Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Could black holes be making the Universe expand faster?

Episode Date: February 28, 2023

Daniel and Jorge discuss a brand new result that suggests that black holes might be driving the unexplained expansion of the UniverseSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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What do you mean? Uh-oh. I'm guessing there was some. some new clickbait article about how scientists made bananas go faster than light or something crazy? They have? You eat them faster than light, but that's not news. Well, they are kind of slippery. But are you saying that we shouldn't trust science headlines?

You think it's fake news? Well, you know, sometimes the headlines don't reflect what's in the article, and sometimes the news article doesn't reflect the actual research that's been done. And sometimes the research itself, it's questionable. Uh-oh. You're saying even peer-reviewed papers can be wrong? What can we trust then? You can trust podcasters, I guess. I hope. All podcasters, even the ones that make tails of Sasquatch. All right. You can trust us. Just trust us.

Well, maybe not us. I mean, I'm a cartoonist. Probably you didn't trust me with physics verification. Then you've got to listen to the podcast, learn physics, so you can figure it out for yourself. Trust yourself. Oh, I see. This is now a... a self-improvement podcast. Hi, I'm Horham, a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I do believe that learning physics is a form of self-improvement.

Well, it depends on what kind of physics. isn't it? How about the physics of eating fatty foods? Yeah, the more you understand it, the better you are informed and the more educated choices you can make. Yeah, but educated choices necessarily mean it's the right choice. I know potato chips aren't good for me, but I still eat it. And you'd rather eat them and not know that they're not good for you, huh? Yeah, maybe that might help my self-improvement. It might help yourself enlargement.

Yeah, my happiness. Oh, wait, did you mean something else? to each of their own chip. But anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Horhe Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio. In which we try to help you on your journey of self-improvement by teaching you everything we do and do not know about the universe. We also help you on your journey of mental self-enlargement as we try to grow your brain and your mind

and fit more understanding of the universe into it because the universe is big and filled with mysteries and all sorts of things that we have and have not figured out. Things that future physicists may be one of you out there will figure out one day. Yeah, because it is an amazing universe one that is always expanding, it seems, with all kinds of interesting knowledge and interesting phenomena to study, to wonder about, to ask questions about, and also to cram into your brain. And it seems like every single day we're learning something that science has figured out. They've done a new study on banana slugs or they've done a new study on bananas. There's a huge population of scientists out there doing studies, learning things about the.

universe and putting them out there in papers well that's kind of what you would expect right i mean scientists are working all the time and they should be coming out with new results right otherwise what are they doing exactly and it's a wonderful delicious fountain of knowledge that science is creating and that knowledge is not just for other scientists it's for everybody we all want to know what are the answers to the deep mysteries of the universe how fast is it expanding what's inside black holes How did our solar system get to be the way that it is? So it's not just other physics professors who read the writings of physics professors. It's everybody out there who wants to know the answers to these big questions.

Yeah, sometimes what scientists discover gets into the news media and out there into the general population. But I feel like it's kind of a filter, though, like only the juicy headlines make it out there into, you know, the big newspapers. It is a bit of a mystery to me what gets covered. I mean, I read a lot of physics papers. and then sometimes I'll read a popular article about one. I'll think like, why did this one get chosen to make a big deal about it? It's not really that big a deal. But, you know, you can take some little aspect of it and make it sound like it's a really big deal

because most people out there don't understand a bigger picture of the field. Is this really a big step forward or is it a tiny little increment? And we're just hearing about the overall motivation for this entire line of research. So it's hard when you're not an expert to really understand what was a breakthrough and what wasn't. Well, I don't think it's a big mystery. There's probably a science reporter out there that needs to also work and to write something on a deadline, probably. Yeah, I guess you've got to pick something to trumpet about. That's the job.

The really good articles, though, do put things in context. They talk to experts or they are written by experts. So the reader can really get a sense of, is this a huge leap forward or is this just promising potential breakthroughs or what's really going on? Well, it seems like there's interesting science headlines. every other week. But I guess sometimes people need a little bit of help figuring out which ones are a big deal and which ones are maybe a little bit, you know, overenthusiastically reported on by the reporter. If you just believe all the headlines that you read, you would think that every couple of weeks there's a result that's going to change fundamentally the way science works,

that like science is going to pivot on this result, that that will look back on history and say, wow, there was time before and after we knew this one fact. In reality, though, a lot of times you'll read about something which sounds like a big deal and then you'll never hear about it again, which tells you like maybe it wasn't really that big a deal. So it's hard to sift through and figure out like which ones historically are actually going to seem like pivot moments in history and which ones are just going to have sort of filled the news cycle for that week. But I feel like that's kind of maybe one of the exciting things about science. You know, it's this idea that stylish ideas can be overturned at any moment. And, you know, everyone's working on a big idea of their own, you know, because we

haven't figured things out. And so everyone has a different angle on it. And any targets that anyone makes could potentially in reality overturn what we know, right? You're absolutely right. And it's tempting to look back on history and say, oh, there was an obvious line, a step from A to B to C to D. And that's how we got to where we are. But when you're in the moment, you don't know which direction is going to bear fruit and which one isn't. The true history of science is sort of like a big branching tree where lots of those branches were later abandoned or died off. And When you're at the tip of the latest branch, you don't necessarily know which direction to go. So that's why people are exploring in lots of different directions and exclaiming excitedly when they figure out something cool that might mean that this is the future path of all of science.

But maybe it's not. Maybe it just dies off after the next branch. You're right. We never do know in the moment. Yeah. You know what I mean that reporter who like finds out about something amazing and then says, man. This was an okay result. Yeah, that's true.

But it also means that you do need to read all these articles. with a grain of salt. And sometimes that's a spoonful of salt, it seems. Like, for example, a recent headline that's made the rounds that everyone seems to be very excited about. You've gotten a lot of questions about it. Yes, there was an article last week that lots of people read and thought, oh my gosh, this seems like a really big deal.

I wonder if it's true. And they sent it to me. So I got dozens of emails from listeners and tweets from people asking me, is this for real? What do you think? It seems like it'd be more efficient if all reporters just ask you every time they write a science article and then you could just, you know, impart your judgment. Well, you know, that happens sometimes. They do reach out to me to ask me for comment. And reporters out there email me. I actually write back. I'd be happy to comment on research articles. I don't know. Do they want? Maybe they don't want. Maybe they don't.

If you're trying to get readers to read their headlines and click through. And now for a splash of cold water, Daniel. Well, the article that came out does sound pretty interesting. It has to do with black holes and the expansion of the universe. So today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question. Could black holes be making the universe expand faster? Black holes and dark energy. Two great tastes that taste great together.

Do they? Man, I feel like it's like black holes versus dark energy. It's like Emperor Palpatine fighting dark later. It sounds to me like the last round of the Battle of the Bands. Yeah, there you go. We can just sit back with some popcorn and watch what happens. I think black holes in dark energy, they've got to be like metal bands or sort of like goth rock or something. Yeah, I'm sure there are groups out there with those names.

But this is an interesting question because at first hearing, it kind of sounds counterintuitive, right? Like black holes suck stuff in. They make things more compact. And yet, how can they be making the universe expand faster? Exactly. So it's got all the elements of a huge scientific revolution and big splash in the news, right? It's counterintuitive and it solves more than one mystery. Like what's going on with black holes and what's going on with dark energy? Oh my gosh, maybe one explains the other. So it's very tantalizing. Yeah, it's always exciting when there's like a crossover event, right? Like Marvel and DC, like Superman and Spider-Man working together or against each other, making the universe faster. It's like combining two tasty sandwiches. You know, peanut butter sandwich is good. A reuben is good.

Would a reuben with peanut butter be even better? Well, until you do the experiment, you can't know for sure, right, Daniel. You're going to do that experiment. You know, if I was a lunch-eating kind of person, I might, but I have to leave it to you. I'll pass. I don't think I need to know that result. Listeners, let us know. But it's interesting.

So this paper came out last week, right? As of this recording. It did. and it set the physics world abuzz. All sorts of cosmologists and experts in black holes and in dark energy. We're arguing about whether this paper made any sense and what it meant and whether we could believe it.

Oh, right, because there are experts in both areas and this one try to put them together. Did they ask for permission or? You don't need to ask for permission to write a paper. You can just write it and send it out there and see if people will read it. Well, he can and do need permission to publish a paper, don't you? It requires a whole committee to approve your paper.

To be approved, you definitely need reviewers and all that kind of stuff. But you can just write a paper and put it on the archive and, you know, people will read it. These days, journal review is sort of a secondary process. People read papers well before they're ever reviewed by journals. Wait, wait, wait, wait. What? You can just post things on the internet without permission? Yeah, this is a site called archive.org where all physicists post their papers before they go to the journals.

Because the journals take forever to review stuff and you want people to read your results. basically as soon as they're ready. So these days, most of the actual science happens on what we call preprints, where people post their papers before they go to the journals. Wow, that sounds like having a policy debate over Twitter comments. Shouldn't you wait until, you know, the experts have checked it out first? Or maybe that is sort of now part of the process of experts checking it out. You put it out there to the whole community.

Yeah, there's actually a vigorous debate about whether we even need journals anymore. Now that we have the internet, journals aren't necessary for actually. publishing and distributing papers, you just have them online. So they're really just there to provide peer review, but, you know, there's a lot of question about whether peer review actually adds anything to papers or if it just delays them and burdens a bunch of people with extra work. I guess that feels a little risky. I mean, that's sort of like calling Twitter comments peer review or like the like buttons.

Like, oh, this paper got 2,000 likes. It must be true. Well, I never read and believe a paper just because it's been peer reviewed. I'm going to read it myself and see if it makes sense anyway. All right. Well, fortunately, people out there have us, or at least they have you to go through papers like this one, do see if it makes sense. And I guess they have me to ask you about it. That's my role. Exactly. And so this paper was a lot of fun to read and to talk to my colleagues about. And I also went out there to gather opinions from random people I ran into on the UC Irvine campus.

Yeah, because as usual, we're wondering how many people out there had heard about this paper or had an opinion about whether black holes can make the universe grow fast. Here's what people have to say. That's not my area of expertise. My understanding was like they're in energy sync though. Like the energy goes like it's like the one place where matter could possibly no like actually be destroyed. So I'm like not sure how to answer that question. But my guess would be the negative or it would do the opposite. But again, I'm not.

I guess that would be an astrophysicist. That would be their expertise. I don't know. I don't really know much about black holes. I'm assuming maybe. I wouldn't think so because like black holes are meant to like go inwards, right? Like almost like a funnel. And they seem to be pulling things in.

So I would almost expect the opposite where it would like help fast forward the, I don't know, when everything condenses. That's my opinion, at least. I'm not a physics. I don't know. So I was actually just reading this paper last week. I think it's a really interesting results. You know, I think the media has maybe blown it a little bit out of proportion and portrayed it in a way that I don't think it's 100% accurate.

However, I do think there is all as interesting. I think what they're doing in the paper looking at sort of black holes as a different type of energy source to drive the expansion is a really cool idea. So, yes, I think it's possible, but maybe not in the way that's been portrayed by the media. Wow. Okay, I don't know. but since the universe is expanding and black holes are part of it, I'm going to go with yes. No, I don't think black holes can make the universe expand. Why not? Because they suck things towards them with them gravity, so they wouldn't be pushing things away and make

expand. They would, if anything, decrease the size of the universe. I didn't read the neuroscience I would probably refer to, so I'm not really sure. In my mind, black hole compresses matter, so I'm not sure how it would expand the universe. Oh, I don't really know much about black holes, so I don't really know. Does it sound plausible to you? all? Yeah, I mean, I guess. All right. Most people had not heard of the article, although I was surprised that one person had just read that paper. Were you like, what? Or did you ask your officemate or one of your grad students? I didn't have a whole lot of time. So I was wandering around the physics portion

of the campus and I'm pretty sure I did hit an astrophysics grad student who had actually read the paper. Oh, I see. This is a little bit loaded of a sample. My favorite response was a person who suggests that I go and ask a physicist for an answer. That sounds like a very sensible thing to do. Why didn't you just ask a physicist, Daniel? Yeah, good question. Exactly. Maybe I should.

I should go get a PhD in physics and I should go figure this out myself. You should be like a professor or something and then you can answer questions for a living. Yeah, I think that person misunderstood what I was trying to do with my question. I think she thought I was wandering around campus looking for somebody to explain this paper to me. Oh, I see, I see. Well, I guess there aren't that many people walking around asking physics questions. Does she think maybe you were like somebody lost on campus? Yeah, you know, it's famously hard to tell physicists apart from homeless people.

And so I think maybe she was just being polite and patronizing me. Well, it's an interesting paper. And so let's dig into it. What does the paper say? So in a nutshell, the paper says that black holes out there in the universe are the source of dark energy, that they are the reason that the universe's expansion is accelerating, that the expansion of the universe is getting faster and faster every year. That's the basic idea of the paper.

That sounds pretty cool. All right, we're done. I'm off to have a peanut butter ribbon sandwich. Yeah, I'm kind of hungry. Although I prefer almond butter to peanut butter. All right. Good to know. We might have to do a side experiment on that.

But let's maybe break it down for people. and let's start with just the idea that the universe is expanding. Some people might not know that the universe is getting bigger and bigger, and it's getting bigger at a faster and faster rate. Yeah, this phenomenon goes by the name of dark energy, which is a very mysterious sounding name for something we don't really understand very well. But we do know some things. Like we look out there into the universe and we watch galaxies,

we measure their velocity relative to us by looking at how the light from them is redshifted because things that are moving away from us faster will have the wavelengths of their light stretched out longer and longer. We call that red shifting. And we look out into the universe and as we look out further and further, we're looking further back in time because it takes light time to get here. So we can see how fast things are moving away from us now, the close up stuff, and how fast things were moving away from us earlier. So we can see sort of how much this is changing. Are things moving away from us faster and faster every year or is it slowing down? And about 20 years ago, we went out and did this measurement using very precise techniques involving supernovas and exactly how they blow up and all that stuff.

And we found something very surprising. We discovered that the universe is expanding and that expansion is speeding up, meaning that every year, galaxies out there are moving away from us faster and faster. And so that's what we call dark energy. We don't know what's doing it. We don't understand the mechanism for it. But we see that this is happening and we want to understand it. Yeah, and you call it dark energy because it's kind of like an energy, right? Like it requires work and energy to make the universe bigger because you're sort of creating more and more space.

That's right. We are making more space between galaxies. Actually, everywhere in the universe, we think that space itself is expanding. So if you have a picture in your mind of the universe's expansion is sort of like a bomb with a tiny little dot at the center that blows up and everything flies through space, you should try instead to think about it as like a universe already filled with stuff which then expands creating new space between everything in the universe all over the place so it's sort of like this stretching of space or this expansion of space itself and you're right that makes more energy because we think that every chunk of space comes with energy

and that energy then drives the expansion which makes more space which drives the expansion even more and so that's why it's accelerating sort of like taken off and then It's called dark because like there's no visible evidence of it in a way, right? Like there's not like everything's glowing or something or there's some kind of explosion that you can see. It's like an invisible force that's growing the universe. Yeah, it is invisible, but I think probably it's called dark because it's mysterious because we don't understand it. It's like unexplained. It's an area we have yet to illuminate.

So I think it's sort of like mentally dark, more than physically dark, though also invisible. You know, we call it dark energy. which suggests that it's like a thing we understand. It's something in physics that's happening. But really we don't understand where this comes from. It's something we see happening in the universe. And we can describe in some ways using our theories, but we don't know really where it comes from at all.

Yeah, it's a big mystery. Maybe even the biggest mystery in the universe, right? Because it's a mystery that kind of permeates the entire universe. And the universe is pretty big. It definitely dominates the universe. Like if you add up how much energy it takes to make this happen, It's like 70% of the energy in the universe. So you take a cubic light year of space, for example,

and you say how much energy is stored in like all the gas and the stars and the planets? That's like 5% of the energy in that cube. Another 25-ish percent is dark batter. That also has energy in it. And the rest of it, 70% of the energy budget of the universe is this weird stuff, dark energy that's causing the universe to expand faster and faster every year. But again, we don't really know why. it's happening or where it comes from. We can describe it in our theories, like we have general

relativity that tells us how the universe works and how space works and how it can expand. And there is an option in general relativity to make this kind of thing happen. Yeah, you have some theories that it maybe is like a property of space itself, like space itself as potential energy and it can't help itself but to get bigger. That's right. And remember that while general relativity is a theory of gravity, and we tend to usually think of gravity is like something that attracts, stuff. Are you attracted to the earth? The earth is attracted to the sun. And we think of general relativity is like explaining that kind of stuff that gravity is purely attractive. General relativity is more complex than that. It's not just like how much mass and energy is there in a

certain place. It also depends on the distribution of that mass and energy and also on the kind of energy. So example, if you have a lot of potential energy in a part of space, it can generate a negative pressure. It can cause the expansion of that space. So Einstein's equations have all these different kind of knobs that can make space do different kinds of things. So if you say, well, space might have a lot of potential energy into it. You had this thing we call the cosmological constant or all of space just has this potential energy in it. That can actually cause this kind of expansion. Then of course, you can ask like, well, why would it have this cosmological constant? Where is this potential energy coming from? And that's sort of where we are. That would be sort of a very deep question about the very

nature of space, right? That's right. As you say space we think has energy. in it. Like we know that space has quantum fields inside of it, right? There's a field for the electron, a field for the Higgs boson and a field for the photon. It has all these fields in it. And those fields have some potential energy. We know that because they're quantum fields. They can't like relax all the way down to zero energy. And so for a while people thought, oh, maybe that's it. Maybe all the fields that are out there in space, they have this potential energy. And that potential energy is what's causing the expansion of the universe. So people sat down to try to calculate it and say, well, how much potential energy is there in all of those?

fields and how much potential energy would you need to explain this expansion of the universe to provide the potential energy that will allow general relativity to drive the universe expanding this way. So you sit down and calculate those two numbers and you hope that they agree because that would mean that it's an explanation. But instead they disagree and they disagree not by a little bit but by a number like 10 to the 120. So like we really just don't understand this at all. Yeah, it's a big mystery. And so the universe is a expanding faster and faster, and we don't know why. And then now this paper is kind of saying that maybe black holes are the source of that expansion.

And so let's get into what exactly black holes are and how they might be fueling dark energy. But first, let's take a quick break. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Joy Hardin-Brandford, and in session 421 of Therapy for Black Girls, I sit down with Dr. Ophia and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right, in terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyperfixation and observation of our hair, right?

That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. You talk about the important role hairstylist play in our hair. our communities, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people. and an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino to the show, and we had a blast. We talked about her recent 40th birthday celebrations, co-hosting a podcast with her fiancé Sue Bird, watching former teammates retire and more.

Never a dull moment with Pino. Take a listen. What do you miss the most about being a pro athlete? The final, the final, and the locker room. I really, really, like, you just can't replicate, you can't get back. showing up to locker room every morning just to shi-talk. We've got more incredible guests like the legendary Candace Parker and college superstar AZ Fudd.

I mean, seriously, y'all, the guest list is absolutely stacked for season two. And, you know, we're always going to keep you up to speed on all the news and happenings around the women's sports world as well. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential.

I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face. When you think about emotion regulation, like you're not going to choose an adapted strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it if it's going to be beneficial to you. Because it's easy to say, like, go you, go blank yourself, right? It's easy. It's easy to just drink the extra beer.

It's easy to ignore, to suppress, seeing a colleague who's bothering you and just, like, walk the other way. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denial is easier. Drinking is easier. Yelling, screaming is easy. Complex problem solving, meditating, you know, takes effort.

Listen to the psychology podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we are playing MythBusters today, kind of, with news headlines, with papers that have been published. There's been a paper recently that has a pretty juicy headline that says that, or that asks a question

whether black clothes can be making the universe expand faster. Now, Daniel, is this a paper that just dropped on the internet or is this a paper that has already been peer reviewed. This is a paper that has been peer reviewed. These guys did not drop it on the internet before they sent it to reviewers. So they kept it a little bit tight to their chest. I think also they linked it with a bunch of publicity and stuff. So sometimes people don't put their papers up in the internet before they get peer review. And I think that's actually more common in astronomy than it is like in particle physics. Interesting. What do you think that is? Astronomers know

how to play the press game a little better than particle physics or particle physics just like to post things on the internet. Well, particle physicists are the ones who invented this whole idea of putting things on the internet. I mean, we invented the World Wide Web. We have these big international collaborations. And also, I think for particle physics, by the time you have a paper ready, usually it's been reviewed by like 5,000 of your other colleagues whose names are also on the paper. And so the peer review process feels a little bit more like a rubber stamp in particle physics than in other fields. All right. Well, this paper that came out recently says that black holes could be what's making the universe expand faster and faster. And so we talked

about what dark energy is, what the expansion of the universe is. Now, let's talk a little bit about black holes. Like, how do you explain what a black hole is and what don't we know about them? Right. And so the takeaway from dark energy is the universe is expanding. It's expanding faster and faster. We don't know why that's happening because we can't explain where this potential energy is coming from, this sort of vacuum energy of the universe. All right. So that's a huge mystery, as you said, right? Big, not understood thing in the universe. Now, what are the other really fascinating, big, misunderstood things in the universe are, of course, black holes that we've talked about on the podcast lots of times because they're so fascinating and amazing and might

contain within them like secrets of the nature of space and time and all sorts of crazy stuff because they are very extreme situations. They're a spot in space that is so dense with energy and matter that space is curved so intensely that nothing can escape past this event horizon. that even photons which travel at the speed of light are trapped inside because space is curved essentially so that it's one dimensional every direction forward once you're inside a black hole leads towards the center of the black hole and in general relativity it says that this force is so powerful that everything inside the black hole eventually collapses to the very very center forming a singularity a dot of infinite density because there's a lot of mass with zero volume yeah we chatted about this a lot and It's interesting that for black holes, it's all about the density of mass, right? Of matter, because gravity gets stronger, the closer you get to it. And so if you put a lot of mass in a small spot, that means you can get really close to it. And so at some point, the gravity gets so crazy, so big that it actually creates a hole in space.

You're exactly right. It's all about the density. Like the same mass that could create a black hole if you squeezed it down could also not create a black hole if it was more spread out. Like the mass of our sun could create a black hole if something squeezed it down or if the sun stopped exploding, which is what's preventing it from collapsing into something more dense. So it's not just about the amount of mass, it's about the density. And that means that you can have black holes of all sorts of masses. You can have black holes like the mass of our sun. You can have black holes like 10 times the mass of the sun, a billion times the mass of the sun.

Black holes come in a huge variety of sizes and masses. And that's one of the big puzzles about black holes. Yeah, well, it's maybe even stepping back a little bit. We don't actually know if black holes are real, real. Like, we talked about them like they are, but actually they are kind of theoretical. And we have pictures of them, but we're not quite sure what's in the picture, right? That's exactly right. We have a model from general relativity that predicts that this would happen.

It says, if you get matter dense enough, then you should create this event horizon and have a singularity on the inside. And for a long time, that was just theoretical. And people thought, hmm, that's weird. I bet something prevents that from happening that seems too strange. But then we saw these things out in the universe. And specifically what we saw were very dark portions of space that had a lot of curvature to them, very strong gravity. For example, we saw stars whizzing by very close and getting turned around by strong gravity. But we didn't see anything at that location.

So we crossed off a bunch of candidates. Oh, maybe it's a neutron star. Nope. Oh, maybe it's this. Maybe it's that. Maybe it's the other thing. And eventually the only thing left was a. general relativity black hole. That's the only sort of explanation we had for this kind of

phenomena. But it's not a direct observation, right? It's not like we've seen the event horizon literally or we verify that it really is a black hole. We just sort of like observe things closer and closer and closer to the black hole that haven't yet fallen in that tell us it must be something very dense and very dark. Right. Something super dense, super dark that doesn't shine. but it could be just a dark hole, not just a black hole, for example. Could just be a lot of mass compacted really tightly, but not necessarily a singularity, which is what the name originally was given in general relativity. Exactly. Early on, it was sort of the only candidate to explain these kind of things,

and that's one reason why people started believing they exist. But recently there's been sort of a flourishing of other ideas, other possibilities that might explain the same observations, other things that would look just like these black holes, but would not be black holes. We talked about a few of them on the podcast, things like dark stars. These are stars that are collapsing due to gravity, but they're collapsing super duper slowly because the gravity slows down time.

So it's not actually a singularity. It's just sort of like a collapsing star frozen in time, which eventually will bounce back and maybe turn into like a white hole. Or we've talked about fuzz balls, which are these weird phenomena from string theory, and all sorts of other various ideas. And the thing that all of these ideas have in common is that they are quantum mechanical. One of the big problems with the idea of a black

hole from general relativity is the singularity. It's the idea of having all this mass in a tiny little dot. That breaks quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics says you can't do that. It violates the uncertainty principle and all sorts of basic principles of quantum mechanics. And general relativity is not compatible with quantum mechanics, which is one reason why seeing inside a black hole would be so awesome because we get to see finally a battle between general relativity and quantum mechanics and see who won. So we think almost certainly general relativity is wrong and needs to be modified by some theory of quantum gravity

that tells us what else is going on inside a black hole. Maybe it's basically like a general relativity black hole but with a quantum blob of a singularity instead of an actual dot. Maybe it's something totally different like a fuzzball or a dark star or something even weirder. Yeah, there could be some kind of strange crossover event in there

like Captain America versus Batman. Exactly. And it's also important to understand that the black holes that we've sort of figured out how to calculate these predictions we've made for like you should see a black hole under these conditions, those only really describe very simplified situations. Nobody actually has been able to calculate a black hole like the ones that we see out there, the ones we suspect exist in our universe. The kind of black holes we can calculate are the ones where you'll have like a dot of mass and otherwise empty universe. We know

how to do that calculation in Einstein's theory. But Einstein's theory is very very, very messy. It's very complicated. It's almost impossible to do anything realistic. Like in Einstein's theory, you can't even do two dots of mass. We can't even solve like the earth going around the sun in Einstein's theory. Even basic stuff like that is too hard. And so for example, what we haven't done in Einstein's theory is figure out how a black hole can survive in an expanding universe. Like we always do our calculations in a flat universe where space isn't expanding. So nobody even really knows like what happens to a black hole when the universe is expanding, especially if that black hole is spinning. So it's not like we even in general relativity have a great description of

what we've seen out there in the universe. You mean at least the general relativity version of them, right? But there could be other versions of a black hole or like a dark hole or a black divot maybe that do explain what's out there. We're not quite sure what that is, right? Exactly. And we also don't know how they get so big sometimes. Exactly. That's one of the other really deep mysteries about black holes, especially the kind of black holes talked about in this paper. These are the black holes at the centers of galaxies. You can have a black hole just from a star at the end of its life. It goes supernova and collapses and you get a black hole that's like five or ten times the mass of our sun. That's cool. We've seen those when we think

we understand them. But also there tend to be black holes at the hearts of galaxies. Like at the center of our galaxy, there's a very big black hole with lots and lots of mass. And at the center of many galaxies, there are black holes with millions or billions of times the mass of our sun. And we see these even very far back in the early universe. If you look at light that's been traveling for a very, very long time from very distant galaxies, you can see galaxies in the first billion years of the universe that already have black holes at their centers that are like a billion times the mass of the sun. And this is a big mystery.

Nobody understands how those black holes got so big, so fast. Well, it's kind of an amazing thing that we can tell that there are. black holes in these galaxies so far away. Yeah, that's exactly right. It's fascinating. And we can tell them often because they are quasars. Quasars are black holes that have very strong magnetic fields that are spinning really, really fast. And so they emit these jets of light that are super duper bright, so we can see them from very, very far away. So they're not always like super direct observations of the black holes. It's not like we've imaged them the way we've imaged a couple of black holes using the event horizon telescope. Again, black holes are almost always indirect.

But we're pretty confident that there's something very dark and very massive and very dense at the hearts of these galaxies. And we don't understand how you make a gravitational object, whatever it is, that massive. Like there just isn't enough time for it to eat enough gas and dust and stars to get that big, that fast. So there's all sorts of theories about how those black holes might have gotten so big, so fast. It was Superman. Now we have two big mysteries, two big things out there in space. One is the expansion of the universe is getting bigger and bigger, faster and faster. We don't know that.

That's dark energy. And then there's black holes, which we know some about, but we're not quite sure on the details or what's actually going on inside of them. And now this new paper says that maybe these two things are related. Like maybe black holes are the reason the universe is expanded. So what does this paper actually say? Yeah, it's super fun and fascinating. Actually, it's a couple of papers.

The first paper makes a really interesting, just sort of observation. about the masses of black holes. Wait, it's several papers? Yeah, they wrote a couple of papers. The first paper is like details of about the black hole masses. And the second paper is this crazy theoretical interpretation about it. Oh, like they drop the movie and the sequel at this time. Exactly, yeah.

Two seasons of your favorite show all of the same time. And the Netflix model of physics or the event, I guess the Avengers end game model. There you go. Film both movies at the same time. We often do this. We work on several papers all at once and then publish them all at the same time because they're all sort of connected to each other. Or you want to be the first person to write an interpretation of your crazy new observation. So you write your interpretation paper

at the same time as you write your observation paper and you publish them separately. All right. So this paper is talking about the masses of these black holes. They went out and they measured the masses of a bunch of black holes over time. They looked at closer by galaxies that are newer and they looked deep into the ancient past and very old galaxies. And they were interested in how fast black holes are getting bigger. Like you have a galaxy and it's spinning. It's got a black hole at its center. Black hole is going to be eating gas and dust and stars. And the galaxies also grow. Galaxies grow by gobbling up gas from the intergalactic medium and also by merging with each other. So essentially what they did is they compared these two things. They said, well, how fast are black

holes growing and how fast are galaxies growing? And what they noticed is that the galaxies are not growing as fast as the black holes are growing. So one question is like, well, how did black holes get big in the early universe? The other question is, how do they keep getting bigger all the time? So this is a really interesting result because they're showing that black holes are growing unexplainedly quickly. I see. Okay, so this first paper did sort of like a survey, right?

Like they just looked at into space and they looked at younger galaxies and older galaxies that have black holes in them, super massive black holes. and they compared the young galaxies with the older galaxies. And they said, between the two in general, are galaxies getting bigger and at what rate? And for those black holes, are those black holes getting bigger and at what rate? And you're saying that the first paper just says,

black holes seem to be getting bigger faster than galaxies are getting bigger. Yeah, black holes are getting bigger like eight to 20 times faster than the galaxies they're in. They are growing much more quickly than the rest of their neighborhoods. But wouldn't that be explained by, the idea that the black holes are basically eating the galaxies because like galaxies don't have a lot of things around them

so they can't really grow that fast but black holes have a galaxy around them and so maybe it could just be that the black holes are eating up their own galaxies and getting bigger that way? We actually do expect galaxies to grow. Remember that something like 40 to 50% of all the protons in the universe are not in galaxies yet. They're between galaxies.

There are these filaments of gas between the galaxies that are still flowing into the galaxies right now. Every galaxy sits at the bottom of a gravitational well created by its dark matter, and there are these like rivers of gas flowing into galaxies, making them bigger. And then also galaxies merge. And so galaxies, we do expect them to grow. And you're right, black holes, we also expect them to grow. And you can do studies of these things and you can predict how fast galaxies and black holes should grow. And it should be about the same rate. You know, there's some limit to how fast black holes should be able to grow because as it gets more powerful, it's accretion

disc gets very intense, the stuff that's swirling around it and is very hot and agitated and hasn't yet fallen back into the black hole. And it generates a lot of radiation, which actually pushes away gas. So black holes can't just grow like infinitely quickly and galaxies should be able to grow about the same rate. What we see is a big discrepancy that we don't understand. So black holes are growing much faster than their galaxies, which is not what our models predict. Okay, that's a mystery. That's a weird thing. So that's the first paper. And the second paper says, well, you know, black holes are growing faster than we think, but is actually connected to something else. They notice that black holes are growing at the same rate as the universe itself, that the expansion of the universe we talked about, this unexplained, accelerated expansion matches very nicely the rate at which black holes are gaining mass.

So these two unexplained things seem to be happening about the same pace. Like, let's say the universe is expanding, how fast? Like a thousand percent per year or something like that? The expansion rate of universe is a little bit more tricky to measure. It's in terms of like kilometers per parsec per second. So it's a little bit complicated. But, you know, in a cartoon version, it's like if the volume of the universe doubles, so are the mass of these black holes.

So as the universe gets bigger, black holes get bigger at the same rate. Which could just be a huge coincidence, perhaps, but these, maybe these authors are saying that it's not a coincidence. Exactly. These authors are saying it's not a coincidence and they have a theory which predicts this, which explains the connection between the black holes mass getting bigger unexplainedly and the universe getting bigger unexplainedly. They want to explain both of these things at the same time.

All right. Well, I'm hooked. I want to know what this theory is. And so let's dig into it. And also let's see what our critic Daniel has to say about this theory. But first, let's take another quick break. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was.

Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at

Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford. And in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Ophia and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right, in terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyper fixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. We talk about the important role hairstyles play in our community,

the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people

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The final. The final. And the locker room. I really, really, like, you just, you can't replicate. You can't get back. Showing up to locker room every morning just to shit talk. We've got more incredible guests like the legendary Candace Parker and college superstar A.Z. Fudd.

I mean, seriously, y'all. The guest list is absolutely stacked for season two. And, you know, we're always going to keep you up to speed. on all the news and happenings around the women's sports world as well. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential.

I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills, and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, It's easier to punch someone in the face. When you think about emotion regulation, like, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it if it's going to be beneficial to you. Because it's easy to say, like, go blank yourself, right?

It's easy. It's easy to just drink the extra beer. It's easy to ignore, to suppress, seeing a colleague who's bothering you and just, like, walk the other way. Avoidance is easier, ignoring is easier, denial is easier, drinking is easier. yelling, screaming is easy, complex problem solving, meditating, you know, takes effort.

Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're talking about the expansion of the universe and a new paper or a new set of papers that says that maybe black holes are the, the ones that are somehow connected to this expansion of the universe. So we talked about how the universe seems to be expanding at a high rate that also seems to match how fast black holes out there in the middle of galaxies are expanding, which could be a coincidence, but these authors are saying that it's not. And they have a theory that links the two of them. So Daniel, what's the theory?

So the theory is pretty crazy, but also a lot of fun. The idea is that black holes are not black holes as we imagined in general relativity. They're not point masses at the centers of these event horizons. Instead, there's something very, very different. That inside the event horizon is not a point mass, but instead, it's a ball of vacuum energy. So what is vacuum energy? What does that mean? Remember, vacuum energy is the thing we thought might explain the expansion of the universe.

We know in general relativity, if the universe, if empty space, what we call the vacuum, space with like particles in it, that has some kind of energy and that energy can drive the expansion of the universe. In this theory, instead of having that energy everywhere in the universe, you have like localized blobs of that energy, it can form black holes. That regions of very, very high vacuum energy can form something that looks like a black hole. What? Okay, okay. Let's maybe take a step back here.

Are they saying that when you make a black hole, you're creating a bubble of vacuum energy? Or are you saying that when you have a lot of vacuum energy? vacuum energy, that is what would you call a black hole? It's the second. We're saying that the things we're calling black holes are actually bubbles of vacuum energy. They're not compressed masses. Here we're talking about the things at the centers of galaxies. Stellar black holes from collapse stars, probably black holes. That's not what these guys are talking about. They're talking about the huge blobs of the centers of galaxies. They're suggesting they're not black holes like we imagined. Instead,

there are these weird blobs of vacuum energy. That somehow mysteriously form or that are, that started somehow or that the universe started with? What are they saying are these bubbles? How can they have the gravity of black holes if they have negative energy? So they don't explain what this vacuum energy is or where it comes from. That's just sort of left a big question mark. But there is a history of people developing these kinds of ideas. I mean, go back to what we were talking about earlier, people trying to understand how you could have a spinning black hole in an expanding universe. Nobody solved those equations in Einstein's theory. Nobody really knows if it's even possible in Einstein's theory. So that leads people to explore other kind of things. Like instead

of having a singularity, the heart of it, what if you put like a little expanding universe inside the black hole, right? It might help you match the expanding universe outside the black hole. So they put this sort of like expanding vacuum energy inside the black hole. And what they see is an incredible distortion of space. There's no singularity. There's no event horizon, but there is an intense curvature of space which would look a lot like a black hole. In the same way that like a fuzzball doesn't actually have an event horizon, but it's still really curved space and so it looks a lot like a black hole. Or the way a dark star is not technically an event horizon because eventually everything comes out of it, these things don't

have event horizons. They were invented in the 60s origin by some Soviet physicists and people have been playing around with them. They're just like another weird prediction of something that would look black hole e. But you would still get sucked into it? Because I thought vacuum energy, you know, had like negative gravity or something like that. Well, that's a cosmological connection we'll get to in a minute. They think this vacuum energy might be driving the expansion of the universe globally. But locally, weirdly, it also looks like a black hole.

Like if you're nearby it, then it bends space intensely because instead of having vacuum energy everywhere, you have localized. It's only this one spot at the heart. of the galaxy. So that discrepancy, having it there but not over here, creates curvature in the region between it. And that looks a lot like a black hole. It looks like a black hole, but wouldn't it be like reverse gravity? Like wouldn't it push things away? Like in the bowling ball analogy in the rubber sheet, wouldn't something like this be like lifting up the rubber sheet, like pinching it and pulling it up? Or am I getting vacuum energy confused with negative energy? This is not

negative energy, right? Vacuum energy is just potential energy. Not negative energy. And Einstein's equations are not very intuitive, right? Like, it's not very intuitive to understand why in some cases potential energy causes expansion of space. Here, this vacuum energy seems to be doing two things. It creates this almost kind of like event horizon locally and also drives the expansion of the universe globally. Whether this makes any sense at all is a topic of intense debate among cosmologists. I talked to a bunch of them over this last week. Half of them were like, this is nonsense. The other half was like, well, maybe under certain conditions that might happen.

But this is definitely a very, very fringe theory that a lot of cosmologists don't accept, even just this part of it, this idea of a gravist star, something with vacuum energy inside it, which looks like a black hole from the outside. A lot of people don't believe that's even possible. Well, what's their excuse for it? Like, how do they explain it? Why is there so much vacuum energy concentrated in one spot? What keeps it together?

They don't have an explanation in this paper. What they do is they say, look, there's an apparent connection between the mass of the black holes and the expansion of the universe. And if you accept this theory that there are vacuum energy interior objects at the hearts of these galaxies, that would explain it. It doesn't argue for that theory. It doesn't justify that theory. It doesn't explain where this vacuum energy comes from or what it is at all.

It just says that there is a theory that allows you to connect these two observations. It feels kind of like a made-up theory a little bit. Like, it feels like they just came up with a theory just to say that they have a theory. It's a little bit ad hoc, right? It's not something that's been thoroughly worked out. Again, remember, nobody knows how to solve Einstein's equations under all these weird conditions, expanding universes, spinning stuff, vacuum interiors or singularities. Nobody knows what the solutions are like.

So nobody can even really say if this is consistent or inconsistent with general relativity. Some of the cosmologists I talked to said there's no way this is consistent with GR. Other people thought, hey, maybe it might be. There are people working on these kinds of solutions. But the really interesting part of the paper is that they argue that having this vacuum energy inside the black holes somehow contributes to the expansion of the universe as a whole. We're used to thinking black holes like acting locally. They suck stuff in nearby. This is suggesting that because they have vacuum energy in them instead of like dense mass, they're also contributing to like the cosmological equation of state, the thing that affects the entire expansion or contraction of.

the universe. And that's even harder for most cosmologists I talk to to swallow. Yeah, because it's not like these black holes are everywhere and spread evenly across the universe. They're just at the very center of some galaxies and those galaxies are pretty far apart from each other, right? If they are the source of expansion in the universe, wouldn't you then see like hotspots of expansion in some places and in places where there aren't galaxies or black holes? You would see no expansion. Yeah, that's exactly right. And that would be very, very weird and also not explained in this paper. They don't even really talk about this aspect of it. And it would be something very, very strange in physics. We have in physics as sort of like hierarchy of scales

where really tiny stuff doesn't usually affect really, really big stuff. Like things that happen inside the sun don't affect the galaxy as a whole or things that you do don't usually affect, you know, the motion of the entire Earth. They're the sort of hierarchy of scales. Really, really high energy stuff in very, very small distances doesn't usually affect low energy stuff over larger distances. And this would break that. This would say the things that are happening like inside black holes can affect the universe as a whole.

That's very, very weird. It's weird, not just because black holes are weird and dark energy is weird. It would require like a very different sort of paradigm of physics. It would tell us something very, very new is going on, something hard to swallow. Yeah, like you have these sources of vacuum energy and somehow their effect is evenly spread out to the universe. somehow that's kind of what you're saying right look that would be weird that would be very strange and that doesn't mean it's not happening we should be ready for strange stuff the history of physics

is filled with times when people are like well the only way to explain this would be this totally crazy idea that can't possibly be true and then it turns out it is true it just it requires us to accept something new this could be one of those moments right or maybe not so it's not always easy to tell but there's a lot of skepticism one reason is that this is like unexplination for what's happening. It's not at all a conclusive explanation. It's not the unique explanation. It might be that you could explain black holes growing at the same rate of the universe in some other way. Instead of black holes driving the expansion in the universe, maybe there is something else that's driving both, right? So it feels sort of like this describes it, but it doesn't clinch it necessarily. We're not sure that this is what's happening

just because it describes it. Science has to be predictive, not just descriptive. It could just be a coincidence, is what you're saying. It could be a coincidence, or it could just be that we have the causality backwards. Instead of black holes driving the expansion of the universe, something else could be driving both of them. So they could be connected. It just might not be this theory of vacuum interior black holes driving somehow magically the expansion of the universe. Well, that would be a juicy headline, too. Could the expansion of the universe be making black holes bigger?

I mean, that's the idea, right? Like maybe the universe is expanding for some reason because of dark energy. and somehow that effect causes black holes to get bigger too. Yeah, exactly. And if you understood where this vacuum energy came from, maybe that would be the source of it. And this paper, again, doesn't address that either. It doesn't say where this vacuum energy is coming from

or what it's made out of. Is it made out of quantum fields like we suspect or is it something totally different? We just don't know. But this paper got peer reviewed and approved. If you had been one of the peer reviewers, what would you have said? If I had been one of the peer reviewers,

I would have asked for a lot more details about this theory and some comments about these obvious questions, you know, like, how is it possible for localized objects to contribute globally to the expansion of the universe? And also, how is it possible for black holes whose mass is a tiny fraction of the mass of the universe, right? Black holes are a little fraction of the 5% of the universe that's our kind of stuff. Dark energy is 70%. How is it possible for this tiny mass fraction to drive this huge energy in the universe? So I want to ask those questions. And I imagine that the authors of this paper are getting those questions from their colleagues. And I'm looking forward to hearing some answers and some follow-up papers.

Well, it sort of sounds like, you know, they discovered something that is significant and is interesting and it is noteworthy, right? They discovered that black holes are increasing at a rate that's higher than the galaxies around them. And they're also increasing at a rate that seems to match the expansion of the universe. Like, that's an interesting result, right? That hadn't been published before. That is definitely a very interesting result. So that's probably, you know, It's worthy. It's just that the ideas are putting forth to maybe explain this are a little bit on the fringe side. And that's probably also why they put it out in two different papers. The first one is, here the black holes we found. The second one is, here's our crazy idea to explain it. And so the second one is definitely a bit more speculative. There are also questions being raised about the first paper. You know, people are looking at this paper and saying, well, you've looked at a bunch of black holes snapshots in time. You never watched an individual black hole grow at the rate of the universe. We can't possibly do. that you have to observe it for billions of years instead you look at different black holes through

history and you try to tell a story about how in general black holes are growing there are some assumptions there that you're making right that black holes in different regions of the universe are growing at the same rates etc and so people are also asking questions about that paper but I think that one's probably pretty solid it's really this connection between black holes and the dark energies theoretical interpretation that's a lot more speculative and a lot of fun also right I don't want to be too negative about it. I love new ideas. I love breakthroughs.

I love speculation. But, you know, we got to put it in context and think about all the question marks that come with it. Right. But that's kind of the norm in physics, right? Like if you have a wild idea, you're allowed to publish a paper with a wild idea, right? Like as long as it has some sort of basis in reality or at least some indication, some hints that are based in reality, which this one did, you sort of allowed in physics, right, to publish crazy ideas.

Sure. And it's also totally reasonable to start off, but they have formed idea to say, look, here's something crazy and fascinating. We don't have all the details worked out, but maybe it's something in this direction. And somebody else will read the paper and be like, huh, here's an obvious hole that needs to be filled. I wonder if, and they'll have an idea and they'll explain it. And so it's totally fine to not have solved everything in one paper, right, to say maybe this direction works and here's some indications that it might be a fruitful path.

Let's keep going this way. And then everybody jumps on it and needs to prove them wrong. or supports it, we'll see. Yeah, like the Higgs boson. I mean, Peter Higgs got the Nobel Prize because he polished the crazy idea without a lot of pieces in actual experiments, right?

He's like, hey, maybe there's a field called the Higgs field and the Higgs boson and that was an explanation, right? It was an explanation and not the only explanation, exactly. And one nice thing about this paper is that they suggest some ways to check these results. There's a bunch of details

that people can do studying the cosmic microwave background and how stars are willing. whizzing around, they make a bunch of predictions. If this theory is right, things we might be able to test. And so there's a lot of really fun work we can do in the next few years to see if indeed black holes are driving the expansion in the universe or not. Do you think I can get my theory Polish, their peer review about Superman and Spider-Man costing the growth of black holes?

I think you have to choose very carefully the journal you're going to send that to. Yeah, the journal of Jorge Cham on Twitter. There you go. Or I'll put it on Archive.org. There you go. Archive.org, yeah. And then I can be a published physics theorist. Join the club. All right. Well, lots to think about here. I guess, again, the main lesson is stay tuned. I mean, people have crazy ideas about things, and they observe the universe, and they find interesting coincidences that may or may not be coincidences.

And that's how science moves forward is, is noticing these weird things and putting out their potentially crazy ideas that sometimes turn out to be true. And we can't always tell in the moment which paper is going to be something that resonates through history and is read by generations to come. And which is just going to be another and an exciting press release that nobody ever talked about again. All right. Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. gives you real talk, real advice with a heavy dose of I-feel uses. Like on Fridays, when I take your questions for the BAQA.

Whether you're trying to invest for your future, navigate a toxic workplace, I got you. Listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grazias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years.

Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We'll talk about all that's viral and trending with a little bit of cheesement and a whole lot of laughs. And of course, the great bevras you've come to expect. Listen to the new season of Dresses Come Again on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now and about. backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell, and the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.

Thank you.