And btw the fact that simultaneity is not preserved among observers is the weirdest physics factoid until you get to quantum physics (which gets even weirder). But it ceases to be weird when you consider the obvious fact that these are all bugs in the simulation we inhabit. We are in a game of The Sims, and the simulation can only do so much for performance reasons. Things like quantum tunneling and the double slit experiment are frustum culling of the physics calculations which would be too expensive to do accurately at such small scales all the time, for example. For another example, the speed of light is a limitation of the engine (most recent game engines usually set it at ~300 m/s) -- a quirk emerging from that is Lorentz contraction, where a photon experiences a no-time, no-length universe. The base reality surely has none of these zany artifacts, and the computers in it are powerful enough to simulate our universe precisely because their chips aren't subject to quantum tunneling like ours are. QED▫️
At 12:13 you said "Anything you see has to be between you and the singularity". Isn't this clearly false and the opposite? It should be: "Anything you see has to be 'further' from the singularity than you" ('further' in terms of geodesic distance). It is impossible for you to see things between you and singularity because the light from that thing will never reach you.
Likewise, at 24:35, you said "You cannot perceive a direction that is not toward the singularity". That's false. In fact, "You cannot perceive a direction that IS toward the singularity". Everything you see is more distant to the singularity on the geodesic, because light between you and the singularity on the geodesic cannot go backwards and reach you.
Got to the end and I see where you're going. Indeed, shining a light through dust particles, so it's scattered and visible, within a black hole would be "shining a light at the singularity" from the OUTSIDE observer frame. From the actual observer's frame, the light will just be observed moving away at the speed of light toward nothingness (NOT the singularity) until the actual observer hits the singularity.
"It is impossible for you to see things between you and singularity because the light from that thing will never reach you."
This seems intuitive but it's actually not true. The speed of your frame in relation to flat space in Schwarzschild coordinates is arbitrarily fast, and faster than light. So, light moves towards you, but you are both still moving towards the singularity even faster.
There is nothing further from the singularity in your own frame, because "behind" you means your past--it's no longer a spatial direction.
I'll make a video on the time/space swap at the event horizon and it will make this visually more intuitive.
I think this might be what he meant when he said "I could see the curvature too". Obviously the black origin point would perceive the red beam to be a straight line, but if you imagine the beam hits a scattering target that turns it green, you can see that there's not only one definitive geodesic leading back to you. From the viewer's perspective, this would be perceived as a green light appearing all around the lensing target, like you see with trippy halo black hole graphical effects in games/simulations/movies.
I'm not really sure what the implication here would be regarding your theory. You might still be able to tell which side the singularity is on because some geodesics would be shorter than others.
I would recommend you play Outer Wilds. It doesn't model black holes perfectly, there's definitely some gameification/simplification going on there (infalling objects don't appear to fall forever, they exit at white holes slightly before the infalling objects enter), but more broadly the game itself is about the existential dread of the inevitable heat death of the universe.
Your map is drawn from above--for the observer at the origin, these lines would all appear perfectly straight. The only way we can visually observe gravitational lensing is if we move the camera or the object or mass moves, giving us a functionally different perspective.
I think you could ostensibly observe gravitational lensing with the naked eye if you happened to be close enough to a black hole, but you wouldn't see it as a curved line necessarily. I'm not even close to an expert on this, but this is a more representational diagram of my original diagram from the perspective of the laser pointer itself:
If I'm right there would be two apparent observations:
1 - The scattered light is visible from the other side of the black hole, even though the geodesic from which the laser originated is different from the visible scattering
2 - Assuming the scattering emanating from the beam is uniform in 3d space, you would expect the scattered light to form a circle around the originating beam (really a circular gradient, but let's assume a solid brightness cutoff for simplicity). The gravitational lensing may cause the apparent circle to morph in shape, especially as the curvature grows infinitely stronger as it approaches the event horizon.
In my image I intended to draw the red beam as slightly overlapping the event horizon, but now I look at it, I accidentally drew it outside the event horizon, as the event horizon is actually that innermost ring. Please pretend that I drew them in the correct places for the purposes of the demonstration of my idea.
The point may ultimately be irrelevant to your argument, though, as this type of directly observable lensing may only be possible outside the black hole, and I don't think would apply if every geodesic were equidistant. That said, I'm not entirely convinced about your argument that as you pass the event horizon, every geodesic in every direction becomes equidistant toward the black hole. It seems possible to me that inside the black hole, geodesics still would have a potentially warping and observable difference in length, as you could see in my second diagram here:
I'm just an armchair enthusiast. Some thoughts (I fully accept I may have no idea what I'm talking about):
When he says that from his perspective, his watch says 5 seconds, and your watch says 10 seconds (even though from your perspective your watch says 10 million years and his watch says 5 seconds) the behavior of light might be a confounding factor and causing you to talk past eachother when discussing simultaneity. There could be a variation in the image received when the light reaches him rather than merely relativity's effect on the passage of time, resulting in a genuine optical illusion (but that explanation also seems like it leaves a different kind of loose end because he really does seem to be arguing for a sort of one-way street relationship for the true passage of time. Even accounting for the speed of light as a confounding factor). I might just need to think about it more.
For the thought experiment about shining a laser pointer just to the left of the moon so that lensing causes it to bend and hit the moon, I think there's a similar issue to do with light that confounds the thought experiment. In reality, every moon or planet or star you see is slightly smaller than it appears, because the effect of lensing is making it seem bigger. You can shine a light to the left of it and that will cause the light to impact it from lensing, but from your perspective with the laser pointer, that would just look like you were pointing it directly at the edge of the surface of the moon with the intent to hit what you are pointing it at anyway. The moon you see and are aiming at is already an image that incorporates the lensing effect to begin with. Really in practice, if you aim at the left-most edge of the moons surface just barely grazing it, you are actually aiming to the left of the moons true physical dimensions by a millimeter or however much, and lensing is pulling that light towards it to impact it. It just doesn't look that way for you shining the laser because the thing you're aiming at has all the calculations baked into what you're seeing already.
Also just some more general thoughts since I've been keeping up with your blackhole stuff:
I see why you say that everything falls in at the same time once it crosses the event horizon because of infinite time dilation so you shouldn't be able to see outside of the black hole, but I personally dont think a true infinite singularity/event horizon is ever truly reached (even if it does exist) to where that logic would become relevant in the first place. It would be like if Windows 11 was the universe, and a program you created to attempt to fully calculate Pi existed on your hard drive. It exists in the sense that you can really look at the file in the UI and click it but your operating system and energy resources are finite and will expend themselves to death attempting to interact with the file in a meaningful way. It's a conceptual endless energy sink and your computer still never actually comes into contact with the idea of fully reaching Pi. But in real time you can see it asymptotically approach Pi for as long as you wish. That's basically all we see when we observe black holes. The time dilation effect represents an unfinished event, inching closer to completion, and never actually getting there. From what I understand the idea that true singularities don't actually truly exist except possibly in the truly infinite future (which also doesn't exist, there's always more future.) is a fairly mainstream hypothesis by physicists. and that infinite singularities coming into contact with finite measurable reality isn't actually possible outside of theoretical physics.
For an infalling observer the event horizon is the surface of the singularity, and It can only be asymptotically approached. The event horizon is never crossed and as you fall towards it, it shrinks away from you as an infalling observer, with a proportionately accelerating rate of time passing behind you, (this all lines up with what the outside observer would see watching you fall in and red shift) and the amount of time it takes to reach it seemingly increases the closer you get to it. Basically think of the Achilles and the tortoise paradox. I think that's the closest you get to actually crossing the boundary of a singularity.
"When he says that from his perspective, his watch says 5 seconds, and your watch says 10 seconds (even though from your perspective your watch says 10 million years and his watch says 5 seconds) the behavior of light might be a confounding factor and causing you to talk past eachother when discussing simultaneity."
Yes, I think he was conflating what "happens" in a frame with what the observer perceives in terms of light. However I think he was still incorrect on that front, as explained in my notes.
"In reality, every moon or planet or star you see is slightly smaller than it appears, because the effect of lensing is making it seem bigger. You can shine a light to the left of it and that will cause the light to impact it from lensing, but from your perspective with the laser pointer, that would just look like you were pointing it directly at the edge of the surface of the moon with the intent to hit what you are pointing it at anyway."
Yes, exactly, this is where I was going: if the moon were a singularity, its angular size would increase to 360 and it would no longer have a meaningful spatial location.
"I see why you say that everything falls in at the same time once it crosses the event horizon because of infinite time dilation so you shouldn't be able to see outside of the black hole, but I personally dont think a true infinite singularity/event horizon is ever truly reached (even if it does exist) to where that logic would become relevant in the first place. It would be like if Windows 11 was the universe, and a program you created to attempt to fully calculate Pi existed on your hard drive. It exists in the sense that you can really look at the file in the UI and click it but your operating system and energy resources are finite and will expend themselves to death attempting to interact with the file in a meaningful way."
Yes, I completely agree with this.
"The time dilation effect represents an unfinished event, inching closer to completion, and never actually getting there. From what I understand the idea that true singularities don't actually truly exist except possibly in the truly infinite future (which also doesn't exist, there's always more future.) is a fairly mainstream hypothesis by physicists. and that infinite singularities coming into contact with finite measurable reality isn't actually possible outside of theoretical physics."
Yes, agreed again.
"For an infalling observer the event horizon is the surface of the singularity, and It can only be asymptotically approached. The event horizon is never crossed and as you fall towards it, it shrinks away from you as an infalling observer, with a proportionately accelerating rate of time passing behind you, (this all lines up with what the outside observer would see watching you fall in and red shift) and the amount of time it takes to reach it seemingly increases the closer you get to it. Basically think of the Achilles and the tortoise paradox. I think that's the closest you get to actually crossing the boundary of a singularity."
I agree with this except I think you might visually see the singularity expand to 360 degrees and the universe behind you shrink to a pinpoint, but other than that I agree.
okay yeah that makes sense, I agree with the idea that it expands to nearly 360 degrees around you with the universe behind you becoming a smaller and smaller pinpoint, but I would want to point out that, in essence, that seems to contradict your argument that there is no direction you can look or move towards that is not part of the singularity. if you agree with me that the pinpoint will continue to shrink asymptotically but never truly entirely disappear, that would then imply that there is at least one nearly infinitesimally small point which constitutes a direction OTHER than the singularity. The point you make often about how nothing can be "behind" you seems to be contradicted by the existence of that pinpoint as far as I can tell. if our universe were a black hole of this sort, I would assume there would have to be an actual pinpoint located somewhere (although it would be too small to see, or maybe outside of the edge of the observable universe), do you think such a pinpoint exists in our universe leading to an "exterior"?
It doesn't contradict my argument, because we were talking about what it would look like if you were falling toward a black hole from outside the event horizon (or that's what I thought we were talking about, anyway). For an observer already inside the event horizon, there is no direction that is away from the singularity.
Max with your explanation of light in this video, you are absolutely right that we could be inside a black hole. The expert guy claims your explanations of light is slightly off, and you just said "I disagree." If you want to get to the bottom of this you would have to go learn in expert depth the mainstream scientific understanding of this light, and then prove it's wrong. Even if you are right, this is something that almost not person is capable of doing, so this is a really hard road.
I could explain why he was wrong on the fly, I just could tell he was going to freak out and wasn't sure how to navigate the conversation. I'm not sure if a podcast conversation is the right way to do this... but I'm going to keep trying. I'll also try another cartoon, and a paper when I and ChatGPT are both ready.
Your willingness to discuss these kinds of topics in the form of a public podcast without any formal training or education in the field is what the people that have done work in physics find very off-putting.
Nobody will take you seriously until you:
1. Go to uni and get an undergrad
2. Get a graduate degree, preferably a PhD
3. Be willing to work in a serious way with colleagues (no public podcasts to proselytize your followers)
4. Publish papers
5. Have them peer reviewed. Repeat from step 3.
You're in the US, you have the very best schools available to you. Pick one — Caltech, MIT, Stanford; whatever it might be and then get to work.
Addendum: It is also off-putting to see you talk about these things from a layman's perspective. You trigger a narcissistic 'injury' reaction from the hoi polloi. Stop it.
Addendum 2: big fan, make more mrgirlsplaining videos.
It has to be possible to discuss an issue without identity politics and without paying hundreds of thousands to some brand first. There’s sooooo much fraud in research papers anyway, it’s verifiably easy to get literally anything peer reviewed and published - there are very interesting documentaries about this. This guy claimed to be a liaison between a layman and a physicist anyway, it’s literally his job not to get offended by having to explain or discuss his beliefs.
"When you invite an expert on your show, you're not supposed to question his answers"
Your role as an expert isn't just to preach facts, but to defend your worldview when challenged. Why would he go on a podcast, knowing he's going to debate the nature of the universe, and then leave when you disagree with his basic assumptions? What was he assuming would happen?
And, as you showed at the end, it's not like his own worldview is unquestionable. Which is what you both agreed on at the beginning anyhow! What a frustrating way to engage with a curious mind.
Hmm, as for the way the conversation ended... hahaha...
I think conversations like this can quickly turn to frustration, for many reasons. I think one of those reasons is the attempt to come to a common understanding - a place where you and the other person come to an agreement about the matter at hand. In my experience: don't expect that, don't try to force that, hell, don't even necessarily hope for that.
The most you can do is create the space where it *might* happen of its own accord. Because otherwise the conversation has a high probability of descending into an argument. Part of creating that space is allowing each person the opportunity to fully present their model and thoughts without interruption. Even if you think it's mistaken. Another part of creating that space is making the other person *feel* heard.
A trait you have, and I think many of us have it, I know I do, is that when listening to someone you want to disagree on the spot if they say something that doesn't seem to make sense. But I think you're underestimating how deep of a rabbit hole each of those seemingly minor disagreements is - how it requires hours just to unpack each of those individual items on their own.
And a 1-2 hour podcast simply doesn't provide the time for that. And more simply, on an emotional level... people don't necessarily even want to have that conversation, especially if they weren't expecting it, because it's exhausting. And that might be part of what fueled his reaction.
Probably the best way to handle this podcast, would have been a bit like a more formal debate - each person gets the stage for 15 minutes, states their case, and then it's the other person's turn, and then you compare notes at the end, and leave it up to the audience as to who to believe or disbelieve.
Possibly part of what drives you is the need to reach a firm conclusion from the conversation - maybe that's part of why you brought him on, to validate or invalidate your theory - which is a fair thing to want - but unfortunately I don't think it's the kind of thing that can be achieved in this format in this time span. *And* each person has to know and agree to that format beforehand, so that nobody feels ambushed.
Anyway, just my two cents, from having too many similar arguments with people in my life time!
Man that's crazy if the times essentially de-synchronize for each observer...
I'm no physicist, but being a games developer I have found it interesting to think of time as simply the rate of change (that's how we treat it in simulations at least), and that time dilation could be explained as localised variations in that rate of change. But if the two observers can end up with inconsistent observations/measurements of the other's time... it blows that idea to smithereens.
Life is strange! This is one of the reasons I don't personally fret too much on trying to explain life... sooner or later it seems inevitable that it simply refuses to conform to our ideas of logic or coherence. Whatever the logic of life actually is, I'm not convinced we'll ever be able to truly model it in symbols.
Not that the attempt isn't worthwhile - some understanding is better than no understanding, so even if perfect understanding is impossible we can always improve human existence by moving further forward.
Also - props to Paul for being a great speaker. I love the way he explains things in simple terms.
I think the field is really harsh on people making mistakes, so everyone is anxious and terrified of seeming out of their depth. And then the topic is just really confusing. But really I think it's a cultural issue with physics, they are all kind of like this in my experience.
That was the funniest ending to any podcast I have ever seen
YOU CALLED IT MAX
THIS CENTURY'S EINSTEIN
And btw the fact that simultaneity is not preserved among observers is the weirdest physics factoid until you get to quantum physics (which gets even weirder). But it ceases to be weird when you consider the obvious fact that these are all bugs in the simulation we inhabit. We are in a game of The Sims, and the simulation can only do so much for performance reasons. Things like quantum tunneling and the double slit experiment are frustum culling of the physics calculations which would be too expensive to do accurately at such small scales all the time, for example. For another example, the speed of light is a limitation of the engine (most recent game engines usually set it at ~300 m/s) -- a quirk emerging from that is Lorentz contraction, where a photon experiences a no-time, no-length universe. The base reality surely has none of these zany artifacts, and the computers in it are powerful enough to simulate our universe precisely because their chips aren't subject to quantum tunneling like ours are. QED▫️
At 12:13 you said "Anything you see has to be between you and the singularity". Isn't this clearly false and the opposite? It should be: "Anything you see has to be 'further' from the singularity than you" ('further' in terms of geodesic distance). It is impossible for you to see things between you and singularity because the light from that thing will never reach you.
Likewise, at 24:35, you said "You cannot perceive a direction that is not toward the singularity". That's false. In fact, "You cannot perceive a direction that IS toward the singularity". Everything you see is more distant to the singularity on the geodesic, because light between you and the singularity on the geodesic cannot go backwards and reach you.
Got to the end and I see where you're going. Indeed, shining a light through dust particles, so it's scattered and visible, within a black hole would be "shining a light at the singularity" from the OUTSIDE observer frame. From the actual observer's frame, the light will just be observed moving away at the speed of light toward nothingness (NOT the singularity) until the actual observer hits the singularity.
"It is impossible for you to see things between you and singularity because the light from that thing will never reach you."
This seems intuitive but it's actually not true. The speed of your frame in relation to flat space in Schwarzschild coordinates is arbitrarily fast, and faster than light. So, light moves towards you, but you are both still moving towards the singularity even faster.
There is nothing further from the singularity in your own frame, because "behind" you means your past--it's no longer a spatial direction.
I'll make a video on the time/space swap at the event horizon and it will make this visually more intuitive.
Looking forward to it
https://imgur.com/a/Ij53TLQ
I think this might be what he meant when he said "I could see the curvature too". Obviously the black origin point would perceive the red beam to be a straight line, but if you imagine the beam hits a scattering target that turns it green, you can see that there's not only one definitive geodesic leading back to you. From the viewer's perspective, this would be perceived as a green light appearing all around the lensing target, like you see with trippy halo black hole graphical effects in games/simulations/movies.
I'm not really sure what the implication here would be regarding your theory. You might still be able to tell which side the singularity is on because some geodesics would be shorter than others.
I would recommend you play Outer Wilds. It doesn't model black holes perfectly, there's definitely some gameification/simplification going on there (infalling objects don't appear to fall forever, they exit at white holes slightly before the infalling objects enter), but more broadly the game itself is about the existential dread of the inevitable heat death of the universe.
Your map is drawn from above--for the observer at the origin, these lines would all appear perfectly straight. The only way we can visually observe gravitational lensing is if we move the camera or the object or mass moves, giving us a functionally different perspective.
I think you could ostensibly observe gravitational lensing with the naked eye if you happened to be close enough to a black hole, but you wouldn't see it as a curved line necessarily. I'm not even close to an expert on this, but this is a more representational diagram of my original diagram from the perspective of the laser pointer itself:
https://imgur.com/a/OydcUWf
If I'm right there would be two apparent observations:
1 - The scattered light is visible from the other side of the black hole, even though the geodesic from which the laser originated is different from the visible scattering
2 - Assuming the scattering emanating from the beam is uniform in 3d space, you would expect the scattered light to form a circle around the originating beam (really a circular gradient, but let's assume a solid brightness cutoff for simplicity). The gravitational lensing may cause the apparent circle to morph in shape, especially as the curvature grows infinitely stronger as it approaches the event horizon.
In my image I intended to draw the red beam as slightly overlapping the event horizon, but now I look at it, I accidentally drew it outside the event horizon, as the event horizon is actually that innermost ring. Please pretend that I drew them in the correct places for the purposes of the demonstration of my idea.
The point may ultimately be irrelevant to your argument, though, as this type of directly observable lensing may only be possible outside the black hole, and I don't think would apply if every geodesic were equidistant. That said, I'm not entirely convinced about your argument that as you pass the event horizon, every geodesic in every direction becomes equidistant toward the black hole. It seems possible to me that inside the black hole, geodesics still would have a potentially warping and observable difference in length, as you could see in my second diagram here:
https://imgur.com/a/91JMZMI
I'm just an armchair enthusiast. Some thoughts (I fully accept I may have no idea what I'm talking about):
When he says that from his perspective, his watch says 5 seconds, and your watch says 10 seconds (even though from your perspective your watch says 10 million years and his watch says 5 seconds) the behavior of light might be a confounding factor and causing you to talk past eachother when discussing simultaneity. There could be a variation in the image received when the light reaches him rather than merely relativity's effect on the passage of time, resulting in a genuine optical illusion (but that explanation also seems like it leaves a different kind of loose end because he really does seem to be arguing for a sort of one-way street relationship for the true passage of time. Even accounting for the speed of light as a confounding factor). I might just need to think about it more.
For the thought experiment about shining a laser pointer just to the left of the moon so that lensing causes it to bend and hit the moon, I think there's a similar issue to do with light that confounds the thought experiment. In reality, every moon or planet or star you see is slightly smaller than it appears, because the effect of lensing is making it seem bigger. You can shine a light to the left of it and that will cause the light to impact it from lensing, but from your perspective with the laser pointer, that would just look like you were pointing it directly at the edge of the surface of the moon with the intent to hit what you are pointing it at anyway. The moon you see and are aiming at is already an image that incorporates the lensing effect to begin with. Really in practice, if you aim at the left-most edge of the moons surface just barely grazing it, you are actually aiming to the left of the moons true physical dimensions by a millimeter or however much, and lensing is pulling that light towards it to impact it. It just doesn't look that way for you shining the laser because the thing you're aiming at has all the calculations baked into what you're seeing already.
Also just some more general thoughts since I've been keeping up with your blackhole stuff:
I see why you say that everything falls in at the same time once it crosses the event horizon because of infinite time dilation so you shouldn't be able to see outside of the black hole, but I personally dont think a true infinite singularity/event horizon is ever truly reached (even if it does exist) to where that logic would become relevant in the first place. It would be like if Windows 11 was the universe, and a program you created to attempt to fully calculate Pi existed on your hard drive. It exists in the sense that you can really look at the file in the UI and click it but your operating system and energy resources are finite and will expend themselves to death attempting to interact with the file in a meaningful way. It's a conceptual endless energy sink and your computer still never actually comes into contact with the idea of fully reaching Pi. But in real time you can see it asymptotically approach Pi for as long as you wish. That's basically all we see when we observe black holes. The time dilation effect represents an unfinished event, inching closer to completion, and never actually getting there. From what I understand the idea that true singularities don't actually truly exist except possibly in the truly infinite future (which also doesn't exist, there's always more future.) is a fairly mainstream hypothesis by physicists. and that infinite singularities coming into contact with finite measurable reality isn't actually possible outside of theoretical physics.
For an infalling observer the event horizon is the surface of the singularity, and It can only be asymptotically approached. The event horizon is never crossed and as you fall towards it, it shrinks away from you as an infalling observer, with a proportionately accelerating rate of time passing behind you, (this all lines up with what the outside observer would see watching you fall in and red shift) and the amount of time it takes to reach it seemingly increases the closer you get to it. Basically think of the Achilles and the tortoise paradox. I think that's the closest you get to actually crossing the boundary of a singularity.
"When he says that from his perspective, his watch says 5 seconds, and your watch says 10 seconds (even though from your perspective your watch says 10 million years and his watch says 5 seconds) the behavior of light might be a confounding factor and causing you to talk past eachother when discussing simultaneity."
Yes, I think he was conflating what "happens" in a frame with what the observer perceives in terms of light. However I think he was still incorrect on that front, as explained in my notes.
"In reality, every moon or planet or star you see is slightly smaller than it appears, because the effect of lensing is making it seem bigger. You can shine a light to the left of it and that will cause the light to impact it from lensing, but from your perspective with the laser pointer, that would just look like you were pointing it directly at the edge of the surface of the moon with the intent to hit what you are pointing it at anyway."
Yes, exactly, this is where I was going: if the moon were a singularity, its angular size would increase to 360 and it would no longer have a meaningful spatial location.
"I see why you say that everything falls in at the same time once it crosses the event horizon because of infinite time dilation so you shouldn't be able to see outside of the black hole, but I personally dont think a true infinite singularity/event horizon is ever truly reached (even if it does exist) to where that logic would become relevant in the first place. It would be like if Windows 11 was the universe, and a program you created to attempt to fully calculate Pi existed on your hard drive. It exists in the sense that you can really look at the file in the UI and click it but your operating system and energy resources are finite and will expend themselves to death attempting to interact with the file in a meaningful way."
Yes, I completely agree with this.
"The time dilation effect represents an unfinished event, inching closer to completion, and never actually getting there. From what I understand the idea that true singularities don't actually truly exist except possibly in the truly infinite future (which also doesn't exist, there's always more future.) is a fairly mainstream hypothesis by physicists. and that infinite singularities coming into contact with finite measurable reality isn't actually possible outside of theoretical physics."
Yes, agreed again.
"For an infalling observer the event horizon is the surface of the singularity, and It can only be asymptotically approached. The event horizon is never crossed and as you fall towards it, it shrinks away from you as an infalling observer, with a proportionately accelerating rate of time passing behind you, (this all lines up with what the outside observer would see watching you fall in and red shift) and the amount of time it takes to reach it seemingly increases the closer you get to it. Basically think of the Achilles and the tortoise paradox. I think that's the closest you get to actually crossing the boundary of a singularity."
I agree with this except I think you might visually see the singularity expand to 360 degrees and the universe behind you shrink to a pinpoint, but other than that I agree.
okay yeah that makes sense, I agree with the idea that it expands to nearly 360 degrees around you with the universe behind you becoming a smaller and smaller pinpoint, but I would want to point out that, in essence, that seems to contradict your argument that there is no direction you can look or move towards that is not part of the singularity. if you agree with me that the pinpoint will continue to shrink asymptotically but never truly entirely disappear, that would then imply that there is at least one nearly infinitesimally small point which constitutes a direction OTHER than the singularity. The point you make often about how nothing can be "behind" you seems to be contradicted by the existence of that pinpoint as far as I can tell. if our universe were a black hole of this sort, I would assume there would have to be an actual pinpoint located somewhere (although it would be too small to see, or maybe outside of the edge of the observable universe), do you think such a pinpoint exists in our universe leading to an "exterior"?
It doesn't contradict my argument, because we were talking about what it would look like if you were falling toward a black hole from outside the event horizon (or that's what I thought we were talking about, anyway). For an observer already inside the event horizon, there is no direction that is away from the singularity.
Bro when even GPT suddenly left in the middle of the discussion I lost it
Max with your explanation of light in this video, you are absolutely right that we could be inside a black hole. The expert guy claims your explanations of light is slightly off, and you just said "I disagree." If you want to get to the bottom of this you would have to go learn in expert depth the mainstream scientific understanding of this light, and then prove it's wrong. Even if you are right, this is something that almost not person is capable of doing, so this is a really hard road.
I could explain why he was wrong on the fly, I just could tell he was going to freak out and wasn't sure how to navigate the conversation. I'm not sure if a podcast conversation is the right way to do this... but I'm going to keep trying. I'll also try another cartoon, and a paper when I and ChatGPT are both ready.
Would you be willing to submit your ideas to a research institution, in the form of a research paper, and to have it peer reviewed?
Yes, but I was hoping to iron out any problems by talking about it first.
Your willingness to discuss these kinds of topics in the form of a public podcast without any formal training or education in the field is what the people that have done work in physics find very off-putting.
Nobody will take you seriously until you:
1. Go to uni and get an undergrad
2. Get a graduate degree, preferably a PhD
3. Be willing to work in a serious way with colleagues (no public podcasts to proselytize your followers)
4. Publish papers
5. Have them peer reviewed. Repeat from step 3.
You're in the US, you have the very best schools available to you. Pick one — Caltech, MIT, Stanford; whatever it might be and then get to work.
Addendum: It is also off-putting to see you talk about these things from a layman's perspective. You trigger a narcissistic 'injury' reaction from the hoi polloi. Stop it.
Addendum 2: big fan, make more mrgirlsplaining videos.
It has to be possible to discuss an issue without identity politics and without paying hundreds of thousands to some brand first. There’s sooooo much fraud in research papers anyway, it’s verifiably easy to get literally anything peer reviewed and published - there are very interesting documentaries about this. This guy claimed to be a liaison between a layman and a physicist anyway, it’s literally his job not to get offended by having to explain or discuss his beliefs.
"When you invite an expert on your show, you're not supposed to question his answers"
Your role as an expert isn't just to preach facts, but to defend your worldview when challenged. Why would he go on a podcast, knowing he's going to debate the nature of the universe, and then leave when you disagree with his basic assumptions? What was he assuming would happen?
And, as you showed at the end, it's not like his own worldview is unquestionable. Which is what you both agreed on at the beginning anyhow! What a frustrating way to engage with a curious mind.
Hmm, as for the way the conversation ended... hahaha...
I think conversations like this can quickly turn to frustration, for many reasons. I think one of those reasons is the attempt to come to a common understanding - a place where you and the other person come to an agreement about the matter at hand. In my experience: don't expect that, don't try to force that, hell, don't even necessarily hope for that.
The most you can do is create the space where it *might* happen of its own accord. Because otherwise the conversation has a high probability of descending into an argument. Part of creating that space is allowing each person the opportunity to fully present their model and thoughts without interruption. Even if you think it's mistaken. Another part of creating that space is making the other person *feel* heard.
A trait you have, and I think many of us have it, I know I do, is that when listening to someone you want to disagree on the spot if they say something that doesn't seem to make sense. But I think you're underestimating how deep of a rabbit hole each of those seemingly minor disagreements is - how it requires hours just to unpack each of those individual items on their own.
And a 1-2 hour podcast simply doesn't provide the time for that. And more simply, on an emotional level... people don't necessarily even want to have that conversation, especially if they weren't expecting it, because it's exhausting. And that might be part of what fueled his reaction.
Probably the best way to handle this podcast, would have been a bit like a more formal debate - each person gets the stage for 15 minutes, states their case, and then it's the other person's turn, and then you compare notes at the end, and leave it up to the audience as to who to believe or disbelieve.
Possibly part of what drives you is the need to reach a firm conclusion from the conversation - maybe that's part of why you brought him on, to validate or invalidate your theory - which is a fair thing to want - but unfortunately I don't think it's the kind of thing that can be achieved in this format in this time span. *And* each person has to know and agree to that format beforehand, so that nobody feels ambushed.
Anyway, just my two cents, from having too many similar arguments with people in my life time!
Man that's crazy if the times essentially de-synchronize for each observer...
I'm no physicist, but being a games developer I have found it interesting to think of time as simply the rate of change (that's how we treat it in simulations at least), and that time dilation could be explained as localised variations in that rate of change. But if the two observers can end up with inconsistent observations/measurements of the other's time... it blows that idea to smithereens.
Life is strange! This is one of the reasons I don't personally fret too much on trying to explain life... sooner or later it seems inevitable that it simply refuses to conform to our ideas of logic or coherence. Whatever the logic of life actually is, I'm not convinced we'll ever be able to truly model it in symbols.
Not that the attempt isn't worthwhile - some understanding is better than no understanding, so even if perfect understanding is impossible we can always improve human existence by moving further forward.
Also - props to Paul for being a great speaker. I love the way he explains things in simple terms.
Holy shit, I don't understand the fragility, it's like he was trying to prove your point about physicists.
I think the field is really harsh on people making mistakes, so everyone is anxious and terrified of seeming out of their depth. And then the topic is just really confusing. But really I think it's a cultural issue with physics, they are all kind of like this in my experience.
I knew what was coming when I saw the length, but I was curious to see how it was gonna happen.
I really tried this time.
I believe you, it really shows and for what it's worth I'm really proud of you.
grrrrrrrr