Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Dr. Erin Macdonald
163 Plays6 years ago
This episode is pure sci-fi/science geek heaven. Join the Tattooed Scottish-American N7 Slytherin Rebel from Starfleet - Dr. Erin Macdonald.
Dr. Macdonald is an astrophysicist, science fiction consultant (currently for the Star Trek franchise), and host of the online series "Dr Erin Explains the Universe". Her specialty is in general relativity, having previously worked in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration searching for gravitational waves. She has since found her home in science fiction, consulting with writers, teaching STEM through popular culture, and fulfilling her life goal of becoming a warp drive expert while living in Los Angeles.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Guest
00:00:01
Speaker
You are listening to Something Rather Than Nothing, creator and host Ken Vellante, editor and producer Peter Bauer. All right. This is the Something Rather Than Nothing podcast. And this week we have Dr. Erin McDonald, who is an astrophysicist.
Dr. Erin McDonald's Career and Identity
00:00:24
Speaker
And she's a science fiction consultant currently for the Star Trek franchise.
00:00:30
Speaker
She's the host of the online series, Dr. Erin Explains the Universe. Her specialty is in general relativity, having previously worked in the LIGO scientific collaboration Searching for Gravitational Waves. She has since found her home in science fiction, consulting with writers, teaching STEM through popular culture, and fulfilling her life goal of becoming a warp drive expert while living in Los Angeles.
00:00:56
Speaker
She is the tattooed Scottish-American N7 Slytherin rebel from Starfleet. Welcome, Dr. Emory McDonald. Thank you for having me. I'm really happy to be here. Thank you so much. Like I had mentioned you before, what a great introduction you've written, succinctly to the point and powerful. In this podcast, I always start off by asking, what were you like?
00:01:25
Speaker
Dr. Aaron, as a young child, were you worried when you were young? Were you doing experiments or what were your interests? Yeah, you know, I think probably inquisitive is the best way to summarize what I was like as a child. I was definitely that kid that got told to stop raising their hand in class.
00:01:45
Speaker
because it was disruptive to the flow of teaching and answering every single question. I cannot abide silence when a question is asked. That was kind of me, but I was interested in science. I was drawn to it. I loved it, but I also loved reading. I was big into dance.
00:02:06
Speaker
And so I definitely had that full left brain, right brain interests that I was able to fulfill both of those passions. So I would go alternate between my science clubs or watching Bill Nye the Science Guy and then go to dance class or pound through a novel a few years above my age group.
00:02:27
Speaker
And I mean, Hermione is probably the best way to summarize what I was like as a kid.
Science Fiction Consulting and Storytelling
00:02:34
Speaker
Hermione from Harry Potter is definitely someone I related to a lot. And, you know, talkative and I always tried to have a good time. I was a little bit oblivious to the social mores of trying to make friends. So there was a little bit of loneliness, but, you know, I had my fictional worlds and I'm very happy that
00:02:55
Speaker
I've been able to make a career in a life that's brought that all together. Yeah. And I've noticed that about your, about your biography. And, uh, you know, it, it, it is really fascinating to see yourself obviously, you know, um, doing research and, you know, uh, having a doctorate in, you know, investigating science, but also, um,
00:03:18
Speaker
also the creative component of being able to consult as far as science fiction and kind of like that interaction between science and science fiction. And it sounds like that dynamic is something you've worked with for quite a long time then, right? Yeah, and it's been a journey because I pride myself in being able to do both of those things, to be able to think scientifically as well as
00:03:45
Speaker
think creatively and there's always a lot of crossover with that but it's actually resulted in it being kind of my biggest struggle getting into this field was because so many people have worked with science consultants in the past when they were when they were needing some science background for their stories and they found it to be kind of a negative experience because the scientists weren't respectful of that balance between
00:04:09
Speaker
getting the science right versus telling the story they want to tell. And that's something I pride myself on. And I've been able to kind of slowly push my way through in the industry and make a name for myself as, you know, people, these writers vouch for me. And I'm so grateful for that by saying, no, she's like, she's respectful and she will help you with that creative side as well as the scientific side. But that's, yeah, there's not that many of us out there.
00:04:36
Speaker
Yeah, it is. And I know we'll get more into it. That is a fascinating interaction.
Existential Themes and Cosmology
00:04:43
Speaker
But what I'm going to start off with is a really big question. Dr. Aaron, why is there something rather than nothing? That's a really big question. I know it's the theme of the podcast.
00:05:01
Speaker
not being a philosopher, but coming from a science background, and particularly astrophysics. I think astrophysics is one of those fields that does try to answer this. And you do find these sort of big picture, open ended questions in very rigorous scientific fields a lot. For me, I, you know, my succinct answer to why there's something rather than nothing is why not? And why, why else
00:05:29
Speaker
would we be here if there wasn't something rather than nothing, but due to the randomness of our universe and maybe universes beyond that, we are here. Now, scientifically, something that crops up a lot in cosmology, which is a field in astrophysics, is trying to understand not necessarily why there is something, but why there is more something than anti-something. Because
00:05:56
Speaker
We've discovered that there is antimatter in our universe, and we have our fundamental particles like the electron, which I think a lot of people have heard of, has a negative charge. Well, there's an anti-electron that we call the positron. And when an electron and a positron meet, they evaporate each other essentially and just turn into light.
00:06:18
Speaker
And so cosmologists are trying to answer that exact question of, well, why isn't everything just light? Why wasn't there an equal amount of matter and antimatter at the beginning of the universe that all just obliterated itself? And, you know, we resulted in an imbalance in that. And the fact that that is a question that we as humanity is trying to answer
00:06:45
Speaker
scientifically with evidence by building telescopes and taking data and trying to figure that out is mind blowing. I always joke that astrophysicists live in a constant state of existential crisis because we're just constantly reminded how random the universe is and how small we really are. But you know, my answer is why not? There's randomness kind of dictates our entire world and I love that.
00:07:15
Speaker
Yeah, thank you so much. But I will say, Erin, I'm not going to reformat the podcast to the more something rather than anti-something podcast. I'm going to stick with what I have for now. I think that works. I think that's more sensible. My next question has to do with the connection between your science, the investigative process in science,
00:07:45
Speaker
And also your creative process or your consulting process around creativity, basically your work process in both realms. Can you tell listeners a bit about how you conduct your research or maybe how you consult on a movie or TV show regarding the science that's being presented? Yeah, you know, it's very different ways of thinking.
00:08:12
Speaker
And when I was a researcher, I left research about, gosh, over six years ago now, about six years ago. And I enjoyed doing research. It's a different kind of mindset. And this is something I try to tell people, especially young people who are thinking about going into the sciences. My grades were not spectacular. I mean, I was a solid B student and it was very competitive, but
00:08:41
Speaker
I learned that just getting good grades doesn't necessarily translate to being a good researcher. And in physics, it's so important to think out of the box. There's an element of creativity to research in that you are having to push the bounds of human knowledge and figure out how to do that. Now, if you have good mentors and you have good training, you're guided in that process to build that mindset.
00:09:09
Speaker
but it really becomes a creative problem solving mindset. And when I left academia, the thing that I learned was having been a researcher in theoretical astrophysics, on paper, I didn't look like I had a lot of job opportunities outside of doing research, but I had been given the tools to problem solve very quickly, very effectively, and to really get to the root of what needed to be done.
00:09:38
Speaker
And that served me very well.
Art, Science Fiction, and Cultural Significance
00:09:40
Speaker
I worked as an aerospace engineer for a few years after that and was really able to translate those skills. However, when it came to storytelling and the creative process and working with writers, the mindset there is you have to learn to let go of a precise explanation. I think that's the hardest part for scientists starting to work as consultants, but storytellers in general.
00:10:06
Speaker
and learning that sometimes you're better off by just not explaining something than trying to explain it too well. And then it becomes burdensome in the dialogue, people start to lose interest, or you get so far down a rabbit hole that you've lost your grip on science as a whole, and none of it makes any sense anymore. So you're better off just leaving it as like, this just happened.
00:10:31
Speaker
And we're not going to try to explain it because trying to is just going to get us in more trouble than just being vague about it. And that was probably the hardest thing for me that I constantly am coming up against when a writer comes to me and says, hey, I've come up with this, like, cool idea for, you know, let's say traveling between multiple universes and I want to try to help them explain it properly.
00:10:58
Speaker
Sometimes it just gets overly complicated and you lose track of the story. And so learning when to step back and especially as a science consultant, advise them to not make it scientific is difficult to do, but I think they appreciate it. For me, now having made this transition and working as a science consultant, I have really just fallen in love with the creative process. We talked a little bit about what I was like as a kid, but
00:11:27
Speaker
Another component of what I was like was I was so into movie making. I just loved, loved movies. This was when they started releasing like double VHS sets of movies that you could see the behind the scenes stuff. And I would watch those obsessively. I had that behind the scenes of Jurassic Park memorized. And for me, being able to peel that curtain back and see how things are done has made me realize that, you know,
00:11:56
Speaker
We all have that creative soul inside of us. And for years, I've been asked why I don't write science fiction myself. And I would respond by saying, I'm a terrible writer. Well, I was a terrible writer because I had it set in my mind that you approach writing in a certain way. And any time I had tried to do that, it just never worked. But seeing all of these different writers and learning the medium of screenwriting,
00:12:26
Speaker
and how some people approach it, like just pen to paper, let's start writing versus others who come at it from a more, let's start with an outline, let's start, you know, build it from the ground up. Learning all these other people's processes made it more accessible to me and made me more comfortable dabbling into it myself and starting to get, grow my interest in that, which has been really exciting. Yeah. I, um,
00:12:53
Speaker
And I appreciate your explanation in touching upon the processes at play and kind of your approach and problem solving around them, right? Because you have the science part of it. You have writing, right, where you have preconceptions of how to write. But I think you probably step back and kind of relied a little bit on balancing those things and using other type of skills to be able to create something or help others create.
00:13:21
Speaker
Exactly. And it's not, you know, when I'm hired and I get asked a question, nine times out of ten, it's not something that I can just answer off the top of my head. But they can trust me that I will know how to find it much sooner and I will be able to translate for them in a way that's better than a Wikipedia page. And I would be able to filter through the nonsense answers that are out there on the Internet.
00:13:49
Speaker
much, much quicker. And that's all the skill sets from research that gives the writers the trust in me to do this research, because I do get asked that a lot. You know, when I'm pitching myself as a science consultant, some people do. It's not that they've had a bad experience with science consultants. They just say, I don't know why we need you. I've been able to write science fiction for a long time, and I feel like my science is really good. But the point is, is that it saves a lot of stress and heartache for a lot of writers.
00:14:15
Speaker
by having someone that they can trust to do that quickly and accurately. Yeah, that's a nice piece for them to be able to have. And we've been building on and talking about both science and art. I'm going to move over a bit to the creative components in art, rather than
00:14:41
Speaker
You know, at the moment, then I think there's so much creativity that you're pointing out in science. But within art, you know, you work in creating things and, you know, and also consuming, you know, a lot of art and pop art, popular culture, TV shows, movies. For you, do you have a working definition of art or things that you consider to be art?
00:15:11
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, for me, it's a really good question. I really like this question. For me, I see art as the manifestation of the soul in whatever medium you're able to get that out in, whether it is writing, whether it's performing, whether it's dance, whether it's music.
00:15:29
Speaker
You know, we all, I am a deeply, deeply emotional person. I feel emotions very, very strongly. I feed off of other people's emotions myself. I experience emotions very intensely. I had a friend whose parents when I was growing up,
00:15:44
Speaker
he told me that if they could translate my emotions into a drug, it would be very powerful and very illegal. But for me, I've always had that, why I continued to pursue dance, even while my interest in science grew. And then once I finished graduate school, I'd kind of dropped off of dance for so long, but I got into acting and then now getting into writing side of things.
00:16:10
Speaker
All of those are very effective ways of communicating our inside feelings, like what it means to be a person. We all have something, whether it's music or a story or a show, or even just 30 seconds in a movie that just hit us like a ton of bricks. And that's because it was a manifestation of what we felt and how we connect with people.
00:16:38
Speaker
I love, I think there was a book a few years ago called History Boys. And there was a quote in that about how beautiful it is to be able to read an author from decades or centuries ago, that you feel is speaking to you like they're reaching through the pages and holding your hand. And I think for me, that really does resonate very closely with me. And so in the
00:17:06
Speaker
I just want to point this out. I think what's interesting in talking to you is there is this academic route, and you mentioned in dealing with academics or that traditional route. But I think there's a way that you talk about science and art and creativity that
00:17:25
Speaker
probably feels different than a lot of people you're interacting with, um, in science, right? So you're a scientist, right? We look at your credentials and you're talking about emotions and it's like, wait a second. I never knew that was going to come up with the scientists. Right. Right. And so I really like, I really liked the, the, the way you described that, um, you know, there just feels like,
00:17:50
Speaker
more of a humanness and openness around your experience that's enjoyable to listen to. Building off your definition of art, Aaron, I was lucky enough in college to even do a deep dive study in science fiction at the college level.
00:18:15
Speaker
which really kind of exposed me a lot of great science fiction beyond what I had read. Science fiction writing, science fiction, pop culture, movies, and otherwise have long had, it's long had this battle as a genre of, you know, looking for respectability or not receiving respectability.
00:18:39
Speaker
even being conceived or viewed as being low art. I mean, what's your take on maybe that history and your opinions about that general assessment that seems to be, that seems to plague the genre? Yeah, you know, when we talk about how I mentioned that art is a manifestation of the soul, I think that science fiction still fills that void. But for so many people, it's the
00:19:09
Speaker
what, you know, I picked this up working as an engineer, so I apologize to anyone listening for this, but it's the unknown unknowns, right? It's the, we're trying to translate our human experiences, but into a world that is not a reference point, that I'm not, you know, when I read a book from the Victorian era that is about the people living during that time, there's still some relatability. And I think science fiction is
00:19:38
Speaker
For those of us who are science fiction fans, we do know and we do understand that it is still a medium to tell very human stories and to explore allegories and all of those things. But I think for people who have never got into science fiction, they have a harder time understanding that. And I'm speaking purely because this is how I was raised. My parents, bless them.
00:20:04
Speaker
never got into science fiction. I didn't even watch Star Trek till I was really in college because my parents just never were science fiction fans. My mom's a writer, my dad's a scientist, but science fiction was never, ever, ever their genre. But my uncle, my Uncle Mike, who I think a lot of people would have an uncle like this,
00:20:28
Speaker
My Uncle Mike was a science fiction writer in the 60s, and there was a lot of drug-induced science fiction that he was writing, and he had his own little self-published sci-fi poem stuff, but that was my exposure. So when it's called like a lower art, I picture my uncle and his almost manifestos of trying to translate how his brain saw the world
00:20:54
Speaker
it made more sense to him to put it on other worlds. And I think that a lot of people get into science fiction because of that, because they feel like they don't necessarily belong and they don't see themselves in our society. And science fiction gives them that outlet, but then that's very not relatable to a lot of people. But that being said, those people who
00:21:19
Speaker
translated their lives into other universes or galaxies or planets or spaceships or anything or, you know, future worlds here on Earth, they are still able to make those touch points back to us that pull people like me along for the ride. That I suddenly am like, oh, okay, like I couldn't have come up with this in my mind, but I completely understand where you're coming from. And that's, I think there is hard
00:21:49
Speaker
few better comparisons than Star Trek.
Star Trek and Societal Influence
00:21:53
Speaker
You know, Star Trek came out in the 60s when the world was really tumultuous. And, you know, 1968 is a crazy, crazy year in history. And Star Trek, you know, Gene Roddenberry kind of came up with this and you watch the pilot and it seems like a lot of the quirky 50s and 60s sci-fi stuff that was out there.
00:22:14
Speaker
but he was able to connect it so tightly to stuff that was going on in our own world that it really deeply resonated with people. And I want to, and I love that about Gene Roddenberry and Star Trek, and I want to tell you my quickly, my path on Star Trek, which is extremely uneven. And so I was just explaining this to somebody is I've always appreciated Star Trek, though I've never,
00:22:44
Speaker
watch the complete series of any of the series. Uh, I love the newer movies. I like the older movies. I love Wrath of Khan. I that's, that's kind of common. Uh, I adore Wrath of Khan. Um, and, uh, but now, uh, Picard is on, um, the show kind of continuation of Star Trek, which I adore.
00:23:07
Speaker
And I took it on because I'm like, I don't have to do the back catalog. I can just jump on right now and, and, and go through that. And I find it just to be an absolutely lovely show. Um, uh, in, in, in tremendous. Have you had any connection with the Star Trek movies or, or that show or what's been your connection with Star Trek? Yeah. So I, I had a friend growing up whose parents were into Star Trek and again, my uncle was into Star Trek, but I never,
00:23:35
Speaker
like I said, sat down and really watched it until I was in college. And for me, my strongest memory of really attaching to Star Trek was when you mentioned the new movies, the 2009 film, that first film that they redid came out in the Kelvin timeline. And
00:23:55
Speaker
That came out the night that we all graduated from my undergrad degree. Like literally we graduated and then we went to the midnight showing. We had dinner with our parents, you know, and then we went off. And that was my first exposure to Trek fandom. And that's where the world opened up for me because I enjoyed Star Trek. I understood why people liked it. I have been devoted. I have been a devoted fan of many, many, many things over my years.
00:24:24
Speaker
But that was the first time I had seen the effect that something like this has on a huge population of people and how it's able to bring people together like a family. And that's when I realized, like, this is my world and and this is where I want to be. It's not. And the movie was fabulous. I still I absolutely love the movie.
00:24:47
Speaker
And just being able to watch it and experience it, though, with Star Trek fans and realizing that I, too, can be part of this, that it's never too late to be part of this family, just, I mean, you can't even describe how much my world opened from that point on. And, you know, look where I am now. But it's just amazing that a show like this has such longevity, but it also is able to create such a social family.
00:25:17
Speaker
Really? Yeah, I've always loved that. I've always loved that about it. One of the things I was thinking of when you were talking about, you know, the, you know, the kind of accusation of low art with science fiction and kind of some of the components of like a projection of somebody's experience into science fiction. I was really thinking of Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut.
00:25:41
Speaker
And, you know, the kind of war, it's a war novel, the war experience, but also this kind of onto another planet fantasy in order to process that war. Right. Right. And I think Kilgore Trout, his alter ego, Kilgore Trout as the, you know, typical or the stereotypical
00:26:03
Speaker
uh, science fiction writer at the time, you know, getting his science fiction stories published in pornographic magazines and whoever would listen.
Gravitational Waves and LIGO's Role
00:26:15
Speaker
Um, uh, moving on to, uh, moving on to, uh, science. Uh, one of the things that, uh, really interests me as far as your stated research, um, into gravitational, uh, waves, um,
00:26:31
Speaker
As I mentioned to you just briefly, I've done a lot of the science that I've done, self-taught, listening, well, some of your lectures and programs on television, reading, Richard Feynman, Brian Green, the popular series on PBS. I am fascinated, deeply fascinated in understanding some concepts, particularly when those concepts
00:27:01
Speaker
tantalize and are elusive to experts such as yourself in science. What I want to ask you about is your research into gravitational waves and what you're looking for and how you go about it.
00:27:18
Speaker
Yeah, I love, love, love gravitational waves. And I was so honored to have been part of that research collaboration. And again, I just to clarify, I am no longer part of the LEGO collaboration. I cannot take credit for any of the amazing stuff that they're doing right now. But my official story is I helped loosen the jar lid. But when I was doing it, we still hadn't discovered gravitational waves. I joined the collaboration in 2009.
00:27:48
Speaker
And for those people who don't know, the LIGO scientific collaboration, LIGO stands for Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory. And gravitational waves are something that Einstein postulated back in, I think, 1915 as a result of his study of general relativity. So the general theory of relativity.
00:28:13
Speaker
where I think a lot of people, you know, people like yourself, you mentioned, see these sort of pop science stuff. You've seen that bowling ball on the trampoline example for how our universe is shaped and how gravity works, that you can put a bowling ball on a trampoline, flick a marble, it'll flick around there. And one of the things that Einstein did is he said, OK, well, what if we change the mass? Like, what if the bowling ball explodes or what if two bowling balls crash into each other?
00:28:42
Speaker
What if there's a change in space time? What happens to that change? And so you do the math. This is one of the things I love about theoretical astrophysics, is you just ask this question and you're like, to the equations. And he took his theory of general relativity and basically added in a perturbation and said, okay, let's poke the trampoline. Let's just poke it and see what happens.
00:29:10
Speaker
And you propagate this little poke through all of the math. And what you end up with at the end is a wave equation that is, there's a wave there that's traveling at the speed of light. And so what he realized is that when there is a disturbance to the trampoline, to this fabric of space-time, that disturbance propagates out as a wave. And that wave travels at the speed of light.
00:29:35
Speaker
And so that's there. It's in the math. Einstein said, this is a cool effect that I've discovered, but it's so small, no one will ever detect it. It's such a small perturbation. No one will ever, ever detect it. And scientists, you know, about 20, 30 years later went challenge accepted. And started to figure out ways that they could detect these tiny, tiny, tiny infinitesimally small ripples in the fabric of our universe, even due to just the
00:30:05
Speaker
biggest, most extreme events, which are black holes colliding. You get two black holes crashing. You know, black holes are these deep, deep gravitational wells. And they're very extreme when you look at what they're doing to that fabric. And then if you collide the two of them, that's a huge explosion. And so those are the ones that we have like a chance of detecting or a star explode, like a supermassive star exploding.
00:30:33
Speaker
And scientists over the years went through different iterations of trying to figure out how to detect these. And there's a lot of really interesting stories behind it. I highly recommend people look up Joseph Weber. He was sort of the first one who tried to detect gravitational waves using these thing called Weber bars off of the concept of resonance.
00:30:55
Speaker
So this idea, you know, you run your finger on a wine glass and it starts to vibrate louder because you've hit what it's called its resonant frequency. Or if you're walking on a bridge and the bridge starts to sway with every step and every step it gets a bigger and bigger sway, that's its resonant frequency. So he thought he could build bars that when these gravitational waves pass through, it would resonate and amplify the signal so they'd be able to detect them.
00:31:22
Speaker
However, his background was such that he used to be in the Navy and he worked on depth charges. And that instilled this mindset for him that if you see a signal, that's a signal. That he wasn't trained to think necessarily scientifically, to be really rigorous and have multiple detections of something before you declare it. He declared these detections left and right.
00:31:48
Speaker
Anyway, really interesting look into the sociology and psychology of science there, but scientists later moved on from the Weber bars because there were so many limitations to those and developed these things called interferometers, where you split a laser beam into, you send one arm down about four kilometers in one direction, another arm in another four kilometers at a 90 degree angle, they hit mirrors, they reflect back, the signal, the light recombines,
00:32:18
Speaker
And if there was a change to the length of those arms by a gravitational wave passing through, then you would get an interference pattern in the light that the frequencies would be slightly off when they recombined. And so that's where LIGO came from. And now I'm mentioning these arms are like four kilometers long. They're trying to find changes in those lengths that are one one thousandth the size of an atom, like stupid, small, insanely, insanely small.
00:32:47
Speaker
But through very precise physics, through very precise mathematics, data analysis, all of this, we're able to filter out signals. And it's just such a technological challenge in itself that it's just amazing the stuff that they're able to do. And then in 2015, it was announced in 2016, but in 2015, they were getting ready to turn on Advanced LIGO where they had improved the technology. It had been down for five years while they installed new technology.
00:33:17
Speaker
I had left the collaboration. And then they turned these detectors back on and almost immediately got a gravitational wave signal from colliding black holes. And since then, they have just found dozens and dozens. And it's just it's amazing. It's amazing for so many reasons, because not only did we prove Einstein's gravitational wave theory was correct, but we have detected space time itself moving.
00:33:46
Speaker
All the other things that we've detected that have to do with space time in general relativity are effects of it on things like light and things like massive objects. We haven't ever detected it itself until now. And we detected black holes colliding, which has always been theorized, but we had never actually been able to witness something like that happening. So it's a whole new field of astronomy.
00:34:12
Speaker
The way I kind of phrase it is that we've been doing astronomy on the electromagnetic spectrum forever, for as long as we've been doing astronomy. You know, with our eyes to telescopes, the whole gambit of the electromagnetic spectrum from radio waves up to x-rays and gamma rays. But gravitational waves,
00:34:33
Speaker
isn't sound, but it's like hearing the universe for the first time. It's as if we have just been using our eyes and now we're able to hear the universe for the first time. And so the universe has opened up to us in a whole new way. And I'm just so excited to see the sort of stuff that we can detect now that we're able to actually detect and study gravitational waves.
00:34:55
Speaker
I'm sorry, that was a very long explanation, but I hope that made sense. I've told my guests this before, and I'm sure you realize it. I have you for a certain amount of time. And I am, you know, I've always talked, you know, I like doing the podcast as popular philosophy.
00:35:12
Speaker
It's enjoyable for me as an intellectual, but I, you know, there's a certain selfish aspect where I want the information.
Multiverse Theory and Black Holes
00:35:20
Speaker
I want it. I want you to teach me via the questions. Uh, what's, what's going on. Um, uh, on, on that point of, you know, I want to take a, get, get your take, uh, on, um, another, uh, popular or a concept that we hear a lot in, in science fiction, that's actually,
00:35:41
Speaker
you know, in science to some degree as well. I'm talking about multiverse, right? You know, I'm a huge, you know, where I completely geek out and people say I do that in a lot of areas, but I completely geek out on comic books, always have since I was a little kid, getting them off the comic book rack that long ago for years and years and years.
00:36:06
Speaker
What, you know, Marvel Universe has become so popular, you know, which is, you know, great, great stories, great graphics, great science fiction, great writing. And in comics, it's almost like this running joke that I'm sure you run into a lot where, you know, characters die, they reappear somewhere else. You know, there's the Spider-Man multiverse with all these great iterations of who Spider-Man is, the Nuah Spider-Man.
00:36:34
Speaker
you know, the manga Spider-Man and, and on and on. Um, you know, so we encountered this concept, you know, of this multiverse, uh, in science fiction more and more, you know, that w that we see these movies. Um, what's going on here in is, is any of this feasible in science? Yeah, the issue. I love diverse theory. I've just putting that out there. I love it. I love it. I love it.
00:37:00
Speaker
The issue scientifically with multiverse theory is that even if we are right about some of them, there's like no way we know how to test it. There's no way we could like actually detect another universe. The big thing to keep in mind is this idea of the cosmological address, right? That we have our star system, our solar system with our star, the Sun,
00:37:23
Speaker
And we are one star in the Milky Way galaxy. And that Milky Way galaxy is one galaxy in our local group of galaxies. And then the universe is made up of these groups and clusters of galaxies. The universe is everything. We don't know anything beyond our own universe. We can't detect anything beyond that, our entire understanding of physics. When we say the universe, that's the end all be all.
00:37:53
Speaker
With multiverse theory, there's lots of different flavors of multiverse. You know, you mentioned the comics. That's sort of that infinite universe theory that, and you can dissect lots of different scientific explanations for this. And essentially what it is is that, you know, we have the big bang that created our universe. And what if there's just a lot of big bangs that are going on? So you picture those bubbles.
00:38:22
Speaker
That's kind of one visualization for multiple universes that, excuse me, you imagine like a bubble bath, right? You have all of these universes, some bubbles are off by themselves, some are big, some are small, some are just forming, some are dying, some of them are touching each other. And so when you get into shows like Fringe, for example, or, and I think sometimes the comics multiverses talk about this too, there are points where they touch.
00:38:52
Speaker
And if you can build a portal to jump between them, then you're able to enter into another universe. And scientifically, what those universes would look like all comes down to chaos theory, what your starting conditions are. If there are even slight differences in starting conditions, that can propagate over billions of years to result in a completely different type of universe.
00:39:20
Speaker
So people who study this are looking into those different ways that our universe has changed, what's driven that change, what has resulted, you know, as we mentioned in matter over anti-matter being the most dominant, what has resulted in our galaxy clusters looking the way they do? And how much would another universe look the same way?
00:39:51
Speaker
You know, you get this quantum multiverse theory that every time you make a decision, you spawn a new universe. Now that violates so much physics with conservation of energy and mass and all of this other stuff. But every time we make a decision, there's another universe where you made the other decision. But then if you think of every decision you make throughout your day multiplied by every person on every planet, it's just you get into infinity and beyond and it falls apart scientifically pretty fast.
00:40:10
Speaker
all super fun to think about. You also get multiverse theory where
00:40:20
Speaker
My favorite multiverse theory that is near and dear to my heart is something called the dripping black hole theory that basically states that we have these supermassive black holes in our universe. They're supermassive black holes. They're in the center of galaxies and they're giant. And the theory is that these supermassive black holes reach a certain critical mass as stuff is falling into them continuously.
00:40:50
Speaker
Stuff falls in, they grow in mass, and they reach a critical mass where they give birth to a new universe. So you can kind of picture it if you're thinking of the sheets, the trampolines, and then you get a black hole that's dipping way down to this point. Imagine that another sheet sort of exploding from that black hole.
00:41:11
Speaker
And then that universe starts to form black holes and another one reaches a critical mass and then that forms a black hole further down. So it's like black holes drip. That's the dripping black hole theory. It's black holes all the way down. And there's many reasons that I love this theory. One is it's it's not crazy. And it's also it's not really violating physics in the way that we necessarily understand.
00:41:35
Speaker
But it also provides a possible explanation for dark energy, where dark energy is this mysterious presence of energy in our universe that is accelerating our expansion. Our universe is expanding and it's accelerating as it expands. And in order to do that, there has to be something there. It's like trying to inflate a balloon without blowing air into it, right? You have to be blowing air into it. And that's kind of what our dark energy is.
00:42:05
Speaker
And so the theory is that dark energy here is the matter that's falling into our mother black hole in another universe that's providing this dark energy that's pushing our universe apart, which I freaking love. Now there's no way any of this can be proven, but I just, I love it. It's near and dear to my heart from a storytelling standpoint, because it just kind of ticks all the boxes for me. Yeah. And I just want to, I want to make sure I get, cause I think I get it. And I'm glad you brought up in the dripping,
00:42:34
Speaker
black hole, that there because I, I listened to your lectures and I had a note to Ash cause I was, I was fascinated. But the, the bit that I'm hearing you now say is that you have that dynamic, which can help form the basis of multiverse, but you're also saying that it's possible in developing that theory that that can also provide an explanation for dark energy, right? That's correct. Yep. For dark energy within our own universe. And obviously it's even if we check, if we're able to go through and like,
00:43:04
Speaker
find maybe a black hole in our own universe that could be the birth of another universe further down, like a child universe for us. If we can measure the amount of matter going into it compared to the amount of matter or the amount of dark energy in our universe, even if we could do all of those and say, well, that was fun, all the numbers check out. Again, scientifically, that's not proving it. We can't believe that we've now proved
00:43:31
Speaker
Other universes exist because you need to actually detect them in order to be able to say that you did that. I mean, it's the same as like Einstein's theory of general relativity that we called it a theory of general relativity or general theory of relativity for so long that actually now that we've detected gravitational waves, we detected space time. So it's technically no longer a theory because we were actually able to detect it itself.
Scientific Theory vs. Proof
00:44:01
Speaker
And that made that transition, even though it has been relied on for so long as fact. And I think this is something that transcends into society as a whole, is understanding what science means as a theory is different to what general society colloquialism says as a theory. One more big concept question for you. Actually, there's not one more. They're probably another one or two.
00:44:31
Speaker
All right. So, uh, take me, for example, uh, when back to the future came out, I was 12 years old. So therefore, uh, I love back to future sort of a million times. I'm talking about time travel. Uh, I can't shake myself from the fact that the amount of times that I saw that movie and being the impressionable age of 12, you know, there's always this like check, you know, as a consistent with a back to the future, uh, understanding of time travel.
00:45:00
Speaker
If I have that for the basis of my understanding, am I in trouble or do I have a good concept of? I think you're OK. I think time travel is another beast like like multiverse theory that you can start to give yourself a headache pretty quickly if you think about it too much. But essentially, I mean,
00:45:27
Speaker
We live in, I keep throwing out this term space time, right? The fabric of space time. We live in a four dimensional universe that three dimensions are space, forward, back, left, right, up and down. And we can move within those. We have control over our movement within that. But time is a fourth dimension that we do not have control over. And there's mathematical reasons why, you know, you go back to the equations and you just cannot manipulate the time dimension.
00:45:56
Speaker
And that is what limits us to time. Unfortunately, the math got us. But you start to open the boxes of paradox, different types of time travel paradoxes. And back to the future is pretty tight storytelling. And there are some great time travel stories out there that kind of manage to close the loop and make you think you understood it just for a second. I think that's
00:46:25
Speaker
I think, I think that's, that, that is my, um, reasonable approximation of understanding. I hold onto it for a few seconds saying, yeah, that made sec, you know, that made sense. You know, that was good enough for a little bit. And then it, uh, it kind of, uh, unravels. Um, uh, thanks
Science Learning and Engagement Resources
00:46:42
Speaker
Aaron. Um, uh, the question about, um, uh, leading off as far as the times, uh, that were in one of the questions I had prepared for you is that,
00:46:53
Speaker
With the, you know, obviously the pandemic, coronavirus going on right now, there's a lot of kids that, you know, there's a lot of issues that happen when schools are closed. Here in the state of Oregon, there's a decent chance that, you know, schools will be closed until September, you know, for the remainder of this school year. And I know myself, I've, you know, put together for my little guy, you know, some different, you know, science programs and just little bits and pieces, you know, to
00:47:22
Speaker
keep his mind active and to be exploring new ideas. Do you have any ideas, helpful resources for learning, for kids, be able to access? I know you do your, you explain the universe, your show, and I certainly want you to mention that, but I just wanted to know if you had some ideas in this realm.
00:47:48
Speaker
One I really like, and I don't know how prevalent it is because I went to this university, I did my undergraduate there, but there's a website that is called, basically it's just called FET, P-H-E-T dot Colorado dot E-D-U, and it's from the University of Colorado, and they have many simulations that you can do from a computer. They're just like JavaScript style simulations.
00:48:14
Speaker
that cover physics, chemistry, math, earth sciences, and biology. And they're all very intuitive. They're these types of interfaces where if you're learning about friction, changing the friction coefficient, or changing the angle that something is sliding down, or playing with prisms, that when you don't have the resources for a lab, this is a great substitute for that. So it's FET, P-H-E-T dot Colorado dot E-D-U, is a great one that I can highly recommend.
00:48:45
Speaker
Um, I know there's a lot of people who are kind of turning to YouTube for, for resources right now, which is great. I would just caution that, uh, making sure that the people posting these YouTube channels have a background in some form of science education. Anyone can post a YouTube video. Um, so, you know, just take it with a grain of salt. There's still, there's some fantastic science communicators out there.
00:49:12
Speaker
who are wonderful at what they do and have posted some great videos. But yeah, everyone's kind of getting creative these days. It has been difficult, and I just can't imagine the burden for so many people trying to manage not just their job, but their job. They're now homeschooling and having to do all of this in the middle of a very distressing crisis that's going on in our world right now is very, very difficult.
00:49:38
Speaker
One thing that I've tried to do that I've started doing was an astronomy club on Friday afternoons. So I'm doing these on Friday at 1pm. I put them on my Twitch page. So if they're kids with parents, parents can sit there with them. But it's live interaction and I
00:49:58
Speaker
go through planetarium software and just answer questions for people. I think we had some questions on Jovian Moon, so I'm going to do that this week. And then I post them to my YouTube channel afterwards. And so there is a lot of stuff out there, but it does take a little bit of digging. But I would highly recommend that FET.colorado.edu. It's a very, very good resource. Yeah, thank you. I hadn't heard of that, and I really appreciate that recommendation.
00:50:27
Speaker
Aaron, I wanted to open it up here at the end. As you know, I listened to your great courses. It was available through Audible. Very, very blessed to have you on the program and really appreciate you taking the time for the listeners of the podcast.
00:50:52
Speaker
What are ways they can interact with the work that you do, the things that you create, the research that you do, the programs that you put out? How can listeners interact with the things that are important to you? Yeah, the easiest way to find me is on Twitter. I'm at Dr. Aaron Mac, D-R-E-R-I-N-M-A-C. You can also check out my website, which is drarrenmac.com. And those will, you can,
00:51:21
Speaker
ask me any questions on Twitter, I'm always happy to answer. And then my website also connects to my Patreon, my Twitch, all of those other ways. I'm always happy to answer questions. You can feel free to contact me through the website if you have anything specific that people need. And once we're through all of this, I will be appearing at local, I usually give talks at local conventions. So if you have a pop culture convention in your town that you would like me to go to, to teach the science behind
00:51:51
Speaker
X, Y, and Z. I am always happy to, please feel free to reach out if you're interested. Uh, yeah. Thank you, Aaron McDonald. As I said before earlier in the podcast for one, we'll dedicate this one podcast is the more something than anti-something podcast dedicated to Dr. Aaron McDonald. Uh, Aaron, thank you so much for your time. I get to tell you, like I said, for my selfish reasons of being able to, uh,
00:52:18
Speaker
ask you some great questions about, you know, science and philosophy and art. I just want to let you know that I really appreciate, you know, your willingness to spend this time and really appreciated you taking the time to appear on the podcast. Thank you. I've really enjoyed this. It's been fun to kind of think artistically and philosophically for a little while. So thank you again. Dr. Erin McDonald,
00:52:46
Speaker
Have a great day and thanks again. Thank you. You too. Bye bye. Bye bye. You are listening to something rather than nothing.