YouSaid · the spoken record

Martin Rees

lines on the record: 143
first: 2022-07-23
most recent: 2022-07-23
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

“It happened to everyone, then that might be an improvement. It's not so obvious. But I think for my part, I think to have lived as long as most people and had a fortunate life is all I can expect and a lot to be grateful for. Old”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, I'm not afraid because I think I'm lucky to have Larta as long as I have and to have been fairly lucky in my life in many respects compared to most people. So I feel very fortunate. This reminds me of this current emphasis on living much longer, these so-called Altos laboratories, which have been set up by Billionaires. There's one in San Francisco, one in La Jolla, I think, and one in Cambridge. And they're funded by these guys who when young wanted to be rich, and now they're rich, they want to be young again. They weren't found that quite so easy. And do we want this? I don't know. If there was some elite that was able to live much longer than others, that would be a really fundamental kind of inequality. And I think.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just keep your eyes open. Yes, that's pastor studentist, but I think most of us, and I include myself in this, didn't realize this sort of thing until too late.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“where you can do something that the old guys never had a chance to think about. Don't go into a field that's fairly stagnant because then it must do or you'll be trying to tackle the problems that the old guy's got stuck on. And so I think in science, I can give people good advice that they should pick a subject where there are exciting new developments and also, of course, something which suits their style, because even within science, this is just one profession, there's a big range of style between the sort of solitary thinker, the person does field work, the person who works in a big team, etc. And whether you like computing or mathematical thought, etc. So pick some. Subject to Susio style. And be prepared to be flexible. That's what I'd say, really.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'd be very diffident, really, about offering any wisdom. But I think they should realize that the choices they make at that time are important. And from the experience of I've had and with many friends, many people don't realize that opportunity is open until it's too late. Somehow think that some opportunities are only open to a few privileged people and they don't even try and that they could succeed. But if I focus on people working in some profession I know about like science, I would say pick an area to work in where new things are happening”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, I mean, I'm a fan. I mean, I've heard him described as a 21st century Brunel for his innovation, and that's true. But whether he's an ethical inspiration, I don't know.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard to find those people Incidentally, I think another problem, which is a downside of social media, is that younger people I know, the number who would contemplate a political career has gone down because of the pressures on them and their family from social media. It's a hell of a job now. And so I think we are all losers because the quality of people who choose that path is... Is really dropping, and as we see by the quality of those who are in these compositions.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't let these issues drop down off the agenda if there's a public clamor. And it needs people like that to keep the public clamour going.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“enlist charismatic individuals, convert the public, because if the politicians know the public care about something, Climate change as an example, then they will make decisions which take cognizance of that. And I think for that to happen, then we do need some public individuals who are respected by everyone and who have a high profile. And in the climate context, I would say that I've mentioned four very disparate people who've had such a big effect in the last few years. One is Pope Francis, the other is David Attenborough, the other is Bill Gates, and the other is Greater Thornburg. And those four people have certainly had a big shift in public opinion and even changed the rhetoric of business, although how deep that is, I don't know. But politicians...”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The century is very special Among the 45 million sentries the Earth experienced already. So it is a very special time where they should be specially interested. But I think going back to the politics, the other problem is getting People who have short term concerns to care about the long term. By the long term, I now mean just looking 30 or 30 years or so ahead. I know people who've been scientific advisors to governments and things and they may make these points, but of course they don't have much traction because, as we know very well, any politician has an urgent agenda, a very worrying thing to deal with. And so they aren't going to prioritize these issues which are longer term and less immediate and don't just concern their constituents. It may concern distant parts of the world. And so I think what we have to do is to”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's social media generally, which makes it harder to get a sort of moderate consensus, because in the old days when people got their news filtered through responsible journalists in this country, the BBC, and they made newspapers, etc., they would muffle the crazy extremes, whereas now, of course, they're on the internet. And if you click on them, you get something still more extreme. And so I think we are seeing a sort of dangerous polarization, which I think is going to make all countries. And that's something we find pessimistic about.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot in life because of lack of knowledge and lack of science, etc. So the gap between the way the world was, which is pretty miserable, and the way the world could have been, which wasn't all that much better, was fairly narrow. Whereas now the gap between the way the world is and the way the world could be is far, far wider. Therefore, I think we are ethically more at fault in allowing this gap to get wider than it was in medieval times. And so I would very much question and dispute the idea that we are ethically in advance of our predecessors.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, I agree with those facts, but I think he misses our part of the picture because there's a new class of threats which hang over us now, which didn't hang over us in the past. And I would also question whether we have collectively improved our ethics at all. Because let's think back to the Middle Ages. It's true, as Pinker says, the average person was in a more miserable state than they are today on average for all the reasons he quantifies. That's fine. But in the Middle Ages, there wasn't very much that could have been done to improve.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“those in Africa will feel massively disaffected. And indeed, it's a manifestation of the excessive inequalities. The fact that the 2,000 richest people in the world have enough money to double the income of the bottom billion. And that's an indictment of the ethics of the world. And this is where my friend Stephen Pinker and I have had some contact. We wrote joint articles on bio threats and all that. But he writes these books being very optimistic about quoting figures about how life expectancy has gone up infant has gone down, literacy has gone up and all those things and he's quite right about that. And so he says the world's getting better.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and I completely agree with that, and to reduce the reason why people feel embittered. But of course, we've got a long way to go to do that because if you look at the present world, nearly everyone in Africa has reason to feel embittered because their economic development is lagging behind. Most of the rest of the world and the prospects of getting out of the poverty trap is rather bleak, especially at a population grows because, for instance, they can't develop like the eastern tigers by cheap manufacturing because robots are taking that over. So they naturally feel embittered by the inequality. And of course what we need to have is some sort of mega version of the Marshall Plan that helped Europe in the post-World War II era to enable Africa to develop. That would be not just an altruistic thing for Europe to do, but in our own interest because otherwise”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty hopeless. We can't enforce the tax laws globally. We can't enforce the drug laws globally. And so similarly, we can't readily enforce the laws against people doing these dangerous experiments, even if all the governments say they should be prohibited. And so my line on this is that all nations are going to face a big trade-off between three things we value. Freedom, security, and privacy And I think different nations will make that choice differently. The Chinese would give up privacy. Have more, certainly more security, if not more liberty. But I think in our countries, I think we're going to have to give up more privacy.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. And I think I'm rather pessimistic because I do worry about the baracto, a small group, who can produce catastrophe. And if you imagine someone with access to the kind of equipment that's available in university labs or industrial labs, and they could create some dangerous pathogen, then even one such person is too many. And how can we stop that? Because it's true that you can have regulations. I mean, academies are having meetings, etc. about how to regulate these new biological experiments, etc., make them say. But even if you have all these regulations, then enforcing regulations”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Screw up car production. This has already happened in the pandemic. So there's a trade-off. And there are other examples. I mean, for instance, the other thing we learned was that it may be efficient to have 95% of your hospital intensive care beds occupied all the time, which has been the UK situation, whereas to do at a Germans do and always keep 20% of them free for an emergency is really a sensible precaution. And so I think we've probably learned a lot of lessons from COVID-19 and they would include rebalancing the trade-off between resilience and efficiency.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It can do, but of course there again. I mean, if you think of supply chains where we get stuff from around the world, then one lesson we've learned is that there's a trade-off between resilience and efficiency and resilient to have an inventory and stock and to depend on local supplies, whereas it's more efficient to have long supply chains. risk there is that break in one link in one chain”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's because things happen faster and human beings aren't in such direct and immediate control because Thermus is delegated to machines. And also because the world is so much more interconnected than some local event can cascade globally in a way it never could in the past and much faster.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“devastation for civilization, of course, and of course you're quite right that this could happen very quickly because of information coming in. And there's hardly enough time for human collected and careful thought. And there have been recorded cases of false alarms several where there had been suspected attacks from the other side. Fortunately, they've been realized to be false alarms soon enough. But this could happen. And there's a new class of threats, actually, which in our center in Cambridge people are thinking about, which is that the command and control system of the nuclear weapons and the submarine fleet and all that is now more automated and could be subject to cyber attacks. A new threat which didn't exist 30 years ago. And so I think indeed we're in a sort of scary world, I think.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the middle of it, because we depended more than ever for communication and everything else on the internet and Zooms and all that. And if that had broken down, that would have made things far worse. And those are the kinds of threats that we think need to be more energized and politicians need to be more energized to minimize. And one of the things I've been doing in the last year through being a member of our part of our parliament is sort of I helped to instigate a committee to think more on better preparedness for extreme technological risks and things like that. So they're a big concern in my mind that we've got to make sure that we can benefit from these advances but safely because the stakes are getting higher and the benefits are getting great as we know huge benefits. from computers but also huge downsides as well.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“could be done perhaps by a small group empowered by AI. And so there's obviously an arms race between the cyber criminals and the cybersecurity people. Not clear which side is winning. But the main point is that as we become more dependent on more integrated systems, then we get more vulnerable. And so we have the knowledge, then the misuse of that knowledge becomes more and more of a threat. And I'd say bio and cyber are the two biggest concerns. And if we depend too much on AI and complex systems, then just breakdowns. It may be that they break down. And even if it's an innocent breakdown, then it may be pretty hard to mend it. And just think how much worse the pandemic would have been if we'd lost the internet.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We now know from COVID-19 that our world is so interconnected that a disaster in one part of the world can't be confined to that part and was spread globally. So it's possible for a few dissidents with expertise in biotech could create a global catastrophe of that kind. And also, I think we need to worry about very large scale disruption by cyber attacks. In fact, I quote in one of my books, a 2012 report from the American Pentagon about the possibility of a state level cyber attack on the electricity grid in eastern United States, which is it could happen. And it says at the end of this chapter that this would merit a nuclear response. pretty scary possibility and that was 10 years ago and I think now what would have needed a state actor then”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A heritage that isn't eroded or damaged to fugitive generations. And so that's one class of threats. But there's another... That worries me perhaps more than many people seem to worry, and that's the threat of misuse of technology. And so this is particularly because technologies empower even small groups of malevolent people or indeed even careless people to create some effect which could cascade globally. To take an example, a dangerous pathogen or pandemic. I mean, my worst nightmare is that there could be some small group that can engineer a virus to make it more virulent or more transmissible than a natural virus. This is so-called gain of function experiments which were done on the flu virus 10 years ago and can be done for others.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An important transition in biology and complexity in this century. But of course the other importance, and this has been the theme of a couple of my older books, is that this is the first century when one species, namely our species, has the future of the planet in his hands. And that's because of two types of concerns. One is that there are more of us where more demanding of energy and resources and therefore we are for the first time changing the whole planet through climate change, loss of biodiversity and all those issues. This has never happened in the past because there haven't been enough humans have been much impacted. So this is an effect that's obviously high on everyone's agenda now and rightly so because we've got to ensure that we leave a”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I would argue it will be fastened up in the future, then we're thinking about six billion years before the sun dies. So any entities watching the death of the sun, if they're still around, maybe it's different from much as we are from slime mold or something, you know, and far more different still if they become... Electronics. So on that time scale, we just can't predict anything. But I think going back to the human time scale, then we've talked about whether there'll be people on Mars by the end of a century. And even in these long perspectives, then indeed this century is very special because it may see the transition between purely flesh and blood entities to those which are sort of cyborgs. And that'll be a...”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Civilization. Well, I think on the cosmological time scale, of course, it won't be humans because something else. Even if evolutions go no faster than Darwinian.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The pattern will change a bit, and there won't be the Milky Way because the Milky Way across the sky is because we are looking in the disk of our galaxy and you lose that because the disk will be disrupted and it'll be a more sort of spherical distribution. And of course many galaxies are like that and that's probably because they have been through mergers of this kind.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Indeed. Stars and planets. Yes, the chance of a star getting close enough to affect our solar system's orbit is small and it won't change that very much. You can be reassured.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and in fact, but we can detect these with their lower frequencies than the ways that have been detected by LIGO. So there's a space set of parameters which can detect these. It's about one cycle per hour rather than about 100 cycles per second. The ones that detect it. But that would happen. Thinking back to what will happen in 4 billion years to any of our descendants, they'd be okay because the two disk galaxies will merge. It'll end up as a sort of amorphous elliptical galaxy. But the stars won't be much closer together than they are now. It'll still be just twice as many stars in the structure almost as big. And so the chance of another star colliding with our sun would still be very small.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, the nice movies to be made of this computer simulations. It'll go through. And then there's a black hole in the sense of Andromeda and our galaxy. And the black holes will settle towards a center. Then they will orbit around each other very fast, and then they will eventually merge. And that'll produce a big burst of gravitational waves. Very big burst.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what would happen is that. Well, and I should say that this is going to happen near us one day, but not the four billion years, because the Andromeda galaxy, which is the biggest galaxy near to us, which is about 3 million light years away, which is a big disk galaxy, with black holes as hub, rather like our Milky Way. And that's falling towards us because they're both in a common gravitational potential well. And that will collide with our galaxy in about four billion years.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's right. So it's thought that our galaxy may have been bright at some time in the past. But now that's when the black hole forbore grew. But now it's not capturing very much gas. And so it's rather faint and detected indirectly and by a fairly weak radio emission. And so I think the answer to your question is that we suspect that most galaxies have a black hole in them. So that means that some stays in their lives or maybe one or more stages they went through a phase of being like a quasar where that black hole captured gas and became very very bright. But for the rest of the lives, the black holes are fairly quiescent because there's not much gas falling into them.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do, yes, we know it weighs about as much as four million suns, which is less than sums of several billion in other galaxies. But we know this architect isn't very bright or conspicuous. And that's because not much is falling into it at the moment. If a black hole is isolated, then of course it doesn't radiate only all that radiates is gas swirling into it, which is very hot or has magnetic field.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, but then they realized that what they were objects which you now know are black holes and they were black holes were capturing gas and that gas was getting very hot but it was producing far more energy than all the stars added together and it was the energy of the black hole that was lighting up all the gas in the galaxy so you've got a spectrum of it there. So this was something which was realized from the 1970s onwards. And as you say the other thing we've learned is that they often do produce these jet squirting out which could be detected in all wave bands. So there's now external picture.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they were discovered when astronomers found things that looked like stars and that they were small enough to be a point-like. Not resolved by a telescope, but Outshone an entire galaxy. And”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's a debate about what's the most epic, but Quasars, maybe, or maybe gamma ray bursts or something, but they are. Remarkable and that they were a mystery for a long time. And they're one of the things I worked on in my younger days.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very intensely varying on ace or time scale, so something very small and dense was giving that radiation. That was the first evidence for black holes. But then the other thing that's happened was realizing that there was a different class of monster black holes in the centers of galaxies. And these are responsible for what's called quasars, which is when something in the center of a galaxy is grabbing some fuel and outshines all the hundred billion stars or so in the rest of the galaxy. And in many cases, it should be, it should be. Should be”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Far most extreme conditions that we could ever simulate. And so we learned lots of basic physics from looking at these objects. And that's been true, neutrons are. But for black holes, that's even more true because the bigger stars, when they collapse, they leave something behind in the center which is too big to be a stable Y2 or four neutron star becomes a black hole. And we know that there are lots of black holes weighing about 10 or up to 50 times as much as the sun, which are the remnants of stars. David detected first 50 years ago when a black hole was orbiting around another star and grabbing material from the other star which swirled into it and gave us x-rays. So the x-rays astronomers found these objects orbiting around an ordinary star and emitting x-ray radiation.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They've been studied in immense detail and they've been real laboratories because the good thing about astronomy apart from what's out there is to use the fact that the cosmos has provided us with a lab.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so he's having inside us atoms made in thousands of different stars all over the Milky Way. And that's an amazing idea. And my predecessor, Fred Hoyle, in 1946, was the first person to suggest that idea. And that's been borne out. That's a wonderful idea. So that's how massive stars explode. And they leave behind something which is very exotic and of two kinds. One possibility is a neutron star, and these were first discovered in 1967, 68. These are stars a bit heavier than the Sun, which are compressed to an amazing density. So the whole mass of more than the Sun's mass is in something about 10 miles across. So they're extraordinarily dense, they're exotic physics”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Burn up their fuel more quickly and more interestingly because when they've turned hydrogen to helium, they then get even hotter so they can fuse helium into carbon and go up the periodic table. And then they eventually explode when they have an energy crisis and they blow out that processed material, which as the digression is crucially important because all the atoms inside our bodies were synthesized inside a star. a star that lived and died more than 5 billion years ago before Solis was informed”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, okay, okay. Well, I mean, I think one thing that. Only became understood really in the 1950s, I suppose, and beyond was how stars evolved differently depending on how heavy they are. The sun burns high into helium, and then when it's run out of that, it contracts to be a white dwarf. And we know how long it will take. It'll take about 10 billion years altogether for its lifetime. But big stars...”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Einstein's theory, extended by people like Roger Penrose, tells us that black holes are, in a sense, rather simple things, basically, because they are solutions of Einstein's equations and the thing that was shown in the 1960s by Roger Penrose in particular and by a few other people, was that a black hole when it forms and settles down is defined just by two quantities, its mass and its spin. So they're actually very standardized objects. It's amazing those objects are standardized as that can be so big and can lurk in the vessel solar system. And so that's the situation for a ready formed black hole. But the way they form obviously is very messy and complicated. And one of the things that I've worked on a lot is What the phenomena are which are best attributed to black holes and what may lead to them and all that.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of all time. That's an example where the engineers deserve the most of the credit because the precision is, as I said, it's like measuring the thickness of a hair. Editions of Alpha Cent”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Although it was a consequence of a solution of his equations, which someone discovered just a year after his theory, Swarshield, but he never took it seriously, and others did. But then, of course, well, this is something that I've been involved in actually finding evidence for black holes, and that's come in the last 50 years. And so now there's pretty compelling evidence that they exist as the remnants of stars or big ones in the centers of galaxies. And we understand what's going on. We have ideas, vaguely on how they form. And of course, gravitational waves have been detected. And that's an amazing piece of technology.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obviously, I agree. It's an amazing story, well, of course, what's interesting is Einstein's reaction because As you know, in House, this is one of the most remarkable predictions of Einstein's theory. He never took it seriously or even believed it.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's probably true because his ability was to sort of collect data and think through things deeply. That's a quite different kind of thinking from what was involved in Newton or someone doing abstract mathematics.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think given a quick course, I mean, he was sort of, if one looks back, he was really a unique intellect in a way. He said that he thought better than everything else by thinking on things continually and thinking very deep thoughts. So he was an utterly remarkable intellect obviously. But of course scientists aren't all like that. I think it's one thing that interests me having spent a life among scientists is what a variety of mindsets and mental styles they have. And, well, just to contrast. Newton and Darwin said, and he probably correct, he thought he just had as much sort of common sense and reasoning power as the average lawyer.”
2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source