Janna Levin: belief

Transcript context

…I wonder if the chicken or the egg, is it, how critical, how essential are the supermassive black holes of the formation of galaxies? Yeah, I mean, it’s ongoing, right? It’s ongoing. Which came first, the black hole or the galaxy? Probably big early stars, which were just made out of hydrogen and helium from the Big Bang. There wasn’t anything else. Not much of anything else. Those early stars were forming. Then maybe the black holes and kind of the galaxies were like these gassy clouds around them. There’s probably a deep relationship between the black hole powering jets, these jets blowing material out of the galaxy that shaped galaxies maybe kind of curbed their growth. I think the mechanisms are still ongoing attempts to understand exactly the ordering of these things. Can we get back to space-time? Just going back to the beginning of the 20th century, how do you imagine space-time? How do we as human beings supposed to visualize and think about space-time where time is just another dimension in this 4D space that combines space and time? Because we’ve been talking about morphing in all kinds of different ways, the curvature of space-time. How are we supposed to conceive of it? How do you think of it? Time’s just another dimension?…

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