Einstein’s Crumbs with Janna Levin

25:03Why not? He did not predict. Well, you know, it's, as I said, abundant. It's endlessly productive. So black holes are crumbs. Black holes are crumbs. Yet to be shaped crumbs. Yeah, you have to go at the equations to decide what you want to think about. Because it describes every possibility imaginable. Once you put matter and energy in, how will space and time curve? So I could, how does that couch curve space-time? Not a great question. Scientifically, not one most people aren't going to spend their time on. But one guy decided, you know, he's on the Russian front during World War I, Carl Schwarzschild.

25:35Oh, Carl Schwarzschild, yes. Did he die on the front? He did. He died like six months after, I think, this correspondence with Einstein where he sends him. He said, I found a very simple solution to your equation. Did he die on the front because he was busy writing letters to Einstein? I know. Not paying attention. Not to the bullets. Hey, buddy, you're on the front. Yeah. Yeah, I think he contracted some infection. It was quite dire. A lot of people back then died of non-bullet injuries. Related. So, but he said, imagine. It was a thought experiment. Imagine you took all the mass of a star and you crushed it to a point.

26:06Or it could have been a planet. Or it could have been anything. So you're imagining that all the mass is at the center in a point. You don't ask how nature would do such a thing. I don't even think Schwarzschild believed that there was a way nature would do such a thing. Certainly Einstein didn't. But the math was sound. It described the curvature of space-time. If you're far away, around a star or the Earth. But as you get closer and closer and all the mass is still in front of you, eventually you form this event horizon where not even light can escape. That's really what we mean by the black hole.

26:32Because the surface gravity gets higher and higher and higher. Yeah, because the mass is always in front of you if you think about it. Like if I go inside the sun, the gravity drops off because I'm leaving some of the mass behind. So you're vaporized. I'm vaporized. It's more than that complication. Right. I always say, you know, black holes are much more benign than people give them credit for. The star is incendiary, right? But the black hole, you can get real close. You just can't get out. So we call this the Schwarzschild solution to Einstein's equations. Yes. So Schwarzschild does this. Yes.

27:01But he dies, so no Nobel Prize for him. But it's still an amazing result. And Einstein doesn't think they're real. He says it's beautiful. He helps get it published. And he couldn't believe that such a simple solution came out so quickly. It was within six months of the publication. Or that nature wouldn't even allow it. Yes, he thought nature would not allow it. Yeah, that there could be something that arises that prevents such a catastrophic collapse of the matter itself. Well, that makes sense. Just staring at this guy, no! Well, try to crush the soda can. It's nearly impossible to get past a certain point.

27:33It's hard to do. It's hard to crush things because there's matter forces that resist. Wait, that's a soda can with soda in it. I could otherwise totally crush a soda can, okay? Can I be clear about this? That'll be like a demo that I wanna see added, but only to a point. You can't make a black hole. No, not a black hole. Right, right, right. Because the atomic forces will resist. Now, so I have to share this quick story with you. I'm having dinner with Stephen Hawking and - Nice flex. and so I was talking about Isaac Newton where he did not figure out that the solar system was stable using his own equations it turns out in the solar system here's the sun and here's like earth going around you're Jupiter every time I go between the sun and Jupiter you're saying I'm very big no I'm saying you're gaseous I've been working to get to Mars I'm saying you're bulbous and gaseous.

28:29So Earth comes around, and it feels you would tug a little because you're closer here, right? And then over here, and it comes back around, it feels a little tug. So all these little tugs, he knew that if this continued, Earth would just fly out of its orbit for thousands, millions of years. This would just be this runaway, destabilizing force going on in the solar system. And so you know what he said? He said, God must step in and fix things. because that's how badass he is. He said, I know my equation works. I can't do it. So the only thing, because we see a stable solar system. Okay, but 100 years later, 100 years later, Laplace comes up with a formalism, a branch of, he develops with others, but he develops a branch of calculus that can demonstrate that these little tugs, which are multiple little tugs on a major system all cancel out.

29:27It's called perturbation theory. But it's just a branch of calculus. The dude invented calculus. So you can't figure that out. So I asked Hawking. I said, how come he didn't figure it out? Because who else are you going to ask if not Stephen Hawking? And you waited a very, very long time for a reply. Yes, I did. Thank you. So I went on to other conversations. And when he was ready. He's assembling with his eye blinks. He's assembling the answer. And it must have been 20 minutes. 20 minutes later, he said something simple and brilliant. He said, you can't think of everything. Not so much. They're talking about 20 minutes to type?

30:09No, no. You can't think of everything. And I said, that is so beautiful. And then he went on to say, to follow that with, Einstein did not come up with black holes. That's right. because you can't think of everything. You can't think of everything. And I said, that's comforting, actually. I mean, an entire industry of scientists have been since still working on Einstein's equations. I got another one for you. Okay. He wrote a research paper on the stimulated emission of radiation. This is an extraordinary result that you have to kind of be on the inside to appreciate. Okay, I'll tell you what it is.

30:44You ready? So you have an atom with these energy levels where the electron hangs out. It's in discrete energy levels. It can't hang out anywhere. This is quantum. A quantum is units of anything, okay? So it's quantized. Even solace. Quantum. Think about it if you have a quantum of solace. Very Marquez somehow. Yes, it is. So the electron can only be in any one of these discrete levels at any given time. And if it's at a higher level, left to itself, it'll want to de-excite back to a lower level. And it shoots out a photon in so doing. So this is what atoms just want to do. If you excite them, they want to de-excite.

31:27We got this. Okay. So let's go back to our atom. And we have an electron hanging out in an energy level. Now, I send in light photons that are exactly the energy level that'll boost this up. So it's gonna absorb those and take them up, okay? It's gonna do that. However, here's what he discovers. That if you bathe an atom with an electron at a given level of photons that would boost it, it will also spontaneously trigger it to de-excite. At the same time? Yes! Exciting and de-exciting. No, no, no, I mean, it will not, all the photons will not go to just boost it. Gotcha. being in that bath will also de-excite it.

32:17There's no classical understanding of that, okay? So it's the stimulated emission of radiation. Normally when you stimulate it, it absorbs it. This one, you shine on it, it de-excites. Okay, that's a weird result. It's a quantum result that he deduces using math and quantum physics, okay? And what do we get out of this? Well, we get lasers. Lasers. You say that so calmly. We get lasers. We get lasers. I would just pull your hair. Pull some. You grab something on it. So it's really an interesting history because there were also masers before lasers, which were microwave versions of this. And Joe Weber, who wanted to study gravitational waves, was working on masers, and they were completely overrun by the laser.

33:06So give us the full acronym. microwave amplitude stimulated emission resonance or something. Laser stands for light. Laser stands for look and stare, experience regret. Oh, very good on the spot. Or it's like, remember George Costanza with the laser pointer? So it's like, look, a Seinfeld episode reference. Oh, this guy's good. That's very good. That's very good. From here on, let us call it. Yeah, well, yeah. So the laser is an acronym, like SCUBA and all these fun acronyms. Laser. Light amplification. Amplification. By the stimulated emission of radiation. And those are the three words in his paper.

33:50I did a real bad job. So light would be. He has a sir of laser. So it'd be visible light. But it works with any kind of photons. Microwaves, it turns out it's easier to make a microwave laser. Microwave amplification by the stimulated emission So this was, this is just some paper he does like while he's taking a crap, right? And publishes it and then. His poop paper. I don't know if he was actually on the toilet. He was experiencing some Brownian motion, if you will. Oh, stop!

34:21Some Brownian movement, yes. So that, for me, that's my favorite. Is it? Of his crumbs. Of his crumbs. Interesting. I mean, it's an unbelievable technological advance. It's incredible, it's everywhere. Yeah, because the amplification is, if you emit light in this bath of light, and that light that you emit is the same light when brought around that will de-excite it and emit a photon. So it's almost self-feeding. The light that it emits is the same light that it then absorbs. So this loop, you can pump light that way with the right number of molecules in the right cavity. Oh my gosh. And it becomes very coherent and very tight beam and very intense.

35:08Yes. So it's a way of getting like this incredible intensity at this one very narrow frequency range or light range. Yeah. And so at the time, I'm sure he was saying to himself, skin peel. Right. I was like, I'm gonna have a little laser. Yeah. I mean, the application of laser were, oh my gosh. So the people who invented the laser, I think it was Charlie Towns, got a Nobel Prize for that. Wow. Did he expect it to be in like a Walmart? Yeah, I know. It's a checkout line. Yeah, no, the first lasers were huge. And so just the idea that here's a paper that 30 years later becomes a device. And the device gets the Nobel Prize.

35:48Incredible. Do you know when Towns got the Nobel Prize? So the laser was invented in 1956, 57. And Einstein died in 1955. So he would not have seen. He was so close to seeing the laser. So close. So close. And they were going to operate on him because he had some element. With a laser? No, no, stop. And he said, he was already in his 70s or something. He said, my work is done. Did he really? Yes. I thought that was classy. He was just scared of medical care. Wow. I mean, he was still so combative with quantum mechanics. I find it fascinating. Give me the quote. Which one? The God does not play dice?

36:23God does not play dice. There are others. Was it Niels Bohr who said back to him, another physicist, Einstein, stop telling God what to do. It was one of several times he talked about God and God's intentions. Because quantum physics is fundamentally statistical. It does not describe a unique objective reality. It only describes a statistical reality. And this felt very bad to Einstein. Even though he made significant contributions to quantum physics. This feels like a trend though, because Newton also was like, I don't know, God.

37:15So a couple of fast other ones. So he predicts out of general relativity that certain phenomenons should produce ripples in space-time continuum, gravitational waves. Right, gravitational waves. So he says, look, if the Earth can curve space-time, if the sun can curve space-time so that the Earth falls around the sun, then if these systems move around, the curves have to move too. So the curves themselves have to modulate like waves. And he predicted something called gravitational waves, which are these silent waves in the shape of space-time. And they are not visible. It's not light. It's pure gravity.

37:52It's not light. But if you saw something, you could see a bobbing on the wave as its path changed around and moving on. So if the sun decides to do something crazy, we would know eight minutes later when the wave got to us. So I think I have this right. There is a cottage industry rising up in astrophysics where they're looking at the pulsars in the galaxy. Pulsars are very fast rotating stars that have extremely precise timing. Precise. So if there's a gravitational wave not coming towards us but passing across our field of view, we can see the effect of the turbulent space-time wave on the timing of the pulsar as it goes through the wave.

38:40And then you can see them move across the universe. They'll bobble around, like buoys on the ocean. Yes, you'll see this effect as that happens. And so it's like, whoa. He wrote many papers where he thought they didn't exist. So he really struggled with whether or not these guys. He headed his nuts there. I know, right? I don't know if black holes exist, but maybe. Well, gravitational waves were really confounding, whether they carried energy or were real in a substantive way or was just, oh, I'm just changing my coordinates. It's just, it's not physically real. There's no physical impact. This was confounding for decades.

39:15He once would write, he wrote papers where he said they do not exist, they would be accepted for publication, and in the space between publication and sending it to press, he would change the entire paper and say they do exist. In the space between it being accepted and going into print. Yes, between it being accepted and going into print. He would change the entire conclusion, rewrite the paper, and say they do exist. He wants to be right no matter what. He wants to know the paper. Right, right, right, right. So then we decide maybe we can detect some of these. And Kip Thorne, who was a guest on our show, we took StarTalk to him because he's Kip Thorne.

39:47Right. We moved the mountain to Kip Thorne. We went to his home office in Pasadena. He's a professor at Emeritus now, I think. Yeah, Caltech. and we talked about Interstellar because he was an executive producer on Interstellar. He wrote the original treatment. It was like his dream idea. He did write the original treatment. He brought on Christopher Nolan to realize those views. It wasn't the other way around. So he petitions Congress and the National Science Foundation and other agencies and with a lot of support from other physicists and the like to build the first gravitational wave detector.

40:24and it's built, it's called LIGO, Laser Interferometer Gravitational Observatory, LIGO, sensibly abbreviated LIGO. And they made it really sensitive to this. They have two lasers that go off at right angles, and if a wave washes over Earth, the length of one laser path will change relative to the other. They make this measurement, bada-bing! They found the first colliding black holes, which deposited so much energy into the space-time continuum, that we have a chance of measuring it. Yeah, I mean, it was the most powerful event humanity's ever observed since the observation of the Big Bang itself.

41:02More energy came out of this. All in gravitational waves. In utter darkness. Utter darkness. And yet, the power was greater than all the stars in the observable universe combined at that moment. But it all came out just in ringing space, literally. So darkness. Right. Could not see it with a telescope. And so, think about it. I love the look on your face. Thank you for that. He's looking back and forth like, what? I'm trying to think of anything else that has been more powerful than those stars combining. I'm stuck at Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. When those stars came together, we all felt it.

41:37That was a moment. It was a tectonic shift. So we discover gravitational waves. That won a Nobel Prize. but more so we discover gravitational waves using lasers his crumbs connected his crumbs came together and made a big smorgasbord of science and physics and Nobel prizes for everybody on board so can you get more amazing than that the detection was essentially in the centenary too Yes! It was in 2015. 100 years. 100 years after his gravitational wave papers. Oh, man. Yeah. Einstein had something to do with that. I mean, he's magic. Einstein totally had something to do with that. Now, Jana, memory serves, Einstein was a big proponent of a unified field theory.

42:32And when I first heard that when I was a kid, field? What do you mean by field? I didn't know that field was synonymous with forces, right? So we have gravitational force, electromagnetic force, which in its day was the electric force and the magnetic force. And then the force. I've seen Star Wars. No, maybe they figured it out. They got the one force, you know. So with the work of Heinrich Hertz and others, we figured out how to combine electricity and magnetism to make one force. And we take that word for granted, but they used to be two whole separate words. Electromagnetic force. So Einstein, why did he fail at this?

43:15What was motivating him? Well, we've all failed at this. Okay. So there's great success in unifying all of the matter forces, all of the quantum matter forces, electromagnetism with the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force. That's the whole story of matter. Done. Completely sealed. Yeah, but they're not combined. There's an outlier. Well, so the electroweak theory is combined. Weak and electromagnetic. We went from electricity, magnetism, and the weak nuclear force. Then we got electromagnetism, and then with my guy from my high school. Right. Which guy from your high school? What? Steve Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow.

43:52Yeah. What was this high school? No, no, yeah. Who was the third one in there? Salaam, Abu Salaam. Abu Salaam, right, that's correct. So the three of them, two of them were classmates in my high school, before me, but in my high school. Anyhow, they - There was something in the water there for sure. They managed to conjoin the electromagnetic force and the weak force, and they called it what? Electro-weak. Okay, that's not very creative, but all right. We'll go with it. But it is pretty magical. It says that those are really one force, which is magical. Something that is at nuclear ranges that we do not experience in our everyday life.

44:23That's manifesting as separate forces today. You go back in time, there's a point where they were just one expressed force in the universe. So that gives us electro-weak, strong force, and gravitation. Yeah, now the strong easily can get in there, even though we don't talk about it very much anymore. What do you mean easily? If you did that, you'd have a Nobel Prize now. Well, there's something called the grand unified theories, and they have certain failures. There isn't like an ideal grand unified theory, but really there's nothing barring the possibility of it. I mean, it's not - No obvious obstacle.

44:50There's no fundamental obstacle to a grand unified theory. Most people think it's going to come along for the ride when we do the full unification. So when Einstein said a unified field theory, was he thinking just that or was he also wanting to include gravity? See, he wants gravity. He wants gravity. He wants gravity. And it's the same thing he did when he went from special to general. When he started thinking about quantum mechanics, he wants a quantum theory of gravity. But gravity behaves so differently from the other forces. Because you can think of gravity not even as a force, but as the just falling down the curvature of space and time.

45:19That's geometry. It's geometry. It's not really a force. So that could be a barrier to summing these together. Well, nobody's ever succeeded at even... So how about Kip Thorne? Does he have some ideas here? Does he... Oh, well, I mean, Kip has endless ideas. Yeah, he does. And I think... Interstellar 2. Yes. I think Kip's ambition is for, yes, a universe that would be completely comprehensible, which would mean we either understand quantum gravity or we understand that gravity is not fundamental. Those are the two kind of choices. Oh, yes. That everything's quantum mechanics. Now, I don't know that Kip's...

45:52Yeah, quantum mechanics is the most successful idea we've ever had about anything in the universe. I don't think any prediction has ever failed. No, and to the largest number of decimal points of any scientific theory in the history of time. Whereas general relativity, as badass as it is, we know where its limits are. Like at the center of a black hole is a singularity. It gives you a singularity in the equations. And I don't know what, that's what we say, where God is dividing by zero. Right. I mean, I'm supposed to divide by zero. Yes. Bad. Well, even Roger Penrose, who talked about the singularity in his Nobel Prize winning paper.

46:22Nobel laureate of recent years. Even in that paper, he says, I don't really think this part's going to survive. He really says, quantum mechanics will probably get rid of the singularity. But it hasn't. But it hasn't, but it hasn't done any of the things it was supposed to do around gravity. The point is, more crumbs await the attention of brilliant people, either who walk among us or are yet to be born. I'm just going to throw in, because this is very relevant to this, wormholes, which Einstein talked about, the Einstein rose in bridges, which ultimately give rise to wormholes, might be involved in understanding that things like black holes and gravity aren't fundamentally real.

46:59They're just sort of embroidered out of quantum wormholes. And so it might really be another one of Einstein's crumbs. Embroidered out of quantum wormholes. Like threads. So more crumbs from Einstein to come. Keep your eyes on wormholes. Is there any other scientist that is that a messian eater, so to speak? Has anybody else left the crumbs? Isaac Newton was badass too. Okay. In fact, I think if Isaac Newton were a contemporary of Einstein, he would have done everything Einstein did and more. Whoa. I'm a Newton guy. Okay. Yeah, you're a real Newton guy. Yeah, yeah, you gotta give me something here.

47:30Yeah. Yeah, I'm a Newton guy. I mean, calculus is pretty impressive. That's pretty good. Yeah, just like on a dare. He's like, Isaac, why are your orbits moving in ellipses rather than circles? And he said, well, I don't know. Let me get back to you on that. I'm gonna eat an apple. Yeah. Let me go back. And I, well, here's why. And, well, how did you do that? Well, I had to invent integral and differential calculus to show that. Okay, Isaac. So if you'll indulge me just for a moment, I need to reflect. on our conversation. Love me some mathematics. Why? It was early on when I learned, when I wanted to be an astrophysicist, that the language of the universe is mathematics.

48:16Now, that's an extraordinary fact because we just invented mathematics out of our heads. The history of math is filled with examples of, I don't know how that works, Let me invent a way to calculate with it so that I can figure out how it works. Thus is the rise of arithmetic and algebra and trigonometry and calculus. All of this helps us commune with the cosmos. But what makes it even more extraordinary is you start out with an idea of how the universe works. but you can't manipulate that idea because you're stuck with using only words. If you make a mathematical representation of that idea, then you can manipulate that idea using the perfect logic of mathematics.

49:10And by doing so, you can extend the idea in places you didn't even know the idea could go because you're extending it with perfectly logical steps from the map of that idea into the world of mathematics. The fact that that works for us at all leaves me in awe of not only the existence of mathematics, but of the human mind that took us there. And here we have, in the likes of Albert Einstein, laying down a physical idea of how the universe works, attaching a mathematical model to it, and the rest of us run with that mathematical model. Crumbs from Einstein's plate, leading to Nobel Prizes that at some level should have all gone to him.

50:02My boy should have had eight, nine, ten Nobel Prizes. But he's sharing his genius with the rest of us in these, the 20th and 21st centuries. More to come from Einstein's crumbs. and that is a cosmic perspective. So, Jana, thank you for helping out here. Thanks, Jana. Always glad to be here. And you have a podcast. Tell me. Oh, right. Joy of Why. I love that. The Joy of Why. That's a beautiful title. Yeah, Quantum Magazine. So the story is my friend Steve Strogatz, who's the original host of the show. It's by Quantum Magazine from the Simons Foundation. Wonderful science magazine. His book was called The Joy of X, Mathematician.

50:45mathematician and I thought it was a brilliant title and so the show was originally called joy of x called the joy of lex Which is all about language and words There's another one I think called the joy of sex Yes, that was the original so Steve and I co-host this show. It's a lot of fun. We deep dive Hardcore physics excellent biology computer science good and the simons foundation from Jim Simons The very successful. Yes, I think he's the most successful wall street trader there ever was and And he brought his background in math and physics. A brilliant mathematician and an accomplished mathematician.

51:21We still use his mathematical results and theoretical physics. I took it right on his yacht. It was called the Archimedes. Nice. That's classy. Jim was the best. All right, I think we did justice to his crumbs here. Thanks so much, guys. Always fun. Yeah. Thanks for filling in those gaps and taking us to the next step. and Harrison you're on the road with your your routine yes I have my comedy magic show we've been off Broadway I'm taking it on the road and I'm doing a stand up all over the country Harrison Harrison Greenbaum dot com dot com we'll look for it alright this has been Star Talk the Einstein Crumbs edition Neil deGrasse Tyson here as always I bid you keep looking up

52:11Thank you.