Michelle Thaller
speaker
1,835 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 28 May
Michelle Thaller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Literally in every direction on the sky, you eventually look back to a time when the whole universe was so dense and bright, you can't see any farther.
Well, not with light.
See, the universe actually does become opaque to light at that point.
It's basically the universe is so bright itself.
Yeah.
I mean, so, you know, you look in any direction on the sky, you look back to a time.
The wonderful thing about the universe changing is we know this is true.
The farther out we look with a telescope, the farther light has had to travel, the more time it takes to get to us.
So the sun, we see the light takes about eight minutes to get from us to the sun, the nearest star about four years, the nearest galaxy to us about two million years.
We can see so far away in space that the light took pretty much the age of the universe to get to us, about 400,000 years after the Big Bang.
At that point, the universe becomes opaque to light.
So there is a limit to how much we can observe with light, how much time there has been for light to actually get to us.
Absolutely.
So your question is a really profound one.
We don't know how big the universe is.
When we talk about the universe, we mainly talk about the observable universe, everything we're able to see.
So the question you just asked, can you see farther back, even if it's opaque to light?
Yes.
And this is something that, again, we talk about moments in your life where the universe changed.
where people did something you thought was impossible.
Showing 1021–1040 of 1,835 · page 52 of 92
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