#2363 - David Kipping

**Joe Rogan** (0:03)
The Joe Rogan Experience.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:06)
Trained by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

**Jamie** (0:12)
We're up.

**Joe Rogan** (0:12)
What's up, man?

**David Kipping** (0:13)
How are you?

**Joe Rogan** (0:14)
Pleasure to meet you, sir.

**David Kipping** (0:15)
Pleasure to be here. Thanks, Jay.

**Joe Rogan** (0:16)
I really enjoy your content online. It's been really fascinating, so I've been doing a deep dive into a lot of your videos over the last few days, and enjoying the hell out of it, and particularly enjoying... I wanted to talk to you about so many different things, but one of the most pressing things, one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you in, because you are very knowledgeable in all things space, is the James Webb Telescope, and all the different stuff that they've been finding, particularly about these galaxies that were formed very shortly after... Not shortly, not within our lifetime shortly, cosmologically shortly after the Big Bang, that it seems like we have to figure out why these things are forming, is the universe older, there's all those different kind of speculation, maybe the Big Bang is not 13 point whatever billion years old, but maybe 22, 24, like what is your take on all this?

**David Kipping** (1:11)
Yeah, the James Webb Space Telescope is such an incredible instrument. The data has just blown us away. When you build this thing and you look at it unfolding in space, you think there's so many ways it could go wrong that we all were just like, this thing was 215 moving parts or something had to unfold. So just the fact that it just all worked was just remarkable. And then we've got those first images, they just blew us away as well because we had some of these engineering expectations of what it would do, but the data was just even better than that. So when it, of course, the first thing you want to do is point it to the most distant part of the universe and see what's out there, and there's darkest patches. And so when it did that, yeah, it started finding a couple of things. It started finding quasars, which is kind of the center of these very active galaxies. These are supermassive black holes, have loads of crap falling in, and they're spewing out all this energy, they're kind of feeding supermassive black holes. And so we started detecting those way earlier than we thought the universe should be able to build them. Because to make a supermassive black hole, means things like a hundred million solar masses, imagine that, a hundred million suns have not only been born but died, gone through their entire life cycle, died, collapsed into a black hole, and then those black holes have presumably somehow merged together into this super behemoth of this hundred million solar mass thing. So we're finding those just 300 million years after the Big Bang. And that was like, hold on, that doesn't make any sense, like how can this be?
And similarly, with the galaxies, we were seeing these images, these galaxies, and you can date roughly how old they should be based off the redshift. So the universe is expanding. So therefore, if something is very far away from us and the universe is expanding, it's light gets stretched more and more and more as it journeys over space. And so we can use that redshift to kind of date how old these things are. When we use those dates, we look at these images, again, they seem suspiciously too old. You really shouldn't be able to form these things that early on in the universe. And so that kind of puzzled us. I think for the galaxy thing, there was a bit of a resolution there. One of the resolutions is that we probably miscalculated how easy it is to form these galaxies in the first place. So we had these models for galaxy formation, we had these models for how stars should form, how quickly they should live, but it was all essentially calibrated on what we see around us, like right here in this part of the universe, in the local universe. And then we kind of realized that those same models probably need to be tweaked if you're going to apply them to the early universe, where the density is so much higher, the gas temperature is much hotter, everything is just completely different in the early universe. So when you kind of make those corrections, it actually looks like maybe it's actually possible to make those galaxies earlier than we thought. So I think the galaxy problem is a bit easier to explain. I think the quasar problem to me is more interesting.