You and Betty and the Nancy's and Bill's and Joes and Jane's will find in the study of science a richer, more rewarding life.

Welcome to Inquiring Minds. I'm Indravis Gontas. This is a podcast that explores the space where science and society collide.

We want to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it matters.

It's not often that a book about numbers finds a publisher and is released to the general public. But listeners of this show, I'm sure,

will agree that math and equations and numbers in general have the ability to explain

almost anything we can conceive of in the universe. Sometimes, though, it takes a bit of

translation. And I, for one, often need a lot of help. So I was delighted to talk to Tony Padilla. He's a leading

theoretical physicist and cosmologist at the University of Nottingham. And in 2016, he and his

collaborator shared the Bukhalter Cosmology Prize for their work on the Cosmological Constant.

He's also a YouTube star, creating videos for number file, many of which

have been viewed millions of times. So he seemed like just the right person to explain some of these

amazing numbers to me, and also to show how understanding these numbers gives us a glimpse,

not just of how we measure the universe,

but ultimately the nature of reality itself.

Tony Padilla, welcome to inquiring minds.

Hi, lovely to be here.

So I have to say that I'm kind of scared of numbers whenever I have like a mathematician or a theoretical physicist on the show, I feel totally out of my element.

Except that like there are times when I can, if I can kind of visualize a number, I feel like then I'm okay.

I can understand it.

But even in the book jacket,

you recommend that there are some numbers that I really even shouldn't try to visualize

because it might lead my head to become a black hole. Black hole head. Okay. So let's start there.

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