good morning hank it's tuesday oh look
it's hank's book an absolutely
remarkable thing which he wants you to
know is available at find bookstores
everywhere
has been since 2018. hank today we're
doing something called mind blowers with
hank and john where we share with each
other the most mind-blowing facts that
we know okay okay hank here's my first
fact
pi calculated to the 38th digit
is precise enough to calculate uh
assuming that we knew all the other
numbers
the size of the milky way galaxy to
within a few
centimeters so like we only need to know
pride to the 38th digit but we know pi
to the 31 trillionth digit that's not a
fact about pi
it's a fact about humans we're amazing
yeah i can't get enough of us
i read a few years ago that there are
probably fragments of dinosaur bone on
the moon
the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs
probably shed debris as far as jupiter
another great mind-blowing fact is that
uh some science communicators figured
out that bananas were a really good
system for the scale of radiation how so
they have a little bit of radiation in
them and so like eating one banana
exposes you to some radiation so
you want to know how much radiation you
get like flying in a jet airplane to
europe
you can do it in bananas now i'm gonna
have to google how many bananas an
airplane flight is to find out if it was
worth it to come here to visit you
here's a mind blower that hank taught me
before the big bang
is an incorrect idea because
in addition to creating space as we now
understand it the big bang created
time as we currently understand it yeah
no absolutely
to me the mind-blowing fact is that you
can look up into the sky with
a telescope and see the big bang
here's a great one henry rice told me
this if the universe
were infinitely big and infinitely old
the the night sky would be white
why because there would be light from
all of the stars
in every direction there would be no
space not taken up by stars because the
universe would be infinitely big and
infinitely old
okay and here's one that gets me for
99.99 of human history you could only
hear music
if you were within earshot of someone
who was making it yes
and the idea of an album of recorded
music
is younger than dr pepper
we do not know why there is matter what
and we do not know like in two different
ways one we don't know why
there wasn't an equal amount of
antimatter and matter created and so
everything annihilated itself like the
big bang it just like should have been
like
even steven yeah big bangs and then in
big smooths
well and then just like it can like
space and time continue to bang but
matter does not
according to our understanding of the
universe a universe without matter is is
just as likely if not more likely than a
universe with matter and then like
separately from that we don't know why
matter exists at all
so we don't really know why i'm here
oh definitely not okay well like like on
way more levels than just those two
right like we don't know why i'm here in
the sense that like we don't know why
the
atoms that are inside of me exist
yeah it'd be interesting to look at what
makes a fact mind-blowing i think it's
when it makes me
feel either big or small when it
re-contextualizes my understanding of
myself and my place in the universe yeah
like i want to understand my own
emotions because
ultimately i am the most interesting
part of the universe
i would argue that i am it's weird
do you not do you not wake up in the
morning and your first thought is of me
and my needs
some days when it's a really bad day
yeah i do think
well we are on a little infinitely tiny
speck
yeah on the one hand it's that feeling
of wonderful smallness
where which you would think would be sad
but isn't but then on the other hand
there's the feeling of like well there
might not have been matter
so in that sense i am quite something
this whole thing is weird
thank you for coming to my ted talk hank
i'll continue to see you right now