Black Holes, Worm Holes, and the Origin of Everything

[00:00:07] One of the smartest people in history, author of Losing the Nobel Prize and Think Like a Nobel Prize winner and He did almost win the Nobel Prize. Maybe he will one day do it Professor Brian Keating physicist extraordinaire

[00:00:26] First we divide this in two because first I was really curious about Black Holes, Worm Holes In the beginning of the universe so we talk about that and he answers some of my questions

[00:00:37] Which I'm sure some of you might have as well once you hear them and then we talk about we have a part two the next day on Just the weird things he's seen on college campuses lately with the whole Israel Hamas stuff

[00:00:51] And we talk in general about when is it worth giving up on a goal or a quest or or I Don't know a life path. So we talk about that Brian Keating Here he is. This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host

[00:01:14] This is the James Altucher Show You ever go on Quora when occasionally there's a question like what's it like to have a 180 IQ right? And then someone answers as if because they think they have 180 IQ and they're like

[00:01:36] It's I'm very I feel very alienated all the time because no one ever understands me Or it's like I process in all the information around me so much faster than everyone else

[00:01:46] That it's hard to then communicate what I'm seeing and feeling because I know so much like it's just there's so much ego And anyone asked that question on Quora or any or whatever

[00:01:56] Yeah, it's like when someone asks you, you know, you're a comedian like what makes you so funny Like it's guaranteed No one ever asked me that when I was a comedian It's good because there's no way to be funny is no way to answer that

[00:02:10] Question and actually, you know portray yourself as humorous because it's like you're just gonna be trying like oh I gotta make a joke and yeah, no to me. It's it's a no-in proposition But yeah, I mean say you're I'm smart and I say well

[00:02:22] I have to sing the alphabet song to know what comes after our It's it's not what you think it's not all I'm cracked up to be What do you think of the original alphabet was

[00:02:32] What do you think like there was a discussion on some Facebook thread whether or not it was Hebrew because Olive bet was it Kim old doll it whatever. Oh, I don't even know they he were Yeah, but it's kind of like matches ABCD

[00:02:48] Yeah, yeah, no, that's definitely true. No, so Phoenician and and Hebrew are pretty similar If you look at the actual symbols, they're very different from what you know Hebrew looks like today and of course, no not too many people speak Phoenician

[00:03:01] I always think the most suspicious thing ever found was the Rosetta stone You know if you ever look at the Rosetta stone It's got like three different languages on it and it's like just the three languages you needed to you know decipher

[00:03:14] Every single ancient text ever written. It's just it's too perfect. It's too it's too on the nose It's a fraud it I mean there's a good book about it

[00:03:23] I haven't finished reading it you're listening to it called like the language of the gods or something or the oh Is that like Eric from and people make it out? There is a book by him, but that's not it. No, it's um

[00:03:35] It's like Simon Winchester. I forget who it is But I haven't listened to it about it over a year But the thing is like it wasn't it wasn't so simple like everyone thinks oh, it's just you know

[00:03:46] Here's a hieroglyphic of a of a rooster and it's next to the you know a Greek letter row And you know whatever But it was like really difficult to to decipher it and it's almost like magical that it that it ever you know provided anything useful well

[00:04:04] Moving on from the Rosetta stone in my random question about language There was a web telescope discover I'm very glad you're on today because there was a web telescope discovery recently It is very much disturbed me about the status of the universe

[00:04:18] And so here's here's the discovery. Yeah, they found a massive black hole that dates back to 400 million years after this opposed big bang happened and I You know we've talked about this many times the the

[00:04:35] The cosmic radiation is I mean how how did Sun's how did Sun's even form in time for? 400 million years how did Sun's even form in time to create a massive back black hole?

[00:04:47] Yeah, well there's a couple ways you could get a black hole. I mean could the black hole have existed before the big bang Yeah, I mean there are certainly claims that there are what are called primordial black holes

[00:04:59] So black hole that was present since the beginning of the universe That's something that people have considered because it provides a mechanism to explain another thing we don't understand Which is dark matter So dark matter is this you know With substance that we infer

[00:05:15] Exists because of its gravitational influence on the nearby universe and how our galaxy Rotates and how other galaxies rotate and yet we don't see any evidence for any material like it But black holes are kind of like idyllic candidates for dark matter. They're not giving off any light

[00:05:33] In fact, they swallow up all the light. They're massive so they have tremendous amount of gravitational force And and so they really behave just like you'd like dark matter to behave And if dark matter exists it should have existed very early in the universe's history as well

[00:05:49] So that's one candidate called primordial black holes originating at the big bang Maybe what you're saying is maybe with the big bang a Lot of atoms and matter spun off, but maybe what remained sort of like when you smash into a car

[00:06:05] There's little bits and pieces everywhere, but some big pieces still exist that weren't really smashed up Maybe that's these primordial black holes. Well a black hole in its most idealized form is just an extremely highly curved volume of space time

[00:06:21] So it doesn't why is time in the equation there? Why can't you just say it's very dense, you know enormously almost infinite gravity Thing what does time have to do with it? Well because you cannot specify a unique position in space without

[00:06:38] Also allocating the time at which it occurs So in a sense having the the universe The the all sorts of events that happen in the universe Are not it's not possible to decouple the effect of some massive object only and isolated only to its effect on spatial dimensions

[00:07:01] So you have to include time so time is sort of essential and in the past before Einstein You know time was supposedly thought to be independent of space

[00:07:11] So you'd plot like a cannonball, you know moving at some you know going up to some height as a function of time So time was this independent variable and you plotted the height of it

[00:07:21] And then it operated under gravity and it would accelerate and its velocity would change etc But then Einstein came along and said well actually space and time are one unified entity and

[00:07:32] You know thinking about them separate would be like we're trying to understand the motion of an object in three dimensions But only describing two of them And so that would lead to you know weird weird kind of project like imagine if you're looking at a cannonball

[00:07:46] And it shoots up and it makes a parabola, so you're looking at it in a profile But if you look at it from above it doesn't look like that at all It just looks like it moves in a straight line

[00:07:56] So suppressing a dimension has grave consequences in terms of your ability to understand dynamically what's occurring So those are sort of the ways that we unify we talk about space and time together

[00:08:08] And also if you're near a black hole time does you know depend on how close you are to the black hole And how massive the black hole is I don't fully understand when people say this like what's the relationship between time and gravity?

[00:08:21] So supposedly the what I understand is and I don't understand why if The bigger the gravity of the object you're standing on like a planet or a black hole or whatever the bigger the gravity the slower time is To the observer so like if I

[00:08:40] Watched something fall into a black hole would it take forever, but to that person. It's just going like normal Yeah, that's right So the so the one of the key aspects of relativity even absent of gravity is That time is not absolute the way it is to Newton

[00:08:56] So Newton you could plot time and it would be the universal function always flowing at the same rate for all observers everywhere And in general that's not possible to have a coordinate system where everybody agrees on

[00:09:10] When an event occurs and even whether or not certain events are simultaneous with other events So you light a firework, you know in your in your Reference frame if I'm moving with respect to your reference frame

[00:09:23] I might see the effect of the firework happening before I see the cause of you lighting the firework Okay, depending on my velocity relative to you so you could have things like there are certain examples where you have like Let's say in your reference frame

[00:09:39] You're carrying a golf club and that golf club and you're just fitting inside of your car But if you're moving and the golf club is exactly as wide as your car

[00:09:49] But if you're moving at very high speeds the golf club gets contracted with respect to the dimension that direction that you're moving it in And it'll actually be smaller than the width of the car

[00:09:59] so you can actually have a you know a golf club that's wider than the width of your car and Slam the doors on both sides of it and fit it inside even though it's too big in a frame

[00:10:09] That's stationary with respect to the car for the golf club to fit And that's because of what's called length contraction so that things get smaller and Time scales take longer for things that are moving But you have to add so there's no way for you to determine

[00:10:26] Your velocity in the universe. There's no absolute Center of the universe from which you can determine your velocity Velocity is relative to observers and you've had this experience probably you're sitting in traffic and

[00:10:40] And the car next to you starts to move and it feels like you're moving backwards But the cars next to you is moving forwards or on a train the same kind of behavior can happen And you can't really say unless you have some third person

[00:10:55] Can't really agree that who's actually moving is it you moving? Is the train moving? Of course, the whole earth is moving with respect to the solar system the solar system is moving with respect to the galaxy

[00:11:05] So taking everything to account you cannot say for sure what velocity you have but Acceleration can be determined so you can actually people observers will agree that one entity is Accelerating versus another entity

[00:11:21] So if you have a rocket moving through space at constant velocity, you can't determine if you're in acceleration But you can't if you're moving with constant velocity But if you start to accelerate then you start to experience phenomena that are

[00:11:35] That can allow you to determine that you're accelerating So it's kind of like you can see something you could determine the properties of something that's more sophisticated Acceleration is a higher order calculus, you know function and derivative technically. It's called then is velocity

[00:11:50] but it is actually easier and more agreed upon when something is accelerating as opposed to something that's moving at constant velocity and Gravity is indistinguishable from acceleration So if you're if you're in a rocket and the rocket has no windows and it's accelerating at 1g

[00:12:09] You can't tell if you're in its accelerating upwards You can't tell if you're on the earth surface stationary inside of an elevator. That's not moving Or you're in this rocket accelerating through the universe at 1g

[00:12:23] There's no experiment that you can do to tell the difference between those two phenomena and they're very different, right? gravity versus motion and so once you have something moving and accelerating then you can say that it actually

[00:12:35] is its time that it experiences will be degraded relative to how it would be behaving if it wasn't being accelerated So the stronger the gravitational field the stronger the acceleration the slower time seems to elapse

[00:12:52] So that's why if someone's falling into a black hole it could seem to an outside observer Like it's taking forever for this person to get to the center of the black hole. Yeah, but for that person It's just he's just falls right into the black hole

[00:13:06] Yeah, eventually now if you're near a black hole for a little bit and you get out of it somehow Is that you're in the future? Right? You're for for us a lot of time has passed and but for that person No time has passed well

[00:13:20] Yes in a sense, so there's two there are two regions of the black hole one is called the event horizon things inside the event horizon Once you go beyond the event horizon You cannot escape out of the gravitational potential of that object So it's sort of

[00:13:38] Like if you throw a baseball on the surface of the earth If you throw it at less than the so-called escape velocity It will always come back down to earth if you throw it greater than the skate velocity

[00:13:49] Which is like 10 kilometers per second. It's very fast. It will go and leave the earth's gravity forever so that's purely the velocity up but the The black hole once you get inside the event horizon, there's no way out

[00:14:02] So every possible path that you could take will always take you to the singularity at the center of the black hole There's no way to escape that I have a question about this

[00:14:29] When we look at a black hole, do we know where do we see the event horizon? Do we know where the event horizon exists? Yeah well So we've actually made images of it not me but there's a telescope called the event horizon telescope

[00:14:40] It's actually an array of telescopes all over the earth's surface from Chile to the South Pole and It has taken very high resolution images of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way

[00:14:53] My question then is if we can see the event horizon doesn't that imply some something is leave Some energy is leaving the black hole because we can see it like yeah

[00:15:03] We don't know something exists unless like light is emanating from it or bouncing off of it like something That's why I see you. That's why I see the chair next to me. It's because something's coming from that object Right, so black holes supposedly nothing's coming from it

[00:15:15] Right, so anything that's coming into the black hole will be on a trajectory that will say come radially from You know some distance and eventually fall into the black hole and there's stuff behind it

[00:15:27] So there's an object that just now is entering the black holes event horizon and right before it went into the black holes event Horizon yeah, there was light coming from this object

[00:15:37] Say it was super hot gas because things do get accelerated to almost the speed of light as they fall into the black holes Event horizon and right before they fall in they're bumping up against each other

[00:15:47] They're emitting large amounts of x-rays and visible light and even radio waves And so the light will come over the top of the black hole There'll be some there'll be some trajectory that the black hole from some the plane of all the material looks like a giant solar

[00:16:03] System basically this stuff is a creating and spiraling and swirling in to get to the center of the black hole So it'll be something in the distance behind the black hole from your perspective and it will have light

[00:16:14] That'll be coming just grazing the black holes event horizon missing it by one millimeter And as long as it misses it by any amount It will be bent and then launched on a trajectory and I'll come towards us

[00:16:27] If it's exactly at the vent horizon it will start to orbit around the black hole So you'll have the light in an orbit, you know We think of the planet in an orbit but imagine light being in an orbit like almost like laser beams

[00:16:39] Going in a circular orbit around the black hole and then anything closer and an angle That's more steep than that will go into the black hole and we won't we won't see it So you're right. We're not seeing stuff that's inside the event horizon

[00:16:51] So you actually see a shadow you see a light shadow where there's no more light that's coming towards you And then you're seeing a halo around the the shadow the black spot the black holes of an horizon of every

[00:17:05] Trajectory of a photon that just barely grazed the event horizon But didn't quite go into it and these are these images that have been made of these two black holes one is in a galaxy about 50 million light years away called

[00:17:17] M87 and then there's one in our center of our galaxy called Sagittarius a star and that's the this giant monster black hole at the center of our galaxy and so yeah, a colleague a Friend of mine at Harvard Shep Doldman

[00:17:32] He's been the leader of this project and they've made images of it for the past, you know five years or so now and Now there's this new there's this Black hole from basically the beginning of the universe that like black holes are usually made from

[00:17:48] Basically stars that got super massive and then imploded on themselves and became super dense hence black holes, but there's this what you're calling a primordial black hole which is Somehow not that it's something it's made of something else

[00:18:03] We don't I guess we can't possibly know what and it's right from the beginning of the universe Well, it's not quite from the very beginning so So 400 million years after the Big Bang. It's not you know It's one it's about five percent of the universe's current age

[00:18:21] So it's not time equals zero so a primordial black hole would be yes Would be exactly, you know at the beginning of time in this case what they've what they're seeing is Is you know is a object that they claim in a galaxy and then the galaxy is

[00:18:39] Has an age that they've that they've dated to 400 million years after the Big Bang so it's not really the beginning of time In fact, I study something that's a thousand times older than this which is the cosmic microwave background Radiation that's 400,000 years old

[00:18:56] So there there were no galaxies meaning was made 400,000 years after the Big Bang that's like it's the it's the furthest thing we can really see Because we can't it's so dense. We can't see past it

[00:19:08] Past it we would see evidence of the Big Bang if if we could see past it That's right So there's different ways that you could get there if it was truly primordial and then it could be primordial

[00:19:17] And then just be located in an old galaxy. That's that's possible But it also could be and so where would it come from it was primordial So there's a theory actually by one of the three recipients of the Nobel Prize Sir Roger Penrose your co-author and

[00:19:34] Think like a Nobel Prize winner. That's right That Roger and me he conjectured that there were that there are actually Black holes are one of the few things that can survive the collapse of a previous universe

[00:19:48] so he believes that the our universe began thanks in part to the the death of a pre-existing universe as we talked about many years ago and different scenarios of how the universe could begin and And the question of whether or not that you know scenario is true

[00:20:07] Nevertheless, it's possible that these black this black hole could have come from the collapse of another universe where these black holes We really can't destroy a black hole

[00:20:15] They only get bigger and bigger as they accrete and you know accumulate more and more mass just like we do in middle age But if that theory was true Then when the Big Bang happened it just like went straight through these black holes

[00:20:31] And so they like let's say that you know The big bang wouldn't have pushed the black holes away like further out of our universe Yeah, so his model that you basically a universe evolves

[00:20:43] once it's once it's in existence it evolves for trillions of years perhaps and the endpoint of all the matter in the universe is really surprising That there's really no escape from the black holes that start to form because you as I say they're they're kind of irreducible

[00:21:00] Once you have a black hole, there's no way there's no there's no garbage can you can throw it into you throw it Into a garbage can the black hole gets bigger. It swallows the mass of the garbage can So

[00:21:12] So in particular, yes, it's it's it's essentially a black hole as I said in its purest form a Black hole only has three properties. It only has its mass It has it's what's called its spinner if it's rotating or not and it can have a charge

[00:21:29] It can have a you know electrical charge associated with it, but that's it So it's really a region of the curvature of space time if you envision space time is sort of a trampoline and The more massive an object is say the Sun

[00:21:44] Then it makes a deeper depression in space time and that allows then a smaller object like a golf ball to roll around In the depression the indentation made by the black hole or the curvature of space But if you imagine a black hole

[00:22:01] Turn up the mass of the of the Sun from a bowling ball and make it like infinite So it's it's basically now vertical walls of the trampoline That's sort of what a black hole is. It's just a place of infinite curvature

[00:22:13] And so it doesn't really have any other properties And so can that go through the Big Bang itself? Well, the Big Bang is sort of a singularity in some concepts

[00:22:24] But in Roger Penrose is not it doesn't have a singularity the universe just kind of transitions gets more and more diluted And then at greater and greater time scales eventually The energy is sufficient to nucleate the expansion of another universe

[00:22:41] But there's no mechanism to destroy the black holes that build up So there's no dissipation mechanism for them. So they just live forever Now someone like Roger Penrose genius Nobel Prize winner one of the smartest businesses ever, you know almost in your category where his knowledge and experience

[00:23:03] Perhaps equals yours, but he seems very confident in his theories about this. How can you really be confident in a theory like that? Well, you really can't I mean really no. Yeah, science is an empirical

[00:23:17] You know fits you know is an empirical endeavor, which means that you you have to base your your credibility or credulity or belief in something on

[00:23:28] Evidence so you you have some idea you have a guess and that becomes a hypothesis and then you try to assemble as much Information to support it and see how well does it explain? Things that have not been explained in the past does it does it raise internal

[00:23:48] contradictions does it have features that are more powerful than a pre-existing idea and You keep going through the list of different virtues of a model or an idea And if it has enough virtues and has passes enough

[00:24:05] Confrontations with observation then you might call it a theory. It's funny because people say oh, it's just your theory Or like oh evolution that's just a theory but when in in physics remember, there's no way to prove something in physics

[00:24:18] I can't prove that the earth is a perfect sphere. In fact, it's not a perfect sphere It has some distortions to it But but I can I can make the case that it's more spherical than it is flat and

[00:24:32] In doing so I have to provide evidence for that claim and then someone else can come along say actually no It's not perfectly spherical it has these distortions and it's actually slightly shaped like a pair and and it has these different

[00:24:45] Properties so only by doing that do we have you know a closer and closer Zeroing in on the quote truth But we can't a very different from mathematics or you know computer science or something You can make a proof in mathematics which is not refutable

[00:25:02] Unless you know the laws of logic are wrong and then in which case you're trying to use the laws of logic To prove that the laws of logic are not consistent. It's interesting though because math

[00:25:13] Everything derives from some first principles, right? So mathematics relies on the basic concepts of set theory Yes, and From set theory we can build a set of axioms that explains all of math

[00:25:25] But if we weren't using set theory and I don't know why we wouldn't our the rules would be Different and we'd be proving different things but but set theory conveniently describes how we count basically and

[00:25:37] Matches that perfectly. That's right. Yeah, so with the with physics like it seems like the first principles sometimes change So we had you know Aristotle But then we had Isaac Newton then we had Einstein then we had quantum mechanics and

[00:25:50] It's sort of like the height of creativity physics is very creative in the sense that We have there's proving things in physics and then we assume they're true But then there's another group of physicists that come along and say, you know what?

[00:26:03] I'm gonna change the rules for a little while because we don't really know what the real first principles are Yeah, I wouldn't say that they you know, they're they're guided by desire to change the rules It's that either there there's two different ways that scientific discoveries happen

[00:26:16] One is that we discover something serendipitously We look at mercury and we say well, that's weird mercury is moving in this weird way And it's not predicted or explainable using the theory of universal gravitation of Isaac Newton

[00:26:32] So then somebody would say I'm gonna explain that effect or retradict not predict it but retradict it I'm gonna say that there. I didn't know there was a word for that Yeah, yeah, that's sort of our post-diction instead of prediction

[00:26:45] In other words, you knew that this was a problem and even Newton knew it was a problem And you know, they they were quite astute even in the 17 1800s But but they didn't know the resolution of it because you can't predict it

[00:26:58] You cannot explain rather why mercury behaves in this strange way Using Newtonian gravity alone. You need a new Conception of gravity which is what Einstein came along and did and then there's another thing that can happen

[00:27:12] Which is that you can have a theory and then make have an Conclusion that comes from it that is then a prediction. So it actually happened with Newtonian gravity There was the motion of the planet Uranus

[00:27:28] By the way, did you know that there's science NASA's Commission made to change the name of the planet Uranus because it's so embarrassing that astronomers are you know and possibly You know tormented by the fact that saying Uranus has brought shame and embarrassment upon us

[00:27:47] So it's sure as it was a horrible name So I've actually come up with a new name for it And I'm prepared to reveal that on the James Altucher show right now. Well, what is the new name your rectum? so

[00:28:00] Okay, but wait, you know why you know why it fails is because All the planets are except earth are named after the Roman names of the Greek gods, right? So Mercury Venus Mercury is Hermes in Greek mythology Venus is Aphrodite Mars Aries Saturn actually

[00:28:19] Saturn is Saturn and Cronus in Greek mythology Jupiter Zeus Yeah, Neptune is Poseidon Uranus is Hephaestus. I believe uh-huh Pluto is Hades. Yeah, so I'm planning anymore. I guess. Yeah, that's right so when when and sometime in the mid 1700s

[00:28:42] People looked at the planet Uranus and its orbit and they were looking at it And they noticed like sometimes in the air would be like a little too far to the left

[00:28:49] And sometimes it was a little too far to the right and they have great historical data for it And just using Newton's laws of motion the grab universe of gravitation An astronomer named Laverier his name is Laverier a French astronomer

[00:29:04] predicted that there would be another planet beyond the orbit of Uranus and it would be pulling and slightly tugging on or delaying The orbit via its gravitational impact on Uranus

[00:29:15] And he actually told somebody where to look and they discovered it exactly where he predicted it purely based upon The laws of Isaac Newton So how come they didn't apply that same idea to Mercury like what happened with Mercury?

[00:29:29] Oh my dear friend you're anticipating what I'm about to say next So the same guy said hey, this is great And if you think about it even though we can see Neptune and they did discover it It was kind of a predict the first prediction of dark matter

[00:29:43] Right in other words They were saying there's some unseen matter that had a gravitational pull on something that we could see visible light in the form Of the planet Uranus and using this prediction

[00:29:54] They were able to recover the position of the dark matter which then you could see actually gives off some light And that's the planet Neptune so that was the discovery of Neptune and so the same guy was a smart guy So he said well this worked really well

[00:30:07] Maybe there was there's another planet inside the orbit of Mercury closer to the Sun That's doing the same thing and the reason that we haven't seen it is because it's so close to the Sun It's blinded and were blinded to its presence. And so it was called Vulcan

[00:30:22] So the planet Vulcan was was predicted by the same guy using the same technique And that's totally wrong. There is no planet closer to the Sun than Mercury But so in that case dark matter hypothesis was wrong

[00:30:35] And what was really needed was kind of like a version of string theory or you know some new form of physics To augment the laws of Isaac Newton and that was the laws of general relativity that we were talking about earlier

[00:30:46] That was what Einstein came up with so you had to actually change the relationship of the laws of physics the underlying notion of space and time and their connectedness together in order to have a The correct explanation

[00:31:00] Retradiction for the orbit of Mercury and that's in fact what happened. So what is then? What is specifically the reason mercury is little off from Newtonian physics? so there's an effect of of the of near very strong gravitational

[00:31:18] Mass of objects like the Sun that distorts space time and causes slight indentations in a way that Causes the this advance of the orbit, you know basically acts as a as a Additional distortion which then acts in distortion meaning a curvature of space-time

[00:31:38] All curvature of space-time is is how we perceive the force of gravity So there's an additional force of gravity due to the presence of the mass of the Sun that's not encountered for When you as you get closer and closer to the Sun's surface

[00:31:53] You actually pick up an extra term and an extra amount of gravity or curvature of space-time that is not present in Newtonian gravity specifically because gravity affects time as well as space so you had to basically add the

[00:32:10] The effect of gravity on time in order to explain the effect of gravity and mass on Objects like massive objects like the planet Mercury if it didn't have an effect on time Then you wouldn't have this advance and therefore it was absent in Newton's laws

[00:32:26] I'm still not quite sure. I fully understand Gravity's effects on time, but that's okay, but the question I have is it was Einstein a You know aware that his theories could be applied to Mercury before he came like did he use mercury as

[00:32:40] Something he was thinking about before he came up with the theory of relativity Like did he curve fit to make it work? No, no He he he was he was definitely interested in this and this was the first and really the only thing that he could think of

[00:32:53] That could provide a test bed at this time in 1914 for the Observed behavior of his theory so the so his theory made a prediction that and that prediction would explain Mercury's behavior and And then later was realized there are many many other consequences of Einstein's general relativity

[00:33:15] Including the fact that when there's an eclipse of the Sun as there is an April 8th of this year It should be visible from Texas all the way up to like Illinois and Buffalo, New York and everything

[00:33:27] And that a total solar eclipse provided an opportunity to view stars that were behind the Sun and They were normally occluded by the brightness of the Sun and rendered invisible

[00:33:37] But during any eclipse you can see stars and you can measure their positions and there's an effect called gravitational Lensing where the gravity of the object either a black hole or in this case the Sun bends the position of where the starlight should be

[00:33:51] just like it bends the trajectory of how the planet Mercury moves and so Einstein predicted that as well and He actually made a math mistake, but eventually he corrected it and then in

[00:34:03] 1919 so over a hundred years ago it was confirmed that there was in fact this distortion of starlight By the mass of the Sun and this was the great, you know discovery that eventually did win him the Nobel Prize Even though people didn't want to admit it

[00:34:19] It was just too astounding of a discovery to neglect And so he didn't win the Nobel Prize in 1905 when he came up with relativity itself Or even in 1915 when he came up with the general theory of relativity it describes gravity

[00:34:33] He only won it after this 1919 discovery in 1921. He won the 1921 Nobel Prize Now how come his theories don't explain dark matter like why is there dark matter? What why couldn't be the case that what he's really predicting is that there's some supermassive black hole unbelievably massive

[00:35:08] That's further than our ability to see it it went in the other direction when the big bang happened whatever and That could be the reason why we experience some weird gravitational tendencies Well, there are people that can actually that dark matter is the manifestation of ordinary matter in

[00:35:29] another dimension We don't have any evidence of that like they're there. It could be just as if you have you know two different Imagine you have two different infinite chessboards, right? And on the chessboards are living some creatures that only are two-dimensional

[00:35:47] They list live in this flat land as it's called and then there's another chessboard And that chessboard is separated by you know, it could be one millimeter away if they can't access They can't move into that third dimension either set of creatures on either two-dimensional chessboard

[00:36:03] They don't have any access to it using light But if gravity could propagate from one chessboard to the other chessboard then you could detect the presence of this other Of this other universe this other flat land merely by looking at the effects on Objects in your own chessboard

[00:36:22] So the pieces are you know these flat two-dimensional chess pieces would move around differently because they might be Tugged upon by the gravity of another object at a day in another universe That's actually a very short distance away

[00:36:35] And that's these have been explored by people like Lisa Randall and and other people There's no evidence for this but that is exactly what you're saying is one of the explanations of dark matter

[00:36:46] This is why I think I think physics is again a super creative discipline because sure you have these things that are Quote-on-quote real that are happening

[00:36:56] But we don't really know why and we have to just be as creative as possible even crazy like there's other dimensions and the multiverse and you know every theory is basically crazy about the universe and

[00:37:09] But in physics you're allowed to be as crazy as possible sometimes even better to be oh, there's 12 dimensions and strings and all these things and And and that's rewarded because create good creativity backed somehow by a mathematical model

[00:37:25] That you might even make up to support your theory is is rewarded in physics. Yeah No, there are you know, but but the the issue is that it It might just be kind of an example of science fiction, right?

[00:37:38] I mean you can there's more things you can theorize than you can actually expect to exist in reality So well and I have a question about that. I'm sorry to interrupt me, but I get curious so like the concept of a wormhole is that

[00:37:52] Science fiction is it theoretical or is it actual? And if it's actually is it likely to be actual or is it actually actual? No, I mean there's no There's absolutely no evidence for wormholes. There are its abundant evidence for black holes

[00:38:06] wormholes are sort of an interesting almost cultural phenomenon more than they are a Practical physics in you know instance of of something that could truly be measured or You know important in science. So there's there's no

[00:38:24] Necessity for wormholes, but there is sort of a necessity for black holes because you have these objects of the endpoints of which are Gravitational and collapsed objects and there's no way to escape once you start gravitational collapse of a massive star As you suggested early on

[00:38:43] It's basically a you know runaway positive feedback loop There's no way to avoid collapsing to in to a singularity where you can't do it There's absolutely infinite curvature now You can't see the singularity because it's obscured by this event horizon or if you like any

[00:39:03] Signature of it would be contained within the event horizon and you cannot Penetrate the event horizon. There's no escape velocity That allows you to get a signal out from inside the event horizon to any distance away from it

[00:39:16] So like radio waves light waves every type of energy or frequency The gravity is too strong for it. So the event horizon is the fictitious surface within which the escape velocity of any object of baseball a photon

[00:39:35] Neutron a crouton is the speed of light and then it only gets larger and larger as you get closer and closer to this to the Singularity itself so at the singularity the escape velocity is infinite

[00:39:47] And so it's impossible to generate anything that goes faster than the speed of light made of matter or energy But you know all the more so is it impossible, you know To a much greater degree to do something that's infinite velocity

[00:40:01] That would be the escape velocity at this at the singularity itself So I forget if this is an Einstein thing, but if you go This if if an object goes the speed of light, isn't it doesn't it get like infinitely massive or what's the yeah properties?

[00:40:18] So so inside a black hole Doesn't it just like? Is it is it infinitely massive there even though it's a singularity? so mass is the property that we associate with difficulty in moving something so it's sort of like inertia mass is

[00:40:38] How much force do you have to apply to something to get it to travel with some acceleration? So if you have a mass if you want to move something And you want it to have an extremely high

[00:40:54] Acceleration say start from zero and accelerate to the speed of light Then that you're taking some finite force and you're dividing by a very large number the acceleration in F equals ma it would be extremely large

[00:41:08] So the mass would then be equal to zero so the only way to get something to move You know infinite speed or you know faster than the speed of light would be if it had less than zero mass

[00:41:18] So all photons all particles of light in the vacuum they travel at the speed of light And then any massive object to travel to get to a Given velocity the equation that tells you how much energy you have to provide

[00:41:33] Looks like 1 divided by the square root of 1 minus the velocity over the speed of light squared So let's say you want to go this you want to go at the you know half the speed of light

[00:41:45] So the energy you're gonna have to provide that object is going to be many many times It's it's so-called rest mass So you're gonna have to supply energy more than all the matter energy that it has itself and that

[00:41:58] Equals MC squared equation is the equation that gives you know the power of a nuclear weapon in other words the the the square of the speed of light is a tremendous number and

[00:42:09] So yeah, so any finite amount of mass will require an infinite amount of energy to travel at the speed of light And anything that's almost zero mass or is zero mass like a photon can travel only at the speed of light

[00:42:22] There's no way to slow down a photon in the vacuum Why is the speed of light a limit like is it is it like an arbitrary limit that that Happened to be just like like magically the number and nothing can go faster than this

[00:42:36] Well, so what ended up happening was in the 1850s in the middle of 1800s Maxwell James clerk Maxwell is a Scottish physicist he was Looking at the laws of electricity and magnetism and came up with these four equations called the Maxwell equations and

[00:42:53] These are fought for what are called differential equations and they describe how much how big an electric field does a charge produce? how how big a magnetic field as a current produce and then it was found that you could take a these these four equations and

[00:43:12] Combine them in a certain way and you got two equations for the propagation of waves So that you'd have a field an electromagnetic field either a magnetic field or an electric field And then it would oscillate sinusoidally with a given

[00:43:28] Frequency in time and a given period or wavelength in space So and it was found that when he calculated what that speed is of a wave Which is pretty straightforward thing to do and physics that the speed that emerged was a speed

[00:43:44] That was very very close to the speed of light as it was known at that time It was the speed of light. It was very difficult to measure But it was known it was greater than about 200,000 kilometers per second and less than 400,000 It's exactly 300,000 kilometers per second

[00:44:00] but back then so it was very suspiciously close and so he realized that Actually these waves would that be propagating with a speed of the speed of light as it was known at that time

[00:44:12] But the problem was they didn't know about any waves that could propagate without there being some kind of medium like an ocean Or air in a room for a sound wave. They didn't know of any waves that could propagate without some kind of substance to support them and

[00:44:28] And so he conjectured this substance called the ether that there was there must be some You know, basically this this invisible fluid that fills all of the universe called the ether and

[00:44:40] Then for about 50 years people tried to see if they could detect the ether and they couldn't find that they they found They couldn't detect the ether and in fact there was no way to To even predict, you know a value that would be consistent with what these measurements

[00:44:56] Seem to indicate so eventually we got rid of the ether and then it was a big puzzle How you could have, you know light traveling always at the speed of light without any substance supporting it

[00:45:08] And that's where Einstein comes in in 1905 50 years later or so and comes up with the notion that light only travels at the speed of light and and light is an electromagnetic wave and no matter what reference frame you're in no matter how fast you're moving if

[00:45:24] You turn on a flashlight that flashlight will always travel at the speed of light as observed by any observer in These in either in any of the reference frames even if you're traveling at half the speed of light if that was even possible

[00:45:36] You turn on a flashlight you will still see the light traveling away from you at the speed of light and And so it became really the only way to have that happen was to say that when something is in motion

[00:45:49] Either the time for that observer slows down or the length as observed by those observers gets smaller So either time gets longer or Distances get shorter or both and these are these were these effects were then measured in the laboratory

[00:46:06] So you could actually measure things at very high speeds and measure how long they live for if it was a particle And if it was moving very close to speed of light or you know some very fast velocity

[00:46:16] It would actually live longer than it would and decay at a later time Then it's brother in a jar sitting at stationary at rest on the earth surface and these are all measured

[00:46:27] So how did he figure out though that light didn't need anything to propagate through it didn't need an ether so Einstein Well, so that was observed Experimentally that there was no detectable ether and so the explanation for it is is

[00:46:46] You know really relies on the generation of how electromagnetic waves are generated So if you have a magnet and you have a wire if you move that magnet inside the wire It will generate an alternating electric current the current will oscillate back and forth inside the wire and

[00:47:05] That that oscillation shows you there's a connection between current is just the motion of electric charges And a magnetic field is a is a collection of you know, there's a collective property of matter

[00:47:20] That illusory, you know generates this magnetic field and so as long as you have a magnetic field and it's moving There's something moving in it It will generate a changing electric current and once you have a changing electric current that generates a magnetic field

[00:47:35] So if you have a magnet a current in a wire It will generate a magnetic field a constant magnetic field And if you alternate the current of the wire

[00:47:43] It will generate an alternating current and then if you do both of those at the same time moving a magnet and having an Oscillating current you can actually generate a self sustaining electromagnetic wave So it's sort of hard to visualize

[00:47:57] It's like the vacuum has the potential at all points in time and then in space To have a light wave or an electromagnetic field and then in certain places We call those you know an excess of probability to find an electric magnetic field a charge

[00:48:13] Or a magnetic field so it's really kind of a self Propagating thing. It's almost like a wave that generates itself. You don't need there's nothing waving There's no medium like the vacuum is changing in the sense that it has a higher or lower chance of having

[00:48:30] This value for an electric or magnetic field and and we have observed that and that's what's called quantum field theory We've observed a quantum version of it We have a classical version Maxwell's a classical field theory and Quantum electrodynamics of the Richard Feynman. That's an a quantum field

[00:48:47] And we have a very good description of all the forces of nature except for gravity Both classically and quantum mechanically but gravity. We don't have a quantum mechanical description of so we don't know actually

[00:48:59] If there's a quantum analog of a photon people call it the graviton, but we actually have never observed it And with even though gravity has many the properties of light and other electromagnetic waves That's right. Yeah, so gravity, you know, there's a

[00:49:18] Funny meme where you look at you know, it's like a picture of this guy Coulomb who Discovered the laws of the equivalent law of universal gravitation but for electric fields and then he's like looking over the shoulder and on an exam of

[00:49:35] Isaac Newton who wrote down the law of you know inverse square law and so yeah exactly Both laws are inverse square laws and both laws have Have properties of wave-like solutions. So there's gravitational waves. There's electromagnetic waves

[00:49:50] They're static, but there are big differences between gravity and electricity and magnetism too The biggest one being that you have only attractive force of gravity But you can have negative or positive, you know attractive or repulsive electromagnetism. There's no Antigravity there's no negative gravitational charges for example

[00:50:12] So and this is the theory that maybe gravity might be coming from a nearby universe So we don't so it looks like things in our universe But we don't quite understand it because it's ultimately some property of another universe, right?

[00:50:25] Yeah, that's right. So we're not sure about that I mean part of what my research is and looking for the you know the earliest signals from the Big Bangs origin so called inflation would be to potentially discover the you know

[00:50:44] Physical evidence for the origin of gravity in the sense that you know if inflation took place There will be a quantum version of gravity called a graviton or and those gravitons will be produced in a way that we could detect them

[00:50:59] Using the polarization properties of the cosmic microwave background. That's that's what I study as we talked about several times so You know kind of what we're doing is looking for primordial waves of gravity in the early universe

[00:51:12] That would be basically the oldest fossil thing you could see at all So not 400 million years like these black hole this black hole in this galaxy if that's what it turns out to be And not 400,000 years like the cosmic microwave background

[00:51:27] But actually something that's you know for you know trillions of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang Like we talked about at my TED Talk here in San Diego Which was unbelievably almost 10 years ago this year James 2014

[00:51:46] That's what we're on the same stage. That's what we met. That's what we met in the green room I feel like I must be going There must be greater gravitational pull on me because I feel like time's going faster or less gravitational pull on me

[00:51:59] Yeah, yeah, I'm going faster right now That was the physics conversation fascinating stuff as always and now we talk about more life personal stuff in another episode and it got kind of Reflective for me. So stay tuned for the next version of Brian Keating