Physicist: Black Holes Are Where God Divides by Zero (Lecture 1 of 6)

And where we're going, we might not come back from. Because a black hole is a place where, as I said, God divides by zero, where the laws of physics break down completely, where time becomes space and space becomes time. What can that possibly mean? We're gonna explore all of that. Things like the causality of events. Can one event precede another event? Could you be older than your grandfather? Welcome everybody to my third course at Peterson Academy. This one is the one I've been most excited for. Don't tell the previous students about that. But this class is actually related to an event which may have just saved my life. And I'll explain that in just a bit. But we're gonna be talking about the most magical and mysterious objects that exist in the known universe. And for a physicist like me, who studies the origin of the universe, the properties of materials at low temperatures, how electrical conductivity works, you never ever get to see things like what I do for my real research and my teaching. You never see that depicted in Hollywood, in blockbusters, in some would say the greatest film ever made, Interstellar. You get to see the objects that we're talking about today throughout all of media. And they captivate the audience. They captivate the public imagination. And for good reason. They are the most interesting and exciting. And perhaps the reason that we're all here, because black holes, wormholes, and Einstein's most outrageous legacy is perhaps the most highest pinnacle of what human intellect has ever achieved. And there are cutting edge discoveries taking place to this very day. Today I wanna communicate to you why this is so exciting, why it's so important, why it's so meaningful. And it's an easy job to do because people are fascinated with these objects in a way that they're not when it comes to studying the properties of electrons at low temperatures or studying how fluids flow in different types of scenarios. So it's a treat for me to teach this course. It is my favorite course. So we're gonna take a journey really truly to the edge of time. What is the meaning of where it is said that God is dividing by zero, black holes, singularities. You've heard of them. You've seen them. They're everywhere from movies to the logo of the Grok AI system that's used in Elon Musk's Twitter and other ventures. So why are these things so important? Why do they captivate the imagination? Well, I'm gonna start with the end. Sometimes it's best I found to start with where we're going. We're going to the center of this object. You've seen them. You might have recognized them. As I said, they're logos for different things. They were featured prominently in blockbuster movies. Again, my favorite movie, which as I said briefly and I'll explain later how interstellar may have saved my life. It may be overdone, but these black holes aren't the most fascinating objects because they embody all aspects of science, of knowledge, of time, of space, of what we say relativity. What does that mean? They even impact in philosophy and certainly into entertainment because they're so powerful. They're so enigmatic. They contain all the pinnacle of what we've learned over the past 400 years or so of studying science as a scientific process, using the scientific method. So again, it's a real treat for me to teach it. Here are the major landmarks on the roadmap, if you will, to where we're going. These things can take place in the extremes of physics only present in black holes. That's why they're so fascinating. Here are the major landmarks. Here's kind of the map of the territory we're gonna go explore in these next eight lectures. You've heard perhaps of the event horizon. It's a movie also. A lot of these things are movies or based on people that have done tremendous work and there'll be many, many more movies to come. So a black hole, simplest way to say it, it's a region of space and time, which is the fabric of the cosmos that we all exist in right now. We exist in space time where gravity is so extreme that nothing can escape from it, not even light. And yet, and yet it has properties that are mundane, ordinary. For example, you've heard of the event horizon. We will explore what is the event horizon? What happens if you go beyond the event horizon? Would you notice it? Would you care? When do you start to care? Well, when a process called spaghettification occurs, you will definitely care when your atoms in your body get ripped apart, but don't worry, that won't come until tomorrow. So you have plenty of time to make out your will, but we're gonna talk about these different features. How is it possible we could even see a black hole? If nothing, not even light, certainly not sound, certainly not TikTok videos, nothing can escape from a black hole. How do we know they exist? It's bizarre. And how have we even thought that they might exist for nearly 300 years? That's what makes them so fascinating. Along the way, we'll encounter some of the most fascinating people, events, human stories that have contributed to this subject matter. And ironically, it's a story just because science is done by scientists and scientists are human, despite the stereotypes that we're just these walking automatons like Wikipedia on legs. No, it's a story of jealousy, of racism, of sexism, of all sorts of crazy things that have happened that humans have overcome in their quest to understand intellectually the most fascinating topic imaginable. And that will bring us to things and names like Schwarzschild down here. The photon sphere, the accretion disk, and the singularity, we'll talk about all these different attributes and how they reveal the unseen reality of the black hole. We'll understand how black holes connect to other black holes, perhaps speculatively in the far future, allowing for the time travel that Hollywood loves to exploit. We'll explain so that you will be able to tell your friends and family what's real, what's fantasy, what's science, and what's science fiction. And that's, again, this is gonna be such a fun journey. I would pay to teach this course if I had to, but there is a human story. We wanna understand how the people came to make these enormous intellectual leaps and what we still do not yet know, because that's for you, that's for the audience, that's for the students at Peterson Academy and my students in San Diego to perhaps make a contribution to. So black holes are not fiction. They are reality. We have observed them, and I'll explain how we've observed them, but what's so fascinating about them is that they were predicted before they were observed. That's what a good scientist should do. A good scientist should not, like my kids, say, well, a Yeti came in last night and ate that last piece of cake, Dad, because that's predicting something after the fact. That's called a retrodiction. It may be true, it may not be true, but a better thing is to predict something that has not yet ever been seen, explore the consequences of if it did exist, what would be the signature of it, and then clever scientists, maybe a year later, a decade later, or in the case of the experiments we'll talk about in this course, two and a half centuries later, prove the prediction was true and allowed us to not only see, but hear and feel black holes' reality. Predicted 250 years before anyone saw one. Next, I'll introduce you to the forgotten genius who called them dark stars in the 1700s. 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