Listener Questions Volume #2

Daniel and Kelly answer questions from curious listeners, about big black holes, nuking hurricanes and the philosophy of photons. 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.

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• 1:05Speaker 03

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series, on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:43Daniel Whiteson?

  So I absolutely love talking about the tiniest little particles, the hearts of black holes, and how we could be misunderstanding, like all of it.

• 1:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I love talking about parasites, teeny tiny little wasps and dung beetles. But judging from my husband's face at the dinner table, it's possible that not everyone shares exactly my interests. So what do you want to hear about?

• 2:06Daniel Whiteson?

  For the podcast, we usually pick topics that excite us and that we think you'll enjoy. But you know, we both have our weird quirks and preferences. So we want to hear from you. We'd love to answer questions you have about the universe, what you think is extraordinary and interesting and needs more explanation. Sometimes we turn your idea into a whole episode. Sometimes we give you a 15 minute answer during a listener question session.

• 2:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  And the questions you send us will help us more generally to gauge our audience's interests, which help us pick additional topics for the future.

• 2:38Daniel Whiteson?

  So please don't be shy. Send us your questions. We want to hear from you. We want this podcast to be about what you are curious about. And today we're tackling three fantastic, hilarious, amazing questions sent to us by listeners just like you.

• 2:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  And if you want to be on the next show, you can email us at [email protected].

• 2:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Your science podcast fame awaits.

• 3:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.

• 3:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I've never run out of questions.

• 3:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hi, I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith and every question I ask leads to even more questions.

• 3:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Why is that, do you think?

• 3:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Because we know so little about everything, I think, at the end of the day.

• 3:34Daniel Whiteson?

  See, we even have questions about questions. There's never an end to them.

• 3:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  So my question for you today, Daniel, is when you were working on a PhD, did you get a satisfying answer to your big question?

• 3:47Daniel Whiteson?

  You're really gonna ask me that? That's so embarrassing. You know, I did a PhD, which was pretty technical. I was measuring how often two top quarks are made and decay in a very specific way. And it was only when I was writing up my thesis, five years into the project, that I did enough reading of the literature to understand like, hey, is this interesting at all? And how am I contributing to the scientific conversation? And that's when I learned I basically wasn't.

• 4:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, no. What did you publish it anyway? I guess at that point you have to.

• 4:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, absolutely, you have to. And you know, that's just part of the process. Because when you start graduate school, you're like a science baby. I mean, you have your inspiration for why you want to study particles. But you don't know what the interesting questions are and what we could actually learn in a reasonable amount of time. So you rely on senior people to guide you and help you pick a topic and get started on it. And so it was only when I finished my thesis that I feel like I knew enough to know what was interesting and what wasn't.

• 4:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, man, that's frustrating. I always tell the students that I work with, do you feel like you've read enough? Yeah, you haven't. Keep reading, go back and read. And they're like, no, no, I'm good. I'm like, oh, you're good? Read twice as much. You are not good yet. You just need to keep reading. That solves a lot of problems, but man, it's hard to know when to stop.

• 5:01Daniel Whiteson?

  And that's why your book has such a lengthy bibliography, Kelly.

• 5:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  At least I practice what I preach.

• 5:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, yes. And how about you? Do you feel like your thesis was exciting, was compelling? You got to answer a big, fat, juicy question?

• 5:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  I was asking whether or not this brain infecting parasite changes like some personality traits in the fish that it infects. And after like seven years, it took me a really long time to get my PhD. The answer is like, no.

• 5:33Daniel Whiteson?

  But you know, negative answers are just as important, right? You can't not publish it because the answer is not exciting or not that interesting. It's important to cross things off the list, you know? I've been doing particle physics for decades. I've never discovered a new particle. Every single paper I've written is like, and we didn't find this, and we didn't find that, and we didn't find this other thing.

• 5:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Mm hmm. I felt like I had designed a really good experiment. And so when I decided. The answer was no. I was like, oh, the answer is really no. I feel good about the answer being no. So yeah, no can be a satisfying answer also, but my PhD advisor would like me to finish publishing that paper.

• 6:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Wait, still? Are you joking?

• 6:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, I mean it. Yeah. I've published a lot of side projects and actually all of those side projects ended up becoming my dissertation. So we have had a lot of publications together, but the main project ended up being so massive and overwhelming and hard to analyze that I still haven't had a chance to write it up. But that is my 2025 project. And that's why I wrote a bunch of my other collaborators to say, I'm not doing anything else this year. I'm finally gonna publish my PhD.

• 6:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Was it also your 2020 project and your 2015 project?

• 6:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 6:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Science takes a while, people. Science takes a while.

• 6:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  It does, unfortunately. But you know what doesn't take a while? Sending an email to you and me.

• 6:49Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right.

• 6:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  And our amazing listeners have done that. And we have three fantastic questions today. All of them sort of more Daniel centric, but we've got a lot of Kelly centric questions queued up for our next Audience Questions episode. But should we jump into our first audience question today?

• 7:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Absolutely. Let's do it. And as a reminder, we're gonna be answering this question from a listener and then reaching out to the listener to give us a grade to see, did we answer your question or did we just confuse you even more? Or leave you unsatisfied with, nobody knows the answer, which is usually the way things things turn out.

• 7:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  But at least that's a real answer. So here we go.

• 7:28Speaker 05

  I have a question about the presence of supermassive black holes in our galaxy.

• 7:33Speaker 05

  So my understanding is we have evidence that a number of smaller galaxies have merged with the Milky Way in the past, right? And pretty much all galaxies have supermassive black holes at their center, right? So what happened with those other black holes when they entered our galaxy? Unless it was a direct hit, they wouldn't have merged with our black hole immediately, right? So how long did this merger take? And in the interim, it seems like there could have been just several supermassive black holes flying through our galaxy, circling the center. Do we have evidence of that happening? It seems like they must have left quite a path of destruction through the Milky Way. If not, is it strange that we can't find evidence of this? And could any still be out there right now?

• 8:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow, this is a super interesting and super informed question. Where do we start here, Daniel? Maybe we start with what happens when galaxies merge? Because this was all sort of new to me.

• 8:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, this is a really fascinating question. Basically wondering like, why don't we see a bunch of black holes zooming around the center of the galaxy? Why does it seem like there's only one in the center of the Milky Way? Chris has a pretty sophisticated understanding of how galaxies merge. And that suggests to him like, there should be a bunch of black holes. And that's my favorite kind of question. When you hear a listener having internalized something about physics and then drawing some conclusion, comparing that to the understanding and being like, wait, something's not fitting here. What am I missing? Because that's the essential process of science, right? Build that model, compare it to the data, update it. It's wonderful to see it happening in real time. So yeah, I agree. We should start by reminding the listeners, at least, who might not know as much as Chris does about how galaxies come together.

• 9:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Based on what you just said, I just want to confirm. Is it actually the case that every galaxy has a black hole at the middle? Because I hadn't realized that. But we've seen a lot of galaxies, so we should know if that's a consistent thing or not.

• 9:25Daniel Whiteson?

  So that's a great question. We don't have a definitive answer because we can't look at every galaxy in the universe. But every single galaxy we've looked at has a supermassive black hole at the center. Or we can explain where it went, like it got kicked out, or there was a collision or something. So there's very strong evidence that every galaxy has a supermassive black hole. But it's not something we understand. If we try to model the formation of those black holes at the centers of galaxies, the models don't describe the data. Like, we can't get our black holes to be as big in the models as we see in reality. Like, there are huge black holes at the center of galaxies only a billion years after the universe forms. We have no idea how you make such a big black hole so quickly. So there's a lot we still don't understand about supermassive black holes, for sure.

• 10:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Do we know why there's a supermassive black hole at the center of every galaxy? Does that make sense?

• 10:14Daniel Whiteson?

  We don't know why they're so big, but it makes sense that, you know, galaxies are big pools of stuff and stuff pulls on itself and falls towards the center. And eventually, if you get stuff dense enough, you're going to get a black hole. So it makes sense to have a black hole at the center of every galaxy. It's the densest point. And you cross that threshold, you get black holes. So yeah.

• 10:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, alright, so then let's back up to what happens when galaxies merge.

• 10:36Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, because Chris is asking why we don't see multiple black holes at the center of the Milky Way from multiple galaxies merging. And this touches on the whole story of how galaxies form. We think that all the galaxies we see today are made up of a bunch of little baby galaxies that came together to make big galaxies. So we don't think big galaxies were like formed all at once into some huge gravitational collapse in the early universe. We think that a bunch of little galaxies were made, and then those galaxies come together to make bigger galaxies. It's like a hierarchical bottom-up formation, rather than just like a single formation of a big galaxy.

• 11:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Is it easy to explain why we think it started with little galaxies coming together, as opposed to just lots of big galaxies forming?

• 11:18Daniel Whiteson?

  For a long time, there were both of those theories, the sort of top-down and the bottom-up approach. But you can tell the difference in the models, like the age of the stars and the formation and the structure of the galaxies are different if you start from little ones, which then build up together to make big ones. And we can see evidence for this. For example, in our Milky Way and surrounding the Milky Way, we see a bunch of little galaxies. We call them dwarf galaxies, that are not fully incorporated, that are sort of in the gravitational grasp of the Milky Way, but not completely eaten. So we see a lot of evidence for this theory that galaxies are formed sort of bottom-up.

• 11:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Alright, so galaxies are formed bottom-up, they all have supermassive black holes at the center. I think we did talk in another episode about how sometimes galaxies merge, and this is one way the Earth, we could all be in trouble if we got too close and we merged with another system. That's coming back to me now.

• 12:08Daniel Whiteson?

  And so these supermassive black holes at the center, just to remind folks, these are not little, normal stellar black holes, like a black hole that you think about from a collapsing star, like a star burns up all of its gas, and then it can no longer resist gravity and eventually collapses and forms a black hole. That's the kind of thing we expect to be like 10 solar masses, 10 times the mass of our sun, maybe. A supermassive black hole is something that's like 10,000, or a million, or a billion times the mass of our sun. So like, really extraordinarily massive objects that are out there at the center of these galaxies. Even these dwarf galaxies have them, up to like 50,000 times the mass of our sun.

• 12:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  So if we know that dying suns cause black holes, how do we get supermassive black holes? Is it like a dying sun party, like they all get together to see the sunset or something?

• 13:00Daniel Whiteson?

  We don't know the answer to that. Like, if you design a model where you say, "I'm gonna use all the known physics we have and the gravity," and you create these galaxies, you get black holes at the center, but they don't get this big. Like, they don't get as big as we see them out there in the universe. So they get massive, and we even call them "supermassive," but they don't get as big as we see. So we don't understand exactly how they form. There's lots of crazy theories. One theory is that black holes may have formed much, much earlier. They're called primordial black holes, before even there was matter, when the universe was still cooling and coalescing. Instead of making protons, maybe it made a bunch of black holes. So the black holes are much older than we think, and they've been forming matter for a long time. Nobody's ever seen one of these primordial black holes.

• 13:42Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, there's a lot of ideas for how these black holes could have gotten so massive. But for Chris's question, the point is, all of these galaxies come with a supermassive black hole. So what happens to the black hole during the merger, right? When two galaxies come together and make a bigger galaxy, do the black holes always combine? How long does that take? Why don't we see black holes in our Milky Way? This is super fascinating, because black holes are really awesome objects, and they're really massive. And the short version of the story is that we think galaxies come together, and then black holes merge. We think that supermassive black holes can merge into bigger black holes, just the same way like two stars that are binary stars both collapse to black holes, they can combine

• 14:22Daniel Whiteson?

  into a bigger black hole. And we've seen evidence of the smaller black hole collapse and merger. That's where the famous gravitational waves are from. They're from two black holes orbiting each other, going faster and faster and faster as they coalesce into a bigger black hole. So we've seen gravitational waves from stellar mass black holes. And then last year, we saw a lot of evidence, a little bit less direct, for gravitational radiation from supermassive black hole mergers, which we think correspond to galaxy mergers. Supermassive black holes at the hearts of galaxies coming together, swirling around each other, generating gravitational radiation, and eventually collapsing into a super-duper massive black hole.

• 15:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Is this a possible explanation for why supermassive black holes are bigger than theory predicts? Or has this already been explored? Like, are they bigger because actually you're just looking at one? And it was three that came together? Or that doesn't explain it?

• 15:20Daniel Whiteson?

  No, that doesn't explain it. We include that in our model and it can't describe the black holes that we see out there. You need something else, some other process that's juicing them up. You know, there was this paper last year about how black holes could be causing dark energy. And this is correlation between the acceleration of the universe and the size of supermassive black holes. But people don't really know if that's anything or nothing. There are papers examining like the size of the bulge in the galaxy and the size of the black hole. Those seem to be correlated, which suggests that it's not just something local. It's a bigger process across the galaxy. It's a very active area of research. And in a few years, I think we'll know a lot more because we're gathering a lot more data about supermassive black hole mergers from these pulsar timing arrays.

• 16:02Daniel Whiteson?

  You use the whole galaxy basically as a gravitational wave detector by looking at how the gravitational waves ripple across pulsars. It's really super interesting. One of the most fascinating things to me is that we actually don't understand how these supermassive black holes merge. Like theoretically, it's a little complicated when they get really close together.

• 16:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, when they get really close together, I guess I would just assume that they like attract each other and just like pull each other into each other? Or is that too simple?

• 16:31Daniel Whiteson?

  No, you're exactly right. And if they're heading right towards each other, boom, they just suck into each other. But remember, they're moving fast already. And if they're not exactly angled at each other, they're going to end up orbiting each other, right? There's going to be angular momentum. They're spinning around each other. Basically, if one black hole passes by the other one, instead of hit directly hitting it, it's going to swing around and the two are going to end up orbiting each other. Now, if those black holes are surrounded by a bunch of other stars, then they're going to lose energy and they're going to fall towards each other. And you might be thinking, well, what about the gravitational radiation? Isn't that going to sap the black hole's rotational energy so that they end up falling towards each other? Yeah, that's true. That happens. But that's not a lot of energy. It's not fast enough to explain how they actually fall together.

• 17:16Daniel Whiteson?

  What they need is the friction, the tugging from stars and gas and dust to slow them down and help them fall in. Gravitational waves are not enough. But when they get really close and there's no other stars and it's just two black holes orbiting each other, we don't understand why they eventually collapse. We think that's a stable situation. Like two black holes orbiting each other without any stars to like slow them down or whatever, they should do that for a long, long time. We don't really understand why they close that final gap. We know that it happens because we've seen evidence of gravitational waves from those mergers, but theoretically it doesn't quite make sense. It's called the final parsec problem. It's still an open question right now in physics.

• 17:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I'm assuming that we don't have a lot of these instances where you have two black holes orbiting each other that you can look at to try to get data because that's probably a pretty rare thing to see?

• 18:07Daniel Whiteson?

  It is hard to see because supermassive black holes are in galaxies far, far away, and it's very difficult to see these things and observe them. And you know, the time scale of these things is very, very long. So we have not yet detected individual supermassive black hole mergers. What we've detected with these gravitational wave observatories that span the galaxy is like a general hum from lots and lots of them. So we know that it's happening, but if we get data from an individual, and you're absolutely right, and track like what's happening over those last few seconds, we could learn a lot about how these things collapse. And so it's something we haven't understood. But still now to answer Chris's question, now that we have sort of the background on like how these galaxies merge and how the black holes mysteriously merge, even though we don't quite understand it.

• 18:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Chris is basically asking if the Milky Way is made up of all these galaxies and those galaxies have black holes and they merged, why don't we see a bunch of black holes at the center of the galaxy instead of just one, right?

• 19:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:03Daniel Whiteson?

  And the answer is that the Milky Way hasn't had a big collision recently. For some reason, the Milky Way is pretty smooth and chill. There hasn't been a lot of activity. So if we had recently in the last, you know, few hundred million years collided with a big mama galaxy, then yes, we probably would have two supermassive black holes at the center swirling around each other and we could watch it happen and maybe learn something about this final parsec problem. But we're sort of lucky, I guess, in that over the last few billion years, we haven't had as many collisions, which is probably one reason why we're not as big. Like, if you look at Andromeda, the nearby galaxy, it's much bigger than the Milky Way. It's a big mama galaxy, and pretty soon, eh, in a few billion years, we are going to collide with it and form some super-duper galaxy.

• 19:46Daniel Whiteson?

  But we're, I guess, a little bit quieter and a little bit smaller. And that's the reason we don't have surviving multiple supermassive black holes at the center.

• 19:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  And just to be clear, the physicist in you would really like to be around when our galaxy merges with another. But Kelly and her children would not want to be around because that could be a very chaotic time. Is that right?

• 20:06Daniel Whiteson?

  That would be a very chaotic time. Yeah, exactly. You know, even though it would be far away, like, the collision of two galaxies doesn't necessarily involve, like, collision of stars directly. It's a lot of gravitational perturbation. And we talked in a whole other episode about what that would be like. And it's pretty risky stuff. But yes, we would learn so much about black holes and how they work and how galaxies form and the history of the universe and our place in it. And it would be totally worth it. Sorry for your children.

• 20:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't think it's going to happen in our lifetime, so we're all right. So let's reach out to Chris and see if this answered his question. And then we're going to take a break before we come back for a question about setting off nuclear weapons in extreme weather events.

• 20:47Daniel Whiteson?

  So I sent our answer to Chris, and he wrote back to me in an email to say, quote, "That was a great discussion and a very satisfying answer. Thank you." So thank you, Chris, and you're welcome.

• 21:07Speaker 01

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• 21:38Speaker 03

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• 21:56Speaker 06

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• 22:19Speaker 03

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• 23:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, and we're back. Our next question is from Margie, and this one is a doozy.

• 23:14Speaker 05

  The other day, I heard that a certain politician wanted to use nuclear bombs to get rid of hurricanes. Politics aside, even though it's a bad idea, it made me wonder, what would happen if a nuke went off in a hurricane? Would it blow it out? What about the radiation in the ocean? Thanks.

• 23:34Daniel Whiteson?

  This is a really fun question, and it's what I've heard a few times people talking about. So I thought, you know what, let's hammer this out on the podcast in case somebody out there with their finger on the nuclear button happens to be a listener.

• 23:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hmm. All right. So I thought that this was an incredible question. As soon as I read it, I was like, oh yeah, I absolutely want to know the answer to this. And you said you've heard this question before. This was totally new to me. So let's start with how hurricanes even work. If we want to talk about how you would blow one out, let's know how they get started.

• 24:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, hurricanes are amazing demonstration of pretty basic physics. You know, heat flow combined with the rotation of the earth gives you this effect. And there's a little bit of a naming thing going on here. The broader category is called a cyclone. And if it's in the Atlantic or the northeastern Pacific, then you call it a cyclone. In the same storm in the northwestern Pacific, you call it typhoon. And if it's in the South Pacific or the Indian Ocean, you call it a tropical cyclone. So you may have heard all of these terms. They're actually all the same thing. They're all just cyclones. Hurricanes are like our version of them.

• 24:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Why? Why did they do that? Were they described by different groups living in different areas at different times? And those names just stuck? Or science sometimes goes a little crazy with our jargon? Is that what happened here?

• 24:48Daniel Whiteson?

  It's actually really fun because we're not 100% clear why we have three names. I mean, the most likely general explanation is the same reason why we have like multiple names for carbonated beverages, Coke, or soda, or pop. They originate in different groups organically, and then it becomes hard to reconcile. Once we realize, hey, these are all the same thing. We think the word hurricane comes from the Caribbean god Huracan, or the Mayan god of wind Huracan. I might be mispronouncing those. And then the words were later adopted by Spanish colonizers. The word cyclone comes from the Greek word kuklos, which means circle. It was coined in 1840 by Henry Pittington of the East India Company to describe storms in the South Pacific. And typhoons, that word doesn't have a clear

• 25:33Daniel Whiteson?

  origin. It might be from the Greek name of a monster associated with the wind, or a Persian word that means to blow furiously. But we don't know exactly where that word comes from.

• 25:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 25:44Daniel Whiteson?

  We're like, oh, that's actually the same thing. You call it hurricane, we call it a typhoon, let's call the whole thing off. But you know, sometimes in science, it's more dramatic than that. There's like competing groups and we think it's called a typhoon. We call it hurricane and then, you know, their minions propagate this kind of stuff. And we had an event like that in particle physics. We had the same particle named by two different people. And these days we give it both names because we couldn't settle the debate.

• 26:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  We have species descriptions like that. Two people didn't realize they were naming the same species, but whoever got their paper published first has precedence, I think. Maybe it differs by field, maybe the person who did it better. But anyway, I've been reading papers from the 1900s and sometimes they even do name calling and stuff. It's intense, but okay, all right. So different names, it's all cyclones. You say tomato, I say tomato.

• 26:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 26:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  What causes them?

• 26:32Daniel Whiteson?

  So a cyclone basically comes from warm water. It heats and moistens the air above it, right? So the ocean is warm, you get hot air above it. That hot air rises, that causes a low pressure because the air is going up. So now more air is gonna move in. So you have this effect where like air is getting sucked in and pushed up, right?

• 26:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 26:52Daniel Whiteson?

  The second step is to get it to spin. The reason it's spinning is because the earth itself is spinning. And this is super fascinating. It comes because the atmosphere at different latitudes is spinning at different velocities. Like, think about how fast the atmosphere is moving at the poles, where the earth is spinning. It's just in place, right? An air molecule above the North Pole is not moving anywhere. But an air molecule above the equator, it's sticking with the land. It's going a lot faster, right? So the air velocity depends on the latitude. The closer you are to the equator, the faster you're going. The closer you are to the poles, the slower you're going. All right, that's cool. Now, what happens if you're sucking air in? Imagine this cyclone.

• 27:36Daniel Whiteson?

  We have a low pressure region. We're sucking air in from the north and we're sucking air in from the south. Well, the air that's coming from the south, if you're in the northern hemisphere, is gonna be moving faster. And the air that's coming from the north is gonna be moving slower. So the air moving from the north is moving slower. Falls behind, the air moving in the south is moving faster, it gets sped up. And that's where the spin comes from. And that's why they spin the opposite direction in the southern hemisphere.

• 28:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Toilet thing.

• 28:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly, the famous fallacious toilet thing. But this is actually true, right? If you could flush your toilet with a hurricane, it actually would flush in a different direction in the northern southern hemisphere, except you couldn't call it a hurricane. You could call it like a tropical cyclone in the South Pacific. So yeah, in the northern hemisphere, they spin in a different direction than in the southern hemisphere. Super cool.

• 28:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, and let's be clear for anyone who missed that. Toilets do not flush in opposite directions in different hemispheres because it's all about the way the holes are put in the toilet seat, right? And that just makes it go in one direction?

• 28:35Daniel Whiteson?

  I have no idea how it actually works. I just know that it's apocryphal.

• 28:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 28:40Daniel Whiteson?

  But so that's the basic mechanism of hurricane, right? Starts with warm water, you get air rising, air rushes in from the sides. It's coming in a different speed, so it ends up spinning. So it's spinning because the earth is spinning. Like if the earth didn't spin, we wouldn't have hurricanes or cyclones or typhoons or any of that kind of stuff.

• 28:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so ways to disrupt this weather pattern would either be to like mess with the temperature or to like put a giant fan in there trying to counteract the spin. But we're talking about nukes, so nukes would heat things up. Could that stop it?

• 29:13Daniel Whiteson?

  I love the idea of using nukes because it's like, what's the biggest thing we got? We have this hammer, what can we do with it? I mean, you see this in space all the time. People are like, how do we power a spaceship? What if you blow up nukes behind it? And that's actually not a crazy idea, right? We're going to talk about that pretty soon on the podcast.

• 29:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, and Project Plowshares was a whole project in the US to figure out what you could use nuclear weapons for. We used them to build like bays and stuff like that, like let's blow that up too. Okay, so anyway, what about a hurricane?

• 29:40Daniel Whiteson?

  So it's not completely insane on the face of it because what is a hurricane? You have a hotspot. It's all about energy flow, right? You have this warm air heated by the ocean is rising and all this stuff is coming in. So if you could like disrupt that somehow, if you could create a hotspot somewhere else or move the heat or disperse it or something, could you disrupt this flow? So it's not insane, right? It's not just like. Hey, I'd love to nuke that. Let's do it. But the problem is that hurricanes are energy flow on a much, much bigger scale than even our nuclear bombs. Like, there is so much energy captured in a hurricane. I looked it up. Hurricanes release like 100 terawatts of energy. And the global power use annually is 25 terawatts.

• 30:23Daniel Whiteson?

  So like, this is an enormous amount of energy. It's four times as much as like, human use.

• 30:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so the biggest nuclear bomb ever exploded was by the Soviet Union. It was Tsar Bomba, right? How does that compare?

• 30:37Daniel Whiteson?

  So you would have to blow that guy up every 20 minutes to compare to the energy of a hurricane.

• 30:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 30:44Daniel Whiteson?

  So it's a big deal. Like, a hurricane is just a massive movement of air. It's because of the mass. Well, there are high speeds as well. You know, these winds can get up to hundreds of miles per hour. But there's just such a huge mass. I mean, you can see the things from space, right? It's big. And anytime you have something really big moving at high speed, there's a lot of energy. And it would take an enormous amount of energy to deflect it. So if you're gonna nuke it, it's gonna require like, all of the Earth's arsenal dropping down on this thing. It's not like a single tactical nuke is gonna deflect this thing. You wanna have an impact, it's gonna have to be huge. And then you're causing a nuclear winter. So I don't think you really accomplished anything.

• 31:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  You haven't solved any problems there. We started by saying that cyclones are because of heat. Is it possible that by trying to stop a cyclone, when we set a nuclear weapon off, we're just gonna make it worse? Because that's more heat.

• 31:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Is that what would happen? Or we don't know if it would get worse?

• 31:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, hurricanes are not something we totally understand, right? Anyway, we can't like, look at a hurricane and say, we know what's gonna happen here because we understand all the physics. We understand the microphysics, but it's such a chaotic system that a little wrinkle here, a butterfly flaps and swings there, the hurricane goes somewhere else. These things are difficult to model. We think that probably what would happen is you'd produce a shock wave, a pulse of high pressure. But we don't think that would actually have a big effect on like, the pressure of a hurricane. In order to change like, a big category five hurricane into a category two hurricane, you'd have to add like a Half ton of air for each square meter inside the eye of the hurricane, which is like 500 million tons of air.

• 32:21Daniel Whiteson?

  So, you know, it's hard to imagine like moving that much air around in terms of like changing the pressure. We don't have like the tool to do this, right? And, you know, fundamentally, like you have a big warm spot in the ocean. Unless you're going to completely disperse that heat, you might temporarily disorganize a hurricane, but the same forces that create it are just going to reorganize it. I mean, as you say, you're like, you're adding heat usually to the system. And so it's just going to come back stronger, you know, like a monster in a terrible movie. Plus, you're going to have like dumped a bunch of radiation into your atmosphere at very high velocity winds that are going to go everywhere.

• 32:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So you have just made me even more amazed that there are some people who don't evacuate when hurricanes come through, because I hadn't realized how much stronger they were than the explosions of nuclear weapons. We've established that heat equals bad in this case. Can you cool it down somehow? I'm guessing the answer is no, because this is just energy on a scale that is uncontrollable.

• 33:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 33:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Has anyone ever tried to like, cool it down?

• 33:24Daniel Whiteson?

  So the US government has sponsored a bunch of projects to try to interfere with hurricanes, which makes sense, like these are destructive things. Is there anything we can do? And in the 60s, there's this project called Storm Fury, which is a pretty awesome name, where the thought was, could we somehow disrupt the flow? Because the hurricane has these walls, there's a cloud circulating around the center. And they thought if they maybe seeded the clouds by dumping a bunch of silver iodide, which nucleates ice crystals, that this silver iodide would make these ice crystals, which could make like a new ring of clouds, which would somehow compete with the natural circulation of the storm and basically disorganize it. Sort of actually releasing some of the heat by forming these ice crystals, right?

• 34:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Releasing some of that water and then like growing the rainy part instead of this spinny part. The idea was sort of reasonable and they actually tried it on a few hurricanes, but it didn't work. And these days, we think that probably it failed because there isn't enough. Supercooled water to react with that silver iodide to have enough of an effect. And so people have tried stuff. Nobody's ever made it work. But you know, people are out there thinking about how can we protect ourselves from hurricanes? What are some things we can do? To me, this is kind of scary. It's in the category of like geoengineering, right? Like, hey, should we put something in our atmosphere to reflect sunlight? Like, you're dumping a lot of stuff into a storm. It could have a big effect. You have no idea where that storm is going to go. And then you feel responsible for it, right?

• 34:50Daniel Whiteson?

  What if the storm was going to hit a fairly uninhabited area? And then you steered it towards New York City? Now you're responsible for that. So I don't know whether it's a good idea or not.

• 35:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't know either. You know, actually, I'd love to have a whole episode on geoengineering stuff because it is so tempting. What if there was some way that we could all just keep doing exactly what we're doing? But just like, throw some stuff in the sky to take care of it. But yeah, I don't think we understand things well enough.

• 35:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, but they did. And in the 60s, they did it for Hurricane Esther and Hurricane Bula, Hurricane Debbie, and then Hurricane Ginger in 1971. I wasn't able to find more recent experiments. I don't know if those are like still classified or whatever. But it's definitely something people tried. Nobody's ever tried to nuke a hurricane as far as I'm aware, which I'm grateful for, though I know that our president-elect, it's an idea that he bounced around within his previous administration.

• 35:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I hope he listens to our podcast and we can help out in that way.

• 35:43Daniel Whiteson?

  I also remember seeing videos during some recent hurricane in Florida of people shooting the hurricane. It seems like, I get what you're expressing, your frustration, and this is the only tool you have. But like, you don't want the hurricane picking up those bullets and throwing them at high speeds at anything. So don't shoot hurricanes, people, with nukes or with bullets or really anything. Just get out of there.

• 36:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, don't contribute to the problem, just leave. That's sound advice there. So let's see what Margie thinks of our sound advice and see if she felt like this was a good answer.

• 36:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Maybe we can convince her to slowly slide her finger off of that big red button.

• 36:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  I wonder how much power Margie has. Spare us, Margie. All right, well, here are Margie's response and then we'll take a break.

• 36:29Speaker 05

  Wow, I'm a little surprised that it would just reform after a blast. But let's say a nuke was

• 36:38Speaker 07

  Shot off in a hurricane in the middle of the ocean. And then it started spreading radiation all over the place. Would it still be spreading radiation when it came ashore?

• 36:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Very glad we were able to answer your question, Marzy. And that's a great follow up question. Yeah, it would be very bad to release a lot of radiation into a hurricane. The sort of long range danger from a bomb going off is exactly having high winds which spread those radioactive materials around. And so dropping one into a hurricane is basically the worst case scenario for containing that radiation. So yeah, the winds and the water would spread that radiation really far and cause a lot of damage. Again, not a good idea. Please don't drop a bomb into a hurricane.

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• 38:18Speaker 06

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• 39:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  So, our next question is from Kevin, so here we go.

• 39:49Daniel Whiteson?

  This is Kevin from Shenzhen, China, and I have a question about philosophy. If a photon turns into electron and a positron, and the electron and positron annihilates into another photon, are the two photons exactly the same? If they are the same, how can the photon appear and disappear out of the air? And if they aren't the same, is there a point when the first becomes the second? Ooh, thank you Kevin for asking such a fun physics/philosophy question. Totally love this one.

• 40:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I absolutely love hearing that we have international listeners. This totally made my day. And Daniel is clearly the right guy to answer your question. So, what's happening, Daniel?

• 40:30Daniel Whiteson?

  So, what's going on here is that photons, when they fly through space, you might just imagine like, hey, it's a little packet of energy. It wiggles through space, that's it, right? But we also talk about photons doing other stuff, like photons can fly along, and then we say sometimes they can turn into a pair of particles. Call this conversion. Like a photon is flying along and it turns into an electron and a positron, two particles, so maintaining the overall charge of zero. And then those particles can annihilate. They can turn right back into a photon. So, you can imagine like either just a photon flying along, which turns into like a little loop of particles, and then turns back into a photon. And Kevin is asking like, what does that mean about the photon?

• 41:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Is that the same photon that comes out after this particle loop? Or is it not? And if it's not, then like, exactly when does the new photon get born?

• 41:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  So is this philosophically the same as the transporter problem?

• 41:27Daniel Whiteson?

  It's actually very similar to the transporter problem. And it touches on, you know, what do you mean by this photon? And how do you kill a photon? And all sorts of stuff. And because in the end, these are quantum processes, right? And the transporter problem in the end comes down to like, any time an object moves from place to place, it's equivalent to making a copy of it and destroying the old one. Especially if we're all just ripples in quantum fields. It's just your information sliding along. And so basically, every moment in your life, you're being transported through space and time. The same way a teleporter works, just smaller distances. And so, yeah, does that matter? Are you being killed every instant and being recreated some other place? What does that mean about being killed? I don't know. Anyway, it's a big rabbit hole of philosophy.

• 42:11Daniel Whiteson?

  But here, we're focusing on a single photon.

• 42:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so you're not going to answer that question for us by the end of this answer. What do we mean then by same? If it's the same photon, what would that mean?

• 42:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so there's two issues here we have to grapple with if we're going to think about what this means. And that's one of them. And the short answer, the big picture answer to this question is that there is no good answer to this question. Because the picture that I just described and that Kevin probably has in his head and a lot of people think about for photons, it's a cartoon picture. It's not like our microphysical explanation for what's really happening. Like, you know, in biology, you can have a microscopic explanation. You can say, oh, the reason you're sick is a virus came in and attacked your cell and it penetrated the cell wall. And you can have this picture in your mind of these tiny things happening that explain what we're experiencing on the big scale. And that can be reality. So that if you like zoom in with a microscope, you can actually watch it. That's awesome, right?

• 43:04Daniel Whiteson?

  And we try to do the same thing in physics. Provide a microscopic explanation for what we think is happening. And that can be very satisfying. But it's sometimes a cartoon and it's misleading. Because what's happening at the microscopic scale is fundamentally Very, very different from what's happening in biology or in the classical scale. It's not like tiny little balls are bouncing off each other or converting into particles. You can't slow these things down and watch them like a movie and get a version of the microscopic story. So, you know, what we mean by a photon isn't just like a photon is flying through space or a photon flies through space and makes a particle loop. It's sort of all of those things mixed together. So that's why we have to identify what we mean by a photon and what we mean by same.

• 43:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  So does this go back to our what is a particle discussion? And do they work as waves or strings? Or so the question is hard to answer because we don't even really know how to describe these things?

• 43:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. And Kevin is picking out one aspect of that cartoon. And really, a photon is all of those things. So let's start by talking about what a photon is and then we can dig into what do we mean by the same photon?

• 44:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 44:10Daniel Whiteson?

  If you think about a photon, it's just you're thinking about a single packet of light that goes through space. Quantum mechanically, Kevin is right that the photon could do that, but it could also convert into this pair of particles and go back. It could also convert into those pair of particles. And then those particles emit photons, which then turn into other stuff and turn into other stuff. There's an infinite number of things that a photon could do when it goes from A to B. And each of those things comes with a probability. And when we talk about the photon, we don't mean one of those particles in one of those stories. What we really mean is that whole bundle. We mean the whole thing all mixed together because we don't know what's happening. And there is no what's really happening. The photon, the thing that we think about, the thing we should identify with is all of those possibilities,

• 44:55Daniel Whiteson?

  not any individual one of them or any part of them.

• 44:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  So when we were doing the what is a particle episode, we talked about how you don't explain the wave theory of how you describe particles until grad school. And so this question is making me wonder how the fact that we are all taught to think about these as like little points that are moving around. How much does that inhibit all of our abilities to think about these things? Like, should we be changing the way we address this in high school? I know it's much harder to explain it as a wave, but it's wrong, it sounds like, the way we explain it.

• 45:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. Quantum field theory in kindergarten, that's what I think. No, it's a great question, and I think you're right. And you see it in physics students as they learn this stuff. You teach them to think about particles, and then you're like, actually, all your intuition is wrong. You have to unpack that and learn this whole other thing. And, you know, I'm very interested in physics education. We have these conversations, like, what is the right order to teach people in? But there's sort of this canonical order that everybody uses that sort of follows the historical development. It's like, we thought this, then we thought that, then we thought that. And as you move through your physics education, you sort of catch up to modernity. And I think it is important to understand where these ideas came from, like, why people thought this and why people thought that.

• 46:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Because just like with the names of hurricane and typhoon, there's a lot of, like, weird, patchy stuff that doesn't really make sense unless you understand the history. So you kind of got to teach people the current ideas, but you also want to give them a tour of how we got here so they can understand why some of it seems weird and ugly. So I don't know the right answer to your question.

• 46:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. I mean, yeah, see, no reason why we couldn't start with, here's the wave theories and string theories of particles. And then after be like, well, here's the history, let's talk about how we got here. So that people would be less confused. But anyway, I'm not a physics educator, but I guess I kind of am.

• 46:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I guess, so we have opinions at least. So in that episode about a particle, we also talked about how you can think about particles as, you know, little dots flying through space, turning into other stuff. You could also think of them as fields, right? Instead of imagining a bit of stuff, imagine a field filling the universe, and particles are ripples in those fields. And those two things are actually mathematically equivalent. You can think about everything as particles, and they pull and push in each other by passing other particles between them. Or you can think of it just fields and energies flowing between the fields. And I think the fields picture is really helpful to think about for this question because... What we're talking about is not just one particle. It's a particle interacting with another particle, right? Photons turning into electrons and back and forth.

• 47:35Daniel Whiteson?

  And in the field picture, that's kind of beautiful. What we see there is two fields interacting. Like a photon, as it flies through the universe, is not just a ripple in the electromagnetic field, as we say, because the electromagnetic field affects the electron field and vice versa. So when you say in the particle picture, okay, a photon is flying along and it can turn into an electron and positron and go back. In the field picture, there's the same thing as saying energy can slosh from the photon field to the electron field and back. And what's really happening is not that there is an electron there or there is a photon there, but the thing we call a photon is this interaction between the two fields. So that's the problem with putting your finger on like, is it the same photon? Well, what do you mean by photon?

• 48:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Do you mean just the electromagnetic field, like theoretically pure concept? Or do you mean the thing we see in the universe, which is this like buzzing interaction between photons and electrons? Or the photon and electron fields? That's really what a photon is. A photon that hits your eye from a droga has interacted with the electron field all the way between there and here.

• 48:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, can we give a two-sentence answer to summarize?

• 48:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so what is a photon? A photon, I think, is all the possible things that could happen between A and B. When the photon is created and the photon is observed. You can't really dig into what happens in between because there are multiple possibilities and all of them play a role. Right? So now to Kevin's question, what do we mean by the same photon? Well, you know, I think that you can't really think about those individual photons and say, is it the same? And if you tried, you get yourself into all sorts of other hairy messes that we touched on earlier. Like, think about an individual photon, not just flying through space, but like bouncing off of a mirror. What happens when a photon bounces off of a mirror? Well, we think it's absorbed and re-emitted at the right angle. Is that the same photon?

• 49:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, you know, it's like if you shine a light on the mirror, the light hits your eyes. We think of the light as bouncing off and hitting your eyes, but it's been reabsorbed and re-emitted. Is that the same? If you say that's not the same, that means that every time particles interact, they're no longer the same particle. But particles are interacting constantly, all the time. You are a huge pile of particles interacting, which means that you are not the same you you were a millisecond ago. So that leads nowhere. If you say that particle interaction means they're not the same particle anymore, then you have no useful meaning for the word same. Then you have to say, well, then maybe a particle is the same if it's like mostly unchanged. You shot the photon at the wall, it bounced off and it's mostly the same energy and the same frequency and all that kind of stuff. So it's mostly the same photon, even though it's

• 50:05Daniel Whiteson?

  interacted. So from that point of view, then the answer to Kevin's question would be like, yeah, it's the same photon. And I think philosophically, unpeeling it, it's a big blob of energy, it's flowing through the universe, it's oscillating between the different fields. It doesn't really matter that has a chance to be an electron here and a chance to be a photon there. It's the same blob of energy that was sent to you from Andromeda. So I think it's the same photon. So does that make sense to you, Kelly? What do you think?

• 50:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. All right. That makes sense to me. Here, let me see if I can explain it. Okay, so the reason that it's a complicated question is because it's hard to think of a particle as like a point in space. They're like packets of energy that are interacting with other packets of energy and they can be hard to describe. You know, they're interacting like they're a wave, like they're a string, but they're just sort of things that are interacting with other things. And that's what they're doing all the time. And so to try to figure out, is this the exact same thing when part of how we understand it is that these things are changing and interacting over time?

• 51:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Mm hmm. It makes it an awkward question. Yeah.

• 51:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. Is that an okay way to summarize it?

• 51:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I think that's great. I'm giving you a PhD in internet physics right now.

• 51:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, right. Okay, but grades are really important to me. And I haven't gotten one in like 15 years. So can you tell me I got an A? Actually, I kind of feel like that was more like a B answer.

• 51:23Daniel Whiteson?

  No, that was a solid A answer. And now I'm curious what Kevin thinks about our answer. So in a moment, you'll hear Kevin giving us a grade on our physics answers to his philosophy question.

• 51:35Speaker 07

  Hi, Daniel and Kelly. Thank you for answering my question. I think you mean that a photon is quantum mechanical. So it's a mix of the probabilities of all the possible things that can happen. Also, depending on the meaning of same, the photon is the same and not the same at the same time, which is mind boggling. I told Totally love these kinds of answers.

• 51:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thank you so much to Chris, Margie, and Kevin for their amazing questions today. We had so much fun thinking about these problems. And if you have a question that you would like to share with us, please write us at [email protected]. We would love to hear from you.

• 52:14Daniel Whiteson?

  We would, and your friends will be so impressed to hear your voice on a podcast, especially a nerdy podcast like ours.

• 52:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Huzzah!

• 52:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Thanks, everyone. Keep asking questions and stay curious.

• 52:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  See you later.

• 52:32Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 52:37Daniel Whiteson?

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

• 52:43Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 52:50Daniel Whiteson?

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

• 52:56Kelly 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.

• 53:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

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• 56:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.