E216 - Janna Levin: An Astrophysicist's Guide to Black Holes, Higher Dimensions & the Nature of Reality

In this episode, I sit down with Janna Levin, a theoretical astrophysicist at Barnard College of Columbia University, Guggenheim fellow, and author of Black Hole Survival Guide, Black Hole Blues, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, and How the Universe Got Its Spots. Janna started out as a philosophy major drawn to the biggest questions, then found in physics a way of answering them that felt true for everyone, everywhere. Preparing for this conversation blew my mind more than almost any other, and sitting with her only deepened that.

What We Dive Into:

1. When a massive star collapses into a black hole, the star itself keeps falling and leaves behind only curved, empty space. With no material features left to observe, every black hole looks alike, which is why physicists treat them like giant fundamental particles holding clues to quantum gravity.

2. Einstein realized the purest experience of gravity is weightlessness, the feeling of falling freely with no chair, floor, or bed in the way. What we call heaviness is really something resisting our fall, while objects simply follow the natural curves of spacetime.

3. Janna suggests technological species may face a bottleneck where the ingenuity that builds rockets also builds bombs. Surviving it could mean reaching a balance with nature so complete that a civilization becomes hard to detect, which may help explain why the cosmos looks so quiet.

Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.

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___________

00:00 Intro

02:24 From Philosophy to Physics

06:39 Made of Star Stuff

12:13 The Ever Expanding Cosmos

17:14 Before the Big Bang

21:31 How Complexity Emerges

24:42 The Nature of Black Holes

32:08 Supermassive Black Holes

39:02 Photographing a Black Hole

45:33 How Stellar Black Holes Form

47:46 Falling Into a Black Hole

56:38 The Information Loss Paradox

1:00:00 Einstein’s Happiest Thought

1:11:00 Nothingness in Physics and Meditation

1:19:56 Why Whales Don’t Go to Mars

1:24:11 Isotopia and Balance With Nature

1:30:50 The Fermi Paradox

1:32:13 Intelligence on a New Substrate

1:37:30 Humility and the Cosmic Perspective

1:41:18 The Odds of Alien Civilizations

1:46:17 Consciousness and Extra Dimensions

1:54:41 How Many Dimensions Exist

2:01:48 Time as the Fourth Dimension

2:04:56 Extra Dimensions and Dark Energy

2:12:06 A Universe Inside a Black Hole

2:19:14 Progeny of One Universe

___________

✨MORE FROM JANNA LEVIN

↳Substack: https://jannalevin.substack.com

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↳The Moth Story: https://youtu.be/dVubvLgTcxg?si=Hkaic0osIYwBMcA0

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