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

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Hi, thanks for joining us on
another episode of Space Nuts. My name

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is Andrew Dunkley, your host.
Hope you're well. Coming up this week,

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we're going to answer questions about short
sighted science, why things spin,

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and what we would ask aliens if
we had the opportunity to do so.

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That's all coming up on this episode
of Space Nuts. Fifteen seconds guidance in

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Channel ten nine ignition sequence Space Nuts
NY four three two one Space Notes as

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a nut re bought it. Bill's
good, okay, Fred. Time for

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our Q and A segment. This
is where we answer questions from the audiences.

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But a couple that I've been sitting
on lately because I thought they required

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homework, and I hope you did
your homework, Fred, I had to

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do I had to do homework on
a couple of these. We'll start off

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by hearing from one of our regular
cinder inters in that Buddy. Hey,

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guys, this is Buddy for More. Do you think that mainstream science sometimes

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is stucking out? It seems like
they they failed to see obvious things because

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it's kind of off their kilter from
their speciality. And I'm just going to

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use one example of the blindness of
science. This sometimes some of the smartest

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scientists the world. You've even said
so bred NASA. Okay, they spent

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ten million dollars to come up with
a pen that would write in space.

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Fantastic. You know, the lessons
loved it. A pencil Okay, now

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I was right there, nobody,
I mean, come on, anyways,

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thanks guys, loves the show,
keep up the good work, and thanks

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for patience. I love buddies laugh. Yeah, because it is funny.

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I think there's a lot more to
it than that. I think, you

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know, the idea of the space
pin was good for some reasons. But

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yeah, well think there's a bit
bit of an urban myth angle going on

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there too. But yeah, it's
let me tell you the true story,

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Andrew, Okay, I'd love to
hear it. Yer, doesn't spoil my

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research. I do too. It
is an urban myth and body should know

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that, yes, you do.
So what happened was in the early days

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of the space of human space flight. Both the Soviet Union and UH and

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the NASA, both of them use
pencils. Yeah, and they were you

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know, they were propelling pencils so
they didn't have to sharden them. But

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it turns out that flat fragments of
pencil lead can float around in space and

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they're not very good for you.
You don't want to get there, you

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know, to get in the works. And it was not actually NASA that

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developed the space pen. It was
a company called the Fisher Pen Company,

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and they did invest We don't know
how much it was, but it's a

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hundred million dollars. It wasn't NASA
who put the money into it. And

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I think in the end NASA did
you some of those Fisher pens, as

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did Ross Cosmos. The Soviets also
used them. So you know, it

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puts it puts the urban myth to
bed because that's what happened. Yeah,

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it's a lot, it's much less
entertaining story is what actually happened. The

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urban miess a lot. Yeah,
there's a few great urban myths from from

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the Space Race era. Mister Gorsky
comes to mind, but we won't go

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there. Apparently, it was a
company in Houston, tay Cam Engineering Manufacturing

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Incorporated in nineteen sixty five that came
up with thirty four mechanical pencils. There

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were the pens had a cost of
four three hundred and eighty two dollars and

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fifty cents. There were one hundred
and twenty eight dollars eighty nine each each

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year per pencil. Yeah, each
pencil. That's a very expensive pencil.

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Pretty flushing pencils. Yeah, which
reminds which reminds me of something before we

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go on, Fred, did you
hear that they found a cache of pencils

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that used to belong to William Shakespeare? But he had this It's true,

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he had this habit and now I'm
serious, he had this habit of chewing

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his pencils, so they couldn't tell
if it was to be or not to

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be the feeling this might be going
somewhere like that. That's very very annolisious

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that that one. Yeah, But
just going back to the you know,

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the thrust of bodies question, ignoring
urban myths. I think he's got a

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good point, and you know,
scientists do tend to at least try and

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be open minded, but it is
you know, the classic example of what

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Buddy's talking about is dark matter.
We think that the idea that there are

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these subatomic particles which we nature we
haven't uncovered yet, permeating the universe.

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We think that is the best fit
to the information. But a lot of

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people I think have got fixated on
that idea, and there's really good reasons

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for doing that. It's not just
the individual galaxy's rotating too fast that tells

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us tark matter is there. It's
the whole geometrical structure of the universe that

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can only work the way it does
if you've got this dark matter component.

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So we're led very strongly in that
direction, but you do still need to

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keep an open mind. And there
are a few scientists who say, well,

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maybe dark matter is there, but
maybe it's something else, and many

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of them are researching intomand modified Newtonian
dynamics. One of our listeners, as

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you probably know, of away and
shout out for piecea there who is actually

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doing his PhD on mode on the
idea that we've got our view of acceleration

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wrong, that Newtonian dynamics have very
low accelerations breaks down, and that in

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itself is a fascinating idea. There
might be, you know, we have

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to try and understand that, but
there are ways in which that can satisfy

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the need for dark matter without it
being dark matter. Some of there are

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still problems with it. It doesn't
fit some of some of the observations that

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we made. But that's I suppose
comparable with the big problem with dark matter,

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which is we can't find it,
we don't know what it is.

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Yeah. So yeah, So Buddy's
point is well made even though it is,

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and I can back it is a
good one. I can back.

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Yeah, I can back Buddy up
with a few other things that have happened

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in science in general. But see
the ice men they found in the Alps,

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who'd been there for thousands of years. When they first tried to find

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out why he died, they missed
the arrowhead in his shoulder. Second team

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of scientists found that the color of
the universe. I love dredging this one

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up for your friend. The color
of the universe completely missed that one.

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Ah, I remember that. Yeah, it's beige, But they said it

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was aqua originally, wasn't it.
George Mendel, I don't know if you've

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heard of this bloke. He was
the first one to pose the theory of

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genetic inheritance, passing things on to
your children that was ignored in science initially.

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Igness semil Wells was the one who
suggested washing your hands would reduce the

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mortality rate in hospitals, that was
ignored, and Ludwig Boltzman, who came

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up with atom formula atom formulas,
he was ignored on the basis that his

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theories destroyed every everyone else's work.
Yeah, there's a classic one from astronomy

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as well, and that is the
discovery of nebulium, which so the and

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there's good reason for it. When
people started first looking at nebulae gas clouds

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with a spectrometer a spectroscope to identify
the elements that are in there, which

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you do by the wavelengths of light
that they radiate, they found this stuff

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that they couldn't pin down. Everything
else, hydrogen, carbon, iron,

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everything else fit what we find in
the laboratory, but there was one species

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that these right lines in the spectrum
of a nebula, which simply didn't fit

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anything. So nebulium was postulated in
the eighteen sixties, late eighteen sixties,

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eighteen seventies, and it wasn't debunked
until nineteen twenty eight. I think,

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so wow, fifty years and it
turns out that what it is is at

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was behaving very differently in the vacuum
of space from what they do in the

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laboratory on Earth. Because we can't
create a vacuum anything like us good and

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so items they emit what are called
forbidden lines. It's a really lovely story.

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Forbidden lines are lines that are forbidden
when you've emission lines, bright lines

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in the spectrum that are forbidden when
you try and measure them on Earth.

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But in the vacuum of space,
they're all possible. And that's what they

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were, so very clever, more
old Irah Bowen who made that discovery,

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and it was we've all been barking
up the wrong tree for a long long

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time. Not me. I wasn't
for them. We've got to move on

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because I'm short of tears, all
right. I think we'll just do one

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more question because you are about to
leave us. But thank you, buddy.

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We might just do this one because
I think it'll be quick and asy.

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And apologies to Robert who asked us
a question about what we'd ask aliens.

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We'll move that out of the next
week next weekschologies for that, Pacemuds.

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We've got a question from Lynn in
Victoria in Australia. Probably a terribly

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simple question, she says, but
I've never heard it discuss. Why does

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everything in the universe insist on spinning, rotating, orbiting around itself or seemingly

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anything else in its vicinity suns,
moons, planets, solar systems, galaxies.

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Everything is twirling about with gay abandon
Why is it so? Yeah?

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I love the gay abundant line because
that's exactly what it looks like. And

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Lin is quite right. Pretty well, everything rotates, and it's a feature

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of the way everything is formed because
all of these things in somewhere or another.

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And let's think about stars in particular, because that's the easiest one to

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deal with. They all involve when
they're formed. They all involve a collapse,

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something being pulled together by its own
gravity. In the case of a

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star, you start off with a
cloud, a nebula, like we've just

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been discussing, a cloud of gas
and dust, which essentially starts compressing itself

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by its own gravity, and that's
the beginning of star formation. Within that

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cloud that's compressing, there will be
little swirls and eddies set up, because

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that's the way gases move. It's
all about gas dynamics. Is this.

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As gases move, they set up
these swirls, and eventually those swirls,

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you know, it turns out that
there is a preferred direction clockwise are anti

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clockwise. As those swirls all come
together, and as the collapse takes place,

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you get the conservation of angular momentum, which means as this thing gets

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smaller, this cloud of gas gets
smaller because it's collapsing, it's been faster

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and it takes on whatever the predominant
direction is of those swirls, so it

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can't really collapse with starting to spin
and collapsing is the basic mechanism by which

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things form, whether they're stars or
even galaxies. So galaxies rotate as well,

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probably because they started off from huge
clouds of gas and dusting. Individual

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stars would form within them, but
there will be an overall rotation direction which

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will be picked up by the galaxy. It is amazing planets the same planets

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swirl because they swirl with the rotation
of the protoplanet disc that we talked about

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earlier. So a great question,
Lynn, But there is a mechanism that

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would cause that. It's hard to
imagine that the universe would just be,

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you know, deafly still pond nothing
doesn't move really, yeah, I mean,

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if things do, if planets aren't
rotating around you know, sorry,

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revolving around a star, they just
fall into the star because gravity would pull

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them in. It's the balance between
their motion and gravity that keeps keeps everything

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on the track. Yeah, just
orbital mechanics. Indeed, all right,

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thank you, Lenn. Lovely to
hear from you. Unfortunately, that's where

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we're going to end it for this
week. But we do appreciate your sending

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in your questions and please keep them
coming. We really would love to answer

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all your questions. We often get
duplications of questions, so if we don't

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answer yours, it's because someone else
asked it before you or after you.

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We sometimes have these things in chronological
order sometimes, but yeah, please send

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them in via our website space nuts
dot io and click on the AMA tab

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Just press the subscribe button and add
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catch video editions of space Nuts on
YouTube. Fred that's where we're going to

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wrap it up for another week.
Thank you Kin, sir, it's a

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pleasure, always good to talk.
We'll talk against him, we will,

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indeed, Fred Wat's an astronomer at
large part of the team here at Space

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Nuts. And thanks to Hue in
the studio for being Hue with the studio,

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and from me Andrew Dunkley, thanks
again for your company. Catch you

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on the very next episode of Space
Nuts. By For now you'll be to

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