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Something You Should Know
Why Some Ideas Change the World & Black Holes: Science’s Greatest Enigma - SYSK Choice
00:51:25
How world-changing ideas take off, why black holes matter, and surprising facts about lottery odds.
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- [00:03]
Mike Carruthers
Today on something you should know a
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Podcast Co-host/Announcer
few things worth knowing.
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Mike Carruthers
If you like to play the lottery,
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Podcast Co-host/Announcer
then how some new startup companies break
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Mike Carruthers
the rules to find success. Like Uber and Lyft, for example.
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Mike Maples Jr.
Lyft, they realized that if they asked the government of San Francisco, can we launch this service? They would have said no. And so they launched the service knowing it was illegal, and then said, we'll get the law changed. Most people won't do that.
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Podcast Co-host/Announcer
Also, sunscreen isn't the only thing to
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Mike Carruthers
protect you from sun damage. Your diet matters too.
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Podcast Co-host/Announcer
And black holes.
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Mike Carruthers
They're very mysterious and they're all over the universe.
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Marcus Chown
It was the Hubble Space Telescope that made the discovery that there's a supermassive black hole in the heart of every galaxy. So there's 2 trillion galaxies in our universe and there's a supermassive black hole in the centre of each. Now we don't know what they're doing there.
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Mike Carruthers
All this today on something you should know.
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Podcast Co-host/Announcer
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Mike Carruthers
something you should know. Fascinating intel, the world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today. Something you Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something you should know. Do you play the lottery? I play sometimes. I'm not an avid player, but you know, when the jackpot gets big, I,
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Podcast Co-host/Announcer
I'll put down a couple of bucks. Not, not because I think I'm going
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Mike Carruthers
to win, but because at least for the few hours between the time I buy my ticket and the time of the drawing, I have just as good a chance as anybody else and can imagine what if There are a couple of things about the lottery you might be interested in knowing. First, first of all, you should only play the lottery if you can afford to play it and only play for fun because the odds of winning are really terrible. But with that said, here are some things to help you play smarter. You cannot improve your chances of winning, but you can very slightly improve your odds of being the only winner by being random in your number choices or doing quick pick.
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Podcast Co-host/Announcer
Why?
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Mike Carruthers
More people play lucky numbers like 7, 11 or 13 or, or they use numbers in their birthday like between 1 and 30. So if you play those lower numbers and you win, you're more likely to have to share the winnings with somebody else. Scratch off tickets usually have a better chance of paying off. Scratch games return about 60% of the money to winners, but the lotto games typically pay out about 50%. Remember to follow the rules because kids under 18 are not supposed to buy tickets or play the lottery. If you buy a ticket for someone under 18 and they win and they try to redeem the ticket, the ticket will likely be invalidated and then no one gets the money. And if you play, check your ticket because about 12% of all lottery prizes go unclaimed. And that's just a shame. And that is something you should know when you watch and see new innovative business ideas explode onto the scene, it's. It's always interesting to see how they did it. After all, there are many new businesses that follow best practices, do all the right things and then there are businesses, or more precisely the people who start the businesses who do not follow best practices, who don't do the expected, don't do things the normal way. In fact, they often break the rules or invent new rules and sometimes those businesses are wildly successful. As a venture capitalist and entrepreneur, Mike Maples Jr. Keeps his eye on those rule breaking businesses and sometimes invests in them. Mike is the co founder of Floodgate, a leading seed stage fund in Silicon Valley that invested in companies like Twitter, Twitch, and others at the very beginning of their startup journeys.
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Podcast Co-host/Announcer
Mike is the host of a podcast
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Mike Carruthers
called Starting Greatness, and he's author of a book called Pattern why Some Startups Change the Future. Hey, Mike, Welcome. Good to have you on something you should know.
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Mike Maples Jr.
Thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to it.
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Podcast Co-host/Announcer
So explain in a little more detail
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Mike Carruthers
what it is you do, how you invest.
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Mike Maples Jr.
Yeah, so I have a pretty unusual job. I invest way too early in startups. I invested in Twitter when it was called Odeo and they were deciding whether to rename it voicemail 2.0. I invested in Lyft when it was Zim Ride and invested in Twitch when it was called Justin tv. And in fact, sometimes I invest when it's legally, ambiguously, too early. So when we decided to launch the lift service, we knew that it was going to be illegal and would need to get the laws changed in San Francisco. So when I mean too early, I
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Mike Carruthers
mean way too early, well, that seems risky. And, you know, investing in companies in the early stages is risky enough, but investing in companies that are potentially breaking the law in the beginning, that's very fly by the seat of your pants kind of investing, it seems to me.
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Mike Maples Jr.
That's right. So, you know, I look for companies that will change the future using technology, and usually they look a little bit crazy at the time that you have to decide. And so you have to be willing to sort of deal with that ambiguity and deal with just the uncertainty of what the future might hold.
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Mike Carruthers
But beyond the risky part, the kind of, the dangerous law breaking part of this, what are you looking for when you look at companies to invest in?
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Mike Maples Jr.
There's a story that I've always liked about two fish. There's these two little fish and they're swimming. They come up to a big fish and the big fish says, how's the water, boys? And then the two little fish swim a little bit longer, and then they say, what the hell is water? And so most of us assume that tomorrow is going to be kind of similar to yesterday. Most of us, there are things happening around us that we don't even see. You know, the wheel was mounted horizontally for hundreds of years before somebody figured out to do it vertically. So wheels used to be used to make pots. And then somebody had the brilliant idea to mount the wheel vertically so that you could make a wagon and you could transport things. So my job is to find the person that breaks the pattern. Most of us are comfortable with what's known. Most of us do what we do, that's how we get through life. Right? Our brains are wired to match patterns, but there's the occasional outlier person who says, you know what, there's a totally radically different way to approach this. And those are the people who change the future. Right? The people who break the patterns.
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Interviewer/Commentator
Breaking the pattern, though, doesn't mean success. You could break a pattern for a really stupid reason or completely misread it or. So just being different doesn't make you successful.
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Mike Maples Jr.
That's right. Most different ideas are wrong, but occasionally there's a non consensus idea that's incredibly right. And this is part of what's so challenging about being a great founder, is that at the beginning you don't know for sure that you're right. You only know that you're non consensus. And so you have to be willing to risk being tragically wrong and embarrassingly wrong for the opportunity to be spectacularly right. And there's, there's no shortcut for that. Right. Any, any coin where both sides are. A winning strategy means that you're going to only have a minor win. You, you can't be in a situation where you can have a radical upside unless you're willing to risk complete failure and embarrassment.
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Mike Carruthers
So let's put a face on this. What. Who are some pattern breakers that you can point to and say they did it the way you just described?
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Mike Maples Jr.
Yeah. So one, one pattern breaker that you probably know is Brian Chesky from Airbnb. Another one that you might know is people like Travis at Uber or the, the founders of Lyft, Logan and John. Another, another pattern breaker would be Elon Musk. Those would be examples of the types of people I'm talking about.
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Mike Carruthers
And so describe how it works. Like take Airbnb and explain the pattern and how they broke it.
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Mike Maples Jr.
Yeah, so. So pattern breakers do two things that are remarkable. They have pattern breaking ideas, but they also engage in pattern breaking behaviors. So the pattern breaking idea with Airbnb, and now it seems obvious what's challenging about these ideas is they start out as a heresy and they become the conventional wisdom. But you could imagine what it looked like in 2008. You're going to stay in a stranger's house. And that's crazy, right? Or like Lyft is another example, people are going to want to ride in a stranger's car. That's crazy. And so at the time you're like, okay, well what, what happens if somebody gets murdered in one of these houses? You know, at the time the host and the guest were in the house at the same time. And so, you know, at the time that you hear about the idea, it hits really different. You're, you, you look at it and you're like, I don't know about that. And by the way, pattern breaking ideas don't just happen in business. Right. Like Copernicus when he said that the sun is at the center of the solar system, not the earth. The Catholic church put him under house arrest and didn't admit that they agreed with his theory for another 200 years. And so a lot of ideas that are breakthroughs start out seeming kind of crazy. And they, they offend people. They, they don't, they don't feel right to most people. They're hated by many people. They're ridiculed by people. So that's the first part of it. And then the second part is the pattern breaking actions. And so a lot of these pattern breaking founders are willing to do things that most of us won't do. So, for example, Lyft, they realize that if they asked the government of San Francisco, can we launch this service, they would have said no. And so they launched the service knowing it was illegal, and then said, we'll get the law changed. Most people won't do that. Right. Justin Kahn, before he started Twitch, sold his prior company on eBay for $250,000. Who does that? Right. Like, most people would try to get their company acquired by another company. And so that's the other part of it is these people are willing to engage in unconventional behaviors to fulfill their mission.
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Interviewer/Commentator
And when they do, when you come
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Mike Carruthers
up with an idea like Airbnb. So we're going to have people stay in strangers homes, sometimes the host will even be there.
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Interviewer/Commentator
And no one's ever done this.
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Mike Carruthers
And this is the weirdest thing.
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Interviewer/Commentator
And what if, God knows what might happen. But do you think that pattern breakers have something that's telling them, yeah, but
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Mike Carruthers
it'll work, or are they just as
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Interviewer/Commentator
baffled as everybody else and think it's a crapshoot?
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Mike Maples Jr.
No, I think they usually know something. And so there's a famous sci fi author, William Gibson, who used to say, the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. And I love that quote because I think that it's true. I think that some people are living in the future before the rest of us. And so another person that's probably familiar to you is Marc Andreessen, who helped invent the Internet browser. And most people at the time that he invented the Internet browser thought that the digital superhighway would be created by the government or by AT&T, or by Microsoft or by AOL. And here's Marc Andreessen at the University of Illinois in a supercomputer lab, making minimum wage as a programmer. And he just starts tinkering with the emerging technologies of the Internet, which had just become legal for business to use. And so everybody thought that it was going to be a top down thing, but it was a bottom up type of thing. But, but I don't think Mark Andreessen was even thinking about starting a startup at first. I think he was just tinkering with things he was interested in and he happened to be living in the future. He was working with high performance computers on super fast networks. He was living in a world that most of us were about to live in. He just was living there first. And so he was living in the future before the rest of us. And more often than not, that's where the great startup ideas come from. Somebody got a glimpse of the future just a little bit ahead of the rest of us.
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Mike Carruthers
We're talking about businesses and ideas that break the rules and change the world. And my guest is Mike Maples Jr. He is a venture capitalist and author of the book Pattern why Some Startups Change the Future.
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Podcast Co-host/Announcer
So Wayfair just became a sponsor here. So my wife and I, we've been spending way too much time on their website trying to decide what to get. Honestly, I had no idea they carried this much stuff. Furniture, outdoor living, lighting, everything for the kitchen, storage, rugs. I mean, it just keeps going.
- [15:35]
Mike Carruthers
At first we were sure we were
- [15:37]
Podcast Co-host/Announcer
going to get a couple of Adirondack chairs for the backyard. But then we started looking at patio
- [15:42]
Mike Carruthers
furniture because ours has seen better days.
- [15:45]
Podcast Co-host/Announcer
And somehow we ended up looking at lamps and storage cabinets. One thing that really surprised me was the prices. I kept finding things that looked like they'd cost a lot more. And I like that Wayfair has Wayfair verified where their product specialists actually test and vet products before recommending them. Plus, with over 20 million five star reviews, you can see what real customers think before you buy. I'll update you later on what we actually get. But if you've been putting off upgrading a room or your patio or really anything around the house, I highly recommend you just start browsing Wayfair. Ready to upgrade your home for way less? Head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home and get your space ready for less. That's W A Y-F-A I R.com Wayfair
- [16:39]
Marcus Chown
Every style, every home.
- [16:42]
Podcast Co-host/Announcer
One thing I've noticed after interviewing literally hundreds of entrepreneurs over the years is that almost nobody starts a business with a perfect plan. No, they start with an idea. That's how I started. But you gotta take the first step. If you've got something you've always wanted to sell, Shopify makes that first step a whole lot easier. You don't have to worry about how your online store will look or how you're going to get paid or what your checkout process is. Shopify has all that handled. That means less time wrestling with the technology and more time doing what actually grows a business. Shopify already powers millions of businesses worldwide, from big brands like Mattel and Gymshark to new businesses just starting up. So maybe they should be powering your business as well. With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea
- [17:41]
Mike Carruthers
and a real business.
- [17:42]
Podcast Co-host/Announcer
So go make it one. Start your free trial@shopify.com sysk that's shopify.com sysk shopify.com sysk so Mike, something I
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Mike Carruthers
want to get your thoughts on is when you look at these great pattern breaking ideas and the people who create
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Interviewer/Commentator
them, it seems, and tell me if
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Podcast Co-host/Announcer
I'm wrong, it seems that they're almost
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Interviewer/Commentator
anybody who does that is good for one or two. But you don't see, well, maybe Elon Musk is the exception, but you don't
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Podcast Co-host/Announcer
see the same person coming back with pattern breaking success, pattern breaking success, pattern
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Mike Carruthers
breaking success in other areas after the first.
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Mike Maples Jr.
I think that's right, Mike, and I think that that's a very insightful question in a lot of ways because. And it relates to living in the future. Right? So I like to say that, that the best founders are ideally fit to the future that they're tinkering with. And so, you know, I've mentioned Justin Kahn earlier who helped start Twitch. He was perfectly suited for Twitch because he wanted to live cast his life, he wanted to be an influencer, he wanted to be Internet famous. But then the next company that he started after he'd succeeded was called Atrium. And it automated legal documents and law tasks. And Justin Kahn doesn't like lawyers, he doesn't like the legal industry. He was starting Atrium because he thought it was going to be a big market or a big opportunity, but he had no passion for it, he had no authenticity for it. And so I think that the reason that a lot of founders have one great startup in them is not because they don't have the talent, it's just that authenticity really matters.
- [19:37]
Interviewer/Commentator
A lot and you mentioned at the
- [19:39]
Mike Carruthers
beginning some of the startups that you invested in early on that were successful.
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Podcast Co-host/Announcer
What about the ones that weren't?
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Mike Maples Jr.
Oh, well, most of them aren't. Greatness in startups is rare. And so it's interesting, right? Like my type of investing is about as diametrically opposed to, say, Warren Buffett as you could be. Right. Like Warren Buffett says, rule number one is never lose money. Rule number two is don't forget rule number one. For me, rule number one is don't pass on Airbnb, which I unfortunately did. And so if I had said yes to Airbnb, I would have made 6,000 times my money on that investment. But I said no. Now, had I been wrong and it went out of business, I would have lost half a million dollars. But half a million dollars times 6,000 is a whole lot more. And so it's a different type of investment model. It's a. It's a model that says you're going to be wrong most of the time. How me, you know how wildly asymmetric is the upside in the case that you're right. And so what I need to be is spectacularly right on occasion. And so I need to invest in ideas that break the pattern enough such that when they work, they'll change the future. And that's a pretty different way of thinking about stuff than how most investors think.
- [21:09]
Interviewer/Commentator
And is the success in the idea or is the success in the ability
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Mike Carruthers
to bend people to.
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Mike Maples Jr.
Turns out you need both. And so if you have an okay idea, but not a great idea, your upside will just be limited in a fundamental way. And the key to a great breakthrough idea is you have to deny the premise of the current rules. And so most people unwittingly try to build a better mousetrap, but what they don't realize is that in that world, the person who built the first mousetrap still has an advantage. They have customers, they have suppliers, they have a brand. They get to define the rules of competition. Startups win when they radically change the rules, when they disorient the incumbents, when they turn the status quo upside down. And so you need to have an idea that embodies those characteristics. You need to have an idea that if it works, it will change the future radically. But ideas on their own aren't enough to change the future. You have to move people to that different future of your design. And so you have to convince people in a tangible way to want to co create the future with you. Because if you don't convince People, your ideas won't get realized, it'll just be an idea.
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Interviewer/Commentator
So in light of what you just said, talk about Lyft and Uber. Because one, I mean to me it's Hurts and Avis and most people look
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Mike Carruthers
at the Uber and Lyft, they've got
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Podcast Co-host/Announcer
both apps on their phone.
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Interviewer/Commentator
They call one, they try one, then
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Mike Carruthers
they try the other to see who has the cheaper price.
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Podcast Co-host/Announcer
But they're two different companies.
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Interviewer/Commentator
So somebody broke the rules and somebody
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Mike Carruthers
else just followed that.
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Mike Maples Jr.
It looks like, well, both companies broke the rules in that case. So sometimes you have a startup idea and somebody else is converging on that idea at the same time. So when I think about Uber and Lyft and pattern breaking, I think about it relative to say, the taxis. And so in, in, you know, early 2000s, if you were in San Francisco and you called a taxi, you'd be lucky if one ever came there. There weren't enough taxis, their service was bad, they didn't show up at a reliable time. You couldn't trust a taxi to get you to your next business meeting, for example, or to get you somewhere on time. And so when people saw Uber and Lyft, they, they take out their smartphone, they see cars on a map in real time, they know exactly when it's going to come. It actually shows up within three to five minutes. It was a revelation, right? Like nobody ever used Uber and Lyft and then said, well, how does that compare to taxis? And so a pattern breaking startup forces a choice and not a comparison, right? Like nobody, nobody when they saw the Tesla Roadster said, how's that different from a Porsche 911? Now there were a lot of ways that Tesla Roadster was worse than a Porsche 911. The seats weren't as comfortable, air conditioning wasn't as good, the radio wasn't as good. But the, the Tesla Roadster 10 years ago, or you know, when it came out, embodied a whole new set of ideas about what a car company was and what a car could be. And so the, the pattern breaking startup needs to say, okay, everybody else in the world is an Apple. I'm not going to be a ten times better Apple. I'm going to be the world's first banana and I'm going to force you to choose, right? You may not want my banana, but for the people who do want that thing, I'm the only person who has it. And so that's where I like to say, you want to force a choice and not a comparison. A startup doesn't want to be compared to anything that's ever come before. It wants to be a completely radically new thing.
- [25:18]
Interviewer/Commentator
And yet there aren't there plenty of companies that do quite well just building that better mousetrap. And there are other people who like look at stories like you told of Uber basically breaking the law and then getting it changed. People aren't just morally aren't willing to do that.
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Mike Maples Jr.
Yeah, so, so that, that's an interesting part. Right, so we, we had talked about how the pattern breakers engage in different behaviors. And, and they're off putting, just like pattern breaking ideas can be off putting to people, so too can pattern breaking behaviors. And so we are, we are conditioned from a very young age to fit in. Right? We want to, when we're at school, we get rewarded when we give the teacher the answers to the questions that they want, we get rewarded when we, you know, we. How do you win friends and influence people? We get told as a manager that we want to get consensus and it turns out that those people don't change the future. You change the future when you engage in different behaviors. And so if, if you, if you want to conform, you'll fall into the conformity trap. So just like ideas can fall into the comparison trap if they're not different enough, founders can fall into the conformity trap if wanting to fit in is more important to them than fulfilling the mission. And so if you're lift and you're launching your service in San Francisco, if you ask the San Francisco regulators, do I have permission to launch this, they're going to say no. That means you're out of business. And so they had to have the courage to launch an illegal service that everybody loved and then negotiate with the government after it was obvious that people wanted this, after it was obvious that the citizens of San Francisco would think that something was taken away from them if it was outlawed. Not everybody's going to do that, right? Not everybody wants to break the law. Some people, to your point, think that's immoral. But you know, a lot of the founders say it's a stupid law.
- [27:32]
Mike Carruthers
So what's the takeaway here? What can people, from hearing these stories of these pattern breakers, what do we take from that? Particularly someone who's thinking of starting their own business or something. What can we use?
- [27:46]
Mike Maples Jr.
People tend to want a recipe for things and it turns out that breakthroughs don't come from a recipe. Right? Like, so if, if you and I have the same recipe to make a cake, we'll make a cake that's pretty similar. But somebody has already come up with the answer to how to do that. Whereas breakthroughs are undiscovered, breakthroughs haven't happened yet. And so if we want to create breakthroughs, we need not a recipe, we need a different mindset. We need to have the willingness to try to notice things that people don't notice because it's just baked into our experience. We don't know, you know, the the founders of Uber and Lyft understood that the iPhone that shipped in 2012 had a GPS locator chip in it and that made ride sharing possible. Most of us don't know that. Most of us don't realize the thing in our pocket has something that's empowering, that could change the future. And so I think that one of the things that I try to help people think about is to notice things, right? To notice things that are around us, to not always just engage in our default behaviors every day, one day at a time the same way, but to take the time to sort of notice the subtleties of things in life all around us that could lead to something radically different.
- [29:16]
Mike Carruthers
Well, it's another chapter in the story of how ideas become successful. And it seems like there's a never ending number of chapters, but it's always interesting to hear how some people break the mold and become pattern breakers and, and find success. I've been speaking with Mike Maples Jr. He is an entrepreneur and venture capitalist and author of the book Pattern why Some Startups Change the Future. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you for coming on and talking about this Mike. I appreciate it.
- [29:47]
Mike Maples Jr.
All right, thanks Mike. Great meeting you.
- [29:50]
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- [30:20]
Podcast Co-host/Announcer
So good, so good, so good.
- [30:23]
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- [30:50]
Mike Carruthers
In conversations about science. You often hear about black holes, these things in outer space with such a strong gravitational pull that nothing can escape them, not even light.
- [31:03]
Podcast Co-host/Announcer
But what exactly is a black hole?
- [31:06]
Mike Carruthers
Where are they?
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Interviewer/Commentator
What do they do?
- [31:08]
Mike Carruthers
Why should we even care? Well, that's what Marcus Chown is here to discuss. He is an award winning science writer and broadcaster. A former radio astronomer at the California Institute of Technology. He's authored several books including A Crack in everything, how black holes came in from the cold and took cosmic center stage. Hi Marcus. Welcome to something you should know.
- [31:32]
Marcus Chown
Thanks for inviting me.
- [31:34]
Mike Carruthers
So explain what a black hole is and how we first figured out there were such things.
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Marcus Chown
So they were predicted in 1915 or 1916. They were a consequence of Einstein theory of gravity, but they were thought to be so ridiculous as to not even be the preserve of science fiction. So Einstein famously didn't believe in them. But over the decades they've moved more and more into the center of science. So they're not science fiction objects on the periphery. And we now know there's a supermassive black hole in the heart of every galaxy, including our own Milky Way. And probably we're having this conversation now because the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy is a relatively small one. It's only about 4.2 million times the mass of the sun. Had we what, we could never have arisen in a galaxy with a big supermassive black hole because they blast away all the gas, the raw material that form stars. So a star like the sun could never have formed. So actually, you know, our having this conversation now is connected to black holes. So they've come that far into the center of science.
- [32:45]
Interviewer/Commentator
What is a black hole?
- [32:47]
Marcus Chown
Well, a black hole is a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing, including light can escape. Or, or to put it in Einstein's terms, it's kind of a bottomless pit in the fabric of space which light, nothing, not even light, can climb out. And they that we see them in two types in our universe. We don't quite know why we only see two types, but we see ones which are formed from the, from the depths of stars. These are called stellar mass black holes. And we see these supermassive black holes which surprise everyone, one in the heart of every galaxy. And we have no idea what they're doing there, how they got there and what their role is.
- [33:32]
Interviewer/Commentator
And how do we know there that if they're kind of, it seems like they're the lack of something, then how do we actually know they're there when they aren't really something we can observe?
- [33:45]
Marcus Chown
That's a really, really good question. Because there was not very much interest in searching for black holes in the first half of the 20th century, even though they were shown to be a consequence of Einstein's theory in 1916. And the reason that nobody was really interested was because like you, they thought they would be black against the black of space. How are you possibly going to spot them? But what people didn't realize is that stars are very rarely on their own. I mean, our sun is incredibly unusual to be a solitary star. Most stars come in pairs, what we call binary systems. So, you know, there are two stars orbiting each other. Our sun is quite unusual in being a solitary star. So what this means, that is if there are black holes, they're almost certainly going to have a companion. And so there's an environment around that random. And what people didn't realize is that the black hole would suck in material from its companion star. And as that material swirled down onto the black hole, it would be heated to millions of degrees. It'd be like water going down a, down a sink plug hole. And it would be heated to millions of degrees so that these objects would actually shine fantastically bright. So now we've discovered that black holes are some of the most luminous objects in the universe, which is completely the opposite of what you'd expect because they're called black holes.
- [35:09]
Interviewer/Commentator
Wait a minute. The most luminous objects in the. And what is it they look like?
- [35:14]
Marcus Chown
Well, in 1963, Martin Schmidt, who was a Dutch American astronomer at Caltech in California, discovered quasars. So he found that there were these point light stellar like objects out in the universe, and they were a tremendous distances. The first one was 3C 273,000 times more distant than Andromeda, which is the nearest galaxy. And yet it was extremely bright. And he calculated that it was pumping out about a hundred times more light than a typical galaxy. And within about a year of 1963, people realized that the only possible source of that incredible amount of energy, that incredible amount of light, was what we call, what was the, the matter swirling in to a black hole, but not a black hole of just a few times the mass of the sun, a black hole of maybe millions or even tens of billions of times the mass of the Sun. So what we actually see with these objects is the, what we call the accretion disks around the black hole. So the material swirls, boils inward Friction, internal friction, cause it causes it to get to millions of degrees. And we see these disks of material, and they are the most luminous objects in the universe. So the black hole at the center, still black, but it's surrounded by this incredibly luminous accretion disk.
- [36:38]
Interviewer/Commentator
And the closest one we can see
- [36:41]
Marcus Chown
is where, if we're talking about supermassive black holes, we've got one in the center of our galaxy that's about 24,000 light years away. So in other words, if anything were to happen to it, we wouldn't know for 24,000 years, because it takes that long for light to get here. That's the nearest one. But every single galaxy has got one. And if you're talking about stellar mass black holes, we, which, which form, we believe, from the deaths of stars. So a star blows itself apart in what we call a supernova. And paradoxically, when a star blows itself apart, its core implodes and become, can become a black hole. If the star is massive enough, the nearest one of those would probably be maybe about a thousand light years away. So they're not very, they are very difficult to spot, but they have to have a companion or they have to have material swirling into them. So if there was a supermassive black hole and it was isolated, didn't have any matter around it, we wouldn't see it. It would indeed look black against the black of space.
- [37:42]
Interviewer/Commentator
Do black holes have anything to do with time?
- [37:47]
Marcus Chown
They have everything to do with time. As Einstein discovered in 1915, time flows more slowly in strong gravity. So incredibly, if you stand on one step of a staircase above, you know, one step above someone else, you age less quickly than the person on the step below. And this has actually been shown to be true by using two super accurate atomic clocks. But when you get the. The black holes are the most extreme examples of gravity, where we get the most extreme distortion of time. So as you have, if you were to fall into a black hole and someone were to observe you, they would see your time go more, more slowly. So you'd be, you would. You would appear to be moving in slow motion. And as you got near the event horizon, which is the point of no return, but in falling matter, you would basically, time would stop for you and you would freeze. So your image would be frozen on the edge of the black hole for all the time, even though you would have actually fallen in the black hole. So this is why before the term black hole was coined by John Wheeler in 1967 in the United States, the Russians called these objects frozen Stars, because time freezes as you actually go through the, the, the event horizon. But we actually think at the very center of these objects, everything skyrocks to infinity. So the, the, the mass, everything, the gravity becomes infinite, which is something we call a singularity. And, and we near the singularity, space and time actually come apart from. So, so these are objects in which actual space and time break apart. And this is why they're interesting to physics, because that can't be true. We know that can't be true. Anything that blows up to infinity, that's telling you that the mathematics you're using is wrong. So gold dust for physicists is to find somewhere where their theories break. And so inside a black hole we know our theory of gravity breaks. So we know that we need to find something better. So this is again, black holes are a frontier where known physics breaks down and we get clues, we hope, to a deeper level of physics.
- [40:06]
Interviewer/Commentator
And it seems like it's very interesting to scientists, but it also, from listening to you talk, it seems like there's so much about them that we don't know, maybe more than we do know.
- [40:18]
Marcus Chown
Well, in, in many ways that's true, but in another way, they are the simplest objects in the whole of science. They're only made of space and time, nothing else. So, so if a star gets the end of its life, a massive star runs out of fuel in its core. So it's no longer can generate the heat pushing outwards to oppose gravity. So it begins to shrink and shrink ever, ever faster. We think that shrinks right down to pretty much zero volume. So the star itself has vanished. But all that's left is this kind of warpage of space time, this, this region where gravity is intensely strong, where space time is actually bent into this, this bottomless pit like a, like a well. So there's nothing left, only space and time. So in many ways, they are the simplest objects in the universe.
- [41:12]
Interviewer/Commentator
So whenever you hear people talk about black holes, it's always about how gravity sucks things in and it can't escape.
- [41:21]
Podcast Co-host/Announcer
But science, as I understand it, doesn't
- [41:23]
Interviewer/Commentator
really know what gravity itself is.
- [41:27]
Podcast Co-host/Announcer
Right.
- [41:28]
Marcus Chown
Absolutely right. So Newton came up with a description of gravity. He basically said that there was an invisible tether, you know, which, which connects the Earth to the sun and keeps the sun orbiting, trapped in orbit around the sun forever. Then in 1915, Einstein showed that was actually wrong. What actually happens is that a big mass like the sun creates a valley in the space time around it. Now, space time is a four dimensional thing, so you can't ex, you can't really see it as a three dimensional creature. That's why it took the genius of Einstein to realize. But basically there's a valley in the space time around the sun, and the, the Earth travels around the kind of upper reaches of that valley, rather like a roulette ball in a roulette wheel. That's actually what's happening. But both of them, as you just rightly pointed out, only describe gravity. So Newton described it one way, Einstein described it another way, but actually what gravity is, we don't actually know. We don't actually know.
- [42:36]
Interviewer/Commentator
I mean, I get that this is really important to understand for scientists, but why do you suppose people are kind of fascinated by black holes? And should we be? I mean, seems like this is something you guys in science handle and that this doesn't really apply much to me.
- [42:51]
Marcus Chown
Well, again, it's about us being here. So it was the Hubble Space telescope in the 1990s that made a discovery that there's a supermassive black hole in the heart of every galaxy. So there's 2 trillion galaxies in our universe. Milky Way where we live is just one of them, and there's a supermassive black hole in the center of each. Now we don't know what they're doing there. And now We've got the NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which is basically the successor of Hubble Space Telescope is about a million million miles from, from the Earth. And it's finding light takes a long time to get to us from across the universe. So it's looking back at the very earliest universe and it's seeing these supermassive black holes in galaxies very shortly after the Big Bangs. So when the universe was only a few percent of its current age and they're already very big. So we're already beginning to get a bit of a problem. How could they have got big so quickly? Because obviously black holes get big by sucking in material. But if you're looking back in the very early universe, there wasn't very much time between the Big Bang and these, these black holes we're observing, there wasn't much time for them to grow. So we don't know how they formed. That's a complete mystery.
- [44:10]
Interviewer/Commentator
But is there any sense of like, would we not be here? Would the universe be something other than what it is if there were no black holes?
- [44:20]
Marcus Chown
Exactly. That's, that's, that's a suspicion. So, you know, in, in a way, some astronomers and physicists have been drag, kicking and screaming to this because they thought that the black holes are so ridiculous they couldn't possibly exist because you don't want them to exist. Because they, they tell you that your physics is broken. So that's one of the reasons why Einstein did not want to believe in them because they, they showed that his theory of gravity had this floor in. So, you know, they, they, they, they are a kind of a problem for physics. But you know, I, I think they just, just show us that there are a lot of mysteries out there. The more we know, I mean, I think, I think Newton said the greater the, the continent of the, the of the known, the greater the coastline of the unknown. So the more we know, the more, the more we don't know.
- [45:13]
Interviewer/Commentator
But does it ever give you, like the way you describe black holes, the way you describe the universe and all these things exist and had to exist and have to do it in this way? Does it ever give you pause to think there may be other forces at work? Mystical, magical, spiritual, creator type forces? Or are you strictly looking at this as this is science, this is science.
- [45:39]
Marcus Chown
I mean, you know, if you take Newton for instance. Newton was a very religious person, very religious. And he just thought figuring out how all this works was, was revealing the mind of God. So, you know, if you're a religious person, you think, well, what a fantastic universe we live in, God created it. If you're not, you just think what a fantastic universe we live in. So, and where everywhere we look, if we fiddle with the laws of physics, even a small amount, we, we think that we will not, you would not get the universe you see around us. So this has led some people to think that maybe there's a multiverse, you know, maybe that this is just one universe among countless other universes, you know, like sand grains on a beach. And in these other universes there may be a slightly stronger force of gravity, a slightly weaker strong force of electromagnetic force or whatever. And only in the universes where these conditions are right, can there form stars like the sun, planets like the Earth, and can there evolve life like ours. But, so that, but that, that was, that would make us, that would make people, it would be another leap in the size of the universe. I mean, if you remember, once upon a time, you thought the universe was just the sun and six naked eye planets. Then at the beginning of the 20th century, we realized that the sun is actually a part of the Milky Way, which is a great island of stars, about 200 billion of them. And then in the 1920s, we realized that our galaxy is but one among 2 trillion others which are flying apart in the aftermath of a titanic explosion which we call the Big Bang. So if we were to discover that there was actually a multiverse, that would be yet another step. The universe is getting even bigger. If the universe gets bigger, that makes us feel a bit smaller, doesn't it, really?
- [47:26]
Interviewer/Commentator
But it does make you wonder that so many things had to be exactly as they are without even slight variations, or we wouldn't be here. It makes you wonder. It just makes you wonder.
- [47:39]
Marcus Chown
Well, it does, but then again, we are only looking at it from our point of view. We're thinking about life as we know it, because unfortunately, we only know of one example. We only know one planet in this whole universe with life. So we're looking at our life and we're thinking what conditions are needed for our life. But how do we know that there isn't life, you know, in unimaginable forms? You know, I mean, could stars be. Be, you know, conscious? Could. I mean, there could be. There could be life which is not based on carbon, is not based on. On the molecules, you know, the biological molecules that we see. So again, it's very, very difficult arguing from. From just one example, which is, you know, terrestrial biology.
- [48:30]
Interviewer/Commentator
But lastly, because black holes are so inaccessible, it seems like to really get to the bottom of the mystery is impossible because. Because they're just too far away. And even if you could get there, it would swallow you up. And so, so we have to admire it from afar and make a lot
- [48:52]
Marcus Chown
of guesses, but we don't, because in 2019, we created the very first, or we. We obtained the very first image of a black hole. So we had a. An international network of radio dishes, one of which was at the south pole. One or two of the. One of them, one or two of them are in America. And this, this array was able to behave like a radio dish the size of the Earth, and. And it was able to create the very first image of a black hole. And this was in a nearby galaxy called M87. The black hole was 6 billion times the mass of the sun, and it was exactly as science fiction films had envisaged it. There was this black, gaping hole surrounded by this glowing material, swirling in. And in 2021, I think we were able to obtain the first ever image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, which is called Sagittarius, a star that's about a thousandth the size of the one in M87. But they seem very, very similar. So we are now at the stage where with more telescopes, we'll be able to see more detail and perhaps even create videos of material swirling into these black holes. So we actually are on the edge of being able to understand them and be able to see whether the predictions of Einstein's theory of gravity hold up.
- [50:26]
Interviewer/Commentator
And what if they don't?
- [50:28]
Marcus Chown
If they don't, that's the most exciting thing of all. Yeah, you know, I mean, that's what physicists and that's what scientists really, really want. They want to see places where their current theories break down because then that gives them a hint at a deeper level of understanding.
- [50:44]
Mike Carruthers
You know, astronomically speaking, you've mentioned in our discussion things like quasars and the Andromeda galaxy and then we have black holes. You know, it doesn't really the term doesn't spark the imagination, but interesting nevertheless. I've been speaking with Marcus Chown. He is an award winning science writer and broadcaster, a former radio astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, and author of the book A Crack in How Black Holes Came in from the Cold and Took Cosmic Center Stage. There's a link to his book in the show notes.
- [51:22]
Podcast Co-host/Announcer
Thanks Marcus.
- [51:23]
Marcus Chown
Thank you very much, Mike. I really enjoyed it.
- [51:28]
Mike Carruthers
Interesting thing about preventing skin cancer. Most of us agree that using sunscreen is one the of of the best ways to protect your skin from the sun and ultimately from skin cancer. Maybe so, but over the last 40 years or so, people have gotten much better at remembering to apply sunscreen. Still, skin cancer rates have gone way up, indicating that there may be more to the story like diet. A diet that includes a lot of fruits and vegetables, fish and herbs seems to have a very protective effect against melanoma, the deadliest skin cancer there is. In regions of the world where people eat diet like I just described, the rate of skin cancer is substantially lower than it is here in the US and that is something you should know. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, I really would appreciate it if you would tell someone you
- [52:27]
Podcast Co-host/Announcer
know about it, you send them the
- [52:29]
Mike Carruthers
link Share this podcast using the Share link on whatever platform you're listening on. It's really easy and help us grow our audience. It means a lot. I'm Mike Heruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know.
- [52:43]
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