AaS! 130: What's the Most Amazing Thing About the Universe?
Ask a Spaceman!
Paul M. Sutter
4.8 • 853 Ratings
🗓️ 16 June 2020
⏱️ 26 minutes
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Summary
What blows me away about the universe? How is it all connected? How does universality give physics the power to explain everything? 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 and the one and only Agent to the Stars (http://www.pmsutter.com).
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Today's question comes from Iva 987 on Twitter, and it's a little bit different, |
| 0:13.2 | but I just couldn't pass it up, so I wanted to just jump right in. |
| 0:16.6 | The question is, what's the most amazing thing about the universe? |
| 0:20.8 | Of course, everyone has their own answer, but this is my podcast, so you're going to get my answer. |
| 0:26.5 | And I'm going to tell you my answer right now and use the rest of the episode to prove my point |
| 0:31.0 | so that you all end up agreeing with me and I'm not the only one who thinks this way. |
| 0:36.3 | I think that the most amazing thing about the universe is the very universality of physics. |
| 0:43.7 | Of how we can learn something here on the surface of the earth in our little rooms and little |
| 0:48.4 | laboratories and our chalkboards and our experiments. |
| 0:52.0 | And what we learn applies throughout all of space and time. And this isn't |
| 0:59.6 | obvious. Nobody really thought this way for a long time. But once we began to realize it, the concept |
| 1:06.9 | exploded our ability to understand the universe. And it didn't have to be this way. There's no reason |
| 1:14.7 | whatsoever that different parts of the universe or different times in the universe have to obey |
| 1:20.5 | the same set of physics. What applies here on the surface of the earth doesn't have to apply |
| 1:26.7 | when the universe was a second old, |
| 1:28.6 | or over in the Andromeda Galaxy, or anywhere, or anyone else. |
| 1:33.5 | It is just amazing. |
| 1:36.2 | So let me give you some examples to show just how amazing it really is. |
| 1:42.1 | Let's start with gravitation, because that's where everything started in this whole |
| 1:46.8 | universality of physics thing. For centuries, for millennia, for basically all of human existence, |
| 1:54.1 | the assumption was that gravity, our attraction to the earth, was just the thing that you |
| 1:59.9 | experience close to the earth, |
... |
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