Janna Levin

Their words

So the idea is that they’re closer to something that you would want to map as a sound, than it’s something as a picture.

Their words

And so I would say, yes, we are just giving proxy names to things we don’t understand, but to dismiss that as some kind of, “Oh, they just don’t know…” It is actually quite the opposite.

Their words

That’s going to be really telling. So I’m not saying it’s simply an engineering problem, but it’s all within the realm of plausible physics, I think.

Their words

I would say, multicellularity which is strictly an energy problem, I think. Again, it’s just like can electrons flow the right way. And is it energetically favorable for multicellularity to exist because if it’s energetically expensive, it’s not going to succeed.

Their words

So I think we’re very attached to imagining creatures like us, that manipulate technology, and I think we have to be way more imaginative if we’re going to really take seriously life in the universe.

Their words

It becomes impossible to imagine that life was not sparked somewhere else, in our Milky Way galaxy, and maybe even in our local neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy, maybe within a few hundred light years of our solar system.

Their words

If I tried to pack a lot of information into a volume, more information than I could pack, let’s say, on the surface of a black hole, I would simply make a black hole and I would find out, oh, I can’t have more information than I can fit on the surface.

Their words

I think that this is suggesting that there might not be a theory of quantum gravity, that gravity will emerge at a macroscopic level, out of quantum phenomena. Now, we don’t know how to do that yet, but these are all hints.

Their words

I’m going back to the vacuum. The empty space, the beautiful event horizon I’ll give up locality, meaning that I will allow things to be connected non-locally by a wormhole.

Their words

I don’t think anyone really believes that at the event horizon you’ll find a firewall. But it did lead to things like the entangled wormholes embroidering a black hole, which was born out of an attempt to address the concerns that AMPS raised. So it did lead to progress.

Their words

I’m unhappy with that. I would not be happy with information loss. I love that it’s telling us that there’s this crisis because I do think it’s giving us the clues, and we have to take them seriously.

Their words

So they’re flawless in the sense that you can completely understand a black hole by looking at just its electric charge, its mass and its spin. And every black hole with that charge mass and spin is identical to every other black hole.

Their words

The best scientists I know often ask the simplest questions. First of all, there’s probably some confidence there, but also they’re never going to lie to themselves that they understand something that they don’t understand.

Their words

To be falling. That is the purest experience of gravity. The experience of gravity, unfettered, uninterrupted by atoms is weightlessness.

Their words

We don’t think that the universe has had enough time to make them from stars that just merge. We know that two black holes can merge and make a bigger black hole and then those can merge and make a bigger black hole. We don’t think there’s been enough time for that.

Their words

That might surprise people. The bigger it is, the less noticeable it is that you’ve crossed the event horizon. One way to think about it is curvature is less noticeable the bigger it is.

Their words

In other words, the singularity ends up in their future and they can no more avoid the singularity than they can avoid time coming their way. There’s no shenanigans you can do once you’re inside the black hole to try to skirt it.

Their words

Absolutely. The world flocked here. And that won’t be the case if we no longer have intellectual freedom.

Their words

And that’s what I mean by science is agnostic. Right? It’s the same technology overcoming a critical mass, igniting thermonuclear fusion.

Their words

But then I think that there’s a confusion that dead stars, these very, very massive stars that die, are synonymous with the phenomenon of black hole. And it’s really not the case. Black holes are more general and more fundamental than just the death state of a star.

Their words

The black hole is not the mass crushed to a point. The black hole is the event horizon. And the event horizon is really just a point in spacetime or a region at spacetime.