Science Friday - SciFri Special Edition: A Time Traveler Cocktail Party. Aug 28, 2018.

Episode Date: August 28, 2018

In 2009, Stephen Hawking decided to throw a party for time travelers, famously sending the invitations after the date of the party. For the 30th anniversary of Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, the SciFri Book Club decided to throw our own party—a Time Traveler Cocktail Party, live at Caveat in New York City! We had hands-on physics demonstrations, built 2018 time capsules, and heard conversations about black holes, gravity and the fabric of our universe with Ryan Mandelbaum (Gizmodo), Rae Paoletta, and physicist Jillian Bellovary (American Museum of Natural History). We also revealed the winning art commissioned as part of a contest challenging artists all over the world to interpret Stephen Hawking’s vivid depictions of the universe. We closed the evening with a poem written by Marie Howe and read by renowned theoretical cosmologist Janna Levin. “Singularity,” by Marie Howe, was originally composed for and performed at The Universe in Verse, a celebration of science through poetry hosted by Janna Levin, and curated by Maria Popova at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hey there, Ira here. Last week, we marked the end of our Science Friday book club reading of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. And to celebrate, we held a time traveler cocktail party at caveat in New York City. We had hands-on physics demos, made time capsules, learned about the quest to find intermediate mass black holes, and of course, there were themed drinks. So we thought we'd share a selection of highlights from the night so you could enjoy it too. And one quick warning, this was an after-hours cocktail party, so the language isn't quite as squeaky clean as your average science Friday. Here's events manager Rachel Baton, picking things up. Hello, thank you all so much for being here and for joining me across the expanse of space and time.

I want to practice something with you all. We're going to do this a couple times throughout the evening. When I say what time is it, I want you to yell, space time, okay? So what time is it? Space time! Oh, that feels good. All right. So Ryan Mendelbaum is a space writer for Gizmodo

where they cover anything smaller than a virus and anything larger than a planet. Ryan first started to be able to time in high school and they're super into birds, which I think is very cool. They'll be in conversation with Jillian Bellowary, who has PhD in astronomy at the University of Washington and is currently an assistant professor

at Queensboro Community College and a research scientist at the American Museum of National History, where she studies the formation and evolution of massive black holes using cosmological hydrodynamic simulations. We know what that means. So yeah, they're both pretty smart. Please welcome Ryan and Gillian. Hi. Hi, hey everybody. So I guess the first thing you have to answer is how black holes bend light, because my dad asked that. Black holes bend light because they actually warp the space and time around them. And so space is actually curved around a black hole,

and light will travel in a straight line, but since space is curved, that straight line is now a curved line. And so the light just has to follow space. So why can't we see a black hole then? Is that why? Well, we can't see a black hole because light can never escape. Light can never come out of it. But we can see things that are near black hole.

black holes, which is helpful. So if there are stars that are orbiting black holes, or if there's gas that's falling into a black hole, it will glow really brightly, then we can see what's going on and we can be like, hey, there's x-rays coming out of nothing. Maybe there's a black hole there, because why else would there be x-rays coming out of nothing? So you've spent more time thinking about black holes than anyone. So can you tell me, like, well, it's certainly more than me. I think about, like, a lot of stuff. But I guess I want know what is like, can you tell me more about what are the biggest questions that people, like what are you asking about black holes right now? Like, what are you wondering? Sure. So I want

to know how these supermassive black holes form. So Ray kind of alluded to this. Like, we don't really know how they form. We know that the small black holes form when massive stars die and blow up. But the supermassive ones, like the one in the center of our Milky Way, that's like a million times the mass of the sun, we don't know how it got made, like at all. We know that you can't build a million solar mass black hole with one million small black holes. It doesn't work for lots of reasons. And we know that these things form really early in the universe. And so you have all of this like mass that needs to get into a really small space in a really short amount of time. And we don't know how to do that like at all. Can you like I can't even

visualize how big this is. Like so is it so what I know that's Sajai star the one at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A-star, has, it's like four million times the mass of the sun. Can you give us, or any other ways we can visualize just how, like, hefty and small these things are? Well, the size of that black hole, if it were in our solar system, would extend to about where, like, the Earth's radius, or the Earth's, like, orbit is. But there's four million suns in that space, which is a lot. And, like, Stephen Hawking said, that, like, one, the size of a, like, the mass of a mountain

would be like the size of a nucleus of an atom, which is not something we can even actually really, like you guys are all like, but really you're like, I don't know what that. What? Which is the appropriate response, so don't feel bad. Yeah, I mean, like, you can't, like, what if you, like, turned a person into a black hole?

Like, what if, like, the president turned into a black hole? Oh, shucks. Something I teach in my classes, actually, is if you could turn a person into a black hole, they could, like, power the, like, the entire United States energy budget for like many, many years. So it would be very efficient use of energy. Yeah.

So I know that there are, I mean, we've spoken about these stellar mass black holes, right, that stars that collapse. We've spoken about these mysterious, like gigantic supermassive black holes. But, I mean, is there anything like what's, that's it? What's going on in the middle? Ah, yeah. So you may wonder, like, is there anything in between, like small and large? Because there's like a huge gap in between.

And yes, we think black holes might come in medium, possibly. So one of my specialties is to try and figure out if there are intermediate mass black holes, which is what we call anything that's like more than a hundred times the mass of the sun and less than a million times the mass of the sun, which is still a really big, huge range. And there's no definitive evidence or proof for these because it's really hard to measure the mass of a black hole. You can't just like weigh it. And so, but there's some evidence for some and these. these cosmological hydrodynamic simulations that were mentioned earlier that I work on

predict that they're actually a bunch of them in small galaxies and floating around in our own Milky Way. Ooh. Well, so everybody's like making fun of these cosmic hydrodynamic simulations, but like, what are they? Basically, I take over a thousand computers at NASA for about six to nine months, and basically, you just put in all of the physics equations. that we know about, like gravity, hydrodynamics, so like gas, heating and cooling, energy.

We put in some stars, we put in some dark matter. We don't know what that is, but we make it up and it's fine. It's fine. And then I study what happens in the black holes. And so I basically make a little cube of fake universe and compare it to the real universe. And I'm like, oh, hey, I've got a bunch of black holes around. Maybe the real universe also has these black holes. And then I tell my friends with telescopes to go look for them. So we can't see a black hole, okay, so we've got to look at the radio waves. Like, is there anybody who's actually trying to, like, take a picture of a black hole? Sure.

Sure. There's a project called the Event Horizon Telescope, which is actually an array of telescopes that covers the entire planet, like from Australia to South America to North America to Europe to South Africa, I believe, like all the continents pretty much. And they're trying to actually take a picture of the Sagittarius A-Star black hole. in the microwave wavelength range. So would that just look like a black circle? The simulations predict that there might actually be a weird funky shape because there's gas around the black hole that is being accreted and because of the strong gravitational effects

and the bending of space and time, it might actually be like this weird, disky, funky thing. So, like, how similar to the black hole from Interstellar What do you think a black hole is? Interstellar is pretty good in terms of the time dilation stuff. Like the people who go to the gargantua don't age and they come back to Earth and like the daughter is like super old. Like that's real.

But like once they go like inside the black hole and there's like libraries inside, I got to draw the line. There's no evidence for that. There's no evidence for not that. But there's no evidence for that. So you heard it here, folks. There's libraries inside of black holes. I mean, maybe there's like candy cane, unicorn, Disneyland in black holes. But we would never know.

Why not? That'd be lovely. So, I mean, I think that they're, like, intriguing. Like, this is the craziest thing that we, if humans have managed to come up with. I mean, so why do you like studying them? because they're so fucking weird. They're just so weird. You know, first learned about them,

and I was just like, what is this ridiculous thing? And then I was like, could I have a job thinking about this thing? Like, well, somebody pay me to do this? And they do. They do. Somebody pays me to think about this. They're just so cool. And the answers are never, like, we can never find them all.

There's always more questions, which is why science is great and why I will have job security forever, because we will never know all the answers. So I will just keep asking more questions. Well, I mean, when you go to work and you have to think about this stuff, I mean, how do you wrap your head around just some scientists cover like 11 dimensions and you're like warping gravity?

Like, I mean, how do you even just go to work in the morning and think about this stuff? I mean, sometimes you just got to stop thinking about it. But no, there's a lot of good analogies. Like there's some warped space time over there the corner that Christy was hanging out with before where there's a it's an analogy for space time where if you have a piece of fabric and you stick a ball in it and it droops and that's warping of space time except that space is actually in three dimensions is two but

it's a good analogy and so you kind of go with that and then I just like to use my imagination and you know add another dimension and it's sort of hard to think about that but then I just pretend and there's some math that goes with it too and so I know of some of that math stuff and and that kind of helps to it to an extent And otherwise, I just go with it, and then at some point, you just have to sort of put it away and be like, all right, I'm just going to write some code now. That's really mostly what I do anyway. I guess I'm just re-associating here, but I mean, we live on Earth, so there's gravity on that, I assume. Indeed.

I mean, surely there's like some warping of space-time effects that we'd be able to experience here, right? I mean, isn't like Einstein's theory of general relativity, like, even measurable here on our own planet? It's true. GPS satellites wouldn't work if we didn't take into effect general relativistic effects because of the warping of space time. And so, and we can also measure the effect of the sun's gravity on the orbit of Mercury. So, so we can definitely observe it here. Awesome. And so I know a little something about you and it's that you have another name. What is your, your professional name, I might say it is? My other name in my other profession is Big Bangor, which I am known as when I skate for the Bronx Gridlock with Gotham Girls Roller Derby. So, I mean, roller derby is like the most physics thing that exists, right?

Like, you must be skating just like, I'm a black hole, like, I'm going to... Pretty much. No, when I skate, I'm constantly thinking about, like, friction, like, how my wheels are acting on the floor. I'm thinking about angular momentum, because I'm going to... I'm going around turns. Collisions when I smash into people. There's tons of physics in roller derby. And part of the reason I'm so good at roller derby

is because I'm good of physics. So I don't know how much time we have left, but I was wondering, like, we're here talking about books. I read a brief history of time. It was awesome. So I mean, what are some books that you as a scientist would recommend, and they don't have to be nonfiction, I mean, anything?

The kind of books I love to read the most, are like sci-fi and fantasy books where humanity is like put in a position where they have to like be like human and evolve to some difficult situation. Like Dawn by Octavia Butler is an example where like some aliens come and they're like, we're assimilating you and they wake up one lady named Lilith and be like, you are our ambassador and she's like, oh shit, what do I do? And And then there's a whole series that she, like, that evolves over time. And also, I really recommend the Broken Earth trilogy

by NK.K. Jemison. It is mind-blowing. And it's like both fantasy and sci-fi, but it's just like, what are humans doing? And what have we become? And what, how do we treat people? And but it's also like, rocks are alive. It's so cool.

It's so cool. Read it. Also, she just won the Hugo Award the third time in a row. Three books, three Hugo. Hugo's, she's amazing. Read that book. Read those books. And then I guess the last question is just talking

about Stephen Hawking, you know, how do you feel like you're embodying his legacy or whatever? You're like, I mean, like, he's like some dude and now we're like, no way. Yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't, I don't, I didn't know him. But he's definitely, you know, really inspiring and someone to, to look back at and be like, wow, look at all these things he thought about and if I can just do like one percent of that I will be pretty good about myself and what else do you want people know about is that it anything else it's signing off words I just you should come to our game on Saturday all right huge huge huge huge round of applause for Ryan Mendelbaum and

big is it Big Bangor Big Benger is that the oh and big and Jillian Bella Barry should we take questions from the audience oh I don't know that we have we maybe like one question yeah do you have one question question from the audience? Oh, right here. Catch. Jay-K. Sorry, caveat, I swear I won't do that to your equipment. Cool. So, can you explain a little bit about how nothing is lost in a black hole and that perhaps our universe could be like a hologram? Have you heard that? I'm sure that you But like I saw a snippet about that and it blew my mind and sort of sounded like anything that goes into a black hole, all of its ingredients are sort of scattered about in some sort of almost code-like system over the surface of the black hole that you could sort of see what everything that ever went in it and went. I've also heard this.

I've also heard this. So this is a theory. There are some theories that information can never be lost. And so like if an electron falls into a black hole, it has some speed and it has some spin and it has whatever else. And that if and that and it maintains that. And so in theory, if you like tossed a book into a black hole and then over the next 10 to the 100 years or so, measured the hawking radiation.

that came from the black hole, you would be able to reconstruct the book. So it's the Hawking Radiation? I think, well, if it's altogether in the black hole, we can't go and find it because it's in the black hole, and if we go to find it, we die. So, but yes, so in theory, according to some theories, I don't think this is everyone's theory. And again, this is the sort of thing that I push it away. It's not. You have to know a library.

That's how you get the library is not. Yeah, you have to throw a library into the black hole and then there's a library in the black hole. Maybe. Yeah, so based on this premise that information can never be lost, which it's untrue, or it's unclear if that's true. So I don't know if that's the case. But also, we, it's impossible as of now to detect Hawking radiation. and so we won't know for a while. All right. Thank you so much.

Big rock applause for Ryan Mendelbaum and Jillian Melliver. Go see Roller Dirty. It's really fun and amazing. And it is now time for our final segment of the night, which is something I am so profoundly excited for. I'm kind of losing my mind. So some of you may have heard of her. But Jan 11 is the director of scientists,

share of the science studios at Pioneer Works and Claire Tau Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. She has contributed to an understanding of black holes, the cosmology of extra dimensions, and gravitational waves in the shape of space time. She was also recently named a Guggenheim fellow, and her books include how the universe got its spots and black hole blues and other songs from outer space, which tells the story of the discovery of the century. Some of you might remember this. It was the sound of spacetime ringing from the clemen of two black holes over a billion years ago. You guys might remember that discovery.

It was pretty cool. So basically, Jana is a complete and total black hole badass. And the piece Jana is about to read was originally composed for and performed at the universe and verse, a celebration of science through poetry, which is hosted by Jana and curated by Maria Popova at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. The poem you're about to hear is by Marie Howe. I like you all to please welcome Janelle Levin. Don't make a big thing about lowering the mic.

So it occurs to me maybe to mention that I knew Stephen. I was in Stevens group in Cambridge for many years. And in the hallways, we used to joke about whose toes he ran over with his wheelchair when he was feeling impish. I think it was none of our toes, but we all pretended anyway. Just since we're talking about him tonight, I should say that knowing him, I don't think that his prodigious mind, his unbelievable accomplishments, can be strongly enough contrasted against those obstacles he faced.

He really was just an unbelievable person. He was also incredibly arrogant and belligerent and difficult. Lenny Susskin said of his good friend Stephen Hawking, the man was arrogant, impossible, but then again, so am I. So this was my upbringing in theoretical physics. just to say he is very much missed. And just to point out that he really did create a paradox, especially in the 70s, over black holes that no one has yet been able to resolve.

Everyone tries to resolve. Even Hawking tries to concede occasionally that there was this resolution, and you brought it up earlier with the hawking radiation and the evaporation of the black hole, but there are two contrasting competing things that are going on in nature, and no one can figure it out, and the black hole is the terrain and the only terrain on which we're going to figure it out. And Hawking is the one who gave us this gift of revealing that to us, that that was the frontier. That is the frontier.

If we want to understand quantum gravity, the ultimate theory of everything, the final chapter is a brief history of time. We have to understand the black hole. And we don't, even since he first proposed us in the 70s, a couple of years after his diagnosis was supposed to be completely fatal. So on that note, he was a loved man. He was a loved man. He was a difficult but loved man. So this is a poem by Marie Howe, and I'm honored that Maria Popova and Marie Howe asked me to read this poem, which was written for the universe and verse about Stephen Hawking, or at least inspired after Stephen Hawking.

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity? We once were. So compact, nobody needed a bed or food or money. Nobody hiding in the school bathroom or home alone. Pulling open the drawer where the pills are kept. For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you, remember? There was no nature, no them, no tests to determine if the elephant grieves her calf, or if the coral reef feels pain.

trashed oceans don't speak English or Farsi or French. Would that we could wake up to what we were when we were ocean and before that to when sky was earth and animal was energy and rock was liquid and stars were space and space was not at all. Nothing. Before we came to believe humans were so important before this awful loneliness. Can molecules recall it what once was before anything happened?

No I, no we, no one, no was, no verb, no noun, only a tiny, tiny dot, brimming with is, is, is, is, is. All everything, home. Thank you. Thanks to caveat, our guest, Jan 11, Marie Howe, Julian. Belivari, Ryan Mandelbaum, Ray Palletta, and all the Science Friday staff who helped make it happen. Stay tuned later this week for our regular sci-fi podcast. Thanks for listening. I'm Ira Flato.