Michelle Thaller

speaker

577 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 21 Jul

Michelle Thaller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson · Running Out of Matter with Michelle Thaller · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

Well, it sounds to me like somebody is just describing what's called the heat death of the universe.

And the answer is yes.

The answer is that the universe is slowing down in the sense that it's not so much that matter can't be destroyed.

It can.

It can be converted into energy, right?

Matter and energy are two sides of the same coin.

That famous equation, hopefully the only one you ever have to deal with in life, unless you want to be a scientist, is energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.

Good old Albert Einstein.

E equals mc squared.

It's your elementary school equation.

So you can destroy matter.

You can make it into energy.

And you can make energy into matter.

That's what we do in particle accelerators.

We get things going with such high energy.

When things collide, there's so much energy around, it actually creates new matter.

That's how you find new types of particles.

New particles.

So energy and matter are equivalent.

And so there is this, but absolutely what's happening is that in the early universe, there were things that were much higher temperature, much higher energy.

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