Solar Scientist Eugene Parker

noise like I I did an I did an auto gain that was that was wrong it did not gain lost it's actually quieter now than it was it was but now it's back to where it was okay okay yeah I I can never seem to solve this problem that that it wants to make the volume lower okay to so let me let me fix as well yeah it's like a group therapy session yeah um settings I need to find settings have you ever come into your studio and decided that your monitors were drunk cuz all of my monitors are on arms and apparently like all of the vibrations from having our roof worked on caused them to shift positions that's funny and and I walked down and it was like oh my God my my dusk had a really good Friday night I will be posting a picture of that later because they are still drunk I did not fix them before this stream okay output no I want input sorry input fifine mic it has the gain all the way up testing testing that's the wrong direction testing testing all right so my gain is up I will adjust it in software as well hello Mary does and doy does a k divey to still L testing I think that's better all right let's let's hear you Fraser can you hear me okay testing testing your levels look better okay yeah that's the problem is we've got the the zoom my input level the zoom the level that Zoom is taking my audio in at the level that your Zoom is playing the audio out at the level that your recording software or I guess your streaming software is then putting that out to YouTube and the level that YouTube is showing so there's like five places where the audio levels can be shut down distorted changed blah blah blah so chaos it is chaos chaos Madness all right I think I found all the places I can adjust the volume thank you for the sub refs Matt thank you and Joe instead ofing my hair twitch you should join our patreon yeah yeah I think he's already in our patreon maybe oh okay well then thank you for thank you for the sub um but yeah patreon is the best way people always ask me like should should I give you a donation on YouTube should I follow you on TW you know sub you on Twitch patreon lets us keep 95% of the money twitch takes a much bigger chunk I don't know what it is YouTube same thing yeah so if if you want to support billionaire companies then use their subscription services and if you want to support cosmoquest and astronomy cast you pay I I have to admit though I have subbed people on Twitch just to get their emotes yeah no I mean if there's something that that the twitch is providing that you can't get any other way then you got to do what you got to do yes sometimes emotes are worth it yeah [Music] um uh okay um I need recording software open I was really good about I have all the links I need forgot the audio software open the links forgot the audio software I would like to State one of my great frustrations is the New York Times has been payrolling absolutely everything lately why are they they're paying for ads I don't know why they're pay Walling everything oh they're pay Walling I they said Pay rolling no no no they're pay Walling everything okay and I was not going to get a New York Times subscription just to uh read the obituary of Eugene Parker in the New York Times but like two or three times a week I hit a pay wall and it just I get it I understand it I mostly respect it but I don't want to give the New York Times any of my money why not they they've their journalism isn't as neutral as it used to be M so I'm happy to pay for the Washington Post I'm not going to pay for both so I mean this is probably a rant for the end of the episode but it's it's a funny thing where like like for example University we make let's say 10% of the advertising Revenue that we made 5 years ago yeah right so so take a maybe maybe 20% just to be safe it's 20% so if we made 100% 5 years ago and I was able to fund my entire team on it yeah we now make 20% of that money and I can't fund my team on it yeah and so the only way that I fund my team is with patreon and with advertising that comes from YouTube yeah so so what we're going through at Universe today has got to be the same issue that people are going through at New York Times at all these other places that you have really you have a couple of options one is you pay wall your content yeah and and then just if you're not part of the pay wall then you don't get to read the content and that's just like it's you you go watch the movie the movie is pay wall you don't get to watch the movie in the theater unless you pay the money to watch the movie right so the question is the content good enough to be able to support that because the advertising just no longer supports the creation of the content yeah and and I think e if if if I didn't have patreon I would have shut Universe today down yeah like I would have just gone and gotten a different job it would no longer be doing this job saving us and what's getting me is I need I need to get better about writing for substock because there are people on substock making bank yeah I mean I have all kinds of ethical problems with using substack as a platform okay I need yeah yeah they look into to it there's there's a bunch of problematic content that they are allowing on the channel and I think it's I think they shouldn't they should ban those people so um I roll my own emailing software and I don't charge for it I just I bundle it into the larger patreon yeah right it's opposed to charging people specifically for the the newsletter itself it's free um but but yeah so I think that that that for people the people who consume cont cont um the advertising no longer pays for it and so if you hit pay walls I think you know it's perfectly fine to go nope but I don't think it's fine to be frustrated at the pay wall I think you can go nope I don't I don't care about the content enough to consume it and I and I wish somebody hadn't linked me to a source that has a site with a pay wall but um but I think everything is like everything like mark my words everything is going to be a pay wall yeah or everything is going to be patreon and and in some cases the patreon will be the pay wall like you won't be able to access it without being part of the patreon right yeah so um yeah so that's the that's where we're at right now and and I think you know it's funny because like like I like I watch people and they're like oh I hate pay walls I'm like well yeah obviously right you know nobody wants to have a pay wall like I think the thing sorry I didn't mean to finish finish no no no no I do it to you do it I I think the thing about the New York Times pay wall that got me is The Whimsy of what they do and don't pay wall because I will often find newer articles that aren't paywalled and I was trying to look at a SE several year old obituary and it just felt like that should be something that isn't pay W yeah I just I want better logic well the logic is Whatever Gets you to to sign up to their pay wall yeah I did not I did not right and so having a piece of information that's old and it's only available in that one location is is better for for them yeah um so so yeah so I it's a um yeah Z things advertisers worked out that no one watches online ads anyway yeah it's true yeah I mean it's it's not that the advertisement like the quantity the supply has gone exponential thanks to Ai and just thanks to cin Farm thanks to people just creating content like there's an infinite amount of content now available to advertise against and so if you have the same so I have like declining viewership readership on Universe today yeah like we're down about a quar to about a quar qu of the of the visitors that we had say 5 years ago yeah and that's mostly because Google is is intercepting the the queries and no longer sing your traffic like right no they're aing the response to everything now exactly so you ask a question and Google gives you the answer and then that's that's that yeah um so yeah um it's getting super frustrating yeah yeah and I mean the downside is just going to make the internet unusable except for these single small islands of of bespoke hand curated content like what Universe today is and so in theory you know we are in Striking Distance now of just going ad free like I think within I'd say within a year we won't have any ads on Universe today and we won't have a pay wall we'll just have patreon yeah that pays for the content and that's like the perfect world but we're not quite there yet so uh but I but I will because because it's it's breaks my heart that 25% of our Revenue comes from advertisements that make the website noticeably worse yeah yeah right it's frustrating but but I couldn't pay people's salaries if I didn't have the advertising yeah the other possibility you and I made different choices I beg for money through our fundraisers we we were successful over the weekend on our fundraiser that made me happy and and you're still dealing with advertisers and yeah for me it's a quarter of my budget comes from the one-time direct donations and for you it's a quarter of the revenue comes from advertising and Y and your yours makes your website worse and mine makes my quality of life worse so well no I mean just the the no I mean I think that being asked to support a thing people get annoyed at yeah obviously right so it's just what's the alternative so we're always having to deal with these situations is and I think so and I think what the New York Times is saying and what other people are saying is our content is so good that you should pay for it yeah and if you can't pay for it that's fine use someone else's content that's what a that's what a movie ticket is is is your that's what buying a book is is someone saying the contents in this book are so good that you're going to want to pay for it and you're going to be glad to spend the time and the money to consume this material so um I've got a my I just my wife just came in I gotta connect with her for one second and then I will I haven't seen her all morning so I just got to chat with her briefly and then I will come back so okay entertain the crowd back I shall ask me anything I have YouTube and Twitter open folks um so how mckin is asking does chat GPT return New York Times content yes yes it does um but it often summarizes it incorrectly so you have to read the original Source because that AI summary at the top of a Google page doesn't always read things correctly I hit that all the time so so Matthew Hensen he's not the creator of the Parker solar probe he is the in inspiration for it uh he was 91 when it finally went off zap fan zap fan I I probably need to switch to duck duck do go one of my frustrations with the switch is I have trained Google which sources I like to go to so because it it does respond based on past site visits um so it's really good about sending me to sites that I know are reputable and dock Dogo doesn't have that yet all right so silent search light over on Twitch says they shouldn't call it AI for artificial intelligence they should call it AP for automated plagiarism and welcome Amsterdam 90 um welcome so I am an astrophysicist uh Fraser K my co-host should return in a moment there he is um he just needed to step off for a moment and we are recording astronomy cast live oh I'm being told to tell about bike riding and yellow lightsaber wielding well the bike riding is is fairly Bland but my my husband used to make lightsabers as a hobby and I never got my own lightsaber whenever I was doing a cosplay I would just borrow one of his and last month the theme for First Friday at the local Science Museum where I do a booth each month was Star Wars and so I pulled out a Jedi cosplay and went to borrow a lightsaber and none of his lightsabers wanted to work and I was super super sad and so my husband bought me a lightsaber with a pale yellow blade which is the color I wanted and the hilt is gorgeous and it's dueling caliber so when I accidentally hit the ceiling light the light is in more danger than the lightsaber it makes me very happy dueling caliber that's funny yeah so people make them now so you can actually smack the sh out of each other yeah that's really cool that's awesome love it all right let's get started okay I am pressing record on the video I am pressing record on the audio levels look good okay all right I think my levels look okay as well all right let's get started yeah astronomy cast episode 728 Eugene Parker welcome to astronomy cast our weekly facts based Journey Through the cosmos where we help you understand not only what we know but how we know what we know I'm fiser Kane I'm the publisher of University today with me as always is Dr Pam gay a senior scientist for the planetary Science Institute and the director of cosmoquest hey panel how you doing I I am doing well I am super excited on October 4th I'm giving a talk at the St Louis Science Center and it's during one of their themed events and the theme for the night is Barbie and stem careers so I I'm going to they they encourage cosplay so I have a pink suit and a pink dress and and I'm uh going to have my first slide says my job is space um and I'm going to talk about all the women throughout history who uh have basically done ground breaking work while being citizen scientists um yeah so I'm super excited about that that sounds great um so I am also excited I I haven't mentioned this to you Pamela yet but um I'm going to be taking a trip after we record next week so so I'll be here next week but then I'll be gone I'm going to uh Europe for 11 days with my kid so the other kid and so I took my first kid to Japan now I'm taking my second kid to Iceland and Amsterdam and so we are going to be in Iceland for three nights and then we're going to be in Amsterdam for the rest of the time does that mean we need to record two episodes next week May maybe but you know or maybe I can record while I'm while I'm afar maybe we we'll figure that out um but and the goal is to see the auroras to to be able to be in Iceland and actually watch as we increase towards solar maximum so I'm pretty stoked and uh I'm looking forward to going back to Europe Amsterdam is one of my favorite cities if I was it's such a great City offered a job in the Netherlands I'd move in a heartbeat yeah so last week we talked about the Parker solar probe and as always we like to talk about the person who inspired the mission what makes this amazing and different is that Eugene Parker was there to watch the launch of the mission that shares his name why was he so influential on solar astronomy and we'll talk about it in a second but it's time for a break and we're back so this is you were quite excited about this we were talking about the Parker Sola probe and you're like and you often would say and by the way he's still alive isn't it so adorable to watch him there at the launch site watching his spacecraft take off so so and he's passed away now but normally normally the people who the spacecraft are named after have been have passed away for a long time and or some in some cases hundreds of years thousands of years in some cases and yet he was there for the launch so who was Eugene Parker he was a physicist who I so I'm I'm pleased to say we have the same Alma ma we both went to the physics department at Michigan State University he just did it a century before I did um he was a physicist and his work ended up opening up the field of Helio physics it didn't exist before him he he finished his undergraduate degree uh 2122 I couldn't tell what date he graduated um he then went to uh keltech to do his PhD which he did in three years which blew my mind he was then an instructor at the University of Utah for a few years before going to the Enrico F Center at the University of Chicago where he did the rest of his career and as a baby Professor he postulated that the sun could have a magnetic field that triggered a solar wind and when he submitted the paper for this the referees one of the M basically now one of them literally said that he needed to go to the library and read more because the paper was ludicrous um the paper was soundly rejected by both referees but the editor of the journal was Chandra seikar who was also at the University of Chicago knew Eugene Parker and he reviewed the math he replicated the math he could find nothing wrong with the math so he published the paper anyways and and so that was 1957 and I have to look at my notes to get all the dates right so the paper was published in 1957 this was before we really had a lot of space probes and in 1962 Mariner 2 on its way to Venus measured the solar wind and all the people who were still making fun of Eugene Parker for his ludicrous idea um had to agree that he was right and since then the particular research paper that he published the one that was soundly rejected with scathing criticism has over 4,000 citations W it's it's just amazing work so wait was did he postulate the existence of the solar wind based on the magnetic field of the sun like you guess the sun would have a magnetic field and therefore it should be producing a solar wind or was he he wasn't just suggesting that the source of the solar wind was the magnetic didn't know there was a solar wind at all wow there there would there the solar wind was not to blame for Aurora yet I now want to go back and find out what they thought caused Aurora up until this point cuz I have no idea yeah um yeah but yeah he completely postulated the the like he's also responsible for like the solar Dynamo idea for magnetism in galaxies and we can go into detail on all of this stuff but in the 1950s we didn't know there was a solar wind he looked at the math he looked at the magnetic field of the Sun and he's like got to be a solar wind right and he did all the math to prove it from first principles it was amazing yeah and when Chandra sear looks through your math and gives it the green light that's I mean he he's the guy who figured out the Chandra secar limit I mean there's there wasent about him so Chandra sear and go back and listen to the episode we did on him um he was also soundly mocked for some of his principles until they were proven so he understood that sometimes you have to wait for someone to die before your theories get accepted and he Parker was so lucky to have Chandra sear in his corner yeah that's that's incredible um all right we're going to talk about this some more but it's time for another break and we're back uh so so like what else I mean so he he made this groundbreaking sort of prediction yeah which which are like the best I mean when someone predicts a thing in the universe and then someone takes a telescope or a mission or whatever and goes and finds that thing those are the some of the most impactful sort of advances in the science that have that are ever made you think about Einstein's relativity you think about uh various theories about black holes and so on when someone makes that kind of a prediction and then the technology comes along to actually demonstrate that it's true it really stands the test of time so so what else then you know how did he top that what did he what did he then go on to do so every bio biography I found of him described him using either the word Visionary or a uh synonym for Visionary and he went on to also postulate what is now called The Parker spiral which he he was a magnetic physicist he wasn't the field of solar science the field of heliophysics didn't exist and his work spanned multiple areas he was a magnetic fields physicist so in looking at the sun's magnetic field which he continued to do he realized that the rotation of the sun would cause drag on the magnetic field and this had there was drag between the two of them is a better way to put it and and this would have two impacts so one thing he predicted was What's called the Parker spiral so between 10 and 20 Au out from the the Sun the magnetic field begins to twist and so if you look at the large scale structure of our Sun's magnetic field it actually has a spiral structure to it it's an Archimedes spiral um it's that classic shape that appears in everything from snails shells to The Grand Design spirals well it's also in the the magnetic field of the Sun and on the other side of that he realized that one of the things that is probably leading to the differential rotation of the sun where we see the equator and the northern and southern latitudes rotating at different rates was probably the magnetic field having an effect on the surface as well so he was able to figure out these two different major components of what the magnetic field is affecting in our solar system both on the solar system scale and on the solar scale and that was amazing right and he I mean he wasn't just content to work on just the sun he took this idea of interactions between magnetic fields and plasma to many different scales yeah he was the person who figured out that there should be magnetic instabilities in galaxies so when you look at a Galaxy you you can get up and down motions in things and they also have a magnetic field due to the spinning of the material around the black hole in the core that is parallel to the dis and because of the orientation in the magnetic field when you get material that is coupled to the magnetic field when you have charged material in the desk that is moving up or down you will get a amplification of that m movement due to the interaction with the magnetic field so when we see these warps in disks to explain that we have to look not just at the gravitational interaction of something perturbing the dis but also the magnetic fields effect on perturbing material in the Diss and and this idea of of or this technique for measuring the magnetic fields around some kind of an object this is all really brand new um where you can essentially measure the polarity of the photons the radio photons that are coming from some object and there's this this incredible work say done by mirat I know that's one of your favorites where they are able to scan chunks of the sky measure the polarity of the radiation of the radio waves that are coming from this area and that is because the the photons have been turned into into various directions and you know causing this polarity that's visible and you can then map out the large scale Alma does this a lot as well you can map out the large scale structure of the magnetic field lines around what you're looking at and and this whole field of predicting these magnetic fields that that you the way they sculpt and create Galactic wide versions of the solar wind all Trace back to Parker's work in doing the math and making these predictions it's it's absolutely incredible I mean you know it's like if they come up with a spacecraft that's also going to search for you know examine the large scale Galactic winds coming off the Milky Way they'll also have to call it the you know the Parker Galactic probe or something yeah it's he was a theorist who took the ideas behind magnetic field Theory and applied it anywhere there could be charged material and the sun was something he kept returning to over and over again the the coronal Corona heating problem um was one of the things that I I think he played with the most uh later in his career in 1987 and looking at the coronal heating problem this is what we talked about in the last episode where where the outermost most diffused part of the sun is like millions of degrees very confusing um and and he was the one who postulated that Nano flares small Brakes in the magnetic field lines that are carrying hot plasma could release sufficient energy to heat the the Corona and and these are things that the Parker solar probe was designed to go look for and and all these ideas he was always out there saying hey I'm a theorist this is what the math says observers go prove me wrong and that is a terrifying place to be and when he was asked to provide advice to Young scientists after having this entire career of over and over again predicting things and sometimes being mocked um his advice was and I'm going to read the quote um if you do something new and Innovative expect trouble but think think critically about it because if you're wrong you want to be the first one to know that and this was advice he gave in 2018 to early career researchers I oh that's fantastic love that idea yeah yeah you if you're wrong you want to be the first to know you're wrong yeah that's so good um you know I mean that that idea the nanof flares that you mentioned right like he back in the 80s did the math predicted that there should be these miniature flares on the surface of the Sun scal down versions of the big bright flares that that we see every now and then these are happening all the time and that they were responsible for the coronal Heating and then you get the detection and measurement of these nanof flares by both Parker solar probe and the solar Orbiter exactly as Parker had predicted that we just didn't have the technology yeah to to sense them beforehand and so I think you know that prediction of his that was just doing some math here like whatever 40 years old plus yeah was finally confirmed by the spacecraft that bears his name and once again he was right did did you watch the Parker Sol probe launch on NASA TV yeah were you scared for him I mean he was nine 92 92 when it launched yeah yeah surrounded by boisterous engineers and people clapping and yeah he looked pretty frail already at the time but he was there he he was there launch and what I was scared for was so so once upon a time they waited until missions were launched to rename them so like uh the firery uh x-ray satellite was glassed up until like four days after launch when it became firmy um and and so we saw that over and over and over again and then they started naming missions before they launched because that gave you more of an emotional connection and made it harder for Congress to murder them um this was particularly important for the spacecraft not the people right right the spacecraft so this this was particularly important from the Nancy Grace ran telescope um but we never except for the Parker solar probe have named some something after someone living and and as I've talked about in the past I I had a mission I needed for my dissertation blow up right after launch and and so that haunts me and so like I'm watching the NASA stream and the whole time I'm like oh God it's going to blow up it's going to break his heart he's going to have a heart attack like this was the worst casing that was going on in the back of my brain everything was fine Nicole Fox who was had a helio at the time was with him the entire time um and in fact after his death not death after that was the wrong phrase Rich please correct that and in fact uh after his retirement and after the spacecraft's launch she continued to send him data from the Parker solar probe for him to review this is a man who retired but just kept doing research yeah and we see that a lot I mean there's just kind so many scientist yeah exactly that the scientists they they they don't retire they die they just keep working um all right we're gonna talk about this some more but it's time for another break and we're back so I mean we we saw the launch of the Parker solar probe and he was still alive yeah but uh and they they had named it in 2017 after him but then he did pass away in 2022 yeah he was aged 94 um he was survived by his wife of 67 years um W relationship goals what was that relationship goals yeah yeah he had both a son and a daughter and and his son had some of the best stories so apparently like the kids growing up knew their dad was a scientist but didn't really know what he did they had no idea that he was famous at all and apparently he was someone that worked really hard to have a work life balance and would tell his kids that anyone who's working over 40 hours is missing on out on life this was someone who was very much your Great Lakes midwesterner he loved to Camp he he loved to go hiking and his hobby was woodworking his son Eric said in an interview that pretty much all the furniture in the house was made by his dad he was that kind of woodworker and he also liked to carve figures of famous people and I tried but I couldn't find any photos of these and I I really I really wish I could because just the idea of this person who as a scientist I hold in such esteem imagining him sitting on his front patio like who was he carving figures of that he considered to be famous that's what I want to know um and no one said anything bad about him that I could find he he was the kind of person that was described as as humble which makes sense with his kids having no idea what he did he was someone who was described as willing to do and publish research that that people didn't believe initially he took those risks and so he was constantly back and forth throughout his career of oh he's such a Visionary and oh that idea is kind of insert negative phrase that's such a hard place to be and to remain humble while living in that kind of a dichotomy just those those are scientist personality goals um yeah yeah I mean I I had heard him described as somebody who who was very creative out of the box thought of you know understood the implications and the consequences of of various observations to sort of figure out what happened next but then was very careful and um diligent in in how he explored the mathematics for what that would imply and was willing to throw out as you say you know as soon as you figure out you're wrong get rid of it but and then when you balance that with that that perspective on work life balance on on shunning workaholism and instead build a career where you're still thinking about as you said you know even when he was 92 he was looking at the results coming from from Parker that that it's more of a marathon that than a Sprint and I think that's really that's a really great way to to live your life yeah and and his Dean at the University of Chicago from when he was an ameritus described him as someone with Boundless Energy one of those people who just like they always say every Visionary should do on the internet he was someone who got up super early in the morning worked uh with with great they they always described him as having amazing intuition and one of the the things that I saw that was like oh not quite work life balance but I understand he had the kind of intuition where if he was in the middle of eating dinner and a thought came to him he'd wander away to go R it off and then come back to the table and I I could just like I know theorists like this where all of the sudden they're off okay the idea the idea took over and but that's experience right that's knowing that that if you don't get the idea like down immediately then it's lost forever yeah it's gone and so if you don't capture it at that moment with enough Fidelity that you can then explore it in more depth that's the challenge of the of the shower thought right that's the problem you're you're walking along and you have a good idea and then you're like okay this idea is so good that I'm gonna hold on to it now and then I'll think about it later on and then you get home and you're like what did I think of again and you it's gone and you and you you mourn it and so I think that's that's just purely wisdom and experience to know okay idea pops up I better get it down right away and even if I have to interrupt dinner right to to do that because you're always digesting these problems and I think back to that that idea of that life balance like like I find I only really make progress on some of the more challenging problems that I'm trying to deal with when I'm in a place that is a lot more Balan and even when I'm doing a task that's completely unrelated I can be out in the forest cleaning up you know uh brush and go oh yeah that's what I should do and then I and then I have to drop what I'm doing and write it down immediately or gone folding laundry all my best ideas come to me while I'm folding laundry yeah now he won every award that you can win pretty much except for did he get The Nobel I don't think he got the Nobel no but he got everything else everything else yeah wrote over 400 papers which is just crazy I mean you imagine like say you're writing papers for 40 years so 10 years that's like a that's a paper a month pretty much so let let's assume that he wrote papers between age 22 when he got his undergraduate degree and 94 so that 72 years that's that's four or five papers some years eight or 10 probably per year and most of us aspire to average one or two a year so that's truly remarkable yeah multiple books like four books many are used textbook as textbooks by people who are teaching the field yeah wow it's it's the correct decision that they named The Parker solar probe after him yeah it's amazing amazing that you got to be there and see it and to be sharp enough at 94 to understand and want to be part of the research is something all of us can only dream of um he had Parkinson's for the last 10 years of his life but his brain was still going yeah and I really am saddened that this is someone who I never met that lived and did research in my lifetime because he seems like a truly amazing human that's incredible very cool well thank you Pamela and thank you Fraser and thank you to everyone out in our audience we each week thank a sorry I have to rearrange my screen for a moment Rich you're gonna have to edit this out because I lost a window oh I moved it up there that was silly of me um all right and and each week we we think think sorry Rich I'm really sorry um and each week we like to thank our our patrons I wish we could thank all of you but we only have enough time to thank those of you who are $10 and up and even then um it's getting challenging this week I would like to thank zero chill Alex Cohen Andrew Stevenson AST sets Benjamin carrier Bob cril Brian Kilby mansky Daniel Donaldson David bogy Diane philippin Ed Felix Groot Galactic president scoop star MC Scoops salot Glenn McDavid Greg wild Jay Alex Anderson Jean Baptist L Martin maybe I think I said that right Jeff Wilson Jim Drake John Trey's just me and the cat Keith Murray Clum badrov love science I see MC butts McGuire butts uh Les Howard Mark Steven raznak Mathias Hayden Michael Prada Mike heisy Paul D Disney Peter Robert hundle Sam Brooks and his mom Scott con Simon Parton the air major and Tim garish thank you all so much for everything you do we would not be here without our patrons and I would not feel slightly lightheaded if there were fewer names you're awesome thanks everyone and we will see you next week bye-bye and then they saved all right 728 um um file okay I saved it there's the window I'm having losing Windows problems all right so um Matthew Hansen asked somewhere in chat if okay so where is it um if I've been to the St Louis Science Center which tells me you joined late um I'm actually giving a talk at the St Louis Science Center on First Friday in October it will be on citizen science the themes for the night our Barbie and stem careers so my talk will start with a slide that says my job is space I will be wearing pink and I'm going to focus on women's great discoveries through citizen science I hope I see you there Matthew um we have a cosmo Quest half a table every month and the other half a table um Annie Wilson and I share our artwork um and we sell stuff basically to pay for all the supplies for the boot so yeah by our art it pays for Science Education um I now feel the need to say I have an Etsy store it's star strider Studios on Etsy buy a planet buy a solar system your funding Science Education very cool um all right looking for other questions Joe dub says mom was a retired Neuroscience nurse I find podcasts I deal with that Neuroscience for her because scratch of that itch in her brain her Alzheimer's is at Bay when viewing data that's really interesting that that's amazing yeah yeah abely amazing that even a person suffering from Alzheimer's who ironically right is like my mom passed away from Alzheimer's and I think about what kinds of things would connect her and and bring her back into the moment and you know for her it would be it would be writing in ideas and and things like that because she was a a writer but um but yeah that's really interesting to sort of think about how um how you can connect with this analytical part of a person's mind in a way that's different from their emotional point and that maybe if they are suffering from Alzheimer's different parts degrade a different rates so you know your mom would have found this fascinating as a neuroscience nurse thinking about the implications of giving people analytical data as they are declining from Neuroscience so yeah yeah yeah thank you for sharing that story alimer sucks yeah it really does where's my AI solution to this problem yeah I mean everyone in my family dies young so they don't have a chance to get Alzheimer's I'm not sure which is winning but there's less suffering when people die young yeah oh it's more of it um so zapan says maybe an episode about Han alphin bit similar with plas waves yeah but is there an alphin spacecraft no no there isn't should there be yes there's enough solar probes yeah yeah yeah um hopefully and in fact I think like the solar Orbiter mentioned Alan waves yeah they're the that confirmed it yeah so I think that's it's time to rename the solar Orbiter boring T after Alin uh howmany asked if chat GPT returns New York Times content so they were suing chat gbt because they were apparently recreating articles on the New York Times or blocks of content and so on and I mean all the big AI compan are are voraciously uh scraping all of our content and that is that's just the reality yeah even LinkedIn has they they uh automatically opted in all users to have their content scraped so you have to go in and manually opt out yep and same thing with meta all of your public data is now incorporated into their AI which you know feels bad for meta like that mostly is going to be garbage you think about the kinds of of comments and stuff that you see at the bottom of of posts like it's not a lot of useful information in there so I'd be amazed if they get very much that's that's really super valuable compared to science journals things like that yeah and and this is where um I think we talked about it last week you start you start seeing AI that are Rick Rolling because they've scraped so many pages with Rick rolls and you just end up up with nonsense because human beings write parodies and sarcasm yeah so I don't see any other questions so I'm going to make you feel uncomfortable Pamela um which was that I I just didn't interview with someone was asking me about you know the amount of time You' do this 25 years blah blah blah and you know you've gone from being a rank amateur to a someone who seems to know a lot about space and you know often when I interview people they're they're like I can't believe how much you know about this kind of those are really good questions and so on you know and I I'll I could talk about Institute resource utilization I can talk about plasma physics I can talk about neutron stars you know any any topic I can talk about it and a big chunk of it is you know I got my PhD from you thank you um when you think about the fact that I've had private access to a PhD astronomer for 17 years that I have been able to ask whatever nonsense question pops into my brain and then I'm doing my reporting work and incorporating a lot of that stuff you know it it came from like a big swack of that knowledge came from you so thank you for being my personal PhD advisor for the last 17 years and although I don't have the PHD I feel like I've I've done the work and you have done the work as well so thank you you you are very welcome you you have been a wonderful learner and I have to admit I so grateful for everything you've learned over the years because when we first started you would ask questions where I was like oh how do I answer this without making him look bad and you you now now like I will have a moment where my brain has dropped a detail about the universe onto the floor and it has rolled away and you can you can catch me when my brain doesn't have the answer because we take turns remembering things yeah yeah I mean it's definitely gone from and I see myself it's funny because I I'll see people ask me questions and they will be the kinds of questions that I would have asked you know why can't we turn the world's telescopes into a big interferometer you know it's the kind of question that I directly asked you and you gave me an answer and now that I understand way more about interferometers is when people ask me that question I'm able to give an answer that is that began from you and then was extended into you what happens when a black hole and antimatter black hole meet you know these are these are things what inside the observable universe like like these are the kinds of questions that I just get over and over and over again obviously you know I was on that same Journey where I had that question and I asked you and you put me set me straight and then I Incorporated that into what I do and yeah where we're at now in the journey is much more as peers where I come with a certain amount of facts loaded in my brain and you come with a certain number of facts loaded in the brain the dynamic is still there where I'm asking you the questions and you're but I am no longer just listening intently at what you're saying and asking further questions I can also provide a backup to your brain when when you drop a factor if there's something that that maybe you don't have readily at your disposal and and I love it and yeah it's great it's great to be able to be a lot more uh peers on this um and yet I definitely wouldn't be wor I am without having this as an outlet so so yeah so thank you thank you so much it's it's really keep up the good work I love doing this you you are a great collaborator yeah yeah um well we got three more minutes left uh anybody else have a question I I have a random thing that I can share that that is really so so I have a brand new doctor sometimes you need to get a new doctor cuz your doctor has done something that just made no sense so you get a new one um and I really really like her and and I've had high cholesterols my entire life and doctors are always like well you should lose some weight but that's their answer to everything elbow hurts you should lose some weight and she's like okay so first of all this is actually genetic for you cuz I looked at your full history and you exercise a lot this this is genetic yeah however your family history for heart attacks and your cholesterol level horrifies me so you shall be more active even than you are now and so I've been playing a lot of games in VR because VR requires you to be super active for a lot of these games and and I've started streaming it because I haven't found a lot of streamers who are streaming VR games last night was the first time I tried it I'm still trying to figure out how to get the sound right I hate Sound this will be the ban of our existence I will be a 99-year-old if I break family Trends little lady still fighting to get sound to work yes yeah me too me too but I will probably be around 1000 p.m. central streaming VR games on my twitch channel uh star strider um I've been and what's your you're using the quest three right yeah I'm using the quest 3 yeah yeah here's mine right here I love my quest 3 yeah yeah did we get ours like at roughly the same time yeah we did yeah yeah I think I got mine a couple weeks before you I got I didn't get my husband my husband who is responsible for all good Electronics in my life um got me the quest three and he got me an aftermarket head thing that makes it a whole lot more pleasant to use I'll send you the info on which one I have yeah um I got the charging stock yes I love that but it but mine's busted so they're sending me a replacement but you you just put this you just put the headset down and it it recharges I also got the the the quest account that could do games yeah this the games every month yeah yeah and then Vader Immortal I haven't started playing the story part of the game yet but there's a lightsaber dojo in the game and so oh that's amazing you can go in and like do Jedi training with with like the little balls that zot you and then you have Droids with lightsabers that come after you as you get to higher and higher levels that's amazing and yeah I I apparently really like attacking things with swords and VR so I've got to run I got to do another meeting immediately so unfortunately I'm going to have to say goodbye to everybody now that's okay um I so thank you everyone for hanging out with us the week thank you in advance to everyone has to edit our nonsense we appreciate it thanks the moderators and uh I will be back tonight at 5:00 Pacific time to do my regular live stream so all right John and Zan are right there I see them okay byebye everyone we're off