Oldest Molecule, Programmable Proteins, Europa Radar & Light’s Double Life (EP. 3)

We go from the universe’s first chemistry to tomorrow’s designer biology, swing by Mars to tune Europa Clipper’s ice radar, and finish with a fresh take on the double-slit experiment. In this episode The “oldest molecule” puzzle (HeH⁺), cooling the early universe, and why JWST’s findings matter Programmable proteins: reassigning codons, recoding organisms, and real biosafety Europa Clipper’s REASON radar test at Mars: frequencies, ice thickness & ocean clues Double-slit, demystified: single photons, “which-path” info, and measurement reality Chapters 00:00 Intro • 01:26 First molecule • 22:27 Programmable proteins • 43:05 Europa radar • 55:00 Double-slit • 1:15:03 Sign-off

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

• 0:00Lester Nare?

  Hello Internet, this is your captain speaking Lester Nare, joined again by our co-host and resident PhD Krishna Choudhary. This is from First Principles. We have four great stories lined up for you all today. Starting with, scientists have solved the oldest puzzle in the universe and have earned an invite to our game night. They're gonna be on my team. The second story, scientists recode the genome for programmable synthetic proteins. Eat your heart out, Ozempic. Number three, NASA's new radar just pulled off something impossible and may in fact lead us to the aliens. And we will wrap up with our fourth story. Physicists confirm that like Superman,

• 0:41Lester Nare?

  light has two identities that are impossible to see at once.

• 1:02Lester Nare?

  My friend, how are you?

• 1:04Krishna Choudhary?

  I'm doing well, how are you?

• 1:05Lester Nare?

  I'm doing quite well. Three days in a row, we've been together.

• 1:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:09Lester Nare?

  Now doing episode three.

• 1:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep.

• 1:12Lester Nare?

  Really excited for what we're gonna talk about today. Some of these stories are really interesting. So, oldest puzzle in the universe.

• 1:19Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right.

• 1:19Lester Nare?

  A 13 billion year old puzzle. Our first story starts from the Max Planck Institute.

• 1:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 1:26Lester Nare?

  Headline, scientists just recreated the universe's first molecule and solved a 13 billion year old puzzle. What exactly did they solve for?

• 1:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. The first molecule is an interesting one, right? It's the universe's first composite structure of multiple atoms. Okay? In order to really understand this, this story is really about primordial chemistry. Okay? It's the first chemistry that the universe saw. And it's extremely important for understanding the early universe and also for understanding like fundamental questions like how we got here. Right? Because obviously, small things that happened back then lead to huge deviations when you stretch out the timeline to 13 billion years when it is now, right?

• 2:15Lester Nare?

  Like the butterfly effect.

• 2:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. And so, things that happened back then, you want to really understand. At a, at a nitty-gritty level, in order to really make sense of the universe that we see today. Right? So, this story out of Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg. That's an experimental story, but it also has a theoretical twist. So, when you say experimental versus theoretical, what exactly does that mean? Experimentally, meaning that in the lab, they actually created Okay. this primordial chemistry, and then they studied it to see what the reactions could be like back when the universe first started. So, experimentally, they did this. And then theoretically, they actually got some insight into how we can start modeling that early universe, right?

• 2:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Because obviously, we can't go back and like, like, experiment on the early universe. The best we can really do is like, look with telescopes. But even the James Webb Space Telescope is only gonna look as far back as the first stars. Mm-hmm.

• 3:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Because it requires light. Right. Right? And the other, I mean, we could look at the cosmic microwave background, which is, which is gonna be part of the story. And that thing was at three hundred thousand years after the Big Bang. So, in order to really make sense of this, I think we should start at the very beginning. Okay. Start at the top, okay? In the beginning. In the beginning was a point. And the point was extremely small, right? Infinitesimally small, they say. It's a singularity. And then it pops into existence. The Big Bang happens, and immediately, um, the physics that we know comes into being. Not, not exactly immediately. There's a, there's a short time right after the Big Bang, where we don't know what the hell is happening.

• 3:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Because the energies and the densities and the temperature is so high that current physics understanding breaks down. But if you go past that, the first thing that happens is, um, you're gonna get like protons and neutrons. Okay. The stuff of ordinary atoms. Except, they're not gonna be in atomic form.

• 4:12Lester Nare?

  How how do you mean?

• 4:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, like the sun, for example, the interior of the sun, or most of the sun, actually. Um, is in a state called a plasma, okay? Because stuff is so hot. That the electrons don't wanna stick around the nuclei.

• 4:28Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 4:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so you've got hydrogen and helium nuclei on the sun. But like because it's so hot, the electrons can just like. Go off on their own. And so you have this soup. Of protons and neutrons and atomic nuclei. And then you have electrons just bouncing around in a soup of light. So. Atoms haven't formed because you need to be cold enough. For the electrons to agree to to stick around and orbit the nucleus. If there's too much energy, then the photon will come in and it'll just. Bounce it right off.

• 4:58Lester Nare?

  Run away from home.

• 4:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And so that's what the if you've seen the images of the cosmic microwave background.

• 5:03Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 5:04Krishna Choudhary?

  This beautiful like. Map of the early universe in blue, red and green.

• 5:08Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 5:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Um. And that is the first ever picture of the universe. At three hundred thousand years, we can't go before that. We can't go before that because. Before that, light wasn't free. To roam the universe.

• 5:22Lester Nare?

  Oh.

• 5:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Because there were no atoms. It would just go from one electron to another charged particle to another charged particle and bounce around. And it was wasn't free like, okay, the reason why I can see the moon. Right?

• 5:33Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 5:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Is because the light from the moon is coming all the way.

• 5:36Lester Nare?

  It's free to travel.

• 5:37Krishna Choudhary?

  It's free to travel all the way, right? Cause there's nothing there, even like you, right? There's air here.

• 5:41Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 5:42Krishna Choudhary?

  But the air isn't doing much to the light. Because. It's pretty diffuse, there's not a lot of density and a lot of it is neutrally charged molecules, right? It's like the the electrons have a neighbor. Neighboring positive charge that they're interacting with. So the freely flowing light doesn't really interact with it all that much.

• 6:01Lester Nare?

  But prior to that three hundred thousand year mark, it's basically darkness.

• 6:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, it's basically so hot. That it's like, it's not even, it's like darkness because it's the opposite of lightness.

• 6:10Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 6:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Of like of, yeah, you know, like it's there's so much light. That it's so hot that the light can't go anywhere and and it doesn't mean anything to see something.

• 6:19Lester Nare?

  In that context.

• 6:20Krishna Choudhary?

  In that context, right?

• 6:21Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 6:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Um.

• 6:22Lester Nare?

  So even though even using the phrase darkness is not technically accurate.

• 6:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 6:26Lester Nare?

  Uh, because it it it's not, but as an analogy to.

• 6:29Krishna Choudhary?

  As in in in terms of we can't see it, we can't see the light, there's like a wall.

• 6:33Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 6:34Krishna Choudhary?

  And we can't see further back in time.

• 6:36Lester Nare?

  You know what's funny, this like reminds me of this idea that in software you have like administrator privileges and then users can access certain app. Aspects of the app, but you can't get into how the core algorithms work.

• 6:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 6:48Lester Nare?

  And it's kind of like the algorithm of the universe at that very base level, we're we're currently blocked from being able to actually access.

• 6:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly, and you know by that analogy, even even though you can't see that algorithm, right?

• 6:59Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 7:00Krishna Choudhary?

  You would be able to look at the software.

• 7:02Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 7:02Krishna Choudhary?

  And know sort of underlying what's what's under the hood. If you're an experienced coder, you could look at an app. Or you know, any kind of thing and then know sort of what the structure of the underlying database. And that's sort of what we're trying to do with a lot of the other studies where we're trying to see, okay, what happened before this? This three hundred thousand years ago, like were there gravitational waves that were going and propagating? Where was there a discrepancy between matter and antimatter? All of this stuff. You know, because we're pretty good at physics by now, that we can like look at this picture and like now start looking at the little details. And start piecing together stuff that happened before, but this story is about stuff that happened after.

• 7:44Lester Nare?

  So that's the setup. So that's that's so the idea is the reason it's the first molecule is because of where in time we're able to do this detection.

• 7:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, as as soon as atoms formed.

• 7:54Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 7:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? As soon as atoms for formed, the first thing they want to do is once it's cold enough, they want to start forming molecules. Molecules are just like multiple atoms interacting, right? Like in this in this room, we've got nitrogen, lot of nitrogen. So that's N two, two nitrogen atoms that share electrons, okay? Um, also oxygen, obviously, right? That's why we're alive. Um, over here, the universe first created only three elements. In the beginning, there were only three elements. Hydrogen, helium, and a little tiny bit of lithium, okay? But when I say they created these elements, it's the nuclei. The electrons aren't anywhere, but these nuclei form. Hydrogen is just a single proton, right? It's like kind of a cop out to even call it, but like it's like, okay, you got a proton, that's hydrogen.

• 8:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, helium, you've got two protons, two neutrons, so and then lithium, you've got three protons. Usually four neutrons, okay, so the lithium seven.

• 8:51Krishna Choudhary?

  As soon as the, as soon as light breaks free, now electrons can start forming atoms. So now you've made a hydrogen atom, you've made helium atoms and lithium atoms.

• 9:00Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 9:00Krishna Choudhary?

  The first atom to actually form was actually helium.

• 9:03Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 9:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, not hydrogen.

• 9:04Lester Nare?

  That's interesting.

• 9:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and it kind of makes sense when you think about, um, if you've, if you've done chemistry, there's something called the, um, ionization potential. So helium has a higher ionization potential. Basically, what that means is, it's like, um, it's, it likes having electrons around it.

• 9:21Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 9:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, the nucleus, it's got two protons, right? Two protons, it's got these two empty spots where electrons can be in, because there's two protons, the electrons are happy to hang out.

• 9:31Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 9:31Krishna Choudhary?

  With hydrogen, there's a single proton, so the pull isn't that much, and so you need, the, the electron has to be sort of lower, you know, and the, the temperature has to be lower for this thing to make sense.

• 9:41Lester Nare?

  That makes sense.

• 9:42Krishna Choudhary?

  But helium has got more of a pull because it's got two protons.

• 9:44Lester Nare?

  That makes sense.

• 9:45Krishna Choudhary?

  So helium forms, and helium is moving around, and there's a bunch of protons, hydrogen atoms, right? And so all of a sudden, you form something called, um, helium hydrate, which is helium with a hydrogen proton. But no extra, no extra electrons, so only two electrons in this molecule.

• 10:04Lester Nare?

  Interesting.

• 10:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Three protons, so it's an ion.

• 10:05Lester Nare?

  Right, okay.

• 10:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay?

• 10:06Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 10:07Krishna Choudhary?

  It's an ion. Helium atom, hydrogen proton, and then there's, the pro, the electrons sort of go around it.

• 10:13Lester Nare?

  All, all three together.

• 10:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, okay. Um, this is the first, first molecule that's, that, that was formed, and having molecules is extremely important for stars. And you might be, like, that's, when I first read about this, I was like really confused, because stars are helium-making factories that take hydrogen and make helium. So, there's no molecules on the sun.

• 10:37Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 10:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Unless they're in, it's in the outer, outer, but like, inside the sun, there's no molecules.

• 10:42Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 10:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? So why do we need molecules?

• 10:45Lester Nare?

  In order to then?

• 10:46Krishna Choudhary?

  In order to make stars. That's the fundamental question.

• 10:48Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 10:48Krishna Choudhary?

  We need molecules in order to make stars. The reason why is, we need the universe to cool down drastically.

• 10:56Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 10:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? If we're a soup of, of hot gas, even if it's neutral gas.

• 11:02Lester Nare?

  Kind of like me this weekend.

• 11:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, oh yeah, I heard about that. Yeah, but if we're this like soup of hot gas. The way a star forms is you've got some like gas cloud. And then it's gonna collapse under gravity, right? It's gonna be spinning very slowly and it's gonna collapse under gravity, so. Conservation of angular momentum, it's gonna spin faster. Now, um. When it collapses, it's gonna heat up, right? Stuff is gonna bump into each other and start heating up. Heating up means what? Thermodynamically, it means the things are moving faster. If things are moving faster, that's kinda like an outward pressure, right?

• 11:43Krishna Choudhary?

  And if gravity's trying to pull it in, but there's an outward pressure pushing out, there's gonna be a balance. You need to keep having gravity pull in. So what you need is some kind of pressure release valve. Okay, right. That lets go of all that energy. Right.

• 11:59Krishna Choudhary?

  And that's what we mean by cooling down. We need to cool this thing down and we need to, by conservation of energy, all this energy from the thermal motion has to go somewhere. And it would be best if it just leaves in terms of radiation. Remember, radiation is also energy. Yes. Right? But the, so there's two ways in which this thermal radiation can go. One is it stays there, so things just keep bombing into each other. Yep. Getting faster and faster, getting faster and faster. That's just, the energy is getting locked in the heat of the thermal motion. But if, if we, if, if we somehow let the radiation just go freely, then we're slowing down. Got it. Right? Because of conservation of energy. Yes. And if we're slowing down, we're cooling. Yes. And then that pressure is no longer there, and so it can contract even more.

• 12:45Krishna Choudhary?

  And then cool more, and then contract even more. So we need some way to dump all of the kinetic energy that is in the motion of heat. Into radiation, into light. Okay? How do we do that? Molecules are really good at doing that. Interesting. Converting sort of thermal motion into light. Okay? And the reason why a molecule can do that, so like, if you just have an atom, it's just a billiard ball. I mean, atoms obviously radiate, right? There's the hydrogen energy spectrum where the electron bumps to a higher energy and goes down like these lights that we have in the studio. I don't know if, I don't know what element these guys are, but like old school back when like we used to have those like white incandescent lights, right?

• 13:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Those were mercury. Those had a mercury gas and the white would be from the mercury. Energy levels going up and down because you pump electricity, the electrons go up and down, they release light and you get this white light. Right, you get like distinct colors that end up being white light. Okay, so individual atoms can do that. But they can't do that under a certain temperature, okay? Because those energy levels are discrete because of quantum mechanics, right? So under a certain energy level, if the photon at that energy is not big enough to kick this transition. Then you're just stuck moving around being billiard balls. Cause the, the temperature is so low that like the, the, the excitation isn't enough to do this, okay? So all of a sudden now you're stuck. This happens at around ten thousand Kelvin.

• 14:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Ten thousand Celsius, about eighteen thousand Fahrenheit. Okay, so the universe is like bigger now. Um, it's cooled down a lot. But we need to cool down further. Atoms won't be able to do this. Okay, so instead what you have is molecules. And what molecules can do is they can vibrate. Right? They have like vibrational modes of energy, they can rotate. And bump into each other that way. They can, they have these dipole transitions, like each molecule has a quantum state. Like, um, and, and so those quantum states are actually at the energy level of this ten thousand and lower. So if you can make molecules and you can have those molecules then heat up. Those molecules will then radiate away. And then you can finally form these stars.

• 14:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so understanding this chemistry is really important for understanding the speed at which the universe cooled down. In its first like million years, right? And that's when those first stars formed. Those first stars then created the ingredients for other stars, like they could be the things that created the galaxy centers that created galaxies, right? So, so this is very important for us to understand how we got here to understand the chemistry at the very beginning.

• 15:24Lester Nare?

  The, the idea is here, kind of like we started with, there's a butterfly effect that happens, right? In terms of where the starting point of the universe is and like where we are here in this space. And there are these interesting transition points. One of which is, you know, the transition point from the soup. To then having our first molecules. And from the first molecules to then having the first things like stars. And what's interesting is kind of just the way you talked about it. I- it's kind of non-intuitive that you needed molecules to first exist. In order for then stars to actually have the capability to even.

• 16:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Even form.

• 16:03Lester Nare?

  Even form themselves. And so the reason why this thirteen billion year old puzzle is so important. It becau- is because it fills in this gap of seeing how it went from first molecules to stars. Which now gives us the ability to understand how long did it actually in this early universe. You know, we can begin to extrapolate from this to look at star formation. And really begin to have a deeper, more robust understanding of some of those sort of later stage actions.

• 16:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, exactly. Like, how did the first stars form? Because when they formed, they would tell us, it would also tell us how big the stars were, right? There's a, there's a hypothesis that the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies. Are actually these dead first stars, right? Because that's the only way you can have like a, a million solar mass.

• 16:55Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 16:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Thing.

• 16:56Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 16:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 16:57Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 16:58Krishna Choudhary?

  So, it's, it's, it's extremely important to understand like very fundamentally what the universe is about.

• 17:03Lester Nare?

  And, and what's, what's incredible about this study is that, uh, this is not, it is, it has theoretical implications. For how we do simulations, etcetera, but this was an experimental result.

• 17:16Krishna Choudhary?

  This was an experimental result. So what they did was, they, they were concerned with this helium hydride, helium and H plus. And they were concerned with how this interacts with sort of the next few molecules that arise. Which is, the next molecule that will probably arise is like, um, hydrogen, right? Molecular hydrogen, which is H two. Now, H two is not very good at dissipating energy, because H two is a symmetric molecule, right? It's just like mirror image. So like, there's some vibrational modes, but there's no dipole in the sense that like, all of the electrons aren't squished on one side. With helium and hydrogen, all of the electrons are basically hanging out near the helium, because there's two protons and one. Right, so then you have this like electric dipole where like there's this charge imbalance.

• 18:01Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 18:01Krishna Choudhary?

  And that charge imbalance gives the molecule the ability to do a bunch more like energy transitions and then like dissipate out more heat.

• 18:10Lester Nare?

  Because there's like this empty block that it needs to resolve for.

• 18:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, there's an asymmetry and then and then like any tiny little thing is gonna kick it in a weird way and you know. Then you get into these quantum states and so on and so forth, which we don't have to get into. But for hydrogen, H2, it's not very good. Hydrogen and deuterium, deuterium is um, it's an isotope of hydrogen. Um, chemically, it's the same as hydrogen, but it's got a proton and a neutron. Right, so it's just a little bit heavier.

• 18:35Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 18:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Now, if I have a deuterium and hydrogen, now there's like a slight imbalance of mass. Right, so then you can have some sort of other stuff, but it's not nearly as good as helium hydride. So the problem is, we wanna, they wanted to figure out how often does helium hydride transition to helium deuterium.

• 18:53Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 18:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, because like if this thing, if this thing is really slow. Then helium hydride could stick around for a really long time and dissipate a lot faster.

• 19:02Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 19:03Krishna Choudhary?

  But what they actually found was that this helium hydride to helium deuterium.

• 19:07Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 19:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Is actually quite fast. Okay, theoretically, it was postulated that it would be quite slow because there's like some kind of ener- they thought that there's some kind of energy barrier that prevents this reaction from happening.

• 19:20Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 19:20Krishna Choudhary?

  But like new simulations and like somebody actually calc- found like a mistake in the old simulations. Because scientists are always like.

• 19:31Lester Nare?

  You sure about that?

• 19:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly. So, so they found this mistake and so it turns out there isn't an energy barrier, right? And what better way to experimentally confirm this than to actually make the thing and then make the reaction happen? And they, what they found was, yeah, there isn't an energy barrier, so even at very low temperatures, you can have this transition happening. Which means that the helium hydride is turning into this, this other not very good molecule. So.

• 19:55Krishna Choudhary?

  That kind of slows down the cooling.

• 19:57Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 19:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Of this universe a little bit, right?

• 19:59Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 19:59Krishna Choudhary?

  And if it slows down the cooling a little bit, then we need to start re-simulating. That how those stars formed. If we were under this assumption that the chemistry was happening this way and now it's happening this way. Right? It impacts the cooling efficiency.

• 20:12Lester Nare?

  Because everything will shift on the thirteen billionaire thirteen billion year timeline, one way or another, based on the rate at which the cooling can can happen. Like things either happen sooner.

• 20:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 20:22Lester Nare?

  Or later.

• 20:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Or later.

• 20:23Lester Nare?

  Depending on this as one of the many, many, many variables in that equation.

• 20:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, and then we can use that and then start looking at James Webb stuff. Space Telescope observations of the first stars, which are, I mean, this this thing is pushing the limits to how far back we can see. Light, right? So we're seeing like the first very first stars that are almost thirteen billion. I think there's some that are even older than thirteen billion years, not older than the universe. But like almost immediately when stars could form, we're seeing that star.

• 20:51Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 20:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 20:51Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 20:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, so um. It's incredibly exciting to be like, okay, like now we have. I think we have a better handle on this primordial chemistry.

• 21:00Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 21:00Krishna Choudhary?

  And now we can start building these models. Science is an iterative process, right? So it's like, once you do this, now you can do more complicated things. And you can push back the envelope further and further into like. Just how much we know. And what about the early universe?

• 21:14Lester Nare?

  And this, what's interesting is how this kind of ties to. Obviously, James Webb has been. Sort of more in the news, in the popular science news because of its capabilities set, how much has been spent on it, etc.

• 21:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 21:27Lester Nare?

  And what's interesting is you have. The results we're getting from James Webb over here. But we still have other fundamental science research that impacts how we interpret.

• 21:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 21:37Lester Nare?

  Uh, and analyze this brand new, fresh, highly robust data set in ways that makes it. Even more valuable than the extremely valuable category that it's already been labeled as.

• 21:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's kind of cool like this was done on in a lab on earth, right? In Heidelberg, Germany.

• 21:53Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 21:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Like so. Experiments here. Experiments here can tell us about like stuff that's happening. You know, the chemistry that's happening like. Three hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, kind of cool.

• 22:05Lester Nare?

  It is kind of cool. Please keep all the Big Bang Theory jokes to yourself, uh, as we've already seen them flooding the comments.

• 22:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, guys, I can, I can talk to girls, okay? I can talk to them sober.

• 22:17Lester Nare?

  So that's, that's a fascinating, the universe's oldest puzzle. One of which we've now have an interesting answer for, courtesy of the Max Planck Institute. And so, we're gonna shift to another story that's about really small stuff.

• 22:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh yeah, this one's awesome.

• 22:36Lester Nare?

  Which is now coming out of Yale University. So the story out of Yale is Yale scientists recode the genome for programmable synthetic proteins. A team of synthetic biologists have rewritten the genetic code of an organism using a novel cellular platform for producing a new class of synthetic proteins. Very fascinating, a little bit earlier this year this came out. And so, you know, help us understand the implications of the ability to recode the genome for specifically programmable synthetic proteins.

• 23:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, um, you know, we've, we've talked about synthetic bio on this podcast before, like the power of CRISPR. This takes it even a step further, okay? This is like, honestly, I thought this was kinda crazy when I read it, okay? So CRISPR is the programmable DNA tool, right? That's the thing that lets us snipe a bit of DNA here, and then other enzymes will come in and put in whatever custom bit of DNA we want, right? This thing is making like, so with CRISPR, one can imagine that this genome sequence was maybe possible without humans, right? Through mutations and stuff like that.

• 23:46Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 23:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Here, we're making synthetic biology that like literally could not be possible without humans.

• 23:52Lester Nare?

  The idea is like, CRISPR, like the, you could see natural processes get the result of what we can.

• 23:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, maybe in a billion, yeah, it'll take like forever, right? Here, we're like, so CRISPR, we're using the same Lego blocks, right?

• 24:03Lester Nare?

  That already exist.

• 24:04Krishna Choudhary?

  ACTG, right, that already exist. We're just, we're just reprogramming like how the ACTG is said because we know what the code is, and then we can create our own proteins. Here, we're creating new Lego blocks.

• 24:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Entirely. Does that make sense? So we're adding more letters to the, in this analogy. Yes, not to the DNA, but to the proteins. General, the protein creation synthesis itself. Yeah, so, so let's go over some basic molecular biology, okay, because that's what's gonna be needed for this. Okay. So, DNA, DNA comes in four letters, okay, there's four building blocks that make up DNA. And DNA is essential to all life, right, that's where we get the genetic information from. And that tells us the blueprint of how to create whatever we want to create. Okay, DNA comes in four letters, A C T G, these are nucleotides, they're just like tiny molecules. Um, they've got three parts and you build a ladder on top of each other and you create a giant little, um, I guess staircase of.

• 25:03Krishna Choudhary?

  The double helix. Of the double helix, right, and then the unique DNA, you have unique DNA, I have unique DNA. And that determines like the kind of organism you're gonna be, the facial features, everything and everything. It determines whether you have good genes or not. Oh, yeah, yes, yes, those are the genes we're talking about, people. Not on the body, in the body. No, in the body, um, and so, DNA is pretty standard, four things. Proteins, on the other hand, there's twenty different amino acids that life uses. Okay. Okay, so twenty different building blocks. Got it. All right, now, what DNA does fundamentally is it tells the, it tells the cell which proteins to put in a sequence.

• 25:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, and, um, what these guys have done is created new amino acids. Entirely. Entirely. Beyond the initial list of twenty. Yes. Oh, wow. You see what I'm saying? No, no, no, that, like, we invented a new Lego block. Yes, we invented a new Lego block for proteins. That's actually, okay, which is, which is the implications of which now. Yeah, we can just, let's discuss the implications, first, let's get into the science, which is, because I think, I mean, experimentally, this is like such a hard thing to do, okay, and I'm gonna get into why, um, so first. Why, why even do this in the first place? Um, why does it make sense to do this? So, here we're gonna get into a little bit of mathematics, okay?

• 26:27Krishna Choudhary?

  So, there's, there's four, there's four letters in DNA. Yes. But I wanna code for twenty. Amino acids. Um, yeah. Yes. Let's say twenty distinct words. Okay. Four letters. Four letters, twenty distinct words. Twenty distinct words. Now, I can't just have one word, one letter per word. Right. Cause then I'd only have four words. Yep. A C T G. Yes. Okay? With two letters per word, I would have sixteen, right? I can have A, A, A, T, A, C, A, G, and so on and so forth. So, four times four, sixteen words. Yep. With two letters. Yep. But with three, I have four times four times four, that's sixty-four. Yes. Yeah, so I can do sixty-four. Yep. Different words. Words, combinations with those. But I only have twenty. Right.

• 27:11Krishna Choudhary?

  So, I need a minimum of three, but that means that there's a bunch of repetition. Right. Right? Cause I have sixty-four different possible words. Yeah. But only twenty different meanings. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, multiple words are gonna mean the same amino acid. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah? Yeah, yeah. And so, there's gonna be this redundancy. Yes. And life codes for that, right? So, for example, um, there's one, there's one, three, there's three, three-letter words. T G A, T A A, and T A G. All of these three code for stop making a protein. Okay. Okay? Okay. A T G, it's so, like, you can imagine, there's a little, like, enzyme, um, called all RNA polymerase.

• 27:55Krishna Choudhary?

  That like goes down and it tries to find A T G. Yep. Okay? That becomes A U G. I guess it tries to find A U G, um, in mRNA. mRNA uses a different set of letters. Instead of T, it uses U. Anyways, there's a little, there's a little, like, guy who goes down and he's trying to find A U G. Okay? Once he finds A U G, he's like, oh. A protein starts here.

• 28:15Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 28:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Then he recruits a bunch of other stuff. There's a ribosome that comes in, which is the protein making factory. Ribosome attaches over there. And then now the ribosome goes, okay, what are these three, what are these three letters? Okay, I need this thing.

• 28:27Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, next. What are these three letters? Okay, I need this thing, right? And so it keeps going until it reaches something called the stop code on, which is a signal to stop.

• 28:36Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 28:36Krishna Choudhary?

  That's the end of my protein.

• 28:37Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 28:38Krishna Choudhary?

  And there's TGA, TAA, and TAG. There's three different words that mean the same thing, stop.

• 28:44Lester Nare?

  Right, right. And like, in theory, I think, I think I can see where we're going with this. Because what we're sort of saying is there's, there's this natural redundancy where certain combinations all equal the same action. We don't necessarily need all of those.

• 28:59Krishna Choudhary?

  We don't necessarily need that.

• 29:00Lester Nare?

  To have the same action, because we already have the action. So I, I.

• 29:04Krishna Choudhary?

  We just need one.

• 29:04Lester Nare?

  Yup.

• 29:05Krishna Choudhary?

  We just need one to reliably mean stop.

• 29:07Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 29:08Krishna Choudhary?

  And then the other two, what if we coded some crazy meaning?

• 29:12Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 29:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? That's never been seen before.

• 29:15Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 29:15Krishna Choudhary?

  So what if I created an amino acid that's never been seen before, that has unique chemical properties?

• 29:20Lester Nare?

  Yup.

• 29:20Krishna Choudhary?

  And then I started using that to create proteins that have never been seen before.

• 29:23Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 29:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Not even in the millions of years of, of biology.

• 29:27Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 29:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? In the trial and error.

• 29:29Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 29:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Because, so proteins are effectively this chain of amino acids. And on the back of each amino acid is something called a, um, an R group. Um, I think it's called a residual group, but I might be getting that wrong.

• 29:42Lester Nare?

  They'll get us in the comments.

• 29:42Krishna Choudhary?

  In any case, yeah, they'll get us in the comments. The R group is basically the thing that makes the amino acid what it is. Sometimes it's like a sulfur atom. Sometimes it's just a lame carbon atom or a hydrogen atom. Sometimes it's like a phosphate group, which has a charge.

• 29:55Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 29:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So you can have like, like a bunch of things that have charge. And then those charges on either side will start folding the protein, and that's what gives it the 3D structure. All of these R groups interacting in this 3D kind of way is what folds this 1D chain into a 3D molecule of a protein that like makes. A protein do what it does.

• 30:17Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 30:17Krishna Choudhary?

  But now, what if we can have different R groups that like with different elements?

• 30:20Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 30:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Or like completely unique properties.

• 30:23Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 30:23Krishna Choudhary?

  That start making the protein do crazy things.

• 30:25Lester Nare?

  Because what the, because what's interesting is you have the chain, but the, to get the effects, it needs. Into the folded three D structure. And sort of what we're now saying is, in the wake of something like, as kind of like a side note, in the weight of something, in the, in the wake of something. Like, uh, the Google's product that they put out, which created the library of all the different, uh, protein fold.

• 30:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. Google, um, Alpha Fold. They won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year.

• 30:52Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 30:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 30:52Lester Nare?

  And so what you're.

• 30:53Krishna Choudhary?

  They actually, they're actually using some AI to like try and figure out what effect this kind of stuff would have.

• 30:58Lester Nare?

  But even if we can see what the protein effect is, what this is sort of saying is we're actually changing the factory that builds them. To do it out of the box.

• 31:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 31:08Lester Nare?

  Effectively and create these new protein structures, which have these emergent properties that can be.

• 31:16Lester Nare?

  Completely net new than anything we've ever been able to experimentally.

• 31:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think this is even like, like Crispar gives us the ability to make new DNA.

• 31:26Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 31:27Krishna Choudhary?

  But like new DNA in terms of like with the same letters.

• 31:29Lester Nare?

  With the same Lego blocks.

• 31:30Krishna Choudhary?

  With the same Lego blocks. This is like new proteins with like.

• 31:35Krishna Choudhary?

  You know.

• 31:35Lester Nare?

  Like who knows what?

• 31:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Who knows what? We could, we could start imagining, now we have, we can use a full vocabulary of sixty four.

• 31:43Lester Nare?

  Which, which if we started with twenty.

• 31:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 31:45Lester Nare?

  And we now.

• 31:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Diversity of life that we get.

• 31:49Lester Nare?

  Let alone, uh, now almost tripling, right, or over tripling, the, a number of again fundamental ways in which you can. Generate and some, this is actually really.

• 32:03Krishna Choudhary?

  And like, it was actually like so hard to do.

• 32:06Lester Nare?

  I can, I mean, obviously.

• 32:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, it's like so hard to keep a bacteria alive and also like mess with it so much. That like, you know, the, the, this poor bacteria is like, bro, like, I have no idea what's going on, right? So what they did was they first started with a strain that already had one of the, I think TAG was. So TAG is one of the other stop codons?

• 32:26Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 32:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Already completely eliminated, okay? They had just like, they had just like done crispr enough to remove all of the TAGs. Okay?

• 32:34Lester Nare?

  In this, in a separate con- or in this.

• 32:35Krishna Choudhary?

  In a, in a separate context.

• 32:36Lester Nare?

  Separate context.

• 32:37Krishna Choudhary?

  In a separate context. So they're like, let's start with that thing, cause one of them's already done.

• 32:40Lester Nare?

  Because, cause someone removed it and everything worked fine.

• 32:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 32:42Lester Nare?

  What we're sort of saying. So it's like, we feel comfortable that if we recode it for something else, there are not gonna be any negative derivative impacts of the removal.

• 32:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 32:49Lester Nare?

  That's already been taken care of.

• 32:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. So next what they did was, they said, okay, now I wanna, I've got two other stop codons, TAG and TAA. I'm gonna do, what I'm gonna do is make TAA the stop codon. It's the stop codon. That's the thing that's gonna tell something to stop.

• 33:03Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 33:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Making a protein.

• 33:04Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 33:04Krishna Choudhary?

  TGA is what I wanna repurpose for something else, okay? So, first thing what you gotta do is, there's something called, like, so how does a, how does the, how does the cell know to remove? So, to stop protein making.

• 33:18Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 33:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Once it sees this. There's these, these things called release factors.

• 33:21Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 33:21Krishna Choudhary?

  That are proteins in themselves.

• 33:23Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 33:23Krishna Choudhary?

  And they look at, oh, there's a TGA, okay, everybody stop, stop what you're doing, okay? So, they got that protein, kicked it out.

• 33:30Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 33:31Krishna Choudhary?

  They, they got the gene.

• 33:32Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:32Krishna Choudhary?

  For that.

• 33:33Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:33Krishna Choudhary?

  For that thing. They booted it out of the genome. So now that thing doesn't, so that like policeman.

• 33:38Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:38Krishna Choudhary?

  That's there to like, say, hey, I see a TGA, you better stop.

• 33:41Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 33:41Krishna Choudhary?

  That thing's gone.

• 33:42Lester Nare?

  So we've defunded the police.

• 33:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so we defunded the TGA police.

• 33:45Lester Nare?

  The TGA police.

• 33:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And we've kept the TAA police.

• 33:49Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 33:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay?

• 33:49Lester Nare?

  Got it, got it.

• 33:51Krishna Choudhary?

  And we've deleted a bunch of non-essential genes, so we've made the genome a lot shorter. Um, this one's interesting. So there's three genes in the E. coli, um, genetics. Where TGA happens in the middle.

• 34:05Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 34:05Krishna Choudhary?

  But like, something gets put in instead, cause TGA is sometimes a stop codon. Cause you know biology, there's never a hard fast rule. It depends on the context of where this codon is in terms of the rest. So. There's three very important genes that has TGA in the middle. So they, they were like careful enough not to completely remove all TGA.

• 34:25Lester Nare?

  It wasn't, it wasn't a blanket delete.

• 34:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 34:27Lester Nare?

  It was a delete except for.

• 34:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, and, and it, and the other parts weren't a delete. It was a substitution instead of TGA, they put in TAA.

• 34:36Lester Nare?

  Got it, got it.

• 34:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 34:37Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 34:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so, so except for this part, because if they put a TAA, then that protein is done and then.

• 34:42Lester Nare?

  That makes sense.

• 34:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, so the, even, even that, that they're targeting, like, you know, you can't see this, you're not like reading it. Going, eh, I want, you know, like, the, you, you gotta make some molecular machinery and experimental apparatus to actually target the correct ones. Leave out the ones that are important.

• 34:58Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 34:58Krishna Choudhary?

  So they did that, then they ran into some problems, which is release factor two, which is the TAA police.

• 35:04Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 35:05Krishna Choudhary?

  TAA police because was starting to get, um, confused. Because it started not only like, it, it started recognizing the wrong thing.

• 35:15Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, because we've messed with this thing so much.

• 35:18Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 35:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, it started, it started sometimes not recognizing TAA, because we put in so much of it.

• 35:24Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 35:25Krishna Choudhary?

  And then somebody would put in, um, a tryptophan amino acid there, instead of stopping the protein production.

• 35:30Lester Nare?

  Got it, yep, yep.

• 35:31Krishna Choudhary?

  So then now they're like, okay, we gotta make TAA police better.

• 35:34Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 35:35Krishna Choudhary?

  At being like, no, that's a TAA, you better stop.

• 35:37Lester Nare?

  Understand the new dynamics that have kind of been created now.

• 35:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and so they, they, they then messed with the TAA genetics.

• 35:43Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 35:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, once they did that, they, um, they used assays, like, which are basically like, you know, um, you do a bunch of like, uh,

• 35:51Lester Nare?

  pipettes.

• 35:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Chemistry and pipetting, and you try to see which proteins are expressed and so on to make sure that this works. Um, the other thing that I found really interesting was, in order to confirm that this worked, they would also infect it with viruses.

• 36:04Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 36:05Krishna Choudhary?

  This bacteria, and the viral, so the way the virus works is it hijacks the bacterial machinery.

• 36:10Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 36:11Krishna Choudhary?

  To like make more copies of itself.

• 36:12Lester Nare?

  Replicate itself.

• 36:13Krishna Choudhary?

  But if, if we've done this right, then the virus is coming in, looking at this new machinery, like, where's my stop? Like, what, what's going on?

• 36:20Lester Nare?

  Where's the factory that I.

• 36:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, where's the factory that I normally do, and then it won't work.

• 36:24Lester Nare?

  That is.

• 36:24Krishna Choudhary?

  That's isn't that kind of cool?

• 36:26Lester Nare?

  No, that is very intriguing.

• 36:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 36:28Lester Nare?

  That is, there's so many levels of.

• 36:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 36:30Lester Nare?

  I mean, we could have multiple podcasts on just.

• 36:32Krishna Choudhary?

  No, this is so crazy. Yeah.

• 36:35Lester Nare?

  Because there there's so many layers of current understanding that are required to even be able to.

• 36:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, yes.

• 36:42Lester Nare?

  To do this.

• 36:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, the the hierarchy of processes that happen within a cell at the molecular level.

• 36:48Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 36:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? I'm talking like, like, yeah, it's it's just incredible, the understanding that we have. And finally, what they did was. So now, when they're all done, they have TGA and TAG, which are like now.

• 36:59Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 36:59Krishna Choudhary?

  We can do whatever we want. So then they got these two, um, they're called non-standard amino acids.

• 37:04Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 37:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Basically made up by us.

• 37:06Lester Nare?

  Right, right. Outside of that initial list of.

• 37:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And so and so then they reworked the chemistry that once, you know, there's a part, the ribosome, it sees some three-letter thing. And then it's like, okay, I'm gonna grab this thing.

• 37:17Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 37:18Krishna Choudhary?

  It started grabbing the right thing and to grab the the this new thing that we made up, we have to make it mimic everything else.

• 37:24Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 37:24Krishna Choudhary?

  So that the ribosome doesn't think anything different. It's just like, oh, this is the one, the the login key, right? And so they did that. And then finally, they created. Um, this new E. coli, they call it um, ochre, O C H R E. It's a genomically re-coded organism. It's not the first genomically re-coded organism, but this is the first one where they've done all of this.

• 37:46Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 37:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Like new, like.

• 37:48Lester Nare?

  Not just changing, we're not just doing the the changing at the DNA level. It is now producing new proteins.

• 37:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 37:57Lester Nare?

  That we have made up.

• 37:58Krishna Choudhary?

  With new Legos.

• 37:59Lester Nare?

  With new Legos that we gave it.

• 38:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 38:02Lester Nare?

  And it's doing so on its own, like, we've created it such that it can self-sustain this new.

• 38:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 38:08Lester Nare?

  Process.

• 38:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like alive.

• 38:10Lester Nare?

  And it's alive. With all of this new internal dynamics. Part of which we just made up from whole cloth.

• 38:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's incredible. It's an incredible story. Like it's from the Reinhard and Isaacs lab at Yale University. Well done.

• 38:25Lester Nare?

  Well.

• 38:25Krishna Choudhary?

  I mean, yeah.

• 38:26Lester Nare?

  This is, we're definitely gonna almost certainly come back to this story because I am sure they're gonna be.

• 38:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, there's gonna be. I mean, now that, now that, I mean, this is the first step in creating a sixty-four Lego block.

• 38:38Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 38:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Alphabet.

• 38:39Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 38:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Actually, it's gotta be sixty-two because you need one to start, one to stop. Fine. So you, but sixty-two is a lot more than twenty.

• 38:46Lester Nare?

  And if we can, and yeah, and right, and so like, the amount of, of emergent and derivative properties, behaviors, dynamics that result from tripling the number of Lego blocks that are fundamentally a part of this protein and amino acid.

• 39:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 39:03Lester Nare?

  Generation process. I mean, let the imagination run wild.

• 39:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's like, it's dude, it's like, it's like, we're, it's like, we're, we've been making houses out of mud huts. Like, we've been making mud huts. All of a sudden, now we got steel.

• 39:17Lester Nare?

  Steel, right, right, right.

• 39:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Like.

• 39:19Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 39:20Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, like.

• 39:21Lester Nare?

  You know what this, this is, I'll, I'll, I'll end with this note because.

• 39:24Krishna Choudhary?

  And this, one thing I wanted to say was like, uh, it's, safety concerns are there.

• 39:30Lester Nare?

  Of course.

• 39:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And, but I was reading at the very end of this article, they were talking about like, how did you, how do we do the safety concerns? One of the things that's interesting is you could make these organisms dependent on this new Lego block.

• 39:43Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 39:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And that way, if it gets out, it's just gonna die.

• 39:48Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 39:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Because this, these Lego blocks aren't out here.

• 39:51Lester Nare?

  In the way.

• 39:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Like, normal E. coli survives everywhere because it depends on the twenty that are found in us, in, in plants and everything.

• 39:58Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 39:59Krishna Choudhary?

  But like, if it, if it requires like some like weird thing.

• 40:02Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 40:02Krishna Choudhary?

  That's only found in labs, well then, yeah.

• 40:05Lester Nare?

  Because I guess the implication of what you're trying to get at is if this newly, if this new form of E. coli were to have a leakage problem, we don't necessarily understand.

• 40:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 40:17Lester Nare?

  What would happen in a, in a free, in a free environment.

• 40:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 40:21Lester Nare?

  How it would impact flora, fauna, other ecosystems.

• 40:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 40:25Lester Nare?

  Um, let the conspiracy theories run wild.

• 40:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:28Lester Nare?

  But that's not the third.

• 40:29Krishna Choudhary?

  But, but one, one way that we could mandate safety is to say that like, okay, how about like, you, these E. coli, like, in order to even digest sugar or something? Like that protein has one of these.

• 40:42Lester Nare?

  Yeah, right, right.

• 40:43Krishna Choudhary?

  So then it can't, it's just gonna like die.

• 40:46Lester Nare?

  The world is gonna get very, very, very.

• 40:48Krishna Choudhary?

  I'm sorry, I stopped you in the middle of something.

• 40:51Lester Nare?

  Cause I always try to think of analogs to help me kind of frame some of these topics and I was talking to someone the other day that um. They were talking about, uh, obviously this is related to the UAP issue. And they kind of made a similar point. It's like when you look at the periodic table, you know, we have all this certain number of elements that are on there. Uh, but we've only really figured out how to engineer those elements at their current, like at certain isotopic.

• 41:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 41:16Lester Nare?

  Ratios. So we're, it's a- as an analogy, we sort of have like whatever the number is at those set isotopic ratios.

• 41:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 41:24Lester Nare?

  But if we could figure out how to one create stable states of these other ones or environments where we.

• 41:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, or like create the magic number element at like one twenty or whatever.

• 41:31Lester Nare?

  Then you open up a new set of tools by which you could then engineer things.

• 41:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 41:37Lester Nare?

  Uh, but we have a, we're not using all of the possible theoretically possible available tools.

• 41:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 41:42Lester Nare?

  In that context, there's a similar, that's so it's how.

• 41:44Krishna Choudhary?

  It's similar, yeah, it's um, in that context, I will say that we have a much better understanding of physics and chemistry there.

• 41:50Lester Nare?

  For sure.

• 41:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Right with biology because there's like ten to the ten more moving parts. The possibility is like, yeah, it's like we're at whereby, we're in biology where physics was, I think in the nineteen teens, nineteen twenties.

• 42:07Lester Nare?

  Okay, okay.

• 42:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 42:08Lester Nare?

  Which, which means.

• 42:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is like when we were like, oh, it's an electron.

• 42:13Lester Nare?

  Which means we still have not yet had our, you know, our, what is.

• 42:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Manhattan Project.

• 42:17Lester Nare?

  Yeah, right, like our sort of mid nineteen nineteen hundreds moment where there's just this incredible explosion. Um, of, of like.

• 42:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Literally.

• 42:26Lester Nare?

  Uh, literally of like practical applications of the fundamental science.

• 42:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, dude, it's nuts.

• 42:31Lester Nare?

  Great story.

• 42:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Like even though this, this story is kind of old, I think it was February.

• 42:35Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, but like I, I came across and I was like.

• 42:38Lester Nare?

  No, we have to talk about it.

• 42:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Lester's got to, got to learn about this.

• 42:41Lester Nare?

  This is, this is really good.

• 42:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Crazy.

• 42:42Lester Nare?

  This is really good. It's unfortunate that it, it was uh, out of our rivals in New Haven, but.

• 42:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 42:48Lester Nare?

  Well, well, well, they're part of the, they're part of the club. We'll give, we'll, we'll give it to them.

• 42:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, at least it's not Harvard.

• 42:54Lester Nare?

  Go Tigers. Uh, okay, that, I'm gonna have to sleep on that one. Our next story, uh, we're going back into space.

• 43:03Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right.

• 43:04Lester Nare?

  Like our first story. NASA's new radar just pulled off something impossible. So during a, uh, uh, during a close Mars flyby, NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft tested its radar system reason for the first time in space.

• 43:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 43:21Lester Nare?

  And this is interesting because I said at the top how this might lead us to aliens. So how do we get from a radar at Mars to aliens?

• 43:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Aliens. That's what it's always been about, man.

• 43:35Lester Nare?

  Always about aliens.

• 43:35Krishna Choudhary?

  It's always about aliens. Um, not like intelligent life. I don't think there's like, um, you know, sea people.

• 43:43Lester Nare?

  Yeah, right.

• 43:43Krishna Choudhary?

  In Europa. But Europa is an extremely important, um, planetoid. It's not really a planet. It's a moon of Jupiter, but if it was, if it was going around the sun, it's quite big, honestly.

• 43:54Lester Nare?

  It's fair.

• 43:54Krishna Choudhary?

  It's quite big. Um, it's bigger than our moon. Um, and it's a planet that has ice on its surface. And we're pretty sure has an ocean underneath.

• 44:04Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 44:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? And we're also pretty sure that it's geologically active.

• 44:09Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 44:09Krishna Choudhary?

  So there's like volcanoes.

• 44:11Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 44:11Krishna Choudhary?

  And the reason why that makes us super excited is because those are sort of the conditions where we find um, a lot of life on Earth in, um, deep sea hydrothermal vents.

• 44:22Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 44:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Those things are some of my favorite places that, you know, if I didn't have a, um, a debilitating fear of water, like I would go in a submarine and visit hydrothermal vents.

• 44:35Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, unfortunately, that I think I'm never gonna do that.

• 44:38Lester Nare?

  It's not happening.

• 44:39Krishna Choudhary?

  But like those, so hydrothermal vents are places on the earth where there's like basically volcanic geothermal activity happening under, under the ocean floor. It's been happening probably for billions of years. Um, it's probably where the first life originated around Earth. Um, and it's also one of the only places where the fundamental source of energy does not come from the sun.

• 44:59Lester Nare?

  Oh, interesting.

• 45:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, that's what's cool. Everywhere else on earth.

• 45:02Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 45:03Krishna Choudhary?

  The fundamental source of energy comes from the sun, right?

• 45:06Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 45:06Krishna Choudhary?

  That becomes like photosynthesized and blah, blah, blah. But geothermal places, I mean Yellowstone, I guess is another. The bacteria in those thermal pools, um, they're getting their energy from the kinds of chemical compounds that are coming from, from the earth. Hydrothermal vents are pretty nice because like there's so much diversity of life down there.

• 45:22Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 45:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, there's bacteria, there's like sponges, there's like all sorts of crazy stuff. So we're thinking Europa has that and we wanna get there.

• 45:31Lester Nare?

  And we wanna get there.

• 45:32Krishna Choudhary?

  And we wanna look at it.

• 45:33Lester Nare?

  And this radar system, this Clipper spacecraft ultimately is destined for Europa.

• 45:39Krishna Choudhary?

  It's gonna get there in twenty thirty.

• 45:41Lester Nare?

  Twen- okay.

• 45:42Krishna Choudhary?

  So it's got a long ways.

• 45:43Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 45:43Krishna Choudhary?

  It was launched last year.

• 45:45Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 45:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, it already made its way to Mars. It's gonna do this like gravity assist, so it's gonna go around Mars, then it's gonna come back to earth, I think, twenty twenty six for gravity assist from us and then shoot off to.

• 45:56Lester Nare?

  It's a double rainbow.

• 45:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 45:57Lester Nare?

  All the way.

• 45:58Krishna Choudhary?

  It's doing a, it's doing a comeback and then it's gonna do it, right? And it's got, um, it's got a lot of systems to try and see Europa for what it is. Um, usually when we've sent stuff to Jupiter, like Europa hasn't really been in the focus, right? We've, there's so many cool things to see around Jupiter and Saturn and things like that. So this one is specifically designed for, um, Europa.

• 46:19Lester Nare?

  Very interesting.

• 46:20Krishna Choudhary?

  It's got, it's got two things that are really cool. The one is it's got a really nice thermal camera.

• 46:24Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 46:25Krishna Choudhary?

  So with the thermal camera, what you can do is you can look at the ice and see if there's parts that are warm, parts that are cold. Which would be those. Maybe the warm parts are where the water's coming out or like where the geothermal activity is.

• 46:35Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 46:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Extremely accurate thermal imaging. Then there's also a radar system. This is, um, the radar is called Reason. It means, um, it's a short form for Radar for Europa Assessment and Sounding Ocean to Near Surface.

• 46:51Lester Nare?

  Right, because the idea is it's going to be doing its detection at that ice layer. And just slightly below that ice layer.

• 46:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 46:59Lester Nare?

  And we will be able to then make uh have a better picture.

• 47:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 47:04Lester Nare?

  Of what is actually there.

• 47:05Krishna Choudhary?

  I mean, how deep is the ice? First question.

• 47:07Lester Nare?

  Cause it right.

• 47:08Krishna Choudhary?

  How how like, you know, maybe we wanna go there and drill.

• 47:11Lester Nare?

  Drill and it's like.

• 47:11Krishna Choudhary?

  But then it's like, okay, how how how deep do we gotta go?

• 47:14Lester Nare?

  Is this gonna be Armageddon where we have to send, you know, uh, you know, to drill two miles into the incoming asteroid?

• 47:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it might be two miles. Uh, I think, I mean, they estimate that it's something like twenty kilometers.

• 47:25Lester Nare?

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 47:26Krishna Choudhary?

  So um, and but you know, we got robots.

• 47:29Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 47:29Krishna Choudhary?

  And we can do it. We can do it. Yeah. So the radar, there's two different types of radar. There's the high frequency radar. Which is at nine megahertz and that's gonna give us like up to um thirty kilometers.

• 47:41Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 47:42Krishna Choudhary?

  In depth.

• 47:42Lester Nare?

  Oh, great.

• 47:43Krishna Choudhary?

  So we'll be able to see like, okay, what's the depth of the ice? How how far away is the ocean?

• 47:46Lester Nare?

  So if it's below, if the ice is only twenty kilometers, then we would be able to basically detect that.

• 47:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Like the ocean.

• 47:52Lester Nare?

  The ocean, that's the ten below that.

• 47:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And then we also have um very high frequency, which is at sixty megahertz. Um, and that gets us to about four kilometers.

• 48:02Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 48:02Krishna Choudhary?

  But we have a lot higher resolution.

• 48:04Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 48:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Unlike spatial features and things like that. So there we can see like, what are the fissures in the ice like?

• 48:09Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 48:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Like, how do those move around? What is the geologic history of that ice crust?

• 48:15Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 48:15Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, because if you look at, you look at Europa, there's like these long gashes and like fissures. Clearly, there's like movement in the ice, right?

• 48:23Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 48:23Krishna Choudhary?

  That's coming from, well, one, it's so close to Jupiter, that Jupiter's gravity liter- literally like stretches and and squishes it.

• 48:31Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 48:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, and that's what's causing the geothermal motion.

• 48:33Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 48:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? The moon is geologically dead. Mars is geologically dead. But Europa and Io, which is the even closer moon, they're geologically active because Jupiter is so massive that it literally like.

• 48:44Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 48:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Squishes and like, you know, the moon is tugging on the earth and because the earth has a fluid. There's tides.

• 48:50Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 48:50Krishna Choudhary?

  This one, this tidal friction, but it's it's so powerful that literal planet is doing tides, right? And it's like squishing and like, so there's a lot of geothermal mo- activity there. There's probably a lot more in Europa.

• 49:03Lester Nare?

  That makes sense.

• 49:04Krishna Choudhary?

  So that's what we're trying to find and and um it's gonna be really interesting. The the cool part to me was um. You know, you could ask like, why why can't you just, so here, it was right on Mars. And they're testing the radar and the thermal imaging.

• 49:17Lester Nare?

  They're doing basically dry run. Okay, it's already on its way, but they're like, while we're on the way, let's just.

• 49:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, let's just make sure everything is right. And Mars is like the best studied thing outside the earth and the moon.

• 49:28Lester Nare?

  Fair.

• 49:28Krishna Choudhary?

  In the solar system, right? So it's like when we take a picture with the radar on Mars. We know exactly what to expect, because we've taken a thousand photos already.

• 49:37Lester Nare?

  So we have something to match it to.

• 49:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and then it's like, there better not be any new surprises, right? Because if they are, it's not Mars, it's your instrument.

• 49:44Lester Nare?

  That makes sense.

• 49:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So everyone's like, fingers crossed, everything worked. Everything worked. One thing that was interesting was like, why didn't you just like?

• 49:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Test this here, right? NASA's JPL made it.

• 49:55Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 49:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, the radar was actually made by UT Austin. Um, the thermal imaging was made by Arizona, I believe. Um, all the universities. And so it's like, why don't you just test it? Well, the antenna for this radar is like. As big as this uh football field.

• 50:11Lester Nare?

  Oh.

• 50:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, that's like, so in order to test it, like, okay, fine, you can, like, in order to fully test it in the thing. This thing is assembled in a clean room. It's in the biggest clean room in JPL. And that thing can like sort of barely fit this. Um, clipper probe, because the solar panels are so massive, because like, you know, Jupiter is five times away from the. Sun as earth.

• 50:34Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 50:34Krishna Choudhary?

  So like you have one twenty fifth of the amount of light. So you need a giant football field sized solar panel to like. Power the radar and the thermal imaging and this thing comes at a cost of energy.

• 50:46Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 50:46Krishna Choudhary?

  And so you're you're fitting fitting it in this like in this giant high bay um clean room at JPL. You want everything to be sterile. Now you like in order to test radar, you need to bounce it off something far away.

• 50:58Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 50:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, so they tested each individual component, but they didn't test the whole thing.

• 51:03Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 51:03Krishna Choudhary?

  The first time that they're testing the real big thing and they like work, everything was great.

• 51:07Lester Nare?

  Talk about tight sphincters. I mean, I just, I mean, I went to, I think I told you about this recently. I went to. Uh up in Santa Barbara, uh Redwire Space was doing a deployment test for their. Solar arrays for the Artemis program.

• 51:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:21Lester Nare?

  And I I went into, it was a much smaller clean room, but it was still quite large.

• 51:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 51:26Lester Nare?

  Um, and just to see the amount of time and the scale of this thing, I mean. The scale of this thing is unbelievable.

• 51:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 51:35Lester Nare?

  So we saw it, you know, deploy itself out and the reason for that is they want to have it in a smaller, tighter package.

• 51:42Krishna Choudhary?

  To to to get it off the earth. Yeah.

• 51:45Lester Nare?

  But then still be able to have the surface area like you're saying to be able to be be valuable. Um, and even something like that, there was a whole process, that the scrub down, etc.

• 51:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 51:56Lester Nare?

  So so it I the scale of this stuff is is incredible and it I can only imagine, I saw how nervous they were. Just doing that test.

• 52:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Here.

• 52:05Lester Nare?

  On the ground and they'd already had a successful one for the the first solar array and they were just doing the second one, so. There was already a level of confidence they'd be fine, let alone be like, okay, well, when it's going by Mars, that. You know, nothing looks, no, there's no like broken pixel somewhere.

• 52:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like they got they got about sixty gigs of data from forty minutes of radar.

• 52:24Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 52:25Krishna Choudhary?

  On Mars and the pictures look fantastic.

• 52:27Lester Nare?

  Fantastic.

• 52:27Krishna Choudhary?

  So I think it's gonna be a really great uh thing to see it in twenty thirty when we get those Europa flybys. Cause it's going it's going past Europa fifty times.

• 52:35Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 52:35Krishna Choudhary?

  It's gonna get as low as sixteen kilometers from the surface, which is pretty close, dude.

• 52:41Lester Nare?

  Quite close.

• 52:41Krishna Choudhary?

  That's like real close.

• 52:42Lester Nare?

  So if if there is, if there is signs.

• 52:47Krishna Choudhary?

  There's signs, if there's signs of life, that's gonna be great. Not even, I mean, signs of life would be crazy, right?

• 52:51Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 52:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Like if we if we, I mean, it does have some equipment to find like. Uh, you know, trace gases and things like that if it came out, but like even signs of like a liquid ocean.

• 53:01Lester Nare?

  No, that that that's yeah, no, exactly. Because here's the thing, we we we're trying to understand how many things are unique to our planet.

• 53:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 53:10Lester Nare?

  Uh, versus abundant in the universe. And as more and more of these fundamental properties become confirmed as being up, cause if there's water on Europa, it's fair to extrapolate that water is relatively abundant. You know, jet more generally in the larger universe, just statistically speaking.

• 53:28Krishna Choudhary?

  A lot of water on Europa apparently, right? It might be all frozen, but I don't think so. A lot of people don't think so.

• 53:33Lester Nare?

  And if it's liquid, specifically if it's liquid water, um, it the it just opens the door more and more. Again, there are the levels of what we mean by life and biosignatures and not all life off planet necessarily is intelligent life. But even the presence of microbial life.

• 53:50Krishna Choudhary?

  In our own solar system.

• 53:51Lester Nare?

  Our own solar system.

• 53:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Right. This is in our backyard.

• 53:54Lester Nare?

  Would would have.

• 53:55Krishna Choudhary?

  I mean, I think that's that that would be just magical.

• 53:57Lester Nare?

  But at a minimum, I think what's great about this is, you know, good thing we got this thing off last year. Uh, before before funding got cut, um, because NASA is really struggling right now. I mean, we're working with trying to get some program stuff and it's just, it's just total bloodbath.

• 54:13Krishna Choudhary?

  No, dude, NASA is definitely struggling, yeah.

• 54:15Lester Nare?

  So we got it out there.

• 54:16Krishna Choudhary?

  We got it out there and now it's like, now it's on a trajectory, right?

• 54:19Lester Nare?

  We can't stop it.

• 54:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we can't really stop it. I mean, even the the the last story that we had with um, with Yale.

• 54:25Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 54:25Krishna Choudhary?

  That one's funded by NIH and NSF.

• 54:28Lester Nare?

  And obviously.

• 54:29Krishna Choudhary?

  And actually DARPA.

• 54:31Lester Nare?

  Oh, I don't like that part.

• 54:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's like, I don't, I don't know why DARPA is doing a.

• 54:35Lester Nare?

  Feels like a Call of Duty game. If anyone remembers the Call of Duty where I think it featured Kevin Spacey as the villain. They basically did this thing where they created a genetic, you know, basically the weapon only impacted people that had this certain.

• 54:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Uh.

• 54:49Lester Nare?

  It was very, DARPA's connection to the synthetic protein thing gives me.

• 54:54Krishna Choudhary?

  It's it's a little icky, yeah.

• 54:55Lester Nare?

  Yeah, gives me that Call of Duty vibe.

• 54:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 54:57Lester Nare?

  Uh, not fun, not fun. Our, our last story. Our last story. Is out of. MIT.

• 55:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 55:08Lester Nare?

  It's actually shocking to see some fundamental science coming from MIT. I know Caltech is, is more well known for that, but.

• 55:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 55:16Lester Nare?

  Uh, credit where credit is due. Uh, famous double slit experiment holds up. When stripped of its quantum essentials, MIT physicists confirm that. Like Superman. Light has two identities. That are impossible to see. At once, so you know, one of the things that we always talk about is there's. There's stuff happening at the size that we are. And then there's stuff happening at the quantum level. And our understanding of these two things is relatively robust, but they don't kind of. They don't blend really well. Uh, but it seems like this particular aspect, we're kind of seeing some consistency in, in both spaces, maybe, but.

• 55:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 55:53Lester Nare?

  I don't know.

• 55:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's, we're. We're basically finding out that like, the world really is quantum.

• 56:01Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 56:01Krishna Choudhary?

  And, um, and it's, it's really a confirmation on something that we already knew.

• 56:06Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 56:06Krishna Choudhary?

  But it's an incredible experiment.

• 56:08Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 56:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, in its own right. So that's, that's why I really loved it.

• 56:12Lester Nare?

  We love experimental design. This looks like it's brand new, July twenty eighth.

• 56:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 56:16Lester Nare?

  So this is again, this is hap- this stuff is happening.

• 56:18Krishna Choudhary?

  This stuff is happening now.

• 56:19Lester Nare?

  Every week, all the time.

• 56:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so the idea is the double slit experiment. It's one of the most famous experiments. In all of physics. It's something that. Um, sort of. Confirms. This duality, this wave and particle picture of light. You know, and it's like, is, is, is an electron a particle? Is an electron a wave? I mean, it's like both, but also not both. It's, it's an electron. And a photon, what is a photon? Well, it's a photon. Sometimes it behaves like waves. Sometimes it behaves like particles. Um. Einstein very famously did not like this.

• 56:53Lester Nare?

  Yeah, uh, it's the spooky.

• 56:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, he, he had, he had a lot of problems with quantum mechanics. One of them was the spooky action at a distance. Um, which is something that we're actually going to come to. And then the other one was, um. This idea of like. The wave particle duality, it's like, no, the world is just well-defined. Hmm, right. Right? Right. Like, God wouldn't do that. There, God wouldn't create ambiguity. Yes, yeah, yeah, the world is well-defined, um, and like, there's, I don't know what you're talking about. Effectively, okay? This whole thing started back in eighteen oh one, when Thomas Young made the first double slit experiment with light. He wanted to show the wave property of light. So the idea is the following, you've got, um, you've got a light source. Mm-hmm.

• 57:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, like, from here, you, um, create a single slit, like, let's say this way. Yep. You create a horizontal slit this way, you've got a light source. Back then, he didn't have lasers, right? So he needed a way to create a very, like, um, sort of monochromatic, like, light. Of the same color and things like that, so he's got a prism. Yep. That spreads it, spreads it apart. Yep. And then he targets only one color. Yep. Right? And then, and then you can, like, be sure that it's just one. Otherwise, white light, there's a bunch of, you're not gonna get anything. Yes. So, he has a horizontal slit in this direction that lets in a specific color of light. And then here, he's got two slits, one up and one down here. Mm-hmm. Okay? And the idea is, the light is gonna, if it's a wave, well, if it's a particle, it's gonna, like, spray like a bullet. Mm-hmm.

• 58:23Krishna Choudhary?

  And then there's two slits, so it's gonna spray like bullets here. And then, if I have a detector, then I'm gonna see two lumps of where the light landed. Right. If it's a particle. Right. If it's a wave, on the other hand, just like how ocean waves spread out, and they interfere with each other. The light's gonna spread out over here, then it's gonna hit these guys and spread out from these two points. And then it's gonna create an interference pattern. Right. Um, kinda like the Moiree patterns that we were talking about last week. Yes. Right? Where you have, like, this, these fringes going out, and then they create, um, light-dark, light-dark, light-dark fringes on the detector, okay? Yep. And when we saw these light-dark, light-dark fringes, you can calculate from the wavelength of light, you can calculate, like, how far apart the light-dark should be.

• 59:08Krishna Choudhary?

  And they're exactly that far apart. You can do the math and, like, okay, it's pretty... Pretty awesome that like, yup, it's it's a particle, right? I mean, sorry, light is a wave. Okay, then comes the quantum revolution. We start understanding that light might actually be a particle. It might be quantized, right? Max Planck uses the quantum of light to demonstrate um black body radiation, which is like why stuff that's hot glows the way it does. And then Einstein himself actually uses light being a particle to explain the photoelectric effect, which is how solar panels work and things like that.

• 59:39Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, okay, so, fine, light can be a particle and a wave, but like, y- you could like sort of justify that by saying that like, you know, even Newton thought light was a particle and like now we're going back to this idea, maybe maybe there's some like, you know, um, discreteness in the way that light acts. Then, in eight nineteen twenty-seven, um, George Thompson won the Nobel Prize for this. He did the same experiment with electrons. And he found that electrons also displayed this interference pattern, okay? So now we're in this spot. We're now electrons are becoming waves. They used to be particles. Light, that was a wave, is now a particle.

• 1:00:20Krishna Choudhary?

  On top of that, when people try to theoretically formulate all this stuff, the people like Heisenberg and Schrodinger and Bohr, um, they come up with quantum mechanics,

• 1:00:30Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:30Krishna Choudhary?

  which now starts having things like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, right? This idea that like, okay, whatever system I'm looking at, I can't know too much about it, right? If I know the position well enough, I'm not gonna know the momentum, so on and so forth, um, and-

• 1:00:45Lester Nare?

  Which is such a funny thing. I still find that so in infinitely fascinating as a mental thing.

• 1:00:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, even as, yeah, and I mean Einstein did as well, right? And he's like, this is crazy stuff.

• 1:00:55Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, so then they're like, so, so, so then Einstein's like, one, one of the rebuttals to this, to this, um, this, this double slit experiment was, okay, like, you've got a bunch of stuff going, and so these guys are interacting, right? What if, what if I made the light source so dim

• 1:01:11Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:12Krishna Choudhary?

  that only a single photon ever went through?

• 1:01:14Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:01:14Krishna Choudhary?

  This whole thing?

• 1:01:15Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:01:15Krishna Choudhary?

  So it went through one, and then presumably, naively you would think it would go through one of the slits, and then it would-

• 1:01:20Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:01:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? But if it went through one of the slits, then I should see just two lumps, not the interference pattern.

• 1:01:26Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:01:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Even if I do a single photon, it somehow splits, interferes with itself, which already, you're like, what?

• 1:01:33Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:01:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Why is it interfering with itself? What does that mean?

• 1:01:36Lester Nare?

  What does that mean?

• 1:01:36Krishna Choudhary?

  And it's creating an interference pattern.

• 1:01:38Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:01:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? Next question. Next obvious question is to be like, okay, which slit did it go through? Right. We only let a single photon through. Right. Which slit did it go through? Well, if we start attaching detectors on the slits, then it becomes a particle again and we see two lumps. We don't see the interference pattern. Okay? So, so this was already getting weird and Einstein had an idea. Okay, so Einstein's like, no, this is, this is some weird stuff. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so he, he had this ingenious, it's in, in nineteen twenty seven Solvay conference, you've seen this photo of the greatest human minds. Yep. Um, at the time in one spot. Never to be repeated again. Right, never to be repeated again, honestly, it's never gonna happen. Um, like more than half of them won Nobel prizes in physics, um,

• 1:02:22Krishna Choudhary?

  just like to be a fly on the wall. It was the Avengers before the Avengers were the Avengers. Yeah, one hundred percent, um, and so, he has this idea of like, okay, well, you know, I have this first slit, right before it gets to the two. Now, if the light is going and it makes its way to the bottom, then it's going to bump the slit up a little bit upwards, right? Because of the momentum transfer. Yeah. Like conservational momentum, the light got deflected downwards, so the slit is gonna bump upwards. Similarly, if the light goes upward, the slit is gonna get bumped downwards. Yep. So I could, I could, instead of watching the light at the two slits. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Right? Yep. This is, I, Einstein's like, he's a tough cookie dude. Like, it's like, it's like, he's not gonna give up.

• 1:03:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Cause like, the problem was, I was watching it at the two slits. Yeah, right, right. And then, and then, you know, it's like, oh, well, you messed with it. Yeah. Right, and, but he's like, no, now I'm gonna mess with it over here. Yeah. Before it even gets to the two slits. Yes. Okay? I'm gonna watch it. I wanna watch the slit go up and down and based on that infer which direction it went. Right. And then from there, I can tell which slit it went. Right. Right? And then, my interference pattern should still be there, but I'll also know which way it went. Right. This is a tough one. Bohr, um...

• 1:03:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Bohr said this was a tough one. So he goes back and him and Heisen, it was basically the dynamic was Einstein would propose a problem.

• 1:03:44Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:44Krishna Choudhary?

  And then Bohr and Heisenberg would stay up all night.

• 1:03:49Krishna Choudhary?

  And then they'd come back the next, next day and they'd have an explanation. This was the explanation. It's a very good one. Um, Bohr said, okay, in order to actually tell.

• 1:03:58Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Whether the slit was bumped up or bumped down.

• 1:04:01Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:04:02Krishna Choudhary?

  I would have to know very precisely which way the slit was going before.

• 1:04:06Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:04:06Krishna Choudhary?

  And which way the slit was going after, right? I need to know a difference in momentum.

• 1:04:10Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:04:11Krishna Choudhary?

  In order to tell if it went up or down.

• 1:04:14Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:04:14Krishna Choudhary?

  I need to measure that very precisely.

• 1:04:16Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:04:18Krishna Choudhary?

  But if I measure that very precisely.

• 1:04:20Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:04:20Krishna Choudhary?

  If I measure the momentum very precisely, what happens to my position?

• 1:04:25Lester Nare?

  Oh, you, you know.

• 1:04:26Krishna Choudhary?

  My position is no longer definite.

• 1:04:28Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:04:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Which means the slit could be here, here, here, here, the, the slit's position gets fuzzy.

• 1:04:33Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Even though I know that it went up or down, I don't know where it was when it went up or down.

• 1:04:38Lester Nare?

  Uh, you know that it's going up the Y-axis or down the Y-axis, but the actual tick mark on the, on the side, it's.

• 1:04:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:45Lester Nare?

  It's fuzzy.

• 1:04:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, that's fuzzy. That's getting fuzzy, right? And how fuzzy that gets means that you have a pretty wide slit.

• 1:04:52Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:04:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Which means the light could have come from up here or up down there.

• 1:04:56Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Which means that this path and this path are no longer equally distant.

• 1:05:00Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 1:05:01Krishna Choudhary?

  So you're not gonna get that interference pattern anymore. The interference pattern is gonna get smudged out.

• 1:05:05Lester Nare?

  This, okay, this is.

• 1:05:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Does that make sense?

• 1:05:07Lester Nare?

  But.

• 1:05:08Krishna Choudhary?

  And so you can't see, even, even if you try to do the cheating.

• 1:05:12Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:05:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Before the thing happens.

• 1:05:14Lester Nare?

  To your detector.

• 1:05:15Krishna Choudhary?

  The, the, the physics knows the cheating is happening.

• 1:05:19Lester Nare?

  It's, it's, it's funny, I mean, does this tie to, I mean, is this kind of the ties to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle?

• 1:05:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, this is, this is Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, right?

• 1:05:28Lester Nare?

  Because the idea is you can only know one of the two.

• 1:05:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:30Lester Nare?

  Uh, you can't know both position or momentum.

• 1:05:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:32Lester Nare?

  And like that, it's just what it is.

• 1:05:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it is just what, it's just what it is. This is, this is what it is, right? And because of that, like you trying to cheat one step before.

• 1:05:41Lester Nare?

  Doesn't matter.

• 1:05:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Doesn't matter because you'll have destroyed the interference pattern already up here.

• 1:05:47Lester Nare?

  This reminds me of like video games where it's like you can't, the rules of the game are defined. And so like if you try to like walk to the edge of the forest, it'll just like, there's no edge of the forest.

• 1:05:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it'll just make you circle around, right?

• 1:06:00Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:06:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:02Lester Nare?

  So, okay, that, and so I think what's, there's a long history of people asking these very ostensibly straightforward.

• 1:06:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:11Lester Nare?

  Questions.

• 1:06:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Where to go?

• 1:06:13Lester Nare?

  Right, right. We have two slits.

• 1:06:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:15Lester Nare?

  We have one singular photon.

• 1:06:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:17Lester Nare?

  We're sending it towards those two slits.

• 1:06:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, which one did it go through?

• 1:06:20Lester Nare?

  And which one did it?

• 1:06:21Krishna Choudhary?

  And it's like, don't ask. Right? And Einstein's like, bro, this is our job as physicists. What are we talking about?

• 1:06:28Lester Nare?

  If we can't like.

• 1:06:31Krishna Choudhary?

  And so that was Bohr's response, right?

• 1:06:33Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:06:33Krishna Choudhary?

  And so what these guys, what these guys at MIT did was, okay, so when we get into that slit problem, right? We're trying to figure out which way it went.

• 1:06:42Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, one of the things is you, you need the momentum to be so precisely determined to understand which way the photon kicked it, right? Um, the photon's momentum is very small compared to even if I have a one gram mirror, right? Or a one gram thingy, like that one gram is gonna have a momentum uncertainty that's like massive, just because it's so big.

• 1:07:04Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:07:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so you need to, in order to actually do this thing where I'm trying to figure out which way the electron went. The thing that is doing the electron, sorry, the thing that is doing the pushing.

• 1:07:15Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:07:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Of that photon, the thing that is creating this disturbance of the photon needs to be extremely small. And that's what these guys did.

• 1:07:23Lester Nare?

  The idea is, we were doing this at larger scales.

• 1:07:25Krishna Choudhary?

  At larger, the slit is massive.

• 1:07:27Lester Nare?

  And so the, the, the, the, the, the spectrum of your error is so massive because of that scale.

• 1:07:32Krishna Choudhary?

  You can't even do the experiment.

• 1:07:34Lester Nare?

  It's not, there's no meaningful results that come from that. So we're just saying, if we go really, really, really, really small. You decrease the, the, the band of, of the possible error, which at least allows you to start to maybe get.

• 1:07:48Krishna Choudhary?

  At, at this question, which way did it go? And if I figure out which way did it go, does it really destroy the interference pattern?

• 1:07:55Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:07:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Cause that's what quantum mechanics says.

• 1:07:57Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:07:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Quantum mechanics says that no matter how I'm, how small I make the slit, if I try to cheat and get information about which way it went, I'm gonna destroy the interference pattern.

• 1:08:05Lester Nare?

  Right, okay.

• 1:08:06Krishna Choudhary?

  That's what these guys found. They made slits out of single atoms. Okay, so what they did was they suspended these atoms, which it was either lithium seven, super light. Or um dysprosium, dysprosium, yeah. One sixty two, it's a very heavy element on the periodic table. They suspended this, these atoms in a light beam, you can do that now, where you have these like. Kind of like these optical tweezers that can uh like.

• 1:08:32Lester Nare?

  Just maintain.

• 1:08:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Hold atoms, right, at a certain spot in like a, in like a little potential well. Um and it's ultra cold, so they're really, they're really cold. Um and then you can have now single photons move through.

• 1:08:46Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:47Krishna Choudhary?

  And they'll interact with the atoms.

• 1:08:48Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:49Krishna Choudhary?

  And then create my interference pattern. And then what I can do is I can turn off the light. And then have the interaction like a microsecond later, so gravity hasn't had time to sort of.

• 1:08:59Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, impact.

• 1:09:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Impact it, um it's still sort of like there, suspended. But in that fraction of time, now it's no longer in this potential well, so it can start spreading out a little bit. And then if a photon hits it, then it'll kick it, right, because before it was like confined in this like well. So it was a pretty rigid slit, basically, but now we're getting to this movable.

• 1:09:20Lester Nare?

  Where we can measure.

• 1:09:21Krishna Choudhary?

  It's like I can like, in principle, figure out which atom moved more.

• 1:09:24Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:25Krishna Choudhary?

  And then be like, oh, it was that one.

• 1:09:27Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Um.

• 1:09:28Lester Nare?

  Of the two, of these two, uh sort of.

• 1:09:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, in principle, they didn't do this, but they're like, in principle, we could have that information.

• 1:09:35Lester Nare?

  Sure.

• 1:09:35Krishna Choudhary?

  And then all of a sudden, the interference pattern disappears, right? And they, they, they could tune it such that like the amount of like. Spread that they were getting in these atoms um wave functions. Was proportional to how much the interference pattern was being destroyed, right, so it's at its very fundamental level, I mean. Like Einstein and Bohr would couldn't even dream of this kind of experiment, right, where single atoms are now my slits.

• 1:10:01Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 1:10:02Krishna Choudhary?

  But, but that's what they did and like, and they're getting this beautiful interference like. And they're, they're getting the knockoff of the interference as they do this.

• 1:10:10Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:10:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Thing where there, if you wait longer, then it spreads out more, then the interference is even worse, um.

• 1:10:16Lester Nare?

  So this, this is, you know, as we've gone to a higher level of like, let's say, resolution.

• 1:10:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:10:23Lester Nare?

  By going super, super small.

• 1:10:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:25Lester Nare?

  Um.

• 1:10:25Krishna Choudhary?

  It's holding up.

• 1:10:26Lester Nare?

  It's the, the, the light, the wave light. Wave particle duality is holding true.

• 1:10:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:33Lester Nare?

  Even at the smallest scales we can get to.

• 1:10:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:37Lester Nare?

  Uh, which means that the universe is just weird.

• 1:10:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's just a weird thing. I mean, this isn't like the biggest test for quantum mechanics, right? Because there's bigger tests. There's like stuff, there's like tests that um, won the Nobel Prize in Physics two years ago, that. Um, it's like um, Bell's experiment where you have, where you send two particles. Far away from each other and then you collapse this one and see if that affected this one, right? It's like looking for correlations far, far away and.

• 1:11:05Lester Nare?

  This is the non-locality?

• 1:11:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, this is the non-locality thing. That's really the thing that Einstein was like worried about the most um. Bohr so.

• 1:11:13Lester Nare?

  Things are not discrete.

• 1:11:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, like the, so Bohr remembers, so like what happened in the nineteen twenty seven conference? Um, we, we basically have these stories about, oh Einstein did this and then Bohr did this. It's from Bohr. Okay, so like Bohr has maybe like embellished it a little bit and he kind of. You know, now when we revisit history, it turns out Bohr might have missed the point. On what was Einstein's biggest qualm, which is the action at a distance.

• 1:11:42Lester Nare?

  Ah, I got you.

• 1:11:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Like Einstein's question was like, if I haven't, like if I have a, it's a very simple thing, right? Even with this double slit experiment. I've got um, I've got an interference pattern here and you're saying that it interfered with itself. Fine, I'll even give you that. But then at the end of the day, I only see one particle, right? It's that if I, if I average over multiple particles, then I see the interference pattern, right? Cause like one particle comes in, it puts it here. Another particle comes in, puts it here. And over time, I'll see an interference pattern. But you're telling me there's a wave function that's everywhere. But then I get only one particle. How does the rest of the wave function know that I'm gonna collapse here?

• 1:12:19Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:12:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Why don't I see two particles?

• 1:12:21Lester Nare?

  Right, right, right, right, right.

• 1:12:23Krishna Choudhary?

  It's a very good question. It's like, how does this part of the wave function know, okay, don't trigger the detector. Cause the other part is doing it over there, you know?

• 1:12:30Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:31Krishna Choudhary?

  And so that was really Einstein's main, main qualm.

• 1:12:33Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:12:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Um.

• 1:12:35Lester Nare?

  Which, which this is not, this is not solving for at all. It's just reconfirming.

• 1:12:39Krishna Choudhary?

  This sort of complementarity thing and showing that it, it really lasts even at the smallest of scales. So there there's still a lot more fundamental research to be done. This was um, this was done at MIT by uh the Fedo Cev and Keterbach Lab. Um NSF and DoD funding.

• 1:12:56Lester Nare?

  Of course.

• 1:12:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:57Lester Nare?

  All all like all.

• 1:12:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:59Lester Nare?

  Really, really valuable fundamental research. Again, we should fund science.

• 1:13:03Krishna Choudhary?

  We should fund sciences. Like this kinda, this kinda stuff is so cool.

• 1:13:06Lester Nare?

  I'm trying to, I'm trying to dig into the spooky action at a distance. It's so quantum mechanics, cause you always talk to me about this stuff, even in our private.

• 1:13:14Krishna Choudhary?

  I'll recommend you a book. It's called um, What is Real? I forget the, I forget the author, but it's an amazing book. I have a copy.

• 1:13:20Lester Nare?

  Okay, yeah, yeah, no, de- definitely because I there the it it seemed, you know, there's always this argument. It's funny earlier you were talking about like, we're pretty good. The physics stuff, we we have a lot of that. We're we're quite good. The biology people, they'll catch up.

• 1:13:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:33Lester Nare?

  Um, but there this this area of sort of quantum mechanics, the inability to quantize gravity, whatever, like all it it. There's always the argument that we've already figured it all out. Physics all happened in the in this time period that we kinda just went.

• 1:13:46Krishna Choudhary?

  But I mean, that's what, that's what they told Einstein and Max Planck before they did quantum mechanics, right? So you never know. Um, it'll it's certainly like, I thi- I think, I think we're poised for um, like a lot of cool discoveries, both in physics and in biology. I think in biology, the tools are now there.

• 1:14:05Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:14:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Where it's like we can start doing crazy experiments.

• 1:14:07Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:14:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Before, like when with the physics stuff, like the tools were only just catching up because electricity and magnetism had just been mastered in the late eighteen hundreds. Right with Edison and Max Maxwell. So then we could start, we could have like these like massive electrical apparatuses and and so. Once electricity and magnetism was solved, then we could go on to this thing.

• 1:14:27Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:14:27Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, it's like now, maybe like once we're getting, you know, there there's a lot, lot of possibilities on where this can go.

• 1:14:35Lester Nare?

  And just to, just to be clear, it's, it's, it's, it's, they're sort of the freight, the box, the sandbox that we're playing in is well-defined. There are just some corners of it, like this area of quantum mechanics, where we're still just trying to fill in some of the mosaic. But we know where the, the box is.

• 1:14:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:49Lester Nare?

  Right? Because we're able to do things like this.

• 1:14:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we're able, I mean, the fact that we're able to do things, right? Like the fact that we're able to suspend two atoms in a laser.

• 1:14:56Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:14:56Krishna Choudhary?

  That's because we know a lot about quantum mechanics.

• 1:14:58Lester Nare?

  Correct.

• 1:14:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? That we can even do that.

• 1:15:00Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:15:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:00Lester Nare?

  Right. So it's like, eh, eh, I just, I continue to be fascinated by this stuff. Four really, really great stories this week. Again, we touched on the universe's oldest puzzle.

• 1:15:13Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right.

• 1:15:13Lester Nare?

  Uh.

• 1:15:14Krishna Choudhary?

  First ever chemistry.

• 1:15:15Lester Nare?

  To, for it, being able to really understand how stars form, now being able to sort of re-simulate the early universe, connecting to stuff coming out of James Webb. Uh, a huge study out of Yale, uh, programmable synthetic proteins, that one is still.

• 1:15:32Krishna Choudhary?

  That one's crazy, dude.

• 1:15:34Lester Nare?

  That one's, that one's nuts to me. We have the Europa mission, new radar reason. It's gonna go be, it's gonna look at the oceans, the potential liquid oceans, but at least the ice. It's, it has two capability sets. Uh, and then finally, uh, kind of reconfirming an oldie, but at a level of clarity that kind of puts to bed. Like it just, this is, we were right, guys.

• 1:15:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. And it, yeah, yeah. And it just opens up new possibilities for, for research as well.

• 1:16:02Lester Nare?

  Again, cause.

• 1:16:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Now we're getting down to this.

• 1:16:04Lester Nare?

  That level, you can, again, with everything, you can always move left or right a lane. And it's like, what if we tried this same fundamental concept of, of how to build the experiment, but apply it.

• 1:16:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:14Lester Nare?

  Over here.

• 1:16:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:15Lester Nare?

  And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we always like to talk about first principles here. My name is Lester Nare, joined again by my co-host and our resident PhD, Krishna Choudhary. We will see you guys next week.