ASM003 The Fastest Car in the Universe and What Happens When We Die

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the fastest car in the universe and what happens when we die

all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike

[Music]

welcome to the third episode of ask science mike a weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life

man you guys are giving me some great questions to work with and i'm at the sundance film festival this week

and i've had an opportunity to meet some of the listeners of this program and have some great conversations about your experiences

with that in mind there's some wonderful questions this week and let's get it started

## The Fastest Car in the Universe

our first question this week comes from corey pitts on twitter

and he asked, “If you were traveling in a car at the speed of light and you turn your headlights on, would they work?”

now this is an interesting and common science question that has one major major major obstacle

and that's you can't go the speed of light

you just can't do it

why

well let's look at a couple of scenarios

you've got your car, you've got a really really fast car

in fact it's the fastest car in the universe and it can accelerate from zero to 99 the speed of light in a millisecond

it's a really fast car

it would require an unfathomable amount of energy to run that engine

but forget about that for a second

you've got your car and you know you pull out of the driveway and you get on the interstate and you just man you put the pedal to the metal and your car accelerates rapidly towards light speed

and some bad stuff happens really fast as your car in its immense acceleration capacity approaches light speed well first of all your body would not be able to withstand the forces of acceleration long before you got anywhere near light speed your card would be punched

but before that could even happen if the car accelerated quickly enough the compression waves of your car pressing into the atmosphere would cause nuclear fusion the oxygen and nitrogen in the air would fuse with the atoms and the front of your car and we understand when nuclear fusion happens a lot of energy is released in the form of x-rays and gamma rays and they're going to cause all kind of damage to the atmosphere into your vehicle and you're just going to in fractions of a second billionth of a second you're not going to have a car anymore you're going to have a ball of plasma accelerating across the surface of our planet at near light speed it would cause an immense explosion like a massive massive nuclear bomb so you can't go the speed of light in a car in our atmosphere so let's remove some of those limitations where now we're going to make our car have a oxygen tanks and take it out of the earth's atmosphere so now we have a space car still a car it's got headlights and it has that same incredible engine that lets it accelerate to a high fraction of light speed in just a tiny fraction of a second and now we're also going to give it some ability uh with unknown technology to sort of mitigate the inertial forces that what acceleration would do to your body we're going to let you survive the trip the acceleration towards light speed in your lifetime okay so we've got some major physics miracles happening here you still can't go light speed because your car has mass no matter what kind of magical technology we put in the car your car cannot go light speed now you may wonder why if if the speed of light is say 186 000 miles a second why can't you just go 187 000 miles per second and when you think that way you're imagining time as this universal constant but einstein's theory of relativity tells us that space and time are both part of the same fabric and that fabric is distorted and warped by gravity and by velocity there's no such thing as absolute time depending on how deep of gravity well you're in or how fast you're moving relative to something else your reference frame of time is different the passage of time is different and this is really well proven our gps satellites have to accommodate for both general and special relativity two understandings uh that einstein used to get his head around gravity and help the rest of us understand physics we have to accommodate for both of those things in order for gps to work right it's crazy uh gravity and velocity come into play with our gps system and and here's why because of this time dilation effect if you as an object with mass were to somehow accelerate beyond light speed from your own local reference frame you would arrive at your destination before you left you'd be traveling through time you would be breaking causality and the universe wouldn't work so you can't go the speed of light so let's imagine instead uh that our car just goes a really high fraction of light speed like 99 the speed of light what would that look like as you're zooming through space and you turn the headlights on well in the car everything's normal if you look in the rearview mirror you see yourself normally now this is sort of interesting right we have to talk a second about speed speed is relative if i'm on a train going 40 miles an hour and i roll a tennis ball forward on the train at five miles an hour how fast is that tennis ball moving well from the reference frame of the train the tennis ball is going five miles an hour from the reference frame of the earth's surface that tennis ball is going 45 miles an hour right if i were to roll the tennis ball in the opposite direction the reference frame of the ground you got a 35 mile an hour tennis ball right or five mile an hour on the trains reference frame light is not like that the speed of light is a constant no matter what emits light it's always going to go 186 000 miles per second or so in a local reference frame always always always always always it's a constant it's such a constant that e equals m c squared that c stands for the speed of light and it is the constant upon which physics rests so you can't go light speed but you can go fractional light speed and so from your own reference frame as your car is going 99 percent the speed of light you look around inside everything's normal everything looks fine the problem is you don't see anything outside of the windows not a thing because everything is coming towards you at a very high fraction of the speed of light and that's going to cause doppler effects doppler compression on the light that's coming from stars and planets and and anything in the front of this car so uh you know a doppler effect if something's moving towards you it shifts towards the blue the frequency from your perspective the frequencies get smaller they get you know higher frequencies that the actual wavelength is smaller and so visible light is going to shift into uv and even higher and a funny thing about car windows they're opaque to uv light uv light can't pass through the glass and car windows so you're not going to see anything even if you had a camera that could take pictures and ultraviolet they'd see nothing now let's put some special windows on the car that let uv light in what would your camera now see the objects would appear compressed they would appear uh you know odd they would also be rotated thanks to some math that frankly i don't understand so your headlights would work but they wouldn't give you any meaningful information they would continue to just blast out of the front of the car at light speed they'd go those photons would bounce off other things be just fine the problem is everything would be doppler compressed and your headlights wouldn't actually be useful to say nothing of the fact that you're using an unfathomable amount of energy that could be put to better use say powering the entire planet for a very very long time [Music] hey mike my name is kevin steinhardt and i'm from greenville south carolina i had a question today about prayer and how you view prayer as someone who is scientifically minded growing up probably much like you or raised in the evangelical church i believed that prayer you know was us talking to god but that god would respond to us and actually was would heal people in certain cases especially if we believed if we would believe and not doubt that god could heal people than he would um and so uh growing up and finding out that maybe it's not as clean cut and as easy as that um i kind of uh question these days and i'm more skeptical of prayer um and especially you know when i read the research and see things um about that people who are prayed for for example go into remission from cancer at the same rate as people who are not prayed for or it doesn't matter if there's a thousand people praying for someone um that they have just as likely a chance to heal as someone that doesn't have anyone praying for them um it's hard for me to grapple my old views of prayer with um you know being somewhat scientifically minded um and so i wanted to kind of see how you view prayer do you think it can heal people um do you think that it does ever heal people um and i know you kind of lean toward a more meditative style of prayer um and so is i guess my question is do you view prayer as something that um that does have an impact on things or just that it can impact our minds you know if we meditate and view god as a god of love and think about him as a god of love um that that's more what prayer should be so thanks a lot i love what you're doing really appreciate uh you listen to my question thanks three episodes in and we've gotten a question about prayer in every single one how wild is that um it doesn't surprise me we all think about prayer and we all long for a connection to something greater than ourselves i know many friends who are atheists and skeptics who admit openly to praying but they don't believe in god they just have an impulse to reach out somehow some consider a moment of weakness others simply consider it part of the human experience of course i'm not an atheist but i do have complicated thoughts on prayer if you know my story you know that studying prayer which has for so long been the foundation of my relationship with god and my faith is what wrecked me because you're right when we scientifically study prayer we don't see any evidence that god is intervening on the behalf of people who pray every time we've done a study and we do what you do in a good study and you have control groups and then you have groups under different experimental criteria there is no benefit demonstrated to people who are being prayed for versus those who are not that's good science those studies are well designed well bummer what's the point of praying i mean you know there's this idea does god intervene in our world or not you know some days i think god probably is kind of an animating force and that i merely project my own uh anthropomorphized experience on to god but then other days the ways that i experience god are so personal and so profound that i'm absolutely unscientifically but personally convinced that god is a being who is listening and responding um and how do we live in that tension well first let's consider a few things one we know that prayer is good for the brain we know that prayer is a healthy activity for human brains studies have consistently shown that it's good for mental health for cognition to pray towards a loving god and in my own experience prayer makes me feel connected to god and studies validate that people who pray report feeling closer to god they report that their belief is deeper and that the more often you pray the more significant that feeling of connection to god is now i've also found in my own experience that prayer motivates me to act when i pray for someone who is undergoing difficult circumstances i'm constantly finding ways that i can reach out to them and help that i can be connected to this divine sort of force i experience in prayer and and be a part of creating more peace in the world prayer encourages me to act so i absolutely pray towards god as if god is a being who can intervene in my life and that surprises people because i have such a a mystical approach to god but i also lean heavily into the story of jesus christ and into the christian tradition and understanding of god and in all those stories god is seen as active in our world and in my own life unscientifically but personally i have experienced the intervention of god in fact at this point in my life it seems as if most of the things that are happening are a part of some divine appointment the people i meet the opportunities i have many of them seem effortless they seem to just sort of float my way that's not scientific it convinces no one but it's powerful to me and in fact i'd like to tell you a story on the subject of healing uh i have a really bad back and i am the kind of person who likes to eat a lot and is not a big fan of physical exercise so the doctors told me because i have this like degenerative spinal disc condition that the best thing i could do to avoid back pain even more powerful than surgery would be to lose 30 pounds and to do exercises that strengthen my core muscle groups well those are like my least favorite exercises so i got busy i started traveling to speak all the time i started working hard making podcasts and and writing my blog and working on a book and instead of losing 30 pounds i gained 15 and instead of becoming more active i became much more sedentary and my back pain returned with a vengeance really like a pair of pliers in my lower back to the point i limped and hobbled well one sunday morning i was hobbling in the church and my pastor betsy if you've listened to literature's podcast you know betsy uh saw me hobbling chess what was wrong and i said my back hurt and she reached for me to pray for me and i said betsy no no it's okay why because i'm cynical about the idea that god intervenes and heals people but as betsy placed her hand on my back and said a quick prayer of healing i felt a tremendous warmth and um suddenly no pain now could i have had a spike of adrenaline could i have been you know a psychosomatic response to an empathetic connection with another human being absolutely the fact is the pain stayed gone the rest of the day and has continued to subside since so whether that was some phenomenon between people or god intervening i don't know all i know is that through prayer i found healing and i think that's a lot of what faith is about is leaning into these mysteries the studies continue to show and we have to admit it's good science that on a large scale prayer does not appear to produce action for others but somehow it still produces action in ourselves it promotes good health but in some other way seems to be a force of of healing now as a guy named science mike that's not a scientific promise i'm just sharing with you uh some stories from my own experiences take them for what they will but because of these myriad of experiences i've had through prayer i continue to pray to a god who listens hey science mike i have a question about anti-matter i was reading a brief history of time by stephen hawking and he mentioned how black holes seemed to emit particles but they weren't actually emitting particles what was happening was there was pairs of matter and anti-matter that were spontaneously separating and one pair would get sucked into the black hole and the other would be expelled so my question is did i read that wrong or if matter and antimatter are supposed to annihilate when they combined how can they spontaneously separate later on thank you so and black hole is a special kind of object in which the laws of physics get weird effectively a black hole is an object so massive that it becomes so dense that atoms collapse upon themselves and and and gravity the gravity well of this object becomes so deep it distorts space time to such a degree that nothing can escape its gravity well not even light hence a black hole now black holes aren't always black they're generally in the vicinity of some traditional matter which is being pulled into the black hole and that creates something called an accretion disk and that accretion disk as its particles are accelerated into very very high velocities become very energetic and they can emit all sorts of energy including x-rays very very powerful stuff but the black hole itself is black except for hawking radiation that's the phenomenon you're describing the larger a black hole is the less hawking radiation it has but all black holes if they are not absorbing matter evaporate now they'll take a long long time to evaporate hawking radiation is a quantum phenomenon and as such uh works very slowly on something like a black hole how long uh well something like for a you know a typically sized black hole uh 10 to the 61st power times the age of the universe for a black hole to evaporate from hawking radiation but what the heck is hawking radiation well empty space has something called vacuum fluctuation this is part of heisenberg's uncertainty principle and effectively a way of thinking of that a model would be that in empty space virtual particles can appear now there always appear in pairs a particle and an anti-particle normal matter has a certain charge protons have a positive charge electrons have a negative charge that's conventional matter well in antimatter you have something called positron that's a positively charged electron and when the two meet they annihilate each other and release energy that's what matter and antimatter do the same thing happens with virtual particles okay now what happens is in the space around the event horizon of a black hole you have these vacuum fluctuations you have these virtual particles and they are amplified by the intense gravity of the black hole they become real particles and sometimes one of the particles escapes now to an outside observer that would look like the black hole emitting a particle that means the particle that fell back into the black hole must have negative energy it means it must annihilate some of the mass of the black hole in order to protect the conservation of energy it's not that matter and antimatter are separating it's that the weirdness of black hole and singularity is doing strange things to the laws of physics hawking radiation virtual particles made real by the gravity of a black hole yeah totally weird i get it but that's a great book a brief history of time is totally worth the effort to read through and digest it's one of my favorites [Music] aj on twitter asks how does science respond to the idea of an afterlife from that view can there be a heaven or a hell science is not about what there can be science is about how probable something is in science we place confidence in a belief that is proportional to the amount of evidence we have to support that belief now how much physical evidence is there for the afterlife none at all most humans believe there's an afterlife science validates that but in terms of an actual afterlife we have absolutely no physical evidence that i'm aware of that lets us know something happens after we die how do we cope with that well let's talk about uh what science tells us about death and dying as science understands it your consciousness emerges from a set of feedback loops your brain constructs a model of reality it responds to the environment and from millions and millions of feedback loops in your brain comes a picture of reality an awareness of self and death when your biological processes stops your consciousness ceases now everything we understand about brain death is actually quite beautiful our brains shut down from the outside in as i've read you know as your body tries to preserve resources it starts by sort of turning the lights off at the outer layers and you you lose your sense of physical place and proximity as your your parietal lobe runs out of fuel and your visual cortex starts to shut down and that could very well produce a sensation much like a tunnel of light as the aperture of your visual process reduces to a point and then halts now what's on the other side of that tunnel of light in brain science is your memories those are deeper uh the parts of your brain that coordinate memory function deeper so it's very plausible in science that you could have this brief and conscious journey through people and places you've known and been that your life could flash before your eyes or that you could perceive people on the other side of a tunnel as your consciousness fades away it's also interesting that pain pain comes from our brain and as death happens the ability to perceive pain goes away now after that what nothing nothing in science is after that a state of perfect and absolute peace and an unawareness of self now some remnant of your soul some part of who you are persists if you had children the patterns that created your biology persist in the dna that you passed on the ideas that you left in the world the things you taught people persist and a very accurate model of the way you see the world exists in the brains of people who knew you well have you ever had a conversation with a loved one who's passed have you ever known what they would say in that moment that's because a model of them lives in your brain and that's some form of an afterlife so i start by saying the secular and scientific view of death and dying is not terrifying it's not horrifying and if that's all there is so be it but my experiences with god lead me to hope for more i hope that there is some reunification some fulfillment of a promise on the other side but science does not speak to that that's a hope of my heart that's a hope that rests in my soul i can't prove that it's not scientifically validated but it does bring me peace so i'm completely comfortable with the scientific view that there is no afterlife that we can prove and no reason to place confidence in that belief and i am equally comfortable leaning into a hope that my maker has a plan and is waiting for me on the other side whatever happens i'll be happy to find out or i won't be disappointed well there it goes another episode of ask science mike in the books you know this week i'm at the sundance film festival with the wind rider forum and the john templeton foundation we've been talking about a really interesting idea about how people approach spirituality today and something called the new copernicans uh keep an eye out on mikemcart.com or on my social media presences because we're doing a series of videos to explore that concept more and i think they're going to come out really well some really incredible people have been involved in terms of today's episode there are show notes on the website asksciencemike.com i will have a link related to every question on the show with more information inside things that you can explore again that's on ask sciencemic.com now remember guys this is your show i have no editorial plan i'm not doing any shaping your questions create the program and to that note i'd love to have more recorded questions you guys have been great you've sent me thousands and thousands of emails with questions but the show's much more interesting if uh there's other voices involved so if you record on your iphone you know with whatever you've got around that's fine you can post that to twitter you put on soundcloud or youtube just use the hashtag asksciencemike and i'll see it if you want to send me a message directly to send me a link as well that's fine but i do look at the ask science mike hashtag i'd love to talk to you more about this episode we've got a twitter handle at ask sciencemike for the program or if you can spell my name you can come have a chat with us on facebook at facebook.com mike.mcarg and i do want to say on the note of q a and interacting with you i would love to come to your event i do travel i enjoy that there's nothing i love more than talking to people about science and faith in person so if you go to ask sciencemike.com and look in the upper right hand corner there's a button that says bookmark you can get more information about what it's like to bring me to an event and i would love to be there thanks for your help this week's episode and uh looking forward to next week already see you later guys you