Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Janna Levin: How to Survive A Black Hole Encounter! (#093)

Episode Date: November 14, 2020

Janna is back to discuss her wonderful new book, BLACK HOLE SURVIVAL GUIDE https://amzn.to/2IlbpKS Keep your distance and enjoy the ride! Please subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 & watch my previous conversation with Janna: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEtGYQ7A0B4?sub_confirmation=1 Leave a comment in the comment section or join the livechat…we all want to engage with Janna! Several Topics are on the menu on our voyage, including: 1. Black Hole basics 2. Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose 3. Are singularities real? 4. What is your favorite BH? 5. Black Hole Batteries! Janna Levin is the Claire Tow Professor of Physics & Astronomy at Barnard College. She earned a PhD in theoretical physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1993, and a Bachelor of Science in astronomy and physics with a concentration in philosophy at Barnard College in 1988, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa. Much of her work deals with looking for evidence to support the proposal that our universe might be finite in size due to its having a nontrivial topology. Other work includes black holes and chaos theory. She joined the faculty at Barnard College in January 2004 and is currently the recipient Tow Professor grant. She is also the Chair and Director of Sciences, Pioneer Works! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic. Five, four, three, two. For my guest, Professor Janelle, how are you today? Congratulations on another phenomenal book launch of this wonderful book, Black Hole Survival Guide. Congratulations, Jenna. Thank you so much. It's always exciting when a book comes out. It's hard to believe it's finished.

You always feel like you're never going to finish a book. Right. It's just this. And then all of a sudden it's done. And there's the build up, the letdown, and then, hmm, should I start writing another book? When should I start writing another book? Well, congratulations. We've got a bunch of people watching live on YouTube currently.

And my name is Brian Keating, host of the Into the Impossible podcast. And it's not too often you get to hear me, you know, gushing like a white hole when I get a guest of the caliber of today's Janelle. And not only once are we going to be blessed to have Jana on the Into the Impossible podcast, but twice in a day because Jana has graciously agreed to come back on tonight for the great debate, live stream, second millennium. Jana, thank you so much. Where are you today? Are you in New York City?

I'm in New York City. And as you can see, I'm being my own tech person as I make slight adjustments. It's so glamorous, the life of an author. I've learned to be a tech person. But, yeah, I'm in New York City. Yeah, it's great. And so campus is closed, but you're teaching remotely as you're launching a book, as you're raising a family, how do you find time to do it all? I don't.

I definitely don't. The days are a blur. The days are a blur. Yeah. I wouldn't have it any other way, though. Yeah, that's right. It keeps things exciting. Actually, I want to start with there.

So your team was gracious enough to get me a copy of the e-book. So I read the book basically in a couple of things. hours. It's such a treat. It's a slim volume, but it has the information density of a black hole. It is so full of tidbits. And, you know, I always said when, you know, I actually had, you know, you were part of my live stream on Friday with Sir Roger Penrose. Yeah. And I always love it when somebody says, you know, I learned something from your book. And, and usually it's like, you know, it's kind of a little bit condescending. So I don't want it to sound that way. But when he said that to me, I felt really good about my book. But I want to say that about your book. I learned a tremendous amount and it raised

so many questions. And the thing that I first want to point out is that it's a work of art too. So you are the director of the Pioneer Works. Tell us, what is Pioneer Works? Did it inspire this book in your mind, this blend, melange between science and art? Yeah. Yeah, Pioneer Works is a new cultural center. It's only a few years old. It's in Red Hook, Brooklyn, which is right on the water in Brooklyn. It's a beautiful old ironworks factory that was converted into a space for art and music and tech and now science, because I'm the director of science is there. We brought science to Prainerics and I very much believe science just is part of culture. And we had this immediate synergy with the founders. And it's really a place for experimentation and exploration where science

and art rubbed together. We don't use this trite thing where we force scientists, an artist necessarily to specifically collaborate. It's really just that they get to rub shoulders and exciting, wonderful things happen. So sometimes we do talks. I did a talk with Peter Gallison a couple of years ago about his film containment on nuclear waste and real high-level science talk, but we did it in the midst of the Hiroshima panels, which was a stunning exhibit of these panels that were painted by these Japanese artists who were in Hiroshima within days after the bomb.

So we have this rubbing of these deep cultural ideas and concepts and perspectives. Leah Halloran, who's the artist for the book, I'm glad you started with that, is a very dear friend of mine. And I was very near the end of the book, actually, and I finally saw what the book was, and I know you understand this feeling.

Sometimes you set out to have a scientific theory or write a book, and you go the opposite direction, you go a different direction, because it guides you. discover things on the journey. And one of the things I realized was I wanted this book to be beautiful in the language and physically. And so I reached out to Leah and asked her if she would do paintings instead of having graphic

figures. And so Leah painted over 20 original paintings for the book. So it really is beautiful. I'm going to show you, I'm going to show you because I know you have it up there, but look how tiny it is. I know. And then these pictures, these pictures are just, you know, that that Leah did. are just so gorgeous.

She did these, like, wonderful paintings for it. And she even did the author image. So my author image is even a painting. Oh, wow. I didn't know she did that. Oh, that's phenomenal. Yeah. So it made the book so special for me to be a collaboration with an artist.

And did it grow specifically out of Pioneer Works in some ways, but in some ways pioneer works science department grew out of that desire. And Leo was, in fact, through our friendship or resident in the science studios for a little while, where she would come and paint in the science studios while we were doing our thing. And it's just the way I've always wanted to live. You know, that's what I said. It's the world I've always wanted to live in.

So we're kind of building it from scratch. Yeah, and I wanted to just read the introduction or the afterward, which really has a tribute to her. We'll read your intro in a second. But Leah Halloran is an artist who often draws from concepts in the history of astronomy. She developed her love of science, beginning with her first job at the age of 15 in San Francisco, dissecting cow eyes. So, you know, that's, if you're not worried about survival, I guess you won't be nauseated by cow eyes. She's a painter and photographer living in Los Angeles, represented in Los Angeles

by Luis de Jesus, Los Angeles. And she's also an associate professor of art at Chapman University. We've had on Michael Shermer, who's a professor there of, maybe it's in the sciences he runs. the Science Along, and Skeptic Magazine. But I want to talk about a commonality. I interviewed, I don't know if you've ever met him. Seth Godin, do you know who that is? I know the name, but I don't think we've met. He's like, he invented email marketing.

He's famous for losing $6 billion, he claims, because he didn't monetize this idea to spam people. He's a phenomenal mind. He runs this ALT MBA program. It has a nice podcast called the Into the Impossible Podcast. Although that reminds me, those of you who don't get enough exercise in this time of pandemic, just exercise your finger and click subscribe on my YouTube channel and thumbs up because tonight Jana is going to be back.

You don't want to miss that. But I talked to Seth Godin last week on my channel and he said that great artists thrive on constraints. Your book seemed to me to be this paragon of constraints. He says that creative people don't ship their work because they're too afraid and they're too unbounded. It seems to me you're known for thinking about constraints and the power

that constraints have. Your previous book, which we discussed this past summer, Black Hole Blues, which is another just delightful book, was about the power of constraint on an experimental team searching for the ultimate signal of black holes. Your book prior to that was The Madman Dreams of Turing Machines.

About two diametrically opposed in some sense, brilliant minds, plagued by constraints in their field, girdle with the incompleteness of mathematics and and Turing with the, you know, possibility of constraints on the power of computers. What is it about constraints that allows your mind to thrive and how do you handle all the constraints that you have and produce so much great creative content? Brian, it's a truly excellent question. When I was a postdoc at Berkeley

at the Center for Particle Astrophysics, so young postdoc, still figuring it out out, I shared an office with, who is now Professor Pedro Ferreira at Oxford, but at the time he like me was a young postdoc still figuring it out. And we were in such a small office that our chairs would knock together the backs of our chairs. And so sometimes to talk to each other, we would simply lean back, generally be able to be face to face. And he said to me, one day, he said, I'm obsessed with constrained creativity. And ever since he said that, it was like an epiphany. I had been struggling with the same concepts, but I hadn't found the right way of saying it. And there is this magic when imagination crashes into constraints. I really believe that the best

artists have incredibly severe constraints that they self-impose. And only then can they, within that very firm and structurally sound scaffolding, can they be genuinely creative? One of the examples I love is James Terrell, the famous artist who just uses light. To the point that I mean he really just uses light, there is no focal point, there is no object, there is to some sense no lens. He simply relates to light and it is just phenomenal work, some of the great work of contemporary art. And so I believe that that's true, obviously with science, when I was a kid, I thought scientists just memorized and recited things. A terrible, terrible stereotype that I don't even know where it came from.

But as I discovered it in college, really, I realized, oh, wow, what you can do if you tighten your constraints is unbelievable. And in fact, in the beginning of the book, I talk about how the most rigid limits created revolutions. It was when you squeeze down in one direction, you explode in the other. And relativity, which is really the basis of this whole book, is one of those examples. Einstein could have called it absolutism. He could have said, I am sticking absolutely firmly to the speed of light and the constancy

of the speed of light and the rigidity of that as a fundamental cosmic limit. And by sticking to that absolute parameter so rigidly, he actually initiated a complete revolution and how we understand the cosmos. We have the big bang and black holes. and an expanding universe and all of these things, and time travel and all of these things that would not have been conceivable had he not imposed that limit.

So I often, when I write, think very hard about structure. I think very hard about limits. And you talk about how small this book is, it didn't start small. In a way, it started really big. My first lump of material was three times bigger. Three times as long. And it was a process of imposing those constraints to figure out what the book really was

and anything else had to go. Yeah, I think it was Descartes or maybe it was Voltaire who said, if I had more time, I would have made it shorter. It's Mark Twain. Oh, Mark Twain. And I actually just thought of that quote in an interview the other day. Mark Twain said, I didn't have time to write a short letter. I wrote a long one instead.

Yes, exactly. So I always hate it, as I said last time, when authors are on podcasts and they say, can you please explain your entire book? Preferably in the exact same voice you narrate for the audiobook so that, you know, our listeners can save a few dollars. But what is the basic thesis of the book in that you took on something that's incredibly challenging to have art and science blended together? Who is the inner critic?

Because I know you have an inner critic that. You talked about it with Tim Ferriss and on his podcast. And you have this voice inside your head. Who are you writing to? Who is your audience, the artist, the scientist, some educated, you know, fool who can't draw a stick figure like me? Who is it? Yeah. Well, I think those are two questions.

And when I was reading popular science book when I was very young, I did not like the kind of condescending tone of some of them, as though here we are the great masters. having climbed the summit, coming down with a tablet, right, and declaring our discoveries. I very much think about the books I write as books that I want to read. And so to a large extent, and some people will criticize this, to a large extent, I am my most severe critic and I am also my most targeted audience. And the reason why I wanted to write this particular book is because I wanted to dispel a lot of myths about black holes. And there are a lot of myths about black holes.

Like black holes are dense objects, as though you roll up to the event horizon and you knock on the surface of this very dense thing. The first chapter, which really launched kind of conceptually all the chapters, was to insist that black holes are nothing, to convey that they are absolutely empty, and that it's more than that. In some sense, black holes are not objects at all.

They're a place. What they are is they are a place in space time. Or you could say more strongly they are a space time. They are a place, literally. They are a space and a time. And that kind of thematic thinking is a current through the whole book, really dispelling myths about black holes. I'd muted myself unintentionally my sound into a sonic black hole,

which you also talk about in this point. You are your own engineer. That's right. Although I am not a Guggenheim genius like you are at figuring these things. I want to ask you, are singularity is real? I mean, if you had a bet your neighbor's annoying pet ferret that keeps you up at night in New York City, would you bet the existence of that creature's life on the existence and reality of a singularity? It seems like we kind of had this Euberos or whatever you call it.

this self-circular argument that, well, singularities are needed because they provide the realm in which we notice that gravity is insufficiently married to quantum mechanics. And then we say, oh, well, quantum mechanics must be married to gravity because otherwise we can't work out the physics at the singularity in a black hole or in the Big Bang. But who ordered them? I mean, why do we know, first of all, there's no evidence for them, experimental. We can't get them, as you point out in the book.

I'm not going to spoil. the ending of the Black Hall survival good. But are they real, I mean, do you really believe that they exist? Or are they just kind of like this tool, like the number infinity, which we don't know if it exists either in reality? Right, right. So it's interesting because a Nobel Prize this year, which was awarded to Sir Roger, who you just had on your show, Sir Roger Penrose. In the 60s, the work he did that earned him the Nobel Prize these 50 years later, more than 50 years later, was that he proved mathematically that if you have a collapsing star,

it not only leaves an event horizon behind it, it does become that dense object that people think is a black hole. But the star is not the black hole. When it becomes a certain density, it creates around it what we call the event horizon, the region beyond which you cannot escape, not even light can escape. But what Roger proved is that it continues to fall.

The star can no more sit there then it can travel outward at the speed of light. It's what it would have to try to do. It's as though space time becomes a waterfall. And the star is forced to fall more and more and more and get smaller and smaller until it catastrophically forms. And Roger showed that this is what the predictions are of the mathematics of general relativity,

a singularity, an infinite curvature in space and time. And then he says in this paper, therefore, this isn't his exact wording, singularities are probably signaling the breakdown of the theory of general relativity, because physically they are anathema. And so he also argued that once we understand the quantum behavior of space time, which would be probed near the singularity, it will be like a false prophecy. It will go away.

And so he even says this in this paper, and I believe that there are very few theoretical physicists who believe that a singularity exists. I would not base my ferret's life on it. Absolutely. No, your neighbor's ferret. Oh, my neighbor's ferret. We have a lot of animals, but we don't have a ferret. So I would very much argue that what the singularity does for us is it signals to us where we need to start thinking about quantum mechanics and quantum gravity, and even how we need to start thinking about it. So the resolution of what happens to that collapsing star, the original story that it falls into a singularity and gets, who knows what happens to it, it falls out of space time, it ceases to exist. It is a terrible thing to make such a prediction.

First of all, as you said, we don't see infinities in nature. And second of all, it means that we've lost the ability to have physical reality to some extent. Things simply drop out of existence. And that seems to be a pretty strong message that we've gotten something wrong. And it doesn't mean that the whole of general relativity is wrong. It's absolutely beautiful. It's absolutely excellently tested. It means that at those scales, it's just not complete. Interesting.

So the other thing that you get into is the quantum nature of black holes and how they've kind of, you know, really enraptured physicists ranging from, you know, Beckenstein and Hawking. all the way up to, you know, obviously with Sir Roger and beyond. And, of course, recently many, many Nobel Prizes have been awarded for black holes. Why do they fascinate ordinary individuals? I mean, to the extent that someone knows about general relativity in the layperson realm, it's, oh, a black hole, or, you know, maybe they might know something about, well, I don't even know, maybe something that's associated with the singularity at the beginning of our current epoch in the universe. But why is it that they know about that Black Hole specifically?

Why don't they know about gravitational weak lensing or something different? Right. Well, Black holes really do have a cultural aura that is not usually associated with astrophysical phenomena. One of the reasons, obviously, the actual physical phenomena is fascinating, the warping of the space and time. And astrophysically, the fact that they are the death state of very massive stars is just remarkable. When Einstein first heard about black holes, they weren't called that. He gets a letter from a friend in which the mathematics is described, and he appreciates

mathematics. He thinks it's true. But he doesn't think that nature will allow them. Nature will protect us from their formation. And it was quite extraordinary that after decades, people realized that nature thought of a way to make them. And it was by killing off a few stars. So if you kill a very massive stars, they will collapse under their own weight.

They're heavy enough that no resistance from matter can stop the catastrophic collapse, and they will form a black hole. But the reason that it's so interesting on the quantum side and the modern side is when we step away from astrophysics and we say, what are black holes telling us about physics in general? Now, when a star dies and it makes a neutron star, or which is a dead star that's not heavy enough to become a black hole, which does have a surface, which is an object. It is made of stuff. And you can go up to it and you can knock on it. It would not be a good idea.

It's a very dense and dangerous place to be. But it's not, the black hole is different because the black hole, as we said in the beginning, in some sense, isn't an object, it's a place. It's actually a perfect place. There's a sense in which a black hole is fundamental to the laws of nature. And that makes it unlike any other astrophysical phenomena I can think of. A black hole is almost like a perfect fundamental particle, not dissimilar from how an electron is a perfect fundamental particle, as far as we know.

Maybe it's made up of strings or something else. But the idea, if I have one electron and I have another electron, They are identical and flawless. They have exactly the same mass. They have exactly the same charge. They have exactly the same quantum features. And they are technically completely indistinguishable. There is no experiment you could perform that says,

ah, this electron's a little fatter than this one, you know. But stars aren't like that. Neutron star can be a little bigger than its neighbor, and it might have a little mountain on. It has a tiny feature and little distinguishing features. Black holes are perfectly flawless. They're featureless. And that makes them exceptional as astrophysical objects.

It also makes them a terrain on which we can explore fundamental physics. And so people who are talking about hawking radiation and talking about the very wild, modern ideas which get really out there, they are using the black hole as a frontier to explore. And the only frontier, really, of its kind that are. allows us to do those explorations and to probe the real quantum nature of gravity and of the laws of physics. So that's very beautiful. I want to come back to the fungibility of black holes in a bit. And you did say that electrons can't be fat or my electrons can be fat or I've struggled with that. My elementary part of my avatar in the particle world is the crouton. I want to ask you a question from another Brian, Brian Penley, who asked if a black hole would take longer than the age of the

universe to significantly dissolve, I think what he means is hawking evaporate. Eventually, eons and eons from now, is there a chance that the universe, too, will evaporate eons and eons from now? Well, it's a very interesting question. The bigger the black hole, the more slowly it evaporates. And as it gets smaller, it will begin to probe the quantum properties more strongly, and those processes become more important. So the astrophysical black holes that we see in the universe are not hawking radiating. They're actually absorbing way more than they emit. So they are really technically not hawking evaporating yet. But if I left a black hole alone, I took away all the background light left over from the big bang so it couldn't even absorb that.

that heat. So there was just in a cold, empty universe. Indeed, it would begin to evaporate. And as it gets smaller and smaller, the evaporation gets more catastrophic and accelerated. And eventually, it really just explodes at the end. And we believe is gone. But it does, the part, the radiation itself is there. The hawking radiation exists in the universe. And so we could conceive of a far future in the cosmos in which the universe is simply full of hawking radiation. And that won't evaporate anymore. We will be left with whatever turns out to be actually fundamental. Maybe there are fundamental strings. Maybe they really are particles. These are things that are still under debate. But it would be as though the universe was just this smooth,

hot bath of the radiation left over from these exploding black holes. And there is a scenario in which you can imagine that the universe effectively dies that way. Because we, no longer perceive a passage of time. There's no longer any more change. There's there's just the same second after second you couldn't under you couldn't perceive a passage of time in a universe that that was just essentially having a kind of a heat death. Ah, gives me a, gives me an idea for your next book. So universe ending survival guard. No one here gets out alive. Um, how to survive the end of the universe. Yeah. I actually have a book that I interviewed. last week, How to Die in Space by Paul Sutter, you may know, is also a famous YouTuber.

Speaking of YouTube, I want to remind folks to click on the comments and the chat, because Jan is back tonight with a joining in the great debate. We're commemorating the 100th anniversary of the great debate, the so-called Curtis Shapley debate. We're going to be looking at supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies. No, not with my puny little two-inch telescope, but we're actually going to be using a massive telescope in Wyoming to do some live stargazing if the weather cooperates. But while you're up there, so reach up, subscribe, and hit the notification bell and

you'll find out later on tonight, 6 p.m. Pacific and 9 p.m. Eastern. So getting back to black holes, so you talk a lot about what happens when material objects go close to a black hole because as you note we are made of matter, you know, we're basically made of three things, two quarks and an electron mixed together. I always wondered how can a black hole be charged? I mean, we only know of two charges. One's, you know, not elementary. You know, we think of electrons as negatively charged and then the quarks have, you know, fractional charges. But how can they be charged if there's basically no thing? You keep saying this in the book. Black holes are no thing, no matter. How can nothingness have charge?

Yeah. You can even start with the question, how can nothingness have mass? Yes. And it's quite a tricky, it feels like a slight of hand to say there's nothing there, but it has mass. If you believe, as some people used to, I don't think it's a very popular idea anymore, that the collapsing star, let's say that's how you made the black hole, forms a quantum remnant in the interior. Then it would be easier to discuss things like, well, you're really assigning the mass to the remnant on the inside or the charge to the, or the charge to the remnant on the inside. But that's really not what we're saying. We're saying it doesn't matter if it's a remnant. It doesn't matter if there's a real singularity

and stuff of the start is gone. What happens is it has imparted to the gravitational energy an equivalent mass. So the black hole has a gravitational energy from far away, even though it's not an object, you would imagine there's an object there. And it wouldn't be until you got closer

that you would realize it's nothingness there. But the gravitational field itself has an equivalent energy to the mass that went into it. And similarly, the gravitational field can have a charge. When we say, what is the shape of the space time around a black hole?

It is different. The gravitational field itself is different if there is charge. And so in that sense, what you're doing is you are imparting these characteristics to the space time itself. It's a subtle,

issue. Yeah, it is. And these are mysterious objects. You talk in a lecture that I really enjoyed at Brown University about, you know, magnetic black holes and batteries and so forth and all sorts of, you know, possible, relevant things. So I want to move down to your research. But before we do, I want to, someone's asking me, what do you think about the fact that there are black holes thought to be supermassive in size at the centers of almost all galaxies. Why is that? I mean, why the galaxies have a tremendous amount of dark matter, and the dark matter is not necessarily related to the black holes. And yet, we find that they have a tremendous number of high correlation between black holes and supermassive black holes in galaxy. So why is that? Well, I would say to some extent, we don't really know. We don't

know how they got so supermassive. So you might have a scenario like this. Very big stars early in the universe, even bigger than the kinds of stars we make today, a different population of stars, collapsed directly, these bigger stars are from an earlier era out of primordial stuff. And they form bigger black holes, and those bigger black holes collide and merge. And that's, in fact, what LIGO detected. We know that black holes merge and get bigger. And so maybe over lots of years of finding other black holes, they became supermassive. Now, some people argue that you really can't form them that way. There's not enough time.

There's not, there aren't enough collisions. And all of this stuff is stuff we're working out now because we're making discoveries month by month. LIGO detected for the first time intermediate mass black holes, black holes that aren't tens of times the mass of sun, but hundreds and, or at least in the hundred range, opening the door to others that are hundreds of times the mass of sun.

And then there were far off these supermassives. So it's possible that supermassive black holes simply collapsed out of the primordial stuff, skipping stars altogether and formed that way. Now, we don't know which comes first, the galaxy or the black hole. But we are starting to understand that the black hole shapes the galaxy,

that it has a lot of responsibility for the size of the galaxy, for regulating the size of the galaxy. For instance, we know that there are these incredible jets that are churned up outside, the black hole. They don't come from the interior because nothing comes out of the black hole, but they're churned up in the environment around the black hole, and that these jets can drive particles and winds that regulate how big a galaxy can get. And if you look at the size of these

supermassive black holes, the largest ones, I believe, are in the tens of billions of times the mass of the sun. Yeah, so that's pretty big. The one in our galaxy is four million times the mass of the sun, which is also pretty big. But even so, it may be a lot of the sun. It may be very big. It may be a lot of the sun. It makes up a pretty small fraction of the mass of the whole galaxy. And that's funny. So people thought, well, maybe they're not that important to the galaxy, but we're starting to understand that to some extent where we live on Earth, in the Milky Way, in orbit around a supermassive black hole, that that whole history and story could largely, our origins,

our history could largely have been shaped by that black hole. And ultimately, that that's where we're going to end up. I mean, that's our fate in a certain, there's a certain scenario. in which we end up as we orbit that black hole in a very, very far future, eventually falling into the supermassive black hole. Yeah. Thank you, Ollie, right, for that question. So next question that I have is someone wants your opinion on conformal cyclic cosmology,

which features the potential emergence of so-called hawking points. And I talked a little bit with this about, with Sir Roger after you graciously attended and then had to leave on Friday. That went on for another nine hours. No, no, I didn't go on that point. It felt like nine hours. So Roger is known for that. Yes, his conciseness is not, yeah, it was very surprising to me that he was so gracious, as are you. But I want to know, and this person wants to know, what do you think of conformal cyclic cosmology? Because it really relies on the only things making it through to the other side in sort of the door's language would be black holes.

So I have to say, I don't know that much about it, but it has recently been on my mind. So let's just to kind of reframe the idea in a very simple way. The idea is that if in this far future, the universe really is just a hot bath of particles and it really becomes just so smooth that it has no identifiable features in some sense,

which obviously right now, New York City, has very strongly identifiable features. We're far from that future. But if you imagine just everything disintegrating into like a hot bath, his idea is that that is conformal, meaning you can map that to a different, what feels or seems like a different universe

at a different temperature. And that you can't really tell the difference anymore. So I don't fully understand the argument, but he's essentially saying, well, then the far future, which looks like the heat death of the universe might actually be mappable to the big bank and that we might have this cyclic series of events where we really have the same conditions as we have in a big bank and I admit I don't fully understand it I tried to talk to other people about it and they don't fully understand it and sometimes you know this is both Sir Roger's strength and his what would earns him sometimes debates is in contention is that he either sees something we're not seeing or he's or he has an

intuition that he hasn't yet completely secured and and you know maybe there will be a time where he he seals it up more and that the rest of us can come along but I think right now it's a very challenging of a fascinating idea. Yeah. No, I love his creativity. I love the fact that he is, he's open to criticism because I said to him, you know, I think you're, you know, it's one of my friends, James Altucher says, you know, smoking your own crack. I mean, I didn't put it to him just like that. It's hard to tell that to someone as gracious as Sir Roger. What are the most mysterious, mesmerizing from an artist's side? Because I view you, you know, there's an old joke. What do you call someone who hangs out with musicians? He calls. I'm a drummer. But I don't know if you're an artist. I don't know your artistic abilities.

I know in the verbal arts, obviously you're a genius par excellence, but I don't know. It's very sweet. You're kind of an honorary artist. You've done so many collaborations. What's the most mesmerizing aspect of a black hole? I'm showing the final image from your book.

You can't see it because it's on my screen, but it's this image here of the astronaut going into that, with the black hole reflected on her visor. and I just think it's so beautiful. But what is, and this image that we can finally simulate what a black hole looks like and what two black holes colliding together? What fascinates you the most? The art of the black hole or the mysterious science of the black hole?

I don't, I can't separate them in some sense. We are driven by emotions. There is allegedly a story from neuroscience and I'm going to butcher it terribly because I'm not a neuroscientist about somebody who had, you know, one of those famous polls through the head stories and how they change. And here this happened to somebody and he maintained his intellect to a certain extent. He could do certain puzzles. He could speak.

He could, he could, was reasonably mathematical, but he could no longer make a decision because his emotional centers were damaged. So if he went to dinner, like the chicken or the fish, like he couldn't make a call. Try the penguin. He should have had the penguin. The penguin is like half chicken, half fish. Trust me. So I don't think we're as compartmentalized as we talk about these days.

I don't know that they can be separated. If I get literally stirred when I think about black holes, sometimes when I think about the mathematics, sometimes when I find the right language for it, I move. So I don't think I can separate the artistry from the intellectual interest. And I think if we really, really could, we'd probably be like the guy who couldn't choose the chicken or the fish. And that's something we would not be perceived as integrated whole people.

So, yeah, I mean, the idea of what is, I want to mention about this picture that you showed because I think that really speaks to how wonderful this collaboration was with Leah. We just understood each other. There was not a ton of, I don't know what you're looking for. I don't understand what you need or really. It was just the first drafts of the paintings were all so close. It was the most smallest changes that we were talking about at the end. And that image was one that I said to her, you know, I really, I really know what I want at the end. I want an astronaut with this big black hole reflected in the visor, you know, the sense of this impending kind of disaster, but beautiful, right?

And even like the tilt of the astronaut's body and the sense of being alone in space and confronting this phenomenon. And it's not just a real astronaut going out and doing those things or even a sci-fi astronaut going out and doing those things. It's a metaphor for the exploration as a scientist to some extent. So Navine is asking, how does a magnetic field, who's around a black hole create a charge on a black hole? This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting a blockbuster triple headliner Saturday, May 16th. Rhonda Rousey returns to face fellow woman's MMA pioneer Gina Carrano in the main event.

Plus co-main's Nate Diaz versus Mike Perry and the best. Best heavyweight in the world, Francis Ngano versus Felipe Lins. Watch Rhonda Rousey versus Gina Carrano, live only on Netflix. Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Eastern Center time, 6 p.m. Pacific time. Oh, so this is exactly what I researched. This is when I'm doing physics and I'm talking to my graduate students and my students. This is what we're very interested in. It is quite interesting that a black hole can act effective.

like a battery in a magnetic field. And what do you mean by that? So here's an example from old-fashioned physics, late 1800s. If I have a magnet, a big enough magnet, and I wave it around, I can create electricity. And this dates back to Faraday. So if I took a light bulb right now, disconnected from a lamp,

not plugged into any electrical source at all, and I waved the magnet around, I could light that light bulb up it would create current in that light bulb it's absolutely amazing in the early days of E&M were the first examples of a unified theory and really beautiful aspects of that whole model so the black hole's like a waving magnet when it's in a magnetic field it's churning the magnetic field up a scenario that I often work on is a neutron star which is a this clap star we discussed which has tremendous magnetic fields sometimes trillings

millions of times the magnetic field of the earth. And it's orbiting a black hole. So now you have literally the waving magnet. And what the black hole creates out of this system, the black hole by forcing the neutron star to orbit around, is acting in a sense like a battery. It's creating electricity. And so now you have the opportunity for charges

to flow along the magnetic field lines and get absorbed into the black hole. And it has been, proven that in magnetic fields, it's not the case that equal and opposite charges flow in, which would leave the black hole with zero charge in the end, but that it preferentially picks one charge over the other. And this depends on the spin of the black hole, which charge it picks and the magnitude of the charge, but it is energetically favorable. It is the lowest energy state is one way of thinking about it if it acquires charge. And this is very interesting

because it means that in these systems, black holes themselves become charged. When a charge spins, it creates its own magnetic field so that the black hole could become like a really bizarre pulsar. And a pulsar is a neutron star with a big magnetic field that has like a lighthouse beam that sweeps around. So you could have these scenarios where the black hole becomes like a lighthouse once it's acquired the charge. It's pretty cool.

Yeah, no, they have all these sorts of interesting properties. And I would be remiss if I don't talk about hawking radiation. And one thing that's always kind of dogged at me was this notion that black holes evaporate. And the way that we conventionally tell our students, they evaporate, caused by hawking radiation, is that there are these virtual particles that pop out of the very active vacuum that Aristotle, amongst others, said it was abhorred by nature. but in fact there's vacua all around but nevertheless how is it possible so and you have a beautiful description which I think you know follows the conventional discussion of it

which is that you know one of the particles you know two particles enter and one particle leaves and that always sounded a little bit strange to me because in one sense the particle you have energy flowing into a black hole from one of the virtual particles the other one's going off to infinity so yes I could see that you would see it as light but Why would that cause the black hole to lose mass if it's actually a quorum energy? Yeah. Well, actually, in a very subtle way, this is related to the argument that once you're on the inside of the black hole, the singularity is always in your future.

It is utterly inevitable that you hit the singularity in the future. If you left your astronaut companion behind on a space station that was safely orbiting, they would imagine that the singularity was at the center in space of this black. whole space, but to you, that direction is time. And that's really, that's a, that's a, that you're saying basically that space and time begin to change for those two astronauts more and more dramatically as you reach the event horizon to the point where your time appears to stand still, so much so that when you cross the event horizon, if they were to continue, which they can't continue to see you, but they would imagine that now your time has actually pointed fully in the spatial gap.

direction as though you've rotated time completely. So for you, the interior of the black hole is directed in the future. Now, why is this relevant to the Hawking conversation? And this is the hard stuff. It's relevant because when I create two particles outside the black hole, quantum fluctuating out of the vacuum, you would imagine that they both have to have positive energy, because we only know of things that have positive energy.

However, if one of them is slightly interior to the event horizon and one of them is slightly outside, which is permitted in the quantum spread of not knowing exactly where things are and the uncertainty principle, the one on the interior can have negative energy. It's not energy to them. To them, it has to do with a negative motion through space. But from the balance of the outside, in the same sense that space and time have switched places, energy and momentum have switched places.

the outside they would say that's a negative energy that was just absorbed. But inside the black haul, you'd say it's not a negative energy because this isn't energy has to do with your flow through time and this isn't the time direction anymore. So it doesn't violate any laws of physics. It's the person inside still perceives a positive energy because they say that's not the time direction anymore. And so it actually from the outside, you would measurably say it has absorbed negative energy, which is E equals mc squared energy, and that energy is going to reduce the mass of the black hole. It's a very subtle process.

Yes. It's extraordinary. Another excellent question from Ollie Wright again. And Ollie's asking, how can something so smooth and so symmetrical, so unlike you, hair-free, as Wheeler did. Unlike me, especially. Yeah. How does something so smooth and symmetrical?

have such high entropy? Oh, it's a really important question. So it is very important question. There are entropies that have to do with disorder, but there are also entropies which have to do with a lack of knowledge. They're not unrelated, because when we think of disorder, let's just think about regular entropy. When I take a bunch of coins,

and they're all stacked perfectly, and that looks like a very ordered, low entropy state, because it's so incredibly ordered, there's many fewer ways to stack it so perfectly that when I take them and I throw them on the floor and they're in a random arrangement. But that has to do technically with my lack of knowledge of that micro state.

They're all different states every time I throw them to the ground, right? Different directions, different orders. It never lands exactly the same way. It's that I can't really tell the difference between those anymore. So it does have to do with my lack of information, my inability to distinguish. So I call that a high entropy state. Now, what's happening with the event horizon is it is imposing a fundamental lack of information about what's on the interior. And that corresponds

to a kind of an entropy. And again, it's a subtle argument. It means that there are all kinds of ways that I could have made a black hole, let's just say the simplest one, it only has mass, no charge, no spin. There are all kinds of ways I could have made that black hole. I could have made it with Encyclopedia Britannicas, I could have made it with a collapsing star, I could have made in the universe through some phase transition, and it could have been made fundamentally in a collider. What I will never know from the outside had I not witnessed its formation is the difference between those states. I can't because the event horizon forbids my my ability to extract that information. It hides all of that information. And as a result, we know that's what we really ultimately

mean by entropy. So it corresponds fundamentally to a lack of knowledge of the exact state on the interior and the variety of arrangements of the state of the interior. And I can't resist because I talked a little bit about that with Roger Penrose, white holes. And you mentioned, you mention them kind of in passing because it's not the white hole survival guide after all. It's the black hole survival guy. But he has a cartoon that I showed the other day, which is called a hypothetical white hole, which is the time reverse of a black hole, such as depicted and figured. And you were the first person who really convinced me to believe that time and space interchange

their orientation, their manifestation. So first of all, how can you have a reversal of time in a white hole without creating, you know, just the opposite, like a double negative? space that was time is now time that was space so how is that possible well well it's really it's it's here's what I would say about the white holes just to just to start there's there's no prediction that we have that interior to a black hole you predict a white hole but what we do know is that I can smoothly sew those space times together and and that's kind of cool right so so so it if you

tried to sew the interior space time of a black hole onto, I don't know, some other space time, it wouldn't fit together. It wouldn't work. It would be like sewing a hyperbolic sheet of paper to a flat sheet of paper. You would have lumps and it just wouldn't be smooth. But the white hole and the black hole actually are smoothly sewn. You can technically mathematically sew them together. Now that's not a prediction, but it's really cool. So some people thought, oh, maybe when you fall into the black hole, the singularity goes into a white hole singularity and match onto a big bang. I think that those questions about space and time, as we've been describing, are fundamentally relative. It absolutely depends on whom you ask. And so the person, for instance, falling inside

the black hole does not see time stop on the event horizon. They're not confused about the direction of time. It's a perfectly smooth transition for them. And they believe the singularity is in the future and then similarly they will their coordinate frame that they're bringing with them their rulers and their clocks if they could survive this journey would allow you to smoothly transition through their time coordinate it's only from the outside the people who are not taking the journey that it looks so strange and so so it's really it's really an extreme version of the relativity of space and time, that it depends on whom you ask. And so the interesting thing then, though, just the white, one thing about white holes that I

love to think about is that it's as though the black hole, however big it is on the outside, let's say our sun were to become a black hole, and it was only six kilometers across. That's how small it would be. I love reminding people that black holes are heavy, but they're small. I mean, they're tiny. That's the whole point of the black hole. Half of Manhattan. Yeah, I could stick it in Central Park.

So now you have this tiny event horizon. What do we mean by the size of the black hole? We mean the shadow cast by the event horizon. And within that tiny region, you could have what we're discussing is an entire universe on the inside. And so black holes are the ultimate of Doctor Who's Tardis, right? They're bigger on the inside than they are on the outside. outside. Very good. Yeah, so I know we're coming to the end here. I know you've got a, you're going to have a book event tonight with Harvard book call. Yeah, do you want to say something

about that? And then I've got a couple of questions I want to close with. Yeah, thanks for, thanks for reminding me. Sarah, I have a book event online tonight with the Harvard Bookstore. I really hope people will tune in. It's at 7 p.m. We have to support our local bookstores. It's heartbreaking to know that Harvard Bookstore, which is an absolute tradition in Cambridge, I went to MIT and took a lot of classes at Harvard. And the Harvard Bookster is a deeply charming, wonderful bookstore. They do a lot of events. They support a lot of authors.

And we have to support bookstores now. So I really hope people will tune in to that talk. And I'll be able to show a lot of the visuals, a lot of the paintings from the book. And so I hope people will enjoy that. And that's 7 p.m. And you can just look up on my Twitter account at Jan 11. I'll put it on the – I'm putting in the links right now.

Yeah. here we go. Great. Yeah. Yeah, that's not to be missed. It'll be virtual, I assume. It'll be virtual. Let's see if we can get a better draw on the Into the Impossible podcast.

I want to close a bit. There are a few more questions, but I know you have to run. You've been so generous with your time. If you had to go to a black hole. I have to go prepare my talk. I know, I know. Yeah, that's right. That's the one benefit with me.

You don't have to prepare anything. I'll take whatever I can get. Right. I love it. Yeah. And then tonight you've got, you don't have to do any preparation tonight, by the way. Tonight's above. Yeah, I mean, I trust, they'll carry the heavy history side.

I'll just talk about the black hole. Exactly. Yeah, we'll have another chance at Janet tonight. I want to ask you, you know, if you had the chance, I'm not going to give away the end of the book at all because I love the book and it's so suspenseful. But if you had a chance, would you take a ride to a black hole? This is a form of a question that I ask people on occasion. If you had a 15% chance of surviving and going to Sagittarius A-Star that you wax so poetically and so beautifully about in the book, would you take that chance of surviving such an encounter under your own guidance? Well, here's the trick about Sagittarius A-Star.

So it's 26,000 light years away. So that means if we could conquer the technology and the energy budget that would basically cost all the energy. resources in the universe to accelerate a spacecraft to near light speed. You can arrive at Sagittarius A-Star still vigorous with youth, although 26,000 years would have passed on Earth, and that would be inevitable. And so you wouldn't be so worried about the election. Civilizations would have come and gone. But you could arrive there vigorous with youth and explore the black hole.

Now, would I really do it? I used to want to go to space or crazy things I used to want to do. But then, you know, I became attached to my family and my children and to the experience of life. You can bring them along, but they also have a 15% chance of it. You wouldn't have, you know, you wouldn't have to keep office hours, so that would be a benefit. Right. But I'll tell you, there is one really cool hitch of hope for your survival, and it's completely absurd. but it's fun to mention it.

Suppose you fall into that black hole. Suppose your quantum bits are flayed and you are torn to your fundamental particles. But suppose hawking radiation figures out a way to get that information outside from inside the black hole. This is what the whole debate is about. The event horizon doesn't let anything out, but you can't lose information

so it happened to the information. But if hawking radiation allows you to do that and my astronaut companion, faithfully collected all of the hawking radiation and decoded in the fire, what happened to me. Technically, it's conceivable. I could be reassembled. Something to look forward to in the deep future. That's right.

Well, Jenna, I want to thank you for being so generous with your time, as always. I want to remind people to tune in. Thank you, Brian. Subscribe to the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imaginations Podcasts and iTunes. This will be posted there. use your finger get some exercise it's been lazy click subscribe

click the notification bell so you'll know when janet comes back tonight i put the link up to your harvard talk janet congratulations it's just it's just so phenomenal you give you're such an inspiration to people like me who struggle to do what you do so

so effortlessly that's all i can say it's really i really appreciate you it's like the duck paddling underneath the water or the water polo players Allegan and effortless, but I'm like... Well, you do it with such ease and graciousness. That's all we can assume.

Thank you so much. And thank you for this podcast. It's a really special podcast. I'm so glad you're doing it. I love doing it. Thank you so much, Sarah. We'll encourage people to keep tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating,

please subscribe, comment, share, and review. Watch on YouTube, listen on iTunes, Spotify, Google Player, Stitcher. We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes. For more information, and to sign up for Professor Keating's mailing list, go to Brian Keating.com. Follow Professor Keating on Medium and Twitter at Dr. Brian Keating, D.R. Brian Keating. For more information on the Clark Center, go to imagination.ucsd. into the impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at the

University of California, San Diego in the Division of Physical Sciences. Eric Vary, director, Ryan Keating, co-director, produced by Ryan Keating and Stuart Volko.