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Hey, I'm Jackie Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect's original series, black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll
explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network iHeartRadio, app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
So Black Effect Podcast Network is sponsored by diet Coke.
From tips for healthy living to the latest medical breakthroughs, WebMD's Health Discovered podcast keeps you up to date on today's most important health issues. Through in depth conversations with experts from across the healthcare community. WebMD reveals how today's health news will impact your life tomorrow.
It's not that people don't know that exercise is healthy, it's just that people don't know why it's healthy, and we're struggling to try to help people help themselves in each other.
Listen to WebMD Health Discovered on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm doctor Laurie Santos, host of the Happiness Lab podcast.
As the US.
Elections approach, it can feel like we're angrier and more divided than ever, But in a new copule season of my podcast, I'll Share with the Science really shows that we're surprisingly more united than most people think.
We all know something is wrong in our culture and our politics, and that we need to do better and that we can be better.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
In nineteen eighty two, Atari players had one game on their minds, sword Quest, because the company had promised one hundred and fifty grand in prizes to four finalists, but the prizes disappeared, leading to one of the biggest controversies in eighties pop culture. I'm Jamie Loftus. Join me this spring for the Legend of sword Quest. We'll follow the
quest for lost treasure across four decades. Listen to the Legend of sword Quest on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.
What if you thought, as an adult that you've been alive forever and then you discovered no, you actually had a childhood and you were born, and you would want to know all.
About that and how can it will be surprising?
That would be surprising, And actually that's sort of the situation science was in for a long time. Astronomers thought the universe is fixed, it's constant. All the stars are just sort of hanging out there in space, not moving, and they'd been like that forever. Hi, I'm Daniel.
Is this Jorge So.
I'm a particle physicist. I smash protons together at cerned in my day job to try to figure out what is the basic nature of matter?
What do you smash as a hobby ban.
Yeah, we know. When you're a particle physicist, you learn to solve problems by smashing stuff together. So whatever's around me.
And I'm a cartoonist and my job is to sit in my pajamas all day and draw funny things.
That's not how you started, right. You didn't grow up thinking I'm going to be a cartoonist.
No. I started off as a researcher. I'm an engineer. I studied robotics. I have a PhD in robotics. But somewhere along the line, I started drawing comics and that kind of took off for me.
And this is our podcast Daniel and Jorge.
Explain the Universe. Today. We're going to talk about how it all began.
The biggest of questions, the Big Bang.
What happened at the very beginning of the universe?
What happened before the Big Bang? It's a pretty deep, basic question about the origin of our universe. What do you think about it, what do you know about it? What do you imagine might have happened before the start of our universe. We went out and we asked people on the street what they thought happened just before the Big Bang.
Well, there was a bunch of particles in the universe, and then the combined together and poof.
You created it had all the energy of the universe.
So then when.
It happened, that's how it was all dispersed.
So most people seem to have some idea that, first of all, the Big Bang is more than just a TV show, right, Right. The idea for the science came before the TV show. I was kind of relieved to hear.
That everyone seems to know it's it sort of marks the beginning of the universe.
Right, It's a moment of creation or the starting of the clock of the universe. Right, everything came from?
But what exactly happened during the Big Bang? And most interestingly, what happened before the Big Bank?
Right? And that's fascinating to me. And these are the best questions, the ones that like try to answer the question where did everything come from? It sort of touches on the philosophical like why are we here? If you knew how the Big Bang happened and how the universe was created, you might get some insight into what the purpose of life is or how to live your life or stuff. So to me, these are like really good, deep basic questions.
So we made a list of the four things we think you should know about the Big Bang. The first one is that the entire universe was once really small. Maybe we think, let's talk about that. What do you mean maybe, Well.
It's an interesting question. We know that the universe had a beginning, right, and how do we know that. We know that because things are expanding, things are moving away from each other. Okay, that was the major discovery. Like one hundred years ago, looked out in the stars and discovered that they're all moving away from us.
Okay, so like we thought everything would still like we were frozen in a gel or something. The stars would just like there are sitting there. Yeah, generally speaking, But then they discovered that they actually things are moving away from each other.
That's right, and everything is moving away from us, and everything is moving away from everything else. They just looked at stars, and you can measure how fast a star is moving relative to us by seeing how its light is stretched or shrunk, depending on whether it's moving away from us or towards It's like a Doppler shift.
Like the highway patrol measuring your speed. You can sort of you can tell how fast you're going.
Yeah, exactly.
It's not like they looked at the stars and said oh now it's down one's over there. It must have moved. It's like it's some other information, right, right.
So they looked out there and they measured all this stuff and they said, whoa, everything's stretching out and moving away from each other. So then the very natural consequences to say, well, run that backwards. What does that mean? It means things might have been smaller and more dense and maybe even come from a little.
Spot like if you hit the rewind bun, if you see things make getting bigger. Now, if you had the rewind bun wow for a while, what happens exactly?
And those are the mental games people were playing. And actually the phrase big Bang was a joke that people made up to mock that idea. They're like, look, how ridiculous this idea is.
It is kind of a silly sounding name, right.
Yeah, it was whimsical.
It was.
It was like a Donald Trump insult, you know, for somebody else's.
Big lee Bang.
Yes, exactly, the Big Bang.
Well, if you were like a respectable scientist today and you had to name this event, you wouldn't call it the big Bang, or you think that it was a good name.
Oh man, if I was on a marketing committee discover the new name for it, the Moment of Creation. Now, I think Big Bang is actually pretty good, you know, Yeah, you got your alliteration. It's short, it's pithy, you know, it's okay, it's pretty well done. I think that's probably why it survived so.
Long, because everyone wants the universe to start with the bank.
That's right.
So you played back the movie of the universe and tells us that everything was once much closer together, and then much much closer, and then much much closer, and if you keep thinking about it, things may have been really really really close together. That's right.
Yeah, they just keep extrapolating down to a point. And around the same time, Einstein came up with all of his ideas of general relativity and thinking about gravity and how the universe works, and people were playing with those equations and discovering that those equations actually predicted that the universe could start from a point. They were consistent with Einstein's ideas of gravity.
What do you mean?
It was consistent, meaning that you can construct a universe that starts from a point and then it blows up and expands, And that totally makes sense from an einstein gravity point of view, like it follows the rules, it's allowed, okay.
Meaning that nothing weird happens, Like you can cram that much stuff into such a small.
Space according to Einstein, right, what is he know, which is pretty well accepted as a smart guy was already's talking about. But you know there are some issues there. The original idea was the Big Bang was this really dense, hot blob of stuff and then it blew up and expanded into things we know. And you know, that was a weird idea for a long time, and people didn't
believe it for a long time. It was in the sixties that they finally found the first like concrete piece of evidence that maybe the Big Bang had happened, right, And that's when they discovered the thing called the cosmic microwave background radiation.
So it was weird to think about so much stuff and matter and stars and being cramped to small space.
Yeah, because it meant the universe wasn't always this dark and cold and empty place that we know today. It was like a hot, dense blob like the center of the sun.
It was a hot mess.
It was a hot mess exactly. The universe was not well organized when it was young.
So yeah, so they said, okay, now, but now they saw something like you call it the cosmic microwave baground radiation. That said, yes, that's a your indication things were a hot mess before.
Yeah, they said, if things were really hot and dense a long time ago, then they should have given off this special kind of light and we should still be able to see it today. And they went out and they found it. You can see it like you can see it if you have a special radio telescope. And some guys built a fancy radio telescope. They weren't even actually looking for this background radiation and they just had a hiss in their telescope. They had this noise in
their telescope. And coincidentally, some people a couple of years earlier had predicted, oh, if you build this kind of telescope, you'll and the big bang happened, you'll hear this hiss. And they turned on their telescope they heard this hiss and they're like, what is this. We can't get rid of this noise. And then two years later they won the Nobel Prize.
That's a great discovery.
It's a pretty you're going to get fired.
But then they're like, oh, that mistake you made. It's the discovery of the universe.
That's right.
So that's the big Bang. It's everything was once really small and then it just kind of exploded out into what we have today.
That's right. That's the whole idea, is that the universe has a beginning and then it expanded into what we know today. And that was the sort of first idea of the Big Bang, like maybe everything came from a point and people, a lot of people, when they think about the Big Bang, they think about the universe starting in a singularity, meaning a bunch of stuff in zero volume.
All of it on top of each other, in the same zero space exactly.
And it's mind blowing to imagine, Like, take the Sun and cram it down into the amount of space you have for a grain of sand. Hard to imagine right now, make it even smaller. Now, add every other star in the universe on top of it. It's like your brain can right, Yeah, it's it's not really the same thing. It's just all the energy, all the energy density that we currently have in the universe was crammed into that
tiny little space. That was sort of the early idea and you can imagine like a big empty universe of space with a tiny dot of matter in it, And of course that engenders a lot of questions like where did that? Any doubt a better come from it? Right? Was there only one? How was it created?
Right?
But before we keep going, let's take a short break.
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I'm buzs Night and I'm the host of the Taking a Walk podcast Music History on Foot John Oates.
Great songs endured, and I'm very proud and happy to know that i was part of something that will endure.
The podcast is an audio diary of insightful conversations with musicians and the inside stories behind their music.
Russ Kunkle, The basic connection that I had with someone that was great coming out of the Whiskey was David Crosby. David I met David and Steven and Graham kind of around the same time, basically through my wife Leah, who is Cass Elliott's sister.
The message of the podcast is simple, honest conversation with musicians about the music they create. Mike Campbell of the Heartbreakers.
It is correct. I rarely worked things out. I like to go off the cup and try to rap things out of the air while you're playing the song and try to catch a little magic.
Listen to the Taking a Walk Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Jackie Thomas. The host of a brand new Black Effect original series, black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jackie Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audio books while commuting or running errands. For those who find themselves seeking solad, wisdom, and refuge between
the chapters. From thought provoking novels to powerful poetry, We'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together. We'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm doctor Laurie Santos, host of the Happiness Lab podcast. Is the US elections approach. It can feel like we're angrier and more divided than every but in a new, hopeable season of my podcast, I'll share with the science really shows that We're surprisingly more united than most people think.
We all know something is wrong in our culture and our politics, and that we need to do better, and that we can do better.
With the help of Stanford psychologist Jamiale Zaki.
It's really tragic.
If cynicism were appeal, it'd be a poison.
We'll see that our fellow humans, even though we disagree with, are more generous than we assume.
My assumption, my feeling, my hunch is that a lot of us are actually looking for a way to disagree and still be in relationships.
With each other.
All that on the Happiness Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
I'm Carrie Champion and this is season four of Naked Sports, where we live at the intersection of sports and culture. Up first, I explore the making of a rivalry, Caitlin Clark versus Angel Reese.
I know I'll go down in history.
People are talking about women's basketball is just because of one single game.
Every great player needs a foil.
And hear them wise, I just come here and play basketball, Ray Kendeled, and that's what I focused on.
From college to the pros. Clark and Reeves have changed the way we consume women's sports.
Angel Reese is a joy to watch. She is unapologetically black.
I love her.
What exactly ignited this fire? Why has it been so good for the game? And can the fanfare surrounding these two supernovas be sustained? This game is only going to get better because the talent is getting better. This new season will cover are all things sports and culture. Listen to Naked Sports on the Black Effect Podcast Network. iHeartRadio, app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
The Black Effect Podcast Network is sponsored by diet Coke.
Well, so that's the Big Bang, And so the next thing people should know is that the Big Bang happened about fourteen billion years.
Ago billion with a b.
Billion years ago. Yeah, and I can't even remember what I did this morning, fourteen minutes ago. That's how old universe is from that moment of the Big Bang.
Yeah, so the universe has been around since the Big Bang about fourteen billion years and you know, for scale, the Earth has been around about four and a half billion years. That's when our solar system was fourned.
Right, Well, how do you how do we know how old the universe is? Like, yeah, like how can you tell?
Yeah, well, we are seeing it expand, and so the simplest way is to just extrapolate back, say how fast does it expand? And extrapolate that expansion back until the zero point.
So like if you look at the furthest stars you see, you know how fast we're going. You can just like hit the rewind button. Yeah, it would take about fourteen billion years for it to connect to everything else.
Yeah, so we're pretty sure that something happened fourteen billion years ago. This expansion of space happened fourteen billion years ago. But these days scientists are a little fuzzier on what exactly the Big Bang was. So idea zero was a tiny dot with all the matter and it explodes into the universe. Problems with this idea are one that you can't really have tiny dots of infinite density, so.
Einstein told me before you could.
Well, that was Einstein's idea, and the idea is consistent with Einstein's gravity. But Einstein's theories of gravity don't account for quantum mechanics. Okay, quantum mechanics when they came after Einstein, he was never really very comfortable with and quantum mechanics is a whole, big, long story, But the thing we need to understand is that it says you can't have things that are super duper tiny. There might be a smallest space, there might be the smallest distance.
Get fuzzy. Yeah, like at some point you can't get unfuzzier.
That's right, exactly. There's a basic unit of fuzziness. Like imagine space being pixelated, right, Like you can't talk about something smaller than one pixel. So we think that quantum mechanics is probably correct. And if you big pixel, the big pixel, that's right, the first pixel of the universe. So we think if you try to follow Einstein extrapolate the universe down to a point, general relativity probably works, but we think it probably breaks when you get down
to really really tiny distances and really heavy stuff. But nobody's ever seen that happen. You have to look inside a black hole or go back in time and see the Big Bang. But these days we have a slightly fuzzier version of the idea of the Big Bang. Rather than a point of matter that then explodes into space, we think of the universe as being created as a blob of space and matter, and then of.
Space and matter. Yeah, so like it like a blob of space.
Like a tiny universe with not much space. So instead of an infinite universe with a tiny blob of matter in it, now imagine a tiny piece of space filled with energy and matter.
Okay, and what's outside of that little space?
We have no idea, Like seriously, we can't even imagine inconceivable, right, But we do know that space can be variable in size, space can expand, and these days we have a more modern idea of the Big Bang as that expansion of that space.
It might kind of like a bubble, like a bubble that's a space, and then there's stuff in the bubble. So you're saying both those things blew up exactly.
And this is the more modern idea that space itself can expand. And so if you're out there thinking, what is he talking about? How can space expand? What is it expanding into? Everything has to be in something, right, and the answer is, we don't know. We think used to think of space as just like emptiness, and we can go a whole episode about just what space is,
and I think we really will, so people listening. But these days we think of space as a thing because it can spand it can bend, and it can ripple, so we know it has all these properties. So it might be that this bubble of space in the early universe was in some sort of super meta deep space that we have never really discovered, or nothing. It could be that it doesn't have to hang in something else. It's just the edge.
But space itself was smaller that that much. We know space was small. Space was smaller, and the stuff in it was crammed in, really really small, that's right. And then about fourteen billion years ago, for some reason do we know why, We don't know why, it decided it didn't want to be that small anymore.
That's right. Yeah, And that was the moment that space was created, and then it expanded like crazy. It's something we call inflation. Inflation is not you know why your money doesn't work as well every year. I mean, that is inflation. But there's and I don't know why do we do this? In science? We take an idea, a word that everybody uses to mean one thing, right, use that same word to mean something totally different.
But it fits what it describes. It in the universe inflated like a balloon, like a bowl, right.
Yes, okay, it's a good descriptive name from that sense. So the universe inflated, that whole balloon inflated, and everything inside it got stretched, okay. And the amount of stretching that happened is crazy. It's like the universe expanded in space by a factor ten to the thirty. That's ten with thirty zeros on it, some crazy huge number, and it did it in this really small amount of time, ten to the minus thirty. So that's zero with thirty
zeros after the decimal plays and then a one. So this incredible expansion, a huge expansion of space of ten to the thirty and this tiny amount of time ten to the minus thirty. It's hard to really even fathom.
It wasn't a rush to get big.
Yes, and it's still getting bigger today. And the other thing that's important to understand is that space didn't get created like on the outside of the universe. It's not like they made more room, it's stuff. The space inside of the universe stretched was created, so like between two particles you had a certain amount of space, then all of a sudden you had extra space between particles. So everything, Yeah, everything's getting stretched out from the inside also not just
from the outside, and that's also continuing to happen. Like the expansion of the universe today, the in fact the universe is getting bigger and bigger is happening all around this. It's more space being created.
The third thing we should talk about today is that we don't know what happened before the Big Bang, like before this little bubble blew up, what happened before.
But before we get into that, let's take a quick break.
I'm buzzs Night and I'm the host of the Taking a Walk podcast music History on Foot John Oates.
Great songs endured, and I'm very proud and happy to know that i was part of something that will endure.
The podcast is an audio diary of insightful conversations with musicians and the inside stories behind their music.
Russ Kunkle, the basic connection that I had with someone that was great coming out of the Whiskey was David Crosby. David I met David and Steven and Graham kind of around the same time, basically through my wife Leah, who is Cass Elliott's sister.
The message of.
The podcast is simple, honest conversation with musicians about the music they create. Mike Campbell of The Heartbreakers.
It is correct.
I rarely worked things out. I like to go off the cup and try to grab things out of the air while you're playing the song and try to catch a little magic.
Listen to the Taking a Walk podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Jackie Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jackie Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audio books while commuting or running errands. For
those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge. Between the chapters, from thought provoking novels to powerful poetry, We'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together. We'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm doctor Laurie Santos, host of the Happiness Lab podcast. As the US elections approach, it can feel like we're angrier and more divided than ever. But in a new coopbole season of my podcast, I'll Share with the science really shows that we're surprisingly more united than most people.
We all know something is wrong in our culture and our politics, and that we need to do better, and that we can do better.
With the help of Stanford psychologist Jamiale Zaki.
It's really tragic.
If cynicism were appeal, it'd be a poison.
We'll see that our fellow humans, even those we disagree with, are more generous than we assume.
My assumption, my feeling, my hunch is that a lot of us are actually looking for a way to disagree and still be in relationship.
With each other.
All that on the Happiness Lap Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
In nineteen eighty two, Atari players had one thing on their minds, sword Quest. This wasn't just a new game. Atari promised one hundred and fifty grand in prizes to four finalists, but the prizes disappeared, and what started as a video game promotion became one of the most controversial moments in eighties pop culture.
I just don't believe they exist.
Every by reactions shock at all.
That sword was amazing, It was so beautiful.
I'm Jamie Loftis. Join me this spring for the Legend of sword Quest, a podcast about the fall of Atari and the disappearing sword Quest prizes. We'll follow the quest for lost treasure across four decades.
It's almost like a metaphor for the industry and Atari itself in a way.
Listen to the Legend of sword Quest on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We think of Franklin as the doddling dude flying a kite and no rain, but those twomen are the most important scientific discoveries of the time.
I'm Evan Ratliffe.
Last season, we tackled the ingenuity of Elon Musk with biographer Walter Isaacson. This time we're diving into the story of Benjamin Franklin, another genius who's desperate to be dusted off from him.
His media empire makes him the most successful self made business person in America. I mean he was never early to bed, an early to rise type person. He's enormously famous. Women start wearing their hair and what was called the coiffor a la Franklin.
And who's more relevant now than ever.
The only other person who could have possibly been the first president would have been Benjamin Franklin, but he's too old and once Washington been doing.
Listen to on Benjamin Franklin with Walter Isaacson on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is like totally territory for speculation and philosophy. We have pretty good theories about what happened during the Big Bang, this idea of the inflation. We even have some experimental evidence to back it up. And it's a pretty solid theory these days that inflation happened.
But what do you mean experimental? Like we can measure the Big Bang?
Can we right? So we can't go back in time and see it right, but we can do things like detectives do after a murder, and we can look for clues and say, are the clues that we see in the universe today consistent with this story or with that other story. Right, so we can sift through the clues from the Big Bang and say, it looks like the universe was created and if inflation happened, it probably created these ripples in that plasma, and we can see those
ripples in the cosmic microwave background radiation. It's really an incredible golden age of cosmology. They're doing all this really precision work to understand exactly what happened and what we know.
So, but we can only see up to a certain points only before that is just the speculation.
Before that, it's just speculation. So one popular idea is that there's this kind of matter called inflationary matter or inflantons, and it has some weird gravitational properties, and those gravitational properties cause inflation.
Like suddenly they came into being inside of this hot mess and it's like we need to get out of here.
Yeah, it's this never ending loop of questions. Right, So you say, well, the Big Bang was inflation. What caused inflation? Inflationary matter? Well, what created inflationary matter? It's like dot dot dot. You could just keep asking that question forever, and I think we will be asking that question forever, We'll always be pushing back and trying to understand, and until we get back to negative infinity in time, we're
never going to have like a solid answer. But that's part of the fun, right, It's not like it's the journey as much as the destination.
But there's some cool ideas there about what happened before that point.
Right, that's right. Yeah, Like maybe the whole universe was filled with inflationary matter and in some places it decayed into normal matter and then inflation happened. And if that's the case, then you have like our universe is one spot inside some huge mega universe of inflationary matter, and maybe at other points in the in that mega universe there are also other dots that turned into what we call pocket universes.
Were like the zits of the the face of the of the mega universe.
Mega is its on the mega universe.
Yeah, and that's maybe like our universe is just like a little bubble in a big sea of other bubbles.
That's right, exactly.
That's one idea.
That's one idea, and we have no way to really to test that idea. Is the problem, because there's no way for us to ever reach those other bubbles, because if that's the case, if that's really the reality of our, of our, of the situation of nature, it means that inflation is still happening because that inflationary matter is still constantly expanding. So those other universes, those other bubbles, are getting pushed away from us much much faster than the speed.
Of light, because it'll never hang out.
You can't send a message to there, you can't ever see it, you can't ever go there. And scientifically that's a big problem, not because I really want to go to the beaches in some other bubble universe, but because if you want to prove that it's true, you have to do an experiment, you have to find some evidence. You have to do you have to have a theory
that can be confirmed. If you have a theory that predicts something you can never test, and it's not really a scientific theory or a useful one, it's right, it's like saying to guess, Yeah, it's a guess, and.
That's one theory. Maybe we're a bubble in a sea of other universes. What's another idea for what happened before the Big Bang?
Well, another idea is that maybe there's a cycle, right, maybe the Big Bang was caused by a big crunch, right, And to understand that you have to think about sort of the future first, Like, so the Big Bang happened, everything expands out, and then one question is like are things going to keep expanding? We don't really know, but one possibilities they keep expanding forever and the universe just sort of drifts out into this endlessly cold, boring, bland situation.
But another possibility is that it slows down, stops, and then falls back in. Right, Everything rushes back and gravity pulls everything back into it to recreate that hots Yeah, deflation, I think you just invented.
Can I go back and change it to my son's name?
Ollivation. The deflation theory would say that the universe comes back, falls.
And then collapses back into a little hot mess again.
A little hot mess. It's like recovering your youth, right, It's like a middle aged crisis or.
Whatever, and then it just bounces back again.
Yeah, and that would be a cycle. So a big crunch, big bang, big crunch, big bang.
That could be big Bang US, big crunch, big bang again, maybe somebody else, somebody else.
Better looking versions of us.
Yeah, impossible, impossibly. Yeah. So that's another idea, is that would happen before is like more and more universes.
Yeah. And there's something nice about that because it explains both that our universe had a beginning and it also gives you an explanation for what happened all the way back to the beginning of time, because it returns to the possibility of the universe is infinitely old, right, because that could have been happening forever. It allows you to have this sort of finite of time for our universe without limiting you to finiteeness for the whole universe, sort of.
Like the right time could be infinite, but space could be finite.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, And that brings us to the last crazy idea, which is maybe there was nothing before the Big Bang.
I mean nothing time.
Not even time, right. We think space was created in the Big Bang and space has expanded and all that stuff, and.
So there could have been no time, no space before.
No space and no time, right, And it's hard to even wrap your mind around what that is. I mean, we have a hard time imagining, like what will happen after we die? Well, the universe continue without us right now trying to imagine the universe without space and time. What does that even mean? And you have to think also about what time is itself? Like, what does it mean for there to not be time? Right, there's no
time in which there's no time. There's no time for that to happen, right, And a lot of people think about time as sort of the organized principle of the universe. Maybe you've heard of the second law through my dynamics that tells us that entropy is always increasing in the universe, and so they.
Imagine things are getting messier.
Things are getting messier and forward in time, that's right, getting more and more spread out, forward in time. And so some people think that that is time. The time is measured by entropy and created by entropy, and that before the Big Bang, if there was if there was nothing, no space, then there was no time. And that sounds like an odd idea, but in other ways we're very familiar with it. Like you know, if you stand on the North Pole and you ask which way is north, well,
there is nothing north in the north. You blew us up. I'm going to write to Stephen Hockey and tell that's actually his His phrase is you know, maybe this's no north of north.
North, there's no before yeah, zero time.
Yeah, because if you're standing on a sphere and you're the north pole of it, there's nowhere to go, nowhere to go, there's no more northiness.
Can the tape ends when you try to rewind it more.
That's right, and that's something we're comfortable with. We're accepting the fact that a sphere has like a limit and edge, and it's reasonable for that for there be nothing beyond it. But when we think of time, we tend to think of in a line, and so we want there to be something before it, or at least for there to be a reason why it started here and not somewhere else or some other other you know, time or it's a very natural, i think idea to have intuitively to
think that something should have been before then. But it could be that there was nothing. That the things were created at that moment and there was nothing before the.
Here and then we came. Yeah, we dropped the mic.
We came. We made this podcast, and that's a summary of all the whole universe in a nutshell. And you know, any of those theories, First of all, those are very difficult to test, and it's hard to imagine how we'll ever know. Right, it might be that there aren't any clues in the rubble of the universe to tell us which one is, which one is? Which there might be, although I'd like to have faith in future scientists coming up with clever ideas for ways to test these theories
which right now seem impossible to test. But in the future people.
Can gave everybody able to see beyond the Big Bang.
Yeah, maybe maybe they'll find some evidence in the current ubble that tells them, oh, is this or is that? Or is the other thing? But even if you get there, imagine having an answer to one of these questions.
Right, what do you think knowing what happened before the Big Bang would tell you like, how would how would it change your life?
I think it would change everybody's life. I think it's the kind of knowledge that would filter into like the global consciousness. Think about like how quantum mechanics has changed the way people think about things. But there's randomness in the universe, right, the universe is not following a fixed set of rules, but that those rules have fuzz in them.
You think it's changed the global consciousness?
Absolutely and not just in New ag people who you know, but in everybody thinking about the universes being a little different from what they imagine. Do you have a question you wish we would cover. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorge dot com. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about
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I'm Joe Gatto, I'm Steve Burne.
We are two cool moms. We certainly are.
And guess where we could find us now? Oh, I don't know the iHeart podcast network. That's right.
We're an official iHeart podcast and I'm super excited about it.
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