Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Big Impact Astronomy, where we explore stories of how the stars are changing lives and connecting communities around the world. From stargazing under war torn skies to bringing science education to isolated communities, we uncover the incredible impact of astronomy beyond the observatory.
This episode of Big Impact Astronomy is brought to you by Primalucha Labs. Prima Lucha Labs makes space exploration accessible for all and empowers communities worldwide through innovative educational astronomy solutions.
Hello everyone, My name is Mike Simmons and I am the founder of Astronomy for Equity. And welcome to our podcast. Today we have cosmologist Mark nyrick. He has PhD in astrophysics. He's a colleague of mine, an affiliate research scientist at Blue Marble Space Institute of Science. He's also an adjunct professor in the department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Denver.
Mark studies the cosmic web of galaxies and matter, also the connections between structures and processes on Earth and in space, and field based interdisciplinary astronomy, learning all really fascinating things that we'll talk about here.
The way he puts it, he develops models to fit the confusing universe of data around us in our human brains to understand patterns and systems quantitatively and even artistically. I'm delighted to welcome Mark to the podcast. Thanks for joining us, Mark.
[00:01:46] Speaker B: Oh, it's wonderful to be here.
[00:01:49] Speaker A: What cosmologists do is a little bit beyond most of us and the physics and so on gets out of control for us normal people that don't have the abilities that you do, but you do some really interesting things that really brings cosmology down to Earth in a way. You combine astronomy or cosmology artistically in particular, doing origami, which is really hard to wrap your head around until you actually see something there. But this all has to do with the structures, the large scale structure of the universe and the small scale structure that we see. So you have to explain this to me so that I can see where, where you're getting at.
[00:02:41] Speaker B: Well, first of all. Well, you said something about cosmologists having some kind of greater ability to, to understand this and I. Well, I think that's not true. It's, it's a lot of it is just experience and being around this stuff for, for a while. But most people, I think, don't have a very developed view of, of how the universe is arranged on very large scales. I think most people know that there's a galaxy and that were a solar system in, inside the galaxy, but. And that there are other galaxies. But the fact that these galaxies outside our galaxy are arranged in a kind of slightly orderly fashion is probably not something that everyone realizes that's what the large scale structure of the universe refers to. It's this cosmic web of matter that lies between galaxies in the universe.
[00:03:39] Speaker A: And so how does that relate to things unearth that we're used to seeing?
[00:03:44] Speaker B: So there are a lot of things in nature that are branching structures, as they're called. So an obvious thing that's a branching structure is something with actual branches, a tree. But there are a lot of other things too. So I guess it could be useful to look at the slides about that. So here, here are some trees. Neurons are called. Well, the word dendrite the describes the these branching structures of these neuron cells. Dendrite means tree kind of. It comes from the same root. So it's been known basically since Ramoniq Cajal looked at these neurons under a microscope, that the neurons in our brains have this branching structure which looks a little bit like a tree. So you can keep going. Here's a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci on the left of a tree. He actually came up with a rule that seems, seemed to be pretty accurate that the sum of the thicknesses of a tree's branches is equal to the thickness of the trunk they branched from. It's kind of like if you're extruding some play DOH through a mesh. If you push that through there, it can branch into lots of little branches, but the whole cross section remains sort of constant. And some similar kinds of rules happen in some other systems, which I'll. I'll say a little bit more about that later, but I'm not sure whether that applies to neurons, but to the cosmic web. Actually, this branching, this rule that later Leonardo da Vinci found actually kind of works roughly, which is kind of interesting. So we can keep going through some other stuff.
Here's some zebrafish neurons, as the zebrafish is just starting to develop into an actual fish. And mycelium, that's a big one. That's really important in forests and in nature in general. So this mycelial structure goes between trees and plants and is a kind of nutrient exchange network that is in many cases ends up helping some plants develop. And it's also really important for soils absorbing carbon, so it's as relevant to climate change. Mycelium was also mentioned in a recent Star Trek series, Star Trek Discovery. They use what they call the mycelium network to travel around within the galaxy. So the cosmic web that I'm going to be talking about and actually showing pictures of is actually outside our galaxy. So you wouldn't be able to use this cosmic web to Travel within our galaxy. But it does end up looking quite a bit like this mycelial network. Also within our bodies, the circulatory system moves nutrients around our body. It has a structure that's optimal for doing that. There's a book called Scale by Jeffrey west, which I recommend if this is interesting to you.
Like a respiratory system, the lungs have a maximal surface area to maximize oxygen transport from the blood to the outside.
Also, the circulatory system is a branching structure. You can kind of see that in blue here. That's part of the circulatory system.
It's sort of a fractal branching structure which minimizes the amount of material necessary to produce the structure. It fans out and nourishes the tissues kind of uniformly. So the cosmic web, Here's a picture of on the right is a circulatory system of a person looking at a map on the left. Here is an example of the cosmic web in the universe, which happens to be colored red, which was an accident. It looks similar. The capillaries and blood vessels of the universe transport matter around into galaxies. And they originally came from a uniform arrangement. So it's actually there's a close analogy that gravity ends up kind of maximizing the transport of the matter in the universe into galaxies.
Not, as far as we know, through any kind of evolutionary process. But that ends up being what happens.
[00:08:13] Speaker A: Nature finds the most efficient way of doing things eventually.
[00:08:17] Speaker B: Yes, right. So that happens with evolution. But even sometimes without evolution, it ends up working.
So here are some cities, road networks. Here's a map of some of the interstates highway in of the US Atop and on the bottom are. And this is from the. The book by Jeffrey west that I mentioned called Scale on the bottom. There are blood vessels of transportation in and out of Texas. So that here they broadened the size of the road according to the amount of traffic that either starts or ends within Texas. So you can see that it's an organic looking blob where it's thickest in the middle. And then it has tendrils that branch out and also river networks. So here is a bunch of watersheds, as they're called. These are. Each color here is a watershed. So the big pink one is the Mississippi watershed. If rain falls on any of that pink area, it ends up going well, it probably ends up evaporating or being used by something. But if it were to flow all the way down to the sea, it would go through the Mississippi River. And then there are lots of littler ones. There's The Colorado river, which is a yellow one right next to that. And then there are lots of other ones.
And those, those geometries also have a lot in common with these branching networks or they are branching networks. And it's probably the closest analogy in nature to the cosmic web, because in one case the cosmic web is gathering matter into galaxies. So the, the galaxies end up being kind of at the end of one of these big rivers like the Mississippi River. But in, on Earth, on, in the terrestrial case, these watersheds are, well, they, they collect water and they, they also get deformed as they form because of erosion. So you end up with kind of a maximized flow through the network. And that roughly happens in the cosmic case also.
[00:10:25] Speaker A: What is it makes these so similar? And in particular the systems that we see on a really tiny scale by comparison, huge ones that we see on a cosmic scale.
[00:10:35] Speaker B: That's something that I'm, that is not entirely established actually. There are some.
So it's, it's possible to say, okay, these look kind of similar. And you can measure quantities that end up being similar between the, the various networks. I would say in, in the evolutionary, in the bio biological case with circulatory systems and our body, it's pretty clear that the structures are optimized to conserve some, to, to minimize some quantity because of evolution. You, you want the total amount of material used to construct this circulatory system to be minimized but still nourish the whole body.
Some other structures like the river networks, the structure just kind of happens. And it's not necessarily the, the result of a, an optimization that, that you can really clearly point to, but there are some ideas about that. There's an idea called the constructal law, which is, was developed by an engineering professor named Adrian Bejan, which says that structures or systems in nature tend to evolve to maximize flow through them.
And that seems to be sort of what's going on, but it's a little bit hard to completely prove that. So, so that, that is a, that is kind of the idea because of this we have all these types of systems in the, in the world, in the universe, that at least I having studied this for a while, whenever I look at a, a tree, I am reminded with by lots of other things like that looks kind of similar. And I, it adds to my appreciation of nature and it's useful actually in meditating for me. And I think it's, it's, it's. Yeah, it's, it's really a powerful concept that all of these systems are Happening on so many scales in the universe, and we're kind of part of that.
[00:12:32] Speaker A: This brings us to the point where we want to see how this connects with the rest of us here on earth. Aside from this being inspirational, really interesting. There are some connections and some educational things that are really cool. I'm going to present this one, Introduce this through a very cool video.
[00:12:57] Speaker C: At Johns Hopkins University, astrophysicists are studying the distribution of matter in the cosmos.
Mark Nyrick believes an origami model can help represent that distribution.
We can only observe visible matter, shown here, A material that forms stars, planets, and entire galaxies.
But this is only part of our universe.
There is also a mysterious substance called dark matter that's invisible.
Astrophysicists have detected it only indirectly, but many believe that it forms the hidden skeleton of our universe.
[00:13:46] Speaker B: The dark matter started to accumulate into clumps Almost immediately after the big bang. And we wouldn't have as much structure as we see in the universe today if there hadn't been this dark matter. The normal matter started to form structures Based on the groundwork, the skeleton that the dark matter laid down from right away. So the dark matter is really the basis of understanding the structures that we see today.
[00:14:13] Speaker C: According to Nirink, the unseen dark matter folds like origami.
Gravity gathers and crumples together the dark matter sheet in places where ordinary matter is drawn to form galaxies and stars.
Pleats in the sheets, called filaments, Poke out from each galaxy, Aligning its rotation with neighboring galaxies in a pattern similar to an origami twist fold.
[00:14:44] Speaker B: In a twist fold, you have a small polygon, so let's say a triangle.
So here we have a triangle. And going from the unfolded to the folded state Entails twisting that triangle. Even though this is a dark matter structure, it accretes regular matter toward that. So the galaxy here would form here.
It's a strong approximation that the universe forms like an origami model.
In particular, the way that various elements of the cosmic web Are spinning Are very explicit in this model.
We see in the universe that neighboring galaxies Tend to be rotating in the same direction. And that actually relates to this origami model.
[00:15:39] Speaker C: Nirink is now working with students to create a more complex model that captures how dark matter folds intersect to build the cosmic web.
The dots on the paper represent the galaxies as observed by telescopes.
Whenever the paper is overlapping, There is an accumulation of dark matter, Therefore, a greater number of galaxies.
Astrophysics is now being enriched With a new vision of a folded universe, Inspired by. By the ancient art of Origami.
[00:16:24] Speaker A: Now we're folding pieces of paper to see how the universe is constructed, or vice versa. This, I mean, this is a model. We're not saying. You're not saying that the universe is folding sheets like this with some. You know, this goes back to the stuff that people talk about. What if our solar system is an atom and we're just part of some giant creature? And, you know, people could go crazy with this stuff here.
[00:16:52] Speaker B: Yeah, right.
[00:16:53] Speaker A: Yeah. So is this just a model for representing it, or is there some real physical connection in some way, such as sheets of dark matter?
[00:17:07] Speaker B: There is really a dark matter sheet that has folded not. So the. The approximation that this is very much like an origami sheet that doesn't stretch at all, for instance. That is. Is wrong. This sheet does stretch, and it doesn't form the angular structures that origami does. They're rounded off. And there is a real physical meaning behind this, this folding process. It's sort of like. So in three dimensions, it's a. You can imagine it as kind of a block of jello that is moving around in some places and where two patches of it pass through each other. That it has to form what happens in two dimensions as a pleat. So it's kind of like if you take a sheet of paper and push. Push it together, it folds and you can form a pleat there. But. And the same kind of thing can happen in three dimensions. It folds, actually. And this is not useful to think about directly, but it folds in six dimensions.
But that's not useful. The main point of it is that different patches can slide around and be on top of each other.
[00:18:24] Speaker A: There are two uses for this that I can think of. One is to understand cosmology and what's going on there with this as a model. And the other is education. I mean, this is artwork that you are doing.
[00:18:37] Speaker B: And that's actually tactile learning in some ways. I mean, it is. It is tactile tactilization, not just visualization, but you're actually doing stuff with your hands, which is. Which is, I think, pretty cool.
[00:18:52] Speaker A: Here we have an outreach event where you're actually doing this with some students.
[00:18:58] Speaker B: It was an outreach event at this really cool place called Science Gallery London. There's this network of science galleries. There are about 10 of them in the world.
This was a workshop where people were making a design using this tool fabric. So this is an actual fabric. It's a closer representation of what's going on in some ways than the. The strict paper Folding, which generates a very angular thing. In this case, what, what they did is gather together a patch of the fabric into one of these blobs and then put a little rubber band around them. It ends up forming these pleats between the, the blobs for a different reason than in. Than happens in the universe. But it ends up looking pretty similar. It ends up being a pretty good representation which. What's going on.
[00:19:53] Speaker A: This is an interesting way of doing astronomy education that I've never seen before. Is this more intuitive than the other ways of doing this for the students? You find great success with this.
[00:20:09] Speaker B: Yeah. And actually even so, yeah, the, the concept of the cosmic web is. Can be kind of abstract. It's easy to show pictures of it. So that gives some appreciation. But, but I think most people wouldn't necessarily remember a picture they saw of the cosmic web for a long time, but they actually would remember that they played around with this fabric and made a design. It really is a more powerful thing. And actually, even with professional astrophysicists, I brought an origami activity where the. To a conference once and passed out these little pieces of paper that the researchers folded. And the. It was, I think the only time that nobody was checking their email during the conference.
They were actually quite engaged and remembered that. So it's, it's. Yeah, it's for everyone. It's. It makes it a lot more human.
[00:21:08] Speaker A: Do you see this as something that might be useful in other areas as well? I mean, astronomy educators use all kinds of different tools for different things. Is this something that might be useful in other areas?
[00:21:21] Speaker B: Well, yeah. Well, in general, tactile sort of learning can be useful. I think that in this case there's an unusual physical angle to it which may not entirely get across to everyone who plays around with it, but it's, it's something to add to it. I think pretty much anytime there's a hands on learning activity that's useful, not just useful, but it's more enjoyable and memorable.
[00:21:51] Speaker A: Adding some other way of perceiving these things is always helpful. Tactile models sound sometimes different things, ways of representing. And we do astronomy with the blind who have tactile models and sonification. Taking basically graphs otherwise and converting that into sound so they can hear what's going on. This is something that people should be doing. There are a lot of resources for astronomy for the blind, but this is ideal. I mean, this is better for sighted people too. I can imagine that those who were not able to see things like the slides that we showed earlier Would have a much easier time understanding what's going on with this kind of a model. You ever considered that or know anything about that?
[00:22:41] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. It's. I mean, I suppose a blind. So. So part of. Part of this activity. And actually maybe you could show the. The slide with. Of the Council of Giants. Currently, usually the participants are trying to replicate the structure using the fabric. I don't know if you remember what that. What that looked like, but it probably. It has some similarities to this structure, the faint lines between the galaxies here.
So I should say first what this is. So the Milky Way is in the middle there. You can see you are here. Arrow. The nearest galaxies around us happen to be in a flat arrangement, which is kind of actually unusual in our universe that a galaxy as big as the Milky Way would have the flat arrangement of other galaxies around us. This isn't just a projection. If you look at it from the side, it's almost flat. That's actually. It's something that astronomers don't really know where the filaments of matter are between these galaxies. In this activity, the participants get to make a guess about effectively of where the filaments are in our nearby universe each time they assemble this thing that looks like the Council of Giants. So the Council of Giants is actually the ring of galaxies around the Milky Way, and the whole structure is called the local sheet. So I'm not answering the original question, which is. Which was about sight impaired people, visually impaired people. So I suppose currently the way this activity works is by looking at a picture and trying to replicate that. But also, there are some physical models I've made of this Council of Giants they could look at also, which, which would help to. Well, they could approach it from that way entirely without pictures.
Yeah, that's important.
[00:24:30] Speaker A: Now, what about the other way? This sounds like a stretch to me, but can you learn something from looking at the structure, looking at the places where the galaxies are and folding the fabric to match the observations and actually learn something about the network of filaments.
[00:24:49] Speaker B: And so that's kind of what I was trying to say, that the way the places where the plates develop in this, in the thing that was on the screen before is effectively a guess of where the. The filaments are. And actually, you can go on to the next slide, which shows an experiment I made using slime mold. So I called this a cosmoldogist. So the, the slime mold. I don't. Some people might not be super familiar with slime mold, but it's this yellow thing that is actually all one cell. This, all of this yellow stuff is one cell that started out at the white rectangle in the middle, which I put where the Milky Way is. And I put other. I put flakes of oat at the locations of all the other galaxies.
Slime mold likes to make a network of connections between the food source, which is the oat flakes. And there's been some work about demonstrating that the slime mold tends to. Can find a nearly optimal or shortest path between all of these points. So, for example, it looks.
They put the locations of Tokyo Metro stations in a petri dish like this, and the slime mold was able to roughly find where the. Where the train should go between that to make an optimal network. So this is. This is the slime molds. Guess about where the filaments are in the local universe. You can go one more slide down. So the. Here are four different slime molds, guesses in different colors about where these networks are. They don't actually agree super well, but there are places, places where they agree pretty well, which is like in the. At the bottom right, there's a bunch of stuff typically there, which indicates that kind of. That there's a. At least in the opinion of the slime molds, there's probably a filament between those two galaxies, which are the Milky Way and the nearest galaxy, which is kind of the only galaxy that's the. The only large galaxy that's visible with the naked eye, which is Andromeda.
[00:27:01] Speaker A: But the universe is made out of slime mold, is that what you're saying?
[00:27:05] Speaker B: Pretty much, yeah.
[00:27:08] Speaker A: Well, that explains a lot. That's fabulous. So how much of this outreach do you do? And do you do this, you know, with your students at the university and so on?
[00:27:20] Speaker B: It's been a part of every class that I've taught recently, and I'm so in Colorado, I'm actually not sure how common this is, but. Yeah, here's. There may be other universities in other states that have these kinds of.
Kinds of campuses, but at least most of the major universities here have. Have these mountain campuses. So here's a picture of Colorado State University's mountain campus. There are some pictures on the left of the campus, and then on the right is a picture I took of a tree and some other trees. I'm really excited that I'll be able to, I think in a class that I'm teaching next quarter, bring the class up to the University of Denver mountain campus, which I'm going to visit this weekend. And, well, point out systems there that have some relation to systems in astronomy. So this cosmic web, for example, there's the prime example. Just a tree has some similarities to the cosmic web. But also all of these seem to be next to rivers just for practical reasons because rivers simplify the terrain and the mountains, but the river will have some characteristics. So it will be really fun to relate to the cosmic web. Also there's a river model of black holes which I. We haven't talked about black holes yet, but there's a way to understand how black holes work which make reference to a river. And thinking of. I'll just briefly say that this way of understanding how a black hole works involves thinking of space kind of falling into the black hole, like into a. Into a drain or over a waterfall. There's a pretty strong analogy there too. So that's going to be another thing that'll be really fun to look at.
[00:29:16] Speaker A: So there's a lot more to develop in terms of these connections and yeah, published on this.
[00:29:23] Speaker B: I think too there's a connection to structural engineering and spiderwebs that I wrote a whole paper about that actually came from an art, some art that I saw.
There's an artist named Tomas Saraceno who makes these installations, room size installations of black cables. This is a. Actually a real spiderweb that spiders made in his studio. And then I guess the next side probably has.
Oh maybe it's a previous one, a structure very much like that. He scanned it in great detail and built this structure and occupied most of a room.
And you can walk around there and pluck the strings even.
Well, this geometry comes from structural engineering in some ways. And it happens that the same kind of structure falls out naturally from the way that this cosmic web develops. It's described by the same geometry. So that was really cool. I don't imagine bringing one of these huge sculptures around in the mountains, but there are spiderwebs in the. In the mountains sometimes, which would be cool to point out their relation to the cosmos. So yeah, I guess I'm really excited about teaching in this setting because while it'll form connections to. Among all these systems. But I think, yeah, even more so than learning particular facts and concepts is the appreciation that these processes are happening around us that are very pretty easy to watch and kind of makes me feel part of the cosmos more to know that. That the. These things are kind of happening on unimaginably vast scales also. But. And yet I can kind of see it in front of me too.
[00:31:21] Speaker A: So from microscopic to macroscopic, everything through Nature. This is amazing. And, and you know, I've done a lot of work with artists who are doing astronomy and art, different ways of representing the same things. But in this case, the artwork is the thing itself. It's not just a representation that those spider webs, that is the cosmic web or something, I mean, they're essentially the same thing. So this is really.
It's just, you know, when you say life imitates art or. Or is it art imitates life? Well, here it's art equals life. I hope that. Are you working with others who are going to bring this into their courses and so on as well?
[00:32:07] Speaker B: Yeah. So the reason that the Colorado State University slide was there was. That's where I've kind of already done this. It was actually in an art class. And this artist named Erica Osborne at Colorado State University who taught a two week intensive art class at this mountain campus, emphasizing all the systems going on in the forest. So the, the cosmic connection fit pretty well into that. And, and I was, that was a lot of fun to be included in that a little bit. Yeah. So I'm looking forward to doing that wherever I can.
[00:32:44] Speaker A: This is one of those things where somebody comes along and just sees something that everybody else has been looking at, but see something within it that people have been looking at for a really long, really long time. And that was you in this case?
[00:32:58] Speaker B: Yeah, I suppose so. The connection to the cosmos is relatively new. Yeah, yeah. I guess we, we haven't really known about this cosmic web for very long in human terms. It's really only since the 80s or 90s since we've known about this, the, the structure that the galaxies in the universe make. Some other cosmologists have had some similar ideas, but I think I'm pushing it and I'm realizing how useful how inspiring it is to non cosmologists, maybe more than others have.
[00:33:29] Speaker A: Yeah, this is fascinating. Well, I'll tell you one thing I've known about the cosmic web and I look at the pictures and I say, what the heck is going on there? And I never really looked into it and understood it, but this makes, this really makes a lot more sense to me. I'm far from a student, I don't have trouble picking things up. But this, watching this, it's actually more interesting to me and really drove it home. I. And I'm going to look into more of it now. And that's really. You know, we use astronomy for so many things. Inspiring people to go into science or inspiring their curiosity or imagination.
This works because it Worked on me. So I know this is an important thing. I hope this gets out there much more.
[00:34:15] Speaker B: Well, also, I think an essential part of it is maybe the, the most important part of it is communicating that although there's some things that seem mysterious and maybe are still somewhat mysterious, a lot of it can be understood. The, the world is largely understandable. It's not some magic happening and there's just vague where the galaxies are. We actually understand these things and, and there are good reasons for them and they're related to other things that we can observe directly.
[00:34:48] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And that's the thing too, is that when we look at images from Hubble or James west or something, those are things that are out there. It's somewhere else. It's not connected to us. But then when you go out under the night sky and you look up and you see the Andromeda galaxy, either, or the Orion Nebula or you see Saturn or something that's right there, this connects us, connects these things to us. And knowing that these structures are common in nature and very small scales, larger scales, and I look outside, see a tree, there are some connections with that that kind of brings it home that this is not elsewhere. This is here. This is what we are a part of. I find it really fascinating and I hope others do too. I hope there will be more. And we have to let people know how to get a hold of you.
I think we have some information to share.
There you are on Instagram. What else have we got? Origami.
[00:35:56] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:35:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:59] Speaker B: And that's, that's actually the same website, but yeah, I had to grab the dot sci dot science domain name when it became available.
[00:36:06] Speaker A: Right, right. And will be people be able to find you contact for you if they want to there. Okay, that's terrific. Well, thanks so much for joining us, Mark. I've known about your work. It's wonderful to dig into it farther and really understand what you're doing with these folding paper and in cosmology and all that stuff. Because it's just, it's wonderful and I, I think it's useful.
[00:36:32] Speaker B: Of course, I think Astronomy for Equity is wonderful, Dave. It's not. You don't have to, of course, convince me that astronomy is powerful for getting in contact with the world and education and equity.
[00:36:47] Speaker A: Well, thank you very much. We're going to show people that this has been another episode of Big Impact Astronomy. I'm your host, Mike Simmons. Jacob Sager is our technical producer. Our audio engineer is Ali Pelfrey. Big Impact Astronomy is produced by Astronomy for Equity bringing astronomy to unserved communities worldwide. This episode of Big Impact Astronomy was brought to you by Prima Lucha Labs. Primalucha Labs makes space exploration accessible for all and empowers communities worldwide through innovative educational astronomy solutions. Learn more about Astronomy for Equity, including how you can support us atastro the number4equity.org.
