Are We Completely Wrong About the Universe? with Trace Dominguez

10.19.2026 Trace Dominguez Episode V2 AUDIO: Hello friends, are you all ready to go on a science adventure? I really love science and I can't get enough of it. Today we'll seek all the answers. This is the conversation with Carl, and I'm Carl Liebowitz. But before we get started, I want to remind you that we're building something really special here, and we want you to be part of that conversation. So remember to look down and hit the subscribe button so you never miss a moment of the conversations shaping our culture today. If Curiosity were a single human being, it would look, sound, and think like today's tests. He's an award-winning science communicator, video producer, host, and professional explorer of the unknown. You're seeing him untangling the universe's biggest mysteries for millions of viewers across Discovery, D News, Seeker, and his hit show trace elements. He spent over a decade making mind-bending science, history, and human curiosity insanely fun. Visually stunning and completely addictive. Strap in, activate your brain, and get ready to have your mind expanded. Welcome to the conversation, the one and the only, Trace Dominguez. Hello, Carl. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for doing this today. So let's get started. What's a science fact you used to believe that was true that turned out to be completely wrong? I mean, there are there are so many because we all have these assumptions when especially when you first start doing science media, you have all these ideas that you learned, you know, a as a kid or in elementary school or middle school or whatever. It's sort of like when you first start learning math and you're like, well what's five minus ten? And they're like, you can't do that. You can't go into negative numbers when you're first learning and then later you start to learn, right, there are negative numbers, there's imaginary numbers. and so For me, I think one of the first w one of the the things that that I used to believe that turned out to be completely wrong was a lot of stuff. You know, I didn't have any one thing. I've made about a thousand videos over the years and I I always try and go into it with this open mind of like, I know some things, or at least I think I do, but I'm ready to not to to play like I don't. Because that makes it easier when I'm doing the research, so I don't come in with my own biases, because we all have them. But I think recently one was Carl, how many species of cat are there? I have no idea. So let's say if I would guess, probably fifty, sixty. You're I mean, you're actually not too far off. There a month ago we thought there were like thirty eight species of cat. Okay. and then in the last month, for the first time in a century, we've discovered two new species of cat. Which is amazing. they were just discovered. We we've been on the planet for thousands of years and we've been doing science for hundreds of years, and we thought we had all the cats, but we didn't. And so like the the cool thing that that I believe to be true that I turned out to be completely wrong about is i the the like kind of cop out answer is most things. but that is true though, because If you look at your life and you look at where you are today and what you're gonna find out in 20 years or 30 years, you soon be completely different. And the way we're evolving with AI, with everything else that's happening in our lives, science is completely it's always changing. Yes, all the time. Yeah. I think one of the things that I thought I understood that I realized I didn't at all was like Einstein's theory of relativity. Right. Like a and that Understandable. It's kind of a big complex physics idea. But the thing that I didn't understand about it is, you know, you you learn the speed of light, you know, is is C, as a constant, it's never changing, and you can't go faster than that when you're out in space. Except for that you can, because if you're on an airplane and you turn on a flashlight, the light is still going the speed of light on that airplane, but you're already going hundreds of miles an hour. So isn't that light going faster than the speed of light? And it is relative to a stationary object. Right. And the thing about relativity, the reason it's called that, is that there is no zero frame of reference. Right? You can't go to a spot in the universe and be like, okay, this is this is it. I'm s I'm standing at zero and everything is referenced relative to me. Instead, it's always relative to the observer. And that was something I just didn't understand until I mean within the last few months really, because I was reading about it recently. But I also I used to work at the weather channel with Al Roker. And and I produced Wake Up With Al and one of the biggest complaints everyone would say when they found out that I worked there was that you guys can never predict the weather correctly. They would say the snowstorm's gonna be fifty, you know, five inches and then it was ten inches. Or we would say it's gonna be ten inches and it would be three. And I would say it's not an exact science because everything's moving. Yes. And when things are moving, you're not going to get the the thing, the data that you want, because we can't predict exactly where the snow's going to fall and how long it's going to fall. We can only use the data and the information that we have to predict it. Yeah. I think that's actually a great way to think about it. Cause that's how I think about when I make videos as well, right? We can only work with what we have. So there's a lot of like couching language of like based on what we know. this. and I think to to your point about weather reporting, it's changed a lot in the age of the internet that now you see Al on NBC and he talks about the different hurricane models and all the different like spaghetti charts, you know, all of that data we didn't really talk about directly with the public a decade ago. And now we talk about it all the time. Every time there's a hurricane, they're like, Well it could go here, it could go here, or it could go here. And it's like depends on what model you want to use. And that's that's pretty advanced stuff. I feel like Do you think that's dangerous for people who are arm check armchair scientists who are sitting there at home coming up with their own ideas? Or is this something that's really good for us? I don't know. I think it's probably a bit of both, right? Like it it can be dangerous if you take that information on its own and you go and run with it. You can see that, especially in things like healthcare. if you take this one study and you go run off with it, that can be a problem no matter what you're doing. I do think it's beneficial to show that uncertainty in science. Uncertainty is so important because it's something that a lot of people are uncomfortable with, but it's something that scientists are typically not as uncomfortable with because they're trained to like, okay, uncertainty is part of the game. We don't always know all the answers and that's okay. What can we like narrow down and try and figure out this one puzzle piece and then another one and then another one to like reduce that uncertainty? But that's life, right? Life is uncertainty. I don't know what's gonna happen today. I have I can only work with what I know and I have no idea what my day will bring, who I will bump into, who will be you know. Yeah. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah, exactly. if you could permanently solve one mystery in the universe, which one would you do? Pick? man. I mean The physicists out there would want me to say like a dark energy, dark matter, which is most of the universe. Like if as I have an astronomy show on PBS, called Stargazers, and we talk a lot about the stars. The stars are a very small percentage of what actually exists in the universe. It's just the stuff we can see. Dark energy is the is what is powering the expansion of the universe, which is expanding all the time. And then dark matter is some of the stuff that holds galaxies together and we don't know what it is. So that would be something that would be really interesting to solve. I don't know how relevant it would be to the average person if we solved that. I don't know because we don't know what it is. A lot of people would probably want me to say, like, are we alone? Are there aliens out there? That was going to be my next question to you, because when you said there's space, that's the question that I get a lot from people when I do. The science shows people are so fascinated and they really want to know, are we alone? Yeah. And I think that that if we could solve that mystery, I think that would be hugely impactful in some ways, but maybe not as much as we think, in that the universe is just so unfathomably big that if we knew there was another being that we could communicate with on a planet somewhere far away, you know. A billion light years away, it would take light a billion years to get there. So we're never gonna talk to that person. So imagine like being in your house and knowing that you will never speak to your neighbor because as soon as you walk out the door, like you you can't go anywhere. and so I don't know if that mystery is something I would want to solve without having some insight into if we could actually do anything about it. You're even if you we would solve it and say there's we would have to learn how to communicate to them. Because we would have no idea how they communicate. We don't know. They wouldn't know how we communicate and it would be it's not like gonna come back and go like take me to your leader. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have an a podcast I do called That's Absurd, please elaborate. We answer silly questions that people send us. And someone said my podcast partner, Julian Huggett, sa answered this one where h if you met an alien, how would you explain what left is? And it's a pretty silly question. But what he ended up doing, and I thought was genius, is you their molecules have this thing called chirality, where, for example, DNA twists in two different ways. It's a double helix, but it twists in the same direction. Or like a glucose molecule kind of turns in the same direction. And if you reverse it, it's called a s a chiral molecule. It looks exactly the same, but it's turning the other way. So he was like First we need to explain how we look at atoms and molecules, but hopefully they're an alien and they got to us, so they know that already. And then you get all the way down into like chirality and you say that that one, that's what we call left, because it twists in that direction. And so there are ways that we could communicate. It would take us a while to figure it, you know, without a Rosetta Stone to to to do the translating for us. 'Cause we don't even know if they would perceive the world the same way. Do they see visible light? Do they see X rays? Like do they you know, we don't we wouldn't know. But I think Duolingo won't help. Yeah, Duolingo has Klingon, but I don't know if they speak Klingon, unfortunately, right? Yeah. Since we invented it. But I actually do think that there are l there's likely life out there. You know, it's just the question is is it microbial? Is it like us? I you know, no one No one knows. That would be a cool mystery to solve. I I don't think that we're alone. The universe is so vast and we can't be the only ones here. But do are I mean I'm I'm not really sure they're they're walking on the planet right now going to cornfields and making designs. Right. I'm not sure that would make sense, but what do I know? Yeah. So I yeah, I same. I don't know if they're here with us, but they are out there somewhere. I was once in Roswell, New Mexico, and I asked someone why did they come here to Roswell? And they said to me, The aliens come here because they want peace and quiet. And I looked up at the sky and I thought, Isn't that peaceful and quiet up there? Yeah. It'd be pretty quiet, like out in space. There's not you know, there's nothing out there. So Yeah. What's something that's happening in science that's right now That isn't really getting enough attention, that should be getting more attention. I think the biggest one is the brain drain of like defunding of science by our government currently. And while that it can be political, but a lot of science is funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation and these different groups. and because we're cutting back on that funding, those scientists who want to study something either have to go to another country or maybe they go open a food truck. And that science never gets done. and I think that that's something that we're not talking about enough because it's not affecting us right now. it's sort of like, I don't know, if you stopped shipping cheeseburgers to your local restaurant, they would have some cheeseburgers for a while. But once they run out, no one's shipping them new cheeseburgers. And to get the the shipping started again takes time. which we all saw during COVID nineteen, right? It took us a while to restart after we'd been shut down. And so it's like this is one of those where we have to train new scientists, get them excited, get them interested, and then have them start labs and start science again. and that can be tough. And so it's something that I don't think we're talking about quite enough. Should we and I'm just gonna s ask this question now about the plague coming out of Siberia, should we be panicked by this or is this just hype created by the news because it's a it's a story of someone who died and and It's just getting a lot of attention and everyone's like, COVID's coming back. Yeah. I think that you see this a lot since COVID nineteen, a lot of these stories, in in the kind of mainstream news because they know that it will get them eyeballs and clicks. because people are now a little more aware and a little more worried about these kind of things. I don't know enough about it to know if we should be worried. I don't know if we should trust the the messaging that is like, well it's fine, it's fine, it's fine. because we've seen that messaging before. But at the same time, yeah, I don't know enough about it. I think it's one of those where we gotta keep an eye on it and that's important. So I'm glad that at least it's being reported and not just being swept. And is there a scientific discovery that genure that genuinely scares you? I mean it's always scary the unknown is scary. For a lot of people, myself included. And I think those are the discoveries that make me not afraid of the process of science, because I like I know how that process works, right? Science is looking at nature and seeing if it does what we think it's going to do, or trying to figure out why it's doing what it's doing. so like the unknown can be scary, but the discoveries are usually revealing something about the unknown. And so I don't think that there's a discovery that's genuinely scared me, but that unknown does scare me. So we just mentioned COVID-19. Like when that started in late 2019, that was scary because we didn't know anything about it and it was clearly spreading and it was clearly doing damage to our cultures and our societies and like our people, but we didn't really know what to do about it and we didn't have a plan and we weren't really ready to like handle it. And it took a long time to figure it out. And that reduced that level of fear for a lot of people in a good way. But the discoveries themselves. We were living in real in real time. Yeah, yeah. We really were. And 'cause when people complain about it, see my reaction always is we were living in real time. We didn't really understand it. And we didn't know how what we had to do, how to survive it, and we had to figure that out. And I think science was trying to figure it out really fast. But Fast doesn't really answer questions that are going to satisfy you at times. Yeah. You have to you have to go through the process. Yes. It was it was actually a real I mean, you could look back and say it was a real miss in that we could have spent some more time talking about this is how science works. We're a little distracted trying to figure out how to live in in the world with a pandemic. But it's like if you look back, it really was watching science happen. in real life. We found this thing. This thing was causing problems. How do we solve for this problem? And it was scientists all over the world, you know, spending all of their time figuring it out. then it became political. Then it became political. And it that that was inevitable, right? Like it's it we're affecting people's lives every day by telling them they can't go outside. People are gonna get mad. I understand that. I think it's it's also though like when we get mad that the scientific recommendations change over time because scientists are okay, like we said, with that uncertainty. When we start, we don't necessarily need to wear masks. wait, maybe actually there is a benefit we find out later as spread increases. And so that gets updated. People get uncomfortable when it's like, wait, but you said before we didn't, and now you're saying we did. You're flip-flopping. And it's like, well, no, I've got more information than I did six months ago. and so like I'm updating what I think is best. And again, scientists are Totally cool with that, typically, because that's where they live. And what is the single hardest concept you've had to ever explain to an audience? Carl, are you good at math? I I'd like to. I'd I'd like to think I am, but I'm probably not. I could probably do a little bit of algebra and that probably will be the end of it. And and then at the end of that I'd be like, it's a little boring for me. Right, exactly. I I like math. I think it's interesting. I love people who are good at it. I like watching people who are good at math. I am not so good at math. So anything with calculus where you know, yeah, like weather reporting, like you mentioned, it's kind of complicated. There's lots of things happening and calculus is a way you can describe all of these fluid motions and all of this stuff interacting. And that gets very complex. I started as a chemical engineering major when I was a freshman in college. I did not graduate as one but because it turned out I loved science. I loved chemistry. but I actually really loved my science teachers more than I actu than I loved the subject. because when I got in there, I literally failed chemistry, I failed calculus, and I had to take them again. And I did okay. enough that I was like, okay, I'm not gonna take them again, but I'm also gonna change my major. so I ended up in behavioral psychology, but that hard science involving math has always been hard for me to explain to people. Because my job as a science communicator is really to take in complex information and try and explain it to people as best I can, meet them where they are. And that's hard for me if I can't distill the information. so for some reason I have trouble with calculus, but I am fine with particle physics and astronomy. Like I don't know how that works, as long as I don't have to do the math part of the particle physics, and I can talk about, you know, how these particles interact based on what we already know. so one of the things that A video that took me a long time to put together was about antimatter. Do you know what antimatter is? I do not. Yeah. So matter, say a hydrogen atom, is a proton and an electron. We have a positively charged proton, we have a negatively charged electron, and they you know it's orbiting. So antimatter would be the opposite. It's a negatively charged nucleus with a positively charged positron around it. and if they touch, they would annihilate and you would see a small amount of Energy released. It's actually a very large amount of energy relative to their size, but you know, because it's just one atom, a small amount of energy. So I went to CERN, which is the European Nuclear Research Center in Geneva, Switzerland. It's under the border of of France and Switzerland. And they have this giant particle accelerator, the large hadron collider, and I went to the antimatter factory that was there, and I had to make a video about what that is and how that works and why we're doing it. And that took a long time. Because it's hard to explain to people what antimatter is, why it matters, why we might want to study it and capture it. and and it it was really fun for me to put that puzzle together, but man, it was a tough concept to really grasp. Yeah. Because we've never we would never interact with antimatter in our entire universe. Yeah. So if you could send a message a hundred years into the future, what would you say? Whoa. Into the future. I think I hope you're still whimsical. I hope we've got more empathy. and I hope we've solved global warming. Otherwise I'm just leaving a message on the answering machine of the future. So AI's not gonna kill us. Let's hope not. I feel like if AI gets a hold of certain technologies, they may cause problems there, but hopefully not. I think They'll have solved that one, I I'm hoping. Got my fingers crossed. Yes, we all do. what's the everyday thing humans do that makes zero sense from an evolutionary standpoint? I think that's a great question. I mean, we do a lot of things. I don't think evolution necessarily tells us what to do, but we do things and then evolution kind of helps us adapt to do them better or, you know, whatever. An everyday thing that humans do. Well, there are people who live in I think in Peru. They're indigenous people, and they drink the groundwater there and are fine. If you and I were to go and drink it, it would be it's riddled with arsenic and it would really cause us problems. But these people have adapted over thousands of years to be able to drink this inorganic arsenic without dying. They would still die if they drank a lot of it because it's still poison. but I think that's pretty cool pretty cool. It's not really w when you go traveling sometimes and you'll go to a foreign country and you'll drink water, you could get really sick. And I I mean I've gotten and I've gotten sick before from drinking water before. And then you come back and you're fine. But I but the people That live there are not getting sick from drinking that water. It's the same thing y you were saying. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so maybe an everyday thing that humans do that makes zero sense from an evolutionary standpoint is literally travel to another part of the world. Like we didn't evolve to be able to move thousands of miles in less than a day. But if you were walking and drinking the water that whole time, you'd probably be okay. I don't know, but you'd probably at least be better by the time you got there, you would be able to handle it better. than if you you know take off into the air and land in Bangalore or wherever and if you could witness any event in cosmic history in person, what are you looking at? What are you watching? Wow. There's a lot of events. I mean supernovae are amazing. I would love to just see a black hole from a safe distance would be awesome. I mean when we took that picture of the black hole with the event horizon telescope and now se we've taken other pictures as well. Like the telescope that they coordinated several radio telescopes, appointed them at Sagittarius A star all over the world, took that data, put it all together and were able to make a picture out of it. That was really amazing. It'd be cool to see that in person. It's very Doctor Who of me to say, but maybe like the end of the Earth. Would be cool, like in cosmic I guess it's more cosmic future. but like, you know, our little planet is around our pretty boring star relatively. Like it's a main sequence star, pretty average, typical star. But at some point it's gonna run out of hydrogen, which is burning now, and the core of the star is gonna collapse of our star, our sun. And then the outer layers of the star are gonna expand. as they cool off and there's just less gravitational energy to keep them in. And so as they expand, they're going to totally encompass the inner planets. Mercury, Venus, Earth, we're all going to gone. we'll all literally be inside of the outer layers of the sun at that point. It'd be pretty neat to see. Like, this is going to be, we're going to be long gone. The sun's going to get about 10% hotter and brighter every billion years or so. So by that point, Earth won't have life on it because it will have burned off. Yeah. But it would be, I don't know, kind of like I don't know. Cool to see or like neat to think about. Like this is everything to us and this is the end of it. Do you want to travel into space? if I could, I would, for sure. Yeah. I think it's really cool. Is there a place like you want to go to Mars? You want to go where do you where would you want to go? You know, if I could go somewhere. I mean it's a long trip to go to differ to anywhere. I think the moon would just be neat. It's not too far, right? It's like going going in the next going to the next town over and visit. It takes a few days to get there. Mars would be very like would be obviously incredible to visit. you can't it'd be hard to live there. It's like a really tough place to spend any amount of time 'cause of cosmic energy and radiation. You'd have to stay underground a lot. I think just going into space for me at this point in my life would be amazing. Getting to go to the moon and stand on the moon would be I don't know. I can't imagine you could because we're still close to Earth, we could still see the detail and the incredible thing that we have here. that overview effect would be super incredible. Yeah. I'm I'm happy to stand and stay on the ground. You don't want to go wanna don't wanna go up there? No. I'm happy to let someone else do it. lying is hard enough. Lying is at this point I'm like, I don't need I don't need to I'm happy to be here. Yeah. On planet Earth. I imagine it would be it's gonna it would be tough to go to somewhere like Mars. Not just from a like technological perspective, but there's a lot of studies on the psychology of it. You know, you're quite you're quite isolated. You can't go outside, obviously, when you're on your way. It's just you're just in the spacecraft for months at a time. At the best of times, you're in there for months. Yeah. And that's hard on people. So I don't know if I could do that. That is hard. And it's a small space. It's not a big space. Yeah. Like even when they went to the moon last year, they were in a they were tiny space. Teeny tiny. the International Space Station's the size of like a five bedroom house. But even that, now that we've all I hate to keep bringing up COVID, but like now that we've all spent time inside. I think we all understand that like if you cannot go outside, it can be quite stressful. So astr there's a reason astronauts are just so like such interesting and such great humans to talk to, because they're really good at that. They they train them really well to like handle that psychologically. I mean, every bump would freak me out. Every time we like we moved too far, like we're hitting some turbulence now. It'd be like, Can we just stay still? That's funny. Like the turbulence would not be my friend. Yeah, yeah. What do you hope is the biggest surprise science drops on us in your lifetime, in our lifetime? I th when I think of that, I think of energy, right? We use energy every day and we need it to power our lives and our modern sensibilities, but also the research and and doing things. So I think of fusion, fusion at room temperature, sustainable energy creating fusion. We talked about hydrogen before, right? It's the same thing the sun does. We take these two hydrogen atoms and we smush them together and they release a bunch of energy and they fuse and make helium. and if we can do that, then we you know, to quote Spider-Man two, you know, you the power of the sun in the palm of my hand. and it would be great if we could figure that out in my lifetime. Ultimately, and this is one of those fun science things that I just love. Ultimately what we're doing is we're creating heat. In order to boil water and turn a turbine, even fusion energy, that's its job, is to make heat to boil water to turn a turbine. And that turning of that turbine generates electricity for us. But doing it with fusion means that we have this ample resource of hydrogen. It's like 80% of the entire universe is hydrogen. So we can just do this cleanly and easily for forever. That would be amazing. And there are people working on it all over the There's Eater in France. There's the NIF in Lawrence Livermore Lab in California is doing fusion experiments. You know, they're they're doing it everywhere. There's places in Japan, Tokamac and Stellarators, and they're all trying to figure it out. So I'm my fingers crossed for that. And if you could leave everyone listening with just one question to ponder for the rest of the day, what would that be? My friend, Mary Beth, has a really great first date question. What are you not curious about at all? Which I think is a great first date question because it tells you a lot about that person and it's a really fun conversation. It's an amazing question. Yeah, really, really good. And I think about it a lot. Like I've never I've never a gone on a date and asked that question. J she would tell me about all these dates she went on and what people would say. And it's amazing because I've talked a lot about space and I have a str show on astronomy. And Marybeth's question to me when I when I asked her that is space. She has no interest at all in space, but we're still very close. And I th I started thinking about for me, the answer right away was like sports, but that's not really true, actually. Because then I started thinking, well, there's all these stories and thus all this like history of it and how people do it and like the overcoming and the resilience. I don't think I have an answer to that question for myself. Like I'm not I'm so curious about everything that I think I could find something interesting everywhere. But I think it's a good question to ponder for yourself. Well, it tells you who the person is. And it tells you it tells you if you're not curious like that bothers me if someone's not curious. Because if you're not curious, then you're just year. You're just existing. Yeah. And I think there's more to life than existing. I think there's questions that we need to a ask. And there's questions that we need to look at and figure out like what is what's going on and Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I think curiosity is like it's almost emotional, like it's deep within us. We we want it we wanna solve these problems and answer these questions. And I I I think it answer it it's a great question for other people, but I think it's neat to ask for myself too. Like I try and think, am I curious about that? And if so, how? So it's like thinking about things that I actually don't love and trying to find things that I could love about them, which is neat. And as we wrap up, is there anything I should have asked you that I didn't? I don't know. I don't think so. What's one question that you want people to ponder for the rest of their day? I was not thinking of that. but I the the question that I would think of, you know, a lot of it is like I like I feel like a a petulant child, but I always like the question that always comes to my mind is why. Yeah. Like when someone says something to me, I'm always like, why? Yeah. Like I don't like to take anything for granted. Like I have to know like why am I doing this? Why am I doing that? What is you know, even if I would go take the subway, why am I taking this subway, not that train? Why am I I just the question of why. Yeah. It's a great question. I like I like why and I like how. Those are my two favorites 'cause it's like you can get so far. Just remembering to to think about those things throughout your day. Trace Dominguez, thank you so much for joining me. Love So tell me, where can we find you on the on the web, your shows, tell us where they are? Yeah. You can find if you Google Trace Dominguez, you'll find me everywhere. I've got Seeker, we started back with Discovery. I've got That's Absurd, Please Elaborate. I do a podcast for the American Medical Association called Health versus Hype, where we talk about wellness trends and talk to doctors about how much facts there are behind that. I make videos and I have a show for PBS called Stargazers. So if you look for me, you'll find. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you out there for listening. Let me know what you think, put your thoughts in the comment section. And as always, everyone, until next time, peace safe.