And I love talking about parasites, teeny tiny little wasps, and dung beetles. But judging from my husband's face at the dinner table, it's possible that not everyone shares exactly my interests. So what do you want to hear about?

For the podcast, we usually pick topics that excite us and that we think you'll enjoy, but you know, we both have our weird quirks and preferences. So we want to hear from you. We'd love to answer questions you have about the universe, what you think is extraordinary and interesting and needs more explanation. Sometimes we turn your idea into a whole episode. Sometimes we give you a 15 minute answer during a listener question session. And

the questions you send us will help us more generalize So what do you want to hear about? to gauge our audience's interests, which help us pick additional topics for the future. So

please don't be shy. Send us your questions. We want to hear from you. We want this podcast to be about what you are curious about. And today we're tackling three fantastic, hilarious, amazing questions sent to us by listeners just like you. And

if you want to be on the next show, you can email us at questions at danielandkelly.org.

Your science podcast fame awaits.

Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.

Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I've never run out of questions.

Hi, I'm Kelly Wiener-Smith, and every question I ask leads to even more questions.

Why is that, do you think? Because

we know so little about everything, I think, at the end of the day. See,

we even have questions about questions. There's never an end to them. So

my question for you today, Daniel, is when you were working on a PhD, did you get a satisfying answer to your big question?

You're really going to ask me that? That's so embarrassing. You know, I did a PhD, which was pretty technical. I was measuring how often two top quarks are made and decay in a very specific way. And it was only when I was writing up my thesis five years into the project that I did enough reading of the literature to understand like, hey, is this interesting at all? And how am I contributing to the scientific conversation? And that's when I learned I basically wasn't. Oh no! What,

did you publish it anyway? I guess at that point you have to?

Yeah, absolutely. You have to. And, you know, that's just part of the process. Because when you start graduate school, you're like a science baby. I mean, you have your inspiration for why you want to study particles, but you don't know what the interesting questions are and what we could actually learn in a reasonable amount of time. So you rely on senior people to guide you and help you pick a topic and get started on it. And so it was only when I finished my thesis that I feel like I knew enough to know what was interesting and what wasn't.

Oh, man, that's frustrating. I always tell the students that I work with, do you feel like you've read enough? Yeah, you haven't. Keep reading. Go back and read. And they're like, no, no, I'm good. I'm like, oh, you're good? Read twice as much. You are not good yet. You just need to keep reading. That solves a lot of problems. But man, it's hard to know when to stop.

And that's why your book has such a lengthy bibliography, Kelly.

At least I practice what I preach. Yes, yes. And

how about you? Do you feel like your thesis was exciting, was compelling, that you got to answer a big, fat, juicy question?