. I guess if you're old enough to remember New Coke, Think of a Coke Zero, maybe. Coke Zero.

[Noel Brown]

New Coke didn't do super well. People love Coke Zero, okay?

[Jorge Cham]

There's classic Coke and there's Coke Zero. And so classic Koch is what people call classical physics. Like, think of Newton and F equals ma. And the best analogy is to think of like, a pool table. Like, how the billiard balls knock on each other, how they bounce each other, how you can, like, aim one and hit one at an angle and know that which angle they're both going to come off of. That's like classical physics. And that's kind of how the whole world around us, to our eyes and ears, works. Like, if I throw a ball at you, you're going to basically know where it's going to go and you're going to be able to catch it, right? And so that's classical physics, pretty simple stuff. But around the beginning of the 19th century, physicists started kind of looking closer at things and noticing weird things. Like, they noticed that the energy, like the light that comes from something that's hot. Hot, it's kind of weird. There's some weird things about it. They notice that if you shine a light on some metals, electrons will kind of pop off, but only in certain frequencies of light or certain settings of light, or it's not proportional to how much light you shine on it. And so there are all these weird things at the microscopic level. So the thing about quantum physics is that it really only sort of applies two things at the really, really tiny, like atomic or close to atomic sizes. That's when you really see the weird quantum stuff. Like, in our everyday lives, we're not going to. Like, your cat is not going to be in two places at the same time. If it's alive or it's dead, it's one of those two things. But if you get down to, like, atoms and you, like, you ask like, where is this atom? You're going to get some weird answers. Like, sometimes the atom is here, but then you measure it a little bit later and it's over there. And sometimes you measured a little bit before where you thought it would be, but no, it's over here. And that's when you get these weird quantum effects.

[Ben Bullen]

Reality seems negotiable. That's spooky. That's what we call it, right? Spooky action.

[Noel Brown]

Is this where quantum entanglement comes in? Forgive me if I'm jumping the shark here. Yeah, that's it. Yeah.

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah. So when people talk about quantum physics, they usually mean a couple of two or three weird things of how things behave. One of them is this idea that, like, things can be in two places at the same time, or they can be up and down at the same time. Quantum entanglement is another one where if you have two fuzzy things, they can sort of make them interact. Now they're sort of coupled in this weird thing where, like, if you take one cat that's maybe alive or dead and another cat that's maybe alive or dead and you have him interact, now you have, like, four possibilities. Like, both cats could be de. Alive, both cats could be dead. And so things just get kind of like. Like, complicated. And all those possibilities are now happening at the same time.

[Noel Brown]

So.

[Ben Bullen]

This is something that, for a lot of people, might be dismissed as an academic truth or series of observations. You might read this in the paper or I guess see it online or on your phone now, and then you say, okay, that's cool, but how does that apply to me? And it feels like, like, the most immediate answer to that now would be the ongoing breakthroughs in what we call quantum computers. Could you tell us a little bit about what a quantum computer is or what quantum computing is, how it differs from, you know, the machines we're using to record this episode today?

[Jorge Cham]

Right, right. Well, Ben, let me tell you something amazing, which is that every computer is quantum. Oh, man.

[Noel Brown]

What this has to do with the processing power, right?

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah, basically. So the way microchips were sort of invented, we're talking about transistors in silicone chips and all that. That was all due to quantum physics. So some dudes in Bell Labs back in the 50s, 60s, 70s, they're like, oh, there's this thing called quantum physics. I wonder what we can do with that? And then they thought, well, maybe we can make tiny little transistors the size of several atoms. And that is the only reason that we have iPhones and Internet and that we're talking and people are listening to us right now.

[Ben Bullen]

Oh, my gosh, guys, we're quantum. We just went quantum on this episode.

[Noel Brown]

We have quantum lept. No, it's true. We quantum leapt the shark. But when people talk about quantum computing, isn't that sort of a stand in that maybe is a little bit of a misnomer, but about just more and more exponentially powerful full processors?

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah, yeah. So I said every computer is quantum, but quantum computers are a different kind of computers that are also quantum. But so it's a computer in which the circuits are so, so small that they're actually down, like, at the single atom, single electron, or single sort of quantum particle level. And so it turns out that when you make a circuit with quantum particles, then you can do quantum math. Like, you can do the math that happens in the quantum universe, the quantum world. And that math is really good at solving certain things. So it's not, probably not good for, like, video calling or listening to podcasts, but it's, like, super incredibly good at, for example, breaking passwords.

[Noel Brown]

Cryptography, because it can just run so many patterns to the point where it'll more or less process of elimination down to the correct solution because of how quickly it can run all of these scenarios.

[Jorge Cham]

Right, exactly right. If I wanted to guess your password right now using an imac or a computer, I would probably have to program the computer to guess every number from here to 10 trillion. And that would just take a really, really long time. But, like, a quantum computer, because it can do quantum math, it can like you said, kind of feel things out all in parallel. And once you do the math in the quantum kind of notation, then, like, the answer kind of, like, bubbles up to the surface, and then you sort of get your password almost right away.

[Ben Bullen]

That's wild. That's wild. Yeah, I know. Cryptography is one of the. One of the big applications that a lot of people talk about, right? Breaking codes, encryption, decryption. What are some other potential uses of this kind of new gen of computing?

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah, no, that's about it. That's the one that we know of. That we know of. We just happened to randomly in the 90s, some computer scientist was like, you know what? This breaking of passwords is really hard, but maybe we can use quantum computers. And you figured out that you can use quantum math to break that problem. Now, scientists think that there may be other problems like that, like, who knows, like finding the nearest habitable planet maybe could be solved by a quantum computer faster or something like that. I'm totally making that up. But the idea is that there might be big, big problems out there that we don't know about yet that quantum computers are really good at solving. And then the other thing that people say quantum computers are good for is just simulating physical nature because the world is quantum once you get down to atoms. And so you kind of need a quantum computer to be able to simulate that better.

[Ben Bullen]

That's fascinating, because then that implies that humanity has created or discovered a thing that can potentially solve problems humanity has not yet figured out how to ask.

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah, exactly.

[Ben Bullen]

Right.

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah.

[Ben Bullen]

Okay, that's. That's wild that. That leads us to another thing. We're. We're gonna have to. I. I think, Noel, we're gonna have to hang out with Jorge more often on the show, if you'll have us. Jorge?

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah, for sure.

[Noel Brown]

And also, I was gonna just really quickly. Last thing about the quantum computing stuff as pertains to another show that Ben and I do together that I think you'd also be a great guest on for this topic specifically, stuff they don' is there seems to be a sense that the escalation of quantum computers and their ability to do these things could potentially lead to a future where you can't have a secret password anymore. It's just like that is passe at this point. There is no security because of how powerful these machines are and just by the fact that they exist.

[Jorge Cham]

Right. Like think of your bank accounts that. That anyone can get into that. Even if you have like cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin or Dogecoin, the quantum computers could break that up and basically that would all be meaningless.

[Noel Brown]

So what's the solution? There is this like, nuclear power type stuff where you have to keep it under wraps, where you got to decide who gets it. Like, it's just. I don't know, it's scary when you talk about it.

[Jorge Cham]

I think everyone has to walk around naked. That's the only solution is no more secrets.

[Noel Brown]

Okay, Fair.

[Jorge Cham]

No more secrets.

[Noel Brown]

See?

[Ben Bullen]

Atlanta Police Department. I'm not a criminal. I'm ahead of the curve.

[Jorge Cham]

That's right.

[Noel Brown]

No, I'm kidding. Fully on board. I think there's a lot more to discuss here. We had some other topics that we were considering, but I think there was just so much here in Big bang and quantum physics and now into quantum computing that we may well just book a part two for this soon down the road and explore some of these other topics that we had, like the history of neuroscience, for example, brain science.

[Ben Bullen]

We were talking about this, and this feels like a natural. I mean, the scary way to get into it for us would be to immediately ask you, Jorge, will human civilization arrive at a point where, without using the word AI, which I find problematic, will human civilization arrive at a point where one could create something as complex as, and is recognizable in function as an organic human brain? Is that where we're headed?

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah, that might be where we're at right now.

[Ben Bullen]

No.

[Jorge Cham]

So the crazy thing is that a lot of these AI models that people use every day. They're super secretive about how big they are or how complex they are. If you try to find out how many nodes, which is kind of like the basic unit in an AI neural network, how many nodes does ChatGPT4 have, or ChatGPT GPT5 or any like, nobody will tell you because they're all, you know, trade secrets. And so some estimates out there are that these might be getting close or at least kind of like in the same order of magnitude or getting there to like how many neurons you have in your brain or how many connections you have in your brain. And so like, you know, we, we're not too far.

[Noel Brown]

You see Ben's face right now?

[Jorge Cham]

Sorry Ben, we have stuff to do later. Actually, you're both talking to an AI right now. I am an AI.

[Noel Brown]

Oh, I wouldn't be surprised. It's getting creepily. I mean, speaking of exponential, you know, improvement, remember when AI slop was just so obvious and was like pixelated and weirdly stretched and just bizarro and it just seemed like kind of like a novelty.

[Ben Bullen]

Always this many fingers, right?

[Noel Brown]

Yeah. But now it's just, it's too good and I don't particularly like it. And also I was seeing that some of the most popular pieces of content now on the Internet are AI generated. Are machine learning generated? That's problematic in and of itself. And it's like, you know, we struggle with this whole idea of like we don't want to be Luddites and get left behind or be old man screaming at Cloud. But it does feel like there's a real inflection point where you can't turn the clock back anymore and it's not a good thing. I certainly think that there is, is excellent positive life, world changing uses for these kinds of things. But it seems like corporations just trot this stuff out without really thinking about the knock on effects.

[Jorge Cham]

They don't. I don't think they do at all. They're just rushing to be the first. And I think we are definitely at an inflection point as you mentioned. Things are definitely different now. But I kind of think back, this.

[Noel Brown]

Was only a handful of years ago. There was Will Smith eating a bowl of spaghetti and looking like absolute pixelated garbage. And now you can make stuff that looks like the news. It's pristine. Sorry to interrupt. It blows my mind.

[Jorge Cham]

It's totally mind blowing. Yeah. But I think back to like the time when Photoshop became popular. Remember that like before you could trust that a photograph was a photograph, but at Some point it's like, no, you can't trust any photograph at all. I think it's just going to be the same for like video now. You can't really trust any video that you see on out there.

[Ben Bullen]

What could go wrong?

[Noel Brown]

Well, and like with Photoshop, you know, you have experts, as it got better and better, who can be like, okay, these are the red flags, these are the things to look for. So you know, this is Photoshop and there certainly still are big signs of AI slop, AI generated stuff. But as it gets better and better, those signs are going to be fewer and fewer and harder and harder to see and you really are going to require experts or we've even talked about on stuff they don't want you to know how there would need to be some validation form like of footage, some sort of watermark or something to show that this was captured in real life through a telephone photo device, Through a photographic device.

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah, yeah. It's going to come down to trust, like whose camera do you trust that was not tampered with AI whose motivation you feel is good?

[Ben Bullen]

And that gets even trickier because then when we, we're forced to resort to trust, which can sometimes be a subjective exercise, we're forced to resort to trust as a currency or authenticator. Then we re enter the world of absolute wing nuts. It makes me remember when we were working previously on some of the most popular conspiracy theories in Western culture, one of which being landing on the moon. Right. That old workhorse gets trotted out all the time. I was talking with people who were Noel and our pal Matt and I were talking with people who would genuinely bring up trust and they would say, well, have you met any astronauts?

[Jorge Cham]

And we have.

[Ben Bullen]

And I was like, yeah, I met some astronauts. They're.

[Jorge Cham]

They went there.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah.

[Noel Brown]

They're not Perry show. Yeah.

[Ben Bullen]

And then they said, well, do you trust that? What was your vibe check on those astronauts? They're kind of busy.

[Noel Brown]

I don't think that's extra tough though, Ben, isn't it? As trust has just eroded so far in terms of trust of the media, in terms of trust of literally what is before your very eyes. So these two things do not unfortunately align particularly well, do they?

[Jorge Cham]

We're still arguing if the earth is round down. There are people who are convinced that it's not.

[Noel Brown]

Shout out Bob.

[Ben Bullen]

Right, right.

[Noel Brown]

Airplanes in the night sky.

[Ben Bullen]

Have you ever met an astronaut? They're the only ones who could see it. Did you trust them? But this is, this is where we get to maybe if we want to put a positive spin on it, we could say, I love your point there, Jorge, about how this feels like a new iteration of similar inflection points. Noel, I think you nailed the perfect phrase for that. Here's hoping humanity can address these same breakthroughs. The way that civilization was able to soldier through and adapt to previous huge game changers. It all goes down to brain science. And we don't want to put you on the spot, Jorge, but we'd love to have you back on a future episode where we can learn from you about the very strange historical saga of humans attempting to study themselves. Two questions. First, are you okay with that? Would you like to hang out with us?

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah, absolutely. This is super fun.

[Ben Bullen]

Awesome. Yes. Okay, great. That would have been an awkward day.

[Noel Brown]

Glad we got that out of the way.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, yeah. If you were too busy.

[Jorge Cham]

Second, no, by the way, we know.

[Ben Bullen]

Secondly, one of our ending questions here, just as a tease for the wild history, ridiculous, dare I say, at times, of brain science. What's one of your favorite brain science? Like anecdotes or maybe quack science in that pursuit?

[Jorge Cham]

Oh, yeah, there's a lot. I wrote a book with a neuroscientist about just the whole brain, the history of the brain, what we know about the brain. You know, one of the most fascinating stories we have on there is the story of someone called Patient hm Henry Molaison. And basically, if you've seen the movie Memento, which was Christopher Nolan's basically first breakout movie, this guy who could only remember 30 seconds at a time, like, that's real. That's something that happens out to some people out there in the world. And it's actually something that happened to someone named Henry Molaison a little while ago. And he was basically a test subject for the rest of his life. And through him is how we know a lot about how our memory works. Before, we didn't know things that there were things like motor memory, short term memory, long term memory, different kinds of memories and where they were in the brain. But thanks to basically the memento guy, we kind of figure all of that out. And it's fascinating to see what he could remember and what he couldn't remember.

[Ben Bullen]

Amazing.

[Noel Brown]

Lots of perfect tease for the next episode where we have you back where we talk more about the history of brain science. And I do just want to point out really quickly, to circle back to something that was said quite a while ago. Max pointed out in the chat here that we do on ridiculous history have multiple episodes about bird poop, not just.

[Jorge Cham]

One we would multiple things get to the bird poop. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ben Bullen]

We got. That's going to sound weird out of context, but yeah, Noel, you're correct. We went through a bird poop phase. Oh, my gosh.

[Noel Brown]

So, Jorge, where can folks find your work? We know we have science stuff still episodes of Daniel and Jorge. Explore the universe. You're a published author on many fronts, a polymath, as Ben put it, but give us the scoop. Where can ridiculous historians out there check out your work?

[Jorge Cham]

Yeah, the best way to find me is just search for sign stuff. One word on your iHeartRadio app or wherever you're listening to this and. And please subscribe. We tackle super fun, super fascinating questions. We talk to experts and we keep it light and fun and easy to understand. So that's the main thing. And then if you're interested in some of my science work, I do have several books published. There's one about kind of what we don't know about the universe. There's one about the brain and what we don't know about the brain. And I also have a series of kids books called Oliver's Great Big Universe. But please check out science stuff.

[Noel Brown]

That's no question about it. It is a classic how stuff works style science exploration. And Jorge is a ace science communicator. So we can't thank you enough for hanging out with us today on Ridiculous History.

[Jorge Cham]

Oh, this was super fun. It was ridiculously fun.

[Noel Brown]

Glad to hear it.

[Ben Bullen]

Nailed it. You know what? That's our outro, Noel.

[Noel Brown]

I think it must be.

[Ben Bullen]

What a ride. Can't wait for part two. Big, big thanks to our super producer, Mr. Max Williams, Alex William Williams, who composed this track.

[Noel Brown]

Oh, yes. And huge thanks to Jonathan Strickland, AKA the Quizzter, AJ Bahamas Jacobs, AKA the Puzzler.

[Ben Bullen]

Big. Oh, I can't imagine, you know how fun it would be to get Bahamas and Jorge in a room together.

[Noel Brown]

Unbelievable. I think a singularity would occur. Time, space as we know it would break down, but like, in the most fun way imaginable.

[Ben Bullen]

Big, big thanks to the rude dudes of ridiculous crime, Christopher Haciotes here in spirit, Eve's Jeffcoat and Noel. Big thanks to you, man.

[Noel Brown]

And you as well. We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Are there any pictures of you online? Then you could already be in a massive police database base without even knowing it. Clearview scrapes together images from Facebook from LinkedIn, from Venmo accounts. I'm Dexter Thomas, host of Kill Switch, a podcast about how living in the future is affecting us right now. Police, they are trusting the software with this magical ability to lead them to the right suspect. In this episode, we dive into how cops are using AI and facial recognition and sometimes getting it wrong and putting innocent people behind bars.

[Jorge Cham]

So if your accuser is this algorithm.

[Noel Brown]

But you're not even being told that it was used, let alone given any of the details about how it works. Listen to Kill Switch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ben Bullen]

OpenAI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be an aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley.

[Noel Brown]

And I'm going to tell you why.

[Ben Bullen]

On my show, Better Offline, the rudest.

[Noel Brown]

Show in the tech industry where we're breaking down why OpenAI, along with other AI companies, are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer.

[Ben Bullen]

Listen to Better offline on the iHeartRadio.

[Noel Brown]

App, Apple Podcasts wherever you happen to.

[Ben Bullen]

Get your podcasts, a body, a suspect, and a hundred years of silence. Buried Bones is a podcast about the forgotten crimes history tried to leave behind. A common misperception about serial predators is that every single time they commit a crime, they commit it the same way. The past is a way of talking, if you know what to listen for. New episodes every Wednesday on the Exactly Right network. Listen to Barry bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jorge Cham]

In 2022, a group of divers were sucked into an oil pipe and trapped deep beneath the sea. They could have been saved, but they weren't following. Their story has led us to lucrative contracts, failing safety standards, and secretive political relationships. As we ask, why were those men left to die? This is Pipeline. Episodes are released weekly. Some search for pipeline on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Noel Brown]

This is an iHeart podcast.