#392: The Spin Cycle of the Cosmos: Unraveling Universal Mysteries

Hi, thanks for joining us on another episode of Space Nuts. My name is Andrew Dunkley, your host. Hope you're well. Coming up this week, we're going to answer questions about short sighted science, why things spin, and what we would ask aliens if we had the opportunity to do so. That's all coming up on this episode of Space Nuts. Fifteen seconds guidance in Channel ten nine ignition sequence Space Nuts NY four three two one Space Notes as a nut re bought it. Bill's good, okay, Fred. Time for our Q and A segment. This is where we answer questions from the audiences. But a couple that I've been sitting on lately because I thought they required homework, and I hope you did your homework, Fred, I had to do I had to do homework on a couple of these. We'll start off by hearing from one of our regular cinder inters in that Buddy. Hey, guys, this is Buddy for More. Do you think that mainstream science sometimes is stucking out? It seems like they they failed to see obvious things because it's kind of off their kilter from their speciality. And I'm just going to use one example of the blindness of science. This sometimes some of the smartest scientists the world. You've even said so bred NASA. Okay, they spent ten million dollars to come up with a pen that would write in space. Fantastic. You know, the lessons loved it. A pencil Okay, now I was right there, nobody, I mean, come on, anyways, thanks guys, loves the show, keep up the good work, and thanks for patience. I love buddies laugh. Yeah, because it is funny. I think there's a lot more to it than that. I think, you know, the idea of the space pin was good for some reasons. But yeah, well think there's a bit bit of an urban myth angle going on there too. But yeah, it's let me tell you the true story, Andrew, Okay, I'd love to hear it. Yer, doesn't spoil my research. I do too. It is an urban myth and body should know that, yes, you do. So what happened was in the early days of the space of human space flight. Both the Soviet Union and UH and the NASA, both of them use pencils. Yeah, and they were you know, they were propelling pencils so they didn't have to sharden them. But it turns out that flat fragments of pencil lead can float around in space and they're not very good for you. You don't want to get there, you know, to get in the works. And it was not actually NASA that developed the space pen. It was a company called the Fisher Pen Company, and they did invest We don't know how much it was, but it's a hundred million dollars. It wasn't NASA who put the money into it. And I think in the end NASA did you some of those Fisher pens, as did Ross Cosmos. The Soviets also used them. So you know, it puts it puts the urban myth to bed because that's what happened. Yeah, it's a lot, it's much less entertaining story is what actually happened. The urban miess a lot. Yeah, there's a few great urban myths from from the Space Race era. Mister Gorsky comes to mind, but we won't go there. Apparently, it was a company in Houston, tay Cam Engineering Manufacturing Incorporated in nineteen sixty five that came up with thirty four mechanical pencils. There were the pens had a cost of four three hundred and eighty two dollars and fifty cents. There were one hundred and twenty eight dollars eighty nine each each year per pencil. Yeah, each pencil. That's a very expensive pencil. Pretty flushing pencils. Yeah, which reminds which reminds me of something before we go on, Fred, did you hear that they found a cache of pencils that used to belong to William Shakespeare? But he had this It's true, he had this habit and now I'm serious, he had this habit of chewing his pencils, so they couldn't tell if it was to be or not to be the feeling this might be going somewhere like that. That's very very annolisious that that one. Yeah, But just going back to the you know, the thrust of bodies question, ignoring urban myths. I think he's got a good point, and you know, scientists do tend to at least try and be open minded, but it is you know, the classic example of what Buddy's talking about is dark matter. We think that the idea that there are these subatomic particles which we nature we haven't uncovered yet, permeating the universe. We think that is the best fit to the information. But a lot of people I think have got fixated on that idea, and there's really good reasons for doing that. It's not just the individual galaxy's rotating too fast that tells us tark matter is there. It's the whole geometrical structure of the universe that can only work the way it does if you've got this dark matter component. So we're led very strongly in that direction, but you do still need to keep an open mind. And there are a few scientists who say, well, maybe dark matter is there, but maybe it's something else, and many of them are researching intomand modified Newtonian dynamics. One of our listeners, as you probably know, of away and shout out for piecea there who is actually doing his PhD on mode on the idea that we've got our view of acceleration wrong, that Newtonian dynamics have very low accelerations breaks down, and that in itself is a fascinating idea. There might be, you know, we have to try and understand that, but there are ways in which that can satisfy the need for dark matter without it being dark matter. Some of there are still problems with it. It doesn't fit some of some of the observations that we made. But that's I suppose comparable with the big problem with dark matter, which is we can't find it, we don't know what it is. Yeah. So yeah, So Buddy's point is well made even though it is, and I can back it is a good one. I can back. Yeah, I can back Buddy up with a few other things that have happened in science in general. But see the ice men they found in the Alps, who'd been there for thousands of years. When they first tried to find out why he died, they missed the arrowhead in his shoulder. Second team of scientists found that the color of the universe. I love dredging this one up for your friend. The color of the universe completely missed that one. Ah, I remember that. Yeah, it's beige, But they said it was aqua originally, wasn't it. George Mendel, I don't know if you've heard of this bloke. He was the first one to pose the theory of genetic inheritance, passing things on to your children that was ignored in science initially. Igness semil Wells was the one who suggested washing your hands would reduce the mortality rate in hospitals, that was ignored, and Ludwig Boltzman, who came up with atom formula atom formulas, he was ignored on the basis that his theories destroyed every everyone else's work. Yeah, there's a classic one from astronomy as well, and that is the discovery of nebulium, which so the and there's good reason for it. When people started first looking at nebulae gas clouds with a spectrometer a spectroscope to identify the elements that are in there, which you do by the wavelengths of light that they radiate, they found this stuff that they couldn't pin down. Everything else, hydrogen, carbon, iron, everything else fit what we find in the laboratory, but there was one species that these right lines in the spectrum of a nebula, which simply didn't fit anything. So nebulium was postulated in the eighteen sixties, late eighteen sixties, eighteen seventies, and it wasn't debunked until nineteen twenty eight. I think, so wow, fifty years and it turns out that what it is is at was behaving very differently in the vacuum of space from what they do in the laboratory on Earth. Because we can't create a vacuum anything like us good and so items they emit what are called forbidden lines. It's a really lovely story. Forbidden lines are lines that are forbidden when you've emission lines, bright lines in the spectrum that are forbidden when you try and measure them on Earth. But in the vacuum of space, they're all possible. And that's what they were, so very clever, more old Irah Bowen who made that discovery, and it was we've all been barking up the wrong tree for a long long time. Not me. I wasn't for them. We've got to move on because I'm short of tears, all right. I think we'll just do one more question because you are about to leave us. But thank you, buddy. We might just do this one because I think it'll be quick and asy. And apologies to Robert who asked us a question about what we'd ask aliens. We'll move that out of the next week next weekschologies for that, Pacemuds. We've got a question from Lynn in Victoria in Australia. Probably a terribly simple question, she says, but I've never heard it discuss. Why does everything in the universe insist on spinning, rotating, orbiting around itself or seemingly anything else in its vicinity suns, moons, planets, solar systems, galaxies. Everything is twirling about with gay abandon Why is it so? Yeah? I love the gay abundant line because that's exactly what it looks like. And Lin is quite right. Pretty well, everything rotates, and it's a feature of the way everything is formed because all of these things in somewhere or another. And let's think about stars in particular, because that's the easiest one to deal with. They all involve when they're formed. They all involve a collapse, something being pulled together by its own gravity. In the case of a star, you start off with a cloud, a nebula, like we've just been discussing, a cloud of gas and dust, which essentially starts compressing itself by its own gravity, and that's the beginning of star formation. Within that cloud that's compressing, there will be little swirls and eddies set up, because that's the way gases move. It's all about gas dynamics. Is this. As gases move, they set up these swirls, and eventually those swirls, you know, it turns out that there is a preferred direction clockwise are anti clockwise. As those swirls all come together, and as the collapse takes place, you get the conservation of angular momentum, which means as this thing gets smaller, this cloud of gas gets smaller because it's collapsing, it's been faster and it takes on whatever the predominant direction is of those swirls, so it can't really collapse with starting to spin and collapsing is the basic mechanism by which things form, whether they're stars or even galaxies. So galaxies rotate as well, probably because they started off from huge clouds of gas and dusting. Individual stars would form within them, but there will be an overall rotation direction which will be picked up by the galaxy. It is amazing planets the same planets swirl because they swirl with the rotation of the protoplanet disc that we talked about earlier. So a great question, Lynn, But there is a mechanism that would cause that. It's hard to imagine that the universe would just be, you know, deafly still pond nothing doesn't move really, yeah, I mean, if things do, if planets aren't rotating around you know, sorry, revolving around a star, they just fall into the star because gravity would pull them in. It's the balance between their motion and gravity that keeps keeps everything on the track. Yeah, just orbital mechanics. Indeed, all right, thank you, Lenn. Lovely to hear from you. Unfortunately, that's where we're going to end it for this week. But we do appreciate your sending in your questions and please keep them coming. We really would love to answer all your questions. We often get duplications of questions, so if we don't answer yours, it's because someone else asked it before you or after you. We sometimes have these things in chronological order sometimes, but yeah, please send them in via our website space nuts dot io and click on the AMA tab or the send us your message tab on the right hand side of the home page and have a look around while you're there. Maybe you'd like to become a patron, and maybe you'd like to become a subscriber if you'd like to follow us on YouTube, for example, subscriptions are welcome. They're free. Just press the subscribe button and add yourself to the list, and you can catch video editions of space Nuts on YouTube. Fred that's where we're going to wrap it up for another week. Thank you Kin, sir, it's a pleasure, always good to talk. We'll talk against him, we will, indeed, Fred Wat's an astronomer at large part of the team here at Space Nuts. And thanks to Hue in the studio for being Hue with the studio, and from me Andrew Dunkley, thanks again for your company. Catch you on the very next episode of Space Nuts. 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