How Big Bang Theory Works, with Neil deGrasse Tyson

Summary

Podcast Summary: Stuff You Should Know – "How Big Bang Theory Works, with Neil deGrasse Tyson"

Date: June 19, 2026
Hosts: Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant
Guest: Neil deGrasse Tyson

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Episode Overview

In this rich, entertaining, and wide-ranging episode, Josh and Chuck dive deep into what the Big Bang Theory actually is (not the TV show!), why it's so well-supported, and where its mysteries and limits lie. They weave in humor, analogies, pop-culture references, and ultimately feature an extended, insightful interview with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who adds clarity and historical perspective to one of science’s biggest questions: how did the universe begin?

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Stage: What is the Big Bang Theory?

• The Big Bang Theory is the most widely supported scientific explanation for how the universe began: it isn't about an "explosion" but a rapid expansion of space itself.
• The phrase "Big Bang" was actually coined as a bit of a jab by Sir Fred Hoyle, initially a detractor.
• The theory deals not with the absolute origin, but the earliest moments after the universe’s beginning.
  • "The Big Bang describes the time starting very soon after the universe formed, but it does not go back into where the origin of the universe came from..." – Josh Clark (06:54)
• Common misconceptions get debunked, such as:
  • It wasn’t an explosion in existing space; it was expansion of space itself from a state of infinite density (a "singularity").
  • Our region of the universe isn’t expanding anymore, but other parts are.

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2. The Science and History Leading to the Theory

• Spectroscopes and Doppler Effect:
  • 1800s astronomers used spectroscopes to split light into wavelengths, laying groundwork for understanding cosmic motion.
  • Christian Doppler's discoveries about sound frequency shifts paved the way to realizing light waves also shift with motion ("redshift").
• Edwin Hubble’s Breakthrough:
  • Discovered that distant galaxies are moving away (“redshift” increases with distance), implying universal expansion.
  • This challenged the then-popular “steady state” model, even causing Einstein to rethink his theories.
  • "He figured that his general theory of relativity would prove this. And, actually, he was extremely surprised to find that his own general theory... [showed] the universe is either expanding or contracting." – Josh Clark (24:32)
• Cosmic Microwave Background:
  • Leftover heat/radiation from the Big Bang detected in the 1960s, providing a "fingerprint" of the theory’s validity.

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3. What Actually Happened (As Far as We Can Tell)?

• Timeline Highlights:
  • t = 1 x 10⁻⁴³ seconds: Where physicists can start meaningful talk; earlier is beyond science's reach.
  • Early universe was a state of infinite density, temperature, and contained all matter and energy.
  • Fractional Second Epochs:
    • Gravity separates from the other three fundamental forces.
    • Baryogenesis: creation of matter slightly outweighs antimatter, allowing our material universe to exist.
    • Inflation: A mind-boggling rapid expansion happens at 10⁻³⁶ seconds.
  • After 0.01 seconds: Subatomic particles can bond.
  • After ~380,000 years:
    • Universe cools enough for atoms to form; universe becomes transparent; the “cosmic microwave background” gets locked in.
    • Only now does light freely travel.

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Notable Analogies

• Smoke Snake Analogy:
  • "You know the little pellets that you would get with your fireworks... and then it snakes out to like, you know, several feet. That’s like it. Except if that pellet were like thousands... of the size of a pinhead." – Chuck Bryant (09:21)
• Party Analogy for Galaxy Clustering:
  • "It’s an attraction, basically, that drew things together... like a really cool dude at a party... his party grows a little bigger." – Chuck Bryant (44:58)
• Flatness and Curvature:
  • Comparing the observable universe to a flat patch on a very large balloon, highlighting why we might see the universe as "flat" from a limited perspective.

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4. Current State and Open Mysteries

• Expansion and Fate:
  • Debate continues about whether universal expansion is endless or will reverse (resulting in a “Big Crunch”).
  • The answer depends on the total amount of matter and the shape/curvature of the universe — complicated by the presence of dark matter, which we barely understand.
• Homogeneity, Isotropy, and Flatness:
  • The universe is surprisingly uniform and isotropic (no center), but this "flatness" is itself a mystery—why is it so precise?
• Known Unknowns:
  • The Big Bang Theory doesn't describe the true "origin" or what came "before."
  • Some laws of physics, such as the first law of thermodynamics, break down or simply become moot that early.

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5. Alternative Models Briefly Covered

• Steady State Model:
  • Universe is always the same density; new matter is constantly added as it expands.
• Ekpyrotic Model:
  • Universe originates from a collision of higher-dimensional "worlds."
• Plasma Cosmology:
  • Focuses on the electrical/plasma states of matter as organizing the universe’s structure.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Evidence vs. Belief:
  • "People ask, do you believe in the Big Bang theory? ...I only believe in things that are evidence based... Of all the data and evidence out there, what theory is best supported? And he said, it’s the Big Bang theory." – (Chuck quoting Tyson, 05:24)
• On Mind-Blowing Scales:
  • "All of the matter, all of the energy... over the last 13.7–9 billion years was in a point that was 23 orders of magnitude smaller than the diameter of an atom." – Josh Clark (11:49)
• On the Limits of Human Comprehension:
  • "This goes beyond what our human senses can understand—sight and sound, like, forget about it." – Josh Clark (10:14, referencing Tyson)
• On the Universe’s Indifference:
  • "The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you." – Neil deGrasse Tyson (58:55)

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Neil deGrasse Tyson Interview Segment

[56:22–69:19]

Key Segments & Takeaways

A. How Tyson Views the Universe (56:22–58:55)

• Distinguishes between what is supported by data and what is speculative.
• Lays out: universe is expanding, was hotter and smaller, will keep expanding.
• "All of this is supported by data... If you have discomfort... too bad. That's just what the universe says." (58:38)
• Recaps Hubble’s crucial contributions and how we learned that “island universes” are actually other galaxies, and the expansion is space itself, not “in space.”

B. What Will Future Discoveries Look Like? (59:15–63:13)

• Warns of “longings” and biases—important to separate our intuitions from actual observation.
• Opens up the possibility of a multiverse; the best-supported theories point in this direction, but no observational test yet.
• Outlines the current impasse: quantum physics (for the small) and general relativity (for the large) don’t mesh at singularities; string theory is "the only game in town" but not yet testable.

C. Where Will the Next Leap Come From? (63:13–67:12)

• Major leaps increasingly come from collaborative, massive projects (LIGO, James Webb Space Telescope), not lone geniuses.
• "If I were a betting man, I would say that the great discoveries... will come from huge collaborations."
• Importance of access to education: "We should be able to measure our civilization by the extent to which we are in the position to discover another Einstein..."
• (67:13) "We've got 7 billion people on Earth. Somebody in there's got to be badass enough to help us out."

D. Tyson’s Personal Origin Story (67:19–68:39)

• Inspired at age 9 by a visit to Hayden Planetarium. Early exposure to science museums, cultural institutions fostered curiosity.
• By age 11, committed to astrophysics: "...I began to question whether or not it was in fact the universe that chose me."

E. Josh and Tyson’s Light-hearted Outro (68:39–69:20)

• Josh thanks Tyson for "moving the Big Bang episode along light years"; Tyson jabs back that a light year isn’t that far on this scale.
• “How about billions of parsecs?” “Nice.” (69:02)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

| Segment | Timestamp | |-----------------------------------------------|-------------| | Start of Big Bang content | 04:41 | | Hubble/distance-redshift discovery | 21:47 | | Cosmic Microwave Background | 27:55 | | Big Bang timeline breakdown | 29:17+ | | Formation of atoms/light, transparency | 41:12–42:28 | | Formation of galaxies, structure | 43:01 | | Open questions & fate of universe | 45:51+ | | Alternatives to the Big Bang | 53:05+ | | Neil deGrasse Tyson full interview | 55:51–69:20 |

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Memorable Moments & Tone

• Humor & Analogies: Frequent playful asides (“smoke snake” analogy, parsing "circularism," pie detour).
• Self-Deprecation: Hosts frequently poke fun at their own lack of astrophysics credentials.
• Pop Culture: References to Star Wars, The Big Bang Theory TV show, and others.
• Accessible Language: Tyson and the hosts always pivot back to explaining concepts in plain, relatable language, using real-world analogies.

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Conclusion

This episode masterfully blends comedy, clarity, and awe about the universe’s origins, making cosmology accessible—and leaving listeners with both humility and wonder. Tyson’s contribution distills the progress and mystery of modern science, highlighting both our achievements and how much lies ahead.

If you listen to one section:
Jump to [Neil deGrasse Tyson’s segment, 55:51–69:20] for approachable, mind-expanding insights delivered with his trademark warmth and wit.

Transcript

[Child]

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[Josh Clark]

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[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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[Child]

Mom, can I have Lingokids? Zach Lingokids, please?

[Josh Clark]

When did we become the Lingokids house?

[Child]

No idea. Last week it was dinosaurs. This week it was Lingokids.

[Josh Clark]

Why Lingokids?

[Child]

Because it's the best thing ever. We can play games with astronauts, wild animals and superheroes.

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[Josh Clark]

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[Child]

Welcome to Stuff youf should know from howstuffworks.com.

[Josh Clark]

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Chipper Josh Clark. There's Chipper Charles Bryant. Oh, that's your new nickname, Chipper Charles. Yep.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeesh.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And then there's Jerry.

[Chuck Bryant]

She's not chipper.

[Josh Clark]

She is actually chipper Today.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm not chipper. I'm grumpy because this time. I know, man, oh man, my head is already melted.

[Josh Clark]

You guys should see the vein in Chuck's forehead. It is protruding. We'll do our best, of course, dude. We're not astrophysicists, but we do have an astrophysicist coming on as a guest at the end of the episode, don't we?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes, my friend. You interviewed Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, or as I like to call him, ndt.

[Josh Clark]

Sure, that's what I call him too. Ndt. He's dynamite.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. But I was unable to be on the interview for various tooth related reasons. So you took it upon yourself. And I think an interview like that is probably just better for one person anyway. It gets a little clumsy if two people that don't know anything about astrophysics are trying to glean information.

[Josh Clark]

Here's my question. Yeah, what'd you eat for breakfast?

[Chuck Bryant]

Doctor?

[Josh Clark]

But yeah, it was very kind of him to come on. And we want to thank our friends at the Fox Theatre where he's going to be on April 20th here in Atlanta. That's right. For hooking that up. So thanks to everybody who made that happen because it's a great interview, as you guys will hear at the end of this episode.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I loved listening to it. And I'm gonna go ahead and say my two favorite parts are probably one that won't make it in. When you said that you're happy to plug the Fox theater show and he was like, don't bother, it's going to be sold out.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I like that too.

[Chuck Bryant]

And then at the end when you thanked him for advancing our understanding of this light years, and he was like, that's not nearly enough. Yeah, he's like a light years. Not very far.

[Josh Clark]

Thanks. Yeah, so I changed it to parsecs. He's like, you're getting closer.

[Chuck Bryant]

I know. It was very funny, actually. I hope you leave that part in there.

[Josh Clark]

I hope so. And later on I immediately regretted not saying, well, you advanced our show billions and billions of light years.

[Chuck Bryant]

He would have appreciated that.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, he would have. And I didn't do it. Yeah, didn't. I wasn't sharp enough.

[Chuck Bryant]

It was good interview though.

[Josh Clark]

So thanks.

[Chuck Bryant]

Feel free to skip right ahead to that.

[Josh Clark]

We'll lay here and go to sleep. So we're talking about the Big Bang Theory and not the TV show. So settle down, nerds.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think he was on that show though, wasn't he?

[Josh Clark]

I'M sure. Yeah, sure, yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

He made an appearance.

[Josh Clark]

I think all you have to do is say, like, you will further science if you appear on this. He's like, I'll do it. Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

I've never seen one episode of that show.

[Josh Clark]

I guess I've maybe seen some here or there. It's, it's, I think, literally the most popular show in the world. Or it was like last season or the season before. Like, it's just taken off like a rocket. And hats off to them too, because they like mix actual science and science jokes and all that stuff. It's. It's like smartening up the world.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, I'll tell you one quote I got from Mr. Tyson, Dr. Tyson, from the Internet, and it was actually heard him say it, so I know it was a real quote. He said that, you know, people ask, do you believe in the Big Bang theory? And in only the way that he can. He was like, well, it's not a matter of believing. He said, I'd only believe in things that are evidence based. And he said the question should be that you posit to people of all the data and evidence out there, what theory is best supported? And he said, it's the Big Bang theory.

[Josh Clark]

Sure. Right. And our colleague Jonathan Strickland, who wrote the article that this is based on, and kudos to that cat, because he took some really, really difficult concepts and explained it really well.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, he explained it in a way that I came close to understanding.

[Josh Clark]

But he makes that same point too, that not only is the Big Bang theory, a theory which obviously cannot be proven, can only be disproven, but that there are other competing theories out there too, which we'll talk about later.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

But that for the most part, it has the most observational evidence backing it up, including the recent confirmation of gravitational waves, which made a huge stir, and that as a result, it's the most widely subscribed to theory among scientists as describing the early universe. And that's a big thing. There's a big distinction about that. A lot of people think that the Big Bang describes the, the formation of the universe.

[Chuck Bryant]

Not true.

[Josh Clark]

No. The Big Bang describes the time starting very soon after the universe formed, but it does not go back into where the origin of the universe came from, what came before it. And it actually doesn't even go all the way back to that point where everything started. It just can't. Because science falls apart, as we'll see, the further you try to go back in time, because time ceases to exist at that point.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. If the universe were a human being. The Big Bang theory sort of describes the point where the sperm and the egg meet up.

[Josh Clark]

It describes the time a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after they met up. What about that?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Which is.

[Josh Clark]

It's close.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's a pretty great time.

[Josh Clark]

It is. So another misconception, Chuck, is that the Big Bang was an explosion. That's not correct.

[Chuck Bryant]

No. In fact, a man named Sir Fred Hoyle is the one who gave it a name. Almost. Well, not almost. He gave it to it in jest as sort of an insult because he was a believer. I don't know if he always was, but he was a believer at the time in the steady state theory and was like, yeah, explosion, this Big Bang. But it's not an explosion at all. So, Chuck, it's a rapid expansion.

[Josh Clark]

It was. And the best way to think of it is like this. So like an explosion. Right. Let's say you have a planet, and that planet is actually the universe and it's just floating there in space. Sure. And Darth Vader shoots it with the Death Star. And it goes. Right. And it goes everywhere. Starts scattering everywhere, but it's scattering within the boundaries, the confines of space as we understand it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

That would be the popular conception of what the Big Bang represents. Not at all. What the Big Bang actually says is that space itself inflated.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

It expanded. And that all the stuff that was in it was in this very tightly wound, dense, incredibly hot core that was a singularity, basically, that expanded into the universe. That's as big as we understand it now.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Something that was so tiny and hot, it had an infinite amount of density because everything we know was crammed in. You know what it's like? It's like if Neil DeGrasse Tyson listens to this, he's going to love this.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

You know the little pellets that you would get with your fireworks? A little black pellet. And then you light it, a smoke snake. And then it snakes out to like, you know, several feet.

[Josh Clark]

Right. That's.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's like it. Except if that pellet were like thousands and thousands and thousands of fraction of the size of a head of a pin.

[Josh Clark]

Right. I think that's a great analogy.

[Chuck Bryant]

And I'm just gonna leave the room and I'll come back in 40 minutes.

[Josh Clark]

But. But even still, Chuck, take that analogy. Right. When you imagine that, you imagine that snake growing that you on a sidewalk, and maybe there's kind of grass in your view, and it's at night and there's a car parked there because you're outside, right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, sure.

[Josh Clark]

That's where our brain wants to take us.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

We want to confine what we know within the boundaries of our universe. What we're talking about is the universe itself growing and expanding in nothingness.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And he points out in the interview, I don't want to spoil it, but he kind of blows my mind when he starts talking about, like, this goes beyond what our human senses can understand, sight and sound like, forget about it.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And that's how nobody's going to be able to pin anything on us because we'll be like, well, we just can't comprehend that. So how could you blame us for getting it wrong? Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

So, Chuck, now I'm going to leave the room.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

And you need what, a half an hour?

[Josh Clark]

It may take a little longer than that.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, I get parts of it, so I'll just chime in when I feel confident.

[Josh Clark]

There's a line, right. That Strickland had in here. He says at the earliest moments of the Big Bang, all of the matter, energy and space we could observe was compressed to an area of zero volume and infinite density. Doesn't that sound like the line from a religious text or something like that?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Isn't it just like right there on that border between like, science and religion, basically?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Like, and now take this drug and everyone take their clothes off and follow

[Josh Clark]

me to the grand room and we'll understand what I'm talking about.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And you know what, when Strickland and scientists and cosmologists talk about that, that is what is known as a singularity, that thing with zero volume and infinite density.

[Josh Clark]

Right. So I think it bears repeating at least one more time. What we're talking about is all of the matter, all of the energy, all of the heat, all the radiation, everything in the universe that is here or ever was here over the last 13 point, roughly 7 to 9 billion years.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Was in a point that was 23 orders of magnitude smaller than the diameter of an atom.

[Chuck Bryant]

You almost, you just caught yourself going to say it's like a little ball, but there's not even circularism.

[Josh Clark]

Right? Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Is that a word?

[Josh Clark]

Yes.

[Chuck Bryant]

There was nothing circular.

[Josh Clark]

And so at this time, at this point, we know that it was very, very hot.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure. Makes sense.

[Josh Clark]

Mind bogglingly hot. Like you can't even think of all the zeros associated with the, the degrees of Kelvin or Fahrenheit or Celsius. Right, Right. And it was incredibly dense. And then something happened. We don't know what that was, science simply isn't equipped to explain it or understand it or detect it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

Something happened to make this incredibly dense ball or whatever it was. Yeah. There was no ball expand.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes. And it was not like the, the smoke snake. It wasn't a child with a lighter.

[Josh Clark]

You don't know that. Neil Degrasse Tyson doesn't know that. Nobody knows that.

[Chuck Bryant]

So this expanding happened really, really, really fast. And we'll talk later about just those first few seconds afterward. Like, that's how fast we're talking.

[Josh Clark]

Well, few, like trillionths of a second is how they break it down. Like so much happened in that first, literally the first second of the origin of the universe that, that there are different ages and epochs that happened in like trillionths of a second.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it's really mind blowing. So as things expanded, though, in those first few seconds and today, things are still expanding, Right? Things are expanding and things are cooling down even as we speak. Literally every second that we're on the Earth, we're expanding. And. Well, not us, but the universe is expanding and cooling.

[Josh Clark]

Right, Exactly. And as a matter of fact, from what I understand, our region of the universe, which is something like 90 billion light years across, is no longer expanding, but other parts of the universe are expanding.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

And there's this really great article about cosmology and where it stands right now. It's in Aeon.

[Chuck Bryant]

Not cosmetology.

[Josh Clark]

No, cosmology, yes. And it was written by a guy named Ross Anderson, and I think it's called in the Beginning. And it's incredibly well written. But he makes a really great analogy. He says that that 90 billion light year across portion of the universe that we inhabit, that we consider our own, is but a small section of one tiny bubble that floats along on a frothy sea whose proportions defy comprehension. Isn't that neat?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And that's just our section of the universe. Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's our little neighborhood.

[Josh Clark]

So the universe is unknowably large. We sound like H.P. lovecraft here describing this stuff.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And still some parts of it are expanding. And apparently in the early universe, when it was a singularity, the four forces, the four fundamental forces.

[Chuck Bryant]

The dark side. Oh, wait, Yeah, I thought you were going. I thought you meant the Star wars universe.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I was.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

So the force, the dark side, Midi

[Josh Clark]

chlorians and Mark Hamill's hair.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, prequels. The four basic forces, as everyone knows. Electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, and gravity. Right.

[Josh Clark]

And at that singularity, before the universe expanded Began to expand. All of them were coupled together into a single unified force.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Which we don't understand how.

[Josh Clark]

No, we don't. And as a matter of fact, trying to get them back together is one of the great pursuits of physics. Because if we can figure out how they were all unified, we can start to understand the science we need, the paradigm we need to understand the origins of the universe, but we just can't figure out how to do it. Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. One thing that kind of blows my mind with this is when, you know, we get to this stuff later on about does it defy other laws of physics and stuff? Like, basically every answer is like, the further you travel back toward that singularity, the less all these rules that we think we understand apply.

[Josh Clark]

Right. It falls apart.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So just, you know, we will probably never understand this stuff.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

You know, at that very singular moment.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. I don't know. I disagree. I think. I disagree. Yeah. I think that we are maybe a century or two away from understanding it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, you just clearly pulled that out of your hat.

[Josh Clark]

Well, I totally did.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay.

[Josh Clark]

But we've made some.

[Chuck Bryant]

Another 126 years.

[Josh Clark]

Well, no, we've made some incredibly huge strides in the last, like, 150, 200 years in our understanding thus far. Right. So I think that's not a bad guess. Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

So it'd be a. Be a string theorist, Right. To marry all these.

[Josh Clark]

I don't know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Probably.

[Josh Clark]

I don't know. And that's what NDT said. That's what we call him now. Yeah, that's what he said. He was like, who knows? It could be string theory. Maybe someone will be able to come up with a unified theory, or what's called a theory of everything that unifies the four fundamental forces back into their. Their single version of a force. Or maybe we just don't understand quantum physics enough quite yet. And when we figure that out a little more, that will unlock some keys for us.

[Chuck Bryant]

Unbelievable.

[Josh Clark]

So, Chuck, before we get into how we started to come to understand the big bang and the origin of the universe, let's take a break real quick. All right.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm gonna go wipe my brow.

[Josh Clark]

You're doing great.

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[Josh Clark]

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[Child]

No idea. Last week it was dinosaurs. This week it's Lingokids.

[Josh Clark]

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[Child]

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[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

any stuff with Joshua?

[Josh Clark]

Stuff you should know?

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, I sort of get this part, so the history part. I'm gonna talk a little bit about it, and this makes a lot of sense to me. Go back in time. Let's get in the wayback machine.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yes, let's.

[Chuck Bryant]

Boy, it feels so safe and comfortable in here.

[Josh Clark]

Stinks of kerosene.

[Chuck Bryant]

It does. Weirdly, it's the 1800s, and astronomers started using something called a spectroscope, which is pretty nifty. We've talked about light waves in here before. A spectroscope is something that divides that light spectrum up into the wavelengths. Blue on the left, red on the right. And as you go further toward the red, the wavelengths grow longer. So that's part one.

[Josh Clark]

Right? Right. That was spectroscopes.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes. That's light waves. Right.

[Josh Clark]

And around the same time, a guy named Christian Doppler was tinkering with the frequency of sound waves. Right. He was studying those because he's a smart guy. He is.

[Chuck Bryant]

And he said, you know what? It's weird that when I sit by a train, it sounds different as it goes by me, approaches, then goes by me and goes further away from me.

[Josh Clark]

Right. It sounds different then. That doesn't really make any sense.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And whereas most people would just eat their figgy pudding and go about their day, he wanted to try and explain it.

[Josh Clark]

He was like anybody else would have been. Like, this new Charles Dickens book is top notch.

[Chuck Bryant]

So he said, you know what, as this noise approaches you, the sound waves it generates compress. It's going to change that frequency, or at least how you perceive it in a different pitch. So as it moves away from you, those waves are going to stretch. That pitch goes down. And I'm going to name this effect after myself.

[Josh Clark]

Right. Well, I'll let my wife do it so I don't look like a jerk. Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

So basically, you marry these two things, Light wavelengths and the Doppler effect.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

And it sort of led us down this path to where we could understand the Big Bang theory.

[Josh Clark]

Right. It would indicate that something, something that was emitting light out there in the universe whose light moved toward the red end of the spectrum would be emitting longer wavelengths, which would suggest, based on Christian Doppler's findings, that it was moving away. Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And they found that. They said, look at these stars. Some of the light is falling into this right hand side. And does that mean it's moving away and it's getting faster?

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

And that wants to get away from us.

[Josh Clark]

That's where Edwin Hubble came in. He basically said, yeah, this is really weird, guys, because some of these stars appear to have a velocity that's proportional to its distance from the Earth. Like there seems to be some sort of rhyme or reason here to it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And it's suggested to Hubble and later on to everybody else, including Einstein, as we'll see, that the universe itself was expanding. And this is where we came to the genuine origin of the Big Bang theory. The idea that the universe was expanding

[Chuck Bryant]

and at a constant rate too.

[Josh Clark]

Right, yes.

[Chuck Bryant]

Is that the idea is that the Hubble constant.

[Josh Clark]

No, no, no. The Hubble constant is the. The proportion between, or the relationship between how fast something is moving away from us to its distance from us.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, yeah, I guess at a constant rate, I mean.

[Josh Clark]

And actually, no, the universe appears to be expanding more quickly than it was before.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So it's increasing, which is.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's what I meant, but makes a

[Josh Clark]

lot of people really nervous.

[Chuck Bryant]

Relationship.

[Josh Clark]

Does that make sense? Yeah, the Hubble constant has to do not necessarily with the inflation of the universe itself or the expansion of the universe itself, but how far or how fast, say a star is moving away from us and the further away from us it is, it appears to be moving faster than others that are closer.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And we should point out you said inflation and. Or expansion. And apparently, if you're an Insider, if you're a scientist, you probably say inflation.

[Josh Clark]

Sure. So expansion is the basis of the Big Bang theory. It's the idea that the universe has expanded over time. So that by logic, since time is one of the four dimensions that we live in. Right. You've got the three dimensions plus time. So therefore, space time describes the fabric of the universe and the reality we live in, Right?

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

So by logic of that, if you went backward in time, the universe would be smaller and smaller and smaller. And the more they started looking into it, the more their mind started popping as they realized, like, wow, this thing was really, really small once, and that's the basis of it. Inflation theory comes in and suggests how that happened, how that expansion happened, and it fills in a lot of blanks that we'll also talk about.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes. You mentioned Einstein earlier. He's a noted smart guy.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And he actually had some issues because it conflicted somewhat with his general relativity theories, because he subscribed to his own theory that the universe was static, it's not expanding.

[Josh Clark]

Right. I think, like, he was like a member of the. There's a way of viewing the universe that, like, it was always this way. It was always spread out this way.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

It wasn't getting bigger. That's nuts. And so he figured that his general theory of relativity would prove this. And actually, he was extremely surprised to find that his own general theory of relativity actually said, no, the universe is either expanding or contracting. It's certainly not steady. And then Edwin Hubble came along and he had his findings, and Einstein said, you know what? I was wrong.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I'm a big enough man to admit it.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. That's the kind of guy I am.

[Chuck Bryant]

And one day people are gonna keep my brain in a jar in a

[Josh Clark]

barn and slice it up. It's gonna go on a car trip. That was a good episode. We did, too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Did we do one on that?

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

On its own.

[Josh Clark]

Einstein's brain.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, yeah, that's right. Boy, those were the good old days.

[Josh Clark]

Einstein's brain episodes.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, so let's talk about some of the predictions that rose from the theory that the universe is expanding. One is. And Strickland says the universe is homogeneous and isotropic, which is a fancy way of saying it's made up of the same materials and completely uniform.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Here is one of the first times we run into something where you're like, what are you talking about? It's funny. If you read Strickland's article and I sent him an email saying as much that I was like, this is really well written.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

But if you just read the words you're saying, it sounds like it was written by someone who is totally insane.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, you know, I know.

[Josh Clark]

And he makes the point too. He's like, well, yeah, all you have to do is look out into the Milky Way or anything like that. Anything we can see easily and see that it looks different. Like there's not a star that looks just like our sun with the same number of planets looking around.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

The point is, is that you look, if you go out of several orders of magnification and look at the universe outside of any given galaxy.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

You're going to see that actually. Yeah. Everything's distributed pretty evenly throughout the universe. And so that makes it homogenous. And then secondly, it's isotropic, meaning that there is no center to the universe. There's no central point.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Which some people posit that the Earth is the center of the universe. Well, we'll talk a little bit about that later.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

But that's wrong. Right?

[Josh Clark]

I mean it hasn't been disproven, but it's just extremely unlikely. I think.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I think it's very human centric thing to say.

[Josh Clark]

But the reason why some people say that is that they are. If you look around.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

That expansion that we're seeing is everything's going away from us.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

Which is like, why is that happening? Like we should be going along at least with. With something else. But the idea is that we're not, because we're the center of the universe. But the implications of that are so mind boggling that it's just not possible almost that we're actually at the center of the universe when we're just this small segment of a tiny bubble in a frothy sea that defies proportions. There's no way that's the center of the universe.

[Chuck Bryant]

So another prediction was, and we talked a little bit about the intense heat at the very first moments of the Big Bang. And if that were true, then you would feel and see this radiation. I guess not see it, but you would have this radiation expanded over the entire galaxy in roughly equal proportions.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Because again, remember, the universe is homogeneous and isotropic. So if there was radiation, it should be evenly distributed.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. There'd be like, they call it an echo. I've seen described in some circles. Makes sense.

[Josh Clark]

Right? Okay. So apparently back in the 40s they detected this stuff and didn't know what they were looking at. And in the 60s they figured out. Holy cow. This is the cosmic microwave background, which is basically. I think of it as more like a fingerprint, the fingerprints of the universe. Right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And it's evenly distributed. It's this trace radiation that's still around from the Big Bang.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Which is pretty amazing. So when you put that and the discovery that the universe does seem to be homogenous and isotropic, along with the fact that we discovered this cosmic radiation background that's evenly distributed throughout the universe, and it really gives a lot of credence to the Big Bang theory. And so too does this gravitational wave.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

The gravitational wave discovery. They apparently found curls in the cosmic microwave background that are remnants of gravitational wave from the Big Bang too. So it's just getting supported all over the place and everybody's super happy about it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, there's like real observational data there.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right. We tease those, those first nanoseconds, nano moments right after the Big Bang. So let's, let's talk about them right now. The earliest thing that scientists can even talk about, like with a straight face, like later on when they're having drinks at the bar, I bet they talk about before this.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

But if they're like on a podium in front of an audience, they can go back as far as. I'll just say the equation, even though it will make no sense to anyone. T equals 1 times 10 to the negative 43 seconds.

[Josh Clark]

May I?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes.

[Josh Clark]

Okay. So T. Yeah. Equals the time after the creation of the universe.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yep.

[Josh Clark]

And as far back as they've gone is.00000000. 0000-000000-00000,000,000,000,000. One second after the creation of the universe. That's how far back they've been able to trace the big bang.

[Chuck Bryant]

43. Nice work.

[Josh Clark]

Isn't that amazing? That fraction of one second is how far back they've been able to figure it out. And so much happened in that first second, Chuck, that just fractions of that fraction are, like I said before, like different epochs in the, the era or the age of the universe. Like entire epochs happen in trillionth of a trillionth of a second.

[Chuck Bryant]

I know.

[Josh Clark]

It's just so mind boggling.

[Chuck Bryant]

I know.

[Josh Clark]

I love it though. Like, I really given myself over to this. I was fighting at first, like, well, that doesn't make sense. I don't want it. How does that make sense? And I did look plenty of stuff up, but I also just kind of Was like, I'm just taking it on faith, despite what NDT says. Like, you do kind of have to take this on faith, especially if you're not an astrophysicist. And I just kind of gave myself over to. And I love it.

[Chuck Bryant]

You know what happens when my mind gets bent like that too far? I just have some pie.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, that's good stuff.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. What kind of stare at the wall and have some pie.

[Josh Clark]

What do you recommend?

[Chuck Bryant]

Doesn't matter. Began.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, so something super sweet, not fruity.

[Chuck Bryant]

What's a fruity pie?

[Josh Clark]

Like cherry pie or apple pie.

[Chuck Bryant]

I like a good apple crumble pie.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah, I do too.

[Chuck Bryant]

But not like the one with the crisscross pastry on top.

[Josh Clark]

I don't really discriminate against pie. I tend more toward the fruity section of the pie spectrum. And I tend to think of pecan, like right in the middle, but then on the other end you have like your creamy and chocolate mousse pies and stuff like that. I, I tend to be on the other side a little more.

[Chuck Bryant]

Or good lemon pie. Lemon ice piece.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah, it's good stuff.

[Chuck Bryant]

What I don't get is the cheddar on the apple pie.

[Josh Clark]

I've never gotten that either.

[Chuck Bryant]

I've never tried it, so maybe I should.

[Josh Clark]

Those people are obviously crazy.

[Chuck Bryant]

I like sweet and savory together, so maybe I should give it a whirl.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Do we have to start talking about this again?

[Josh Clark]

Dip a french fry in a frosty and call it a day.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, so at that point that you described that, you know, don't say all the zeros again, but at that point, the universe was tiny. Tiny, tiny and small and dense and hot. And the area of the universe spanned a region of about 3.9 by 10 to 34 inches. Everything.

[Josh Clark]

And that area. Right. 10 to the negative 33 centimeters. Again, the average diameter of an atom, or roughly something like that is 10 to the negative 10. Yeah, this is that much smaller than an atom. And everything that's in the universe now was encapsulated in that tiny little thing, whatever it was.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

And again, like, surely astrophysicists and cosmologists when they were coming up with these calculations are like, this can't be right. Yeah. And I guess over time they were like, it seems to be right. Either we're all just totally off our rockers and really, somebody forgot to carry a one and everybody forgot to carry a one, or this is really how things started and it's just mind boggling to Think.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, so in that very first, first, first, first moment, theorists think that those four primary forces that we mentioned are still hanging together.

[Josh Clark]

Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

They're still united. And that matter and energy were inseparable

[Josh Clark]

at this point, which is another. Don't feel bad if, like, you're sitting there going, like, how is that possible? No one knows.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

They just. See, the calculations bear that out is another way to put it. You know.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

But that's how it was. Matter and energy were one in the same.

[Chuck Bryant]

And as things expanded. We'll go into these in detail. We go through something called bariogenesis, particle cosmology, and then standard cosmology.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

And as this time passes, things become a little more easy to understand. And when I say easy to understand, I mean extremely difficult. But at least. At least your mind can wrap around it.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Start to. At least. Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So, remember, we started at T, which is the time after the creation of the universe. T equals 1 times 10 to the negative 43 seconds.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

The next. The next big part where things start. And actually in between the two, gravity separated from the. From the four fundamental forces.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, Just a little thing like that.

[Josh Clark]

Right. But the next big one that came along was at 10 to the negative 36 seconds. And this is where baryogenesis happened. And around this time, also, this is where the electroweak, which is electromagnetic and weak force, combined together, separated from the strong magnetic force. And apparently here at that 10 to the negative 36 power seconds, that was where inflation happened. That's where the expansion began.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. And that's where we actually could begin to observe some kind of matter.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And they think that what happened was a tremendous amount of matter and antimatter were created.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

But that. And we did it. We. I don't remember a lot about the details, but remember we did a podcast on antimatter spacecraft.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, yeah.

[Josh Clark]

How amazing those were.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

But antimatter and matter like to destroy each other and effectively cancel one another out. But apparently, at the beginning of the universe, at the origin of the universe, it's suggested by this that there was a slight imbalance in whatever makes matter and whatever makes antimatter. So that there was slightly more matter that was created than antimatter, which is a good thing. Right. So that that stuff survived. Had the balance been the other direction, there'd be slightly more antimatter than matter now. And who knows what kind of loopy bizarro universe that would have created, Seriously.

[Chuck Bryant]

Or if there would have been anything at all.

[Josh Clark]

So all that matter that survived is the matter that we see in the universe now.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And that's a lot of matter. So imagine, since this is just a tiny fraction of the matter that was created and destroyed by the antimatter that was also created, how much matter and antimatter was created at 10 to the negative 36 seconds.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Through baryogenesis.

[Chuck Bryant]

Again, it's just mind boggling.

[Josh Clark]

And that was the result, Chuck, of energy and matter uncoupling as well, Right?

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right. And this is the point where we can actually start to. You know, we did one on the Large Hadron Collider. It's a particle accelerator, the biggest and best that we have on the Earth. And this is where you can actually use a particle accelerator to recreate and look at this stuff.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

So we can actually observe this at this point.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. We can smash things together and be like, kaboom. Look at that early universe. That's what they do at cern. Oh, yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right. Well, people should listen to that one too, by the way. Oh, yeah, that would be a good, like, primer.

[Josh Clark]

That was the one where we wondered whether it was going to end the universe or not.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. It did not.

[Josh Clark]

Not yet.

[Chuck Bryant]

So at this point, there is still no light, things are too dense, and it is still just a dark, dense area.

[Josh Clark]

Right? Exactly. And I think during the particle cosmology epoch, the electromagnetic force and the weak force break off into separate forces.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. And we still can't at this point, these subatomic particles still can't bond. They're there, they can form, but they can't hook up and party.

[Josh Clark]

Right, Exactly. That actually didn't start to take place until we reached the standard cosmology age, which is the age that I believe we are in now. Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Which started 0.01 seconds after the initial bang.

[Josh Clark]

Right. 100th of a second. So we've gone through that many ages and we haven't even mentioned them all within that first second.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it's crazy.

[Josh Clark]

It is crazy. So that standard cosmology, this is about where the astrophysicists and cosmologists say, we understand it from about here on out.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

Everything else is a little shaky, but we've got some observational data that backs it up. But here is where neutrons and protons were formed. And a little after that, they started to be able to form nuclei through nucleosynthesis. Right. And they would ultimately be the building blocks of atoms.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. So at this point, things are still expanding and cooling at a rapid rate. And we can actually, there are no atoms yet, but like you said, it's too hot at this point for electrons to complete that process.

[Josh Clark]

Right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Still too hot in the hot tub.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. I mean, after 100 seconds, the universe had cooled to a temperature cooled after 100 seconds to 1.8 billion degrees Fahrenheit or a billion degrees Celsius. That was how hot it was still after 100 seconds.

[Chuck Bryant]

Should we take another break here?

[Josh Clark]

Less.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, let's do that. And we'll come back and. And explain the rest of it in great, easy to understand detail.

[Child]

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[Josh Clark]

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[Child]

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[Josh Clark]

Why Lingokids?

[Child]

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[LingoKids Advertiser]

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[Child]

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[Josh Clark]

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[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

learning stuff with Joshua.

[Josh Clark]

Stuff you should know.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, buddy. When we left off, things were expanding and cooling.

[Josh Clark]

And they still are actually.

[Chuck Bryant]

The end.

[Josh Clark]

Yep.

[Child]

Nope.

[Josh Clark]

Good night, everyone.

[Chuck Bryant]

And everyone here is Neil Degrasse Tyson

[Josh Clark]

to take us home. So 56,000 years after the creation of the universe or after the big bang, we were at a temperature of 15,740 degrees Fahrenheit.

[Chuck Bryant]

Nice and cool.

[Josh Clark]

Or 8,726 degrees Celsius. Right after another 324,000 years. So at 380,000 years after it had cooled down to 4,000, just under 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit and just under 3,000 degrees Celsius. And finally Here atoms started to form because protons and electrons could combine. And the other thing that happened too was the density had expanded out enough, the volume had increased is a better way to put it. And the temperature had cooled so that suddenly the universe was now transparent. We could see through it up to this point. 379,000 years, you still couldn't see through it. It was too dense and too hot. And at about 380,000 years, it hits that point and you can see it like we do now.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. We finally have light at that point. Those cosmic microwave background radiation that we talked about earlier, it's locked in. I don't think we mentioned earlier where we're at now, temperature wise. Just to kind of put it in perspective, we currently are at roughly negative 454.8 degrees Fahrenheit, negative 270.4 degrees Celsius.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. That's the temperature of space right now, right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So it's definitely cooled. Apparently it's still cooling. Like it's still not at absolute zero yet. Which is the, the lowest temperature or the lowest activity that atoms will move at ever.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

So it's, it's still cooling and still expanding.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right. So here's when things really heat up or I guess really cooled down. Sorry, bad pun. Strickland points out for the next hundred million years or so, this is when the universe is really cooling. It's expanding, and then you have matter clusters together.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Eventually forms gas. And this is the quick view. We'll dive into it. Those gases form stars. So stars cluster into galaxies. Those galaxies cluster together into solar systems.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's the overview.

[Josh Clark]

And so what they think happened was. Because this really doesn't make any sense. As a matter of fact, one of the criticisms of Big Bang theory is that it violates the law of entropy, that organizations become more disordered and chaotic over time.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

And the idea that planets and galaxies and things formed, it seemed like it became more orderly. It's the opposite. Right, exactly. And so they've really kind of looked into how anything would have formed at all. And what they think happened was that back in say the 10 to the negative 43 second era, there were quantum fluctuations, little vacuum energy fluctuations within this universe, this tiny little universe. And that as the universe expanded very quickly, those fluctuations grew tremendously in size. And the vacuum energy in the cosmic microwave background, those little fluctuations that are on there. Yeah. Were just different enough from the other spots in the universe that they had slightly more density and thus exerted slightly more Gravitational pull than other areas. And so more matter started to attract around them and they started to form stars, and the stars started to form galaxies and planets started to form around them. And all of a sudden, what had just started out as little vacuum energy and became ultimately universal hotspots where you could find matter clustered together. Which explains why so much of it is deep of deep space is just void.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And why some of it has stuff. Apparently it all began with these little tiny quantum fluctuations way back trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the universe was created.

[Chuck Bryant]

So like a really cool dude at a. At a party the size of all humankind, and he's so cool that people start hanging out with him and that his party grows a little bigger.

[Josh Clark]

Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

Is that a good way to describe it?

[Josh Clark]

I think that's. That's better than anybody could ever hope to.

[Chuck Bryant]

So it's what. So it's an attraction, basically, that drew things together ever so slightly enough.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

To form larger bodies and then larger bodies.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And the reason why they think this happened is because the. These tiny little fluctuations, little. Little details in these little. This little universe grow bigger over time. Right. Especially if you look at this inflation growing as a process of time rather than just like volume expansion. It's also. Time is a dimension to it. Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So it makes total sense in that just these little things would get bigger as the universe itself got bigger, too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, does that mean that the universe, being coy here, does that mean the universe will ever expand for all of time infinitely?

[Josh Clark]

So, I mean, you're talking about like that debate, right? Yeah, yeah. There's a whole debate over whether or not it's ever going to stop. And all of it comes down to how much matters in the universe, which we don't quite know yet.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

When they calculate the matter we do know about, they realize that there's actually some that you can't account for, and that's dark matter, because we know that there's something that's making stars behave differently or there's clearly some matter that we can't detect that's out there.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So we can't account for all the matter in the universe. So we don't know how much matter is in the universe.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. But the idea is if there's enough, then that gravity will reverse and things will start to contract again.

[Josh Clark]

Right, Right. Because gravity is this force that attracts matter to other matter.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And yeah. Eventually, if there's enough matter, it'll counteract that expansive force that came out of it. And then, yeah, probably will either stop is one school of thought, or the universe will contract and form what's called the Big Crunch. And some people say that's what our universe is. It's just the cycle of expansion and contraction that takes place over many billions of years. But we're just one part of a cycle that is ongoing, perhaps forever.

[Chuck Bryant]

It makes it sound, when we talk about it like that. It makes it sound like the universe is just breathing.

[Josh Clark]

It does, doesn't it?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, yeah, in a creepy way.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And Chuck, that has to do. Also, the reason why they don't know if it's gonna keep expanding or contracting, they don't know if it's what's called a closed universe with positive curvature or one with negative curvature. Right. And it also has to do with the. The shape of space to a certain degree. And Strickland also wrote a really top notch article called does space have a Shape?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that's a good one.

[Josh Clark]

It really is. And something from studying this that they figured out is that really it doesn't seem like it has a positive or a negative curvature. It seems flat. Seems like it has a zero curvature. And this is what's called the flat problem of the Big Bang theory. Why should it be flat? That doesn't make any sense. Because if you look at the spectrum between positive curvature and negative curvature, and there's a lot of places on that spectrum where the universe could fall one way or the other, but it's so close to the middle that astrophysicists and cosmologists have no idea if it's positive or negative in its curvature. And they've started to wonder, like, why should we be almost exactly in the middle? That doesn't make any sense. It would suggest that the early universe was so finely tuned that were only slightly off of center.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

So it would have had to have started almost completely at center, because remember, small fluctuations grow bigger and bigger over time and on a larger scale. So since we're still so close to center right now, with the universe as big as it is, it would have had to have been basically on top of exactly in the middle between a closed and, or a negative and a positive curvature at the very beginning of it, which is kind of puzzling in and of itself, that that's like. Well, that indicates some sort of weird fine tuning.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So does that mean that the astrophysicists are off a little bit in their, their own fine tuning of the Big Bang theory and inflation or what? Who knows? Or is there a little Kid with the lighter who set the snake off.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

And the snake was very well manufactured.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, that's just one thing that we can't quite explain. We talked earlier about the fact that at, at the very beginning that the Big Bang theory wasn't meant to address a lot of questions, one of which is that we touched on was what happened before the Big Bang. And we just don't know.

[Josh Clark]

It doesn't even try. It doesn't. It can't.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right, yeah. Like trying to explain time before timing existed is futile.

[Josh Clark]

Right. Because you get into stuff that I just suggested, which is basically amounts to intelligent design or whatever, and there's, that's, that's beyond science. Like science isn't equipped to say, oh, well, what about this? Or what about that? And I tried really hard to get Neil Degrasse Tyson to say something and he was not going to bite.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, no, and smartly, you know, I think a scientist looks at the observational data and extrapolates from there. And like I said, I'm sure. And I think he even said in the interview that, sure, people like to talk about these things, but it's not like hard science.

[Josh Clark]

Right. And also to answer that flat problem that I brought up, apparently inflation theory does answer it. It does satisfy it by saying the universe appears flat to us because we're looking at it strictly on a very local level, even though we're looking at 90, 90 billion light years or something like that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

It's really just a very small segment of something. So if you take a balloon, you blow it up. Yeah, it's still curved. But the, if you're just looking at just a pinpoint segment of it, it's gonna appear flat to everybody looking at it from just that tiny perspective. So it's basically our perspective that we're looking at the universe right now makes it seem like it's flat, but it's really actually curved one way or the other.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

That's the answer to that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, should we talk about some of the problems with the Big Bang theory?

[Josh Clark]

Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

There are criticisms and there will continue to be. One was that is that it violates the first law of thermodynamics, that you can't create or destroy matter or energy. And proponents will say that that's unwarranted for a couple of reasons. One is, like we already said, it doesn't address the creation of the universe. It was never meant to. But just how it evolved or inflated over the years. Over the years, over the 60 or 70 years. And another reason is kind of like we said earlier, is that the further back you go, the rules don't apply. So maybe the law of thermodynamics is just completely moot.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

When you go back that far.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Like it didn't come into being until later.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. If matter and energy are like one in the same, I can imagine that some of our current laws don't necessarily apply.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Well, probably a lot of them.

[Josh Clark]

Right. And then one of the other things too is that that inflation that supposedly happened when the strong nuclear force decoupled from the electroweak force.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And the universe suddenly expanded, you know, within that one second, it just kept growing and growing and growing.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Way faster than the speed of light.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And a lot of people are like wrong. Nothing can go faster than the speed of light.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, there was no light.

[Josh Clark]

Well, nothing you could see. Yeah. There are definitely photons. But they had the, the proponents of Big Bang have the same answer. They say, well again, dude, you're talking general relativity. That wouldn't have applied at all.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. The answer is kind of consistently. Don't even come at me with that. Your laws.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Should we talk about. Should we finish with a few other alternative explanations?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Like we said, there are alternative models. Right. One of them is that same one that Einstein was a proponent of, the steady state model, that it is not actually expanding. And the. Apparently this is hard for me to wrap my mind around. The people who say that it's not expanding explain away expansion by saying that matter is created in proportion to the original density of the universe.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

So maybe the universe is expanding. Some and more matter has to be created to keep the same density. So I think what they're saying is.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think that's what it means.

[Josh Clark]

The universe has been at the same density all the time.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

And sure it's expanding, but it's also creating more matter.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. So which holds it static.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, guess so.

[Chuck Bryant]

The ek. Pyrotic. Ep. Chaerotic. Epirotic.

[Josh Clark]

I know those two should not be ekpyrotic.

[Chuck Bryant]

Ekpyrotic model.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. I think that's it, man.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's just. We're the worst. That suggests the universe is the result of a collision of. Well, that's the one you brought up earlier of two three dimensional worlds. And that there is some hidden fourth dimension out there.

[Josh Clark]

Well, that's part of. The fourth dimension is part of like standard astrophysics and cosmology. But this was like this, this thing says our universe came out of two universes colliding in the Fourth dimension, which. That defies me a little bit. But the idea that there are four dimensions and one of them is time is definitely a part of standard stuff. Still hard to think of.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

And then plasma cosmology, I like that one a lot because it's just totally different from the way we think of the universe. It seeks to describe it based on its. Basically its electrical charge state. You know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay.

[Josh Clark]

Rather than, like, the temperature of it or the density or anything like that. It's more involved in, like, the plasma aspects of it because, you know, plasma is ionized gas.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And it's like a fourth state of matter. And plasma cosmology looks at it through that lens, which is basically totally alien to everything we just talked about, from what I can gather.

[Chuck Bryant]

Did you say there's a totally aliens out there?

[Josh Clark]

There's aliens out there. And the universe was started by a little kid with a lighter.

[Chuck Bryant]

Wow.

[Josh Clark]

That's my stand. Well, if you like this, then stick around, because right now, Chuck, we have an interview with Neil Degrasse Tyson. We weren't joking.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, great job on that one, too, buddy.

[Josh Clark]

Thanks, man. We missed you. He was like, where's Chuck?

[Chuck Bryant]

No, he didn't.

[Josh Clark]

Yes, he did.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, how you guys doing? Good.

[Josh Clark]

How are you doing?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Are you assuming I know how stuff works?

[Josh Clark]

I have an inkling that you may have a clue. I guess my first question is then, how do you. Specifically, how do you think of the universe? When you think of the universe as a whole, do you think of it as something like a speck of dust underneath a giant fingernail? Or is it part of a branching multiverse? Or is it a bubble that kind of pushes up against other bubbles? What is the universe when you think of it?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I think of the universe in a fundamentally different way from that of my colleagues. What you want to do is separate the things we have data and observations to support and the things that live and thrive on the frontier of theorizing about what the universe was, is, or will one day be, or what larger system it could be a part of. So if you live in the realm of data, then we are in an expanding universe, and it's been expanding for nearly 14 billion years. And it was smaller in the past and hot in the past, and it's getting larger and cooler by the minute. And we exist on this planet we call Earth, born 4.6 billion years ago with the rest of the solar system in some undistinguished part of an undistinguished galaxy we call the Milky Way. And this scenario this picture was very hard earned. And it's no more than about 80 or 90 years old in total. Edwin Hubble, the man in this particular usage of the word Edwin hubble in the 1920s, so about 90 years ago, 1926, discovered that there are other island universes, if you will, not the way we might think of that term today. But back then there were these spiral fuzzy things in the night sky imagined to be just spiral fuzzy things in the Milky Way. He would show that those spiral fuzzy things are not in the Milky Way. They are entire other Milky Ways, other galaxies. And that was a profound expanding expansion of our worldview, if you would. And then just three years after that, he would show that these spiral fuzzy things are rapidly moving away from us. Coupled with Einstein's general theory of relativity, we would learn that it's not just galaxies spreading apart within a pre existing space. It is the fabric of the space and time itself that's expanding. All of this is supported by data. So if you have discomfort thinking that the universe had a beginning and that we will expand forever, then too bad. That's just what the universe says. And the universe. I've said this before. The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. Especially when what we learn of the universe comes to us from methods and tools that completely transcend our native inborn biological senses, which in fact is the great ascent of science.

[Josh Clark]

Sure.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

What are all the ways we can decode the operations of nature without having to rely on the limits that our biological senses force us to occupy?

[Josh Clark]

So when science is furthered, you know, decades down the road, and the vision we have or the view we have of the universe we live in is magnified by orders of magnitude from what we're looking at through right now. What do you suspect? What shape do you suspect it's going to take? Do you have suspicions? I mean, if you don't, how do you keep yourself from. From making that leap? Like, yes, of course this is what it's going to be. This is what we're really living in.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, we all have biases, and let me not call them biases. Let's say we all have longings for how we think or want the universe to be. And if you begin to believe your longings too strongly, then you might miss some realities that don't fit your expectations and someone else will catch them and make the discovery. So it's okay to lean in one direction or another, but don't do so while being blind to what else could be true. In spite of how you think it might be. So now the scenario I gave you is sort of, is very well established in terms of observations and data. Data and basically a century of thinking about and observing the universe and posing questions and answering them. So beyond that, we can ask, is there a multiverse? This seems to come naturally out of certain thinking about the behavior of the universe. When you try to bring together quantum physics and Einstein's general relativity, There are, there are good arguments to suggest that we could be in a multiverse. And it's not obvious, at least to me, how one would test that just yet. And so. But the theories of the universe that point to a multiverse are themselves well tested. So this is what gives you the confidence that maybe, maybe our multiverse folks are onto something. And there are other frontiers. For example, the quantum physics, which is the theory of the small and general relativity, the theory of the large, they work perfectly well in their own regimes. General relativity describing the large scale universe, quantum physics describing with very high precision, atoms, molecules, nuclei, particles, this sort of thing. But in the early universe, when the entire universe was the size of an atom, then we might suppose that quantum forces override whatever was going on with general relativity, because now the entire universe is of the size that quantum laws significantly manifest. And so, and right now we do not have a good way to merge those two theories. And we got top people working on it. So these are collectively the string theorists and others in that realm who are thinking long and hard about, is there a third theory that needs to be introduced that will enclose quantum physics and general relativity into a deeper, broader understanding of what's going on? Or will quantum physics absorb general relativity? I don't know that people know just yet. And it involves very high levels of math and higher dimensions and this sort of thing. And some people have criticized string theory for not really being a legitimate theory because you can't test it in any traditional way. But it's the only game in town. And they're not very expensive. You know, you give them a pencil and a pad and throw in a laptop and a string theorist is in business. So I let them go as far as they can take it.

[Josh Clark]

So it does seem like there is either. Like you said, quantum physics may be the answer to all this. We just don't fully understand that field yet enough to get back to the moment of the big Bang or what happened before the big bang. But it could also be, from what I've seen, the unified field theory that gets us back to that point. But either way, to get To a point where we go further beyond our current understanding, further back in time in the Big Bang, including before the Big Bang of what was before. It seems like it's going to take a vast leap forward. Do you think that leap is going to come from a genius that hasn't been born yet, or has been born, but hasn't been educated and entered the field yet? Is that how it's going to happen? Is it going to happen from this person, combining this work with this work and that work and this work, and then suddenly the pieces are going to fall together? In that sense, that's a great question.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That also has a philosophical dimension to it, such that in modern times, great leaps in science, do they happen by the lone genius burning the candle at midnight, coming up with a eureka moment, or do they come about because you have huge, expensive, highly collaborative scientific projects, such as ligo, discovering gravitational waves, such as the next generation space telescope. It's called the James Webb Space Telescope, not yet launched, but that will enable us to see galaxies being born in the early universe, as well as a host of other frontier tier observations that were not possible with previous telescopes. Well, that telescope had to be designed by whole teams of people with questions that they had in mind that they want answered by the new data. So I'm not convinced that we're just waiting for a new smart person to come along and have it all make sense. I think we're waiting for someone to obtain new data that we've never seen before that then force us into new ideas and understandings of the universe. Maybe there's some new theory that maybe I'm not discounting it, but what I can tell you is we're in an era. Look at the Higgs boson, for example, that required the Large Hadron Collider and thousands of scientists and tens of thousands of engineers who built the thing in the first place. So we're kind of in a collaborative era right now. And so if I were a betting man, I would say that the great discoveries to come will come about from huge collaborations, possibly even international collaborations. Now, that doesn't remove the question as to whether there is an Einstein walking among us who happened to have been born into poverty in a developing country and then we will never know. Well, that would be one of the great tragedies of modern civilization. So I, as an educator, feel very strongly about what kind of access people of the world should have to knowledge, to learning, to health, to, you know, a person should be able to live a day and not have the entire Day be preoccupied about whether, whether you have food or whether or not you're going to die from a disease that your neighbor just died of. So this is a. So I think we should be able to measure our state of our civilization by the extent to which we are in the position to discover another Einstein rising up from the midst. And that's. So that's one way to get an Einstein. Another one is to wait around until one is born into the right circumstances.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You know, we've got 7 billion people on Earth. Somebody in there's got to be badass enough to help us out.

[Josh Clark]

So you, I mean, you brought up your role as an educator and you're a world class science popularizer and explainer. What is it that got you into science as a kid?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I was nine years old and it was a first visit to the Hayden Planetarium right here in New York. My local planetarium. I think most big cities have planetariums. Even medium sized cities will have a planetarium. And my family, my parents took my brother, my sister and me to all the cultural institutions of the city every weekend. So one weekend it was the Natural History Museum, another it was the zoo, another it was the aquarium. We even went to other things that sort of talented grownups did. Like we'd go to a baseball game or the opera or theater. And that exposure enabled the three of us to see what is possible beyond the traditional. You want to be a doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, you know, the three traditional options that you're given as a six year old or a seven year old. And so out of that arose my interest in the universe. That really got cemented. By the time I was 11, I knew that, in fact, I was so convinced that I wanted to do astrophysics that I began to question whether or not it was in fact the universe that chose me.

[Josh Clark]

That's really cool. Well, thank you very much, Dr. Tyson. We appreciate you joining us. This was like you just took our big, Big Bang episode and moved along light years. So thank you.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, okay.

[Josh Clark]

Thank you.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Lightyear's not actually very far in the scale of the universe, so I'd feel better if I'd taken it along. Billion.

[Josh Clark]

How about a parsec or something?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Parsec is only 3.26 light years, so that still won't even happen. You know, a parsec is not even far enough away to get to the nearest star to the sun. Okay, so you're just in the wrong zone there.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, well then how about billions of parsecs?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Nice.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, thank you very Much. What a guy, huh?

[Chuck Bryant]

Great job. Yeah, he was, Man. He's just such a cool customer. That's why he is where he is now.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And if you want to hang out with him, head on over to the Hayden Planetarium. I'm sure he'd be happy to see you.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

You can see him on tour. You can see him with StarTalk Live. He's got a podcast for those of you who don't know. With our pal Eugene Mirman.

[Chuck Bryant]

He was on our TV show, even.

[Josh Clark]

He was. I didn't get a chance to ask him if he remembered that.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm sure he didn't.

[Josh Clark]

That's why I didn't get a chance.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that just would have been embarrassing.

[Josh Clark]

Well, if you want to know more about the Big Bang, type those words into the search [e-mail] and they'll bring up some great stuff. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm gonna call this Is Russia European.

[Josh Clark]

Nice.

[Chuck Bryant]

Remember that debate?

[Josh Clark]

Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, it wasn't so much a debate. We just kind of wondered in the Continents episode. Hey, guys, thanks for cracking me up with the show. It's astonishing how many film references you can fit into a geography lesson. Yes, Russia is definitely a European country. Historically, it's always been considered a part of Europe. For example, it was named as one of the six major European countries in World War I, and the Tsar was closely related to other royalty in Europe. This is very different from China or India. Always much more distant and mysterious to the east. Also, consider that maps are very deceptive. Over 75% of Russia's population is on the European side, including every major city from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, from Milan to Minsk. I knew you were going to say that. Very nice. I would have been so disappointed had you not. Most of the land you see to the east is empty and largely uninhabitable, only there to look pretty on a map. Well, I don't know about that, but that's what.

[Josh Clark]

That's what the little kid with the lighter put it there.

[Chuck Bryant]

So, cheers. That is from Timothy. And that was one heck of a Seinfeld reference.

[Josh Clark]

Timothy or Timothy? Is he Russian?

[Chuck Bryant]

No. Good point.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it's Timofey Moskov, who just wrote it using his pseudonym.

[Chuck Bryant]

Timothy Milan Timinsk.

[Josh Clark]

If you want to get in touch with me and Chuck and Jerry, you can tweet to us@syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com stuffyoushouldknow and you can send us an Email to stuff [e-mail] and as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyou should know.com. For more on this and thousands of

[Child]

other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. With my mom and dad living in Orange county, when we bring my five and seven year old to visit, we are sometimes in for a two hour drive that could feel like 10.

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[Chuck Bryant]

Hey everyone, it's Kel Penn.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I'm inviting you to join the best

[Josh Clark]

sounding book club you've ever heard with

[Chuck Bryant]

my podcast, Hearsay, The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. Every episode I nerd out with amazing guests and dive into the best new

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[Josh Clark]

It's the book club for your ears.

[Chuck Bryant]

Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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[Child]

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