Speaker 1: I want you to do something for me right now.
Just take a second and look around the room you're in.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just pick a totally ordinary object.
Speaker 1: Right exactly, Like maybe it's the coffee cup sitting on
your desk, or maybe a pen, or honestly, just hold
up your own hand and look at it looks pretty solid, it.
Speaker 2: Feels safe, it feels normal, exactly.
Speaker 1: It obeys all the rules of the physical world you've
known since you were a toddler. Well, what if I
told you that simple, mundane object you're looking at right
now contains the exact same dormant explosive power as a
twenty one kiloton nuclear weapon.
Speaker 2: I mean, it is a deeply unsettling thought when you
actually let the physical reality of it synk in. We
walk through the world completely oblivious to this sheer apocalyptic
energy bound up in the most boring objects around us.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and let's not stop there. Tonight, when you step
outside and look up at the night sky, you're going
to see this beautiful, sprawling map of stars and galaxies.
And it feels like this fixed, reliable ceiling to our world.
I mean, we've navigated by it for millennia. But here's
the kicker that sky. It is a massive, universized optical illusion.
It is actively lying to your eyes, constantly distorting the
truth of where things actually are.
Speaker 2: Because we build our entire understanding of reality on the
assumption that what we see is was actually there. We
assume space as flat, time as universal, and matter is solid.
But the universe is what's far more deceptive and far
more fluid than our primate brains ever evolved to comprehend.
Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling threads. I am so glad you're here
with us now. Our mission today is not to throw
dusty old equations at you, or you know, make you
memorize physics formula.
Speaker 2: Now, definitely not. We're not doing a textbook read along, right.
Speaker 1: Our mission is to completely shatter your perception of daily reality.
We're going to explore the terrifying, the deeply unsettling, and
frankly the onspiring truths that were revealed by Albert Einstein's
theories of relativity, alongside a century of staggering astronomical days
that well basically proved them right.
Speaker 2: And we are pulling from a really fascinating stack of
historical and modern data to do this. We're looking closely
at the original frameworks from Einstein's nineteen oh five Special
Relativity and nineteen sixteen general relativity papers, alongside some modern
physics analysis.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and some incredible space missions too.
Speaker 2: Exactly. We also have the almost unbelievably precise findings from
NASA's Gravity pro b mission, and we're diving deep into
the seismic data from the Lego observatories, which literally heard
the universe ringing.
Speaker 1: When I first started digging into this material, I had
the exact same reaction I think a lot of people.
Do you hear the name Einstein and you immediately think
of abstract math, You think of stuff that only matters
to astronomers peering through massive telescopes on mountaintops, or people
in lab coats smashing sub atomic particles together in underground colliders.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it feels incredibly distant from our actual lived experience.
Speaker 1: Right, totally disconnected from your morning commute or checking your
email or making that cup of coffee. But what we're
going to unpack today is that relativity isn't just you
know out there in the deep cosmos. Relativity is the fragile,
highly localized, incredibly warped bubble that dictates the physical geometry
of your entire existence, Every single second of your life
is actively governed by these bizarre rules.
Speaker 2: I promise you, by the time we wrap up this conversation,
you will never look at the ground beneath your feet,
the clock ticking on your wall, or the GPS guiding
your phone the same way ever again.
Speaker 1: So let's jump right into the deep end. I want
to talk about how we perceive the space around us,
because we all walk around assuming space is this rigid,
fixed stage like an empty theater. Right, A ruler is
a foot long, a mile is a mile. If you
park your car in the driveway, it takes up a
very specific, unchanging amount of space.
Speaker 2: Well, that's the new Tonian view of the universe, which
works perfectly fine for building bridges or throwing you a baseball.
We assume space is an empty box and things just
move around inside the box.
Speaker 1: But when I was reading up on Einstein's nineteen oh
five Special Theory of Relativity, I came across the concept
of length contraction, and it essentially proves that physical distance,
like the actual size of objects and the space between them,
is nothing more than a localized illusion.
Speaker 2: What's really fascinating here is the absolute rigidity of the
underlying mechanism. Length contraction isn't just a quirk. It is
a forced mathematical necessity. It dictates that as an object
accelerates and gets closer to the speed of light, it
physically compresses in the direction of its motion.
Speaker 1: Okay, I have to stop you there, because I want
to make sure I'm visualizing this correctly, and I want
you listening to picture this too. I found this incredible
analogy in the sources that help me wrap my head
around it, the train analogy. Yes, imagine you're standing on
a train platform and a highly advanced futuristic train speeds
past you at ninety percent the speed of light. Now
my brain immediately thinks, okay, it's going super fast, so
it just looks like a blur. It's a normal train,
just moving quickly. But the math absolutely rejects that, doesn't.
Speaker 2: It utterly rejects it. You wouldn't just see a blurred,
normal sized train. If you had a camera capable of
capturing it in a microsecond, you would see a train
that is physically squashed. It would be compressed down to
less than half of its original length. The metal, the glass,
the seats, the passengers, everything is literally occupying less physical
space in the direction it's traveling.
Speaker 1: Wait, I need to push back on this, because this
is where my brain starts flashing warning signs. If the
train is physically compressed to less than half its size,
wouldn't the sheer mechanical force of that crush everything inside?
I mean, if you shrink the space my body occupies,
wouldn't my bones break?
Speaker 2: You would think, so? Yeah, right?
Speaker 1: Wouldn't the atoms in my body before so close together
that they trigger some kind of catastrophic nuclear fusion. How
does the train or the person inside survive that?
Speaker 2: That is a brilliant question, and it strikes right at
the heart of why relativity is so counterintuitive. Bones don't
break and your atoms don't fuse because the matter itself
isn't being crushed by external pressure. The actual physical metric
of space.
Speaker 1: Has changed, the metric itself.
Speaker 2: Yes, think of space like a grid drawn on a
piece of elastic fabric. The atoms in your body are
sitting on the intersections of that grid. As you approach
the speed of light, the entire fabric of space itself compresses.
The distance between the atoms shrinks, but the atoms themselves
don't feel squashed, because the local laws of physics, the
electromagnetic force is keeping your atoms apart, have scaled down
perfectly with the space.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, So to the local universe inside the train,
nothing has changed. The ruler you use to measure the
distance between your atoms has shrunk by the exact same
proportion as the distance itself.
Speaker 2: Precisely, and this is because of the foundational rule of
the universe. The speed of light is constant for all observers,
no matter how fast they are moving. If you are
standing on the platform and I am on the train,
moving at ninety percent the speed of light, and we
both measure a beam of light shooting past us, we
both have to measure it moving at exactly one hundred
and eighty and eighty two.
Speaker 1: Miles per second, which makes no intuitive sense. I mean,
if I'm driving down the highway at sixty miles an
hour and a car passes me going seventy to me,
that car is only moving ten miles an hour. Velocities
are supposed to.
Speaker 2: Subtract, right, but light refuses to do that. The universe
will not allow you to catch up to a light beam.
So if we both have to measure light moving at
the exact same speed, despite the fact that I am
chasing it at ninety percent the speed of light. Something
else has to break to make the math work out, and.
Speaker 1: The universe decides that space and time are what break.
Speaker 2: Exactly. The universe bends, flexes, and compresses physical distance to
ensure the speed of light remains absolute. The space you
occupy is entirely subjective.
Speaker 1: That is completely mind bending, because if I'm the passenger
on that train, like you said, I don't feel compressed.
My coudy cup looks completely normal. My arms and legs
are fine. But here is the terrifying subjective reality. When
I look out the window of that speeding train, what
do I see?
Speaker 2: This is where reference frames completely upend our sense of reality.
From your perspective inside the train, your arrest, the train
isn't moving, The universe is rushing past you. So when
you look out the window, you don't see a squashed train,
you see a squashed universe. Wow. Yeah, the train platform,
the planet Earth beneath it, the Solar System, the distant stars,
everything flying past your window is physically compressed in the
direction of travel.
Speaker 1: I am compressing the Earth just by driving.
Speaker 2: Past it really fast in your frame of reference. Yes,
the physical dimensions of reality are entirely flexible. They warp
depending on absolutely nothing more than how fast you're moving
relative to something else.
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean for us sitting here
right now? It means there is no true objective shape
to anything in the universe. The room you are sitting in,
the space your body is taking up right now, it's
just a temporary dimensional suggestion. It only exists in this exact,
comfortable shape because you have to be standing relatively still
with the Earth.
Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it.
Speaker 1: If an alien spaceship zoomed past Earth at near light
speed in their reality, you and the room you are
in would look like a squashed pancake, and they wouldn't
be wrong. Both realities are mathematically true.
Speaker 2: It shatters the idea of the empty fixed stage, and
that's just what sheer velocity does to space. But things
get even more claustrophobic when we introduce gravity, because space
isn't just a frictionless vacuum where things happen. General relativity
paints a picture of space time as a physical, interactive medium.
It's a thick fabric.
Speaker 1: And this brings me to a concept called frame dragging.
The historical papers and the modern physics analyzes outline this,
and there's a brilliant way to visualize it that completely
changed how I think about the ground beneath my feet.
Imagine dropping a perfectly round, spinning sphere into a massive
vat of incredibly thick, viscous honey.
Speaker 2: The honey analogy perfectly captures the fluid dynamics of space time.
Speaker 1: Right, So as that sphere spins, the friction grabs the
thick honey and drags it along, creating this swirling, localized
whirlpool right around the equator of the sphere. The honey
closest to the sphere spins the fastest, and it sort
of tapers off the further away. You get what Einstein
positive is that this is exactly what the Earth is
doing to reality. Right this very second Earth is not
just rotating cleanly in an empty void. It is violently
twisting the fabric of space and time. It is dragging
reality along with it as it spins.
Speaker 2: And for decades this was just a mathematical quirk. It
was something Einstein predicted, but the effect around a planet
like Earth would be so infinitesimally small that physicists assumed
we could never ever build a machine sensitive enough to
detect it. But then we get to NASA's Gravity pro
B mission in two thousand and four.
Speaker 1: I went so deep down the rabbit hole reading about
gravi pro B. The engineering required for this mission sounds
like science fiction. They had to build these gyroscopes to
measure the twisting of space, and to do that they
needed to create perfect spheres.
Speaker 2: The quartz spheres they created for Gravity pro B are
officially recognized as the most perfectly spherical objects ever manufactured
by human.
Speaker 1: Beings, which is just wild to think about.
Speaker 2: To give you an idea of the scale, they're about
the size of a ping pong ball. If you scaled
one of these quard spheres up to the size of
the entire Earth, the tallest mountain or deepest ocean trench
would be less than eight feet tall.
Speaker 1: The precision is just staggering. I mean eight feet tall
on an Earth sized scale.
Speaker 2: It had to be that perfect because any imperfection, any
microscopic imbalance, would cause the mechanical wabble that would completely
drown out the tiny relativistic signal they were looking for.
They coated them in niobium, suspended them in a vacuum
using electrical fields so nothing physically touched them, and cooled
them to near absolute zero using liquid helium.
Speaker 1: So you have these utterly flawless, freezing cold spheres floating
freely in space, orbiting the Earth. They pointed the spin
axis of these gyroscopes at a distant guide star I
am Agassi and basically said, Okay, if Newton is right
and space is just an empty box, these gyroscopes will
stay perfectly aligned with that star forever because nothing is
pushing them.
Speaker 2: They left them in orbit for over a year, tracking
them with mind boggling precision. With the data finally came
back and was fully analyzed years later. It confirmed Einstein's
map absolutely perfectly.
Speaker 1: The gyroscopes had drifted. They drifted, Yeah, it was an
incredibly microscopic We were talking about fractions of an arcsecond,
which is roughly the width of a human hair viewed
from ten miles away.
Speaker 2: But they drifted, and they hadn't been pushed by solar wind.
They weren't pulled by the Earth's magnetic field, and there
were no internal mechanical flaws pushing them off course.
Speaker 1: They were physically pulled off course because the actual literal
space they were occupying was rotating. The space itself was
being dragged by the Earth's rotation, and it turned the
gyroscopes with it. I just want you to let that
sink in for a second. You listening to this right now,
you are not standing on a solid rock that is
just cleanly sailing through an empty, frictionless void. You are
trapped at the bottom of a four dimensional whirlpool. You
are caught in the current of a twisted fluid reality.
You can't see it with your eyes, you can't feel
it with your hands, but it is actively dictating the
physical geometry of your existence.
Speaker 2: It completely reframes how we think about our place in
the cosmos. We are swimming in a thick, warped medium.
And what is brilliant about that realization is that it
leads directly to our next major shift in perspective. Because
if space is this thick, twisted fluid, what happens when
things violently crash inside that fluid?
Speaker 1: Exactly if we are sitting in this cosmic honey and
it can be dragged, what happens if you slap the honey?
Speaker 2: It sends out a ripple, which brings us to gravitational waves.
For all of.
Speaker 1: Human history, we have perceived the ground beneath our feet
as solid, unmoving. If the ground moves, we call it
an earthquake, and we view it as a localized geological anomaly,
tectonic plate slipping, that sort of thing. But Einstein's nineteen
sixteen prediction positive that because space time is a physical medium,
it can carry physical shockwaves.
Speaker 2: He theorized that when the most massive violent objects in
the universe accelerator collide, like black holes or neutron stars,
they displaced the fabric of space so violently that they
send out ripples. Think of a heavy stone dropped into
a calm pond. Gravitational waves travel outward in all directions
at the speed of light, stretching and squeezing space itself as.
Speaker 1: They go, but for a century nobody could prove it
because the universe is so vast. By the time those
ripples reached Earth, they would be unimaginably faint. If the
twisting of space by Earth rotation was the width of
a human hair from ten miles away, a gravitational wave
would be stretching space by less than the width of
a single proton.
Speaker 2: The physics community genuinely debated whether we would ever have
the technological capacity to measure something that small, But in
twenty fifteen, the advanced Lego observatories completely changed the game.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the sheer absurdity of the Lego machines
because these are l shaped vacuum tubes over two miles long,
built in Washington State and Louisiana. They shoot high powered
lasers down these tubes, bounce them off perfectly polished mirrors,
and wait for the lasers to fall out of sink.
Speaker 2: And that's the key, falling out.
Speaker 1: Of sink, right, because if a gravitational wave rolls through
the Earth, it will physically stretch one of the two
mile arms and compress the other, causing the lasers to
arrive back at the detector at slightly different times.
Speaker 2: And to make sure it's actually a gravitational wave and
not a truck driving by or a microscopic seismic tremor,
they have to isolate these mirrors using active dampening systems
that push back against ambient nois millions of times a second.
Speaker 1: And in September twenty fifteen, it actually happened they detected
a signal. They literally heard the universe ring.
Speaker 2: The event they detected is known as g W one
five zero nine to one two, and the scale of
this event is almost impossible for a human brain to process.
Two black holes, one roughly thirty six times the mass
of our Sun, the other twenty nine times the mass
of our Sun. They were locked in a binary orbit,
spiraling closer and closer together at half the speed of light.
Speaker 1: This is happening roughly one point three billion light years
away from Earth.
Speaker 2: Yes, they spiraled into each other and merged into a
single massive black hole, and in the final fraction of
a second of their collision, they released three entire solar
masses of pure.
Speaker 1: Energy, three suns worth of mass, completely converted into the
energy of a spacetime ripple in a tenth of a second.
That's just I can't even picture that.
Speaker 2: It was more energy released in that moment than the
combined light of all the shining stars in the observable universe,
every star you can see, every star in every galaxy
we have ever mapped. The luinous output of all of
them combined was dwarfed by this single invisible collision.
Speaker 1: And that energy rippled outward. It traveled through the cosmic
fluid for over a billion years. It traversed the cold,
dark voids of the universe, just to wash over our
tiny planet in twenty fifteen. But this is the part
that really gets under my skin. This is the personal impact.
What does that mean for you and me? It means
that as that wave passed through the Earth, your physical atoms,
the room you are sitting in, the planet you live on,
they were physically stretched in one direction and squeezed in
the other.
Speaker 2: Now, obviously it happens on an incredibly subatomic scale, because
the wave traveled for a billion years, it had dissipated
down to a fraction of the width of a proton
by the time.
Speaker 1: It hit us, But it physically happened. You were stretched
and squeezed by a billion year old ghost of a
dead collision. It is so unsettling to realize that we
are constantly vibrating, because if Ligo can hear them, it
means the universe is full of these events, invisible shock
waves from exploding supernovas, merging black holes, colliding neutron stars
that are continuously washing over us right now. The ground
beneath you is never ever truly still. The universe rings
like a bell, and we are vibrating right along with
the frequency.
Speaker 2: And this fluidity of space doesn't just mess with our
sense of physical stillness, it completely compromises our sense of sight.
If space can be stretched and twisted, it means the
paths through space are not straight lines, which brings us
to the phenomena of gravitational lensing.
Speaker 1: This is the ultimate betrayal by the cosmos. Humanity has
always relied on the stars to map out where we are,
from ancient sailors navigating by constellations to modern astrophysicists building
multi billion dollar telescopes like James Webb. We look into
the deep corners of the cosmos, We plot the locations
of galaxies, and we trust our eyes. We assume light
travels in a straight line from the star to our telescope.
Speaker 2: But if space is a warped fluid, then light cannot
travel in a straight line. Light has to follow the
contours of space time. Because massive objects like galaxy clusters
have such immense gravity, they warp the fabrico space so
severely that they create deep valleys. In reality, when light
from a distant galaxy passes by one of these massive clusters,
it is forced to follow the curve of that warped
space bending around the massive object.
Speaker 1: Think of it like a cosmic magnifying glass, but a
really cheap, poorly made one. I want you to picture
looking through the bottom of a thick glass soda bottle.
Everything on the other side is distorted, smeared, bent out
of shape. That is exactly what massive galaxy clusters are
doing to the light of the universe.
Speaker 2: The visual evidence of this is staggering and undeniable. When
we look at a distant quasar or galaxy located directly
behind one of these massive foreground clusters, the light has
been heavily bent and stretched. Sometimes we see a single
galaxy smeared into a massive glowing arc across the sky,
wrapping around the foreground cluster. It's called an Einstein ring.
Speaker 1: And sometimes it's even weirder. Sometimes the light from a
single source takes multiple different paths around the massive object
to reach us. So when we point our telescopes at it,
we see four or five identical copies of the exact
same galaxy just scattered across the sky and across patterns
the exact same galaxy showing up in four different places.
Speaker 2: What is profound about this is the implication for our
map of the universe. It means the universe is actively
hiding its true layout from us. The night sky you
look up at is is quite literally a fun house mirror.
Speaker 1: That is exactly a funhouse mirror. When you look up,
you are not seeing things where they actually are. We
are essentially staring through cracked glass, attempting to piece together
the true geography of a universe that has been bouncing, bending,
and warping light for billions of years before it finally
hits our retinas.
Speaker 2: We simply cannot trust what we see. The cosmos is
heavily actively distorted, so.
Speaker 1: Naturally, the human response to this is, well, if we
can't trust what we see from here, for telesoops are
just looking through warped glass, let's just build a spaceship
and fly out there figure it out in person.
Speaker 2: Which brings us to our next major realization, and this
one is a bit of a heartbreaker, the cosmic quarantine.
Speaker 1: Yes, this is where we confront the absolute limits of
our existence. We have to talk about the cosmic speed limit,
famously represented by the letter C in Einstein's equations, I
grew up on science fiction. I think most of us did.
We were raised on Star Wars, Star Trek, Interstellar. We
were raised on the promise of warp drives, hyperspace, and
the sprawling galactic civilizations spanning thousands of star systems. We
inherently assume that if humanity just survives long enough and
our technology keeps progressing, eventually we will conquer the stars.
It's just a matter of time and engineering. We went
from the Right Brothers to the Moon in sixty six years.
Surely we can figure out Alpha Centauri.
Speaker 2: It is a beautiful dream, but Einstein's equations contain a
brutal absolute prohibition. The speed of light in a vacuum
C is approximately one hundred and eighty six thousand, two
hundred and eighty two miles per second.
Speaker 1: Which again sounds incredibly fast. You could circle the Earth
seven and a half times in one second at that speed.
Speaker 2: It is incredibly fast from a terrestrial perspective. But the
critical rule is that C is not just the speed
at which photons of light travel. It is the absolute
maximum speed for any information, any physical matter, or any
causal influence to propagate through the fabric of the universe.
Speaker 1: I want to stop an unpack. Why we can't just
build a bigger engine to push past it? Because usually
in our daily lives, if you want to go faster
in a car, you just put it a bigger engine,
burn more fuel, generate more thrust. Why doesn't that work
in space? Why does the universe throw up a brick wall.
Speaker 2: It comes down to the mathematical constraint of mass and
energy under special relativity. As an object with mass, like
a spaceship or a human body, accelerates, you have to
pump kinetic energy into it. But relativity dictates that as
velocity increases, the object's relativistic momentum increases asymptotically. To push
an object with any mass at all to the actual
speed of light, the math shows it would require infinite energy.
Speaker 1: Infinite energy, not just a lot of energy, not just
all the energy in the sun, more energy than exists
in the entire universe.
Speaker 2: Exactly. It is mathematically and physically impossible. Yeah, this isn't
a technological hurdle. It's not a sound barrier that we
can eventually break if we just invent a sleeker aerodynamic shape.
It's not something we can engineer our way around in
a thousand years. It is built into the fundamental source
code of reality. Mass cannot reach the speed of light.
Speaker 1: And this is where the philosophical reac of this hits
me so hard, because when you look at the sheer
scale of space, it means we are prisoners. We are
under a permanent cosmic quarantine.
Speaker 2: The scale of the universe weaponizes that speed limit against us.
Speaker 1: Let's put this out. Let's pretend we somehow invent a
miraculous propulsion system. We harness antimatter, we bend the rules
as much as theoretically possible, and we build a ship
that can go ninety nine point nine percent the speed
of light. We are practically kissing the speed limit. We
are still hopelessly trapped because the universe is just too
unfathomably big. The absolute nearest star system to us, Proxima centaury,
is over four light years away. At our absolute maximum speed,
it still takes four years of empty, freezing darkness just
to reach our next door neighbor.
Speaker 2: And that is just our immediate neighborhood. If you want
to visit the center of our own Milky Way galaxy,
it is twenty six thousand light years away. Even traveling
at ninety nine point nine percent the speed of light,
humanity would rise and fall several times over before you
even got halfway there.
Speaker 1: And if we look beyond our own gallonlexy, it gets
even more desolate because we aren't just fighting distance, We
are fighting the expansion of the universe itself.
Speaker 2: Yes, driven by what we currently call dark energy. The
space between galaxies is expanding, and the further away a
galaxy is from us, the more expanding space there is
between us and them, which means the distant galaxies are
receding from us faster than the speed of light.
Speaker 1: Wait, how can they be receding faster than light if
light is the absolute.
Speaker 2: Speed limit, Because the galaxies themselves aren't moving through space
faster than light, the space between the galaxies is stretching.
Space itself is not bound by the cosmic speed limit.
It can expand as fast as it wants.
Speaker 1: This just fills me with this profound sense of melancholy
because it means the vast, overwhelming majority of the cosmos
has already permanently slipped beyond our cosmic horizon. They are
being carried away on the expanding tide of space time
faster than a light beam could ever possibly pursue them.
Speaker 2: We are currently isolated. We are locked inside this localized
bubble of physics. Thing outside our local group of galaxies
is fundamentally untouchable forever.
Speaker 1: We are destined to just sit here on our little
rock and watch the rest of the cosmos slowly fade
into the dark. We can look through our cracked funhouse
mirror of gravitational lenses all we want, but we can
never ever reach out and touch it. The universe through
a party, and we are locked in the basement.
Speaker 2: It forces a profound shift in perspective. We have to
focus on our local neighborhood. We have to reckon with
the physics of the here and now.
Speaker 1: But the irony is this isolated bubble we're trapped in.
It doesn't just dictate where we can go, it dictates
when we are. Because as we pull on the next thread,
we realize that relativity dictates our speed and gravity. Are
currently messing with something even more personal than space. Segmenting
off the distance is one thing, but relativity fractures time itself.
Speaker 2: This is perhaps the most difficult concept for the human
brain to intuitively accept, because of all the things we
experience the steady, relentless march of time feels the most universal.
We could debate the size of a room or the
shape of a shadow, but time feels absolute absolutely.
Speaker 1: A minute is a minute, a second is a second.
You and I are having this conversation right now. We
synchronize our watches, we set our morning alarms, we celebrate
New Year's Eve as a global event. We share this
deeply ingrained, collective understanding of the present moment. We all
believe we exist in a shared now, but.
Speaker 2: The math of general relativity utterly dismantles this assumption. Now
does not exist globally. Time is not a constant, universal
background metronome ticking away for everyone. Equally, time is a
highly localized, deeply personal, and entirely malleable fluid.
Speaker 1: We have to talk about gravitational time dilation. The fundamental
rule is the stronger the gravitational field you are in,
the slower time passes for you relative to someone in
a weaker gravitational field.
Speaker 2: Yes. This comes from Einstein's equivalence principle, which basically shows
that acceleration and gravity are mathematically indistinguishable in terms of
how they warp spacetime. If you stand near a massive object,
your local space time is heavily warped, and because the
speed of light must remain constant across this warped geometry,
your local clock has to slow down relative to an
observer further away from the mass.
Speaker 1: And this isn't just happening out in deep space in
your black holes or neutron stars. This is happening to
you right now, sitting in your chair, walking down the street,
or driving your car. The center of our planet, the
Earth's core, has immense mass. The closer you are to it,
the stronger the gravitational pull.
Speaker 2: Which leads to a brilliantly absurd biological reality.
Speaker 1: I love this part of the physics because it is
so wild when you really think about it. Because your
feet are physically closer to the center of the Earth
than your head is, gravity is microscopically stronger at your feet. Therefore,
time is literally moving slower for your feet. Your head
is aging faster than your toes. You are biologically fracturing
in time just by standing up.
Speaker 2: It is a mathematical fact. If you live on the
top floor of a skyscraper, say a penthouse in New York,
you are experience and seeing slightly weaker gravity than the
person living down to the basement apartment. Therefore, the penthouse
dweller is aging slightly faster over a lifetime. It might
amount to fractions of a microsecond, but the effect is real.
Speaker 1: Obviously, these differences are infinitesimal for human bodies. We need
insanely precise atomic clocks to measure it. But the philosophical
horror of this is absolute. It means there is no
universal clock. Every single object, every single person, every atom
is experiencing its own unique, private flow of time, depending
entirely on its proximity to mass. You are in your
own isolated temporal bubble.
Speaker 2: And if you want to take it to the absolute extreme,
look at a photon of light itself. To a photon
traveling from a distant star, time essentially stops. The time
dilation at the speed of light is infinite.
Speaker 1: Wait, really, think about that. The photon emitted from a
star in the Andromeda Galaxy travels through the freezing void
for two point five million years before it hits the
lens of a telescope on Earth.
Speaker 2: Yes, from our perspective to two point five million years past,
But to the photon the moment it was emitted, and
the moment it hits your eye with the exact same
instant to a particle of light, the entire history and
future of the universe happens simultaneously. There's no shared present.
You are drifting out of sync with everything else in existence.
Speaker 1: Okay. I can hear people listen to this and saying,
all right, this is all very abstract philosophy. It's a
neat party trick to say my feet are younger than
my head, or that light doesn't experience time, but it
doesn't actually affect my life. I still have to pay
my taxes on April fifteenth. But here is where it
gets terrifyingly practical. Your phone's GPS is currently fighting a literal,
active war against Einstein's math.
Speaker 2: GPS drift ye. This is the perfect example of where
relativity stops being theoretical chalkboard physics and becomes the crucial
structural pillar of modern human civilization.
Speaker 1: Let's break the exact math down because the raw numbers
make it so clear. The Global Positioning system relies on
a constellation of dozens of satellites. They are orbiting about
twelve thousand, five hundred miles above the Earth, and they
are zooming around the planet at roughly eighty seven hundred
miles per hour.
Speaker 2: So we have two conflicting relativistic forces at play here,
pulling the satellite's clocks in opposite directions. First, we have
special relativity, which deals with velocity. Because these satellites are
moving incredibly fast eighty seven hundred miles an hour, they're
onboard atomic clocks experience time dilation, they should tick slower
than the clocks resting on the ground. The math says
their speed causes them to lose about seven microseconds a day.
Speaker 1: Okay, so speed makes them run seven microseconds slow every day.
Speaker 2: But then then we have general relativity, which deals with gravity.
Because these satellites are twelve thy five hundred miles away
from the Earth's surface, they are much further out of
Earth's gravity. Well, they experience significantly weaker gravity than we
do on the surface. Weaker gravity means time ticks faster.
This effect speeds up their clocks by about forty five
microseconds a day.
Speaker 1: So speed slows them down by seven microseconds, but the
weaker gravity speeds them up by forty five microseconds. You
subtract the seven from the forty five and the net
result is that the atomic clocks on the GPS satellites
are moving thirty eight microseconds a day, faster than the
clocks on Earth.
Speaker 2: And thirty eight microseconds sounds completely insignificant to a human being.
It's thirty eight millions of a second. You blink your
eye and hundreds of thousands of microseconds past.
Speaker 1: It sounds like nothing. Who cares about thirty eight millions
of a second let it drift.
Speaker 2: You should care, because the GPS system figures out where
you are by timing how long it takes a radio
signal to reach your phone from the satellite, and radio
signals travel at the speed of light one hundred and
eighty six thousand miles per second exactly.
Speaker 1: Light covers a vast amount of ground in a microsecond.
At that speed, a thirty eight microsecond time drift equals
a seven mile location error every single day.
Speaker 2: If we did not program the software in those satellites
to deliberately run their clocks slow prior to launch to
artificially correct Feinstein's math before the signal ever reaches your phone,
our entire global system would fail cumulatively.
Speaker 1: Let's vividly paint this picture. Imagine some rogue software engineer
just flips the switch and turns off that artificial relativistic correction.
Within forty eight hours, global navigation becomes utterly useless. You
open Google Maps to find a coffee shop, and your
blue dot is floating fourteen miles away in the middle
of a lake. But it's not just you getting lost
on a road trip. The stakes are apocalyptic. Commercial airliners
descending into fog banks are suddenly flying blind, missing runways,
entirely shipping and logistics the massive automated trucks and trains
delivering food to grocery stores completely grind to a halt.
Speaker 2: And it goes far deeper than just geographical navigation. The
global power grids rely on the hyper precise GPS microsecond
timing for synchronization. The alternating current across a continent has
to match up perfectly. Without that relativistic timing correction, the
grid synchronization falls apart, and massive rolling blackouts cascade across
the globe.
Speaker 1: And the global banking system. This is the terrifying part.
Millions of high frequency stock trades, international wire transfers, and
credit card transactions are time stamped using these exact satellite
signals to prevent fraud and ensure chronological order. If the
timing drifts by a few miles worth of light speed data,
the entire global financial system loses its synchronization. It collapses
into total economic ruin. We are talking about the end
of modern technological society in a matter of days.
Speaker 2: It is a profound realization. Our technological reality, our safety,
our food supply, our economy. It all relies on actively
compensating for the fact that time is worked. We're using
relativity to keep the lights on.
Speaker 1: So if time is this fluid and we can measure
it so precisely that we literally have to program our
satellites to deal with it, can we exploit it? If
speed slows down time, can we build a machine to
take advantage of that? The answers yes, But the universe
demands a terrifying emotional toll.
Speaker 2: We're talking about time travel.
Speaker 1: Which is another staple of our sci fi diet. Usually
in movies, time travel involves stepping into a sleek machine,
spinning some dials and going back to the past to
fix a mistake, or jumping to the future to see
flying cars and then coming home in time for dinner.
But special relativity guarantees that time travel is absolutely one
hundred percent real. It's just strictly a one way street.
Speaker 2: This brings us to the famous twin paradox, which beautifully
illustrates the extreme inescapable consequences of time dilation.
Speaker 1: Let's walk through this because it highlights the isolation of relativity.
You have two identical twins. They are the exact same age,
born minutes apart. One twin stays right here on Earth,
works a normal job, lives a normal life. The other
twin gets into a highly advanced spacecraft capable of traveling
at let's say, ninety nine percent the speed of light.
The traveling twin blasts off, heads to a star system
that is five light years away, and then turns the
ship around and comes right back.
Speaker 2: Because of the extreme speed, the traveling twin is going
to experience massive time dilation relative to Earth. To the
quinn inside the ship, perversing the space doesn't take five
years each way. Due to the length contraction we talked
about earlier, the physical distance to the star shrink for them.
The entire journey flying to the star, turning around, coming
back might feel like it took roughly fourteen months. A
subjective time.
Speaker 1: So for the traveling astronaut, a little over a year
has passed. They ate fourteen months of meals, they slept
fourteen months of nights, their hair grew a little bit.
They aged exactly one year and two months.
Speaker 2: But when that ship lands back on Earth, the traveler
is going to open the hatch and step out into
a deeply unrecognizable world. Because for the twin who stayed behind,
watching the ship travel at sublight speeds to a star
five light years away and back, over a decade has passed.
Speaker 1: The astronaut steps out, looks at their identical twin and
sees a stranger, someone who is ten years older, wrinkling skin,
graying hair, a whole decade of life lived, children born, careers, advanced,
while the astronaut hasn't even had to replace their toothbrush.
Speaker 2: I often hear people ask why this isn't symmetrical. If
velocity is relative, couldn't the twin on the ship say
the Earth moved away from them, so the Earth twin
should be younger. The key that breaks the symmetry it's acceleration.
The traveling twin had to fire engines to speed up,
slow down, turn around, and speed up again. They changed
reference frames. That acceleration forces them into the time dilated reality.
When they returned to the original frame.
Speaker 1: It is mathematically guaranteed. Let's explore the existential horror of
taking this to the extreme. Say you don't just go
to a nearby star. Say you're an explorer. You build
a fast enough ship and you decide to fly around
the entire galaxy. You accelerate to ninety nine point ninety
ninety nine nine percent the spit of light. You cruise
around the Milky Way. Check out nebulae snapping photos of
black hole to you inside the comfortable bubble of your ship.
Maybe five subjective years pass. You read some books, learn
a new language, exercise five years of normal human life.
Speaker 2: But the Earth you left behind, the Earth.
Speaker 1: You left behind is gone when you return. Thousands or
maybe millions of years would have passed on Earth. Everyone
you ever knew, your family, your friends, your entire civilization
turned to absolute dust. The continents themself. Elves might have shifted,
human beings might have evolved into something else entirely, or
gone extinct.
Speaker 2: There is a great way of summarizing the cruel nature
of this physics. You can outrun time, but you cannot
undo it.
Speaker 1: You become a ghost. You become completely unstuck from your
own era, stranded in an alien future with absolutely zero
way to ever go back. You have successfully time traveled
to the future. You have witnessed the depths of time,
but you bought a one way ticket. It is incredibly
isolating to think about. To explore the stars means permanently
sacrificing everyone you love on Earth.
Speaker 2: It forces you to realize that we are deeply bound
to our current present. We share this incredibly fragile sliver
of existence with the people alive right now, and to
leave it behind using the sheer brute force of velocity
means losing it permanently.
Speaker 1: Okay, so far on thrilling threads, we have established that
the physical dimensions of space are an illusion depending on
your speed. We've established that the sky is a warped
lying funhouse mirror. We know we are permanently quarantined in
our local neighborhood by the speed of light. We know
time is a personal, fracturing fluid that is constantly threatening
to ruin our GPS and crash the global economy. And
we know that if we try to outrun time. We
end up as lonely ghosts in the future. So what
is left? What about the actual physical matter we are
made of? What is stuff?
Speaker 2: This brings us to our final exploration. We have to
look at the intersection of energy and mass and the
dormant apocalypse is hiding in plain sight.
Speaker 1: Let's circle all the way back to the opening of
the show. I asked you to look at a coffee
cup or paperclip, and I claimed it was a nuclear bomb.
We are going to talk about e mc squared. It
is the most famous equation in human history. You see
it on T shirts, you see it on coffee mugs.
It's a pop culture punchline for genius. It looks so
elegant and simple, three letters in number, but when you
unpack the mechanism of it, it is actually the most
unnerving realization in all of physics.
Speaker 2: Before Einstein published that equation in nineteen oh five, humanity
had a very neat comfortable, categorized view of the world.
We fundamentally believe that energy and matter were two completely separate,
distinct things. Matter was physical stuff would metal dirt your
own flesh. It had mass. Energy was an action or
property movement, Heat.
Speaker 1: Light right solid stuff versus non solid action exactly.
Speaker 2: But Einstein mathematically proved that this distinction is a complete illusion.
Mass and energy are not two different things. They are
fundamentally the exact same thing, just locked in different states.
Mass is simply deeply impossibly concentrated energy. It is energy
congealed into a solid form.
Speaker 1: And the terrifying part of the equation is the C squared.
We've already established that the speed of light C is
one hundred and eighty six thousand miles a second, but
the equation demands we multiply that number by itself one
hundred and eighty six thousand times one hundred and eighty
six thousand. It becomes an astronomical, almost incomprehensible number nearly
thirty five billion.
Speaker 2: The equation means that energy equals mass multiplied by that
astronomical number, which implies that an incredibly tiny, microscopic amount
of mass contains an unfathomable amount of dormant energy.
Speaker 1: This is where I want you to get visceral for
a moment. Look around the room again, Look at the walls,
Look at your own hands resting on your lap. The
physical world is not safe, and it is not solid.
If you could find a way to perfectly convert just
one single gram of matter the weight of a single
flimsy metal paper clip, into pure energy, it would release
an explosion equivalent to twenty one kilotons of TNT.
Speaker 2: That is a physically larger explosive yield than the atomic
bomb dropped on Nagasaki in nineteen forty five from a
single paper clip.
Speaker 1: Everything you can touch, everything you can see, every object
you interact with is a tightly wound spring of apocalyptic power.
We are literally walking, breathing collections of explosive cosmic energy.
Speaker 2: The only reason we are not instantly vaporizing everything around us,
the only reason you don't detonate when you stub your toe,
is that the universe has mercifully locked this energy away
using the strong nuclear forces that bind atomic nuclei together.
The mechanism holds the energy in a stable equilibrium, But the.
Speaker 1: Math is sitting right there. We are dormant bombs, sitting
quietly in a universe that could hypothetically decide to unbind
the lock. When we split the atom, we only unlocked
a tiny fractional percentage of that mass, and it was
enough to level cities it completely recontextualizes the physical world.
Matter is just frozen energy waiting to be released.
Speaker 2: And if we want to see what happens when the
universe pushes these rules to their absolute breaking point, when
mass and gravity are taken to the ultimate extreme, we
have to look at the ultimate monsters of relativity. We
have to look at where the math goes.
Speaker 1: To die black holes.
Speaker 2: When Carl Schwarzschild saw Einstein's field equations in nineteen sixteen,
and he famously did this while serving on the Russian
Front during World War One, calculating artillery trajectories by day
and revolutionizing astrophysics by night, he found something in the
math that deeply disturbed him.
Speaker 1: It disturbed everyone. Even Einstein hated it.
Speaker 2: He did. Einstein actively rejected it. He thought it was
a mathematical glitch and anominally on a chalkboard that nature
would never actually allow to form. It was too ugly.
But Shortchild found that if you took a certain amount
of mass and compressed it into a small enough radius
this four Child radius, the gravity would become so intensely
concentrated that the escape velocity would exceed the speed of light.
Speaker 1: And since we already established the absolute cosmic quarantine. That
absolutely nothing, no matter how much infinite energy you pump
into it, can travel faster than light. It means nothing
could ever escape this object, not physical matter, not radiation,
not even information.
Speaker 2: They are entirely real. We have photographed the shadows of
them using the event horizon telescope. We've heard them collide
using the Lego observatories we discussed earlier. They are the
ultimate terrifying conclusion of general relativity.
Speaker 1: Let's visualize this horror because it is the most extreme
environment in reality. When a truly massive star, many times
larger than our Sun, runs out of nuclear fuel, it
can no longer generate the outward pressure needed to fight
its own incredible gravity. In a fraction of a second,
the star collapses inward. The gravity becomes so extreme it
crushes the star's core past the limits of atomic structure.
It crushes past the quantum forces that keep electrons apart.
It compresses all that mass, millions of Earth's worth of mass,
into an infinitely small, infinitely dense point, a singularity.
Speaker 2: In Surrounding that singularity is the event horizon, the spherical boundary,
the point of no return.
Speaker 1: If you cross the event horizon, you don't just die,
you literally leave the observable universe. The descriptions of the
physical process of falling in or gruesome, and physicists casually
call its bigetification. Because the gravity gradient is so severe,
meaning the gravity changes incredibly fast over a very short distance,
the pole on your feet would be millions of times
stronger than the pole on your head.
Speaker 3: Tidal forces right, you would be stretched out like a
piece of taffy, pulled into a single, agonizingly thin stream
of subatomic particles before you even got near the center.
Speaker 2: But the true horror of a black hole isn't what
it does to human feces, or even what it does
to solid matter. It is what it does to the
very fabric of reality itself.
Speaker 1: This is the part that breaks my brain. At the singularity,
the beautiful, elegant math of relativity breaks down completely. The equations,
return infinities, space and time do not just warp, they shatter.
The laws of physics simply cease to exist.
Speaker 2: Inside a black hole, the mathematical mapping of space and
time essentially swaps rolls. The light cones tipped completely over.
Speaker 1: Let's unpack that mechanism, because that sounds like science. Fiction jargon.
What does it actually mean for space and time to
swap roles?
Speaker 2: Think about your life right now. In our normal, safe universe,
you can move freely through space in any direction you choose.
You can walk left, right, go upstairs, go down. You
have total freedom of movement in space, but you have
zero freedom of movement in time. You are dragged relentlessly,
unstoppably forward into the future. Second by second. You cannot
move backward in time, and you cannot stop.
Speaker 1: Okay, so I control my space, but I am passenger
in time.
Speaker 2: Exactly inside the event horizon of a black hole that
dynamic violently flips. Once you cross that threshold, you are
dragged relentlessly toward the center singularity. You can't move away
from it in space any more than you can move
back to yesterday. In our world, space becomes a one
way street pointing inward. But time time becomes the direction
you are falling.
Speaker 1: You are dragged toward the center, not just through a
physical space, but through time.
Speaker 2: The singularity isn't just a physical place you hit. It
becomes an unavoidable moment in your timeline. It becomes your
inescapable future.
Speaker 1: So the singularity is the literal end of time for
whatever falls into it. Space can be torn, Time can
be killed, and somewhere out there in the dark depth
of the cosmos, the laws of physics that keep us safe,
the rules that govern the paper clip on our desk,
simply cease to function.
Speaker 2: It forces us to confront the fact that our local,
rational universe has boundaries where the rules simply end.
Speaker 1: I need to take a deep breath. Let's recap the
psychological gauntlet we just ran today on thrilling threads. We
started by looking at a speeding train and realizing the
very physical shape and size of the world around us
is a localized, subjective illusion forced upon us by the
speed of light. We learned that the universe is literally
ringing like a bell, with gravitational waves from dead stars
constantly stretching and squeezing our atoms. We looked up at
the night sky and realized gravitational lensing makes it a lying,
distorted funhouse mirror. We accepted that the absolute speed limit
of light has permanently quarantined us in a lonely corner
of an expanding universe, out of reach from the rest
of creation.
Speaker 2: We recognize that time is fracturing around our very bodies,
with our feet aging slower than our heads, and our
GPS satellites constantly fighting the reality of time travel just
to prevent total global economic apocalypse.
Speaker 1: We realize that if we try to conquer the stars,
we buy a one way ticket to a dead future,
abandoning everyone we love. And we ended by looking at
a paper clip as a dormant nuclear bomb and staring
into the abyss of a black hole, realizing it is
the graveyard where time dies and the laws of physics
are obliterated.
Speaker 2: It is an immense heavy amount to process, But if
I connect this to the bigger picture, there is a
strangely comforting, deeply grounding takeaway in all of this.
Speaker 1: Comforting really, because I feel profoundly tiny and terrified right now.
I need comforting after this.
Speaker 2: Think about it this way. The universe is unbelievably hostile.
It is filled with apocalyptic energies, crushing gravity and isolating distances.
Yet here we are. The next time you feel completely
overwhelmed by a deadline at work, or you are stressing
over a meeting, or you are laying in bed replaying
some embarrassing moment in your head from five years ago,
zoom out. Remember that you are a walking, breathing collection
of impossible, dormant cosmic energy. You are surfing your own
highly localized temporal bubble. You are trapped in a four
dimensional whirlpool of twisted space time, hurtling through a universe
that defies human logic at every turn. And despite all
of those chaotic mind bending rules, the atoms in your
body have managed to assemble themselves into a conscious pace
capable of looking back at the universe and figuring out
how it works.
Speaker 1: When you frame it like that, suddenly the daily grind
doesn't seem quite so heavy. The fact that we exist
at all in this razor thin margin of safety where
the physics allows for life is incredible. We are walking
miracles of physics, just sitting here having a cup of coffee,
Speaking of which I am definitely going to be side
eyeing my coffee cup for the rest of the day,
knowing the explosive potential sitting inside it.
Speaker 2: Just keep it out of a particle accelerator.
Speaker 1: Fair point. But before we go, there is one less
thread here that I think completely breaks the paradigm we've
just built. We spent this entire hour talking about the smooth, predictable,
albeit warped geometry of Einstein's relativity, but we know it
breaks down at the singularity, which implies that relativity, as
grand and perfect as it seems, is not the final answer.
Speaker 2: The great unresolved crisis of modern physics the incompatibility of
general relativity and quantum mechanics.
Speaker 1: Right, relativity governs the massive st the smooth fluid of space, time,
the speed of light, but the quantum world, the atoms
that make up our bodies operate on chaotic jumping probabilities.
They can be entangled across vast distances instantly, seemingly mocking
the cosmic speed limit we just talked about. If relativity
is the absolute rule, why does it die inside a
black hole? It leads to this chilling thought. What if
the smooth, warped space time we just spent an hour
terrifying ourselves with is itself just an emergent illusion. What
if space and time aren't the foundation of reality but
just a localized byproduct of quantum entanglement that we happen
to be trapped inside. What if Einstein was only describing
the surface of the ocean and we haven't even begun
to look at the water molecules.
Speaker 2: That is the frontier of quantum gravity, and it suggests
that the true nature of reality might be even stranger
than everything we just discussed.
Speaker 1: I love that the idea that everything we just learned
might just be the prologue to an even weirder reality.
All right, I want to turn this over to you
listening right now. Out of all these terrifying, mind bending
truths we cover today, which one completely broke your brain?
Is it the fact that the universe is actively hiding
behind a fun house mirror of bent light? Is it
the dread of one way time travel to a dead future?
Or does it mess with you more that relativity itself
might just be a localized delusion masking a deeper, chaotic
quantum reality.
Speaker 2: It is a profound set of mysteries to weigh against
each other.
Speaker 1: Leave a comment and let us know where you stand
or what you think the truth is at the bottom
of a black hole, or tell us if you're just
going to spend the rest of the day staring suspiciously
at the mundane objects on your desk. Thanks for joining
us on this deep exploration, Keep questioning reality, keep looking up,
and until next time, keep pulling on those thrilling threads,