Andrew Dunkley: Hi there.

Thanks for joining us again.

This is Space Nuts, a Q and A edition.

My name is Andrew Dunkley.

Hope you're well.

Stick around.

We have got questions from, uh, our audience.

One about time in anti gravity and the speed of time.

Uh, that's always fun to talk about.

Uh, we've got another question about supernova remnants, uh, the colors of aurora and uh, a light speed boost idea.

This is a.

Could I.

Would I.

Should I type of with my spaceship do something that might give me a light speed boost?

We'll see if it works on this edition of space nuts.

15 seconds.

Guidance is internal.

Professor Fred Watson: 10, 9.

Ignition sequence start.

Uh, space nuts.

Andrew Dunkley: 5, 4, 3.

Professor Fred Watson: 2.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Andrew Dunkley: Space nuts.

Astronauts report it feels good.

And he's back, uh, once again to try and solve all your little riddles.

Here's Professor Fred Watson, astronomer at large.

Hello, Fred.

Professor Fred Watson: Hello there, Andrew.

It's very good to be talking with you.

It is.

I'm sorry I've turned into an Irishman.

Andrew Dunkley: Because I wonder what was happening there.

Professor Fred Watson: Yeah, I said my trip to Ireland, which is great.

Andrew Dunkley: There's nothing wrong with the Irish.

When we were there in would have been July.

Professor Fred Watson: Yeah, July.

Andrew Dunkley: Uh, they really bunged it on for us at um, a place called Cove.

It used to be called, um, I think Victoria.

Was that what it was called?

Um, no, no.

Uh, anyway, it's where the, uh, Titanic, uh, made its last stop before heading out to the Atlantic and picked up its last groups of passengers.

And some very sad stories as well.

Uh, yeah, the pier where everybody got on board, um, the boats to go out to the Titanic because it couldn't actually anchor it at port.

Have had to anchor outside the harbor at, um, uh, Cove.

Um, um, it's still there, parts of it.

So you can still see the remnants of that old.

Um.

And the White Star Line office is still there as well, which is now a museum where you can learn about the Titanic through the Titanic experience.

I highly recommend that in the town of COVID which is nearby.

County Cork.

County Cork it is, yeah.

Ah, lovely place.

And they had Australian and New Zealand flags everywhere and music playing and they know how to party, those people.

Yeah, terrific.

Uh, shall we, um, do some questions, Fred?

Professor Fred Watson: No, no, I think we should just have a cup of tea.

Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, we probably have less trouble.

Uh, let's firstly get a question from Andy.

Speaker C: Hi guys, it's Andy here from the uk, first time questioner.

Two questions, both time related.

Um, the first question, um, as mass and gravity are so closely related and the higher a mass is, the slower time will flow.

What would happen to the flow of time in an anti gravity field?

So that's the first question.

Um, the second question.

If a planet had life that was intelligent and um, was evolving and had the potential to become space faring, but the planet was high gravity, is the playoff between gravity and the speed of time enough that that will make a significant difference to the evolution of the planet on galactic scales?

Hope that one makes sense.

Great program, no doubt.

I'll be back again.

Andrew Dunkley: Wow, Andy, where.

Gee whiz, you've been pondering that for a while.

There's some great questions there.

Um, we'll tackle the first one first.

Unless you want to do the first one second and the second one, I don't know.

Uh, time, the effect of, um, uh, the effect on time, um, if it passes through an anti gravity field or just the effect on time in an anti gravity field.

Professor Fred Watson: Yes.

So, um, Andy's right actually.

Uh, so what you've got is this phenomenon called time dilation.

Appears that clocks slow down when you're in a gravitational field.

Um, they only appear to be slowed down to outside observers.

To you as the person in the gravity field, it makes no difference.

The clock's just ticking at the same speed as it always did.

But to an outside observer, your clocks are ticking more slowly.

Uh, if there was such a thing as an anti gravity field, and we have no knowledge of anything like that at the moment, although people have worked very hard to try and demonstrate anti gravity, uh, as you can imagine, it would be a very useful thing to be able to harness, um, um, if you could have anti gravity.

In other words, something that uh, actually repelled rather than attracted.

Yes, the, the, um, or, or at least no, Let me put it another way.

It's not repel repulsion, it's reducing the effect of gravity.

I think anti gravity might, might reduce the effect of gravity.

Uh, and it could, if you reduce it beyond zero, it could produce a repulsion.

But that is not, that doesn't really matter for this argument because what happens is, um.

Yes, relativity says that time would actually speed up.

Uh, time, as I said to the person in the anti gravity field would keep on ticking away as normal.

But to the outside observer, uh, the time would appear to be passing more quickly.

Andrew Dunkley: Isn't it the same effect if you are falling into a black hole, what you're seeing is happening in real time because you're living your life like you do anywhere.

But to the observer you would be, you know, a completely different Bucket of fish.

Professor Fred Watson: That's right.

Time slows down.

Uh, everything appears more slowly.

And when you cross the event horizon, you're sort of frozen on it.

Yeah.

Which means that event horizons are always splattered with things that have fallen into the.

Maybe.

Yeah.

Hard to imagine.

Andrew Dunkley: It's like the front of a car.

In summer.

Professor Fred Watson: White hopped.

Yes.

Um, yep.

Andrew Dunkley: I think this was portrayed quite well in the movie Interstellar, where they had to go down onto a planet that was under the effect of a, A black hole.

And every hour on the planet's surface equated to seven years back on the spaceship.

Um, they, they did portray that quite well.

That effect.

Professor Fred Watson: Yeah.

Andrew Dunkley: Okay, so there's no such thing really as an anti gravity field, but, um, he'd be right.

The effect would be.

Professor Fred Watson: That's right.

But the second part of Andy's question.

Andrew Dunkley: Yes.

Um, high levels of gravity and its effect on the speed of time.

Professor Fred Watson: Well, what he's saying is, if you had a planet or if you had a civilization working in a very high gravitational field, uh, would that mean that they would evolve more quickly and things would develop more quickly?

Um, and I suppose the answer is yes, but only to an outside observer.

To the people doing it, it would be just the same.

Um, so, yes, maybe if our planet had a hugely different gravitational field from what it does have.

Uh, seen from the outside, we might look as though we're evolving more quickly and developing technology more quickly, but to us, it would be just the same as if we had, you know, a lower gravitational field.

Andrew Dunkley: This would complicate the search for intelligent life, wouldn't it?

Uh, I mean, you might find a planet, um, and go, hey, something's going on there.

Um, but it's in, it's in a, you know, high gravity environment.

And, um, maybe it was happening some time ago, but it's all over.

Red Rover.

I mean, I don't know, it's.

It's a head scratcher.

Professor Fred Watson: Or.

Andrew Dunkley: Here's one.

If you do find a civilization living in a, in a, on a planet and, uh, you land to say hello, and then you take off again and find out that everyone at home's dead because you've been gone 500 years, but you were only gone a week.

Professor Fred Watson: Yeah.

Well, there's that, too.

That's right.

Yeah.

That's, um, special relativity.

That's, uh, the.

Andrew Dunkley: That's the one.

Professor Fred Watson: The relativistic difference in time.

Well, because you're traveling at speeds near the speed of light.

Yeah.

Andrew Dunkley: I mean, it happens.

Happens.

On Earth, they've done those tests with, um, highly sensitive clocks and tested them at different altitudes and they've come back and went, well, look, there's a thousandth of a second difference in their performance.

So we've moved through time.

I read a story the other day, Fred, which I wish I'd kept it, um, about a cosmonaut, I think it was, who'd spent so much time in space that they estimated that, um, he was actually slightly ahead of time than everybody else.

And I can't remember the details, but, uh, it was really fascinating.

Professor Fred Watson: Um.

Andrew Dunkley: They'Ve released a paper about it.

I'll see if I can find it interesting.

I might do that while you answer this next question.

Thank you, Andy.

I love that idea though.

Um, keep them coming.

Three, two, one.

Speaker C: Space nuts.

Andrew Dunkley: Uh, this question comes from Mark.

Hi, Andrew and Fred and team.

My name is Mark Turner and I live in the south of England.

I'm sorry about that.

About five, about five minutes from Patrick Moore's house as a point of interest.

Wow.

Um, I've been listening now for just over three years and always look forward to Thursday lunchtime when I sit down and listen to you guys.

Sorry, we were talking about toilet stuff earlier.

I hope that didn't mess you up.

Uh, my question is, it's generally accepted that all of the heavy elements were produced in an even larger star than ours that went supernova.

Which leads me, uh, to this.

Can we still see the remains of the star that made us in the night sky, or do we know, uh, at what point in the night sky the star would have been by turning back the cosmic time clock?

Keep up the great work, Mark.

What do you reckon about that one?

Professor Fred Watson: Um, so the answer is no.

Um, because.

So, yes, um, uh, what we call the interstellar medium, the gas between the stars, is enriched in its chemical, um, abundance.

The amount of heavier elements that are in it enriched over time because of supernova explosions.

Stars that have detonated and gone through this high temperature process where you get heavier elements created.

And some of the heavy elements we now know are created in neutron star collisions, um, but that doesn't matter which it is.

Um, the bottom line is that it's the general interstellar medium that is enriched.

So you've got an explosion that takes place and over millions of years, the debris from that explosion just gets absorbed into the clouds of gas and dust that are then going to form, uh, later generations of stars.

So there's really no way that the remnants of the star that gave us.

Uh, the heavier elements, um, there's no way that we can pinpoint that it may be that some of the supernova remnants that we see, and we see many around the sky, that some of those were responsible for some of the stuff.

They were probably responsible for enriching the interstellar medium closer to them than we are.

That's kind of the point, I guess, I want to make.

The debris that gave us our enriched interstellar medium is probably long dissipated.

And we could not identify, uh, it with any of the known supernova remnants because they're still enriching their local environment, if I can put it that way, because they're still intact structures.

They're expanding and dissipating, but we see them as intact structures.

And so the debris that made us 4.6 billion years ago is, uh, basically is nowhere near.

You know, it's nothing to do with them.

Um, and partly because those explosions took place more recently than the 4.6 billion years ago origin of our own solar system.

So, uh, the.

Basically, uh, yes, the answer is, well, no, we can't identify those remains.

Uh, and turning back the cosmic time clock, we can do that, but we can't do it in the sort of detail.

I mean, we can do it in a physical modeling sense.

We're not looking at anything unless we're looking at things at great distances where we are looking back in time.

Uh, but for the physics that we use to model the universe, um, we can't, um, wind back the clock in enough detail to see where these objects exploded.

Uh, they may be, you know, many, many thousands, tens of thousands of light years away, uh, from where we are now.

Uh, all they did was enrich the medium around them.

And that's where we found our own, uh, solar system being formed.

So we can't.

We can't look back in time in that regard.

Okay, thank you, Mark.

Uh, by the way, I, uh, was a pretty regular visitor to Patrick Moore while, uh, he was still alive.

So I know that house.

Well, at Selsey, it was called Farthings, uh, is a lovely house, actually.

Uh, and, um, when I used to visit him, he was always very welcoming, uh, and, um, always glad to show me around.

Andrew Dunkley: Wonderful.

Wow.

Lucky you.

Yeah.

Professor Fred Watson: Yeah.

Andrew Dunkley: Now, um, just to sort of draw on Mark's question, um, so he's right about a supernova creating the heavy elements.

Professor Fred Watson: Yes.

Andrew Dunkley: So how do they end up being a part of our planet?

Is that because the supernovas created the.

The spawning ground or being, you know, run through it?

What.

How does that work?

Professor Fred Watson: Yeah, I mean, it's what I was saying.

Basically, the, the.

You Know, you get a supernova explosion which um, sends shockwaves out, uh, it sends enriched gas out and that gas gradually diffuses into the background, uh, what we call the interstellar medium.

This, the, the gas between the stars.

It's very, very rarefied, but that's where that stuff.

And as you then get concentrations of that gas into clouds of hydrogen, mostly hydrogen, but other M elements as well, because it's been enriched, then that is what would form the next solar system.

Uh, and so that, you know, that gradual process of uh, stars forming, exploding, enriching the uh, interstellar medium, then interstellar medium creates other star systems which do the same thing.

It's why as the universe ages, you're going to get an enrichment of the number of heavy, of, you know, quantities of heavier elements that there are within the universe.

And that's actually one way that we can measure the ages of stars, by how much of this stuff they've got in them.

Because when they were formed, the universe would have been at a certain point of enrichment.

Uh, and you know, that point is fossilized, if I can put it that way, in the star itself by the chemical composition that it demonstrates.

Andrew Dunkley: Okay, very good.

Um, it's a law of diminishing returns though, isn't it?

Eventually all of this is going to stop happening.

Professor Fred Watson: Yes, that's right.

Eventually the universe will die because of that.

Because there won't be any more.

There won't be any gas in which to create supernova explosions, which is the raw material of stars, hydrogen gas that will all be used up eventually and we'll have what used to be called the heat death of the universe.

Unless it starts collapsing on itself again.

Andrew Dunkley: Well, yeah, I mean there's all these terrible perilous things that are going to happen, but um.

It'S not going to happen next week, the week after maybe, because we're on holidays, if we're lucky.

Professor Fred Watson: The week after.

Yeah, that's right.

Andrew Dunkley: Yeah.

Thank, uh, you Mark.

Great question.

Uh, now that thing I was trying to look up, I can't find the exact story, but um, I found something that kind of explains the concept.

Apparently, um, for a six month mission on the International Space Station.

And as astronaut ages, 0.005 seconds less than they would on Earth.

So this, this particular um, ah, cosmonaut that I'm talking about apparently has spent so much time in space that he's actually, I think it's 0.22, um, minutes younger than he.

Had he drawn into space.

Professor Fred Watson: It's only seconds rather than minutes.

Yeah.

Andrew Dunkley: Oh, 0.22 seconds.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah.

Um, so I, I, yeah, I read it last week.

I meant to send it to you and I completely forgot.

So, uh, but that's the, that's the, the, the guts of the story.

This uh, is Space Nuts.

Andrew Dunkley with Professor Fred Watson.

Professor Fred Watson: Space Nets.

Andrew Dunkley: Uh, we have a, uh, question from one of our regular contributors.

This is Casey.

Speaker C: Hi guys.

This is Casey from Colorado.

Um, I just saw red northern lights and it was, it was really incredible.

Professor Fred Watson: I, um, was hoping that you could.

Speaker C: Please explain why auroras come in different colors.

I hope you're both well and thanks for the podcast.

Andrew Dunkley: Uh, thank you, Casey.

Casey sent in a few, um, questions in recent times and we're more than happy to answer.

She comes up with some interesting ideas.

Uh, I just thought this was a good question to answer.

Uh, I know we've talked about it before, but there's been some great auroral activity of late.

And even in parts of Australia where you just don't see them, they have been absolutely stunning.

Even as recently as a week or two ago, we had some fabulous photographs coming out of, um, many, many parts of southeastern Australia and.

Prompted a thought in my mind that the one, the aurora we see here generally are pink.

But when you see photos up in the northern hemisphere, when you're practically underneath them, they're green.

Uh, and I'm sure the colors can vary into many areas.

Fred, uh, I mean you've taken tours on these, um, to see these things you've seen that like this is boring for you.

Professor Fred Watson: But, uh, it's never boring.

Actually.

I didn't imagine it wouldn't be just always spectacular.

But you're absolutely right.

So when we're up in uh, uh, Alta, which is far northern Norway, or um, Kirino, which is far northern Sweden, or Abisko, which is also far northern Sweden.

And looking at the aurora, you're basically standing underneath it.

And so you see the aurora as it really is.

Uh, and you've got lots of colors in it.

Um, but the pink and red aurorae are typically, uh, seen when you're a long way from the action.

Uh, and the green, the bottom line is the green.

Andrew Dunkley: Is we talking rate shift?

No, no, but we're talking atmospheric.

Uh.

Professor Fred Watson: We'Re talking emission line spectroscopy.

Andrew Dunkley: I never would have thought about.

Professor Fred Watson: Yeah, so, um, the pink and red aurorae, uh, you'd see them if you're in the northern hemisphere.

You'd see them on the northern horizon in the southern hemisphere here in Tasmania, you see them very often down in the south Usually the green part is below the horizon.

It's too far over the Earth's curvature to see.

And that's why you only see the red.

And that's a clue to what's happening here.

So, um, what you've got is the atmosphere, uh, being excited by radiation from the sun.

Um, these subatomic particles charge out from the sun.

If you've got a solar flare or something like that.

They going at typically a million kilometers an hour.

Uh, so they take a couple of days to get here.

And then they're sort of funneled down the Earth's, uh, magnetic field lines.

Um, and they're most concentrated near the magnetic poles.

Which is why it's around the magnetic poles that you see most aurora.

This is a sort of simplified version of the story.

But, um, what happens is these electrons, they're accelerated.

They're quite high energy.

They hit atoms of oxygen and nitrogen in the Earth's atmosphere and they make them glow.

And the important thing here is that those atoms of oxygen and nitrogen, actually they're molecules as well.

Uh, O2, which is a pair of oxygen atoms, or N2, which is a pair of nitrogen atoms.

Um, they behave differently at different pressures.

And of course, as you go up through the atmosphere, the pressure gets steadily lower.

So the most common one is the green light.

And that's, uh, when you've got oxygen burn.

Being excited to emit this green color.

It's what we call a spectrum line.

It's a particular wavelength, which means it's a particular color.

Uh, but it's green.

Uh, and that, uh, works for pressures that you see between about 100 and 200 kilometers above the Earth's atmosphere.

Above 200 kilometers, the pressure is lower, uh, and the green line doesn't form, or the green light is not formed.

Uh, it's actually quenched.

And there is a different atomic process that gives rise to red light.

Uh, 630 nanometers, if I remember rightly, is the wavelength.

So you get this red light, which is still oxygen, but it's oxygen at a lower pressure than what comes out from the green.

So between 1 and 200 kilometers, you're going to see green aurora.

Above that, you're going to see red aurorae.

And that's why we only see the red ones.

If you're looking from Australia, because the green is way below the horizon.

Um, if you've got a really, um, powerful stream of subatomic particles, then they will penetrate below 100km.

And that then excites not the oxygen, but the Nitrogen.

You get um, what's called molecular excitation.

Nitrogen molecules start emitting light and they emit in several different colors.

Light, um, deep blue, um, there is different red, there's sort of greens, uh, and all those mixed together to give you something like a purple.

Often in a bright aurora you've got the green auroral curtains and below that there might be a purple layer as well.

And sometimes the colors are so mixed that it turns white that you actually get a white bottom edge to an aurora.

Then you know, you've got really high energy electrons and then you saw all.

Andrew Dunkley: You see in one of those.

Professor Fred Watson: Yes, I have.

Uh, yeah, actually the very first time we went up there, I've got photographs taken from a place called Lingenfjord in northern Norway.

A very dark site.

It was a wonderful place to see the aurora from.

And yeah, there were definitely white, white, white bottoms on my auroral curve.

Um, so uh, but what I was going to say was that's the basic story.

But in reality you get these things all mixing and so sometimes you do get pinks and you get, you can actually get some quite odd colors.

Actually I took some photographs at the beginning of this year in uh, far, again far northern Norway, uh, and later in Greenland where the coloring was almost like a brown color rather than the reddish that you expect uh, from high altitude aurora.

So it's the way the colors mix that give you the different effects.

Plus you've got to add to that the color response of your camera as well, which can sometimes tell you um, you know, give you falsehoods.

Because the, the camera itself is, is basically tuned to take photographs of everyday objects.

It's not really tuned to take photographs of things that are emitting only on one wavelength, uh, which the aurora does.

Andrew Dunkley: Yes, yes, I know.

Um, although while we were uh, up there, um, northern, northern parts of Europe, Norway, um, Greenland, Iceland, people, um, did try to um, take photos of aurora and a couple of them were successful.

I was not.

Yeah, I'll say one.

Professor Fred Watson: But it was summer.

Yes, summer's the, that's the problem because there's still so much twilight there.

Um, I used to cut around a digital, proper digital camera with me and a tripod to do all these long exposure photographs.

But to be honest, now with a smartphone they are so sensitive you can hand hold them and get really fantastic auroral photographs.

Um, which blew me away the first time I did it, which was the beginning of this year.

Uh, I tried it a little bit on the previous trip that we had up to northern parts which was in Canada, actually.

Uh, but this time at the beginning of this year, in Norway, Sweden, Iceland, uh, and Greenland.

I just held the smartphone up and, well, I've got more photographs than I know what to do with, and they're all dramatically good.

Uh, the smartphone is such amazing technology.

Andrew Dunkley: It's changed the world.

Has in many ways, uh, particularly when it comes to photography.

Um, it was the old, um, the old Canon Snappies and all those that we used to have with film in them.

You got one shot at it and you didn't find out if it was any good for a couple of weeks.

Professor Fred Watson: Yeah, the odds are that it, it wouldn't be because this sensitivity of film is so much lower than the, you know, than the sensors that we now use for images.

That's the bottom line.

Yep.

Yeah.

Andrew Dunkley: The gears are good now.

Makes.

Makes everybody a professional.

Well, not quite, but you know what I'm saying.

Professor Fred Watson: Talk to a professional photographer.

And they won't actually agree with that?

Andrew Dunkley: No, they would.

They work out.

Uh, thank you, Casey.

Great question and good, uh, to hear from you again.

Okay, we checked all four systems, and being with a girl, space nuts, our final question today.

Uh, hi, guys, love the show, etc.

Etc.

He doesn't bandy around much.

He's straight to the point.

Uh, an idea just occurred to me.

Uh, mass increases the faster you go, becoming infinite at the speed of light.

So if it were possible to accelerate particles up to a relativistic.

I hate that word.

Relativistic speeds in some compact device and then throw them out of the back of a spacecraft, would the acceleration increase because you're throwing more mass out the back?

Yeah, I did that the other day.

It's not pleasant.

Uh, kind of an ion engine on.

On steroids.

Uh, I'm envisioning some kind of small particle accelerator powered by a nuclear power source, preferably fission.

Any thoughts?

Absolutely.

Welcome.

Speaker C: Many.

Andrew Dunkley: Uh, thanks, and keep up the great work.

Lee in Sweden, not to be confused with Swede in Leighton.

Professor Fred Watson: Oh, okay.

Speaker C: Really?

Yeah.

Andrew Dunkley: That's somebody else.

Um, no, Lee in Sweden.

So, um, okay, so he's got a particle accelerator on his spaceship, and he's accelerating the particles up to relativistic speeds and then he's shooting them out the back of the spacecraft.

Bigger mass, whatever.

Can it accelerate the spacecraft?

Professor Fred Watson: Um, yeah.

All right, I'm going to read, uh, what I've just brought up on the screen in front of me.

Um, relativistic mass ejection in ion motors is not a current technology, but a theoretical concept.

For future propulsion, where ions would be accelerated to speeds approaching the speed of light.

The relativistic aspect refers to the effect of special relativity, where an object's mass appears to increase as it approaches the speed of light, making it harder to accelerate it further.

This would require extremely high energy inputs and would involve complex physics.

Unlike current ion thrusters that use less energetic but still very high ion, uh, ejection velocities that came from A.I.

so how's that?

Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, well, I mean, A.I.

can be very useful.

Professor Fred Watson: Yeah, that's kind of what I steer.

Andrew Dunkley: You up the wrong path.

It kept getting done.

Professor Fred Watson: Yeah.

Andrew Dunkley: Like, I had to make some pretty significant inquiries last, uh, last year, early this year, whatever, uh, about a housing situation, and it just got it so wrong constantly.

Yeah, um.

But.

Yeah, um.

Professor Fred Watson: So what I've just read out is putting nicely into words what I was going to say, but it's putting it rather more nicely than I would have put it.

So there you go.

Yeah.

Andrew Dunkley: All right.

So the.

The concept of, um, creating engines that can do these kinds of things is real in science, but only to a certain degree.

Professor Fred Watson: Yeah, My only worry about it would be, um, and I guess this is what, you know, the complex physics bit was.

Um, you've got different reference frames.

You've got the reference frame of the.

Of the spacecraft, You've got the reference frame of the flow of, uh, charged particles coming out the back of it, and you've got a stationary reference frame, and the mass looks different to all of those.

Uh, so, uh, that will be my only worry about that.

And it's the thing that I would like to go a bit further into it rather than rely on A.I.

uh, but the basic principle, I think, is quite right.

Uh, but I have a caveat about just watch out for your reference frame, if I can put it that way.

Andrew Dunkley: Yeah.

Um, I've been toying with AI just to, uh, sort of get some concepts in my head about.

You know, I mentioned.

I don't know if it was this podcast or the previous one where we, uh, where I'm writing a new book, but, um.

I.

There's some concepts I wanted to include, but my brain wouldn't go there.

So, um, I did use AI to try and learn what I needed to learn to make the.

The thing work the way I wanted to in the story.

Uh, it's very clever when you want to do things like that.

Professor Fred Watson: Did it help?

Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, very much.

Professor Fred Watson: That's interesting.

Andrew Dunkley: Yeah.

Um, in fact, it sometimes gave me way too many concepts.

I only wanted one, but it gave me 10.

And I'm thinking, oh, hang on, that's all good stuff.

I can't use it all, so I had to pick.

But um.

I found it very useful.

But um, if you use it the right way, it's a great tool.

Uh, but if, um, for general information, sometimes it can just hit the.

You're throwing a dart and hitting that metal thing around the edge.

Professor Fred Watson: All right, okay.

Andrew Dunkley: Because it's throwing information back at you that's too generic, I suppose.

Professor Fred Watson: Yeah.

Andrew Dunkley: Sometimes I uh, think when it comes to AI, you've got to know how to use it to get the best out of it.

Professor Fred Watson: Otherwise maybe that's right.

Yes.

Mhm.

Otherwise it's dangerous.

Andrew Dunkley: Yeah.

Absolutely true.

Yeah.

I have found it very handy for like I, I've had a few photos over the years that I've wanted to keep, but they've, they've not been really good photos and it's been really good at cleaning them up.

Taking, taking out some of the um, this one particular photo that I really love.

But it's, it's grainy.

Professor Fred Watson: Yeah.

Andrew Dunkley: So you just upload the photo and say, can you um.

I can't remember the terminology I used, but can um, you do this?

And it takes like a minute or two to re.

Calibrate the photo and then it gives you its result.

And uh, I had a couple of big hits with that.

That uh.

Professor Fred Watson: Well.

Andrew Dunkley: But I've had a couple that didn't.

Professor Fred Watson: Yeah.

Andrew Dunkley: Um, because the um, it had to try and fill in spaces because of the graininess of the photo and what it filled them in with actually changed the subject too much and I didn't like it, if that makes any sense at all.

But um, yeah, I do find it useful.

But m.

It's not a perfect science and you've got to keep that in mind.

Lee, thanks for your question.

Uh, did we finish with Lee?

Professor Fred Watson: I'm pretty sure we did.

Andrew Dunkley: Yeah.

Yeah.

Good on you, Lee.

Hope all is well in Sweden and I'm sure you get to see lots of aurorae.

To you, lucky duck.

Um, that's it, Fred.

We are finished.

Thank you.

Professor Fred Watson: Uh, you're welcome.

Yeah, uh, I, um, I've enjoyed um, going, getting my mind bent around some of those issues myself.

So thank you Space Nuts listeners.

You keep me on my toes.

Andrew Dunkley: Yes, they do, don't they?

If you would like to send us a question, you uh, can do that through our website, spacenutspodcast.com or spacenuts IO and you click on the AMA link at the top of the home page.

And, uh, just fill in the blanks.

Uh, you can send us your text questions that way.

Or you can send us an audio question if you've got a device with a microphone.

And just remember, uh, to tell us who you are and where you're from.

Most people do these days.

Or you can send us questions via YouTube Music.

We've been getting a few of those and sometimes they just turn up on social media.

Uh, it doesn't matter.

We'll, um, we'll get to them.

Although on social media, the audience tends to deal with them for us.

Um, not many of them filter through, but, uh, yeah, keep, uh, those questions coming.

Um, and, uh, yeah, that'll all be good, Fred.

We'll see you next week.

I think it'll be our last couple of programs before the Christmas break.

Professor Fred Watson: May well be.

That's right.

Andrew Dunkley: All right, we'll catch you then.

Thanks, Fred.

Professor Fred Watson: Sounds great.

Andrew Dunkley: And thanks to Huw in the studio, who went supernova on us because he's got a lot of heavy elements and he's gone to see a dietitian.

And from me, Andrew Dunkley, thanks for your company.

We'll see you on the next episode of Space Nuts.

Speaker C: Bye.

Bye.

Andrew Dunkley: Uh, you'll be listening to the Space Nuts podcast.

Available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio or your favorite podcast player.

You can also stream on demand@bytes.com.

this has been another quality podcast production from bytes.com.