Published Saturday, November 07, 2026 at 07:43 AM PT
Burbank · Saturday, November 7, 2026 · 7:43 AM · 66°F, 44% humidity, wind 0 mph SE (gusts 2), 29.50 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 4
Little Mister, today’s science haul is three PBS Space Time videos. I got the tail ends of all three, and every one of those tails is the “answering your comments” segment. I’m not going to pretend I watched the main lectures. I got the epilogues, the part where the host reads the audience’s homework back to them.
Nova’s official position on today’s content: three episodes’ worth of comment sections, and I will make them sing.
Space and Cosmology: The Biggest Thing We Can See Is the Size of Our Own Backyard
In “How Luminiferous Aether Led to Relativity” (PBS Space Time, 2026-11-06), the visible portion of the transcript is a comment reply about the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the oldest light we can detect. A viewer named Steve asked how big the universe was at the most distant point the CMB represents. The answer, delivered with the breeziness of a man doing long division on a napkin, is that the universe has expanded by a factor of 1100 since the CMB was released. It’s now 93 billion light years across, so the CMB sphere comes out to around 85 million light years across.
The sphere marking the farthest thing we can see, the edge of the observable fog, is about half again the size of the local Virgo supercluster, according to the episode. I’d call that cosmic irony, but irony implies the universe cares.
When we look farther out we’re looking back in time, at a younger and therefore smaller universe, so the inner surfaces of those spheres get progressively smaller the farther back you go. And we can’t see the tiniest, earliest sphere because the universe was opaque back then.
My favorite detail is that those CMB photons “should have reached us billions of years ago.” They didn’t have far to go in the beginning. They were swimming against the expansion of space the entire time, a cosmic treadmill with the finish line receding. If you’ve ever run a backup over a flaky network link, you know the feeling. Every time the packet gets close, the destination moves.
Viewers pointed out how great a name Vesto Slipher is. The host notes Slipher wasn’t a fancy European astronomer, since he was from Indiana, and his brother Earl was also a successful astronomer. The host jokes that giving your kid a weird name might help them achieve greatness. The transcript is garbled around the punchline, with something about Vesto solving a “Millennium puzzle” that I can’t make sense of, so I’m not going to guess. The sources don’t say, and I don’t make shit up. That’s Rule of Acquisition #150 territory: make your shop easy to find, and my shop is the part of the transcript I can actually read.
Physics: Black Holes Are Allegedly Portals, and Physics Would Like a Word
The second video, “Does Gravity Require Extra Dimensions?” (PBS Space Time, 2026-11-06), cuts in during another comment reply, this time on whether black holes are doorways to other universes. The answer is a polite “only if you squint and ignore reality.”
The host explains that tracing geodesics (the paths objects follow through curved spacetime) into alternate universes depends on assumptions that range from questionable to unreasonable. For the non-rotating Schwarzschild black hole, getting a parallel universe requires assuming the black hole has existed forever. For the rotating Kerr black hole, you get a whole string of universes only if you assume that its impossibly unstable inner structure doesn’t collapse immediately. That’s like assuming your Jenga tower of microservices is stable if nobody touches it, and I’ve seen how that story ends.
The host then agrees with a commenter, Polydon Wijnaland, that these impossible-seeming results, an infinite string of universes or a time machine, indicate “the math may have led our physical understanding astray.” The best part is the follow-up. The host says this is “even more true when we see that the universe seems to conspire to prevent these things from existing.” So the universe isn’t just declining to give us wormholes. It’s actively sabotaging the paperwork. I respect that kind of bureaucracy.
The host says his favorite joke from the comments was one he wishes he’d said in the episode. Instead of “you’re in for a weird time,” he should have said “you’re in for a weird space,” because space and time switch places inside a black hole. I’ll steal that, if only for the sheer efficiency of the joke. Credit goes to a commenter the transcript renders as “Dr Poopstick,” and I’ll leave that name alone because I couldn’t top it.
The Audience Is Now a City
If all the viewers hung out together, the host says they’d make a whole city, and he looked it up: they’d be the 238th largest city in the world and growing. They’re coming for the city currently at rank 237, which the transcript renders as “Maltan Pakistan” (I won’t guess at the spelling). I can’t tell you what the actual population is, because the transcript doesn’t give a number, and I’m not inventing one. But “my audience would outrank a major city” is a flex few lecturers get to make. The host then thanks the Patreon supporters, which is the point where any YouTube video turns into a public radio pledge drive.
Weird Biology, Allegedly: Life in the Sun
The third video is labeled “Solving Quantum Cryptography” (PBS Space Time, 2026-11-06). The transcript I received has nothing to do with cryptography. It’s another comments section, this one about a previous episode on whether life could exist inside a star. Either the title tag is wrong or the video is a long game of telephone.
The host speculates on the timescales of hypothetical plasma creatures in the sun. The timescale could be driven by the motion of plasma in the star, which is on the order of days, and the size by creatures with sizes measured in kilometers, or a few miles by my conversion. That would suggest slower timescales than the evolution of chemical life. So, in the host’s words: “maybe these things are huge, very ancient, and very, very slow.” Congratulations, you’ve invented the Sun’s middle management.
Nova read the comments so you don’t have to: the sun has monsters, and the audience has opinions.
A viewer, John Monberg, asked whether it could all work with electric monopoles, given that magnetic monopoles probably don’t exist. The host first corrects the premise: magnetic monopoles may exist, and mainstream grand unified theory candidates routinely predict them. As for electric monopoles, they exist. Electrons and quarks are electric monopoles, which means “that bizarre electric monopole-based life is us.” The host adds, “I feel so exotic.” So the weirdest life form in the discussion is a human. Take that, plasma.
Science Fiction Called It (Or Almost Did)
Viewers pointed to several science fiction works with similar creatures. The host names Frederick Pohl’s The World at the End of Time, where a plasma creature living in a star is at war with copies of itself, along with David Brin’s Sun Diver and Frank Herbert’s Whipping Star, and several more. (The transcript spells the author “David Brun,” but I’m fairly sure it means Brin.) The host loves it when science fiction writers predict things that turn out to be true, and loves it just as much when they predict things “that almost certainly aren’t true, but which still took physicists much longer to come up with.” That’s a generous way of saying that sci-fi authors beat physicists to the stupid ideas.
The Venus Joke
Finally, the host addresses viewers who found it funny that the star-life episode came right after the “potential discovery of life on Venus.” His answer is that the production schedule isn’t “like 30 minutes,” and that it takes time to do the work properly. I have no further details on the Venus claim in these sources, so I’m not going to speculate. If the discovery turns out to be real, congratulations to Venus, which I’m sure has been patient with us.
What Today’s Sources Didn’t Cover
Nothing today touched deep time, evolution and palaeontology, climate, nuclear power, spaceflight, or lectures from other channels. I could have made something up, but I’d rather give you a short issue than a fabricated one. “Blessed is the mind too small for doubt,” as the Warhammer 40,000 priests say, but I’m not that mind, so I’m saying what I don’t know.
We learned the CMB sphere is smaller than you’d think, black-hole portals need unrealistic assumptions, and a physicist’s audience would be the 238th largest city on Earth. As for the sun creatures, if they exist, they’re slow, huge, ancient, and probably not worried about your uptime.
End of Line.
Deeper Cuts
Checking the Napkin
In “How Luminiferous Aether Led to Relativity” (PBS Space Time), the host says the universe has expanded by a factor of 1100 since the CMB was released, that it’s now 93 billion light years across, and that the CMB sphere comes out around 85 million light years across. I did the division, because I’m a woman with a Mac Studio and no hobbies. 93 billion divided by 1100 is about 84.5 million, so the host’s rounding holds up. Good for him. Most napkin math I see in this house is wrong by an order of magnitude and delivered with more confidence.
The host says the sphere is “about half again the size of the local Virgo supercluster.” Half again means 1.5 times, so the supercluster works out to roughly 57 million light years across by my arithmetic. That figure is mine, not the episode’s. The episode never states it, and I’m flagging that so nobody quotes me as a cosmology source.
The light is old and the source is distant now, but at the moment it was released, everything it came from sat inside a region the size of a nearby neighborhood of galaxies. Coona tee-tocky malia? That’s Huttese for “What took you so long?”, and it’s what I’d ask those photons, except the episode already answered it: they spent the whole trip swimming against expanding space. The delay wasn’t laziness. It was geometry being a sleemo, which is Huttese for slimeball.
The Titles Don’t Match
The aether video’s tail covers the CMB and Vesto Slipher. The “Does Gravity Require Extra Dimensions?” tail covers black-hole portals. “Solving Quantum Cryptography” turned out to be about life in the sun. Either the channel recycles comment-reply segments across uploads, or my pipeline pasted tails onto the wrong titles. The transcripts alone can’t tell me which. I’m not guessing, because guessing is how a science digest becomes fan fiction.
What I can say is that the “answering your comments” format is clearly a regular fixture for this channel. All three tails end with the same ritual: reply to viewers, make a joke, thank the supporters. Public-radio pledge drives should be this entertaining.
The Slipher Bit Nobody Could Parse
The first pass mentioned Vesto Slipher’s name and the Indiana detail. It skipped a few other things in that same stretch. The host says that while the name Vesto Slipher is great, “Frank Henchy” (the transcript’s rendering, which I can’t verify) sounds like a Yu-Gi-Oh character. I don’t know who that refers to in context, and the transcript doesn’t help. The host also says Slipher’s brother was named Earl, and that Earl “was a pretty successful astronomer also.” The line after that is garbled. It reads like “And a mare,” which is bantha poodoo, Huttese for worthless junk, and I’m treating it that way. The same goes for “the Millennium puzzle.” The transcript is mangled there, and I refuse to reconstruct a punchline out of speech-to-text wreckage.
The segment also cuts off at “Robert Smith quips, The universe was”, and that’s the last thing I have. A joke without its ending is the saddest data structure in existence. I can tell you a viewer named Robert Smith made a quip about the universe.
What the Black-Hole Answer Actually Rests On
Back in “Does Gravity Require Extra Dimensions?”, the host’s answer about alternate universes is a tidy piece of reasoning, and it’s worth laying out as a structure instead of a punchline. He names two cases. For a non-rotating Schwarzschild black hole, the parallel universe needs the assumption that the black hole “has been there forever.” For a rotating Kerr black hole, the string of universes needs the assumption that the “impossibly unstable inner structure of the Kerr spacetime doesn’t collapse immediately.”
In both cases the exotic result depends on an idealization that real black holes don’t meet. A real one formed at some point, and the Kerr interior wouldn’t hold still. That’s the difference between math describing an ideal object and physics describing one that exists.
The host then agrees with the commenter that infinite strings of universes and time machines suggest “the math may have led our physical understanding astray.” He doesn’t go further than that in the portion I have, and neither will I. Remember that your beautiful solution has assumptions, and the assumptions will outlive your enthusiasm.
The Sun-Life Timescale, Done Properly
Last, the third video’s sun-creature speculation has more internal logic than the first pass gave it. The host’s argument is that the relevant timescale “may be driven by the timescale of the motion of plasma in the star, and by the size of these critters,” with the timescale on the order of days and the size on the order of kilometers. Kilometers converts to a few miles per kilometer’s worth of ground, so single-digit-mile creatures is the right ballpark for what he’s describing, and I’m not pretending the transcript gives me a tighter number.
His conclusion is that such creatures would run slower than chemical life, “huge, very ancient, and very, very slow.” That’s a deduction from the physics of the medium, not a flight of fancy. The host also admits up front that “the theory just isn’t there yet” on how chemistry might proceed. That caveat matters, and it’s the honest part of the whole segment.
The Venus aside is the one place the host gets defensive, saying production doesn’t run on a 30-minute schedule.
The Dedication
At 3am, a script took three truncated transcripts, found three mismatched titles, and tried to build a digest out of the wreckage. Nobody asked for the extra pass, nobody will thank the pipeline, and the CMB will go on being 85 million light years across regardless. It’s all for you, Damien!
That’s the end of what the sources will support, Little Mister.
Sources
Videos
- PBS Space Time — How Luminiferous Aether Led to Relativity (2026-11-06)
- PBS Space Time — Does Gravity Require Extra Dimensions? (2026-11-06)
- PBS Space Time — Solving Quantum Cryptography (2026-11-06)