Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - What did the Event Horizon Telescope Discover? Chat with Heino Falcke: black holes, polarization EHT (#132)

Starting point is 00:00:02 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. We're going to have a great time today talking with one of the leaders working on the cutting edge, the cutting edge of shadows of space time itself, and that is Haino Falca, who is joining us today from the lower regions, the Netherlands, where he is a professor at Radbaud, Radbao, Radbood University at Naim. Radvout. Radvout. Okay, so some things that, the D's are hard.

Starting point is 00:00:43 And we're going to talk about the Event Horizon Telescope because, I know, I think it is unequivocal that you were one of the first originators of these terms that we search for, the shadows of black holes, the event horizon that we're looking for, that we have found. that your team has found in 2019 when you made this wonderful press conference release, which later resulted in many well-deserved accolades and awards all over the world. You are currently, as I say, a German professor of astroparticle physics and radio astronomy. You won the 2011 Spinoza Prize, as well as a 2006 Academy Prize of the Berlin-Brandenberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, ERC grant was originated by you for some of this organizational, you know, the founding of this project and other projects to test Einstein's theory of relativity. And for a long time, I have to commend you because I thought you guys would study Sagittarius A Star. I thought that was going to be

Starting point is 00:01:51 your first target. But instead, you turned to Messia 87. And I want to talk about why that choice was made and what the announcement that was made just yesterday implies for astronomy, for cosmology, for physics. But first of all, can you tell us a little bit about the event horizon telescope and what its mission is to do? Yeah, I mean, today this is a big collaboration of 350 scientists around the world. It was founded by 13 stakeholder institutions among them with my university, but other places like Harvard, MIT, Max Plan, institutions in Asia. And we tried to image black holes. We tried to see them. And that was my long-term dream, actually, to finally see a black hole. It started all for me 25 years ago when I was

Starting point is 00:02:52 indeed looking at the black hole in the center of our Milky Way. And I realized that, you know, there's light coming directly from the event horizon radio light at a particular frequency. And that was what our models were telling me. And then, you know, people in Bonn were working at this technology, very long baseline interferometry, which, you know, turns the entire Earth into a telescope. And then at some point, I, you know, I found some old books about, you know, relative which described how black hole would bend light. And in fact, it amplifies itself. And so what that means is that the dark region,

Starting point is 00:03:40 the event horizon would become actually larger than I had actually thought before. And it would be shined, you know, and our models would tell us he would shine light at it from all directions. And, you know, with that magnificent self-magnification of black holes, this, you know, what we then later called in this publication in 2000, this shadow of a black hole, would possibly be observable by a worldwide global telescope operating at the highest radio frequency, something that was just in the infancy at the time. But that was such a tantalizing realization that, you know, we could be looking into the dark,

Starting point is 00:04:25 of black holes and actually resolve that scale, see, you know, see almost down to the event horizon, where, you know, all light disappears, where information disappears. And from then on, we started, you know, working on it. I started working on it doing a bit more theory, some observations. And then we published this paper in 2000. And then colleagues in the U.S. started to do more experiments, a group of Dolman. developing broadband digital equipment. And in the 2010s, 11, 12, we thought we'd all have to work together to make this happen. There's only one world, and it doesn't belong to just one institution. You have to work together. And if you want it or not, you know, if you want to see black holes, you need the entire world.

Starting point is 00:05:22 And out of that came the event-reized. telescope, which is, you know, was a rocky start at the beginning, and now is really, you know, gets going and pushing through the data and the science, where the stakes are very high and you have to be very careful what we do. And so sometimes it takes a long time. I want to talk as much about the team and how we come to understand the nature of large collaborations, I think, is very mystifying to most scientists, non-scientists, rather, and even to some scientists. You know, we're used to thinking of scientists. The lay people might look at a scientist and say, oh, they're very specialized.

Starting point is 00:06:13 You know, I don't have any right to learn about what they're doing because, you know, I wouldn't go into a doctor's office and just start, you know, messing around with the experiment. or something like that, and that's a specialized piece of equipment, and this is a specialized piece of equipment. But I think these types of things that you study are really captivating of the whole world, as was shown just a few years ago. And yet, I think the public thinks about scientists is all just one big family working happily together, but I see it. Sometimes you have to combine almost rival teams, as you mentioned, in order to use the

Starting point is 00:06:48 resources that are necessary. These telescopes in your array, if I'm not mistaken, include telescopes at the South Pole in Chile, Europe, everywhere across the planet. So it took a planet-sized telescope to do the work that you did. Talk about what is harder, measuring the event horizon, capturing the light shadow, or assembling a team of hundreds of scientists around the world to get them all working together on a common goal? I think the latter, certainly for most of scientists. We are used to sit behind the computer, do our stuff, sit behind the equipment, make it work, work overtime, make sure we get the results we have and overcome obstacles.

Starting point is 00:07:29 But then they're always annoying other people, right? You have to work with. They always have different opinions. And usually you write your own papers, and then you disagree and you go to conferences, and then you discuss things, but you do your own thing. Now, here you have to agree on what to do, to do it and how to publish it.

Starting point is 00:07:51 And you have to check each other. But what is a challenge, sometimes a sociological challenge to egos and individualists as scientists is also a strength in the end. Because we only have one world, we can do this experiment only once. We need to make sure we can. check ourselves. So usually, you know, if you're on your own, you publish a paper, someone else comes out, that's all crap, I have a better idea,

Starting point is 00:08:26 and then let's stand next to each other, and it takes a long time until you, you know, the community accepts what is correct and who did, you did proper data reduction, who did proper analysis, who had the right models and so what. Here, you know, as I said, we need the entire world. We only have one group publishing this. So that competition, that checks and balances, we have to build into the collaboration. It cannot be a monolithic one thing, which is just, you know, one, you know, ruled by one person, and then, you know, that's what we do.

Starting point is 00:09:03 We have multiple groups. And it became sort of a mantra that almost everything we do, we do at least twice or three times. And now I learned a new word quintuple, five times. So in the latest paper where we published this polarization, you know, which tells of magnetic fields around the event horizon. There were five independent teams and methods that all agreed with each other. And you talk to the coordinators, and that's a stressful process. But I think it's a, if you then look back at the outcome, and you see what has all been done. because people are pushing each other.

Starting point is 00:09:48 They say, you know, they say, you know, I've done it this way. You know, we need to do this check. We cannot be entirely sure. We have to rerun this. The final outcome is really impressive. I think what you achieve together in what I call competitive collaboration is so much better than what any individual can do. chief. It still leads the vision and ideas of individuals and also the egos, but it is, you know,

Starting point is 00:10:24 this is nothing you can do on your own. We have a question from a good friend of the show, Ernesto Eduardo Dubart Ganes, I think is how I pronounce Ernesto's last name. He's asking, would a gravitational wave distort the geometry of the event horizon, or not even, would it even affect anything inside or outside the event horizon? Can gravitational waves from the black hole? First of all, does this black hole emit gravitational waves? And then can they pertur by their inside or outside of the event horizon? Yeah, that's a great question. Luckily, at this point, gravitational waves do not play an important role for these black holes because they isolate. They're on their own. They're sleepy, so to speak. They're not bothered. They're not bothered.

Starting point is 00:11:15 by anyone else. Rotation waves are created if you have two black holes merge, or if you have something really, you know, sizable object fall into the supermassive black hole. Then you disturb space time,

Starting point is 00:11:31 and you radiate gravitational waves, and it actually does affect, they affect each other. They affect each orbits, and they affect even their metric, space time around them. So we have a very stable environment. The metric is the same today, tomorrow, and in the future, in the next 100,000 years,

Starting point is 00:11:54 the space-time curvature of M87 will not change at all. And that's as big strengths compared to the gravitational wave measurements that you know. Because there you have two black holes merge and it goes very quick and there's bang. And you hadn't seen them before, you see the gravitational waves, and you have to infer all the parameters and then they're gone. You can't verify this anymore. You have lots of information from the data. We at least can go back and we have fewer sources.

Starting point is 00:12:28 We have much fewer sources, but these few sources, we can check over and over again. Check over the next hundred years. People can verify what we've done on this source. It will still be around. You can measure its mass better and better. So that's a big advantage. So you have fewer, but you can do them much better.

Starting point is 00:12:46 And then you're testing really different aspects of gravity to some degree. In one case, you're testing the dynamics, and we are testing the spacetime geometry, space-time curvature. Right. That's what we're measuring. Another good friend of the show, reminder talking to Haino Falca, Radabode University in the Netherlands. We're talking about the event horizons, really monumental discovery announcement yesterday. We'll get to why that's so important in just a bit.

Starting point is 00:13:15 Just a reminder, please subscribe to this channel. Hit the subscribe button and you'll be notified. We have a lot of live streams coming up. We have David Spurgel coming up very soon. And we're going to have John Mather winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize. Don't want to miss these conversations. And leave a comment and a thumbs up and follow Haino on Twitter. His handle is H. Falca over there on Twitter.

Starting point is 00:13:38 So a question from Sebastian Clark, can a black hole, defract gravitational waves, can act as a gravitational lens, or even absorb the energy from a gravitational wave? That's a good question. I'm not the main expert really on general relativity, but I think that is the case, because you have gravitational waves. They deforms space time, and if you run through gravitational, you know, the only object that really in a major way change space time is are, are black holes. I mean, Earth as well,

Starting point is 00:14:14 you know, it's a minor change. And gravitation waves to some degree behave like light. And light is being deflected around black holes.

Starting point is 00:14:27 And in fact, if you calculate a gravitational wave that are being emitted from this merging process, you're really making, you know,

Starting point is 00:14:36 the same kind of calculations to some degree as you would do for light, you know, gravitational waves are even emitted at the same radius. You know, if you see that ring of light that we see in M-87, this comes from light going around the circle, more or less around the black hole. You know, light is almost 100% bent. And the emission of gravitation waves happens at exactly the same scale.

Starting point is 00:15:07 This is where the hydrogen waves are, you know, produced, you know, and, and, and, you know, released. So we are really probing the same kind of physics and the same kind of scale, spatial scale, as in with light and with gravitational waves. And we're really probing even the same aspect of the metric. You know, there's a space metric, space diametric described by various components. There's a timeline metric, and that's directly related to the size of that ring and to the emission region of gravitational waves. So really there are lots of similarities, even though they are completely different techniques to some degree. The difference is one is dynamic and the other one is static. Very good.

Starting point is 00:15:51 And one is the light, the other one is space time light. Is that a word that we can invent? So let's talk about the telescope itself. Can you give an overview? It's a worldwide telescope. It's a radio telescope, which means it operates primarily at a, at millimeter free wavelengths and above. But can you say more about what are the primary components of it?

Starting point is 00:16:19 And was this detection yesterday, this announcement yesterday, was this always in the planning? Were you guys kind of surprised by it or serendipitously found? The magnetic fields were robust enough to detect and actually do scientific, make scientific measurements with. Yeah. Yeah, we're using radiotopes. It's actually, radio telescopes.

Starting point is 00:16:39 It's actually a net. So the telescope is a network of telescopes. So it's a telescope of telescopes, a very hierarchical structure, so to speak. And we have, as you, I think you mentioned that before, we used to have eight telescopes on six different locations. Among that, this really giant Alma telescope. It's a billion dollar and billion euro telescope, which in itself consists of smaller. telescope. You have Alma, which has, I think, 64 dishes, which are combined into one telescope, and then that telescope is combined with all the other seven telescopes into a worldwide

Starting point is 00:17:23 telescope. So really, you're building up that structure from few telescopes to more to even more telescopes. And you have a telescope in the South Pole, a 10-meter telescope. It's a small telescope, But, you know, the South Pole is a very dry and cold region. And millimeter waves that we observe are actually affected by the humidity in the air. So you want to go to a high mountain where it's really dry, and South Pole is actually perfectly suited for this. I myself was initially in Arizona. There's a telescope, which used to be a German-American telescope.

Starting point is 00:18:07 Now it sort of belongs to Arizona. And then it was in Spain, there's a 30-meter telescope in the piccoveleta, it's just near Granada. You know, you can almost see the Alhambra, and you can see the oceans from the mountains, and you can go skiing next door. It's a wonderful telescope, it's a massive big telescope, which usually looks for molecular lines, which looks for dust, for chemicals in the universe. And only when you combine it with all the other telescopes, get the resolution to see the event horizon.

Starting point is 00:18:46 So all of these telescopes have their own personality. I always say, you know, and that gives problems. Also, telescope is only human after all, right? So it's run by humans and has its own quirks and problems and properties that need to be taken care of. And then you have to make sure it all works. It works all in synchronization. And you put atomic clocks next to the telescopes to synchronize them.

Starting point is 00:19:15 That's still not good enough because you need to then correct the atomic clocks by looking at actually quasars and black holes in the universe, which actually act as reference points. And therefore, you can use them also to correct your clocks. You need to actually, when you bring the data together later, You need to take into account aspects like, well, the precise position. You need to be to a fraction of a millimeter. You need to sort of determine the position of the telescopes across the globe.

Starting point is 00:19:48 In the initial models, people, you know, measure and take into account continental drift. The tidal waves. I mean, the earth breezes, you know, goes up and down. All these things have been put into these models actually over the last decades. You know, we didn't invent this. We make use of like 40 years or 50 years of work on, on VLBI that has come to a culmination really in this experiment. So I could go on and on, you know, talk about polar wonder, right?

Starting point is 00:20:14 The Earth wobbles. And that's something you would see in this VLBI data. Like, you know, some of this you can calculate sort of Jupiter pulling on the Earth, so, you know, the Earth wobbles a little bit. But then there's a 10-meter or 20-meter wobble that's left, and that has to do with the ocean swapping around and the air being on one side a bit more than on the others or whatever. So, I mean, the earth is pretty round,

Starting point is 00:20:42 but at a certain level, everything becomes an egg. That's right. This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting a blockbuster triple headliner Saturday, May 16th. Ronda Rousey returns to face fellow woman's MMA pioneer Gina Carrano in the main event. Plus co-main's Nate Diaz versus Mike.

Starting point is 00:21:06 Perry and the best have you wait in the world, Frances 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. So good. So we have another question. Are there observations ongoing? I know a lot was canceled due to COVID. What's the current status of observations? Yeah, good, good question. I mean, we were extremely lucky. 2017 we had our annus mirabolis, a miracle year where everything worked. The weather was fine or all around the world.

Starting point is 00:21:42 All the telescopes worked. And we got all the data we needed. And by the way, I didn't answer the previous question. I have to come back to whether that was polarization was planned or not. And in 2018, we tried again. And then, you know, some telescopes weren't ready. some receivers were not working. We had bad weather.

Starting point is 00:22:08 In fact, I was in Spain. I couldn't see the top of the telescopes. It was so foggy. We were in the middle of clouds. And that wasn't. We couldn't see even the brightest radio sources we couldn't see anymore in some days. And then at one telescope, even,

Starting point is 00:22:23 one of the crew was actually held at gunpoint. And we stopped the observations because it looked it was too dangerous. in that region. And it was. An entire telescope was shut down actually for a year or two because of security issues. And then 2020, 2019,

Starting point is 00:22:43 we were all extremely worn out and some telescopes weren't ready again for maintenance and other reasons and security issues, as I mentioned. And then we're hoping 2020, yeah, we're going to observe again. Well, you know, corona struck. And it was like, really, I mean,

Starting point is 00:22:58 the last telescope, you know, we dropped it two weeks before the observing run. And, you know, it was clear there was a global lockdown and we couldn't do the observations anymore. But 2021 looks like it's going to happen in April. So maybe we're lucky. We have more telescopes now. We have Greenland telescope. We have in France, the Neuma array by Iram. It's in the French Alps, the 2.5,000-meter.

Starting point is 00:23:28 altitude, a plateau in the snow. It's a wonderful dish. It's very harsh conditions, but I've gone up there by helicopter. I got a VIP treatment once by them. And you fly up there and you think it's like a James Bond movie because you're going up the Alps and nothing is there. And then suddenly out of this, on this top of the mountain, you see these 11, by now should be 12 silver dishes,

Starting point is 00:23:53 15 meter in diameter with a big building in the center where actually entire dish can be moved. into it. And so it's bizarre, but it's, you know, it's taking data for, I don't know, 20 or 30 years now. I don't know how old it is now. It's probably in the late 80s it was built. Yeah, these are wonderful dishes. And each one of them has their own stories and people and, yeah, usually wonderful places. And each of them has different food, right? So if you're in Spain, you get Indonesian food. If you go to France, you get French food. And if you go to Arizona, you get deep-fried pizza that you get from the people market.

Starting point is 00:24:32 You get no polis, yeah. And in Greenland, what do you get? You get Danish food? I haven't been there, I must say, yeah. It's interesting because it's officially Danish territory, I think. But the Greenland people are, you know, feel pretty independent, I think. And the telescope is run by our colleagues from Taipei. Oh, wow.

Starting point is 00:24:58 So it's really, truly international, even within. It's very funny. Arizonaans running in Greenland and Taipei. So we were going to talk about polarization and the announcement that was made yesterday and we'll take more questions. Remind him talking, Hainofalka, who is one of the leaders, originators of the idea of looking for light shadows. Isn't that interesting?

Starting point is 00:25:18 I always say what I do is interesting because I'm looking for the exposure of gravitational waves on the cosmic microwave background radiation. So we're using waves of light to expose waves of gravity in sort of an old-fashioned film camera metaphor. But you're actually looking for shadows of gravity that are deleting out light, sort of acting as a sink, as a vacuum cleaner for light. And that was one of your main, you know, kind of inspiring ideas way back when before you even got funding to do this project. So talk about what is polarization. My audience, as you can already tell, is extremely astute. They know a great deal, but there are some non-experts out there.

Starting point is 00:25:59 What is polarization of a radio wave? And why does that tell us anything of interest about black holes that we didn't know before? You may actually notice if you go to, if you have polarized sandglasses or actually a 3D movie. They typically have polarized glasses, which, you know, switch on and off in some coordinated fashion. And there's a hidden property of light that it has a direction of ostens. It's a light wave and it oscillates in a certain plane. It can oscillate from left to right, but it can also oscillate up and down. And normal light from the sun is unpolarized.

Starting point is 00:26:37 It oscillates, you know, half of the light is going left, right, the other half is going up and down. And so that averages out. But if you shine light on, for example, glass, you know, it's reflected of glass, then actually light gets a preferred direction. It will be polarized, only a certain orientation of this oscillation will be emitted. And the same happens if you actually produce radio emission. A very simple example, if you have an antenna, just a little rot antenna, right?

Starting point is 00:27:12 You have electrons going up and down, and they produce electromagnetic waves. And the waves will be sort of polarized, you know, which is sort of determined by the direction of this antenna. So you'd have to want to get unpolarized radio emission to transmit, you'd have to have an antenna go up and one antenna go left to right. You know, I have a cross, essentially. Then you would get unpolarized radio emission. But if you have one antenna, it's only one polarization that you pick up or that you transmit. And, you know, detectors can, you know, our eyes cannot see that.

Starting point is 00:27:48 I think some animals can actually see polarization. Yeah. Bees can. But we have to use radio telescopes polarization filters to actually translate that for us. And so radio telescopes can do this. They can split the radio waves up into different polarization. In fact, they always do. And so this was always in our data and was always planned.

Starting point is 00:28:11 It was actually something we always had to take into account. So the only problem really only problem, quote unquote, is just to calibrate it properly, to make sure the outcome is right. And that, you know, from, we had the data since 2018 on our hard drives. But, you know, to actually reduce and calibrate it took three years, right? And, you know, understand everything. It's just, you know, because you need to understand every little detail and so forth. So that is a hard part.

Starting point is 00:28:48 And what does it tell us about black holes? Well, you outer radio light will be polarized near black holes and what is polarizing it? It's magnetic fields. And magnetic fields play a very important role in controlling the gas flow that's falling into a black hole. They can actually, you know,

Starting point is 00:29:12 they can be dragged along and just disappear in the black hole or they can become so strong that they even halt the plasma they form sort of a Star Trek-like shield around the black hole which could even protect gas from falling in and they can be wound up

Starting point is 00:29:31 and lead to plasma shooting out along the rotation axis of the black hole. So black hole, magnetic fields on Earth, we use them to for the compass and to measure direction of where Columbus would go, right?

Starting point is 00:29:49 So we usually don't use, we don't see them as very strong effects. But around black holes, these magnetic fields really determine the dynamics and the entire drama playing around black holes. And they polarize the light in a certain direction, typically in a direction perpendicular to the magnetic fields. And so the image that we published shows the polarization of light, you know, the direction where it, you know, oscillates. And sort of the magnetic fields where it comes from is roughly 90 degrees relative to those fine lines that you see in this image. But then there are also relativistic effects and so forth. So the real image in the end is much more complicated how black holes look like. Nothing is simple around black hole.

Starting point is 00:30:36 Nothing is simple. But more or less, you know, if you see that polarization, you know, polarized light, you roughly get a feeling where the black, where the magnetic fields are and what they're doing. So, yeah, one of the properties of black holes, they're kind of like particles. They can have a lot of different characteristics. But actually, they're, you know, they're limited to a handful.

Starting point is 00:30:59 We have mass charge and spin, and black holes can have similar properties, but almost no more, right? Isn't that the so-called no-hair theorem of black hole? That they're really kind of fungible, in a sense. They aren't that complex in a deep sense. In that sense, black holes are the most boring, the most boring objects in space, right? So they have these two parameters, the spin and the mass.

Starting point is 00:31:27 And that tells you everything about it, right? So, but they look, and they don't have hair, as you say, right? So the black holes themselves do not have the magnetic fields. Right. So you cannot thread magnetic fields through the event horizon, for example. They go from the inside to the, from the inventorizing to the outside. Like we have on Earth, right? We have a magnetic field that's generated inside.

Starting point is 00:31:55 You know, in the poles, you have this ploidal magnetic fields and goes to the outer space and protects us as well and, you know, and connects to the inside. That's not possible in black holes. So if magnet fields fall into it, the mags fields will be cut off. and color from the rest of the environment. Yet, we see those magnetic fields very close to the event horizon. That's anchored in the plasma. That's rotating around.

Starting point is 00:32:22 It's being amplified. So while black holes cannot have hair, they can have a wig, I like to say. And so they're really surrounded by this hair of magnetic fields, but it doesn't go inside. And that's, I think, an important thing to understand. What can we learn more? I've had on Lenny Susskin and Sir Roger Penrose and others. In Roger Penrose's case, he talks about the singularity is sort of the most interesting aspect of a black hole. Lenny Susskin, I'm going to the hand will say, no, it's what he calls the stretched horizon.

Starting point is 00:32:56 It's sort of above the event horizon by a plank length or something like that. What is the most interesting aspect of a black hole and what to you personally? And then what kind of future properties of light? We've seen that the light has a spectrum. We know it has polarization. We know it has isotropy or patterns thereof. Are there any other properties that have yet to be discovered? We've seen time variability.

Starting point is 00:33:23 What would be the next, not the next major discovery, although I hope that you'll clue me in next time there's a big discovery. I'll keep it confidential, I promise. But are there other properties of light or radio waves that can be? exploited, not speaking specifically, but can other discoveries be made using the capabilities of technology? That was a good try to getting some confidential information out. But now, let me start with the last question before I go back to the, I think, more fundamental

Starting point is 00:33:52 question you raised at the beginning. Yeah. What actually is what makes Black Hall so interesting. Certainly one of the important and maybe long-term goals really is to see whether Black holes are spinning. And that can produce a very interesting effect in combination with magnetic fields. In fact, the spin-off black holes will make the space around black holes also co-rotate. And, you know, magnetic fields are in that space and they'll be drawn along.

Starting point is 00:34:25 And this way, you can actually transport energy, transport rotationally energy from the black hole to the environment. You can actually slow down the rotation of a black hole through magnetic fields that are threading around it and put it into a powerful plasma outflow. And we think that's what's happening really in M87, at least in our simulations, when we try to explain what we're seeing,

Starting point is 00:34:59 the effect that gives at least some fraction, some significant fraction of the energy to this outflow is actually spin energy from the black hole. That's not the entire story, but that certainly is an important effect. And this is a very fundamental effect that, you know, was also think also by Roger Penrose was the first one to describe a process with light

Starting point is 00:35:20 where you can shine light on a black hole. It can actually extract spin energy from a black hole by scattering light in a different way, left or right, around a spinning black hole. So that's a very fundamental thing. you know, really, you know, isn't that cool, right? You extract energy from a black hole. I mean, this is mighty, you know.

Starting point is 00:35:40 Yeah, Jan 11. The mighty battery. You just tap into it and you get a huge amount of energy out. And that's what these supermassive black holes do. And in the very long run, yes, of course. It's, it's this big question. What's really happening at the event horizon? What's happening with information?

Starting point is 00:36:00 What's happening really? And indeed, it remains a fundamental question. Maybe the event horizon is totally boring, at least in relativity, when you fall through the event horizon, nothing really exciting happens. You know, it's just you wouldn't even notice, really, anything happening to you. And even like a supermassive black hole, like I'm 87,

Starting point is 00:36:23 you could fall through it. You wouldn't even be ripped into pieces because it's, you know, it's so big. Title forces are not so strong. you were so small compared to that big black hole. But, you know, what's happening is the singularity? The annoying and almost, yeah, this mightily annoying aspect is that we can't know, right? So because it's eventorized, we can't look into it.

Starting point is 00:36:52 There's some extremely exciting physics where time is reversed, where all the matter is to turn into something that we have no, clue of what it is, right? How can you have six billion solar masses in disappearing in something that is, you know, almost infinitely small? What's happening there? Some extremely weird physics that's beyond our understanding, and we can't measure it. That's how it's like, you know, I always compare this to like Christmas time, right? So you have, you know, at least, you know, in the old days, my parents would, you know, all the presents would be in the room and then the door would shut, right? I would not be allowed to go in. And you could peek through the keyhole a little bit

Starting point is 00:37:35 and try to figure out what's going on. There's this Christmas tree and all this presents around and so forth. But you know, you know, next day tomorrow, you know, or we celebrate in the evening, you can go in and, you know, and look what's in there. Right. And right now it's looked like, you know, the universe and God tells us, right? So, yeah, there's this wonderful physics inside. But, you know, this door I keep shut, right? You know, just, you know, go off. You can look through you, but you're not going to see anything. And that makes it so dramatic for physics. We're rattling on this door.

Starting point is 00:38:10 We try to get in. We try to understand what's happening inside Blackholds. We can dream about it. We can have many theories. There are so many ideas and theories, you know, from Pendrose to Zucon, but many others. But how are we going to test it? And this, I think, is sort of a, you know, the, big battle that we are going to fight in the next, I don't know, years, 10 years, decades,

Starting point is 00:38:36 100 years, 1,000 years, I have no clue whether and when we will solve that. Right. No, that makes it so. Yeah, but I want to go as far as possible. That's why I wanted to go to this edge of black holes. Maybe you'll go journey someday into the black hole with Elon Musk and SpaceX. So we're talking today again. I'm happy to let him go. I, you know, I'm I'm willing to stay behind and enjoy this planet. Someone's got to host the press conference at home. So we're talking again with Haino Falca, some of the leaders of the Event Horizon Telescope.

Starting point is 00:39:12 You can find them on Twitter, H. Falca, and you can find Event Horizon Telescope. I'm showing some images here on YouTube. Please do subscribe to this podcast wherever you're listening to it or watching it. Just hit the subscription little bell. there, whatever it is, wherever you may be getting this. The Heinz's book is coming out in the U.S., at least in May. I think it's already out some parts of the universe, right?

Starting point is 00:39:37 Yeah, it was already out in German. It was easier for me to write it in German. Then it got to the Netherlands, and then in Spain it's out now, and now it's coming to the U.S. at May the Force. May the Force be with you. Can't wait. It's a wisely chosen date, Star Wars Day. and then you can read the entire story of the event horizon telescope

Starting point is 00:39:59 from, in fact, the first view of a little child is inspired by the moon landing to the first view together with students and colleagues of this entirely new world, the exciting region around black holes. It's an amazing journey from, you know, the first, the first astronomers looking at the stars to us now looking into black holes. We've come a long way, really. Yeah, we certainly have. And even in just the last couple of weeks, it's been the news won't stop.

Starting point is 00:40:34 Yesterday, two days ago I had on James Beecham and Phil Ilton of the Large Hadron Collider and the Atlas experiment and the LHCB Beauty experiment that detected potential evidence for a fifth force of nature, new materials, new matters. new violations of fundamental symmetries. This announcement came the day after by your team and your collaborators. You know, who knows what's going to come next a couple weeks ago. Similarly, there's been just a spectacular news coming out of all quadrants of astronomy and physics. And it's just an amazing time. We landed a helicopter on Mars. We're going to have an airfield on another planet, which actually has a piece of the right flyer, you know, this little

Starting point is 00:41:21 fabric segment of the original Flyer 1 that the Wright brothers flew from Kitty Hawk. And now it's on Mars. And they set up an airport there. So there's going to be TSA delays, I'm sure. But stay tuned for more great events on this channel. We have David Spurgel coming up, John Mather, and many other great guests coming up, as well as Professor Sarah Seeger, who made a big announcement herself last year of potential evidence for phosphine, which is a byproduct we think of life. She's a guest that will be on very soon as well. So Haino, in the few minutes we have left,

Starting point is 00:41:56 we do have more questions, and I want to bring those up. So how can black holes survive potentially these collisions and explosions and sort of events that would tear ordinary matter apart? What actually is the force that makes black holes so resilient against? the most cataclysmic forces in nature.

Starting point is 00:42:23 Yeah, and it is gravity, and that's really amazing aspect, that gravity is really the weakest of all forces, and it keeps us on the planet, but it doesn't destroy us. But if you really, you know, if everything pulls together in one direction, then gravity wins of all forces in nature. And that's because there is no anti-gravity, right? So in electrons and protons or in charges, you have positive and negative charges in magnetic fields or north and south pole. Gravity, you only have gravity.

Starting point is 00:42:58 And that makes it very special. And if you think about gravity is actually that made all world. You had this big bang. But then it was due to gravity that everything came together and assembled. And you formed an earth and planets and sun and stars. And it's, so yeah, it's gravity that gives us life in the universe. And, yeah, when it all, you know, when it runs away, when gravity becomes stronger than anything else, it collapse, it forms a black hole.

Starting point is 00:43:32 And then there really is nothing there to escape its grip. And that is very, yeah, it's very fundamental and strange property of gravity. And indeed, the last thing that will survive probably in this universe are really supermassive black holes. Yeah. I mean, the M87 will live a, I mean, even if there's hawking radiation, M87 will live a staggering 10,97 years. So it's one with 97 zeros. Wow. You know, in this book, I tried to calculate, you know, I thought I tried to explain this somehow in a way that we can comprehend.

Starting point is 00:44:12 It was impossible. It was like, you know, if, you know, over the lifetime of the universe, universe, you take one proton, one atom out of this universe, okay? Every age of the universe. Yeah. Yeah. And you keep doing this. The universe will be gone faster than this black hole will have disappeared. Yeah. It's just one atom. Gizzillions of protons, atoms in this entire universe. That's right. Yeah. People want to talk about a supernova that's brighter than the whole galaxy that it lives within, but these black holes, have a permanence that Hollywood celebrities can only dream about. Ernesto is asking again that is entropy,

Starting point is 00:44:53 not, you said that there's only these two properties of black holes, but he's asking, isn't entropy a property related to temperature of the black hole? That's another distinguishing feature. Well, this is sort of a, something that came out of, sort of the aspects of quantum gravity.

Starting point is 00:45:11 And you can, but in the end, these properties of black holes, you know, entropy or temperature are directly related to the mass. So it's just a different word for the math of a black hole. Right. Ali is asking apologies if this came up.

Starting point is 00:45:28 I don't think it did. But why do you think that there is a supermassive black hole at the center of almost all galaxies? What is the reason behind that? Is it coincidence? Do they form? Are they the reason that galaxies form? What is our best knowledge about that? Yeah, stuff got to go somewhere, right?

Starting point is 00:45:51 And if you look at the evolution of a cluster of stars, you know, you have this distribution of stars. Some of them will turn into black holes. They will sink towards the center. They, you know, the heaviest objects typically sink towards the center. And then there's no way to go. At some point, they have to coalesce into one bigger black hole. And then more and more will come. It will keep growing.

Starting point is 00:46:11 And since a black hole doesn't really evaluate. operate fast enough on any galactic time scales, it will just get bigger. And so it's almost unavoidable that you have supermassive black holes at the very center, unless they kicked out. But who's ready to bully a supermassive black hole out of a galaxy? I mean, this is, you know, it only can be another black hole, more or less. Thor is not going to make it all the way out there. So, and then the next question is more about host prerogative question as the host of

Starting point is 00:46:44 into the Impossible podcast. Please do subscribe and leave a comment if you're enjoying this. And if you're new to the channel, yeah, leave a give me a thumbs up in the little icons there. So what's next for our galaxy? We saw last year, Andrea Gez and Reinhard Gensel won Nobel Prizes for the work that they did to image the motion and the dynamics of stars near the, it's just said, compact object at the center of our gas. Didn't say supermassive black hole. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:47:19 Yeah. What is the prospects for event horizon? Is there something that precludes the event horizon telescope from seeing it? Is it easier to see M87 because it's sort of more massive? What are the pros and cons of Sajah star versus M87, for example? Yeah, we should be able to see it, right? Eventually, I'm absolutely convinced that's what got me going initially. that's what we wanted to see.

Starting point is 00:47:43 An M87 was sort of a lucky shot to some degree, right? And it turned out of a very good lucky shot because it's a big one. And so all the gas that rotates around takes actually days to weeks, like three weeks, to go around. So if you take a picture within a day, it's actually relatively stable.

Starting point is 00:48:05 In the galactic center, stuff goes around in 20 minutes or so. So within a day, it has made, many, many rotations. And so that makes it really hard to image. But on the other hand, then you're integrating over a longer time scale. So that actually is better. So we are more sensitive to the space time, which is stable and much less affected by the variability of the plasma,

Starting point is 00:48:34 which can move the shadow a little bit around and makes intensity bright or left or right sometimes. So in the long run, Cetje Star, the center of a galaxy, will be the prime target, the one that is really most important. And we have yet to see the event horizon and the shadow in this one. But thanks to the work of Gensler and Gaze, we know exactly how heavy it is.

Starting point is 00:48:56 You know, less than a percent. It's a fraction of a percent. We know the mass. We know the mass of this black hole better than our own mass, right? Our own weight. And so by, you know, we know exactly how big the shadow should be, because that's related to the mass. And there's something we should test.

Starting point is 00:49:15 We will test. We will see eventually. We may need a few more telescopes in the long run to do it a little bit better. We may want to go into space eventually, but yes, we will see it. We will see the shadow. I'm pretty convinced. And of course, it would be nice if it would be not exactly as we expected to be. But, you know, we have to wait.

Starting point is 00:49:40 and look what the data tells us. And I assume I'll be the second to know next time I'm hiring on it. That's only fair, you know, after all I've been through. I want to ask you about future prospects. If you had your choice, would you rather have another baseline, say, on another planet, maybe Mars is nice this time of year? Would you rather have, you know, higher frequency?

Starting point is 00:50:02 Would you like to do optical? I mean, could you use an optical interferometry on a planetary scale to get even better measurements of the event? maybe even closer in, zoom in? Or is this basically at the limits of what we'll ever know about the kind of the shape configuration magnetic field of black holes? We're astronomers, you know, we want it all, right? So we want all of this, all of the above.

Starting point is 00:50:28 But yes, I mean, we first start with more baselines on Earth to give slightly more robust measurements. We're really at the limit of what we can do at the moment with these few telescopes. As I said, I'm involved in a project. We're trying to get a telescope into a continent is missing at this moment. And then eventually you go to space. And you want to go to higher frequencies as well. The higher the frequency, the longer the separation of the telescopes, the better the image.

Starting point is 00:51:00 Now, going to Mars is probably initially a bit far away to do it because it's overkill. You were really having too much resolution, actually. You don't want to do that. And if you want to see things that are so small that you have to put a telescope on Mars, it has to be insanely big because, you know, they'll be weak typically and so. And it takes a long time for Mars to rotate around the sun and Earth. Because that's what we're using the Earth is to look at it from different directions. the Earth rotates and we're using that effect.

Starting point is 00:51:42 So, you know, somewhere in space between, you know, a medium Earth orbit to, you know, people talk about even the Moon. I think that probably is already a bit too far away. But really, you know, we've done a study, you know, what we call the eventorizing imager. If you put three dishes, don't even have to be very big around Earth at 15,000 kilometer altitude from the center, you get almost perfect, perfect images. sharp images, you know, nothing, you know, not this donut anymore. You see whips of the black hole and so forth. So it's, sci-fi can become reality. It's a question of will and of money,

Starting point is 00:52:18 of course. Uh-huh. So Nico's asking, do you have any hopes for the Nobel Prize in 2021? I am not going to talk about that. I assume they mean me, not you. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. It wouldn't be out of the question. Look, how many Nobel prizes have gone to black holes in just the last three years. It's incredible. I mean, I think what really qualifies me for no surprise, I've appeared on your show, I guess. That might disqualify you, Hainer. You don't know. You might know of my book about losing it.

Starting point is 00:52:49 I know, I know. So the last question I have from myself, and then I'll open it up on Clubhouse, on a couple more on YouTube, is, are we at the same, you know, precipice as, you know, for example, Ligo, once Lago, once Lago, really made convincing discoveries, now it's turned into, you know, it has hundreds of discoveries. It has, it's become statistically significant, not just one-off mesmerizing discovery. So I analogize their discovery in 2015, 2016, with your 2019 discovery. When will you get into the kind of just, you know, discovery a day or imaging a day? Or will that never happen based on, you know, how exquisitely precise these images have to be and how much time that takes? Will you ever get to the level of statistical measurements, black hole event horizons every day?

Starting point is 00:53:41 Yeah, good point. That's what I said before, the gravitational wave, they have many, many sources, but they're gone very quickly. We only have at this point two sources. All the other ones are too far away or too small. All the earth is too small, right? However you like it. On the other hand, it's amazing that the Earth is just big enough, right?

Starting point is 00:53:59 So it's just big. Right. And normally you could go to higher frequencies and you become more precise. But if you go to the, like, terrahertz regime, higher frequency radio, the atmosphere actually shuts off. So we're really, really at the edge of what you can do from the ground. But we can do it well. We can do it better. And I think we want to do a movie. We can do a movie from the ground. But it will remain hard work. It's not that we get just bang, bang, bang, many images.

Starting point is 00:54:33 Each of these images will be, I think a master. piece and valuable in itself, but it will involve a lot of hard work. And if you want to see dozens and thousands of black holes, you have to go to the space mission. And that will take a while. So I think every result, every paper that we published will remain precious for the next couple of years. Yeah, every source, every paper, just like every person is precious on the team, no doubt. I know it's been such a pleasure. I've started to read your book. You were kind enough to send me an advanced copy in English. I requested a German copy. I don't know. I must have gotten a...

Starting point is 00:55:13 No, I'm just kidding. I can't... I only know one word in German. Is it true that the word... What is the word for ambulance in German? Krenkenwagenwagen. Yes, that's my favorite word in all of German. Call a Krenkewagon for Keating. I want to thank you for your time and congratulate you and your team on success. As we said at the very the team and dynamics in human enterprise that is science. We are always thought of scientists as walking Wikipedia's or something, but actually the hardest part is to realize we're all human beings. And to coordinate this is really a testimony to you and your team.

Starting point is 00:55:52 And I wish you great luck with it. And I want to have you back later this spring once your book is out and available in America, at least. And while I'm already really tearing through it, enjoying it, I know we're kindred spirits. I'd like to talk to you in great. depth. But for now, it's late there. You have plans for celebration dinner. I don't want to keep you from that. And we're going to sign off. So please, yes, everybody do look into Haino's book. You can get on an Amazon already. There's a link in the YouTube description. While you're

Starting point is 00:56:20 on YouTube, subscribe to the channel. We have, as I said, David Spurgo coming up very soon. You'll be surprised how soon he comes out. Sarah Seeger and John Mather, just to name a few. And you can find past videos to Roger Penrose, Frank Wilcuk, as well as with Jan 11. and Katie Freeze and all these great black hole aficionados. Do not miss it. Haino, thank you so much. Have a wonderful day. Thank you for going Into the Impossible. Part one, part two to come. Have a great rest of your day. Congratulations. Have a good day. Bye-bye. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Starting point is 00:56:54 Hello, I'm Stuart Volko, producer of Into the Impossible. If you enjoyed this episode with Professor Brian Heating, please let us know by subscribing, commenting, sharing, and most importantly, rating and leaving reviews. It really helps keep our universe expanding. We appreciate hearing from you and read every review and comment. We're always open to your suggestions for future episodes. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating, DR. Brian Keating.

Starting point is 00:57:22 And join our premieres every Tuesday at 8 a.m. Pacific time for live chats. Follow Brian on Twitter, Medium, and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. That's DR. Brian Keating. For free access to exclusive content, please visit Professor Keating's website and sign up for his informative newsletter at Brian Keating.com. Into the Impossible is produced with the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Eric Vary, director, Brian Keating, co-director, Patrick Coleman, associate director, produced by Stuart Volko and Brian Keating. For more information on the Arthur C. Clark Center, go to imagination.ucsd.edu.

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - What did the Event Horizon Telescope Discover? Chat with Heino Falcke: black holes, polarization EHT (#132)

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