What I love most about this podcast is how much it makes me feel valid. I was on a long cosmology/quantum physics binge last year. I did this even though my STEM knowledge is stuck at barely secondary school level. I always felt a little guilty, there was always this voice in my head telling me I wasn't *really* enjoying it, at least not in the proper way. I was just one of those stupid people who wanted the cool facts but didn't understand even the most rudimentary logic behind it. Seeing somebody approach the subject like this makes me feel that maybe it is valid to want to know more about how the universe works, and be amazed by it. Even though I won't ever be able to understand it properly.
You know, I'm not so sure about that last part. Once you learn to love something, figuring out how it works gets a lot easier. You might not know how smart you are until you've learned to love not being smart, but the process of becoming smarter. Learning to understand and accept not just THAT you're stupid, but HOW you're stupid, and embarking on the quest to become smart by brute force - Tackling those little stupidities one at a time, until you've improved their situation, and then moving onto the next one, and continuing one step at a time, and just never quite stopping all the way. You never really reach intelligence, as a destination - No one ever does. Intelligence is the journey of better and better understanding how stupid you are, and just refusing to ever stay the same amount of stupid. I wish you luck on your journey, wherever it takes you. I believe in you.
I checked back every day since the last upload to see if there were any more episodes. Seriously this series is fascinating. I’m a John Green type brain but I LOVE trying to understand the stuff Katie knows. Thank you everyone apart of this project!!
Fun fact: if you were to dig to the center of the Earth (handwaving away the heat and pressure issues), you'd be weightless, because all the stuff causing gravity is equally spread around you.
Why does every drawing of a gravity well get biggest at the center of an object instead of turning around in the middle and becoming flat in the middle?
Also fun fact: if you jumped through that hole from the International Space Station, you'd meet it exactly on the other side as it passed half its orbit (ignoring air resistance).
You'd be weightless but crushed nonetheless by the Earth-sized amount of material crushing downwards upon you. The half of the Earth above you is pulled down by the half an Earth below you and vice versa, and left-vs-right, and front-vs-back, and in all directions simultaneously, all crushing towards you as their common center. Weightless. But dead.
The music for this is very soothing, which helps when I--like John--experience some form of anxiety when thinking about the big big big big picture of it all
I absolutely love and applaud how brave John is lol. He's absolutely terrified by all the stuff he's learning and yet he enthusiastically keeps pressing forward. Way to go!
I have to say that I really love this series ! It is so well explained by Katie and clarified by John's questions. It is not too simplified to get un interesting, yet involved more than enough to just be fascinating to make us desire to learn more ! It makes me wanna go back to school to study astrophysics ! Great great job to you and I hope this goes on for a very long time !!
I LOVE this podcast. Speaking on the speghetti-ification aspect, Loki season 2 in it's comic book/tv series way shows this when they're trying to do something near a blackhole.
lmao now im imagining John writing a chapter that suddenly gets really descriptive, like more and more detail about a black hole until u have enough material for physicists to get a paper out of the 20 seconds of screentime the black hole imagery demands. To save money in the movie it could be a slow-zooming close-up that only renders the fraction of the black hole thats on screen. Maybe its like a runaway metaphor for the inescapeable "gravity" between people with such a strong connection. Idk i could see a love story about physicists including this, and the whole thing existing just to get more hollywood supercomputer time would be really really funny
That was amazing. Not that I completely understand black holes now, but the information isn't getting lost in the singularity at the center of my brain!
Thanks! im obsessed with black holes and listened to this podcast already for 3 times! Id like yall guys to tell more about neuron stars and pulsars (possibly about every other type of a star). Also some theories related to black holes such as white ones and other stuff. Thanks!! waitnig for the next episode
I love this show, thanks you all. I watch and read a lot of everything, science included. Your discussions let me feel like I know this; but I still feel wonder and amazement about it. I agree that a singularity seems completely ridiculous, but, I kinda feel that there are many ridiculous things in our world that seem simple and mind boggling at the same time. 😊 That feeling when the more you learn about something, the more complicated or amazing (or strange) it is.
Honestly I think I'm starting to look forward to the sponsorship spots in this podcast, haha! Fascinating episode, I've read a lot about black holes and this was VERY cool!
I was recently wondering why black holes didn't form earlier and, in particular, why the early hot, dense universe didn't become one. The best guess I came to was that (for some reason) black holes require an area of high density surrounded by a less dense area to form (as opposed to the near uniform density of the early universe). Any thoughts, anyone?
What you have to remember is that that the universe is expanding at a rate faster than the speed of light (thats what leads to the red shift of distant galaxies is the light wave being stretched and the universe expands) so in the early universe, everything is moving faster than light and unable to condense into a blackhole
I think the general just is that the energy was too high for Gravity to create any but the most minuscule black holes which I think there's some PBS Space Time episodes about them evaporating rather quickly because they were so small
what helped me understand how black holes work was the mental image of our sun turning into one. (technically our sun isnt massive enough, but lets ignore that) if our sun was replaced by a black hole with the exact same mass then absolutely nothing would change, gravitationally speaking. our planets would still have the same orbits as before, just around an incredibly small black hole
My pondering is if a black hole made of matter and a black hole of antimatter met what would happen? Would it explode or just get bigger because a black hole is no longer matter?
How does selling life insurance turn out to be such an easy thing to tie into a discussion of the universe… "You need health insurance, because Dr Katie Mack says the world will still be here tomorrow!"
Wouldn't it be plausible to state that the Higgs Field change, which allowed for expansion also allowed for the formation of Black Holes; thus the extra large black holes formed as the universe cooled?
Dr. Mack made the point I was hoping would be made: 56:09 the idea of a "singularity" at the center of a black hole is not the universally accepted (pun intended) foregone conclusion. We have no idea what's at the center of black holes. Many people mention singularities as if they are fact but several theories (as Dr. Mack describes) offer alternatives, all of which (including the idea of singularities) are not certain. As Dr. Mack mentions at 56:37 infinities in your equations generally mean your model is wrong, which underscores not that the idea of a singularity is _definitely_ wrong but that the equations of General Relativity that give rise to singularities within each black hole are a broken paradigm for describing these phenomena. I'm excited to hear what astrophysicists like Dr. Mack learn in the coming years about black holes that may offer more insights into what lives beneath and beyond their event horizons!
I want to know the theoretical feasibility of placing three ligo style observatories in orbit around a black hole, to measure the oscillating gravitstional field of a black hole. That should alow us to see if its a simple spinning singularity, or if theres more variance in density behind the event horizon.
I find it amazingly clever that an astrophysicist basically used Interstellar as an excuse for the studio to do their homework and write a paper afterwards. "I convinced Hollywood to spend so much money on a simulation based on my model. Here's what I found out!"
Since the event horizon radius of a black hole is proportional (linear) to its mass, while in 3D space usually an object’s mass grows cubical to its radius…. we’d see the event horizon radius go up really fast if we tally up more mass into the equation. I heard that based on some observation, the theoretical event horizon for all the mass in the observable universe is larger than the size of the observable universe, meaning we could practically call the observable universe a black hole?
I don’t understand why they say information is destroyed when it enters a black hole; it seems to me that instead it’s *sequestered*. I realise it can never be accessed again, but that’s not the same thing as destruction.
I can't help but wonder how scientist have figured out the math, like how long our sun has been burning vs how long it has left. Like what if they're wrong and we don't have 5 billion years to figure things out? Based on global warming will Earth even be habitable for that long? Or will it be like Mars.
Couple questions…after the event horizon is it really bright? Second, can quantum particles escape the event horizon? I know nothing escapes past that point but what if the particle is right at the boundary but its probabilistic nature makes it just beyond the boundary for a split second and the poof it’s gone. Sorry if these are stupid questions.
The more i watch the more questions I have…if the Big Bang came from a point of infinity density how was it able to expand when these “smaller” points of infinities that we call black holes don’t let anything escape. My brain hurts
The jets of a quasar are from superheated gas in the accretion disk, which is outside the event horizon, or the point of no return. The gravity from the black hole and friction from all the gas bouncing around and off each other shoots energy out like a jet.
7:35 "So over the course of about a billion years, it'll become bright enough to burn off the oceans of the Earth. So that's going to be it for us" So interplanetary travel is (eventually) a must, then (if we don't destroy ourselves first, that is).
Oh let me tell you John, we're gonna make it to see the oceans boiling. In fact, we'll probably see them start boiling within our life times at this rate! 😬
Because the mathematics says it doesn’t happen … Correction: At densities greater than those supported by neutron degeneracy, quark matter is _expected_ to occur.
could dark matter be the pulling taught of the fabric of space between singularities? As in, since it’s only readable to us via its gravity, could it be not matter itself, but a sort of weight exerted by things dense enough to “pull taught” or exert force on the fabric of space itself?
lol universe where a star goes super nova the day the protagonist was born where in which he gets to look out his window to physically view his fondest moments in time as a snap shot
I absolutely love and applaud how brave John is lol. He's absolutely terrified by all the stuff he's learning and yet he enthusiastically keeps pressing forward. Way to go!
This series is so great. It's like getting back the wonder of learning about this stuff the first time.
"When you say a short period of time, sometimes that means like a picosecond and sometimes it means 2 million years". Physics in a nutshell!
It's about the relativity of time (the passage of time, the perception of time etc.), I guess. 🙃
What I love most about this podcast is how much it makes me feel valid.
I was on a long cosmology/quantum physics binge last year. I did this even though my STEM knowledge is stuck at barely secondary school level. I always felt a little guilty, there was always this voice in my head telling me I wasn't *really* enjoying it, at least not in the proper way. I was just one of those stupid people who wanted the cool facts but didn't understand even the most rudimentary logic behind it.
Seeing somebody approach the subject like this makes me feel that maybe it is valid to want to know more about how the universe works, and be amazed by it. Even though I won't ever be able to understand it properly.
You know, I'm not so sure about that last part. Once you learn to love something, figuring out how it works gets a lot easier. You might not know how smart you are until you've learned to love not being smart, but the process of becoming smarter. Learning to understand and accept not just THAT you're stupid, but HOW you're stupid, and embarking on the quest to become smart by brute force - Tackling those little stupidities one at a time, until you've improved their situation, and then moving onto the next one, and continuing one step at a time, and just never quite stopping all the way.
You never really reach intelligence, as a destination - No one ever does. Intelligence is the journey of better and better understanding how stupid you are, and just refusing to ever stay the same amount of stupid.
I wish you luck on your journey, wherever it takes you. I believe in you.
❤❤❤❤
I checked back every day since the last upload to see if there were any more episodes. Seriously this series is fascinating. I’m a John Green type brain but I LOVE trying to understand the stuff Katie knows. Thank you everyone apart of this project!!
Episodes every 2 weeks!
Fun fact: if you were to dig to the center of the Earth (handwaving away the heat and pressure issues), you'd be weightless, because all the stuff causing gravity is equally spread around you.
And quite dead due to m a g m a.
Why does every drawing of a gravity well get biggest at the center of an object instead of turning around in the middle and becoming flat in the middle?
Also fun fact: if you jumped through that hole from the International Space Station, you'd meet it exactly on the other side as it passed half its orbit (ignoring air resistance).
You'd be weightless but crushed nonetheless by the Earth-sized amount of material crushing downwards upon you. The half of the Earth above you is pulled down by the half an Earth below you and vice versa, and left-vs-right, and front-vs-back, and in all directions simultaneously, all crushing towards you as their common center. Weightless. But dead.
@@Nomaken2 I guess cause it's hard to illustrate. Gravity wells are already difficult to convey on paper.
Please just make this podcast into a 500 episodes series. I love it so much, I don't want it to end 🥹
+
The music for this is very soothing, which helps when I--like John--experience some form of anxiety when thinking about the big big big big picture of it all
4:54 "I expect it to get worse, but I'm still excited"
Put that on a shirt!!
I absolutely love and applaud how brave John is lol. He's absolutely terrified by all the stuff he's learning and yet he enthusiastically keeps pressing forward. Way to go!
I love this series, and hearing John's joyful anxiety is delightful.
Katie's explanations are simple to understand too.
“Proper emergency” killed me😂
I can't stop hearing Super Massive Black Hole by the Muse every time they say it 🌌
yes it's driving me crazy!
Literally same lmao
OK, so it's not just me. Phew!
I have to say that I really love this series !
It is so well explained by Katie and clarified by John's questions. It is not too simplified to get un interesting, yet involved more than enough to just be fascinating to make us desire to learn more ! It makes me wanna go back to school to study astrophysics !
Great great job to you and I hope this goes on for a very long time !!
I LOVE this podcast. Speaking on the speghetti-ification aspect, Loki season 2 in it's comic book/tv series way shows this when they're trying to do something near a blackhole.
This podcast is so good, i can't wait to listen every time you guys release them.
Thank you John and Katie!
I really love this series, I really hope it goes on for a long time
lmao now im imagining John writing a chapter that suddenly gets really descriptive, like more and more detail about a black hole until u have enough material for physicists to get a paper out of the 20 seconds of screentime the black hole imagery demands. To save money in the movie it could be a slow-zooming close-up that only renders the fraction of the black hole thats on screen. Maybe its like a runaway metaphor for the inescapeable "gravity" between people with such a strong connection. Idk i could see a love story about physicists including this, and the whole thing existing just to get more hollywood supercomputer time would be really really funny
New background is perfect!
i’m living for this series John, thanks!!
John and Katie, it's ssssso good, it's so so good, thank you!
That was amazing. Not that I completely understand black holes now, but the information isn't getting lost in the singularity at the center of my brain!
Could we talk about neutron stars as if they were colossal chemical elements?? 19:50
Thanks! im obsessed with black holes and listened to this podcast already for 3 times! Id like yall guys to tell more about neuron stars and pulsars (possibly about every other type of a star). Also some theories related to black holes such as white ones and other stuff. Thanks!! waitnig for the next episode
this is a great series. I'm so happy it's here!
I love this show, thanks you all. I watch and read a lot of everything, science included. Your discussions let me feel like I know this; but I still feel wonder and amazement about it. I agree that a singularity seems completely ridiculous, but, I kinda feel that there are many ridiculous things in our world that seem simple and mind boggling at the same time. 😊 That feeling when the more you learn about something, the more complicated or amazing (or strange) it is.
i love this podcast so much
Nuclear Pasta, that's what my husband said made for dinner last night
Honestly I think I'm starting to look forward to the sponsorship spots in this podcast, haha!
Fascinating episode, I've read a lot about black holes and this was VERY cool!
I want to learn about everything in this format
I'm really having a good time with this series. 😃
Informative as always.
I was recently wondering why black holes didn't form earlier and, in particular, why the early hot, dense universe didn't become one. The best guess I came to was that (for some reason) black holes require an area of high density surrounded by a less dense area to form (as opposed to the near uniform density of the early universe). Any thoughts, anyone?
The early universe was dense but not THAT dense.
That's exactly right! It was super dense everywhere, so there wasn't really any direction to collapse into
There probably were. Look up primordial black holes.
What you have to remember is that that the universe is expanding at a rate faster than the speed of light (thats what leads to the red shift of distant galaxies is the light wave being stretched and the universe expands) so in the early universe, everything is moving faster than light and unable to condense into a blackhole
I think the general just is that the energy was too high for Gravity to create any but the most minuscule black holes which I think there's some PBS Space Time episodes about them evaporating rather quickly because they were so small
I LOVE this series!
what helped me understand how black holes work was the mental image of our sun turning into one. (technically our sun isnt massive enough, but lets ignore that)
if our sun was replaced by a black hole with the exact same mass then absolutely nothing would change, gravitationally speaking. our planets would still have the same orbits as before, just around an incredibly small black hole
This is the best vid or podcast or thingy, ever. Just super cool 'n fantastical....
My pondering is if a black hole made of matter and a black hole of antimatter met what would happen? Would it explode or just get bigger because a black hole is no longer matter?
The event horizon gets bigger and there’s lots of gravitational waves to measure.
Even Horizon is a great name. I hope John agrees.
How does selling life insurance turn out to be such an easy thing to tie into a discussion of the universe… "You need health insurance, because Dr Katie Mack says the world will still be here tomorrow!"
I just watched the youtube short of Hank Green saying "I'm so old" and the first thing I hear is John Green going "God, I'm so old"
🗣 WHAT IS THAT MELODY!!!
Wouldn't it be plausible to state that the Higgs Field change, which allowed for expansion also allowed for the formation of Black Holes; thus the extra large black holes formed as the universe cooled?
Dr. Mack made the point I was hoping would be made:
56:09 the idea of a "singularity" at the center of a black hole is not the universally accepted (pun intended) foregone conclusion. We have no idea what's at the center of black holes. Many people mention singularities as if they are fact but several theories (as Dr. Mack describes) offer alternatives, all of which (including the idea of singularities) are not certain. As Dr. Mack mentions at 56:37 infinities in your equations generally mean your model is wrong, which underscores not that the idea of a singularity is _definitely_ wrong but that the equations of General Relativity that give rise to singularities within each black hole are a broken paradigm for describing these phenomena. I'm excited to hear what astrophysicists like Dr. Mack learn in the coming years about black holes that may offer more insights into what lives beneath and beyond their event horizons!
I want to know the theoretical feasibility of placing three ligo style observatories in orbit around a black hole, to measure the oscillating gravitstional field of a black hole.
That should alow us to see if its a simple spinning singularity, or if theres more variance in density behind the event horizon.
Here's a "well, actually" about not having names for numbers that large: 10^69 is a duovigintillion.
I guess John finally figured out the Fault in Our Stars!
Am I the only one who longs to die via crossing an event horizon? Ahhhhhh
All that gravity talk has me imagining a John-crepe on the surface of a distant world and I don't like it at all. Awesome episode as always
i love you john
I find it amazingly clever that an astrophysicist basically used Interstellar as an excuse for the studio to do their homework and write a paper afterwards. "I convinced Hollywood to spend so much money on a simulation based on my model. Here's what I found out!"
Everything is everywhere
THE BIG SINK
Anyone else now singing “constant burning” a la KD Lang?
Love this Stuff! ^.^
I love these!
Since the event horizon radius of a black hole is proportional (linear) to its mass, while in 3D space usually an object’s mass grows cubical to its radius…. we’d see the event horizon radius go up really fast if we tally up more mass into the equation.
I heard that based on some observation, the theoretical event horizon for all the mass in the observable universe is larger than the size of the observable universe, meaning we could practically call the observable universe a black hole?
Please add decks to all courses!!
Will "we" still be here in a billion years? Following the normal course of evolution, we won't even be the same species by then.
Well, I suppose it depends on how you define “we”!
Gold and platinum for instance, are heavier than iron. They are formed in supernovas. Not sure why she didn't mention that.
I don’t understand why they say information is destroyed when it enters a black hole; it seems to me that instead it’s *sequestered*.
I realise it can never be accessed again, but that’s not the same thing as destruction.
I can't help but wonder how scientist have figured out the math, like how long our sun has been burning vs how long it has left. Like what if they're wrong and we don't have 5 billion years to figure things out? Based on global warming will Earth even be habitable for that long? Or will it be like Mars.
Couple questions…after the event horizon is it really bright? Second, can quantum particles escape the event horizon? I know nothing escapes past that point but what if the particle is right at the boundary but its probabilistic nature makes it just beyond the boundary for a split second and the poof it’s gone. Sorry if these are stupid questions.
The more i watch the more questions I have…if the Big Bang came from a point of infinity density how was it able to expand when these “smaller” points of infinities that we call black holes don’t let anything escape. My brain hurts
No, I don’t think so, because the event horizon is just a mathematical surface in spacetime.
Your quantum particle question is Hawking radiation.
Wow, this was excellent! One hour to cover stuff I've been learning for all of my life.
Okay but Sagittarius A* is also a beautiful name.
Question for John, does this podcast mean you're going to write a sci-fi story?
How are there plasma jets if nothing can escape?
It's stuff that hasn't fallen all tthe way in past the event horizon yet.
The jets form outside of the event horizon, so they're still able to escape.
The plasma jets are formed from the accretion disc, which is outside the event horizon.
The jets of a quasar are from superheated gas in the accretion disk, which is outside the event horizon, or the point of no return. The gravity from the black hole and friction from all the gas bouncing around and off each other shoots energy out like a jet.
And all of the above thanks to twisted magnetic fields - even more twisted than the space-time itself.
Hey John, I do have it on good authority that the universe is weird.
Few stuff can shut me up like this 🤐
This isn't showing up in my podcast feed, just as a video on the crash course channel
I can’t wait for the dark matter !
Could a event horizon rotating off center axis emit light as its relative
Wow
7:35 "So over the course of about a billion years, it'll become bright enough to burn off the oceans of the Earth. So that's going to be it for us" So interplanetary travel is (eventually) a must, then (if we don't destroy ourselves first, that is).
❤❤❤
⚫
John, less an interview'er and more an existential dread inserter (jk)
Vroomph
Nothing human maybe
Oh let me tell you John, we're gonna make it to see the oceans boiling. In fact, we'll probably see them start boiling within our life times at this rate! 😬
We have electron degeneracy, neutron degeneracy, why not quark degeneracy?
Because the mathematics says it doesn’t happen …
Correction: At densities greater than those supported by neutron degeneracy, quark matter is _expected_ to occur.
could dark matter be the pulling taught of the fabric of space between singularities? As in, since it’s only readable to us via its gravity, could it be not matter itself, but a sort of weight exerted by things dense enough to “pull taught” or exert force on the fabric of space itself?
Hm..discovered time dilation of black holes on my own. However, turns out be correct. Am I a genius?
Not unless you published it before 1915 when Einstein published General Relativity.
lol universe where a star goes super nova the day the protagonist was born where in which he gets to look out his window to physically view his fondest moments in time as a snap shot
one thing about me, i'm going to die.
Yeah no-one is making films, haven't for many years.
When our Sun becomes a Red Giant, will Superman still have his powers?
Remember; blackholes are not objects but events in space-time 😊
What? Just how do you define object?
That's incorrect. They are objects in astrophysics. They meet both criteria of an object (definable position, measurable mass)
the word spacetime pretty much makes everything an event
First here
I absolutely love and applaud how brave John is lol. He's absolutely terrified by all the stuff he's learning and yet he enthusiastically keeps pressing forward. Way to go!