Starts With A Bang podcast

A simple, innocent question that I received had me thinking for days about how to answer it. The question? "If humans were made in God's image, whose image were aliens made in?" There's so much to say from a science perspective about how humans were made, and how aliens might be made, that I couldn't resist giving it my absolute best! Do you agree? Comment below!

Ever wonder about the biggest questions that there are? You know the ones I mean: about what is the Universe, where does it come from, and what is its fate? For millennia, these were questions for poets, philosophers, and theologians. Yet, despite all the "answers" that they offered, there was no way to test or verify whether they were correct. Enter science. After countless lifetimes struggling mightily with these, we have the answers, and they're spectacular. What do we know? How do we know it? And why is science so powerful at giving these answers? Find out, on this latest edition of the Starts With A Bang podcast!

Ever dream of traveling back in time? According to all the laws of special relativity, all you can do is travel forwards through time, controlling your rate by controlling your motion through space. But in General Relativity, the curvature of spacetime allows you to play with those rules a little more flexibly. You can make it back in time, but you still can't kill your own grandpa before your parents were conceived. Find out why on this edition of the Starts With A Bang podcast! Video version (for the first time): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhCxtdxa8nI

Our current best theories describing the Universe, general relativity for gravity, quantum field theory for electromagnetism and the nuclear forces, do a fantastic job independently and together. But there are fundamental questions that go unanswered if we take these as the final answers. What happens to the gravitational field of an electron passing through a double slit? What happens to the information on a black hole's surface when it decays? And what happens close by a gravitational singularity? Without a quantum theory of gravity, we can't know. Yet we're on a path to try and figure it out! Where are we, and how far do we have to go? Find out, on this edition of the Starts With A Bang podcast!

Right around one year from today, the James Webb Space Telescope will launch to a position 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth, deploying into a quasi-stable orbit around the L2 Lagrange point. Its magnificent, 5-layer sunshield will unfold, allowing it to passively cool down to temperatures cold enough to turn nitrogen into a liquid. Beyond that, it will have on-board coolant taking it down to 7 Kelvin, allowing us to observe light that's 50 times as long as the wavelengths the human eye can see. The gold mirrors are ideal for reflecting infrared light, and will allow us to view the Universe as never before. This isn't the "next Hubble" as some are saying, but rather the first James Webb! Here's what's in store, and what makes it so magnificent.

On August 21, 2017, a total solar eclipse occurred over the continental United States for the first time in nearly 39 years, when half the current US population wasn't even born. For many of us, it was our first opportunity to ever experience a sight like this for ourselves, and not only lived up to the hype, it was something that even a scientist couldn't fully anticipate. Here's a first-person account of what the experience was like, and how to enjoy it to the fullest, yourself, the next time one comes around!

On August 21, 2017, a coast-to-coast total eclipse across the United States will occur, the first one in 99 years. As the Moon's shadow hits the Earth and speeds across it, there's so much to see and enjoy, but only if you're prepared. What should you look for? Where should you go? How can you stay safe? And what's the science behind it? Come get the full story on the latest edition of the Starts With A Bang podcast! More information: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/07/27/the-sights-safety-and-science-of-the-great-american-eclipse/

At a fundamental level, everything we know of in this Universe is made of the same few fundamental particles: quarks, gluons, electrons and photons, which combine to give us atoms, which in turn make up all the molecules, cells, organs and living creatures inhabiting our world today. But how do we go from these tiny scales where everything looks so similar to the huge diversity of what exists at a larger, more macroscopic scale? The secret is encoded in a single quantum rule that governs how it all works: the Pauli exclusion principle. Come get the scoop here on the latest Starts With A Bang podcast!

Have you ever wondered how the Universe will end? In the far future, everything that we know, see, measure and perceive today will someday decay away, becoming something very different from what we know it as today. The Earth will cease to harbor life, the Sun will die, the galaxies will merge and recede, and eventually everything will fade to black. But beyond that, space itself will push everything apart, stellar remnants will get ejected, and even the most massive objects at all will decay into nothingness. In just 20 minutes, you can experience the entire future of everything to come.

Is time travel possible? Of course it's inevitable in some sense, as we always move through the Universe at the "boring" rate of one second per second. But what about traveling into the future? If we go, can we ever come back? And what about back in time? Would it be possible to alter the past, or revisit a historical event as an observer? The mathematics of relativity opens the door to a lot of possibilities, but the physical Universe has a lot to say about it, too.