The Daily - Cosmic Questions

Episode Date: August 19, 2022

What is a black hole? Why do we remember the past but not the future? If time had a beginning, does it have an end?We don’t have the answers to some of the universe’s biggest questions. What we do know often feels bleak, such as the notion that in a billion years there will most likely be no life on Earth. Or the reality that someday the entire human race will probably be forgotten.Nonetheless, people search for answers. These are some of the cosmic questions that haunt the human experience.Guest: Dennis Overbye, the cosmic affairs correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: When the largest space observatory ever built sent its images back to Earth, here’s what astronomers saw.In space you can’t hear a black hole scream, but apparently you can hear it sing. Hear what that sounds like.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

Hey, it's Michael. A quick note about today's show. As you all know, we're a news show, and so much of what we do is pursue the answers to big and urgent questions. What will be the impact of a giant piece of legislation? Or what are the implications of a verdict in a major trial? Recently, two of our Times colleagues,

audio producer Bianca Gaver and science writer Dennis Overby, embarked on an effort to explore some of the universe's biggest questions. But this time, the point wasn't to deliver concrete answers. Instead, it was to sit with the kinds of big, dreamy, existential questions that we don't have answers to. Today, we share some of the conversations that Bianca and Dennis have been having. It's Friday, August 19th. Hello? Hi, Dennis. It's Biancaianca yeah how are you i'm good how are you um i'm fine so i'm talking to you officer on my iphone i'm through my earbuds is that okay is this

yeah it sounds great all right Okay. What are we doing? Why don't you just start by introducing yourself? Can you say your name and what you do at the Times? My name is Dennis Overby. And for some reason, I get away with calling myself the Cosmic Affairs Correspondent of the New York Times. That's what it says on my business cards. So the title is Cosmic Affairs Correspondent. Right.

My beat I describe as physics, the universe, anything having to do with Einstein and anything else that I decide fits into that rubric. So I'm interested in how people relate to their position or their role in a universe that we don't understand and probably never will. We walk around our little bubbles of certainty that are occasionally rudely shattered, like the sudden emergence of a pandemic, or worse, you know. We sort of think we can run our lives. We really can't. What do you mean?

Well, you know, the truth of this is that the universe doesn't care. I mean, the stars in the sky, they don't know about us. We'll never know whether anybody's living there or not, probably. And eventually, in a billion years, there will be no life on Earth because the sun will warm up and boil away the oceans. The human race will be forgotten. So in the far, far fullness of time,

nothing will remain. Does being the cosmic affairs correspondent make you depressed make me depressed what you said just now is very grim well it doesn't i'm not depressed right now i guess um i mean maybe i've always been depressed. Definitely, I'm kind of a pessimist. But it doesn't depress me to write about these things, because it seems like something that has to be illuminated. It's part of our heritage as humans to understand our predicament. Right. Because you're aware that the universe could collapse tomorrow.

It could. Anything could happen. The stock market could collapse tomorrow. I don't know about you, but I'm getting all these emails these days about investment opportunities and where Elon Musk is putting his money now or click here to find out and better get it on the ground floor, but which ground floor are you going to get in on? Right. I think you were going to talk about like what you write about.

Oh, right. So lately, especially during the last year, I've written a lot about black holes. Black holes are the cat videos of astronomy. People can't get enough of them. They have this kind of elemental attraction to them, right? They're doomed. And I have a history with black holes because I've been writing about black holes for years, 40, 45 years, I think.

Wow. Because long ago, at the beginning of my journalism career, I got a job as an assistant typesetter at a magazine called Sky and Telescope, which was an astronomy magazine published in Cambridge. At the time, back in the 1970s, black holes were kind of a controversial concept. A lot of people didn't believe in them. So I got them to send me to a conference in which Stephen Hawking was talking about black holes. And I went to England and followed him around Cambridge for a while. I to his annoyance. And he had a great sense of humor, and he was sort of a smart aleck. I mean, I didn't know at the time that I would eventually write his obituary. So I've been identified with this subject for a long time.

Yeah. with this subject for a long time. Yeah. And it pulled me in because it does raise all these issues of mortality and what actually, what is the world made of? What is matter made of?

If you can go into a black hole, disappear, right? You can just clearly disappear. So was it ever really here to begin with? Raises all these questions that are interesting to think about and are kind of on the edge of science. So yeah, black holes. So it seems like your job is very philosophical and you were called an evangelist of cosmic ignorance.

Yeah. What does that mean? I love that phrase because I believe cosmic ignorance reminds us of who we are, that we don't really know much about this universe we're in. The whole thing in science is like if you can formulate a question, you can find an answer to it. But it's not clear that we even know the right questions yet. That's the kind of thing you often get from deeper thinkers. And I don't know, I guess I think it's refreshing that we are so ignorant.

You have to be very smart to find out how ignorant you are. We're like teenagers kind of trying to imagine what it's like to be in love i just find it refreshing because yeah maybe because there's no boss man who knows all the answers like there's no father who knows best we We're all equal in our ignorance. So can you read me some of the cosmic questions you came up with? Okay, let's see. What's a black hole and why do we care what happens inside? Is there other life in the universe? Can you say these a bit more slowly and with a sense of drama?

What's a black hole and why do we care what happens inside? Is there other life in the universe? How come we don't already know? If there's other life in the universe, how come we don't already know about it? What's the fate of the Earth and the universe? Are there other universes? Do we have free will? Is there free will in the matrix? What does that mean? That's something I've been thinking about.

Are there any good movies about science? This is something scientists talk about. How would we know if there's life on it? Will we ever live on Mars? Why do we remember the past's life on it? Will we ever live on Mars? Why do we remember the past and not the future? And then did God have any choice creating the universe? That was Einstein's question. It's funny, I was expecting them to be it's funny i was expecting them to be very sciencey but they're kind of speculative and hypothetical and almost science fictiony they are yeah that's what makes them fun i think

i'm not sure that i want to live in the real world that deeply, you know? Mm-hmm. After the break, Bianca and Dennis turn to one of life's most mystifying questions, and they go searching for some answers. okay so the question is based on something that stephen hawking said in a talk i heard him give probably 20 or 30 years ago, which is, why do we remember the past but not the future? I guess the point is that we really don't understand all these notions that we take for granted, like time or space, right? And mathematically, it's treated like a dimension. We tag things with where they are and when they are. But that's not the way we live.

We don't have a choice when we come out of the subway, whether we want to go forward or backward in time, the way we have a choice of saying going north or south or east or west. Like in math, we have the choice to change the time variable, but you're saying in life we don't? We don't. No, we don't. We're stuck. Yeah. Humans have always had some sort of way of marking the passage of time.

Think of Stonehenge and think of the great clock towers. Time became more sort of a mathematical part of physics with Galileo. And then Newton embellished that. And Newton kind of created this idea of like the universe is this kind of stage with a clock. And we were in it. And the stage stayed the same. The clock stayed the same. We just went through our paces.

That worked fine until Einstein came along and showed that, well, clocks could measure time differently depending on where they are or how fast they were moving. Space didn't stay the same. Things shrank and they expanded. And that's relativity. That's his famous theory of relativity. Right. That time is much more malleable than we realized. Yeah.

So speaking of Einstein, can you tell that story of a friend of his whose husband died and the condolence letter? Oh, right. Oh, this is a famous letter that he wrote. I wish I had the quotation in front of me. Maybe it's in my book. I don't know if I can find it. Let's see.

What's the name of your book? Einstein in Love. So, okay. Einstein in love. So, okay. Einstein's best friend, Michela Besso, died in 1955, only a month before Einstein himself died. Writing to Michela's wife, he said, What I admired most about Michela was the fact that he was able to live so many years with one woman,

not only in peace, but also in constant unity. Something I have lamentably failed at twice. So in quitting this strange world, he has once again received me by little. That doesn't mean anything. For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however tenacious. So what he is saying there is that all these moments of your life actually exist, but you're just only experiencing one of them at a time. It's kind of like the frames on a real film.

It's kind of like the frames on a real film. You're watching a movie, the frames are all there, but you're only experiencing one at a time. The rest are in the loop. They've gone past, or they're still on the way. This is a sort of popular theory among physicists. But I don't think there's any agreed upon theory or view of time. If you go back far enough, then you run into the Big Bang, which is where everything began, as far as modern science knows. We don't know where the universe came from, but we know that whatever made the universe also made space and time. But the more physicists have looked at them, the more slippery they become. And when you hold them up to the light, they start to fall apart.

they start to fall apart. Because we're big creatures, we're made up of billions and billions and billions of atoms. Our idea of time might be, if not wrong, only an approximation due to the fact that we are so big and last so long. But reality could be like a Chuck Close painting, that when you look at it up close,

all these little dabs and points of paint, and they don't seem to mean anything. It's only when you get on the other side of the room that they appear as fully formed portraits. And in the same way, we kind of make sense of the world around us because we're kind of seeing it averaged

over many, many particles and many, many very tiny blindingly fast interactions and connections. So where you are in the universe matters. What conditions you're under in the universe matter every place in the universe has kind of a different perspective so einstein had this great imagination he followed his thoughts and what he discovered is contrary to

all our intuitions namely that time can speed up or slow down. Things can shrink or expand depending on how they appear to be moving. You know, matter can gather itself together and disappear into a black hole. These are crazy ideas. But they are now bedrock principles of the universe. He was the first one to show mathematically that the time just didn't work the way we thought it did. So he's undermined the whole idea, really,

of kind of independent objective reality. If you look at the math, especially in relativity, it's just high school algebra. Anybody can do it. I mean, Einstein's secret was that he asked really good questions. If you have a question, you can answer it. But the real hard thing is coming up with a good question to begin with. I mean, part of the art and craft of not just science, but I would even say like novel writing, is to ask a specific question that goes places you didn't dream.

So how would you summarize the question that you think Einstein was setting out to answer? The question he set out to answer, he famously posed this to himself when he was 15 years old. If he was traveling along a light beam at the speed of light, what would he see? That's the question? That question unlocked 20th century physics. You would be surprised as anybody to find out that we can actually see these effects in the universe. The space bending and warping. We thought they were true,

we just didn't think it would be possible to actually observe them. They observed the bending of light around the sun during this eclipse in 1919, and that was what made him eternally famous. Okay, so going back to time, tell us about how we know which way time is moving. Tell us about how we know which way time is moving. So our brains know which way time is going because of what they call entropy. What is entropy? Think of it as sort of kind of the amount of disorder, messiness.

So it just means that in time, things get more disordered. Your closet gets messier. Your closet gets messier. Your desk gets messier. And in general, entropy increases as you go through time. So we get older and die. We can't reverse entropy. So we're going to die. So we're always stuck wasting energy. So we're always stuck wasting energy.

And it seems to me that that gives a direction to time. We go from ordered states to more disordered states. Right. You know, a general colloquial way of saying it is that things get worse. And this is why, although I don't think we want to go into it like this this is why you can't actually have a perpetual motion machine do not talk about perpetual motion machines this would be so confusing okay all right all, all right, all right. Okay, so moving on to recap, time began with the Big Bang, then things became more and more disordered, which is how we know the direction that time is moving. What questions does this make you and scientists wonder about the end of time? I'm sorry, is that a cue for me or something? Yeah.

Well, if time had a beginning, can it also have an end? What does that mean? So if we look far enough ahead into the future, the stars will all have burned out. A lot of them will collapse into black holes. The black holes will have evaporated and everything will be so far apart that there'll just be kind of these random particles wandering around. Right, so time is no longer moving directionally from order to disorder. It's just all disorder. Right, there's no difference from one place to any other place. Yeah.

That would be the end of time. That's the best prediction astronomers can make right now. So that would just be it. The universe happened once. It was a great thing. But for the vast length of its duration, there wouldn't be anything happening. So this actually is the best time to be alive in the universe because there's a lot happening now. What's interesting to me is we kind of all create the same time.

Each one of us is in our own little bubble, right? same time. Each one of us is in our own little bubble, right? Every one of us is the center of the universe because every, we all kind of see things from where we are. So we all have a slightly different point of view and you know, amazingly, there's a lot we agree on. Right. We share time and we also have our own sense of time. Yeah. So as Bob Dylan said, I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours.

Okay. That was great. Thanks for putting up with me, Dennis. Well, it's great of you to take this on. Talk to you soon. Okay. Bye. Bye. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. It appears increasingly likely that the affidavit used to justify an FBI search of Donald Trump's home will be released. On Thursday, a federal judge ordered that the Biden administration propose redactions to the affidavit to ensure that making it public would not disclose sensitive secrets. sensitive secrets.

Affidavits for a search warrant are almost never released until charges are filed because they contain detailed information about a criminal investigation. But media organizations have requested that this affidavit be made public now because it involves a former president. And Deshaun Watson, the star NFL quarterback, has agreed to a tougher punishment than originally proposed over allegations that he repeatedly committed sexual misconduct during massage appointments. Watson, the subject of a recent Daily episode, will be suspended for 11 games rather than just six games and pay a record $5 million in fines. Today's episode was produced by Bianca Gaver, with help from Corey Schreppel. It was edited by Wendy Dorr,

with help from Anita Bonagio. Contains original music by Dan Powell, Roe and Nemezdo, and Kyle Scott Wilson, and was engineered by Dan Powell and Corey Schreppel. Our theme music is by Jim Rundberg and Ben Landvark of Wonderly. Special thanks to May Ryan,

who conceived of this project with Dennis, physicist Jana Levin, who consulted with Dennis project with Dennis, physicist Jana Levin, who consulted with Dennis on it, and our audio department colleagues Hans Butow, Tracy Mumford, Tali Abacasis, Anna Martin, and Tina Antolini. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.