Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Brian Keating on Live Life Better with Scott Eastwood (#341)

Episode Date: August 26, 2023

Scott Eastwood evokes one of the best primers on cosmology and astrophysics you’re ever going to get in this wide ranging discussion wit Brian Keating. From the age and size of the Universe to relativity and the essence of science itself, and the pursuit of the Nobel prize, this episode could make you one of the most interesting people in the room at your next dinner party! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/live-life-better-with-scott-eastwood/id1398401294 twitter.com/ScottEastwood Please join my mailing list 👉 briankeating.com/list for your chance to win a real meteorite 💥! Join me and ⁦Lawrence Krauss for an Onstage Dialogue ⁦at the San Diego Air & Space Museum Tuesday, Oct 17, 2023 at 7:00 PM: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/live-onstage-dialogue-brian-keating-lawrence-m-krauss-tickets-699430514497 Support The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast by supporting our sponsors: Post your free listing at LinkedIn Jobs https://www.hellofresh.com/impossible Thanks HelloFresh! Go to HelloFresh.com/50impossible and use code 50impossible for 50% off plus free shipping! As an Into The Impossible listener, you can get 15% off a MASTERCLASS annual membership masterclass.com/impossible Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! https://www.jordanharbinger.com/podcasts  Please leave a rating and review: On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB On Spotify it’s here: https://spoti.fi/3vpfXok On Audible it’s here https://tinyurl.com/wtpvej9v  Find other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  Become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With many things that are 122 years old, they kind of get a little bit long in the tooth. And I think the Nobel Prize in particular in the sciences, which is my domain of expertise, is more than overdue for a reformation. And so that was the spirit of the title in some sense. The other sense of the word is that I lost the Nobel Prize. So I was hot on the trail of winning a Nobel Prize for discovering the spark that ignited the Big Bang. So how did the Big Bang unfold? How did the early universe come about?

I created an invention in the early part of the 2000s to go after this very question using a telescope located at the South Pole to see the signal of the Big Bang and this period that ignited the spark that exploded the universe into existence from nothingness. This discovery was made by this experiment that I called Bicep. It's at the South Pole. There's a picture of it on the cover. That instrument in 2014 on St. Patrick's Day, 2014,

released evidence that we had detected the spark that caused the universe to come into existence. And because of that, immediately we were whispered as making one of the greatest discoveries, not just in science or astronomy, but in all of human knowledge. Welcome, dear listeners, to this replay edition of Into the Impossible, featuring Hollywood celebrity and performance improvement aficionado Scott Eastwood's interview with Brian Keating on the Live Life Better podcast. son of Hollywood icon Clint Eastwood, Scott's paved his own way as an actor, producer, and podcaster.

He's logged 38 movie credits, including his debut in Flags of Our Fathers, Grand Torino and Victus, The Perfect Wave, Suicide Squad, Fast and Furious Eight, Fate of the Furious, and Pacific Rim Uprising. As you're about to hear, Scott's more than a movie star. He's a human performance hacker and a kindred curious mind. Scott evokes one of the best primers on cosmology and astrophysics you're ever going to get. From the agent size of the universe to relativity, the essence of science itself, and the pursuit of the Nobel Prize,

this episode could make you one of the most interesting people in the room at your next dinner party. If you love first-hand science and intelligent discourse, please keep into the impossible in your feeds by subscribing and following. Impress your curious friends by sharing this episode. please take a minute to honor us with a five-star asterism and a review. We appreciate your comments and suggestions and read everyone. And now for this wide-ranging astrophysics primer with Hollywood luminary Scott Eastwood in discussion with your host, Brian Keating. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Open the pod bay doors, please, help. Brian, thank you for being here. Thanks for coming to talk to us. Losing the Nobel Prize. That is the title of your book. A story of cosmology, ambition, and the perils of science, his highest honor. Why losing the Nobel Peace Prize? Yeah.

The Nobel Prize. Is it a Nobel Peace Prize? The Nobel Prize. It's a Nobel Prize specifically in the sciences, but maybe it applies to more than just that. Maybe even the Peace Prize. So, yeah. There's a difference that you're saying there's a difference between the Nobel Prize. Yeah. Peace Prize and Nobel Prize?

Yeah. There's actually six prizes that were under the Nobel name at one point or another. The Peace Prize is probably the most famous of them. And there were even prizes that were added after Alfred Nobel, who's the namesake of the award, after he died. So he had a will. He died in 1896. And he wrote a will just about a year before he died that specified where he wanted his war profits to go from. So he had made dynamite and patented the product dynamite and become one of the wealthiest people that had ever lived in the 1800. And in 1888, he was wandering around Paris, where he was a visitor and loved Paris. And he saw a headline and said, Alfred Nobel, the merchant of death is dead.

And described him as the person who had killed the most people in human history up until that point. By virtue of dynamite and making landmines and underwater mines and things like that and all sorts of life-taking supplies. And so obviously, but he wasn't dead because he was reading the obituaries. It's kind of like Mark Twain when he read his own obituary. He said, the reports of my demise are over-exaggerated. And so, too, with Alfred Nobel. But in truth, it was his brother. And his brother had a, he and his brother had a falling out a couple of years earlier,

and they weren't even talking to each other. And luckily, they just made kind of a rapprochement and got friendly again just a couple of weeks before the older Nobel died, Ludwig. So that's whose obituary it was. So they got it wrong. Can you imagine reading your own obituary? And it's like, describes you as a real a haul. Excuse me.

Just a total jerk. You killed Scott Eastwood. He killed more on here. It is true. Maybe your dad did. But only in the movies. But instead, this obituary really caused him to reevaluate his life. I call it like, you know, a Christmas Carol or, you know, it's a wonderful life where this

guy sees what life is going to be like after he's gone. And he realized then and there he had to make a change and do repentance. His repentance was to take these prophets after he died and endow this prize that would agitate the world towards peace, prosperity. inventions, creativity, literature, and science. And that's what the prize did for a long time. But as with many things that are 122 years old, they kind of get a little bit long in the tooth. And I think the Nobel Prize in particular in the sciences, which is my domain of expertise,

is more than overdue for a reformation. And so that was the spirit of the title in some sense. The other sense of the word is that I lost the Nobel Prize. So I was hot on the trail of winning a Nobel Prize. For what? For discovering the spark that ignited the Big Bang. So how did the Big Bang unfold? How did the early universe come about?

I had created an invention in the early part of the 2000s to go after this very question using a telescope located at the South Pole. And this telescope can't see visible light like the Hubble telescope or human eyes are actually tiny little telescopes. They can't this type of telescope to see the signal of the Big Bang and this period that ignited the spark that exploded the universe into existence from nothingness. This discovery was made by this experiment that I called Bicep. It's at the South Pole.

There's a picture of it on the cover. That instrument in 2014, on St. Patrick's Day, 2014, released evidence that we had detected the spark that caused the universe to come into existence. And because of that, immediately we were whispered as making one of the greatest discoveries, not just in science or astronomy, but in all of human knowledge. Some said it advanced the progress of human knowledge more than any other single discovery in history up until that point. So it was an extremely, you know, monumental discovery.

And I agreed with a lot of the assessment for it. And immediately we were put both under the microscope for possible mistakes by the haters that didn't like what we were doing. There were champions that thought we had proven their pet theory of how the universe unfolded. And then there were, you know, kind of just cautious observers questioning whether or not we had done everything right and dotted all the eyes and crossed all the T's. But along the way, the Nobel Prize was never really out of our eyesight or out of our mindset. We, you know, in acting or something like that, you're familiar with, I don't think you set out your career, correct me if I'm wrong, to win an Academy Award.

You wouldn't turn one down if you got one. But the analogy sort of stops at a certain point because just as, you know, it would be foolhardy for you to tell a younger version of yourself, oh, try to win an Oscar because so few people, can win. Only one man wins best actor each year, right? And actress, etc. So on the other hand, the movie studios that you work for or work with, they'd be more than overjoyed if you won an Oscar. And in fact, you know, they want most of their movies except for, you know, what's the latest Fast and the Furies? I love those movies, but I was in one. Oh, yeah, awesome. Fantastic. So I don't think that, you know, in most cases, that the goal of that movie is different than the goal of a movie like, you know, gone with the wind or something like that. One is for entertainment.

And one is sort of, you know, is maybe, maybe should care more about entertaining people. But along the way, they're seeking the adulation, credulity of this wider body that confers these accolades. This being the science community. The science community, exactly. So the analogy with the movie studios that you're familiar with are the science funding agencies, this university that we're speaking at today. They really do put pressure on scientists, especially young scientists, that you're almost not even, I even had one young lady who was an aspiring astronomer drop out of astronomy because she

was told early on that if she didn't win a Nobel Prize, she really wouldn't count for much in science. And that would be like telling us starlit near nothing unless you win an Academy Award. So the pressures were there. And I think part of the reason that the book was written is to sort of cause that reformation to happen, not in the scientific community, but in the hearts and in the souls of scientists. we do become a little bit entranced by this notion of winning this. I always say there's more people that are on the space station every year than are living people that have won the Nobel Prize in physics.

It's just such a rare thing that it's natural that such people, just as they do in Hollywood, they get elevated to these godlike statured statures. And I think ultimately that's not congruent with the way that science should be done. So let's get granular just for a second on what you did that was considered for the prize, right? So you're talking about the spark that possibly created the Big Bang. Right. How are you seeing that? Yeah. How are we looking back into the past?

So when you look at Tim over there, he's about a foot or two feet away. You guys are keeping your distance. You guys work really closely together, so got to keep your distance. But you're not seeing him as he is right now. You're seeing him as he was about one nanosecond ago because light traveling incredibly quickly It actually takes about a nanosecond to travel every foot So you can convert that to miles and you can convert seconds to hours and it comes out to be a hundred and Eighty six thousand miles per second you might have

I heard that along the way or you might look at the sun and see the sun not as it is the second But you know that sunlight travels it takes about eight minutes to get from the sun to the earth those 93 million miles and it's the same same math either way the point being when you look out and into space in any direction. You're not seeing that object as it is now. You're seeing it so many light seconds away from you. You're seeing it so many seconds ago. If it's eight light minutes away from you, you're seeing it eight minutes ago. So, too, if you look back where there's no sun, there's no tim, there's nothing, there's nothing, there's nothing, there's nothing, you're looking back to the beginning of the time itself, when the universe itself came into existence. So astronomers

long have known that you could look back into space where there's nothing in your way, no stars, galaxies, planets, anything else in your way. And you'd be peering back to the beginning of when light itself was created. But how? Exactly. So how is the big question, right? So how did the universe come into existence? The best answer to that question is we don't know.

But you never make progress unless you try harder, right? So I mean specifically how do you look back? Oh, yeah. So you can look back right now to the beginning of when optical light was created using the two telescopes inside of your skull, namely your eyeballs. So eyeballs are little telescopes. They reflect and they refract light through tiny lenses onto detectors. And instead of like an iPhone with a million megapixels or a thousand, you know, a million pixels,

you have, you know, trillions of cells in your retina that sense color and intensity of white and dark light and color light as well. And so your eye is a little tiny telescope. It's called a refracting telescope. It uses lenses. You can either use a refracting telescope or a reflecting telescope. A telescope that is a reflecting telescope like we have on Mount Wilson and Los Angeles or in Mount Palomar in San Diego County. Those telescopes have enormous mirrors, 20 feet across.

They focus light to detectors in the form of these CCD cameras. These are detectors that work really somewhat cold temperatures, and they're ultra-sensitive. They can detect several tiny little photons at a tonne. In our case, we were looking back from heat, at heat left over from the Big Bang. So the Big Bang was incredibly hot. All the energy in the universe, all the matter in the universe was essentially in a volume of space smaller than this room. And then, And then at some point, astronomers believe it started expanding. And that expansion causes things to cool down. You ever spray your computer with those computer cleaners and the can cools down a little bit?

I don't know if you guys dust or any house. I don't dust in my house. But nevertheless, if I did or when I did, the can gets a little cool. And what happens is as things expand, they cool off. It's a phenomenon called entropy. So you guys might have heard entropy, high entropy, low entropy. When the universe goes from having very much energy compressed to a tiny amount of volume, and then it goes from that to an incredibly large volume, same amount of matter.

The matter didn't get destroyed or the energy can't get destroyed, even if the matter does. The temperature of the universe cooled off dramatically, and it went from being white, hot, brilliant hot, hotter than the surface of the sun many times over. And it cooled off over hundreds of thousands of years into what we call microwaves. And microwaves aren't too dissimilar from what you have in your kitchen, except that they're wavelengths of radiation, what's called electromagnetic radiation, with wavelengths of a few millimeters to a few centimeters. So there are 1,000 or 2,000 times smaller than visible lights wavelength.

That is the leftover heat from the Big Bang. So the heat has cooled off over millennia, over 13.8 billion years, 13 billion. Where did you guys get that number? So that number comes from observing, so again, I'm going to appeal to your shamelessly to your Hollywood roots, right? So you look at a child like CSI. Very shameless. Better than me.

I'm shameful. So you look at CSI. You ever watch CSI when there's a dead body in a room? And what is the first thing they do? They take the body's temperature. Why are they taking the body's temperature? What the heck is that going to tell them? So what they know is that when the human body's alive,

you know the temperature of the human body's 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. All they have to do is measure the temperature of the room and knowing what mostly the body is composed of water. And water is extremely well understood. So what happens is when you're alive, your temperature is 98.6. The minute you die on those shows, they measure the temperature. They know the cooling curve of water. So if the room is cooler than 98.6, eventually the body temperature will

equilibrate to that exact temperature. To the temperature of the room. Exactly. So what we see now is we know the temperature of not liquid water or the human body. We know the temperature that hydrogen forms at. Okay. So it's much, much hotter temperature. It's thousands of degrees Celsius, not 98.6 degrees.

And knowing the temperature which hydrogen forms at and measuring the temperature that the universe is today. So it goes from being, say, three, what we call Kelvin, 3,000 Kelvin. It cools up 3,000 degrees above absolute zero, and it's cooled off over time to be just three degrees above absolute zero. That means the universe is expanded by a factor of a thousand in all dimensions, and that size and that expansion, we can equate to how many years it's been expanding for. So, we use the space is a certain temperature. Which, which temperature is that? Yeah, so it's three degrees above absolute zero. Okay.

Minus 270 degrees Celsius is about minus 450 degrees Fahrenheit. So it's frosty, right? And that temperature is irradiate. It's like we're inside of an oven. If we go back in time, the oven gets hotter. As we go forward in time, the oven gets cooler. So it's like the dead body. The bed body's cooling off over a certain amount of time.

Most of the ordinary matter in the universe is composed of hydrogen. We understand hydrogen. It's the simplest element. We understand its properties very exquisitely accurately. So we've measured how old the universe is by taking its temperature, literally, just like those people on CSI. So how do you know, though, if the temperature, of space has it reached 3

yeah through plus 3 degrees right that's its current temperature right and it can never get the 0 can never actually cool to absolute zero but if we're looking at space and it's already at 3 degrees above Kelvin yeah yeah above zero Kelvin yeah 3 degrees positive yeah

how do we know that it hasn't been at zero Kelvin for let's call it 20,000 years yeah and then it you know then it just recently you know so in science, we make use of something called Occam's Razor, which is basically saying that the simpler you can make your explanation the better and the simplest of all explanations that still can accommodate all the things you see is likely to be the accurate answer. Of course, if something was willing to play tricks with us and we, you know, we're a simulation and some giant supercomputer, which we can talk about, then all bets are off. But going back a thousand years, 10,000 years, 20, that's like a blink of a fraction of a cosmic eye, you know, kind of lifespan. The universe is billions of years old. So we can look at the properties of the universe. By making use of that property I said before, when you look back in space, you're looking back

at time. So you can look back at a distant galaxy and actually take its temperature. So you can measure the temperature of that galaxy using microwaves and radio waves. And that will tell you what temperature was that galaxy at when the universe was half its current size. And it'll be twice as hot as it is now. So we understand precisely what the universe is made up of in terms of ordinary matter. Turns out most of the ordinary matter in the universe or all the ordinary matter in the universe pales in comparison to the non-ordinary matter called dark matter that we know almost nothing about.

That's a story, but dark matter doesn't have a temperature. So it can be really cold and not interact with the matter that I'm describing now. So we measure the temperature by looking at distant galaxies. We can uncover what its temperature must have been. And we compare it to models and simulations and the theoretical understanding that we've developed by combining every branch of physics together into one overarching model of how the evolution of the universe has taken place. But in all that, it's like saying, you know, what did you look like, you know, a millisecond after you were born or whatever? Those questions make sense and you've grown, you've seen those

sketches where they say like some poor kid on a milk carton, right? They say, here's the last known picture of him or her at age four, and here's what they probably look like. And sometimes they look pretty accurate when they actually do luckily find the child. But in most cases, you know, you can get sort of an accurate example. But what you'd really like to know as a cosmologist is like, what did that child look like when it was born? You know, what did the exact moment of birth look like for the universe? And more than that, we don't understand how birth, how, you know, I talk to my kids about, you know, where do babies come from? We don't know where universe has come from. That's the ultimate question. Studying everything else is like,

is like, you know, projecting forward what would happen if this kid looked like, this is this parent look like this and that look like that and then white mother looked like that. But we still don't know what is the process like. What is the conception of the universe? like? How did it come to be? We know almost nothing about that. So by looking back, what do you know? Yeah. So we know, in physics, we talk about everything in the universe according to the laws of nature that we understand today. We can predict on a statistical basis what the universe was like back to about a second, maybe less than a second after the Big Bang. So in some models of the universe's earliest moments, the Big Bang happened once.

It created one universe. It's our universe. And in that universe, we can, we can go back in time from today, which is not, you know, in July of 2018, but instead, we can go back 13.82 billion years ago to time equals zero plus one second. And we know everything. That's not to say we know everything in the sense that, like, I can tell you what you did on a Thursday, six years ago, and we don't know that. We know statistically, what was the temperature of the universe, what was the density of the universe, what physical laws were predominating in the universe? How many stars are there in the universe? How much dark matter is there? Even things we don't know about? We knew how much there are.

We know how much there are of those things that are unknown. So there are these known unknowns, unknown unknowns, et cetera. We can go back to a second, but we're greedy because a second is kind of an artificial thing, right? It's like a heartbeat or whatever. But we want to go back to time equals zero. I personally want to go back 10 minutes before zero. I want to know what happened before the universe that we call our universe before the Big Bang came into existence. That's the ultimate grand goal.

Can we see all the way back to the Big Bang? or are we deducing from as far back as we can see to the Big Ben? That's an excellent question. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th.

Tickets on sale now at Yamavatheater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary you in must be 21 to enter so when we say see it's anthropomorphizing we're saying like what do we see with our eyes or our senses we can't see even in the sense of anthropomorphizing which is totally fine we can't see back any any farther in time or farther back in space than about half a million years using light so the light that produced the heat that I'm talking about today that's now three degrees that light started off half a million years almost after the Big Bang

a little bit earlier than that. But let's round up to half a million years. 380,000 years. Very good. Did a little bit of homework. Yeah, good. That's great. So if you try to go back to 382 billion years or whatever,

you actually aren't seeing, you aren't learning anything new because light is really scattering amongst the particles of electricity and magnetism that were existent back then. The analogy I like to use is you guys are surfers, right? So you go out in June, there's June gloom, right? So you can't see beyond the cloud layer using your eyes. But if an airplane flies overhead, you can detect the presence of that airplane using your ears. Or maybe if you had like NSA technology, you could see vibrations in the cloud using microwaves and lasers and all sorts of crazy stuff.

We want to see farther back in space, which as I said means farther back in time or vice versa, actually. So we need something other than light. That's the premise. And what came upon me, thanks to the insights of theoretical cosmologists working before me, was that you could use gravity instead of light to measure what the properties of the universe were, going back to even the first trillions of a second after the Big Bang, not just the first second. The first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang could be made visible, sensible, using waves of gravity, not waves of light.

And that's because gravity, gravity is the weakest force in nature. There's four forces of nature. There's electricity and magnetism that's kind of familiar. Gravity is very familiar. And then there are two forces that operate only inside the nucleus. So there's those four forces, two nuclear, one electricity and magnetism, one gravity. Gravity is the weakest of all four of those. But in science and physics, the weaker something is, the more long range its impact can be.

So light waves are weaker than nuclear forces, and light waves can travel across the entire visible universe. You can see a star on the other edge of the universe, or a galaxy at the other edge of a universe. But gravity can go even farther because gravity is even less interactive. which kind of explains something's, again, appealing to your surfing backgrounds, right? So you guys surf, you know that there's four tides a day, too high, too low. Where do the tides come from? They come from the moon. So the moon's gravity on one side of the earth pulls the ocean on one side, and that makes a high tide on one side.

But it also makes a high tide on the other side, exactly out of phase 180 degrees. So what does that mean? It means gravity goes through the matter of the earth. So light can't do that. So if someone's on the moon, they're shining a laser beam, it'll just hit San Diego, won't go all the way through to Australia or wherever is on the opposite side of us. But gravity will.

So if you had a gravity laser and you could shoot waves of gravity, it would go right through the earth. So we make use of the fact that gravity goes through everything. It's going through us right now. And if these theoretical physicist predictions were correct, the waves of gravity that were released during this explosion that ignited the spark of the Big Bang, those would be visible today in the form of waves of gravity, not waves of light. And that's what you were looking for in your book. Yep.

So that was the goal of the Bicep experiment, and that's later a successor called Bicep 2. It was to measure the waves of gravity how they interacted with light at 380,000 years after the Big Bang. So it was like trying to detect an explosion, not by seeing the light from the explosion, but seeing how the sound waves of the explosion affected the light that we see today. So it's multiple levels of abstraction. It's not, it's not, you know, don't try to water it down on the book. I want to explain it so people can have an appreciation for how significant the challenge is of trying to observe something that's unobservable by human. in sensation. And for us, you know, for me, that meant that you could actually see, potentially see back as far as any force could do. Because I said, there's no force weaker than gravity.

We don't know of any force. There might be, but we don't know of any force. So that means you could never go back farther in time to actually time equals zero. But it didn't matter because the same theories that said the universe began expanding at the speed of light or faster, They also predict concomitantly with them that the universe is not alone, that we're actually accompanied by perhaps an infinite number of universes, some completely different than our universe, some identical to our universe, some are you guys have, you know, are the scientists and I'm interviewing you for my podcast. And so things are really kind of hairy when you include an infinite number of possibilities.

That's called the multiverse. We know that exists in science. We don't know it exists. Right now, it's not even, I wouldn't even say it's at the level of a theory. You guys heard it's something say, oh, well, you know, whatever, climate change. It's just a theory. Or, you know, you hear, oh, the theory of evolution, it's just a theory. Nah, that's not really true.

It's more than a theory when you have scientific evidence for something like, say, relativity. The theory of relativity is not a theory. Would you explain that? Yeah. Because I'm fascinated by the theory and I've read a little bit about it. But I want to hear from here. Yeah. Yeah, so when we say, when we talk about something in science being a theory, it's more akin to saying having a set of mathematical tools that describe something that are backed by physical evidence.

So you can have a theory for anything. You can say there's a purple unicorn sitting at the South Pole. And that's your theory. And that's what, and that's what's spinning the world around. Like purple unicorns? I like purple unicorns. Yeah. I don't know.

In this case, relativity. Yeah. What is the theory of relativity? So the theory of relativity describes the interconnectedness of how an event in space, and an event in time are related to each other, how cause and effect can manifest themselves, and how the speed of light, constancy, determines the limits of visibility for certain events.

So nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. How do you know that? So we've tested it. We've tested with any known material particle. We cannot accelerate it beyond, we can get arbitrarily close to the speed of light, namely you can get to 99.99%. That's how, say, these particle accelerate.

We can actually do that. Not with people, but with being, of material, particles of matter called protons. How do we do that? So those are these big particle accelerate. Do you remember a couple of years ago people were saying, oh, the universe could all be sucked into a black hole because they're going to make this particle collision at this accelerator called CERN or the large particle, right?

Yeah, so that was the Hague's boson, right? So that was in the search to determine the particles that are responsible for what we sense as gravity and mass. They thought that by accelerating particles near the speed of light, those particles could create miniature black holes and the miniature black holes wouldn't know their miniature or they only start off miniature and they get bigger and bigger every day. So they could get big, well, every trillionth of a trillionth of a second. So they could actually become exponentially large and an infinitesimal amount of time. Ignore that. I'm just saying that accelerator is located

on the border of France and Switzerland. They accelerate. Did we ever do that? Do we ever actually? Yes, we have particles. We didn't create black holes. No, no. So we have never done that. But we have accelerated using powerful magnets in a tube in a circular tube that's sucked out of all the oxygen that could possibly be inside this tube 100 feet underground. They've accelerated protons, which are the building blocks of all atoms. Hydrogen is made of just a single proton, a single electron. They'll take some hydrogen gas. They'll zap away all the electrons. You'll be left with just protons. Those are positively charged entities. If you get another positive charge near it, you can accelerate it because light charges repel each other. And then once that starts

accelerating under the force of electricity and magnetism, then you can control its orbit in a tunnel. And the faster it orbits, the higher energy it has. So the higher energy, the bigger the tunnel, the bigger the magnets, everything gets larger and larger. This thing is like 30 kilometers around, I think. They accelerated these protons and their antiparticles called anti-protons to near the speed of light. I think it's like 99.94 the speed of light. Such that they, They crossed the border between France and Switzerland 12,000 times a second. And it's not just one of them. We're talking trillions of protons.

If you were in there, you'd be totally irradiated. You have a whole blasted through anti-particles. It would be really dead. So you're not even allowed there unless you have a retina scan to go underground to see this stuff. It's really an interesting place. This is really the biggest project human beings have ever built in science. It's not my project. It's a particle physics experiment.

But you're asking about how do we know how fast we can accelerate stuff? you guys couldn't have gotten here. Well, you guys know your way here, but the fact that you were able to, people are able to navigate using the global positioning system, the GPS satellites, they are built in for not only the effects of space, time,

and for the speed of light, but also the effects of gravity. Gravity gets stronger, the lower your elevation. So if you're coming from the mountains and you're coming down, you know, from L.A. or wherever, and you came down to sea level here in San Diego, you would have to compensate for that, or you could be off by, you know, several feet,

not like miles, but you could be off by several feet. But the military cares a lot about several feet. If they're going to get a smart, you know, bomb into some, you know, a spider hole underground somewhere, they want to hit that accurately. So how do they do that? So if they were off by just a foot or two, they would not be able to hit their target, literally. And so we know now by measuring how fast light travels,

by bouncing it off things in the solar system, that not only does light travel at this constant speed that we know is 186,000 miles per second or, you know, 300,000 kilometers a second, but all forms of light, including the heat that I study, microwave heat, that travels at the speed of light. So we actually have measured that across the solar system, across the galaxy, and beyond that, we just haven't lived long enough to be able to measure things beyond our solar system, shall we say. So we, you know, in order to know more about the constancy of nature of these effects, we would have to test it even more precisely. But the point I'm trying to make is that if you can test something, so let's say light travels up,

186,000 miles per second. There's 5,280 feet in a mile. So if you're off by one foot, you're up by one, five thousand two hundred and eightieth out of 186,000 miles. So you can test it to incredibly high number of decimal places. You'll never be able to get it perfect. But it's the most perfectly tested theory that we have. So it's a model.

When I say the theory of relativity, it's a model for the way that light behaves, not only how light behaves, but how gravity affects lights travel. And it's the most accurately, tested branch of nature that we have. So in no way do I mean disparagingly when I say something's a theory. You could say that the Pythagorean theory is a theory, but it's perfect in that you can

prove it mathematically. You can prove that one plus one equals two. And you can prove that. That's a theory. It's part of what's called number theory. That proof could be three times thicker than my book, which is already pretty hefty, like 296 pages or whatever it is. So if you imagine something that you want to confirm as well.

what's called epistemology. How do you know something as a fact? How do you know something? You confirm that what your idea of something actually agrees with the way that you observe the world. We're trying to observe, you know, I always say we're trying to, the island of knowledge that we have is big, but the ocean of ignorance, is John Archibald Wheeler used to say. There's a coastline that defines the boundary between the island of knowledge and the ocean

of ignorance. Our job of scientists make the boundary, the coastline bigger and bigger every day because you want And the coastline, you know, it kind of represents this meta state where we don't really know, we kind of know that we don't know something. Yeah. But the ocean is infinite. And that's what's so exciting about doing science. It's like you're never bored. You never get bored of what you do as a scientist.

So I feel kind of like an expert because I saw Interstellar. Yeah. But just checking in with you. Yeah. Is that so funny that you bring them up? Possible. Like, because what they're saying really like, if we travel. a certain speed, right, and go a certain place that time could be moving much faster in one place than

another, right? Yes. That's sort of what it's... Yeah, so I have a funny story about that. So I travel a lot internationally, and a couple of years ago I wanted to get one of these global entry cards, and to get it, you have to go down to the border, you go down to Chula Vista or whatever, South San Diego, you go to the Customs and Border Patrol, and you check in there. And they're going to ask you, you know, why do you need this and whatever?

There's a guy right in front of me, and I heard them asking questions. I was pretending to listen on my phone or whatever. And I heard what they're asking me. I was like, what do you do for a living, sir? And he's like, I'm a scientist. I'm like, you know, I'm pissed because how many like, you know, they're going to think we're like drug mules and we get like communicate this to guy. He's like, I'm a scientist.

I think it's like an oceanographer or something like that. They let him go, okay, have a good day, sir. They come to me, what do you do? I'm a scientist. Oh, yeah? What do you do? I'm like, I'm an astrophysicist. And they're like, oh, yeah, what did you think of interstellar?

A litmus test I haven't seen it Which really pisses up I still haven't seen it It's published by my same publisher The book that describes the physics behind it And the consultant to it just won the Nobel Prize Kip Thorne up at Caltech

Oh do you steal your prize? No he didn't steal my prize I have an interesting story about him later on But so this guy's like well what did you think of interstellar And you know I could BS with the best of them So I was like well the interstellar warp drive That they're trying to communicate And the guy's like okay

You think you're smarter than me You're right and I was like Well you guys got the gun You guys look pretty nasty. Better be nice to you. So they ended up giving me the card. So getting back to Interstellar, it is true, and it has been extremely well tested. There are particles.

It is true. It is true that things moving at a high speed create, there's what's called time dilation when you can prolong a lifespan of something if it's moving at high velocities with respect to something else. But you've ever been sitting on a train or in traffic? Everyone else starts moving, and you feel like you're moving in their state and stationary. So ask yourselves,

your listener should think of it to them. What does it mean? What does motion mean? How can something in motion experience some physical phenomenon when the thing that you're calling stationary, maybe that's moving? So that's a paradox.

That's something that's related to what Einstein used to think about called the twin paradox. Imagine two twins and my wife and I just had twin. If I imagine the girl and she stays at home and I send my son off near the speed of light

and he goes out to Alpha Centurie four light years away and then he comes back to Earth, he'll actually be about the same age as he is now. He won't have aged at all. She could be, you know, 100 years old by the time he comes back, depending on how the relativity of time

took place for him, what speed he specifically went out at. That is the determining factor. Now, what is the determining factor? Now, what is the difference between their two motions? One is going very fast. Well, one is going really fast, but just like you, sitting in the train state, I mean, how do you know that you're moving?

Velocity. Just relative. Relative. So that's where relativity comes from. Relative to what, to us spinning on this globe? So it could be just a twin sitting here. She could be in space, no globe, nothing around. She could just be sitting in space. He goes off to Alpha Centurri at this half the speed of light, comes back at the half the speed of light. What's the difference between those two?

Couldn't he just see her moving away from him? And it looks like he feels like he's stationary. And that's why he doesn't feel like he's aged at all. And then she comes back and he's 100 years older. What is the difference between those two is that he had to make what's called acceleration. He had a change. I kind of snuck a fast one by. He had to change his velocity, which is a phenomenon called acceleration.

When you change a velocity, like your accelerator in your car, you change your velocity. He did acceleration. She didn't because he turned around. And all the aging that she experienced, according to his clock and his watch, took place when he made that U-turn and came back. That's what relativity shows. So things in motion that are truly in motion. Yeah, it's truly mind-blowing.

When they're in motion, their clocks run slower. So there are particles called muons that exist. They're kind of like electrons, except they're about 100 times heavier, I think, something like that. And they enter the Earth's atmosphere. And when I have a bottle of muons in my lab, eventually they'll decay into other particles, including particles of energy called light and photons. In my lab, they last for, say, half a second or less, actually half a millisecond, I think. But when they crash into the atmosphere, they're accelerating and they're decelerating,

their clocks will run a little bit slower. So we can measure the lifetime of those objects, and they actually live longer than the ones in the laboratory. So we've tested this time dilation, this relativity, the twin paradox, using twin muons, not twin people. That would be kind of cruel. And you also can't accelerate something big like a human being to near the speed of light, whereas you can with a tiny little point. So you're saying that every time I get in the car and drive to L.A., I'm actually at a very, very small bit staying a little younger. Yeah. I feel like I'm dying.

that's right like I'm dying that's right very slow death didn't we actually put an atomic clock on airplanes and run around okay go for it

you'll do better service than I'm yeah so so what they did is they took they took clocks that are the most precisely kind of precisely automated clocks that exist called atomic clocks that count the number of oscillations

of a certain isotope of cesium and they measured how how many pulses of a clock which is all a clock is your heart's a clock you know the ticking of a pendulum's clock, the sun going around, anything that's periodic can be a clock. They measured how fast the cesium atom was ticking, and they found that when you flew it around, you flew two clocks around the world in opposite directions, they would agree that they had experienced

less time than a stationary, identically otherwise clock on the earth's surface. By... By this is like maybe even a second or something like that. And that's just at a regular airplane speed of a... Yeah, six hundred miles an hour. Fraction of the speed of light, tiny percentage of the speed of fire. Exactly by the amount that Einstein's relative. So, twice that because there's two planes moving in opposite directions with respect to each right so so could we is it possible that we can move half the speed of light without dying so we actually i think the fastest we've ever done anything in terms of spacecraft that ever left the solar system um we can travel so i know we travel basically it equates to about a light hour uh per year so you're you're talking

that really really tiny fractions of the speed of light so if you convert a light hour it's a measure of distance, how far does light travel in an hour? And then you take year and you convert everything to seconds. You're talking about like maybe, maybe, you know, a frat couple, maybe a couple hundred kilometers per, sorry, a couple thousand kilometers per hour for something like on the earth. And then in space, maybe 10 times that. I mean, we got to the moon, which is one light second away. It took less about a week. But even it took a day, I mean, you're talking just tiny, tiny fractions of the speed of light. So even if we could figure out, let's call it, say we can figure out how to travel to speed of light.

Yeah. Isn't things so far away like a star that we're looking at, would it still take? Yeah, it would take four years. It would take four years to get there if you're traveling at the speed of light. The issue is that to accelerate something at the speed of light, the mathematics works out that you have to make it, you have to give it energy at an increasingly geometrically progressing rate, such that the amount of energy to accelerate even the tiny little flea to the speed of light would be infinite.

So you can't actually get that. And a lot of gasoline. Yeah. So you need a lot of... So you're like... Vibranium. You need the vibranium. We're working on it in the lab.

But if you actually could do something at half the speed of light, so it takes twice as long. But even that is what I'm saying is we're at maybe a percent of the speed of light right now with our best technology. There are plans to accelerate a cell phone camera, not a cell phone itself, but like the size of a sensor of a cell phone, a one square centimeter size cloud of camera. cameras, shoot them like tiny little sales using laser beams. Pee-Poo! Are you making shit up right now?

No, I'm not. This is a project funded by a- Let me make it even worse. Laser beams. It is funded by a Russian billionaire. Does that not intrigue even more? So there's a Russian guy named Yuri Milner, and he created this project, $50 million project,

to shoot these tiny, and that won't even be like pennies on the dollar, but it actually takes. to accelerate these cloud of sensors to the nearest stellar system, which is called Proxima Centauri. Okay, wait, hold on. Rewind. Where's Proxima Centauri? What is that? So it's about in that direction, and it's about four light years away from us. So light travels about, as I said, 186,000 miles per second. It will still take four years for a laser beam to get there.

If we shot just the laser beam. That's at the speed of light. That's at the speed of light. Now, what people say is that you could use a sail in space that has no wind resistance. So there's no air friction. There's nothing in space. A sail. An actual sail.

It's called a light sail. Yep. And so if you blast something with light, it has energy. And that light can give it a kick. And if you shot it with a big enough laser and you didn't disintegrate it and it was able to capture that energy, it could accelerate without any friction. So it could actually go very comparable. Fastly the speed of light? No, it can't go faster than the speed of light because it's made of matter.

So this is like an actual chip from your iPhone or something even smaller with a little antenna on it because it's no good if it goes. and doesn't take any pictures and send them back. Sure. So this is a very advanced project. I don't know if it'll ever be successful. It's the first time that people have thought that it's actually possible to do it, though, which is kind of an interesting time in human existence.

We've known how big the universe is and how small little, you know, one of the scientist Jill Tarter, who is the inspiration for Jody Foster's character in the movie Contacts. She's a real person. She describes, like, how much of the universe have we explored listening for other civilizations, listening for E.T.

it's equivalent to like a thimble of water in the Pacific Ocean. It's just minute because we've only had the technology to do it for a few years. Maybe a couple, maybe five decades, six decades. So not only are we just learning potentially about civilizations that are at most, you know, 70 years away from us by the speed of light travel. They're also only learning about us, our existence. We've only beamed radio waves off for 70, 80 years now that they could be aware that, oh, there was an Olympics in 1936 where Jesse Owens was, right? and that's in the movie too. So this, hold on real quick,

because I'm intrigued by this. Yeah. This other universe that we're talking about, that could be how many years away? Oh, so this is another solar system. Another solar system. That's four years at the speed of light. And we photographed that?

We know that the star is there. We know how far away the stars. When you say the star, what do you mean? So there's a star. Yeah, there's a star like our sun is a star. Around the star could be a planet. We think there are planets around it. But we can't see far enough.

We can see the effects of the planets on the gravitational field of the star. So it's a complicated chain of reasoning. Scientists think there are planets there. There's a reason to suspect that there could be a planet there. It might have no life on it. It might be completely unlike our solar. There could be 100 planets there. We have no idea.

It could be 100 planets. It could be a thousand planets. Could be none. But the thing that's interesting about it, it happens to be the closest star to our sun. So there's no other star that we could get to. And this project could take 50. I think the baseline is 25 years. So they're talking about traveling at, you know,

sort of, you know, maybe 15% the speed of light, 20% the speed of light. So that means it will take five times longer than humans. So it would take 25 years to go five light years. 25 years to go five light years distance. So it's still very ambitious, probably not going to be successful. It may not happen in the time scale.

But my excitement about it is based on the fact that it's the first time that, at least on paper, it pencils out to be maybe practical. I mean, it's not as fanciful as it would have seemed 100 years ago. I mean, don't forget, we've only been flying airplanes for 114 years or something like that. I think that we've gone to this point where we've been to other solar systems. I mean, sorry, we've been to other planets in our solar system. We haven't yet left our solar system.

But we have sent objects that have left our solar system. And so now they're in this no man's land between our sun solar system and this other solar system that I'm describing our possible solar system. That's supposed to come back, right? They're not going to come back. They're going to send back radio waves, the thing that they're shooting out, that they're shooting back. These little cell phones,

we'll have little antennae on them. They'll broadcast, hey, we're here. Here's a picture. There's a selfie of me, you know, the satellite, the little tiny chips. They're going to send out like a million of these cell phone cameras because they'll be really cheap in 25 years. And they'll have the resolution.

They'll have the imaging. And then they'll have enough energy from the star that they're near, but they'll keep going right past it. There's nothing to slow them down. So those are like, here's a proximate center, you know, wave as they pass by, and they'll send light beams back to Earth. And if you have a million of these things, the thought is that at least a couple of them will be facing the right direction towards Proxima Centuri.

They'll have the right geometry to send back to the Earth and it will have enough energy. Yeah, and I'll have enough energy to lay dormant for 25 years. This thing, imagine like switching on your iPhone in 25 years. Do you think it would power up? I mean, they have to have enough energy from the star and solar energy capture. And by the way, how does that quick does the radio waves come back? They all travel at the speed of light. So actually, as soon as they get there, let's say they get there.

Let's say they got there tomorrow, we wouldn't know that they got there for four years because they're four light years away, four radio waves away, four microwave years away, infrared years. It's all the same. The light of all different colors, literally, travels at the exact same speed. So the closest star is four light years away. Yeah. And that's within our galaxy. That's in our galaxy.

And how big is our galaxy? Our galaxy is enormous. So our galaxy is about 100,000 light years across. Okay. And we're about two-thirds of the way out. So we're about 60,000 light years from the center of our galaxy. And we're one of a billion galaxies. How can you measure 100,000 light years?

Like, would you draw it on a map? Yeah, exactly. I mean, what are we taking pictures from telescopes, right? Yeah, so we're using telescopes. We're using geometry, which is extremely well understood. And we use something else, which is actually described in some detail in the book, that nature is kind to us. It's not malicious.

It tells us things about itself if we're clever enough to decipher what it's telling us. So it's like, you know, the movie Arrival. I don't know if you ever saw it. Like if you can actually interpret what there's a contact or if we can interpret what nature's the guideposts, the rulers, the clocks that nature gives us, we can learn a lot about it. But it requires us to be lucky and very clever and very hardworking. So it turns out that you can actually measure how far away something is using a ruler more than just like laying the ruler out and measuring on the ground. You can use something called trigonometry, geometry, and things like that. So one way you can do this, you guys can do it right now.

So pick some part in the room. I'm going to cover up like the door handle and close your eyes. Close one of your eyes, hold your thumb over, cover something up. Now open the other eye and close the eye that you're on. It shifts, right? It's shifted back and forth. That's called parallax. That changing of the angle.

What it was based on, if you guys had really wide, I have really narrow eyes to get because I look in telescopes all the time, but if you guys had like really wide set eyes, the angle will be much bigger, right? Because one eye would be looking at a really radical angle compared to the original eye that you're looking at. So when something's separated by a large amount, you can actually measure very big angles or you can measure very small angles very accurately. How do we do that on Earth? Well, the Earth is kind of like the diameter of the Earth's orbit is like the separation between our two eyes. So today's in July. We measure the position of a star or a planet or something close by to us

against the background of really far away galaxies and stars that we know to be much farther away than our own galaxy or very distant within our own galaxy. Then you wait, Six more months later, you're across the orbit. So it's like your other eye now. Now you're in January. Measure that same star. You've seen that it would move. It moved by much, much less than a degree.

It turns out it'll move by fractions of a thousandth of a degree. That change in angle, combined with the knowledge of how big the Earth's orbit is, 93 million mile diameter, we know exactly how far away that star is. The farther away. It's like triangulation, right? Triangulation. It's exactly where it comes from. So that process allows us to measure things in our own galaxy. Now, once you get things in our own galaxy, you could be lucky, as we were in the 1900s.

I say we, but astronomy was lucky. Astronomer named Levitt, Henrietta Levitt, she discovered that there was a type of a star that would blink on and off every couple of days. And its blinking was related to how much energy it was putting out. And she could measure the energy by how bright the star was. And she measured over time, it was getting, it was like breathing. It was getting brighter and brighter than it was getting darker and darker, brighter and brighter, and it never stopped repeating.

So it was like a clock. And she realized that she could use the properties of that star and how bright it got. She could use it like a light bulb at a distance. So not only can you do this thing with your eyes, but you ever see like a car, you know, a light from a really great distance, as it gets half as close, half as far away from you, its brightness goes up by a factor of four.

So that means you can use the brightness of something as a ruler too. So she realized she could use these special stars called... What? What? What do you think that it was? She was using this type of star whose intensity changes periodically and it never changes, like a clock. She's like gas moving in and out? It was the size of the atmosphere of the star getting bigger and smaller. Kind of like sun spots, but it was the way that this star's dynamics work.

Not all stars are like this. Most stars have some degree of variability. This star would change its brightness by a factor of two. So it was either getting closer by a significant amount, which didn't seem likely. I could keep moving back and forth a good fraction of the Earth's distance, you know, light years? we're talking about in a couple of days, that's not possible. So she realized that it was actually because the brightness was changing and she could measure the brightness precisely.

Therefore, she got its distance called the luminosity distance to the star. When she combined it, she also had a measurement of its parallax. So parallax goes back to the ancient Greeks. They realized you could measure things with angles, like a survey or scope. That goes back to the ancient Greeks, Archimedes and people like that. She realized she could combine something that she knew, which is the geometric distance, the parallax distance, with the luminosity distance, which she didn't know. And she did something called calibration.

When you measure something, compare it to something you understand perfectly, you can then calibrate the new thing. And then the new thing, she could stretch out to other galaxies have these same stars in them, called Cepheid variable stars. And in fact, at Mount Wilson in 1923, Edwin Hubble, the progenitor, the father of much of modern astronomy, and the namesake of the Hubble Space Telescope, he discovered there was one of these Cepheid's blinking on and off

in the Andromeda galaxy. And so he realized that galaxy is actually a million light years away from us. So that galaxy, and it kind of looks like the way our galaxy looks. So they start to get a picture of what our galaxy look like. And then from the geometry

of where these other objects were in that galaxy, he measured how big that galaxy is. And he could infer from other sepheids in our galaxy how far across our galaxy stretched. And I'm skipping hundreds of, you know, of examples in astronomers

and contributions along the way. I kind of give a condensed history in the book. because along the way there's a substance in the universe called dust and it's kind of like the dust you know like that you guys are on my truck right now

you got truck dust black don't get a black car you know every time I buy a car I say I'm not going to get a black car and then I just end up I got a dirt colored car yeah just go with quicksand yeah dust looks good on dirt that's right yeah dust dust and rust

so you know and with kids we know we learn a lot about dust right so You guys don't know about it, but Patrick and I know about it. Dust. Hopefully not that. So, 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. In the universe, stars don't live forever, you know, like just like in Hollywood. The stars go out, they go out with the bang. The brighter they burn, they burn down. Our stars on his way out too. So when a star dies, it does so, depending on how big it is, it can do so in spectacular

fashion. and it can blow apart all the things that it was made of into space that surrounds it. And some of those materials are really lucky for us that were blasted out into space because they form the material in our planet. Like there's not some like machine in space that churned out a planet. That material that's in our earth had to come from somewhere. And if you ever think about where did it come from, there aren't that many sources. You know, 7-Eleven in space.

You can get everything, right? Home Depot. Planet Depot. Instead, when a star that existed before our sun, five billion years ago, perhaps. It exploded. It shot out meteorites and things like material metal, dirt, rocks, dust, and things like that, eventually that formed

in our... Through gravity. Through gravity, exactly, yeah. So it just attracted it to it and got bloated up and made it... Bigger, more gravity, bigger, more gravity. Exactly. And that ended up creating our entire solar system. And parts of our solar system that didn't form into planets are what we call meteorites, asteroids, and things like that, that weren't big enough to form a planet

are still pretty big, but aren't quite big enough. But they're basically giant rocks of dust. But there's also smaller parts of pieces of dust that are in the solar system. And those smaller pieces of dust can absorb light from stars. Depending on their size, they can trick astronomers like this woman, Henrietta Levitt, and Hubble himself, they can trick you. Because if you saw two, let's say I told you, here are two light bulbs. One is half as bright as the other one. So you say, well, that one must be four times farther away. Actually, it's four times less bright. A quarter is bright. It must be twice as far away as the other one. But if you knew all of a sudden there's dust, like an inch of dust covering up the first one, it could

actually be at the exact same distance. So dust can deceive you into thinking something's farther away and bigger than it actually is. And for a long time, Scott, you asked about, well, how do we know it's really big? They thought the universe was much. They thought our galaxy was the entire universe. So there's about 100 billion stars in our galaxy, and we've known that for quite a while in our galaxy. Now we know there's about 100 billion galaxies in the universe as well. But for a long time, We didn't know. So it goes, it goes galaxy. Solar system is where our systems.

Yeah. Okay. There's multiple solar systems. Many could be billions, trillions of solar systems. We have no idea. Yep. Plants within. But if we don't know how many solar systems there are.

Yeah. How do we know how many stars are? Well, so we can count the number of stars pretty accurately. Stars are actually pretty easy to, you know, to see. They'd be a clamor for attention. You know, again, a lot of parallels in Hollywood. Not going to mention any names. But, yeah.

So they're bright. They get with a tremendous amount of energy. There's like the equivalent of a million Hiroshima of bombs going off every second on the sun's surface. Incredible amounts of energy. Pretty easy to detect, even if they're really far, literally across our galaxy. So all you do is you count up, well, how many stars do you see in the distribution of them on the sky? And you don't have to count up each one. You can count up make an average.

Just like if you're trying to estimate how many people are at Petco Park on a Padres game, you can estimate it. You're not going to get it perfectly down to the person. You can count each person. That would be very timely. care about sports here. It's probably out of that. San Diego. San Diego.

I always say the easiest job in the world is San Diego weather forecaster and the hardest part of San Diego SportsCaster. It's like the worst job in the world. Anyway, so we can estimate. We estimate, exactly. And not only can you estimate how many stars are in our galaxy, you can estimate how many galaxies there are in the universe. If there is just one universe, the question we're trying to answer with our telescopes nowadays, is our universe alone? do we exhibit the same kind of extrapolation that you were making or you said we know there's lots of stars lots of planets lots of solar systems lots of galaxies well who says there's not lots of universes

for a long time we thought we were the center of the solar system we thought the sun went around the earth right i described that in the book that also came about you know and through a a variety of different features and force you know most people think scientists are really kind of dispassionate you know robots is we you know we just walk and you know we're like wikipedia just walking around, right? But in reality, you know, science is a human endeavor. Like there's, you guys have interviewed plenty of scientists on your, on your show. You know this, that scientists are just normal people, but they happen to do abnormal things with their time. And one of those things is, you know, to do really accurate studies of things that could be complete minutia to other people,

but to us, it's really fascinating. But we're not immune from the forces that just an ordinary average person is interested in. So we sometimes have preconceived notions about the way the universe should or should not work. So for a long time, people thought, well, the sun seems like it goes around the earth. And in fact, I challenge, you know, I bet you could ask 100 out of 100 people on the street today, unless you get away from a university campus and say, prove to me that the earth isn't the center of the solar system. Most people couldn't do it.

I won't ask you guys to do it. And then you could even ask them, prove to me that the earth isn't flat. I love that. You're like, all these people make fun of, oh, this flat earth guy. Yeah, I mean, guys probably pretty much a fool. But in reality, it sure does look pretty flat. You know, like you guys got down here. You didn't use a globe to get to use your sea captain hat.

Guarantee you. You know, you interviewed 100 people. They wouldn't be able to explain to you how it's not. Well, because people know it's not. Right. He'd be like, because I was indoctrinated as such. Exactly. So how do you get past the indoctrination?

How do you get past this notion of, well, of course, it's obvious. And in fact, it's obvious to really smart people. And like, it kind of forgives. You remember that, you know, a few good men, like when the, Jack Nines, and saying, like, well, you want me on that wall, you need me on that. My theory is like the average person who's not a scientist wants there to be people that are smarter than him or her about science, at least, so that they can not think about themselves. It kind of absolves you a little bit if you say, well, that person want a Nobel Prize,

you know, she or he can tell me what to think about blah, blah, blah, and you can fill in the blank. And sometimes you get this what's called authority bias, or, you know, where you respect this person because he's really smart. Like, Albert Einstein had a lot of, like, really crazy notions about, like, communism, and all sorts of stuff. But people took him very seriously. He thought there should be no borders. I mean, maybe some, I don't know what your politics is, but a lot of people considered it like, well, it's really brilliant.

Like, we should just lay down all of our arms and then have no nations. Yeah, and everyone's going to love each other. And like, didn't work in Europe, like, didn't pan out so well. But because he was so brilliant in physics, he obtained this kind of aura about him that led to what's called authority bias. So in science today, that's the Nobel Prize. And he also won a Nobel Prize, but not until much later in his life. But the point being that scientists are susceptible to biases, and one of those biases, confirmation bias, you want to prove that what you thought. Your theory.

Yeah. You want to prove your theory. And it could be for a variety of practical reasons. You need a job. You need to keep the lights on. Yeah, you need to keep the lights on. You need to keep the telescope, you know, oiled up. But, no, we don't oil telescopes.

Sounds perverse. But in reality, what dust did to astronomers throughout history and including, including my experiment, which ultimately caused us to lose the Nobel Prize, was it tricked us into seeing something that wasn't actually there. We saw what we wanted to see. And in part, that was driven by these human emotions. And that's why I think it's interesting to people when they read it, they're like, oh, well, I didn't realize it would be a memoir, because it really is a memoir.

It's more of a kind of an autobiographical sketch. It has science in it to explain all these things that we've been talking about, astronomical topics. And then, you know, kind of this discourse on whether or not these, like, should we have Academy Awards for scientists, basically? And that's kind of been the ultimate introspective moment for me in realizing what did it do to me? Because I'll tell you, honestly, I wanted to win a Nobel Prize at all caught. I was one of those actors.

It sounds like you're not like that. Like, who just wanted to win an Oscar. Like, I'm going to prove to people, like, you know, and in my case with my father, who was a pretty eminent scientist, and I wanted to prove to him, I was better than him, or I was as good as him, and he should, you know. It seems much more important to have awards for scientists than it does two for actors.

Yeah. I mean, I would agree with that, but then, but the process by which we award these. So, for example, like, my wife was an actress for a long time. Every year, she's in the SAG. So she gets these DVDs. You probably get them, right? So it doesn't only say, like, so-and-so, Scott Eastwood nominated for 10, or won six Academy Awards for Best Actor,

but it says how many times you were nominated, and not even for an academy, it'll be like, Palm the Orr, and the Sundance, this, and this and that. Like, it will say every single thing, not only that you won, but you were nominated for. And I think that's very interesting. If I told you that the Nobel Prize, you'll never know. If I didn't write this book, no one would ever know that I not only was nominated for a Nobel Prize, but I was actually a nominator. I was like the Academy itself.

I was nominating people to win the Nobel Prize the year after I lost it. So imagine, like, you get asked to nominate. You lose the Oscar. You're sure you're going to get it for Fast Fieries Five or whatever you're in. And then you don't get it. So, so, but then you're asked the next year, who should get it? Who's a better actor than you, Scott? Like, tell me about, you know, in that case, that's what's a scientist.

Yes, it was humiliating. It was embarrassing. After we had retracted it and basically, you know, shown that we didn't make a blunder, we didn't plagiarize, we didn't, you know, fudge our data, we had made a mistake of confirmation bias. Admitting those mistakes after being on the front page in the New York Times and having, you know, millions of views on our YouTube video of the discovery and, and all the scientists, being celebrated as going to win the Nobel Prize,

to have to retract that. That's sort of what the book is about. And how do you deal with not winning, like losing the Oscars? Like, you might not win an Oscar. How do you deal with that? Now, for you, it sounds like you have equanimity about it. Fine, that's great.

And I wish I had that in an earlier time of my life. But for scientists, you know, we get told things like you gotta get a Nobel Prize or be on the trail of a Nobel Prize to get tenure or to get funding. And when you do get funding, just like an actor, when they win an act, Oscar, your dad can do whatever you wants, right?

And he can pick and choose. The point being that it has an outsized influence conferring the authority bias, the question is, what does that do next? How does that affect a young person who's coming up who doesn't know exactly that she has the right stuff to win a Nobel Prize or not? And I agree with you 100%. And that is a conclusion. We should do it, you know, actually without regard for those accolades, because that's the

purity of the craft of being a scientist that you get to pay a decent amount, not not not, you know, tremendous amount. But I make the case in the book, you know, in contrast that, you know, the number of parts might be having a negative effect on science as opposed to what Alfred Nobel wanted. Well, it's such an, sorry, it's such an important notion just even in today and society, what's going on. It's like, I want to, I believe that global warming is not real, so I'm going to go find information to make that.

Right. To get a good idea. Your hypothesis, right. Yeah. Right. And what is that doing? So my theory is if science is undermined, if people don't. If they doubt the scientific method, which is basically, you know, cause and effect, reality,

like you're actually asking, what is the effect of a scientific process on something that we humans can observe, the cultivation of new knowledge? Imagine if you lived, it's almost impossible for us to imagine. Imagine if we lived in a universe where cause didn't precede effect. And, and, like, truth could be completely variable, like, not just the twin paradox, like, not just relativity, but there were no, there was nothing. There was no scientific. epistemology. You couldn't actually determine a fact. Like, okay, well, that won't happen, but science is the bedrock by which we discover new laws and new facts and new truths about how the world works and it's predicated on logic. So once scientists become, I don't want to say corrupt,

but once we never get like ethical training and basically, I mean very rarely do we get ethical training. Like, how do you behave when you have this huge discovery that everyone wants you to make and you know you're going to win a little prize if you do it? But you have these lingering doubts. that a lot of us expressed before this happened. It was like a steam train. You couldn't stop it. There's so much momentum and so much pressure to do it. Because billions of dollars are at stake for these types of science project.

You wouldn't think it would be the case, but it is. And you want to make those people happy, and there's a lot on the line. Absolutely. 100%. Yeah. So there's a lot of pressures. And it affects people's and affects how the soul of science is really going to be treated in the modern world. And I want science to thrive.

I think it's the most, you know, it's the, the most important thing that society has. And most of the time it's apolitical, I mean, I mentioned global warming. Forget about that. And forget about evolution for a second. I mean, I believe in evolution, you know, as much as I believe in relativity, which is, you know, 100%. But on the other hand, you know, if you're dealing with nuances and new discoveries and things that no one has ever really, you know, gotten to before, if you undermine that and the integrity

of how science itself is supposed to be conducted, I think society is at risk. So it's kind of like a warning cry, you know. And I think the Nobel Prize is kind of an emblem of it. So one of the Nobel Prize is a Nobel Prize in literature. And this year it's been canceled. So the King of Sweden was involved in its cancellation because one of the people that was the director of it, her husband was cheating on her and having sex and doing all sorts of bad stuff with women that wanted to win the Nobel Prize in literature trying to curry favor with him. But then she got fired for what her husband did. And so like maybe she was a part of it.

Maybe who knows. But now what's happened is that the integrity of the Nobel Prize has been questioned in literature. People have called upon it to be canceled before. It's been given out to people like terrorists have won the Peace Prize. People that create more armies in the world have won it. And in the case of the physics prize, I'm worried that's going to happen. So part of it's kind of like a creedicure to, you know, kind of prevent the Nobel Prize from in physics, which is my beloved prize, from that from ever going away.

Interesting. What are you working on now? So now I'm working on raising five kids and I'm working on a project that has benefited from the lessons learned of this project called Bicep. So Bicep was a small telescope at the South Pole. From that telescope, we've learned a tremendous amount, not the, as I said before, the results are correct, the interpretation was wrong. We said we saw the spark that ignited the Big Bang, as I discussed, in the beginning of the show. The actual thing that we saw was dust. We saw the most humble, boring schmutz in the universe that actually tricked us into seeing exactly what we wanted to see, both scientifically at heart, but also to win the Nobel Prize.

That was definitely an inescapable part of it for some of us on the team. From that project, we've now learned how to correct those flaws, biases, those preconceived notions that we had about how the universe, quote-unquote, should be. From that, we've designed a new experiment called the Simon's Observatory, and that's located in Chile. Instead of the South Pole, it's located at about 17,000 feet above sea level in the northern Atacama Desert of Chile, which looks a lot like, I mean, it could be in the Martian Part 2 or whatever. It looks just like the surface of Mars. It's got active volcanoes nearby. It's got craters, salt flats. It's got geysers.

It's an amazing place to work and to live. And we want to get above as much of the Earth's atmosphere as possible. So that's why we go to the South Pole. The South Pole is about 10,000 feet above sea level effectively. the Atacama desert, 17,000 feet. So you're above almost half the atmosphere when you go to the site in Chile. And when you look up, it's like the sky is black. It's not blue.

It's like black right above you. So we've learned from what Bicep did wrong. We're trying to correct that for this new experiment called the Simon's Observatory. And one of the things that we're doing, whereas before with Bicep, you could make the argument, maybe I would have won the Nobel Prize, maybe one of the other founders of the experiment, or co-leaders of the, now, so there were only a handful of people. So only three people can win a number. Nobel Prize, according to these made-up rules by the committee in Sweden. Now we've got

245 people working in the experiment. And it's not that that's never happened before, where a lot of people were taken, required to make a scientific discovery that resulted in a Nobel Prize. But now we're basically like, not F you to the Nobel Prize, but we just don't care about it. It's not, it's no longer the animating impulse that it once was. Because I think for me, especially, look, you know, I don't know if you ever, how biblically you've ever gotten in your life. I don't mean, you know, in the negative sense of Bible, but I always remember reading about the golden calf. There's a famous story of the golden calf where the Israelites got out of Egypt and they had all these plagues and they

killed all the Egyptians, God killed all the, and then 40 days later they go into the desert and then Moses disappears for 40 nights and he's not there. And the Israelites make a golden calf out of gold and say, this is our God. We're no longer going to worship this Yahweh guy. We're going to worship this calf that we made ourselves. And I'm just thinking that's so stupid. Like, how could you, how can any intel, you know, I'm Jewish, so I'm going to appeal to my Jewish egotism, but say, like, I thought Jews are supposed to be smart. You know, like, how are they worshipping this stupid piece of metal that they themselves made? And it just didn't sound true to me. And I was like, maybe the whole Bible just doesn't make sense.

It's not worth reading. But in the end, I remember just the day that I submitted the manuscript for this book, a guy who won the Nobel Prize, he came to UCSD to give a talk, and he brought his Nobel Prize with him. He brought the actual golden chunk of metal. It's like 24-carriage girl weighs like a pound. And he was, and everyone was like ooing and eye. All these physicists were ooing and eyeing over it. And they were just like worshipping it. And they were worshipping him.

They were like posing for selfies with him, kissing it. Nobody bowed down to it like the golden cap. It came pretty close. And then even I who had written this book, like, I was like, can I take a selfie? Like, it just showed me that within human nature, it's natural to want to idolize people and idolize things. and when you can do, you might expect that.

I mean, we talk about American Idol, right? I mean, in Hollywood, in that world. What do you think that is in our psyche that's? I think it's related to this authority and status bias. Like, why do you think Kim Kardashian will go to the White House and talk about prison reform? I mean, it's like, does she, has she studied, you know, papers and done literature, or social criminology? No, she's just like, you know, someone who's got a lot of fame and attention.

I think goes back to the hunter-gatherer tribes. Like, if you were a guy, especially back then, you know, now it's more egalitarian, but you know, the more you knew, the more past history you knew about like where to hunt or don't drink that pool over there, don't eat that mushroom, eat that one. You were like the badass. Yeah, exactly. You had the authority and you got more women and you probably were, I had more procreation. And so, yeah, the more powerful that was, I think that that ties into it. And because we are not gods, you know, our task is to become, you know, and we don't, we shouldn't try to supplant, you know, the actual God, if that's something

you believe in. But it's natural because we want heroes. to worshiping sports teams. I went to the Padres game yesterday. Kids are worshipping, you know, all these hitters or not on the Padres, but on the Pirates. But nevertheless, you know, they do have it. And even my daughter, my middle daughter,

she has a poster not of a sports team, not of Miley Cyrus, not a kid. She is a poster of the last woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics. That's a great. That's a tour that she worships. That's great. How do we get young kids? And that's not divisive either.

Right. Exactly. No, but I mean, how do we get more young people to have those people they worship? That's right. No, so that's a big thing that we think about, especially, you know, with the kind of searching for, because I think there's a beauty in the simplicity of, we're talking before we start recording just about minimalism and kind of record. That's what science is. Science is about kind of pairing away all the false red herrings and everything else and getting. What is the core of truth?

Science, the word science, in the language Greek, it means knowledge, but it doesn't mean wisdom. Like wisdom is a different word. I don't know what the word for wisdom is in Greek. I should probably learn it. But it's true that knowledge is more than just the accumulation of facts. When you have that knowledge plus accumulated wisdom, you can have wisdom and true insights into the way nature works. And I think if we can cultivate a reverence for that, then you might see people. I mean, right now it's, you know, the culture is a lot more obsessed with sports stars and music stars.

And I don't think there's going to be a, you know, Nobel Prize idol on TV anytime soon. but I think, you know, in the past it's been done by, well, we're fighting some enemy, the Soviet Union or China or whatever. I hope it doesn't have to be like that. I hope we can pursue knowledge for its own sake, but knowing past history, maybe that's not going to happen. We're going to have to wait for the asteroid to come to Earth in 50 years and, you know, then train a whole bunch of people that deflect it away and figure out how to save humanity or just call in Ben Affleck and who's will us. Call them in. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals

because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. I think I've always been more enamored by scientists, more enamored by people who were... And maybe it's because I grew up in a family that, you know, my father is who he is. And I just realized people are people. You know, they're not, you know, they're not these mythical.

That's right. People, I was always fascinated on merit, right? You know, on people who go out and do something. You know, people who like yourself or trying to discover something, trying to benefit society. Not to say that, you know, certain people aren't, I guess, but it's, I guess, I don't know, the way I always measured it was through some sort of,

I guess maybe I was more fascinated with academia a little bit. Just something tangible that's contributing to growth of humanity rather than entertainment maybe? Yeah, you know, look, we all need entertainment as well. But I think there should be a balance, right? I mean, if you are only focused on entertainment, then are you putting forth something that's going to, you know, benefit some. I remember the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. He's, you know, probably the dean of all documentary filmmakers in America today. He spoke at my college graduation at Case Western, and he said something to the effect of, well, you know, a lot of us are science major.

And he's like, you know, science is phenomenal at discovering new things and providing technology and defending, you know, defending civilization. Whatever that means, discovering cures for stuff, discovering new horizons beyond what we can see with the human eye, et cetera, discovering new paradigms for where we came from. But what is that which needs to be protected? It's the arts. It's like the culture of a civilization. And that needs protection. And one thing we do here at UC San Diego with this Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination that I'm a part of is to try to see what are the commonalities between the creativity of a scientist, the creativity of an artist and a writer and a thinker. And what are those commonalities that can shed light on the meta level, on what does it mean to be imaginative, creative?

And what you're saying a few minutes ago boils down to this pursuit of curiosity, which some say is our defining human characteristic. Why are we here? Yeah, exactly. What makes us unique is that we have this capacity for curiosity. We're not just only obsessed with, well, how do we get more crop yields or how do we get more termites to eat or, you know, like other than I. she's my so how do we how do we and and that quest beyond it um you know it's what's so fascinating to me and what makes us human and the thing that i most want to understand in life is is that is that urge well when we and then you know what sheds light when we're talking about this subject right

specifically space like to me i just start to question like why the fuck are we so concerned with all these mundane things you know what the Kardashians are wearing what doctor Donald Trump said or didn't say or what, you know, it's like, well, what about, you know, the fact that we're on a rock spinning through space? What? Scale of all things. It's just, like, we're here for a second. It's inconsequential and then we're gone. Absolutely.

It's so, it's mind-boggling to me. You know, you look up and you see 100 billion suns, you know, burning away throughout the galaxy. And nobody ever looks up and I hate that star. You know, like, you might say, I hate that Republican. I hate Trump. I hate, Maxine, whatever. You could, you could, but nobody feels politicized. I don't mean, like, the political aspects, as I said before, global warming can be blue.

But I don't mean that. I mean, science in its purest state as a search for new knowledge, it's not political. And that's what's so beautiful about it. We need, as a culture, a safe space where we don't have to debate. And I don't say, oh, you're a Democrat. I'm a Republican. You want to have a safe space. And it could be that it's in sports or it could be that.

But nowadays you even see what like sports is getting politicized. Like I can't even read the newspaper. I don't want to, I don't care. I'm going to see a baseball game. And it's just divisive. They just they make adversity in their lives. You know, they make shit up. Yeah, because they like conflict.

Conflict cells. Yeah, conflict is true. You don't hear, oh, you know, today in, in, wherever in Uzbekistan, you know, this village that's been at peace for 100 years, still at peace. You don't hear about that. Yeah, it's like, it's not going to make the news. But science, I think, you know, to the extent. that it does make the news, I think it's usually

in a reason, it provides a reason for hopefulness. And I think that that's, you know, ultimately, science is the most optimistic expression of the human species. And we were all born with awe and wonderment, not hate. That's right. You know, and if we would just stop, like I'm camping this week down here

in Carlsbad and just sit there and look up at the stars. And just people just, I just wish people would look up a little more often. Right. It gives the cosmic perspective. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I need to look up.

When you say stars, you know, like our sun, could explode one day, right? Could cease to exist. Is there anything that indicates that, like, have we measured that that could happen or that might happen? Yeah. Yeah. So we actually have a very well-understood theory of how stellar evolution, how stars are born. how they live out their lives and how they die. The most important parameter that describes them is their mass.

So the bigger the star, the more likely it's to burn out, blow up, explode, maybe turn into a black hole in some cases. You've got to go back to black hole before your doctor's. Our son is sort of in this interesting state because it's the most familiar, stellar object to us. We define everything either as being more massive than our sun or less massive than our sun. Star that's much more massive than our sun could explode in what's called a supernova. It could collapse. It could form a black hole potentially or a neutron star. Our star, the sun, will probably not do that.

It will probably swell up, get really large, cool off, become more red in color, vaporize the planets in the solar system. So there's nothing left. Eventually, cool back down and what's called a white dwarf. But, you know, keep paying your taxes. I always think it's going to take about four billion years. Sun's about middle age right now. How do we know that? So we measure, populate.

So we don't have a camera watching the sun, obviously. But what we do have is 100 billion other examples. Some are just like our sun. And we've seen how they evolve on what's called this sequence of stars, called the main sequence of stars. And so we categorize, we make up in quality of data with quantity of data. So you can get a very accurate estimate of the lifespan of how long you're going to live, not from, you know, I don't have to go into your genetics and find out exactly,

well, you did this, you smoked this and that grade, you know, whatever. I can just say, statistically, there's, you know, half the popular 3.5 billion men on Earth, and then I can drill down a little bit deeper and find out exactly, and that's how insurance companies make their money, right? They bet you're going to live for a certain amount of time. You're betting you're going to die. And so these statistics and actuarial statistics apply to stars as well. So we have a good sample of other stars that are similar enough to our son that we can divine what it's going to be like. You mentioned black holes.

So, yeah, so black holes occur when a sun is a star is about twice as massive as our sun. It wouldn't look exactly like our son. We wouldn't be here asking at this position from that object because it would be too hot for water to exist, for carbon-based life forms to exist. Maybe it would be farther away from it. But so when a black hole forms, a star gets so massive that eventually when it can no longer fuse its elements together to make the energy that is given off in nuclear fusion, that star collapses under its gravity. And it can form a supernova and what's left over after the supernova in some cases can be a black. black hole. What is a black hole is a, uh, is defined as a place where gravity is so strong that not even light can escape from it. So in our case, uh, or in the case of, of, of a very massive star,

that's tens of times the mass of the sun. It could actually collapse to a place where in, in a finite volume, maybe something, you know, bigger than our solar system, but not by that much, that anything that got within that distance of the center of this black hole would never be able to, not only would it never be able to escape, but light produced by it. So if you shot a laser beam right as you're falling into what's called the event horizon, that's the last signal anyone ever see. They would never see what happened to you. If you're waving to them as you're going through the event horizon,

they'll never see, they'll just see you eventually. You'll be frozen in space and time. You'll be frozen for all time in this whatever position. You last went through this hypothetical surface or this boundary called the event horizon. So when we look up at space and we see the space between stars, could that be black holes there? There could be black holes there and we wouldn't be able to see them

because we have no back light to compare against. So the way that we know that there are black holes and we've seen black holes in a variety of ways, one way is that they do give off light but not from themselves. So when matter falls into it, it's like a big disposal in your sink. When matter falls in,

it gets heated up through friction, rubbing together and it can get extremely hot and there can be processes that give off very high. high energy x-rays and gamma rays and things like that. And it does so in a very complicated pattern, but we've seen the traces of these x-rays in space. We've also seen when two black holes come together, they give off the same waves of gravity,

very similar to what I was talking about in the early universe is Spark, this big bang gravitational wave background. The black holes that we've observed with this experiment called LIGO, that indicated to us that two black holes, about 30 times the mass of the sun. So one was say 30 times the mass of the sun. One was like 32 times the mass of the sun. They came together and they formed a black hole

that's 60 times the mass of the sun. So two solar masses worth of energy got converted into energy in the form of gravity because black holes are black. They don't give off light. So the only energy that they could give off are waves of gravity. And we detected those waves of gravity

by the motion of a detector in Louisiana and one in Washington State. and they vibrated at just the right magnitude compared with what Einstein's prediction was and it showed that black holes exist and black holes can get swallowed into one another and create a new black hole that's more massive by just a little bit less than the sum of the two masses

and the missing mass comes in the form of energy and the waves of gravity. And what happens in a black hole? So black hole is an incredibly mysterious place. We don't know exactly what happens once you go inside the event horizon which is no matter because you could actually never go into one. We don't believe it could ever go into one. I know on interstellar, they have wormholes

and they have black holes combined with one another. Part of the reason I do what I do, which is to build telescopes that actually can observe things, is I like to kind of get rid of some of the nonsensical theories and maybe prove what's actually correct or observe what actually does exist. So wormholes are like really fascinating. They appear in movies, like I think a wrinkle in time and other things. But in terms of like, do we have any evidence for them? No, not right now. Black holes were sort of at that level about 50 years ago when they were first conjectured in the 1960s. But now we have abundant evidence for their existence, but we still haven't been to one. We haven't made one.

But you're absolutely right. There could be a black hole in the blackness of space that we couldn't see. We could detect it if it collides with something else using the waves of gravity approach. Or we could do what's called gravitational lensing, which is another consequence of Einstein's theory. There are ways to measure the existence of things that you can't see with light. And that's what's really fascinating. Well, you say we don't think we could travel through one. Why do you, what's your evidence that is?

So what gravity really means is that there's black holeless gravity really means is that so the typical analogy, which is only barely serviceable, is imagine they have like a trampoline and you put a bowling ball on a trampoline. So what a massive object does is it distorts gravity. It distorts the force of gravity that you'd feel. So if you got close to a black hole, you could have a black hole that has the same mass of the earth. and if it was located 5,000 miles away from us, 6,000 miles away from us,

you would weigh the same as you would on the surface of the earth if you're near that black hole. But if you have a black hole that's much, much bigger, as you got physically closer, then it would only occupy the space of, you know, maybe of a proton size or something like that. It would be incredibly small. So you couldn't actually,

you personally couldn't get into the event horizon to get ripped apart. But if you have a solar mass black hole... To get ripped apart. So something that's bigger than the mass of the sun by a factor of two, you could actually get close enough so that on a human scale, the force of gravity on your feet would be exponentially larger than the force of gravity on your head, even though it's only six feet apart, right? So that is like the force of tides on the Earth's oceans.

That tidal force could be stronger than the chemical bonds that bind your atoms together in your body. So you could actually have a gravitational force, even though it's the weakest of all forces in general, specifically near a black hole, it becomes much more important than, So the matter that, let's say a planet was orbiting near a black hole, the planet's held together by chemical forces. It's made of carbon, silicon, iron. Those chemical bonds can get ripped apart by the gravitational field. So gravity is enough strength on black hole scales to totally obliterate matter and completely destroy matter. And when it does that, the black hole gets a little bit bigger. So it's kind of like the blob.

When it eats something, it gets actually bigger, physically larger and more massive. So is it taking on energy one? and in two, if energy can't be created nor destroyed, is a black hole, a big bang on the other side? Yeah, so some people do speculate that the universe could come from something that is allied with a black hole, and that's called basically a white hole. These two things together are what are both known as singularities.

So you might have heard the word singularity or whatever. Singularity means that you're dividing something, which is macroscopic, like something bigger than one, or even if it's not bigger than one, you're dividing it by zero. You're saying how much mass in the numerator divided by how much volume in the denominator. That's density.

When you make the volume zero, you're dividing something macroscopic, a mass of your mass, kilograms or the Earth's mass. You're dividing that by zero. So you get in singularity as a division by zero. So you get infinite density. So we actually don't know

what the properties of the matter are like when they're in that state at the center of a black hole. And it does depend on the size of the black hole. But we do know that the size of the black hole would change, the area of the black hole would change, depending on how much matter it's gobbled up. So, and we do see the remnants, as I said, of two black holes coming together to make a third black hole, which is, and then those two black holes that were previously there do no longer exist. But really, you can only

think of them as a gravitational structure. You can't think of like, well, there's people in there, or there's atoms in there. And you really have to think about it as the force of gravity. that an observer would feel if they could weigh themselves. Or you could put a scale there. How much would the spring and a scale deflect as it got closer and closer to the advanced horizon and then beyond the event horizon? And then the other thing is that the gravity can be so strong,

it's like the bowling balls mass going to infinity rips the trampoline, but preserves it. So you need an infinite amount of energy to climb out of it because the gravitational field is so strong. So we see effects of the boundary between the non-outside the black hole and the black holes of N Horizon. We see those effects, and we see the collision of multiple black holes. But beyond that, we don't really, you know, there's some thought of, well, you could make a black hole if you have enough energy and a small enough space.

Those fears were unfounded. They weren't really able to do that. You say we're kind of at the precipice of understanding of black hole. Yeah. Do we see them in telescopes? You can see the effects of them. We believe at the center of our galaxy and every mass of galaxy like ours that has hundreds of billions of stars, perhaps. that they're orbiting, all the stars seem to be orbiting around basically a blank spot where there's no star at the center of our galaxy.

This is, this is one or multiple? No, it's one black hole. We think there's just one black hole at the center of the galaxy. We only think there's one black hole in our sun. But it's a million times bigger than our sun. The more mass than our sun. So it has a million masses of the sun concentrated into a region smaller than our solar system, closer to us than Neptune. So it's an amazing amount.

I imagine a million stars, you know, would be, you know, the sun's a million. There's something. How far away is this? So the center of our galaxy is about 60,000 light years away from us. So it's fairly far away from it. It happens to be in the center. It happens to be in the center. Exactly.

Yeah. No, it is the center. So we see stars. So another reason we know it exists, we see stars orbiting around an empty place in space. So there's nothing there. You don't see like a shadow. If you were close enough, you would see a shadow. And you see all the light rays that were coming from right behind.

it would be refracted like a lens, but you'd see a disc, the black disc, and then surrounding will be this halo of all the light coming to us from beyond the black hole. But anyway, so the black hole that is at the center of our galaxy is causing stars to orbit around it, just like the planets in our solar system orbit around the sun. So if you turn the sun off and you kept its matter there in the form of a black hole, the Earth would keep orbiting around it. Mercury would keep it. We would all die eventually because we would have no solar elimination.

but nevertheless, the planets would keep orbiting just like nothing ever happened. Only if you just got rid of the sun altogether with the planets fly out of their orbits. So the stars are orbiting around this dark star that we can't see at the center of our galaxy, and we take pictures of those stars using infrared light. And what's happening to those planets? Are they eventually being stars? Some of them are getting ripped apart. If they go close to the sun, like a comet when it comes close to it, when it goes close to the black hole.

Some of them are getting ripped apart into gas clouds and planetary, kind of nebulae. Those objects, some of those are going to crash into the black holes of on Horizon in the next 10 years or so. So there are telescopes... You already know this is going to happen? Well, it's just like we know that Mercury is going to be over there tomorrow. Yeah, so we do know that. So we can predict the orbits based on the theory of relativity and even Newton's laws and Kepler's laws, which go back 450 years. We can predict very accurately where those stars are going to be orbiting around the black hole. All you need to know is what the mass is. And so that's how we measure the mass as well from the orbital

dynamics of the stars that surround it. How long we've been watching this, Black Hole? So there's movies you can look up online. There's a colleague of mine at UCLA named Andrea Ghez. She runs a group that looks at the center of the galaxy using these very interesting telescope techniques that can

get rid of the atmospheric blurring, the scintillation, the twinkling of starlight. She can look and peer into the center of the galaxy using a telescope on Monekeia in Hawaii. And she can see what's happening to these stars over years. And she's been measuring on since 1994, I think.

So she's got, and some of them go around the black hole every three or four years. So some of them are orbiting pretty fast, and she can peer into the center of the galaxy. She can see a dozen stars moving around the center, and she can predict when fragments of those stars are going to break off and fall into the black

hole. So far, every time they predicted, and I think it's partially to get public publicity, every time they predict, oh, there's going to be a big, you know, it's basically like a forecast, and they keep getting it wrong. If nothing ends up being visible, eventually something will happen. I'm pretty confident about that.

And when that happens, I predict she'll win a Nobel Prize. But that could never happen. It could happen tomorrow. We don't know. That's awesome. Yeah. Wow. So cool what we know.

Yeah. And what we don't know. But isn't that cool? Like, if we knew everything, it would be boring. Yeah. That's right. The wonder we talk about. What would Brian do all day long?

Yeah. I mean, we could still make movies. You know, you could still make movies, but. Yeah. It's my stories. There is a movie called the Black Hole. I have a wonder, man. Have you seen this?

It's Neil Tyson posted the first computer, what does it say? Computer-generated image of a black hole. Let me see this. So, yeah, when they talk about how they generate an image, they're constructing what the force of gravity would look like at different points around the black hole or it could be around anything.

You could actually, the gravitational field of view is actually interesting and complicated to look at. Black holes are actually pretty simple. They only have three properties. They have mass. They have how fast they rotate because they can actually spin. And they have charge. They can be charged, we think. We actually haven't observed their charge necessarily.

But we've observed their mass and their spin. And then the spin can point in three different dimensions. So really, they're very simple. It's sort of like an atom, or not even an atom, an electron. You've seen one electron. People never say, oh, electrons are so fast.

Like, each one is identical. They're all commodities, like a grain of corn or something, you know. Like, they're all the same. They just have, you know, they matter in aggregate, not individually. Mm-hmm. Well, I got no more questions. Only a thousand. A thousand more questions.

I think that's enough for today. I got the laboratory and the telescopes. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for your time, bud. I'll show you guys our detectors, our telescopes, or we have all sorts of really interesting things. And our claim to fame is we have the coldest spot in San Diego and all of California probably. We cool things down in our laboratory to not even one Kelvin,

one degree of absalibusor. We can cool it down to six, one thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. Let's go check it out. So cryogenics kiss my ass, right? That's right. Yeah, don't go in the cryo machine. I only charge a thousand dollars. Thank you guys very much. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening. Keep in touch, inspired and informed by signing up for Professor Keating's Monday magic email at briankeating.com slash list. And if you have a dot-edu domain, we'll send you an artifact older than the earth,

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