TMEHpodcast

Congratulations! You’ve successfully avoided YouTube Shorts.

It is a well-known fact that the moment YouTube goes down, the collective productivity of Earth increases by approximately 4,000%, which is immediately squandered by everyone going to Hacker News to read comments about YouTube being down. I myself have taken to podcasts… an ancient medium in which people simply talk at you for ninety minutes without a single sponsorship for a mobile game, and this is considered a failure

This is really lovely work! Simple to use, surprisingly solid, and just a pleasure to poke around with. The fact it runs in the browser is a bit of magic on its own.

One idea for later might be a few preset systems, such as Alpha Centauri or other known three-body systems. It would give people a quick way to drop into something real before they start making chaos of their own.

Anyway, cracking project.

Initially read the headline and thinking it would be about a certain TV show about Silicon Valley. Not disappointed

The detection of a potential giant planet in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri A is compelling, not because we could live on the planet (likely a gas giant), but because it could host moons with the right conditions for life. If even one of those moons is Earth-sized and water-rich, it might be our nearest shot at finding another habitable world.

Still, getting there with something like David Kipping’s proposed TARS propulsion system (a solar-powered launcher that can fling tiny probes at ~40 km/s) we’d be looking at 30,000+ years to reach the star system. It’s a step forward, but for now, our best hope is to keep watching. Until someone develops fusion propulsion…

What you’re describing is Bayesian inference in action. Given how rare big interstellar comets should be, and how common small ones should be, the lack of detections makes the big-comet hypothesis incredibly unlikely. So we update our beliefs: it’s probably small. Space statistics at work

Cutting 20% from NASA isn’t just a loss of jobs, it’s a loss of momentum, morale, and institutional knowledge built over decades. We need more long-term vision, not less. NASA’s not just about space, it’s about pushing boundaries, educating future generations, and reminding us what’s possible when we aim higher together.

The ISS is set to be decommissioned in 2030 with a controlled descent into the Pacific Ocean. But with NASA’s recent budget cuts slashing science funding and crew size, the transition plan feels more like wishful thinking than a roadmap. Without proper support, America risks losing the foothold in low Earth orbit.

Summary: NASA’s Hubble and Chandra telescopes have identified a rare intermediate-mass black hole in galaxy NGC 6099, bridging the gap between stellar and supermassive black holes. These elusive objects are a missing link in our understanding of how black holes grow and evolve. By combining X-ray and optical data, astronomers found evidence of a dense star cluster and high-energy emissions, pointing to a black hole that helps complete the black hole family tree.

I’m a space enthusiast, and from what I’ve learned here’s the breakdown: solar systems take millions of years to form. It all starts in a nebula where gas collapses and coalesces into a star and surrounding material. The process is long and complex (and not fully understood), but we know it eventually produces rocky planets, gas giants, and smaller debris.

This new paper reports something exciting, they’ve spotted a moment that signals the beginning of rocky planet formation. In the system HOPS-315, gas has cooled enough for solids to condense, which is when planet formation kicks off. This happens about twice as far from its baby star as Earth is from the Sun.

And of course, ALMA, the telescope that made the discovery, is fantastic at catching solar systems in the act of forming. It was only a matter of time before this stage was observed.

To be launched in 2031 and positioned at Lagrange Point 5. Vigil will spot solar storms before they hit Earth.

No matter how chaotic the merger looks, the event horizon must asymptotically become either spherical (Schwarzschild) or oblate (Kerr). The mass distribution inside doesn’t change this, general relativity doesn’t allow static “lumpy” horizons.

It’s wild how much happens in those milliseconds though. Numerical relativity papers like the one you shared from arxiv.org show the horizon “sloshing” before it stabilizes.

Keep an eye on whether the final FY 2026 appropriations bill keeps LIGO at two sites. Until then, it’s a real risk, but salvageable.

Also in July 1962, the United States detonated a high-altitude nuclear bomb known as Starfish Prime 400 km above the Pacific Ocean. The blast pumped the Earth’s magnetic field full of radiation, creating artificial belts of charged particles around the planet.

Unfortunately, this newly electrified environment was bad news for satellites. Telstar 1, launched just a day later, became an unintended casualty. As it passed through the radiation-charged Van Allen Belts, its delicate electronics began to degrade. By November 1962, Telstar was faltering, and by February 1963, it fell silent.

Amazing slice of science history.

I’ve often wondered what This American Life would have been if it were British.

“Each week, we bring you stories of life in Britain. Not extraordinary life. Not even particularly interesting life. Just… life. Grey, tea-soaked, mildly apologetic life. Today’s theme: Standing Quietly in Queues While Contemplating Death and Crisps.”

Yes, I realize not-having initially understood what LOC DNS actually is. As mentioned, this could of course be applied to Hubble.

Relativity isn’t needed because rockets never get anywhere near the speeds or gravitational extremes where Einstein’s equations matter. At rocket speeds, Newtonian mechanics is so accurate the difference is negligible, so why make things harder? NASA sticks with Newton because it’s simpler, faster to calculate, and gets the job done perfectly for launching rockets into orbit.

Brilliant! This is both clever and educational. I immediately wondered if it would be possible to do something similar for JWST.

Unfortunately LOC DNS records top out at ~42 million meters (42,000 km altitude) and JWST is 38x further out (~1.5 million km away). So you can’t represent its location with a LOC altitude field. Maybe Hubble?

Newton leaving it to “future work” is iconic, like casually predicting neuroscience. Meanwhile, French mathematician Lagrange solved orbital parking mechanic over a century before we sent rockets into space

You’re correct. Newton wasn’t proposing a mechanism or deeper cause for gravity; he just described its effects. Einstein did add a “why” of sorts, with general relativity, he reframed gravity not as a force but as the curvature of spacetime caused by mass and energy. That’s closer to a mechanism, but even there we might ask: why does mass curve spacetime? And we don’t have a deeper answer to that.

Newton’s physics is still taught and used everywhere because it’s simple and accurate enough for 99% of practical situations. Einstein’s relativity isn’t a better explanation, it just extends it to extreme conditions. NASA still uses Newtonian law to launch rockets.

Great analogy: “Stopping data climate collection is like breaking a thermometer because you don’t like knowing you’ve got a fever.”

Now you’re speaking my language! Let’s get started shall we?

Closed-loop systems like on the ISS already reclaim water from humidity, sweat, and urine, and could be scaled up for larger habitats. Air works similarly: CO₂ is scrubbed, oxygen is regenerated from electrolysis, and trace gases are filtered. I realize you still need an initial stock of oxygen and nitrogen, but isn’t this a problem that could be solved eventually with science?

Starship feels like the ultimate engineering gamble, so many moving parts (literally) that getting it right might be as hard as building the habitats it’s meant to launch.

On nitrogen, I keep wondering: if in-space manufacturing matured, couldn’t we generate atmosphere by cracking water for oxygen and synthesizing nitrogen analogues through hydrogen-based pathways? Or is Earth’s air mix so specific that importing nitrogen stays unavoidable?

I agree and I’m old enough to remember when Reddit was like this

Closest approach will be October 29, 2025. It’s currently passing Jupiter’s orbit. I’m amazed that even at this speed it will take that long to get here.

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.” ~Douglas Adams

Actually no. Gravity is slightly weaker at your head than at your feet (because it’s farther from Earth’s center). According to general relativity, clocks tick faster in weaker gravity. The effect of your head being higher up outweighs the fact that it’s moving slightly faster due to Earth’s rotation.

If you’re standing up, your head experiences more time than your feet, by about 6.2 nanoseconds per year. So your brain is slightly older than your toes.

I made a significant error conflating different levels of the quantum gravity problem. Special relativity and quantum mechanics have indeed been successfully merged since the Dirac equation in 1928, forming quantum field theory that underlies all particle physics. That's well-established and experimentally validated.

The Wheeler-DeWitt equation is specifically an attempt to merge general relativity with quantum mechanics - quantum gravity - which remains unsolved. And you're correct that even the Wheeler-DeWitt equation does contain spacetime coordinates including time, as shown in your matrix breakdown.

The "timelessness" issue I was referring to is more subtle - it's about how when you try to quantize general relativity using the ADM formalism, you get a constraint equation (the Hamiltonian constraint) where the total Hamiltonian equals zero, leading to what looks like a "frozen" or timeless quantum state. But this is a technical issue in the formalism, not literally "no time variable exists."

I oversimplified this into "contains no time variable" which is just wrong, as you've demonstrated. The actual problem is much more nuanced and relates to how time evolution works in quantum gravity, not the absence of temporal coordinates.

>> That just make no sense. Atomic clocks just measure the frequency of some process, some may use entanglement, but the clocks don't show that time is created by quantum entanglement.

You're absolutely right - that's a complete logical leap that makes no sense. I conflated two separate things:

1. Atomic clocks are incredibly precise frequency measurements of atomic transitions 2. Some recent atomic clock experiments use quantum entanglement to enhance precision

But precise frequency measurement has nothing to do with proving time emerges from quantum entanglement. That's like saying "this really accurate thermometer proves temperature is created by the mercury inside it."

The fact that some atomic clocks use entanglement for better precision doesn't mean they're revealing that "time measurement has quantum foundations" in any deep sense about time's nature. They're just using quantum effects as a tool for more accurate measurement of whatever time actually is.

I was trying to connect recent atomic clock advances to the emergent time hypothesis, but there's no actual connection there. The clocks measure time precisely - they don't tell us anything about whether time is fundamental or emergent.

Thanks for keeping the physics accurate!

This is a science comedy podcast, so I’m hoping the 30K view I give my listeners on these topics encourage creative, but critical thought (sprinkled with humour).

Thank you! Although don’t go back too far, season one is admittedly a bit of a mess, conceptually ok in places but narratively scattered, but like a corporate handbook that's been photocopied too many times. Season two focuses on space (the big), quantum (the small), and space history (the old) and of course the corporate comedy.