YouSaid · the spoken record

Avi Loeb

lines on the record: 200
first: 2021-01-14
most recent: 2021-01-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That you get right. So you pay the same amount of money, but at least you know what's inside. So why don't we figure out what the word is about, what the universe contains, what is the dark matter? It will help us appreciate the bigger picture. And then you can assign your own flavor to what it means, you know.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why? Because it makes you appreciate better the environment that you live in. And sometimes people think religion, for example, is in conflict with science. Spirituality, that's not true. If you see a watch and you look at it from the outside, you might say, oh, that's interesting, but then if you start to open it up and learn about how it works, you appreciate it more. So science is the way to learn about how the world works. And it's not in conflict to the meaning that you assign to all of this, but it helps you appreciate the world better. So in fact, I would think that a religious person should promote science because it gives you a better appreciation of what's around you. You know, it's like, you know, if you buy in a grocery, you buy something, you know, a bunch of fruits that are packed together. And you can't see from the outside exactly what kind of fruits are inside. But if you open it up and study, you appreciate better the merchandise.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The process that you should get satisfied by, the process of learning you should enjoy. So it's not so much that there is a meaning. In fact, there is, as far as I can tell, things just exist. I think it's inappropriate for us to assign meaning for our existence because as a civilization, we will eventually perish and nothing will be, you know, just another planet on which life died. And if you look at the big scheme of things, who cares? Who cares? And how can we assign significance to what we are doing? So if you say the meaning of life is this, well, it will not be around in a billion years. It cannot be the meaning of life. Because nothing will be wrong. So I think we should just enjoy the process. Know, it's like many other things in life, you enjoy good food, okay? And you can enjoy learning.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they might be wiser because they lived around for a while, but I'm afraid they will be silent. I'm afraid they will not have a good answer. And I think...”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An excellent question, and if we ever find an alien that we can converse with, I would like to answer an answer to this question”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They kept at the same time this notion that they are short-lived. I mean, you cannot be arrogant because anything that you advocate for, you know, you will not be around to do that in 100 years. So people will just forget and move on. And if you keep that in mind, the scissors in ancient Rome, they had a person next to them telling them don't forget that you're a mortal. You know, there was a person with that duty because the Caesars thought that they are all powerful. And they had for a good reason someone they hired to whisper in their ear. Don't forget that you're mortal.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you have to be careful not to be depressed by it because otherwise you lose the vitality, right? So I think the most important thing. A sense of appreciation that you're alive. That's the first thing, but more importantly, a sense of modesty. Because how can anyone be arrogant?”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah I'm not afraid, you know what Epicorus, actually Epicorus was a very wise person, according to Lucretius. Epicorus didn't live anything in writing. But he said that he's never afraid of death because as long as he's around, death is not around. And when death will be around, he will not be around, so he will never meet death. So why should you be worried about something you will never meet? It's an interesting philosophy of life. You shouldn't be afraid of something that you will never encounter, right?”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, to me what stands out is his statement that the best way to corrupt the mind of young people is to tell them that they should agree with the common view. you know and uh you know it goes back to the thread that went throughout discussion”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and he died at a young age in an accident, unfortunately. And then, you know, people like Nietzsche that Broke conventions. And I noticed that Nietzsche is still extremely popular. You know, that's quite surprising. He appeals to the young people of today.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, actually, yeah, I read the number of existentialists that Appeal to me because they were authentic. You know, Saturn, he declined the Nobel Prizes we discussed, but he also was mocking people that pretend to be something better than they are. He was living an authentic life that is sincere. And that's what appealed to me. And Albert Camille was another French philosopher that advocated existentialism. You know, that really appealed to me. That's probably my”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Eventually, a decade later became the chair of this department and served for nine years as the chair of the astronomy department at Harvard. But at that point, it became clear to me that I'm actually married to the love of my life, even though it was an arranged marriage. There are many philosophical questions in astrophysics that we can address. But I'm still very different than my colleagues were focusing on technical skills in getting to this job. So, my mother was really extremely instrumental in planting the seeds of thinking about the big picture in me. Then my father, he was working in the farm and we didn't speak much because we sort of understood each other without speaking. But what he gave me is a sense of that it's more important to do things than to talk about them.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that someone said, I don't want to become a junior faculty at the Harvard Astronomy Department because the chance for being promoted are very small. So he took another job. And then I was taken in line. They gave it to me. I didn't care much because I could go back to the farm any day. And after three years, I was tenured.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“International project that was funded by the Star Wars Initiative of Ronald Reagan. And that brought me to the US to visit Washington, D.C., where we were funded from. And then on one of the visits, I went to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and met John Bacal that later offered me a five-year fellowship there under the condition that I'll switch to astrophysics. At which point, you know, I said, okay, I cannot give up on this opportunity. I'll do it. Switch to astrophysics. It felt like a forced marriage, kind of arranged marriage. And then I was offered the position at Harvard because nobody wanted that. They first selected someone else.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different than my colleagues, as you can tell, because my upbringing was quite different. And the only reason I'm doing physics or astrophysics is because of circumstances. At age 18, I was asked to serve in the military. The only way for me to pursue intellectual work was to work on physics because that was the closest to philosophy. And I was good at physics so they admitted me to an elite program called Alpiot that allowed me to finish my PhD at age 24 and to actually propose the first”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From my mother, I mean, she was very much my inspiration for pursuing intellectual work. She studied at the university, and then because of the Second World War, after the Second World War, she was born in Bulgaria, they immigrated to Israel. And she left university to work on a farm. And later in life, when all the kids left home, she went back to the university and finished the PhD. But she planted in me the intellectual curiosity and valuing learning or acquiring knowledge as a very important element in life. And my love with philosophy came from attending classes that she took at the university when I was a teenager. I was fortunate to go to some of these and they inspired me later on. And I'm very...”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They don't think creatively they are being threatened by innovation. And it's the natural reaction of someone that cares about their ego More than about the matter that we are discussing. And so I said, I don't care how many likes I have on Twitter. I don't care whether the experts say one thing or another. I will basically exercise my judgment. And do the best I can. Turns out that I'm wrong. I made a mistake. That's part of the scientific endeavor. And it took me a while to recognize that. And it was a lot of wasted opportunities. So to the young people, I would recommend don't listen Two experts carve your own path. Now, of course, you will be wrong. You should learn from experience just like kids do. But do it yourself.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Else would develop it so that it becomes the hottest thing in this field. And it happened, you know, once it happened to me multiple times, I then realized the hell with the experts.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely. Well, first, I should confess that I enjoy working with young people much more than with seniors. And the reason is they don't carry a baggage of prejudice. They're not so self-centered. They're open to exploration. My advice, I mean, one of the lessons that took me a while to learn, and I should say I lost important opportunities as a result of that. So I regard it as a mistake on my behalf, was to believe experts, so quote-unquote. on a number of occasions i would come up with an original idea and then suggest it to an expert someone that works in the same field for a while and the expert would dismiss it most of the time because it's new and was not explored not because of the merit and then what happened to me several times is that someone else would listen to the conversation or would hear me suggesting it and i would give up because the experts said no and then that someone”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About it, and you know, it was published, and I regard it more as of a speculation than the artificial origin of a mua. And to me, you know, as far as I'm concerned, I applied the same scientific tools in both cases. There is an anomaly that led me to that discussion which has to do with hydrogen being cold in the early universe more than we expected. So we suggested maybe the dark matter particles have some small charge. you deal with anomalies by exploring possibilities. That's the only way to do it and then collecting more data to check those and searching for technological signatures is the same as any other part of our scientific endeavor. We make hypotheses and we collect data and I don't see any reason for having a taboo on this subject.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So most of the community believes that it's a particle That we haven't yet detected, it doesn't interact with light, so it's dark. But the question is, what does it interact with and how can we find it? And for many years physicists were guided by the idea that it's some extension of the standard model of particle physics, but then they said, oh, we will find some clues from the large hadron collider about its nature, or maybe it's related to supersymmetry, which is a new symmetry that we haven't found any evidence for. In both cases, the large hadron collider did not give us any clues. And other people search for specific types of particles in the laboratory and didn't find any. A couple of years ago, actually, around the time that I worked on Omu Amua, I also worked on the possibility that the dark matter particles may have a small electric charge, which is a speculation, but nobody complained about it.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so what we need is some anomalies that would hint what the nature of the dark matter is, or to detect it in the laboratory. There are lots of laboratory experiments searching, but it's like searching for a needle in a haystack because there are so many possibilities for the type of particle that it may be. But maybe at some point, we'll find either a particle or black holes as the dark matter or something else.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you can, for example, detect gravitational waves that emerged from that. And there is an effort to do that, and that could potentially tell us something. But yeah, it's a challenge. And that's why we're stuck. So I should say, despite what physicists portray, that we live through an exceptional growth in our understanding of the universe, we're actually pretty much stuck, I would say, because we don't know the nature of the dark matter. Most of the matter in the universe, we don't know what it is, and we don't know how the universe started. We don't know what happens in the interior of a black hole.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enough evidence to guide us, and until then, you know, there are many important problems that we can address why bang our head against the wall On a problem for which we have no guidance.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So if we collect data about how the universe started, we could potentially test theories of, or it can educate us about how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity. If we get any information about what happens near the singularity of a black hole, if we get a sense of somehow we learn what happens at the sink, that would educate. So there are places where we can search for evidence, but it's very challenging, I should say. My point is, you know, the string theorists, they decided that they know how to approach the problem, but they don't have a single theory. There is a multitude of theories and it's not tightly constrained and they cannot make predictions about black holes or about the beginning of the universe. So at the moment I say we are at a loss. The way I feel about this concept of the theory of everything, we should wait until we get...”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by the way, on that, I should say, you know, there are some conjectures. In principle, if we figure it out, if we have a theory of quantum gravity, it's possible to imagine that we will figure out how to create a universe in the laboratory by irritating the vacuum, you might create a baby universe. And if we do that, it will offer a solution to what happened before the Big Bang. Perhaps the Big Bang emerged from the laboratory of another civilization. So it's like Baby universes are being born Out of laboratories And inside the baby universe, you have a civilization that brings to existence a new baby universe Just like humans, right? We have babies and they make babies. So, in principle, that would solve the problem of. Why there was a Big Bang and also what happened before the Big Bang. So we came our umbilical cord.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they've evaporate into radiation that doesn't carry this information according to Hawking's calculation. And then the question is, according to quantum mechanics, information must be preserved. So where did the information go if a black hole is gone and where is the information that was encoded in the encyclopedia when it went into the black hole? And to that question, we don't have an answer yet. It's one of those puzzles about black holes. And it touches on the interplay between quantum mechanics and gravity. Another important question is what happened at the beginning of the universe? What happened before the Big Bang?”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Properties or qualities, the mass, the charge, and the spin, according to Einstein, but then when Hawking tried to bring in quantum mechanics, to the game he realized that black holes have a temperature and they radiate. This is called Hawking radiation. It was sort of anticipated by Jacob Bekenstein before him and Hawking wanted to prove Bekenstein wrong and then figure this out. And so what it means is black holes eventually evaporate.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the right theory from scratch. And Einstein gave the illusion that you can just sit in your office and understand nature when he came up with his general theory of relativity. But first of all, perhaps he was lucky, but it's not a rule. The rule is that you need evidence to guide you, especially when dealing with quantum mechanics, which is really not intuitive. So there are two places where the two theories meet. One is black holes, and there is a puzzle there. It's called the information paradox. In principle, you can throw the encyclopedia Britannica into a black hole. It's a lot of information. And then it will be gone because a black hole carries only three...”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so in physics, the biggest challenge is to unify quantum mechanics with gravity. And I believe that once we have experimental evidence for how this happens in nature, in systems that have quantum mechanical effects but also gravity is important, then the theory will fall into our lap. But the mistake that is made by the community right now is to come up”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right things. But the tenure is a great privilege because it allows you to, in principle, explore things that are not accepted by others. And unfortunately, it's not being taken advantage of by most people. And it's a waste of a very precious resource”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's really interesting to look at people that are innovators where in some phases of their career their ideas fit into the social structure that is around them, but in other phases it doesn't. And when you look at them, they just operated the same way throughout. It says more about their environment than about them.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the details and didn't treat him with proper respect because he was not considered one of them. And I think that speaks volumes about the current scientific culture, which is based on groupthink and on social interaction rather than on the merit of the argument and on the evidence in the context of physics. So in mathematics, there is no empirical basis. You're exploring ideas that are logically consistent. But nevertheless, there is this groupthink. And I think he was so frustrated with his past experience that he didn't even bother to publish his papers. He just posted them on the archive. And in a way, it's saying, you know, I know what the answer is. Go look at it.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what I read is that you're talking about the mathematician. The mathematician turned on. What I read is that he was disappointed by the response of the community, the mainstream community, the mathematicians, to his earlier work where they dismissed it.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Let's be sincere. Why pretend? So, if there were no in a world where there were no prizes, no honors. We would act like kids, as I said before. We would really be focusing on the ball and not on the audience.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the only way to make progress is by evidence, giving us the support that we need to make airtight arguments. So when you say global warming is taking place, if the evidence is fully supportive, if there are no holes in the argument, then people will be convinced because you're not trying to fool them when the evidence was not complete. You also show them that the evidence is not complete.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, the natural progression of science is based on trial and error, reporting some results and perhaps they are wrong, but then other people find perhaps better evidence and then you figure out what's going on. And that's the natural way that science is, you know, it's a learning experience. So if you give the public an image by which scientists are always right. And, you know, some of my colleagues say we must do that because otherwise the public will never believe us that global warming is really taking place. But that's not true because the public will really believe you if you show the evidence. So the point is you should be sincere when the evidence is not absolutely clear or where there are disputes about the interpretation of the evidence. We should the king is naked. There is no point in pretending that the king is dressed.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he gave up on the Nobel Prize. And there are two benefits to that one. that you're not working your entire life in the direction that would satisfy the will of other people. You work independently, you're not after these honors. Just for the same reason that if you're not living your life for making a profit or money, you can live a more fulfilling life because you are not being swayed by the wind of how to make money and so forth. The second aspect of it is, you know, that very often these prizes, they distort the way we do science because instead of people willing to take risks and instead of having announcements only after a group of people converges with a definite result,”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know Jean-Paul Starter, who I admire as a teenager because I was interested in philosophy when I grew up on a farm in Israel. You know, I used to collect eggs every afternoon and I would drive the tractor to the hills of our village and just think about philosophy, read philosophy books. And Jean-Paul Sata was one of my favorites. And he was honored with the Nobel Prize in literature. He was a philosopher primarily, existentialist. And he said, the hell with it, you know, why should I give special attention to this committee of people that get their self-importance from awarding me the prize? Why does that merit my attention?”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So maybe in the early stage of the solar system, the conditions were affected, shaped by these flares of the black hole at the center of the galaxy. And that's why for the first two billion years there wasn't any oxygen in the atmosphere. Who knows? But it's just interesting to think that from a theoretical concept that Einstein resisted in 1939, it may well be that black holes have influence on our life and that it's just like discovering that some stranger affected your family and in a way your life. And if that happens to be the case, a second Nobel Prize should be given not for just the discovery of this black hole at the scent of the galaxy, but perhaps for the Nobel Prize in camp. For the effect that it had on effect.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This process happens once every 10,000 years or so. So we expect that these flares to occur every 10,000 years. But we also see evidence for the possibility that gas clouds were disrupted by the black hole because the stars that are close to the black hole are residing in a single or two planes. And the only way you can get that is if they formed out of a disk of gas, just like the planets in the solar system. There is evidence that gas fell into the black hole and powered possibly a flare. And these flares produce X-rays and ultraviolet radiation that could damage life if the Earth was close enough to the center of the galaxy. Where we are right now, it's not very risky for us. But there is a theoretical argument that says the solar system The sun was closer to the galactic center early on, and then it migrated outwards.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you don't see flares, then you can put limits on the existence of a black hole in the solar system. It would be extremely exciting if there was a black hole, if planet 9 was a black hole, because we could visit it, you know, and we can examine it. And it will not be a matter of an object that is very removed from us. Another thing I should say is it's possible that a black hole affected life on Earth. The black hole at the center of the Milky Way. How that black hole right now is dormant. It's very faint. But we know that it flares when a star like the sun comes close to it The star will be spaghettified, basically become a stream of gas, like a spaghetti. And then the gas would fall into the black hole, and there would be a flare.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It could be that the dark matter is made of black holes of this mass. We don't know what the dark matter is made of. It could be black holes. So we said, but there is an experimental way to test it. The way to do it is because there is the OR cloud of icy rocks in the outer solar system. And if you imagine a black hole there, every now and then a rock will pass close enough to the black hole to be disrupted by the very strong gravity close to the black hole. And that would produce a flare that you can observe. And we calculated how frequently these flares should occur.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I should say the question is where is the nearest black hole? Can we visit it? And I wrote a paper with my undergraduate student, Amir Siraj, suggesting that perhaps if there is one in the solar system, we can detect it because I don't know if you heard, but there is a claim that maybe there is a planet 9 in the solar system because we see some anomalies at the outer parts of the solar system. So some people suggested maybe there is a planet out there that was not yet detected. So people search for it, didn't find it. It weighs roughly five times the mass of the Earth. And we said, okay, maybe you can't find it because it's a black hole. That was found early in the universe.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which can only be induced at those distances if there is a 4 million solar mass Object that is extremely compact. And the only thing that is compatible with the constraints is a black hole. And they actually made a movie of the motion of these stars around the center. One of them moves around the center over a decade, you know, over time scales that we can monitor. And it was a breakthrough in a way. So combining LIGO with the detection of a black hole at the center of the Milky Way and in many other galaxies like quasars, now I would say black hole research is vogue. It's very much in fashion. We saw it back in 2016 when we established the black hole initiative.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was mostly mathematical work. And actually, Stephen Hawking also contributed significantly to that frontier. And unfortunately, he is not alive. So he could not be honored. So Penrose received it on his own. And then two other astronomers received it as well, Andrea Gez and Reinhard Genzel, and they provided conclusive evidence that there is a black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy that weighs about 4 million times the mass of the Sun. And they found the evidence from the motion of stars very close to the black hole, just like we see the planets moving around the Sun. There are stars close to the center of the galaxy, and they are orbiting at very high speeds of other thousands of kilometers per second or thousands of miles per second. Think about it.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the 2017 was given for the LIGO collaboration for discovering gravitation waves from collisions of black holes. And the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics was given for two things. One was theoretical work that was done by Roger Penrose in the 1960s demonstrating that black holes are inevitable when stars collapse.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the prediction that Schwach made for how a black, the space-time around the black hole is because when two black holes collide, you can sort of map. From the message that you get, you can reconstruct what really happened, and it's fully consistent.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just like a stone being thrown into the surface of a pond. They generate waves, disturbances in space and time that propagate out at the speed of light. These are gravitational waves. They create a spacetime storm around them, and then the waves go all the way through the universe and reach us. And if you have a sensitive enough detector like LIGO, you can detect these waves. So it was not just the message that we received for the first time, gravitational waves, but it was the messenger. So there are two aspects to it. One is the messenger, which is gravitational wave for first time were detected directly. And the second... And the second was the message, which was a collision of two black holes, because we could see the pattern of the ripples in space and time, and it was fully consistent.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very quickly, and so we see those black holes, and that was found in the mid 1960s. But in 2015, exactly 100 years after Einstein came up with his theory of gravity, the LIGO observatory detected gravitational waves. And these are just ripples in space and time. So according to Einstein's theory, the ingenuity of Einstein's theory of gravity that was formulated in November 1915 was to say that space and time are not rigid. They respond to matter. So, for example, if you have two black holes and they collide,”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source