Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Brian Keating On Black Holes, Wormholes and the Origin of Everything w/ James Altucher

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

Join my mailing list https://briankeating.com/list to win a real 4 billion year old meteorite! All .edu emails in the USA 🇺🇸 will WIN! A couple of months ago, I had the pleasure of chatting with James Altucher. James is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, bestselling author, and host of The James Altucher show.  In the first part of our interview, James wanted to learn more about black holes, wormholes, and the origin of the universe, so we explored these topics in detail. Enjoy!  Key Takeaways: 00:00:00 Intro 00:00:37 IQ and intelligence  00:01:40 History of the alphabet and Rosetta Stone  00:03:12 Recent JWST discoveries and black holes 00:07:19 The relationship between time and gravity  00:11:51 Falling into a black hole  00:23:39 Mathematics vs. physics  00:27:53 What happened with Mercury?  00:33:00 Why is there dark matter?  00:35:45 The concept of a wormhole  00:38:07 Limits of the speed of light and Einstein’s relativity  00:49:47 Outro — Additional resources: 📝 Get one month of Snipd Premium for free with this link: https://get.snipd.com/Cx7S/brianSnipd Snipd lets you take Smart Notes 🧠 with AI 💡 — it’s my favorite podcast player 😀 ! ➡️ Connect with James Altucher: 🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheJamesAltucherShow  💻 Website: https://jamesaltucher.com/ ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So we had Aristotle, but then we had Isaac Newton, then we had Einstein, then we had quantum mechanics. And it's sort of like the height of creativity. Physics is very creative in the sense that there's proving things in physics and then we assume that they're true. But then there's another group of physicists that come along and say, you know what, I'm going to change the rules for a little while. Because we don't really know what the real first principles are. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, hell. You ever go on Quora when occasionally there's a question like,

what's it like to have 180 IQ? And then someone answers as if because they think they have 180 IQ and they're like, I'm very, I feel very alienated all the time because no one ever understands me. Or it's like I process all the information around me so much faster than everyone else that it's hard to then communicate what I'm seeing and feeling because I know so much.

Like it's just, there's so much ego when anyone asks that question on Quora or any, or Reddit or whatever. Yeah, it's like when someone asks you, you know, you're a comedian, like, what makes you so funny? Like, it's guaranteed. Huh, no one ever asked me that when I was a comedian. It's good because there's no way to be funny.

There's no way to answer that question and actually, you know, portray yourself as humorous. Because it's like, you're just going to be trying like, oh, I got to make a joke. And yeah, no, to me, it's a no-in proposition. But, yeah, I mean, people say, I'm smart, and I say, well, I have to sing the alphabet song to know what comes after R. It's not what you think.

It's not all I'm cracked up to be. What do you think of the original alphabet was? What do you think? Like, there was a discussion on some Facebook thread, whether or not it was Hebrew, because Al-Fet, was it, Gimald, whatever. I don't even know the Hebrew alphabet. I'm Jewish. Yeah.

But it's kind of like matches ABCD. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, that's definitely true. No, so Phoenician and Hebrew are pretty similar. If you look at the actual symbols, they're very different from what Hebrew looks like today. And of course, not too many people speak Phoenician. I always think the most suspicious thing ever found was the Rosetta Stone. You know, if you ever look at the Rosetta Stone, it's got like three different languages on it.

And it's like just the three languages you needed to decipher every single ancient text ever written. It's just, it's too perfect. It's too on the nose. So you think it's a fraud? I mean, there's a good book about it. I haven't finished reading it or listening to it called like the Language of the Gods or something. Oh, is that like Eric Frum?

And people make it out. There is a book by him, but that's not it. No, it's like Simon Winchester. I forget who it is, but I haven't listened to it and I'm about it over a year. But the thing is like it wasn't so simple. Like everyone thinks, oh, it's just, you know, here's a hieroglyphic of a rooster

and it's next to the, you know, Greek letter row and whatever. But it was like really difficult to decipher it. It's almost like magical that it ever, you know, provided anything useful. Moving on from the Rosetta Stone

in my random question about language, there was a web telescope discovery. I'm very glad you're on today because there was a web telescope discovery recently. It has very much disturbed me about the status of the universe. And so here's the discovery. They found a massive

black hole that dates back to 400 million years after the supposed Big Bang happened. And I, you know, we've talked about this many times. The cosmic radiation is, I mean, how did suns even form in time for 400 million years? How did sons even form in time to create a massive black hole? Yeah, well, there's a couple ways you could get a black hole. I mean. Could the black hole have existed before the, Big Bang. Yeah, I mean, there are certainly claims that there are what are called primordial black hole,

so a black hole that was present since the beginning of the universe. That's something that people have considered because it provides a mechanism to explain another thing we don't understand, which is dark matter. So dark matter is this, you know, substance that we infer exists because of its gravitational influence on the nearby universe and how our galaxy rotates and how other galaxies rotate, and yet we don't see any evidence for any material like it, but black holes are kind of like idyllic candidates for dark matter. They're not giving off any light. In fact, they swallow up all the light. They're massive, so they have tremendous amount of gravitational force.

And so they really behave just like you'd like dark matter to behave. And if dark matter exists, it should have existed very early in the universe's history as well. So that's one candidate called primordial black holes originating at the Big Bang. maybe what you're saying is maybe with the big bang, a lot of atoms and matter spun off, but maybe what remained, sort of like when you smash into a car, there's little bits and pieces everywhere,

but some big pieces still exist that weren't really smashed up. Maybe that's these primordial black holes. Well, a black hole in its most idealized form is just an extremely highly curved volume of space time. So it doesn't... Why is time in the equation there? Why can't you just say,

it's a very dense, you know, enormously almost infinite gravity thing. What does time have to do with it? Well, because you cannot specify a unique position in space without also allocating the time at which it occurs. So in a sense, having the universe, all sorts of events that happen in the universe are not, it's not possible to decouple the effect of some massive obvious. only and isolated only to its effect on spatial dimensions. So you have to include time. So time is sort of essential. And in the past, before Einstein, time was supposedly thought to be independent

of space. So you'd plot like a cannonball, you know, moving at some, you know, going up to some height as a function of time. So time was this independent variable and you plotted the height of it and then it operated under gravity and it would accelerate and its velocity would change, etc. But then Einstein came along and said, well, actually, space and time are one unified entity. And, you know, thinking about them separate would be like, well, trying to understand the motion of an object in three dimensions, but only describing two of them. And so that would lead to, you know, weird, weird kind of project. Like, imagine if you're looking at a cannonball and it shoots up and it makes a parabola. So you're looking at it in a profile. But if you look at it

from above, it doesn't look like that at all. It just looks like it moves in a straight line. So suppressing a dimension has grave consequences in terms of your ability to understand dynamically what's occurring. So those are sort of the ways that we unify. We talk about space and time together. And also, if you're near a black hole, time does, you know, depend on how close you are to the black hole and how massive the black hole is. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save?

Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected.

When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. I don't fully understand when people say this. Like, what's the relationship between time and gravity? So supposedly, what I understand is, and I don't understand why. If the bigger the gravity of the object you're standing on,

like a planet or a black hole or whatever, the bigger the gravity, the slower time is to the observer. So like if I watched something fall into a black hole, would it take forever? But to that person, it's just going like normal. Yeah, that's right. So one of the key aspects of relativity,

even absent of gravity, is that time is not absolute, the way it is to Newton. So in Newton, you could plot time, and it would be the universal function always flowing at the same rate for all observers everywhere. And in general, that's not possible

to have a coordinate system where everybody agrees on when an event occurs. And even whether or not certain events are simultaneous with other events. So you light a firework, you know, in your reference frame. If I'm moving with respect to your reference frame, I might see the effect of,

the firework happening before I see the cause of you lighting the firework, okay, depending on my velocity relative to you. So you can have things like there are certain examples where you have like, let's say in your reference frame, you're carrying a golf club and that golf club and you're just fitting inside of your car. But if you're moving, and the golf club is exactly as wide as your car. But if you're moving at very high speeds, the golf club gets contracted with respect to the dimension that direction it.

you're moving it in, and it'll actually be smaller than the width of the car. So you can actually have a golf club that's wider than the width of your car and slam the doors on both sides of it and fit it inside, even though it's too big in a frame that's stationary with respect to the car for the golf club to fit. And that's because of what's called length contraction, so that things get smaller and timescales take longer for things that are moving. But you have to add, so there's no way for you to do. your velocity in the universe. There's no absolute center of the universe from which you can

determine your velocity. Velocity is relative to observers, and you've had this experience, probably you're sitting in traffic, and the car next to you starts to move, and it feels like you're moving backwards, but the car's next to you is moving forwards, or on a train. The same kind of behavior can happen. And you can't really say, unless you have some third person, can't really agree that who's actually moving. Is it you moving? Is it the train moving?

Of course, the whole Earth is moving with respect to the solar system. The solar system is moving with respect to the galaxy. So taking everything to account, you cannot say for sure what velocity you have. But acceleration can be determined.

So you can actually, people, observers will agree that one entity is accelerating versus another entity. So if you have a rocket moving through space, at constant velocity, you can't determine if you're in acceleration, but you can't, if you're moving with constant velocity. But if you start to accelerate, then you start to experience phenomena that are,

that can allow you to determine that you're accelerating. So it's kind of like you can see something, you can determine the properties of something that's more sophisticated. Acceleration is a higher order calculus, you know, function, a derivative, technically, it's called, than is velocity. But it is actually easier and more agreed about. upon when something is accelerating as opposed to something that's moving a constant velocity. And gravity is indistinguishable from acceleration. So if you're in a rocket and the rocket has no

windows and it's accelerating at 1G, you can't tell if you're, and it's accelerating upwards, you can't tell if you're on the Earth's surface stationary inside of an elevator that's not moving, or you're in this rocket accelerating through the universe at 1G. There's no experiment that you can do to tell the difference between those two phenomena. And they're very different, right? Gravity versus motion. And so once you have something moving and accelerating, then you can say that it actually is, it's time that it experiences will be degraded relative to how it would be behaving if it wasn't being accelerated. So the stronger the gravitational field, the stronger the acceleration, the slower time seems to elapse. So that's why

if someone's falling into a black hole, it could seem to an outside observer like it's taking forever for this person to get to the center of the black hole. But for that person, it's just, he just falls right into the black hole. Yeah, eventually. Now, if you're near a black hole for a little bit

and you get out of it somehow, is that you're in the future, right? For us, a lot of time has passed. But for that person, no time has passed. Well, yes, in a sense. So there are two regions of the, black hole. One is called the event horizon, things inside the event horizon. Once you go beyond the event horizon, you cannot escape out of the gravitational potential of that object. So it's sort of

like if you throw a baseball on the surface of the earth, if you throw it at less than the so-called escape velocity, it will always come back down to Earth. If you throw it greater than escape velocity, which is like 10 kilometers per second, it's very fast, it will go and leave the Earth's gravity forever. So that's purely the velocity up. But the black hole, once you get inside the event horizon, there's no way out. So every possible

path that you could take will always take you to the singularity at the center of the black hole. There's no way to escape that. I have a question about this. When we look at a black hole, do we see the event horizon? Do we know where the event horizon exists? Yeah. Well, so we've actually made images of it, not me, but there's

a telescope called the Event Horizon telescope, it's actually an array of telescopes all over the Earth's surface from Chile to the South Pole. And it has taken very high resolution images of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. My question then is, if we can see the event horizon, doesn't that that imply some energy is leaving the black hole because we can see it? Like we don't know something exists unless like light is emanating from it or bouncing off of it. Like something, that's why I see you, that's why I see the chair next to me. It's because something's coming from that object. Right. So the black hole supposedly nothing's coming from it. Right. So anything that's coming

into the black hole will be on a trajectory that will say come radially from, you know, some distance and eventually fall into the black hole. And there's stuff behind it. So there's an object that just now is entering the black holes in End Horizon. And right before it went into the black holes of End Horizon, yeah, there was light coming from this object. Say it was super hot gas because things do get accelerated to, almost the speed of light as they fall into the black holes event horizon. And right before they fall in, they're bumping up against each other. They're emitting large amounts of x-rays and visible light and even radio waves. And so the light will come over the top of the black hole. There'll be some trajectory that the black hole from some the plane of all the material looks like a giant solar system, basically. This stuff is accreting and spiraling and swirling in to get to the center of the black hole. So there'll be something in the distance behind the black hole from your,

perspective and it will have light that'll be coming just grazing the black holes of event horizon missing it by one millimeter and as long as it misses it by any amount it will be bent and then launched on a trajectory and it'll come towards us if it's exactly at the vent horizon it will start to orbit around the black hole so you'll have the light in an orbit you know we think of a planet in an orbit but imagine light being in an orbit like almost like laser beams going in a circular orbit around the black hole, and then anything closer in an angle that's more steep than that will go into the black hole and we won't see it. So you're right. We're not seeing stuff that's inside the event horizon. So you actually see a shadow. You see a light shadow where there's no

more light that's coming towards you. And then you're seeing a halo around the shadow, the black spot, the black holes of end horizon, of every trajectory of a photon that just barely grazed the event horizon, but didn't quite go into it. And And these are these images that have been made of these two black holes. One is in a galaxy about 50 million light years away called M87. And then there's one in our center of our galaxy called Sagittarius A Star. And that's this giant monster black hole at the center of our galaxy. And so, yeah, a colleague, a friend of mine at Harvard, Shep Doldman, he's been the leader of this project.

And they've made images of it for the past, you know, five years or so now. And now there's this new, there's this. black hole from basically the beginning of the universe that like black holes are usually made from basically stars that got super massive and then imploded on themselves and became super dense hence black holes but there's this what you're calling a primordial black hole which is somehow not that it's it's made of something else we don't i guess we can't possibly know what and it's right from the beginning of the universe well it's not quite from the very beginning so so 400 million years after the Big Bang, it's not, you know, it's one, it's about 5% of the universe's current age.

So it's not time equals zero. So a primordial black hole would be, yes, would be exactly, you know, at the beginning of time. In this case, what they've, what they're seeing is, you know, is a object that they claim in a galaxy. And that the galaxy is, is, has an age that they've, that they've dated to 400 million years after the Big Bang. So it's not really the beginning of time. In fact, I study something

that's a thousand times older than this, which is the cosmic micro-background radiation. That's 400,000 years old. So there were no galaxies. Meaning it was made 400,000 years after the Big Bang. That's right. It's the furthest thing we can really see because it's so dense.

We can't see past it. Past it, we would see evidence of the Big Bang if we could see past it. That's right. So there's different ways that you could get there. If it was truly primordial, and then it could be primordial and then just be located in an old galaxy, that's possible. But it also could be, and so where would it come from? It was primordial. So there's a theory, actually, by one of the three recipients of the Nobel Prize,

Sir Roger Penrose, your co-author and think like a Nobel Prize winner. That's right. Roger and me. He conjectured that there were actually black holes are one of the few things that can survive the collapse of a previous universe. So he believes that our universe began thanks in part to the death of a pre-existing universe, as we talked about many years ago, and different scenarios of how the universe could begin. And the question of whether or not that scenario is true, nevertheless, it's possible that this black hole could have come from the collapse of another universe where these black holes, you really can't destroy a black hole.

They only get bigger and bigger as they accrete and accumulate more and more mass, just like we do in middle age. But if that theory was true, then when the Big Bang happened, it just like went straight through these black holes.

And so they, like, let's say the, you know, the Big Bang wouldn't have pushed the black holes away, like further out of our universe. Yeah. So his model that you basically, a universe evolves once it's in existence, it evolves for trillions of years, perhaps. And the end point of all the matter in the universe

is really surprising that there's really no escape from the black holes that start to form because, as I say, they're kind of irreducible. Once you have a black hole, there's no way, there's no garbage can throw it into. You throw it into a garbage can, the black hole gets bigger.

It swallows the mass of the garbage can. In particular, yes, it's essentially a black hole. as I said, in its purest form, a black hole only has three properties. It only has its mass. It has its, what's called it, spin, or if it's rotating or not, and it can have a charge.

It can have an electrical charge associated with it. But that's it. So it's really a region of the curvature of space time. If you envision space time as sort of a trampoline, and the more mass of an object is, say the sun, then it makes it a deeper depression. in space time, and that allows then a smaller object, like a golf ball, to roll around in the depression, the indentation made by the black hole or the curvature of space. But if you imagine

a black hole, turn up the mass of the sun from a bowling ball and make it like infinite. So it's basically now vertical walls of the trampoline. That's sort of what a black hole is. It's just a place of infinite curvature. And so it doesn't really have any other properties. And so can that go through the Big Bang itself? Well, the Big Bang is sort of a singularity in some concepts, but in Roger Penrose is not. It doesn't have a singularity. The universe just kind of transitions gets more and more diluted.

And then at greater and greater timescales, eventually the energy is sufficient to nucleate the expansion of another universe. But there's no mechanism to destroy the black holes that build up. so there's no dissipation mechanism for them. So they just live forever. Now, someone like Roger Penrose, genius, Nobel Prize winner, one of the smartest businesses ever, you know, almost in your category

where his knowledge and experience perhaps equals yours. But he seems very confident in his theories about this. How can you really be confident in a theory like that? Well, you really can't. We don't really know. Yeah. Science is a. empirical, you know, fits, you know, is an empirical endeavor, which means that you have to base your,

your credibility or credulity or belief in something on evidence. So you have some idea, you have a guess, and that becomes a hypothesis. And then you try to assemble as much information to support it and see how well does it explain things that have not been explained in the past. Does it, Does it raise internal contradictions? Does it have features that are more powerful than a pre-existing idea? And you keep going through the list of different virtues of a model or an idea. And if it has enough virtues and passes enough confrontations with observation, then you might call it a theory.

It's funny because people say, oh, it's just your theory or like, oh, evolution, that's just a theory. But in physics, Remember, there's no way to prove something in physics. I can't prove that the Earth is a perfect sphere. In fact, it's not a perfect sphere. It has some distortions to it. But I can make the case that it's more spherical than it is flat. And in doing so, I have to provide evidence for that claim.

And then someone else can come along and say, actually, no, it's not perfectly spherical. It has these distortions. And it's actually slightly shaped like a pair. and it has these different properties. So only by doing that do we have a closer and closer zeroing in on the quote truth. But we can't very different from mathematics or computer science or something. You can make a proof in mathematics, which is not refutable unless the laws of logic are wrong. And then in which case you're trying to use the laws of logic to prove that the laws of logic are not consistent.

It's interesting, though, because math, everything derives from some first principles, right? So mathematics relies on the basic concepts of set theory. And from set theory, we can build a set of axioms that explains all of math. But if we weren't using set theory, and I don't know why we wouldn't, the rules would be different, and we'd be proving different things. But set theory conveniently describes how we count, basically, and matches that perfectly. That's right, yeah. So with physics, like it seems like the first principles sometimes change.

So we had Aristotle, but then we had Isaac Newton, then we had Einstein, then we had quantum mechanics. And it's sort of like the height of creativity. Physics is very creative in the sense that we have, there's proving things in physics and then we assume that they're true. But then there's another group of physicists that come along and say, you know what, I'm going to change the rules for a little while because we don't really know what the real first principles are. Yeah, I wouldn't say that they're guided by desire to change the rules. It's that either there's two different ways that scientific discoveries happen. One is that we discover something serendipitously. We look at Mercury and we say, well, that's weird.

Mercury is moving in this weird way. And it's not predicted or explainable using the theory of universal gravitation of Isaac Newton. So then somebody would say, I'm going to explain that effect or retur dictate, not predict it, but retradicted. I'm going to say that there... I didn't know there was a word for that. Yeah, yeah. Or post-diction instead of prediction.

In other words, you knew that this was a problem, and even Newton knew it was a problem. You know, they were quite astute, even in the 17-1800s, but they didn't know the resolution of it because you can't predict it. You cannot explain, rather, why Mercury behaves in a strange way using Newtonian gravity alone. You need a new conception of gravity, which is what Einstein came along and did. And then there's another thing that can happen, which is that you can have a theory and then have a conclusion that comes from it that is then a prediction. So it actually happened with Newtonian gravity.

There was a motion of the planet Uranus. By the way, did you know that NASA's commission made to change the name of the planet Uranus? because it's so embarrassing that astronomers are, you know, and possibly, you know, tormented by the fact that saying Uranus has brought shame and embarrassment upon us. So it's true. So it was a horrible name. So I've actually come up with a new name for it,

and I'm prepared to reveal that on the James Altucher show right now. Well, what is the new name? Your rectum. So. Okay, by wait, you know why it fails? Why? because all the planets except Earth are named after the Roman names of the Greek gods, right? So Mercury and Venus, Mercury is Hermes in Greek mythology.

Venus is Aphrodite, Mars is Ares. Saturn actually, is Saturn. Saturn is Cronus in Greek mythology? Jupiter is Zeus. Yeah. Neptune is Poseidon. Uranus is Hephaestus, I believe. Pluto is Hades.

Yeah. It's not a planet anymore, I guess. I don't know. That's right. So sometime in the mid-1700s, people looked at the planet Uranus and its orbit, and they were looking at it, and they noticed sometimes in the era

would be a little too far to the left, and sometimes it was a little too far to the right. And they have great historical data for it, and just using Newton's laws of motion, universal gravitation, an astronomer named Laverier, his name is Laverier, a French astronomer, predicted that there would be another planet beyond the orbit of Uranus, and it would be pulling and slightly tugging on or delaying the orbit via its gravitational impact on Uranus.

And he actually told somebody where to look, and they discovered it exactly where he predicted it purely based upon the laws of Isaac Newton. So how come they didn't apply that same idea to Mercury? like what happened with Mercury? Oh my dear friend, you're anticipating what I'm about to say next. So the same guy said, hey, this is great. And if you think about it, even though we can see Neptune and they did discover it, it was kind of the first prediction of dark matter.

In other words, they were saying there was some unseen matter that had a gravitational pull on something that we could see, visible light in the form of the planet Uranus, and using this prediction, they were able to recover the position of the dark matter, which then you could see actually gives off some light. And that's the planet Neptune. So that was the discovery of Neptune. And so the same guy was a smart guy. So he said, well, this worked really well.

Maybe there was another planet inside the orbit of Mercury, closer to the sun, that's doing the same thing. And the reason that we haven't seen it is because it's so close to the sun, it's blinded and we're blinded to its presence. And so it was called Vulcan. So the planet Vulcan was predicted by the same guy using the same technique and that's totally wrong. There is no planet closer to the sun than Mercury.

So in that case, dark matter hypothesis was wrong. And what was really needed was kind of like a version of string theory or some new form of physics to augment the laws of Isaac Newton. And that was the laws of general relativity that we were talking about earlier. That was what Einstein came up with. So you had to actually change the relationship of the laws of physics, the underlying notion of space and time and their connectedness together, in order to have the correct explanation, retradiction,

for the orbit of Mercury. And that's in fact what happened. So what is then, what is specifically the reason Mercury is little off from Newtonian physics? So there's an effect of near very strong gravitational mass of objects like the sun that distorts space time and causes slight indentations in a way, that causes this advance of the orbit, you know, basically acts as an additional distortion, which then acts in distortion, meaning a curvature of space time.

All curvature of space time is how we perceive the force of gravity. So there's an additional force of gravity due to the presence of the mass of the sun that's not encountered for, as you get closer and closer to the sun's surface, you actually pick up an extra term and an extra amount of gravity or curvature of space time that is not present in Newtonian gravity, specifically because gravity affects time as well as space. So you had to basically add the effect of gravity on time

in order to explain the effect of gravity and mass on objects, like massive objects like the planet Mercury. If it didn't have an effect on time, then you wouldn't have this advance, and therefore it was absent in Newton's laws. I'm still not quite sure I fully understand gravity's effects on time, but that's okay. But the question I have is, was Einstein aware that his theories could be applied to Mercury before he came?

Like, did he use Mercury as something he was thinking about before he came up with the theory of relativity? Like, did he curve fit to make it work? No, no. He was definitely interested in this, and this was the first and really the only thing that he could think of that could provide a test bed at this time in 1914 for the observed behavior of his theory.

So his theory made a prediction, and that prediction would explain Mercury's behavior. And then later it was realized there were many, many other consequences of Einstein's general relativity, including the fact that when there's an eclipse of the sun, and that a total solar eclipse provided an opportunity to view stars that were behind,

the sun and they were normally occluded by the brightness of the sun and rendered invisible. But during an eclipse, you can see stars and you can measure their positions. And there's an effect called gravitational lensing where the gravity of the object, either a black hole or in this case the sun, bends the position of where the starlight should be, just like it bends the trajectory of how the planet Mercury moves. And so Einstein predicted that as well. And he actually made a math mistake, but eventually he corrected it. And then in 1919, so over 100 years ago, it was confirmed that there was, in fact, this distortion of starlight by the mass of the sun.

And this was the great discovery that eventually did win him the Nobel Prize, even though people didn't want to admit it. It was just too astounding of a discovery to neglect. And so he didn't win the Nobel Prize in 1905 when he came up with relativity itself, or even in 1915, when he came up with the general theory of relativity, it described. gravity. He only won it after this 1919 discovery in 1921. He won the 1921 Nobel Prize. Now, how come his theories don't explain dark matter? Like, why is there dark matter? Why couldn't it be the case that what he's really predicting is that there's some super massive black hole, unbelievably massive, that's further than our ability to see it. It went in the other direction when the big bang happened, whatever. And that could be the reason why we,

experience some weird gravitational tendencies? Well, there are people that conjecture that dark matter is the manifestation of ordinary matter in another dimension. We don't have any evidence of that. It could be, just as if you have two different, imagine you have two different infinite chess boards, right? And on the chess boards are living some creatures that only are two-dimensional, they list live in this flatland, as it's called. then there's another chess board, and that chess board is separated by, you know, it could be one millimeter away. If they can't access, they can't move into that third dimension, either set of creatures on either two-dimensional chessboard. They don't have any access to it using light,

but if gravity could propagate from one chess board to the other chess board, then you could detect the presence of this other universe, this other flatland, merely by looking at the effects on objects in your own chess board. So the pieces, you know, these flat two-dimensional chess pieces would move around differently because they might be tugged upon by the gravity of another object in another universe that's actually a very short distance away. And these have been explored by people like Lisa Randall and other people. There's no evidence for this, but that is exactly what you're saying,

is one of the explanations of dark manner. So this is why I think physics is, is, again, a super creative discipline because you have these things that are, quote, unquote, real that are happening. But we don't really know why. And we have to just be as creative as possible, even crazy. Like there's other dimensions and the multiverse and, you know, every theory is basically crazy about the universe. But in physics, you're allowed to be as crazy as possible. Sometimes it's even better to be, oh, there's 12 dimensions and strings and all these things. And that's rewarded because good creativity backed somehow by a mathematical model that you might even make up to support your theory is rewarded in physics.

Yeah. No, there are, you know, but the issue is that it might just be kind of an example of science fiction, right? I mean, there's more things you can theorize than you can actually expect to exist in reality. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month.

Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Well, and I have a question about that. I'm sorry to keep interrupting, but I get curious. So like the concept of a wormhole, is that science fiction? Is it theoretical or is it actual?

And if it's actual, is it likely to be actual or is it actually actual? No, I mean, there's no, there's absolutely no evidence for wormholes. There is abundant evidence for black holes. Wormholes are sort of an interesting, almost cultural phenomenon more than they are, a practical physics instance of something that could truly be measured. or important in science. So there's no necessity for wormholes. But there is sort of a necessity for black holes

because you have these objects of the endpoints of which are gravitationally collapsed objects and there's no way to escape. Once you start gravitational collapse of a massive star, as you suggested early on, it's basically a runaway positive feedback loop. There's no way to avoid collapsing to

in a singularity where you can't do it. There's absolutely infinite curvature. Now, you can't see the singularity because it's obscured by this event horizon or if you like any signature of it would be contained within the event horizon and you cannot penetrate the event horizon. There's no escape

velocity that allows you to get a signal out from inside the event horizon to any distance away from it. So like radio waves light waves, every type of energy or frequency, the gravity is too strong for it. So the event horizon is the fictitious surface within which the escape velocity of any object, a baseball, a photon, a neutron, a crouton, is the speed of light. And then it only gets larger and larger as you get closer and closer to the singularity itself.

So at the singularity, the escape velocity is infinite. And so it's impossible to generate anything that goes faster than the speed of light made of matter or energy. But, you know, all the more so is impossible, you know, to a much greater degree to do something that's infinite velocity. That would be the escape velocity at the singularity itself. So I forget if this is an Einstein thing, but if you go, if an object goes to speed, beat of light, doesn't it get like infinitely massive or what's the properties? So, so inside a black hole, doesn't it just like, is it, is it infinitely massive there, even though it's a singularity? So mass is the property that we associate with difficulty in moving something. So it's sort of like

inertia. Mass is how much force do you have to apply to something to get it to travel with some acceleration. So if you have a mass, if you want to move something and you want it to have an extremely high acceleration, say start from zero and accelerate to the speed of light, then that you're taking some finite force and you're dividing by a very large number. The acceleration in F equals MA would be extremely large. So the mass would then be equal to zero. So the only way to get something to move, you know, infinite speed or, you know, faster than the speed of light would be if it had less than zero mass. So all photons, all particles of light in the vacuum, they travel at the speed of light. And then any massive object to travel to get to a given velocity, the equation that tells you

how much energy you have to provide looks like one divided by the square root of one minus the velocity over the speed of light squared. So let's say you want to go this, you want to go at the, you know, half the speed of light. So the energy you're going to have to provide that object is going to be many, many times it's so-called rest mass. So you're going to have to supply energy more than all the matter energy that it has itself. And that E equals MC squared equation is the equation that gives, you know, the power of a nuclear weapon.

In other words, the square of the speed of light is a tremendous number. And so, yeah, so any finite amount of mass will require, an infinite amount of energy to travel at the speed of light. And anything that's almost zero mass or is zero mass, like a photon, can travel only at the speed of light. There's no way to slow down a photon in the vacuum. Why is the speed of light a limit? Like, is it like an arbitrary limit that happened to be just like magically the number

and nothing can go faster than this? Well, so what ended up happening was in the 1850s, in the middle of 1800s, Maxwell, James Clerk Maxwell is a Scottish physicist, he was looking at the laws of electricity and magnetism and came up with these four equations, called the Maxwell equations, and these are four what are called differential equations.

And they describe how big an electric field does a charge produce, how big a magnetic field does a current produce. And then it was found that you could take these four equations and combine them in a certain way. And you've got two equations for the propagation of waves so that you'd have a field, an electromagnetic field, either a magnetic field or an electric field, and then it would oscillate sinusoidally

with a given frequency in time and a given period or wavelength in space. And it was found that when he calculated what that speed is of a wave, which is pretty straightforward thing to do in physics, the speed that emerged was a speed that was very, very close to the speed of light, as it was known at that time. The speed of light was very difficult to measure, but it was known it was greater than about 200,000 kilometers per second and less than 400,000. It's exactly

300,000 kilometers per second. But back then, so it was very suspiciously close. And so he realized that actually these waves would then be propagating with a speed of the speed of light. as it was known at that time. But the problem was they didn't know about any waves that could propagate without there being some kind of medium, like an ocean or air in a room for a sound wave. They didn't know of any waves that could propagate without some kind of substance to support them.

And so he conjectured this substance called the ether, that there must be some, you know, basically this invisible fluid that fills all of the universe called the ether. and then for about 50 years, people tried to see if they could detect the ether, and they couldn't find that they found they couldn't detect the ether. And in fact, there was no way to even predict, you know, a value that would be consistent with what these measurements seem to indicate.

So eventually we got rid of the ether, and then it was a big puzzle how you could have, you know, light traveling always at the speed of light, without any substance supporting it. and that's where Einstein comes in in 1905, 50 years later or so, and comes up with the notion that light only travels at the speed of light. And light is an electromagnetic wave. And no matter what reference frame you're in,

no matter how fast you're moving, if you turn on a flashlight, that flashlight will always travel at the speed of light as observed by any observer in any of the reference frames. Even if you're traveling in half the speed of light, if that was even possible, you turn on a flashlight, you will still see the light traveling away from you at the speed of light. And so it became really the only way to have that happen

was to say that when something is in motion, either the time for that observer slows down or the length as observed by those observers gets smaller. So either time gets longer or distances get shorter or both. And these effects were then measured in the laboratory. So you could actually measure things at very high speeds and measure how long they lived for if it was a particle. And if it was moving very close to the speed of light

or some very fast velocity, it would actually live longer than it would and decay at a later time than its brother in a jar sitting stationary at rest on the earth's surface. And these were all measured. So how did they figure out, though, that light didn't need anything to propagate through?

It didn't need an ether. So Einstein Well, so that was observed experimentally that there was no detectable ether And so the explanation for it is, you know, really relies on the generation of how electromagnetic waves are generated. So if you have a magnet and you have a wire, if you move that magnet inside the wire, it will generate an alternating electric current. the current will oscillate back and forth inside the wire. And that oscillation shows you there's a connection between current is just the motion of electric charges.

And a magnetic field is a collection of, you know, as a collective property of matter that generates this magnetic field. And so as long as you have a magnetic field and it's moving, there's something moving in it, it will generate a changing electric current. and once you have a changing electric current, that generates a magnetic field. So if you have a current in a wire, it will generate a magnetic field, a constant magnetic field. And if you alternate the current of the wire, it will generate an alternating current. And then if you do both of those at the same time, moving a magnet and having an oscillating current,

you can actually generate a self-sustaining electromagnetic wave. So it's sort of hard to visualize. It's like the vacuum has the potential at all points in, in time and in space, to have a light wave or an electromagnetic field. And then in certain places, we call those, you know, an excess of probability to find an electric magnetic field a charge or a magnetic field. So it's really kind of a self-propagating thing. It's almost like a wave that generates itself.

You don't need, there's nothing waving. There's no medium. Like the vacuum is changing in the sense that it has a higher or lower chance of having this value for an electric or magnetic field. And we have observed that, and that's what's called quantum field theory. We've observed a quantum version of it. We have a classical version. Maxwell is a classical field theory and quantum electrodynamics, Richard Feynman.

That's a quantum field. And we have a very good description of all the forces of nature, except for gravity, both classically and quantum mechanically. But gravity, we don't have a quantum mechanical description of. So we don't know, actually, if there's a quantum mechanical description of. we don't know actually if there's a quantum analog of a photon. People call it the graviton, but we actually have never observed it. And even though gravity has many of the properties of light and other electromagnetic waves.

That's right, yeah. So gravity, you know, there's a funny meme where you look at, you know, it's like a picture of this guy, Kulam, who discovered the laws of the equivalent law of universal gravitation. but for electric fields. And then he's like looking over the shoulder on an exam of Isaac Newton who wrote down the law of inverse square law. And so yeah, exactly.

Both laws are inverse square laws and both laws have properties of wave-like solutions. So there's gravitational waves, there's electromagnetic waves, there's static, but there are big differences between gravity and electricity and magnetism too. The biggest one being that you have only a track force of gravity, but you can have negative or positive, you know, attractive or repulsive

electromagnetism. There's no anti-gravity. There's no negative gravitational charges, for example. So, and this is the theory that maybe gravity might be coming from a nearby universe, so we don't, so it looks like things in our universe, but we don't quite understand it because it's ultimately some property of another universe. Right. Yeah, that's right. So we're not sure about that. I mean, part of what my research is and looking for the, you know, the earliest signals from the Big Bang's origin, so-called inflation, would be to potentially discover the, you know, physical evidence for the origin of gravity in the sense that, you know, if inflation took place, there will be a quantum version of gravity called a graviton. And those gravitons will be produced in a way that we could detect.

them using the polarization properties of the cosmic micro-ray background. That's what I study, as we talked about several times. So, you know, kind of what we're doing is looking for primordial waves of gravity in the early universe. That would be basically the oldest fossil thing you could see at all. So not 400 million years like this black hole in this galaxy, if that's what it turns out to be. And not 400,000 years like the cosmic my great background, but actually something that's, you know,

four, you know, trillions of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, like we talked about at my TED Talk, here in San Diego, which was unbelievably almost 10 years ago this year. James, can you believe it? That's what we're on the same stage. That's what we met. That's what we met in the green room. I feel like I must be going, there must be greater gravitational pull on me

because I feel like time's going faster or less gravitational pull on me. Yeah, yeah. Time's going faster right now. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return

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