Hidden Star in Betelgeuse, Dancing Atoms, Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays & VR Immunity (EP. 2)

Lester and Dr. Krishna dive into: • Beetlejuice & “Bracelet” – why a red super-giant may soon swallow its tiny partner • Atomic Harlem Shake – 0.15 Å resolution images of thermal jiggles in 2-D materials • Too Fast, Too Furious – IceCube’s constraints on proton fractions in 10²⁰ eV cosmic rays • Interstellar Google Maps – New Horizons proves star-pattern navigation works • Mind-Body Woo-Woo – VR coughs that literally raise your white-blood-cell count

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. I'm joined by my co-host and our resident PhD, Dr. Krishna Choudhary. This is from First Principles. We have a great episode this week. We are gonna touch on, first, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice. Found a companion, but this is not Love Island. A great story about a stellar companionship. Second story, atom-scale images of atoms vibrating. We've seen atoms doing the Harlem Shake. What does it mean? What are the implications? Story number three, high-energy cosmic rays. We're talking too fast and too furious. Fourth story, navigating the stars using a camera. We've figured out an interstellar Google Maps, or have we?

• 0:43Lester Nare?

  And lastly, we'll end with our mystery box, which is Krishna's story of the day. How are you, good sir?

• 0:50Krishna Choudhary?

  I'm doing well. Second episode.

• 0:52Lester Nare?

  I'm very excited about this.

• 0:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 0:54Lester Nare?

  First one went well.

• 0:55Krishna Choudhary?

  First one went well.

• 0:56Lester Nare?

  Maybe we'll do a third one.

• 0:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 0:58Lester Nare?

  So we'll start with our first story. Interestingly, it got all the way to CNN.

• 1:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 1:05Lester Nare?

  Which is, you know, usually when news gets to there. It's a little bit dicey.

• 1:09Krishna Choudhary?

  This one's not fake.

• 1:10Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:11Krishna Choudhary?

  This one is not fake.

• 1:12Lester Nare?

  So the title on the story is Beetlejuice, one of the most familiar stars in the sky, may have a hidden companion star orbiting it. Astronomers have observed what they believe to be a never-before-seen companion star orbiting Beetlejuice, a pulsating red supergiant star in the shoulder of the Orion constellation.

• 1:35Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right.

• 1:35Lester Nare?

  Why, what exactly is happening here? Why does it matter?

• 1:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:41Lester Nare?

  And does the galaxy lie on Orion's Belt?

• 1:44Krishna Choudhary?

  The galaxy is not on Orion's Belt. Orion's Belt is actually just in the galaxy itself, so it's the other way around. Beetlejuice is just one of my favorite stars. And so whenever anything happens with Beetlejuice, I get very excited. This might not matter in the grand scheme of things to human beings, but I still think it's an extremely cool observation that we've made.

• 2:11Krishna Choudhary?

  About my favorite star. So you know what, tough. If you guys don't like Beetlejuice, whatever. Um, just go see Orion and you'll see him on the top right shoulder. So Beetlejuice makes up the top right shoulder. It's unmistakable. It's red. Um, it looks like Mars, except it's blinking. So you know it's a star.

• 2:28Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 2:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Mars is about the same brightness, but it doesn't blink because it's closer to Earth. So it's a little bit bigger. It's like Mars is kinda like a circle, whereas Beetlejuice is 700 light years away. So it's a it's literally a point. And so it twinkles a little bit.

• 2:42Lester Nare?

  This is a nice little, uh, short drive through the

• 2:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 2:44Lester Nare?

  Interstellar.

• 2:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Honestly, it's not that far. 700 light years in the grand scheme of things is not that far. It's actually the closest red supergiant to Earth.

• 2:53Lester Nare?

  So when you say supergiant, is it, it's, it's a star?

• 2:57Krishna Choudhary?

  It's a star.

• 2:57Lester Nare?

  So a lot of people will think, oh, it's like a bigger Jupiter, but that's not true.

• 3:01Krishna Choudhary?

  No, no, no. This thing is

• 3:04Krishna Choudhary?

  it's nice that you mentioned Jupiter. So this star is so big that if you were to put it where the sun is, it would be as big as Jupiter's orbit.

• 3:14Lester Nare?

  Oh, wow.

• 3:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 3:16Lester Nare?

  So it would be like this all the way past the

• 3:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, yeah, it would swallow Jupiter. Now you see why it's my favorite star. It's like, it's an amazing star. It's this red supergiant. This thing's only 10 million years old.

• 3:29Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 3:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. So it's like the, the, the sun is 5 billion years old.

• 3:33Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 3:34Krishna Choudhary?

  And the sun is gonna become a red giant, but not a supergiant.

• 3:37Lester Nare?

  Oh, so this is it's, this is it's

• 3:39Krishna Choudhary?

  This is, it's dying.

• 3:40Lester Nare?

  It's on the path.

• 3:41Krishna Choudhary?

  This thing is dying. It used to be a blue massive star. And then it ran out of oxygen because um, one of the cool things about stars is like the bigger you are, the shorter your lifespan. It's kinda like you party too hard and then

• 3:53Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 3:53Krishna Choudhary?

  You're just like fucked.

• 3:54Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 3:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 3:55Lester Nare?

  Live free and die hard.

• 3:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, exactly.

• 3:57Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 3:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Stars do that in exactly.

• 4:00Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 4:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Like the bigger you are, the faster you deplete the hydrogen.

• 4:04Lester Nare?

  That gives you life.

• 4:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? That gives you life. And then now you ran out of hydrogen. Now you gotta start burning, burning helium. Once you run out of helium, now you gotta start burning carbon and nitrogen. Once you, once you start running out of that, you swell up and then, you know, things are bad. So this is, this, this thing is in its last legs.

• 4:20Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 4:20Krishna Choudhary?

  But it's this massive star, um, 700 light years away, 700 times the radius of the sun.

• 4:26Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Um. And it's it does a lot of really cool things, okay? One of the cool things it does is every like, um, I think it's every four hundred days. It has a cycle where it like dims and it gets brighter and it dims and it gets brighter. Now that's okay.

• 4:42Lester Nare?

  That's pretty close to the earth's.

• 4:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, it is like three, yeah, yeah, three sixty five, four hundred, yeah, right? Um, it dims, it gets brighter. That's like okay for red super giants because things do that, okay? A lot of these stars do that.

• 4:54Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 4:55Krishna Choudhary?

  If you if you look at other red super giants that are farther away, they'll do the same thing.

• 4:58Lester Nare?

  So they don't stay at the static.

• 5:00Krishna Choudhary?

  No, they're called variable stars and they're actually very important for, um, like, that's actually super important for like fundamental science reasons because that tells us how far stuff is by looking at the frequency of of this. It tells us how bright they really are and then you can tell, okay, well, I know how bright it really is because it's oscillating at this frequency. But I see it as this bright. So why is why is it this bright when it should be this bright? Oh, it's because it's this far away and you can tell the distance to stars. So variable stars are extremely important for fundamental science in terms of like calibrating that. Edwin Hubble did the first kind of survey of that, um, out in Mount Hubble.

• 5:40Lester Nare?

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Not Mount Hubble, uh, Mount Wilson, right in the outskirts of LA.

• 5:44Lester Nare?

  This is the same thing you were telling me about the other day, I think, with like how we use quasars for time and for navigating, like, because they're so consistent.

• 5:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, because they're they're so far away and so consistent, you can use them to to to chart like, uh, three hundred sixty degree rotation of the earth. In this case, it's like, because these guys are so consistent in the way that they vibrate and how bright they are. We can use them to chart distances as as we go out.

• 6:10Lester Nare?

  That makes sense.

• 6:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, anyway, so four hundred days, it does this cycle, that's fine.

• 6:13Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 6:14Krishna Choudhary?

  But every six years, it does another cycle. So there's like a four hundred day cycle and on top of that, there's this slower six year cycle. You see what I'm saying? There's like a slower oscillation on top of this faster oscillation.

• 6:28Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 6:28Krishna Choudhary?

  And that slower oscillation is six years and that one's weird.

• 6:31Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 6:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so people thought, okay, that's weird, six years is kind of long. They thought that maybe there's another star that is wobbling it.

• 6:40Lester Nare?

  That would be impacting.

• 6:41Krishna Choudhary?

  That would be impacting this six, that would be orbiting it every six years.

• 6:45Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 6:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, but it's been incredibly hard to see because Betelgeuse is so massive. Right, it's the size of Jupiter's orbit. So like, it's like, it's like to try and image the other star. It's like you got, you got this one dancing partner that's like outshining you in every form of the word.

• 7:04Lester Nare?

  This is like, I don't think people understand the scale of what you're talking about.

• 7:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 7:08Lester Nare?

  Like this thing is so incredibly large. I can't, it's, it's hard to even.

• 7:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's, it's hard to even, it's so incredibly large and so incredibly bright because it's large.

• 7:19Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 7:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, that like when we point a telescope at it, all you're gonna see is it. You're not gonna see the other guy.

• 7:25Lester Nare?

  Right, that's right.

• 7:26Krishna Choudhary?

  That's like right next to it, like four Earth orbits away.

• 7:31Lester Nare?

  Cause it's, it's basically gets sort of engulfed.

• 7:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 7:34Lester Nare?

  In, in the, in the, in the super giant. I mean, this sounds very similar to what we talked about last episode about Earth's one millisecond shift in its orbit time, which was partly because of.

• 7:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 7:47Lester Nare?

  We don't know, but other objects interacting with Earth. So similarly, you're saying that the super giant is having this companion.

• 7:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 7:57Lester Nare?

  That is what is impacting and creating the six year cycle in addition to this four hundred day cycle.

• 8:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, exactly.

• 8:02Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 8:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, and so like, the idea is like, you have this interaction and we see it in the brightness of Betelgeuse, but we wanna, we wanna actually see the thing, right?

• 8:12Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 8:12Krishna Choudhary?

  We wanna see its partner.

• 8:13Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 8:13Krishna Choudhary?

  So that becomes incredibly hard.

• 8:16Lester Nare?

  Wait, just really quick, because you're saying we can measure and then make a hypothesis that is being impacted by this thing, but we've not made a direct observation.

• 8:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, because when you point, when you point your telescope at it, all you see is a single point of light.

• 8:30Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 8:30Krishna Choudhary?

  You see a single point of light and that light's brightness is going up and down every six years. Right? Now, what we think is that there are two points of light.

• 8:39Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 8:39Krishna Choudhary?

  But how do we resolve that two points of light?

• 8:41Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 8:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Because.

• 8:44Krishna Choudhary?

  I actually did the calculation, okay? This thing, it turns out, this thing is about four Earth astronomical units, so four Earth orbits

• 8:55Lester Nare?

  Yep, away.

• 8:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Away from its star, okay?

• 8:57Lester Nare?

  Yep, yep.

• 8:57Krishna Choudhary?

  And it's got about 4% the brightness of Beetlejuice, this new star.

• 9:00Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 9:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay?

• 9:01Lester Nare?

  So it's very dim in comparison.

• 9:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and this thing is 700 light years away.

• 9:04Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:05Krishna Choudhary?

  So, that's the same as if somebody in New York City

• 9:10Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 9:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Went on to the top of the Empire State Building

• 9:13Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 9:13Krishna Choudhary?

  And put up two iPhones with their, with their flashlights.

• 9:16Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 9:17Krishna Choudhary?

  They put them right next to each other, right? You hold two iPhones, you hold two iPhones, you put the two flashlights.

• 9:23Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 9:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Imaging Beetlejuice and its companion, it's as hard as imaging two flashlights on two iPhones right next to each other on the Empire State Building from Los Angeles.

• 9:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Imagine trying to take a picture of that from LA.

• 9:40Lester Nare?

  I mean, the Samsung Galaxies are pretty good.

• 9:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Hey!

• 9:43Lester Nare?

  You know, right? The Xiaomi phones are also pretty good.

• 9:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:46Lester Nare?

  But I don't believe

• 9:48Krishna Choudhary?

  I don't think they, yeah.

• 9:48Lester Nare?

  I don't think if I was, even if I was at Spire 73 in downtown Los Angeles, it's the highest open-air bar in western hemisphere, at least as of two years ago.

• 9:58Krishna Choudhary?

  It's a great bar.

• 9:59Lester Nare?

  And I pointed it at New York.

• 10:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Well, the Earth would be in the way, because the Earth is round.

• 10:05Lester Nare?

  Ah!

• 10:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, but let's, let's

• 10:07Lester Nare?

  Let's just assume it's flat.

• 10:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Let's assume it's flat, fine.

• 10:10Lester Nare?

  Don't get in the comments.

• 10:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Don't, don't, don't clip this, okay? Yeah, but

• 10:13Lester Nare?

  But, I don't even know that I would get to the east side.

• 10:16Krishna Choudhary?

  No, yeah, you wouldn't, yeah. Like, even if there was a vacuum, right? You wouldn't be able to resolve these things. They would, it would just, if you were lucky enough to even see the two iPhones, they would be like one dot.

• 10:27Lester Nare?

  This is actually really helpful context for understanding the scale of the challenge

• 10:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, yes, exactly.

• 10:32Lester Nare?

  With these, with these

• 10:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 10:33Lester Nare?

  Experiments and these tools.

• 10:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so, it's, it's an incredible feat that we could do this. And the image that they produced is amazing. They use the Gemini Space Teles, not the Gemini Space Telescope, sorry. They use the Gemini Telescope in Hawaii.

• 10:45Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 10:45Krishna Choudhary?

  That's at the peak of Mauna Kea, in the big island of Hawaii. It's a beautiful, massive telescope.

• 10:51Lester Nare?

  Hawaii!

• 10:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's, it's, one of the best parts of Hawaii is the fact that they have these incredible astronomical observatories

• 10:59Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 10:59Krishna Choudhary?

  That are like Unmatched in the northern hemisphere.

• 11:02Lester Nare?

  Which makes it because no light pollution.

• 11:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, no light pollution. It's like perfectly poised, super high altitude in the middle of the ocean. Thirteen thousand feet above sea level, like.

• 11:13Lester Nare?

  Which is four thousand feet lower than the Atacama, because the Atacama one is about seventeen thousand.

• 11:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and Atacama is basically a bunch of Europeans. Like, they've, they've colonized the shit out of Chile's high desert. For astronomy, but it's for astronomy, so, you know.

• 11:29Lester Nare?

  I will make a small caveat. We do respect the desires of the locals in Hawaii and that their lands are theirs. And so, this is not a claim to that land as being property of the globe. However, there is a lot of value for all of us in being able to have these tools in particular locations. And we are grateful for the people, to the people of Hawaii for that.

• 11:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, we're incredibly grateful for the people of Hawaii for lending their land to give us these tools to explore what really is the final frontier.

• 11:59Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 11:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, like, I, you know, I don't want to digress too much, but it's like, in, in, in the cultures, it's like, exploring the unknown, right? Exploring the oceans was how they got to Hawaii. And now it's like they're exploring the vast ocean of space.

• 12:13Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 12:14Krishna Choudhary?

  It's, it's incredibly romantic to me that like, it's, you know, Hawaii is, Hawaii is the spot where all of this is happening.

• 12:21Lester Nare?

  I, I will say that my, uh, my wife wanted me to propose when we went to Hawaii and we're looking at the observatories. I did not get the memo, so that did not go over well.

• 12:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, dude.

• 12:29Lester Nare?

  However, we are still here today, so.

• 12:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, you're good.

• 12:32Lester Nare?

  It could have been worse.

• 12:33Krishna Choudhary?

  It could have been worse, yeah.

• 12:34Lester Nare?

  It could have been worse.

• 12:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so I proposed on Mount Wilson.

• 12:37Lester Nare?

  Oh, really?

• 12:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, so I don't think she got the memo, but, but I had the memo.

• 12:44Lester Nare?

  This is great. So, so the, the, the real story here is, is we, we, sort of this connection between measurement and direct observation.

• 12:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 12:53Lester Nare?

  Right, or, or measurement.

• 12:55Krishna Choudhary?

  It's like a hypothesis, right? We're doing the scientific method where we see this thing.

• 12:58Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 12:59Krishna Choudhary?

  And we exhaust all the other possibilities and we're like, well, it's gotta be like a companion.

• 13:03Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 13:03Krishna Choudhary?

  And then we're like, okay, how do we measure this thing? And so, we, we point this, um, Gemini North Telescope. To it.

• 13:10Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 13:11Krishna Choudhary?

  And we also use this thing called speckle imaging, which was actually developed at UCLA. A lot of it was developed at UCLA to try and image the center of the galaxy to see those beautiful star trails around the black hole center that won Andrea Gez the Nobel Prize.

• 13:27Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 13:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Very recently. It was actually like on the floor above my PhD lab.

• 13:32Lester Nare?

  Ah.

• 13:32Krishna Choudhary?

  I was on the fifth floor and then the sixth floor was basically all an imaging lab that was trying to make imaging these tiny little things possible.

• 13:41Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And they use that to to prove the supermassive black hole.

• 13:45Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 13:45Krishna Choudhary?

  But in this case, what they used in speckle imaging is basically like you take a bunch of really fast images.

• 13:52Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 13:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. You take a bunch of really fast images and then you average them together.

• 13:56Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 13:56Krishna Choudhary?

  The reason why you're doing this is you treat each image as an independent sample. So instead of like taking a long exposure.

• 14:03Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 14:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Where like the atmosphere is in the way.

• 14:05Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 14:05Krishna Choudhary?

  And so you get a lot of blurring.

• 14:07Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 14:07Krishna Choudhary?

  What you do is take a bunch and then you

• 14:11Krishna Choudhary?

  mess around with each image and average it in just the right way that you can start resolving like incredible detail.

• 14:18Lester Nare?

  That's very.

• 14:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Because you want high resolution and high contrast.

• 14:21Lester Nare?

  Right. Which you can't get on the long exposure.

• 14:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 14:23Lester Nare?

  You can't get with a short exposure, but high volume.

• 14:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, exactly. So that's called speckle imaging. And some of these exposures, they're like extremely short. They're like 14 milliseconds. 14 milliseconds.

• 14:34Lester Nare?

  This is, oh my goodness.

• 14:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And you're taking like thousands of these and then you're averaging them together. And finally, you get this beautiful picture of Beetlejuice and its little companion. The little companion is like 4% as bright as Beetlejuice. So obviously, we weren't seeing it before.

• 14:48Lester Nare?

  The little bro. This is a little bro.

• 14:50Krishna Choudhary?

  This little bro and and.

• 14:51Lester Nare?

  The little giant.

• 14:52Krishna Choudhary?

  And unfortunately, it is not a nice relationship. This is not.

• 14:57Lester Nare?

  Oh, okay. So.

• 14:58Krishna Choudhary?

  This is not a Disney happy ending.

• 15:00Lester Nare?

  I referenced Love Island earlier because I thought companion is usually, you know, referenced in a way that.

• 15:06Krishna Choudhary?

  It's not gonna end well.

• 15:08Lester Nare?

  I imagine the super giant.

• 15:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 15:11Lester Nare?

  Is going to be engulfing.

• 15:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 15:13Lester Nare?

  The companion.

• 15:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 15:15Lester Nare?

  We don't support.

• 15:16Krishna Choudhary?

  That was four. Yeah, this 4%.

• 15:18Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 15:19Krishna Choudhary?

  The size. It's not. It's not. It's like, I think in the next 10,000 years, it's gonna, it's gonna be gone.

• 15:25Lester Nare?

  We're gonna get. I'm so happy. We're gonna be able to see that in our lifetime.

• 15:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's gonna be. It's gonna be pretty cool.

• 15:29Lester Nare?

  That's incredible.

• 15:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, one last thing.

• 15:32Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 15:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Sorry.

• 15:32Lester Nare?

  No, no, no, go, go, go ahead.

• 15:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, I was gonna say one last thing that I think is, um. Uh, very nicely done by the astronomers, right? When, when you discover a new object, you tend to get to name it.

• 15:42Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 15:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay?

• 15:43Lester Nare?

  Hmm.

• 15:44Krishna Choudhary?

  So Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice is an interesting name.

• 15:47Lester Nare?

  Spelled B E T E L G E U S E.

• 15:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 15:53Lester Nare?

  Not like the Beetlejuice we know.

• 15:55Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 15:55Lester Nare?

  It's like a French.

• 15:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, this is a weird, weird Beetlejuice. It's actually um, an Arabic.

• 16:01Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 16:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Name.

• 16:02Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 16:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? Um, it was named by the Arabs back when um, you know, Europe was in the Dark Ages and Arab Arabia was, you know, where um, scientific learning and all of that was happening.

• 16:13Lester Nare?

  They don't, they don't teach us that in school.

• 16:14Krishna Choudhary?

  No, but it's.

• 16:15Lester Nare?

  They like deliberately ignore like centuries.

• 16:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, like algebra is from algebra. Algorithm is like named after an Arabic word anyways. Um, Beetlejuice means the hand of a giant.

• 16:27Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 16:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Because like it's on his shoulder.

• 16:29Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 16:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 16:30Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 16:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, and they probably inherited those constellations from the Greeks.

• 16:34Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 16:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, and Eljuice means giant in Arabic. So they stuck to that theme and they're naming this new star Siwara, which means bracelet.

• 16:48Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 16:49Krishna Choudhary?

  It's like a bracelet on the hand of a giant. I thought that's kinda cool. I don't know.

• 16:53Lester Nare?

  Look, look, I appreciate that you can both be technical and creative.

• 16:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:58Lester Nare?

  At the same time.

• 16:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, and yeah, I, I think it's nice, you know?

• 17:02Lester Nare?

  So as although the ending of the story may not be the most happy, this is not a Disney movie, as you said.

• 17:11Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 17:11Lester Nare?

  Uh, it is another great example of again, just the incredible genius of so many of the human beings around us. And so I think now, we, we talked about really, really big stuff.

• 17:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, this is the, that, that star was the size of Jupiter.

• 17:29Lester Nare?

  Which is.

• 17:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Uh, the orbit, not, not the planet, the orbit of Jupiter, like the sun Jupiter, yeah.

• 17:34Lester Nare?

  So now we're gonna go in the opposite direction.

• 17:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 17:37Lester Nare?

  So the headline on our second story here is first direct images reveal atomic thermal vibrations in quantum materials.

• 17:50Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right.

• 17:51Lester Nare?

  And then the byline goes, researchers investigating atomic scale phenomena impacting next generation electronic and quantum devices have captured the first microscopy images of atomic thermal vibrations revealing a new type of motion that could reshape the design of quantum technologies and ultra-thin electronics. So the way I described it was, we've seen atoms do the Harlem Shake. So, but it seems like the key idea here is it's an imaging feat of something really, really, really small. And the thing that we image that was really, really, really small was, was doing a little shimmy.

• 18:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 18:32Lester Nare?

  So how do we go from this really small thing vibrating to ultra-thin electronics?

• 18:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes. Well, first we got to understand what is the thing that we imaged, okay?

• 18:47Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 18:47Krishna Choudhary?

  So for that, have you ever heard of Moiree patterns? M-O-I-R-E.

• 18:55Lester Nare?

  Yes, like with the accent on.

• 18:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Moiree, yeah.

• 18:58Lester Nare?

  That's so Moiree.

• 19:00Krishna Choudhary?

  You might have seen it. Yeah, it's kind of like that.

• 19:02Lester Nare?

  Do you know what it is? In, in film, you get it on your imaging, like in particular situations. They call it's like a Moiree effect.

• 19:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, the, yes, exactly.

• 19:11Lester Nare?

  And, and so, yes, but what does that have to do?

• 19:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, like, like I get it, you, you can get it all the time if you like, if you, if you take your phone and then like, if I were to take my phone and then take a photo of your LCD screen.

• 19:23Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, it's got the.

• 19:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And then I zoom in on the, like, if you've ever taken a photo with your phone of like a screen.

• 19:29Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 19:29Krishna Choudhary?

  And then you zoomed in on the screen, you're gonna get these like weird like, like, like netty patterns.

• 19:36Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 19:36Krishna Choudhary?

  You know?

• 19:37Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 19:37Krishna Choudhary?

  And, and why is that happening? That's because there's a pattern on the LCD screen, okay?

• 19:42Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 19:42Krishna Choudhary?

  So because the LCD screen is a bunch of pixels, so there's a, there's a regular pattern on there. And then your phone. The way it's displaying it has another pattern, right? So what you're doing is, you've got these two patterns. You've got these two patterns that are overlapping.

• 19:57Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 19:57Krishna Choudhary?

  And when you do that, you get these giant patterns. Like, there's a third bigger pattern.

• 20:03Lester Nare?

  From the, from the, sort of, the amalgamation.

• 20:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 20:07Lester Nare?

  Of those two small ones.

• 20:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, so what you need is like two small patterns? And then you slightly offset it. And you'll get these like, nice, like, looking bigger patterns.

• 20:15Lester Nare?

  I think some film people would disagree with you about the characterization of nice.

• 20:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, yes. I don't know if it's nice. From a quantum materials perspective, it is quite nice.

• 20:25Lester Nare?

  This is, okay.

• 20:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 20:26Lester Nare?

  So I do know what you're talking about.

• 20:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 20:29Lester Nare?

  And it's, basically, it's a, it's an interference pattern.

• 20:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, it's an interference pattern between two regular 2D patterns, right? There's like two patterns in 2D, we're making them interfere slightly. It can't be like completely.

• 20:41Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 20:42Krishna Choudhary?

  It's gotta be like, just slightly a little bit off. And then you'll get these like, long-range patterns, right? The, the, the smaller the difference between them, the, the longer the range, right?

• 20:52Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 20:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, and so, what you can do now is you can create these, like, silicon hetero-structures. So you can have these like, materials that are made out of silicon? And then you like, put some other stuff in it?

• 21:06Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 21:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 21:07Lester Nare?

  Like chips?

• 21:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes. I mean, chips are, yeah, chips are exactly like silicon and I think boron? Or like some other kind of element on top? But in this case, what we're really trying to do is we're trying to, we're trying to measure the properties of tiny, like, extremely thin silicon hetero-structures.

• 21:23Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 21:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? Hetero-structure, hetero just means different, so you're putting some other stuff in there. Um, you get the silicon, and usually, this structure forms a kind of 2D lattice, right? A 2D grid.

• 21:36Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 21:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Now, if you stack two on top.

• 21:38Lester Nare?

  Like graph paper?

• 21:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, yes. If you stack two on top.

• 21:41Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 21:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Then, there's gonna be some kind of defect, right? Usually. And that's gonna cause these Moiré patterns. Because you've have, you have a lattice.

• 21:49Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 21:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Of like, atoms.

• 21:50Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 21:50Krishna Choudhary?

  And then you have another lattice of atoms. These, these lattices are like nanometers apart.

• 21:56Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 21:56Krishna Choudhary?

  So like, you know, tens of atoms apart. And then, and then, there's gonna be some defects.

• 22:01Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 22:01Krishna Choudhary?

  So you get these Moiré patterns within the atomic structure. Of the thing that you're trying to study.

• 22:08Lester Nare?

  What it makes me think of is when I was in math class and I would have my notebook and I would have graph paper. And if I would remove the paper slightly, so it wasn't perfectly aligned with the page below it. You could kind of see a little bit of the.

• 22:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, you can exactly see a more a pattern.

• 22:24Lester Nare?

  Right, right, like.

• 22:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 22:25Lester Nare?

  It's it's it's loosely in a simplified way, a similar concept.

• 22:29Krishna Choudhary?

  I mean, no, it's literally that concept.

• 22:31Lester Nare?

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 22:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, no, it's not even loosely, it's literally that, right? You got grid, you got a grid on top and then it's a little bit off and you get a little pattern.

• 22:39Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 22:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 22:40Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 22:40Krishna Choudhary?

  So, so.

• 22:41Lester Nare?

  So, so what, so these in this pattern. We're trying to image this really, really small structure.

• 22:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 22:51Lester Nare?

  That has these patterns present.

• 22:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, and so these patterns, um, like these structures, right? These like thin structures with like these interacting sheets that have this like long periodicity in space. They're really important for things like superconductivity, heat conduction studies, new materials, like stuff of the future.

• 23:10Lester Nare?

  The metamaterials.

• 23:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Like the stuff that we want to make in the future. We want to make it cheaply, we want to make it at an industrial scale. But in order to do that, first, we need to understand physically what is going on.

• 23:22Lester Nare?

  So as as an analogy, we have a Lego block that's eight by eight.

• 23:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 23:29Lester Nare?

  That's the level at which we can like engineer.

• 23:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 23:31Lester Nare?

  We're trying to get down to a Lego block that's one by one.

• 23:35Krishna Choudhary?

  In some sense, yeah.

• 23:36Lester Nare?

  And a smaller, like, like the understanding of Lego blocks.

• 23:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Of the Lego blocks, yeah.

• 23:41Lester Nare?

  At that scale.

• 23:42Krishna Choudhary?

  At that scale and at that like even you're you're trying to also make the Lego block like incredibly cold. So that you can understand the physics at the basic level.

• 23:50Lester Nare?

  I got you.

• 23:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 23:51Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 23:51Krishna Choudhary?

  And you're trying to understand like the atoms within the Lego block in some sense, right? And like how the Lego block stretches and and and shears and squishes. That way, when you make a bigger thing, you have a better handle on everything.

• 24:05Lester Nare?

  You understand all of these sort of derivative outcomes that will happen.

• 24:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 24:09Lester Nare?

  Because of effects at this really, really, really, really small scale.

• 24:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, yeah, and so you've got these like more a patterns, right?

• 24:15Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 24:16Krishna Choudhary?

  And it turns out these patterns will actually move around. Okay.

• 24:20Lester Nare?

  Okay, hold on.

• 24:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Because, because the defect, right? The defect that creates this pattern is gonna move because the temperature is not zero.

• 24:27Lester Nare?

  Oh, right.

• 24:28Krishna Choudhary?

  So because temperature is not zero, there's gonna be some wiggling going on in the lattice. And because there's some wiggling going on in the lattice, the pattern itself

• 24:35Lester Nare?

  Is, is constantly.

• 24:36Krishna Choudhary?

  is gonna move and it's gonna be constantly shifting.

• 24:38Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 24:38Krishna Choudhary?

  So, understanding how this thing shifts, what's the physics of that?

• 24:42Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Is incredibly powerful and incredibly needed for understanding like how these, these 2D heterosystems work. And that's what these guys did. They're from the University of Maryland. They did something called electron tycography. That's P-T-Y-C-O-graphy.

• 24:59Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 25:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? Tyco, tyco means like, um, like to fold in Greek, okay? And it, it's a new form of like electron microscopy, basically.

• 25:09Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 25:09Krishna Choudhary?

  But it, it's, it's like halfway between X-ray crystallography and electron microscopy. So electron microscopy is the idea of, like,

• 25:19Krishna Choudhary?

  when we, when we think microscope, we think like a light microscope, right?

• 25:22Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Like the stuff in your bio labs.

• 25:24Lester Nare?

  That's something we did in 8th grade.

• 25:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 25:25Lester Nare?

  We were looking at frog legs.

• 25:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Where it's like, it's like, okay, you're using visible light. You've got a traditional lens and then, and then you try to like see stuff. Now, visible light has a size, like the wavelength of visible light, the stuff that's in these lights,

• 25:40Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 25:40Krishna Choudhary?

  uh, of about 400 to 700 nanometers.

• 25:43Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 25:44Krishna Choudhary?

  So the wave has a spatial resolution of 400 to 700 nanometers, which means you can't see stuff smaller than that, right? If you've ever been to the ocean, if there's a tiny little island and the waves are like 10 meters apart

• 25:58Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 25:58Krishna Choudhary?

  and the island is like a meter,

• 25:59Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 26:00Krishna Choudhary?

  the waves don't give a fuck. They're just gonna go through, right? But if the island is massive and the waves are small, then the waves bend around it and that's when you can actually resolve stuff. Okay, so light, visible light is not gonna work. Because visible light, the smallest you can go is like 400 nanometers, right?

• 26:16Lester Nare?

  This is, this is why when people talk about like signals intelligence gathering or these kind of detection platforms, right?

• 26:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 26:22Lester Nare?

  You have optical, you have radio, you have infrared.

• 26:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:27Lester Nare?

  And the point there is that that range Is that different?

• 26:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it tells you, it tells you the resolution of the stuff. And there's like some atmospheric effects in the stuff that you're talking about, yeah. But like, but like, for example, with radio, like if, if you, if you take like a long wave radio image of something. And the something is like the size of a, like, you know, a size of you.

• 26:46Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 26:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Then you're not going to resolve anything.

• 26:48Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 26:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Cause the radio wave is massive.

• 26:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So what, what are you doing?

• 26:53Lester Nare?

  What are you doing? No, okay, so the, the, the scale of this stuff just continues to always blow my mind.

• 26:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 27:00Lester Nare?

  Uh, that we can even.

• 27:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I haven't even told you the, the resolution that these guys got. Okay, so, but here's the other thing, okay?

• 27:07Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 27:07Krishna Choudhary?

  So I told you, right, like, like usually you use light and light microscope in the bio lab. But now like biologists increasingly, they use electron microscopes because of quantum mechanics. Electrons have wave-like properties.

• 27:18Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:18Krishna Choudhary?

  And the, the wavelength of electrons is around X-rays. It's extremely small.

• 27:23Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 27:23Krishna Choudhary?

  So if you shoot electrons through stuff.

• 27:26Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 27:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Through a sample.

• 27:27Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 27:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Then you can resolve at the wavelength of electrons, right? Cause they're the same in quantum mechanics.

• 27:32Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 27:33Krishna Choudhary?

  And so now you can like resolve down to like the angstrom level. Right?

• 27:37Lester Nare?

  So we're.

• 27:37Krishna Choudhary?

  But that's not good enough.

• 27:38Lester Nare?

  That's still not good enough.

• 27:39Krishna Choudhary?

  The angstrom, one angstrom is the size of a hydrogen atom. And that's not good enough for these guys, okay? Because in order to see these thermal vibrations.

• 27:47Lester Nare?

  Were they Chinese?

• 27:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, no, University of Maryland.

• 27:50Lester Nare?

  But were the scientists Chinese?

• 27:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Uh, it might be, yeah, yeah.

• 27:54Lester Nare?

  I'm just.

• 27:54Krishna Choudhary?

  They might be.

• 27:55Lester Nare?

  Immigration matters, that's.

• 27:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, they might be. But I mean, I don't know the, the citizenship of them and things like that, right?

• 28:01Lester Nare?

  That's fair.

• 28:01Krishna Choudhary?

  But I mean, if they're US citizens, then yeah, we gotta keep them right here.

• 28:05Lester Nare?

  This is, this is important stuff.

• 28:07Krishna Choudhary?

  This is important stuff.

• 28:08Lester Nare?

  We want the, we want the ultra-thin.

• 28:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, yes, yes, yeah, we want the ultra-thin electronics.

• 28:12Lester Nare?

  I want the self-driving car that can jump over a puddle.

• 28:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 28:16Lester Nare?

  Anyway.

• 28:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, um, so these guys, it wasn't good enough for them in angstrom, right? And so what they, what they did was with electron tichography, what you can do, and this only happens with periodic materials. So with like stuff that is, looks like graph paper. What you can do is you can, you can shoot electrons at something that looks like graph paper. And you're going to get what's called a diffraction pattern.

• 28:38Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 28:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Because like all of the electrons. are gonna interfere because of the lattice structure because of the periodic structure of stuff. So you're gonna, you're gonna get like one lattice pattern. Now what you're gonna do is move the samples up. And then do it again. And then move the sample up and do it again. And because the sample itself is periodic. Right? The fact that you're moving this is gonna give you higher resolution on the image that comes at the end. That's the genius of electron tichography.

• 29:03Lester Nare?

  So.

• 29:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Like it's the, the fact that this thing is graph, if this thing wasn't graph paper, then you'd be just taking like photos of like different parts of the stuff. But because it's graph paper, I move it up. It's the same thing.

• 29:15Lester Nare?

  Thing from before.

• 29:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And so now I can use the spatial invariance to nail down my resolution in space. And then I get down to 15 picometers, which is point one five angstroms. So it's 15% the size of a hydrogen atom. And that's the images that you're seeing there in that, in that article. Right? Like those individual dots, those are individual atoms, right? Like that's, that's a single atom in a lattice. And then there's a bunch. Like e- each dot is a, is an atom. It's incredible. Like the image is incredible.

• 29:49Lester Nare?

  The image we're looking at right now kind of looks like when you were a kid and you go up to the TV really, really, really close and you can see each of the individual.

• 29:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, like the, yeah.

• 30:00Lester Nare?

  On the TV.

• 30:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 30:01Lester Nare?

  Just for the.

• 30:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Back when it was like, back when it was like, uh, we had like the electron tubes.

• 30:05Lester Nare?

  Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The vacuum tube.

• 30:09Lester Nare?

  I, I like, I'm at a kind of a loss of words.

• 30:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, like it's, it's, we're, we're seeing like the nature of. Yeah, the, the material in itself, like, like, yeah, it's, it's incredible.

• 30:18Lester Nare?

  Isn't this like a level at which things start to get a little weird? Like we're getting close.

• 30:23Krishna Choudhary?

  I mean, no, no, things are already getting weird.

• 30:25Lester Nare?

  Things are already weird.

• 30:26Krishna Choudhary?

  This is, yeah, at this level, it's already.

• 30:28Lester Nare?

  It's a little.

• 30:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Yeah, now we're, you're starting to get into like Heisenberg uncertainty principle style stuff.

• 30:34Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 30:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. This is incre- okay, and so I think one shout out to US academic research institutions.

• 30:43Lester Nare?

  Yes, shout out to how we import the best talent in the world.

• 30:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, yeah.

• 30:49Lester Nare?

  You're still gonna get funding, don't worry about it, we got enough money flowing in, come here, help us build and discover incredib- I just.

• 30:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 30:59Lester Nare?

  It's really hard to like, um, for a layman to, to internalize. Because I think the delta between my everyday understanding of science as someone who comes from a family of scientists.

• 31:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 31:13Lester Nare?

  And then like, people who just don't have that conversational context or exposure to the information, don't really understand how thorough, robust, and outrageous the processes to do the things we talk about.

• 31:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 31:29Lester Nare?

  That then make it into papers.

• 31:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, no, it's again, it's like, it's like, point one five, the size of a hydrogen atom, right? That's the resolution, that's the, that's the size of the pixel that we're imaging this thing.

• 31:41Lester Nare?

  It's also reproducible, so there's no belief going on here.

• 31:45Krishna Choudhary?

  No, no, somebody else can do exactly what they did.

• 31:48Lester Nare?

  And be like, ah, like.

• 31:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, yeah, and you know what, what'll probably happen is like whoever's the competitor is gonna do what they did, make some tweak, make it better and be like, well, I made it better. Yeah. Like, that's how scientists are, we're petty as fuck, dude.

• 32:02Lester Nare?

  Yeah. That, that second story, I, I'm gonna have to take a second to.

• 32:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's crazy, because like, because the more we understand these kinds of materials, right? The closer we are to these next generation materials of superconductivity.

• 32:16Lester Nare?

  This is the application.

• 32:16Krishna Choudhary?

  It could be like, it could be like, um, like there's also some talk about like creating like quantum, um, computing, using these like, these 2D materials, like maybe the, the vibrations in these materials can be our zero and one for the, for the quantum computer that we wanna make, yeah.

• 32:33Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:33Krishna Choudhary?

  I mean, that, that, that may be a little bit.

• 32:37Lester Nare?

  Caveats, caveats, caveats.

• 32:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, like there's, there's a lot more work there. But like, understanding 2D materials that are this thin are incredibly important for like quantum sensing, which is very important.

• 32:46Lester Nare?

  We can't get to the next step until we get to the first step.

• 32:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 32:49Lester Nare?

  And the first step is knowing how stuff at this level operates.

• 32:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and this is also the first time that electron tichography has been used to study this kind of material. Right? So, the big thing is like using this experimental method, which has been used before.

• 33:05Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 33:05Krishna Choudhary?

  But now it's like being used for this kind of stuff.

• 33:07Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Applying to these more patterns, right? In these like 2D defect structures.

• 33:13Lester Nare?

  This is, I, I think that-

• 33:14Krishna Choudhary?

  So it, it opens up like, okay, what else can we do with electron tichography?

• 33:17Lester Nare?

  There's two, there's two, there's two big, like, sort of key insights here. One is that the methodology applied to this use case bears fruit. And two, the fruit that we got is delicious.

• 33:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 33:32Lester Nare?

  It's, it's, it's ripe.

• 33:33Krishna Choudhary?

  It is nice.

• 33:34Lester Nare?

  Juicy, and we can get more of it.

• 33:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:37Lester Nare?

  And, okay, okay, this is great. So, so we started off really big, then we went-

• 33:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Really small.

• 33:44Lester Nare?

  Way small.

• 33:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, really small.

• 33:45Lester Nare?

  A little whiplash. We're gonna stay small for our third story, uh, which...

• 33:54Lester Nare?

  Okay, let's just jump into it. So, in Antarctica-

• 33:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:59Lester Nare?

  We have, uh, would you call it? And it's not an observatory, we have a facility.

• 34:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 34:05Lester Nare?

  Called-

• 34:05Krishna Choudhary?

  It's, it's not an, it's a- It kind of is an observatory.

• 34:08Lester Nare?

  But of, not the way people think about it.

• 34:10Krishna Choudhary?

  But not the way people think, yeah.

• 34:11Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 34:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 34:12Lester Nare?

  So, Ice Cube, not NWA Ice Cube.

• 34:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:16Lester Nare?

  Uh, there's no space in between the two words. Uh, neutrino search sets first constraints on proton fraction of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. Neutrinos are subatomic particles with no charge and very little mass that are known to weakly interact with other matter in the universe. Due to their weak interactions with other particles, these particles are notoriously difficult to detect. However, uh, it seems like we may be on the path here. And so- This is where we're talking about too fast, too furious because we're dealing with ultra-high energy. Ultra-high.

• 34:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Ultra-high.

• 34:58Lester Nare?

  Energy, cosmic rays.

• 35:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 35:01Lester Nare?

  I mean, this sounds both dangerous and exciting.

• 35:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's incredibly exciting because it's a part of physics that like, like seriously, people don't know.

• 35:11Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 35:12Krishna Choudhary?

  How you get something so fast, so furious.

• 35:14Lester Nare?

  Because what we're saying is, is this is after Fast Five. So for the Fast and Furious franchise watchers who are familiar.

• 35:24Lester Nare?

  Everything up to Fast Five was, generally speaking, realistic. Everyone could be like, oh, I can understand how a car goes that fast. I can understand.

• 35:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Da-da-da. Makes sense.

• 35:33Lester Nare?

  As soon as they started flying off of cliffs and being in space with cars.

• 35:40Lester Nare?

  Then the question, how, how, all right, how you do that?

• 35:42Krishna Choudhary?

  How you do that? And that's what physicists are asking.

• 35:44Lester Nare?

  How you do that? For these ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, the shtick seems to be, in some cases, they're moving so fast that we don't have an idea of how they were able to achieve that level of speed.

• 36:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 36:01Lester Nare?

  Is that, is that?

• 36:02Krishna Choudhary?

  That's exactly right, yeah. So let me tell you first about cosmic rays.

• 36:05Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 36:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? Cosmic rays are basically particles that come from outside the Earth.

• 36:09Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 36:10Krishna Choudhary?

  And they're like big particles. Big particles, I mean, like, uh, yes, like immigrating particles from, from way out there, okay? These can be something as light as a proton.

• 36:21Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 36:22Krishna Choudhary?

  To something as big as like a gold nucleus.

• 36:24Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 36:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? A gold nucleus is like hundreds of protons.

• 36:27Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 36:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So, um, and they're incredibly fast. They're going very close to the speed of light, okay? Now, usually, what we do is we measure the energy of these particles using something called the electron volt, which is, um, how much energy it takes, um, to raise, to move an electron across one voltage of, um, electric potential. It's just, it's just a way of measuring like, like, energy at the particle level. Um, to give you some idea of what that means, like CERN, which is the, the big particle collider.

• 37:03Lester Nare?

  It's where apparently, uh, European scientists are interacting with interdimensional beings, according to the internet.

• 37:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, um, that's new. I should talk to some of my friends who work there and see if they can put us in touch. That'd be a great guest on this podcast, interdimensional beings. Tell me, sir, do you know where cosmic rays come from? Was that you? Was that you?

• 37:25Lester Nare?

  Well, actually.

• 37:28Lester Nare?

  But CERN is this, it's, it's, it's, uh, it's the same thing as the LHC.

• 37:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's the Large Hadron Collider. So the Large Hadron Collider, this massive, massive particle collider that builds the biggest. No, it's like thirteen miles. It's, it's like, it's across two continent, like, two, um, countries. Like France and Switzerland share a border and it goes underneath that border. It's that big. It's, it's what created the God particle, the Higgs boson. Incredibly high energy, some of the highest energies that we can pack into a small space into individual particles. The proton beams that go around CERN right now are at six TeV, which is six times ten to the twelve. So six with twelve zeros electron volts, okay?

• 38:13Lester Nare?

  I want that in my bank account.

• 38:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, like, that, that's, that's a lot of electron volts packed into a single proton.

• 38:19Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 38:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? An electron volt is how much energy would need to take one electron up one volt. This is six times ten to the twelve into a single particle, okay? That's a lot of energy, but at least we can imagine how to make it, okay? And, and, you know, you might've seen all the, you might've seen all the headlines of being like, we're accessing the, the beginning of the universe, right? And we are, because like at those, at those energies, we're accessing the beginning of space and time itself, right? We're, we're getting as close to the big bang as we possibly can. Okay, so ten to the twelve, ten to the twelve electron volts is like, it's pretty nice.

• 39:00Lester Nare?

  We can do it. We can create that. We can understand it.

• 39:04Krishna Choudhary?

  We can understand it. We're good to go.

• 39:05Lester Nare?

  And we have all the frameworks.

• 39:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we're good to go.

• 39:07Lester Nare?

  We know the tactics and the strategy.

• 39:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And then came the biggest cosmic ray of all time.

• 39:15Lester Nare?

  I think I remember this.

• 39:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, it was called OMG particle, the oh my god particle.

• 39:19Lester Nare?

  Oh my.

• 39:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it was discovered in Utah randomly. Um, I mean, not randomly, obviously a bunch of physicists had these cosmic ray detectors. It had ten to the twenty electron volts in a single particle.

• 39:35Krishna Choudhary?

  That's a, they detected ten to the twenty, which is um, a million times the energy of the proton in the LHC.

• 39:46Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 39:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay?

• 39:47Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 39:47Krishna Choudhary?

  So now, now we're like, okay, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

• 39:50Lester Nare?

  Hold on a second. Hold up.

• 39:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Hold up. How do you, how do you pack so much energy?

• 39:57Lester Nare?

  Into a.

• 39:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Into a single particle?

• 40:00Lester Nare?

  You know what this reminds me of, and it's totally unrelated, but our discussion about vacuum energy, which has a similar question of how can there actually be that much energy?

• 40:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 40:10Lester Nare?

  It's unrelated, but just the, the level of.

• 40:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, the level of awe about like, how does this, how does this even, even happen?

• 40:18Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 40:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Like, uh, let me give you some stats, cause I, I did some calculations about like what that would mean, okay? So, ten to the twenty electron volts in a single particle, this is the, oh my god particle. Um, it, um, if we wanted to see how fast it was going in terms of the speed of light, cause nothing can go faster than the speed of light, but the closer you get to the speed of light, the higher your energy is, right? This thing had zero point nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine with twenty four nines before other numbers show up.

• 40:48Lester Nare?

  In ter, oh my god.

• 40:48Krishna Choudhary?

  In terms of like, so zero point nine nine nine, twenty four nines, and then like five, four, ten, ten, ten, like, see? Times, times the speed of light, okay? Going that fast, if it originated, um, if it originated.

• 41:02Lester Nare?

  Oh my god.

• 41:04Krishna Choudhary?

  One point five billion light years away.

• 41:07Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 41:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Then, from our, because of relativity, from our reference frame, it would basically take one point five billion years to get here, right? But because of time dilation, in relativity, the faster you move, the slower your clock goes. From the, from that particle's perspective. From the particle's perspective, it would only have lived one point five days.

• 41:27Lester Nare?

  Get the.

• 41:28Krishna Choudhary?

  So, to us.

• 41:29Lester Nare?

  Get out of here!

• 41:30Krishna Choudhary?

  To us, it's one point five billion years, but to the, whatever particle it was, it was just like, oh, one point five days, I'm here on earth. Hey, it's Utah.

• 41:39Lester Nare?

  It takes us that long to get to like Texas from here.

• 41:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, um, mate, like, so the other thing, it would, it would take a photon 250,000 years. So like if, if it was in a race with a photon, right? So, so there's our particle, the OMG particle, and then there's a photon. If these two were in a race, it would take the photon 250,000 years to get a one centimeter lead on this guy. I, I, so that's, that's, that's, that's what's happening here, right? That's, that's where we're like, okay, like this is a, this is, this is incredibly fast. What makes something, what makes a single particle that is massive? It's trivial for photons to move that fast because they're massless.

• 42:25Lester Nare?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 42:26Krishna Choudhary?

  But this is something that has mass, so it requires work and work to actually like accelerate it, right?

• 42:32Lester Nare?

  Yeah, no, I mean.

• 42:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Like you can't, like photons, you just create it, it moves because it's massless.

• 42:37Lester Nare?

  We're not, we're not, we're not concerned about the speed of a photon because it has no mass. And so of course it can move incredibly, incredibly high speeds.

• 42:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, like by relativity, it's like trivial, but like this thing, this thing, it has stuff in it. And the stuff is like, it has a rest mass.

• 42:52Lester Nare?

  And also, and its rest mass is also huge comparatively.

• 42:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a proton compared to a photon, which is zero. Yeah, it's like, it's at least a proton, right? It could be a higher nuclei, right?

• 43:04Lester Nare?

  But it's at least that.

• 43:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and, and all of these calculations are, are with the least.

• 43:09Lester Nare?

  This is, this is like, I can't.

• 43:10Krishna Choudhary?

  So, so, and you start wondering, okay, like where do these big cosmic rays come from? Okay, you might think, okay, it's like supernova, right? Like supernova, it's, it's a massive star, blows up, and then it like, like sprays a bunch of like mass, like these particles with massive energies, like fine. No, no, but those, those cosmic rays should not have 10 to the 20, okay? Like for a supernova to have 10 to the 20 is like, it's, the, the star is too big to have like. Yeah, yeah, it's like, ah, nah, right? And then it's like, so, so there's some theories that suggest that it's, it's a particle that. It's been like forming from the great, great beginning of the universe and then it's interacting with

• 43:53Krishna Choudhary?

  the cosmic microwave background, which is just the background.

• 43:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Like light of the universe that's left over from the big bang and that light from the universe is bombarding it and just the way to like accelerate it. But like that even that seems like crazy, right? And so the the idea is we need, we need more data about this. Okay? So that's where a neutrino observatory like Ice Cube comes in.

• 44:17Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 44:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so Ice Cube was started by the University of Wisconsin, Madison. One of the great things about America is that like our flagship state institutions are just doing like ridiculous research that like other countries would be jealous of, but ours is like, no, Wisconsin got this.

• 44:34Lester Nare?

  This is S tier, basic research.

• 44:36Krishna Choudhary?

  No, this is like, Wisconsin got this, like all those like alcoholics over there are like, you know what? We're also gonna make the greatest neutrino observatory in the world.

• 44:44Lester Nare?

  Shout out UW Madison, because this is, this is.

• 44:47Krishna Choudhary?

  It's incredible. No, so this thing, this, this Ice Cube Observatory is like one of my favorite things the humans have done. Okay? We basically went to Antarctica, like we got all this ice.

• 44:56Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 44:57Krishna Choudhary?

  What do we do with it? So they bored like this like one to two mile deep tunnels into the ice. So the area, the area of the observatory is about one square kilometer. It's like a few city blocks.

• 45:10Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 45:11Krishna Choudhary?

  And then they bored a bunch of tunnels.

• 45:13Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 45:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, that are one to two miles deep and in it they put photomultiplier tubes, which are basically like light detectors. Okay, and think of them as light detectors. Now here's what happens. Cosmic ray comes in.

• 45:23Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 45:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. Slams into the ice.

• 45:27Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 45:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. When it slams into the ice, all of that energy, it's gonna, it's gonna hit one of the water molecules or something like that. It's gonna spray a bunch of neutrinos everywhere. Right? Because all of that energy has got to go somewhere. So it's gonna spray all these neutrinos. And then those neutrinos are gonna bump into other water molecules and so on and so forth. Pretty soon what's gonna happen is there's gonna be a charged particle, either a proton or an electron, that's gonna move through the ice at faster than the speed of light in ice. Think about that for a second.

• 45:57Lester Nare?

  I don't get it.

• 45:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. The speed limit of the universe is the speed of light in a vacuum.

• 46:02Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 46:03Krishna Choudhary?

  But light moves slower in stuff, right? Light moves a little bit slower in air. It moves hella slower in water. It moves the slowest in diamond, which is what gives it its sparkle.

• 46:13Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 46:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, in ice, it moves pretty slow, right? It's got the, the water has this crystalline structure, the slowing down the water.

• 46:19Lester Nare?

  That scares me because if that's the case, then what you're about to say is even crazier.

• 46:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so when this cosmic ray came in, it knocked out particles and those particles had enough energy to move through ice higher at a faster speed than light moves through ice. Does that make sense? Because the speed limit is light in a vacuum, not light in ice.

• 46:45Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 46:45Krishna Choudhary?

  That's the speed limit.

• 46:46Lester Nare?

  We're gonna need to take a break because I think my brain is gonna explode.

• 46:49Krishna Choudhary?

  It's incredible what we're using to find these things. So you know what happens when something like that happens?

• 46:55Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 46:56Krishna Choudhary?

  You would know this, you're into like, you know, UAPs and all that kind of stuff. What happens when an object moves faster than the speed of sound?

• 47:03Lester Nare?

  Oh, I mean, you're supposed to get massive, like, you know, you get the sonic boom.

• 47:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Sonic boom, exactly. You got a sonic boom, why?

• 47:10Lester Nare?

  Too much friction.

• 47:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, because, because the thingy is moving through the air faster than the speed of sound and so you're creating this like disturbance.

• 47:17Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 47:17Krishna Choudhary?

  But like the, the, what is sound? Sound is the, the rate at which the disturbance moves through air.

• 47:23Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 47:23Krishna Choudhary?

  So you're piercing through the air faster than the speed of sound. So you get this sonic boom.

• 47:27Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 47:28Krishna Choudhary?

  You get this cone shockwave.

• 47:29Lester Nare?

  Oh, does the same.

• 47:30Krishna Choudhary?

  We're creating a light shockwave.

• 47:32Lester Nare?

  A light boom!

• 47:34Krishna Choudhary?

  A light boom. And that's what all these photomultiplier tubes, all these light detectors are catching.

• 47:38Lester Nare?

  The light boom. Here comes the boom!

• 47:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 47:42Lester Nare?

  Wait.

• 47:42Krishna Choudhary?

  These light, so, so all of those tunnels are catching the light booms from these high energy particles as they knock out other particles and create this.

• 47:50Lester Nare?

  That's actually.

• 47:51Krishna Choudhary?

  It's called Chernkov radiation.

• 47:53Lester Nare?

  Chernkov.

• 47:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Chernkov radiation, after the Russian like physicist who like first proposed it and stuff like that.

• 47:58Lester Nare?

  That's, I'm glad you made that connection because that helped solidify it.

• 48:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:02Lester Nare?

  Um, because now I get.

• 48:04Krishna Choudhary?

  You've got a charged particle that's moving, so now the. electromagnetic field can't move faster than like the thingy so you're getting this like like shockwave in the electromagnetic field and and that's creating a bunch of light and that's what you're seeing right and so that's that's the way that ice cube this giant observatory observes cosmic rays

• 48:24Lester Nare?

  right

• 48:24Krishna Choudhary?

  right

• 48:25Lester Nare?

  and what's the point here is is like we are are actively observing

• 48:30Krishna Choudhary?

  yes yes and we're actively observing them and what we'd want to do is we want to find these really really big ones okay and what ice cube has done right now it is it has put constraints on how many of the big ones of these really big ones can be protons and not like heavier stuff

• 48:47Lester Nare?

  got it

• 48:47Krishna Choudhary?

  because that's important

• 48:48Lester Nare?

  so it's like a

• 48:49Krishna Choudhary?

  we want to yeah we want to figure out like how much of it is protons how much of it is like like helium nuclei maybe nitrogen nuclei maybe even higher gold nuclei iron nuclei right and so they put a constraint on it they said that like less than seventy percent are protons which means that thirty percent have to be these higher um nuclei which now that that's crazy because thirty percent are like these bigger nuclei how did they get that fast it's like it's it's

• 49:16Lester Nare?

  it's already crazy that the proton

• 49:17Krishna Choudhary?

  yeah

• 49:17Lester Nare?

  was going that fast

• 49:18Krishna Choudhary?

  this fast

• 49:19Lester Nare?

  and then now we're saying there's

• 49:20Krishna Choudhary?

  there's other stuff

• 49:21Lester Nare?

  that's bigger

• 49:23Krishna Choudhary?

  yeah

• 49:23Lester Nare?

  and it's

• 49:24Krishna Choudhary?

  that has the same energy it's like you know so

• 49:27Lester Nare?

  something is not right

• 49:28Krishna Choudhary?

  yeah and it's it's I mean it's incredibly exciting right the and ice cube I think is expanding or at least it was before the budget cuts but um they they were supposed to do an ice cube two point oh

• 49:41Lester Nare?

  oh they're

• 49:41Krishna Choudhary?

  which is like like you know just bigger area

• 49:43Lester Nare?

  yeah

• 49:44Krishna Choudhary?

  and so you get higher resolution you get more resolution about where it came from um one of the cool things about ice cube is that it's actually more sensitive to stuff like okay here's the earth right ice cube is on the bottom

• 49:55Lester Nare?

  yep

• 49:56Krishna Choudhary?

  it's more sensitive to stuff coming from up here because then up here because here there's so much background there's all sorts of random shit

• 50:04Lester Nare?

  by the time it comes all the way through

• 50:05Krishna Choudhary?

  yeah only the big stuff is going all the way through yeah yeah so the earth acts like a filter and so what ice cube is really doing if you're on the north pole you're looking for stuff coming out of the ground Isn't that kind of funny?

• 50:18Lester Nare?

  It is.

• 50:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, you're you're looking for particles coming out of the ground, like, from the earth. Because the earth has done the work of filtering.

• 50:26Lester Nare?

  And this is stuff coming from god knows how far away.

• 50:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:29Lester Nare?

  And how far.

• 50:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. This is like outside our galaxy.

• 50:31Lester Nare?

  This is.

• 50:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, this is, this is very much outside our galaxy.

• 50:35Lester Nare?

  Is this facility, um, because Antarctica has a lot of complicated geopolitical.

• 50:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 50:42Lester Nare?

  Issues.

• 50:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 50:43Lester Nare?

  Uh.

• 50:44Krishna Choudhary?

  It's an international facility.

• 50:45Lester Nare?

  Okay, so there's.

• 50:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, this is kind of like a CERN on Antarctica.

• 50:48Lester Nare?

  Makes sense.

• 50:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. I think, I mean, like, uh, Wisconsin-Madison, I think, was one of the first people to, like.

• 50:54Lester Nare?

  Create the.

• 50:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Create it, but, but like, and they had like two or, like, not that many, but, and I think they partnered with other institutions as well, but now it's become this big effort, right? Because it's like, it's just like such a, it's such a nice thing, like, the earth has provided us with a giant.

• 51:09Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 51:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Ice sheet.

• 51:10Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, right.

• 51:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? That basically doesn't move.

• 51:12Lester Nare?

  Right, right. That we can utilize as a sort of substrate by which to run these experiments. And so, this is, uh.

• 51:22Krishna Choudhary?

  I thought that was such a cool story.

• 51:23Lester Nare?

  This is, no, this is really interesting, because what's so funny is this facility has so many conspiracy theories about it.

• 51:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Really? You've heard about it?

• 51:31Lester Nare?

  In the UFO community, because people are like, ah.

• 51:34Krishna Choudhary?

  No, no, no, it's, it's just.

• 51:35Lester Nare?

  That's where they.

• 51:36Krishna Choudhary?

  It's just tunnels.

• 51:37Lester Nare?

  The saucers are under the ice and they're, it's there so that they can.

• 51:41Krishna Choudhary?

  No, I mean, all of the data is publicly available.

• 51:44Lester Nare?

  I mean, this is, this is why.

• 51:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Right.

• 51:46Lester Nare?

  We operate from first principle.

• 51:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. No, it's just, it's, it's just a bunch of tunnels with, like, light detectors. And we're trying to look at light booms.

• 51:55Lester Nare?

  I will, I will say, there was an interesting thing, I'll ask you about this next week, about someone talking about, uh, neutrinos, because, because so many people, let me ask you this question, there's not that many neutrino detectors.

• 52:09Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 52:09Lester Nare?

  On earth.

• 52:10Krishna Choudhary?

  No, there's, there's, there's a big one in Japan that's quite, um, quite famous. There's one in, I think, South Dakota in the Black Hills that's quite famous. This one's the, this one's a really good one. Yeah.

• 52:20Lester Nare?

  The reason.

• 52:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Not that many, though.

• 52:21Lester Nare?

  This is, the reason I bring this up is someone was making this hypothetical of if you're, I'm always talking about the intelligence agencies. If you're an intelligence agency and you're looking for a communication channel, that's extremely difficult to be able to intercept or hack.

• 52:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 52:34Lester Nare?

  Because there's not that many neutrino detectors, it is a medium by which, if you can figure out how to. I make it a controlled medium. It's it is a secure channel.

• 52:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 52:43Lester Nare?

  I'm not saying that's a thing, but a lot of people have talked about this.

• 52:46Krishna Choudhary?

  No, no, I understand what you're saying. There was there was a like, there's a patent. So one of my friends, completely unrelated to the UAP community.

• 52:55Lester Nare?

  Sure.

• 52:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Like, one of my friends sent me like this patent that somebody from Johns Hopkins had made about like neutrino communication, where instead of using electricity, they use neutrinos. I was extremely skeptical, right? Because neutrinos are like incredibly hard to interact with.

• 53:11Lester Nare?

  I mean, we already, we just talked about why.

• 53:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I mean, it's like, dude, like, I kid you not, in the early days, in the early days of like neutrino observations.

• 53:19Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 53:21Krishna Choudhary?

  There was like, there's a funny story of a PhD at Caltech who like wanted to like study neutrinos over his PhD, and he he had, he he observed seven neutrinos in like six years. So he had names for

• 53:37Krishna Choudhary?

  so like in his defense, he's like, so then I observed Fred.

• 53:43Krishna Choudhary?

  It's it's like, it was that hard. Now we're getting a lot more because these observatories are getting bigger and bigger. But like, you know, like to communicate, you would need something this big. It's, yeah, it's and and the other thing about neutrino communication is the background is so insane, right? Because like the sun, like we put our, we put our hands out right now. The sun is putting neutri- millions of neutrinos.

• 54:04Lester Nare?

  Killing us.

• 54:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Through us.

• 54:05Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 54:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Through our hands right now, right? So like, it's it's it's tough. I don't think it's as simple as like a telephone.

• 54:12Lester Nare?

  No, I I I totally agree. It's just, it is interesting having both feeds of information.

• 54:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 54:19Lester Nare?

  In in terms of sort of talking, talking through this. So that that story with you. So we went big, small, small. Now we're gonna go back to big. And we're talking about our our our potential interstellar Google Maps. And so this is New Horizons Images Enables First Test. First, number one, numero uno, of interstellar navigation. By looking at the shifting stars in photos from New Horizons probe, astronomers have calculated its position in the galaxy. A technique, again, we always talk about tools and techniques and frameworks because they're not single use. You can expand and sort of.

• 55:04Lester Nare?

  Get incredible amount of value from one key insight like CRISPR in our last episode. This technique can be useful for interstellar missions. So if I'm trying to go to Alpha Centauri, Centauri, Centauri, I'm gonna need navigation.

• 55:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, that's right. You're gonna need navigation and you can't rely on the Earth. That's the key here. Alpha Centauri is four light years away. Okay, so if you're trying to beam back to Earth, being like, hey, where am I? You're gonna have to wait eight years, right? Four years to get there, four years to get back.

• 55:36Lester Nare?

  There's so many movies, every space movie touches on, oh, we have this big ball that glows, or we have this projector hologram, and then you're gonna use the star, the deep, but navigation is fundamental to every space movie.

• 55:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 55:53Lester Nare?

  Because you gotta know where you're going.

• 55:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 55:55Lester Nare?

  Because once you start going.

• 55:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, once you start going, you got, you got, and you know what's incredibly romantic to me about this particular story? Is we're navigating the same way that the big explorers navigated. Back during, okay, okay, European colonization, but like, they, they use the stars where, you know, don't fucking. I, I, I didn't think of that, but like, I was, I was saying it, I was like, oh, wait, no, no, no, those are the, that's the bad people. Anyways, but you know what I mean? Like, it's like Magellan when he went around the world, well, he died halfway, but when his ship went around the world, he used the stars to navigate.

• 56:35Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 56:35Krishna Choudhary?

  And we're doing the same thing here at JPL and NASA, right?

• 56:40Lester Nare?

  It makes, it makes logical sense.

• 56:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 56:42Lester Nare?

  And we, we, we've talked about this where distances and frequency of different types of interaction quasars, we talked about the, the vibration stuff earlier, allow for, or the dimming rather, the great dimming, allow for a consistent reference point in order for us to be able to do so. But this is interesting because I guess, and tell me, like, help me understand, they were using existing imagery. This is another important point. We put the stuff on earth or in orbit and we point it out and we capture data.

• 57:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 57:14Lester Nare?

  And it's not like Twitter or the news where that data has a week of value. And then after the first week, all the possible insight that could be derived out of that has already been figured out.

• 57:24Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 57:25Lester Nare?

  It doesn't work that way.

• 57:26Krishna Choudhary?

  No, no, no. That data, that data has timeless value.

• 57:29Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 57:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? There's always, there's always some massaging we can do to get some new insight, right?

• 57:34Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 57:34Krishna Choudhary?

  And that's what these guys are doing because, so basically like the New Horizons spacecraft is a spacecraft that was launched in 2006. It was the fastest thing that humanity has ever thrown out there into the cosmos. Okay?

• 57:48Lester Nare?

  So fast as Voyager one and two.

• 57:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. This thing was just on a straight shot to Pluto. Actually, first it was, it was going to Jupiter and then it was going to use a gravity assist by Jupiter to go straight to Pluto.

• 57:58Lester Nare?

  We watch space movies, so we know about the gravity.

• 58:01Krishna Choudhary?

  And so it, and yeah, yeah, you go around like that. Yeah. You use like Newton's laws basically to like give yourself a boost. And this thing is currently moving at 10,000 kilometers an hour. It's past Pluto, so it took 10 years to get to Pluto. Just imagine how far Pluto is, right? Um, it took these incredible shots of Pluto and then now it's just out in the outer solar system.

• 58:26Lester Nare?

  On search for planet nine.

• 58:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's trying to find it. Um, we'll see, right? So usually when stuff like this goes out, like the Pioneer that's, that's out into interstellar space, Voyager, which is out in interstellar space now, New Horizons, usually um, in order to figure out where you are, you basically beam back to earth and um, JPL has this thing, JPL, which is NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab out in Pasadena, um, maintains something called the Deep Space Network. Um, okay, so there's like, there's like an antenna dish that's like near death valley in California. There's one in Madrid. I forget where the third one is, but effectively it's at 120. It's like at a third of a circle around the earth.

• 59:08Krishna Choudhary?

  So there's always a dish pointing uh, in every direction.

• 59:13Lester Nare?

  You know what scene we should insert here is that scene from Independence Day where Jeff Goldblum is talking about. Line of sight. The reason that they have this global communication network is because anyway.

• 59:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Of a line of sight, but in this case, there's a line of sight to every part of the cosmos. Right? So you've got like earth with like three beams that are going out in opposite directions. Um, and so what you do is you point to earth and you say, okay, how long did it take to get there? I know which way the satellite is pointing to extremely high degree of accuracy. So.

• 59:43Krishna Choudhary?

  I can then within tens of meters. Resolve where I am.

• 59:48Lester Nare?

  Which is pretty good if you're close. But gets increasingly not as good if you're far.

• 59:54Krishna Choudhary?

  That's kind of the point. If we're trying to do this for real. We're trying to go to the stars. We can't be waiting, like even New Horizons probably has to wait like several hours, right? To get that information. If we're, if we're trying to navigate. Right? Not just like coast, which right now New Horizons is coasting. But if we're trying to navigate, what we're gonna have to do is update our location as we're going through. Our journey. And so what these guys did was they looked at where, so as you're moving, right? We always talk about on this podcast how we're stuck on earth. Well, these guys aren't. Right? These guys are not stuck on earth. They're moving through the cosmos. They're now in the interstellar medium away from the sun's influence. And so.

• 1:00:37Krishna Choudhary?

  To them, the positions of the stars are slightly different. Does that make sense?

• 1:00:43Lester Nare?

  Cause we're, we're moving at some incredible speed as a, as a system. In a direction.

• 1:00:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, in some direction, but they're moving this way. And now the, the background looks different because they're from a different vantage point. And by looking at that vantage point and our vantage point. And taking those pictures exactly, we can now resolve where they are, right? Because it can only look like that from one spot. And so we know where that one spot is.

• 1:01:08Lester Nare?

  That makes total sense.

• 1:01:09Krishna Choudhary?

  And that's, that's what this thing did.

• 1:01:11Lester Nare?

  Okay, got it. So it is creating the next sort of like, instead of just looking back at earth as a single ref, as a single point of reference. To, to. Understand your position in this larger vastness of space. We are now using both that reference point. And the reference.

• 1:01:28Krishna Choudhary?

  No, this one doesn't even use the earth. It's just that.

• 1:01:31Lester Nare?

  It just you, because we know. And so we can back. Engineer back calculate from just the snapshot of the sky.

• 1:01:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 1:01:40Lester Nare?

  Which has an orientation or like a frame.

• 1:01:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:44Lester Nare?

  That allows us to be like, oh.

• 1:01:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we're from there.

• 1:01:46Lester Nare?

  Over there's the Hollywood sign, over there's Sunset Boulevard, over there's Venice Beach.

• 1:01:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly, which means I must be here. Yeah, exactly. And the camera on New Horizons was not meant for this kind of stuff. So the airbar is like pretty big. It's like, it's like, like an astronomical unit, like the orbit of the earth.

• 1:02:03Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:02:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so not great, but it's about the principle.

• 1:02:08Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:02:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Because it's, yeah, it's exactly, it's about the, this is the first time they use that principle. Yeah, so I, I think, I think, I think it's a cool, cool story because they use Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359, which are very close stars. They, they figured out where they were in, in relation to the background and then they, they did the back calculation.

• 1:02:30Lester Nare?

  I mean, this, it.

• 1:02:31Krishna Choudhary?

  And this is something we're gonna use later, right?

• 1:02:33Lester Nare?

  I was gonna say.

• 1:02:33Krishna Choudhary?

  When we go to the stars, this is, this is how we do it.

• 1:02:36Lester Nare?

  We upgrade the cameras, so we get higher resolution, which will then bring that one astronomical, that airbar down.

• 1:02:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:43Lester Nare?

  Right? And we get the airbar down. I mean, is there a theoretical situation here where on platform, like on the New Horizons 2.0? It had, it can get, this is, I'm getting in the weeds, it can get some sort of asynchronous update from our mapping of the whole universe, right? Like happening in the background.

• 1:03:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:03:03Lester Nare?

  But it can be capturing live imagery.

• 1:03:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:06Lester Nare?

  And doing a calculation in real time because we're sort of feeding it this background algorithm in like.

• 1:03:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, totally. I mean, I mean, it could, well, how I would design it is, how I would design is, is I would have a computer that would already have the information.

• 1:03:22Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:03:22Krishna Choudhary?

  On where the relevant stars are. And then use that to then just locally make the, make the.

• 1:03:28Lester Nare?

  You can have, you can have the LLM on your local machine.

• 1:03:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:32Lester Nare?

  You don't need to go to the cloud.

• 1:03:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Although I don't want to hallucinate, and this is an easy enough problem where I could just like brute force it.

• 1:03:38Lester Nare?

  Fair.

• 1:03:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, I don't, I don't need a neural network here.

• 1:03:41Lester Nare?

  I think this is actually an important insight though.

• 1:03:42Krishna Choudhary?

  I might need a neural network to actually identify the dots, but once I have identified the dots, right? Cause identifying dots is really good, like image recognition, in terms of like object recognition stuff. But like, once I have the dots, then it's just physics, right? And geometry.

• 1:03:57Lester Nare?

  This I think is really important though, because it, it allows untethered.

• 1:04:04Lester Nare?

  Interstellar navigation.

• 1:04:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:04:06Lester Nare?

  That's like the.

• 1:04:07Krishna Choudhary?

  That's the, that's the key.

• 1:04:08Lester Nare?

  That's the key.

• 1:04:09Krishna Choudhary?

  That's the key. Like, I don't want to depend on the Earth, which might be like very far away at some point.

• 1:04:14Lester Nare?

  Which also means you could imagine, right, that you have, you know, light sails, like a fleet of light sails.

• 1:04:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:20Lester Nare?

  Or whatever that go out, that have their own onboard system like you described. But also because if you send a bunch of them directionally in like a close proximity, but not, you know, over there. They could also information share.

• 1:04:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:35Lester Nare?

  Right, in their local context.

• 1:04:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, yeah, and then like do like a hive mind type of thing.

• 1:04:39Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 1:04:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Quorum sensing.

• 1:04:41Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 1:04:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:41Lester Nare?

  The fleet learning, the same way that Tesla.

• 1:04:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:45Lester Nare?

  Uh, learns to do self-driving. I, I, I just, what I'm trying to do is like really hone in on the import of like. It's, it's the technical insight and what it unlocks.

• 1:04:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:58Lester Nare?

  Is a totally different, you know, those games like Age of Empire or, uh, uh, civilizations?

• 1:05:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, dude, I've played those all the time.

• 1:05:05Lester Nare?

  They have the technology tree.

• 1:05:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 1:05:07Lester Nare?

  And the choices you make unlock different paths.

• 1:05:10Krishna Choudhary?

  That's exactly, dude, yes, you're on it.

• 1:05:12Lester Nare?

  This, this is like why this kind of stuff, because now we have all of these fifty-two hundred new doors.

• 1:05:18Krishna Choudhary?

  New doors to open, yeah.

• 1:05:19Lester Nare?

  That if we had not made that kind of fundamental insight, which seems at this point, because we don't invest money in these things and like, we don't. We don't have Wonder anymore and all that stuff.

• 1:05:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:28Lester Nare?

  But like, there is, it, it is an, it has interesting implications. Like, being able to have untethered, uh, navigation. Like, imagine having Google Maps offline.

• 1:05:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Just offline, yeah. That can like update based on like cameras around your car. Right? That's kind of cool.

• 1:05:44Lester Nare?

  That's great. Cause I've been on my, in my car with no service.

• 1:05:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:47Lester Nare?

  Several times.

• 1:05:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, but if like, but if your, but if your computer just had the Earth memorized.

• 1:05:51Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:05:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And then like just looked around with all the cameras and been like, oh, I know that mountain.

• 1:05:56Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:57Krishna Choudhary?

  And been like, oh, you're here.

• 1:05:58Lester Nare?

  This is, that's, I mean, I think that's incredible.

• 1:06:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. I, I think it's, I think it's a really cool concept, yeah. And it's like the obvious thing to do, but like, somebody's got to do it. And New Horizons is a great probe because the camera's still working. It's like in good condition, right? Voyager's like barely holding on, like, and launched in the seventies. It's like, bro, just like, I'll tell you I'm alive and that's it. Don't ask me to.

• 1:06:22Lester Nare?

  Very, and again, we, there is a delta between where we are now and like it being applied in.

• 1:06:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, but somebody's got to make that first leap.

• 1:06:31Lester Nare?

  We have to start somewhere.

• 1:06:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:33Lester Nare?

  Uh, someone, we all get fried chicken, chicken wings, burgers, pizza, someone had to do it first.

• 1:06:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:42Lester Nare?

  And so that's why a lot of these stories are so important. We have reached the point in the show, mystery box.

• 1:06:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Mystery box time.

• 1:06:52Lester Nare?

  Krishna is going to bring forth a story of the day, of the week, rather, uh, that I know nothing about.

• 1:06:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:00Lester Nare?

  And this week, it's going to be.

• 1:07:04Krishna Choudhary?

  About woo woo.

• 1:07:06Lester Nare?

  Ah, mind, body.

• 1:07:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Mind, body woo woo.

• 1:07:09Lester Nare?

  We, we love.

• 1:07:09Krishna Choudhary?

  I gave you that little preview, right? Mind, body woo woo.

• 1:07:12Lester Nare?

  As, as LA residents, we're big fans of the mind, body woo woo.

• 1:07:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, mind, body woo woo, this one's real, okay? So this is a story that involves brain scans.

• 1:07:21Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:07:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Blood tests.

• 1:07:22Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:07:23Krishna Choudhary?

  And Google's Oculus, the VR system.

• 1:07:27Lester Nare?

  It sounds like a party I don't want to go to.

• 1:07:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. I think I've been to one of those parties. And it was not fun, no. Um, but fundamentally, let me ask you a question, okay?

• 1:07:38Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:07:39Krishna Choudhary?

  When you get sick, or when you get, um, exposed to a pathogen, how does your body respond? There's an immune response.

• 1:07:45Lester Nare?

  Yeah, I get sweaty, I get a fever.

• 1:07:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, you got a fever, your immune sys, your, your immune system goes up, your first responders in the immune system are like, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna start attacking whoever's coming in, right? Um, what if you just thought that you were getting sick?

• 1:08:05Lester Nare?

  Wait a minute, okay. I have, this is funny.

• 1:08:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, not even what if you just thought that you were getting sick, what if you just saw a sick person near you?

• 1:08:15Lester Nare?

  Uh-huh. Okay.

• 1:08:18Krishna Choudhary?

  It turns out, the body has the same response. The immune system starts working, even if you see a sick person near you.

• 1:08:31Lester Nare?

  Bro.

• 1:08:32Krishna Choudhary?

  That's what's, it's crazy.

• 1:08:34Lester Nare?

  This makes so much sense.

• 1:08:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Really?

• 1:08:38Lester Nare?

  This is, yes, I want to, this is, again, mystery box, so.

• 1:08:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, go on.

• 1:08:45Lester Nare?

  No, no, so my wife and I, I tell her this all the time.

• 1:08:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:50Lester Nare?

  When I fly, I've gotten sick almost every time I've flown like in the last six to 12 months, which is brand new for me. And in one of the recent times I flew out, I told her, I was like, I'm just gonna, I'm not getting sick.

• 1:09:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:05Lester Nare?

  And I'm like, I'm just gonna think I'm not gonna get sick and I won't get sick.

• 1:09:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 1:09:11Lester Nare?

  And it has worked.

• 1:09:12Krishna Choudhary?

  And it has worked.

• 1:09:12Lester Nare?

  Since I've started saying that. But this idea of me making eye contact with someone with the sniffles.

• 1:09:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm. And then your immune system responding?

• 1:09:20Lester Nare?

  The, the, the like background system being like, oh.

• 1:09:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that's what this is.

• 1:09:24Lester Nare?

  That's, that makes, but it makes sense though.

• 1:09:27Krishna Choudhary?

  That's what this is. I mean, it kind of makes sense.

• 1:09:29Lester Nare?

  It's a survival mechanism.

• 1:09:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, no, that's, that's exactly what the authors of this paper are arguing. But to me, no, to me, what's incredible is like your neuro, like your nervous system is like prying your immune system. You know what I mean? Like, it's this like, like this connection between mind and body that's like so real. So let me, let me describe to you before we get into it, okay? Let me describe to you what the experiment was.

• 1:09:57Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:09:57Krishna Choudhary?

  And then how they, how they concluded all this stuff because it's in.

• 1:10:00Lester Nare?

  I love mystery.

• 1:10:01Krishna Choudhary?

  It's pretty interesting. Okay. So they've, they got these volunteers, okay? Split them up into two groups. Okay, um, first group, you had these volunteers put on VR headsets, okay? These are virtual reality, because, okay, you know, ethically, if you want to do this kind of experiment, you can't like literally expose people to sick people, all right? Like, all right, okay. So let's get past that. Um, what do you do? You put on, uh, the Google's Oculus, okay? And you got one group that has like, like people with like rashes and like, like sniffles and like coughs. They approach in this virtual reality world, okay? And the other group just has like normal people approach, okay? And then there's a third group that gets flu shots, okay?

• 1:10:46Krishna Choudhary?

  So the first two groups, the Oculus group, Oculus group that gets the rashes and the coughs, they're being exposed to. Visible visual stimuli of sick people. The second group in the Oculus um cohort, they get exposed to normal people. And then the third group get exposed to real pathogens, right? Cause a flu shot is like some kind of like innoc- like sort of dead virus, but it's still a virus and it's gonna create an immune response. That's the whole point of a vaccine. Okay, so what they found was that the group that had the Oculus like VR experience with the rashes and the coughs had the same kind of immune response as the people who had the vaccine.

• 1:11:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Get the F out of here. That's not, that's not all, okay? So they went a little bit further and they actually did EEG, which is electroencephalography, like on their brains, where you attach a bunch of electrodes to the skull to try to see like what brain areas are active. They also did um MRI imaging on the brain to see which brain areas became active during that time. And the, the part of the brain that became active was the frontal and the parietal cortex, like up here, which has to do with um something called the um, it's like a preemptive response, it's the part of the body that like deals with the stuff that is near you. Yeah. Like this sense of like self and like um personal space. Yeah. Okay? Your, your little aura bubble. Yes, yes, your aura bubble.

• 1:12:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, it activated the uh peripersonal space system. Mm-hmm. Okay? Mm-hmm. So now you've got this like mechanistic understanding, right? Where it's like, okay, I see sick people. Mm-hmm. The part of my brain that deals with like my body and like the immediate surroundings of my body are being triggered. And then that triggers, yeah, and that triggers the lymphatic system and the, and the immune system to then release these things called ILCs, which are innate lymphoid cells, which are like the first responders. Yeah. Right? So then when you did the blood tests on the patients, on the, on the volunteers, you get like the same level of these ILCs that people with. Like it's it's it's so weird.

• 1:12:57Lester Nare?

  This is.

• 1:12:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Like it's it's like it's like a conscious like a conscious observation. Triggered like an immune response.

• 1:13:07Lester Nare?

  The way I was thinking about it in my head is like the immune system like it has akin to giving a computer computer vision. Right?

• 1:13:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:15Lester Nare?

  It's like giving the immune system access.

• 1:13:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I mean, it it always had this, but this is the first time we measured it, right?

• 1:13:21Lester Nare?

  Like it it it can.

• 1:13:23Krishna Choudhary?

  And it's like and and at some point, it's like, yeah, of course, the brain, of course, there's like, there's like some subconscious pathway, right?

• 1:13:29Lester Nare?

  Sure.

• 1:13:30Krishna Choudhary?

  That is gonna see that and then and then trigger the immune system.

• 1:13:34Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Just like how like things are triggered by stress and things are triggered by but it's it's it's a very, I like the way that they did the experiment.

• 1:13:43Lester Nare?

  I was literally.

• 1:13:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? With the VR and with the.

• 1:13:46Lester Nare?

  I think that's the that's the interesting thing. It's like even in this manufactured. Non because you could argue like if it's human to human, it's real life, right? There is something that is subtly different.

• 1:13:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:00Lester Nare?

  About like the real world interaction versus an abstraction via the VR headset. What's almost most fascinating is that it still activates.

• 1:14:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Yeah, like like like obviously they knew they were in Oculus.

• 1:14:13Lester Nare?

  Right?

• 1:14:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 1:14:14Lester Nare?

  They had.

• 1:14:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Like they were consciously aware that they're in a VR system, but like still the the subconscious part of the pathway.

• 1:14:20Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:14:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Was like, ah, that person's got a rash.

• 1:14:25Krishna Choudhary?

  You know? Like whatever neural network is working in the background identifying like.

• 1:14:31Lester Nare?

  That's.

• 1:14:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Like sick people.

• 1:14:33Lester Nare?

  You know when people say, I feel like I'm getting like they get that feeling?

• 1:14:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:36Lester Nare?

  That they feel like they they know they're about to get sick. It's kind of like this interaction.

• 1:14:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, and like. Yeah.

• 1:14:44Lester Nare?

  Wait.

• 1:14:45Krishna Choudhary?

  It's cool.

• 1:14:45Lester Nare?

  That's actually really, really cool.

• 1:14:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:48Lester Nare?

  The experimental design is interesting because it sort of creates one interesting degree of separation like we just talked about. And the fact that the system still has similar activation levels.

• 1:14:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:58Lester Nare?

  Um, yeah, with a with a digital. I mean, there's there's so many like weird implications of that because you could, again, you probably extrapolate. There's a lot of people who've had concerns about.

• 1:15:10Lester Nare?

  Like digital companions and VR and its ability to affect your like emotional.

• 1:15:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, but this is, this is going even beyond that. It's not even, it's like, it's like the subconscious immune system thing. That I didn't even know I could control, but like visual, visible stimuli is now controlling it.

• 1:15:25Lester Nare?

  Which sort of brings up this like issue of like, okay, so that means, right, like all of our forms of visual consumption. Regardless of whether it's.

• 1:15:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Like on the phone.

• 1:15:39Lester Nare?

  Or, or digital.

• 1:15:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:40Lester Nare?

  Is, is having this, at least in this context.

• 1:15:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Wow, I didn't even think about that.

• 1:15:46Lester Nare?

  You know what I'm saying? Like that, that implications of that are actually kind of crazy.

• 1:15:49Krishna Choudhary?

  That is kind of crazy shit.

• 1:15:50Lester Nare?

  Yeah, like, which is why it's interesting. They did VR with it for ethical reasons.

• 1:15:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:56Lester Nare?

  Um.

• 1:15:57Krishna Choudhary?

  No, but no, you're right. It's like.

• 1:15:59Lester Nare?

  Where does that stop?

• 1:16:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's like, it's like the, the content that I consume digitally, how much is that shaping like a subconscious?

• 1:16:08Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:16:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Part of me, like my body.

• 1:16:10Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:16:11Krishna Choudhary?

  More than my mind at this point, right?

• 1:16:13Lester Nare?

  You would maybe make the argument that with VR, because it more closely mimics your normal perception.

• 1:16:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I mean, that's the point. Yeah.

• 1:16:20Lester Nare?

  Probably has a higher.

• 1:16:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:22Lester Nare?

  Whatever, like.

• 1:16:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, yes, yes. But it's, it's not a steep cutoff, right? There's gonna be.

• 1:16:27Lester Nare?

  Some.

• 1:16:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:28Lester Nare?

  And so the question is, what is the delta between the VR context versus the, anyway, I, this.

• 1:16:34Krishna Choudhary?

  I didn't even think about that, dude.

• 1:16:35Lester Nare?

  Is why we love mystery box.

• 1:16:36Krishna Choudhary?

  That's crazy.

• 1:16:38Lester Nare?

  What a great story, dude.

• 1:16:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I thought it was, I saw this. I was like, oh dude, Lester's gonna love this.

• 1:16:43Lester Nare?

  I, I, oh my, I hate being sick. It's the worst thing ever.

• 1:16:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:47Lester Nare?

  However, it is good to know, you know, don't look at the sick people.

• 1:16:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just don't look at them, dude.

• 1:16:55Lester Nare?

  It's like that, what is that? Um, it's, it's not like, um, there's those.

• 1:16:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Well, but then your, your immune system won't get primed and then maybe you will actually get sick. So.

• 1:17:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Chicken and egg.

• 1:17:06Lester Nare?

  Damned if you do, damned if you don't. With that, we are going to wrap up this week's episode of From First Principles. I am your host again, Lester Nare, joined by my co-host and the smartest person I know, as well as our resident PhD, Christian.

• 1:17:24Krishna Choudhary?

  You need to, you need to get more friends, mate.

• 1:17:29Lester Nare?

  We'll see you guys next week. Peace.