Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What's Inside a Black Hole?

Episode Date: October 23, 2018

What is a black hole, and what would it be like to fall into one? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....

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Starting point is 00:00:00 This is an I-Heart podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System
Starting point is 00:00:33 On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate.
Starting point is 00:01:06 Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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.
Starting point is 00:01:30 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 Aheart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Starting point is 00:01:55 Sometimes science comes up with the worst name for things they discover. I know, like killer whales, which aren't killer and are not actually whales. They're actually dolphins. Excellent point, but I was actually thinking about black holes. Okay, that's one of my favorite space names. What's run with black holes? It's an awesome name, but black holes aren't totally black, and they're not actually holes.
Starting point is 00:02:18 They're dolphins. All right, who runs the science PR department here? I think it's run by a bunch of dolphins. A bunch of killer dolphins. So long, and thanks for all the fish. We're heading for the black hole. Hi, I'm Jorge. And I'm Daniel, and this is Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe.
Starting point is 00:02:50 Today, we're going to ask the question. What is inside a black hole? Maybe the deepest, darkest mystery in the universe. But first, as usual, we went around and asked people on the street, what do they know about black holes and what's hiding inside them? Here's what they had to say. A bunch of destroyed matter and energy. I don't know exactly what's inside, but it captures light
Starting point is 00:03:19 and it has a gravity so, like, strong that, like, after a certain point, you can't escape it. Isn't it like a vacuum? The anti-universe? I don't know. Holy moly. I love some of those answers. The anti-universe.
Starting point is 00:03:36 It seems like most people kind of had a good idea of what a black hole was, right? Like a lot of people knew it was like a dense mass, right? Yeah. It's like a gravitational trap. Things can't escape from. People seem to have the basics out there, right? That they're dense, they're dark, and things can't escape from them. Right.
Starting point is 00:03:53 But nobody knew what's inside of one. That's right. Nobody could tell us what was inside a black hole. Apparently, just walking around on the street isn't the best way to get a solid scientific answer to a Western. But anyway, so black hole. So I guess, you know, before we talk about what's inside a black hole, we should just for a recap, what is a black hole? Yeah, what is a black hole? Black holes are sort of fascinating ideas because for a long time, people thought black holes were just sort of like a mathematical curiosity. Like the kind of thing that you see in an equation, then if you believe that equation describes reality,
Starting point is 00:04:26 then it suggests black holes might exist. But it's the kind of thing that makes you wonder, is this really true or it's just sort of like a weird feature of the equation, something people are not going to actually discover? What do you mean? Like this is the origin of the idea of black holes? Like it was actually a theory first? It wasn't observed or anything?
Starting point is 00:04:42 Exactly. The idea of black holes came from general relativity. And it wasn't observed for decades later. In fact, Albert Einstein thought black holes would never be seen. He thought they didn't really exist, even though his theory predicted them. What did the theory predict? Einstein's basic idea is that gravity is not a force like other forces, things that pull and push on each other like electromagnetism and the weak force.
Starting point is 00:05:05 He thought gravity instead was just a bending of space time. And his idea was any mass would just sort of bend space. So imagine like a rubber sheet. Space is that rubber sheet. You put something big and heavy on it, it bends things down. Now if you want a marble, you roll a marble across that sheet, instead of just going flat across the sheet, if it encounters. some place where the sheet is bent, it's going to change its path. So the marble thinks it's going straight, but actually, like, the rubber it's on is curved.
Starting point is 00:05:34 That's right. It's at the most direct path is now curved with respect to your previous path. And that's a tricky concept for people to understand that it's the bending of space, and it's the sort of intrinsic bending. It changes the natural straight lines. But I love how you say the marble thinks it's going straight. Like, you have this tendency to anthropomorphize everything. Like we were talking about that last time.
Starting point is 00:05:56 In this case, like the marble has an opinion. Like, hey, man, I'm going straight. I don't care what space says. Everything is a cartoon to a cartoonist. I imagine that you look at the world and see little cartoon thought bubbles on everything. That's my worldview. So we were talking about very heavy objects. The idea is very heavy masses bend space.
Starting point is 00:06:17 They bend space so that when you move through space, you end up moving through a curved path. And Einstein and then some later folks, that there are some solutions to the general relativity equations where space has bent so much that you can imagine it's like a bottomless hole in that rubber sheet so the things can never escape them
Starting point is 00:06:37 and Einstein and these other folks they discover these features the equations but they were like is this real you know and this goes to the heart of some of the stuff I love like the connection between physics and math right we like we use math as a language of physics to describe the universe
Starting point is 00:06:53 and sometimes the math takes in directions where we're like, no, that doesn't really work. Here, the math is not physical, right? We'll, like, throw away mathematical ideas that we say are not physical because they don't describe what actually happens. Sometimes the math describes something which we think is unphysical. It turns out to be real, and that's what happened here, which is pretty cool. Well, so the math predicted that if you might have a situation where you have so much mass
Starting point is 00:07:17 in such a small space that will distort space so much that will sort of create almost like a whole in space. Yeah, like a bottomless hole in this rubber sheet so that even light, which travels, you know, the fastest thing in the universe, can't escape because all the straight line paths are closed now. Wow. So like you're
Starting point is 00:07:39 so dabbed down into the hole of the rubber sheet, you'd have to be pointing up basically to get out. There's no path out. Yeah, exactly. You know those big funnels they have in lots of science museums? You can put a penny in and it rolls around. It goes faster and faster and faster and then drops down into the hole.
Starting point is 00:07:53 you can think of it sort of like that but imagine then you're down in the hole right there's no way for the penny to roll up and out of that hole right okay so it started off as a mathematical weird case right for Einstein and he was a smart guy but he didn't think
Starting point is 00:08:09 that could actually exist in real life yeah he thought it wouldn't actually happen because he thought that everything spins and because things spin it's harder for them to collapse you can think of most of the stuff in the universe as sort of a battle between gravity
Starting point is 00:08:26 and some sort of pressure keeping it from collapsing. Gravity wants to suck stuff together, right? Crunch them together. Yeah, it's weak, but you give it enough time, it's going to pull things together and make them tighter and denser and denser.
Starting point is 00:08:39 So you might ask, well, why isn't everything in the universe a black hole? Like, it's 14 billion years in. Gravity's had a lot of time. You know, why is the sun not a black hole? Why is the Earth not a black hole? Because gravity has compressed them. And the answer,
Starting point is 00:08:53 many cases is that they're spinning and the spinning provides a sort of a rotational pressure think about what happens when you're standing on a merry-go-round right um somebody spins it you can get thrown off the merry-go-round and so that's sort of rotational pressure that keeps you from getting sucked in and our galaxy and the sun and the earth all these things are spinning and it does make it harder to become a black hole and so Einstein thought that there's no way you could ever see this because things were spinning and that we wouldn't ever actually see a black hole. It would be impossible for them to create. He thought gravity could never actually crunch anything down that small
Starting point is 00:09:30 because at that size, things would sort of spin outwards more than gravity could crunch them in. Yeah. But then he was proven wrong. Like we actually saw black holes. That's right. And I want to talk a little bit more about that. But first, a quick break. My boyfriend's professor.
Starting point is 00:09:50 is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy?
Starting point is 00:10:13 That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not?
Starting point is 00:10:33 To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The Holiday Rush. Parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass.
Starting point is 00:11:07 The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Starting point is 00:11:44 A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. 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. 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.
Starting point is 00:12:22 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. Yeah, so we should talk about how you can see a black hole, right?
Starting point is 00:12:55 I always imagine you see like a little black dot or a black circle in the sky or something. So a black hole is so heavy that light can't escape it. Right. And that means that it doesn't reflect any light. Right. You shine a flashlight on it, no light comes back. Right? You shine a spotlight on it.
Starting point is 00:13:10 You shine a laser on it. You shine anything on it. No light comes back. Even if it has the sun next to it, it won't bounce off. That's right. No light reflects. Okay. And it also doesn't emit any light.
Starting point is 00:13:21 Now, there's a tiny asterisk we should talk about later, which is called hawking radiation. Turns out black holes do give off a little bit of energy, but you can't really see it. So from the point of view of seeing a black hole, it's basically invisible. It's just like a black circle. Right. So how could you possibly see that a black hole is there? Well, you know, I watched that movie, Interstellar, which I know could be a whole topic of conversation. That was your research for the podcast?
Starting point is 00:13:46 Yes, that. And I read the Wikipedia page for The Black Hole movie. movie, which is a classic 70s movie. Did you ever watch that movie? Yes, it did. In fact, I saw that movie a few weeks ago with my kids. No way, really. I think it was supposed to be like a response to Star Wars or something.
Starting point is 00:14:01 And it's much weirder than Star Wars. According to Wikipedia, it's like the first Disney movie ever to get a PG rating. My kids were like, why did you show us this movie? Was this supposed to be good? Or is this
Starting point is 00:14:17 educational? But that movie was It was a huge part of my childhood, you know? It made a huge impression on me. You saw the Black Hole movie as a kid? Yeah, you didn't see it as a kid. You might have been the only one. I don't think it was very popular. No, it's huge in Panama.
Starting point is 00:14:30 What are you talking about? Huge in Panama. Yeah. I rest my case, folks. Yeah. Let's hope this podcast is huge in Panama. Let's hope we achieved that level. My fellow Panamanians, I hope they're listening.
Starting point is 00:14:43 So how can you actually see a black hole? Let's shift out of the fictional world and back into what we imagine to be the real world. Okay. How could you see a black hole? Well, its biggest defining feature is its gravity. And so it has very powerful gravity. And you can see the effect of gravity on nearby stuff. So, for example, one of the biggest black holes that's near us
Starting point is 00:15:01 is at the very center of the Milky Way. There's an enormous black hole there. It's huge. It's called supermassive. And that's the category of black hole. And we can see that it's there because we see stars orbiting it. So we see the path of stars that are going around the black hole. so we can tell, oh, these stars are orbiting something,
Starting point is 00:15:21 but we see nothing there. So you can do the calculations. You can say, oh, all these stars' orbits are consistent with something really heavy here. Like, imagine you were looking at the solar system and you couldn't see the sun. You could guess that there was something really massive there because you could look, all these planets.
Starting point is 00:15:38 They're going around. And they're all consistent with orbiting one thing that's really heavy. And you could even calculate its mass from the orbits and all that stuff. You could deduce that the sun was here without actually seeing it. Now, that would be a pretty silly way to see the sun,
Starting point is 00:15:51 but you could definitely tell. And we can use that same approach, and we have to see the huge black hole in the center of the Milky Way, for example. Oh, I see. Maybe that's the problem is that the closest black holes to us is at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Now, that's the closest really big one. It's like 27,000 light years, I think.
Starting point is 00:16:09 It's pretty far away. There are closer black holes to us than the one of the center of the Milky Way, but they're not as large. I see. But there's a theory about what they see. sort of look like, which is like a black ball, right? Yeah, and there's other stuff near the black hole, right? Like, say, for example, you have a black hole and it's near a star.
Starting point is 00:16:27 What's it going to do? It's going to shred the star. It's going to suck all the stuff out of the star into the black hole. And you can see that also. Before stuff falls into the black hole, you can see it like on the way, you know? So, for example, imagine there's like a hole in the sidewalk and everybody's falling into it. If you notice a trail of people walking along the sidewalk. And then nothing on the other side.
Starting point is 00:16:49 A lot of screaming. You can pretty much deduce. Oh my gosh. Exactly. So there's lots of black holes where you can see the stuff falling into it. And sometimes it'll like orbit once or twice before it falls in. This thing called the accretion disk, which is like the stuff orbiting the black hole before it comes in. And so a lot of times you can see that around the black hole.
Starting point is 00:17:10 It's sort of like a warning like, you know, abandon hope, all ye who fly near here. Because you are entering the black hole. Yeah. But that also brings up another really interesting point, which is like, a black hole is not a hole. You know, it's a clever name, and it sounds awesome, and it connects to this sort of geometric idea of like having a hole in the bottom of the rubber sheet. But I think most people think of a black hole as like a hole in space, like something you could fall into. But as you said earlier, black hole is something that's really dense. It's really heavy.
Starting point is 00:17:41 It's really thick. You can't fall into it. It's more like a black mass or like a black rock. You know, it's like saying, can you fall into the earth, right? Like, you can't fall into the earth. You can fall onto the earth, right? Well, you're sort of assuming you know what's inside a black hole, right? Well, we know it's really dense, right?
Starting point is 00:17:58 We know there's a lot of stuff in there. But in terms of, like, space, like space is so distorted. It's sort of like a hole, isn't it? It's like the rubber sheet analogy. It is sort of like a 3D hole. It's like a hole in 3D space. Right? It's a gravitational well that you can't climb out of.
Starting point is 00:18:15 But that doesn't mean that. that it's like empty inside. You can like, once you go in, you can like dance all around and there's plenty of room, right? Yeah, let's think about that. This sort of, where is the edge of the black hole? And a lot of people think of the edge of the black hole
Starting point is 00:18:27 as something we call the event horizon. Okay, what's the event horizon? Besides being a bad science fiction movie with Sam Neal. Sorry, the event horizon is another movie you saw. Yes. I see you're not up on your bad science fiction cinema. Did this only come out in Panama? No, this was a real movie.
Starting point is 00:18:44 It had like Lawrence Fishburn, I think. Sam Neal, it was like a big deal. But anyways, so what is the event horizon of a black hole? Yeah, so that's the point after which you can't escape, right? If you are closer to the center of the black hole than this threshold, you can't escape. Outside of that, there's still a possibility. Inside, there are no paths. It's like you could escape if you could move faster than light, but even if you were
Starting point is 00:19:10 moving at the speed of light, you could not escape. But be careful because people like to say, oh, maybe if you could move faster than light, you if you went faster than the speed of light, blah, blah, blah. But going fast than the speed of light, that's a whole other podcast we should do. It's impossible. And so saying something like going fast
Starting point is 00:19:26 than the speed of light is like saying like, well, then if you had magic, then yeah, sure, all the rules would be off. So like an interstellar, when they showed the black hole as this black sphere, that's the event horizon, right? That's like the edge of that sphere,
Starting point is 00:19:39 black circle is the event horizon because anything inside would just look black. So is this a physics podcast or a film podcast. It's a film six podcast. No, but I mean, I guess, you know, the reason I bring it up is that, you know, I think a lot of people may have heard of the event horizon, right? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:19:58 Conceptually what it is, you can't escape after that. But like a representation of a black hole, that circle is kind of the event horizon, right? Yeah, you're exactly right. And so you would see like the accretion disk around the black hole, the stuff that's about to fall in, like what's on deck to get sucked up by the black hole. But you're right, the black hole. hole itself would be black. And that's the event horizon. You're seeing the edge because you can't see anything in it. Nothing can escape it. Right. And so it's surrounded by matter, which you can
Starting point is 00:20:24 normally see, but the actual black hole itself is the edge of the event horizon. And that's what makes the question so interesting because you can't see in there. People wonder what's in there. Einstein's original idea was that there was something called a singularity. That's a point of essentially of infinite density. At the very center of it, right? That's right. Yeah. An infinite small space, right? Super, super dense. As soon as you cross some threshold of mass density, then you've created this hole in the bottom of the rubber sheet,
Starting point is 00:20:54 a gravitational well that nothing can escape. But it's not necessary that the whole event horizon is filled in with mass. I think this is the point you were trying to make earlier. There's got to be a dense core in there somehow, but it creates a gravitational well that's larger than that core. And so this is the original idea. Einstein's original idea was that there's this singular. to this really, really dense point.
Starting point is 00:21:17 Okay, so maybe a black hole is like some kind of point surrounded by, who knows, but it sort of goes out to the sphere of blackness. That's going to be the name of our band, right? Sphere of blackness. Or my next Panamanian bad sci-fi movie. I think that's La Bola Negra. There's so many concepts tied together into black holes.
Starting point is 00:21:40 But I think people still wonder what's inside a black hole because we're pretty, sure that this idea of a singularity can't be right. I'm pretty sure that there aren't singularities inside black holes. So not even our theory about what's inside is right. Yeah. And
Starting point is 00:21:56 you know, Einstein's theory is wonderful and it's beautiful and it's predicted lots of stuff which seemed weird but actually happens like gravitational waves, right? Einstein predicted gravitational waves, these ripples in space time when massive objects slam into each other or spin around
Starting point is 00:22:12 each other. A hundred years before we saw them, right? or hurt them as it may? Yeah, yeah, decades and decades. I don't remember the exact date, but a long time before we saw them. And the problem with Einstein's theory is that it doesn't include any quantum mechanics. And that's because we figured out quantum mechanics
Starting point is 00:22:28 sort of at the same time or in the decades after general relativity. And something really important about quantum mechanics is that it doesn't allow things to be located in infinitely small spaces. There's a basic fuzziness to the universe, and you just can't violate that. Right. And so having a singular.
Starting point is 00:22:45 Like a point of matter in a zero volume is, you know, it would blow a quantum mechanics mind. Right. But I guess technically quantum mechanics is about momentum, right? Momentum has a minimum size, right? Well, it is about momentum, but it's about actually most measurable things like time, energy, space, and momentum. All these things come in finite grains, like little quanta, little basic units that you can't get smaller than. But even if, what if it's infinite mass, like a black hole or like infinite density? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:23:19 Well, quantum mechanics tells us that doesn't exist, you know, that there's a finite width to everything. And so you can't have infinitely small objects. Quantum mechanics says it just can't happen. Oh, something is happening in there, right? There's something going on inside a black hole. And whatever it is, it's intense enough and dense enough to create a black hole. You don't need infinitely small points to create a black hole. you just need a density above a certain threshold.
Starting point is 00:23:45 General relativity tells us it's an infinite singularity, but quantum mechanics says it can't be infinite. Right. Yeah, there's this idea that I thought was really cool, that anything can become a black hole. Like if you squeeze it enough, it becomes a black hole, right? Like if somebody squeezed me and my mass into a small enough volume, I would just like become a black hole, right?
Starting point is 00:24:07 Yeah, it's a great idea. And I'm not sure, like, technically anything could become a black hole because you'd need to have a certain amount of mass per volume. But I guess in principle, if you compress something down far enough and it had some mass, then it would be dense enough to become a black hole. And black holes don't have to be huge. Black holes can also be tiny. For example, we're trying to create black holes at the Large Hadron Collider.
Starting point is 00:24:31 And those would be black holes like the size of protons. That is a great thought that I don't think a lot of people know, is that black holes can be different sizes. Yeah, absolutely. You can have a tiny one or a huge one or a super massive, gigantic one. That's right. And basically the only thing
Starting point is 00:24:45 you can know about a black hole from the outside is its mass, which means its size, and it's rotation. So it's whether it's spinning or not. And so that's why we desperately want to know
Starting point is 00:24:57 what's inside of black hole beyond just our curiosity. Like anytime there's something in the universe, it's something in your house, for example, that you aren't allowed to look inside. Like if I said, Ornay, never look inside this box.
Starting point is 00:25:09 You'd be deathly curious to see inside it, right? So you're saying it's like the universe has created a box and it refuses to tell us what's inside. That's right. Well, this is a perfect point to take a break. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly and now I'm seriously suspicious. Oh, wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit.
Starting point is 00:25:33 Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast. So we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now hold up, isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly
Starting point is 00:26:01 trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the Explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush.
Starting point is 00:26:26 Parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the Explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene.
Starting point is 00:26:49 In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance, bro, tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome to Brown and Vision.
Starting point is 00:27:29 This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit or turning to credit cards, you may just reclass. create the same problem a year from now when you do feel like you are bleeding from these high interest rates i would start shopping for a debt consolidation loan starting with your local credit union shopping around online looking for some online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable listen i am not here to judge it is so expensive in these streets i 100% can see how in just a few months you can have this much credit card debt when it weighs on you it's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand it's nice and dark and
Starting point is 00:28:08 the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it, and in fact, it may get even worse. For more judgment-free money advice, listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. If you could see inside it, you would learn something really deep about the way gravity works and quantum mechanics and how they're connected. There's like, you know, 10 Nobel Prize's worth of stuff, hiding inside a black hole, maybe even an actual Nobel Prize. Wow. So that's the answer to the question.
Starting point is 00:28:43 What's inside a black hole is fame and fortune? A trip to Stockholm. So what would happen if you try to get near a black hole? Okay, yeah. Well, there's something you have to understand, which is something called a tidal force. And the best way to understand it, maybe, is to think about what happens when things get near the sun, for example.
Starting point is 00:29:05 So one of my favorite examples came in 1997, when this comet came into our solar system and approached really close to the sun. It's called Comet Shoemaker Levy. Is that the one that almost missed Jupiter? That's the one that slammed right into Jupiter, actually. Wow. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:29:21 Okay. Yeah, it was pretty awesome to watch. Cosmic collisions. But before it got there, it got torn apart by tidal forces. Oh, shredded. Yeah, it got shredded. And say you're near a black hole or you're near the sun or something, then your head and your feet are not the same distance from the sun.
Starting point is 00:29:40 And because gravity depends on the distance. So your head will be pulled in with greater force than your feet. If your head are closer than your feet, then yeah, there'll be a stronger force on your head than there is on your feet. And effectively, that means it's tearing you apart. But the difference would have to be greater than the force is holding me together. Exactly. Like right now, you are sitting on the earth, and there is a greater force on your feet than there is on your head.
Starting point is 00:30:04 So whatever part of your body is on the floor right now is feeling a stronger gravitational force than whatever part is elevated, right? Because it's further from the center of the Earth. Right, right. Gravity falls like one of a distance squared. So that's a pretty big factor. But the difference is not enough to overcome the forces that are holding me together. That's right. You're saying near a black hole, those differences are so huge you would actually shred your part.
Starting point is 00:30:27 Yeah, exactly. Like that comet that came into the solar system got shredded by Jupiter and by the sun. If you got too close to a black hole, you would get torn up. part before you got anywhere near it. So in my view, it's impossible to get very close to a black hole unless you're incredibly strong. You need to build an object
Starting point is 00:30:45 with really, really tight bonds, right? The things that are holding me together are the electromagnetic bonds between the atoms in my body. And gravity is constantly tugging on those if I'm near the earth or near the sun. Tugging on those. But, you know, not so hard. And we've evolved to be strong enough
Starting point is 00:31:00 to not be shredded by the earth. But not strong enough to be to not be shredded by a black hole. Right. So basically, we may never be able to, like, go to a black hole and see what's inside, right? It's hard to imagine. And I hate to say never. I hate to say never because it prescribes future generations' intelligence.
Starting point is 00:31:16 And there's probably some genius out there who has a clever idea for how to do it. It's not theoretically impossible to be near a black hole. It's just practically very difficult. Okay. Which makes it, you know, a pretty tough engineering problem. So we know black holes are out there. We know they're mysterious. We know they contain some.
Starting point is 00:31:34 deep dark secret. We don't think they contain the anti-universe. I don't believe they contain wormholes. But you don't know. I don't know. No. They don't believe they contain worms or anything else weird. But I would love to get to know what's inside a black hole. I don't know about visiting one or seeing one or getting too close to one and getting shredded. I desperately want to know what's inside a black hole. Maybe inside we'll find my marbles. They lost for sure. All right. Thanks everyone for listening to Daniel and Jorge Explain the Thanks for listening. Do you have a question you wish we would cover?
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Starting point is 00:33:23 There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of the new season of, Love Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot.
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