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Heino Falcke and Jörg Römer, "Light in the Darkness: Black Holes, the Universe, and Us" (HarperCollins, 2021)
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- [00:00]
Heino Falcke
Hello, everybody.
- [00:01]
Marshall Poe
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
Gregory McNiff
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Gregory McNiff. I'm excited to be joined by Heino Falke, the author of Light in the Darkness, Black Holes, the universe, and us. Light in the Darkness was published by HarperOne Press in May of 2021. Heino Falca is a German professor of radio astronomy and astroparticle physics at Radenbaud University in the Netherlands. His main field of study is black holes, and he is the originator of the concept of the black hole shadow. In 2019, Heino announced the first Event Horizon Telescope results at the EHT press conference in Brussels. He is also the author of most recently, the Big Story of Our World, which we expect to be published in English sometime soon. I selected Light in the Darkness because it combines the history of astrophysics with philosophical and historical reflection in a way that is accessible without being simplistic. The book situates black holes within a broader human story, connecting scientific discovery to meaning, humility, and curiosity about our place in the universe. It is both a scientific account and a deeply personal meditation on why the universe matters to us. Heino, thank you for joining us today.
- [02:18]
Heino Falcke
Thank you for having me here.
- [02:20]
Gregory McNiff
Heino, why did you write Light in the Darkness and who is the target audience?
- [02:25]
Heino Falcke
Well, to be honest, it Wasn't my goal to write this book, but then I was pressured by various people. I should write a book. Then I thought, okay, I have to do a good job on it. And the audience really is the popular, the broad public. It's not just for experts in astronomy, even though there are a lot of details in there. But I really. I want to tell the story of astronomy, but also the story of the first image of a black hole, my personal story, and the story of the universe to people on the street, more or less. Right. Who have a deep interest in this and who cares and who are curious. That's, you know, and I just want to make signs lively, you know, see how science is, how real science works. Because that's, you know, big part of the book as well.
- [03:17]
Gregory McNiff
Absolutely, yeah. That comes across. I mean, the scientific method, I think we think of it as very abstract, logical, and always progressing in a linear manner. And you suggest or show it's anything but. It's messy. And failure is as much an outcome as success.
- [03:34]
Heino Falcke
But that's the important part of it. Right. To also allow for failure and to learn from it and then build on it.
- [03:42]
Gregory McNiff
Absolutely. I want to ask a little more about that because you cite a particular experiment later in the book, but I want to start right at the beginning. Not only did you write the book, but the forward is by Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Why did you ask her to write the forward?
- [03:58]
Heino Falcke
Oh, she's a living legend. She's a pioneer of radio astronomy discovering pulsars, and maybe most known for the fact that she's a woman that did not get the Nobel Prize, even though she would have absolutely deserved it in the discovery of the Nobel Prizes. And she's a fantastic, wonderful human being who cares deeply about people, about her field, and is not easily compromised. So she has some clear views of her own, and that's what I really liked. And you actually see this even in the foreword?
- [04:34]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah. It's beautifully written. Heino, I want to ask you a little bit about your background growing up. I think as a child, you wanted to be an astronaut. That career trajectory didn't pan out, but you still come pretty close to examining or exploring the universe, so to speak. And you also describe your childhood as having parallels with black holes, which, if not an obsession, is a real passion of yours. Can you talk about that?
- [04:59]
Heino Falcke
Well, I started with a fascination for the heavens. Right. I was a very curious kid and seeing the first astronauts running around on the moon. We're not the first one. I think it was Apollo 15 that I really, really saw on television and it made a deep impression on me as telling us, you know, we can, you know, walk on other worlds. I mean, isn't that amazing? What else can be possible and what else is out there? And I want to know what's, you know, what's in, in the heavens and what's beyond them that, you know, I mean, my curiosity doesn't stop at the moon or at galaxies or even, you know, at the end of the universe. And it goes beyond. As a child, you think about everything. So it was pure curiosity. And black holes I came across later, of course, means nothing to think about as a five year old. But when you do studies and you start, you read popular science articles, you learn about black holes. And they are some form of an ultimate border and frontier of knowledge. I mean, in the sense at the time we didn't know they would exist. They had all kinds of exotic properties. But even if you would detect them, they would mean that there's a frontier of what we can know because they are surrounded by an event horizon. That means there's a physical space inside that must be there that we cannot measure, that we cannot access by normal scientific methods. And so that's how far you can go with physics. And I want to be there where you know, as far as you can go with your mind and with physics.
- [06:42]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, you clearly have gone very far. Before we formally started this interview, we talked about how much material you cover in a book that's 300 pages, and that includes everything from the history of astronomy up into Kepler or Galileo, through Einstein's relativity. You talk about different types of astronomy, including radio astronomy and ligo, dark energy, dark matter. There's a lot of material in here and it's fascinating how you tie it all together. I want to ask you about a few of those themes. The first is what the author, Frank White calls the overview effect. Can you talk about that?
- [07:18]
Heino Falcke
Yeah, that's the experience that some astronauts have when they look at the Earth from above and you see the Earth as a whole. And I think certainly that picture of the blue marble has made a deep impression on me as well. You see this, you know, this blue planet, which is very thin atmosphere, shielding it from the darkness and coldness of sky of the universe. And that gives you a very different feeling about the Earth. I mean, understanding, you know, we are all together on this little rock in space and we have to get along. And it can be sometimes overwhelming. Astronauts say, change their feeling for the world. They are actually worldview, literally. And I Think that's what science, to some degree, can do for you. And it gives us images that people would have not even dreamed about 100 years ago. Right. And so there is also not just a scientific impact that science has, it also has an impact on our minds and our spiritual experiences as well. You know, science to some degree, can be spiritual, if you want to say so.
- [08:35]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, I absolutely want to get into that, because your book is divided into four parts and the fourth part, actually, each part's fascinating. I found the third particularly fascinating because you really go into your research. I want to talk about that. But in the fourth part, you really hit head on the relationship between religion and science and what their specific roles are and what they can accomplish or how you view their. Their tasks. I absolutely want to get into that, but I do want to circle back to this notion of the scientific method and failure. You write failures can be groundbreaking. And this failure here, you're referring to an experiment by the American physicists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley would become one of the few key experiments that would set the history of physics and astronomy on its current path. Can you talk to me about the role of failure in scientific. In the scientific method and analysis?
- [09:27]
Heino Falcke
We always say, and sometimes it's very true, that essence of scientific methods is that you can falsify a theory. And in fact, in astronomy, often have lots of theories which are very adaptable, and they're not easily falsifiable because they sort of squeeze around. They have some free parameters and so forth. But sometimes they're really these key experiments that really tell you, no, that is absolutely not going to work. And one of these was this Michael Zimorli experiment where people had the idea that the entire universe is filled with an ether where light would go through like air, where sound waves go through, and it showed. No, that's not the case. And light behaves differently. And that was. And that realization that really shook a standard paradigm got it out of your head, and it made space for something new. And that something new was special relativity, which later turned into general relativity, which describes black holes these days. So, yeah, without that failure, we wouldn't have such a clear understanding of space and time. Now, when you said, and black holes.
- [10:48]
Gregory McNiff
Absolutely. And I do want to get into black holes, clearly it's a major theme in the book. Would you say science progresses one failure at a time, or would you say failure is a bad thing? It almost seems like in some ways it moves us forward, even if we don't get the result we expect.
- [11:05]
Heino Falcke
Yeah, I mean, that's what people often say. You progress with failure, and that is very true. But in the scientific reality, it's often that failure is seen as a failure and it will hurt your career if you come with a negative result. So you have to be very careful how you phrase an experiment. Make sure that the failure actually gives you new insight. Because also a poorly executed, purely designed experiment is a failure. And that doesn't help science at all. A purely written paper can be a failure. It doesn't help science at all. So it needs to be really a very craftful, designed failure to move us forward. So even good failure isn't easy as a good scientific breakthrough result isn't easy either.
- [12:02]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, that's a very thoughtful distinction. I want to come back to this notion of black holes, and I'll probably be asking questions throughout this interview on them. But you write, quote, if we didn't understand the physics of the sun and of cosmic particles, we couldn't understand the physics of black holes either. How astounding is it that throughout the entire universe everything is bound together by the same processes and plays out according to the same laws?
- [12:28]
Heino Falcke
Yeah.
- [12:29]
Gregory McNiff
Could you expand on that? Because that's really an amazing insight buried on, you know, the, the first part of the book here.
- [12:36]
Heino Falcke
I was recently asked by some, you know, some, some kid actually, you know, what, what is astrophysics and, and, and how does it work? And the only reason why astrophysics works is because we think and we see that the physical laws that we discover here on Earth are applicable to the entire universe and that we can learn from what we see in the universe to about physics here on Earth and vice versa. And we don't have access to all the details of the entire universe. Right. Black holes are very far in distance. We don't see the details of them. You know, this image that we made with the Event Horizon Telescope is still a very rough image of a black hole, but it's an image. Right. So fantastic. But if you want to get to the real detail of the plasma physics, which is very crucial around black holes, for example, you have to do this in a laboratory, but the laboratories aren't big enough. So you go to the sun, which is our biggest plasma physics laboratory. It accelerates particles, it has strong magnetic fields. So some aspects of what happens around black holes you can learn from the Sun. And so everything in the universe is somewhat connected. You learn something about stars and you comply it to other star systems, to galaxies, and vice versa. And so you need to really have that big view in Astronomy, because a single object doesn't give you all the answers. It's always a combination of things.
- [14:05]
Gregory McNiff
I want to circle back there because I want to ask you about the role of mathematics and science. But before we get there, the first part, you really are providing an overview of astronomy, the first part of your book. And you talk about why astronomy, or the development of it, appeared in certain cultures or I guess, progressed in certain cultures, and specifically the Judeo Christian culture. And you write, in the Judeo Christian worldview, there is nothing supernatural about nature. It doesn't have a will of its own, but was formed by a single God who is the creator and origin in all things. In this conception, we discover an important foundation for modern natural sciences, namely the ability to rely on a set of principles that underline nature. Only when you have this assumption does science make sense. To begin with, is there something unique about the Judeo Christian culture? Obviously, other cultures have done science, but it does seem like some of the advances, at least astronomy, have disproportionately come in this culture.
- [15:08]
Heino Falcke
Yeah, I think some scientists today, they underappreciate, let me put it that way, the role that world views, that philosophy, that religion plays in advancement of science, because, you know, it needs a certain mindset and a certain motivation to do science and to think in a certain direction. Let me just, you know, start with a period long time ago that was a Neolithic revolution. That's when we started to become farmers. Right. Suddenly, astronomy became very important because it would, you know, give you exact calendars. And so observing it, very precise, precisely, was important. People would observe them for centuries, develop math to predict the motion of planets, and then trying to actually, in the end, predict what the gods would tell you, right? So they had a certain worldview. In other cultures, the planets were like gods or signs of the gods. And so then to some degree, your questioning stops, right? Because if, you know, if the gods have a certain thinking of certain desires or certain will of their own, then it doesn't make sense to ask, why do the planets do what they do? Why do the stars do what they do? Why are they there? And in the Judeo. Yeah, actually, in the Jewish worldview that, you know, developed, you had one God, one underlying principle. And if you read Genesis, for example, this was not a magic story, right. Even people think nowadays because they're modernized, oh, it's a very magic thing. But really, it was very much removed from all kind of godly things. You know, God made, God spoke, and then something happened. But the stars weren't Gods. There's no tree that was holy or anything. So they were just things, they were just lights. And so then it made sense to ask why? How does it work? How do things? Because they don't have a will of their own. And there may be underlying principles that we can discover and that govern these things. And that turned out to be natural laws that we use today. Sort of theologically speaking. The word, the word that God spoke, so to speak. What are these words? So, you know, the way you think about the world gives you a certain direction and certain insights. And science is always done by humans, human beings, and they have worldviews, they have their own ideas and views, and sometimes their own dogmas block them from discoveries.
- [18:01]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, I really found it fascinating the way you contrast the Chinese culture, which is focused on the supernatural, and Judaism, which is, quote, strongly characterized by rational argumentation. But that was very interesting.
- [18:14]
Heino Falcke
This is not to say that Chinese were not rational. Right. It's just some aspects of the worldview at the time, at that time might not have been so conducive to developing the natural law. The natural sciences that we have today so needed to have. Even though the Chinese were The better astronomers, 1,000 years ago, they were the better astronomers. Yeah.
- [18:39]
Gregory McNiff
And yet you're right, the Chinese astronomers did too little with their data. So there's something going on there in the mind of how they're approaching.
- [18:47]
Heino Falcke
That's good scientific advice. You know, it's not just data, it's always interpretation and the way to analyze data in the right framework. And I try to stress that in all projects.
- [18:59]
Gregory McNiff
No, clearly. And again, another insight here just a few pages later. And I got to say, you might. This might be the most fascinating insight, your whole book. You actually suggest Kepler's achievements are, quote, more seminal than Galileo's. You probably would be in the minority with that. Why do you think that?
- [19:18]
Heino Falcke
No, I'm not sure I'm the minority of that. If we teach first year semester astronomy, the first year astronomy, then we teach Kepler's laws.
- [19:31]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah.
- [19:32]
Heino Falcke
And Galileo actually ignored Kepler's discoveries, namely that the planets go around in ellipses and have their certain regularities between them. And that's exactly. And he already speculated there might be some form of a, you know, maybe not force, but something that, you know, that causes this. And that later led to Newton discovering gravity, the law of gravity. And of course, that and its shortcomings later led to the theory of general relativity, where we really revolutionized space and time. So in a way, Kepler set us on a course that's used in science today. Of course, Galileo was also very important. He got fame. Sometimes you get fame for other things. Right, because he sort of got in trouble with the Pope in part not just because of science, but also for indecent language that he used at the time. You know, it was a very different time. And he was a very outspoken character, which of course is perfectly fine. But in terms of science, I think both are very important for the history of science. And Kepler sometimes is a bit forgotten and that's. We should rediscover Kepler a little bit, I think.
- [20:51]
Gregory McNiff
No, absolutely. I mean, he laid his laws, laid the foundation for celestial mechanics and allowed Newton to go on to basically build his model of the universe. I do want to read your bio, a three sentence bio Kepler, which is fascinating. Kepler was by nature the opposite of Galile, an excellent mathematician, slight in stature and prone to illness. He was plagued by self doubt all his life and suffered a continued series of misfortunes in his personal life. His mother was accused of being a witch by the governor and when his wife died, he had a hard time with the arduous search for a new partner. He never had much luck with women. So you can be the absolute, the father of cosmology or the new physics, or make strong contributions and still struggle like the rest of us though, going from the serious to the less serious. What is a parsec and why does Star wars get it wrong?
- [21:50]
Heino Falcke
Yeah, well, a parsec is a measure of distance roughly a little bit more than three light years. It's a parallax second. It's sort of the shift that you see of a star when the earth goes around the Earth. When the Earth goes around the sun. Right. You see it, you know, if there is on the left side of the sun, then you see the star at a slightly different position than when there is on the other side of the sun. And from that shift, which you measure in arc seconds, you can actually measure a distance. The further away something is, the less it will shift. You know, it's like closing the left or your right eye and you'll see that things in the foreground will shift a little bit with respect to the background. And yeah, and there's this famous quote, there's a Kessel run made in I forgot how many parsecs. Right. And it just sounds like a time. Okay, there are some excuses which I think are lame. They came later, they said, okay, yeah, in this particular way it is meant as a, as a distance really. I suspect they just screwed up when they wrote the script.
- [22:54]
Gregory McNiff
I suspect you're right. Moving to part two, the mysteries of the universe. You write, light creates reality because it conveys information. What do you mean by that?
- [23:07]
Heino Falcke
It's interesting. If you think about forces, a quantum physical way of describing forces is that you exchange virtual quantum particles. And, for example, the electromagnetic force, which really governs most of the forces that we experience is the exchange of virtual photons, light, essentially, virtual light particles. And so what we see and what we feel about particles is largely the exchange of virtual photons, sometimes some other particles, but typically light like particles. So really, reality is created by matter to some degree, but to experience it, you need light. And the universe just out of light wouldn't be interesting, you know, because, you know, it moves too fast. You need. You need really matter, which doesn't move at speed of light all the time, but so you need both. You need the slow particles and the light to experience it.
- [24:15]
Gregory McNiff
Excellent. A Dutch journalist called you up and said, basically, what value is any research on Mercury? And you were, why shouldn't we pick on the planet Mercury and what has it contributed to our daily lives?
- [24:32]
Heino Falcke
Yeah, I thought this was a wonderful story because they say, okay, why do these weird things that nobody cares about? Right? Why do we care about Mercury? And it turned out it was just this very little detail about the orbit of Mercury that led Einstein to really confirm his theory of general relativity. It was a little, tiny error between theory and observations that was bothering scientists, and nobody could have cared less about it in the rest of the public. Right. Just this is a detail. Don't care about it. But it was the start of the biggest revolution of our understanding of space and time, our universe today, and in fact, also of technology, because, like, GPS navigation systems today wouldn't work without understanding of general relativity. So because, you know, the mass of the Earth changes the time. You know, the clock here on Earth runs differently than clocks up in satellites that we measure to measure our positions. So, yeah, sometimes little details can really change not just our world, but the entire universe.
- [25:46]
Gregory McNiff
What's your view of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence? And if we were to find it, would life go back to normal after a certain point?
- [25:55]
Heino Falcke
Yeah. I was once at a conference about extraterrestrial life, and a lot of people were expecting all kinds of fantastic almost. Sometimes I felt like they had the feeling that this would change the entire humanity and aliens would be something like an epiphany and something like that. I expect once we found life a year later, we just get used to it like we get used to everything else. But it will of course be an important finding if we ever do so we should be doing it. The point is we have absolutely no clue how likely it is that there is intelligent life out there. I have a feeling that probably there is life out there, but I'm not so convinced. We have huge amounts of intelligent civilizations out there. Even though I love Star Trek, I just love this universe to be filled with civilizations. I'd love to travel there. I'm just worried that just looking at our own Earth, how much it took. That was this recent book what all had to happen in order to create intelligent life. And we are only here for having civilizations, empires for 2,000 years or so, cultural civilizations 10,000 years, humans 300,000 years. That's just a blink of an eye in the universe evolution. And we don't know whether how long we'll survive. Obviously I'm hopeful, others less hopeful, but still it may take a lot of effort, a lot of time and a lot of luck to make intelligent civilizations at work. So maybe that could be a thought. Maybe we actually are alone and that gives us even bigger responsibility for us until it's proven otherwise. And if you find others, then we need to find out what they think, how they feel and, or cover. Who knows, you know, maybe they're aggressive. We have no, no clue. But it's, it's important to search. But I don't think it will change in a fundamental way how we feel about ourselves because that's determined by us, it's not by someone else.
- [28:23]
Gregory McNiff
Absolutely. Just to may ask a follow up there specifically around religion because you do talk about your faith throughout the book, do you think it would change our understanding of religion or maybe more directly would that increase or decrease your faith? If we were to find intelligent life on one of a trillion exoplanets in.
- [28:41]
Heino Falcke
Contrast to what other people say. And I'm, you know, I'm a Christian, I, you know, I openly talk about this. I don't think it would change my faith at all. To me it's a purely scientific question. It would certainly be interesting to talk about their religious experience in contrast to many people. I don't think religion will go away. I think it's, it's to some degree hardwired into us humans and we need to have a healthy relation to it. And some of the issues we see today is that we have many unhealthy relations to religion in you know, either complete absence or complete corruption of it. So I think finding the healthy balance is going to be important and be nice to see. Interesting to see what, you know, aliens think about it, what they have experienced. It's also interesting that actually all sci fi stories are actually full of religion. It's quite fascinating that this is always part of many of these stories. But yeah, it was a famous quote by the head of the Vatican observatory, a Jesuit. He was asked, would you baptize an alien? And he said, sure, if she asks for it. I thought that was a very pragmatic answer.
- [29:59]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, he actually wrote a book too. He seems like a fascinating individual.
- [30:04]
Heino Falcke
Yeah, he is.
- [30:05]
Gregory McNiff
I want to move on. You write, without the death of stars, there would never have been light or even the pretty red color chosen through the Golden Gate Bridge on Earth. How does death of stars lead to the birth of life on Earth?
- [30:20]
Heino Falcke
Yeah, that's a fascinating thing. If you start with the Big Bang. The big Bang is totally useless and boring, right? So I mean, you have hydrogen and helium and that's it. And it's just in some clouds floating around, nothing happens. And then, okay, apparently there was also some dark matter, which we still don't understand. And then, you know, these things clump together. Still nothing spectacular happening. And at some point a star forms and nuclear fusion happens. Okay, okay. Then hydrogen becomes helium. Okay, still boring. Not really a fundamental change, but then later stages, in the end stage of a star, you suddenly fuse carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and if it's very heavy, also iron. And that happens only very short period, but it's an important period in the life of the universe. And of course, if stars would just be sitting around and then that wouldn't change the universe, but they explode. They, you know, give. They expel their outer shells. And so they give back this enriched material. Suddenly you don't have just hydrogen and helium. You have all elements, all the elements that we are made of that we use here on Earth. And so suddenly in the universe, there's a huge amount of complexity simply by the fact there are stars. And to some degree, it's sort of the beginning of the evolution of life already because things become much more complex from simply the emergence of stars. So it is very fundamental what stars are, and they have a life cycle of their own and so forth. So, yeah, it's fascinating to see how a seemingly boring, dull universe suddenly becomes more and more complex, leading to a podcast about books.
- [32:25]
Gregory McNiff
Nice way to stick the landing there. Would you say we're made of stardust?
- [32:32]
Heino Falcke
Absolutely, we are. It's even a very biblical statement. Right. Every funeral, I think you're Here you're made of dust and you return to D. And that's pretty much true for the universe.
- [32:44]
Gregory McNiff
I don't want to jump into your current book, but I'm fascinated by the probability or the process of life, abiogenesis, Just briefly. How so? My last interview was with an atheist who was raised Catholic and he wrote a book, the Science and why We Exist. And he was very frank and said to me, the most complicated or complex structure we've built on Earth is the Large Hadron Collider. There might be some debate on that, but that seems like a pretty good guess. He said the brain is far more complicated than that. I throw it back to you. How did we get from helium, helium and hydrogen at the Big Bang to an incredibly complicated brain with consciousness, dreams, etc.
- [33:29]
Heino Falcke
It's not my field obviously, but I've been talking with people about it and a colleague of mine in the Netherlands, actually one of the leading people looking at the, the molecular physics happening inside of cells. He has a big, big, big consortium of people trying to create artificial cells. Incidentally, he's also a very devout Christian, right? So people ask, how can you be a Christian and try to create life? You want to play God? And he said, no, I want to play for God. I want to understand what things are, how things work. But if he gives the talk and others about what's happening with the DNA and the molecular motor, so to spe at work there and in ourselves, it's just absolutely mind boggling what has to happen to create life. I personally believe it's the natural laws have led to the emergence of life. But it's not just pure luck in a sense, right? Because you can't just randomly throw a few things together and suddenly a cell comes out. Because you need not only the DNA, you need the mechanism to replicate, to separate, you need the surroundings of the cell that shields it. You need a way to actually gain energy, like feeding mechanism, so to speak, maybe some sensors already. All of that you need to have in place to actually make life evolve and multiply, right? And that just, you know, just put the numbers together, just it doesn't happen by accident. So you have to have some situation and people are debating where this is. Is this actually even is this warm little pond or is this at the surface of early Earth, is it deep in the waters, are these smokers all kinds of ideas where this might have happened. There needs to be a very again, a conducive environment where all things come together, where the natural laws, the initial conditions the stuff that you have around all conspire to suddenly make some life forms. And so it's in essence, not just luck, right? It is many things coming together. And so it is as if the universe and natural laws and initial conditions were made such that life could emerge. Now, is this something that was designed into it? I would not read that into it. I don't think you can say that. But it's also, it still is to me, a wonder, you know, that we hear that, you know, there's out of again a big Bang. Suddenly life emerges. It is really a fundamental change in the universe, a cosmological Big bang. This little experience of this first lucar, the last universal common ancestor of life, is a momentous moment in the history of the universe. It might have happened elsewhere. Who knows? And if we find life elsewhere, we know that actually the universe as a whole actually likes to make, you know, is sort of, you know, is able to make life, or it really was a freak accident. Who knows? It's a fascinating question.
- [36:50]
Gregory McNiff
No, and I don't want to get hung on this, because it really isn't subject to your book. But I have interviewed biologists and chemists and astrobiologists, and the odds of small proteins forming amino acid sequences are something like 10 to the 80th zeros, which exceeds the atoms in the universe. And the odds of a functional protein forming randomly are so astronomically low as to be a number with hundreds of zeros. It just seems almost impossible. And yet it's happened. I mean, I know you discussed winning the lottery or your neighbor winning the lottery. I mean, we've clearly won it, regardless of your view of how. But absolutely fascinating question. I want to move on to a fascinating quote. How do you interpret Edwin Hubble's comment that the history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons?
- [37:39]
Heino Falcke
And that was true for a long time, really, because the universe got bigger and bigger. You know, we had the solar system, and, you know, we thought we were the center of the universe, and then we moved the sun into the center. People already had a feeling that there was something bigger outside. You know, even before we had the first good measurements of the distances to stars, they were always thought to be further out. Even if you look, read old text in the Bible, people talk about sort of a immeasurable vastness and size of stars out there that they didn't see. They just, you know, had the impression there's something big out there. But then scientifically, it took a long time to really measure the distances to stars, to see Their light years. You know, that was just, I think, probably 200 years ago or so that we really found that. And then we tried to make a structure or scientists tried to make a structure of the Milky Way. And we thought that's it. And Hubble was the one who showed there are galaxies outside our Milky Way. That was discussed before, but he found very good evidence for it. And suddenly that became bigger. Then we discovered quasars, and we found that universe is actually billions of light years in size. Yeah. And then the Big Bang was found. And so. Wow. So really the horizons expanded, expanded, expanded. Everything got bigger. But now we're hitting horizons. And is the Big Bang, obviously, which is a, you know, and the other one, the horizons of black holes. And there are other, you know, fundamental limitations to our knowledge, like quantum uncertainties and chaos theory and so forth, where, you know, science seems to tell us that the not knowing is part of the science. Yeah. Before that, the expanding horizon was not knowing was because we couldn't measure good enough. Well, we did not have a good enough understanding. But now we find that horizons are just baked into the universe. So now we are not expanding horizons, we're discovering horizons.
- [39:52]
Gregory McNiff
No. That's fascinating. I want to move to part three, the journey to the image. And this is a really. Actually, I'll say part three and part four. Very personal, but this is very personal in your professional life. And the subtitle might be Personal Journey to the Event Horizon Telescope and the First Image of a Black Hole. Briefly, before we get to eht, could you talk about radio astronomy and how the Very Long Baseline Interferometry Telescope works?
- [40:22]
Heino Falcke
Yeah, I mean, radio astronomy, I think, has a special role because it was sort of developing in the 30s. Karl Jensky in the US you know, found there was investigate. He was investigating radio because for radio communication and there was some noise. And he figured out that this noise was coming from the Milky Way. The cosmos was making radio waves. That was the first time that we were doing astronomy in a color that's not visible to the naked eye, so to speak. We were looking at the universe at different electromagnetic waves. And radio is light as the light we see with our naked eye, just at a much lower frequency. You know, if you think about the electromagnetic spectrum being a piano, then maybe the optical part that we see is, you know, the one key in the middle. And radio is, you know, the keys at the very left part of the piano. Yeah. But fundamentally there's no difference. It's just different frequencies. And now we see the universe in all the colors we see, X rays, gamma rays, near infrared, far infrared, all the entire spectrum. It's like a symphony of colors, so to speak, where we used to have one key in the beginning, one note. And so that's why this was very fundamental, the discovery of radio astronomy. And it became very important during the Second World War because it caused radar for finding, detecting aircraft and so forth. So the technology developed, and there is a certain combination between new detector types and military usage in astronomy, which is quite interesting topic on itself. Astronomy is now completely innocent. It's always been part of wider societal issues and developments, including military and economic uses. And then radio astronomy has one disadvantage. It has very low resolution. There's a radio telescope here in Germany, which I use the 100 meter telescope in Effortsberg, near Bon. 100 meter telescope. The bigger telescope, the sharper it is. This one is not sharper than your naked eye, actually, which is much more smaller because the waves are so much bigger. But there's a big trick you can do. You can actually record the radio waves because they have many, many photons, and you can record the current they produced. And you have digital equipment. You can digitize radio waves, essentially, and then you can combine them. And you can do this by having telescopes distribute over the entire world. Okay? They collect the radio waves. And suppose you'd have a telescope the size of the world. It would have an enormous resolution, right? But you can't build a telescope the size of the world. But what would it do? The light would come in, would be reflected, and the light would be combined in the focus. And what we do in radio interferometry is we collect the light at these different telescopes around the world. We digitize it, and then we combine them digitally in the computer. We do what a mirror would do in the focus. We just do this in the computer with programs. And so we really recreate a virtual telescope because we have digital copies of those photons, those collection of photons. And for the experts, you can't do this in the optical easily, because they are quantum objects. But in radio, you have so many photons overlapping that they're not quantum limited. So that's just bracket closed for the nerds. And so we could create this, this worldwide telescope by combining these individual small telescopes, adding the different perspectives of telescopes around the world, which is a great capability. And it was developed already in the 70s, and there was a Nobel Prize for that technique. So it's nothing I discovered. We just pushed it to the extreme limit. And so we said in our paper in, well, in last paper, in 2000, we had some papers before that we said, you know, if we do this at the highest frequencies, we can actually see the shadow of a black hole. So the absence of light, and that would give us the highest resolution, highest resolution astronomy. And we could go to this ultimate limit of our knowledge in space and time.
- [45:15]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, okay, let's go there. I mean, the big part of this book is you and your team's work, the Event Horizon Telescope, to see a shadow of a black hole. And could you talk about that process, specifically how you and your team design the camera and this Eureka insight, you had that, quote, black holes enlarge themselves, that they are gigantic gravitational lenses.
- [45:40]
Heino Falcke
Yeah. Now I was triggered. I was working on black holes, but on something different, actually. But then I did my PhD at a time when some of the first VLBI experiments at high frequencies, these interferometry experiments at high frequencies were made on a mysterious object in the center of our Milky Way, where people have thought, now this could perhaps be a black hole, or maybe not. There were widely different ideas of about what that is. And there were the first measurements by Reinhard Gensler, who later got a Nobel Prize for actually measuring the mass, how much it weighs. This object and found today we know it's 4 million times the mass of the Sun. This is object in the center of the Milky Way, and it has some radio emission. I thought, well, gee, if that has radio emission and it really is a black hole, couldn't we use the technique to actually see it? And then you calculate it, what the size is, and it seemed to be too small. Right. And I just, you know, it was a back on the envelope calculation. I had done some more detail calculation, but I didn't put things together. And then I found an old book from the 70s from Jim Bardeen, and to calculate how a black hole looks like in front of a star and the darkness looked much bigger than the black hole itself. Hey, what's this? And then I realized, wow, black holes, of course, they are so strong, they bend light and they function like giant lenses. And so they actually amplify, magnify themselves. They magnify the darkness that we see. And that darkness we call the shadow of a black hole. Because we don't see the black hole itself. We see the lack of light. Or people always ask, how can you see a black hole? You don't. What you see is the absence of light. You see the shadow of it. And that's why I insist on this term having a deep meaning of something that we cannot see and yet we can still measure. And when I saw this, it was just really, eureka. A moment. I called it an amazing grace moment. When you get up and you feel like, okay, I was blind, but now I see. And I was convinced, yes, we'll be able to see a black hole. In my lifetime, there always had been sort of vague ideas how black hole would look like, but you can actually make an experiment, design experiment to see it. That wasn't really clear to people. And at that time, it was clear to me. And then you have to go and evangelize and go out into the community and tell them, hey, folks, you know, we can do this. You know, we have to do this and this and this. It takes a while, and then it catches on and the snowball becomes running. It goes, you know, runs and becomes bigger and bigger. And it was pretty clear what you had to do. It required money and collaboration, collaboration of people around the world, different telescopes, putting things together, getting, you know, funding from different agencies and so forth. And part of that, only part of that is described in the book. And because it was even more difficult than, you know, described in the book. But I think everybody was driven by that idea. In the end, we want to see a black hole. Right. Despite all the, you know, the hardships and the. The. The distrust that was there in the beginning, the different ambitions that people had, in the end, it was this common unifying goal. We want to see a black hole. It was the realization we need each other. Nobody can do it on their own. Needs a global team to do this.
- [49:34]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, that's really interesting. It came across. I mean, I know you were dealing with colleagues in Harvard and another team was in Mexico, and I think they were, I don't know, arrested or kidnapped. It was an amazing story how it came together. And you actually credit project managers as being an important but unsung hero in this process. One interesting anecdote I found is somebody called you up and said, quote, you won this Spinoza Prize, which has an award, a monetary award larger than the Nobel. And you weren't quite sure what it was, but it seemed very providential.
- [50:12]
Heino Falcke
Yeah, it's the biggest science prize in the Netherlands. And I was new in the Netherlands, and I. I hadn't been so aware of it, to be honest. And I was called up by the head of the, you know, essentially, what's the NSF in the. In the US oh, you won the Spinoza Prize. And I first had to really understand what that really is. But that was certainly a life Changing. Yeah, experience. Because it really, really amplified or accelerated our goal to actually image that black hole. It really set me on course. That money actually was not for yourself. It was really for science. Yeah, no, some of that is still left today. I'm still using it for some science project because it allows you to start new project, risky projects, and then you can get more funding and so forth. And so it was an important backbone of my scientific success. Yeah, and it's great. I mean, the people trusted in you said, okay, we invest. You know, I forgot how much it was. Was it 2 or 3 million? It's not a huge amount, but, you know, enough to get you going. We invested in that guy. We trust he will do good things with it, use it for science and. Sure, I think we did.
- [51:34]
Gregory McNiff
Absolutely. I want to talk to circle back smoothly on black holes because you almost describe them in, in as individuals, as living organisms, and here, you know, you talk about them being boring or the silent majority. I, I found that interesting. Could you maybe talk about, you know, another place you talk about how they eat matter. Do you view black holes as living organisms?
- [52:03]
Heino Falcke
Oh, absolutely don't. But I think humans have the tendency to project their humanity onto things and it makes us easier to relate to them, to understand them. And to be honest, I understand physics better if I have a picture from everyday's life in my head. Not just equations, but a bigger picture story, so to speak. So it helps us to understand things better. Some people don't like it. Some pure scientists, they don't like this. But I think not everybody is a pure mathematician who thinks in just formula. But we need other pictures. And for the general public, it's much easier to understand things. I think if you describe it that way.
- [52:49]
Gregory McNiff
No, that makes total sense. I just want to make the connection between the VLBI and eht.
- [52:55]
Heino Falcke
Right, the vlbi, the very long baseline deformetry that we are using. Yeah, I think we didn't introduce the term.
- [53:00]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, exactly. And that's a technique. While the EHT is the network of telescopes using the vlbi.
- [53:07]
Heino Falcke
Right.
- [53:08]
Gregory McNiff
Okay, perfect. Okay. We talked about black holes. Another interesting point was the amount of data that the EHT generated. And it's not like you could see the image immediately as it was picked up by the eht. Someone had to process all this data. Could you talk about that and the role of Fourier transform in producing an image from this data?
- [53:32]
Heino Falcke
Yeah, I mean, first of all, if you build a telescope, a huge telescope like this, which is a precision instrument, it's a Hell of an engineering that you need to do, right? And so we save some of that by recording, by getting rid of half the telescope, the one that, you know, puts things together in the focus, and we replace it by computer programs. But then these computer programs need to do all these fine adjustments that you need to do otherwise with engineering. You need to correct for the earth motion, even for the motion of the continent. You know, one telescope was at the South Pole actually. The ice moves, we have the atmosphere. The atmosphere actually changes arrival time of radio waves. So there's a lot of calibration going on. And the information we get in the end is even incomplete. And that's where the Fourier transform comes in. Because every combination of telescopes measures a certain sound, a certain note in, in, in the music, right? You know, imagine the picture of a black hole being a symphony, okay? It has all kinds of frequencies, low frequencies, high frequencies. You have triangulum, you have a, a bass, whatever, you know, different instruments producing different sounds and so forth. And our instruments are like strings that measure certain sounds. Right. If the telescopes are far away, we actually measure high pitched notes. And if they're close together, we measure low pitched notes. That's different to intuition, perhaps. And then we put things together. But there's always information missing because we don't have telescopes all around the world. Okay. And what we measure actually is the Fourier transform of the image, not the image itself. And it sounds a bit technical, but what is a Fourier transform? Now, if you have, look at old hi fi equipment, for example, you have these equalizers, right? You have sound come in, you see the music and you see bars at different frequencies. Sometimes you see a lot of low frequencies or high frequencies and these red and lines going up and down. And what this does is actually it does a Fourier transform of the sound that comes in and turns it into. How much noise is there or sound is there at different frequencies. That's all there is. In fact, if you look at the. If you write down music on a piece of paper, you write down the notes. In essence, this is a Fourier transform of the music itself. Yeah. Just how strong are individual nodes or frequencies? That's what it tells you. And we miss half the pages in the sheets or have the notes or a three quarter of them. And yet we can reconstruct the original sound. Yeah. Because even if you don't hear the entire melody of the song, you can still recognize song. Okay? That's what it is. But then you still need to recover the missing parts to make it look a bit better or sound better. And so there are all kinds of algorithms that try to guess what the missing information is or fill it in a reasonable way to make a cleaner image. And luckily, we have a very good control of what information is missing, what we can believe and what we cannot believe. But you have to do it in a good scientific way. And that is really a long process that took a long time. And you check it with all kinds of algorithms and tests and challenges. Different people have to do the same thing, reconstruct the image in different ways. And luckily, all the different methods came to the same answer. And so that made us very confident that the image that we published is correct. And I think we have now confirmed it many times that what we've been doing was correct.
- [57:50]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, I found that really interesting. Then you use the analogy of the Fourier transform of the image. Then it's like the score of the symphony. And you just spoke about that. And a radio interferometer is a measuring device that records the music and divides it up. But you also note that the image, the mirror, is made up of many small telescopes. It doesn't have to be complete. And Fourier transform allows you to get this precise image, even if you have missing, I guess, missing segments within the initial.
- [58:17]
Heino Falcke
And in fact, that technique is used all over actually, today. If your computer makes a jpeg, you know, in an image, it actually makes Fourier transform and throws away some frequencies, throws away some information, and then turns it back into an image. And you don't see the difference. There's some, you know, there's some. Some notes you don't need in order to see the full picture.
- [58:42]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, I mean, that's amazing. We're going back to a French mathematician in the early 1800s here, and here we're using his technology to see the. The shadow of a black hole. Before I move on to part four, you ended your press conference, I think it might have been five or six press conferences announcing this image of the black hole with, quote, it feels like looking at the gates of hell.
- [59:09]
Heino Falcke
Why did you say that? Well, the two backgrounds I was thinking of, George Smoot apparently said, we're looking at the face of God when they presented the fluctuation of the cosmic microwave background. So looking at the big Bang, essentially. And so I was thinking, let's do the opposite. We're looking now at the end of space and time. And so the opposite of God, maybe hell, so to speak. But it was also coming from a conversation I once had when I gave a public talk. I was talking to an artist and she had made pictures of things I had presented in an earlier talk. And then I asked, now are you going to now make pictures of black holes? And she said, no, no, no. I'm so afraid. They make me fear. They make me feel like they are. No, they are. I'm looking at hell, right? And black holes have this dangerous feeling, this mythical appearance. And to some degree, they're sort of, you know, they're burning up stuff and you get into. And you never get out. Well, I think in the, in the. I think the. I'm not Catholic, but in the Catholic view, I think you can get out of hell, right? But in black holes, you can only get in and you're being destroyed. So may not be perfectly Catholic, but, you know, to be honest.
- [60:26]
Gregory McNiff
So unfortunately, on the Catholic view, once you're near hell, you're there to stay. But purgatory.
- [60:30]
Heino Falcke
Okay, Purgatory. Okay, sorry, yeah, I'm not an expert on this. Okay, good, fine.
- [60:33]
Gregory McNiff
No, as I get older, I increasingly become an expert on purgatory. But you set us up nicely for the transition to part four by talking about the reactions we as humans have to black holes. At the. You label part four beyond the limits. A glimpse into the future, the big unresolved questions in physics, humanity's place in the universe, and the question of God. Why are we, humanity, so fascinated with black holes and the idea of the beyond?
- [61:05]
Heino Falcke
Because our imagination, our questioning doesn't stop at the borders, it goes beyond. While our physics actually has to stop at the point that we can measure. And that's the important difference. So the questioning goes on, but the means that we have to answer them, at least with natural science, is limited. So I think we'll always be asking our questions about God, especially now that we see that, as I mentioned before, science has its inherent limits, inherent frontiers of our knowledge that, you know, even if we transcend them in some way, right. Suppose we, at some point, you know, okay, we find out there's not just one Big Bang, there may be multiple big bang bangs and multiverses, for example, right? But then we have to ask the question, okay, where do the multiverses come from? Or we think, okay, the Big Bang is a consequence of a quantum field that likes to explode once in a while into big bangs, okay? Where does this quantum field come from? And where do the laws of nature come from that created them? So I think we just keep on asking questions, and that's why we have to be mindful of the fact that science can answer a lot of useful questions. But not all the questions that we humans have, because I think our curiosity is infinite while our universe is actually finite.
- [62:28]
Gregory McNiff
And you think black holes tap into that curiosity, right?
- [62:31]
Heino Falcke
Yeah, yeah. No, black holes, as I said before, just. They represent the limit of our knowledge. Now, scientifically, they sort of. You can get to the edge of black holes, you see the shadow, and we can point to it. I can tell you exactly where in coordinates to a very precise number, where that thing is, and it's in our universe. But there is no current, no physical way to understand what's happening in the inside. And if you'd fall inside, you could survive the trip into the black hole, by the way, for a certain time, you could not tell us what you experienced. You could write a paper about it. You couldn't send a movie or a video clip or picture from it. Not even your cries would reach me, even though you could still see me. You could be inside the black hole. You would receive light from me. You would see me here giving an interview, but you couldn't answer to me. And that, to some degree, that loneliness, that being cut off from the rest of the universe, it does feel like hell a little bit. Right. So it is a fascinating region to think about. And maybe, I think giving a picture to it, it takes away some of the fear because if you can see something, it is maybe less mysterious and less, to some degree, less dangerous because you have the feeling, okay, I can deal with that. I know how it looks.
- [64:07]
Gregory McNiff
Absolutely. Obviously, this is a personal book as well in which you discuss your faith. How do you view the relationship between science and religion? It does feel like some of your colleagues view it more adversarial than you do. And can science strengthen one's faith? Can it prove the existence of God? Where do you come out on those questions?
- [64:27]
Heino Falcke
First of all, I think astronomy has always been linked to faith. Just looking at the stars has always inspired people to think further. And priests have been astronomers. Many of the scientists our science is based upon in the past had been devout believers, faithful people. So to say that science and religion don't go together is something that is very recent. It's sort of part of a sort of cultural war of the last hundred years we shouldn't get into. I think I'm against all kinds of wars, to be honest, also against cultural wars. So it's important to. To bring these two worlds together and to think them together. And in fact, I've just been giving a talk about science, about the entire evolution of the world, from the Big Bang to today. Including evolution of life to a deeply religious crowd of 7,000 people. And it would just. And they loved it. Right. I think if you tell science in the right way, people can embrace it. And for, for scientists, it's important to understand again, what the limit of their profession is. And what I take away from, from the science is just the sheer size and the awe inspiring, the beauty and the size of the universe which makes us small. I mean, we are literally a dust speck on a dust speck. But then my face does give me the certainty to some degree that I'm a loved dust speck here and that I have a certain purpose to be here. And I feel like this big universe is like my father's garden, so to speak. I can play in. Right. That's given to me as not just a cold and empty universe. There is purpose and love and hope in this universe. We have that in us. And I think, I believe that at the beginning of this universe there is a creator. And I think that hope, love and faith is not something that we discovered. We just mirror something that was there in the beginning already. Now, obviously scientifically, you can approve this, it could be wrong, but that's what faith is. And I don't think you can actually disprove it either. And I feel pretty, you know, I, I feel very, you know, not just happy also I feel, you know, you know, I, yeah. To be here. I mean it, you know, emotionally. That is certainly a much nicer position to have. Even though I didn't choose it for, for that purpose.
- [67:45]
Gregory McNiff
Right.
- [67:45]
Heino Falcke
It just came as an added benefit because, you know, I, my faith was sort of developing together with my scientific curiosity. In the end, you discover, wow, this universe is really big. But hey, maybe God is even bigger.
- [68:00]
Gregory McNiff
Heino but as you learn more about the universe, I mean, we talked about the universal laws and you describe mathematics as the mythology of science. Does it strengthen your faith as you get a better understanding of the universe? As we scientists and humanity understand how the universe works, The Big Bang, you know, everything from the electromagnetic spectrum to space, time, gravity. I mean, it's so far from what we would intuitively believe or think of how the universe works. Does that have any impact on your fate?
- [68:34]
Heino Falcke
Yeah, because I think there is. We discover, we have discovered and we're still discovering there's an underlying order in the universe and that to some degree is an abstract order. It's something that, you know, because if you look at the universe, it looks chaotic. You know, all things seem to be, you know, unpredictable and so forth. And certain things we can suddenly predict. And we think all of this is due to an underlying order which is the same in the past, now and the future. Right. The same things that, you know, believers attach to God. Right. He's the same then now and the future and in eternity. So there is some underlying stability that really transcends ourselves. But it's not that this order actually, you know, is a prison, so to speak, that it actually determines all the things that happen, that everything that happens is already predetermined. I think it would have been absolutely impossible to predict scientifically that something like the Earth would emerge and people would run around and would say the things that we say right now. I think nobody could have written a computer program to predict everything that happens here. We can't even predict where in two weeks a thunderstorm and a flash will hit whatever a tree, which tree will be hit. I think it's fundamentally impossible to predict that. And so there's order and there's freedom. And that's certainly a godly combination, I would say. And to some degree, a miracle that I feel is. Has, you know, goes very deep.
- [70:21]
Gregory McNiff
I think that's a great place to end the interview again. The book is Light in the Darkness, Black Holes, the Universe and Us by Heino Falcon. Heino, thank you so much for your time in writing such a thoughtful and engaging book. Looking forward to discussing the next one when we get an English translation.
- [70:39]
Heino Falcke
I'd love to. Thank you.
- [70:41]
Gregory McNiff
Thank you.