Ring the bell.
The big one.
for everyone to hear!

Astronomers from earth, subtle in their instruments, deep in their

Binary In-spiral image, taken from here.

understanding have heard the song of the stars.

We’ve heard the The Ringing of their footsteps  as two neutron stars danced so close to one another that they BURST from the knowing of one-another!

we’ve witnessed their rupture and the ensuing echoing birth of worlds worth of precious metals.

A DAY OF MARVELS!

for you today i’ve gone to the beginning! to the best! THE TRIUMPHANT RETURN OF THE A-TEAM!

And joining us, our guest today is Charlie Demers, the man of joy (listen to his album, also he is on the CBC all the time!), the man of wonders (he has a book report podcast where they read left wing books), and here is that book he told us to tell you about!

a warning friends. This episode is for adult ears. Children would not care to hear the words used in it.

Physicists: Jocelyn Read, David Tsang

Intro Music: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists 

Exit Music: John Vanderslice 

Okay.
some stars blow up.

not all of them. but some of them.

Why?

why would something, which had enjoyed millions of years of a non-explody existence just explode?

to get to the heart of the matter we have to get to the core of the thing. We talk about the lifecycles of stars, and nuclear fusion, and quantum mechanics, and fission, and shock wave and neutrinos.

our guest today is Zach Weinersmith, author of the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Webcomic. Zach and Kelly have written an amazing book called “Soonish” .a book about the technology which will come soon.

Physicists: Hanalore Gurling-Dunsmore, Dr. James Sylvester

Intro Music: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists 

Exit Music: John Vanderslice 

So.
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging works on the basis of looking

each electron has a pair, so this would be invisible to ESR.

at how the nuclei of atoms interact with big external magnetic fields.
but all of the electrons in an atom also have little magnetic fields, so… we can do the same sort of thing to the electrons in an atom!

the technique is called “Electron Spin Resonance” and we can use it to look at all sorts of amazing things: from how much radiation an object has been pelted with, to the shape of a folded up protein, to how locating free radicals in our bodies.

our guest today is Diana Goodman, genius movie buff, and host of the Thirty Twenty Ten Podcast.

Physicists:Dr. Nicole Prent, Dr. Jacqueline Townsend

Intro Music: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists 

Exit Music: John Vanderslice 

Finally, a little glass from the titanium physicists podcast.
this episode is fascinating!!

hold onto your glass

the deal with glass is that it’s not a crystal.
i’m sure you’ve heard that before but what does it mean?
the answer is amazing.

materials science is amazing!!!

our guest today is Bobak Ferdowsi, the handsomest man at NASA. You can follow him on twitter right here, and his webpage is here,  but if you keep following him you might end up wandering around a distant planet for the rest of your life.

Our physicists are Dr. Jessica Rimsza, a materials physicist currently at Sandia National Labs; and Dr. Jane Cook, a materials physicist who is the chief scientist at the Corning Museum of Glass.

Physicists:Dr. Jessica Rimsza, Dr. Jane Cook

Intro Music: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists 

Exit Music: John Vanderslice 

Okay

i don’t want to alarm you but the moon is shrinking

it’s getting smaller.

and smaller

and smaller.

and as it shrinks, its surface SHAKES.

and we’ve known for years.

The unchanging moon, sitting in the sky since the dawn of time? It is a figment of our collective imagination.

Today’s guest is an expert on Imaginary Worlds! Indeed, Eric Molinsky hosts a podcast by that very name!

To help me through all of this, I have recruited two notable planetary physicists! Meg Rosenburg and Briony Horgan. oh man this episode rocks.

Physicists:Dr. Meg Rosenburg, Dr. Briony Horgan

Intro Music: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists 

Exit Music: John Vanderslice 

Okay, i’m going to be straight with you: i couldn’t think of a good pun for this episode. I’ve been working on it for so long, I just published it with the best name i could think. I’m sorry i’ve let you down.

BUT THIS EPISODE WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN BECAUSE IT’S AMAZING.

this is from the wikipedia page about the reports of measuring faster than light neutrinos.

beams of neutrinos!

remember neutrinos? the little particles that nothing can touch?

well we make beams of them.

why? how?

these are great questions.

to ask them, i’ve invited WILL SMITH. Will is a science and technology journalist par excellence.One of the founders of the tested.com websites, his current project is to start the world’s first virtual reality TV talk show: The Foo show!

Physicists:Dr. Ken Clark and Dr. Tia Michelli

Intro Music: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists 

Exit Music: John Vanderslice 

Muons are very small fundamental particles that are much heavier than they should be. their name is pronounced “mew-on” btws.

anyway, they fall apart pretty quickly, but they rain down on us from the upper

i got this picture from this other webpage

atmosphere at almost the speed of light. It’s magical, and fascinating and pretty useful. They cascade down from spaaace!

Our Guest this time is Sarah Gailey, the author of “River of Teeth” a story about hippos versus cowboys!!  She also wrote a ton of awesome essays about harry potter and you can also follower her on twitter.

Physicists:Dr.Ryan Martin and Diana Cowern (host of Physics girl youtube videos!!!)

Intro Music: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists 

Exit Music: John Vanderslice 

There is a mystery.

in the center of our galaxy is an ENORMOUS black hole.
MILLIONS OF TIMES the mass of the sun.

Stars orbiting the black hole, 4 million times heavier than the sun, at the center of our galaxy

so large that it throws enormous stars around like they were pebbles thrown by an elephant. not a human, human’s aren’t heavy enough. an elephant.

but that’s not the mystery.

you know, these are the most powerful things in the universe, and as gas pours into them they are capable of producing light powerful enough to outshine entire galaxies… and we’re not even quite sure how all of that business with the plasma and the gas and the magnetic fields and the spiralling in works.

and that’s a mystery, but it’s not THE mystery.

see… in order for them to reach their ENORMOUS SIZE would, as normal physics would have it, take LONGER THAN THE AGE OF THE UNIVERSE. hahaha! what a wonderful thing to discover!

Today our guest is a person I’ve wanted to meet for years: The founder of the Skepchick website, Rebecca Watson. Here is her Twitter, here is her Youtube channel, and here is her Patreon page.

Physicists:Dr. Katie Mack and Hannalore Gerling-Dunsmore

Intro Music: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists 

Exit Music: John Vanderslice 

Okay, lets get the spelling over first:
“The Sunyaev–Zel’dovich Effect.“

The idea is that the photons we see from the cosmic microwave

This is the Picture of Temperatures/Densities in the Cosmic Microwave Background. It was taken by the WMAP satellite!

background will backlight everything that we can see. Most things don’t really interact with these cold photons… but some things can. The hot gasses surrounding giant clusters of galaxies.

and so, we can see the shadows of these things in the cosmic microwave background pattern!

OH MAN OH MAN!

The guest is Ted Leo, the dude who made the intro to our show!!

Physicists: Danica Marsden and Michael Zemcov

Intro Music: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists 

Exit Music: John Vanderslice 

Oh man! It’s season 6!

Listen. Today’s episode is bananas.

it’s about a type of thing called a “quasiparticle:” a phenomena that acts like a particle.
Today we’re talking about Phonons: quantized vibrations in a crystal.

that’s right. vibrations in a crystal are mathematically particles.

Absolutely bananas.

Today’s guests are Megan and Anthony Leon from Hawaii!!!

Physicists: Fiona Burnell, Darren Peets

Intro Music: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists 

Exit Music: John Vanderslice