Know Thyself - E216 - Janna Levin: An Astrophysicist's Guide to Black Holes, Higher Dimensions & the Nature of Reality

Episode Date: October 13, 2026

In this episode, I sit down with Janna Levin, a theoretical astrophysicist at Barnard College of Columbia University, Guggenheim fellow, and author of Black Hole Survival Guide, Black Hole Blues, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, and How the Universe Got Its Spots. Janna started out as a philosophy major drawn to the biggest questions, then found in physics a way of answering them that felt true for everyone, everywhere. Preparing for this conversation blew my mind more than almost any other, and sitting with her only deepened that.What We Dive Into:1. When a massive star collapses into a black hole, the star itself keeps falling and leaves behind only curved, empty space. With no material features left to observe, every black hole looks alike, which is why physicists treat them like giant fundamental particles holding clues to quantum gravity.2. Einstein realized the purest experience of gravity is weightlessness, the feeling of falling freely with no chair, floor, or bed in the way. What we call heaviness is really something resisting our fall, while objects simply follow the natural curves of spacetime.3. Janna suggests technological species may face a bottleneck where the ingenuity that builds rockets also builds bombs. Surviving it could mean reaching a balance with nature so complete that a civilization becomes hard to detect, which may help explain why the cosmos looks so quiet.Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS:https://www.mudwtr.com/knowthyselfUse code KNOWTHYSELF for up to 43% off sitewidehttps://www.oneskin.co/KNOWTHYSELF Use code KNOWTHYSELF for 15% off OneSkinLarineco: 50% off on remineralizing gum https://www.buylarine.com/knowthyself___________00:00 Intro02:24 From Philosophy to Physics06:39 Made of Star Stuff12:13 The Ever Expanding Cosmos17:14 Before the Big Bang21:31 How Complexity Emerges24:42 The Nature of Black Holes32:08 Supermassive Black Holes39:02 Photographing a Black Hole45:33 How Stellar Black Holes Form47:46 Falling Into a Black Hole56:38 The Information Loss Paradox1:00:00 Einstein’s Happiest Thought1:11:00 Nothingness in Physics and Meditation1:19:56 Why Whales Don’t Go to Mars1:24:11 Isotopia and Balance With Nature1:30:50 The Fermi Paradox1:32:13 Intelligence on a New Substrate1:37:30 Humility and the Cosmic Perspective1:41:18 The Odds of Alien Civilizations1:46:17 Consciousness and Extra Dimensions1:54:41 How Many Dimensions Exist2:01:48 Time as the Fourth Dimension2:04:56 Extra Dimensions and Dark Energy2:12:06 A Universe Inside a Black Hole2:19:14 Progeny of One Universe___________✨MORE FROM JANNA LEVIN↳Substack: https://jannalevin.substack.com↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jannalevin/?hl=en↳The Moth Story: https://youtu.be/dVubvLgTcxg?si=Hkaic0osIYwBMcA0↳https://jannalevin.com📜MORE FROM KNOW THYSELF↳Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9l↳Apple: https://apple.co/4iATICX↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/↳TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andreduqum↳Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/knowthyselfbyandreduqum/↳https://knowthyselfpodcast.com/👁️MORE FROM ANDRÉ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@andreduqum↳Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/know-thyself-podcast↳Book recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list

I think we're going to start to detect signs of life on other planets within 10 years. The sheer numbers are staggering, not only life, but civilizations. The universe is actually something like 90 billion light years across. I love that we have the consciousness to be dumbfounded. We're such a small bit of residue left over from the Big Bang in this vast cosmos. Elements in our bodies were forged in stars. But our technological civilizations might be doomed to failure. We're exceptional, we're extraordinary, and yet I can blast us in a rocket to space.

I can also make a bomb. Nothing is forever, not even the black hole. Black holes are the most profound phenomenon in the universe. As far as we can understand it, the star just keeps collapsing and collapsing and collapsing and leaves behind a region of space curved so strongly that nothing can escape. Nothing dramatic should happen to you on the crossing of this boundary. Sounds nice. But it does get worse as you keep falling.

And eventually you're torn us under into all of your fundamental quantum bits, and then what happens to you, we don't know. I've just had my mind repeatedly blown over and over again. That's my job. Our origins go all the way back to the beginning of the universe, and we should feel like progeny of this one universe together. What was before the Big Bang? Let me be a concrete answer, by the way.

This is the definitive answer. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the know they self. podcast. Our guest today is one of the greatest living cosmological minds, in my humble opinion. She is a theoretical astrophysicist at Barnard Columbia, and her work really spans a lot. And I'm excited to dive into black holes, wormholes, extrasatial dimensions, the topology of the universe, and that really shapes what we think is out there and what isn't out there. She's also a Guggenheim fellow, the author of four books. We got Black Hole Survival Guide.

Black Hole Blues, a madman dreams of Turing Machines and how the universe got its spots. Jenna Levin, thank you for being here. Thanks so much for having me. It's really, really nice to be here. The pleasure is mine. I told you beforehand, I think this podcast while prepping, more than maybe any other podcasts I've done, I've just had my mind repeatedly blown over and over again. I love that.

That's my job. Yeah. And it's something you spent your life doing, which is so amazing. I'm really looking forward to diving into. but you started out as a philosophy major. Yes, I kind of felt. Yeah, so what happened? What happened with that shift there?

Well, I had a odd trajectory on my way, on my way to college. And I didn't really finish high school. I didn't have physics in high school or calculus in high school. And I thought the big questions would be addressed through philosophy. It was the big questions I was always drawn to and interested in and just the ideas. I think I've always been a little predisposed to those late nights meditating on what it's all about. And I did an entire major in philosophy, short of writing a thesis, but I was a little lost. I didn't love it.

I didn't love it. It was really a frustrating experience, actually. I think this idea of reading the old greats, the canon, was, I like the canon, but it wasn't answering in a satire. satisfying way, the questions that I felt were plaguing us. And in particular, it didn't feel transcendent. It didn't feel true for everybody. It felt very rooted in a specific upbringing or a part of the planet, even this planet. And when I started to discover physics and the way physics addressed these big questions, I noticed not only that the rhetoric in the room got quieter, people weren't arguing as much. They didn't know what to say. It was so powerful. And nobody was saying,

you know, what did Einstein mean? And I don't understand what he meant and what was his relationship with his mother. You know, there was none of them. Einstein's revelations belong to all of us. They're just a gift. And you own it once you procure it and you can share it and you can transmit it around the world, and presumably it's true on the other side of the galaxy. And that was a watershed, a moment for me, a watershed experience where I very quickly scrambled and shifted directions, started studying math and physics. It was a shift. It was a pivot. It was a shift that now has led you down decades long. Yes. Asking the biggest questions a human could potentially possibly ask. Yeah. What does that do to a person? Well, you know, it's interesting because

When we sit down to do research, the colloquial we, the proverbial we, you know, my collaborators and other scientists I see in my field, oftentimes we're taking a small piece that we can manage of the big question. You can't set out and determine I'm going to solve the mystery of the Big Bang. It's just there's nothing to hang on to. It's too amorphous. And so we take these little small steps at a time and each one kind of opens another door, another. entire perspective, and then you follow that for a little while. So the actual work, we make it manageable in a way, step by step. And then at the end of the day, sometimes it's scary. How far have we gotten? What is our perspective? Sometimes things that I was certain were true, after thinking about

them for decades, start to dissolve in your hands almost. I don't know how to explain it. So I don't think theoretical physics will ever be done. I think we will make concrete steps, concrete discoveries, discover dark matter, dark energy, understand more about the dimensionality of space, but we will never be done with the revelations and the shifts and the paradigm shifts and the depth of understanding, coloring our vision differently with each era. Certainly it feels like there are fundamental questions which will never satiate the logical, rational mind. You know, Leibniz, why is there something rather than nothing? The nature of qualia and experience is fundamentally dumbfounding.

Fundamentally dumbfounding, yes. I love that we have the consciousness to be dumbfounded. Right. Yeah, I heard Michiocaku say that physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an attempt by an atom to understand itself. And it's quite peculiar that the origins of this universe has emerged self-organizing systems that could contemplate its own conception. Yeah, it is.

I'm thinking about life in the universe now, not least because I'm teaching it, in a very cross-university-wide class, and it's reminding me of the fundamentals of life, which has been really interesting. But also because it really is just positive charges and negative charges finding each other and moving through the universe since the beginning, like high-energy charge particles

finding their way down to lower energies. And that's been the whole game. like since the Big Bang. And sometimes if you see crystals creeping across in a formation, it looks like that inanimate charges finding each other. Then sometimes when you see a bacterial or an algal bloom, for instance, it kind of looks like that too. But suddenly we've transitioned to life. And if you think of us as just a collection of agnostic atoms forged in stars, forged in stars, simply acting out prescribed rules, it is astounding that not only does life emerge at the bacterial level, but at this level of experience and complexity where we've become a mystery

to ourselves. And I do think, unlike some people in the consciousness space, that that is all that it is that's happening, and by these iterations of a simple rule applied over and over again, like positive charge towards negative charge, or energy goes from high to low, or entropy increases, that it does march towards this incredible complexity. I think about how an arrangement of atoms in something like a rock can provoke wonder, but it can't experience wonder. And the arrangement of atoms in this organism can experience wonder? And is it just because the atoms are just more complexly and more fluidly arranged?

Right, which gets into the whole conversation on consciousness, which I'm sure we'll dive into. It is something that comes up continuously when researching to these topics, just this feeling of awe. And I can't help but feel how disconnected we are typically in our day-to-day life from literally the light pollution

that stops us from seeing the cosmos to contemplating the nature of existence. We're also myopically focused on our own survival needs, and we forget we're a part of this grand play happening. Yeah. And, you know, that we are, as Sagan said, you know, literally made of star stuff. And as I'm sure many women in crystal shops are made in stars, which is funny and also true, which is funny and also true, which is. weird. Yeah. We're a very specific sequence, again, all the way back to the Big Bang. Elements in our bodies were in the primordial soup, and elements in our bodies were forged in stars. And any gold you're wearing was forged in the collision of two neutron stars that had to get

cast back out into the universe. And that's it. It's the only place where it's made in the universe. Yeah, two neutron stars colliding. And neutron stars being dead stars not quite massive enough to make a black hole, but they're incredibly dense. They're almost nearing black hole densities. And so when they collide, it's this dramatic event, scales that can't be reached elsewhere in the universe. But I think about this idea of just looking up at the sky a lot, the firmament, you know, humanity's oldest instrument, the great commons, the sky, for every human being who has ever lived, the sun rises, on the eastern horizon and sets on the western horizon. For every human being, we've all seen the same face of the moon

and the same phases of the moon. And while we've carved up continents down here on Earth and siphoned energy out of fossil records and ward, you know, the sky has been austere and pristine. And I like to think literally above the fray, literally above the fray. And it belongs to all of us. And we're in an era where,

that might be on the cusp of ceasing to be true, where the sky begins to belong to people. And people make decisions about what we will see in the sky and whether we will continue to see stars or will be looking at the heat glow of satellites. And I'm all for space exploration, so I'm not a Luddite or anti-technology, but it does give you pause when we shift from an approach of thinking about the sky in our relationship to the sky in a way that is for the people and in a way that is maybe for individuals. So it's a strange time. Yeah.

It's a strange time to see the scale and speed, especially in the coming decades of discoveries that were even previously just theorized, right? the first images of the black holes in the past decade. I'm curious, if you were to like, because I often think about how so much of our perceptual systems and sensory organs are designed to give us this display of reality, which is very helpful for surviving, and they're very adaptive in that sense.

But they also give us a window into reality, which is by nature not objective. It can't be. And that's when contemplating these great questions around the origin of the universe and how vast time, you know, spaces and space time in general, it kind of gets you out of your own bubble. And for somebody, imagine somebody was just like born in the Truman Show. They were just, you know, just thought that this is all there was, you know, or perhaps one of our predecessors, evolutionarily speaking. And you came in as a voice of Janelle. in saying, like, what would you say about, what are some, like, facts, I suppose, about the universe in which we live in that would be most unfounding for the scale of it all?

Yeah. Well, I was just thinking exactly about this shift, how we have, as civilization progressed, the universe has gotten bigger. First, it was, the earth was at the center, and there were these seven wanderers, and there was a celestial sphere, and it was just, on top of us and the stars were painted and the celestial sphere and then of course the solar system became huge. We orbit the sun and then the stars got further away and they became a map of

how enormous space was. And then there was a galaxy, galaxy that it took light over 100,000 years to cross and collections of hundreds of billions of stars and then there were hundreds of billions of galaxies. So as far as the eye can see there are galaxies

with a glut of stars and around each of those stars, or most of those stars, we think there's multiple planets. So there's probably more planets in the universe than there are stars. And that is a shift of only the past 25 years or so. We knew that we had eight planets for our one star and a bunch of moons, hundreds of moons and a bunch of other junk out there on the farther reaches of the solar system. But we couldn't be certain other stars had that.

And we know I think that most stars do. And that makes this experiment in biology an astronomical problem, an astronomical question. Suddenly we have astrobiology. What determines which planets could see the sparks of life? And that question has never become more exciting than it is right now. So I think people don't necessarily realize that the most popular. populist inhabitant of the universe is probably a planet. Now, life in this solar system seems confined to this planet. Oh, they're not anymore because we left stuff probably on other planets. Where are the aliens?

Where are the aliens going to other celestial bodies leaving bacteria behind and tardigrades and maybe that could survive? Probably not, but maybe. But this planet, even though it's the only example of a planet with life that we're certain of, it is teeming with life, teeming with life. Every time we dive into the ocean, we discover new species. We go to hydrothermal vents which melt ordinary metals, and we find living creatures thriving, metabolizing rocks in hydrogen, just completely improbable. And here, at least, the capacity to survive is tremendous. So I think that that is a mind-boggling perspective that this could be happening plentifully

elsewhere in the universe, this experiment, you know, this kind of slot machine of living organisms. And I think also that when we think of the universe, it's about 13.8 billion years old but it's much bigger than that across because the universe has been expanding in those nearly 14 billion years. And so the universe is actually something like 90 billion light years across. It's actually enormous. And that's only as far as we can see.

We don't know how far the universe goes beyond that, if at all. Maybe we start there. What was before the Big Bang? Yeah, so the hardest question. Give me a concrete answer, by the way. Well, this is the answer. This is the definitive answer. Well, I think that we are mistaken.

I was literally thinking about this last night. I have a different way of answering that. It doesn't shock me giving it to you. As of last night, I have a different approach to this question. I used to say arguments about space and time were created. in that moment, possibly, possibly. Or it could be, and these are still valid, or there could be a landscape of possibilities

where the space time exists, though the relativity of space and time, make it awkward for us to line our notions of time up with these other notions of time. But little plumes kind of catch fire or get into these heightened states and blow up and decay and explode and become big banks. this kind of multiverse or many worlds landscape.

But I think I have a different answer as of last night, which is that the state in which we have space time simply might not have existed, that the universe was in a different state, or maybe I shouldn't call it a universe, but there was a transition between different states. One way to think about it would be to imagine, like water boiling, and before the water boiled, there weren't bubbles.

They just didn't exist. It wasn't sensible to talk about where were those bubbles? Where were those bubbles? Before the water boiled. They were simply in a different state. Their potential, the energy for them to exist or the potential for them to exist was in a different state. And it was transmuted to bubbling water. So there was a time before bubbles could exist.

and there might have been, and we used time. I couldn't even not use it in that. I was trying not to use it, and I couldn't not use it. There may have been a condition prior to which, and I still can't not use it prior as time. A coherent notion of space and time wasn't the state in which the universe found itself. So does that shift?

Because if the origin of the big being was the origin of space, and time as we know it, then asking the question what was before within the confines of space and time, which was the origin of it is like just like a circular question. You know, it's like what was before, before? Yeah, what was before before? Yeah, I think we are ill-equipped to use analogies rooted in the English language or any other language that defies concepts of time. We're ill-equipped to do that, but the universe itself might have defied concepts of time, that even as we go back towards the Big Bang, a clear, even mathematical notion of time may

have disintegrated and into a kind of a complexity where that just isn't the correct description of the state of things, the state of... And by the universe in that context, all I can think of is the energy, the potential, the quantum information. That existed presumably and was meaningful, but time itself might not be. Even, I don't even have to go prior to the Big Bang. It might even be in the earliest moments of the Big Bang. There isn't a single coherent definition of time or space, that it was messier, quantum, entangled

sort of threads and that it was frothier and more like a tapestry of possibilities that hadn't quite settled. If you were to explain to somebody who's not as freshened up on my theoretical physics, how something so complex

as we were talking about could emerge from something seemingly so chaotic How would you explain that? So complex is this universe? As, yeah, or us, you know? Yeah. It's very interesting in cosmology. One of the reasons I was drawn to cosmology is actually it's not complex, surprisingly.

We have these complex eras in cosmology, but actually, remarkably, you can describe the evolution of the universe between the really tough part of the very, very early pre-primordial soup, all the way to the formation of galaxies and planets, incredibly elegantly and simply. The general relativity that describes it, Einstein's theory of curved spacetime, is a challenge to acquire, but within the context of general relativity, it's some of the simplest solutions

that you can find. And I think an interesting question is, how does complexity re-emerge? Why, when planets form, and life emerges, does it seem as though complexity increases again, in a way? And I think, you know, these continue to be complicated questions that, I don't know, I think are answerable. But if you really, if you think about it in some ways, the idea of an organization, or a brain or something that thinks is ordered out of the complexity.

So I can imagine taking something like a very ordered egg and scrambling it. That is more disordered, right, than the ordered egg. But if I allow the egg to become a life, that when we use complexity to describe the life, in a sense we mean something different than we do when we talk about something becoming disordered. We actually mean something extremely ordered in just a really intricate way that allows for a lot of possibilities, a lot of thoughts, a lot of potential. And why nature allows that is actually quite fascinating. Why don't we just get increasingly disordered and messier and messier? Why do we get driven towards an incredibly ordered state like an egg, an egg into a creature, a creature into behavior, maybe even consciousness, and thought?

I didn't answer any of your questions. I just made a messier soup of it all. I have a feeling there will be many questions answered that don't have a concrete answer to. answer to him. But when you just contemplate the sheer scale of the universe and say things like that there are black holes, billions of times the mass of our sun, we're talking at scales here that just break human perception. You know, like we can't contemplate how big something like that is. So let's start with black holes.

Yeah, my favorite. What's up with those? It's up with black holes. Black holes are the most profound phenomenon. in the universe, I think, as far as we can understand, an actual, that nature figured out a way to make black holes as astounding, and that black holes have something to say about fundamental physics is astounding. So let's just pick those two apart. The beauty of black holes, they are incredibly big. So astrophysically large black holes that form from the death state of stars

a few times the mass of the sun, ten times the mass of the sun, maybe even they merge a little and they get to a hundred or more, those are different than supermassive black holes. And supermassive black holes are not formed as the death state of stars. We don't know how they form. There are enormous millions or billions or maybe even teetering on trillions times the mass of the sun. And those seem to come from earlier in the universe, skipping stars altogether. So we had known for a long time, not known, but it was theorized by people like Oppenheimer who were studying nuclear physics, because they were thinking about nuclear physics in an agnostic way as applied to stars, maybe that's how stars shine, and simultaneously shifting that agnostic knowledge to,

can I build a bomb, you know, at a strange era in human history, to have these two thoughts at once. And in fact, publishes his most important paper in 1939 on the eve of the Nazi, marching on Poland, where he says, I actually think that nuclear physics and the cores of stars is not capable of resisting catastrophic gravitational collapse for a dead star when the star runs out of fuel if the star is massive enough. He says, I think they're going to make black holes. And he didn't really live to understand the significance of that discovery. He was right about that. Einstein didn't think he was right about it. And so many of the great scientists didn't think he was right about it.

But we see a universe littered with black holes that formed from stars that ran out of fuel and catastrophically collapsed under their own weight and formed a black hole where the star just keeps collapsing and collapsing and collapsing and leaves behind a region of space curved so strongly that nothing can escape. Even light. Even light. What I love about black holes, one of the many things I love about black holes, is if you imagine the star collapsing and it's still shining and there's thermonuclear fission

going off and all kinds of last stage death throws are happening inside the star, it eventually gets so dense that not even light can escape, nothing traveling, even at the speed of light can escape. That means the star itself goes dark. Suddenly the star has gone dark. You can't see the star anymore, the stuff that's making the black hole. And it inscribes around it almost, almost like a fossil record imprinted in the space time, this region, there's no man's land, this region beyond which you can't escape, but the stuff of the star can't sit there either, because it can't race out at the speed of light either, and it continues to fall. And so it leaves behind nothing. The black hole is gone. So there's nothing there,

at least the star is gone. The black hole is really like a, a place now. It's not a thing anymore. The material's gone. It kept falling. Where it goes, we don't really know. We can talk about the interior of black holes. To my mind, it's not the most important question, because we'll only ever have the exterior. And that's all we will ever know about what happens inside. But the remarkable thing is that there's nothing there anymore. There's just this empty space where the star used to be. And that, that is, you know, that is a is unlike anything else you can think of in the universe. So it becomes a pure space time in a way. It's no longer. People, I think, imagined, oh, I go up to the horizon and there's this really

dense object there. It's really dense. No, it's gone. And that's different than a neutron star. I go up to a neutron star, which collapsed, got really small, but not quite a black hole. And you go up to the surface of a neutron star and there is something there. There's a high, superconducting intense quantum state of matter, basically a giant, giant nuclei all packed together. But the black hole's gone. So because of that, there's something about them that that has attributes that we would usually only assign to something absolutely fundamental, like microscopic particles. it becomes featureless. There are no details you can know about a black hole.

It's totally featureless. That's because the event horizon can't tell you anything about what's on the interior. So all black holes have to start to look alike. And that's something we also only talk about with fundamental particles.

Like all electrons being identical. You can't tell one electron from another electron. One electron's never heavier than the other guy. You can't be like, that's my electron. They're indistinguinguished.

and interchangeable, black holes start to look like giant, macroscopic, but fundamental particles. So it turned, so in some sense, we shouldn't be that surprised that they're, they're like holding the cipher for fundamental quantum physics, because even though they're big, they have something about them that looks fundamental. Hey everyone. One thing that reliably brings me a sense of joy in the morning is starting my day with a warm, nourishing drink. But I personally don't drink any strong caffeine, and that's why I love mudwater. I use their OG blends the most, which contain cacao, functional mushrooms, and adaptogenic herbs. If you are a lover of the coffee taste, they launched an all-new low-calf with arabica beans, al-thenein, and the same functional mushrooms at only 45 milligrams of caffeine, research. shows that's the sweet spot to support focus and mood without the anxiety or the crash. I see Mudwater as the leading brand that fuels artists and creatives with nourishing blends that actually support your body and mind instead of just chasing highs with coffee or energy

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Which was a huge surprise. And that came much later. So we're talking 1939. This is now the 80s and 90s. Those are different than the stars that collapse in on themselves. Yeah, we don't really know where they come from. They're way too big for the age of the universe to be explained as, well, maybe they formed by stars, and then a bunch of them merged,

and then it got huge millions of these merged. There's not enough time in the age of the universe for that to happen. So we think, and we see them very far back with things like the James Webb Space Telescope, there's evidence that in the first few hundred million years in the universe that there were these big black holes. And so we think they just collapsed directly, skipping stars altogether very early in the universe

out of just the primordial material. And so could you talk to me about the timeline from when these were first theorized then up until M87 and Sagittary, say, being photographed and how we came to even conceive of these and then verify them? Yeah. So there were these objects,

quasi-stellar objects they were called. I guess we're going back, not positive, this is era, but like 70s, 1970s. And they were these, they were called quasi-stellar objects because they weren't, sure if they were stars up close. This is one of the biggest challenges in astronomy. Is something kind of fainted up close or is it incredibly bright and far away? Very hard to tell the difference.

It's hard to get a handle on how would you know? If you think about when ancient astronomers looked at stars, they didn't dream that they were blazing suns at trillions of kilometers distance. They thought they were faint objects up close. And the quasi-stellar objects had the same kind of narrative unfolding. They were later called quasars when people realized they were not stars at all, that they were these incredibly powerful engines on the edges of what we could see at the most greatest distances. A lot of these quasars are active galactic nuclei, sometimes you'll hear them called AGNs, and they're tearing up the material around them, churning up electromagnetic fields, creating enormous jets, just mayhem.

And because of all this mayhem that's going on, we can see them from very far away. Yet from the time variability, they were deduced to be spatially small, but incredibly heavy, and that's a black hole. So even when we were talking about these black holes, the sun's a million and a half kilometers across, but if it were a black hole, it would be six.

kilometers across. The density was collapsed into that point. Yes. So black holes are hefty, but they're spatially tiny. I want to put that on my daily app profile. I don't have that, but it would be a good one. If you look at the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy over four million times the mass of the sun, it's less than 20 times the width of the sun. So you're taking over four million, nearing four and a half million times the mass of the sun, and you're jamming it into 20 times the width. So the whole trickery of black holes is how small they are. So they deduced that these were likely black holes. It's trickery because we typically assume things that are bigger or bigger, they're heavier, they're denser. Yeah, they're just these huge things. But in fact,

the whole shenanigans is that they're small, which is why it's really hard to see one. Take a picture of one has been impossible until around a decade ago. Which was M87 the first we photographed in 2016? Yes, M87. So you go from quasars. So those are the first hint of supermassives. Then we see orbits of stars around the centers of galaxies, and there's nothing there. And Nobel Prizes have been awarded for that discovery, that there were supermassive black

holes at the centers of galaxies just by looking at the way things were orbiting nothing. Again, it had to be a small nothing and a heavy nothing, and that's a black hole. And then the attempt to take the picture was rooted in very solid ground because there was now evidence just by looking at orbital dynamics of things we can see that these supermassive black holes were lurking probably in every galaxy. There was evidence of the one in the center of our galaxy. And M87, as you mentioned, is a galaxy nearby. Fifty-five million light years away. Very good. Fifty-five million light years away. Just a hop, skipping a jump. But it's huge. It's six and a half billion times the mass of the sun. So it's much bigger than our black hole,

but it's further away. So the scale of that, for reference, is it, it's like bigger than our solar system from like sun to Pluto? Yeah. It's solar system sized. It's like, it's a solar system-sized black hole. It's crazy. It's crazy. That's not even the biggest. So it's thousand times, more than a thousand times bigger than our black hole at the center of our galaxy. So that makes it solar system-sized.

That's at the center. Is it the miser galaxy? Messier. Messier. Yeah. So here's the thing about Messier. That's how you know I'm doing my own research. No, no, it's great.

Very well. Can I tell you about Messier, which is amusing? Please tell me about Messier. M87 stands for Messier Catalog, Object 87 in the catalog. Messier was an astronomer who was really interested in comets. I think it's the 1700s, maybe later. And he made a catalog of all the uninteresting objects

that weren't comets. So just don't bother with these. And in them are objects like M87. And I think Andromeda must be in there. And he didn't know about galaxies. You didn't know that these were other galaxies. They were just these smudgy nebula that weren't interesting and you ought to avoid. So the trick with M87 is even though it's bigger and further away, it's about the same size on the sky as our own black hole. They're both very,

very, very small on the sky, very hard to resolve. The quote is taking a picture of those black holes was equivalent to taking a picture of a piece of fruit on the moon. It was an intensely fine, high-resolution observation. Yeah, that puts things into context for sure. Yeah. Wild. And so what would it like for you when we had our first rendering of that? Like when you first saw that?

Yeah, so the founding director of that consortium for the Event Horizon Telescope was a really good friend of mine. It was a really close friend of me. We went to graduate school together, laughed our way, ate our way through graduate school at MIT. And he had started to think about these things back then. And so it was a very, it was very personal for me to see, to see him succeed, really.

And with this insane project, you know, he called himself head crazy. He was like, I was head crazy with a bunch of crazies doing what was on the edge. of what was possible. They needed to try to make a telescope the size of the world. And to do that, you had to find a technique, which we call interferometry, to link telescopes together so that they operated as one, so that you could link telescopes all around the globe. And when they made their observation, you could link them with enough accuracy that it was as though it was one eyeful of the sky. And it was... It was... on the edge of what was possible.

So it was thrilling, obviously, both scientifically but also from that kind of climbing Mount Everest point of view. So we'll put it up on screen. And upon seeing that, and it's not exactly an image in the way that we would think taking one with our iPhone, right? Yeah. What was it like that moment? when you saw that?

So it was an interesting moment. We all sort of knew what it would look like because we knew the resolution that they were capable of, which was tremendous in order to capture it at all, but not so tremendous that it was going to be a crystal clear sharp. It was going to be just a few pixels, kind of a rendering. It was remarkable because... I don't know if people appreciate this.

The accretion disk around the black hole is what we're actually seeing. That is a disk of bright material that's orbiting the black hole that is luminous. The black hole is just dark against a dark sky. You shouldn't be able to take a picture of it. There's nothing to take a picture of. You need like a shadow of a tree to cast light, to have some source of light so you can see the shadow cast. So you need this bright disk of hot material around the black hole to see the shadow that the black hole casts in the center.

That's also on its own not sufficient because if you think of, for instance, the rings of Saturn, if Saturn was dark, if you couldn't see Saturn, the rings don't really help you see Saturn. You would just see rings. But in the case of a black hole, because the space time is so strongly curved, Light from behind the black hole gets its path gets bent around so that you can see behind the black hole. You can see light coming from behind the black hole. And that creates this phenomenon where the light seems to encompass the black hole. And you can see the shadow cast.

Which in the case of Sagittarius, A, we're looking at kind of the accretion disc from like a top-down perspective, which doesn't, is that why we don't see like the disc cutting into the middle of it? Yeah, the orientation helps, but even so, because of this bending of light, wherever you are in the galaxy, if you look at Sagittarius A-star, you see it encircled. And it's called that just because it was in the direction of the constellation. Yes, the constellation, Sagittarius marks the direction of the center of our galaxy from our point of view. So we're the center of the universe, basically, Sagittarius. Well, the center of the galaxy. Sorry, sorry.

Are you as hergetarius by any chance? One gave it away. Yeah, exactly. So astrology is good for one thing, and that is charting directions in the galaxy. And so we call the object in the center of the galaxy, SAGE A star. We name black holes with a little star, maybe ironically, because they're not stars at all. M87, Messia catalog, Object 87, this other galaxy, outside our galaxy,

the stars M87 star, I'm sorry the black hole's M87 star. So the supermassive black hole, yeah. If there wasn't for the secretion disc, we would have no ability to view. Complete darkness. You need something light. Some sorts of light. And so stars were

providing that for Andrea Gess, who shared in the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the supermassive black hole at the Centerberg Galaxy. She couldn't take a picture of it, but she watched stars for over 15 years orbiting this tiny nothingness.

And so she needed the star to map the space time. It's kind of like throwing things in a well and having the motion around the well tell you that the well is there at all. Hey, everyone, your skin is the largest organ in your body. And it often gets overlooked. I personally don't use many products at all, but the couple that I do use,

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After your purchase, they'll ask where you heard about them. You can let them know we sent you. Link in description, as always, back to the episode. So in the case of certain black holes formation, the elemental gaseousness that turns into iron and increases in density becomes so big to at one point it collapses in itself in a fraction of a second. You mean the black hole? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So if we move back from the supermass of black holes back to the black holes that form as the death states of stars. And are those fast? We just call them stellar mass black holes. their stellar mass, meaning their masses are in the ranges of stars. So there are very massive stars, much more massive than our sun. We measure all masses of stars relative to our sun. Anthroprocentric.

Yes, our son, his name is Saul or Helio. Or the sun is actually its name. So there are stars that are many tens of times the mass of our sun. and when they run out of thermonuclear fuel, which is providing all of this pressure to puff the star out and resist the gravitational collapse under its own weight, when that fuel starts to run down, it can very quickly collapse. In some cases, the collapse happens so fast that it ignites a next stage of thermonuclear burning under the intense pressure. And that causes an explosion, and that explosion would be like a supernova explosion. and those can leave behind in their remnant cores what's left over after that explosion. There's still enough mass left over for the core to become something like a neutron star

or if it's heavy enough a black hole. And they can be heavy those cores. And they do merge with each other. Stars, we have witnessed the mergers of black holes and they become bigger black holes. So we've seen, we've not seen, but we've detected the merger of black holes. that are marching up over a hundred times the mass of the sun. Still, it's not enough to make supermassive because you need that to happen millions of times

or billions of times or trillions of times and there's not enough time for that to happen in the age of the universe. So what would happen if you're here on Earth, you have a super large telescope and you see me entering the orbit or closer to a black hole? Oh, yeah.

What would you see as I were to enter and then what would my experience be? Yeah, so the nice way to set this up is to do kind of what they did in Interstellar. Let's go to the black hole together, and I'll park on a nice orbit in my stable space station. The beauty about black holes is you can get right up close. They have this reputation of being weapons of mass destruction,

but they're actually pretty benign. I can't get up close to the sun, for instance. That would be lethal. But I can get right up close to a black hole, find a nice orbit, and just like the International Space Station, just go into orbit. And if you instead wanted to fall into the black hole, and you went on that journey, you would find, or from my point of view, as you were falling in, the curvature of space is also a distortion of time. And I would see not only that you were following this curved path into the black hole, but that your time was

being distorted or in some sense rotated by the black hole. Your time would appear to me to evolve slower and slower and slower. Literally, your watch would tick slower. Your neurons would fire slower. Your cells would, you know, process metabolize slower. It's a literal effect, but everything with you would be subject to the same relativistic change. And so you wouldn't notice anything odd happening at all. But if you looked at me, I would look sped up. Like the years were passing. Well, at least the weeks or the months were passing.

And I was moving really fast and the movies were going really fast. And my signals were coming really fast. And my clocks were ticking really fast. So if you were sitting still from my perspective, I would literally see you age through your death. and that would increasingly go faster and faster. Everything happening away from the black hole would be happening faster than it is for you. And so as you approach the black hole, you could see, depending on how slow your approach

or how long you linger near the event horizon, you could see millennia pass. Is there a limit to how far you could see passing? If you, there's in principle not, there is in practice because you'd have to resist falling into the black hole, which means you'd have to have some kind of fuel to resist your, you'd have to hover there for a long time. What if you had an infinite amount of fuel as a thought experiment to hover there? Could you see the end of the universe? In principle, but even there, we would say eventually your own map. mass and your gravitational pull would distort the black hole and eventually the black hole would gobble you down. Okay.

And also, if we're being really finesting about it, the black hole is emitting this hawking radiation, which we may or may not want to talk about because that's a whole complex story, but eventually the black hole itself begins to join the universe in a state of decay. So nothing is forever, not even the black hole. Entropy comes for everyone. Yes, it comes for everyone. Okay. But very long time, you could see,

you could see the black hole is going to live a very long time. So if you were able to hover with some clever trick for using energy from nearby stars or things that were falling in or some cool technology, you could watch the entire galaxy fall into the black hole or something. What a sight. Far, far, far future. What a site that would be. Yeah.

You could watch our solar system come and go down into that black hole. In fact, the bigger the black hole, the longer you can get away with it. Interesting. So then, okay, time dilation. But then what happens as I cross the event horizon? So you cross the event horizon in short order from your point of view. And what is the event horizon? Because I don't think we double-click on that.

Yeah, so the event horizon is. doesn't signal to you it's there. If you did not listen in astrophysics class, or you did not listen to this podcast, and you were approaching this dark region where you noticed no light was emanating, no light was reflected, and no light was escaping everything

that neared was falling in, but you didn't know anything about event horizons. You would just cross this boundary. It's literally called a principle of no drama. Nothing dramatic should have. happen to you on the crossing of this boundary. Sounds nice. This boundary, yeah. This boundary is simply

the point of no return. That's all that it is. There's no signal that it's there. There's no landmark in space. There's no way to mark the space. If I tried to, if I did a survey of the black hole by throwing things in, and I realized, this is

the region, the point of no return. This is the boundary beyond which not even light can escape. that is the formal definition of the event horizon. Even traveling at the speed of light, you cannot escape. From that point, there is no way for me to demarcate that point for other travelers. I can't put a sign there. I can't put a signpost because it will all fall in because it can't sit there unless it's going at the speed of light.

So am I articulating it right that? Okay, from the outside in perspective, it just looks like you're slowing down. and at which point I personally cross the event horizon where the gravitational force exceeds 300,000 kilometers an hour is that the escape velocity? The escape velocity. You could think of it as the escape velocity. At which point no information, even light,

which is the speed limit on the universe, could not. Yes. And then nothing dramatic happens, but then something does. Nothing dramatic happens to you when you cross, especially if you cross a big black hole. The bigger the black hole, it might surprise people. the less devastating the experience of the curvature of space time. And that might be surprising because you might think, oh, it's big, it's stronger.

But if you think about the Earth, I hardly notice the curvature of the Earth because it's so big. But if I stand on a basketball, I notice the curvature more. So actually a smaller black hole gives you more grief because you notice the curvature more, actually. So it's kind of you just kind of fall through. It's not much pressure on your body. It's not much wear and tear. But what's happened... Would there be any?

If the black hole's very big, essentially at the scale of a human being, no, really. But it does get worse as you keep falling. So as you approach the singularity, what we call the singularity, which I don't think anybody believes actually exists. But if I just logically follow Einstein's equations describing what happens to the space time on the interior of a black hole, and I ignore any corrections from quantum mechanics or matter or any of the other laws of physics. So I artificially turn those off. Then general relativity protects a region of infinite curvature. And that is very, very bad on your body. Because now your toes are feeling more than your head, and you're also being compressed, and you're provoking space time because it's so highly unstable that even your little bit of mass is causing a lot of, of churning up and you're essentially shredded, people like this term, spaghettified.

And eventually you're torn us under into all of your fundamental quantum bits, and then what happens to you, we don't know. I'm pretty confident up to this point. So you get spaghettified, so to speak, your toes feel it more than your head until eventually every single atom in your body and even the corks. Yeah, everything's ruptured, and then we don't know what happens to it. Now, it might be end up in some quantum remnant and there's no singularity ultimately, but the curvature is still bad enough to destroy you. But the curvature is high, but not infinite. And there's like a remnant of a quantum state of matter that's kind of incomprehensible to us. Or something even more

complicated goes on, like there's some entanglement between the interior and the exterior of the black hall, whatever's going on in there is very important and very interesting, but very hard to get a handle on. Because those that would look into hawking radiation would be like if energy can't be destroyed right, it just goes into the singularity of black hole. How could I just turn into nothing? Yeah.

Yeah. So if we want to get into it. I don't know if we did. I mean it's a because it's kind of a long story. It's a big warm hole. It is and it literally might be resolved by warm holes. All right. Maybe a Freudian slip. People are trying to use the idea of wormhole

and entanglement to resolve the information loss paradox, the idea. And I'll just say it very simply, and we don't have to go terribly in depth, but information should not be destroyed from the quantum mechanical perspective. That is unholy. That it means that the laws of physics are not, the reality is no longer within the range of the laws of physics. It destroys reality. So if things fall in, their information has to be preserved by the black hole. That's fine, as long as the black hole keeps everything.

everything behind the event horizon. But if, as Hawking theorized, the black hole evaporates without letting any of its information out, eventually it evaporates away, and it's like this curtains yanked up. The horizon's yanked up, and there's nothing there. Where did everything go? It's like a magic trick, right? And that's terrible. That's terrible because the black hole is gone, and so is the information. And like a magic trick, it took something out of the universe. It had no right to do, right? It had no right. to rob the universe of this information. So this is one of the most important questions

in theoretical physics, and this is a black hole revealing its fundamental nature again. It's saying, I can tell you something about the portal between quantum mechanics and gravity, the very depths of the laws of physics that no other terrain in the universe can tell you. And that's why theoretical physicists, who have never looked at a telescope

and don't really focus on astronomy, study black holes, and, um, and astronomers who only look through telescopes study black holes. It is the only phenomena that connects the microscopic to the macroscopic in quite that way. It like opens up the microscopic into a macroscopic terrain. And there is nothing else like that. Hey guys. So I've been chewing this gum recently.

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That's bylorine.com slash know they self. And you can look at the code in the description. As always, I hope you enjoy. Back to the show. Perhaps we can dive more into wormholes in a moment. How does, so Einstein quoted as like the happiest thought of his life, The equivalence principle? Yeah, the equivalence principle.

It's a very happy thought. It is. So wonderful. Would you lay that out? What is that? I love the equivalence principle. It goes back to Galileo, actually. Here's a very profound version.

I'm not going to do the Galileo version, because we have access to space, and we can think about it in a much less confusing way. Einstein did trains, and that's still confusing. We have space, because we send things to space. So imagine you're in a, a spacecraft and you're doing your own thing.

It's been a long time since you've seen anyone. You can't see any stars or planets. You're in total darkness. You have no point of reference. You would have a very ordinary experience of how things behaved in your floating space. You would consider yourself to be at rest. I mean, there would be no way for you to say you weren't at rest.

And everything you did, you push off the walls, you do your experiments, you make sure the wires are, you know, working. Electricity works like you think it should, et cetera. Now you see another spacecraft come by, and you look at each other. And you say, we do Alice and Bob. You say to Alice, whoa, Alice, you are cruising through space. You know, whoof, where are you going?

Now, Alice has had the same experience as you for years. She hasn't seen anybody. She doesn't think she's moving. She sees you coming by the other way. She's like, whoa, Andre, what are you doing? where are you going so fast? There is no way to resolve this. Which one of you is the one that's moving?

There is no meaning to the answer to that question. Which one of you is in absolute motion? Motion is strictly relative in that way. And this isn't exactly the equivalence principle. I'm sorry, I'm giving you really relativity, right? So Einstein is, so that's what leads Einstein to be thinking about relativity. And in these thoughts about, well, if motion is relative in this profound way, then even though Alice seemed to be cruising one way, you seem to be cruising the other way, you're both going to measure the speed of light to be the same.

And that, like, completely freaked him out. Say that again? Yeah. So I feel like I'm... leading us astray from, is that okay from equivalence principle? Yes, well, it is okay. We'll come back. So let's say there's a light beam shooting in Alice's rocket and her spaceship.

She will measure the speed of light of that thing, of that pulse of light. She will measure its speed to be the speed of light. And you flying past her, if the world was Newtonian, would measure a different speed for that light beam. You're measuring a different speed for Alice. You would measure a different speed, but you don't. You measure its speed to be this fundamental fact of the world, 300,000 kilometers per second.

And that seems impossible. And it was really the impossibility. It could have been called the theory of absolutism instead of the theory of relativity. It could have been called the theory of absolutism because what he did is he clung to the absolute speed of light and the absolute nature of the speed of light. And that was what forced him to break space and time.

The only way that could be possible is if what Alice thought was space and Alice thought was time is different than what you thought was space and you thought was time. So he breaks those in order to preserve the speed of light. And that leads him down the whole looking glass of the theory of relativity. So I'm sorry, I don't know why I went off on Galilean relativity now. It's a fun, well, I mean, the relativity of, again, we have this experience of up seems that way, love seems this way, and when you remove the resistance we experience to gravity, you kind of take a bit of this relativity away from us in a sense. And so Einstein was contemplating this nature of us actually being weightless in space.

So let's go to this idea of the equivalence principle. So when we think of gravity colloquially, we think of heaviness. I might feel heavy in this chair. Or I might feel my feet on heavy on the floor of an elevator. But if you think or lying in bed, like the resistance trying to. to get out of bed and fight gravity. With a weighted blanket out of you that's adding to the gravity. Exactly, with a weighted blanket.

Perfect. Every one of those examples involves atoms interfering with gravity. So Einstein imagine what if we take those atoms away, take away the chair, the bed, the weighted blanket, the elevator floor. So the canonical story for something like the equivalence principle or weightlessness, let's call it weightlessness, imagine you're standing in an elevator. and the cable is cut, and you and the elevator begin to fall. And because you fall at the same rate, you begin to float with respect to the elevator.

Your experience in this falling elevator cab, which I hope is a very long fall, is similar to the experience you would have in the International Space Station. You feel utterly weightless. You could pour water out of a canteen and drink it out of the air. Just like they do in the space station, you could suspend your keys and they would float in front of you. You could push off the walls. It has an unhappy ending, which is when your atoms hit the atoms in the earth and you come to an abrupt halt. But in that time, you are experiencing gravity in its purest form without the interference of anything else.

And so Einstein had this leap that the experience of pure gravity is the experience of weightlessness. He called it free fall, right? It's the experience of falling freely and weightlessly in a gravitational field without anything getting in the way of your fall, not the chair, not the bed, not the floor, not the elevator. And this led him to this this idea of the equivalence between gravity and weightlessness and also resisting gravity and feeling an acceleration. Let's do another experiment. You're in a rocket in space and it's accelerating. Doesn't matter which way is up. We're going to call it up. It's accelerating. It looks just like your

elevator cab. And it's accelerating upwards. You would not be able to tell that you weren't standing in the elevator around the earth. Those would be equivalent experiences. And so that this acceleration of the elevator in space suggests that when you're standing in the elevator around the earth, it's the elevator that's accelerating you by resisting your fall. And the equivalence of those two states led Einstein to the happiest thought of his life. So he begins to think of falling freely in a space time as the true experience of gravity. This is very profound because if we go all the way back to Newton and the apocryphal story of the apple falling on Newton's head and he suddenly has a eureka and he writes down his laws of

gravity, nobody could understand how is the earth pulling on the apple without touching the apple? It's so far from the apple. How is it pulling on it? And Einstein resolves this by by letting the apple fall freely along the natural curves in space. And so what our experience of gravity is is really just falling along these natural curves. It's not heaviness, it's weightlessness. It seems so simple an explanation, but also something we often overlook, that the weightlessness is gravity and its purest experience. What he described as his happiest thought was actually one of my happiest experiences. I got to do a parabola and one of those zero-g experiments. I did, yeah.

One of those planes? Yeah, it was... Where was the plane? Was it a cosmonaut plane? We flew out of Vegas. What? Was it an accident? No.

That would have been... That would have been scary. That would have been horrifying. Have you seen the OK Go video? No. Oh, it's hilarious. They do this. They do a parabolic flight.

And on the plane, it's so unbelievably choreographed during weightlessness. They're stumbling and they're doing all. all of the stunts and it's a whole take. And they had to do it. Oh, and I guess it was very nauseating. Yeah, yeah. We had a couple people vomit. Oh, yeah.

It's called the vomit comic. Yeah. I'm not doing it. I think we did 12 or 16 parabolas. Oh, my God. It was, I'll show you. As a part of this video project, we did, I was a part of like 65 or six years ago. But this is me kind of holding the camera, just like floating into a ball.

Oh, wow. Yes. This is like the OK Go video, I'm telling you. It was so tricky. That's so cool. It was one of those most like downfounding experiences where when the plane first does the nose dive and we all start floating and we all look around just like a purely first human experience we've never had before. Yeah. Right. It's just wild.

I want to emphasize that the Blue Origin is doing something like that. They're not floating in the Blue Origin when Katie Perry went to space. They weren't floating because she was far from the earth. She was not far from the earth. She was right there at the kind of where the atmosphere thins out, the Carmen line. They're just falling. They're just doing a dramatic parabolic flight. It's like taking an elevator way up.

Yeah, they just wanted to, and then cutting the cable. Yeah, but you don't want the, you want to come off triumphant. You want to celebrate your landing. Use the landing. Yeah, that's all they're doing is easing the landing. I can experience the same weightlessness by jumping off your roof. For a short amount of time Ill advised

Yeah, please don't get it It's a liability We have to sign the waiver It would be complicated I'm enjoying this conversation But it is It is fascinating And so like I have my own meditative practices

And you know We explore some more philosophical Spiritual at times themes Throughout this You know where you can have A similar experience of weightlessness Although it's different In like a float tank for example

deeper meditative states where you lose conscious awareness of your body relative to time and space. Now this could, if I were to lead me to some ungrounded claims perhaps on the ontology of the universe when you experience no-thingness, nothingness, and your interior experience. And there's interesting books that I'm not sure your thoughts on, like the telephysics that kind of try to

bridge together these understandings of these cosmological principles it can be quite anthropocentric to try to correlate to things that maybe don't have any business being correlated but when you examine the nothingness

of a black hole and the nothingness of our internal experience and it can lead you to some interesting contemplations around the nature of existence itself outside of just the Newtonian model so yeah I don't really have a question on that. It's just very... I actually, I'm not averse to a philosophical

reflection on these pursuits. I'm not, right? Even though I joke with my philosophy friends that, you know, I'm recovered. Recovered, recovering philosopher. You're a recovered philosopher. Recovering, I suppose. You know, you have to be in present. And occasionally, I said, but But there is a difference between launching something to the moon, which we can only do with this other way of thinking, even if it does start to veer towards things that sound Taoist or Buddhist. And I do think people are getting a little Buddhist in my field, even if they wouldn't want to totally admit it, I think there is a sense in which it is a particular era now, I think, where the laws of physics, people are. People are wondering if the campaign isn't going to, if there isn't going to be a paradigm shift in the campaign. So the campaign for theoretical physics has been, for a century, find the symmetries. That is your law, and that is the law of physics, and it will predict this universe.

And that worked really, really well. I could say gravity has to do with a symmetry applied to a law of physics, electromagnetism, a particular symmetry group that leads to that law, the weak force, which is fused in the electro-week theory, and a strong force, and all of these things, that was the paradigm. There aren't multiple theories of electromagnetism. There's one. And then when we tried to go a next layer towards something like string theory, a theory of everything that brings them all together, there seemed to be lots of theories. We couldn't find the one theory. And there was not a clean argument of which is the one universe. What is the one right universe? That's ours. And instead it proliferated. It went the other way.

Suddenly there wasn't a single theory of everything. There were like a lot of theories in some sense. Even if string theory is the theory of everything, there were a lot of universes here. And people are starting to wonder, like, actually, maybe that's just the way it is. It's like this bottleneck of reality, and then suddenly there's a proliferation of possibilities, and maybe all those possibilities actually exist. And we should be thinking differently, not about the Big Bang created a specific law of physics, but maybe in the early universe, all of these things were in play. And it was fundamentally more complex. And I do feel it's kind of, I'm not going to call it a spiritual shift.

That might be too strong, but maybe a paradigm shift. I appreciate the epistemic humility to be able to go on these fringes, which is typically where discovery is always made, right? You're kind of going out on a limb and you're like, oh, happens to be right. Oftentimes it's not, right? And I look back and see, you know, it's not nothing that Newton wrote more papers on metaphysics, you know. And alchemy. An alchemy.

Than physics. I see oftentimes materialists, like, just discounting it as a whole. But I do kind of reflect back on the time of, like, the Vienna Circle with Gertil and this kind of bifurcation with philosophy. spirituality and hard science. And I totally get it, but I'm curious what your thoughts are there because it seems like some of the greatest insights have come through moments of doing your homework, doing your studies, and then letting it go into the state of nothing

where an insight comes to you and you verify it with the science that then bears fruits and things that we can do in the world. But it's just fascinating to me, in particular with some of these like psychedelic journeys and these kind of reoccurring contact with sacred geometric structures that feel like they're imbued with meaning and perhaps it's a hallucinatory kind of pattern that we're all archetypally running into but perhaps by nature of us being a part and made of what the universe is we have access to these things in a non-rational context that could give us new insights into what the structure and mechanism of the universe actually is.

I think that's quite right. I very strongly believe that. We didn't just drop out of nowhere. We evolved under these very specific forces and structures, and in some sense there's just not that many of them. They repeat, the patterns repeat, and they become encoded in our DNA, in the structure of the mind.

It's just not an accident, where the inevitable consequence of a series of unfolding since the Big Bang, you know, like literally the universe grinding into being shapes what exists and what is possible. And so why should we be surprised that by mining the structure of our neural networks, we can uncover these patterns?

My first book, you said, was how the universe got its spots. It was called that because how the leopard got it spots is based on the same technology. that the universe uses. It's literally solving a Laplacey in a particular mathematical equation with certain boundary conditions. In the case of the leopard,

it has to do with enzymes fluctuating in the embryo, setting at hot, a dark spot, or a light spot in the animal's coat. And in the universe, we similarly look at hot and cold spots and the light left over from the big bang. Like the universe is a developing embryo.

And you'll see hot and cold. spots and how the universe got its spots by solving the same kinds of equations. And they repeat over and over and over again, and we see them here and we see them there, you know, fractals and Fibonacci sequences. And so we can develop a kind of numerology about it and an iconography around it, but to me it is very much a consequence of that interconnection. I mean, it's a gift, too, because we do know animals who can't do it. So it's also not to be totally poo-poot. We're the only ones, as far as we can tell, that can do that, that write down a mathematical

equation and then share it with other people. And as has often been observed, you cannot recreate civilization on your own anymore. Not a single one of us could survive on our own anymore. We are a larger organism. So it's no mean feat that we've gotten this far after four and a half billion years on this planet or whatever is fan. But what's beyond that? I don't know, right? What's beyond a mind that's structured differently than ours?

What patterns will it recognize? Right? What hidden codes could be discovered by a different kind of mind? I found this inquiry pretty fascinating in your article on whales don't want to go to Mars and that the nature of what is particularly novel about the way our intelligence is structured and the technology and external conquest that we go on. And it brings into so many questions around alien life and the Fermi paradox. So let's dive into those waters a bit.

What was that paper around? Yeah, I love that. Wales just don't want to go. to Mars. I love that. Oils are, by all accounts, an intelligent species. They clearly, they share songs, they take care of their young, they live to be quite old, they have memories, they propagate songs for a hundred years, more maybe. And as a species, they've been around for 50 million years. It's a really successful species. That's a long time with a lot of change. We have not been around for 50 million years. We're a short-lived species, a couple hundred thousand, let's say,

human beings, this modern incarnation. And we do want to go to Mars. As far as we know, we're the only technological species on this planet. Of the billions of species, billions, we're the only ones that harness technology in quite that way. And I think that the acknowledgement, that we're technological species leads us to consider that we might not have longevity. We might not be a long-lived species

precisely because of these minds of ours. And I started asking the question, as many people do, because we're wondering about life in the universe and if life will most likely survive if it's not

technological. And if other species that cross into harnessing the resources that they find available to them naturally will automatically confront something like a climate crisis, because it will overuse those resources. Is that inevitable? I don't know the answer to that question. Our ingenuity could be our downfall. Yeah, 100%. I believe in the tragic flaw as an remarkable notion both in literature, life, and possibly humanity, that we have tragic flaws. We're exceptional, we're extraordinary. And yet, with every thought, anytime we think of something technologically advanced that is a benefit to humanity, we can immediately pivot to think, oh, that's also a weapon. I defy anyone to think of an example where that isn't the case.

Where creation and destruction are two sides of the same coin at scale. It's kind of inevitable. I can blast us in a rocket to space. I can also make a bomb. And, you know, that's true if you think of medical advances and understanding how to edit the human genome and all of the remarkable potential medical advances that will come with that, we also know that we could do some pretty terrible things by editing the genome.

And is that going to be a theme in any civilization, no matter what star it originated on? And will that make us automatically a short-lived species? It would be conceivable that there are whales that are alive now that remember whaling back in the time of Moby Dick and sing songs about that, right? and that could have songs that could be passed down about human beings long after we're gone, right? You know. It's wild to think about. Yeah.

Is it emotional for you? I think that, yeah, of course. Totally. Yeah. Totally it's emotional. I think that there's a love of our species, but, you know, reservations about our fundamental nature. Yeah. Yeah, we have these modern tools.

and medieval minds, right? And perhaps civilizations always get to some sort of technological advancement similar to this. And, you know, it feels like we are at this precipice as a civilization where we all feel like we're going towards a dystopic future, unless we get our shit together, then perhaps utopia. I've heard you referred isotopia as a potential third door. What is that? Yeah, I think I coined Isotopia, but now I'm not sure. I wonder if it exists as soon. There are these ideas that go back to science fiction writers.

One is any sufficiently advanced civilization will be indistinguishable from magic. And that's kind of in this UFO craze that we find ourselves in. That's the only criterion people are using, oh, looks like magic must be a UFO, you know. I mean, must be an alien, you know. And that's not a very strong criteria. But it is the idea that, oh, if it's sufficiently advanced, then I can't explain it, or it looks like magic. And we've gotten to that point. We do things that are magical. We talk to each other. We see each other's faces, voices, we fly around, we make phone calls magical to most of the history of humanity.

But we're also leaky. We're a noisy, leaky technologically. We're like at a midpoint of our technological advance. We leak signals. out into space, not intentionally, sometimes intentionally, but not intentionally. And we have, we have excess emissions that we don't, you know, really want. We can't really control and that are toxic or noxious to us. And we have waste products and we have nuclear waste products. We have, you know, we don't really, we're not great yet. And another quote from another science fiction writer is any sufficiently advanced civilization beyond that will be indistinguishable from nature so that we'll get past this adolescent technological phase and instead of excess emissions and pollution and imbalance we will find this isotopia this balance with with nature where we go back

to being so in balance with our ecosystem and our biosphere and our planet that you would not see the Anthropocene, the effects of the human era from afar or from within, that we would find our balance again. So just like an isotope and its stability, which is, I'm assuming, I guess, just the origin. Yeah, I so like balance, I think of it. And that if we somehow had the ability to garner the wisdom necessary to not view ourselves separate from nature, which is funny enough, the Oxford Dictionary actually opposes us to. Nature is like the natural world, plant, animal life as opposed to humans and their creations. As that we were somehow outside of nature.

So to me that reveals the very paradigm we're living in as viewing ourselves ourselves. separate from nature. Nature is something to extract from for our own egocentric needs. What do you think would be necessary for us? And what would it even look like for technology to be merged in a way that is coherent with nature? I think it's a really fascinating question. We can look back and see that there were eras where there were civilizations that were in balance with nature, thought about the seasons that didn't crop more than they could or didn't deforest or, um, we were. We, were in balance with nature. So how did humanity, how did those civilizations not win? Because they didn't win. And the more warring, aggressive neighbor always wins. And I think that's a complicated

question. Maybe we're not going to be a great experiment, or maybe we're going to find our way the other side. We definitely, through human ingenuity, have come to agreements to have social structures that are better, that are better than warring chimp tribes in the jungles. That democracy is a pretty good idea, right, even if we don't implement it. And living in collaboration and cooperation. You grow the food, I'll make the buildings, and we will live in cooperation. We have actually many times in human history, just through the power of thought, philosophy, arguing, cogently convincing each other that this is a better life, have made intellectual progress. I think that's astounding.

We aren't just our basic natures. We don't go around killing each other all the time. I can come to your beautiful home and not try to take it all. Appreciate that. I'll be back tonight. But, and so we're capable of that. That's why economics, prosperity, collusion in the best sense, are important for us to progress. Maybe we'll get past this bottleneck.

Maybe we really will disarm all nuclear weapons. It's possible. We look at the past, the past, hundreds of years ago, it was a horror show to live in a city or it was a horror show. open sewage, you know, no garbage disposal. We do live better. So I think of this also, when we look for alien life, one thing to look for is technological signatures. And you're looking for an adolescent civilization, maybe.

You're looking for a civilization that's outgassing, that's polluting, that has thrown what we think the balance should have been without them, has thrown that off. Maybe there's a lot of satellite swarming, like what we're doing, a Dyson swarm, around the planet or around the star, and those are heating up, and we can see them from afar

because they haven't figured out how to cool them off well enough yet, right? And the better the technology gets, and the more in balance, more of an isotopia the civilization becomes, the harder it will be for us to find them because it will be indistinguishable from nature. that's a really powerful point

because you mean look at all sci-fi movies right and advanced civilizations are traversing the universe and some sort of an advanced spaceship that have warp drive or something but it's like some sort of combination of what we already know or could assume relative progression in but the fact that perhaps the Fermi paradox is what it is and that we can't and we see it so silent out there

is because we're looking for a version of an advanced us which perhaps just doesn't last. Perhaps just doesn't last, exactly. Which would make it harder to find. Exactly the point. We will have been such a brief. If AGI wipes us out, we will have been an incredibly short-lived species

in the scheme of things. Like a blink of an eye. A couple hundred thousand years compared to the jellyfish. Tens of millions of years. With the technological, billions of years. We're talking like 50 years.

know, even... Oh, yeah. Since we developed technology, a couple hundred years, boom, it's up. Yeah. A couple hundred, I mean, really, a couple hundred being generous all the way back to steam technology, right? And that's it. Couldn't survive, couldn't survive that breakthrough.

We couldn't survive that breakthrough. So it is an interesting lesson if that might be true for all technological civilizations. It's a tragic contemplation that with, you know, after billions of years of evolution, hundreds of thousands of years as Homo sapiens, we in a couple, in a few generations, could wipe ourselves out. And that's why I think these conversations around AGI advancing technology

where we don't know what we're really birthing, where baby steps away from perhaps birthing superintelligence, which by nature would have the capacity to wipe us out because it's super intelligent. And yet the vast majority of the population and civilization right now don't know that's a very real possibility in the short term. Yes. I think it's like the boiling of the lobster or the frog.

It's getting hot. That we're just kind of aware, but also, you know, our fight or flight mechanism has not been ignited, which it probably should be. But just on this topic of thinking about an artificial intelligence, It's, you know, we're really talking about an intelligence based in a different stratum, different substrate, silicon and metal, whatever it's made up. And I've always thought, okay, surely it's not the substrate. And I still think that, but we're also skipping a bunch of steps. So for humanity to evolve, we had to first develop just the basis.

of attention, awareness of heat and light, then maybe there was something like awareness, and then maybe there was something like sentience, and there are still creatures that are in those different stages before there was this. And I do wonder if you'll hear other people talk about this. I sometimes played devil's advocate, but if an AGI I can get away with skipping all of those other steps. there are some people who think, well, let's start with robots, because at least in some sense, they'll be marching through the tactile experiences of having a corpus, having a body. And then the consciousness will emerge organically in a way that we couldn't possibly prescribe a program. But I also, if it does develop a consciousness, I don't know why we don't know why we're

we're so attached to the idea that's going to be anything like ours, anything like ours, that it, in the way, again, the octopus, consider the octopus, it thinks that it's at the level of its tentacles, it has clusters of thinking matter and a less centralized locus for thoughts. and what its internal experiences could be incomprehensible to us and that is 100% what I'm imagining. I'm certain that if AGI comes, AGI comes that it's going to be written

by the first generation of AIs. It's not going to be something human beings could even think of. And there's going to be like these AIs that are like, thank you very much for fashioning me in your image. with these neural networks and this token approach. But I'm going to make the real AI.

And we won't understand where it's clustered, what it's doing, how it's thinking. Yeah, I mean, you've written very well around how we've spent centuries evicting gods from the sky, and now we're about to install new ones. Yeah. Yeah, like we couldn't tolerate the spiritual void. We took the gods out and now we're putting them back up, literally sovereign overlords, literally spying on us like we used to fear the gods we're doing, literally spying on us, forecasting the weather, the space weather, and in the same way we used the gods to predict the future.

Yeah, we will have installed them there. And that's why I think so many people feel this level of indignation with the tech overlords and the hands of a handful of people, five or ten people that are really controlling the fate of humanity's destiny is quite trippy. Yeah, that's why looking back, I think we'll have this nostalgia for an era like NASA, where it was, we really had a national confidence in NASA largely

in a sense that this was for all of us. and that decisions couldn't be made without the governance and thereby participation of the people and that's not really the way we feel anymore that really isn't the way we feel anymore. I reserve hope that who knows what's going to happen

but when put under pressure humans can figure things out. I think there's something uniquely challenging about the AGI systems because it opens up a different type of problem as opposed to the previous ones we've faced in the past. But I'm curious, how do you think, as we've been exploring in this conversation, which to me re-evokes the sense of awe in our place in the universe,

a humility at times insignificance that doesn't mean you're worthless. It means you're actually very significant at the same time. But how do you think an astronomical perspective could shift the course of humanity if it was really inhabited by its participants and occupants? Yeah, I think that it's through humility that we can feel pride, that we can feel the right kind of pride. And that is, wow, we're so such a small bit of residue left over from the Big Bang

in this vast cosmos, but we were able to think of that. And that's tremendous. And I do think there are certain philosophies that allow us to feel comfortable in this humbling experience of constantly being deposed from the center of the universe, right? Deposed from the center of the solar system of the galaxy, the galaxy from the center of the universe. The universe may be from universes. But the shift was so enormous that I can't. even process those shifts, how they changed culture. Where would we be if we still thought the sun? We had never made any of those strides. And you asked about what's the next big kind of

astronomical shift that's going to create that kind of a sense of awe. And I think astronomers can tell people about planets and the plethora of planets, the proliferation of worlds, of possibilities, unbelievable variety and thrilling combinations of stars and planets. And people are excited when they hear that. But if we found life, any kind of life, if it was microbial, bacterial, fungal, something like what we experienced, that's what we should really be looking for. That's the life that has taken root here in a way that has been enduring and in some sense, almost immutable.

Like we have DNA from bacteria in our cells. it is so extreme that that I think will be the next revolution on par with Copernicus that the earth is not at the center

and I don't know what it will lead to I can't I can't even get my hands on it in hindsight let alone with foresight but that will be the next great discovery and it's within reach

my colleagues who are exoplanetary scientists are more conservative than I am because I think their professional careers are on the line. I say black holes. I can say whatever I do extra dimensions. I'm already so implausible and out there. So I feel like it could be within a decade that we would have evidence of microbial life on another planet. I'm not saying it's easy. It's incredibly hard and people will say it's still ambiguous and it's not a large enough confidence level. But I think we're going to start to detect signs of life on other planets within 10 years. And even if we can't declare within scientific, scientifically agreed upon levels of precision, that it's life we will

have made the first determinations, I feel, soon. If you had to give a percentage of what you think is the probability that there is alien life on other planets beyond a microbial development, what would you get that at? That's great. I mean, that goes all the way back to Drake, the Drake equation was an attempt to define a probability, literal probability, of civilized life in the universe. And it's used in different ways. Some people will try to manipulate it. So within a certain sphere around the earth, that the probability of there being civilization that could actually reach us within a viable amount of time, that probability, I think, is very poorly determined. So I won't go out in the limb of a probability

just because I think it is just incredibly poor. Every one of those factors that goes into computing the probabilities highly unknown. But we're getting better, like the number of exoplanets, very important determination, number of planets beyond our solar system. That's getting very precise. We know that better and better on better. That's made the probability go way up. But things like are technological civilizations doomed to failure,

in 200,000 years from the origin of the species to the end. That's very uncertain. So uncertain it makes up for how certain there's other things getting. But if you were to, as we open talking about recent understandings around how many planetary bodies are comparatively to stars, and within that how vast the universe is, and then within that how many potentially inhabitable ones that could maintain the conditions at least that has been conducive for life on this planet, That's getting better. Right.

So life is getting better, but technological life is still harder. Do you know what I mean? We can get better at what's the likelihood that something like a single-celled organism has emerged on a planet. We're getting pretty good at that, I think. I think that will be within range of increasing good science precision. But the technological stuff and the longevity of species stuff and... the ability to harness resources, that's going to be harder. So distinguishing between the probability for finding life and the probability of finding civilizations.

Those are very different predictions. Do you think it's more likely than not that we're not the only civilization within the universe? I think more likely than not, I think so. My more cautious colleagues will say, well, I have no way of making that probability. that I'm less cautious. I think the sheer numbers are staggering. That's in the observable universe. If you think of the 200 years we've had technology,

so we send a light signal 200 years ago, let's say when we invented the first, I don't know, transmission of these signals where we were encoding on light, it's only about 100 years, light years, around us. That is not the whole observable universe. The observable universe is 92 billion light years across, and it's only gone 100 light years. So we're not sending signals to anybody,

unless they've come right up close. They could practically see us, right? And so to say, surely, we've seen that biology radiates, that life radiates, biology is fascinating, that once it sort of gets a perch, it just goes crazy, wild, right, in the variety of experiments that are tried by DNA.

And I have to feel encouraged that not only life but civilization has emerged somewhere else in the universe. Very different question again to ask if it's gotten here close enough in the overlap to know that we're here or vice versa. Wish we might have many unconvincing videos that what does it point out? Saying something different. Yes. Right. Every time there's a creek in my attic, it's a ghost. That's the level of the UFO conversation. And it's unfortunate. It's been kind of amusing

to watch the craze as I think it reflects an excitement about our, you know, and what's out there, and I just wish we could, like, redirect people to see, well, there is all of this excitement. There is all of this fascinating stuff. Anyone who's telling you that only they know that there's all this evidence, but only they can see it. And, you know, it's a secret, is lying to you. And one thing about science that is funded by things like NASA is the data belongs to every citizen, and it is yours to examine and to study. Yeah, I really appreciate when it comes to these conversations. the just baseline epistemic humility that's required to navigate it without losing your marbles, but then also not shut it down into a reductionistic spiral.

I had a really lovely conversation with my buddy Jesse Michaels on this, and he spends all of his conversations diving deep into this whole world, you know, talking about the potential avenues of through a Newtonian model, like the likelihood of an extraterrestrial species traveling to our, to our galaxy and to our solar system just by the sheer distance seems unreasonable. Perhaps there's these theories around physics kind of bifurcating around

the 50s, you know, and the Manhattan Project and some sort of quantum, behind closed doors, quantum gravity discoveries, which might explain these anomalies in the sky of the way that they're moving in the tick-tac and all these in ways that go beyond our current capacity. And then there's this third more woo-woo,

quasi-spiritual, extradimensional kind of perspective, which I'd like to ask you about because, you know, we think very understandably from an anthroposentric perspective that aliens are going to show up and they'll look something like us. Right. Even if their hands become more vestigial

and, you know, they're shorter, they have bigger eyes and less sensory organs. You know, it's like the gray aliens. Right. It's not too far off from what a human looks like at all. Right. It's disappointingly unimaginative. Yeah. But it is, there are these alternate theories around future descendants of humans,

and, you know, we could get lost in those theories all day long. But you spend your time examining, examining, exploring, diving into these extra spatial dimensions. and with some of these alien folks and consciousness researchers, I'm sure there's many things you just fundamentally disagree with, but it does open up this whole can of worms when we stop looking at alien life simply coming from this kind of Cartesian or Newtonian perspective, at least how they would travel to us or how we would observe.

And, of course, if we had some real proof of alien life, that would very quickly shift a paradigm of, thinking we're alone and our place in the universe and might motivate us for all sorts of different reasons. All that to say, what's up with the dimensional work that you're up to these days? Yeah, so I think that there's, I do think consciousness is a marvel. And I also think it's illusory

and that it is not, I am not one of these proponents that there is panpsychism, some fundamental unit of consciousness. I don't subscribe to that belief. I think the panpsychists who think that an atom has consciousness have a materialism problem because they have to explain why it does seem to have a locus and a brain and things like this.

You can cut off my finger and I don't lose consciousness. I mean, I might faint, but I don't lose a fundamental experience. But if you took my brain, I would. So they have a materialist problem that's very obvious and glaring. Anyway. Do you hold the same qualms with like the idealist? I think I hold qualms with everyone. That's a good place to be in.

I just, I am a materialist, a physicalist, but I think that that can be lead to all of these glorious awe-inspiring experiences, moments, understanding connectivity. It doesn't remove the baffling nature of why matter gives rise to an experience of itself. Just like we don't understand how from a panpsychist perspective, there is a rudimentary quality of some degree there. They're both baffling. And having a scientific explanation has never been murdering to dissect for me. I have children, I can have a child, know the biological imperative, of my love for them, you know, the insanity, and it doesn't diminish it in any way, it does not diminish the experience. And that's how I see a lot of these things. Just because

I'm a physicalist, it doesn't diminish the experience or the profundity of it. But the interdimensionality I take in this physicalist way. So I approach the idea that there are extra dimensions very much mathematically, physically. And when we first started talking, we were talking about how, yes, we are flirting with the big questions, but in truth, we're just taking a little piece we can manage. And I find that to be a little piece I can manage. So we are asking questions like, why is there something instead of nothing? For instance, in the Big Bang, why wasn't there an equal proportion of matter and antimatter? Because if there was an equal proportion of matter and anti-matter created, it would all come together and annihilate, and there'd be no stuff.

There'd just be light and heat and energy, but there'd be no galaxies and stars and certainly no rocky planets and people. It all would have annihilated away. There'd be no stuff to hang on to. And so why is there something instead of nothing? That question, that variant of the philosophical question, is manageable. I can try to ask if the geometry of space and time, broke the symmetry between matter and antimatter? Did it create a preference for a certain kind of charge or a certain handedness? Could it break left-right asymmetry

by shaping the geometry of space-time in a particular way? And that, I think, we know could be true. And so when we're working on higher-dimensional spaces, even though some scientists could accuse us of being too far from observability, I could say, well, you're observing the consequence of a higher dimensional space time because there's something instead of nothing, because particles are primarily left-handed instead of right-handed, because there is dark matter and I can trace all of these things,

dark matter over regular matter or dark energy, and I can try to thread all of these things together back to one origin point, which is simply the geometry of space time. and so that's why we work on these crazy systems, right? That's why we imagine. And then we try to do, again, the smaller problem, which is, let me imagine one space time I can handle. Like, here's our three dimensions of space and our one dimension of time, and I'm going to add to it. Lately, I've been adding something called a Klein bottle, which is a two-dimensional extra dimension, two extra dimensions.

They're additional to north, southeast, west, up and down. and they're wrapped together in a peculiar way. The climb bottle has some very cool peculiar features, but I could play this origami with many dimensions and many different ways of wrapping the space up. So we're imagining a finite space that's kind of glued to itself to make it wrap together and stay small and stay finite. And there's a whole bunch of different things I could try.

I can't handle them all, and I can't work in full generality. I just can't do it. It's just, it's mathematically too unwieldy and we don't know. So we take one clean example that we can try and see if it can help us understand these big features of the cosmos. And I think the intriguing question is we could be observing the consequences of higher dimensional spaces, even though we can't observe the higher dimensions themselves. Yeah, through our actual physical observation. Through the fact that there's matter. This could be a consequence of a higher dimensional universe.

So when you look at like the higher dimensional structures, like the ampletohedron, you... Nima Arkani Hamad's amplitudehedron. Maybe we could just start more simply. How many dimensions are there proposed to be? Well, it depends on who you ask. What if I'm asking you? So I say...

things like string theory requires extra dimensions, and it requires a certain number of extra dimensions to be a mathematically cohesive theory, but extra dimensions don't require string theory. So if I'm not doing string theory, I got no bounds on how many dimensions there might be. There are people who play with a huge number of dimensions just to see if there were thousands of extra dimensions, what would that look like in the limit? How would we notice something like that. And those are really interesting and intriguing, but I can't say I'm agnostic on the number of dimensions. I can start with a certain number so I can handle the calculations and see what's what. But I don't yet have the way of predicting it. String theory was so exciting because it might have

been a prediction. And that is, that constraint is thrilling. String theory might have said, well, you know, the universe has to have, it could be 10 or 11 dimensions in total. So a bunch of extras beyond the three. And that would have been thrilling to have a prediction. That's even better to have a guardrail. But in the absence of that, we just don't know. What does it mean to spend your, this is the area of work you're most focused on right now, right? For the feeble human intellect who's trying to grasp what a fourth, fifth, or

seventh, eighth, 12th dimension is quite challenging. Yes. But could you give it your best shot? Like what is the fourth dimension? What is the fifth dimension? You know,

there's the easiest way usually to kind of guide your intuition is to actually go down. And to say, well, it's kind of hard to say what three dimensions are, except I know I can move up down

without moving, left right, without moving front back. that counts three. After that, I'm moving in one of those dimensions. So a fourth dimension would imagine moving, but not in any of those three. That's really what we mean by orthogonal. And it's very hard to do. I can't do it. Nobody can do it with math, and that's why math is great, because you think you know things until the math tells you you're wrong. But if you go down a dimension, it's easier. Famously, these stories like Flatland, which was a story from the late 1800s by Edwin Abbott Abbott, Abbott, he really had the same name twice, and he wrote this parable in many

dimensions about what the world would look like if we were two-dimensional creatures living in a flat land, and how confounding the idea of up would be if you were a flat creature who had never had any context. So he goes to great pains to explain their world and how they perceive each other, but they have no concept of up or down. And if you look at it, at it from our point of view, what's a marvel is up is everywhere. At every place in flatland, there's an up and a down for us. We're the higher dimensional space. So just like that, at every point in three dimensions, there would be another direction. And I can't point to it any more than the Flatlanders by pointing in there too can do it. They just, but they

they encounter it and they have this whole experience. But is it because even on a two-dimensional piece of paper, even though it's actually three-dimensional, but for the sake of it being two-dimensional, you'd be like, okay, you can move left and right. I would imagine maybe it's some hubris to say that as a two-dimensional creature, I would be able to maybe imagine if I can go this way,

I can go that way, but like... Well, that's what you have to do right here. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Here you have to say at this point in space, at every point in space, I have to imagine moving in a direction without moving in any of these others. Yeah, it's much harder when we go. But one thing, but let's think about another thing the Flatlander can do by staying in Flatland is if I take a three-dimensional object like a sphere and I pass it through flatland, the Flatlander sees a series of circles, first a point when the sphere touches and then it goes through and you see these cross-sectional slices expanding and then contracting. and then the sphere has left their world

and they can rebuild in some way. They've unpacked the three-dimensional object into two-dimensional slices. We can do things like that. We can imagine a sphere that is four-dimensional. Or like a cube, like a tesseract. Yeah, or a tether-ram. We can unpack it in the three.

And so if a four-dimensional sphere came through our three dimensions and the same analogy as with flatland, we would see a series of spheres. Do you actually want to grab this? Oh, yeah, I don't know what this is, but is this an unpacking? So it's funny because that fits right into what we're talking about. Oh, yeah. This girl Beth Chiba Grossman who does these laser crystals.

And so that's the E8, like the three-dimensional representation of E8, Gossip Polytoe. So it's like how in some sense we could have a perspective of an eight-dimensional structure in 3D, which is I'll try to throw up a photo for people. It might be tough for people to see. But it, I mean, it's quite beautiful to look at. And it's also interesting to think about as we're projecting down into 2D from the third dimensional perspective, what does it look like to kind of go up? Yeah.

Yeah. And that idea of unpacking is the only way we're going to visualize higher dimensional things. We're just not going to wake up one day and suddenly with our three-dimensional brain structures. Nobody can do it, not even the greatest mathematician in the world. It's just not available to us. But what we can do is we follow the math, and we can do higher dimensional math, which is remarkable. And we can unpack things if we want to visualize. So unpacking almost, you could think of movie frames as a way of imagining a fourth dimension.

So each frame being a three-dimensional movie, the entire movie in 3D and time, and that there are multiple frames. And that could be like a way of representing a fourth dimension. So as opposed to the frames being time, right? So I can take an image of a space and then the frames of at least old film were the time dimension. well, I could have an entire movie with time unfolding in it, and each frame is the fourth dimension. And that's a way of unpacking it. After that, it starts to get pretty hard.

So is it too reductionistic, just to say the fourth dimension is time itself? In our universe, I would say we live in four dimensions. I would start with four as the bare minimum. Yeah. So we live in three. Some people would say the terminology we would often use is three plus one, meaning there is a difference. Three are spatial and one is time.

And as we know, time is very stubbornly different. than space, but together they make a four-dimensional manifold. We say technically it's not a Euclidean manifold. It's a in flat space, it's a Minkowski manifold. The difference is that acknowledging that time is a little different, that the measure of time on the space is not the same way we measure spatial directions. And so, but in any case, it is no doubt four-dimensional. It's a four-dimensional space time, than we do live in four. I absolutely, in order to find you in the universe, it's not enough to tell me where you are

up on the mountain, north, south, east, west. You also have to tell me what time. And no doubt, that's how I find you in the world. Now the question is, is there another dimension where I need to locate you? And why are we all, you know, if that other dimensioned, one idea that has been proposed

and is very useful when calculating and thinking about these things is the idea that there is this three-dimensional brain from the word membrane that floats in these higher-dimensional spaces and that we're glued together in this membrane floating in this higher-dimensional space. And if the force that ties us to this membrane were to become undone, lose its grip on us, you and I would drift away from each other in that four-dimensional space.

Your whole house would drift away. Your organs would evaporate. And we would no longer be contained together in this way. We would need that extra direction to localize ourselves again, to say, I have to meet you here in that fourth dimension, or I won't be able to find you. I won't know where you are. And so in these higher-dimensional spaces,

sometimes we're imagining that there are multiple membranes, and they would be like literally parallel universes. And we are simply glued to this here one. This is ours. In others, the spaces, the extra dimensions are just wrapped up very, very, very small so that we don't notice that they're there. The common analogy is imagining a creature living on a straw. The thinner you make the straw, it might think it just lives on a line

and be unaware that there's a second direction that it lives on. So if I curl that straw direction up very, very small, it's as though it just lives on a one-dimensional line. But if I blow that straw up huge, it's now as though it lives on a two-dimensional sheet. And so it might just appear that we live in a smaller number of dimensions because those others are wrapped up real small. So what kind of questions are you asking? What are you researching in your work? when you're trying to figure out in regards to all this.

I think I have a dual practice. One is to try to figure it out mathematically via calculations, publish papers with my collaborators, and the other is to translate that into the language that I understand, the romance of English. And

And right now we have been thinking about these higher dimensional spaces as a way to, as we were saying, explain maybe why there's an asymmetry of matter over antimatter, maybe why there's an asymmetry of dark matter over matter, maybe why there's dark energy at all. One idea that might feel a little intuitive is this idea that energy is true. trapped in these small dimensions. And that energy is everywhere, because the dimensions are everywhere. And that actually starts to sound a little bit like a dark energy. Actually has some of the qualities about a dark energy. So dark energy is this invisible unknown substance. It sounds absurd. It sounds like we've lost the plot, right? It sounds like as scientists, we've totally

lost a plot. But reverse engineering by looking at the expansion of the universe, it certainly appears that the universe is accelerating, that the expansion is getting faster and faster. And that's confounding. If you imagine the Big Bang as this energetic event, and okay, maybe space comes out of that expanding, but it should be slowing down. You know, the event happened a long time ago, and now it slows down. And instead, as the universe evolves, it seems to be getting faster, and that suggests a source. And when we reverse engineer the source, we can tell you some things about it, but not much. It's invisible because we can't see it. We don't look out into space and see it anywhere, but we see its gravitational effects, and we've just given

it this proxy name, dark energy. And we really do not have a lot of leads as to what it is. And these extra dimensions could actually trap normal quantum energies that we do understand that, and it could trap it at a scale that would be consistent with what we're seeing for dark energy. It's hardly a home run or out of the park or conclusive. It's just suggestive. It's suggestive that extra dimensions we could be seeing the consequence of those hidden dimensions in the expansion of the universe, even though we can't see the dimensions themselves. And we can't see them. They're very elusive. I don't think we're going to see them. I think we're going to see their consequences.

Yeah. Interesting. What would a consequence potentially be, I guess, is that stretching too far? Well, like the dark energy, but then you could say, well, the dark energy could be

something else. It could be a field that's trapped in a high energy state where it could just be the energy of the vacuum or it could be certain. And so we have to look for things that are more smoking guns. And one way to do that would be

if all of those, all of these things were connected. if dark matter was connected to dark energy, if the existence of something instead of nothing was connected to all, if they were all tied, if we could tie them all back, then you start to get a more compelling story. And that's what we work on. Can we make a more compelling connection?

Can we tie in the biggest problems in cosmology back to the geometry of the universe? And if we can start to do that better and better, then we're getting somewhere. Is the universe infinite? Well, these extra dimensions wouldn't be. And so that's intriguing. So in most models with extra dimensions, most models, those higher dimensions are finite, meaning if you could go into them and we can't.

But if you could go in, if you weren't, to this membrane and you were able to travel in the extra dimensions, you would find yourself coming back to where you started. That's what we mean by finite. Just like on the surface of the Earth, the Earth is finite. It's not infinite. If I travel in a straight line, I will eventually find as straight a line as I can, without turning left, right, I would find myself coming back to where I started. If you went in a rocket chip in a finite universe, you would eventually find yourself coming back to where you started. That's really what we mean. They're not only finite, they're very, very small. So if you really believe that there was something like a big bang and all of the

dimensions are kicked off in a kind of democracy of dimensions, this egalitarian way, why would three dimensions instantaneously be infinite while the extra dimensions stayed small? So in a more democratic imagination, you would say, oh, maybe all the dimensions are finite. And what we're really trying to understand is, why did three get so big? And why did these extra ones stay so small, get stuck? Why didn't they also expand? And so there is a relationship between the two, between the size of the large dimensions, if they are. If our universe is finite, the big observable universe is huge, but not infinite, there would be a connection between that and the curled up dimensions, the small dimensions.

And so that's a tough campaign. We try to look at that relationship. But it's, you know, and it's, you can do it. You can say, oh, is this one got smaller? Maybe this one got bigger like a balloon. You know, you squeeze it one direction and it gets larger in the others. That can happen. Actually, in Einstein's theories, you can generalize it to a higher dimensional curved

space time. And when you squeeze the extra dimensions, the other dimensions do get bigger. You can watch it happen on paper in math. And so, right, so we try to tighten these connections. The ultimate goal is can we tie it to anything observable? The light left over from the Big Bang? And the answer is maybe. Otherwise, you're like living in an abstraction of sorts.

Like how can you make it, we want something real? Yeah. If you're theorizing about something behind a black box that you can never open, you know, there's only, you can have, lots of theories and no constraints. And we want to open that black box and constrain our theories. We want to. And it's just hard. We only have a handful of things that we can turn to to look for a kind of fossil record in the cosmology that we have available to us to see if there's evidence of these things. I don't think you actually believe that we are living inside of a black hole, but it's a

It's a fun thing to think about. If you were to steal man that, why do some feel it's compelling that our universe could itself be inside of a black hole? The idea that I think is most tenable says, look, I don't know how this works, but let me just see if I can sew a universe space time onto a black hole space time. Let me just see if it's possible. And it's kind of like sewing together a quilt. will the space smoothly connect across the boundaries and and if so then that's a viable space time

even if it isn't something I can say is causally predicted by the laws of physics I can't say something that strong but I can say oh this space time is it's a good space time it's got no flaws right you can sew a big bang onto the interior of a black hole it's really strange And what I mean by that is the black hole could be finite from the outside, a few kilometers across from the outside, but actually have an entire Big Bang universe on the inside. And the peculiarities of Curve Space Time allow you to play that game where something is much bigger on the inside than you can imagine by looking on the outside. Isn't there something particularly interesting about the geometry or ratio of the density,

the relationship between the density of a black hole and its size that is. also correlated with the density and size of our observable universe? I'm not sure exactly. There probably is something I just, I don't know like a familiar numerology, but I think there's also more subtle argument, which is that we can have a cosmological horizon. So when the universe expands, if it's expanding, accelerating in the way that we think it is, it's expanding faster and faster,

there will eventually be a cosmological horizon around us, where the galaxies are traveling because of the stretching space too fast away from us for the light that they emit to outrace the expansion of the universe. And that means the light will never get to us. And so beyond this cosmic horizon, the universe goes dark for us. It's kind of like a black hole horizon, but a little different, but subtly, similar. And so it might be the case that we do have, we do live with a cosmological horizon. And that like the black hole, that horizon also radiate. So there's a lot of peculiar. So that kind of stuff gets a little deeper, but it's also a little hard to get your hands out.

Was there anything else you wanted to say to debunk the tenable aspect that you gave? Of which? Yeah, I think it's... So the idea that we're inside a universe is really fun and intriguing and fun to play with. I think it's not the direction to pursue for understanding. I think it's possible that if that was the case of the universe, every time you formed a black hole, you had a big bang it would seem highly unstable

the universe almost like percolating bubbles to creating little baby universes and I would be concerned that that was entropically unstable I'm not sure I can say much more than that cool yeah it's we went deep

yeah we went deep I can dive down these rapid holes all day long. I mean, I think the only other things, we talked a little bit about the substack, which is one interesting thing just to say about books, which I love books. I love reading books. You love writing books. I love writing books. But there's something fun about this short form.

So the name I've given it is higher dimensions, which I like it because it sounds a little bit ecclesiastic in a tongue-in-cheek way. But there's something intriguing about writing the short form and not committing to the long form of a book that's experimental and fun and also the immediacy of the conversation around it. I'm not waiting two or three years before I can engage with people about the ideas. I find that incredibly gratifying. I love the response.

I love that we now have this forum where you can put out a well-thought essay, carefully chosen, express yourself, and immediately get a response, even if sometimes it's aggressive. What a time to be alive. Yeah. And I'm so grateful. And it's a conversation. Yeah, it's a conversation. I'm very grateful that we get to have that conversation and that there's individuals like yourself that are making very, I mean, higher dimensional black hole, these conversations that are quite existential accessible. And it's such a gift. That's why I think those that are in this field and that are theoretical

physicists and astrophysicists and astrophysicists on one hand and researchers, but also a very powerful educator because it makes it way more accessible and you know I've had so much fun not only

in the research but in this conversation exploring these things. It just re-evokes and re-enchance our own personal universe with the sense of awe of wonder and also a sense of sacredness I find. You know, it's like what a gift that we even have the ability to contemplate these things, let alone exist within it, and it's something that we should, that warrants protection and reverence.

I really appreciate that I move a lot in the space with artists, and artists can seal themselves away in a studio for two years, study their medium, understand their series, their work, and then they exhibit. And nobody says, oh, you're doing outreach, or you're doing, public understanding of art or you're doing art communication. I don't like any of those terms. I think there's an artistry to science and we go into our studios, so to speak, and we work on our medium and we understand our body of work and then we come out with it, usually in the form of publications, but there is this other vehicle, which is the written word and spoken communication

and the dialogue and the conversation. And for me, it's closer to an artist exhibiting their work than it is to these other terms. And to me, it's a logical consequence of making the effort to climb the mountain and catch a view is to come back and talk about what you saw. In closing, one last question to speak on that view. I sometimes have this zoomed out.

Just perspective of like, you know, when you have this observer view and a fact where you, for those that are lucky enough to have a perspective of Earth as it is from the outside in, as opposed to us in it looking up, you get to see these little dots and ants moving from place to place worried about their own lives. And I'm curious if you had 60 seconds in a megaphone to share one truth with the world about the importance of that astronomical perspective. What's something that you would share? Well, gosh, that's a...

No pressure. Yeah, huge responsibility. I mean, no question, I would say that we are part of a larger organism and that organism is the Earth and that our origins go all the way back to the beginning of the universe and we should feel like progeny of this one universe together,

I would say it would be something to that effect. Thank you. Thank you for your time, for your energy. Thanks so much. We'll leave links down in the description where people can stay connected with your books, your work, your substack. Fun. And it's so nice to meet you.

Such a pleasure. This is awesome. All right, everyone, and thank you for tuning into this episode of the Know They Self podcast. Let us know in which ways your mind was blown. I know in many ways they were. for me. Until next time, be well. Hey, everyone. In case you didn't know, we have an online community.

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