Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…ou and I are here. Because stars send their material back out into space and you and I get to be made of carbon and oxygen and all this good stuff. We’re not just hydrogen. So the suns do that for us. And then what’s left sometimes ends at a neutron star, which is a very cool object, very fascinating object, super dense, but bigger than a black hole, meaning it’s not compact enough to become a black hole. It’s an actual thing. A neutron star is a real thing. It’s like a giant neutron. Literally electrons get jammed into the protons and make this giant nucleus in this superconducting matter, very strange, amazing object. But if it’s heavier than that, the core, and that’s heavier than twice the mass of the sun, it will become a black hole. And Oppenheimer wrote this beautiful paper in 1939 with his student saying that they believed that the end state of gravitational collapse is actually a black hole. This is stunning and really a visionary conclusion. Now the paper is published the same day, the Nazis advance on Poland, and so it does not get a lot of fanfare in the newspapers. Yeah, We think there’s a lot of drama today on social media. Imagine that. Here’s a guy who predicts how actually in nature would be the formation of this most radical of object that broke even Einstein’s brain, while one of the most evil, if not the most evil humans in history, starting the first steps of a global war. What I also love about that lesson is how agnostic science is. Because he was asking these utopian questions, as were other people of the time, about the nuclear physics and stars. You might know this play Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. There’s this line that he attributes to Bohr. And Bohr was the great thinker of early foundations of quantum mechanics, Danish physicist, where Bohr says to his wife, nobody’s thought of a way to kill people using quantum mechanics. Now of course, then there’s the nuclear bomb. And what I love about this was the pressure scientists were under to do something with this nuclear physics and to enter this race over a nuclear weapon. But really at the same time, 1939, really Oppenheimer’s thinking about black holes. There’s even a small line in Chris Nolan’s film. It’s very hard to catch. There’s a reference to it in the film where they’re sort of joking, “Well, I guess nobody’s going to pay attention to your paper now,” because of the Nazi advance on Poland.…

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