Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2217 - Brian Cox
Uploaded: 2024-10-24T17:00:30.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2217 - Brian Cox' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-10-24. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2217 - Brian Cox' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-10-24. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2217 - Brian Cox

Joe Rogan podcast check it out
The Joe Rogan experience
Train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night
All day
All right, Brian Cox, good to see you sir
Good to see you again
How's things in the world of the discovery of the universe?
Exciting
Yes, very
I would say
I've been doing some work on black holes recently
Which I hadn't started last time I saw you actually
So I got interested in it
And the amount of the progress that's being made
In trying to understand how they work
And a question that was posed by Stephen Hawking
A long time ago
Really 1970s, early 1980s
Which is what happens to stuff that falls in
The simplest question you could possibly ask
Right
There's progress being made on that now
Which I think is profound and exciting
How is the progress being made?
Like how do we
How do we study a black hole?
I mean it's mainly theoretical
Although
We have now got photographs of them
So we have two photographs
Which are radio telescope photographs
Right
One of the
The one in the centre of our galaxy
Which is a little one
It's called Sagittarius A star
It's a little supermassive black hole
So it's about 6 million times the mass of the sun
Which makes it a little supermassive
And then there's another one
The first photo that was taken
It's a collaboration called Event Horizon
And they took a photo of one in the galaxy M87
55 million light years away
That thing is around 6 billion times the mass of the sun
I mean imagine that
6,000 million times more massive than our sun
Is that the largest black hole we've ever discovered?
No there are bigger ones than that
But that's the scale of them
It's a big-ish one
But if you think about it
I mean so
There's a number
It's called the
The Swartshore radius of the thing
So if you took our sun
Which you can fit a million earths inside
And collapsed it down
To make a black hole
It would form a black hole
When it shrunk
Within a radius of 3 kilometers
About 2 miles
So you've got to take this thing
Which is what
I have to convert from kilometers to miles
Don't I?
But it's about
That's okay
700,000 kilometers
So it's about 500,000 miles radius
Or something like that
The sun
So you squash it down
Until it's about 2 miles
And then that would form a black hole
Wow
6 billion times the mass of the sun
Means you multiply that by 6 billion
So these things
The so-called Swartshore radius
Is larger than our solar system
Basically
Oh my god
This thing that sits in the galaxy
So we've got these two photographs
Larger than our solar system
Yeah, the event
So it's a big structure
That's a Chandra x-ray image of
There it is
That's it
So that one
There
That's the M87 black hole
So what you're seeing there
Is the emission from the material
That's swirling around it
It's called the accretion disk
So you have material
That's orbiting
Very fast
Emitting a lot of radiation
And that's what you see
It's a flat disk by the way
So you think
Think Saturn's rings
So this material is very flat
But what you're seeing
In that photograph
Is the light rays
Being bent around the black hole
From that flat disk
So that was a prediction
From Einstein's theory
Basically published it in 1915
And you can predict
That that's what one
Should look like
And then just about
Was that four years ago
Now maybe five years ago
For the first time in history
We get an image of one
And it looks like the prediction
Wow
So it's a remarkable thing
How phenomenal is that?
Yeah
So we've got
We've had those two photographs
The other thing we've had
Is so-called
Gravitational wave detections
So these are colliding black holes
And they collide
And merge together
And obviously that's quite
A violent event in the universe
And so that event
That process ripples
Space-time
So it sends ripples out
In the fabric of the universe
Space and time
And actually Kip Thorne
I've spoken to him several times
He's one of the greats
Right, won the Nobel Prize
For this
And he calls it
A storm in time
So you get a time storm
So really
We're to think
As we speak now
There will be
These very tiny ripples
From violent cosmic events
Passing through this room
And they're changing
The rate that time passes
So that
As they go through
And we can detect that now
So we have detectors
That can pick that up
And so we've seen
Those collisions as well
So these collisions
How far away?
Oh millions of light years away
And they're affecting
What's happening
In this room right now
Yeah, to a tiny extent
So there's an experiment
Called LIGO
Which is the
What does it stand for?
Something like
Gravitational interferometer
I can't remember exactly
What the word
But there's
So basically
It's laser beams
And there's one
In Washington State
North of Seattle
And one in Louisiana
And they're kind of
Laser beams
Four kilometer long
Laser beams
At right angles
And they can detect
These very tiny shifts
In the
Effectively
You could say
The length of the laser beam
It's a bit more
Fiddly and complicated
But it essentially
Measures this
The distortion in space-time
Caused by these ripples
And it's way less
Than the diameter
Of an atomic nucleus
By the way
Way less
These little
Oh my god
And so we've started to
We've observed
Many of those
There it is
There's LIGO
So it's just basically
Two laser beams
But these ultra
High precision thing
And so we've got data now
Of the collision
Of black holes
And those event horizon
Pictures
With radio telescopes
So that's part of it
But the main bit
Has been theoretical advances
In understanding
Exactly
In a sense
It was what's wrong
With Stephen Hawking's calculation
Which is a weird thing
To say sometimes
Because people think
Stephen Hawking
Sure he didn't get
His math wrong
But he did actually
In his calculator
So what he calculated
Back in 1973
1974
Is that a black hole
So we picture this thing
From which nothing can escape
Even light
So when you go in
You're gone
Basically
What he calculated
Is that
Even though these things
Are just a distortion
In space and time
That's the description
Of them
So it's almost
If there's nothing there
Apart from a distortion
In space and time
He calculated
That they glow
So they have a temperature
So they emit radiation
It's called Hawking radiation
And so important
Was that discovery
If you go to Westminster Abbey
In London
Look on the floor
Of the Abbey
On his memorial stone
And he's in there
Next to Newton
And Shakespeare
And all these people
And he's there
And chiseled in stone
On the floor
Of Westminster Abbey
Is his equation
For the temperature
Of a black hole
So it was this
Tremendously important discovery
So he discovers
These things glow
And he calculates
How they glow
They're very low temperature
But they emit things
Which means that
They shrink
Because they're
They're emitting stuff
And so they're shrinking
So that means
They have a lifetime
So first of all
One day they'll be gone
So that means that
You have to address
This question
Of what happened
To all the stuff
That fell in
And his calculation
Said that there's
No record at all
Of anything that fell in
In all this radiation
That's come off the black hole
So it's purely
Information-less
Radiation
So what that means
Is that black holes
Destroy information
According to that calculation
And that's a big deal
Because nowhere else
In all of physics
Does anything
Erase information
From the universe
So it's really true
That if I got this
This notepad and pen
Right
And I wrote some things
On it
And then I set fire
To this
Even just incinerated it
Put it in a nuclear
Explosion
Whatever
In principle
According to all
The laws of nature
That we know
If you collected
Everything that came off
All the radiation
All the bits of ashes
And things
And you could just
Measure it all
Then just in principle
The idea is
You could reconstruct
The information
So it all gets scrambled up
And thrown out
And so in practice
You can't do it
But just in principle
The laws of nature
Say that information
Is not destroyed
It's just scrambled up
In a way that you can't
Reconstruct
Right
But this calculation
That Stephen did
Said there is no information
In that radiation at all
Zero
Just nothing
So it seemed that
Uniquely
In the universe
Black holes
Erase information
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When you say
There's no information
Like how are you measuring
Whether or not
There's information in it
So
So really in bits
I mean the idea is
And it's
And I should say
It's very much in principle
This
So no one thinks
In practice
You could reconstruct
What I wrote down on this
If you set fire to it
But in principle
Well maybe sometime in the future
In a million years from now
In principle
You could just collect everything
Then somewhere in that
In that
In that
All that radiation
And ashes
And light
That's come off the thing
Is the information
It's there
So you could
Reconstruct the book
Or what I wrote
On this page
In principle
But the thing
About Stephen's calculation
Was that even in principle
It said there is no
Information
And by the way
It's kind of easy
To see why actually
Because
This radiation
This Hawking radiation
That comes off the black hole
It's coming from
The horizon of the black hole
So I should say
What the horizon is maybe
So it's
If you
Remember I said
That the sun
If you squashed it down
Within three kilometres
Of radius
You'd get this
Kind of distortion
In space and time
From which
If you went in
Across this region
Three kilometres
You went inside it
You couldn't get out
So that's called
The event horizon
So you wouldn't notice
If you fell through
The horizon of the black hole
In the Milky Way galaxy
If you went into that one
We could be falling through
That horizon now
In this room
And we wouldn't notice anything
Except that
We couldn't get out again
And ultimately
In a few hours
In that case
Time would end for us
So we just go
You go to the end of time
We could talk about that
There's a picture of that
Maybe I should talk about
This is getting quite complicated
Already isn't it
We didn't start in a relaxing way
That's fine
No need to
No need to
Let's get right into it
So we wouldn't notice
Not for the big black holes
So yeah
So these supermassive black holes
We could fall
Across this horizon
It's just like
Being in emp