Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - PART TWO: Secrets of the Universe: What Happened Before The Big Bang, Life Across the Galaxy, Surviving a Black Hole & How We’re All Made of Stars | Astrophysicist Janna Levin

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

BLACK HOLES, THE BIG BANG & ALIEN LIFE: Astrophysicist Janna Levin Breaks Down the UniverseEver wondered what existed before the Big Bang? Or why all planets are different, and why Earth is so perfectly suited for life?In this mind-expanding episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, renowned astrophysicist and author of Black Hole Survival Guide, Janna Levin (Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University), takes us on a cosmic journey through the deepest mysteries of the universe, and how they reflect back on what it means to be human.From the terrifying truth about black holes to the surprising science behind moons, planets, and even nuclear weapons, we're answering space questions you didn’t even know you had.Janna Levin breaks down:- Everything You’ve Ever Wondered About the Big Bang: What came before it, myths, how it created space and time- What is Time and how do black holes bend it?- Why planets are round- What moons really are (and the wild origin of our Moon)- How stars give birth to planets- What black holes are, what happens inside, and their role in the fundamentals of physics- Why some stars become black holes and others don’t- How Einstein and Oppenheimer cracked the code on black holes and how we observe them today- What would happen if our Sun became a black hole and could we actually fall into one?- Spooky effects of black holes on time & space (Could they teach us to age slower?)- Why there’s likely a black hole at the center of every galaxy- Why Janna Levin believes we’ll discover alien life within 50 years & what it could look like (it will likely be on moons, not planets!)- Will our tragic reliance on tech destroy us, or save us?- Can we make tech more compatible with nature?- Why advancing tech increases the generational gap- Why Janna doesn’t believe AI will ever become truly conscious- Why the universe is considered left-handed- What would happen if the Sun were knocked out of our system- Nuclear weapons & how they were invented through studying the Sun- Parallels between nature and cosmic phenomena across the universeThis episode of MBB is really all about the growing hunger in society to understand the cosmos, and therefore, ourselves. Don’t miss this mind-blowing journey into the heart of space, time, existence, and our place in it all! Janna Levin’s Substack, Janna Levin's Extra Dimensions: ⁠https://jannalevin.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, I'm Myambiolic. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to part two of our conversation with fascinating astrophysicist, Janet Levin. She's the author of The Black Hole Survival Guide, a professor of physics and astronomy at Columbia University at Barnard College. And part one of our conversation was literally all about how we got here. How do we know that the Big Bang happened? How did planets evolve? Why are planets round?

That was one of my favorite things she talked about. Part two is going to take us into a thorough investigation of black holes, what they are, what they're not. What happens if you get too close to them? And what can black holes teach us about the way that we can harness energy in the universe? We cover Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, and what Einstein was really trying to discover. We'll end this episode with a variety of smaller but incredibly important questions. what does it mean for space and time to collapse? Can we age slower?

Are black holes going to be able to help us do that? What happens if the sun is knocked out of the solar system? And we'll also talk about why the universe is left-handed. Here's part two of our conversation with Jana Levin. Break it down. How does this all lead to black holes? Well, black holes have been full of surprises. Really full of surprises.

This has been a century for black hole discoveries, A bunch of Nobel Prizes were awarded for discoveries around Black Hole. I have a piece coming out soon about Roger Penrose to Roger Penrose, who received the Nobel Prize for his work proving that Black Hole's were an inevitable death state of very massive stars. Before Penrose, people really weren't sure if it was even mathematically feasible to form them, or if it was just an oddity of a specialized, circumstance that nature would never actually attain. And he proved that it was this sort of generic death state for very heavy stars. So take us from Big Bang, right, from the Big Bang and this sort of

explosion and creation, right, at the same time. Where do black holes fit in? Why do we have black holes? What are they? Yeah. Well, Einstein, when he was first presented with this mathematical solution to his theory. They weren't called black holes. That term didn't come for another 50 years. This is, again, like 1916. He thought, oh, yeah, this is a real mathematical solution. Everything crushes to a point,

a region around which this crushed point forms where we're not even like can escape, and we call that a black hole. It goes dark. How did he know to be looking for this, meaning what was the problem that Einstein was trying to solve that eventually led to our understanding of black holes. So Einstein had been struggling to ask the question,

if space and time are relative, what does that mean for the whole universe? And what does that mean for matter and energy that lives in the universe? And this is when he wrote down, arguably the most important set of equations in the history of time that describe how space and time warp, stretch, react to matter and energy.

And he threw it out there After many flawed attempts, he used to joke about how there were many incorrect papers with his name on it. And finally, they write down this consistent description, you tell me the matter and energy in the universe, and I'll tell you what the universe is doing. Even then, he wasn't the first person to say, oh, wait, the universe is expanding. That's what it's doing. He was shocked by that. He thought that was wrong. He fought the Big Bang. That's a whole other story. Same thing with the black hole. Somebody else, this is named Carl Schwarzschild, was a German infantry soldier during World War I.

He was on the Russian front. He had enlisted. He was also an astronomer. And he wrote Einstein this crazy letter. Said something to the effect. It was unreasonably chipper. The war has treated me kindly enough. I've had a moment to wander

through the land of your ideas. This is the kind of letter you write from the Russian front. And the problem he was asking is, what if the matter was all crushed to a point? He didn't say how. He didn't say if it was possible. He just said, imagine. Imagine I took a star, I crushed it to a point. And I just asked, what does the space time do around it?

That's all. And it's probably just a fantasy. It's just the simplest thing he could attempt, believe it or not. To crush all the matter to the point was the simplest mathematical solution he could find. And within a matter of six months of Weinstein publishing the theory, he hands, he hands, and really everything essentially we know about black holes in mathematical form. And it was incredible. It wasn't called a black hole for another five decades.

But Einstein, he thought this was right. He helps him get the paper published. Schwarzschild dies on the Russian front like six months later, you know, never knowing the impact of his ideas. But Einstein thought nature wouldn't make them in reality. Einstein thought, it's just a mathematical oddity. How is nature going to crush matter? to a point. I mean, how's it going to do that? That's silly. It's hard to crush things.

And that was the prevailing thinking for a very long time. And so people started understanding this whole thermonuclear fuel thing. It was really Oppenheimer, who was working on thermonuclear physics, who connected not only working on the Manhattan Project, but connected that stars were doing something similar. And Oppenheimer wrote a very important paper where he predicted that, in fact, stars would make black holes in 1939 when they ran out of thermonuclear fuel. Not that they run out of thermonuclear fuel in 1939, but he wrote the paper in 1939, and he publishes it on the day that the Nazis advanced on Poland. And so it fell into obscurity. We were busy with other things. We were busy with other things, as was he, like the Manhattan

Project. But it was just one of these moments in history where the scientists were thinking about the same thing for very different reasons, stars war. Star Wars. There you go. And so, yeah, that's what brought us really to the point of thinking about black holes as real objects. And then we start to see them. We start to see them as the death state of stars. very, very heavy stars when they run out of thermonuclear fuel, they have a very dramatic end.

They suddenly aren't burning so much, and they can't keep that pressure up. They collapse under their own weight. Penrose did this in a very abstract, very elegant calculation showing that this would happen. And they collapse to the point where the space time is so highly curved that not even light can escape the well. All light that veers too close will fall in to this well created by this collapsing object. And eventually, we call that the event horizon, the region beyond which not even light can escape. And eventually the star itself keeps falling. What happens to it, honestly, we just still don't know.

In the interior of the black hole, we don't know what happens to it. But it leaves behind this inescapable. sort of siphon. We probably have a billion of those in our galaxy. I want to zoom in on one of these components that you're talking about with a black hole, and I want to see if you can help us understand. What does it mean to say what you said about space and time? And, you know, this delightful book, which literally fits in my pocket, does a really, really great job of kind of explaining space and time in very, you know, kind of simple, a simple term so that you can build complexity. What does that mean when we talk about a black hole? Because I think, I don't know what most

people think of is like, oh, nothing can escape. If you get close to it, it's going to suck you up like a vacuum. And we think of that funnel shape, right? But what does it mean? How can you, how can I conceptualize something that is a star, which I'm like, it's twinkling, but I understand there's gas. Right. It's going in, it's creating a new place. Yeah. I mean, in many ways, the black hole is more like a place than it is like an object. So let's go back to the star. The star is also deforming space time. Right now, we are trapped on a, technically you might say geodesic, more naturally we're inclined to say orbit around the sun. And That orbit can be thought of as a groove in space time created by the presence of the sun,

where you can fall freely around the sun and just no engines. We're not firing engines. The Earth is not burning fuel to stay in orbit around the sun. It's for free. We are absolutely no engines, no energy. We're just falling towards the sun. But we're going so fast that we keep clearing the prospect of falling in. Oh, it's keep going.

So think of a groove on a record, right? A piece of dust, a speck of dust on that groove will stay in that groove unless something is blowing it out of its orbit. It's just going to keep going. We could be here for a very, very, very, very long time. And we are literally just falling along a natural curve in space. The curve in space was created by the sun, the presence of the sun. That's the Einsteinian way of thinking about this. Newton's way would be there's a gravitational force.

And they seem similar, but there are different predictions from Einstein's theory that we can see. We can see the differences. Now, as the sun, if the sun were to collapse to a black hole, which it won't. It's not big enough. It'll kill us in other ways. But if the sun were to collapse to a black hole, our orbit would be absolutely fine. So there's this myth about black holes that they suck everything up. We would find us a perfectly smooth orbit around a black hole at a safe distance.

we could orbit forever exactly the same. And so black holes do have circular orbits around them. It's just that you can get much closer to a black hole. So if you look at the sun, it's like a million and a half kilometers across in diameter. If it were a black hole, it would be six kilometers across. To make it dense enough to create the black hole, it has to be really small. So I'm taking the entire mass of the sun and I'm crushing it to the size of a city. Okay.

And once that's happened, now it's only six kilometers across. I can get really close to that thing without burning up. I could have an orbit 30 kilometers outside of black hole, like right on top of that black hole. And I won't be sucked in. It's perfectly safe orbit. I don't feel comfortable. I would not feel comfortable. We're using kilometers.

That's even your metric system. I feel like I'm tightrope walking on a very high building edge. And there's one slip and you're sucked in and that's it. Yeah, you don't. It's not, I mean, you would be apocalyptic cold. But talk about how this applies then to the notion of space time and why it's different when a star is collapsing. So it's not, so in that sense, it's not fundamentally different. It's different by degrees. It's different qualitatively. So the sun has a lot of the kinds of orbits a black hole has. But the more interesting orbits are only when it's so small that you're in so close that it gets more.

more and more conspicuously relativistic, and you start to see much more unusual phenomena that you can't see because the sun's just too diffuse. It's too big, a million and a half kilometers and all that mass spread out. It's just more diffuse, you know? But if you crush it down to six kilometers, the mass of the sun, then everything we're describing,

the orbits are curves in space time. The curves just become more and more dramatic, harder and harder to find ways away. requires, if I want to leave this orbit, I can send a satellite traveling with some fuel, and I can send it past Jupiter. We've done these things. If we were very close to that black hole, that would be really hard. It would be energetically cost a lot to get further and further away.

So it's really just a matter of the degree becomes dramatic. And eventually there's a region where you would have to travel at the speed of light to escape. and that is just not something we think matter can do. So then everything falls in. Right. So then you're in the territory. Have we sent things and they just get sucked up? We have not sent anything near a black hole.

Right. But we see things getting sucked up by a black hole. Okay. So we've seen black holes often come with stellar companions. Stars can come in pairs. One of the stars dies, becomes a black hole, runs out of fuel, becomes a black hole. The other star now has this, okay, this very dense object. And the material, it starts to cannibalize its companion.

We start to see black holes destroying their neighboring stars and things like that. Starts to ruin the neighborhood. Yeah. All stars don't become black holes. No, about 1%. Why? It's about how massive they are. So our sun, when it runs out of fuel, it'll go through some period of collapse and expansion.

But it's not heavy enough. to overcome how hard it is to crush things, right? It's hard to crush things. And how, Valerie's asking, how do we see this? So, it's like a big tellus. So this was, well, this was first observed in x-rays in the 60s and 70s. We saw what looked, they're called x-ray binaries. We saw essentially a black hole that looked like it was tearing apart its neighbor.

And we saw the light in the, it looks like. It looks like bright flashes of light in x-rays coming from a tiny, tiny, tiny region. And so you're deducing how much mass in a small space. So one of the things about Blackhulls we think of these huge monsters. Point of Blackhalls is they're spatially small. Miami-Bi-Lix breakdown is supported by superpower. We all know the feeling of leaving a doctor's office and kind of feeling like we didn't get anything out of the experience that was useful.

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In the same way that we can make descriptions about the Big Bang from the light that we see, right? The collection of matter. In those same ways, we can use those same methods to say something's going on here. There's an enormous mass. There's light coming off of it. And we know that that comes from an expenditure of energy. Right. Very good.

So you say, look, I'm seeing a tremendous amount of energy coming from a very, very small space that seems to have a lot of mass. And that combination is when people began to say, I think these are black holes, because they couldn't find anything else going to have so much mass in such a small space and be responsible for such energy. The light you're seeing is not coming from the black hole. It's coming from the destruction of the neighboring star. And so that is how we see. We see black holes powering jets that are larger than the galaxies in which they reside. These are magnetic jets, literally like ray guns, blasting highly charged particles into these huge jets that can go billions of light years across. So that's a tremendous amount of energy and power originating from a very small source, again.

a black hole. And now we can look at stars from the center of our galaxy and we see them orbiting something that's four and a half million times the mass of the sun. These supermassives are different than dead stars. We don't know where they come from. Four and a half million times the mass of the sun. And it's very small. I mean, solar system sized, but if you think, I mean, if you think about the mass of the sun, you think it's only four and a half million times the mass of the sun. It's only about 17, 18 times the sun across. So you're jamming in that tiny spatial region four and a half million times the mass. And that's when you get a black hole.

So we see this black hole at the center of our Milky Way. It's 26,000 light years away. You can see the stars orbiting it. You're like, well, it's that. There's nothing there. I can't see anything. And you say, oh, it must be a black hole. And now more recently we've literally taken a picture.

Was it look like? It looks like it's called the project was Event Horizon Telescope. It looks very smudgy because it's hard to do. It's only a few pixels. But what we see is we see the ring around the shadow cast by the black hole. And the ring is from debris that was hot that was falling in. And it casts the shadow, essentially, of the black hole. I want to ask you a very emotional question.

For you, as an astrophysicist, what is that like the first time you got to see? the visualization of a black hole. Well, I have a special connection to that particular project. So both as an astrophysicist and just as a person, the principal investigator, the director of that project,

Shep Doloman, was a roommate of mine in graduate school. We went to MIT together. And one of my favorite all-time people. I mean, just a complete nut, incredibly creative person and not a,

not a normal path even in physics. He was sort of, I knew he was going to land something tremendous, but he was an outlier in many ways creatively and imaginative. And he has been talking about this project since then. And had dreamt of it and thought about it and then made it a reality. So when there was a press release and an invitation, you know, I get an invitation from Shep saying,

I think you should come to D.C. I mean, we all knew what it was because there was only one thing they were trying to do. There was a twist. There was a twist in the result, but we knew they were trying to take a picture of the event horizon. It's called the Event Horizon Telescope.

So really, it's just the shadow of the black hole. And there's only two candidates. And the surprise was that it was the other candidate. So the two candidates are our supermassive black hole called Sedge A-Star, because it's in the direction of the constellation and Sagittarius from the point of view of the Earth. Are you as Sagittarius?

And the other was a very big galaxy, a whole other galaxy, M87, that has an enormous black hole. It's much bigger than ours, over six billion times, billion times the mass of the sun. But it's so far away, it's about the same size in the sky. You know what I mean? It was like a similar candidate, M87, or sometimes called M87 Star, which. we indicate black holes with the star moniker. And it was M87. I couldn't believe it.

That really surprised me. But yes, there was a tremendously moving moment. And also just kind of surreal. Just kind of surreal. Really what was most surreal about it since we anticipated the result was feeling like a billion people, you know, in that moment we're looking together

at this nothing. at the center of our galaxy, that we orbit, right? And that might have something to do with why there are habitable regions in the galaxy. You know, I mean, it's just there was that moment, that kind of vertigo. Yes, it was a big day. Philosophically speaking, what does it mean to you or the average person that there's nothingness at the center of our galaxy? Hmm. Philosophically, I mean, I think this idea of the nothingness of black holes is something I think we're still trying to understand.

Objects in the ordinary sense are all slightly imperfect, or if you don't want to say that, they're slightly, they're features, distinguishing features. And that's true, even with the most finely-crows. S. It really always has some fundamental distinction, even if it's at the microscopic level that I can't easily detect. Ordinary objects are unique. Black holes are indistinguishable from each other in a certain very profound way that we only see at the level of subatomic particles. And that has to do with the fact that they're really nothing.

They're not made of, it's, they're atomic content's unimportant. Whether there's atoms in the interior or not is unimportant. They have this flawlessness hidden behind the event horizon. The event horizon cannot tell us anything about the interior. And in its intensity of obfuscating the interior, it makes this flawless veneer. And that means black holes look the same if they have the same mass regardless of what they're made of. Because nothing is nothing. Because nothing is nothing, and they're indistinguishable, and the event horizon won't let us know if there's any distinction.

If they were all made out of encyclopedias or all made out of some weird element or just made out of light, you can't know this. But they start from a star. They start from a star. But what is made in the end is something. But just like nothing made a star, a star can make nothing. That's good. Thank you. And so that's that facet of black holes, which also.

Penrose contributed into understanding it. There are these things called no-hair theorems, like Black Hole's can't have hair that can't have distinguishing features. This idea that they're similar to gigantic fundamental particles, I think, is very profound. I think it says something about Black Hole's role in the fundamental theory of the laws of physics that is not played by anything else at macroscopic scales. So, yeah. There's something you said, and, you know, it's not a coincidence, you know, to have the Manhattan project kind of square in the middle of, you know, for most of us, like, our history.

And, you know, I think that just like we just kind of talked about that nothing can make a star and a star can make nothing, right? Can you sort of explain how, like, creating a nuclear bomb? Right? Is taking some very fundamental and phenomenal things about the natural world and, you know, kind of coterizing them, right, in this very terrifying way. Yeah. Well, it's E equals MC squared.

And that's what a nuclear bomb is probing. So E equals MC squared, the most famous equation of all time, is the idea that there's energy trapped in the nucleus of an atom. But essentially everything has energy. One way you can think of it is it's the energy we all have just moving through time. It's like the energy of our existence in some sense. People didn't, it's a tremendous amount of energy. E equals MC squared energy.

That's why you want to make a nuclear bomb because the energy you can release, let's say you fuse two elements and you make something whose mass is less than the sum of the parts. So some of that E equals MC squared, that mass energy, is what comes out. And it's so huge what's trapped in these nuclear particles that you have the potential of a nuclear weapon. It's also why you have the potential of a star, which is a tremendous amount of energy radiating for billions of years. If you think about how that, what power you're talking about. So we're able to understand these things before we understand them. There's a great line in this play Copenhagen by Michael Frayn,

where he attributes to Niels Bohr, the great quantum physicist, Danish quantum physicist, the line he says to his wife, I don't think anyone's thought of a way to use quantum mechanics to kill somebody. And of course, this. on the cusp of the nuclear weapon, and he does become involved with the Manhattan Project. So at first, it's just a dream about moving through time and the energy trapped in just the existence of matter, moving through time. It's base energy. Basically, anything we can understand, it seems like we try to harness. This is back to our opening conversation about being a technological

species. Well, I mean, also, you know, you can take it one step further. Everything that we try and understand, we harness, and then it can be used against us. Against us. I mean, I think of that, you know, just because I'm kind of a ludate, you know, I think of that even in terms of technology. You know, I thought it was unbelievable, you know, to have a desktop computer when I was in college. Like, it was the first ones and, you know, and then I thought it was amazing to have this phone. in the palm of my hand. Right. And I mean, we haven't changed in terms of our, you know, evolutionary capacity in the last 10 years.

Right. But what we've seen is a complete hijacking, right, based on an adaptation. Right. That has become a compulsion. Yes. I mean, I guess it's another one of those examples we're saying, you know, our mandibles changed. Our upright stance.

Our birth canal became a hazardous proposition. But all of this in reaction to our children. Right. So are we on some strange evolutionary path? We really will, we really will be fundamentally biologically different. It's funny because, and it's a little bit, you know, it's a little bit obtuse, but there was just a piece in the Atlantic about Gen Z and how they date and how they fall in love. And most Gen Zers, Gen Z is what 97 through, it's our kids. I have a couple of those. Yeah. Yeah. I made it. A couple of those. Right. What they said or what, you know, what they kind of revealed in a, you know, series of really

fascinating and tragic interviews is that young people would rather have sex than hold hands. That most people consider of this generation, most people consider that a completely standard gesture, you know, intercourse. But the notion of intimacy, of emotional intimacy, of holding hands, of asking someone, will you be my girlfriend, is so. terrifying and I was thinking, what is that that we've evolved to, right? And I think it's, it's a similar kind of line of questioning. You don't have to answer that. Yeah. Well, I mean, I hate to invoke the AI because those conversations have not progressed. Well, it is one of those

examples we also talked about in the beginning where you're circling around the same drain. And very rarely does somebody say something that gives me pause where I think, oh, I haven't heard that before, you know. But this is a new, even the Zirs will distinguish themselves from the generation that's growing up with this. And this is that whole phenomenon that the technology escalates so quickly that the difference between two people in the 11th century and the 15th century not as huge as 1980 and 20, 25. And we've seen how this movie ends. Yeah.

Like we've literally seen what happens when the machines take over. We all get sucked into a black hole. Yes. I do wonder, you know, the machines for me right now, I really do think these are very interesting, but they're just computing this probabilistic thing. I don't see anything going on there yet. I understand that regardless, though, they're really powerful. I think that's one of the things that chills me is I don't know that consciousness is a requirement of something that can compute very well, right? Consciousness is a requirement of something that doesn't compute very well. I should be asking you, but, you know, my impression has been like because of, you our poor computational power, we have to approximate. That's a child, that's a chair. Right. Right.

That's very hard to teach something with a lot of computational power. Well, that's also art, music, love, creativity. Like, that's great. That's what you get. And that's what you don't get when you, I mean, I don't mean to be this person, but you don't, when people are like, oh, it's thinking, it's like, no, it's not. It's amassing all of the information that exists as zeros and ones. Right.

And it's spitting out a probability. Right. And that's very powerful. Maybe it'll even be a kind of thinking. and maybe one day I'll love my AI and I'll be sympathetic and nostalgic about my AI, but I don't know that it will ever need consciousness in the way that we do,

if it's computational power, Esco keeps getting better and better. What Robin Hanson would say is we don't need consciousness and soon we'll all just be, you know, I can't even articulate it, we'll just be AI interfaces interfacing with each other. And I'm like, I don't think I evolved to this point, or that we evolved to this point, for that to be where,

this story ends? I don't know. Does the AI need the qualia of the experience of yellow? Right. Does it? Why would it need that? Maybe it's just okay. I've measured this energy and that's sufficient. And it has access to all the variations of what yellow could be so it could just pick a point and then have that. And converse about it really effectively and that's a kind of a thinking. Yeah, but it might never have qualia. It doesn't have the experience of when you see this. Right. Yes. Exactly. that image of the black hole. But it will fake it really well to the point where we wouldn't really

understand the difference of it. Is it actually having it or is it just representing to us that it has it because that's what it thinks we want? Right. Why not emulate the reaction as well as it's emulating the language describing the reaction? All of that can be programmed

in this by, you know, the AI can program itself in this black box of these learning algorithms. And that's, and again, of that's fine. What will it matter whether or not it has a conscious experience? And its drive for self-preservation is not a sign of consciousness necessarily. It's a sign of replicating our drive for self-preservation and how we would go about that same task. So it's just an amazing mirroring agent. Yeah, I get very worried when people are like, it's thinking,

it's knowing, it's feeling. No, it's really not. It's a very, it's a really fancy abacus. What has happened recently that black holes are being talked about so much? Is it that there's the picture? What has evolved that it's become part of sort of a common consciousness or awareness now? I would say towards the end of the last century, you know, on the end of the 1900s, people were thinking black holes might start to fade in terms of their scientific importance. And I remember I was very excited about black calls. I was all about black halls in graduate school.

And people are like, what are you doing? You know, come on. We sort of know everything we need to know. Where are we going to go with this classical system? And then a lot of things happen. One of them's purely theoretical and some of that is observational. So, yes, we started to see the stars orbiting the center of our galaxy. People watched them patiently for 16, 17, 20 years and deduced that there was a supermassive black hole. That was a surprise because that doesn't come from dead stars. These are new. We don't know where, they're actually, they're old. They're probably the oldest black holes in the universe, but we don't know 100 percent. know where they came from, probably skipped stars altogether, directly collapsed in very diffused material in the early universe. So these are fascinating. Then there were these other, yeah, just other observations like that, beginning to understand some of these very powerful engines. This was earlier, but these things we see in the farthest reaches we call quasars, most powerful, brightest beacons, most powerful engines in the universe, and they're probably, well,

I think very confidently sourced by black holes. And then these recent things like taking the picture of the black hole. And so the conversation now is an active one of science. How did they form? What effect do they have in the galaxies? What's the role that they're playing? Well, we all end up falling into black holes. So there's all of that astronomy.

Good old astronomy. The rest of the world might not continue to be as interested in it as we are. And then there's just theoretical stuff about black holes being fundamental. That, I think, is a real driver for people who want to understand quantum laws of physics. They want to understand quantum gravity. They want to understand if there truly is a theory of everything. They want to know if string theory is right or wrong. Black holes are your terrain to understand all of that.

Are there more black holes forming or we're just being able to observe them more? Yeah, there are more forming. So there are star forming regions, so there's more stars forming. and some of those will be black holes one day. So it's really about how massive the star formation is. And maybe over time there will be less stars forming and less very, very massive stars forming. But in our galaxy of its hundreds of billions of stars,

about 1% of them are big enough to become black holes. What about other galaxies? Do we know about black holes there? Yeah, probably about the same. This is part of that we're kind of unique, but not so unique. You know, we expect other galaxies to be made of atoms to reflect light, to have the same thermonuclear properties in the cores of stars. And so, yeah, we expect about 1% of those to make black holes.

Are we all going to fall into a black hole? It's possible. So we're in orbit. The picture that we just discussed, one of two pictures that have ever been taken of actual black holes, we are in orbit around that black hole, very slow. and eventually we could fall in. Slowly drifting into it? No.

We're orbiting safely like we are the sun. And the entire solar system is going together. Our whole solar system together orbits the black hole. And when Indromeda crashes through our galaxy, we might have collided before, we'll probably collide more than one time in the future, our black holes will merge eventually. What does that mean when galaxies collide?

Yeah, so largely they pass through each other because there's a lot of empty space between the stars. But what distinguishes our galaxy from another galaxy? It's not like there's a border. Well, that's a good question. It drops off real fast. So it drops off real fast. Meaning the

density of stars. Oh. And so our galaxy looks like this spiral Milky Way. Yeah, yeah. Then there's a lot of nothing between us and Andromeda. Pretty empty. Real nothingness out there. How far? That's a couple million light years. And 55 million light years to M87, which I mentioned.

And these are close. These are our close neighbors. These are the ones that are behaving oddly because we're all so close together. So what would that be like when galaxies collide? So billions of light years apart, our other galaxies, and we're only going to collide with our local friends in our Virgo cluster. Do planets smash into each other?

Not likely, terribly unlikely, because there's just so much empty space. That doesn't feel definitive enough. Well, I guess it's possible. It's not zero possibility. I mean, I'm going to run the stats on that. If you think if you just told me there's so many stars and there's so many planets and there's so many moons, you know, a lot of space.

There's a lot of space between every star. Right. And that's why they look like tiny dots and not a wall of brightness. They look like mostly darkness with a little twinkle. But statistically speaking, the more there are, the higher the probability that something will, you know.

And they're still really sparse. That's amazing. Yeah, a lot, really a lot of empty space. But there's a lot of gas and dust. And that stuff will collide and that'll light up. But mostly the stars will miss each other very likely. And if you look at simulations... Like ships passing in the night?

Yes. Uh-huh, really. And some of the stars might get thrown out of the galaxies when this happens just from gravitational, you know, whiplash. The sun gets thrown out. So the simulations show our solar system staying together pretty comfortably. Like we stay with our sun. And we get kicked around into a different orbit around the center.

Oh, wait, a catastrophic question. What if the moon... Sorry. What if the sun gets knocked out? out of its orbit. Does we die? We are going to be knocked out of our orbit around the black hole. As long as we stay in orbit around the sun, wherever it goes, as long as we go, we're okay.

Okay, so because we're tethered as in a sense. If we part ways, it is all over. But we will. We need the sun. We will ice over. The title of this episode is, we need the sun. Yeah. Understood, but we could, our orbit around the black hole could change.

That's fine. As long as we stay with the sun. And will that have any effect on us? I mean, I'm sure there are unforeseen consequences, but more or less, as long as we're within the sun's magnetic solar influence, we're probably largely okay. And if we were to fall into the black hole, we'd all go together with this. It's not like it's going to pluck us separately. I'm sending you first.

Like a piece of lint from the, you know, solar neighborhood. But we're very stable. It's this thing I told you, black holes aren't vacuuming things up at 12. 26,000 light years away, you're fine. There are things in orbit around the black hole. These stars we talked about, they're fine. He likes things to be worried around the black hole. What should he be worried about?

What happens when you do get into black hole? Explain this how time changes. Yeah. So one of the most beautiful results that goes all the way back to when Churchill first found this mathematical description was this idea that time appears to slow as you approach the event horizon. And let me clarify what that really means. If you and an astronaut are in a happy space station together and you are in some safe orbit outside the black hole and you're monitoring it, fine. One of you jumps in. As you approach

the black hole, you've beautifully manufactured NASA watches and they're perfectly synced. One of you falls into the black hole. As you approach the black hole, your watch will appear to run slowly, according to the person who's safely back on the space station. But so will your breath slow down. So will your biological functions? From your point of view, your clock is just fine. Okay? Everything synced, just fine. It's the person back in the space station seems to be going really fast and seems to be aging really quickly. And their hair is turning gray. And their clock is whizzing and music is playing really fast. And all of these things are happening as you approach the event horizon. Now, as you get to the event horizon, your time has slowed as much as it

possibly can to the person who's now aged 100 years in the time you've aged, let's say, a minute, however long it's taken you to do this traumatic fall, thinks you've frozen. At one point, they were called frozen stars, because I didn't understand what happens when you cross this boundary. And it seems to them that you actually never quite make it across. Now, eventually your mass will deform the black hole enough, and maybe after a million years, they'll be like, oh, yeah, they're gone. But from your point of view, the whole thing took a minute. That's like in contact when Jody Foster has like this entire experience and she sees her dad and she meets God and blah, blah, and she comes back and they literally said you disappeared for 10 seconds. It's like every near-death

experience we've heard. Yeah, and well, Interstellar also represents this by my good friend, Kip Thorne, who's also nearby. Kip won the Nobel Prize for, we didn't even mention that detection, the detection of two collision of black holes. And he wrote the treatment for interstellar. So that interstellar, he really thought about the physics of that. It was his idea to make this crazy movie.

So to the person going across them, that's the interesting person. And that was not understood for a very long time that what happens to them, Are they really frozen there? And relativity suggests that they're seeing nothing unusual. So how are they hanging out there? And actually, as far as they're concerned, we call it no drama.

They had an experience as unspectacular as stepping into the shadow of a tree. And they crossed right over. And they didn't know. Nothing terrible happened to them. If the black hole is big enough, they actually don't get torn apart, which might seem counterintuitive. They can drop across just like a pebble. And then it unfolds. And then they're in trouble.

They might start to notice things are looking weird. But black holes can be bright on the inside, even if they're dark on the outside, because light can fall in behind them. Nothing's stopping the light from coming in. Just can't get out. So they can see the space station and going through and falling apart in millions of years passing, and they can see the galaxy evolving, all these things happening very quickly. As they approach the singularity in there, our description breaks down terribly.

Nobody really knows what happens in there, but survival is absolutely not. You know, as I say, the Black Hole Survival Guide title is, you know, spoiler alert, it doesn't end well. Yeah. It does not end well. If I put on just my magical thinking hat for a moment, if we can understand how to create a nuclear bomb by understanding stars, can we understand how to slow aging by understanding some of the impacts of black holes? Well, here's the thing. We are aging more slowly on the Earth. For the same reason, it's just not as dramatic. It's this, again, it's more extreme and kind with black holes. But it is the case that the Earth's curvature causes time to change as well. And we are aging more slowly on the surface of the Earth than we would if we were very far from the Earth and away from all other planets. So that is a measurable effect. And there are other relativistic effects that have to be corrected for with all of our GPS units for Lyft or Uber to pick me up on the correct corner, right? This is measurable and factual.

It's not just something that's so theoretical. The reason why it doesn't do you any good in terms of longevity is because you're synced with the clock. You're not getting any more out of it. A minute on your watch is a minute for your experience. There's nothing special about your watch in this. Literally, your time is changed relative to someone else's time. All of it has changed. So you don't get more out of life.

I'm just imagining that you could harness some black hole energy into a chamber that I sleep in. Right. But it's not the energy. It's the experience of it. Yeah, your experience of it is the same. Even if somebody felt 30 years pass for the one night you. slept well, you'd still have that one night's sleep, right? No more. You didn't have, you weren't able to get up, live 30 years of life. You got no more out of it than that eight

hours in your experience. And so, you know, in that sense, but what I could do is I could freeze you. You have a terrible disease and you want to wait until there's a cure. There's a cure. And so I can't, I don't yet know how to travel to my future, but I know how to travel to your future or get you to travel to civilization's future. So I could park you near a black hole. Your time will slow down. Two hundred years later, we have a cure. We bring you back. New business idea. Human parking lots. Elon Musk is barking up the wrong tree. Yeah. Where can people find out more about you and all of the incredible writing you do? I really appreciate that. This substack venue is new for me. I really, um, I, I,

don't think of myself as short form turning around pieces. Substack is aiming a little bit more for long form. I guess we're meeting in the middle. But this idea of thinking about things and just communicating has been really fun. It's been an unusual experience. It's allowed me. After our conversation, maybe I'll go back and think of something that was sparked literally by us talking.

And whereas that used to kind of disappear into the void, I'm finding an opportunity to collect those reflections. That's great. So that's really been fun. the last piece we were just talking about is about how we radiate as hot bodies. And I wanted to bring you my hat, which I made with Planx Law on it, to match your nerdy, wonderful brain hat that I saw when I walked in. So I think that's really a place.

And also, I do a lot of Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, which is an art cultural center in New York, and arts and science place where science is a pillar in a cultural institution. And that's been a really long-term project in Labor of Love. And we do a lot of events, talk to Nobel laureates, talk to scientists of all varieties. And we have people in the hundreds packing a sort of cool place in Brooklyn. It's kind of what you said at the beginning of the conversation because they want access to this level of understanding. And they want it for emotional reasons, poetic reasons, not because they're going to graduate school. They want it to make sense of their lives.

Yeah. They're not building the human parking lot startup yet. Yeah, right. We'll be starting that after today's talk. We also started at Substack and found that it's a really cool place to expand on a lot of ideas. So we recommend people check yours out and tag us if you come up with any big ideas from this conversation. As we depart, anything that has really surprised you or sort of made you wonder in the last. last little while that you want to share with us as we say goodbye?

Yeah, I've been working with my scientific collaborators, Brian Green, Massimo Parati, Daniel Cabot. I mean, I have the pleasure of really working with geniuses. I mean, honestly, we've been thinking about a universe with extra dimensions, which many people have thought about since Einstein. If you're going to talk about space and time, Y3, space, why one time? And I've been astounded at looking at some of these, we call them topological spaces, some of these very peculiar geometries in these higher dimensional space and how it could, even if there are these tiny curled up origami dimensions that we can't probe, they're on the quantum scale, we can't point to them, we don't occupy them, they could leave an imprint in the Big Bang, they could leave an imprint in the part. that we see that are allowed in the spectrum of possibilities.

They could have something to do with primordial quantum black holes. I think that has been very fascinating, chilling. You have this moment of feeling like you have a glimpse of something. Maybe nobody else has ever seen. And then it's very fleeting and fugitive and hard to get your hands around. Are there any updates on the handedness of the universe? Well, exactly part of this project was about the handedness of the universe. What does it mean to say that the universe tends to be left-handed?

So literally, if you have a left-handed glove, you know it does not fit you properly on the right-hand. And in particle physics, that refers to a subtle quantum property called spin. Things can spin in a left-handed way and that cannot be turned into a right-handed spin. But it's just like saying a left-handed glove and a right-handed glove. For reasons we don't understand, most particles interact left-handed. predominantly, especially one interaction called the weak interactions. We don't know why. It's left-handed. It's chiral, is how we say it. What's wrong with the right-handed guy? Why doesn't it feel the same interaction?

And we think dark matter could be right-handed, and that's why it's evading us. There's, you know, there's so, so part of these extra dimensions is that I can, I can send things in these strange topological spaces left-handed and they can come back right-handed. It was a game we were trying to play. It isn't the most interesting thing that we ended up discovering about it. But yeah, these are, every theoretical physicist

interested in particle physics wonders about the chirality of the universe. It's very hard to talk to you for only a couple hours. I think you, I think. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks so much for having me. So much fun to get to talk you. Yeah, really fun. I wish I had a cool t-shirt and I wish I had my hat. Until next time. Thanks so much for having me.

A lot of these interviews, people will say stuff and then they're in the flow and I'm like trying to make notes and write down things to circle back on. But she was like, no, our son isn't going to turn into a black hole. It's going to destroy us in other ways. Wait, what? We didn't talk about like, she didn't explain that. Is that going to happen soon? Should I be worried? How concerned am I supposed to be? Is this the conclusion that we're doing? Yes. Oh, we're in it? Oh, we started? We got to keep that. I didn't know we started. It's a little bit casual.

Like, the only way that we would all incinerate is if when the galaxies collide, it knocks the sun out of orbit and we go with it. And then we're sucked into a black hole, but it's not very probable that will happen. You know what, Jana? That's not enough assurance. While there is a lot of empty space, I'm sure. couple stars are just going to bump into each other and explode. I mean, I... I mean, by, I am sure, I have no calculations.

It's the end of never-ending story. Do you remember what happens? Anyone out there? No. Things start colliding. They're blowing apart because he doesn't name the princess. And all the things are colliding. That's what I pictured.

It's a deep cut I don't have a reference for. Oh, goodness gracious. But like, also, like, our closest neighbors are slow. slowly encroaching on us and but our far away neighbors are like too far. It's just a lot to process. I was mostly thinking, how does you keep all those numbers in her head? And then I thought about like all the things I know about the brain,

all the different structures and all the different tracks. Like I guess you know what you know, but I'm like... I mean, if we were to ask you about song lyrics, you would just have an endless supply of information. We had someone on the other day who was like Locus Aurelius and I'm like, I know where the Locus Cyrillus is. I've dissected that.

I know where is it? Well, it's the back here. It's on this thing. And it's blue. This is like cerulean blue. Anyway, but I was like, just the, I don't think that we truly really can understand what she's talking about. Just because of the sheer numbers. Like, six billion light years away. Eight million kilometers of, I talk, I can't. I can't. This is really, it's, I don't know if I can even explain how sweet this book is. And also the, the, the, there's this beautiful art. And so it shows, here's what you were asking about, how time changes when you're traveling. It's just all these beautiful illustrations of all of these really enormous concepts. It's really beautiful. So I recommend the Black Hole Survival Guide. Also, it's not bigger than like seven inches, eight inches.

No, literally, it's like the size of, well, it's the size of what I wish my cell phone was. Hello. Make sure to follow us on Substack and check out Jenna Levin's Substack page. as well from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have we'll see you next time it's my and be all next break down she's gonna break it down for you she's got a neuroscience phdd or two one fiction one and now she's gonna break down so