How Black Holes Break Reality | Marcus Chown [Ep. 493]

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 Could a black hole erase your past? Wipe out every memory, every detail, that makes you who you are? That’s just one of the crazy questions we explore as we encounter the insane paradoxes of black holes. Black holes don’t just trap matter. They trap information too. This is what makes them one of the greatest mysteries of our universe. They challenge our fundamental understanding of physics and our reality. Everything we know about our world breaks down when we confront their mystifying properties. Today's guest, Marcus Chown, has spent years tracing the history of black holes—not just the science, but also the brilliant scientists who gave us the knowledge and insight into these marvels. From equations scribbled in the trenches of WWI to a vanishing dark star in the 1970s, Marcus takes us on a journey from discovery to understanding…of all that we know so far. His latest book, A Crack in Everything, tells the astonishing story of how black holes went from absurd fantasy to perhaps the fundamental phenomenon that shapes our entire reality. — Key Takeaways: 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:09 The most terrifying object in the universe 00:03:05 Judging a book by its cover 00:05:10 Paradoxes and information in black holes 00:10:26 Historical figures and black holes 00:23:23 The future of black hole research 00:34:44 Are black holes responsible for our existence? 00:38:53 Do black holes create universes? 00:44:06 Human stories that didn’t make it into the book 00:59:37 Outro — Additional resources: ➡️ Learn more about Marcus Chown: 📚 A Crack in Everything: https://a.co/d/5KI9iZK ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter:⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating⁠⁠⁠ 🔔 YouTube:⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1⁠⁠⁠ 📝 Join my mailing list:⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://briankeating.com/list⁠⁠⁠ ✍️ Check out my blog:⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/⁠⁠⁠ 🎙️ Follow my podcast:⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://briankeating.com/podcast⁠⁠⁠ — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:42Brian Keating?

  Could a black hole erase your past? Wipe out every memory? Every detail that makes you who you are? That's just one of the crazy questions we explore as we encounter the insane paradoxes of black holes. Black holes don't just trap matter, they trap information too. This is what makes them one of the greatest mysteries of our universe. They challenge our fundamental understanding of physics and of reality. Everything we know about our world breaks down when we confront their mystifying properties. Today's guest, Marcus Chow, has spent years tracing the history of black holes, not just the science, but also the brilliant scientists who gave us the knowledge and insight into

• 1:25Brian Keating?

  these marvelous behemoths of space and time. From equations scribbled in the trenches of World War I, to a vanishing dark star in the 1970s, Marcus takes us on a journey from discovery to understanding of all that we know so far and what we do not yet know. His latest book, A Crack in Everything, tells the astonishing story of how black holes went from absurd fantasy to perhaps the most fundamental phenomenon that shapes our entire reality. Let's go. Marcus, soon I want to ask you if black holes are actually creators? A type of force that acts as a womb, perhaps for new universes, but certainly for solar systems like our own. But first, let's start where everyone starts, as black holes as destroyers of worlds. What makes black holes?

• 2:10Brian Keating?

  The most terrifying objects in the cosmos.

• 2:12Speaker 04

  Well, the regions of space where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. So they do have this reputation for sucking in material relentlessly. And this was really a big mistake that physicists and astronomers made over the last century because they thought that they just suck in material, they're black, they're against the black of space, and they'd be actually impossible to see. But actually, one of the most striking features of, well, first of all, black holes, the black holes that we know of in the universe include some of the most luminous objects in creation. So they're far from being black. And although we can just about see material disappearing down the hole of a black hole, just about,

• 2:57Speaker 04

  the most striking feature is often of material coming out, you know, often along these Titanic jets of material which stab out through galaxies for millions of light years. So really, you know, the idea of them sucking in material is kind of, they do, but actually they kind of defy that picture. And that's basically because they're embedded in an environment. And physicists and astronomers assume that they would be black because they would be isolated. But in fact, pretty much everything in the universe is embedded in an environment. Most stars are binary stars. You know, a sun is quite unusual, being a solitary star is quite unusual. And being embedded in an environment, having a companion, having gas or dust around you, makes all the difference.

• 3:42Speaker 04

  And this leads to these objects being, in fact, incredibly luminous, even though they're black holes.

• 3:48Brian Keating?

  One thing I really loved about your writing, I always love your writing, but about the book, is that you kind of steer away from the kind of pop culture mythology of spaghettification. Yes, you mention it, of course, you have to, it's a law of nature, right? But you really get into the hard facts and physics of it. And it's no surprise because of your scientific training and your past books as well. And speaking of books, I like to do what you're never supposed to do on the show, which is a feature called Judging Books By Their Cover. So I actually bought the audiobook and rated it with an asterism of five stars. Nothing less would suffice. It's got the encomium that it well deserves from Richard Dawkins, a pretty wonderful book and from my, one of my kids' favorite astrophysicist,

• 4:32Brian Keating?

  also named Brian, Brian May, he says Marcus, Marcus Chan rocks. Wow. You can't ask for a better. So, so please, that's the back cover, but judge the front cover, title, subtitle, and this mysterious, monstrous cover art that's so beautiful.

• 4:46Speaker 04

  Glad you like it, but I should point out that there are two types of black holes. There are the theoretical black holes, which you, you talk about, which are fantastically important because, you know, major theories of physics collide in black holes. Our theory of the microscopic world, quantum theory, our theory of big things, general relativity and thermodynamics, our theory of heat, they clash and they're not melded. They predict different things in the same domain, which is gold dust for physicists because when a theory is shown to break down and Einstein's theory of gravity breaks down at the center of a black hole, then we are encouraged to look for a deeper, better theory.

• 5:28Speaker 04

  So there's, so there's theoretical black holes and of course Stephen Hawking's name is associated with those. And then there's the real black holes, which are the black holes we've actually found out in the universe. And my book is essentially about the real black holes because incredibly, not only do they exist, but they're relatively common. And as you said in your intro, that they play a role in us, us having this conversation today.

• 5:53Brian Keating?

  I need to really understand the nature of black holes. Are they really, you know, cosmic safes, hiding away information forever? Are they cosmic shredders, obliterating it beyond recovery? How do you, as an, as a, you know, as a popularizer and an explicator, exceptional explicator par excellence, how do you think of these things? How do you think of their paradoxical nature and Hawking radiation, information paradox, firewalls? Talk about how these objects are fascinating in their own right, but made even more so by the many paradoxes that they bring up.

• 6:24Speaker 04

  They are paradoxical. As I said, the, the, the real black holes in the universe are paradoxical because they are. Black, you know, they are they are fantastically luminous because of the the material that falls into them. And the friction, because it turns out that the nothing, everything in the universe is rotating, the earth is rotating, the galaxy is rotating. Which means material uh doesn't fall directly into a black hole. It kind of swirls down onto it like water down a plug hole and friction causes it, was it the heat to millions of degrees? And this is what causes them to shine. But I ought to just point out that that black holes are the simplest objects in the whole of physics. Because there's nothing, they they're made of nothing more than space and time as far as we know.

• 7:07Speaker 04

  So I ought to tell you that stellar mass black holes uh form when a star gets to the end of its life. Uh runs out of fuel with no fuel to to to burn, to generate heat, to push outwards. Gravity crushes the star and as far as we know, it crushes it down to to a point what we call a singularity. And maybe the star, as far as we know, actually vanishes. Uh and all that's left is a bottomless pit in the fabric of spacetime. This is Einstein's picture. Einstein realised that gravity was actually the curvature of spacetime. And we can't visualize it because it's a four dimensional thing. That's why it took genius of Einstein to realise. So, you know, all there is left after the star has collapsed is this bottomless pit.

• 7:49Speaker 04

  Into which from which nothing, not even like, can actually climb out. But you talked about Hawking radiation. Um you you know, a lot of people get puzzled by this. Hawking in nineteen seventy four realised that actually uh black holes glow. They they have a temperature, they are thermodynamic objects. And they they glow with this stuff called Hawking radiation that streams outwards. And people are often puzzled because they say, well, surely uh black holes are defined by by nothing ever getting out of them. Well, the Hawking radiation doesn't get out of them. It's created in the vacuum just outside the perimeter of the black hole. So we we define this kind of spherical membrane. Uh this is an imaginary membrane called the event horizon.

• 8:31Speaker 04

  And it's the point of no return for in falling light and matter. And the Hawking radiation is generated on the outside. But I mean, I know the question you're asking me, and that is. That as far as we know, in physics, information is not, is never destroyed. This is quite fundamental to, to our laws of physics. And so the question then is, if the star, the massive star shrinks down to nothing and vanishes, leaving only a, a kind of bottomless pit in spacetime. What happens to the information that describes the star? Tremendous amount of information will be required to, to, you know, tell you the, the, the type of atoms, their location, where their electrons are. You know, you can imagine, it's an incredible amount of information. The actual event horizon is not a perfect sphere.

• 9:17Speaker 04

  That it's probably got a, a microstructure. So if you were to zoom in on, in on it, on a very small scale, you would see it, it's kind of mountainous. And this, this actually impresses itself on the Hawking radiation, you know, just as your voice. Uh, or if you're on, on the radio, it presses itself on the carrier wave, the radio wave that transmits the, that your voice to the listener. This kind of microscopic terrain, um, actually impresses itself on the Hawking radiation. And it's in this microscopic terrain that the information that described the original star is recorded. So that's, that's kind of one possible way. I think that's probably the consensus. You know, you're an after physicist, Brian, you must know.

• 10:01Brian Keating?

  There's so much to unpack in this lovely book. Um, I, I recommend the audio version because it's, I always like to hear the author's voice. You didn't record the audio book, but it's close enough to an American's ear that, uh, it sounds like you, Marcus, I have to say, it's, it's wonderfully done. Although, and the printed book is as well.

• 10:17Speaker 04

  Well, I've actually recorded audio books before, so I didn't get asked on it. Well, I really, really enjoyed it. I, I mean, have you done it? I bet you have.

• 10:23Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I did it. Well, I did it for, uh, seven or eight hours of the dialogue between, uh, Galileo's, uh, world systems with my friend Carlo Raveli and, and others. So, yeah, we did it. We actually recorded the first ever audio book of Galileo.

• 10:36Speaker 04

  The last one I recorded, uh, it was two days in a recording studio. And then the third day we had one hour left. And when I got in the recording studio, they said, oh, yesterday, when I recorded eight hours, we had an, an unexplained hiss in the background. And, and could you record it again? And I mean, I was in the studio for 10 hours and I, I was kind of speechless at the end. Because I thought it was all over, but, but, but obviously there are harder jobs like working down coal mines than recording your, your, your audio book.

• 11:09Speaker 00

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• 11:39Brian Keating?

  Writing equations in the trenches of World War I. And you know, soon I want to ask you what the next great black hole discovery might be, whether it would be in theory, observation, experiment, you know, ranging from quantum gravity breakthroughs to the so-called multi-messenger astronomy and observations that we haven't dreamed of yet. But first, to really understand where we're going, we have to look at how we got to our understanding of black holes from the first place, because it's a it's a human story, too, not just about, you know, cosmic monsters and ruptures in spacetime. And it involves people like Carl Schwarzschild and Subramanian, Sharan Sehkar, and many, many others. And I wonder of all these, you know, kind of characters that you got to study, which is the most sympathetic or pathetic, perhaps? There's a lot of sadness.

• 12:24Brian Keating?

  There's a lot of debauchery, or shall I say, you know, kind of skullduggery by some unsavory characters that goes along with it, including the ignorance of underrepresented groups in astronomy to get attention. So talk about that, the history of the discovery, the theoretical predictions, and the experimental triumphs that led us to the understanding that we have now before we pave paths forward to the future.

• 12:47Speaker 04

  So the book begins with Carl Schwarzschild, who was on the outbreak of the, he was German. He was the director of the Berlin Observatory on the outbreak of the First World War. He joined the German army immediately. He had no need to. He was 40 years old, but antisemitism was on the rise in Germany, and he was Jewish. And he wanted to show he could be a patriotic German. He ended up running a weather station in Belgium, calculating shelter trajectories. He ended up at a place called Mole House, which was on the northern border of France, between France and Germany, the only bit of the Western Front that was mountainous. And in November 1950, he went on leave to see his family in Berlin. And on the 18th of November,

• 13:29Speaker 04

  1915, il a assisté à une conférence par Albert Einstein. Et Einstein, dans quatre conférences en novembre 1915, a présenté sa nouvelle théorie de la gravité révolutionnaire. Et Schwarzschild était complètement captivé, il est revenu à la frontière, et il a fait quelque chose que Einstein pensait être impossible. Et donc, ce que vous devez réaliser est que Einstein a montré, vous savez, Newton a dit qu'il y avait une... que la gravité était effectivement une tige invisible qui connectait la Terre et le soleil et qui gardait la Terre en orbite pour toujours. Einstein a réalisé que c'était incorrect. Quelle est la gravité, ce que une masse comme le soleil fait en fait, c'est qu'il va dans un lac dans le temps et le lieu, dans un lac. Je l'ai dit avant, vous ne pouvez pas vraiment voir ce lac.

• 14:11Speaker 04

  Et la Terre va dans le sens où elle se trouve, dans le lac, plutôt comme une balle de roulette dans une roue de roulette. Donc, la gravité est en fait la courbe de l'espace. Maintenant, une chose que vous devez savoir est que Newton a utilisé une formule pour caractériser la gravité, et Einstein a utilisé dix. Donc, en fait, trouver la courbe de l'espace pour n'importe quel corps utile, comme une étoile, était considéré par Einstein comme impossible. Mais, dans une couple de semaines, Schwarzschild, à la frontière occidentale, a trouvé la solution, l'a envoyé à Einstein. Einstein était étonné de recevoir une lettre de la frontière occidentale, et puis de trouver qu'il y avait quelque chose dans ça qui était considéré comme impossible, vous savez. Et il a présenté ce résultat à l'Académie des sciences prussienne. Mais Schwarzschild n'avait pas fini et a réalisé que si...

• 14:55Speaker 04

  en gros, il a trouvé la courbe, désolé, autour d'une masse sphérique, qui était la forme du lac entre le temps et l'espace. Et puis il a réalisé que si cette masse devait devenir plus et plus compressée, le lac deviendrait plus steep, jusqu'à ce que finalement il devienne une pente infinie à laquelle la lumière ne pouvait pas fuir. Et donc, l'objet serait fermé de l'université, il serait noir. Il a envoyé ça à Einstein. Einstein l'a présenté à nouveau à l'Académie prussienne. Il n'a jamais cru en croire des trous noirs jusqu'à sa mort. Et il y a une raison évidente pour ça. Il a pris dix ans de sang et de sang pour trouver sa nouvelle théorie et pour découvrir qu'en quelques semaines de le présenter, qu'il y avait en fait un endroit où il s'est brisé. Je vous l'ai dit avant, que si une étoile s'effondre, il n'y a rien pour la bloquer.

• 15:39Speaker 04

  Shrinking down to a point, we call it a singularity, when everything skyrockets to infinity, the density or whatever. When you get that in a formula, when you get that in a theory, it tells you your theory has been stretched to a point beyond which it's got anything sensible to say. So Schwarzschild, and then sadly, you know the story. Sadly, had a disease called Pnephagus vulgaris in late December, in nineteen fifteen, when he was writing to Einstein, he got these blisters in his mouth. They spread all over his body, took a long time for them to be diagnosed, but this is a disease in which the immune system attacks the skin, and the skin, of course, is your barrier against infection, against microorganisms. So he knew he was going to die.

• 16:21Speaker 04

  And he actually went back to Berlin and died in May nineteen fifteen. But his idea did not die with him. And I just, there's a lot of things I could tell you, but you asked me about people who I would like to talk about. And one of them is Louise Webster, who has been entirely written out of the history of science. She was the co-discoverer of black holes with Paul Merdin in nineteen seventy one. And of course, if you've read my book, you've read my book, of course. I was switched on to black holes at the age of twelve, because I was a member of the Junior Astronomical Society, and my dad took me to a talk in London by someone called Paul Merdin, who hobbled towards the stage. And on crutches, he had childhood polio.

• 17:07Speaker 04

  And he proceeded to talk about this object called Cygnus X one, which was the first black hole candidate. And it blew my mind, it blew my twelve year old mind, you know, so. But it's only recently I discovered that he actually co-discovered it with a woman called Louise Webster. They were both thirty years old, she was Australian, and she went back to Australia. And she had liver disease, and she had one of the very first successful liver transplants in Australia. But sadly, got cancer and she died at forty nine. And she's been completely forgotten. So if you remember anything about this podcast today, remember the name of the co-discoverer of black holes, Louise Webster.

• 17:49Speaker 04

  Also know that you know pulsars or neutron stars, these are another collapsed form of stars. So if a star is not massive enough to collapse all the way down to singularity, it can form what we call a neutron star, which is a star basically about the size of, I don't know, half the size of San Diego. But but with the mass of the sun and you know, a sugar cube of material of a neutron star would weigh as much as a human race, a super dense object. They were discovered by Joseph Bell, who was a graduate student at Cambridge in 1967. And there have been three Nobel Prizes, four pulsars, and none have gone to her.

• 18:33Speaker 04

  So the two types of stars, what we call relativistic stars, the two types of stars are endpoints of stellar evolution and that require relativity to understand. Black holes and neutron stars were both discovered by women.

• 18:47Brian Keating?

  I had Dame Bell Burnell on the podcast. I had her on December 10th in 2023, which you'll recognize as the day the Nobel Prizes are given away. So I wanted to make sure that at least, you know, we celebrated the proper way. There's one other object that plays sort of, it might have been a red herring or it might have been kind of a false start, but but is integral to the story of black holes. And that's their, you know, kind of mirror image, white dwarves, at least. The story that you weave so beautifully starts off with a young Subramanian Chandrasekhar traveling and then ultimately getting undercut. And that delaying the progress of not only the discovery of black holes, but theoretical astrophysics for decades to come.

• 19:30Brian Keating?

  He eventually did get recognition with a Nobel Prize, but not until he was quite old. So talk about him, his discoveries, why they're so important and how they segue into the black hole narrative.

• 19:40Speaker 04

  Well, of course, nobody who thought about it wanted to believe in black holes. I mean, this is the story of people over the last century being dragged, kicking and screaming, having to consider these objects because no one wanted to think about the singularity at the center, where everything breaks down, and certainly Einstein didn't want to believe it. So anyone after about 1915 who thought about it, which were very few people, thought there's got to be some other force that intervenes that stops a massive star or the core of a massive star at the end of its life from shrinking down to an infinitely dense point to a singularity. There's got to be something that stops it. And in the 1920s, That something turned up, which was of course what we call quantum theory.

• 20:22Speaker 04

  Quantum theory is our very best description of the microscopic world and their of atoms and their constituents. You know, it's given us lasers, nuclear reactors, iPhones, you know, basically created the the modern world. There's a principle called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. And all we really need to know is that if you try and compress something like a proton or electron or whatever into a small volume, it resists. And this is not anything to do with its temperature. It's not the fact that it's flying around because it's because it's got temperature. This is a fundamental. This is a fundamental thing. And so anyone who thought about it thought, well, actually, and there were people at Cambridge in in England, like Ralph Fowler, who thought about this thought, well, actually, this runaway

• 21:07Speaker 04

  catastrophic gravitational collapse will be stopped. And then a nine, as you say, a nineteen year old Indian from Madras, which is now Chennai, I believe in India, was on his way to Cambridge to be to do a degree. And he was sitting on the deck of his ship as it went through the Suez Canal. And he was thinking about the death of stars. And he happened to know about a quantum theory and he knew a bit about stars. And he realized that everyone who thought about this problem had missed out one key element. And that was Einstein's theory of relativity, which basically gives an upper limit to the speed of anything.

• 21:50Speaker 04

  So if you compress, a star gets the end of its life and it shrinks and its electrons get pushed together, they can push back through the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. They push back, you know, rather like, you know, raindrops on a on a roof, you know, spattering on a roof. Uh, but there's a Pushing New Yorkers. Yeah, the the limit, there's a limit to how fast they can push back because they cannot move faster than the speed of light. And he realized that there was actually, if the star was more massive, what we called it, what we, its name was Supermanian Chandrasekhar. We now call it the Chandrasekhar limit if a star is more than about one and a half times the mass of the sun. This Heisenberg Certain principle, what we call degeneracy pressure, could not prevent the star from collapsing.

• 22:34Speaker 04

  So if the star, at the end of which it was more massive, a black hole would be the outcome. And as you say, probably the greatest, one of the greatest astronomers of his day, Arthur Eddington, the, the, one of the two people who had understood Einstein's theory of gravity in nineteen fifteen. The other was Willem de Sitter, who was a, a Dutch physicist. Uh, but Eddington, um, understood it and, and, and presented it to the English speaking world. He was, I mean, I remember there was a poll, um, I think it was in the twenties or thirties in America of who was the, uh, you know, the top ten astronomers in the world. And he was ranked by American astronomers as the number one astronomer.

• 23:15Speaker 04

  And Eddington just did not believe in this limit, this, this Chandrasekhar limit. And, and it's very hard to understand why he didn't. Because he just said, the world does not work this way. Nature does not work this way, which is not really much of an argument. And he did his best to completely undermine Chandrasekhar and in fact humiliate him. Chandrasekhar gave a presentation at the Royal Astronomical Society in London. And, um, he did not know that Eddington, well, Eddington was going to go to talk after him. And he did not know that Eddington's talk was to entirely undermine him. And poor old Chandrasekhar had to even move to another field of, of astronomy.

• 23:58Speaker 04

  Because he knew he, he could not compete with Eddington because Eddington was such a powerful figure. But as you just say, he, in nineteen eighty-three, he was vindicated. He got the Nobel Prize. Uh, Eddington died, I think in the Second World War. Uh, never got the Nobel Prize, but, but Chandrasekhar did. Uh, uh, and he was very hurt all of his life, although he was always said that he admired Eddington. And I was there actually, uh, on the spot at Caltech. When Willie Fowler got the Nobel Prize in nineteen eighty-three. And Chandrasekhar shared the physics Nobel Prize that year.

• 24:37Speaker 00

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• 25:06Brian Keating?

  So given the fact that I see the black hole story as sort of a relay race, not a marathon, but bold ideas, you know, kind of first promulgated by theorists outpacing experimentalists and instrument builders, but that kind of, you know, trickles down when, when we reach the limit of measuring, you know, massive and super massive black holes. We went, as I understand, the, the trajectory that this subject took, thanks to your book, white dwarves, then followed by neutron stars, and then eventually pulsars, and then black holes. And, and theory was always in front. And even it was in front for a long time with gravitational waves. I've spoken to, you know, all three, Kit Thorne, Barry Barish, and Ray Weiss on this podcast, as well as people like Shep Dolman from the Event

• 25:51Brian Keating?

  Horizon Telescope. What do you see as the future of this marriage between theory, phenomenology, observation, instrument builders of chasing down the impossible? What's going to be the next frontier? Is it some new developments in theory? Or have we reached the end of theory? Is it some new technological device that we don't have yet? Or is it some huge budget to build larger and larger instruments to the kind of which we do have? Where do you see the future of this field going?

• 26:20Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, it's incredibly exciting. So first of all, you just mentioned gravitational waves, which are like ripples in the fabric of spacetime. I mean, basically a tsunami in the fabric of spacetime. But of course, by the time we pick up these, these signals, they filled a huge volume of space and become massively diluted. But they were detected in, on the 14th of September 2015, predicted by Einstein in 1916. Because, you know, mass or energy can warp space. It can Also ripple it, it can also jiggle it and and knows what gravitational waves are. The first discovery was of two black holes which had merged and I think there were something like one was about thirty five times the mass of the sun, the other one about fifty, something like that. This was much, much bigger than anyone had expected.

• 27:04Speaker 04

  And we're now seeing mergers, we've seen about a hundred now, including neutron star mergers and black hole neutron star mergers. And we're seeing black holes which are much more massive than actually could possibly exist. So there is actually a gap, a mass gap where we do not expect to see max black holes. And that is because when a star is massive enough, we get what was called a pair instability supernova and the star blows itself completely apart. So there is no implosion at the centre to form a black hole. So we shouldn't see any black holes in a particular range, yet we do see them. So what we're learning is that the black holes we're seeing merging, pairs that we're seeing merging, spiralling together and merging individually had actually merged before.

• 27:49Speaker 04

  So this process of merging is quite common. That's going to continue and and we're going to be surprised by what we actually discover. I think probably one of the most amazing things is the James Webb Space Telescope, which is, you know, showing us the pretty newborn universe when it was maybe two or three percent its current age. And we're beginning, we're seeing these supermassive black holes or we're seeing evidence of these supermassive black holes, very, very large, very early on. So we're seeing billion solar mass, uh, supermassive black holes within, you know, three or four hundred million years of the big bang. And and that's quite difficult to understand, but I think there's some evidence. I mean, there are these things called red dots you've probably heard about, which have been seen. And they may well be black holes

• 28:34Speaker 04

  enshrouded in a, in a very, very dense shell of material. And so sucking in material at a rate greater than they ought to be able to do. So we may get this pretty soon, I hope, the solution to where these massive black holes come from. Now, I ought to just say, what I haven't told you is there's probably a complete spectrum of of black holes from stellar mass up to. Really large ones, but, but, but we, we, we basically see two populations. One is stellar mass black holes, which we believe form when in supernovae, a star blows itself apart. Paradoxically, the core implodes. In fact, it's the implosion that drives the explosion.

• 29:14Speaker 04

  And then we see these supermassive black holes and, and the biggest ones are something like 60 billion times the mass of the sun. And their origin is a complete mystery. We're seeing them very, very early on in the universe. So, so we believe that black holes start off quite small. I mean, it could have been an early generation of stars that formed very shortly after the big bang. There's a lot of evidence that they would have been more massive than stars today. So it's quite possible they would have gone through their livestock stories, their, their lifefishers quite quickly exploded up for produced black hole. Those black holes maybe would have merged, sucked in material, but it's quite difficult to see how a black hole could grow from stellar mass to a billion times the mass of the sun in the available time. So that's, that's a really big mystery.

• 29:58Speaker 04

  I mean, it could be and theoretically that they are spawned in some way in the, in the big bang itself, in the turbulent conditions in the big bang. That would be very interesting. So I think, you know, to answer your question, I think the origin of supermassive black holes would be, that would be, that's an incredibly important question to answer. But, but, so let's face it, there's one, Hubble Space Telescope discovers in the 1990s that there's actually a supermassive black hole in the heart of pretty much every galaxy. In fact, essentially every galaxy. So we don't know what they're doing there. Did they come first? Were there supermassive black holes formed in the universe? And then maybe they gathered material ratten, which then collapsed to form stars. So were they the seeds around which galaxies form?

• 30:42Speaker 04

  Or were the galaxies formed first and then maybe there were very dense clusters in the centre that ended up forming a supermassive black hole. So we don't understand anything really about the origin of supermassive black holes. So the story of my book basically is how black holes are coming from the cold. So as you said in your introduction, Brian, at the very beginning, they were so ridiculous as to not even be considered a preserve of science fiction. But gradually, last century, they've moved more and more into the centre of, of science. When we realised that they had to exist because we discovered, Martin Schmidt at Caltech discovered quasars, which are

• 31:22Speaker 04

  Often pump out a hundred times the amount of of light of a normal galaxy from a volume, maybe the same size of the of the solar system. So that was nineteen sixty three. Within a year, theorists had realised that it was only one possible source of that energy, and that was material swirling down like water down a plug hole, you know, on onto a black hole, being heated to millions of degrees and shining that way, but not a black hole of a few times the mass of the sun, a black hole of billions or or tens of billions times the mass of sun. So supermassive black holes. But then we thought, well, quasars, they are what we call active galaxies. There's a there's a whole lot zoo of them. But basically, they're galaxies. We define them as galaxies that are generating most of their light,

• 32:06Speaker 04

  not from stars, but from a accretion disk, what we call around a supermassive black hole. And at that point, you know, only one percent of of galaxies were active galaxies. So we could think, well, they're not really important. We can sweep them into a carpet. They're anomalies. And then we discovered there's one in every single galaxy. And and the reason that we only see them in only one percent of galaxies are active is because in only one percent of galaxies are they being fed. So in ninety nine percent of galaxies, they've sucked in all the gas and ripper but ripper but stars and and they're slumbering, you know, they're slumbering. And and of course, there's a supermassive black hole in the centre of our own galaxy, although it's a tidler.

• 32:45Brian Keating?

  That's right. Compared to our big brothers and M eighty seven. I want to quote a lyric from the famous astrophysicist, not Brian May, but from Leonard Cohen. And it goes like this, ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There's a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. And I interpreted the title of your book along those lines, in that you present black holes as this confluence between all the major ideas of of physics, modern physics, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, information theory, general relativity, special relativity, they all sort of break down at one level or another. How important is that narrative, you know, where the cracks are

• 33:26Brian Keating?

  what reveal the truth and and why and why we shouldn't as physicists be afraid of of flaws? And cracks in our most cherished theories and ideas.

• 33:35Speaker 04

  Well, you've put your finger on exactly what the title means, you know, because, you know, in physics, places where our known laws of physics break down are are are gold mines, you know, they're really what we look for. You know, we look for paradoxes, we look for places where there are certainly where there are two theories that predict for the in the same domain, different things, then we know that one or both of those theories is wrong. And there is a great, I saw this survey, a a psychological survey. And it was about people who were willing to change their point of view, you know, it was talking about politics, but people are willing to change their point of view. And the people who scored highest are the people who were most likely to change their view were people with a scientific background.

• 34:17Speaker 04

  And that is because they actually enjoy seeing, you know, that they enjoy being proved wrong. So really, you know, scientists get a lot of joy out of out of finding out that their theories don't work. Because they're constantly looking for the deeper, better theory. And and really, our scientific theories are provisional, you know, they are, they are the best description we have at this moment. But we know they break down. So, you know, to everyone but Einstein, who was not happy with black holes. Uh, black holes are are of gold dust, you know, I mean, they're they're if we get contradictions in physics. And we are challenged by nature to come up with a better theory. And the better theory we expect, but we could be wrong, is what we call a quantum theory of gravity.

• 35:02Speaker 04

  Where we unite our our theory of the very small, uh, which is quantum theory with our theory of the very big, which is general relativity. Because in a in a black hole, something very big becomes very small, you know, a star shrinks smaller than an atom. So we we we need to unite these to understand what happens in the center of a black hole. And coincidentally, uh, where the universe came from, because we believe that the universe also began in a singularity. Although a singularity in time rather than a singularity in space, but similar kinds of things. So so, yeah, and I was I was saying about how how how scientists actually revel in in having to change their mind, you know, because really, I mean, if you go back. Fifty years. I mean, our picture of the of the of the universe is entirely different

• 35:46Speaker 04

  to the picture that we have now. I mean, imagine how many objects that we we know of now in the universe that we didn't know about. I'm thinking of things like gamma ray bursters, which were actually they were known about, but the US military was keeping them a secret, discovered them because it was trying to find the gamma rays produced by clandestine Russian nuclear tests. It was it was using spy satellites to do that. And it discovered this, you know, a burst of gamma rays once a day from somewhere in the sky. Fortunately, those satellites, they could tell where they were coming from. Otherwise, it would they would have triggered a nuclear war. They knew that they were not coming from the Russians. They were coming from Spain. Black holes are just really challenging.

• 36:27Speaker 00

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• 36:57Brian Keating?

  Yes. Yeah, it's a unique laboratory for understanding physics at the extremes. I want to mention something you hinted at before I get to the creation of the universe from black holes. Maybe we can touch upon an interesting theory that you discuss in the book, which, by the way, you don't discuss cosmic natural selection, which we're going to get to in a minute. But you do discuss how our existence might be owed, in fact, to black holes. Can you elaborate on that for our listeners that might be shocked again to hear such a such a wild idea?

• 37:26Speaker 04

  This is the greatest irony. So, you know, they start off, you know, as really not even a preserve of science fiction, and they move so far in the to the center of our picture that we actually think that first of all, they they play some key and mysterious role, still mysterious role in generating the universe we see around us, but specifically in us having this conversation. It comes down to, I told you, every galaxy's got a Massive black hole in its core and we've got one. It's called Sagittarius A star, it was discovered in nineteen seventy four, so fifty one years ago. Two people in twenty twenty Andrea Getz, astronomer in California, and Reinhard Genzel in Germany won a Nobel Prize in twenty twenty four, working out its mass and its mass is four point two

• 38:11Speaker 04

  million times the mass of the Sun. But this is, this is a mystery. Because this is really, really tiny. This is thousands of times smaller than the supermassive black holes in active galaxies like quasars. And if we compare the Milky Way with Andromeda, Andromeda is the nearest big galaxy, a galaxy that's a spiral galaxy. And very, very similar to the Milky Way, its supermassive black hole is fifty times bigger. So why have we got such a tiny, tiny supermassive black hole connected to us being here? Because in, I, I, I said in the beginning, in the galaxies with big black holes, they have these tremendous titanic jets that stab outwards from the north and south poles of the spinning black holes. Stab outwards often not only millions of light years through space, but sometimes

• 38:56Speaker 04

  a hundred billion light years through space. I mean, it's, it's shocking me. But how they, how they stay collimated, how they stay narrow for that long is, is still a mystery. But what in, in the galaxies with the big supermassive black holes, these jets can push away, drive away all the gas in the centre of galaxies. Now that's the raw material of new stars. So in these galaxies, the star formation is, is kind of snuffed out after one generation. But it didn't happen in our galaxy because we've got a tidler of a black hole. We've probably never had any powerful jets at all. And, and so we've had multiple generations of stars and our Sun is a third generation star and in each successive generation, which forms from the raw material, you know, of the exploding stars of the previous generation.

• 39:41Speaker 04

  In each successive generation, more heavy elements are forged, so more carbon, more oxygen, more iron, more calcium.

• 39:49Brian Keating?

  That brings up this, this little artifact that I give away to my listeners. If you go to briankeen.com/list, this is a meteorite, which is a fragment probably of a population two star that eventually Well, as to be a part of our solar system as a bridge between the earlier and later generations. So these stars give their lives to make our lives possible.

• 40:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, and now because of our small black hole, it has been possible for there to be multiple generations of stars. And I just listed those elements and those elements that have been forged because we've had multiple generations, because we have a small silver black hole. Those elements are precisely the ones needed to make your meteorite, to make a rocky planet like the earth and to make biological life like you and me. We could not be having this conversation in, for instance, M87. You mentioned M87. This is a nearby galaxy with a 6.5 billion solar mass black hole. Image was publicized in 2019, the first ever image of a black hole. And we could not have arisen in that galaxy. So we believe that that galaxy is probably a biological desert.

• 40:56Speaker 04

  It's remarkable that we've come from thinking that these objects were so ridiculous as not to be the preserve of art fiction to thinking that we're having this conversation because of a black hole Sagittarius star.

• 41:06Brian Keating?

  And that brings me to this provocative question that I've been teasing the listeners about since the first few seconds. We started off the conversation with a description of black holes as predators, as paradox machines. And I promised I'd come back to this idea that the black hole might not be the end of the story when it comes to producing life on earth. What about if it's the cause not only of our existence on this beautiful podcast, but of entire universes like our own within the multiverse? And just for the readers and listeners that are not familiar, rather, Lee Smallin, past guest on the podcast, proposed that black holes might actually spawn new universes, each one with slightly mutated laws of physics, a kind of cosmic natural selection. He calls it that, in fact, CNS.

• 41:50Brian Keating?

  Now, I noticed in the book, I didn't see it, and that was a little bit surprising. I don't believe you mentioned cosmic natural. You mentioned Lee, Lee is in there, I think, one or two times. But I'm curious, first of all, why didn't you mention it? Was it a little bit of a bridge too far? Or is there actually some justification for treating these black holes not only as, you know, fertilization?

• 42:12Brian Keating?

  Within galaxies for life like us to exist, but also for universes on to themselves to exist. In other words, within the multiverse to explain the peculiar qualities of our own. Is this a bridge too far or are black holes not tombstones, but rather cosmic universal cradles?

• 42:30Speaker 04

  I think it's a bridge too far and the reason is that my book is principally about real black holes. You know, black holes that we've actually discovered. So it's the, you know, it culminates with, you mentioned the event horizon telescope. Getting the first ever images of Sagittarius O star and M eighty seven, the, the black holes. My last chapter is about speculative ideas, but I didn't mention this one. And, and one of the reasons is that we really don't know what it's like inside a black hole. So I've got the, the stories from people like Paul Merdin, who was the co-discoverer of stellar mass black holes. And Roy Kerr, who was a really interesting character, he's now ninety one years old. He basically came up with the first development in Einstein's theory of gravity for forty seven years. And he did something which people thought was impossible.

• 43:15Speaker 04

  He discovered the shape of the spacetime around a spinning black hole. Now, I told you everything in the universe is spinning. So actually Schwarzschild had come up with the, the shape around a static black hole. So that wasn't very realistic. So he came up with a, a description which describes every single black hole in the universe. He was twenty nine at the time. He himself gave up on working out what the spacetime was like within, inside a black hole. Because the problem was just too difficult to solve. So we really don't know what it's like inside a black hole. Not only can we not solve Einstein's equations to find out what the shape of the spacetime is inside a black hole. But we certainly don't know what it's like near the singularity because the singularity is, is, doesn't exist, by the way, I should tell you that.

• 43:58Speaker 04

  Uh, when a singularity appears in a, in a theory, it's toast, your theory is broken, you need a better theory. So we need a quantum theory of gravity to tell us what exactly is at the center of a black hole and we don't know what that is. So saying that, that, you know, it connects to another, another region of spacetime, that it's a time machine. It generates another, another black hole or another universe. This is so, so far removed from what we can confidently talk about that I didn't really.

• 44:27Speaker 04

  It's really, there's loads of other books about black holes. Most books about black holes are about theoretical black holes, about Hawking radiation. I love Lee Smolin's idea. I hope he's correct. But, but again, it's not very well founded. And the problem is, once you start admitting not very well founded ideas into this, you have a book which is a hundred times longer than the book that you were writing. And people get lost, you know, what, what do we know and what that we don't know. My thought is really that the things that we know are so fantastic and so amazing that we, we don't need to really spec. Thank you more. Again, you know, I mean, if, if you, I mean, I'm thinking of something else like dark matter.

• 45:07Speaker 04

  So with dark matter, which was this invisible stuff that, that fills the universe outweighs the visible stars and galaxies by about a factor of six. We can speculate and there's literally hundreds of speculations as to what that dark matter could be. But it doesn't really get us anywhere. And the reader then gets confused by all these hundreds and hundreds of possible suggestions, none of which are constrained by physics because we've never detected any. So, yeah, no, I think Lee, because Lee Smolin wrote a wonderful book, didn't he? It was called, what was it called now?

• 45:40Brian Keating?

  And the life of the cosmos.

• 45:40Speaker 04

  Life of the cosmos, yeah, about black holes. Yeah. So basically he says that the conditions necessary to create black holes, the laws of physics necessary to create black holes. Are also the laws of physics necessary to create biological life. So that the two are hand in hand. So, so the universes that create the most born, the most black holes, I think that's correct, isn't it?

• 46:03Brian Keating?

  Produces conscience of nature and, and laws of physics that are compatible. It's an anthropic, what's called a weak anthropic.

• 46:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that is, you know, I mean, obviously, as Einstein said, the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is it's comprehensible.

• 46:17Speaker 04

  Which is a fantastic remark, isn't it really?

• 46:20Speaker 00

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• 46:50Brian Keating?

  Well, one thing I appreciated with bittersweetness was your mentioning the bicep two affair, which I played a not insignificant role in. And it made me think of some of the more, again, there's a lot of, you know, pathos in these. Our mutual friend, John Levin, who you write about in the book, has written the Black Hole Blues about the, you know, kind of stories of, of the unsung heroes, the lovable losers and so forth. And one of them, you know, which I resonate with, no pun intended, actually pun intended, it was a good pun, is Joseph Weber. So he, of course, was, you know, claiming that he had detected gravitational waves, you know, three or four decades before Igo actually did it. And it was only because of a slight amount of hubris, I think it's safe to say that

• 47:32Brian Keating?

  on his part, that he never really gave up the belief that he had discovered these first. And it let me think about all the false starts and the, and the curious characters in this book. You know, you mentioned Louise and you mentioned Johnson Bell and others, but are there other stories, maybe that didn't fit into the book or perhaps would be in an additional book? Are there other, you know, sort of human stories that, that were neglected? You know, because we look at the black hole and it's not unlike a black mirror. We, we learn about the subterfuge and the chicanery and the stolen credit and the stolen valor in this book very delightfully. Were there other characters that you didn't get a chance to disclose that maybe the public has a, would have a desire in knowing more about?

• 48:14Speaker 04

  A lot of science writers tend to write science as if it's like, you know, one way street, everything, you know, it's a logical timeline, but in fact, scientists are human beings. They proposed the existence of things for the wrong reasons. Progress of science is like a drunkard's walk, you know? Two steps forwards, a few backwards, you know. I mean, your subject, I know, is the uh is the cosmic background radiation, it's the afterglow of the big bang. Um my first popular science book was called Afterglow Creation, and I went to interview lots of people who unfortunately are dead. I talked to Robert Wilson, who discovered the microwave background, uh to people like Bob Dickey and David Wilkinson and all these kind of people.

• 48:55Speaker 04

  But I mean, interestingly, I mean, one of the one of the great, great figures was George Gamow. He basically came up with the idea of the hot big bang, you know, I mean, I mean, common sense, I suppose, tells you that if the universe was was smaller, it would have been hotter, because if you, you know, squeeze the air in a bicycle pump, it gets hotter. But no one had really thought seriously about that. So Edwin Hubble discovered the universe was expanding in nineteen twenty nine, which meant that if you ran the history of the universe back in your mind's eye like the movie in reverse, you would come to a point when it was all compressed into a small space, you know, call it a big bang. But no one really thought more about it. It was so ridiculous to think that they could think about physics then. But then then we get George Gamow, who was a Ukrainian um American physicist.

• 49:41Speaker 04

  And he was very interested in when where the chemical elements had came from. There was a lot of evidence from the early twentieth century that the universe had begun with the simplest element, and that all the other elements, ninety two naturally occurring ones, had been assembled by these these atoms or nuclei coming together. But that required a lot of heat. Turns out that the the nuclei, the cores of atoms are positively charged. And when you try and thrust together two positively charged nuclei, that they really repel ferociously. So you really have to smash them together at very high speed, and that means high temperature. We just mentioned, by the way, Arthur Eddington, and one of the greatest, one of the greatest British astronomers.

• 50:23Speaker 04

  But he had made a mistake, and he thought that that, well, he he had an idea that elements could not be built in inside stars. By this time, they knew in about the nineteen thirties that hydrogen nuclei, the the cores of hydrogen atoms.

• 50:40Speaker 04

  They were glued together in a multi-step process to make the second heaviest element helium. This would liberate enough energy to explain sunlight or starlight. But he, he thought, Eddington, that as the sun rotated, there would be currents, what we call meridional currents, which would kind of spread out that helium. So if you imagine the helium is the ash. So, so basically, this, this would actually cause stars to, to fizzle out. He had managed to rule out stars as the place where elements were built. So Gamow was thinking, where else? You know, and this is when he started thinking about the universe. When it was small, it would have been very hot. And he thought, that's just it. That's the place, you know?

• 51:24Speaker 04

  And he got his pre-students in Washington, Ralph Alfer and Robert Herman, to work out the details because Gamow was not a details man. He came up with a lot of brilliant ideas in his life, but he was not a details man. And they worked it all out and they realized that incredibly, you could actually end up with 10% of the atoms in the universe. There's helium, 90% hydrogen, but you couldn't get really beyond that at all. So you could, and it turns out that 10% of the atoms in the universe are hydrogen. So again, so he comes up with the idea of the hot big bang for entirely the wrong reason, but he's correct. You know, and then again, when they, when, when people started searching for this afterglow,

• 52:09Speaker 04

  there was a team at Bell Labs in Hong Kong, in New Jersey. And there was also a team remarkably, only about 20 miles away in Princeton. And they had a little, little radio dish or radio horn on their roof. The leader of their team was a guy called Bob Dickey. And he had the idea that the universe was pulsating, you know, it was what, so he. Cycling. Yeah, like, like a cyclic universe, like a giant beating heart. So there would, there would, there would be a big bang, it would expand. Gravity would eventually crack it down to a big crunch and it'd expand again. And you realize that this, this beating heart universe would have radiation over, you know, there'd be something like. A billion, ten billion photons for every particle, matter or so.

• 52:53Speaker 04

  So his team was looking for this this afterglow for entirely the wrong reason because the universe we don't believe the universe is pulsated either. This has happened with the discovery of planets. I mean, the first planets were found around a pulsar, weren't they? I can't remember.

• 53:07Brian Keating?

  Yeah, there was a planet around the pulsar.

• 53:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, obviously, it couldn't be, there couldn't be any life on them because a pulsar is a super dense object with a lot of radiation around it. But this triggered people to actually look at real stars, you know, because they detected, they detected it by the wobble of the star. So the star, the pulsar, was moving backwards and forwards because it was being periodically tugged from one side and the other side by a planet. And this got people looking at real stars. And sure enough, they began to find planets. So now we've probably got five or six thousand extra solar planets that have been found. So again, you know, there's all these accidental things that actually happen. I really love this, the way this worked. One of my heroes is Fred Hoyle, who was at Caltech.

• 53:52Speaker 04

  But he, he in fact, quacked the problem of where all the, all the elements in your body come, come from. He found the about eight or nine processes, nuclear processes in stars that made all the elements. He put together some pieces of information. He was working on radar during the Second World War. He came to America. In that time, he was supposed to be doing war work, but he went to California. He met an astronomer for water, Bader, who was at Caltech. Bader gave him some papers on supernovae, stars that explode. And on his way back, he got delayed in Montreal because of bad weather. And he bumped into a lot of people that he knew from Cambridge. And he knew they'd been working on a project called Tube Alloys,

• 54:35Speaker 04

  which was the British project to build an atomic bomb, you know. So he knew, and he, he gathered from reading between the lines that there was a problem. There was a problem that they, they had a problem trying to build an atomic bomb. And he couldn't think what the problem could be. He knew that one of the elements that would be used was plutonium. And he realised that plutonium, as you push two bits together to To get a critical mass would generate so much heat that it would push itself apart. So the only way you could actually create the nuclear reactions of a of a nuclear bomb was to implode this stuff. In Bader, Bader, it had realised that supernova were exploded by the implosion of stars.

• 55:18Speaker 04

  And he put the two ideas together and he thought, is it the implosion of a star at the end of its life that creates the billions of degrees necessary to meet heavy elements? So the idea had come from the atomic bomb. So it's just weird the way all the ideas come together. And and he was able to show in about nineteen forty six that you could, in what we we would get what's called nuclear thermodynamic equilibrium. Basically, the the the relative abundance of elements would freeze out. And he was able to show that the relative abundance of these elements like iron and nickel and all these these was exactly what we'd observed.

• 55:58Speaker 04

  And so that was, it's the information which came from the atomic is just being delayed in Montreal, that bit of information that gave him, he was able to predict the relative abundances of some elements. And then he came to Caltech in nineteen fifty three. And the reason he came to Caltech was because he was at a conference in Italy on galaxies. And Walter Bader had presented a result in which he realised that the distance indicators, there were two types of what we call CFI variables, and and we had not realised there were two types. And if you realise this, you realise that in fact the universe was twice as old as we had thought.

• 56:41Speaker 04

  And he had presented this in a paper, but there has been, there were two people in the audience who then quickly published a paper with Bader's result as if it was theirs. And Hoyle had been sitting there because they didn't have a secretary to record the the results. And he was able to prove that Bader had had his idea stolen. And Bader was so pleased that when he went back to Caltech, he wrote to Hoyle and said, I've persuaded people here to to have you come over. Would you like to come over? He went over, he met Willie Fowler, who was a nuclear physicist, and he had a prediction. You probably know this prediction, that the problem in in building up the elements is when you get to helium, if you stick two helium nuclei together, you get beryllium eight and it's not stable.

• 57:26Speaker 04

  So how do you get to heavier elements? So he thought maybe occasionally three helium nuclei collide at the same moment. It's probably like, you know, in a supermarket car park, three people with their shopping trolleys all collide at the same time. And if this reaction with what is called, what we call resonant, then then you would get the formation of carbon and then you could build all the heavy elements. And he went to Willie Fowler and Willie Fowler was a nuclear physicist. And there's something that physicists will never admit to you. And that is that they've only ever solved one problem exactly. And that's the two body problem.

• 58:08Speaker 04

  So they've only solved that problem of an electron going around a proton in a hydrogen atom, the moon going around the earth, that's the only problem they can solve exactly. Once you get to three bodies or more, it's not possible to solve it exactly. It turns out that a nucleus of of carbon has twelve particles in it, six neutrons and six protons. This finding out anything about it, like its energy, energy states was impossible. And this guy from England with round spectacles turned up in Willie Fowler's lab at Caltech. And he said something that no nuclear physicists or claimed something that no nuclear physicists would ever claim. He said it's got an energy state at this particular level because he knew it had to

• 58:53Speaker 04

  in order for three helium nuclei to come together and make carbon twelve. And there was a discussion and and they realized that they had measured the properties of carbon twelve. But if it had, they might just have missed something. Three days later, they found the carbon twelve. He's the only person to have made a prediction ahead of what you call an anthropic argument. So his only argument was. We are here, we're made of carbon, therefore this state of carbon must exist. So I mean, it's the end.

• 59:28Brian Keating?

  The so-called oil miracle.

• 59:31Speaker 04

  Of course, he actually coined the term Big Bang and never believed in it.

• 59:35Brian Keating?

  And he worked very closely with my late great colleagues, Jeff and Margaret Burbidge.

• 59:40Speaker 04

  Absolutely. He was considered to be a rather difficult character and a bit of a loner, but actually history shows that he had incredibly loyal colleagues that he worked with over long periods of time. You know, Margaret and Jeffrey Burbidge and Willie Fowler. And then when we mentioned earlier that the Nobel Prize, Chandrasekhar winning in eighty-three, and so did Willie Fowler. And that was very desperately sad for Fowler and Hoyle because they were such friends. And Fowler knew that Hoyle should have shared the prize with him because had it not been for that visit to Caltech in nineteen fifty-three. Fowler said, I would have been a run-of-the-mill nuclear physicist. In fact, he actually worked out.

• 1:00:22Speaker 04

  He'd actually been able to prove the, what we call the carbon nitrogen and oxygen cycle, which generates heat in massive stars. So he had done something, but the actual discovery of where all the elements came from, that was due to Fred Hoyle in nineteen fifty-three. So, you know, that was so sad. Hoyle told me that he was very, very upset for three days. And then at Grofflin Bell, he said, well, I know the history books will remember that I did this. But it was, it was very, very sad because I mean, there's a man called Jacob Brnovsky, who did a big TV series in Britain. And he said, a genius is someone with two good ideas. Hoyle had two good ideas.

• 1:01:04Speaker 04

  He had his state theory, which was wrong, but it was testable. It was testable. And it was, it turned out that the universe was born in the Big Bang. And he was wrong, but it, but it made testable predictions. And of course, he figured out where all the heavy and all the elements in our bodies come from. So he certainly had two good ideas.

• 1:01:23Brian Keating?

  Marcus, this has been a delight. I think of you whenever I think of very clear, crisp explications. That turn math and mystery into meaning for telling the human stories. And I think black holes are, in a sense, the universe's refusal to explain itself. You can, as your late great friend at Caltech, Richard Feynman said, "You can dance with nature, but she won't let you dip her and lift her veil," something like that. And I want to just thank you for the great work that you're doing. And where could people find out more about you?

• 1:01:53Speaker 04

  Thank you very much. I really enjoyed our conversation. Well, I've got a website called www.marcus.chown.com. And you can get my book, if you want, from Barnes and Noble or Amazon or any of these places, hopefully in bookstores in America. We had a real problem recently. We had a cyber, the publisher had a cyber attack. They weren't able to reprint that. I think they've reprinted by now.

• 1:02:20Brian Keating?

  Maybe fell into a black hole, you know, the cyber. Marcus, thank you so much. I'll let you get back to your evening. And I just want to thank you again for this wonderful book, A Crack in Everything, and That's How the Light Gets In. So now we'll ring the bells that still can ring. Thank you, Marcus.

• 1:02:35Speaker 04

  Thank you very much, Brian.

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