The Joe, the Jogan experience. Train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. It's also there's some things that are so awesome.
It's like that's fucking awesome. I was trying to talk about black holes to some high school students just seriously earlier this week. And I kept saying, what the fuck? I got nothing to pitch but I, the Shorewood Men's Club.
I was giving a talk there. The Shorewood Wisconsin is where I live. The Men's Club invited me to give a talk about astronomy last week. And my mention I was coming to the show, they just freaked out.
And so the only thing I have is my Shorewood Men's Club. Well shout out to the Shorewood Men's Club. That's awesome. That's so cool that you give those speeches.
I love your YouTube talks. They're fantastic. Well thank you. Wow.
I have watched probably everyone you've ever done. I've watched at least, I mean, haven't you done a watch at least like ten of them? Yeah, I mean, so pretty much what I did at NASA I did a lot of science spokesperson stuff. And so most of that was, you know, I'm more on the NASA videos.
I hosted like launch events. I haven't done much privately on YouTube. I'm thinking about starting some stuff. Oh you should.
Please. 100%. 100%. You've said so many things that made me just go what?
Like here's a big one that you said. You were talking about if the size of Earth, if the Earth was the dot of an eye in a book in regular print that the Milky Way galaxy would be as large as the Earth itself. Actually a little bigger. Yeah.
So I mean the thing is this is an interesting thing about science communication. You say that if the sun was the size of a dot of an eye and you've got to remember you can fit a million Earth's inside the sun. This is a huge thing. So if that's the size of a dot of an eye and untext then the galaxy would be the size of the Earth.
That's when people's eyes get big and people respond to it. So it's not just the Earth's the sun. So if the sun was the dot of an eye. Yes, that's right.
So let's make this clear. So the sun were the size of the dot of an eye on page of text. So if the Earth was the dot of an eye then the Milky Way galaxy would be bigger than the Earth. Yeah.
So if the Earth was the dot of an eye then how big is the Milky Way galaxy? Because the sun is how many millions Earth's? The volume wise you could fit over a million Earth's inside the sun. Yeah.
The sun is about 800,000 miles across. You could fit about 110 Earth's across it. The diameter. We do those things where you show the differences between our sun and different stars and men stars and you go bigger and bigger and bigger and you get to the point where you're like, I can't, this is not working.
I can't process this. It's too kooky. There's nobody that can process it. One of the really kind of the thing about sort of demystifying scientists is the idea that our brains somehow work any differently.
And we can visualize what a light year is. Light year is about six trillion miles. The distance light travels in a year. No, we're human beings.
We get used to using the terms, we get used to using the numbers, but we've got the same brains everybody else. Nobody can visualize what a galaxy really is. And you can take pictures of them, you can say the word galaxy, but people have no idea what monsters these are. And then with the James Webb Space Telescope, all of a sudden you're taking pictures of billions of them.
And they're right in front of your eyes. This is not something that you can argue about. It's an image. And you see these foggy hazes of stars, basically so many stars, you can't see them individually.
And that's real. And it still gives me goosebumps. That's awesome. It gives me goosebumps too, but it's so cool that it gives it to you and you actually study it your whole life.
Oh, that's the whole point. I mean, working for NASA was a huge, huge honor. And all of us there are doing this. We were all science fiction fans.
We all love imagination. That was the best thing about working at NASA. It was the joy and the teamwork and the camaraderie and the people that you're working with. That they think is the best thing in the world to do.
Well, I mean, there's a real problem that we have where I think that cities and light pollution have really, you know, it's great that we have cities. It's wonderful. It's wonderful that we have all this electricity and that we can see things at nighttime. But boy, we have done ourselves a massive disservice by not being able to see the stars all the time.
And I think people have kind of lost the wonder of it when you're only looking at it as images on your phone or when, you know, the only time you get it is on vacation. Occasionally you look up in the sky. Wow, look at all the stars here. It's different here.
This is something that everyone should be absolutely blown away by. At night, you have a vision of the most spectacular thing any human being has ever seen ever. Just the Milky Way galaxy alone. It's nuts.
It's crazy to think that those are all stars and that you can't count them. It's insane. There's so many of them. And it's above you every day.
And we're just blazae blazae. We're just like so used to it. We're so dismissive. It doesn't mean it's exciting when someone's excited by it because I'm like more people need to get the fuck away from the cities and just go see how crazy this is that we're flying through space.
It is profound and to be that close. I mean, just looking up, you don't even need a telescope or a pair of binoculars. The presence of something so much larger than you. But I mean, if you've listened to some of my podcasts, I think you know that the big deal for me is that you are such a part of this.
You are such an intimate intrinsic part of this. It's not we're separate from space. We look up and there's something separate from us. That's the story of us up there.
The only way the universe makes atoms. The only way that makes the chemicals all around us, the aluminum, the iron, the oxygen, the carbon, the phosphorus, everything that makes me up, the only thing in the universe that makes atoms is the interior of a star. It's the only place where nuclear fusion puts atoms together. So everything that you are, the story is up there.
And so you're not looking at something separate and distant. Astrophysics is the story of the end of your nose, literally. I mean, we are part of this beautiful, bigger thing. That's a weird concept.
I mean, that's from that old song. We are Golden. We're a billion-year-old. Yeah, that's real.
That's what we are. And that's what all life is. And that's just a very strange thing for people to wrap their heads around as we're slowly getting a greater and greater understanding of the complexity of the universe itself, which is relatively recent in terms of human history. I mean, we really didn't know all, we just know now because the James Webb Telescope is so crazy where they're seeing these new, these galaxies, they're confusing.
Like why are they formed so early? This episode is brought to you by Uber Eats. Hockey season's here and Uber Eats is delivering game-day deals on favorites like wings, pizza, fries, and snacks. And you can order more than food like gear to rep your team or fresh batteries for the remote.
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If you're thinking about building a website, you should try Squarespace. I know because I use it. That's right, JoeRogan.com is powered by Squarespace. It has all the features that you need to create a standout website like an AI-enhanced website builder, SEO optimization tools, and seamless checkouts with mobile pay links.
Head to Squarespace.com slash Rogan for a free trial. And when you are ready to launch, use the offer code Rogan to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. I was going to talk about this just a few weeks ago. The red dots.
They never let astronomers name anything, right? You're seeing something so dramatic and they call it the little red dots, right? Or there's a storm on Jupiter that's three times the size of the Earth with 400 mile an hour wind, so they call it the red spot. How do no one's allowed to name them?
Well, naming conventions are complex. So if you discover an asteroid, you get to name it. If you discover a comet, the comet is named after you. But anything else has to be done by the International Committee.
And so because of that, things don't end up with very interesting names. They'll end up with catalog numbers, basically phone numbers. What do they call that weird hexagon on Jupiter? Oh, Saturn.
I think they call that the hexagon on Saturn. They don't even, they don't really have the hexagonal storm. It's fantastic. You could fit about two Earths across that.
And it's a hexagon jet stream, basically. You've got super fast moving winds around the pole of Saturn. And Saturn is so cold, the gas is so cold, there's almost no friction in the gas. So unlike here, the jet stream here, there's kind of this joke.
Oh, there's a picture. Hey, that's fantastic. That's wild. One of my favorite pictures NASA ever took.
If you look at the little dot in the middle of that, the sort of little eye of the storm, we actually have a picture from Cassini where you can see the sun glinting off of hundreds of miles high. There you go. It's not on the bottom there. It's in the bottom in the middle.
Yeah, that picture. One more. Yeah, that's a picture from the Cassini space mission. That's a real image.
Wow. And that's the eye of that storm. And those are, like I said, hundreds of miles high banks of clouds catching the sunlight and the poles of Saturn. And you know, we did that.
We went there. We flew over that storm. That's crazy. And yeah, I mean, as amazing as the storm is, it's at least fairly well understood as a very low temperature jet stream.
You know, maybe you should know, you're here a bit of a joke about the weather's the same as it is now. There are patterns that get set up in the jet stream of the earth. And you take away all the heat and all the friction. It forms this beautiful storm.
What is the theory's why it forms a hexagon? It's something called a standing wave. The jet stream basically sets up a wave inside the circulation. And I will admit, I'm not an atmospheric specialist, but that's what I know.
And that wave kind of makes this hexagonal shape. And then you cool everything down without friction. And that's how the whole thing works. They have done computer simulations of very fast moving jet streams under the conditions of Saturn.
And you can get this sort of shape to set up. Wow. God, it's so fascinating. It's fascinating that we think of that as being so far away.
That's just right now neighborhood. Yeah. It's super hard to get to places right there. Well, we're hoping to launch.
I want to say we NASA is hoping to launch a new mission to one of the moons of Saturn. Hopefully in like 2028, it'll take it something like, you know, six, seven years to get out of Saturn. But there's a giant moon of Saturn Titan, which has a thick atmosphere. It's the only place where the air pressure.
The air pressure is actually a little bit greater than the room here. And it's very cold. You know, it's almost close to 300 degrees below zero, but it's got this thick atmosphere and tons of organic molecules and evidence of liquid water below the surface. It's one of the places that might be friendly for life.
And so they're designing. It's called dragonfly. It's an octocopter. It's a big drone.
There you go. Perfect. And so, so, so dragonfly is going to be this big octocopter that we're going to land on this moon Titan. We've already landed on this moon once with a 16 emission.
And it's got this really kick-ass chemical laboratory inside to look for the conditions for life, you know, anything that we might be able to find. And obviously sample more than one site. It would actually fly around and go to different places. There's rain, there are oceans, there are rivers, the only place we know, they're open, you know, great lakes, lakes on Titan.
Wow. But it's so cold that it's not liquid water. It's actually liquid natural gas, liquid methane and methane. Yeah.
Yeah. We've already landed there. We actually sent to probe there as part of the casino mission to land on Titan. I mean, it's just badass that, you know, that we humans have been there.
That's an artist's conception, but that's what it would look like. You know, we sent to probe there. You know, it took a bunch of readings and then eventually froze to death. But, but some of them readings that it took were intriguing about the possibility of life on Titan.
Do the Russians land something on Venus? Yeah, well, more than once. Yeah, the Soviet Union is the only nation, former Soviet Union now that ever landed on Venus. And landing on Venus is way hard.
You've got crazy pictures, too. The surface temperature is about a thousand degrees and the air pressure is similar to being about a mile below the ocean. That's a photo. Yeah, it's a photo.
Yeah, that's real. It's a photo taking an a thousand degree temperature. Yes, didn't last long, but everything is crushed flat. I mean, the landscape is just crushed flat by that, you know, huge pressure.
You know, this incredible dense atmosphere. The clouds are sulfuric acid. That's why it looks yellow. That's real.
You know, sulfuric acid clouds is like a classic vision of hell. It's heavy and deep and dense and sulfuric acid. Yeah. It's so interesting, too, that we are understanding of planets in terms of like just what's in our solar system.
They're all different. They vary so much. They know about the known universe in terms of planets. Is it possible that there could be some planets out there that are set up completely different than the planets in our solar system?
Oh, absolutely. One of my favorite websites just for fun. I mean, so it changes every day how many planets around other stars we know about. We call them exoplanets, exterior planets.
I think we're up to about 5,000 that we know of. When did we start noticing them? So this was at least detecting. Yeah, yeah.
This is something I was involved with ever since I was in college. When I was in college, my research advisor was a man named David Latham and he was trying to define the first evidence. I mean, we figured other stars have planets. I mean, it can't be just us.
But they're hard to see. They're tiny, they're dark. I mean, compared to a star, right? I mean, planets don't glow themselves, right?
So they just reflect starlight. I mean, we literally said it was like trying to see a firefly around a searchlight from 200 miles away. How would you do it? And I mean, now we're actually getting so good at it.
We find more every week, almost every day. I mean, pretty soon it's going to be, I think, thousands of new planets every single year. And some of the actual images. So for the most part, we don't have images.
But that doesn't mean we don't have really cool observations, including the chemistry of their atmospheres. This is really amazing to me. So they're so tiny. It's hard to actually get a pixel.
But when these things pass in front of their star, right? So there's a star. And they pass in front of it. So you're looking at this thing, pass in front of the star.
It makes a tiny little solar eclipse. It goes by, it blocks a little bit of the starlight. And we find them that way. We find the stars twinkling as little planets will round them again and again.
They have to come back three times for us to say it's a planet. Otherwise, it could be a spot on the star, something else. And the amazing thing is that the starlight will shine through the atmosphere of that planet. And we can actually probe the chemistry of the atmosphere.
So we find planets that have the size of the Earth, about the temperature of the Earth, they have evidence of water vapor, carbon dioxide, oxygen. And last year, there was this fantastic controversial discovery. I mean, it's very real. We need to follow it up.
We think we're starting to see the evidence of organic molecules. It's not a very strong signal yet. And this was a press release from the James Webb Space Telescope. And there were some scientists that wondered if these could be organic molecules that might someday be traceable even to the presence of life.
They resembled something that Plankton might give off on an ocean world. And then, of course, the rest of the scientists said the data's not good enough yet. We need much better observation before you can say that. We could maybe believe it's an organic carbon-based molecule, but we don't know which one it is yet.
I mean, stay tuned. I would never have thought the first evidence of life outside the Earth, the really hard chemical scientific evidence would be on a planet around another star. I thought maybe we find on Mars or on some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. But now with the James Webb Space Telescope and the telescopes that will come afterwards, we might be able to actually get enough of a sense of the atmosphere of these planets to start looking for life science.
Yeah. So the sun, the star, is passing light through this little tiny thing that's smaller than a pixel. Yeah. And through the atmosphere where the light passes through, what are we using to detect that?
It's a technique called spectroscopy. And it's a really, really powerful thing. And this is what most scientists do as beautiful as images are of a gorgeous galaxy or star. That's not really what we do.
We look at these little squiggly lines. We get very excited. We let the light from the star pass through a grating that actually draws into a rainbow. You take that white light, you've seen pictures of like prism, dark side of the moon, pink floyd, white light goes in, rainbow comes out.
If you measure really, really carefully how much light is coming in every color, you can tell astounding things. You can tell how hot the star is, how fast it's rotating. In some cases, how far away a galaxy is. That's how we measure how far away the arc from us in space.
And you can measure the chemistry molecule by molecule. You can tell exactly what atoms and molecules are in that object. Here we go. Look at that.
So what you're amazing person, by the way, that's incredible. Thank you so much. Every element, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen has a fingerprint in the rainbow. And it's like, you know it's that.
There's nothing else like it. You know that you see carbon and nitrogen if you see these colors of the rainbow shining at that particular light. And it's not just simple things like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, but it's water vapor, carbon dioxide, organic molecules. Everybody has their fingerprint in the rainbow.
And so when the starlight shines through the atmosphere, there you go. That's how we tell what these things are made of. You know, this is a dying star. This is actually in the Korean enabula.
And the most, one of the most luminous stars there is. And we pass the light through a rainbow and then looking really, really carefully at how much light comes in every color. You can pick apart exactly what it's made of. Yeah.
Did you know that helium, you know the element helium, right? You may be familiar that the Greek, the Greek sun gods name is Helios. Helium is an element we discovered on the sun before we ever knew it was here. In the turn of the last century, in the late 1800s, when they were passing sunlight through a prism and they were looking at all these patterns of light, there was one chemical that we'd never seen before here.
And so they named it after the sun. It was on the sun, but not here. We never knew that helium was here. That was found later.
It was later we found it in natural gas, radioactive decay. Helium is a delight gas. It just leaves the earth. It just doesn't stick around.
And so helium, we saw this pattern of colors in the sun's light and we were like, what the hell is that? And it turned out to be a new element we never found before. What year was that? We should look this up.
I don't know exactly. But if we Google what year was helium found, I'm sure I can find it. Well, I've been thinking about helium balloons and people who suck helium. That's right.
But we didn't even know about helium until 1868. There we go. That's nuts. I just found out that there was helium in the sun in 1868.
Long before we ever identified it on this planet. That is so nuts. Yeah. Just think what's out there.
We didn't even know about helium. It's not just that it's what's out there but that there's people out there that can figure out how to do that. In 1868. Shout out to Pierre Johnson of French astronomer who figured it out.
When you think about, you know, I know that one thing you love is the idea of Einstein and time being different. And all that. You know, they figured all of this out around like 1908. It was more than a hundred years ago.
And we don't really even have a better thing yet. You know, I mean, they figured out that time isn't the way that we experience it. Just by really simple, brilliant thought processes, observations, a hundred and some years ago, a hundred and a little more than a hundred and twenty years ago. Yeah.
Incredible. The idea that the faster you go, the slower time is so hard to wrap one's head around. And one of the things I heard you talking about, you were talking about GPS satellites. And you were saying that GPS satellites are going about what they're going like 20,000 miles an hour or something like that.
So actually, if we want to break this down a little bit, there are a couple of different effects about time. And one of the things that NASA does is it calibrates the GPS satellites in a single coming. I mean, I think I heard that within a day, if we didn't take into account the time difference these things are in, that we'd be about six miles off in a single day. That's crazy.
Oh, yeah. It's a big deal. That's so crazy. And it's so crazy.
And that's just above us. Time really is something. I mean, this is not a theory. Time is variable depending on how fast you're going and also how far off the Earth surface you are.
Or how far away from a big gravity body you are. In the case of the GPS satellites, there's two things going on. And it's kind of fun because it's actually the reverse for the astronauts. So let's want to break this down.
This is really fun. Okay. So we have clocks that are so accurate that if you move about two feet above where, you know, if we had a clock on this desk and then if we moved it up about two feet, we could actually detect time flowing differently because you're just that far away from the Earth's gravity, just two feet. Your head and your feet, we spend most of our lives, they standing up, are actually going through time at slightly different rates.
If the farther away you are from a gravitational source, I mean, you probably like movies like Interstellar, right, with your Matthew McConaughey. Remember the big black hole? The closer they get to the big black hole, the slower time goes? That's not theory.
That's something we can actually measure with clocks. And a black hole has so much gravity, it does it a lot more dramatically. But it's happening right in this room. Seriously, your head is in a different timeframe than your feet right now.
That's nuts. Yeah. And I mean, it's measurable. You need extremely accurate clocks.
But in the case of the GPS satellites, the GPS satellites are what we call a medium orbit. They're not as far away as the geostationary satellites. But they're not actually going that fast. They're only going about 9,000 miles an hour around the Earth.
The astronauts in the space station, by the way, are going much faster. They're going more, let's say approximately 20,000 miles an hour. So the GPS satellites are going a little slower. And yeah, 8,000 miles an hour is a lot and that does slow your time down.
But the bigger effect for GPS satellites is how far away from the Earth they are. Wow. So they're actually going a little faster than we are in time. Now, they're also slowed down by their fast velocity.
The faster you go, the slower your time goes. But people don't realize there's another factor. And that's how far away you are from gravity. For the astronauts, the astronauts are closer to the Earth.
Right? So they're actually not so far away as the satellites. And they're going much faster. So for the astronauts, it's the time dilation from the motion.
That's a bigger effect. If you are on the space station for a year, you come back about one hundredth of a second younger than you should be. And obviously, it's not a big deal. But it's easily measurable.
Wow. And in the case of the satellites, you wouldn't get the right location. The data would be a little bit more than you should be. The closer you are into gravity, the slower time goes.
I think the weirdest thing that I've ever heard anybody say is that all time exists currently. That's Einstein. I mean, that goes back 120 years. That's such a bizarre thought.
We don't know if it's true. But Einstein really thought there wasn't much of a way around it. Because he said, okay, well, if everything is going, well, if everything is going, well, it's not going to be a little bit more than you should be. I mean, I'm not sure.
I mean, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure.
I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure.
I'm not sure. Everything is going at different velocities compared to everything else. It's a great question a kid can ask. How fast am I going through space?
The Earth, the Euler of the Earth that goes around about 1,000 miles an hour. We go around the Sun at about 67,000 miles an hour in our orbit. The Sun's going around the galaxy about half a million miles an hour on the galaxy. The galaxy is going towards a galactic cluster at more than a million miles an hour.
But how fast are we going, really? The only thing you can measure is how fast are you going relative to something else? There's no answer. How fast am I going?
Are you still or am I actually traveling close to speed of light right now? I don't know. Einstein said the only way you could really think about how that would work is if the universe was just one big thing. All of time and space exists in a big whole thing.
There's only one now. Einstein famously said the past, present, and future are persistently annoying illusions. Now, again, do we know this to be true? At the moment, we don't have any better physics.
I doubt that physics will get any less weird than that. But yeah, that's sort of the way modern physics thinks the universe maybe is a big whole thing that started from beginning to end. It is all now-ish. But if that's the case, so subjectively, we can measure things.
We can measure time. But what are we measuring? Are we making artificial time constraints? Are we doing it ourselves?
When we create a clock, we create a watch. The watch is 24 hours a day. It's running. What is it measuring?
Yeah. Right? That is exactly the question Albert Einstein asked. That is a deep, excellent question.
That was the problem. In a famous thought experiment, Einstein made a clock by setting up two mirrors and having light bounce between the two mirrors. And that was the tick of the clock. Tick, tick, tick, tick.
And the problem was that that's how he started thinking about the speed of light. If you had this thing in a spaceship that was going on, a huge fraction of the speed of light, then a person standing watching it go by would actually watch the light trace out a pattern like this. Because it's actually ticking between the mirrors, but the mirrors are moving along. And so you see the light make this sort of bouncing movement.
And that means it's actually traveled farther than the person on the ground who thinks that the mirrors are just sort of, the light is making just a straight up and down line from mirror to mirror. That question that you asked is what completely revolutionized physics? Everything fell apart. But people said, how do you even measure time?
Was it mean to make a clock? What are we measuring? I still understand what we're measuring. Oh, Lord.
Yeah. I get it. I mean, I don't know if I have an answer for you. I don't think anybody does.
But here's the deal. So the clock in Einstein's experiment. So the clock has two mirrors and there's light bouncing between it. And that's the distance that travels in one tick.
But now you put that clock on a spaceship and the spaceship's going really fast. And as it goes by, you see that clock, as it streams by really fast, you see the light make this motion. And this line is actually longer than that line. This line, if you measure it, that's actually a longer line than I drew than the original line between just the two mirrors, because now it's at an angle.
And this is what made Einstein say, time has to change. If anything moves, the tick of a clock changes, whatever you measure time, whatever time is, whether you measure it with a bouncing clock or whether you measure it with a vibrating atom like we do in the Bureau of Standards, or whether you measure it with a spring that's slowly unwinding in a wristwatch, anything you can do to measure one moment to the next changes when motion is involved. There's no way to get around it. It's not just the measurement.
It's time itself is changing. Any way we have to measure this thing we call time. And I have to tell you, Joe, I don't think we have an answer to what time is. What are we measuring?
I think right there, I think you're asking for the next revolution in physics that we don't have yet. I really mean that. So when we're measuring time currently, like when I look down my watch, I'm measuring time in this particular space, like where I am, what altitude I'm at, how fast I'm moving, and the watch just does a reasonable job of calculating all that. And that's you.
I mean, that's what you see here sitting still with your watch looking at it. If someone's flying by close to the speed of light, they won't see you measure time the same way. But you said something else that freaked me out that if you traveled at the speed of light, the problem would be you would have infinite mass. Well, anything with mass, yeah.
Yeah, that's the thing. So if a person was in a spaceship and a traveled the speed of light, that spaceship would have infinite mass. It's basically it makes accelerating up to the speed of light impossible that anything with mass can't travel at the speed of light. I mean, the equations blow up.
But what does infinite mass mean? Do you have more mass than the whole universe? What the hell is that? As you approach the speed of light, if you have mass, it takes more and more energy to accelerate you even just a little bit more.
So you never get to the speed of light. You're going 99.9% speed of light. Okay, I want to go a little faster. It takes more and more energy, each little tiny step you make.
It's basically you never get to the speed of light. It takes infinite amount of energy. So when it comes to things like interstellar travel, I don't think we're ever going to take a spaceship and accelerate it to the speed of light. I mean, we might get very close.
There are particles in space that do have mass like neutrinos, tiny little bits of mass. They travel very close to the speed of light, but they don't travel at the speed of light. But to me, I think that the idea of traveling interstellar distances or even intergalactic distances, the thing that starts to really get me is the question of this, what is space and what is time at all, quantum entanglement. Right, Glaig brought that up.
Oh, yeah. I'm going to say I hope your listeners, I don't want to get, I want people to come along with us. Oh, they're coming along. Yeah.
I don't want to say things that sound so stupid. They're like, you know, why are they saying this? Please stop me if we need some more background. This does not sound stupid in a way, should it form.
Okay. But the idea of quantum entanglement, we should explain that to people. And what it essentially means is that things are entangled, they're connected at regardless of the distance. Yes.
And it could be an immeasurable amount of distance. Any distance. Literally the beginning of the universe distance, like 13.8 billion light years away distance. You're entangled with that.
It's amazing because once again, let's go back to the idea that this is a real experimental fact, right? I mean, a lot of times this is crazy stuff that, you know, scientists will say this stuff and people hear it for the first time and they say, well, that sounds like idiotic. That sounds stupid. Why?
Where do they get that from? And the idea that time changes is now, it's one of the most commonly proven facts every day. Like I said, we need it to calibrate the GPS satellites. It's easy to measure.
So, quantum entanglement was something that even Albert Einstein, 100 years ago, he understood that quantum mechanics was pointing that way, but he really didn't like it. He called it spooky action at a distance. He hated it. Because he realized that quantum mechanics had this implication that if things could somehow be connected quantum mechanically, you could take them any distance away from each other and they would somehow be able to respond to each other instantaneously with no time difference.
And, you know, he didn't think that would ever actually happen. And then back in the mid 1990s, we started to experiment with atoms and we found out that it was real. That, it can start off pretty simply. You have two atoms that are in orbit around, you know, so an atom has a nucleus of protons and electrons in the middle.
Sorry. An atom has a nucleus of protons and neutrons. The electrons are flying around in orbits around the atom. Two electrons can be in the same orbit only if they're spinning in different directions.
They have an angular momentum called spin. And the only way these two electrons can fit in that orbit together is if they're spinning in one spin in an upward direction, one-state spinning in the downward direction. Hate the broken finger. So, if you take these electrons out of the atom and you can do that, you know that they're in different spins because they had to be in that orbit together.
So, now you separate them. You can separate them by any distance you want. You can separate them by centimeters in a laboratory. The Chinese have done this up to the space station that they run back.
You can conceivably do it to another galaxy. If you take those electrons and you separate them, you know that they were spinning in opposite directions. So, if you take an electric field and you change the spin of one, the other one immediately changes in response. Regardless of the distance.
Regardless of the distance. And we know this to be true. We've done this. And the amazing thing is the universe is saying these two things are the same quantum mechanical system.
They're basically the same object. They're connected to each other. They're entangled together. And it doesn't matter.
Space and time don't matter. You separate them in space. Any distance you want. How does that work?
The universe says the space and time between them doesn't matter. They're the same system. To me, that's the real intriguing thing about you could a civilization learn how to harness that. You're not really even having to worry about traveling from one part to another.
How do you do you watch the three body problems show? So you have these things called sofans. Sofans are entangled to this alien civilization. And they can respond instantaneously because they're entangled.
Yes. That's fantastic science. As far as I can tell, that could be theoretically possible. Well, that's what bonkers is that we are made out of all this stuff that's entangled.
What's it entangled to? Is it entangled to stuff inside a black hole right now? Is it entangled to stuff that is on the other side of the universe from us? If the big bang had all of this stuff in a small volume at once, are we entangled to everything in some way?
Seriously? Seriously? I mean, is a part of me quantum mechanically right now in the Andromeda galaxy? Yeah, actually.
That would be the implication. I mean, talk about, I don't think we understand yet what reality is. I really don't. What does it mean?
Are we all somehow the same particle entangled to each other? Are we connected to everything? All at once? I mean, that could be where physics is taking us now.
That's bananas. It's very difficult to think about when you think you're a person in Austin, my feet around the ground. Here I am touching this desk. I'm going to get my car later and go get something to eat.
I'm getting to feed the cat, right? Yeah. But that's not really what's going on. It's way more complex, way bigger.
And you were speculating that that could be how some advanced, super advanced, intelligent life form travels. It's always been more compelling to me than the idea of taking a spaceship and traveling somewhere. It seems super crude. I like the idea of making a horse fly.
Yeah. We talked about that movie in interstellar because there were a lot of good teaching moments in that movie for a physicist. The idea that time really does slow down close to a black hole. Again, we observe this.
When we observe things orbiting close to a black hole, you can tell that happens. And the idea that this advanced civilization that we never actually see in the movie somehow communicates through basically space and time itself through gravity. That's how Matthew McConaughey is able to even go back in time and space to help his daughter solve gravity and all that. I was like, I wonder if that's really more would it be like.
Advanced civilizations. You've got to think. I mean, you look around the earth and there are things like grasshoppers and hamsters that are fantastic, incredibly complex beings. But you try to teach them quantum mechanics or ask them to crochet a blanket or whatever.
They don't have the capacity. And you've got to think that there's the similar jump where we don't even know the right questions to ask. That's what a civilization. Can they see the universe as a whole thing?
Do they know that they're connected to everything? And can they somehow use that to travel? Maybe. Maybe.
And if you just extrapolate, if you just think about where we've gone from primitive man to what we're currently experiencing, and you take that thousands of years, millions of years, whatever it is, you keep going. And as long as civilization gets rid of war and figures out a way to not die of disease and natural disaster, you could potentially continue this process of technological innovation for millions of years. And you would imagine that it would go exponentially greater and greater in its ability to do things. And its ability to not just not even things that we can imagine.
Like we have a crude understanding, amazing understanding of the universe, but crude in comparison to what's potentially out there. We could potentially be observing in a physical way every planet on every star one day. But we can't even think of that as being a possibility now. But what we're doing right now is insane to people who live in the 1400s.
You showed someone from the 1400s a nuclear power plant, they'd be like, what the fuck are you guys doing? Like what is this? If you showed them a nuclear detonator, if you showed them a FaceTime on a phone, they'd be like, this is insanity. I just got in a little middle tube and came here from Milwaukee.
I'll fly back tonight. Yeah. Absolutely. And we're just accustomed to it.
It becomes normal. And this idea that the entire universe would be accessible is just bananas. Have you ever wondered if maybe the real follow on to humanity someday will be some form of AI? I think so.
I mean, I do wonder if the human brain is just kind of limited. If you say there are multiple dimensions and time is something that changes. I mean, I just said that scientists are no better than anybody else at comprehending a big number or a big amount of space. We just kind of get used to it.
I mean, will we have a creature someday that we've created an AI that then all of a sudden can comprehend these things? Is that really the real evolutionary path of humanity? I think so. I think it's just a completely different kind of life and that we're thinking of it as artificial.
I don't think it's artificial at all. I think it's a life. It's just a different kind of life. It's an earthling.
I mean, seriously, it's our children. We created this. Yeah. I always describe ourselves as like we're an electronic caterpillar.
We're making cocoon. We don't even know why we're doing it because it's just what we do. The thing about human beings is we've always been completely fascinated with innovation. I've always said that if you looked at us objectively for something like, what does the species do?
Oh, they make better things. They keep making better things. They're never satisfied with the things. Bees made the bee hive and like, I think we got it, boys.
Is it? We're not satisfied at all. And so if you just kept going with that, like where does it go? Well, it has to go to life.
It has to go to some sort of a human created new kind of life form that exists out of the components of the earth. But instead of being born out of evolution and out of natural mutation and natural selection, it's a random mutation. It's made out of us. We made it.
And it'll probably make better versions of it. And that would be the new life. And that's how you get over all the biological hurdles that we have. You think about the things that trouble us.
War and crime and violence and all these different things that are a real problem with the human race. When you stop being human. And if we really are entangled with everything, that will be us. It'll just be us in a completely different realm.
Yeah. I do like this idea that what we call AIs now is in something separate. I mean, they are children. It is an earthling.
It is something we've created. The question I've often wondered is, you know, sometimes, I think sometimes we lack imagination about what might be possible. I've always enjoyed science fiction where the AIs also learn about love or about the arts or about creativity. I mean, whether you want to go with like the new battle star Galactica or whether you want to go with a profound experience I had with a friend of mine who's an author who has cochlear implants.
And you know, he realizes that he doesn't hear like a human. I mean, the cochlear implants don't replicate perfectly what it means to hear the way our ears do. They bypass our ears. They wire directly into his brain and stimulate the experience of sound.
And so he's hearing in his words like a cyborg. This is a Michael Correst, a wonderful man that did some essays about this. And he's talked about how much emotional response he has to music now, something he could never experience. How being a cyborg quote unquote, you know, experiencing something in a non-human way has added joy and depth and passion.
You know, are we so sure that technology makes us more and more, you know, kind of 1950s robot like, or could it take us into new experiences of being connected with each other, you know, new ways of loving each other, new ways of understanding things. I mean, does it have to be all bad this? Well, all of our differences fall apart. We realize we're all one thing.
Yeah. If we realize we're all one thing, then all of our monopoly of resources, all that stuff goes away. If we realize we're all one thing, we're part of the problem with human beings. We're very selfish.
And the reason why we're very selfish is because that's how you had to survive. If you wanted to survive and you wanted to be passed on to the next generation, you had to be selfish because other people were being selfish too. And that's the game that humans were playing. If we get to a point of universal telepathy, like universal telepathy with a universal language where all human beings are sharing thoughts, there are no secrets.
We are all one thing. Everyone's terrified of that. People love secrets. Love.
I don't want people listening to my phone. I don't want people, well, I don't know either because it would be people doing that. And those people have their own ulterior motives and it's gross. They would have control or they know your emails.
But what if there's no secrets? It's not possible because our understanding of each other is now complete. It's like we read each other's minds in a sense, but it's much more complex than that and much more in depth. You feel what that person feels.
You are that person and we're all one thing. That could be possible through technology. And this is where I have hope where a lot of people are very fatalist with AI and they look at it in this dystopian sense of these oligarchs, these technical oligarchs are going to be controlling offs through the AI and they're going to have access to it and power. I don't know if anybody is going to control it.
I have a feeling it's going to be kind of like the internet in a way where I don't think they really thought what the internet was going to be. I think they had this understanding of being able to exchange information through universities. I think it got to a point where if they knew what the internet would be today and how little control they would have with the population and narratives and I think they probably shut it down a long time ago. I have a feeling that's going to be the same way with AI and especially AI as it integrates with us which I think is the only way that the human species really truly survives.