0:04

What if you thought, as an adult that you've

0:06

been alive forever and then you discovered no,

0:08

you actually had a childhood and you were born, and you

0:11

would want to know all about that. It would

0:14

be surprising. And actually that's sort

0:16

of the situation science was it. For a long

0:18

time astronomer thought the universe

0:20

is fixed, it's constant. All the stars

0:22

are just sort of hanging out there in space, not

0:25

moving, and they've been like that forever. Hi,

0:38

I'm Daniel, is this Horran? So?

0:40

I'm a particle physicist. I smash protons

0:43

together at certain in my day job to try to figure

0:45

out what is the basic nature of matter?

0:48

What do you smash as a hobby ban? Yeah? You know, when you're

0:50

a particle physicist, you learned to solve problems

0:52

by smashing stuff together. So whatever's

0:54

around me, And I'm a cartoonist

0:56

and my job is to sit in my pajamas

0:59

all day and for funny things. That's not

1:01

how you started, right. You didn't grow up thinking I'm

1:03

going to be a cartoonist. No, I started

1:05

off as a researcher. I'm an engineer. I studied

1:07

robotics. I have a PhD in robotics. But um,

1:10

somewhere along the line, I started joining

1:12

comics and that kind

1:14

of took off for me. And this is our podcast

1:16

Daniel and Jorge explained the universe.

1:20

Today, we're going to talk about how it all

1:22

began. The biggest of questions,

1:29

the Big Bang. What

1:32

happened at the very beginning

1:34

of the universe, What happened before

1:36

the Big Bang? It's a pretty deep basic

1:39

question about the origin of our universe. What do

1:41

you think about it, what do you know about it? What do you

1:43

imagine might have happened before the

1:45

start of our universe. We

1:47

went out and we asked people on the street what they

1:49

thought happened just before the Big Bang. Um,

1:52

well, there was a bunch of particles in the

1:55

universe, and then they combined together and had

2:00

all the energy of the

2:02

universe. So then when

2:06

it happened, that's how it was all dispersed.

2:09

So most people seem to have some idea that,

2:11

first of all, the Big Bang is more than just a

2:13

TV show, right, that the idea

2:15

for the science came before the TV show. I

2:18

was kind of relieved to hear that everyone seems

2:20

to know it's uh. It sort of marks the beginning

2:22

of the universe. Right, it's a moment of creation

2:25

or the starting of the clock of the universe,

2:27

and everything came from. But what

2:29

exactly happened during the Big Bang?

2:32

And most interestingly, what

2:34

happened before the Big Bang?

2:37

Right? And that's that's fascinating to me. And

2:39

these are the best questions, the ones that like try

2:42

to answer the question where did everything come from?

2:44

This sort of touches on the philosophical like why

2:46

are we here? If you knew how the Big

2:49

Bang happened and how the universe was created, you might

2:51

get some insight into like what the purpose

2:53

of life is or how to live your life or stuff.

2:55

So to me, these are like really good, deep, basic

2:58

questions. So

3:03

we made a list of the four things we

3:05

think you should know about the Big Band. The

3:07

first one is that the entire universe

3:10

was once really small. Maybe

3:15

we think, let's talk about that. What do you mean maybe,

3:17

Well, it's an interesting question. We know that

3:19

the universe had a beginning, right, And how do we know

3:21

that? We know that because things are expanding, things are

3:23

moving away from each other. That was the major

3:26

discovery, Like a hundred years ago, people

3:28

looked out in the stars and discovered that they're

3:30

all moving away from us. Okay, So like

3:32

we thought everything would still like we were frozen

3:34

in a gel or something. The stars were just

3:36

like they're sitting there, generally

3:39

speaking. But then they discovered that they actually

3:41

things are moving away from each other, that's

3:43

right, And everything is moving away from us,

3:45

and everything is moving away from everything else. They

3:48

just looked at stars, and you can measure how fast

3:50

a star is moving relative to

3:52

us by by seeing how it's light

3:54

is stretched or shrunk, depending on whether

3:56

it's moving away from us or towards the second

3:59

dopler shift, like the highway

4:01

patrol measuring your speed, you can sort

4:03

of you can tell how fast you're going. Yeah, exactly.

4:06

It's not like they looked at the stars and said, oh, now

4:08

it's that once over there, it must have

4:10

moved. It's like that's some other information, right, right,

4:12

So they looked out there and they measured all this stuff, and they said,

4:14

whoa, everything's stretching out and moving

4:16

away from each other. So then the very natural

4:19

consequences to say, well, run that backwards.

4:21

What does that mean? It means things might have

4:23

been smaller and more dense and maybe

4:26

even come from a little spot like if you had

4:28

the rewind bunt. If you see things maketting bigger,

4:30

now, if you had the rewind bunt, wow

4:33

for a while, what happens exactly? And

4:35

those are the mental games people were playing. And actually

4:37

the phrase big Bang was a joke

4:40

that people made up to mock that idea. They're

4:42

like, look, how ridiculous this idea is. It's

4:44

kind of a silly sounding name, right, Yeah, it was like whimsical.

4:46

It was. It was like a Donald Trump insult,

4:49

you know, for somebody else's big Lee

4:51

Bang. Yeah, the big Bang.

4:53

Well, if you were like a respectable scientist

4:56

today and you had to name this

4:58

event, you wouldn't call it the big Bang? Or do you

5:00

think that it was a good name? Oh man, if

5:02

I was on a marketing committee,

5:05

discover a new name for it, the

5:07

moment of creation. Um, now,

5:10

I think big Bang is actually pretty good. Yeah,

5:12

you got your literation. It's short,

5:14

it's pithy, you know, it's it's pretty

5:17

well done. I think that's probably why it survived so long, because

5:19

everyone wants the universe to start with the bank.

5:24

That's right. So you played back the

5:26

movie of the Universe, and it tells

5:28

us that everything was once

5:30

much closer together, and then much much

5:33

closer, and then much much closer, and if you keep

5:35

thinking about it, things may

5:38

have been really really really close together. That's

5:40

right. Yeah, they just keep extrapolating down to

5:42

a point. And around the same

5:44

time Einstein came up with all of his ideas of

5:46

general relativity and thinking about gravity and

5:49

how the universe works, and people were playing

5:51

with those equations and discovering that those equations

5:53

actually predicted that the universe

5:55

could start from a point. They were consistent with

5:57

Einstein's ideas of gravity. What you mean

6:00

consider it was consistent, meaning that

6:02

that it, um, you can construct a universe

6:05

that starts from a point and then it blows

6:07

up and expands, And that totally

6:09

makes sense from an Einstein gravity

6:11

point of view, like it follows the rules.

6:14

It's allowed, meaning

6:16

that nothing weird happens,

6:18

like you can cram that much stuff into such as small

6:21

space according to Einstein, right,

6:25

which is pretty well accepted as a smart

6:27

guy, he knows what he's talking about. But you

6:30

know, there are some issues there. Um. The

6:32

original idea was the Big Bang

6:34

was this really dense hot blob of stuff

6:36

and then it blew up and expanded into

6:39

things we know, and you know, that was a weird

6:41

idea for a long time, and people didn't believe

6:43

it for a long time. It was in the sixties that

6:45

they finally found the first like concrete

6:48

piece of evidence that maybe the Big Bang had happened.

6:51

And that's when they discovered the thing

6:53

called the cosmic microwave background radiation.

6:56

So it was weird to think about so

6:58

much stuff and matter and stars and

7:00

being cramped to small space. Yeah,

7:02

because I meant the universe wasn't always

7:04

this dark and cold and empty place

7:07

that we know today. It was like a hot,

7:09

dense blob like the center of the sun.

7:11

It was a hot mess

7:13

exactly. The universe was not well

7:15

organized when it was young. Um.

7:18

So yeah, so they said, okay,

7:21

now, but now they saw something like you

7:23

call it the cosmic microwave background

7:25

radiation that said, yes, that's a

7:28

clear indication things were a hot mess before.

7:30

Yeah. They said, if things were really

7:32

hot and dense a long time ago, then

7:34

they should have given off this special kind of light

7:36

and we should still be able to see it today. And they went

7:38

out and they found it. You can see it like you

7:42

can see it if you have a special radio telescope,

7:45

and some guys built a fancy radio telescope.

7:47

They weren't even actually looking for this background radiation

7:50

and they just had a hiss in their

7:52

in their telescope. They had this noise in their

7:54

telescope. And coincidentally,

7:57

some people a couple of years earlier had predicted,

7:59

oh, if you build this kind of telescope, you'll and the

8:01

big Bang happened. You'll hear this hiss and they

8:03

turn on their telescope. They heard this hiss and they're like, what is

8:05

this. We can't get rid of this noise. And then two

8:08

years later the one the Nobel Prize. That's a

8:10

great discovery. It was a pretty happy you're gonna

8:12

get fired, but then they're like, oh, that mistake

8:14

you made. It's the discovery of the universe.

8:18

That's right. So that's a big bang. It's everything

8:20

was once really small and then it's just gonna

8:22

explode it out into what we have today.

8:25

That's right. That's the whole idea, is that the universe

8:27

has a beginning and then it expanded

8:30

into what we know today. Um, And

8:32

that was the sort of first idea of the big bang,

8:34

like maybe everything came from

8:36

a point, and people, a lot of people, when

8:38

they think about the Big Bang, they think about the universe starting

8:41

in a singularity, meaning a bunch

8:43

of stuff in zero volume, all

8:45

of it on top of each other, in the same

8:49

zero space exactly. And it's mind blowing

8:51

to imagine, Like, take out the Sun and

8:53

cram it down into the amount

8:56

of space you have for a grain of sand. Hard to imagine,

8:58

right now, make it even small. Now

9:00

at every other star in the

9:02

universe on top of it. It's

9:04

like your brain in the same thing,

9:07

right, Yeah, it's it's not really

9:09

the same thing. It's just all the energy, all

9:11

the all the energy density that we can have

9:14

in the universe was cramed into that tiny

9:16

little space. That was sort of the early idea.

9:18

And you can imagine like a big empty

9:21

universe of space with a tiny

9:23

dot of matter in it, And of course that

9:26

engenders a lot of questions like where did that

9:28

tiny dot a matter come from? Right? Was

9:30

there only one? Um? How

9:32

was it created? Right? But before we keep

9:34

going, let's take a short break. Well,

9:47

so that's a big bang, and so the next thing people should

9:49

know is that the Big Bang happened about

9:52

fourteen billion years ago billion

9:54

with a b billion years ago and

9:57

I can't even remember what I did this morning

10:00

fourteen minutes ago. That's

10:03

how old universe is from that moment

10:05

of the Big Bang. Yeah, so

10:07

the universe has been around since the Big Bang about

10:09

fourteen billion years and you know, for scale,

10:12

the Earth has been around about four and a half billion

10:14

years. That's when our solar system was formed.

10:16

Well, how do you how do you how do we know how old the universe

10:18

is? Like, yeah, like how can you tell?

10:21

Yeah, well, we are seeing it expand and

10:23

so the simplest way is to just extrapolate back,

10:25

say how fast is it expanding? And

10:28

extrapolate that expansion back until the zero

10:30

point. So like if you look at it, the

10:32

furthest stars you see,

10:34

you know how fast we're going. You can just like hit

10:37

the rewind button. It would take about

10:40

fourteen billion years for it to connect

10:43

to everything else. Yeah, so we're

10:45

pretty sure that something happened fourteen billion

10:47

years ago. This expansion of space happened

10:49

fourteen billion years ago. But these days

10:51

scientists are a little fuzzier on what

10:54

exactly the Big Bang was. So

10:56

idea zero was a tiny dot

10:59

with all the matter and explodes into the universe

11:02

um. Problems with this idea are one

11:05

that you can't really have tiny dots of

11:07

infinite density, so Einstein

11:09

told me before you could. Well, that was Einstein's

11:11

idea, and the idea is consistent with Einstein's

11:14

gravity, but Einstein's theories

11:16

of gravity don't account for quantum mechanics.

11:19

Quantum mechanics something that came after Einstein

11:21

he was never really very comfortable with, and

11:24

quantum mechanics is a whole, big, long story.

11:26

But the thing we need to understand is that it says

11:28

you can't have things that are super duper tiny.

11:30

There might be the smallest space, there

11:33

might be the smallest distance. Yeah,

11:36

like at some point you can't get unfuzzier.

11:38

That's right, exactly, it's a basic unit of fuzziness.

11:41

Like imagine space being pixelated,

11:43

right, Like you can't talk about something smaller

11:45

than one pixel. So we think

11:48

that quantum mechanics is probably correct. And

11:51

if the big pixel, that's right,

11:53

the first pixel in the universe. So

11:56

we think if you try to follow Einstein extrapolate

11:59

the universe down to point general

12:01

relativity probably works, but we think it probably

12:03

breaks when you get down to really

12:05

really tiny distances and really heavy

12:08

stuff. But nobody's ever seen that happen.

12:10

You have to look inside a black hole or go back

12:13

in time and see the Big Bang. But these days

12:15

we have a slightly fuzzier version of the idea

12:17

of the Big Bang. Rather then a point of

12:19

matter that then explodes into space,

12:22

we think of the universe is being created as

12:24

a blob of space and matter

12:27

and then and matter. Yeah,

12:29

so like it was, it's a like a blob

12:31

of space, like a tiny universe

12:34

with not much space. So instead

12:36

of an infinite universe with a tiny blob of matter

12:38

in it, now imagine a tiny piece

12:40

of space filled with energy and

12:42

matter. Okay, and what's outside of that little

12:44

space we have no idea, Like seriously,

12:47

we can't even imagine inconceivable,

12:50

right, But we do know that space can

12:52

be variable in size, space can expand,

12:54

and these days we have a more modern idea of the Big

12:57

Bang as that expansion of that space

13:00

kind of like a bubble, Like a bubble

13:02

that's a space, and then there's stuff in the bubble.

13:05

So you're saying both those things blew

13:08

up exactly. And this is the

13:10

more modern idea that space itself can

13:12

expand. And so if you're out there thinking, what

13:14

is he talking about? How can space expand? What is

13:16

it expanding into? Everything has to be in something,

13:19

right, And the answer is, we don't know.

13:22

We think used to think of space is

13:24

just like emptiness, and we can go a whole

13:26

episode about just what spaces and I think

13:28

we really will, so keep listening. But

13:31

these days we think of space as a thing because

13:33

it can expand, it can bend, and it can ripple,

13:35

so we know it has all these properties. So

13:37

it might be that this bubble of space

13:39

in the early universe was in some sort of super

13:42

meta deep space that we have never really

13:44

discovered, or nothing. It

13:46

could be that it doesn't have to hang in something

13:48

else. It's just the edge. And space

13:51

itself was smaller that that much. We know

13:53

space was small. Space was smaller, and

13:55

the stuff in it was crammed in

13:59

really really small to try it. And then about fourteen

14:01

billion years ago, for some reason do we

14:03

know why, and we don't know why, it

14:05

decided it didn't want to be that small anymore, that's

14:07

right, Yeah, And that was the moment

14:09

that space was created and then it expanded

14:12

like crazy. It's something we call inflation. Inflation

14:15

is not you know why your money

14:17

doesn't work as well in every year? I mean that is

14:19

inflation. But there's I don't

14:21

know why do we do this? In science? We take an idea,

14:24

a word that everybody uses to mean one

14:26

thing, We just like use

14:28

that same word to mean something totally different,

14:30

but it fits when it describes it.

14:33

In the universe inflated like a balloon,

14:35

like a bubble, right, yes, okay, it's a

14:37

good descriptive name from that sense. So the

14:39

universe inflayed, that whole balloon inflated, and

14:41

everything inside it got stretched. And

14:43

the amount of stretching that happened is crazy.

14:45

It's like the universe expanded

14:48

in space by a factor ten

14:50

to the thirty. That's ten with thirty

14:52

zeros on it, some crazy huge number,

14:54

and it did it in this really small amount

14:56

of time. Tend to the minus thirty.

14:59

So that zero with thirty zeros

15:01

after the decimal place, and then a one.

15:04

So this incredible expansion, a huge

15:06

expansion of space have tended the thirty in

15:08

this tiny amount of time, tend to the minus

15:11

thirty. It's hard to really even fathom. It was

15:13

in a rush to get big yes, and

15:15

it's still getting bigger today. And the

15:17

other things that's important to understand is that

15:19

space didn't get created like on the outside

15:21

of the universe, like they made more room.

15:24

It's stuff. The space inside the

15:26

universe stretched and kind of created,

15:28

so like between two particles you

15:30

had a certain amount of space, and all of a sudden you had

15:32

extra space between particles. So

15:34

the more things, Yeah, everything is getting stretched

15:37

out from the inside also not

15:39

just from the outside, and that's also continuing

15:41

to happen, like the expansion of the universe

15:44

today. The in fact the universe is getting bigger and bigger

15:46

is happening all around. This is more space

15:48

being created. The third thing we

15:50

should talk about today is uh

15:52

that we don't know what happened before

15:55

the Big Bang, like before this little bubble

15:57

blew up, what happened before.

16:00

But before we get into that, let's take a quick

16:02

break. This

16:14

is like totally territory for

16:16

speculation and philosophy. Um, we

16:19

have pretty good theories about what happened

16:21

during the Big Bang. This idea of the inflation, we

16:23

even have some experimental evidence for

16:26

to back it up, and it's pretty solid theory these

16:28

days that inflation happened. But what do you mean experimental?

16:30

Like, we can't measure the Big Bang? Can we

16:33

write? So we can't go back in time and see it right,

16:36

Um, But we can do things like detectives do

16:38

after a murder, and we can look for clues and say, are

16:40

the clues that we've see in the universe today consistent

16:42

with this story or with that other story. So

16:45

we can sift through the clues from the Big Bang and

16:47

say, it looks like the universe was created,

16:50

and if inflation happened, it probably created

16:52

these ripples in that plasma. We can

16:54

see those ripples in the cosmic micro background

16:56

radiation. It's really an incredible golden

16:59

age of cosmology. They're doing all this really precision

17:01

work to understand exactly what happened

17:03

and what we know. So, but we can only

17:05

see up to a certain points. We can only see before

17:07

that is just the speculation. Before

17:10

that, it's just speculation. So one popular

17:12

idea is that there's this kind of matter

17:14

called inflationary matter inflatons,

17:17

and it has some weird gravitational properties,

17:20

and those gravitational properties cause inflation,

17:23

Like suddenly they came into being inside of

17:25

this hot mess and it's like we

17:28

need to get out of here. Yeah, it's this never ending

17:30

loop of questions. Right, So you say, well,

17:33

in the Big Bang was inflation? What caused

17:35

inflation inflationary matter? Well, what created

17:37

inflationary matter? It's like dot dot dot.

17:40

You could just keep asking that question forever, and

17:43

I think we will be asking that question forever, will

17:45

always be pushing back and trying to understand, and

17:47

until we get back to negative infinity and time,

17:49

we're never going to have like a solid answer. But

17:52

that's part of the fun, right, It's not like it's

17:54

the journey as much as the destination. But there's

17:56

some cool ideas there about what happened before

17:59

that point, right, that's right. Yeah, Like

18:01

maybe, um, the whole universe

18:03

was filled with inflationary matter and

18:06

in some places it decayed into normal

18:08

matter and then inflation happened. And

18:11

if that's the case, then you have like our universe

18:14

is one spot inside some

18:16

huge mega universe of inflationary

18:18

matter, and maybe

18:20

at other points in the in that mega

18:23

universe there are also other dots

18:25

that turned into what we call pocket

18:27

universes, like it of the

18:30

in the space of the of the mega universe,

18:32

Mega zits on the mega universe and

18:35

that maybe maybe like our universe is just like

18:38

a little bubble in a big sea of other

18:40

bubbles. That's right, exactly, that's

18:42

one idea, and um, we have no way

18:44

to really to test that idea is the problem because

18:48

there's no way for us to ever reach those

18:50

other bubbles. Because if

18:52

that's the case, if that's really the reality

18:54

of our, of our the situation of nature,

18:57

it means that inflation is still happening because

19:00

inflationary matter is still constantly expanding.

19:03

So those other universes, those other bubbles

19:05

are getting pushed away from us much

19:07

much faster than the speed of light. Because it's never

19:09

like hang out. You can't send

19:11

a message there, you can't ever see it, you can't

19:14

ever go there. And scientifically

19:16

that's a big problem. Um, not because I

19:18

really want to go to the beaches and some other bubble universe,

19:21

but because if you want to prove that it's true,

19:23

you have to do an experiment, you have

19:25

to find some evidence. You have to do you have to have

19:27

a theory that can be confirmed. If

19:30

if you have a theory that predicts something you can never

19:32

test, and it's not really a scientific theory

19:35

or a useful one. It's

19:36

it's like, yeah,

19:39

it's a guess and uh, next

19:41

one theory, maybe were a bubble in a sea of other

19:43

universes. What's another idea for

19:45

what happened before the Big Bang? Well, another idea

19:48

is that maybe there's a cycle,

19:50

right, maybe the Big Bang

19:52

was caused by a big crunch, right.

19:55

And to understand that, you have to think about sort of

19:57

the future first, Like, so the Big Bang

19:59

happened, every expands out, and

20:01

then one question is like, are

20:03

things going to keep expanding? We don't

20:06

really know, but one possibilities they keep expanding

20:08

forever in the universe just sort of drifts

20:10

out into this endlessly cold,

20:13

boring, bland situation. But

20:15

another possibility is that it slows down,

20:17

stops, and then falls back in.

20:20

Everything rushes back and gravity pulls

20:22

everything back into a to recreate

20:24

a hot plate. Yeah,

20:26

deflation, Well, I think you just invented.

20:30

Can I go back and change it to my son's name

20:35

oliveration. The

20:38

deflation theory would say that the universe

20:40

comes back, falls and then collapses

20:42

back into a little hot mess

20:44

again, a little hot mess. It's like recovering your

20:46

youth, right, it's like a middle age crisis or whatever,

20:49

and then it just bounces out again.

20:51

Yeah, and that would be a cycle. So a big crunch, big

20:53

bang, big crunch, big bang. That could

20:55

be big bang US, big crunch,

20:58

big bang again. Maybe somebody else,

21:00

somebody else yeah,

21:03

impossible, impossibly um

21:06

Yeah. So that that's been Another idea is that what happened

21:09

before is like more and more

21:11

universes. Yeah. And there's something nice

21:13

about that because it explains both

21:16

that the our universe had a beginning and also

21:18

gives you an explanation for what happened all the

21:20

way back to the beginning of time because it

21:23

returns to the possibility of the universe is

21:25

infinitely old, right, because that

21:27

could have been happening forever. It allows

21:29

you to have this sort of finite length of time

21:31

for our universe without limiting you

21:33

to finiteness for the whole universe,

21:35

sort of like this time

21:37

could be infinite, but space

21:40

could be finite. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

21:43

And that brings us to the last crazy

21:45

idea, which is maybe there

21:48

was nothing before the Big Bang. I

21:50

mean nothing, not

21:52

even time. Right. We think space

21:54

was created in the Big Bang, and spaces expanded

21:57

and all that stuff, and so

21:59

so there could have no time, no space before,

22:01

no space and no time, right, And

22:04

it's hard to even wrap your mind around what that

22:06

is. I mean, we have a hard time imagining, like,

22:09

what will happen after we die? Well, the universe continue

22:11

without us right now, trying to imagine the

22:13

universe without space and time? What does

22:15

that even mean? And you have to think also

22:17

about what time is itself? Like, what

22:19

does it mean for there to not be time? Right,

22:22

there's no time in which there's no time. There's

22:24

no time for that to happen, right, um,

22:26

And a lot of people think about time

22:29

as sort of the organizing principle

22:31

of the universe. Maybe you've heard of the second law

22:33

of thermodynamics. It tells us that entropy

22:36

is always increasing in the universe, and

22:38

so they imagine things are getting messier,

22:40

Things are getting messier inward, that's

22:42

right, getting more and more spread out forward

22:45

in time. And so some people

22:47

think that that is time, that time is measured

22:49

by entropy and created by entropy,

22:52

and that before the Big Bang, if there was if

22:54

there was nothing, no space, then

22:56

there was no time. And that

22:58

sounds like an odd idea, but in

23:00

other ways, we're very familiar with it. Like you

23:03

know, if you stand on the north pole and you asked

23:06

which way is north, well, there is nothing

23:08

north. You

23:12

blew us up. I'm

23:15

gonna write to Stephen Hawking and tell you,

23:18

um, that's actually his his phrases.

23:20

You know, maybe there's no north of north north. There's

23:22

no before zero time.

23:25

Yeah, because if you're standing on a sphere and you're

23:27

the north pole of it, there's nowhere to go,

23:30

no more northiness, there's no

23:32

you can't the tape ends when

23:34

you try to rewind it more. That's right, and that's something

23:36

we're comfortable with. We're accepting the fact that a sphere

23:39

has like a limit and edge, and it's

23:41

reasonable for that there be nothing beyond

23:43

it. But when we think of time, we tend to think of in

23:46

a line, and so we want there to

23:48

be something before it, or at least for there to be

23:50

a reason why it started here and not

23:52

somewhere else or some other other you know,

23:54

time or um. It's a very natural,

23:57

i think idea to have intuitively to

24:00

think that something should have been before then. But it

24:02

could be that there was nothing, that the

24:04

things were created at that moment and there was nothing

24:07

before there, and then we came, Yeah,

24:09

we dropped the mic, we

24:11

came, we made this podcast, and that's the summary

24:13

of the whole universe in

24:17

a nutshell. And you know, any

24:19

of those theories. First of all, those are very

24:21

difficult to test, and it's hard to

24:23

imagine how we'll ever know. Right,

24:25

it might be that there aren't any clues

24:28

in the rubble of the universe

24:30

to tell us which one is, which one is, which

24:32

it might be, Although I'd like to have

24:35

faith in future scientists coming up with

24:37

clever ideas for ways to test

24:39

these theories which right now seemed possible

24:41

to test. But in the future people can

24:43

be everybody able to see beyond the Big

24:45

Bang. Yeah, maybe maybe

24:47

they'll find some evidence in the

24:49

current reubble that tells them it is this, or is that,

24:51

or is the other thing? But even if

24:53

you get there, imagine having an answer

24:55

to one of these questions, Right, what do you think

24:58

knowing what happened before the Big Bang would

25:00

tell you like, how would how would it change

25:02

your life? I think it would change everybody's

25:04

life. I think it's a kind of knowledge that

25:07

would filter into like the global

25:09

consciousness. Think about how quantum

25:11

mechanics has changed the way people think about things.

25:13

But there's randomness in the universe, or

25:16

the universe is not following a fixed

25:18

set of rules, but that those rules have

25:20

fuzz in them. You think it's It's changed the

25:22

global consciousness way absolutely,

25:25

and not just in New a g people who

25:27

you know, but in everybody thinking about the

25:30

universe is being a little different from what they imagined.

25:38

Do you have a question you wish we would cover. We

25:40

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