PART TWO: Secrets of the Universe: What Happened Before The Big Bang, Life Across the Galaxy, Surviving a Black Hole & How We’re All Made of Stars | Astrophysicist Janna Levin

BLACK HOLES, THE BIG BANG & ALIEN LIFE: Astrophysicist Janna Levin Breaks Down the UniverseEver wondered what existed before the Big Bang? Or why all planets are different, and why Earth is so perfectly suited for life? In this mind-expanding episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, renowned astrophysicist and author of Black Hole Survival Guide, Janna Levin (Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University), takes us on a cosmic journey through the deepest mysteries of the universe, and how they reflect back on what it means to be human. From the terrifying truth about black holes to the surprising science behind moons, planets, and even nuclear weapons, we're answering space questions you didn’t even know you had. Janna Levin breaks down:- Everything You’ve Ever Wondered About the Big Bang: What came before it, myths, how it created space and time- What is Time and how do black holes bend it?- Why planets are round- What moons really are (and the wild origin of our Moon)- How stars give birth to planets- What black holes are, what happens inside, and their role in the fundamentals of physics- Why some stars become black holes and others don’t- How Einstein and Oppenheimer cracked the code on black holes and how we observe them today- What would happen if our Sun became a black hole and could we actually fall into one?- Spooky effects of black holes on time & space (Could they teach us to age slower?)- Why there’s likely a black hole at the center of every galaxy- Why Janna Levin believes we’ll discover alien life within 50 years & what it could look like (it will likely be on moons, not planets!)- Will our tragic reliance on tech destroy us, or save us?- Can we make tech more compatible with nature?- Why advancing tech increases the generational gap- Why Janna doesn’t believe AI will ever become truly conscious- Why the universe is considered left-handed- What would happen if the Sun were knocked out of our system- Nuclear weapons & how they were invented through studying the Sun- Parallels between nature and cosmic phenomena across the universeThis episode of MBB is really all about the growing hunger in society to understand the cosmos, and therefore, ourselves. Don’t miss this mind-blowing journey into the heart of space, time, existence, and our place in it all! Janna Levin’s Substack, Janna Levin's Extra Dimensions: ⁠https://jannalevin.substack.com/⁠ https://jannalevin.substack.com/ Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:04Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 0:05Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 0:07Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to part two of our conversation with fascinating astrophysicist Janna Levin. She's the author of "The Black Hole Survival Guide," a professor of physics and astronomy at Columbia University at Barnard College. And part one of our conversation was literally all about how we got here. How do we know that the Big Bang happened? How did planets evolve? Why are planets round? That was one of my favorite things she talked about. Part two is going to take us into a thorough investigation of black holes, what they are, what they're not, what happens if you get too close to them, and what can black holes teach us about the way that we can harness energy in the universe?

• 0:52Jonathan Cohen?

  We cover Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, and what Einstein was really trying to discover.

• 0:58Mayim Bialik?

  We'll end this episode with a variety of smaller but incredibly important questions. What does it mean for space and time to collapse? Can we age slower? Are black holes going to be able to help us do that? What happens if the sun is knocked out of the solar system? And we'll also talk about why the universe is left-handed. Here's part two of our conversation with Janna Levin.

• 1:21Jonathan Cohen?

  How does this all lead to black holes?

• 1:24Speaker 02

  Well, black holes have been full of surprises, really full of surprises. This has been a century for black hole discoveries. A bunch of Nobel Prizes were awarded for discoveries around black holes. I have a piece coming out soon about Roger Penrose, Sir Roger Penrose, who received the Nobel Prize for his work proving that black holes were an inevitable death state of very massive stars. Before Penrose, people really weren't sure if it was even mathematically feasible to form them, or if it was just an oddity of a specialized circumstance that nature would never actually attain. And he proved that it was this sort of generic death state for very heavy stars.

• 2:09Mayim Bialik?

  So, take us from Big Bang, right? From the Big Bang and this sort of explosion and creation, right? At the same time? Where do black holes fit in?

• 2:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:22Mayim Bialik?

  Why do we have black holes? What are they?

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, well Einstein, when he was first presented with this mathematical solution to his theory, it wasn't called, they weren't called black holes. That term didn't come for another 50 years. This is again like 1916. He thought, oh yeah, this is a real mathematical solution. Everything crushes to a point. A region around which this crushed point forms, where we're not even like, can escape. And we call that a black hole. It goes dark.

• 2:54Mayim Bialik?

  How did he know to be looking for this? Meaning, what was the problem?

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:57Mayim Bialik?

  That Einstein was trying to solve?

• 2:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:00Mayim Bialik?

  That eventually led to our understanding of black holes?

• 3:02Speaker 02

  So Einstein had been struggling to ask the question, if space and time are relative, what does that mean for the whole universe? And what does that mean for matter and energy that lives in the universe? And this is when he wrote down arguably the most important set of equations in the history of time that describe how space and time warp, stretch, react to matter and energy. And he threw it out there after many flawed attempts. He used to joke about how there were many incorrect papers with his name on it. And finally, they write down this consistent description. You tell me the matter and energy in the universe, and I'll tell you what the universe is doing.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  Even then, he wasn't the first person to say, oh, wait, the universe is expanding. That's what it's doing. He was shocked by that. He thought that was wrong. He fought the Big Bang. That's a whole other story. Same thing with the black holes. Somebody else, his name Carl Short shield, was a German infantry soldier during World War I. He was on the Russian front. He had enlisted. He was also an astronomer. And he wrote Einstein this crazy letter. Said something to the effect, I mean, it was unreasonably chipper, like. The war has treated me kindly enough. I've had a moment to wander through the land of your ideas. You know, I mean, this is the kind of letter you write from the Russian front.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  And he, the problem he was asking is, uh, what if the matter was all crushed to a point? He didn't say how. He didn't say if it was possible. He just said, imagine, imagine I took a star, I crushed it to a point. And I just ask, what does the spacetime do around it? That's all. And, and it's probably just a fantasy. It's just the simplest thing he could attempt, believe it or not. To crush all the matter to the point was the simplest mathematical solution he could find. And within a matter of six months of, of Einstein publishing the theory, he, he hands him really everything essentially we know about black holes in mathematical form. And it was incredible. It wasn't called a black hole for another five decades. But Einstein, he thought this was right. He helps him get the paper published.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  Schwarzschild dies on the Russian front, um, like six months later. Yeah, you know, um, never knowing the impact of his ideas. But Einstein thought nature wouldn't make them in reality. Einstein thought, oh, it's just a mathematical oddity. How, how is nature going to crush matter to a point? I mean, how's it going to do that? That's silly. It's hard to crush things. And, and that was the prevailing thinking for a very long time. And so people started understanding this whole thermonuclear fuel thing. It was really Oppenheimer. He was working on thermonuclear physics, who connected, not only working on the Manhattan Project, but connected that stars were doing something similar.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  And, um, and Oppenheimer wrote a very important paper where he predicted that in fact, stars would make black holes in 1939, when they ran out of thermonuclear fuel. Not that they run out of thermonuclear fuel in 1939, but he wrote the paper in 1939 and he publishes it on the day that the Nazis advanced on Poland. And so it fell into obscurity, but it was. We were busy with other things. We were busy with other things, as was he, like the Manhattan Project. But it was just one of these moments in history where the scientists were thinking about the same thing for very different reasons. Stars, war. And, uh. Star Wars.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  And so, yeah, that's what brought us really to the point of thinking about black holes as real objects. And then we start to see them. We start to see them as the death state of stars. Very, very heavy stars, when they run out of thermonuclear fuel, they have a very dramatic end. They suddenly aren't burning so much. And they can't keep that pressure up. They collapse under their own weight. And this is, Penrose did this in a very abstract, very elegant calculation, showing that this would happen. And they collapse to the point where the spacetime is so highly curved that not even light can escape the well.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  All light that veers too close will fall in to this well created by this collapsing object. And eventually, we call that the event horizon, the region beyond which not even light can escape. And eventually, the star itself keeps falling. What happens to it, honestly, we just still don't know. In the interior of the black hole, we don't know what happens to it. But this, it leaves behind this inescapable sort of siphon. We probably have a billion of those in our galaxy.

• 8:02Mayim Bialik?

  I want to zoom in on one of these components that you're talking about with a black hole. And I want to see if you can help us understand, what does it mean to say what you said about space and time? And, you know, this delightful book, which literally fits in my pocket, does a really, really great job of kind of explaining space and time in very, you know, kind of simple, simple terms so that you can build complexity. What does that mean when we talk about a black hole? Because I think, I don't know what most people think of as like, oh, nothing can escape. If you get close to it, it's gonna suck you up like a vacuum. You know, and we think of that funnel shape, right?

• 8:47Mayim Bialik?

  But what does it mean? How can you, how can I conceptualize something that is a star? Which I'm like, it's twinkling, but I understand there's gas, right? Where it's going, and it's creating a new place?

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, in many ways, the black hole is more like a place than it is like an object. So, so let's go back to the star. The star is also deforming spacetime. Right now, we are trapped on a, technically, you might say geodesic. More naturally, we're inclined to say orbit around the sun. And that orbit can be thought of as a groove in spacetime created by the presence of the sun, where you can fall freely around the sun and just no engines. We're not firing engines. The earth is not burning fuel to stay in orbit around the sun. It's for free. We are absolutely, no engines, no energy.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  We're just falling towards the sun. But we're going so fast that we keep clearing the, the prospect of falling in.

• 9:52Mayim Bialik?

  And this, right, so the, so think of a groove on a record, right? A piece of dust, a speck of dust on that groove will stay in that groove unless something is blowing it out of its orbit. It's just gonna keep going, yeah.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  We could be here for a very, very, as we have been, very, very long time. And we are literally just falling along a natural curve in space. The curve in space was created by the sun, the presence of the sun. That's the Einsteinian way of thinking about this. Newton's way would be there's a gravitational force. And they seem similar, but there are different predictions from Einstein's theory that, that we can see. We can see the differences. Now, as the sun, if the sun were to collapse to a black hole, which it won't, it's not big enough. It'll kill us in other ways. But if the sun were to collapse to a black hole, our orbit would be absolutely fine. So there's this myth about black holes that they suck everything up.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  We would find us a perfectly smooth orbit around a black hole at a safe distance. We could orbit forever exactly the same. And so, black holes do have circular orbits around them. It's just that you can get much closer to a black hole. So if you look at the sun, it's like a million and a half kilometers across in diameter. If it were a black hole, it would be six kilometers across. To make it dense enough to create the black hole, it has to be really small.

• 11:17Mayim Bialik?

  Got it, okay.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  So I'm taking the entire mass of the sun and I'm crushing it to the size of a city. Okay, and once that's happened, now it's only six kilometers across. I can get really close to that thing without burning up. I could have an orbit 30 kilometers outside a black hole, like right on top of that black hole. And I won't be sucked in, it's perfectly safe orbit.

• 11:37Jonathan Cohen?

  I don't feel comfortable.

• 11:38Speaker 02

  I would not feel comfortable.

• 11:40Mayim Bialik?

  But we're using kilometers, that's even your metric system.

• 11:42Jonathan Cohen?

  I feel like I'm tightrope walking on a very high building edge. And you just one slip and you're sucked in and that's it.

• 11:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, it's not, I mean, it would be apocalyptically cold.

• 11:55Mayim Bialik?

  But talk about how this applies then to the notion of spacetime and why it's different when a star is collapsing.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  So it's not, so in that sense, it's not fundamentally different. It's different by degrees. It's different qualitatively. So the sun has a lot of the kinds of orbits a black hole has. But the more interesting orbits are only when it's so small that you're in so close that it gets more and more conspicuously relativistic. And you start to see much more unusual phenomena that you can't see because the sun's just too diffuse. It's too big, a million and a half kilometers, all that mass spread out. It's just more diffuse, you know. But if you crush it down to six kilometers, the mass of the sun, then everything we're describing, the orbits are curves in spacetime.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  The curves just become more and more dramatic, harder and harder to find ways away. Requires, if I want to leave this orbit, I can send a satellite. Traveling with some fuel, and I can send it past Jupiter. We've done these things. If we were very close to that black hole, that would be really hard. It would be energetically, cost a lot to get further and further away. So it's really just a matter of the degree becomes dramatic. And eventually, there's a region where you would have to travel at the speed of light to escape. And that is just not something we think matter can do.

• 13:21Mayim Bialik?

  So what happens when things get-

• 13:22Speaker 02

  And then everything falls in.

• 13:23Mayim Bialik?

  Right, so when-

• 13:24Speaker 02

  So then you're in the territory-

• 13:25Mayim Bialik?

  Have we sent things? And they just get sucked up?

• 13:27Speaker 02

  We have not sent anything near a black hole.

• 13:29Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  But we see things getting sucked up by a black hole.

• 13:31Mayim Bialik?

  Okay.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  So we've seen black holes often come with stellar companions. Stars can-

• 13:37Mayim Bialik?

  You're stellar companion.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  Stars can come in pairs. One of the stars dies, becomes a black hole, runs out of fuel, becomes a black hole. The other star now has this, okay, this, you know, very dense object in the material. It starts to cannibalize its companion. We start to see black holes destroying their neighboring stars and things like that.

• 13:58Jonathan Cohen?

  Starts to ruin the neighborhood.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:00Mayim Bialik?

  No, all stars don't become black holes.

• 14:03Speaker 02

  No, about 1%.

• 14:05Mayim Bialik?

  Why?

• 14:06Speaker 02

  It's about how massive they are. So our sun, when it runs out of fuel, it'll go through some period of collapse and expansion. But it's never, it's not heavy enough to overcome how hard it is to crush things. Right? It's hard to crush things.

• 14:20Mayim Bialik?

  And how, Valerie's asking. How do we see this?

• 14:26Speaker 02

  So-

• 14:27Mayim Bialik?

  It's like a big telescope.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  So this was, well, this was first observed in X-rays in the 60s and 70s. We saw what looked, they're called X-ray binaries. We saw essentially a black hole that looked like it was tearing apart its neighbor. And we saw the light in the-

• 14:44Mayim Bialik?

  What does that look like?

• 14:44Speaker 02

  It looks like bright flashes of light in X-rays, coming from a tiny, tiny, tiny region. And so you're deducing how much mass in a small space. So one of the things about black holes, we think of these huge monsters. Point of black holes is they're spatially small.

• 14:58Mayim Bialik?

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• 15:42Mayim Bialik?

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• 16:27Mayim Bialik?

  It's the best way to support our show. In the same way that we can make descriptions about the Big Bang, from the light that we see, right? The collection of matter?

• 16:42Speaker 02

  Uh huh, yeah.

• 16:42Mayim Bialik?

  In those same ways, we can use those same methods to say, something's going on here. There's an enormous mass. There's light coming off of it. And we know that that comes from an expenditure of energy.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  Right, very good. So you say, look, I'm seeing, woo! I'm seeing a tremendous amount of energy coming from a very, very small space.

• 17:06Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  That seems to have a lot of mass. And that combination is when people began to say, I think these are black holes. Because they couldn't find anything else that could have so much mass in such a small space and be responsible for such energy. The light you're seeing is not coming from the black hole. It's coming from the destruction of the neighboring star. And so that is how we see. We see black holes powering jets that are larger than the galaxies in which they reside. These are jet, magnetic jets, like literally like ray guns blasting highly charged particles into these huge jets that can go billions of light years across.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  So that's a tremendous amount of energy and power originating from a very small source, again, a black hole. And now, we can look at stars from the center of our galaxy, and we see them orbiting something that's four and a half million times the mass of the sun. These supermassives are different than dead stars. We don't know where they come from. Four and a half million times the mass of the sun, and it's very small. I mean, it's solar system sized, but if you think about the mass of the sun, you think it's only four and a half million times the mass of the sun. It's only about 17, 18 times the size of the sun across. So you're jamming in that tiny spatial region, four and a half million times the mass. And that's when you get a black hole.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  So we see this black hole at the center of our Milky Way. It's 26,000 light years away. You can see the stars orbiting it. You're like, what's that? There is nothing there. I can't see anything. And you say, oh, it must be a black hole. And now, more recently, we've literally taken a picture.

• 18:46Mayim Bialik?

  What's it look like?

• 18:48Speaker 02

  It looks like, it's called, the project was Event Horizon Telescope. It looks very smudgy, because it's hard to do. It's only a few pixels. But what we see is we see the ring around. The shadow cast by the black hole. And the ring is from debris that was hot, that was falling in. And it casts the shadow essentially of the black hole.

• 19:12Mayim Bialik?

  I want to ask you a very emotional question. For you, as an astrophysicist, what is that like, the first time you got to see the visualization of a black hole?

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Well, I have a special connection to that particular project. So both as an astrophysicist and just as a person. The principal investigator, the director of that project, Shep Doloman, was a roommate of mine in graduate school. We went to MIT together. And one of my favorite all-time people. I mean, just a complete nut, incredibly creative person. And not a, not a normal path, even in physics. He was sort of, I knew he was going to land something tremendous. But he was an outlier in many ways, creatively and imaginative. And he has been talking about this project since then.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  And had dreamt of it and thought about it. And, and then made it a reality. So when there was a press release and an invitation, you know, I get an invitation from Shep saying, "I think you should come to DC." I mean, we all knew what it was. Because there was only one thing they were trying to do. There was a twist. There was a twist in the result. But we knew they were trying to take a picture of the Event Horizon. It's called Event Horizon Telescope. So really, it's just the shadow of the black hole. And there's only two candidates. And the surprise was that it was the other candidate. So the two candidates are our supermassive black hole, called SAG A-Star, because it's in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, from the point of view of the Earth.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Are you a Sagittarius? And the other was a very big galaxy, a whole other galaxy, M87, that has enormous black holes, much bigger than ours, over six billion times, billion times the mass of the sun.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  But it's so far away, it's about the same size in the sky. You know what I mean? It was like a similar candidate, M87. Or sometimes called M87 Star. We indicate black holes with the star moniker. And it was M87. I couldn't believe it. That really surprised me. But, but yes, it was a tremendously moving moment. And also just kind of surreal. Just kind of surreal. Really, what was most surreal about it, since we anticipated the result, was feeling like a billion people, you know, in that moment were looking together at this nothingness at the center of our galaxy that we orbit, right?

• 21:56Speaker 02

  And that might have something to do with why there are habitable regions in the galaxy. You know, I mean, it's just, there was that moment, that kind of vertigo. Yes, it was a big day.

• 22:10Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 22:11Jonathan Cohen?

  Philosophically speaking, what does it mean to you or the average person that there's nothingness at the center of our galaxy?

• 22:22Speaker 02

  Philosophically, I mean, I think this idea of the nothingness of black holes is, is something I think we're still trying to understand. Objects in the ordinary sense are all slightly imperfect, or if you don't want to say that, they're slightly, they're features, distinguishing features. And that's true even with the most finely crafted Swiss watch. It really always has some fundamental distinction, even if it's at the microscopic level that I can't easily detect. Ordinary objects are unique. Black holes are, are indistinguishable from each other in a certain, very profound way

• 23:06Speaker 02

  that we only see at the level of subatomic particles. And that has to do with the fact that they're really nothing. They're not made of, it's, they're, atomic content's unimportant.

• 23:20Speaker 02

  Whether there's atoms in the interior or not is unimportant. They have this flawlessness hidden behind the event horizon. The event horizon cannot tell us anything about the interior. And in its intensity of obfuscating the interior, it makes this flawless veneer. And that means black holes look the same if they have the same mass, regardless of what they're made of.

• 23:49Mayim Bialik?

  Because nothing is nothing.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  Because nothing is nothing, and they're indistinguishable. And the event horizon won't let us know if there's any distinction. If they were all made out of encyclopedias, or all made out of some weird element, or just made out of light, you can't know this.

• 24:03Jonathan Cohen?

  But they start from a star.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  They start from a star, but what is made in the end is something...

• 24:08Mayim Bialik?

  But just like nothing made a star, a star can make nothing.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  That's good.

• 24:13Mayim Bialik?

  Thank you.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  And so that's that facet of black holes, which also Penrose contributed into understanding it. There are these things called no-hair theorems, like black holes can't have hair, they can't have distinguishing features. This idea that they're similar to gigantic fundamental particles, I think is very profound. I think it says something about black holes' role in the fundamental theory of the laws of physics that is not played by anything else at macroscopic scales. So, yeah.

• 24:50Mayim Bialik?

  There's something you said, and, you know, it's not a coincidence, you know, to have the Manhattan Project kind of square in the middle of, you know, for most of us, like, our history. And, you know, I think that, just like we just kind of talked about, that nothing can make a star, and a star can make nothing, right? Can you sort of explain how like creating a nuclear bomb, right, is taking some very fundamental and phenomenal things about the natural world? And, you know,

• 25:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:27Mayim Bialik?

  Kind of cauterizing them, right? In this, in this very terrifying way.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, um, it's E equals mc squared. And that's what, that's what a nuclear bomb is probing. So E equals mc squared, the most famous equation of all time, is the idea that there's energy trapped in the nucleus of an atom. But essentially, everything has energy. One way you can think of it is it's the energy we all have just moving through time. It's like the energy of our existence in some sense. And people didn't, it's a tremendous amount of energy. E equals mc squared energy. That's why you want to, to make a nuclear bomb. Because the energy you can release, let's say you fuse two elements

• 26:14Speaker 02

  and you make something whose mass is less than the sum of the parts. So some of that E equals mc squared, that mass energy is what comes out. And it's so huge, what's trapped in these nuclear particles, that you have the potential of a nuclear weapon. It's also why you have the potential of a star, which is a tremendous amount of energy radiating for billions of years. If you think about that, how that, what power you're talking about. So we're able to understand these things before we understand them.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  There's a, there's a great line in this play, Copenhagen, by Michael Frayn, where he attributes to Niels Bohr, the, the great quantum physicist, Danish quantum physicist, the line he says to his wife, "I don't think anyone's thought of a way to use quantum mechanics to kill somebody." And of course, um, this on the cusp of the nuclear weapon. And he does become involved with the Manhattan Project. So at first, it's just a dream about moving through time and the energy.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Trapped in just the existence of matter, moving through time. It's base energy. Basically, anything we can understand, it seems like we try to harness. This is back to our opening conversation about being a technological species.

• 27:45Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I mean, also, you know, you can take it one step further. Everything that we try and understand, we harness and then it can be used.

• 27:55Speaker 02

  Against us.

• 27:56Mayim Bialik?

  Against us. I mean, I think of that, you know, just because I'm kind of a Luddite. You know, I think of that even in terms of technology. You know, I thought it was unbelievable, you know, to have a desktop computer when I was in college. Like, it was the first ones and, you know. And then I thought it was amazing to have this phone, you know, in the palm of my hand.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:17Mayim Bialik?

  And, I mean, we haven't changed in terms of our, you know, evolutionary capacity in the last 10 years. But what we've seen is a complete hijacking, right? Based on an adaptation.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:32Mayim Bialik?

  That has become a compulsion.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  Yes. I mean, I guess it's another one of those examples where saying, you know, our mandibles changed, our upright stance, our birth canal became a hazardous proposition. But all of this in reaction to our tools.

• 28:45Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  So are we on some strange evolutionary path? Well, really, we will. We really will be fundamentally, biologically different.

• 28:53Mayim Bialik?

  It's funny because, and it's a little bit, you know, it's a little bit obtuse, but there was just a piece in The Atlantic about Gen Z and how they date and how they fall in love. And most Gen Z'ers, Gen Z is what, 97 through, it's our kids.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  I have a couple of those.

• 29:14Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I made a couple of those.

• 29:15Mayim Bialik?

  Right. What they said, or what, you know, what they kind of revealed in a, you know, series of really fascinating and tragic interviews is that young people would rather have sex than hold hands. That most people consider of this generation, most people consider that a completely standard gesture, you know, intercourse. But the notion of intimacy, of emotional intimacy, of holding hands, of asking someone, will you be my girlfriend? Is so terrifying. And I was thinking, what is that that we've evolved to? Right? And I think it's a similar kind of line of questioning. You don't have to answer that.

• 29:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I mean, I hate to invoke the AI because those conversations have not progressed. Well, it is one of those examples. We also talked about in the beginning where you're circling around the same drain. And very rarely does somebody say something that gives me pause where I think, oh, I haven't heard that before, you know. But this is a new, even the Zers will distinguish themselves from the generation that's growing up with this. And this is that whole phenomena that the technology escalates so quickly that the difference between two people in the 11th century and the 15th century not as huge as 1980 and 2025.

• 30:36Mayim Bialik?

  And we've seen how this movie ends. Like, we've literally seen what happens when the machines take over.

• 30:41Jonathan Cohen?

  We all get sucked into a black hole.

• 30:43Speaker 02

  Yes. I do wonder, you know, the machines for me right now, I really do think these are very interesting, but they're just computing this probabilistic thing. I don't see anything going on there yet. I understand that regardless, though, they're really powerful. I think that's one of the things that chills me is I don't know that consciousness is a requirement of something that can compute very well. Right? Consciousness is a requirement of something that doesn't compute very well. I should be asking you. But, you know, my impression has been, like, because of our poor computational power, we have to approximate. That's a child, that's a chair. Right? That's very hard to teach something with a lot of computational power.

• 31:21Mayim Bialik?

  Well, that's also art, music, love, creativity. Like, that's what you get. And that's what you don't get when you, I mean, I don't mean to be this person, but you don't, when people are like, oh, it's the thinking. It's like, no, it's not. It's amassing all of the information that exists as zeros and ones. And it's spitting out a probability.

• 31:38Speaker 02

  Right. And that's very powerful. And maybe it may even be a kind of thinking. And maybe one day I'll love my AI and I'll be sympathetic and nostalgic about my AI. But I don't know that it will ever need consciousness. In the way that we do, if it's computational power, Esca keeps getting better and better.

• 31:56Mayim Bialik?

  What Robin Hanson would say is, we don't need consciousness. And soon we'll all just be, you know, I don't, I can't even articulate it. We'll just be AI interfaces interfacing with each other. And I'm like, I, I don't think I evolved to this point.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:09Mayim Bialik?

  Or that we evolved to this point for that to be where this story ends. I don't know.

• 32:14Speaker 02

  Does the AI need the qualia of the experience of yellow?

• 32:17Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  Does it? Why would it need that? Maybe it's just okay. I've measured this energy and that's sufficient.

• 32:23Jonathan Cohen?

  And it has access to all the variations of what yellow could be. So it could just pick a point and then have that.

• 32:30Speaker 02

  And converse about it really effectively. And that's a kind of a thinking.

• 32:34Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, but it doesn't.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  It might never have qualia.

• 32:36Mayim Bialik?

  It, it doesn't have the experience of when you see this.

• 32:40Speaker 02

  Right. Yes, exactly.

• 32:41Mayim Bialik?

  It doesn't have that.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  That image of the black hole.

• 32:43Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 32:43Jonathan Cohen?

  But it will fake it really well to the point where we wouldn't really understand the difference of it. Is it actually having it or is it just representing to us that it has it because that's what it thinks we want?

• 32:54Speaker 02

  Right. Why not emulate the reaction as well as it's emulating the language describing the reaction? It, all of that can be programmed in this by, you know, the AI can program itself in this black box of these learning algorithms. And that's, and again, all of that's fine. What will it matter whether or not it has a conscious experience?

• 33:17Jonathan Cohen?

  And its drive for self-preservation is not a sign of consciousness necessarily. It's a sign of replicating our drive for self-preservation and how we would go about that same task. So it's just an amazing mirroring agent.

• 33:31Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, I, I get very worried when people are like, it's thinking, it's knowing, it's feeling. No, it's really not. It's a very, it's a really fancy abacus.

• 33:41Jonathan Cohen?

  What has happened recently that black holes are being talked about so much? Is it that there's the picture? What has evolved? That it's become part of sort of a common consciousness or awareness now?

• 33:54Speaker 02

  I would say at the, towards the end of the last century, you know, on the end of the 1900s. People were thinking black holes might start to fade in terms of their scientific importance. And I remember, I was very excited about black holes. I was all about black holes in graduate school, and people were like, "What are you doing? You know, come on. We sort of know everything we need to know. Where are we going to go with this classical system?" And then a lot of things happened. One of them is purely theoretical, and some of that is observational. So, yes, we started to see the stars orbiting the center of our galaxy. People watched them patiently for 16, 17, 20 years, and deduced that there was a supermassive black hole. That was a surprise, because that doesn't come from dead stars. These are new. We don't know where-- actually, they're old.

• 34:37Speaker 02

  They're probably the oldest black holes in the universe, but we don't 100% know where they came from. Probably skipped stars altogether, directly collapsed in very diffuse material in the early universe, you know? So, these are fascinating. Then, there were these other, yeah, just other observations like that, beginning to understand some of these very powerful engines. This was earlier, but these things we see in the farthest reaches, we call quasars, most powerful, brightest beacons, most powerful engines in the universe, and they're probably, well, I think, very confidently sourced by black holes. And then these recent things, like taking the picture of the black hole.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  And so, the conversation now is an active one of science. How did they form? What effect do they have in the galaxies? What's the role that they're playing? Well, we all end up falling into black holes. So, there's all of that astronomy. Good old astronomy. The rest of the world might not continue to be as interested in it as we are. And then, there's this theoretical stuff about black holes being fundamental. That, I think, is a real driver for people who want to understand quantum laws of physics. They want to understand quantum gravity. They want to understand if there truly is a theory of everything. They want to know if string theory is right or wrong. And black holes are your terrain to understand all of that.

• 36:00Jonathan Cohen?

  Are there more black holes forming, or we're just being able to observe them more?

• 36:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, there are more forming. So, there are star-forming regions, so there's more stars forming, and some of those will be black holes one day. So, it's really about how massive the star formation is. Maybe over time, there will be less stars forming and less very, very massive stars forming. But in our galaxy of its hundreds of billions of stars, about 1% of them are big enough to become black holes.

• 36:28Mayim Bialik?

  What about other galaxies? Do we know about black holes there?

• 36:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably about the same. This is part of that, that we're kind of unique, but not so unique. You know, we expect other galaxies to be made of atoms, to reflect light, to have the same thermonuclear properties in the cores of stars. And so, yeah, we expect about 1% of those to make black holes.

• 36:49Jonathan Cohen?

  Are we all gonna fall into a black hole?

• 36:51Speaker 02

  It's possible. So we're in orbit, the picture that we just discussed, one of two pictures that have ever been taken of actual black holes. We are in orbit around that black hole, very slow, and eventually, we could fall in.

• 37:09Jonathan Cohen?

  Slowly drifting into it?

• 37:11Speaker 02

  No, we're orbiting safely like we are the sun. And the entire solar system is going together. Our whole solar system together orbits the black hole. And when Andromeda crashes through our galaxy, we've probably, we might have collided before, we'll probably collide more than one time in the future, our black holes will merge eventually.

• 37:33Mayim Bialik?

  What does that mean when galaxies collide?

• 37:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, so largely, they pass through each other, because there's a lot of empty space between the stars.

• 37:39Mayim Bialik?

  But what distinguishes our galaxy from another galaxy? It's not like there's a border.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  Well, that's a good question. It drops off real fast.

• 37:47Mayim Bialik?

  It drops off real fast.

• 37:50Speaker 02

  Meaning the density of stars.

• 37:52Mayim Bialik?

  Oh.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  And so, our galaxy looks like this spiral Milky Way.

• 37:55Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:56Speaker 02

  Then there's a lot of nothing between us and Andromeda, pretty empty. Real nothingness out there.

• 38:01Mayim Bialik?

  Like, for how far?

• 38:02Speaker 02

  That's a couple million light years and 55 million light years to M87, which I mentioned. And these are close. These are our close neighbors. These are the ones that are behaving oddly, because we're all so close together.

• 38:15Mayim Bialik?

  So what would that be like when galaxies collide?

• 38:18Speaker 02

  So billions of light years apart are other galaxies. And we're only gonna collide with our local friends, in our Virgo cluster.

• 38:24Mayim Bialik?

  Do planets smash into each other?

• 38:25Speaker 02

  Not. Likely terribly unlikely because there's just so much empty space.

• 38:29Mayim Bialik?

  That doesn't feel definitive enough.

• 38:31Speaker 02

  Well, I guess it's possible. It's not zero possibility. It's just unlikely.

• 38:35Mayim Bialik?

  I'm gonna run the stats on that. If you think, if you just told me there's so many stars and there's so many planets and there's so many moons.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  But there's a lot, so a star, there's a lot of space between every star.

• 38:44Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  And that's why they look like tiny dots and not a wall of brightness. They look like mostly darkness with a little twinkle.

• 38:51Mayim Bialik?

  But statistically speaking, the more there are, the higher the probability that something will.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  Right, and they're still really sparse.

• 38:57Mayim Bialik?

  That's amazing.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, a lot, really a lot of empty space. But there's a lot of gas and dust. And that stuff will collide and that'll light up. But mostly the stars will miss each other very likely. And if you look at simulations.

• 39:09Mayim Bialik?

  Ships passing in the night.

• 39:10Speaker 02

  Yes, uh huh, really. And some of the stars might get thrown out of the galaxies when this happens, just from gravitational, you know, whiplash.

• 39:18Mayim Bialik?

  The sun gets thrown out of the.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  So the simulations show our solar system staying together pretty comfortably, like we stay with our sun. And we get kicked around into a different orbit around the center.

• 39:27Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, let's have a, oh wait, a catastrophic question. What if the moon, what if, sorry. What if the sun gets knocked out of its orbit? Does everybody die?

• 39:36Speaker 02

  We are going to be knocked out of our orbit around the black hole. As long as we stay in orbit around the sun, wherever it goes, as long as we go, we're okay.

• 39:45Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, so, because we're tethered in a sense.

• 39:47Speaker 02

  If we part ways, it is all over.

• 39:49Jonathan Cohen?

  But we will.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  We need the sun. We will ice over.

• 39:53Mayim Bialik?

  The title of this episode is, "We need the sun."

• 39:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:56Jonathan Cohen?

  Understood, but we could, our orbit around the black hole could change.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  That's fine. As long as we stay with the sun.

• 40:04Jonathan Cohen?

  And will that have any effect on us?

• 40:07Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm sure there are unforeseen consequences, but more or less, as long as we're within the sun's magnetic solar influence.

• 40:15Mayim Bialik?

  We can't be pulled away.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  We're probably largely okay. And if we were to fall into the black hole, we'd all go together with this. It's not like it's gonna pluck us separately.

• 40:24Mayim Bialik?

  I'm sending you first.

• 40:25Speaker 02

  Like a piece of lint from the, you know, solar neighborhood, but, but, but we're very stable. It's this thing I told you, black holes aren't vacuuming things up at 26,000 light years away. You're fine. There are things in orbit around the black hole. These stars we talked about, they're fine.

• 40:41Mayim Bialik?

  He likes things to be worried about. What should he be worried about?

• 40:44Jonathan Cohen?

  What happens when you do get into a black hole? Explain this, how time changes.

• 40:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, so. So one of the most beautiful results that goes all the way back to when Churchill first found this mathematical description was this idea that time appears to slow as you approach the event horizon. And let me clarify what that really means. If you and an astronaut are in a happy space station together, and you are in some safe orbit outside the black hole, and you're monitoring it, fine, one of you jumps in. As you approach the black hole, you've beautifully manufactured NASA watches, and they're perfectly synced. One of you falls into the black hole. As you approach the black hole, your watch will appear to run slowly, according to the person who's safely back

• 41:34Speaker 02

  on the space station. But so will your breath slow down, so will your biological functions. From your point of view, your clock is just fine. Okay, everything's synced, just fine. It's the person back in the space station seems to be going really fast, and seems to be aging really quickly. And their hair is turning gray, and their clock is whizzing, and music's playing really fast. And all of these things are happening as you approach the event horizon. Now, as you get to the event horizon, your time has slowed as much as it possibly can. To the person who's now aged 100 years, in the time you've aged, let's say, a minute, however long it's taken you to do this dramatic fall, thinks you've frozen. At one point, they were called

• 42:17Speaker 02

  frozen stars, because they didn't understand what happens when you cross this boundary. And it seems to them that you actually never quite make it across. Now, eventually, your mass will deform the black hole enough, and you know, maybe after a million years, they'll be like, oh, yeah, they're gone. But from your point of view, the whole thing took a minute.

• 42:39Mayim Bialik?

  That's like in Contact, when Jodie Foster has like this entire experience, and she sees her dad, and she meets God, and blah, blah, blah, and she comes back, and they literally said, you disappeared for 10 seconds.

• 42:51Jonathan Cohen?

  It's like every near-death experience we've heard.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, and well, Interstellar also represents this, by my good friend Kip Thorne, who's also nearby.

• 43:01Speaker 02

  Kip won the Nobel Prize for, we didn't even mention that detection, the detection of two collision of black holes. And he wrote the treatment for Interstellar. So that Interstellar, he really thought about the physics of that. He, it was his idea to make this movie, this crazy movie. So to the person going across them, that's the interesting person. And that was not understood for a very long time. That what happens to them, are they really frozen there? And relativity suggests that they're seeing nothing unusual. So what, how are they hanging out there? And actually, as far as they're concerned, we call it no drama. They had an experience as unspectacular as stepping into the shadow of a tree. And they crossed right over. And they didn't know, nothing terrible happened to them.

• 43:46Speaker 02

  If the, if the black hole is big enough, they actually don't get torn apart, which might seem counterintuitive. They can drop across just like a pebble. And, and then, you know, then it unfolds. Then they're in trouble. Then they might start to notice things are looking weird. But black holes can be bright on the inside, even if they're dark on the outside, because light can fall in behind them. Nothing's stopping the light from coming in.

• 44:10Mayim Bialik?

  Just can't get out.

• 44:11Speaker 02

  So they can see the space station and going through and falling apart and millions of years passing. And they can see the galaxy evolving, all these things happening very quickly. As they approach the singularity in there, our, our description breaks down terribly. Nobody really knows what happens in there, but your survival is absolutely not. You know, as I say, the, the black hole survival guide title is a, you know, spoiler alert, it doesn't end well. Yeah. Does not end well.

• 44:37Jonathan Cohen?

  If I put on just my magical thinking hat for a moment, if we can understand how to create a nuclear bomb by understanding stars, can we understand how to slow aging by understanding some of the impacts of black holes?

• 44:55Speaker 02

  Well, here's the thing, we are aging more slowly on the earth. For the same reason, it's just not as dramatic. It's this, again, it's more extreme in kind with black holes. But it is the case that the Earth's curvature causes time to change as well. And we are aging worse slowly on the surface of the Earth than we would if we were very far from the Earth and away from all other planets. So that is a measurable effect. And there are other relativistic effects that have to be corrected for with all of our GPS units for Lyft or Uber to pick me up on the correct corner. This is measurable and factual. It's not just something that's so theoretical.

• 45:39Speaker 02

  The reason why it doesn't do you any good in terms of longevity is because you're synced with the clock. You're not getting any more out of it. A minute on your watch is a minute for your experience. There's nothing special about your watch in this. Literally, your time is changed relative to someone else's time. All of it has changed. So you don't get more out of life.

• 46:05Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm just imagining that you could harness some black hole energy into a chamber that I sleep in.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  Right.

• 46:12Mayim Bialik?

  But it's not the, right, it's not the energy, it's the...

• 46:16Jonathan Cohen?

  It's the experience of it, not...

• 46:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, your experience of it is the same. Even if somebody felt 30 years pass for the one night you slept well, you'd still have that one night's sleep.

• 46:29Jonathan Cohen?

  Uh huh.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  Right, no more. You didn't have, you weren't able to get up, live 30 years of life. You got no more out of it than that eight hours in your experience. And so, you know, in that sense, but what I could do is I could freeze you. You have a terrible disease and you want to wait until...

• 46:45Jonathan Cohen?

  There's a cure.

• 46:46Speaker 02

  There's a cure. And so I can't, I don't yet know how to travel to my future, but I know how to travel to your future or get you to travel to civilization's future. So I could park you near a black hole. Your time will slow down. 200 years later, we have a cure, we bring you back.

• 47:05Jonathan Cohen?

  New business idea. Human parking lots.

• 47:08Mayim Bialik?

  Elon Musk is barking up the wrong tree.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:11Mayim Bialik?

  Where can people find out more about you and all of the incredible writing you do?

• 47:16Speaker 02

  I really appreciate that. This Substack venue is new for me. I really, um, I don't think of myself as short-form, turning around pieces. Substack is aiming a little bit more for long form. I guess we're meeting in the middle. But this idea of thinking about things and just communicating has been really fun. It's been an unusual experience. It's allowed me, after our conversation, maybe I'll go back and think of something that was sparked literally by us talking. And whereas that used to kind of disappear into the void, I'm, I'm, I'm finding an opportunity to collect those reflections.

• 47:50Mayim Bialik?

  That's great.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  So that's really been fun. I, um, I, uh, the last piece that we were just talking about is about how we radiate as hot bodies. And I wanted to bring you my hat, which I made with Plank's Law on it, to match your nerdy, wonderful brain hat that I saw when I walked in. So I think that's really a place. And also I do a lot of Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, which is an art cultural center in, in New York, and arts and science place where science is a pillar in, in a cultural institution. And that's been a really long-term project in labor of love. And we do a lot of events, talk to Nobel laureates, talk to scientists of all varieties. And we have people in the hundreds packing, sort of a cool place in

• 48:35Speaker 02

  Brooklyn. It's kind of what you said at the beginning of the conversation, because they want access to this level of understanding. And they want it for emotional reasons, poetic reasons, not because they're going to graduate school. They want it to make sense of their lives.

• 48:52Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah. They're not building the human parking lot startup yet.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. We'll be starting that after today's talk.

• 49:00Jonathan Cohen?

  We also started at Substack and found that it's a really cool place to expand on a lot of ideas. So we recommend people check yours out and, and tag us if you come up with any big ideas from this conversation. As we depart.

• 49:15Jonathan Cohen?

  Anything that has really surprised you or sort of made you wonder in the last little while that you want to share with us as we say goodbye?

• 49:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've been working with my scientific collaborators, Brian Greene, Massimo Parati, Daniel Cabot. I mean, I have the pleasure of really working with geniuses, I mean, honestly. We've been thinking about a universe with extra dimensions, which many people have thought about since Einstein. If you're going to talk about space and time, why three? Space, why one time? And I've been astounded at looking at some of these, we call them topological spaces, some of these very peculiar geometries in this higher dimensional space and how it

• 50:04Speaker 02

  could, even if there are these tiny curled up origami dimensions that we can't probe, they're on the quantum scale, we can't point to them, we don't occupy them, they could leave an imprint in the Big Bang, they could leave an imprint in the particles that we see that are allowed in the spectrum of possibilities. They could have something to do with primordial quantum black holes. I think that has been very fascinating, chilling. You have this moment of feeling like you have a glimpse of something maybe nobody else has ever seen and then it's very fleeting and fugitive and hard to get your hands around.

• 50:46Mayim Bialik?

  Are there any updates on the handedness of the universe?

• 50:50Speaker 02

  Well, exactly part of this project was about the handedness of the universe.

• 50:55Mayim Bialik?

  What does it mean to say that the universe tends to be left-handed?

• 50:57Speaker 02

  So, literally, if you have a left-handed glove, you know it does not fit you properly on the right hand. And in particle physics, that refers to a subtle quantum property called spin. Things can spin in a left-handed way and that cannot be turned into a right-handed spin. But it's just like saying a left-handed glove and a right-handed glove. For reasons we don't understand, most particles interact left-handed.

• 51:20Speaker 02

  Predominantly, especially one interaction called the weak interactions. We don't know why. It's left-handed. It's chiral, is how we say it. What's wrong with the right-handed guy? Why doesn't it feel the same interaction? And we think dark matter could be right-handed, and that's why it's evading us. There's, you know, there's so part of these extra dimensions is that I can, I can send things in these strange topological spaces, left-handed, and they can come back right-handed. It was a game we were trying to play. It hasn't, it isn't the most interesting thing that we ended up discovering about it. But, but, yeah, these are, every theoretical physicist interested in particle physics wonders

• 52:05Speaker 02

  about the chiral of the universe.

• 52:07Jonathan Cohen?

  It's very hard to talk to you for only a couple hours.

• 52:12Speaker 02

  I thank you, I think.

• 52:16Mayim Bialik?

  Thank you so much for being here.

• 52:17Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 52:18Mayim Bialik?

  Really so much fun to get to talk to you.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, really fun. I wish I had a cool T-shirt and I wish I had my hat. Till next time. Thanks so much for having me.

• 52:25Mayim Bialik?

  Thank you.

• 52:29Jonathan Cohen?

  A lot of these interviews, people will say stuff, and then they're in the flow. And I'm like trying to make notes and write down things to circle back on. But she was like, no, our sun isn't going to turn into a black hole. It's going to destroy us in other ways. Wait, what? We didn't talk about, like, she didn't explain that. Is that going to happen soon? Should I be worried? How concerned am I supposed to be?

• 52:53Mayim Bialik?

  Is this the conclusion that we're doing?

• 52:55Jonathan Cohen?

  Yes.

• 52:55Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, we're in it? Oh, we started?

• 52:58Jonathan Cohen?

  We gotta keep that.

• 52:59Mayim Bialik?

  I didn't know we started. It's a little bit casual, like, the only way that we would all incinerate is if, when the galaxies collide, it knocks the sun out of orbit and we go with it. And then we're sucked into a black hole. But it's not very probable that'll happen. You know what, Janna? That's not enough assurance.

• 53:20Jonathan Cohen?

  While there is a lot of empty space, I'm sure a couple stars are just going to bump into each other and explode.

• 53:28Jonathan Cohen?

  I mean, by, I am sure, I have no calculations.

• 53:31Mayim Bialik?

  It's the end of Never Ending Story. Do you remember what happens, anyone out there?

• 53:36Jonathan Cohen?

  No.

• 53:37Mayim Bialik?

  Things start colliding, they're blowing apart because he doesn't name the princess. And all the things are colliding, that's what I pictured.

• 53:45Jonathan Cohen?

  It's a deep cut, I don't have a reference for.

• 53:47Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, goodness gracious.

• 53:49Jonathan Cohen?

  But like, also, like, our closest neighbors are slowly encroaching on us, and but our faraway neighbors are like, too far. It's just a lot to process.

• 53:59Mayim Bialik?

  I was mostly thinking, how does she keep all those numbers in her head? And then I thought about like, all the things I know about the brain, all the different structures and all the different tracks. Like, I guess you know what you know, but I'm like...

• 54:11Jonathan Cohen?

  I mean, if we were to ask you about song lyrics, you would just have an endless supply of information.

• 54:15Mayim Bialik?

  Well, like, we had someone on the other day who was like, Locas Cereles, and I'm like, I know where the Locas Cereles is, I've dissected that, I know where that...

• 54:22Jonathan Cohen?

  Where is it?

• 54:22Mayim Bialik?

  Well, it's the back here, it's a pond thing. And it's blue, it's like cerulean blue. Anyway, but I was like, just the, I don't think that we truly, really can understand what she's talking about, just because of the sheer numbers, like, 6 billion light years away, 8 million kilometers of, it's like, I can't, I can't. This is really, it's, um, I don't know if I can even explain how sweet this book is, and also the, the, the, there's this beautiful art, and so it shows, here's what you were asking about, how time changes when you're traveling. It's just all these beautiful illustrations of all of these really enormous concepts. It's, it's really beautiful, so I recommend the Black Hole Survival Guide.

• 55:06Jonathan Cohen?

  Also, it's, it's not bigger than like, 7 inches, 8 inches?

• 55:10Mayim Bialik?

  No, literally, it's like the size of, well, it's the size of what I wish my cellphone was. Hello?

• 55:19Mayim Bialik?

  Make sure to follow us on Substack and check out Janna Levin's, uh, Substack page as well. Uh, from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have, we'll see you next time.