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Hey everyone, this is once again your friendly neighborhood cosmologists Katie Mack. I am giving a little bit of an update to this episode. So this episode is mostly answering questions about astrophysics and cosmology things, and since it was recorded in twenty seventeen, there have been a couple of changes, a couple of updates. One of the things that I answered questions about was asteroid searches, and I mentioned that there's a big part of the sky we're not really
looking at that has gotten better in recent years. There are some new observational projects. We have a much better survey of the sky for finding potentially dangerous space rocks. There are some caveats though. One of them is that because of things like these new constellations of satellites that are going up, some of that is making those observations a little bit more difficult. I think we're still in a much better place than we were, and we're finding
way more potentially hazard as objects. Nothing is a big threat at the moment, don't worry, but yeah, it'll be interesting to see how that develops in the next few years. The other update is just that my social media stuff is all different now. I'm still on Twitter as at Astrokatie, though I'm using Twitter less these days. I'm on Instagram at astro Katie Mac. So check those out, and just check out my web page astrokt dot com. That hasn't changed.
You can learn about stuff like my book The End of Everything, Astrophysically Speaking, where I talk about how the universe might end and what that would look like if we could see that. And I have a newsletter now that you can also check out. There's a sign up on my website. It's called watch this space time. So thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy the show.
Hey, this is Ali Ward here with ologies. Now a few things up up top. If you like ologies, I personally myself would love it if you took a second to rate and or review it on iTunes? Have you done that yet? It doesn't cost any money, you just do it. And I also totally read all of your reviews. I'm thrilled by them. Today someone named smileness. There are six asses in that said the actual best, yep, the
actual best. When things get all jargony, Ali fills in the gaps, great guests, great topics, and a genuinely lovable host, which, by the way, I read that while walking into the post office and I almost started crying or skipping. So thank you everyone for these. When you leave reviews and you rate it, other people say, hey, what's this thing now?
Cosmology Part two. If you listen to the very very end of part one last week with the just phenomenal doctor Katie Mac aka Astro Katie, then you learned a lot about particle physics and the large heart on collider string, cheese, black holes, the world's most expensive selfie, and your own aching insignificance all of ours. If you haven't listened, give to go. I also tell you of somewhat embarrassing secret at the very end of the podcast. Maybe I'll do
that again. So Part two with Doctor Mac means getting right into the nitty gritty your questions and trust me, I had a million, but Katie and I were late to meet up with friends to see Murder on the Orine Express, so I could only ask about half an hour's worth of questions. So I may have to nab her in the future to ask the rest because so many good questions. I have so many questions from Okay, it's like a rapid fire around Sure, yeah, I'm just I'm here for it. Okay, I'm going to throw a
bunch of questions at you. If you want to skip any of them, you can just pass. First questions I'm going to ask her from the Patreon page. So people are patrons.
We appreciate them very much. They are great people. They are great people, task sick, and we want them to continue and ask lots of questions. Yes, which are all very good questions. Yes exactly.
Yes, you can be a patron for twenty five cents.
An episode which is an amazing deal.
Isn't it a good deal?
People should totally do that.
I wanted to make it accessible. Yeah, if you did feel like tossing a dollar a month, then get yourself over to patreon dot com slash ologies. I post calls for questions, some behind the scene photos, or some patron only videos, and for twenty five dollars a month, I'll be your emergency contact, which I hope you never need. And also I may not be reliable. This is a question. I'm just going to say one of the questions, but three different people asked a variation of it. Aaron Herdman
and Alex Introini Intoronini. Alex did that right, I'm sorry. Both wanted to know is there a name for the disorientation in panic one feels when considering the vastness of the universe. Also, do you know of a way to get past it? There is a name?
So a couple of names. One is cosmic rutigo okay, and the other is cosmophobia. And I don't know if these are like official names, but these are names that I've heard. There's so. A couple of friends and colleagues of mine have a podcast called cosmic urdigo where they talk about cosmology and stuff and space and things, but it's based on that topic. And cosmophobia I know about because I occasionally get emails from people who say that they have severe cases and want my help. So it
is a thing. Sometimes people get really really upset about, like the fastness of space or just like the fact
that we have no control over these huge forces. I mean that is something like I have moments where I'm like, WHOA right, Like, because there are things like you know, black holes are colliding with each other, and and like the universe is expanding and it's accelerating in its expansion, and like it's getting bigger and bigger and faster and faster, and like sometimes you know that stuff is really you know, I mean you think about your little life and what's going on in your day to day and at the
same time, like stars are exploding, and you know, and we have we can look at we can look at the Big Bang, like we can actually see the primordial fireball of the Big Bang, Like we can see that.
How ladies and gentlemen, Alley Ward zero chill.
The reason is that the whole universe was hot and dense and smaller than it is now. So the Big Bang theory is just the idea that the universe in the past was smaller and denser and hotter than it is now. And so if you kind of dial back the current expansion of the universe, then you get to the universe being very very small and dense and hot.
And so every point in the universe now was at some point much hotter and filled with like radiation, right, So, like this part of the universe now, in the very distant past was full of radiation and very hot and very dense. Right. But so when we look out into other parts of the universe, because light takes time to travel, every time we look farther away, we're looking farther into the past. And so we're looking at that part of the universe as it was maybe a billion years ago
or five billion years ago or whatever. And there's a part of the universe that's so distant that when we look at it, we're looking at it as it was
during the time was still on fire. Right, So we look, as we look into the distance in any direction, we're seeing that part of the universe as it was when it was still in that primordial fireball kind of state, which was how long ago it was, well, that was that was around So the fireball started to cool around three hundred and eighty thousand years after the big bang whatever, after the moment of the beginning whatever you call that, because this is that's still part of the hot big bang,
which is like the hot phase. So we can actually see radiation coming from every direction in the sky. That is the radiation of that heat. Like that that radiation from that early time just reaching us now from really distant parts of the universe. And so we can look at it and we're looking at like the fireball universe. We're looking at that primordial plasma, and so like we see the yeah, yeah, and so like we know that
it happened because we can see it. We can watch it, right, we can actually see parts of the universe that are still still there as far as we're.
Concerned, and that can give you cosmic fartigogy.
Yeah, yeah, just like just like thinking about like you know, that was like that was a big important event and like so this sort of like nice, gentle, stable universe is not That's not how it always was, and we don't know, you know, we think that most cosmologists think at the beginning of the universe, before that hot phase, there was a period of very rapid expansion of the universe called inflation. We don't know why that started. We don't know why that ended. We don't know that that
couldn't just start happening again right here, right now. There are theories of the theories where you could have you can have the universe like and right here, right now in this room.
Oh god.
Oh so this is an idea called vacuum decay, where you can you can have like the universe like, have a quantum event happen where one point in the universe like transitions to this other state it's called another vacuum, a true vacuum state, and that would create this bubble of like.
Death again, bubble of death.
That expands out at the speed of light in every direction, so you would never see it coming. And it's a probabilistic event. It's a quantum event, so it could happen at any moment. It probably won't, oh god, you know it probably probably were just wrong about the theory. And even if we weren't wrong about the theory, like the the sort of timescale that we calculate for it. It would probably take like, you know, trillions of years or something,
but like it's a probabilistic event. It could happen in any moment. Technically, it's just with very low probability. So like that could freak you out. And I've gotten emails from people like they read about that and they're like, I can't sleep, and I'm like, I'm sorry, do.
You have any advice for that?
I mean, you know, I tell them, like they so about vacuum decay, I can tell them like a few things. One is that we don't know, we don't have any we don't know for sure that this is even possible. If it were possible, it probably would have happened in the very beginning of the universe because the conditions for it happening then were much more favorable. So it probably would have already happened if it was going to happen already,
or if it if it was possible at all. And then I say, well, if it's gonna like you, there's nothing you can do. Yeah, I mean, like, like it's it's traveling at the speed of light, you won't even see it coming.
That's the best way to die. Yeah, you won't.
I mean you won't notice like basically, like like so it is absolutely the best because you don't see it coming, so you can't be scared of it. You don't even really notice it because it's happening at the speed of light and you're not like around afterward and nothing is around.
Yeah, everyone you love dies at the same time.
Everything dies, everything's gone immediately at the same time. There's no there's no fomo, right, there's nothing. You're not missing out on anything because the whole universe is done now, right, like, and so it's kind of in some sense, it's like really in consequence because there's like no consequences of it. It's yeah, so it doesn't matter. Like you could just blink, you know, and then like like you know, you blink
and like maybe you open your eyes again. Maybe you're consumed by a vacuum bubble of death, but like who cares, like who, you don't know.
If I could vote on a way for everything to end, I would be like totally yeah, vacuum vacuum decay, vacuum decay. Yeah, that's gonna be my platform. I'm gonna run hurt twenty twenty Vacuum decay. It is my platform.
It is the best way to end the universe.
Okay, so that's one way to chill out. Paula Herrera wants to know how scared should we be of a giant asteroid destroying Earth? Are any of the sci fi movie methods to save the planet plausible or are we basically doomed should an asteroid come our way?
Yeah, that's that's a little bit of a sadder point because like, okay, so we're basically not really monitoring about half the sky right now.
What Okay, no big deal, No big deal.
Because we used to have some monitoring stations in the southern hemisphere and they lost funding, So we don't have as good a handle on like the number of objects out there that could cause really big problems. There is like we have there's some kind of like goals about how many like what fraction of objects above a certain size we should be you know, aware of, right And it's like you're supposed to see ninety percent of objects above some size or whatever, and we're not really there.
So I think there are programs being put together now, and there's there's efforts to have a better catalog. It's not like we're due for a giant you know, impact or anything like. It's you know, these are still things that are probably not gonna happen anytime soon. But but I can't honestly tell you that, like we're on top of it. Wow, like we have you know, we're nitor a lot, but we're not monitoring enough to say that,
Like we definitely don't have anything coming in. So okay, so whether or not we could stop it, like okay, So there's there are a couple of methods. If we find out about it early enough, like five years ahead, ten years ahead, then there's a possibility of sending a spacecraft to it and changing the course of it in
some way. You don't want to just blow it up, partially because some of these things are like kind of loose rebbel piles and so it wouldn't really work to try to blow it up, but also because like if you have a huge asteroid and then you blow it up, then you have like a bunch of smaller asteroids and that's not always better. Yeah, But but there there are a bunch of really cool ideas for just nudging it
a little bit. And if you find out about it long enough in the you know, before it comes, then you don't have to nudge it very far at all to get it totally off course it will miss the Earth. So like one of them is to take a really really massive spacecraft and just like park it next to the asteroid in the orbit for a while and so it gets like pulled a little bit by the gravity of the spacecraft. And that can if you get it early enough. That's called gravitational tractor. Yeah, if you get
it early enough, that can work. There are other ideas about like creating like a giant sack and like like capturing it in a sack, because you can't necessarily it's not necessarily like a solid thing.
How are you going to make a bag? They're gonna have to put her on an asteroid.
I mean it depends on the size of the asteroid, right, But I mean.
I don't know, like this is made out of like my lar cat on tape.
I don't know.
I'm sorry, I'm a little activated by this. I looked up asteroid bags. I was distracted for a few minutes on some Galaxy printed tots and duffels, and I was like, oh, that's nice, and then okay, I realized its space people call these capture bags like it's just no big deal, like just use to collect fallen leaves or a dog doodle.
But NASA introduced a plant a few years ago, and I asked the search engine gods what the bag might be made of, and I found out it could be inflatable, could be metal mesh, or could just be high strength material. Sounds like they're figuring that out too. My guess is it's just a very large blue Ikia bag toe that fucker in. Those things are strong.
It's another idea, which is even which is also really cool, where you like spray spray paint half of the object so that it changes like the reflectivity, and then that means that like the solar wind will push a little bit more on one half than the other in some way, and that can change the trajectory. So there are a couple of possibilities.
Those are some good options.
Yeah yeah, but you need a lot of lean time and.
A lot of paint in a really big bag.
Yeah yeah.
Oh my god. I just can't believe that we're kind of sleeping on the job there.
I mean, it's like we're not. I mean, there are people, there's a lot of a lot of these things are being monitored, and there's nothing that we know about that's anytime soon coming as a threat. But there's also like we're not we're not fully on top of this in the way that I feel like we should be.
Oh Man, good to know.
Yeah, Russell Kelly wants to know. Will the universe expand forever or will it eventually collapse in on itself?
That is a great question. Based on our current understanding and the data that we have now, it looks like it will expand forever, which will lead to something called the heat death, which is the most depressing way for the universe to and which is that like that we have dark energy. Dark energy is whatever is making the
universe expand faster and faster. If it's a cosmological constant, which is just a kind of dark energy that first invented by Einstein, but it seems to be the case, then what will happen is that over time the other galaxies will get farther and farther away. Not Andramata, the Andromeda galaxy is coming for us now. It's on its way. It's going to collide with the Milky Way in about
four billion years. Okay, that'll be fine whatever, But then you know, the more dist galaxies will just get farther and farther away, and eventually we won't be able to see any other galaxies outside of our little local group.
This is like when all your friends grow up and move out to the suburbs or like get rich and go to Santa Monica.
And then you know, we won't be able to see like the cosm mic right background anymore that the after glow of the Big Bang. It'll so the universe will just get really really dark and really empty, and then our our little group of galaxies will kind of be
combined to one big blob. But eventually, like all the stars will burn out because they'll run out of fuel and there's no more like gas coming in to make new stars from other galaxies, So the stars will burn out, and then like a bunch of things will collapse into black holes, and the black holes will evaporate, and like the protons will decay, and like everything will just kind
of like decay into nothingness. And then then like there'll be this like it'll be this really empty, cold, dark universe with nothing in it and no like and just like this tiny amount of radiation and no ability for any new structures to form, except maybe through some kind of quantum process, which is kind of a cool thing with those is another topic.
That's so goddamn lonely. Yeah.
Yeah, it's called the heat death.
So what happens when the Andromeda Galaxy collides with the Milky Way though you've cleaned right over that, What the hell is that about?
That's really cool? Actually, So the Andromeda galaxy is a spiral galaxy like her own. It's it's got about it's got about a trillion stars, it's more massive than the Milky Way, and it's got a super massive black hole. And they're all coming toward us at something like I think it was like one hundred kilometers a second. Anyway, they're all they're all coming toward us right now.
And is it gonna smishy smash.
Yeah, it's gonna it's gonna come and in about four billion years it'll get here and it'll it'll collide with the Milky Way galaxy. And the way that galaxies collide
is kind of cool. They like sort of merge and like they make these long trails of stars coming out and it'll be this sort of like really spectacular light show of like gasle collide and make new stars, and there'll be this burst of star formation, and the black holes might like turn on and start like pulling in matter and like getting really bright, and stars will be flung out into space and on these long tails.
The sounds like a warehouse space rave. I'm not gonna lie. I'd be down for this.
But because galaxy is, because there is so much space between stars in galaxies, probably our solar system will not be affected. Okay, like probably we'll just like this. The sky will get really interesting, but you know, it'll also be four billion years from now, so the Sun will be burning out, and you know, the Earth will already have its oceans boiled away and life on Earth will be impossible. But if you know, we left something here to take pictures, they would be really pretty.
Yeah, Mike mel Choir Melchior wants to know, are uranus joke still funny? It's really urinus, isn't it.
So?
Actually I don't know which is a better pronunciation. I usually say urinus just because I don't want to, I don't want to deal with it. But then it's got the name Urine in it too, like it doesn't really help. No, they're not. They're not particularly okay.
So I use an AI for transcription for this podcast and it transcribed to you'urin ass and I'm sorry, but yes, that is funny. Megan Gerard wants to know slightly more on a local practical level. She loves stargazing, but even in a small city, it's hard to do because of light pollution. So can you recommend any tactics resources organizations
for helping reduce light pollution? Also, she thinks maybe light pollution is bad for us and animals, and so good way to stargaze and good way to reduce light pollution.
So there are there are national organizations for like dark Skies. I don't remember the names, but if you if you look them up, there's they have their charities that that their whole purpose is to try to get better lighting in cities so that more of the light goes down and up and changing like what the lamps are made of and stuff like that. So you can get involved
in these campaigns and they're really they're really helpful. Yeah, I can't remember the name of the organizations right now, but there are a few of them out there.
Dark Sky Dot org has a bunch of information on getting involved in dark sky advocacy and membership in this kind of a dark sky club, So hit that up. I will try to do my part and stop falling asleep with lights on. I fell asleep with them on again last night, but tonight Tonight to Night International Dark Sky Association. I'm gonna do my part.
If you want to go start using and your city's too bright, you just have to go somewhere else. Basically, so when I was living here, when I was growing up in La in Long Beach, I was part of the La Astronomical Society and they would have Dark Sky Star Star parties where we would drive like four hours into the mountains and it would be really dark there. So you don't have to get that far out out of the city to do good stargazing.
So getting the fuck out of Dodge, Yes, got it.
Yeah, that's pretty much it. There's a really great film called The City Dark, which is about it's about light pollution and what it does to us and what it does to astronomy, and i'd recommend checking that out.
I fell sleep the lights on last night. It's not because your brain And now this said questions comes from the Facebook group. There's Ologies podcast Facebook group. But before we take questions from you, we're going to take a quick break for sponsors of the show. Sponsors. Why sponsors?
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Okay, Isabel Lauren wants to know, what do you think the ship of the universes hyperbolic terroid? What do you think? Did I sell? Did I say toroid? Okay?
You saidid okay, okay, troidal is the adjective. Okay, but yeah, it's so to the taurus is a donut shape.
Oh that's all, That's what.
That's all she's saying.
Yeah, so a troid cake would be a donut. Yes, yes, I went my whole life not knowing this somehow. But also a trus apparently technically would be like an inner tube hollow, and a solid taurus is a donut. But I want to say I was on a dessert show called Unique Suites for like a lot of seasons. I have to say a cake donut seems like a solid torus.
But if it's a fluffier yeast donut, there's all kinds of air pockets in there, and the volume and density seems somewhere between a taurus and a solid torus, and I need a physicist to get on this for me. Thank you. Okay, oh yeah, back to the ship of the universe.
The universe the way she's asking the question. The answer is the universe is probably flat, okay, which just means it just means that there's no large scale curvature to the universe. So I said that matter curves space, so you get these like dents and space on the very large scales. The space is flat in the sense that it's not large scale curved. It's still probably three dimensional. I mean, the space part is three dimensional, and then
there's time that's a fourth dimension. But you know, it's flat in the sense that if you had two beams of light that were parallel, they would stay parallel forever.
Okay.
That seems to be the case, at least as far as we can measure. There could be some larger scale curvature that we don't measure because it's just so big, Like if you have a ball that's big enough, it looks flat, like the surface of the Earth looks flat. But the universe on the whole, as far as we know, appears to be flat. There's no evidence for curvature, but it could be curved around on some really large scale.
Okay, we'll find out before the stars all collapse on themselves healthily. Maybe I don't know.
I don't know.
PJ. King and Laur March both had kind of the same question. Is there a reason why some stars appear to twinkle more than others?
Oh? Yeah, well, so stars appear to twinkle when you're looking through the atmosphere because the atmosphere is bending the light a little bit just by being like a little bit hotter, a little bit wetter or something in different parts. And so when you look through that that sort of you know, messy air, it makes the position of the
star move around a little bit from your perspective. And that means that sometimes it'll look a little bit brighter and sometimes it'll a little bit dimmer, and that makes the twinkling. So the brighter star is sometimes that makes it look less twinkly or or more. It depends on kind of what the air is doing. But planets don't twinkle.
Why not? So the reason planets don't twinkle is because so the twinkling of a star comes from the fact that we like it's it's just a point of light from our perspective, it's just a single point of light, and so it can be moved around, and that little point of light can be sort of magnified a little bit, and that makes it look brighter or less. But a planet is a disc of light from our perspective, it's
really really small disc. But it's a disc of light that's big enough that the little the little sort of turbulence cells or whatever in the atmosphere only like just move the light around within the disc mostly, and so it doesn't get significantly brighter or dimmer because the motion of the air is not enough to really change the sort of size and shape of that disc.
So if he twinkles, you got a star. If it doesn't twinkle, you've got a planet.
More or less, Yeah, more or less. So if you see something pretty bright in the sky and it's not twinkling and other things are, then you've probably seen a planet, and they're probably seeing Jupiter, Saturn, Mars or Venus.
It's so great. Yeah, And if that does happen and it's the first time you've heard this, then you should high five Katie on Twitter. Lauren Oakes wants to know what is the deal with other dimensions this might not be the right part to act, but I still want to know. Okay.
So we have three dimensions of space, so that's forward, back or left, right, up, and down. We also consider time to be a dimension, so when you think about things like relativity, you have to include time as like part of your coordinate grid basically, and so that coordinate grid has to have four dimensions. So the time is
the fourth dimension. And the reason for that is that you know, space and time can kind of affect each other, like things like moving through space at a higher speed changes the way you move through time, and when you're close to a gravitating object that changes the way you move through time, And so it has to be part of the same sort of malleable fabric. In some mathematical sense, there could be higher there could be other dimensions of
space and that we just can't interact with. We can't see, we can't perceive, and in some cases those other dimensions of space might be kind of wrapped around to themselves, which is a weird concept, but it's kind of like if you imagine, like like if you imagine a string, right, a string is a three dimensional object. Two of those dimensions are kind of wrapped around really tight, so it only has a little bit, a little direction. You can go in two of the dimensions, you can go really
long way in the other one. And so it might be that in space in our universe we can go as far as we want in our three dimensions, but the other dimensions are so small that we don't notice
them because they're all wrapped up. And one of the reasons that those extra dimensions are hypothesized is that it might be that all of our particle interactions of stuff can only happen in this three dimensional space, but gravity can leak out into the other ones a little bit, And so if that were happening, that would explain why gravity is so weak compared to all the other forces. That's a hypothesis, you know. So there could be other dimensions that might solve that problem.
But what about multiverses? And is there another met with a better life, meaning a different dimension.
So when people say dimension in that sense, they just mean another universe the dimensionality like the dimension doesn't mean space and anymore, it means something else. So there could be other universes depending on how you define a universe, because you could just define a universe to be everything, and then everything is part of the universe.
By desfinition, there can't be a second everything. Yeah, okay, but you can define a universe as just the observable universe. So what's within our sort of the distance out to which we can observe anything, which is a set distance, and then there.
Could be stuff beyond that. We know there's stuff beyond that,
so that's kind of outside of our universe. You can think of that as another universe, and then you can have other universes that are separated by higher dimensions from us, So you can have like like our you can imagine our universe is a flat sheet and there's another flat sheet, so we've just take the one dimension down and they could collide maybe, And this is like there's a theory for the big bang that comes from these two sheets collide and that makes a big bang, and they come
apart and then they collide again later on, so called the ekpyrotic model. Wow, my thesis advisor was one of the people who came up with that. So there and then there are other ways to have other universes, like with the Many World's idea of quantum mechanics, which says that every time a quantum event happens, basically another universe branches out from ours in a way that somehow makes sense mathematically but sounds ridiculous when you think about it.
Is that kind of like an alternate reality?
Kind of?
Yeah, is there another men in another universe, in another reality who brushes her hair more regularly?
Well, in the many worlds hypothesis, I guess technically that would be the case.
But so if that's like a rabbit hole that you want to go into, just like start googling.
Because in many worlds, like there's another universe where like a photon just went through that window or didn't, and that's the only difference.
Oh my god, Oh my god.
So, like every possible thing Rik.
Kyle Land wants to know, is there actual scientific proof that there might be life beyond our planet aliens?
Yes? Now probably?
Okay, So what does Katie hate about her job? What does she hate?
So?
What is the uncertainty of the kind of academic career? Letter? Okay, So I spent the last eight years as a postdoc, which means I had my PhD and I was doing research, but I didn't have a permanent job, and I didn't know where I was going to go next, or how long I would be there, or whether or not I would be able to continue in science, because it was just you know, applying for jobs and uh, it's just
it's a it's a difficult thing to be doing. And I you know, all jobs have some uncertainty at some stage, but I feel like in academia that uncertainty and that sort of tenuousness lasts a really long time. Yeah, And if you get to the stage where you're definitely not going to get an academic job and you wanted one, then you have spent many years making not very much money when you could have done something more lucrative, and it wouldn't have it would have been better off in
like every way. So you know, I mean I enjoyed doing the research, and so for me, it was like, well, I'll just keep doing science as long as I can. I enjoy it. I'm willing to make that sacrifice. But for a lot of people it's just so disruptive and it's so difficult that it's like it's it's a really high anxiety time and it's really hard, and a lot of people leave because that is just really hard to deal with.
So that's the main thing.
And then the other thing is that, like it's just it's really easy to have a lot of like self doubt and have to be very kind of self driven, and it's hard to know if you're doing a good job. And like it's it's academia can be very competitive and you don't get a lot of like positive feedback, and so it can be just hard to kind of like keep doing what you're doing and know that you're doing it well or know how to do it well or you know, all of that stuff can.
Be difficult, which is great that you're a science communicator as well, because you get to get a lot of feedback from the public. Imagine, I know, yeah, I mean that, and that does help a lot.
Like if if I'm you know, sitting in my office banging my head again something that I feel like I really should know this thing or I really should understand it, that this should come more easily, and then you know, I feel like I'm a total failure and I don't know anything. And then I go talk to you know, a room full of school kids and suddenly like I'm an expert. Like then I feel like I know a
lot of things. And then it helps a lot. So yeah, for me, it's it's made a big difference in like just keeping me from getting too depressed about, you know, not understanding the universe as well as I wanted to.
What about your favorite thing about the job or cosmology or physics.
Or my favorite thing is that I get to ponder the deep questions of reality as my job, you know. Yeah, Like I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago, and it was most of the topics in this conference were not stuff I work on. So it was like really deep questions about the nature of reality and like whether or not space time is really a thing, and how particles really work and all of that, and I was just like, like, I didn't it's not the area
I work in. So there was a lot I didn't understand about it, but I could grasp some of it, and I felt like I just felt so privileged to be able to be in that room and to think about these things and to have some grasp of these huge concepts, and like I get to that that was part of my work, you know, and that was just an amazing That's just an every time that happens, it's an amazing feeling that I get to do these mental exercises and learn about the fundamental properties of the universe,
and that's my job. I mean, and you know, I mean, writing the papers and teaching and all of that stuff is also my job. So there's a lot of other aspects to it, but just learning about the universe is a big part of my job and I love that.
It's so baller. Yeah, all right, thank you for letting me talk to you for so long. I'm so sorry. That's the longest interview I've ever done because there's too many questions. Okay, let's go to a movie.
Okay, bye.
So we barely made the movie, which was a very forgettable mystery romp about a train stuck in the snow, but stellar mustaches and I will remain forever shook it by this conversation. I'm glad we took as long as we did.
Now.
To follow doctor Mack, you can find her on Twitter as astro Katie or.
On Instagram at Ostro Katie Mac.
And this podcast is at Ology's on Twitter and Instagram, and I'm at Ali Ward on both and for t shirts and tots and mugs and to support the podcast, while also covering your nude body. Go to ologiesmerch dot com and of course, if you like the podcast and want to support, just tell a friend or make a post about it or rate it on iTunes. That's huge,
And yeah, I'll give you a secret this week. This week's secret is that I record all the narration in my closet because the sound is pretty good, there's all these clothes to dampen it. But the real nugget here is that I have a real laundry situation and about half my body currently sitting on a pile of towels, which I will get to this weekend after I obtain some soap. So yeah, I'm podcasting from a laundry nest. I'm like a cozy little woodland rodent talking at you
through a machine. Big huge thanks to Stephen Ray, Morris Pare and Saint of Podcasts for editing this episode, and to Shannon Felds and Bonnie Dutch for all of their help with merch and Aaron for running the Ologies podcast Facebook group. And the theme song was composed and performed by Nick Thorburn aka Nick Diamonds of the band Islands. He's great check out his music. Until then, ask smart
people all the dumb questions you want. The universe is big, and regret is maybe the scariest thing there is.
Okay, Brebright Pacaderman College, Bombiology, crypto zoology, lithologyinology, meteorology, fology, anthology, seriology, selinology.
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