Listener Questions #51

Daniel and Kelly answer listener questions about special relativity, organisms that eat plastic, and whether the future is already determined. 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?

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• 0:05Speaker 01

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• 0:35Speaker 03

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• 1:49Speaker 04

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• 2:13Speaker 05

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• 2:55Speaker 05

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• 3:35Speaker 05

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• 3:43Speaker 06

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• 4:15Kelly Weinersmith?

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• 4:57Kelly Weinersmith?

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• 5:15Speaker 03

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• 5:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Photons slow down when they approach space with a curve. Is that real, or just some illusion we observe?

• 6:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  If plastic waste were edible, humans would all eat like kings. Can any species fill this niche? Are there plastic-eating things?

• 6:15Daniel Whiteson?

  If you and I disagree on what's now in the space-time sea, does tomorrow already exist, or is it still up to me?

• 6:24Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 6:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe of listener curiosity.

• 6:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Episode number 51.

• 6:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Fifty-one.

• 6:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's a new thing we do. I don't know that it adds anything, but I enjoy it.

• 6:56Daniel Whiteson?

  I just enjoy hearing the big number, like, wow, think about all the questions we've answered.

• 7:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I mean, that's like 150 questioners from listeners that we've, like, it's 150 things that have been shared with us. That's exciting.

• 7:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. Well, hello, everyone. I'm Daniel White, and I'm a particle physicist, and I write books about aliens and the nature of science.

• 7:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I'm Kelly Wiener-Smith. I study parasites and space, and I'm interested in medical history this week.

• 7:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Not that we're talking about that today, but that's what's on my mind.

• 7:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, speaking of interest in the Wiener-Smith household, I have a question for you, Kelly.

• 7:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, go for it. I hope it's about my goats.

• 7:38Daniel Whiteson?

  I'll make it about your goats. All right, so my question for you is, have your husband or your goats considered starting their own podcast?

• 7:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  That is such a great question. You know, my goats have a strong desire to be heard.

• 7:53Daniel Whiteson?

  And the listeners want to hear from your goats, so there's a built-in audience. We've had requests.

• 7:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, but I don't know that they're going to want to hear that more than once. Because they all have very distinct voices, which I think is interesting. I can hear one of them call, and I'm like, oh, Lea's head is stuck in the fence again. Like, I just, I know them by their voices. But I don't think there's a big audience for that. However.

• 8:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Really?

• 8:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, my amazing husband, he's really into AI. Every morning, we have coffee together, and it's pretty much 30 solid minutes of Zach AI-ing at me. And he is always reading about the newest, the newest things that's going on, the new math problems that's been solved, thinking about what this means for the future of humanity.

• 8:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Cool, cool.

• 8:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  And it turns out his brother, Marty Weiner, also thinks about AI a lot. And so does Chris Slow, who's the current chief technical officer at Reddit. And Zach's brother, Marty, would probably want you to know that he's not just Zach's brother. He also was the chief technical officer at Reddit and was one of the early engineers over at Pinterest. He's like a, he's a big Silicon Valley dude. But anyway, they have a podcast about AI called Last Humans in the Loop. And I think they've got like five or six episodes they've just started, and it is a fascinating look at AI. You too can hear Zach Weiner-Smith talk about AI.

• 9:12Daniel Whiteson?

  So if you are not satisfied just hearing Kelly throw shade at Zach, you can also hear Zach throw shade at Kelly. Get more Weiner-Smith in your ear.

• 9:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  There you go. Yes, I highly recommend it. And they do video, so you can see, you can see all of them responding in real time. Marty had this really great bit where you can now download voices of some actors, and he had, I think it was he downloaded the voice of Kermit the Frog reading a particularly violent scene in The Odyssey, and he did it with a puppet. At the same time on the show. So anyway, most of it is serious, but that cracked me up. And anyway, yes, highly recommend it for shenanigans and for real, serious AI news.

• 9:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow. So that's an application of AI that's really going to change everybody's life. I can see they really put their finger on the important issues, haven't they?

• 9:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  They've done a mixture of things. Yeah, they, I think at the end, they talk about sort of frivolous, funny AI stuff as like, you know, a closer and that was, that was a bit of closer.

• 10:09Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Well, today we are not just here to talk about the things that the Wiener Smiths are excited about, though partially we are, we're here to address questions that you have because we're curious about the universe and so are you. And we want to know about that curiosity. We want to understand where it takes you and especially where you get stuck. What ideas are not working together in your head? What concepts don't make sense? What have we talked about that didn't quite connect? Or what did you hear on another podcast, maybe with other Wiener Smiths? That didn't make sense to you and you need Daniel and Kelly treatment? Please send us your questions and your curiosity to [email protected].

• 10:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  So let's jump right in with our first question. This first question is from Lincoln from Florida. And Lincoln makes a pretty strong case for Florida. So let's, let's go ahead and listen.

• 11:00Speaker 06

  Hello, it's Lincoln here from the best of the 50 states, Florida. If you don't agree, check the tourist count. According to special relativity, the velocity of light always appears to us as C. However, as an object approaches a black hole, it appears to any observer to slow down and stop before reaching the event horizon. Does this phenomenon actually occur? If so, could this be used in the distant future to study light and potentially begin to understand its fundamental nature? Thank you for providing a place for questions that make my friends stare blankly. Best regards from Lincoln.

• 11:37Daniel Whiteson?

  I like that Lincoln is using data to answer questions, you know? He's not just making wild claims about what state is best.

• 11:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Money talks, I guess. And there's a lot of money talking in Florida, I guess.

• 11:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I was just in Florida this week and there's other data, I think that points in the other direction. Like the humidity and the temperature together points very negatively towards Florida being the best state. But hey, you know, pick your metric.

• 12:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  But you made the mistake of mentioning the other day that Los Angeles was the most humid location on the planet last week or something, right?

• 12:11Daniel Whiteson?

  In the country, yes.

• 12:14Daniel Whiteson?

  But it was pretty sticky in LA last week and that was a complaint. I was not bragging, you know? I was like, things are going downhill because California is approaching Florida or approaching Virginia levels of stickiness. Not good.

• 12:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. All right. You know, let's, let's get back to the science. Let's get back to the science. So we're talking about special relativity here. Give me the background on special relativity.

• 12:36Daniel Whiteson?

  So we're talking about special and general relativity here because he's asking a question about the speed of light near a black hole. But let's start with special relativity because the issue at the heart of this question is a conflict between what you often hear from special relativity and what we've learned from general relativity about how light moves. So let's start with special relativity and the big fact at the heart of special relativity is that light always moves at the same speed. So if you have a flashlight and you click it on, light is zooming out of your flashlight at the speed of light. If you happen to be on a train moving at half the speed of light, somebody on the ground is going to see you moving at half the speed of light. And when they measure the speed of your flashlight beam, it's not going to be one and a half times the speed of light.

• 13:19Daniel Whiteson?

  It's still going to be the speed of light. So that flashlight beam moves at the speed of light relative to you on the train, relative to the guy on the ground, relative to a particle moving through space, relative to somebody sunning themselves on the beach of Florida and getting skin cancer, relative to all of those people. It's constant. Unlike humidity in LA, which seems to go up and down a lot, the speed of light is constant.

• 13:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right. Okay. And that's not you all just getting something wrong, right? That's real?

• 13:45Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right. That's real. That's something we've measured. It's fascinating. It's counterintuitive. It was a big surprise. Experimentally, it took forever for people to really absorb it and accept it. But it's real and it leads to all the consequences of special relativity. The fact that there's no universal now that we'll talk about later in the program. And the fact that things get shorter as they get faster, the time slows down, all comes from the same basic fact that light moves at the same speed, no matter what, whoever is measuring it, right? And that's true no matter what your frame of reference is, right? If you're in motion relative to the earth, or if you're not, or if you're pointing in this direction or pointing in that direction. And this is often said very, very absolutely, like the speed of light always moves at the speed of light.

• 14:29Daniel Whiteson?

  But there is a very important asterisk that's usually ignored, that's going to be really crucial today.

• 14:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 14:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay. And that asterisk is that this is true, that the speed of light is the speed of light, no matter what, as long as you are operating in flat space.

• 14:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  What?

• 14:46Daniel Whiteson?

  So if space is not curved, so if space is flat and from here to the end of the universe, space is flat, then you can make this claim and you can measure velocity and this is all true. But once space gets curved, you need general relativity to describe what's going to happen and how time flows and how things move. Special relativity no longer applies when space is curved and that's what happens near black holes.

• 15:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  So how much of space is flat and how much of space is curved? Do you just get curved near black holes or more info?

• 15:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Amazing question. Yeah. Great question. So on the whole, the universe is flat. Like if you measure the curvature of the whole universe, it's on average flat. But on average, flat doesn't mean locally flat. Like, you know, if the temperature on average in the United States is 75 degrees, that doesn't mean that it's 75 degrees in Florida. In fact, it's probably not. It's never 75 degrees in Florida. It's always 95. Anyway, near black hole, space is very, very curved or near the earth, space is gently curved. However, space is always flat near you.

• 15:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 15:52Daniel Whiteson?

  There's always some neighborhood around you where space is approximately flat. And how big that neighborhood is depends on the amount of curvature. So if you're in a part of the universe where there really are no masses, then space is flat in a really broad neighborhood. Even if you're falling into a black hole and space is really, really curved, there's always like a tiny little neighborhood in your vicinity where you can say, all right, but around here, within like a meter or so, space is close enough to flat for me to say that it's flat.

• 16:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 16:20Daniel Whiteson?

  So it's always flat in your little neighborhood.

• 16:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, got it. It's like how the earth is round, but it doesn't look round to me because it's flat in my little area.

• 16:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. Because you can only see a little bit of it. And so it looks basically flat. If you zoom down and consider the whole earth, you'd see the curvature, but it's a good approximation to say the earth is flat around you, right?

• 16:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 16:38Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So Lincoln is saying, hold on, I hear that the velocity of light is always C, right? No matter what, but near a black hole, time slows down and even stops as things approach the event horizon. What happens to a photon as it approaches the black hole and does that break the rule of special relativity, right? And the answer is both really unsatisfying and also really deeply revealing about something really basic and intuitive that we don't often think about, which is how to measure velocity. So the brief answer, which is really unsatisfying, is that you cannot measure the velocity of things outside your immediate neighborhood. Like the velocity of things that are far away is not even well defined.

• 17:21Daniel Whiteson?

  It's not even a quantity we really know how to talk about.

• 17:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 17:25Daniel Whiteson?

  And so the answer is you can't talk about the speed of photons that are far away from you in curved space. If they're in your neighborhood, then they're basically in your little flat bubble and you can measure their speed and you always get C. If space is curved and the photons are not in your flat bubble, there's like a lot of curvature between you and them, then there's no way to even define their velocity.

• 17:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. Do you think one day we'd figure out how to do it or it's just impossible?

• 17:50Daniel Whiteson?

  It's just impossible, right? And general relativity tells us why. And I love this kind of thing in relativity because it forces you to revisit something which sounds simple and obvious and think about the assumptions that go into it and then realize those are broken. And so you might be wondering like, what is he talking about? How could you not measure something's velocity? Velocity is just like, I'm measuring the distance and I'm seeing how that changes with time, right? Duh. Obviously you can still make those measurements.

• 18:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's what I was thinking. Thinking, duh.

• 18:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, let's think in a little bit more detail about what happens when we measure velocity, right? Technically, what we do is we compare two vectors. Take a simple example. We have two people, they're running next to each other, right? You have Daniel versus Usain Bolt, right? And you might think, what do we do? How do we measure their velocities? Well, we just see how they move across the earth and we measure the distance versus time, and that's the answer. And it's true that we get the distance versus time for each person, and that gives us two vectors, you know, a length and a direction for Usain Bolt, and a length and a direction for Daniel, and then we compare them, right? And because Daniel and Usain Bolt are running in the same direction, right next to each other, the comparison is obvious. One's really big, one's not so big. Usain Bolt is faster than

• 19:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Daniel. Easy to do. All right. But what if Daniel can't get Usain Bolt to come and race against him right here? He can't get him to come to Southern California. Instead, Usain Bolt is running on a track on the other side of the planet than Daniel.

• 19:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 19:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay. How do we do it now? Well, we still have to compare vectors, but Usain Bolt's vector is now pointing in a different direction than Daniel's, right? Because the earth is curved. And imagine he's like on the opposite side of the earth and he's running in the other direction. So how do you compare the two vectors now? And you're thinking, okay, easy still. You just like bring one vector over to the other and line them up so you can compare them, right?

• 19:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Duh.

• 19:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Duh. And, and that works if space is flat. But the problem is that when you move a vector through curved space, there's a lot of different ways you can do it. And the choice that you make of how to do it gives you a different answer, right?

• 19:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  But it's flat in your area, and Usain Bolt is running in a little flat bit. Why can't we compare the vectors?

• 20:05Daniel Whiteson?

  You can do an approximation. You said, I'm just going to take the length of the vector, right? But really, velocity is a 3D object, and so you have to do a complete comparison. And so let me walk you through this example of what I mean by the vectors change through curved space.

• 20:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 20:19Daniel Whiteson?

  So say, for example, you're at the North Pole, and you have a spear, okay? And your job is to go on a little walk across the earth and keep the spear pointed in the same direction. Okay? So it's parallel to the ground. You're starting at the North Pole, and maybe you point your spear towards London. Okay?

• 20:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 20:37Daniel Whiteson?

  So it's pointing south, right?

• 20:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. I'm menacingly walking towards London.

• 20:41Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes. All right. So you walk towards London, shaking your spear, keeping it parallel to the ground. It's still pointing south. Now you walk past London, you get all the way to the equator. Okay? Still pointing south. Now you walk along the equator, maybe like a quarter of the way around the planet. Your spear is still pointing south, right?

• 20:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 20:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Now you walk back towards the North Pole. Okay?

• 21:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 21:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Spear's still pointing south. Has your spear changed direction?

• 21:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  I rotate my hand.

• 21:08Daniel Whiteson?

  But is your spear pointing the same direction it was originally?

• 21:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, not if I'm walking back north again.

• 21:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. It's now like 90 degrees relative to where it was before. So you've taken a vector and you've moved it along a curved surface, and you've come on a complete path, and you've never turned your vector, right? And yet, it's not pointing in the same direction as when you started. This is geometrically what we mean by curvature. If you take a vector and you take a journey and you come back and it's not pointing in the same direction, then that space is curved. That's what we mean by curvature in some sense geometrically. So if you want to compare two vectors that are separated, in flat space, it makes sense. In curved space, it does not make sense, because you have to bring the vector over close to you in order to measure it, and that changes the vector. It can change the

• 21:57Daniel Whiteson?

  direction, it can change the length of the vector. And so that's why velocity for distant objects is not well-defined in curved space, because different people can choose differently. Like, I'm going to bring that photon's distant vector over to me this way. Somebody else can bring it over here this way. And if space is curved, they can get different answers. And so there's not one definition for what that velocity is. And so the cop-out answer that simultaneously, I think, reveals something cool about the assumptions we make when we talk about velocity is, you can't talk about the velocity of really distant objects. For example, when we say distant galaxies are recessing at faster than the speed of light, right? Isn't that breaking the rules of special relativity? Yeah, because that

• 22:40Daniel Whiteson?

  velocity is not actually meaningful. It's a way we talk about velocity to give people a sense for it. But in general relativity, you can't really talk about the velocity of those distant galaxies. What's really happening is space is expanding between us and them. For example, those galaxies are not experiencing any acceleration, right? No accelerometers in those distant galaxies are indicating that they're accelerating relative to us. So the right way to think about that is space is expanding. And the right way to think about this is that space is curved between you and that photon, so you can't really measure the velocity. You can measure an apparent velocity. You can keep track of where it's going at various intervals, and you can calculate what we call a coordinate velocity. Like, here are the measurements I made, here's what I would call the velocity.

• 23:22Daniel Whiteson?

  But it's not the same velocity somebody else would measure. And it's not just observer-dependent. It depends on the choices you make of coordinates, which are arbitrary in general relativity. And so it's not well-defined, unfortunately. So the story you hear when they say, a photon, as it approaches a black hole, slows down, is not bogus. It's just that it's an extension of these concepts beyond where they're really physical. And so Lincoln is asking, does that phenomenon actually occur? And I would say no. And the reason is that if you moved your observer to close to that photon, like if you zoomed in and stood near the edge of the event horizon, what would you see? Well, if you're near the photon, you're going to see it moving by you at the speed of light. And if you fall into a black hole, you don't

• 24:06Daniel Whiteson?

  see time slow down. You've just fallen into a black hole, and you move through the event horizon and towards the singularity. So this apparent slowdown is not a real physical phenomenon. It's an artifact of being distant, and of there being a lot of curvature between you and the object. And unfortunately, there is no solid answer to what is the velocity of a distant object outside of your little flat neighborhood.

• 24:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow. All right. Lincoln, that was a lot, man. But there are definitely days where I'm like, oh, that's going to take me a week to like, to, to think more about. But that was a great explanation. Physics is not always intuitive.

• 24:45Daniel Whiteson?

  It isn't, yeah.

• 24:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so Lincoln, what do you think?

• 24:48Daniel Whiteson?

  What you thinking, Lincoln?

• 24:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Do you think that's the first time he's heard that?

• 24:56Daniel Whiteson?

  You couldn't just let me have that, huh?

• 24:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, that's not how you and I roll.

• 25:00Speaker 06

  Hello again from the greatest state, Florida. And may I point out that the humidity and the heat is normal to us. And you're just not a Floridian. Thank you so much for a clear and conceivable answer to my question. Although it is a little disappointing, at least now I can understand how special relativity is just Einstein flexing. Thank you for the answer, and may you always understand why Florida is the best state. Also, that's like the fourth time I've heard Lincoln thinking this week.

• 25:50Speaker 03

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  It's Big Noon Saturday, noon Eastern on Fox.

• 28:17Speaker 05

  This is Hoda Kotb from Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb. Halloween has a funny way of making you buy things you'd never normally buy. A 10-foot skeleton? Sure. A full-size fog machine? Why not. Three bags of candy that somehow become six bags of candy? It happens. Which brings me to the Chase Freedom Flex card, the savvy decision that will earn you more cash back on the everyday purchases, plus the extraordinary Halloween tricks and treats. With Freedom Flex, you earn even more treats on your Halloween and every Day needs, you get 5% cash back on popular rotating quarterly categories, 3% on dining and drugstores and 1% on all other purchases. More ways to earn, more ways to get rewarded. That's no tricks, all treats.

• 29:02Speaker 05

  More ways to earn, more ways to get rewarded. So 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 JP Morgan Chase Bank, NA member FDIC. Subject to credit approval. Offer subject to change. Terms apply. Some days it's the little things you look forward to most. And with Pepperidge Farm's thoughtfully crafted cookies, there's always something worth savoring. Maybe it's a Milano made with premium chocolate between two delicate biscuits, a Sausalito baked with rich milk chocolate chunks and macadamia nuts, or the simple buttery goodness of a chestman.

• 29:43Speaker 05

  So pour the coffee, find a comfy chair and take a moment to treat yourself to a cookie or two. Pepperidge Farm, have a little taste.

• 29:54Speaker 03

  911, what's your emergency?

• 29:57Speaker 03

  Please help us. They're everywhere. We think they're murder warnings. 911 Nashville returns.

• 30:04Daniel Whiteson?

  It's a homicide detective down here. Three bodies on the ground.

• 30:07Speaker 03

  With emergencies of biblical proportions.

• 30:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, since swarms upon you and upon your people. That's one of the plagues of the Bible. And somebody's unleashing them on Nashville.

• 30:17Speaker 03

  Ryan Phillippe joins 911 Nashville. All new Thursdays on ABC, next day on Hulu. OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A plus by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five star Trust Pilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on.

• 30:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amount subject to lender approval.

• 31:03Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, we're back and we're answering questions from listeners. And as is tradition, apparently on today's episode, we are making lots of references to other podcasts on today's episode because we know you listen to other podcasts and that's cool. We do too. We don't expect an exclusive relationship. We want to know what else you're excited about.

• 31:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel, what podcast do you listen to as soon as it comes out?

• 31:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, great question. I listen to This American Life pretty regularly and almost immediately. I listen to Hyperfixed quite often. I listen to Heavyweight. Heavyweight is an excellent, amazing podcast. Love that one. And my guilty pleasure while driving is If Books Could Kill because it makes me laugh and doesn't require me to think too much.

• 31:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Excellent.

• 31:47Daniel Whiteson?

  How about you?

• 31:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  The rest is history. And the underworld podcast.

• 31:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Nice.

• 31:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Those are, yeah, those are my two go-tos. But everyone's listening to the best podcast ever right now. And so let's focus on our podcast and answer a Discord question from Yarthvar the True. And we are continuing by tradition of not remembering to get first names from Discord listeners before we answer their question on the show.

• 32:14Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm sure that's the name on the driver's license, Kelly.

• 32:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yarthvar the True.

• 32:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Why would you assume otherwise?

• 32:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  My mistake, my mistake. Let's hear what True comma Yarthvar has to ask.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  Hi, this is Mr. True comma Yarthvar, middle name the, with a question in the form of a statement mainly for Kelly. I would be interested in learning more about bacteria or maybe other life forms that are evolving to digest plastic. I think that I heard Katie Golden of Creature Feature Podcast mention a study on larva eating styrofoam, for example.

• 32:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Thanks for the great question, Mr. True.

• 32:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, so this is a big problem. Like the fact that there is all of this plastic waste all over the world. This could be a huge food source for animals that could figure out how to eat it. And so to try to understand the scale of plastics that we are putting in the universe, I found one site that said that we produce 360 million tons of plastic waste.

• 33:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 33:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Each year. And another that said we produce 450 million tons of plastic waste each year. So we are producing hundreds of millions of tons of plastic waste each year.

• 33:26Daniel Whiteson?

  And I guess plastic waste is like plastic we produce and then want to throw away? Because there's a lot of plastic we produce that we keep and cherish forever.

• 33:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right. No, waste, I think definitely implies this is stuff that you have thrown either into the recycling bin or into the trash, but you are done with it.

• 33:41Daniel Whiteson?

  And chemically, like what is a plastic? I have this vague notion that it's like you take oil and you process it through chemistry and you get plastic. Is that basically what's happening?

• 33:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that's basically what's happening. But the important thing to note is that that oil has a bunch of carbon in it. And a lot of the like things that we eat have carbon in it.

• 34:01Daniel Whiteson?

  I like carbon.

• 34:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  I love carbon. Big fan.

• 34:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Crunchy bits when you've cooked something a little bit too long. As Katrina calls, the cancer ends. I love the cancer ends of stuff.

• 34:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I love the cancer ends of stuff too. Just to try not to eat too many. You can enjoy them sometimes. But if you can cut those carbon chains in different ways, you can make different compounds. And this is chemistry. That's my best definition of chemistry there. But so, so the question is, can you take carbon chains in plastic and cut them into ways that produce things that are edible?

• 34:39Daniel Whiteson?

  I see.

• 34:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  And it appears that some bacteria, some fungi and some worms have figured out how to do that. And the first time we sort of recognized that this was happening in nature that I could find was in 2016, there's bacteria in a recycling plant in Japan that was found breaking down the plastic. And in particular, the kind of plastic we're talking about is PET. This is found in a lot of water bottles, found in a lot of different kinds of like jugs. It makes polyester. Your clothes have a lot of this kind of plastic in it. It's a very common plastic. And this bacteria was producing an enzyme that has been named PETase.

• 35:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay. Andase is something we often refer to in chemistry for like, it's an enzyme that helps catalyze something or make some reaction happen?

• 35:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  So my first Google result, National Institutes of Health is apparently the reference. It says enzymes are biological catalysts, usually made of proteins that speed up chemical reactions in living things.

• 35:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Cool. And no surprise that it's a microbe that first does this. Katrina's always saying microbes learn how to eat anything.

• 35:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep, yep.

• 35:47Daniel Whiteson?

  And we heard like from your friend who's an expert in the deep underwater vents, like microbes are down there eating crazy stuff.

• 35:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep.

• 35:54Daniel Whiteson?

  So thank you microbes for pioneering everything, basically.

• 35:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  And what we're going to get to is that we are trying to figure out how to use this for our own purposes to try to break down a lot of the plastics. And so the bacteria that they discovered, it looks like it actually has two reactions that it does. Like the first one uses that PATase and then it breaks those products down into two smaller carbon chains. One is terophthalic acid and the other is ethylene glycol. And what you need to know there are two things that I think I'm getting correct here. One is that at this stage, the bacteria can start eating those things and using the carbon. And two, these are also ingredients that we use to make more PET.

• 36:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  So once this reaction has happened, if you can collect the products that were made by the bacteria, you can then start making new plastic products.

• 36:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh.

• 36:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Which could be very helpful in like recycling plants and stuff.

• 36:53Daniel Whiteson?

  So you're saying the microbes have this enzyme in them, which breaks down the plastic into stuff that their metabolism knows how to ingest.

• 37:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep.

• 37:02Daniel Whiteson?

  And also produces stuff that we can use to make yay more plastic. That's amazing. And are they making this PETase? Or did they like find it or is it occurring naturally? Or like, is it expressed in their genome?

• 37:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  So I think the, the best guess is that it evolved from feralic acid esterases. Who cares? The answer, what, what you want to know is that this is something that they use to break down plant walls. So this was something that they were using to get into plants. And with a little bit of tinkering, it can be used to start breaking down plastic. So this isn't something that the bacteria had to like, you know, evolve out of nothing. This is something that they already had, that it turns out if you change it a little bit, you know, for example, you've got, you know, billions of bacteria, maybe trillions, quadrillions in a recycling plant. You know, some of them had a mutation in this thing that's breaking down plant walls. And then it actually turned out that that helped them break down the plastics.

• 37:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  And now they've got this like head start on a new food source.

• 38:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, that's a great example of evolution, right? You have something which does a different job and you randomly evolved to do something new, which unlocks an enormous new food source, since you can see why that would help those populations survive. I guess I'm surprised it didn't happen faster.

• 38:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, right. Well, and it's actually not happening super efficiently yet. Like another thing to understand for evolution is that like, you know, if a mutation happens and suddenly something that was breaking down plant wall is now helping to break down plastic, you don't necessarily get the most efficient version of that enzyme, right?

• 38:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 38:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  For that enzyme to get better over time, you need to have, you know, for example, more random mutations that need to get like tried out as they change the way the enzyme works. And then the individuals that have the slightly more efficient enzyme are the ones that have more babies. And like, it's a very long, slow process that depends often on random things happening along the way. And so there are some labs that are specifically taking like the code for these enzymes and are mutating it to much more quickly move through all of the different ways, all of the different shapes that this enzyme could take and see if any of them are actually much more efficient if you like essentially speed up evolution in the lab.

• 39:09Daniel Whiteson?

  Uh oh. But then like, what if you release these things and they like dissolve all the plastic in the world in five seconds?

• 39:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, right. So that, that's something that people joke about a lot. I mean, they're still going to have to compete with all the other bacteria on the planet. They will have this massive new food source. Maybe this is something we need to worry about. I didn't find a lot of people panicking about it. What do you think? How much would you worry? How much would Katrina worry about this? That's what I need to know.

• 39:34Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, I don't think I'm even aware of the role the plastics play in my life. Like imagine all plastics on the planet were instantly deleted. Like I guess my glasses would fall apart and.

• 39:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Our microphones.

• 39:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Probably would fall apart and probably my car wouldn't work.

• 39:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, we'd be pwned.

• 39:55Daniel Whiteson?

  I don't think we're ready for that. So be careful biologists.

• 40:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, right, right.

• 40:01Daniel Whiteson?

  It's not just physicists who can destroy the world.

• 40:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, so we will get to in just a second, we'll get to the ways that people are trying to be a little bit careful about this.

• 40:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 40:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  But I just wanted to note real quick that there's a company called, I think, Carbios. And they are essentially, they're the ones that are like doing this, you know, evolution in the lab thing to try to find more efficient enzymes. And they're trying to break down pre-existing plastics and they have some like deals with companies that make makeup and make up containers. And they are trying to upcycle it back into more plastics, which is kind of cool. So a lot of stuff would be staying out of the landfill or like coming out of the recycling plants more quickly. So, okay. But so then the question is, if you have, for example, done something in the lab and genetically modified an organism, like, for example, maybe you decide that these enzymes, it would be better if they were made by E. coli than if they were made by the bacteria we first found them in because

• 40:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  it's just easier to manipulate E. coli. So you put the genes for this enzyme in E. coli. You probably don't want to release that into the environment because people are very uncomfortable about genetically modified organisms. And if you're the person that makes it so that all the plastic gets digested, you're not going to have a lot of friends. And so what they're doing is they are working on ways to, for example, make E. coli, and by they, I mean, like, different groups, not necessarily the Carbios group. But anyway, they're working on trying to get E. coli or other bacteria to produce enzymes in large quantities in the lab. And then they release those enzymes into places where plastic needs to get broken down. So they're, they're cutting the bacteria out, but they're releasing the

• 41:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  enzymes. And like, your laundry detergent has enzymes in it.

• 41:39Daniel Whiteson?

  That's cold blooded, man.

• 41:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Why is that cold blooded?

• 41:42Daniel Whiteson?

  You're getting the bacteria to produce this enzyme. They evolved so they can eat, and you're using it to break down the plastics without letting the bacteria have lunch. That seems cold.

• 41:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  They're probably feeding the bacteria because they want them to keep surviving and making this enzyme. I guess it depends on, do you have to kill the bacteria to get the enzyme? Or do the, can you make the bacteria excrete the enzyme in some way? We should have invited Katrina today.

• 42:08Daniel Whiteson?

  The bacteria should unionize, man. They own the means of production here, right? They have nothing to lose but their chains.

• 42:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right. Getting political.

• 42:17Daniel Whiteson?

  But I guess I'm a little confused. I would have thought this is something you wanted to introduce into a landfill, so that the plastic in the landfill like degrades more quickly, turns back into soil, all that good stuff. But it sounds like you're saying, we want to like, collect plastic out of this waste stream and isolate it and then break it down so we can like reuse it to make more plastic and stuff. Isn't there like a big energy cost to recycling and taking these things out of the waste stream? Is that really worth it?

• 42:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  So it depends on who you're talking to, what the goals are. So there are some groups that would like to take plastic that's already going to a recycling plant, for example, and use that to make new plastic stuff. And so essentially, just make the recycling process a lot simpler. There are other folks who are, for example, taking plastics, maybe from recycling plant, and then they're trying to turn it into things like vanillin, which is the like, chemical that gives vanilla its taste. And apparently, you can make that by breaking down plastics and then just tinkering with it a little bit.

• 43:18Daniel Whiteson?

  What? You can make vanilla flavor from plastics?

• 43:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep. Yep. Apparently, we already make vanilla flavor from petroleum.

• 43:26Daniel Whiteson?

  What?

• 43:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Stuff. And so the like scientist that was, you know, answering questions was a little bit defensive, presumably because this has been asked of them many times. But if you get synthetic vanilla flavoring, it might have a bit of a petroleum background.

• 43:40Daniel Whiteson?

  All those folks out there who defend vanilla ice cream as like a legitimate flavor and a competitor to actual chocolate ice cream? Like, yeah, I don't think so.

• 43:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I agree. They're bad people.

• 43:53Daniel Whiteson?

  I was trying to be choice in my words, but that's what you're here for, Kelly. Unleash it on everyone.

• 43:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right. I was obviously joking. But, but then there's other groups that are, for example, trying to put these enzymes into bacteria that can survive in saltwater environments, so that then you could release those organisms, like, I don't know, into the giant trash patch in the ocean. I actually think there's many giant trash patches because we're a great species.

• 44:21Daniel Whiteson?

  We're wonderful.

• 44:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  We're at the best. And you could release them into the ocean and then let the bacteria start breaking down those trash patches. So there's some people who are talking about like wanting to release this stuff into the environment. I think a lot of people have very complicated feelings about genetically modified organisms. And so I think there'd be a lot of people you'd have to convince that that was a good idea if you wanted to go forward with that.

• 44:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 44:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  But Mr. True wanted to know if there were other organisms that do this. It looks like fungi do it as well. They have an enzyme that breaks cutin down. And this is a part of plants again. And so fungi here again have a thing that they were using to break down plants. But it turns out with a little bit of tinkering, it can break down plastic. And so some fungus can do this as well. And some wax worms appear to be able to do this. So there was a scientist who had some beehives, and these worms are really bad for beehives. And she started taking them out of the beehive. And then she put them in a plastic bag. And she noticed that not only were they eating their way out of the bag, but anywhere their

• 45:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  saliva had touched, the bag started to degrade. And so I think the follow up work suggested that to some extent, this is stuff being produced by their microbiome. So it goes back to bacteria again. But there are some worms that seem to be able to, some like grubby things that seem to be able to live on plastic as well.

• 45:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow. Fascinating.

• 45:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. So anyway, maybe we will be able to harness biology to fix a massive problem that we have caused. But we're gonna have to wait and see.

• 45:54Daniel Whiteson?

  It does feel like biology has these tools, or at least it's better at adapting. I mean, the whole process of like, evolution is just such an incredibly parallel way to search for new techniques, right? You have like, quadrillions of bacteria constantly trying new things and evolving in new ways. And the chances that we could like, find a new solution faster than a zillion bacteria all in parallel, seems ridiculous. But it's cool that you then isolated and fine tuned it, and then are hopefully careful about how you implement it.

• 46:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep. We can be inspired by biology in a lot of different ways. All right, let's see what Mr. True has to say, or Miss True. I didn't realize that Yarthvar could also be a lady listener. So anyway, Mix, MX True, what do, what do you have to say?

• 46:45Speaker 02

  Hi, Yarthvar again. Thanks for the informative and complete answer. I don't have any follow up questions, but I do have a couple of comments. First, I echo your concern with releasing these organisms into the environment. I would hope that we only take such a bold step after conducting our due diligence with the utmost of rigor. Second, even though there is a grain of hope that these organisms might break down some of our plastic waste, I think that we still need to limit the amount of plastic that we allow into the environment. And finally, Yarthvar actually is my name, though in a different language. It's Edward in Old Norse, the medieval language of my Scandinavian ancestors. It might sound funny to the modern ear, but I prefer it to my other ancestral option. Old English is I'd

• 47:29Speaker 02

  weird or I'd weird. Anyway, thanks again. I appreciate you both and wish good health and happiness to all.

• 47:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers, producer, songwriter, guitarist, and co-founder of the group Sheik. A great song has a way of defining a moment, a moment of joy, heartbreak, or anything in between. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, dropping in on some of the coolest, most fascinating artists working today. We'll go deep into their lives and careers and hear what it was like before the moment that made them. From hit makers like Miguel.

• 48:19Speaker 02

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• 48:31Daniel Whiteson?

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• 49:04Speaker 04

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• 49:47Speaker 04

  Start Saturday strong. It's Big Noon Saturday on Fox.

• 49:51Daniel Whiteson?

  And here we go. It all starts at 10 Eastern with Big Noon Kickoff, live with an epic pregame. The crowd, the atmosphere, this is what makes us special. Then it's America's number one game. What a hit. The best pregame, the best announcers, the biggest games. Down the sideline, touchdown. It's Big Noon Saturday, noon Eastern on Fox.

• 50:13Speaker 05

  This is Hoda Kotb from Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb. Halloween has a funny way of making you buy things you'd never normally buy. A 10-foot skeleton? Sure. A full-size fog machine? Why not? Three bags of candy that somehow become six bags of candy? It happens. Which brings me-

• 50:30Speaker 03

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• 51:14Speaker 03

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• 51:19Speaker 05

  Some days, it's the little things you look forward to most. And with Pepperidge Farm's thoughtfully crafted cookies, there's always something worth savoring. Maybe it's a Milano made with premium chocolate between two delicate biscuits. A Sausalito, baked with rich milk chocolate chunks and macadamia nuts. Or the simple buttery goodness of a chestman. So pour the coffee, find a comfy chair, and take a moment to treat yourself to a cookie. Or two. Pepperidge Farm. Have a little taste.

• 51:50Daniel Whiteson?

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• 52:19Speaker 03

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• 53:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, and we're back. And our last question of the day is from Sebastian. And Daniel hinted earlier in the show that this would have something to do about the speed of light and time. Let's go ahead and hear the question.

• 53:13Speaker 03

  Hi, I've been trying to wrap my head around the block universe for a while. From my understanding, you always see a different slice of spacetime depending on your speed and direction. So if you and I are traveling in different directions at high speeds, we would have a different view on what is now. What does that say about the future being unwritten? Or is the future already determined in this theory? If so, what are arguments for or against the block universe? Thank you. Love the show.

• 53:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  I remember that you and I once had an episode where we were checking out like sci-fi books and movies and how they dealt with like space and time and time travel. And at the end, I was like, well, this was a Daniel is a wet blanket episode, which is out of the ordinary, but you know, very refreshing. And so I'm looking forward to what you have to say here.

• 54:07Daniel Whiteson?

  This is a really fun question because it gets to the heart of like, what does it mean that special relativity breaks our ideas of now? And you know, do we still have free will or is the future somehow determined because maybe somebody else can see more of it than we can or something? So let's dig into it first and remind ourselves what exactly special relativity says and doesn't say about time and about now and the future.

• 54:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 54:32Daniel Whiteson?

  So special relativity says that light always moves at the speed of light regardless of the observer or your velocity, as long as it's nearby, right? In a little flat neighborhood. And that breaks our sense of whether things have to happen at the same time or not. And the classic example is Kelly's on a train and she has two flashlights and she shines a flashlight forward and a flashlight backwards. And because she's standing in the center of the train car, she sees the light beams hitting the front and the back of the train at the same time. Right? Makes perfect sense. They go the same distance in the same amount of time. Of course, they hit the front and the back at the same time. But Zach is not in the train with Kelly. He's on the ground.

• 55:16Daniel Whiteson?

  He's eating his breakfast cereal or whatever. He's watching Kelly on the train do this experiment. What does he see? Well, he sees the back of the train moving towards where the light was emitted and the front of the train moving away from where the light was emitted. And because the light moves at the same speed relative to Zach, he sees the light hit the back of the train first and the front of the train later. That would not be true for sound waves, for example, because sound waves don't move at the same speed for all observers. They move at the same speed relative to their medium. So for example, if Kelly shouted instead of using light beams, then Zach would see the shout moving slower, going backwards and faster going forwards because it's moving

• 55:59Daniel Whiteson?

  at the same speed relative to the air, which is moving relative to him. But light doesn't work that way. Light moves at the speed of light no matter what. And so he sees it hit the back of the train before he sees it hit the front of the train. So Kelly says these two things happen at the same time and Zach says, no, they don't. And somebody else going the other direction sees the opposite, sees it hit the front of the train before the back of the train. What's going on? Is the universe broken? No. What's going on is that special relativity tells us that there is no global now. It's not like there's a one clock for the whole universe and the universe ticks forward one step at a time and everybody can agree on what time we're at and what's happening

• 56:44Daniel Whiteson?

  at the same time. Instead, like the listener asked, we all see like a different slice of spacetime depending on our speed and our direction. So there's as many moments of now as there are locations in the universe and velocities in the universe.

• 56:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 57:00Daniel Whiteson?

  So if you're not at the same location and you don't have the same velocity, then you see time flowing in a different way and you can even disagree about the order in which stuff happens.

• 57:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so are we like mostly talking about little things like, you know, you're a second or two off about when the light hits the train or could, are we talking about you could be a year or two different? I guess it depends on how far the thing has traveled. Like if you're looking at how far light traveled across the universe and you got different result, yeah. How, how, how, how big of a time? I'm, I'm very confused.

• 57:41Daniel Whiteson?

  It can be a big difference. You know, if somebody gets on a spaceship and they're moving 99% of the speed of light away from us for a long time, then their clock can differ by years from our clocks. So it can be a huge difference. And that's actually nice if you're going to travel to like Alpha Centauri, you know, then it might take a long time on Earth clocks for you to get there, but it doesn't take that much time on your clock on the ship, which is nice because you're the one on the ship. So it can be a big deal for sure. And for people who wonder like, hold on a second, how can the order of events be changed? You know, like if somebody shoots an arrow at an apple, can somebody else like see the apple get hit before they shoot the arrow? Does this break causality? And the answer is no, there are limits.

• 58:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Special relativity can reorder events, but only ones that are causally disconnected.

• 58:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think we're living in a simulation by somebody who wrote a fictional world that has kind of crazy rules, but we have to follow them. And this just is very counterintuitive.

• 58:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. Events that are close enough in space and time where light can move between them are causally connected because you can like send a message from one to the other. And those events you cannot reorder using special relativity. Only things that are causally disconnected, where they're far enough apart that light can't go between the events, those things you can't send any message from one event to the other.

• 59:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 59:03Daniel Whiteson?

  So those kinds of events can be reordered based on your velocity. All right. So what does that say about the flow of time? Right? Are different people seeing into the future or different futures? Like definitely what I consider to be now is different from what you consider to be now. And it's tempting to imagine that like, you know, Zach versus Kelly are seeing different slices of the future and that what they're doing is just revealing slices of an already determined future. And your speed through the universe is just determining like which slice of the pre-existing spacetime block you're getting. It's tempting. And that's the theory of the block universe that says that the past, the present, and

• 59:45Daniel Whiteson?

  the future all exist simultaneously within some like four dimensional spacetime structure. What do we mean by four dimensions? Well, you know what we mean by three dimensions of space and time? You have X, Y, and Z, three directions you can move in space. Now, if you imagine that to be a 4D structure, that just means that like through time, stuff is happening in space. And so you can't like stack up 3D spaces on top of each other in a 3D space. You have to imagine it like changing as you move the arrow of time. And so in this block universe theory, the past, the present, and the future are already fixed. Right? Like the future exists as much as the past exists and the present exists, the way like when you go to watch.

• 1:00:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Watched the Spider-Man movie. The ending is already determined. You're just happening to watch a certain frame of it. You haven't seen the ending, but the past, the present and the future in the movie are already fixed. So the block universe theory says that that's our universe, that the past, the present and the future are already set. And we're just like, we're having a certain slice through it. And the special relativity version of that is the slice you see of the universe depends on your location and your velocity.

• 1:00:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  So this is a no free will theory. Is that right?

• 1:01:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. It's a no free will kind of a theory. And so Sebastian's question is, does special relativity imply the block universe? And I would say, no, it's compatible with the block universe. The idea that special relativity gives you a different slice of that block universe. But as you say, the block universe is a deterministic theory. It says the future is already set, but special relativity doesn't require that. Special relativity says that the past, the present and the future are different for everybody. Like we disagree about what now means, but it doesn't mean that you don't have choices to make. You can still have a universe where the laws are probabilistic, for example, like quantum mechanical, right?

• 1:01:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Where the outcome of an experiment is determined by random probability and not fully determined by the past. So the past might determine the probability of something happening, but not the actual outcome. And so the past doesn't determine the future in our universe, for example, because we think the universe is quantum mechanical. And so the, the universe is not fully deterministic. And so it's not consistent with a block universe. So special relativity just means that now is local. It doesn't mean that the future is determined. You know, it says something weirder. It says that you don't get a unique, universal answer to the question, what is happening everywhere right now? But it doesn't say that the future is determined.

• 1:02:23Daniel Whiteson?

  And remember those cones we talked about, like where you can influence and things that are causally linked to you are not causally linked to you. Special relativity doesn't say that like Kelly has seen my future because she's moving at a different velocity or whatever. You know, you can rearrange certain events, but only things that are not causally linked together. So it's not like Kelly can see what I've decided to do. Right? Kelly can't rearrange the future in a way that changes my chain of causality.

• 1:02:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, that's too bad.

• 1:02:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Does that make sense?

• 1:02:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, it makes, makes sense, but it's disappointing.

• 1:02:58Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, you can influence the decisions I make and you certainly do make a good argument, make a funny joke. You're definitely going to influence the path of Daniel's life, but not by getting on a train at half the speed of light.

• 1:03:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, got it.

• 1:03:09Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. And so if you didn't already predict that answer, Sebastian, in your block universe, then I'm curious how our answer determines your response. Hi, Daniel and Kelly. I think that clears it up. So free will still has a chance.

• 1:03:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. Thank you, everybody, for sharing your amazing questions with us today. As a unfortunate reminder, Kelly is still on an email hiatus and probably will be till 2027 because I have about six months of amazing questions from y'all to work from still. So hold on to your great questions. I still am going to want them at some point, but I'm working through the stack as we go.

• 1:03:46Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Thanks, everybody. We really love hearing from you, hearing about your curiosity, hearing your questions, and we love being a part of your journey of curiosity. Thanks so much for taking us along for the ride.

• 1:03:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thanks for listening.

• 1:04:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Thanks, everybody, for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us.

• 1:04:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman.

• 1:04:17Daniel Whiteson?

  He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram and X, D and K Universe. Come engage with us.

• 1:04:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  You can email us at [email protected]. We really do want to hear from you.

• 1:04:32Daniel Whiteson?

  And you can find our website, www.danielandkelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord, where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe.

• 1:04:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we also have the most amazing moderators. This is an iHeart Podcast. Thanks for joining us.

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