AaS! 109: What are the mysterious cosmic strings?
Ask a Spaceman!
Paul M. Sutter
4.8 • 853 Ratings
🗓️ 6 August 2019
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How do cracks appear in spacetime? What does it have to do with symmetry? Could we ever hope to find a cosmic string? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!
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Music by Jason Grady and Nick Bain. Thanks to Cathy Rinella for editing.
Hosted by Paul M. Sutter, astrophysicist at The Ohio State University, and the one and only Agent to the Stars (http://www.pmsutter.com).
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In so many myths, both past and present, there are stories of creatures, right? |
| 0:16.5 | That are hidden, that are deep, that are asleep. |
| 0:20.0 | And then through some bumbling of humanity, usually our greed or our sense of adventure, we find them, we awaken them, like dragons in their hordes of gold or the bell-rog. |
| 0:36.0 | You know, if you dig too deep and too greedily, you're going to awaken some ancient terror, |
| 0:41.9 | some lovecraftian nightmare. |
| 0:44.9 | The point of these stories is probably more about human nature than nature-nature, |
| 0:49.3 | but nature has secrets. |
| 0:53.4 | Nature has some deep stuff. Nature has some deep stuff. |
| 0:56.1 | Nature has some scary things that in some cases we're probably better off not knowing that they exist. |
| 1:04.8 | And the bow-rog, the dragon, the monster that I'm talking about today is cosmic strings. Cosmic strings are a potential |
| 1:16.5 | leftover, a potential remnant of the very early universe. In the very early universe, |
| 1:24.0 | was just a different place, man. And I'm not talking like when the universe was a thousand |
| 1:28.1 | years old or a hundred years old or a second old. I'm talking about when it was a billionth |
| 1:33.5 | of a billionth of a billionth and probably a few more billions of a second old. Some tiny fraction. |
| 1:41.1 | Life in that universe would be completely unrecognizable to us today. |
| 1:49.9 | The forces of nature that we identify and we recognize and we enjoy, the structures, the chemistry, just everything is different. |
| 2:04.8 | Life in the early universe was symmetric. |
| 2:11.3 | Life in the early universe, especially when it comes to the forces of nature, had a certain symmetry to it that is completely and totally broken today. The symmetries, it's a little bit hard to describe |
| 2:20.7 | the symmetries. And one of these days I'll do a whole episode just on symmetries and forces |
| 2:24.5 | of nature. Feel free to ask. But the symmetries are symmetries in the mathematics. You write |
| 2:31.1 | down the equations that describe these forces, and then there are certain reflections. |
| 2:36.1 | There are certain things that stay the same if you flip things around or move them to a different point in space or change of the charge or something. |
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