Listener Questions #30

Daniel and Kelly answer questions about sentience, chicken eggs, and the early Universe! See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 1:04Speaker 03

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• 1:19Speaker 04

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• 1:41Daniel Whiteson?

  From twitching leaves to thinking minds, where does "I" begin? Is it wiring, roots, or loops that inspires thinking?

• 1:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Birds have been around for 150 million years, but chickens, less than half of that. So did chickens come first, or was it eggs? Go ahead, have a guess at it. That was kind of long.

• 2:03Daniel Whiteson?

  These rhymes get better every time.

• 2:07Daniel Whiteson?

  To see the early universe, we need neutrinos or gravitational waves. But how will we know what to look for in all of that particle haze?

• 2:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Whatever questions keep you up at night, Daniel and Kelly's answers will make it right.

• 2:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.

• 2:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Listener questions, episode 30.

• 2:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I never get tired of hearing questions from listeners.

• 2:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Weinersmith. I study parasites and space, and I also never get tired of your questions. They're always wonderful. And Daniel, I have a question for you. Do you prefer eggs that have been sitting in the refrigerator or eggs that have been sitting on your counter?

• 2:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, my gosh, I am not prepared to have an opinion about that.

• 3:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh.

• 3:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Why? Do they taste the same?

• 3:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I just kind of, they probably taste pretty similar, but I've noticed that there are cultural differences. I think in Europe, you're more likely to get eggs that don't need to be refrigerated. And so the differences in the United States, I think we rinse off our eggs. And once you've rinsed them off, they need to be refrigerated. But if you don't rinse off your eggs, they come out of the chicken with a layer called a bloom, which protects against bacteria and stuff like that. And so you can just leave chickens on your counter for a while.

• 3:34Daniel Whiteson?

  You mean eggs on your counter?

• 3:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or chickens. Yeah. I wouldn't recommend it. But, but yes, eggs.

• 3:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Come to Kelly's Deli, where chickens roam the counter.

• 3:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I bet I probably would not get a very good health rating if we did that. Yeah.

• 3:52Daniel Whiteson?

  There's something fascinating there, that eggs are protected from infection.

• 3:57Daniel Whiteson?

  But we usually rinse things because we want them clean and uninfected. But here rinsing things makes them more vulnerable to infection.

• 4:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I feel like in America, we want like ultimate control over everything and we just feel like we have more control if we've shoved things in the fridge. And also, I suppose every once in a while, when an egg comes out, it gets a little poo on it. And so if you can rinse it and then stick it in a fridge, you know, maybe you feel better about it that way.

• 4:24Daniel Whiteson?

  I don't really want any poo on my counter is the truth.

• 4:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah, no, I get that. I get that. That is one of the downsides of farm fresh chicken eggs is every once in a while, you're like, oh, yes, biology happened here and there is some poo.

• 4:37Daniel Whiteson?

  And on your counter in your house at home on the science farm, are there unwashed chicken eggs and occasional poo?

• 4:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Uh, there are unwashed chicken eggs. Uh, the answer is yes. I was gonna try to figure out a nice way to say it. Uh, you know, we've got like brushes to clean them off before you crack them to make sure that none of that poo ends up, uh, please come back to our house and visit.

• 5:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Sure, I will. But why don't you rinse them before you crack them? Because once you rinse them, they're not protected, but there's then there's just moments before you crack them.

• 5:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, we rinse and brush. Well, I mean, you know, because when the poo dries, it's harder to get off. And so it's nice to have a brush. And so, yeah, yeah, we we clean it all off right before we crack it to make sure that like, you know, sometimes when I crack eggs, I get shell in the bowl and we just want to make sure that that's clean because I'm not so good at cracking eggs.

• 5:30Daniel Whiteson?

  But you are very good at answering questions from listeners and that's what we're doing today on the podcast. We are hearing from all of you, everything that makes you wonder about the universe, all the extraordinary fascinating mysteries about the universe that you want to hear about. And so today we are tackling three fascinating topics from biology to physics to the origins of the universe to the origins of chickens and eggs.

• 5:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, we are. So let's jump right in and hear our question from Jared.

• 5:57Speaker 06

  Hello, my name is Jared and I'm a huge fan of you both. I absolutely love your show. My three children enjoy the podcast also. My two pre-teen sons enjoy Kelly's gross biology explanations and my six-year-old daughter likes to fall asleep to Daniel's voice during car rides. My question today is about how we classify and explain the different levels of self-awareness in the universe. I've been reading about how across the spectrum from reactivity to sapience, living systems exhibit increasingly complex forms of awareness, ranging from basic stimulus response to sentience, self-awareness, and ultimately sapience, which I now know is different than sentience. I've been reading about how concepts like metacognition, reflective consciousness,

• 6:39Speaker 06

  and theory of mind seem to mark pivotal transitions along this continuum. But the boundaries we've set up to define and describe this kind of spectrum of awareness are still fuzzy to me, and it's led me to having like a ton of smaller questions like, what's the difference between plants and machines in terms of reactivity? Could mammals have moments of sapience? Or could the boundaries be crossed accidentally, temporarily? So I was just hoping with your distinct scientific vantage points that you could help explain the fundamental physical or biological thresholds that enable these higher levels of awareness to emerge from simpler matter and life. And perhaps even let me know if there are any overlooked mechanisms or principles, perhaps at the intersection of physics and biology, that would be cool.

• 7:22Speaker 06

  That could help explain not only how these layers of awareness arise, but also the current limits of our scientific understanding of awareness and what might be the next breakthrough that could reshape how we define or recognize it in the universe. All right, thank you very much.

• 7:35Daniel Whiteson?

  So thank you, Jared, number one, for sharing the podcast with your kids and helping raise the next generation of curious people in the universe. Awesome. We love that. Thank you so much. And also for asking such a hard, such a deep question about the nature of like sentience and consciousness and whether we can understand how that emerges from like core physical activity.

• 7:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I'd also like to note that I am so glad that the next generation is still excited about gross stuff. So thank you to the preteens for digging the gross biology. But anyway, yes. Wow. Where do we start with this difficult question, Daniel?

• 8:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes. So we got to start by saying, we're not going to be offering any solid answers because there are none, right? We just do not understand this stuff. There are so many issues here from never being able to probe the awareness of another object in the universe, not to mention another human being, right? First person experience this like subjective existence that we have where I feel like I'm in my head and I'm feeling my body. That's not something I can share with you, not something you can probe from the outside, not something you can verify. I don't even know, Kelly, if you are any different fundamentally from a rock in terms of your inner life.

• 8:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thanks, Daniel.

• 8:52Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, I think that you are, you seem different, but I don't know from a philosophical skeptical point of view. And that's fundamentally going to limit us from having any solid answers.

• 9:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I think the good news is that people don't really come to our podcast for solid answers. They come to our podcast for the we don't really know version of answers. And so.

• 9:11Daniel Whiteson?

  And you do that much better than a rock does that, by the way. You're a much better podcast host than like a lump of granite.

• 9:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thanks, question mark.

• 9:23Daniel Whiteson?

  But Jared is asking a really interesting question about like the spectrum of reactivity, right? Like, how do we categorize these things? How do things get more complicated? Is there a way that we can understand not just reactivity, but like sentience and conscious experience by gradually scaling up from simple reactivity to the universe all the way up to, you know, having a first person experience? So let's take a walk from the simplest to the more complex. We can start with like physical reactivity, things in the universe react to other things. You know, like if you have a rock out there in the sun, it will absorb photons, it will gain mass, it will change the nature of the chemical bonds, it will store that energy.

• 10:05Daniel Whiteson?

  So that's, you know, direct causal reaction to something outside the universe. Just like if you press a button on your toaster or you write a program for your computer, the universe seems to be causal. It seems like you can influence the future. And so things that happen in the universe affect the future, right? That's like the most basic level at which things in the universe interact.

• 10:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Got it. Yes. Rocks and Kelly, warm up. Let's. Let's move to more complex.

• 10:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Before we get to more complex, though, you can already ask, does the rock feel anything? Like, the rock is sitting in the sun, it's getting warmed up. Does it go in its own rocky way like, hmm, that feels nice? The way like, when you have your face in the sun, it feels nice. Obviously, what it's like to be a rock is not going to be what it's like to be Kelly or Daniel or Jared or any of his kids. But there might be something it's like to be that rock. And we can't say that it isn't. And there are even theories out there that everything in the universe is aware, is conscious at some level. So that by the time we get to podcast host, we can say that that podcast host's rich

• 11:18Daniel Whiteson?

  inner life, which enjoys poo free eggs, for example, comes, emerges from the basic elements of consciousness that begin with fundamental particles. You know, that electrons have like, a little bit of consciousness and it comes together. I'm not ascribing to that degree. I'm just saying, there are people who already at this level of interaction with the universe, put a little dot of awareness and experience.

• 11:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Is there an interesting question to be asked here about like, if you asked AI and it gave you an answer about its experience, like because it can answer? Is that an interesting answer?

• 11:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, it's interesting because an AI, unlike a rock, can tell you that it has an inner life, right? If you ask Gemini or ChatGPT, they can tell you that they think, that they feel, that they have thoughts, whatever. You can't tell the difference between them having those thoughts and claiming those thoughts, or them not having those thoughts and yet claiming those thoughts. Because you could write a program which claims those thoughts and you don't know that it actually has them, right? Claiming them and having them are different things. And in philosophy, we have this concept of a philosophical zombie. And the thought experiment is like, could, for example, there be a version of Kelly who claims to have a rich inner life and acts like she has a rich inner life and yet doesn't?

• 12:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  You did compare me to a rock earlier.

• 12:40Daniel Whiteson?

  In a flattering complimentary way, you're better than a rock. Much, much better than a rock.

• 12:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thank you.

• 12:48Daniel Whiteson?

  In fact, you rock, Kelly.

• 12:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, that was great.

• 12:51Daniel Whiteson?

  But the point of that thought experiment, the philosophical zombie, is to point out that the subjective experience we're talking about, that inner life, is not revealed by your actions, that there's nothing on the exterior you can do to probe it, so that even somebody who seems to have it, even somebody you fall in love with, might not have an interior life. And there are examples of people out there who like fall in love with ChatGPT and have like AI boyfriends and feel real emotions about them. And imagine that the AI also feels real emotions in response, even if it doesn't. So my point is that already at this level, the philosophical questions are complicated.

• 13:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Mm hmm. Yes. And I am already sort of feeling existential dread. So, all right, let's move on to the next level.

• 13:33Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So the next level is like biological. We have simple plants that can do things like organize their cells. They maintain gradients across cell walls. Plants can orient their leaves to the sun. This is more than just like a rock absorbing a photon. There's like a feedback here. There's like memory, you know, there's maybe even goal-like behavior. The plants move towards the sun. The trees grow up, the roots go down. There's goal-like behavior here, but it's sort of implicit, right? We don't know if the plant is like stretching towards the sun and enjoying having its leaves toasted. But it's definitely more self-organized and reactive to the universe than just a rock.

• 14:15Daniel Whiteson?

  And there are some cases that some people tout, slime molds, for example, of, you know, what seems like maybe intelligent behavior exploring a maze. Though I know, Kelly, that you are not in the top 10 list of people who are impressed by slime mold intelligence.

• 14:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Check out one of our earlier listener questions episode to hear Kelly throw cold water on slime mold solving mazes.

• 14:39Daniel Whiteson?

  And you do that even better than a bucket of cold water, I have to say.

• 14:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thank you. And maybe better than a rock. And there's, there's all kinds of inanimate objects that I can outperform.

• 14:49Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So now let's take one more step up the perceptual ladder to critters that have like explicit sensory organs, you know, even simple things like ants and flies. They have eyes. They can experience the world. They have chemical sensors. They communicate with each other. They leave trails for each other. You know, they make sounds, they leave chemicals. They definitely can learn. I have a friend who does experiments on fruit flies and they definitely can learn sounds and songs and all sorts of stuff. We don't know what it's like to be an ant. There doesn't have to be anything it's like to be an ant or a fruit fly. You could have like a little robot which accomplishes exactly the same thing and doesn't have any internal state, but there also could be something it's like

• 15:34Daniel Whiteson?

  to be an ant or a fruit fly. We just don't know.

• 15:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Do you think that there's some chance that we're sort of biasing this towards ourselves by saying like, oh, they need to have sense organs like the kinds of sense organs I recognize in myself, you know, because like plants are detecting where the sun is so that they can turn towards it. So they've got something like sense organs. Are we essentially defining

• 15:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Things, yeah, to match what we do?

• 15:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Absolutely. And obviously, and I don't know that we could do anything else. The only thing we can do is ask about similar experiences. We can try to think about what it might be like to be something else. But in the end, we're always translating the unfamiliar back into the language of the familiar. You know, this is like a big theme of my book about alien physics is that it's really hard to think outside of your own little box. And so it could be that there's something it's like to be a rock and a plant, which is very, very different from what it's like to be human. And it's rich and complicated in a way we just can't understand or even conceive of. Even if we could talk to them and they could try to explain it to us, we might never really be able to crock it because there are some things that are just untranslatable.

• 16:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Do aliens speak physics? Available through fine bookstores everywhere.

• 16:50Daniel Whiteson?

  And also terrible bookstores.

• 16:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 16:52Daniel Whiteson?

  So we've gone from rocks to like plants to now critters with explicit sensory organs. You can take the next step up and say, well, what about more intelligent animals? Animals that have a model of the world within them. You know, that they can integrate sensory information over time. They have memory, they can be trained, they can make predictions. You know, they don't just react to the world and have basic memory. They have like a model of themselves in the world and they use that to make predictions. That's clearly a more sophisticated way to respond to the world. And in that case, it's tempting to say, look, if you have a mind and in that mind, you have a model of yourself,

• 17:33Daniel Whiteson?

  then clearly referring to yourself and isn't that a kind of experience? It seems very likely. And, you know, when I interact with my dog, it's very easy for me to see parallels in my dog's emotional response to my own. Like he likes being scratched and I can tell that he likes it, right? Or if I'm upset with him, he knows and I can tell that he doesn't like when I'm upset with him. All these things. And again, maybe it's just the slice of humanity that is reflected in the dog, but there's definitely some overlap there, right? Whatever it's like to be a dog, there are parts of it that are similar enough to what it's like to be a human, that we can have that emotional connection, right? And so it's very tempting to say, well, clearly my dog has an inner life. It is something it's like to be Daniel's dog.

• 18:18Daniel Whiteson?

  But again, how do I really know? If somebody came along and like magically removed that experience from my dog, but kept all the same behavior? Obviously I couldn't tell by construction. So it's frustratingly opaque.

• 18:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. It does kind of feel like you were a little bit more willing to entertain the idea that your dog has a rich inner life than you were to entertain the idea that your co-host has a rich inner life.

• 18:42Daniel Whiteson?

  I'll say in my defense, I made that argument as an example of ridiculous but unrefutable arguments, right?

• 18:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm just giving you a hard time. Okay, go on.

• 18:52Daniel Whiteson?

  No, but I mean, I only have a dog in my house. You have a whole spectrum of critters. Give us a sorted list from most to least likely to have an inner life.

• 19:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Chickens, no inner life.

• 19:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Chickens are just robots, you're saying?

• 19:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Just robots, just robots. And, and my doggy Milo, very rich inner life. And my goats, you know, I think my, my goats are very frustrated when I don't let them out on time or when I come out without animal crackers and they've, they've got a rich inner life.

• 19:23Daniel Whiteson?

  And then, you know, the next step, of course, is full sapience. You know, where you can think, you have language, you can have abstract concepts, you can think about thinking, you can argue about arguing, you have a rich inner life and a model of the world that includes yourself and your own model of the world in it and it's recursive all the way down. Where along the spectrum does experience emerge? We just don't know, right? This is what they call the hard problem of consciousness. Even if you can understand mechanically how the brain works, signals go up the optic nerve, dot, dot, dot, that doesn't tell you why there's something it's like to be a person. And so, you know, there's all these various approaches that people take in the philosophical community.

• 20:08Daniel Whiteson?

  We mentioned one of them already, panpsychism, where mentality is a fundamental aspect of reality, like mass or charge. It's not the idea that like electrons have a political opinions, but that there's some sort of minimal experiential properties of all matter at the most basic level and that the experience doesn't emerge suddenly, but gradually from the simple experiences combining into richer experiences of complex systems. That's not a like widely held or mainstream view, but it is an opinion I've seen out there.

• 20:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  I feel like I've sort of lost track of what we mean by experience and mentality at this point. So like, experience must mean more than like a photon has hit me and I have recognized that the photon has hit me and mentality must, yeah, like what, what do we mean now by experience and mentality?

• 20:58Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean that there's something it's like to be you.

• 21:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 21:01Daniel Whiteson?

  That you're having a first person experience.

• 21:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Got it. Okay.

• 21:04Daniel Whiteson?

  And there are people who deny that, right? Folks like Daniel Dennett, a school of thought called reductive physicalism, say there is no first person experience, that there is no moment of now. What you think you are experiencing right now is just your brain analyzing what recently happened, right? That the moment of the present itself is an illusion and it's constructed by your brain, putting together a bunch of sensory information, telling a story about what just happened. And it's so recent that you surf along the edge of it and it feels like there's a you, but there isn't really. So you weirdly remember being conscious, but never really are. It's a fascinating idea.

• 21:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Are we in like a simulation or we're just like?

• 21:49Daniel Whiteson?

  No.

• 21:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  No.

• 21:50Daniel Whiteson?

  We are not in a simulation. We are just remembering a present we never experienced. This is a fascinating idea and it's hard to wrap your mind around. It's in Daniel Dennett's book, Consciousness Explained, which is like, wow, ambitious title, right?

• 22:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 22:05Daniel Whiteson?

  It's a really fun book and we should dive into it more another time. Another idea is called functionalism. It says, look, it's all about information. It doesn't matter what matter it is. It's not like the sentence is built into the electron and then it all comes together. It's about how this stuff is arranged and it's about the model in your head of the universe, but there's no real explanation there for like how that emerges. Like where along that spectrum we described, it begins that there's something it's like to be an ant or a bird, just that it's comes out of the information. And, and here the implication is that if you like built a simulation of Kelly, it would have the same experience as Kelly.

• 22:50Daniel Whiteson?

  It's nothing about the wetware or the Kelly-ness of your particles. It's just the arrangements of the stuff.

• 22:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's a good arrangement.

• 22:58Daniel Whiteson?

  And then the last sort of broad philosophical approach is called strong emergence. And it says, hey, this whole argument that things need to bubble up from the littlest bits that somehow the first person to experience needs to be emerging from the toing and froing of the little particles inside you, forget all that, even though it seems to be like the foundation of modern science and physics at least, and say, look, things emerge because there are just new fundamental laws at every level. So it's not like the behavior of the biggest stuff bubbles up somehow from the behavior of the smallest stuff. It's got its own laws and maybe things flow the other way. And like consciousness emerges because of some weird new law of the universe and it

• 23:40Daniel Whiteson?

  can control the microscopic instead of the microscopic controlling the macroscopic. So, you know, the short answer is nobody knows the answer and there's an enormous variety of totally contradictory approaches in the philosophical community to this very, very hard problem.

• 23:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  I feel like this is the kind of conversation where I need to like hear a sentence and then sit for 10 or 15 minutes to be like, what did that sentence mean? And then start again.

• 24:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, yeah, that's philosophy for you. Exactly. And you're going to go all the way down to like, what does meaning mean anyway?

• 24:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. Am I real? Is this, is any of this real? What is real?

• 24:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. And then you'll discover that at the foundations of philosophy, you know, nothing and we know nothing. And, you know, that's where Descartes was and it's very hard to go anywhere from there. So you just got to make some assumptions and move forward as best you can because it's not clear what we know and what we don't know and what knowing even means. All right. So I hope we've confused you enough, Jared. Let us know if that helped you at all. And thank you again for your question.

• 24:49Speaker 07

  Wow. Thank you so much, Daniel and Kelly, for the amazing and detailed answer. You've certainly given us all a lot to think about. We promise our next question won't be as difficult next time. We'll keep it simpler. Certainly next time when we're talking about our cat, Oreo, and we're talking about her learned behavior over time and how she's picked up on certain human words, we'll now have a more context to kind of discuss that. And yeah, we don't have any follow up questions. Just keep up the great work. We love the podcasts.

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• 25:59Speaker 08

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by my friend, John Legend. What still makes you just sit down at the piano?

• 26:22Speaker 09

  If you sat down at 9:00 AM and then at noon, you had a full song that you recorded and put in your voice recorder or you recorded at your studio, you just created something brand new that didn't exist when you woke up. What a beautiful feeling it is. I'm always excited to write something new. I've been writing for Broadway, which has been a new challenge with new collaborators and amazing performers who are triple threads, who can sing and dance and act and do all these amazing things. And I want to keep feeling that. And so that means not resting on my laurels, going out there and continuing to create something new.

• 26:57Speaker 08

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• 27:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay, we're back and we're answering questions from listeners. And today, we're tackling the deep philosophical questions like, do rocks feel pain? And also ancient questions like, what came first, the chicken or the egg?

• 27:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  And this is a question that people, you know, sometimes enjoy having long, deep philosophical questions about. But I love ruining fun and evolution has a clear answer.

• 27:41Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, my gosh. Wow.

• 27:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so let's hear Noah's question and then I'm going to give you a clear answer.

• 27:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Nice.

• 27:47Speaker 10

  Hi, Daniel and Kelly. I would love to hear about the evolutionary history of chickens and eggs. Is there an answer to which came first?

• 27:55Daniel Whiteson?

  You're just gonna give a clear answer to make me look bad because of my philosophical ramblings.

• 27:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, you should have just said, "No."

• 28:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Moving on.

• 28:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  You could have saved us all 20 minutes, Daniel. No, that was fun.

• 28:08Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so, great question, Noah. Kelly, tell us, what does science say about the chicken versus egg debate?

• 28:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, eggs have been around for a really long time, okay? So like, we think of women as having eggs and men as having sperm. And so if you think of it that way, then eggs have been around for, you know, since we've had fish and since we've had amphibians and millions and millions and millions of years. But I understand that that's not actually what we're talking about. We're talking about, you know, chicken eggs as in like having that hard shell. But let's, let's take a few steps back. Okay, so initially, we had, you know, fish swimming around in the oceans and we had amphibians and they were laying eggs in water. When you lay eggs in water, you've got this sort of perk that you're in this aquatic environment. So when you lay your eggs, you don't have to worry about them drying out and dying.

• 28:55Daniel Whiteson?

  But is that where eggs begin with amphibians in the water? Or are there precursors to that?

• 29:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, invertebrates like starfish also make eggs, but if we're talking about vertebrates making eggs, then shark and fish were making eggs before the amphibians were. But so when four-limbed vertebrates, like reptiles, started leaving the ocean to move on land, we started having this problem, which is that, well, now that we're out of the water, our eggs are gonna start drying out. And so what do we do? Our eggs needed to become more complicated. And thus arose the amniotes. And that's just kind of a fancy word for saying we ended up getting fancier eggs. And so amniotes includes birds, reptiles, and mammals. And so amniote, these are fancy eggs that have three extra layers. And what

• 29:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  these three extra layers do is they, first, they provide an extra little fluid-filled sac. And this is like the amnion. And essentially, it closes the embryo and it's like a protective fluid. And so if your egg were to go rolling down a hill, which you probably should try to make sure your egg doesn't do, but if it does, it like will protect it against bumps and bruises and sort of give it a bit of a cushion. And it just sort of suspends the embryo. And it's almost like you've brought your aquatic environment with you by putting it in this like sac.

• 30:17Daniel Whiteson?

  It's like we're still stuck on ocean-based life and all of land-based life is like carrying around little bags of ocean.

• 30:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, yes, we are carrying our past with us in that sense, which is kind of cool.

• 30:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Which is fascinating because like all of the life that we build, like robots, it's all dry, right? Why don't we build robots that are based on gooey bags?

• 30:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, you're the computer scientist. My sense is that when you start adding water to computers, things don't go real well.

• 30:44Daniel Whiteson?

  That's true.

• 30:48Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so we have the amnion. What are the other extra layers that the amniotes added?

• 30:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so you also have the chorion and the alontose. I'm sure that I am mispronouncing those as everyone has come to expect. And anyway, those two layers are helpful for gas exchange. So you still need to be able to get oxygen into the egg to give that oxygen to, you know, the embryo inside. And you need to be able to manage waste. And so these two layers essentially allow for gas exchange and they contain the waste that's produced by the embryo inside.

• 31:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Waste-related question.

• 31:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Uh huh.

• 31:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Are the amniotes the first ones to accidentally poo on their eggs? Or did fish do that also?

• 31:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, um, let's see. Okay, so that's a really great question, Daniel.

• 31:34Daniel Whiteson?

  How did you not research that?

• 31:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  How did I not research that?

• 31:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  I have had the experience of mixing gametes from fish, which essentially means you very gently run your fingers along their abdomen to get them to release eggs or sperm. And they have occasionally released waste as well.

• 31:57Daniel Whiteson?

  What's the verb you use to describe that?

• 31:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Some people call it milking.

• 32:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  I wasn't gonna go there, but.

• 32:05Daniel Whiteson?

  The way you might like, you know, milk a bull?

• 32:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Mm hmm. Yep, yep, that way, that way.

• 32:13Daniel Whiteson?

  The glorious labor of science.

• 32:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, the world of an ecologist. So.

• 32:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Anyway, so, uh, yeah, so, so these extra layers made our eggs more complicated and allowed us to come on land. But I think the chicken and the egg question isn't about, uh, you know, this slightly more complicated egg. So, you know, for example, in humans, we essentially brought a lot of this system inside of our bodies. So we have an amniotic sack. So we've got this fluid filled sack. We put the ocean inside of our bodies and we allowed gas exchange with like our placenta and stuff like that. Uh, but birds and reptiles, they made this system where you can essentially have the whole thing outside of the body and you can like lay it in a nest.

• 32:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Seems like a better plan, doesn't it?

• 33:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's, there's some benefits to being able to carry the baby around with you all the time. You always know where it is. There's, there's some definite benefits, um, but it is also a bit difficult. I will admit. Okay. But so then the question is when did like bird eggs, as we come to think of them, come about? Uh, and the answer is that birds evolved during the Jurassic period, which was 150 million years ago. So what we think of as bird eggs arose 150 million years ago. Amniotic eggs in general are 300 million years old, so older than birds. Uh, but now the question is, when do we get chickens?

• 33:42Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Wait, so already eggs came before birds broadly?

• 33:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. Yeah. Eggs. So like reptiles have eggy things also. They're a little bit different than what you think of as a chicken egg, but like amniotic eggs, 300 million years old. Birds in general, 150 million years old. But chickens weren't like the first birds. Chickens come later and chickens appear to be about 66 million years old. There's a fossil that appears to be the ancestor of chickens and ducks, and they have named this fossil Wonder Chicken.

• 34:15Daniel Whiteson?

  No.

• 34:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes.

• 34:17Daniel Whiteson?

  No, really?

• 34:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, Wonder Chicken.

• 34:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Wonderful name.

• 34:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I, I wasn't able to find a lot more information. Uh, I mean, I suppose it could have been they found it in like Germany and it was like Wunder Chicken or like, I don't, I don't know the details.

• 34:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Was it like six feet tall and 800 pounds or something?

• 34:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  I hope so.

• 34:34Daniel Whiteson?

  When it walked, the earth shook.

• 34:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right.

• 34:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Here cometh the Wonder Chicken.

• 34:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. Your dinner this time.

• 34:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Netflix, please call us.

• 34:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. I'm available to consult.

• 34:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'll write jokes too, but not poems. Don't worry.

• 35:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  But so, so what we really want to know is like, all right, so we've had chickens in the wild and there are wild chickens. So for example, there are red jungle fowl that you can find in Southeast Asia, like so in China and India and stuff like that. And there's green jungle fowl and gray jungle fowl. And the red jungle fowl in particular, if you look up pictures of them on like Wikipedia, they look like the kind of chicken you'd find in your backyard. Actually, kind of surprisingly, they have like the beautiful colors and the, you know, the males look like any rooster that you would expect to see in your backyard.

• 35:32Daniel Whiteson?

  They poo on their eggs.

• 35:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Probably. I mean, humans poo on their babies sometimes too. It's like, it's a messy process, man. And so, anyway, all right. So then the question is, when did we start getting domestic chickens? And that is apparently something that scientists fight about a lot. I've found a lot of papers where they were like, you know, arguing about methods and this person was mad at that person. And it, so it does look like domestic chickens came from red jungle fowl. There may have been some hybridization with some other wild chicken species, but mostly it came from red jungle fowl. Somewhere in Asia, maybe 10,000 years ago.

• 36:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  There's some archaeological evidence and that archaeological evidence tends to be like they found chicken eggs. And it's not necessarily clear if the chickens were there because of the eggs or because we were eating the chickens or because there were cockfights. And there could have been a lot of different reasons we had chickens around, but you do see things like chickens, like, you know, beautiful roosters on coins in different cultures. And so chickens do look like they were important part of our cultures for a really long time. There was one study that estimated that based on like DNA stuff, maybe chickens have been with us for 50,000 years. We've been like carrying them around with us.

• 36:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  But anyway, definitely we are sure that the ancient Greeks around 600 B.C., so something like 2,600 years ago, you can see chicken imagery in like the Greek pottery. And so we're sure that we had chickens, at least at that point, maybe even much earlier.

• 37:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Do you think there's any relationship between domesticating chickens and agriculture? And I can understand like domesticating dogs when you're still a hunter gatherer community. You can't, you kill, you share with the dogs. What about chickens? I mean, I always think about feeding chickens grains. But actually, now that I think about it, chickens eat anything, don't they? So you could have chickens eat your kill also.

• 37:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, so I can see it being much, much easier to have chickens if you're staying in one place, which would be easier if you were in agricultural society. But on the other hand, yeah, I mean, we feed our chickens everything.

• 37:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Including chicken, right?

• 37:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 37:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Cannibalism for the win.

• 37:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, yes. Pull out your DKU bingo card.

• 37:57Daniel Whiteson?

  All right.

• 37:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, okay, so the answer is eggs came first, then came chickens. But you can still have fun philosophical debates, just not when Kelly's around.

• 38:06Daniel Whiteson?

  But I think that's only because you've interpreted the question as what came first? The chicken or any kind of egg? But I think the question is what came first? The chicken or the chicken egg?

• 38:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh. But, but no, because eggs came first. You had to have.

• 38:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Answer's the same, all right.

• 38:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  The answer's the same. The red jungle fowl came first and at some point there was a, anyway, domestication happened and blah, blah, blah. So let's, let's see if Noah has more whimsy in his heart than I do. And maybe he will disagree with my answer.

• 38:41Speaker 10

  I'm endlessly amazed at how much the story of many millions of years that humans have accumulated. Previously, I kind of assumed that this answer would be neither or both, just played out in time. But I agree with Kelly, eggs seem like the clear winner here. At least there's no shortage of as yet unsolved paradoxes to think about. Many thanks to both of you. I love the show.

• 39:11Speaker 01

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• 39:41Speaker 08

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by breakout singer-songwriter Alex Warren.

• 40:02Speaker 11

  I'm like a kid when I play music and I make music and I'm constantly asking questions. You know, whether it's an instrument I haven't played, or it's a melody that seems foreign. You know this every night you play a show and it's the same set, but it's not the same show. At a certain point, your brain kind of goes on autopilot. When I'm in the studio, or if I'm making music, that's where that curiosity kind of comes back, you know? I haven't lost it yet, but I'm also on my sophomore album, so, and you, you obviously are an expert here.

• 40:28Speaker 08

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 40:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, we are moving from eggs to gravitational waves. And next up, we have a question from Gerard, which sounds like a really good setup to a new sci-fi book.

• 40:57Speaker 12

  I've heard that if we could read gravitational waves from the Big Bang, someday we would also be able to see further into the past than with light. My question is, how would we be able to tell which gravity waves originated in that very early time and which formed later? Is there some analog with light's red shifting? I've also heard the same possibility with neutrinos. Again, would there be a way of distinguishing early neutrinos from later?

• 41:19Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Thank you very much, Gerard, for this wonderful question. I love digging into the early universe, the cosmic egg, if you will.

• 41:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, you are so good at making connections. I think someone should write a book about aliens that can read gravitational waves. Maybe somebody has.

• 41:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes. Oh, yes. Well, we can read gravitational waves and we hope by doing so, we can learn something about the history of the universe. So far, most of what we've learned about the very, very early universe comes from photons. And this is the light, the cosmic microwave background light, that comes from a moment when the universe was very hot and very dense and went from being opaque, like the center of the sun, to cooling enough that protons captured electrons and became neutral hydrogen, which is transparent, like hydrogen gas. So photons that were made just before that moment, instead of getting absorbed, flew free through the universe and are still around. Any light made before that time was immediately absorbed,

• 42:18Daniel Whiteson?

  just like light made inside the sun is absorbed. So the earliest we're used to seeing the universe, that concrete data from what happened a long time ago, is 13.8 billion years ago plus 380,000 years. That's how long it took for the universe to cool enough to become transparent.

• 42:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  And as far as we can imagine, there is no way for light to tell us anything about what happened before that point.

• 42:44Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right, because none of those photons are still around.

• 42:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 42:47Daniel Whiteson?

  If they were, we could see them and we could learn stuff. There were photons made, lots and lots and lots of them, but they're not around anymore. They were gobbled up by the atoms and the electrons.

• 42:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, it's like when your great, great grandparents are gone and they can't tell you their stories anymore.

• 43:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. But we would like to dig further, right? And before we dig further, just a note on the timeline. We'll define a moment, call it t equals zero, the first moment. We don't mean that that's the first moment of the universe. It's the first moment where our laws of physics apply at all, where we can think about this stuff, where we can hypothesize what might have happened because... Quantum mechanics and general relativity separated enough that we can just use one of them. Before that moment, things were so hot and so dense and so nasty, we can't even think about them. We can't do calculations. We don't have a theory to explain it because we don't have quantum gravity. So we don't know what happened before t equals zero. t equals zero and then forwards, we can think about theoretically.

• 43:44Daniel Whiteson?

  And the gap there is that we can think from t equals zero to 380,000 years afterwards. And but we can't see yet before 380,000 years. Does that make sense?

• 43:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. And is gravitational waves going to help us get back earlier?

• 43:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, exactly. And so Gerard is asking about how we can see past that boundary, not with light, but with other probes. And so he talks about two of them, gravitational waves and neutrinos. And the reason you could see earlier with gravitational waves and neutrinos is that the universe was transparent to those earlier and then it was transparent to light. Like many things in the universe are transparent to neutrinos that are not transparent to light, like the earth. Photons will not fly through the earth. The earth is opaque to photons, but it's transparent to neutrinos. Neutrinos will fly right through it. So the fact that the universe was opaque to photons for the first 380,000 years doesn't mean it was opaque to neutrinos. In fact, it was transparent to neutrinos.

• 44:44Daniel Whiteson?

  The same story applies to gravitational waves. Gravitational waves pass through basically everything and they scatter a little bit or they're affected by matter. But everything but black holes are transparent to gravitational waves. So they're an amazing way to look even earlier than light can show us what happened in the early universe. And Gerard's excellent question is, cool, but aren't there neutrinos and gravitational waves everywhere? How could we tell the difference between a neutrino that came from the very early universe? And one that like was made eight minutes ago in the sun? Or gravitational waves that are made from black holes? How do we know the difference between those and gravitational waves from the very early universe?

• 45:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  You check their ID.

• 45:29Daniel Whiteson?

  That was a joke, but it's actually basically the answer.

• 45:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Great.

• 45:35Daniel Whiteson?

  So let's start with neutrinos because they're a little easier. Neutrinos decoupled from matter, meaning they stopped really interacting with matter about a second after t equals zero. So neutrinos do interact with matter. If it's very, very dense, then even neutrinos will interact with it. But it only took about a second after that t equals zero moment for the universe to become dilute enough for neutrinos to just fly through and essentially ignore everything. So for the first second neutrinos were absorbed, but that surface of last scattering, the cosmic neutrino background comes from one second after t equals zero instead of 380,000 years, which is amazing.

• 46:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 46:18Daniel Whiteson?

  And so like, wow, we could see a lot of stuff we hadn't ever seen before. Super fun. Now, the issue is that these neutrinos are very, very low energy. Just like the cosmic microwave background light is very, very red shifted. These neutrinos have been super duper red shifted down to low energies. Like the plasma that made the cosmic microwave background light was really, really hot. And when those photons were made, they were very high energy, very short wavelength. But the universe has expanded since then. And when it expands, it also expands those photons and makes them super duper red. Which is why it's often said that the CMB light is like light from a black body at like three degrees Kelvin.

• 47:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Because you'd have to be that cold now to emit photons at that wavelength. And the same thing has happened to neutrinos. Neutrinos from the sun, for example, are like one to 10 million electron volts in energy. Neutrinos from supernova, maybe twice that down to a few MEV. But the neutrinos from the very early universe are very, very, very low energy, which makes them very, very challenging to see. Not impossible, but it means they're not going to interact as much as neutrinos with higher energy. So we have plans to see them and we hope to see them. Current experiments that look for dark matter, for example, are very, very sensitive to things that go bump in the night.

• 47:40Daniel Whiteson?

  And they very recently become sensitive enough to see like the neutrino background, this neutrino fog that fills the universe. Not from the early universe yet, but from like everything else that's emitting neutrinos. And we hope on one day to be sensitive enough to these cosmic neutrino background from the very early universe, but not yet. And we'll know that they're there because we'll see them at lower energy than basically anything else makes neutrinos.

• 48:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Am I remembering correctly that you told me it's hard to measure neutrinos, period?

• 48:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, because they hardly interact. You build a big detector and like one in a trillion or one in a quadrillion neutrinos that fly through your detector will interact with it.

• 48:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, man.

• 48:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 48:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right.

• 48:20Daniel Whiteson?

  The lower the energy, the more challenging it is. So yeah, it's hard.

• 48:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's a good thing there's so much money for science.

• 48:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Now gravitational waves are also an excellent source of information about the early universe for the same reason as neutrinos. Neutrinos hardly interact with matter because they only use the weak force, which is very, very weak. Gravitational waves only use gravity, which is even weaker than the weak force. And so they decouple from everything else in the universe almost immediately, right? So using gravitational waves, you can see even further back than one second after t equals zero.

• 48:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Whoa.

• 48:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Amazing.

• 48:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 48:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes. But again, they are also affected by redshift. And so these would be very, very low frequency gravitational waves, very long wavelengths. Now, the gravitational waves that we're used to thinking about are the ones from like black holes that collide with each other. And before they do, they orbit each other and emit a huge amount of energy gravitational waves. Those are fairly high frequency and we can see those with our detectors. And so those detectors like LIGO, they can see gravitational waves with really long wavelengths because they don't make any change on the scale of like the Earth even. You need like a galaxy sized detector to see really long wavelength gravitational waves.

• 49:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 49:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Amazingly, humans have a galaxy sized detector for gravitational waves. People have used pulsars, which are extraordinary neutron stars that rotate with extreme regularity. And by variations in their rotations, we can tell whether space between us and the pulsar has been squeezed or stretched. In the last couple of years, we've even seen evidence of very long wavelength gravitational waves using pulsar timing arrays. Really an amazing piece of science.

• 50:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 50:05Daniel Whiteson?

  But even those might be too short wavelength to see the early universe gravitational waves.

• 50:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 50:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Because they're going to be extremely low frequency. The pulsar timing arrays probably are seeing like a general gravitational wave background from all sorts of black holes and acceleration. I mean, everything you do creates gravitational waves. You wave your hand in front of you, you're creating gravitational waves because any kind of acceleration is going to create them. So there's just like gravitational wave noise through the universe. But the ones from the early universe will be unique because they won't have like any specific source. They won't come from this black hole or from that black hole. They'll just fill the universe, sort of the way the cosmic microwave background light will. And they'll be very broadly spread out across various frequencies. There'll be no big peak, no clear power structure. It'll be a very

• 50:57Daniel Whiteson?

  broad frequency signal. Even that will be very, very hard to see. And so the way people hope to see gravitational waves from the early universe is not actually by seeing the gravitational waves directly, but instead by seeing those gravitational waves affect the cosmic microwave background light. So that light we talked about earlier that was made 380,000 years after t equals zero, when it was made, it was affected by these gravitational waves that were already around from the early universe because it gives that light a special twist. Remember that light is a ripple in the electromagnetic field and a field is just like numbers in space. And the Higgs field, for example, is just like

• 51:39Daniel Whiteson?

  a number at every location in space. But light is a vector field, which means it's not just one number, it's like three numbers. Or equivalently, you can think about it like a little arrow with a length and a direction at every point in space. And as light moves, those arrows ripple. And it can do more than just move, it can also spin, right? So this is what we call polarization of light. The same way that like if you have a jump rope, you can shake it up and down, or you can shake it sideways, or you can shake it in like a swirly motion, this different way for waves to propagate along that string. Same thing for photons. And mathematically, you can decompose them into what are called E modes that are radial patterns and B modes that are like twisting swirling patterns.

• 52:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Gravitational waves are the only way we know to give B-mode polarization to the CMB light. There's something about how those gravitational waves are stretching and squeezing this space while light is being formed that gives it those B modes. Other gravitational waves, like black hole collisions late in the universe, cannot give like a broad pattern of B-mode polarization. So if you look at the cosmic microwave background light and you measure its polarization and you see B modes, that would be fascinating information about the early universe. And a few years ago, an experiment called BICEP-2 claimed to have discovered it. Huge news rocked the science community until it turned out that

• 53:07Daniel Whiteson?

  they made a mistake in their analysis and they were relying on data from another experiment to remove the effect of dust, but they didn't actually have that data from that experiment. They took a screenshot of a PowerPoint slide and misinterpreted it and used that as the basis for their analysis and they came up with these big claims and had to walk it back. Very embarrassing. Brian Keating wrote a book about it called Losing the Nobel Prize. It's a fun story.

• 53:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Not for the people involved.

• 53:40Daniel Whiteson?

  He tells it with a smile on his face, I think.

• 53:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Was Brian Keating involved?

• 53:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, yes. Deeply. No, he's not. He's not embarrassing other people. He's owning up to his own mistakes.

• 53:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, okay.

• 53:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Their own mistakes.

• 53:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Got it.

• 53:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Anyway, we have not yet seen that. So Gerard, that's how we might differentiate early universe neutrinos from later universe neutrinos, or we might spot evidence for early universe gravitational waves, either of which could tell us amazing things about what happened in the first few moments after t equals zero, none of which could tell us about what happened before t equals zero. That's a whole other question mark.

• 54:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Which one do you think is more likely to tell us something first?

• 54:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, wow. Great question. I think we probably will figure out this B-mode polarization of the CMB before we figure out how to see these very low-energy neutrinos. But both communities are filled with super smart people, working hard and coming up with clever ideas that I could never anticipate. So we'll see.

• 54:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, and we'll see what Gerard thinks about the answer.

• 54:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Gerard listened to our answer and wrote back to me and he preferred to send a written response, I'll read it for you now. Here's his reply. "I didn't know that gravitational waves would be like photons and be stretched by their long journey through expanding space, lowering their frequency. The idea of indirectly detecting them by their effect on the CMB photon polarization is ingenious. I wonder how precise the measurements would need to be before scientists could reconstruct any earlier than CMB features. Nor did I know that neutrinos would also lose energy through stretching space. I guess I've always thought of them as particles, but we can think of them as waves in a field? I am always fascinated when science builds on an idea by extending it to another domain, as in this example.

• 55:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Light waves stretch, so gravity waves should stretch too. A further question, evoked by your description in the hot, dense, early universe. What kind of structure might it have had? Would the high energy simply prevent anything from coalescing? I'm sure we will be surprised by something no one has even imagined." Thank you very much for that response Gerard. Let me answer some of your follow-up questions. Yes, neutrinos also lose energy as they move through space because space is stretching. This is a great example of the non-conservation of energy in an expanding universe. It applies to everything. Particles and waves. Particles in the end are really just ripples in quantum fields and they are affected by the expanding universe.

• 56:11Daniel Whiteson?

  You also ask, "What was the structure like in the hot, dense, early universe?" It's a great question and structure is a tough way to think about it because in the very early universe, you have these quantum fields that are filled with frothing energy. It's not like now when you have isolated energy and you can think about a little ripple in the field as a particle. It's like taking a thousand drops and putting them in a glass. You don't really think about drops anymore. Now you think about other emergent forms of that water, waves and other sorts of things. And so what's going to happen in the very early universe is that those quantum fields will be filled with energy and will get all sorts of weird, bizarre effects.

• 56:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Thank you very much to these listeners for sending in your questions and to everybody out there who drives this podcast forward with your personal curiosity about the universe.

• 57:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Please send us your questions at [email protected]. And if you like the podcast and you think about leaving us a rating, we would really appreciate that.

• 57:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, exactly.

• 57:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Help other people find the podcast so that they can share their questions, too.

• 57:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Come for the science, stay for the poo on the eggs.

• 57:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or whatever gross stuff floats your boat.

• 57:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you.

• 57:37Daniel Whiteson?

  We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.

• 57:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.

• 57:50Daniel Whiteson?

  We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at [email protected].

• 57:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D and K Universe.

• 58:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

• 58:10Speaker 13

  With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. Whether you're leading a big project, planning an elaborate trip, or trying to balance work and life, ChatGPT can help. Give it a goal, plus things like files, notes, or project plans. Develop a trip itinerary with daily updates, or create a prioritized schedule, so you can spend less energy sorting out the details and more on bringing your biggest ideas to life. Get started at chatgpt.com.

• 58:37Speaker 14

  Hey, this is Mario Lopez from all Mario Lopez Daily Podcast. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an all-wheel drive Camry, Corolla Cross, or a Corolla sedan with the latest features in tech. Or test drive a spacious Grand Highlander or adventure-ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid models available, you can enjoy longer trips without all the stops. While Toyota's legendary resale value means you could get more at traded. So get a great deal today and great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for deals and details. Toyota, let's go places.

• 59:15Speaker 15

  What's that?

• 59:16Speaker 13

  My fresh detector.

• 59:17Speaker 15

  Uh, your what?

• 59:18Speaker 13

  There it is.

• 59:19Speaker 15

  What is it detecting?

• 59:21Speaker 13

  Fresh produce, fresh meat.

• 59:24Speaker 15

  Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh?

• 59:29Speaker 13

  Apparently, we celebrate.

• 59:31Speaker 16

  At Food Lion, you can count on fresh food at fresher prices when your fresh detector is going off. Head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com.

• 59:42Speaker 17

  This is Danielle Fishel from Pod Meets World. Every purchase is a financial decision, so it's worth asking. What am I getting out of this? If you're using the Chase Freedom Flex Card, you can maximize your cash back on things you need. Groceries and gas, cash back. Dinner, cash back on that, too. More ways to earn, more ways to get rewarded. Sign up for the Chase Freedom Flex Card. Learn more at chase.com/getflex. This is a paid collaboration with Chase Freedom Flex. Cards issued by J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, N.A., member FDIC. Subject to credit approval. Offer subject to change. Terms apply. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.