PART TWO: Secrets of the Universe: What Happened Before The Big Bang, Life Across the Galaxy, Surviving a Black Hole & How We’re All Made of Stars | Astrophysicist Janna Levin

Summary

Podcast Summary: Mayim Bialik's Breakdown

Episode: PART TWO: Secrets of the Universe: What Happened Before The Big Bang, Life Across the Galaxy, Surviving a Black Hole & How We’re All Made of Stars
Guests: Astrophysicist Janna Levin
Date: October 15, 2025

---

Overview

This episode dives deep into the mysteries of black holes, the interconnectedness between stellar death and cosmic phenomena, what Einstein and Oppenheimer truly sought, and philosophical reflections on what humanity's increasing understanding—and manipulation—of the universe means for our existence. Janna Levin, renowned astrophysicist and author of The Black Hole Survival Guide, joins Mayim Bialik and Jonathan Cohen to break down black holes, the curvature of space-time, relativity’s impact on aging, the formation of galaxies, and philosophical questions about consciousness, AI, and the "handedness" of the universe.

---

Major Discussion Topics & Insights

1. Black Holes: Origin, Discovery & Nature

• How Black Holes Entered Science:

  • Black holes were first theorized based on Einstein’s equations, but not immediately accepted as real objects.
    • "This is again, like 1916. He [Einstein] thought, oh, yeah, this is a real mathematical solution. Everything crushes to a point, a region around which this crushed point forms where we're not even like, can escape. And we call that a black hole." (03:25 – Janna Levin)
  • Schwarzschild, serving in WWI, derived the essential math, writing to Einstein from the Russian front—demonstrating that the geometry of space-time around a crushed star naturally leads to what we call black holes (04:02–07:17).

• From Mathematical Oddity to Astrophysical Reality:

  • For decades thought to be just theoretical oddities; only later did observations and further theory (Oppenheimer, Penrose, etc.) show they arise from death of massive stars.
  • "Roger Penrose...received the Nobel Prize for his work proving that black holes were an inevitable death state of very massive stars. Before Penrose, people really weren’t sure if it was even mathematically feasible to form them.” (02:24 – Janna Levin)

• What Are Black Holes?

  • "In many ways the black hole is more like a place than it is like an object." (10:01 – Janna Levin)
  • The event horizon: the point of no return, beyond which not even light can escape.
  • They're spatially small but massively dense—e.g., the sun crushed to a 6-km diameter sphere.

• Myths Debunked:

  • Black holes don’t suck everything in. Stable orbits are possible around them as with any star, as long as one keeps a safe distance (12:07–12:36).

Notable Quote:

"There's this myth about black holes that they suck everything up. We would find us a perfectly smooth orbit around a black hole at a safe distance. We could orbit forever exactly the same."
— Janna Levin (11:07)

---

2. Observing Black Holes

• Detection and Evidence:
  • Binary star systems: Black holes often have companion stars, and as a black hole cannibalizes its companion, X-rays reveal their presence (15:28).
  • "What looked like...a black hole that looked like it was tearing apart its neighbor. And we saw the light...bright flashes of light in X rays coming from a tiny, tiny, tiny region." (15:28 – Janna Levin)
• Event Horizon Telescope—First Image of a Black Hole:
  • Personal connection: Project director Shep Doleman was Levin’s grad school roommate (20:23).
  • The image is a blurry ring surrounding the black hole's shadow, visual proof of the event horizon (17:55–20:23).
• Supermassive Black Holes:
  • The Milky Way's central black hole: Four and a half million times the sun's mass but solar-system-sized (17:55–18:40).
  • "We see this black hole at the center of our Milky Way...You can see the stars orbiting it. And you're like, what's that? There's nothing there. I can't see anything. And you say, oh, it must be a black hole." (18:40 – Janna Levin)

---

3. Philosophical and Scientific Implications

• Black Holes as Indistinguishable Objects:
  • They have no “hair”—no distinguishing features aside from mass, charge, spin.
  • "Black holes are indistinguishable from each other in a certain very profound way...They're really nothing...They have this flawlessness hidden behind the event horizon." (23:20 – Janna Levin)
• Nothingness Made Real:
  • "Just like nothing made a star, a star can make nothing." (25:06 – Mayim Bialik)

Notable Quote:

"Black holes look the same if they have the same mass...the event horizon won't let us know if there's any distinction."
— Janna Levin (24:46)

---

4. From Cosmic Curiosity to Nuclear Bombs—Harnessing Knowledge

• Manhattan Project, Stars, and Energy:
  • Oppenheimer made the connection that stars and thermonuclear bombs involve similar physics (07:19–07:37).
  • "E=mc². The most famous equation of all time is the idea that there's energy trapped in the nucleus of an atom...Anything we can understand, it seems like we try to harness." (26:30 – Janna Levin)
  • Technological and ethical implications: Knowledge leads to power, which can be turned against us (28:44).

---

5. Time, Relativity, and Aging

• Relativity’s Wild Consequence:
  • Time slows down dramatically near a black hole's event horizon.
  • "Your watch will appear to run slowly according to the person who's safely back on the space station...As you get to the event horizon, your time has slowed as much as it possibly can." (43:17 – Janna Levin)
  • For the falling astronaut: No drama, everything appears normal until inside the black hole, where physics breaks down.
• Practical Effects:
  • Relativity causes tiny, measurable time differences even on Earth—corrected for in GPS tech (48:33).
  • Slowing aging via relativity works, but doesn’t grant extra life experience—your subjective time is unchanged.

Notable Quote:

"We are aging more slowly on the Earth for the same reason [relativity]...but you’re synced with the clock. You’re not getting any more out of it."
— Janna Levin (47:23)

---

6. Galactic Collisions, Doom, and Survival

• Will We Fall Into A Black Hole?

  • The solar system is in a stable orbit around our galaxy’s central black hole—safe as long as we orbit together (39:17).
  • Collisions of galaxies (like with Andromeda) are mostly empty space passing through empty space; catastrophic star-on-star crashes are statistically rare (40:01–41:13).

• Catastrophe Scenarios:

  • If knocked out of orbit with the sun, “we die.” But as long as we stay gravitationally bound to the sun, we move with it (42:04–42:18).
  • What’s most dangerous: losing our tether to the sun’s gravity.

Notable Quote:

"As long as we stay in orbit around the sun, wherever it goes, as long as we go, we're okay."
— Janna Levin (42:13)

---

7. AI, Consciousness, and the Future

• AI as a New “Black Hole”?
  • The power of computation doesn’t require consciousness; may surpass us in ability but possibly never in “qualia”—the experience of being (33:13–35:05).
  • "Consciousness is a requirement of something that doesn’t compute very well. I should be asking you, but my impression has been because of our poor computational power, we have to approximate." (33:35 – Janna Levin)
• Mirroring, Not Thinking:
  • AI can emulate human reactions convincingly, but isn’t feeling or “thinking” as we do—“just a fancy abacus.” (35:59 – Mayim Bialik)

---

8. The Handedness (Chirality) of the Universe & Extra Dimensions

• Handedness:
  • The universe is “left-handed”—most particles interact in a left-handed way, for reasons unknown.
  • "In particle physics that refers to a subtle quantum property called spin. Things can spin in a left handed way and that cannot be turned into a right handed spin...We think dark matter could be right handed and that’s why it's evading us." (53:18–53:25 – Janna Levin)
• Extra Dimensions:
  • Levin and collaborators are researching whether hidden dimensions, while unobservable, could leave subtle imprints on cosmic beginning or particle properties (51:52–53:16).

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Black holes 101: 02:21–10:00
• How Einstein and Schwarzschild arrived at black holes: 03:25–07:17
• Death of stars—Formation of black holes: 07:19–10:01
• Black holes as places, not objects; Orbits, event horizons: 10:01–14:23
• How we observe black holes (X-ray binaries, Event Horizon Telescope): 15:28–20:23
• Janna's emotional reaction to seeing the black hole image: 20:10–23:10
• Philosophical meaning of “nothingness” at galaxy centers: 23:10–25:12
• E=mc², Manhattan Project, nuclear energy, and power: 26:30–28:44
• Galaxies colliding, solar system’s fate: 39:17–42:18
• Time dilation, aging near black holes: 43:12–48:47
• AI vs. human consciousness: 33:13–35:59
• Extra dimensions, handedness/chirality discussion: 51:52–54:35

---

Memorable Moments & Notable Quotes

• "In many ways the black hole is more like a place than it is like an object." (10:01 – Janna Levin)
• "Just like nothing made a star, a star can make nothing." (25:06 – Mayim Bialik)
• "The reason why it doesn't do you any good in terms of longevity is because you're synced with the clock. You're not getting any more out of it." (47:23 – Janna Levin)
• "Black holes can't have hair, they can't have distinguishing features. This idea that they're similar to gigantic fundamental particles, I think is very profound." (25:12 – Janna Levin)
• "I was mostly thinking, how does she keep all those numbers in her head?" (56:28 – Mayim Bialik)
• "Consciousness is a requirement of something that doesn't compute very well." (33:35 – Janna Levin)
• "We think dark matter could be right-handed and that's why it's evading us." (53:23 – Janna Levin)

---

Where to Learn More & Closing Thoughts

• Janna Levin shares new thoughts and longform essays on her Substack. She’s also deeply involved in Pioneer Works, an arts and science space in Brooklyn.
  • "This idea of thinking about things and just communicating has been really fun. It's been an unusual experience...I'm finding an opportunity to collect those reflections." (49:44 – Janna Levin)
• The conversation hints at the awe and scope of cosmic mysteries and their surprisingly personal philosophical implications for technology, mortality, and meaning.

---

Recommended Reading

• The Black Hole Survival Guide by Janna Levin

End Note:
"From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time." (57:39 – Mayim Bialik)

---

Transcript

[Jana Levin]

Oh, the car from Carvana's here. Well, will you look at that. It's exactly what I ordered.

[Carvana Narrator]

Like precisely. It would be crazy if there were any catches.

[Jana Levin]

But there aren't, right?

[Jonathan Cohen]

Right.

[Carvana Narrator]

Because that's how car buying should be with Carvana.

[Mayim Bialik]

You get the car you want, choose delivery or pickup, and a week to.

[Carvana Narrator]

Love it or return it.

[Jana Levin]

Buy your car today with Carvana.

[Carvana Narrator]

Deliver your pickup fees may apply. Limitations and exclusions may apply. See our seven day return policy at.

[e-mail] it's not just about window treatments. It's about you. Your style, your space, your way. Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right. From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows. [e-mail], the only thing we treat better than windows is you. Visit blinds.com now for up to 45% off with minimum purchase plus a professional measure at no cost. Rules and restrictions apply.

[Mayim Bialik]

Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

[Jonathan Cohen]

And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

[Mayim Bialik]

And welcome to part two of our conversation with fascinating astrophysicist Jana Levin. She's the author of the Black Hole Survival Guide, a professor of physics and astronomy at Columbia University at Barnard College. And part one of our conversation was literally all about how we got here. How do we know that the Big Bang happened? How? How did planets evolve? Why are planets round? That was one of my favorite things she talked about. Part two is going to take us into a thorough investigation of black holes. What they are, what they're not, what happens if you get too close to them. And what can black holes teach us about the way that we can harness energy in the universe?

[Jonathan Cohen]

We cover Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, and what Einstein was really trying to discover.

[Mayim Bialik]

We'll end this episode with a variety of smaller but incredibly important questions. What does it mean for space and time to collapse? Can we age slower? Are black holes going to be able to help us do that? What happens if the sun is knocked out of the solar system? And we'll also talk about why the universe is left handed. Here's part two of our conversation with Jana Levin. Break it down.

[Jonathan Cohen]

How does this all lead to black holes?

[Jana Levin]

Well, black holes have been full of surprises. Really full of surprises. This has been entry for black hole discoveries. A bunch of Nobel prizes were awarded for discoveries around black holes. I have a piece coming out soon about Roger Penrose to Roger Penrose, who received the Nobel Prize for his work proving that black holes were an inevitable death state of very massive stars. Before Penrose, people really weren't sure if it was even mathematically feasible to form them or if it was just an oddity of a specialized circumstance that nature would never actually attain. And he proved that it was this sort of generic death state for very heavy stars.

[Mayim Bialik]

So take us from Big Bang, right from the Big Bang, and this sort of explosion and creation right at the same time. Where do black holes fit in? Why do we have black holes? What are they?

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, well, Einstein, when he was first presented with this mathematical solution to his theory, they weren't called black holes. That term didn't come for another 50 years. This is again, like 1916. He thought, oh, yeah, this is a real mathematical solution. Everything crushes to a point, a region around which this crushed point forms where we're not even like, can escape. And we call that a black hole. It goes dark.

[Mayim Bialik]

How did he know to be looking for this? Meaning, what was the problem that Einstein was trying to solve that eventually led to our understanding of black holes?

[Jana Levin]

So Einstein had been struggling to ask the question, if space and time are relative, what does that mean for the whole universe? And what does that mean for matter and energy that lives in the universe? And this is when he wrote down arguably the most important set of equations in the history of time that describe how space and time warp stretch, react to matter and energy. And he threw it out there after many flawed attempts. He used to joke about how there were many incorrect papers with his name on it. And finally they write down this consistent description. You tell me the matter and energy and the universe, and I'll tell you what the universe is doing. Even then, he wasn't the first person to say, oh, wait, the universe is expanding. That's what it's doing. He was shocked by that. He thought that was wrong. He fought the Big Bang. That's a whole other story. Same thing with the black hole. Somebody else, his name, Carl Schwarzschild, was a German infantry soldier during World War I. He was on the Russian front. He had enlisted. He was also an astronomer. And he wrote Einstein. This crazy letter had something to the effect it was unreasonably chipper, like, the war has treated me kindly enough. I've had a moment to wander through the land of your ideas. I mean, this is the kind of letter you write from the Russian front. And the problem he was asking is, what if the matter was all crushed to a point? He didn't say how. He didn't say if it was possible. He just said, imagine. Imagine I took a star, I crushed it to a point, and I just asked, what does the space time do around it? That's all. And it's probably just a fantasy. It's just the simple, simplest thing he could attempt, believe it or not, to crush all the matter to the point was the simplest mathematical solution he could find. And within a matter of six months of Einstein publishing the theory, he hands him really everything, essentially, we know about black holes in mathematical form. And it was incredible. It wasn't called a black hole for another five decades, but Einstein thought this was right. He helps him get the paper published. Schwarzschild dies on the Russian front, like, six months later, never knowing the impact of his ideas. But Einstein thought nature wouldn't make them. In reality, Einstein thought, oh, it's just a mathematical oddity. How is nature going to crush matter to a point? I mean, how's it going to do that? That's silly. It's hard to crush things. And that was the prevailing thinking for a very long time until people started understanding this whole thermonuclear fuel thing. It was really Oppenheimer, who was working on thermonuclear physics, who connected, not only working on the Manhattan Project, but connected that stars were doing something similar. And Oppenheimer wrote a very important paper where he predicted that, in fact, stars would make black holes in 1939 when they ran out of thermonuclear fuel. Not that they run out of thermonuclear fuel in 1939, but he wrote the paper in 1939, and he publishes it on the day that the Nazis advanced on Poland. And so it fell into obscurity.

[Mayim Bialik]

But we were busy with other things.

[Jana Levin]

We were busy with other things, as was he, like the Manhattan Project. But it was just one of these moments in history where the scientists were thinking about the same thing for very different reasons. Stars War and Star Wars. There you. And so, yeah, that's what brought us really to the point of thinking about black holes as real objects. And then we start to see them. We start to see them as the death state of stars. Very, very heavy stars when they run out of thermonuclear fuel. They have a very dramatic end. They suddenly aren't burning so much, and they can't keep that pressure up. They collapse under their own weight. This is. Penrose did this in a very abstract, very elegant calculation showing that this would happen. And they collapse to the point where the space time is so highly curved that not even light can escape the well, all light that veers too close will fall in to this well created by this collapsing object. And eventually we call that the event horizon, the region beyond which not even light can escape. And eventually the star itself keeps falling. What happens to it? Honestly, we just still don't know. In the interior of the black hole, we don't know what happens to it. But this, it leaves behind this. This inescapable sort of siphon. We probably have a billion of those in our galaxy.

[Mayim Bialik]

I wanna zoom in on one of these components that you're talking about with a black hole. And I want to see if you can help us understand. What does it mean to say what you said about space and time and, you know, this delightful book, which literally fits in my pocket, does a really, really great job of kind of explaining space and time in very, kind of simple, simple terms so that you can build complexity. What does that mean when we talk about a black hole? Because I think, I don't know what most people think of as like, oh, nothing can escape if you get close to it. It's gonna suck you up like a vacuum, you know, like that's. And we think of that funnel shape.

[Jana Levin]

Right.

[Mayim Bialik]

But what does it mean? How can I conceptualize something that is a star, which I'm like, it's twinkling, but I understand there's gas. Right. It's going in its creating a new place.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, I mean, in many ways the black hole is more like a place than it is like an object. So let's go back to the star. The star is also deforming spacetime. Right now we are trapped on a. Technically, you might say geodesic more naturally. We're inclined to say orbit around the sun. And that orbit can be thought of as a groove in space time created by the presence of the sun, where you can fall freely around the sun. And just. No engines. We're not firing engines. The Earth is not burning fuel to stay in orbit around the sun. It's for free. We are absolutely no engines, no energy. We're just falling towards the sun. But we're going so fast that we keep clearing the prospect of falling in.

[Mayim Bialik]

And this is going. So think of a groove on a record, right? A piece of dust, a speck of dust on that groove will stay in that groove unless something is blowing it out of its orbit.

[Jana Levin]

Right.

[Mayim Bialik]

It's just gonna keep going.

[Jana Levin]

But we could be here for a very, very, as we have been very, very long time and we are literally just falling along a natural curve in space. The curve in space was created by the sun, the presence of the Sun. That's the Einsteinian way of thinking about this. Newton's way would be there's a gravitational force and they seem similar. But there are different predictions from Einstein's theory that we can see. We can see the differences now as the Sun. If the sun were to collapse to a black hole, which it won't, it's not big enough, it'll kill us in other ways. But if the sun were to collapse to a black hole, our orbit would be absolutely fine. So there's this myth about black holes that they suck everything up. We would find us a perfectly smooth orbit around a black hole at a safe distance. We could orbit forever exactly the same. And so black holes do have circular orbits around them. It's just that you can get much closer to a black hole. So if you look at the sun, it's like a million and a half kilometers across in diameter. If it were a black hole, it would be 6km across. To make it dense enough to create the black hole, it has to be really small. So I'm taking the entire mass of the sun and I'm crushing it to the size of a city. Okay. And once that's happened, now it's only 6km across. I can get really close to that thing without burning up. I could have an orbit 30 km outside a black hole, like right on top of that black hole, and I won't be sucked in. It's perfectly safe orbit.

[Jonathan Cohen]

I don't feel comfortable.

[Jana Levin]

I would not feel comfortable.

[Mayim Bialik]

We're using kilometers. That's even your metric system.

[Jonathan Cohen]

I feel like I'm tightrope walking on a very much building edge, and you just. One slip and you're sucked in and that's it.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, you don't. It's not. I mean, it would be apocalyptically cold.

[Mayim Bialik]

But talk about how this applies then to the notion of space time and why it's different when a star is collapsing.

[Jana Levin]

So it's not. So in that sense, it's not fundamentally different. It's different by degrees. It's different qualitatively. So the sun has a lot of the kinds of orbits a black hole has. But. But the more interesting orbits are only when it's so small that you're in so close that it gets more and more conspicuously relativistic and you start to see much more unusual phenomena that you can't see because the Sun's just too diffuse. It's too big. A million and a half kilometers, all that mass spread out. Got it. It's just more diffuse, you know. But if you crush it down to 6 km, the mass of the sun, then everything we're describing, the orbits are curves in spacetime. The curves just become more and more dramatic. Harder and harder to find ways away requires. If I want to leave this orbit, I can send a satellite traveling with some fuel and I can send it past Jupiter. We've done these things. If we were very close to that black hole, that would be really hard. It would be energetically cost a lot to get further and further away. So it's really just a matter of the degree becomes dramatic. And eventually there's a region where you would have to travel at the speed of light to escape. And that is just not something we think matter can do. And that happens. Then everything falls in.

[Indeed Narrator]

Right.

[Mayim Bialik]

So when.

[Jana Levin]

So then you're in the.

[Mayim Bialik]

Have we sent things and they just get sucked up?

[Jana Levin]

We have not sent anything near a black hole.

[Mayim Bialik]

Right.

[Jana Levin]

But we see things getting sucked up by a black hole. Okay, so we've seen black holes often come with stellar companions. Stars can come in pairs. One of the stars dies, becomes a black hole, runs out of fuel, becomes a black hole. The other star now has this, okay, this very dense object and the material, it starts to cannibalize its companion. We start to see black holes destroying their neighboring stars, and things like that.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Starts to ruin the neighborhood.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah.

[Mayim Bialik]

Now all stars don't become black holes.

[Jana Levin]

No, about 1%.

[Mayim Bialik]

Why?

[Jana Levin]

It's about how massive they are. So our sun, when it runs out of fuel, it'll go through some period of collapse and expansion. But it just. It's never. It's not heavy enough to overcome how hard it is to crush things. Right. It's hard to crush things.

[Mayim Bialik]

And how. Valerie's asking, how do we see this? It's like a big telescope.

[Jana Levin]

So this was. Well, this was first observed in X rays in the 60s and 70s. We saw what looked. They're called X ray binaries. We saw essentially a black hole that looked like it was tearing apart its neighbor. And we saw the light. It looks like bright flashes of light in X rays coming from a tiny, tiny, tiny region. And so you're deducing how much mass in a small space. So one of the things about black holes we think are these huge monsters. Point of black holes is they're spatially small.

[WhatsApp Narrator]

When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp. The secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone.

[Activia Narrator]

Learn [e-mail] finally, in your wellness era, then, you know gut health is gut wealth. And with 20 years of science behind it, Activia can help keep those good gut vibes going. Deliciously smooth and creamy Activia probiotic yogurts and dailies have billions of live and active probiotics and help support gut health while you go about your day. Your gut is where it all begins. So start with Activia. Enjoying Activia twice a day for two weeks as part of a balanced diet and healthy lifestyle can help reduce the frequency of minor digestive discomfort.

[Indeed Narrator]

This episode is brought to you by Indeed. When your computer breaks, you don't wait for it to magically start working again. You fixed the problem, so why wait to hire the people your company desperately needs? Use Indeed sponsored jobs to hire top talent fast and even better, you only pay for results. There's no need to wait. Speed up your hiring with a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast terms and conditions apply.

[Mayim Bialik]

In the same way that we can make descriptions about the big bang from the light that we see, right? The collection of matter in those same ways, we can use those same methods to say, something's going on here. There's an enormous mass, there's light coming off of it, and we know that that comes from an expenditure of energy, right?

[Jana Levin]

Very good. So you say, look, I'm seeing. Woo. I'm seeing a tremendous amount of energy coming from a very, very small space that seems to have a lot of mass. And that combination is when people began to say, I think these are black holes, because they couldn't find anything else, could have so much mass in such a small space and be responsible for such energy. The light you're seeing is not coming from the black hole. It's coming from the destruction of the neighboring star. And so that is how we see. We see black holes powering jets that are larger than the galaxies in which reside. These are jets, magnetic jets, like literally like ray guns blasting highly charged particles into these huge jets that can go billions of light years across. So that's a tremendous amount of energy and power originating from a very small source. Again, a black hole. And now we can look at stars from the center of our galaxy. And we see them orbiting something that's four and a half million times the mass of the Sun. These supermassives are different than dead stars. We don't know where they come from. Four and a half million times the mass of the Sun. And it's very small, I mean solar system sized. But if you think of, I mean if you think about the mass of the sun, you think it was only four and a half million times the mass of the Sun. It's only about 17, 18 times the size of the sun across. So you're jamming in that tiny spatial region. Four and a half million times the mass. And that's when you get a black hole. So we see this black hole at the center of our Milky Way. It's 26,000 light years away. You can see the stars orbiting it. And you're like, what's that? There's nothing there. I can't see anything. And you say, oh, it must be a black hole. And now more recently, we've literally taken a picture. What does it look like? It looks like it's called. The project was Event Horizon Telescope. It looks very smudgy cause it's hard to do, it's only a few pixels. But what we see is we see the ring around the shadow cast by the black hole. And the ring is from debris that was hot that was falling in and it casts the shadow essentially of the black hole.

[Mayim Bialik]

I want to ask you a very emotional question for you as an astrophysicist. What is that like the first time you got to see the visualization of a black hole?

[Jana Levin]

Well, I have a special connection to that particular project. So both as an astrophysicist and just as a person, the principal investigator, the director of that project, Shep Doleman, was a roommate of mine in graduate school. We went to MIT together. And one of my favorite all time people, I mean just a complete nut, incredibly creative person and not a, not a normal path. Even in physics. He was short of, I knew he was going to land something tremendous. But he was an outlier in many ways, creatively and imaginative. And he has been talking about this project since then and had dreamt of it and thought about it and then made it a reality. So when there was a press release and an invitation, you know, I get an invitation from Shep saying I think you should come to dc. I mean we all knew what it was because there was only one thing they were trying to do. There was a twist, there was a twist in the result, but we knew they were Trying to take a picture of the event horizon. It's called Event Horizon Telescope. So really it's just the shadow of the black hole, and there's only two candidates. And the surprise was that it was the other candidate. So the two candidates are our supermassive black hole called Sag A because it's in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius from the point of view of the Earth. Are you a Sagittarius? And the other was a very big galaxy, a whole other galaxy, M87, that has enormous black hole. It's much bigger than ours, over 6 billion times billion times the mass of the sun. But it's so far away. It's about the same size in the sky. You know what I mean? It was like a similar candidate, M87, or sometimes called M87 star. We indicate black holes with the star moniker, and it was M87. I couldn't believe it. That really surprised me. But yes, it was a tremendously moving moment and also just kind of surreal. Just kind of surreal, really. What was most surreal about it, since we anticipated the result, was feeling like a billion people, you know, in that moment, we're looking together at this nothingness at the center of our galaxy that we orbit. Right. And that might have something to do with why there are habitable regions in the galaxy. You know, I mean, it's just. There was that moment, that kind of vertigo. Yeah. So it's a big day. Yeah.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Philosophically speaking, what does it mean to you or the average person that there's nothingness at the center of our galaxy?

[Jana Levin]

Philosophically, I mean, I think this idea of the nothingness of black holes is something I think we're still trying to understand. Objects in the ordinary sense are all slightly imperfect. Or if you don't, I want to say that they're slightly. They're features, distinguishing features. And that's true even with the most finely crafted Swiss watch. It really always has some fundamental distinction, even if it's at the microscopic level that I can't easily detect. Ordinary objects are unique. Black holes are indistinguishable from each other in a certain very profound way that we only see at the level of subatomic particles. And that has to do with the fact that they're really nothing they're not made of. Their atomic content's unimportant. Whether there's atoms in the interior or not is unimportant. They have this flawlessness hidden behind the event horizon. The event horizon cannot tell us anything about the interior. And in its Intensity of. Of obfuscating the interior, it makes this flawless veneer. And that means black holes look the same if they have the same mass.

[Mayim Bialik]

Regardless of what they're made of, because nothing is nothing.

[Jana Levin]

Because nothing is nothing and they're indistinguishable. And the event horizon won't let us know if there's any distinction. If they were all made out of encyclopedias or all made out of some weird element or just made out of light.

[Jonathan Cohen]

You can't know this, but they start from a star.

[Jana Levin]

They start from a start, but what is made in the end is something.

[Mayim Bialik]

But just like nothing made a star, a star can make nothing.

[Jana Levin]

That's good.

[Mayim Bialik]

Thank you.

[Jana Levin]

And so that facet of black holes, which also Penrose contributed into understanding it, there are these things called no hair theorems. Like black holes can't have hair, they can't have distinguishing features. This idea that they're similar to gigantic fundamental particles, I think is very profound. I think it says something about black holes role in the fundamental theory of the laws of physics that is not played by anything else at macroscopic scales. So, yeah.

[Mayim Bialik]

There'S something you said and you know, it's not a coincidence, you know, to have the Manhattan Project kind of square in the middle of, you know, for most of us, like our history. And, you know, I think that just like we just kind of talked about that nothing can make a star and a star can make nothing.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Right.

[Mayim Bialik]

Can you sort of explain how, like, creating a nuclear bomb, right. Is taking some very fundamental and phenomenal things about the natural world and, you know, kind of cauterizing them, right, in this very terrifying way?

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, well, it's E equals MC squared. And that's what a nuclear bomb is probing. So E equals MC squared. The most famous equation of all time is the idea that there's energy trapped in the nucleus of an atom. But essentially everything has energy. One way you can think of it is it's the energy we all have just moving through time. It's like the energy of our existence in some sense, and people didn't. It's a tremendous amount of energy. E equals MC squared energy. That's why you want to make a nuclear bomb, because the energy you can release, let's say you fuse two elements and you make something whose mass is less than the sum of the parts. So some of that E equals MC squared, that mass energy, is what comes out. And it's so huge what's trapped in these nuclear particles that you have the potential of a nuclear weapon. It's Also why you have the potential of a star, which is a tremendous amount of energy radiating for billions of years. If you think about that, how that what power you're talking about. So we're able to understand these things before we understand them. There's a great line in this play, Coping Hagen by Michael Frayn, where he attributes to Niels Bohr, the great quantum physicist, Danish quantum physicist, the line he says to his wife, I don't think anyone's thought of a way to use quantum mechanics to kill somebody. And of course, this on the cusp of the nuclear weapon. And he does become involved with the Manhattan Project. So at first it's just a dream about moving through time and the energy trapped in just the existence of matter moving through time. It's base energy. Basically. Anything we can understand, it seems like we try to harness. This is back to our opening conversation about being a technological species.

[Mayim Bialik]

Well, I mean, also, you know, you can take it one step further. Everything that we try and understand, we harness. And then it can be used against us. Against us. I mean, I think of that, you know, just. Cause I'm kind of a Luddite, you know, I think of that even in terms of technology. You know, I thought it was unbelievable, you know, to have a desktop computer when I was in college, like it was the first ones. And you know, and then I thought it was amazing to have this phone, you know, in the palm of my hand.

[Jana Levin]

Right.

[Mayim Bialik]

And I mean, we haven't changed in terms of our evolutionary capacity in the last 10 years, but what we've seen is a complete hijacking based on an adaptation that has become a compulsion.

[Jana Levin]

Yes. I mean, I guess it's another one of those examples. We're saying our mandibles changed, our upright stance, our birth canal became a hazardous proposition. But all of this in reaction to our tools. So are we on some strange evolutionary path? Well, really, we will. We really will be fundamentally biologically different.

[Mayim Bialik]

It's funny because. And it's a little bit, you know, it's a little bit obtuse, but there was just a piece in the Atlantic about Gen Z and how they date and how they fall in love and most gen zers. Gen Z is what, 97 through? It's our kids.

[Jana Levin]

I have a couple of those. Yeah, I made a couple of those.

[Indeed Narrator]

Right.

[Mayim Bialik]

What they said or what, you know, what they kind of revealed in, in a, you know, series of really fascinating and tragic interviews is that young people would rather have sex than hold hands. That most people consider of this generation, most people consider that a completely standard gesture, you know, intercourse. But the notion of intimacy, of emotional intimacy, of holding hands, of asking someone, will you be my girlfriend? Is so terrifying. And I was thinking, what is that that we've evolved to? Right. And I think it's a similar kind of line of questioning. You don't have to answer that.

[Jana Levin]

But yeah. Well, I mean, I hate to invoke the AI because those conversations have not progressed. Do it well, it is one of those examples we also talked about in the beginning where you're circling around the same drain and very rarely does somebody say something that gives me pause where I think, oh, I haven't heard that before. But this is a new Even the Zeers will distinguish themselves from the generation that's growing up with this. And this is that whole phenomena that the technology escalates so quickly that the difference between two people in the 11th century and the 15th century not as huge as 1980 and 2025.

[Mayim Bialik]

And we've seen how this movie ends.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah.

[Mayim Bialik]

Like we've literally seen what happens when the machines take over.

[Jana Levin]

Yes.

[Jonathan Cohen]

We all get sucked into a black hole.

[Jana Levin]

Yes.

[Maytag Narrator]

Upgrade your laundry routine with a durable and reliable Maytag Laundry pair at Lowes, like the new Maytag washer and dryer with performance enhanced stain fighting power designed to cut through serious dirt and grime. And what's great is this laundry pair is in stock and ready for delivery when you need it the most. Don't miss out. Shop Maytag in store or online today at Lowe's.

[American Express Narrator]

Experience a membership that backs your business journey with American Express business Platinum. Earn 5 times Membership Rewards points on flights and prepaid hotels booked on amextravel.com plus enjoy a welcome offer of 200,000 points after you spend $20,000 on purchases on the card within your first three months of membership. American Express Business Platinum there's nothing like it. Terms apply. Learn more@american express.com Business Platinum.

[Carvana Narrator]

Tonight, turn down the noise of the day and focus on the rest with agz, the nightly drink for winding down and resting up. New from AG1. AGZ supports your body's natural sleep cycle with clinically studied key herbs and adaptogens and minerals in amounts supported by research. And no melatonin, helping you wake feeling rested, wind down, rest up with Agz. Learn [e-mail] I do wonder, you know.

[Jana Levin]

The machines for me right now, I really do think these are very interesting, but they're just computing this probabilistic thing that I don't see anything going on there yet I understand that. Regardless, though, they're really powerful. I think that's one of the things that chills me is I don't know that consciousness is a requirement of something that can compute very well.

[Mayim Bialik]

Right.

[Jana Levin]

Consciousness is a requirement of something that doesn't compute very well. I should be asking you, but my impression has been because of our poor computational power, we have to approximate. That's a child, that's a chair. That's very hard to teach.

[Mayim Bialik]

Something a lot of computational power, music, love, creativity. That's what you get, and that's what you don't get when you. I mean, I don't mean to be this person, but. Yeah, you don't. When people are like, oh, it's the thinking. It's like, no, it's not. It's amassing all of the information that exists as zeros and ones.

[Jana Levin]

Right.

[Mayim Bialik]

And it's spitting out a probability. Right.

[Jana Levin]

And that's very powerful. And maybe it'll even be a kind of thinking. And maybe one day I'll love my AI and I'll be sympathetic and nostalgic about my AI, but I don't know that it will ever need consciousness in the way that we do if it's computational power. Eskel keeps getting better and better.

[Mayim Bialik]

What Robin Hanson would say is, we don't need consciousness, and soon we'll all just be. You know, I can't even articulate it. We'll just be AI interfaces interfacing with each other. And I'm like, I don't think I evolved to this point or that we evolved to this point for that to be where this story ends.

[American Express Narrator]

I don't know.

[Jana Levin]

Does the AI need the qualia of the experience of yellow?

[Indeed Narrator]

Right.

[Jana Levin]

Does it? Why would it need that? Maybe it's just, okay, I've measured this energy and that's sufficient.

[Jonathan Cohen]

And it has access to all the variations of what yellow could be. So it could just take a point.

[Jana Levin]

And then have that and converse about it really effectively. And that's a kind of a thinking. Yeah, but it might never have qualia.

[Mayim Bialik]

It doesn't have the experience of when you see this, Right?

[Jana Levin]

Yes, exactly.

[Mayim Bialik]

It doesn't have the image of the black hole.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah.

[Jonathan Cohen]

But it will fake it really well to the point where we wouldn't really understand the difference of it if. Is it actually having it or is it just representing to us that it has it? Because that's what it thinks we want.

[Jana Levin]

Right. Why not emulate the reaction as well as it's emulating the language describing the reaction? All of that can be programmed in this by, you know, the AI can program itself in this black box of these learning algorithms. And that's. And again, all of that's fine. What will it matter whether or not it has conscious experience?

[Jonathan Cohen]

And its drive for self preservation is not a sign of consciousness necessarily. It's a sign of replicating our drive for self preservation and how we would go about that same task. So it's just an amazing mirroring agent.

[Mayim Bialik]

Yeah, I get very worried when people are like, it's thinking, it's knowing, it's feeling. No, it's really not. It's a very. It's a really fancy abacus.

[Jonathan Cohen]

What has happened recently that black holes are being talked about so much? Is it that there's the picture what has evolved, that it's become part of sort of a common consciousness or awareness now?

[Jana Levin]

I would say at the. Towards the end of the last century, you know, the end of the 1900s, people were thinking black holes might start to fade in terms of their scientific importance. And I remember I was very excited about black holes. I was all about black holes in graduate school. And people were like, what are you doing? You know, come on, we sort of know everything we need to know. Where are we gonna go with this classical system? And then a lot of things happen. One of them's purely theoretical, and some of that is observational. So, yes, we started to see the stars orbiting the center of our galaxy. People watched them patiently for 16, 17, 20 years and deduced that there was a supermassive black hole. That was a surprise. Cause that doesn't come from dead stars. These are new. We don't know where they're actually. They're old. They're probably the oldest black holes in the universe, but we don't 100% know where they came from. Probably skipped stars altog directly collapsed in very diffuse material in the early universe. So these are fascinating. Then there were these other. Yeah, just other observations like that, beginning to understand some of these very powerful engines. This was earlier, but these things we see in the farthest reaches, we call quasar's most powerful, brightest beacons, most powerful engines in the universe. And they're probably, well, I think, very confidently sourced by black holes. And then these recent things, like taking the picture of the black hole. And so the conversation now is an active one of science. How did they form? What effect do they have in the galaxies? What's the role that they're playing? Will we all end up falling into black holes? So there's all of that astronomy Good old astronomy. The rest of the world might not continue to be as interested in it as we are. And then there's this theoretical stuff about black holes being fundamental that I think is a real driver for people who want to understand quantum laws of physics. They want to understand quantum gravity, they want to understand if there truly is a theory of everything. They want to know if string theory is right or wrong. And black holes are your terrain to understand all of that.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Are there more black holes forming or we're just being able to observe them more?

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, there are more forming. So there are star forming regions. So there's more stars forming. And some of those will be black holes one day. So it's really about how massive the star formation is. And maybe over time there will be less stars forming and less very, very massive stars forming. But in our galaxy of its hundreds of billions of stars, about 1% of them are big enough to become black holes.

[Mayim Bialik]

What about other galaxies? Do we know about black holes?

[Jana Levin]

Probably about the same. This is part of that, that we're kind of unique, but not so unique. You know, we expect other galaxies to be made of atoms to reflect light, to have the same thermonuclear properties in the cores of stars. And so, yeah, we expect about 1% of those to make black holes.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Are we all going to fall into a black hole?

[Jana Levin]

It's possible. So we're in orbit. The picture that we just discussed, one of two pictures that have ever been taken of actual black holes. We are in orbit around that black hole, very slow. And eventually we could fall in slowly drifting into it. No, we're orbiting safely like we are the sun. And the entire solar system is going together. Our whole solar system together orbits the black hole. And when Andromeda crashes through our galaxy, we've probably might have collided before. We'll probably collide more than one time in the future. Our black holes will merge eventually.

[Mayim Bialik]

What does that mean when galaxies collide?

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, so largely they pass through each other. Cause there's a lot of empty space between the stars.

[Mayim Bialik]

But what distinguishes our galaxy from another galaxy? It's not like there's a border.

[Jana Levin]

Well, that's a good question. It drops off real fast. So it drops off real fast, meaning the density of stars. Oh, and so our galaxy looks like this spiral Milky Way.

[Mayim Bialik]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jana Levin]

Then there's a lot of nothing between us and Andromeda. Pretty empty real nothingness out there.

[Mayim Bialik]

That's for how far?

[Jana Levin]

That's a couple million light years. And 55 million light years to M87, which I mentioned. And these are close. These are our close neighbors. These are the ones that are behaving oddly because we're all so close together.

[Mayim Bialik]

What would that be like when billions.

[Jana Levin]

Of collisions collide light years apart are other galaxies and we're only gonna collide with our local friends in our Virgo cluster.

[Mayim Bialik]

Do planets smash into each other?

[Jana Levin]

Not likely. Terribly unlikely. Cause there's just so much empty space.

[Mayim Bialik]

That doesn't feel definitive enough.

[Jana Levin]

Well, I guess it's possible. It's not zero possibility. It's just.

[Mayim Bialik]

I mean, I'm gonna run the stats on that. If you think. You just told me there's so many stars and there's so many planets and there's so many moons, but there's a lot.

[Jana Levin]

So there's a lot of space between every star.

[Mayim Bialik]

Right.

[Jana Levin]

And that's why they look like tiny dots and not a wall of brightness. But they look like mostly darkness with a little twinkle.

[Mayim Bialik]

But statistically speaking, the more there are, the higher the probability that something will happen.

[Jana Levin]

Right. And they're still really sparse.

[Mayim Bialik]

That's amazing.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, really a lot of empty space, but there's a lot of gas and dust and that stuff will collide and that'll light up. But mostly the stars will miss each other. Very likely. And if you look at simulations passing in the night. Yes. Uh huh. Really? And some of the stars might get thrown out of the galaxies when this happens, just from gravitational, you know, Whiplash.

[Mayim Bialik]

Whiplash. The sun gets thrown.

[Jana Levin]

So the simulations show our solar system staying together pretty comfortably. Like we stay with our sun and we get kicked around into a different orbit around the center.

[Mayim Bialik]

Okay, let's have a catastrophic question.

[Jana Levin]

What if the moon.

[Mayim Bialik]

What if, Sorry, what if the sun gets knocked out of its orbit?

[Jana Levin]

We die. We are going to be knocked out of our orbit around the black hole. As long as we stay in orbit around the sun, wherever it goes, as long as we go, we're okay.

[Mayim Bialik]

Okay, so because we're tethered in a.

[Jana Levin]

Space, if we part ways, it is all over.

[Jonathan Cohen]

But we want.

[Jana Levin]

We need the sun. We will ice over.

[Mayim Bialik]

The title of this episode is we need the Sun.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Yeah, understood, but we could. Our orbit around the black hole could change.

[Jana Levin]

That's fine. As long as we stay with the sun.

[Jonathan Cohen]

And will that have any effect on us?

[Jana Levin]

I mean, I'm sure there are unforeseen consequences, but more or less. As long as we're within the sun's magnetic solar influence, we can't be pulled away. We're probably largely okay. And if we were to fall into the black hole, we'd all go together with this. It's not like it's gonna pluck us separately.

[Mayim Bialik]

I'm sending you a piece of lint.

[Jana Levin]

From the, you know, solar neighborhood. But we're very stable. It's this thing. I told you. Black holes aren't vacuuming things up. At 26,000 light years away, you're fine. There are things in orbit around the black hole. These stars we talked about, they're fine.

[Mayim Bialik]

He likes things orbit around the hole. What should he be worried about?

[Jonathan Cohen]

What happens when you do get into black hole? Explain this. How time changes.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah. So one of the most beautiful results that goes all the way back to when Schwarzschild first found this mathematical description was this idea that time appears to slow as you approach the event horizon. And let me clarify what that really means. If you and an astronaut are in a happy space station together and you are in some safe orbit outside the black hole, and you're monitoring it fine, one of you jumps in. As you approach the black hole, you have beautifully manufactured NASA watches, and they're perfectly synced. One of you falls into the black hole. As you approach the black hole, your watch will appear to run slowly according to the person who's safely back on the space station. But so will your breath slow down. So will your biological functions. From your point of view, your clock is just fine. Okay? Everything synced just fine. It's the person back in the space station seems to be going really fast and seems to be aging really quickly, and their hair is turning gray and their clock is whizzing and music's playing really fast. And all of these things are happening as you approach the event horizon. Now, as you get to the event horizon, your time has slowed as much as it possibly can. To the person who's now aged 100 years in the time you've aged, let's say, a minute, however long it's taken you to do this dramatic fall, thinks you've frozen. At one point, they were called frozen stars because they didn't understand what happens when you cross this boundary. And it seems to them that you actually never quite make it across. Now, eventually, your mass will deform the black hole enough, and maybe after a million years, they'll be like, oh, yeah, they're gone. But from your point of view, the whole thing took a minute.

[Mayim Bialik]

That's, like, in context, when Jodie Foster has this entire experience and she sees her dad and she meets God and blah, blah, blah, and she comes back and they literally said you disappeared for 10 seconds.

[Jonathan Cohen]

It's like every near death experience we've heard of.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah. And well, Interstellar also represents this by my good friend Kip Thorne, who's also nearby. Kip won the Nobel Prize for. We didn't even mention that detection, the detection of two collision of black holes. And he wrote the treatment for Interstellar so that Interstellar. He really thought about the physics of that. It was his idea to make this crazy movie. So to the person going across, that's the interesting person. And that was not understood for a very long time that what happens to them? Are they really frozen there? And relativity suggests that they're seeing nothing unusual. So how are they hanging out there? And actually, as far as they're concerned, we call it no drama. They had an experience as unspectacular as stepping into the shadow of a tree and they crossed right over and they didn't know nothing terrible happened to them. If the black hole is big enough, they actually don't get torn apart, which might seem counterintuitive. They can drop across just like a pebble. And then it unfolds and then they're in trouble. They might start to notice things are looking weird. But black holes can be bright on the inside, even if they're dark on the outside, because light can fall in behind them. Nothing's stopping the light from coming in.

[Mayim Bialik]

Just can't get out.

[Jana Levin]

So they can see the space station and going through and falling apart and millions of years passing and they can see the galaxy evolving. All these things happening very quickly as they approach the singularity. And there our description breaks down terribly. Nobody really knows what happens in there. But survival is absolutely not. You know, as I say, the Black Hole Survival Guide title is a spoiler alert. It doesn't end well. Yeah, does not end well.

[Jonathan Cohen]

If I put on just my magical thinking hat for a moment. If we can understand how to create a nuclear bomb by understanding stars, can we understand how to slow aging by understanding some of the impacts of black holes?

[Jana Levin]

Well, here's the thing. We are aging more slowly on the Earth for the same reason. It's just not as dramatic. It's this again. It's more extreme in kind with black holes. But it is the case that the Earth's curvature causes time to change as well. And we are aging more slowly on the surface of the Earth than we would if we were very far from the Earth and away from. Away from all other planets. So that is a measurable effect. And there are other relativistic effects that have to be corrected for with all of our GPS units for Lyft or Uber to pick me up on the correct corner. Right. This is measurable and factual. It's not just something that's so theoretical. The reason why it doesn't do you any good in terms of longevity is because you're synced with the clock. You're not getting any more out of it. A minute on your watch is a minute for your experience. There's nothing special about your watch in this. Literally, your time is changed relative to someone else's time. All of it has changed so you don't get more out of life.

[Jonathan Cohen]

I'm just imagining that you could, like, harness some black hole energy into a chamber that I sleep in.

[Jana Levin]

Right.

[Mayim Bialik]

But it's not the energy. It's the.

[Jonathan Cohen]

It's the experience of it. Not.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, your experience of it is the same. Even if somebody felt 30 years pass for the one night you slept well, you'd still have that one night's sleep. Right? No more you didn't have. You weren't able to get up, live 30 years of life. You got no more out of it than that eight hours in your experience. And so in that sense. But what I could do is I could freeze you. You have a terrible disease and you wanna wait until there's a cure. There's a cure. And so I can't. I don't yet know how to travel to my future, but I know how to travel to your future or get you to travel to civilization's future. So I could park you near a black hole. Your time will slow down. 200 years later, we have a cure. We bring you back.

[Jonathan Cohen]

New business idea. Human parking lots.

[Mayim Bialik]

Elon Musk is barking up the wrong tree.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah.

[Mayim Bialik]

Where can people find out more about you and all of the incredible writing you do?

[Jana Levin]

I really appreciate that. The Substack venue is new for me. I really. I don't think of myself as short form. Turning around pieces. Substack is aiming a little bit more for long form. I guess we're meeting in the middle. But this idea of thinking about things and just communicating has been really fun. It's been an unusual experience. It's allowed me, after our conversation, maybe I'll go back and think of something that was sparked literally by us talking.

[Mayim Bialik]

And.

[Jana Levin]

Whereas that used to kind of disappear into the void, I'm finding an opportunity to collect those reflections. That's great. So that's really been fun. The last piece we were just talking about is about how we radiate as hot bodies. And I wanted to bring you my hat, which I made with Plank's law on it to match your nerdy, wonderful brain hat that I saw when I walked in. So I think that's really a place. And also I. I do a lot at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, which is an art cultural center in New York. An arts and science place where science is a pillar in a cultural institution. And that's been a really long term project in labor of love. And we do a lot of events, talk to Nobel laureates, talk to scientists of all varieties. And we have people in the hundreds packing a sort of cool place in Brooklyn. It's kind of what you said at the beginning of the conversation. Because they want access to this level of understanding and they want it for emotional reasons, poetic reasons, not because they're going to graduate school. They want it to make sense of their lives.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Yeah, they're not building the human parking lot startup yet.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, right. We'll be starting that after today's talk.

[Jonathan Cohen]

We also started at Substack and found that it's a really cool place to explore.

[Jana Levin]

Yes, I've been checking out.

[Jonathan Cohen]

So we recommend people check yours out and tag us if you come up with any big ideas from this conversation as we depart. Anything that has really surprised you or sort of made you wonder in the last little while that you want to share with us as we say goodbye.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, I've been working with my scientific collaborators, Brian Greene, Massimo Paratti, Daniel Cabot. I mean, I have the pleasure of really working with geniuses. I mean, honestly, we've been thinking about a universe with extra dimensions, which many people have thought about since Einstein. If you're going to talk about space and time, why three space? Why one time? And I've been astounded at looking at some of these, we call them topological spaces, some of these very peculiar geometries in this higher dimensional space. And how it could. Even if there are these tiny curled up origami dimensions that we can't probe, they're on the quantum scale, we can't point to them, we don't occupy them. They could leave an imprint in the big bang. They could leave an imprint in the particles that we see that are allowed in the spectrum of possibilities. They could have something to do with primordial quantum black holes. I think that has been very fascinating, chilling. You have this moment of feeling like you have a glimpse of something maybe nobody else has ever seen, and then it's very fleeting and fugitive and hard to get your hands around.

[Mayim Bialik]

Are there Any updates on the handedness of the universe?

[Jana Levin]

Well, exactly. Part of this project was about the handedness of the universe.

[Mayim Bialik]

What does it mean to say that the universe tends to be left handed?

[Jana Levin]

So literally, if you have a left handed glove, you know it does not fit you properly on the right hand. And in particle physics that refers to a subtle quantum property called spin. Things can spin in a left handed way and that cannot be turned into a right handed spin. But it's just like saying a left handed glove and a right handed glove. For reasons we don't understand, most particles interact left handed predominantly. Especially one interaction called the weak interactions. We don't know why it's left handed. It's chiral is how we say it. What's wrong with the right handed guy? Why doesn't it feel the same interaction? And we think dark matter could be right handed and that's why it's evading us. So part of these extra dimensions is that I can, I can send things in these strange topological spaces left handed and they can come back right handed. It was a game we were trying to play. It isn't the most interesting thing that we ended up discovering about it, but yeah, these are. Every theoretical physicist interested in particle physics wonders about the chirality of the universe.

[Jonathan Cohen]

It's very hard to talk to you for only a couple hours.

[Jana Levin]

I think. Thank you. I think.

[Mayim Bialik]

Thank you so much for being here.

[Jana Levin]

Thanks so much for having me.

[Mayim Bialik]

So much fun to get to talk to you.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, really fun. I wish I had a cool T shirt and I wish I had my hat. Till next time. Thanks so much for having me.

[Jonathan Cohen]

A lot of these interviews, people will say stuff and then they're in the flow and I'm like trying to make notes and write down things to circle back on, but she was like, no, our sun isn't going to turn into a black hole. It's going to destroy us in other ways. But wait, what we didn't talk about, like, she didn't explain that. Is that gonna happen soon? Should I be worried? How concerned am I supposed to be?

[Mayim Bialik]

Is this the conclusion that we're doing?

[Indeed Narrator]

Yes.

[Mayim Bialik]

Oh, we're in it. Oh, we started.

[Jonathan Cohen]

We gotta keep that.

[Mayim Bialik]

I didn't know we started. It's a little bit casual. Like the only way that we would all incinerate is if when the galaxies collide, it knocks the sun out of orbit and we go with it and then we're sucked into a black hole. But it's not very probable that'll happen. You know what, Janna? That's not enough assurance.

[Jonathan Cohen]

While there is a lot of empty space, I'm sure a couple stars are just gonna bump into each other and explode.

[Mayim Bialik]

I mean, I.

[Jonathan Cohen]

It's like by. I am sure, I have no calculations.

[Mayim Bialik]

The end of never ending story. Do you remember what happens to anyone out there?

[Jonathan Cohen]

No.

[Mayim Bialik]

Things start colliding. They're blowing apart. Because he doesn't name the princess and all the things are colliding. That's what I pictured.

[Jonathan Cohen]

It's a deep cut. I don't have a reference for.

[Mayim Bialik]

Oh, goodness gracious.

[Jonathan Cohen]

But like, also, like, our closest neighbors are slowly encroaching on us, but our faraway neighbors are, like, too far. It's just a lot to process.

[Mayim Bialik]

I was mostly thinking, how does she keep all those numbers in her head?

[Jonathan Cohen]

Head?

[Mayim Bialik]

And then I thought about, like, all the things I know about the brain, all the different structures and all the different tracks. Like, I guess you know what you know. But I'm like.

[Jonathan Cohen]

I mean, if we were to ask you about song lyrics, you would just have an endless supply of information.

[Mayim Bialik]

We had someone on the other day who was like, look, Aerilius. And I'm like, I know where the locus coeruleus is. I've dissected that. I know.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Where is it?

[Mayim Bialik]

Well, it's the back here. It's a Ponds thing. And it's blue. It's like cerulean blue. Anyway. But I was like, just the. But I don't think that we truly really can understand what she's talking about just because of the sheer numbers. Like, 6 billion light years away, 8 million kilometers of light. It's like, I can't. I can't. This is really. It's. I don't know if I can even explain how sweet this book is. And also the. The. The. There's this beautiful art, and so it shows. Here's what you were asking about. How time changes when you're traveling. It's just all these beautiful illustrations of all of these really enormous concepts. It's really beautiful. So I recommend the Black Hole Survival Guide.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Also, it's not bigger than, like, seven inches. Eight inches, literally.

[Mayim Bialik]

It's like the size of. Well, it's the size of what I wish my cell phone was. Hello? Make sure to follow us on substack and check out Gen11's substack page as well. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.

[Maytag Narrator]

It's Maya Bialix, Breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two, and now she's going to break down. It's a breakdown. She's going to break it down.