"Black holes curve space and time around them in the way that we've been describing. Things follow along the curves in space. If the black holes move around, the curves have to follow them right? But t..."

"The following is a conversation with Jenna Levan, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist specializing in black holes cosmology of extra dimensions, topology of the universe, and gravitational waves i..."

"say that you sent me a message about not starting early in the morning, and that made me feel like we're kindred spirits. You wrote to me, "When the great physicist Sydney Coleman was asked to attend ..."

"quite fascinating because the entire idea really just started as a thought experiment. And if you think of it's 1915 1916 when Einstein fully describes relativity in a way that's the canonical formula..."

"decass crushed to a point. The black hole is the event horizon. The event horizon is really just a point in spaceime or or a region in spaceime. It's actually in this case a surface in spaceime. And i..."

"almost overkill. You don't really need to be that precise as relativity. Um and yes, it predicts the phenomenon of black holes, but doesn't really explain how nature would form them. But then it also ..."

"to say that black holes are no thing. They're nothing. Okay. So what what what does that mean? That's that's what I mean. That's the more profound aspect of the black hole. So you asked originally um ..."

"dramatic and it creates a shock wave. So that's the supernova explosion. So a lot of these they rebound because once they crunch they've reached a new critical uh capacity where they can reignite to h..."

"first steps of a global war. What I also love about that lesson is how agnostic science is because he was asking these utopian questions as were other people of the time about the nuclear physics and ..."

"together but the story of um they still weren't called black holes. This is 1939 and they had these very long-winded ways of describing the end state the catastrophic end state of gravitational collap..."

"actually above Tom's restaurant, you know, from Seinfeld near Colombia in New York. Nice. There was a a place or there still is a place there where people were giving lectures about astrophysics. And ..."

"he draws the opposite conclusion. There's a story that Oppenheimer was sitting outside of the auditorium when Wheeler was coming forth with his declaration that in fact black holes were the likely end..."

"of nuclear weapons. Very few um theoretical physicists want to see this continue. that moment in history, the Soviet Union had incredible scientists. Nazi Germany had incredible scientists and the Uni..."

"there's something interesting to think about the tension the cold war between China and the United States in the 21st century you know some of those same questions some of those ideas will rise up aga..."

"an event horizon. But what can we know and what do we know about the physics of of space time inside the black hole? I don't mind being incautious about thinking about what the math tells us. So I'm n..."

"completely rotated into my space. And this is connected with the idea that inside the black hole space and time have switched places. Um, so I might see them hover there for millennia. Other astronaut..."

"know. Yeah, at first at least, you might not realize what's happened. There are some hints. For instance, black holes are dark from the outside, but they're not necessarily dark on the inside. So this..."

"in the center. Obviously the human uh sensory system we're not able to process that information correctly right it would be a microcond in a right that would be too fast. Yeah but it would be wow it' ..."

"formed directly by collapsing out of primordial stuff. Mhm. that there's a direct collapse right into the black hole. So like in the in the very early universe, these are primordial black holes from t..."

"kind of curbed their growth. Um and so I think the mechanisms are still are still ongoing attempts to understand exactly the ordering of these things. Can we get back to spacetime? Just going back to ..."

"Um but we know mathematically how to unpack it on paper. I can mathematically suppress one of the spatial dimensions and then I can draw it pretty well. Now the problem is that we'd call it a ukitian ..."

"it can be impossible to solve some of those equations. What was so amazing about what Shell did is he found this very elegant simple solution within like a month of reading um this final formulation. ..."

"know, as a physicist and he writes all of these remarkable papers on relativity and quantum mechanics. Um and then even in 191516 he does not know that there are other galaxies out there. This this wa..."

"it very seriously and everyone else is trying to come up with models to make it go away. Um to make uh the speed of light be a little bit more reasonable like everything else in the universe. Um you k..."

"his life. And the equivalence principle comes pretty early on in his thinking. And and um it starts with something like this. Like right now I think I'm feeling gravity because I'm sitting in this cha..."

"earth's mass and shape curves the paths in space and then those curvatures tell you how to fall, the paths along which you should fall when you're falling freely. And so the Earth has found itself on ..."

"human mind is capable of things. I mean some of that is um constructing thought experiments that collide with our understanding of reality. Maybe in the collisions, in the contradictions, you try to t..."

"Mhm. We all know that we're conscious. We have a subjective experience of things. Nobody understands that people have ideas and so on. But it's such a dark sort of we're entering a dark room where a b..."

"fascinating when we're in a situation where we're pressure testing our own ideas. He did something remarkable Newton did, with his theory of gravity. Just understanding that the same phenomena was at ..."

"gravitational field. And as soon as the tree lets go of it, the apple will simply fall along the curve that exists. I would I would love it if somebody went back to Newton's time and told him all this..."

"office is bigger than my office. I know this chair this or or maybe uh you got married to this person that I was always in love with the betrayal of something. The one woman in the department. Yeah. T..."

"questions the best scientists I know often ask the simplest questions questions. Um they're they're really um first of all there's probably some confidence there, but also they're never going to lie t..."

"the discovery. But the discovery yeah absolutely the discovery is going to come because somebody couldn't sleep at night and couldn't rest. So in that way I think black holes are a kind of portal into..."

"holes because black holes are kind of this this larger um idea and uh they might have been made primordally when the big bang happened and they're there's something flawless about black holes that mak..."

"don't like to call them objects in a traditional sense unlike anything else in the universe that's macroscopic. It's kind of a little bit more like a fundamental particle. So, an electron is described..."

"thought experiments which are quite beautiful well on that topic I have to ask you about the paradox the information paradox of black holes what is it so this is what catapulted Hawkings fame when he ..."

"sense when it's in a precise location it is fundamentally no longer in a precise motion. And that uncertainty principle means I can't precisely say a particle is exactly here, but it also means I can'..."

"event horizon, now you have a real problem. Okay? Now, the pair has been separated by this event horizon. Now they can both fall in. That's okay. But if one falls in and the other doesn't it's stuck. ..."

"lighter and as it continues to do this the black hole really begins to evaporate. It does more than just radiate. It evaporates away. And um it's intriguing because Hawking said, "Look, this is going ..."

"about the event horizon or quantum mechanics isn't what we think it is but the two are not getting along anymore and just to tell you how dramatic it is so the temperature goes down with the mass of t..."

"not been fully resolved. I looked up all the different ideas for the resolution. So, there's the information loss, which is what you referred to. It's perhaps the simplest yet most radical resolution ..."

"some sense, it says there's no interior to the black hole. Nothing ever crosses. So, I gave you this very nice story that there's no drama. Sometimes that's how it's described at the event horizon and..."

"that's the case. So the no hair theorems are um formal proofs that the black hole is this featureless perfect fundamental particle that we talked about that all you can ever tell about the black hole ..."

"fully and indeed it needs to store a vast amount of information. Okay another one. This is a weird one. boy is uh ER equals EPR. This is probably it though. Oh boy. So ER equals EPR is Einstein Rosen ..."

"encoded in the area of the black hole meaning as the area grows the entropy grows it does not grow as the volume this actually turns out to be really really important If I tried to pack a lot of infor..."

"So, there's a there's some mathematics there. There's physics and then there's trying to conceal what that actually means practically for for us. Mhm. Well what it would mean for us is that informatio..."

"the event horizon isn't the fundamental uh feature on the spacetime. The fundamental feature is the quantum entanglement embroidering the event horizon. The embroidering is is just tiny wormholes. So ..."

"meaning that I will allow things to be connected non-locally by a wormhole. So that is the weirdest thing you're willing to allow for which is arbitrary distance connection of particles through a worm..."

"Um I think there I think it's impossible to predict. There has been real progress and the progress as we've said comes from the childlike curiosity of saying "Well, I don't actually understand this. I..."

"there's like a little origami of these tightly rolled up dimensions. Um, not all of them, not all the models require that they're small, but most do. String theory requires extra dimensions to make se..."

"other intelligent alien civilizations out there that are operating on a different membrane? Is is this a bit of an out there question? But I I ask it more kind of seriously like is it possible do you ..."

"different laws of physics. So if I can do some of these things on paper, like imagine a higher dimensional space in which I'm confined to a brain and there's another brain or maybe a whole array of th..."

"like some kind of weird? It is possible that there's other things that live in the bulk. I mean, last night I was calculating away looking at something that lives in the bulk. Okay, this is fascinatin..."

"go to something as crazy as extra dimensions and brain worlds and all of that. What's happening right now in the past 30 years in astronomy looking at real objects is that the number of planets, exopl..."

"how we humans are really like 50/50 here. Well, isn't that kind of appalling? I mean, just take that statement. We've only been around for like I mean couple hundred thousand years tops, you know? Um,..."

"think me as a human is a horrible thing. But if there's a lot of other alien civilizations, that's a pretty cool thing. You want to give everybody nuclear weapons half of them will figure it out, half..."

"does not even have a localized brain. Um, I don't think they have a heart or blood. I mean, they're really different from us. Okay? And that's what I think we have to start thinking about when we thin..."

"that extreme way. I mean can you think of life as cuz you said electrons is is there some degree of information processing required? So like it does something interesting in quotes with information. I..."

"energetically favorable, it's going to take off. It's really just and that's why I also think that going from inanimate um to animate is probably gray. Like the transition is gray. At what point we ca..."

"the kind of thing you need for life. You can't have a very simple linear chain and expect to get life. But I don't know, maybe sulfur would do. Okay. Okay. As we get progressively towards crazier and ..."

"the Earth that we could find ourselves on a connected compact spaceime. And so topologically um there's something we know for sure something beyond Einstein's theory that has to explain that to us. No..."

"energy. So it's not that crazy. There's something called the Casmir effect. You have two metal plates and put them really close together. You can see this kind of quantum fluctuation between the plate..."

"feature that they're saying here's what I want my wormhole to look like first. So it's like saying I want to build a building first. So they ar they construct there's an architecture of the spaceime t..."

"we've already been confronted with something that we look at the spaceime. The spaceime is expanding ever faster. We say, "What could possibly do that?" We don't know what it is. But I can tell you ab..."

"of dark energy that exists. Um so the question is just why is it it becomes why is it such such a weird value. Um not how is this conceivable because we can't conceive of it. Yeah. But if it's a weird..."

"doesn't Oh, it's really compelling. Yeah. I mean, you see um these images of uh galaxies that clusters that that pass through each other and you can see where the light is, the luminous matter is dist..."

"missing component. I wanted to say that I was been recently fascinated by the flat earth people because there's been a split in the community. Mhm. First of all, the community is fascinating study of ..."

"believe a thing? What's very interesting is um use trying to use rational arguments. So I that makes it even more confounding to me. I would understand more somebody who just said, "Look, I have faith..."

"I have to talk to you about this, one of the most incredible things that humans have ever accomplished is LIGO. Hm. We have to talk about gravitational waves. And the the very fact that we're able to ..."

"spaceime. It's really important to emphasize that it's not light. None of this has to do literally with light that we can detect with normal things that detect light. X-rays form of light. Gamma rays ..."

"would feel like to ride the gravitational wave? So like to be to exist to exist as you mentioned here would literally bob around like your orbit would change right if you were orbiting these black hol..."

"And so the idea of LIGO, this instrument, is to build a gigantic musical instrument. It's kind of like building an electric guitar where the electric guitar is recording the shape of the string and it..."

"engineering. I don't know how they did I swear I follow them around from so I just for fun I'm I'm very theoretical. I don't build things. I'm always super impressed that people can translate somethin..."

"there's great leaders that push it forward like that. Yeah, it really is. You see so many u moments when they could have stumbled. Yeah. Um and they built a first generation machine just after 2000 an..."

"know, man. the greatest engineering on the in the you know cuz I I don't know cuz you know yeah humans getting together and building the thing that's really ultimately what uh what impacts the world r..."

"know he was thinking about uncomputable numbers. So um and that led him what's an uncomputable number? A number like 0.175. It just goes on forever with no pattern and I can't I can't even figure out ..."

"um by using a combination of this thinking and just sheer ingenuity and some luck. Um but uh but the other profound revelation that Turring has is that well maybe we're just machines right and uh just..."

"instability actually. Yeah. sometimes um they're already outside of kind of social norms. They're already outside of normal connections with people. They've already made that break. Um and I think tha..."

"And maybe you'll create something special in this world and in the end it might destroy you. And I think a lot of these stories are that it's not that Oh yeah. It's not like saying, "Oh, because uh in..."

"Yeah. And but we should mention that for every girl on touring, there's millions of people who have tried and who have destroyed themselves and without without reason. I would find it impossible to no..."

"happens and he had a really I it would break me straight up break me. He had he had a proof. Yes. He announced it and they somebody found a mistake in it. That would just break me. Yeah. Because you n..."

"reference to Turring. Now some people deny this. That's nice. That's nice. Um but uh some people say he did that so his mother could believe that maybe it was an accident but yeah, quite a terrible en..."

"Pioneerics became science and art. It's not artists who all do science or scientists who do art. It's real hardcore scientists talking about science and a lot of live events. We have a magazine called..."

"it's a cool place to go and visit when in New York. Yes. You have to come see us. I think you would love it. Also, I should mention fashion. I've seen you do a bunch of talks and there's there's a lot..."

"collaboration because even though I I collaborate theoretically, I have great collaborators, Brian Green, Masimo Paratti, Dan Kat, these are my really close collaborators. Um, a lot of theoretical phy..."

"is um it's it's an remarkable uh precise, stunning, ethereal, all of these things at once. And there's no who, what, where, when, or how. Um, you might guess it's a nuclear event that kicks off the bo..."

"literature can do that. Yeah. If you could have one definitive answer to one single question. This is the thing I mentioned to you. So hard. Yeah. Well there's a there's an oracle and you get to talk ..."

"on drawing something beautiful in the sand. Yeah. Before it's washed away. Well, this was an incredible conversation. I'm truly grateful for the work you do and me for your work. Thanks so much for ha..."