Invisible Rainbows with Dr. Alfredo Carpineti

0:00Hello and welcome to Pale Blue POD, the astronomy podcast for people who are overwhelmed by the universe but still want to be its friend. I'm your host Dr. Moyamictir and astrophysicist and folklorist and good friend to the universe. We braid each other's hair on the regular. I am in my office at Pale Blue POD diversity right now waiting for an exciting guest soon. I'll be joined by Dr. Alfredo Carpennetti. He's an astrophysicist and science communicator. You know much like me. He decided to leave the field of research and talk about stuff. He is also the creator and co-host of IFL Sciences podcast The Big Questions and

1:02the founder slash chair of Pride and STEM, the largest charity in the UK committed to supporting LGBTQ plus folks in STEM fields. And the reason he's here today is that he's the author of the book Invisible Rambos, the unseen universe beyond our senses which came out in May in the UK and is coming out in the US very very soon. He I believe just came in on the ferry a little bit ago so should be walking down the hallway now and I believe that's him. Alfredo come on in. Welcome. Hello, Moyam. Thank you very much for having me. It's so nice to meet you in person. We've been corresponding for years and thank you for taking the long trip out to the POD diversity. Well it is an absolute pleasure to be here. Thank you. Congratulations on your new book. I read it and absolutely loved it. Like it was a pleasure every single page. I learned so much and you're an excellent writer. Thank you. Thank you very much. It's it's very humbling here in your

2:06reaction and as several people told me very similar things and I wrote that book to be filled with science. I wrote that book thinking if when I was nine I could have a book like that. They would have helped me so much and I wanted it to as I said every single page had some cool things about the universe and I can imagine my nine year old self reading the book and going to my parents and I'm like did you know about this? Yes they might not have enjoyed it. No you absolutely nailed it. I actually took some pictures and sent some things to my friends. I was like did you hear this? Did you? It was very exciting. Thank you and congratulations. Thank you very much. Yes and I love that you start the book with a nod to Arania, the muse of astronomy because I've obviously been spending a lot of time with the muses lately and it was nice that you two have been spending some time with them. Yes and I don't know obviously the people on

3:07the podcast will not say it but behind me I have a little statue of Urania 3D printed from a Roman version. That's beautiful right next to your book very appropriate. Yes. So I would love to know how it's been for you to see the book out in the world. Any surprises? Any nice comments from people? Yeah it has been incredible. It's so nice that I've been able to walk to some book shops and just seeing it there in some cases in the windows and I just like oh my god oh my god it's been wonderful having the chance of traveling a little bit of the UK to talk about it and meeting so many different people. A lot of them telling me like oh I'm really intrigued but I don't know if this is for me it might be a little bit to complicate around just like if there's something in the book that you don't get it's not you I am the problem I should have explained it better

4:11and I think it's very important that science communicator are focused on making as accessible as possible and on that note my mother-in-law was speaking on FaceTime with my husband and she didn't realize I was in the room as well and she said like oh yeah just finished the radio waves chapter and I understood everything and I was like thank you ham and you're like no you were not supposed to to hear that I'm like well that is great it's a yeah but it's you're like oh it was very worried that I wouldn't get it like but well if you didn't get it it's not about you's not about you're not having the skill to get it is about me not having made it clear enough but I'm glad that so many people are enjoying it I get a lot of I cannot believe that you put this many pop culture reference in it which there were a lot more in the original draft and then I thought okay maybe I need to cut down a little bit oh thank you I thought like it's literally

5:19now one that is extremely poignant is Dolly Parts or Reference in the Gamma Rage chapter and RIP yeah and for me it was important I need to grant in things that people can relate to and pop culture is something that's more or less we can all relate to and it's not like those pop culture references won't be understandable in the future they just might be understandable to the aging population that grows with the book indeed like there were a few things like always there's a little bit too niche but unlike I think people can in case they're really confusing they really want to know like they're always said in a source of with a wink so that it's clear that I am making a little joke that should be easily searchable online if necessary yes that

6:21that always came across and I think it's important to have a few little like in jokes for specific groups because then people will really feel like you're talking to them when they read it absolutely yeah great job and you covered so much it's not like this is a book about black holes or a book about planets like it really covers everything which is the advantage of writing a book where the frame is let's cover the electromagnetic spectrum but I'm curious if any of the topics that you mentioned are near and dear to your own academic heart so what did you study in your PhD program? yes in my PhD program I studied galaxy collisions if I need to go very specific the role of galaxy mergers in making the big elliptical galaxies in the local universe that was my focus and there are a few merger reference in the book but I didn't go too much into it because a lot of the sudden

7:31mergers is invisible light we do some stuff and I did some stuff in infrared and actually now it's been a while since I did my PhD so now we do a lot more infrared work on mergers because we're looking at mergers much earlier in the history of the universe so we need infrared telescopes to see them or at least to see them clearly and a little bit of an ultraviolet because mergers produce a lot of young hot stars and they shine strongly in ultraviolet so that's we combine about some they were like while I was studying some projects about doing radio waves doing some studies of certain properties especially studying the sort of massive black holes in x-rays it just I doubled but I never went into the details of it and so I didn't want to carry galaxy mergers throughout the book they're there they were my first love and so they they need a place of

8:35respect but there is so much more to explore with the light that we cannot see that's very true and such restraint on your part because I know in every space thing I do I'm a talk about planets and I'm gonna talk about them a lot so I was impressed that I couldn't tell from reading it what you had studied well thank you I feel that there are actually I think there is one thing that is by far my favorite you can stumble upon it in the radio chapter and it's the fast for your verse yeah I can't help it I absolutely love them love them so much that's I decided for book two to dedicate an entire chapter and even though I will talk about planets and I'll talk about a lot of different things the first chapter is about fast for reverse it doesn't make sense in my source of narrative structure by just like I love them so much they're my favorite and this is my book so I'll study what they're about things yes it's your book you can fast radio burst if you want to exactly exactly what is it about FRB is that excites you so much that's two decades ago we didn't

9:43know they existed and we think that maybe at least several hundreds maybe 10,000 of fast for your bursts hit the earth every single day that is a lot and I love those kind of things that show one end the boundless extent of our ignorance and on the other the other creativity of the human race in the challenging that ignorance it's always like feels that this massive mountain of ignorance and we're all there with like little teaspoons scraping away bits of it but it's it's incredible that we can do that so and like the first live detection of fast for reverse was 2015 like the field is that young that's amazing and it's incredible and there's so much we don't know but they also have so much potential because they could give us a way to measure the expansion

10:46rate of the universe independent from the other ways and that is a big thing because our two main ways to measure the expansion rate of the universe don't match at the moment so we need independent measurements and it's there's so much potential there's so much we don't know and I'm just like I get giddy about the oh this is amazing I can see it on your face listeners the pure joy on Alfredo's face when he's talking about fast radio bursts is inspirational really is that your favorite thing to explain like that you have a whole books worth of light lessons in here what is your favorite thing to explain about light oh oh you're making me choose between the uh children I think fast for your verses probably my favorite phenomenon and that happens beyond the visible light but I think probably my favorite to explain it's galaxies distant galaxies and redshift

11:52yes again it's another place that's there is so much that we don't know and it's fascinating to see that there are a few things that I mentioned in the book that's they're not out of date but now there would be massively more expanding simply because how much we're discovering in the infrared and it's just like I I went and reread the chapter just to make sure what then I put one of the potential most distant galaxies that we knew at the time and then we found one that is further of course this is the problem about writing books at the cutting edge of research because there's a lot of time actually between when you finish the book and when it actually comes out and science advances in that time and sometimes that happens very quickly so I went like how did I sort of hinted that this might be out of date and actually I did quite well to say at the time of writing this is as far as we can tell but probably by the time that you're reading this we find more

12:57excellent okay as well as well but yes if for me it's really fun to explain what is like at the frontier what is like at the very edge of science and that is truly the very edge this is as far as telescopes allow us to see back into the past as far away from earth as possible and what's more fun than that yeah and then you get to have really fun conversations about what can we mean by edge of the universe and I'm sure people ask you often like what is beyond it or what was before the big bang yeah I love this question because it and I think it's very important something that our science communicator and scientists should do more it's saying we don't know and it is okay not to know and there are a few hypothesis for the beyond before the big bang it's like they're

14:01very much hypothetical as far as we can tell our science cannot even begin to consider how to test that or maybe it's impossible for our science to test it in the first place but it's fun to think about it because they are big philosophical problems and we can discuss does it even make sense to have a before the big bang because time starts time as we consider it start a certain point there are ideas that the universe is infinite in spatial dimensions but not time so why sound special and you got to all this fundamental question they're just like oh my god on one end to try and go and get a solution you need to probably have a PhD in astrophysics a PhD in philosophy and a few other things probably skills with maths that are far beyond me but at the same time it's a question that everyone can ask what is time and I think this is every time I get those kind

15:05of questions in events and everything I always want the people to feel like you have asked such an important question that humanity has been battling for thousands of years, truly battling and we're nowhere close to an answer we I think we are much closer to a more rigorous answer but we do not have the answer and so because so many times people tell me oh this probably is a stupid question I was like no there's no such thing as a stupid question and usually they come up with the most philosophical complicated question and I just like you are in the proud tradition that has span oceans and civilization asking something so fundamental and I think having the mic or the platform to just make it people feel like you should continue to wonder about that you should

16:08should continue to question that it's it's an enormous privilege and pleasure I agree yes you light up when you talk about it that way that's really nice but I agree those are the kinds of questions that if we weren't in like a lecture hall or in a in a crowded bar giving a talk and instead on a couch and we could just be cross-legged talking about this I would then feel such a deep connection to you like those are the types of questions you ask if you want to get to know someone and like peel back the layers of the matrix together and that's important yeah because it's just like we can explain everything that if we want to answer about time we can explain all the what we know about the physics so we can explain about the possible supposed connection to thermodynamics which is a phenomenal branch of science but also shouldn't we also discuss how humans use time our

17:11civilization have related to time differently or when we close humans in like those simulated space environments and they're like in caves away from sunlight their circadian rhythm is not the rhythm of the regular day so what does it tells us it's just like there are so many complication and maybe somebody that has just a positive interest is not going to find the mathematical solution to what it's time but maybe they come up with the philosophical solution maybe they have some insights that somebody like me that's just thinks oh there must be a connection to thermodynamics because that is the thing that I know and the things that I know not to bet against in physics I cannot get because I don't have their life experiences or their intuition or their knowledge and this is why I feel like yes like you don't need to have all the mathematical knowledge

18:16wonder about this big questions because maybe you come up with something else or together we come up with something else because we shared this perspective and yes absolutely on the sofa or having dinner that's where the connection happened yeah yeah yeah absolutely we obviously you're a great science communicator I'm sure you've had a lot of difficult conversations with people what do you find is the most common misconception about light what do people tend to not understand about it oh very good question I think that there are actually a few things one of them is fundamental misconception about quantum mechanics and the fact that the nature of light is both wave and particles at the same time and that is a much bigger conversation because the particle wave duality of nature is a crucial thing that we should be much better at explaining yeah I've done

19:22like three episodes on it and still haven't quite cracked the code on how to talk about wave particle duality it is something that is absurd it is absolutely absurd because we understand what waves are thanks to our beautiful planet with liquid water oceans and throwing things in ponds and puddles when we're little or not so little and we understand what particles are and yet like just accepting that oh yes things are both at the same time I don't know like I have a master in quantum field theory and PhD in astrophysics and it's just like no it doesn't make sense like even in my head I cannot comprehend in an instinctive way that they are one and the same so having to explain it it's it's a very tollask and I think the other thing is realizing that all the different

20:27section of light that we subdivide the all of the section of the electromagnetic spectrum and how we subdivide it is just a single aspect of the same phenomena radio waves and gamma rays are the same phenomenon just different energies and again I feel there we can blame Gulliel Momarconia my fellow countryman for the intervention of the radio and suddenly the radio and radio waves became associated with listening and hearing rather than light phenomena and everything that is obviously more energetic than visible light as a danger component so it's seen as something like oh we need to keep it out of distance I don't know it's very important to study the universe with that so I feel that there is several things that are misconception that I hope that I manage to dispel in the book but as I said it's something that I struggle with and

21:34try my best in the book and I don't think I have found this is the solution people will read this and all I oh yes finally everything is clear about a particle wave duality hopefully they are aware that there is that thing that it is a big problem and even if they don't feel like it's so at least they know that it's there yeah you said before that there's this kind of pile of the dirt of stuff we don't know yet and we're chipping away at it as a society yes but also as individual people and every time someone reads their book they get to chip away at that pile of unknown stuff a little bit more yes it's anything I like the saying that we move mountain one rock at a time and so we're chipping at our ignorance truly one if we're lucky one at teaspoon at a time often enough is just we're there with tweezers sounds like oh let's get this few atoms away some dust spec away yeah so true

22:36hey friends it's me Alfredo is playing with the interactive rainbow art exhibit that the art department just installed in the hallway it lets you see and feel what it would be like to catch the end of the rainbow and walk through it but our hallway obviously has the whole electromagnetic spectrum and Alfredo is having a blast while he's out there I'm going to share some quick messages with you first here are three real ways that you can help pale blue pod grow if that's something you're interested in doing the first is to tell your friends your co-workers your family person you meet on the street corner who's asking for directions tell them about pale blue pod get them listening to the show get them to be a friend to the universe and that means we have better download numbers to impress potential sponsors and that that would be nice I would like some sponsorship money please and thank you the next way you can help us is buying our merch we

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24:42donation isn't something you're into right now you could make a one time donation at the paypal link in the episode description and be a brief but bright supernova in the pale blue pod sky isn't that fun but no matter what kind of support you give whether it's monetary or word of mouth recommendation or just listening to our podcast we love you and we're honored that we get to be a part of your week thank you so much my next and final message is a podcast recommendation it's another show in the multitude collective and it's a fun one if you like gossip and history it's called this guy sucked and it's a history podcast for haters by haters you can join historian doctor Claire obin and a new expert every week to pull back the scholarly curtain on some of the world's biggest bummers no dead person is safe and the show's guests prove that the best part of understanding the past is in fact criticizing it they just did an episode about Thomas Jefferson and I don't know about you but for some reason in this day and age I'm finding it very cathartic to hear

25:46honest conversations about how fucked up america's founding fathers were so check out this guy sucked if that's something you would also like to hear new episodes come out every Thursday okay Alfredo's back and he has a little twinkle of all the colors of the rainbow in his eye I think now is a great time to continue our conversation about his excellent excellent book so you mentioned that all of these sections of the electromagnetic spectrum they're all just different energies of the same phenomenon but could you choose a favorite range of energies if you had to do you have a favorite region of the electromagnetic spectrum oh yes I do yes I do it will have to be infrared interesting why why infrared okay let me tell you like again oh you're making me choose between all my children now right and when I think about it when I consider

26:49every group by itself I literally just feel that I cannot choose one because each one brings something unique even if I'm just like oh you know what because make them the microwaves are right give us the cause microwave background but we tend to do a lot of other things that we do microwaves with radio waves are way far infrared there is a good overlap apart from the cause microwave background but it is the cosmic microwave background one of the most important discovery in astronomy ever and it's fundamental that we studied so how could I just put the microwaves on the side right yeah microwaves do like one thing but they do it really really well absolutely and so how could I just push them apart but I need to choose my favorite and then I keep thinking like I love gamma rays and the gamma ray bursts and yes there are a few other things but gamma ray bursts are amazing in another case of one good things and very very well but also the gamma rays we do a lot

27:55because they're so difficult to study we study them in other wavelengths and then we get to extrace and all the powerful events and the super massive black holes or it's amazing and it'll provide us and the new stars and the active galaxies and the sun protecting us from the sun amazing and obviously radio waves with my faves fast radio bursts and hunting for alien signals and studying massive galaxies and other ways to study super massive black holes or pulsars but now my love is in front is is the galaxies is looking at the atmospheres of planets that might tell us about the possibility of alien life there is about discovery the fact that Uranus ad and still has rings and weird auroras and being a very very weird planet hole together

28:57it's so full of interesting mysteries for me so it will be my favorite nice I love how you still went through and and gave good attributes for all of the regions like a loving parent as I said that I I really couldn't choose so I needed to give it was like constructive criticism or feedback and needed to give positive feedback about all my wavelengths and I couldn't just be like yeah I don't I don't care about x-rays I respect it although a long-term listeners of the pod will know that the radio region will always have my heart which is weird because you don't really study planets in the radio that much but I just love that you can use radio during the day that is a very good reason to to think about radios because you can have more socially acceptable hours exactly I want to pivot a little bit to talk about your process for writing the book because it's so well structured like I said you cover so many topics and I really

29:59like the way you connect astronomy history to queer history at different moments so like the discovery of sage a star and the destruction of magnus Hirschfeld's institute in Germany what was your research process and like please tell me how you outlined this book because I need to take your advice well the plan was always to have narrative structure like like a story like like a fairy tale that you have beginning middle and end so you needed to have something like that you go through your dark forest of ignorance and that was the plan and then it's of realizing like I don't actually have a single character so if I decided to make I don't know studying black holes through the different wavelengths and use black holes as a proxy then I would have had that as my main character and as I was structuring things I realized the main character

31:05is the reader the reader is going on this journey across the wavelengths and it's a little less like a simple fairy tale and more like an epic journey like the others you have different trials and tribulations and every wavelength is that so you are going through hopefully not trials hopefully is a very easy read about you are exploring different things and learning and getting some new skills that by the time you get to the gamma ray chapter and that came out very easily because of what I was mentioning the connection to all the other wavelengths you have all the skills to understand what the universe beyond the visible is like but also understand the connection between all the wavelengths and so I felt that that was going to be the crucial narrative thread building this arc of connection at the same time because I wrote as my first proposed chapter

32:11infrared I knew that it was going to be quite a political book just by the virtue of me being a queer astronomer and queer science communicator and talking about some queer issue throughout it was going to be a political book there is no avoiding that because of our society works and my identity is political and politicized and books are political exactly and politicized so it was unavoidable and I started looking at deeper and longer from connection as something that I saw first was the way that visible light astronomer or at the time in the 60s were just known as astronomer reacted to astronomy beyond the visible so using infrared and especially radio waves at the time and they just rejected it they didn't consider it astronomy and that was in 1960s

33:14and he might have like wow what are on the nose parallel between astronomy and the olguard and astronomy rejecting something wholesale simply because this is not how we've done things in the 60s just in the time of the birth of the civil rights movement or when the civil rights movement actually got enough steam to become mainstream and things started changing so we're just like that is already on the nose enough and then I came across in a few places this parallel between the discovery of a search series star the so-called the center of the Milky Way and actually it was the discovery of a weird hiss in radio waves from the center of the galaxy we didn't know what it was and the connection to the book burning in Nazi Germany and I've seen it in Carlo Velis book and in another couple of articles online and people were very kind of like

34:18this is what was happening like one side of the Atlantic there was this discovery on the other side they were burning Einstein theory of general relativity and the thing the first thing that popping to my head was like yeah I know how much they hated Einstein's work and it was consider quote unquote Jewish science but also I knew from my personal reading and partly professional reading on queer history that the first targeted was that instead of sexual studies and when I looked at the connection like oh they might have also had general relativity there in the first book burning but most of the books were from the institute of sexual studies and that is a history that is missing from the other science-righton science communicator that only

35:18focused on Einstein general relativity which I understand the connection I made the same connection we needed answer general relativity to understand that's our massive black hole but the queer aspect is important because everything is connected everything the problems are systemic are not just one individual throwing general relativity on the pyre to be burned the question there was systemic it was not about Einstein the individual or a single Nazi that's true general relativity or dislike general relativity it's about systems and the context is important yeah you're so right it's a part of a much bigger problem it's not that they were burning because of anti-semitism solely they were also burning for you know antiquiness anti-blackness and just hate and prejudice in general and I think that is crucial to discuss in the context to make sure that we do not make the same

36:24mistakes again which I think is extremely relevant unfortunately extremely it's always a bitter sweet feeling when your book is super-precient and like and timely and you don't know what to do with the fact that all of a sudden you've written something that really speaks to the times yeah you see I would I would love for a target buffler to still be alive mostly for just to hear her opinion on death and the parable of the sword it does like but that probably just it's not pre-ashions it's just being a black form in the United States so that Joss gave you the ability to just tell you exactly what's happening now and is extremely relevant for the next 50 years yes history will continue to repeat itself and till we stop it indeed one way to stop it as a weird transition I don't know uh yeah I'll

37:25just lean into it one of the ways that we stop that hate one of the ways that we stop those terrible feelings is by getting more empathy for other people being exposed to other cultures other ideas through things like traveling and I saw in the book that you got to do some traveling to different observatories uh you saw Mirkat I'm so jealous uh that you saw Mirkat uh you saw the launch of R&S 6 like what was your favorite trip that you took for this book oh the well I think I think we will have to be uh Mirkat's and seeing I saw the first antenna of this square kilometer array so that was truly truly special and I wanted to do that and the plan that I had in a place fell through and while I was trying to start having a god and email say hey somebody cancelled their their tickets to do this over with a little flight there would you be interested and I couldn't

38:29reply fast enough yeah I would have had to travel back in time to reply even earlier than the email was sent literally I was at the limit of the speed of light how quickly I was typing that's amazing do you have any other trips that you would love to take to other observatories um can I say how well space telescope yes yes you can we the the pot diversity actually has a spaceship we can send you out on it I would love to do that so we can give it a little refurbish I would love the Hubble Space Telescope to be the first space telescope that's uh enter its fifth decade and uh yes we'd love to do that uh in uh all safety thanks to your spaceship but if I need to think of earthbound experiments I think I would pick the extremely larger telescope that is being built in Chile and I think that would be a great one to visit my favorite telescope I've ever visited was

39:36Alma I made a snow angel underneath one of the dishes and it was an incredible magical experience I hope you get to go to the out of common I can't imagine I love Alma it was great what was something interesting that was new to you that you learned for this book during your research oh I make a big song and dance uh that's uh pulsar which are type of neutron star the very dance and we discovered them and well they're in jostly bell bernel discovered them in 1967 by seeing them for the first time radio waves as pulsating radio object and so um next year is gonna be 50 years since we have discovered them and we don't know how they emit radio waves and I didn't know that um for them one of the uh researcher on uh what a pulsar astronomer Dr. Bradley mayors from Australia told me that we don't know and I was like what do you mean we don't know the pulsars we know about them only tanks radio waves they're too small to be seen in

40:42not a wavelengths we know them through radios and I like yeah we don't know I love that the thing you learned is that we have yet to learn a thing yeah well but I told you that's the thing that really you get me giddy but for me which I was like what what like I think we call it a secret shame of pulsar astronomy and I love that that it was just it was just so much fun to to discover that there was a lot of things that were new to me or there were things that were vaguely familiar or I heard those conference or on a paper and then speaking to all the cool researcher that is spoke to were just like oh this is amazing oh this is brilliant oh this I didn't consider this that's the best part of researching for a book is like yes you're doing this to teach other people but you get to learn so much yes yes and this is why I wanted to make a book that was so full of

41:43cool things and facts and new discoveries so that I would get the people just as uh getting happy as I am yes it worked mission accomplished you mentioned book two earlier you said you have a whole chapter on frb's what what else can you tell us about this second book I can tell you the title it's called the unexpected cosmos and it should be coming out in 2028 and it's about all the biggest discoveries of the last few decades said that where completely surprises I'm I'm sat I'm gonna be like one of the first in line to get that that's so exciting and you're turning them out just two years later well I've been writing it for well since last november and has been very busy at the moment with the book tour of book one but I have written about a quarter of it

42:43so should be done by next summer wow good luck um thank you you see sometimes a surprise some of my friends but I write a lot and I write fast oh I wish and then there's a lot of anything okay okay yeah yeah I write very slowly but tend to do fewer drafts so maybe that's the trade-off yeah I think for me it's just like I need to put digital pen to paper and then I can just read it over and to you improve it to make it better but I need to have something to start and so it's just like bashing awards afterwards and hoping against hope that most of them would make sense in English oh did I want to wrap up with a fun hopefully fun game so you say at the beginning of this book that invisible rainbows will act as a tasting menu for what the universe

43:44beyond visible light is like and your complimentary cocktail will be served in the chapter about radio waves but I want a complimentary cocktail for all of the regions of the spectrum Alfredo so I would love to play a matching game okay where you have to match some of the classic cocktails to the different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum I sent you the list the options and for the the listeners I'll say the options are apparel spritz bloody Mary dark and stormy martini and you can tell me how how you prefer your martini a mojito an old-fashioned and a whiskey sour as well there are seven of them I am including the visible part of the spectrum and we'll go down the list you tell me what region you think goes with the drink perfect yeah I like this challenge the the complimentary cocktail is a cocktail that I make up so the classic cocktails makes the challenge much easier instead of having to invent six more cocktails but yes

44:51shall we start the you can aim of a cocktail and I will assign it let's start with the apparel spritz which region do you think that is I think apparel spritz is a fun energetic cocktails that it's well it's very Italian and some I'm picturing it on a sunny day on a you're outside and so we'll have to be ultraviolet yes yes and it's it's like so pretty and that kind of like glowing orange does make me think a little bit of a of a high ultraviolet thing yes yes yeah I think it's very sunlight and that is the focus most of the focus on ultraviolet chapter so yes good choice all right what about a bloody Mary a bloody Mary so that is our typical hangover cocktail or the day after so I think it's something that gives you clarity and as a

45:52loss in it and it takes a little bit to guess right and I would assign it to microwaves simply because of the cosmic microwave background love things in it but to fully understand it takes some time yes and it's also not something you want at any occasion like you drink a bloody Mary at a brunch or or a day after a bender you're not drinking a bloody Mary on your night out on a Friday exactly exactly okay another good choice what about a darkened stormy hmm a dark and stormy I think I'm gonna connect the darkened stormy to x-rays I know that we probably don't think of x-rays as dark and stormy but I want to think of the what's happening around some massive black holes about the immense forces and energies there and I like the dark

47:02and stormy connection there I love that I was playing a little maybe a trickery I thought that maybe you would pick that for radio waves because of the rum and raspberry maybe taste yeah I was actually I had immediately picked a different one for radio wave so we can discuss that when we get to that cocktail that was very instinctive I was thinking like I kept thinking like oh maybe we did rock the storm but not like the first ones I saw that on the list like oh that is my radio wave cocktail okay I'm excited to get there yeah well next we'll move on to the martini and you can tell me how you how you prefer martinis so I have my martinis either jinnobotka with very little vermut I said as in general it should have the amount of vermut will be just pointing it to the direction of italy and just wave them about and I prefer lemon twists okay all right and

48:04which region of the spectrum is that oh I think a martini needs to be the gamma rays I was thinking that it's it's like it's not for everyone but the people that can appreciate it will appreciate it yeah yeah I agree I want so badly to be the type of person cool enough to enjoy a martini and I'm just not this is not in my cards it's okay and and that is okay yes what about a mojito that's radio waves yay and I do love a mojito okay this fits why why is that the radio wave is the rum connection that's people can read up in the in the book but there was something about I think it's the the radio wave chapter is also the longest chapter there is so much talk about any felt a little bit of modeling up of a lot of things and I feel that I did a good job

49:08connecting everything going from one to the other but there was a lot of things and it's all connected because a lot as you said we can do radio waves throughout the day we get a lot of data and the people that study the duet the search for extras of racial intelligence also publish results on FRBs or on pulsar etc so I think there's all this connection and but it's all all a bit messy and I felt that there was very much a mojito and also mojito is a great cocktail so yes thank you for picking the most delicious cocktail for in my opinion the best version of the spectrum yeah thank you you did that for me personally I feel it is for you personally what about an old fashioned I felt that the old fashioned was going to be for our last wavelength infrared oh we're doing we're doing visible too oh are we missing what's

50:08then there's a whiskey sour oh oh no no no I'm sticking with the the choice yes all fashion it's dirty it's something that it's very tangible it's something that you almost can feel which is what the infrared is infrared is truly at the edge of our senses an old fashioned is that it's something that is like it's there is physical it's got some heft to it and yes sorry I've forgotten about the whiskey sour but whiskey sour I think it's the perfect choice for visible light you have a little bit of everything and you have lemon juice and lemons are not something that we found in nature something that we interpret and created so life never gave us lemons we gave lemon to life and that is all a little bit arbitrary like visible light which is completely arbitrary

51:16and it's sharp and the part of the spectrum that's we see with our eyes if we can see is very very thin so we have to be sharp and something about the egg white like the frothiness and the fact that it's the only one with egg in it on the list does also seem to point to the visible part because it stands out among the rest yeah and visible lice is just a combination of colors that makes white so perfect yes perfect thank you so much that was really fun I actually don't really drink I have like a mojito a year and so this is actually how I'm going to think about the cocktails going forward for the rest of my life also and well when we do cocktail making a course at pod university we can do also mocktail making course yes absolutely we at the pot diversity are very inclusive of of almost all lifestyles like there's like you don't be a jerk you can't be a

52:22jerk at the pot diversity that's really the only one yeah exactly that's a be a good person and just leave a let leave mm-hmm well Alfredo I've had such an amazing time talking to you hearing about your book it's so great I'm actually going to be recommending this to anyone who is looking for like a general astronomy book for the next several years so thank you for that thank you very much is there anything else you want to tell us about the book or your work not it's from to mind thank you very much for having me on I can be found writing daily at iflescience.com and if you want to follow me on socials everywhere that is not so and as the on website at dr. carpignity mm-hmm and your links will be in the episode description so listeners you can just go click on it and follow Alfredo because you're going to want to thank you very much thank you and listeners I hope

53:26you see your rainbow today if you don't you are space. Pail BluPod is hosted by dr. moya mcteer and kani gibs. Moya created the show with the funny and talented korean caputo with help from the multitude productions team our theme music is by Evan johnston our cover art by shea mcmullin and our audio editing is handled by the superlative stay in touch with us and the universe by following at pale blue pod on instagram or check out our website palebupa.com i moya m go astro moe on all socials and i'm at constar24 on instagram if you want to support our show join our community at patreon.com slash pale blue pod or send this episode to your family and friends group chats we're a member of multitude an independent podcast collective and production studio if you like pale blue pod you will love the other shows that live on our website and multitude dot productions thanks for listening to pale blue pod

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