Space, it is a vast and mysterious place that engulfs everything and is continuously expanding and defying all the principles and knowledge we know. There is so much wisdom and knowledge contained in the endless field and it seems we can never grasp all of it. This far-reaching plain attracts my attention and intrigues me. I love anything and everything to do with space.
Keeping that in mind, I was scrolling through the enormous list of podcasts that the TED Radio has to offer and one in particular caught my eye. The podcast was called Peering into Space, so I naturally clicked on it and didn’t think twice.
To summarize this podcast into a couple sentences would be effortless. There were three central ideas that the podcast covered, and only two of them really gave me a decent walk away thought after listening. The first idea that was discussed involved the expansion of the universe, the next notion talked about an asteroid that could hit our planet and the third idea was about what other life could out there in the vast universe. I’m going to talk about the first topic. The second topic doesn’t have a lot of ground to cover like the first, and the last topic is just very bland and is just a question asked to frequently, I really think it was only used to make the podcast reach the one hour mark like most podcasts do.
In the podcast, we are introduced to three scientists. Brian Greene a theoretical physicist, Phil Plait who is apart of the Hubble Space Telescope team, and Jill Tarter who is apart of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institution (SETI).
Brain Greene really got my gears turning as I was listening to him talk about his piece. He talked about the history of the how we as humans understand how our galaxy and universe moves. Before the early 1900’s it was believed that everything was static, stuck in place. Then that idea was challenged and proved wrong by Edwin Hubble, he noticed that our nearby galaxies were increasing there distance from us suggesting that everything is expanding away from each other. He improved on this discovery and stated that the expansion is slowing down as well due to gravity pulling everything back together from the big bang. This discovery became the norm from the 1920’s all the way to the late 1990’s.
In 1998 Adam Reese, a Physics Professor created the new norm by noticing in his observations that there was a “mistake.” During his observations, he kept recognizing this same issue that suggested that the universe is expanding, but it is not slowing down… IT’S SPEEDING UP! Hearing that was absolutely mind-blowing. The problem was backed up hundreds of times by astronomers performing different experiments and observations and everyone thought it crazy that they were was arriving at the same outcome. Adam Reese and another accomplice came forward with this idea and proved its relevance and accuracy and as a result, they both received Nobel Prizes. Now the norm of how our universe is expanding is that it is speeding up.
But…..how? You might be asking.
Well, the most common and agreed upon theory is that there is a form of dark matter behind all of this. Whatever this substance is, scientist agree for now that it is all over the place and repels everything away from it. This causes everything to be pushed away from each other explaining expansion but also raises some more questions.
For example, “If the universe is expanding, then what are we expanding into?”
This brings another theory into the picture that was brought up during the podcast. Brain Greene shines light on this for a second, but I found it very interesting. He goes on to say that, “If we are expanding then we are expanding into something, we can’t be expanding into nothing.” He suggests that we are not in one universe but we are in an array of verses a multiverse that we are diffusing into, and those arrays of multiverses expand into other multiverses, etc, etc. Having never heard this I was absolutely blown away.
Brain Greene was my favorite speaker out of all the scientists in this podcast. He was very passionate about what he was talking about, and he gave a good insight and perspective to let the audience including myself see space in his own eyes. This is the reason I love space there is always something new to learn and it’s never-ending and I enjoy that the most.
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